Baring unexpected or unusual circumstances, this will my last communication until about September 21st or so, after we return from abroad and I get over a bit of the jet lag. From August 10th through September 14th, my email will beMarch1932@yahoo.com. From the 14th through the 19th, I won’t have a computer. From the 19th, after we return, my email address reverts to the usual one of dor_naor@netvision.net.il.
This evening’s message is somewhat long, not only in amount of items (9) but also in the length of some of them. Am not apologizing, just preparing you.
Item 1 relates to the verdict handed down this past week in the trial of Abir Aramin. I presume that most of you know about the 10 year old Palestinian girl, Abir Aramin, who was shot and killed by an Israeli border policeman. Because the police initially refused to investigate, her father, with the help of the Yesh Din organization took the case to court. If you are unfamiliar with the details see http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/bassam-aramins-search-for-justice-2055355.html
Eventually the case went to the Israeli High Court which this past week agreed that the investigation had left much to desire, but nevertheless refused to put the two border police involved in the crime on trial (seehttp://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4093294,00.html)
Item one is Nurit Peled-Elhanan’s response to the verdict. Nurit Peled-Elhanan lost her own daughter in a suicide bombing.
Item 2, Justice for Palestinians, is a call to action from a delegation of Indigenous and Women of Color Feminists, who after their visit to Palestine censure the occupation and support bds measures to help end it.
Item 3 is very brief, even if you watch the 4 minute video. But the message is ghastly. Thousands of families in Gaza dependant on UN help for food will not receive it due to a lack of donor funds.
Item 4, “A Year of Waste,” is Roger Cohen’s take on this past year of non-movement in settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it’s not really a conflict. It is Israel’s colonization, ethnic cleansing, and military occupation that the Palestinians understandably want to be rid of.
Will the news in item 5 bring about the change? Item 5 reports that the Arab League will take the Palestinian’s case to the Security Council. Will the United States also veto the demand to recognize Palestine on the 1967 lines if the Arab League introduces it to the Security Council rather than the Palestinians? And if accepted what alterations will that actually bring?
Item 6 reports that Israel’s new boycott ban draws fire from Israeli lawyers, some of whom identify with the Israeli right.
Item 7 is another criticism by Carlo Strenger of the newly passed law: “Israel’s McCarthy coalition is on a dangerous power trip.” Dangerous, indeed!
Item 8 is unrelated to events in Israel or even in the Middle East. However, the project that it is about is not only a novel idea, but is one that any country might benefit from, and especially a country as highly militaristic as is Israel. Imagine if Israel (which has seen 12 wars/military campaigns in less than 60 years) instead of building a supposed Museum of Tolerance on an area in dispute–the centuries old Muslim cemetery, which involves digging up the graves–would build a museum that, like the one in Dresden, is an anti-war museum. How much more tolerance that might bring than the present project in Jerusalem. Imagine that the museum would relate the Palestinian narrative, would display villages that had been demolished and the means of demolishing them, would display not only essential elements of the Holocaust but also essential elements of the Nakba. Would that not be a better basis for tolerance than is thumbing one’s nose at Muslims by building a museum on their graves?
The final item is, as you have guessed, Today in Palestine. It is worthwhile making this daily reading. The link to the site iswww.theheadlines.org
This site, along with additional materials from my colleagues, will keep you up to date on what is happening here.
All the best,
Dorothy
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1. The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it
Abir Aramin was shot in the head, but nobody shot her
On Sunday 10 July 2011, 8 Tammuz, the legal seal of approval was given to the book The King’s Torah [1] by Israel`s High Court of Justice, which ruled that the child Abir Aramin, age 10, who was shot in the head three years ago in Anata, was struck by a bullet that came from an unknown rifle fired by unknown soldiers or police. The projectile that was found under her small body has found no home, and it might as well stop searching.
In other words: the High Court has authorized the shedding of the blood of all little Palestinian girls and sent a clear message to the soldiers/police of the Israeli Occupation Forces – the murder of little Palestinian girls, especially those who are buying candy at a kiosk next to their school at nine in the morning, is not a crime. No one has been punished and no one will be punished. The allegations of the prosecution, that is, of the parents, the eyewitnesses, the Yesh Din organization, the proof and the evidence – did not make their way into the ears of the [female] judges. Are they mothers too?
This judgement is the climax of an evidently wonderfully planned and oiled campaign to render permissible the killing of Palestinians that has been conducted for decades now in newspapers, in political speeches, in literature and song, in military plans, in the formulation of the army’s ethical code and in the textbooks that explain that every massacre of Palestinians since 1948 was good for the Jews, for the Jewish democracy and for the conservation of the Jewish majority in the State of/Land of Israel in the long, short or middle run. This campaign has gained momentum since the cast lead and phosphorus massacre in Gaza two years ago. Since then everybody has found justification and rationalization for the killing of Palestinians. Retired military officers and officers who are not retired appear before schoolchildren and students in military preparatory programs, or just people who want to sleep with a clean conscience at night, and explain to them that the most moral army in the world does not do anything without moral-ethical-“value” justification, so if Palestinian children are harmed in the course of a moral-ethical-justified military operation, full of values and bursting with morality, then it was certainly the lesser evil, a necessary injustice, splinters, imposed by circumstances, a necessity that is not to be condemned – never to be condemned. Because the killing of Palestinians is always done in the name of the law – international or national, or in the name of the laws of the Torah, in the name of the sublime values of preserving non-Palestinian human life, in the name of the War on Terror, military accomplishments, the principle of deterrence, which is always justified and explained in words that do not include the human component. Dead Palestinians are a target, an objective, a “sector”, an operation, an action, a procedure.
And indeed the [female] judges of the High Court – are they mothers too? – did not condemn the murder, nor did they call for punishment for the soldiers who stuck a rifle out of an armoured jeep and aimed it at the nape of a little girl’s neck who was buying candy at a kiosk with one hand while holding her sister’s hand with her other hand, and fired with precision, a shot that left one hand raised, holding Arin’s hand, and the rest of Abir`s little body sprawled on the empty, dusty street. They did not condemn the deed or demand that the soldiers or police (since the Kfar Qasim massacre [2] the IDF has always emphasized that members of the Border Guard are police, not soldiers) be put on any trial of any kind.
They did not condemn the murderers, nor did they express sympathy for Abir`s family. Palestinian families do not experience grief – never, and so there is no need to share in their grief. They have too many children to feel grief at the loss of one of them.
And for this reason we should demand an immediate end to the harassment of Rabbi Elitzur and other rabbis who endorsed to the book The King’s Torah, which explains, using the holy scriptures and Jewish Halacha, why non-Jewish children should be killed without regret or remorse, for the good of the Jewish nation, and who preach at the gate as well as in organized meetings with soldiers, in schools and in the newspapers, for the killing of Palestinian children. The harassment of the rabbis could, God forbid, be interpreted as racism or discrimination, since the High Court has certified that their preaching is kosher. Not that they need any such certification.
And the only consolation that remains for those of us who knew her, and are pained at her death and the grief of her brothers, her sisters and her parents, is that God will avenge her blood.
*** *** ***
Prof. Nurit Peled-Elhanan is the daughter of the former MK Matti Peled, the wife of Rami, the mother of Smadar who was murdered on 4 September 1997 in an attack at a pedestrian mall in Jerusalem.
Translator’s notes
1. In Hebrew, Torat ha-Melech. A controversial book by two Israeli rabbis, Yosef Elitzur and Yitzhak Shapira, in which it is argued that Jews may kill Gentile children if they believe that they will grow up to harm Jews.
2. On 29 October 1956, Border Guard troops (technically police officers) killed 48 Palestinians in the Israeli Arab village of Kfar Qasim, while enforcing a curfew that had been imposed on Israeli Arab villages because of the Suez War.
Translated from Hebrew for Occupation Magazine by George Malent
========================================
2. Forwarded by Pnina
—– Original Message —– From: “Martina Rieker”
To: <H-GENDER-MIDEAST@H-NET.MSU.EDU
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2011 7:10 AM
Subject: Justice for Palestine
H-Gender-MidEast
From: Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi <ria55@sfsu.edu
Date: Thursday,
July 14, 2011
Please distribute widely:
Justice for Palestine
A Call to Action from Indigenous and Women of Color Feminists
Between June 14 and June 23, 2011, a delegation of 11 scholars,
activists, and artists visited occupied Palestine. As indigenous
and women of color feminists involved in multiple social justice
struggles, we sought to affirm our association with the growing
international movement for a free Palestine. We wanted to see for
ourselves the conditions under which Palestinian people live and
struggle against what we can now confidently name as the Israeli
project of apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Each and every one of us-
including those members of our delegation who grew up in the Jim
Crow South, in apartheid South Africa, and on Indian reservations
in the U.S.-was shocked by what we saw. In this statement we
describe some of our experiences and issue an urgent call to others
who share our commitment to racial justice, equality, and freedom.
During our short stay in Palestine, we met with academics,
students, youth, leaders of civic organizations, elected officials,
trade unionists, political leaders, artists, and civil society
activists, as well as residents of refugee camps and villages that
have been recently attacked by Israeli soldiers and settlers.
Everyone we encountered-in Nablus, Awarta, Balata, Jerusalem,
Hebron, Dheisheh, Bethlehem, Birzeit, Ramallah, Um el-Fahem, and
Haifa-asked us to tell the truth about life under occupation and
about their unwavering commitment to a free Palestine. We were
deeply impressed by people’s insistence on the linkages between the
movement for a free Palestine and struggles for justice throughout
the world; as Martin Luther King, Jr. insisted throughout his life,
“Justice is indivisible. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice
everywhere.”
Traveling by bus throughout the country, we saw vast numbers of
Israeli settlements ominously perched in the hills, bearing witness
to the systematic confiscation of Palestinian land in flagrant
violation of international law and United Nations resolutions. We
met with refugees across the country whose families had been
evicted from their homes by Zionist forces, their land confiscated,
their villages and olive groves razed. As a consequence of this
ongoing displacement, Palestinians comprise the largest refugee
population in the world (over five million), the majority living
within 100 kilometers of their natal homes, villages, and
farmlands. In defiance of United Nations Resolution 194, Israel has
an active policy of opposing the right of Palestinian refugees to
return to their ancestral homes and lands on the grounds that they
are not entitled to exercise the Israeli Law of Return, which is
reserved for Jews.
In Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in eastern occupied Jerusalem, we
met an 88-year-old woman who was forcibly evicted in the middle of
the night; she watched as the Israeli military moved settlers into
her house a mere two hours later. Now living in the small back
rooms of what was once her large family residence, she defiantly
asserted that neither Israel’s courts nor its military could ever
force her from her home. In the city of Hebron, we were stunned by
the conspicuous presence of Israeli soldiers, who maintain
veritable conditions of apartheid for the city’s Palestinian
population of almost 200,000, as against its 700 Jewish settlers.
We crossed several Israeli checkpoints designed to control
Palestinian movement on West Bank roads and along the Green Line.
Throughout our stay, we met Palestinians who, because of Israel’s
annexation of Jerusalem and plans to remove its native population,
have been denied entry to the Holy City. We spoke to a man who
lives ten minutes awa y from Jerusalem but who has not been able to enter the city for twenty-seven years. The Israeli government thus continues to wage a demographic war for Jewish dominance over the Palestinian population.
We were never able to escape the jarring sight of the ubiquitous
apartheid wall, which stands in contempt of international law and
human rights principles. Constructed of twenty-five-foot-high
concrete slabs, electrified cyclone fencing, and winding razor
wire, it almost completely encloses the West Bank and extends well
east of the Green Line marking Israel’s pre-1967 borders. It snakes
its way through ancient olive groves, destroying the beauty of the
landscape, dividing communities and families, severing farmers from
their fields and depriving them of their livelihood. In Abu Dis,
the wall cuts across the campus of Al Quds University through the
soccer field. In Qalqiliya, we saw massive gates built to control
the entry and access of Palestinians to their lands and homes,
including a gated corridor through which Palestinians with
increasingly rare Israeli-issued permits are processed as they
enter Israel for work, sustaining the very state that has displaced
them. Palestinian children are forced through similar corridors, lining-up for hours twice each day to attend school. As one Palestinian colleague put
it, “Occupied Palestine is the largest prison in the world.”
An extensive prison system bolsters the occupation and suppresses
resistance. Everywhere we went we met people who had either been
imprisoned themselves or had relatives who had been incarcerated.
Twenty thousand Palestinians are locked inside Israeli prisons, at
least 8,000 of them are political prisoners and more than 300 are
children. In Jerusalem, we met with members of the Palestinian
Legislative Council who are being protected from arrest by the
International Committee of the Red Cross. In Um el-Fahem, we met
with an Islamist leader just after his release from prison and
heard a riveting account of his experience on the Mavi Marmara and
the 2010 Gaza Flotilla. The criminalization of their political
activity, and that of the many Palestinians we met, was a constant
and harrowing theme.
We also came to understand how overt repression is buttressed by
deceptive representations of the state of Israel as the most
developed social democracy in the region. As feminists, we deplore
the Israeli practice of “pink-washing,” the state’s use of
ostensible support for gender and sexual equality to dress-up its
occupation. In Palestine, we consistently found evidence and
analyses of a more substantive approach to an indivisible justice.
We met the President and the leadership of the Arab Feminist Union
and several other women’s groups in Nablus who spoke about the role
and struggles of Palestinian women on several fronts. We visited
one of the oldest women’s empowerment centers in Palestine, In’ash
al-Usra, and learned about various income-generating cultural
projects. We also spoke with Palestinian Queers for BDS [Boycott,
Divestment, and Sanctions], young organizers who frame the struggle
for gender and sexual justice as part and parcel of a comprehensive
framework for self-determination and liberation. Feminist colleagues at Birzeit University, An-Najah University, and Mada al-Carmel spoke to us
about the organic linkage of anti-colonial resistance with gender
and sexual equality, as well as about the transformative role
Palestinian institutions of higher education play in these struggles.
We were continually inspired by the deep and abiding spirit of
resistance in the stories people told us, in the murals inside
buildings such as Ibdaa Center in Dheisheh Refugee Camp, in slogans
painted on the apartheid wall in Qalqiliya, Bethlehem, and Abu Dis,
in the education of young children, and in the commitment to
emancipatory knowledge production. At our meeting with the Boycott
National Committee-an umbrella alliance of over 200 Palestinian
civil society organizations, including the General Union of
Palestinian Women, the General Union of Palestinian Workers, the
Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel [PACBI], and
the Palestinian Network of NGOs-we were humbled by their appeal:
“We are not asking you for heroic action or to form freedom
brigades. We are simply asking you not to be complicit in
perpetuating the crimes of the Israeli state.”
Therefore, we unequivocally endorse the Boycott, Divestment, and
Sanctions Campaign. The purpose of this campaign is to pressure
Israeli state-sponsored institutions to adhere to international
law, basic human rights, and democratic principles as a condition
for just and equitable social relations. We reject the argument
that to criticize the State of Israel is anti-Semitic. We stand
with Palestinians, an increasing number of Jews, and other human
rights activists all over the world in condemning the flagrant
injustices of the Israeli occupation.
We call upon all of our academic and activist colleagues in the
U.S. and elsewhere to join us by endorsing the BDS campaign and by
working to end U.S. financial support, at $8.2 million daily, for
the Israeli state and its occupation. We call upon all people of
conscience to engage in serious dialogue about Palestine and to
acknowledge connections between the Palestinian cause and other
struggles for justice. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice
everywhere.
Rabab Abdulhadi, San Francisco State University*
Ayoka Chenzira, artist and filmmaker, Atlanta, GA
Angela Y. Davis, University of California, Santa Cruz*
Gina Dent, University of California, Santa Cruz*
G. Melissa Garcia, Ph.D. Candidate, Yale University*
Anna Romina Guevarra, author and sociologist, Chicago, IL
Beverly Guy-Sheftall, author, Atlanta, GA
Premilla Nadasen, author, New York, NY
Barbara Ransby, author and historian, Chicago, IL
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Syracuse University*
Waziyatawin, University of Victoria*
*For identification purposes only
For press inquiries, please contact feministdelegation@gmail.com (mailto:feministdelegation@gmail.com).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, PhD
Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies
Associate Professor of Race and Resistance Studies
Senior Scholar, Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative
College of Ethnic Studies
San Francisco State University
1600 Holloway Ave, EP 425
San Francisco, CA 94132
Phone: (415) 405-2668
Fax: (415) 405-2573
Email: amed@sfsu.edu (mailto:amed@sfsu.edu)
==========================================
3. Al Jazeera Wednesday,
July 13, 2011
Families hit by lack of UN food aid to Gaza
Thousands of families not receiving UN assistance because of a shortage of donor funds.
[Use the link to see the 4 minute video on the situation]
Thousands of families in Gaza are not receiving UN assistance because of a shortage of donor funds.
The UN Relief and Works Agency said that unless it gets $5Om in the next few months, the emergency distribution of food aid will be cancelled completely.
There are currently no UN officials at the food distribution centre to hear refugees’ complaints.
WASHINGTON — Almost a year ago, President Obama declared to the United Nations General Assembly: “When we come back here next year, we can have an agreement that will lead to a new member of the United Nations — an independent sovereign state of Palestine, living in peace with Israel.”
It’s been a wasted year.
Just about everywhere in the Middle East there has been movement — stirring, remarkable, uneven — as the region breaks old chains of despotism and seeks its slice of the modern world. But Palestinians and Israelis remain stuck in their sterile and competitive narratives of victimhood, determined, it seems, to ensure past rancor defeats promise.
It’s been a year of terrible waste.
There is no alternative to resolving this most agonizing of conflicts but neither party ever quite gets to that realization. After 63 years the balance of power is overwhelmingly skewed in Israel’s favor and the one country that might redress that balance — the United States — is unwilling to because its politics allow no room for that. In general when power is so skewed between two parties peace is elusive.
Obama, when he returns to the U.N. in a few weeks, will face the consequences of a wasted year.
As usual, there’s plenty of blame to spread around. Obama had one of his worst moments last September when he brought the Israeli and Palestinian leaders to the White House to announce renewed talks, only for them to unravel as Israel refused to extend a moratorium on settlement expansion. Now, when the United States says to the Palestinians — “Trust us, come to the table, we can deliver” — they scoff.
It’s been a year of squandered opportunity.
The Palestinians, with ample cause for frustration at the sterile maneuvering of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have lost the sense of direction that had been growing for two years under the direction of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. They seem to have opted for an act of political theater that will get them nowhere and place them in confrontation with the United States.
Fayyad’s state building in the West Bank — schools and roads and institutions and security forces — led the World Bank to declare last year that the Palestinian Authority was ready for a state “at any point in the near future.” But Fayyad never got recognition from Israel for his achievements: Terrorist violence is down 96 percent in the West Bank in the past five years.
Israel snubbed a viable partner — criminal waste.
So the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, became tempted by the notion of going to the U.N. in September to seek recognition for a Palestinian state. It’s not an idea Fayyad likes because he’s a pragmatist interested in results not symbolism. The results of this approach, if adopted, will be negative.
The U.S. will veto the Palestinian demand in the Security Council. It is possible major European allies will vote with the Palestinians and a 14-1 vote would be embarrassing for Israel. A vote in the General Assembly would go overwhelmingly in the Palestinians’ favor. But this would not get Palestine anywhere.
It would not gain membership in the United Nations. U.S. funding, to the tune of about $550 million a year, would be cut off because Congress would be incensed. The Israelis, angered, might also cut off tax revenues. The occupation would continue, along with its humiliations.
Abbas also decided to sign a reconciliation agreement with Hamas that was not thought through. It has since proved stillborn because Hamas will not accept Abbas’s insistence that Fayyad remain as prime minister. Instead, Abbas should have negotiated a truce pending elections in a year that would allow Palestinians to decide who should represent them. An empty reconciliation with Hamas only gave ammunition to Netanyahu, incensed Congress and embarrassed Fayyad.
The waste is so crushing that the Quartet, meeting this week in Washington, was unable even to agree on a statement. The Palestinians liked the mention of a peace “based on the 1967 lines” in Obama’s recent Middle East speech. Netanyahu loathed the speech but liked the mention of “Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people.” Between the 1967 lines dear to the Palestinians and the Jewish state obsession of Netanyahu, finding a suitable form of words to encourage talks proved beyond the Quartet.
The Israeli insistence on up-front recognition from the Palestinians of Israel as a “Jewish state” is absurd — a powerful indication of growing Israeli insecurities, isolation and intolerance. There was no such insistence a decade ago.
States get recognized, not their nature, and the Palestine Liberation Organization has recognized Israel’s right to “exist in peace and security.” Palestinians are not going to elaborate on their recognition ahead of negotiations, while Netanyahu refuses to elaborate on what his vague formulation of “two states for two peoples” might actually mean.
The Jewish state issue is a cherry-on-the-cake issue for the last stage of any talks. So pushing it to the front of the agenda is just Netanyahu’s way of putting delaying tactics ahead of strategic thinking once again.
The waste is staggering and the looming train wreck appalling.
You can follow Roger Cohen on Twitter at twitter.com/nytimescohen .
===========================
5. Washington Post Updated,
July 14, 6:2011
Arab League endorses Palestinian bid to seek recognition of independence at United Nations
The Arab League on Thursday endorsed a Palestinian plan to seek full membership at the United Nations this fall, setting up a likely confrontation with the United States in the powerful U.N. Security Council.
Negotiations with Israel on the terms of Palestinian statehood have been frozen since 2008. As an alternative, the Palestinians have decided to seek U.N. recognition of an independent “Palestine” in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, the areas Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war.
Arab League foreign ministers, meeting Thursday in Doha, Qatar, said they would support the Palestinian bid.
The ministers pledged in a statement to “take all necessary measures and to rally needed support of all world countries, starting with members of the Security Council, to recognize the state of Palestine … and to win full membership of the United Nations.”
“Comprehensive and just peace with Israel will not be accomplished unless Israel withdraws from all occupied Arab territories,” it said.
There was no immediate official reaction from Israel or the United States to the decision. However, the United States, one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, has strongly hinted it would veto a Palestinian membership request. A U.S. veto would derail a quest for full U.N. recognition.
As an alternative, the Palestinians could go to the General Assembly and seek recognition there as a non-member observer state, a largely symbolic nod. Still, widespread support in the General Assembly would signal that a majority of countries support Palestinian statehood in the pre-1967 lines.
After Thursday’s announcement, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said the Palestinians would appeal to both bodies, beginning with the council. “We hope the United States will not use its veto against this decision,” he said.
Speaking from Doha, Erekat said the Arab ministers decided to form two committees — one to work on procedural matters and the second to rally international support for the Palestinians.
Taking on the U.S. is potentially risky for the Palestinians, since Washington is the main Mideast mediator. Already, there is a move in Congress to cut off funds millions of dollars in aid if an emerging Palestinian unity government includes the militant Hamas group, which is considered a terrorist organization by the West.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects a full withdrawal from the occupied lands, where some 500,000 Israelis have settled since 1967, including 300,000 in the West Bank and 200,000 in Israel-annexed east Jerusalem. Netanyahu says Israel will never relinquish east Jerusalem, which he considers an integral part of its capital. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but continues to control its borders, sea and air space.
Palestinian officials acknowledge a victory at the U.N. would not immediately change the situation on the ground, but they believe a strong international endorsement would step up pressure on Israel to withdraw from occupied territory.
Israel and the United States say a Palestinian state should be formed through a peace deal with Israel.
The latest significant round of peace talks broke down in late 2008. At the time, Netanyahu’s predecessor and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had agreed on the principle of swapping some West Bank land for Israeli territory, in order to enable Israel to retain some major Jewish settlements. However, the leaders were far apart on the extent of such a swap, and other key disputes, including the fate of Jerusalem.
The Palestinians have said they will not resume talks unless Israel agrees to freeze settlement construction and accepts the pre-1967 lines as the basis of a peace deal. Israel says issues like settlements and borders should be on the negotiating table.
=============================================
6. The Guardian
14 July 2011
Israel’s boycott ban draws fire from law professors
Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu defends controversial measure but legal experts, including some rightwingers, say it damages freedom of expression
Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu told the Knesset he was ‘against boycotts aimed at the Jewish state’. Photograph: Jim Hollander/AP
Israel’s new law effectively banning political boycotts is unconstitutional and does grievous harm to freedom of expression and protest, three dozen eminent Israeli law professors have said in a petition.
The move followed prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s robust defence of the law in the Knesset (parliament) on Wednesday in which he said he was “against boycotts aimed at the Jewish state”.
The petition, sent to attorney-general Yehuda Weinstein, was signed by the deans of many of Israel’s law schools, including some associated with the political right.
“This law is a classic case of the tyranny of the majority,” said Alon Harel of Hebrew University, one of the instigators of the petition. “The majority aims at silencing, persecuting and threatening the minority. It conflicts directly with the principles established in Israel in the 1990s that entrench the right to freedom of speech in the legal system. It is the most cherished right in the Israeli legal system.”
Under the Law for Prevention of Damage to the State of Israel through Boycott, an individual or organisation proposing a boycott may be sued for compensation by any individual or institution facing possible damage as a result. Evidence of actual damage will not be required.
It bans consumer boycotts of goods and services produced in West Bank settlements and the blacklisting of cultural and academic institutions in settlements. It also bars the government from doing business with companies that comply with boycotts.
Boycotts were a standard form of protest in Israel, Harel said. But the new law was a “non-neutral restriction”.
“Speech or action which promotes one viewpoint is protected and sanctioned, yet speech which promotes another viewpoint is prohibited,” he said.
Boycotts by ultra-orthodox Jews against the Israeli national airline El Al over flying on the sabbath or by Israeli tourists against Turkey following last year’s flotilla had not been targeted, he said.
Harel said the new law had to be seen within a wider context: “Basically, Israel is still a lively democracy. But this is part of a campaign to win the political struggle not through free elections and political discourse but through silencing certain sections of society.”
Several civil rights groups have launched a challenge to the new law in Israel’s supreme court and high court of justice.
Another bill is to be brought before the Knesset next week which allows the investigation of the funding of human and civil rights groups in Israel. Many groups say this is unnecessary as their funding is totally transparent and they claim it is part of a wider campaign of harassment and an attempt to restrict their actions.
Two rightwing members of the Knesset announced on Wednesday they would present a further bill allowing the Knesset to veto supreme court appointments. The right has criticised its judges for decisions it considers to be against Israel’s interests.
The bill, which is not widely supported, is unlikely to succeed. The speaker of the Knesset, Reuven Rivlin, said: “The threat to the supreme court is a danger to democracy.”
Despite being absent for Monday night’s vote in favour of the law, Netanyahu told the Knesset: “I don’t want anyone to be confused. I approved the law. If I hadn’t backed it, it wouldn’t have passed. I am against boycotts aimed at the Jewish state.”
He denied the new law damaged Israel’s image. “What mars its image are the reckless, irresponsible attacks against the legitimate attempt by a democracy on the defensive to draw a line between what is acceptable and what isn’t acceptable,” he said.
Matthew Gould, the British ambassador to Israel, came under fire for saying in an interview with Israeli newspaper Maariv that the UK was concerned about the law.
“For a foreign diplomat to take such a public stance is highly unusual,” a foreign ministry official said. “It is not customary for an ambassador to speak out against a legislative process.”
In a separate development, nursery schools in Israel are to be required to raise the Israeli flag and sing the national anthem at least once a week to strengthen children’s Zionist values. Kindergartens in Arab areas will be exempt from the requirement, issued by the education ministry.
==============================
7. Haaretz Thursday, July 14, 2011
Latest update 14:38 13.07.11
Israel’s McCarthy coalition is on a dangerous power trip
The slew of anti-democratic laws introduced by the current Knesset constitutes one of the darkest chapters in Israeli history.
Tags: Knesset Avigdor Lieberman Benjamin Netanyahu Yisrael Beiteinu
The flood of anti-democratic laws that were proposed, and partially implemented, by the current Knesset, elected in February 2009, constitute one of the darkest chapters in Israeli history. The opening salvo was provided by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party with its Nakba law, that forbids the public commemoration of the expulsion of approximately 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 war.
Since then, a growing number of attempts were made to curtail freedom of expression and to make life for human rights groups more difficult. The latest instance is the boycott law that is passed this Monday by the Knesset, even though its legal advisor believes it to be a problematic infringement on freedom of speech.
The law, as Knesset Member Nitzan Horowitz from the leftist Meretz Party said, is outrageous, shameful and an embarrassment to Israel’s democracy.
What stands behind this frenzy of attempts to shut down criticism? The answer, I believe, is fear, stupidity, confusion – and now also a power-trip.
The result of Netanyahu’s and Lieberman’s systematic fanning of Israelis’ existential fears is tangible: polls show that Israelis are deeply pessimistic about peace; they largely do not trust Palestinians, and in the younger generation belief in democratic values is being eroded.
But this pessimism and siege-mentality is not only to be found in ordinary Israeli voters, but also in the political class. After talking to a number of right-wing politicians, I am unfavorably impressed by their total lack of understanding of the international scene. They have profound misconceptions about the Free World’s attitude towards Israel, and very little real understanding of the paradigm shift towards human rights as the core language of international discourse. They buy into Netanyahu’s adage that Israel’s existence is being delegitimized, rather than realizing that Israel’s settlement policy is unacceptable politically and morally to the whole world.
Out of their utter confusion between international criticism of Israeli policies and existential danger for Israel, the right-wing coalition members look for a scapegoat to be blamed for Israel’s unprecedented isolation. The Israeli left and Human Rights organizations are an easy target. Instead of understanding that Israel’s settlement policy is a genuine catastrophe, they claim that NGOs provide the international community with ammunition for criticizing Israel, and are trying to silence them.
Confusion, ideology and a growing intoxication by the coalition’s unchecked power create the explosive mix that is drawing Knesset members into the maelstrom of ever more anti-democratic measures, of which the boycott law is the latest, but by no means last installment. The passing of the boycott law is giving the right-wing MKs a sense of unbridled supremacy: Yisrael Beitenu and Likud MK Danny Danon are already pushing for a committee to investigate what they call “leftist” organizations and NGOs.
They are working all their might to turn Israel into an illiberal democracy. They are turning into a classic case of what Alexandre de Tocqueville, one of the great observers of democracy, called “the tyranny of the majority”, using their clout without any restraint.
Drunk with power, they do not listen to the Knesset’s legal advisor; they will not listen to American Jewry, including the recently right-leaning ADL, as well as the US State Department who are warning them that they have crossed the line of what is democratically acceptable, and harmed freedom of expression grievously.
The next step is under way: The Supreme Court has been a thorn to Israel’s right for a long time, because it tries to uphold universal human rights. The coalition is now trying to break one of pillars of democracy, the separation of powers, and to undermine the Supreme Court’s ability to function as a democratic balance to the Knesset’s power.
A new Likud initiative proposes that the Knesset should be able to veto candidates for the Supreme Court. The new system would “allow the committee to introduce to the court a different state of mind and allow them to influence the legal system”. In simple words: they want both to intimidate the Supreme Court, and gain control over its judicial philosophy, to bring it in line with their chauvinistic ideology. Once this happens, Netanyahu’s proud statements that Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East will no longer be true.
A final word on Netanyahu and Barak: Both of them are sufficiently ashamed of their coalition’s actions, in order not to show up for the vote on the boycott law. If they think that this absolves them from responsibility, they are dreadfully wrong. History will judge their cowardice harshly: their legacy will be to have presided over Israel’s descent into rabid McCarthyism.
A revolutionary German military museum, designed by the star architect Daniel Libeskind, will soon open in Dresden. Although set up by the German armed forces, the Bundeswehr, its curators hope the museum will cast new light on war and the suffering it causes. As such, it is a very German project.
In August 1943, German soldiers attacked the village of Kommeno in western Greece. They burnt down homes and drove the villagers’ cattle away. They raped the women and tortured the men. They stuffed gasoline-soaked cotton wool into babies’ mouths and lit it. At dawn, a priest with a Bible under his arm confronted the soldiers. He died in a hail of bullets. The Bible fell to the ground.
Historian Gorch Pieken says he tells this story whenever people ask him why he is opening a war museum, and in Dresden of all places. He tells it again as he wanders through the as yet unfinished exhibition, through dark, empty rooms and past oppressive, angular walls designed by architect Daniel Libeskind.
Pieken, 49, reconstructed the attack on Kommeno for the museum. He discovered that the brave priest’s Bible was kept in the village church. Pieken now wants to display the yellowed and bloodstained Bible alongside the other 7,000 objects at the Bundeswehr’s Military History Museum in Dresden, the first war museum of the reunited Germany.
A team of young historians has set itself an ambitious target for the exhibition, which opens on October 14: They want to tell the history of war — of all wars — from an entirely new perspective. “We expect to trigger a heated debate,” Pieken says.
Up to now, most military museums — like the Imperial War Museum in London and the Musée de l’Armée in Paris — have been more akin to an homage to warfare than places for reflection. They present weapons, shining machinery and pressed uniforms, celebrate great battles, and recall the heroic deeds of brave soldiers patriotically fighting against the odds and often enough sacrificing their lives for their country.
Addressing the Big Questions
The new military museum in Dresden wants to do away with this tradition. Although there will also be plenty of guns and cannons on display, and the chronology of military campaigns will be recounted, the historians have a far loftier goal in mind. They want to examine the topic of violence from the perspective of cultural history.
The museum will address the big questions in human history: Where does violence stem from? Is humanity evil? Is there such a thing as a just war? These are the kinds of questions that are being asked in Germany right now as German soldiers are dying in Afghanistan, NATO is bombarding Libya, and a dictator in Syria is having his own people shot and killed.
As the saying goes, the first casualty of war is truth. Certain events are deliberately not talked about, and the negative aspects of narratives are glossed over. Anyone who, like the curators in Dresden, claims to provide the true picture of war, risks sounding at best presumptuous and at worst naïve. Ever since the time of the Nazis, Germans have had problems dealing with pathos — especially with regard to war. There have been heated debates about whether Chancellor Angela Merkel should be allowed to award soldiers a medal of bravery or whether politicians should even use the term “fallen” to describe dead soldiers. But can war be described without the use of pathos?
What’s more, if the curators present war in all its gory detail, wouldn’t they be forced to conclude that all military action is irresponsible and that there are no grounds for violence? And wouldn’t that in turn lead to the logical conclusion that German troops shouldn’t be in Afghanistan? To put the question another way: How self-critical can Germany’s military, the Bundeswehr, really be?
‘War Is Only the Tip of the Iceberg’
Gorch Pieken stands in the entrance hall of the museum. He’s wearing tinted glasses, the top two buttons on his shirt are undone and his blond hair is tied back in a ponytail. “War is only the tip of the iceberg,” he says. “We’re interested in what’s below the waterline.” Pieken studied in Cologne, and then worked for the German Historical Museum in Berlin for 10 years. When the Defense Ministry asked him to become the museum’s scientific director, he jumped at the chance.
Over the years, he has managed to amass a wealth of exhibits that are surprising because they tell stories that have never been told. Stories like that of the nameless girl who sorted the shoes of the deceased in a concentration camp in Lublin, Poland. Shortly after writing a poem entitled “Dead Shoes,” she too was sent to the gas chamber. But her poem survived, and fellow prisoners learnt it off by heart. When the museum opens in October, the poem will be displayed alongside the shoes of concentration camp prisoners. Although the museum is still under construction and many of its exhibits are still in storage, its emotive power is already becoming apparent.
The official opening is more than three months away. Builders cart rubble out of the museum. The sound of drilling echoes around the building. Workers are sanding floors and laying electrical cabling. The former Albertstadt barracks has changed more in the last five years than in the previous 140. Numerous armies have used it since the 19th century. Its arsenal has housed the military museums of the Royal Saxon Army, the Imperial German Army, the Nazi Wehrmacht and the East German National People’s Army, the NVA. After reunification, the German government decided to expand the arsenal and transform it into an exemplary museum for the Bundeswehr.
The expansion will cost €57 million ($80 million). Lieutenant Colonel Matthias Rogg, who was appointed the director of the Military History Museum last year, says the project was unanimously approved within the armed forces. The Bundeswehr wants the museum to be a modern institution that reflects its parent organization.
A Radical Break with the Existing Building
The Defense Ministry commissioned American architect Daniel Libeskind to redesign the museum. Libeskind’s parents were Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust in a Soviet labor camp until they were permitted to emigrate to Israel in 1957, from where they later moved to the United States. Now their son is building a war museum for the Germans.
Libeskind has traveled to Dresden on several occasions over the last few years, most recently with his wife, Nina. He says, “A German war museum can’t simply be an armory. It must take the country’s difficult past into account.” This isn’t the first time Libeskind has helped the Germans to interpret their history. His design for the Jewish Museum in Berlin, which was completed in 1999, created a central location in the German capital to remember the Shoah.
In Dresden he has driven a 30-meter (100-foot) steel-and-glass wedge through the arsenal’s late classicist facade. As a result, the museum looks like the bow of a ship breaking though an iceberg. Although the historical stairwell has been preserved, the wedge slices through the interior space of the old building. Mighty stone pillars and massive vaulted ceilings are contrasted by tilting, seemingly toppling concrete walls, while light rooms are bordered by thick brick facades. A third of the original structure was destroyed.
Many Dresdeners are appalled by the new architecture. When Libeskind first presented his design to the city, local journalists asked why the building couldn’t remain as it was. But Libeskind’s uncompromising style has rarely seemed more appropriate than in Dresden. His aim was to smash through the original imperial structure, convinced that only a radical break with the existing architecture could fulfill the museum’s stated goal of providing a new perspective on war.
Daring Approach
Gorch Pieken runs his hand along the tilting walls that appear to be getting in each other’s way. “Many people say the old building was beautiful. I say that German history is not. German history isn’t beautiful.” Least of all that of the German army: It includes Nazi Germany’s war of annihilation, the Wehrmacht’s involvement in the Holocaust and millions of dead German soldiers. The country has no need for heroism anymore.
The museum is daring from the moment you step inside. Tanks and howitzers used to stand on raised platforms in the entrance hall. They have now been replaced by a bound first edition of “On War” by the famous German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, together with interpretations of Clausewitz by politicians such as Defense Minister Thomas de Maizière and intellectuals such as the German author Hans Magnus Enzensberger. In the background, British video artist Charles Sandison has projected the words “Liebe” and “Hass” (“love” and “hate”) on the walls.
Pieken says he wants the museum to be more an “experience” rather than just “a collection of display cabinets.” He has therefore divided the museum into two exhibitions. What remains of the original building contains a chronological representation of “German wars” from the late Middle Ages to Afghanistan, primarily focusing on the 20th century. The exhibits in the new part are divided by theme, including “fashion and the military,” “politics and violence.” The exhibitions themselves are interwoven. As such, visitors interested in the fuel consumption of Wehrmacht tanks will also learn that some of the gasoline was supplied by hydrogenation plants, including from Auschwitz.
Pieken climbs the historic staircase to the top of the new building. From October, visitors will be able to take an elevator to the top floor. Just like the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the MHM in Dresden will lead visitors from top to bottom. The area immediately under the roof will be dedicated to “war and remembrance.” To this end Pieken had the barrack set from the Tom Cruise movie “Operation Valkyrie,” which deals with the July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, brought to Dresden from the Babelsberg Film Studios near Berlin.
The floor is littered with stones from cities destroyed in World War II: Wielu in Poland, Rotterdam and Dresden. The tip of the Libeskind wedge points toward Ostragehege stadium in the west of the city, where Allied planes dropped target indicators on February 13, 1945 at the start of the aerial bombardment which killed more than 35,000 people.
Difficult Location
Given Dresden’s history, it is a difficult place to have a war museum — and therefore the ideal location. The city is a reminder that the German people also view themselves as victims of World War II. Although other German cities were also bombarded from the air, and more people were killed in Hamburg in July 1943 than in Dresden, the memory of the bombardment is more present in Dresden than elsewhere. “In Dresden, the history of World War II is reduced to a single day: It begins and ends on February 13, 1945,” says Dresden historian Matthias Neutzner. Every February, neo-Nazis from across Europe travel to Dresden to mark the anniversary of the city’s wartime destruction.
But few people know that there were eight satellite concentration camps in the city or that Dresden had always been a stronghold of the Nazi Party, the NSDAP. Its inhabitants prefer to see their home town as a jewel of European high culture, and don’t like to hear that foreigners mainly associate Dresden with World War II. The municipal government has therefore gone to great lengths to return Dresden to its prewar glory. The Frauenkirche church has been rebuilt completely, while the Semper Opera House and the Zwinger and Albertinum art museums have been restored.
Gorch Pieken thinks the Military History Museum could help Dresden overcome decades of self-denial about its darker past and recognize the evil of the war as well as the evil that led to the war. “The people of Dresden tend to forget who actually started the war,” he says. Pieken has set himself the task of presenting Dresden’s twin role as victim and perpetrator through the museum.
Visitors Need a Strong Stomach
He therefore documents both the story of a boy who lost his entire family on February 13, 1945 and the fate of Henny Brenner, a writer who was one of around 200 Jews still living in Dresden in the last year of the war. Just hours before the Allied bombardment of the city, Brenner received news that she was to be taken to a concentration camp. The bombing therefore saved her life.
Pieken takes us down to the third floor. Here his exhibition will try to dissect the relationship between the military and everyday life as reflected in art, fashion, language and photography. The exhibits will include a chain-mail shirt designed by Vivienne Westwood and Hussar uniforms worn by German reggae singer Patrice. There will also be models of abused animals that served as the subjects of military experiments: elephants, cows and dogs.
Last but by no means least, there will be a self-portrait by Felix Nussbaum, a Jewish artist who fled the Nazis to Belgium. (Daniel Libeskind also designed the Felix Nussbaum Haus museum in Osnabrück, which is dedicated to the painter.) Although Nussbaum knew that the smell of his paints and turpentine would eventually give away his hiding place, he never stopped painting. Nussbaum died in Auschwitz. Like so many of the exhibits in the museum, Nussbaum’s painting is a moving historical document.
Future visitors to the Military History Museum will need a strong stomach, especially on the second floor, which addresses wartime suffering. There they will be faced with gruesome exhibits such as the skull of a World War I soldier who committed suicide. They will also be treated to the smell of decay that pervaded the trenches, and a video will show the slow, painful death of a cat poisoned by gas. “We want to create as vivid an image of violence as possible,” Pieken says. “That’s why we need suitably graphic exhibits.”
Many of the objects on display are surprising, simply because you’d never expect to find them in a military museum. For instance there are ladders woven from twigs by African refugees in a desperate attempt to climb over the border fence between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Melilla. Taken as a whole, Dresden’s Military History Museum will teach visitors more about society than any anthropological collection.
The Dirty Side of War
Following a visit to various war museums in 1926, the German author Kurt Tucholsky wrote, “This is not correct. This is how it was — and yet it wasn’t. Is this how we are to be remembered? If so, we are going about it in the wrong way. Something is missing. Where is the horror, the weeping, the oppression, the hopelessness, the senselessness, the deadened feelings, the atmosphere of collective insanity?”
Pieken has found room for the dirty side of war in his military museum. Just as good war movies are often antiwar movies because they reveal the true horrors of war, the Bundeswehr’s war museum will be an antiwar museum.
It is therefore also a very German project. It’s probably the case that a German war museum can not present a simple chronology of military campaigns, just as a German historian can not write a purely descriptive history of World War II.
Nevertheless Pieken does not call for an end to violence. Pacifism is not an innocent position, since the decision not to go to war can be as harmful as going to war. The exhibition shows the suffering that goes hand-in-hand with military action while at the same time explaining that it may sometimes be necessary. Even so, the exhibition is unable to specify rules that would determine when a war is evil and when it is justified. The museum is thus as complex as reality itself.
Gorch Pieken says the exhibition is intended to boost the Bundeswehr’s acceptance by society. He has already convinced the people of Kommeno, the Greek village that was attacked by German soldiers. They have promised to give him the Bible that belonged to the brave priest.
