Posted by: Sammi Ibrahem Chair of West Midlamd PSC
Dear Friends,
Much reading below. Yet it is a fraction of the news and other interest items today. There are such eras, I’m sure you realize. Given this, only the final 2 items of the 7 below are about events in Egypt, which we hope will end with real changes and the best for the Egyptian people. Meanwhile, Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, praises Mubarak for his contributions to peace http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4024283,00.html. Peres is once again out of step with reality.
Item 1 is good news. It relates that for the first time ever a Knesset committee has discussed the issue of boycotts against Israel and how to combat them. Now we know that the bds campaign is working—it has become sufficiently important and successful to scare Israel’s leaders into taking steps against it. Wonderful! But this does not mean that we can rest on our achievements. We have to keep up bds campaigning and to work harder yet to convince performers not to perform in Israel until it changes its ways, and to convince organizations not to invest in Israel, and individuals not to buy its products. We shall yet overcome!
Item 2 is likewise good news. It tells us that 5 of Norway’s largest PR firms have rejected Israel’s plea to embellish its image. Bravo! May PR firms in other countries follow suit.
Item 3 reports on the trials and tribulations of the Palestinian Tourist Ministry to advertise tourism in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Well when you look at maps the past several years Palestine has been wiped off naps, sad to say. Follow the links below the article on item 3 to the UN map and the Israel Road map. No Palestine! One area on the Israel road map does say “occupied,” but it appears to be the South Hebron Hills and Hebron area. All the rest—Bethlehem, Tul Qarem, Ariel, also, and so much more are all in Israel according to the map. More shocking is that the UN has also dropped Palestine from its maps.
Item 4 is not easy to read, and surely must raise doubts in some minds that Israeli soldiers are capable of such acts, and that children can be treated so cruelly just because they are Palestinians. But that’s the way things are, unfortunately. Also, the depiction of Israel’s military courts where the children are taken for trial and verdicts handed down show that one consideration that is absent is justice. Please read this very important depiction and spread widely. The authors, Aya and Tami are thoroughly reliable. Aya, who is petit, about 5-6 years ago tried to stop a soldier at Kalandia checkpoint from shooting a child, and the soldier replied as he pushed her down and aimed, “I’m not going to shoot all of the kids, just that one,” as if that could justify killing a 13 or 12 or 14 year old. Fortunately his life was saved by an officer coming and taking the soldier away before he had a chance to shoot. But the soldier’s act is what happens to people when they see children as ‘enemies’ rather than as children.
In Item 5 David Shulman reviews two books, one by Sari Nusseibeh, the other by Breaking the Silence. I have heard Sari Nusseibeh on several occasions, and find him to be a gentle and intelligent person, but politically naive. For instance, he partnered a two-state ‘solution’ with Ami Ayalon—a man who believes in and promotes the demolition of Palestinian residences as punishment, and believes in the use of force. I could never understand how Sari Nusseibeh could work with such a person. But in the end nothing came of their plan, in any case. The 2nd book relates the testimonies by soldiers of what they did during their years in the OPT. Both books are worth reading. So also is David Shulman’s review of each.
In item 6 Noam Chomsky tells us that “It’s not radical Islam that worries the US – it’s independence.” As if to exhibit the truth of this, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton tonight gave America’s support to Omar Suleiman, who, as director of Egypt’s Intelligence service, could be expected to continue the regime set by Mubarak. Suleiman as head of the government will be the same wine in new bottles.
Item 7, “Exhausted, scared and trapped, protesters put forward plan for future,” is Fisk’s take on the latest events in Egypt.
Still hoping for success for the protesters, that is to say, for a change for the better for all Egyptians.
Dorothy
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1. [forwarded by Ofer N]
From: Hind Awwad
BDS Success: First Ever Knesset Discussion on Combating Cultural Boycott of Israel
Wednesday, 02 February 2011 16:26 Alternative Information Center (AIC)
The power of the Palestinian-led movement to boycott, divest and sanction Israel (BDS) has resulted in yet another first – a discussion of the cultural boycott on 1 February by the Education and Culture Committee of the Knesset.
Musician Elvis Costello is one of many international artists who refuse to perform in Israel
Attended by representatives of the Ministries of Education and Culture, together with Israeli entertainment producers who have been financially harmed by the cultural boycott of Israel, the Education and Culture Committee discussed the topic of the boycott of Israel by international artists.
The chairperson of the committee, MK Alex Miller, of the ultra-right wing Zionist party Yisrael Beitenu, called on the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Culture and Finance to establish an inter-ministerial committee to examine how to protect producers who are harmed by artists who cancel their appearances in Israel for ideological reasons.
The discussion came in response to a wave of artist boycotts in recent months, among them Elvis Costello, Vanessa Paradis, Johnny Depp, Dustin Hoffman, and the Pixies.
The organization Boycott from Within has played a large role in encouraging artists to follow their conscience and not perform in Israel.
“BDS’s non-violent and human rights based campaign urges artists not to put their stamp of approval on Israel’s system of often murderous ethnic discrimination. As such, an international performance in Israel is understood amongst the Israeli public as condoning this reality and making a statement against the necessity to change it,” the group wrote in a letter to singer Macy Gray, explaining the importance of the BDS movement.
“Coming to perform in Israel has become a political act, a statement of support for the state of Israel’s ongoing crimes and human rights violations. It is also an act against a rapidly growing non-violent human-rights based civil society Palestinian movement. The question remains: is this a political act you wish to take part in?” the letter said.
MK Miller announced at the meeting that he, together with MK Ronit Tirosh, of the right-wing Likud party, will be drafting legislation that provides compensation to producers. He also called on the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Culture to construct a joint strategy to deal with the phenomenon of the delegitimisation of Israel in the world of culture.
Eran Sheishon, head of the political-security team of the Reut Institute, said that campaigns must be conducted to encourage consumption of boycotted products by Jewish communities and supporters of Israel – Buycott and not Boycott, reported YNet News.
Israel wants to hire PR firms in 10 countries to improve its reputation, according to Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth. Norwegian PR firms have refused. The assignment is to help the country promote its vision in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as prevent an international boycott of Israeli goods, amongst other things. Each PR agency would receive approximately 20 million kroner annually. Israel has contacted specialists in Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, the Czech Republic and Norway. Five of Norway’s largest PR firms have said ‘no’, reports Dagens Naæringsliv (DN).
israel, osloembassy, aviadivri
“Israel is an highly controversial project,” Sigurd Grytten, Burson-Marsteller’s Managing Director, tells the paper.
Statements by heads of Geelmuyden.Keise, Gambit H&K, Apeland Informasjon, and First House range from “difficult”, to “no comment”. Only Kreab’s Gavin Anderson says he might consider the assignment.
According to DN, 27 Israel-friendly Norwegian MPs believe slanted media coverage of Israel is to blame.
“Press coverage of Israel in Norway is one-sided. There is a discouragingly little talk of Israel as a dynamic and modern society which is among the world’s leaders in technology, science and culture”, says Christian Democratic Party (KrF) MP Hans Olav Syversen, leader for Israel’s friends in Parliament.
He also believes it is because PR agencies fear how their customers would react, expressing surprise at how little independence they display.
“I didn’t think they (generally) shared their clients’ views wholeheartedly.”
Aviad Ivri, Counselor at the Israeli embassy in Oslo, admits Israel faces a considerable challenge.
“It’s no secret that Israel has a reputation problem,” he says.
Published on Friday, 4th February, 2011 at 09:26 under the news category, by Nicoleta-Madlina Sincan.
Last updated on 5th February 2011 at 21:56.
This post has the following tags: israel, osloembassy, aviadivri.
A detail of the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism ad
This holiday season, an advertisement from the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism was attacked for “ignoring” Israel’s existence. The charges of geographical misrepresentation stem from the following lines:
“From the famous cities of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Jericho, Nablus, and Gaza, the Palestinian people welcome you to visit this Holy Land … Palestine lies between the Mediterranean Coast and the Jordan River, at the crossroads between Africa and the Middle East.”
The ad, which ran in National Geographic’s Traveller magazine, resulted in more than sixty complaints being lodged with the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and is now under investigation. As the UK’s Guardian newspaper reported, London lawyer David Lewis wrote a letter to the ASA complaining that “it implies that ‘Palestine’ has a Mediterranean coastline; but while this is true as regards to Gaza, that territory is not within the de facto jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. More seriously, it implies that Palestine occupies the whole or the bulk of the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, ignoring the existence of Israel.” Other commentators objected to the inclusion of Jerusalem as a Palestinian city (“Palestinian holiday ad ‘ignored existence of Israel’,” 10 January 2011).
Last year, two Israeli tourism ads were banned by the ASA for including landmarks from disputed territories, such as the Dome of the Rock. But if the same standards are applied to Palestine — if Palestine is forbidden to include “disputed” territories — then Palestine has little or nothing to advertise. Even the fraction of Palestine under what could be considered “Palestinian control” is under de facto Israeli control due to the occupation, settlements and Israel’s wall in the West Bank. According to Ben White’s Israeli Apartheid, in 2000, only 17 percent of the West Bank was under “full Palestinian control,” and increasing settlement construction over the last decade means there is even less land under such control today. Moreover, the idea of “full Palestinian control” is a delusion, as Palestinians do not have control over the airspace or the population registry, nor do they have the ability to cross boundaries within the occupied territories at will.
By Lewis’s definition, in which only areas under “full Palestinian control” can be considered Palestine, there is no Palestinian land that the Ministry of Tourism can promote. This makes the current trappings of Palestinian statehood, such as the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism, a sham. To “concede” cultural organizations to the Palestinian people as evidence of granting them some degree of self-rule is an empty gesture when they are denied their own territory from which to act as cultural and political authorities. To deny the whole of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism is to deny them to the Palestinian Authority, or any other puppet-government-institution granted to the Palestinians. If the PA is not in control of the occupied territories — and this is the case — how can it be expected to govern the Palestinian people, or negotiate with Israel on equal terms?
The disparity is especially jarring considering that the Government of Israel’s tourism website (www.goisrael.com) does not mention Palestine under the “State of Israel” section or even the “Muslims in Israel” section. When giving a virtual tour, a map pops up in which the West Bank and Gaza Strip are in a slightly different shade but appear to be part of Israel, and the cities of Hebron, Bethlehem and Nablus are highlighted in large letters. There is nothing to indicate that the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, or these cities in particular, do not belong to Israel. The map does not include the names of cities in bordering countries, emphasizing the illusion that Hebron and the others are part of Israel. The boundaries of Israel do not curve inside the West Bank and Gaza, or even follow the line of the wall, which cuts deep into the West Bank, but include the occupied territories completely.
This map is, sadly for Palestinians, less a distortion than an accurate representation of reality in which Israel is the de facto — if not de jure — owner of the entire mass of land, controlled through military occupation, unequal access to natural resources, denial of building permits to Palestinians and limitations on the movements of Palestinians through checkpoints and roadblocks.
The map is also fitting, given that while Palestinians are constantly called upon to recognize Israel as a preexisting condition to any negotiations, Israelis are not expected, prior to negotiations, to recognize Palestine. The Palestinian advertisement was lambasted for its “rejectionism” by the Board of Deputies of British Jews since it did not mention Israel, but the “rejectionist” label should then be applied to the Israeli Ministry of Tourism. (Not to mention the BBC Series Top Gear for the episode in which the stars drove to the Palestinian town of Bethlehem without mentioning “Palestine” or “Palestinians” even once.)
Perhaps a more accurate piece could have run as follows: “Palestine stretches from the Gaza Strip on the Mediterranean Sea to the West Bank on the Jordan River, with the State of Israel in between. However, a wall that is illegal under international law cuts off a large section of the West Bank, and most of the land that is now called Palestine is actually under Israeli military rule. We invite you to East Jerusalem, which is being illegally annexed by Israel. We invite you to Hebron, Bethlehem and Nablus, but please only attempt to travel between these West Bank cities if you are not of Palestinian descent (and preferably not ethnically Arab), as you could be held for hours at checkpoints or denied entry. We should also point out, if we are to represent the land of Palestine honestly, that much of the West Bank is overtaken with Israeli settlements, also considered illegal under international law. You are also invited — as long as you aren’t a Palestinian — to see the tourist sites in nearby Israel, which was ethnically cleansed during its 1948 founding.”
This formulation is clearer, and it mentions Israel. One wonders if Mr. Lewis would object.
Paula Rosine Long is a poet and activist from North Carolina. She is currently a graduate student at Cambridge University in Middle Eastern Studies and is writing her thesis on Edward Said’s role in Palestinian collective memory.
Occupation of the Territories: Israeli Soldier Testimonies 2000–2010
by Breaking the Silence
Jerusalem, 431 pp.,
Sari Nusseibeh, Jerusalem, April 2004
A few weeks ago I was in al-Nabi Salih, a Palestinian village northwest of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. It wasn’t so easy to get there; the Israeli army had closed off the area on every side, and we literally had to crawl through the olive groves, just beneath one of the army’s roadblocks, before we managed to reach the village. Al-Nabi Salih is a troubled place. The large Israeli settlement of Halamish nearby has taken over nearly half of the village lands, including a precious freshwater spring. Most Fridays there are dramatic confrontations between the soldiers and the villagers protesting this land grab and the other difficulties of life under occupation.
Yet the first thing I saw in al-Nabi Salih was a huge sign in Arabic and English: “We Believe in Non-Violence. Do You?” It was World Peace Day, and speaker after speaker reaffirmed a commitment to peace and to nonviolent resistance to the occupation. Particularly eloquent was Ali Abu Awwad, a young activist who runs a new organization, the Palestinian Movement for Non-Violent Resistance, with its offices in Bethlehem and growing influence throughout the occupied territories. “Peace itself is the way to peace,” he said, “and there is no peace without freedom.”1
All of this is, in some ways, rather new in Palestine, although in his latest book the philosopher Sari Nusseibeh, the president of al-Quds University in Jerusalem, traces an earlier stage of organized Palestinian civil disobedience in the popular struggle of the first intifada in 1988 and 1989, in which he had a significant part. In the more recent past, nonviolent resistance in the form of weekly demonstrations and marches has been a mostly local phenomenon, limited to a few villages between Jerusalem and the coastal plain such as Budrus and then more famously Bil’in, and to some extent to a cluster of villages in the Bethlehem area to the south. These demonstrations are invariably violently suppressed by the army with tear gas, rubber-coated bullets, and, quite often, live ammunition. Sometimes they degenerate into clashes, with stone-throwing from the Palestinian side; at other times, as on the day I was in al-Nabi Salih, the demonstrators manage to maintain discipline in the face of the guns.
The army has so far kept these protests from spreading beyond the villages in question—in keeping with the general policy of fragmenting, isolating, and fencing in all Palestinian communities in the territories controlled by Israel. Budrus was a success story—really the only one so far; nonviolent protests by the villagers, with women prominently involved and with the support of Israeli and international activists, forced the army to redraw the path of the separation barrier and to restore the lands initially appropriated by the government.2 Bil’in, in contrast, though it has kept up a weekly protest for some six years now—at the price of many wounded (some critically), hundreds arrested, and two killed3—has been permanently deprived of at least a third of its lands by the construction of the separation barrier despite a decision by the Israeli Supreme Court in favor of the village claims in 2007.4
One of the leaders of the struggle in Bil’in is Abdallah Abu Rahmah, occasionally called the Palestinian Gandhi—an impressive, indeed charismatic man with a proven record of peaceful, courageous resistance to the occupation and the ongoing theft of land. I know him: I had the honor of being arrested together with him when I first came to take part in the Bil’in demonstrations in 2005. He has spent the last twelve months in prison after being arrested and accused by the army of “incitement” and “organizing and participating in illegal protests.”
Protesting the loss of Palestinian land, especially by the disenfranchised owners of the land in question, is, it seems, by definition illegal under the terms of the occupation. By any reasonable standard, the arrest and prosecution of Abu Rahmah, who has been acclaimed throughout the world as an exemplar of nonviolent struggle for human rights, should have set off a wave of outspoken public protest on the part of Israeli academics, artists, public intellectuals, and even ordinary citizens. Nothing like this has happened.5 Abdallah Abu Rahmah’s case was decided on January 11: the military judge accepted the prosecution’s appeal against the “leniency” of the punishment and extended the jail sentence from twelve to sixteen months, so he’s of course still incarcerated. The judgment is available on the Internet in Hebrew, and it’s quite a remarkable document, disheartening to read. On the face of it, the deafening silence about his case within Israel is a mystery.
Such eloquent silence raises the classic question applicable to many such situations of organized oppression imposed by a government from above. Why are ordinary Israelis apathetic to the fate of Abu Rahmah and many others like him?6 Why do they evince no interest in the daily suffering caused by the occupation?
Last July I heard Sari Nusseibeh speak at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities at an evening honoring its retiring president, Menahem Yaari. In itself, the presence of a major Palestinian figure—in this case the president of al-Quds University—at an Israeli academic occasion is not unusual: Israeli scholars were also welcome guests at various Palestinian academic venues until recently, when despair over the Israeli government’s policies prompted some Palestinian institutions, including al-Quds University, to close their doors to most Israeli academics. But both professional and personal links remain strong.
Nusseibeh used the occasion of the academy lecture to deliver a damning indictment of the Israeli academic establishment for its truly astonishing passivity over the past forty-three years of occupation. Although, in general, the government is probably right in seeing the Israeli universities as a natural breeding ground for leftist—that is, liberal and peace-oriented—opinion, Nusseibeh is also right. Like everyone else, Israeli academic intellectuals as a group have failed to mount a sustained and politically effective protest against the occupation and the accompanying colonial project of settling Israelis in the territories. Like most other Israelis, with some notable exceptions, they live within the system and tolerate its misdeeds. The large audience at the academy listened to Nusseibeh’s scathing critique that evening with what seemed to me, for the most part, a stony and impassive silence.
Nusseibeh is a gentle, urbane, reflective man, a philosopher and historian of philosophy (he is an expert on the great medieval Islamic philosopher Ibn Sina) who has, perhaps contrary to his natural disposition, found himself deeply involved in Palestinian politics over many years. He is also a courageous and honest person who does not hold back from his own people his view of what is right.7 I once saw him try to persuade a very hostile Palestinian student at the Hebrew University—in Arabic, and in public—that Palestinians will have to relinquish what is called the right of return in order to reach peace. Some years ago I also heard him deliver another lecture at the Academy of Sciences, no less damning than the one just mentioned, but this time directed against what he sees as negative, narrow-minded, and self-destructive trends among contemporary Arab intellectuals generally.
In 2002 he joined up with Ami Ayalon, the former director of Israel’s General Security Service, the Shin Bet, to advocate a so-called two-state solution based on agreed conditions that today seem axiomatic to a majority on both sides of the conflict: Israel’s retreat to the Green Line border of 1967, a demilitarized Palestine, no right of return to former homes within Israel—which does not exclude compensation for losses—and a divided Jerusalem serving as capital for both Palestine and Israel. Nusseibeh is a Palestinian patriot who, given the developments of the last few years, is no longer at all certain that a separate Palestinian state is worth the effort, as the skeptical title of his new book suggests.
There is, of course, a more general question underlying his title. What is any state actually worth? Is it really something worth killing—or for that matter dying—for? If so, just how many deaths might it be worth? Ten, as in Abraham’s bargain with God? Ten thousand? A million, as in the slogan made famous in the Algerian struggle for independence? Such questions have become pressing in the Palestinian case by the continuing consequences of Palestinian statelessness and by the unacceptable reality of ongoing Israeli occupation. States, says Nusseibeh, are “meta-biological entities”—that is, essentially, fictions that take on a life of their own and all too often end up exacting fatal costs from their citizens, who buy into the concocted vision these entities tend to propound.
Like Hobbes, he thinks that states should be seen as instruments to accomplish practical goals, not metaphysical entities, although he recognizes that they sometimes can, under auspicious circumstances, provide the vehicle for expressing a people’s collective identification with its homeland, its landscapes, memories, and hopes. Nusseibeh is also what we might call a moral optimist: he believes—I am tempted to say, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that history is evolving along a “moral trajectory”; that is, that human beings are slowly getting better and that shared, self-evident universal values, based on the irreducible rights of the individual and “our common sentiment for compassion,” are gradually beginning to transform the world.
The two basic values for any society, he says, are equality and freedom (in that order); he thinks that we can all agree on them and that, once we so agree, they should allow for
peacemakers to break meta- biological barriers: for Israelis and Palestinians to see each other as human beings, and to forge a common fight for the well-being of the two communities.
Does this hopeful vision imply that there will be two states? Not anymore. Nusseibeh sees the two peoples as already, de facto, part of a single political unit between the Jordan River and the sea.
What, then, does he propose for the future of this political unit? He suggests, at least as a thought experiment,
a single-state but electorally non- democratic consensual arrangement, that is, a mutually agreed-upon conferral by Israel of a form of “second-class citizenship” on all Palestinians currently under occupation who wish to accept it.
What this means is that Palestinians would renounce political rights—such as voting for the Knesset and serving in high government office and in the army—but receive basic civil rights: health insurance, social security, freedom of speech and movement, education, legal self-defense, and so on. They would be subjects but not citizens of the joint Israeli-Palestinian entity, which would be owned and run by the Jews. As Nusseibeh notes, there is already in place a precedent for some such arrangement: the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in East Jerusalem have lived like this for the past forty-three years. The advantage is that the present untenable situation, in which a vast Palestinian population lives without basic human rights, will come to an end; and perhaps eventually another, better model will evolve, as happened in South Africa.
Ed Kashi/VII
An Israeli soldier standing guard at a checkpoint in Qalqilya, West Bank, with waiting Palestinians visible in the mirror of a vehicle, June 2003
Nusseibeh’s proposal is clearly meant to challenge the political elites on both sides to think seriously about what lies around the next turn in the road or after the next terrible explosion. Even so, it seems not a little disingenuous. Booker T. Washington famously proposed something rather like it for African-Americans—the so-called Atlanta compromise—in 1895; it was, of course, almost immediately superseded. Can one really separate political from civil rights? Is that what most Palestinians want or need? Practically speaking, were the Palestinian Authority to dissolve itself and demand something along the lines of Nusseibeh’s suggestion, Hamas would surely fill the void that would be created within twenty-four hours. The Hamas leaders are, in fact, ready and waiting for just such an eventuality, as Nusseibeh knows well.
Still, one can easily understand how he, like so many on both sides, has more or less given up on the notion of two states, although at various points in his book he still seems to suggest that the two-state model, were it feasible, would be the optimal solution. Many, both in the peace camp and outside it, think it is simply too late—the extent of Israeli colonization and appropriation of land makes the notion of partition impracticable.
I don’t agree, but I think we are rapidly approaching such a result, and I think the cause is, on one level, entirely clear. It lies in the steadfast reluctance of the Israeli establishment to make a real peace, under any circumstances. What the present government and the Israeli security services clearly want is to continue the occupation under one form or another, maintaining near-total control over the entire Palestinian population. (Whether the Israeli public at large really wants this or not is an open question.)
But surely such a policy, perfected to hitherto unknown levels of mendacity by Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, is irrational and self-defeating, possibly even suicidal, quite apart from being immoral and criminal under international law. Here the mystery deepens. At present, there is on the table—still somehow alive—the Arab League’s peace initiative of 2002, also known as the Saudi initiative, which was reaffirmed at the Riyadh summit in 2007. Anyone who has looked carefully at the written document or listened to what the Arab leaders are saying publicly should have no doubt that this route to peace and normalization should be broadly acceptable to Israel. It calls for an independent Palestinian state, with Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories; a “just solution,” subject to negotiated agreement, to the problem of Palestinian refugees8; and a peace agreement between Israel and the Arab states.
Had the Saudi initiative been offered to David Ben-Gurion in the 1960s, it would have looked like a utopian dream come true. But the plan has never even been discussed at an Israeli cabinet meeting, and Netanyahu’s government has made it clear so far that it will do whatever is necessary to avoid making such a peace with the 250 million or so Arabs surrounding Israel, to say nothing of the millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories and beyond. How are we to explain this stubborn refusal? How is it related to the eerie silence about Palestine I mentioned earlier?
Many Israelis, including those who might acknowledge the accuracy of my description, will readily blame the impasse on the cumulative trauma resulting from Arab, including Palestinian, violence against Jews going back to the beginning of the conflict. There is clearly some truth to this claim, though it does not explain the gratuitous cruelty inflicted by Israel on the Palestinians over the last few decades or the enormous and continuing theft of land that must be seen as the true raison d’être of the occupation. To understand the issue more deeply, it’s crucial to see what the occupation really means on the ground—and, apart from actually spending time in the occupied territories, there is no better way to understand this reality than to read the volume of soldiers’ testimonies just published by the Israeli peace group known as Breaking the Silence, a book, in my view, that is one of the most important published on Israel/Palestine in this generation.
Published in both Hebrew and English but so far only in Jerusalem, Occupation of the Territories: Israeli Soldier Testimonies 2000–2010 documents the everyday miseries of the occupation as seen through the eyes of over a hundred ordinary soldiers who served in the territories and who tell us what they saw and did and heard in the course of their service. Some of them were shocked by their experiences; others report almost nonchalantly, in the rich colloquial Hebrew of the army, as if they were detached from feeling, their sensibilities blunted or anesthetized. They were all part of a vast machine—the occupation system, which includes not only the army units but also the police, the military police, the military courts, government bureaucrats, politicians, and, of course, Israeli settlers—and they almost always followed their orders, including orders that were patently illegal, without protest, indeed even without speaking with one another about the crimes they witnessed or took part in.
You have in the book published by Breaking the Silence an account of the whole sordid business that all Israeli activists see week after week in the territories: the routine use of terror against the Palestinian population as a principle of control; the beatings and shootings and arbitrary arrests; the inventive and pervasive forms of humiliation inflicted on innocents; the expulsions from homes and grazing grounds and fields; the farce of the military courts; the occasional acts of pure sadism on the part of senior officers as well as ordinary soldiers and, in particular, settlers; the violent suppression of nearly all forms of protest, including (especially) nonviolent civil disobedience and peaceful demonstrations; the premeditated irrationality of the Civil Administration, which controls the lives of the occupied population through a bewildering regime of permits and bureaucratic regulations; and, above all, the intimate interweaving of the army units and the settlers, who regularly and freely assume the authority of telling the soldiers what to do (inevitably at the expense of Palestinian civilians).
Some of the most appalling testimonies relate to the years of combat during the second intifada. On the other hand, one could argue that what passes for normalcy under the occupation, as we see it today, is even worse, precisely because of its relentless, daily, dehumanizing grind. Any reader of Occupation of the Territories will soon see how the occupation has become a degrading system of control. I have never accepted Hannah Arendt’s thesis of the banality of evil (or rather, of the evildoer—which is what she meant), but I have observed the workings of the devastating drug of habituation. I have seen how evil, embedded in a ramified, often impersonal system, can be broken down into small, daily acts that, however repugnant at first, rapidly become routine.
Consider the following, chosen more or less at random from Occupation of the Territories:
i>During your service in the territories, what shook you the most?
…There was a thing that they [the IDF soldiers] came to a house and simply demolished it…. The mom watched from the side and cried, the kids sitting with her and stroking her….
What does it mean to wreck a house?
To break the floors, turn over sofas, throw plants and pictures, turn over beds, break closets, tiles…. The looks of people whose house you’ve gone into. It really hurt me to see. And after that, they left them for hours in the school tied up and blindfolded. At four in the afternoon the order came to free them. That was more than 12 hours.
Or this, from a soldier sent to guard the fanatical Israeli settlers in Hebron:
[There are Palestinian kids] who die for no reason, innocent, where settlers go into their homes and shoot at them, and settlers go crazy in the streets and break store windows and beat up soldiers and throw eggs at soldiers and lynch the elderly, all of these things don’t even make it to the media…. The people who live in that [settlers’] neighborhood do whatever they want, the soldiers are forced to protect them. And it exists here in the State of Israel, and no one knows about it…. People prefer not to know and not to understand that something terrible is happening not far from us, and really no one cares.
It is not surprising that there have been efforts within Israel, including by the Foreign Ministry, to silence Breaking the Silence and to dry up the group’s funding, some of which comes from European sources.9 The book is painful, and shameful, to read. It is also, incidentally, eloquent testimony to the remarkable freedom of speech that is, for now at least, still the norm inside Israel. The editors’ conclusion, stated in a mild and careful way (milder than I would have put it), is incontrovertible and worth quoting in full:
While it is true that the Israeli security apparatus has had to deal with concrete threats in the last decade, including terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens, Israeli operations are not solely defensive. Rather, they systematically lead to the de facto annexation of large sections of the West Bank to Israel through the dispossession of Palestinian residents. The widespread notion in Israeli society that the control of the Territories is intended exclusively to protect the security of Israeli citizens is incompatible with the information conveyed by hundreds of IDF soldiers.
One has always to bear in mind that we are dealing with a deeply entrenched system driven by its own internal logic and largely independent of local decisions made by individuals—soldiers, judges, bureaucrats—who are caught up in it, although each such person bears his or her
own measure of responsibility and guilt.
This particular system could not continue to exist without a profound and willful blindness that we Israelis have cultivated for decades, and whose roots undoubtedly predate the existence of the State of Israel itself. I am speaking of blindness not to the existence of millions of Palestinian people—they are there for all to see—but to the full humanity of these people, their natural equality to us, and the parity (at least that, if one can measure such things) between their collective claim to the land and ours. There is also, again, a studied blindness to the cumulative trauma that we Israelis have inflicted upon the Palestinians in the course of realizing our own national goals (and later, in going far beyond any rational conception of such goals).
This is no ordinary blindness; it is a sickness of the soul that takes many forms, from a dull but superficial apathy to the silence and passivity of ordinary, decent people, to the malignant forms of racism and protofascist nationalism that are becoming more and more evident and powerful in today’s Israel, including segments of the present government. I suppose that to acknowledge these facts is too demoralizing, and too laden with potential guilt, for most of us. Often it seems that we will do anything—even risk catastrophic war—to avoid having to look our immediate neighbors in the face, to peel away the mythic mask. Palestinian violence over many years has made it easier for Israelis to make this choice, but it is important to bear in mind that it is, indeed, exactly that, a choice. There is a clear alternative—clearer today than ever before. In the history of this conflict, Israelis have by no means had a monopoly on blindness, but they are the party with by far the largest freedom of action and the greatest potential to bring about serious change.
What does the future hold? Sari Nusseibeh repeatedly expresses his belief that change is possible if people have the self-confidence and faith in themselves to act. He sees his task as an educator to be one of inculcating such faith. And he also describes, in several chapters of his often moving book, a moral basis for political action that can speak to all of us. Like Gandhi, and like Abdallah Abu Rahmah and Ali Abu Awwad, with whom I began, Nusseibeh seeks not to coerce his opponents—in this case the Israeli people along with their political and military institutions—into changing their self-destructive course but to change their will, or their feelings. He wants them to step back from prejudice and an obsession with brute force and to open their eyes. He wants them to find in themselves the generosity of spirit needed in order to take a chance on peace, whether in the form of two states or a single binational entity or, perhaps, some kind of confederation.
Can nonviolent political action have an effect on Israelis? I don’t know. I think a generosity of spirit does exist, somewhere, in the collective, fearful, angry Israeli soul. It might even be hiding under the superficial veil of apathy. Nusseibeh closes his book with a paradoxical observation that he himself characterizes as “astounding.” In a situation like that in Palestine, where there is a vast asymmetry in power, the moral leverage to “draw out the desired attitudinal change in the other party” by the nonviolent exercise of one’s innate freedom, and by holding fast to universal values, belongs to the weaker, not to the stronger, party. Thus
if one defines power as the ability to cause political change to one’s own advantage, it is the Palestinians who hold this power even though (or precisely because) they are being held down by a mighty military force.
Some Palestinians, at least, including the current Palestinian government of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, have clearly internalized this truth and are putting it to use in practical ways. These days, Fayyad uses every public opportunity to announce unequivocally that violence is not an option, no longer a part of the Palestinian repertory. He is, of course, not the only player in the field.
So here is one answer to Sari Nusseibeh’s question. A Palestinian state that emerges from mass nonviolent struggle, clearly occupying the moral high ground, would undoubtedly have intrinsic worth, quite apart from its practical value in solving the tragic anomaly of Palestinian statelessness. But I don’t expect the Palestinian state to emerge like that. Only immense international pressure, on many levels, can bring the Israeli occupation to an end. Still, at this particular moment the Palestinians have a major asset in Israel’s recalcitrance, its steadfast refusal to make peace. Under current international conditions, and despite the continuing suffering on the ground inside the occupied territories, the more foolish, cussed, and destructive Israel becomes, the better for the Palestinian cause. Maybe someday even the US will no longer be able to swallow further humiliation at Israel’s hands and will choose not to exercise its veto in the UN and other international forums on Israel’s behalf.
A Palestinian state, recognized by all the world except for Israel, would, no doubt, be only a step toward an indeterminate future, replete with old and new dangers. Judging by recent statements by right-wing Israeli politicians such as Michael Eitan,10 one such danger is that Israel may (following the Gaza model) eventually retreat from much of the occupied territories without making peace with the new state—probably the worst of all possible outcomes, but one entirely consonant with the collective blindness I have described. I’d like to think the tortured peoples of Israel and Palestine could do better.
—January 27, 2011
For an expanded series of testimonies from Occupation of the Territories, see the author’s blog post, “‘And No One Wants to Know’: Israeli Soldiers on the Occupation,” NYRblog, January 9, 2011 (www.nybooks.com/nyrblog).
—The EditorsFont Size: A A A E-mail Print Share More by David Shulman
What Is a Palestinian State Worth?
by Sari Nusseibeh
Harvard University Press, 248 pp., $19.95
Occupation of the Territories: Israeli Soldier Testimonies 2000–2010
by Breaking the Silence
Jerusalem, 431 pp., available at jfjfp.com/?p=19918
Agostino Pacciani/Anzenberger/Redux
Sari Nusseibeh, Jerusalem, April 2004
A few weeks ago I was in al-Nabi Salih, a Palestinian village northwest of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. It wasn’t so easy to get there; the Israeli army had closed off the area on every side, and we literally had to crawl through the olive groves, just beneath one of the army’s roadblocks, before we managed to reach the village. Al-Nabi Salih is a troubled place. The large Israeli settlement of Halamish nearby has taken over nearly half of the village lands, including a precious freshwater spring. Most Fridays there are dramatic confrontations between the soldiers and the villagers protesting this land grab and the other difficulties of life under occupation.
Yet the first thing I saw in al-Nabi Salih was a huge sign in Arabic and English: “We Believe in Non-Violence. Do You?” It was World Peace Day, and speaker after speaker reaffirmed a commitment to peace and to nonviolent resistance to the occupation. Particularly eloquent was Ali Abu Awwad, a young activist who runs a new organization, the Palestinian Movement for Non-Violent Resistance, with its offices in Bethlehem and growing influence throughout the occupied territories. “Peace itself is the way to peace,” he said, “and there is no peace without freedom.”1
All of this is, in some ways, rather new in Palestine, although in his latest book the philosopher Sari Nusseibeh, the president of al-Quds University in Jerusalem, traces an earlier stage of organized Palestinian civil disobedience in the popular struggle of the first intifada in 1988 and 1989, in which he had a significant part. In the more recent past, nonviolent resistance in the form of weekly demonstrations and marches has been a mostly local phenomenon, limited to a few villages between Jerusalem and the coastal plain such as Budrus and then more famously Bil’in, and to some extent to a cluster of villages in the Bethlehem area to the south. These demonstrations are invariably violently suppressed by the army with tear gas, rubber-coated bullets, and, quite often, live ammunition. Sometimes they degenerate into clashes, with stone-throwing from the Palestinian side; at other times, as on the day I was in al-Nabi Salih, the demonstrators manage to maintain discipline in the face of the guns.
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The army has so far kept these protests from spreading beyond the villages in question—in keeping with the general policy of fragmenting, isolating, and fencing in all Palestinian communities in the territories controlled by Israel. Budrus was a success story—really the only one so far; nonviolent protests by the villagers, with women prominently involved and with the support of Israeli and international activists, forced the army to redraw the path of the separation barrier and to restore the lands initially appropriated by the government.2 Bil’in, in contrast, though it has kept up a weekly protest for some six years now—at the price of many wounded (some critically), hundreds arrested, and two killed3—has been permanently deprived of at least a third of its lands by the construction of the separation barrier despite a decision by the Israeli Supreme Court in favor of the village claims in 2007.4
One of the leaders of the struggle in Bil’in is Abdallah Abu Rahmah, occasionally called the Palestinian Gandhi—an impressive, indeed charismatic man with a proven record of peaceful, courageous resistance to the occupation and the ongoing theft of land. I know him: I had the honor of being arrested together with him when I first came to take part in the Bil’in demonstrations in 2005. He has spent the last twelve months in prison after being arrested and accused by the army of “incitement” and “organizing and participating in illegal protests.”
Protesting the loss of Palestinian land, especially by the disenfranchised owners of the land in question, is, it seems, by definition illegal under the terms of the occupation. By any reasonable standard, the arrest and prosecution of Abu Rahmah, who has been acclaimed throughout the world as an exemplar of nonviolent struggle for human rights, should have set off a wave of outspoken public protest on the part of Israeli academics, artists, public intellectuals, and even ordinary citizens. Nothing like this has happened.5 Abdallah Abu Rahmah’s case was decided on January 11: the military judge accepted the prosecution’s appeal against the “leniency” of the punishment and extended the jail sentence from twelve to sixteen months, so he’s of course still incarcerated. The judgment is available on the Internet in Hebrew, and it’s quite a remarkable document, disheartening to read. On the face of it, the deafening silence about his case within Israel is a mystery.
Such eloquent silence raises the classic question applicable to many such situations of organized oppression imposed by a government from above. Why are ordinary Israelis apathetic to the fate of Abu Rahmah and many others like him?6 Why do they evince no interest in the daily suffering caused by the occupation?
Last July I heard Sari Nusseibeh speak at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities at an evening honoring its retiring president, Menahem Yaari. In itself, the presence of a major Palestinian figure—in this case the president of al-Quds University—at an Israeli academic occasion is not unusual: Israeli scholars were also welcome guests at various Palestinian academic venues until recently, when despair over the Israeli government’s policies prompted some Palestinian institutions, including al-Quds University, to close their doors to most Israeli academics. But both professional and personal links remain strong.
Nusseibeh used the occasion of the academy lecture to deliver a damning indictment of the Israeli academic establishment for its truly astonishing passivity over the past forty-three years of occupation. Although, in general, the government is probably right in seeing the Israeli universities as a natural breeding ground for leftist—that is, liberal and peace-oriented—opinion, Nusseibeh is also right. Like everyone else, Israeli academic intellectuals as a group have failed to mount a sustained and politically effective protest against the occupation and the accompanying colonial project of settling Israelis in the territories. Like most other Israelis, with some notable exceptions, they live within the system and tolerate its misdeeds. The large audience at the academy listened to Nusseibeh’s scathing critique that evening with what seemed to me, for the most part, a stony and impassive silence.
Nusseibeh is a gentle, urbane, reflective man, a philosopher and historian of philosophy (he is an expert on the great medieval Islamic philosopher Ibn Sina) who has, perhaps contrary to his natural disposition, found himself deeply involved in Palestinian politics over many years. He is also a courageous and honest person who does not hold back from his own people his view of what is right.7 I once saw him try to persuade a very hostile Palestinian student at the Hebrew University—in Arabic, and in public—that Palestinians will have to relinquish what is called the right of return in order to reach peace. Some years ago I also heard him deliver another lecture at the Academy of Sciences, no less damning than the one just mentioned, but this time directed against what he sees as negative, narrow-minded, and self-destructive trends among contemporary Arab intellectuals generally.
In 2002 he joined up with Ami Ayalon, the former director of Israel’s General Security Service, the Shin Bet, to advocate a so-called two-state solution based on agreed conditions that today seem axiomatic to a majority on both sides of the conflict: Israel’s retreat to the Green Line border of 1967, a demilitarized Palestine, no right of return to former homes within Israel—which does not exclude compensation for losses—and a divided Jerusalem serving as capital for both Palestine and Israel. Nusseibeh is a Palestinian patriot who, given the developments of the last few years, is no longer at all certain that a separate Palestinian state is worth the effort, as the skeptical title of his new book suggests.
There is, of course, a more general question underlying his title. What is any state actually worth? Is it really something worth killing—or for that matter dying—for? If so, just how many deaths might it be worth? Ten, as in Abraham’s bargain with God? Ten thousand? A million, as in the slogan made famous in the Algerian struggle for independence? Such questions have become pressing in the Palestinian case by the continuing consequences of Palestinian statelessness and by the unacceptable reality of ongoing Israeli occupation. States, says Nusseibeh, are “meta-biological entities”—that is, essentially, fictions that take on a life of their own and all too often end up exacting fatal costs from their citizens, who buy into the concocted vision these entities tend to propound.
Like Hobbes, he thinks that states should be seen as instruments to accomplish practical goals, not metaphysical entities, although he recognizes that they sometimes can, under auspicious circumstances, provide the vehicle for expressing a people’s collective identification with its homeland, its landscapes, memories, and hopes. Nusseibeh is also what we might call a moral optimist: he believes—I am tempted to say, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that history is evolving along a “moral trajectory”; that is, that human beings are slowly getting better and that shared, self-evident universal values, based on the irreducible rights of the individual and “our common sentiment for compassion,” are gradually beginning to transform the world.
The two basic values for any society, he says, are equality and freedom (in that order); he thinks that we can all agree on them and that, once we so agree, they should allow for
peacemakers to break meta- biological barriers: for Israelis and Palestinians to see each other as human beings, and to forge a common fight for the well-being of the two communities.
Does this hopeful vision imply that there will be two states? Not anymore. Nusseibeh sees the two peoples as already, de facto, part of a single political unit between the Jordan River and the sea.
What, then, does he propose for the future of this political unit? He suggests, at least as a thought experiment,
a single-state but electorally non- democratic consensual arrangement, that is, a mutually agreed-upon conferral by Israel of a form of “second-class citizenship” on all Palestinians currently under occupation who wish to accept it.
What this means is that Palestinians would renounce political rights—such as voting for the Knesset and serving in high government office and in the army—but receive basic civil rights: health insurance, social security, freedom of speech and movement, education, legal self-defense, and so on. They would be subjects but not citizens of the joint Israeli-Palestinian entity, which would be owned and run by the Jews. As Nusseibeh notes, there is already in place a precedent for some such arrangement: the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in East Jerusalem have lived like this for the past forty-three years. The advantage is that the present untenable situation, in which a vast Palestinian population lives without basic human rights, will come to an end; and perhaps eventually another, better model will evolve, as happened in South Africa.
Ed Kashi/VII
An Israeli soldier standing guard at a checkpoint in Qalqilya, West Bank, with waiting Palestinians visible in the mirror of a vehicle, June 2003
Nusseibeh’s proposal is clearly meant to challenge the political elites on both sides to think seriously about what lies around the next turn in the road or after the next terrible explosion. Even so, it seems not a little disingenuous. Booker T. Washington famously proposed something rather like it for African-Americans—the so-called Atlanta compromise—in 1895; it was, of course, almost immediately superseded. Can one really separate political from civil rights? Is that what most Palestinians want or need? Practically speaking, were the Palestinian Authority to dissolve itself and demand something along the lines of Nusseibeh’s suggestion, Hamas would surely fill the void that would be created within twenty-four hours. The Hamas leaders are, in fact, ready and waiting for just such an eventuality, as Nusseibeh knows well.
Still, one can easily understand how he, like so many on both sides, has more or less given up on the notion of two states, although at various points in his book he still seems to suggest that the two-state model, were it feasible, would be the optimal solution. Many, both in the peace camp and outside it, think it is simply too late—the extent of Israeli colonization and appropriation of land makes the notion of partition impracticable.
I don’t agree, but I think we are rapidly approaching such a result, and I think the cause is, on one level, entirely clear. It lies in the steadfast reluctance of the Israeli establishment to make a real peace, under any circumstances. What the present government and the Israeli security services clearly want is to continue the occupation under one form or another, maintaining near-total control over the entire Palestinian population. (Whether the Israeli public at large really wants this or not is an open question.)
But surely such a policy, perfected to hitherto unknown levels of mendacity by Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, is irrational and self-defeating, possibly even suicidal, quite apart from being immoral and criminal under international law. Here the mystery deepens. At present, there is on the table—still somehow alive—the Arab League’s peace initiative of 2002, also known as the Saudi initiative, which was reaffirmed at the Riyadh summit in 2007. Anyone who has looked carefully at the written document or listened to what the Arab leaders are saying publicly should have no doubt that this route to peace and normalization should be broadly acceptable to Israel. It calls for an independent Palestinian state, with Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories; a “just solution,” subject to negotiated agreement, to the problem of Palestinian refugees8; and a peace agreement between Israel and the Arab states.
Had the Saudi initiative been offered to David Ben-Gurion in the 1960s, it would have looked like a utopian dream come true. But the plan has never even been discussed at an Israeli cabinet meeting, and Netanyahu’s government has made it clear so far that it will do whatever is necessary to avoid making such a peace with the 250 million or so Arabs surrounding Israel, to say nothing of the millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories and beyond. How are we to explain this stubborn refusal? How is it related to the eerie silence about Palestine I mentioned earlier?
Many Israelis, including those who might acknowledge the accuracy of my description, will readily blame the impasse on the cumulative trauma resulting from Arab, including Palestinian, violence against Jews going back to the beginning of the conflict. There is clearly some truth to this claim, though it does not explain the gratuitous cruelty inflicted by Israel on the Palestinians over the last few decades or the enormous and continuing theft of land that must be seen as the true raison d’être of the occupation. To understand the issue more deeply, it’s crucial to see what the occupation really means on the ground—and, apart from actually spending time in the occupied territories, there is no better way to understand this reality than to read the volume of soldiers’ testimonies just published by the Israeli peace group known as Breaking the Silence, a book, in my view, that is one of the most important published on Israel/Palestine in this generation.
Published in both Hebrew and English but so far only in Jerusalem, Occupation of the Territories: Israeli Soldier Testimonies 2000–2010 documents the everyday miseries of the occupation as seen through the eyes of over a hundred ordinary soldiers who served in the territories and who tell us what they saw and did and heard in the course of their service. Some of them were shocked by their experiences; others report almost nonchalantly, in the rich colloquial Hebrew of the army, as if they were detached from feeling, their sensibilities blunted or anesthetized. They were all part of a vast machine—the occupation system, which includes not only the army units but also the police, the military police, the military courts, government bureaucrats, politicians, and, of course, Israeli settlers—and they almost always followed their orders, including orders that were patently illegal, without protest, indeed even without speaking with one another about the crimes they witnessed or took part in.
You have in the book published by Breaking the Silence an account of the whole sordid business that all Israeli activists see week after week in the territories: the routine use of terror against the Palestinian population as a principle of control; the beatings and shootings and arbitrary arrests; the inventive and pervasive forms of humiliation inflicted on innocents; the expulsions from homes and grazing grounds and fields; the farce of the military courts; the occasional acts of pure sadism on the part of senior officers as well as ordinary soldiers and, in particular, settlers; the violent suppression of nearly all forms of protest, including (especially) nonviolent civil disobedience and peaceful demonstrations; the premeditated irrationality of the Civil Administration, which controls the lives of the occupied population through a bewildering regime of permits and bureaucratic regulations; and, above all, the intimate interweaving of the army units and the settlers, who regularly and freely assume the authority of telling the soldiers what to do (inevitably at the expense of Palestinian civilians).
Some of the most appalling testimonies relate to the years of combat during the second intifada. On the other hand, one could argue that what passes for normalcy under the occupation, as we see it today, is even worse, precisely because of its relentless, daily, dehumanizing grind. Any reader of Occupation of the Territories will soon see how the occupation has become a degrading system of control. I have never accepted Hannah Arendt’s thesis of the banality of evil (or rather, of the evildoer—which is what she meant), but I have observed the workings of the devastating drug of habituation. I have seen how evil, embedded in a ramified, often impersonal system, can be broken down into small, daily acts that, however repugnant at first, rapidly become routine.
Consider the following, chosen more or less at random from Occupation of the Territories:
i>During your service in the territories, what shook you the most?
…There was a thing that they [the IDF soldiers] came to a house and simply demolished it…. The mom watched from the side and cried, the kids sitting with her and stroking her….
What does it mean to wreck a house?
To break the floors, turn over sofas, throw plants and pictures, turn over beds, break closets, tiles…. The looks of people whose house you’ve gone into. It really hurt me to see. And after that, they left them for hours in the school tied up and blindfolded. At four in the afternoon the order came to free them. That was more than 12 hours.
Or this, from a soldier sent to guard the fanatical Israeli settlers in Hebron:
[There are Palestinian kids] who die for no reason, innocent, where settlers go into their homes and shoot at them, and settlers go crazy in the streets and break store windows and beat up soldiers and throw eggs at soldiers and lynch the elderly, all of these things don’t even make it to the media…. The people who live in that [settlers’] neighborhood do whatever they want, the soldiers are forced to protect them. And it exists here in the State of Israel, and no one knows about it…. People prefer not to know and not to understand that something terrible is happening not far from us, and really no one cares.
It is not surprising that there have been efforts within Israel, including by the Foreign Ministry, to silence Breaking the Silence and to dry up the group’s funding, some of which comes from European sources.9 The book is painful, and shameful, to read. It is also, incidentally, eloquent testimony to the remarkable freedom of speech that is, for now at least, still the norm inside Israel. The editors’ conclusion, stated in a mild and careful way (milder than I would have put it), is incontrovertible and worth quoting in full:
While it is true that the Israeli security apparatus has had to deal with concrete threats in the last decade, including terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens, Israeli operations are not solely defensive. Rather, they systematically lead to the de facto annexation of large sections of the West Bank to Israel through the dispossession of Palestinian residents. The widespread notion in Israeli society that the control of the Territories is intended exclusively to protect the security of Israeli citizens is incompatible with the information conveyed by hundreds of IDF soldiers.
One has always to bear in mind that we are dealing with a deeply entrenched system driven by its own internal logic and largely independent of local decisions made by individuals—soldiers, judges, bureaucrats—who are caught up in it, although each such person bears his or her
own measure of responsibility and guilt.
This particular system could not continue to exist without a profound and willful blindness that we Israelis have cultivated for decades, and whose roots undoubtedly predate the existence of the State of Israel itself. I am speaking of blindness not to the existence of millions of Palestinian people—they are there for all to see—but to the full humanity of these people, their natural equality to us, and the parity (at least that, if one can measure such things) between their collective claim to the land and ours. There is also, again, a studied blindness to the cumulative trauma that we Israelis have inflicted upon the Palestinians in the course of realizing our own national goals (and later, in going far beyond any rational conception of such goals).
This is no ordinary blindness; it is a sickness of the soul that takes many forms, from a dull but superficial apathy to the silence and passivity of ordinary, decent people, to the malignant forms of racism and protofascist nationalism that are becoming more and more evident and powerful in today’s Israel, including segments of the present government. I suppose that to acknowledge these facts is too demoralizing, and too laden with potential guilt, for most of us. Often it seems that we will do anything—even risk catastrophic war—to avoid having to look our immediate neighbors in the face, to peel away the mythic mask. Palestinian violence over many years has made it easier for Israelis to make this choice, but it is important to bear in mind that it is, indeed, exactly that, a choice. There is a clear alternative—clearer today than ever before. In the history of this conflict, Israelis have by no means had a monopoly on blindness, but they are the party with by far the largest freedom of action and the greatest potential to bring about serious change.
What does the future hold? Sari Nusseibeh repeatedly expresses his belief that change is possible if people have the self-confidence and faith in themselves to act. He sees his task as an educator to be one of inculcating such faith. And he also describes, in several chapters of his often moving book, a moral basis for political action that can speak to all of us. Like Gandhi, and like Abdallah Abu Rahmah and Ali Abu Awwad, with whom I began, Nusseibeh seeks not to coerce his opponents—in this case the Israeli people along with their political and military institutions—into changing their self-destructive course but to change their will, or their feelings. He wants them to step back from prejudice and an obsession with brute force and to open their eyes. He wants them to find in themselves the generosity of spirit needed in order to take a chance on peace, whether in the form of two states or a single binational entity or, perhaps, some kind of confederation.
Can nonviolent political action have an effect on Israelis? I don’t know. I think a generosity of spirit does exist, somewhere, in the collective, fearful, angry Israeli soul. It might even be hiding under the superficial veil of apathy. Nusseibeh closes his book with a paradoxical observation that he himself characterizes as “astounding.” In a situation like that in Palestine, where there is a vast asymmetry in power, the moral leverage to “draw out the desired attitudinal change in the other party” by the nonviolent exercise of one’s innate freedom, and by holding fast to universal values, belongs to the weaker, not to the stronger, party. Thus
if one defines power as the ability to cause political change to one’s own advantage, it is the Palestinians who hold this power even though (or precisely because) they are being held down by a mighty military force.
Some Palestinians, at least, including the current Palestinian government of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, have clearly internalized this truth and are putting it to use in practical ways. These days, Fayyad uses every public opportunity to announce unequivocally that violence is not an option, no longer a part of the Palestinian repertory. He is, of course, not the only player in the field.
So here is one answer to Sari Nusseibeh’s question. A Palestinian state that emerges from mass nonviolent struggle, clearly occupying the moral high ground, would undoubtedly have intrinsic worth, quite apart from its practical value in solving the tragic anomaly of Palestinian statelessness. But I don’t expect the Palestinian state to emerge like that. Only immense international pressure, on many levels, can bring the Israeli occupation to an end. Still, at this particular moment the Palestinians have a major asset in Israel’s recalcitrance, its steadfast refusal to make peace. Under current international conditions, and despite the continuing suffering on the ground inside the occupied territories, the more foolish, cussed, and destructive Israel becomes, the better for the Palestinian cause. Maybe someday even the US will no longer be able to swallow further humiliation at Israel’s hands and will choose not to exercise its veto in the UN and other international forums on Israel’s behalf.
A Palestinian state, recognized by all the world except for Israel, would, no doubt, be only a step toward an indeterminate future, replete with old and new dangers. Judging by recent statements by right-wing Israeli politicians such as Michael Eitan,10 one such danger is that Israel may (following the Gaza model) eventually retreat from much of the occupied territories without making peace with the new state—probably the worst of all possible outcomes, but one entirely consonant with the collective blindness I have described. I’d like to think the tortured peoples of Israel and Palestine could do better.
—January 27, 2011
For an expanded series of testimonies from Occupation of the Territories, see the author’s blog post, “‘And No One Wants to Know’: Israeli Soldiers on the Occupation,” NYRblog, January 9, 2011 (www.nybooks.com/nyrblog).
—The Editors
======================
6. The Guardian,
4 February 2011
America It’s not radical Islam that worries the US – it’s independence
The nature of any regime it backs in the Arab world is secondary to control. Subjects are ignored until they break their chains
‘The Arab world is on fire,” al-Jazeera reported last week, while throughout the region, western allies “are quickly losing their influence”. The shock wave was set in motion by the dramatic uprising in Tunisia that drove out a western-backed dictator, with reverberations especially in Egypt, where demonstrators overwhelmed a dictator’s brutal police.
Observers compared it to the toppling of Russian domains in 1989, but there are important differences. Crucially, no Mikhail Gorbachev exists among the great powers that support the Arab dictators. Rather, Washington and its allies keep to the well-established principle that democracy is acceptable only insofar as it conforms to strategic and economic objectives: fine in enemy territory (up to a point), but not in our backyard, please, unless properly tamed.
One 1989 comparison has some validity: Romania, where Washington maintained its support for Nicolae Ceausescu, the most vicious of the east European dictators, until the allegiance became untenable. Then Washington hailed his overthrow while the past was erased. That is a standard pattern: Ferdinand Marcos, Jean-Claude Duvalier, Chun Doo-hwan, Suharto and many other useful gangsters. It may be under way in the case of Hosni Mubarak, along with routine efforts to try to ensure a successor regime will not veer far from the approved path. The current hope appears to be Mubarak loyalist General Omar Suleiman, just named Egypt’s vice-president. Suleiman, the longtime head of the intelligence services, is despised by the rebelling public almost as much as the dictator himself.
A common refrain among pundits is that fear of radical Islam requires (reluctant) opposition to democracy on pragmatic grounds. While not without some merit, the formulation is misleading. The general threat has always been independence. The US and its allies have regularly supported radical Islamists, sometimes to prevent the threat of secular nationalism.
A familiar example is Saudi Arabia, the ideological centre of radical Islam (and of Islamic terror). Another in a long list is Zia ul-Haq, the most brutal of Pakistan’s dictators and President Reagan’s favorite, who carried out a programme of radical Islamisation (with Saudi funding).
“The traditional argument put forward in and out of the Arab world is that there is nothing wrong, everything is under control,” says Marwan Muasher, a former Jordanian official and now director of Middle East research for the Carnegie Endowment. “With this line of thinking, entrenched forces argue that opponents and outsiders calling for reform are exaggerating the conditions on the ground.”
Therefore the public can be dismissed. The doctrine traces far back and generalises worldwide, to US home territory as well. In the event of unrest, tactical shifts may be necessary, but always with an eye to reasserting control.
The vibrant democracy movement in Tunisia was directed against “a police state, with little freedom of expression or association, and serious human rights problems”, ruled by a dictator whose family was hated for their venality. So said US ambassador Robert Godec in a July 2009 cable released by WikiLeaks.
Therefore to some observers the WikiLeaks “documents should create a comforting feeling among the American public that officials aren’t asleep at the switch” – indeed, that the cables are so supportive of US policies that it is almost as if Obama is leaking them himself (or so Jacob Heilbrunn writes in The National Interest.)
“America should give Assange a medal,” says a headline in the Financial Times, where Gideon Rachman writes: “America’s foreign policy comes across as principled, intelligent and pragmatic … the public position taken by the US on any given issue is usually the private position as well.”
In this view, WikiLeaks undermines “conspiracy theorists” who question the noble motives Washington proclaims.
Godec’s cable supports these judgments – at least if we look no further. If we do,, as foreign policy analyst Stephen Zunes reports in Foreign Policy in Focus, we find that, with Godec’s information in hand, Washington provided $12m in military aid to Tunisia. As it happens, Tunisia was one of only five foreign beneficiaries: Israel (routinely); the two Middle East dictatorships Egypt and Jordan; and Colombia, which has long had the worst human-rights record and the most US military aid in the hemisphere.
Heilbrunn’s exhibit A is Arab support for US policies targeting Iran, revealed by leaked cables. Rachman too seizes on this example, as did the media generally, hailing these encouraging revelations. The reactions illustrate how profound is the contempt for democracy in the educated culture.
Unmentioned is what the population thinks – easily discovered. According to polls released by the Brookings Institution in August, some Arabs agree with Washington and western commentators that Iran is a threat: 10%. In contrast, they regard the US and Israel as the major threats (77%; 88%).
Arab opinion is so hostile to Washington’s policies that a majority (57%) think regional security would be enhanced if Iran had nuclear weapons. Still, “there is nothing wrong, everything is under control” (as Muasher describes the prevailing fantasy). The dictators support us. Their subjects can be ignored – unless they break their chains, and then policy must be adjusted.
Other leaks also appear to lend support to the enthusiastic judgments about Washington’s nobility. In July 2009, Hugo Llorens, U.S. ambassador to Honduras, informed Washington of an embassy investigation of “legal and constitutional issues surrounding the 28 June forced removal of President Manuel ‘Mel’ Zelaya.”
The embassy concluded that “there is no doubt that the military, supreme court and national congress conspired on 28 June in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the executive branch”. Very admirable, except that President Obama proceeded to break with almost all of Latin America and Europe by supporting the coup regime and dismissing subsequent atrocities.
Perhaps the most remarkable WikiLeaks revelations have to do with Pakistan, reviewed by foreign policy analyst Fred Branfman in Truthdig.
The cables reveal that the US embassy is well aware that Washington’s war in Afghanistan and Pakistan not only intensifies rampant anti-Americanism but also “risks destabilising the Pakistani state” and even raises a threat of the ultimate nightmare: that nuclear weapons might fall into the hands of Islamic terrorists.
Again, the revelations “should create a comforting feeling … that officials are not asleep at the switch” (Heilbrunn’s words) – while Washington marches stalwartly toward disaster.
On a day of drama and confusion in Cairo, opponents of the Mubarak regime propose a new kind of politics.
Caged yesterday inside a new army cordon of riot-visored troops and coils of barbed wire – the very protection which Washington had demanded for the protesters of Tahrir Square – the tens of thousands of young Egyptians demanding Hosni Mubarak’s overthrow have taken the first concrete political steps to create a new nation to replace the corrupt government which has ruled them for 30 years.
Sitting on filthy pavements, amid the garbage and broken stones of a week of street fighting, they have drawn up a list of 25 political personalities to negotiate for a new political leadership and a new constitution to replace Mubarak’s crumbling regime.
They include Amr Moussa, the secretary general of the Arab League – himself a trusted Egyptian; the Nobel prize-winner Ahmed Zuwail, an Egyptian-American who has advised President Barack Obama; Mohamed Selim Al-Awa, a professor and author of Islamic studies who is close to the Muslim Brotherhood; and the president of the Wafd party, Said al-Badawi.
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Other nominees for the committee, which was supposed to meet the Egyptian Vice-President, Omar Suleiman, within 24 hours, are Nagib Suez, a prominent Cairo businessman (involved in the very mobile phone systems shut down by Mubarak last week); Nabil al-Arabi, an Egyptian UN delegate; and even the heart surgeon Magdi Yacoub, who now lives in Cairo.
The selection – and the makeshift committee of Tahrir Square demonstrators and Facebook and Twitter “electors” – has not been confirmed, but it marks the first serious attempt to turn the massive street protests of the past seven days into a political machine that provides for a future beyond the overthrow of the much-hated President. The committee’s first tasks would be to draw up a new Egyptian constitution and an electoral system that would prevent the president-for-life swindle which Mubarak’s fraudulent elections have created. Instead, Egyptian presidents would be limited to two consecutive terms of office, and the presidential term itself would be reduced from six to four years.
But no one involved in this initiative has any doubts of the grim future that awaits them if their brave foray into practical politics fails. There was more sniping into Tahrir Square during the night – an engineer, a lawyer and another young man were killed – and plain-clothes police were again discovered in the square. There were further minor stone-throwing battles during the day, despite the vastly increased military presence, and most of the protesters fear that if they leave the square they will immediately be arrested, along with their families, by Mubarak’s cruel state security apparatus.
Already, there are dark reports of demonstrators who dared to return home and disappeared. The Egyptian writer Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, who is involved in the committee discussions, is fearful for himself. “We’re safe as long as we have the square,” he said to me yesterday, urging me to publish his name as a symbol of the freedom he demands. “If we lose the square, Mubarak will arrest all the opposition groups – and there will be police rule as never before. That’s why we are fighting for our lives.”
The state security police now have long lists of names of protesters who have given television interviews or been quoted in newspapers, Facebook postings and tweets.
The protesters have identified growing divisions between the Egyptian army and the thugs of the interior ministry, whose guards exchanged fire with soldiers three days ago as they continued to occupy the building in which basement torture chambers remain undamaged by the street fighting. These were the same rooms of horror to which America’s “renditioned” prisoners were sent for “special” treatment at the hands of Mubarak’s more sadistic torturers – another favour which bound the Egyptian regime to the United States as a “trusted” ally.
Another young man involved in the committee selections admitted he didn’t trust Omar Suleiman, the former spy boss and Israeli-Palestinian negotiator whom Mubarak appointed this week. Suleiman it is, by the way, who has been trying to shuffle responsibility for the entire crisis on to the foreign press – a vicious as well as dishonest way of exercising his first days of power. Yet he has cleverly outmanoeuvred the demonstrators in Tahrir Square by affording them army protection.
Indeed, yesterday morning, to the shock of all of us standing on the western side of the square, a convoy of 4x4s with blackened windows suddenly emerged from the gardens of the neighbouring Egyptian Museum, slithered to a halt in front of us and was immediately surrounded by a praetorian guard of red-bereted soldiers and massive – truly gigantic – security guards in shades and holding rifles with telescopic sights. Then, from the middle vehicle emerged the diminutive, bespectacled figure of Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the chief of staff of the Egyptian army and a lifelong friend of Mubarak, wearing a soft green military kepi and general’s cross-swords insignia on his shoulders.
Here was a visitor to take the breath away, waving briefly to the protesters who crowded the military cordon to witness this extraordinary arrival. The crowd roared. “The Egyptian army is our army,” they shouted in unison. “But Mubarak is not ours.” It was a message for Tantawi to take back to his friend Mubarak, but his visit was itself a powerful political symbol. However much Mubarak may rave about “foreign hands” behind the demands for his overthrow, and however many lies Suleiman may tell about foreign journalists, Tantawi was showing that the army took its mission to protect the demonstrators seriously. The recent military statement that it would never fire on those who wish to dethrone Mubarak, since their grievances were “legitimate”, was authorised by Tantawi. Hence the demonstrators’ belief – however naïve and dangerous – in the integrity of the military.
Crucially missing from the list of figures proposed for the committee are Mohamed ElBaradei, the former UN arms inspectors and Nobel laureate, and members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the “Islamist” spectre which Mubarak and the Israelis always dangled in front of the Americans to persuade them to keep old Mubarak in power. The Brotherhood’s insistence in not joining talks until Mubarak’s departure – and their support for ElBaradei, whose own faint presidential ambitions (of the “transitional” kind) have not commended themselves to the protesters – effectively excluded them. Suleiman has archly invited the Brotherhood to meet him, knowing that they will not do so until Mubarak has gone.
But al-Awa’s proposed presence on the committee – and that of the Islamist intellectual Ahmed Kamel Abu Magd – will ensure that their views are included in any discussions with Suleiman. These talks would also cover civil and constitutional rights and a special clause to allow Suleiman to rule Egypt temporarily because “the President is unable to perform his duties”.
Mubarak would be allowed to live privately in Egypt providing he played no part – publicly or covertly – in the political life of the country. He is regarded as a still-fierce opponent who will not hesitate to decapitate the opposition should he hang on to power.
“He is one of the old school, like Saddam and Arafat, who in the last two days has shown his true face,” another committee supporter said yesterday. “He is the man behind the attacks on us and the shooting deaths.” Mohamed Fahmy knows what this means. His own father has been in exile from Egypt for seven years – after proposing identical protests to those witnessed today to get rid of the Mubarak empire.
Egypt’s day in brief
Curfew shortened
Cairo’s curfew has been reduced by three hours. People must be off the streets between 7pm and 6am instead of 5pm and 7am.
Al Jazeera offices torched
The Cairo offices of Al Jazeera were stormed and set alight. The broadcaster blamed supporters of President Mubarak for trying to hinder its coverage, adding that its website was also hacked. Last week, authorities closed the office and revoked credentials of its reporters.
Egypt economy slumps
Egypt’s economy has lost at least $3.1bn due to the crisis, investment bank Crédit Agricole said yesterday. The unrest has closed businesses and banks, and thousands of tourists have fled. The bank said the crisis is costing Egypt at least $310m per day, and said the Egyptian pound could depreciate by 20 per cent.
Obama criticises intelligence
President Obama sent a note bemoaning failure of US intelligence to predict crises in Tunisia and Egypt, AP reported.
What happens next?
Mubarak flees
If the President decides that the voices calling for his arrest, trial and even execution are gaining sway at the highest levels, he could take advantage of the rumoured offers of asylum, and disappear. But this is the least likely possibility. If he was ready to go, he would most likely have done so already, when the seriousness of the protests first became clear. His speech this week showed he was determined to go on his own terms.
Negotiated departure
The preferred solution of the Western powers, in particular the US, which has been leading demands that “an orderly transition must begin now”. For Mr Mubarak to agree he would have to be convinced that he would be able to step down in a “dignified” fashion. The most likely catalyst will be the senior echelons of the army, especially now that Mr Mubarak has given the US short shrift. If he were to go, his Vice-President, Omar Suleiman, would take charge of a transitional government, including opposition elements, ahead of new elections.
Protests fizzle out
Some supporters of Mr Mubarak will be heartened that, for all the sound and fury of the protesters, they have so far failed to force the President’s hand. The longer the protests go on, the less likely it is that he will exit suddenly. Even some of Mr Mubarak’s worst enemies are arguing that he should be allowed to carry on until September. Those who want him out now will argue that a lot can change before his mooted departure – and may fear violent reprisals once they lose the protection of the army. Such a scenario could probably materialise only if the Egyptian military and the US conclude that it is the best case.
Crackdown
The clashes in Tahrir Square in central Cairo on Wednesday hinted at the bloodshed that could unfold if the regime decided it had a chance to cling on to power by crushing the opposition. But that possibility has probably diminished as the protests have widened. Any state-sponsored attack on citizens would meet with outrage and strong action from the West, probably including the withdrawal of the US aid on which Mr Mubarak relies.
