Mondoweiss Online Newsletter

NOVANEWS

• From Occupation to ‘Occupy’: The Israelification of American domestic security

• Israeli gov’t cancels oafish ad campaign targeting Christmas, US marriage

• ‘This is how they drove us out’–Tiberias’s exiles recall the Nakba

• Letter from Cairo: the liberals, the Brothers, and the poor

• A Warsaw Ghetto with guns (my recent trip to Israel/Palestine)

• Marcus warns, US Jews could abandon Israel over treatment of women (ixnay about alestiniansPay)

• Nakba denial: ‘NYT’ removes the word ‘expulsion’ from article describing Palestinian refugees

• Even Foxman warns Israel’s rightwing tilt will kill the brand

• Jewish exiles, from Pakistan to Brooklyn

• Anti-Zionist rabbi to be subject of panel at National Press Club

From Occupation to ‘Occupy’: The Israelification of American domestic security

Dec 02, 2011

Max Blumenthal

Israeli gov’t cancels oafish ad campaign targeting Christmas, US marriage

Dec 02, 2011

Philip Weiss

Is this the week that Israel, the longest running Jewish American TV show, “jumped the shark?” I wonder. Ruth Marcus getting vexed in the Washington Post that restrictions on women in Israel are a “national security” threat because they will alienate American Jews, on whom the country depends. Abe Foxman complaining about threats to civil liberties in the Knesset for the same reason.  And now that stupid ad campaign warning Israelis in the U.S. not to marry Americans, but come back home. It disturbed Jeffrey Goldberg among others. Again because it makes their job, propagandizing, impossible.

The Netanyahu government hasnow cancelled the ad campaign, in embarrassment. The Washington Post rubs it in: “The Israeli government has canceled an ad campaign in which it suggested that Israeli expatriates will ‘lose their national identities’ if they marry Jewish Americans or celebrate Christmas. “

Goldberg got the scoop, from Israeli ambassador Michael Oren, who said, “The Ministry of Immigrant Absorption’s campaign clearly did not take into account American Jewish sensibilities, and we regret any offense it caused.”

Maybe too late… JTA adds:

The Anti-Defamation League’s national director, Abraham Foxman, told Haaretz the ads were “heavy-handed, and even demeaning.”

According to the Haaretz report, Israeli’s Foreign Ministry consulted with the Absorption Ministry after receiving several complaints from American Jews and was told that the feedback from Israelis who live in the United States was positive.

Notice the Israelis thought it was great. Clueless.

‘This is how they drove us out’–Tiberias’s exiles recall the Nakba

Dec 02, 2011

Sam Kestenbaum

Mosque in Tiberias with “Death to Arabs” graffiti. (Photo: Sam Kestenbaum)

Zochrot is a Hebrew word which means “remembering.” It’s also the name of an Israeli NGOfounded in 2002–during the Second Intifada–to collect stories and personal narrativesof the Palestinian Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” referring to the displacement and exodus of Historical Palestine’s Arab population in 1948.

What Zochrot sought to do then was to preserve the Palestinian history of Israel, a history that for decades has been obscured and ignored. This is what they’ve been doing for the past nine years. The Nakba is ongoing, the group’s website reads, it wasn’t just the exodus and persecution of the Palestinian people following the creation of the state of Israel – the “catastrophe” is able to continue because most Jewish Israelis don’t know the pre-state, Palestinian, history of their land.

On a sunny November day, a group of Israelis–both Jewish and Palestinian–walk through the streets of Tiberias. They are here to learn about what this northern city was like, before the founding of Israel.

Touring Tiberias with the pre-Nakba generation

Two elderly Palestinian-Israelis lead the group. Both of them grew up here and lived through the Nakba, when all of Tiberias’ Palestinians were driven away.

The city of Tiberias slopes towards the Sea of Galilee. Today it’s a cluster of modern, Israeli buildings. All municipal signs are written in Hebrew and English. At the center of Tiberias — on the shore of the lake — there are ruins: old foundations, synagogues, two boarded-up mosques and crumbling stone walls of the old city.

The tour is conducted in Hebrew and Arabic. The speakers carry one small, hand-held microphone and amplifier and take turns addressing the group.

Nuwal Saleh is 75 and she wears a black dress and a white hijab. She remembers her old home, which was on Fish Street, in the center of the old city. When she was eleven, the British Mandate ended. The day after the British pulled out of the city, the Haganah, the paramilitary Zionist forces, entered.

After the British left, she says, the Haganah started shooting.

They came carrying guns, Saleh says, near her home. She points down the street as she remembers, “They came from there,” she says, “over the hill.”

Saleh and her family fled, fearing they may be killed. They had heard stories of whole Palestinian villages being massacred. They didn’t want to be one of them. Saleh remembers she returned to her home years later, knocked on the door and was met by an Algerian Jewish family. She told them, “this used to be my home,” and cried.

Remembering Tiberias, then and now

What used to be the center of the old city of Tiberias is now a parking lot. There are hotels and shopping centers. Some Palestinian neighborhoods in the city were completely flattened; others are still standing, but owned by Israeli Jews.

Ali Abu Hosni is in his 80s and was also born in Tiberias. His family–like Saleh’s–now lives in Nazareth. He wears a neat gray suit and thick glasses. Most of the Palestinians living in Tiberias fled to Nazareth, he says. Others went to Syria and Jordan. When the Haganah invaded, he explains, they set blockades on all but one side of the city. “This is how they drove us out.”

Abu Hosni shifts between Hebrew and Arabic as he speaks. He does not speak English. When he was growing up, he says, Jews, Christians and Muslims lived together here side by side. In what used to be the market of the old city, Muslims, Jews and Christians did commerce together. He paints an almost idyllic picture. They had a very good relationship, he says. This was before the Zionists came.

The Jews who live here now? Abu Hosni shrugs. He doesn’t have too much to say about them. The character of the city has changed. Some of the street names have changed. Everything is in Hebrew.

Road in Tiberias. (Photo: Sam Kestenbaum)

An Israeli Nakba

The Nakba isn’t spoken about often in Hebrew. This past spring, a bill was passed in the Knesset which legislated the withdrawal of state funding from any Israeli institution that commemorates the Palestinian day of mourning. Tours like this–Israelis learning about Palestinian history–are not common.

On the tour are five middle-aged Jewish Israelis from Tel Aviv. One woman, with short, cropped hair wears a Zochrot T-shirt and listens intently. She is a regular.

There is a family of Palestinian-Israelis who takes pictures with their cell phones and cameras. A red-haired Jewish Israeli says that this is her first time on a tour with Zochrot. Her friend had come before, and recommended it.

Norma Musih, the co-founder of Zochrot, writes about the importance and immediacy of Nakba remembrance, for Israeli Jews, like herself, specifically.

“The Nakba is not the story of another people that took place somewhere else. It is a story that we, as Israeli Jews, are responsible for,” she writes. The next step after remembering, Musih continues, is honoring the Palestinians’ right of return.

She knows that this would change Israel’s demographics. “The Israeli state would not continue to exist in its current form,” she writes, but believes “that in this new state life would be better, for both Palestinians and Israelis.”

Abu Hosni takes us to what used to be the central mosque of Tiberias. It’s boarded up now. Iron bars block the entrance. Trash has been thrown inside and someone has written in Hebrew, “Death to Arabs” across the door.

This mosque was called the “Upper Mosque,” because it’s further up on the hill. Synagogues were on the other side of the line of shops.

On Eid al-Fitr, the festival marking the end of Ramadan, he remembers that they would fire a blank shot from the town’s cannon. This is how they would begin the celebrations.

This was a bustling market, Abu Hosni says, and points at nearby shops. He remembers coming here as a kid. On market days you wouldn’t be able to tell the Jews, Muslims and Christians apart.

Sam Kestenbaum is an American writer and editor based in the West Bank. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Jerusalem Report and The World of Chinese. He is a regular contributor to The Palestine Monitor and Tikkun Daily.

Letter from Cairo: the liberals, the Brothers, and the poor

Dec 02, 2011

Scott Long

Salafist campaign workers in Cairo’s Shobra district (@mmbilal on Twitter)

So this is what violence in Cairo is like now: the city has grown inured to it. You can stroll down a sidewalk in perfect serenity, and ignore the fact that a few blocks away lies what the foreign journalists call a “war zone.” Tuesday night — the end of the first round of the parliamentary elections — I was wandering Mahmoud Bassiouny Street downtown. I reached street’s end and a tangle of highways by the Egyptian Museum, and suddenly there were people rushing across the pavement and screaming, and bright crashing flashes that I recognized as Molotov cocktails. Behind me, abruptly, aggressive young guys in leather jackets had built a makeshift barricade across the street and were diverting traffic, and waving large knives. Among their shouts, I could distinguish “Eid wahda” —“One hand.” A few shopkeepers motioned me to get the hell away. For months crowds have targeted foreigners amid gathering xenophobia, reviling them as spies. There was, however, no obvious place to run. I walked as calmly as I could back past the barricade and the multiplying mob, and it was only at Talaat Harb Street, as the usual bustle of the city settled in, that I checked Twitter and called my friends and realized I’d been in the middle of the latest installment of the Battle of Tahrir. By night’s end, around sixty people, democratic protestors attacked by their opponents, were in the hospital. At midnight, I watched demonstrators carrying their comrades, swathed in bandages, across the square.

I’ll say more later about exactly what was going on. First, though, the elections.

The returns have been dribbling in for two days. This was the first round of three: a third of Egypt’s governorates, including Cairo and Alexandria, cast ballots. The sweep of the Islamic parties’ victory surprised everyone, including some wings of the Islamists themselves.

Freedom and Justice (FJP), dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, carried about 40% of the vote. More shockingly, el-Nour, the main Salafist party — representing literal, puritan, right-wing Islamists — won about a quarter of the ballots to come in second overall. The Egyptian Bloc, a coalition of liberal and largely secular parties, placed third, slightly behind it. The next election rounds will largely be held in more conservative parts of the country. Unless the Coptic vote in Upper Egypt shows unexpected strength, Freedom and Justice will hold close to a majority of seats; with el-Nour, they could control the new parliament completely.

Most people expected the Brotherhood to win, though by a lesser margin. At a polling place downtown I visited on Monday, Freedom and Justice organizers swarmed everywhere, flush with leaflets and paraphernalia, while the other parties were pretty much invisible. Several observers heard the same comment over and over from FJP activists: “We’re confident because we’ve been organizing for this moment for 80 years.” Certainly, for at least two decades the Brotherhood have been the only opposition force with a real grassroots presence. This time, they had the chance to try it out in a fair election. On the other hand, the Salafists’ success seems to have shocked even the Freedom and Justice Party. Mubarak jailed and tortured the ultraconservative Islamists with still more fervor than he devoted to repressing the Brotherhood; driven underground, they had few of the Brothers’ opportunities to organize in cities or villages. Their ability to pull millions of votes out of a hat this time shocked many across Egypt.

In the US, naturally, neoconservatives bray that Egypt is the new Iran, making up in population for what it lacks in plutonium: “Egypt’s turn toward Islamic revolution would be catastrophic. As the largest country in the Arab world, it has influence that Iran could never hope to achieve.”

I spent most of the last week talking to “liberals” in Egypt — a catch-all term defined quite differently than in the West. It includes Communists of various sorts, socialists, social democrats, anarchists, and free-market liberals, most but not all secular, united by a commitment to democracy, divided by disparate beliefs in what it means — some wedded to the parliamentary process, some dreaming of direct self-governance. Few, though, had an apocalyptic sense about the Islamists’ victory. They talk about three key things. First, as democrats they can’t reject out of hand the outcome of a democratic election. Second, the parliament will have little power in a government still run by a military junta. And third, the junta remains the real enemy.

The generals are killing people. I spoke last night to two gay friends who have been committed revolutionaries since January. Both were in Midan Tahrir the week of November 20, and their rage against SCAF (the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) was palpable. That week, the junta reacted to a renewed sit-in in the square with brute force. They sent Central Security police down Mohamed Mahmoud Street, leading from the Ministry of the Interior, to beat and abuse protesters. The protesters fought back, blocking the street and throwing stones at the police. The police in turn soaked the street in tear gas, till mushroom clouds of it loomed above the city; they fired at the demonstrators with rubber bullets and birdshots — aiming, it’s clear, at the eyes to blind them. The square these days is full of people with bandaged sockets, bandaged faces; friends of my friends lost their eyes. One police marksman, Sobhi Mahmoud Shenawy, became known as “the eye sniper.” Forty-three dissidents died. “This was a deeply personal fight,” Ahmad told me. “You could see they would kill you in a minute.” And Yehia, one of my gay friends, added, “You felt that such people, who would fire to blind you, didn’t deserve to rule a city block, much less a country.”

paper-bird.net/2011/12/02/from-egypt-the-class-impasse/
Wounded protesters, Nov. 20 (@NadimX on Twitter)

As gay men, my friends don’t much fear the Brotherhood or the Salafis. They remember that the worst persecution of gays in Egypt’s history, and probably anywhere in the region, happened under the secular Mubarak regime, from 2001-2004. The FJP could hardly augur anything worse.

To be sure, the Brotherhood, always opportunists, sold out in the last weeks, giving their support to SCAF. But the new Prime Minister whom SCAF plans to puppeteer, Kamal el-Ganzouri, is a Mubarak veteran who presided over mass torture of Islamists during his last term as premier in the 1990s. The Islamists have long memories; they will not forgive him. Already, the FJP has announced it expects a government responsible to the parliament. SCAF quickly warned them the new cabinet will answer to the generals alone. “The Brotherhood can mobilize a million people in the street if they want,” my friends told me. “If it comes to a face-off with SCAF, they’re almost the only political force with a chance to win.”

Still, liberals — and feminists, and gays, and Egypt’s large Coptic minority, and many others — hardly trust the Brotherhood. And the Islamists’ triumph raises serious questions about where the revolution is going.

Back to last Tuesday night’s violence — because it illuminates those questions. How did the fighting start? On Tuesday morning, the revolutionaries in Tahrir decided to expel some of the vendors who populated the place. The square has become a market; in addition to tea, juice, food, and fruit, hawkers pitch T-shirts, flags, and souvenirs. The vendors have a bad reputation; they’ve been accused of peddling drugs; the dissidents thought they might besmirch the image of the revolution. Out with them!

This has happened before, once over the summer; back then the vendors got violent, and they did this time as well. In the evening, they counterattacked, assaulting the square with stones and Molotov cocktails. Or somebody counterattacked. The men I saw blocking traffic didn’t look like vendors; it’s possible SCAF took advantage of the situation to send in its own provocateurs. (Their battle cry, “One hand,” was SCAF’s own slogan: “The army and the people are one hand.”) What matters, though, is that the revolutionaries decided to turn on Egyptians who were using the revolution to scrape by. A protester I met in Tahrir two nights ago said plaintively: “We fought the revolution for the poor. And why should we throw them out of here so shamelessly? Just so we would look more clean?”

Yehia told me last night, “On the front lines at Mohamed Mahmoud, it was mostly poor people. They were fighting bare-handed, bare-chested; they couldn’t even afford gas masks on their faces.” And Ahmad added,

They’re the ones exposed to daily insults from police officers more than anybody else. And I don’t think they take values as relative, the way we usually do as part of the middle class. Sacrificing your life — we calculate about it: it this the time, today? Maybe this battle isn’t worth a life. But they have more absolute values of sacrifice and courage. For them, being on the front lines was a matter of human dignity.

But the revolution has failed to do justice to their dignity. The poor may be at the forefront of the battles, but the revolution’s leaders are overwhelmingly middle-class. The front lines of democracy and the front lines of class are not the same. And the bourgeois leaders have failed to reach across Egypt’s yawning class divide.

Some of the failure has been programmatic. Over the summer, as revolutionary groups struggled to agree on a list of demands, they found consensus on democracy and civil liberties easy — but their concession to addressing economic issues dwindled to an anodyne promise to raise the minimum wage. Strikers from factories to public services who had put their bodies and jobs on the line for Mubarak’s overthrow felt ignored.

But some of the failure was more physical. The revolutionaries failed to leave Tahrir, failed to go into the neighborhoods and towns and villages, to talk to workers and peasants, to organize. The Salafists, despite years underground, didn’t make that mistake. They spent the summer recruiting a third of a million active members for el-Nour. The revolutionaries waited for the masses to come to them. The result is written in the election returns. Even Zamalek, the liberal island of the haute-bourgeoisie in mid-Nile, went for the Brotherhood. The doormen and maids and porters who slave for the wealthy live in Zamalek too, shunted to cellars and rooftop shacks — but they emerged, and they voted for the FJP.

The encampment in Tahrir is an ideal and almost a fetish for many leftist Egyptians. You can see why if you’ve been there: it’s an Arab Woodstock and Brook Farm, an alternative space to a corrupt society and state, a place where diverse identities can meet and share, where unities grow out of differences and one can imagine a new way of life, a new world. It’s beautiful. But too much time, many feel, was wasted this summer and fall defending Tahrir against the military, and too little speaking to the rest of society. An alternative community may represent the dream of comprehensive change, but does little to realize it. The hard work of talking across class boundaries and building solidarities to encompass the rest of Egypt fell by the wayside.

There’s still time to recuperate the revolution. But it will take hard work. It will take dialogue. It will take renewed respect for the multiple meanings of dignity.

Over the summer, revolutionaries tried to stage a march on the Ministry of Defense in Cairo’s Abbasiyya district. Together with an Egyptian friend, I got there late; the marchers had been stopped several blocks short of the ministry, surrounded on three sides by massed troops and tanks. We tried to go through the surrounding neighborhood, and get into the demonstration from the fourth side. The rundown, impoverished streets teemed with tense, angry citizens — enraged at the marchers, whom they regarded as invaders. And at one point we found ourselves suddenly in the midst of a river of running people, men and women pouring out of buildings, armed with big knives that glinted in the light of Ramadan lanterns strung above. They were shouting: “They’re attacking us! Strike back! Defend yourselves!” They could easily have turned on us, but somehow they raced past us unseeing. They engulfed the protest, and beat and brutalized many demonstrators. We couldn’t break through to join our friends; shaken, we limped home.

It was a fine example of false consciousness, you could say: the poor enlisted to defend an arrogant and indifferent regime. But the protesters too had their arrogance. When they first met the residents of the neighborhood, who blocked the way and demanded why these outsiders were marching through, many shouted back “It’s a public street! We have the right to march here.” That claim of possession is not what you say to Cairo’s poor, whose back streets and close communities are all they have. The revolutionaries are learning about dignity the hard way.

A Warsaw Ghetto with guns (my recent trip to Israel/Palestine)

Dec 02, 2011

Philip Weiss

Menajem Perez’s family bar mitzvah trip to Israel
posted by Israel Maven tours on facebook

Most of my Sept./Oct. trip to Israel and Palestine was demoralizing. The two societies are utterly separated and have zero sense of shared community. The Israeli community is contained in its values and beliefs and privileges and has no idea about Palestinian conditions, and Palestinians in the occupied territories are utterly contained in a segregated world. The sense of impending conflict is overwhelming. I found myself hating the Israelis for their colonialism and racism and apartheid but not wanting to jump into the bath of Palestinian resistance completely. It is not that I differ with the Palestinian analysis, it is only that the emotion is so raw, sore, victimized, and revolutionary, and the denial involved in referring to Israel as “’48” seems a kind of blindness.

I found this separation of consciousness and community so scary that at times I said to myself,I’m American, this isn’t worth dying for; I need to get out of this mess and tiptoe away.

Then at the end of my trip in Ramallah I got a glimpse of hope, in an Arab Spring social media way. I had dinner with Abir Kopty and Joseph Dana and others and had an upward mood swing, to the belief that the same forces that upended the fear of Mubarak’s unending totalitarian order in Egypt could also upend the fear in Israel and Palestine of the unending segregation order. A new idea has come, borne by a new generation. But that’s at the end of this story…

This was my fifth trip to the area and I spent less time in Israel than ever before. I realized that I am unconsciously boycotting Israel; I want little to do with the place. But Israel feels like a geographical anachronism, a New-Jersey-Austria teeming with guns and North Face and Ben and Jerry’s, implanted in the Arab world.

Here are two of my West Jerusalem walks:

I walk out of the Old City at the Jaffa Gate, and there are two young women at a little kiosk handing out cards to send a care package to an Israeli soldier. The appeal is entirely in English. Notice this language: “Express… our unity.” Thank them! Message: You live a protected life in the U.S. so we are defending the Jews.

I walk down to the David Citadel, a forbodingly lavish hotel designed by Moshe Safdie, and draped over the bronze and granite façade is a weatherproof banner for Menajem Mendel Perez’s bar mitzvah tour, organized by an Israeli touring company called Israel Maven tours with the M&Ms logo on the banner– you can glimpse it at right.

I go back to my room and find Israel Maven Tours’ facebook page and there is Menajem and his family firing guns on his bar mitzvah tour. (picture at top)

And look: Here’s a video of Menajem’s  grandmother firing an automatic rifle, on facebook.

So that’s what he did on his bar mitzvah. Now you are a man. Go fire guns.

I walk up the hill to the King David Hotel to taste the history of the British mandate period and famous terrorist Zionist attack on the hotel in 1946 and the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty. Instead I find myself walking down a long hallway in the hotel reading a row of tiles with celebrity guests’ signatures. I am thinking of world history and standing on Candice Bergen and Metallica.

I go to Rosh Hashana services at an English-language synagogue in Jerusalem and come out afterward as a sandy-haired youth in green Teva sandals is showing off his M16 to friends and family. Actually his father is showing the gun off. The little bearded father is telling the friends what rifle barrel is longest, Uzi, M16,  Kalashnikov. “I was trained on a Springfield .303,” the kid says in a New York accent.

There is such a worship of guns in Israel, and so much fear– fear of this historical moment, of the Arab spring, of Turkey, of democracy. I felt as if the Israelis intended to recreate the Warsaw Ghetto, this time with guns. For the historical framework of the Warsaw Ghetto rationalizes Jewish ethnocentrism and militarism– and expiates the survivors’ guilt so many Jews feel because they lost their whole family in the Warsaw Ghetto.

This framework explains why Israel has done so much to alienate Egypt and Turkey. The isolation fulfils the Israeli emotional baseline: the world hates us. And now opposition to the UN statehood initiative is just isolating Israel more.

There is something self-destructive about Zionism. The myths of Masada and the Warsaw ghetto are romances of self-destruction. And now the Zionists are isolating Jews from any larger ideal, and embracing hatred, and there is no way this can end happily…

I spent most of my time inside the occupation, observing the treatment of Palestinians. This is crushing to see. Every American Jew should get a little taste of what I saw. And every American. I’ve described some of my journeys inside the occupation here and here and here.

Palestine is cut up into different sections, A B and C, and whenever you are on the border of Area A you see big red signs warning Israelis not to go there, it’s dangerous. There is a feeling inside Israeli society that if you even walk into these areas you will be torn limb from limb– Palestinians are teaching their children to hate you in squalid refugee camps that are nests of masked terrorists.

This is part of the segregation of Palestinians. It is like the fear that white Americans used to have of the ghettoes, but reinforced by law and the “security” wall. I know that I had that fear too. I’d never been to Nablus before this trip, I thought of that as Deep Dark Palestine. Who would be able to pull me out? The Marines won’t help me!

Then you go in and it is another human place. People are working, or they are walking with their families. People smile at you and want to help direct you to your destination. The famous hospitality is just that– deeply welcoming.

But everyone’s life has been touched by military occupation, and the stories never end. These people hate the occupation. I can’t blame them.

I met Saed Abu-Hijleh, an American-educated lecturer and poet, whose mother was gunned down right next to him outside their hillside villa in Nablus 10 years ago. His father is a leading surgeon in Nablus– his father is like the surgeon you’d want in an American hospital, stony, neat and precise. His wife was gunned down by Israeli soldiers as she was doing embroidery on the stone terrace. Their house in Santa Monica would go for $5 million. During the first intifadah young Saed was shot in the stomach at a demonstration and imprisoned, and beaten in prison till the stomach wound opened up again. When he got out, his father shipped him to American schools to save his life.

I met the mayor of a village in the Jordan Valley who was shot three times when he was 15 when he was walking out to his family’s fields to visit his parents. Haj Sami Sadeq wasparalyzed.

He showed me around his village, and at the women’s clinic, I met a young Palestinian American woman in a sequined belt and designer handbag whose brother was killed when the Israelis blew up a police station during the second intifidah. She had come to the clinic with her mother, who wore traditional clothing. The mother says a prayer for her son every morning. The young American is suburban; she is afraid to come back here.

“The way I look at my country, I like rules. I want people not to live in chaos. In America there is freedom because there are laws. I like the law. Here they live under chaos because there are no rules.”

These are not unusual meetings. Yes, Abu-Hijleh and Haj Sami are leaders, I sought them out. But meeting that woman was entirely random. The sense of lawlessness is pervasive. Israel is trying to take their lands. That is the largest truth of the occupation. It is a “slow-moving… ethnic cleansing,” Bill Fletcher Jr. says accurately; and fear and uncertainty and despair fill every molecule of political consciousness. The American government paves the roads and builds clinics and puts up huge billboards, normalizing the occupation– but it does nothing to stop the neverending theft of lands by violent settlers supported by the army.

“These people need one thing—“ says Gilbert Carlson, a tall young idealistic American teacher in Nablus. “Exposure. They need their story to be told to the outside world. What they need is for the people from the governments that support Israel to wake up and realize what is going on here is beyond absurd. The word absurd doesn’t begin to characterize it.”

Gilbert Carlson

Carlson tells me of the frustration he experiences trying to describe a checkpoint to friends back in the States. Imagine hundreds of people standing waiting in the cold, women and children up to their ankles in mud, as Israeli teenagers in uniform sort though their documents, he says. But Gilbert doesn’t feel he can ever convey that scene.

“Before I set foot in Palestine I would have said, ‘the occupation is fucked up,’ but really I had no idea what was going on here. There really are no words. Or I’m short on words for what I’ve seen. There are too many emotions to put across, that words don’t allow. And in the end I say, You just have to come visit a checkpoint.”

I experienced that emotional battering time and again in Palestine. I wondered what I could say or do to convey what I was seeing to Americans. What picture could I take? What wail could I record?

And what struck me most of all was that where you would expect to see an international force protecting a vulnerable population, you see 24- and 25-year old international idealists, like Gilbert Carlson.  Where some international legal body ought to be separating the populations and protecting the weak from the fourth largest army in the world and airlifting supplies to Gaza, there are 24-year-old kids—like Morgan Bach, a teacher from Seattle who lives in Haj Sami’s village so that it is not wiped off the map by Israeli military bases that surround it and have demolition orders for the town. The courage and sacrifice of these young people is inspiring. I would never be capable of it. Some day their deeds will be recorded in history books: that when governments failed to do anything to protect people, they stepped in.

My side is frequently accused now of trying to “delegitimize” Israel. And I know that some on my side see no legitimacy in Israel and work to delegitimize it by calling it ‘48 and Palestine. But when you visit the place it is clear that Israel has done most of the work for them. Its complete indifference to the 1967 lines of international consensus, which its advocate Alan Dershowitz described as “Auschwitz borders,” as Abba Eban did before him, justifying the Warsaw ghetto with guns and Candice Bergen– well, they showed the same indifference to the 1947 lines of international consensus, UN Partition. And the ethnic cleansing and colonization that Israel carries out today in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and the Negev serve to undermine the liberal idea that the establishment of the state was a blow for human progress, rather than just a chapter in the story of colonization and expulsion and the white man’s burden.

“1948 is still going on every single day, but that’s a tough narrative to sell in the U.S.,” Gilbert Carlson says.

I told Carlson that the American view is changing. The statehood initiative and Obama’s collapse have woken a lot of Americans up to the issue. Henry Siegman recently used the wordcolonialism in connection with Israel. And the New York Times is doing stories about Israel’s international isolation with the thrust that Israel has brought this situation on itself. America has been damaged; Netanyahu’s humiliation of Obama at the United Nations has shocked our liberal Establishment. And Nicholas Kristof’s piece reluctantly calling for democracy in the entire land is animated by awareness of this isolation.

But the Israelis, even the good ones, are incapable of sorting this problem out for themselves. The occupation is “lovely” for them, as Nabil Sha’ath put it. A leftwing Israeli Palestinian friend who hates the occupation has started ignoring politics and says that it is a time of hopelessness: she has to live here and there is nothing she can do to change things. You stop even thinking about it, she says, because you can’t see any good coming from any of the players, the Quartet, Obama, Netanyahu. They are all so incapable of doing any good.

She is in her 40s. One of the problems with the conflict is age. The old are all locked in their generational understandings, and those understandings are failures. Nabil Sha’ath is locked inside the great saga of Palestinian resistance, compromise and Oslo—the failed saga of his lifetime, and no one wants to admit that the saga is a failure. Anyone over 45 or so in America who cares about the issue has also been trained by a group of experiences that begins with terrorism and ends with an olive branch and historic compromises and the dream of two people living side by side, oh how can we achieve it.

Partition has a generationally ordained quality. Sha’ath in his 70s supporting Partition as the climax of his life’s arc. I’m 56 and sometimes support Partition. We have old eyes. Young people have a wisdom born of new experiences and assumptions. It is no surprise that the most interesting voices on the struggle, from Adam Horowitz to Ali Abunimah to Max Blumenthal to Susie Abulhawa, are in their 30s.

My last night in Palestine I spent in a Ramallah restaurant courtyard under a pomegranate tree with young social media activists, Abir Kopty and Joseph Dana and others. Kopty is from the Galilee and Dana from the US and Israel. They say that their crowd is a small one, but what inspiring belief and esprit de corps they have. They remind me of the Egyptian facebook revolutionaries: they have a new idea they truly believe in and don’t see why it can’t be brought about. Democracy– really, is that such a hard idea to absorb?

And though their movement ramifies in a lot of different ways (nonviolent protest, international voluntarism, boycott, the statehood initiative, etc) it is really in the end a mental struggle, they are resisting old ideas, and they must convince millions of people who are set in an old way to say I am for democracy.

Tahrir could not have happened without western media– without the worldly young revolutionaries using facebook and the American networks to leverage their struggle; and in the end Kopty and Dana are also seeking to leverage western media. They are up against the same kind of generational opposition that Tahrir faced. Because of their heroic battles, the old think that two states is a good and legitimate outcome. There is that attitude to overcome. Not just in America and the Israel lobby, but in “international consensus.”

Well Mubarak had international consensus behind him, didn’t he? Ideas and attachments can dissolve in a few seconds. Nicholas Kristof and Daniel Levy, both fairly young, are saying the same thing: We have to talk about the possibility of one state.

One big wall the dreamers must tear down is Israeli fear. Israelis know that they have done wrong. When Micha Kurz of Grassroots Jerusalem came to the United States and talked about the occupation a year or so back, he visited a conservative synagogue where wise men acknowledged everything he told them about Jerusalem. But they said their great responsibility in political life is to protect Israelis, and they are afraid that when the Israelis lift their boots from the neck of the Palestinians there will be a bloodbath. The Palestinians will turn on the Israelis.

At our dinner