Mondoweiss

A war of values
Israel's crisis
Gaza Freedom March: Why I went to Cairo
monstrous
40 years after first epiphany, Judt still very bashable
Karon says things will break faster than you think

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 10:29 AM PST

The video above was shot by Max Blumenthal a year ago today. I wonder if any of the people in it have changed their views?

I've finally gotten around to reading the Goldstone Report. It's an amazing document. In addition to the legal analysis and incredible documentation of the destruction wrought by the Israeli attack last winter, it is also full of small windows into Palestinian life that I find incredibly moving. Here's one that I couldn't help but think about as I re-watched the video above:

The Mission was struck by the resilience and dignity shown by people in the face of dire circumstances. UNRWA Director of Operations, John Ging, relayed to the Mission the answer of a Gaza teacher during a discussion after the end of the Israeli military operations about strengthening human rights education in schools. Rather than expressing scepticism at the relevance of teaching human rights in a context of renewed denial of rights, the teacher unhesitantly supported the resumption of human rights education: "This is a war of values, and we are not going to lose it".

Israel's crisis

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 09:23 AM PST

Just back from Israel/Palestine, the overwhelming sense I carry away is that the present state cannot last. Just how it goes down I have no idea. But conditions are so obviously discriminatory, and the knowledge of these conditions now so widespread– among the Christian pilgrims in my Jerusalem guesthouse, among European leaders, and now too among the Israeli elite and American left–that the situation is reminiscent of the delegitimizing of communism in the 70s and 80s. The period of apartheid struggle that Ehud Olmert warned of two years ago is upon us. So too his warning of possible "national suicide."

The surprise for me is that the indifference of American Jews to this injustice is more than matched by that of the mass of Israelis: They live inside the bubble of their opinion that Israeli society is fair. So this trip has left me pretty depressed, even as it has renewed my sense of ethnocentric purpose: I will do what I can to bring the American Jewish community into the world conversation about the reality of Israel/Palestine.
This will happen. A few weeks back Israeli activist Micha Kurz said that a war had begun between one part of Israeli society and another; and I come home knowing that that war is about to erupt inside American Jewish life. You might say that it has already erupted: J Street's emergence and all the liberal Zionists in the New York Review of Books attacking the occupation are signs. But we ain't seen nothing yet. We are on the verge of a Jewish intifada, and about time too.

Now why do I say that the current situation cannot last?

I use the words apartheid and Jim Crow on this site all the time, but it is something else to see these policies before your eyes and be overborne by the feeling (and over days to come, I will offer observations of such moments). And today there is no secret about these conditions. They are being discussed openly not just in the Palestinian community—and believe me, every Palestinian I met expressed hatred for this system–but in Israel and Europe, and even at the fringes of the American Jewish community. A week ago I got out of a taxi in the occupied West Bank at the Ofer prison for a demonstration against the arbitrary detainment of Palestinian human rights worker Jamal Juma', and there were Mustafa Barghouti and Omar Barghouti leading the protest–and a dozen American Jews from the visiting group American Jews for a Just Peace, also several news teams from the Arab world and Europe. What all these people recognize, and what Mustafa Barghouti woke up to three years ago, is that the peace process has been meaningless. Israel is today "the worst country in the world" because of the system it has set up, Barghouti told me: he would be arrested if he used that road right there, he said, pointing at settlers road 443; and the Jews in the West Bank use 26 times the amount of water as the Palestinians and Palestinians pay twice the price that Jews do for water and electricity. And when Barghouti says that Israel is now the worst country in the world he means that there is at last international outrage over the fact that a country claiming to be a democracy in the 21st century is creating these conditions.

A couple of dozen Israelis I met echo the understanding that their society faces an existential crisis, in one year or ten years. Even Ynet has columnists who say it is apartheid, and even Zionists I met are filled with despair. They know that it is like South Africa, they know the world is paying attention, they know that the Palestinians hate the system. And meanwhile the country's leadership is committing national suicide by expanding the realm of apartheid conditions even as Al Jazeera and Reuters train their cameras on the scene.

This is the war that Micha Kurz told me about. Zionism is today divided between those who want the Land of Israel and the more pragmatic Zionists who think that the landgrab is destroying the state; and the second group is joined by non-Zionists and anti's. This division did not exist for most of the occupation; previously, Labor Zionists went along with the religious crazies and Revisionist fanatics who wanted to populate Eretz Israel. But today liberal Zionist Tom Segev writes in the New York Review of Books that Zionism was never about having the land, it was about maintaining a Jewish majority. And Yoel Marcus writes in Haaretz that Israel must do everything to stave off the "demographic dominance" of non-Jews.

The same war is visible in Ameican Jewish life, between mainstream Jewish organizations like AIPAC that have pushed the messianic occupation and J Street which has opposed it, so far mildly. But in Israel the battle is raging openly, and of course the expansionists are winning, as they always have. Netanyahu's settlement freeze means nothing when you consider that there are thousands of freshly-poured foundations across the West Bank and the settlers will now undertake to build houses on them during the freeze, and East Jerusalem continues to be ethnically cleansed.

What are they thinking? How does the right wing imagine that it can secure Israel's future when it is consolidating a system in which 5 million Jews will govern a non-Jewish majority in the so-called Jewish homeland? The answer I got from Assaf Sharon and other activist Israelis is that the leadership is counting on miracles: that God will take care of the Jews so long as they are in Eretz Israel, or that somehow American Jews will be granted voting citizenship in the land and so Jews will continue to outnumber the Palestinians (p.s. dual loyalty is an antisemitic canard), or that the Palestinians will undertake voluntary transfer and clear out of the land on their own. The last would seem to be government policy, of making the Palestinians feel very, very unwelcome.

It is the weakness of the Israeli system, of course, that feverish people are now guiding government policy. Even Netanyahu must be afraid of them; and his recent efforts to try to break up centrist parties so as to capture some of their more conservative members for his coalition is seen by some as a pragmatic effort by the Prime Minister to provide himself a political base so as to take on the right wing.

The feverish have taken political cover from the Jewish-only bubble. I mean all the Jews, including Americans, who are swaddled in Holocaust consciousness of Jews as victims and have refused to develop any knowledge of a situation in which Jews exercise oppressive control. One of the most startling discoveries of my trip was learning from Mikhael Manekin, a leaders of the soldiers' group Breaking the Silence, that the group had taken leading Israeli establishment figures, including government officials, on its tour of Hebron in recent months and they had come away disturbed and angry at the blatant apartheid conditions in the city, in which some Palestinians cannot walk on the street that they live on. The shock is that I took this tour nearly 4 years ago, but that even Israeli leaders have blinded themselves to a situation that has been an outrage for 40 years. Not to mention American Jewish leaders, here in the country where liberals attack you if you use the word apartheid.

This Jewish blindness will not last. There is too much stirring. Didi Remez is a Zionist, but he is using his Coteret blog to get facts to the American mainstream about the deadly occupation; and though he and I disagree about the necessity of the Jewish state, he doesn't mind marching alongside me and BDS-supporting Jews in the fight against the occupation. I saw him at the Sheikh Jarrah demonstration Friday, against the ethnic cleansing of the East Jerusalem neighborhood so that Jerusalem will be Jewish Jewish Jewish; and who else should I see there but Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker– so maybe the New Yorker will write about this at last and tell its readers what virulent Zionists are doing to old Arab neighborhoods.

I know that many of these Israeli activists are committed to the idea of a Jewish state. Even among Jews who oppose the occupation and are butting heads with soldiers in villages in the West Bank, there are many who are trying to preserve Israel as a national refuge for the Jews. They are like Daniel Levy of J Street, who has called for a return to the '67 borders to preserve the Jewish state. Or Bernard Avishai, also at the Sheikh Jarrah demo, who wishes to maintain a Hebrew republic, presumably in a form of partition.

Can they bring about a wider awareness of the crisis come soon enough to save the Jewish state? I don't know. Yet somehow I doubt that a Jewish state—an ethnocracy somehow redeemed by institutionalized respect for the rights of a minority population– will survive the crisis. The proliferation of settlements on strategic hilltops in the West Bank and the signs for Israeli businesses like Ahava a mile from the Jordan River, let alone the Warsaw-treatment of Gaza, would seem to have destroyed the prospect for a viable Palestinian state on the leftovers of Palestine; and without a real state that permits the self-determination of Palestinians, and some real accommodation of refugees' rights, Palestinians will continue to agitate, and the international solidarity movement will continue to advocate for them.

My despair springs from the fact that while I saw Arab media everywhere I went, the larger Israeli Jewish community and the American Jewish one are in denial. They have little knowledge of what is going on, and enfolded in nationalist ideals of 100 years ago, are ill-prepared for the impending crisis. And I'm afraid that this hardened, self-righteous resistance to the truth– let alone to 21st century liberal values– will result in greater violence and draw in the United States.

The brightest hope I got on my trip came from young Jews. Standing on a hillside in the Palestinian village of Al-Walaje–which is being engulfed by the Israeli idea of greater Jerusalem embodied by the fortress-like presence of the settlement called Gilo that dominated the horizon a half mile away–I met two guys from my home town, Baltimore: Josh Levey and Michael Kaplan.

Josh

They are just teenagers; but brace yourself– they attended an all-Jewish high school and are now working in a refugee camp outside Bethlehem for three months. As a boy, Levey told me, he yelled abuse at the anti-Zionist Jewish group Neturei Karta at pro-Israel demonstrations; but more recently, he has countered the hasbara in his own high school with vigorous opposition. Three months in a Palestinian refugee camp! These boys from my home town have no mental reservations about speaking of the Palestinians as human beings. So we are seeing a Jewish intifada at last, a shaking off of Zionism now that the ideology has sputtered out in ethnic cleansing and political prisoners and white phosphorus.

As we talked, an older American-Israeli woman, a Meretz/liberal Zionist type, who was also nobly demonstrating againt the landgrab, interrupted us to say that it is a simple matter to buy the settlers out; why, Naomi Chazan has said that is the case. As she talked with the boys about miraculously undoing the white stucco walls and red tile roofs of the elite settlement above us, it became clear that she regards the Jewish state as a necessity for Jews, but that somehow these boys do not. And in a couple of months, Josh Levey and Michael Kaplan will be coming home.

Gaza Freedom March: Why I went to Cairo

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 10:31 AM PST

Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb at a demonstration outside the French Embassy in Cairo. (Photo: Anne Paxton)

Operation Cast Lead was a massacre filled with thousands of heart breaking stories. Each of the 1400 persons killed represents an entire world. Yes, it is also a war crime to fire kassam rockets into Israel with the intention to kill civilians. Over 2,000 rockets and 1,600 mortar shells were fired into Israel in 2008 alone. Some among the Palestinian population use armed force to resist Israeli's military occupation and blockade of Gaza and the West Bank. According to international law, armed resistance against illegal occupation can be considered a just cause, as long as the rules of war are observed. However, as a person committed to nonviolence, I view the use of militarism by states or non-state actors to ensure security or resist occupation as a self-defeating strategy that promotes more violence and suffering and does not, in the end, result in well-being or peace for beleaguered populations. However, for those who believe in the use of military force as a viable option, Israel's response to kassam attacks went far beyond legal and ethical boundaries. The much maligned Goldstone report proved beyond reasonable doubt that Israel intentionally targeted civilians and civilian institutions with deadly weapons. This is nothing new.

Operation Cast Lead made clear that the sixty year Israeli military siege of the people of Palestine has increased in brutality and ferocity. Sixty years of evidence that includes eye-witness reports, analysis of video, satellite and photographic images, medical reports, forensic analysis of weapons and ammunition remnants, and the written observations and testimony of thousands of witnesses from Palestine, Israel and the international community reveal a continual pattern of continuous assault that has very little to do with Israel's claim of 'security'. Rather, the end game is creating 'facts on the ground' that establish a Jewish state from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea which limits Palestinians to 20% of the national population. Israel employs forced displacement, blockade, air strike, land mines, rubber bullets, white phosphorous, dime bombs, torture, beating and sexual humiliation, arbitrary arrest and administrative detention of minors and adults, water and land theft, Jewish only roads, hundreds of military checkpoints, security fences, nightly incursions, human shields, collaborators, deportation, permit systems, denial of access to economic opportunity, health care, culture and education, targeting of sewage and electricity plants and water installations, uprooting of thousands of trees and the destruction of thousands of homes to force the remaining Palestinian population into small enclosed areas that can only be described as open air prisons. Ariel Sharon described these enclaves designated as the future Palestinian State as 'bantustans'. In short, all these tactics amount to what is considered the crime of apartheid for the sake of creating a state that awards national and civil privileges based on Jewish identity while confining the excess non-Jewish population to their own 'homeland'. This is the ugly truth that is so hard for Jewish people and millions of so-called Christian Zionists to face. Anyone who spends a day in Palestinian territories sees this truth immediately. The so-called two state solution which is based on this vision of reality is hardly viable or legal. People will not and cannot endure oppression forever. Our own history should teach us this lesson. The question is, how does an oppressed people change the situation on the ground and open history to new possibilities.

Those who both decry Palestinian armed resistance and the option of boycott, divestment and sanctions can't have it both ways. Once you accept the fact that Israel's behavior toward Palestinians falls into the category of the crime of apartheid, BDS is the logical and ethical nonviolent response. If any other state were engaged in similar behavior, BDS would be an acceptable form of resistance, as it was in the case of South Africa. Forty years of dialogue and negotiation with Israelis and Jews clearly has not worked to advance the cause of self-determination for Palestinians. The situation on the ground is far worse than ever before. The two state solution and all the peace plans and road maps have been undermined by the systematic effort to enclose Palestinians in bantustans and deny them civil and national rights. In this context, further efforts at dialogue only benefit those with privilege, unless they are accompanied by strategies of resistance to the systematic inequality Palestinians face on a daily basis.

While J Street and associated partners are a much appreciated alternative voice within the Jewish community to the AIPAC machine, they have thus far failed to address the concerns nor partner with Palestinians in their own struggle for human and equal rights. As Jews, we have to recognize that we are not going to be the ones who determine the direction of the Palestinian nonviolent struggle for freedom. What we can and should do, is find ways of acting in solidarity with that struggle by joining the Palestinian initiated international effort to use boycott, divestment and sanctions to force Israel to comply with international law and end the siege of Gaza and the illegal occupation of Palestine. We can also support those within Israel who are resisting the oppressive actions of their own state. We cannot truly work on this issue without understanding the meaning of resistance in our lives. For Jews, I believe resistance requires serious study and practice of the Torah of Nonviolence. Nonviolence is the only way forward. Accepting the violence perpetrated against Palestinians will destroy our beautiful tradition. By struggling in solidarity with those who oppose militarism and support boycott, divestment and sanctions we are also renewing the most sacred elements of our tradition that require us to protest in the street, pursue justice and peace and avoid violence. It is not an easy road.

Boycott is a strategy capable of being used for good and for bad. In this case, I believe that BDS is the only viable nonviolent method that can impact 'facts on the ground'. All of us who love freedom, justice and peace, all of us who love the people of Israel and the people of Palestine have a profound responsibility to act in alignment with the people who are the actual victims in this situation. They are calling for BDS. That is why I went to Cairo and created the Interfaith Gaza Satyagraha as an affinity group within the Gaza Freedom March, to join my voice with theirs.

As the only rabbi present in Cairo for the entire GFM experience, I was honored to stand with hundreds of other activists from over forty nations, many of whom spoke to me of their commitment to oppose antisemitism wherever it emerged. I spent ten days planning actions, protesting in the streets, talking about next steps, networking and envisioning. At one point, American Jews organized a protest in front of the Israeli Embassy which is fifteen stories above the street and visible only by the familiar blue and white flag. I was asked to lead a Sabbath service. Jews, Muslims, Christians, Egyptians and internationals of all persuasions stood round a simple kiddish cup, Egyptian flat bread and candles. I invited participants to envision a world where everyone could find a seat at the table and eat, unafraid. We sang and prayed in Hebrew in public and I saw tears flow. Standing among the crowd was a man with a Palestinian father and a Sephardic Israeli mother. He wept in joy because, for one instant, the worlds of conflict stretching across the borders of his soul could dissolve in a single vision of unification and peace. So may it be for all of us, Palestinian and Jew, living together on the same land in recognition of our common love for place and each other. Palestinians have the right to return to their own land, or receive just compensation.

Only a 'solution' which ensures 'the right to exist' and universal human rights of all people living on the historic land of Israel/Palestine will suffice. The children of the future will see the world very differently than those of us living now. They will face new challenges and inherit a new sense of globalism which hopefully strengthens the religious, cultural and national heritage of both Palestinians and Israelis in a renewed culture of peace. It is up to us to prepare the way.

Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, cofounder of Shomer Shalom Network for Jewish Nonviolence and The Community of Living Traditions at Stony Point Center, NY

monstrous

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 08:58 AM PST

From Physicians for Human Rights-Israel. Note that transplanted corneas must be harvested at great expense from deceased people.

Israel prevented 17 sight-impaired Gazans from leaving for cornea transplant operations on time; a donation of dozens of corneas went down the drain

The Israeli authorities at Erez checkpoint this week prevented the exit of 17 sight-impaired patients, suffering from various eye diseases, from the Gaza Strip in order to undergo cornea transplants, a treatment that is not available in the Gaza health system. Because of this delay, the medical window of opportunity to perform the transplants for these patients was closed, because corneas can be transplanted only within the shortest time frame (24-48 hours after they are extracted from the donor's body).

The patients from Gaza whose exit was prevented will therefore have to wait for another donation, which may or may not happen. At the beginning of the week Physicians for Human Rights – Israel (PHR-Israel) received an appeal from the Musallam Medical Center in Gaza. According to the appeal, a large group of 14 patients from Gaza, who were invited to Ramallah for cornea transplants from Sunday to Wednesday this week (January 3-5, 2010), did not reach their destination. Three other patients approached PHR-Israel separately. The group of patients includes some who were waiting weeks or even months for cornea transplants. The longest wait was 31-year-old S.A., who has been waiting for this operation for three years.

The main Musallam Medical Center in Ramallah this week received two deliveries from the US with dozens of corneas, donated by Tissue Bank International, an American organization that facilitates cornea and tissue transplants. Every year corneas are sent during Christmas break, during which such operations do not take place in the US, as a donation to the Palestinian health system, and dedicated especially to eye patients from Gaza.

40 years after first epiphany, Judt still very bashable

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 07:56 AM PST

Evan Goldstein in the Chronicle of Higher Ed profiles Tony Judt, and does a nice job tracing his path to the groundbreaking one-state essay in the New York Review of Books. But note that Goldstein uses the opportunity to convene the liberal-Zionist bashers, most of them deeply invested in the Jewish state, instead of focusing on the central truth of the matter, that Judt was moved by his own Jewish experience in the liberal west to try and imagine a liberal future for Israel/Palestine. And that the NYRB has essentially retreated from his position. Extended excerpts:

Fearing that their teenage son was too socially withdrawn, his parents, in 1963, sent him to a summer camp on a kibbutz in Israel. Judt became a committed Zionist. "I was the ideal convert," he says. A leader in left-wing Zionist youth movements, he even delivered a keynote address at a large Zionist conference in Paris when he was only 16 years old. (A smoker at the time, he seized the opportunity to denounce smoking by Jewish adolescents as a "bourgeois deviation.") In 1967, a few weeks after the Six-Day War, Judt volunteered as a translator for the Israel Defense Forces on the Golan Heights. He was surprised to find that many of the young Israeli officers he worked with were "right-wing thugs with anti-Arab views"; others, he says, "were just dumb idiots with guns." Israel, he came to believe, "had turned from a sort of narrow-minded pioneer society into a rather smug, superior, conquering society."..

Early in 2002, when Judt was at home recovering from radiation and surgery to treat cancer in his left arm, he became "more and more worried about the failure of Israel to do the right thing." In May of that year, The New York Review published his first major statement on the Middle East conflict, the solution to which, he contended, was obvious: two states, the dismantling of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, and no right of return to Israel for Palestinian refugees. Judt fingered Israel for the bloody impasse, provocatively likening its actions to those of France in its colonial war against Algeria. By 1958, he noted, the damage that French policy was inflicting on the Algerians was surpassed by the harm France was inflicting upon itself. Israel, he wrote, was in a similarly dire predicament.

Judt's historical analogy drew sharp rejoinders. "If Israel resembles French Algeria, why exactly should Israel and its national doctrine, Zionism, be regarded as any more legitimate than France's imperialism?" asked the political writer Paul Berman. That was a good question. A few months later, Judt revised his position. "The time has come to think the unthinkable," he proclaimed in a widely disseminated essay in The New York Review. The two-state solution—a Jewish state and an Arab state—"is probably already doomed," and the least-bad option remaining was for Israel to convert from a Jewish state to a binational state. "The depressing truth," Judt wrote, "is that Israel today is bad for the Jews."

According to Benny Morris, a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and author of One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict (Yale University Press, 2009), Judt's essay placed the one-state idea "squarely and noisily on the table of international agendas." The Forward described it as "the intellectual equivalent of a nuclear bomb on Zionism." Within weeks, The New York Review had received more than 1,000 letters to the editor. Suddenly, says Robert Boyers, editor of the quarterly Salmagundi and an observer of the liberal intellectual scene, Judt was a major voice weighing in on the Middle East. Indeed, if the death of Judt's friend the literary critic Edward Said, in 2003, left a "yawning void" in the national conversation about Israel, Palestine, and the Palestinians, as Judt has suggested, then it is Judt himself who has filled that void.

And like Said, who also advocated a one-state solution, Judt has become a very public target for criticism. An op-ed essay in The Jerusalem Post accused him of "pandering to genocide." Omer Bartov, a professor of European history at Brown University, dismissed the binational idea as "absurd"; Walzer, co-editor of Dissent magazine, derided it as an escapist fantasy that "offers no practical escape from the work of repressing the terrorist organizations and withdrawing from the Occupied Territories." Steven J. Zipperstein, a professor of Jewish culture and history at Stanford University and a close friend of Judt's for a quarter of a century, blasted the article as "one more in a long series of calls (perhaps the silliest yet) for Jewish self-immolation."

The most trenchant critique is that Judt's embrace of binationalism echoes the reckless, unrealistic style of trafficking in ideas that he condemned in Past Imperfect. "I, too, wish everyone was a cosmopolitan Kantian, and we had one huge democracy for the brotherhood of all mankind," says Gadi Taub, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of a forthcoming book, The Settlers and the Struggle Over the Meaning of Zionism (Yale University Press). "But these are two peoples (Jews and Palestinians) severely traumatized by the lack of national independence." To argue that such a situation lends itself to shared sovereignty in a binational state is, says Taub, "the strikingly irresponsible kind of thing that intellectuals sometimes do for their own convenience vis-à-vis their own conscience. In reality, a one-state solution will doom Israelis and Palestinians to a permanent civil war."

Judt seems unconcerned that his public image is now so tied to his views on Israel. "Google me," he says nonchalantly. "You will end up at the binationalism essay straightaway." He goes on to observe that "to the outside world, I'm a crazed, self-hating Jewish left-winger." Joking aside, Judt is not entirely comfortable in his role as the public face of the anti-Zionist crowd. "I wouldn't call myself anti-Zionist, because there are openly anti-Semitic people who use anti-Zionism as a cover," he explains. Some of them, like the white nationalist David Duke, have reached out to him, prompting accusations that he is giving intellectual cover to bigots. Despite such "foul vilification," says the Columbia historian Fritz Stern, "Tony has, if anything, only become more outspoken."

There have been efforts to silence Judt.

Karon says things will break faster than you think

Posted: 11 Jan 2010 07:25 AM PST

From Pamela Olson's blog, Fast Times in Palestine:

South African [-American] Jewish journalist named Tony Karon, who supported the Gaza Freedom March, recently posted this encouraging message on Facebook:

"In South Africa in 1988, if you'd asked any of us how long our struggle was going to last, the honest answer would have been twenty years. We couldn't destroy the regime and they couldn't destroy us; looked like a bloody stalemate. And then, barely a year later, a changing international balance of forces that none of us could have foreseen prompted a dramatic change of course. The darkest hour is just before dawn and all that… Happy New Year, and keep up the great work!"

--
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