September 14, 2011

EDITOR: Obama’s New Clothes…

For almost three years, Mr. Obama was resting on his Cairo laurels, doing less than nothing for controlling Israeli atrocities, the building of new settlements, the wall, and now, in one weekend he wishes to achieve all that he has never even started! Diplomats fly like there’s no tomorrow, smoke is coming out of the State Department, all in order to stop the Palestinians from going to the UN… maybe we can get them to speak to Netanyahu for few days, so the UN vote danger will pass… and then we will think of something else… or not.

The extreme poverty of US and EU ‘diplomacy’ is exposed in its disgusting emptiness and lack of principles. The New Policy is NO POLICY! Obama is rattled by the victory of a right wing Republican in Queens, for the first time in 90 years! What else is awaiting him elsewhere, one wonders…

But the Emperor is naked, and no tricks of the last minute will cover up his pudenda. Out of nothing comes nothing. No amount of running around frenetically willl change this.

The UN vote on Palestine may not bring about a solution (it cannot do so) but it already has done some good – it has exposed the empty hypocrisy of western policy on Palestine, and the rest of the world must now watch and react to this continued vacuum in Washington and Europe.

By Carols Latuff

 

US steps up pressure on Palestinians to drop UN statehood bid: Guardian

Washington envoys to join EU chief and Tony Blair in negotiations designed to prevent US carrying out veto threat
Chris McGreal in Washington and Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem
Catherine Ashton with Binyamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem. Photograph: Getty Images
The US is attempting to fire up a fresh round of Middle East peace talks in an attempt to head off a major diplomatic embarrassment over a looming Palestinian request for recognition of statehood at the United Nations.

Washington has again dispatched negotiators to meet Palestinian and Israeli leaders as it scrambles to find ways to avoid carrying out a threat to veto a Palestinian request for full membership of the UN, which is expected to be made to the security council or the general assembly next week.

If the request is made to the security council, a US veto of Palestinian demands for statehood – on the grounds that two decades of negotiations has failed to end the occupation – is likely to further damage America’s already battered reputation in the Middle East, particularly when Washington has strongly backed the uprisings in Libya and Syria and broadly welcomed the Arab spring.

The US is working with Tony Blair, special envoy of the quartet of the UN, EU, US and Russia, to come up with a framework for talks that could lure the Palestinians back to the negotiating table. US envoys David Hale and Dennis Ross, the European foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and Blair are due to meet Palestinian and Israeli leaders.

But Washington is also seeking support from Britain in particular in its stand against the Palestinian resolution, if it does come to a vote at the UN. Two other security council members, Russia and China, have openly backed the Palestinian move. France is sympathetic to the Palestinian demand but is seeking a compromise resolution that could be supported by Germany, which is opposed to UN recognition of a Palestinian state, in the hope of forging a common EU position.

Britain has so far not declared how it would vote, but diplomatic sources say that it is torn between American pressure to support the US position in the security council and concerns about what such a move would do to the UK’s standing in a changing Middle East, particularly while it is still heavily involved in Libya.

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has said he will take the request for full recognition as a state to the UN security council next week. But some Arab and European nations are pressuring him to downgrade the request to the general assembly, which can only offer observer status to the Palestinians, to save Washington the embarrassment of having to wield its veto.

Israel was also making last-minute efforts to persuade undeclared countries not to vote for a Palestinian resolution, amid threats to tear up previous agreements, impose financial penalties and annexe West Bank settlements if the Palestinians go ahead.

Obama confirmed the US would veto any request brought before the security council, describing the Palestinian push as “counterproductive”. But the White House wants to avoid such a step, knowing it will play badly among Arabs whose own moves for self-determination this year Obama has endorsed.

In Washington, the US House of Representatives foreign affairs committee opened a hearing on Wednesday into whether American aid to the Palestinian Authority should be discontinued. Some members of the overwhelmingly pro-Israel US Congress have been pressing for a cut off in aid if the Palestinians submit their request to the UN. However, there is concern among others that such a move would leave Israel to pick up a greater share of the cost of occupation.

The European Union is at the centre of the efforts to avoid diplomatic meltdown. Its belief that only a negotiated settlement can resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is given added force by its desire to avoid a damaging split among its 27 members.

But efforts to secure a breakthrough are constrained by Palestinian demands of guarantees that any talks would be based on the pre-1967 borders, plus a total settlement freeze. Israel is unlikely to sign up to that.

The Palestinians insist their approach to the UN does not preclude a return to negotiations later. “We see no contradictions between doing both,” said Dr Mohammad Shtayyeh, a senior member of the team heading to New York.

The UN bid was “the beginning of the game, not the end,” he said. “It is a process.”

In public, Palestinian officials are standing firm in the face of “very serious pressure” to backtrack. Privately, there are suggestions of wavering.

However, the International Crisis Group warned this week that any climbdown now “could decisively discredit [Mahmoud Abbas’s] leadership, embolden his foes and trigger unrest among his people”. It went on: “Most Palestinians do not strongly support the UN bid; but they would strongly oppose a decision to retract it without suitable compensation.”

Israel has engaged in its own diplomatic offensive to try to derail the Palestinian bid, instructing its diplomats around the globe to campaign vigorously for votes and lavishly hosting delegations from undeclared countries.

But Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, acknowledged that the “battle to stem the tide” was lost, and warned that “this unilateral course of action won’t lead to peace and won’t lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state”.

The Palestinians reject the claim that they are acting unilaterally, saying the UN path “is the ultimate expression of multilateralism”. They add that Israel’s apparent opposition to unilateralism has not stopped it acting without agreement, such as building and expanding settlements.

Sallai Meridor, a former Israeli ambassador to the US, said the move “weakens the chances for negotiation and agreement and increases the chances of frustration and violence. For Israelis it will strengthen the voices saying there is no one to talk to. Once you act unilaterally, the chances for negotiations are much lower.”

Israel is also alarmed at the prospect that the Palestinians could bring a case against it at the international criminal court, a possibility that would open up with enhanced UN status for the Palestinians. “No Israeli government could negotiate if it has criminal proceedings hanging over its head,” said a former official.

Retaliatory options raised by Israeli ministers should the Palestinian bid succeed include tearing up the Oslo accords, under which the Palestinian Authority was given control of parts of the West Bank and Gaza, annexing the West Bank settlements and withholding tax revenues that Israel collects on behalf of the PA. The US Congress is also threatening to cut off financial aid to the Palestinians.

Violence in the aftermath of the UN move has been predicted by the Israelis for months, despite Abbas’s insistence that any demonstrations would be peaceful. “Non-violent demonstrations have a high risk of developing into something violent regardless of planning,” said Meridor. “When you take gasoline and play with matches, you run the risk of a big fire.”

The Israeli security forces have restocked with crowd-dispersal equipment, including teargas, rubber bullets and water canon. They are also training and arming settlers, fuelling fears on both sides that hardline elements could provoke violence.

How the bid for Palestinian statehood will work at the UN

• The main session of the 2011 UN general assembly opens in New York with a speech by Barack Obama on Wednesday 21 September.

• The Palestinians say they will submit a formal application for full membership as a state next week. The approval of the 15-member security council is required.

• The US will veto such an application. But it may set up a committee to examine the request in the hope of kicking the issue into the long grass.

• In the event of a veto, the Palestinians say they will request enhanced “observer member status” at the general assembly, which does not require security council approval but needs a two-thirds majority (129 votes).

• The Palestinians claim to have the support of 126 countries, equating to about 75% of the world’s population, including China, India, Russia, Pakistan, Egypt, South Africa, Turkey, Brazil, Ireland and Spain.

• Israel concedes it will lose a vote at the general assembly but hopes to claim the support of a “moral minority” of countries, including the US, Canada and Italy.

• The EU bloc of 27 countries is split. Of the “big three”, Britain and France have not explicitly declared their intentions, and Germany is opposed to full membership. France is inclined to back the Palestinians but is attempting to come up with a compromise acceptable to Germany in the interests of EU unity.

• The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, is due to address the general assembly on Friday 23 September.

• Israel’s turn at the podium is also scheduled for 23 September. It has not been decided whether the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, or the president, Shimon Peres, will represent Israel.

Palestinians on statehood: ‘We want action, not votes at the UN’: Guardian

Villagers who have often been at the sharp end of Palestinian-Israeli relations are sceptical about the UN route
Harriet Sherwood in al-Walaja
Mohammed Hassan al-Atrash is unconvinced of the merit of the Palestinian push for UN recognition of statehood. Photograph: David Levene
Mohammed Hassan al-Atrash, a man whose life story is a microcosm of all that has befallen the Palestinian people over the past 63 years, smiles ruefully at the prospect of a Palestinian state winning the support of most countries in the world at the United Nations next week.

“I am a simple man,” he says, leaning on his sturdy walking stick. “I don’t know about politics. But from my life experience, I don’t think we will gain anything. What is left, after the settlements, the military zones, the wall, the bypass roads? You think you can build a state on a few scattered villages?

“If the UN is supportive of the Palestinians, they should stop Israel from doing all this. Talk is easy. What’s important is what is happening on the ground.”

It is a view shared by many Palestinians. As world leaders engage in frantic last-minute diplomacy in an attempt to avoid a damaging car crash of competing interests in New York, Palestinians shrug and get on with lives governed by checkpoints, permits, house demolitions, land confiscation and harassment from Jewish settlers. A vote at the UN, they say, will not end Israel’s occupation.

The story of Atrash, 68, and his village, al-Walaja, which perches on terraced hills between the ancient cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, is the history of the Palestinian people over more than six decades.

It starts when the village was captured by advancing Jewish soldiers from the Palmach brigades in the war that followed Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948. Thousands of villagers fled and the armistice line – the Green Line – was drawn through their land, taking 70% of it into the new state of Israel.

For the next few years, five-year-old Atrash and his family lived in a cave, from where they could glimpse their old home, before they moved in with relatives in the part of Walaja on the Palestinian side of the Green Line. The land was dry and difficult: almost all the village’s 30-odd water springs were across the valley in Israel.

In 1967, after the six-day war, triumphant Israeli troops occupied the Palestinian territories, where they remain. The Israeli authorities redrew the boundary of Jerusalem, and half of Walaja’s remaining land was annexed to what Israel claimed as an undivided capital.

A few years later, in 1971, the settlers came. More village land was swallowed up to build the colonies of Gilo, and later Har Gilo, illegal under international law.

In the mid-1980s, the Jerusalem authorities began issuing demolition orders for scores of homes built by the villagers, who until then had not even known they lived inside the city boundaries. They were told they did not have the correct permission, and were billed for the destruction after it was carried out.

And, now, bulldozers and diggers are swallowing up swaths of the village’s last lands for Israel’s separation barrier. When complete, the concrete and steel edifice will encircle Walaja, leaving a single entry and exit point controlled by the Israeli military. Every day, Atrash sees more of his land disappearing under the relentless march of Israel’s giant machines.

The judder of the machinery is also disturbing, possibly fatally, the roots of an ancient olive tree, known as al-Badawi. Thought to have stood for up to 5,000 years, the tree’s knotted trunks and branches would serve well as an emblem of the incipient state of Palestine, whose demand for recognition at the United Nations next week is causing seismic waves in diplomatic and political circles.

But for Walaja’s 2,300-strong population, the perspective is different. Deeply disillusioned after 20 years of negotiations that have failed to produce independence, and through which Israel has relentlessly built and expanded settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, many Palestinians have little faith in their political leaders to effect meaningful change.

“We are suffering from a leadership crisis,” says Ahmad Barghouth, 64, a neighbour of Atrash in Walaja. “Our leaders are either fools or traitors. Throughout history I don’t think independence has been granted to a state with no land.”

Barghouth, whose terraces of fig, plum, walnut and olive trees are also being churned up to make way for the barrier a few metres from his house, is scathing about the suggestion that a positive UN vote may open up recourse for the Palestinians to international legal bodies.

The international court of justice ruled in 2004 that the construction of the West Bank barrier was illegal and should be halted. “Did anyone implement it? You see the wall before your eyes,” says Barghouth. The UN passed resolutions calling on Israel to end its occupation. “Have these been implemented?” asks Barghouth. “We want action on the ground, not votes at the UN. We want an end to it.”

Despite such scepticism, and fears that the move towards a Palestinian state could effectively relinquish the right of refugees to return to their original homes, Palestinian leaders insist their strategy is correct in the context of two decades of failed negotiations.

They say a positive vote on the issue of statehood will strengthen the Palestinians’ hand in negotiations. Such an act of political symbolism, while not immediately altering conditions on the ground, could change the paradigm of relations between Israel and Palestine, they argue.

According to the national campaign, Palestine: State 194, the bid for membership of the UN is a step towards freedom and ending the occupation. “For almost seven decades now, the Palestinian people have been denied their natural and historical right to establish an independent state. The establishment of a sovereign and viable [state] is a debt owed by the international community to the Palestinian people that is long overdue,” it says. “Now it is Palestine’s time.”

Veteran Palestinian politician Hanan Ashwari told western diplomats this week: “September is a historic test for the international community. We have reached a turning point, both in terms of possibilities for peace on the ground and in the light of democratic changes transforming the region as a whole.”

Sheerin al-Araj, a member of Walaja’s village council, concedes that the approach to the UN may be a useful tool to bring pressure to bear on Israel. “But it’s not the end of the road,” she says. “It has to serve a bigger goal … I don’t trust [the Palestinian leadership] to have a back-up plan.”

One option she favours would be for the Palestinian Authority, created under the 1993 Oslo accords, to “hand back the keys”. She says: “We should say to them if you don’t want us to have a state, take responsibility for your occupation.”

Negotiations, she says, are pointless. “You can’t negotiate with someone who’s holding you by the throat.”

Barghouth is also mistrustful of a leadership which, he says, is doing Israel’s dirty work. “The Palestinian security forces prevent any resistance while the settlers are carrying out atrocities against us, taking our trees, burning our mosques, humiliating our people. If we defend ourselves, Abu Mazen [Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas] condemns us to the Israelis.”

More than 50 of Atrash’s olive trees and all of his 18 almond trees have been torn from the ground to make way for the barrier. Soon he will be left with two olive trees, with another 100 beyond reach on the other side. “My trees are like my children,” he says. “They are ripping my heart out when they uproot them.”

He shakes his head at the thought of world leaders gathering in New York next week to discuss the fate of his land. “Doesn’t the UN know the Israelis are building settlements on someone else’s land? That they’re building a wall inside the West Bank?”

What will happen in the coming months? “Only God knows,” he says. “We hope the future is good for the Palestinian cause. But if there’s unrest, the whole world will suffer.”

Violence borne from a combustible mix of frustration and settler provocation is predicted by many, on both sides of the conflict. “The Israelis are closing off other options,” says Araj. “Violence is the last thing I want, but it’s coming.”

Political groups express pride at forcing Israeli ambassador to flee Egypt: Ahram online

Groups demand investigation into protester deaths, criticise continued detention of 150 protesters
Nada Hussein Rashwan, Wednesday 14 Sep 2011
A press conference was held in front of the Journalists Syndicate in Cairo on Wednesday, in response to disturbances at the Israeli embassy and Giza Security Directorate at the weekend.

Participants included groups that called for the protest in Tahrir Square on 9 September: the 6 April Movement, Kefaya, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Arab-Islamic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Arab Unity Party, and the Nasserist Party.

It was divided into three segments.

In a statement, the participants expressed their pride in raiding the embassy on Friday 9 September after the government had failed to respond to the killing of six Egyptian soldiers by Israel, and claimed forcing the Israeli ambassador to leave the country was a success for the protesters.

They condemned the killing of five protesters at the embassy and demanded an immediate investigation into the deaths. They also criticised the continued detention of 150 protesters arrested near the embassy and security directorate building during the disturbances on 9 and 10 September.

They asked US president Barack Obama to refrain from meddling in Egypt’s internal affairs and giving orders to Egyptian authorities.

In the second segment of the conference, eye witnesses gave their testimony on the incident. The first witness said some protesters were able to reach the embassy by climbing an adjacent building and were helped into the embassy building by local residents.

“By that time, we could see papers flying out of the building, so we wanted to get in to bring more of them” the witness continued. He also said military soldiers were protecting the embassy. “They told us we wouldn’t be able to get through the steel gate.”

He said security forces had already started firing tear gas and rubber bullets at the protest on street level

A second witness, a member of the Nasserist Party, began by saying it was an honour for Egyptian citizens to raid the Zionist embassy. He told how he and four others were able to access the building next to the embassy building from behind one of the army vehicles, where they entered the embassy building through the windows.

“One of us climbed the building and went up to take down the flag, while we broke the iron gate on the first floor”, he added.

Writer Abdel-Hakam Diab gave his testimony on what was described throughout the conference as the concocted incidents at the Giza Security Directorate.

Diab affirmed that the building was heavily secured by a large number of security vehicles. “If the building’s entrances were blocked by that many vehicles, how could it be raided?” he asked, hinting that what was said about protesters raiding the building could not have been true.

He continued, saying there is a plot aimed atdemonisingthe revolution, infavourof the old regime.

Another witness supported Diab’s claim by saying he has video evidence of street children confessing to the protesters after they were captured by them in Tahrir that they were paid by the ministry of interior to infiltrate the protests.

The witness says he saw a group of similarly looking adolescents around the Israeli embassy area running through the protest spreading rumoursto instigate chaos.

The mother of one of the detainees who were arrested at the Israeli embassy protest spoke at the conference. She said her son was investigated (illegally) from inside his prison cell, by a group of men who claimed they were from human rights organizations.

West Bank villagers’ daily battle with Israel over water: Guardian

Al-Amniyr villagers in the West Bank face a catch-22: if they obey the law they cannot collect water. But if they fail to water the land, they lose it anyway
David Hearst
Israeli authorities use Israeli army machinery as they destroy a water reservoir used by Palestinian farmers in Hebron, in the West Bank village of Yatta, near the Israeli settlement of Sosia. Photograph: Abed Al Hashlamoun/EPA
The South Hebron Hills, sweltering in 34C heat and in its second consecutive year of drought, is a landscape of brutal contrasts. There is enough water here to support lush greenhouses, big cattle sheds, even ornamental plants. It arrives in large, high-pressure lines. And there appears to be no limit to the bounty it can bring.

Cheek by jowl with the water towers and red roofs of the Israeli settlers in this area of the West Bank is a landscape of stone boulders, tents and caves. The Palestinian village of al-Amniyr looks from afar like a rubbish tip until you realise that the rubbish is people’s dwellings, which have been destroyed in attacks targeting their water cisterns.

The villager Mohammed Ahmad Jabor’s water cistern has been destroyed three times this year. The last time was by the settlers. The settler attacks come generally at night and where they cannot destroy water cisterns they poison them by putting chicken carcasses in them.

The second time Jabor’s cistern was destroyed was by Israeli soldiers who destroyed seven tent dwellings and a sheep pen.

Jabor has gone to the Israeli courts repeatedly, which have upheld his and fellow villagers’ ownership of the land, a title he claims that dates back to Ottoman times.

But the ruling of the court has had no effect either on the determination of soldiers and settlers to stop anyone or any animal living in al-Amniyr. The land has been declared as agricultural, a designation which prohibits residents from constructing structures of any kind, especially cisterns.

Constructions need permits, which are all but impossible to obtain. Where they are obtained, it is in areas such as quarries, which are impossible to exploit. And under another law, if the land is not used for three years, it reverts to Israel.

So the inhabitants of al-Amniyr, at-Tuwani and the other villages that comprise Susiya, are faced with a catch-22. If they comply with the law they cannot build cisterns and collect even the rainwater. But if they fail to use their land agriculturally, they lose it anyway.

“We are without tents and without water, so how can we live here?” Jabor asks. Walking past the roots of a ripped-up olive grove – the replacement seedlings are already planted – Jabor answers his own question. A blue plastic sheet in an entrance to the rock, conceals a heavy, metal door. Beyond lies a cave, complete with a crying kitten, chickens and a metal stove for the winter. This is home for him and his seven children.

Most villagers date the start of their battle over water with Israel to 1982, when Ariel Sharon, then minister of defence, transferred all the West Bank water systems to Mekorot, the Israeli national water company for the nominal price of one shekel.

The Oslo accords created a Joint Water Management Committee, which grants Israel a veto over water resource and infrastructure in the West Bank. The committee issued a joint declaration in 2001 “for keeping water infrastructure out of the cycle of violence”.

The Emergency Water, Sanitation and Hygiene group (EWASH), a multinational consortium of NGOs funded by the European commission, accuses Israel of breaking this declaration, although there is a long list of other obligations under humanitarian law as an occupying power. In the past two years, it has logged the destruction of 100 water, sanitation and hygiene structures, 44 cisterns, 20 toilets and sinks, 28 wells. This year alone, 20 cisterns have been destroyed. Most of this is happening in Area C, which is under full Israeli military control.

The effect of the water shortage on the Palestinian population is not disputed. The average use of water by Palestininians is 50 litres a person a day for domestic purposes, one-fourth of the Israeli use. Rates of diarrhoea are high, particularly among children in herder communities. One survey found that 44% of children between six months and five years had diarrhoea in the two weeks before. Bodies such as the World Bank, UNRWA, Unicef and the World Food Programme have all carried out studies on it.

Where Palestinian villages are permitted, villagers complain of weak water pressure or the high price of tankered water. In Susiya it comes in at 35 shekels a cubic metre.

The Palestinian Water Authority issued a statement in May this year condemning the demolition of cisterns as a violation of numerous bilateral agreements and declarations between Israel and the PLO as well as between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Israel disputes it is responsible for the unequal distribution of water in the West Bank, and accuses Palestinians of letting untreated sewage flow into the water table and of lowering the level of table with unauthorised wells. It said that under Oslo accords water resources were divided between Israel and the PWA, each side was held responsible for the water it consumes and a bilateral committee was set up as a mechanism to monitor the use of water and approve new projects. The last time the bilateral committee met 65 new water projects were approved, mostly for the Palestinians.

The Israeli embassy in London said: “Unfortunately there is a limited supply of water in the region. This is the fairest system for allocation through a bilateral committee.” He called reports about Israeli settlers poisoning the water supply of palestinians “unacceptable behaviour” and was by no means government policy. Asked about the use of water by Israeli settlers, he said that as they paid for it, it was up to each individual how they used it.

Erdogan receives hero’s welcome in Egypt: Ahram online

PM Tayyip Erdogan chose to start his Arab cooperation-building tour in Cairo after cutting ties with Israel; a strong statement that the enthusiastic Egyptian crowd at the airport who greeted him were keenly aware of
Nada Hussein Rashwan, Tuesday 13 Sep 2011
Islamists warmly welcomed Erdogan upon his arrival in Cairo (Photo by: Lina Wardani) ‎
Turkey’s prime minister Erdogan arrived in Cairo yesterday evening on his first stop in an “Arab Spring” tour that starts with Egypt and will proceed onto Libya and Tunisia. A few thousand Egyptians awaited Erdogan at the airport, carrying signs of welcome and support.

A few weeks prior to his visit, a Facebook campaign was launched, calling for a welcoming party at the airport to greet the prime minister with roses. The organisers wished to show their support for Turkey’s latest decision to cut ties with Israel following heightened tensions between the two Mediterranean powers.

Ankara recently expelled the Israeli ambassador after Tel Aviv refused to apologise for its raid of a Gaza-bound flotilla last year. During the raid, eight Turks and an American of Turkish descent were killed.

The Turkish leader’s visit has received a lot of attention from people in Egypt and around the world, due to recent border tensions between Egypt and Israel.

Many Egyptians believe Egypt should have emulated Turkey’s resonse to Tel Aviv by also cutting diplomatic relations with Israel as a response to the killing of six Egyptian soldiers on the Egyptian-Israeli border last month.

Turkey’s move to expel the Israeli ambassador and freeze mutual agreements occurred just after mass protests broke out in Cairo in front of the Israeli embassy last week.

Consequently, Erdogan has seen his popularity skyrocket among Egyptians: a factor which could help the leader as he seeks to strengthen Turkey’s relations with post-Mubarak Egypt.

Members of the Muslim Brotherhood comprised a sizeable portion of the airport welcome, as they carried flags emblazoned with the Brotherhood’s logo and chanted in favour of Erdogan – interspersing their chants with praises of God.

The Muslim Brotherhood has been a strong supporter of Turkey’s current government despite differences between the two sides over emphasis on the role of secularism in politics.

In Tel Aviv, an Arab Spring that ignores the Arabs: The Electronic Intifada

Greg Burris, 14 September 2011

A protest in Israel that does not also address the occupation is really no protest at all. (Oren Ziv / ActiveStills )

No one could have ever predicted that a single act of protest — the self-immolation of a desperate Tunisian street vendor — would unleash a tidal wave of collective resistance and rebellion throughout North Africa and the Middle East, threatening to topple regimes that had long been considered permanent political players.

But perhaps the most surprising outcome of this regional groundswell of protest was to be seen in Israel where Jewish protesters held up placards and shouted slogans declaring that the revolutionary spirit of Cairo’s Tahrir Square had come to the streets of Tel Aviv. The Arab Spring, it seems, has turned into the Israeli Summer.

But how do the ongoing protests in Tel Aviv relate to the larger regional turmoil? What do the protests say about the current state of Zionism, and what do they mean for the occupation of Palestine? To answer these questions, one might begin by turning to a rather unexpected source: Israeli pop culture.

Zionism escapes unscathed
In 1984, Israeli rock musician Shalom Hanoch released his bestselling album Waiting for Messiah. Located squarely within the rock tradition of protest, the album was graced by an audacious piece of cover art: an extreme close-up of a filthy ashtray, overflowing with garbage and cigarette butts. It is as appropriate a metaphor as any for the true poverty that resides at the heart of the good life, for the grime undergirding the glamorous.

Further solidifying the album’s protest credentials is its title track which tells the tale of the fabled Jewish Messiah, who at long last arrives on earth. But his appearance in the world does not come as a happy occasion. Upon seeing the sad state of affairs that greets him in modern-day Israel, the intrepid, young Messiah does not fulfill any prophetic dreams. Instead, he throws himself from a rooftop, committing suicide on the pavement of a Tel Aviv street. “The Messiah is not coming,” Hanoch intones, his raspy voice accentuating the guttural sounds of Hebrew. “The Messiah is not even going to phone.”

But is the message of Waiting for Messiah really all that radical? Before embracing the song as a musical manifesto of leftist rebellion and revolt, one should delve a bit deeper. The lyrics suggest that the grievances leading to the Messiah’s suicidal plunge are entirely economic. Specifically cited is the mishandling of the Israeli stock market. One may thus surmise that the Messiah too was an unlucky investor.

Absent entirely from this picture are the Palestinians. They are relegated to the shadows — marginalized, obscured and forgotten. Thus, an image of protest is cultivated even if the thing that clearly demands the most protest — the ethnocentric Zionist state and its accompanying occupation of the Palestinian people — is not mentioned at all. It is as though everything can be criticized except for precisely that which matters most. In this fashion, protest — even that of an angry rock anthem — functions to perpetuate the very status quo it purports to be against. At the end of the day, Zionism escapes unscathed.

Revolt against neoliberalism
The recent protests that have erupted in Israel should be understood in the exact same fashion. Stationed in a makeshift tent city on Tel Aviv’s swanky Rothschild Boulevard, the protesters’ demands are strikingly similar to those voiced by their Arab neighbors: affordable housing, cheaper food and gasoline, higher wages and an end to the deterioration of the country’s health and education systems.

According to prominent Middle East labor historian Joel Beinin, “The Arab awakening is in part a rebellion against the neoliberal development model, even if it is rarely named. The housing crisis in Israel is similarly a symptom of neoliberal policies” (“The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Arab Awakening,” Middle East Report Online, 1 August 2011). But while these economic problems have been exacerbated by Israel’s costly military occupation of Palestine and the government subsidization of illegal settler communities in the West Bank, the overwhelming tendency is to ignore these inconvenient facts and instead to treat the occupation as an entirely unrelated subject, as a “security issue” with no bearing on the protests whatsoever.

Thus, even though Hanoch’s album was released in 1984, it could have been recorded yesterday. Had its titular Messiah postponed his arrival on earth by 27 years and appeared in the hot Israeli summer of 2011, he would have still taken that rooftop dive and splattered his body on the streets below. Once again, the problem is the economy, and once again, the Palestinians are left completely out of view.

There are those who claim that addressing the Israeli occupation at this time would serve only to divide the protesters. Uri Avnery, for instance, has argued that even “bringing up the occupation would provide [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu with an easy weapon, split the tent-dwellers and derail the protests.” Avnery, who is a longtime fixture on the Israeli left, concludes that there is “no need to push the protesters” in this direction and that with patience, the protests will eventually turn against the occupation on their own, as if by magic (“How godly are thy tents? Who are these people? Where will they go from here?,” Counterpunch, 5 August 2011).

This view is not uncommon. However, the desire to delink the call for social justice from the occupation and to simply hope for the best is ill-conceived. The view that the unity of the protests must be maintained at all costs overlooks the crucial fact that a protest in Israel that does not also address the occupation is really no protest at all.

On Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard, the middle class demonstrators are thus attempting to wage an Arab Spring without any Arabs. While the tent city protest has been unusual in its size and in the wide degree of support it has received throughout the country, the urge behind it does not constitute a real challenge to the Israeli state. The protests represent a reaction against the economic injustices exacerbated by the Israeli government’s neoliberal policies, and as such, the broader framework of Zionism is entirely capable of absorbing the protesters’ demands.

Settlers embraced
Indeed, what is the Rothschild Boulevard rebellion but the latest manifestation of an old, Zionist dream? Like the pioneering Zionist settlers before them, the protesters today envision the creation of a welfare state in the land of milk and honey, where life is affordable, food is plentiful and the country’s rightful inhabitants, the Palestinians, are excluded from the discussion. They simply seem not to exist. The protesters do not want to disavow the Zionist dream; to the contrary, they want to implement it.

But a dream for the early Zionists was a living nightmare for the local Palestinians. When freedom for one people is achieved with the occupation of another, there is nothing to be celebrated. The Rothschild Boulevard rebellion departs in no way from this precedent. Without addressing the occupation, the protesters’ demands, at the very best, aim only to make life better for the occupiers, and the welcomed inclusion of members from the Ariel mega-settlement in the revolt, as reported by Max Blumenthal and Joseph Dana, should serve here as a grim warning (“How could the largest social movement in Israel’s history manage to ignore the country’s biggest moral disaster?”, Alternet, 24 August 2011) . It is the occupiers who stand to receive better health care, better education, higher wages, more affordable housing and all around better living conditions, and those living under the occupation receive nothing.

Conservative agenda
Thus, in this case, protest is not at all that radical. Like Hanoch’s earlier rock anthem, the image of radical protest conceals a rather conservative agenda. That is, protest functions within the predetermined parameters of the dominant social order. Rather than posing a threat to the Israeli state, the protests aim only to make life better for its Jewish citizens. They seek to improve the Zionist dream of building a social welfare state in a Palestine without Palestinians. What is really needed is for that dream and its accompanying system of apartheid to be dismantled entirely.

Thus, the various left-leaning supporters of the Rothschild Boulevard rebellion who defend the exclusion of the Palestinian issue in the name of Israeli unity have it all wrong. Unity does not mean coming together with occupation supporters and land-usurping settlers. Rather, real unity would mean crossing that much tabooed Jewish-Arab, Israeli-Palestinian divide. It would mean that the exclusive, ethnocentric dream of Zionism would have to be replaced by a democratic dream without segregation and apartheid. Economic justice predicated on ethnocentric exclusion is hardly a dream worth fighting for. When those Jewish Israeli citizens consigned to the bottom rungs of their government’s ladder of exploitation are ready to recognize that their true enemy is the same as the one terrorizing the occupied Palestinian people, then and only then will there be a unity in protest worth celebrating.

Greg Burris is a former instructor at Istanbul Bilgi University in Turkey and a current graduate student in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Statement on the September 2011: PYM

Declaration of Statehood
We, in the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), stand steadfastly against the proposal for Palestinian statehood recognition based on 1967 borders that is to be presented to the United Nations this September by the Palestinian official leadership. We believe and affirm that the statehood declaration only seeks the completion of the normalization process, which began with faulty peace agreements. The initiative does not recognize nor address that our people continue to live within a settler colonial regime premised on the ethnic cleansing of our land and subordination and exploitation of our people.

This declaration serves as a mechanism for rescuing the faulty peace framework and depoliticizing the struggle for Palestine by removing the struggle from its historical colonial context. The attempts to impose a false peace with the normalizing of the colonial regime has only led us to surrender increasing amounts of our land, the rights of our people, and our aspirations by delegitimizing and marginalizing our people’s struggle and deepening the fragmentation and division of our people. This declaration jeopardizes the rights and aspirations of over two-thirds of the Palestinian people who live as refugees in countries of refuge and in exile, to return to their original homes from which they were displaced in the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe) and subsequently since then. It also jeopardizes the position of the Palestinians residing in the 1948 occupied territories who continue to resist daily against the ethnic cleansing and racial practices from inside the colonial regime. Furthermore, it corroborates and empowers its Palestinian and Arab partners to act as the gatekeepers to the occupation and the colonization of the region within a neo-colonial framework.

The foundation of this process serves as nothing more than to ensure the continuity of negotiations, economic and social normalization, and security cooperation. The state declaration will solidify falsified borders on only a sliver of historic Palestine and still does not address the most fundamental issues: Jerusalem, settlements, refugees, political prisoners, occupation, borders and resource control. We believe such a state declaration will not ensure nor promote justice and freedom for Palestinians, which inherently means there will be no sustainable peace in the region.

Additionally, this state declaration initiative is being presented to the United Nations by a Palestinian leadership that is illegitimate and has not been elected to be in a position of representation of the Palestinian people in its totality  through any democratic means by its people. This proposal is a political production designed by them to hide behind their failure to represent the needs and desires of their people. By claiming to fulfill the Palestinian will for self-determination, this leadership is misusing and exploiting the resistance and sacrifices of the Palestinian people, particularly our brothers and sisters in Gaza, and even hijacking the grassroots international solidarity work, such as Boycott Divestment and Sanctions efforts and the flotilla initiatives. This proposal only serves to squander all efforts made to isolate the colonial regime and hold it accountable.

Whether the proposal for statehood recognition is accepted or not, we call on Palestinians inside our occupied homeland and in countries of refuge and exile to remain committed and convicted to the worthiness of our struggle and inspired by their rights and responsibilities to defend it. We call on the free people of the world and the Palestinian people’s allies, to truly practice solidarity with the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle by  not taking a position on the state declaration but rather continuing to hold Israel accountable by means of Boycott in all forms economically, academically, and culturally, Divestment and Sanctions.

Until Return and Liberation,
International Central Council
Palestinian Youth Movement