Category: Israel 2003-08

Some great good sense and interesting analysis today from Gershon Baskin, the Israeli co-director of the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information.
Writing in the Palestinian newspaper Jerusalem Times— unfortunately subscription only– Baskin says this about the synagogues that remain in the Gaza settlements:

Two of the 26 synagogues in Gaza have been transferred to Israel proper. The remaining 24 synagogues are supposed to be demolished by the Israeli army according to the decision of the Israeli government. But this week the settlers petitioned the High Court to request that the Government be ordered not to destroy them. The settlers

What is weird about the lead in this AP story today?

JERUSALEM – A Gaza settler, his coffin draped in prayer shawls and an orange flag representing the settlers’ protest, was borne on shoulders along a winding path in Jerusalem’s ancient Mount of Olives cemetery, then buried Monday for a second time.
The ceremony was repeated five times in the hillside cemetery that overlooks Judaism’s holiest site, as graves from the Jewish cemetery in the Gaza Strip were relocated to Israel as part of the country’s pullout from the coastal territory.

Maybe the fact that they refer to “a Gaza settler”, conveying the clear impression that this guy is still alive, rather than to, for example, “the mortal remains of a Gaza settler”?
Honestly, the first time I read it I could not figure if that first para was about a live settler or the mortal remains of a late one. (Till I got to “buried… for a second time.”)
I am very happy that the mortal remains of those settlers previously buried in the illegal Gaza settlements are being removed and relocated in a respectful way. Far less happy that the reburial is being done in the Mount of Olives cemetery in occupied East Jerusalem.
Of course in Israel/Palestine as all other colonial situations there is a strong political geography of mortal remains as well as of live humans. How many Palestinians do I know who would love to be able to have their final resting place in their home-villages or towns inside their ancestral homeland, but cannot! Denial of burial rights is often a huge issue just inside the West Bank itself, with the Israeli authorities frequently denying families the right to bury loved ones in family plots… For example, if they happen to be the other side of the “barrier” that Israel has unilaterally imposed around Jerusalem since 1994.
That AP piece, by Gavin Rabinowitz, tells us that some of the mortal remains exhumed from the Gaza settlements are being reburied at other places inside Israel, rather than in East Jerusalem. But he chose to write about this particular reburial– and did so without even noting that just perhaps, the Mount of Olives might have deep religious significance for people other than Jews…
For Christians, perhaps, including those million or so Palestinians around the world who are descendants of some of Jesus of Nazareth’s very first converts to the new universalistic faith…
But Rabinowitz does go to pains to tell us that the Mount of Olives “overlooks Judaism’s holiest site”. Also, that, “Jewish tradition holds that when the Messiah comes, those buried in the Mount of Olives will be the first to be resurrected.”
(He also told us that “participants” at the funeral he was reporting– maybe “mourners” would be a better term, Gavin?– “expressed hope that the upheaval of the Gaza evacuation would hasten the coming of the Messiah and the rebuilding of the Temple.”)
In general, while I’m glad for the sake of Israeli families that they can deal with the mortal remains of loved ones in a way they find respectful and appropriate, I would urge everyone in Palestine/Israel– as elsewhere in the world– to give a lot more weight to the land and other resource needs of present and future generations rather than those of passed-away elders.
And at the very least, if burials continue to be the norm, the circumstances under which they are allowed (and reported on by the international media) should definitely be equal-opportunity for everyone, without discrimination.

It has been an emotion-wracked week in Palestine/Israel. But I think AP’s Steven Gutkin was right when he noted this:

So far Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza is as significant for what did not happen as for what did.
No major attacks from Palestinian militants. No use of weapons by settlers. No significant disruption of life inside Israel. No mass refusal of soldiers to carry out orders.
The army credits preparation and training for the relatively smooth pullout. But there are deeper reasons, too: Palestinians do not want to do anything to endanger the return of their land, and Israelis are reluctant to raise a hand against their own army.
Israel’s historic pullout from the Gaza Strip and parts of the northern West Bank is playing out with lightning speed. An operation that was supposed to take a month was nearly complete in 2 1/2 days, with 19 of 25 settlements slated for removal emptied before the weekend…

Here on JWN, I got an emotional set of reactions from supporters of Israel to my endorsement, a couple of days ago, of the proposition that the manner of evacuating the local settlers (and also, it must be said, many outside agitators) from Gaza looked as though it involved a good degree of stage-management from the authorities.
Commenter Diana asked (apparently a number of times), “What proof do you have that Israel staged the disengagement?… Cui bono?” I’ll reproduce lower in this post the answer I gave her.
Meanwhile, regarding the internal Israeli debate over the disengagement, I just read this fascinating piece in Sunday’s HaAretz, in which Israeli historian Tom Segev critiques the Israeli media’s coverage of the disengagement thus far:

Some of the pictures were, in fact, heartrending, but it is not always possible to know whether the settlers are mourning the fate of the Jewish people, or only the loss of their Jacuzzis. Again and again they were described as “wonderful people,” agents of genuine Zionist patriotism. Most of the broadcasts were captives of the emotional manipulation created by the settlers, and adopted the thesis that evacuating the Gaza Strip is a national catastrophe and “is causing pain to all of us.”
Nobody described the evacuation as an opportunity, with hope. By not doing so, the broadcasts missed the real drama, namely that Israeli society is now attempting to rescue itself from the historic mistake it made almost 40 years ago, and is trying to find the way back to a different Zionist tradition.

If you want to get more of a glimpse of how the extremist settler activist used their children as human shields, while programing them explicitly in all kinds of hate-messaging, read this piece, by Ruth Sinai from tomorrow’s HaAretz, too.
Anyway, here’s what I replied to Diana’s question:

Continue reading “Week’s end in Israel”

A great piece on Counterpunch yesterday by Jennifer Loewenstein, about the Gaza evacuation “drama”. She writes:

A great charade is taking place in front of the world media in the Gaza Strip. It is the staged evacuation of 8000 Jewish settlers from their illegal settlement homes, and it has been carefully designed to create imagery to support Israel’s US-backed takeover of the West Bank and cantonization of the Palestinians.
There was never the slightest reason for Israel to send in the army to remove these settlers. The entire operation could have been managed, without the melodrama necessary for a media frenzy, by providing them with a fixed date on which the IDF would withdraw from inside the Gaza Strip. A week before, all the settlers will quietly have left

Ze’ev Schiff writes this in HaAretz today about expectations in the Israeli security forces:

… The security forces have no knowledge of any plans by [Israeli] extremists to use weapons, but they believe it is possible that such an incident could occur due to an impulsive decision or spontaneous response to a situation.
Regarding the Palestinians, the calculations are different. Palestinian Authority officials have told the Americans and Israelis they have convinced Hamas not to open fire during the disengagement, and the PA is committed to deploying forces on the ground to back them up. So far, the PA has enlisted about 1,500 troops, including police officers (not 5,000, as the authority’s interior minister, Nasser Yusuf, has promised), some of whom are on leave at any given time…
The assumption is that Hamas, the Palestinians’ leading and largest terror organization, will avoid firing while Israeli citizens are being evacuated from the Gaza Strip. But as soon as Israel Defense Forces troops are the only ones left in the area – soldiers are expected to remain in the Gaza Strip for about a month after civilian evacuations are completed to demolish the abandoned homes and other structures – the group is expected to change its policy. Hamas plans on using arms against the IDF to emphasize that Israel is withdrawing from Gaza under fire, and underline the Palestinian victory achieved by Hamas.
Israel’s policy as outlined by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is to suspend the disengagement if civilians are fired upon during the evacuation and allow the army to respond. The question is whether this policy also applies to the use of arms against the IDF once the civilians have been removed.

Interesting. However, I’m not sure I agree with the assessment that once the settlers are gone Hamas will start firing against the remaining IDF troops. Firstly, the Israeli security forces have very often misread Hamas in the past, so let’s not take their word as Torah this time round?
Secondly, Hamas seems to be positioning itself for broad political influence in Gaza after the IDF withdrawal… getting into a firefight with the IDF could well be judged as likely to undermine that goal.
(But I still do worry that– once the settlers are all gone– the IDF might be tempted to launch its own round of punitive actions inside Gaza, anyway? Remember: there is no third-party monitoring force present in Gaza that could necessarily record which side started or escalated any incident.)
Thirdly, regarding Israelis present inside occupied Palestine, I’m not sure that Hamas makes much of an operational distinction between civilians (i.e. settlers) and security-force personnel: for them, it’s not that military operations against one of those groups is more or less legitimate than against another.
But anyway, Schiff’s piece is interesting because he is, as always, a savvy and very well-informed observer of the thinking of the Israeli security chiefs.
For a savvy and very well-informed Israeli view of Palestinian thinking, it’s always worth reading HaAretz’s Danny Rubinstein. He writes today:

According to the UNRWA figures, there are more than 4 million descendants of refugees registered at its institutions. The Palestinians say that another 1.5 million refugees are not registered with UNRWA, so that their total number comes to 5.5 million. As is known, the largest concentration of refugees is in the Gaza Strip, about 950,000 (out of about 1.3 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip). About half a million of the Gaza refugees live in UNRWA camps, from Jabalya in the north (105,000 people) to Rafah in the south (91,000).
It is important to note these figures because the experience of loss is still burning in these refugees’ bones. And not just theirs. The Palestinian people as a whole is living the uprooting suffered by about half of its members. In every corner of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, paintings and sculptures in the shape of keys can be found. A statue of a woman carrying a large key in her hand stands, for example, in the center of the plaza near the entrance to the home of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) in Ramallah.
In this context it was possible to see the outburst of anger among Palestinians who were asked whether they didn’t have even a little bit of sympathy for the Jewish settlers in Gush Katif and northern Samaria (West Bank) who are losing their homes. No. They don’t have any sympathy or any understanding. All of the requests for forgiveness from the settlers, like that of President Moshe Katsav, and all the sympathy with their terrible pain and their distress from Israeli politicians look to Palestinians like egotism and hypocrisy.
In the context of what has been happening in Gaza recently, an Israeli observer can also see it this way. During the course of the bloody conflicts of recent years, approximately 30,000 inhabitants of the Gaza Strip have been uprooted from their homes. Entire Palestinian neighborhoods along the Philadelphi route in Rafah, at the edges of the Khan Yunis refugee camp, along the route to Netzarim and in the north on the edges of Beit Hanun have been turned into heaps of ruins by the Israel Defense Forces. The reason was an Israeli security need.
Thousands of Palestinian refugees, with only a few days’ warning, and in some cases only a few hours, have had to evacuate their homes, which were demolished, and their fields and orchards, which have been razed. In at least two cases that were publicized, an Israeli bulldozer demolished a house with its tenants inside, two old people to whom no one had paid any attention, and they were buried under the ruins.
On a number of occasions, UNRWA workers have taken Israeli and foreign journalists to see the piles of ruins and the temporary accommodations (tents) they prepared for these families. On this day when the families of the Israeli settlers in Gaza are receiving the notifications about losing their homes, it is permissible to remember their neighbors’ loss as well.

Nicely put, Danny. Thanks for holding up a lamp of humanity to the world.

The list of inflammatory, escalatory, illegal, and otherwise violent actions that the US-supported Government of Israel has taken against Palestinians in recent weeks continues to grow.
One recent addition to this long list, as reported by AP yesterday, is this:

Jerusalem planners have approved the construction of a new Jewish neighborhood in the city’s Muslim Quarter, officials said Tuesday, threatening to further inflame tensions between Israelis and Palestinians in the city claimed by both as a capital.
The plan to build 21 apartments for Jews in the walled Old City’s Muslim Quarter was approved 5-2 by a local planning board late Monday, said Yosef Alalu, a dovish city council member who is on the committee. The plan has to go through several more bureaucratic stages before final approval.
The plan was presented to the planning board by the Housing Ministry.

Does anyone in the Bush administration have any idea what Jerusalem– and in particular, the lovely, walled “Old City” that lies at its heart– means to 1.2 billion Muslims around the world?
When will we hear President Bush or any other US political leaders speaking up to denounce this latest application by Israel of unilateral, quite illegal, and extremely inflammatory structural violence against the Muslims of Palestine?
When will we see the US leadership take concrete steps to rein in the inflammatory actions of its coddled darling, Israel?
When will we see the US start to forthrightly advocate the building of an equality-based political order in Israel/Palestine, whether within one single state or two?
(Okay, I’m not holding my breath. But will they please do something?)
The present walls of Jerusalem’s Old City were built by the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. But most of the structures inside their enclosure–including the whole Muslim Haram al-Sharif area with its two holy mosques; the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and numerous other ancient churches; and the foundations of the Jewish Temple– are far, far older than the walls. In line with traditional Islamic principles of city planing, the city is divided into four ethnic/religious “quarters”– the Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Armenian Quarters.

Continue reading “Meanwhile, in Jerusalem…”

Gershon Baskin is someone I like, respect, and admire a lot. He’s a Jewish Israeli, quite forthright in his espousal of his version of the Zionist ideal. Moreover, unlike a lot of “Zionists” who sit in the United States and tell other Jewish people to go live in Israel, he actually “made aliya” to Israeli himself and has been living with the risks that that entailed ever since.
Gershon has a very moving op-ed in the Jerusalem Post today, in which he states his personal values very clearly:

Zionism was not about conflict with our neighbors. It was about creating a just, progressive and humane society based on “Jewish values” for Jews to live and prosper, both in spirit and in substance. Real Zionism accepted the reality that non-Jews would always live within our midst. This was expressed with both eloquence and finesse in Israel’s Declaration of Independence. That Declaration has always served, for me, as a kind of statement of intent and of the values upon which this state and this society rests, or should rest.
ZIONISM is not about occupying the West Bank and Gaza. The continuation of the settlement enterprise is an act of suicide for the Zionist dream. It is not only about demographics. It is perhaps even more so about values, morality and lessons that we, as Jews, should understand better than anyone else.
The disengagement from Gaza is a Zionist act. Ending our occupation and domination over Gaza and its people is an action aimed at saving Zionism from those who have tainted the noble aspects of its cause since 1967. The Zionist dream is still in danger and the Zionist enterprise is at risk as long as we continue our occupation and domination over the West Bank and its people. The march out of the occupied territories must continue. We must return to ourselves and build Israel from within.

For many years now, Gershon has been the Jewish-Israeli co-director of an organization (that he founded) called the Israeli-Palestinian Center for Research and Information. One of the reasons I respect him such a lot is that, back in the early 1990s I was doing a lot of Israeli-Palestinian peace-building work, and he was one of the very few Jewish Israelis I worked with who sincerely seemed to “get” that having Jewish Israelis (and their Jewish-American friends) controlling every aspect of the “joint” Israeli-Palestinian projects that were proliferating like mushrooms in those days was not, actually, the best way to build longterm relations of reciprocity and mutual respect between the two peoples.
I could write a book about how many, extremely well-meaning Jewish Israeli “peaceniks” I worked with who thought that because they knew best, they should be able to make all the big decisions and keep their Palestinian “partners” in a quite subordinate position.
How incredibly patronising!
No wonder that a huge proportion of those “joint” projects ended up failing. When the second intifada broke out in September 2000, almost all them collapsed (but not until after a lot of the Israeli organizations and individuals– along with a much smaller number of their Palestinian counterparts– that had participated in them had profited handsomely from the investment put into them by well-meaning but naive international donors.)
Anyway, I write that here as background to the principal reason why– though I don’t always agree with Gershon– still, I respect him so much: he has always seemed to me to be sincerely trying to build IPCRI on a basis of true human equality between members of the two nations… What a breath of fresh air! (This is, incidentally, one of the main reasons that IPCRI was one of the few “binational projects” organizations to survive September 2000.)
A number of well respected Palestinian figures have worked with Gershon as co-director of IPCRI. The current one is veteran newspaper editor Hanna Siniora.
Indeed, Gershon’s commitment to allowing his Palestinian partners to have their own voice within and through IPCRI’s projects even, earlier this month, extended to allowing them to use IPCRI’s mailing list as part of their effort to “take on” and publicly criticize the extremely patronizing/controlling approach often followed by people associated with the “Peres Center for Peace”, which is one of the veterans in the Israeli-Palestinian “peace”-monopolization business.
That whole dispute– which most likely continues– is over the terms on which Palestinian health professionals choose to engage with their Israeli counterparts. (You can find a short guide to that dispute, with links to some of the relevant statements and publications, here.)
Anyway, all of that is some more background as to why it’s worth reading what Gershon has written in the Jerusalem Post today:

Continue reading “An admirable vision from Israel”

I was going to title this post “Sharon’s bait and switch”. As in, making a big show about withdrawing from the tiny Gaza Strip while quietly consolidating Israel’s hold on the much larger areas of the West Bank that it wants to hang on to.
Then I thought, “No, he doesn’t even feel the need, in front of an ‘outraged’ international public opinion, for example, to engage in any subterfuge on the issue. It’s all fully out in the open. He’s saying, in effect– to Israelis and foreigners alike– ‘You’ll see, I’ll withdraw somewhat from Gaza (which is a heck of a place to try to administer, anyway.) And I’ll hang onto Ariel and all the other places in the heart of the West Bank that I’ve been building up for some time… Does anyone want to try and stop me?'”
Here’s what Sharon said at the large West Bank settlement (colony) of Ariel yesterday:

“I reiterate and clarify that this bloc is one of the most important. It will forever be part of the State of Israel. There is no other thought and no other direction of thinking.
“I came here today to see how the city can be expanded and the bloc strengthened, as I do and shall do in the other blocs. This bloc will forever be an inseparable part of the State of Israel, territorially contiguous with the State of Israel like the other blocs,” he said.

Here (scroll down a little) is a map that shows you how deeply the Ariel bloc cuts into the northern West Bank.
And here is what I wrote back in March 2004 about Sharon’s plan to withdraw from Gaza:

Continue reading “Ariel Sharon’s Ariel “full monty””

I am totally delighted that the Israeli Knesset has voted for the bill that authorizes the compensation package for the 9,000 settlers who’ll be relocated out of Gaza this summer.
Here are some details from a story filed late Wednesday by AP’s Ravi Nessman:

The bill, approved Wednesday by a vote of 59 to 40 with five abstentions, allocated $871 million for the estimated 9,000 settlers who will be displaced when Israel pulls down all 21 settlements in Gaza and four others in the northern West Bank.
The vote took hours as legislators decided on nearly 200 proposed amendments, soundly defeating one requiring a national referendum on the plan. Sharon has rejected such a vote as a delaying tactic.
The plan still needs to overcome several more hurdles before it can be implemented.
Sharon must pass a budget by March 31 or his government will collapse, possibly taking the withdrawal down with it, because a new election would have to be called…
The Cabinet will hold a procedural vote Sunday on the plan and will have separate votes later on each of the withdrawal’s four phases.

It seems to me that the settlers have gotten themselves a wonderful deal.
Imagine this: You take your family to a lovely seaside villa built on somebody else’s land (maybe some of the land expropriated for the Sinai settlements from my friend Freih Abu-Middain?) The government is so keen to have you move there that they give you all kinds of sweet deals on financing or renting your home, and perhaps the lovely irrigated orchards all around it. (Did you ever read Amira Hass’s lovely book Drinking the sea at Gaza, where she writes about the strong salinity of the water the Gaza Palestinians have to make do with, given how much of their customary water supplies have been overdrawn by Israel and the settlements?)
… Anyway, moving right along, you’re this Israeli settler, and you’ve been having this lovely life there. And then the government comes and tells you, sorry buddy, it’s time you moved out… and they give you nearly $100,000 for every man, woman, or child in your family.
Wow!
Great work if you can get it, eh?
Nessman gives more details of how the buyout will work:

Continue reading “Nice work if you can get it, eh?”

An important piece by Gideon Levy in Sunday’s Ha’Aretz paints the sorry history of the IDF’s very close relationship with many segments of Israel’s settler society, including settler extremists.
He writes about the close and overlapping organizational links between the IDF’s Central Command–responsible for the West Bank– and “Yesha”, the “state within a state” coordinating body that the West Bank settlers have established:

The IDF has accompanied the settlement enterprise from the start, back when the big lie about the “security value” of the settlements was still prevalent. Some of the first settlements sprang forth from within IDF bases, a distorted phenomenon in itself, and the boundary is sometimes blurred to this day. In Beit El, for example, IDF barracks abut the settlers’ residences, illustrating the lack of a border between Yesha and the IDF. The security deployment in the territories is also a dangerous mix of the army and militias, battalion commanders and security coordinators (a job settlers perform, armed by the IDF), and it is unclear who is subordinate to whom. The commanders of what is conventionally referred to as an “apolitical” army realize that their promotion is sometimes influenced by lobbying from the Yesha council. In recent years, this symbiosis has reached new peaks. There are even cases in which settlers stand with soldiers at checkpoints and decide who will or will not pass.
Parts of the map of checkpoints and bypass roads, conditions of closure and encirclement, as well as sections of the separation fence’s route, were dictated by the leaders of Yesha and designed only to meet their wishes. The settlers demanded a pointless checkpoint between Ofra and Shilo, in the Hermiya valley, and they got it – until seven soldiers and three civilians were killed there in March 2002 and the checkpoint was dismantled. Hardly a day goes by without a meeting between senior IDF officers and the settlers. A growing number of IDF commanders in the field are residents of the territories. A large part of the IDF’s activities are coordinated with the most violent and unruly group in Israeli society…

Continue reading “The IDF and the settlers”