EDITOR: Voicing the truth shall be punished!
The Palestinians have complained to the UN about Israel illegal settlements, in which more than 600,000 Jews live. These are illegal under international law, and against UN resolutions. Even the US presidents were always clear about the illegalities involved. So every knows, and every speaks about it, but this is not allowed to the Palestinians themselves, as the fascist government of Israel is about to prove. So, to the crimes already committed, will be added the crime of depriving the PA of its funding. And, do not forget, please: this will be done with US President, Barack Obama’s support. Should we suggest another Nobel Prize for him? It is a pity they do not award an annual prize for hypocrisy – he would get is every year.
Israel mulls ways to penalize PA in wake of UN human rights probe: Haaretz
Top ministers Lieberman, Ya’alon and Steinitz reportedly support freezing the transfer of tax revenues to the Palestinian Authority.
By Barak Ravid
Israel is considering sanctions against the Palestinian Authority after the United Nations’ Human Rights Council decided to establish an international investigative committee on the West Bank settlements.
Today, a forum of eight senior Israeli cabinet ministers is scheduled to meet in Jerusalem to discuss sanctions against the PA and representatives of the UN Human Rights Council in Israel. It is unclear whether any decisions will be made during today’s meeting.
Three members of the octet reportedly support freezing the transfer of tax revenues to the PA. According to one source, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya’alon and Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz would back such a move.
Lieberman said Friday that the move by the UN body proves that the Palestinians do not want to renew negotiations with Israel. “We are dealing with Al-Qaida terror on the one hand and diplomatic terror by Abu Mazen on the other,” Lieberman said, referring to PA President Mahmoud Abbas.
Senior officials in the Prime Minister’s Bureau and the Foreign Ministry said Israel would not cooperate with the UN committee. The Prime Minister’s Bureau decided Friday that the committee’s members – who are yet to be determined – would not be allowed into Israel.
Lieberman also said Friday that he plans to call a meeting of senior Foreign Ministry staffers to discuss next steps. One proposal is to cut off ties with some of the council’s reporters who visit Israel once every few months.
Lieberman said he was considering asking the United States and other members of the council to resign. Yet this appears an impossibility, as the Obama administration, for one, views membership in the council as one of the basic building blocks of its international policy.
EDITOR: Pogroms are fine in Jerusalem!
Now, a week after the event, and with not a single person questioned or arrested, the Jerusalem police is pretending to inquire into this mass pogrom, taking place in the most public arena in Jerusalem, the Malcha Mall, in broad daylight, and watched by hundreds of shoppers. Of course, there was no reason to inquire, said the police, as no one has complained…
Jerusalem police launch probe of soccer fans caught attacking Arab workers at mall: Haaretz
Video footage shows hundreds of Beitar Jerusalem fans rioting against Arab workers in Malha Mall; investigation delayed because no complaints were filed, say police.
By Oz Rosenberg
The Jerusalem Police announced Sunday that it had opened an official investigation over the riots that erupted last week when 300 Beitar Jerusalem fans attacked Arabs at the capital’s Malha shopping mall.
Hundreds of Beitar Jerusalem supporters who went to the mall after a match last week were caught on video assaulting Arab cleaning personnel, in what was said to be one of Jerusalem’s biggest-ever ethnic clashes. “It was a mass lynching attempt,” said Mohammed Yusuf, a team leader for Or-Orly cleaning services.
Despite CCTV footage of the events, no one was arrested because no complaint was filed, according to Jerusalem Police.
Witnesses said that after a soccer game in the nearby Teddy Stadium, hundreds of mostly teenage supporters flooded into the shopping center, hurling racial abuse at Arab workers and customers and chanting anti-Arab slogans, and filled the food hall on the second floor.
“I’ve never seen so many people,” said A, a shopkeeper. “They stood on chairs and tables and what have you. They made a terrible noise, screamed ‘death to the Arabs,’ waved their scarves and sang songs at the top of their voices.”
Shortly afterward, several supporters started harassing three Arab women, who sat in the food hall with their children. They verbally abused and spat on them.
Some Arab men, who work as cleaners at the shopping center and observed the brawl, came to their rescue. “How can you stand aside and do nothing?” said Akram, a resident of the Old City’s Muslim Quarter who was one of the cleaners who got involved. CCTV footage shows that they started chasing the rioting youths, wielding broomsticks.
It seemed the workers managed to chase the abusers away, but a few minutes later supporters returned and assaulted them. “They caught some of them and beat the hell out of them,” said Yair, owner of a bakery located in the food hall. “They hurled people into shops, and smashed them against shop windows. I don’t understand how none shattered into pieces. One cleaner was attacked by some 20 people, poor guy, and then they had a go at his brother who works in a nearby pizza shop and came to his rescue.”
The attackers also asked Jewish shop owners for knives and sticks to serve as weapons but none consented, witnesses said. Avi Biton, Malha’s security director, sent a force of security guards in an attempt to restore order, but they were outnumbered. He called the police who arrived in large numbers about 40 minutes after the brawl started. At about 10.30 P.M., they evacuated the mall and the management shut its doors.
“I’ve been here for many years and I’ve never seen such a thing,” said Gideon Avrahami, Malha’s executive director. “It was a disgraceful, shocking, racist incident; simply terrible.”
Biton said that his department would step up security measures when Beitar matches take place. “This event was unusual for Beitar fans,” he said. “We’ve learned our lesson and from now on we’ll make more serious preparations ahead of Beitar games.”
Beitar fans are known for their staunchly anti-Arab positions and have been previously involved in attacks on Arabs.
On Tuesday, a day after the incident, Avrahami gathered the mall workers and apologized to them. “He promised it would never happen again,” said Akram.
Beitar Jerusalem’s management said in a statement that the club “firmly condemns violence and leaves it to the treatment of the authorities.”
Young Palestinians act out their struggle on another stage: Observer
A year ago the Israeli-born director of a tiny theatre in a West Bank refugee camp was gunned down. Now young Palestinians are fighting to save the place where they can voice their anger, frustration and dreams in creative ways
Killian Fox
The Observer, Sunday 25 March 2012
On 4 April 2011, Juliano Mer-Khamis turned up unexpectedly at the Freedom theatre in Jenin and went inside to talk with his students and staff. Usually he’d call ahead whenever he planned a return to Jenin, but this time, driving up from Ramallah where he had just premiered a new production of a play by Eugène Ionesco, he gave no advance warning.
An actor and director who had forged a successful film and stage career in Israel, Mer-Khamis moved to Jenin in 2006 to set up the Freedom theatre in the city’s sprawling refugee camp, one of the most deprived areas in the West Bank. In his five years as artistic director, he had created a hub of cultural activity in Jenin and, by touring home-grown productions abroad, had given young people in the camp a sense that they had a voice in the world.
After nearly a fortnight in Ramallah, Mer-Khamis had a lot to catch up with at the theatre. A new class was opening at the acting school, and there were perennial financial problems to contend with – but first he wanted to see his family. His Finnish wife, Jenny Nyman, was pregnant with twins and due to give birth at any moment. He spent a few minutes chatting and joking with the acting-school co-ordinator, Rawand Arqawi, one of several women working at the theatre despite opposition from the local community. Then he picked up his one-year-old son, Jay, who was here with a babysitter, and set off home in his little red Citroën.
With Jay in his lap and the babysitter beside him, he drove out of the theatre’s cramped courtyard and turned right. A hundred metres down the street, a man stepped out of an alleyway shouting “Stop! Stop!”. His face was masked, according to the babysitter, and he had a gun – but in spite of this, Mer-Khamis stopped the car.
At first, he seemingly thought it was a joke – Jenin humour is notoriously rough. Then, realising the man was going to shoot, he swung Jay out of range. In the same moment, the man opened fire and shot Mer-Khamis seven times before retreating into the refugee camp’s maze of narrow streets.
Back at the theatre, Arqawi heard the commotion and ran out to find Mer-Khamis slumped inside the car, bleeding heavily. The babysitter had been hit in the arm by shrapnel from a bullet but her injury wasn’t serious. Jay was unharmed. An ambulance turned up a few minutes later. Arqawi got in with Mer-Khamis, who was still alive. He tried to say something but she was unable to make it out. Before they could get him to a hospital, the 52-year-old was dead, leaving Arqawi and his devastated colleagues to wonder who had killed him and why – and whether the theatre he’d worked so hard to establish could survive without him.
From the outset, it was clear that the Freedom theatre was a dangerous undertaking, but Mer-Khamis and his co-founders believed that the need for it in Jenin outweighed the risks. When it opened in 2006, there were no other theatres in the area and Jenin’s only other significant cultural centre, a cinema, had been closed for 20 years.
In the heart of the West Bank’s impoverished northern region, Jenin feels very remote from the administrative capital Ramallah, 60km to the south. Little of the development money that has poured into Ramallah in recent years seems to have made it this far north. When I made the short journey between the two cities, I felt like I was travelling from a boom town to a frontier outpost.
To get to the Freedom theatre, we drove through the dusty, uneven streets of Jenin city to the edge of the refugee camp. Established by Palestinians displaced during the foundation of Israel in 1948, the camp is now home to more than 10,000 people and its makeshift concrete buildings cover an entire hillside at the edge of city. The infrastructure is basic but functional and the houses I visited had electricity and plumbing. It looks more like a run-down part of town than a refugee camp.
Many of the buildings here are pockmarked with bullet holes – reminders of the chaos that gripped this place a decade ago. During the five-year period of instability known as the second intifada, when protests against Israel’s policies escalated into widespread violence, Jenin camp was a stronghold of armed resistance. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, a coalition of militias associated with the political party Fatah, had a heavy presence here, and between 2000 and 2003, according to Israel, at least 28 suicide bombers were dispatched from the camp.
In April 2002, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) responded by invading the camp with bulldozers to flush out the militants within. TwenSty-three IDF soldiers and at least 52 Palestinians were killed in the fighting and many more were injured. The bulldozers left hundreds of families homeless. Piles of rubble marking where houses once stood can still be seen around the camp.
For the thousands of children growing up here (in a 2007 census over 40% of the camp’s population were under 15), violence and its effects have been part of everyday life. When the Freedom theatre opened in 2006, many of the young people who joined believed in armed struggle against the Israeli occupation. Mer-Khamis and his co-founders sought to challenge that belief and provide a creative outlet for anger and trauma.
Under Mer-Khamis, whose forthright political views made him a controversial figure among Israelis and Palestinians alike, the theatre also set out to effect social change and challenge authorities on both sides. Students were encouraged to express the frustrations of their everyday lives in drama-therapy sessions, and on stage they tackled such issues as women’s rights, religious fundamentalism and local corruption. An adaptation of Animal Farm, first staged in 2009, cast Palestine’s political leadership as power-hungry pigs who end up no better than their former masters. Shortly before his death, Mer-Khamis had been working on an adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s controversial 1891 play Spring Awakening, which was banned in Britain in the Sixties for its portrayal of teenage sexuality. The production never made it to the stage but news that it was being planned caused outrage in the local community.
In terms of its outward appearance, if nothing else, the Freedom theatre is an unassuming place. The entrance, on one of the main streets running through the refugee camp, is unmarked. The performance spaces and the acting school are housed in a couple of plain sandstone buildings which began life as railway storage units in the Ottoman era.
When I visited Jenin late last year, there was an air of restlessness about the theatre, as if a central mechanism had stalled and everyone was waiting anxiously for it to start moving again. Outside in the courtyard, a few students sat around under a tree, smoking and passing the time of day. Inside at reception, a young woman in a headdress surfed the web. Around her, the walls advertised past productions and work by students on the photography course. (As well as professional acting courses, the theatre offers courses in photography, film-making and creative writing.)
The main event of the afternoon was not a performance or a rehearsal: it was the arrival of a large group of Swedish theatre practitioners and enthusiasts who were coming to assess the fragile state of Jenin’s only theatre.
Jonatan Stanczak, the new managing director and one of Freedom theatre’s co-founders, led the group into the reception area for an introductory talk. Sketching out the pre-history of the theatre, Stanczak explained that Mer-Khamis’s association with Jenin stretched back long before 2006 – in the late 80s, his mother, Arna, a Jewish-Israeli activist and social worker, came to live in the refugee camp. “Arna was a woman of Jewish heritage who challenged the Israeli-Zionist agenda from a very early stage,” Stanczak said. “She was excluded from her family because she married a Palestinian man [Saliba Khamis] who she met in the early Israeli communist party.”
In Jenin, Arna established four educational centres for young people in the camp and later set up a small community theatre on the top floor of a local family house. She named it the Stone theatre after the stones children from the camp would throw at Israeli army vehicles.
Juliano Mer-Khamis, who had served a term in the Israeli army before becoming an actor, joined his mother in Jenin to run a drama group and direct shows in the tiny theatre space. But he didn’t stay there long. Arna died of cancer in 1995, a year after the theatre opened, and her son returned to Israel to resume his acting career.
In 2002, the Stone theatre was demolished by an Israeli bulldozer and several of the boys from Mer-Khamis’s class died in the fighting. (Two former students had carried out a suicide attack on the Israeli town of Hadera the previous October, killing four women and injuring many others before being shot dead by Israeli police.) However, the memory of the theatre lived on and a few years later, as the trouble in Jenin was receding, a former student named Zakaria Zubeidi – who had led the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades in Jenin during the second intifada but later renounced violence – appealed to Mer-Khamis to return and set up a drama project for a new generation of young people even more vulnerable than the last.
In one way or another, everyone involved in the Freedom theatre has been affected by the years of unrest in Jenin. On my night in the refugee camp, I stayed with Kamal Awad, whose family lives in a small house near the theatre. A 23-year-old acting student with leading-man looks, he also works as a refuse collector with the UN Relief and Works Agency.
While Awad’s mother prepared an evening meal of hummus and pickles, his father sat across from us in the front room with his head in his hands, rocking back and forwards and compulsively rubbing his scalp. During the camp invasion in 2002, according to Awad, his father received a blow to the head from an Israeli soldier that left him brain-damaged and unable to speak. The family have been unable to afford proper medical treatment so they do what they can for him at home. As the oldest son, Awad became responsible for the family. The situation also took a heavy emotional toll on him. “Before I started working with Juliano in 2006, I was aggressive and ready to fight,” he said. But joining the Freedom theatre allowed him to step outside his anger. “As well as acting, I learned how to laugh about myself and make other people laugh. I learned how to be a better human being.”
The core of the theatre’s work is the use of drama as a form of therapy. In the safety of the rehearsal room, trained practitioners encourage students to share their experiences and work through them in role-plays and other theatrical processes. “The first role-play I did,” Awad told me, “was about my father. It helped a lot to work through family problems on stage.”
When Stanczak ended his introduction in the reception area, he showed us a video of a drama therapy session. In a dark room, individual students from the theatre acted out their feelings and urges while the others stood around them in a close circle. One student, a former militant, was holding himself responsible for the death of his sister during an army raid. Another student, whose violent home life had left him with a speech impediment, said: “I am pulling out the fear inside me so I can be free, so this thing inside my mouth will go away.”
“Drama therapy is a safe way to deal with your own personal experience, within the art,” said Petra Barghouthi, a drama therapy practitioner. “You don’t face directly your experience, you deal with it obliquely, indirectly, either by using a story or role-play or movement or sound, or all different techniques of theatre.”
Afterwards, Stanczak walked us through the main theatre space to a large blacked-out rehearsal room where a group of students were having an introductory lesson in playback theatre, an improvisational form that uses stories from the audience as material for drama and debate. The class broke up as we arrived and I asked Mahmoud al-Ghanim, who had joined the acting school a year and a half ago, what the theatre was doing for him.
“Everyone has problems in life – anger, sadness – and that’s what I’m trying to articulate here,” he said. “I can’t cry outside, but on stage I can cry and shout and break things. It’s the best way to express emotion.”
When the theatre first opened in 2006, it had difficulty attracting people to take part in activities such as drama therapy. “Jenin refugee camp is a conservative and traditional community,” said Barghouthi. “They still believe that if a person is suffering from psychological difficulties, it’s something that is a shame. They don’t believe they have to ask for help.”
That the theatre was being run by someone from Israel made the challenge even greater. The younger people who didn’t remember Arna Mer-Khamis or the Stone theatre viewed her son with suspicion. “We were wondering, what was this Jewish guy doing here,” Awad recalls. “People thought he was a spy.”
“My friends and neighbours would talk and say bad things: ‘How do you work with a Jewish person who killed our children?'” says Rania Wasfi, an administrative assistant and the first woman to work at the theatre. “This was the biggest problem.”
Attempts were made to burn down the building and members of the theatre were physically attacked. Leaflets denouncing Mer-Khamis were circulated, but gradually his charisma and obvious passion for the project won people over. He stopped young people in the street and urged them to get involved. When children eager to take part were obstructed by their parents, Mer-Khamis would go around to their houses and explain why the project was worthwhile.
One particular source of disapproval was the theatre’s drive to get girls into the acting school. Within the conservative strictures of the camp, many women are discouraged from leaving the home, even to attend school.
“My family thought I was crazy for wanting to come here,” says Suzanne Wasfi, a film-maker and photography instructor. “They told me I must be dreaming and refused to let me go. But then people, including Juliano, came to talk to my family and eventually I was allowed to come.”
She wasn’t the only one. Before Mer-Khamis’s death, according to Rawand Arqawi, it had got to the point where the classes at the theatre were predominantly female. “We had to go out and look for boys instead.”
What’s striking about many of the productions devised and staged by the Freedom theatre is that they aren’t restricted to anti-Israeli propaganda or representations of Palestinian suffering under occupation. Through his work at the theatre, Mer-Khamis was intent on creating a more nuanced picture of life in the West Bank.
“Actors, painters, musicians [have been] going out to festivals in Europe and showing the occupation in all its forms – the suffering, the economic situation,” Mer-Khamis said in April 2010. “I think we forgot [to talk about] our own houses, children, wives … Now the youth have decided to say: ‘We go out, discuss the wall and the checkpoints but we go out also with the impression of our own women, with the monolithic dictatorship of our society, with tradition and religion.'”
Questioning aspects of Palestinian society inevitably provoked anger. “Many people didn’t like that we criticised our own society,” Mer-Khamis said. “But this is the policy of the Freedom theatre. As well as criticising the occupation in all its atrocities, we should also able to look at ourselves.”
Before Mer-Khamis’s death last April, the theatre was busier than ever. It had around 100 students and 15 full-time staff, and the audience for its productions at home and abroad was increasing. Though a small operation compared with theatres in Ramallah and Bethlehem, it received a large amount of international attention and financial support for its size. In 2009, the then foreign secretary David Miliband visited the theatre and its guest book contains names of writers, actors and dramatists from all over the world.
Much of the goodwill towards the theatre had to do with its larger-than-life co-founder. “We went to 10 different theatres around the West Bank last March,” a Swedish visitor to Jenin told me, “and everyone talked about Juliano. He was such an inspirational character.”
The creative engine at the theatre didn’t grind to a halt on 4 April 2011 – new work has been produced and undergraduate groups have been touring in Germany and the US – but it’s clear that losing Mer-Khamis has hit the theatre hard. Student numbers are down, according to Arqawi, and many activities are on hold. Among those who left the theatre was Mer-Khamis’s wife Jenny Nyman, who gave birth to twins shortly after the murder and is now living with her three young children in Israel.
To make matters worse, the theatre has found itself under investigation by the Israeli security service Shin Bet. In the early morning of 27 July, a group of Israeli soldiers broke into the theatre, smashing windows and furniture, and arrested two men – location manager Adnan Naghnaghiye and the theatre’s chairman, Bilal Saadi.
Ten days later, acting student Rami Hwayel – who was playing Pozzo in a production of Waiting for Godot at the time – was arrested at an army checkpoint. A second raid on the theatre on 22 August resulted in the arrest of Naghnaghiye’s brother Mohammed, a security guard at the theatre. Each was accused of taking part in the Mer-Khamis murder, but all four men were eventually released without charge and are now back at work. On 29 December, the amnesty deal offered to co-founder Zakaria Zubeidi by Israel in 2007 was revoked; it has since been reinstated but with restrictions and now Zubeidi is not free to leave the Jenin area.
Stanczak sees the break-ins as part of the “systematic harassment” of the theatre by Israeli authorities and alleges that his colleagues, whom he maintains are innocent, were treated inhumanely in detention. When I asked if he anticipated further arrests, he said he didn’t know. “We never thought they’d come again after the first time. But this unpredictability is a reality of life here. It’s what breaks people’s spirits.”
Four separate authorities – the Israeli and Palestinian police and the IDF as well as Shin Bet – have been investigating the case but as yet Mer-Khamis’s murder remains unsolved. It has been the source of much speculation in the local and international media. The arrest of a local man by Palestinian police hours after the attack fuelled rumours that Hamas, with whom the man was believed to have links, had ordered the killing – perhaps in response to the negative portrayal of Palestinian authorities in Animal Farm – but Hamas denied the claims and the man was later released.
Some suspect Israeli involvement. Others believe that the murder was planned closer to home. An anonymous leaflet circulating Jenin in the weeks after the murder appeared to corroborate that theory. “He was not killed for a scene in a play,” it read. “He was killed for the accumulation of his activities since he came here.”
Stanczak questioned the leaflet’s validity. “We don’t think it’s the same people,” he said. “The organisation that signed the flyer hadn’t been heard of before and hasn’t since. It seems some people used the murder as an excuse to spread their propaganda and demand that almost all NGOs in Jenin close down.” The fact that Mer-Khamis had arrived unexpectedly in the camp on 4 April casts further doubt on the notion that it was a carefully planned hit.
The speculation has done more harm than good, Stanczak said: it has only fuelled paranoia around the theatre, causing students to drop out and scaring away potential new admissions.
Rawand Arqawi, who worked closely with Mer-Khamis, echoed Stanczak’s concerns but was keen to talk about what happened on 4 April. She took me to the spot where Mer-Khamis was killed, within a short walk of the theatre. We stood on a main street lined with parked cars. People wandered by, glancing at us.
“It was the same time of day, about 4pm,” she said, “but that day the street was empty. No people. No cars.” Apart from the babysitter, only one person reported witnessing the attack but was too far away to identify the killer.
Arqawi is clearly frustrated by the lack of progress in the case. She acknowledged that the local community has been conspicuously silent about the murder. She also pointed out that four separate investigations – three of them by highly capable Israeli organisations reacting to the death of an Israeli citizen – have so far failed to find an attacker who struck in broad daylight in the middle of a densely populated area.
Ultimately, she said, “if the killer is from the camp or outside, it doesn’t matter. A man has been killed and we need to know who did it so that we can get back to normal.”
While they await closure, Mer-Khamis’s colleagues have been doing their best to carry on without him. There are reasons to be hopeful. In December, a second Freedom theatre space opened in Jenin city. Multimedia activities and after-school drama groups are opening up again and several new courses, including the one in playback theatre, have been added.
“We came very close to collapsing amid all the confusion and fear,” Stanczak said, “but we have managed to ride through the storm.” Mer-Khamis’s “borderless, visionary, crazy way of looking at the world” can never be replaced, he admitted, “but I think some of that craziness and inspiration continues with the people he worked with for over five years.”
Before I left Jenin, I sat in the sun-dappled courtyard with a small group of students and technicians and asked them how they felt about the theatre’s future without Juliano.
“We believe it will continue,” said Areej al-Ayasi, a shy young woman who joined the acting school just a week before Mer-Khamis’s murder. “We must start from the beginning and build it up again.”
Kamal Awad agreed and told me in Arabic how Mer-Khamis’s death marked the true beginning of their cultural revolution. “Now we have a real challenge on our hands,” he said. Others chipped in and Rawand Arqawi did her best to translate. She looked at the students fondly and then turned to me. “Juliano always told us: ‘Don’t give up.’ He said theatre is a bridge to new generations, and if one generation dies it will continue in the next.” Arqawi smiled. “So when Juliano died, we learned this from him.”
Peter Beinart calls for a ‘Zionist BDS’ By RON KAMPEAS: JPost
Journalist’s call for a boycott of goods manufactured in West Bank settlements ignites heated debate from multiple camps. By J Street
WASHINGTON — Should Jews shun other Jews? And should they shun Jews who call on Jews to shun other Jews?
Peter Beinart’s call in Monday’s New York Times for a boycott of goods manufactured in West Bank settlements reignited a debate not just about what works and doesn’t when it comes to advancing a two-state solution, but also about what should and should not be said during the debate.
Beinart, a journalist and essayist whose book “The Crisis of Zionism” is about to come out, tried to cast his call in pro-Israel terms.
“If Israel makes the occupation permanent and Zionism ceases to be a democratic project, Israel’s foes will eventually overthrow Zionism itself,” he wrote.
Beinart referred to his boycott proposal as “Zionist BDS” — a play on the pro-Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions movement targeting all of Israel, which Beinart firmly condemned in his Times essay as an effort to dismantle the Jewish state.
The pushback was immediate and came from multiple camps in the Israel debate: those who rejected Beinart’s thesis but sought to engage him and those who think his latest call places him beyond the pale. More pushback came from advocates of a broader boycott movement targeting all of Israel.
Beinart has been a high-profile figure in the debates over Israel ever since he penned a much-discussed 2010 essay in The New York Review of Books suggesting that what he depicted as an Israeli slide away from democratic values would alienate American Jewish youth. The essay won him plaudits from the pro-Israel left.
Beinart is scheduled to be a featured speaker at this week’s J Street national conference. But even the dovish J Street was cool to his boycott proposal. Its president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, said that boycotting settlements was unlikely to yield positive results.
“We favor a border not a boycott — we want to get the political process going to arrive at a border,” he said.
Ben-Ami hastened to note, however, that the idea of boycotting settlements was not out of place in the Israeli discourse. Another J Street conference keynoter, he noted, was Amos Oz, the widely respected Israeli novelist who has signed onto a letter supporting Israeli artists who refuse to perform in the West Bank settlement of Ariel.
“It’s a legitimate point of view that a lot of passionate two-state Zionists share,” Ben-Ami said. “And Peter is within the mainstream in Israel.”
Seth Mandel, writing on the Contentions blog at the conservative Commentary magazine, assailed Beinart’s boycott proposal as well as his labeling of Israel proper as “democratic Israel” and Israeli settlements as “nondemocratic Israel.” Mandel called these arguments “both morally reprehensible and a dangerous slippery slope.”
“The slippery slope, of course, is that the ‘legitimate’ vs. ‘illegitimate’ argument will immediately be applied to those, anywhere and anytime, who voice any support for the Jews Beinart says to stay away from,” Mandel wrote.
Jeffrey Goldberg, a writer for The Atlantic who also has harshly criticized the West Bank settlement enterprise, chose the path of engagement, parrying with Beinart in a much-watched exchange on Twitter.
“What’s your alternative for stopping the settlement growth that dooms Israeli democracy?” Beinart asked Goldberg.
Goldberg replied: “Longer discussion, but international boycott will only make mainstream Israelis more sympathetic to settlers, not less.”
Centrist Jewish groups were critical of Beinart’s proposal.
“I don’t think a JCRC would support any organization that would support any kind of activity that would bring any harm to a segment of Israel,” said Ronald Halber, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington.
Halber said he did not think Beinart would become a pariah in the Jewish community, arguing that it “sounds like he wrote the piece more to start a discussion than advance the proposal.”
“I find it a less than serious proposal from a person I consider thoughtful,” he said.
David Harris, the American Jewish Committee’s executive director, said that questions of whether Beinart was in or out of the discussion were rendered moot by the welcome Beinart received in venues like the pages of The New York Times — and that meant he would continue to score speaking gigs from Jewish groups.
“Peter Beinart is not knocking at a proverbial tent; Peter Beinart has been let in by the New York Times,” he said. “I only wish he were as open to some of the ideas of the hosting Jewish institutions as they are to hearing his thoughts.”
Abraham Foxman, the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, said that Beinart’s proposal would alienate Israelis and so violated a basic tenet of first heeding what another Jewish community was considering before recommending action.
“We don’t have the Palestinians, and with a campaign like this you won’t have the Israelis — that’s a great accomplishment towards peace,” Foxman said sarcastically.
One Jewish group, however, has taken a similar line to Beinart. Americans for Peace Now, which is a member of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, announced its backing for settlement boycotts last July.
The debate is sure to continue, if only because Beinart was stoking it at the virtual meeting place he hosts at the Daily Beast/Newsweek. The newly launched blog, called Zion Square, has assembled an array of prominent contributors, predominantly hailing from the left of the political spectrum.
One of Zion Square’s writers, Raphael Magarik, chided those who said Jews boycotting Jews should be out of bounds, and noted that such actions have been commonplace throughout Jewish history.
“To cut from our playbook the best tactic Jews have for censuring other Jews, a tactic that dates at least to the Talmud and has as its targets the likes of Leon Trotsky, the first Lubavitcher Rebbe, and Baruch Spinoza — well, that’s what I call painful and unnatural,” he wrote.