Op-ed Israel

2011-04-19T18:15:00.000-07:00

The murder of Vittorio Arrigoni and the Israeli Media

17 April, 2011

(translated from Hebrew by Daniel Breslau)

As expected, the Israeli media haven’t passed up the opportunity to dance on the grave of Vittorio Arrigoni, the activist in the International Solidarity Movement who was murdered in Gaza last week. No one will say a thing about the real causes of this vile murder.

At Ynet they decided to exploit the opportunity to publish a scare piece about the Salafist organizations in Gaza. Dan Margalit went further, in his rush to put out a accusatory article in which he called Vittorio a “crude anti-Semitic propagandist.” In closing, Margalit wrote: “But the main point is not Arrigoni, but what is happening in Gaza. His killing, like the resumption of rocket attacks suggests that with respect to government, the strip has become a no-man’s land.” To translate: We need to impose order on Gaza. Get ready for another round of carpet bombing.

It is doubtful that Margalit has any idea who the man really was. And I doubt that he cares. Jeff Halper’s eulogy (Hebrew) reveals the image of a brave man who risked his life in order to protect the Gazan fishermen whose livelihood and even lives were imperiled by the Israeli occupation. As far as Margalit is concerned, this constitutes “support for terror.”

The eulogy brings up a different act of terror, that Dan Margalit is not prepared to condemn, which occurred exactly two years ago: the killing of Bassam Abu Rahma by the occupation army in Bil’in.

Margalit will not contemplate the link between these events. He can’t fathom that his country, that murdered Bassam Abu Rahma, his sister Jawahar, Rachel Corrie, nine participants in the solidarity flotilla to Gaza, and many others that dared to oppose the continuing terror that it inflicts on the territories, operates according to the same methods as Vittorio’s murderers.

We won’t get an explanation for the murder from Margalit. He won’t say a word about the hardships of the fishermen that Vittorio aided, because they are themselves terrorists in his eyes. Neither will he say a word about the siege on Gaza. In his eyes it is almost certainly a legitimate means of wielding pressure on the “terror government.” He won’t bother himself to check who is hurt and who benefits from the siege. He has no interest in the analysis (Hebrew) that shows that the siege on Gaza hurts the civilian population but not the armed groups.

Palestinian society has reached the limits of its ability to endure after almost 44 years of occupation and almost four years of siege. It is a crumbling society, suffering severe hardships, which lead some to desperate solutions involving the murder of solidarity activists or actions against civilians.

The solution for this society will not come from another siege or another massacre. Whatever hope remains comes from its youth, most of whom, according to a recent study, have lost faith in the existing parties, and are looking for civil society organizations and a new party to represent them.

2011-04-13T12:38:00.000-07:00

A leftist has been murdered: attack the left!

How Israeli media have assimilated the assassination of Juliano Mer-Khamis to the consensus narrative

When a unique figure in the struggle for Palestinian rights, a unique kind of leftist, was gunned down in Jenin, most commentators pointed out the senselessness of the crime. Ha'aretz colmnist Ari Shavit saw the tragedy as a wonderful opportunity to bash the left. Of course Israeli pundits can find in any death, or even unseasonable weather, an occasion to bash the left. But how was Shavit provoked by the assassination of Juliano Mer-Khamis to write a piece that would make Avigdor Lieberman proud, attacking a group of his fellow citizens?

With no evidence, Shavit claims the left has fallen silent, overcome with moral confusion, in the face of the murder in Jenin. Leftists can only conceive of evil emanating from Israel or Western forces. So when a "peace hero" is murdered by Palestinians, their brains short circuit. This invention launces Shavit into a tirade on the left's selective morality and denial of "the forces of evil in the Arab-Muslim world."

But Shavit has fabricated a description of "the left's" behavior in order to support his attacks. Any quick survey of responses to the murder will show that his charge of confusion and silence is ridiculous. Mer was "killed in cold blood" (Combatants for peace - Hebrew), his murder was "a crime against humanity" and the result of "religious fanaticism" (The Left Bank - Hebrew), and these poignant words from his friend, Natan Zahavi (Hebrew):

Juliano was murdered by cowardly maniacs beside the theater that he founded for the children of the refugee camp, "Freedom Theater" he called it. Five bullets made orphans of the 150 children of the theater, as they lost the man who tried to teach them the word's most original form of warfare, war on the stage without bloodshed. Blessed be his memory.

Some clues to Shavit's animus can be found in other comments that maek the same point without Shavit's vagueness and code words. Less diplomatic was Asaf Golan (Hebrew) in the right-wing Makor Rishon (the online paper that brags that it is "unbiased, and unabashedly Jewish and Zionist."):

This disturbing and simple truth is hard for many students of the western liberal school to digest, as they try in various ways to please the Islamic demon, in order to open up a dialogue with him. However, in practice this approach only strengthens the darkest dictatorships in the world, and produces tragicomic situations, in which a moral army like the IDF is presented as war criminals, while hideous murderers like Moamar Gaddafi, Bashar Al-Asad, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are presented as exemplary human beings.

Still more direct was a publicist named Yehuda Drori (Hebrew), who gives us a full translation of Shavit's thesis into plain language:

I have no doubt that Juliano Mer fell victim to murderers representing the very group of people that he was trying to help. But in plain terms, he lived among snakes, and one of them killed him with its bite. … Now I believe that Juliano Mer is of greater value in death than in life, because he proves to us once more that there is no one to talk to, there's no one there to work with toward "peace" and we must be extremely wary of them, and of all the do-gooders who believe that it is possible to build a bridge to peace with that rabble.

If you find this message is still too subtle, here's self-styled journalist Dudu Cohen on Mako (Hebrew), the website of Israel's commercial channel 2, finally doing away with niceties:

Not that I didn't already know this, but the barbaric murder of Juliano Mer just reminded me of whom we are dealing with. ... The murder of Juliano Mer demonstrates that opposite us stand human animals. A civilized people that seeks peace? Don't make me laugh. A poor oppressed people that just wants to live with us in peace beneath the olive trees? Get real. A moral, kind, and humane people that is only looking for a chance to make the world a better place? Yeah, right. What is funny is that many among us Israelis, particularly from the liberal-humanist department, paint the Palestinians with such flattering colors. The Palestinians themselves refuse to fit that image, and are driven mostly by hatred of others, discrimination against women, lack of democracy, and values that are completely opposed to those of the world of humane values.

In all of these comments racism is tightly coupled with attacks on the left. The belief that the Palestinians suffer from inherent moral and cultural deficiencies, and that the left makes things worse by ignoring this self-evident fact, are two sides of a single discourse. From this outlook, which is that of the Israeli mainstream, the murder of Juliano Mer-Khamis is the perfect parable: naive leftist meets his death at the hands of the inherently hateful Palestinians whose dark side he willfully denied.The Palestinians are evil and the left is in denial. What better way to justify continued oppression of four million than to hold that they are undeserving of human rights and that those who advocate for them are hopelessly deluded?

Political repression, violent Islamic political movements, oppression of women: are these phenomena better understood by those who insist they be denounced as "forces of evil" or by those who see them as having historical causes, as not inherent to a race, religion, or culture? Which of these demonstrates an "ability to see historic reality as a whole, in all its complexity"? There are countless studies, essays, and commentaries by people on the left that relate the rise of Islamic violent movements to a set of historical circumstances that include autocratic regimes, Western imperialism, the distortion of the political space by autocrats and occupiers, and the repression of secular alternatives, among other factors.

But Juliano Mer himself is perhaps the best refutation of the slander of Shavit and his more straight-talking allies. This fighter for Palestinian rights knew he was simultaneously fighting religious and political repression in Palestinian society. Those who use such phenomena to confirm their sense of superiority and to blame the victims of oppression cannot claim to understand the problems of that society better than Juliano Mer.

2010-11-28T21:17:00.000-08:00

Peace activists sue to block appointment of a suspected war criminal

Israel’s Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, has just appointed to the IDF’s second highest position a general suspected of war crimes and of contempt for the

decisions of Israel’s highest court. On Sunday, 28 November, a group of Israeli peace organizations and public figures filed a motion with Israel’s High Court of Justice against the appointment of General Yair Naveh as the Deputy Chief of Staff of the IDF. The petitioners include former government minister and human rights advocate Shulamit Aloni, former Knesset member and head of Peace Now Mossi Raz, Gush Shalom Chair Uri Avneri, the poet Natan Zach, and renowned photographer Alex Levac. They were joined by the organizations Yesh Gvul and Gush Shalom.

On the basis of documents that were leaked to journalist Uri Blau, by Anat Kam, a former assistant in the office of the Chief of Staff, the petitioners argue that Naveh is guilty of violating international law and of disregarding decisions handed down by the Israel’s high court. The documents show that Naveh and others approved extrajudicial killings of Palestinian militants who could have been arrested, also killing innocent bystanders in the process. Naveh signed off on the assassinations in his role as head of Central Command from 2005 to 2007.

In December of 2006, the High Court of Justice refused to ban “targeted killings” as a military tactic, but specified conditions for the legality of the practice. The army must verify that a less harmful means, such as arrest, is not available, and must take every effort to minimize harm to innocent civilians. Blau’s report showed that these conditions were disregarded in assassinations of numerous wanted militants. At the time of Blau’s exposé in 2008, Naveh responded “Don’t bother me with directives of the High Court of Justice. I don’t know whether the court has issued any directives or not.”

“If the appointment of the chief of police can be delayed due to suspected sex offenses, then surely the appointment of Deputy Chief of Staff can be put off because of suspected war crimes,” said Omer Shatz, the attorney representing the petitioners.

2010-11-28T18:43:00.000-08:00

Week 2266 of Occupation November 8-14, 2010

Daniel Breslau

Obama gets tough?

The US President, Barak Obama, is very mad at Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for continuing to build in the occupied territories. He's so mad, in fact, that he is letting Netanyahu extort even more rewards from the Americans in return for his agreement to temporarily stop some of the illegal construction. All this is in the hope of reviving the charade known as "direct talks." Are twenty state-of-the-art F35 fighter planes enough? How about throwing in promises to block any UN action to hold Israel accountable for its attack on the Gaza aid flotilla or the war crimes documented in Goldstone's report on the 2008-9 invasion of Gaza? But there’s more. Obama has promised to intensify pressure on Iran and to block any calls for international inspection of Israel’s nuclear weapons. In other words, the US is surrendering its independence on key issues of foreign policy and international law in order to coax Israel to take a 90-day break from its illegal colonization of Palestinian lands.

Netanyahu is surely now telling his cabinet "all we need to do is stop building in the settlements for three months -- three months during which we can make vague and insulting offers to the Palestinians. At the end of ninety days we can pick up where we left off with a massive push of new construction. And we'll have the new war toys plus the US fighting to keep the international community off our backs."

One element of the deal does raise some problems for Netanyahu. He is required to present his position on final Israel-Palestine borders, a demand that he has evaded since the start of indirect talks early this year. Because his political position does not allow him to commit to a map that would not be a joke in the eyes of the Palestinians and the world, this requirement is more difficult than the 90-day freeze. If it does not sink the entire agreement, we can expect Netanyahu to work hard to escape this demand.

A corrupt alliance in East Jerusalem

This week Haaretz published a lengthy exposé of the official corruption through which the Israeli government transfers confiscated Palestinian properties in East Jerusalem to right-wing settler organizations. The state simply transfers properties, at well below market prices, to the settlers of El'ad, Ateret Cohanim, and others, that it has confiscated under the terms of Israel's notorious Absentee Property Law. Officials use their discretion to waive the legal requirement that the properties be offered on the open market, where they might be bought by those with the wrong ideology, the wrong ethnicity, or the wrong religion.

Like Talia Sasson's report in 2005 on the collusion of housing and defense ministry bureaucrats with illegal settlements, the exposé provides a hint of the depth to which the settlement enterprise penetrates the Israeli state. The settlement movement in East Jerusalem is an arm of the state, aided by the Jerusalem municipality, the police, and the courts. And the racism of this corrupt partnership is blatant and systematic. Remember, the families of Sheikh Jarrah are targeted for eviction only because they are not Jewish. The state even pays for private security guards to protect the settlers of Silwan, while no one protects the Palestinian residents from the frequent attacks and constant harassment from the settlers.

The real peacemakers

World leaders and their farcical negotiations may be finally taking their rightful place, as an irrelevant sideshow to the real struggle for a future of equality, cooperation, and mutual respect between Israelis and Palestinians. The weekly nonviolent protests in West Bank communities threatened by the apartheid wall; protests refusing to observe the Beit Hanoun buffer zone in the northern Gaza Strip; the artists boycott of the settlement of Ariel; the global movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions; and other forms of resistance in civil society are leading the way, while governments are paralyzed.

This week the Sheikh Jarrah solidarity movement marked one year of weekly protests in response to the eviction of Palestinian families in the Jerusalem neighborhood to the immediate North of the Old City. In Karm al Jaouni, the "tomb quarter" at the very center of Sheikh Jarah, 60 Palestinians have already been evicted since 2008. But it was after police invaded the homes of the Hanoun and Al Ghawi families in the Fall of 2009, throwing the 53 occupants and their belongings into the street, that outraged Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals mounted a concerted resistance. Every Friday, for the past year, the protestors have marched in solidarity with the evicted families.

On the surface, the dispute over the evictions seems to involve contradictory claims and questions of the authenticity of documents held by each side. Although those attempting to remain in their homes must make their claims in Israeli courts, by doing so they are reluctant participants in Israel's efforts to legitimate its rule. Israeli authorities pretend that disputes over title and residence in these Palestinian areas are internal legal matters, to be determined within the legal system. But the Israeli legal system has no jurisdiction and no right to treat the Palestinian residents and those who are settling in violation of the Geneva conventions as bearers of equal rights. The courts are therefore perverting justice to assist settlers whose motives are political. They are not aggrieved citizens trying to recover their property, but right-wing activists trying to block the return of occupied East Jerusalem to the Palestinians. The evictions are not an internal Israeli legal matter, but an international crime.

Though the protestors alone cannot possibly match the force of the Israeli legal system and occupation forces, they can assure that the apparatus of ethnic cleansing does not return to normalcy after these evictions. And they can stand in the way of any future evictions long enough for the world to see.

Those resisting on the ground every week are the leaders, and if their resistance provokes people around the world to apply real political and economic pressure on Israel, the heads of state will have to follow them.

Support the Sheikh Jarrah struggle:

http://www.en.justjlm.org/

2010-11-28T18:36:00.000-08:00

Colonizing the (distant) past On 1 September, attendees at an open-air conference on biblical archeology found the polite academic proceedings interrupted by a young woman's voice through a megaphone from the hillside overlooking their meeting:

"Hello to everyone. You have not arrived at an academic conference today. You have arrived at a conference of racism, a conference of hate, a conference of misanthropes, a conference that is trying to remove Palestinians from their homes for the sake of the Jewish master race. We've heard about things like this in other places and times in history. This is not an academic conference. This is a racist conference of the extreme right. Everyone here today has arrived, perhaps by mistake, at a conference of the extreme right. Don't continue to take part in this conference. This is not a conference of people who support human rights. This is a conference of racists. It is a conference of people that want to push the Palestinian population out of Silwan!"

The so-called "City of David" in the in the East Jerusalem village of Silwan, is being excavated by a partnership of religious settlers and willing archeologists. To manage the national park, the Israeli government has contracted with a right-wing settler organization, Elad. The group is committed to illegal Jewish settlement of the Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, with the political goal of breaking up the contiguity of Palestinian districts and blocking any reversal of Israel's occupation of the area.

The archeologists provide cover for the project of Jewish settlement in the area by providing a pretext for confiscating Palestinian land. The excavations also serve the ideological purpose of strengthening Jewish claims to the city, framing the settlement project as a return rather than a hostile takeover. A number of Israeli archeologists have been happy to link their research to Elad's goals. A cascade of dubious archeological claims has come from the work of those like Eilat Mazar, who is funded by the right wing donors such as the neoconservative American financier Roger Hertog . Using a method that has been largely rejected by archeologists, Mazar searches underground for finds that can corroborate biblical texts. This often involves highly speculative and creative dating of objects in order to fit them to the scriptures. Thus a structure that is likely to be of Hellenistic provenance, nor earlier than the 4th century B.C.E., is back-dated to 1000 B.C.E. and prematurely identified as "King David's Palace." The date of a wall that has been thought to be a Hasmonean fortification (no earlier than 147 B.C.E.) is revised by 300 years in order to identify it as the famous Nehemiah's Wall.

While Mazar's dating techniques are highly controversial among academic archeologists, her discoveries are immediately and uncritically embraced by the amateurs who are more interested in recruiting the past for the cause of settlement. In the hands of Elad, the controversial findings become absolute certainties, testifying to the historical depth of Jewish presence, the invisibility of the nearly two thousand years since. Tourists guided through Elad's Disney-like theme park are told that they have returned to retrace the footsteps of David and Solomon. While using archeology to advance and justify colonization, Elad has worked to erase 1400 years of continuous Muslim presence. In 2008, a mass burial from the 8th or 9th century C.E. was obliterated by Elad, and the remains of at least 100 individuals were secretly spirited away and disposed of.

The work of Elad systematically enlists the dead and their buildings into today’s ultranationalist settler movement. Those whose remains might provide a different interpretation of the history of human settlement in Wadi Hilweh are silenced. It is not the protestors that have politicized archeology.

For more information on archeology in the service of Judaizing Jerusalem, and the ongoing struggle against it:

http://silwanic.net/

http://www.alt-arch.org/index.php

Keep the heat on

On Sunday, 12 September, Israel hinted at its expected political (and economic) payoffs from the reinitiated talks. The Foreign Ministry has appealed to leadership of the European Union, to proceed with upgrading its relations with Israel. The EU had been considering upgrading Israel to the status of senior trade partner, but froze that process after the Netanyahu government refused to continue with talks where its predecessor had left off.

Anyone speculating about the real aims of the Israeli government in the new round of negotiations with the Palestinian Authority, should recognize that the starting position of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not reflect well on his intentions. Rather than building on the past seventeen years of negotiations, and the understandings achieved between successive leaderships on both sides, Netanyahu has insisted on starting over. Even if the talks miraculously achieve their stated goal of an agreement in one year, any such agreement will take additional years to implement. And those years will provide unlimited opportunities for foot dragging, provocation, and false pretexts.

During the negotiations and the unlikely implementation period, those protesting Israel’s occupation, calling for boycott, divestment, and sanctions, will be accused of “undermining the peace process.” But Israel has still done nothing to show its willingness to end the occupation and implement a just resolution. All of these modalities of pressure must be kept up, now more than ever.

2009-10-21T12:17:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Amira Hass, Winner of International Women's Media Foundation 2009 Lifetime achievement Award

Amira Hass Acceptance Speech International Women’s Media Foundation 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award

Allow me to start with a correction. How impolite, you’d rightly think, but anyway, we Israelis are being forgiven for much worse than impoliteness.

What is so generously termed today by the International Women’s Media Foundation as my lifetime achievement needs to be corrected. Because it is Failure. Nothing more than a failure. A lifetime failure.

Read the full speech here.

2009-10-14T07:37:00.000-07:00

War is Peace
Week 2209 of Occupation
Published in Occupation Magazine

If Israel cannot carry out the kind of action it inflicted on the Gaza Strip at the beginning of this year, then it will be very very bad for peace. So say Israel's leaders as they look for allies willing to help suppress the United Nations Fact-Finding Report on the Gaza Conflict, better known as the Goldstone report. Benjamin Netanyahu declared that if the report's recommendations are adopted by international bodies, the peace process will end. Israel will not agree to a peace deal if it is not allowed to behave the way it did in Operation Cast Lead.

Now the establishment columnist Ari Shavit gives a slightly different variation on this theme, which brings out its Orwellian resonance:

To prevent the region's deterioration into complete chaos, Israel must exercise force once every few years. These limited demonstrations of power do not achieve a decisive military victory or a breakthrough in the peace process.

Their entire purpose is to stabilize the violent relationship between Israelis and Arabs. Thus they create a temporary, strong-arm balance that subdues the conflict and ensures calm for a few years.
(Ha’aretz, 8, October, 2009)

Shavit's argument helps to uncover the logic that is submerged in Netanyahu's. Force directed at Israel brings chaos and is damaging not only to Israel, but to the region. Israel's use of force, on the contrary, restores order, not only to Israel, but for its ungrateful neighbors as well. Israel's wars are really in the best interest of everyone in the Middle East, bringing peace and sparing millions from the chaos that is induced by their own military actions.

The Ha’aretz columnist might defend himself by noting that he did mention the terrible human cost and brutality of these wars, and of the Gaza invasion in particular. But this only places him in a more precarious moral stance, since he is in effect arguing that the suffering of the victims of the invasion was necessary, even that it was for their own good. It's terrible what the Palestinians of Gaza must go through so that the region can know calm and order.

Since peace is achieved by war, the Goldstone Report, by limiting Israel’s ability to prosecute a war, destroys the peace. By making it harder for Israel to go to war against an entire population, the report emboldens the Palestinians, and this will bring war sooner that it would have come otherwise. Since Israel's military supremacy in the region is the source of peace and stability, anything that places limits on the use of that supremacy, as the Goldstone report certainly seeks to do, is a threat to peace and security for everyone. In the Ministry of Truth where Shavit is employed, the efforts of those seeking to end impunity for war crimes, whom he calls the “Goldstoners,” amount to “an insane incitement campaign against Israel.”

But it is not peace that Shavit and Netanyahu are protecting, but a Pax Israeliana, imposed through violence and the constant threat of violence. It is inherently unstable, and requires perpetually increasing levels of deadly violence. The intensity of violence required to put down the insurgent struggle of a people occupied in its own land is indeed massive. What methods will be employed after the kind of onslaught that was unleashed on the Gaza Strip in January of 2009 is found to be of insufficient brutality?

Both Netanyahu and Shavit tell us that movement toward peace can only take place under the umbrella of Israel’s military superiority and total freedom to wield it. But history shows otherwise. What observer of the years since 1967 would conclude that international reaction to Israel's brutal methods was not a force for progress? Periods of relative quiet, particularly the first twenty years of occupation and a few years at the end of the 1990s, when Israel successfully contained resistance away from the glare of international cameras, were the worst years from the perspective of continued colonization and dispossession of the Palestinians. Conversely, every microscopic increment of progress toward resolving the conflict was achieved with the help of limitations on Israel's free choice of methods of repression. Did Israel seriously contemplate negotiating with the PLO before it faced international censure for its brutal response to the first intifada? And the “disengagement” from Gaza was at least in part a way of deflecting international pressure in response to the excess violence of Operation Defensive Shield.

A free hand in repression makes occupation easier, while scrutiny and disapproval of Israel's methods impose additional costs. And these costs have moved Israeli governments and citizens closer to recognizing the rights of the land's other inhabitants. Each time Israel has been condemned for indiscriminate attacks, excessive brutality, or war crimes, it has objected strenuously. Each time the international community has called for an investigation these calls have been treated as a threat to all peace-loving nations. But in each of these instances, the region has inched further, though not far enough nor fast enough, toward a just peace.

2009-10-08T07:51:00.001-07:00

Attacking conscience

Above: Jeeps, by David Reeb (2008).

Corporate-owned media have become a major promoter of fascism within democracies. Loyalty tests on artists and intellectuals no longer shock us as they would have just a couple decades ago. But this piece by Ben Dror Yemini in Ma'ariv is a good opportunity to draw attention to the astonishing and haunting work of the painter David Reeb. Few artists are able to transcend political discourse in challenging our perceptions of state power, morality, and our own passive complicity (the German painter Gerhard Richter comes to mind).

But Yemini doesn't seem to know anything about Reeb's paintings. He is incensed that the artist has been awarded the Dizengoff prize by the Tel Aviv Municipality, one of Israel's highest honors for artists. Reeb has signed a petition calling for sanctions on Israel for committing war crimes, and was a signer of the letter calling for a boycott of the Toronto Film Festival for participating in pro-Israel propaganda. The latter involvement is misrepresented by Yemini, who wrongly wrote that the Toronto letter calls for a boycott of Tel Aviv, and that it compared Tel Aviv/Jaffa to Johannesburg/Soweto (the actual comparison was much more apt: Tel Aviv/Gaza to Johannesburg/Soweto).

Yemini concludes by equating intolerance of dissent with "normal democracy":

David Reeb is not the problem. The problem is the way in which those who spit on us get more and more prizes, more and more government funding, and more and more grants. So the public must rise up. We must not give in. There is no such thing in any democracy. Not one. It is time for Israel to be a normal democracy too, with a little bit, just a little bit, of self respect.

One could not ask for more of a succinct and open manifesto for democratic fascism.

Would Reeb's artwork have given Yemini more fuel, or would it have left him, as it leaves me, speechless?

2009-10-06T09:51:00.000-07:00

Does the enforcement of international law encourage terrorism?

Moshe Arens is a retired right-wing politician who writes a regular column in Ha'aretz. While in government, he did not support a single peace agreement and was a major booster of Israel's military-industrial complex. His best-known political protegee is the current Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu.

Arens has never seen a problem for which there was not a military solution, and it is this stance that is largely responsible for the current lamentable situation. It is to be expected that he would see any limitation on Israel's freedom to use whatever military means it likes as a mortal threat. But he has outdone his friends in government in his hysteria and distortion of the Goldstone Report.

Writes Arens in a column in today's paper, terrorists

...can also interpret the report as international approbation for carrying out military operations from civilian population centers - schools, hospitals, refugee camps, etc. - as they did in the years when they were launching rockets into Israeli towns and villages in the south of Israel, and as they continued to do during the Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip.
From the report it is clear to them that establishing military units and rocket launchers in civilian population centers will from now on be an effective military tactic that they can hope to apply with impunity, enjoying at least partial immunity from an Israeli response. That response is likely to be withheld out of concern that it will lead to Israel being charged with committing a war crime.

The report, however, strongly affirms the principle that staging military attacks from within population centers is illegal, a war crime, and can amount to a crime against humanity. Where there was evidence of such activity, it condemned it. If Arens was genuinely against impunity for such illegal tactics, he would be calling for the enforcement of the report's recommendations.

2009-10-01T18:31:00.000-07:00

The Obama Administration once again prefers "peace process" to peace

The Palestinian Authority had submitted a draft resolution to the UN's Human Rights Council resolving that the body adopt the results of the Goldstone Report on the Gaza invasion, and to call on the UN to hold Israel and Hamas accountable for their actions. This includes the report's recommendation that if the parties to the conflict fail to conduct internal investigations that are "independent and in conformity to international standards," then the charges should be referred to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

The Council was to vote on the resolution on Friday, 2 October. But now the PA has withdrawn their draft, under strong diplomatic pressure from the Obama Administration. The US has apparently told the Palestinians that the move would threaten the peace negotiations, echoing the line that the Israeli government has taken.

The primary threat to the negotiations is the threat made by Israel, to the effect that it would not participate in negotiations while international bodies are pursuing the charges made in the report. The US has, in effect, once again placated Israel and pressured the Palestinians to follow suit. The Palestinian Authority is working hard to explain its withdrawal of the draft, lest its credibility be further damaged by its failure to seek justice for its citizens.

Israel's government is now preoccupied with a global campaign to stop the Goldstone Report from acquiring any official backing by international organizations. The main argument that Netanyahu, Barak, and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman are now using is that the report threatens the ability of countries to defend themselves. But it is a hard sell to equate the acts that the report documents, perpetrated against an occupied population, with self defense.

2009-09-30T22:03:00.000-07:00

The Goldstone report is excellent for peace

Israel's military superiority over the Palestinians -- usually described as 'overwhelming', although 'ridiculous' may be more accurate -- is a cause of the conflict's perpetuation. It makes the occupation doable.

It would not take an equalization of forces for the Palestinians to have a minimally effective deterrent. The nature of the conflict means that the amount of damage Israel can sustain and still have its public's support is much less than the amount of force required to deter the Palestinians. This is always the case in conflicts between occupiers and insurgents fighting for their homeland.

The "Goldstone report," as the UN fact finding mission on the Gaza invasion is known, has done the world a favor by changing the strategic balance, and this is why it is as threatening to Israel as if the Palestinians had acquired some advanced weaponry, or an air force. And it is because the report is thorough, credible, and balanced, that it is effective. If Israel is confined, as it should be by law, to retaliating against the combatants responsible for attacks, and is required to take reasonable measures to protect the non-combatant population, its property, infrastructure, and institutions, then the strategic balance is indeed shifted.

When Israel's Prime Minister on Wednesday said that proceedings in the Hague based on the report would "deal a death blow to the peace process," he meant the peace process as he would like it to proceed. This is also a threat aimed at the US and the Europeans, to refuse to cooperate with a peace process if the case against Israel goes forward. In this case, what might be bad for the current peace process, is very good for peace.

Update:Gideon Levy makes some similar points, and more, in his latest column.

2009-09-27T23:18:00.001-07:00

No freeze, no peace

Week 2207 of Occupation

Since Barack Obama took over as US President, those who care about a just peace in the Middle East have wondered whether he would preside over a genuine peace process, or simply a Palestinian pacification process, as had his predecessors. The way his administration has so easily dropped its initial demand for a freeze on construction in Israel’s illegal settlements gives the first indication that the new administration’s break with its predecessor is confined to the realm of rhetoric.

A freeze in settlement construction, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, is not some concession that the Palestinians are trying to wrest from Israel before the negotiations begin. It is not a symbolic confidence-building move. It is nothing less than a necessary condition for the success of any negotiations. A peace process while Israel is building settlements is a charade, or worse than a charade, since it provides political cover for Israel’s continuing colonization.

For the sixteen years since the Oslo accords, Israel's continued expansion of settlements, along with illegal roads and wall, has embarrassed and undermined the Palestinian Authority. It has led the Palestinian public to view the negotiations as a trick to enlist them in their own continuing dispossession.

The very settlements that Israel now claims will remain under its sovereignty in any final status agreement, the so-called "consensus settlements", are largely the product of rapid growth since the 1993 Oslo Accords. In 1996, the settlement of Beitar Ilit had a population of 5,000 people living in 1200 households. Today the population is around 35,000. Maale Adumim, originally established as an unauthorized outpost in 1975, doubled in size during the years since the Oslo accords, and is now home to about 35,000 settlers. Modi'in Ilit, the largest settlement in the West Bank, did not exist as a separate jurisdiction in 1993, but was a neighborhood with a population of around 2000. It now numbers about 40,000 residents. All three of these settlements reached their immovable size only after Israel's agreement in 1995 not to “initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.” The Palestinians signed that interim agreement believing that these words ruled out settlement expansion.

These three Oslo settlements were developed with the intent of prejudicing the outcome of negotiations. Each had a specific strategic purpose: Beitar Ilit to consolidate the Etzion Bloc south of Bethlehem, Modi'in Ilit to push back the Palestinian border North of Jerusalem, and Ma'ale Adumim to divide the West Bank in half East of Jerusalem. Each was aimed at a specific plot of Palestinian land, which Israel effectively stole while negotiations were ongoing.

Nothing but a complete freeze of settlement activity will suffice, since all forms of settlement growth amount to making the Israeli presence deeper and more durable. Provision for “natural growth” has allowed the extremely high birth rate of the settlers, particularly the ultra-Orthodox of Modi’in Ilit and Beitar Ilit, to become a political instrument for annexing territory. And allowing growth within existing planning boundaries is no more innocent in its political aims of assuring the permanence of these illegal settlements.

When Israel flatly refused to freeze settlement activity, Obama could have responded with the truth: genuine negotiations cannot proceed unless this condition is met. Therefore it is Israel that is undermining any opportunity for peace. He would not be siding with the Palestinians by doing so, but would simply be pointing out that Israel cannot in good faith negotiate the return of land while colonizing it. Instead, the US administration implicitly endorsing Israel’s position that it was Abbas who was blocking talks, when it called for a resumption of negotiations “without preconditions.” After first insisting on a settlement freeze, the US has now left the Palestinians to make the case alone. Israel did offer a temporary freeze, to go into effect after thousands of approved housing units are constructed. But Abbas cannot assent to this, nor should the US, since to do so would be to give Israel back-door approval for resumed construction once the freeze expires.

The Obama Administration seems to believe that any negotiations are better than no negotiations. This is true if you are interested in negotiation as an end in itself, regardless of where it might lead. In its desperation to get a process, any process, started, the US has accepted conditions from Israel that vitiate the chances of that process moving toward a just resolution.

2009-09-24T06:23:00.001-07:00

Review of One State, Two States, by Benny Morris

Forthcoming in Contemporary Sociology

One State, Two States : Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict, by Benny Morris. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. 240 pp. $26.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780300122817.

Daniel Breslau Virginia Tech dbreslau@vt.edu Category: politics 891 words

When it is difficult for a party to a conflict to acknowledge its own role in the conflict’s origin and perpetuation, it will portray the other side as impervious to good will. The other side’s hostility is elemental, fixed, and unprovoked. One would expect a historian of the Israel-Palestine conflict to understand this style of thought as a historical product, emanating from the conflict itself. But in One State, Two States, Benny Morris thoroughly inhabits this perspective; it informs his interpretation of the conflict from its beginnings to its present discouraging state.

Morris begins by warning readers of a resurgence of “one-state” solutions to the conflict. In his view, one-state proposals are cover for the hidden agenda of replacing Israel with a Muslim-Arab state in which Jews are at best a second-class minority. He contends that the resurgence of one-state proposals has been precipitated by Palestinian actions – Arafat’s rejection of the Clinton/Barak proposals in late 2000, and the rise of the Islamist Hamas movement – and its advocacy by “a coterie of non-Arab Western intellectuals” (6).

The bulk of the book consists of a long chapter on “The History of One-State and Two-State Solutions.” Beginning with the Zionist movement, Morris chronicles the ideological and political disputes among its factions, concerning the desired political relationship to the Palestinians and its territorial configuration. He shows how a range of one-state alternatives were weeded out. On the right, the revisionist Zionists, followers of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who militated for a maximalist Jewish state were ultimately frustrated by geopolitical realities. The opposite wing of Zionism, composed of a diverse set of intellectuals and leftist organizations advocating coexistence in a binational state, failed to find significant partners on the Palestinian side who would tolerate even shared sovereignty. Morris sees the failure of the binational project as caused by, and evidence for, Palestinian intransigence. He minimizes what even Jabotinsky was acutely aware of: that the Palestinian reaction was driven by an anxiety over the prospect of their own displacement – physical, cultural, and political—an anxiety that would prove to be justified. The Zionist center, embodied by the Labor Party-led Alignment that ruled Israel for nearly thirty years, was more pragmatic than either of the one-state factions, and accepted the 1947 UN partition plan. But it is not quite right to credit this group with early acceptance of a two-state solution, as Morris does, since most of Israel’s leadership rejected Palestinian statehood at least until the 1990s.

While Morris is attentive to the diversity of perspectives within the Zionist movement and Israel, there is no parallel treatment of the Palestinian national movement. His polemic tolerates no substantive distinctions between Palestinian factions. For Morris, the Palestinian National Movement, as a whole, has rejected Israel’s existence, rejected even the presence in Palestine of the Jews who had immigrated under Zionist auspices (and their descendents), and has had no other goal than Palestinian-Arab-Muslim sovereignty over the entire homeland. Any utterance or strategic position consistent with these objectives Morris labels as a genuine statement of Palestinian intentions. Any deviations he treats as “tactical” or “superficial” dissimulation, “a spin invented for gullible Westerners” (168).

For the period beginning in the 1970s, when the strategic position of the Palestinian political center showed signs of moderation, this scheme leads Morris into some surprising contortions. For instance, he brings up the case of Palestinian moderates who were assassinated in the late 1970s. He describes those assassinated as “dissidents” who “struck out on their own,” seeking an opening for discussing coexistence with Israel, only to be fatally disciplined by their “colleagues” (123). In fact, all the figures mentioned by Morris were at the center of Palestinian national politics. They did not strike out on their own, but were undertaking diplomatic efforts fully authorized by the PLO. Their assassins were members of the Abu Nidal organization, a rejectionist fringe. Morris has the story backwards: it was the representatives of the political majority who sought conciliation, while dissidents killed in the name of rejectionism. The entire strategic shift toward coexistence with Israel, beginning in the 1970s and becoming PLO policy in the late 1980s, is regarded as a carefully constructed sham. When dealing with more recent history, Morris indulges in a pastime pioneered by “pro-Israel” websites that mine the media for quotes that seem to contradict Palestinian public support for a two-state solution.

Morris’s insistence on forcing Palestinian history into this framework of intransigence and duplicity is surprising, since he knows very well that the Zionist movement can be, and often is, given the same treatment. The argument that the Zionists always had their eye on the whole of Palestine, and any deviation was a ruse in order to enlist international support, is equal to Morris’s account in plausibility and inadequacy.

Near the end of the book, Morris’s outlook is taken to its logical conclusion. Citing incompatible values, he dismisses the possibility of Jewish and Arab coexistence in a binational state. “The value placed on human life and the rule of (secular) law is completely different—as exhibited, in Israel itself, in the vast hiatus between Jewish and Arab perpetration of crimes and lethal road traffic violations” (187). So determined is Morris to avoid consciousness of Israel’s role in the economic, social, and political marginalization of its Palestinian Arab minority, that he converts the symptoms of marginalization into essential cultural deficiencies.

2007-02-21T21:10:00.000-08:00

Is Ha'aretz doing a Judith Miller?
Reports of a growing threat, advanced weapons, based entirely on unnamed insider sources, with no effort to independently verify the reports, printed as a news scoop — sound familiar? These are the practices the New York Times engaged in that made it little more than a conduit for the Bush administration's misinformation campaign in preparation for the invasion of Iraq. They are the same practices for which the Times later apologized. And they are practices that the Times has recently reinitiated in becoming an outlet for the new misinformation campaign aimed at Iran.

The Israeli daily Ha'aretz is often described as the New York Times of Israel. When it comes to dressing up misinformation as news, the comparison is deserved. The main difference is that Ha'aretz tends to serve the military itself more than whoever happens to be in the government. The IDF wants to invade the Gaza Strip. For months, it has been pushing the government to authorize such an invasion. Its goal is to neutralize the armed resistance groups militarily. Ha'aretz and correspondent Amos Harel are helping lay the groundwork for such an invasion with a Judith Miller-style planted story about advanced weaponry obtained by resistance groups in Gaza.

2007-01-09T22:46:00.000-08:00

Most Israeli high school students are racists - don't blame the schools

This piece has not appeared on the English website yet (here's the Hebrew version) so let me give my own translation:

75% of Jewish students: Arabs are ignorant and dirty
Fadi Eyadat
Ha'aretz, Wednesday, 10 January 2007
75% of Jewish high school students think that Arabs are ignorant, uncivilized, unclean, and violent. 69% think that Arabs are not intelligent, and more than one third are afraid of Arabs. These are the findings of a study on "Perception of the other among Jewish and Arab youth in Israel," presented this week at a conference on bilingual education that took place at Haifa University. The study was conducted among 1,600 students in 22 high schools in Israel.
In contrast, the study found that 27% of the Arab students believe that Jews are ignorant, 40% think that they are uncivilized, and 64% believe that they are violent. 57% of the Arab students think that Jews are unclean. However, while 75% of the Arab students expressed willingness to meet with Jewish students, less than half of the Jewish students agreed to such a meeting.
"In the study, we found an intense expression of stereotypical thought in the Jewish students, compared to the Arab youth," said Dr. Hagai Kupermintz from the Center for Peace Education at Haifa University, who carried out the study, along with Dr. Yigal Rosen and Rabiah Hasaisi.
"These students will become soldiers at the roadblocks"
"The hostile violence from all directions is part of the reason that the students can't find common ground on which to meet with the 'enemy'," explains Kupermintz. The Jewish students' perception of Arabs is formed from behind "extreme and black glasses." According to Kupermintz, this negative thinking is liable to cause damage at the national level, with far-reaching consequences. "These students become soldiers and find themselves at a checkpoint facing an Arab population, so it is no wonder that their attitude and reactions will be extreme," he explains. Furthermore, says Kupermintz, the educational system does not place the topic of equality and coexistence near the top of its priorities. And the Jewish students hardly ever meet Arabs, and do not know them.

Of course we would be right to conclude from this study that a majority of Jewish Israeli high school students harbor racist views about Arabs. This is probably true for the adult population as well. And we could interpret the findings, as Dr. Kupermintz does, in a way that is very typical of the way we approach racism in the U.S.: Racist attitudes are inculcated in children from an early age by their parents, their school, and formative experiences. After high school, those racists corrupt institutions like the army, since they are not capable of behaving in a fair, rational, and bureaucratic way. Change the attitudes in the children, and you will get rational and empathetic adults.

I believe Dr. Kupermintz has it almost completely backwards. He seems to base his interpretation from a certain elite thinking about soldiering that is very prevalent in Israel. There is an ideal in Israel of the soldier that is unemotional, that does not bear his enemy any ill will, but shoots out of an understanding of the regrettable necessity of war. The myth of "shooting and crying" still lingers to comfort us about the morality of the soldiers.

There is no such army, in Israel or anywhere else, at least while it is engaged in an ongoing violent conflict. Soldiers are not clerks, and the necessity of coldly executing bureaucratic orders has never been sufficient to motivate killers. They cannot be motivated to kill without being trained to see the other as sub-human. They cannot be relied on to treat the other like an animal without being taught that the other is an animal. Dehumanizing the other, of which racism is one example, is not a corruption but a prerequisite for the brutality that is demanded of soldiers. How long can someone who respects and values the lives of Arabs, like those of Jews, be expected to effectively command a checkpoint?

"According to Kupermintz, this negative thinking is liable to cause damage at the national level, with far-reaching consequences." The racism of high school students cannot cause damage at the national level, since it is the damage that the national level itself inflicts on young minds.

2007-01-02T10:47:00.000-08:00

Occupation justice As a judiciary that rules on internal matters, Israel's courts are not immune to politics and biases. After all, the democratic system that appoints the independent judiciary has many of the flaws of democratic systems in the US and elsewhere: elite control, party control, etc. But at least these problems are not qualitatively different from those in other nominal democracies, and the Israeli judiciary, including the Supreme Court, can be said to be, in formal legal terms, independent. And the court has made some important rulings, eliminating some glaring forms of discrimination against the Palestinian minority.

The situation is entirely different when Israeli courts rule on matters related to government and military conduct in the occupied territories. Here the courts function as a colonial judiciary, imposed without the consent of most of those affected by its decisions. The Supreme Court has behaved accordingly.

The occasion of the retirement of Aharon Barak, who served since 1995 as Supreme Court President, provides an opportunity to assess the record of this colonial court justice. Barak's formula, throughout his tenure consisted of 1) "balancing" the rights of the occupied population with the security needs of the occupier; and 2) consistently adopting whatever members of the security forces told him as the definition of Israel's security needs. Thus, Barak himself approved the confiscation of huge quantities of agricultural lands, demolitions of homes, restrictions on movement, for questionable security reasons, such as the construction of the so-called "security barrier." As evidence of Israel's security needs, and as assurances of minimal disruption to the lives of Palestinians, he accepted at face value all manner of lies, without allowing any independent parties to refute them. For example, he approved the construction of the wall in East Jerusalem on the basis of assurances, now proven to be fraudulent, that the wall would not interfere with the "fabric" of civilian life. He approved other sections of the wall on the basis of false testimony that the path was determined by security needs, when the path actually was designed to take future settlement expansion into account. The same logic governed Barak's decisions regarding targeted assassinations and administrative detention.

None of the hagiographic commentaries about this brilliant legal mind have mentioned the massive logical and legal contradiction informing all of the Barak court's decisions regarding the occupation. The court generally assumed that the West Bank and Gaza Strip are occupied, and thus subject to international humanitarian law. This meant the Palestinian population was entitled to protection but not political rights. But at the same time, the security of settlers outweighed the Geneva protections of the occupied population. The court contained this contradiction by consistently refusing to rule on the legality of the settlements.

Israeli peace and human rights activist Gideon Spiro has more to say about the Barak court's record of legitimizing all of the predations of occupation.

2007-01-02T09:09:00.000-08:00

If you are for peace - negotiate with the real Palestinian government Haim Baram is one of the most reliable and articulate voices of the Israeli left, and an erstwhile sportswriter. His weekly columns in the Jerusalem weekly Kol Ha'ir are always incisive, and are usually available in Hebrew only. Mark Marshall has translated his latest piece, which can be found at Occupation Magazine.

Baram reiterates some of what I have said below regarding Israel's pattern of support for Fatah. But he goes further in arguing that you cannot be serious about peace without negotiating directly with the elected Palestinian government. And he puts such negotiations in the context of a holistic 9-point plan.

He compares Israel's leaders to the legendary citizen of Chelm, who searched for a lost coin under a streetlamp, rather than in the darkened street where he had lost the coin. Of course, offering this up as advice to the Israeli government is rhetorical—Olmert, Peretz, et al. deliberately shot out the streetlight on the street where they misplaced the peace coin.

2006-12-28T09:57:00.000-08:00

Killing two national movements with one stone Israel loves centrist, secular Palestinian nationalist movements (The PLO and within it, Fatah) when they are fighting for their survival. When they threaten to actually consolidate power and effectively lead, they become public enemy number one. When they are down they can be manipulated and concessions can be wrung from them. When they are up, they assert legitimate Palestinian demands with a unified voice.

Fatah is down, after losing the Palestinian paliamentary elections in February 2006. It has been hurt by the boycott of the Palestinian Authority, since its security forces have faced the cutoff of funds. Recently, however, Israel, the US, and supposedly, the Saudis too, have been supporting the movement led by Mahmoud Abbas, with money and weaponry. Israel and the US, who once demanded a consolidation of Palestinian security forces, are now promoting heavily-armed militias under the command of the political opposition.

Abbas is desperate now, as Arafat was when he gave up central Palestinian demands in 1993, desperate enough to make another Faustian bargain with Israel and the US. The Egyptian AK-47s that are now being shipped to Abbas's presidential guard, with the involvement (possibly the inducement and secret financing) of Israel and the US, will be of great aid to Fatah in the short run. But how will the organization fare when those tainted weapons are used to overthrow the elected government?

It is heartwarming to see Israel's top politicizer of intelligence, Amos Gilad, who "fixed the intelligence" around the "conceptzia" that Arafat was not interested in coexistence with Israel, now referring to the greatly weakened Fatah as "the forces of peace." "Forces of peace," is a term that means "tools of Israeli policy." Israel is arming Fatah to defeat Hamas, in what is almost certain to be a Pyrrhic victory.

2006-12-17T21:54:00.000-08:00

A US-backed coup for Palestine? While the U.S. is boycotting the Hamas-led government of the Palestinian Authority, it is funding a buildup of weaponry and personnel by the Fatah movement. The Israeli press has been reporting on this for some time—here's the latest item. At a time when the 1.5 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip face a complete economic breakdown caused by closures and international sanctions, while Israel withholds tax revenues from the Palestinians and blocks wire transfers from abroad, prevents Palestinian leaders from bringing funds in, the US is funding the opposition. Saudi Arabia is helping too, probably because of its ties to the US and its concerns about growing Iranian influence.

The US/Israel policy at the moment is therefore one of openly fomenting civil war among the Palestinians. The fledgling democracy will be destroyed and if a Fatah government manages to seize power, it will only survive through violence and repression. The consent of the governed is out of the question now that Mahmoud Abbas is openly working with the Americans. The Palestinians will not accept rule by a US-backed coup. If the situation in the occupied territories seems dire now, it will be much worse once Abbas attempts to dissolve the Palestinian Legislative Council and the real civil war breaks out.

I'm sure there are those in the US administration who think they are serving the cause of peace by supporting moderates over Islamic "extremists." They are tragically naïve, and are playing into the hands of the Israelis, who want anything but a strong, viable, Palestinian government. The result will be anything but peace.

2006-12-14T19:28:00.000-08:00

The Gaza invasion is coming I want to be on record with what seems to be an almost obvious point about Ehud Olmert's recent conciliatory-sounding speech at Sde Boker. Here is the comment I posted to a left-wing mailing list on Nov. 28:

Olmert’s new conciliatory attitude is a ploy, but it is a ploy with a specific purpose: to establish the right public opinion climate, domestically and internationally, for the reinvasion of the Gaza Strip, with all the horrors that will entail. Israel wants to reinvade the Gaza Strip. This has little to do with the Qassam rocket attacks, which are not a strategic threat at all, but has everything to do with new weaponry the Palestinian resistance groups may be amassing, such as anti-tank missiles. The leadership has been convinced by Yuval Diskin that the strategic equation in Gaza is changing, and it is only a matter of time before Israel will face the same kind of stiff resistance there that it faced in Lebanon. The only reservation Olmert and Peretz have to such an invasion now is that, in order to dismantle the armed resistance, it would entail massive civilian casualties. Of course Israel’s leaders don’t have a moral problem with generating such casualties, but they are very concerned about Israel’s image so soon after it has received so much negative publicity over crimes in Lebanon and Gaza. In this light, Olmert’s repackaging of Israel’s policy as some kind of bold initiative is simply a setup for the invasion to come. He conceded only “bargaining chips” – items that Israel withheld only for tactical purposes, so they could be painlessly conceded at times like this. There is no change in the policy of annexation, cantonization, and rejection of Palestinian rights, and therefore no concession on the things that Palestinians are fighting for. Olmert knows that Palestinian armed resistance will not cease. And he knows that soon he will have a much more favorable climate for the Gaza reinvasion, when he will say “we extended our hand in peace, and this is what we got in return.”

Gideon Levy suggested something similar, also based on the simplest of interpolations of past behavior. Levy's time scale is too short, though. Israel needs two give the charade two months, not days.

I was surprised that Uri Avnery did not reach a similar conclusion when he labeled Olmert's initiative an exercise in spin, especially when he begins his column with a comment on the lineage of this tactic: And, indeed, it was a typical method of Ben-Gurion: before launching a military operation, he would make a speech culminating with "We are holding out our hand for peace!"

Everything that has happened since has reinforced my prognosis. Amir Peretz has ordered the army to continue preparations for an invasion. Army intelligence continues to report that Hamas is not weakening, but is consolidating its power and accumulating more firepower during the ceasefire. The army wants the invasion. If no pretext is found, one will be generated -- January or February.

2006-12-14T17:59:00.000-08:00

Netanyahu's familiar modus operandi Today Ha'aretz has a story about Netanyahu and his cronies, Danny Naveh and Dore Gold, who have initiated an "international public relations campaign" against Iran. Bibi has never had a problem making an international fool of himself for the sake of domestic politics. It is only sad that being an international joke actually helps in the Israeli domestic political scene. Bibi's group summoned 70 foreign diplomats to tell them that Ahmedinejad is bent on using nuclear weapons to wipe out the Jews. They want to lodge a complaint in the International Court of Justice against Ahmedinejad, for war crimes and for planning to commit genocide.

Netanyahu has used the scare tactic many times before. His favorite strategy is to refuse any distinctions among any political Islamic group, insisting that they are all (I mean Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Al Qaeda, the Islamic Movement in Israel) an international monolith that only he is prepared to take on. Anyone pursuing a sensible policy is then painted as a do-nothing or an appeaser.

2005-05-17T05:56:00.000-07:00

Does violence pay? Akiva Eldar has an op-ed piece in Ha'aretz of May 16, "Violence Does Not Pay," arguing that the withdrawal fro Gaza had nothing to do with terror attacks of the intifada. His evidence: public opinion data that shows that the Israeli public did not change its views as a result of the violence. His data, and that of Brig. General (reserves) Meir Elran, may be correct, but his conclusions are wrong.
Eldar and Elran show that the intifada did not directly increase the Israeli public's willingness to support a withdrawal (at least based on the crude measures available). But this finding says nothing about whether or not violence pays, since the disengagement was not a response to changes in Israeli public opinion.
If Eldar had taken into account the actual reasons for the disengagement plan -- international pressure, particularly from the U.S. for Sharon to make some concessions -- and had taken into account the behavior of the Israeli government during the current ceasefire, he would have to conclude that, sadly, violence most certainly does pay.
The violence of the intifada, and the disproportionate violence of its suppression by Israel, despite the enormous costs to both societies, focused the world's attention on the situation like nothing else. It is possible that even the suicide bombings, which inevitably provoked sympathy for their innocent victims, helped the Palestinians by keeping the conflict in the headlines. But certainly Israel's response, especially Operation Defensive Shield in March of 2002, and targeted assassinations in 2003, brought the most international condemnation of Israel in many years, and embarrassed the US at a time when it was desperate for cooperation from Arab countries. The disengagement plan was above all, and by Sharon's own admission, a plan to relieve external pressure on Israel. Had it not been for the negative attention Israel received as a direct result of the intifada, there would have been much less pressure to relieve, and no disengagement.
Since Abu-Mazen's ceasefire, which has surprised the Israeli authorities with its longevity and discipline, the few small concessions the Palestinians have gained have been more than offset by continual construction of the wall, construction in the settlements, and moves by Israel to make a true Palestinian state impossible. Their cause has only been set back, while the world reads of a few hundred fanatic settlers scuffling with police.
What lesson does Eldar expect the Palestinians to learn from all this?

2005-05-01T22:07:00.000-07:00

Salt Bullets As more details come out about the 4/28 assault on the nonviolent demonstrators in Bil'in, it is apparent that the event marked a deliberate and planned escalation in violence against such demonstrations. Israel has introduced a new weapon for the dispersal of nonviolent protests. A gas-powered rifle, that has the effect of a machine gun, shooting plastic bullets coated with a salt-like chemical. This is combined with a documented use of infiltrators posing as Palestinian youth, throwing stones in order to permit a more violent response from the soldiers. Here is a picture of the effects of this weapon on one of the demonstrators:
Add to this the usual use of rubber bullets, teargas canisters used as projectiles hurled and fired at demonstrators, and beatings with clubs. An updated report can be read here.

This is a turning point in Israel's repressive tactics, but it may be a turning point in the nonviolent resistence as well. We need to support these protests against the apartheid wall, to cheer them on, and to help them grow.

2005-04-28T21:00:00.000-07:00

Israeli soldiers and border police descend on non-violent demonstration after planting stone-throwing infiltrators I have this from at least four sources, all of which are in perfect agreement. Here are some translated excerpts from Ma'ariv's story:

The infiltrator unit of the prison service, "Masada," was established about six months ago in response to violent disturbances of security prisoners in the Shekma prison. The unit is composed of veterans of patrols and special units of the IDF -- in order to "respons to any possible occurence within the prison facilities." However, if the claims of demonstrators against the fence are correct, the unit also operates outside of prison facilities. The purpose of sending the unit there, they said, was not to preserve order, but "to provoke and to turn the Israeli peace activists against the Palestinian residents."

The occasion was a large demonstration against the construction of the "separation fence" in the village of Bil'in. As the crowd of 700-1000 demonstrators, including 200-300 Israeli peace activists as well as three prominent Arab knesset members, proceeded toward the construction site, carrying olive trees they planned to plant, they were set upon by police and soldiers.

Knesset member Muhamad Baraka (Hadash party) reported that in the course of the demonstration, that was accompanied by rubber bullets and shock grenades from the security forces, men from within the crowd began throwing stones at the soldiers and police. "We sent some organizers over," said Baraka, "they said that they were from the nearby village, Safa, and when we asked to see their identity cards, they removed their masks and pulled out pistols, and then it was clear to us that they were infiltrators."

Here's what an Israeli peace activist who participated in the rally posted on the Yediot website:

Someone from the army decided in advance to use force against us, to rain down tens and hundreds of tear gas grenades on an orderly and peaceful demonstration in which Israelis and Palestinians marched together. They were lacking a pretext, since the village leaders, together with the Israeli organizers, decided that the demonstration would be completely non-violent, and gave strict instructions to the village youth not to throw stones. Thus they sent infiltrators—afterwards, we found that they were from a special unit of the prison service—among the marchers.
Infiltrators dressed as Palestinians, covered their faces and began to throw stones at the soldiers. And when it was discovered that they were Israeli infiltrators they started attacking the demonstrators, hitting them and arresting them.
This was a despicable act in order to carry out a despicable assignment: to protect bulldozers that are devouring more than half of the land of the village of Bil’in. 2300 out of 4000 dunams, condemning the village residents to poverty and hunger in order to enlarge the ultra-orthodox settlement Kiryat Sefer, a voracious and aggressive settlement that is ceaselessly expanding at the expense of the lands of the adjacent villages. Security is nothing but a false pretext here, the real urpose of the fences and walls is not to protect the citizens of Israel, but to confiscate land for the settlers. Amikam Leiberman

And here's yet another eyewitness report that tells basically the same story: We were in Bil'in today. The Gush Shalom website carries another, corroborating, account.

Apparently, there were many video cameras at the scene. We will find out what happened.

2005-04-02T21:48:00.000-08:00

Mainstream Zionism and the settlements This op-ed piece by Ma'ariv columnist Ben-Dror Yemini demonstrates something hugely important. It is an effort to take the term 'Zionism' back from the right and the settlers, and shows that the most middle-of-road Zionist thinking, however self-righteous and tendentious, can be reconciled with the harshest disavowal of the entire settler enterprise. It is striking to read someone with such classic nationalistic views repeatedly referring to the occupation as "apartheid." Very recently leftists were thought to be beyond the pale when they drew any such parallel.

2005-03-31T06:53:00.000-08:00

Quote of the day The political system is up in arms over Sharon's latest demonstration of the low esteem in which he holds democratic institutions. After defeating the call for a national referendum over his disengagement plan, and winning passage of his budget, Sharon introduced legislation to enlarge the cabinet, for the sole purpose of rewarding Likud members that remained loyal to him. Even those who could not resist the pressure to support this measure, which was defeated, agreed that this marked a new low in Israeli political culture. Our quote comes from senior Labor Party member Avraham "Beiga" Shohat. When his Labor colleague Haim Ramon was trying to convince him to support enlarging the cabinet, in a conversation in the Knesset cafeteria (where most of Israeli political history has taken place), Shohat was heard throughout the cafeteria: "Have I come all this way just to wipe Sharon's ass?"

2005-03-30T21:35:00.000-08:00

It's all in the game Yediot reports that Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, who is visiting Washington, is making the rounds complaining about Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen's failure to live up to his commitments to stop terror:

Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, in speaking to senior administration figures, voiced harsh criticism of the chairman of the Palestinian authority, Abu-Mazen, saying to the Americans that Abu Mazen is not fulfilling his commitments. "There is a large gap between the announcements and the reality on the ground with regard to reforms and the war on terror," said Mofaz in his meetings in Washington.
Mofaz met with Defense Minister Donald Rumsfeld, and with Vice President Dick Cheney. Tonight he will also meet with the Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, and with the President's national security advisor, Steve Hadley.
Mofaz complained to the Americans about the serious problems in intelligence cooperation with the Palestinians, and mentioned that this is leading to delays in the transfer of additional towns to the Palestinians. "We sent the authority a list of 17 wanted men in Jericho and 35 in Tul Karm, so that they would surrender their weapons, turn them over to the Palestinian Authority, and cease their activities with terror organizations," he said to the Americans, adding that these steps have not been carried out.
Mofaz emphasized that as long as the Palestinians do not carry out their responsibilities under the agreement, Israel will cease to turn additional towns over to the Palestinians.

The same article continues, describing continuing clashes in Ramallah between Palestinian regular security forces and members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the Fatah-aligned militants, over wanted Al Aqsa members who are holed up in the Muqata compound in Ramallah. Apparently, Abu Mazen, as head of the state in the making, places a higher priority on arresting outlaws disturbing the peace and refusing to accept his government's authority, than in arresting suspects who are abiding by agreements to refrain from violence against Israel. Israel is demanding that he send his security forces into the two large towns that are restoring order after the IDF has pulled out, and initiate what could easily turn into violent confrontations with those who are honoring the cease-fire.
Mofaz knows that Abu Mazen is not foolish enough to do such a thing. The Defense Minister is playing a game that Israel has played many times in recent decades: issuing demands to the Palestinians that they know will not be carried out, in order to always have an excuse not to carry out Israel's own obligations. As long as the Palestinians have not completely dismantled Hamas and other militant groups, which together constitute the political representatives of a large part of Palestinian society, Sharon and Mofaz will always be able to make the accusation that they are not doing enough.
This maneuver is made all the more transparent when Abu Mazen has in fact been an impressive success in securing a commitment to his cease-fire, and effectively halting attacks on Israel and Israelis.
His success, both at home and internationally, has put Israel in an uncomfortable position. Now, as with late 2003, when there is pressure on Israel to carry out its obligations, such as removing outposts and freezing settlement construction, the Israeli government is doing as it did then: manufacturing reasons to delay fulfilling its commitments, and hoping that this will prove to the Palestinian militants that Abu Mazen can't deliver the goods. The undoing of Abu Mazen and his ceasefire will once again free Israel's hands to do as it pleases.

2005-03-24T22:48:00.000-08:00

Kertzer: No US consent to West Bank settlement blocs Off-the-record statements by US ambassador to Israel, Dan Kertzer, to junior staffers in Israel's foreign ministry, have been leaked to the Israeli daily, Yediot Acharonot. The statements will embarrass Ariel Sharon, and might threaten his planned evacuation of Israeli settlers and military from the Gaza strip (and a few small settlements in the northern West Bank). One of Sharon's key arguments to his right-wing supporters is that he has secured an "understanding" from the US, in return for the "disengagement" plan, by which the large settlement blocs in the West Bank will remain under Israeli control in any final agreement with the Palestinians. According to Kertzer, this is a big misunderstanding. Here are some key sections of the report in Yediot:
Kertzer spoke with an unusual openness and without the usual diplomatic restraint.
He contradicted the central argument of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and his staff, that there is an understanding with the Bush administration according to which in the final settlement with the Palestinians, the large settlement blocs in the West Bank will remain under Israeli sovereignty.
According to Kertzer, this is the result of a misunderstanding of things that were said in Sharon's office in conversations with the Bush administration."Let's take for example the route of the fence in the area of the Ariel bloc and Ma'ale Adumim. This is an example of the misunderstanding, that arises from misunderstood language," said Kertzer.
"I learned from the Israeli media that your decisionmakers think that understandings with Washington were achieved on these issues. I'm telling you that no such understandings were ever reached, and that I have confirmed this with Washington. Sometimes, when an American representative finishes a coversation with the words "I understand," it is interpreted by the Israeli listener, who is not an expert in English grammar, as a confirmation of the existance of understandings reached during the conversation."

All of this is good and bad. Bad, if it will chip away at support in Israel for the "disengagement," and good if it really means that the US has a realistic view of the need to remove the West Bank settlements if peace is to be achieved.
Kertzer also gave a humorous sendup of recent Israeli diplomatic bumbling in Washington, which continues to embarrass the Bush administration while it is trying to establish its credibility in the Arab world:
Kertzer also addressed US-Israel relations, and said that they are "exacting a heavy price from the US because of the need to defend Israel in international organizations. But this is a price that the US is prepared to pay." In addressing what he called "Israel's mistakes in the American dimplomatic arena," alluding to the sort of statements Sharon made in his conversations with US leaders, he said, "the Israelis have a tendency to raise the same topics again and again. For instance, at the beginning of every political meeting, the Israeli speaker repeats the mantra "Jerusalem is the eternal and unified capital of Israel."

2005-03-21T11:41:00.000-08:00

Setting the right precedents Those of us who support the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip while opposing "disengagement" are starting to see some returns on our strategy. Now that the state has to defend itself against legal attempts by settlers to stop the evacuation, it is forced to adopt legal positions that could undermine the entire settlement enterprise, or at least pave the way for mass evacuations in the West Bank. In an on-line posting in Ha'aretz, that is not yet available in English, Yuval Yoaz reports that the state prosecutor's office is arguing that the Gaza settlers should have known that they could be removed at any time. "The status of the territory and of the Israeli settlements within it forced the settlers to expect that they could be evacuated at any time." The prosecutor pointed out that the high court of justice had already ruled that the status of the settlements, like the territories, is temporary. The prosecutory also argued that since the settlements were the result of government decisions, the government can also decide to evacuate them. The settlers argue that the Israeli Declaration of Independence, which has the status of law, establishes the right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel. If the government has to argue that this does not apply to settlements beyond the pre-1967 borders, then it will remove this potential obstacle to evacuating any of the West Bank settlements as well. The bad news, of course, is that construction and plans for more construction are forging ahead in the West Bank. But the good news is that Sharon's government, in fighting the legal battle to evacuate the Gaza Strip, is laying the legal foundations for evacuating Ma'ale Adumim.

2005-03-17T06:53:00.000-08:00

Sharon is "shocked,shocked..." about the outposts

What is behind the stir created by Attorney Talia Sasson's report on the "unauthorized outposts" in the occupied territories? The outposts themselves are significant, not just because they are illegal settlements, but because they are strategically placed to consolidate the settlements' control of the hilly center of the West Bank. Their hilltop locations were carefully selected to disrupt territorial contiguity for the Palestinians. A blatant land grab, they could not have been established through legal procedures. Now, what the Israeli media and peace organizations have known for years, is vindicated by the government itself.
It is hard to say that Sasson exposed anything, because the massive illegality she describes was carried on in broad daylight. But the remarkable collective denial of systematic law-breaking in the outpost project was only possible because the circle of complicity included nearly every powerful government functionary, including those whose responsibility it is to uphold the law. As Akiva Eldar reports, successive attorneys general and even Supreme Court justices knew of the illegality at the heart of the outpost phenomenon, actively blocked efforts to stop it, and eagerly participated in the after-the-fact legitimation (in Hebrew, the word is "halbana" - bleaching) of illegal outposts. The Sasson report thus taints not only a few rogue assistant government ministers, but at least three Prime Ministers, and the entire legal and judicial branch of government. Spreading settlement activity through systematic violation of Israeli law, expropriation of public and private Palestinian lands, was and is the de facto policy of Israel for many years.
It is a great irony of this episode that it is the settlers themselves, through their leadership, who, with total honesty, are exposing the depth and breadth of the web of illegality, for fear of being scapegoated. More than anything, they are interested in tracing responsibility right up to Ariel Sharon, which turns out to be an absurdly easy investigative task. Sharon met regularly with Ze'ev "Zambish" Hever, the head of the settlement movement, to pore over maps and determine strategically opportunate sites. He is on record repeatedly proposing and even ordering illegal settlement activity.

2005-02-12T20:54:00.000-08:00

Gideon Levy, in today's Ha'aretz, excoriates the Israeli left for being innocuous and inconsequential, even as it is (apparently) enjoying a reawakening. His most damning observation is that the left establishment has taken its cue from Ariel Sharon himself, responding to his "disengagement" plan as license to speak with more self-assurance against occupation. This is the nature of the establishment opposition, in the US as well as Israel. They always accompany their criticisms with acknowledgement of the most commonsense elements of the public consensus. In Israel it is the rituals of evenhandedness that Levy describes; in the US it is the reflex assent to the dominant definition of the Iraq situation as our troops and the Iraqi people struggling for democracy against a malevolent "insurgency."

2005-02-11T08:58:00.000-08:00

OEI is back, but a name change is due, since I find myself unable to control my own editorializing voice. And also, I need an outlet for reporting on the Israeli extraparliamentary left, which, together with the new popular Palestinian resistance, is the most important political force for the future of the region. Just a note to the US media and our new Secretary of State: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not about violence. It is about rights, above all the right to self-determination, which cannot be realized without territorial integrity, sovereignty, control of borders and resources. The Palestinians do not have any of these, nor has Israel agreed to honor any of them. So, the recent Sharm-al-sheik cease fire declaration is not a move toward peace. It is not a cessation of violence either, since Israel continues to enlarge settlements in the West Bank, consolidate territory, and build its wall, all of which are being forced on the Palestinians, in their own land, at the barrel of a gun. Armed robbery is still a violent crime even if no shots are fired. The Sharm agreement signals a temporary change in the grammar of the conflict. It is an agreement of both sides to pursue their case in the international arena at least until Israel's semi-withdrawal from the Gaza strip is completed. This will allow Sharon to carry out his plan of strengthening Israeli control in the West Bank. It will allow the Palestinians to regroup and revive the institutional infrastructure that has been devastated since 2001. And the US greatly prefers quiet, however short-lived, to the political risks of pushing for a genuine peace. But the terms of the Sharm agreement are unsustainable and lead nowhere. With the Palestinians agreeing to stop fighting the occupation by force, and Israel agreeing to stop using force to suppress that fight against the occupation, we are left with the occupation and the day-to-day violence that it entails.

2004-08-03T23:42:00.000-07:00

Consensus or settlements? In the dispute that broke out on Monday, over Israel’s approval of the construction of 600 or more new housing units on 2500 dunams of Ma’aleh Adumin, a number of Israeli news sources have referred to Ma’aleh Adumim as a “consensus settlement.” The term is supposed to mean that there is a consensus that the settlement, the largest in the West Bank, and an eastern suburb of Jerusalem, will remain part of Israel under any future peace agreement with the Palestinians. Ma’ariv’s English internet edition, which seems to want to outflank the Jerusalem Post on the right, reported that the settlement is “considered a consensus settlement” without saying by whom.

This is a fiction, as there has been no effort to verify that there is such a consensus in Israel, especially when all opinion polls say that a majority are in favor of evacuating most or all of the settlements in exchange for peace. The only consensus is the international one according to which all the settlements are illegal and should be removed in any just solution. Ma’aleh Adumim may be the biggest, hence the most difficult settlement to evacuate, but it is an obstruction to the viability of a Palestinian state and an obstruction to peace like no other. No other settlement presents as much of an obstruction to Palestinian territorial contiguity. It bisects the west bank, disrupting travel from ramallah to Bethlehem, and cutting off East Jerusalem and the adjacent Palestinian towns from the rest of the future state (see a map here).

It is also interesting that the Israeli government has, in this case, completely dispensed with the pretext of “natural growth” as a justification. The expansion of Ma’aleh Adumim is overtly strategic. Even as housing units are empty, Mofaz and Sharon want to build a new neighborhood on the settlement’s Western side, in order to link it to the ring of settlements around Eastern Jerusalem.

When Bush praised Sharon’s disengagement (“disconnection” is more appropriate and a better translation of the Hebrew hitnatkut) plan, and compensated by declaring that some settlements would remain part of Israel in any peace agreement, he, of course, hadn’t the faintest idea that he was committing the US to a contradiction. Now that Sharon has taken advantage of the election season, in carrying out a flagrant violation of the roadmap, the contradiction will have to be resolved on one side or the other: roadmap and international law, or unilateralism and settlements.

2004-05-20T21:27:00.000-07:00

Terror according to the rules of engagement The IDF soldiers are not trained to shoot civilians. They are trained to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties. But it is also manifestly untrue that the IDF takes every possible measure to avoid killing civilians. Every single day tradeoffs are made based on judgment calls, weighing military necessity, the safety of troops, and possible or likely civilian casualties. The imperative of demolishing a particular building, killing a particular militant, pacifying a particular neighborhood, is judged to be worth the possible civilian casualties that will result. According to the Geneva Conventions, these decisions must be based on military necessity. But military necessity is ultimately a judgment call, influenced by fear, anger, and, among other intangibles, the commanders' unacknowledged estimation of the value of an innocent life. The IDF does not have a policy of killing civilians, but every day it decides that certain actions are worth the loss of civilian life. On Wednesday, May 19, a decision was made that it was militarily necessary to prevent a crowd of perhaps one thousand demonstrators from reaching their destination at the gates of the Tel a-Sultan neighborhood of Rafah. The presence of this throng of determined and fearless civilians where the IDF had already imposed a curfew, cut off water and electricity, and now was engaging in house-to-house searches and rounding up all young men, could not be permitted. That a missile from the helicopter and four tank rounds were fired as warning shots indicates how serious the IDF was in their resolve to stop the non-violent procession. Anyone who knows something about military strategy will know that warning shots are a kind of threat, and that a threat is only meaningful if it is issued with the full intention of carrying it out. Implicit in the order to give warning shots is the order that if they are not heeded, at some point one must resort to actual force. Alex Fishman, the military correspondent of Yediot Achronot, confirms this in today's paper: "Yesterday the Palestinians carried out an action that appeared in the IDF’s preview screening, the night before the operation. They sent a march from the Shabura refugee camp in the direction of Tel sultan, as they did in the past in Jenin, in Tul Karm, and in Nablus. The army has clear procedures for dealing with this problem. First, the army defines a “red line,” which the demonstrators must not cross, a line at which they are considered to represent a threat to the military forces. Initially, they shoot only as a warning. At the second stage, they aim at the main inciters." Fishman does not say what the third stage is. But he confirms that the IDF wanted the march stopped, and was prepared to stop it at any price, including the one which eight of the young marchers paid. It is possible that the tank’s gunner misjudged the size of the crowd, and thought he was aiming into an open area. But, had he intentionally fired on the marchers, this may have also been consistent with his orders.

2004-05-13T18:05:00.000-07:00

Something's happening See my post from yesterday. The combination of the Likud referendum and the recent terrible attacks on Israeli personnel carriers in the Gaza Strip is leaving the settlers and their supporters more isolated than ever. Ari Shavit, in Ha'aretz, agrees. It has never been clearer to the majority that these young men are not being killed in a war on terror, but in a war for the settlements and occupation. Finally a shift in Israeli politics is underway. Look for Saturday night's (May 15) peace demonstration in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv to be an historical turning point.

2004-05-12T22:13:00.000-07:00

Countering settler rhetoric: Amos Oz Anything new by novelist and essayist Amos Oz is news. In this wrenching 5/11 piece in Yediot, he turns the manipulative rhetoric of the far right on its head. The timing is right--a massive public rejection of the settlement project is in the works, and will finally force the government's hand. Stay tuned.

2004-05-07T07:07:00.000-07:00

Removing the Masks Gideon Samet, in Ha'aretz, has an interesting interpretation of the Likud vote against Sharon's "disconnection"* plan. He is right in saying that the settlers and far-right activists who rejected the plan simply do not offer an alternative to continuing war and annihiliation of the Palestinians. *The usual translation of hitnatkut is 'disengagement,' but this is a poor translation of the Hebrew. 'Disconnection' is more literal and also captures the spirit of Sharon's plan.

2004-04-21T18:43:00.000-07:00

The U.S. Mandate in Palestine? As with the major US media, the Israeli media have a tendency to get so caught up in the reality defined by their government sources that they start to believe it too. Even in a paper like Ha'aretz, that project an erudite superiority, columnists occasionally come up with a bizarre mix of insight and uncritical acceptance of the official line. This is the case with today's contortion by Aluf Benn. He picks up on something that is truly news: the role that the U.S. is assuming as trustee for the Palestinians, and the future Palestinian state. But his conclusion, that the US is taking responsibility for defending the rights of Palestinians against Sharon's Israel, has no basis in reality. The US policy is little more than the fumbling of a bunch of neoconservatives who have little knowledge of, and less respect for Palestinian experience, rights, and demands, trying desparately to be less despised in the Arab world while avoiding any politically damaging friction with Israel. With its "trusteeship," the US will only be taking over from Israel the responsibility (and the blame) of squelching the national aspirations of 3.5 million people. But I guess that serving as the trustee for an entire people, until such time as a "responsible" leadership comes along, is working so well in Iraq...

2004-04-20T20:22:00.000-07:00

Disengagement, South African style Now that the details of Sharon's plan have been released, it is clear that it is an aggressive retreat and an oppressive liberation. It is nothing more than the imposition by force of the "interim solution" of indefinite duration that Sharon has advocated for the past 25 years: the Palestinians given limited autonomy within Israel's security borders, in Gaza and in disconnected bantustans in the West Bank. Akiva Eldar, in Ha'aretz, shows the striking similarity between Gaza after the implementation of Sharon's plans, and the "homelands" of late apartheid South Africa. In today's Yediot, Tanya Reinhart is skeptical even of Sharon's intention to remove the Netzarim settlement in the middle of the Gaza Strip.

2004-04-15T21:33:00.000-07:00

Bush and Sharon make peace - more reactions Yediot had the most extensive coverage of reactions across the political spectrum. Bush's speech was very carefully worded by his advisors, and Sharon's, to have something for everyone, and something to offend everyone. Its significance is not in its abstract meaning, but its effect in the current context, of giving US imprimatur to Sharon's effort to impose on the Palestinians by force what he could never achieve through negotiations.

2004-04-14T19:15:00.000-07:00

Arik and George The initial reactions to Bush's statement of support for Sharon's "disengagement" plan are a virtual ideological mapping of the middle east political universe. Here are some early analysis by Ha'aretz columnist Danny Rubinstein, and military affairs correspondent, Ze'ev Schiff.

2004-04-12T22:51:00.000-07:00

Ma'ariv keeps the professors in line Lately, the daily Ma'ariv has taken upon itself the task of policing the rhetoric of left-wing activist professors. Although rhetoric of this sort in Hebrew, kept within Israel, goes unnoticed, when terms like 'genocide' are used in connection with Israel's actions against the Palestinians, in writings that are distributed in English or French to foreign readers, the professors are called to order by--ironically--the free press! This piece by Lev Grinberg, published in French in the Belgian paper La libre Belgique, and circulated all over the internet in English, was attacked by the Foreign and Education Ministries, and unfairly sensationalized in Ma'ariv. Here is Grinberg's reply, which Ma'ariv has not seen fit to publish. This week a remarkably similar bout of indignation erupted around a piece by Tel Aviv University Professor Ran Hacohen, which was distributed on a number of web sites. Ma'ariv again led the way in condemning Hacohen for comparing Israel to the Nazis. I think there is a good argument against the deliberately inflamatory rhetoric that Hacohen has used, but his comparison should be put in perspective. Far from making a global comparison of Israel to the Third Reich, his piece accused Israel of waging war unconstrained by international norms (let alone law), an approach elaborated by Hitler, among others.

2004-04-12T06:28:00.000-07:00

The mirror of occupation The comparisons between the US occupation of Iraq and Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories are too tempting to pass up, especially in recent weeks. The Israeli Press is now fixated on the American experience as it continues to sour. For starters, here's Gideon Samet's column in Ha'aretz, on the way the US seems to have adopted the approach of the Israeli military leadership. Some translations will follow shortly, I promise.

2004-03-25T12:22:00.000-08:00

Paralysis of thought Yossi Melman is the leading Israeli journalist covering the murky world of Israeli intelligence. Today in Ha'aretz, he has a great piece putting the Yassin elimination in the long history of Israel's assassination operations.

2004-03-24T21:01:00.000-08:00

Israel reacts to the "elimination" of Sheikh Yassin Though this comes at a time when I am ridiculously overburdened with real work, I feel obliged to include something on the public discussion in the aftermath of this apparent escalation of the conflict. Scanning the major papers, each has published at least six or seven op-ed reactions to the assassination. Ma'ariv is about equally balanced between proponents and critics of the operation, Yediot gives a slight preponderance to critics, and Ha'aretz has a variety of critical pieces, along with a triumphal guest editorial by Moshe Feiglin (it's not in the English edition, but I don't have the intestinal fortitude to translate it now). Here are translations of two pieces, with two different critical readings of the assassination: A strategic blunder (Reuven Paz, in Ma'ariv), and a deliberate and reckless escalation (B. Michael, in Yediot).

2004-03-18T22:09:00.000-08:00

The Jerusalem Post crosses a red line I haven't posted anything from the Jerusalem Post here, although it is Israel's fourth largest daily paper. The reason is that the paper simply does not maintain minimal journalistic standards. None of the other papers puts an ideological line so blantantly above all concerns for competence, knowledgeability, and accuracy of its reporting and editorial writing. Recently, though, the Post was threatened, cajoled, and browbeaten into behaving like a responsible newspaper. On March 1, in a piece "commemmorating" the anniversary of the killing of American peace activist Rachel Corrie, the Post columnist blamed Corrie for her own death and indirectly for deaths of Israelis killed by Palestinian terror. The shameful piece drew the unusual response of furious letter from the US embassy in Tel Aviv. Read about the whole episode here. The International Solidarity Movement (ISM), with whom Rachel Corrie was working at the time of her death, threatened a lawsuit if it was not allowed to publish a response in the Post. On the March 16 anniversary of Rachel's death, the Post printed this measured response by the ISM's founder. Once more, one needs to point out the uncomfortable irony of the Rachel Corrie case. The deaths of hundreds of innocent Palestinians have been shamelessly spun and trivialized by this paper, yet a line is crossed only when the victim is a US citizen.

2004-03-18T19:27:00.000-08:00

The human face of the settlers Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun is a unique and fascinating character in the Gush Emunim movement of religious settlers. While the religious right closed ranks when many in Israel blamed them (at least in part) for fomenting the character assassination and then the actual assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Bin Nun was one of the few to break ranks and demand that religious leaders accept some of that blame. He threatened to name names of rabbis who had made a ruling of din rodef, a religious death sentence on Rabin. In this piece from Yediot Aharonot, he continues to believe there is common ground between the party of Rabin and the settler movement and calls for an end to mutual left vs. right demonization. One might disagree with Bin-Nun’s equation of uprooting a settler, who is there contrary to international law and only through the military sponsorship of an occupying power, and transferring Arabs, who have lived there for generations. But the least we can do is conduct our political struggles with a respect for the other side’s sincerity and outlook.

2004-03-18T06:39:00.000-08:00

The "concession to terrorism" card There is an interesting similarity between the American reaction to the recent Spanish elections and the opposition to Sharon's plan for a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from almost all of the Gaza strip. Both criticize an action that is intelligent and just, on the grounds that it is a concession to terror. By this reasoning, no country should do the just thing if that happens to be what terrorists want too. Israel's control of the Gaza strip is of no strategic value. It is a huge waste of resources to defend 6,000 settlers in dispersed sites among over one million Palestinians, besides the obvious injustice of imposing a brutal and restrictive military regime on the Palestinians for the sake of those 6,000. And a large majority of Israelis favor a full evacuation of the Gaza settlements. Yisrael Harel is a settler and a columnist in Ha'aretz. He can be counted on to give an eloquent, seemingly reasonable statement of the settler viewpoint. But what he writes is not what the settlers say amongst themselves. Here he objects to the evacuation in terms of pragmatic strategic concerns, but not far below the surface are the themes that one would get in the settler discourse: the Arabs are simply out to destroy Israel and any easing of their lives will just encourage them. Harel urges instead the pursuit of an Israeli military victory. It is frightening to imagine what a military victory against 3.5 million people would look like.

2004-03-17T08:31:00.000-08:00

Confirming the Islamic world's worst fears about the West The opinions expressed in this piece in today's Ma'ariv are endangering lives. The best argument that Al Qaeda has for recruiting shaheedeen is that the West does not tolerate peaceful, moderate Islam. Now they have Yoav Keren to write their recruiting pamphlet.

2004-03-16T21:02:00.000-08:00

Against the anti-terror orthodoxy Israel has been fighting against terror and terrorists for years, and when its methods fail, its response is typically to pursue those same methods even more vigorously. If targeted killings don't end terror, it is assumed that the answer is more targetted assassinations. When raids and closures and demolitions fail, that's right, more raids and closures and demolitions. In a courageous guest op-ed in the March 15 Ha'aretz, Muli Peleg suggests why Israel, and Western states in general, have been unable to learn from their failures, and suggests a radical cognitive break from the mind-set of counter-terrorism. Since Ha'aretz guest op-eds do not usually appear in their English edition, we give you the translation as an OEI exclusive.

2004-03-11T07:02:00.000-08:00

The politics of peace Two pieces in today's Ha'aretz provide what one cannot get from the US media: the internal political context of Ariel Sharon's policies. In order to understand Sharon's "disengagement" (hitnatkut) plan, one must first of all refuse the narrative the Israeli government has used to justify it, and which has been uncritically repeated as a matter of fact in all US media. This narrative states that Israel accepted the "Road Map" for peace, but found that it had no one with whom to negotiate, so it was forced to take unilateral steps. The truth is that Israel's "acceptance" of the road map was a de facto rejection of the plan, since Sharon refused to live up to any of the obligations the plan placed on Israel. His "disengagement" plan is simply a way of ignoring the road map and imposing his long-term vision of a permanent settlement on the Palestinians. Aluf Ben describes the political dilemmas of Sharon's main rival within the Likud Party, namely Binyamin Netanhahu. Ari Shavit gives a critical assessment of Sharon's leadership and the undisciplined way his plan has been unveiled and promoted. I think Shavit is mistaken in thinking that Sharon has turned from a competent hard-liner to an inept peacenick. One need only observe that Sharon, in all his highly-publicized "reversals," has never suggested anything that contradicts the plan he has promoted since the 1970s, of confining the Palestinians to Bantustans in Gaza and 40% of the West Bank, completely encircled by Israel.

2004-02-29T21:51:00.000-08:00

On the home front - a cultural war Family Day - Yom hamishpacha - was celebrated on February 22. Yediot Acharonot, Israel's largest circulation daily, put up a lightning rod with this piece by conservative activist Gil Ronen (an OEI exclusive). In the deliberately provocative style that is compulsory in the Israeli opinion column, Ronen gives us pause to ask, does a nation in the pressure cooker of violent conflict and economic collapse inevitably regress to authoritarian patriarchy? Ronen seems to think so, although for him this is the silver lining of the cloud hanging low over Israeli society. We will continue to post other recent ruminations on the occasion of family day that give us some hope that the unfinished liberation of Israeli women cannot be turned back.

2004-02-27T09:41:00.000-08:00

The politics of victimhood, again Many among Israelis and their supporters still see the Hague proceedings as a cynical attack on Israel, and its right to defend itself. Fine, let's make sure this right is respected. But does one honor the memory of terror victims by wielding victimhood as a debate-ender? Should charred buses be a way of silencing the legitimate complaints of Palestinians whose lives and livelhoods are destroyed by the wall? James Tisch and Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations think so, and in this 2/23 piece from Ma'ariv they go from appropriate horror and indignation at recent terror attacks to a crude dismissal of those opposing the fence, who they want to equate with terrorists. Ha'aretz has promoted debate by publishing the Hague testimony of a Palestinian farmer as an op-ed piece. This did not appear in the English edition, but we provide it here as an OEI exclusive.

2004-02-25T20:44:00.000-08:00

Everyone's talking about the wall The security fence, or wall, that is snaking its way through occupied territory, is the subject of hearings at the International Court of Justice, at the Hague. In Israel, it is called "gader hahafrada," the separation fence, and has become a true lightening rod by which everyone can stake out their own position. In the coming days we will try to feature the full range of views on the fence, including some OEI exclusive translations. For starters, two pieces from Ha'aretz, one by military correspondent Ze'ev Schiff, who gives a surprising (given his usually critical stance on the Sharon government's policies) defense of the wall. The other is by Yossi Sarid, a veteran human rights activist and leader of the left-wing Meretz party, who identifies with the almost universal contempt in Israel for the proceedings in the Hague, but nonetheless, in a Jan. 21 piece, objects to the wall in the strongest moral terms.

2004-02-23T10:39:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Op-Ed Israel, a semi-daily survey of Israeli opinion writing, collected and commented by Daniel Breslau.