Mondoweiss Online Newsletter

NOVANEWS

International solidarity boat crew attacked off Gaza coast

Jul 13, 2011

Hama Waqum

I am writing this exactly twelve hours after I was attacked by an Israeli warship, off the Gaza coast.

As a member of the Civil Peace Service, I board the Oliva boat around twice a week to monitor Gazan fishermen’s human rights. But today, it wasn’t just the fishermen who were targeted.

We approached a cluster of hasaka fishing boats that were being attacked with water cannons at midday on July 13. As we got closer all I could focus on was the officer manning the machine gun, covered from head to toe with black, which struck me as very medieval, if you know what I mean.

Our boat, along with the fishing vessels, was around two miles out to sea, well within the three-mile fishing limit imposed by Israel. We saw marines congregate on deck to watch as the water cannon was angled slowly but deliberately towards us. To my delight they struggled against the wind initially, but eventually managed to angle round us as we fumbled with the water-logged engine. I took one look at the jet being generated vertically and knew what was coming. Sure enough, pellets of water began to rain down on us with stinging force. Then I, camera in one hand, felt the jet stream slap my face directly, staying there for several seconds, before the boat was yanked away by the fishermen around us. I was flung backwards and words I never utter escaped my lips. Struggling to stay up, I forced myself to take it on the chin. Literally. As the assault continued, they repeatedly aimed at my face and each time my nose, eyes and mouth filled with seawater. At one point I even saw a naval officer indicate to the marine controlling the cannon to aim for me. He gleefully obliged.

Israeli naval water cannons are able reach high into the air; even when fired vertically they can reach about four times the height of the gunboat. This warship was about 10 metres away. Imagine someone boxing your face. Imagine that their fist is larger than a bowling ball. Now imagine that punch lasting for ten minutes. This is what it felt like.

For ten minutes we were pursued as we tried to escape the gunboat. There were several fishing boats around us and, if there is a silver lining, it is that our presence distracted the Navy from attacking them.

Our boat began to fill with water and we struggled, along with the fishing boats around us to return to shore. Even as we picked up speed, the gunboat honed in on us, with relentless attack after attack. Eventually at just over one mile off the Gaza shore, the gunboat lagged behind and we were on the home straight.

We were completely drenched through. Our captain had to order us to corners of the boat, worried it was about to capsize or sink from all the water with which it had been filled. My body started to buzz and I’m surprised I didn’t electrocute everyone with the static that was building in my bloodstream. The fishermen were safe, we escaped and I felt like we had won. Even though rinsing my mouth with the salinated Gazan water to make wudu that evening brought my brain right back to gargling waterjets on the Oliva boat, the footage is gold dust and we refused to cower from their water-taunting and domination.

Although the attack was challenging for those of us who experienced it, it is essential to remember that this an everyday occurrence for Gazan fishermen. Earlier that very day, the boat of one fisherman was shot at repeatedly. There were too many bullet holes in the bow of his boat for me to count. His netting cables were shot through and he lost his catch. I’m sure he must have been fishing for grenades or something, right? Whereas I returned to shore simply with a stinging face and drenched clothes, when fishermen are attacked, they are unable to make their living. For the one attack on CPS Gaza, there have been tens if not hundreds of attacks on fishing boats.

International observers of Gaza are being targeted evermore frequently, as witnessed with the sabotage and interception of the 2nd flotilla fleet. Such attacks prevent those who have easier access to the world beyond the siege from witnessing attacks on Gazan civilians. These are the actions of a nation that has something to hide.

Human rights volunteers will continue to monitor violations, regardless of what the Israeli Navy fires at us, not only because we aren’t doing anything wrong, but because we know, and I mean this graciously, we are doing what is right and is what no authority is willing to do: ensuring that when fishermen are shot and attacked, somebody is there to witness and document it. Not everyone is able to get to Gaza, so hopefully the video footage and this account will help to bring Gaza to you.

Hama Waqum is a volunteer for CPS Gaza, she writes in a personal capacity and tweets at @WelshinGaza.

Desert Bloomism: The Israeli myth that won’t spoil, wither, or die

Jul 13, 2011

NimaShirazi

“This tractor does two things – it turns the land and turns us off the land. There is little difference between this tractor and a tank. The people were driven, intimidated, hurt by both. We must think about this.”

– John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Chapter 14

“If the olive trees knew the hands that planted them, their oil would become tears.”

– Mahmoud Darwish

Last month, as the horrifying existential and delegitimizing threat of a few small boats and dozens of courageous peace activists (including a bunch of old folks, a Holocaust survivor, and a Pulitzer Prize laureate) armed with international law, an affinity for human rights, humanitarian aid, and scary potential papercut-inducing letters of support for Palestinian freedom and self-determination sought to challenge the illegal Israeliblockade, The New York Times‘ Ethan Bronner did his best to divert attention away from the suffering in Gaza by publishingarticles showing how wonderful and luxurious life is in an besieged open-air prison.

On June 28, Bronner published a piece entitled, “A Bountiful Harvest, Rooted in a Former Settlements Soil.” The Times online header read: “Gaza Establishes Food Independence in Former Israeli Settlements.” Beyond the obvious agenda inherent in these banners, the piece itself peddles age-old Zionist tropes of historical revisionism, land redemption and blooming deserts.

Bronner begins:

Hundreds of acres of watermelons, orange saplings and grapevines stretch in orderly rows out to the horizon. Irrigation hoses run along the sand, dripping quietly. Apple trees are starting to blossom nearby. Avocados and mangoes are on their way.

Gaza, cut off by Israel and Egypt for the past four years and heavily dependent on food aid, is expanding an enormous state-run farm aimed at gaining partial food independence.

Most striking is that the project sits in the center of the coastal strip on the sites of the former Israeli settlements whose looted greenhouses and ruined fields became a symbol of all that had turned sour in the Israeli withdrawal six years ago.

What Bronner leaves out is the extent of the aid dependencyand humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Earlier this week, Chris Gunness, senior director at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), put it this way:

Let’s look at the basic humanitarian facts on the ground. Ninety five percent of water in Gaza is undrinkable. Forty percent of disease is waterborne, it’s caused by poor water. 45.2 percent of the labor force is unemployed. Eighty percent aid dependency. A tripling of the abject poor since the blockade. There’s clearly a crisis in every aspect of life in Gaza.

A recent report by the World Food Programme revealed that only 20% of Gaza’s population could be classified as “food secure,” while “the prevalence of Gaza household food insecurity remains very high at 54 percent with an additional 12 percent of households vulnerable to food insecurity.” The report also found that 38% of Gaza residents live below the poverty line, noting that “[w]ithout social and humanitarian assistance, nearly half of the Gaza population would be under the poverty line (48.2 percent).”

Bronner writes of Israel’s removal of “9,000 settlers and all of its soldiers from Gaza in 2005,” at which point “[t]he settlers’ high-tech greenhouses, which were bought for the Palestinians with $14 million in donations, were left unguarded and within days were stripped of computer equipment, irrigation pipes, water pumps and plastic sheeting.” He omits the fact that Gaza remains occupied territory, controlled externally on all sides – land, sea, air – and constantly under attack by the Israeli military. Bronner describes the economic siege and collective punishment of a civilian mundanely as “security procedures on exiting trucks” imposed by Israel after “an attack on the border.”

In truth, the result was a near total ban on exports which has devastated Gaza and made impossible any sort of economic recovery. The chart below, taken from a 2010 report by the Palestine Trade Center, shows annual export trends from June 2006 to July 2010.

Here are Gaza import and exports trends over the past decade:

Between November 2010 and May 2011, only 290 truckloads of exports were allowed to leave Gaza, despite the supposed “relaxation” of the siege in June 2010. These totals represent “only 5 percent of the pre-blockade export volume“, when more than 960 truckloads exited Gaza each month. Israeli human rights organization Gisha recently reported, “Between November 2010 and April 2011, Israel exceptionally allowed export of a minimal amount of strawberries, flowers, peppers and tomatoes from Gaza to European markets.” Gisha also revealed that “the average rate of export during that time was two truckloads per day” and that “since May 12, 2011, no trucks carrying goods for export have left the Strip.”

Bronner boasts of increased productivity, the rebirth of settlement areas, farms which are “expanding every year” and providing “jobs for 500 people, as well as fruits and vegetables for large segments of Gaza’s 1.6 million inhabitants,” as well as “100 tons of grapes and 23,000 tons of watermelons” produced and sold locally. He describes meetings held over “spiced coffee…slices of crisp apple and cucumber.”

Yet, even more alarming than Bronner’s denial of Israeli responsibility as an occupying power for the well-being of Gaza’s inhabitants (declaring that “in the past couple of years” Gaza has “struggled with its isolation and economic decline”, as if it were not deliberate Israeli policy and a clear contravention of international law) is his inversion of victimization and false equivalency:

For the former Jewish settlers, who began coming here in the 1970s, the loss of their livelihoods and homes when the Israeli Army removed them remains a source of trauma. The way they mourn and remember their loss bears at times a striking resemblance to the way Palestinian refugees mourn theirs.

At a small museum at the entrance to Jerusalem named for the former settlement bloc, Gush Katif, that loss is on display: the keys to a former synagogue hanging on a wall, a cup of broken glass from its windows nearby and color photographs of smiling farmers in their greenhouses cultivating yellow peppers and geraniums.

Farming was the core of the settlers’ lives here. They provided 10 percent of Israel’s agricultural output and 65 percent of its organic greenhouse vegetables, exporting $25 million worth of produce annually. Many of those settlers remain in transitional housing inside Israel and in West Bank settlements. The failure of the Israeli government to resettle them properly has been yet one more argument offered in Israel against settler withdrawals for a Palestinian state.

Former CIA official and current Georgetown professor Paul Pillar, reacting to Bronner’s obfuscations, responded eloquently in a post in The National Interest:

There is no moral or legal equivalence between the fate of refugees forced by a conquering army from homes their families had occupied for generations, and the status of settlers installed by a conquering regime that later pulls them out. Nonetheless, it is ironic that the Israeli government appears to be employing the same technique—of using displaced persons to support an argument about an international dispute—that Israelis have long accused Arab regimes of utilizing.

As if to add insult to injury for the poor uprooted colonists, Bronner also reveals that “what was the settlement of Gan Or, part of the fields ha[ve] been renamed Mavi Marmara” (he describes last year’s execution of nine peace activists as theresult of “tussles onboard”) and sorrowfully reports that the synagogue of the illegal Gaza settlement of Gadid, a “six-sided structure dear to the hearts of many former settlers,” has suffered an even more unspeakable fate: “Today it is a mosque.”

Bronner quotes former colonial farmer Shlomo Wasserteil, founder and curator of the Gush Katif Museum in Jerusalem, echoing the line of desert-bloomism when recalling his arrival in Gaza all those years ago. “There was nothing but sand, not even a bird, like the Sahara,” Wasserteil says. “We produced the best tomatoes in the world. We revolutionized cultivation in sand and taught our neighbors in Jordan how to do it.”

The idea of land redemption and development was enshrined in Israel’s own unilateral Proclamation of Independence which declared, “Pioneers… and defenders, they made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community controlling its own economy and culture, loving peace but knowing how to defend itself, bringing the blessings of progress to all the country’s inhabitants, and aspiring towards independent nationhood.” (emphasis added)

That sentiment was reiterated last May during an Independence Day celebration by Israeli President Shimon Peres, who praised Zionist achievements this way: “We proved we can create a budding garden out of obstinate ground.”

And in late June, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, addressing the World Zionist Organization in Jerusalem, connected Zionist land redemption to the ongoing illegal colonization of the West Bank. “We are settling and developing the land – it is possible to see towns in Ariel, Ma’ale Adumim and Gush Etzion,” he said, “But we are also obligated to develop all parts of the country – the Galilee and the Negev.”

Israeli journalist and historian Meron Benvenisti has explained that such statements are the essence of classical Zionist mythology, reinforcing “the image of all Arabs as sons of the desert” and pitting “the barbarous desert against progress and development.”

Netanyahu’s own father, Ben Zion Milikovsky, revealed the depth of this ideology during an interview with the Israeli newspaper Maariv in 2009. When asked of his feelings about Arabs, the elder Netanyahu replied:

The bible finds no worse image than this of the man from the desert. And why? Because he has no respect for any law. Because in the desert he can do as he pleases. The tendency towards conflict is in the essence of the Arab. He is an enemy by essence. His personality won’t allow him any compromise or agreement. It doesn’t matter what kind of resistance he will meet, what price he will pay. His existence is one of perpetuate war.

In his seminal 2001 book, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948, Benvenisti explains the purpose and consequence of such a narrative:

The Arab was “not only the son of the desert but also the father of the desert,” in the famous words of Major C.S. Jarvis – the British governor of Sinai – which were adopted by the Zionists. And thus the fallahin [non-nomadic Palestinians] – tillers of the soil for generation upon generation – could easily be transformed into “bloodthirsty desert savages,” who not only sought to annihilate the Jewish community but also were guilty of turning Eretz Israel – flowing with milk and honey – into desolate desert. In the textbooks for course in Knowing the Land, the Arabs are portrayed as being responsible for the ecological ruin of the entire country: they destroyed the ancient farming terraces, thereby causing soil erosion and exposing bare mountain rock; because of them the streams were blocked and the coastal valley became a land of malarial swamps; their goats ravaged the ancient forests that had covered the Land; with their violent feuds and their murderous hostility toward all agents of progress, they turned the Land into a perpetual battlefield.

Hence the Zionists did not rob the country’s inhabitants of their land; they redeemed it from desolation.

But the truth is that the Palestinian soil didn’t actually require expert Jewish agricultural know-how to produce fruits, vegetables, and the myriad other crops native to the land. Pre-Israel Palestine was not quite the barren dustbowl of Zionist fantasy – far from it.

In December 1945 and January 1946, a comprehensive Survey of Palestine was conducted and published by British Mandate authorities on behalf of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. The survey revealed that the land was rather prosperous for Arab Palestinians and Jewish famers alike.

During the 1944-1945 planting season, nearly 210,000 tons of grain were cultivated in Palestine, of which 193,376 tons were Arab crops, compared to 16,579 tons of Jewish crops. Almost 80,000 tons of olives were cultivated that year, over 78,000 tons of which were grown by Arab Palestinians. Of the over 244,800 tons of vegetables produced in Palestine that season, Arab farmers were responsible for more than 189,000 tons; of the 94,700 tons of fruit, Arab orchards produced 73,000 tons. Almost all of the region’s citrus groves were Palestinian owned and operated. Nearly 143,000 tons of melons were cultivated, over 135,600 tons of which were Arab-produced, while almost all of the more than 1,680 tons of tobacco grown were on Arab farms, as were 20,000 tons of figs and 3,000 tons of almonds. Eighty percent of the 40-50,000 tons of grapes and 4-5 million liters of wine were produced in Arab vineyards. The survey found that in Jericho, Tiberias, and in the central coastal plain, “about 60 per cent. of the area (nearly 8,000 dunums) planted with bananas is Arab owned.” The overall price of the Palestinian agricultural yield that season was more than £21,800,000. Jewish cultivation was responsible for nearly £4,711,000 compared with Palestinian Arab production of over £17,100,000, accounting for almost 80% of total value.

Less than two years later, in November 1947, the United Nations recommended that the indigenous Arab majority of Palestine (then consisting of about 70% of the population) establish a state of their own on 44% of its historic homeland, while the 30% Jewish minority (consisting mostly of recent immigrants from Europe) would get 56% of Palestine, despite the fact that the minority owned less than 8% of the land at the time. When that suggestion was understandably rejected by Palestinian representatives, a unilateral declaration established a Jewish State of Israel in Palestine and, in the ensuing war, Israel snatched an additional 22% of Palestine as its own.

In 1948, during what Israelis proudly refer to as their “War of Independence,” over 450 Palestinian towns were ravaged, abandoned and destroyed, including villages that had signed non-aggression pacts with their Jewish neighbors; over 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their own homes. Ethnic cleansing and land theft laid the foundation of the new state. Zionist resettlement began immediately.

Benvenisti tells us, “Even villages that had not been captured by Israel, and whose residential sections were situated in the (Jordan-held) West Bank, did not escape land confiscation. More than sixty villages located on the Jordanian side of the armistice lines lost large portions of their landholdings, which were on the Israeli side.”

“In fact,” he writes, “the takeover of land began shortly after its military occupation. By April 1948 Jewish farmers had already begun harvesting the crops that had ripened in the abandoned fields and picking the citrus fruit in Arab groves.” So much Palestinian farmland was seized by Israel through extra-legal means and retroactive absentee laws that “by mid-1949 two-thirds of all land sown with grain in israel was abandoned Arab land.”

For a colonial-settler state that often takes great pains to reiterate its historic connection to and love of the land it now controls, over the past six decades Israel has taken ever greater steps to destroy the very land it claims to value so much. Soon after the Nakba, Palestine’s famed citrus groves suffered “blatant neglect” as they “were not irrigated after the departure of their owners. Water pumps and pipelines were dismantled and stolen, and no one was interested in taking care of the trees.” As Benvenisti explains, “The Jewish citrus growers were barely capable of caring for their own groves once the cheap Arab labor on which they depended had left.”

Tragically, “the overwhelming majority of the 150,000 dunams of citrus trees – the most valuable agricultural crop left behind by the Arabs – remained untended” and “as a result, entire tracts of productive citrus trees, especially in the Tel Aviv-Jaffa area, were earmarked for the construction of housing developments.” The same thing happened to abandoned Palestinian olive groves and pomegranate orchards, which were seen by the conquering Israelis as “an annoyance.”

“Pomegranates from the ancient trees are not fit for marketing,” writes Shmuel Dayan, one of the founders of the Moshav Nahalal, a leader of the Moshav Movement, and father of Moshe Dayan. “We shall have to lay out tens of thousands of pounds [old Israeli currency] to uproot them. The residents expect the trees to be uprooted, and will afterwards use the land for growing cattle fodder.” To Dayan, the only tried-and-true method of agriculture was that of the classic moshav, and the glorious pomegranate trees interfered with the production of fodder. Before long it became clear that agricultural planning based entirely on dairy cattle and chickens was wasteful. Large surpluses of produce (eggs, milk and dairy products, certain fruits and vegetables) occurred; the agricultural settlements needed to be heavily subsidized, and when subsidies were cut, the immigrant moshavim were thrown into a state of crisis. But the olive and pomegranate trees of the “primitive” Arab village were no more.

Tens of thousands of dunams of olive trees were uprooted and replaced by non-indigenous European field crops, which the Jewish settlers preferred, as cultivation required a smaller workforce and less irrigation. The deliberate destruction of fertile land and bountiful groves and orchards was also integral of the Zionist enterprise, which relied on denying Palestinians the right to return to their own land. Consequently, Benvenisti writes, “the stronger the international pressure for the return of the refugees (throughout 1949-50), the greater the efforts to destroy the agricultural infrastructure that might have made possible the absorption of the returning refugees.”

He continues:

The destruction of hundreds of thousands of dunams of fruit-bearing trees does not fit Israel’s self-image as a society that knows how to “make the desert bloom.” And the contention that the green Arab landscape had been destroyed because of the necessity of adapting crops to the agricultural practices of the Jews only underscores the conclusion that it was not the war that had caused this devastation, but rather the disappearance of the specific human community that had shaped the landscape in accordance with its needs and preferences. The destruction of vast areas of orchards did not attract the same degree of interest as had the demolition of the Arab villages, despite the fact that it perhaps had a more devastating effect on the landscape.

And yet, this past May, a Ha’aretz report was proud to announce that since the founding of Israel, “exports have soared 13,400% from $6 million to $80.5 billion.” Ami Erel, chairman of the Israel Export and International Cooperation Institute, boasted, “From an exporter of oranges in the early years, Israel has become a developed country.” Ha’aretzpointed out that Israeli “[a]griculture represented only about 2% of the country’s exports in 2010.”

The natural ecology of Palestine has further been altered by the Israeli obsession with planting artificial forests of pine trees. Max Blumenthal has written that “the pine trees themselves were instruments of concealment, strategically planted by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) on the sites of the hundreds of Palestinian villages the Zionist militias evacuated and destroyed in 1948…The practice that David Ben Gurion and other prominent Zionists referred to as ‘redeeming the land’ was in fact the ultimate form of greenwashing.” Yet, these non-native species are not well-suited to the Palestinian environment. According to Blumenthal, “Most of the saplings the JNF plants at a site near Jerusalem simply do not survive, and require frequent replanting. Elsewhere, needles from the pine trees have killed native plant species and wreaked havoc on the ecosystem. And as we have seen with the Carmel wildfire, the JNF’s trees go up like tinder in the dry heat.”

The devastation continues. Israel and its colonial outposts in the West Bank consistently destroy what remains of Palestinian olive trees and wheat fields.

Indeed, Netanyahu’s personal contempt for the land of Palestine and the environment in his never-ending crusade to steal, colonize and Judaize every square inch, is the topic of a recent Ha’aretz article entitled “For Netanyahu, saving Israel’s deserts is all about settlements.” The report, written by Zafrir Rinat, describes the Israeli Prime Minister as being “solid as a rock not only with regard to the right of the Jewish people to settle their land, but also in his insistance on seeing nature and landscape as no more than an obstacle to the realization of his settlement vision.”

Try as they may, Netanyahu and Bronner’s efforts to rewrite the history of Palestine are fruitless. The truth is sown in the soil.

This is how israel makes the desert bloom.

+972 Magazine: Boycott law will affect international activists

Jul 13, 2011

Alex Kane

The anti-boycott bill that the Israeli Knesset passed yesterdaywill principally affect those Israelis who call for boycotts of Israel or illegal settlements in occupied Palestine. But how will it affect the global Palestine solidarity movement, and those who advocate for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) that target Israel?

Noam Sheizaf at the excellent +972 Magazine has an important“reader’s guide” up where he is taking questions on the anti-boycott bill. I asked him to address the question of whether international BDS activists will be affected by the new law. My question:

International activists have, following the Palestinian call, been leading the BDS movement and calling for boycotts of Israel. While I have not seen any language concerning foreign nationals in the bill, is there any indication that internationals may also be affected by the law?

The recent “air flotilla” exposed Israel’s policy of denying entry to those who openly proclaim their intent to visit occupied Palestine. Can being a BDS activist now land you in trouble at Ben-Gurion or Allenby, in the form of being denied entry?

Can someone claiming economic damage from a boycott call now attempt to sue foreign nationals or foreign organizations?

Sheizaf asked Mairav Zonszein, who is a contributor to +972and who does media work for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, about this aspect of the law. Here’s the response:

When in Israel, one needs to obey Israeli laws, including ones concerning damages. From what I heard from ACRI (Association of Civil Rights in Israel, which has been in the frontline of the struggle against the law), the anti-boycott law would include foreign nationals as well – as long as they make the boycott call while in Israel. One reservation is that it’s not a criminal law, so you need someone to actually sue you for damages, and the court needs to be able to collect them. My guess is that if this law remains active, rightwing and settlers’ organizations will become serial prosecutors plaintiffs of boycottes in order to silence dissent, and, of coarse, make some money on the way.

The law doesn’t apply to foreign nationals in the West Bank, which is under military rule and not Israeli civilian law. It does apply to Israelis everywhere in the world.

The leadership of the Palestinian-led BDS movement, though,say the movement won’t be deterred by this law. In fact, the other way the law will affect the BDS movement is that it will undoubtedly strengthen calls for boycotts of Israel and its settlement policy.

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

In major shift, ‘Peace Now’ calls for boycott of settlement goods

Jul 13, 2011

Philip Weiss

Bravo to Peace Now. Understanding the crisis that the new anti-democratic law in Israel represents, it has called on everyone to boycott settlement products. It has at last come out for boycott, of a limited nature. Will J Street follow? FromJPost:

Speaking before a few dozen supporters outside the courthouse on Tuesday, former Meretz MK Mossi Raz said, “Last night, the Knesset passed one of the most dastardly laws in the history of the state of Israel … the Knesset broke the tools of the Israeli democracy, and we must now use these broken tools in order to defend Israel’s democracy.”
Raz said that while Peace Now has never called for a boycott against the settlements, following the passing of the boycott law the organization “will call for a boycott of the settlements until the occupation is over and a Palestinian state is founded next to the state of Israel.”

From Peace Now’s Facebook page:

By Tuesday afternoon Peace Now launched its “Boycott the Settlements Campaign” outside the Tel Aviv Law Courts, where we signed the public up to a petition and urged people not to buy products from the settlements – highlighting products like Psgot wines. The petition in Hebrew: http://www.atzuma.co.il/stopthesettelments

New Policy

Until today Peace Now has never boycotted or called upon people to boycott the settlements, we have always preferred to debate the issue with the public. However as soon as the Freedom of Speech has been violated and this right to debate has been taken away from us – the only option remaining is to go head to head with the extreme right and break the law immediately. Our campaign drew attention from all the national newspapers, and TV + media outlets. MK’s began to deny they were the ones that supported the law, and the AG admitted he would have difficulty legally defending the law in court.

An open letter to Israeli boycott activists

Jul 13, 2011

David Samel

Now that your government has made any calls for boycott illegal, I urge you to comply with the new law rather than risk financial penalties and even imprisonment. After all, Israel is a democracy, and every citizen should respect the outcome of the democratic process.

But I do not suggest you sit idly and abandon your strongly-held conviction that your country must be pressured to end the Occupation and grant freedom and equality to Palestinians. Instead I propose you modify your calls from the prohibited tactic of boycott to measures deemed acceptable by your government

To start, you could demand that foreign military forces seal off Israel completely and reduce the amount of food that enters the country to the minimum deemed necessary to keep the population alive. Anything in excess, including clothing, children’s toys and notebooks, should be excluded as “luxury items.” Of course, Israel’s domestic food production might help to alleviate shortages, so chicken farms and flour mills should be destroyed. Construction materials must be strictly prohibited, because Israelis have been known to use them for shelters to guard against attack, a known military purpose. Israelis also should be allowed enough water to survive, but any surplus should be diverted to provide Palestinians with lush lawns, swimming pools and relaxing baths.

A system of hundreds of military checkpoints could be installed throughout the country to severely curtail domestic travel. Pregnant women should be urged to take up residence in close proximity to hospitals, because it is difficult and time-consuming for those manning the checkpoints to distinguish between genuine pregnancies and cleverly disguised suicide belts. As for international travel, no Israelis should be allowed out of the country for any reason, save the most dire emergencies, and even then, who knows?

To counter the problem of Israeli belligerence against others, foreign militaries should adopt a program of targeted assassinations. Any Israeli who is suspected of having provided any assistance at all for a past attack or to be planning for a future one should be summarily executed without warning, preferably by air strike. If an Israeli soldier is deemed to have fired any weapon offensively, his/her home town or neighborhood should be identified and flattened.

Such measures may seem harsh, cruel and even sadistic, but should not run afoul of the new law. In fact, I believe you can find legal justifications for their implementation in pronouncements of high government officials and spokespersons. And don’t lose heart. There may be unanticipated casualties among the supposedly innocent Israeli civilian population, but they have been known to willingly sacrifice their sons and daughters for the PR value. Unfortunately these people do not respond to anything but force. Think of it as tough love. And do not fear that the international community would never tolerate these measures, especially over a prolonged period of time. There is abundant evidence to the contrary.

I flew in to help Palestinians plant olive trees. The Israelis took me to a prison in the desert

Jul 13, 2011

annie

Elke Zwinge-Makamizile is a member of the German Peace Council as well as The International League for Human Rights. She took part in the “Fly in” protest action to Palestine. She is being interviewed by Gitta Düperthal, a journalist for Junge Welt, in German. Translation by Cynthia Beatt.

Last Friday hundreds of activists attempted to travel to Palestine via Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. [Approximately 124 managed to do so]. You are one of those deported on Sunday. How did the Israeli authorities treat you?

It already began on Friday in Frankfurt/Main: as the plane was to start on time at 11 am, it suddenly braked sharply. After hours we were unloaded onto another machine and we were only able to take off around 5 pm – apparently due to an uneven surface area on the runway! Whoever wishes to believe this can do so; I rather believe this was to give the Israeli authorities time. Therefore we landed in Ben-Gurion Aiport at 11 pm, where they immediately took away our passports. The Israeli security officials seemed to know exactly who belonged to our group.
We had been invited by the Palestinian Peace Movements and there was a program prepared for us. The day of July 9th was chosen because this day in 2004 the International Court of Justice in the Hague declared the construction of the Wall on Palestinian Territories to be illegal. Amongst other activities, we were to visit the “Freedom Theatre”, to take part in the symbolic planting of olive trees and to visit a refugee camp. Instead we were forced to spend hours in detention rooms at the airport until we were taken in the early morning on Saturday to a prison van, in which other activists had already been sitting for four and a half hours. 23 women were inside and 16 men were penned in the other area of the same van. Around 35 security officials, whom we could see through the barred windows, stood outside. To pass the time we began to sing, upon which they threatened to use tear gas on us.

Where were you taken?

We were brought to the Beersheva Ela-Prison in the middle of the Negev Desert, where we were kept from Saturday morning until Sunday midday in a kind of luxury prison – not one of those prisons in which, according to Amnesty International, torture takes place. At our request consular officials of the countries from which the activists originate visited us; that was France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany. They noted our names and asked whether anyone should be notified. The Israelis were obviously at pains to ensure that no one would have reason to complain about their treatment there. Nevertheless we were under surveillance by video cameras the entire time.

How did the security officials react to you?

We used every opportunity to explain to them that we wished to make a contribution to easing the isolation of the Palestinians – the next step should be that Palestine must be recognized as a State and receive membership in the United Nations, to be voted upon in September. They did not comment on our views but my impression was some of them seemed to understand and did not show animosity towards us. They obviously had not been expecting people like us after the unbelievable propaganda campaign that Israeli officials started against us.
Israel’s Home Secretary Yitzhak Aharanovich, for example, described us as “extremists and hooligans”, intending to disrupt public order. On the Ynet internet page we were even denounced as potential lawbreakers.

The ships of the second Gaza-Flotilla have been detained in Greece since days and many “Fly In” demonstrators couldn’t reach their destination – the Israelis compelled international airlines to refuse to even carry certain passengers. How do you feel about the success of this action?

We used the situation to make the media aware of how bad the human rights situation is in the West Bank and in Gaza. Through this sharp and totally exaggerated reaction by Israel it has become evident to many people all over the world what the government is prepared to do to isolate the people of Palestine.

Prominent Protestant journalist who learned everything from secular Jews warns them about their blindness to a messianic ‘debacle’

Jul 13, 2011

Jefferson Morley

Editor: I urge all readers to check out an important post by a distinguished journo, Jefferson Morley, at his site World Opinion Search, explaining why he as a Protestant who has worked with Jews (and married one) would support BDS as a liberal imperative. His title is “Confessions of an Anti-Semitic WASP.”

As a Jew-loving liberal I must say that David Greenberg’srecent piece in Slate on Yale’s center for the study of anti-Semitism struck me as abstract, and one-sided–yet I took it personally. When I quit my kvetching, I decided that Greenberg’s usually capacious historical vision had failed to capture the reality of anti-Semitism in the city where I live, Washington DC.
The piece evokes anti-Semitism as a threat to the Jewish community worldwide, particularly as articulated by Islamic fundamentalists, including the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Some liberals, he says, are faint of heart when it comes to talking about this. Greenberg (a former colleague at the New Republic in the mid-1980s) asks: “How did liberalism—historically the philosophy of toleration and equal rights—come to be so squeamish about confronting Jew-hatred in its contemporary forms?
Here’s how:
There is a growing non-violent movement in Israel, the Palestinian territories, the United States and Europe called BDS, which stands for the boycott of, divestment from, and sanctions on the current government in Tel Aviv because it disenfranchises, demonizes, and denies the rights of about half of the human beings under its sway, solely on the basis of race and religion.
The BDS movement is liberal, in precisely the same way the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa was liberal. BDS, for example, seeks to open up the apartheid roads in Israel that are now restricted for the use of believers of one faith only. BDS says the existence of a “Jews-only” highway is long-term folly as a security measure for Jewish people and ill-liberal on its face.
The BDS movement confronts a democratically-elected and messianically nationalistic government that daily seizes the land of people of one faith for the exclusive use of the people of another.
BDS seeks to call attention to the fact that Israel receives more U.S. taxpayer dollars than any country in the world, while its leaders barely conceal their intention to draw our nearly bankrupt government into yet another war in the Middle East in the near future.
In short, BDS is rooted in the same human desire for participatory government—the same revulsion against arbitrary power–that fuels the unexpectedly inspiring events known as the Arab Spring. Yet to declare one’s support for the BDS movement in Washington invites—no, insures– that you will indicted as an “anti-Semite” in a liberal American journal. If you are lucky, you will only be charged with the misdemeanor of being “squeamish” about Jew hatred.
That’s how it happened to me.
So excuse me, while I plead innocent to Jew-hating. Greenberg’s worries (and Ron Rosenbaum’s) about anti-Semitism seem abstracted from the reality of American politics in 2011. The most successful anti-Semite in recent U.S. presidential politics was Pat Buchanan, a charming and intelligent Irishman who undeniably has some gut animus against my Hebrew kin. He sometimes displays the same bile for my black brethren and the Latino “illegal immigrants” in my life–and for much the same reason. These dusky humanoids threaten Buchanan’s sense of the United States as a white Christian republic, which is why I never voted for the man.
Was Buchanan over-the-top when he described the U.S. Congress as “Israel’s amen corner in Washington?” Maybe. Was the U.S. Congress over the top in giving a strutting bully named Netanyahu 29 standing ovations for during his recent Capitol Hill cameo? Definitely. We need analysis of that Zionist debacle more urgently than another sotte voce warnings about the somewhat more distant threat (at least to sane Washington discourse) of Jew hatred.
Greenberg doesn’t name any liberals who deny the reality of Jew-hatred in the Arab world, but I suppose there are a few. I don’t know or like any of them. For the sake of argument, I can agree with Paul Berman’s suggestion that the anti-Semitism of the Muslim Brotherhood somehow inspired the 9/11 hijackers and the global Islamist movement. So what? Save for pre-modern Yemen, the newly mobilized publics of the Arab world show little tolerance for or interest in the damaged and discredited leaders of what our hero Hitchens has usefully dubbed “Islamofascism.” Let’s do what we can to keep it that way.
As a taxpayer, I’m not that worked up about the strain of Jew hatred in the Muslim Brotherhood’s culture right now because my money does not fund the Egyptian Islamic party. I do pay for the regime in Tel Aviv. As a voter, I think my preferences are even-handed. In policy terms, the U.S. government has a few ways to shape the behavior of the Muslim Brotherhood in a more liberal direction—and it should use all of them. The U.S. government has many more levers to nudge the Israeli government in a more liberal direction—and it should use all of them.
As for the micropolitics of the Yale anti-Semitism center, Greenberg attributes the closure of the first center to some subtle, unspoken bad faith of American liberals that the administration can’t quite articulate. Ron says it is “shameful.” As an alumnus, I agree Yale should clear the air with a concise explanation of why the first center did not meet university standards and why the second does. It’s a teachable moment.
For all his complaining, Greenberg does not address the rather more tangible role of the campus BDS movement in Yale’s decision. This multicultural movement–which naturally includes more than a few Jewish kids–made it clear to the administration of the school that an anti-Semitism center would be held to high standards of liberal discourse. It seems to me (from afar) that Yale responded to these legitimate concerns while trying to keep the boundaries of discussion as wide as possible.
Instead of addressing the arguments of the Yale BDS movement, Greenberg props up a straw man.
“Yes, yes,” he says. “Criticism of Israel isn’t necessarily anti-Semitic. Everyone agrees about that. What liberals seem to have a hard time admitting these days is that criticisms of Israel can ever be anti-Semitic. “
This liberal doesn’t have a hard time admitting that. The Jewish people have always had lots of enemies. They don’t need any more. That’s why the Muslim Brotherhood and Benjamin Netanyahu should be watched closely. But why am I getting so huffy and personal about this?
Greenberg’s essay torqued me because I am a 10^thgeneration white Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) whose formative education began when I first met Jewish people. It happened when I was enrolled in 6^th grade at the almost totally Jewish Ethical Culture school on New York’s Upper West Side. It was there, among the liberal Jews, that I contacted an apparently incurable lifelong case of the dread social disease known as “secular humanism.”
I attended Fieldston, the high-achieving high school in the Bronx that gave the world J. Robert Openheimer, the visionary physicist who warned against nuclear weapons, and Lloyd Blankfein, the Goldman Sachs visionary who got rich while my 401K evaporated, I came of age with a fatal weakness for Henny Youngman jokes and Jewish women. I eventually married one. Her father was an Ashkenazi Jew from Romania, and I was glad to have a mensch of a father-in-law. It seemed natural.
Actually I never met my father-in-law. Nesti Arene died a decade before I met my wife. But I sure love him from afar. He was darkly handsome aspiring musician who studied with Pablo Casals while still in his teens. In Nazi-occupied Paris, he lived under an assumed name to evade a national security apparatus that sought to liquidate Jews and communists. He was expelled to Argentina, and, via a romantic twist of fate, wound up bringing new levels of excellence in classical music to the people of El Salvador. Toward the end of his life, he became a refugee again. In 1980, he and his family had to leave San Salvador or be killed by a U.S.-funded national security apparatus that sought to liquidate Jews and communists. Blown across the globe by 20^th century geopolitics, my father in law never lost his sense of culture or his sense of humor. My kind of mensch.
Yet because I am a BDS supporter, I am by the current norms the nation’s capital, a borderline anti-Semite whose views have no place in respectable debates in Washington. I’m also alleged to be an enemy of academic freedom at my own alma mater. I’m “squeamish.”. Some might allow as I’m not really a Jew hater, I’m just “objectively” helping the anti-Semitic conspiracy that plans to wipe out the Jewish people in the near future. (Actually, my views on Iran are actually more complicated than that but never mind.) I hope my old friends Greenberg and Rosenbaum don’t think I’m trafficking in age-old anti-Semitic stereotypes. I don’t think I’m a self-hating (non) Jew. But if it turns out I am, I suppose I will feel bad about it. In my own mind, I’m just a slightly evolved WASP: a Wannabe Ashkenazi Supporting Palestinians.

Obama’s Israel policy is big factor in Brooklyn cong’l race, as candidate insists on his ‘Zionist bona fides’

Jul 13, 2011

Philip Weiss

Ed Koch weighs in on the race to replace Anthony Weiner in his Brooklyn congressional district:

“If Jewish New Yorkers and others who support Israel were to turn away from the Democratic Party in that congressional election and elect the Republican candidate to Congress in 2011, it might very well cause President Obama to change his hostile position on the state of Israel and to re-establish the special relationship presidents before him had supported,” Koch said in his weekly commentary….

“I want to put a shot across Obama’s bow,” Koch said in an interview. He is furious with Obama over the president’s public push to get Israel to use its 1967 borders as a starting point for negotiations over a Palestinian state.

Have no fear. From the NY Jewish Week.

In an interview Tuesday, Weprin said he would stress his six visits to Israel as a City Council member and the fact that he has family living there as part of his Zionist bona fides.

“I’m one of the few [Democrats] who has been very strongly criticizing Obama on the statement he made that the starting point [in Mideast peace talks] is Israel going back to the pre-‘67 border,” Weprin said.

Marriage equality– are we fighting to get into a Norman Rockwell painting or for true liberation?

Jul 13, 2011

Jessica Rechtschaffer

One couldn’t help but smile at the hundreds and thousands of people revelling in Pride and the legalization of gay marriage. The positive press about the LGBT community stood in stark contrast to the derogatory condemnations of “faggots and perverts” during the pre-Stonewall era 41 years ago. But there is more to marriage “equality” than meets the eye; and peel away the surface and you find politics, money and the limited expectations of the mainstream gay lobby at play.

Cuomo, Bloomberg and Quinn triumphantly marched down Fifth ave while the bands played and cheering crowds hailed Cuomo as the gay emancipator. What was ignored was that the same weekend that gay rights was beling celebrated, the NYPD raided a gay leather bar. What is also ignored was the police tried to shut down the revellers from the anti-assimilationist drag march from gathering outside the Stonewall Inn. While the press was cheering Bloomberg and his massive giveaway to Republican and Democrat legislators who supported the gay vote, not one reporter or mainstream gay rights activist asked publicly why Bloomberg had a sudden change of heart after using New York City tax dollars to fight gay marriage back in 2005. Cuomo was certainly crowned king of the day, he has secured the gay vote in New York and certainly in the nation. But, a week after the vote came through, Cuomo decided to allow fracking. What good is marriage equality when Cuomo has just given the green light to poison the water supply in New York State?

Lastly, there is the very meaning of marriage itself and the exclusionary nature of marriage legalization.

Like any subset of a population, gays are not a monolithic community.

But, over the past two decades, the largest and wealthiest, gay lobby, the Human Rights Campaign has been dominating gay rights by pushing a conservative, assimilationist and corporate driven agenda under the guise of “equality”. The HRC version of gay rights is a clean cut, well off white gay man and his partner. Well groomed (think Ellen) token Lesbians are included in their marketing. The HRC strives to portray the homosexual community as straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting or a Leave it to Beaver episode but with same sex couples who scream, “Don’t fear us, we want to be like you! Lobby groups like the HRC, and GLAAD are not about fighting for the rights for all members of the community but rather fighting for what is fundable for their organizations. Hence, the 60’s and 70’s cry of liberation has been the lobbyist agenda of equality and the emergence of the lowered expectations for queer rights. The three main goals of big gay are

1) Gay Marriage

2) Gays in the Military

3) Hate crimes.

These sound like laudable goals on the surface but they grossly limit our rights. For example. Gay marriage leaves out the rights of those who never want to get married and marriage equality opens doors for some, but shuts doors for others (this includes straight domestic partners). Domestic partners (straight and now gay) face even more pressure to get married in order to gain access to health plans, power of attorney etc. Already, those companies that do have a domestic partner access are now moving to terminate this option (already priced at a higher rate to consumers) now that marriage has been extended to the gay community.

The second issue, gays in the military, is another example of the politics of lowered expectations. In a time of war, why are so called progressive organizations fighting to allow gay cannon fodder for the military. Why aren’t these groups fighting to end all job descrimination?

The third issue is hate crimes. Again, it sounds good on the surface but we live in a society where 2 million people are incarcerated in the prison-industrial complex. Why not focus on education and prevention rather than after the fact, when a queer person has been brutalized and the perpetrator of that violence is then sent to prison where he can prey on imprisoned queers?

Real liberation, real rights for all queers is about working for not what’s low hanging fruit and what’s most fundable and advantageous for the most assimilated. Rather it is fighting for those in our community who are the most marginalized. It is fighting against continued police brutality and harrassment, it is fighting for the rights of queer homeless, queer prisoners and the transgendered community. It is fighting to for our acceptance with bias, both those who want to assimilate and those who refuse to follow the mainstream. This is sadly still all but ignored save by the radical pockets within the queer community who are still out there fighting hard for real liberation.

Jessica Rechtschaffer lives in New York.

Newsweek slammed for Israelcentric coverage of Egyptian revo

Jul 13, 2011

Philip Weiss

From Peter Hart at the FAIR blog. The dude is on it!!

Here’s the headline and subhead in a Newsweekpiece (7/10/11) about the Egyptian presidential election:

Egypt’s Rising Power Player

Amr Moussa is on track to succeed Mubarak. And that spells danger for Israel.

Reporter Dan Ephron characterizes Moussa like this:

“long and vocal history of anti-Israel diatribes”

“his anger against Israel”

“one of Israel’s most relentless detractors in Egypt”

“He confronted Israelis at conferences and attacked them in television interviews”

“His tirades even made him the subject of a hit song”

“his longstanding dislike of Israel”

“anger at Israel is genuine”

This would be a lot more convincing if there was some rhetoric or record from Moussa that would suggest an obsessive dislike of Israel. Instead, we get one quote from him saying the peace plan was “just [an Israeli] trick to continue talking and make the cameras flash … but there’s no substance. We shall not engage in such a thing anymore.”

It would be hard to argue, whatever your position, that this “peace process” has led to much in the way of peace.