Israeli minister hits back: Erdogan is the enemy, not Turkey: Haaretz
Turkish PM says ‘Turkey’s problem is with Israel’s government, not its people,’ says the country will continue to fight Israel’s ‘piracy,’ seek solutions to fight Gaza flotilla raid within international law.
Tourism Minister Stas Misezhnikov slammed Turkish Prime Minister Recap Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday, saying that while Turkey isn’t Israel’s enemy, Erdogan is.
“The Turkish people aren’t the enemy, but Erdogan is Israel’s enemy,” said Misezhnikov in response to Erdogan’s earlier comments that Turkey’s problem is with the Israeli government, and not the Israeli people.
“This isn’t a healthy situation, and unless he leaves office there is no room for optimism,” Misezhnikov said during a cultural event in Bat Yam. He added that there are indications that Erdogan isn’t speaking as a representative of the Turkish people and that the country is divided in its support for him.
The tourism minister also called on Israelis to heed the government’s warnings and refrain from traveling to Turkey. The tourism ministry is due to meet on Sunday to discuss ways to draw travelers toward staying in Israel for their summer vacation.
Earlier on Saturday, Erdogan said that his country did not have a problem with Israel’s people but rather with its government’s policies, the Turkish news agency Andolu reported.
The Turkish PM stressed that his country would continue to investigate Israel’s attack on the Turkish-flagged aid flotilla the Mavi Marmara in which nine activists were killed.
“We have not remained silent against this piracy and injustice, and we will not do so, and we will seek solutions within the framework of international law,” Erdogan told reporters in Ankara.
Meanwhile United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Israel to agree to an international investigation of its deadly commando raid on the Turkish ship trying to bring aid to Gaza and do “much more” to meet the needs of the Palestinians living there.
Ban said Friday that Israel’s investigation of the May 31 flotilla raid is important but won’t have “international credibility,” which is why he is continuing to urge the Israeli government to agree to an international panel with Israeli and Turkish participation.
Last week Israel, under mounting international pressure, formed an internal five-person panel – including two foreign observers – to investigate events surrounding its May 31 interception of a six ship convoy heading to the Gaza Strip.
The unholy story of Israel’s City of God: The Independent
‘Ajami’ reveals the brutality of life in Tel Aviv’s ethnically mixed Jaffa neighbourhood through the eyes of those who live there. As the film is released in Britain, Donald Macintyre meets its stars
Saturday, 19 June 2010
Dusk is falling rapidly as Esther Saba – Arab, Israeli citizen and Christian – sits in her yard dispensing lemonade and mint tea to her visitors and talking about her problems.
She mentions the eviction order hanging over her home, her husband’s heroin addiction, the wealthy new Jewish residents moving into her home town’s rapidly gentrifying neighbourhoods and the worry of bringing up three children safely in a district where there was yet another fatal drive-by shooting only a fortnight ago.
At an intersection a couple of blocks away, armed police use their two Jeeps as a temporary checkpoint to examine the IDs of passing local Arab youths. The checkpoint would seem entirely normal in the West Bank – but not here on Israel’s picturesque Mediterranean coast, less than five minutes’ drive from the heart of Tel Aviv.
For this is the Ajami district of Jaffa, the eponymous setting for the relentlessly gripping Jewish-Arab feature film of crime, poverty and violent feuding in an ethnically-mixed community. It took less than a month to shoot on a shoestring budget with local amateur actors, but has won a string of awards and was nominated for an Oscar. It went on release in Britain for the first time yesterday.
One of the film’s stars Shahir Kabaha is now back working in his father’s bakery, after a trip to Hollywood for the Oscar ceremony. He acknowledges that the film initially upset some of the city’s residents for unflinchingly “washing their laundry in public”. But Mrs Saba, in her yard, says emphatically: “This movie is my reality; the reality of each one of us.”
The film grew out of Jaffa’s streets as well as being filmed on them. Scandar Copti, the co-director with his Jewish colleague Yaron Shani, is from here. He is a Christian, Palestinian-Israeli son of a local school principal who trained as a civil engineer before becoming a film-maker.
The story captures with vivid authenticity what the producers describe as the “the tragic fragility of human existence in the enclosed community of Ajami, where enemies must live as neighbours”.
It is told first through the eyes of Nasri, a sensitive 13-year-old, whose family is at risk after his uncle killed a member of a Bedouin clan running a protection racket. A neighbour fixing his car is killed in a drive-by shooting when he is mistaken for the teenager’s older brother, Omar. There is a weave of other characters: Malek, the West Bank Palestinian with a desperately ill mother who sneaks into Israel to work; Dando, the hard-bitten Jewish Israeli cop, haunted by the disappearance of his own brother; Abu Elias, a well-off Christian restaurant owner whose daughter is in love with Omar but cannot marry him because he is a Muslim; Brinj – played by Copti himself – whose dreams of a future with his Jewish girlfriend are upset by a street brawl in which his brother is accused of involvement in the stabbing of a Jewish neighbour. But at the core of the film is Omar’s desperate struggle to raise a huge sum – agreed at a reconciliation meeting, a sulha – to end the feud.
If Ajami sounds over-plotted – and this is only the half of it – it doesn’t seem like it. It has been compared to City of God. While the Brazilian film is much more violent, the two share a willingness to confront the audience with an uncomfortable reality; one that has no neat, happy ending. While Ajami exposes the tensions within as well as between ethnic, religious and socio-economic groups, it never treats its main characters – Arab or Jewish – as cardboard cut-outs but as suffering, painfully understandable, individual human beings. The constant use of improvisation, albeit within a tightly scripted storyline, often gives it the spontaneous feel of a documentary. All but three of the actors in the riveting sulha sequence were told that it was for real, making the tension and anger all the more credible. Every Saturday for six months, Copti went to genuine sulhas to understand how they worked. “Then I brought a lot of people to Jaffa for what they thought was a real sulha and told them that there would be a crew filming it for a documentary. We filmed about an hour and twenty minutes, including the eating of the lamb [which ritually celebrates the reconciliation] and then cut it to about four or five.”
Yaron Shani had originally conceived an urban crime drama shot in this way when he was a student at Tel Aviv’s famous film school. But the idea only came alive years later when he met Copti, who had entered a short film in a contest Shani was helping to organize. Shani asked Copti if was interested on working on “something bigger” and the seven-year, intensely co-operative, mutually dependent process of bringing Ajami to the screen was born. Shani had thought a Jewish-Arab setting might be “very interesting” but until he met Copti he was, by his own admission, among the many Israeli Jews who know little about the country’s 1.5m Arab citizens, despite the fact that most speak Hebrew as well as Arabic (the reverse is only true for a minority of Israeli Jews) and vote in the same elections. A characteristically Israeli row erupted over the film hours before the Oscars, when Copti said he did not see himself as representing Israel “because I cannot represent a country that does not represent me.” Right wing politicians queued up to denounce what they saw as Copti’s ingratitude for state funding which had helped to finance the film. Yet Copti’s remark – and the film – highlights some of the underlying problems of the Arab minority in Jaffa and, by extension, that in Israel.
You don’t have to spend long in the real Ajami to have a glimpse of what a few of the grievances are: employment discrimination, municipal neglect; a hostile police force; poor schooling. Mrs Saba is convinced that the recent murder – a drive-by from a motorcycle just like in the film in a suspected gang hit – will remain unsolved, like dozens of others in the last decade. “I can take you to Kedem [a street in Ajami] and there’s a police patrol going by every five minutes,” she says. “Yet it took them half an hour to get to where the shooting happened.” Perhaps the murders are unsolved because witnesses won’t talk to the police? “That’s true,” says Mrs Saba’s friend Theodora Deeb. “If the people who did this found out you had talked, you would be the next one in the grave.” Mrs Saba agrees, but insists – an almost universal complaint by Palestinians in Jaffa – that there is a completely different standard of law enforcement between cases in which Arabs and Jews are the victims. “If the government really wanted to make Jaffa a better place they could. They know exactly who the killers are, but they think: ‘Let them [the Arabs] kill each other.'”
As with the police, so with education and employment, say the two women. The 49 per cent drop-out rate at Arab Jaffa state schools is much worse than in neighbouring, overwhelmingly Jewish Tel Aviv and Mrs Saba believes the municipality just doesn’t care. “I can take you to a park near here where you will see all the nine-year-olds hanging out instead of going to school. But nobody calls the parents.” Mrs Saba, a manicurist and the household’s only breadwinner, says there are few role models and incentives to suggest that education is worthwhile. “If a youngster goes for a job from high school what is the first question they ask? What he did in the Army? What is his ethnicity? They have left the Arabs the jobs like drug dealing, killing, shooting and stealing.” It’s a relief, against this bleak background, to meet Shahir Kabaha, who plays Omar in the film. Over a narghila in his local café, Mr Kabaha, 25, defends Copti’s remark. “If Tarantino made a film about the war in Iraq, does that mean his movie represents America or Iraq? No, it’s a Tarantino movie.” He says that a loss of traditional control by the sheikhs – or community leaders – in Jaffa has much to do with crime and schools that are “out of control”. But he agrees with Mrs Saba about the police. “About 15 years ago three Arab guys killed a Jewish guy in Jaffa and one of them ran away to Gaza. They got him even in Gaza. But if an Arab kills an Arab they don’t do anything.” Mr Kabaha, who wants to act full-time, is too intelligent to give up his day job for now. He works in Abu Shadi, the bakery run by his father, which is famous for its stuffed pastries, or bourekas. He admits to being “frustrated” by finding he cannot get Jewish roles – the large majority – in television drama. He could do it with consummate ease, as he was partly educated at a Jewish school, speaks faultless Hebrew and is physically indistinguishable from any other Israeli 25-year-old in his trainers, jeans and t-shirt. Mr Kabaha is proud of having “many” Jewish friends. Almost half the customers at Abu Shadi are Jewish. But he distinguishes between the many Jewish residents of Jaffa, who relish living in a mixed community, from two other groups. The most recent arrivals are ideologically-minded former settlers evacuated from Gaza in 2005 who have come to Ajami with the deliberate goal of helping to “Judaise” a mainly Arab neighbourhood. The others are wealthy Jewish incomers eager for a substantial home by the sea, sometimes in a gated complex, close to the historic Old City of Jaffa.
Every Palestinian in Jaffa believes that eviction orders have been served on around 500 houses, including Mrs Saba’s, to make way for such developments. In the 1948 war, Jaffa was bombarded relentlessly for three days by Jewish paramilitary forces. The fighting and the flight of refugees from Jaffa reduced the Palestinian population from more than 70,000 to around 4,000 (a number which has now more than quadrupled). Most of those that remained had to rent houses that had been confiscated by Israel after the war. From the early seventies, in exchange for paying “key money” to the public housing authority, most tenants in the Arab quarters like Ajami paid low rents, which were often not even collected. But from the nineties, the land developers moved in and the authorities began to issue eviction orders, for previously overlooked “offences” like rent arrears or, in as in Mrs Saba’s case, for adding extensions without a permit, something that is notoriously hard to come by. “They want to push out the people from Jaffa,” says Mr Kabaha. “This would be the most perfect country in the world if it was based on people who want to solve problems and not on people who want to make money on the back of those problems.” One of the several achievements of Ajami is not only that, as Copti puts it, it digs “deep into Palestinian society”, but also that it tells its compelling story without clunking exposition of all this political context. Instead it shows the consequences of it, leaving debate for after the film has ended. “We felt that dealing with the human side is the only way to address the big issues that are behind everything,” as the two directors, one a Jew the other an Arab, put it jointly in the promo notes for the film. “But all the social problems revealed in the stories of Ajami are governed and generated by politics.”
International organizations renew condemnation of Gaza siege: The Electronic Intifada
Nora Barrows-Friedman, 17 June 2010
On Monday, 14 June, Muhammad Juma Abu Wardeh, a 17-year-old Palestinian laborer, was shot and wounded by Israeli snipers along the “buffer zone” in eastern Gaza as he collected materials for a cement plant in Jabaliya, north of Gaza City. Israel’s ongoing blockade against the Gaza Strip has prevented access to raw construction materials, such as cement and industrial aggregates, forcing workers to risk their lives to trawl open agricultural areas for resources.
Since the 31 May attack on the Gaza-bound Freedom Flotilla, during which Israeli naval commandos boarded the Mavi Marmara ship in international waters and killed nine unarmed activists, international organizations and several governments have condemned Israel for its actions at high sea. Furthermore, they have addressed the draconian policies associated with the three-year blockade against the Gaza Strip that the Freedom Flotilla aimed to break.
In a move widely seen as a token gesture meant to ease public outcry against its policies, Israel’s National Security Cabinet stated on Thursday, 17 June that it would change its “method” of the blockade in order to ease the import of banned items into Gaza. According to a 17 June statement by Amnesty International, citing media reports, “Israel is to move from allowing only listed products into Gaza to using a list of products that will be specifically prohibited. It is not yet clear which products will remain prohibited and there is also no mention of allowing the free movement of people, also a human right under international law” (“Israel Gaza Blockade must be Completely Lifted”).
The Palestinian news agency Maan reports that “under the plan, the port would remain closed, the naval blockade would continue, the Erez crossing would close and Israel would continue controlling the 300-meter wide ‘no go zone’ that amounts to some 67 square kilometers of the tiny Gaza Strip” (“Israeli cabinet to change ‘method’ of siege,” 17 June 2010). The elected Hamas government swiftly condemned Israel’s plan, saying that it was an attempt to “mislead” the public.
In its statement released following the Israeli government’s announcement, Amnesty International urged the Israeli government to “completely lift” its blockade against Gaza. Malcolm Smart, Amnesty International’s director for the Middle East and North Africa, denounced Israel’s move: “This announcement makes it clear that Israel is not intending to end its collective punishment of Gaza’s civilian population, but only ease it. This is not enough … Any step that will help reduce the dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza is to be welcomed, but Israel must now comply with its obligations as the occupying power under international law and immediately lift the blockade.”
Alongside the draconian banning of imports into Gaza, the non-existent export flow has plunged Gaza into an economic crisis, which is not addressed in Israel’s new plan for the blockade.
“Just as important as allowing goods into Gaza is allowing exports to leave Gaza, yet there is no mention of this in today’s announcement,” stated Smart. “Banning the vast majority of exports, raw materials and the movement of people has destroyed the economy of Gaza, and pushed its population into unemployment, poverty and dependency on aid agencies for survival. These problems will not be solved while the blockade continues.”
Amnesty’s appeal comes on the heels of a similar statement released on Monday, 14 June by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). In its statement, the ICRC categorized Israel’s blockade against the Gaza Strip as a violation of international law, ending three years of self-described neutrality by the organization, as it hesitated to publicly condemn Israeli policies against Gaza until this point.
“The closure imposed on the Gaza Strip is about to enter its fourth year, choking off any real possibility of economic development,” the statement read. “Gazans continue to suffer from unemployment, poverty and warfare, while the quality of Gaza’s health care system has reached an all-time low … The whole of Gaza’s civilian population is being punished for acts for which they bear no responsibility. The closure therefore constitutes a collective punishment imposed in clear violation of Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law.”
The ICRC’s full statement calls on the international community to make sure Israel ends the blockade and meets its obligations toward Palestinians in Gaza under humanitarian law (“Gaza closure: not another year!”).
ICRC spokesman Simon Schorno told The Electronic Intifada from Washington, DC that although confidential meetings to address the Gaza blockade were held with Israeli officials last year, the Israeli government had not fulfilled its obligations under international law. “We’ve been saying all along that [Israel was] violating international law,” Schorno said. “Now we’re publicly denouncing its violations of the law against Gaza.”
Schorno said that the ICRC identified several issues that impede normal life in Gaza under Israel’s blockade. “First of all, the closure is the main obstacle. We emphasize that the strict provisions of health services in Gaza — including the medicines that patients are allowed to receive, the maintenance of medical equipment, and the electricity shortages — are very problematic. Dialysis machines, for example, need electricity to work. Power cuts prevent doctors from treating patients. And the situation regarding clean water is terrible. There is virtually no access to clean water, as the entire ground system has been contaminated.”
Schorno told EI that as a direct result of Israel’s blockade, along with Egypt’s years-long collusion with Israel’s policy of border closure, Palestinians inside the Gaza strip have been forced to purchase lower-quality goods at skyrocketing prices — usually smuggled through the vast tunnel network at the Gaza-Egypt border. He also said that Israel’s militarized enforcement of Gaza’s shrinking maritime sovereignty in the Mediterranean, and the 300km-long “no go zone” along the land perimeters of the strip, has devastated the local fishing and agricultural economies.
“What we’re aiming for with this statement is to ensure that signatories to the Geneva Conventions abide by its obligations,” Schorno added. “Israel did not provide any results. We’re not naive; we don’t think that the statement will immediately change things, but we can call on all parties to act and for collective punishment to come to an end. The fact that we can speak about this matter, and these violations, makes a difference. This is an important step.”
Nora Barrows-Friedman is an award-winning independent journalist, writing for The Electronic Intifada, Inter Press Service, Truthout and other outlets. She regularly reports from Palestine, where she also runs media workshops for youth in the Dheisheh refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.
Israel should consider a one-state solution – it might soon be its only option: Haaretz
Israel would do well to apply some of the features of the one-state solution: to become a truly liberal, secular state without ethnic dominance in which subgroups no longer try to impose their way of life on each other.
By Carlo Strenger
In a recent op-ed, Moshe Arens suggested that Israel seriously consider the option of a single state west of the Jordan, in which Palestinians be granted full citizenship.
The one-state solution is advocated by a number of Palestinian intellectuals and is becoming rather popular within the European left. Their reason is generally that the one-state solution would give more justice to the Palestinians – this position is mostly seen as anti-Israeli. Israel’s extreme right favors holding onto the greater land of Israel, generally on theological grounds.
Arens raises his idea from a different standpoint, because he is a secular liberal who indeed believes in full equality for Israel’s Arabs. Even though I have for years argued that the one-state solution is not feasible, Aren’s idea needs to be explored – at least as a thought experiment – because it may well be that the window of opportunity for the two-state solution is about to close. So far no Israeli government has succeeded in implementing it; Palestinians are beginning to reject it, and Israel may not be able to uproot more than one hundred thousand settlers.
Arens has indeed tried in his political career to increase equality for Israel’s Arabs, and he deplores Israel’s failure to do so. He has told me in conversation that this failure was his strongest motivation for writing the article on a one-state solution. In my mind, thinking about this failure requires us to face that Israel has been in an ongoing culture war for most of its existence – and not only with respect to its Arab citizens. Israel’s elections ostensibly seem to be about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but in reality they are a reflection of the tensions in Israel’s society: religious vs. secular; Ashkenazi vs. Sephardim; Jews vs. Arabs.
Of course, many will not accept Arens’ assessment that there are only 1.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank, and Palestinians are unlikely to accept the exclusion of Gaza from the new state. But even in Arens’ scenario, Israel would de facto become a bi-national state. Jewish cultural hegemony would have to be largely renounced and give way to a multicultural model.
Arens’ idea raises a real challenge for Israel: It would, for the first time, have to truly face the task of radically revising its political system and culture and to think carefully about how ethnicities, religions and worldviews can truly live side by side with each other instead of struggling for cultural hegemony.
One consequence of Arens’ idea is that the state would have to sever its ties to all religious institutions, and would have to become completely secular, along the French or U.S. model. Both Jews and Muslims would have to accept that religion cannot play any role in affairs of the state, and religious institutions would become completely voluntary and communitarian. In order to avoid tensions between the various religious groups, and between religious and secular lifestyles, the Swiss confederative model might be considered. The federal government’s involvement in the canton’s internal affairs would be low to allow for maximal cultural flexibility.
Both Jews and Palestinians would have to be willing to renounce the struggle for hegemony. The political culture would have to be structured in a way that avoids such a struggle. Jews would have to be willing to accept Jabotinsky’s suggestion that the President of the state could be sometimes Jewish and sometimes Arab.
Of course the most attractive feature of the one-state solution is a complete restructuring of the Middle East. Arab rejection of a fully liberal Israel-Palestine would no longer have a case. Of course radical Islamists might continue to object to the presence of non-Muslims, but the majority of Arabs would feel much more comfortable with a bi-national state.
I continue to be skeptical about the one-state solution. I am afraid that it will be very difficult to implement, and it is almost unimaginable that a cohesive society would emerge after a century of bloody conflict, particularly if you consider that even states like Belgium are on the verge of falling apart. Economic inequality, which is very high in Israel today, would increase even further and create huge problems.
Arens’ challenge must be taken seriously, for a number of reasons:
First, we are close to the point at which only the one state solution will be possible.
Second, because we need to face that the culture wars have led to the point where Israel is currently on the verge of falling apart as a country. The events surrounding the refusal of Haredi parents in Immanuel to have their daughters study with Mizrahi girls must be seen as what they are. The Haredi community has staged the imprisonments of these parents into a grand event of martyrdom for the Torah. For them Israel’s legal system simply has no legitimacy.
Paradoxically, not only Ashkenazi Haredim think this way – the Haredi state of mind was made fully explicit by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Shas’ spiritual leader, who condemned the High Court of Justice for intervening. He said that the offended Mizrahi parents should not have turned to arka’ot – the term traditionally used by Jews to designate the courts of the gentile countries in which Jews lived. It was seen as a betrayal of Jews by Jews to turn to these courts instead of a rabbinical court. Add to this that some Haredim used terms like the Chelmnitzky pogroms and ‘inquisition’ to describe these events. This rhetoric shows the depth of the chasm between the Haredim and the rest of the country.
De facto, approximately one million Jews – Haredim and part of the settler community – have ceased accepting the authority of the state. Add to this that most of Israel’s 1.5 million Arabs do not identify with the state and you get a society without little cohesion and a state whose legitimacy is question from within and from without.
Given this situation we need to see that Israel will have to rethink its conceptual and legal foundations. Even if the two-state solution would finally be achieved, Israel would do well to apply some of the features of the one-state solution: to become a truly liberal, secular state without ethnic dominance in which subgroups no longer try to impose their way of life on each other. It should seriously consider a confederative structure to defuse its culture wars that are tearing it apart.
Jewish challenges to Zionism on the rise in the US: The Electronic Intifada
Gabriel Ash, Emily Katz Kashawi, Mich Levy, Sara Kershnar, 14 June 2010
In June 2010, two opposite ends of the Jewish political spectrum will vie for one historical moment. As Israel and the Zionist movement struggle to maintain their century-long pull on Jewish minds, a new project is emerging to rechart the course away from Zionism and toward embracing a renewed commitment to a shared humanity.
On 19-22 June, just prior to the US Social Forum, North American Jews will gather in Detroit to challenge racism, colonialism and imperialism — first and foremost by contributing to efforts to overcome Zionism and decolonize Palestine. The 2010 US Assembly of Jews: Confronting Racism and Israeli Apartheid (www.jewsconfrontapartheid.org), comes at a time when there is great urgency to build on recent successes of the Palestine solidarity movement, and as United States corporations and the government continue to commit grave injustices in Palestine — not to mention in its own communities.
This event follows on the heels of the 36th Congress of the World Zionist Organization (WZO) to be held in Jerusalem that same week. The WZO was founded in 1897 at the First Zionist Congress to serve as the umbrella organization for the Zionist movement. At this upcoming gathering, the Congress will no doubt reassert and refocus its strategies for defending Israel’s legitimacy against growing condemnations, attempts to hold Israel accountable for war crimes, and the successes of the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions.
The WZO is both a symbol and a founding institution of Zionist political thought and action that brought us to this current historical moment. One finds an illustration of this disastrous trajectory in the press releases the WZO published during Israel’s 2008-09 winter invasion of Gaza. For example, on 12 January, by the time most of the horrible facts of the massacre were already public knowledge, the WZO opposed UN Security Council Resolution 1860 calling for an immediate ceasefire, labeling it “anti-Israel,” and criticized it for failing to demand “humanitarian assistance” to Israel. Many leading Zionist organizations echoed similar positions, whereas “softer” Zionist organizations waffled and fumbled. Reading their expressions of apology, support and indeed even encouragement for unconscionable crimes, it is painful to imagine that a beating heart was linked with the hand that typed them.
Likewise, on 31 May of this year, a monumental effort to break the illegal and crippling siege on Gaza was recently thwarted by the Israeli government. A flotilla comprised of six boats, 700 peace and solidarity activists from more than 40 countries delivering 10,000 tons of humanitarian aid was attacked by the Israeli navy and taken control of by killing and injuring people on a boat flying a Turkish flag in international waters. The inhumanity and illegality of these acts are undeniable and increasingly in the public eye. As awareness of Israel’s moral and political bankruptcy is growing worldwide, so does the authoritarianism, violence and self-righteous fanaticism of the Israeli authorities and of growing sections of the Israeli public.
Overcoming Zionist ideas and practice is crucial, first and foremost, because of the impact of its institutionalized racism and colonialism on the people of Palestine and the broader region. This impact manifests in the demand for political, legal and economic power for Jews and European people and cultures over indigenous people and cultures. This racism is also the cause of the extensive displacement and alienation of Mizrahi Jews (Jews of African and Asian descent) from their diverse histories, languages, traditions and cultures and in the marginalization and economic exploitation of its Mizrahi population and migrant workers within Israeli society.
Zionism is also anti-Semitic in its rejection of Jewish cultures and histories — including both Jews who are “other” than European and the European Jewish “victim” which it attempted to distance itself from in the creation of the “new Jew.” While rejecting the feminized Jewish victims of Christian Europe, it then uses their memory to justify and perpetuate European racism and colonialism and a militarized Jewish state. Likewise, Zionism promotes Islamophobia in Palestine, the broader region, the US and around the world. And the resentment and anger toward Jews living in Israel and elsewhere, aroused by Israeli violence and military domination, is used to justify further Zionist violence.
Zionism perpetuates Jewish exceptionalism and tells a version of Jewish history that is disconnected from the history and experiences of other people. By exceptionalizing the Nazi genocide, Jews are set apart from the victims and survivors of that and other genocides instead of being united with them. As such, Zionism implicates us in the oppression of the Palestinian people and in the debasement of our own heritages, struggles for justice and alliances with our fellow human beings.
The strategy to promote an understanding of Israel as an apartheid state is having increasing success, particularly in its explanation of why boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel are justified. Advances in this arena are rattling Zionist organizations in Israel and around the world. However, Zionist institutions like the WZO, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Anti-Defamation League, The Simon Wiesenthal Center, B’nai B’rith and others in the US and elsewhere have access to millions of dollars to spend on shielding Israel from accountability for its apartheid policies and its accelerating war crimes, and for furthering the colonization, ethnic cleansing and the theft and destruction of Palestinian land.
The confluence of interests between the Israeli state, global capitalist interests, especially that of weapon manufacturers, “post-conflict” construction and security companies and the oil industry is going strong. Islamophobic reactions in Western Europe, the US and Canada and general xenophobia seeks to use Muslims and immigrants as the scapegoats for the universal crisis of capitalism and excuses for perpetual war and occupation.
US and Israeli military aggression in the region support and reinforce each other. Despite American concerns that Israeli policy damages the image of the US, Israel’s economic and military power in the region is deemed vital by Washington. As a corollary, it is ever more apparent that pro-Israel lobbies in the US are opposed to anti-war efforts. The Zionist organizations and the Israeli lobby increasingly align with the neoconservatives in the US and share their investment in the agenda of war, occupation and/or sanctions against Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Lebanon and Syria.
Anti-Zionist Jews in the US can play a role in asserting to the anti-war movement that meaningful headway will not be possible without confronting the role Israel plays in provoking and justifying the US’s war agenda. After decades of debate and hesitation, Palestine is still a point of contention in the American anti-war movement. Challenging the US funding of Israel is avoided out of concern that it will detract from critiques of the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Contrary to this concern, placing Palestine squarely in the center of an anti-war agenda in the US is the key to a more fundamental shift in US policy and practice of which war is a necessary strategy. In turn, through building with the anti-war movement, we can contribute to efforts to reduce the isolation of the Palestinian struggle, advance challenges to Islamophobia, and directly challenge the mutually beneficial relationship shared by the US and Israel.
Accountability of Israeli, US government and international Zionist support for Israel will not come from a shift in US policy but through shifting American public opinion and debate, fomenting popular movement, using international and US legal sanctions and supporting the Palestinian call for BDS. The 2010 US Assembly of Jews seeks to contribute to these efforts and reflects a significant departure from Zionism that has been building since the second Palestinian intifada broke the stranglehold of the Oslo accords. It has continuity with a long history of Jewish participation in struggles for human emancipation. Ours are among the growing voices of Jews who seek a departure from the course that Zionism has been and continues down — a course that is a betrayal of our humanity as it simultaneously denies that of Palestinians.
Jews have an independent case against Zionism, and we are also part of a solidarity movement. When Jews aren’t clear — either about their own confrontation of Zionism, or about the precedence of the demands of the Palestinian grassroots struggle — Jewish participation threatens to muddle rather than clarify and strengthen the Palestine solidarity movement. We must be cautious to not presume that our commitment and investment in overcoming Zionism suggest “equality” in the struggle; overstepping our actual role in the movement undermines Palestinian leadership in their own struggle, thus reinforcing the centralization of Jewish voices that Zionism promotes and racism suggests. Likewise, equating the need for Palestinian liberation and safety with safety of most Jews in contemporary Western countries is inaccurate.
The Assembly will be a chance to reflect on ourselves as a part of US and international movements for justice and bring clarity to our politics and practices so that we can increase our effectiveness. Jewish anti-Zionism is not an identity, but a politic to develop and actualize and a location from which to challenge Zionism. Organizing to gain the approval of — or legitimacy in relationship to — Jewish popular opinion, liberal Zionist organizations, or US public opinion undermines our ability to be in solidarity. Likewise, in the long-run, rewriting Palestinian demands (e.g. excluding the right of return from BDS campaigns) to fit agendas that reinforce peace as a strategy for maintaining an exclusive Jewish state does not challenge the foundations of Zionist policies and principles. However, in the short-run any participation that advances BDS is useful in delegitimizing Israel. It is the development and sharing of distinctions such as these that will deepen and increase the possibility of a real alternative to Zionism and the ability of Jews to contribute to a powerful and effective Palestine solidarity movement. These are the issues that we hope to raise and explore with Jews and our partners in struggle at the 2010 US Assembly of Jews.
Our commitment to confronting Zionism is part of our commitment to cutting the threads of racism, anti-Semitism, elitism, fascism, colonialism and imperialism that have nourished Zionism and were institutionalized in the apartheid structures of Israel. Instead, we build continuity with the historic and current movements for human emancipation, class struggle, equality, democracy and justice. These threads have always existed in Jewish histories, against histories of Jewish collaboration with those that seek to oppress.
Gabriel Ash is an activist, writer and a core member of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN). He writes because the pen is sometimes mightier than the sword and sometimes not.
Emily Katz Kashawi is an activist, communications professional and a mother of twins.
Mich Levy is an activist, educator and an international organizer with IJAN.
Sara Kershnar is an activist and an international organizer of IJAN.
Haifa University “Proud to Be Academic Home of (Israeli) Security Forces”: AIC
“Haifa University is proud to continue being the academic home for the security forces and to teach the IDF leadership a large number of different and diverse perspectives. This is the sole way to be better people and better commanders,” said Haifa University Rector Professor Yossi Ben Artzi through a press release.
Professor Ben Artzi made this announcement following Haifa University’s winning of an Israeli army tender to continue training students at the army’s College for National Security for MA studies in the next five years.
“This is a very big achievement for the university…National security in our age deviates from the classic perspective of the concept and includes wide aspects of competition between societies for their position in the world, awareness, public relations, the struggle for public opinion, a steadfast, healthy society and more. A good commander must understand…(that) education is (also) the key to the national security of Israel,” Professor Ben Dor is quoted as saying.
Haifa University, like other Israeli academic institutions and universities, both explicitly and implicitly supports the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and the ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people, including Palestinian citizens of Israel. Haifa University, amongst other measures, sponsors scholarships for army veterans and those who took part in the 2008/9 military attack on the Gaza Strip; discriminated against Palestinian students in the allocation of student housing (a policy that was declared illegal by the High Court); and hosted a conference focusing on the “demographic threat” to Israel, amongst others.
Activists may contact Haifa University to express their support of the 2005 Palestinian United Call for BDS against Israel. There is no pride in occupation.
Haifa University Communications and Media Relations
Telephone +972-4-8288722
Fax +972-4-8246995
E-mail press@univ.haifa.ac.il
Mad Israelis section
This section is devoted to the many unhinged in Israel whose voice should be heard…. to separate its contributors from others, less nutty correspondents, their names have been coloured red.
Indifference and outrage: YNet
World indifferent to global atrocities but outraged by Jewish self-defense
Ophir Falk, 06.16.10
During his millennium address to the White House a decade ago, Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel told a distinguished audience that the horrors of the 20th century were possible because of the world’s indifference to the suffering of the oppressed in Cambodia and Nigeria, India and Pakistan, Eritrea and Ethiopia, and on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. Murder was facilitated by indifference.
Indifference, he explained, can be “tempting and even seductive” but must be uprooted from human nature. Wiesel could not understand why President Roosevelt who, “was a good man, with a good heart”, refrained from “bombing the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once”. The cost of indifference was staggering.
Today, the world is indifferent to the ongoing atrocities in Darfur, to tyranny and torture of dissidents in Tehran, to starvation and AIDS in Africa and to the disregard for women’s human rights throughout most of the Islamic world.
The world, however, is no longer indifferent to the Jews – it is outraged by them! It is outraged Jews dare defend themselves. It was outraged when Begin bombed Saddam’s reactor in 1981. It is now outraged that Israel, that bothersome bully in the Middle East (or as Krauthammer of the Washington Post puts it “Those troublesome Jews”), dared kill nine radical Islamists on board a vessel of villains to Gaza.
They are outraged again, just like when Israel acted in self defense after more than 8,000 rockets were launched from Gaza at its citizens between 2005 and 2008. The outrage has led the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council, composed of such Human Rights giants as Pakistan, Cuba and Saudi Arabia, to once again demand “an independent international fact-finding mission.”
Israel can only count on itself
The press too has once again gone overboard. With a blatant discount for facts, The Economist reported Israel “resorts to violence too readily” and put a picture of Benjamin Netanyahu behind barbed wires on the cover of its weekly magazine. A New York Times editorial stated that same week that, “Turkey is understandably furious about Israel’s disastrous attack on the Turkish aid ship.” And of course, Reuters, the home of dishonest journalists, was caught doctoring photographs that incriminated a knife-wielding “peace activist”, replacing it with a picture of a passenger providing care to a wounded IDF soldier.
Double standards are also applied by Israel’s closest allies. President Obama insists that Israel allow an international inquiry to inspect its actions, yet he has dismissed any form of criticism or inquiry of his targeted killing – drone war policy that has directly caused the death of hundreds of civilians in Pakistan and Afghanistan since he took office.
Whether its indifference or outrage – one thing is clear. When it comes to vital security interests, Israel can count solely on itself. A case in point is nuclear Iran.
In this context, President Obama may ultimately be remembered as “a good man, with a good heart,” and his efforts to impose important yet unenforceable sanctions on Ahmadinejad’s regime may attest to that. However, these are not the “crippling sanctions” needed or promised and it is still a mystery whether he views a nuclear Iran as an existential threat to anyone, other than perhaps Israel.
A soft setting for his indifference. He won’t bomb those plants, not even one of them.
Israel’s security is in its own hands. Therefore, today perhaps more than ever, Netanyahu’s overarching task is to guarantee that the fate of Israel’s six million Jews will differ from that of those who lived in Europe during the darkest days of humanity. We should all be indifferent to the hypocritical outrage over Israel’s just actions.