Mondoweiss Online Newsletter

NOVANEWS

• In Cairo, the SCAF consecrates sectarian bloodshed

• Panic and shock sweep Cairo

• The Ninety-Nine Percent

• In Cairo, we consecrate the freedom of religion

• Palestinians have their own Gandhis and Kings

• Israeli Navy fires at fishing boats in Gaza & Settlers attack Hebron… just another Saturday in Palestine

• Protest encampments take root in Washington D.C.

In Cairo, the SCAF consecrates sectarian bloodshed

Oct 10, 2011

Sarah Hawas

I enjoyed reading Philip Weiss’s personal account of how he came to mark Yom Kippur in Cairo. Ahead of a day in which a mass anti-sectarian march was planned, it instinctively felt like a nice rejoinder to the spirit of the ongoing revolution and the millions of Egyptians who have constantly resisted the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces‘s (SCAF) sectarian provocations, and not only following the onset of the revolution. Yet it was also oddly removed from the prevailing sordid reality of religious communities in Egypt, and the complex history of Egyptian Jewry which suffered at the hands of Zionism. Especially relevant in light of today’s disturbing events, I want to expand on a couple of politically skewed assumptions he exhibited in his account of the experience. This is not to take away from what the prayer service signified to him, but to invite us all to recognize what is concealed in the image of “freedom of religion in Cairo” that he aspires to portray or to imagine, supposedly in contrast to neighboring Israel.

For one thing, Egyptian Jewry cannot be represented by a half-expatriate crowd of largely Zionist Jews praying in the suburb of Maadi. There is good reason why the “downtown Jews” were not bussed in for the service, which as Weiss is aware was directly related to the Israeli embassy, even in the absence of the Israeli diplomatic staff. It is therefore disingenuous and presumptuous, not to say politically problematic, to place everyone under the same umbrella. In fact, it actually reifies the essentializing impulse of Zionism, which has not only exacted terrorism against Palestinians for most of modern history, but has also terrorized other Arabs – crucially, Arab Jews: Egyptian, Iraqi, Moroccan and Yemeni alike. In Egypt, the key 1954 Lavon Affair, closely followed by the 1956 Israeli attack on Egypt, effectively annihilated the Egyptian Jewish community. Combined with reactionary nationalist forces, it resulted in widespread anxiety around the Jewish community and led to the near-disappearance of Egyptian Jewry by the end of the decade.

Indeed, if sites like Mondoweiss and the increasing visibility of anti-Zionist Jewish activists outside of Israel should teach us anything, it is about the extent to which Zionism victimized Jews everywhere outside of Israel, and imported Arab Jews to carry out its dirty work in completing the earlier phases of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by replacing their labor with Hebrew hands. Given this essentializing impulse, which the proprietors of Mondoweiss in part resist, why would anyone jump to conclusions about the past or present of Egyptian Jewry? Understanding the political context in which Philip – in all good intentions – marked Yom Kippur yesterday depends heavily on understanding the nexus of Israeli and Western imperial interests in the region combined with the sustenance of sectarian provocations and violence which aptly manifested its latest installment in the SCAF-sponsored massacre of Copts and their Muslim supporters that began Sunday afternoon between Maspero and downtown Cairo.

The protest march, led by Christians and joined by Muslims was in response to continued restrictions on church-building, and the SCAF’s continued hostility – in light of systematic sectarian clashes throughout the year – and refusal to end official discrimination faced by Christians when it comes to building and maintaining churches. They were sparked by the burning of an Aswan church a week ago, an event that notably took place almost immediately following mass protests against emergency law and the SCAF’s overdue transfer of power to a civilian government. Though more details are bound to emerge in the next hours and days to better elucidate what initially sparked the violence outside Maspero today, multiple eyewitness reports confirm that from the very beginning, plain-clothes police and local hired thugs were deployed to attack the protesters, who subsequently received a deadly crackdown from the military police.

A basic temporal context must be kept in mind: the periodic targeting of Coptic communities by certain sectarian Islamist groups as well as paid armed thugs, and Copts’ sustained marginalization and humiliation by the state, has persisted from before 25th January and in the months that followed systematically and consistently, and the most recent church bombing in Aswan occurred almost immediately following mass demonstrations against the emergency law, which was enacted in response to Egyptians’ raiding of the Israeli embassy, which was itself a mass spontaneous direct action in response to Israel’s murdering of Egyptian soldiers and refusal to apologize, as well as the SCAF’s impotence in reacting to these murders.

Does this seem like a stretch? Think about it. In a moment of heightened, indeed, climaxing social organizing and revolutionary verve, Egyptians are moved to reclaim their dignity in the face of Zionist aggression. The SCAF, performing the edicts of Uncle Sam, promptly suppresses the Embassy uprising, conducting mass arrests (the civilian victims of which are currently subjected to extra-legal military trials) and escorting the Israeli diplomatic corps home to Tel Aviv for a breather. Overnight, emergency law is revived – in what is only an official escalation of the already prescient anti-strike law endorsed by the Muslim Brotherhood. As Egyptians flood the streets demanding the termination of the SCAF’s reign of power, a church goes up in flames in Aswan. The governer subsequently insists, but the church was illegal.

If the late fifties, following the Lavon Affair, saw the new regime’s introduction of reactionary anti-semitism, buying wholesale into Zionist and colonial propaganda, by the seventies this would be exacerbated all the more by Sadat’s violent separation of Egyptians from their regional identification and his regime’s symbiotic relationship to key Islamist groups, that would go on to foment sectarian provocations sustaining a state of emergency that continues to this day. This is not to suggest that sectarianism is solely attributable to the Camp David era. Indeed, we can trace this to early modern European colonialism, which was frequently paraded as an effort to protect Christians, but which through unprecedented sectarian violence and manipulation effectively exiled most Ottoman Turkish, Syrian and Iraqi Christians.

And it’s important to remember that the massacre of Syrian Christians took place almost simultaneously to the French blood libel in Damascus. Iraqi Jews were similarly butchered alongside the Assyrians under the British. Yet the contemporary crisis in Egypt can be better analytically weighed as a distinct and deliberate outcome of that wretched moment in Egyptian history: the advent of Sadat, Camp David, and the cementing of Egyptian society at the doormat of US imperialism.

Sadat deliberately exacerbated sectarian hatred through his strategic deployment of Islam in the interests of imperialism. He supported the rise of Islamist groups in order to castrate the influence of the Egyptian left, including Nasserites and pan-Arab nationalists. With that, began the legacy of “sectarian strife” in the seventies. Prior to the Camp David era, Egyptians by and large viewed themselves as Arab – most still do, yet Sadat’s violent political and economic neutering of their Arab identity following the Infitah meant that the vast majority of Egyptians, many of whom were now openly flitting in and out of the Gulf countries, resorted to different degrees of Islamism in resistance to the newly imposed anti-Arab imaginary. In turn, many Copts adopted an exclusivist form of religio-nationalism as their primary site of indentification in the face of a post-Arabist political and social reality.

With the eighties, increased support – in the wake of the Afghanistan war – for Egyptian Islamists by both the US and Saudi Arabia, was another ingredient that further isolated Copts from national and regional belonging. With time this accumulated institutionally to result in a definitively anti-Christian discourse in which, on the one hand, Western and elite reactionary punditry foams at the mouth over the “oppression of religious minorities” only feeding the beast that is the Egyptian state more ammunition for its self-sustaining mirage of “national unity and stability”.

And so a vicious – though by no means antagonistic, in fact highly symbiotic – cycle and relationship persists, in which Western-sponsored civil society efforts continue to intervene to “democratize” Egyptians, in the process hijacking the identities of local Christians, conflating them, essentializing them, and ultimately creating a constant state of emergency that socially reproduces itself and foments more of the same. All this, while US-led colonialism in Iraq led to a historically unprecedented spate of sectarian violence, mainly between Shiites and Sunnis, though anyone who followed American mainstream media over the last 10 years will have noticed they lay emphasis to the attacks on Iraqi Christians, as though they are exceptional.

That the Egyptian neoliberal state, allied as it is with the Muslim Brotherhood more explicitly following the ouster of Mubarak, has had a clear hand and interest in the creation and maintenance of sectarian provocations is plain to see. But before we begin to talk about fighting it, before we begin to sloganeer about “national unity”, “anti-sectarianism” and an “end to political discrimination against non-Muslims”, before we fetishize empty liberal tropes like “freedom of religion”, we would do well to recognize two things: first, the only Christians in Egypt that do not experience any kind of discrimination are the elite and extremely wealthy ones, and second, the internationalist discourse of “freedom of religion” is not only complicit, but responsible for the perpetuation of the sectarian isolation of Christians. The state is not a site for gaining religious freedoms.

It thrives on the separatist minoritatian psychoses that constitute sectarian violence. Therefore, any strategy that seeks to paint Egyptian Chrisitans, or Jews past or present, as a separate sect and exaggerate their place in society – as so much of Western society chooses to do – misses the fundamental power structures that produce them as such and furthers their exclusion. Just as Zionism deliberately sought to exile Jews from the world and ghettoize them in colonial settlements in Palestine, so the nexus of Israeli and Western power would rather see those populations surrounding Israel perpetually mired in a sea of exclusivist intolerance deserving only of bombs and emergency laws.

This nexus, of Western and Israeli interests in sectarian bantustaning, should not be lost on anyone witnessing today’s atrocities outside Maspero and throughout downtown Cairo. And now more than ever it should warn against knee-jerk reactions steeped in the discourse of “freedom of religion” – which is the Hebrew equivalent of Mubarak’s “it’s between me or chaos”.

Today’s events constitute the first time the army and its hired thugs have explicitly targeted a predominantly Coptic protest, running people over with armored vehicles at top speed and deliberately killing up to nineteen protesters in the space of a few hours. State propaganda was in full force, using the sectarian language of “the Copts” and never “the demonstrators” and making vacuous statements about Copts “killing two soldiers”. In addition to propagating the classic rumors of “foreign infiltrators” and “agendas”, State TV also licensed – indeed called for – Egyptian civilians to “protect the military from the Copts”. As of the time of writing, many Egyptians have indeed responded to the incitement and numerous eyewitnesses report seeing Muslim marches to the tune of “There is no God but Allah” hitting the streets. The SCAF and Muslim Brotherhood led counter-revolution, in other words, has found its bitter climax in the always-reliable vulgar sectarian bloodbath. And because the events outside and around Maspero were nothing short of an intensified combination of the Camel Battle and the Abbasseyya kidnappings, over the coming hours and days, we will regroup. We will fight back. But we will not fight for “religious freedom” or “national unity”. The former is the language of Hilary Clinton and the NGO-industrial complex that has mismanaged Egyptian society for decades. The latter is the language of state television. What we will fight for is our revolution: an end to the regime, a cleansing of all our institutions, and our will and dignity in deciding who and what we are for.

Panic and shock sweep Cairo

Oct 09, 2011

Philip Weiss

Waves of panic and shock are passing through Cairo tonight along with gusts of smoke and teargas.

I was at a friend’s shop near Tahrir Square at 7 tonight when facebook began lighting up with news of the clashes at Maspero, the radio and television building a few blocks to the north. “The Christians are setting fire to cars,” my friend said.

He said a new chapter in the revolution had been opened. We walked toward Tahrir and heard what sounded like firecrackers. “That is live fire,” he said with anguish. “Believe me, we lived through this for days.”

He turned back but I wanted to see. Tahrir Square was filled with panicked people. The crowds moved first one way and then another. I heard more shots ringing out, it was not clear from where, and decided to get out of there. I walked northeast to meet friends at a restaurant.

In shops and businesses, people stood around watching the live feed from Maspero with worried faces. No one is happy in Cairo tonight. I went into a barber shop to watch, and the proprietor welcomed me, the Cairo friendliness unabated. He seemed embarrassed. “Christians and Muslims are together in our country, this is very unusual,” he said.

By 8:30, when my friends and I had finished eating, downtown was a panicky mess. Smoke wafted through the streets, and mobs of people ran one way and another without any purpose but an aura of hysteria. The door of my hotel was barred, and a dozen internationals had gathered in the television room. The management was urging everyone to stay inside. The wild rumors had begun. The highway to Alexandria was shut. And then it was open.

I left the hotel a few minutes later to make a pressing Skype call, and the streets were suddenly empty. People stood on balconies watching. Stores were shuttered. The redheaded clerk at the internet salon who always wears a tie wore a lugubrious expression. He said he was afraid for Cairo.

Cairo is on edge tonight. The English television channel is blaming the disturbances on outsiders. “It’s very obvious that there is a plot, a consiracy against Egypt,” Yehia Ghanim of Al Ahram newspaper said in an interview on Nile television. “”Some other party, a third party, is planning for a disaster in Egypt.”

Nile TV is utterly supportive of the army. It claims that 19 soldiers have been killed. While Al Jazeera and Reuters say that 19 civilians have been killed.

The Egyptians I know believe Facebook and social media more than any mainstream outlet. In the midst of the panic tonight, an English friend at my hotel says she saw a crowd swarming a man in Tahrir who had caught some of the action at Maspero on his mobile phone. She couldn’t get close enough to see, and then men urged her to leave the Square, in a hurry. Syria and Libya are out of control; and Egyptians are afraid of what the next chapter of their revolution holds.

The Ninety-Nine Percent
Oct 09, 2011

Nima Shirazi

To sit in silence when we should protest
Makes cowards out of men. The human race
Has climbed on protest.

– Ella Wheeler Wilcox, I Protest, 1914

With so much effort being exerted by the right-wing lunatic punditocracy and commentariat, Citigroup fiancées with CNN programs, know-nothing pizza magnates and billionaire mayors to belittle and dismiss Occupy Wall Street protesters as “stereotypically aging hippies and young kids who could have just left a Phish concert,” here’s a look at who’s actually down at Liberty Plaza.

Hero, 21
The Bronx, New York

John, 61
Croton-On-Hudson, New York

Alisha, 20
Las Vegas, Nevada

Kevin, 60, and John, 57
Queens, New York

Ronnie, 24
New York, New York

Taylor, 20
Catasauqua, Pennsylvania

Ari, 29
Chicago, Illinois

Michael, 20
The Bronx, New York

Susie, 52
Brooklyn, New York

Matthew, 28
New York, New York

Natalie, 26
Seattle, Washington

Lexi, 38
New Orleans, Louisiana

Samoa, 53
Brooklyn, New York

Hamza, 29
Utica, New York

Pat, 69
Erie, Colorado

Layla, 5 months
Brooklyn, New York

All photographs ©Nima Shirazi

The ever-intrepid and affable J.A. Myerson contributed to this report.

*****

I PROTEST
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, 1914

To sit in silence when we should protest
Makes cowards out of men. The human race
Has climbed on protest. Had no voice been raised
Against injustice, ignorance and lust
The Inquisition yet would serve the law
And guillotines decide our least disputes.
The few who dare must speak and speak again
To right the wrongs of many. Speech, thank God,
No vested power in this great day and land
Can gag or throttle; Press and voice may cry
Loud disapproval of existing ills,
May criticise oppression and condemn
The lawlessness of wealth-protecting laws
That let the children and child-bearers toil
To purchase ease for idle millionaires.
Therefore do I protest against the boast
Of independence in this mighty land.
Call no chain strong which holds one rusted link,
Call no land free that holds one fettered slave.
Until the manacled, slim wrists of babes
Are loosed to toss in childish sport and glee;
Until the Mother bears no burden save
The precious one beneath her heart; until
God’s soil is rescued from the clutch of greed
And given back to labor, let no man
Call this the Land of Freedom.

*****

Nima Shirazi blogs at Wide Asleep in America. You can follow him on Twitter at@WideAsleepNima.

 

In Cairo, we consecrate the freedom of religion

Oct 09, 2011

Philip Weiss

I don’t think I have ever had such a meaningful Yom Kippur as yesterday in Cairo.

It began as a journalistic stunt story. I used to do these stories all the time for mainstream media in my adventurous 30s. Can you do X? (get into X club, ask celebrity X an unseemly question) Well, I was determined to find a congregation on Yom Kippur—for the sake of the finding it. But the Adly street synagogue downtown did not open till 10, the Egyptian guards said; and they sent me on to the Ben Ezra synagogue in Coptic Cairo. I took the Metro to Christian Cairo and walked all around the St George’s monastery till I found the little synagogue in a low alley. It was open, as a tourist attraction. The lady at the desk said I should go to Maadi, the southern suburb where many Jews once lived.

I spent another hour wandering around, and then a cab delivered me to a low domed building in a sprawling residential neighborhood notable for police barricades here and there in the dusty streets. Some were for ambassadorial residences. But at least a dozen cops were posted outside the walls of the tiny Biton synagogue, built in 1934. An iron gate was cracked open. I put on my yarmulke and crept in over recently laid sod and heard the murmuring of prayers.

Inside the synagogue a dozen people, exactly a dozen, sat in a small half circle before the altar. I took a chair in the semicircle, and one of them got up to greet me, a burly bearded guy from the American embassy. How much Hebrew do you know? Not much, I said. Well you will be called on, he said.

The service was led by a doctor at the embassy in what I can only call a downhome manner. The two or three serviceable prayer books were passed along the line so that the rest of us could read aloud. The ark was never opened, I think in an acknowledgement that we did not have a true minyan. One or us was a fidgety 8-year-old boy in glasses, playing with an oversized deck of game cards. Another two or three were not Jewish.

At the break I learned that the service is ordinarily much fuller and more serious; the Israeli embassy staff flies in a rabbi for a couple of weeks. But the Israeli embassy staff fled last month. So everyone in our little group was American. There are a handful of Egyptian Jews in Cairo, but I was told they live downtown, and they are all getting old. There was a thought to bus them to the temple, but it didn’t happen.

For the afternoon service, I brought my wife back, and it was even better. I’m not Jewish, she announced to the leader of the service, who this time was a grad student at the American University of Cairo. That’s fine, he said– neither was the embassy official’s wife. We made up for the lack of prayerbooks with little fawn-colored chapbooks we found in the lobby. They were printed for His Majesty’s troops, with all the Jewish services in about 100 pages. “God Save the King” was right after the Adon Alom.

At dusk an Egyptian Jew came in on crutches, dignifed and severe in an aubergine crepe blouse, and the 8-year-old boy blew the shofar. I felt tears in my eyes as we sang the Avinu Malcheinu. The melody had never been so haunting.

As the sun set, we had a kind of divine intervention. There was a cry from the courtyard. Out the open door, I saw a sharp blaze rising from the foliage and thought, gasoline. The Egyptian minder of the synagogue was running to and fro, and some congregants scuttled out of the synagogue as if we were under attack. “The burning bush,” said the embassy man’s wife. I tried to walk calmly out to the fire. Later we were told that bad wiring in the Sukkot booth in the yard had ignited the vines. The man from the embassy grabbed a fire extinguisher, but it pissed weakly at the fire. Then the Egyptian minder came round the corner with a hose and trained that on the roof of the booth, now fully consumed.

Of course, when it was well and truly out, a dozen policemen came pouring into the yard dragging a fire hose. And in true comic manner the thing was drenched again and again.

We passed around a mug of wine to break the fast, and Egyptian staff brought in trays of sweets. The old Cairene Jew had seen to that–bananas and ice cream and raw red dates, served by Egyptians.

I sat beside her in a pew and told her how hard it had been to find the service. She explained that they had not advertised it on their website, fearing it might provoke a demonstration. Do you have children? I asked. No. Eight dogs. Do your friends in America tell you to come there? Why should I go there? she responded. A relative in Europe presses her to move there. She’s not interested.

I reminded myself that just an hour before I had beaten my breast for being provocative so many times in the year past, then tilted toward her and said, I want to tell you, I am not a Zionist.

That’s good, she said, no intellectual should be an ist.

And what do you think of the revolution? I asked. It is very good, she said. Though we worry about the Muslim brotherhood. So: she is like an American Jew, fighting for liberalism in her land.

It was the most meaningful Yom Kippur of my life because we were affirming the freedom to worship—we were the only congregation for a thousand miles in northeast Africa– and because the service was so non-Zionist at its heart. Zionism insists that Jews are unsafe as a minority in other lands, they must return to their alleged homeland, and this insistence had created a giant wound across the Arab world, where so many Jews had lived safely—75,000 once in Egypt. Now there are just a handful, and the ethnic cleansing, or self-cleansing, that took place here is held up as an affirmation of Zionism, which is invested in the idea of intolerance, because intolerance rationalizes its creed. And so many Jews in Israel hate the Arab spring, and would like to see the dictatorships last forever.

Yesterday we helped the Jews here to hold their place. We insisted that Jews can be anywhere and safe and following our ancient rituals, with an Egyptian firehose.

 

Palestinians have their own Gandhis and Kings

Oct 09, 2011

Pam Bailey

I appreciate Nicholas Kristof, columnist for The New York Times, because he writes and well and thoughtfully about far-flung areas of the world, including the “ordinary” people who are striving to make a difference. But although his intentions are good, he has a bit of a blind spot when it comes to Palestinians and their struggle for independence. I hear this same almost unconscious bias from many liberals during my countless speaking engagements, so it’s worth addressing it head-on.

Take Kristofs Oct. 5 column, with the promising headline “Is Israel Its Own Worst Enemy?” His first two paragraphs read, “For decades, Palestinian leaders sometimes seemed to be their own people’s worst enemies. Palestinian radicals antagonized the West, and, when militant leaders turned to hijackings and rockets, they undermined the Palestinian cause around the world. They empowered Israeli settlers and hard-liners, while eviscerating Israeli doves. These days, the world has been turned upside down. Now it is Israel that is endangered most by its leaders and maximalist stance.”

Let’s deconstruct that opening….What Kristof seems to be saying is that in the past, it was Palestinian leaders who were the “obstacles to peace,” and it’s only now that Israeli leaders are standing in the way.  Uhhhh…..what about the years and years of illegal settlement expansion and home demolitions? In the next few paragraphs, Kristof does indeed criticize Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “hard line” on settlements in the next few paragraphs, but appears to believe it’s a recent trend, limited to this particular PM. Yet, Israeli leaders have been talking about peace and acting to make it impossible ever since Israel was created in 1949. The growth in settlements actually accelerated after the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accord.

And then there is Kristof’s focus on “Palestinian radicals antagonizing the West,” and “militant leaders turning to hijackings and rockets.” What he doesn’t say (and doesn’t know?) is that the statistics paint a different picture of who is antagonizing who. The organization of former Israeli soldiers called Breaking the Silence reports that since the outbreak of the Second Intifada in September 2000, more than 1,000 Israelis and 6,000 Palestinians have been killed. Palestinians are clearly at much more risk of being harmed by an Israeli than vice versa. And lest you think that most of these Palestinians are terrorists who “deserve” to be killed, just read the transcripts of the testimony from the former soldiers. A 2010 Breaking the Silence report stated: “A significant portion of the (Israeli army’s) offensive actions are not intended to prevent a specific act of terrorism, but rather to punish, deter or tighten control over the Palestinian population. ‘Prevention of terror’ is the stamp of approval granted to any offensive Israeli Defense Force action in the (Occupied) Territories, obscuring the distinction between the use of force against terrorists and the use of force against civilians. In this way, the IDF is able to justify actions that intimidate and oppress the Palestinian population overall.”

In addition to the arbitrary arrests, assassinations, home demolitions, etc. committed by Israeli soldiers, there are the violent acts against Palestinians by Israeli residents of the illegal settlements. Washington, DC’s Palestine Center documented more than 1,000 acts of settler violence in 2009. And in 2010, B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, recorded almost one incident a day and in some cases more against Palestinians and their olive trees during the harvest season. Robert Serry, UN special coordinator for the Middle East “peace process,” labeled these as acts of “terror.” The Israeli government has done little to try to control them.

Kristof takes time out briefly to anticipate his critics, saying that, “Every negotiator knows the framework of a peace agreement: 1967 borders with land swaps, Jerusalem as the capital of both Israeli and Palestinian states, only a token right of return…”

Oh, really? Just which negotiators is he talking about? Certainly not any Palestinians who have the support of their people. A 2010 poll by the Palestinian Centre for Public Opinion found that 82% opposed giving up the right of return in some shape or form.

And in a “bone” tossed to Netanyahu, Kristof writes: “Granted, Mr. Netanyahu is far from the only obstacle to peace. The Palestinians are divided, with Hamas controlling Gaza. And Hamas not only represses its own people but also managed to devastate the peace movement in Israel.”

So….it’s Hamas that makes it hard for peace activists to thrive in Israel? Kristof clearly didn’t talk to any actual Israeli peace activists. Ask them about their biggest barriers, and they point to their own government.  For example, they cite the “boycott ban” recently passed by Israel’s 120-seat Knesset. The legislation makes it a civil offense to call for the boycott of “the state of Israel, one of its institutions or an area under its control,” with the last clause seen as a direct reference to Israel’s West Bank settlements. Those accused of calling for such a boycott can be sued by any individual or institution claiming damage as a result, and organizations found to have called for a boycott risk losing their tax-exempt status.

“The Boycott Law will lead to unprecedented harm to freedom of expression in Israel and will bring justified criticism against Israel from abroad,” Hagai El-Ad, executive editor of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, was quoted in Israeli newspapers as saying. Eilat Maoz of the Coalition of Women for Peace accused the Knesset of “political persecution,” warning that the law would “create an atmosphere of fear” and “incite the entire Israeli public against peace and human rights activists and organizations.” Commentator Ben Caspit denounced the new law as fascism. “When private citizens can be convicted for voicing their opinions… this is fascism,” he said.

Kristof concludes by offering this sage advice: “The Palestinians’ best hope would be a major grassroots movement of nonviolent peaceful resistance aimed at illegal West Bank settlements, led by women and inspired by the work of Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A growing number of Palestinians are taking up variants of that model, although they sometimes ruin it by defining nonviolence to include stone-throwing and by giving the leading role to hotheaded young men.”

He is not alone in coming to this conclusion, or in believing that the weekly protests celebrated in the movie “Budrus” are a recent phenomenon. My advice to Kristof and those who think the same is to read Mazin Qumsiyeh’s  new book, “Popular Resistance in Palestine.” He chronicles in almost excruciating detail repeated acts of organized non-violent resistance practiced by Palestinians as far back as the Ottoman years – ranging from sit-ins to refusal to pay taxes.  Unfortunately, many of the “Gandhis” who helped lead these actions have ended up dead or in prison, first at the hands of the British and then of the Israelis. In fact, I would argue that Palestinians no longer need to be told to follow the lead of Gandhi or King. Rather, they have their own non-violent role models – three of them in just one West Bank town, Bil’in, which has peacefully protested the annexation of 60% of its land since 2005 and attracted much international support.

Bassem Abu Rahme, 29, was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers in April 2009, just minutes after he shouted to them to stop shooting because a woman in the Bil’in march had been wounded.

In August of that same year, more than 200 masked and camouflaged Israeli soldiers swarmed into Bil’in at 3 a.m and raided five homes – including that ofMohammad Khatib, another leader of the Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements. After briefly allowing him to say goodbye to his wife and their four children, he was blindfolded and taken to the Ofer military prison in Israel. After two weeks of detention, a military judge ruled that evidence against him was falsified, after it was proven that Khatib was abroad at the time the army alleged he was photographed throwing stones during a demonstration.  At 1:45 a.m. in January 2010, Khatib was woken by Israeli soldiers storming his home and arrested once again — one night after he gave an interview to the prominent Israeli news website Ynet. This time, he wasn’t acquitted until January of this year.

Abdullah Abu Rahma, a 39-year-old high school teacher and father of three, is the third Bil’in protest leader to be targeted by the Israeli military. He was first harassed in September of 2009, in a raid so egregious that one of the participating soldiers was later indicted for assault; it is highly unusual for an Israeli court to rule against one of its own. Then, at exactly 2 a.m. in December 2009, seven Israeli military jeeps arrived at his home and arrested him in the presence of his wife and children. This time, he was imprisoned for 16 months, being released in March of this year. Abu Rahmah, who during his trial was declared a human rights defender by the EU and a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, vowed to continue struggling against the Israeli occupation, despite  the six-months suspended sentence he still faces. He said, “On my release, I have no intention to go back home and sit there idly. In fact, by imprisoning me they have silenced me long enough. Our cause is just, it is one striving for freedom and equality, and I intend to continue fighting for it just as I have before.”

To me, these three individuals sound like Gandhis – and not “hotheaded young men.” As for Kristof’s comment about running the protests with stone-throwing, note from Khatib’s story that sometimes these charges are fabricated. But yes, stone-throwing – largely by the “shabab,” frustrated youth aged 10-20 – does occur, although not with the approval of the protest “elders.” It is very difficult to control the behavior of everyone in a mass protest. Neither could Gandhi ,or King.  In a paper titled “The Road to Nonviolent Coexistence in Palestine/Israel” and written by Michael N. Nagler, PhD.; Tal Palter-Palman; and Matthew A. Taylor of UC Berkeley’s Peace and Conflict Studies program, the authors explain:  “… stone throwing is more an act of defiance than an intention to injure (the literal meaning ofhimsa, violence), saying that stones (in most cases) cannot hurt well-equipped helmeted soldiers. The shabab resort to stone throwing to protest the presence of the army on their lands. For Palestinian youngsters suffering from a deep feeling of humiliation and hopelessness, this simple yet concrete act of resistance is often a way to survive psychologically, by reclaiming a feeling of empowerment in an otherwise forlorn and depressive environment.”

In any case, the frustrated acts of youth still struggling to contain their anger do not negate the courageous leadership of their elders. So how about saying that Palestinians need more Abu Rahmas and Khatibs, instead of Kings and Gandhis? I have spent time in the West Bank and have lived in the Gaza Strip for six months at a time. And all it takes is a little curiosity to find many “budding” leaders, ripe for the making. The purpose of the Palestinian Gandhi Project, which I co-founded with a kindred-spirit traveler/activist, Keren Batiyov, is to give those emerging inspirations a megaphone, a platform for sharing their voices with their fellow Palestinians in the diaspora, as well as with Kristof and the rest of the Western world. It’s time to recognize these new heroes and look to the future rather than the past.

 

Israeli Navy fires at fishing boats in Gaza & Settlers attack Hebron… just another Saturday in Palestine
Oct 09, 2011  |

Seham

Israeli Navy Fires At Fishing Boats In Gaza

On Friday evening, the Israeli Navy opened fire on a number of Palestinian fishing boats in Palestinian territorial waters near Beit Lahia, in the northern part of the Gaza Strip; no injuries were reported.

Violent clashes break out in Ras al-Amud

An outbreak of violent clashes erupted Friday after Israeli occupation forces cordoned off East Jerusalem’s Ras al-Amud district in conjunction with the Jewish Yom Kippur holidays.

Settlers attack a village near al-Khalil

Dozens of Jewish settlers at dawn Friday attacked the village of Khirbat Tuwwana, to the east of Yatta in the southern West Bank al-Khalil district.

And more news from Today in Palestine:

Settlers / Land, Property, Resource Theft & Destruction / Ethnic Cleansing

Settler homes approved in East Jerusalem

JERUSALEM (AFP) — The Jerusalem municipality has given the green light for the construction of 11 new apartments in the Jewish settlement of Pisgat Zeev in the annexed east of the city, a councilor told AFP on Saturday. “The municipality approved at the beginning of the week the construction of 11 apartments, as part of a project of 300 housing units supposed to be approved section by section,” Pepe Alalou of the leftist Meretz party said.
link to www.maannews.net