Today’s message begins with a review of Omar Barghout’s ‘BDS: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights,’ While the critique does not delve into the issues of bds, it does summarize Barghouti’s arguments well. I have not yet read the book, but from the review it would seem to be a very worthwhile read.
Item 2 is a commentary arguing that the present Israel-Palestine situation is unsustainable for both Palestinians and Israelis. Agreed.
Item 3 is a letter to the editor of the Guardian, countering the impression left (according to the writer) by Conal Urquhart regarding the murder of Juliano Mer-Khamis.
Item 4 “Children are the best peacemakers in the Middle East”
is by Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, who lost 3 daughters and a niece when a tank fired into the room in which they were sitting. The incident occurred during Israel’s 2008-9 military campaign in Gaza and during a TV news program. The doctor’s pain—his repeated ‘why?’ was heard by viewers due to the inability of the reporter (who was acquainted with Dr. Abuelaish, and who was obviously himself in shock and in pain over the incident) to hang up on the poor man in his moment of woe. The incident received a good deal of publicity, because the doctor is an obstetrician and had cared for patients and delivered babies in Israeli hospitals. Not all the responses to his pain were generous or understanding. Some were horrid (e.g., ‘he deserved it after what Hamas is doing to us”—as though he could control Hamas’s acts). Was unpleasant (to put it mildly) to see how stupid, uncaring, and brain-washed Israelis could be. There was, however, a good deal of sympathy for him in the media.
In item 5, Turkey warns Israel against a repeat of its attack on the last flotilla during the sailing of the upcoming one.
Since none of the preceding are about events here in the unholy land, item 6, Today in Palestine, furnishes you with some information about things occurring here.
All the best,
Dorothy
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1. [forwarded by Abraham Weizfeld
The Electronic Intifada
“Characterizing actions and positions that target Israeli apartheid and colonial rule as anti-Semitic is itself anti-Semitic, for such arguments assume that Jews are a monolithic sum that Israel represents and speaks on behalf of and, moreover, that all Jews per se are somehow responsible for Israeli crimes, a patently racist assumption” (149).
“Our South Africa moment has finally arrived,” said Palestinian author-activist Omar Barghouti in a series of speeches delivered in 2010. With the publication of BDS: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, the first book dedicated to the game-changing boycott, divestment and sanctions movement — known by the initials BDS — has itself finally arrived.
The long-awaited volume aims to summarize the key arguments that Barghouti — a co-founder of the movement — has been making in the six years that he has been working to rally global support for the landmark 2005 Palestinian BDS call.
Something between a monograph and an anthology, the volume brings together essays, open letters (some co-authored), interview transcripts and even a campaign case study. These elements, while stylistically varied, revolve around the same three central points: first, that the nature of the oppression visited upon Palestinians by Israel resembles, in many ways, the situation of black South Africans under apartheid; second, that this oppression must be actively resisted; and third, that the growing BDS movement provides the most moral, efficient and effective mechanism for conducting that resistance.
Barghouti does not suggest that Israel’s policies toward Palestinians precisely mirror those of apartheid South Africa, however. “Israel’s version of apartheid is more sophisticated than South Africa’s was,” he explains. “It’s an evolved form” (167). He points out numerous similarities as well as differences, noting that many of the distinctions are the result of the fact that “South Africa, unlike Israel, did not employ ethnic cleansing to expel most of the indigenous population out of the country … In South Africa, the overall plan was to exploit blacks, not throw them out” (169).
As the author demonstrates, many of Israel’s practices in maintaining the resulting system of institutional inequality are clearly worse than those of South Africa under apartheid. To those who dispute the label of “apartheid” to describe Israel, Barghouti notes that apartheid has “for decades been recognized by the United Nations as a generalized crime with a universal definition” (199).
Drawing much of its inspiration from the South African struggle, Barghouti explains that the BDS movement represents a “qualitatively new stage” in the history of Palestinian resistance to colonization and occupation (61). As expressed in a quoted statement by Palestine’s BDS National Committee (BNC), “Israel’s impunity is the direct result of the international community’s failure to hold it accountable” for its behavior (209).
The existence of a Palestinian-led movement which asks its international supporters to demonstrate solidarity not only in words, but through concrete actions, has effectively broken this cycle. Now, as a result of worldwide BDS efforts, companies directly profiting from the oppression of Palestinians “are experiencing real, deep losses that are directly connected” with their complicity in Israeli apartheid (165). Thus, “the BDS movement has dragged Israel and its well-financed, bullying lobbying groups onto a battlefield where the moral superiority of the Palestinian quest for self-determination, justice, freedom and equality neutralizes and outweighs Israel’s military power and financial prowess” (62).
Barghouti excels in distilling the arguments surrounding BDS down to their essentials. It is precisely because of his insistent focus on these fundamental issues that it has become all but impossible to find articulate holders of opposing views willing to engage him in public debate. As Barghouti makes plainly clear, the bottom line in the relationship between the core, rights-based demands of the BDS movement, and the positions of all those who oppose them, is that those who continue to support the concept of a “Jewish state” — from “soft Zionists” on the left to the overt proponents of genocide on the right — advocate a system of society in which rights are bestowed, abridged, or denied on the basis of ethnic origin, while the BDS movement insists that all human beings must be treated as equals.
Rather than admit to the nature of this distinction, those who oppose the BDS movement on the basis of political conviction consistently resort to other arguments. Some address the goals of the BDS movement, but many simply the means. Both types of arguments are deftly deconstructed by Barghouti, who hones in on their inherent flaws like a hypocrisy-seeking missile.
Barghouti’s skill at exposing the often racist assumptions and double-standards which undermine the contentions of BDS opponents is most clearly evident in his discussion of academic boycott, a subject treated extensively in the volume.
Critics who challenge academic boycott of Israel on the grounds that it jeopardizes the academic freedom of Israelis, the author says, “completely ignore that by denying Palestinians their basic rights — all our freedoms — Israel is infringing deeply on our academic freedom. That doesn’t count, it seems … Those who care about academic freedom only when it pertains to Jewish Israelis — perceived as ‘white,’ ‘European,’ ‘civilized’ — and not when it pertains to us brown Palestinians are hypocritical, to put it mildly” (174-175).
Barghouti emphasizes the anti-racist position which forms an explicit pillar of the BDS movement’s platform: “Individuals who believe that some are more human or deserve more rights than others based on differences in ethnic, religious, gender, sexual, or any other human identity attributes cannot belong to this consistently antiracist struggle for universal rights,” he states (33). The author turns accusations of inherent anti-Semitism in the movement on their head: “Characterizing actions and positions that target Israeli apartheid and colonial rule as anti-Semitic is itself anti-Semitic, for such arguments assume that Jews are a monolithic sum that Israel represents and speaks on behalf of and, moreover, that all Jews per se are somehow responsible for Israeli crimes, a patently racist assumption” (149).
The author does not mince words in criticizing projects which “normalize” the current state of affairs between Israel and the Palestinians. “Joint projects that claim to be ‘apolitical’ are often the most blatantly politicized,” he writes, for they “deliberately disregard the context of colonial oppression and imply the possibility of achieving peace without addressing the root causes of conflict” (140).
True peace cannot possibly be achieved in such a context, Barghouti argues: “A master and a slave can reach an agreement where the enslavement is accepted as reality and the slave cannot challenge it but only make the best out of it. There is no war — no conflict, nobody is killing anybody — but the master remains master and the slave remains slave. That is not the kind of peace that we, the oppressed, are seeking or can ever resign ourselves to” (173).
With Palestinians in Gaza facing a man-made catastrophe as a result of a siege deliberately crafted to push the entire population to the brink of destruction, Barghouti argues, BDS has become a moral imperative: “Unless the price of its system of oppression is sufficiently raised through concerted civil-society pressure campaigns, [Israel] will never give it up,” he writes (173). “In short, Palestinians cannot wait. Israel is no longer ‘just’ guilty of occupation, colonization and apartheid against the people of Palestine … It has embarked on what seems to be its final effort to literally disappear the ‘Palestinian problem.’ And it is doing so with utter impunity. The world cannot continue to watch. Thus BDS. Thus now” (47).
Barghouti does an admirable job of providing a lucid theoretical overview of BDS which incorporates many of the lessons learned in the activist trenches. It is nearly impossible to develop and articulate a perfect synthesis of “academic” and “activist” perspectives, but Barghouti arguably comes closer to bridging this divide than than any other figure writing in English. Though his writing undoubtedly leans slightly more toward the theoretical, his awareness of developments “on the ground” among activists actually implementing BDS campaigns around the world is impressive.
Readers are likely to notice that key facts and arguments are distributed, and sometimes repeated, throughout the volume, rather than being consolidated and treated sequentially. Some may view this as a flaw (though perhaps an unavoidable one, owing to the disparate nature of the source material), but others may see this as a deliberate choice by the author to help readers to keep central themes front-and-center as they engage with the material. The approach also ensures that those who choose to read only particular chapters will still likely be exposed to the most crucial elements.
In his conclusion, Barghouti states that BDS possesses “almost all the ingredients” necessary to end Israel’s multi-faceted oppression of Palestinians, but does not specify what ingredients remain missing (225). The book’s utility to activists would be strengthened if the author were to provide additional context here, describing with what other political forces BDS activists must engage in order to achieve the most concrete and lasting gains.
Barghouti is nevertheless convinced that BDS will serve as the central pillar in a strategy that will ultimately decide the outcome of the Palestinian struggle: “When Israel’s oppression is met with substantial resistance, primarily from the Palestinian people, the Arab world and the world at large, particularly in the form of sustainable BDS campaigns leading to comprehensive UN sanctions, as was the case in the struggle against South African apartheid, the Israeli economy will suffer tremendously and the BDS movement inside Israel will gain considerable momentum.” Among Israelis, this will lead to a massive evaporation of support for apartheid policies (who will themselves join the BDS movement in growing numbers), Barghouti predicts, and then “Collapse of the multitiered Israeli system of oppression … becomes a matter of time” (223).
Abraham Greenhouse is co-founder of the Palestine Freedom Project (www.palestinefreedom.org) which provides resources and logistical support to grassroots Palestine solidarity activists, and has been active in organizing BDS campaigns both prior and subsequent to the 2005 Palestinian civil society call for BDS. Follow him on Twitter as @grinhoyz.
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2. The Guardian,
25 April 2011
For Israelis and Palestinians, the status quo is neither sustainable nor desirable
To suggest Israelis and Palestinians are equally responsible would suggest they hold equal power to shape events. They don’t
Back in 2008 a Florida couple running a small business that throws children’s parties bought two costumes that looked like Tigger and Eeyore on eBay from a firm in Peru for $500. When Walt Disney saw the characters advertised online, it threatened legal action for an infringement of copyright laws and presented the couple with a seven-point demand to cease and desist.
The couple complied with all but one – instead of sending the costumes to Disney to be destroyed, they sent them back to Peru for a refund. “We needed the money,” explained Marisol Perez-Chaveco, whose family was on public assistance. This was too much for Disney, which responded with a million-dollar lawsuit plus costs.
One would think that a company dedicated to marketing itself as the wholesome home of eternal childhood would regard such a heavy-handed approach as an own goal; as though the magic castle was home not to family fun but a faceless corporation ruthlessly pursuing small family businesses. But for Disney that is precisely the point. They want people to witness the ferocity with which they pursue their interests (they once threatened to sue a daycare centre for painting Minnie, Micky and Goofy on its walls) pour encourager les autres.
After a week in the West Bank participating in the annual Palestine Festival of Literature, you get the feeling Israeli security services are using the same public relations team as Disney. We were kept several hours at the Israeli-Jordan border while three Britons with Turkish and Arabic sounding names were held for questioning.
At the West Bank-Israel crossing on the access highway to Nazarath, only brown-skinned people had their passports held. Our final event in the village of Silwan – an evening of poetry, literature and Palestinian rap – was a riot. Literally. Local youth responded to Israeli teargas with a hail of stones. The British consul, who was to attend, turned back halfway. The rest of us, holding onions to our noses to counter the gas, walked past burning tyres, smoking skips and bricks strewn across the road, to the venue. By the time we got there, most people had fled.
The point isn’t that they should have treated us better because we were foreign. But rather, if this is how they treat foreigners who they know have a voice, imagine how they treat locals. Families with small children waiting for hours before putting the entire contents of their car in shopping trolleys and wheeling that through security so they can get home. Grown men and women being shouted at by teenagers with guns. We got only a glimpse. And even that was an eye opener.
The intimidation, humiliation and harassment that emerge from these encounters are not byproducts of a broader strategy. Like Disney’s legal warnings, they are central to the strategy itself. Occupation on this scale and for this length of time can only prevail by a consistent and persistent effort to crush the spirit of the occupied.
Meanwhile, Tinker Bells sprinkle their fairy dust to blur the view or to beautify the ugly. Witnesses are told they either didn’t really see what they saw, only saw what they wanted to see, should have seen something else as well, or should have gone somewhere else where they could have seen worse.
Elsewhere, a vigorous marketing campaign ensures that when the strip-searching is done the first thing you see when you pull up your trousers are tourist posters of religious sites against azure skies saying “Welcome to Israel”.
Since 2005, a massive rebranding campaign has taken place to dispel Israel’s reputation for religiosity and war and portray it instead as the home of “creative energy”. The trouble is, since then there has been the bombing of Lebanon, the Gaza blockade, the attack on a Gaza aid flotilla, and the escalation of illegal settlements.
To suggest that Palestinians are equally responsible for this state of affairs would suggest the two sides hold equal power to shape events. They don’t. No matter how many rhetorical checkpoints get thrown up, there are some basic facts you just cannot get around. Israel is the occupier; Palestinians are the occupied.
That justifies nothing, and explains a great deal. Israel does not have to be the worst place on Earth for the occupation to be worthy of condemnation. Nor can its actions or existence be understood in isolation from western foreign policy and Europe’s history of antisemitism. Similarly, Palestinians do not need to be beyond criticism for their right to resist occupation to be considered valid.
At the first cabinet meeting after the 1967 war Israel’s justice minister, Yaakov Shimshon Shapira, asked: “In a time of decolonisation in the whole world, can we consider an area in which mainly Arabs live, and we control defence and foreign policy? Who’s going to accept that?”
The truth is that while much of the world didn’t like it, they were prepared to accept it for several decades. That seems to be changing. Israel’s power is not in question. But its influence is clearly waning. Polls show a significant shift in Europe towards support for Palestinians. In September, the UN general assembly looks set to support the recognition of a Palestinian state within its 1967 borders.
Whether such a solution is even possible at this stage is an open question. Through its land grabs and settlement building Israel has created an ugly patchwork out of the West Bank, which is sewn together with a range of separate and unequal ID cards, access roads and car registration plates for Israelis and Palestinians that would be difficult to unpick without the whole thing unravelling.
Israel’s refusal to talk to Hamas and the effective emasculation of Fatah has left it with no one with any credibility to negotiate with. The Palestinian Authority – an authority without any real authority – is regarded by most as simply another layer of occupation. Last week the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said he opposed another armed uprising. But the truth is that Fatah wasn’t behind the last uprisings, and would be incapable of leading any more. Through the entire week, Abbas’s name did not come up once.
In this regard, the Israeli occupation has been a victim of its own success on its own terms. It has not so much provided security for a Jewish state as created a fortified country in which non-Jews live as a majority either as second-class citizens or not as citizens at all.
“The continuation of the occupation guarantees the nullification of Zionism,” argued the historian Professor Yehuda Bauer last week, the day before a demonstration of prominent Israelis against the occupation. “That is, it rules out the possibility that the Jewish people will live in its land with a strong majority and international recognition. In my eyes, this makes [Israel’s] government clearly anti-Zionist.”
A Palestine that is independent, non-contiguous and home to thousands of foreigners who do not respect its laws is not viable. Given the trajectory of Israeli domestic politics, an Israel that reverses the expansionist impulses of the past 44 years in return for peace is not likely. The status quo is neither sustainable nor desirable. Something has to give.
One need not embrace Palestinian self-determination to challenge this situation. A simple demand for equality and human rights for Palestinians will do.
• This article was amended on 25 April 2011. A phrase in the original read, “At the crossing into Nazareth”. The location of the crossing has been clarified in the text.
Conal Urquhart gives the impression that Juliano Mer Khamis was an unpopular, quixotic outsider, disliked by most and hated by some, and a victim of irreconcilable cultural differences (A killing inspired by drama not politics, 22 April). He quotes extensively from a “fatwa-style” extremist leaflet and speaks with a “group of elderly women” . But to the public who went to the Freedom Theatre and the actors and students who participated in its productions, this Palestinian theatre was extraordinarily popular and successful.
The theatre’s latest production, Alice in Wonderland (which we, a group of artists with New York Theatre Workshop, attended just days before Juliano was killed) was performed 35 times and was often sold out. While Alice was banned for school-age children by the Palestine education ministry on the grounds that it was “immoral”, this same ministry often brought school children from all over the West Bank in large groups to the Freedom Theatre. This belies the assertion that Juliano “only managed to alienate those he most wanted to inspire”.
Urquhart frames Juliano’s murder as a struggle between “liberal western values of freedom of expression and a more conservative, traditional world view”. This is an outdated opposition. Ideals such as freedom of expression and equality have long been an integral part of the Palestinian struggle, even if these same values have been eroded by a decades-long, brutal occupation.
Juliano did “alienate” and anger a powerful minority of the Palestinian communities he served – but what theatre that is truly challenging, truly radical, doesn’t? Let’s hope that theatres around the world will take inspiration from the Freedom Theatre, because necessary and vital theatre is threatening, controversial, and therefore, at times, deadly for its practitioners.
Naomi Wallace
Erin B Mee
Otterburn, North Yorkshire
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4. The Observer,
24 April 2011
Children are the best peacemakers in the Middle East
For the sake of my dead daughters, I will never cease striving for peace
I always feel great joy every time I deliver a baby. To hear that first cry gives me hope because a new person has been born, a new chance at life. There will be a fresh pair of eyes to see the world and, I hope, see it in a better way.
The world is filled with conflict and the conflict does not seem to end. In the delivery room, the conflict of painful labour comes to an end as a mother delivers a baby and holds him or her in her arms. The cause of her pain is handed to her and she views the baby as a gift.
As I continue to follow news about ongoing tensions between Palestinians and Israelis in Jerusalem and Gaza, I am reminded all the more of the children caught within this conflict. Having worked in Palestine and Israel, I know there is no difference between Israeli parents and Palestinian parents. Both instinctively protect their child. But in times of conflict, both must learn to understand this need about one another.
Some view my lawsuit against the state of Israel sceptically. For two years, I have waited patiently and worked tirelessly to get Israel to admit responsibility for the killing of my daughters, aged 20, 15 and 14, coupled with an apology. Instead of hope, I was presented with denial and attempts to justify their killings.
In order to get closure, I want Israel to understand the pain I and others have faced, not deny it or ignore it in arrogance and ignorance. These traits are currently dominating the decisions being made – we cannot progress to a state of goodwill unless that changes. People are not just numbers and statistics. We feel pain, we love, we hurt. One of the biggest pains for me was when the legal adviser to the Israeli Ministry of Defence described my daughters’ deaths as “collateral damage”.
In my experience, no baby is born violent or hateful. By contrast, the environment, the lifestyle into which a child is born, is key. If that were not the case, people wouldn’t choose to move to and live in neighbourhoods that they deem safe, nor would parents inquire about and select certain schools that they deem the best quality for their children.
By the end of the first intifada, I saw children, some very young, throwing stones in anger at Israeli tanks. Quite what they thought they would achieve was beyond me, but I witnessed it with my own eyes. The day the Oslo Agreement was signed and the tanks began to withdraw, I witnessed the same children giving flowers, olive branches and candy to the Israeli soldiers as they left.
It is for those children, and for my three daughters and niece who I lost in the Gaza war in 2009, that I tour numerous countries, trying to promote justice, respect and the understanding that we are human and we are fundamentally the same. The journey is difficult, because I am often away from home, but my soul is energised by the people I meet along the way – others who hope, like me, that a peaceful solution will be found to a crisis that has already gone on for far too long.
The individuals I meet are on the whole very happy to hear someone speaking the same language as them. They are convinced that a peaceful solution can be found, convinced that some progress can be made towards taking moral courage, taking responsibility and being truthful, eventually leading to reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. This model can be applied to any conflict in the world and is not limited to the Middle East.
Occasionally, there are a rare few individuals who I regret to say do not share my hopes. I don’t regard any of the questions or comments that I receive difficult to answer, but it pains me to hear the sentiments behind them sometimes. In a recent radio interview in Philadelphia, a caller from Bosnia told me he was filled with hatred towards the people who killed his family.
While I, too, feel the pain of loss, I would have liked to have had the opportunity to talk more with him and help him understand that healing comes through doing good things in the memory of those we love. Conversely, hatred keeps us blind and prevents us from seeing any good in life. Through doing good deeds, we keep them blessed and alive.
I implore Israelis and Palestinians to develop the necessary moral courage and responsibility to move forward with actions towards a process that would save the lives of families and, most important, children. Instead of moving tanks, there needs to be a movement of hearts. Instead of continuing a cycle of action and reaction, there needs to be action on the ground, not just talks.
Each of us should do our part, depending on our circumstances and abilities. All the military might of the Israeli state is not providing it with security and safety. All the rockets going into Beersheba are not providing Palestinians with the rights they are entitled to.
The Israeli government has enforced a statute of limitation for Palestinians to challenge and ask questions. After that, the assumption is that we should forget our loved ones, that we should move on. As long as I am alive, my daughters will live on with me. As long as I am walking on a path towards justice and peace, my daughters will be walking with me.
Justice for my daughters is striving to ensure that more young lives are not lost. I don’t want to tell my girls they were killed in vain. I don’t want to tell the babies that are born in times of conflict that they are born in vain.
In life and in death, children remain the best advocates for peace and are the beauty of life. In our lives we have priorities. The future is our priority and our children are our future.
Turkey: Israel shouldn’t repeat its Gaza flotilla mistake
Speaking with the Sydney Morning Herald earlier this week, Turkish FM says it is Israel’s responsibility to lift its blockade on the Strip, saying no one nation owned the Mediterranean.
Israel mustn’t attempt to stop a planned aid flotilla bound for the blockaded Gaza Strip, Turkey’s Foreign Minister told in an interview on Monday, adding that Turkey could do nothing to stop organizers from launching the flotilla.
Turkey said on Thursday it had received a request from Israel to help stop activists sailing to Gaza on the first anniversary of an Israeli raid on a Turkish ship, but it said the flotilla plan was not Ankara’s concern.
The comment comes after Ankara had already made it clear earlier this month that it would and could not stop the 15-ship aid flotilla, planned to set sail next month, a year after nine Turks were shot dead after Israeli marines stormed a flotilla organized by a Turkish Islamist charity.
Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald on Monday, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu urged Israel not to “repeat the same mistake,” adding that it was “Israel’s responsibility not to implement [a blockade] against Gaza.”
“A fact-finding mission of the UN declared that [the blockade] is illegal,” Davutoglu said, adding that in last year’s flotilla people were killed 72 miles [116 kilometers] from the coast, so this was in international waters. The Mediterranean does not belong to any nation.”
Referring to Turkey’s professed inability to stop flotilla organizers from going ahead with their plans, saying: “We can advise, we can say something, but we cannot stop the flotilla.”
Turkey, a secular Muslim nation, has been an important regional ally of Israel for more than a decade.
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party government, which has roots in banned Islamist movements, froze relations with Israel after the deadly raid.
Ankara has demanded an apology as a condition for mending ties, regardless of a UN probe’s findings into the incident.
