Author: Helena

State-building: Palestine

Conventional wisdom here in DC has it that the Palestinians somehow need to “prove” they’re capable of running a state before they’re allowed to have one….
Never mind that the Palestinians are an extremely– one might even say, obsessively– well-educated bunch of people… Never mind that during the 1950s and 1960s, the proto-state administrations that were built all up and down the Arab coast of the Gulf were all established overwhelmingly by Palestinians… Never mind that in Palestine, the PA had built up one entire set of administrative institutions in the West Bank and Gaza, some of which functioned pretty well under the circumstances of occupation– but they were then all smashed to smithereens in the paroxysm of destructive vengeance unleashed by Ariel Sharon in 2002…
No, never mind all that history. The CW here in Washington DC says that the Palestinians, yet again, have to “prove” their capabilities before they can be allowed to have a state. (As if their backwardness in administrative affairs was the major impediment to their gaining their independence!)
And Salam Fayyad is earnestly setting out to supply the required proof to the Americans on this score… and doing this by trying to build (yet again) the institutions of a Palestinian proto-state in, thus far, just the occupied West Bank.
Fayyad’s whole approach has now been very forcefully challenged by the veteran Palestinian social activist Dr Mustafa Barghouthi.
Barghouthi argues for a hard-hitting program of action for national liberation built around these four basic pillars:

    * Resistance
    * Steadfastness
    * National unity, and
    * Global solidarity.

On the crucial issue of resistance, he writes:

    In all its forms, resistance is an internationally sanctioned right of the Palestinian people. Under this strategy, however, it must resume a peaceful, mass grassroots character that will serve to revive the culture of collective activism among all sectors of the Palestinian people and, hence, to keep the struggle from becoming the preserve or monopoly of small cliques and to promote its growing impetus and momentum.

Anyway, go read the whole of his program there.
Dr. Mustafa has considerably more legitimacy and political credibility in Palestinian society than Fayyad. It’s based on the lengthy, dangerous, and visionary work he has pursued since the early 1980s to organize Palestinians throughout the OPTs in the crucial field of grassroots medical relief. Because of his strong and sustained emphasis on grassroots self-organization and self-empowerment he has always been 100 times more “political” than Fayyad. (Hence his strong and now long-sustained call for national unity; a topic on which, at the political level, Fayyad is strangely silent.)
At the end of the article, Barghouthi makes some points about a one-state versus two-state solution that seem a little unclearly written. Maybe I’ll write him and ask for some clarifications.
But the four-point program looks excellent.

Naomi Klein and her Hebrew-language publisher discuss BDS

… in this excellent interview, from Cecilie Surasky of Jewish Voices for Peace.
The words of Klein’s publisher, Yael Lerer– a Jewish Israeli– are particularly hard-hitting. She says,

    As an Israeli citizen, I need boycotts for two reasons. First, I want Israelis to feel more strongly that everything is not normal. It means nothing for many self-identified left-wing Israelis to say, “It’s awful, what’s going on in Gaza and in Hebron,” while continuing their daily lives like everything is fine. They go to the shows and they go to the concerts. These people are the elites in this country. These are the journalists that work at the newspapers. I want to move them. I want to shake these people up and make them understand they cannot continue their normal life when Palestinians in Qalqiliya [a West Bank city completely surrounded by the Separation Barrier] — only fifteen minutes away from Tel Aviv — are in prison.
    The second reason I need the boycott is because I lost the hope of creating change from within, which was what I tried to do as an activist for many years. Twenty years ago I could never have imagined this semi-apartheid situation. I care about the future in this place. I care about my fellow Israelis. I have a huge family here and many, many friends. I know many people who don’t have any other passports, and who don’t have any other options. I think that the solution for this place, the only possible future, is living together. Unfortunately, at this stage, I don’t see how this future can be achieved without international pressure. And I think that boycott is a nonviolent tool that has already shown us that it can work. So I’m asking: please boycott me.

Big appreciation to all three of these people. Who are all, as it happens, female.
By the way, they also deal really well with the principal anti-BDS arguments made by Uri Avnery– namely that people are not calling for a boycott of North Korea or Burma, so why Israel; and that that a boycott will only force Israelis into a defensive and even more intransigent crouch.

Fayyad, Maliki, the Americans

Over the weekend I finished reading the 37-page program that Salam Fayyad, the PM in the Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority (PA) produced for the new, and still western-funded ‘government’ that he heads in Ramallah.
Readers can find the text of the program here. (HT: John Knight.)
It is a typical technocrat’s document– lengthy, larded with Jargon-of-the-Month formulations, and resembling nothing so much as the overly wordy “workplans” that people applying for grants from western funding organizations are required to submit to them. (Wonder why?) Much of it even sounds very admirable: lots of emphasis on things like “accountability” and “good governance” and other equally worthy goals.
But to note only that is to completely miss the point of this document, I think. Despite the strong emphasis on technocracy, this is an intensely political document. Indeed, the skirting of the most evident political issues facing the Palestinian people is, in a sense, the main point of this document. It embodies the politics of “anti-politics”; that is, it aims to provide an alternative to the division between Fateh and Hamas that currently– along with, of course, Israel’s continued massive campaign against all manifestations of Palestinian rights or interests– plagues the Palestinian people.
That is what we should expect, perhaps, of Fayyad, a personally decent man who made the choice to be parachuted into Ramallah as, essentially, the tool of the Americans back in 2005.
He’s been playing a complicated game ever since. He is not a man with a history in any branch of the extremely lengthy and hard-fought campaign of resistance to Israeli occupation. He comes without his own political network, and has to rely almost completely on the US-mobilized funding that comes to him as PM of the PA in order to try to build support from Palestinians.
In the 2006 parliamentary elections, he and Hanan Ashrawi were the only two people elected to the parliament from the list that they’d formed. Hamas won those elections handily, of course. Fayyad and all other non-Hamas people were warned strongly away from participating in the Hamas-backed government. However, in the National Unity Government formed in March 2007, he was named Finance Minister– indicating, presumably, that he had the confidence of both Fateh and Hamas at that time.
But in June 2007, when the US-backed forces of Fateh/Contra leader Dahlan launched the disastrous coup that broke up the NUG, Fayyad was the US-backed figure who was thereafter installed in Ramallah as ‘Prime Minister’, in a completely unconstitutional way.
So for him now to speak of “accountability” and “good governance”, etc is inherently non-credible.
He has, however, been trying to pull off what we might call the “Nuri al-Maliki move”. Over in Iraq, Maliki was installed as Prime Minister as a result of elections administered by the occupying US military and according to constitutional “rules” that had been largely dictated by the US occupation. Nonetheless, Maliki has tried to carve out a space for independent Iraqi decisionmaking that is not totally dominated by Washington; and he has had some success in that, I think.
Most notably, during the tough negotiations of last fall over the SOFA agreement long demanded by the Americans, Maliki succeeded in transforming the SOFA into a Withdrawal Agreement; and he got written into it a date certain for the complete withdrawal of all US forces from the country, which the Bushites had never wanted.
So the first question has to be: Is Maliki’s success in that regard replicable by Fayyad (or anyone else) in Palestine?
There are structural differences, to be sure. The US, when it intervenes in Palestinian politics, does so not as the direct occupying power– as it has done in Iraq– but as a sort of proxy for the Israeli occupying power. The consequence of this is that regardless of what Keith Dayton or other Americans who work very closely with Fayyad might want to do, actually the IOF is a far bigger presence. And though the Americans might want to see Fayyad “succeed” as a PM, there’s a large chunk of opinion in the Israeli political elite that really does not want to see any Palestinian administration “succeed” anywhere west of the River Jordan, whether in Ramallah or Gaza City.
That’s one big difference.
Another difference that stems from the fact that in Palestine the US is really a proxy for the real occupier whereas in Iraq it was the real occupier is that in Iraq, the dynamics of the situation got around to the place where even the people in the Bush administration ultimately judged that it was in the US’s interest to withdraw from the damaging and expensive confrontation in Iraq, and therefore from Iraq itself. So they had, if you like, an increasingly strong incentive to see Maliki (or someone!) succeed in building something of a sustainable indigenous governing capacity there.
In Palestine, however, the US is taking no losses in blood or even, in any direct way, treasure, from the continuation of the occupation. Hey, they and the Israelis even got the Europeans to pick up most of the tab for running the apparently endless occupation! (And the occupying army’s own forces, meanwhile, are suffering almost no casualties there.)
But this indicates that the US has correspondingly less strong of an interest in “withdrawing” from its role in Palestine, and therefore less of a motivation for seeing a sustainable indigenous government “succeed”. It becomes more optional for them, if you like.
Though in the broader regional and international context, I would say that the American people’s interest in seeing a fair and sustainable resolution of the Palestine Question is quite compelling. But that’s a broader argument; and maybe it doesn’t hit the decisionmakers in the Obama White House with quite the same urgency as the need to stanch the erosion of US blood and treasure in Iraq but getting the heck out of the country has done to them, and even before them, the Bushies.
So, can Fayyad pull off the “Nuri al-Maliki move”?
Other factors, I think, intervene as well. Maliki had two distinct advantages when it came to arm-wrestling with the Americans who’d installed him. (And we should remember that he wasn’t even their first choice. He was imposed on them back in early 2006 by a situation in which the Americans already demonstrated their inability to control all the key levers of political power inside Iraq.)
The first of his advantages has been the parliament there. despite all the evident problems in the electotal system, nonetheless the parliamentarians developed some real capability as a force overseeing some of the key actions and initiatives of the Maliki government. As I understand it, it was largely the very nationalist-minded pressure from the parliamentarians that stiffened Maliki’s spine on the SOFA issue and resulted in him winning the Withdrawal Agreement.
Fayyad, for obvious reasons, looks unlikely to be able to rely on allies in parliament to act as a counter-weight to US pressure.
And the second of Maliki’s “advantages” in his relationship with his country’s occupiers– I put that word in scare-quotes, advisedly– has been the strong influence that Iran won inside the Iraqi political system from the very moment that the Americans toppled Saddam Hussein. I am not privy to the extent to which Maliki (like most other figures inside the current Iraqi political firmament) has become reliant on Iranian help in, often, even the most basic aspects of personal and political survival. But the fact that the Iranians have been able to sustain webs of significant influence throughout just about all the different parts of the reconstituted Iraqi forces means that most Iraqi pols today are not completely reliant on the Americans for their physical survival. Which of course, has made it easier for them to “stand up to” the Americans on key issues like the WA.
Iran’s influence deep within Iraq’s security structures is, however, a very mixed “blessing” for many Iraqis: one that will most likely cause deep problems within the country for many years to come.
Fayyad, for his part, has no such “counter” to any pressures the Americans and Israelis might put on him…

Turkish FM mediating between Iraq and Syria

As long-time JWN readers are aware, I have always been worried about the prospect that as the US military decreases its presence in Iraq, many of the country’s neighbors would rush in to fill the resulting security vacuum and the contest between them could escalate in many unpredictable ways. That was why I strongly urged– from long before the Iraq Study Group endorsed this necessary recommendation– that as the US withdraws either Washington or, preferably, the UN should convene a high-level meeting of Iraq, the US, and all Iraq’s neighbors to work out a code of conduct for the behaviors of all parties with regard to Iraq; and preferably also establish a UN-based monitoring and incident-resolution mechanism to follow up on compliance with those agreements.
The US government hasn’t done that, though the troop withdrawal is already well underway and some serious tensions have already been emerging. And neither has the UN done much to put into place such a plan.
I guess for both the US and the UN, the ‘sensitivity’ of including Iran in any such arrangement seems like a real obstacle. (I wish, obviously that the UN had a lot more independence from US tutelage at this point.)
But now, Turkey seems to be stepping into the conflict-reduction role in a significant way. Today, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu is scheduled to pay consecutive visits to Iraq and Syria to try to resolve the conflict that’s erupted since the Iraqi government accused Syria of harboring the opposition leaders who, Baghdad alleges, orchestrated the bombings of various Iraqi ministries on August 19 that killed 95 and wounded more than 600, many of them ministry employees.
Davutoğlu became foreign minister only a couple of months ago. But before that, as a much respected foreign-policy intellectual, he was a special adviser to Turkish PM Rejep Tayyip Erdoğan. In that role, he spearheaded a fascinating– though ultimately unsuccessful– series of “proximity talks” between Syria and Ehud Olmert’s government in Israel.
The idea that Turkey may be in a position to help Iraq and its six neighbors keep tensions among them to a minimum as US power recedes may seem counter-intuitive, since for a couple of generations many Iraqis, Syrians, and other Arabs retained a degree of remembered resentment against Turkey over the oppressive role the Ottoman Empire played against ethnic-Arab nationalists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. However, I was surprised during my last few visits to Syria to discover the degree to which Syrians in and close to government– and Syrians in general– seem to have “gotten over” those sensitivities.
Indeed, many Syrians I’ve spoken to in the past couple of years speak of Turkey as something of a current role model for them. Many Syrians look at the success that Turkey has had in dealing with challenges like economic development, finding an internal balance between the forces of secularism and Islamism, finding an external balance between ‘east’ and ‘west’, the challenges posed by Kurds and other national minorities– and they wish they could emulate them.
The same is true, I think, of many other Arabs.
This doesn’t mean that, among Iraq and all of its neighbors, there are NO remaining sensitivities regarding Turkey’s role in the region. But it does mean there is considerably more scope for a leading Turkish role in reducing the kinds of tensions I’m worried about in the whole peri-Iraq theater than many people (self included) would have thought possible even five or ten years ago.
By the way, the watchword of the academic work Davutoğlu has done on Turkey’s foreign policy is that it should be aimed not just at “zero problems with the neighbors”, but also at intense engagement with the neighbors. (And yes, that includes Armenia, where the Erdogan government has taken some notable steps towards reducing earlier tensions.)
You can read two of my recent evaluations of Turkey’s new regional role here and here.
Turkey now has good relations with Iraq and all of its neighbors– including Iran– as well as with the US, which will continue to be a power in the region even as it departs. Turkey is, of course, a full member of NATO and retains numerous other very good links with the west.
I do wish, though, the Ban Ki-Moon and the weight of UN legitimacy was also a lot more involved in this peri-Iraq tension reduction effort.

BDS: Avnery’s dangerous argumentation

I have a lot of respect for the veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery. The first time I met him was in the PLO headquarters in Tunis in the late 1980s– a place that was anathema to both of our governments, but to his a lot more than to mine. (Indeed, for him as an Israeli it was actually illegal to meet with PLO people then.)
However, the argument he published yesterday that was against the burgeoning BDS movement was had some deeply flawed and dangerous arguments in it.
Over at Mondoweiss, Anees of Jerusalem has highlighted one serious (and apparently very racist) flaw in Avnery’s argument. His criticism was of these statements:

    Blacks in South Africa are very different from the Israelis, and from the Palestinians, too. The collapse of the oppressive racist regime did not lead to a bloodbath, as could have been predicted, but on the contrary: to the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee.

Actually, Avnery’s argument there is not only racist– with the clear implication that the Palestinians (“unlike the blacks of South Africa”) are indeed intent on a bloodbath; but also illogical.
Because yes, it is true that a “bloodbath” was what was widely predicted in South Africa after the fall of the apartheid regime– but western liberals went along with the sanctions campaign notwithstanding that.
… And then, it didn’t happen. So what good are the predictions of western liberals in regard to South Africa or Palestine, anyway??
Anyway, Anees was right to call Avnery on the racism of his argument there.
I want to call Avnery on a couple of other aspects of his argument.
First, he plays a deliberately deceptive numbers game.
He writes,

    The South African struggle was between a large majority and a small minority. Among a general population of almost 50 million, the Whites amounted to less than 10%. That means that more than 90% of the country’s inhabitants supported the boycott, in spite of the argument that it hurt them, too.
    In Israel, the situation is the very opposite. The Jews amount to more than 80% of Israel’s citizens, and constitute a majority of some 60% throughout the country between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. 99.9% of the Jews oppose a boycott on Israel.
    They will not feel the “the whole world is with us”, but rather that “the whole world is against us”.

No, regarding Israel and Palestinians the situation is not “the very opposite” of what it was in South Africa. There are around six million Jews in Israel (and maybe 99.9% of them oppose the BDS campaign; or maybe fewer than that.) But there are some 5.5 million ethnic Palestinians in the area under Israeli control– and an additional five million or more Palestinians forced to live in exile from homeland.
Avnery just wipes the Palestinian exiles from his tally-board of political relevance as if they have no legitimate say in anything!
Well, that is one huge problem with his numbers game.
Don’t you think it would be important to Avnery as a peace activist that Palestinians moldering in refugee camps in Lebanon or elsewhere might finally be able to say, “the world is with us”?
But apparently, he doesn’t care.
Another problem with his argument comes where he tries to say that the Israelis have nothing in common with the Afrikaners– because only the Israelis suffered the Holocaust, and besides, many Afrikaners were pro-Hitler.
But guess what. The Afrikaners were also acting from a very deep sense of past community hurt and community vulnerability. They were the people for whom the whole concept of “concentration camps” had been invented in the first place, for goodness sake!
And they too, like many Jewish ethnonationalists in Israel, had a profound sense of having been “called” by their G-d to create their settler state in Africa.
So the two peoples have many similarities in their core culture. But one big difference is that the Israelis have not thrown up their “Frederik De Klerk” figure yet: a national leader who over time came to recognize the equal humanity and equal rights of the long-despised “other.”
What can all of us do to help persuade Jewish israeli society to generate its own De Klerk?
Wide-reaching BDS may indeed be one of the best ways.
But at a very minimum, in the first instance, all those governments in the west that espouse the cause of human equality and human freedoms should absolutely stop the generous and quite unconditional subsidies they continue to give to the Israeli state and business community.
See also the close critique of Avnery’s argument by the South African Ran Greenstein, that Avnery’s own organization was good enough to publish, here.
… Regarding Avnery, this is sadly not the first time I’ve had to remark on the limits of this veteran campaigner’s vision. Earlier this month, I wrote about the plea he had written to his fellow veteran in the peace movement Dov Yermiya, urging Yermiya not to go ahead with his planned renunciation of Zionism as a guiding philosophy.

Neve Gordon and BDS: Update

Most JWN readers are probably well aware of the firestorm of controversy that erupted after Neve Gordon, the chair of the Politics Department at Israel’s Ben Gurion University published this op-ed in the L.A. Times August 20, in which he argued that if a two-state outcome in Israel/Palestine is to be won then outsiders must engage in a widespread campaign of Bycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) to this end.
After he published that, BGU president Rivka Carmi circulated a letter saying, among other things,

    “…This kind of Israel-bashing detracts from the wonderful work that is being done at BGU and at all Israeli universities. Academics who entertain such resentment towards their country are welcome to consider another professional and personal home.”

The thinly veiled threat in her letter then aroused much further condemnation from supporters of academic freedom around the world.
Now, Sydney Levy has an excellent update at Muzzlewatch about all the reactions to the Neve Gordon affair.
Gordon has received some good support from fellow-academics at BGU and around the world. Levy tells us that Prof. Uri Ram, that head of BGU Sociology and Anthropology Department, has stated that,

    Should he be fired as head of the Political Science department due to his political opinions I shall call on all department heads in the University to resign as well, in support of Gordon and in protest of the violation of his rights, civil freedom and the University establishment in Israel.”

It is certainly true that BGU has for many years hosted a faculty that is far more open-minded in its views than the faculties at most of Israel’s heavily state-controlled universities. Check out the list of their “Notable faculty members” here.
It includes such voices of conscience as Oren Yiftachel and Danny Rubinstein.
I should add that during the many years when Benny Morris was quite unable to get a job in the history department of any other university in Israel because of the work he had done uncovering Israel’s expulsionist campaigns against the Palestinians in the war of 1947-48, it was finally BGU that offered him a position. (His formerly leftist political views, as we know, later swung radically to the right.)
Yiftachel, Rubinstein, and (the earlier version of) Morris all found a welcome at BGU so long as it was run by the social-justice-minded economist Avishay Braverman. Bt a couple of years ago he left BGU to run for election near the top of the Labour Party’s list. Now he is one of the handful of leading Labourites who have followed Ehud Barak into the Netanyahu government.
Meanwhile, BGU’s presidency was taken over by Rivka Carmi, a physician. Her commitment to academic freedom seems extremely thin– especially compared with Braverman’s.

Saturday reading: Two plans for the West Bank

One of the docs I’m reading today is the full text of the “Fayyad Plan”, aka the Program of the Thirteenth PA Government. If you recall that the PA was formed in 1994 to be the Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority, you can see how far behind the curve the US-led peace process has fallen…
Fayyad’s plan is not yet online as far as I can see. But I’ll let y’all know as soon as it is.
The second doc I’m reading today is certainly online. It’s a series of blog posts on the Haaretz website by a woman from San Mateo, California called Allison Speiser.
Her most recent post, on August 20, was titled “Making Aliyah to the West Bank: Touchdown!”
“Making Aliyah” is the “cute” way that Zionists and their supporters refer to the act of emigrating from other countries to Israel. Under Israeli law, any Jewish person who does so gets instant citizenship and a package of “absorption” benefits. Palestinian indigenes expelled from the country 61 years ago are still not, however, allowed to return to their homes there.
Other notable posts from Speiser this year have included these:

She seems like an interesting person. She apparently gave the limit of $2,300 to Obama’s election campaign last year. She refers repeatedly to “the West Bank”, instead of saying “Judea and Samaria/ Yehudah ve Shomron” as the hardline Israeli ethnonationalists do.
In her latest post, she writes,

    When you watch the steady stream of cars and buses in each direction, it is hard to imagine that anyone would think of this area as anything other than just another part of Israel – and yet there are clear signs that we are in a separate place. The West Bank.
    I still think about the signs, posters and graffiti that I saw in our first few days here. There is graffiti stating ‘Kahane was right’, ‘Gush Katif – we won’t forget and we won’t forgive’ and other notations indicating the right-wing leanings of the residents here. Bumper stickers tell a similar tale. There were also printed posters telling America to mind its own business and some hardline statements toward Obama and his recent demands on Israel. Seeing these posters as a brand new olah from America gave me mixed feelings – or perhaps just a weird feeling.

There is something interesting going on in her mind. She “saw” those apparently disturbing signs of her new neighbors’ rightwing views “in our first few days here”– but apparently she doesn’t still “see” them today? Does she perhaps, actually physically “see” them but not any longer pay them any heed? Has their presence become somehow normalized for her?
Then this:

    I wonder how I will deal with the big picture questions my kids will ask about bombs, rockets and what the green line is all about. I wonder how I will explain to them why some people use the term “Occupied Territory.” I wonder how I will explain to my kids what a “Palestinian” is.
    I feel strongly that this land is ours, that we have every right to live here and that we must do everything possible to hold on to this land. I want my kids to feel the same way I do, and to ascribe to the same beliefs as I do – doesn’t every parent? But I also feel that it’s important to teach all sides of the story so that people learn to look at an issue from all angles.

Oh my, look at those quotes around the “Palestinian”, and the “occupied territory.” But at least, she seems to be trying to keep something of the liberal values she apparently grew up with in California.
In the March post, she gave us a possible clue as to why– of all the possible places a new immigrant to Israel could choose to go and live– she (and I assume also her husband, though he seems oddly absent from her descriptions of the decision-making) decided to go and live in a West Bank settlement.
The post starts with an evocation of the highly stage-managed episode in late summer 2005 when the Sharon government evacuated the (yes, always quite illegal) Jewish settlements from Gaza…
Then, she writes,

    Although it was not me sitting on the roof then, and it was not me being led away, it’s a scenario that is not all that hard to imagine in my life. And I do imagine it. This summer, we will move to Israel. In all likelihood, we will move to a small yishuv (town) in the Shomron (northern West Bank) outside of the security fence still being built. We will be moving outside of the major blocs that many agree will be part of any future pull out.
    In 1967, Israel was viciously attacked by Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria also contributed in some way to the offensive. At the end of the war, Israel had gained control of several key pieces of land including the Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. They attacked Israel, Israel won the war and won control of land. Borders are redrawn at the end of many, many wars. Anywhere else in the world, and that would be the end of the story. But not in Israel.
    The status of the land often referred to as “occupied territory” is complicated, lacks a simple solution that would satisfy all sides and is beyond the scope of this post. To that end I encourage everyone to do their homework, become informed members of the conversation. I do plan on making my home on land that I feel should belong to Israel, but I will also abide by any final decision made by the Israeli government. While the debate rages on, I’ll continue to protest, demonstrate, vote and argue. I hope that the government will see things my way and keep the land. But at the end of the day, I know its also important for us to be strong as one people and move forward as one people. So if that day in August ever does come, I’ll sit peacefully on top of my roof, make sure that my point was heard… and then wait for them to take me away.

So it strikes me her decision to migrate directly from San Mateo, California to a settlement in the West Bank may well have been motivated by financial considerations, more than conviction.
By going to this settlement, she becomes assured of: (a) higher social benefits and lower housing costs for herself and her family than if they’d moved to someplace inside Israel, and (b) a good prospect that, as part of the eventual settlement with the Palestinians, they will get a handsome “relocation” pay-off from the government– and financially underwritten no doubt, then as always, by Mr. & Ms. US taxpayer.
By the way, the comments under that March blog post are pretty interesting.

Feeling Jewish hate in Jerusalem’s Silwan

Richard Silverstein had a chillingly informative post on his blog this week that contained an English translation of a short piece Israeli journo Meron Rapoport wrote about a recent visit to the large Jewish settlement being established in the heart of the ancient Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, in East Jerusalem.
(Thanks for posting that, Richard.)
Rapoport wrote,

    There were three of us – Ilan the director, Michael the cameraman, and me, the interviewee. We were making a film that explores the overt institutional discrimination against this East Jerusalem neighbourhood’s Palestinian residents…
    Even before we manage to position our camera, a group of religious girls comes up the path (we could tell they were religious by their skirts). They were around eight to ten years old, smug and beautiful chatterboxes. One of them slowed down beside us. “Film me”, she said amiably. “What would you like to tell us”, we asked. “I want to say that Jerusalem is a city that belongs to us, the Jews”, she said while walking – “it’s just a shame there are Arabs here. The Messiah will only come when there’s not even a single Arab left here”. She walked on. The girls giggled and sauntered along with her.
    …[T]wo young women came up the path. They are seventeen or eighteen years old. Secular, evidently not local residents. One of them stood in front of the camera. “Take my picture”, she fawned. “Do you want to be interviewed”, we asked her. “Yes”, she said. She’s from Gan Yavneh, came to visit Jerusalem, the City of David, she said. “Why the City of David in particular”, we asked. “Because this is where David was a king, this is a very important location for the Jewish people. It’s just a shame there are Arabs here. But soon all the Arabs will die, God willing, and Jerusalem will be ours alone”. She walked on.
    Two minutes went by. An Orthodox family came up the path. The husband, dressed in black, asked Ilan the director: “say, do both Arabs and Jews live in this neighbourhood?” “Both Palestinians and Jews”, Ilan replied, “but the majority is Palestinian”. “That’s temporary”, the Orthodox man allayed his concerns; soon there will be no Arabs left here.
    I look at Ilan and Michael. Barely a quarter of an hour had passed since we arrived; we had not interrogated anyone about their attitude to Arabs, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or about the future of Jerusalem. We just stood in the middle of the street. Like pylons. The hatred poured on in our direction, like a river to the ocean. Freely, naturally.

The piece was originally published in Hebrew, here. The translation was by Keren Rubinstein.
I think it was important that Rapoport noted that he and his colleagues hadn’t even started asking their questions before “The hatred poured on in our direction, like a river to the ocean… ”
As Richard wrote in his blog post, Rapoport’s piece looks like a short prose equivalent of the two “Feel the Hate” videos that Max Blumenthal shot in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv earlier this summer.
This kind of blind inter-group hatred is tragic, wherever it occurs: a symptom of a very deep spiritual wounding.
But it is also particularly dangerous when it is promulgated amongst– and comes to be embraced by– a group of people who have guns and all the other appurtenances of state power to back them up and are capable of acting on their hate-fueled fantasies.
Much has been said about the role of “incitement” in stoking the antipathy that many Palestinians have for the Israelis. (The fact that Israel has been maintaining a belligerent, intrusive, and land-grabbing military occupation over East Jerusalem, the rest of the West Bank, and Gaza for 42 years now is also, of course, relevant to Palestinians’ feelings.)
But how about the role of “incitement” in helping form the views of these Jewish Israelis? Where did they get them from?
In particular, where did the youngsters get their views from?
Definitely worth investigating.
I can believe that some of this hatred arose from the horror and tragedy of past Palestinian actions against Israeli civilians. (But we can only allow that to be a factor inasmuch as we allow the much greater horrors and tragedies that Israel has visited upon Palestinians also to be factor, for them.)
But is there no incitement by politicians, educators, and other community leaders involved in this generation of Israeli hatred? Of course there has been incitement.

Obama team needs to align its rhetoric NOW

In the pronouncements he made at the very beginning of his presidency, Obama said– quite correctly– that the United States has its own strong interest in seeing the speedy conclusion of a fair and durable Palestinian-Israeli peace.
But in yesterday’s press briefing, Assistant Sec. of State P.J. Crowley said the following:

    Our objective is to get them vested in formal negotiations. And in those formal negotiations, we will tackle the hard issues that we know exist, and get not only to the finish line, but get across the finish line.
    Ultimately, this is not a process by which the United States will impose conditions on Israel, on the Palestinian Authority, on other countries. This is – ultimately, the judgment as to both getting to negotiations and getting to a successful conclusion is something that the parties will have to make. We, the United States, are prepared to help them.

On the face of it, this looks just like the characterization of the US role as nothing more than that of a “facilitator” that lay at the core of the failures of both the Clinton administration and the GWB administration to secure the Final Peace Agreement between Israel and Palestine.
If the US just “facilitates” the mediation– while continuing to give Israel unparalleled assistance in the financial, security, and political spheres– that adds up to nothing more than being complicit in Israel’s continued grave violations of international law in the occupied territories. US aid to Israel needs to be made tightly conditional on Israel complying with the demands of international law and of US diplomacy.
Of course, Crowley has spent just about all of his career in the State Department in a situation where mouthing these kinds of things was what was required if an employee there wanted to have any chance of promotion. So perhaps it’s not surprising he’s still mouthing them.
Haaretz’s Natasha Mozgovaya reported that the White House “had nothing to add” to Crowley’s comments.
So many people who should be paying attention are on vacation these days!
The Obama administration will certainly not succeed in Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy if it sticks to the “facilitator” role. Crowley and everyone else who speaks for it needs to start quietly but consistently reassuring Americans and everyone else that the administration will be firmly pursuing our own country’s undoubted interest in this matter, including through the considered use of all the instruments of policy at its command.