'Separation' is now the byword in Israel. Declaring that "there is no (Palestinian) partner", politicians embark on ever-new programs and projects of unilateral actions, and the Separation Wall/Fence/Barrier grows ever higher and cuts ever deeper into Palestinian territory. But rather than disentangling, it is only intensifying the lethal embrace in which the two peoples are trapped
When an opposition gains an overwhelming elections victory, it is customary to describe it as "sweeping into power." But this would not be precisely the right term to use for the unexpected sweeping victory of the Islamic Hamas movement in this year's Palestinian elections.
Rather, the Palestinian Islamic Movement gained control over a parliament and a cabinet possessing many of the outward trappings of sovereignty but very few of the actual attributes -- and are nevertheless often expected by the international community to act as the organs of a sovereign state would.
As was demonstrated again and again -- both before and after Hamas' electoral victory -- Palestinian lawmakers and cabinet ministers cannot secure to their constituents so much as the right to move freely from one village to its neighbour, or safeguard any of them from being lifted from their beds at late night raids and taken off to detention and interrogation by the Israeli security services.
For that matter, Palestinian parliamentarians and ministers cannot be sure that this would not happen to them, either. The government of Israel can (and did on several occasions) prevent a Palestinian minister or PM from so much as arriving at his ministry -- or alternately, close up a Palestinian president at his bureau and prevent him from travelling anywhere else.
It has been said, and not without reason, that an Israeli lieutenant in charge of a checkpoint has far more concrete power over daily Palestinian life than the whole of the Palestinian government.
The lightly armed troops at the Palestinian Government's disposal, though numbering in the tens of thousands, had proven (not surprisingly) unable to withstand a confrontation with Israeli tanks and helicopter gunships. (The one time that some of them tried -- at Jenin in April 2002 -- the results were quite gruesome.)
Virtually the only sphere where the Palestinian Government is actually able to act more or less like a government is in running such services as health and education. Keeping schools, clinics and hospitals open in the conditions prevailing over the past five years often required of the Palestinian officials involved a heroic effort, which was not always given proper recognition.
However, the Palestinian Authority is not able to mint its own currency. Nor can it collect its own taxation, since it is not in control of its own borders. Rather, for the payment of salaries, it is dependent on Israel to levy customs duties and VAT on its behalf -- moneys which Israel is treaty-bound to pass over, but which had been held up already on more than one occasion.
In addition, the Palestinian Authority is highly dependent on aid from the International Community, especially the Europeans -- aid which in the hey-day of Oslo was supposed to build up the Palestinian infrastructure, and which in recent years barely suffices to prevent the PA's collapse.
Inside the Palestinian society itself, the authority of any Palestinian government -- whatever the identity of the governing party -- is bound to be limited by the multiplicity of armed militias belonging to political parties and factions -- and the often blurred line between some of these militias and factions within the Palestinian security forces themselves. (Ironically, the two countries which most often make vociferous demands upon the PA to disarm and dismantle these militias -- Israel and the United States -- both have a historical record of having multiple militias participating in their respective struggles for independence, and of disarming or amalgamating such militias only once complete independence and sovereignty were secured.)
Fatah's failure
Given the powerlessness of the Palestinian legislature and cabinet, one may wonder that there was such a fierce struggle among Palestinian political parties to gain control of these bodies, and that on the grassroots level Palestinians threw themselves into electioneering with at least as much gusto as in countries where the elected representatives posses real power. Indeed, the international observers led by former US President Jimmy Carter confirmed that it had been a free multi-party election, arguably the freest elections ever held in an Arab society.
Obviously, what Palestinians most expect of their elected leaders is to transform the empty forms and ceremonies into a real Palestinian sovereignty, and to get rid at last of the occupation, whose shadow lies extremely heavy on every Palestinian town and village. Just as obviously, the Fatah Party -- which led the Palestinian national movement since the 1960's and headed the PA since its inception -- had utterly failed in that crucial task.
When signing Oslo in 1993, recognizing Israel and abolishing the PLO's "National Covenant", the Fatah leadership and supporters expected to get in exchange an end to the occupation. This was supposed to happen in 1999, at the end of the "interim period" envisaged in Oslo. But in 2006 the occupation is all too much still there. Israeli settlements have grown substantially since 1993, to which was added the Wall/Fence/Barrier cutting through Palestinian lands, the numerous checkpoints and roadblocks and roads reserved to Israelis only.
In fact, Palestinians live more impoverished and circumscribed lives than before 1993.
Fatah leader Abu Mazen, elected President by a large majority in 2005, was hailed as a moderate by both the Israelis and the Americans -- which did not gain him even a place at the negotiating table, much less any concrete achievement which he could show to his people.
The Israeli unilateral withdrawal from Gaza could not be claimed as such. Its value was severely limited by continued indirect Israeli control over the Strip -- and to the extent that it was considered a Palestinian achievement, credit was given to Hamas' armed action rather than to Abu Mazen's diplomacy.
It was Fatah's failure to break the Israeli occupation's yoke, combined with the fact that some of the party's leaders were seen as lining their own pockets, which mainly led to the electoral upset. Much more so than any sudden attraction to Islamist ideology and rhetoric. As often happens in democratic elections, it is the incumbents who lose elections rather than the opposition that wins them. Palestinian voters turned in large numbers to the main opposition party available, which happened to be Hamas.
In point of fact, the Hamas leaders themselves did not expect quite such a victory. Most Palestinian pollsters predicted that they would have between thirty to forty percent of the vote. This would have made Hamas a formidable opposition party that nobody could ignore, without facing them with the need to assume responsibility for running the Palestinian Authority and become directly exposed to predictable pressures.
What to do about Hamas?
The Hamas electoral victory was the first real test faced by Ehud Olmert, quite soon after Sharon's stroke catapulted him to the top of the Israeli pyramid.
To begin with, Olmert seemed a bit ambiguous. While government speakers started right off with loud rhetoric about "The terrorist government", the acting PM hesitated about the crucial concrete step of stopping the transfer of tax moneys to the Palestinians.
The government waffled, making three different decisions on the matter in the space of a week and a half. At least some advisers seemed aware of the possible dire consequences of letting the Palestinian civil service collapse.
It was, however, elections time. Binyamin Netanyahu, former PM and now leader of the rump of what had been Israel's ruling Likud Party until Sharon split and pulverized it, thought he had found a rousing campaign theme. Billboards appeared all over the country with the enormous new slogans: "Leftist Olmert gives money to Hamas!" and "Netanyahu stands strong against Hamas Terrorism!" Back in 1996, this kind of demagoguery had been what knocked Shimon Peres out of the race and brought Netanyahu to power. In 2006 it would prove a miserable failure -- but Olmert, with nearly two months to go till the elections and far from sure that he could maintain Sharon's electoral following that he inherited -- did not dare to take the chance.
Thus, the decision was taken. The tax moneys, which are the undoubted property of the Palestinian Authority, were diverted into the Israeli treasury, there to be "held until further notice."
As hardly anyone remembers any more, the first public reaction by George W. Bush, once the results were announced, had been to heap praise upon Palestinian democracy and its free multi-party elections.
That, however, was evidently the script prepared for the expected Fatah victory. Quite soon Bush and his advisers came to the conclusion that democratic elections do not count for much when the results are not those expected at Washington, D.C. The American tone fast became vociferous and self-righteous.
On some previous occasions, the Europeans strove to provide at least some kind of counter-balance. Not this time. At a crucial meeting of the Quartet of Middle East negotiators, the EU went along with the US in drawing up a list of demands and presenting them with a blare of publicity to the winners of the Palestinian elections -- as was to be repeated ad nauseam in the following months.
The Hamas leadership was to "renounce violence, recognize Israel and accept all previous agreements." There were no parallel demands made upon Israel, the only return offered to the Palestinians being continuation of funds to pay salaries to the PA employees. (Abu Mazen and the pre-elections Fatah Government had fulfilled all three conditions, and had gotten nothing more than the funds).
As could have been expected, Olmert and his ministers lost all further hesitation and took the Quartet decision as a crucial diplomatic coup, which it truly was. It was to be fully exploited for the creation of "a seamless international rampart against Hamas" -- in effect, a political and diplomatic counterpart to the physical walls and fences being erected by Israeli bulldozers all over the West Bank.
Tzipi Livni, Olmert's trusted second in command who had not so long ago striven to develop a moderate and dovish image, was appointed Foreign Minister and immediately set out to orchestrate the international anti-Hamas campaign.
Flitting from capital to capital, she hotly took issue with those who dared to step out of line: President Vladimir Putin who invited a Hamas delegation to Moscow as part of his escalating campaign to assert Russia's independent role on the international arena and thumb his nose at the Americans; President Thabo Mbeki who had the temerity to suggest that Israelis as well as Palestinians had something to learn from the mostly peaceful ending of South African Apartheid; the Norwegians and Swedes who seemed to dimly recall the time when they had the pretence of having an independent role as Middle East mediators...
The Israeli Foreign Ministry's experts marked the Europeans as "the weak link" whose determination to boycott the Hamas-led government might eventually waver. While the Israeli side, backed by Washington, seemed quite content to let Hamas provide a proof that "there is no partner", the quixotic Europeans were actually making some effort to make Hamas into a suitable partner for Israel...
Recognition for a price
Government speakers and their friendly columnists made much of the Hamas refusal to recognize Israel, and there were extensive quotations from the Hamas' Islamic Charter, especially the part where it quotes the infamous "Protocols of Elders of Zion" and treats them as an authentic document. Invariably, when referring to Hamas calls for dismantling the state of Israel, the Hebrew word used was "hashmada" (extermination).
Actually, as the government's own intelligence experts and orientalists often confirmed, Hamas had developed far beyond the rhetoric contained in that document from the 1980's (as the PLO had developed away from its own infamous Covenant, long before it was officially abolished).
At least the pragmatic faction of the Hamas leadership, represented prominently by such people as the new Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, seem ready to recognize Israel -- but only in exchange for a complete end of the occupation (which would seem a reasonable quid pro quo to many non-Hamas Palestinians, too).
Had somebody wanted to develop contacts which may ripen into peace negotiations, various statements made by Haniyeh, his Foreign Minister Mahmud a-Zahar and various other Hamas leaders could have provided more than enough of a starting point. However, Olmert showed no such inclination -- and the contradicting statements made by other Hamas leaders (and sometimes, denials and retractions made by the same person) were enough to discount the reconciliatory statements issuing from the Hamas side.
"We should not starve the Palestinians, but it will not harm them to have a bit of diet" said Dov Weisglass, who had been Ariel Sharon's chief confidential adviser and who seeks to achieve a similar position under Olmert as well. He said it at an informal discussion at the Prime Minster's office in Jerusalem, where it was decided to increase international efforts to get all funds to the Palestinians cut off "except for vital humanitarian aid."
Weisglass' words -- which had "aroused considerable laughter from the assembled advisers and generals" -- were soon leaked to the press, where they were much less appreciated. In Yediot Aharonot, columnist B. Michael noted that even without an international siege, an all too large part of the Palestinians live at or below the poverty line, and that Weisglass is one of the wealthiest corporate lawyers in Israel, known for his fondness of gourmet food.
Bypassing techniques
In fact, opinion polls indicated a considerable part of the public either actively supportive of negotiations with the Hamas-led Palestinian government or resigned to the eventuality of such negotiations taking place -- as had happened with the PLO. This position did not, however, find any adequate expression in the political system and the ongoing elections campaign.
It is not so long since Labour Party leader Amir Peretz had spoken out clearly and strongly in favour of a negotiated solution rather than a unilateral Israeli action -- and got a standing ovation from the enormous crowd gathered in Tel-Aviv's Rabin Square (see previous issue, p. 4). That was, however, in the forgotten aeon before the Palestinian elections, when the idea of a Hamas victory was dismissed as far-fetched.
It did not occur to Peretz to break ranks and call for negotiations with the Palestinian voters' choice (or if it did, his advisers and campaign managers took care he would not utter any such idea in public). Rather, Labour elections broadcasts firmly reiterated the party's total rejection of "talking to terrorists who seek to destroy us."
Peretz did meet with Palestinian President Abu Mazen, as well as with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and with the King of Morocco (where he was himself born). He floated the idea of "Hamas-bypass negotiations" -- i.e., Israel would negotiate
Starving the Gaza strip
And shelling its citizens
Will not stop
The Qassam rockets.
Only negotiations
With the elected
Palestinian leadership
Can achieve that.
Gush Shalom www.gush-shalom.org
[Ad in Ha'aretz, April 6]
with Abu Mazen while ignoring the Palestinian cabinet and legislature, and reach an agreement which would be presented to the Palestinian electorate in a referendum.
From a legalistic point of view, such a course of action seems possible under the Palestinian constitution. Much more doubtful that such an agreement -- inevitably containing some concessions highly unpalatable to Palestinians -- would gain the necessary massive approval when negotiated in the teeth of vociferous opposition from the elected Palestinian cabinet.
As it was, the public airing of the idea in the Israeli elections campaign seems to have had the effect of exacerbating the atmosphere of mistrust between the Abu Mazen and the Hamas leaders, while Israeli voters seemed to regard it with considerable skepticism.
In any case, Peretz increasingly watered down his opposition to unilateralism, as the chances waned of Labour having an electoral victory that would make him the next Prime Minister.
In fact, long before elections day, newspaper commentators took it more or less for granted -- against increasingly feeble denials by the Labourites -- that Peretz was going to join the government and become Olmert's main partner in some scheme or another of unilateral evacuation of West Bank settlements.
Confronting the settlers, but...
Simultaneously with launching the worldwide diplomatic campaign against the new Palestinian government, Olmert also embarked on a head-on confrontation with Israeli settlers on the West Bank.
The timing was not of the new PM's making, but of the Peace Now movement and the judges of the Supreme Court in Jerusalem. With a diminishing ability to mobilize the masses in peace rallies, Peace Now in recent years increasingly focuses on the monitoring of ongoing settlement expansion. Back in early 2005 Dror Etkes, the energetic coordinator of the movement's Settlement Watch, chose a fitting subject for a test case: the "outpost" of Amona, north of Jerusalem.
The meticulously collected evidence presented to the judges pointed to a particularly flagrant case of law breaking. The settlers had erected their houses without a shred of legal authorization (even under the military government's rather loose criteria of legality) and on a plot of land whose Palestinian ownership was unquestionable (even under a rigged system specifically designed to make the proving of Palestinian ownership as difficult as possible).
The judges ordered the state to demolish the nine settler structures. The settlers' lawyers had secured several months' stay of execution. As it happened, the final deadline arrived just at the moment when Olmert assumed effective power.
He may not have chosen it deliberately, but neither was he ready to flinch -- rejecting various "compromises" which would have let the settlers stay on and instructing the army and police to carry out the court order and use "as much force as necessary." For their part, the settlers staged a major mobilization of their fiery youths, with the aim of restoring the "deterrence" which they felt they had lost with the Gaza Strip withdrawal.
Indeed, the settler youths barricaded themselves in the Amona houses where they had stockpiled stones, rocks and pieces of scrap iron -- which were all hurled at the approaching army and police. The grey uniformed Yasam (riot police) charged in with their batons, and in short order the nine settler houses were cleared and demolished.
However, the scenes shown that evening on TV enabled the settlers to present themselves as the victims of police brutality, and they made full use of the opportunity. (Even though the police did not resort against settlers to such means as tear gas canisters, shock grenades and "rubber" bullets -- all used routinely against Palestinians and left-wing Israelis at Bil'in and other locations.)
Right-wing Knesset Members succeeded in initiating a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry whose deliberations gained considerable media attention. The centerpiece of their campaign was repeated allegations of the police having sexually assaulted settler girls (though none of the girls concerned ever came forward to testify or lodge a formal complaint).
Altogether, a public atmosphere was created in which Olmert and his advisers decided to avoid further confrontations with settlers until the elections, and put on hold plans to remove three Nablus Region settlement outposts notorious for repeated violent assaults upon their neighbouring Palestinian villages.
In the broadcasts of their pirate radio station, settler leaders warned their followers that this was "a mere short respite" and called upon them to prepare for "a major attack by the leftist Olmert" immediately after the elections. And they made use of this respite to establish themselves in various locations, such as Palestinian houses "acquired" by sundry dubious means in Hebron and East Jerusalem.
Days of thunder
[Excerpted from Gideon Levy, Ha'aretz, May 5]
Boom after boom, shell after shell, thunder after thunder.
The windows of the houses shake, the walls that were cracked during the previous shelling are already threatening to collapse from the blast, the children scream in fear or walk around shocked and silent in the shelled house.
One shell after another, every few minutes another one. Sometimes there is a vague and distant noise, and sometimes there is a thundering and very nearby BOOM!!!!
The skies tremble, the end of the world.
Boom after boom, a shell every five minutes.
It is impossible to know where the last one landed, much less where the next one will land.
Yesterday afternoon a shell landed on the heads of these children and adults, whose home we are now visiting.
Boom after boom, even now, terrible fear.
The Palestinians enjoyed no such "elections respite." During the elections campaign, as before and afterwards, the army went raiding into the Palestinian cities of the West Bank -- night after night, and sometimes in daylight, too.
Between ten and thirty people were arrested every night, and radio news every morning reported the precise number and invariably declared all of them to be wanted terrorists. (Palestinians claimed that many were political activists, some being elected members of the Palestinian Legislature -- but such claims were rarely broadcast and even more rarely taken seriously.)
On some mornings, one got told that some wanted terrorists had resisted arrest and got killed in a shootout with soldiers. On occasions the report included polite expressions of regret about a civilian, sometimes a child, being killed by the fire intended for a terrorist.
Gradually reports got interspersed with stories of Palestinian youths gathering whenever soldiers entered their town or village, resisting, interfering with the arrest operations, throwing stones, sometimes being themselves shot and wounded or killed (for which the Israeli army command also expressed some polite regrets). In fact, several experts pointed out that the regular Israeli army raids had the "unpredictable side effect" of increasingly reviving the kind of "popular mass uprising" which characterized the First Intifada of the late 1980s.
Palestinian militias shooting homemade Qassam rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israeli territory cited such killings and claimed to be acting in retaliation. In the beginning, this was even published on occasion in the Israeli press.
After some time, the connection was completely blurred. For mainstream Israelis, the Qassams were a wanton unprovoked act of aggression, fully justifying retaliation at the rate of several hundred Israeli artillery shells for any single Qassam.
The Qassam is actually a highly inaccurate weapon, with nearly all rockets shot falling in uninhabited areas. Israeli artillery fire did not, to be fair, intentionally target civilians -- but civilian casualties there were, again and again, providing the militias with new reasons for retaliation...
Skeptical voters
"It is such a boring, sleepy elections campaign," complained the commentators again and again. "Such important things at issue, and nobody really cares." Indeed, no party held a mass rally in this campaign, there were few elections posters to be seen on the street, and opinion polls indicated the lowest voter turnout in Israel's history.
"Why should I vote? What difference does it make? They are all corrupt!" said a young man interviewed on a Ramat Gan street by a TV Second Channel team. Similar responses kept cropping up whenever journalists tried to gauge the mood at the grassroots.
Amir Peretz had revived what seemed a completely moribund Labour Party. The themes of social justice and sensitivity which he injected into the elections campaign, particularly the pledge to increase the minimum salary, did gain Labour some new support in impoverished town and slum neighbourhoods -- but nothing like the groundswell which some activists hoped for in the immediate aftermath of Peretz's surprise winning of the Labour leadership.
Even less did Binyamin Netanyahu have anything to show for all his attempts at riding to power on a wave of nationalist hysteria. He resorted to the most fiery and demagogic scare-mongering, conflating the Hamas elections victory, the ongoing shooting of the Qassams, and the Iranian attempts at achieving nuclear weapons together with the inflammatory statements and speeches of Iran's president. Supposedly good raw materials for demagoguery, yet it all fell flat and Netanyahu made no headway whatsoever.
Since quite early in the campaign it was already taken for granted that the Kadima Party was going to be the big winner -- whether headed by Sharon or by Olmert. Quite a lot of people were going to vote for Kadima, but few if any of them felt any strong enthusiasm. And opinion polls did show Kadima suffering from a slow hemorrhage. From a predicted peak of more than forty seats in the 120-member Knesset, Kadima went down to 39, to 38, to 36 -- seeming to lose a seat or two every week, and with several weeks still to go until elections day.
Then, Olmert did something that all observers agreed Sharon would absolutely not have done -- namely, commit himself ahead of the elections to a definite plan. In interviews to the Israeli and international media, two weeks ahead of the elections, he introduced a new concept (or, a new euphemism): The Convergence Plan.
Olmert started out by declaring his preference for a negotiated solution, based on the famous "Road Map for Peace", but immediately added that "Israel would not wait forever for a partner to appear." Lacking a partner, his government "would take things into its own hands" and define Israel's permanent borders unilaterally. (After the elections, the period of "waiting for a partner" was delimited at "about half a year").
He did intend to discuss and in effect negotiate with the Bush Administration, to whose remaining lifetime Olmert's plan seems tied -- imposing November 2008 as the deadline. Olmert seems also interested in talking to the Europeans and the moderate, pro-Western Arab regimes and get at least their tacit approval. And he would talk to the settlers in the hope of getting them to cooperate -- or at least, to refrain from violently resisting. About 70,000 settlers are to be evacuated, out of some quarter of a million, and concentrated or "converged" into "settlement blocs" that "would be part of Israel forever."
The settler leadership sounded the alarm, declaring Olmert "an existential danger to Eretz Yisrael and the Settlement Project." Dovish commentators hailed "Convergence" as the program of the "The emerging new peacemaker, walking in the path of Rabin and (yes) Sharon" -- overlooking Olmert's seven "settlement blocks" and "security zones" which would leave the Palestinians with little more than a collection of enclaves.
Specifically, Olmert staked a claim over the Jordan Valley, which in itself constitutes between 30% and 40% of the West Bank and into which the army now forbids entry to Palestinians.
Aluf Ben in Ha'aretz expressed doubt whether the Americans would give even an unofficial endorsement to a plan involving such drastic annexations. "To have any chance on the international arena, Olmert will have to draw his boundaries pretty close to the Green Line [pre-'67 border]."
For their part, the Palestinians (Fatah and Hamas alike) called it "a declaration of war." Especially as Olmert immediately started "counterbalancing" this "bold step to the Left."
At the settlement city of Ariel, deep within the West Bank, Olmert attended civic ceremonies, and was seen shaking hands with local settler leaders. Soon, he authorized the construction of a large Israeli police station at the so-called "E-1 Area", earmarked to link Jerusalem eastwards with the giant settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim -- which would incidentally cut off from each other the northern and southern halves of the West Bank.
Then, with a bit more than a week before the elections, the army was mobilized for a spectacular military operation.
The Jericho gimmick
In 2001, Israel assassinated Abu Ali Mustafa Secretary-General of the Marxist PFLP, a founding component of the PLO. Two months later, the PFLP assassinated Israeli Minister Rehav'am Ze'evi, former general who made a political career calling for the "transfer" of all Arabs.
It can be argued that the PFLP's way of exacting retribution was less morally reprehensible than the random killing of Israeli civilians. But Sharon considered it otherwise, imposing a siege upon the Presidential Compound in Ramallah where the PFLP members involved were holed up -- both those who pulled the trigger and Ahmed Sa'adat who succeeded Mustafa. In May 2002, the standoff ended with a pledge by the PA to keep the militants in its prison at Jericho, where British and American observers were stationed.
Four years later, on the morning of March 14, 2006, the British and American observers departed from the Jericho Prison, for reasons that the British FM later failed to coherently explain even after several hours of debate in the House of Commons. Within less than half an hour of the UK/US personnel's departure, large Israeli forces rolled into Jericho and surrounded the prison. In the initial exchange of fire two Palestinian police got killed and several wounded. Later, all Palestinians in the building -- police, prison staff and prisoners indiscriminately -- were ordered to go out, stripped to their underwear. The five PFLP members remained in their cell until bulldozers started methodically destroying the building.
A targeted killing is a targeted killing
Israeli peace groups urgently conferred by phone and email, and organized a protest vigil outside the Defence Ministry in Tel-Aviv. Some two hundred people arrived at short notice, waving such signs as 'Olmert -- blood-soaked elections propaganda.'
During the protest, Uri Avnery told journalists: 'The killing of Ze'evi was a targeted killing from the Palestinian side, not substantially different from the Israeli Army using this measure,' publication of which led to a murder threat against Avnery by extreme-right leader Baruch Marzel.
In addition to the five whom they had come to get, the Security Services hauled off some thirty other Palestinians in whom they had an interest. More than a hundred others, who had been imprisoned on charges of theft, robbery, rape and murder were simply let loose in the middle of Jericho.
On that evening, normal TV programs were suspended in favour of repeated reports from Jericho, in an upbeat jingoistic tone. Ze'evi's son, who fully shares his father's racism, congratulated Olmert, and the footage of the Palestinian police, standing in their underwear under the Israeli guns, was screened again and again.
The jurists at the Justice Ministry gave as their opinion that in this case double jeopardy is possible, as the Palestinian trials were held with "improper procedures." And when in the end they concluded that there wasn't enough evidence linking Sa'adat to the killing of Ze'evi, the elections had already taken place...
Malignant neo-nationalism
Despite all that Olmert could do, the seepage of voters away from Kadima continued -- especially among Russian Israeli voters. Quite a few Russians had intended to vote for Sharon, "a strong man" who had grown up in a Russian-speaking house and could utter some Russian phrases -- which Olmert couldn't.
Netanyahu's hope to catch some of these voters, who had voted Likud in 2003, was forlorn; nor did they show any interest in Labour, despite the fact that in theory Peretz's emphasis on social justice should have appealed to them.
The main beneficiary turned out to be a man who used to be Netanyahu's protege. Avigdor Lieberman had emigrated from the Soviet Union in the 1970's, and started as a nightclub bouncer. His "rags to riches" story of becoming a major political figure (and a successful businessman, too) appealed to many fellow Russian Israelis and some native-born ones, as well. With the political demise of Nathan Sharansky, Lieberman was left as the only serious contender for the Russian ethnic vote in Israel.
But Lieberman had more to offer than Russian ethnic feeling. At the advice of his campaign manager, the infamous Arthur Finkelstein, he adopted a tough "law and order" stance, stating his ambition to gain the portfolio of Internal Security and lead a crime-busting crusade. Many of Finkelstein's ultra-conservative clients in the US took such a line, which hitherto was nearly unknown in Israel. And as with many American campaigns, the racist undertones were not buried very deep down -- in this case, the broad hint that Arabs in general and specific groups such as Negev Bedouins in particular were to blame for most crime in Israel.
In fact, Lieberman provided a new type of extreme-right nationalism and racism, taking account of present trends in Israeli politics and society and in particular of "Convergence."
Though himself living in the a West Bank settlement ("Nokdim", south-east of Jerusalem) Lieberman consciously distanced himself from the traditional settler ideology of "not a single inch!" On some occasions (not always -- Lieberman does not pretend to be completely consistent) he has not ruled out the dismantling of settlements -- perhaps many settlements, perhaps even his own.
The main thrust of his demagoguery is in persistently presenting the Arab citizens of Israel as treacherous, disloyal, "a demographic danger." And Lieberman's remedy: to pass Arab Israeli towns and villages to the Palestinian Authority, in exchange for "settlement blocs" to be retained by Israel -- and in the process disenfranchise their inhabitants and deprive them of Israeli citizenship.
In fact, Lieberman had taken to its ultimate logical conclusion the principle of "demographic threat" on which Sharon's Disengagement and Olmert's Convergence are based. Deceptively simple: if it is right and justified to give up territory and destroy settlements inhabited by Israeli Jews in order to reduce the number of Arabs under Israeli rule, why should the state not use other means for the same purpose?
Indeed, even the Israeli signatories to the Geneva Agreement of 2003 often used the demographic argument in order to justify their plan towards Israeli audiences. And Yossi Beilin -- initiator of Geneva and leader of the Meretz Party -- made the biggest blunder ever recorded in Israeli political history when he invited Lieberman to have a friendly breakfast in his home, with both of them eating herring and Beilin telling the Yediot Aharonot journalist "I disagree with Lieberman on many things -- but he is a bright chap and it is a pleasure to talk to him."
Beilin's ill-considered overture wreaked the carefully planned campaign of his party, and seems likely to bring on the end of Beilin's own career.
Many commentators marked out Lieberman long in advance. It was alarming but not really surprising to see him garner 11 seats -- putting him and his "Israel, Our Home" party virtually at a par with the 12 seats of the rump Likud. Israel's ruling party for three decades, the Likud had a sharp fall indeed from the 40 seats they got in 2003.
But there were more absurdities in these "sleepy" elections: the success of the Pensioners' Party. Such a party competed in several earlier elections campaigns and never managed to gain a single seat, and until two or three weeks before the elections everybody was sure it would happen yet again. But Israel's senior citizens have suffered terribly in the past few years from the aggressive neo-Liberal politics introduced by Netanyahu, and had a good reason to feel that no one would take care of their interests unless they do it themselves.
Also, in the weeks immediately before the elections, supporting the Pensioners' Party suddenly became a trend among young people disgusted with all existing parties. It started with a comedian in a popular TV satirical show raising the subject as a joke, continued with students on university campuses holding facetious processions with such slogans as "Vote for Grandma's noodle soup" and ended with the Pensioners' Party garnering no less than 7 seats.
Colossus no more
Some predictions had given a Sharon-led Kadima 45 or even 50 seats. Had Sharon remained hale he might have been a colossus or titan, bestriding the political scene among powerless pygmies and literally free to do whatever he desired. On the other hand, it might also be that the Kadima support would have eroded anyway, even with Sharon at the helm. Nobody will ever know for sure.
Kadima did win the elections, in the sense that it emerged as the biggest party in the Knesset -- but gained no more than 29 seats, less than one-quarter of the total and just ten seats ahead of Labour's 19.
Clearly, Olmert held far less cards than he expected, and would have to find partners -- and compromise with them. There were good reasons for the celebrations held in the Labour Party headquarters that night, even though their share of the vote also fell far short of the rosy expectations at the beginning of the campaign.
For his part, Olmert made a victory speech from which the word "Convergence" was carefully omitted, and which included a call upon Abu Mazen to "disarm the terrorists and come to negotiations." Thereby, Olmert was providing a face-saving formula for the Shas Party to enter the government. (Rabbi Ovadyah Yosef, the Shas Spiritual Leader, had ruled that withdrawal for the sake of peace is acceptable and worthy, while unilateral withdrawal is unacceptable).
A few days after the elections, there was a curious interlude: the parties of the right enthusiastically courting Amir Peretz, urging, indeed begging him to become Israel's Prime Minister with their support. They were willing to grant him any measure of radical social reform he might choose. Netanyahu seemed ready to overturn completely all the free-market policies that he had led as Finance Minister. All this was, of course, dependent upon Peretz promising to refrain from any move towards the Palestinians, either unilaterally or via negotiations, and leave all settlements in place.
When the story got to the newspaper headlines, there was a storm of protests -- by columnists, by grassroots Labourites, by some Labour Party leaders who were never really reconciled to Peretz assuming leadership.
Peretz and his people denied: "The settlers and their friends approached us very energetically, but we rejected it out of hand." The right-wingers claimed that Peretz "had been very serious about forming a government with us, until he got cold feet." Commentators had the idea that Peretz had tried to strengthen his negotiating position towards Olmert, which might not be too far-fetched.
The Bypass Map
In the aftermath of that curious affair, little doubt was left that Olmert and Peretz were going to be the major partners of the new cabinet.
The two of them did not have too much trouble in formulating the new government's program. The text started with the pious wish and hope of defining Israel's definite borders in negotiations with the Palestinians.
The opening of such negotiations was, however, made conditional upon "mutual recognition, acceptance of previous signed agreements, the principles of the Road Map, the stopping of violence and the disarming of terrorist organizations." And should the Palestinians fail to meet all these preconditions "in the near future" the government would act unilaterally, "on the basis of a wide national understanding inside Israel" and of "deep understanding with Israel's friends in the world."
The government would then draw up borders that would "necessitate reduction of the extent of Israeli settlement in Judea and Samaria." It was the first time since 1967 that an Israeli cabinet had such an undertaking written down in its program, and the Labourites counted it as one of their main achievements.
The inclusion of this provision had the effect of keeping Lieberman out -- though Olmert very much wanted to have him in, so as to "counterbalance" Peretz.
Instead, Lieberman set about seizing leadership of the right-wing -- with a fiery Knesset speech calling for the Arab Knesset members to be "indicted for treason and put to death." At the same time, he also loudly complained that his exclusion from the cabinet was a sign of "discrimination against Russian Israelis."
Ambitious Defence Minister
Throughout his elections campaign, Amir Peretz made his wishes clear: he wanted to become Prime Minister. Failing that, he wanted the Finance Ministry, where social-economic decisions are made, so as to reverse the policies benefiting the rich and pushing the poor further and further down.
Out of precisely the same considerations Olmert (who is anything but a social reformer and who has many personal and political friends among the rich) was determined not to let Peretz come anywhere near the treasury.
The new government might have foundered over this rock -- except that Olmert came up with a counter-offer which Peretz (to the surprise of many) found worthy: the Ministry of Defence.
To the band of activists for Social Justice who had supported him and who found this choice strange and disappointing, Peretz promised that the Defence Ministry would be a good stepping stone towards becoming PM in the next elections and implementing social reforms then. Not everybody was convinced.
There followed an inordinate number of press articles and TV talk show discussions dealing with two main themes: Could any civilian take up control of Israel's mighty military machine? And if so, could it be the specific civilian named Amir Peretz, a previous trade unionist?
In fact, Peretz had much more of a military background than most ministers of defence in Western countries -- given that before entering the unions he did spend some years as a career officer, reaching the rank of major (though in logistics rather than in a combat unit) and was severely wounded in the accidental explosion of an ammunition dump.
A question hardly asked: what would happen when a man who hitherto seemed a sincere supporter of peace and dialogue, a man who made such a moving speech to hundreds of thousands on the Rabin Square just a few months ago, is placed at the very top of the machine of occupation and oppression?
Would he be able to at least ameliorate the situation, or would he become all too soon caught up in the escalating brutality?
On the morning of May 4, Amir Peretz took possession of the bureau on top of the gleaming new chromium tower of the Defence Ministry in Tel-Aviv (at whose feet peace activists, like persistent ants, through the years hold pickets and protests).
On the very same evening, he already authorized an aerial strike on a militia training camp in the Gaza Strip in which five Palestinians were killed, part of the army's long and futile campaign to stop the Qassams.
Not perhaps a definite answer to the above-mentioned question. But much of the bad feeling persisted also when on the following day Peretz instructed the army to remove forthwith settlers who had taken over a Palestinian house in Hebron, and promised to ease "gradually" the restrictions on entry of Palestinian workers into Israel.
Boycott against the occupied
The month in which Olmert and Peretz and the other Israeli party leaders held their delicate (or sometimes crude) dances and manoeuvres was the time when the international boycott of the Palestinians went into effect and the funds were cut off.
For the crime of voting in free democratic elections for one of the main contending parties -- a party whose armed militia maintained a one-sided ceasefire with Israel throughout the year before the elections -- the Palestinian people were exposed to the most severe and brutal kind of economic sanctions. (Israel never had to face anything remotely the like -- neither after the massacres of Sabra and Shatila in 1982, nor after destroying a large part of the Jenin Refugee Camp and killing 52 of its inhabitants in the "non-massacre" of April 2002.)
Before 2000, a large part of the Palestinian workforce was employed in Israel, in low paid jobs by Israeli standards that still produced an important cash flow to the Palestinian economy. This was cut off almost entirely since the Intifada outbreak.
Many Palestinians work in agriculture, and more returned to it when losing jobs in Israel. But a lot of lands were effectively confiscated by the Wall/Fence/Barrier -- including a disproportionate part of the West Bank's most fertile plots. Many olive and citrus groves were deliberately destroyed by the army, "to deny cover to terrorists/Qassam launchers." And the numerous roadblocks and prohibitions on road travel made the marketing of agricultural product much more difficult. Altogether, agriculture was heavily damaged in the Intifada years.
The Palestinian territories have never had much of an economic infrastructure. Most of the foreign investors and rich Palestinians from abroad who tried to create some in the Oslo years went bankrupt during the Intifada.
There remained one more or less reliable economic mainstay: the government service, some 165,000 teachers, nurses, doctors, street cleaners, clerks (and armed police). All drawing a monthly salary -- not a very high one, much less than what Palestinians used to earn in Israel, but (until this year) quite steady and reliable.
Given the normal size of Palestinian families, these 165,000 civil servants provided directly for some million dependants. Indirectly, they supported many more -- shopkeepers, taxi drivers, all kinds of modest small businesses where some of these modest monthly salaries were spent.
Take away the government salaries from the Palestinian economy and there is left -- more or less nothing. A simple point which the executives and officials at Washington D.C., babbling about "stopping the salaries but providing humanitarian help" apparently had great difficulty in comprehending. And the Europeans, who should have known better, went along anyway.
Gush Shalom's call upon Europe
[The following is excerpted from an open letter to the EU, published as an ad in the Jerusalem Post and the English and Hebrew Ha'aretz, on April 12.]
(...) Only three months ago, European monitors supervised the Palestinian elections. They confirmed Palestine as the first democracy in the Arab world.
Now you, the leaders of Europe, are giving the Palestinians a lesson in democracy: unless they overthrow the government they have just elected, there will be no milk for their children, no medicines for their sick, no work for their unemployed, no salaries for their doctors and teachers.
This is not only barbaric, it is also folly: no people in the world would submit to such brutal and humiliating outside pressure. The inevitable result will be a further radicalization of Palestinian opinion, a deepening of the hatred for Israel and the West in the entire Arab and Muslim world. (...)
Certainly, they must recognize the State of Israel's right to exist, just as Israel must recognize the right of the State of Palestine to exist. But such recognition will grow out of negotiations, not the other way round.
Certainly, they have to stop violence, just as Israel must do so. But even at this stage a prolonged armistice can be achieved. (...)
It is in the interest of Europe, as it is in the interest of Israel and Palestine, to achieve peace. Don't succumb to pressure from outside interests, whose policy has already led to several recent disasters in the Middle East.
www.gush-shalom.org
Adding to the hardships, the Israeli side closed down the Karni Checkpoint, the Gaza Strip's main lifeline. It is through Karni that Gaza imports vital foodstuffs and other supplies needed for its overcrowded population and which Gazans cannot produce for themselves. Karni is also the main and almost only outlet for such goods as Gaza is able to produce and export.
The closing of Karni nullified the project of transferring the Israeli settler hothouses intact to Palestinian management, in which the Quartet's envoy James Wolfensohn invested considerable energy and quite a bit of his own private fortune.
The hothouses were duly passed over during the Israeli evacuation, and most were successfully protected from looters in the immediate aftermath -- only to have the harvest rot in place or sold at next to nothing in the Strip itself, since the closure of Karni placed the European market out of reach.
Officially, the closure of Karni had nothing to do with boycott or economic pressure upon the Palestinians. It was solely due to intelligence agencies warning of terrorist groups intending to launch an attack. By the nature of things, the veracity of such intelligence warnings cannot be checked.
Also, there was an intensification of Israeli artillery bombardments of the northern Gaza Strip, supposedly in reaction to the Qassam rockets.
According to the Israeli generals, a new type of rocket -- the Russian Grad, more often known as Katyusha -- has been smuggled into the Gaza Strip.
The Grad is supposedly a far more accurate weapon than the homemade Qassam; its longer range poses a threat to such strategic targets as the Ashkelon Power Station. (In fact, in the two known cases where they were used, Grad missiles fell down far short and wide of where they had been aimed...)
The introduction of the Grad was given as the reason for new instructions to the Israeli gunners: they could aim at a spot one hundred metres from the populated Palestinian areas. Hitherto the red line had been three hundred meters.
With these two hundred metres added to the artillery aimers' range, the number of shells accidentally falling down in inhabited areas greatly increased. In the month since the change in policy, it already cost the lives of five Palestinian civilians, some of them children, and the wounding of dozens of others. No other result was perceptible.
Division of powerlessness
Since the Palestinian elections, Fatah sullenly rejected all overtures by the Hamas victors to join a National Unity Government. Many of the party leaders did not conceal their hope that the Hamas Government would prove short-lived and their intention of doing everything in their power to make it a reality.
This would probably have happened in any case, with a party that had been in charge for decades seeing the helm suddenly snatched out of its hands. All the more so when the world's sole remaining superpower, as well as other powers and principalities, took it actively upon themselves to egg Fatah on to confrontation with the new government.
Just as vehemently as one and a half years ago they urged President Arafat to give up his control of finance and the armed forces, the Americans nowadays implore President Abu Mazen to hold on firmly to all the authority he inherited from Arafat, and where possible to regain whatever they themselves had made Arafat give away.
In effect, where before the Palestinians had one powerless government, they now found themselves with two rival ones. Two rival government which are all the more powerless, which spend much of their time and energy in vociferously confronting each other, and which possess rival militias and armed forces -- not strong enough to confront the occupation, but quite strong enough to engage in bloody and destructive civil war. All this, while hovering on the verge of total economic collapse.
Still, Palestinians have some sense of self-preservation, and a strong abhorrence of civil war. Confrontations and violent clashes between Fatah and Hamas, some of them lethal, were always followed by strong calls for reconciliation.
Meanwhile, American experts raised doubts as to the wisdom of destabilizing the Hamas government. In new elections, the contrary Palestinians might vote Hamas back in with an even greater majority -- taking US and Israeli displeasure as the strongest of endorsements.
This might be part of the reason why the Americans, in display of rationality rare in the present administration, decided to accept the proposal of President Chirac of France and start restoring the funding for Palestinian salaries, under one face-saving guise or another.
The margin of hope
We go to print with the news of some relatively positive developments.
The Quartet is preparing to restore funding to the Palestinians. After some bloody skirmishes in the Gaza Strip, Hamas and Fatah militias established a cease-fire. In the Israeli prison the senior Fatah prisoner Marwan Barghouti got together with his colleagues of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other factions to draft a paper accepting the 1967 borders. The call of prisoners with a strong moral authority seems endorsed by Prime Minister Haniyeh. At the anti-Wall demonstration in A-Ram, Fatah and Hamas leaders marched together with a contingent of Israeli peace activists. And last but not least, Amir Peretz seems to take the call for dialogue and negotiations with the Palestinians as a bit more than lip service.
There is no way of knowing how many of these developments will prove of more than fleeting importance. Even by the time you read this, a whole new series of disasters and follies may have cropped up.
Still, the hope for and chance of true peace and reconciliation -- rather than cold, alienated separation and unilateralism -- is not dead.
The Editors
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Two-state solution discredited, without workable alternative
Beate Zilversmidt
The two-state solution was never intended as utopian fulfillment of an idealistic dream. It was conceived as a compromise, taking into account the irreconcilable dreams of the two sides, and forging a reconciliation, nevertheless.
It wasn't an easy thing -- one side, arising as a phoenix from the Holocaust ashes, unwilling to give up what had caused it so much euphoria to get hold of; the other side insisting on its rights which it had not been able to defend militarily. The lack of belief that this conflict could be solved was what caused distrust and animosity to turn into hatred.
To break down the hatred and to find a somehow fair middle way, a formulation that would satisfy at least the basic needs of both sides, was what the two-state solution was about.
Such a solution, to have a chance at all, had to take into account the difference in power, while at the same time leaving intact the dignity of the weaker side. Following the Six Day War when the IDF occupied the part of Mandatory Palestine which had remained Arabic in 1948, the idea came up in more than one mind: the new situation opened a way to compromise. The Palestinians would give up the claim to what they lost in 1948, against the Israelis giving up what they "conquered" in 1967.
Then, in 1974, PLO leader Yasser Arafat was invited to speak at the United Nations General Assembly, and he spoke of "the rifle in the one hand and the olive branch in the other." In the same period the PLO adopted the policy "to set up a Palestinian state on any part of Palestine that had been liberated."
At that time there were already contacts with some "righteous Israelis" -- initially only with anti-Zionists. These first anti-Zionists were the bridge for a meeting with more mainstream Israelis. That was when the ICIPP was founded -- the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, as whose newsletter The Other Israel started.
Uri Avnery, then Knesset Member, may already not have been a very convinced Zionist at the time; it was some years after his book "Israel without Zionists" had come out. But both, retired Six Day War General Matti Peled, and Dr Yakov Arnon, who had long served the Labour Party as Director General of the Finance Ministry, definitely went to meet with the PLO as Zionists.
It was the intention that they, as Zionists, would pave the way for the PLO to consider negotiations with the Zionist government of Israel. The Prime Minister at that time was Rabin and he was personally briefed about the ICIPP's meetings with the PLO -- a fact that was from the start known to the PLO leadership.
These were also the years that the settlement movement ("Gush Emunim") built itself up into creating facts on the occupied Palestinian ground, and on the other hand Palestinians added the hijacking of planes to their repertoire of military struggle...
Still, in the midst of all this took place the first indirect Rabin-Arafat contact. We all know how many decades, wars and many more obstacles it took before these two leaders came to the point of actually shaking hands. But meanwhile, both are dead and we look back to those hopeful years in the early 1990s as towards a shattered illusion.
The Oslo process, which in 1993 had aroused such expectations on both sides, deteriorated because of the overcautiousness of Rabin. His great merit was that he built relations of trust with the Palestinians -- but whenever it came to implementation of what was agreed upon he dragged his feet; the expression "there are no holy dates" was his. We will never know, though, how it would have ended had he not been assassinated.
In 2000, as a result of the failed negotiations of Ehud Barak, the search for peace and dialogue was severely discredited, at least on the Israeli side.
One cannot be sure that it was premeditated, but Barak's haste after Camp David to declare that the talks "have failed" -- instead of "are not yet fully concluded" -- was a sure way of bringing about the renewed war, a war which started with stones against rifles, but which escalated into an extremely cruel confrontation.
This was the atmosphere enabling Sharon's comeback. Blocked during two decades from being Defence Minister because of Sabra and Shatila, he now got hold of the prime ministership.
For years, he had a free hand for cruel oppression: besieging of Palestinian towns and villages, with starvation an openly discussed way of breaking their will; the erosion of scruples also manifested at checkpoints, in nightly raids and daily killings.
Only incidentally did these facts succeed in shocking the world: the pictures of blindfolded naked men with numbers on their arm; the Palestinian who was made to play the violin at a checkpoint. (It apparently shocks especially when it reminds of the Jewish holocaust stories....) However, all this did not yet really discredit among Palestinians, who had been for it, the idea of a two-state solution.
Their support for the '67 border compromise came, however, under severe pressure with the building of the Security Barrier / Separation Fence or whatever one calls it: 8-meter high Walls around, sometimes through, cities and hundreds of kilometers of double electronic fences with a patrol route in between and surrounded by much, much barbed wire. It was however the route which angered most, cutting away a thick slice with a special preference for the West Bank's aquifers.
Even, if such a barrier would have been built on the Israeli side of the Green Line ('67-border), one could have wondered whether this huge investment in walls and fences is really the best way to prepare for the post-occupation period, which could be expected to bring peace and a start of good neighborly relations. And as an immediate remedy against suicide bombers, not even the highest Wall helps as long as it is not complete -- a fact that Israelis found out the hard way. The assaults on people roaming around in city streets became a near daily threat, with Jerusalem's center paralyzed, and tourism brought to a total halt.
The idea of the Wall originated from the Labour Party, a partner in Sharon's governments. They may or may not have understood that in the cynical Sharon era a Wall could only become another excuse for another huge land grab.
After we got to see on TV how the army broke its way from Palestinian house to the next house through the walls, and how one tonne bombs were thrown on a residential block in Gaza, there started also some counter-movement.
In 2003 there was the Geneva Initiative and, not less important, growing dissent among the army ranks -- first the wave of draft refusers, but then also infecting fighting units from which more and more reservists refused to serve in the occupied territories, culminating in the collective refusal of 27 pilots. Sharon said it more than once: this was what made him understand that he had to come up with something -- the something being the Gaza Disengagement.
And now we are in the situation that extreme hostility to the Palestinians is mixed with partial giving up of land occupied in 1967, including even the dramatic, probably purposefully mediagenic evacuation of settlers and dismantling of the smaller settlements. And, while never willing to talk to even the most moderate Palestinian leaders, Sharon did take up the concept of "Palestinian state", but what he had in mind was not more than a few scattered enclaves.
Since the two-state solution was insincerely taken up by the government, more and more of its former supporters start feeling disgusted with the concept. This becomes clear in discussions among Israeli peace activists but also in exchanges with international friends of the cause. More and more people turn to the dream of One State, taking South Africa and the overcoming of Apartheid as their model.
It brings to mind the words of a personal friend, the late South African anti-Apartheid activist Esther Levitan. It was during the years that Apartheid seemed very immovable and Mandela still lingered in prison. She said: in South Africa the problem can be solved; the Whites are only a few percent of the population and the Blacks will win, but in Israel I don't see such an easy solution.
At that time it seemed odd that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was considered by her the less solvable. But after so many years, her words start making sense. In South Africa the military inequality was counterbalanced by other factors. But, compared with the Whites of South Africa, the Jewish Israelis have a much stronger position: not only do they have relatively greater numerical strength; they also aren't (any more) dependent on cheap Palestinian labour; furthermore they have a very strong weapon against international criticism -- the accusation of anti-Semitism.
The fact is that when it imposed a total boycott, including the freezing of assets, on the already extremely impoverished Palestinian people that it occupies, Israel was rewarded by the support of the Western leaders. The most heavy economic sanctions for no more reason than that the Palestinians had voted in too big numbers for one of the accepted contenders in the democratic and internationally-monitored elections.
At the same time grassroots efforts to start no more than a cultural boycott against Israel as long as it continues the occupation were foiled at their very inception.
This is the situation, and this is why one still can only hope for an end to the occupation to which the Jewish Israelis can be brought without having to give up the Jewish majority state.
As much pressure as can be produced will be needed to enable the Palestinians to indeed get all the territories occupied in 1967 to call their state, and that any deviation from the '67-border will be agreed upon in direct talks between the sides and compensated by mutually acceptable land swaps.
The Palestinians living right now in dire circumstances, in besieged Gaza and under heavy-handed Israeli military rule in the West Bank, should not have to wait for their liberation until the Israeli Jews have been transformed into angels.
The "two-state" concept may have become pale and stained, but without it we stand barehanded. Let's do this first. Later the two states can decide, as equals, to become one.
* * *
Those who cross the fence
Asafa Peled
April 14, Yediot Aharonot
The following is an interview with 3 Anarchists that appeared in a mass distribution weekly supplement. We print here a major portion. Translation, TOI-staff.
The Separation Fence is closing in upon more and more Palestinian villages. Their inhabitants are cut off from sources of livelihood. Some Israelis are not willing to remain silent. Matan Cohen lost an eye because of it. Shai Karmeli-Pollak gave up for its sake a promising career. Leila Mosinzon is going to prison for its sake, next month.
The Separation Fence has become their obsession. What is it that is bringing young people to give up the well-fed bourgeois life and get tear gas blown in their faces every Friday afternoon?
For a long time, dozens of villagers -- children, youths and adults -- waited at the entrance to the Beit Sira Municipal Council building. They were very excited, and it burst out when the car stopped nearby.
A seventeen-year old boy came out, a bit clumsy and wearing glasses, who looked like a typical Tel-Aviv high school pupil. The crowd surrounded him with shining eyes, and stood in line to shake his hand. The boy, wearing stylish jeans and Adidas shoes, seemed rather embarrassed by this very warm reception. "You were willing to give your eye for our struggle," said one of the village leaders to Matan Cohen. "You risked your life to let our voice be heard. If it was possible, each one of us here would have exchanged his good eye for your damaged one."
This was Matan Cohen's first visit to the village after being severely hurt in his eye by a rubber bullet shot by a Border Guard soldier a month and half ago during an anti-fence demonstration.
Cohen had undergone already two operations and his sight is very limited. Only in some months will it be clear if he would be able to see with the damaged eye. Sunlight is difficult for him and he is blinking all the time.
In the Palestinian press published immediately after it happened, the photo of Cohen's face covered in blood was published under the caption "an Israeli peace activist shot in the eye during a demonstration against the fence."
"It is very moving to see how the village people react, and all the children waiting for my arrival," says Cohen. "As far as I am concerned, this human warmth, our togetherness, is the biggest achievement of struggle. More than a struggle against the physical wall and the thousands of acres it is stealing from the Palestinians. The real struggle is against the mental wall."
The demonstration in which Cohen was hurt, on February 24, was one of a series of demonstrations organized in different West Bank locations every Friday, organized by local committees along the route of the fence. Some call the organizers "The Palestinian Gandhis" because of their unarmed demonstrations.
Every week since the building of the fence started there is a regular ritual: after the villagers end the Friday prayer, everybody leaves the mosque, together with Israeli activists from "Anarchists Against the Wall" and some sympathizers from abroad, towards the fence west of the village.
The army declares the area, which is a large part of the village lands, to be a closed military zone. The procession advances. Some are singing, some make speeches, some present a kind of street theatre that changes every week.
The soldiers and Border Guards form a cordon and wait for the demonstrators, to prevent them from nearing the fence. The demonstrators try to reach it anyway. There are many photographers, and nearly every minute is preserved. This material would be used afterwards in court, to defend those who would be accused of assaulting soldiers.
The sun is hot; the dust clouds go up. They call "Soldiers, go home!" and the soldiers try to push them back. There is shoving, shouting, and cursing. Soon smoke grenades and shock grenades are hurled and rubber bullets are shot. Demonstrators scatter, calling out "Go away, this is out home!" "Thieves!" "Don't shoot!"
Some demonstrators are hurt; some are detained and taken to a military vehicle parked beyond the fence. The event lasts several hours until everybody disperses.
"The demonstration was in fact over when they shot me," tells Cohen. "I was left, together with three other Israeli activists, quite far from the soldiers. I shouted to them not to shoot, but one of them raised his gun and shot me directly in the eye."
In photos and video footage from that day, Cohen is seen frightened and bleeding, crying out for an ambulance, between his fellow activists and the soldiers who had just hurt him and who were trying to help. Eventually, a Palestinian ambulance took him to the army checkpoint, from which he was transferred to an Israeli ambulance and taken to hospital.
He is still not calm. "Yes, I am afraid" he says and tells of other cases, during the three years that he is participating in protests, when soldiers shot at unarmed civilians. Hundreds were wounded and ten killed.
Fascinating phenomena
-- Were you willing to sacrifice your eye for the struggle against the fence?
"I don't think if somebody told me that I was going to be wounded in this way, I would have gone to the demonstration. But the risk of being wounded or killed is always hovering above everybody's head. As far as I am concerned, I will go on with the non-violent protests, because there is no choice.
The fence leaves people totally dispossessed, in complete despair. Continuing the struggle is vital in order to show that, though they use daily violence in order to break the struggle, we will go on and not let them silence us. I believe that non-violent protest has much more power than the violent oppression."
The group known as "Anarchists Against the Wall", to which Cohen belongs, is one of the fascinating phenomena that came into being because of the building of the fence.
The term "anarchists" brings to mind a group of tattooed punks, who run away from conscription and who protect wild flowers with as much fury as they devote to the downtrodden Palestinians. In practice, their anarchism is mainly expressed in the independent activity of every member, with many individual differences between them.
In fact, this is not really an organization, but a collection of individuals. Many of them had not been active at all until the bulldozers started to create their accomplished facts. They are between ten to a hundred people, without a leader or hierarchy, membership dues or fixed obligations. Each one finances his or her own expenses. Coordination takes place via phone or email, and anybody who wants to join is getting help in transportation and entry into the Palestinian villages.
Many of them had served in combat roles in the army. Some are lecturers, computer experts, students and pensioners. Most of them are vegetarians or vegans, and some arrived at the anti-fence struggle via Animal Rights protests.
The fence had taken them to a place far beyond the mainstream Israeli debate and discourse. The barrier caused the desire to meet the humans behind it, who have gone unnoticed before they were separated from Israel. The price is high -- they get beaten up, wounded, detained for days at a time and face dozens of criminal charges at the court.
It is difficult to understand what makes ordinary people, who had lived calm daily lives, let themselves be drawn into this daily ritual and in many ways give up their freedom. After several days among them one can at least understand what keeps them there. The scenes to which they are exposed are very different from what you can see in the news: villages cut off from their sources of livelihood -- water sources, schools, hospitals, and jobs. Movement is severely restricted, thousands of acres are confiscated and thousands of trees uprooted for the erection of the fence.
The people whom they meet are caged behind walls, with a single gate between them and the outside world. People who until the intifada had jobs in Israel are unemployed for five years already, with their families at the edge of hunger. The fence takes away also the chance to go back to agriculture as a source of livelihood. For the activists, every trip to the fence makes the going back home more difficult.
To be a bit blond
Three years ago, Matan Cohen started participating in activities in the Territories. "I read about terrorist attacks and the killing of Palestinian civilians. When the victims are Palestinians they remain nameless. Just numbers -- two Palestinians killed, seven Palestinians wounded... No names, no personal details. This language is why Israelis close their hearts for the suffering of the other side.
The same is true in my case. When I was wounded the media reported it, but the 14 Palestinians who were wounded went unreported, unknown. If somebody who is a bit blond is hurt it arouses identification. [When a Palestinian] is killed there is no commission of inquiry. Until now no soldier has been prosecuted for killing unarmed demonstrators.
I meet soldiers of almost my age, some of them people with whom I grew up, and they have never been in these villages, never spoke to the people, and have no idea of their situation. They feel that they are fulfilling a mission to defend Israel. I am here to tell them that this is not a security fence, that you can't establish security by oppressing another people who live at our side.
He says that his family supports his political stance but has asked him not to go to demonstrations. With time, however, they understood that their boy is not an adventurer. His first activity was joining a convoy that brought humanitarian help to a village under curfew in the Nablus area. He was the youngest of the Israeli dissidents who set out. "I remember being afraid and thinking that I am doing something dangerous, but the reality I saw was shocking.
We were kept and harassed for three hours at the army checkpoint. When we finally got there everything became real, concrete, real life. The dead and wounded have a real human form. The gap and abyss between us, this habit of talking of "us" and "them" is weakening and is mixing into a "we" which includes everybody. I did not see a difference between a person who suffers here and a person who suffers there."
-- Is this not a biased look? The Palestinians are throwing stones, and the soldiers are hurt.
"The presence of the soldiers is in itself violent. When people live under a daily oppression, some young people can't restrain their anger, and I can understand that. Their livelihood was taken away, and they are forbidden to demonstrate against the theft of their lands. When an armoured jeep enters the village in order to make a demonstrative show of force, I understand quite well why people throw stones at it."
Hell - half an hour from here
A group op of Israeli and Palestinian activists tries to advance towards the western side of the village, to the fence, near where Matan Cohen was wounded. An army force comes by and stops them. The Palestinians are angry, because it is their own lands, but nevertheless seem about to move back.
Shai Carmeli-Pollak (37), film director and leading anti-fence activist, refuses to accept the army dictat. He calls the Army Spokesman' office on his mobile phone, and explains at length that he and his companions are in a completely kosher Palestinian territory, that they do not seek a confrontation, and that it is the soldiers who are breaking the law.
Soon Lieutenant-Colonel Avi shows up, who authorizes the demonstrators to march another half a kilometre, albeit closely accompanied by himself and his soldiers. Pollak seizes the opportunity to talk to him and explain at length his opinions and worldview. "You look at the Palestinians from a completely military angle. You are completely blind to the fact that you are facing civilians," Pollak says.
The Colonel answers patiently. The two continue talking in front of the astonished Palestinians, to whom such an eye-to-eye contact with a military man is inconceivable.
A few days later, Pollak would insist on conducting a no less profound talk with soldiers at the checkpoint who refuse passage to everybody except holders of a journalist's card. Every Thursday evening, the area around the fence construction site is declared a closed military zone, in an effort to prevent the entry of Israeli activists.
Pollak insists upon seeing the order -- "If you don't have a proper order, signed by an authorized officer, you can't enforce a Closed Zone," he tells the soldiers. While he is deep in debate with the army detachment, the other demonstrators bypass the checkpoint on foot and continue on their way through the fields.
In the demonstration, he addresses the soldiers who had formed a cordon blocking the protest procession from reaching the fence: "You are being sent to protect illegal activities. You are not protecting the country, you are protecting the interests of real estate tycoons and building contractors. You have to understand that the state of Israel has signed an intentional treaty that obliges an occupying force to care for the occupied population. Even the Supreme Court accepted some of our arguments."
Without shouting, but quite determined, he continues a long conversation with the soldiers -- a calm, non-confrontational discussion -- and explains to them where he thinks they have gone wrong. When a soldier says, "we are defending the border" Pollak corrects him: "No, you are not. The border is not here, it is seven kilometres behind you. You are given all these weapons not in order to defend the border, it is to act as the villagers' prison guards, to cage them in."
When a soldier addresses him roughly, Pollak has no hesitation in calling the Army Spokesman's office again, demanding that the threatening soldiers be calmed down.
Until three years ago Pollak was far from being politically active. True, he was a leftist, but expressed it mainly through the ballot box. He served as a conscript in a field unit of the Israeli Air Force, studied cinema at Tel-Aviv University, and directed the drama 'Avramov'. He became deeply involved in Israeli television, directing especially humorous features such as "Zbeng." and was elected Chair of the TV Producers' Association.
Three years ago he went to Holland to visit his brother Yonathan Pollak (23), a prominent anarchist active both against the fence and for Animal Rights. The younger brother was then deeply involved in a wave of anti-globalisation protests, and Pollak was impressed.
When he came back to Israel the Second Intifada was already raging, but Pollak was still "caught up in the Rabin Peace Euphoria" as he puts it. But there came the day (so he tries to explain what has shaken up his life) when he realized he could no longer believe the news broadcasts and the official claims, "there is nobody to talk to."
"I don't know why it did not happen before. It is a kind of decision to grow up and not to believe blindly what they tell us. Or to put it another way, I saw angry Palestinians and decided to believe their anger."
His first active step was to go into the West Bank and join a group that set out to bring food and medicines to villages under closure. "I was confused," he recalls." I was still new at this, I hardly knew anybody. I remember near the settlement of Susya [in the South Hebron Hills] the police stopped us and forbade us to go on. The people of Ta'ayush [Coexistence, a joint group of Palestinian and Jewish activists] decided to just defy the police. It was the first time in my life that I turned against the law, against what a policeman told me to do and not to do.
At that moment, I was mainly angry at the violation of my civil rights. But when I met the Palestinians and saw under what conditions they had to live, I realized that that was completely the wrong focus. How puny was my complaint at my rights being infringed, compared with the brutal trampling over of their most basic rights.
In the first year of being active he continued producing "Zbeng" and various other TV programs. It became a kind of schizophrenia. "It was so difficult to go back from there to Tel-Aviv and change totally your mode of thinking.
In Tel-Aviv everybody walks carefree in the street and sits in cafes. True, from time to time there is a suicide bombing in which people are hit, and this is in everybody's subconscious. But over there, the people don't have this luxury of just walking the street freely. Suddenly, friends call you in the middle of the night, friends from a village, and tell about the army coming in, about detentions, about people being beaten up. Half an hour from here it is Hell, and nobody knows about it."
From his father, actor Yossi Pollak, he has gotten a small video camera and started to document the event he participates in. At first, it was just as private mementos. About a year ago he got a producer to share the work, and is now in the process of editing for Channel 8 a film about the anti-fence struggle in Bil'in. His camera documents damage to persons and property, meetings with human rights activists, the building of the fence and the changes in its route, and especially the behaviour of the army.
When he and his brother were beaten up and detained by the army, Pollak passed on the footage to the Channel 1 News. The filmed testimony proved false the army claims that it was the Pollak brothers who had assaulted the soldiers.
Pollak: "the camera helps set free Palestinian activists who faced severe charges. There were cases when the judge expressed anger with the army and police for having detained these people. When a Palestinian is put on trial, it is him who must prove his innocence much more than the prosecution needs to prove guilt. Palestinians can also remain in pre-trial detention for long months. Video footage also helps get events on the ground into media channels that often don't bother to send their own crews.
NO COPYRIGHT
Our articles may be reprinted, provided they include the address The Other Israel POB 2542, Holon 58125, Israel.
Sometimes we get to show the viewers at what price the security fence is being built, how quick the army is in hurling tear gas grenades at 12-year old girls who protest the theft of their families' land."
Pollak himself got beaten up with clubs to the head and body, and shock grenades exploding near him. Also when not physically near the fence he is permanently available on the phone: coordinating with the action committees, asking about the situation of his friends in various villages, volunteering to transport international volunteers. With the Palestinians he speaks a far from bad Arabic.
"I have changed totally in these years," he says. "If you have a modicum of sensitivity, when you get to the West Bank and see the situation there is no way you can remain what you were before. Were I to produce a film now, I would obviously take up a script about somebody who chooses to go to the Territories and meet people, a kind of character resembling myself, and make this the Good Guy in the film."
-- There is something very naive about this. You live in the reality that you chose for yourself and decide that you are the Good Guy.
"In our society, to do something just because it is a good deed, a moral act, seems to people like an idiotic motive. The hype is "what do I do in order to succeed in life'.
-- Do you also feel hurt and outraged about the suicide bombings?
Of course. It is self-evident that I oppose murder and random killings on both sides. Bu there is something very hypocritical about the common attitude to suicide bombings. Life under occupation is life under permanent terrorism. This is something people here are unwilling or unable to understand. They are fixed on considering themselves as the victims. When I go around the Territories and see how people live, suicide bombings seem to me a logical outcome -- notwithstanding the fact that when I am walking the street in Tel-Aviv, I can become the next victim, just like everybody else.
The next stop is the home of 50-year old Wagee Burnet of Bil'in Village. He and Pollak embrace warmly several times. Burnet, a building contractor, had worked in Israel for thirty years. He speaks fluent Hebrew and could have been mistaken for an inhabitant of a Jerusalem Region moshav community. Two days after the Intifada broke out, an army bullet hit Burnet's son, the eldest among ten children. The son was crippled and consigned for the rest of his life to an electric wheelchair, moving slowly through the cobbled alleys of Bil'in.
His father was automatically denied entry permit to Israel [on the authorities' theory that anybody who might have a motive for revenge should be barred]. He had no choice but to go back to raising vegetables and herding sheep. A short time ago he suffered a heart attack, but continues to go to demonstrations.
"I know there is no symmetry between the two of us," says Pollak. "What I am permitted and can do, he can't. Still, I feel that I am getting from him much more than I can give. I look at him with a never-ending astonishment. With all the terrible suffering he passed through, he still has a joy of life, he still can greet us Israelis.
We have so much to learn from them, from their intimate knowledge of the land. Instead of learning from the mistakes of the past, we continue to confiscate lands and hold people as prisoners."
After two days of going to Bil'in and meetings with Palestinian activists, Pollak seems worn out. Still, he continues answering his mobile phone, which does not cease ringing. " As long as I am an Israeli and I live here, I can't be at peace with myself if I don't do something against the occupation. It might be that I will have to do this for life, I hope I will always have the strength to carry on."
Eleven criminal charges
At the entrance to Budrus Village, Leila Mosinzon (31) pulls out a big kerchief and covers her long hair, as the Palestinian women do. With the long skirt over her jeans and the blue sweatshirt above, she could easily be mistaken for a Palestinian girl. She says she is tying the scarf over her hair in order to spare the village women the discomfort they feel when some Israeli and international women demonstrators arrive in the village wearing revealing clothes.
In the home of Sudkiya and Ahmed Abd-el-Rahim and their 15 children, at the village center, she is received with kisses and embraces and immediately becomes a virtual member of the family. In the inner courtyard of the poor house everybody crowds around her, the children waiting impatiently their turn for a hug.
It is difficult to recognize the determined activist who throughout the car drive here spoke with such ideological ferocity about the iniquities of the occupation. For a moment she drops down the volume, asks questions and answers them delicately with a shining happy face.
Mosinzon, like Pollak, was born at Jaffa, in a mixed Jewish-Arab environment. Her mother is Mizrahi, originating from an Arab country. her father is Ashkenazi [European], whose parents rejected their daughter-in-law.
When she was eight years old she and her younger brother were separated from their parental home and taken to live with their grandparents. "I grew up in a racist home, my grandfather used to say: 'The only good Arab is a dead Arab.'
For years I suffered physically and mentally. We were forbidden to see our parents. At the age of seventeen I ran away from home together with my dog. I tried to tell my schoolteacher how much I was suffering; she just did not believe me. It was just like now, when I come back from the Territories and try to tell what I saw and people don't want to hear. They can't face the truth.
When I came the first time to a demonstration and the army started shooting, I felt the helplessness of the Palestinians and it reminded me of my own helplessness as a small girl. When I stand in front of the soldiers' guns I tell myself that perhaps due to me being there somebody else avoided being hurt. That is a kind of tikkun (redemption)."
After being conscripted she was assigned to serve as teacher at an impoverished town in the north. Afterwards she went on a long trek abroad, and on her return she worked at a lot of temporary jobs, from waitress at a restaurant to office cleaner.
She says she was a rather passive activist until the campaign at Yanun Village three years ago. The settlers of Ithamar constantly threatened, harassed and assaulted the tiny village's 25 families, until they finally ran away in fear. She was among the activists who came to spend the night in the Palestinians' homes until the inhabitants felt safe enough to come back. She had spent there five nights in all, and with one of the families she established a contact that changed everything for her.
Mosinzon traveled to Germany to take part in a Peace Now sponsored meeting between Israelis and Palestinians. From there she went on to Japan at her own expense, to collect funds for a Yanun family whose two daughters were born with handicapped hands and needed a complicated and expensive treatment.
When the anti-fence demonstrations started she joined in. Since then, in the past three years, she is only rarely working -- finding a job and remaining in it just long enough to finance food, travelling expenses and a mobile phone. She has given up having an apartment of her own, and is wandering between the homes of friends in Jerusalem to those of Palestinian families in the villages, especially the Budrus family, which virtually adopted her.
She organized children's summer camps in seven Palestinian villages and got friends who are circus performers to come and teach the children some of their tricks. She was beaten up, hit directly by a gas grenade, detained ten times and ordered to keep away from the fence and always came back. She got charged with eleven criminal counts of "disorderly behaviour" and "assaulting soldiers", and the prosecution insists upon sending her behind bars.
Mosinzon came to know the Budrus family when she organized a camp there. "They know I have nothing to give them except to come and sit down with them and laugh together with the children with whom I fell in love and who have opened widely my heart. Visiting here returns me to myself. They are happy that I am there, and this gives me the feeling of a real family, which I never had before.
In order to provide some economic help to the family Mosinzon got together with a friend who works at an ecological farm. The two of them organized a workshop at the village, to let Israelis study ecological agriculture. The Israeli pupils came seven times to Budrus, each paying 50 Shekels per lesson, which were given to the family.
At stormy periods she avoids visiting the family, for fear that her presence would anger the army and cause them harm. About a month ago Sudkia was hurt by rubber bullets when soldiers came to arrest her brother. "When Sudkiya was hurt I was on my way to a social event. When I heard it I started shaking. I decided that it might be more harmful when I am not with them."
Full translation available at request or on
geocities.com/toi_billboard/AATW_interview.htm
Israeli groups working together as "The Olive Harvest Coalition" decided to do something more than harvesting: a "Donate a Tree" campaign was launched, to replace the olive trees uprooted on behalf of the Wall, and for those destroyed by settlers.
With money raised in Israel and abroad, and with hundreds of old and young activists from all over the country taking part, thousands of saplings were planted. We joined the activity at Qafin Village of Saturday, Feb. 18.
A desolate landscape. Behind us the last houses of the Israeli Arab town of Baq'a al Garbiya, a single old border stone still marking the pre-'67 "Green Line." Ahead, the "Separation Fence", with its grim lines of barbed razor wire mounted with electronic "early warning devices" and interspersed with military patrol roads.
We have arrived at the cut off Qafin lands, already four year virtually inaccessible to their owners. Once full of trees -- now strewn with high mounds of rubble and smelly rubbish.
"This garbage dump is completely illegal. Some individuals or companies took advantage of the lands being unattended. They just started to dump here, it is more cheap than the legal places" says Waji Gazawi, an Arab Israeli activist from the nearby town of Qalansawa. He is the District Coordinator for Ahali, a newly founded association based in Nazareth which takes upon itself the care of lands from which the Palestinian owners have been excluded.
"We formally notified the Ministry of the Environment, which is legally bound to act in such cases. and asked them to remove all this. But we are not holding our breath waiting for them to act. We raised enough funds from donations to remove all the garbage ourselves. A month from now there will be no garbage left and the olive saplings which are planted today will have all the room they need to grow and develop."
These explanations were actually filling the time of a delay. The army, it turned out, reneged on an earlier agreement and refused to open the gate and let the Qafin villagers cross the fence and join us. "This gate is installed for the Supreme Court. They tell the judges that there are gates for the villagers' use -- but how often the gates are opened, and whether the villagers are let through, is quite another thing," says an experienced activist.
While organizers start negotiating with officers, activists take the time to prepare two giant Hebrew-Arabic banners THEY UPROOT -- WE PLANT!
Others just wander around, discovering that the Ahali tractor has already dug holes in the earth, ready for the saplings.
Finally, the officers allow through ten arbitrarily selected Qafin villagers (out of some twenty-five who wanted to come), led by the town's mayor -- and with them the truck of saplings.
The work is actually quite simple: take off the black nylon covering around the roots, carefully place the olive sapling in the hole, and fill in. Some activists had brought mattocks and spades -- which made them look like the Zionist pioneers in the old black-and-white photos.
"Welcome, friends, to the land of Qafin, and thank you for coming to help us" says Mayor Taysir Harashi, as we assemble at the end of the work at a more or less level piece of land. "You should know that this is the first time that I am able to visit this part of our lands since the Fence went up four years ago. Until 2001 Qafin had some 10,000 dunums [four dunums = one acre]. 6,000 were left behind the Fence, we have 4,000 left; 2,000 are built up, 2,000 are all that we have left to live from.
The army is very tight-fisted with the permits. Many people who ask are refused, without any reason given. If you get a permit at all, it is only for the harvest season. There are almost no permits for the rest of the year, to do the necessary maintenance.
We told the army that if they don't let us remove the undergrowth between the olive trees, fires could spread very quickly. They did not listen. Then the fire really came -- five fires, burning our olive trees, in three months.
Every time it was the same. We asked the army for a permit for the Palestinian fire brigade to cross and put off the fire, and the army did not allow it. Our Israeli friends in Kibbutz Metzer called the Israeli fire brigade, but they didn't come quick enough. We could just watch across the Fence and see our trees burning. 4,500 dunums out of the 6,000 on this side were totally burned.
We asked the army to investigate what caused the fires. They shrugged and said it was probably an accident. Somebody dropping a cigarette, something like that, or perhaps five people dropping five cigarettes. Who knows?"
"We have a very long history of contacts with Qafin, as with the other Arab towns and villages around here" says Doron Lieber, administrator of the neighboring Kibbutz Metzer.
"In the 1950's Qafin, like the rest of the West Bank, was under Jordanian rule. But there was no border fence then, and it was not too difficult to establish friendly relations. This continued after 1967, and we never had problems of theft or burned fields such as plagued other border communities.
When the Fence started to go up, we pleaded with the army people to put it along the Green Line route and not touch the land of Qafin. We told them that hungry and frustrated neighbors are the worst danger to security. We said that we prefer to give up some of our own land. We thought that perhaps we convinced them, but then there was the terrorist attack. [In 2002, a Palestinian infiltrator shot to death a mother and her two children at Kibbutz Metzer.]
Of course our friends at Qafin offered condolences, mourned our dead as their own. But the army used it as a pretext to push the Fence route deep into the land of Qafin, as they had intended from the start.
Now, we try to act as the wards of the land, until the Qafin people could take care of it themselves once again. Together with Ahali we have undertaken to tend the saplings that will be planted today, to trim the trees and get rid of the undergrowth. But I hope we will have to do so only for a short while."
"Metzer and Qafin should serve as the pattern for the peoples and communities of this country. We will struggle together until we pull down the Walls and Fences, we will not let them separate us. There can be no peace without justice!" burst out Jana Ziferblat, of the Women's Peace Coalition.
And Suhel Salman, of the Tulkarm branch of PARC (Pal. Agricultural Relief Committees) was equally eloquent: "Our slogan: 'They Uproot -- We Plant'. And it is more than a slogan. Peace is impossible with Separation Fences, which are hatred fences. Life is too short to be wasted in contests of hatred. We are not only planting olive saplings, we plant seeds of love."
Uri Avnery of Gush Shalom: "We knew it all along, this is not a security fence. It is an annexation fence cutting off some 10% of the West Bank. The Jordan Valley is another 33%. Sharon always said he wanted it, and Olmert continues on his way. Add to that 'Greater Jerusalem' and the 'settlement blocks" and 'the access roads' -- altogether it's more than half of the West Bank. The Palestinians are suffocating in isolated enclaves. The hidden hope of those who plan it: that they will just go away by themselves."
The concluding remarks come from Ya'akov Manor, coordinator of the Harvest Coalition who initiated this entire event. "I have news from the South Hebron Hills. The Jerusalemites have successfully planted trees at four different locations, near settlements where olive trees had been uprooted. The saplings, both here and there, were paid for by donations. I should especially remark on the intensive fundraising by Boston Jewish activists.
So much for the good news. But I am sorry to say that the last part of our program -- sitting down and having some informal talk with our Palestinian friends over pita with hummus -- must be cancelled. The army gave them permission only until 2pm. After that, the gate will be closed and their presence here, in their own land, becomes 'illegal.' So it must be goodbye, right now."
Contact:
Taisir Harashi, Mayor of Qafin 970-599 280550 / 972-505 546 426 (Speaks excellent English)
Some American donors wrote moving dedications
geocities.com/toi_billboard/tree_dedications.htm
* * *
Stop the Gaza bloodshed!
Protest march in Tel-Aviv, April 17
More and more people were arriving at the rendezvous point outside the Hassan Bek Mosque, proposed by the Women's Peace Coalition because of its being easily accessible to Jaffa Arabs. (Hassan Bek is all that remains of Manshiyeh, a bustling Palestinian neighborhood which was totally razed in the wake of the 1948 war; at present the delicate minaret seems trapped among the cold and arrogant office buildings all around).
A contingent of mostly young Jaffans duly came by, with placards in Arabic, Hebrew and English. We were still waiting for the Hadash Communists, who had their own vigil near the Ministry of Defense. Meanwhile, people were talking about the Italian elections. "Did you hear? Berlusconi is definitely out! One bastard less!" "Don't be so sure. Remember how Sharon was forced in '83 to give up the Defense Ministry, and everybody thought he was finished?"
"When I went out of my house", says another activist, "a neighbor greeted me with 'Happy Passover.' I wanted to scream at him, 'What is there to be happy about? Did you not see TV last night, bleeding children, a nine year old girl dead, killed by our artillery in Gaza?"
Finally the Communists arrive, headed by the newly elected Knesset Member Dov Khenin -- the advocate who ably defended the Five Refusers during their yearlong court martial. We set out in a ragged long line towards the nearby seashore. An activist takes a bit of cello-tape and attaches two Gush Shalom placards to his bicycle: Stop the Slaughter of Children! at the front, and at the back No to Artillery, No to Qassams! Cease-fire Now!
We walk northwards along the esplanade. The late afternoon sun, slowly sinking into the Mediterranean, is a pleasant and harmonious sight -- so utterly at odds with the horrors out of Gaza. Youngsters burst out with "All ministers are war criminals!" and "Olmert to the Hague!" It feels strange to insert the name of the acting PM where Sharon's name was chanted before. The longhaired youngsters have no doubt: "Olmert, you have the blood of Hadil Ghraben on your hands."
On the other sidewalk, a disheveled man shakes a fist at the procession: "Traitors, God damn you! I say, kill them all! Kill them all!" Other by-passers ignore him, and he soon falls silent.
At the US Embassy, with its tall radio masts towering above the seaside, the chanting shifts to English: "One, two, three, four -- Occupation no more! Five, six, seven, eight -- stop the killing, stop the hate!" and "George W. Bush, we know you -- Your father was a terrorist too!"
For the French Embassy, a bit further on, a special sign had been prepared: Et Tu, Europa? "I expected nothing better from Bush and his gang, but the behavior of the Europeans is really outrageous" says the white-haired man who earlier spoke of Berlusconi.
Meanwhile, we watch the people in the fashionable seaside cafes that we pass one by one. There are few overt reactions, faces seem puzzled, as if our procession does touch them, but they ask themselves 'what difference does it make...'
...a week later bombs in Tel-Aviv
We had just heard about the explosion and were busy making phone calls: "Wanted just to know you are okay. You heard about the bombing, did you?" Then we saw an email coming from overseas to the Gush Shalom mailbox, a very short one:
"Any comment on the latest terror attack assholes?"
As a matter of fact -- yes.
One o'clock. In the noon news magazine on the radio, the commentator speaks in a rather bored way of the ongoing army raid into Nablus, words nearly identical to the reports of yesterday and of last week: "The Palestinians claim that the boy shot in central Nablus was unarmed... The soldiers assert that they had shot only at armed militants, as per orders... This is part of a continuing operation to root out terrorists in Nablus and Jenin, which is already going on for several weeks... When soldiers arrive, dozens of youngsters start throwing stones, which complicates the detention of wanted terrorists..."
Suddenly: "We interrupt this report. A large explosion just occurred at the Old Central Bus Station in Tel-Aviv. Dozens of casualties. Stand by for further details."
The Old Central Bus Station. The least fashionable part of Tel-Aviv. The lively dirty streets that are the haunt of migrant workers one jump ahead of the notorious Immigration Police, together with the most poor and disadvantaged of Israelis. The place where people have again and again to endure suicide bombings, too. Today, once again.
As always, the dilemma: Should we go there, to the scene where six people have just perished and forty others wounded, a place which is just a short bus ride away and where we just a few days ago went to buy sandals? Go there, as Israelis and human beings and peace activists -- but to do what? To say what?
Sure, we are horrified by the senseless random killing. But we have also something to say about why it happened, how it might have been prevented, how the next one can still be prevented. But how to say it on this day and in that location? How to make comprehensible, to shocked and angry and traumatized people, that the occupation is the root cause of our suffering as well as the Palestinians'? How to explain convincingly that we must dry at source the oppression which makes young Palestinians don explosive belts and throw away their lives together with those of others?
In the end, we don't do anything except stay tuned to the non-stop broadcasts on radio and TV. At least the extreme-right people, who in past years used to rush to such scenes with their hate placards, are not there either today. It seems that they no longer find the public so receptive to their simplistic "solutions."
The flood of news reports continues. The number of fatalities has grown to nine, and doctors at Ichilov Hospital are still fighting to save the life of a very severely wounded sixteen year-old boy. At least two of the women killed were foreign migrant workers, and the Israeli consulate in Romania is trying to locate the family of one of them. Responsibility was claimed by the Islamic Jihad, and the perpetrator was a sixteen-year old boy from the West Bank town of Qabatiya. In the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian boy (age not mentioned) was killed in an Israeli artillery bombardment (probably, somebody again instructed the artillery to decrease the range to the Palestinian inhabited areas...)
The bombing had targeted the very same cheap restaurant that was attacked in the previous Tel-Aviv bombing, three and a half months ago. Three and a half months ago. Nobody seems to remember the time when suicide bombings were taking place every week, or also several times each week.
Nobody mentions that that had been when Hamas was the main initiator of suicide bombings. Nobody mentions that Hamas has been carefully keeping their one-sided truce for more than a year now, that Jihad is a small organization with limited resources, that the Hamas self-restraint made the difference between life and death for quite a few Israelis in the past year.
A TV reporter speaks smugly from the scene of the bombing: "The police carried out massive detentions of Palestinian workers. Illegal Palestinians were found in all the restaurants and workshops around the site of the bombing. Why couldn't the police arrest them before it happened?" (Because they had absolutely nothing to do with the bombing, because
If there is a God
Nurit Peled
Yesterday when these bloodthirsty megalomaniac criminals were sworn in the Knesset, a boy who lived all his life in the worst possible hell they have built for him, a boy who has never left his ghetto, blew himself up with other miserable people in the central bus station in Tel Aviv, the most unguarded place in Israel since it harbors "illegal" people and drop-out children, imported whores and junkies. And if God does exist I hope he will take this boy together with his victims and show them the beautiful world they have all missed because of the evil men who have sworn yesterday to go on tormenting them and turning their lives into the worst possible hell, right here in Hellyland.
Nurit Peled lost her 13-year daughter in a Jerusalem suicide bombing, and tells her truth in squares and halls around the globe.
Contact: nuritpeled@gmail.com
they came to Tel-Aviv for no other reason than to feed their families -- but nobody says this on the air...)
In Jerusalem, the swearing-in ceremony of the newly elected Knesset goes ahead as scheduled, and is broadcast live. The eternal Shimon Peres is Acting Speaker. Not always our favourite among politicians. But in his speech today, he at least admits that the Palestinians are not solely to blame for the absence of peace, and that some Israeli mistakes also have something to do with it. This is not nothing, especially on such a day.
The late night news is sometimes less tightly controlled than the prime time. The commentator reports about Defense Minister Mofaz holding consultations with his generals on the coming military response, and remarks: "So, there will be a retaliation, and the Palestinians will retaliate to the retaliation, and we will retaliate again, and then what?" No answer was forthcoming.
Adam Keller
Holon, April 17, 2006
* * *
Islam's Holocaust denial trap
John Bunzl - Ha'aretz Feb. 2
When reading the infamous statements by Iranian President Ahmadinejad and similar utterances by other Arab or Muslim spokespeople, an obvious contradiction becomes apparent: They oscillate between denying the Holocaust (e.g., calling it a myth) and demanding that the price for the Holocaust (meaning contrary to the denial, it is something that must have happened) should be paid by those who committed it (Germany, Austria, Europe, Christianity, the West) and not by the Palestinians.
This contradiction can be explained by forms of Holocaust instrumentalization specific to a Middle Eastern context. Although it is not always easy to distinguish between these and certain European/Christian forms, it could be stated in a general way that the latter try to rehabilitate anti-Semitic atrocities and their perpetrators, while the former try to delegitimize the State of Israel. It is this attempt -- and the (partly true) assumption that the Holocaust is used being to justify Israeli policies -- that obstructs the perception of the Holocaust as a tragedy in its own right.
A simple experiment might illustrate this observation: Let's assume for a moment that the Zionists had chosen to colonize, say, Argentina. This would probably have eliminated any attempts by Arab intellectuals to trivialize the Holocaust. Since pro-Zionist forces in the United States would have occupied themselves with developments in Latin America, theories of an imperialist-Zionist plot to dominate the Middle East and confront Islam would hardly have come up.
But the struggle over Palestine created a mental and conceptual trap. Zionist colonization and native resistance constitute the core of the conflict. But due to its long duration, a legitimizing superstructure developed. The notion that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," combined with conspiracy theories -- both phenomena being traditionally widespread in Oriental political culture -- opened the door to a selective adoption of anti-Semitic "ideas" deriving from a European/Christian context. To this must be added rudimentary anti-Jewish elements in the Koran that could be exploited and blown out of proportion. Perceptions of the Holocaust have to be "understood" in this context.
Another context derives from the concept of Israel being the state of the Jewish people and being the ultimate response to the Holocaust, and Israel often using this tragedy to justify its actions and to silence its critics.
Israeli Holocaust exploitation is apparently a source for the misconception that recognizing the Holocaust equals supporting Zionism. This misconception is facilitated by the fact that objective scholarly research on the genocide of Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators has not been conducted in the Arab/Muslim world, that translations of the best studies on this period are not available and that cultural productions do not deal seriously with the issue -- all guided by the misleading notion that such activity would play into the hands of the Zionist enemy.
It was the late Edward Said who thought differently. He argued convincingly that recognizing the Holocaust for what it was (a genocide of the Jewish people) would increase the moral validity and legitimacy to demand recognition of the (very different) Palestinian Nakba ('catastrophe' of 1948), and that such recognition would make it easier to understand some features of Israeli society that genuinely reflect consequences of trauma and cannot be reduced to effects of political instrumentalization.
A closer look at these consequences will reveal the fact that Holocaust awareness within Jewish society does not inevitably lead to anti-Palestinian (anti-Arab or anti-Muslim) conclusions, but can -- to the contrary -- be invoked to support humanist and universalist approaches.
Whatever Arab, Muslim or other "Revisionists" say, the trauma of Nazi atrocities is still with us -- and denial will not make it go away.
John Bunzl is a scholar on the Middle East desk of the Austrian Institute for International Affairs and a professor of political science at the University of Vienna [and a long-time friend of The Other Israel].
* * *
'We don't ask for the moon' Nuri el-Okbi's struggle for Bedouin rights
Beate Zilversmidt
The Bedouins of the Negev are more and more pushed into a corner. Governmental committees are planning how to take away their lands and concentrate them in townships where they will only be able to survive as under-class laborers. For this purpose everything is done to make their life hell.
Bedouin agriculture is made impossible, their crops destroyed by spraying them with poison, or uprooting them with tractors and bulldozers.
Furthermore, not all today's Bedouins are so fond of continuing to live in their traditional tents. But if they stay on their lands the only thing they are allowed to do is to preserve their folklore, which happens to be one of Israel's tourist attractions.
Bedouins in 'unrecognized villages' can't count on any governmental provisions. But when they build stone structures for themselves, then the authorities do find the time -- to provide them with a demolition order.
We are speaking about Israeli citizens who pay taxes; not about the totally disenfranchised residents of the occupied territories.
For about thirty years assertive Bedouin Nuri el-Okbi and his Association for Support and Defense of Bedouin Rights in Israel, have been fighting against the odds.
El-Okbi is that kind of person who does it all by himself. He is not receiving a salary from a respectable, well-established organization for his many hours of activism. Probably he would not have the patience for it, for acting only within bureaucratic rules. He provides the livelihood for himself and his family in ever-inventive ways.
Some period he had his little Falafel Bar around the corner of the Tel-Aviv vegetable market. In Lod he is running a car repair garage in his own backyard. Right now, that source of income is threatened as during the latest wave of governmental demolition of Bedouin homes the authorities suddenly - after thirty years - realized that "in this area of Lod it is forbidden to have a business."
In February, el-Okbi went to the United States and met among others with Jews for an End to the Occupation (JFAETTO). But what caught the interest of at least some press reporters was his meeting with Native American leader Winona LaDuke, to learn from her about the history of their not so different plight. Meanwhile, as if to provide el-Okbi with evidence, the Israeli authorities routinely destroyed hundreds more dunums of Bedouin crops...
Upon his return to Israel in March, he is among the activists of a protest tent in Lod against the demolition of Bedouin homes. (Since the 1960s Bedouins started to move to Lod, encouraged to do so by the authorities, though no housing was provided, nor building permits.)
Moving back and forth between his garage, the protest tent, and a Be'er Sheva lawyer, el-Okbi speaks a lot on the mobile phone. But amidst this, he still found time to give us a ride from the Lod railway station. We came with a guest, Luxembourg activist Kay Krafzcyk.
At the protest tent, KM Ahmed Tibi was speaking to some dozens crowded inside.
From Kay's diary:
Near the tent was a demolished house in the process of rebuilding. In the tent I took a place next to a nice, young woman who translated me many things from Arabic to English. Suddenly I heard Tibi say: "Luxemburg!" "He addresses you!" Shock.
What can I say. I can't add anything. I mean, how can I contribute anything!!! but gotta say something, so I ask my neighbors: "what can I possibly say?"
[In fact, Kay's passionate message of solidarity was very well received -- TOI]
Later I met a young man with a broken arm. As I was wounded too with a big plaster above one eye, he asked: "Police?" "No, I just fell down." He pointed to his arm and said: "That's from the police. Say that's from the police, too. That sounds much better." We couldn't stay serious, even though the situation that is provoking all this is so cruel. We took pictures, donated some money to the Rebuilding Alliance, drank some coffee and then... it was time to go back home. So, Nuri took us to his old car, bought us some Pita, eggplant, Hummus and something to drink and continued to talk of his life, work etc. He gave me also a book that he had written, as a present. Isn't he a lovely, kind person?
[Contact: kayforpeace@yahoo.com]
On the way back, we promised to help Nuri with getting activists and press attention for another bold plan: campaigning for the right to build on part of the el-Okbi tribe's land an agricultural community for themselves. Bold it is, as in Israel founding a new agricultural community is preserved only to Jews. But according to all other criteria the plan is in fact extremely modest.
The following describes it in Nuri's own words, quoted from the April 14 press release:
"In these days the Jewish people commemorate their emergence from Slavery to Liberty (Passover). This is also the time that we, members of the el-Okbi Tribe and citizens of the state of Israel from its very inception, decided to embark on our struggle against the authorities' harassment.
It is intolerable to continue enduring gross discrimination in the land that is our land from time immemorial. Therefore, we have decided to erect a protest tent where we can receive those willing to listen to the sad story of the el-Okbi tribespeople, holders of Israeli citizenship. We will show our guests our sorry and intolerable situation at our present location, in Hora, and also the Al-Arakib area which our tribe owns, and where we want to build our own recognized village -- to create a better future for the tribe's young.
In front of our eyes, enormous government resources are spent for the creation of 'Giv'ot Bar', a community earmarked for the settlement of Jews on el-Okbi tribal land which was our fathers' and their fathers' fathers. Looking in the other direction we can see how in another part of our ancestral land there are brought in Bedouins of another tribe, Tarabin a-Sana, whom the authorities want to remove from where they now live, in order to expand the affluent Be'er Sheba suburb of Omer.
We have nothing against either of these. The whole of our legitimate and elementary demand is to be also ourselves allowed to create an agricultural community on the part of our ancestral land which is still free -- an agricultural community of our own, rather then being 'concentrated' into the government's 'Bedouin Townships', a 'solution' which we completely reject. And in the place where we want to settle down -- which we know as we know the palm of our hand -- there already exists the necessary infrastructure: a road, electricity and water lines. All that is needed is for the authorities, who are responsible for our present difficult situation, to take the appropriate decision. That is what we struggle for in our protest tent.
The public -- and also the representatives of the government authorities -- are hereby cordially invited. Have a Happy Passover!"
Several solidarity delegations made their way to the Negev protest tent, mainly organized by the Negev Coexistence Forum. (In recent years, the Coexistence Forum is organizing near weekly such solidarity visits -- as well as voluntary work days spent in unrecognized villages, helping the residents paving ways, creating play grounds etc.)
The police also showed up: to destroy the protest tent and drag Nuri off to several hours of detention. But another tent was erected, and the remnants of the old one preserved as a 'monument of the police visit'.
At their second visit, the police decided to use their equipment only to bury this reminder deep under the earth. At the time of writing we heard from Nuri that he intends, with the help of a group of Labor Party activists, organized by Naftali Raz, to dig up the "monument." Meanwhile, at least one official came to speak to Nuri about giving them a very little piece of (their own) land. An unacceptably small piece, but even so it's a sign that the campaign is hitting the nail.
Nuri el-Okbi, Association of Bedouin Rights
972-545-465556 / 972-8-9151425
For el-Okbi's book 'Waiting for Justice'
pob 5212, Be'er Sheba, Israel. Negev Coexistence Forum
Chaya Noach 972-50-6441498 http://dukium.org
Naftali Raz - 972-2-5341729 / 972-54-5494172 zar89@netvision.net.il
JFAETTO Minnesota - Jesse Benjamin 1-612-961-1094
* * *
The dog did it
More than 30 prominent Israelis signed a letter sent May 9 to Prime Minister Olmert, urging him to order the army to defend Palestinian children in the southern Hebron Hills from residents of the Maon settlement.
The children of the Palestinian village of Umm-Tuba walk daily to and from school in the neighboring village of Hirbat al-Tuwani, along the boundary of Maon and the illegal outpost of Havat Maon. They have long been subject to harassment by settler hooligans.
For years, volunteers of the Hebron-based Christian Peacemakers Team accompanied them, often hindered by the army from doing so. Then Israelis got involved, too, and Ta'ayush activists succeeded to talk the IDF and police into themselves providing the children with an army escort on their way to and from school.
Last week, May 6, the settlers threw again stones at the convoy, injuring four children as well as two of the soldiers. Then, one of the settlers set a dog on the children; only when soldiers shot in the air did they disperse.
Despite the violence and the resulting injuries, not one settler has ever been arrested for the attacks on the Umm-Tuba children.
"Beyond the disgrace that requires military escort for small children and the powerlessness in the face of the attackers, it seems the escort in its current format is not enough to protect the children... The subjection of elementary school children to attacks of lawbreakers in the absence of proper defense is unbearable," says the letter.
"The right to education is a basic human right and the State of Israel is responsible for its full protection. The IDF must provide the children of the village with full and proper protection. Law enforcement authorities must apply justice to the settlers, and not stand in the way of the activists aiding the villages' children."
The signatories also sent copies to the new defense minister Amir Peretz.
The letter bears signatures of some of Israel's most well-known artists and intellectuals, including writers Haim Guri, David Grossman, Sami Michael, Amos Oz, Saed Kashua and Meir Shalev, along with professors Menachem Brinker, Yermiyahu Yovel and Avishai Margalit. Actresses Gila Almagor and Hanna Meron and musician Ehud Banai also signed the letter. (Ha'aretz, May 10)
+++ May 12, two buses carrying Peace Now activists to protest the settler harassment were blocked at Gush Etzion Junction by army and police, while on their way to al-Tuwani. The group of approximately 100 included also KM Ran Cohen (Meretz). Only after Cohen called the new Defense Minister were the activists permitted to continue -- reason for the settler pirate radio to call upon their listeners to converge on the Maon farm and defend it against "the leftists and the Arabs."
As it turned out, the army was successful in preventing the two sides from coming close to each other, and the settlers had to make do with shouting from far, while the peace activists held up slogans 'Hebron Next on the Evacuation List.'
[The moral indignation about settlers' criminal behaviour is what mobilizes new sectors of Israeli society, bringing to solidarity with Palestinians and protest activity people who could never be mobilized to take part in an anti-Wall protest. The injustice of the Wall remains within the Israeli 'consensus', the injustice of settlers -- not any more.]
+++ Last November, the Kibbutz Movement's Special Assignment Division pledged to go to Salem Village near Nablus, and help Palestinian farmers whom settlers prevented from working their lands (see previous issue, p.19, 20).
The kibbutzniks were as good as their word, showing up in Salem every Friday -- with the result that they themselves became the target of harassment. Late at night on April 13, settlers came to the home of kibbutz organizer Yoel Marshak. "Five unknown persons turned on lights on the porch of my home and banged wildly on the door, frightening the family", Marshak recalls. He went outside to speak with them and they handed him a piece of paper accusing him of plotting to "destroy the state of Israel and uproot its Jews."
The spectrum of Marshak's activities is broad -- from helping Vicky Knafo's 2003 march on behalf of single mothers, to the encouragement of kibbutz youngsters to choose for officers' training in the army, to helping settlers of Gush Katif dismantle their greenhouses on the eve of the disengagement.
Following the settler incident, Kibbutz Movement secretaries Shor and Bargil instructed Marshak "to suspend his controversial activity pending further study." He refused point blank, declaring his determination to go on at all costs -- and was backed by a groundswell of support at the kibbutz grassroots, forcing the secretaries to beat a retreat in a hurry.
So far, the settlers have only helped to put the matter on the agenda. On the day after there came many more Israelis, 30 in all, to guard a similar number of Salem farmers while they worked their olive groves. Some 15 right-wing activists were also at the site, but engaged this time only in verbal confrontation.
A notorious right-wing kibbutznik, Ahuvya Tabenkin, was there too. He is the son of the well-known founding father and Socialist-Zionist ideologue Yitzhak Tabenkin, whose comrade Yoel Marshak's father, Benny, happened to be.
"Benny is turning in his grave." said Ahuvya to Yoel -- who chose not to return in kind...
Contact: Yoel Marshak, Kibbutz Movement HQ, 13 Leonardo da Vinci St., Tel-Aviv; ginatak@kba.org.il
* * *
A-Ram's dignified protest and how violence was used to break it
The initiative came from the local leadership of the residents of the a-Ram Jerusalem suburb. Mayor Sirhan Salayme took an active role. Israeli peace groups were invited to jointly make plans of action "against the occupation and for a peace that is just for both peoples."
It was not the first time of such joint efforts. Much of what we earlier together demonstrated against, has become a-Ram's sad reality: the Wall, which bisects the main street of a-Ram, makes the going to the other side of the road a very long journey (to say the least). But then, the a-Ram residents don't give up, so why should we.
The first in a series of joint actions would be a protest march on Saturday May 13, by a few hundred Israelis -- as many as could be mobilized by a coalition of Israeli groups. The Palestinian side would bring schoolchildren, teachers, neighborhood residents and supporters, in much bigger numbers.
The slogans were meticulously formulated, as to make sure that all the different participants could agree with them: No to Walls and Checkpoints / Yes to Negotiations / No to Unilateral "Convergence" / Jerusalem Open to All Her Residents.
The very organizing of this action proved wrong the Israeli government's assertion that "there is no partner." In spite of the Wall, which was built to separate, the residents of a-Ram continue their joint activities with Israelis.
But, when the day came, it turned out that this very fact is not at all appreciated by the Israeli authorities. The demonstration became a very stormy one.
It had been so carefully prepared as a non-violent protest. The pupils of the elementary schools in their school uniforms led the demonstration, with the smallest in front. But to no avail: the army and police had decided in advance to suppress the demonstration by force.
When the 200 Israeli peace activists approached the a-Ram Checkpoint, it became clear that they would not be allowed to pass. Therefore they went around. At a point where the meters-high grey concrete slabs have not (yet) been erected they broke through a fence. Quite some demonstrators succeeded in passing quickly through the breach, but those who where stopped by police had to remain on the "Israeli" side -- and demonstrated there.
On the main road of a-Ram, which is already divided by the Wall, the Israelis joined the Palestinian march, which was already on its way, led by Mayor Salayme. Right behind the massed schoolchildren, the leaders of all Palestinian parties -- from Fatah to Hamas -- had formed a line. White-haired Uri Avnery was invited to join and walked between the red-bearded Hamas leader, Sheikh Abu-Tir, and the former presidential candidate Mustafa Barghouti. Next to them was the Minister for Jerusalem Affairs of the new Palestinian government, Abu Arafah, also a Hamas member.
Further on along the road, in the middle of a-Ram, the police and army had concentrated a large force. Rows of policemen blocked the road, with mounted police in front and a large number of army Hummer vehicles behind. Seeing this, the organizers diverted the schoolchildren into a side street, and the thousand demonstrators, men and women, young and old, marched on towards the improvised tribune that had been prepared in advance, still with the line of party and organization leaders in front.
When still about 50 meters from the police line, they were suddenly, and without any provocation, bombarded with a salvo of tear gas canisters. The road was covered with clouds of gas. The demonstrators found shelter in adjoining buildings, and thus Abu-Tir and Avnery found themselves together in the guest room of one of the houses.
Some minutes later, when the gas had dispersed, the demonstration went on, but it was attacked again and again by the soldiers, Hummers and police riders.
Ten activists were arrested. After a few hours, the three Israeli detainees were released, but not the seven Palestinians. It seems that Occupation Authorities have embarked upon a more aggressive approach towards non-violent joint protest. The day before, police in Bil'in shot two international activists and a foreign photographer in the head with rubber coated steel bullets. All three were hospitalized.
But in spite of it all, something important was achieved during the difficult hours of the a-Ram protest march: in this demonstration there existed a complete national unity of all Palestinian factions, and the Hamas representatives showed no hesitation to march side by side with Israeli peace activists, treating them with marked friendliness.
Israeli partners:
Bat Shalom, Gush Shalom, ICAHD, Alternative Information Center, Mahsom Watch, Women's Coalition for Peace, Taayush and Yesh Gvul.
Israel coordinators
Yossi Bartal, Altern. Inf. Center 972-54-7705048
Molli Malkar, Bat Shalom 972-2-6245699
Khulood Badawi, Taayush 972-54-7469738
Adam Keller, Gush Shalom 972-50-6709603
P.S. The demonstration did get quite a lot of media attention, due to its being dubbed "violent" and to the encounter of Avnery with Abu-Tir. Ynet, Yediot Aharonot's Internet site, gave quite a lot of space also to the Wall protest and the message of peace, by quoting at length what Avnery had to say.
"We arrived at a non-violent demonstration, which was meticulously planned and led by all the a-Ram schoolchildren, starting from the first grade. The demonstration was aimed at protesting the wall, whose consequences are more serious in a-Ram than anywhere else. Some 30,000 residents of a-Ram, most of whom are Jerusalem residents, are prevented from approaching Jerusalem. Children cannot reach their schools and patients cannot reach hospitals," he said.
"We will continue to demonstrate," Avnery vowed. "I see a special significance in today's incident because it is the first time the army operated against us while led by Amir Peretz."
From 'Violent clashes in anti-fence protest', by Ali Waked, May 13, Ynet news.
* * *
Combatants for Peace
The brothers Yonathan and Zohar Shapira both chose for military careers and did well in them (as a combat pilot and elite commando officer, respectively) until overcome by the feeling that what they were being ordered to do was completely wrong and immoral. They were among the signatories of the 2003 refusal letters that helped get Sharon to the decision to leave Gaza -- and which caused both of them to be thrown out of the IDF.
Some time later, Zohar had the chance to participate in a meeting with former Palestinian Fatah fighters from around Bethlehem, most of whom had spent years in Israeli prisons. An increasing number of meetings were held of what came to have the name "Combatants for Peace."
The Palestinian towns and suburbs around Jerusalem provided a friendly venue, accessible -- at least until the Wall is completed -- to both Israelis and Palestinians.
Participants agreed on a program supporting the establishment of a Palestinian state in the '67 borders with a capital in East Jerusalem, and the personal pledge of complete refusal to bear arms against each other. "Violence on both sides won't bring about a solution," says Usama Abu Karesh, one of the Palestinian organizers. "Neither will unilateral steps. We stand together to prove that there is a partner for cooperation and peace."
Only after a year of activity, in which membership has passed the hundred mark, did they decide to go public. The venue chosen for the April 10 public meeting, organized with the help of the veteran Yesh Gvul refuser movement, was the school of Anata -- a school whose courtyard is divided by the Wall and half denied to the playful village kids.
The stark white room is soon buzzing with Arabic and Hebrew conversations. Participants range in age from 20 to 60; some wearing suits and polished shoes, others dressed casually. Various illustrious supporters arrive: former PA ministers Yasser Abed-Rabo and Kadura Fares; Luisa Morgantini, Italian Member of the European Parliament; famous Israeli singer David Broza whose participation helped get Israeli TV crews over...
But most important: the combatants:
Avichay Sharon, 24, serving in the IDF during the current Intifada: "We don't want to look at each other through weapon sights, we want to see each other as human."
Osama Abu Karsh, 35, jailed for three years for attacking Israeli troops with firebombs: "Both our sides have been fighting, but we want to sit at the same table. We hope we can achieve something."
"We carry a dual platform: No to the occupation, and no to all other violent activities," says organizer Zohar Shapira. "Too long have we heard that there's no partner. We, fighters who paid a personal price in the conflict, are proving that this is a lie. There is someone to talk to -- you only have to want to talk."
Raed al-Hadaar, a Fatah activist from Ramallah: "Four years I was in prison and the only Israelis I met were prison guards. Now, in this room, I see Israelis which I can meet as equals and share a common goal of peace and justice."
Avner Vishnitzer: "There are people telling us that we are naive. This makes me very angry. Naive, we? And what are they? To rule people by force for nearly forty years and think it can last -- is that not naive?! To build concrete walls to hide behind and think everything will be OK, is that not naive? They are naive, we are realists, the only realists!"
Basam Aramin: "It's a paradox. You hear a man talking about how he shot, killed, damaged your neighbour's house. But you feel empathy for him. You realize that we are all from the same background, but just from different sides. The soldier wanted to protect his people, and so did we. I was armed, I fought against the occupation to attain freedom and I spent seven years in the darkness of prison. My friends and I fought with guns, bottles, Molotov cocktails and stones. We fought with words, cameras, pens, songs and literature. But sending suicide bombers to blow up buses fuels Israeli propaganda and stains the good name of the Palestinian struggle."
Yonathan Shapira: "We, me and my friends and family, were raised to love and serve the state of Israel. When I refused to take part in Air Force attacks on civilian population centers, I found myself at the center of a storm. But we need to do this. Palestinians have tried for years to oppose the occupation, and everything they've done has just made the response more brutal. So, we want to create an alternative."
At the end of the meeting -- an unpleasant surprise: Army and police surround the school on all sides, village youths and children are confronting them. A tense atmosphere and suddenly the tear gas canisters start flying. The Israeli and Palestinian combatants face it together, and unarmed...
+++ For nearly two years now, Aviv Sela had been a central activist of the Shministim, organizing solidarity actions on behalf of draft refusers. On April 5 his own turn came to embark upon a string of prison terms: "We are told that the Palestinian society is one-dimensional, all of it 'extremist' and 'terrorist.' But I went to the Territories and saw a complex society, with various factions and different ideas, and a variety of modes of struggle. I met Palestinians who conduct a non-violent protest, and I would not dream of coming to them with a gun."
Usually, the army exempts female CO's far more easily than male ones. Maayan Padan was not so lucky. In February she appeared before the army's "Conscience Committee" and was thoroughly grilled by suspicious officers. When she admitted that despite being a vegetarian she worked as a waitress in a food chain, they concluded that she was "not a sincere pacifist" (sic). Starting on April 25, she embarked on proving her sincerity by undergoing repeated terms in the army's notorious Women' Prison.
20-year old Wasim Hir, an actor from Peqi'in Village in the Galilee, is a Druze -- a member of the only community among Arab Israelis that is liable to conscription. Two years ago, when his call-up arrived, he hid away and was declared "a deserter." After a year of hiding he was caught by "deserter-catchers" and hauled into basic training, whereupon he refused.
"I don't feel that I belong in this military, considering its actions in the Palestinian territories. I am an Arab, and I don't wish to wage an ethnic war against my own people. I am an actor, performing before Palestinian audiences, and I don't want to oppress my own audience."
Eyad Raleb Sif, also a Druze, was enrolled in the
Border Guard in Nov. 2004, and sent "to do the dirty work" at roadblocks and checkpoints near the West Bank town of Qalqiliya, as well as at the Separation Wall. What he witnessed made him increasingly rebellious and resentful. Eventually he went AWOL, and was sent for 70 days to Military Prison No. 4,where he was mistreated and physically abused by prison wardens for refusing to address them as "sir." On April 27 he was transferred to Military Prison No. 6, where the mistreatment ceased.
I don't usually tell these stories, because they might give rise to the suspicion that I am paranoid.
For example: 27 years ago, I was invited to give a lecture-tour in 30 American universities, including all the most prestigious ones -- Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Berkeley and so on. My host was the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a respected non-Jewish organization, but the lectures themselves were to be held under the auspices of the Jewish Bet-Hillel chaplains.
On arrival at the airport in New York I was met by one of the organizers. "There is a slight hitch," he told me, "29 of the Rabbis have cancelled your lecture."
In the end, all the lectures did take place, under the auspices of Christian chaplains. When we came to the lone Rabbi who had not cancelled my lecture, he told me the secret: the lectures had been forbidden in a confidential letter from the Anti-Defamation League, the thought-police of the Jewish establishment. The salient phrase has stuck to my memory: "While it cannot be said that Member of the Knesset Avnery is a traitor, yet..."
And another story from real life: a year later I went to Washington DC in order to "sell" the Two-State solution, which at the time was considered an outlandish, not to say crazy, idea. In the course of the visit, the Quakers were so kind as to arrange a press conference for me.
When I arrived, I was amazed. The hall was crammed full, practically all the important American media were represented. Many had come straight from a press conference held by Golda Meir, who was also in town. The event was to last an hour, as is usual, but the journalists did not let go. They bombarded me with questions for another two hours. Clearly, what I had to say was quite new to them and they were interested.
I was curious how this would be reported in the media. And indeed, the reaction was stunning: not a word appeared in any of the newspapers, on radio or TV. Not one single word.
By the way, three years ago I again held a press conference, this time on Capitol Hill in Washington. It was an exact replica of the last time: the crowd of reporters, their obvious interest, the continuation of the conference well beyond the appointed time -- and not a single word in the media.
I could tell some more stories like these, but the point is made. I recount them only in connection with the scandal recently caused by two American professors, Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. They published a research paper on the influence of the Israel lobby in the United States.
In 80 pages, 40 of them footnotes and sources, the two show how the pro-Israel lobby exercises unbridled power in the US capital, how it terrorizes the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives, how the White House dances to its tune (if indeed a house can dance), how the important media obey its orders and how the universities, too, live in fear of it.
The paper caused a storm. And I don't mean the predictable wild attacks by the "friends of Israel" -- which means almost all politicians, journalists and professors. These pelted the authors with all the usual accusations: that they were anti-Semites, that they were resurrecting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and so forth. There was something paradoxical in these attacks, since they only illustrated the authors' case.
But the debate that fascinates me is of a different nature. It broke out between senior intellectuals, from the legendary Noam Chomsky, the guru of the Left throughout the world (including Israel), to progressive websites everywhere. The bone of contention: the conclusion of the paper that the Jewish-Israeli lobby dominates US foreign policy and subjugates it to Israeli interests -- in glaring contradiction to the national interest of the US itself. A case in point: the American assault on Iraq.
Chomsky and others rose up against this assertion. They do not deny the factual findings of the two professors, but object to their conclusions. In their view, it is not the Israel lobby that directs American
policy, but the interests of the big corporations that dominate the American empire and exploit Israel for their own selfish aims.
Simply put: does the dog wag its tail, or does the tail wag its dog?
I am nervous about sticking my head into a debate
between such illustrious intellectuals, but I feel obliged to express my view nevertheless.
I'll start with the Jew, who went to the Rabbi and complained about his neighbor. "You are right" the Rabbi declared. Then came the neighbor and denounced the complainant. "You are right" the Rabbi announced. "But how can that be," exclaimed the Rabbi's wife, "Only one of the two can be right!" "You are right, too," the Rabbi said.
I find myself in a similar situation. I think that both sides are right (and hope to be right, myself, too).
The findings of the two professors are right to the last detail. Every Senator and Congressman knows that criticizing the Israeli government is political suicide. Two of them, a Senator and a Congressman, tried -- and were politically executed. The Jewish lobby was fully mobilized against them and hounded them out of office. This was done openly, to set a public example. If the Israeli government wanted a law tomorrow annulling the Ten Commandments, 95 Senators (at least) would sign the bill forthwith.
President Bush, for example, has withdrawn from all the established American positions regarding our conflict. He accepts automatically the positions of our government, be they as they may. Almost all the American media are closed to Palestinians and Israeli peace activists. As to professors -- almost all of them know which side of their bread is peanut-buttered. If, in spite of that, somebody dares to open their mouth against the Israeli policy -- as happens once every few years -- they are smothered under a volley of denunciations: anti-Semite, Holocaust denier, neo-Nazi.
By the way, American guests in Israel, who know that at home it is forbidden to mention the influence of the Jewish-Israeli lobby, are dumbfounded to see that here the lobby does not hide its power in Washington but openly boasts of it.
The question, therefore, is not whether the two professors are right in their findings. The question is what conclusions can be drawn from them.
Let's take the Iraq affair. Who is the dog? Who the tail?
The Israeli government prayed for this attack, which has eliminated the strategic threat posed by Iraq. America was pushed into the war by a group of Neo-Conservatives, almost all of them Jews, who had a huge influence on the White House. In the past, some of them had acted as advisers to Binyamin Netanyahu.
On the face of it, a clear case. The pro-Israeli lobby pushed for the war, Israel is its main beneficiary. If the war ends in a disaster for America, Israel will undoubtedly be blamed.
Really? What about the American aim of getting their hands on the main oil reserves of the world, in order to dominate the world economy? What about the aim of placing an American garrison in the center of the main oil-producing area, on top of the Iraqi oil, between the oil of Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Caspian Sea? What about the immense influence of the big oil companies on the Bush family? What about the big multinational corporations, whose outstanding representative is Dick Cheney, that hoped to make hundreds of billions from the "reconstruction of Iraq"?
The lesson of the Iraq affair is that the American-Israeli connection is strongest when it seems that American interests and Israeli Interests are one (irrespective of whether that is really the case in the long run). The US uses Israel to dominate the Middle East, Israel uses the US to dominate Palestine.
But if something exceptional happens, such as the Jonathan Pollard espionage affair or the sale of an Israeli spy plane to China, and a gap opens between the interests of the two sides, America is quite capable of slapping Israel in the face.
American-Israeli relations are indeed unique. It seems that they have no precedent in history. It is as if King Herod had given orders to Augustus Caesar and appointed the members of the Roman senate.
I don't think that this phenomenon can be wholly explained by economic interests. Even the most orthodox Marxist must recognize that it also has a spiritual dimension. It is no accident that American (as well as British) fundamentalist Christians invented the Zionist idea well before Theodor Herzl hit upon it. The evangelical lobby is no less important in today's Washington than the Zionist one. According to its ideology, the Jews must take possession of all the Holy Land in order to make the Second Coming of Christ possible (and then -- the part they don't shout about -- some Jews will become Christians and the rest will be annihilated at Armageddon, today's Megiddo in Northern Israel).
At the basis of the phenomenon lies the uncanny similarity between the two national-religious stories, the American myth and the Israeli. In both, pioneers persecuted for their religion reached the shores of the Promised Land. They were forced to defend themselves against the "savage" natives, who were out to destroy them. They redeemed the land, made the desert bloom, and created, with God's help, a flourishing, democratic and moral society.
Both societies live in a state of denial and unconscious guilt feelings -- over there because of the genocide committed against the Native Americans and the horrifying slavery of the Blacks, here because of the uprooting of half the Palestinian people and the oppression of the other half. Both here and there, people believe in an eternal war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness.
Anyhow, the American-Israeli symbiosis is unique and far too complex a phenomenon to be described as a simple conspiracy. I am sure that the two professors did not mean to do so.
The dog wags the tail and the tail wags the dog.
* * *
Who is to blame?
Gila Svirsky
Feb 2, 2006
Listening to the reactions of passersby at the recent Jerusalem vigil of Women in Black, you would think it was our peaceful little group that put the Hamas into power. This stems from Israeli right-wing politicians who are asserting that Hamas won because of the Gaza withdrawal and other conciliatory overtures, i.e., "rewarding terrorism." Indeed, Bibi Netanyahu & Co. are delighted with the Hamas victory, on which they can now build a fear-saturated election campaign, their last hope to return voters to the fold who lately had slipped into something more moderate.
But here's my take on what made Hamas victorious in the recent elections: Israel's failure to sit down and negotiate an end to the occupation. This is often phrased as "the failure of Fatah to make progress on peace," but they amount to the same thing: the Fatah failed because Israel refused to offer any reward for moderation, refusing to sit down and negotiate with them.
And what about the corruption claim -- that voting for Hamas was also a vote against the corruption of the Fatah politicians? This may have played a role for some voters, but since when does corruption bring down a politician? Certainly not in Israel, where Sharon's corruption has been an open book, but forgiven by those who support his politics. Corruption is tolerated when approval ratings are high in other respects. The corruption of the previous Palestinian government would have been overlooked, had the politicians only managed to show some progress on ending the occupation.
When terrorists become politicians
I remember standing on the balcony of my home in Jerusalem on a lovely May morning in 1977 and gasping when I heard who had won the Israeli election: Menahem Begin, former head of a Jewish terrorist organization that had killed 91 civilians by bombing the King David Hotel in 1946. And then it was Begin who returned the Sinai Peninsula and negotiated peace with Egypt. In 2001, Israel elected Ariel Sharon, responsible for blood-soaked episodes in Qibiya, Beirut, Gaza, Sabra and Shatila, and more. And then it was Sharon who returned Gaza -- imperfect, but a singularly important precedent.
I condemn terrorism, whether "rogue" or state sanctioned, and I would never have voted for Hamas (or Begin or Sharon). But who is better positioned than Hamas to reach a compromise peace agreement? We have the mirror image of Israel in the Palestinian election: Just as the Israeli right (Begin and Sharon) could make concessions more easily than Yitzhak Rabin, who had to fight our right wing all the way, so too the Hamas can mobilize more support for concessions than the more moderate Fatah could now undertake.
About creeping fundamentalism
I am worried about Hamas rule, particularly its domestic agenda in Palestine: I worry about women, non-Muslims, journalists, gays, people in the arts, and all those who benefit from the open society. To what extent will the Hamas increase the role of Shari'a (Muslim) law in civilian life? Or religious education in the schools? On the other hand, it's quite evident that Palestinians have experienced democracy and will not easily tolerate a closing of their society.
I take heart from this week's survey of the Palestinian population, published in the Palestinian Authority's Al-Hayat Al-Jadeeda and reported in the Jerusalem Post: 84% of Palestinians support a peace deal with Israel. In case you wondered if this includes the Hamas, 75% of Hamas voters are opposed to calls for the destruction of Israel. The Hamas knows that seculars comprise a large portion of their constituency.
And who benefits from ending foreign aid?
So along come American and Israeli politicians advocating for a policy that would isolate and punish the Palestinians by withholding financial aid. Everyone knows this would destabilize the fragile economy, harm the innocent (but not the politicians), and foster increasing bitterness against the secular west. A much more reasonable approach would be to extend support and see how responsibly Hamas uses it. Or does someone have an interest in sowing chaos in the Palestinian territories?
Yes, I too would like to demand a renunciation of terrorism and violence as a precondition for talking... I'd like to demand it from both sides. But realistically this has to be done as part of the negotiations.
* NEW OLD GAMES (editorial overview), p. 1-10
- Fatah's failure, p.1
- What to do about Hamas?, p.2
- Recognition for a price / Bypassing techniques, p. 3
- Confronting the settlers, but..., p.4
- Skeptical voters, p.5
- The Jericho gimmick, p.6
- Malignant neo-nationalism, p.7
- Colossus no more, p.7
- The Bypass Map, p.8
- Ambitious Defence Minister, p.8
- Boycott against the occupied, p.9
- Gush Shalom's call upon Europe, p.9
- Division of powerlessness, p.10
- Margin of Hope, p.10 (end Editorial)
* Two-state solution discredited, Without Working Alternative p. 11, 12
* Those who cross the fence, Asafa Peled, p.12-17
- Fascinating phenomena, p.13
- To be a bit blond, p.14
- Hell - half an hour from here, p.14-16
- Eleven criminal charges, p.16-17
* The story of the trees, p.17-18
* Stop the Gaza bloodshed!, p.19
* ...a week later, bombs in Tel-Aviv, p.19-20
* If there is a God, Nurit Peled, p.20
* Islam's Holocaust denial trap, John Bunzl, p.20-21
* We don't ask for the moon -- Bedouin struggle p.21-22
* The dog did it (on settler hooliganism) p.22-23
* A-Ram's dignified protest and how violence was used.. p.23-24
* Combatants for peace, p.24-26
* Who's the dog, who the tail? Uri Avnery, p.28-26
* Who's is to blame? Gila Svirsky, p.28-27
