The Other Israel Issue Nr 131-132 July 2007 (raw version)
Index in the end
Of the lead article a definite version has already been posted:
HIGH TIME OF CYNICISM T131-132
HIGH TIME OF CYNICISM
The end of March and beginning of April saw the flaring up of new hope. It was expressed in such events as the gathering of several hundred Peace Now activists outside the Prime Minister's residence in Jerusalem, flying the flags of the 22 member states of the Arab League, plus the Palestinian and Israeli flags, under the banner: 'Don't miss the chance for peace!'
Though it seems much longer, it was only a few months ago. For a moment, Muslims and non-Muslims alike looked with expectation to the Holy City of Mecca. At a time singularly lacking in positive leadership, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia tried to step into the breach with two bold initiatives.
At the Arab Summit, the Arab Peace Initiative was re-introduced and reaffirmed - offering to Israel complete peace with the entire Arab World in return for complete withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. In fact the Saudis had already launched it once - back in March 2002 - only to see it immediately derailed and wiped off the agenda by the bloody Passover Eve suicide bombing in Netanya and the bloodier Israeli invasion of the West Bank cities ("Operation Defensive Shield").
This time, the initiative was not derailed - at least, not in such a blatant and peremptory way. And there was more: the heads of the warring Palestinian factions were induced and pressured into forming a "National Unity" government, ending (or so it seemed) the internecine fighting between rival militias and presenting to the international diplomatic arena a body with a valid claim to politically represent the entire population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
As the reader knows by now, that chance was missed, the incipient positive momentum soon turned into very negative directions, and there were a lot of violent deaths, some of them very gruesome. To the people of good will it is left to pick up the pieces.
The opportunity that was
Though the fact was not often appreciated in the mainstream Israeli and Western media, for the Hamas Movement to enter a joint cabinet with the rival Fatah Party represented a concession. It included explicitly agreeing to "respect previous agreements signed by the Palestinian Authority" - a formulation that resulted from prolonged bargaining and haggling between the Palestinian factions and the various Arab mediators.
This went a long way towards recognition of Israel and accepting the Oslo Agreements, on whose base the Palestinian Authority was created. Certainly, this formulation was in no way compatible with the harsh language of the Hamas Covenant, which the Israeli rightwing is so fond of quoting.
Given a modicum of openness on the side of the international community, this key article in the Unity Government's program could have served as the foundation for the kind of "creative diplomacy" beloved of past international mediators arriving in the Middle East. Such openness, however, was conspicuously lacking.
Not that much could have been expected of the Olmert Government - nor of George W. Bush with his division of the world into Good Guys and Bad ones, and with Hamas firmly placed among the latter. But quite a few Palestinians (and others) hoped for better from the European Union.
Initially, indeed, there were hesitant EU declarations welcoming the formation of the new Palestinian cabinet. Switzerland and Norway, European countries that are not part of the European Union and thus not bound by its common foreign policy, did recognize the Palestinian Unity Government, as did South Africa.
But rather than the harbingers of a general change, these turned out be no more than exceptions proving the rule. Engaging in some weeks of hand wringing, and giving non-Hamas ministers of the new government a warm welcome at Brussels but sending them back empty handed, the Europeans finally fell in behind the intransigent American position.
"The Diplomatic Quartet" reaffirmed its demand on the new Palestinian government, as on its predecessor, for an unquestioning obedience to the three conditions which had been set last year (Recognition of Israel, Acceptance of Previous Agreements and Renunciation of Violence) and which many Palestinians (and not only Hamas supporters) found one-sided and unfair (there was
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no reciprocal demand on Israel recognizing Palestine, implement previous agreement with the Palestinians or renounce its daily military raids into the Palestinian cities).
Since the hey-day of the Oslo Peace process, the EU holds the main purse strings of the Palestinian government -- which, being debarred from control of its own borders and economy, cannot finance itself by taxation, as governments normally do.
Therefore, the continual denial of European aid to the Palestinians, added to the withholding of Palestinian tax moneys collected by Israel on behalf of the Palestinians but held in the Israeli Treasury's coffers since early last year, meant that the Palestinian National Unity Government has failed in its most elementary task -- namely, to pay the government employees their monthly salaries.
Certainly, with the diplomatic avenues closed in its face, the new Palestinian government could offer its people not the slightest chance or hope of advancing towards a negotiated end to the Israeli occupation.
This meant that the political leaders -- not only of Fatah, but also of Hamas -- were fast losing ground to the heads of their parties' respective armed militias.
Courting the Saudis...
The Mecca-brokered Palestinian Unity Government had been met by the Israeli government's outright hostility. The Arab League's offer of full Arab recognition of Israel in return for full Israeli withdrawal encountered a more subtle reaction.
Though an outspoken reservation was made with regard to the return of Palestinian refugees, the government reiterated on several occasions that "The Saudi Initiative has many positive aspects." It was evident that Olmert in no way indicated acceptance of the initiative's stipulation of Israeli withdrawal to the '67 borders. Rather, he simply issued repeated invitations to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to enter immediately into "negotiations with no preconditions."
Far from beginners at the art of diplomacy, the Saudis concluded that such a public meeting would in effect grant already to Olmert the coveted prize of de-facto recognition by the richest of all Arab countries, without Israel in any way obliging itself to the required territorial quid-pro-quo.
In seeking such a "photo opportunity" with the Saudi King and sundry Gulf Emirs and Sheiks, Olmert was in fact hoping not only for a major coup for Israeli diplomacy but also -- and especially -- for a means of slightly improving his disastrously plummeting popularity ratings in Israeli public opinion.
Olmert, however, did not have it his way. The Saudis politely pointed out that there was no longer a "Saudi Peace Initiative" since it has been duly and formally adopted by all member states of the Arab League and made into an Arab Peace Initiative.
Therefore, it was suggested that Jordan and Egypt, the two members of the Arab League that already have peace treaties with Israel and maintain embassies in Tel Aviv, would conduct negotiations with Israel on behalf of the League.
Once this point was made clear, Israeli enthusiasm for the Saudi/Arab initiative visibly diminished. A mere four months after being launched, this once-hopeful initiative seems well on its way to the same limbo to which were consigned so many earlier Middle East initiatives and plans, which remain officially on the table, year in and year out, and get occasional empty and perfunctory praise...
...skirmishing with the Syrians
The Golan border with Syria has long been considered Israel's most quiet frontier. The Syrians carefully adhered to the terms of the 1974 cease-fire that ended the Yom Kippur War, and there have hardly been any border incidents.
Despite vociferous declarations to the contrary from Damascus, Israeli right-wingers persisted in interpreting the Syrian conduct as a tacit acquiescence in the loss of the Golan Heights -- conquered in 1967 and unilaterally annexed in 1981.
And though Israeli governments on several occasions engaged in negotiations with Syria, these were never conducted in an atmosphere of urgency and the need to defuse an immediate crisis, which were the normal background to talking to the Palestinians. In fact, it was generally assumed that
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Syria had no military option -- at least, no option of conducting a direct conventional war with Israel with any hope of success. (Egypt, Syria's ally in the 1973 war, soon afterwards concluded a peace treaty with Israel. And the Soviet Union declined and disintegrated, unable to re-supply the Syrian Air Force and Armoured Corps.)
The Syrians did, however, develop effective ways of reminding Israel of the unfinished Golan business by conducting an ongoing "war by proxy." Hizbullah and smaller Lebanese militias proved valuable and willing allies in such Syrian designs, and later the Syrians also developed similar contacts with Hamas and other Palestinian groups.
The Second Lebanon War of 2006 seemed one more exercise of such an indirect war, with the Syrians standing carefully aside and leaving Hizbullah (and the population of Lebanon in general) to bear the brunt of the fighting. It was seen to have produced an effective counter-measure to the long-standing Israeli superiority, through Hezbollah's combination of guerilla tactics with the intensive use of missiles of various kinds.
Katyusha rockets devastated the Israeli population centres, even though the Israeli fighter planes and bombers continued to dominate the Lebanese skies; advanced anti-tank missiles, in the hands of militants hidden in the mountainous terrain, pierced the armour even of the best Israeli tanks; a shore-to-sea missile inflicted losses on one of the Israeli gunboats which for decades patrolled Lebanese waters with impunity...
Suddenly, it was clear that Syria could adapt the same kind of strategy for a future attempt at militarily regaining the Golan -- with many more missiles than Hizbullah has, some of them far more advanced and of a far longer range than those deployed in Lebanon.
Even had this possibility not occurred to the Syrian generals by themselves, they would have soon gotten the idea from their Israeli colleagues and military commentators, who in a whole series of alarming articles in the Israeli press set out scenarios for the possible Syrian tactics and strategy, in considerable detail.
Adding plausibility to the idea of Syria starting war was the attitude of Vladimir Putin's Russia, seeking to assert its position on the international arena by -- among many other things -- renewing the flow of arms to Syria.
Also increasingly prominent in the background were the bold efforts of Iran, Syria's long-standing strategic ally, to pursue its nuclear plans in the teeth of international opposition. An American and/or Israeli air strike on the Iranian nuclear installations, the possibility of which had been discussed quite openly for a considerable time, would be likely to draw Syria into the resulting war.
(Few of those nowadays condemning the "Syrian-Iranian Axis of Evil" remember that these two countries originally came into alliance, back in the 1980s, mainly in common apprehension of none other than Saddam Hussein's Iraq, then a highly unfriendly neighbour to both and a staunch ally of the United States).
In spite of possible temptations, however, entering into a direct war with Israel would still be a very high-risk gamble for Syria. The recent bitter experience suffered by inhabitants of Beirut and other parts of Lebanon clearly indicates that in such a war, Syria's main population centres and industrial areas would likely be devastated in Israeli bombings and suffer heavy damage and casualties -- with the Syrian economy far from robust, to begin with.
An Israeli-Syrian war might play into the hands of the American neoconservatives, who consider Syria to be part of "The Axis of Evil" and still long to effect "a regime change" in Damascus, in spite of the manifestly disastrous effects of the Iraqi experiment.
Most observers agree that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would much prefer to keep the option of war theoretical, and use it as a catalyst for a diplomatic process leading to Israel bloodlessly disgorging the Golan. In any case, in the past year Israelis experienced a perplexing stream of media proclamations and discreet diplomatic messages emanating from Damascus.
Offers to resume peace negotiations and reach an agreement of Peace in Return for The Golan -- either in the framework of the Arab Peace Initiative or in direct bilateral negotiations -- are intermingled with veiled and sometimes open threats of war, should Israel persist in holding on to the 1967 conquests. Rather than all-out war, some Syrian proclamations hint at the possibility of low-level guerilla war in the Golan -- taking, in effect, an earlier page from Hezbollah's book.
The time seems over that Israel could leave the Syrian issue on the back burner, and public debate has reached a higher pitch than seen for many years. Quite a few members of the political and military elites talk of the next war as "a question of when rather than if." Indeed, some of them clearly look forward to such a war as a means of "renewing" the "Israeli deterrence" damaged in last year's Lebanese fiasco. Israeli generals with considerable relish invited foreign journalists to witness "soldiers training for the conquering of a Syrian village."
On the other hand, an opposing faction -- also with significant access to the corridors of power -- sees war as far from inevitable, and on the contrary would like to see a resumption and completion of the talks with Syria, broken off in April 2000. The Army's own Military Intelligence has been quite outspoken on this point, its representatives on several occasions engaging in acrimonious debate with the far more hawkish Mossad Intelligence Agency.
Supporters of this position argue that the 2000 talks had been very close to success when then PM Barak got cold feet and called them off, and that a peace with Syria would end its alliance with Iran and
In a feat of "back-channel" alternative diplomacy, retired Israeli diplomat Alon Liel -- a former aide of Yossi Beilin and a participant in the Oslo talks -- teamed up with Abe Suliman, a Syrian-American businessman who to some degree did -- and to some degree did not -- represent the government in Damascus.
The draft agreement worked out by the two of them was presented at a highly publicized, precedent-setting visit by Suliman to the Knesset in Jerusalem. It evidently could be a good basis for an official agreement, given a genuine Syrian willingness to make peace and an equally genuine Israeli willingness to give up the Golan.
For his part, PM Olmert was careful to assure the Syrians that there was no Israeli intention whatsoever to attack them, that all the conspicuous military manoeuvres were purely defensive in nature, and that war could break out "only due to a most tragic misunderstanding" -- and was answered with similarly worded declarations from the Syrian side. All of which did not stop the continuing exchange of warlike declarations and gestures across the Golan cease-fire line.
The Prime Minister was far more reticent with regard to any move towards the negotiating table. Often reiterated statements made such negotiations conditional upon Syria first dropping its alliance with Iran on the one hand and with the Lebanese and Palestinian "terrorist organizations" on the other.
For their part, the Syrians indicated that they might be willing to talk of such issues in the negotiations themselves, in return for some Israeli gestures -- for example, an end to the government-sponsored extension of settlements on the Golan and the whole-page ads in Israeli papers, calling upon inhabitants of the Tel Aviv area to move to "wonderful family houses" on the Golan. "Conditions are not yet ripe for the launching of negotiations without preconditions" was the Orwellian-flavoured conclusion of Olmert.
In one leaked account of a high-level confidential policy meeting, Olmert was quoted as saying: "We can't talk to the Syrians, the Americans would not allow us to do it." Olmert was roundly criticized, in numerous editorials and oppositional speeches, for speaking in a way unfitting for the head of a state claiming to be independent and sovereign.
On his next visit to Washington, Olmert got President Bush to declare (with disdainful expression on his face): "If the Israelis want to talk to the Syrians, that's their business, we will not interfere." But Bush would not dream of mediating or facilitating or in any way helping the success of such talks, as Clinton did in his time. In any case, no talks with Syria followed and none are predicted in the foreseeable future. And the reason seems to lie mainly in domestic Israeli politics.
As has often been pointed out, the Golan settlers are in a far stronger public position than any other group of settlers. Israelis tend to consider the Golan as being truly part of Israel, far more than any other occupied territory -- mainly because the area's Arab population was expelled across the border upon its conquest in 1967, and was not left to present "a demographic problem" as in the West Bank.
Israelis like to go hiking in the Golan's admittedly lush and beautiful landscape, without bothering too much about the political implications. In order to evacuate the Golan, an Israeli Prime Minister would need far more than the miserable single-digit popularity ratings with which Olmert has to contend since the failure in Lebanon.
Of course, Olmert's failure to open peace negotiations may eventually entail another disastrous war.
Still on his feet
In April there was a general feeling that Ehud Olmert was nearing the end of his political career. The Winograd Commission was about to present its Interim Report on the Conduct of the War in Lebanon. Olmert had himself hand-picked the commission members, sidestepping the law stipulating that they should be appointed by the President of the Supreme Court. Nevertheless, it was correctly expected that the Commission would severely criticize him, if only to prove its own impartiality.
Numerous scenarios were published well in advance, enumerating a whole set of factors which -- singly or in combination -- were expected to bring Olmert down: A wave of popular anger at the grassroots of Israeli society would gather unstoppable momentum; the members of Olmert's own Kadima Party -- a jury-rigged political structure hastily created by Sharon in 2005 and to which Olmert fell heir quite by chance -- would realize that their only chance of political survival would be to replace him with somebody more popular; the Labour Party, his main coalition partner, would bolt and deprive him of Parliamentary majority; his other partner, the extreme-right demagogue Avigdor Lieberman, would bolt -- in tandem or in competition with Labour; various corruption scandals, now under investigation by Attorney-General Mazuz, would crystallize into hard evidence and a charge sheet, incompatible with remaining a Prime Minister...
In the matter of his own political survival, however, Ehud Olmert soon exhibited in abundance the kind of nimble skill so manifestly absent from his conduct of weightier issues. Having made careful advance planning for various contingencies, expertly manipulating the media and quickly adapting to changing situations, the PM and his advisers managed to defuse or ride out the threats, one by one.
A tumultuous mass rally calling for Olmert's immediate resignation did take place at Tel-Aviv's Rabin Square, organized by a coalition dominated by Right-leaning groups though also including the Meretz Party. But it was not quite as massive as some past rallies at the same location, and at its conclusion the protesters went home and attempts to organize further protests soon petered out. Moreover, the likelihood that Likud leader Binyamin
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("Bibi") Netanyahu would take power, should Olmert fall, was enough to make many stick to Olmert as "The Lesser Evil."
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni had long before tried to depict herself as a credible alternative, with a reputation for personal honesty and integrity as well as being the initiator of bold and imaginative diplomatic plans and moves (or what passed for such). Especially, she emphasized her special personal connections with US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice in a so-called "Women's Connection" bypassing their male bosses. However, Livni's months-long build-up failed miserably at the moment of truth.
Olmert's people managed to quickly defuse the incipient mutiny in the Kadima parliamentary faction, setting other would-be inheritors at Livni's throat (and each other's). The Foreign Minister managed to discredit herself with one wrong step -- openly calling upon Olmert to resign, but failing to herself resign from his cabinet -- and was showered with waves of ridicule in the media, forcing her to the humiliation of "making her peace" with the PM. Her reputation and political fortunes may yet recover, in the ever-changing kaleidoscope of Israeli politics -- but as of the time of writing, she is clearly not in the running at any leadership contest.
Unlike Olmert, Defence Minister and Labour Party Leader Amir Peretz had no chance of riding out the scathing criticism levelled at him in the Winograd Report. Once known as a peace activist, trade union organizer and social reformer, Peretz had managed to violate all his promises at record speed and alienate the Israeli public in general and most members of his own party as well.
The PM took no official position about the Labour Party primaries selecting Peretz's successor, but was visibly pleased that former Prime Minister Ehud Barak had won out against his main competitor, retired Admiral and Security Chief Ami Ayalon. Ayalon had vowed to take Labour out of the Olmert Cabinet. Barak, to the contrary, slid into the Defence Ministry right upon getting the Labourites' confidence, unceremoniously throwing out his hapless predecessor.
Olmert had long wanted to get Barak to take over the military portfolio, so as to increase the government's popularity ratings. With his considerable prior experience as Army Chief, Defence Minster and Prime Minister, Barak declared himself "the person most suitable to conduct Israel's next war" -- his main slogan in successfully campaigning to get the confidence of the Labour Party membership.
Olmert had been warned that Barak, though a valuable ally in the short term, could eventually turn out to be a dangerous rival -- having ultimately set his sights at regaining the Prime Minister's bureau, from which he was ousted in January 2001. But for a Prime Minster whose career seemed moribund, the short term prevailed. Olmert has now gained a breathing spell -- at least until the autumn, when the final Winograd report is due.
The PM has further fortified his position by getting the famous Shimon Peres elected as President of Israel. While the presidency is a mainly ceremonial position, having won the hard-fought contest over it enhanced Olmert's prestige.
Those who had already written Olmert off evidently need to revise their calculations. Whether he intends to do anything with the time he won -- other than simply hold on to power as long as possible -- remains to be seen.
Benchmarks -- coming and going
Already for many years, a recurring complaint by Palestinians had been the extensive network of Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks spread over the West Bank. Indeed, many highways have been declared altogether out of bounds for Palestinian traffic and reserved to settler traffic.
For Palestinians, travel from one city to another -- or even from a village to its immediate neighbour -- has become a long, frustrating, unpredictable and on occasion highly hazardous process. This resulted in considerable disruption not only to the daily personal lives of Palestinians, but to any economic activity which requires a regular and reliable inter-city transport -- i.e., to virtually all Palestinian economic activity.
The issue of easing travel restrictions on Palestinians came up regularly in each and every meeting between Israeli and Palestinian officials, and was often also taken up by the Americans. A ritual developed by which the Israeli Prime Minister of the moment would promise to do his best to ease Palestinian daily life, "subject to Israel's security needs." In practice, generals and security chiefs made clear their view that any removal of checkpoints and roadblocks would result in a wave of suicide bombings in the Israeli population centres. This "professional opinion" would be immediately published widely by the army's numerous official and unofficial mouthpieces in the media.
At some time in April, Major General Keith Dayton -- the American Security Coordinator appointed to deal with the situation on the ground in the Palestinian territories -- tired of the game of asking his Israeli counterparts for unspecified "humanitarian gestures towards the Palestinians" and getting in return an unspecified nothing. He presented his "Benchmarks" plan, enumerating the exact location of various West Bank road-blocks, their name as used in the IDF's own terminology -- and a precise timetable for their removal.
In return, the Palestinian security forces were supposed to intensify their activity to prevent the shooting of Qassam missiles from Gaza into Israeli territory.
In a marked contrast to the extreme Israeli deference to American wishes where the idea of (not) opening negotiations with Syria was concerned, General Dayton's Benchmarks encountered an immediate, vehement and outspoken rejection by the Israeli generals, which was duly conveyed to
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Washington by Olmert. Allegedly, an aide of Amir Peretz -- then still Defence Minister -- had been indiscreet and provided the Americans with information on the location of the West Bank roadblocks. In the view of the military hierarchy, immediately shared with the general public, this was the ultimate proof of Peretz's unfitness for his job and the urgent need to replace him (as was done soon afterwards).
The Israeli generals did not, however, need to worry for long. Another pet project of their American colleague Dayton -- the arming and training of Palestinian armed forces loyal to President Abu Mazen, with the openly proclaimed aim of their suppressing those of Hamas -- created a situation which soon swept Dayton's Benchmarks off the agenda.
The rabbit jumped too early
Palestinians never came close to realizing a Unified Armed Force. Ever since the Palestinian Authority was formed, division and subdivision persisted into (often mutually hostile) militias, owing loyalty to different political parties -- or to specific factions or leaders.
With the election of the Hamas-led Government in March 2006 things became worse. The official Palestinian Armed Forces refused to acknowledge that government or take any orders from it, proclaiming sole loyalty to President Abu Mazen. The Haniya Government reacted by forming its own armed forces, known as the Executive Force. These were deployed mainly in the Gaza Strip -- with Israeli forces preventing formation of the Hamas-loyal forces on the West Bank.
Both sides claimed to be the genuine armed forces of the Palestinian Authority, loyal to a duly and democratically elected government, and accused the other of being in illegal rebellion. Both sides had some point -- depending on which interpretation is taken of the rather ambiguous and self-contradictory Palestinian legislation on the relations between Prime Minister and President.
It had been originally adopted, under considerable international pressure, with the aim of weakening the President and strengthening the Prime Minister (at the time, Arafat was President and Abu Mazen was Prime Minister). But it was hastily amended in the opposite direction, again under considerable international pressure, once Abu Mazen became President and Ismail Haniya the Prime Minister.
In practice, this legal ambiguity resulted in the Gaza Strip having two rival governments, each with its own armed forces (not counting the numerous "incursions" and ongoing siege by the Israeli Army). An inherently unstable situation, bound to produce frictions and clashes of increasing frequency and ferocity. Smaller armed groups occasionally added their own discordant notes -- for example, the long lasting kidnapping of BBC reporter Alan Johnston.
Throughout the past year, Palestinians hoping for an end to the spectre of civil war pinned their hopes on the formation of a Unity Government. However, the framers of the Mecca Agreement did not tackle the daunting job of uniting the various armed forces and militias. Instead, a single neutral Minister of the Interior was chosen after considerable wrangling, to whom all of these forces were supposed to be accountable. In the event, none of them took any real notice of him, and he soon resigned.
Had the Unity Government developed a momentum of political and diplomatic success, the spirit of national unity might have eventually seeped down to the armed grassroots -- or at least, the various military leaders might have restrained themselves. But such, clearly, was not the case.
Not only did the international community maintain its strangling boycott. Israeli and American officials continued quite openly their efforts and preparations for an eventual final military showdown, in which Fatah was expected to pulverize its foe. The fact that Fatah and Hamas were partners in a National Unity Government was completely ignored.
Specifically, one Fatah faction was expected to pull that trick -- the one headed by Muhammad Dahlan, a Gazan who had started as a grassroots leader in the First Intifada and had then spent quite a bit of time in an Israeli prison -- but that was a long time ago.
Not all factions of the Israeli military and security services were equally sanguine about the ability -- and the willingness -- of Dahlan and his men to carry out the role assigned to them in such scenarios. For months there was a continuous wrangling in the high Israeli echelons whether or not to authorize Egypt's arming Dahlan's troops with armoured cars and heavy machine guns. The opponents asserted that the Fatah troops would not fight in earnest, and the arms provided to them would fall into Hamas hands or even be used against Israel by Fatah people themselves.
The net result of these deliberations and debates -- of course leaked to the press, and from there swiftly translated into Arabic -- was the worst of possible worlds for Dahlan and his people. The Israeli debate was more than enough to depict them as collaborators, turning to the occupier for machine guns with which to shoot their own people -- but the guns themselves they did not get...
Hamas prepared for defence in the eventuality of being attacked, and also for a pre-emptive strike of its own. Industriously procuring arms via the smugglers' tunnels from Sinai to Gaza, Hamas did not seem to encounter any cross-purposes among its own suppliers.
Sderot pays again
In the first half of May, confrontations between the Palestinian factions in Gaza broke out again, and soon reached proportions rivalling those of the time before the Unity Government was formed. The reaction of several Israeli columnists expressed the gut feeling on the street: "Let them kill each other."
Suddenly, however, a massive salvo of Qassam missiles came of the Gaza turmoil upon the Israeli
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border town of Sderot and its environs. They were far more numerous than the occasional shooting of a missile or two on a day, which is the usual retribution for the killing of Palestinians by Israeli troops. And further massive salvos landed on Sderot, day after day during the following week.
The Qassam is a highly inaccurate weapon, and most of those shot from Gaza exploded harmlessly. Still, more than a hundred missiles were enough to leave two Israelis dead, several severely wounded and a town in the grip of panic and hysteria.
Israeli papers published extensive eulogies and emotive background articles on the two Israeli victims of the bombings (as is of course never done for the dozens of Palestinian civilians killed in Israeli bombings).
The shady multi-millionaire Arkady Gaidamak, who had made his fortune in arms trading at African civil wars, financed buses which demonstratively evacuated Sderot residents -- forcing the government to follow suit and conduct its own extensive evacuation project.
Right-wingers -- on this as on many earlier occasions -- called for an intensive military operation to conquer the entire Gaza Strip and "root out the terrorist infrastructure" -- modelled on the Israeli re-conquest of the West Bank cities in April 2004. But Olmert still remembered the recent sharp criticism made by the Winograd Commission of his hasty plunge into war in Lebanon.
Moreover, many of the PM's advisers were of the opinion that the shooting at Sderot had been deliberately initiated with the aim of provoking Israel into just such an all-out invasion, and in that way unite all Palestinian factions against the common enemy.
And the generals, watchful for sudden developments on the Syrian and/or Lebanese borders, warned against committing too much of the IDF's resources to Gaza. (Ben Kaspit, a well-connected Ma'ariv commentator, actually wrote "We need to make peace with Syria so as to free the army's hands for the bloody job which must be done in Gaza"...)
In conclusion, the government contented itself with intermittent air strikes and small-scale "incursions", in which between twenty and thirty Palestinians were killed.
There followed a kind of informal de-escalation (reportedly helped by the mediation efforts of Qatar) and after a week and half, shooting along the Gaza border returned to the "drizzle" level which had prevailed for years.
Inside the Gaza Strip, inter-Palestinian tensions built up again towards the final climax, a few weeks later.
The miscalculation of the patrons
The quick and utter collapse of Muhamad Dahlan's troops in Gaza, at the middle of June, took virtually everybody by surprise -- including, apparently, the Hamas forces that achieved it.
Many explanations were offered for that outcome. The Fatah forces were demoralized and had not been paid for many months, due to the international financial boycott; they were disunited and divided into many sub-groups and factions, often mutually-hostile; many of their commanders escaped in the very inception of the fighting, or were not present in the Strip at all (including Dahlan himself).
Possibly most important, while American and Israeli planners have made plans assigning to these
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troops a role amounting to collaboration with the occupation, the troops themselves -- members and supporters of the Fatah Movement, which had led the Palestinian National Movement for decades -- in no way felt that they had signed up to perform such a mission. When confronted with Hamas' well-organized and highly motivated troops, it was no real contest -- even though on paper the Fatah men greatly outnumbered those of Hamas.
Not everybody in Hamas was happy with the outcome. It was clearly a victory for the Hamas military wing, whose control of the Gaza Strip was now unchallenged by any Palestinian armed group (though many smaller militias remained at large, including some Fatah offshoots opposed to Dahlan's). It was, however, a grave setback to the Hamas political wing, in particular to Prime Minister Haniyeh, thoroughly undermining and discrediting their claim to political legitimacy as a democratically elected government.
Palestinians of all political factions expressed shame and dismay at this extreme manifestation of disunity and internecine bloodshed. The killing of four Palestinian children in a "misdirected" Israeli aerial strike in the southern Gaza Strip -- the kind of event which would in normal circumstances arouse stormy reactions -- passed virtually unnoticed, in the face of the internal Palestinian bloodshed occurring nearby.
For their part, Israeli governmental and right-wing propagandists made full use of such events as the public execution by Hamas militants of their most hated Fatah opponents, by shooting or throwing them from the top floors of Gaza high-rise buildings. (As Yediot Aharonot columnist Dror Ze'evi wryly commented, reactions in the Israeli media might have been more subdued if it were the Dahlan people doing it to Hamas leaders...)
Some of the right-wingers went as far as reviving the argument that "There is no such thing as a Palestinian People", rarely heard in Israel since the time of Golda Meir in the 1970's.
More mainstream commentators and politicians contented themselves with the assertion that the Palestinians have "proved incapable of governing themselves." Therefore, they were to be indefinitely consigned to continued Israeli rule, to the imposition of an international force and regime, a return to Jordanian and Egyptian tutelage as before 1967, or a combination of all three. And the pesky Palestinian
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demand to have regular communications between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank -- an explicit Israeli obligation in the Olso Agreement that was never fulfilled -- could now be conveniently swept off the table, since "the Palestinians themselves have severed the connection."
Such patronizing attitudes were manifested in the public debate on the fate of hundreds of fleeing Fatah militants and their family members, crowded just across from the IDF forward positions at Erez. Some commentators called upon the government to admit these refugees "as a special act of mercy and compassion, proving Israel's moral superiority" while others demanded that they be turned back since they were "terrorists just like Hamas." (In the end Barak, in his first decision as Defence Minister, let the "new refugees" in -- but only on condition that they immediately go to Egypt, rather than to the West Bank.)
Meanwhile, however, Hamas failed to make any overt move to impose a theocratic dictatorship in Gaza. After a brief rampage of revenge killings, they did issue a pardon to their defeated enemies. Despite an intensified Israeli and international physical and financial siege, they did make a credible effort to establish regular governmental services in a territory which had long suffered the ravages of having two rival feuding governments.
This culminated with the spectacular release of the BBC journalist long held by a small radical militia -- an affair in which Hamas acted as governments often act in such cases, using a combination of military pressure and judicious negotiations in order to finally get the hostage free and unharmed.
However, the Gaza Strip remains under continued blockage, with no more than a trickle of supplies being allowed in, to avert outright starvation. At the time of writing some 6000 Gazans are already for a month unable to return home, being stranded under the hot summer sun on the Egyptian side of the Rafah Border Crossing -- the Gaza Strip's sole access to the outside world, now hermetically closed and sealed.
No partner times two
Since the so-called "generous offers" presented by Barak in his previous tenure, and whose rejection served as the effective casus belli for the numerous small and large military offensives launched since October 2000, the dominant discourse of the Israeli mainstream held that "there is no partner."
All Palestinian leaders have been categorized as being either bloodthirsty terrorists who must be isolated and fought against, or weaklings who cannot be trusted with any real power. From the official Israeli point of view, the dramatic events in Gaza simply created two Palestinian governments -- one of either type.
Immediately upon Abu Mazen dissolving the National Unity Government and appointing a new cabinet headed by economist Salam Fayad -- the one Palestinian to effectively possess a personal "Good Guy" certificate from George W. Bush -- Olmert proclaimed the new situation to show "a great promise."
The new Palestinian government, free of Hamas presence and outspokenly hostile to Hamas for its Gaza misdeeds, was to be coddled, encouraged and "strengthened." That did not mean, however, that it was to get any real power in the West Bank, which was supposed to be under its rule. The idea of removing checkpoints and roadblocks, briefly mooted by Olmert as "gesture to help Abu Mazen" was once again unceremoniously vetoed by the generals and security chiefs.
Even while Israel's PM every day proclaims outspoken sympathy for the leader of Fatah Movement, with the fall of night the military units supposedly accountable to that Prime Minister are continuing to hunt, detain and often kill members of the same Fatah -- as of all Palestinian factions impartially -- throughout the West Bank...
Prisoners' small change
Olmert's one gesture of actual support for Abu Mazen -- aside from a "gradual and phased" disgorging of the detained tax moneys which are unquestionably the Palestinians' own property -- was the release of 250 Palestinian prisoners out of more than ten thousands incarcerated by Israel.
Olmert ceremoniously proclaimed this prisoner release in the presence of Abu Mazen, as well as of President Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah of Jordan, at the Sharm a-Sheikh Summit -- a "photo opportunity" which failed to greatly impress either Israelis or Palestinians.
There followed weeks of wrangling about the identity of prisoners to be released, with the security services trying -- as they did on past occasions -- to fob off the Palestinians with prisoners whose terms are nearly over anyway.
Also as on previous occasions, "prisoners with blood on the hands" would be excluded. This means that Marwan Barghouti -- the one Fatah leader considered to have enough popularity and integrity to be able to unite the Palestinian people -- would for the time being remain behind bars, sentenced to "five consecutive life terms plus forty years."
Even from his prison cell, Barghouti has played an important role in all significant political moves of the past years. The idea of his release is being promoted by a significant faction within the political and military establishment, whose most well-known speaker is Minister Gideon Ezra -- himself a former senior operative of the Shabak Security Service and far from consistently dovish in his positions.
Ironically, Barghouti's release is most likely to be procured through the agency of none other than Hamas -- as part of a prisoner exchange involving the freeing of Israeli soldier Gil'ad Shalit, captured in June 2006 and held ever since in some secret Gaza Strip location.
On the day of the Sharm A-Sheikh Summit, the Hamas leaders upstaged Olmert by for the first time
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releasing a voice cassette of the captive soldier. The news captured the headlines, and Israel's mass circulation dailies -- including even the usually right-wing Ma'ariv -- published highly emotive conspicuous editorials calling upon the government to "Bring Gil'ad Home." Opinion polls showed a large majority in support of such a deal, even at the price of releasing many "prisoners with blood on their hands", from all Palestinian factions. That does not in any way mean that Olmert is going to do it, any time soon.
On a more fundamental issue, the governments of Israel and the United States are already for years on record as supporting a Two State Solution -- and nevertheless Israel's actual military occupation of the territory, now entering upon its forty-first year, has rarely seemed so far from coming to an end.
Something very rotten in Israel
As often happens in Israel, scandals and affairs follow each other in quick succession, yesterday's hot sensation being barely remembered today. Suddenly, the sex scandal of President Moshe Katzav burst again into the headlines, with the news of a plea bargain by which the rape charges against the former president would be dropped and he would walk free out of the court, with no more than a suspended sentence to show for his alleged sexual assaults of no less than ten women employees.
A call for protest action, issued by Feminist groups, gathered enormous momentum and drew a crowd estimated by police at twenty thousands to Tel-Aviv's Rabin Square.
Many demonstrators felt that the scandalous privileged treatment of "The Presidential Rapist" was but the tip of the iceberg -- while others were hostile to any linking of the Katzav Affair with wider issues. It might be worthwhile to end this account with an excerpt from the speech of Liat Rosenberg, delivered to the sound of a tumultuous mixture of cheers and boos:
"In the past days we heard Katzav's victims in the media. There is nothing new in such stories, except for the fact that they were published. I hear such stories thousands of times, in my work at the Tel Aviv Rape Crisis Centre, and usually they get no publicity whatsoever.
These victims of rape, and many other victims of all kinds, are being silenced. There is something very rotten in an Israeli society in which oppression of all kinds is a daily reality, and which is silencing and hiding that oppression.
A rotten society that again and again elects the same recycled rotten leaders and uncritically swallows their utterings -- their hollow, oppressive, uncaring, violent, occupying utterings -- and that still buys into the pretence of a moral Israel and a chosen Jewish People. (...)
The gap continues to increase between the values that this country is supposed to represent and the actual rotten reality of xenophobia, alienation, commoditization and plea bargains. This cannot be my country. As long as a soldier who points his gun at children is a war hero and a famous rapist gets off Scot free, I will not call this my country!"
It was the voice of a new generation -- not yet so often getting the stage -- a generation which has never known something else than the ugly face of Israel the Occupier. Maybe they are more hardened, and will succeed where others have failed.
The Editors
Holon, July 10, 2007
Ad in Haaretz, June 22
Not everything
That is bad
For Palestine
Is good for Israel.
The split in Palestine
Is bad for Israel.
We need peace
With the entire Palestinian people
All their factions, all their territories
Supporters of Fatah, and supporters of Hamas
In the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip
The alternative Independence Ceremony of Yesh Gvul is already quite an institute by itself. On April 23 we came together for the tenth time, in front of the stairs opposite the Prime Minister's Office.
These stairs provide a natural podium, but this is also the place where Emil Grunzweig was killed by a grenade thrown by a right-winger, when walking at the front of a Peace Now demonstration. That was in 1983, in the aftermath of the IDF-supervised Sabra and Shatila Massacre.
Every year, some thousand people prefer to stand hours in the cold of the Jerusalem evening, to attend a simple but solemn ceremony -- instead of staying home and feeling alienated during the official 'Yom Ha'atzmaut' celebrations.
What is special about it is that Yesh Gvul succeeded to make this the event of everybody, not just of its own members. Paradoxically, it is the organization named "There is a border" which blurs the dividing lines between left-wing groups, by every year inviting a variety of representatives of different worthwhile initiatives.
As the invitation formulated it: "To light a beacon for an immediate cessation of senseless violence and of the Occupation regime that generates it, advocating a correction of the wrongs caused by Israeli society, urging an improvement in our attitude towards the weak and the needy among us, and expressing hope of peace with all our neighbours."
These noble aims were also this year in one way or another expressed by the torch lighters.
Akil A-Talalka, resident of Twil Abu Jarwal in the Negev, told of how his "illegal" home has been
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demolished five times -- and defiantly built again every time.
Prof. Kalman Altman, Hadash central member and a veteran Haifa activist, explained how his stamina is maintained by remembering that there are so many good people -- to prove which he read out a list of peace groups, MachsomWatch, Gush Shalom and a lot of others.
Johnny Bayu of the Center for Development of African Refugees, who found in Tel-Aviv a very precarious refuge from political persecution at home: "If Jews don't care about the weak who have nowhere to go, who will?"
Lakia Yardeni spoke of how difficult it was for Ethiopian Jews to get to Israel, of the difficulties of living as a black-skinned Israeli woman -- and of the difference which can be made by such things as the Ethiopian Women's Embroidery Project, maintained at the Negev town of Kiryat Gat by Ahoti ("My Sister"), a radical Feminist group.
Adv. Gabi Laski, human rights lawyer very much involved with Bil'in matters and with international peace activists getting deportation orders from the Israeli authorities, spoke as fiery as we know her from the courts -- crying out against laws which have nothing to do with justice.
Prof. Jad Ne'eman, cinematographer often dealing with sensitive political issues, spoke of his hesitation about participating in an Independence Ceremony -- even an alternative one -- and of deciding after all "to bear the burden of being an Israeli."
Maya Negev of Bnei Avraham (Children of Abraham), a group active against the brutality of the occupation in Hebron, told of the Hebronites' great aspiration: to be free to walk in all parts of their own city, with no barriers to tell them of streets reserved for settlers only.
Tali Fahima, who all by herself built bridges towards the militants of the Jenin Refugee Camp and who just got out from a long prison term imposed for that crime, had a long dedication to make ("I light the beacon on behalf of the Palestinians in Israeli prisons, Israeli Arabs who the conflict brought into prison, Lebanese imprisoned in Israel, and the Israelis imprisoned in Gaza and Lebanon -- all of them should be considered POWs"), showing herself the unbroken, intelligent and determined peace fighter whom we already knew her to be.
Amir Paster, a young conscientious objector imprisoned during the Second Lebanon War, spoke of how his father attempted to dissuade him from sharing a platform with "The Traitor Fahima" -- and how he defied a father who is very dear to him.
Anat Hoffman, former Jerusalem municipal councilor involved in anti-discrimination campaigns, spoke of the injustice and discrimination inflicted by Jews on Arabs, as well as on Jewish "dissidents", and of the long road with such obstacles as city bureaucrats, government bureaucrats, and bureaucratized rabbis.
The 24 year-old refusnik Busira Yitav, philosophy student and reserve lieutenant at the Nachal Brigade, couldn't come in person due to being in a military prison; his torch was lighted by all the children who were present together.
The last one who spoke was Adam Keller, arousing some rare laughter when he reported his exchange with Bank Hapoalim upon its patriotic-commercial gesture of letting everybody "paint the country blue-and-white." (His full text follows hereafter.)
Interspersed through the whole event, Ofer Golani and Noam Lekah sang and played the guitar. Sound and texts added to the evening.
Shooting and laughing
Words spoken by Adam Keller as Beacon Lighter.
The day before yesterday I received a nice gift from Bank Hapoalim, the Workers' Bank which has long ceased to have anything to do with workers: a nylon bag full of small Israeli national flags "Made in China." The accompanying letter asked me to raise the flags so as "to help paint the country Blue and White."
I sent the gift back to the Central Directorate of Bank Hapoalim (50 Rothschild Boulevard, Tel Aviv). I thanked them but remarked that as long as the State of Israel continues to use brutal force in order to paint in Blue and White territories that do not belong to it, I would not be able to participate in raising this flag.
In a month from now, we are going to mark an unhappy birthday: forty years to the occupation. Already for forty years, two thirds of Israel's total history, the occupation continues -- a malignant cancerous growth, which is becoming bigger and even more dangerous with every passing year. Until now, this country is unwilling or unable to undertake the necessary operation. I hope and pray that it is not yet too late, that it is still possible to get rid of the occupation and recover from its effects.
For many years we have talked of the phenomenon known as "shooting and crying": those people who perpetrated horrifying deeds in the Occupied Territories or in Lebanon and elsewhere, and afterwards cried and said how sorry they were and how much it pained them to do these things -- which did not stop them from afterwards doing new horrible things and then again crying and being sorry. We have condemned them and mocked them for their hypocrisy -- and rightly so.
But in recent years there is hardly any "shooting and crying" left. Instead, there is a new phenomenon, which I call "shooting and laughing." Sincere people, quite lacking in hypocrisy. People who perpetrate horrible acts and are quite happy with what they had done and utter not one word of regret. And there are such not only in the territories of occupation. The public life of the state of Israel is nowadays full of those who steal and laugh, or rape and laugh, or spit in our faces and laugh.
A typical example is Dan Halutz, the famed pilot who slept well at night after a one-ton bomb was thrown on Gaza and killed fourteen civilians, eight
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of them children. A slight bump in the wing is all he felt. In fact, one thing did disturb him -- when the Gush Shalom movement sent letters to army officers, warning them that their acts might constitute war crimes. Then, he called for Gush Shalom to be outlawed. I personally got at the time some thirty anonymous phone calls, threatening me with murder. Well, now he is no longer the Army Chief of Staff, and we are still around!
It should be mentioned, however, that even when Dan Halutz was kicked out of the army in infamy, his fall was soft and cushioned -- directly into a prestigious course at Harvard University, participation in which is considered as a major gateway into the world of international business. $56,000 is the price of participation in that course. It was, of course, paid by the IDF out of our tax money.
Now, the directors of big companies stand in line to offer Mr. Halutz senior management positions. And in two or three years he intends to go into politics. Not just into politics. Not for him "just a miserable humdrum ministry." He will settle for nothing less than the Ministry of Defence. And in our nice country, it is far from inconceivable that he will get his wish. "He will still be back" as the song says.
I spoke a lot about Dan Halutz, not because that man is so important in himself. He simply represents and symbolizes perfectly so many phenomena, the connection between occupation and corruption, and between Israeli chutzpah and war crimes, and between capital and politics, and between the army and capital, and what "Pioneer" signified two generations ago and what it means now. ["Halutz" is "Pioneer" in Hebrew].
I would like to conclude with a few wishes. First, and perhaps the most important, I would like to wish all of us never to break and despair -- even when the situation sometimes looks quite hopeless. And let us always remember that we are not only struggling to free the oppressed Palestinians, which is a worthy and righteous cause. We are fighting to preserve our own future in this land.
I would like to wish that there would be no third generation of occupation refusers. A second generation of refusers we already have. In many families the father went to prison fifteen or twenty years ago, for refusing to serve the occupation, and now the sons -- and also the daughters -- go to prison in their turn.
For myself, for many years I had been thinking of 2002 as a small cloud on the horizon, which kept becoming bigger and bigger. 2002 was when my son Uri was going to be eighteen years old. And then 2002 came around, and Uri went to prison for half a year, and I am very proud of him.
At least for the children who are now in the elementary schools, and in the kindergartens, and in the cradles, and those who are not yet born, I can still hope. I wish they would never get to see the inside of Military Prison 4 and Military Prison 6, that they will know of occupation and oppression only from history books.
And I would like to wish that an Independence Day would come when this square will be empty. That the State of Israel will change and we will no longer feel alienated by its official holidays and official ceremonies, and will no longer feel the need to have our own alternative ceremonies in order not to suffocate completely.
And that there will be no longer a need for a movement called "Yesh Gvul" ["There is a Border/There is a Limit"] because it will be generally accepted and recognized that the state of Israel has a physical border, a border of peace, recognized by the neighbours and in International Law, and that it has moral limits defining what the state and its army may do -- and what they may not.
Now, I have the honour of lighting this torch for the glory of the State of Israel and the State of Palestine, living side by side in peace and good neighbourliness, without occupation, without oppression and without discrimination, and building together a future of peace.
A small but not insignificant success
+++ In September 2003, advocates Avigdor Feldman and Michael Sfard presented to the Supreme Court in Jerusalem an appeal -- initiated by Yesh Gvul and co-sponsored by a other peace groups and by well-known public figures -- asking for a criminal investigation to be launched by the army's Judicial Branch, regarding alleged criminal offences committed during the planning and the execution of the liquidation of Hamas militant Salah Mustafa Shehada in Gaza City on July 22, 2002.
The Shehada Affair is still well remembered, despite a considerable number of later gruesome "incidents." The Israeli Air Force had chosen to perform this a "pin-point pre-emptive strike" by the dropping of a one-ton bomb on a crowded Gaza residential neighbourhood, late at night. Shehada, a senior Hamas military leader, was indeed killed and his home totally destroyed. Fourteen of his neighbours, eight of them children -- who just had the fatal bad luck to be living on this street -- were also blown up.
As the Yesh Gvul activists predicted in advance, the judges were in no hurry to pick up this hot potato, and for several years they again and again postponed hearing the case.
For its part, Yesh Gvul gave official notice that "The Supreme Court in Jerusalem is the last Israeli stop on the route of this train. Its next stop would already be outside the boundaries of Israel, among the institutions set by the international community to enforce International Law."
These were not idle words. Yesh Gvul made contact with the British advocate Daniel Machover, who started energetic moves through the British legal system.
His efforts gained considerable attention when Doron Almog -- former Commanding General South -- had to beat a hasty retreat at Heathrow
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Airport and fly back to Israel, when informed that a detention order had been issued against him by the British Police, on war crimes charges connected with the Shehada Affair and with several other issues (the destruction of 59 homes at Rafah Refugee Camp on the night of January 10, 2002, and the killing of the baby Nuha Shukri Almakadma on March 3, 2003).
Meanwhile, the mills of Israeli justice continued their slow and careful grinding. In December 2006, the Supreme Court took up the issue of assassinations and "liquidations" ("targeted killings") in general.
The panel headed by then Supreme Court President Aharon Barak ruled that the government did have "the right to assassinate terrorists." At the same time, the court said that if such an assassination resulted in the death of innocent civilians, the decision and its implementation must be "objectively" examined to determine what went wrong -- especially, whether the army could or should have known that the bombing was likely to kill innocent people. The court did not specify, however, exactly who should conduct such an inquiry, and the Shehada Affair was not explicitly referred to.
It was only on June 17, 2007 -- nearly five years after the fatal bombing in Gaza -- that the judges at last took it up. It turned out that the army had, in fact, already conducted an internal investigation -- a classified investigation with classified results, of which government attorney Shai Nitzan declined to divulge any hint. But under pressure from the justices, he then pledged that the army would "consider" agreeing to an independent probe, whose findings would be given to both the appellants and the court.
Thereupon, the panel -- headed by the newly appointed Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch -- gave the state 45 days to reply definitively whether or not it was going to establish such a probe.
And there things rest at the time of writing, with Yesh Gvul cautiously "commending the justices on this brave decision" and expressing hope "that the probe committee will indeed be set up, and will carry out its investigation in an unprejudiced and unbiased manner according to the rules of International Law."
More on this subject: www.yeshgvul.org/index_e.asp
****
About alternate realities
and drowned celebrations
Once, it had been a distinctive slogan of the radical left. Now, the words 'Jerusalem -- Capital of Two States' appeared on large placards in Hebrew, Arabic and English behind the podium in the May 11 'Alternative Jerusalem Day' ceremony organized by Peace Now. Several hundred people had gathered on the plot of grass outside the Damascus Gate in the Old City Wall of Jerusalem -- mostly Israelis, but also Palestinians.
In order to arrive, East Jerusalemite Palestinians had to run the gauntlet of police and Border Guard checkpoints further east, where the forces of Israeli Law and Order made a considerable effect of intimidation -- thereby providing a visible proof of the event's main point: that Jerusalem is not united, and that the government sponsored celebrations of its "unification" forty years ago are an expensive sham (the costs are in the tens of millions of dollars).
Flags with the Peace Now logo, the Meretz Party's green flags and some red ones of the Hadash Communists fluttered above the crowd -- as did a single Israeli national flag, which some Palestinians and also some of the Israelis present found distasteful in what was acknowledged by everybody to be an occupied territory.
Peace Now also designed a special symbol for this event: instead of the single rampant lion appearing on the official coat of arms of the Jerusalem municipality, there were two co-equal lions facing each other, almost close enough to embrace.
The Peace Now movement did not produce fitting stickers for the occasion, but an activist had thought of bringing the Gush Shalom sticker 'Jerusalem, Capital of Two States' which was very popular among the crowd.
"This is not the Alternative Jerusalem Day Ceremony," said the keynote speaker, Meretz Party Leader Yossi Beilin. "The alternative ceremony is what is scheduled by the government for next week, a ceremony marking an event which never happened, a unification which never took place, an alternate reality having no connection with real life.
"Not that I have any longing for the pre-1967 Jerusalem in which I grew up, a city bisected by an ugly concrete wall. We look forward to two coexisting Jerusalems, the Israeli one including everything Jewish, the Palestinian one everything Arab, and the Old City shared by a special regime." (He referred to the detailed proposal laid out in the Geneva Agreement, but said he was not wedded to its precise details).
Pepe Alalo, Jerusalem City councilor, spoke of concrete details: "Who can say that this city is unified? Just go around the eastern neighborhoods, see what a terrible neglect of the roads and infrastructures. Do they seriously claim that this is part of the Capital of the State of Israel? And the same is true for the educational system, health, everything."
Abdullah Abdullah, Palestinian legislator from East Jerusalem and former Palestinian Ambassador to Athens, concluded his speech with crying out slogans which even those with rudimentary knowledge of Arabic could understand and applaud: "No to Occupation! Yes to Peace! Two Capitals for Two States!"
Dov Henin, Knesset Member for the Hadash Communists and a noted environmental activist: "We are not only fighting the injustice of the occupation. We are also fighting for the future of Jerusalem as a city, for the simple daily life of people who live in it.
"With this megalomaniac extension of Jerusalem in all directions, out of nationalistic and demographic
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considerations and against the most basic principles of city planning, the city centre is inevitably degenerating and collapsing."
And former MK Mossi Raz remarked on the latest of these grandiose plans: "The crazy idea we heard this week, of erecting three whole new Jewish neighborhoods in the midst of the Arab areas of Jerusalem, shows that they, too, know we are right. They, too, know that Jerusalem is not united. This kind of mad trampling bulldozer behavior is not how you behave in a United City."
There was a short simulation game, with an Israeli and a Palestinian activist respectively acting the roles of the future mayors of Yerushalayim and Al-Quds, ceremoniously inaugurating a modern new border crossing between the two capitals. And popular singer Sha'anan Strit excited the younger part of the audience with a wild rock version of "Jerusalem of Gold" (from which the more nationalistic lyrics were absent -- though it was anyway difficult to distinguish the words.)
Finally, participants were asked to go to a large board placed nearby and sign a common pledge:
"Jerusalem of Peace! -- We, Palestinians and Israelis exhausted by forty years of occupation, bloodshed and lack of hope, have gathered here today to demand from our leaders a change of direction, and to prove that that there is a chance for peace.
"Jerusalem is important to us. It could be one of the most wonderful places in the world. But instead of sharing it peacefully we have all been losing out for forty years.
"We, Israelis and Palestinians, women and men, recognize the importance of Jerusalem to the other side, and are willing to reach a compromise based on the principle of two capitals for two states in this holy city."
+++" The official ceremonies to mark "Forty Years of Unified Jerusalem", which had been planned and prepared for months by the government and the Jerusalem Municipality, were scheduled for May 15 (the anniversary of the IDF entry into the Old City by the Jewish calendar).
As happened, however, this year's May 15 was an unusually rainy day. Most of the carefully prepared official celebrations -- such as mass fireworks over the Old City Walls, a parade of IDF veterans and a speech by the Prime Minister on the 1967 battle site -- had to be cancelled. And the settler religious-messianic youths, who insisted upon parading and literally "showing the flag" in the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, got soaked to the bone. "Perhaps God was trying to tell them something" suggested Yediot Aharonot's satirist B. Michael.
The Palestinians of East Jerusalem were the worst to suffer -- with some low-lying areas being totally flooded (basic infrastructure in these areas has been consistently neglected by the Jerusalem Municipality). Nevertheless, visitors to these neighborhoods reported on that day an unaccustomed lighthearted mood...
****
40 Years-Enough!
a 6-day whirlwind of protest
By Adam Keller
"The Six Day War has already lasted Forty Years! Time to end it!" Shauki Hatib, representing Israel's Arab citizens, was quoted in Yediot Aharonot's reporting on the big June 9 demonstration.
He was not the only one who felt this way. By an ever more brutal exercise of naked force Israel has now kept, for forty years, the territories conquered in those swift six days of war in 1967 -- a brilliant military victory turning into a moral quagmire in which the country has been floundering and sinking ever deeper for a full two-thirds of its history.
A lot of people and groups felt the urgent need to do something, not to let this date go unheeded. To shake their country "Until she opens her eyes" -- a quotation from a famous Israeli song (sometimes also used by right-wingers) which was the title for a day-long event by combined human rights groups at a converted hanger in the port of Tel-Aviv, June 1.
The horrible situation in "Israel's Backyard", which goes mostly unreported in the mainstream media (and which many Israelis don't want to hear about) was presented in comprehensive lectures by dedicated field workers, sharing some of their most disturbing findings -- and some of them digressing into describing very emotional personal experiences undergone while collecting the data.
A thorough analysis of the very depressing situation was offered by a variety of sociologists, economists, political scientists, past and present diplomats and political figures, in several symposiums with impeccable academic credentials and in less formal events at tents erected in street corners and on university campus lawns.
An activist TV group succeeded to get for this week a license to screen daily half an hour "Community TV", and they used it to bring reports not shown elsewhere. (Their charter only forbade any mention of specific political parties, and they adhered to it.)
No less than five groups of artists, independently of each other, had since early this year been working on exhibitions opening in this week at galleries around the country -- of photos taken directly in the Occupied Territories by Israelis, Palestinians or both together (some of them at considerable risk to the photographers) and of paintings -- by local and international painters -- inspired by the situation there.
Less formally, large-scale copies of the most shocking photos were pasted over night in central city locations. And ad busters changed the text of huge commercial signs at the sides of intercity highways to read "Forty Years of State Terrorism."
Similar signs were hung beside the enormous portrait of Zionism's Founding Father Theodore Herzl, at the entrance to the thriving city of Herzliya, and activists staged such "direct actions"
Tzavta Club, Tel Aviv, June 7.)
****
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as burning garbage cans filled with tyres at the entrance to Tel-Aviv and blocking Jerusalem streets with barbed wire -- complete with genuine IDF warning signs taken from West Bank roadblocks.
There were also the "flash mobs" suddenly appearing in shopping malls and chiding shoppers for their addiction to consumer goods and indifference to oppression; and the addition of a red powder to public fountains throughout Tel-Aviv, which made them resemble fountains of blood for days; and the "Critical Mass", dozens of bicycles decorated with black balloons and red "stop the occupation" flags driving with deliberate slowness in the roads surrounding the compound of the Ministry of Defence and the IDF High Command...
Meanwhile, for one day the entrance to the Tel-Aviv CinemathŠque -- where documentary films on the occupation were shown and numerous peace and reconciliation groups had set up stalls -- was converted into a military checkpoint, an exact physical replica of those dotted across the West Bank, with visitors needing to shuffle slowly through a long and narrow passage hemmed in by gleaming metal bars and gruffly ordered to present their I.D.'s by an actor wearing an IDF uniform and threateningly holding a (plastic) submachine gun.
And the Women in Black, who had been holding unbroken regular weekly vigils since 1988, for this week increased the frequency to daily vigils -- with their characteristic big black palms inscribed with "Stop the Occupation" in Hebrew and Arabic.
Aside from trying to bring the Occupied Territories into the heart of Tel-Aviv and West Jerusalem (and to a lesser degree, of other Israeli cities and towns) there were quite a few actions in the Territories themselves.
The army erected barriers and prevented Palestinians from joining the anti-settler protest at Hebron's Old City, and conversely blocked most of the Israelis who had intended to join the Palestinian peace rally at Tulkarm.
But Israelis and Palestinians in quite big numbers did succeed in meeting each other and amicably mingling, mainly in and around Jerusalem: at the rally in the football stadium of Anata; the joint car cavalcade around the Old City walls and up to Mount Olive; the two days of the Peace Song Festival at Tantur on the Jerusalem-Bethlehem border; and the launching of the Jerusalem Initiative, affirming support from both sides for the Two State Solution, at the conference hall of the Notre Dame of Jerusalem Center -- where the Catholic Church offers a convenient neutral venue at a location which was a deserted no-man's-land between 1948 and 1967.
Members of the Gay and Queer communities expressed their own opposition to the occupation, both as organized groups within the Tel-Aviv Gay Pride Parade which by coincidence fell within the same week, and in some smaller specific events -- picturesque and sometimes deliberately provocative.
Gay militancy was increased by the massive offensive against them launched by ultra-Orthodox groups in Jerusalem -- a bigotry that quite a few Gays see as another manifestation of the narrow-minded racism of the occupation.
The Golan Heights -- also captured in the same 1967 war, mostly emptied of their Syrian population, settled with Israelis and formally annexed to Israel -- were less highlighted. Still, a newly-founded women's group, centered in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat HaSharon, held a Day of Action to collect signatures throughout the country on a petition calling upon the government to stop rejecting the peace feelers of Syrian President Assad.
Altogether, it was a more hectic and action-packed week than we have seen in quite a long time. It was physically quite impossible for a single person to attend all the events -- especially on the particularly packed June 5, the precise anniversary of when it all started forty years ago.
The umbrella organization known as "Occupation 40" gave up in advance the idea of trying to supervise and tightly coordinate all the events, as being both impossible and inherently undesirable. Instead, the formula of "a convergence" was adopted by numerous autonomous groups, each expressing the common rejection of the occupation and all its works by its own means and methods.
The joint headquarters confined itself to compiling a comprehensive list of all activities and making it available to activists and to the Israeli, Palestinian and international media, maintaining some contact and exchange of information with similar initiatives outside the country, designing a logo with a large bleeding "40" numeral which was made into a widely-distributed poster -- and with organizing a single joint action in which all groups could share, in addition to their own events.
Converging on Tel-Aviv
Organizing meetings had taken place with increasing frequency at the Minshar Art Academy (which itself organized and hosted a historical 1967-2007 photo exhibition), at the Kibbutz Movement Headquarters and on the premises of the Tel-Aviv Heinrich Boell Institute.
When the moment came near, and considerable physical space was needed for the preparation and storage of posters and leaflets, the whole rooftop of a ramshackle, half-ruined building at a Jaffa industrial zone was placed at the campaign's disposal by a friendly entrepreneur.
Some fascinating and original ideas for the main event, raised by activists -- such as constructing a giant physical maze in the form of the numbers "40" -- turned out to be too expensive or otherwise impracticable.
Finally, the idea of a protest march ending with a rally -- not precisely original, but still a worthy and time-honored formula in the Israeli peace movement -- was settled upon.
A considerable lot of negotiating, haggling and diplomatic smoothing of ruffled feathers was needed
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to get many groups and individuals into harness together: Zionists, non-Zionists and Anti-Zionists; supporters of the Two States Solution and of the One State; staunch respectable upholders of legality and wild youths who felt that twitting a policeman's tail was the greatest of funs...
In addition, there were all kinds of rivalries and old unsettled accounts between competing groups, on less principled grounds. Still, there was more goodwill and less obstructionism than in some past joint efforts, with everybody -- whatever their differences -- feeling the urgent need to make a good showing on this anniversary. Negotiating with the police on the route, too, was less difficult than in some past occasions.
The date of Saturday, June 9, was chosen -- both because Saturday is the best time of the week for supporters of the Israeli peace movement to gather, and because it was the day chosen internationally for demonstrations and protests against the Israeli occupation, all around the globe.
"Thousands continue to arrive"
At 6:00 pm, the appointed gathering time, there were only a few scattered people at the rendezvous point at the Rabin Square, a place that looks quite desolate when empty. But the anxiety which organisers felt was premature. Israelis, at least in this respect, are indeed a Middle Eastern people and not very punctual.
By 6:15 there was already a respectable crowd, with chartered buses arriving from different parts of the country and Tel-Avivians coming on foot in increasing streams. By 6:30 it was already possible for spokespersons to phone newspaper editorial offices, urge those not yet present to send a reporter, and say truthfully enough: "Thousands of demonstrators have already turned up, and thousands more are continuing to arrive."
Time until the demonstration marshals started getting everybody into the line of march was used by various groups to distribute leaflets advertising further actions planned for the coming days: A poetry-reading evening, to be attended by 30 Jewish
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and 30 Arab poets; The Victory March to Commemorate 40 Years to the War of National Erection (with a cartoon of a tank made into a very blatant phallic symbol); a planned joint donation of blood by Jewish and Arab women, to Palestinian and Israeli medical institutions. A commemoration was announced for the Mugrabi Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, 130 family homes demolished by Israeli bulldozers on June 11, 1967 -- the occupation's first major act of brutality, in which a woman inhabitant was crushed to death under the ruins of her home. The commemoration was to be followed by the rebuilding of a more recently destroyed Palestinian house.
The presence of the Raelians, whose leaflets told that mankind was created by extra-terrestrial aliens via genetic engineering, aroused some debate ("What are these people doing here? This has nothing to do with them!" "What do you care that there is at least one sect on our side.").
One leaflet was a facsimile of an advertisement published in Ha'aretz on September 22, 1967:
"Our right to defend ourselves against destruction does not give the right to oppress others. Occupation entails Foreign Rule / Foreign Rule entails Resistance / Resistance entails Oppression / Oppression entails Terror and Counter-Terror / The victims of terror are usually innocent / Keeping the Occupied Territories will make us into a people of murderers and victims / Get out of the Occupied Territories immediately!"
The present leaflet added just one line "That was published 40 years ago -- shall we wait another forty years before ending the occupation and rule over another people?" (In 1967, the ad's signatories -- just 12 in number, supporters of the Matzpen Group -- had been widely condemned as "The Most Extreme of All Extremists"; nowadays, they are almost as widely hailed and embraced as brave and far-seeing pioneers, as was remarked at the memorial for their recently-deceased organizer Shimon Tzabar).
The stain that cannot be removed
The insistent rolling of drums of the Batucada Peace Drummers was an effective sign for getting the march underway, bloc after bloc and contingent after contingent, by an order carefully discussed and arranged in advance -- followed by a large crowd of peace supporters without any manifest factional loyalty. The Communists carried their red flags and Meretz supporters had green ones, and there were also Anarchist black flags emblazoned with a large "A." Some Israeli national flags were brought by Peace Now supporters, and a few Palestinian flags were brought by Arabs from the Galilee, but both were greatly outnumbered by the Gush Shalom flags, featuring a circle containing the Israeli and Palestinian colors together, on a white background. And in among the flags, quite a few participants held olive branches aloft.
The organizing coalition provided a large quantity of printed signs, in two varieties -- red and black -- reading "40 occupation -- a stain which cannot be removed!" Many copies were held aloft of two posters -- one with the 40 Occupation logo in white on black, the other with the photo of armed soldiers and a traditionally-dressed woman crying on the ruins of a demolished house.
The vans from whose loudspeakers the chanting of slogans was coordinated were decorated with enormous banners: Stop the Occupation! Yes to Israeli-Palestinian Peace! Back to the 1967 borders -- via an agreement! No more unilateralism -- Yes to Immediate Negotiations for Regional Peace! No to Walls and Fences on Palestinian land! Dismantle the settlements! Checkpoints strangle the Palestinians -- remove them now! In Gaza and Sderot, children want
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to live! In addition, many of the marchers had prepared their own handmade signs, some with elaborate cartoons and drawings:
'The occupation is our shame!' '40 years of occupation, 40 years of despair', 'Stop Israeli aggression, free Palestine', 'If it is possible to talk to us, it is possible to talk to them', 'The 40 years' occupation balance sheet: 90 Billion Dollars wasted, 18,000 houses destroyed, 600,000 (!) Palestinians spent time behind bars -- shall we continue?' 'Army support for criminal settlers -- evil, stupidity, shame', 'The Wall will fall, Occupation will fall', '40 years of robbery' 'Occupation is a cancer' 'The answer to racism -- Israel without Zionism'; 'Occupation is the terrorist infrastructure'; 'We all say no to the occupation!' 'Jews and Arabs -- we refuse to be enemies!' 'The occupation corrupts,' 'The settlements -- Israel's catastrophe.'
The Combatants for Peace banner depicted two fighters throwing away their guns and extending their hands towards each other. A group of Italian volunteers, engaged in helping out at threatened Palestinian villages, had their own banner with '40 anni -- basta!' and the banner from the Japanese women of Shinfojin Akiruno was composed of 40 pieces sewn together, each donated by one of their activists.
As the march turned from the Ibn Gvirol Street to King Saul Boulevard, a group burst out with "Peretz Peretz, Hey hey hey, How many kids did you kill today!" and was answered by another group's "Dismantle the guns/ Evacuate the settlers/ Don't want to die in vain/ Now is the time to make peace!" (It all rhymes in Hebrew).
"This is the last time we call out against Peretz, by the next demonstration there will be a new Defence Minister for this slogan" remarked one of the youths.
Teddy Katz' voice could be heard from the loudspeaker of the Gush Shalom van inviting the many bystanders to join the protest march.
Meanwhile, the people of the Smile Liberation Front -- wearing a motley collection of mismatched military uniforms, and with clown makeup on their faces -- were energetically crawling on the asphalt, in a credible mimicking of soldiers on field exercise. A girl at the side was tightly clutching a diminutive brown dog whose shaking she was vainly trying to calm down. "I must go away, I should not have brought him here. He comes with me every week to the Women in Black, and he was so brave barking at the Kahane Fascists when they tried to attack us. But here the crowd and the noise are just too much for him, poor dear."
'Refuse to be enemies!'
As on earlier occasions, the steps of the Sha'ar Tzion Public Library facing the Tel Aviv Museum Plaza were used as an improvised podium -- saving the demonstration's budget a considerable expense. Under the banner announcing the library's 120's birthday -- a truly venerable institution by Israeli standards -- the organisers had hanged their own: "After 40 years of occupation, Gaza and Sderot are burning."
Using the powerful loudspeakers, moderators Khulood Badawi and Yana Kanapova used the time until the crowd finished filing into the plaza to exhort and orchestrate a burst of energetic chanting:
"Peace -- Yes! Occupation -- No! Peace -- Yes! The Wall -- No! Negotiations -- Yes! War -- No! Fence and Wall -- the way to Hell! Occupation breeds hatred -- Peace, the way out!"
"Forty years? Who could have imagined it!" said a white-haired man at the edge of the crowd. "I remember 1987, already then we said and wrote that Twenty Years of Occupation was far too long, and that it could not go on like this. And now the nightmare has gone on another twenty years, and became even much worse, and who knows how much longer it will still continue?" A remark by the woman who passed by, holding a hand-painted sign with "Occupation is Our Shame and Disgrace", made him angry: "Me? Despair? Not on your life! When you don't see me in such a demonstration you will know I am in my grave!"
"I am not so much counting years," said the youngster with the weird hairdo and tattoos who stood nearby. "I was born into this dirty mess, it was here all my life. We just have to go on punching these bastards on the nose -- the ministers, the generals, the settlers, the police, the whole fucking bunch of them. They will fall in the end. Look at the shape Bush the Asshole is in now, already."
The discussion was cut short by Shauki Hatib taking the floor. "I am speaking to you, here in Tel Aviv, in a time of danger. Forty years after the 1967 war, there is loud talking of a new war, and there is also a rising tide of racist incitement against the Arab population in Israel.
Everything we say is rejected out of hand, because it is said by Arabs. A year ago we have opposed the war in Lebanon. We did not oppose it because we were against the Jews. We opposed it because it was bad for everybody in Israel, Jews and Arabs alike. Now, a year later, everybody agrees that it was a bad war. Does that change the attitude to us? Only to the worse!
Nevertheless, I am optimistic. Yes, I am optimistic! The fact that we stand here together in Tel-Aviv, thousands of Jews and thousands of Arabs together, united in the struggle against the occupation, is a good reason to be optimistic!"
The crowd burst out in a prolonged chanting of "Jews and Arabs / Refuse to be enemies! Refuse to be / enemies! Refuse to be / enemies! Refuse to be / enemies!"
Next to speak was Naomi Hazan, former Meretz Knesset Member, who started on a somber note: "I can't say good evening. The fact that we mark forty years of occupation means this is a bad evening, an evening of pain, of shame, of anger and frustration, of realizing that our efforts in the past forty years have failed. Our efforts to end the occupation and achieve a peace agreement have
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means that we have to renew the struggle, continue it and intensify it -- and this time win!
We have to protest -- protest against the Wall, against the settlement extension, against oppression, against the people who at this moment sit in Jerusalem and plan the next war!" (Wild clapping) "But protest is not enough. We have to support a political solution, to push until it is implemented. There are lessons to learn from the past ten years. No more unilateral actions, no more partial steps, certainly no more "managing the conflict", no more obstruction tactics, no more preconditions for negotiations and preconditions for the preliminaries to negotiations. No more talking of a Peace Process as a need in itself.
The time has come to tackle the main problems, the fundamental problems, and to solve them. And the solution is clear and obvious: two states for two peoples, two capitals for two states in Jerusalem, dismantling of settlements, and yes -- a solution for the refugees according to the UN resolutions including an Israeli admission of Israel's part in creating this problem, and an Israeli apology for that part.
There is a peace coalition of Israelis and Palestinians, who think alike, who can and should work together to achieve this solution. There is a wide international backing. A Palestinian state will set Israel free, free from being an occupier! (clapping).
Before passing on to the next speaker, Badawi read out the long list of cities where demonstrations against the occupation have taken place: London, Washington, Sydney, Brussels, Sao Paolo, Toronto, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Dublin, Rome, Osaka, Amsterdam, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Geneva... Each name was greeted with clapping. Also a statement read from the podium, of solidarity with the demonstrators against the G-8 Summit in Germany, aroused cheers.
Revenge is useless
Bassem Aramin of Anata, a large Palestinian suburb of Jerusalem, was among the Palestinian founders of Combatants for Peace. Five months ago, he got to the headlines under tragic circumstances when his ten-year-old daughter Abeer was killed by Israeli "Border Guards" (euphemism for the notorious Israeli Riot Police).
He spoke in Arabic, every sentence being translated into Hebrew -- though on several occasions he corrected the translator, exhibiting a fair knowledge of Hebrew himself. "I don't seek revenge; none of us seeks revenge; revenge is useless. We who have fought have come together to make peace. Palestinians who have taken the gun in order to free our people from the occupation, and Israelis who have come to our land as soldiers with guns, as occupiers, as killers. We are now all together in one movement, we are trying to end the occupation and make peace.
Do you know why the army is not allowing Israeli citizens to enter the Palestinian territories? Do you know why? They say it is for your safety, but that is not the real reason. The reason Israelis are not allowed to enter the territories is that your politicians are afraid that the people would find out the truth about what's going on there. The truth is that your boys who were sent there have become bad boys, without any reservations or red lines left, bad boys who are making the Palestinians' life unbearable. This is what they don't want you to know!"
Nurit Peled Elhanan, who followed directly afterwards, had been billed as one of four co-equal speakers. But planned or not, hers was unquestionably the keynote speech.
"Bassam and me are both victims of the cruel occupation which is ravaging this country for forty years already. We have both come here to cry for the cruel fate of this country where my daughter Smadar and his daughter Abeer -- both named for flowers -- were murdered, at an interval of ten years from each other.
But what unites Bassam and me is not only the death that the occupation has visited upon us. What unites us is especially the belief and determination to so raise the children which are left to us that they will never again leave their lives in the hands of corrupt, greedy, power-seeking politicians and blood-thirsty conquering generals." (Full text at page 18-19.)
Yoav Kapshuk of the Y-net news website, walking through the crowd and seeking the two polar ends of the spectrum represented in the demonstration, talked with Yariv Oppenheimer of Peace Now ("Continued occupation means the destruction of Zionism, now is the time to act before the opportunity for peace is lost.") and with Yonatan Pollack of Anarchists Against The Wall ("Israel is creating an Apartheid system in the occupied territories, the international civil society must boycott Israel in order to force an end to the occupation.").
Meanwhile, the podium was taken by artists. Rona Klein sung one of the bitter Hanoch Levin satirical pieces which had shaken the Israeli society of 1968 and 1969, still barely out of the post-war euphoria: "The cook prepares meat for the General/ The General prepares a sumptuous meal for the cannons/The squad follows the sergeant-major/The sergeant major also goes the way of all flesh/My brother the hero has fallen for his country/His heart is now open to the grass/His blood has flowed out/Nothing will bring him back/Not even a special decree by the Army Chief of Staff..."
The three members of the Biluyim sung a piece of their own making, full of allusions to the heroic poetry of Israel's early years, with the refrain: "We have tried so hard, we have covered up the ruins, we have changed the names of all the streets, all we ever wanted was to sit with our fathers around the fire, as in the Good Old Days."
The final word of the evening was given to a performer in quite a different style, the rapper and hip-hop artist Sameh Zakout a.k.a. Saz, who had found the style created in black ghettos of America highly appropriate for his own life experience in the
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Arab community of Ramla -- a discriminated, marginalized and poverty-stricken minority in what had been an Arab city before 1948.
He immediately broke into a fast-moving rap song (Hebrew with some Arabic mixed in) telling of life hemmed in with walls and fences, trapped between police and drug pushers, and with the constant refrain "Every morning we wake up / To the same messed up reality / Every morning, every morning, every morning. / They sell you the same bullshit / Every morning, every morning, every morning."
Finally, he called upon the crowd to give "a very very loud shout, to let all the fascists around hear, all those who call us Stinking Arabs and Traitor Leftists or the other way around, let them all hear what we think of them." Only on the third try was he satisfied with the volume of unanimous shout of the crowd.
List of participating organizations:
Gush Shalom, Balad, Coalition of Women for Peace, Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), Ta'ayush, Hadash, Peace Now, Meretz Youth, Meretz Young-Our Colors, Yesh Gvul, New Profile, Combatants For Peace, The Alternative Information Center (AIC), Shministim Letter, Machsom Watch, Women In Black, The Fifth Mother, The Left Forum-Haifa University, Students' Coalition-Tel-Aviv University, Maki, Banki, Tandi, The Campus Will Not Remain Silent, Indymedia Israel, ACTV, Bereaved Families' Circle. In cooperation with: The Follow Up Committee For The Arab Population in Israel.
Postscript: The "Occupation 40" events had been announced in a major media campaign, and the impact of the many small and some bigger actions can be gauged by the rising howl of right-wingers that "the leftists have hijacked the commemoration of the Six Day War Victory."
Nadav Ha'etzni -- lawyer, settler leader and Ma'ariv columnist -- can serve as a typical example: "This week marks forty years for our return home, home to Hebron of Our Fathers, to Ruth's Bethlehem, and of course to Jerusalem, the very Fount of our National Existence. In 1967 Zionism was vindicated in Six Glorious Days. But now, instead of breaking out in a wild Hora dance to commemorate this anniversary, we are the target of a massive offensive of mourning and disinformation, aimed at completely distorting history.
The more the events of 40 years to the war came nearer, the more intensive the campaign of blackening everything national or Zionist or patriotic. -- I was invited to a discussion organized by the Bar Association in Eilat, under the seemingly neutral title 'Legal Aspects of forty years of Israeli rule in the Territories.' When I got there, I was shocked to find myself in the midst of a wild attack on our so-called 'Occupation', which some speakers actually characterized as 'the most barbaric in history' (Ma'ariv, June 1).
For his part, the mainstream senior commentator Sever Plotker of Yediot Aharonot remarked: "The anniversary of the Six Days' War is conspicuous in the complete absence of any official or public event to mark it -- except for the gatherings of the organizations marking 40 years to the occupation" (Yediot Aharonot, June 5).
Finally, one can quote the left-wing song writer Dan Almagor, who was invited to moderate a public discussion on the songs and popular culture of 1967 and the years immediately following it -- both those celebrating the war and the army and the beginnings of anti-war satire and protest.
"When I was asked to take responsibility for this evening, some months ago, the idea was an alternative event, with a more critical point of view on what happened in 1967. But the mainstream presentations to which this evening was supposed to be an alternative turned out to be already quite alternative themselves." (June 7, Tzavta Club, Tel-Aviv.)
****
Disgrace unto the nations
Nurit Peled-Elhanan
Speech at the June 9 Tel-Aviv rally
Good evening. It is a great honour for me to stand on this stage beside my friend and brother Bassam Aramin, a man of the Palestinian peace camp, one of the founders of the Combatants for Peace movement of which two of my sons, Alik and Guy, are members.
Only last week, on Tuesday in Anata and on Thursday in Tul Karem, the Combatants for Peace movement succeeded in organizing two massive gatherings and recruited ten thousand Palestinians to their goal -- a joint non-violent struggle against the occupation through close cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians. If not for the racist laws of the State of Israel all those thousands of people could be with us here this evening to prove once and for all that we have a partner.
Bassam and I are both victims of the cruel occupation that has been corrupting this country for forty years now. The two of us came this evening to lament the fate of this place that has buried our two daughters -- Smadar, whose name means 'the bud of the fruit', and Abeer 'the perfume of the flower', who were murdered at an interval of ten years, ten years during which this country has filled with the blood of children and the underground kingdom of children on which we tread day by day and hour by hour has grown to overflowing.
But what unites Bassam and me is not just the death that the Occupation sentenced us to. What unites us is principally faith and a willingness to raise the children that have been left to us so that they will never again allow corrupt, greedy and power-hungry politicians, or generals who thirst for blood and conquest to rule, over their lives and set them against each other.
No more will they allow the racism that has spread over this country to lead them off the path of peace and brotherhood that they have paved for themselves. Because only that brotherhood can bring down the wall of racism that is being built before our very eyes.
For forty years now, racism and megalomania have dictated our lives. Forty years during which more than four million people do not know the meaning of
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freedom of movement. Forty years, in which Palestinian children are born and raised as prisoners in their homes that the Occupation converted into a prison, deprived at the outset of all the rights that human beings are entitled to because they are human.
Forty years during which Israeli children are educated in racism of the type that has been unknown in the civilized world for decades. Forty years during which they have learned to hate the neighbours just because they are neighbours, to fear them without knowing them, to see a quarter of the citizens of the State as "a demographic danger" and an "enemy within", and to relate to the residents of the ghettos created by the policy of occupation as "a problem" that must be solved.
Only sixty years ago, Jews were residents of ghettos and seen in the eyes of their oppressors as a problem that needed to be solved. Only sixty years ago the Jews were enclosed behind ugly concrete and electrified walls topped with watchtowers manned by erect armed figures, and deprived of the ability to make a living or to raise their children with dignity.
Only sixty years ago racism exacted its price from the Jewish people. Today racism rules in the Jewish state, tramples people's dignity underfoot and deprives them of liberty, condemns all of us to lives of hell.
For forty years now the Jewish head has unceasingly been bowed in worship of racism while the Jewish mind is devising the most creative ways to devastate and demolish and destroy this country.
That is what remains of the Jewish genius, which has become Israeli. Jewish compassion, Jewish mercy, Jewish cosmopolitanism, love of humanity and respect for the other, have been long forgotten. Their place was claimed by racism.
It was only racism that motivated a Border Guard soldier to pull the trigger from inside his armoured vehicle and to shoot at the head of little Abeer as she huddled by the wall of her school, in fear of the military vehicle that was plopped down in the schoolyard as if it owned the place.
It is only racism that motivates the drivers of bulldozers to demolish houses on top of their occupants, to destroy vineyards and fields, to uproot centuries-old olive trees. Only racism can invent roads on which traffic is classified on the basis of race, and it is only racism that motivates our children to humiliate women who could be their mothers and to abuse old people at the evil checkpoints, to strike young people their own age who, like them, want to drive with their families to bathe in the sea, and to look on impassively as women give birth on the road.
It is only pure racism that motivates our best pilots to drop one-ton bombs on residential buildings, and it is only racism that permits those criminals to sleep well at night.
Because racism eliminates shame. This racism has erected for itself a monument in its own image -- the monument of an ugly, rigid, menacing and invasive concrete wall. A monument that proclaims to the whole world the banishment of shame from this country.
This wall is our wall of shame; it is testimony to the fact that we have turned from being a light unto the nations to "an object of disgrace to the nations and a mockery to all the countries".
And this evening we must ask where we take our shame? How will we remove the disgrace? But first and foremost, how is it that the shame does not keep us from sleeping at night? How do we consent to have half our salaries be used for the execution of crimes against humanity?
How did it happen that we succeeded in restricting the shame to two columns in the newspaper, and to devote to it no more than the minutes that we devote to a cursory reading of the articles of Gideon Levy and Amira Hass, as one reads a report on a scenario that was known in advance?
How did it happen that we succeeded in packing endless daily suffering, hunger, malnutrition, children's trauma, disablement, orphanhood and bereavement into one alienating word: "politics"?
How is it that our children continue to strut and swagger in the uniforms of brutality that they wear when they serve in the army of slaughter and destruction?
How is it that all the splendid institutions of the world stand aside and cannot do a thing to save one child from death or to remove one concrete block from the wall of shame? How is it that all the peace and human rights organizations are not able to stop the jeeps of the Border Guards that come to terrify schoolchildren and to kill them, are not able to stop one bulldozer on its way to demolish a house on top of its occupants, to rescue one olive tree from destruction or one schoolgirl who lost her way to school and found herself in the gun sights of the soldiers of the Occupation?
One of the answers to these questions is that the State of Israel is able to silence and paralyze the entire world because there was a Holocaust. The State of Israel has acquired a permit to abuse an entire nation because there is anti-Semitism. The State of Israel is bringing existential disaster -- economic, social and human -- on its citizens and on its subjects and no one dares to stop it because once there was Hitler. And all that while the survivors of the Holocaust are suffering the ignominy of hunger in this country.
This evening we must appeal to the world for help in ridding ourselves of the shame. This evening we must explain to the world that if it wants to rescue the people of Israel and the Palestinian people from the imminent holocaust that threatens all of us, it is necessary to condemn the policy of occupation, the dominion of death must be stopped in its tracks.
All war criminals who put away their uniforms and set out to travel in the world must be arrested, tried and imprisoned instead of being allowed to enjoy the pleasures of freedom while they are still dragging behind them a jingling cashbox full of war-
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crimes. And the time has come for us to stop handing our children over to an educational establishment that plants in them false and racist values and teaches them that their contribution to society is summed up in the abuse and killing of other people's children.
The time has come for us to explain to them that the local population of this place is not divided into Jews and non-Jews as is written in their school-books, but into human beings who want to live in peace and quiet in spite of everything, such as Bassam Aramin and many others like him, who if not for the racial laws that restrict their movements would be standing with us today, and people who have lost their humanity and take pleasure in destruction and devastation.
And the time has come for us to tell our children where they are living. Today, while the entire civilized world enjoys slandering and smearing the Palestinian education system, there is no schoolbook in Israel that presents a picture of a Palestinian as a modern ordinary person. There is no schoolbook in Israel that presents a map that shows the true borders of the State. There is no schoolbook in Israel in which the word "occupation" appears.
Our children are conscripted into the army of occupation without knowing the place in which they are living and without knowing its history and its people. They join the army imbued with hate and fear. Our children are educated to see everyone who is not Jewish as the Goy, the Other, who generation after generation seeks to destroy us. This education makes it easy for the military establishment to turn children into monsters.
Therefore the only way to prevent our children from becoming tools in the hands of the machine of destruction is to teach them the history of this place, to draw for them its borders, to help them to know the neighbours, their culture, their customs, their courtesy and their rights on the land where they live and lived for many generations before the Zionist Pioneers arrived at the Promised Land of Israel.
And above all, to teach them not to submit to the State, not to respect its authority, because the State is ruled by petty thieves and base opportunists who do not control their sexual and other impulses even in the most dire times and run this country according to the laws of the Mafia. You killed one of mine -- I'll kill a hundred of yours. You threw a homemade bomb at me -- I'll drop on you a hundred of the most elaborate and destructive bombs in the world that will leave no trace of you or your family or your neighbours. You burned one of my cars, so I'll burn one of your cities. That is the logic of the criminal world.
This evening we must think about those who are condemned to death in the next year, and of those who are condemned to fall into crime under the cover of the law and the uniform. We must rescue all of them. We must teach all of them not to obey orders that, even if they are legal according to the race laws of this State, are manifestly inhuman.
And above all, this evening we must stop for a moment, all of us, and look into the face of little Abeer Aramin, her head shot from behind, whose murderer will never face judgment in this country and will never be punished in any way he deserves, and ask ourselves, Why does that streak of blood rip the petal of her cheek
Nurit Peled-Elhanan is Laureate of the Sakharov Prize of the European Parliament for Human Rights and Freedom of Thought.
****
Vanunu back to prison
We were under the impression that the authorities took a deliberately low-key attitude to the nuclear whistle-blower Morderchai Vanunu. The annual renewal of the restrictions imposed on him was effected in a routine way, with hardly any fanfare, and it is quite long since the police staged a spectacular raid on his apartment or otherwise paid him conspicuous attention.
This seemed quite a sensible behaviour on the part of a government which is conducting a world-wide campaign against the Iranian nuclear program, energetically urging the international community to impose ever-heavier sanctions on Iran, and making open preparations for the contingency of going to war over that nuclear program.
Any return of Vanunu to the limelight would inevitably remind the world of the fact that while Iran may gain possession of some nuclear bombs at some time in the future, Israel has already developed and deployed a considerable arsenal of them decades ago.
It was, therefore, generally assumed that the low-intensity judicial process against Vanunu, which had been dragging on for years, would end with some kind of perfunctory, suspended sentence. Such, however, was not the case: on June 25 Mordechai Vanunu appeared in court, and was handed a six month sentence -- having been found guilty of "talking to foreign journalists on 14 separate occasions."
During the hearings the prosecution never once presented any evidence to show that anything Vanunu had said to the journalists had damaged or even threatened to damage Israel's security. Michael Sfard, Vanunu's lawyer, said that "it was clear Vanunu was being jailed for a purely formal breach of the restrictions put on him. He was not punished for anything which he said, just for the act of speaking."
The judge, Mr. Yoel Tzur, has managed with a harsh and vindictive verdict to bring Vanunu back into the limelight. Once again, he was at the centre of attention, a man campaigning for the truth and the right of freedom of expression, who has served his sentence to the last day and is denied the right to leave a country from which he feels thoroughly alienated (and whose mass-circulation papers still carry occasional editorials castigating him as "a despicable traitor who should have been executed").
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Immediately following the verdict, Amnesty International declared Mordechai Vanunu to be a Prisoner of Conscience. Their press release, dated July 2, went on to charge Israel with violating International Law by imposing arbitrary restrictions on Vanunu and restricting his right to travel and to free expression.
Indeed, the verdict underlined the little-known fact that in Israel, "The Only Democracy in the Middle East", an army general (the General in Charge of the Home Front, to cite his official title) has the legal power and discretion to place severe restrictions on the daily life of a civilian: to forbid said civilian from leaving the country, and to define where in the country that citizen may live and where not, to whom he may speak and to whom not. And for defying the restrictions imposed on him by a general, a civilian can -- and is -- sent to prison by a civil court.
And while at present Vanunu is the only Israeli citizen so honoured, there is nothing in the law to prevent the general from imposing such restrictions on others as well.
The Israeli Prison Authority has already let it be known that they have kept empty the cell in which Vanunu had spent eighteen years of his life -- as if they were all along expecting to get him back sooner or later.
In fact, Vanunu is not yet behind bars again -- as required by law, he and his attorneys have the option of lodging an appeal to a higher court. Such an appeal is likely to take two or more years to work its way through the legal system, during which time Vanunu will retain his relative freedom-under-restrictions; and the appeal may or may not end with a reversal of the present verdict.
Vanunu can, however, also take a daring decision: simply, not to appeal, to let the verdict stand and let himself be taken to prison again -- and to make a defiant speech at the prison gates. He has until September 1 to make his decision.
Protest letters to:
Ministry of Interior, 2 Kaplan Street, Jerusalem 91950
On the morrow of Independence Day, a newspaper reported that an Arab child had refused to stand up while the national anthem was sung. The paper was furious. I was not. In fact, it raised a childhood experience from the depths of my memory.
It was in Hanover, Germany, some months after Adolf Hitler had come to power. I was a pupil in the first class of a high school that bore the name of the last German Empress, Auguste Victoria.
The rise of the Nazis to power did not, in general, cause immediate and dramatic changes. Life went on. But in school there was a marked change: every few weeks there was a celebration for one or another of the many military victories that German history is richly endowed with. On such days, all the pupils congregated in the big hall, the "aula", the principal made a speech full of pathos and the pupils sang patriotic songs.
On one of these occasions -- I think it was in celebration of the conquest of Belgrade from the Turks by Prince Eugen in 1717 -- we assembled again in the aula, and at the end of the ceremony two anthems were sung: the national anthem ("Deutschland Ueber Alles") and the Nazi anthem (The Horst Wessel Song). The hundreds of pupils rose to their feet, raised their right hands in the Nazi salute and sung devotedly.
I was 9 years old, a pupil of the most junior class, and the youngest child in the class. I was also the only Jew in school. I had no time to think. I rose to my feet, but I did not raise my hand and did not sing. One little boy in a sea of raised hands. I was trembling with excitement.
Nothing awful happened. But afterwards, some of my classmates threatened that if I did this again, they would break my bones. I was saved from this test. A few weeks later my family fled Germany and went to Palestine, the land of my dreams.
Hundreds of thousands of Arab children are now facing a similar test. They are expected to sing an anthem that ignores their very existence and reminds them of the defeat of their people. Recently, the publisher of Haaretz, Amos Schoken, the son of an immigrant from Germany, proposed changing the anthem.
"Hatikva" (The Hope) was written more than a hundred years ago. At the time, a small Zionist community already existed in this country, but the song reflected the point of view of the Diaspora. "As long as deep in the heart / A Jewish soul is yearning, / And towards the edge of the East, the orient, / An eye is looking out towards Zion" (My literal translation.)
Since then, the situation of the Jews and of this country has changed radically. In the country, a large and strong Hebrew society has emerged. Why should we sing about the "edge of the East" when we are living in Zion?
True, the fact that a song has become obsolete, even ridiculous, does not make it unfit to serve as a national anthem. The French anthem calls on the sons of the fatherland to stand up against the bloody tyrants (meaning Germans and others) and soak the fields with their impure blood. The Dutch anthem speaks about the injustices committed by Spain some 400 years ago. The British anthem prays to God to frustrate the knavish tricks of the enemies of the monarch.
So, we Israelis may be allowed not to lose our hope to be "a free people in our land" -- as if we were under occupation. (Whose, exactly? Jewish? British? Turkish?) In the original text, by the way, the hope was "To return to the land of our fathers, / The town where David camped." It was changed later.
No, the problem with Hatikva is not the text of the song, nor the melody, which was swiped from Eastern Europe. The problem is that it excludes the Arab citizens, who now constitute more than 20% of Israel's population.
I don't want start another discussion of whether or not Israel is a "Jewish state" (What does that mean? That it belongs to the Jewish religion? That the majority is Jewish?) Even somebody who wants it to be so must ask himself: Is it wise to make every Arab
citizen feel that he or she does not belong? That this is a foreign and hostile state?
Hatikva can well remain the anthem of the Zionist movement, and Jews can sing it in Los Angeles or Kiryiat Malachy (both "cities of the angels"). But it should not be the anthem of the state.
In World War II, Stalin decided that the then national anthem -- the Internationale -- did not serve his purpose anymore. He wanted to arouse patriotism and needed the cooperation of his capitalist allies. So he announced a competition for the writing of a new anthem. A rousing song was chosen, which struck such deep roots that even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians preferred it to the old anthem of the Czars.
The time has come to discuss changing our anthem, not only for the sake of the Arab citizens, but also for our own sake: to have an anthem that reflects our reality. 38 years ago in the Knesset I first submitted a bill in this spirit. It was soundly defeated. Now is the time to revive the idea.
The same is true for the flag.
The blue-white flag is the banner of the Zionist movement. It took the Jewish prayer shawl, the tallith, added the Star of David (an old Jewish symbol, which also appears in other cultures) and created a new national flag. It has one obvious fault: the blue and the white do not stand out against the background of the blue sky, the white clouds and the grey buildings. It is enough to compare it to the jolly American Stars and Stripes, the solemn British Union Jack and the esthetic French Tricolore.
But the main fault of the flag lies in the fact that it excludes the Arab community from the family of the state. An Arab who salutes the flag is lying to himself when he tries to identify himself with symbols like the tallith and the Star of David that exclude him and don't speak to him.
(The more so as many Arabs believe that the two blue stripes stand for the Nile and the Euphrates, and that the flag hints at the Zionist ambition to create a Jewish state according to the Biblical promise (Genesis 15, 18): "Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt into the great river, the river Euphrates." This is an invention, but it makes the flag even more difficult to accept.)
The aim of a national flag is to unite. This flag disunites. It does not touch the heartstrings of an important community in the state. It pushes them away. And not only them. As Gideon Levy wrote, it has been expropriated by the extreme Right and is connected, in the eyes of advocates of peace and justice, with the shame of the roadblocks, the settlements and the occupation.
Not so long ago, the Canadian state was facing a similar problem. The national flag, based on the Union Jack, was pushing away the minority of French-speakers. In spite of the fact that these constituted only 10% of the population (to which could be added the offspring of mixed couples), the majority decided, wisely, that the unity of the country was more important than their own British sentiments. A new flag was decided upon, a flag that has at its center a symbol every Canadian can identify with: the Maple Leaf.
The opposition to the changing of the anthem and the flag does not emanate, of course, only from a devotion to existing symbols. It is mainly an opposition to the changing of the Jewish identity of Israel.
The desire to preserve the "Jewish state" is strong and profound. Lately it has been strengthened even more by the demand of Arab intellectuals, citizens of Israel, to re-arrange the relationship between the state and the Arab minority.
Almost daily, new proposals pop up. So, Otniel Shneller, a member of the Knesset and close friend of Ehud Olmert, came up with his own suggestion:
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to turn over to the Palestinian state, once it is set up, the Arab villages in the Triangle, an area on the Israeli side of the Green Line, in return for the settlement blocs on the Palestinian side, which would be incorporated into Israel. This way the proportion of Arabs in the state will decrease and the proportion of Jews increase.
Unlike Avigdor Lieberman, who proposed something similar, this Kadima member of the Knesset does not propose to do it by force. He professes to a desire to achieve an agreement with the inhabitants, so that they would retain some of their social rights in Israel even after becoming citizens of the Palestinian state. What is important for him is only that they -- and perhaps also the Arab inhabitants of Galilee -- will cease to be citizens, so that Israel will be more "Jewish and democratic" -- or rather, "Jewish and demographic."
Shneller and Lieberman -- both settlers, both belonging to the extreme Right -- do not propose to give up East Jerusalem, where almost a quarter of a million Palestinians are living. That does not worry them, because these Arabs have never been given Israeli citizenship anyhow. When they were annexed to Israel in 1967, they were accorded only the status of "permanent residents." Therefore, they are not required to hoist the blue-white flag and to sing Hatikva.
By the way, these proposals show that these two Rightists have lost hope for the Greater Israel, and resigned themselves to a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Otherwise their proposals would be meaningless.
How do the Arab citizens of Israel react to Shneller's ideas? They just ignore them. Up to now, not a single Arab voice has been raised in support of this proposal, much as not a single Arab voice has been heard in support of Lieberman's ideas.
That sheds light on a fact that has escaped many: the Arab citizens of Israel are much more connected with the state than it seems. In spite of their suffering discrimination in practically all fields of life, they are connected with the political, economic and social system. They have no desire whatsoever to give up Israeli democracy, social security benefits and the economic advantages. They certainly want to order the relations between them and the state on a new basis, but they definitely do not want to be separated from it.
Many years ago, an Arab member of the Knesset, Abd-al-Aziz Zuabi, coined the phrase "my state is at war with my people." That is the dilemma of the Arab citizen of Israel. He is a part of this state, and at the same time belongs to the Palestinian people.
Every "Israeli Arab" is faced with this reality, and every one is looking for an answer of his or her own. The Azmi Bishara Affair symbolizes this dilemma. As long as there is no Israeli-Palestinian peace, the dilemma will endure.
A new anthem and a new flag will not solve the problem, but they will constitute a significant step towards a solution that both sides can live with.
****
Where are you going, Palestine
Roni Ben Efrat
The following view on things, reprinted with thanks from Challenge 104, July-August, may interest you.
June 5, 2007 marked forty years of Israeli Occupation. Five days later Hamas began its conquest of Gaza, and on June 14, PA President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah formally dissolved the unity government. After forty years, Israel has finally succeeded in breaking the Palestinian national project.
Defeating the Fatah apparatus of Muhammad Dahlan, the Hamas fighters committed war crimes, aimed at warning other potential nests of opposition. The surviving Dahlan loyalists escaped from the Strip with Israel's assistance. Israelis take a grim satisfaction in the new Palestinian tragedy, but in this they remain as shortsighted as ever: their country's national/colonial enterprise cannot long survive without a viable Palestinian counterpart that accepts its legitimacy.
One outcome of the violence is that Abbas -- also known as Abu Mazen -- has performed his own disengagement from Gaza. He voices no interest, for now at least, in finding common ground with Hamas. Another outcome is clarity of line: after the start of
the second Intifada in September 2000, Palestinian discourse became blurred, with Hamas adopting nationalist language and Fatah -- religious. Now the ruler of the West Bank is Fatah, anchored in the secular, Israeli, pro-American camp, while the ruler of Gaza is Hamas -- militant, anti-American, Islamist, isolated from the Western world.
The wider Arab context is divided as follows: Egypt and Jordan support Abu Mazen alone. Qatar too recognizes his legitimacy, but not as exclusive; the Hamas government, it says, is also legitimate. Saudi Arabia, which recently ushered Hamas and Fatah into the Mecca Agreement, supports Abu Mazen but believes that the two sides must return to the table.
Few recall that toward the end of the first Intifada -- when the PLO was at a low point -- Israel's initial concept was to set up a Palestinian state in Gaza, over which Yasser Arafat would preside. The idea was to deck it with the symbols of sovereignty: the Palestinians would settle for that, it was thought.
Under the same concept, the Oslo Accords never specified the territory that the Palestinians would receive in the West Bank, or the fate of Jerusalem and the settlements. In the course of the second-stage talks, Yasser Arafat managed to nail down the unity of the West Bank and Gaza. He even got control of the major Palestinian cities.
The Oslo process had been hampered all along by the opposition of Hamas (which refused to take part in the parliamentary elections of 1996). Hamas never accepted the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority (PA), an Oslo creation. It did all it could to stop the process. Its suicide attacks, which began in 1994 after Muslims were massacred in Hebron, made the whole PA untrustworthy in Israeli eyes. Israel demanded that Arafat clamp down, but he could not do so completely. An all-out fight against Hamas would have alienated other Palestinians, who were already criticizing the PA for its corruption and impotence.
In this way, a vicious circle developed that has been with us ever since. Israel said, and continues to say, that it cannot make concessions toward a peace agreement unless the PA first dismantles the terror apparatus; the PA answered, and continues to answer, that it cannot gain the popular support it would need to dismantle Hamas unless it first can show achievements in the peace process.
Within the stalemate created by the circle, Hamas gained legitimacy. Its new status became evident during the second Intifada, which erupted, we recall, after the Camp David talks of July 2000 broke down.
Why did they break down? Because the Palestinians -- under closure while Israel thrived and the settlements swelled around them -- had by then lost faith in both Israel and Arafat. The PA president no longer had a domestic or pan-Arab mandate to sign an agreement with Israel.
It was the militant wing of Fatah, the Tanzim ("Organization"), that started the second Intifada.
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The Tanzim did so without a national strategy. The revolt was motivated largely by resentment, aimed not so much at Israel as at Arafat's PA. (The Tanzim members had been marginalized -- edged out of the better PA jobs -- by the Tunis clique.) Two further factors then joined the uprising. One was Arafat himself, scrambling to keep his leadership. The second was Hamas, which welcomed the collapse of Oslo. None of these contributed a strategy. The national question was merely sidetracked into an arena of blood. Fatah's al-Aqsa Brigades, competing with Hamas for the hearts of the people, adopted the tactic of suicide attacks. The practice of atrocity became a habit. We have just now witnessed its boomerang in Gaza.
The Second Intifada ground to a halt after three major actions by Israel: (1) Operation Defensive Shield, which destroyed Fatah's military apparatus in the West Bank; (2) assassinations of the top Hamas leaders; and (3) unilateral disengagement from the Strip, which Hamas viewed as its own victory. For various reasons (one was the ease with which Israel had picked off its leaders) Hamas decided to turn toward politics. The decision, we shall see, had implications it failed to think through. Hamas entered the elections of January 2006, winning 74 seats in parliament, compared to 45 for Fatah (23 for other parties).
The landslide plunged Hamas into a dilemma. On the one hand, it had entered elections whose framework and legitimacy derived from the Oslo Accords. But those Accords are based on Palestinian recognition of Israel -- a thing Hamas refuses to do.
The party was in a peculiar position. Because Palestine was a state-in-the-making, there was hardly anything to govern: rather, the main task of government would be to engage in a political process leading to statehood. Those who had voted for Hamas expected and wanted it to engage in that process. Disgusted with Fatah corruption, they believed that Hamas would do better. To engage in the process, however, Hamas would have to negotiate, and negotiate it could not.
The impossibility of its position weakened Hamas. Meanwhile, the Western world imposed a boycott on the PA, and four million Palestinians found themselves under economic siege.
In response, Hamas attempted to wear two faces. There was the moderate governing party that tried to use Fatah as a mediator with the West. Second, there remained the rigidly fundamentalist movement, whose leaders went east in search of money for salaries, bringing it back -- literally -- in suitcases.
The predicament of Hamas opened the crack through which Fatah (especially Dahlan's forces in Gaza, supported by the US) could return to the fray. Fatah had never accepted the decision of the people (just as Hamas, earlier, had never reconciled itself to Arafat). The Mecca Accord, signed in February 2007, was an attempt to paper over very basic differences. Behind the new unity government stood two shadow regimes, one belonging to Fatah, which included the military wing of Dahlan, and the other belonging to Hamas, which fired Qassam rockets from Gaza into southern Israel.
After being ousted from Gaza, Abu Mazen -- in his fourth presidential year -- made the decision that the US and Israel had long demanded: he dissolved the Hamas government.
On a superficial view, Abu Mazen killed two birds with one stone: he ended the boycott on the PA in the West Bank and he isolated Hamas. On a deeper view, however, the national project (and he is among its last surviving founders) has been smashed to bits.
Suppose Israel were to make a separate peace with Abu Mazen? This would solve nothing, because there would still be none with Hamas, which has forces in the West Bank. The split between Hamas and Fatah has provided Israel with excuses not to withdraw, not to dismantle settlements and not to permit the rise of a Palestinian state. It can say: "How can we cede land to Abu Mazen, knowing that Hamas could use it for launching rockets toward Tel Aviv or the airport? Our army must remain in the West Bank to keep Hamas from taking that too -- and to defend Abu Mazen!"
The PA President, by ditching Hamas, has diminished his bargaining power: he can no longer say to his Western protectors or to Israel, "Excuse me, but I have an internal opposition to contend with, so I cannot accept your terms." What is more, in the absence of honest leadership, the Western money soon to hit the West Bank will likely find its way into private pockets, creating new resentment and strife.
As for Hamas, which had once hoped to conceal its agenda beneath Abu Mazen's table, it is now the sole ruling party in Gaza. It will have to justify the rash operation in which it divided the unity package. It faces 1.4 million hungry citizens. It has no industry, no donor money, no infrastructure, and no international legitimacy. All it can offer is the Qur'an. Hamas will see the support of the people crack. Charity will likely give way to a reign of internal terror, like that which occurred in Iran, Algeria and Afghanistan. If Hamas again seeks unity with Fatah, it will find that it has to bend.
And what about Israel? It frolics in its villa behind walls and checkpoints, but the Palestinian problem never ceases to knock. Israel could not cope with a united Hamas-Fatah front, but it cannot cope with their separation either. It doggedly seeks tactical solutions for a basically strategic problem. Each solution becomes a new impediment, requiring further tactical solutions. An example is the proposal to release Marwan Barghouti, currently serving five life sentences; he, it is thought, is the only Fatah leader with the strength and credit to stand against Hamas. But who is Barghouti? He is head of the Tanzim, the group that started the misconceived Second Intifada largely for the private motives stated above.
The solution, for Israel, is not to create another collaborator. The solution -- despite new excuses to avoid it -- remains what it has always been: real
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Palestinian sovereignty over all the lands conquered in 1967. But such a thing will not happen, cannot happen, unless a different kind of leadership emerges on both sides.
The Israelis will have to find leaders who are willing to pay the price of peace. Among the Palestinians, a leadership will have to emerge that resembles neither Hamas nor Fatah. It will have to be both honest and realistic. It will have to put the common people first, the workers and refugees -- rather than trying to buy them off with the drug of foreign charity or the promise of an otherworldly paradise.
****
The Avnery-Pappe debate
The "Two-States or One State" public debate between Uri Avnery and Ilan Pappe got enormous attention long before it actually took place, on May 8. That evening, the Big Hall at the Kibbutz Movement House in Tel-Aviv was tightly packed, as the two "gladiators" sparred under the modest but firm moderation of Prof. Zalman Amit. Thanks to Angela Godfried, manager of ICAHD's Action Advocacy Project, simultaneous translation to English was available to the numerous internationals attending.
Actually, this subject is already for several years being debated in all kinds of informal gatherings, The initiative for this formal contest between the two prominent champions was taken by Teddy Katz -- historian and Gush Shalom activist, who is on good terms with both of them.
Ilan Pappe, prominent among Israel's iconoclastic "New Historians", started with the history of Zionism -- specifically, with the desire to create a Jewish state in what was a predominantly Arab country and to make that state also democratic, i.e. one where Jews would be the majority and thus democratically elect a government composed of Jews. The one and only way to achieve this aim was by ethnic cleansing, which is what Zionism proceeded to do in 1948, achieving its "Jewish Democratic State" in some 80% of historic Palestine -- Israel in the borders of between 1949 and 1967.
The two-state solution in Pappe's view never represented justice -- which should have awarded the Palestinians at least 50% of the country. Rather, it represented the hope that the land hunger of "The Zionist Minotaur" could be appeased with these 80%, and that Israel would be content to leave to the Palestinians the remaining 20% -- i.e. the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
That hope, however, proved false. Israeli settlements and "facts on the ground" have bitten deep into the remaining Palestinian territory, making the Two State Solution impossible to implement. At the same time, the Two State Solution as an idea became compromised and corrupted with the declared adherence of Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, George W. Bush and others of their kind.
Instead of standing for an independent Palestine in at least part of the land, the Two State Solution came to be a smoke screen behind which settlement and occupation could increase and the Palestinians enclosed in ever-narrowing enclaves: "The real Two States formula is the one which we see being implemented in front of our eyes: half the West Bank annexed to Israel, and the other half as a Bantustan surrounded by walls and fences, but allowed to fly a Palestinian Flag"
It was time for the Israeli Peace Movement to abandon this now tainted and hopeless idea, and take up the banner of a Single Democratic State in the entire territory. The Palestinians, he said, were willing to accept the Jews living in the country as their equal partners in building such a state, even though these Jews have come into their country without their consent and brutally dispossessed them. Palestinians were willing to accept even "Those who just yesterday stepped off the plane from Russia", which is "concession enough, and it is unfair to demand more of the Palestinians."
Of course, achieving the One State was a long task, requiring generations of patient educational work, but it should be embarked on. And meanwhile, activists should realize that help and pressure from outside is indispensable. Israeli activists should welcome -- indeed, actively encourage -- the various international initiatives of boycott against Israel, especially in Britain.
(Pappe himself had spoken up in favour of an academic boycott of Israeli universities, including Haifa University where he was teaching himself; as a result, his relations with colleagues and university administration have grown virtually unbearable, and he has now taken up an invitation to teach at the University of Exeter.)
Uri Avnery had no major dispute with Pappe over the history of Zionism in general and the massive ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948, some of which Avnery had personally witnessed as a soldier at the time. (He did point out that it had been two-sided, and that the few Jewish communities conquered by Arabs in that war had also been "cleansed" away).
The main debate was, of course, about the present and the prospects for the future. In Avnery's view, the One State Solution is a council of despair, an escape from the concrete struggle that has to be waged and won into an unrealistic, unrealizable Utopian dream. Like it or not, he said, a basic ingredient of present reality is that a state with a Jewish majority is the most basic and fundamental ethos of Jewish Israelis, shared by very nearly all of them, the result of five generations of striving.
As perceived by them, the Jewish majority is Israel. Giving it up, under whatever guise or formula would not be an act of changing Israel or democratizing it, but of dismantling Israel and creating an altogether different state in its place -- which Israelis would never consent to do.
Implementing the Two State Solution might be difficult, especially the dismantling of settlements, but "it is far easier to dismantle a settlement, to dismantle settlements, to dismantle ALL the settlements -- far easier than to force six million Jewish
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Israelis to dismantle their state." Therefore, opting for the One State since it is difficult to gain the Two States is like being unable to attain the peak of Mont Blanc, and therefore trying for the Everest instead.
In effect it means giving up the hope of influencing Israeli society and relying on outside pressure instead. But no amount of outside pressure would be enough to induce Israelis to give up their state -- only an overwhelming military defeat of Israel could achieve that, and in such a case debates among Israelis would become irrelevant.
Avnery emphasized that despite all difficulties, the Two State Solution is far from hopelessly buried. True, the likes of Sharon and Olmert are speaking insincerely about "a Palestinian state", meaning completely different things, unacceptable things. But the very fact of their needing to make such a lip service is proof of how much the Two States have already become accepted, in Israel itself and internationally, as the only possible solution.
Finally, Avnery pointed to the terrible plight of the Palestinians -- occupied, dispossessed, besieged and starved, and with the possibility of a new ethnic cleansing hanging above their heads. "The Palestinians do not have the time for the protracted, generations-long educational process which Pappe talked about. We have a patient lying in front of us, a severely wounded and bleeding patient. The most urgent thing is to stop the bleeding, to find a solution which is not ideal, but is real and can be implemented."
Thereupon, Avnery challenged Pappe: "Let me offer you a compromise: work with us for the creation of the Two States. After the two states are there, after the immediate dangers will have been averted, by all means go on struggling to get the two of them united into a single state.
Avnery himself did not rule out the possibility of some kind of eventual federation between the Israeli state and the Palestinian state: "A partnership between two states, with an open border and a joint economy -- of course, with safeguards for the Palestinian economy", which may later develop Benelux-like in partnership with Jordan and other countries in the region.
All of that, however, could only be thought of after the Two States were already there, living in peace with each other and ready to move further forward. And even in a federation, they would still be two states, each with its own government, each its own football team.
For his part, Ilan Pappe clarified that -- while he hoped for pressure from the outside to be placed on Israel -- he did not expect such pressure in itself to bring about the creation of a single state.
Rather, such pressure should result in "the end of Israeli military presence in the lives of the Palestinians", but that would not be the end of the conflict: "It was the pipedream of Camp David 2000 that an end to the occupation would be the end of the conflict." An end to the occupation would bring no solution to the Palestinian refugees, and Arabs inside Israel would continue to be second-class citizens. Only a Single State would solve these two problems.
Avnery retorted that putting an end to the occupation while leaving the conflict between the peoples raging and cardinal issues unresolved was neither possible nor desirable. "Occupation will not end without peace. There is no way of putting an end to all this injustice, except in the framework of peace."
Such a peace must also involve and address the refugees, of whom "an agreed number will return to Israel, and the others will be absorbed in the Palestinian State or in the present places of habitation while getting generous compensations, similar to what the Germans paid us. Let us put on the table the solution which will be agreed upon -- a detailed, clear solution, so that each of the refugees would know the choices they could make -- and ask them."
With regard to outside pressure, Avnery stated that -- without seeing it as an alternative to striving to change public opinion inside Israel -- he wholly supported a selective international boycott on bodies which support the occupation and take part in it, for example Gush Shalom's own decade-long boycott of settlement products. However, "the kind of boycott which might make normal, sane Israelis feel that the entire world is ganging up on us because we are Jews would achieve an exactly opposite result."
The issue of the Arab citizens of Israel came up again and again. In particular, Arabs present in the audience mentioned the case of Knesset Member Azmi Bishara -- who shortly before the debate was effectively driven into exile by the assertions that he had "helped Hizbullah during the 2006 war" -- as the example of what Jewish Israel has in store for assertive Arab citizens.
According to Pappe, as long as the "Jewish Democratic State" formula was dominant, Arabs in Israel would always be considered "a demographic threat." There would always be surveys of the numbers of Arabs compared with the numbers of Jews -- and if the percentage of Arabs passed a certain level, the spectre of a new ethnic cleansing would raise its head. "This is the logic of the Two States Solution, of Ehud Barak's 'We are Here and they are There'. It does not leave a real place for Arabs 'Here'."
Avnery, for his part, was more hopeful: "What we need to do now is push the demographic demon back into the bottle. At this moment, concern with demography is a national obsession that cannot be dispensed with. Fifty years from now, it might be different. After fifty years of common life in a State of Israel at peace, the demographic balance might no longer seem so important.
If fifty years ago somebody had told the Americans that there might be a Hispanic majority in their country, they would have broken out in a violent uprising. Now, this is a serious possibility in the US, in the not too far future, and it seems that most Americans can live with such a possibility."
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Avnery also mentioned his part in a group of citizens who appealed to the Supreme Court to remove the definition "Nationality: Jewish" from their identity cards and replace it with "Nationality: Israeli", and he highly praised the document recently published in Nazareth by the leadership of Israel's Arab citizens, saying that "it could serve as the basis for serious discussion on a new framework for the relations between the state and its Arab citizens."
On some questions from the audience, the two speakers were not very divided. For example, the Iranian nuclear program:
Avnery: "I am not afraid of the Iranian Bomb. I think this is mostly a fabricated hysteria and demonization. Iranians are a normal people, like every other -- no more insane than Israelis. (Pappe: That's not saying much.) Avnery: True. The Iranian regime is not crazy, even if their president sometimes behaves a bit strange. If they gain a nuclear bomb -- not that I wish for that -- if they gain a nuclear bomb, they will not use it. They will have a Bomb and we will have a Bomb. They will not use theirs because they will know the price, and we will not use ours because we will know the price. We will live in danger like many other nations live under various dangers. The greatest danger is the manipulation of the Holocaust. Anybody who mentions the Holocaust in any political context should be condemned."
Another questioner suddenly brought up "The extermination of the Philistine People, three thousands years ago, by King Saul and King David", a Biblical event from which far-reaching conclusions were drawn regarding contemporary politics.
Pappe answered: "Are the Palestinians of today descendants of people exterminated by King Saul? Look, I have encountered two interesting encyclopedias: The Hebrew Encyclopedia and the Palestinian Encyclopedia. The Palestinian Encyclopedia asserts that the Palestinians are the descendants of the Canaanites; the Hebrew one holds that the Jews here are descendants of the ancient Hebrews. Both assertions are utter bullshit" (laughter in the audience).
Living through times where Israel is like a ship loaded with explosives and without a captain, and surrounded by cliffs, it was actually refreshing to hear these two display their thoughts -- the bold, uncompromising thinking of Pappe and the very special rationality of Uri Avnery ("it is not rational to ignore the irrational motives which affect people's behaviour").
While perhaps nobody changed his mind on the subject of the debate, at least one could go home knowing that the two camps -- of which Avnery and Pappe are such outspoken representatives -- respect each other enough to continue together the struggle against the occupation, a struggle which both speakers considered as the primary point on the agenda. And strange as it may sound, for this struggle the evening provided some new energy.
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From New York to Bil'in
In a recent New York Times interview, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni ("top diplomat involved in race against time to achieve peace") made a passing reference to what she called "the high-tech fence": "In Europe, I hear Palestinians talk about ghettoization and the Berlin Wall. But if you are talking about a two-state solution, what do you think? There is going to be a border, a fence, something."
She also made light of the fence's location, cutting deep into the West Bank territory. According to her, the 1967 borders are "impractical", and didn't George W. Bush already authorize Israel to hold on to "existing major Israeli population centers"? Therefore, she said, "perhaps the barrier, which often zigzags inside the West Bank to separate Jewish settlers and Palestinians, could even be useful."
Had NYT's Richard Cohen bothered to look for sources of information other than the top diplomat's word, he might have found that the Fence not only separates Palestinians from settlers, but also separates them from ancestral lands (and often sole sources of livelihood), which have been earmarked for future settlement expansion.
Such is the case of the famous village of Bil'in. The giant settlement-city of Modi'in Illit has grandiose expansion plans, involving most of the land that Bil'in still had. The villagers' lawyer Michael Sfard presented the Supreme Court with evidence -- compiled by Peace Now "Settlement Watcher" Dror Etkes -- that these plans were illegal, even under the rather loose criteria of "legality" applying on the West Bank. The judges ordered a halt to the construction, pending a final verdict.
Thereupon, the settlers got the Military Government's "Supreme Planning Committee" to retroactively legalize the construction "permits". Adv. Sfard then lodged a new Supreme Court appeal, to declare this "whitewashing act" to be itself illegal -- and the settlers reacted with publishing tear-raising stories of settler families with their many children "victimized by the Leftists and Arabs" and "denied a roof over their heads"...
Whatever the final outcome in the courts -- and many villagers are a bit skeptical -- the struggle on the ground continues. Sun or rain, every Friday noon the villagers, together with Israelis of Anarchists Against Walls and internationals from the ISM, walk in procession, out of the village streets and towards Livni's "high tech fence." Sometimes the soldiers open up before they even come close; sometimes the protestors are able to hold an hour long rally before the shooting starts; sometimes, the wind suddenly shifts, blowing the tear gas back in the soldiers' own faces; on very few, exceptional cases, a procession is actually allowed to proceed without being attacked by the army...
It is very difficult to get any real media attention. "Bil'in? It just repeats itself every week" say jaded reporters and news editors. It needs something really exceptional to get attention. For example, when the
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person wounded in the leg from a "rubber bullet" shot by an Israeli soldier turned out to be Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mairead Corrigan, renowned for her efforts to reconcile Catholics and Protestants in her native North Ireland.
Or when Puerto Rican activist Alberto de Jesus (better known as Tito Kayak) managed to climb unnoticed the army's own 30-metre high observation tower, to raise the Palestinian flag over it and wave from the top for five hours, to the soldiers' frustrated fury and the villagers' delight and cheers. (He had already performed a similar feat on top of the Statue of Liberty in New York, to protest the U.S. Navy exercises on Puerto Rico's Vieques Island).
Meanwhile, Salon Mazal -- an alternative cultural center in Tel Aviv -- presented a photo exhibition on Bil'in years-long struggle by Rani Bornat, a 27-year old villager, who was wounded by an army bullet and became wheelchair bound for the rest of his life, but continues to take part in the nonviolent struggle. The photographer was warmly greeted by sympathetic Israelis at the opening evening (getting a permit for him to enter Israel had been far from easy).
Also, two conferences took place in Bil'in itself -- one bringing together Palestinians from other parts of the West Bank, wishing to learn from its inhabitants' experience, the other involving a wide range of Israeli and international supporters. Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, at the time Minister of Information in the short-lived Palestinian Government of National Unity, came up with some creative ideas for combining the official level with the grassroots, in the struggle against the occupation.
Indeed, the Bil'in example is spreading. In the Bethlehem Area south of Jerusalem, extensive construction work -- conducted with virtually no media attention -- is well on its way to create, not one fence but two. The end result is that a huge enclave -- some 70 square kilometres -- will be created, in which 19,000 Palestinians will be surrounded by fences from all directions -- as well as losing much of their land. Here, too, a large settlement-city is involved -- in this case, the one known as "Ephrata", built in an especially long and narrow pattern which does not fit any known principle of city planning but is admirably suited to taking up a maximum amount of Palestinian land.
The names of several villages -- Umm Salamuna, Ma'asara and Wadi-Al-Neiss -- are now appearing with increasing frequency in the email action alerts. Villagers, having as in Bil'in the support of Israeli and international activists, lie down in front of bulldozers -- an action which on several occasions temporarily halted the work. And on the confiscated lands, various protest activities take place, ranging from Muslim prayers to women's demonstrations.
As we go to print, the latest of many reports tells of the July 14 protest in Wadi-Al-Neiss, marking the third anniversary of the International Court of Justice ruling -- which the State of Israel continues to violate with impunity. The detention of one protester -- a Palestinian from the Land Defense Popular Committee -- is mentioned, as well as five minor injuries, an hour and half of unsuccessful efforts to cross the line of the Fence and prolonged fierce debates in Hebrew between Israeli protesters and soldiers. (At least, some of them seem willing to listen...)
Finally, there should be mentioned the successful planting of no less than 75 olive saplings, by villagers and peace activists, at the Nablus Area village of Iraq Burin -- on land which had been subject to prolonged attacks by settlers and army, with access long denied to the Palestinian owners. This was followed by a further 20 saplings being planted at the neighboring village of Till. There was no interference by army or settlers, and by the latest report the saplings are still there (which can by no means be taken for granted).
* HIGH TIME OF CYNICISM (editorial overview), p. 1-9
- The opportunity that was, p.1
- Courting the Saudis..., p.2
- ...skirmishing with the Syrians, p. 2
- Still on his feet, p.4
- Benchmarks -- coming and going p.5
- The rabbit jumped too early, p.6
- Sderot pays again, p.6
- The miscalculation of the patrons, p.7
- No partner times two, p.7
- Prisoners' small change, p.8
-- Something very rotten in Israel, p.9
* Alternative ceremony, p.9-12
-- Shooting and laughing, p.10
-- A small but not insignificant success, p.11
* Alternate realities/drowned celebrations, p.12
* 40 YEARS -- ENOUGH, 6 days of protest, p.13-18
-- Converging on Tel-Aviv, p.14
-- Thousands continue to arrive, p.15
-- The stain that cannot be removed, p.15
-- Refuse to be enemies! p.16
-- Revenge is useless, p.17
* Disgrace unto the nations, N. Peled-Elhanan 18-20
* Vanunu back to prison, p.20
* Avnery-Pappe debate, p.24-26
* From New York to Bil'in, p.26
* A hope not lost, Uri Avnery, p.28
* Where are you going, Palestine? Roni Ben-Efrat 28
On the night of June 25, a group of women activists arrived at the Akerstein Sales Center at Herzlia Pituach.
They inserted fast-drying glue into the locks of entrance doors, sprayed red stains on outer walls and pasted posters "Don't make profits by robbing Palestinians of livelihood and annexing their lands to Israeli settlements".
The Akerstein Company, mainly known as the producer of decorative tiles, is also involved in construction of the Wall.
