EDITOR: The unbelievable is here at last…
Who would believe that reason main rein Washington, in a difficult year for the Democratic President? A pleasant surprise, nonetheless, and it may also be a sign for some future moves against the massive support if Israel, one of the richest countries, by the US, one of the countries most affected by the crisis, with its massive budget problems, not to mention morality and political wisdom…
U.S. Senator seeks to cut aid to elite IDF units operating in West Bank and Gaza: Haaretz
Senator Patrick Leahy claims Shayetet 13 unit, undercover Duvdevan unit, and the Israel Air Force Shaldag unit are involved in human rights violations in occupied territories.
U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy is promoting a bill to suspend U.S. assistance to three elite Israel Defense Forces units, alleging they are involved in human rights violations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Leahy, a Democrat and senior member of the U.S. Senate, wants assistance withheld from the Israel Navy’s Shayetet 13 unit, the undercover Duvdevan unit and the Israel Air Force’s Shaldag unit.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak, a long-time friend of Leahy’s, met with him in Washington two weeks ago to try to persuade him to withdraw the initiative.
According to a senior Israeli official in Jerusalem, Leahy began promoting the legislation in recent months after he was approached by voters in his home state of Vermont.
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A few months ago, a group of pro-Palestinian protesters staged a rally across from Leahy’s office, demanding that he denounce the killing by Shayetet 13 commandos of nine Turkish activists who were part of the flotilla to Gaza last May.
Leahy, who heads the Senate Appropriations Committee’s sub-committee on foreign operations, was the principle sponsor of a 1997 bill prohibiting the United States from providing military assistance or funding to foreign military units suspected of human rights abuses or war crimes. The law also stipulates that the U.S. Defense Department screen foreign officers and soldiers who come to the United States for training for this purpose.
Leahy wants the new clause to become a part of the U.S. foreign assistance legislation for 2012, placing restrictions on military assistance to Israel, particularly to those three units.
Leahy says these units are responsible for harming innocent Palestinian civilians and that no system of investigation is in place to ensure that their members are not committing human rights violations. According to Leahy’s proposal, U.S. military assistance to Israel would be subject to the same restrictions that apply to countries such as Egypt, Pakistan and Jordan.
The senior Israeli official said that the Israeli Embassy in Washington had been trying unsuccessfully now for some months to persuade Leahy to back down from the initiative.
Two weeks ago, during Barak’s visit to Washington, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, asked Barak to meet with Leahy to dissuade him from promoting the legislation.
Leahy, who is on the Democratic Party’s left flank, has for many years promoted human rights issues globally. He has been sharply critical of Israel in recent years, especially following Operation Cast Lead in late 2008.
However, he also signed Congressional resolutions supporting Israel’s right to self-defense.
Leahy, 71, has served in the Senate for 35 years. He was a personal friend of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and has known Ehud Barak since the latter was IDF chief of staff.
Barak, who met with Leahy privately, was quoted by the senior Israeli official as telling the senator: “The difference between Israel and terror groups or other countries in the Middle East is that we give an accounting and there is monitoring.”
Barak also said the IDF had a strict judiciary with broader powers than the judiciary in the United States armed forces.
Barak was also quoted as telling Leahy that the IDF military advocate general is not subservient to the military command, but rather to the attorney general, and has complete autonomy.
“If a Palestinian is injured, he can approach the High Court of Justice,” Barak said. “The investigations undergo judicial review that is independent of commanders. There are dozens of hearings every year that are based on Palestinians’ complaints against soldiers. They reach the highest and most independent authorities,” he said.
Leahy listened to Barak, but he did not say whether he would withdraw his initiative. According to the senior Israeli official, Israel does know whether Leahy has done so.
However, the official said Barak felt Leahy had understood his message, and that the Israeli Embassy in Washington was following the matter. If necessary, Barak and Leahy would hold another talk, the official added.
Leahy’s spokesman, David Carle, said the senator did not comment on his private conversations.
Israeli air strikes on Gaza after rocket hits Beersheba: BBC
Israel has carried out a series of air strikes on the Gaza Strip, after militants in the Hamas-run territory fired a rocket into southern Israel.
One Palestinian was killed and at least five others were wounded, Palestinian health officials said. Some of the pre-dawn strikes targeted an area east of Gaza City, they said.
The rocket had been fired from the Gaza Strip into the southern Israeli town of Beersheba.
No-one was hurt in that attack.
“We learned of the martyrdom of the youth Musa Shtawe, 29, who died of his injuries after a strike east of Gaza City,” Adham Abu Selmiya, spokesman for the Hamas-run emergency services in the Gaza Strip, is quoted as saying by the AFP news agency.
Recent weeks have seen an increase in mortar and rocket fire from Gaza after months of relative calm.
Further south, two more raids were carried out east of Khan Yunis and on a tunnel under the border with Egypt near Rafah, Palestinian sources said.
“The raid in Rafah left three people injured, including a child,” Mr Abu Selmiya said.
Soldiers’ testimonies on the occupied territories: Haaretz
The main significance of the testimonies published by Breaking the Silence is not in the descriptions of the acts of horror but rather in the documentation of the destructive effects of the occupation not only on the Palestinian inhabitants but also on the soldiers themselves.
By Ilana Hammerman
Kibush Hashtahim
(Occupation of the Territories: Israeli Soldier Testimonies 2000-2010 ) Published by Breaking the Silence (Hebrew), 347 pages, NIS 50 English version to be available later this year; 430 pages.
On the 50th anniversary of the death of Albert Camus, last year, I was invited to discuss him on the morning talk show “Mah Bo’er” on Army Radio. The host, Razi Barkai, asked me about the writer’s personal relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. But I had other things to say about Camus in the short time that had been allotted to the conversation, and I responded to Barkai that gossiping about the relations between Camus and de Beauvoir wasn’t what I had in mind.
“Don’t tell me that all you have in mind now is the occupation,” was the sharp and surprising response from the interviewer, with whom to the best of my recollection I had never spoken before in my life, neither about the occupation nor about anything else.
This response made a deep impression on me. Again and again I have asked myself in its wake the following question, to which I have yet to find an answer: How do you talk to people about what they so badly don’t want to hear that they will hasten to gag you even when you are intending to speak about something else? About Camus, for example.
True, not about Camus and the Parisian bohemia, but rather about Camus and his involvement in the political discourse of his day, about his complicated view of the French occupation of Algeria, about his committed writing. For these, after all, were the things he had in mind, the intellectual, writer and commentator Albert Camus. That is what preoccupied him, that pragmatic humanist, whom in my youth I saw as a guide and who in the meantime, not necessarily to his benefit, had become an almost mythological figure. A kind of modern saint whose heritage many people claim as their own without considering that it does not accord with their own disengagement from the current political reality.
Okay, so maybe Razi Barkai was right. An interview with me about Camus really was liable to lead us, if only by implication, to the “occupation” – that is, to the state of Israel’s control for 44 years now over the lives and fate of about 4 million people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (yes, also in Gaza, despite the “disengagement” ) – and to the silence of most Israeli intellectuals in the face of this reality. And he didn’t want that, the popular interviewer. He didn’t want to hear it and he didn’t want to expose his listeners to hearing it, even by implication.
And to tell the truth, most probably his listeners weren’t especially keen to hear it, either. And like them, the television viewers, who want neither to see nor to hear, and the newspaper readers, who prefer not to read. And the media indulge them all and do not report to them, or if they do, do it in a measured, moderate and cautious way, lest the numbers of listeners and viewers and readers drop, and with them the number of advertisers, and with them the revenues.
Thus, in “the only democracy in the Middle East,” where there is a large measure of freedom of information and of the press, in recent years a self-censorship has developed that is infinitely more effective than any official censorship could be, because its roots go very deep: into the consciousness and the subconscious of Israel’s citizens. They do not want to know. And when it comes to looking reality straight in the face, the worst of them are members of the middle class, whose daily routine is good and pleasant, and for whom it is convenient not to know what maintaining that reality entails.
These satiated Israelis – much more than those Israelis who are living in poverty and distress – not only have a moral obligation to know, it is also worth their while to know, very much worth their while. Because the danger threatening their comfortable routine is growing. Because five minutes from Kfar Sava their countrymen – soldiers, police and civilians – are constantly fanning embers under barrelfuls of gunpowder. Because it isn’t for the security of the satisfied middle-class Israelis that these people are concerned, and for which they have been embittering the lives of millions of people for decades now, but rather they are committed to realizing an ideology most Israelis do not support at all. It is an ideology of annexation that has already been realized on the ground to the extent that almost certainly there is no way back and the entire public discourse about “the peace process” is “fake, fake.” The diametric opposite of the bullets that hit Yitzhak Rabin, who perhaps wanted to and could have rectified something in the next to last minute.
The logic of the absurd
If so, how do you get readers to pay attention to books that are trying to reveal this reality to them? For example this book, which is called simply “Occupation of the Territories” and is thick and black – both its binding and its contents – and contains the transcribed testimonies, not always comfortable and fluent reading, of 101 male and female Israeli soldiers who served in those territories during the course of the past 10 years.
One of the soldiers whose testimonies are presented in the book says he has been reading the book “Lords of the Land,” by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar. “That’s exactly how it is,” he says in his testimony about the improvised roadblocks he and his buddies would put up on “the Jewish roads” in the West Bank. “The Lords of the Land decided: ‘This one you don’t let cross, and he’ll wait until we decide.’ When we go to eat, they fold up the roadblock and everyone leaves.”
I wondered what that fellow would have done had he read “Lords of the Land” before his military service, and now I am wondering what the young people who read his testimony and the other testimonies in “Occupation of the Territories” may do. Will they take a stand or even do a deed after having read the book? Will they open their eyes and take in a more comprehensive view of what is happening in the territories? Will they be more aware, will they refuse to obey certain orders while they are serving there?
For it is impossible to read these two books, “Lords of the Land” (first published by Dvir in 2004, and available from Nation Books in an English translation ) and the recently published “Occupation of the Territories” (partially downloadable in English for the time being at http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/testimonies/publications ), without discovering what a big and dangerous lie we are living in here. “Lords of the Land” relates and documents in detail the history of Israeli settlement in the territories and the explicit and implicit policy employed in the taking over of the lands of the West Bank. This policy has continued uninterrupted since 1967, under the leadership of all of Israel’s governments to this day. Its inevitable outcome will be to thwart the possibility of the establishment of another state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, although this is completely contrary to the protestations of the desire for a peace agreement to be based on the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel.
“Occupation of the Territories” completes the picture with its documentation of the army’s conduct in the occupied territories during the past decade. It firmly establishes “Lords of the Land’s” clear survey and demonstrates the extent to which the military control of these territories – like the gigantic settlement project – is aimed mainly not at defending the security of the citizens of the sovereign state of Israel, but rather at deepening Israel’s civilian, political and economic control there.
This is the logic of the absurd things that happen in the territories. Indeed, logic and not madness; rather, a consistent, practical and effective system of which even the arbitrariness is an inseparable part. The system has already entirely changed the face of this piece of land, to the satisfaction of those who stand with a clear mind behind the ideology of the Greater Land of Israel, who are pulling the strings and are acting on its behalf devotedly and decisively – and to the distress of those who know that the realization of this ideology is a disaster, but to whom this knowledge is so painful that they lower their heads and shut their eyes so as not to see things as they are.
This logic also rules in the ostensibly absurd reality depicted in the soldiers’ testimonies. The Israel Defense Forces are present in the territories of the West Bank in order to remain there, in order to make it clear to the Palestinian inhabitants “who’s the boss here” (as the soldiers put it ).
To this end the IDF conducts daily policing activities there, which are assigned to very young soldiers who spend weeks, months and even years in the very midst of a civilian population. Armed from head to toe, they stand at the barriers, race around in jeeps and armored vehicles on the roads, in the streets and in the alleys of towns and villages or patrol them on foot with their weapons cocked, banging on doors of homes in the middle of the night, entering them and searching, arresting men and teenage boys before the eyes of their families who have been rousted from bed. And in doing all these things, they have been maintaining, whether they want to or not, a routine of humiliation and abuse, damage to body and soul and property of civilians, a routine of a Wild West way of life in which neither the abusers nor the victims have any thorough knowledge of the laws and the rules that apply to them.
For in this stretch of land, despite the many fences and walls and barriers of all sorts that scar its landscape, the borders are not clear and they are not permanent – not only the physical borders between one power and another and between one authority and another, but also the mental and moral borders between what is permissible and what is forbidden, between good and evil, between stupidity and wickedness, between the humiliated and those who humiliate.
‘We’ll make your life bitter’
“We are here. The IDF is here” – as one of the givers of testimony in the book says. “In general they told us that some terrorist, if he were to hear the IDF presence in the village, then maybe he would [emerge]. He never appeared. It seems that the objective was just to show the local population that the IDF is here, and it’s a policy that repeats itself: ‘The IDF is here, in the territories, and we’ll make your life bitter until you decide to stop the terror.’ The IDF has no problem with it. We, the ones who were throwing the grenades, didn’t understand why we were doing it. We threw a grenade. We heard the ‘boom’ and we saw people waking up. When we got back they said to us: ‘Great operation,’ but we didn’t understand why. It was every day. A different force from the company each time, part of the routine. Not an especially positive way of life.”
This testimony by a soldier from a paratroop unit, who was called upon with his buddies to throw stun grenades within a village at 3:00 A.M., comes off as modest and innocent, in comparison with many other testimonies that describe acts of harassment and real crimes: sowing destruction in private homes, acts of looting, murderous beatings, shooting to injure and even to kill. You read those and you are truly shocked, and you don’t want to believe.
But while reading the book, I often had the thought that maybe the testimonies of that sort are too numerous, and that it is precisely the ostensibly milder testimonies that are more significant. Indeed, the lines of resemblance among the grave testimonies, despite the distance in time and place, show that these things do not involve unusual people or unusual deeds, but rather are in the very nature of bullying military activity within a civilian population. This is so especially when the power is in the hands of such young people, still boys and girls, who have been taught to see each and every person in this population as an enemy, as a terrorist and as an immediate danger to themselves and their families.
But the main significance of this collection of testimonies is not in fact in the descriptions of the horrible deeds included in it – other occupying armies have done the same and even worse – but rather in the destructive effect of the soldiers’ daily and constant presence not only on the inhabitants but also on the soldiers themselves.
“The standards of good and evil deteriorate there,” says one of them. “I think that’s the thing that is most difficult … the day to day is very gray … I can’t tell you what’s good and what isn’t, because I don’t have all of the tools.” And another soldier says: “It was difficult. Look we’re … the majority are good people. It’s not that most are problematic, there is a problematic minority. The problem is that then it was legitimate. So beating up an Arab, cursing, degrading him … pointing your weapon in his face and then shooting in the air a second later, those were legitimate things … there were people who knew that they would beat someone up every day. They talk about it freely, they photograph.
“I remember from there the nuances at the roadblock, not the extreme incidents of abuse, but what this causes,” relates another important testimony. “This feeling of ‘I am above them,’ which won’t help, you are above them. You say to them when to cross and when not to, they are not disciplined so you get annoyed, and you have the power to get annoyed because you have a weapon and you can close the checkpoint. barrier on them … it penetrates you, this supremacy … the most difficult part for me is the annoyance towards them, it’s not just getting annoyed for no reason, it’s the annoyance of an educator: ‘You aren’t doing what I’m telling you? I’ll show you [what’s what]’ … I’m convinced that the arbitrariness was an approach. The approach to undermine their confidence, their stability, so they won’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. I don’t think it’s some kind of stupidity of someone from above, I think it was a policy…”
Who is your enemy?
The book is edited very intelligently in terms of its ability to convey the information in it. Yes, information, not statements of a political stance, though there is no doubt this information necessitates the taking of a political stance. It has four chapters, each of which places the emphasis on a different aspect of the policy of military control in the occupied territories. Taken together, the four chapters, with their precise and factual introductions, do a fine job of mapping out well and thoroughly the whole of this policy.
But they also do something else, which is equally important: They show the huge gap between the official terminology of the Israeli authorities, along with the public discourse that usually accepts this lexicon of terms almost without question, on the one hand, and the reality on the ground, on the other.
The authorities and the public discourse in Israel talk about “prevention,” about pinpointed thwarting of terrorist activity, whereas the testimonies describe in minute detail actions whose entire aim is to intimidate an entire population by means of the massive, noisy and threatening presence of soldiers, provocations, arbitrary arrests and collective punishments. In Israel they talk about a policy of “separation” between the Palestinian population and Israeli citizens, to protect the latter, whereas the testimonies clearly demonstrate that the walls and the roadblocks do not separate between Palestinians and Israelis, but rather between Palestinians and Palestinians, between their villages and between their towns; between people and their lands; between people and roads – and their aim, in the long term, is to enable not a policy of defense but rather a policy of robbery, expropriation and annexation of lands.
The Israeli establishment talks about a proportional, considered policy intended to preserve the civilian population’s “fabric of life,” that is, to ensure a routine that is as normal as possible despite the abnormal circumstances. The testimonies, however, describe the diametric opposite: Incessant damage to this routine. The official language talks about enforcing law and order in an egalitarian manner among all the inhabitants of the territories, the millions of Palestinians and the hundreds of thousands of settlers. The book, however, documents from the mouths of the soldiers a dual regime, aimed at enabling and advancing the settlers’ political aspirations at the Palestinian population’s expense.
There’s another reason why it is impossible, in reading this book, not to wonder and be angered by the silence and the silencing and the indifference: After all, it isn’t the soldiers of a mercenary army who are serving there, but rather we ourselves, our neighbors, our friends, our acquaintances, our sons, our daughters, our grandsons and our granddaughters. For three generations now. So, why is it that people talk so little about these things?
Even without much media coverage, people know, and many more could know. A few of the soldiers who testify in the book do talk about the repression, the silence during the time of service itself and the pressing need to shake it all off and forget upon the return home, to civilian life. Nevertheless, there is no satisfactory explanation here for the ignoring and the denial. Almost certainly the deeper and far more frightening answer is to be found in the changes seen in public opinion surveys conducted in Israel in recent years.
Thus, for example, a recent survey of young people aged 15 to 24, conducted by the Dahaf Institute for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and the Macro Center for Political Economics, shows a clear shift to the right: Young people prefer strong leadership to the rule of law, and Jewish nationalism to liberal democracy. Most of them do not aspire to peace with the neighboring countries and do not believe in the possibility of Jewish-Arab coexistence. At the same time, the number of supporters of violent resistance to government decisions concerning the peace process has increased. This trend is strong among young people aged 21 to 24 – that is to say, graduates of military service – more than among the youth.
From this survey it is possible to learn that more and more of the young people now serving in the territories are doing their job wholeheartedly, and that they have no interest or need to shake up public opinion in this country. One can also gather that there is an unambiguous connection between the control of those territories during 44 of the state’s 63 years of existence and the ruination of its inhabitants’ democratic civil awareness.
And the tens of thousands of liberals and humanists in Israel who stand off to the side should not say they know all this. Real knowledge, which is the basis for a sober and educated stance, and perhaps also for action, is in the details and not in general cliches like “The occupation corrupts,” “The occupation destroys” and “End the occupation.” Thus there are two possibilities: Either you go out to the West Bank and see and hear for yourself what the army and the other state authorities are doing there and how the settlements are expanding non-stop with their knowledge and their active help – or you read closely the books that document this for you. And then perhaps you too will ask, as does one of the soldiers who testifies in the book: “But who is your enemy in this war?” – and you will ask yourself whether it isn’t worth your while, too, to reconsider the extent of your public involvement in what is happening here.
Ilana Hammerman is editor of the Teuda series at the Am Oved publishing house and a political activist.
A vile logic to Anders Breivik’s choice of target: Guardian
Like Pim Fortuyn before him, Breivik embodies the intersection between rightist populism and liberal political correctness
Slavoj Žižek
Anders Behring Breivik killed more than 70 people in Norway. Photograph: Scanpix Sweden/Reuters
In Anders Behring Breivik’s ideological self-justification as well as in reactions to his murderous act there are things that should make us think. The manifesto of this Christian “Marxist hunter” who killed more than 70 people in Norway is precisely not a case of a deranged man’s rambling; it is simply a consequent exposition of “Europe’s crisis” which serves as the (more or less) implicit foundation of the rising anti-immigrant populism – its very inconsistencies are symptomatic of the inner contradictions of this view.
The first thing that sticks out is how Breivik constructs his enemy: the combination of three elements (Marxism, multiculturalism and Islamism), each of which belongs to a different political space: the Marxist radical left, multiculturalist liberalism, Islamic religious fundamentalism. The old fascist habit of attributing to the enemy mutually exclusive features (“Bolshevik-plutocratic Jewish plot” – Bolshevik radical left, plutocratic capitalism, ethnic-religious identity) returns here in a new guise.
Even more indicative is the way Breivik’s self-designation shuffles the cards of radical rightist ideology. Breivik advocates Christianity, but remains a secular agnostic: Christianity is for him merely a cultural construct to oppose Islam. He is anti-feminist and thinks women should be discouraged from pursuing higher education; but he favours a “secular” society, supports abortion and declares himself pro-gay.
His predecessor in this respect was Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch rightist populist politician who was killed in early May 2002, two weeks before elections in which he was expected to gain one fifth of the votes. Fortuyn was a paradoxical figure: a rightist populist whose personal features and even opinions (most of them) were almost perfectly “politically correct”. He was gay, had good personal relations with many immigrants, displayed an innate sense of irony – in short, he was a good tolerant liberal with regard to everything except his basic stance towards Muslim immigrants.
What Fortuyn embodied was thus the intersection between rightist populism and liberal political correctness. Indeed, he was the living proof that the opposition between rightist populism and liberal tolerance is a false one, that we are dealing with two sides of the same coin: ie we can have a racism which rejects the other with the argument that it is racist.
Furthermore, Breivik combines Nazi features (also in details – for example, his sympathy for Saga, the Swedish pro-Nazi folk singer) with a hatred of Hitler: one of his heroes is Max Manus, the leader of the Norway anti-Nazi resistance. Breivik is not so much racist as anti-Muslim: all his hatred is focused on the Muslim threat.
And, last but not least, Breivik is antisemitic but pro-Israel, as the state of Israel is the first line of defence against the Muslim expansion – he even wants to see the Jerusalem temple rebuilt. His view is that Jews are OK as long as there aren’t too many of them – or, as he wrote in his manifesto: “There is no Jewish problem in western Europe (with the exception of the UK and France) as we only have 1 million in western Europe, whereas 800,000 out of these 1 million live in France and the UK. The US, on the other hand, with more than 6 million Jews (600% more than Europe) actually has a considerable Jewish problem.” He realises the ultimate paradox of a Zionist Nazi – how is this possible?
A key is provided by the reactions of the European right to Breivik’s attack: its mantra was that in condemning his murderous act, we should not forget that he addressed “legitimate concerns about genuine problems” – mainstream politics is failing to address the corrosion of Europe by Islamicisation and multiculturalism, or, to quote the Jerusalem Post, we should use the Oslo tragedy “as an opportunity to seriously re-evaluate policies for immigrant integration in Norway and elsewhere”. The newspaper has since apologised for this editorial. (Incidentally, we are yet to hear a similar interpretation of the Palestinian acts of terror, something like “these acts of terror should serve as an opportunity to re-evaluate Israeli politics”.)
A reference to Israel is, of course, implicit in this evaluation: a “multicultural” Israel has no chance to survive; apartheid is the only realistic option. The price for this properly perverse Zionist-rightist pact is that, in order to justify the claim to Palestine, one has to acknowledge retroactively the line of argumentation which was previously, in earlier European history, used against the Jews: the implicit deal is “we are ready to acknowledge your intolerance towards other cultures in your midst if you acknowledge our right not to tolerate Palestinians in our midst”.
The tragic irony of this implicit deal is that, in the European history of last centuries, Jews themselves were the first “multiculturalists”: their problem was how to survive with their culture intact in places where another culture was predominant.
But what if we are entering an era where this new reasoning will impose itself? What if Europe should accept the paradox that its democratic openness is based on exclusion – that there is “no freedom for the enemies of freedom”, as Robespierre put it long ago? In principle, this is, of course, true, but it is here that one has to be very specific. In a way, there was a vile logic to Breivik’s choice of target: he didn’t attack foreigners but those within his own community who were too tolerant towards intruding foreigners. The problem is not foreigners, it is our own (European) identity.
Although the ongoing crisis of the European Union appears as a crisis of economy and finances, it is in its fundamental dimension an ideologico-political crisis: the failure of referendums about the EU constitution a couple of years ago gave a clear signal that voters perceived the EU as a “technocratic” economic union, lacking any vision which could mobilise people – until the recent protests, the only ideology able to mobilise people was the anti-immigrant defence of Europe.
Recent outbursts of homophobia in eastern European post-communist states should also give us pause for thought. In early 2011, there was a gay parade in Istanbul where thousands walked in peace, with no violence or other disturbances; in gay parades which took place at the same time in Serbia and Croatia (Belgrade, Split), police were not able to protect participants who were ferociously attacked by thousands of violent Christian fundamentalists. These fundamentalists, not Turkey’s, are the true threat to the European legacy, so when the EU basically blocked Turkey’s entry, we should ask the obvious question: what about applying the same rules to eastern Europe?
Antisemitism belongs to this series, alongside other forms of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. The state of Israel is here making a catastrophic mistake: it decided to downplay, if not completely ignore, the “old” (traditional European) antisemitism, focusing instead on the “new” and allegedly “progressive” antisemitism masked as the critique of the Zionist politics of the state of Israel. Along these lines, Bernard Henri-Lévy (in his Left in Dark Times) recently claimed that the antisemitism of the 21st century would be “progressive” or not exist at all. This thesis compels us to turn around the old Marxist interpretation of antisemitism as a mystified anti-capitalism (instead of blaming the capitalist system, the rage is focused on a specific ethnic group accused of corrupting the system): for Henri-Lévy and his partisans, today’s anti-capitalism is a disguised form of antisemitism.
This unspoken but no less efficient dismissal of those who would attack the “old” antisemitism is taking place at the very moment when the “old” antisemitism is returning all around Europe, especially in post-communist eastern European countries, from Hungary to Latvia. Something that should worry us even more is the rise of a weird accommodation between Christian fundamentalists and Zionists in the US.
There is only one solution to this enigma: it is not that the US fundamentalists have changed, it is that Zionism itself has paradoxically come to adopt some antisemitic logic in its hatred of Jews who do not fully identify with the politics of the state of Israel. Their target, the figure of the Jew who doubts the Zionist project, is constructed in the same way as the European antisemites constructed the figures of the Jew – he is dangerous because he lives among us, but is not really one of us. Israel is playing a dangerous game here: Fox News, the main US voice of the radical right and a staunch supporter of Israeli expansionism, recently had to demote Glenn Beck, its most popular host, whose comments were getting openly antisemitic.
The standard Zionist argument against the critics of the policies of the state of Israel is that, of course, like every other state, Israel can and should be judged and eventually criticised, but that the critics of Israel misuse the justified critique of Israeli policy for antisemitic purposes. When the Christian fundamentalist supporters of the Israeli politics reject leftist critiques of Israeli policies, their implicit line of argument is illustrated by a wonderful cartoon published in July 2008 in the Viennese daily Die Presse: it shows two stocky, Nazi-looking Austrians, one of them holding in his hands a newspaper and commenting to his friend: “Here you can see again how a totally justified antisemitism is being misused for a cheap critique of Israel!” These are today’s allies of the state of Israel.
The sham solidarity of Israel’s Zionist left: The Electronic Intifada
Budour Youssef Hassan, 28 July 2011
Is this what solidarity looks like? (Anne Paq / ActiveStills)
On 15 July, thousands of Israelis marched in occupied East Jerusalem to show their support for a Palestinian “state” in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Portrayed by its Israeli organizers as a joint Palestinian-Israeli march and ornamented with the slogans of “shared struggle” and “solidarity,” the Palestinian participation in the event was however scarce — a fraction of those in attendance were Palestinians. This event came a few weeks after a similar march in Tel Aviv, and while the Jerusalem march garnered more publicity due to its location, both events expose the failures of the purported solidarity of the Israeli Zionist “left” with the Palestinians.
The term solidarity — much like co-existence — is so overused in the liberal Zionist discourse as to render it meaningless. The misconception of solidarity raises the question: what does solidarity mean and, more specifically, when can an act carried out by Israelis in the name of supporting Palestinians be considered an act of true solidarity?
Can every instance of Israelis flocking to the streets chanting “End the occupation” be blithely described as solidarity? Should every occasion of Israelis carrying Palestinian flags be ecstatically celebrated as a major boost for the Palestinian cause? Should Palestinians be simply grateful that, amid the increasing construction of settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the overwhelming surge of racism in Israeli society, there are still some Israeli voices willing to “recognize” a Palestinian state?
When persons in a position of privilege formulate and design a solution and impose it on a colonized and occupied people as the only viable solution and the “sole remaining constructive step,” as the 15 July call to action put it, this is not solidarity but rather another form of occupation. Solidarity means not telling people what you think their problem is, let alone telling them what you think the solution should be. Solidarity means not agreeing on everything or even agreeing on a fixed solution but fighting for a shared cause irrespective of the differences.
A quasi-state built on 22 percent of the land of historic Palestine is not what Palestinians have been fighting for over the last 63 years and presenting it as such strips Palestinians of their voices and of their right to decide their own destiny.
Many argue, though, that struggling shoulder-to-shoulder with Zionist leftists widens the support base for Palestine and provides Palestinians with an opportunity to debate and convince the other side. This would be true if Zionists viewed Palestinians as equal partners but they do not. The whole idea of two states for two peoples as the only solution to the Palestinian-Israeli impasse — extremely popular among liberal Zionists — is predicated upon isolationism, exceptionalism and Zionists’ sense of moral righteousness and superiority to Palestinians which grants them the legitimacy to determine the problem, the solution and the means by which this solution shall be achieved.
A “joint” Palestinian-Zionist march does not offer an opportunity to engage in a productive dialogue; it rather gives Zionists one more chance to marginalize Palestinians’ voices and lecture Palestinians on how they should resist and what they should accept.
Thus, these demonstrations that ostensibly demand equality in reality maintain the privileged status of Israeli Jews. And although such demonstrations are capable of drawing thousands of Israelis every once in a while, they do not really widen the Israeli support base for Palestinians. Instead, they reflect support for a “solution” that overlooks the refugee problem — the core of the Palestinian struggle — and fragments the Palestinian nation and dooms Palestinian citizens in Israel to perpetual inferiority and discrimination.
Solidarity is not measured by numbers; it’s not about how many people came to a pro-Palestine demonstration. It is about why those people came. Fighting alongside fifty Israelis who are truly committed to the Palestinian cause is, therefore, much more important and valuable than marching in the shadow of thousands of Israelis who think Palestine is merely the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
On its Facebook page, the 15 July Jerusalem march was titled in Hebrew “Marching for the independence of Palestine” while the Arabic version read, “Together towards the liberation of Palestine.” There is a huge difference between liberation and an “independent state.” Freedom for Palestinians means much more than establishing a bantustan in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The inconsistency in the Arabic and Hebrew wording is telling but it is neither new nor rare for “leftist” Israeli organizations to address the Palestinian public in a different language and tone to that used for addressing the Israeli public.
Of the hundred or so Palestinians who attended the march, many may have joined because of the false perception that the aim of this march was to demand freedom, rather than to call for bogus “independence.” In addition, members of the Palestinian popular committees of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan, whose neighborhoods face house demolitions and a silent, grinding process of ethnic cleansing, say that they felt they had no option but to join the march in order to draw attention to their struggle. But their plight was exploited by the organizers to advertise the march as a “joint struggle,” to score political points and serve their public relations purposes.
The contributions of the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement, the main organizers of the 15 July march, should not be diminished. The weekly demonstrations it has been organizing in Sheikh Jarrah and al-Lydd shed light on the struggle of the Palestinian residents against Israel’s systematic policy of house demolition and evictions. Leading members of the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement and other Israeli leftist peace organizations receive vicious attacks from the Israeli far right, including death threats and accusations of treason.
This, however, must not place them beyond criticism. For all their activism, they have failed to fully embrace the Palestinian public and get it involved. Their demonstrations are dominated by white, secular liberal Zionists and the Palestinian voice, which they supposedly want to make heard, is inaudible amid a chorus of Hebrew-language chants about peace and coexistence. Even the slogans and the placards which were raised during the demonstrations were decided beforehand by the Israeli organizers, turning the protests into a tedious, painfully predictable and elitist routine.
In sum, Israeli “solidarity” is a double-edged sword. It has the potential of advancing the Palestinian cause and influencing Israeli public opinion and bringing the Palestinian struggle into the mainstream media. However, there is a great risk of groups hijacking the growing grassroots movement of Palestinian popular resistance under the cloak of solidarity and coexistence.
That there is a sweeping tide of blatant extremism among the Israeli ruling elite and wider society does not mean that Palestinians should gratefully cheer soft-core Zionist “compromises.” Solidarity is neither an act of charity nor a festival of boastful speeches and empty rhetoric. It is a moral obligation that should be carried out with full, unwavering and unconditional commitment.
Those who seek appreciation and gratitude had better stay in their cozy chairs in Tel Aviv. Attempts to exploit the Palestinian plight for political purposes and to turn the Palestinian cause from a struggle for human rights, justice, freedom and equality into a parade of fake independence and cliches must be called out and countered.
Budour Youssef Hassan, originally from Nazareth, is a Palestinian socialist activist and third-year law student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Follow her on Twitter: twitter.com/Budouroddick.