Mondoweiss Online Newsletter

NOVANEWS

 

• Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity movement gears up for big Palestinian independence demonstration

• ‘Flytilla’ protest rocks the Israeli status quo in a sacred place – the airport

• Israel tracked Facebook to compile int’l blacklist for flytilla

• Alterman describes a future for Israelis as free citizens of a normal democratic country ‘dystopian.’ And why?

• Jewish binationalists predicted declaring a Jewish ethnic state would plunge Palestine into unending war

• Israel and human rights split due to irreconcilable differences

• Avnery on group psychosis

Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity movement gears up for big Palestinian independence demonstration

Jul 10, 2011

Alex Kane

Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem–As they do every Friday afternoon in occupied Jerusalem, the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity movement demonstrated July 8 against illegal Jewish-only settlements in Jerusalem that continue to displace Palestinians and diminish any remaining hope that a state of Palestine could have East Jerusalem as its capital.

What made this march slightly different, though, is that the hundreds of activists who marched in Jerusalem and chanted outside the homes of settlers who have evicted Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah were eagerly looking ahead to next Friday. On July 15, the solidarity movement is calling for a large, joint Jewish-Arab demonstration in support of a Palestinian state and the current effort for United Nations recognition of that state. Their call reads:

Today it is clear that genuine negotiation is not going to happen under the current government. Even if the Europeans and the Americans drag Bibi to another round of talks, there will be no outcome. For a long time now, negotiations have been nothing more than yet another means of perpetuating occupation. There is no choice for anyone advocating for an end Israeli control over the Palestinians other than supporting the only realistic way left to achieve this goal: recognition of an independent Palestinian state.

Applying to the United Nations for such recognition is not merely the Palestinian people’s right, it is the sole remaining constructive step for countering unending negotiation and the threat of increased violence. As Israelis who support the Palestinian struggle for independence, it is our duty to express our backing for the Palestinian initiative.

The leaders of the movement, in between Arabic chants of “From Sheikh Jarrah to Bil’in, free, free Palestine,” were busy inviting the demonstrators who showed up in the scorching heat to join them next Friday. Both the Israeli and Palestinian activists involved with the Sheikh Jarrah protests hope it marks a significant display of support for a free and independent Palestine. It’s part of many efforts across Palestine to prepare for Septemberand what could happen next.

“We are looking towards September, and the possibility of a popular uprising around Palestine,” Daniel Argo, an Israeli leader in the movement, told me.

Similarly, Sara Benninga, a well-known Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity activist who spoke at this year’s J Street conference, said, “It’s an ongoing struggle. We have our high points, and next week is definitely going to be a high point–a big march of many Palestinians and Israelis together…It is the choice of the Palestinian nonviolent struggle to go down this road, and we in solidarity with them are supporting their decision.”

The July 8 demonstration also came on the same day that international solidarity activists attempted to fly to Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv and declare their intention to visit the occupied West Bank. Israel deployed a beefed-up security presence, while civilian Israelis beat up and spit on the activists. The Israeli authorities also detained and deported many activists; some remain in Israeli prison currently.

“The fact that Israel is trying to deny access to peaceful activists coming to visit Palestine, to express solidarity, just shows how much Israel is threatened from the nonviolent, joint struggle. It gives us more power to continue because we know this is our right, and eventually, we’re going to win,” said Benninga.

Alex Kane, a freelance journalist currently based in Amman, Jordan, blogs on Israel/Palestine atalexbkane.wordpress.com, where this post originally appeared. Follow him on Twitter @alexbkane.

‘Flytilla’ protest rocks the Israeli status quo in a sacred place – the airport

Jul 10, 2011Elinor Amit

A report over the weekend in Maariv said that IDF special forces went on a flight from Geneva in Ben-Gurion Airport to sort the passengers between “pro Palestinian activists” and the rest of the passengers. Eventually, they deported 25 people. This is only one of many events that took place as over 600 peace activists landed in Ben-Gurion airport and declared the true goal of their visit: visit in the West bank, and participating in non-violent activities against the occupation.

Thus, a new frontier between the peace activists and Netanyahu’s government opened, and this one is especially sensitive. Israelis consider the airport as a sacred place – their gate to the free world, an escape from the mess the Palestinians “caused” them. It is also a gate that is closed to Palestinians, and was therefore a source of suffering, both in the concrete and the symbolic level. Now this sacred Israeli temple was violated, and the illusion many Israelis had, of belonging to the international Western community, was exposed as well.

The “flytilla” is another demonstration of the third undeclared intifada – this Intifada is being carried out by Palestinians, Israelis, and international groups, and is using non-violent creative means of resistance to the occupation. It’s goal is to make sure, again – using non-violent means – that convenient escapism will not be an option for Israelis. Based on the Israeli reaction it seems this third Intifada has been a huge success so far. This can be seen in the laws against boycott, and the public attention given to the protests. Most of this attention is so far negative, but there were also few initiatives and calls to end the occupation by powerful groups in the society, that were directly linked to the BDS actions. This raises critical and interesting questions – when will the Israelis say “enough” and cut their losses? And could it be done without a major shift in the U.S. policy toward the conflict?

Elinor Amit is a post doctoral student in the psychology department at Harvard University. She moved to the US from Israel in 2008.

Israel tracked Facebook to compile int’l blacklist for flytilla

Jul 10, 2011

Philip Weiss

Facebook made the Egyptian revolution. I guess the sword cuts both ways. CBC:

Israel had tracked the activists on social media sites like Facebook, compiled a blacklist of about 300 names and asked airlines to keep those on the list off flights to Israel.

Alterman describes a future for Israelis as free citizens of a normal democratic country ‘dystopian.’ And why?

Jul 10, 2011

Jack Ross

Eric Alterman has an important piece at the Forwardstating the liberal Zionist opposition to any talk of a one-state/binational democracy in Israel/Palestine and, from an American platform, reminding Palestinians who live over there that they must accept their historic dispossession. Jack Ross, author of a new book on anti-Zionism, responds:

I can not help but begin – so let me just get it out of the way now – with a cheap shot at Eric Alterman for his worshipfulness of I.F. Stone, who in 1948 rushed desperately to make it on time to board the ill-fated Irgun-bound ship Altalena to the point of begging at the dock to be allowed on to no avail.  This must color the discussion considerably.  The revelation (in this post) that Alterman went to Israel on a Zionist Organization of America-sponsored trip as a youth tips his hand: he yearns for the restoration of that shining moment when Henry Wallace and the American Labor Party were shouting “it is part of the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan to sacrifice Jewish blood for Arab oil.”
(In this connection, it had to be one of the most bizarre moments at the 2009 J Street conference when a Nation editor approvingly quoted rabid neocon Ron Radosh saying that The Nation played such a vital role in the establishment of the State of Israel, particularly through its former editor Freda Kirchwey, arch-apologist for the Stalin show trials ten years earlier.)
With this political pedigree, therefore, it is nothing short of sickening to see Alterman denounce as “naive” or “utopian” the program of the Ihud, to say nothing of Tony Judt, God rest his soul.  On the other hand, I give Alterman credit for recognizing something surprisingly few others have: that UN recognition of a Palestinian state is the best hope out there, however final and desperate, for saving the two-state solution.  Yet his arrogant insistence that this must still somehow be satisfactorily brought about on Israel’s terms seems to indicate that the J Streeters, no less than the neocons, have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

Most disturbing of all, Alterman describes a future for Israelis as free citizens of a normal democratic country as “dystopian”. And why? Let me here give a plug to my book and quote the answer to the “dual loyalty” question given more than fifty years ago by Elmer Berger and the American Council for Judaism (ACJ). “It is not we who reject Jewish nationalism who raise the specter of dual loyalty, it is the Zionists, in their insistence that we are a part of their mythical ‘Jewish nation.'”
A further point is in order.  The very first commenter on my post of my “stump speech” raised the point that the ACJ was primarily concerned not with the Palestinians but with their own Jewish identity, whereas so much of progressive Jewish identity today is bound up in the Palestinian cause.  This is an important paradox that cannot go unaddressed.
It has been amazing to me to bear witness to how many of the activists around groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and Young, Jewish,and Proud came to the Palestinian issue through a personal rediscovery of Judaism, and how this has served as an example to other young Jews coming into the movement.  This has not gone unnoticed by the usual suspects, for instance, this Commentaryessay which asked “Are Young Rabbis Turning Against Israel?”   (It has also not gone unnoticed by those who disapprove on the left.) The Commentary essay, which descends at times into self-parody, laments that so much of the rising generation of Jewish religious leadership came to Judaism through a personal religious awakening and not a commitment to “peoplehood”.  It was only when I read the essay that I realized this is something very significant they have in common with Elmer Berger, who set out on the path to rabbinic ordination out of a personal sense of calling from a marginal Jewish family, whereas most of his contemporaries at Hebrew Union College came from Orthodox families and tended to see the Reform rabbinate as a means of upward social mobility.

I can also attest from personal experience that this primacy of personal awakening also applies to those of my generation who have found their way to Orthodoxy, and though they will more often be merely ambivalent about Zionism, this too is no accident.
In seeking to reconcile these grounds for admiration for “the movement” with the support for panaceas like BDS which I still find problematic (though it must be said is also the source of tremendous and admirable courage on display in the recent flotilla drama), my conclusion is that the best way to understand the Jewish anti-Zionist movement of my generation is as a militant religious awakening akin to abolitionism, with both the good and bad implications of this analogy.
And to those who will cry foul about my beginning with a negative reference to I.F. Stone and ignoring his later turn against Zionism, in my recent research for a complete history of the Socialist Party of America I came across the unpublished memoirs of a core party activist of the 30s and 40s named Judah Drob.  In this manuscript was reproduced the entirety of a letter he wrote to his aunt, after she sent him an article of Stone’s about the Palestinians. After assuring he would have been better pleased with it had I.F. Stone not been for so many years a Soviet apologist, Drob went on to give his lament for how Zionism had corrupted the Jewish soul, whereas it once meant something special to be Jewish, and that he feared to share these feelings with any but close family.
My heart stood still as I read it.  While it goes without saying that there is no comparison in the human toll, we who are young, Jewish, and proud must cast off the oppressive yoke of Zionism no less than any of its other victims.  The cause of peace and justice in Palestine is thereby, for better or worse, inextricably bound up with the cause of an American Jewish spiritual renewal.

(Writings of Judah Drob Unpublished Manuscript.  Morris Weisz Papers, Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University , Detroit, MI). Letter to Aunt Dorothy Schaeffer [1970s]

I’d take I.F. Stone more seriously if he hadn’t been for so long a Soviet apologist.  Thus whatever he says is an embarrassment to people who don’t like the Israeli and Zionist attitude toward, and treatment of, Arabs, since he is suspected of saying what he does for Soviet, not humanitarian, democratic, or Jewish concerns.
…I haven’t been a Zionist, but I am naturally concerned with the survival of Jews.  The establishment of the State of Israel has accomplished none of the things claimed for it: instead of being more secure than in the past, Jews who live in Israel are in the gravest danger; instead of being widely respected because they are a State, Israelis are ostracized and hated in international circles; instead of being respected for contributions to arts and sciences, their most notable contribution is as effective soldiers; inept in peaceful pursuits, they seem perfectly adept at war.
Being a Jew used to mean something special, and we were proud not to be like the nations of the earth.  What the establishment of Israel has meant is that the most representative body of Jews is now exactly like all the nations of the earth, behaving in accordance with the reasons of state, me first and the devil take the hindmost.  I don’t know how to reconcile one’s own interests with those of others, but I don’t think it is very politic or safe not to take the other fellow into account.
For a hundred years or so, Jews were seen as sympathetic creatures, victims who deserved help and consideration.  Israel has managed to reverse that, to make Jews seem to be selfish and oppressive, doing to others what had once been done to them, but still demanding the world’s support and sympathy.  It doesn’t impress me, but rather depresses me, to hear arguments about how more Pakistanis and Indians have been displaced than Arabs.  That can’t possibly make it right.
Jews remembered for almost 2000 years the land they came from and their hope that they would be able to return.  What makes us think that Arabs have shorter memories?  There were never very many Jews, so they were never much of a menace to anybody, but there are enough Arabs in the world to be a constant threat and danger to Israel.  Even if more moderate leaders make some kind of peace with Israel (an apparently unlikely eventuality while the present major parties control Israeli policy) it can be expected that there will always be irreconcilables among the Arabs, who will be an ever-present threat and at least a horrible terrorist menace.
Once in Israel there was a movement, led by Buber and Magnes, that advocated a binational State.  The Ichud party got little support then, and it is much too late now to adopt its policy.  Since that solution is interdicted, I don’t know what a solution could be now.  I don’t feel comfortable telling any body of people that in order to maintain my right to self-determination I deny you yours.
A long tirade.  All this is something too sensitive to say to anybody but a beloved aunt.  Please send this back to me, since I didn’t make a copy, and would like to have it around in case I get up the courage some time to say it out loud.

Update: An earlier version of this post said that I.F. Stone was a member of the Communist Party in 1948. According to D.D. Guttenplan’s biography of Stone, American Radical, Stone “never joined the Communist Party, even though his position on a number of issues was so close to the party line as to be indistinguishable.”

Jewish binationalists predicted declaring a Jewish ethnic state would plunge Palestine into unending war

Jul 10, 2011

Philip Weiss

More about Eric Alterman’s important piece at the Forwarddefending Zionism against Palestinian refugees’ claims of dispossession. This is from the great Jerry Haber, in the Forward comment section.

Professor Alterman, please drop the standard Zionist narrative of the “naivete” of the Ihud group [which supported binationalism before the founding of the state of Israel]. They were not “naive”; they simply were a tiny minority who saw that a) the Palestinian Arabs had no less a right, and in some sense, more right to statehood in Palestine than Eastern European Jewish settlers (of the over-forty Zionist signatories of the Declaration of Independence, only one was a native of Palestine);

b) the declaration of a Jewish ethnic state against the wishes of the native Palestinian Arab majority would plunge Palestine in an unending war — and the Ihud group’s belief has been borne out by history. The Palestinians were not a partner to Ihud because they felt that the Zionist settlers had no national claims on Palestine; at best they were willing to give the Jews collective minority rights. The Ihud group argued against statehood, and when statehood was a done deal, for federation with weakened national sovereignty.
Naive? Not any more. With the two-state solution long dead, the most probable scenario is the current status quo for a long time, followed by some sort of one-state binatonalist solution.

Judah Magnes wasn’t naive. He was simply ahead of his time.

Israel and human rights split due to irreconcilable differences

Jul 10, 2011

Louis Frankenthaler

I read, today, in Haaretz that “two controversial bills – one prohibiting calls for a boycott against Israel, and the other restricting the ability of human rights groups to raise funds abroad – are likely to be the focus of fierce debate in the Knesset next week.”  This will be just the latest example of Israel’s counter-democratic parliament passing bills and laws with little resemblance to democracy.

What first comes to mind is the incongruent nature of the two bills.  On the one hand, the anti-boycott bill forbids causing economic harm to institutions, arms, etc. of the State of Israel for political reasons via boycotts… That, is, the Occupation, as an institution of the State of Israel is protected from boycott, and anti-Occupation boycott advocates are subject to punishment.  On the other hand the Knesset is toying with a bill to legislatively boycott human rights NGOs. It seeks to limit the human rights community’s ability to accept donations that originate from foreign government sources, essentially only because they advocate for human rights and reveal, criticize and seek to change Israeli human rights policy.  It seems that for the Knesset, human rights is like cottage cheese… The price of human rights is too high so they boycott it.  However, the righteous demand for fair pricing of a basic food staple is no less just than the struggle against homophobia (which Israel’s hasbarganda program has pinkwashed) or the struggle for religious pluralism. And certainly the struggle for fairly priced cottage cheese is no less important than the struggle against the Occupation and for human rights.  It is clear, I guess, that this Knesset is for the Occupation and against human rights.

Never mind the fact that boycott is a legitimate, non-violent, common and, in fact very Jewish form of social protest. Prominent Jews advocated boycotts of racially segregated bus lines in the US south in the 1960s.  There was a boycott of Pepsico in the framework of the struggle for freedom for Soviet Jewry. And never mind that Human rights, many progressive and liberal Jews might say, are enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence.  In essence Israel, through the current ruling coalition’s legislative tentacles, is effectively saying that boycott is a crime and that Israel is officially estranged from human rights.  How else can it rectify the coupling of these two legislative initiatives?  Is Israel a human right observant state?  (Answer the question as you like… but at least for the sake of argument…).  If so the boycott law and the funding limitations are out of place.  If the answer is in fact that Israel is divorcing itself from human rights, well then the two laws should steam role there way through the Knesset.

That being said, I, as a human rights worker who seeks out foreign government funding for human rights advocacy, and yes advocacy that is in obvious dissonance with Israeli policy and advocacy for social change, will not cease this activity.   If Israel is in fact declaring its divorce from human rights and we as ‘children’ of the divorce are asked to choose a parent, I choose human rights.

Post Script: I imagine that if Rabbi Abraham Joshua Hecshel, who said that “I felt my legs were praying” as he marched for civil rights with Martin Luther King Jr., were alive today he would shudder at the current Knesset’s molestation of human rights.  If not I imagine that he is turning over in his grave.

Louis Frankenthaler lives in West Jerusalem with his family.  He is a human rights worker and doctoral student.

Avnery on group psychosis

Jul 10, 2011

Philip Weiss

The latest Avnery includes an important fact about Lebanon 1982 that ties into the fact that Gaza also was preceded by relative calm, till an Israeli raid, November 2008, that upped the violence and “justified” Cast Lead.

For example, for 11 months before Lebanon War I, not a single shot was fired from Lebanon into Israel. Against all expectation, Yasser Arafat had succeeded in enforcing a total cease-fire even on his Palestinian opponents. Yet after Ariel Sharon started the war, practically all Israelis clearly “remembered” that the Palestinians had shot across the border every single day, turning life in Israel into hell…

The whole world is against us. Everybody is out to destroy us. Every move is a threat to our very existence. Everyone critical of Israeli policy is an anti-Semite or self-hating Jew.

It has been said that paranoiacs also have real-life enemies. The trouble is that the paranoid, by their offensive and distrustful behaviour, create more and more real-life enemies.

The slogan “All the world is against us” may easily function as a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Israel is not the only country to suffer from this affliction. At some time, the Germans have been afflicted. So have the Serbs. So, to some extent, has the US and many others. Unfortunately, the costs of paranoia are very high.