Mondoweiss Online Newsletter

 NOVANEWS

• A mother’s story: Om Fares

• More creeping halacha

• UNICEF pressures Israel on child detainees

• Endangered Palestinian village gets int’l media attention– except from the U.S.

• Netanyahu cuts his deals with Hamas, not Fatah, and here’s why

• Blindered Blitzer likens Hamas to Al Qaeda… typical

• Finkelstein thinks shift in young Jewish opinion means there will be 2 (viable) states. Mearsheimer doesn’t

• ‘Occupy Boston’ takes on the the occupation of Palestine

• Will ‘Occupy Wall Street’ give Jon Stewart political identity crisis?

A mother’s story: Om Fares
Oct 19, 2011

Shahd Abusalama

The prisoners’ families make sure not to miss any day of the weekly protest so the number of the people inside the Red Cross is more than usual on Mondays. Therefore, one should expect to see lots of tears and hear lots of tragedies, especially after the names of the soon-to-be released prisoners were declared.

As I entered the Red Cross this Monday, an old lady was sitting in a corner, hardly noticeable. She was putting her hand on her cheeks, closing her eyes and saying nothing. The wrinkles on her face, with expressions of sorrow and burdens and the broken glasses of the picture she was holding, directed my steps toward her.

Om Fares holding her imprisoned son’s picture

I tried to talk to her but I didn’t get an answer immediately, only after I started talking very loudly while holding her hands. I realized that she barely hears and her vision is very week. “Who’s this man in the picture?” I asked using a very high tune. “This is my son Fares, my darling. He’s not going to be released. I am very sick and about to die. I even spent last night in hospital. Why wasn’t he included to fill my last days of my life which passed for 22 long years without him? I want to enjoy hugging my son before I die,” she said with tears falling so intensively and bitterly.

Calming her was a very difficult task, but one can imagine how deeply her wounds were felt. I was looking around asking who accompanied that lady to the tent, as I found it impossible to imagine that a blind woman came by herself. However, what I thought was impossible, was actually a fact.

After questioning people in the Red Cross about her, I met a young woman who seemed to know her. She told me that the old woman, Om Fares, lives alone in Beach Camp. Her husband passed away years ago and she has no body to take care of her. It was very hard for me to believe that this very old woman, who can barely walk, see or hear, lives alone. I was very angry and questioned loudly how an old sick woman could be left alone with no one to look after her. But the young woman calmed me down after she declared that Om Fares was a reason for her to keep coming to the weekly protests. She even arranged a group of girls to help her and show solidarity with her. They have shifted turns along the week to visit her as much as they could. Hearing that, I couldn’t help but smiling with relief to know that there are still some caring people, and without her asking me to join her group, I stated that I am already a part of them.

The young lady told me that she once was sitting with Om Fares in her very simple and narrow house chatting, attempting to make her feel that she is not alone or forgotten. Suddenly Om Fares asked her to bring a piece of paper and a pen to write down what she heard her saying. “Dear Fares, when you are free, I’m going to pick for you the most beautiful bride in Palestine. I’m going to build a big house for you to live in with your kids. Stay steadfast my darling and God willing your freedom will be soon,” she said while her week hands are busy drying the falling tears on her cheeks. The poor woman didn’t realize that she was only a dreamer, but a dreamer who never gives up.

I can actually say that no one left a profound impact on me as much as this woman, Om Fares. I pray that she gets the chance to see her son before she dies and I promise her that she will never be alone and she will have many people who will never forget her or her precious tears over her son’s ongoing imprisonment.

Shahd Abusalama lives in Gaza and blogs at Palestine From My Eyes.

More creeping halacha
Oct 19, 2011

Adam Horowitz

More signs of creeping halacha in New York City. From the New York World:

On the morning of October 12, Melissa Franchy boarded the B110 bus in Brooklyn and sat down near the front. For a few minutes she was left in silence, although the other passengers gave her a noticeably wide berth. But as the bus began to fill up, the men told her that she had to get up. Move to the back, they insisted.

They were Orthodox Jews with full beards, sidecurls and long black coats, who told her that she was riding a “private bus” and a “Jewish bus.” When she asked why she had to move, a man scolded her.

“If God makes a rule, you don’t ask ‘Why make the rule?’” he told Franchy, who rode the bus at the invitation of a New York World reporter. She then moved to the back where the other women were sitting. The driver did not intervene in the incident.

The B110 bus travels between Williamsburg and Borough Park in Brooklyn. It is open to the public, and has a route number and tall blue bus stop signs like any other city bus. But the B110 operates according to its own distinct rules. The bus line is run by a private company and serves the Hasidic communities of the two neighborhoods. To avoid physical contact between members of opposite sexes that is prohibited by Hasidic tradition, men sit in the front of the bus and women sit in the back.

The article continues:

The arrangement that the B110 operates under can only be described as unorthodox. It operates as a franchise, in which a private company, Private Transportation Corporation, pays the city for the right to provide a public service. Passengers pay their $2.50 fare not by MetroCard, but in dollar bills and coins. The city’s Franchise and Concession Review Committee defines a franchise on its website as “the right to occupy or to use the City’s inalienable property, such as streets or parks, for a public service, e.g., transportation.”

The agreement goes back to at least 1973, and last year the franchise paid the city $22,814 to operate the route, according to the New York City Department of Transportation. According to the news site Vos Iz Neias?, which serves the Orthodox Jewish community in New York City and elsewhere, the bus company has a board of consulting rabbis, which decreed that male passengers should ride in the front of the bus and female passengers in the back.

City, state and federal law all proscribe discrimination based on gender in public accommodations. “Discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations in New York City is against the law,” said Betsy Herzog, a spokeswoman for the New York City Commission on Human Rights, which investigates and prosecutes alleged violations of anti-discrimination law.

The Department of Transportation, which issues the franchise, confirms that it understands the B110 to be subject to anti-discrimination laws. “This is a private company, but it is a public service,” said Seth Solomonow, a spokesman for the DOT. “The company has to comply with all applicable laws.”

Any chance this will be taken up in Albany similarly to how Oklahoma and Wyoming tried to outlaw sharia law? It’s doubtful, but that doesn’t mean some in the Jewish community aren’tconcerned.

UNICEF pressures Israel on child detainees
Oct 19, 2011

Adam Horowitz

From Foreign Policy’s Turtle Bay blog:

As the Israeli-Palestinian prisoner swap got under way this week, the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) appealed late last night to the Israel military to ensure the release of 164 Palestinian prisoners detained as minors, mostly on charges of throwing stones at Israeli authorities.

The minors were not included in a list of the first round 477 Palestinian prisoners who were released in exchange for one Israel soldier, Gilad Shalit, freed by Hamas after five years of captivity through a prison swap brokered by the Egyptian government. It remains unclear whether the minors will be included in a second round of an additional 550 Palestinian prisoners due to be released in the coming months, according to UNICEF officials.

“As stated in the convention on the rights of the child, the detention of children should be used only as a measure of last resort for the shortest appropriate period of time,” said Jean Gough, UNICEF’s Special Representative in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. “UNICEF calls on the Israeli government to release Palestinian child detainees so that they can be reunited with their families.”

Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Ron Prosor, reacted sharply to the U.N. agencies appeal, telling Turtle Bay in a statement that “this press release demonstrates UNICEF’s clear bias and double-standards when it comes to Israel. Its timing is mind-boggling.”

Prosor said that while Israel is willing to discuss the concerns of any humanitarian agency UNICEF “should use its time and resource to focus on real violators of children’s rights in the Middle East.”

Israel’s detention of minors has been a sore point for the U.N. children’s agencies and other children’s rights groups, who maintain that children should not be tried by military courts and that governments should only jail minors under the most extreme circumstances. “Military tribunals are not required to treat children’s best interests as their primary concern, and, therefore, are not an appropriate forum for hearing cases against children,” according to a September report by the U.N. secretary general special representative for children and armed conflict, Radikha Coomaraswamy.

“Seven thousand Palestinian children have been detained, interrogated and prosecuted and imprisoned in the Israeli military system over the past ten years,” Catherine Weibel, a spokeswoman for UNICEF said in a phone interview today.

Weibel said that 35 of the detained minors are between the ages of 12 and 15 but that most are 16 or 17 years of age. Under Israeli law, minors over the age of 14 can be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison for throwing a stone at an individual, and up to 20 years for hurling it at a moving vehicle. In practice, Israeli military courts rarely sentence minors to more than 2 months, and typically hold them for a period of a couple of weeks to about 3 months. Children under the age of 12 are released from custody without being charged.

Endangered Palestinian village gets int’l media attention– except from the U.S.
Oct 19, 2011

Philip Weiss

Haj Sami Sadeq is a mayor in Palestine. Behind him is the Jordan Valley. Around him are the lands of his little village, Al Aqaba.

The entire village is under Israeli demolition orders. In fact, the Israeli army bulldozed the road to his village on Sept. 15, 2 weeks before I shot this picture. They want his lands. And they seem to be cutting his village off from the rest of the world.

Despite the fact that Haj Sami is in a wheelchair because he was crippled by the Israeli army when he was 16 years old and just walking on his family lands, despite the fact that  the people of Al Aqaba village are not allowed to drill for water on their own land and they have been slowly leaving this starved village– their mayor believes in peace. Here is the mural on the wall of his school.

 Inside the school these days is an American volunteer, Morgan Bach, 24, below, teaching kindergartners the ABC’s.

Morgan Bach is not just in Al Aqaba to teach– but to make sure that the Israeli army doesn’t tear the village off the map. The Rebuilding Alliance paid Morgan’s airfare, but nothing more. The village feeds her.

And this brave young woman, who not long ago was living in a sorority house in Walla Walla, stays in Al Aqaba to protect the village– something no international government body is willing to do for Haj Sami or his people.

I’ve been a journalist all my life. I think this is a pretty good story.

But below is a video I shot of Haj Sami the night I stayed in his village. He had just given me dinner. Then I asked him how much media attention he’s gotten.  Highlights: At :48 he tells where all the media have come from. At 2:55-4:00 he tells about his visit to the U.S. in 2008, and people don’t even know where Palestine is. I wonder why…Update: There’s a campaign to raise money for Al Aqaba right now, at Rebuilding Alliance’s website. Can you help out?

Netanyahu cuts his deals with Hamas, not Fatah, and here’s why
Oct 19, 2011

Michael Desch

Great editorial in today’s New York Times asking the obvious question: If Benjamin Netanyahu can cut a deal with Hamas of the magnitude he did to win the release of Gilad Shalit, why can’t he pursue a more comprehensive deal with Palestinian moderates such as Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad over the West Bank? Money quote:

One has to ask: If Mr. Netanyahu can negotiate with Hamas — which shoots rockets at Israel, refuses to recognize Israel’s existence and, on Tuesday, vowed to take even more hostages — why won’t he negotiate seriously with the Palestinian Authority, which Israel relies on to help keep the peace in the West Bank?

The answer, of course, is that the Israeli right has always found it preferable to deal with Hamas than Fatah because the former are less of a threat to the Iron Wall/Greater Israel project.

Israel looked the other way, perhaps even encouraged the rise of Hamas, during the first Intifada as a counterweight to the PLO. Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2004 was, in the words of his advisor Dov Weisglass in Ha’aretz, designed to put the peace process in “formaldehyde” and take the pressure off of the settlements in the West Bank.

“And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”

And now, this deal with Hamas after Netanyahu’s sustained campaign against Abbas’ bid for United Nations recognition of the State of Palestine.

Bottom-line: The Israeli right would rather have Greater Israel and war than a two state solution and peace. Netanyahu’s deal is fully consistent with that historical pattern.

Blindered Blitzer likens Hamas to Al Qaeda… typical
Oct 19, 2011

Philip Weiss

Wolf Blitzer had Herman Cain on CNN yesterday and asked him what he thought about the prisoner exchange in Israel and Palestine. Pizza boss said he couldn’t judge it and Blitzer pressed him. He said, what if we had a bunch of Al Qaeda prisoners that we were going to exchange for an American prisoner? What if they wanted us to release a bunch of people in Guantanamo?

Palestinians are jihadis, was the message from this former reporter for the Jerusalem Post, who also worked for AIPAC, the Israel lobby giant.

On NBC’s Morning Joe, meanwhile, the koffee-klatch turned to two Jews at the table for their opinion of the release, neoconservative Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Mark Halperin (whose views on the issue I have no clue about but whose father is a liberal Zionist). Both men spoke for Israeli society. They said that Israel is a big family, and Gilad Shalit was like a missing member of the family, and so on emotional terms, everyone in Israel is for the release.

Blinders. Not a word for the Palestinian perspective. Not a word about Why Palestinians would seek to resist occupation.

Jewish blinders. Zionist blinders. Forgive me if I get confused sometimes.

Here are some good Jews. In the Israeli press, no less. People of understanding (thanks to Ilene Cohen). Gideon Levy, “Shalit is returning to a state in psychosis”:

Who isn’t against terror and for Shalit’s release? But that same sobbing society did not for a moment ask itself, with honesty and with courage, why Shalit was captured. It did not for a moment say to itself, with courage and with honesty, that if it continued along the same path there will be many more Gilad Shalits, dead or captured. In successive elections it voted, again and again, for centrist and right-wing governments, the kind that guarantee that Shalit will not be the last. It tied yellow ribbons and supported all of the black flags. And no one ever told it, with courage and with honesty: Shalit is the unavoidable price of a state that chooses to live by the sword forever.

No one ever asked it: Why is it permissible to negotiate with Hamas over the fate of a single soldier yet prohibited to do so over the fate of two bleeding peoples?

Instead, Israeli society now wraps itself in a self-righteous cloak of self-praise: How concerned we are about the fate of a single soldier. And what about the fates of many soldiers, of an entire army, an entire people?

And realist Akiva Eldar emphasizes that the core reasons for Shalits are not going away:

Hamas will exploit any opportunity to kidnap an Israeli, just as Israel does not miss any opportunity to assassinate wanted Palestinians. . . . / A minister who supports outposts and opposes negotiations with the Palestinian camp that is working to contain Hamas terror and supports the two-state solution cannot argue that prisoner exchanges “will provide a tailwind to terror and strengthen the Hamas government” (Moshe Ya’alon, during the cabinet debate on the Shalit deal ).

Finkelstein thinks shift in young Jewish opinion means there will be 2 (viable) states. Mearsheimer doesn’t
Oct 19, 2011

Philip Weiss

There’s a great dialogue between Norman Finkelstein and John Mearsheimer in the forthcoming American Conservative. The conversation is moderated by Scott McConnell. My favorite bit is when Mearsheimer asks Finkelstein whether he’s an anti-Zionist; and Finkelstein doesn’t really dig the label. Go read it. My excerpt is the substance, the men’s difference over the two state solution. Realist Mearsheimer says it’s a lost cause. Finkelstein is “optimistic.”

Jumping the gun here, I think the weakness in Finkelstein’s case is that while he believes that Jewish opinion is dispositive of the issue in the U.S., and I agree with him, he argues that the great shift now taking place in that opinion is going to save the two-state solution. When in fact the great shift he heralds among Jewish youth could just as well be for liberal democracy in Israel and Palestine– i.e., one state, or a binational state. Mearsheimer says, rightly, that Finkelstein is adopting the Beinart liberal-Zionist position. Oh and I love the last line here (a great counter to the smear that Mearsheimer is anti-Semitic).

Mearsheimer: The reason that the Oslo peace process is dead and that you’re not going to get a two‑state solution is that the political center of gravity in Israel has moved far enough to the right over time that it’s, in my opinion, unthinkable that the Israelis would number one, give up the Jordan River valley; number two, abandon Ariel and Maale Adumim; and number three, allow for a capital in East Jerusalem….

Finkelstein: I don’t agree with that. There are many reasons to be pessimistic. But there are also some grounds for a reasonable amount of optimism. …

And then the question is trying to change the calculus of power. Here things are changing. There are changes in American public opinion, which are quite significant when you look at the polls.

There are changes in Jewish public opinion. There are major regional changes—what’s happening now between Israel and Turkey that’s part of an Arab Spring….

Politics is about what is realistically possible in terms of your long‑term values, your philosophical perspective. What is really possible now in my opinion are two states, basically what people call the international consensus. It doesn’t mean it’s my philosophical preference. If you asked me, I’d say I would like to see a world without states…

Mearsheimer: Your point that pressure has not been brought to bear on the Israelis up to now is correct. But the reason that pressure has not been brought to bear is because the United States protects Israel at every turn. If the United States were willing to put serious sanctions on Israel, there’s no question that we could get Israel to move to a two‑state settlement very quickly…

But then the question is, who’s going to put pressure on Israel?

Finkelstein: That’s why I said there are new factors. … there are changes in public opinion. The challenge is translating the changes in public opinion into some sort of political force. There is raw material; it still requires work. It’s a hard job, but our possibilities now are greater than ever.

Mearsheimer: Yeah. I hope that you’re right, but I think that you’re wrong. The reason has to do with how American politics works. The way this political system of ours was set up in the beginning gave huge amounts of influence to interest groups, interest groups of all sorts.

In the present situation, interest groups that have lots of money can influence the political process in profound ways. The principal reason that we don’t have any financial reform after the 2008 financial crisis is, in large part, because of the interest groups or lobbies associated with the financial industry. They’re just so powerful in Washington that Congress really can’t stand up to them. As a result, we’ve done very little to fix the system that caused this disaster in 2008.

When it comes to foreign policy, we, of course, have interest groups—like the Cuban lobby, the Israel lobby, the Armenian lobby—that can wield lots of influence. In this day and age, where money really matters, and where the Israel lobby has lots of money to throw at political candidates, it is very easy for it to get its way. And foolishly, in my opinion, the lobby tends to support the hard-line policies of Israel, which I don’t think are in Israel’s interests.

The end result is that virtually nobody on Capitol Hill will stand up to Benjamin Netanyahu. And the president won’t either.

Finkelstein: Everything you said, of course, is true and I don’t bury my head in the ground. The only addition to what you said is, I haven’t seen any real attempt to challenge the lobby. There’s never been a serious opposition in Washington. They’ve never had to contend with anybody…..

McConnell: Are you guys surprised by how quickly Obama seemed to have climbed down from making a solution to the conflict a top priority? By all indications he was someone who understood the moral and political case for a Palestinian state.

Mearsheimer: He did not step away from the problem quickly. Shortly after taking office in January 2009 he began to put pressure on Israel—throughout 2009, throughout 2010, and even earlier this year Obama was putting pressure on the Israelis.

That of course is why Netanyahu came to Washington and spoke before AIPAC and spoke before Congress and went toe to toe, in effect, with Obama. The sad truth is that Netanyahu beat him at every turn, and now with the election looming and the economy in shambles, Obama is in no position to pick a fight with Israel.

Finkelstein: Even if Obama prevailed over Netanyahu, the settlement he was calling for was roughly that map where Israel would keep about 10 percent—9 or 10 percent—of the West Bank, including all the major settlement blocs.

If you include the settlement blocs, like Maale Adumim, there’s no state because the way that settlement bloc is constructed, it separates Jerusalem from the whole West Bank. So you have this little island of Jerusalem. Metropolitan Jerusalem is about 30 to 40 percent of the Palestinian economy. If you separate Jerusalem, there’s no state. Even if Obama prevailed and you got the 10 percent map, it still has no relationship to what a viable Palestinian state would look like….

Mearsheimer: Then I wonder why you’re so optimistic that we can solve this one?

Finkelstein: Oh, because as I said, I totally agree with you on Congress. I totally agree with you on the executive. On those points there’s no disagreement at all. What I said is there is a changed political configuration now. There are changes in public opinion. There are changes in Jewish opinion. There’s a lot of work to be done. But there are reasons to be optimistic.

McConnell: Can you elaborate on the changes in Jewish opinion?

Finkelstein: Trying to understand Jewish relationships with Israel, there are three factors. There is the ethnic factor, which is the one people tend to home in on—Israel, Jewish State, of course Jews love Israel. That’s how people usually reason.

There is a second factor. That’s the citizenship factor, namely American Jews are American citizens, and they have a good life here, and they are very wary of being hit with the dual-loyalty charge. So wherever it looks like there are tensions between the U.S. and Israel, or tensions might be brewing, Americans Jews are very cautious and very wary…

And then there’s the third factor. It’s the ideological factor. American Jews are liberal. … American Jews are having a lot of trouble as liberals—especially young American Jews on college campuses, which tend to be more liberal than American society in general—they’re having a lot of trouble reconciling their liberal beliefs with the way Israel carries on, and Israeli conduct and Israeli society in general…

McConnell: And Birthright Israel isn’t enough to counter this?

Finkelstein: It’s not enough, no, because Birthright Israel, first of all, is self‑selective. Many of them are just…

Mearsheimer: It’s propaganda. It’s very hard to propagandize Jews. They’re very knowledgeable, and they’re critical thinkers.

‘Occupy Boston’ takes on the the occupation of Palestine
Oct 19, 2011

Adam Horowitz

From the JTA:

Tuesday’s march, under the moniker Occupy Boston –Not Palestine, was held in conjunction with dozens of members of Jewish Women for Justice in Palestine at Dewey Square, the center of the Occupy Boston movement, according to a report in the The Daily Free Press, a Boston University independent student publication.

The protesters linked arms and marched down the street chanting slogans.

Protesters told the student newspaper that Israel uses U.S. tax dollars to occupy Palestine, and that the new Middle East will marginalize the United States over its relationship with Israel.

“We need to build houses in the U.S. instead of destroying houses in Palestine,” Murray said. “The occupation has gone on for so long because the U.S. vetoed 41 valid U.N. Security Council resolutions. They’ve given Israel the green light to abuse human rights,” Nancy Murray of Boston told the student newspaper.

Will ‘Occupy Wall Street’ give Jon Stewart political identity crisis?
Oct 19, 2011

Philip Weiss

Business Insider:

This might come as a blow to some members of its fanbase: ‘The Daily Show’ does not appear to be a fan of Occupy Wall Street.

Much like every other mainstream media show, when they went down to Zuccotti park they only managed to find weirdos.

Mark Wauck tells me that this is Stewart’s house. Big carbon footprint. Big dock.