Six Human Rights Groups to Israeli High Court: Renew Fuel Supply to Gaza and Open the Crossings for Food, Equipment and Humanitarian Supplies
Today, July 11, 2006, six human rights groups petitioned the Israeli High Court demanding that the crossings in Gaza be opened to allow for the steady and regular supply of fuel, food, medicine, and equipment, including spare parts needed to operate generators.
The groups – the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, Hamoked: Center for Defence of the Individual, B’tselem, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel and Gisha - Center for the Legal Protection of Freedom of Movement also asked for an urgent hearing in order to prevent serious harm to the health of the civilian population, especially patients in hospital, and to prevent the breakdown of the water and sewage system in Gaza.
During the current military operation in the Gaza Strip the Israeli military has interrupted the supply of fuel to Gaza and kept Gaza`s crossings mostly closed to supply of food and other humanitarian goods. The uninterrupted supply of fuel and equipment is necessary for the functioning of Gaza`s health and sanitation systems, and Gaza requires a steady supply of food and medicine.
Since Gaza`s power station was destroyed on June 28, there is an increased need for fuel to power the generators in Gaza and for spare parts to keep the generators running at such a high capacity. The closure of Karni Crossing has led to shortages in food at a time when, given the difficulty of obtaining electricity to prepare and refrigerate foodstuffs, Gaza requires increased shipments of dairy products, meat, flour, and other goods.
Without a steady supply of fuel and parts, hospitals cannot perform life-saving surgery and treatment plants cannot pump and treat sewage in Gaza. Gaza hospitals have reduced their activities to life-saving procedures. Since the bombing of the power plant, Gaza`s water utility has been dumping 60,000 cubic meters of raw sewage into the sea each day, for lack of power and equipment to run the treatment plants, and there is concern that untreated sewage will pollute the aquifer or spill into the streets.
Because of the electricity shortages, stores in Gaza have stopped selling meat and dairy products. Trucks laden with food and medicine have been stuck at Karni Crossing, which has been closed since July 6, including 230 containers from international aid organizations.
Withholding fuel, food, and equipment from Gaza residents constitutes collective punishment, in violation of international law. The petition argues that Israel is not fulfilling its legal obligations to provide for the needs of the civilian population and to distinguish between military and civilian targets.
According to Faysal Shawa, a businessman and Gaza resident: "We have been thrown back to the way people lived 100 years ago ... We don`t have water, we don`t have milk for our kids."
According to Maher Najer, Deputy Director of Gaza`s Water Company: "We face severe shortages in the electricity, fuel, and spare parts needed to operate Gaza`s water and sewage systems. These shortages threaten to create a public health catastrophe."
© All rights reserved to ACRI
last updated : 11/07/06
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Monday, July 10, 2006
Israel Has Crossed A Moral Boundary
Outrage at the new human rights violations by the IDF in Gaza is shared by those who would see Israel's religious state replaced by a more inclusive democracy, as well as those who, like Michael Lerner (below), love and support Israel as a homeland and refuge for Jews. Regardless of one's position, it is clear that the passions aroused by this conflict have made Israel/Palestine one of the most dangerous places in the world. As Juan Cole points out, fifty thousand Turks demonstrated on Sunday, and 3000 went into the streets in Cairo, despite the government crackdown. Cole says, "if it weren't for authoritarian governments in the region, hundreds of thousands of people would be on the streets demonstrating as we speak. Since they can't demonstrate, they turn to Islamist politics and sometimes terrorism. Ironically, a sense of justice denied and outrage over human rights violations can actually turn people toward an acceptance of extreme measures."
Please take action.
Israel has Crossed a Moral Boundary
Rabbi Michael Lerner
In 2003 I was prevented from speaking at a large demonstration protesting the impending war in Iraq because I was deemed too pro-Zionist by one of the sponsoring organizations. My sin then, as now, is that I believe that both sides have acted with insensitivity and have been oblivious to the needs of the other, and both sides need to repent.
I still believe that now, and as late as last week was calling on the tens of thousands of readers of www.tikkun.org to insist to the Palestinians that they would be far more effective if they were to adopt the non-violent strategies of Gandhi, King, and Mandela rather than to imagine themselves capable of militarily defeating Israel. And just as I’ve critiqued the state terrorism against civilians that the IDF brings to the West Bank occupation, so I’ve always critiqued the terrorism of some sectors of the Palestinian population.
But this week it’s impossible as a Jew and as an American to not notice that a new human rights violation by Israel has taken place which manages to surpass many of its previous violations in cruelty and in the outrage it has generated.
Anyone has ever faced the crippling heat of the desert-like conditions of southern Israel or the Gaza strip knows the desperation for water that comes each summer. So when Israel bombed and destroyed the electricity system for 1.2 million Gazans and thereby made all electric pumps inoperable, they inflicted a collective punishment on the entire Gazan population.
The alleged justification was a desire to punish Palestinians for electing a Hamas government, and more immediately to retrieve a soldier who had been “kidnapped” (the quotes because this was not a civilian but a soldier in uniform, so if Israel sees itself as at war with Hamas, then the only possible description is that their soldier was captured by the other side). The Hamas government, however, has publicly urged the “kidnappers” whom it does not control to free the captured soldier.
Moreover, the outrage in Israel about this “kidnap” reflects a huge level of systematic denial going on in the consciousness of Israelis and many who support its policies—because virtually every human rights group including the various Israeli human rights organizations has chronicled tens of thousands of acts of "kidnap" of this sort by the IDF against Palestinian civilians, who are then kept in detention for as long as six months without a trial, often facing brutal torture, and then released without ever having been charged with any crime. Of course, and I thank God for this because I care for the well being of the people of Israel , and as a Jew I am deeply tied to the success and safety of this particular Jewish society, the Palestinians have never been able to punish hundreds of thousands or millions of Israelis collectively for these systematic violations of human rights. To the extent that they do so through acts of terror, I condemn those acts.
This is a defining moment in our relationship with Israel for all Americans of whatever faith. Just as we need to make clear to our own government that its human rights violations in Guantanamo and Iraq are unacceptable, so we need to communicate to the Israeli people that the mass punishment of a million people for the acts of a few is as unacceptable when it comes from a democratic society as when it comes from the willful oppression of entrenched authoritarian dictators. Even if, God forbid, the captured soldier is murdered by the lunatics who captured him, it is only they and their conscious sponsors who should be punished, not random Palestinians, unless you think it equally appropriate to some day punish the entire American public for the three million Vietnamese killed by American action in Vietnam or for the horrendous acts which continue in Guantanamo and Iraq even today.
Unfortunately, we can’t count on our U.S. government to convey this sentiment without qualifying its concerns in ways that essentially communicate that Israel can do whatever it wants and we won’t interfere.
So the onus is upon us as ordinary citizens to act and act decisively. We need to communicate our concerns to legislators and media. We need to organize demonstrations in front of the offices of our elected officials, and also outside Israeli consulates and those Jewish institutions which continue to use their influence to support Israeli policy even at this moment (there are a few which have spoken out in critique, but very very few). And we need to write to those in power in Israel, starting with Prime Minister Olmert, telling them that even those of us who love Israel and will never let it be destroyed find this particular action unconscionable, demand that Israel immediately rebuild the electricity system, and that Israel stop trying to impose its will with military might but instead sit down with the Palestinians and negotiate a lasting peace.
Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun magazine, the largest circulation liberal/progressive Jewish magazine in the world. He is rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue in San Francisco, national chair of The Network of Spiritual Progressives , and the author of ten books, most recently a 2006 national best-seller The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right
Please take action.
Israel has Crossed a Moral Boundary
Rabbi Michael Lerner
In 2003 I was prevented from speaking at a large demonstration protesting the impending war in Iraq because I was deemed too pro-Zionist by one of the sponsoring organizations. My sin then, as now, is that I believe that both sides have acted with insensitivity and have been oblivious to the needs of the other, and both sides need to repent.
I still believe that now, and as late as last week was calling on the tens of thousands of readers of www.tikkun.org to insist to the Palestinians that they would be far more effective if they were to adopt the non-violent strategies of Gandhi, King, and Mandela rather than to imagine themselves capable of militarily defeating Israel. And just as I’ve critiqued the state terrorism against civilians that the IDF brings to the West Bank occupation, so I’ve always critiqued the terrorism of some sectors of the Palestinian population.
But this week it’s impossible as a Jew and as an American to not notice that a new human rights violation by Israel has taken place which manages to surpass many of its previous violations in cruelty and in the outrage it has generated.
Anyone has ever faced the crippling heat of the desert-like conditions of southern Israel or the Gaza strip knows the desperation for water that comes each summer. So when Israel bombed and destroyed the electricity system for 1.2 million Gazans and thereby made all electric pumps inoperable, they inflicted a collective punishment on the entire Gazan population.
The alleged justification was a desire to punish Palestinians for electing a Hamas government, and more immediately to retrieve a soldier who had been “kidnapped” (the quotes because this was not a civilian but a soldier in uniform, so if Israel sees itself as at war with Hamas, then the only possible description is that their soldier was captured by the other side). The Hamas government, however, has publicly urged the “kidnappers” whom it does not control to free the captured soldier.
Moreover, the outrage in Israel about this “kidnap” reflects a huge level of systematic denial going on in the consciousness of Israelis and many who support its policies—because virtually every human rights group including the various Israeli human rights organizations has chronicled tens of thousands of acts of "kidnap" of this sort by the IDF against Palestinian civilians, who are then kept in detention for as long as six months without a trial, often facing brutal torture, and then released without ever having been charged with any crime. Of course, and I thank God for this because I care for the well being of the people of Israel , and as a Jew I am deeply tied to the success and safety of this particular Jewish society, the Palestinians have never been able to punish hundreds of thousands or millions of Israelis collectively for these systematic violations of human rights. To the extent that they do so through acts of terror, I condemn those acts.
This is a defining moment in our relationship with Israel for all Americans of whatever faith. Just as we need to make clear to our own government that its human rights violations in Guantanamo and Iraq are unacceptable, so we need to communicate to the Israeli people that the mass punishment of a million people for the acts of a few is as unacceptable when it comes from a democratic society as when it comes from the willful oppression of entrenched authoritarian dictators. Even if, God forbid, the captured soldier is murdered by the lunatics who captured him, it is only they and their conscious sponsors who should be punished, not random Palestinians, unless you think it equally appropriate to some day punish the entire American public for the three million Vietnamese killed by American action in Vietnam or for the horrendous acts which continue in Guantanamo and Iraq even today.
Unfortunately, we can’t count on our U.S. government to convey this sentiment without qualifying its concerns in ways that essentially communicate that Israel can do whatever it wants and we won’t interfere.
So the onus is upon us as ordinary citizens to act and act decisively. We need to communicate our concerns to legislators and media. We need to organize demonstrations in front of the offices of our elected officials, and also outside Israeli consulates and those Jewish institutions which continue to use their influence to support Israeli policy even at this moment (there are a few which have spoken out in critique, but very very few). And we need to write to those in power in Israel, starting with Prime Minister Olmert, telling them that even those of us who love Israel and will never let it be destroyed find this particular action unconscionable, demand that Israel immediately rebuild the electricity system, and that Israel stop trying to impose its will with military might but instead sit down with the Palestinians and negotiate a lasting peace.
Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun magazine, the largest circulation liberal/progressive Jewish magazine in the world. He is rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue in San Francisco, national chair of The Network of Spiritual Progressives , and the author of ten books, most recently a 2006 national best-seller The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right
Saturday, July 08, 2006
On Kidnapping
Look who's been kidnapped!
Hundreds of Palestinian 'suspects' have been kidnapped from their homes and will never stand trial
Arik Diamant
It's the wee hours of the morning, still dark outside. A guerilla force comes out of nowhere to kidnap a soldier. After hours of careful movement, the force reaches its target, and the ambush is on! In seconds, the soldier finds himself looking down the barrel of a rifle.
A smash in the face with the butt of the gun and the soldier falls to the ground, bleeding. The kidnappers pick him up, quickly tie his hands and blindfold him, and disappear into the night.
This might be the end of the kidnapping, but the nightmare has just begun. The soldier's mother collapses, his father prays. His commanding officers promise to do everything they can to get him back, his comrades swear revenge. An entire nation is up-in-arms, writing in pain and worry.
Nobody knows how the soldier is: Is he hurt? Do his captors give him even a minimum of human decency, or are they torturing him to death by trampling his honor? The worst sort of suffering is not knowing. Will he come home? And if so, when? And in what condition? Can anyone remain apathetic in the light of such drama?
Israeli terror
This description, you'll be surprised to know, has nothing to do with the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit. It is the story of an arrest I carried out as an IDF soldier, in the Nablus casbah, about 10 years ago. The "soldier" was a 17-year-old boy, and we kidnapped him because he knew "someone" who had done "something."
We brought him tied up, with a burlap sac over his head, to a Shin Bet interrogation center known as "Scream Hill" (at the time we thought it was funny). There, the prisoner was beaten, violently shaken and sleep deprived for weeks or months. Who knows.
No one wrote about it in the paper. European diplomats were not called to help him. After all, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the kidnapping of this Palestinian kid. Over the 40 years of occupation we have kidnapped thousands of people, exactly like Gilad Shalit was captured: Threatened by a gun, beaten mercilessly, with no judge or jury, or witnesses, and without providing the family with any information about the captive.
When the Palestinians do this, we call it "terror." When we do it, we work overtime to whitewash the atrocity.
Suspects?
Some people will say: The IDF doesn't "just" kidnap. These people are "suspects." There is no more perverse lie than this. In all the years I served, I reached one simple conclusion: What makes a "suspect"? Who, exactly suspects him, and of what?
Who has the right to sentence a 17-year-old to kidnapping, torture and possible death? A 26-year-old Shin Bet interrogator? A 46-year-old one? Do these people have any higher education, apart from the ability to interrogate? What are his considerations? I all these "suspects" are so guilty, why not bring them to trial?
Anyone who believes that despite the lack of transparency, the IDF and Shin Bet to their best to minimize violations of human rights is naïve, if not brainwashed. One need only read the testimonies of soldiers who have carried out administrative detentions to be convinced of the depth of the immorality of our actions in the territories.
To this very day, there are hundreds of prisoners rotting in Shin Bet prisons and dungeons, people who have never been –and never will be – tried. And Israelis are silently resolved to this phenomenon.
Israeli responsibility
The day Gilad Shalit was kidnapped I rode in a taxi. The driver told me we must go into Gaza, start shooting people one-by-one, until someone breaks and returns the hostage. It isn't clear that such an operation would bring Gilad back alive.
Instead of getting dragged into terrorist responses, as Palestinian society has done, we should release some of the soldiers and civilians we have kidnapped. This is appropriate, right, and could bring about an air of reconciliation in the territories.
Hell, if this is what will bring Gilad home safe-and-sound, we have a responsibility to him to do it.
Arik Diamant is an IDF reservist and the head of the Courage to Refuse organization
(07.05.06, 12:35)
Hundreds of Palestinian 'suspects' have been kidnapped from their homes and will never stand trial
Arik Diamant
It's the wee hours of the morning, still dark outside. A guerilla force comes out of nowhere to kidnap a soldier. After hours of careful movement, the force reaches its target, and the ambush is on! In seconds, the soldier finds himself looking down the barrel of a rifle.
A smash in the face with the butt of the gun and the soldier falls to the ground, bleeding. The kidnappers pick him up, quickly tie his hands and blindfold him, and disappear into the night.
This might be the end of the kidnapping, but the nightmare has just begun. The soldier's mother collapses, his father prays. His commanding officers promise to do everything they can to get him back, his comrades swear revenge. An entire nation is up-in-arms, writing in pain and worry.
Nobody knows how the soldier is: Is he hurt? Do his captors give him even a minimum of human decency, or are they torturing him to death by trampling his honor? The worst sort of suffering is not knowing. Will he come home? And if so, when? And in what condition? Can anyone remain apathetic in the light of such drama?
Israeli terror
This description, you'll be surprised to know, has nothing to do with the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit. It is the story of an arrest I carried out as an IDF soldier, in the Nablus casbah, about 10 years ago. The "soldier" was a 17-year-old boy, and we kidnapped him because he knew "someone" who had done "something."
We brought him tied up, with a burlap sac over his head, to a Shin Bet interrogation center known as "Scream Hill" (at the time we thought it was funny). There, the prisoner was beaten, violently shaken and sleep deprived for weeks or months. Who knows.
No one wrote about it in the paper. European diplomats were not called to help him. After all, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the kidnapping of this Palestinian kid. Over the 40 years of occupation we have kidnapped thousands of people, exactly like Gilad Shalit was captured: Threatened by a gun, beaten mercilessly, with no judge or jury, or witnesses, and without providing the family with any information about the captive.
When the Palestinians do this, we call it "terror." When we do it, we work overtime to whitewash the atrocity.
Suspects?
Some people will say: The IDF doesn't "just" kidnap. These people are "suspects." There is no more perverse lie than this. In all the years I served, I reached one simple conclusion: What makes a "suspect"? Who, exactly suspects him, and of what?
Who has the right to sentence a 17-year-old to kidnapping, torture and possible death? A 26-year-old Shin Bet interrogator? A 46-year-old one? Do these people have any higher education, apart from the ability to interrogate? What are his considerations? I all these "suspects" are so guilty, why not bring them to trial?
Anyone who believes that despite the lack of transparency, the IDF and Shin Bet to their best to minimize violations of human rights is naïve, if not brainwashed. One need only read the testimonies of soldiers who have carried out administrative detentions to be convinced of the depth of the immorality of our actions in the territories.
To this very day, there are hundreds of prisoners rotting in Shin Bet prisons and dungeons, people who have never been –and never will be – tried. And Israelis are silently resolved to this phenomenon.
Israeli responsibility
The day Gilad Shalit was kidnapped I rode in a taxi. The driver told me we must go into Gaza, start shooting people one-by-one, until someone breaks and returns the hostage. It isn't clear that such an operation would bring Gilad back alive.
Instead of getting dragged into terrorist responses, as Palestinian society has done, we should release some of the soldiers and civilians we have kidnapped. This is appropriate, right, and could bring about an air of reconciliation in the territories.
Hell, if this is what will bring Gilad home safe-and-sound, we have a responsibility to him to do it.
Arik Diamant is an IDF reservist and the head of the Courage to Refuse organization
(07.05.06, 12:35)
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Collective Punishment
Mona El-Farra, is a 52 year-old woman, who lives in Gaza City. She says of herself, “ I am a physician by training, a human rights and women's rights activist by practice.” She has a blog that she has entitled “From Gaza with love” (see (http://www.fromgaza.blogspot.com/)
Saturday, July 01, 2006
Dear all:
My friend Hoda lives next to the Ministry of Interior building in Gaza that was hit last night with 2 rockets, the attack occured 2am yesterday, please forgive me about the accuracy, l am starting to lose track of days and nights and how many times we were attacked. Hoda told me that the whole building was shaking.
She went out, with her pyjamas, all the residents were out in their night wear, children faces were too pale,some of them were crying hystiricaly, the fume filled the place , the flat next door were largely damaged (it is the next to the building that was targeted),where a family with 6 children live ,there was large fire, the firee brigades used her flat, to put off the fire, the Ministry of interior building was empty during the attack !!!!,the aim was revenge and destroyingof the building ,i live 150 meters from Hoda place, no body is safe no one is immune .what happened with Hoda reminded me with the night when late president Arafat headquarters in Gaza were attacked, 2 years ago, I lived nearby, and too close, that night 37 shells hit that building.
The power is still off ... we had it for 3 hours yesterday, enough to recharge my laptop, and mobile phone and to do some cooking. I am highly concerned about the hospitals, the fuel supply to run the local generators is running down ,the borders are completely sealed since the attack, no fuel was allowed inside Gaza since that date, the medication and medical supplies are running down too, We do not have enough strategic storage, because of the previous ongoing sanctions, our drug stores are exhausted, the water supply is scarce too, we need to rationalise our water use,we are going through big humanitrian disaster.
Sonic booming
When the get fighters ,go fastly through the sound barrier, we expereince this sort of terrifying raids at least 7 times, in different times of the day and night, many international human rights orgs. appealed to Israel to stop this raids, knowing its harmful effect on people, they never used it before withdrawal from Gaza.
How can i let you know what is my personal feelings? During this raids, if I am sleeping my bed shakes tremendously, my dauhgter jumps to my bed, shivering with fear then both of us end up on the floor ,my heart beats go very fast , and i had to pacify my daughter, now she knows we need to pacify each other , she feels my fear, if I am awake i flinch up and scream loudly, i cannot help myself, ok I am a doctor and mature middle aged woman with large experience and an activist too, but with this booming i go hystirical, after all we are all humans and each have its own threshold, hearing the sound of breaking windows is frightening too, many tin roofs in the refugee camps collapsed on the heads of families, as a result of this booming, hospitals received large number of psychologicaly traumatised children.
1.5 million residents in Gaza face COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT, feelings of hate will grow larger, and all these assaults and savage agressions against population will not bring peace or security to Israel, only justice peace will.
Israel is talking about security of its citizens, against militiamen, who are armed with some home made fire sticks rockets. Israel is talking about terrorism, what can i call this sonic booming and power plant attack, but STATE TERRORISM
Yours in love and solidarity
Mona ElFarra
Saturday, July 01, 2006
Dear all:
My friend Hoda lives next to the Ministry of Interior building in Gaza that was hit last night with 2 rockets, the attack occured 2am yesterday, please forgive me about the accuracy, l am starting to lose track of days and nights and how many times we were attacked. Hoda told me that the whole building was shaking.
She went out, with her pyjamas, all the residents were out in their night wear, children faces were too pale,some of them were crying hystiricaly, the fume filled the place , the flat next door were largely damaged (it is the next to the building that was targeted),where a family with 6 children live ,there was large fire, the firee brigades used her flat, to put off the fire, the Ministry of interior building was empty during the attack !!!!,the aim was revenge and destroyingof the building ,i live 150 meters from Hoda place, no body is safe no one is immune .what happened with Hoda reminded me with the night when late president Arafat headquarters in Gaza were attacked, 2 years ago, I lived nearby, and too close, that night 37 shells hit that building.
The power is still off ... we had it for 3 hours yesterday, enough to recharge my laptop, and mobile phone and to do some cooking. I am highly concerned about the hospitals, the fuel supply to run the local generators is running down ,the borders are completely sealed since the attack, no fuel was allowed inside Gaza since that date, the medication and medical supplies are running down too, We do not have enough strategic storage, because of the previous ongoing sanctions, our drug stores are exhausted, the water supply is scarce too, we need to rationalise our water use,we are going through big humanitrian disaster.
Sonic booming
When the get fighters ,go fastly through the sound barrier, we expereince this sort of terrifying raids at least 7 times, in different times of the day and night, many international human rights orgs. appealed to Israel to stop this raids, knowing its harmful effect on people, they never used it before withdrawal from Gaza.
How can i let you know what is my personal feelings? During this raids, if I am sleeping my bed shakes tremendously, my dauhgter jumps to my bed, shivering with fear then both of us end up on the floor ,my heart beats go very fast , and i had to pacify my daughter, now she knows we need to pacify each other , she feels my fear, if I am awake i flinch up and scream loudly, i cannot help myself, ok I am a doctor and mature middle aged woman with large experience and an activist too, but with this booming i go hystirical, after all we are all humans and each have its own threshold, hearing the sound of breaking windows is frightening too, many tin roofs in the refugee camps collapsed on the heads of families, as a result of this booming, hospitals received large number of psychologicaly traumatised children.
1.5 million residents in Gaza face COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT, feelings of hate will grow larger, and all these assaults and savage agressions against population will not bring peace or security to Israel, only justice peace will.
Israel is talking about security of its citizens, against militiamen, who are armed with some home made fire sticks rockets. Israel is talking about terrorism, what can i call this sonic booming and power plant attack, but STATE TERRORISM
Yours in love and solidarity
Mona ElFarra
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Presbyterians Not Backing Down on Divestment
When faced with a clash between their investment practices and their socially responsible investment policy, the Presbyterians have always called for a step-by-step process that applies ever-increasing pressure on corporations which profit from human rights violations. Divestment is a final step, one that need not be engaged in if a corporation brings its policies in line with international norms and values. Their press release is below:
Presbyterian Israel-Palestine Mission Network
PRESS INFORMATION For more details, please contact:
Kristine Currie 313-303-4458 Email: Kcurrie45@sbcglobal.net
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Presbyterian Divestment - Still on the Table
(BIRMINGHAM) June 21, 2006 - The Presbyterian Church (USA)'s 217th General Assembly retained the process known as "phased, selective divestment". The current resolution urges investments "only in peaceful pursuits" in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank including East Jerusalem; and affirms the "customary corporate engagement process" of the Mission Responsibility Through Investment Committee (MRTI) charged with carrying out General Assembly policy.
Today's decision continues the call to end the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian Territories. It further criticizes the separation barrier which "encroaches into Palestinian territory and fails to follow the legally recognized borders of Israel."
Palestinians are facing a humanitarian catastrophe. United Nations reports reveal that 60% of Palestinians are now living in acute poverty and that over half of all Palestinians are completely dependent on food aid. The rise in poverty is a direct result of Israel's policies of occupation. These include road closures, the construction of the separation barrier, checkpoints, and restrictions on the movement of Palestinian commerce in particular food.
Since the 2004 GA, the PC (USA) MRTI committee has focused upon corporations whose profits are derived from the sale of products and services used in illegal activities violating human rights. The church's socially responsible investment policy follows a process of corporate engagement to assure that its investment portfolio is in accordance with the church's social justice policies. After developing criteria specific to the pertinent human rights issues, the process involves four steps: identify target companies; engage management in dialogue, initiate shareholder action, and, if needed as a last resort: recommend divestment to a subsequent General Assembly.
Currently, the MRTI has identified five corporations whose products and services are used to harm civilians: Caterpillar, Motorola, Citigroup, ITT Industries and United Technologies.
Presbyterian Israel-Palestine Mission Network
PRESS INFORMATION For more details, please contact:
Kristine Currie 313-303-4458 Email: Kcurrie45@sbcglobal.net
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Presbyterian Divestment - Still on the Table
(BIRMINGHAM) June 21, 2006 - The Presbyterian Church (USA)'s 217th General Assembly retained the process known as "phased, selective divestment". The current resolution urges investments "only in peaceful pursuits" in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank including East Jerusalem; and affirms the "customary corporate engagement process" of the Mission Responsibility Through Investment Committee (MRTI) charged with carrying out General Assembly policy.
Today's decision continues the call to end the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian Territories. It further criticizes the separation barrier which "encroaches into Palestinian territory and fails to follow the legally recognized borders of Israel."
Palestinians are facing a humanitarian catastrophe. United Nations reports reveal that 60% of Palestinians are now living in acute poverty and that over half of all Palestinians are completely dependent on food aid. The rise in poverty is a direct result of Israel's policies of occupation. These include road closures, the construction of the separation barrier, checkpoints, and restrictions on the movement of Palestinian commerce in particular food.
Since the 2004 GA, the PC (USA) MRTI committee has focused upon corporations whose profits are derived from the sale of products and services used in illegal activities violating human rights. The church's socially responsible investment policy follows a process of corporate engagement to assure that its investment portfolio is in accordance with the church's social justice policies. After developing criteria specific to the pertinent human rights issues, the process involves four steps: identify target companies; engage management in dialogue, initiate shareholder action, and, if needed as a last resort: recommend divestment to a subsequent General Assembly.
Currently, the MRTI has identified five corporations whose products and services are used to harm civilians: Caterpillar, Motorola, Citigroup, ITT Industries and United Technologies.
Saturday, June 10, 2006
"Accidental" death from a Palestinian Point of View
Begging for a Response
Israel’s ongoing air strikes on Gaza are politically motivated
By Sam Bahour
The Israelis are a stiff necked people. They refuse to accept anything less than full acquiescence by anyone involved in their plans, no matter the cost -- human, political, financial, or otherwise. Israel’s non-stop aggression against Palestinians – averaging two Palestinian deaths a day for several years now – is much more than what is popularly being coined in Israel and abroad as low-intensity warfare. If international and humanitarian laws are to be used as a measure, the ongoing Israeli killing spree is taking on the shape of a sustained campaign of war crimes aimed to remove the Palestinians from Israel’s way.
The recent Israeli shelling of a crowded Gaza beach full of Palestinian civilians spending a weekend by the sea is the latest tragedy in an unrelenting effort undertaken by the newly elected Israeli government to provoke Palestinians, in specific, the Hamas-led Palestinian government. The carnage of this latest Israeli attack (the afternoon attack, not the morning one) left a toll of 10 dead and over 50 wounded. The entire incident, like the hundreds prior, quickly become a footnote in some Israeli military report that will most likely also carry an empty apology for the large numbers of children and women among the dead. President Bush refused to condemn the attack and the United Nations, like a large slice of the Israeli public, will most likely not even take note of it.
In a world that has become numb to Middle Eastern carnage, except if the dead are Israeli, it does not come as a surprise that, at most, the dead are merely counted, hardly ever are they named. The lack of world leadership has moved the international community to completely lose any moral compass whatsoever. The basic fact that one party, the one burying its children on nearly daily basis, is an occupied people, the Palestinians. The other party, the one launching air and sea strikes on civilian populations, and constantly shelling the Gaza Strip is the occupying party, Israel. This core fact of the conflict has become lost in some misguided desire to create symmetry between Palestinians and Israelis. International and humanitarian laws classify an occupied people as “protected persons,” and every signatory to the Fourth Geneva Convention, including the US, has an obligation to interfere to stop this cruel and inhumane Israeli collective punishment of Palestinians.
Article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention defines war crimes as: "Wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including...wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected person, …or wilfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial, ...extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly."
International law does not release from responsibility an occupying force because it apologizes for killing those it occupies, especially an occupying force that has instilled a mode of operation of systematically killing and then cynically apologizing.
Israel kills with purpose. Following the rise to government of the hard line Hamas movement to the Palestinian government, Israel is optimizing on the US led campaign to bring a full collapse of the democratically-elected Palestinian government, by killing on a daily basis of what the world’s media has sadly accepted as “targeted assassinations.” There is a clear political agenda in the latest round of Israeli attacks. Israel is begging for Hamas to react in kind by breaking its one sided truce that Hamas has held for over a year, despite Israel’s continued provocations.
Israel knows that as it continues to cage Palestinians in pockets of living hell, it is human nature that sooner or later the Palestinian government or even Palestinian individuals will be forced into reacting by trying to defend its population, never mind that the Palestinians do not have the means to even dent the Israeli military powerhouse. Nevertheless, by the Palestinians striking back, and sadly taking Israeli lives in the process, Israel can then kick into action its well-oiled public relations spin machine to turn the tables on the entire Palestinian cause for independence and self-determination and thus, further continue the delegitimization and the demise of the Palestinians.
Israel’s renowned planning efforts forgot one elementary fact of life. Like with slavery, there was a right and wrong and in the end right prevailed and slavery ended. And, like with South Africa’s Apartheid, there was a right and wrong, and the racist Apartheid system fell flat on its face. The Israelis have forgotten that militarily occupying the Palestinians -- for over forty years now -- is wrong too, and their occupation will come tumbling down in due time. Sadly, as Israeli politicians do cartwheels to sustain their oppression of Palestinians, or maintain their popularity with the dead bodies of Palestinians, both Palestinians and Israelis are paying the price with their lives.
The writer is a Palestinian-American living in the besieged Palestinian City of El-Bireh in the West Bank. He is co-author of HOMELAND: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians (1994) and can be reached at sbahour@palnet.com.
June 9, 2006
Ramallah
Israel’s ongoing air strikes on Gaza are politically motivated
By Sam Bahour
The Israelis are a stiff necked people. They refuse to accept anything less than full acquiescence by anyone involved in their plans, no matter the cost -- human, political, financial, or otherwise. Israel’s non-stop aggression against Palestinians – averaging two Palestinian deaths a day for several years now – is much more than what is popularly being coined in Israel and abroad as low-intensity warfare. If international and humanitarian laws are to be used as a measure, the ongoing Israeli killing spree is taking on the shape of a sustained campaign of war crimes aimed to remove the Palestinians from Israel’s way.
The recent Israeli shelling of a crowded Gaza beach full of Palestinian civilians spending a weekend by the sea is the latest tragedy in an unrelenting effort undertaken by the newly elected Israeli government to provoke Palestinians, in specific, the Hamas-led Palestinian government. The carnage of this latest Israeli attack (the afternoon attack, not the morning one) left a toll of 10 dead and over 50 wounded. The entire incident, like the hundreds prior, quickly become a footnote in some Israeli military report that will most likely also carry an empty apology for the large numbers of children and women among the dead. President Bush refused to condemn the attack and the United Nations, like a large slice of the Israeli public, will most likely not even take note of it.
In a world that has become numb to Middle Eastern carnage, except if the dead are Israeli, it does not come as a surprise that, at most, the dead are merely counted, hardly ever are they named. The lack of world leadership has moved the international community to completely lose any moral compass whatsoever. The basic fact that one party, the one burying its children on nearly daily basis, is an occupied people, the Palestinians. The other party, the one launching air and sea strikes on civilian populations, and constantly shelling the Gaza Strip is the occupying party, Israel. This core fact of the conflict has become lost in some misguided desire to create symmetry between Palestinians and Israelis. International and humanitarian laws classify an occupied people as “protected persons,” and every signatory to the Fourth Geneva Convention, including the US, has an obligation to interfere to stop this cruel and inhumane Israeli collective punishment of Palestinians.
Article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention defines war crimes as: "Wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including...wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected person, …or wilfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial, ...extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly."
International law does not release from responsibility an occupying force because it apologizes for killing those it occupies, especially an occupying force that has instilled a mode of operation of systematically killing and then cynically apologizing.
Israel kills with purpose. Following the rise to government of the hard line Hamas movement to the Palestinian government, Israel is optimizing on the US led campaign to bring a full collapse of the democratically-elected Palestinian government, by killing on a daily basis of what the world’s media has sadly accepted as “targeted assassinations.” There is a clear political agenda in the latest round of Israeli attacks. Israel is begging for Hamas to react in kind by breaking its one sided truce that Hamas has held for over a year, despite Israel’s continued provocations.
Israel knows that as it continues to cage Palestinians in pockets of living hell, it is human nature that sooner or later the Palestinian government or even Palestinian individuals will be forced into reacting by trying to defend its population, never mind that the Palestinians do not have the means to even dent the Israeli military powerhouse. Nevertheless, by the Palestinians striking back, and sadly taking Israeli lives in the process, Israel can then kick into action its well-oiled public relations spin machine to turn the tables on the entire Palestinian cause for independence and self-determination and thus, further continue the delegitimization and the demise of the Palestinians.
Israel’s renowned planning efforts forgot one elementary fact of life. Like with slavery, there was a right and wrong and in the end right prevailed and slavery ended. And, like with South Africa’s Apartheid, there was a right and wrong, and the racist Apartheid system fell flat on its face. The Israelis have forgotten that militarily occupying the Palestinians -- for over forty years now -- is wrong too, and their occupation will come tumbling down in due time. Sadly, as Israeli politicians do cartwheels to sustain their oppression of Palestinians, or maintain their popularity with the dead bodies of Palestinians, both Palestinians and Israelis are paying the price with their lives.
The writer is a Palestinian-American living in the besieged Palestinian City of El-Bireh in the West Bank. He is co-author of HOMELAND: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians (1994) and can be reached at sbahour@palnet.com.
June 9, 2006
Ramallah
Friday, June 09, 2006
400 Israeli Women Are Watching
Checkpoint Witnesses
By Amelia Thomas
The Christian Science Monitor
Wednesday 07 June 2006
The Israeli women of Machsom Watch keep a close eye on soldier behavior at the roughly 600 Israeli-controlled checkpoints in the West Bank.
Nablus, West Bank - The midday heat beats down fiercely as a silver car swings off the main Israeli highway toward the West Bank. Pulling over just before an army-patrolled checkpoint, the three women inside pull name tags and signs from their purses. "Machsom Watch" read the logos they attach to their shirts, the windshield, and on a flag fluttering from the back window. These Israeli women are volunteers for an organization whose members venture into the West Bank twice a day, every day, to some of the roughly 600 Israeli checkpoints (machsomim in Hebrew) there.
Machsom Watch, founded in 2001 by three seasoned activists, consists of some 400 ordinary Israeli women who take turns standing at Israeli-controlled checkpoints, watching for human rights violations and harassment of Palestinian civilians by Israeli soldiers.
Some simply observe and report; others attempt to talk with soldiers or intervene on the part of Palestinians. Each "patrol" produces a report of their shift's events, which is then put up on their website (www.machsomwatch.org). Most checkpoints the women monitor are inside the West Bank, rather than on border points between Israel and the Palestinian territories.
The purpose of such interior checkpoints is solely "to prevent free passage of Palestinian residents between their villages and towns," says group spokeswoman Adi Dagan. This violates international law, she says. The checkpoints' hours of operation and procedures are "arbitrary" and often changed, she says, making access to jobs, schools, and hospitals for many Palestinians at best, time- consuming and at worst, impossible.
The Israeli Defense Force disputes this. "If the Army's sole purpose would be to prevent freedom of movement for normal Palestinians," says IDF spokesman, Capt. Jacob Demal, "it would be a waste of our time. But checkpoints are there to impair the transportation efforts of potential suicide bombers, who use the routes time and time again."
On the issue of checkpoints' hours and regulations changing "arbitrarily," he agrees. But the changes, he says, are based on "general or specific intelligence," in response to the threat level.
Machsom Watch's women are from many professional backgrounds, social classes, and regions of Israel. "Most have never been politically active before," Ms. Dagan says. "They are largely women in their 50s, 60s, or beyond, whose kids are grown up and now for the first time ever they can act on their beliefs."
The three grandmothers taking a Sunday afternoon shift that circles the Nablus region are no exception. Two, Alix Weizmann and Aliya Strauss, are teachers; the third, Susan Lourenco, a university administrator, was born and raised in England by German Jewish parents. Each is acutely aware that her actions are not widely appreciated. "Most average Israelis," says Ms. Lourenco, "don't know what's going on and don't care. But our priority is to make the Israeli public know what's happening in this region and show them that changes have to be made."
"That's not an easy task," adds chirpy Ms. Strauss, now a busy social activist and demonstration-goer in her mid-70s. She sports an "End the Occupation" baseball cap and huge sunglasses.
"I finally decided to make a commitment and join two years ago," says Ms. Weizmann, whose four children all served in the IDF and don't approve of her "unpatriotic" activities. "I think we make a bit of a difference. You have to do the little that you can."
The car winds through the dramatic, rocky country of the Samarian Hills. "Palestinians aren't allowed on this road," notes Lourenco, though the road cuts through Palestinian farmland. The only other vehicles are military tanks and Humvees, jeeps from nongovernmental agencies, or the cars of Jewish settlers - some from illegal settlements that dot the hillsides. About 400 miles of such roads, open only to Jews, snake across the West Bank.
Finally, the women arrive at the first checkpoint on their itinerary, near the Jewish settlement of Shavei Shomron. The neat tarmac road continues up to the settlement; the road that was once the main thoroughfare between the cities of Jenin and Nablus peters out into a narrow, poorly surfaced road.
At the top of this road lies the first checkpoint, an army outpost complete with trailers, watchtower, concrete posts, and curling razor wire. Israeli citizens are not allowed to venture any further. "So we'll just hang around, and see what happens," says Weizmann with a rueful grin.
The women are not relishing their stop here.
"Last week, the soldiers shouted all kinds of vulgar insults at us, too disgusting to relate," recounts Lourenco.
The women encounter other kinds of abuse. "We've been spat at, screamed at, sworn at, our cars scratched by settlers," she continues. None of the women is frightened of a threat from the "enemy" Palestinian side. "They know we're there to help them," says Strauss. "It's our side we're scared of."
As the women stand in the baking heat, a Palestinian minibus pulls up carrying workers from the Palestinian Archaeological Authority, its roof laden with wheelbarrows and shovels. Each morning at 4 a.m., they pass through this checkpoint; every day at 2 p.m., they return home. Almost every time, soldiers on guard delay them. "No authorization to pass today," calls the young soldier from the watchtower.
"But they came through this morning," shouts up Lourenco, on the workers' behalf.
The soldier sighs and picks up his telephone. After a short conversation, the soldier steps down from the tower, examines the workers' permits, then quickly lets them proceed. "It just goes to show," notes Lourenco as they pull away, "that decisions are all down to the individual soldier. That's the biggest problem of all."
Throughout the day, the women move from checkpoint to checkpoint. Their daily "patrol" takes roughly seven hours and includes stops at about five checkpoints, more if soldiers set up temporary "rolling" checkpoints.
Next, the women stop at the Beit Iba checkpoint on the outskirts of Nablus. The area is in chaos, as a new army restriction bans taxis and buses from entering or exiting the city. Two young Palestinian men sit in concrete corrals, a third in a tiny tin-doored inspection booth. The young men explain, in shouts, that they are being held as punishment for trying to circumvent the checkpoint. One has already been held, in stifling heat without even a place to sit, for almost four hours.
"Army rules forbid soldiers to punish civilians like this," says Weizmann, as Lourenco steps forward to talk to the commanding lieutenant, no older than 22. He stands, brandishing his machine gun at queuing civilians. He is not obliged to give out his name and does not turn toward her.
To these soldiers, the treatment is legitimate. "We're punishing them for trying to avoid the checkpoint," the young lieutenant finally offers. "Otherwise, what should we do - just let them go?"
"It's not allowed," says Lourenco firmly.
"Yes, it is," he replies, uncertainty wavering in his voice.
Minutes later, without explanation or apology, the men are briskly and quietly freed. It appears that, on this occasion, the presence of Machsom Watch has hastened their release.
As the women talk with another group of Palestinians having problems at the checkpoint, some soldiers look on.
"They're really annoying," says one, frowning.
"I don't have any opinion of them," says another flatly.
A third soldier attempts a polite smile. "They're not a problem," he says. "We work following the rules. It's only if we do something wrong." He glances over at the three women, "Well, then it might be a problem."
A trickle of Palestinians is slowly making its way through the checkpoint. "It's hard physically," the soldier continues. "Too hot in summer, too cold in winter. But we're protecting Israel from bombers and terrorists. Some people just want to go to work and we can't let them past." He shrugs. "You get used to it."
"I guess the intent [of Machsom Watch] is good, that they're trying to ease the situation for Palestinians," says IDF spokesman Captain Demal, who notes that the Army often cooperates by giving the women the cellphone numbers of the checkpoints' first-in-commands. "At the same time," he says, "they don't see the whole intelligence picture. And there's a big threat to soldiers." Soldiers have been killed at checkpoints. "We've done a steady job of improving checkpoints ... improving them on a human level," he adds.
The Machsom Watch women's biggest problem may lie in the suspicion with which both soldiers and civilian Israelis greet them, and the strain of witnessing unpleasant events on a weekly basis.
On their way home, the mood in the car is heavy, Lourenco is disturbed by what she sees as an increasing stranglehold on Palestinian civilians. She seldom sleeps well the night after her shift, she says, and rises early to write her report.
"After five years, we haven't been very successful," says Dagan. "Not a single checkpoint has been removed, and we haven't been able to change policies on restriction of movement for Palestinians. It's only getting worse," she continues. "But it's a long-term project to try to challenge something so big and deeply rooted."
"Often I feel we do so little," sighs Lourenco as the car pulls back into Tel Aviv's rush-hour traffic. "But I cannot live in Israel and remain silent. We show a peace-loving face to Palestinians who see no other Israelis but soldiers and settlers." And although she says she finds her task increasingly difficult, she knows that her presence at checkpoints makes a difference. "You should see the Palestinian women's eyes light up when we catch their eyes. I couldn't stop now."
By Amelia Thomas
The Christian Science Monitor
Wednesday 07 June 2006
The Israeli women of Machsom Watch keep a close eye on soldier behavior at the roughly 600 Israeli-controlled checkpoints in the West Bank.
Nablus, West Bank - The midday heat beats down fiercely as a silver car swings off the main Israeli highway toward the West Bank. Pulling over just before an army-patrolled checkpoint, the three women inside pull name tags and signs from their purses. "Machsom Watch" read the logos they attach to their shirts, the windshield, and on a flag fluttering from the back window. These Israeli women are volunteers for an organization whose members venture into the West Bank twice a day, every day, to some of the roughly 600 Israeli checkpoints (machsomim in Hebrew) there.
Machsom Watch, founded in 2001 by three seasoned activists, consists of some 400 ordinary Israeli women who take turns standing at Israeli-controlled checkpoints, watching for human rights violations and harassment of Palestinian civilians by Israeli soldiers.
Some simply observe and report; others attempt to talk with soldiers or intervene on the part of Palestinians. Each "patrol" produces a report of their shift's events, which is then put up on their website (www.machsomwatch.org). Most checkpoints the women monitor are inside the West Bank, rather than on border points between Israel and the Palestinian territories.
The purpose of such interior checkpoints is solely "to prevent free passage of Palestinian residents between their villages and towns," says group spokeswoman Adi Dagan. This violates international law, she says. The checkpoints' hours of operation and procedures are "arbitrary" and often changed, she says, making access to jobs, schools, and hospitals for many Palestinians at best, time- consuming and at worst, impossible.
The Israeli Defense Force disputes this. "If the Army's sole purpose would be to prevent freedom of movement for normal Palestinians," says IDF spokesman, Capt. Jacob Demal, "it would be a waste of our time. But checkpoints are there to impair the transportation efforts of potential suicide bombers, who use the routes time and time again."
On the issue of checkpoints' hours and regulations changing "arbitrarily," he agrees. But the changes, he says, are based on "general or specific intelligence," in response to the threat level.
Machsom Watch's women are from many professional backgrounds, social classes, and regions of Israel. "Most have never been politically active before," Ms. Dagan says. "They are largely women in their 50s, 60s, or beyond, whose kids are grown up and now for the first time ever they can act on their beliefs."
The three grandmothers taking a Sunday afternoon shift that circles the Nablus region are no exception. Two, Alix Weizmann and Aliya Strauss, are teachers; the third, Susan Lourenco, a university administrator, was born and raised in England by German Jewish parents. Each is acutely aware that her actions are not widely appreciated. "Most average Israelis," says Ms. Lourenco, "don't know what's going on and don't care. But our priority is to make the Israeli public know what's happening in this region and show them that changes have to be made."
"That's not an easy task," adds chirpy Ms. Strauss, now a busy social activist and demonstration-goer in her mid-70s. She sports an "End the Occupation" baseball cap and huge sunglasses.
"I finally decided to make a commitment and join two years ago," says Ms. Weizmann, whose four children all served in the IDF and don't approve of her "unpatriotic" activities. "I think we make a bit of a difference. You have to do the little that you can."
The car winds through the dramatic, rocky country of the Samarian Hills. "Palestinians aren't allowed on this road," notes Lourenco, though the road cuts through Palestinian farmland. The only other vehicles are military tanks and Humvees, jeeps from nongovernmental agencies, or the cars of Jewish settlers - some from illegal settlements that dot the hillsides. About 400 miles of such roads, open only to Jews, snake across the West Bank.
Finally, the women arrive at the first checkpoint on their itinerary, near the Jewish settlement of Shavei Shomron. The neat tarmac road continues up to the settlement; the road that was once the main thoroughfare between the cities of Jenin and Nablus peters out into a narrow, poorly surfaced road.
At the top of this road lies the first checkpoint, an army outpost complete with trailers, watchtower, concrete posts, and curling razor wire. Israeli citizens are not allowed to venture any further. "So we'll just hang around, and see what happens," says Weizmann with a rueful grin.
The women are not relishing their stop here.
"Last week, the soldiers shouted all kinds of vulgar insults at us, too disgusting to relate," recounts Lourenco.
The women encounter other kinds of abuse. "We've been spat at, screamed at, sworn at, our cars scratched by settlers," she continues. None of the women is frightened of a threat from the "enemy" Palestinian side. "They know we're there to help them," says Strauss. "It's our side we're scared of."
As the women stand in the baking heat, a Palestinian minibus pulls up carrying workers from the Palestinian Archaeological Authority, its roof laden with wheelbarrows and shovels. Each morning at 4 a.m., they pass through this checkpoint; every day at 2 p.m., they return home. Almost every time, soldiers on guard delay them. "No authorization to pass today," calls the young soldier from the watchtower.
"But they came through this morning," shouts up Lourenco, on the workers' behalf.
The soldier sighs and picks up his telephone. After a short conversation, the soldier steps down from the tower, examines the workers' permits, then quickly lets them proceed. "It just goes to show," notes Lourenco as they pull away, "that decisions are all down to the individual soldier. That's the biggest problem of all."
Throughout the day, the women move from checkpoint to checkpoint. Their daily "patrol" takes roughly seven hours and includes stops at about five checkpoints, more if soldiers set up temporary "rolling" checkpoints.
Next, the women stop at the Beit Iba checkpoint on the outskirts of Nablus. The area is in chaos, as a new army restriction bans taxis and buses from entering or exiting the city. Two young Palestinian men sit in concrete corrals, a third in a tiny tin-doored inspection booth. The young men explain, in shouts, that they are being held as punishment for trying to circumvent the checkpoint. One has already been held, in stifling heat without even a place to sit, for almost four hours.
"Army rules forbid soldiers to punish civilians like this," says Weizmann, as Lourenco steps forward to talk to the commanding lieutenant, no older than 22. He stands, brandishing his machine gun at queuing civilians. He is not obliged to give out his name and does not turn toward her.
To these soldiers, the treatment is legitimate. "We're punishing them for trying to avoid the checkpoint," the young lieutenant finally offers. "Otherwise, what should we do - just let them go?"
"It's not allowed," says Lourenco firmly.
"Yes, it is," he replies, uncertainty wavering in his voice.
Minutes later, without explanation or apology, the men are briskly and quietly freed. It appears that, on this occasion, the presence of Machsom Watch has hastened their release.
As the women talk with another group of Palestinians having problems at the checkpoint, some soldiers look on.
"They're really annoying," says one, frowning.
"I don't have any opinion of them," says another flatly.
A third soldier attempts a polite smile. "They're not a problem," he says. "We work following the rules. It's only if we do something wrong." He glances over at the three women, "Well, then it might be a problem."
A trickle of Palestinians is slowly making its way through the checkpoint. "It's hard physically," the soldier continues. "Too hot in summer, too cold in winter. But we're protecting Israel from bombers and terrorists. Some people just want to go to work and we can't let them past." He shrugs. "You get used to it."
"I guess the intent [of Machsom Watch] is good, that they're trying to ease the situation for Palestinians," says IDF spokesman Captain Demal, who notes that the Army often cooperates by giving the women the cellphone numbers of the checkpoints' first-in-commands. "At the same time," he says, "they don't see the whole intelligence picture. And there's a big threat to soldiers." Soldiers have been killed at checkpoints. "We've done a steady job of improving checkpoints ... improving them on a human level," he adds.
The Machsom Watch women's biggest problem may lie in the suspicion with which both soldiers and civilian Israelis greet them, and the strain of witnessing unpleasant events on a weekly basis.
On their way home, the mood in the car is heavy, Lourenco is disturbed by what she sees as an increasing stranglehold on Palestinian civilians. She seldom sleeps well the night after her shift, she says, and rises early to write her report.
"After five years, we haven't been very successful," says Dagan. "Not a single checkpoint has been removed, and we haven't been able to change policies on restriction of movement for Palestinians. It's only getting worse," she continues. "But it's a long-term project to try to challenge something so big and deeply rooted."
"Often I feel we do so little," sighs Lourenco as the car pulls back into Tel Aviv's rush-hour traffic. "But I cannot live in Israel and remain silent. We show a peace-loving face to Palestinians who see no other Israelis but soldiers and settlers." And although she says she finds her task increasingly difficult, she knows that her presence at checkpoints makes a difference. "You should see the Palestinian women's eyes light up when we catch their eyes. I couldn't stop now."
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Israeli Conscientious Objectors
Over 1000 Israelis have declared themselves conscientious objectors, unwilling to fight in the Occupied Territories (or at all). Israel does not recognize international agreements that uphold the right of people to refuse military service for reasons of conscience. Maayan Padan is one of the remarkable young people who have chosen to go to prison repeatedly for the "offence" of peace.
This message comes from New Profile, an Israeli organization dedicated to the demilitarization (or, as they say, "civil-ization") of Israeli society.
CO Maayan Padan has returned to prison for a second term. She was first sentenced to 7 days in prison for her refusal to enlist on 16 May, and then on 21 May she was given 21 more days in prison for staying AWOL between prison terms. Maayan has begun serving her prison term of 28 days in total on 21 May in Military Prison No. 400, and is due to be released on 15 June.
Before returning to prion, Maayan made the following statement:
Today, after my first prison term, I am stronger in my stand, that we should struggle to dismantle military organisations as such and to stop entrenching militarism in society. Children looking up to 'soldier heroes' interpret violent acts in a positive light and shape their characters and worldviews around them. Parents dress their babies as soldiers. Our sould are sacrifised in the name of land, but this sacrifise is a fiction, used as excuse to continue the systematic occupation, oppressing the spirit of the Palestinian people and creating deep grievances eventually leading to the desperate protest of terrorism. It is our duty to pose an alternative and to struggle for its right to exist.
Maayan's prison address is:
Maayan Padan
Military ID 6151802
Military Prison No. 400
Military Postal Code 02447, IDF
Israel
Fax: ++972-3-9579348
Recommended Action
First of all, please circulate this message and the information contained in it as widely as possible, not only through e-mail, but also on websites, conventional media, by word of mouth, etc.
Other recommendations for action:
1. Sending Letters of Support
Please send the imprisoned objectors letters of support (preferably postcards or by fax) to the prison addresses above.
2. Letters to Authorities
It is recommended to send letters of protest on behalf of the imprisoned objectors, preferably by fax, to:
Mr. Amir Peretz,
Minister of Defence,
Ministry of Defence,
37 Kaplan St.,
Tel-Aviv 61909,
Israel.
E-mail: sar@mod.gov.il or pniot@mod.gov.il
Fax: ++972-3-6976711
Copies can be sent to the commanders of the military prisons (note the updated fax number for prison No. 6) at:
Commander of Military Prison No. 6,
Military Prison No. 6,
Military postal number 01860, IDF
Israel.
Fax: ++972-4-954-05-80 Commander of Military Prison No. 400,
Military Prison No. 400,
Military postal number 02447, IDF
Israel.
Fax: ++972-3-9579389
Another useful address for sending copies would be the Military Attorney General:
Avichai Mandelblit,
Chief Military Attorney
Military postal code 9605, IDF
Israel
Fax: ++972-3-569-43-70
It would be especially useful to send your appeals to the Commander of the Induction Base in Tel-HaShomer. It is this officer that ultimately decides whether an objector is to be exempted from military service or sent to another round in prison:
Amir Rogowski,
Commander of Induction Base,
Baqum, Tel-HaShomer
Military Postal Code 02718, IDF
Israel.
Fax: ++972-3-737-60-52
Copies of appeals can also be sent to:
Head of Incompatibles Unit
Induction Base (Baqum)
Tel-HaShomer
Military Postal Code 02718, IDF
Israel.
Fax: ++972-3-737-67-05.
For those of you who live outside Israel, it would be very effective to send protests to your local Israeli embassy. You can find the address of your local embassy on the web.
Here is a sample letter, which you can use, or better adapt, in sending appeals to authorities on the prisoners' behalf:
Dear Sir/Madam,
It has come to my attention that [name & military ID], a conscientious objector, has been imprisoned [his/her] refusal to perform military service for the [n-th] time in a row, and is held in Military Prison No. [400/4/6].
The imprisonment of conscientious objectors such as [name] is a violation of international law, of basic human rights and of plain morals. The repeated imprisonment of conscientious objectors is an especially grave offence, as it means sentencing a person more than once for the same offence, and has been judged by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to constitute a clear case arbitrary detention.
I therefore call for the immediate and unconditional release from prison of [name], without threat of further imprisonment in the future.
Sincerely,
This message comes from New Profile, an Israeli organization dedicated to the demilitarization (or, as they say, "civil-ization") of Israeli society.
CO Maayan Padan has returned to prison for a second term. She was first sentenced to 7 days in prison for her refusal to enlist on 16 May, and then on 21 May she was given 21 more days in prison for staying AWOL between prison terms. Maayan has begun serving her prison term of 28 days in total on 21 May in Military Prison No. 400, and is due to be released on 15 June.
Before returning to prion, Maayan made the following statement:
Today, after my first prison term, I am stronger in my stand, that we should struggle to dismantle military organisations as such and to stop entrenching militarism in society. Children looking up to 'soldier heroes' interpret violent acts in a positive light and shape their characters and worldviews around them. Parents dress their babies as soldiers. Our sould are sacrifised in the name of land, but this sacrifise is a fiction, used as excuse to continue the systematic occupation, oppressing the spirit of the Palestinian people and creating deep grievances eventually leading to the desperate protest of terrorism. It is our duty to pose an alternative and to struggle for its right to exist.
Maayan's prison address is:
Maayan Padan
Military ID 6151802
Military Prison No. 400
Military Postal Code 02447, IDF
Israel
Fax: ++972-3-9579348
Recommended Action
First of all, please circulate this message and the information contained in it as widely as possible, not only through e-mail, but also on websites, conventional media, by word of mouth, etc.
Other recommendations for action:
1. Sending Letters of Support
Please send the imprisoned objectors letters of support (preferably postcards or by fax) to the prison addresses above.
2. Letters to Authorities
It is recommended to send letters of protest on behalf of the imprisoned objectors, preferably by fax, to:
Mr. Amir Peretz,
Minister of Defence,
Ministry of Defence,
37 Kaplan St.,
Tel-Aviv 61909,
Israel.
E-mail: sar@mod.gov.il or pniot@mod.gov.il
Fax: ++972-3-6976711
Copies can be sent to the commanders of the military prisons (note the updated fax number for prison No. 6) at:
Commander of Military Prison No. 6,
Military Prison No. 6,
Military postal number 01860, IDF
Israel.
Fax: ++972-4-954-05-80 Commander of Military Prison No. 400,
Military Prison No. 400,
Military postal number 02447, IDF
Israel.
Fax: ++972-3-9579389
Another useful address for sending copies would be the Military Attorney General:
Avichai Mandelblit,
Chief Military Attorney
Military postal code 9605, IDF
Israel
Fax: ++972-3-569-43-70
It would be especially useful to send your appeals to the Commander of the Induction Base in Tel-HaShomer. It is this officer that ultimately decides whether an objector is to be exempted from military service or sent to another round in prison:
Amir Rogowski,
Commander of Induction Base,
Baqum, Tel-HaShomer
Military Postal Code 02718, IDF
Israel.
Fax: ++972-3-737-60-52
Copies of appeals can also be sent to:
Head of Incompatibles Unit
Induction Base (Baqum)
Tel-HaShomer
Military Postal Code 02718, IDF
Israel.
Fax: ++972-3-737-67-05.
For those of you who live outside Israel, it would be very effective to send protests to your local Israeli embassy. You can find the address of your local embassy on the web.
Here is a sample letter, which you can use, or better adapt, in sending appeals to authorities on the prisoners' behalf:
Dear Sir/Madam,
It has come to my attention that [name & military ID], a conscientious objector, has been imprisoned [his/her] refusal to perform military service for the [n-th] time in a row, and is held in Military Prison No. [400/4/6].
The imprisonment of conscientious objectors such as [name] is a violation of international law, of basic human rights and of plain morals. The repeated imprisonment of conscientious objectors is an especially grave offence, as it means sentencing a person more than once for the same offence, and has been judged by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to constitute a clear case arbitrary detention.
I therefore call for the immediate and unconditional release from prison of [name], without threat of further imprisonment in the future.
Sincerely,
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Appeal from Physicians for Human Rights-Israel
Call for Donations to Aid Palestinian Hospitals
The financial crisis affecting the Palestinian Authority (PA) due to the stoppage of international aid and the freezing of the tax revenue by the state of Israel, has had a grave impact on the Palestinian population in the occupied territories and has led to an acute shortage of basic needs, such as medicines and food.
A number of Palestinian hospitals in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have asked us at Physicians for Human Rights-Israel to assist them in acquiring a number of medicines and medical equipment needed for the daily functions of the hospitals. During visits we have conducted to several hospitals we witnessed the harsh reality of a scarcity of life saving medicines and medical equipment to be used in the operating rooms.
Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, together with several Israeli peace and human rights groups, began a campaign to raise funds in order to aid the Palestinian areas that were hardest hit as a result of the financial crisis, and to provide, as best we can, some of the urgent medical needs of the Palestinian hospitals, with whom we have been in contact for many years.
Additionally, we are handling individual cases of patients from the occupied territories who have not received permits needed to enter Israel for urgent treatment, or patients that the PA is not paying for their treatment, due to the financial crisis. This activity also involves legal costs.
Physicians for Human Rights-Israel feels obligated to support our colleagues working in the Palestinian health system, who in this difficult time are doing all they can in order to grant the best medical service to the Palestinian population, and to aid patients and medical teams who are carrying the burden of this difficult crisis.
We turn to you with this urgent appeal asking that you donate to this activity according to your ability. In light of the urgency of the matter, we ask that those who are able to donate contact us as soon as possible, so that we can begin to transfer the aid immediately. Physicians for Human Rights-Israel plans on organizing shipments within the upcoming days.
We kindly request that you pass this message on to others, with the hope that they will answer our request and join us in this aid mission.
For more information regarding the crisis in the occupied territories:
Ibrahim Habib, Fieldwork Director, +972-54-7577696
Shabtai Gold, Public Outreach, +972-54-4860630
More information about the crisis is available on Physicians for Human Rights website: www.phr.org.il
How to donate:
All of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel’s activities are supported by donations from individuals and organizations. Inside Israel, donations to the organization are recognized as tax deductible. From outside Israel, tax deductible donations can be made through the New Israel Fund.
For more information regarding donations please contact: Daniel Hasson, +972-3-687-3718
mail@phr.org.il
www.phr.org.il
The financial crisis affecting the Palestinian Authority (PA) due to the stoppage of international aid and the freezing of the tax revenue by the state of Israel, has had a grave impact on the Palestinian population in the occupied territories and has led to an acute shortage of basic needs, such as medicines and food.
A number of Palestinian hospitals in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have asked us at Physicians for Human Rights-Israel to assist them in acquiring a number of medicines and medical equipment needed for the daily functions of the hospitals. During visits we have conducted to several hospitals we witnessed the harsh reality of a scarcity of life saving medicines and medical equipment to be used in the operating rooms.
Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, together with several Israeli peace and human rights groups, began a campaign to raise funds in order to aid the Palestinian areas that were hardest hit as a result of the financial crisis, and to provide, as best we can, some of the urgent medical needs of the Palestinian hospitals, with whom we have been in contact for many years.
Additionally, we are handling individual cases of patients from the occupied territories who have not received permits needed to enter Israel for urgent treatment, or patients that the PA is not paying for their treatment, due to the financial crisis. This activity also involves legal costs.
Physicians for Human Rights-Israel feels obligated to support our colleagues working in the Palestinian health system, who in this difficult time are doing all they can in order to grant the best medical service to the Palestinian population, and to aid patients and medical teams who are carrying the burden of this difficult crisis.
We turn to you with this urgent appeal asking that you donate to this activity according to your ability. In light of the urgency of the matter, we ask that those who are able to donate contact us as soon as possible, so that we can begin to transfer the aid immediately. Physicians for Human Rights-Israel plans on organizing shipments within the upcoming days.
We kindly request that you pass this message on to others, with the hope that they will answer our request and join us in this aid mission.
For more information regarding the crisis in the occupied territories:
Ibrahim Habib, Fieldwork Director, +972-54-7577696
Shabtai Gold, Public Outreach, +972-54-4860630
More information about the crisis is available on Physicians for Human Rights website: www.phr.org.il
How to donate:
All of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel’s activities are supported by donations from individuals and organizations. Inside Israel, donations to the organization are recognized as tax deductible. From outside Israel, tax deductible donations can be made through the New Israel Fund.
For more information regarding donations please contact: Daniel Hasson, +972-3-687-3718
mail@phr.org.il
www.phr.org.il
Sunday, May 21, 2006
A (mostly) nonviolent demonstration
Uri Avnery
20.5.06
Who's guilty? The victim of course
THOSE WHO listened to the radio news last Saturday heard a stunning report: that Muhammad Abu-Ter and Uri Avnery had barricaded themselves together in a private home in a-Ram.
The very fact that these two - the No. 2 man of Hamas and the notorious Israeli leftist - were together was already shocking enough. But the fact that they had invaded the home of an innocent Palestinian family and barricaded themselves there, like criminals fleeing from the police, was even more staggering.
This false news item would, perhaps, deserve no special mention, if it were not typical of the whole media coverage, not only of this specific demonstration, but of all joint demonstrations of Israeli peace activists and Palestinians. More than that, it throws light on the close connection between the Israeli media and the occupation regime. Without this connection, it is doubtful if the occupation could have lasted for the 39 years it has so far.
Therefore it is worthwhile to analyse the events in detail.
FIRST OF all, the background. A-Ram (that's how the name is spoken, though its written form is al-Ram) was a small Palestinian village north of Jerusalem, on the highway to Ramallah. Since the "unification" of Jerusalem in 1967, the village has become much bigger. The reason: while the Palestinian population doubles every 18 years or so, it is well-nigh impossible to obtain a building permit in East Jerusalem. For lack of an alternative, many Arab East Jerusalemites build homes for their enlarged families in the surrounding villages. A-Ram has in fact become a town, but most of its 50 thousand inhabitants have Jerusalem (i.e. Israeli) identity cards, and their life revolves around Jerusalem. Their work, health services and universities are there. Officially, however, the town belongs to the occupied territories.
When it was decided to build the Separation Wall around Jerusalem, the plan was to cut a-Ram off from the city. Worse: the path of the Wall passes right down the middle of the main street - so that it does not separate between Palestinians and Israelis, but mostly between Palestinians and Palestinians.
To get an idea: it is as if a wall had been built in the middle of Broadway, from 42nd Street to Harlem. Or in the middle of the Champs-Elysees, from the Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe. Or in Berlin, in the middle of the Kurfuerstendamm, from the Memorial Church to the Messegelaende. The two parts of the city and its neighborhoods would be separated by a nine meter high wall.
When this was only in the planning stage, the inhabitants held a number of non-violent demonstrations. To all of them, Israeli peace activists were invited and came. But in the meantime, the monstrous Wall has become reality. It cuts off the holders of Israeli identity cards from the city where their businesses and places of employment are located. It cuts off the pupils from their schools, which are only 100 meters away on the other side of the wall. Not to mention the students who are separated from their universities; the sick, separated from their hospitals; even the dead, separated from their cemeteries.
Now the wall is nearing completion. It is still under discussion in the Supreme Court, but experience shows that that is pretty hopeless. One can still reach the town through an army checkpoint, but even this hole is about to be plugged: the Wall will close off this place, too. In the meantime, in some places there is still a high fence instead of the concrete structure, pending the conclusion of the court proceedings.
In order to protest this, a large Palestinian-Israeli event was planned. It was to be a march in the main street, along the Wall (on the Palestinian side, of course), from the town center to an improvised tribune, where speeches were to be made.
The details were worked out in three planning sessions. In order to underline the non-violent character of the event, it was decided that the schoolchildren, whose schools have been cut off, would march at the head in their school uniforms, their satchels on their backs, accompanied by their teachers. Also, an alternative route was planned for them in case there would be a danger of a clash with the army.
WHEN WE - about 300 Israeli activists of several peace movements - were approaching a-Ram, we were informed that large forces were waiting to block our passage at the checkpoint. Going around them, we reached the wall on the "Israeli" side. At this point there stands a high fence, instead of the concrete structure. We breached it and many demonstrators succeeded in crossing to the "Palestinian" side, into a-Ram, before the army, which was surprised by this move, succeeded in rushing up reinforcements.
In the meantime, the Palestinian demonstration had already started on its way, exactly as planned - at the head a group of boy-scout drummers with their flags, after them the small children of the first class, behind them the other schoolchildren, from small to big, then the main demonstration with posters and flags, led by a row of leaders of all Palestinian parties. The Israeli activists mingled with the Palestinians in order to demonstrate solidarity, and I was invited to join the front row.
That way I found myself walking between Abu-Ter, the Hamas leader who has become famous in Israel not least because of his brightly shining red beard, and the Palestinian minister for Jerusalem affairs, Abu Arafeh, also a Hamas member. Next to them there were the leaders of Fatah, the Popular Front, the Democratic Front and the People's (ex-Communist) Party. We marched arm in arm, and it seemed that the demonstration would pass off peacefully. And then, suddenly, we saw that the road ahead of us was blocked by a large contingent of soldiers and policemen who were waiting for us - rows of soldiers heavily armed from head to foot, in front of them mounted police on their horses and behind them army Humvees.
The first concern was the safety of the children. Their teachers led them into a side street, and we marched slowly on, on our way to the tribune. There could not have been a less threatening sight than the row of notables, arm in arm, walking in front.
ABOUT WHAT happened then I can testify as an eye-witness, and I am prepared to undergo any lie-detector test:
When we were about 50 meters from the concentration of soldiers and horses in the main street of a-Ram, a voice from a megaphone announced that the area had been declared a "Closed Military Zone" and that our demonstration was illegal. While we were standing, facing the soldiers, a huge salvo of tear gas canisters suddenly rained down on us. It was not preceded by any provocation.
Clouds of gas rose up between us, in front and behind. More salvos of stun grenades raised hell, and so we escaped to the nearby houses. I entered the nearest one and found myself in the company of Abu Ter, who received me with great friendliness. Our eyes were burning and tearful, and we could not talk much, but we decided to have a more meaningful conversation soon.
When the gas dispersed, we emerged to join the continuing demonstration. The activists formed again and again on the road, the policemen and soldiers attacked us again and again with tear gas and stun grenades, storming forward in waves - armed and well-protected soldiers, Humvees and police riders (wearing spurs, which are forbidden by Israeli laws for animal protection.)
Only at this stage - and that's the main thing! - did some local children and youngsters start to throw stones at the policemen - stones that could do no damage, since they fell short of the policemen, whose gas launchers have a far longer range. The demo organizers did their best to restrain them, but the anger of the youngsters against the soldiers who had invaded their town was too strong. After two hours, through a dialog with the senior police officer, contact was broken off and the Israeli activists returned home.
In the course of the event, 12 people - seven Palestinians and five Israelis - were detained. The Israelis were released a few hours later, the Palestinians remained in custody, with our lawyers dealing with their cases.
THAT WAS what happened in a-Ram. From then on, it was a story of the media.
The demonstration was widely covered, for two main reasons - the violence used and the meeting between me and Abu-Ter, which provided a piquant angle, since until now there has been no dialog between Hamas and Israelis. The news on all the three Israeli TV networks reported on the event extensively. That by itself was unusual - generally, most TV stations ignore our demonstrations, or devote a few seconds to them (except for a few reports by brave reporters.)
This time, too, no Israeli medium - TV, radio or newspaper - troubled to send reporters or photographers to the event, so there was no eyewitness Israeli media report from the scene. The TV stations showed clips taken by foreign networks. The reporters just made the most of what they heard from the police and us.
And lo and behold: all the media reported the same: the demonstrators had started the violence by throwing stones, two policemen "had been wounded and treated on the spot". (This lie repeats itself at all our demonstrations. One could begin to suspect that there are two policemen whose sole duties are to be "wounded and treated on the spot" each time we demonstrate.)
The police and army statements were outright lies. They knew in advance that our demonstration would be non-violent. I rely on them to have their agents at all our meetings, and we spoke about our preparations openly over the phone and in our e-mails. Two paid ads were published before the events in Haaretz. It is absolutely clear that the army and police had prepared in advance to suppress the demonstration by force. Otherwise they would not have brought horses and Humvees.
For many years we have witnessed the mendacity of official spokespersons, and I have no doubt that the reporters covering the occupied territories are aware of it. In some media, a sentence saying that "the demonstrators argue that it was the policemen who started the violence" appeared, but in all the media it was stressed that the violence started with us, so the police had no alternative but to react.
This is an Israeli tradition, which has unfortunately also been accepted by the international media: the Israeli security forces always "react" to the violence of the other side. But, curiously enough, the killed and wounded are mostly on the other side.
The small example of a-Ram illustrates what happens on a larger scale throughout the country: in matters concerning the army and police, the news in all the media, without exception, from Maariv to Haaretz, from Channel 1 to Channel 10, is indistinguishable from government propaganda. (with honorable exceptions in opinion columns and the op-ed pages.)
The chances of the victims getting fair coverage are close to nil. After all, the victims are always to blame.
20.5.06
Who's guilty? The victim of course
THOSE WHO listened to the radio news last Saturday heard a stunning report: that Muhammad Abu-Ter and Uri Avnery had barricaded themselves together in a private home in a-Ram.
The very fact that these two - the No. 2 man of Hamas and the notorious Israeli leftist - were together was already shocking enough. But the fact that they had invaded the home of an innocent Palestinian family and barricaded themselves there, like criminals fleeing from the police, was even more staggering.
This false news item would, perhaps, deserve no special mention, if it were not typical of the whole media coverage, not only of this specific demonstration, but of all joint demonstrations of Israeli peace activists and Palestinians. More than that, it throws light on the close connection between the Israeli media and the occupation regime. Without this connection, it is doubtful if the occupation could have lasted for the 39 years it has so far.
Therefore it is worthwhile to analyse the events in detail.
FIRST OF all, the background. A-Ram (that's how the name is spoken, though its written form is al-Ram) was a small Palestinian village north of Jerusalem, on the highway to Ramallah. Since the "unification" of Jerusalem in 1967, the village has become much bigger. The reason: while the Palestinian population doubles every 18 years or so, it is well-nigh impossible to obtain a building permit in East Jerusalem. For lack of an alternative, many Arab East Jerusalemites build homes for their enlarged families in the surrounding villages. A-Ram has in fact become a town, but most of its 50 thousand inhabitants have Jerusalem (i.e. Israeli) identity cards, and their life revolves around Jerusalem. Their work, health services and universities are there. Officially, however, the town belongs to the occupied territories.
When it was decided to build the Separation Wall around Jerusalem, the plan was to cut a-Ram off from the city. Worse: the path of the Wall passes right down the middle of the main street - so that it does not separate between Palestinians and Israelis, but mostly between Palestinians and Palestinians.
To get an idea: it is as if a wall had been built in the middle of Broadway, from 42nd Street to Harlem. Or in the middle of the Champs-Elysees, from the Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe. Or in Berlin, in the middle of the Kurfuerstendamm, from the Memorial Church to the Messegelaende. The two parts of the city and its neighborhoods would be separated by a nine meter high wall.
When this was only in the planning stage, the inhabitants held a number of non-violent demonstrations. To all of them, Israeli peace activists were invited and came. But in the meantime, the monstrous Wall has become reality. It cuts off the holders of Israeli identity cards from the city where their businesses and places of employment are located. It cuts off the pupils from their schools, which are only 100 meters away on the other side of the wall. Not to mention the students who are separated from their universities; the sick, separated from their hospitals; even the dead, separated from their cemeteries.
Now the wall is nearing completion. It is still under discussion in the Supreme Court, but experience shows that that is pretty hopeless. One can still reach the town through an army checkpoint, but even this hole is about to be plugged: the Wall will close off this place, too. In the meantime, in some places there is still a high fence instead of the concrete structure, pending the conclusion of the court proceedings.
In order to protest this, a large Palestinian-Israeli event was planned. It was to be a march in the main street, along the Wall (on the Palestinian side, of course), from the town center to an improvised tribune, where speeches were to be made.
The details were worked out in three planning sessions. In order to underline the non-violent character of the event, it was decided that the schoolchildren, whose schools have been cut off, would march at the head in their school uniforms, their satchels on their backs, accompanied by their teachers. Also, an alternative route was planned for them in case there would be a danger of a clash with the army.
WHEN WE - about 300 Israeli activists of several peace movements - were approaching a-Ram, we were informed that large forces were waiting to block our passage at the checkpoint. Going around them, we reached the wall on the "Israeli" side. At this point there stands a high fence, instead of the concrete structure. We breached it and many demonstrators succeeded in crossing to the "Palestinian" side, into a-Ram, before the army, which was surprised by this move, succeeded in rushing up reinforcements.
In the meantime, the Palestinian demonstration had already started on its way, exactly as planned - at the head a group of boy-scout drummers with their flags, after them the small children of the first class, behind them the other schoolchildren, from small to big, then the main demonstration with posters and flags, led by a row of leaders of all Palestinian parties. The Israeli activists mingled with the Palestinians in order to demonstrate solidarity, and I was invited to join the front row.
That way I found myself walking between Abu-Ter, the Hamas leader who has become famous in Israel not least because of his brightly shining red beard, and the Palestinian minister for Jerusalem affairs, Abu Arafeh, also a Hamas member. Next to them there were the leaders of Fatah, the Popular Front, the Democratic Front and the People's (ex-Communist) Party. We marched arm in arm, and it seemed that the demonstration would pass off peacefully. And then, suddenly, we saw that the road ahead of us was blocked by a large contingent of soldiers and policemen who were waiting for us - rows of soldiers heavily armed from head to foot, in front of them mounted police on their horses and behind them army Humvees.
The first concern was the safety of the children. Their teachers led them into a side street, and we marched slowly on, on our way to the tribune. There could not have been a less threatening sight than the row of notables, arm in arm, walking in front.
ABOUT WHAT happened then I can testify as an eye-witness, and I am prepared to undergo any lie-detector test:
When we were about 50 meters from the concentration of soldiers and horses in the main street of a-Ram, a voice from a megaphone announced that the area had been declared a "Closed Military Zone" and that our demonstration was illegal. While we were standing, facing the soldiers, a huge salvo of tear gas canisters suddenly rained down on us. It was not preceded by any provocation.
Clouds of gas rose up between us, in front and behind. More salvos of stun grenades raised hell, and so we escaped to the nearby houses. I entered the nearest one and found myself in the company of Abu Ter, who received me with great friendliness. Our eyes were burning and tearful, and we could not talk much, but we decided to have a more meaningful conversation soon.
When the gas dispersed, we emerged to join the continuing demonstration. The activists formed again and again on the road, the policemen and soldiers attacked us again and again with tear gas and stun grenades, storming forward in waves - armed and well-protected soldiers, Humvees and police riders (wearing spurs, which are forbidden by Israeli laws for animal protection.)
Only at this stage - and that's the main thing! - did some local children and youngsters start to throw stones at the policemen - stones that could do no damage, since they fell short of the policemen, whose gas launchers have a far longer range. The demo organizers did their best to restrain them, but the anger of the youngsters against the soldiers who had invaded their town was too strong. After two hours, through a dialog with the senior police officer, contact was broken off and the Israeli activists returned home.
In the course of the event, 12 people - seven Palestinians and five Israelis - were detained. The Israelis were released a few hours later, the Palestinians remained in custody, with our lawyers dealing with their cases.
THAT WAS what happened in a-Ram. From then on, it was a story of the media.
The demonstration was widely covered, for two main reasons - the violence used and the meeting between me and Abu-Ter, which provided a piquant angle, since until now there has been no dialog between Hamas and Israelis. The news on all the three Israeli TV networks reported on the event extensively. That by itself was unusual - generally, most TV stations ignore our demonstrations, or devote a few seconds to them (except for a few reports by brave reporters.)
This time, too, no Israeli medium - TV, radio or newspaper - troubled to send reporters or photographers to the event, so there was no eyewitness Israeli media report from the scene. The TV stations showed clips taken by foreign networks. The reporters just made the most of what they heard from the police and us.
And lo and behold: all the media reported the same: the demonstrators had started the violence by throwing stones, two policemen "had been wounded and treated on the spot". (This lie repeats itself at all our demonstrations. One could begin to suspect that there are two policemen whose sole duties are to be "wounded and treated on the spot" each time we demonstrate.)
The police and army statements were outright lies. They knew in advance that our demonstration would be non-violent. I rely on them to have their agents at all our meetings, and we spoke about our preparations openly over the phone and in our e-mails. Two paid ads were published before the events in Haaretz. It is absolutely clear that the army and police had prepared in advance to suppress the demonstration by force. Otherwise they would not have brought horses and Humvees.
For many years we have witnessed the mendacity of official spokespersons, and I have no doubt that the reporters covering the occupied territories are aware of it. In some media, a sentence saying that "the demonstrators argue that it was the policemen who started the violence" appeared, but in all the media it was stressed that the violence started with us, so the police had no alternative but to react.
This is an Israeli tradition, which has unfortunately also been accepted by the international media: the Israeli security forces always "react" to the violence of the other side. But, curiously enough, the killed and wounded are mostly on the other side.
The small example of a-Ram illustrates what happens on a larger scale throughout the country: in matters concerning the army and police, the news in all the media, without exception, from Maariv to Haaretz, from Channel 1 to Channel 10, is indistinguishable from government propaganda. (with honorable exceptions in opinion columns and the op-ed pages.)
The chances of the victims getting fair coverage are close to nil. After all, the victims are always to blame.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Summer Reading
Middle East expert Juan Cole (www.juancole.com) suggests this "very basic" reading list for those of us who want to understand the social and political dynamics in the Middle East from a progressive point of view.
Dodge, Toby. Inventing Iraq: The failure of nation-building and a history denied. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Gelvin, James. The modern Middle East: A history. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Gerges, Fawaz. The far enemy: Why Jihad went global. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Hourani, Albert. A history of the Arab peoples. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991. General history of the Arab world from the time of the Prophet Muhammad to the present.
Keddie, Nikki. Modern Iran: Roots and Results of revolution. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. History of modern Iran with some early modern and nineteenth-century background, but good treatment of the twentieth century and the Islamic Republic.
Khalidi, Rashid. Palestinian identity: The construction of modern national consciousness. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Khalidi, Rashid. Resurrecting Empire: Western footprints and America's perilous path in the Middle East. Boston : Beacon Press, 2004.
Kennedy, Hugh. When Baghdad Ruled the World. New York: Perseus Books, 2006. Explores the medieval history of Muslim-ruled Iraq and its civilizational glories.
Kepel, Gilles. Jihad: The trail of political Islam. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Marr, Phebe. The modern history of Iraq. 2nd ed. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2004.
McAlister, Melani. Epic encounters: Culture, media, and U.S. interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Mottahedeh, Roy. The mantle of the Prophet: Religion and politics in Iran. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985.
Packer, George. The assassinsin's gate: America in Iraq. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
Quataert, Donald. The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922. 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambrige University Press, 2005. Best recent social history of the greatest Middle Eastern empire and its early twentieth-century demise
Rosen, Nir. In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq. New York: Free Press, 2006.
Shadid, Anthony. Night draws near: Iraq's people in the shadow of America's war. New York: Henry Holt, 2005.
Shlaim, Avi. The iron wall: Israel and the Arab world. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000.
Smith, Charles. Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict. 5th ed. Boston:Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004.
Dodge, Toby. Inventing Iraq: The failure of nation-building and a history denied. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Gelvin, James. The modern Middle East: A history. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Gerges, Fawaz. The far enemy: Why Jihad went global. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Hourani, Albert. A history of the Arab peoples. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991. General history of the Arab world from the time of the Prophet Muhammad to the present.
Keddie, Nikki. Modern Iran: Roots and Results of revolution. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. History of modern Iran with some early modern and nineteenth-century background, but good treatment of the twentieth century and the Islamic Republic.
Khalidi, Rashid. Palestinian identity: The construction of modern national consciousness. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Khalidi, Rashid. Resurrecting Empire: Western footprints and America's perilous path in the Middle East. Boston : Beacon Press, 2004.
Kennedy, Hugh. When Baghdad Ruled the World. New York: Perseus Books, 2006. Explores the medieval history of Muslim-ruled Iraq and its civilizational glories.
Kepel, Gilles. Jihad: The trail of political Islam. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Marr, Phebe. The modern history of Iraq. 2nd ed. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2004.
McAlister, Melani. Epic encounters: Culture, media, and U.S. interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Mottahedeh, Roy. The mantle of the Prophet: Religion and politics in Iran. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985.
Packer, George. The assassinsin's gate: America in Iraq. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
Quataert, Donald. The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922. 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambrige University Press, 2005. Best recent social history of the greatest Middle Eastern empire and its early twentieth-century demise
Rosen, Nir. In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq. New York: Free Press, 2006.
Shadid, Anthony. Night draws near: Iraq's people in the shadow of America's war. New York: Henry Holt, 2005.
Shlaim, Avi. The iron wall: Israel and the Arab world. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000.
Smith, Charles. Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict. 5th ed. Boston:Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004.
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Links for Palestinian and other Peace Organizations
Holy Land Trust sponsors a Peace and Reconciliation project as well as the Palestine Summer Encounter.
Rapprochement is very active in non violent resistance in the Beit Sahour, Beit Jala, and Bethlehem areas.
Forusa leads delegations and does women's nonviolent resistance work.
Christian Peacemaker Teams http://cpt.org/ sends trained internationals to listen, and talk with people on both sides of the conflict. Art Gish's wonderful book, Hebron Journal: Stories of Nonviolent Peacemaking(2001, Herald Press) came out of his experiences as a member of CPT.
International Solidarity Movement
ISM is a Palestinian-led movement committed to resisting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land using nonviolent, direct-action methods and principles. They do training and welcome participation of internationals in active resistance in the Occupied Territories.
The Michigan Peace Team does nonviolent training and sends teams to serve as a peaceful presence in domestic and international conflicts.
The Palestine Right to Return Coalition is a broad-based, non-partisan, democratic, and charitable organization of grassroots activists and students committed to comprehensive public education on the rights of all Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and lands of origin, and to be granted full restitution of all their confiscated and destroyed property in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International law and the numerous United Nations Resolutions upholding such rights.
Wi'am: Palestine Conflict Resolution Center does non-violent resistance and reconciliation work in the Bethlehem area.
Rapprochement is very active in non violent resistance in the Beit Sahour, Beit Jala, and Bethlehem areas.
Forusa leads delegations and does women's nonviolent resistance work.
Christian Peacemaker Teams http://cpt.org/ sends trained internationals to listen, and talk with people on both sides of the conflict. Art Gish's wonderful book, Hebron Journal: Stories of Nonviolent Peacemaking(2001, Herald Press) came out of his experiences as a member of CPT.
International Solidarity Movement
ISM is a Palestinian-led movement committed to resisting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land using nonviolent, direct-action methods and principles. They do training and welcome participation of internationals in active resistance in the Occupied Territories.
The Michigan Peace Team does nonviolent training and sends teams to serve as a peaceful presence in domestic and international conflicts.
The Palestine Right to Return Coalition is a broad-based, non-partisan, democratic, and charitable organization of grassroots activists and students committed to comprehensive public education on the rights of all Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and lands of origin, and to be granted full restitution of all their confiscated and destroyed property in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International law and the numerous United Nations Resolutions upholding such rights.
Wi'am: Palestine Conflict Resolution Center does non-violent resistance and reconciliation work in the Bethlehem area.
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
Jimmy Carter: Punishing the Innocent is a Crime
International Herald Tribune
May 7, 2006
Innocent Palestinian people are being treated like animals, with the presumption that they are guilty of some crime. Because they voted for candidates who are members of Hamas, the United States government has become the driving force behind an apparently effective scheme of depriving the general public of income, access to the outside world and the necessities of life.
Overwhelmingly, these are school teachers, nurses, social workers, police officers, farm families, shopkeepers, and their employees and families who are just hoping for a better life. Public opinion polls conducted after the January parliamentary election show that 80 percent of Palestinians still want a peace agreement with Israel based on the international road map premises. Although Fatah party members refused to join Hamas in a coalition government, nearly 70 percent of Palestinians continue to support Fatah's leader, Mahmoud Abbas, as their president.
It is almost a miracle that the Palestinians have been able to orchestrate three elections during the past 10 years, all of which have been honest, fair, strongly contested, without violence and with the results accepted by winners and losers. Among the 62 elections that have been monitored by us at the Carter Center, these are among the best in portraying the will of the people.
One clear reason for the surprising Hamas victory for legislative seats was that the voters were in despair about prospects for peace. With American acquiescence, the Israelis had avoided any substantive peace talks for more than five years, regardless of who had been chosen to represent the Palestinian side as interlocutor.
The day after his party lost the election, Abbas told me that his own struggling government could not sustain itself financially with their daily lives and economy so severely disrupted, and access from Palestine to Israel and the outside world almost totally restricted. They were already $900 million in debt and had no way to meet the payroll for the following month. The additional restraints imposed on the new government are a planned and deliberate catastrophe for the citizens of the occupied territories, in hopes that Hamas will yield to the economic pressure.
With all their faults, Hamas leaders have continued to honor a temporary cease-fire, or hudna, during the past 18 months, and their spokesman told me that this "can be extended for two, 10 or even 50 years if the Israelis will reciprocate." Although Hamas leaders have refused to recognize the state of Israel while their territory is being occupied, Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh has expressed approval for peace talks between Abbas and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel. He added that if these negotiations result in an agreement that can be accepted by Palestinians, then the Hamas position regarding Israel would be changed.
Regardless of these intricate and long-term political interrelationships, it is unconscionable for Israel, the United States and others under their influence to continue punishing the innocent and already persecuted people of Palestine. The Israelis are withholding approximately $55 million a month in taxes and customs duties that, without dispute, belong to the Palestinians. Although some Arab nations have allocated funds for humanitarian purposes to alleviate human suffering, the U.S. government is threatening the financial existence of any Jordanian or other bank that dares to transfer this assistance into Palestine.
There is no way to predict what will happen in Palestine, but it would be a tragedy for the international community to abandon the hope that a peaceful coexistence of two states in the Holy Land is possible. Like Egypt and all other Arab nations before the Camp David Accords of 1978, and the Palestine Liberation Organization before the Oslo peace agreement of 1993, Hamas has so far refused to recognize the sovereign state of Israel as legitimate, with a right to live in peace. This is a matter of great concern to all of us, and the international community needs to probe for an acceptable way out of this quagmire. There is no doubt that Israelis and Palestinians both want a durable two-state solution, but depriving the people of Palestine of their basic human rights just to punish their elected leaders is not a path to peace.
Former President Jimmy Carter is founder of the Carter Center, a nonprofit organization working for peace and health worldwide.
May 7, 2006
Innocent Palestinian people are being treated like animals, with the presumption that they are guilty of some crime. Because they voted for candidates who are members of Hamas, the United States government has become the driving force behind an apparently effective scheme of depriving the general public of income, access to the outside world and the necessities of life.
Overwhelmingly, these are school teachers, nurses, social workers, police officers, farm families, shopkeepers, and their employees and families who are just hoping for a better life. Public opinion polls conducted after the January parliamentary election show that 80 percent of Palestinians still want a peace agreement with Israel based on the international road map premises. Although Fatah party members refused to join Hamas in a coalition government, nearly 70 percent of Palestinians continue to support Fatah's leader, Mahmoud Abbas, as their president.
It is almost a miracle that the Palestinians have been able to orchestrate three elections during the past 10 years, all of which have been honest, fair, strongly contested, without violence and with the results accepted by winners and losers. Among the 62 elections that have been monitored by us at the Carter Center, these are among the best in portraying the will of the people.
One clear reason for the surprising Hamas victory for legislative seats was that the voters were in despair about prospects for peace. With American acquiescence, the Israelis had avoided any substantive peace talks for more than five years, regardless of who had been chosen to represent the Palestinian side as interlocutor.
The day after his party lost the election, Abbas told me that his own struggling government could not sustain itself financially with their daily lives and economy so severely disrupted, and access from Palestine to Israel and the outside world almost totally restricted. They were already $900 million in debt and had no way to meet the payroll for the following month. The additional restraints imposed on the new government are a planned and deliberate catastrophe for the citizens of the occupied territories, in hopes that Hamas will yield to the economic pressure.
With all their faults, Hamas leaders have continued to honor a temporary cease-fire, or hudna, during the past 18 months, and their spokesman told me that this "can be extended for two, 10 or even 50 years if the Israelis will reciprocate." Although Hamas leaders have refused to recognize the state of Israel while their territory is being occupied, Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh has expressed approval for peace talks between Abbas and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel. He added that if these negotiations result in an agreement that can be accepted by Palestinians, then the Hamas position regarding Israel would be changed.
Regardless of these intricate and long-term political interrelationships, it is unconscionable for Israel, the United States and others under their influence to continue punishing the innocent and already persecuted people of Palestine. The Israelis are withholding approximately $55 million a month in taxes and customs duties that, without dispute, belong to the Palestinians. Although some Arab nations have allocated funds for humanitarian purposes to alleviate human suffering, the U.S. government is threatening the financial existence of any Jordanian or other bank that dares to transfer this assistance into Palestine.
There is no way to predict what will happen in Palestine, but it would be a tragedy for the international community to abandon the hope that a peaceful coexistence of two states in the Holy Land is possible. Like Egypt and all other Arab nations before the Camp David Accords of 1978, and the Palestine Liberation Organization before the Oslo peace agreement of 1993, Hamas has so far refused to recognize the sovereign state of Israel as legitimate, with a right to live in peace. This is a matter of great concern to all of us, and the international community needs to probe for an acceptable way out of this quagmire. There is no doubt that Israelis and Palestinians both want a durable two-state solution, but depriving the people of Palestine of their basic human rights just to punish their elected leaders is not a path to peace.
Former President Jimmy Carter is founder of the Carter Center, a nonprofit organization working for peace and health worldwide.
Sunday, May 07, 2006
Letter from Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire
From: Mrs. Mairead Corrigan Maguire
Nobel Peace Laureate
Subject: Free M. Mordechai Vanunu,
Proposals to end the war between Israel and Palestine
May, 2006
LET MORDECHAI VANUNU GO...
On leaving Israel/Palestine today, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate, who has spent the last 10 days in Israel-Palestine campaigning for an end to the detention of Mordechai Vanunu, said:
"I believe it is sad and shameful that the Israeli Government continues to detain Mordechai Vanunu for this the 20 year of his internal exile within Israel. He has no secrets. He is no threat to Israeli security. I therefore call upon the Israel Government to uphold Mordechai Vanunu's human rights to freedom of speech and freedom of movement and let him go.
I also support his call for a Nuclear Free Israel, Middle East and world and call upon the Israeli Government to open Dimona for inspection, and to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation treaty.
During my visit I have travelled to Jenin Refugee Camp, Hebron, and Bethlehem in the Israeli Occupied Territories. I have witnessed the daily suffering of the Palestinian people living under an increasing and worsening oppressive Israeli occupation.
I believe there is a great desire for peace amongst all the people, but in order to move into serious dialogue and negotiations urgent steps, and the political will; particularly from the Israeli Government, need to be taken. I therefore make the following Appeal:
l) I call upon the International Community, European Community, the United States of America, to intervene to end the 40 year occupation by Israel and to end the Palestinian suffering in Palestinian camps for 60 years. The International Community must not be intimidated and silenced by threats of being anti-Semitic or anti-Israeli, but must be bold in demanding Israel upholds it obligations under International Law.
2) The way for peace must be for Israel to end the occupation and recognize and respect all the national and international human rights of the Palestinian people.
3) I call upon the Palestinian people to use the methods of Jesus Christ, Badshan Khan, Gandhi, Martin Luther King of nonviolent resistance to the occupation and apartheid system, which continues to cause so much suffering to their people. And for the International Community to support such a nonviolent resistance by the Palestinian people.
4) I call upon the Israeli Government to uphold International Court of Justice and dismantle the Apartheid wall, and the Apartheid system of injustice. To recognize the democratically elected Government of the Palestinian people and enter into serious dialogue with their new 'partner for peace.
5) I call upon Israeli Government, European Union, United State, to restore Foreign Aid as the withdrawing of this, is in effect. a collective punishment of the Palestinian people, many of whom already live under great poverty and hardship, due to the continuing illegal occupation and colonization of the Palestinian Territories.
6) I call upon all Israeli and Palestinian people to continue to hope and believe and act for peace, and to do everything in their power to begin to build trust and friendship amongst each other. Nuclear Weapons, militarism, and emergency laws will not build trust, but overcome the fear of each other, and continuing the great work already being done by both Israeli and Palestinian peace activists, and many others, will bring peace. The Israeli Government can help this process by making it possible for people to actually meet each other, and build a grassroots peace movement together.
I have great hopes for both Israeli-Palestinian and leave strengthened and upheld by the love and affection I have received from my many Israeli and Palestinian Friends.
Shalom/Salam,
Mrs Mairead Corrigan Maguire
Nobel Peace Laureate,
Peace People,
224 Lisburn Road,
Belfast. BT9
Northern Ireland UK.
www.peacepeople.com
Tel: (44) (0)2890 663465
Fax: (44) (0)2890 381987
Email Info@peacepeople.com
Nobel Peace Laureate
Subject: Free M. Mordechai Vanunu,
Proposals to end the war between Israel and Palestine
May, 2006
LET MORDECHAI VANUNU GO...
On leaving Israel/Palestine today, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate, who has spent the last 10 days in Israel-Palestine campaigning for an end to the detention of Mordechai Vanunu, said:
"I believe it is sad and shameful that the Israeli Government continues to detain Mordechai Vanunu for this the 20 year of his internal exile within Israel. He has no secrets. He is no threat to Israeli security. I therefore call upon the Israel Government to uphold Mordechai Vanunu's human rights to freedom of speech and freedom of movement and let him go.
I also support his call for a Nuclear Free Israel, Middle East and world and call upon the Israeli Government to open Dimona for inspection, and to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation treaty.
During my visit I have travelled to Jenin Refugee Camp, Hebron, and Bethlehem in the Israeli Occupied Territories. I have witnessed the daily suffering of the Palestinian people living under an increasing and worsening oppressive Israeli occupation.
I believe there is a great desire for peace amongst all the people, but in order to move into serious dialogue and negotiations urgent steps, and the political will; particularly from the Israeli Government, need to be taken. I therefore make the following Appeal:
l) I call upon the International Community, European Community, the United States of America, to intervene to end the 40 year occupation by Israel and to end the Palestinian suffering in Palestinian camps for 60 years. The International Community must not be intimidated and silenced by threats of being anti-Semitic or anti-Israeli, but must be bold in demanding Israel upholds it obligations under International Law.
2) The way for peace must be for Israel to end the occupation and recognize and respect all the national and international human rights of the Palestinian people.
3) I call upon the Palestinian people to use the methods of Jesus Christ, Badshan Khan, Gandhi, Martin Luther King of nonviolent resistance to the occupation and apartheid system, which continues to cause so much suffering to their people. And for the International Community to support such a nonviolent resistance by the Palestinian people.
4) I call upon the Israeli Government to uphold International Court of Justice and dismantle the Apartheid wall, and the Apartheid system of injustice. To recognize the democratically elected Government of the Palestinian people and enter into serious dialogue with their new 'partner for peace.
5) I call upon Israeli Government, European Union, United State, to restore Foreign Aid as the withdrawing of this, is in effect. a collective punishment of the Palestinian people, many of whom already live under great poverty and hardship, due to the continuing illegal occupation and colonization of the Palestinian Territories.
6) I call upon all Israeli and Palestinian people to continue to hope and believe and act for peace, and to do everything in their power to begin to build trust and friendship amongst each other. Nuclear Weapons, militarism, and emergency laws will not build trust, but overcome the fear of each other, and continuing the great work already being done by both Israeli and Palestinian peace activists, and many others, will bring peace. The Israeli Government can help this process by making it possible for people to actually meet each other, and build a grassroots peace movement together.
I have great hopes for both Israeli-Palestinian and leave strengthened and upheld by the love and affection I have received from my many Israeli and Palestinian Friends.
Shalom/Salam,
Mrs Mairead Corrigan Maguire
Nobel Peace Laureate,
Peace People,
224 Lisburn Road,
Belfast. BT9
Northern Ireland UK.
www.peacepeople.com
Tel: (44) (0)2890 663465
Fax: (44) (0)2890 381987
Email Info@peacepeople.com
Saturday, May 06, 2006
Letter from Churches for Middle East Peace
May 2, 2006
The Honorable George W. Bush
President of the United States
The Honorable Mahmoud Abbas
President of the Palestinian Authority
The Honorable Ehud Olmert
Prime Minister-Elect of Israel
Dear President Bush, President Abbas and Prime Minister Olmert,
We write to you as leaders of churches and church- related organizations from the Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant traditions that work together in Churches for Middle East Peace.
With a sense of great urgency, we appeal to you to take immediate actions that can restore hope for peace between the state of Israel and the future state of Palestine. With anguish, we recognize the tremendous grief, anger, suffering and fear felt by both the Israeli and Palestinian people. With alarm, we observe the growing danger that this unresolved conflict brings to the people of the United States as anti-American sentiment is fueled by the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. With hope, we ask for your intervention in four areas of deep concern: the pending humanitarian crisis, the cessation of violence, the establishment of a mutually negotiated border between Israel and the future Palestine, and the status of Jerusalem.
The looming humanitarian crisis among the Palestinian people is our most immediate concern. We have heard reports from a recent Churches for Middle East Peace delegation to Jerusalem and the West Bank and from staff of humanitarian and development agencies that the cut-off of aid to the Palestinian Authority and the strict limitations on aid going through NGOs poses a threat of massive dimensions. We ask each of you to adopt policies and take actions that provide both space and opportunity for the newly elected Hamas government to make positive changes, while finding mechanisms that allow financial assistance to reach the Palestinian people immediately.
President Abbas, we encourage you to maintain your persistent commitment to peacemaking and nonviolence. We were deeply grieved by the suicide bombing in Tel Aviv on April 17 and alarmed by Hamas officials’ statements condoning this terrible act of violence. We urge you and the Palestinian people to remain steadfast in pursuit of peace and to press the officials of Hamas to accept previous agreements regarding Israel and to renounce violence.
Prime Minister Olmert, we commend you for declaring that under your leadership Israel will withdraw from additional occupied land and dismantle some settlements in the West Bank. Such actions, undertaken in consultation with the Palestinians, could be important moves forward in Israel’s compliance with UNSC Res. 242, which continues to be the internationally accepted legal basis for resolution of the conflict. We also urge you to end the practice of targeted assassinations and incursions into Palestinian areas.
President Bush, your vision of a two-state solution that provides for a viable state of Palestine living in peace alongside a secure and internationally recognized state of Israel remains our goal – a goal that is shared by the majority of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, according to polling data. Yet, steps are being taken by both governments that make this solution increasingly difficult. As you continue to press Hamas to change, we ask you to remain diligent about changes being made by Israel on the ground. We applaud your statements, and those of Secretary of State Rice, that no one should try to unilaterally predetermine the outcome of final status agreement and encourage Prime Minister Olmert to heed your words.
It is extremely important that decisions on the final status issues of borders, Jewish settlements, refugees, water and the sovereignty of Jerusalem be agreed upon in the context of negotiations and with the strong leadership of the United States in cooperation with the Quartet and the Arab League. We believe that in you, President Abbas, the Israelis do have a partner with whom to negotiate. That is the only means by which the outcomes will be viewed as legitimate and conducive to a durable peace between Israel and its neighbors. Prime Minister Olmert, if you choose to unilaterally disengage from portions of the West Bank and the environs of East Jerusalem, we urge you to publicly declare that the withdrawal lines are not permanent borders and that those will be determined in negotiations with the Palestinians.
Similarly, we ask for Prime Minister Olmert’s assurance that the separation barrier is only temporary, and that its route, where it extends beyond the Green Line, is not a permanent border. The separation barrier is having a tremendously negative impact, both psychologically and economically, on the Palestinians and on the potential of a viable Palestinian state. While the separation barrier may prevent some terrorist attacks, we believe Israel’s security lies ultimately in a negotiated end of the occupation that is accepted by the United Nations as the fulfillment of Security Council resolutions and is consistent with the requirements of the Geneva Conventions.
Churches for Middle East Peace has long advocated the sharing of Jerusalem by the two peoples and the three faiths. The severing of Bethlehem and other parts of the West Bank from East Jerusalem by means of the separation barrier and restrictive residency and other laws is extremely troubling. It is no longer possible for the vast majority of Palestinian Muslims and Christians in the West Bank and Gaza to worship at their holy sites and to have access to Jerusalem-based institutions. We believe that a negotiated solution for Jerusalem, that takes into account the profound dimensions of the Holy City for Jews, Christians, and Muslims globally, is the key to Middle East peace and the eventual reconciliation of the Abrahamic family.
President Bush, President Abbas and Prime Minister Olmert, you alone are capable of reawakening your peoples to the promise of peace. Our urgent appeal to you is witness to the great numbers of people of the Christian tradition, in the United States and globally, who pray for peace and for your strength and courage to be peacemakers.
Sincerely,
Signed by 20 church leaders in the CMEP coalition
The Honorable George W. Bush
President of the United States
The Honorable Mahmoud Abbas
President of the Palestinian Authority
The Honorable Ehud Olmert
Prime Minister-Elect of Israel
Dear President Bush, President Abbas and Prime Minister Olmert,
We write to you as leaders of churches and church- related organizations from the Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant traditions that work together in Churches for Middle East Peace.
With a sense of great urgency, we appeal to you to take immediate actions that can restore hope for peace between the state of Israel and the future state of Palestine. With anguish, we recognize the tremendous grief, anger, suffering and fear felt by both the Israeli and Palestinian people. With alarm, we observe the growing danger that this unresolved conflict brings to the people of the United States as anti-American sentiment is fueled by the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. With hope, we ask for your intervention in four areas of deep concern: the pending humanitarian crisis, the cessation of violence, the establishment of a mutually negotiated border between Israel and the future Palestine, and the status of Jerusalem.
The looming humanitarian crisis among the Palestinian people is our most immediate concern. We have heard reports from a recent Churches for Middle East Peace delegation to Jerusalem and the West Bank and from staff of humanitarian and development agencies that the cut-off of aid to the Palestinian Authority and the strict limitations on aid going through NGOs poses a threat of massive dimensions. We ask each of you to adopt policies and take actions that provide both space and opportunity for the newly elected Hamas government to make positive changes, while finding mechanisms that allow financial assistance to reach the Palestinian people immediately.
President Abbas, we encourage you to maintain your persistent commitment to peacemaking and nonviolence. We were deeply grieved by the suicide bombing in Tel Aviv on April 17 and alarmed by Hamas officials’ statements condoning this terrible act of violence. We urge you and the Palestinian people to remain steadfast in pursuit of peace and to press the officials of Hamas to accept previous agreements regarding Israel and to renounce violence.
Prime Minister Olmert, we commend you for declaring that under your leadership Israel will withdraw from additional occupied land and dismantle some settlements in the West Bank. Such actions, undertaken in consultation with the Palestinians, could be important moves forward in Israel’s compliance with UNSC Res. 242, which continues to be the internationally accepted legal basis for resolution of the conflict. We also urge you to end the practice of targeted assassinations and incursions into Palestinian areas.
President Bush, your vision of a two-state solution that provides for a viable state of Palestine living in peace alongside a secure and internationally recognized state of Israel remains our goal – a goal that is shared by the majority of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, according to polling data. Yet, steps are being taken by both governments that make this solution increasingly difficult. As you continue to press Hamas to change, we ask you to remain diligent about changes being made by Israel on the ground. We applaud your statements, and those of Secretary of State Rice, that no one should try to unilaterally predetermine the outcome of final status agreement and encourage Prime Minister Olmert to heed your words.
It is extremely important that decisions on the final status issues of borders, Jewish settlements, refugees, water and the sovereignty of Jerusalem be agreed upon in the context of negotiations and with the strong leadership of the United States in cooperation with the Quartet and the Arab League. We believe that in you, President Abbas, the Israelis do have a partner with whom to negotiate. That is the only means by which the outcomes will be viewed as legitimate and conducive to a durable peace between Israel and its neighbors. Prime Minister Olmert, if you choose to unilaterally disengage from portions of the West Bank and the environs of East Jerusalem, we urge you to publicly declare that the withdrawal lines are not permanent borders and that those will be determined in negotiations with the Palestinians.
Similarly, we ask for Prime Minister Olmert’s assurance that the separation barrier is only temporary, and that its route, where it extends beyond the Green Line, is not a permanent border. The separation barrier is having a tremendously negative impact, both psychologically and economically, on the Palestinians and on the potential of a viable Palestinian state. While the separation barrier may prevent some terrorist attacks, we believe Israel’s security lies ultimately in a negotiated end of the occupation that is accepted by the United Nations as the fulfillment of Security Council resolutions and is consistent with the requirements of the Geneva Conventions.
Churches for Middle East Peace has long advocated the sharing of Jerusalem by the two peoples and the three faiths. The severing of Bethlehem and other parts of the West Bank from East Jerusalem by means of the separation barrier and restrictive residency and other laws is extremely troubling. It is no longer possible for the vast majority of Palestinian Muslims and Christians in the West Bank and Gaza to worship at their holy sites and to have access to Jerusalem-based institutions. We believe that a negotiated solution for Jerusalem, that takes into account the profound dimensions of the Holy City for Jews, Christians, and Muslims globally, is the key to Middle East peace and the eventual reconciliation of the Abrahamic family.
President Bush, President Abbas and Prime Minister Olmert, you alone are capable of reawakening your peoples to the promise of peace. Our urgent appeal to you is witness to the great numbers of people of the Christian tradition, in the United States and globally, who pray for peace and for your strength and courage to be peacemakers.
Sincerely,
Signed by 20 church leaders in the CMEP coalition
Thursday, May 04, 2006
This Is What Real Dialogue Looks Like
This interesting piece, published in Haaretz, one of Israel's foremost newspapers, received over 175 "talkback" replies on the day it came out. This is the kind of dialogue we want to promote!
Haaretz Friday, May 5, 2006
The country that wouldn't grow up
By Tony Judt
By the age of 58 a country - like a man - should have achieved a certain maturity. After nearly six decades of existence we know, for good and for bad, who we are, what we have done and how we appear to others, warts and all. We acknowledge, however reluctantly and privately, our mistakes and our shortcomings. And though we still harbor the occasional illusion about ourselves and our prospects, we are wise enough to recognize that these are indeed for the most part just that: illusions. In short, we are adults.
But the State of Israel remains curiously (and among Western-style democracies, uniquely) immature. The social transformations of the country - and its many economic achievements - have not brought the political wisdom that usually accompanies age. Seen from the outside, Israel still comports itself like an adolescent: consumed by a brittle confidence in its own uniqueness; certain that no one "understands" it and everyone is "against" it; full of wounded self-esteem, quick to take offense and quick to give it. Like many adolescents Israel is convinced - and makes a point of aggressively and repeatedly asserting - that it can do as it wishes, that its actions carry no consequences and that it is immortal. Appropriately enough, this country that has somehow failed to grow up was until very recently still in the hands of a generation of men who were prominent in its public affairs 40 years ago: an Israeli Rip Van Winkle who fell asleep in, say, 1967 would be surprised indeed to awake in 2006 and find Shimon Peres and General Ariel Sharon still hovering over the affairs of the country - the latter albeit only in spirit.
But that, Israeli readers will tell me, is the prejudiced view of the outsider. What looks from abroad like a self-indulgent, wayward country - delinquent in its international obligations and resentfully indifferent to world opinion - is simply an independent little state doing what it has always done: looking after its own interests in an inhospitable part of the globe. Why should embattled Israel even acknowledge such foreign criticism, much less act upon it? They - gentiles, Muslims, leftists - have reasons of their own for disliking Israel. They - Europeans, Arabs, fascists - have always singled out Israel for special criticism. Their motives are timeless. They haven't changed. Why should Israel change?
But they have changed. And it is this change, which has passed largely unrecognized within Israel, to which I want to draw attention here. Before 1967 the State of Israel may have been tiny and embattled, but it was not typically hated: certainly not in the West. Official Soviet-bloc communism was anti-Zionist of course, but for just that reason Israel was rather well regarded by everyone else, including the non-communist left. The romantic image of the kibbutz and the kibbutznik had a broad foreign appeal in the first two decades of Israel's existence. Most admirers of Israel (Jews and non-Jews) knew little about the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948. They preferred to see in the Jewish state the last surviving incarnation of the 19th century idyll of agrarian socialism - or else a paragon of modernizing energy "making the desert bloom."
I remember well, in the spring of 1967, how the balance of student opinion at Cambridge University was overwhelmingly pro-Israel in the weeks leading up to the Six-Day War - and how little attention anyone paid either to the condition of the Palestinians or to Israel's earlier collusion with France and Britain in the disastrous Suez adventure of 1956. In politics and in policy-making circles only old-fashioned conservative Arabists expressed any criticism of the Jewish state; even neo-Fascists rather favored Zionism, on traditional anti-Semitic grounds.
For a while after the 1967 war these sentiments continued unaltered. The pro-Palestinian enthusiasms of post-1960s radical groups and nationalist movements, reflected in joint training camps and shared projects for terrorist attacks, were offset by the growing international acknowledgment of the Holocaust in education and the media: What Israel lost by its continuing occupation of Arab lands it gained through its close identification with the recovered memory of Europe's dead Jews. Even the inauguration of the illegal settlements and the disastrous invasion of Lebanon, while they strengthened the arguments of Israel's critics, did not yet shift the international balance of opinion. As recently as the early 1990s, most people in the world were only vaguely aware of the "West Bank" and what was happening there. Even those who pressed the Palestinians' case in international forums conceded that almost no one was listening. Israel could still do as it wished.
The Israeli nakba
But today everything is different. We can see, in retrospect, that the victory of Israel in June 1967 and its continuing occupation of the territories it conquered then have been the Jewish state's very own nakba: a moral and political catastrophe. Israel's actions in the West Bank and Gaza have magnified and publicized the country's shortcomings and displayed them to a watching world. Curfews, checkpoints, bulldozers, public humiliations, home destructions, land seizures, shootings, "targeted assassinations," the separation fence: All of these routines of occupation and repression were once familiar only to an informed minority of specialists and activists. Today they can be watched, in real time, by anyone with a computer or a satellite dish - which means that Israel's behavior is under daily scrutiny by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The result has been a complete transformation in the international view of Israel. Until very recently the carefully burnished image of an ultra-modern society - built by survivors and pioneers and peopled by peace-loving democrats - still held sway over international opinion. But today? What is the universal shorthand symbol for Israel, reproduced worldwide in thousands of newspaper editorials and political cartoons? The Star of David emblazoned upon a tank.
Today only a tiny minority of outsiders see Israelis as victims. The true victims, it is now widely accepted, are the Palestinians. Indeed, Palestinians have now displaced Jews as the emblematic persecuted minority: vulnerable, humiliated and stateless. This unsought distinction does little to advance the Palestinian case any more than it ever helped Jews, but it has redefined Israel forever. It has become commonplace to compare Israel at best to an occupying colonizer, at worst to the South Africa of race laws and Bantustans. In this capacity Israel elicits scant sympathy even when its own citizens suffer: Dead Israelis - like the occasional assassinated white South African in the apartheid era, or British colonists hacked to death by native insurgents - are typically perceived abroad not as the victims of terrorism but as the collateral damage of their own government's mistaken policies.
Such comparisons are lethal to Israel's moral credibility. They strike at what was once its strongest suit: the claim of being a vulnerable island of democracy and decency in a sea of authoritarianism and cruelty; an oasis of rights and freedoms surrounded by a desert of repression. But democrats don't fence into Bantustans helpless people whose land they have conquered, and free men don't ignore international law and steal other men's homes. The contradictions of Israeli self-presentation - "we are very strong/we are very vulnerable"; "we are in control of our fate/we are the victims"; "we are a normal state/we demand special treatment" - are not new: they have been part of the country's peculiar identity almost from the outset. And Israel's insistent emphasis upon its isolation and uniqueness, its claim to be both victim and hero, were once part of its David versus Goliath appeal.
Collective cognitive dysfunction
But today the country's national narrative of macho victimhood appears to the rest of the world as simply bizarre: evidence of a sort of collective cognitive dysfunction that has gripped Israel's political culture. And the long cultivated persecution mania - "everyone's out to get us" - no longer elicits sympathy. Instead it attracts some very unappetizing comparisons: At a recent international meeting I heard one speaker, by analogy with Helmut Schmidt's famous dismissal of the Soviet Union as "Upper Volta with Missiles," describe Israel as "Serbia with nukes."
Israel has stayed the same, but the world - as I noted above - has changed. Whatever purchase Israel's self-description still has upon the imagination of Israelis themselves, it no longer operates beyond the country's frontiers. Even the Holocaust can no longer be instrumentalized to excuse Israel's behavior. Thanks to the passage of time, most Western European states have now come to terms with their part in the Holocaust, something that was not true a quarter century ago. From Israel's point of view, this has had paradoxical consequences: Until the end of the Cold War Israeli governments could still play upon the guilt of Germans and other Europeans, exploiting their failure to acknowledge fully what was done to Jews on their territory. Today, now that the history of World War II is retreating from the public square into the classroom and from the classroom into the history books, a growing majority of voters in Europe and elsewhere (young voters above all) simply cannot understand how the horrors of the last European war can be invoked to license or condone unacceptable behavior in another time and place. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that the great-grandmother of an Israeli soldier died in Treblinka is no excuse for his own abusive treatment of a Palestinian woman waiting to cross a checkpoint. "Remember Auschwitz" is not an acceptable response.
In short: Israel, in the world's eyes, is a normal state, but one behaving in abnormal ways. It is in control of its fate, but the victims are someone else. It is strong, very strong, but its behavior is making everyone else vulnerable. And so, shorn of all other justifications for its behavior, Israel and its supporters today fall back with increasing shrillness upon the oldest claim of all: Israel is a Jewish state and that is why people criticize it. This - the charge that criticism of Israel is implicitly anti-Semitic - is regarded in Israel and the United States as Israel's trump card. If it has been played more insistently and aggressively in recent years, that is because it is now the only card left.
The habit of tarring any foreign criticism with the brush of anti-Semitism is deeply engrained in Israeli political instincts: Ariel Sharon used it with characteristic excess but he was only the latest in a long line of Israeli leaders to exploit the claim. David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir did no different. But Jews outside of Israel pay a high price for this tactic. Not only does it inhibit their own criticisms of Israel for fear of appearing to associate with bad company, but it encourages others to look upon Jews everywhere as de facto collaborators in Israel's misbehavior. When Israel breaks international law in the occupied territories, when Israel publicly humiliates the subject populations whose land it has seized - but then responds to its critics with loud cries of "anti-Semitism" - it is in effect saying that these acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts: The occupation is not an Israeli occupation, it is a Jewish occupation, and if you don't like these things it is because you don't like Jews.
In many parts of the world this is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling assertion: Israel's reckless behavior and insistent identification of all criticism with anti-Semitism is now the leading source of anti-Jewish sentiment in Western Europe and much of Asia. But the traditional corollary - if anti-Jewish feeling is linked to dislike of Israel then right-thinking people should rush to Israel's defense - no longer applies. Instead, the ironies of the Zionist dream have come full circle: For tens of millions of people in the world today, Israel is indeed the state of all the Jews. And thus, reasonably enough, many observers believe that one way to take the sting out of rising anti-Semitism in the suburbs of Paris or the streets of Jakarta would be for Israel to give the Palestinians back their land.
Israel's undoing
If Israel's leaders have been able to ignore such developments it is in large measure because they have hitherto counted upon the unquestioning support of the United States - the one country in the world where the claim that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism is still echoed not only in the opinions of many Jews but also in the public pronouncements of mainstream politicians and the mass media. But this lazy, ingrained confidence in unconditional American approval - and the moral, military and financial support that accompanies it - may prove to be Israel's undoing.
Something is changing in the United States. To be sure, it was only a few short years ago that prime minister Sharon's advisers could gleefully celebrate their success in dictating to U.S. President George W. Bush the terms of a public statement approving Israel's illegal settlements. No U.S. Congressman has yet proposed reducing or rescinding the $3 billion in aid Israel receives annually - 20 percent of the total U.S. foreign aid budget - which has helped sustain the Israeli defense budget and the cost of settlement construction in the West Bank. And Israel and the United States appear increasingly bound together in a symbiotic embrace whereby the actions of each party exacerbate their common unpopularity abroad - and thus their ever-closer association in the eyes of critics.
But whereas Israel has no choice but to look to America - it has no other friends, at best only the conditional affection of the enemies of its enemies, such as India - the United States is a great power; and great powers have interests that sooner or later transcend the local obsessions of even the closest of their client states and satellites. It seems to me of no small significance that the recent essay on "The Israel Lobby" by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt has aroused so much public interest and debate. Mearsheimer and Walt are prominent senior academics of impeccable conservative credentials. It is true that - by their own account - they could still not have published their damning indictment of the influence of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy in a major U.S.-based journal (it appeared in the London Review of Books), but the point is that 10 years ago they would not - and probably could not - have published it at all. And while the debate that has ensued may generate more heat than light, it is of great significance: As Dr. Johnson said of female preachers, it is not well done but one is amazed to see it done at all.
The fact is that the disastrous Iraq invasion and its aftermath are beginning to engineer a sea-change in foreign policy debate here in the U.S. It is becoming clear to prominent thinkers across the political spectrum - from erstwhile neo-conservative interventionists like Francis Fukuyama to hard-nosed realists like Mearsheimer - that in recent years the United States has suffered a catastrophic loss of international political influence and an unprecedented degradation of its moral image. The country's foreign undertakings have been self-defeating and even irrational. There is going to be a long job of repair ahead, above all in Washington's dealings with economically and strategically vital communities and regions from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. And this reconstruction of the country's foreign image and influence cannot hope to succeed while U.S. foreign policy is tied by an umbilical cord to the needs and interests (if that is what they are) of one small Middle Eastern country of very little relevance to America's long-term concerns - a country that is, in the words of the Mearsheimer/Walt essay, a strategic burden: "A liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states."
That essay is thus a straw in the wind - an indication of the likely direction of future domestic debate here in the U.S. about the country's peculiar ties to Israel. Of course it has been met by a firestorm of criticism from the usual suspects - and, just as they anticipated, the authors have been charged with anti-Semitism (or with advancing the interests of anti-Semitism: "objective anti-Semitism," as it might be). But it is striking to me how few people with whom I have spoken take that accusation seriously, so predictable has it become. This is bad for Jews - since it means that genuine anti-Semitism may also in time cease to be taken seriously, thanks to the Israel lobby's abuse of the term. But it is worse for Israel.
This new willingness to take one's distance from Israel is not confined to foreign policy specialists. As a teacher I have also been struck in recent years by a sea-change in the attitude of students. One example among many: Here at New York University I was teaching this past month a class on post-war Europe. I was trying to explain to young Americans the importance of the Spanish Civil War in the political memory of Europeans and why Franco's Spain has such a special place in our moral imagination: as a reminder of lost struggles, a symbol of oppression in an age of liberalism and freedom, and a land of shame that people boycotted for its crimes and repression. I cannot think, I told the students, of any country that occupies such a pejorative space in democratic public consciousness today. You are wrong, one young woman replied: What about Israel? To my great surprise most of the class - including many of the sizable Jewish contingent - nodded approval. The times they are indeed a-changing.
That Israel can now stand in comparison with the Spain of General Franco in the eyes of young Americans ought to come as a shock and an eleventh-hour wake-up call to Israelis. Nothing lasts forever, and it seems likely to me that we shall look back upon the years 1973-2003 as an era of tragic illusion for Israel: years that the locust ate, consumed by the bizarre notion that, whatever it chose to do or demand, Israel could count indefinitely upon the unquestioning support of the United States and would never risk encountering a backlash. This blinkered arrogance is tragically summed up in an assertion by Shimon Peres on the very eve of the calamitous war that will in retrospect be seen, I believe, to have precipitated the onset of America's alienation from its Israeli ally: "The campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must."
The future of Israel
From one perspective Israel's future is bleak. Not for the first time, a Jewish state has found itself on the vulnerable periphery of someone else's empire: overconfident in its own righteousness, willfully blind to the danger that its indulgent excesses might ultimately provoke its imperial mentor to the point of irritation and beyond, and heedless of its own failure to make any other friends. To be sure, the modern Israeli state has big weapons - very big weapons. But can it do with them except make more enemies? However, modern Israel also has options. Precisely because the country is an object of such universal mistrust and resentment - because people expect so little from Israel today - a truly statesmanlike shift in its policies (dismantling of major settlements, opening unconditional negotiations with Palestinians, calling Hamas' bluff by offering the movement's leaders something serious in return for recognition of Israel and a cease-fire) could have disproportionately beneficial effects.
But such a radical realignment of Israeli strategy would entail a difficult reappraisal of every cliche and illusion under which the country and its political elite have nestled for most of their life. It would entail acknowledging that Israel no longer has any special claim upon international sympathy or indulgence; that the United States won't always be there; that weapons and walls can no more preserve Israel forever than they preserved the German Democratic Republic or white South Africa; that colonies are always doomed unless you are willing to expel or exterminate the indigenous population. Other countries and their leaders have understood this and managed comparable realignments: Charles De Gaulle realized that France's settlement in Algeria, which was far older and better established than Israel's West Bank colonies, was a military and moral disaster for his country. In an exercise of outstanding political courage, he acted upon that insight and withdrew. But when De Gaulle came to that realization he was a mature statesman, nearly 70 years old. Israel cannot afford to wait that long. At the age of 58 the time has come for it to grow up.
Tony Judt is a professor and the director of the Remarque Institute at New York University, and his book "Postwar: The History of Europe Since 1945" was published in 2005.
Haaretz Friday, May 5, 2006
The country that wouldn't grow up
By Tony Judt
By the age of 58 a country - like a man - should have achieved a certain maturity. After nearly six decades of existence we know, for good and for bad, who we are, what we have done and how we appear to others, warts and all. We acknowledge, however reluctantly and privately, our mistakes and our shortcomings. And though we still harbor the occasional illusion about ourselves and our prospects, we are wise enough to recognize that these are indeed for the most part just that: illusions. In short, we are adults.
But the State of Israel remains curiously (and among Western-style democracies, uniquely) immature. The social transformations of the country - and its many economic achievements - have not brought the political wisdom that usually accompanies age. Seen from the outside, Israel still comports itself like an adolescent: consumed by a brittle confidence in its own uniqueness; certain that no one "understands" it and everyone is "against" it; full of wounded self-esteem, quick to take offense and quick to give it. Like many adolescents Israel is convinced - and makes a point of aggressively and repeatedly asserting - that it can do as it wishes, that its actions carry no consequences and that it is immortal. Appropriately enough, this country that has somehow failed to grow up was until very recently still in the hands of a generation of men who were prominent in its public affairs 40 years ago: an Israeli Rip Van Winkle who fell asleep in, say, 1967 would be surprised indeed to awake in 2006 and find Shimon Peres and General Ariel Sharon still hovering over the affairs of the country - the latter albeit only in spirit.
But that, Israeli readers will tell me, is the prejudiced view of the outsider. What looks from abroad like a self-indulgent, wayward country - delinquent in its international obligations and resentfully indifferent to world opinion - is simply an independent little state doing what it has always done: looking after its own interests in an inhospitable part of the globe. Why should embattled Israel even acknowledge such foreign criticism, much less act upon it? They - gentiles, Muslims, leftists - have reasons of their own for disliking Israel. They - Europeans, Arabs, fascists - have always singled out Israel for special criticism. Their motives are timeless. They haven't changed. Why should Israel change?
But they have changed. And it is this change, which has passed largely unrecognized within Israel, to which I want to draw attention here. Before 1967 the State of Israel may have been tiny and embattled, but it was not typically hated: certainly not in the West. Official Soviet-bloc communism was anti-Zionist of course, but for just that reason Israel was rather well regarded by everyone else, including the non-communist left. The romantic image of the kibbutz and the kibbutznik had a broad foreign appeal in the first two decades of Israel's existence. Most admirers of Israel (Jews and non-Jews) knew little about the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948. They preferred to see in the Jewish state the last surviving incarnation of the 19th century idyll of agrarian socialism - or else a paragon of modernizing energy "making the desert bloom."
I remember well, in the spring of 1967, how the balance of student opinion at Cambridge University was overwhelmingly pro-Israel in the weeks leading up to the Six-Day War - and how little attention anyone paid either to the condition of the Palestinians or to Israel's earlier collusion with France and Britain in the disastrous Suez adventure of 1956. In politics and in policy-making circles only old-fashioned conservative Arabists expressed any criticism of the Jewish state; even neo-Fascists rather favored Zionism, on traditional anti-Semitic grounds.
For a while after the 1967 war these sentiments continued unaltered. The pro-Palestinian enthusiasms of post-1960s radical groups and nationalist movements, reflected in joint training camps and shared projects for terrorist attacks, were offset by the growing international acknowledgment of the Holocaust in education and the media: What Israel lost by its continuing occupation of Arab lands it gained through its close identification with the recovered memory of Europe's dead Jews. Even the inauguration of the illegal settlements and the disastrous invasion of Lebanon, while they strengthened the arguments of Israel's critics, did not yet shift the international balance of opinion. As recently as the early 1990s, most people in the world were only vaguely aware of the "West Bank" and what was happening there. Even those who pressed the Palestinians' case in international forums conceded that almost no one was listening. Israel could still do as it wished.
The Israeli nakba
But today everything is different. We can see, in retrospect, that the victory of Israel in June 1967 and its continuing occupation of the territories it conquered then have been the Jewish state's very own nakba: a moral and political catastrophe. Israel's actions in the West Bank and Gaza have magnified and publicized the country's shortcomings and displayed them to a watching world. Curfews, checkpoints, bulldozers, public humiliations, home destructions, land seizures, shootings, "targeted assassinations," the separation fence: All of these routines of occupation and repression were once familiar only to an informed minority of specialists and activists. Today they can be watched, in real time, by anyone with a computer or a satellite dish - which means that Israel's behavior is under daily scrutiny by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The result has been a complete transformation in the international view of Israel. Until very recently the carefully burnished image of an ultra-modern society - built by survivors and pioneers and peopled by peace-loving democrats - still held sway over international opinion. But today? What is the universal shorthand symbol for Israel, reproduced worldwide in thousands of newspaper editorials and political cartoons? The Star of David emblazoned upon a tank.
Today only a tiny minority of outsiders see Israelis as victims. The true victims, it is now widely accepted, are the Palestinians. Indeed, Palestinians have now displaced Jews as the emblematic persecuted minority: vulnerable, humiliated and stateless. This unsought distinction does little to advance the Palestinian case any more than it ever helped Jews, but it has redefined Israel forever. It has become commonplace to compare Israel at best to an occupying colonizer, at worst to the South Africa of race laws and Bantustans. In this capacity Israel elicits scant sympathy even when its own citizens suffer: Dead Israelis - like the occasional assassinated white South African in the apartheid era, or British colonists hacked to death by native insurgents - are typically perceived abroad not as the victims of terrorism but as the collateral damage of their own government's mistaken policies.
Such comparisons are lethal to Israel's moral credibility. They strike at what was once its strongest suit: the claim of being a vulnerable island of democracy and decency in a sea of authoritarianism and cruelty; an oasis of rights and freedoms surrounded by a desert of repression. But democrats don't fence into Bantustans helpless people whose land they have conquered, and free men don't ignore international law and steal other men's homes. The contradictions of Israeli self-presentation - "we are very strong/we are very vulnerable"; "we are in control of our fate/we are the victims"; "we are a normal state/we demand special treatment" - are not new: they have been part of the country's peculiar identity almost from the outset. And Israel's insistent emphasis upon its isolation and uniqueness, its claim to be both victim and hero, were once part of its David versus Goliath appeal.
Collective cognitive dysfunction
But today the country's national narrative of macho victimhood appears to the rest of the world as simply bizarre: evidence of a sort of collective cognitive dysfunction that has gripped Israel's political culture. And the long cultivated persecution mania - "everyone's out to get us" - no longer elicits sympathy. Instead it attracts some very unappetizing comparisons: At a recent international meeting I heard one speaker, by analogy with Helmut Schmidt's famous dismissal of the Soviet Union as "Upper Volta with Missiles," describe Israel as "Serbia with nukes."
Israel has stayed the same, but the world - as I noted above - has changed. Whatever purchase Israel's self-description still has upon the imagination of Israelis themselves, it no longer operates beyond the country's frontiers. Even the Holocaust can no longer be instrumentalized to excuse Israel's behavior. Thanks to the passage of time, most Western European states have now come to terms with their part in the Holocaust, something that was not true a quarter century ago. From Israel's point of view, this has had paradoxical consequences: Until the end of the Cold War Israeli governments could still play upon the guilt of Germans and other Europeans, exploiting their failure to acknowledge fully what was done to Jews on their territory. Today, now that the history of World War II is retreating from the public square into the classroom and from the classroom into the history books, a growing majority of voters in Europe and elsewhere (young voters above all) simply cannot understand how the horrors of the last European war can be invoked to license or condone unacceptable behavior in another time and place. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that the great-grandmother of an Israeli soldier died in Treblinka is no excuse for his own abusive treatment of a Palestinian woman waiting to cross a checkpoint. "Remember Auschwitz" is not an acceptable response.
In short: Israel, in the world's eyes, is a normal state, but one behaving in abnormal ways. It is in control of its fate, but the victims are someone else. It is strong, very strong, but its behavior is making everyone else vulnerable. And so, shorn of all other justifications for its behavior, Israel and its supporters today fall back with increasing shrillness upon the oldest claim of all: Israel is a Jewish state and that is why people criticize it. This - the charge that criticism of Israel is implicitly anti-Semitic - is regarded in Israel and the United States as Israel's trump card. If it has been played more insistently and aggressively in recent years, that is because it is now the only card left.
The habit of tarring any foreign criticism with the brush of anti-Semitism is deeply engrained in Israeli political instincts: Ariel Sharon used it with characteristic excess but he was only the latest in a long line of Israeli leaders to exploit the claim. David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir did no different. But Jews outside of Israel pay a high price for this tactic. Not only does it inhibit their own criticisms of Israel for fear of appearing to associate with bad company, but it encourages others to look upon Jews everywhere as de facto collaborators in Israel's misbehavior. When Israel breaks international law in the occupied territories, when Israel publicly humiliates the subject populations whose land it has seized - but then responds to its critics with loud cries of "anti-Semitism" - it is in effect saying that these acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts: The occupation is not an Israeli occupation, it is a Jewish occupation, and if you don't like these things it is because you don't like Jews.
In many parts of the world this is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling assertion: Israel's reckless behavior and insistent identification of all criticism with anti-Semitism is now the leading source of anti-Jewish sentiment in Western Europe and much of Asia. But the traditional corollary - if anti-Jewish feeling is linked to dislike of Israel then right-thinking people should rush to Israel's defense - no longer applies. Instead, the ironies of the Zionist dream have come full circle: For tens of millions of people in the world today, Israel is indeed the state of all the Jews. And thus, reasonably enough, many observers believe that one way to take the sting out of rising anti-Semitism in the suburbs of Paris or the streets of Jakarta would be for Israel to give the Palestinians back their land.
Israel's undoing
If Israel's leaders have been able to ignore such developments it is in large measure because they have hitherto counted upon the unquestioning support of the United States - the one country in the world where the claim that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism is still echoed not only in the opinions of many Jews but also in the public pronouncements of mainstream politicians and the mass media. But this lazy, ingrained confidence in unconditional American approval - and the moral, military and financial support that accompanies it - may prove to be Israel's undoing.
Something is changing in the United States. To be sure, it was only a few short years ago that prime minister Sharon's advisers could gleefully celebrate their success in dictating to U.S. President George W. Bush the terms of a public statement approving Israel's illegal settlements. No U.S. Congressman has yet proposed reducing or rescinding the $3 billion in aid Israel receives annually - 20 percent of the total U.S. foreign aid budget - which has helped sustain the Israeli defense budget and the cost of settlement construction in the West Bank. And Israel and the United States appear increasingly bound together in a symbiotic embrace whereby the actions of each party exacerbate their common unpopularity abroad - and thus their ever-closer association in the eyes of critics.
But whereas Israel has no choice but to look to America - it has no other friends, at best only the conditional affection of the enemies of its enemies, such as India - the United States is a great power; and great powers have interests that sooner or later transcend the local obsessions of even the closest of their client states and satellites. It seems to me of no small significance that the recent essay on "The Israel Lobby" by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt has aroused so much public interest and debate. Mearsheimer and Walt are prominent senior academics of impeccable conservative credentials. It is true that - by their own account - they could still not have published their damning indictment of the influence of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy in a major U.S.-based journal (it appeared in the London Review of Books), but the point is that 10 years ago they would not - and probably could not - have published it at all. And while the debate that has ensued may generate more heat than light, it is of great significance: As Dr. Johnson said of female preachers, it is not well done but one is amazed to see it done at all.
The fact is that the disastrous Iraq invasion and its aftermath are beginning to engineer a sea-change in foreign policy debate here in the U.S. It is becoming clear to prominent thinkers across the political spectrum - from erstwhile neo-conservative interventionists like Francis Fukuyama to hard-nosed realists like Mearsheimer - that in recent years the United States has suffered a catastrophic loss of international political influence and an unprecedented degradation of its moral image. The country's foreign undertakings have been self-defeating and even irrational. There is going to be a long job of repair ahead, above all in Washington's dealings with economically and strategically vital communities and regions from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. And this reconstruction of the country's foreign image and influence cannot hope to succeed while U.S. foreign policy is tied by an umbilical cord to the needs and interests (if that is what they are) of one small Middle Eastern country of very little relevance to America's long-term concerns - a country that is, in the words of the Mearsheimer/Walt essay, a strategic burden: "A liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states."
That essay is thus a straw in the wind - an indication of the likely direction of future domestic debate here in the U.S. about the country's peculiar ties to Israel. Of course it has been met by a firestorm of criticism from the usual suspects - and, just as they anticipated, the authors have been charged with anti-Semitism (or with advancing the interests of anti-Semitism: "objective anti-Semitism," as it might be). But it is striking to me how few people with whom I have spoken take that accusation seriously, so predictable has it become. This is bad for Jews - since it means that genuine anti-Semitism may also in time cease to be taken seriously, thanks to the Israel lobby's abuse of the term. But it is worse for Israel.
This new willingness to take one's distance from Israel is not confined to foreign policy specialists. As a teacher I have also been struck in recent years by a sea-change in the attitude of students. One example among many: Here at New York University I was teaching this past month a class on post-war Europe. I was trying to explain to young Americans the importance of the Spanish Civil War in the political memory of Europeans and why Franco's Spain has such a special place in our moral imagination: as a reminder of lost struggles, a symbol of oppression in an age of liberalism and freedom, and a land of shame that people boycotted for its crimes and repression. I cannot think, I told the students, of any country that occupies such a pejorative space in democratic public consciousness today. You are wrong, one young woman replied: What about Israel? To my great surprise most of the class - including many of the sizable Jewish contingent - nodded approval. The times they are indeed a-changing.
That Israel can now stand in comparison with the Spain of General Franco in the eyes of young Americans ought to come as a shock and an eleventh-hour wake-up call to Israelis. Nothing lasts forever, and it seems likely to me that we shall look back upon the years 1973-2003 as an era of tragic illusion for Israel: years that the locust ate, consumed by the bizarre notion that, whatever it chose to do or demand, Israel could count indefinitely upon the unquestioning support of the United States and would never risk encountering a backlash. This blinkered arrogance is tragically summed up in an assertion by Shimon Peres on the very eve of the calamitous war that will in retrospect be seen, I believe, to have precipitated the onset of America's alienation from its Israeli ally: "The campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must."
The future of Israel
From one perspective Israel's future is bleak. Not for the first time, a Jewish state has found itself on the vulnerable periphery of someone else's empire: overconfident in its own righteousness, willfully blind to the danger that its indulgent excesses might ultimately provoke its imperial mentor to the point of irritation and beyond, and heedless of its own failure to make any other friends. To be sure, the modern Israeli state has big weapons - very big weapons. But can it do with them except make more enemies? However, modern Israel also has options. Precisely because the country is an object of such universal mistrust and resentment - because people expect so little from Israel today - a truly statesmanlike shift in its policies (dismantling of major settlements, opening unconditional negotiations with Palestinians, calling Hamas' bluff by offering the movement's leaders something serious in return for recognition of Israel and a cease-fire) could have disproportionately beneficial effects.
But such a radical realignment of Israeli strategy would entail a difficult reappraisal of every cliche and illusion under which the country and its political elite have nestled for most of their life. It would entail acknowledging that Israel no longer has any special claim upon international sympathy or indulgence; that the United States won't always be there; that weapons and walls can no more preserve Israel forever than they preserved the German Democratic Republic or white South Africa; that colonies are always doomed unless you are willing to expel or exterminate the indigenous population. Other countries and their leaders have understood this and managed comparable realignments: Charles De Gaulle realized that France's settlement in Algeria, which was far older and better established than Israel's West Bank colonies, was a military and moral disaster for his country. In an exercise of outstanding political courage, he acted upon that insight and withdrew. But when De Gaulle came to that realization he was a mature statesman, nearly 70 years old. Israel cannot afford to wait that long. At the age of 58 the time has come for it to grow up.
Tony Judt is a professor and the director of the Remarque Institute at New York University, and his book "Postwar: The History of Europe Since 1945" was published in 2005.
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