June 24, 2012

Violence sponsored by the state: Haaretz Editorial

We can only hope that the attempt to forcibly silence the social protest won’t succeed. But the police’s illegitimate action reveals system-wide contempt for the foundations of Israeli democracy.
Jun.24, 2012

Police arrest protest leader Daphni Leef in Tel Aviv, June 22, 2012. Photo by Alon Ron

The police’s violent suppression of a demonstration Friday on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard, with the close cooperation of municipal inspectors, clearly reflects the government’s intent to prevent more social protests this summer. The inability to come to terms with legitimate protest is another worrisome stage in the government’s disparaging approach to protecting democratic society.

The scene Friday will not soon be forgotten: Daphni Leef, lying on the sidewalk and surrounded by riot police, trying to protect herself from the representatives of public order. Another demonstrator, her hands shaking and her voice gone, displayed the scratches and bruises caused by the people who are supposed to protect us.

This time, stuttered apologies and innocent looks from Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch and Police Commissioner Yohanan Danino will not help. Summoning activists to police stations to find out their plans for the summer is not legitimate. An attempt to gather information ahead of a legal demonstration is not legitimate. Conveying messages such as “don’t cross the line” is not legitimate.

We can only hope that the attempt to forcibly silence social protest won’t succeed. But the police’s illegitimate action, without opposition from their superiors, reveals system-wide contempt for the foundations of Israeli democracy. If the police and the minister in charge of them do not understand that they must respect the protest, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must make a clear statement on the matter.

Experience shows that the chance this simple expectation will be met is not particularly high. Under such circumstances, the attorney general must make clear to the authorities that protest is an inseparable part of democratic life.

Israeli air strikes kill Palestinian militant and wound six: Guardian

Rockets were fired from Gaza into southern Israel, threatening to disrupt the unsteady truce brokered by Egypt

Israel launched two air strikes in Gaza on Friday, killing a Palestinian militant and wounding six people, after rockets were fired from the enclave into southern Israel, threatening to unravel an Egyptian-brokered truce. Palestinian officials in Gaza said the militant killed in a strike on a refugee camp was a member of a pro al-Qaida fringe Salafist Islamist group which Israel blamed in part for a cross-border attack from Egypt’s Sinai that killed an Israeli man on Monday. A second air strike launched after darkness fell wounded four other men in northern Gaza, Hamas medical officials said.

Jonathan Cook: Israel’s ‘price tag’ terrorism has tactical political goals: Jonathan Cook

By Jonathan Cook, The National – 22 June 2012

Violent, so-called “price tag” attacks by Jewish settlers have become a staple of life for Palestinian communities over the past few months. The latest is the torching this week of a mosque in the village of Jaba, close to the city of Ramallah.

Palestinians in areas of the West Bank under Israeli control live with settler neighbours who beat and shoot them, set alight fields, poison wells, kill livestock and steal crops. These acts of terror have begun to spread elsewhere: homes, cars, cemeteries, mosques and churches are now targets in East Jerusalem and Israel too. Earlier this month a school and several cars were vandalised in Neve Shalom, the only genuinely mixed Jewish-Arab community in Israel.

Invariably the “price” invoked by the settlers is unrelated to any Palestinian action. Instead Palestinians are punished indiscriminately for the smallest concession the settlers fear Israel might make in the diplomatic arena.

Superficially, the settlers’ behaviour looks like a particularly vicious form of tantrum-throwing, but there are tangible benefits to be gained from the trail of destruction they leave behind.

They provided a clue to their reasoning, as they always do in “price-tag” attacks, on the walls of Jaba’s mosque. In black spray-paint, they spelt out their grievance: “Ulpana”.

Ulpana, also near Ramallah and home to 30 Jewish families, is a settler “outpost” – one of more than 100 such settlements-in-the-making that are scattered across the West Bank. Unlike a similar number of much larger and more established settlements, which are illegal under international law, the outposts violate Israeli law too.

After years of petitions from human-rights groups, Israel’s Supreme Court has reluctantly ruled recently that Ulpana must be removed. D-Day for the settlers, July 1, is rapidly approaching.

The torching of the mosque – the settlers’ trump card – was intended chiefly as a reminder to Israel’s right-wing government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, that any move against them risks triggering a round of intensified violence that will further damage Israel’s image with the international community.

But it was also designed to dampen the enthusiasm of the courts for further costly run-ins with settlers. The Supreme Court, settlers hope, will be in no hurry to enforce the destruction of future Ulpanas.

Following the torching of Jaba’s mosque, Mr Netanyahu made the usual formulaic nods towards enforcing the rule of law. Dan Halutz, a former military chief of staff, was more candid, admitting there was no will to stop such attacks. “If we wanted, we could catch them [the perpetrators], and when we want to, we will,” he told Army Radio.

There are no signs a change of heart from the army is imminent. In fact, quite the reverse: for the past two decades the settlers have been strenuously working to take over the military’s combat units and its top ranks. What was once the Israeli people’s army is now very much the preserve of the settlers. The resulting collusion has been amply on display in recent weeks as a stream of embarrassing “occupation videos” have surfaced.

A few weeks ago, for example, Shalom Eisner, one of the new breed of settlers turned army commander, was caught on filmsmashing his rifle butt into the face of a Danish peace activist in the Jordan Valley. Mr Eisner’s only remorse, after the video was aired on Israeli TV, was to concede: “Maybe it was a professional mistake to use the gun when there were cameras around.”

And last month Palestinians in Asira Al Qibliya, near Nablus, filmed soldiers abetting armed settlers as they attacked the village. While villagers threw stones to repel the invaders, settlers opened fire, seriously injuring a youth. All the while, the soldiers could be seen guarding the settlers, clearly neither in danger from the Palestinians nor interested in stopping the shooting.

Israelis have not asked why, in cases such as the Asira video, where the faces of the lawbreaking settlers and soldiers are clearly visible, there have been no arrests.

Nor are they questioning Mr Netanyahu’s response to the Ulpana ruling. He has adopted the modus operandi of the settlers, inflicting his own price tag, this time on the courts: at the latest count, 60 new homes are to be built in a relocated Ulpana settlement for every one targeted by the judges.

But his pandering to the settlers has gone even further. He has effectively declared Ulpana’s existing five apartment blocks sacred territory, vowing, despite the enormous cost, to “saw” them: that is, to move them wholesale to the new site in the West Bank. In this way, he has sanctioned the very zealotry that finds its perfect justification and expression in the price tag attacks.

Ordinary Israelis are likewise adopting a mood that chimes with that of the settlers. The mounting documentary evidence of the settlers’ brutality, difficult for Israelis to ignore or deny, is rapidly hardening public opinion.

This toughening of public emotion leaves Israelis both indifferent to the suffering of Palestinians and in a mood for violence and vengeance towards any non-Jews who share their state, including not only 1.5 million Palestinian citizens but also migrant workers and now African asylum-seekers.

Once Israelis longed to believe in their own mythical slogans of ethical superiority: they had the “most moral army in the world” and their soldiers, as Golda Meir famously observed, suffered uniquely from an oversensitivity syndrome termed “shoot and cry”.

Nowadays, even the pretence of soul-searching is gone. If Israelis have a current motto, it is “shoot and shrug your shoulders”.

Jonathan Cook won the 2011 Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

EDITOR: Alice Walker stands with Palestine!

In a world where money rules, such as that of literary prizes and honours, where even such literary giants such as Amitav Gohsh or Margaret Atwood are not immune to taking blood money from Israel, if the sum is large enough, it is very refreshing to hear about a principled writer such as Alice Walker, refusing to allow her book The Colour Purple to be printed in a Hebrew version. Below is an argument by the usual Zionist apologist, writing that for Israel, ‘the occupation is only one of our problems’… obviously, not an important problem. Thank you, Alice Walker, for again serving as a moral lighthouse in these times of moral relativity and easy conscious.

Alice Walker’s The Color Purple should be read in Israel: Guardian CoF

By not allowing a new Hebrew edition, Alice Walker is preventing those who could learn from her powerful novel from reading it

Alice Walker

‘Alice Walker’s aspiration should be to have her books read by those with whose beliefs she does not agree.’ Photograph: Tara Todras-Whitehill/AP

Literature at its best should be a Trojan horse. Good authors don’t just tell us a story to pass the time in a pleasant way; he or she offers ideas that insinuate themselves into the reader’s mind, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes in the form of a tale that disguises its moral and cultural lessons. Books can provide readers a mirror in which they will see something they hadn’t seen before, and give them the opportunity of subsequently seeing themselves and their surroundings in a different light.

Alice Walker relinquished the possibility of becoming a literary Odysseus when she announced recently that she had declined the offer to publish a new Israeli edition of her classic novel The Color Purple. Walker explained her decision on the grounds that Israel is an apartheid state and added that she hoped the boycott would have an effect on civil society in Israel.

Let us set aside the proposition that Israel is an apartheid state, though to me this doesn’t seem an accurate definition. The background to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not racial. It would have been enough to talk about the Israeli occupation: there is no need to bandy slogans around in order to strengthen the argument that the occupation must be ended.

But let us use Walker’s assumption that Israel is indeed an apartheid state. If South Africa was still under an apartheid regime, would it not be smarter to enable the people there, by as many means possible, to read what Walker has to say about racial discrimination?

Boycotting is easy. A herd of boycotters is a comfortable herd. Being anti-Israeli these days is fashionable. As a boycotter you join a popular crowd, and you’re safe in the knowledge you will get automatic applause from your intellectual and literary milieu. Clearly the issue of Israel/Palestine is important to Alice Walker, but she and others involved in the arts who are implementing a cultural boycott of Israel are accomplishing the opposite of what they believe in.

What is Walker achieving by preventing a new generation of Israelis – a translation was originally published in the 1980s – from reading The Color Purple in Hebrew ? What punishment does she, and all the boycotters of Israel, think they are meting out to us? To be plain, most Israelis don’t have any particular interest in Alice Walker, and her own boycott won’t make waves.

But the accumulation of boycotts does have an effect on Israeli life. By isolating them, boycotters create a renewed sense of unity and self-worth among Israelis, and greater antagonism and closedness to the outside world. In one sense, the boycotters are feeding the flames of a lingering sense of victimhood. Victimhood is one of those mental constructs that is hard for Israelis to rid themselves of – and therefore, one which the Israeli establishment itself nurtures because it is convenient.

Some people say that when a writer prevents publication of his or her book in Israel, or refuses to participate in literary festivals here, she or he is in fact punishing precisely those – in the centre and on the left, who are disproportionately represented in literary circles – who support peace and oppose the current government’s policy.

I’d like to suggest a different argument, using the example of the Trojan horse. I believe Alice Walker’s aspiration, and that of other major cultural figures, should be to have her books read precisely by those people with whose actions and beliefs she does not agree. Walker, of all people, who has confronted racism and written a powerful fictional critique of it, is preventing Israelis from being exposed to the very kind of literary work that is crucial for them to read.

Walker should want her books to appear not only in bookshops and on private bookshelves but on huge billboards along the highways in the state of Israel. For whose edification is she talking about racism and segregation? Is her aim only to preach to the converted, to the liberal masses of Scandinavia? It is precisely here in Israel that her voice needs to be heard, and in Hebrew.

Had Walker herself done more research, she would have certainly have found that the occupation is only one of our problems. Perhaps it’s the most acute of our problems, but the manifestations of racism in Israeli life are far more extensive than solely attitudes towards the Palestinians. The incarceration and deportation of African migrants living in Israel is an intense current issue here and it is eliciting unprecedented racism from Israelis, and not only from the mob in the streets but also in the Knesset – the Israeli parliament – and from senior government ministers, who have actively fanned the flames of race hatred.

Maybe this public and humiliating demonstration of primitive racism to the world is Israel’s punishment for the occupation. Something inside us is sick. The situation is disturbing as well as infuriating – but the way to fight it is to make your voice heard, not to be silent. In her decision not to have her book translated in Israel, Walker is choosing to keep silent, absenting herself from Israel’s crucial public discourse about racism and the occupation. This is a strange and disappointing choice for an activist writer such as her.