Chair of West Midland Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Dear Friends,
The first of the 7 items below is brief: a letter to the editor to remind us that Mordechai Vanunu though no longer in a prison, remains unjustly imprisoned in Israel.
The last item is also brief: a video of an attack on Palestinian prisoners by a special police unit. The video is about 4 minutes.
In item 2 we learn that Fatah might participate in the upcoming Gaza flotilla.
Item 3 details the Palestinian development plan following the declaration of the Palestinian state, and assuming UN acceptance.
Items 4 and 5 show that while the Palestinians are forging ahead, the Israeli government till now has no plan of how to conduct matters should a Palestinian state come into being. This, in turn, impacts on Israeli conduct and thinking. Item 4 shows how settlers are going ahead with new colonies. And in item 5 Ari Shavit, who is no leftist, deplores the uncertainty of the moment.
Item 6 “The four sons” is something quite different from the usual fare that I include, and is even a bit dated, since the Passover Seder took place 3 nights ago. However, I found item 6 worthwhile because of its message at the end: “It’s fruitless to try and lure every Jewish kid into an all-or-nothing ghetto that defies the grammar of the rest of his or her life. Rather, as on “Glee,” Jewishness is meaningful not as platform, but as content. If it resonates, it endures, and if it doesn’t, there are hundreds of other streams available.”
For the ‘hundreds of other streams’ to be available, one has to live in a mixed society rather than in a tribal society, as in Israel. The Israeli Jewish youngster does not have hundreds of other streams available. Not only that, but also the number of available streams grow ever smaller with Israeli education’s brain washing narrowing the scope of what Israeli youngsters know and are taught to esteem. In a ‘pure Jewish’ atmosphere of the kind that is idolized by Israel’s leaders, the opportunity to broaden one’s scope is becoming pitifully limited.
All the best,
Dorothy
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1. The Guardian,
April 21, 2011
Letters
Today marks seven years since Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear whistleblower, was released from Ashkelon prison to face the assembled world’s media, having served his full sentence of 18 years (11.5 years in solitary confinement) for revealing the truth of Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons programme. Since his release he has faced no further charges regarding any “secrets” he is still supposed to have, yet it is for this reason he is not allowed to leave Israel and suffers daily restrictions on his freedom of movement, speech and association. It is time the British government called for these cruel restrictions to be withdrawn so he can leave Israel immediately, as he wishes.
Ben Birnberg Trustee, Free Vanunu, Jim Boumelha President, International Federation of Journalists, Jeremy Corbyn MP Parliamentary human rights group, Jeremy Dear General secretary, National Union of Journalists, Kate Hudson General secretary CND, Bruce Kent Trustee, Free Vanunu, Jon Sen Film-maker
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2. Haaretz,
April 21, 2011
HomeCultureTravelPublished 10:10 21.04.11
Fatah may partake in upcoming Gaza flotilla, senior official says
Nabil Sha’ath, the factions head of foreign relations, says Fatah officials do not require either the permission of Israel or Hamas before arriving at the blockaded Strip.
Senior Fatah officials will be allowed to take part in a planned aid flotilla to the Gaza Strip, a senior faction official said on Thursday, departing from the party’s previous policy of only supporting Gaza initiatives from afar.
The Free Gaza Movement, a pro-Palestinian activist umbrella group, has said it was planning to launch a 15-ship aid flotilla in late May bearing international passengers including Europeans and Americans.
Nine Turks were shot dead in the May 31 clash when Israeli marines stormed a flotilla organized by a Turkish Islamist charity, which ignored orders to turn back as it tried to breach an Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip.
In the past, Fatah, a central member of the West Bank-ruling Palestinian Authority, refrained from physically participating in Gaza aid initiatives, also as a result of its long-standing feud with rival faction Hamas, which has been ruling the coastal enclave since 2007.
Speaking with Nazareth’s A Shams on Thursday, Fatah official Nabil Sha’ath, in charge of the party’s foreign affairs portfolio, said Fatah would permit senior officials to partake in the planned flotilla, since it was considered a humanitarian effort geared at lifting the Gaza blockade.
Referring to the possibility that Fatah officials may require authorization from both Israeli security forces and Hamas, which governs the Strip, Sha’ath said: “We don’t need approval to arrive at our homeland, and certainly not from a movement like Hamas and Israel’s security establishment.”
Sha’ath’s comments came after earlier this week donor states to the Palestinian Authority, which held a conference last week in Brussels, condemned in its concluding statement uncoordinated aid flotillas to Gaza.
The conference called on all parties to use land terminals to the Strip and avoid provocations. The statement is signed by the chairman of the conference, Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store.
A major force behind the clause was intense lobbying from the Israeli delegation to the conference, comprised of the coordinator of government activities in the territories, Maj. Gen. Eitan Dangot, and Foreign Ministry diplomats.
The concluding statement endorsed the opinion of the United Nations special coordinator on the peace process in the Middle East, Robert Serry, the opinion of the World Bank and of the International Monetary Fund, all of which praised the effective operation of the Palestinian Authority in various fields and determined that the authority was above the bar of a functioning state in these areas.
The donor states voiced a commitment to the vision of establishing an independent, sovereign and democratic Palestinian state, to exist peacefully and securely alongside Israel.
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3. LA Times,
April 20, 2011
WEST BANK: Palestinian development plan looks at period after state creation
When Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad met the donor coordination group for the Palestinian territory, the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee (AHLC), on April 13 in Brussels, he presented them with his new National Development Plan (NDP) 2011-2013, titled Establishing the State, Building our Future.
In the foreword of the report, Fayyad wrote: “We stand today on the verge of national readiness for the birth of the State of Palestine. … The journey has been long and arduous, but the end is now in sight –- we are now in the homestretch to freedom.”
Fayyad’s first two-year program, Palestine: Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State, was introduced in August 2009. It envisioned building the institutions for a viable state by August 2011 so that when the Palestinians go to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2011 to demand international recognition of an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza, they will be able to convince the international community of their readiness.
Fayyad got a strong boost at the AHLC meeting from three major and credible international bodies: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations. All three gave Fayyad’s plan high scores, confirming that the Palestinians will be ready by September to have their own state.
The NDP was designed as a development plan to follow establishment of the state. It builds on what the first plan started. “At this historic juncture in our struggle for freedom,” wrote Fayyad, “implementing the NDP will bring to fruition the effort to build a sovereign Palestine.”
When the donor countries meet in Paris in June to discuss new aid to the Palestinians, the NDP will be on the table. They will be asked to pledge some $5 billion for the plan to work and $500 million to prepare East Jerusalem to become the capital of the Palestinian state.
Ali Jirbawi, the Palestinian official who headed the team that wrote the NDP and the earlier report, discussed the new plan Wednesday with a group of Palestinian representatives of civil society organizations and other government bodies.
He said his team held 240 consultation meetings with the participation of 2,000 people representing various sectors of the Palestinian society to prepare the NDP.
In the end, the team came up with the NDP, which covers four sectors: governance, social, economy and infrastructure.
Jirbawi said the NDP is a development plan that identifies priorities and works on implementing them.
But some of the areas it focuses on, such as rural areas and the Jordan Valley, are part of the West Bank under Israeli military rule, and Israel is not willing at this time to allow the Palestinians to develop or have control over these areas.
Jirbawi and Fayyad recognize that the Israeli occupation remains the major impediment for the implementation of this ambitious plan, not to mention the dream of having an independent state by September. Another impediment is the division between the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
One scenario of the plan is that all obstacles facing its implementation, such as the blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip and the Israeli military checkpoints all over the West Bank, will be removed to allow economic growth.
“The ceiling is ending the occupation so that there will be rapid growth in the economy,” said Jirbawi.
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4. Haaretz,
April 21, 2011
Settlers establish settlement ahead of Palestinian statehood declaration
Settlers are waking up ahead of the Palestinian attempt to declare unilateral statehood in September and in light of indication that Netanyahu may be launching a diplomatic move in near future.
Five hundred people wearing white shirts gathered Wednesday on the hills facing the West Bank settlement of Itamar to establish a new settlement, named Regev.
Veteran settlement leaders Daniella Weiss, Rabbi Dov Lior, and the aged and ailing Rabbi Moshe Levinger, spoke. Young people erected a tent and a wall of rocks as bored Border Police soldiers watched the proceedings.
Regev’s fate will probably be no different than the other outposts Daniella Weiss has established: it will either be repeatedly evacuated and re-established or abandoned after a short time.
But the importance of today’s event is in the process underway among the settlers now, ahead of the Palestinian attempt to declare unilateral statehood in September.
After the settlement freeze ended last September, the settlement leaders briefly launched campaigns to depose Defense Minister Ehud Barak and to publish more construction tenders in the settlement blocs. But these plans did not strike resounding chords, and were shelved. Now that there are indications that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be launching a diplomatic move in the near future, the settlers are waking up.
At the same time the new outpost was going up opposite Itamar, the Shomron Regional Council was holding a funfest in Itamar, complete with inflatable castles for kids.
Weiss held her event outside the settlement’s fence to show that she and her small band of disciples are not part of the establishment.
“Regev is not part of Itamar. It is outside of the fences…overlooking the city of Shekhem [Nablus]…Idealistic people are joining us…people with a strong feeling for the land of Israel,” she said.
The radical settlement movement is concerned about the possible transfer of areas from C (full Israeli control ) to B (Palestinian civil control; Israeli military control ) to A (full Palestinian control ), as reported in Haaretz. If that happens, young people are reportedly planning to take over these areas to prevent their evacuation.
Just before Passover, settlement leaders began to realize that Netanyahu was going to make a significant move. As of Wednesday, their intelligence was meager. One of the seven senior ministers who regularly leaks information to them was mum.
The leaders have decided to urge Likud MKs and Likud Central Committee members to exert massive pressure on Netanyahu, as they did to prevent the continuation of the construction moratorium, and make the summer session of the Knesset a decisive one for Netanyahu.
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5. Haaretz,
April 21, 2011
One last chance for Israel to reaffirm its right to exist
This time it is not the chance to end the conflict with the Arabs but to work with the international community to firmly establish the Jewish state’s right and ability to exist.
Just like the Palestinians, we never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Time after time, we reject the complex diplomatic proposal that has been placed on the table. Time after time, the next proposal is more difficult than its predecessor. Although time is against us, we recklessly refuse to realize this. We refuse today what we will ask for tomorrow and what will cause us regret the day after tomorrow.
In 1987, Israel did not move ahead on a peace agreement that might have have been signed with King Hussein. In 1991, Israel did not reach an autonomy agreement that it might have been able to reach with the Palestinian leadership in the territories. In 1993, Israel did not demand that mutual recognition between it and the Palestinian Liberation Organization be immediately turned into a final-status agreement. In 1995, Israel did not try to implement the Abbas-Beilin understandings. In 2002, Israel did not propose its own initiative to counter the Arab peace initiative. In 2005, Israel did not leverage disengagement to determine a defensible border that would divide the land.
Because of greed and hesitation, we always did too little too late. Because we tried to have it all, we have attained little. Because we tried to expand our border, we have narrowed it. Deplorable foot-dragging has caused us irreversible diplomatic damage.
Make no mistake: It is not at all certain that at any one of the tests over the past quarter-century, Israel had a partner. It is unclear whether King Hussein, Faisal Husseini, Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas and the Arab League were partners for peace. But the moment to test Husseini was the year of the Madrid Conference. The moment to test Arafat was the great summer of Oslo. The moment to test Abbas was the winter after Rabin’s assassination. The right time to test the Arab League and the international community would have been right after disengagement. Israel did not act at the right time and the right place to put its enemies and allies to the true test.
The outcome is an avalanche. The more time that passes, the more the Jewish national movement retreats and the stronger the Palestinian national movement becomes. International support for Zionism has eroded while Israel’s security and demographic situation grows worse.
What Israel could have gotten from Jordan we are unlikely to get from the PLO and will not be able to get from Hamas. What we could have gotten from Clinton, it is doubtful we can get from Obama and impossible to get from his successors. What we could have gotten from the international community in exchange for a major withdrawal in 1990, in 2000 and in 2005, we cannot get now. The slope is not only slippery, it is also steep.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should understand the process well. The statesman who was once a Greater Land of Israel man now has the views of one of Labor’s early predecessors, Ahdut Ha’avoda. His fondest dream is the Allon Plan to partition the West Bank. His red lines are Rabin’s lines. What deputy foreign minister Netanyahu rejected point-blank in 1991, Prime Minister Netanyahu is enthusiastically prepared to adopt in 2011. But even during his two years in leadership, Netanyahu has continued to stall and stall – and stall. He did not produce a daring diplomatic plan following his Bar-Ilan speech. He did not propose the establishment of a demilitarized and limited Palestinian state last summer. He allowed Obama, Abbas and time to wreak havoc on him. He brought Israel to a point in which time, which is working against it, could be its undoing.
The opportunity of the summer of 2011 differs from all previous ones. This time, it is not a chance to make peace, but to avoid defeat; not the chance to end the conflict with the Arabs but to work with the international community to firmly establish the Jewish state’s right and ability to exist. But to implement even this modest opportunity, we will have to pay. It must be made clear that Israel will not rule over another people, and that under the right conditions and at the right time, Israel will withdraw to adjusted 1967 borders. The payment required is costly and painful. For Prime Minister Netanyahu, the chance of the summer of 2011 is the last chance.
Television images shows troops using live ammunition in deadly operation at detention centre.
Hundreds of Palestinian have died inside Israeli prisons and now an Israeli television channel has aired shocking footage of Israel’s so-called Control and Restraint unit, or Masada, attacking Palestinian prisoners.
Activists have demanded people in charge of the operation, carried out in 2007, be charged and the family of one of the victims told Al Jazeera that they would consider suing Masada.
Al Jazeera’s Nisreen El-Shamayleh reports from Seida in the occupied West Bank.
Source: Al Jazeera
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7. Haaretz,
April 21, 2011
The Four ‘Sons’ as Characters From ‘Glee’
[Published originally in the Forward]
Who Is the Wise Child? ‘Glee’ actors Lea Michele, Mark Salling, Kevin McHale and Jenna Ushkowitz. [for pictures, use the link]
On a Tuesday night in April, millions of people will gather together for the tale of four Jewish children, each of whom embodies contemporary Jewish consciousness in a different way. The evening is filled with song, multiple narratives and insights into Jewish identity. I’m talking, of course, about the award-winning Fox television series “Glee.”
For those of you not in the know, “Glee” is the TV show of the moment. At once an escapist fantasy and the most realistic depiction of high school angst this side of Claire Danes, “Glee” is also — thanks largely to co-creator Brad Falchuk, son of the current Hadassah national president — among the most “out” Jewish shows to grace the small screen. Like the show’s gay, disabled, multiethnic and differently sized kids, what’s interesting about its Jewish characters is how their difference marks them as “other,” but, precisely as it does so, includes them in a very 2011 world in which difference is the one thing we all have in common.
Rachel Berry (Lea Michele) is the “Wise Child” — to a fault. She endlessly touts her Jewishness in one way or another, from Barbra Streisand songs to protests at Christmastime. She is also an irritating control freak, just like the unctuous Wise Child, who asks annoying, detailed questions about the statutes, laws and ordinances that God has commanded. The Haggadah obviously wants us to praise this kid, but most years I just want to slap him. Just like Rachel, he’s a know-it-all and a drama queen. “Look at me!” the Wise Child brags, just as Rachel does. Look how smart and good I am! Like Rachel in her goody-two-shoes sweaters, the Wise Child is intolerable. Rachel is a quintessential Jewish stereotype — smart, Semitic-looking, Magen-David-wearing — and yet she performs her Jewishness in the same way she performs her many solos on the show: in your face, turned up to 11. The Wise Child is the same way.
Noah “Puck” Puckerman (Mark Salling) is the “Wicked Child.” His is the most original of the Jewishnesses on “Glee,” contradicting every stereotype that Rachel serves to uphold. Puck is a bad kid: in and out of juvy, dumping geeks in trash cans and impregnating another guy’s girlfriend. He’s a big, strong kid who doesn’t act or “look Jewish” in stereotypical ways. Yet for all Puck’s badness — and maybe because of it — there’s something irresistible about him. He has his sensitive side, which he shows in his singing and in his love affair with the plus-sized Lauren Zizes (Ashley Fink), yet every time his sensitivity is revealed, it is undermined by his latest outrageous comment or action. Puck is the bad boy with whom many of us can’t help falling in love even though we know he’s bad for us.
Puck, like Rachel, is also very upfront about his Jewishness. Often this is played for laughs, since his character is so un-stereotypically Jewish that his high level of pride and Jewish knowledge seems out of place. One moment he’s insulting disabled people (in front of a disabled person), the next he’s singing Neil Diamond. As Puck says at one point, “I put the Jew in ju-vy.” Oh, and trivia fans, according to an interview in Moment, the movie part of the Puckerman family’s Simchat Torah custom — eating Chinese food and watching “Schindler’s List” — is actually based on that of the Falchuk family.
Puck’s “wickedness” also highlights an egregious flaw in the Passover liturgy, where the wicked son is defined solely by his supposed self-exclusion from the Jewish people. The question he asks is, “Mah ha’avodah hazot lachem?”: “What is this service to you?” For this, he is to be reproached. But is the Wicked Son’s inquiry really so awful? Maybe he’s just trying to learn what meaning the Seder ritual has for someone else so that he can understand it better. To me, the wicked son is really the Listening Son. And even more outrageously, is there no other way that wickedness is manifested? Surely Puck is an example (as if we needed another) of a self-identifying Jew who is nonetheless a rasha, a wicked person. By defining wickedness solely in terms of Jewish identification, the Haggadah comes off as ethnocentric.
Artie Abrams (Kevin McHale) is the “Simple Child.” He’s not unintelligent, but in terms of Jewishness, his is the simplest and the least interesting. Obviously, Artie is Jewish: Not just his name, but his brown-haired-white-guy-with-dorky-glasses nerd look marks him as stereotypically Jewish in every way Puck is not. Yet unlike Puck and Rachel, Artie hasn’t performed his Jewishness in any way whatsoever. There’s nothing to Artie’s Jewishness; it’s just there. Like the simple son, he shows up at the Seder but does little more.
For years, characters like Artie would be the only visibly Jewish ones on certain TV shows. Anyone remember Arvid (played by Dan Frischman), the nerd from the 1980s sitcom “Head of the Class”? We’re used to this character; we’ve seen him so many times. Probably Jerry Lewis invented him: the nutty, nebbishy professor who never has to say he’s Jewish, because we all know it already. There’s even another character like him on “Glee”: Jacob Ben Israel (Josh Sussman), the creepy, geeky loser who stalks Rachel. (Jacob’s not in the glee club, so he isn’t a “son” here. He’s also one of the slimiest characters on the show.)
Artie’s clichéd Jewishness might be insulting were it not juxtaposed with Rachel’s and Puck’s. As it stands, it’s another instance of how American Jewishness is performed today: vapidly, with an emptiness that leads to assimilation. Many in the institutional Jewish world think that the rebellious Puck is the problem with American Judaism today — but surely it’s the apathetic Artie who will sooner drift away from Jewish life.
Finally, Tina Cohen-Chang (Jenna Ushkowitz) is the “Child Who Does Not Know There’s a Question To Ask.” Like Artie, Tina is no dummy — but her Jewishness is completely invisible save for that double-barrel, presumably interfaith name. Because she is Asian, and because her Chinese heritage is central to her identity (she is now dating Mike Chang, the “other Asian,” and they commiserate about their ethnicity often), her Jewishness has effectively vanished. As with Artie, it’s not mentioned. The priestly name is there, but that’s as far as it goes.
This, too, is an important way that Jewishness is performed today: as absence. Most likely, Tina is Jewish according to Halacha, if we assume that Cohen is her mother’s name. (By the way, the Internet tells me that Ushkowitz herself is Catholic.) But she celebrated Christmas — as did Artie, now dating the blond “über-shiksa” Brittany Pierce — and has never responded to the Jewish comments made by Rachel and Puck. If Artie is on his way out of Jewish identity, Tina seems already gone.
At the same time, neither Artie nor Tina seems to be missing anything. There’s no hole in their lives where Jewishness used to be. In the grammar of the show, they have other distinguishing marks of “otherness”: Artie is in a wheelchair, and Tina, in addition to being Chinese, is a bit of a goth. This is true for Rachel and Puck, as well: She has two dads and is a nerd; he has a Mohawk and is a part-time juvenile delinquent. Jewishness figures into these four lives as just another optional feature of identity. It can be major, minor or entirely absent. It can be religious, cultural or even physical.
The days in which one is either In or Out are over. The binarism of Wise and Wicked, “With Us” or “Against Us,” is no longer operative in American Jewish life, even though many Jewish leaders pretend that it is. In the age of the iPod, Jewishness is one genre among many that may be incorporated into a young person’s playlist. It’s fruitless to try and lure every Jewish kid into an all-or-nothing ghetto that defies the grammar of the rest of his or her life. Rather, as on “Glee,” Jewishness is meaningful not as platform, but as content. If it resonates, it endures, and if it doesn’t, there are hundreds of other streams available.
As for me, I’ll catch “Glee” Wednesday night on Hulu. Happy Passover!
