Mondoweiss Online Newsletter

NOVANEWS

 

• Munayyer op-ed in Boston Globe explains that U.S. was incapable of exerting pressure on Israel to accept two-state solution

• Ajl on the social origins of the tent protests

• ‘Leahy Law’ seeks to hold all countries to the same standard, including Israel

• Some of the violence, deaths and injuries in Palestine this week include…

• The ‘untamed wildernesses’ of Israeli and American colonialism

• I watch as Jewish settlements engulf East Jerusalem

• Co-oping BDS, part I: Progressive except Palestine

• New US envoy to Israel blows airkiss to neoconservatives

• Religious identity and transparency

• Jewish spring? ‘New Republic’ cites importance of ‘human rights’ in the Occupied Territories

Munayyer op-ed in Boston Globe explains that U.S. was incapable of exerting pressure on Israel to accept two-state solution

Aug 18, 2011

Philip Weiss

Wonderful op-ed in the Boston Globe by Yousef Munayyer of the Palestine Center states the cause of the Palestinian statehood initiative in plain, clear terms. How long before our media finally accept these realities and reflect them in their reports: the destruction of the two-state solution, the absurdity of the peace process, the helplessness of the United States gov’t… Munayyer:

For over two decades, the Palestinians have engaged in a diplomatic process, mediated by Washington, aimed at ending the Israeli occupation and achieving full Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza. During this period, despite the agreed-upon framework of two states, Israel has continued to illegally transfer its population into occupied Palestinian territory. Today, the number of Israelis living in illegal colonies in occupied territory is nearly triple what it was when the Washington-led process began.

It is not simply the presence of these illegal colonies that has torpedoed the two-state framework. After all, what is built illegally can and should be dismantled, and the usurped property returned to its rightful Palestinian owners. Rather, it is the belief among Palestinians that the United States is incapable of pressuring Israel into halting illegal expansion, let alone dismantling illegal settlements and ending the occupation.
Congress is, as one commentator notes, “the backstop that gives [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu the ability to say no to President Obama.’’
Congress has regularly united behind the Israeli prime minister against our own president for merely suggesting that Israel comply with stated US policy (not to mention international law). And this month, more than 80 members of the House are visiting Israel as guests of an affiliate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Due to this discord, the Palestinians have effectively downgraded their confidence in the United States’ ability to be an even-handed mediator.

 

Ajl on the social origins of the tent protests

Aug 17, 2011

Seham

Calls to end the occupation have thus far been mostly absent, a silence that speaks eloquently to the composition of Israeli society, in which a call to end the occupation or dismantle the racist juridical structure is perceived as an attack on the state religion — militarist nationalism. Such a call would be “political,” as opposed to the current protests, merely “social” in nature.

It is still early, but two things seem clear.

One, this movement will not break the Israeli structure of power. Two, this is an early fracture — a foretaste of later ruptures — within Zionism.

To read all of Max Ajl’s piece click here.

‘Leahy Law’ seeks to hold all countries to the same standard, including Israel

Aug 17, 2011

Adam Horowitz

Josh Ruebner writing in The Hill about Sen. Patrick Leahy’s call to block US funding to three Israeli military units who have committed human rights violations:

The “Leahy Law,” as it is commonly known, prohibits the United States from providing any weapons or training to “any unit of the security forces of a foreign country if the Secretary of State has credible evidence that such unit has committed gross violations of human rights.” In the past, this law has been invoked to curtail military aid to countries as diverse as Indonesia, Colombia, Pakistan, and the Philippines. Along with other provisions in the Foreign Assistance Act, of which it is a part, and the Arms Export Control Act, it forms the basis of an across-the-board policy that is supposed to ensure that U.S. assistance does not contribute to human rights abuses.

Ha’aretz reports that the Senator is looking to invoke this prohibition regarding “Israel Navy’s Shayetet 13 unit, the undercover Duvdevan unit and the Israel Air Force’s Shaldag unit.” The inclusion of specific units in the story may indicate that Leahy already has findings from the Secretary of State that these Israeli military units have committed human rights abuses.

If so, then this could be a much-overdue watershed in holding accountable Israel, the largest recipient of U.S. military aid, for its gross misuse of U.S. weapons to commit systematic human rights abuses of Palestinians living under Israel’s illegal 44-year military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip. During the last decade, on at least five occasions, Members of Congress have requested the State Department to investigate Israel’s misuse of U.S. weapons; to date, the State Department has failed to notify publicly the Congress about any such violation. The State Department also has refused to disclose documents related to these investigations in response to a long-standing Freedom of Information Act request filed by the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.

It is time to end Israel’s impunity and hold up to the light of day the devastating impact that U.S. weapons transfers have on Palestinian civilians. From 2000 to 2009, according to research conducted by the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and published at www.weaponstoisrael.org, the United States appropriated more than $24 billion in taxpayer-funded weapons for Israel. With this munificence, the United States licensed, paid for, and delivered to Israel more than 670 million weapons and pieces of related military equipment. In just three years (2007-2009), the United States gave Israel more than 47 million pieces of ammunition, or enough bullets to kill every Palestinian living under Israeli military occupation more than 10 times over.

Tragically, the prospect of Israel misusing these U.S. weapons to kill Palestinian civilians has been borne out too frequently. According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, from September 2000-December 2009, the Israeli military killed 2,969 Palestinians who took no part in hostilities, including 1,128 children. One such child, 10-year-old Abir Aramin, was killed by a rubber bullet, possibly supplied by the United States, which was shot into the back of her head when she was walking home from school.

For the sake of Abir and all Palestinians who are maimed, killed, or whose homes, farms, and infrastructure are wantonly destroyed in the course of Israel’s brutal military occupation, the United States must end taxpayer-funded weapons transfers to Israel and hold it accountable, just like every other country, for its violations of the law. To do anything less would be to unfairly hold Israel to a different standard.

Some of the violence, deaths and injuries in Palestine this week include…

Aug 17, 2011

Seham

The Palestinians are being brutalized by Israeli violence which is subsidized with American tax dollars. This is not an all inclusive list as Palestinians are reporting that violence against them has increased during Ramadan, with attacks getting worse during the hours preceding them breaking their fast.  During Jewish holidays the Israelis impose curfews against entire towns and villages in the West Bank so that the settlers can burn and pillage Palestinian property in peace and during Muslim holy months the Israelis look the other way as the settlers go out and provoke violence.

Palestinian youth killed by military jeep
A Palestinian youth, Amin Talib Dabash, died late last night 16 August after he was run over by a military jeep belonging to the Israeli ‘border guards’, in the area between Um Tuba and Jebal Abu Ghunaym, south of Al Aqsa Mosque.  Eyewitnesses said the driver deliberately targeted the young man who was on his way to work. He was taken to the Haddasa hospital where was pronounced dead one hour later. Israeli occupation soldiers and settlers regularly target Palestinians with their vehicles whenever they drive through Palestinian residential areas, especially in the villages of occupied Jerusalem. They are never held accountable by the authorities.

Medics: Gaza teenager shot dead
GAZA CITY (Ma’an) — Israeli forces shot dead a Palestinian teenager near the central Gaza Strip city of Deir Al-Balah late Tuesday, medical officials reported.  Medics said the Palestinian, who was not identified, suffered “more than 10” gunshots to the head and upper body after soldiers east of the Al-Masdar area opened fire.
75 year old woman shot in Johr al-Dik
Selma Al Sawarka, or Um Ahmad, is an active woman, a mother of seven, and a grandmother of 35, who has never quit working. August 10, 2011 dawned like most days do for her; she went out to graze her family’s goats. She took her neighbor with her, 15 year old Keefa Al Bahabsa.

They went to the same land they usually go to. At 9:30 that morning they saw an Israeli tank and an Israeli jeep near the border. Not an uncommon sight. The tank and jeep left. About 30 minutes later, the jeep returned, three soldiers got out, and opened fire on Um Ahmed and Keefa. Um Ahmed was shot in the leg, Keefa fled to get help. The soldiers also shot ten of the families goats.

Here are some more examples:

Palestinian shepherd severely injured in landmine blast north of Jordan Valley

Palestinians: Fisherman injured by Navy fire off Gaza coast
Settlers attack bus of relatives of Palestinian prisoners
PA: Settlers torch farmland near Nablus
Israeli soldiers torch dozens of olive trees in W. Bank village
A prisoner’s wife and her baby were also detained this week, but, it didn’t fit into the category of violence…

The ‘untamed wildernesses’ of Israeli and American colonialism

Aug 17, 2011

Paul Mutter

A June editorial in +972 Magazine examined the (non-)utility of the argument “Who started it in 1948?” One thing that struck me about the points of the argument regarding the disposition of land in the British Mandate of Palestine was how similar the Zionist claim that the Jordan River Valley is an integral part of Israelsounds to arguments made centuries earlier over a different river valley that was once as contested as the Jordan River Valley is today: the Ohio River Valley in the United States.

In the 1760s and 1770s, the Ohio River Valley was a flashpoint that loomed large in foreign and American consciousnesses. Multiple wars were fought over it, military outposts were built throughout its boundaries, people argued that its seizure was tantamount to national survival, and officially sanctioned (by George Washington, no less) ethnic cleansing took place after the American Revolution as settlers and land speculators crossed the Appalachian Mountains into the region.

It all began when the British (doesn’t everything?) fought the French and Indian War, also known as the Seven Years War, largely to check French political ambitions in Europe. The colonies were a secondary combat theater, but the war had the bonus outcome of driving the French from the fertile Ohio River Valley, a prize sought by many colonials, from Virginia plantation owners (including George Washington) to New England merchants and farmers. Britain, however, did not think unregulated settlement was a good idea. The British thus issued theProclamation of 1763 (without consulting any of the colonial legislatures), which severely restricted the expansion of colonial settlement westward and turned over most of the Ohio River Valley to allied Native Americans. British forts went up to enforce the boundary lines and British soldiers began evicting those American settlers and traders who were there illegally. Americans were furious.

At the heart of the colonists’ rage (the rebellion against the Crown wasn’t all about taxes, despite what you may hear from conservatives today) was the belief that the Native Americans, weren’t worthy of possessing the land they inhabited. They weren’t natives, they were transients (and savage ones at that). Even though the British did begin to chip away at Indian territories to appease the colonials, it was not enough for them.

Sound familiar? While the Arab invasions of (present-day) Israeli territory in 1948 may indeed have been the catalyst for the expulsion of Palestinians, the aforementioned perceptions about strangeness, inferiority and savagery were the precipitants for the Nakba – and Israel’s ensuing distorted claims that the former inhabitants now have no claims to the land).

The issue of legality is what made the Proclamation of 1763 especially galling: it implicitly recognized that the Native Americans were, well, Native Americans and legally entitled to the land they lived on, something a very vocal number of colonists (including most of the now-deified “Founding Fathers”) absolutely refused to accept. Here is how the mythmaking gets going: You couldn’t “give” these people ownership of the land. “Ownership” was alien to them (actually, it wasn’t, but subtleties like that didn’t matter). These people weren’t white (i.e., they were inherently inferior). They had no paperwork to denote land ownership (except sometimes they did – but like certain UN Security Council resolutions, the settlers selectively recognized them).

And, worst of all to American sensibilities, the natives didn’t even farm the land. All that “vacant land” going to waste! That the American continent was a wilderness before European settlement is an assumed historical fact.

And it is just that: assumed.

Americans have long failed to realize that the “wilderness” was actually one of the most intensive examples of arboriculture ever practiced in human history: rather than rely on fields, Native Americans managed the forests for game and crops (and often did practice farming, just not to the extent that the European colonists did). The untamed wilderness myth only got worse as time went on, because people moving west increasingly came upon depopulated landscapes. Just a few years before, these landscapes had been heavily managed by native populations, but they now lay fallow, rendered vacant by disease, warfare and ill tidings of the rapacious white man’s approach. The real (or imagined) vacancy of the land is necessary for any colonial enterprise to succeed: the land has to “belong” to those not even on it yet. Sometimes it helps to force the vacancies along.

Israeli assertions that Zionism has made the “desert bloom” and that the Arabs were incompetent farmers have taken on the same justificatory tone (both moralsitic and scientific) as the untamed wilderness myth in the U.S. The blooming dessert meme also explains why the present water situation in Israel has become a major environmental issue and the Israelis have had to destroy so many Palestinian orchards – to conserve water, perhaps?

But these orchard demolitions reveal an inherent problem with the wilderness narrative: the land is inhabited. The Founding Fathers, though unhappy with Indian land claims, recognized that the natives did live there (duh, that was the whole problem!) and, obviously, since they lived there in numbers, knew that they were able to feed themselves. The “wilderness” mythology is, in fact, a largely modern invention in both Israel and America.

So how does one end up glossing over this? The simplest solution is for the people at the time to have already gone and created a “wilderness” through scorched earth tactics, as the 1779 Sullivan Expedition to the Ohio demonstrated. Largely forgotten today, it was launched four years into the American War for Independence and was regarded as an extremely important military effort at the time. George Washington himself ordered it, making it comparable to David Ben-Gurion’s decision to launch the October 1948 invasion of Galilee.

Like the Galilee operation, the Sullivan Expedition had been given the same objective: secure the territory for future settlement by evicting the native population. Washington, who was known among the Iroquois as “The Devourer of Villages” ordered the expedition to:

“Lay waste all the [Indian] settlements around, with instructions to do it in the most effectual manner; that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed.

“After you have very thoroughly completed the destruction of their settlements; if the Indians should shew a disposition for peace, I would have you to encourage it . . .”

Washington wasn’t sending an army out just to burn down a few dozen native tents – he was sending them to burn down dozens of native villages (comparable in size to the average colonial village) until the natives sued for peace.

Regarding that, though, he cautioned his officers over what “peace” in these circumstances meant:

“It is likely enough their fears, if they are unable to oppose us, will compel them to offers of peace, or policy may lead them to endeavour to amuse us in this way to gain time and succour for more effectual opposition. Our future security will be in their inability to injure us . . . and in the terror with which the severity of the chastizement they receive will inspire them. Peace without this would be fallacious and temporary.”

Ben-Gurion made the Israeli association (in tactics and justification) with this era in American history quite clear during the 1948 War of Independence. His biographer, Michael Bar-Zohar, says that Ben-Gurion told his head officers “the American Declaration of Independence . . . [has] no mention of the territorial limits. We are not obliged to state the limits of our State.”

Galilee was, like Ohio, supposed to remain in the hands of its native inhabitants (that was the UN plan). But, once the natives were cleared by the invaders (in Ohio’s case, by the Americans’ burning of Indian villages and their food stocks just before the onset of winter; in Galilee’s, this was achieved by forced evictions and massacres of Arabs that “encourage”  a mass exodus), the now-“empty” land could be peopled by the settler. The narrative then became that the settlers had the virtue of divine providence; they were fighting for their lives; the natives didn’t think of themselves as natives until after they abandoned their land when a fight that they started turned sour for them, etc.

Over time, it becomes easier to forget about these actions and to go along with the post-victory narrative that the land was always “empty” and “uncultivated” (even though men like Washington and Ben-Gurion knew that this was not the case because they planned their campaigns on the premise that their forces were going to have to seize and destroy at least a few dozen native settlements in order to claim victory). This forgetting is less prevalent (relatively speaking) in Israel today because 1) it happened only sixty-odd years ago and 2) there are a lot more Palestinians than Native Americans alive today. But in any case, history is fickle, whether it spans half a dozen or two dozen decades. History, written by the victors, always tends to focus more on the eras of expansion that follow the eras of displacement.

Small wonder that both Israel and the U.S. rely on their selective memories to justify their actions and find common ground in their narratives of expansion (not narratives of dispossession, but of provident growth, of democracy and technology triumphing over feudalism). Israel serves a useful purpose from a military standpoint, true, for the U.S. but also serves a useful ideological one as a complement to the manufactured American historical narrative.

Selective memory is more or less how consensus is made in any society, particularly a colonialist one. In most Belgian historiography, you’d think that King Leopold II of Belgium was one of the best things to ever happen to the Congolese, or was at least no worse than any other colonizer (rationalization is always a form of justification). Japanese government officials and the media referred to “incidents” in China in the years leading to WWII rather than “battles” (a euphemism sometimes repeated in postwar history textbooks). “History is a series of lies on which we agree,” as Napoleon once said.

And, as we’ve already heard, the Israelis made the desert bloom and the U.S. tamed the virgin wilderness (the Arabs and Indians being footnotes and irritants in the blazing pace of progress set by kibbutz dwellers and homesteaders, respectively).

Two Manifest Destinies (yes, the Jewish National Fund uses that language), two peoples harnessing underutilized resources to better the whole world through economic and democratic beneficence. The expansionist “Age of Jackson” in America can be seen again in Israel – through a line of self-serving historiography extending from the Sullivan Expedition and the Trail of Tears to the Nakba and the Six Days War.

As Adam Hochschild puts it in King Leopold’s Ghost:

“And yet the world we live in – its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence – is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget.”

Update: The original version of this post included a quotation attributed to Ben-Gurion re the ethnic cleansing of the Galilee that is not supported by scholarly sources. Commenter Robert Werdine pointed out the error, which I regret.

 

I watch as Jewish settlements engulf East Jerusalem

Aug 17, 2011

Anees of Jerusalem

I went strolling through occupied East Jerusalem around our neighboring settlement, Pisgat Zee’v, the other day…

The Palestinian neighborhood of Beit Hanina is now surrounded by settlement construction. Neve Yaakov on the north now meets Pisgat Ze’ev on the east.

You can see the area of construction in this Google map:

link to maps.google.com

And here is Beit Hanina:

link to maps.google.com

Co-oping BDS, part I: Progressive except Palestine

Aug 17, 2011

Kiera Feldman

Once, in the bulk goods aisle of the Park Slope Food Coop, a wild-haired woman stood next to me and scrutinized the coffee-grinder settings. “I’m using it for an enema,” she explained. “It needs to be very fine.” I suggested the espresso grind.

This is exactly the kind of shopping experience I hoped for when I joined the Park Slope Food Coop in the fall of 2009: a realization of the eternal promise of New York, home of the strange. (That and crazycheap organic food.) Founded in 1973, the Coop is a Brooklyn institution with enough character to have spawned its own genre of trend piece. Some examples: the Coop has Byzantine rules and work requirements (debatable); the Coop has nannies covering their employers’ shifts (dubious); and, most recently, the Coop is becoming a hotbed of anti-Semitism (downright wrong).

The New York Observer has contributed the latest addition to the genre, with a smug piece earlier this month devoted to Coop members’ efforts to initiate a boycott of Israeli products and divest from whatever Israeli holdings the Coop might have. At the historically progressive Coop, the Observer procured a chorus of sources declaring the campaign anti- Semitic and intolerable in “the heart of Chaimtown,” as one man put it, referring to Park Slope’s high Jewish population. For the full sensationalist effect, Alan Dershowitz—the de facto representative of the hawkish Israel-right-or-wrong Jewish establishment—denounced the campaign’s “bigotry” and threatened to shut the joint down, an ambitious goal for a Cambridge, Massachusetts, resident who is not a member of the democratically-governed Coop.

The Coop campaign is part of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS), a global movement launched with a 2005 call by 170 Palestinian civil-society groups. Shorthand demands: end the occupation of the Palestinian Territories; end the legal discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel; and allow the 700,000 Palestinians expelled in the 1948 creation of the state to return—along with their descendants—to what is now Israel. Until the country complies with international law, the movement vows economic and cultural boycotts, institutional divestments, and governmental sanctions of Israel. Perhaps the strongest indicator of BDS’s power is the Boycott Law passed in the Knesset in July, making it illegal for groups like Boycott from Within to advocate BDS in Israel, a state that bills itself as “the only democracy in the Middle East.”

Leading the charge against BDS at the Coop is Barbara Mazor, who told theObserver, “I think [BDS supporters are] latching onto it like slogans. Like true believers, it’s the cool thing to do. You know, ‘I’m a progressive, and it’s a progressive cause,’ so I think that’s how it’s coming through, very thoughtlessly.” (Mazor also alluded to her otherwise liberal politics with a dig at “a certain president [who] spent eight years in office.”) The political alignment of the Coop’s BDS opponents is made clear on their website, which links to the reactionary pro-Israel group Stand With Us, known for having once pepper sprayed anti-occupation activists from the group Jewish Voice for Peace, along with having published an anti-BDS comic book that depicted Palestinians asvermin, in a throwback to Nazi propaganda.

“People here are always thinking about the implications of everything,” Mazor was quoted as saying in a 2001 academic article about the Coop. “That’s really nifty. I find that stam people [Yiddish for “ordinary people”] think about less and less.”

Those who argue that the Coop boycott campaign is anti-Semitic believe that BDS “singles out” Israel among all the other nations of the world that commit grave human rights violations; the only reason anyone would focus on Israel, the logic goes, is because they harbor prejudice against Jews. “Israel has a lot of problems, but so does China, so does America, so does a lot of the world,” Coop member Andrew Sepulveda told the Observer, voicing a common BDS counterargument. But must we rank wrongdoing nations before taking a stand? And is it not logical to single out Israel, given that U.S. foreign policy has already singled out Israel with over $3 billion in annual military aid? “Whenever we take a political action, we open ourselves up to accusations of hypocrisy and double standards,” BDS supporter Naomi Klein reminds us, “since the truth is that we can never do enough in the face of pervasive global injustice.”

“The reason we’re boycotting Israel and not Atilla the Hun is because there is an international call for boycott on Israel, and we should be honoring boycotts,” according to one Coop boycott supporter, who asked not to be named. “We shouldn’t be crossing picket lines. End of story. The reason we aren’t boycotting Atilla the Hun is because there is no international campaign to boycott Atilla the Hun. If the victims of Atilla the Hun ask for a boycott, then we should take that seriously.”

In a letter published in the Coop’s house organ, the Linewaiters’ Gazette, boycott organizers noted that the Coop has a long tradition of boycotts—of both individual companies and entire nations. A 20-year boycott of South African products began in 1973, the year of the Coop’s founding. There have been eleven Coop boycotts since 1989, including Coca-Cola, Domino Sugar, non-United Farm Worker grapes, and tuna.

Until recently, the matter of boycotting and divesting from Israel had only been raised in letters in the Linewaiters’ Gazette, where the debate has ebbed and flowed for over two years. But at a July 26th general meeting—a monthly gathering held at Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim—the grinding wheels of Coop democratic process began turning with the first face-to-face discussion of BDS. The question at hand was not whether or not the Coop should join BDS, but rather whether they should even hold a membership-wide vote. “Why not boycott Syria, Saudi Arabia, or Bahrain?” said Susan Tauber, one of the members advocating against the referendum, according to the Linewaiters’ Gazette’s recap of the general meeting.

Coop BDS organizers told me that almost all of the supporters who spoke at the meeting were Jewish and identified themselves as such. Still, Jewish opponents of BDS at the Coop show that the “progressive except Palestine” phenomenon in the American Jewish community has not gone away. While open to hosting the debate in his synagogue, Congregation Beth Elohim’s Rabbi Andy Bachman—generally considered a progressive rabbi—condemned the boycott efforts in a statement, writing, “BDS rhetoric reveals that the ultimate goal of the majority of its supporters is a dissolution of Israel as a Jewish state.

This is simply untenable and unjust.” (Bachman was referring to BDS’ demand that Palestinian refugees be allowed to return to what is now the state of Israel in accordance with UN Resolution 194.) In the Linewaiters’ Gazette, BDS opponent Ruth Bollettino made the same argument, but in starker language. “The ‘right’ of Palestinian refugees to return means dismantling the Jewish state demographically, flooding it with Palestinian Arabs,” Bollettino wrote, revealing the racial fears underpinning the drive to maintain Israel as a Jewish-majority state. Her letter joined seven others against BDS, one in support of BDS, and an unrelated letter thanking a stranger for having returned $90 that had fallen out of the writer’s pocket at the Coop entrance.

Boycott supporters at the Coop would seem to be in the minority, if one were to judge by the letters in the Linewaiters’ Gazette or the Observer, which admitted its nonscientific methods while noting, “Finding pro-boycott members outside the co-op Monday night was no easy task.” But Melissa, a Brooklynite Coop member of eight years, had a different impression of the membership’s stand. “The silent majority of Coop members are probably uncertain about the issue of BDS,” she said, adding, “The challenge that we have is not to change the minds of people like Barbara Mazor.” Rather, it is to educate their fellow Coop members as to the need to honor the Palestinian BDS call.

Retired lawyer Dennis James, a Coop BDS organizer, noted the generational divide he sees in conversations about BDS—who shuts off, and who’s willing to engage. “Some of the older people, you can’t raise the subject. It’s verboten,” James said. “Whereas younger people might argue with you but they will talk about it.”

The other day, I met up with my friend Jesse Bacon at Tealounge, a coffeeshop across the street from the Coop. Despite having once seen a mouse scamper through the glass dessert case there, I ate part of Jesse’s cookie as we talked BDS shop. He’s an activist with Jewish Voice for Peace, working on their campaign to get the pension fund TIAA-CREF to divest from Motorola and other companies profiting from the occupation of the West Bank. Many TIAA-CREF holders are teachers and other professionals who tend to skew liberal in their politics. Working on the campaign has helped Jesse see how important it is to have a sympathetic population when advocating BDS in an institution. Jesse weighed in:

In a certain sense, the Coop campaign is dealing with liberal people who just want to get their crunchy, hippie food and be left alone. But the best things that movements critical of Israel can do is to push people to be consistent. Consistency is a great thing to offer people. It requires some explanation and education as to why this is part of your other values–why boycotting or divesting from Israel is an extension of them.

The cringe factor was high for both of us while reading the Observer’s anonymous source decry the Coop BDS campaign reaching into the heavily Jewish populated Park Slope, “the heart of Chaimtown.” At the same time, Jesse pointed out, “The fact that a BDS campaign is even going on in ‘Chaimtown’—the heart of the Jewish crunchy liberal establishment—whether or not this wins, it shows that this issue is everywhere now.”

Stay tuned for my next installment, in which Jesse and I go shopping at the Coop to see what products could go inside the Israeli boycart.

This post originally appeared on the website Waging Nonviolence.

New US envoy to Israel blows airkiss to neoconservatives

Aug 17, 2011

Philip Weiss

The new American ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, evidently hasn’t been reading our incisive criticisms of the State Department’s $200,000 grant to the Islamophobic thinktank, MEMRI. From Shapiro’s twitter feed:

Hats off to my colleagues in Washington, who have directed a grant to the Middle East Media Research Institute…

Religious identity and transparency

Aug 17, 2011

Philip Weiss

Former New York Times reporter Amy Waldman has published a novel called Submission that is about a fictional memorial to 9/11 created by a young Muslim-American architect named Mohammed Khan. Twice now I have heard Waldman interviewed on public radio, and, leaving aside the possible fearful resonances in her title (Islam means submission to God), I was struck by the willingness on the part of Waldman and her interviewers to deal in identity politics. That is, when it’s not Jewish identity politics.

I heard that Mohammed “Mo” Khan is a secularized Muslim, but angry. I heard that Sean Gallagher– i.e., a Roman Catholic — rips the hijab off a Muslim woman. The Washington Post review says there’s a WASP too:

The ensuing drama changes the lives of every member of the novel’s ensemble cast. The rich investor’s WASP-ish widow, the dead janitor’s illegal immigrant wife, the demagogic politician, the desperate tabloid hack, the beleaguered chairman of the competition jury, the dead FDNY hero’s low-life brother, the radio shock jock, the Muslim community organizer, the white trash incendiary blogger and, of course, the besieged winning architect are all represented here.

I wonder where the Jewish characters are. Now maybe Waldman has them. But no one’s talking about them.

At one level, I understand this reluctance. During the Ocean Hill-Brownsville struggle of 40 years ago, or the Crown Heights upheaval of 20 years back, the Jews were humble — teachers and Hasidim– and could be openly identified as political actors. But the Jews of the 9/11 context are far more empowered actors. They include the Israel lobby whose support for the occupation of Palestine played a part in Al Qaeda’s decision to attack the U.S., as even the 9/11 commission has said. They include the actual designer of the 9/11 memorial– Michael Arad– an Israeli diplomat’s son. They include leading New York politicians who are making decisions and writers who are chronicling the matter. (I’m guessing novelist Waldman is herself Jewish).

And I understand the reluctance because, as a small group with so much power, we feel vulnerable. When the repulsive Texas Gov. Rick Perry threatened physical violence against Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke the other day, how many Jews reflected that Bernanke is Jewish? All of us, I bet.

But our vulnerability doesn’t resolve the issue of journalists’ blindness to the Jewish presence. We’re American Establishment actors–  as neoconservatives, as liberal Zionists, as Israel lobbyists, yes and as anti-Zionists. As often as not, we’re the storytellers. About half the narrators I listen to in the Media-Industrial complex are Jewish, and I haven’t even gotten to the execs who founded Facebook and Google, changing our lives.

And yet we’re inhibited about discussing this presence. It would be unimaginable to hear a Jewish TV personality going on about how Jewish values had propelled, say, Mike Bloomberg in the way that Chris Matthews went on and on the other day– very movingly– about the Irish-Catholicness of his hero, the late Hugh Carey.

We can’t be that open. We still can’t trust America enough to talk about the Jewish rise.

I find it irritating. I am going to thumb through Amy Waldman’s book the next time I’m in a bookstore and see if there are major Jewish characters. If there are, I’ll read the book. If there aren’t, I won’t. Because if there aren’t, it would be failing at the writer’s task of representing reality.

P.S. Two other examples of this issue of transparent political identity:

1. Yesterday we posted a video of Noam Chomsky. A brilliant man, and great leader, yes. And he said some smart things. But I found it disturbing to listen to him go on about evangelical Christians in America with all but complete lack of differentiation. A third of Americans expect the second coming in their lifetime, he said. The Christian Zionists are among the most antisemitic people in the world; they want all the Jews to be exterminated. Does he know any of these people? Would he describe American Jewish attitudes so sweepingly and negatively? No.

2. A couple weeks ago on National Public Radio, Robert Siegel interviewed writer Suketu Mehta about his article in The New Yorker magazine about an African woman in New York City who is seeking asylum. In the interview, Siegel made a confession about his own origins and beliefs. I found it very refreshing: for me, it was a window on the new Jewish experience, empowered and increasingly conservative. It was an honest, reflective moment.

SIEGEL: I have to confess that now being myself two generations from the boat that sailed into the country, I identify at least as much with the hearing officer, or the immigration officer, as I do with the applicant for asylum.

So he’s sitting there, asking her a question: Were you raped? Yes. Did you go to the hospital? Is there some document? Yeah, there is, but it’s not here. There are papers somewhere back in my home country. How can he conceivably verify the story that he’s being told?

Mr. MEHTA: Well, that’s a very good question. And my sympathies, too, are with the asylum officer. He’s got the awesome responsibility of deciding whether or not to let in a person who, if he makes the wrong move, could be sent back to be raped all over again. And I think that the immigration system needs more resources….

 

Jewish spring? ‘New Republic’ cites importance of ‘human rights’ in the Occupied Territories

Aug 17, 2011

Philip Weiss

Eyal Sagiv in the New Republic, on how tent protests are giving Israelis a new way to think about politics. Hmm. Some changes afoot inside the lobby…

Is there any chance that this language can move from Rothschild to the Knesset? Is there any hope that the many visitors to the tent protest will realize that the fight for welfare rights is inseparable from the fight for human rights in Israel and the occupied territories and the fight for peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? It is difficult to answer these questions. The pessimists might well be right. A war or a conflict could easily put an end to this summer haze and return us to the language of nationalism and survival. Yet even if the protests do not yield all the change that we want, it is not unreasonable to hope that the ideas that have been put forward about welfare this summer on Rothschild Boulevard will, at least, give all Israelis a few more things to consider the next time they go to vote.