The New Year suggests the need for new thinking. The Israeli Palestinian conflict seems so entrenched, so hopeless, that it might be well to step back and consider what peace-builders with experience in other “intractable” conflicts can teach us.
John Paul Lederach, a professor in the Conflict Transformation Program at Eastern Mennonite University and a trainer and consultant for peace-builders in many conflict-ridden countries, tells us that the most significant challenges in peace-building are the result of three critical factors: first, who talks to whom in behind-the-scenes dialogue; second, how deeply the issues of structural injustice are considered in the peace negotiations; and third, how long the process of conflict transformation is carried on after “peace accords” are finally set in place. Each of these factors is important to consider as we search for ways for Quakers to get involved in a lasting peace-building process.
1. Who talks to whom? Most conflict resolution work involves bringing people together across enemy lines for negotiation, dialogue and/or mediation. But most of the time, people meet others of relatively equal status: top-level politicians and military leaders meet their counterparts; mid-level religious leaders, academics, and heads of NGOs meet others like themselves; and community people meet other community folks as they hear each each other's concerns and hopes, enjoy meals together, and “refuse to be enemies.” The trouble is that political leaders don’t have the benefit of personal dialogue with ordinary people; NGO heads don’t get to discuss their concerns with the military; community people aren’t invited to academic conferences, and so on. Building these kinds of vertical relationships of respect and understanding are critical, especially in efforts to end protracted, violent conflict. Dialogue must go on at all levels, both within equal status groups and between them. Peace-building is an organic system that requires attention to all its channels of communication, not just among people whose interests and points of view are similar. In Northern Ireland, Quakers conducted dialogues with and between politicians in confidential settings that were critical to the emerging peace process.
2. How to address the “justice gap”? Lederach points out that people take up direct, physical violence when they are trying to address perceived injustice at economic, social, cultural, and/or political levels. As the conflict escalates, the direct violence eventually reaches a saturation point. People get fed up with killing each other when they realize that the physical violence has made them worse off than they were before. At this point, peace negotiations begin. However, these talks, and the “peace accords” that eventually follow, rarely address the structural issues that started the conflict in the first place. In the case of the Palestinians, the obvious structural injustice is land, or the right of return, but it also includes the economic gap between Palestinians and Israelis, and the discriminatory attitudes of many Israelis toward their Palestinian neighbors. Even if land claims are one day settled, the income disparities and the racism that so often justifies them must be squarely addressed.
3. How can relationships be transformed after “peace breaks out”? Former combatants too often see peace accords as an “end-game,” without paying sufficient attention to long-term community building and reconciliation. The term, “conflict transformation” suggests that the relationships between groups must be fundamentally reconfigured for peace to be lasting. Relationship-building means that people on both sides must be adaptable, vigilant, and willing to change. Conflict transformation requires support infrastructure that enhances people’s capacity to respond to relational needs, rather than being limited by static events and legal agreements. Regardless of whether the Israelis and the Palestinians settle for a two-state or a one-state solution, they will need to develop relationships that respect and value each other as neighbors and/or fellow citizens. It can’t be done? Just look at Europe -- at each other's throats in two world wars, and before that, centuries of violent conflict. Now we have the European Union.
What roles do Lederach’s insights suggest for Quakers? In our efforts to help resolve the IP conflict, we should not dwell solely on ending the Occupation, pressing for an end to settlement construction, or using the power of nonviolence to force both sides to the bargaining table. While these efforts are important and necessary, they leave out the three crucial areas of conflict resolution and transformation described above. Can Quakers find ways to address the relationship-building necessary in the region, and the political and economic power imbalance at the global level that so often leaves “free” people struggling with poverty, despair, and interpersonal violence?
Work for peace -- with justice, dialogue, and respect,
Helen Fox
Convener, Palestine Israel Action Group
Ann Arbor Friends Meeting
Monday, January 03, 2011
Friday, December 03, 2010
The "peace process"
PIAG's dispatch for December reports on the status of the Israeli Palestinian peace process, and comments on some suggested solutions to the current impasse.
A bit of background: The Obama administration has been trying all year to bring both sides to the negotiating table, but Palestinians have refused to talk as long as Israel allows the construction of illegal, "Jewish-only" settlements to continue unabated. To understand why the settlement issue is so critical to Palestinians, see PIAG's map cards http://www.fosna.org/content/mapcards which detail the loss of Palestinian lands to Israel since 1948.
To encourage Israel to agree to at least a three-month settlement freeze, the Obama administration recently came up with a bright idea: the US would sell Israel $3 billion worth of fighter jets and veto any anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/15/AR2010111506596.html
PIAG wonders why the Obama administration believes that weapons of war will promote the atmosphere of trust that is so necessary for peace talks to succeed. Is this a blatant "bribe," as some columnists claim? Or does the US really think that a conflict of this magnitude and depth can be solved by threat and intimidation?
Neve Gordon, professor of political science at Israel’s Ben Gurion University bluntly comments on Obama's offer: "Imagine a sheriff offering the head of a criminal gang the following deal: ‘If you agree to stop stealing from your neighbours for three months, I’ll give you cutting edge weaponry and block any efforts by other law enforcement authorities to restrain your criminal activities.’ http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2010/11/15/neve-gordon/one-sided-deal/
If this is the best that the U.S. can come up with, we might think what’s needed are some new ideas. But so many good ones have already have been proposed. The Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (PASSIA) has published a collection of a dozen proposed solutions by Palestinian and Israeli authors: http://www.passia.org/ The U.S.-based J Street has come up with a “borders and security first” approach: http://www.jstreet.org/ And Yuval Rabin, son of assassinated Israeli prime minister Itzak Rabin, crafted a peace plan that he believes will "minimize the impact of the spoilers." http://bitterlemons-api.org/inside.php?id=5
But Jeff Halper, who has studied the conflict for decades, says it is relatively easy to come up with proposals that incorporate all seven elements that are critical for a just and lasting peace: the terms must be inclusive of both peoples, allow each their national expression, provide economic viability to all parties, be based on human rights, international law and UN declarations, squarely address the right of return, be regional in scope (rather than limited to Palestine and Israel), and address the security concerns of both sides. Any number of solutions that include these elements would be viable. The problem, Halper says, is that Israel will never agree to end its Occupation: “There will be no negotiated settlement, period.” While PIAG is not quite that pessimistic, we note that signs do point in that direction.
So how will the conflict be resolved? The Palestinians, fragmented and suffering from weak leadership, are unlikely to organize strong, non-violent tactics that could break the deadlock. Nor can the international community force Israel’s right wing government to bargain in good faith, given the unshakable, "pro-Israel" position of the U.S. Congress. Yet Halper believes that as early as next year, something will happen to break the impasse, creating a context in which a just peace is possible.
This "game-changing break" could come in the form of a unilateral declaration of independence by the Palestinian Authority along the 1949 armistice lines – unlikely, Halper thinks, because of the leadership vacuum. The other possibility Halper sees is the resignation or complete collapse of the Palestinian Authority. If that happens, Israel, not wanting Hamas to gain control over the West Bank, would use its military might to re-take all of the Territories, and then be obliged under international law “to economically support four million impoverished Palestinians with no economic infrastructure whatsoever,” an impossible burden. Strangely enough, this nightmare scenario would put Palestinians and their supporters into the driver's seat, especially if the international community intentionally refrains from providing humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, who would inevitably suffer in the violence and chaos of the re-Occupation. http://www.middleastpost.com/2523/palestine-2011-jeff-halper/
As Quakers, we view this scenario with alarm. While a game-changer is surely necessary to break the stalemate, urging an even greater disaster onto the Palestinian people is neither moral nor pragmatic. Even if Israel were forced to negotiate on Palestinian terms to avoid its own economic collapse, we do not see how the resulting "peace agreement" would promote justice, security, or economic cooperation, not to mention reconciliation.
PIAG urges you to speak out before the situation degenerates further. Visiting members of Congress, appealing to FCNL to lobby on Capitol Hill, writing letters to the editor, joining the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, vigiling, educating, all are principled ways to insist that peace is possible.
A bit of background: The Obama administration has been trying all year to bring both sides to the negotiating table, but Palestinians have refused to talk as long as Israel allows the construction of illegal, "Jewish-only" settlements to continue unabated. To understand why the settlement issue is so critical to Palestinians, see PIAG's map cards http://www.fosna.org/content/mapcards which detail the loss of Palestinian lands to Israel since 1948.
To encourage Israel to agree to at least a three-month settlement freeze, the Obama administration recently came up with a bright idea: the US would sell Israel $3 billion worth of fighter jets and veto any anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/15/AR2010111506596.html
PIAG wonders why the Obama administration believes that weapons of war will promote the atmosphere of trust that is so necessary for peace talks to succeed. Is this a blatant "bribe," as some columnists claim? Or does the US really think that a conflict of this magnitude and depth can be solved by threat and intimidation?
Neve Gordon, professor of political science at Israel’s Ben Gurion University bluntly comments on Obama's offer: "Imagine a sheriff offering the head of a criminal gang the following deal: ‘If you agree to stop stealing from your neighbours for three months, I’ll give you cutting edge weaponry and block any efforts by other law enforcement authorities to restrain your criminal activities.’ http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2010/11/15/neve-gordon/one-sided-deal/
If this is the best that the U.S. can come up with, we might think what’s needed are some new ideas. But so many good ones have already have been proposed. The Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (PASSIA) has published a collection of a dozen proposed solutions by Palestinian and Israeli authors: http://www.passia.org/ The U.S.-based J Street has come up with a “borders and security first” approach: http://www.jstreet.org/ And Yuval Rabin, son of assassinated Israeli prime minister Itzak Rabin, crafted a peace plan that he believes will "minimize the impact of the spoilers." http://bitterlemons-api.org/inside.php?id=5
But Jeff Halper, who has studied the conflict for decades, says it is relatively easy to come up with proposals that incorporate all seven elements that are critical for a just and lasting peace: the terms must be inclusive of both peoples, allow each their national expression, provide economic viability to all parties, be based on human rights, international law and UN declarations, squarely address the right of return, be regional in scope (rather than limited to Palestine and Israel), and address the security concerns of both sides. Any number of solutions that include these elements would be viable. The problem, Halper says, is that Israel will never agree to end its Occupation: “There will be no negotiated settlement, period.” While PIAG is not quite that pessimistic, we note that signs do point in that direction.
So how will the conflict be resolved? The Palestinians, fragmented and suffering from weak leadership, are unlikely to organize strong, non-violent tactics that could break the deadlock. Nor can the international community force Israel’s right wing government to bargain in good faith, given the unshakable, "pro-Israel" position of the U.S. Congress. Yet Halper believes that as early as next year, something will happen to break the impasse, creating a context in which a just peace is possible.
This "game-changing break" could come in the form of a unilateral declaration of independence by the Palestinian Authority along the 1949 armistice lines – unlikely, Halper thinks, because of the leadership vacuum. The other possibility Halper sees is the resignation or complete collapse of the Palestinian Authority. If that happens, Israel, not wanting Hamas to gain control over the West Bank, would use its military might to re-take all of the Territories, and then be obliged under international law “to economically support four million impoverished Palestinians with no economic infrastructure whatsoever,” an impossible burden. Strangely enough, this nightmare scenario would put Palestinians and their supporters into the driver's seat, especially if the international community intentionally refrains from providing humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, who would inevitably suffer in the violence and chaos of the re-Occupation. http://www.middleastpost.com/2523/palestine-2011-jeff-halper/
As Quakers, we view this scenario with alarm. While a game-changer is surely necessary to break the stalemate, urging an even greater disaster onto the Palestinian people is neither moral nor pragmatic. Even if Israel were forced to negotiate on Palestinian terms to avoid its own economic collapse, we do not see how the resulting "peace agreement" would promote justice, security, or economic cooperation, not to mention reconciliation.
PIAG urges you to speak out before the situation degenerates further. Visiting members of Congress, appealing to FCNL to lobby on Capitol Hill, writing letters to the editor, joining the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, vigiling, educating, all are principled ways to insist that peace is possible.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
The arts, religion, and culture
As the stalemate in the peace talks continues, with the Israelis refusing to stop settlement construction, the Palestinians refusing to talk until the theft of land and resources is halted, and the Americans preoccupied with November elections, PIAG’S dispatch for November reports on issues in the arts, religion, and culture.
CULTURAL PRESERVATION
In Gaza, concern is mounting over the difficulty in preserving important archeological sites and artifacts, as Israel continues to ban materials that Palestinian curators need to pursue their scientific work. Indiscriminate bombing during the seige of Gaza has also threatened sites important to Palestinian history and the world storehouse of cultures: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11588.shtml
CULTURAL CONFUSION
Journalist Ali Abunimah expresses his frustration with Barack Obama, who had no qualms about wearing the religiously mandated head convering when visiting Israel's Wailing Wall, but has turned down an invitation to the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, a site sacred to Sikhs, on the grounds that the required head covering would make him look like a Muslim. Of course, Sikhs are not Muslims, but Americans have been known to confuse the two, perhaps because Sikh turbans remind them of Hollywood depictions of Arabs in film: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-223210418534585840# While Abunimah's anger at Obama over this issue may seem petty, it reminds us of the danger, both physical and political, of U.S. Islamophobia, and the willingness of many Americans to downplay or excuse our own or our allies' aggression against Muslims.
http://aliabunimah.posterous.com/obama-expands-his-islamophobia-to-include-sik#more
CULTURAL BOYCOTT AS NONVIOLENT TECHNIQUE
Palestinians have called on the international community to engage in a cultural and academic boycott of Israeli artists and intellectuals whenever and wherever they appear abroad: http://usacbi.wordpress.com/ In Ann Arbor last month, a group of activists joined this international effort by protesting the Jeruselem Quartet at Rackham Auditorium: http://www.annarbor.com/community/neighborhoods/um_campus/two_groups_merge_to_protest_jersusalem_quartet/
While it may seem unfair to target a small group of Israeli musicians who themselves may have qualms about their government's actions, boycotts of academic and cultural institutions are time-tested nonviolent techniques that exert political pressure on oppressive regimes, and are especially effective against countries that attempt to project a benevolent, cultured image, in contrast to their targets, who, they claim, are unworthy or of no consequence.
CULTURAL PRESERVATION
In Gaza, concern is mounting over the difficulty in preserving important archeological sites and artifacts, as Israel continues to ban materials that Palestinian curators need to pursue their scientific work. Indiscriminate bombing during the seige of Gaza has also threatened sites important to Palestinian history and the world storehouse of cultures: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11588.shtml
CULTURAL CONFUSION
Journalist Ali Abunimah expresses his frustration with Barack Obama, who had no qualms about wearing the religiously mandated head convering when visiting Israel's Wailing Wall, but has turned down an invitation to the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, a site sacred to Sikhs, on the grounds that the required head covering would make him look like a Muslim. Of course, Sikhs are not Muslims, but Americans have been known to confuse the two, perhaps because Sikh turbans remind them of Hollywood depictions of Arabs in film: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-223210418534585840# While Abunimah's anger at Obama over this issue may seem petty, it reminds us of the danger, both physical and political, of U.S. Islamophobia, and the willingness of many Americans to downplay or excuse our own or our allies' aggression against Muslims.
http://aliabunimah.posterous.com/obama-expands-his-islamophobia-to-include-sik#more
CULTURAL BOYCOTT AS NONVIOLENT TECHNIQUE
Palestinians have called on the international community to engage in a cultural and academic boycott of Israeli artists and intellectuals whenever and wherever they appear abroad: http://usacbi.wordpress.com/ In Ann Arbor last month, a group of activists joined this international effort by protesting the Jeruselem Quartet at Rackham Auditorium: http://www.annarbor.com/community/neighborhoods/um_campus/two_groups_merge_to_protest_jersusalem_quartet/
While it may seem unfair to target a small group of Israeli musicians who themselves may have qualms about their government's actions, boycotts of academic and cultural institutions are time-tested nonviolent techniques that exert political pressure on oppressive regimes, and are especially effective against countries that attempt to project a benevolent, cultured image, in contrast to their targets, who, they claim, are unworthy or of no consequence.
Friday, October 01, 2010
The settlement freeze and its aftermath
PIAG’S dispatch for October reports on the latest developments in the struggle for peace with some kind of justice in Palestine. Political analysts, diplomats, and activists “on the ground” give their perspectives on the settlement freeze, which expired on September 27th:
THE POLITICAL ANALYST:
U-M Professor Juan Cole is alarmed that Israeli PM Netanyahu could so blithely “blow off” President Obama’s plea to extend the settlement freeze. This “bespeaks diplomatic amateurism on Obama’s part,” says Cole. “Obama should not have put himself in a position where he had to plead with Netanyahu! Now that the United States has been arrogantly blown off by Tel Aviv, it just looks weak and pathetic, a helpless giant — a posture that could well encourage its enemies to attempt to inflict their own humiliations on it.” http://www.juancole.com/2010/09/netanyahu-blows-off-us-mahmoud-abbas-pleads-for-settleme-freeze.html
THE DIPLOMATS:
“Adding to the pressure,” says the New York Times, "is a meeting in Cairo next week of the Arab League, at which the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmood Abbas has promised to deliver a speech in which he will 'declare historical decisions.' That sparked rumors that he might threaten to resign, something he has done before."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/world/middleeast/01mideast.html?th&emc=th
Rumor also has it that the Arab League may bring the settlement freeze issue to the United Nations, reports the Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz: http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/arab-league-may-bring-settlement-freeze-debate-to-un-1.316513
THE ACTIVISTS:
While politicians wrangle, David Shulman of Jewish Voice for Peace reports from the West Bank village of An-Nabi Salih, where he is participating in a demonstration on International Peace Day. “Take a helmet,” his friends had advised. The Jewish settlers, the IDF, the Palestinians -- they’re all violent there. Yet despite the passions on all sides, Shulman hears “tough words of peace and hope” from Palestian leader Ali Abu Awad of the Palestinian Movement for Non-Violent Resistance at “the bravest and most dignified demonstration” he has ever seen. “I bow my head to all the volunteers who came to An-Nabi Salih today, who struggled past the soldiers and the roadblocks and didn’t turn back,” Awad tells the crowd. “Our struggle is complicated and hard, a struggle that we all share—local leaders of the villages, women, children, families—the first large-scale Palestinian non-violent movement on the ground, aimed at building a just peace with Israel. When I see Israeli activists coming here to the village, my heart cries with happiness; I am honored to have these people with us. To all the Jews I say: you are not my enemy. The occupation is your enemy, as it is ours. . .” http://networkedblogs.com/8nQH4
THE POLITICAL ANALYST:
U-M Professor Juan Cole is alarmed that Israeli PM Netanyahu could so blithely “blow off” President Obama’s plea to extend the settlement freeze. This “bespeaks diplomatic amateurism on Obama’s part,” says Cole. “Obama should not have put himself in a position where he had to plead with Netanyahu! Now that the United States has been arrogantly blown off by Tel Aviv, it just looks weak and pathetic, a helpless giant — a posture that could well encourage its enemies to attempt to inflict their own humiliations on it.” http://www.juancole.com/2010/09/netanyahu-blows-off-us-mahmoud-abbas-pleads-for-settleme-freeze.html
THE DIPLOMATS:
“Adding to the pressure,” says the New York Times, "is a meeting in Cairo next week of the Arab League, at which the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmood Abbas has promised to deliver a speech in which he will 'declare historical decisions.' That sparked rumors that he might threaten to resign, something he has done before."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/world/middleeast/01mideast.html?th&emc=th
Rumor also has it that the Arab League may bring the settlement freeze issue to the United Nations, reports the Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz: http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/arab-league-may-bring-settlement-freeze-debate-to-un-1.316513
THE ACTIVISTS:
While politicians wrangle, David Shulman of Jewish Voice for Peace reports from the West Bank village of An-Nabi Salih, where he is participating in a demonstration on International Peace Day. “Take a helmet,” his friends had advised. The Jewish settlers, the IDF, the Palestinians -- they’re all violent there. Yet despite the passions on all sides, Shulman hears “tough words of peace and hope” from Palestian leader Ali Abu Awad of the Palestinian Movement for Non-Violent Resistance at “the bravest and most dignified demonstration” he has ever seen. “I bow my head to all the volunteers who came to An-Nabi Salih today, who struggled past the soldiers and the roadblocks and didn’t turn back,” Awad tells the crowd. “Our struggle is complicated and hard, a struggle that we all share—local leaders of the villages, women, children, families—the first large-scale Palestinian non-violent movement on the ground, aimed at building a just peace with Israel. When I see Israeli activists coming here to the village, my heart cries with happiness; I am honored to have these people with us. To all the Jews I say: you are not my enemy. The occupation is your enemy, as it is ours. . .” http://networkedblogs.com/8nQH4
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Red and Green
Uri Avnery's Column
Ha'aretz, August, 2010
Channel 10, one of Israel’s three TV channels, aired a report this week that surely frightened a lot of viewers. Its title was “Who is Organizing the World-wide Hatred of Israel Movement?”, and its subject: the dozens of groups in various countries which are conducting a vigorous propaganda campaign for the Palestinians and against Israel.
The activists interviewed, both male and female, young and old - quite a number of them Jews - demonstrate at supermarkets against the products of the settlements and/or of Israel in general, organize mass meetings, make speeches, mobilize trade unions, file lawsuits against Israeli politicians and generals.
According to the report, the various groups use similar methods, but there is no central leadership. It even quotes (without attribution, of course) the title of one of my recent articles, “The Protocols of the Elders of Anti-Zion” and it, too, asserts that there is no such thing. Indeed, there is no need for a world-wide organization, it says, because all over the place there is a spontaneous surge of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli feeling. Recently, following the ”Cast Lead” operation and the flotilla affair, this process has gathered momentum.
In many places, the report discloses, there are now red-green coalitions: cooperation between leftist human-rights bodies and local groups of Muslim immigrants.
The conclusion of the story: this is a great danger to Israel and we must mobilize against it before it is too late.
THE FIRST question that arose in my mind was: what impact is this report going to have on the average Israeli?
I wish I could be sure that it will cause him or her to think again about the viability of the occupation. As one of the activists interviewed said: the Israelis must be brought to understand that the occupation has a price tag.
I wish I believed that this would be the reaction of most Israelis. However, I am afraid that the effect could be very different.
As the jolly song of the 70s goes: “The whole world is against us / That’s not so terrible, we shall overcome. / For we, too, don’t give a damn / For them. // … We have learned this song / From our forefathers / And we shall also sing it / To our sons. / And the grandchildren of our grandchildren will sing it / Here, in the Land of Israel, / And everybody who is against us / Can go to hell.”
The writer of this song, Yoram Taharlev (“pure of heart”) has succeeded in expressing a basic Jewish belief, crystallized during the centuries of persecution in Christian Europe which reached its climax in the Holocaust. Every Jewish child learns in school that when six million Jews were murdered, the entire world looked on and didn’t lift a finger to save them.
This is not quite true. Many tens of thousands of non-Jews risked their lives and the lives of their families in order to save Jews – in Poland, Denmark, France, Holland and other countries, even in Germany itself. We all know about people who were saved this way - like former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak, who as a child was smuggled out of the ghetto by a Polish farmer, and Minister Yossi Peled, who was hidden for years by a Catholic Belgian family. Only a few of these largely unsung heroes were cited as “Righteous among the Nations” by Yad Vashem. (Between us, how many Israelis in a similar situation would risk their lives and the lives of their children in order to save a foreigner?)
But the belief that “the whole world is against us” is rooted deep in our national psyche. It enables us to ignore the world reaction to our behavior. It is very convenient. If the entire world hates us anyhow, the nature of our deeds, good or bad, doesn’t really matter. They would hate Israel even if we were angels. The Goyim are just anti-Semitic.
It is easy to show that this is also untrue. The world loved us when we founded the State of Israel and defended it with our blood. A day after the Six-day War, the whole world applauded us. They loved us when we were David, they hate us when we are Goliath.
This does not convince the world-against-us people. Why is there no world-wide movement against the atrocities of the Russians in Chechnya or the Chinese in Tibet? Why only against us? Why do the Palestinians deserve more sympathy than the Kurds in Turkey?
One could answer that since Israel demands special treatment in all other matters, we are measured by special standards when it comes to the occupation and the settlements. But logic doesn’t matter. It’s the national myths that count.
Yesterday, Israel’s third largest newspaper, Ma’ariv, published a story about our ambassador to the United Nations under the revealing headline: “Behind enemy lines”.
I REMEMBER one of the clashes I had with Golda Meir in the Knesset, after the beginning of the settlement enterprise and the angry reactions throughout the world. As now, people put all the blame on our faulty “explaining”. The Knesset held a general debate.
Speaker after speaker declaimed the usual clichés: the Arab propaganda is brilliant, our “explaining” is beneath contempt. When my turn came, I said: It’s not the fault of the “explaining”. The best “explaining” in the world cannot “explain” the occupation and the settlements. If we want to gain the sympathy of the world, it’s not our words that must change, but our actions.
Throughout the debate, Golda Meir – as was her wont – stood at the door of the plenum hall, chain-smoking. Summing up, she answered every speaker in turn, ignoring my speech. I thought that she had decided to boycott me, when – after a dramatic pause – she turned in my direction. “Deputy Avnery thinks that they hate us because of what we do. He does not know the Goyim. The Goyim love the Jews when they are beaten and miserable. They hate the Jews when they are victorious and successful.” If clapping were allowed in the Knesset, the whole House would have burst into thunderous applause.
There is a danger that the current worldwide protest will meet the same reaction: that the Israeli public will unite against the evil Goyim, instead of uniting against the settlers.
SOME OF the protest groups could not care less. Their actions are not addressed to the Israeli public, but to international opinion.
I don’t mean the anti-Semites, who are trying to hitch a ride on this movement. They are a negligible force. Neither do I mean those who believe that the creation of the State of Israel was a historical mistake to start with, and that it should be dismantled.
I mean all the idealists who wish to put an end to the suffering of the Palestinian people and the stealing of their land by the settlers, and to help them to found the free State of Palestine.
These aims can be achieved only through peace between Palestine and Israel. And such a peace can come about only if the majority of Palestinians and the majority of Israelis support it. Outside pressure will not suffice.
Anyone who understands this must be interested in a world-wide protest that does not push the Israeli population into the arms of the settlers, but, on the contrary, isolates the settlers and turns the general public against them.
How can this be achieved?
THE FIRST thing is to clearly differentiate between the boycott of the settlements and a general boycott of Israel. The TV report suggested that many of the protesters do not see the border between the two. It showed a middle-aged British woman in a supermarket, waving some fruit over her head and shouting: “these come from a settlement!” Then it showed a demonstration against the Ahava cosmetic products that are extracted from the Palestinian part of the Dead Sea. But immediately after, there came a call for a boycott of all Israeli products. Perhaps many of the protesters – or the editors of the film - are not clear about the difference.
The Israeli right also blurs this distinction. For example: a recent bill in the Knesset wants to punish those who support a boycott on the products of Israel, including – as it states explicitly - the products of the settlements.
If the world protest is clearly focused on the settlements, it will indeed cause many Israelis to realize that there is a clear line between the legitimate State of Israel and the illegitimate occupation.
That is also true for other parts of the story. For example: the initiative to boycott the Caterpillar company, whose monstrous bulldozers are a major weapon of the occupation. When the heroic peace activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death under one of them, the company should have stopped all further supplies unless assured that they would not be used for repression.
As long as suspected war criminals are not brought to justice in Israel itself, one cannot object to the initiatives to prosecute them abroad.
After this week’s decision by the main Israeli theaters to perform in the settlements, it will be logical to boycott them abroad. If they are so keen to make money in Ariel, they can’t complain about losing money in Paris and London.
THE SECOND thing is the connection between these groups and the Israeli public.
Today a large majority of Israelis say that they want peace and are ready to pay the price, but that, unfortunately, the Arabs don’t want peace. The mainstream peace camp, which could once bring hundreds of thousands onto the street, is in a state of depression. It feels isolated. Among other things, its once close connection with the Palestinians, which was established at the time of Yasser Arafat after Oslo, has become very loose. So have relations with the protest forces abroad.
If people of goodwill want to speed up the end of the occupation, they must support the peace activists in Israel. They should build a close connection with them, break the conspiracy of silence against them in the world media and publicize their courageous actions, organize more and more international events in which Palestinian and Israeli peace activists will be present side by side. It would also be nice if for every ten billionaires who finance the extreme Right in Israel, there were at least one millionaire supporting action in pursuit of peace.
All this becomes impossible if there is a call for a boycott on all Israelis, irrespective of their views and actions, and Israel is presented as a monolithic monster. This picture is not only false, it is extremely harmful.
Many of the activists who appear in this report arouse respect and admiration. So much good will! So much courage! If they point their activities in the right direction, they can do a lot of good - good for the Palestinians, and good for us Israelis, too.
Ha'aretz, August, 2010
Channel 10, one of Israel’s three TV channels, aired a report this week that surely frightened a lot of viewers. Its title was “Who is Organizing the World-wide Hatred of Israel Movement?”, and its subject: the dozens of groups in various countries which are conducting a vigorous propaganda campaign for the Palestinians and against Israel.
The activists interviewed, both male and female, young and old - quite a number of them Jews - demonstrate at supermarkets against the products of the settlements and/or of Israel in general, organize mass meetings, make speeches, mobilize trade unions, file lawsuits against Israeli politicians and generals.
According to the report, the various groups use similar methods, but there is no central leadership. It even quotes (without attribution, of course) the title of one of my recent articles, “The Protocols of the Elders of Anti-Zion” and it, too, asserts that there is no such thing. Indeed, there is no need for a world-wide organization, it says, because all over the place there is a spontaneous surge of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli feeling. Recently, following the ”Cast Lead” operation and the flotilla affair, this process has gathered momentum.
In many places, the report discloses, there are now red-green coalitions: cooperation between leftist human-rights bodies and local groups of Muslim immigrants.
The conclusion of the story: this is a great danger to Israel and we must mobilize against it before it is too late.
THE FIRST question that arose in my mind was: what impact is this report going to have on the average Israeli?
I wish I could be sure that it will cause him or her to think again about the viability of the occupation. As one of the activists interviewed said: the Israelis must be brought to understand that the occupation has a price tag.
I wish I believed that this would be the reaction of most Israelis. However, I am afraid that the effect could be very different.
As the jolly song of the 70s goes: “The whole world is against us / That’s not so terrible, we shall overcome. / For we, too, don’t give a damn / For them. // … We have learned this song / From our forefathers / And we shall also sing it / To our sons. / And the grandchildren of our grandchildren will sing it / Here, in the Land of Israel, / And everybody who is against us / Can go to hell.”
The writer of this song, Yoram Taharlev (“pure of heart”) has succeeded in expressing a basic Jewish belief, crystallized during the centuries of persecution in Christian Europe which reached its climax in the Holocaust. Every Jewish child learns in school that when six million Jews were murdered, the entire world looked on and didn’t lift a finger to save them.
This is not quite true. Many tens of thousands of non-Jews risked their lives and the lives of their families in order to save Jews – in Poland, Denmark, France, Holland and other countries, even in Germany itself. We all know about people who were saved this way - like former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak, who as a child was smuggled out of the ghetto by a Polish farmer, and Minister Yossi Peled, who was hidden for years by a Catholic Belgian family. Only a few of these largely unsung heroes were cited as “Righteous among the Nations” by Yad Vashem. (Between us, how many Israelis in a similar situation would risk their lives and the lives of their children in order to save a foreigner?)
But the belief that “the whole world is against us” is rooted deep in our national psyche. It enables us to ignore the world reaction to our behavior. It is very convenient. If the entire world hates us anyhow, the nature of our deeds, good or bad, doesn’t really matter. They would hate Israel even if we were angels. The Goyim are just anti-Semitic.
It is easy to show that this is also untrue. The world loved us when we founded the State of Israel and defended it with our blood. A day after the Six-day War, the whole world applauded us. They loved us when we were David, they hate us when we are Goliath.
This does not convince the world-against-us people. Why is there no world-wide movement against the atrocities of the Russians in Chechnya or the Chinese in Tibet? Why only against us? Why do the Palestinians deserve more sympathy than the Kurds in Turkey?
One could answer that since Israel demands special treatment in all other matters, we are measured by special standards when it comes to the occupation and the settlements. But logic doesn’t matter. It’s the national myths that count.
Yesterday, Israel’s third largest newspaper, Ma’ariv, published a story about our ambassador to the United Nations under the revealing headline: “Behind enemy lines”.
I REMEMBER one of the clashes I had with Golda Meir in the Knesset, after the beginning of the settlement enterprise and the angry reactions throughout the world. As now, people put all the blame on our faulty “explaining”. The Knesset held a general debate.
Speaker after speaker declaimed the usual clichés: the Arab propaganda is brilliant, our “explaining” is beneath contempt. When my turn came, I said: It’s not the fault of the “explaining”. The best “explaining” in the world cannot “explain” the occupation and the settlements. If we want to gain the sympathy of the world, it’s not our words that must change, but our actions.
Throughout the debate, Golda Meir – as was her wont – stood at the door of the plenum hall, chain-smoking. Summing up, she answered every speaker in turn, ignoring my speech. I thought that she had decided to boycott me, when – after a dramatic pause – she turned in my direction. “Deputy Avnery thinks that they hate us because of what we do. He does not know the Goyim. The Goyim love the Jews when they are beaten and miserable. They hate the Jews when they are victorious and successful.” If clapping were allowed in the Knesset, the whole House would have burst into thunderous applause.
There is a danger that the current worldwide protest will meet the same reaction: that the Israeli public will unite against the evil Goyim, instead of uniting against the settlers.
SOME OF the protest groups could not care less. Their actions are not addressed to the Israeli public, but to international opinion.
I don’t mean the anti-Semites, who are trying to hitch a ride on this movement. They are a negligible force. Neither do I mean those who believe that the creation of the State of Israel was a historical mistake to start with, and that it should be dismantled.
I mean all the idealists who wish to put an end to the suffering of the Palestinian people and the stealing of their land by the settlers, and to help them to found the free State of Palestine.
These aims can be achieved only through peace between Palestine and Israel. And such a peace can come about only if the majority of Palestinians and the majority of Israelis support it. Outside pressure will not suffice.
Anyone who understands this must be interested in a world-wide protest that does not push the Israeli population into the arms of the settlers, but, on the contrary, isolates the settlers and turns the general public against them.
How can this be achieved?
THE FIRST thing is to clearly differentiate between the boycott of the settlements and a general boycott of Israel. The TV report suggested that many of the protesters do not see the border between the two. It showed a middle-aged British woman in a supermarket, waving some fruit over her head and shouting: “these come from a settlement!” Then it showed a demonstration against the Ahava cosmetic products that are extracted from the Palestinian part of the Dead Sea. But immediately after, there came a call for a boycott of all Israeli products. Perhaps many of the protesters – or the editors of the film - are not clear about the difference.
The Israeli right also blurs this distinction. For example: a recent bill in the Knesset wants to punish those who support a boycott on the products of Israel, including – as it states explicitly - the products of the settlements.
If the world protest is clearly focused on the settlements, it will indeed cause many Israelis to realize that there is a clear line between the legitimate State of Israel and the illegitimate occupation.
That is also true for other parts of the story. For example: the initiative to boycott the Caterpillar company, whose monstrous bulldozers are a major weapon of the occupation. When the heroic peace activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death under one of them, the company should have stopped all further supplies unless assured that they would not be used for repression.
As long as suspected war criminals are not brought to justice in Israel itself, one cannot object to the initiatives to prosecute them abroad.
After this week’s decision by the main Israeli theaters to perform in the settlements, it will be logical to boycott them abroad. If they are so keen to make money in Ariel, they can’t complain about losing money in Paris and London.
THE SECOND thing is the connection between these groups and the Israeli public.
Today a large majority of Israelis say that they want peace and are ready to pay the price, but that, unfortunately, the Arabs don’t want peace. The mainstream peace camp, which could once bring hundreds of thousands onto the street, is in a state of depression. It feels isolated. Among other things, its once close connection with the Palestinians, which was established at the time of Yasser Arafat after Oslo, has become very loose. So have relations with the protest forces abroad.
If people of goodwill want to speed up the end of the occupation, they must support the peace activists in Israel. They should build a close connection with them, break the conspiracy of silence against them in the world media and publicize their courageous actions, organize more and more international events in which Palestinian and Israeli peace activists will be present side by side. It would also be nice if for every ten billionaires who finance the extreme Right in Israel, there were at least one millionaire supporting action in pursuit of peace.
All this becomes impossible if there is a call for a boycott on all Israelis, irrespective of their views and actions, and Israel is presented as a monolithic monster. This picture is not only false, it is extremely harmful.
Many of the activists who appear in this report arouse respect and admiration. So much good will! So much courage! If they point their activities in the right direction, they can do a lot of good - good for the Palestinians, and good for us Israelis, too.
Saturday, September 04, 2010
50 Ways to Act for Peace With Justice
List initiated by Mazin Qumsiyeh, George Rishmawi and others at
The Palestinian Center for Rapprochement Between People
1) Educate yourself via reliable books. For example books by Ilan Pappe
(Ethnic Ceansing of Palestine), Edward Said (The Question of Palestine).
2) Educate yourself and track current information and key historical data
via websites (and disseminate it). For example look into
http://www.imemc.org/, http://electronicintifada.net/,
http://english.aljazeera.net/, Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem,
Palestine Remembered, and similar websites.
3) Educate yourself by visiting Palestine and writing about it. There are
many organizations doing tours that inspire. Examples Siraj Center, Alternative Tourism Group, Holy Land Trust, Global Exchange, Birthright Unplugged, International Solidarity Movement, etc
4) Practice using clear and unambiguous vocabulary including language to
protest apartheid and colonization. See for example developing an anti-apartheid framework for the struggle (PDF File):
http://www.endtheoccupation.org/downloads/AAF%20curriculum%20training%20.pdf
5) Challenge media bias by first educating yourself and others about its
existence and the extent of the bias. See for example
http://ifamericansknew.org/
6) Write to the mainstream media. You can write letters to the editor (usually
200 words) and/or opinion pieces (700-900 words).
7) Start your own group or join an existing organization that works for
justice. Simply search/google your city with the word Palestine to identify
candidates.
8) Join the International Solidarity Movement (ISM)
9) Develop close working relationship with progressive parties and groups in your country.
10) Network and enhance groups working on sanctions and suspension of US aid to Israel. e.g. Suspend US Aid to Israel Now
11) Lobby. This is done individually or by supporting/joining one or more of the many groups doing it, e.g. Council for the National Interest, Citizens For Fair Legislation, American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine, and American Association for Palestinian Equal Rights (http://www.aaper.org/).
12) Hold a teach-in, seminar, or public dialogue. This is straightforward:you need to decide on a venue, speakers, and publicity. This can be facilitated through such groups as Palestine Media Watch which have speakers bureaus.
13) Send direct aid and support for people on the ground through transparent and trustworthy groups.
14) Use youtube and googlevideo to disseminate information
15) Challenge Israel in local and International courts.If you are a lawyer, donate your time and start networking and initiating cases (e.g. US Congress is violating US laws by sending money to Israel, US Citizens can bring cases against foreign governments that harmed them). Groups with great interest and activism on behalf of Palestinians includes Lawyers Without Borders, National Lawyers Guild, Al-Haq, Yesh Din, and Adalah - Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.
16) Help coalitions work for Palestine and insist they do not leave this issue; example is http://CTUnitedforPeace.org.
17) If you work in a group, suggest formation of local or national coalitions to increase the power by association.
18) Join the campaigns for economic boycotts. See successful examples here: http://www.qumsiyeh.org/boycottsanddivestment/
19) Join or initiate a campaign for cultural and academic boycott; see also
http://pacbi.org/.
20) Host an art exhibit or other art performance (music, dabka etc) that highlight the rich Palestinian culture.
21) Engage in civil disobedience actions to draw attention and change policies.
22) Develop campaigns to support the right to enter: see www.righttoenter.ps
Israel Takes Aim At Palestinian Families By Ida Audeh
http://www.countercurrents.org/audeh110907.htm
23) Facilitate a visit by the Wheels of Justice bus tour to your area (in the US) or create a similar bus (e.g. in Europe). See justicewheels.org
24) Donate to aid Palestinian Children. For example, Palestine Children Relief Fund, and Playgrounds for Palestine
25) Develop campaigns to ban Political Junkets to Israel.Here is an example "In a challenge to one of the most powerful lobbying tactics used by the Jewish community, a county in Maryland decided last week that local legislators could no longer go on sponsored trips to Israel. http://www.forward.com/articles/11553/
26) Support the campaigns to end the siege on Gaza. See http://www.freegaza.org/
27) Work in your country against discrimination: Arabs Against Discrimination: http://www.aad-online.org/
28) Support Human Rights: Human Rights Watch: http://hrw.org/doc/?t=mideast&c=isrlpa
B'Tselem:The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories http://www.btselem.org
29) Support the Right to Education Campaign: http://right2edu.birzeit.edu/
30) Donate to United Nations Relief and Works Agency: http://www.un.org/unrwa/
31) Work against home demolistions: Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions: http://www.icahd.org/eng
32) Support empowering Youth from Palestine e.g. see http://www.yfppal.com/
and http://www.alrowwad-acts.ps
33) Write to and work with alternative mass media (like DemocracyNow, Public Access TV).
34) Create your own content and post it to the web
35) Utilize social networking sites to reach a mass audience (e.g. Facebook)
36) Go into chat rooms, email discussions, etc. and spread the word.
37) Buy Palestinian Products, for example from www.palestineonlinestore.com,
www.canaanfairtrade.com, www.palestinefairtrade.org.
38) Pray for Peace and Justice or if you are not religious, take time out to
think and meditate on what can be done to achieve Peace with Justice
39) Make a podcast or public service announcement and spread it
40) Drop a banner from a traffic bridge or any other publicly visible location
41) Put out an information table in a university student center, public gathering, festivals, or other places where people congregate.
42) Host a fundraising party or dinner at your home.
43) Show a documentary in a public setting and then have a discussion about it.
44) Organize a public debate between those who support Zionism and those who support equality and justice
45) Learn Arabic or if you are an Arab learn another language (including Hebrew) so that you can communicate better
46) Do street theater
45) Engage in Civil disobedience acts (this may entail getting arrested).
46) Reach out to Christian religious leaders and ask them to act based on the Kairos Palestine document www.kairospalestine.ps
47) Challenge the Zionist attempts to doctor Wikipedia (ie. imposing a Zionist distorted version on this free web encyclopedia).
48) Start a genuine interfaith dialogue based on acting for justice rather than chatting to hide injustice.
49) Find a way not to pay taxes to governments that violate human rights and use your taxes for war and oppression.
50) Host a dinner with Arabic food and show people the rich cultural traditions like embroidered dresses that go back to Canaanitic times.
Write to us to remind us of other ways to act.
The Palestinian Center for Rapprochement Between People
1) Educate yourself via reliable books. For example books by Ilan Pappe
(Ethnic Ceansing of Palestine), Edward Said (The Question of Palestine).
2) Educate yourself and track current information and key historical data
via websites (and disseminate it). For example look into
http://www.imemc.org/, http://electronicintifada.net/,
http://english.aljazeera.net/, Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem,
Palestine Remembered, and similar websites.
3) Educate yourself by visiting Palestine and writing about it. There are
many organizations doing tours that inspire. Examples Siraj Center, Alternative Tourism Group, Holy Land Trust, Global Exchange, Birthright Unplugged, International Solidarity Movement, etc
4) Practice using clear and unambiguous vocabulary including language to
protest apartheid and colonization. See for example developing an anti-apartheid framework for the struggle (PDF File):
http://www.endtheoccupation.org/downloads/AAF%20curriculum%20training%20.pdf
5) Challenge media bias by first educating yourself and others about its
existence and the extent of the bias. See for example
http://ifamericansknew.org/
6) Write to the mainstream media. You can write letters to the editor (usually
200 words) and/or opinion pieces (700-900 words).
7) Start your own group or join an existing organization that works for
justice. Simply search/google your city with the word Palestine to identify
candidates.
8) Join the International Solidarity Movement (ISM)
9) Develop close working relationship with progressive parties and groups in your country.
10) Network and enhance groups working on sanctions and suspension of US aid to Israel. e.g. Suspend US Aid to Israel Now
11) Lobby. This is done individually or by supporting/joining one or more of the many groups doing it, e.g. Council for the National Interest, Citizens For Fair Legislation, American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine, and American Association for Palestinian Equal Rights (http://www.aaper.org/).
12) Hold a teach-in, seminar, or public dialogue. This is straightforward:you need to decide on a venue, speakers, and publicity. This can be facilitated through such groups as Palestine Media Watch which have speakers bureaus.
13) Send direct aid and support for people on the ground through transparent and trustworthy groups.
14) Use youtube and googlevideo to disseminate information
15) Challenge Israel in local and International courts.If you are a lawyer, donate your time and start networking and initiating cases (e.g. US Congress is violating US laws by sending money to Israel, US Citizens can bring cases against foreign governments that harmed them). Groups with great interest and activism on behalf of Palestinians includes Lawyers Without Borders, National Lawyers Guild, Al-Haq, Yesh Din, and Adalah - Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.
16) Help coalitions work for Palestine and insist they do not leave this issue; example is http://CTUnitedforPeace.org.
17) If you work in a group, suggest formation of local or national coalitions to increase the power by association.
18) Join the campaigns for economic boycotts. See successful examples here: http://www.qumsiyeh.org/boycottsanddivestment/
19) Join or initiate a campaign for cultural and academic boycott; see also
http://pacbi.org/.
20) Host an art exhibit or other art performance (music, dabka etc) that highlight the rich Palestinian culture.
21) Engage in civil disobedience actions to draw attention and change policies.
22) Develop campaigns to support the right to enter: see www.righttoenter.ps
Israel Takes Aim At Palestinian Families By Ida Audeh
http://www.countercurrents.org/audeh110907.htm
23) Facilitate a visit by the Wheels of Justice bus tour to your area (in the US) or create a similar bus (e.g. in Europe). See justicewheels.org
24) Donate to aid Palestinian Children. For example, Palestine Children Relief Fund, and Playgrounds for Palestine
25) Develop campaigns to ban Political Junkets to Israel.Here is an example "In a challenge to one of the most powerful lobbying tactics used by the Jewish community, a county in Maryland decided last week that local legislators could no longer go on sponsored trips to Israel. http://www.forward.com/articles/11553/
26) Support the campaigns to end the siege on Gaza. See http://www.freegaza.org/
27) Work in your country against discrimination: Arabs Against Discrimination: http://www.aad-online.org/
28) Support Human Rights: Human Rights Watch: http://hrw.org/doc/?t=mideast&c=isrlpa
B'Tselem:The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories http://www.btselem.org
29) Support the Right to Education Campaign: http://right2edu.birzeit.edu/
30) Donate to United Nations Relief and Works Agency: http://www.un.org/unrwa/
31) Work against home demolistions: Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions: http://www.icahd.org/eng
32) Support empowering Youth from Palestine e.g. see http://www.yfppal.com/
and http://www.alrowwad-acts.ps
33) Write to and work with alternative mass media (like DemocracyNow, Public Access TV).
34) Create your own content and post it to the web
35) Utilize social networking sites to reach a mass audience (e.g. Facebook)
36) Go into chat rooms, email discussions, etc. and spread the word.
37) Buy Palestinian Products, for example from www.palestineonlinestore.com,
www.canaanfairtrade.com, www.palestinefairtrade.org.
38) Pray for Peace and Justice or if you are not religious, take time out to
think and meditate on what can be done to achieve Peace with Justice
39) Make a podcast or public service announcement and spread it
40) Drop a banner from a traffic bridge or any other publicly visible location
41) Put out an information table in a university student center, public gathering, festivals, or other places where people congregate.
42) Host a fundraising party or dinner at your home.
43) Show a documentary in a public setting and then have a discussion about it.
44) Organize a public debate between those who support Zionism and those who support equality and justice
45) Learn Arabic or if you are an Arab learn another language (including Hebrew) so that you can communicate better
46) Do street theater
45) Engage in Civil disobedience acts (this may entail getting arrested).
46) Reach out to Christian religious leaders and ask them to act based on the Kairos Palestine document www.kairospalestine.ps
47) Challenge the Zionist attempts to doctor Wikipedia (ie. imposing a Zionist distorted version on this free web encyclopedia).
48) Start a genuine interfaith dialogue based on acting for justice rather than chatting to hide injustice.
49) Find a way not to pay taxes to governments that violate human rights and use your taxes for war and oppression.
50) Host a dinner with Arabic food and show people the rich cultural traditions like embroidered dresses that go back to Canaanitic times.
Write to us to remind us of other ways to act.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Resumption of Peace Talks
PIAG is cautiously optimistic about the announcement of the resumption of direct talks between Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The Palestinian Authority broke off direct talks with Israel in December 2008, when Israel launched its three-week assault on Gaza. President Obama has spent the last 18 months trying to persuade both sides to restart the dialogue. You can read about the resumption of negotiations in both the New York Times and Aljazeera, each of which presents a slightly different perspective:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/21/world/middleeast/21diplo.html?_r=1&hp
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/08/201082012452252467.html
One of the difficulties with restarting face to face negotiations has been the issue of Jewish-only settlements that Israelis continue to build with impunity on Palestinian land. A self-imposed settlement freeze has been in place since November 2009, yet the freeze did not include East Jerusalem and has been routinely violated in the West Bank. Although the result has clearly been better than no freeze at all, 492 violations have been reported by the liberal Israeli group Peace Now: http://www.peacenow.org.il/site/en/peace.asp?pi=61&docid=4747&pos=0
Mr. Netanyahu has refused to extend the settlement freeze past September 26, its expiration date, claiming that doing so would cause his right-wing government to collapse. http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/netanyahu-extending-settlement-freeze-will-cause-government-to-collapse-1.304671 Such is politics!
In the past, Mr. Abbas has insisted that all Israeli settlement construction be stopped before peace talks resume. Yet it appears that Abbas has conceded this point under intense pressure from the U.S. and the European Union. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/21/world/middleeast/21diplo.html?hp
Of course, all these decisions have ignored the people of Gaza entirely. Hamas, the duly elected ruling party, has never recognized Abbas’s government in the West Bank, and predictably has criticized the decision of the Palestinian Authority to return to the negotiating table. According to Hamas leader Ismail Haniya, “nothing has been achieved” to warrant the resumption of talks. There have been no gestures of good faith, no thawing of relations, no assurances that a new Palestinian state will be based on the 1967 borders, no guarantee that Palestinian lands will not continue to be expropriated while talks drag on over the next year.
We agree. Yet Quakers put their faith in dialogue, and believe that discussion in hopeless circumstances can sometimes yield surprising results.
So it is with hope mixed with a certain degree of skepticism that we report this very small step toward a just peace. Despite the difficulties, most close observers of the conflict agree that these talks may be the last chance for a two state solution.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/21/world/middleeast/21diplo.html?_r=1&hp
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/08/201082012452252467.html
One of the difficulties with restarting face to face negotiations has been the issue of Jewish-only settlements that Israelis continue to build with impunity on Palestinian land. A self-imposed settlement freeze has been in place since November 2009, yet the freeze did not include East Jerusalem and has been routinely violated in the West Bank. Although the result has clearly been better than no freeze at all, 492 violations have been reported by the liberal Israeli group Peace Now: http://www.peacenow.org.il/site/en/peace.asp?pi=61&docid=4747&pos=0
Mr. Netanyahu has refused to extend the settlement freeze past September 26, its expiration date, claiming that doing so would cause his right-wing government to collapse. http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/netanyahu-extending-settlement-freeze-will-cause-government-to-collapse-1.304671 Such is politics!
In the past, Mr. Abbas has insisted that all Israeli settlement construction be stopped before peace talks resume. Yet it appears that Abbas has conceded this point under intense pressure from the U.S. and the European Union. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/21/world/middleeast/21diplo.html?hp
Of course, all these decisions have ignored the people of Gaza entirely. Hamas, the duly elected ruling party, has never recognized Abbas’s government in the West Bank, and predictably has criticized the decision of the Palestinian Authority to return to the negotiating table. According to Hamas leader Ismail Haniya, “nothing has been achieved” to warrant the resumption of talks. There have been no gestures of good faith, no thawing of relations, no assurances that a new Palestinian state will be based on the 1967 borders, no guarantee that Palestinian lands will not continue to be expropriated while talks drag on over the next year.
We agree. Yet Quakers put their faith in dialogue, and believe that discussion in hopeless circumstances can sometimes yield surprising results.
So it is with hope mixed with a certain degree of skepticism that we report this very small step toward a just peace. Despite the difficulties, most close observers of the conflict agree that these talks may be the last chance for a two state solution.
Monday, May 31, 2010
A Time for Quakers (and everyone) to Act
Dear All,
Last night, the Israeli army attacked the humanitarian flotilla to Gaza in international waters, killing between 10 and 20 peace activists on board. The international community is in an uproar. Please read the New York Times and/or Aljazeera accounts below. And please, now is the time to act. Letters to the editor, op-eds, talking to friends, sending mail to your Senators and Representatives as well as the President, all can help.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/world/middleeast/01flotilla.html?ref=world
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/05/201053133047995359.html
While individual actions are essential, it is time for Quaker Meetings to take a more visible stand on the difficult, controversial, yet crystal clear issue of Palestine. A recent story in Friends Journal on another controversial issue, slavery, makes a similar point. Here is the jist of it.
322 years ago, four Quakers living in Germantown PA, wrote a Minute decrying the Quaker practice of slavery (see attached for the full text).
The signers made several arguments, the first and most prominent being the Golden Rule: "There is a saying that we shall doe to all men like as we will be done ourselves; making no difference of what generation, descent or colour they are." The authors ask, in a tone of anguish, if their fellow Quakers would like to be treated as they treat their slaves, for "Quakers doe here handel men as they handel there ye cattle."
The four Dutch Quakers who wrote the Minute presented it to their monthly Meeting in 1688. It was judged too controversial, and sent to the Quarterly Meeting, where it was judged too weighty. It was then sent to the Yearly Meeting, where "it was adjusted not to be so proper for this Meeting to give a Positive Judgment in the case, It having so General a Relation to many other Parts, and therefore at present they forbear It."
Why was this Minute so controversial? Slavery, by 1688, had become quite profitable, and profit, as well as freedom from oppression, was a draw for new immigrants. And although various forms of slavery were quite widespread at the time (in Russia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe), slavery in the "New World" had become color-coded (slave=black), which made it easier for the people who saw themselves as "white" to consider blacks as less than human. There are always "reasons" to ignore the Golden Rule.
The proposed Minute, never passed, was filed away in the archives of the Philadelphia Meeting House until it was "rediscovered" by Quaker abolitionists 156 years later, and used to promote the national anti-slavery cause. Pennsylvania abolished slavery 92 years after the Minute in Germantown pointed out its inconsistency with the Golden Rule.
http://www.friendsjournal.org/here-slaverys-death-began
Dear Friends, let us not be like the early Pennsylvania Quaker Meetings, that were unable to take a principled collective stand on the Golden Rule. If Palestinians are human beings like ourselves, and if our own government supports their oppression through monetary and military support of Israel, we cannot in good conscience stand by silently.
In peace with justice
Helen Fox
for the Palestine Israel Action Group
of Ann Arbor Friends Meeting
Last night, the Israeli army attacked the humanitarian flotilla to Gaza in international waters, killing between 10 and 20 peace activists on board. The international community is in an uproar. Please read the New York Times and/or Aljazeera accounts below. And please, now is the time to act. Letters to the editor, op-eds, talking to friends, sending mail to your Senators and Representatives as well as the President, all can help.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/world/middleeast/01flotilla.html?ref=world
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/05/201053133047995359.html
While individual actions are essential, it is time for Quaker Meetings to take a more visible stand on the difficult, controversial, yet crystal clear issue of Palestine. A recent story in Friends Journal on another controversial issue, slavery, makes a similar point. Here is the jist of it.
322 years ago, four Quakers living in Germantown PA, wrote a Minute decrying the Quaker practice of slavery (see attached for the full text).
The signers made several arguments, the first and most prominent being the Golden Rule: "There is a saying that we shall doe to all men like as we will be done ourselves; making no difference of what generation, descent or colour they are." The authors ask, in a tone of anguish, if their fellow Quakers would like to be treated as they treat their slaves, for "Quakers doe here handel men as they handel there ye cattle."
The four Dutch Quakers who wrote the Minute presented it to their monthly Meeting in 1688. It was judged too controversial, and sent to the Quarterly Meeting, where it was judged too weighty. It was then sent to the Yearly Meeting, where "it was adjusted not to be so proper for this Meeting to give a Positive Judgment in the case, It having so General a Relation to many other Parts, and therefore at present they forbear It."
Why was this Minute so controversial? Slavery, by 1688, had become quite profitable, and profit, as well as freedom from oppression, was a draw for new immigrants. And although various forms of slavery were quite widespread at the time (in Russia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe), slavery in the "New World" had become color-coded (slave=black), which made it easier for the people who saw themselves as "white" to consider blacks as less than human. There are always "reasons" to ignore the Golden Rule.
The proposed Minute, never passed, was filed away in the archives of the Philadelphia Meeting House until it was "rediscovered" by Quaker abolitionists 156 years later, and used to promote the national anti-slavery cause. Pennsylvania abolished slavery 92 years after the Minute in Germantown pointed out its inconsistency with the Golden Rule.
http://www.friendsjournal.org/here-slaverys-death-began
Dear Friends, let us not be like the early Pennsylvania Quaker Meetings, that were unable to take a principled collective stand on the Golden Rule. If Palestinians are human beings like ourselves, and if our own government supports their oppression through monetary and military support of Israel, we cannot in good conscience stand by silently.
In peace with justice
Helen Fox
for the Palestine Israel Action Group
of Ann Arbor Friends Meeting
Friday, May 28, 2010
Please support International Flotilla to Gaza
PIAG’s monthly dispatch for June, 2010 focuses on ten humanitarian ships with 700 peace activists on board bringing 5000 tons of aid to Gaza this Memorial Day Weekend, with all the celebration and trepidation that nonviolent action entails. This video clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkNmwohwSeE shows the joyful send off of The Rachael Corrie, one of the ships in the "Freedom Flotilla" which will converge in the Meditarranean and set sail toward Gaza, where the Israeli military is determined to stop them.
Described as "a force more powerful" by Ewa Jasiewicz in the Electronic Intifada, "this flotilla represents radical solidarity and a force that can be realized when people from all over the world act on their conscience. It's a force made real through stepping out onto the streets or into occupation-supporting businesses, through speaking out, through fundraising in mosques, churches, synagogues, schools; through writing, singing, sharing, relaying and promoting, and packing and driving boxes of materials and cement, and cheering on and praying for and protesting any attack."
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11266.shtml
We conclude with an appeal from the Shalom Center: A Prophetic Voice in Jewish, Multireligious, and American Life: Support Humanitarian "Ship-In" to Gaza: Urge Israeli Government to Let Ships Land:
From the Shalom Center:
"According to Israeli news reports, half the Israeli Navy has been deployed to intercept these ships instead of letting them proceed to deliver food, medical supplies such as wheelchairs, and materials for reconstructing homes that were destroyed during the Israeli government's attack on Gaza a year ago.
The ships are being sent because the Israeli government has imposed a blockade on many civilian goods from entering Gaza. The ships are intended as a nonviolent way of breaking through the blockade.
In Israel, Rabbis for Human Rights has urged the government to allow the ships to pass and to end its blockade of civilian goods from entering Gaza. The Shalom Center joins in this plea and invites our readers and members to join in it as well by writing or calling Secretary of State Clinton, the Israeli Embassy to the United States, and the Israeli consulates near where they live.
This nonviolent approach to achieving political change is both profoundly ethical and profoundly practical. It echoes, for example, the work of the civil rights movement in the United States in the early 1960s. Sit-ins, freedom rides, freedom schools, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party all operated on the principle of carrying into practice in the present the vision that its activists had for the future.
Their vision was that restaurants, buses, and schools should be open to all, and that the Democratic Party in Mississippi should reflect the voting rights of all citizens of Mississippi, black and white.
What civil rights activists faced was racially segregated society and culture. They did not begin by petitioning Congress for new laws; they did not attack segregationists or segregated institutions. Instead, they embodied the future that they hoped for -- in the present when they were living.
Since they hoped to achieve integrated restaurants, they went in integrated groups to the restaurants. That left the burden of response on the owners and officials. They could arrest sit-in activists; they could even kill them; or they could let the restaurants become integrated.
Over time, so many Americans were moved and drawn by these nonviolent protests that they joined the demonstrations, and insisted that Congress change the laws.
These ten ships approaching the coast of Gaza are doing the same thing. They want the blockade of civilian goods to end; so they are ending it by bringing humanitarian supplies. They are putting the burden on the Israeli government of choosing to attack them or choosing to let the supplies through.
For years, many of us have urged Palestinians to turn to nonviolent action. Now they and their supporters are doing this. And they are doing it not by boycotting or divesting from Israel but by a positive rather than a negative action -- affirming the simple justice of allowing Palestinians in Gaza to receive what human beings need. I hope that many Americans, many Jews among them, will respond as Northern whites responded to the sit-in movement 50 years ago.
Below you can find three items: the English translation of the letter sent today by Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel to Defense Minister Ehud Barak; a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and to the Israeli Embassy; and the telephone, fax, and e-mail addresses of Secretary Clinton, the Israeli embassy to the United States, and consulates around the country.
Supporters are encouraged to draw on these letters as they like, to phone, e-mail, or fax their own comments to Secretary Clinton and the Israeli government -- -- urging them to welcome, rather than attack, these ships bearing humanitarian supplies.
Below is the English translation of the letter sent today by Rabbis For Human Rights to Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
To Defense Minister Ehud Barak,
Rabbis For Human Rights believes that, instead of viewing humanitarian aid as a provocation, Israel ought to let the Gaza flotilla reach the Gaza port, along with the cargo and those on board, after a thorough but quick inspection.
Rabbis For Human Rights supports the people of conscience from around the world who have sent humanitarian aid to Gaza. We also welcome Israeli government's announcement that it will allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza. We are hopeful that, after years of the blockade that has caused great suffering to the Gaza's civilian population, violated international law and prevented Gazans from rebuilding their lives after the Gaza War, Israel will carry out the Jewish tradition's demand that, even when a town is under siege, a side must be left open. (Mishna Tora; Hilchot Malakhi 6:7)
However, Israeli statements hedging on what will be allowed in and denying that there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, along with the list of goods denied in recent years, whose only connection with security is that they allow the civilian population to exist, causes doubt as to Israel's true intentions.
RHR also calls on those responsible for the flotilla to change their decision, and to agree to the request of Gilad Shalit's father to take a package and letter to his son.
B'Vrakha (In Blessing),
Rabbi Arik Ascherman
Executive Director
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Dear Ambassador/ Dear Secretary,
As a rabbi, I am deeply committed to the physical safety and the moral and ethical legitimacy of Israel. Both would be enhanced by welcoming, rather than halting and arresting, the ships bringing humanitarian aid to Gaza -- and by ending the Israeli government's blockade of civilian goods.
Ten ships, over 700 international passengers, and some 5,000 tons of reconstruction materials, representingover 50 countries, are represented on this Flotilla, including parliamentarians, medical professionals, and peace activists. These individuals have every right - indeed,. Obligation -- to sail into Gaza's sea port and deliver the much needed humanitarian, medical, and construction materials necessary for Palestinians in Gaza to rebuild their lives.
Media sources report that Israeli naval forces are allegedly in training to prepare to interdict the Flotilla and prevent the arrival of the ships at "any price". According to news reports, about half of the Israeli naval forces will participate in an operation to prepare to seize the boats in the flotilla and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak will supervise the operation.
Israel has stopped at least three Free Gaza sailings since January 2009, including one ship which almost sunk after being deliberately rammed by an Israeli vessel and another ship which Israel intercepted in international waters and arrested all of its passengers. Another ship was forced to turn back after the Israeli Navy threatened to shoot the civilian passengers on board.
I am writing to ask you to do everything possible to prevent Israel from using military force to launch an attack or naval blockade on the Flotilla and it's peaceful, unarmed, international citizens. Please do the right thing and stand with the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza by calling on Israel to ensure that all threats to attack the Freedom Flotilla are withdrawn and its safe passage is guaranteed. I remain hopeful that you will take to heart your role in this and will do everything in your power to ensure their safety.
Signed,
Rabbi Arthur Waskow
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
Phone (Office of Public Affairs): 202/647-5171.
Embassy of Israel to US
Phone: (202) 364-5500
Fax: (202)364-5429
Email: info@israelemb.org
Consulate General of Israel in Atlanta
1100 Spring St. N.W. Suite
440 Atlanta, Georgia 30309
Phone: (404) 487-6500
Fax: (404) 487-6555
Email: information@atlanta.mfa.gov.il
Consulate General of Israel in Boston
Phone: (617) 535-0200
Fax: (617) 535-0255
Email: cultural@boston.mfa.gov.il
Consulate General of Israel in Chicago
Phone: 312-297-4800
Fax: 312-297-4855
Email: contactus@chicago.mfa.gov.il
Consulate of Israel to the Southwest
Phone: (713) 627-3780; (713) 622 4924
Fax: (713) 627-0149
Email: consular.dep@houston.mfa.gov.il
Consulate General of Israel in Los Angeles
Phone: (323)852-5500
Fax: (323)852-5555
Email: info@losangeles.mfa.gov.il
Consulate General of Israel in Miami
Phone: 305-925-9400
Fax: 305-925-9455
Email: info@miami.mfa.gov.il
Consulate General of Israel in New York
Phone: (212) 499-5400; (212) 499-5000
Email: consular@newyork.mfa.gov.il
Consulate General of Israel in San Francisco
Phone: 415 - 844-7500; (415) 844-7510
Fax: 415-844-7555
Email: consulardep@sanfrancisco.mfa.gov.il
Consulate General of Israel in Philadelphia
Phone: 215-977-7600
Fax: 215-977-7611
Email: info@philadelphia.mfa.gov.il
Described as "a force more powerful" by Ewa Jasiewicz in the Electronic Intifada, "this flotilla represents radical solidarity and a force that can be realized when people from all over the world act on their conscience. It's a force made real through stepping out onto the streets or into occupation-supporting businesses, through speaking out, through fundraising in mosques, churches, synagogues, schools; through writing, singing, sharing, relaying and promoting, and packing and driving boxes of materials and cement, and cheering on and praying for and protesting any attack."
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11266.shtml
We conclude with an appeal from the Shalom Center: A Prophetic Voice in Jewish, Multireligious, and American Life: Support Humanitarian "Ship-In" to Gaza: Urge Israeli Government to Let Ships Land:
From the Shalom Center:
"According to Israeli news reports, half the Israeli Navy has been deployed to intercept these ships instead of letting them proceed to deliver food, medical supplies such as wheelchairs, and materials for reconstructing homes that were destroyed during the Israeli government's attack on Gaza a year ago.
The ships are being sent because the Israeli government has imposed a blockade on many civilian goods from entering Gaza. The ships are intended as a nonviolent way of breaking through the blockade.
In Israel, Rabbis for Human Rights has urged the government to allow the ships to pass and to end its blockade of civilian goods from entering Gaza. The Shalom Center joins in this plea and invites our readers and members to join in it as well by writing or calling Secretary of State Clinton, the Israeli Embassy to the United States, and the Israeli consulates near where they live.
This nonviolent approach to achieving political change is both profoundly ethical and profoundly practical. It echoes, for example, the work of the civil rights movement in the United States in the early 1960s. Sit-ins, freedom rides, freedom schools, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party all operated on the principle of carrying into practice in the present the vision that its activists had for the future.
Their vision was that restaurants, buses, and schools should be open to all, and that the Democratic Party in Mississippi should reflect the voting rights of all citizens of Mississippi, black and white.
What civil rights activists faced was racially segregated society and culture. They did not begin by petitioning Congress for new laws; they did not attack segregationists or segregated institutions. Instead, they embodied the future that they hoped for -- in the present when they were living.
Since they hoped to achieve integrated restaurants, they went in integrated groups to the restaurants. That left the burden of response on the owners and officials. They could arrest sit-in activists; they could even kill them; or they could let the restaurants become integrated.
Over time, so many Americans were moved and drawn by these nonviolent protests that they joined the demonstrations, and insisted that Congress change the laws.
These ten ships approaching the coast of Gaza are doing the same thing. They want the blockade of civilian goods to end; so they are ending it by bringing humanitarian supplies. They are putting the burden on the Israeli government of choosing to attack them or choosing to let the supplies through.
For years, many of us have urged Palestinians to turn to nonviolent action. Now they and their supporters are doing this. And they are doing it not by boycotting or divesting from Israel but by a positive rather than a negative action -- affirming the simple justice of allowing Palestinians in Gaza to receive what human beings need. I hope that many Americans, many Jews among them, will respond as Northern whites responded to the sit-in movement 50 years ago.
Below you can find three items: the English translation of the letter sent today by Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel to Defense Minister Ehud Barak; a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and to the Israeli Embassy; and the telephone, fax, and e-mail addresses of Secretary Clinton, the Israeli embassy to the United States, and consulates around the country.
Supporters are encouraged to draw on these letters as they like, to phone, e-mail, or fax their own comments to Secretary Clinton and the Israeli government -- -- urging them to welcome, rather than attack, these ships bearing humanitarian supplies.
Below is the English translation of the letter sent today by Rabbis For Human Rights to Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
To Defense Minister Ehud Barak,
Rabbis For Human Rights believes that, instead of viewing humanitarian aid as a provocation, Israel ought to let the Gaza flotilla reach the Gaza port, along with the cargo and those on board, after a thorough but quick inspection.
Rabbis For Human Rights supports the people of conscience from around the world who have sent humanitarian aid to Gaza. We also welcome Israeli government's announcement that it will allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza. We are hopeful that, after years of the blockade that has caused great suffering to the Gaza's civilian population, violated international law and prevented Gazans from rebuilding their lives after the Gaza War, Israel will carry out the Jewish tradition's demand that, even when a town is under siege, a side must be left open. (Mishna Tora; Hilchot Malakhi 6:7)
However, Israeli statements hedging on what will be allowed in and denying that there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, along with the list of goods denied in recent years, whose only connection with security is that they allow the civilian population to exist, causes doubt as to Israel's true intentions.
RHR also calls on those responsible for the flotilla to change their decision, and to agree to the request of Gilad Shalit's father to take a package and letter to his son.
B'Vrakha (In Blessing),
Rabbi Arik Ascherman
Executive Director
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Dear Ambassador/ Dear Secretary,
As a rabbi, I am deeply committed to the physical safety and the moral and ethical legitimacy of Israel. Both would be enhanced by welcoming, rather than halting and arresting, the ships bringing humanitarian aid to Gaza -- and by ending the Israeli government's blockade of civilian goods.
Ten ships, over 700 international passengers, and some 5,000 tons of reconstruction materials, representingover 50 countries, are represented on this Flotilla, including parliamentarians, medical professionals, and peace activists. These individuals have every right - indeed,. Obligation -- to sail into Gaza's sea port and deliver the much needed humanitarian, medical, and construction materials necessary for Palestinians in Gaza to rebuild their lives.
Media sources report that Israeli naval forces are allegedly in training to prepare to interdict the Flotilla and prevent the arrival of the ships at "any price". According to news reports, about half of the Israeli naval forces will participate in an operation to prepare to seize the boats in the flotilla and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak will supervise the operation.
Israel has stopped at least three Free Gaza sailings since January 2009, including one ship which almost sunk after being deliberately rammed by an Israeli vessel and another ship which Israel intercepted in international waters and arrested all of its passengers. Another ship was forced to turn back after the Israeli Navy threatened to shoot the civilian passengers on board.
I am writing to ask you to do everything possible to prevent Israel from using military force to launch an attack or naval blockade on the Flotilla and it's peaceful, unarmed, international citizens. Please do the right thing and stand with the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza by calling on Israel to ensure that all threats to attack the Freedom Flotilla are withdrawn and its safe passage is guaranteed. I remain hopeful that you will take to heart your role in this and will do everything in your power to ensure their safety.
Signed,
Rabbi Arthur Waskow
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
Phone (Office of Public Affairs): 202/647-5171.
Embassy of Israel to US
Phone: (202) 364-5500
Fax: (202)364-5429
Email: info@israelemb.org
Consulate General of Israel in Atlanta
1100 Spring St. N.W. Suite
440 Atlanta, Georgia 30309
Phone: (404) 487-6500
Fax: (404) 487-6555
Email: information@atlanta.mfa.gov.il
Consulate General of Israel in Boston
Phone: (617) 535-0200
Fax: (617) 535-0255
Email: cultural@boston.mfa.gov.il
Consulate General of Israel in Chicago
Phone: 312-297-4800
Fax: 312-297-4855
Email: contactus@chicago.mfa.gov.il
Consulate of Israel to the Southwest
Phone: (713) 627-3780; (713) 622 4924
Fax: (713) 627-0149
Email: consular.dep@houston.mfa.gov.il
Consulate General of Israel in Los Angeles
Phone: (323)852-5500
Fax: (323)852-5555
Email: info@losangeles.mfa.gov.il
Consulate General of Israel in Miami
Phone: 305-925-9400
Fax: 305-925-9455
Email: info@miami.mfa.gov.il
Consulate General of Israel in New York
Phone: (212) 499-5400; (212) 499-5000
Email: consular@newyork.mfa.gov.il
Consulate General of Israel in San Francisco
Phone: 415 - 844-7500; (415) 844-7510
Fax: 415-844-7555
Email: consulardep@sanfrancisco.mfa.gov.il
Consulate General of Israel in Philadelphia
Phone: 215-977-7600
Fax: 215-977-7611
Email: info@philadelphia.mfa.gov.il
Friday, April 02, 2010
The Settlement Issue
Dear All,
PIAG’s monthly dispatch for April, 2010 reports on the current impasse in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and suggests how nonviolent direct action can address the deadlock.
The U.S. insists that Israel must halt the expansion of Jewish-only settlements on disputed lands in order for negotiations to begin. Here is a cool, interactive map that shows how settlements have expanded in and around Jerusalem:
http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/ht/display/ContentDetails/i/9823/pid/3584
Israel refused to stop expanding its settlements, and in fact, announced the building of even more at the very moment Vice President Joe Biden paid Israel a diplomatic visit. Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu then visited Washington and was deliberately snubbed by the White House.
Meanwhile, Meron Benvenisti, a “dovish” Israeli historian known for his study of Israeli building on land it captured in the 1967 war, made the startling pronouncement that Israeli settlements have “buried the two-state solution.” He is now advocating a bi-national state, an idea that Israel is very unlikely to accept. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62M3FY20100323
In the US, a new Zogby poll has found that the majority of the public agrees that the settlements are wrong and should be stopped, and are “deeply concerned that the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict puts US interests at risk across the Middle East.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-zogby/new-poll-on-american-atti_b_515835.html
What to do? Economic actions have a long, respected history of moving powerful governments from intransigence to productive negotiation. For many years, PIAG has been compiling a list of bold initiatives around the world to end the Israeli occupation. The report, entitled “Global Actions to End Israel's Occupation of Palestinian Land,” contains hundreds of actions taken by governments, businesses, labor unions, NGO's, academic and religious organizations, and other groups, and is now disseminated and updated regularly by the Interfaith Peace Initiative. www.interfaithpeaceinitiative.com/globalactions.pdf
PIAG’s monthly dispatch for April, 2010 reports on the current impasse in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and suggests how nonviolent direct action can address the deadlock.
The U.S. insists that Israel must halt the expansion of Jewish-only settlements on disputed lands in order for negotiations to begin. Here is a cool, interactive map that shows how settlements have expanded in and around Jerusalem:
http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/ht/display/ContentDetails/i/9823/pid/3584
Israel refused to stop expanding its settlements, and in fact, announced the building of even more at the very moment Vice President Joe Biden paid Israel a diplomatic visit. Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu then visited Washington and was deliberately snubbed by the White House.
Meanwhile, Meron Benvenisti, a “dovish” Israeli historian known for his study of Israeli building on land it captured in the 1967 war, made the startling pronouncement that Israeli settlements have “buried the two-state solution.” He is now advocating a bi-national state, an idea that Israel is very unlikely to accept. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62M3FY20100323
In the US, a new Zogby poll has found that the majority of the public agrees that the settlements are wrong and should be stopped, and are “deeply concerned that the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict puts US interests at risk across the Middle East.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-zogby/new-poll-on-american-atti_b_515835.html
What to do? Economic actions have a long, respected history of moving powerful governments from intransigence to productive negotiation. For many years, PIAG has been compiling a list of bold initiatives around the world to end the Israeli occupation. The report, entitled “Global Actions to End Israel's Occupation of Palestinian Land,” contains hundreds of actions taken by governments, businesses, labor unions, NGO's, academic and religious organizations, and other groups, and is now disseminated and updated regularly by the Interfaith Peace Initiative. www.interfaithpeaceinitiative.com/globalactions.pdf
Monday, January 18, 2010
Israeli Military Rule and Incarceration Procedures in the West Bank
by Alice Rothchild
January 17, 2010
Dr. Rothchild, author of "Broken Promises Broken Dreams," reports from Ramallah, where she was visiting as part of a health and human rights delegation.
Ala Joradat, the program manager of Adameer, a Palestinian human rights organization that focuses primarily on prisoners, legal aid, and monitoring, meets with our delegation and tries to unravel the complex civil and human rights issues that face Palestinians, particularly those who choose to protest the conditions of the Israeli occupation.
He explains that the prisoners are both a product of the conflict and a cause for the conflict. Since 1967, 800,000 Palestinians have experienced detention, representing more than 53% of the population over 18. Because mostly Palestinian males are targeted for arrest, 60-70% of adult males have been to prison. To me this feels somewhat parallel to the disproportionately large number of African-American males currently incarcerated in the US. I wonder if this reflects a huge number of militants and fighters in the OPT, or are there more subtle political forces at work.
Ala explains that arrest and detention are based on military orders that have been in effect since 1967. The military commander issues and cancels orders, heads the civil administration, and assigns the prosecutors, judges, translators, etc, so the entire "justice system" is collegial and the military court is a division of the Israeli Defense Force. Ala emphasizes that military orders are designed to control the population, ranging from what road a Palestinian can use to whether he can dig a well for water. I am stunned at the list of mind boggling potential security offenses which include:
1. Reading the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet who gave voice to the anguish of dispossession and exile
2. Reading "The Collection of UN Resolutions on the Question of Palestine 1948-1982"
3. Associations of parties, factions, charitable societies, NGOs, unions, and student associations. (After Oslo, defacto the PLO and Fatah were legitimized, but in Israeli law they are still listed as "illegal terrorist organizations.")
4. Wearing political symbols, including the cartoon character "Handala"
5. Carrying a Palestinian flag (which is the flag of the PLO which is technically still an illegal organization)
6. Protesting the seizing of your land
7. Throwing stones at the separation wall (destruction of state property)
8. Throwing stones at a soldier (attempted murder)
9. Assisting an injured person at a demonstration, including medical workers, (assisting a terrorist) and the list goes on.
Functionally what this means is that the IDF can control the lives of people and organizations and use the thousands of potential security offenses in an unpredictable and arbitrary manner.
According to Ala, an Israeli soldier, policeman, or even civilian can detain a Palestinian for 8 days without a specific reason, no legal review, and and at the end of this initial period, Palestinians appear before a military judge where they can be released, prosecuted and charged, placed in administrative detention, or most likely sent for interrogation for up to 180 days, with no access to a lawyer for up to 90 days. Ala notes that the interrogation centers are located in police stations or prisons, are controlled by the Shin Bet, and report to the prime minister without external monitoring.
Most of the torture that has been well documented by a variety of Israeli and Palestinian organizations occurs in these settings. The methods have changed over the years, but any statements obtained under torture are admissible in court, even if torture is proven.
The prisons are also rife with collaborators; if a prisoner denies he has committed any crimes, then other prisoners suspect he is a collaborator. If the prisoner boasts of criminal activities true or false, to prove himself to the other prisoners, this is all reported back to the Israeli authorities and held as evidence without any external investigation.These are the kinds of cases Adameer has represented for years.
Ala further explains that charges are also often so vague, without clear times and places, they are difficult to disprove. He cites an example of a case where three men were accused of shooting an Israeli vehicle north of Ramallah. Two confessed and one did not and Adameer took the case. During the trial, it was revealed that the event occurred in July, 2004. The prisoner stated he was in Jordan for the month of July. This information was brought to the attention of the military judge. Because the Israelis control all the borders, the judge could have easily accessed the security computer systems and determined if this man had left the country in July. Instead, the judge asked the Adameer lawyer to prove that the prisoner was in Jordan. The lawyers then brought evidence of stamps and papers that revealed that the prisoner was telling the truth. The military judge then demanded that the lawyers prove that the stamps were not fake. The man was subsequently found guilty in what sounds to me to be a kangaroo court.
Another dark side to this military justice system is the well documented use of collective punishment, demolition of the homes of prisoners, prohibition of family visitation, isolation of prisoners, and neglecting to provide adequate health care to prisoners. Ala also urgently wants us to understand administrative detention, an unlimited detention that can be renewed for months at the judgement of the military commander. If a military judge deems that a prisoner is a potential threat, his source of information is a secret file that neither the prisoner or the prisoner's lawyer has access to, and there is no limit to how often the administrative detention can be renewed.
Ala describes cases where the detention was renewed just as the prisoner was leaving the prison, or even once he got home. What this means is that all people "of suspicion" can be imprisoned without evidence indefinitely. In the past 21 years, one Palestinian man has spent 17 years on and off, in administrative detention, effectively destroying him as well as his family.The most significant point for me in this legally and ethically disturbing discussion is that the vast majority of people in administrative detention are nonviolent civil society activists. Additionally the IDF has a history of assassinating or imprisoning the more moderate Palestinian leadership.
So what are the implications of this system? Clearly the Israeli authorities are very threatened by nonviolent resistance and a powerfully organized civil society movement. This concept challenges the very idea of the unrelenting Arab threat that is the foundation of the Israeli security industry and foreign policy. Judging from the legal system in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, a tortured and unjust legal system is strangling the leadership as well as the foot soldiers in the nonviolent movements that continue to persevere and sometimes flourish under the most difficult of circumstances.
I can only wonder how many Gandhis and Martin Luther Kings, and Mandelas are rotting in Israeli jails today.
January 17, 2010
Dr. Rothchild, author of "Broken Promises Broken Dreams," reports from Ramallah, where she was visiting as part of a health and human rights delegation.
Ala Joradat, the program manager of Adameer, a Palestinian human rights organization that focuses primarily on prisoners, legal aid, and monitoring, meets with our delegation and tries to unravel the complex civil and human rights issues that face Palestinians, particularly those who choose to protest the conditions of the Israeli occupation.
He explains that the prisoners are both a product of the conflict and a cause for the conflict. Since 1967, 800,000 Palestinians have experienced detention, representing more than 53% of the population over 18. Because mostly Palestinian males are targeted for arrest, 60-70% of adult males have been to prison. To me this feels somewhat parallel to the disproportionately large number of African-American males currently incarcerated in the US. I wonder if this reflects a huge number of militants and fighters in the OPT, or are there more subtle political forces at work.
Ala explains that arrest and detention are based on military orders that have been in effect since 1967. The military commander issues and cancels orders, heads the civil administration, and assigns the prosecutors, judges, translators, etc, so the entire "justice system" is collegial and the military court is a division of the Israeli Defense Force. Ala emphasizes that military orders are designed to control the population, ranging from what road a Palestinian can use to whether he can dig a well for water. I am stunned at the list of mind boggling potential security offenses which include:
1. Reading the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet who gave voice to the anguish of dispossession and exile
2. Reading "The Collection of UN Resolutions on the Question of Palestine 1948-1982"
3. Associations of parties, factions, charitable societies, NGOs, unions, and student associations. (After Oslo, defacto the PLO and Fatah were legitimized, but in Israeli law they are still listed as "illegal terrorist organizations.")
4. Wearing political symbols, including the cartoon character "Handala"
5. Carrying a Palestinian flag (which is the flag of the PLO which is technically still an illegal organization)
6. Protesting the seizing of your land
7. Throwing stones at the separation wall (destruction of state property)
8. Throwing stones at a soldier (attempted murder)
9. Assisting an injured person at a demonstration, including medical workers, (assisting a terrorist) and the list goes on.
Functionally what this means is that the IDF can control the lives of people and organizations and use the thousands of potential security offenses in an unpredictable and arbitrary manner.
According to Ala, an Israeli soldier, policeman, or even civilian can detain a Palestinian for 8 days without a specific reason, no legal review, and and at the end of this initial period, Palestinians appear before a military judge where they can be released, prosecuted and charged, placed in administrative detention, or most likely sent for interrogation for up to 180 days, with no access to a lawyer for up to 90 days. Ala notes that the interrogation centers are located in police stations or prisons, are controlled by the Shin Bet, and report to the prime minister without external monitoring.
Most of the torture that has been well documented by a variety of Israeli and Palestinian organizations occurs in these settings. The methods have changed over the years, but any statements obtained under torture are admissible in court, even if torture is proven.
The prisons are also rife with collaborators; if a prisoner denies he has committed any crimes, then other prisoners suspect he is a collaborator. If the prisoner boasts of criminal activities true or false, to prove himself to the other prisoners, this is all reported back to the Israeli authorities and held as evidence without any external investigation.These are the kinds of cases Adameer has represented for years.
Ala further explains that charges are also often so vague, without clear times and places, they are difficult to disprove. He cites an example of a case where three men were accused of shooting an Israeli vehicle north of Ramallah. Two confessed and one did not and Adameer took the case. During the trial, it was revealed that the event occurred in July, 2004. The prisoner stated he was in Jordan for the month of July. This information was brought to the attention of the military judge. Because the Israelis control all the borders, the judge could have easily accessed the security computer systems and determined if this man had left the country in July. Instead, the judge asked the Adameer lawyer to prove that the prisoner was in Jordan. The lawyers then brought evidence of stamps and papers that revealed that the prisoner was telling the truth. The military judge then demanded that the lawyers prove that the stamps were not fake. The man was subsequently found guilty in what sounds to me to be a kangaroo court.
Another dark side to this military justice system is the well documented use of collective punishment, demolition of the homes of prisoners, prohibition of family visitation, isolation of prisoners, and neglecting to provide adequate health care to prisoners. Ala also urgently wants us to understand administrative detention, an unlimited detention that can be renewed for months at the judgement of the military commander. If a military judge deems that a prisoner is a potential threat, his source of information is a secret file that neither the prisoner or the prisoner's lawyer has access to, and there is no limit to how often the administrative detention can be renewed.
Ala describes cases where the detention was renewed just as the prisoner was leaving the prison, or even once he got home. What this means is that all people "of suspicion" can be imprisoned without evidence indefinitely. In the past 21 years, one Palestinian man has spent 17 years on and off, in administrative detention, effectively destroying him as well as his family.The most significant point for me in this legally and ethically disturbing discussion is that the vast majority of people in administrative detention are nonviolent civil society activists. Additionally the IDF has a history of assassinating or imprisoning the more moderate Palestinian leadership.
So what are the implications of this system? Clearly the Israeli authorities are very threatened by nonviolent resistance and a powerfully organized civil society movement. This concept challenges the very idea of the unrelenting Arab threat that is the foundation of the Israeli security industry and foreign policy. Judging from the legal system in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, a tortured and unjust legal system is strangling the leadership as well as the foot soldiers in the nonviolent movements that continue to persevere and sometimes flourish under the most difficult of circumstances.
I can only wonder how many Gandhis and Martin Luther Kings, and Mandelas are rotting in Israeli jails today.
Friday, July 03, 2009
Two states, one state, or "condominial" arrangement?
This Quaker Monthly dispatch (from PIAG, Ann Arbor Friends Meeting) focuses on various ideas for the resolution of the Israel Palestine conflict. Joe Volk, of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, reported in a recent conference call that President Obama is convinced not only that a resolution of the conflict is long overdue, but that U.S. security depends on it.
Obama and many others, including Israelis, Palestinians, U.S. Jews, and leaders of Arab countries in the region, believe that a two-state solution is the most realistic and desireable. The "One Voice Movement," with "over 650,000 signatories in roughly equal numbers both in Israel and in Palestine, and 2,000 highly-trained youth leaders" advocates this approach.
Yet many are convinced that time is running out for a two-state solution. 60 Minutes (Jan. 25, 2009) explains this view in text and video.
Others believe that a one-state solution is more in accord with recognized human rights standards. The reasons this approach is more reasonable and just are laid out by Palestinian-American activist Ali Abunimah in his visionary book, "One Country" and in an op-ed written by an unlikely, but rather eloquent advocate for peace: Libya's Muammar Gaddafi.
But creative, "outside the box" ideas could be even more likely to break the stalemate. One such solution, by political scientist Russell Nieli, advocates a "condominial" arrangement: two ethnically-defined states within one bi-national settlement community. There would be two constitutions, two judicial systems, two sets of laws, two flags, yet anyone, Palestinian or Israeli, would have the right to live anywhere within the territory of either state. Each state would "take care of its own" in terms of their people's econmic, cultural, religious, and welfare needs. Everyone, Israeli and Palestinian, would have a "right of return," including, of course, the Palestinians forced out in al Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. (Pictures show the human face of this 1948 tragedy.) Goods and services would move freely across state boundaries. The sharing of water resources would be regulated by the U.N. Palestinian armed forces would be restricted (though Israeli forces would not -- one of the main problems with this arrangement, as I see it). A complete explanation can be found in Nieli's article, "Finally, a New Idea: The Marriage of a One-State and a Two-State Solution," in Tikkun Magazine (July-August, 2009).
Obama and many others, including Israelis, Palestinians, U.S. Jews, and leaders of Arab countries in the region, believe that a two-state solution is the most realistic and desireable. The "One Voice Movement," with "over 650,000 signatories in roughly equal numbers both in Israel and in Palestine, and 2,000 highly-trained youth leaders" advocates this approach.
Yet many are convinced that time is running out for a two-state solution. 60 Minutes (Jan. 25, 2009) explains this view in text and video.
Others believe that a one-state solution is more in accord with recognized human rights standards. The reasons this approach is more reasonable and just are laid out by Palestinian-American activist Ali Abunimah in his visionary book, "One Country" and in an op-ed written by an unlikely, but rather eloquent advocate for peace: Libya's Muammar Gaddafi.
But creative, "outside the box" ideas could be even more likely to break the stalemate. One such solution, by political scientist Russell Nieli, advocates a "condominial" arrangement: two ethnically-defined states within one bi-national settlement community. There would be two constitutions, two judicial systems, two sets of laws, two flags, yet anyone, Palestinian or Israeli, would have the right to live anywhere within the territory of either state. Each state would "take care of its own" in terms of their people's econmic, cultural, religious, and welfare needs. Everyone, Israeli and Palestinian, would have a "right of return," including, of course, the Palestinians forced out in al Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. (Pictures show the human face of this 1948 tragedy.) Goods and services would move freely across state boundaries. The sharing of water resources would be regulated by the U.N. Palestinian armed forces would be restricted (though Israeli forces would not -- one of the main problems with this arrangement, as I see it). A complete explanation can be found in Nieli's article, "Finally, a New Idea: The Marriage of a One-State and a Two-State Solution," in Tikkun Magazine (July-August, 2009).
Thursday, April 16, 2009
One State?
ISRAEL-PALESTINE: One-State Supporters Make a Comeback
Analysis by Helena Cobban (2009)
WASHINGTON, Apr 10 (IPS) - President Barack Obama has spoken out forcefully - including this week, in Ankara, Turkey - in favour of building an independent Palestinian state alongside a still robust Israel. However, many Palestinians have noted that President George W. Bush also, in recent years, expressed a commitment to Palestinian statehood. But, they note, Bush never took the actions necessary to achieve such a state - and neither, until now, has Obama.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government continues to give very generous support to Israel - where successive governments have built Jewish-only colonies in the occupied West Bank and taken other actions that make a viable Palestinian state increasingly hard to achieve.
Many Palestinians and some important voices in what remains of Israel's now-battered peace camp have concluded that it is now impossible to win the 'two-state solution' envisaged by Bush and Obama. This has led to the re-emergence in both communities of an old idea: that of a single bi- national state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, in which both Hebrew-speaking Jewish Israelis and Arabic-speaking Palestinians would have equal rights as citizens, and find themselves equally at home.
That goal was advocated most eloquently in the 1930s and early 1940s by Judah Magnes, Martin Buber, and other intellectuals at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. However, most Israelis moved away from it after Israel was established as a specifically Jewish state in 1948.
Later, in 1968, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) articulated a somewhat similar goal: that of building a 'secular democratic state', which comprises both pre-1967 Israel and the West Bank and Gaza - which Israel brought under military occupation in 1967.
However, the PLO leaders could never agree on which of the numerous Jewish immigrants brought into Israel before and after 1948 to include in their project. A few years later, in 1974, most PLO supporters - but not all - moved decisively away from the 'one-state' model. They started working instead for the two-state model: an independent Palestinian state in just the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza, alongside the Israel state.
For 26 years after 1974, Israel's governments remained deeply opposed to an independent Palestinian state. All those governments made lavish investments in the project - illegal under international law - of implanting their own citizens as settlers in the occupied West Bank. They annexed East Jerusalem. When pressed on the Palestinians' future, they said they hoped Palestinians could exercise their rights in Egypt or Jordan - just not inside historic Palestine.
This idea has been making a comeback recently - including among advisers to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.In 1993, Israel finally recognized the PLO, and concluded the Oslo Accord with it. Under Oslo, the two sides created a new body called the Palestinian Authority (PA), designed to administer some aspects of daily life in parts of the occupied territories - though not, crucially, in occupied East Jerusalem.
Even after Oslo, Israeli officials made clear that they had not promised the PLO a full Palestinian state. They also said, correctly, that their rights and responsibilities as a military occupying power would remain in place. The final disposition of the occupied areas would await conclusion of a final peace agreement.Oslo specified that that agreement should be completed by 1999.
Ten years later, that deadline has still not been met - a final peace treaty still seems fairly distant. Meanwhile, Israel has used the 16 years since Oslo to increase both the number of settlers it has in the West Bank and the degree of control it exercises over the economies of both Gaza and the West Bank.Palestinian-American political scientist Leila Farsakh describes Israel's policies toward the economies of both areas as "the engineering of pauperisation." She notes that despite the large amounts of international aid poured into the West Bank, poverty rates there have risen. Most West Bank areas outside the territory's glitzy 'capital', Ramallah, are poor and increasingly aid-dependent. Lavish new settlements housing 480,000 settlers crowd much of the West Bank's best land, and guzzle its water, Farsakh explains.
In an Israeli population of just 7.2 million, those settlers now form a formidable voting bloc. Attempts to move them out look almost impossible. In the latest round of peace negotiations that Israel and the PA/PLO pursued from 2000 until recently, participants discussed ways to reduce the number of settlers required to move by annexing the big settlement areas to Israel in return for a land exchange. But those boundary modifications look complex, and quite possibly unworkable.
Meanwhile, the negotiation over a small Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza has sidelined the concerns and rights of three important Palestinian constituencies. The 1.2 million Palestinians who are citizens of Israel would remain as an embattled minority within an Israeli state still ideologically committed to the immigration of additional Jews. The 270,000 Palestinians of Jerusalem might also still be surrounded and vulnerable. And the five million Palestinians who still - 61 years after they and their forbearers fled homes in what became Israel in 1948 - would have their long-pursued right to return laid down forever.
From 1982 - the year the PLO's leaders and guerrilla forces were expelled from Lebanon - until recently, the main dynamo of Palestinian nationalism has been located in the Palestinian communities of the occupied West Bank and Gaza. But in recent years, those communities have been severely weakened. They are administratively atomised, politically divided, and live under a palpable sense of physical threat.
Many 'occupied' Palestinians are returning to the key defensive ideas of steadfastness and "just hanging on" to their land. But new energy for leadership is now emerging between two other key groups of Palestinians: those in the diaspora, and those who are citizens of Israel. The contribution those groups can make to nationwide organising has been considerably strengthened by new technologies - and crucially, neither of them has much interest in a two-state outcome. Not surprisingly, therefore, discussions about the nature of a one-state outcome - and how to achieve it - have become more frequent, and much richer in intellectual content, in recent years.
Palestinian-Israeli professor Nadim Rouhanna, now teaching at Tufts University in Massachusetts, is a leader in the new thinking. "The challenge is how to achieve the liberation of both societies from being oppressed and being oppressors," he told a recent conference in Washington, DC. "Palestinians have toŠ reassure the Israeli Jews that their culture and vitality will remain. We need to go further than seeing them only as 'Jews-by- religion' in a future Palestinian society."Like many advocates of the one-state outcome, Rouhanna referred enthusiastically to the exuberant multiculturalism and full political equality that have been embraced by post-apartheid South Africa.Progressive Jewish Israelis like Ben Gurion
University geographer Oren Yiftachel are also part of the new movement. Yiftachel's most recent work has examined at the Israeli authorities' decades-long campaign to expropriate the lands of the ethnically Palestinian Bedouin who live in southern Israel - and are citizens of Israel. "The expropriation continues - there and inside the West Bank, and in East Jerusalem," Yiftachel said, explaining that he did not see the existence of "the Green Line" that supposedly separates Israel from the occupied territory as an analytically or politically relevant concept.
Analysis by Helena Cobban (2009)
WASHINGTON, Apr 10 (IPS) - President Barack Obama has spoken out forcefully - including this week, in Ankara, Turkey - in favour of building an independent Palestinian state alongside a still robust Israel. However, many Palestinians have noted that President George W. Bush also, in recent years, expressed a commitment to Palestinian statehood. But, they note, Bush never took the actions necessary to achieve such a state - and neither, until now, has Obama.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government continues to give very generous support to Israel - where successive governments have built Jewish-only colonies in the occupied West Bank and taken other actions that make a viable Palestinian state increasingly hard to achieve.
Many Palestinians and some important voices in what remains of Israel's now-battered peace camp have concluded that it is now impossible to win the 'two-state solution' envisaged by Bush and Obama. This has led to the re-emergence in both communities of an old idea: that of a single bi- national state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, in which both Hebrew-speaking Jewish Israelis and Arabic-speaking Palestinians would have equal rights as citizens, and find themselves equally at home.
That goal was advocated most eloquently in the 1930s and early 1940s by Judah Magnes, Martin Buber, and other intellectuals at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. However, most Israelis moved away from it after Israel was established as a specifically Jewish state in 1948.
Later, in 1968, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) articulated a somewhat similar goal: that of building a 'secular democratic state', which comprises both pre-1967 Israel and the West Bank and Gaza - which Israel brought under military occupation in 1967.
However, the PLO leaders could never agree on which of the numerous Jewish immigrants brought into Israel before and after 1948 to include in their project. A few years later, in 1974, most PLO supporters - but not all - moved decisively away from the 'one-state' model. They started working instead for the two-state model: an independent Palestinian state in just the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza, alongside the Israel state.
For 26 years after 1974, Israel's governments remained deeply opposed to an independent Palestinian state. All those governments made lavish investments in the project - illegal under international law - of implanting their own citizens as settlers in the occupied West Bank. They annexed East Jerusalem. When pressed on the Palestinians' future, they said they hoped Palestinians could exercise their rights in Egypt or Jordan - just not inside historic Palestine.
This idea has been making a comeback recently - including among advisers to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.In 1993, Israel finally recognized the PLO, and concluded the Oslo Accord with it. Under Oslo, the two sides created a new body called the Palestinian Authority (PA), designed to administer some aspects of daily life in parts of the occupied territories - though not, crucially, in occupied East Jerusalem.
Even after Oslo, Israeli officials made clear that they had not promised the PLO a full Palestinian state. They also said, correctly, that their rights and responsibilities as a military occupying power would remain in place. The final disposition of the occupied areas would await conclusion of a final peace agreement.Oslo specified that that agreement should be completed by 1999.
Ten years later, that deadline has still not been met - a final peace treaty still seems fairly distant. Meanwhile, Israel has used the 16 years since Oslo to increase both the number of settlers it has in the West Bank and the degree of control it exercises over the economies of both Gaza and the West Bank.Palestinian-American political scientist Leila Farsakh describes Israel's policies toward the economies of both areas as "the engineering of pauperisation." She notes that despite the large amounts of international aid poured into the West Bank, poverty rates there have risen. Most West Bank areas outside the territory's glitzy 'capital', Ramallah, are poor and increasingly aid-dependent. Lavish new settlements housing 480,000 settlers crowd much of the West Bank's best land, and guzzle its water, Farsakh explains.
In an Israeli population of just 7.2 million, those settlers now form a formidable voting bloc. Attempts to move them out look almost impossible. In the latest round of peace negotiations that Israel and the PA/PLO pursued from 2000 until recently, participants discussed ways to reduce the number of settlers required to move by annexing the big settlement areas to Israel in return for a land exchange. But those boundary modifications look complex, and quite possibly unworkable.
Meanwhile, the negotiation over a small Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza has sidelined the concerns and rights of three important Palestinian constituencies. The 1.2 million Palestinians who are citizens of Israel would remain as an embattled minority within an Israeli state still ideologically committed to the immigration of additional Jews. The 270,000 Palestinians of Jerusalem might also still be surrounded and vulnerable. And the five million Palestinians who still - 61 years after they and their forbearers fled homes in what became Israel in 1948 - would have their long-pursued right to return laid down forever.
From 1982 - the year the PLO's leaders and guerrilla forces were expelled from Lebanon - until recently, the main dynamo of Palestinian nationalism has been located in the Palestinian communities of the occupied West Bank and Gaza. But in recent years, those communities have been severely weakened. They are administratively atomised, politically divided, and live under a palpable sense of physical threat.
Many 'occupied' Palestinians are returning to the key defensive ideas of steadfastness and "just hanging on" to their land. But new energy for leadership is now emerging between two other key groups of Palestinians: those in the diaspora, and those who are citizens of Israel. The contribution those groups can make to nationwide organising has been considerably strengthened by new technologies - and crucially, neither of them has much interest in a two-state outcome. Not surprisingly, therefore, discussions about the nature of a one-state outcome - and how to achieve it - have become more frequent, and much richer in intellectual content, in recent years.
Palestinian-Israeli professor Nadim Rouhanna, now teaching at Tufts University in Massachusetts, is a leader in the new thinking. "The challenge is how to achieve the liberation of both societies from being oppressed and being oppressors," he told a recent conference in Washington, DC. "Palestinians have toŠ reassure the Israeli Jews that their culture and vitality will remain. We need to go further than seeing them only as 'Jews-by- religion' in a future Palestinian society."Like many advocates of the one-state outcome, Rouhanna referred enthusiastically to the exuberant multiculturalism and full political equality that have been embraced by post-apartheid South Africa.Progressive Jewish Israelis like Ben Gurion
University geographer Oren Yiftachel are also part of the new movement. Yiftachel's most recent work has examined at the Israeli authorities' decades-long campaign to expropriate the lands of the ethnically Palestinian Bedouin who live in southern Israel - and are citizens of Israel. "The expropriation continues - there and inside the West Bank, and in East Jerusalem," Yiftachel said, explaining that he did not see the existence of "the Green Line" that supposedly separates Israel from the occupied territory as an analytically or politically relevant concept.
Sunday, March 01, 2009
Israel's Trauma Psychology and the Attack on Gaza
By Avigail Abarbanel
http://www.avigailabarbanel.me.uk/gaza-2009-01-04.html
Sunday 4th January 2009
One of the things that is not being discussed much in the media is how much talk there is in Israel about attacking Iran. Word on the (Israeli) street is that an air attack on Iran's nuclear reactors is imminent.Israel has been itching for a 'good war' for a while now. The botched attack on Lebanon in 2006 was a psychological disappointment that did not fulfil its purpose, and only led to a deepening chasm between the political and military arms in Israel. An Israeli friend told me in disgust the other day, that there is an atmosphere of 'national orgasm' in Israel about the prospect of attacking Iran. While people are being bombed in Gaza, all Israelis can talk about is the coming attack on Iran.
But there is a link between the two.Israel's social problems have grown exponentially over the past 15 years. It's a very different Israel now than the one I grew up in. There is more violent and organised crime than ever before, and more domestic violence and abuse of children than ever. There are more drugs and drug use, and they have drink-driving, something I have never encountered while I was still living there. This is reflected in official reports as well as in the daily newspapers. My brother who lives in Israel described to me how soldiers who spend their military service in the Occupied Palestinian territories implementing Israel's brutal occupation, come home on weekends only to get involved in drunken armed brawls and murders. This was unheard of in my time.
Israelis have never been particularly kind to each other. It's one of the reasons I left actually. In my late twenties I started to grow weary of the unkind, harsh and unforgiving atmosphere around me. It was a tough place to live in not because of our 'enemies' but because of how people treated one another. You would believe that we were all enemies rather than people who have some kind of a shared heritage. The only thing that could unite people and temporarily brought out more kindness and a sense of cooperation was a feeling of being under collective threat, and in particular a 'good wholesome war'. I lived through the war of 1967 and the national euphoria it generated, and the 1973 'Yom Kippur' war and the attrition war that followed. During the time of the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 I was a soldier myself. My last war in Israel was the 1991 Gulf war, when an Iraqi Scud missile landed only a few metres from my apartment building in Ramat-Gan near Tel-Aviv.
I remember well the atmosphere before, during and after wars. These were the best times. You could feel a change in the air. People seemed to have a renewed sense of purpose. Even long-standing family or neighbourly feuds were put aside, and everyone helped everyone. There was more patience and we children were picked on a lot less. Although I was scared of wars I remember also feeling excited. It helped that we all believed the myth that all of our wars were of the 'milchemet ein breira' type - 'no choice wars'. The kind that was imposed on us and that we 'reluctantly' had to get involved in, and only in self defence. We also believed in 'tohar ha'neshek' - 'purity of arms', that is the myth that our soldiers always act honourably and only kill when they have no choice and never unarmed civilians. We were always the 'good guys' in all our collective stories, which of course added to the general fuzzy patriotic feeling.
Israel and perhaps the rest of the world too, refuse to see that Israel's problems are a direct result of deep-seated Jewish trauma and its consequences. Israel's response to trauma was to arm itself to the teeth, and to become an incredibly aggressive country while perpetuating inside and out the myth of victimhood and goodness. As a psychotherapist I recognise this reaction to trauma. Some people who have been traumatised respond to it by becoming very powerful and very frightening. This is a reaction to having been hurt, and a response to the desire to never be hurt again.
Unfortunately this isn't a good or wholesome way to live. This is a way of life that perpetuates inner conflicts, leads to isolation and invites animosity from others. It's hard to spread good will and kindness in the world when one's inner world is based on an adversarial foundation. What is true for individuals can also be true for whole societies. Israel had a chance to heal its traumatised Jewish past but instead chose to perpetuate the trauma and pass it on to subsequent generations. The very creation of the state of Israel is a reaction to trauma. If you understand the dynamic of trauma and the solutions people try to find to it you can understand why Israel's existence has always been fraught with trouble. The fact that Israel has never used its education system and national institutions to facilitate healing from trauma is sad but not unusual. Trauma becomes so much a part of the sufferer's identity, that to heal means to change the very foundation of who you are, something most people, let alone entire cultures are rarely prepared to do.
Many Israelis who have left, have done so for the same reason I did. We were all searching for a calmer, kinder way of life, where people could be friendly and helpful to one another rather than nasty and suspicious. It's hard to leave one's home but if home is so harmful you just have to do it because the personal cost of staying is higher than the cost of the grief over losing your home.
This latest vicious war crime that is unfolding in Gaza and the increasing talk about attacking Iran are a response to yet another turn in the cycle of Israel's collective trauma. Trauma always follows a cyclical dynamic. It's hard to live with it, with the constant fear and mistrust. It's exhausting and demoralising and it can take up every bit of energy you have to just get up in the morning and get on with your daily tasks. People can go on for a while like this, somehow coping from day to day. But things inevitably come to a head and life becomes unmanageable. This is usually a familiar enough point in the cycle and the sufferer would often think 'Oh, no, not again!'
At those times people desperately search for something, some kind of temporary solution to relieve the suffering, a new diet perhaps, a new job, renovations, or a war. This is often accompanied by a desperate belief that this time they will find the ultimate solution to everything, and all will be well after that. I think Israelis really believe that if they can crush Hamas in Gaza, all their problems will be solved and they will live happily ever after free from Qassam rockets or any kind of Palestinian resistance. The question of the future of the Palestinians doesn't even come into it. When one suffers trauma, one's thinking is always short-term and self-centred. The focus is always on one's own short-term survival.
Trauma is often accompanied by denial and people spend their lives looking for solutions outside themselves. In aggressive and violent responses to trauma people will believe that it is 'that person' or 'that group' that is causing their problem, and will try to do something to hurt or eliminate them. People eventually come to therapy when they have tried everything and realise that outside measures cannot solve their problem, that there may be something about themselves that they have to fix. Unfortunately not many of the aggressive types come to therapy. Many of them end up in jail instead. People with unhealed trauma can be destructive to others but ultimately they are living an unsustainable life and are self-destructive. Many of the measures that they will adopt throughout their lifetime will be counter-productive and will end up hurting them just as much as they hurt others.
Israel has kept the Palestinians as an ongoing 'problem' so that they have someone to blame each time their trauma reaches its cyclical unmanageable point. If Israel wanted to solve its problem with the Palestinians it could have done so a long time ago. It could start by acknowledging the ethnic cleansing of 1948, then offering a right of return and compensation to the refugees in compliance with UN resolution 194 from December 1948, and that would be it. But to do that Israel would have to compromise its racist and undemocratic dream of being an exclusively Jewish state. And being an exclusively Jewish state is in itself a reaction to Jewish trauma. It is based on the simple idea that Jews are not safe with non-Jews and therefore need a state of their own where they can live separately and therefore safely. But to give up on this dream would require a complete re-evaluation of Jewish and Israeli identity and belief system. People would have to stop believing that the world is bad for Jews and Jews are only safe with one another. This means questioning some of the most fundamental principles of Jewish faith and culture. Such a process of questioning will inevitably start Israel on a path of healing and will also mean that Israel will have to find another way of being that does not involve an adversarial view of the world and perpetual war. I don't think Israel is ready for that. Healing is something that sadly, few people are prepared to do and I guess the same goes for entire societies.
But fighting the Palestinians has become very ugly over the years. The world is making a fuss about it, the Palestinians are fighting back and this ongoing war against civilians is demoralising and breaking the spirit of Israeli soldiers and having a negative effect on their entire society. This 'solution' or way of coping with the trauma (i.e. keeping the Palestinians as an enemy) is backfiring. So instead of solving the problem, Israel is looking for another bigger and more 'legitimate' war that is far less complicated. A war that all Israelis can agree on and be excited about, and that will once again unite the people and offer an uplifting relief from the daily effort of Israeli existence.
From a military perspective Israeli leaders always follow the principle of trying to 'kill two birds with one stone'. I believe that the attack on Gaza is serving two purposes. It is trying to break Palestinian resistance but it is also an attempt to provoke Iran into doing something, anything that can be used as a pretext for attacking the nuclear plants there, and who knows what else. Israel cannot afford to just go to Iran and attack with no real 'excuse', and Bush's tired rhetoric about Iran's nuclear capabilities and potential threat is wearing thin as Bush is on his way out. Obama is yet an unknown quality to Israel so they think they have to find a way to do it themselves with or without the US. That's why Israel has refused the call for a ceasefire in Gaza. They have a clear plan that they are intent on following no matter what the human cost is, and this is just as much about psychological warfare as it is about guns and bombs. It is a horrible thought but the Palestinians are and always have been just pawns in the vicious dynamic of Israeli/Jewish trauma. They don't otherwise really matter to Israelis. Most Israelis have always had trouble seeing the Palestinians as human beings like them and I believe that they do not care about the suffering they are causing them. If they did they would behave differently.
The longer they drag the air attacks on Gaza, the more furious the world and the Arab world in particular is going to be, and this is exactly what Israel is trying to achieve. Drag it on until everyone is completely exasperated and then start a ground attack that might just be the tipping point for Iran. Then Israel could attack Iran, something it has been planning to do for years, and say that it is exercising its 'right for self-defence'. The world can't stand up to that argument even when we are dealing with a few rockets from Gaza that hardly dent Israel, let alone when it comes to a properly organised country with its own armed forces like Iran. Israel's claim for self-defence will appear completely plausible.
The psychology of trauma is treacherous and filled with inner contradictions. It is precisely why the world must intervene decisively in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict: to save the Palestinians from Israel and the Israelis from themselves, and possibly spare us all a much bigger war. Without mature, assertive and clear-thinking intervention this cycle of trauma and the violence it breeds will continue until one day it will exhaust itself because enough people will have died, or a final blow will have been cast somewhere by someone, from which there will be no return
http://www.avigailabarbanel.me.uk/gaza-2009-01-04.html
Sunday 4th January 2009
One of the things that is not being discussed much in the media is how much talk there is in Israel about attacking Iran. Word on the (Israeli) street is that an air attack on Iran's nuclear reactors is imminent.Israel has been itching for a 'good war' for a while now. The botched attack on Lebanon in 2006 was a psychological disappointment that did not fulfil its purpose, and only led to a deepening chasm between the political and military arms in Israel. An Israeli friend told me in disgust the other day, that there is an atmosphere of 'national orgasm' in Israel about the prospect of attacking Iran. While people are being bombed in Gaza, all Israelis can talk about is the coming attack on Iran.
But there is a link between the two.Israel's social problems have grown exponentially over the past 15 years. It's a very different Israel now than the one I grew up in. There is more violent and organised crime than ever before, and more domestic violence and abuse of children than ever. There are more drugs and drug use, and they have drink-driving, something I have never encountered while I was still living there. This is reflected in official reports as well as in the daily newspapers. My brother who lives in Israel described to me how soldiers who spend their military service in the Occupied Palestinian territories implementing Israel's brutal occupation, come home on weekends only to get involved in drunken armed brawls and murders. This was unheard of in my time.
Israelis have never been particularly kind to each other. It's one of the reasons I left actually. In my late twenties I started to grow weary of the unkind, harsh and unforgiving atmosphere around me. It was a tough place to live in not because of our 'enemies' but because of how people treated one another. You would believe that we were all enemies rather than people who have some kind of a shared heritage. The only thing that could unite people and temporarily brought out more kindness and a sense of cooperation was a feeling of being under collective threat, and in particular a 'good wholesome war'. I lived through the war of 1967 and the national euphoria it generated, and the 1973 'Yom Kippur' war and the attrition war that followed. During the time of the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 I was a soldier myself. My last war in Israel was the 1991 Gulf war, when an Iraqi Scud missile landed only a few metres from my apartment building in Ramat-Gan near Tel-Aviv.
I remember well the atmosphere before, during and after wars. These were the best times. You could feel a change in the air. People seemed to have a renewed sense of purpose. Even long-standing family or neighbourly feuds were put aside, and everyone helped everyone. There was more patience and we children were picked on a lot less. Although I was scared of wars I remember also feeling excited. It helped that we all believed the myth that all of our wars were of the 'milchemet ein breira' type - 'no choice wars'. The kind that was imposed on us and that we 'reluctantly' had to get involved in, and only in self defence. We also believed in 'tohar ha'neshek' - 'purity of arms', that is the myth that our soldiers always act honourably and only kill when they have no choice and never unarmed civilians. We were always the 'good guys' in all our collective stories, which of course added to the general fuzzy patriotic feeling.
Israel and perhaps the rest of the world too, refuse to see that Israel's problems are a direct result of deep-seated Jewish trauma and its consequences. Israel's response to trauma was to arm itself to the teeth, and to become an incredibly aggressive country while perpetuating inside and out the myth of victimhood and goodness. As a psychotherapist I recognise this reaction to trauma. Some people who have been traumatised respond to it by becoming very powerful and very frightening. This is a reaction to having been hurt, and a response to the desire to never be hurt again.
Unfortunately this isn't a good or wholesome way to live. This is a way of life that perpetuates inner conflicts, leads to isolation and invites animosity from others. It's hard to spread good will and kindness in the world when one's inner world is based on an adversarial foundation. What is true for individuals can also be true for whole societies. Israel had a chance to heal its traumatised Jewish past but instead chose to perpetuate the trauma and pass it on to subsequent generations. The very creation of the state of Israel is a reaction to trauma. If you understand the dynamic of trauma and the solutions people try to find to it you can understand why Israel's existence has always been fraught with trouble. The fact that Israel has never used its education system and national institutions to facilitate healing from trauma is sad but not unusual. Trauma becomes so much a part of the sufferer's identity, that to heal means to change the very foundation of who you are, something most people, let alone entire cultures are rarely prepared to do.
Many Israelis who have left, have done so for the same reason I did. We were all searching for a calmer, kinder way of life, where people could be friendly and helpful to one another rather than nasty and suspicious. It's hard to leave one's home but if home is so harmful you just have to do it because the personal cost of staying is higher than the cost of the grief over losing your home.
This latest vicious war crime that is unfolding in Gaza and the increasing talk about attacking Iran are a response to yet another turn in the cycle of Israel's collective trauma. Trauma always follows a cyclical dynamic. It's hard to live with it, with the constant fear and mistrust. It's exhausting and demoralising and it can take up every bit of energy you have to just get up in the morning and get on with your daily tasks. People can go on for a while like this, somehow coping from day to day. But things inevitably come to a head and life becomes unmanageable. This is usually a familiar enough point in the cycle and the sufferer would often think 'Oh, no, not again!'
At those times people desperately search for something, some kind of temporary solution to relieve the suffering, a new diet perhaps, a new job, renovations, or a war. This is often accompanied by a desperate belief that this time they will find the ultimate solution to everything, and all will be well after that. I think Israelis really believe that if they can crush Hamas in Gaza, all their problems will be solved and they will live happily ever after free from Qassam rockets or any kind of Palestinian resistance. The question of the future of the Palestinians doesn't even come into it. When one suffers trauma, one's thinking is always short-term and self-centred. The focus is always on one's own short-term survival.
Trauma is often accompanied by denial and people spend their lives looking for solutions outside themselves. In aggressive and violent responses to trauma people will believe that it is 'that person' or 'that group' that is causing their problem, and will try to do something to hurt or eliminate them. People eventually come to therapy when they have tried everything and realise that outside measures cannot solve their problem, that there may be something about themselves that they have to fix. Unfortunately not many of the aggressive types come to therapy. Many of them end up in jail instead. People with unhealed trauma can be destructive to others but ultimately they are living an unsustainable life and are self-destructive. Many of the measures that they will adopt throughout their lifetime will be counter-productive and will end up hurting them just as much as they hurt others.
Israel has kept the Palestinians as an ongoing 'problem' so that they have someone to blame each time their trauma reaches its cyclical unmanageable point. If Israel wanted to solve its problem with the Palestinians it could have done so a long time ago. It could start by acknowledging the ethnic cleansing of 1948, then offering a right of return and compensation to the refugees in compliance with UN resolution 194 from December 1948, and that would be it. But to do that Israel would have to compromise its racist and undemocratic dream of being an exclusively Jewish state. And being an exclusively Jewish state is in itself a reaction to Jewish trauma. It is based on the simple idea that Jews are not safe with non-Jews and therefore need a state of their own where they can live separately and therefore safely. But to give up on this dream would require a complete re-evaluation of Jewish and Israeli identity and belief system. People would have to stop believing that the world is bad for Jews and Jews are only safe with one another. This means questioning some of the most fundamental principles of Jewish faith and culture. Such a process of questioning will inevitably start Israel on a path of healing and will also mean that Israel will have to find another way of being that does not involve an adversarial view of the world and perpetual war. I don't think Israel is ready for that. Healing is something that sadly, few people are prepared to do and I guess the same goes for entire societies.
But fighting the Palestinians has become very ugly over the years. The world is making a fuss about it, the Palestinians are fighting back and this ongoing war against civilians is demoralising and breaking the spirit of Israeli soldiers and having a negative effect on their entire society. This 'solution' or way of coping with the trauma (i.e. keeping the Palestinians as an enemy) is backfiring. So instead of solving the problem, Israel is looking for another bigger and more 'legitimate' war that is far less complicated. A war that all Israelis can agree on and be excited about, and that will once again unite the people and offer an uplifting relief from the daily effort of Israeli existence.
From a military perspective Israeli leaders always follow the principle of trying to 'kill two birds with one stone'. I believe that the attack on Gaza is serving two purposes. It is trying to break Palestinian resistance but it is also an attempt to provoke Iran into doing something, anything that can be used as a pretext for attacking the nuclear plants there, and who knows what else. Israel cannot afford to just go to Iran and attack with no real 'excuse', and Bush's tired rhetoric about Iran's nuclear capabilities and potential threat is wearing thin as Bush is on his way out. Obama is yet an unknown quality to Israel so they think they have to find a way to do it themselves with or without the US. That's why Israel has refused the call for a ceasefire in Gaza. They have a clear plan that they are intent on following no matter what the human cost is, and this is just as much about psychological warfare as it is about guns and bombs. It is a horrible thought but the Palestinians are and always have been just pawns in the vicious dynamic of Israeli/Jewish trauma. They don't otherwise really matter to Israelis. Most Israelis have always had trouble seeing the Palestinians as human beings like them and I believe that they do not care about the suffering they are causing them. If they did they would behave differently.
The longer they drag the air attacks on Gaza, the more furious the world and the Arab world in particular is going to be, and this is exactly what Israel is trying to achieve. Drag it on until everyone is completely exasperated and then start a ground attack that might just be the tipping point for Iran. Then Israel could attack Iran, something it has been planning to do for years, and say that it is exercising its 'right for self-defence'. The world can't stand up to that argument even when we are dealing with a few rockets from Gaza that hardly dent Israel, let alone when it comes to a properly organised country with its own armed forces like Iran. Israel's claim for self-defence will appear completely plausible.
The psychology of trauma is treacherous and filled with inner contradictions. It is precisely why the world must intervene decisively in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict: to save the Palestinians from Israel and the Israelis from themselves, and possibly spare us all a much bigger war. Without mature, assertive and clear-thinking intervention this cycle of trauma and the violence it breeds will continue until one day it will exhaust itself because enough people will have died, or a final blow will have been cast somewhere by someone, from which there will be no return
Monday, February 16, 2009
An Open Letter from Daniel Bar-Tal
from the Occupation Magazine
http://kibush.co.il/show_file.asp?num=31924
Daniel Bar-Tal
Open Letter
January 31, 2009
Dear Friends
This is probably one of the most difficult periods in my political life as a Jew living in the State of Israel. The events of the war in Gaza hit hard my foundations of hope that a peaceful conflict resolution between Israelis and Palestinians can be achieved in the near future. Moreover, my trust in humanity has been weakened seeing the ease with which human beings rally for a war, exercise blind patriotism, express desire for vengeance, delegitimize the opponent, and develop insensitivity to human life, denial of responsibility, self-righteousness and moral entitlement.
This is in contrast to the great difficulty that human beings have in mobilization for peace. We see over and over again that it takes many years and many efforts to persuade people in the importance of peace, but it takes an extremely short time to convince people in the need of war. It is even more difficult to establish moral considerations.
I have been agonizing for weeks whether to write an open letter. I could not bring myself to the paper and pencil or to the keyboard, feeling despair and helplessness. But only a responsibility to voice another opinion as an alternative to the officially presented views that are supported by the great majority of the Israeli Jews brought me to write this letter.
It is important that you will know that there is a minority of us, Jews in Israel, who care about moral considerations and opposed this war. What can I say when I know that about 1300 Palestinians killed, at least half of them innocent civilians, including children, women, and old people, over 4000 were injured, thousands of homes were destroyed and dozens of thousands became homeless. Also on the Israeli side 13 Israelis were killed, including 3 civilians, hundreds were wounded, and thousands had to escape from the hundreds of rockets that were fired on Israel.
I could repeat the arguments of the Israeli government that through the years many hundreds of rockets were fired on the Israeli land west of Gaza, including populated settlements; that no government would allow that their citizens will be hurt; that after eight years of restraint, Israel has decided to act against the terror attacks coming from the Gaza Strip.
Israeli restraint, [they say], was misinterpreted as weakness by Hamas and members of the vertical axis of extremism led by Iran; that Israel had given a mutual agreement to preserve peace its final chance when it agreed to the Egyptian brokered Period of Calm agreement in June 2008, whose terms were repeatedly transgressed by Hamas.
It is just natural that those who sent the soldiers to the war have to defend it and rationalize it. This is a human principle. But these arguments do not tell the whole story. Even if we take the Israeli arguments without the background and complexity, they cannot account for the scope of civilian losses and the destruction on the Palestinian side. The brutality and scope of the Israeli actions testify to deeper roots that are founded in the darker side of human beings.
They express the wish to erase the feeling of failure in the Second Lebanese War during the summer of 2006; they reflect a deep sense of collective victimhood because of the continuous firing of rockets on civilian settlements in the south by the Hamas military organ-- this sense of victimhood led to the urge to revenge in order to punish for the harm done and prevent further firing. In addition, they are derived from the continuous dehumanization of the Hamas organization. Finally, they are based on the conviction that Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, allowing Palestinians to live their lives and they instead engage in terror.
But, the reality is much more complex than the narrative perpetuated by the Israeli political and military establishments, which successfully constructed the beliefs of the Jewish public in Israel. This is a kind of irony because one of the objectives of the war was to carve the consciousness of the Palestinians so they will recognize the harm that Hamas is causing to the Palestinian cause and Palestinian life. This objective was not achieved and instead the war strengthened the hatred and mistrust of both sides towards each other, reinforced the support of hawkish opinions on both sides, and as a result, the peaceful process is further greatly damaged.
Moreover, it is hard to detect any meaningful political gains of Israel in the balance of this war. We are back to the same lines that were before the war ---with terrible losses and destruction. The psychological analysis of the situation illustrates the selective, biasing and distorting transmission and dissemination of information by the Israeli channels of communication. It does not mean that the alternative information does not exist in Israel but very few are interested in knowing what is really happening.
Thus, most of the Israeli Jews do not know what Israel perpetrated through the decades of occupying Gaza;
most of the Israeli Jews do not know that originally Hamas was founded by the Israeli authorities to provide an alternative to the national movement of PLO;
most of the Israeli Jews do not know that Hamas is a religious–fundamental movement that also provides welfare, health and educational services to the Palestinian people;
most of the Israeli Jews do not know that Hamas was elected democratically (with the insistence of USA) to lead the government of the Palestinian authority because of Fatah corruption, and mostly because of the fruitless negotiations with Israel which did not provide any political solution of the conflict;
most of the Israeli Jews do not know that the policy of the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon about ‘No Palestinian Partner’ led to unilateral disengagement from Gaza without negotiation with the Palestinian Authority. This act was done in order to delegitimize Palestinian Authority and in attempt to keep control over the West Bank.
Moreover, the disengagement did not free Gaza but turned it into one big prison. Israel controls the entrances to Gaza and controls every aspect of human life in Gaza. It decided to change the support of Gazans in Hamas by carrying out a siege that allowed minimal living and brought Gaza to economic disaster.
Israeli Jews know that even after disengagement, Hamas continues to fire rockets on the Israeli civil settlements but few know that during 2005– 2008, hundreds of Palestinians were killed by the Israeli forces.
Few know that the tunnels were built mainly to smuggle civil goods that could not be brought to Gaza and not only weapons as the great majority believe.
Few know that there is a relationship between Israeli violence and Palestinian violence, preferring to see the latter as irrational, fanatic, and immoral while the former as defensive, moral and well justified.
Few of the Israeli Jews recognize that Israel during two years had at least two alternative strategies to prevent further escalation: either to talk with Hamas which is possible and negotiate long-term cease-fire, or take decisive actions of peace (for example, to ease conditions of life of the Palestinians by removing many of the checkpoints and to remove illegal settlements as required by the Israeli promise to U.S.) vis a vis President Abbas and the Palestinian Authority to show the Palestinians that process yields tangible fruits that lead to prosperity and security.
Even when we shift to the period before the war, most of the Israeli Jews do not know that it was possible to negotiate continuation of the cease fire with Hamas and do not remember that it was Israel who broke the ceasefire of November 4, 2008, killing 6 Palestinians.
Hamas is not my cup of tea as it is a fundamentalist religious organization that practices also terrorism, but it is a social movement with wide support in the Palestinian society because it provides an alternative to humiliated Palestinian national identity. This movement is not homogenous and it is possible to hear in it different voices including ones that support negotiation with Israel and acceptance of the two state solution.
All these omissions are not surprising in view of the fact that the involved sides in conflict have been deeply embedded in the culture of conflict. They systematically try to construct the views of society members in a direction of presenting own society as being moral, just, peace loving, or moderate and the rival as being immoral, intransigent, violent, irrational, or extreme.
In addition each side views itself as the victim of this conflict. This process goes on for decades. Only during few years during Rabin time it looked as the peace process is gaining momentum. But since the year 2000, when the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak decided on the policy of `no partner`, the peace process is dying.
It is true that Palestinians have their share in the failure of the Oslo process. But the tremendous asymmetry of power puts the responsibility for the continuation of the conflict mostly on the Israeli side. It is Israel that has almost all the cards to solve the conflict; it occupies the land, holds Eastern Jerusalem, controls the life of the Palestinians, controls the resources of the West Bank, expands constantly the Jewish settlements on the West Bank, exercises preventive and punishing violent acts according to own will and has (at least had until now) almost unconditional backing of the superpower.
The contours of the potential settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are more or less clear: If it will happen, it will be in accordance to Clinton proposal, Taba understandings, Geneva agreement, and Arab league proposal: Israel will have to return to 1967 borders with some swaps of land in order to hold the most populated clusters of Jewish settlements just beyond the green line of 1967, Jerusalem will be divided, most of the Jewish settlements inside the territories will be dismantled, and the refuges problem will have to be solved via common agreement with their compensation and settlement mostly in the future Palestinian state.
The present Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert outlined openly these principles to the Israeli public but did not take any concrete steps to implement them.
Israeli public, while recognizing the need in two state solution (because of the demographic fear), objects to the outlined principles. The majority of the Israeli Jews object to divide Jerusalem, to withdraw to 1967 borders and to dismantle most of the Jewish settlements the West Bank. In fact I must admit that I do not see any Israeli government evacuating about 60,000 Jewish settlers from the West Bank.
Israeli Jewish public after the destruction of the peace camp in 2000 is moving steadily towards hawkish-nationalistic views. The present war provided additional blow to the peace camp. It is almost certainly that the next Israeli government will be very hawkish after the February 10 elections. The rest will be written in the history books.
The war did not erupt spontaneously but was well prepared, including its scope, the type of weapons to be used, and so on. Also it was consciously decided to use a disproportional might in order to save lives of Israeli soldiers and to teach the Palestinians a lesson.
The results of the war are tragic for both nations. It provided unequivocal evidence to each side that the other side is evil and immoral. Now few of us here and there can only evaluate the tragedy, explain the events and pray for a miracle from outside forces that will come and save us from the worst human instincts.
Sincerely Daniel Bar-Tal
http://kibush.co.il/show_file.asp?num=31924
Daniel Bar-Tal
Open Letter
January 31, 2009
Dear Friends
This is probably one of the most difficult periods in my political life as a Jew living in the State of Israel. The events of the war in Gaza hit hard my foundations of hope that a peaceful conflict resolution between Israelis and Palestinians can be achieved in the near future. Moreover, my trust in humanity has been weakened seeing the ease with which human beings rally for a war, exercise blind patriotism, express desire for vengeance, delegitimize the opponent, and develop insensitivity to human life, denial of responsibility, self-righteousness and moral entitlement.
This is in contrast to the great difficulty that human beings have in mobilization for peace. We see over and over again that it takes many years and many efforts to persuade people in the importance of peace, but it takes an extremely short time to convince people in the need of war. It is even more difficult to establish moral considerations.
I have been agonizing for weeks whether to write an open letter. I could not bring myself to the paper and pencil or to the keyboard, feeling despair and helplessness. But only a responsibility to voice another opinion as an alternative to the officially presented views that are supported by the great majority of the Israeli Jews brought me to write this letter.
It is important that you will know that there is a minority of us, Jews in Israel, who care about moral considerations and opposed this war. What can I say when I know that about 1300 Palestinians killed, at least half of them innocent civilians, including children, women, and old people, over 4000 were injured, thousands of homes were destroyed and dozens of thousands became homeless. Also on the Israeli side 13 Israelis were killed, including 3 civilians, hundreds were wounded, and thousands had to escape from the hundreds of rockets that were fired on Israel.
I could repeat the arguments of the Israeli government that through the years many hundreds of rockets were fired on the Israeli land west of Gaza, including populated settlements; that no government would allow that their citizens will be hurt; that after eight years of restraint, Israel has decided to act against the terror attacks coming from the Gaza Strip.
Israeli restraint, [they say], was misinterpreted as weakness by Hamas and members of the vertical axis of extremism led by Iran; that Israel had given a mutual agreement to preserve peace its final chance when it agreed to the Egyptian brokered Period of Calm agreement in June 2008, whose terms were repeatedly transgressed by Hamas.
It is just natural that those who sent the soldiers to the war have to defend it and rationalize it. This is a human principle. But these arguments do not tell the whole story. Even if we take the Israeli arguments without the background and complexity, they cannot account for the scope of civilian losses and the destruction on the Palestinian side. The brutality and scope of the Israeli actions testify to deeper roots that are founded in the darker side of human beings.
They express the wish to erase the feeling of failure in the Second Lebanese War during the summer of 2006; they reflect a deep sense of collective victimhood because of the continuous firing of rockets on civilian settlements in the south by the Hamas military organ-- this sense of victimhood led to the urge to revenge in order to punish for the harm done and prevent further firing. In addition, they are derived from the continuous dehumanization of the Hamas organization. Finally, they are based on the conviction that Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, allowing Palestinians to live their lives and they instead engage in terror.
But, the reality is much more complex than the narrative perpetuated by the Israeli political and military establishments, which successfully constructed the beliefs of the Jewish public in Israel. This is a kind of irony because one of the objectives of the war was to carve the consciousness of the Palestinians so they will recognize the harm that Hamas is causing to the Palestinian cause and Palestinian life. This objective was not achieved and instead the war strengthened the hatred and mistrust of both sides towards each other, reinforced the support of hawkish opinions on both sides, and as a result, the peaceful process is further greatly damaged.
Moreover, it is hard to detect any meaningful political gains of Israel in the balance of this war. We are back to the same lines that were before the war ---with terrible losses and destruction. The psychological analysis of the situation illustrates the selective, biasing and distorting transmission and dissemination of information by the Israeli channels of communication. It does not mean that the alternative information does not exist in Israel but very few are interested in knowing what is really happening.
Thus, most of the Israeli Jews do not know what Israel perpetrated through the decades of occupying Gaza;
most of the Israeli Jews do not know that originally Hamas was founded by the Israeli authorities to provide an alternative to the national movement of PLO;
most of the Israeli Jews do not know that Hamas is a religious–fundamental movement that also provides welfare, health and educational services to the Palestinian people;
most of the Israeli Jews do not know that Hamas was elected democratically (with the insistence of USA) to lead the government of the Palestinian authority because of Fatah corruption, and mostly because of the fruitless negotiations with Israel which did not provide any political solution of the conflict;
most of the Israeli Jews do not know that the policy of the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon about ‘No Palestinian Partner’ led to unilateral disengagement from Gaza without negotiation with the Palestinian Authority. This act was done in order to delegitimize Palestinian Authority and in attempt to keep control over the West Bank.
Moreover, the disengagement did not free Gaza but turned it into one big prison. Israel controls the entrances to Gaza and controls every aspect of human life in Gaza. It decided to change the support of Gazans in Hamas by carrying out a siege that allowed minimal living and brought Gaza to economic disaster.
Israeli Jews know that even after disengagement, Hamas continues to fire rockets on the Israeli civil settlements but few know that during 2005– 2008, hundreds of Palestinians were killed by the Israeli forces.
Few know that the tunnels were built mainly to smuggle civil goods that could not be brought to Gaza and not only weapons as the great majority believe.
Few know that there is a relationship between Israeli violence and Palestinian violence, preferring to see the latter as irrational, fanatic, and immoral while the former as defensive, moral and well justified.
Few of the Israeli Jews recognize that Israel during two years had at least two alternative strategies to prevent further escalation: either to talk with Hamas which is possible and negotiate long-term cease-fire, or take decisive actions of peace (for example, to ease conditions of life of the Palestinians by removing many of the checkpoints and to remove illegal settlements as required by the Israeli promise to U.S.) vis a vis President Abbas and the Palestinian Authority to show the Palestinians that process yields tangible fruits that lead to prosperity and security.
Even when we shift to the period before the war, most of the Israeli Jews do not know that it was possible to negotiate continuation of the cease fire with Hamas and do not remember that it was Israel who broke the ceasefire of November 4, 2008, killing 6 Palestinians.
Hamas is not my cup of tea as it is a fundamentalist religious organization that practices also terrorism, but it is a social movement with wide support in the Palestinian society because it provides an alternative to humiliated Palestinian national identity. This movement is not homogenous and it is possible to hear in it different voices including ones that support negotiation with Israel and acceptance of the two state solution.
All these omissions are not surprising in view of the fact that the involved sides in conflict have been deeply embedded in the culture of conflict. They systematically try to construct the views of society members in a direction of presenting own society as being moral, just, peace loving, or moderate and the rival as being immoral, intransigent, violent, irrational, or extreme.
In addition each side views itself as the victim of this conflict. This process goes on for decades. Only during few years during Rabin time it looked as the peace process is gaining momentum. But since the year 2000, when the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak decided on the policy of `no partner`, the peace process is dying.
It is true that Palestinians have their share in the failure of the Oslo process. But the tremendous asymmetry of power puts the responsibility for the continuation of the conflict mostly on the Israeli side. It is Israel that has almost all the cards to solve the conflict; it occupies the land, holds Eastern Jerusalem, controls the life of the Palestinians, controls the resources of the West Bank, expands constantly the Jewish settlements on the West Bank, exercises preventive and punishing violent acts according to own will and has (at least had until now) almost unconditional backing of the superpower.
The contours of the potential settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are more or less clear: If it will happen, it will be in accordance to Clinton proposal, Taba understandings, Geneva agreement, and Arab league proposal: Israel will have to return to 1967 borders with some swaps of land in order to hold the most populated clusters of Jewish settlements just beyond the green line of 1967, Jerusalem will be divided, most of the Jewish settlements inside the territories will be dismantled, and the refuges problem will have to be solved via common agreement with their compensation and settlement mostly in the future Palestinian state.
The present Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert outlined openly these principles to the Israeli public but did not take any concrete steps to implement them.
Israeli public, while recognizing the need in two state solution (because of the demographic fear), objects to the outlined principles. The majority of the Israeli Jews object to divide Jerusalem, to withdraw to 1967 borders and to dismantle most of the Jewish settlements the West Bank. In fact I must admit that I do not see any Israeli government evacuating about 60,000 Jewish settlers from the West Bank.
Israeli Jewish public after the destruction of the peace camp in 2000 is moving steadily towards hawkish-nationalistic views. The present war provided additional blow to the peace camp. It is almost certainly that the next Israeli government will be very hawkish after the February 10 elections. The rest will be written in the history books.
The war did not erupt spontaneously but was well prepared, including its scope, the type of weapons to be used, and so on. Also it was consciously decided to use a disproportional might in order to save lives of Israeli soldiers and to teach the Palestinians a lesson.
The results of the war are tragic for both nations. It provided unequivocal evidence to each side that the other side is evil and immoral. Now few of us here and there can only evaluate the tragedy, explain the events and pray for a miracle from outside forces that will come and save us from the worst human instincts.
Sincerely Daniel Bar-Tal
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Ideas for the New Administration
A New Mideast Approach
By Yousef Munayyer
Washington Post
Saturday, January 24, 2009; A13
The Obama administration appointed former senator George Mitchell as its special envoy to the Middle East this week in a positive step toward resolving the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While a fragile cease-fire has brought a temporary halt to the recent bloodshed in Gaza, the outburst of violence at the end of the Bush administration was the culmination of eight more years of failed U.S. policy. The new administration will need to break with that policy if it is to make progress toward ending the conflict.
The Bush policy can be divided into two periods. Initially, the administration sought to marginalize Yasser Arafat and pushed for the democratization of the Palestinian Authority. President Bush supported the Palestinian presidential election of 2005 and supported the Palestinian parliamentary elections early the next year -- until he saw the outcome of the vote.
The election of Hamas in January 2006, and the faltering of the longest-ruling party in Palestinian politics, was a wake-up call. The administration, understanding the pressure that Islamic movements were putting on regimes in the Middle East, shifted to "bolstering the moderates." The goal became marginalizing Hamas through economic sanctions and siege, while funding and supporting Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
But this tactic of backing "our guy in the fight" achieved results much like those of the Cold War-era tactics it resembled. Ideology-driven civil conflict has raged on. Neither side has moved toward peace or security.
To make real progress toward a lasting peace, a fundamental shift in U.S. policy is needed. Simply put, a divided Palestinian partner can never make serious concessions to arrive at a lasting agreement when it is viewed as legitimate by only half of its population.
The United States must work to forge a unified Palestinian partner and must be wary of the dynamics of legitimacy in domestic Palestinian politics. Attempts to continue aligning Mahmoud Abbas with Israel against Hamas only serve to erode Abbas's legitimacy among his people. And Abbas's Fatah party members will continue to be targeted by domestic opposition as "sellouts." This appearance of submission contributed to their defeat in the 2006 parliamentary elections.
Rather than seeking to bolster the moderates in this conflict, the Obama administration should focus on moderating the extremists. The idea of eliminating Hamas could not be seriously proposed by anyone with any knowledge of domestic Palestinian politics. The notion that Hamas is a primarily militant organization based in Gaza ignores the movement's vast support in the West Bank and elsewhere.
Dealing with Hamas and groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Islamic Jihad in arenas of legitimacy, such as elections, negates the possibility that outside parties will spoil peace negotiations.
Those who would resolve the conflict must understand that such parties and groups, often labeled rejectionist, are not primarily ideologically based and are not monolithic. They, like most political parties, are beholden to a constituency.
Yet while their politics are not always the same, the political alliances between them are far stronger than any ideological divisions. For example, consider the image of the Islamist Khaled Meshal of Hamas seated next to communist George Habash at rejectionist party conferences.
Yes, Hamas and other groups must stop the violence. But the process cannot begin by demanding that they recognize Israel.
The support for rejectionist parties in Palestinian politics, Islamist or otherwise, comes straight out of the refugee camps. Gaza has the highest concentration of refugees; nearly half of the population shares in the personal experience of dispossession.
Asking rejectionist parties to recognize Israel's right to exist, thereby justifying the displacement of the majority of their constituents, is not something that could be agreed to under today's circumstances. Most Palestinians owe their tragedies to the very genesis of Israel.
The key to real progress in resolving the conflict is, and has always been, providing a just resolution to the refugee issue. While a resolution will not be easy or immediate, a significant step in the right direction would be an acknowledgment from the state of Israel of at least partial responsibility for creating the refugee problem.
Such a statement, made in a serious and genuine tone and supported by American mediation, would destroy the perception held among many in the Middle East that Israel does not want peace. This, in turn, would begin to moderate the extremists.
The territorial outline for a two-state solution is largely agreed upon, even by some rejectionists. What remains outstanding is a just resolution for the refugee issue. The Obama administration should begin by tackling this necessary step toward comprehensive and lasting Arab-Israeli peace.
The writer is a policy analyst with the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
By Yousef Munayyer
Washington Post
Saturday, January 24, 2009; A13
The Obama administration appointed former senator George Mitchell as its special envoy to the Middle East this week in a positive step toward resolving the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While a fragile cease-fire has brought a temporary halt to the recent bloodshed in Gaza, the outburst of violence at the end of the Bush administration was the culmination of eight more years of failed U.S. policy. The new administration will need to break with that policy if it is to make progress toward ending the conflict.
The Bush policy can be divided into two periods. Initially, the administration sought to marginalize Yasser Arafat and pushed for the democratization of the Palestinian Authority. President Bush supported the Palestinian presidential election of 2005 and supported the Palestinian parliamentary elections early the next year -- until he saw the outcome of the vote.
The election of Hamas in January 2006, and the faltering of the longest-ruling party in Palestinian politics, was a wake-up call. The administration, understanding the pressure that Islamic movements were putting on regimes in the Middle East, shifted to "bolstering the moderates." The goal became marginalizing Hamas through economic sanctions and siege, while funding and supporting Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
But this tactic of backing "our guy in the fight" achieved results much like those of the Cold War-era tactics it resembled. Ideology-driven civil conflict has raged on. Neither side has moved toward peace or security.
To make real progress toward a lasting peace, a fundamental shift in U.S. policy is needed. Simply put, a divided Palestinian partner can never make serious concessions to arrive at a lasting agreement when it is viewed as legitimate by only half of its population.
The United States must work to forge a unified Palestinian partner and must be wary of the dynamics of legitimacy in domestic Palestinian politics. Attempts to continue aligning Mahmoud Abbas with Israel against Hamas only serve to erode Abbas's legitimacy among his people. And Abbas's Fatah party members will continue to be targeted by domestic opposition as "sellouts." This appearance of submission contributed to their defeat in the 2006 parliamentary elections.
Rather than seeking to bolster the moderates in this conflict, the Obama administration should focus on moderating the extremists. The idea of eliminating Hamas could not be seriously proposed by anyone with any knowledge of domestic Palestinian politics. The notion that Hamas is a primarily militant organization based in Gaza ignores the movement's vast support in the West Bank and elsewhere.
Dealing with Hamas and groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Islamic Jihad in arenas of legitimacy, such as elections, negates the possibility that outside parties will spoil peace negotiations.
Those who would resolve the conflict must understand that such parties and groups, often labeled rejectionist, are not primarily ideologically based and are not monolithic. They, like most political parties, are beholden to a constituency.
Yet while their politics are not always the same, the political alliances between them are far stronger than any ideological divisions. For example, consider the image of the Islamist Khaled Meshal of Hamas seated next to communist George Habash at rejectionist party conferences.
Yes, Hamas and other groups must stop the violence. But the process cannot begin by demanding that they recognize Israel.
The support for rejectionist parties in Palestinian politics, Islamist or otherwise, comes straight out of the refugee camps. Gaza has the highest concentration of refugees; nearly half of the population shares in the personal experience of dispossession.
Asking rejectionist parties to recognize Israel's right to exist, thereby justifying the displacement of the majority of their constituents, is not something that could be agreed to under today's circumstances. Most Palestinians owe their tragedies to the very genesis of Israel.
The key to real progress in resolving the conflict is, and has always been, providing a just resolution to the refugee issue. While a resolution will not be easy or immediate, a significant step in the right direction would be an acknowledgment from the state of Israel of at least partial responsibility for creating the refugee problem.
Such a statement, made in a serious and genuine tone and supported by American mediation, would destroy the perception held among many in the Middle East that Israel does not want peace. This, in turn, would begin to moderate the extremists.
The territorial outline for a two-state solution is largely agreed upon, even by some rejectionists. What remains outstanding is a just resolution for the refugee issue. The Obama administration should begin by tackling this necessary step toward comprehensive and lasting Arab-Israeli peace.
The writer is a policy analyst with the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)