MONDOWEISS ONLINE NEWSLETTER

NOVANEWS

Report from Bil’in: ’soldiers showed no discrimination with their firing, shooting directly at the faces of the protestors’

Picture 106
The Israeli military chases a protester in Bil’in. (Photo: Hamde Abo Rahma)

Hamde Abo Rahma sends this report on the latest protest in Bil’in:
Today’s demonstration marked the culminating event in the Fifth Bil’in International Conference for Palestinian Popular Resistance, which began on Wednesday, April 21 with a full line-up of speakers including politicians, leaders of Popular Committees, Israeli activists, and international solidarity activists. The conference continued through Thursday and Friday. After the final conference session on Friday morning, in which workshop groups reported on their conclusions in preparation for the conference statement, the conference participants gathered with scores of other Israeli, international, and Palestinians waiting at the mosque for the weekly demonstration.
Today’s demonstration was larger than normal in size, and lasted an especially long period of time. Serious injuries were sustained during the demonstration, and several were arrested. Present at the demonstration were local political figures, including Mustafa Barghouti, and international solidarity leaders such as Luisa Morgantini.
At 1:30pm the crowd of demonstrators processed to the site of the Wall, carrying posters and flags, and were immediately met by soldiers, sound grenades, and smoke bombs. Protestors encountered a line of soldiers who were hiding; these soldiers fired a wall of gas at the protestors in order to force the demonstrators into a second line of soldiers who were waiting to make arrests. Demonstrators reported that soldiers showed no discrimination with their firing, shooting directly at the faces of the protestors, and no discrimination in their arrests, trying to arrest even journalists.

Picture 229Imad Rizka being led away from the protest. (Photo: Hamde Abo Rahma)

Several serious injuries were sustained. Imad Rizka, approximately 37 years of age, from Yaffa, was shot in the forehead with a tear gas canister. He was taken away immediately to Ramallah Hospital by ambulance. His condition is unknown at the time of writing. Rizka is well-known in Bil’in, as he comes to the village every Friday to demonstrate.
Soldiers fired a great deal of tear gas from both sides of the fence. Demonstrators were forced to retreat, but among those who remained, several were arrested. Soldiers crossed the fence and advanced well into the demonstrators’ territory, grabbing five demonstrators. Those arrested were a Palestinian journalist Muheeb Barghouti; an Israeli journalist, an elderly Palestinian man named Abu Sadi; Israeli activist Tali Shapiro; and two internationals from Liverpool, England, who were visiting Bil’in as part of a twin cities partnership. The soldiers took them away in between firing rounds of tear gas to drive the protestors back.
Additional injuries are as follows:
One demonstrator from Italy, struck in the back by a tear gas canister; an Italian demonstrator who was shot in the arm with a new type of weapon; an Israeli activist; Um Samarra, 45, from Bil’in, who was hit in the leg by a tear gas canister; Haitham al-Khatib, cameraman, who was slightly injured; a Palestinian woman from Bethlehem who sustained a leg injury; and a Palestinian journalist named Abbas al-Momni.
Today’s protestors showed great tenacity in the face of tear gas, injuries, and arrests, and an especially large number of demonstrators remained at the fence, facing the soldiers. The demonstration lasted an especially long period of time, as demonstrators refused to completely leave the area, and returned several times during lulls between waves of tear gas.
Update from the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee:
Emad Rezqa was hit in the forehead by an aluminum tear gas projectile shot directly at him by Israeli soldiers during the weekly anti-Wall demonstration in Bil’in earlier today. He suffered a fractured skull and brain hemorrhage. Rezqa is currently hospitalized at the Hadassa Ein Karem hospital in Jerusalem.
The demonstration Rezqa was injured in concluded the three-day International Bil’in Conference on Popular Struggle, and was attended by hundreds of people. Five demonstrators were arrested during the protest.
The march, which commenced at the village’s mosque after the midday prayer, was attacked with tear gas some 30 seconds after reaching the gate in the Wall, despite the fact that it was entirely peaceful. The gas forced most of the participants to retreat back towards the village, but a smaller group managed to stay by the gate, chanting and shouting slogans.
A few minutes after, a group of soldiers began firing a second round of tear gas projectiles, this time directly at the demonstrators from a distance of about 30 meters. Rezqa was hit and quickly evacuated to the Ramallah hospital with blood gushing from his forehead. He was transferred to the Hadassa Ein Karem hospital after being x-rayed and diagnosed as suffering a broken skull.
Following Rezqa’s injury, soldiers invaded Bil’in through the gate in the Wall and arrested four protesters who were staging a sit-in some hundred meters away from the Wall, as well as a journalist who was next to them.
Another demonstrator was similarly injured today during a demonstration in the village of Nabi Saleh. The protester was hit in the head with a tear gas projectile shot directly at him after the Army invaded the village even before the demonstration began.
In Ni’ilin, roughly 300 people demonstrated in solidarity with the villages political prisoners. The demonstration was attended by two PLC members from the Change and Reform party – Mahmoud Ramahi and Fadhel Saleh, who joined the protest today following Ramahi’s statement in support of the popular struggle last Wednesday during the Bil’in conference.
Ramahi and Slaeh’s participation is yet another sign of the recent expansion of the popular struggle and the momentum the movement is gaining in the Palestinian street.

Barack Obama is speaking the language of Israel-firster Dennis Ross

William Quandt, a National Security Council staffer in the NSC’s Middle East office during the Nixon and Carter administrations, has an article up at Foreign Policy’s Middle East Channel downplaying any hopes that the Obama administration is serious about pushing for a solution in Israel/Palestine. Quandt writes, “My own reading of this administration is that it really has not yet made up its mind what to do about Israel, the Palestinians and Syria–and this far into a new administration, that is reason for concern.”
Although much has been made of President Obama’s statement that Middle East peace is a “vital national security interest” for the U.S., Quandt devotes more attention to another Obama statement with worrisome implications:

The truth is, in some of these conflicts the United States can’t impose solutions unless the participants in these conflicts are willing to break out of old patterns of antagonism. I think it was former Secretary of State Jim Baker who said, in the context of Middle East peace, we can’t want it more than they do.

The notion that the United States can’t want peace more than the Israelis and Palestinians want it is, as Quandt points out, a relic of the Clinton and second Bush administration’s approach to Israel/Palestine, and not Baker’s view. It’s also a view that Dennis Ross has pushed hard, with tragic consequences for the Palestinians. The question we should be asking is why Ross has such a prominent role in Obama’s strategy for dealing with the Middle East, a role that is very detrimental. Ross, as Laura Rozen at Politico reported in late March, is still very much involved in crafting the administration’s approach to Israel, and is reportedly “more sensitive to Netanyahu’s coalition politics than to U.S. interests.”
The Wall Street Journal adds onto the story in a big way, really showing how happy Netanyahu and the Israel lobby must be to have Ross inside Obama’s team:

U.S. officials said Mr. Netanyahu’s government has been communicating much of its position through the White House’s senior Middle East adviser Dennis Ross, at times bypassing special Mideast peace envoy George Mitchell. That decision has been interpreted by some in the administration as an attempt to sideline Mr. Mitchell in favor of Mr. Ross, who has advocated U.S. cooperation with Mr. Netanyahu, rather than confrontation. Mr. Ross has publicly taken positions in line with Mr. Netanyahu’s government, particularly the centrality of stopping Iran’s nuclear program as a means to underpin Mideast peace efforts.

The comment from Obama that repeats Ross’ view that the U.S. can’t want peace more than Israel and the Palestinians may seem “neutral” on the surface, but it really isn’t. As Helena Cobban has wrote:

That argument has been used as a major justification for a diplomatic quietism that has been a cover, actually, for continued, very generous US financial and military help to Israel that has completely underwritten Israel’s pursuit of its illegal policy of land-grabbing settlement-building in the West Bank and Golan and its very destructive launching of periodic wars, assassination campaigns, and other acts of lethal physical violence against its neighbors.

Ross is a major player in the Israel lobby, and if Obama is listening to him, as he seems to be, than we know for sure that Obama is not going to change a damn thing when it comes to U.S. policy towards Israel. Rahm Emanuel seemed to confirm that the Obama administration is intently listening to Ross when he told Charlie Rose that there are no plans for a U.S. peace proposal to be placed on the table (I’m leaving aside the fact that, if as reported Obama would be proposing a settlement based on the “Clinton Parameters,” it would mean discarding Palestinian rights. But that’s a separate issue.)
It’s no wonder that the Palestinians have lost faith in Barack Obama. There’s no “change we can believe in” on this issue, as well as on many other foreign policy issues.

Clemons suggests that Schumer is representing Israel, not U.S.

Great post by Steve Clemons demanding to know if Chuck Schumer has ever sided with the U.S. against Israel. “Has Chuck Schumer EVER Criticized Israel or its Leadership in the Way He Just Unloaded on Obama?” Says that Schumer’s tonguelashing of the Obama administration for putting pressure on Netanyahu comes close to sounding like he should be in the Knesset not the Senate.

This is the 2nd time I know of that Schumer has publicly crossed the line when it came to zealously blaming his own government and colleagues in delicate matters of US-Israel-Palestine policy.
During the third of three major efforts of the George W. Bush administration to get the recess appointed US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton confirmed in the US Senate, Senator Schumer launched a passionate personal campaign to help Bolton succeed.
Schumer called many Democratic Senate colleagues and bluntly said, “A vote against John Bolton is a vote against Israel.”

I love that journalists are finally beginning to sound like journalists on obvious questions. And I like the dual-loyalty issue, because… it’s real; and voters deserve to be informed on the question. Oh and something else. A lot of liberals like to blame the Christian Zionists for our policy in the Middle East. Does Christian Zionism have anything to do with Schumer’s advocacy? Or that of his protege Anthony Weiner? Or the abandonment of Obama by a significant portion of his own political base on this question? Does it explain Dennis Ross running the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute and then running Iran policy under Obama?

Wiesel should stop offering celestial prescriptions for a city he doesn’t live in

More than a hundred activists from the Sheikh Jarrah movement in Jerusalem published an open letter to Elie Wiesel in response to the letter Wiesel published last week in the Washington Post:
Dear Mr. Wiesel,
We write to you from Jerusalem to convey our frustration, even outrage, at your recently published letter on Jerusalem. We are Jewish Jerusalemites – residents by choice of a battered city, a city used and abused, ransacked time and again first by foreign conquerors and now by its own politicians. We cannot recognize our city in the sentimental abstraction you call by its name.
Our Jerusalem is concrete, its hills covered with limestone houses and pine trees; its streets lined with synagogues, mosques and churches. Your Jerusalem is an ideal, an object of prayers and a bearer of the collective memory of a people whose members actually bear many individual memories. Our Jerusalem is populated with people, young and old, women and men, who wish their city to be a symbol of dignity – not of hubris, inequality and discrimination. You speak of the celestial Jerusalem; we live in the earthly one.
For more than a generation now the earthly city we call home has been crumbling under the weight of its own idealization. Your letter troubles us, not simply because it is replete with factual errors and false representations, but because it upholds an attachment to some other-worldly city which purports to supersede the interests of those who live in the this-worldly one. For every Jew, you say, a visit to Jerusalem is a homecoming, yet it is our commitment that makes your homecoming possible. We prefer the hardship of realizing citizenship in this city to the convenience of merely yearning for it.
Indeed, your claim that Jerusalem is above politics is doubly outrageous. First, because contemporary Jerusalem was created by a political decision and politics alone keeps it formally unified. The tortuous municipal boundaries of today’s Jerusalem were drawn by Israeli generals and politicians shortly after the 1967 war. Feigning to unify an ancient city, they created an unwieldy behemoth, encircling dozens of Palestinian villages which were never part of Jerusalem. Stretching from the outskirts of Ramallah in the north to the edge of Bethlehem in the south, the Jerusalem the Israeli government foolishly concocted is larger than Paris. Its historical core, the nexus of memories and religious significance often called “the Holy Basin”, comprises a mere one percent of its area. Now they call this artificial fabrication ‘Jerusalem’ in order to obviate any approaching chance for peace.
Second, your attempt to keep Jerusalem above politics means divesting us of a future. For being above politics is being devoid of the power to shape the reality of one’s life. As true Jerusalemites, we cannot stand by and watch our beloved city, parts of which are utterly neglected, being used as a springboard for crafty politicians and sentimental populists who claim Jerusalem is above politics and negotiation. All the while, they franticly “Judaize” Eastern Jerusalem in order to transform its geopolitics beyond recognition.
We invite you to our city to view with your own eyes the catastrophic effects of the frenzy of construction. You will witness that, contrary to some media reports, Arabs are not allowed to build their homes anywhere in Jerusalem. You [will] see the gross inequality in allocation of municipal resources and services between east and west. We will take you to Sheikh Jarrah, where Palestinian families are being evicted from their homes to make room for a new Jewish neighborhood, and to Silwan, where dozens of houses face demolition because of the Jerusalem Municipality’s refusal to issue building permits to Palestinians.
We, the people of Jerusalem, can no longer be sacrificed for the fantasies of those who love our city from afar. This-worldly Jerusalem must be shared by the people of the two nations residing in it. Only a shared city will live up to the prophet’s vision: “Zion shall be redeemed with justice”. As we chant weekly in our vigils in Sheikh Jarrah: “Nothing can be holy in an occupied city!”                
Respectfully,
Just Jerusalem (Sheikh Jarrah) Activists

BDS is a long term project with radically transformative potential

I’m grateful to Jerry Haber for taking the time to engage me on the role of ‘liberal’ Zionists in the BDS movement. Sometimes my tone borders on truculence, which is really just impatience. I’m impatient for ‘liberal’ Zionists to discard the ‘Zionist’ and become regular liberals like the rest of us. I think these are people who know better, but cling to notions of racial dominance in an ill-got geographical space for a variety of reasons.
I’ve written before I don’t really believe that liberal Zionists exist. Very quickly; liberal means we’re all equal, and Zionist means we’re not. It’s a contradiction in terms that I believe is irreconcilable. For instance, Avigdor Lieberman would like to see an end to the occupation. Is Avigdor Lieberman a liberal Zionist? Why not? Lieberman talks about ‘population swaps’ whose intent is to preserve the Jewish character of the state. Is that what liberal Zionists find so odious? How do liberal Zionists seek to preserve the Jewish character of the Jewish state if not through supranational gerrymandering or more ethnic cleansing? This is not a rhetorical question. How do liberal Zionists intend to hold on to their Jewish state?
Haber writes that “civil equality of Palestinian Arabs in Israel may entail the end of the Jewish state, but many people, Jews and Palestinians, don’t think that it does.” I’d like to respectfully correct the misconceptions of any Jews and Palestinians who do not think that granting civil equality to Palestinian Israelis means the end of the Jewish state. Today, in the Jewish democracy, 1 out of every 5 citizens is not Jewish. In a truly equal society, any one of those people can hold a senior governmental post. What happens to ‘Jewish self-determination’ when the prime minister of Israel is a woman named Diana Buttu? In America, the proportion of black to non-black people is less than that of Palestinian Israeli to Jewish Israeli. Yet, white Americans and others elected a black man. That’s because the principle of ‘white self-determination’ is a discredited orthodoxy in American civil discourse. That’s because it’s racist.
Furthermore, Haber writes that “Palestinian Israeli leaders… do not oppose the existence of a Jewish ethnic state.” I take issue with this characterization of Palestinian Israeli leaders’ views. Azmi Bishara has repeatedly called for an Israel that does not discriminate or privilege one race over another. MK Ahmed Tibi has also described the Jewish state as “democratic towards Jews, and Jewish towards Arabs.”
But I’m avoiding the meat of the thing; do I want so-called liberal Zionists to join in our BDS efforts? If not, why? The BDS movement seeks to enact “non-violent punitive measures” to induce Israel into:
1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall;
2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.
Ok fine. So BDS does mean the end of the Jewish state. But can’t I see the value in reaching across the aisle, so to speak? The movement may be burgeoning but remains too small. Why shouldn’t we indulge in ad hoc partnerships to get things done? Richard Silverstein, Richard Goldstone, and many other self-proclaimed Zionists have done an immeasurably positive amount of work in skinning the Zionist cat (That’s a deliberate analogy. I don’t kid myself about how difficult it must be for a Jewish person to criticize the Zionist state), shouldn’t they be asked to join the BDS movement?
To be sure, I’m not dogmatically against cooperating with people whose views I find objectionable. If it came down to it, I’d be happy to work with the racist up the street to get the city to fix a neighborhood pothole.
Likewise, I’d work with a liberal Zionist to break the Zionist siege of Gaza, whose people really have no use for protracted ideological jockeying. There is an immediacy there that demands action from any quarter.
But I view the BDS movement as a long-term project with radically transformative potential. I believe that the ultimate success of the BDS movement will be coincident with the ultimate success of the Palestinian enfranchisement and equal rights movement. In other words, BDS is not another step on the way to the final showdown; BDS is The Final Showdown.
This belief grows directly from the conviction that nothing resembling the ‘two-state solution’ will ever come into being. Ending the occupation doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t mean upending the Jewish state itself. That’s because, as Yair Wallach writes, “The occupation appears increasingly as a de-facto permanent feature of the Israeli system of government, rather than as a set of temporary policies and security measures. And inevitably, the occupation involves the disenfranchisement and denial of collective political rights for the Palestinians.”
Therefore the success of the BDS movement is tied directly to our success in humanizing Palestinians and discrediting Zionism as a legitimate way of regarding the world.
With that holistic long-term view of BDS in mind, it becomes easy for me to say to that hypothetical Berkeley student senator, “We’ve waited a long time for our rights, we can wait until you’ve grown sufficiently as a human being to recognize our equal humanity before you cast that vote.” I have a robust faith in the humanity of the Jewish people (and people everywhere). I do not think we will have to wait very long for many of them to unlearn the Zionism which disfigures it.
We Palestinians have compromised on our fundamental rights and humanity repeatedly to gain political favor or a modicum of statehood. The most important lesson we can draw from Oslo is that Zionism does not permit many Zionists to act in good faith. Despite themselves, they are obsessively engaged in counting babies. Take the recent Sheikh Jarrah demonstrations. The Bradley Burstons of the world tell us that they demonstrate to prevent the unthinkable from happening. ‘If Jews have a right to properties they relinquished in 1948 in East Jerusalem, then Palestinians have a right to properties they relinquished in 1948! We cannot set the precedent!!’ Is this liberal Zionism? What’s so liberal about it?
The chief hallmark of intelligence is the capacity to learn from one’s mistakes. We cannot engage in expedient coalition-building now for a few short-term gains. We will end up sacrificing a clear moral compass in the long-run, which is bad for everyone. That’s how we ended up where we are after the Oslo farce.
There is the view that liberal Zionists are fence-sitters – nearly there, but not quite – and we ought to undertake to bring them into the fold. One day, imperceptibly, they will find that they no longer hew to a vision of a racially-pure (or Jewish majority) Israel.
When I was in college in the United States, I was frequently approached by well-intentioned Zionists who would invite me to ‘dialogue’ meetings and the like. I always refused because it was clear that these people sought, on some level, to absolve themselves of their Zionist guilt. It may have been tied to the Nakba, or the occupation, or the realization that I couldn’t participate in studying abroad in Tel Aviv, or any number of things.
Would I be doing these people a favor by joining them in holding hands and ameliorating some of the psychological tension that results when basically good people hold racist views? Or am I permitting them to persist in their destructively dichotomous state of mind by helping them put off the moment of crisis for just a bit longer? Personally, I felt more comfortable confronting their racism head on. Maybe if we apply force to the mind of a liberal Zionist, something will snap: “I can’t believe it. But he’s right. Palestinians are people, too. And they ought to be able to live in Jaffa just like me!”
Truthfully, I don’t know with any certainty how we should approach the fence sitters. It probably has something to do with an individual’s temperament, and whether she responds to blatant contradictions or hand-holding. I do know that I’m temperamentally unsuited to hand-holding.
But I’d like to acknowledge that these people may one day be friends and allies, and eventually, compatriots. So here’s a direct plea:
Discard your Zionism. Learn to animate your humanity with an immutable, plangent belief in the fundamental equality of all people. Learn to see the other as an extension of your human, not Jewish, self. Learn to stop worrying, and love the demographic bomb.

Goldstone Report said that Gaza remains occupied… why?

tank
Eva Bartlett of International Solidarity Movement posts this photograph and report today from Gaza:

Four Israeli military bulldozers accompanied by four tanks invaded the Al Faraheen region, east of Khan Younis, this morning, destroying farmland, tearing up wheat and lentil crops, and terrorizing the civilians in the region.
“It’s normal,” said Jaber Abu Rjila.
“They invade whenever they want,” said his wife Leila.
The couple’s house and chicken farm, just under 500 metres from the border, was ravaged during an Israeli invasion in May 2008. They now rent a house further away from the border region, although their livelihood has been destroyed.

Below, a tank passes close to a Palestinian home that has been previously attacked:
tank2 

Judt says Holocaust is exploited for ‘uncompromising Israelophilia and… lachrymose self-regard’

Another fabulous memoir piece by Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books, this one on the sources of his own proudly nonreligious Jewish identity. I gather his method of composition is oral, which you can see in the way he circles his subject, but the thrust of the piece is a challenge to “Israelophilia” and a call for a secular basis of identity engaged by universal justice standards. Frankly I don’t think Judt will reach the masses with this one. The message is in the end too assimilationist–and Jewish corporate entities don’t want to hear that, even as their children are gamboling in western history as Judt is: “I don’t make a point of socializing with Jews in particular—and for the most part I haven’t married them.” Great line. Judt:

Some years ago I attended a gala benefit dinner in Manhattan for prominent celebrities in the arts and journalism. Halfway through the ceremonies, a middle-aged man leaned across the table and glared at me: “Are you Tony Judt? You really must stop writing these terrible things about Israel!” Primed for such interrogations, I asked him what was so terrible about what I had written. “I don’t know. You may be right—I’ve never been to Israel. But we Jews must stick together: we may need Israel one day.” The return of eliminationist anti-Semitism was just a matter of time: New York might become unlivable.
I find it odd—and told him so—that American Jews should have taken out a territorial insurance policy in the Middle East lest we find ourselves back in Poland in 1942. But even more curious was the setting for this exchange: the overwhelming majority of the awardees that evening were Jewish. Jews in America are more successful, integrated, respected, and influential than at any place or time in the history of the community. Why then is contemporary Jewish identity in the US so obsessively attached to the recollection—and anticipation—of its own disappearance?…
American Jews are instinctively correct to indulge their Holocaust obsession: it provides reference, liturgy, example, and moral instruction—as well as historical proximity. And yet they are making a terrible mistake: they have confused a means of remembering with a reason to do so. Are we really Jews for no better reason than that Hitler sought to exterminate our grandparents? If we fail to rise above this consideration, our grandchildren will have little cause to identify with us.
In Israel today, the Holocaust is officially invoked as a reminder of how hateful non-Jews can be. Its commemoration in the diaspora is doubly exploited: to justify uncompromising Israelophilia and to service lachrymose self-regard. This seems to me a vicious abuse of memory. But what if the Holocaust served instead to bring us closer, so far as possible, to a truer understanding of the tradition we evoke?
Here, remembering becomes part of a broader social obligation by no means confined to Jews. We acknowledge readily enough our duties to our contemporaries; but what of our obligations to those who came before us? We talk glibly of what we owe the future—but what of our debt to the past? Except in crassly practical ways—preserving institutions or edifices—we can only service that debt to the full by remembering and conveying beyond ourselves the duty to remember.
Unlike my table companion, I don’t expect Hitler to return. And I refuse to remember his crimes as an occasion to close off conversation: to repackage Jewishness as a defensive indifference to doubt or self-criticism and a retreat into self-pity. I choose to invoke a Jewish past that is impervious to orthodoxy: that opens conversations rather than closes them. Judaism for me is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling: the dafka-like quality of awkwardness and dissent for which we were once known. It is not enough to stand at a tangent to other peoples’ conventions; we should also be the most unforgiving critics of our own. I feel a debt of responsibility to this past. It is why I am Jewish.

Hafradah v apartheid, the story continues

Hannah Schwarzschild responds to the debate she helped start over the use of the word “hafradah,” which is Hebrew for separation, instead of “apartheid” to characterize Israel’s occupation.
So let me respond quickly, since I seem to be getting attacked from left, right and center for having brought up this old idea in a conversation about the difficulties of using the A-word (such as scheduled speakers dropping out of teach-ins at the last minute). First, this was not my idea (I don’t know who first suggested it, but it sure wasn’t me: I don’t speak Hebrew and wouldn’t know a geder hafradah if I pole vaulted over one.) I re-raised the “hafradah” idea last weekend only to illustrate that we have an option to use the Israelis’ own language against them in strategic moments when the “Apartheid” terminology is diverting the conversation unhelpfully (have you ever gotten stuck in a conversation with a Marxist pedagogue who wants to differentiate, quite correctly, the Afrikaaner use of labor from the Zionist one?). That’s not an “own goal,” that’s how minds get opened and hypocrites get exposed.
For what it’s worth, I use the A-word all the time, and have battled for the right to use it in organizations where some feared it would alienate liberal Zionists who write big checks. But keeping “hafradah” in our collective back pocket as a way to explain to unbelievers that racial/ethnic segregation is official Israeli policy can be a useful thing — I’m not sure why anyone thinks it’s an either/or.
Can’t we all just get along?

Rashid Khalidi: Under Obama ‘there has been no real change in the fatally flawed policies of the U.S. in the region’

As Palestinians prepare to commemorate the Nakba and Israelis celebrated their Independence Day, tension between the U.S. and Israel over settlement construction in occupied East Jerusalem continues. To make sense of these and other developments, the Institute for Middle East Understanding sat down in New York City with Professor Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University. Khalidi is the author of six books on Middle Eastern history including Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, and most recently Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East. He is the editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies and a former adviser to the Palestinian delegation at the Madrid and Washington peace talks.
IMEU: Israel just celebrated its Independence Day. What are your thoughts on the state of the state? Is there a shift in Israeli society, and in the perception of Israel, or perhaps a questioning of Israel’s historical choices and her current policies?
RK: Well I am not in Israel so I can’t say really. From a distance, and through the lens of the Israeli press, it seems there is something unusual going on, perhaps a process of questioning as you say. But I would say that there has been a real shift in the Jewish Diaspora, and in terms of the perception of Israel internationally and in the U.S. Something is changing there. This process started to unfold after the 2006 Lebanon war and even more after the 2008-09 Gaza war. A lot of people said ‘this is too much’ and it opened their eyes to the injustice and blindness of Israeli policies, not to mention the brutality.
IMEU: Earlier this week Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak made a statement in which he essentially said the occupation must end. He said: “The world isn’t willing to accept…that Israel will rule another people for decades more…It’s something that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world.” He went on to say that Palestinians aspire to a state of their own and that “there is no other way, whether you like it or not, than to let them rule themselves.” What are your thoughts on this?
RK: Barak in many ways represents the more rational element in Israeli decision-making, the element which doesn’t seek to bend reality to an Israeli vision at every turn. He represents an element of the leadership that is not totally detached from reality in other words. It should be obvious to anyone in their right mind, for example, that Israel cannot rule the Palestinians forever. Unfortunately most of those in power in Israel now really do think that they can bend reality to their will.
In some ways Zionism is and always has been this quite remarkable effort to shape reality to the will of its philosophy, to the will of the movement. It has been amazingly successful at doing this through brilliant PR and through creating facts on the ground. As I said, most Israeli current leaders are still living in this fantasy world, the apogee of which was during the Bush years. Throughout Bush’s tenure reality could be skewed and twisted more easily than ever before.
But we also should note that many among the Israeli elite, and many Israeli intellectuals are well aware of this dangerous strand of thinking in Israel and they are opposed to this idea that reality is alterable. Unfortunately many of these people, these more sensible Israelis, are outside of Israel living in the U.S. or in Europe.
IMEU: Elie Wiesel took out a full-page add in the NYT to say Jerusalem is for the Jews and the Jews alone. What’s your response to this?
RK: How does one respond to such narrow thinking? The idea that Jerusalem is the province of this or that exclusive tribal nation-state (which is in effect what Wiesel is arguing) represents a quite peculiar reduction of Judaism. Tony Judt, in a recent piece, talks about the same clash between this tribalism on the one hand, and the more universal principles of Judaism on the other.
Wiesel’s seems to be a very primitive vision indeed, and one that is intended to stir up atavistic tendencies. My guess is that this thinking increasingly only really appeals to a dwindling band of older folks. I think Wiesel’s view turns off a large number of younger Jews, especially in the Diaspora.
A lot of Israelis buy some version of this stuff, yes. But what is important, and in some ways this ties back to your first question, is that the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel used to be able to appeal universally to all or most Jews and to many others regardless of their differing viewpoints. Now it seems the hardcore Zionist establishment is really beating one drum which only attracts a hardcore and homogeneous segment of Jews in Israel and around the world, those people who actually believe this way of thinking.
Whether or not this is sustainable depends a lot on what happens here. If there continues to be growing dissent against this worldview – a worldview largely detached from reality – then people like Wiesel and Avigdor Lieberman will be more and more isolated. They will of course still have important allies in the Christian right and in the military-industrial complex, and on Capitol Hill, but they will be isolated increasingly from the growing number of people here in the U.S. who refuse to swallow every fantasy that AIPAC feeds them.
Of course, we could see the right wing Republicans make big gains in 2010 and 2012, and then return to a faith-based fact-free foreign policy in this country, which in turn fuels the delusional people involved in the conflict.
IMEU: What about the Palestinian National movement? How do you view the current situation in relation to other historical moments in the Palestinian national project?
RK: This particular moment is discouraging. It is a very bad time for the Palestinian national movement. But 1948 was much worse. The society and the economy were shattered then, and the population violently dispersed. It was a catastrophe for the Palestinian people in every sense of the word.
With that said, the national movement today is in worse shape than it’s been for 40 or 50 years, especially the leadership, but Palestinian civil society is in some ways more vibrant than ever, and quite resilient.
The question is whether this civil society will produce a leadership capable of spearheading a national movement worthy of the name.
Right now the Palestinian leadership (Fatah and Hamas) are divided and essentially made up primarily of clapped out hacks with no real strategic plan to get from point A to point B. It is clear that despite their rhetoric and their supposed plans, both factions have for years had no really viable vision of where to go.
On the one hand Hamas has this fantasy of violent resistance from within Gaza creating a state. The unilateral pull out of the Israelis from Gaza unfortunately fueled this fantasy and gave it more life. But a plan that consists of liberating Palestine with clumsy homemade rockets is not to be taken seriously. To Hamas’s credit they have largely abandoned this course of action and held their fire for more than a year, but they are still deluded in thinking that their line will create two states.
Similarly delusional is the policy promoted by Fatah, which seeks to negotiate from a position of abject weakness and internal division, and seeks to build a state while still under occupation. How do you create a state under military occupation? This was true before Arafat’s death as well. He thought for many years that he was building a state but the occupation persisted and after the 2nd intifada began he was frozen out and isolated by Israel and the Bush administration, and the fantasy he had bought into was shattered. The second intifada was in many ways a spontaneous popular reaction to that unacceptable status quo (settlements were mushrooming, for example, and the settler population doubled from 1990 to 2000). In this sense it was much like the first Intifada at first, but was hijacked and spiraled into a suicidal and violent lashing out, which was disastrous for Palestinians.
Somehow there persists today among Fayyad and others this fantasy that a state can still be built under occupation.
So the two factions respective policies’ today, besides being at odds, are in themselves not viable and do not challenge the status quo in any meaningful way. The Palestinians are today quite bereft of leadership. This is partly Israel’s doing of course, as they have imprisoned, exiled or assassinated many of the best potential leaders in the movement for years, and today they are still actively pursuing a policy of undermining and neutralizing potential leadership, especially at the grassroots level. This is one challenge that civil society is facing. The cards are stacked against the Palestinians but as I said, they are a resilient and creative people, even if their leaders today are not.
IMEU: What is your reading of the Obama administration’s handling of the conflict over the past year and a half or so?
RK: Contrary to the nutty right wing elements in the blogosphere which see me as an evil genius pulling the strings of Obama’s policy I do not have much good to say about his policies thus far.
Obama has yet to jettison the past administrations’ failed policies for new ones that will lead to success.
There has been some change, but it has been essentially discursive and nothing more. People cite Obama’s words on settlements and his Cairo speech as evidence of change, but that and 5 cents won’t get you a cup of coffee. There has been no real change in the fatally flawed policies of the U.S. in the region. The questioning at the highest levels of the administration and the military establishment of aspects of the American-Israeli relationship, important though it is, is still only rhetorical and has not shifted policy in practice.
There still exists this accepted conventional wisdom in D.C. which says that you cannot ask the Israelis to change the status quo, in fact the wisdom states that only that which the Israeli government of the day dictates is doable, given its domestic political constraints, is within the realm of possibility. This means that the ramshackle nature of this or that governing coalition in Israel effectively dictates American policy towards Israel and the Palestinians.
So whatever policy makers may say that is different, the U.S. in practice still supports the siege of Gaza, the expansion of illegal settlements, and every other destructive and often illegal policy of the Israeli government.
Some people argue that the U.S. is in fact genuinely working to change these Israeli policies, such as the siege of Gaza. Well, if that is true then the U.S. is not a superpower because it has so far been unable to change a single thing on the ground and those policies persist unfettered. Lichtenstein could be a superpower if that was definition of a superpower and those were the kind of results expected from a superpower throwing around its weight.
If the administration REALLY wanted to oppose settlement building in Jerusalem and other occupied territories, for example, all it would take would be for the Treasury Department to enforce US law and remove the 501c3 designation from the so-called “charities” which are funding this illegal activity at the expense of the taxpayer and the US national interest (not to speak of the Palestinian people). That would not require a negotiation with Mr. Netanyahu, or so much as a by-your-leave from Congress. That would just be the executive branch enforcing US law, which is its job.
IMEU: What can the U.S. do in this respect, short of forcing a change in Israeli policy?
RK: The U.S. cannot force Israel to behave in a certain way but it can make Israel bear the consequences of what it is actually doing, which is breaking international law, and harming the national interest of the United States.
These are the things that need to change for a real break from the failures of past American policy, and for the slight changes so far to more than merely rhetorical. It can be done, but it will take great courage on the part of the administration. If this happens it will be good not only for the U.S. and the Palestinians, but for the Israeli people as well.

See: www.mondoweiss.net

2 thoughts on “MONDOWEISS ONLINE NEWSLETTER

  1. I was very pleased to find this site.I wanted to thank you for this great read!! I definitely enjoying every little bit of it and I have you bookmarked to check out new stuff you post.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *