Below is a letter to the organisers of TIFF in Toronto, decrying their decision to hold a special even programme for Tel Aviv’s 100th birthday:
Dear organisers of TIFF,
As a former Israeli (but first and foremost as a human being) I feel outraged by your decision to spotlight Tel Aviv in your programme. As I show in my numerous publications on Israeli cinema, Tel Aviv (not accidentally named the “White City,”in Zionist and Israeli propaganda) hides behind its claim to be a modern, progressive and essentially cosmopolitan city, the existence of Jaffa, long considered Tel Aviv’s “primitive” and backwards alter ego. Jaffa’s population was ethnically cleansed in 1948 and the remaining Palestinians who still live there are subject to an ongoing and deliberate institutional and individual discrimination.
Although I was born in Tel Aviv I decided to leave Israel in 2001 to protest against its escalating oppression of the Palestinian people. The recent carnage in Gaza was a reminder, not only to me, but to the whole world, of the criminal nature of the Israeli state. Your decision to spotlight Tel Aviv in your festival amounts to an attempt to whitewash the crimes committed by Israel, and coordinated from the “Bunker,” the Israeli Army’s headquarters located at the center of Tel Aviv, not far from the maternity hospital where I was born. This conflation of the so called civilian life of Tel Aviv, and its military core is what this city is about. It is a metaphor for fortress Israel disguised as the “only democracy in the Middle East.”
I hope that you would reflect on your misconceived decision and learn the correct lessons from it.
Yours sincerely,
Prof. Yosefa Loshitzky
A new article on BDS:
Boycotts as a Legitimate Means of Resistance
As Determined by the Oppressed People
by Kim Petersen / August 29th, 2009
Prejudice does not always come with an ugly face. The same holds for Zionism and racism. It is entirely possible for well-intentioned people to hold a prejudice and, even worse, act on held prejudices.
Uri Avnery opposes the brutality inflicted on Palestinians. He campaigns for peace with Palestinians. But he also has a Zionist past. He is European born and fought for the terrorist Irgun in perpetration of a holocaust (Nakba) against Palestinans. He later renounced Irgun’s tactics. He is antiwar, but he is not anti-the fruits of war. He approves of a two state solution. In other words, Israeli Jews will keep the fruits of their dispossessing others — this while continuing to press for the return of what they were dispossessed.1
Avnery advocates selective use of tactics against Zionism. This is apparent when it comes to an international boycott of Israel. Avnery states that no one is better qualified than South African archbishop Desmond Tutu to answer this question.2
What does Tutu say? He has called on the international community to treat Israel as it treated apartheid South Africa. Tutu supports the divestment campaign against Israel.3
Avnery’s fellow Israeli, Neve Gordon, agrees that it is time for a boycott.4 Avnery laments, “I am sorry that I cannot agree with him this time – neither about the similarity with South Africa nor about the efficacy of a boycott of Israel.”
Indeed, the apartheids — while in many respects similar — are also different. Gary Zaztman pointed to a key difference:
For all its serious and undoubted evils and the numerous crimes against humanity committed in its name, including physical slaughters, South African white-racist apartheid was not premised on committing genocide. Zionism, on the other hand, has been committed to dissolving the social, cultural, political and economic integrity of the Palestinian people, i.e., genocide, from the outset, at least as early as Theodor Herzl’s injunction in his diaries that the “transfer” of the Palestinian “penniless population” elsewhere be conducted “discreetly and circumspectly.”5
Boycotts as a Tactic against Racism
Avnery says Tutu told him: “The boycott was immensely important, much more than the armed struggle.”
But it was the revolutionary, Nelson Mandela, who refused to give up the right to armed struggle, who negotiated the dismantling of South African apartheid.6
Tutu also told Avnery, “The importance of the boycott was not only economic but also moral.”
Avnery writes, “It seems to me that Tutu’s answer emphasizes the huge difference between the South African reality at the time and ours today.”
So what is Avnery saying? First he states that Tutu is best qualified person to speak to the effectiveness of boycotting as a tool in the fight against racism, then he says Tutu has it wrong. So is Avnery saying, then, that he is best qualified to speak on the effectiveness of boycotts against racism?
Avnery fears that Israeli Jews will feel “the whole world is against us.”
However, isn’t that, in a sense, what the purpose is: to show that the whole world is against Jewish racism against Palestinians? It must be emphasized that the world is not against Jews, as Israeli propaganda would choose to portray it. Although he doesn’t specifically state it, Avnery is using a version of the anti-Semitism smear: if you are against anything Israel does, then you are against Israelis. Hence, you are anti-Semitic. This grotesque perversion of morality and logic holds that to be against racism toward Palestinians makes one anti-Semitic.
Avnery admits, “In South Africa, the world-wide boycott helped in strengthening the majority and steeling [sic] it for the struggle. The impact of a boycott on Israel would be the exact opposite: it would push the large majority into the arms of the extreme right and create a fortress mentality against the ‘anti-Semitic world’. (The boycott would, of course, have a different impact on the Palestinians, but that is not the aim of those who advocate it.)”
Avnery merely states what is the current status quo. Israel is already hunkered down in an extreme right fortress mentality. The boycott is not the cause. Avnery fixates on the population dynamics. What is the relevance of majority and minority in Avnery’s reasoning? It would seem that Palestinians being in the minority – and the fact that the Palestinians support the boycott – to be even greater reason for international support of the boycott. Who and what is Avnery supporting: Palestinians from racism or Israeli Jews from the economic effects and moral stigma of an international boycott?
As for the aim of the boycott campaign: “to deny Israel the financial means to continue to kill Palestinians and occupy the lands.”7
Avnery raises “the Holocaust” arguing that Jewish suffering has imprinted itself deeply on the Jewish soul. That the Nazis rounded up Jews in concentration was a moral outrage. But what is the lesson of World War II? That suffering imposed on any identifiable group of people is evil and wrong, or that one group can appropriate a holocaust, make it their own, and use past suffering as a shield to inflict a holocaust on another people? Avnery argues that boycotting Jews will remind them of Nazism, but when Jews use Nazi-type techniques what should they be reminded of?
Avnery says it is okay to boycott of the product of the “settlements.” He draws a distinction between “settlers” (i.e., “colonisers”) and other Israeli Jews. How then does Avnery rationalize the fact that the “settlers” are in the West Bank?
Avnery asserts, “Those who call for a boycott act out of despair. And that is the root of the matter.” Indeed, despair is life for many Palestinians under occupation or in refugee camps.
Avnery states that an international boycott would be difficult to achieve, and the US would not be behind it. It was not easy to achieve against the apartheid regimes in South Africa either. Is that a reason not to try? Did not the US oppose a boycott of South Africa? Yes, it might take a long time. But times do change. The US (and its western allies’s) recalcitrance was steam rolled in Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, and elsewhere. Empires have risen and fallen throughout history.
Avnery finds that the tactic of boycotting is “an example of a faulty diagnosis leading to faulty treatment. To be precise: the mistaken assumption that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resembles the South African experience leads to a mistaken choice of strategy.”
Avnery continues, “In South Africa there was total agreement between the two sides about the unity of the country. The struggle was about the regime. Both Whites and Blacks considered themselves South Africans and were determined to keep the country intact. The Whites did not want partition, and indeed could not want it, because their economy was based on the labor of the Blacks.”
Seems there is some faulty analysis going on. “Whites did not want partition”? How can Avnery state something so factually inaccurate? What were Venda, Lebowa, the Bantustans, if not sections of South Africa partitioned off by the White government? Furthermore, that Zionism is now no longer dependent on Palestinian labor does not mask that it at one time was dependent on such labor; Avnery is cherry picking in his argument. Denying Palestinians the right to work in historical Palestine is a tactic that evolved from Zionism.
Also, how is it that Avnery can argue against an international boycott of Israel when Israel maintains a crushing illegal embargo against Palestinians – a war crime? As long as Israel uses such a tactic, then resistance through boycott, certainly, is legitimate.
Avnery says Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs have nothing in common. However, this same lack of commonality was true between White and Black South Africans as well. Nonetheless, I take exception with the thrust of such argumentation. It prepares the ground for racism. Israeli Jews, Palestinians, Black and White South Africans are all humans. They all eat, work, sleep, have dreams, have families. This should be reason enough to act humanely toward each other: love of humanity. It is entirely possible to embrace our shared humanity and respect diversity.
Avnery concludes, “In short: the two conflicts are fundamentally different. Therefore, the methods of struggle, too, must necessarily be different.”
This is logically flawed reasoning, much like the logical and moral flaw that being a victim of a genocide minimizes one’s own culpability in a subsequent genocide. One suspects that Avnery may well be the victim of a pained conscience and cognitive dissonance. I submit that the two “conflicts”8 are fundamentally similar. Fundamentally, colonial Israel and colonial South Africa share these hallmarks: a racially, culturally, spiritually, linguistically different group of outsiders through preponderant violence dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their homeland, and set up an apartheid system which humiliates the Indigenous peoples and privileges the occupiers.
Avnery focuses on certain “fundamentals” — which I submit are not fundamentals but nuances — that he considers different.
Avnery’s solution lies with “a comprehensive and detailed peace plan” from US president Barack Obama and “the full persuasive power of the United States” to lead to “a path of peace with Palestine.”
Avnery remembers well previous US-backed peace plans, like Oslo and the Roadmap. Why, then, does he cast his audacious hope on AIPAC appeaser Obama? Avnery hopes that Israeli Jews will realize that peace with Palestinians is the way? The peace activist touts a solution that has failed and been rejected many times. He rejects a solution that worked in South African because of the sensibilities of the oppressors.
But let us examine Avnery’s logic that fundamentally different “conflicts” demand different struggles.
Oppression is overthrown by struggle. Fundamentally different “conflicts” can succeed through similar struggles. As one example, revolutionaries overthrew an American-backed dictatorship in Cuba through armed struggle and Cuban revoluntionaries defeated South African forces in Angola through armed struggle.9
In his article’s finale, seemingly assured of his own argumentation over the person he deems the best qualified authority on boycotts as a tool to overcome apartheid, Avnery points to a prayer of Tutu’s – a prayer that would serve all of us well:
“Dear God, when I am wrong, please make me willing to see my mistake. And when I am right – please make me tolerable to live with.”
Hopefully, Avnery abides by such humbleness when he sees the error of his ways as well.
Notes:
See Dinah Spritzer, “Last chance for Holocaust restitution?” JTA, 30 June 2009. [↩]
Uri Avnery, “Tutu’s Prayer,” Gush Shalom, 29 August 2009. [↩]
Desmond Tutu, “Israel: Time to Divest,” New Internationalist magazine, January/February 2003. Available online at Third World Traveler. [↩]
Neve Gordon, “Boycott Israel,” Los Angeles Times, 20 August 2009. [↩]
Gary Zatzman, “The Notion of the ‘Jewish State’ as an ‘Apartheid Regime’ is a Liberal-Zionist One,” Dissident Voice, 21 November 2005. [↩]
See Bill Keller, Tree Shaker: The Story of Nelson Mandela (Boston: Kingfisher, 2008). Mandela wanted to pursue a peaceful, non-violent settlement, but when faced with the violence of state power he felt compelled to use violence as a method of struggle. Mandela did emphasize that this violence was not terrorism: 98. [↩]
”Aim of the boycott campaign,” Boycott Israel Now. [↩]
The word “conflict” minimizes the atrocities wreaked on Palestinians and South Africans by their oppressors. [↩]
Isaac Saney contends that the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale was the “turning point in the struggle against apartheid. ”Isaac Saney, “The Story of How Cuba Helped to Free Africa,” Morning Star, 4 November 2005. Available at Embajada de Cuba en Egipto. [↩]
A very important piece in Ha’aretz, by Anat Matar from Tel Aviv University, making the case for academic resistance to Israeli policies, and for being prepared to pay the price for supporting the BDS initiative
By Anat Matar
Several days ago Dr. Neve Gordon of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev published an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times. In that article he explained why, after years of activity in the peace camp here, he has decided to pin his hopes on applying external pressure on Israel – including sanctions, divestment and an economic, cultural and academic boycott.
He believes, and so do I, that only when the Israeli society’s well-heeled strata pay a real price for the continuous occupation will they finally take genuine steps to put an end to it.
Gordon looks at the Israeli society and sees an apartheid state. While the Palestinians’ living conditions deteriorate, many Israelis are benefiting from the occupation. In between the two sides, Israeli society is sinking into complete denial – drawn into extreme hatred and violence. The academic community has an important role to play in this process. Yet, instead of sounding the alarm, it wakes up only when someone dares approach the international community and desperately call for help.
The worn-out slogan that everybody raises in this context is “academic freedom,” but it is time to somewhat crack this myth.
The appeal to academic freedom was born during the Enlightenment, when ruling powers tried to suppress independent minded thinkers. Already then, more than 200 years ago, Imannuel Kant differentiated between academics whose expertise (law, theology, and medicine) served the establishment and those who had neither power nor proximity to power. As for the first, he said, there was no sense in talking about “freedom” or “independent thought” as any use of such terminology is cynical.
Since then, cynicism has spread to other faculties as well. At best academic freedom was perceived as the right not to ask troubling questions. At worst was the right to harass whomever asked too much.
When the flag of academic freedom is raised, the oppressor and not the oppressed is usually the one who flies it. What is that academic freedom that so interests the academic community in Israel? When, for example, has it shown concern for the state of academic freedom in the occupied territories?
This school year in Gaza will open in shattered classrooms as there are no building materials there for rehabilitating the ruins; without notebooks, books and writing utensils that cannot be brought into Gaza because of the goods embargo (yes, Israel may boycott schools there and no cry is heard).
Hundreds of students in West Bank universities are under arrest or detention in Israeli jails, usually because they belong to student organizations that the ruling power does not like.
The separation fence and the barriers prevent students and lecturers from reaching classes, libraries and tests. Attending conferences abroad is almost unthinkable and the entry of experts who bear foreign passports is permitted only sparingly.
On the other hand, members of the Israeli academia staunchly guard their right to research what the regime expects them to research and appoint former army officers to university positions. Tel Aviv University alone prides itself over the fact that the Defense Ministry is funding 55 of its research projects and that DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the U.S. Defense Department, is funding nine more. All the universities offer special study programs for the defense establishment.
Are those programs met with any protest? In contrast with the accepted impression, only few lecturers speak up decisively against the occupation, its effect and the increasingly bestial nature of the State of Israel.
The vast majority retains its freedom to be indifferent, up to the moment that someone begs the international community for rescue. Then the voices rise from right and left, the indifference disappears, and violence replaces it: Boycott Israeli universities? This strikes at the holy of holies, academic freedom!
The writer is a lecturer in Tel Aviv University’s Department of Philosophy.
August 28, 2009 By Jonathan Cook
(Amra) — The inhabitants of the Bedouin village of Amra have good reason to fear that the harsh tactics used by the Israeli army against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have been imported to their small corner of Israel’s Negev desert.
Over the summer, the Tarabin tribe, all of them Israeli citizens, have had the sole access road to their homes sealed off, while the dirt track they must use instead is regularly blocked by temporary checkpoints at which their papers and vehicles are inspected at length.
Coils of razor wire encircle much of the village, and children as young as eight have been arrested in a series of night-time raids.
“Four-fifths of our youngsters now have files with the police and our drivers are being repeatedly fined for supposed traffic violations,” said Tulab Tarabin, one of Amra’s 400 Bedouin inhabitants. “Every time we are stopped, the police ask us: ‘Why don’t you leave?'”
Lawyers and human rights activists say a campaign of pressure is being organised against the Tarabin at the behest of a nearby Jewish community, Omer, which is determined to build a neighbourhood for Israeli army officers on the tribe’s land.
“The policy in Israel is that when Jews need land, the Bedouin must move – no matter how long they have been living in their homes or whether their communities predate Israel’s creation,” said Morad al Sana, a lawyer with the Adalah legal centre for Israel’s Arab minority. “The Tarabin’s crime is that they refuse to budge.”
The 180,000 Bedouin in the Negev have never been welcome, says Oren Yiftachel, a geographer at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheva. They are descendants of a few thousand who managed to avoid expulsion from the southern semi-desert region during the 1948 war that founded Israel.
Many of the surviving Bedouin, including the Tarabin, were forcibly relocated from their extensive ancestral lands in the 1950s to an area close to the Negev’s main city, Beersheva, Prof Yiftachel said. Israel declared the Bedouin lands as “state land” and established a series of overcrowded “townships” to house the tribes instead.
“The stated goal is one of ‘Judaisation’,” Prof Yiftachel added, referring to a long-standing policy of concentrating the rural Bedouin into urban reservations to free up land for Jewish settlement. About half of the Negev’s Bedouin, some 90,000, have refused to move.
According to a recent report from the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), the townships have “continuously ranked as the poorest, least developed and most crime-ridden towns in Israel”.
The refuseniks, such as the Tarabin, have faced unrelenting pressure to leave their 45 rural communities, none of which is recognised by the state. The villagers endure “third world conditions”, according to ACRI.
“The unrecognised villages are denied basic services to their homes, including water and electricity, and the villages themselves have no master plans,” Mr al Sana said.
As a result, he added, the villagers are forced to live in tin shacks and tents because concrete homes are invariably destroyed by the authorities. In the past two years, several shacks as well as the local kindergarten in Amra have been demolished.
The stark contrast between the dusty encampment of Amra and the green lawns and smart villas of Omer, only a stone’s throw away and the country’s third wealthiest community, is unsettling even for some of Omer’s 7,000 residents.
One, Yitzhak Nevo, a philosophy professor at Ben Gurion University and a leading activist with Dukium, a Negev coexistence group, said that, although the lands on which the Tarabin live fall under Omer’s jurisdiction, the Bedouin have been entirely excluded. “Even though they live within Omer’s municipal limits, their children get no education from us; our health clinic does not treat them; they are not hooked up to our water or electricity supplies and their refuse is not collected.”
He said Amra had been treated as nothing more than an eyesore until the mid-1990s when the powerful mayor, Pinhas Badash, decided that the Tarabin were both harming property values and obstructing the town’s expansion plans.
As Omer’s new neighbourhoods reached the limits of Amra, Mr Badash stepped up the pressure on the villagers to leave. A few years ago he pushed through the building of a new community for the Tarabin away from Omer. Two-thirds of the tribe relocated, while the remainder fought the attempted eviction through the courts.
“It was a very dirty business in which those in the tribe who left first were offered cheap land on which to build while the rest were threatened that they would be offered nothing,” Mr al Sana said.
Amra’s remaining Bedouin have found themselves surrounded by a tall wire fence to separate them from Omer. Two gates, ordered by the courts to ensure the Bedouin continued to have road access through the town, were sealed this year.
Since the beginning of the summer police patrol Amra’s side of the fence around the clock and the Tarabin report that a private security firm chases off any of them found inside Omer.
Nissim Nir, a spokesman for Mr Badash, denied that the Tarabin were being hounded. Omer made a generous offer to relocate them from their “illegal” site, he said.
Recently Mr Badash announced that thousands of acres around Omer would be forested with the intention of stopping the Bedouin from returning to the area once they had been evicted.
Mr Tarabin, 33, accused the police of being little more than hired hands carrying out Mr Badash’s plan.
“We are being suffocated. There are night-time searches of our homes using bogus pretexts, and arrests of young children. We are photographed and questioned as we go about our business. At the roadblocks they endlessly check cars entering and leaving, and fines are issued. No one visits us unless they have to, and we stay home unless we have to leave.”
He added: “Why is it so impossible for Omer to imagine allowing us to be a neighbourhood of the town?”
BDS hits again! This time in Israel itself:
Two international curators who were to participate in the planning of ArtTLV, an art biennial taking place in Israel in September, have pulled out of the project after their Israeli counterparts refused to publish articles condemning Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza and to arrange a symposium on art and war.
The two curators, Viktor Misiano from Russia, and Zdenka Badovinac from Slovenia, had visited Israel prior to the three-week-long operation in Gaza, which began in December 2008.
After the pair pulled out, the curatorial responsibilities were transferred to veteran Israeli curator Edna Moshenson and her colleague Maayan Sheleff.
One of the event organizers, Irit Sommer of Sommer Contemporary Art gallery in Tel Aviv, said the idea for an international collaboration came up in the initial planning stages. But she said this week that she understands Misiano and Badovinac’s decision.
“We decided to invite international curators to participate in the project, but when they arrived war broke between us and they decided they weren’t able to curate an exhibition under the conditions we set. Despite it we’re still on good terms. We have even expressed some interest in an alternative project they’ve suggested with Israeli artists aimed to serve as a platform for public appeal with anti-war references. The idea is great but we currently lack the finances to back it. We’ve invited them to attend the September opening at our expense and I hope they will.”
The project manager, Medi Shavid, said that an international biennial doesn’t require international curators, as it’s enough to display art from around the world.
“It was our decision to terminate the collaboration due to their conditions,” said Shavid. “We chose not to go through with it, and also realized that their budget demands were beyond our means. So we rolled up our sleeves and created an excellent international exhibition by ourselves.”
“It’s a tremendous opportunity to be able to team up with international curators and I hope next year our budget will enable us to expand the project,” said Edna Moshenson, the Art TLV curator. “This year the exhibition is collaboration between foreign and Israeli artists.”
Viktor Misiano and Zdenka Badovinac are unavailable to respond.
By Hasan Abu Nimah, The Electronic Intifada, 27 August 2009
It may not be unknown that Abbas and his Ramallah Authority can only function within specified parameters
tailored for the convenience, indeed the security needs, of the occupying power and the pro-Israel policies of its
foreign supporters. Hamas has no place within that tightly built scheme. Despite Hamas’ willingness to enter the
political system and play by the rules, the idea has been to eliminate the resistance movement from the equation
completely, permitting it no political role whatsoever.
Hasan Abu Nimah comments.
By Robin Yassin-Kassab, The Electronic Intifada, 31 August 2009
Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home is a beautifully achieved coming of age novel which follows a clever girl through a
war, a domestic battlefield, and repeated forced migrations. For our heroine, these events are aspects of normal everyday life (because everything’s normal when it happens to you), like school, friends, family and shopping. Robin Yassin-Kassab reviews for The Electronic Intifada.
By Sarah Irving, Electronic Lebanon, 31 August 2009
Nostalgia, insists architect and academic Rami Daher, is a legitimate feeling. While most individuals’ instinctive
thoughts of the glories of Levantine architecture might run to ancient mosques, castles and palaces, Daher’s
yearning is towards an era in living memory, and on a more everyday scale. Sarah Irving reports for Electronic
Lebanon.
Press Release, PACBI, 31 August 2009
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel is gravely concerned that the Toronto
International Film Festival 2009 has decided to spotlight Tel Aviv for its inaugural City-to-City program. We
encourage filmmakers and audiences to boycott the Spotlight as it extends a gesture of “goodwill” to a colonial and apartheid regime which is violating Palestinian human rights with utter impunity.
NAHR AL-BARED A TEST CASE FOR PALESTINIAN REFUGEES IN LEBANON
By Ray Smith, Electronic Lebanon, 27 August 2009
NAHR AL-BARED, Lebanon (IPS) – Palestinian refugees at Nahr al-Bared in north Lebanon are living under tight military siege two years after a war destroyed the refugee camp. It has now become a test case for a new approach in Lebanon’s security policy towards Palestinian refugee camps.
By Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 27 August 2009
The inhabitants of the Bedouin village of Amra have good reason to fear that the harsh tactics used by the Israeli
army against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have been imported to their small corner of Israel’s Negev
desert. Over the summer, the Tarabin tribe, all of them Israeli citizens, have had the sole access road to their
homes sealed off, while the dirt track they must use instead is regularly blocked by temporary checkpoints at
which their papers and vehicles are inspected at length.
By Joy Ellison, Live from Palestine, 27 August 2009
“Nasser says hello,” the woman said as she stood in my doorway and smiled. I was barely able to choke out, “Say
hello to him too.” Nasser, the woman’s husband, was in prison. He was arrested on 20 July during a peaceful
demonstration in his West Bank village of al-Tuwani. He did nothing wrong, nothing but build a house on land he owns. A Palestinian need do nothing more to be treated like a criminal. Joy Ellison writes from al-Tuwani,
occupied West Bank.
