PCHR Condemns Attack by GIS Members on Staff of ‘al-Haq’ in Ramallah: PCHR
Thursday, 26 August 2010 12:00
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) condemns the attack launched on Wednesday, 25 August 2010, by members of the General Intelligence Service (GIS) on staff members of ‘al-Haq’ organization in Ramallah, while documenting GIS’s attempts to stop an assembly organized by Palestinian political factions and civil society organizations in protest a decision by the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) to participate in direct negotiations with Israel. PCHR calls upon the government in Ramallah to respect public freedoms and to ensure respect for the work of human rights organizations and to provide protection for their personnel.
According to statements made by ‘al-Haq’ and according to Wissam Ahmed, 33, Program Officer at al-Haq, on Wednesday afternoon, 25 August 2010, a number of al-Haq’s staff members got out of their offices as they heard noise coming from the main street. They had information that GIS members were attempting to stop the assembly of political and civil society organizations which was scheduled to be organized in the hall of the Protestant Church opposite to al-Haq offices. The assembly was supposed to discuss the positions towards direct negotiations between PNA and the government of Israel. In the meanwhile, Wissam Ahmed, 33, Program Officer at al-Haq, took a video camera and went to the street to film the event, but he was beaten by a person in civilian clothes. Later, it was found out that this person was a GIS member. The camera was taken from Ahmed and thrown onto the ground. After Ahmed had managed to get his camera back, he asked why he was prevented from filming the event. In response, more than 10 GIS members surrounded him and beat him on the head and the neck. They took his camera and pushed him away.
Mrs. Nina Ata Allah, Head of the Observation and Documentation Department at ‘al-Haq’, who intervened to stop the GIS attack on her colleague, was also attacked. A GIS member stepped on her feet. She was injured in the feet as a result and was transferred to the hospital of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society in Ramallah for treatment. Sources from ‘al-Haq’ reported that Mr. Shaawan Jabarin, asked some police members who were in the scene about the camera. One of them told him that it was with GIS members.
It should be noted that this attack on staff members of al-Haq is part of attacks launched by the Palestinian security services in Ramallah on a peaceful march which was organized with the participation of members of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Secretaries General of a number of political parties, leaders of the civil society organizations as well as independent figures. Security forces prevented the participants in the march from organizing a press conference which was scheduled to be held in the hall of the Protestant Church. A member of the Executive Committee of the PLO was arrested as well.
In view of the above, PCHR:
Strongly condemns this attack by GIS members on staff members of al-Haq and the confiscation of their camera.
Reiterates that it is important that the Palestinian security forces respect the work of human rights organizations and to ensure protection to their personnel in all circumstances.
Points with concern to the recurrence of attacks on the right to freedom of opinion and expression and the right to peaceful assembly. PCHR stresses that these two rights are guaranteed by the Palestinian Basic Law and by international human rights instruments.
Gideon Levy: The Media in Israel is the biggest collaborator with the Occupation: MAP
This week MAP attended a CAABU organised meeting with Ha’aretz journalist and editor Gideon Levy in London.
Mr Levy spoke of the “ongoing process of dehumanization and demonizing” of the Palestinians in the Israeli media, which despite being “professional and free” chooses to turn a blind eye to the occupation.
This is particularly true when it comes to reporting on the situation in Gaza. Israeli journalists have been banned from entering Gaza since November 2006. Mr Levy described how during Operation: Cast Lead the deaths of two Israeli dogs received front page coverage whilst news of hundreds of Palestinian casualties was confined to the back pages.
He described Israel as “an Apartheid state by any criteria” and spoke of how the chances of change coming from within Israeli society “are zero’ as people are ‘in a coma’ towards the Occupation. He went on to say that as change “cannot come from within it will have to come from Washington”.
In response to the news of upcoming peace talks, Mr Levy described them as an “ongoing masquerade” as “the absence of leadership in Israel means that people are happy to negotiate forever, the danger is that the failure of the talks might initiate a more violent phase”.
EU rebukes Israel for convicting Palestinian protester: BBC
The European Union has criticised Israel for convicting an organiser of weekly Palestinian protests against the West Bank separation barrier.
EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said she was “deeply concerned” about Abdullah Abu Rahmeh, who now faces several years in prison.
She said he was a “human rights defender” committed to non-violent protest.
Israel’s foreign ministry described her statement as highly improper.
‘Legitimate right’
Jailed since December, Abdullah Abu Rahmeh was convicted by a military court on Tuesday of inciting protests in the West Bank village of Bilin and of participating in the protests without a legal permit.
Lady Ashton expressed deep concern “that the possible imprisonment of Mr Abu Rahmeh is intended to prevent him and other Palestinians from exercising their legitimate right to protest against the existence of the separation barriers in a non-violent manner,” her office said.
“The EU considers the route of the barrier where it is built on Palestinian land to be illegal,” it quoted her as saying in a statement.
Her statement drew a sharp rebuke from Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor, who said that any “interference with a transparent legal procedure is highly improper”.
Sentencing is scheduled for next month, after which Abu Rahmeh – a 39-year-old schoolteacher – will appeal the conviction, his lawyer has said.
Weekly protests
Activists have been protesting against the barrier for five years in what they say are mostly peaceful demonstrations. Some demonstrations have been attended by stone-throwing Palestinian youths.
Israel says it considers the protests to be “violent and illegal”. Israeli security services have fired tear gas, stun grenades, rubber bullets and on occasion live rounds at protesters.
There have been two fatalities among protesters and an American peace activist suffered brain damage after being hit by a tear gas canister.
Israel says the barrier was established to stop Palestinian suicide bombers entering from the West Bank.
But Palestinians point to its route, winding deep into the West Bank around Israeli settlements – which are illegal under international law – and say it is a way to grab territory they want for their future state.
In 2004, the International Court of Justice in The Hague issued an advisory ruling that the barrier was illegal and should be removed where it did not follow the Green Line, the internationally recognised boundary between the West Bank and Israel.
Facing jail, the unarmed activist who dared to take on Israel: The Independent
Baroness Ashton ‘deeply concerned’ at court’s ruling in case of West Bank protest
By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
Thursday, 26 August 2010
Baroness Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, yesterday issued an unusually sharp rebuke to Israel over a military court’s conviction of a Palestinian activist prominent in unarmed protests against the West Bank separation barrier.
Lady Ashton said she was “deeply concerned” that Abdallah Abu Rahma was facing a possible jail sentence “to prevent him and other Palestinians from exercising their legitimate right to protest against the separation barriers in a non-violent manner”.
Though acquitted on two charges – including one of stone-throwing – Mr Abu Rahma, 39, a leader of the anti-barrier protests which have taken place every Friday for five years in the West Bank village of Bil’in, was convicted on Monday on another two: “incitement” and “organising and participating in an illegal demonstration”.
He is in jail, awaiting sentencing next month. He was detained last December by troops who arrived at his Ramallah home at 2am in seven jeeps as part of what anti-barrier activists say has been an escalating wave of arrests of protesters in West Bank villages, angry about the barrier and settlements encroaching on Palestinian land.
Pointing out that the European Union regarded the barrier as “illegal” where – as at Bil’in – it was built on Palestinian land, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy said the EU considered Mr Abu Rahma, who works as a teacher at a private school, to be “a human rights defender committed to non-violent protest”.
The protest by Lady Ashton, who was yesterday accused by Israel’s foreign ministry of “interfering” in the country’s judicial process, follows mounting concern by Western diplomats over the severity of measures taken by Israeli security forces against the mainly rural protests. Officials from several European countries, including Britain, were present for the verdict in the Ofer military court on Monday.
Her intervention was partly designed to demonstrate that the EU representatives will continue closely to watch developments on the ground in the West Bank while direct peace negotiations, due to start in Washington next week, get under way.
The military judge also acquitted Mr Abu Rahma of a charge of illegal arms possession which arose from a collection of used tear gas canisters and bullet cases he had been making to demonstrate that police and troops used violence against protesters.
The Popular Struggle Co-Ordination Committee said the “absurd” charge demonstrated the lengths the military was prepared to go to “to silence and smear unarmed dissent”.
It added that the incitement charge had been upheld even though it was based on the testimonies of minors who had been arrested in the middle of the night, and which the court recognised had defects. No other evidence had been offered, despite the routine filming of the protests by the security forces. It said the charge of organising demonstrations had not been used since the first intifada, from 1987 to 1993.
In 2008 Mr Abu Rahma was given an award by the International League for Human Rights in Berlin for “outstanding service in the realisation of basic human rights”. He met “the Elders”, a group of global statesmen and women including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, when they made a solidarity visit to Bil’in last year.
The protests at Bil’in, the highest profile of several in West Bank villages, have seen clashes between security forces using tear gas and rubber bullets and stone-throwing youths. After a protester was killed there in April 2009, military prosecutors said there was insufficient evidence for an investigation.
Construction work on rerouting part of the barrier at Bil’in finally began this year after the state had twice been found in contempt by the Supreme Court for failing to implement a 2007 court order to reroute the barrier.
Yigal Palmor, Israel’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, said: “In a country in which even open supporters of Hamas and Hizbollah enjoy freedom of speech, Lady Ashton’s accusations sound particularly hollow. If she thinks she can do a better job than the defendant’s lawyer, she should say so. Otherwise, interfering in a transparent legal process in a democratic country is a very peculiar way to promote European values.”
But Mr Abu Rahma’s lawyer, Gaby Lasky, said: “The international community must take a tough stand on this issue, and I am happy that the political motivation of the indictment against a human rights defender was clear to the EU from attending the hearings.”
The Co-ordination Committee, a loose body of protest organisers, said yesterday there had been a “dramatic” increase in arrests. Of 93 made at Bil’in alone in five years, 46 were made since July of last year. At the more recent flashpoint of Nabi Saleh, there had been 41 arrests in the last eight months.
Avner Cohen: Why Israel should end its policy of nuclear ambiguity: Haaretz
26 Aug 2010
Avner Cohen is a senior fellow of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He is the author of “Israel and the Bomb” and the forthcoming “The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain with the Bomb.”
Avner Cohen, you claim that the time has come for Israel to abandon its policy of nuclear ambiguity. Why now, and why would that be good for Israel?
“Nuclear ambiguity is a cornerstone of Israeli strategic thinking. It was born many years ago, and sealed as part of a comprehensive deal with the United States in 1969. It was appropriate at the time, but today, in my opinion, it is not just anachronistic, but foolish and anti-democratic. Even in realpolitik terms, it is an ‘own goal’ for Israel. In my view, it undermines genuine Israeli interests, including the need to gain recognition and legitimacy and to be counted among the responsible states in this strategic field.”
Are you sure the pressure on Israel is so severe? If Israel is criticized over its nuclear program, it’s usually marginal. The brunt of the criticism is over its treatment of the Palestinians.
“Israel received tacit consent for its nuclear program from the Western world because it appeared to be a small, just state surrounded by enemies, and the memory of the Holocaust was still fresh. Israel’s image was different then.
“In the long term, the more Israel appears to reject peace and to be the one that opposes a two-state solution, the more it will be perceived as a regional bully that possesses nuclear weapons. So the world will be a lot less forgiving on the nuclear issue. The situation of ambiguity, in which you don’t have real legitimacy, is not a good place to be.”
The United States has called on Israel to join the nonproliferation treaty, but during Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, U.S. President Barack Obama said he recognizes the special nature of the threats Israel faces, and these threats warrant special security measures.
“The Americans want to appear just and fair because the issue is seen in Israel as completely sacred. They want to look as though they respect that. This agreement [with the U.S.] has been passed along from president to president, but I don’t believe this issue is as sacred to Americans as it is to Israelis.”
Do you give credence to the slippery slope theory, under which abandoning ambiguity would lead to demands that Israel disarm?
“Those are cliches used by the defense establishment. Nobody demands that Israel make such an announcement without first doing the preparatory work among its allies and the Arab states. This great fear of a slippery slope is ridiculous. Israel has its own interests; nobody can coerce it to do things.”
What about the claim that ambiguity is what keeps the Arab states from feeling a need to launch an arms race against Israel?
“I don’t dismiss that claim out of hand, and if, after study and thought, this fear turns out to be warranted, I would be prepared to wait. But in some ways, ambiguity is insulting to the Arabs. The claim you mention treats Arabs as though they were children: If they are told that Israel doesn’t admit to it, that frees them of the need to deal with the reality. I believe the Arab countries don’t want to play a game of make-believe, but rather want to discuss the topic directly and realistically.”
You say, basically, that Iran is imitating Israel’s nuclear behavior. That comparison would certainly rankle Israel supporters.
“But the way Iran has advanced toward nuclear capability is not via announcements and tests, but rather by rumors. It can even remain within the bounds of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. If that rankles anybody, let it rankle.
“If Iran is not attacked, it will want to achieve a status of ambiguity; I see this as nearly certain. The international community thus has another reason not to accept the idea of ambiguity as legitimate. The norm that a state with a nuclear weapon must say so clearly is part of the nonproliferation regime. The longer Iran continues down this path, the less patience the world will have for Israel.”
How do you envision the scenario of ‘coming out of the nuclear closet?’
“Censorship plays a very central role in the enforcement of nuclear ambiguity. So long as there is a [military] censor, it is very hard to alter ambiguity. If censorship didn’t exist, Israeli newspapers would be able to write about the subject more openly.
“Another issue is the need for a law that addresses the nuclear topic. There is a Shin Bet [security service] law, but there is no law for the Mossad and no law for the Israel Atomic Energy Commission. This is a very problematic situation.
“On the international level, it’s a sensitive subject that demands preparatory work. Ultimately, I see a political statement by Israel’s government in which the prime minister would find the right way to put this subject on the table. He would talk about the historical background and the responsible way Israel has dealt with this topic. With a few rare exceptions, these weapons have no military use; Israel views them as a means of deterrence. I don’t think Israel would need to go into detail regarding how many [bombs] it has or exactly what it has.
“Israel has a right to the bomb no less than New Delhi, or even the United States. Ambiguity creates a sense that we are sinners, as though we had done something so terrible that we can’t tell the awful truth – and I don’t think it is so awful. This is a country that the world has viewed as a nuclear state for a long time, and the time has come for it to say something positive on this huge, complicated and awe-inspiring topic…
“All these states are ultimately committed under the treaty they signed to achieve a world without nuclear weapons. Whether that will happen in our lifetimes I can’t say.”
You say ambiguity undermines Israeli democracy and prevents debate on matters of life and death, such as the question of whose finger will be on the button. Do you think the Israeli public is ready for such a discussion?
“There has been very little creative thinking in this area, and ambiguity is one of the stifling factors that have produced an unacceptable, closed culture incapable of creative thinking. Ambiguity’s power derives from the fact that Israeli society accepts it, and it seems to the public that any attempt to deviate from it would cause serious damage to Israeli security.
“Ambiguity has created a public incapable of dealing with the topic, one that is afraid of it and prefers the issue to be handled by ‘trustworthy hands’ so that it does not have to take responsibility itself.
Ambiguity has created an ignorant, craven public which, in a certain sense, has betrayed its civic, democratic duties on this subject.”
What’s it like researching a topic nobody discusses?
“When I started studying this subject 25 years ago, I had the feeling I was entering a palace where nothing could be touched. It took me years to find the right way to handle the topic responsibly – from a researcher’s perspective, not from the standpoint of someone who is directly involved in the matter.
Today I think it is possible to initiate a meaningful dialogue about concrete, real issues.”
Why Not to Bomb Iran: NYTimes
By ROBERT WRIGHT
Has the Atlantic magazine become a propaganda tool — “a de facto party to the neoconservative and Israeli campaign to initiate a global war with Iran”? That question was being discussed last week on The Atlantic’s own Web site, among other places, after the magazine unveiled a cover story saying that Israel is likely to bomb Iran within a year.
The article wasn’t an argument for bombing, just a report on Israel’s state of mind. So why all the outrage — why, for example, did Glenn Greenwald of Salon title his slashing assessment of the Atlantic article “How Propaganda Works: Exhibit A”?
In part because the author of the article is Jeffrey Goldberg, who has previously been accused of pushing a pro-war agenda via ostensibly reportorial journalism. His 2002 New Yorker piece claiming to have found evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda is remembered on the left as a monument to consequential wrongness. And suspicions of Goldberg’s motivations only grow when he writes about Israel. He served in the Israeli army, and he has more than once been accused of channeling Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.
There is certainly a bit of channeling in Goldberg’s Atlantic piece. For example: “Netanyahu’s belief is that Iran is not Israel’s problem alone; it is the world’s problem, and the world, led by the United States, is duty-bound to grapple with it.” Still, the piece is no simple propaganda exercise. Indeed, what’s striking is that, for all the space given to the views of hawkish Israeli officials, they don’t wind up looking very good, and neither does their case for bombing Iran. The overall impression is that, as Paul Pillar, a former C.I.A. official, put it after reading Goldberg’s piece, Israel’s inclination to attack Iran is “more a matter of the amygdala and emotion than of the cortex and thought.”
For starters, Netanyahu comes off in Goldberg’s article as so psychologically enslaved by his uberhawk father as to be incapable of making autonomous policy decisions. (One Israeli politician told Goldberg that there can be no two-state solution until the 100-year-old father dies.) So the elder Netanyahu’s manifest enthusiasm for military action against Iran may be one of the most powerful forces behind it. This shouldn’t inspire American confidence in such a policy — and one thing the Atlantic article drives home is that Israel very much wants America to support air strikes or, better yet, actually conduct them.
The debate becomes about who should bomb Iran, not about whether Iran should be bombed.
When the subject turns from Netanyahu’s psychology to Israel’s psychology, the inclination to bomb Iran still looks none too cerebral. One of the prime movers behind it is that Israel’s regional nuclear monopoly has “near-sanctity, in the public’s mind” because it has “allowed the Jewish state to recover from the wounds of the Holocaust.” This is an understandable reaction to the trauma of the Shoah, and it helps explain the political pressure to bomb Iran, but it’s not a sound strategic reason to do so.
Memory of the Holocaust also, of course, informs Israel’s Iran policy in another way. “The Jews had no power to stop Hitler from annihilating us,” an anonymous Israeli official tells Goldberg. “Today, 6 million Jews live in Israel, and someone is threatening them with annihilation. But now we have the power to stop them. Bibi knows that this is the choice.”
Actually, my own sources tell me that, though many Israelis take seriously this prospect of Iran trying to annihilate them, Israel’s policy elites by and large don’t. They realize that Iranian leaders aren’t suicidal and so wouldn’t launch a nuclear strike against a country with at least 100 nukes. On close reading, as others have noted, the Atlantic piece suggests that this sober view indeed prevails in Israel’s higher echelons. Though Netanyahu warns us about a “messianic apocalyptic cult” possessing nuclear weapons, he doesn’t seem to be seriously imagining the “cult” launching a first strike. Goldberg writes: “The challenges posed by a nuclear Iran are more subtle than a direct attack, Netanyahu told me.”
So what are those challenges? For one thing, “Iran’s militant proxies would be able to fire rockets and engage in other terror activities while enjoying a nuclear umbrella.” Whether heading off this prospect would justify bombing Iran is an interesting question, but we don’t need to ask it, because the prospect isn’t real. There’s no way Iran’s having a nuclear weapon would keep Israel from taking out Hezbollah missile sites in Lebanon as missiles from them rained down on Tel Aviv. If the Holocaust has left Israelis with an exaggerated fear of Iran’s intentions, it has also left them with an absolute refusal to be cowed.
One “existential” threat that Israel’s policy elites do seem to take seriously is that a nuclear Iran might render Israel such a scary place to live as to induce a brain drain. “The real threat to Zionism is the dilution of quality,” defense minister Ehud Barak tells Goldberg. Here again, I think the threat is overstated. After a year or two, Iran’s possession of nukes would become background noise for the average Israeli, less salient than periodic flurries of missiles from Lebanon or Gaza — flurries that so far have failed to noticeably drain Israel of intellectual capital.
The “brain drain” issue illustrates what weak “propaganda” much of Goldberg’s piece is: America is supposed to support — or even conduct — a military attack designed to keep talented people from immigrating to America? If I were Israel, I’d hire a new propagandist.
So, if this piece, read closely, makes for such an ineffectual pro-bombing pamphlet, why is Goldberg being pilloried as a propagandist?
For starters, there’s the claim that, though he spends a fair number of bullet points on the blowback from an attack on Iran, he still understates it. No mention, for example, of how an American-backed attack (and America would surely stand by Israel in the end) would feed the war-on-Islam narrative that is already starting to fuel home-grown terrorism in America.
But the main charges against Goldberg aren’t about loading the cost-benefit analysis. They’re about framing the future debate. His piece leaves you thinking that Israel will attack Iran very soon unless America does the honors. So the debate becomes about who should bomb Iran, not about whether Iran should be bombed.
And this is the way Israel’s hawks want the debate framed. That way either they get their wish and America does the bombing, or, worst case, they inure Americans to the prospect of a bombing and thus mute the outrage that might otherwise ensue after a surprise Israeli attack draws America into war. No wonder dozens of Israeli officials were willing to share their assessments with Goldberg, and no wonder “a consensus emerged that there is a better than 50 percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by next July.”
Yossi Alpher, an Israeli peace activist and a 12-year veteran of the Mossad, has opined that Goldberg was “naïve” in not realizing that these officials were using him as part of a public relations campaign. As accusations against Goldberg go, “naïve” is pretty flattering, and I do think it may be more apt than “cynical.” I’ve long felt that most ulterior motives are subconscious, and Goldberg seems to be a case in point. Back in 2002, when he was vociferously arguing for an invasion of Iraq, he just wanted to believe that his Kurdish sources were giving him solid evidence of Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda — notwithstanding the fact that they, as fellow invasion advocates, had an interest in fabricating evidence. Now Goldberg again seems eager to accept the testimony of people whose testimony is obviously suspect.
In any event, his article shouldn’t distract Americans from the real question: Given that the United States would almost certainly be drawn into war with Iran in the wake of an Israeli strike, and given that America would be blamed for the strike whether or not it had green-lighted it, and given the many ways this would be bad for national security, how can American leaders keep it from happening?
Here, at least, Goldberg has performed a service. His article, read closely, suggests that even from Israel’s point of view, there’s no sound rationale for bombing Iran, especially when you consider the long-term downside: an attack would radically dim what prospects there are for lasting peace in the Middle East; Israel’s downward spiral — in which regional hostility toward it leads to conflicts that only deepen the hostility — would be sustained big time. If appealing to America’s interests isn’t enough to keep Israel from attacking Iran, maybe appealing to Israel’s interests will help.
1948 and Israel’s deceptive bargaining position: Salon.com
Israel’s demand that Palestinians recognize it as a Jewish state sounds reasonable — unless you understand 1948
BY BEN WHITE
The refrain from Israeli politicians and the country’s allies and apologists is familiar: There can be no peace deal until the Palestinians “recognize” Israel as “a Jewish state.” While this can sound reasonable to the casual listener in the West, this demand actually points to critical flaws in the “peace process” and the way in which the international community approaches the Palestine/Israel question.
This is because such a demand, and understanding why it is so unacceptable to Palestinians, means going back to 1948 — when hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were destroyed, their inhabitants forbidden from returning by the new Jewish state — and throwing the spotlight on two groups of Palestinians that the so-called peace process has ignored or marginalized: the refugees of ’48 (and their descendants) and the Palestinian minority that’s left inside Israel. The unpleasant reality is that Israel as “a Jewish state” means the permanent exile and dispossession of the former, and the colonial control of the latter.
In the West, even talking about Palestinian citizens inside Israel risks confusion, since for so long they have been referred to as “Israeli Arabs” or “Arab Israelis.” This is a formulation intended to obfuscate their Palestinian identity, a discursive erasure symbolic of far more brutal methods (some of which are described below). The lack of attention paid to the issues faced by Palestinians in Israel by Western politicians and pundits is unfortunate, since their historic and contemporary reality radically undermines the well-worn cliché that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East.”
The Palestinian minority (around 20 percent of the population) are those who managed to remain inside the Jewish state after the expulsions of 1948, events described in Arabic as al-Nakba, or “The Catastrophe.” With their society shattered — at least 85 percent of Palestinians in what became Israel were expelled — the minority was then subjected to military rule until 1966. This martial law combined with legislation passed in the Knesset to effect what is perhaps the defining dynamic in the relationship between the Jewish state and its Arab minority: land confiscation.
By the mid-1970s, the average Arab community inside Israel had lost between 65 and 75 percent of its land (see, for example, Ian Lustick’s 1980 study “Arabs in the Jewish State”). Policies that nowadays most people associate with Israel’s regime in the West Bank — seizure of Palestinian land in order to build Jewish settlements — have been routine inside Israel with regards to the Palestinian minority. Since 1948, around 1,000 Jewish communities have been created in Israel — but not one Arab town. Arab municipal communities make up 2.5 percent of state land, though the Palestinian minority has grown seven-fold.
The legislative and legal processes that the Israeli state implemented in order to expropriate the land of the Palestinian refugees also meant that some citizens — about one in four of the Palestinian minority — became known as “present absentees.” This means that their property was confiscated even though they remained in the borders of the new state. Meanwhile, across Israel, tens of thousands of citizens live in “unrecognized villages,” a result of planning and zoning by the state that categorized land as non-residential despite the presence of Arab villages. Many of these communities can be found in the Negev, where Bedouin Palestinians live unconnected to basic utilities, and at risk of home demolitions.
Just recently, the entire unrecognized village of al-Araqib was destroyed repeatedly, at the same time as the Israeli Knesset approved legislation intended to legalize and facilitate Jewish farms that had been established in the Negev. The context here, as well as in the Galilee, is the strategic aim of “Judaization”: increasing the Jewish presence in regions of the state deemed to have “too high” a proportion of Palestinian citizens. In the words of Haim Yacobi of Ben Gurion University, it is a “[project] driven by the Zionist premise that Israel is a territory and a state that ‘belongs’ to, and only to, the Jewish people.” Yeela Raanan, of the Regional Council for the Unrecognized Villages, surveyed the ruins of al-Araqib and said: “Redeeming the land is part of the Zionist project. Any land held or claimed by Arabs is a problem.”
A political party or movement that calls for more of the “right” people in a particular area because there are too many of the “wrong” people is rightly considered fanatical. Yet in Israel, this has been policy at a state and local level for over 60 years and it is part of mainstream discourse to talk of the Arab minority as an intrinsic “threat.” Netanyahu, as finance minister in 2003, described Palestinian citizens as a “demographic problem.” Last year, Israel’s housing minister declared it a “national duty” to “prevent the spread” of Palestinian citizens, since in the Galilee “populations that should not mix are spreading there.”
To document all the ways in which Israel’s regime of control keeps Palestinians as second-class citizens is beyond the scope of this article: It is far deeper and more systematic than the “complaints of discrimination” that the likes of the BBC and CNN tack on at the end of news items. Take “selection committees,” for example, which decide who gains admission to small communities based on criteria like “social suitability,” a setup that operates in hundreds of agricultural and community towns (over two-thirds of all the towns in Israel). Its use as a tool to exclude Palestinians has been made more explicit recently, with legislative efforts intended to “allow the rejection of Arab residences in small Jewish communities.”
This is only one of a recent rush of racist bills in the Knesset (the indispensable Adalah have also compiled a list of “10 Discriminatory Laws”). The same Knesset has stripped Arab MK Haneen Zoubi of parliamentary privileges, by way of punishing her for participating in the Gaza flotilla. Zoubi was almost physically assaulted in the chamber, as she faced cries of “Go to Gaza, traitor.” Other Palestinian members of the Knesset received an e-mail from MK Michael Ben-Ari announcing that “after we take care of her [Zoubi] it will be your turn.”
In Israel in 2010, human rights defenders are persecuted. Three months ago, Ameer Makhoul, director of Arab NGO network Ittijah, was snatched from his house in the night, and for almost two weeks, prevented from meeting his lawyers. A year before, Makhoul had been told by a Shin Bet agent (Israel’s domestic intelligence agency) that “next time” he will “have to say goodbye to his family since he will leave them for a long time.” In 2007, the Shin Bet confirmed they would “thwart” those who “harm” the Jewish character of the state, “even if such activity is sanctioned by the law.” As Makhoul’s wife, Janan Abdu, told me in Haifa recently, her husband had become well-known for what he has been saying about Israel — “the land regime, citizenship issues, what’s happening in the Negev, about the contradictions between being ‘Jewish’ and ‘democratic.'”
This is the question that many Western media outlets won’t touch, and most politicians dismiss with platitudes. The Palestinians in Israel are forgotten, particularly in terms of the international community’s peace process, despite — or realistically, because of — the way in which their struggles relate to what happened in 1948 and the meaning of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. This is the conversation that needs to take place, and increasingly is, from academia to activists. Talking with Haneen Zoubi at her home in Nazareth, the MK made an observation that needs heeding in Washington: “Israel’s treatment of its Palestinian minority is the more credible test of chances for a comprehensive peace.” So far, it doesn’t look good.
Ben White is a freelance journalist and writer, specializing in Palestine/Israel. His articles have appeared in The Guardian online’s “Comment is free,” Al-Jazeera English, New Statesman, Electronic Intifada, and Middle East International.
Israel tells schools not to teach nakba: Jonathan Cook
The National
August 22. 2010
NAZARETH // Government officials warned Israeli teachers last week not to cooperate with a civic group that seeks to educate Israelis about how the Palestinians view the loss of their homeland and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.
Israel’s education ministry issued the advisory after Zochrot – a Jewish group that seeks to raise awareness among Israeli Jews of the events of 1948, referred to as the “nakba” by Palestinians – organised a workshop for primary school teachers.
The ministry said the course had not been approved and told teachers not to participate in Zochrot-sponsored activities during the coming school year.
In a letter to the education ministry protesting against Zochrot’s activities, the Legal Forum for the Land of Israel, an advocacy group for Jewish settlers, called the group’s educational materials “part of a criminal vision to wipe Israel off the face of the earth”.
It was unclear whether participants in the workshop for primary school teachers would be punished, but a teacher identified as a trainer for the seminar might be investigated by the education ministry, the Jerusalem Post reported.
The warning is the latest move by the education ministry, headed by Gideon Saar, a member of the prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, to use school curricula to advance a more strident Zionist agenda.
In March, for instance, the ministry banned Israeli schools from distributing a booklet for children about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Critics had objected to parts of the declaration that refer to freedom of religion and protection of asylum-seekers.
The ministry’s latest move involves the controversies that still swirl over the events that led to the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 – what Israelis describe as their “War of Independence” and what Palestinians call the nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe”.
Eitan Bronstein, Zochrot’s director, said the ministry was trying to “frighten off” teachers from learning about a period in Israel’s history that until now, he said, had been presented in schools only from a “triumphalist perspective”.
The group, which was founded eight years ago and whose Hebrew name means “remembering”, has provoked controversy by organising visits to some of the hundreds of Palestinian villages destroyed by the Israeli army during and after the 1948 war.
Zochrot members place signposts at the former villages using their original Arabic names, and bring Palestinian refugees back on visits, upsetting Jewish residents who live in communities built on those lands.
In recent months, Zochrot has concentrated on developing a programme on the nakba for schools, allowing teachers to address the subject from a Palestinian perspective for the first time.
Mr Bronstein said more than 300 high school teachers had asked for Zochrot’s information kits over the past year, and a few primary school teachers had started to show an interest too. That has provoked a backlash from education officials and right-wing groups.
“A small but growing number of teachers are curious about the nakba and want to find out more,” he said. “The problem is that the education authorities see this development as threatening and are prepared to intimidate teachers to stop them from getting involved.”
Last week’s workshop was the first Zochrot had arranged for primary school teachers.
Hebrew textbooks focus chiefly on the success of Israel’s troops during the 1948 war. The books say that the 750,000 refugees either left voluntarily or were ordered to leave by Arab armies. Most historians now say that Israeli troops either physically expelled the Palestinians or frightened them so much that they fled.
In 2006 an Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, published a popular book in English – but little read inside Israel – that went farther, arguing that Israel had implemented a military plan to “ethnically cleanse” Palestinians even before Israel’s founders declared statehood.
A year later Yuli Tamir, the dovish education minister, provoked public outrage by approving for the first time the use of the word “nakba” in an Arabic textbook for the quarter of the school population who belong to the country’s Palestinian minority.
The book was banned last summer by Mr Saar, Ms Tamir’s successor.
Mr Saar has also backed legislation to punish groups and individuals who commemorate the nakba. The bill, which enjoys wide support, is working its way through the parliament.
Zochrot’s kit includes teaching units on life among Palestinians before and after the 1948 war, personal stories from refugees, a tour of a destroyed village, and a discussion of the refugees’ right of return.
Amaya Galili, Zochrot’s educational coordinator, said that although the group offered complete lesson plans, most teachers incorporated only elements of the programme so that officials would not notice they were using Zochrot’s material.
A history teacher in Jerusalem, who did not want to be identified, said she was one of half a dozen in the city who had participated in Zochrot’s courses.
She said, however, that her new-found understanding of the nakba had had almost no impact on either the curriculum or the pupils at the school.
“There are many other ways for the school to make sure that an atmosphere of fear prevails towards Palestinians. It’s easy to insert a nationalistic and religious agenda into the classroom – and, after all, I am just one teacher.”
The changes at the education ministry have become increasingly apparent since Mr Saar’s appointment nearly 18 months ago.
Earlier this year, the ministry demanded that its logo be removed from a joint Hebrew and Arabic website called Common Ground, which aims to promote greater understanding between the country’s Jewish and Palestinian citizens. Officials had objected to Zochrot’s posting of a story written by a Palestinian girl about the nakba.
Ms Galili said the ministry’s response to Zochrot’s work contrasted strongly with its encouragement of private initiatives by right-wing groups.
One, called Gush Katif week, brings former Jewish settlers from Gaza into 400 schools to celebrate life before Israeli troops and Jewish settlers withdrew from the Strip in 2005. Another, Mibereshit, run by a far-right rabbi and financed by evangelical Christians in the US, offers pupils tours of the country, including the settlements, in a bid to “strengthen Zionist education”.
“Many of these programmes sound superficially reasonable. They’re presented as ‘instilling positive values’ or ‘learning to love the land’. But, in fact, they are cover for dubious initiatives by religious and settler groups,” Ms Galili said.
Over the past year, Mr Saar has emphasised courses on Zionism, Jewish heritage and Judaism. He has also increased pupils’ visits to Jerusalem, including settlements in its Palestinian districts, and introduced a programme to bring soldiers into the classroom to help enlist pupils into the military.
In search of an Israeli left: Opendemocracy
22 August 2010
The disconnection between the international left and its counterparts in Israel has become near total, to the detriment of the causes that both espouse. But a situation with complex roots can be remedied by looking more closely at the work of people on the ground, say Keith Kahn-Harris & Joel Schalit.
Every Israeli news outlet, from the website of the arch-right Arutz Sheva radio-station to the centre-left newspaper Ha’aretz, was broadcasting the same story and showing the same video-clip. Aboard the Turkish ferry Mavi Marmara in Cyprus before it set sail towards Gaza, a Turkish activist called Bülent Yildirim was exhorting the vessel’s passengers to prepare to be martyrs and to throw Israeli troops into the sea.
The significance of the footage, released earlier the same day by Israel’s foreign ministry, was clear: it provided yet another indictment of the motives of those traveling on the flotilla, whose ostensible aim was to carry “humanitarian aid” to suffering Palestinians. Their true purpose, the images seemed to reveal, was not so much humanitarian as Islamist – and spiced by a good dose of anti-Israel bigotry.
Some of the western activists who joined the mainly Turkish contingent may not have have shared this ideological complex in detail, but even if naive (ran the common argument) their actions made them complicit in such hatred and the violence that was to follow. The death of eleven Turkish citizens in the Israeli commando-raid on the Mavi Marmara on 31 May 2010, which caused an international outcry and forced the Israeli government of Binyamin Netanyahu to hold an official inquiry into the incident, in this view reflected the bad faith of those on board; and after all, what more could be expected of partisan westerners whose hostility to Israel is deep-rooted?
In an article published that same day in Ha’aretz, the paper’s defence correspondent Amos Harel argued that international NGOs are now being utilised by Israel’s enemies as tools in a global campaign to delegitimise the Jewish state. The pro-Palestinian political stance of most of these organisations hides a deeper story: that a new global left has become duped by the “asymmetrical-warfare” strategies of Israel’s Islamist foes. The effective alliance between militant Islamism and international leftism lies behind much of the criticism of Israel today.
Amos Harel’s case is a variant on a familiar story that has been made with various degrees of intensity for over a generation. In the first decade of the 21st century it has been fuelled by United States neo-conservative supporters of the “war on terror”, who have sought every opportunity to link political and NGO critics of US and Israeli foreign policy to jihadi ideas and campaigns. The argument extends to targeting the Israeli left and its sympathisers within the Jewish diaspora, who are scorned for disloyalty or worse on account of their critical stance towards Israeli governments and their policies towards the Palestinians. In this mindset, foreign and domestic leftism fuse into a single threat to Israeli statehood. The result is that the Israeli left is further marginalised and excluded from the heart of the country’s political discourse, even on such major issues as the assault on the Mavi Marmara.
A great transformation
The Israeli left’s reasons for advocating Palestinian rights and statehood may often differ from those of their European or American counterparts, but the Israeli right is happy to portray the motives as the same in order to exclude such voices from any core debate about Israel-Palestine and even from Israeli politics as such. The aspiration, striking in the context of a country with a rich and fertile leftwing political and intellectual tradition, is that the left should have no natural home in Israeli-Jewish politics whatsoever.
Such assaults on the Israeli left and those in the Jewish diaspora with affinities to it reflect how far Israel has changed. Both rightist champions of Israel and many leftist critics of the country share a historical myopia that ignores or dismisses Israel’s progressive roots. From the state of Israel’s foundation in 1948 until the elections of 1977, which saw the electoral breakthrough of the rightwing Likud party, Israeli politics was dominated by a leftwing consensus which shared close parallels with European social democracy and labour movements. Israel in this period had strong trade unions, centralised economic planning, and a highly regulated economy; its most characteristic institution was the collective farms (kibbutzim) scattered across the country. At the same time, this was a leftism that had very few links, for reasons of geopolitics and anti-semitism, with the Soviet bloc.
Israel’s subsequent role as a bête noir for much of the world’s left is often attributed to the events of 1967 and subsequently, principally the six-day war and the occupation of the West Bank; as well as to the breakdown of Israel’s leftist consensus during the 1970s. But a neglected source of this change is the way that after 1968, the dominant (mainly economic) definitions of what it meant to be “leftwing” were increasingly supplanted by more identitarian definitions that foregrounded anti-racism and anti-colonialism. This change revealed two things about the preceding period: it revealed the limitations of the Israeli left, under whose auspices (it should be recalled) the settlement movement began, and who had never properly attended to the needs of Israel’s Palestinian minority; and it demonstrated the parochialism of leftist critiques of Israel, which failed to recognise that such a situation could have arisen under “progressive” stewardship.
In this view, the heightened importance of identity politics amongst western progressives – as well as accentuating the decline of labour politics in the west – made inevitable a post-1967 turn against Israel. This transition to a new political mindset was reflected within Israel itself, as in the 1980s newly formed groups such as Peace Now began to challenge Israeli territorial politics without introducing a corresponding social agenda. It was also reflected within Israel’s leftwing political establishment, as the once dominant Labour Party which had already capitulated on the economic front now half-heartedly embraced the peace agenda.
This generational transformation has had the effect of consigning Israel’s progressive roots to a general forgetting. Ze’ev Sternhell’s analysis of the failings of Israeli socialism (in The Founding Myths of Israel [1995]) and James Horrox’s study of the anarchist origins of Israel’s kibbutz movement (A Living Revolution [2009]) are valuable efforts to recover and explore this history. But overall, a new sensibility that reflects the bitter partisanship of the times – shared across left and right, in Israel and the diaspora alike – rules. On one side, Israel is a Jewish state, justly restoring a people originally exiled by European imperialism to its ancestral middle-eastern roots; on the other, Israel is a monocultural, repressive entity, invoking Judaism to mystify its fundamentally western, colonial character.
A narrowing agenda
Alongside the amnesiac marginalisation of the Israeli left from central debates about the country’s future, Israel’s political scene leaves little room for optimism. Its centre-left parties are reduced to a minority presence in parliament, leaving most progressive activism to take place outside the parliamentary sphere – through NGOs and campaigning organisations such as Physicians for Human Rights. The most leftwing parties in parliament with any liberal credentials – such as the former communists, Hadash – are automatically disenfranchised from the Jewish national consensus because they include significant Arab memberships. An Israeli/Jewish right can easily portray the extra-parliamentary left as unrepresentative on the sole grounds that the latter operates outside of the legislative sphere. Similarly, the diaspora left has no difficulty in viewing Israel as being intrinsically rightwing, precisely because of the great distance of Israel’s left from the country’s political establishment.
The narrowing of the agenda of pro-Palestinian activism within the global left plays an important role here. Since the conflict over Gaza in December 2008-January 2009 the situation there has been the focus of most pro-Palestinian campaigning. But the activist left, in highlighting Israel’s siege of the territory and its consequences, has made remarkably little criticism of the Hamas movement which rules the strip. The result is to ignore both an Islamist government’s deep opposition to many progressive values and the need to show more support for democratic Palestinian activism in the West Bank. In contrast to the Islamist retrenchment in Gaza, organising against the occupation in the West Bank has begun to develop in non-violent directions. Fatah, the governing movement there, has a historically secular and leftist tradition (despite its corruption) and Israeli activists are much more involved with it.
More broadly, many progressives outside Israel overlook the fact that an Israeli left still exists and can be worked with. In part this “forgetting” derives from the view that the situation in Israel-Palestine is so bleak that only the most radically pessimistic critiques of Israeli politics provide any affirmation; there is, in effect, no one left to work with (an ironic echo of the Israeli right’s complaint that “there is no partner for peace”).
As a result, much of the global left has abandoned Israeli politics altogether in favour of a discourse that focuses solely on the superiority of a “one-state” rather than a “two-state” solution. The problem is that by taking leave of the Israeli political sphere, many progressives have absolved themselves of supporting those organisations that could yet challenge the status quo. What remains is a kind of negationism, based on the fantasy that the situation could be transformed entirely through outside pressure, without any Israeli involvement. While external pressure on Israel is vital to any true change, internal pressure also plays a crucial role. A democratised Israeli public sphere will be a key component in making any kind of solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict work.
A closer look
The very possibility of nurturing such progressive change in Israel requires at least three things:
* finding ways to support NGOs such as the New Israel Fund
* actively supporting multiethnic and Arab political parties and NGOs
* drawing attention to the plight of Israeli Christians and Muslims, migrant workers, illegal immigrants – and rising social inequalities amongst all Israelis.
Anyone investigating each of these specific issues will soon discover an enormous amount of individual activism, even if not a dedicated organisation directly connected to them. There is no better way to challenge the Israeli right than to support and adopt these causes – for it is here that Israel’s left is working to protect people and contest the status quo, and in a manner that defies the right’s denigration and marginalisation.
The lesson to be learned from the situation of the Israeli left is that details are always important. The more attention is paid to them, the less plausible are flattening generalities which encourage neglect and negation. In the end, a refusal to look at what is happening on the ground is a conservative attitude that upholds the status quo and (in this case) is unwittingly complicit in the decline of Israeli democracy. The only way to reverse this situation is to raise Israel’s left up to the same position of importance as its global counterparts. Can’t find it? Try looking a little harder.