Category: Israel-2009

Anyone who expected that his appointment as Foreign Minister would somehow ‘tame’ Avigdor Lieberman got a rude shock yesterday when he bluntly told a foreign ministry gathering that Israel was no longer bound by the undertakings reached at the November 2007 Annapolis conference.
He also told Haaretz’s Barak Ravid, “You won’t get any ‘Israbluff’ with me.”
He said he considered Israel was still bound by the Road Map provisions from 2003– but stated very clearly that the Palestinians must fulfill their side of the Road Map before Israel needed to do anything.
Regarding Syria, he told Ravid: “we have already said that we will not agree to withdraw from the Golan Heights. Peace will only be in exchange for peace.”
The positions articulated by Lieberman are very familiar– they are in line not only with his own previous rhetoric but also with the positions articulated and pursued by B. Netanyahu’s earlier government in Israel, 1996-99. No-one should be surprised, therefore, that Netanyahu has done nothing so far to disavow Lieberman’s most recent statements.
The foreign ministry statements were made at a ceremony in which Lieberman took over power from Tzipi Livni, who as head of Kadima will now be in opposition to the Netanyahu government. Many senior members of Israel’s diplomatic corps were there. Some were reported as visibly shaken when they heard the new line they will have to go out to the world to sell.
I have to say it does clarify matters to have Lieberman speaking with such apparent frankness about what Israel’s real policy towards it neighbors will be. In one of the news reports–I forget which– he was quoted as saying that actually his policy will be the same as that followed on the ground by the preceding government, despite its formal adherence to Annapolis. “How many settlements did they dismantle? How many roadblocks?” he asked.
Very good questions.
So now, what he is promising is a change from the policy of “pursue the colonization and control project on the ground while hiding it by participating in all kinds of meaningless negotiations”, by ripping off all the camouflage of the ‘negotiations’.
“No more ‘Israbluff'”, indeed.
Western governments, that have been very happy to connive in the whole “Israbluff” project for 16 years now and have even helped construct the various structures– Oslo, Annapolis, and so on– through which it was exercised, have so far been in apparent shock, and have been unable to say anything to stick up for their “endless negotiations” approach in the face of the demolition job Lieberman has now done on it.
AP reported that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, now in London with Obama, called Lieberman early today. According to Lieberman spokeswoman Irena Etinger, “the conversation was conducted in a ‘good atmosphere,’ and the two agreed to meet as soon as possible.”
But nothing public from Clinton– or anyone else in the Obama administration– that expressed any criticism or concern about what Lieberman had said.
… I think I’m with Lieberman now– in this way: No more Israbluff, and no more Ameribluff or Eurobluff either.
Let each nation and group of nations pursue its own interests calmly and in a focused way and without participating any more in the mendacious edifice that the “peace process” has become ever since the solid principles of Madrid were transformed into the hocus-pocus of Oslo.

Okay, I’m changing my own rules a bit here since I originally intended to use this “Israelis, mainly peaceniks” rubric to collect the highlights from the interviews I conducted with people in that category during my recent trip to Israel. But I never got around to seeing Menachem Klein when I was there; I just went to a talk here he give here in DC at lunch-time today. So I thought I’d insert him into the series here while my memory is still fresh.
He started off with the important observation that all the talk about Israel “possibly becoming” a single state, from the Jordan to the sea, is misleading because it already is one state: “We already live in a de-facto one state. De facto, Israel already rules over all of Mandate Palestine.”
Well that was useful, and I think analytically powerful. As was, too, his description of the fact that within this “de facto one state” Israel rules over five distinct groups of Palestinians, subjecting each group to different rules and limitations.
The five groups he identified were:

1. Israeli Palestinians, who have civil and political rights though not full equality.
2. The Palestinians of East Jerusalem, who have no political rights but have rights of “residency” (that is, in East Jerusalem, and thereby also the right to travel within 1948 Israel; he did not spell out sufficiently that the civil rights of the EJ Palstinians are also unacceptably curtailed in that they are not allowed to hold any public political gatherings at all.)
3. The Palestinians of the West Bank who live on the Israeli side of the Wall/barrier.
4. The Palestinians of the rest of the West Bank; and
5. The Palestinians of Gaza.

Klein’s talk was also bracingly honest because he spelled out a number of times that the Mahmoud Abbas regime in the West Bank acts “as a proxy” for the Israelis. He did not provide the kinds of details about how this proxy-hood is exercised in practice that, for example, Mustafa Barghouthi did in the interview I did with him back in February. But too often, people on “the left” in Israel tend to participate in the charade that “the PA” is on some kind of equal footing with the State of Israel, so I found it refreshing that Klein cut through that nonsense.
On another occasion he said,

The Abbas regime is a protectroate, supported by Israel and funded by the western donor countries, primarily the Europeans.

Interesting that Klein had such a clear-eyed view of the nature of the PA regime, since he was one of the Israeli members of the group that produced the non-governmental 2003 “Geneva Accord”, in which PA cabinet member Yasser Abed Rabboo headed the Palestinian team at Arafat’s request. A great fuss was made of that whole effort as if it was virtually a quasi-governmental agreement. It never was.
I thought Klein made a lot of sense, too, when he said that the situation has changed so radically since 2000, that the two parties can’t simply “pick up the negotiations from where they left off, at Camp David 2 and Taba; that is no longer an option.”
… Thus, nearly all of Klein’s diagnosis of the situation was very accurate. His main inaccuracy in diagnosis came, imho, when he vociferously denied there is any valid comparison to be made between the “de facto one state” that Israel is currently running and the former apartheid regime in South Africa.
His first argument on the apartheid question was to note that the differentiations that Israel made among the five groups of Palestinians he had identified made the situation different from apartheid. In the Q&A period, I noted that apartheid’s securocrats had also introduced, finetuned, and endlessly manipulated many forms of differentiation among their basically disfranchised non-“White” subjects, so the differentiation Israel makes among various groups of Palestinians didn’t prove his point.
He then shifted to an argument that apartheid was based on race (that is, I think, skin color), whereas the current Israeli system is based on “ethnonationalism.” He never did satisfactorily explain why that distinction is important, either.
Look, I know that many Jewish Israelis and their friends in the west just hate to have “the A word” applied to their state. So if it’s the word that’s getting in the way of continuing this rational discussion, my modest proposal is that we find a different word for this. I was thinking about the term “Zipartheid.” Or perhaps just “Z-partheid” (US-style: “zee”; then we could say that concept covers the whole gamut from A to Z…)
Well, those were my own first modest suggestions. But then I was, um, scrolling around on the internet and I came across another suggestion, too: “Spartheid”. Yes, a wonderful idea for the neologism I have in mind, and it also nicely captures the “Spartan”/securocratic culture of this state.
I see the term was coined– in a 2003 article about the nature of Israel’s rule over Jerusalem— by a certain Dr. Menachem Klein…
So maybe we should stick with Spartheid as our new word of choice. (Menachem: what happened to you between 2003 and now?)
Well, moving right along here, though most of Klein’s diagnosis of the situation was excellent– I’ll come back to the apartheid question later– I thought his policy prescription for how to deal with it was really pathetic.
He started and ended his talk by underlining that he is still a strong supporter of the two-state solution. So how, he said, could we think of getting from the present de-facto one state situation to one of two states?
He argued that to do this, it was important to understand why it was that the Israeli government– and so many Israelis– had come to support the present situation. This was, he said, because of the acuteness of their continuing security fears. And so it was those fears that had to be in some way either allayed or reframed… And Israelis had to come to understand that if they wanted to end up with the longterm good security that, in his view, only a two-state outcome could provide, then in the meantime they might have to be prepared to put up with the small risk of decreased “immediate security” that could be associated with withdrawing from the 1967-occupied lands.
Look, this section of his arguments never really made complete sense to me, despite several of us in the audience having pressed him repeatedly on “how to get from here to there”. So maybe I’m misrepresenting the arguments some here, since I did not understand them too well. On the hand, I don’t think I’m misrepresenting them. I think they just are extremely muddled.
My view, fwiw, is that Israelis and others who support a two-state solution should just simply focus on getting a speedy and total withdrawal of Israeli forces and settlers from the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and not even get drawn into the whole game of pandering to the fearfulness of Jewish Israelis about what would ensue thereafter. That fearfulness is to some extent genuine and heartfelt; but it has also, let’s face it, been manufactured and hyped to a large degree by successive securocratic Israeli governments with considerable help and aid from their cheering sections in the US pro-Israel community and the US arms industry.
Klein mentioned– these people all mention, sometimes with the frisson of a sharp intake of breath– the concern about “What would happen to Ben Gurion airport if we withdrew from all the West Bnk?”
You know what? If a government of Israel announced tomorrow that by June 30, three months from now, they intended to have withdrawn all their forces and settlers from the West Bank but they would need to have cast-iron guarantees of the security of the original Israeli state after that withdrawal, then I can guarantee you that the international community, the Palestinians, and everyone else would all be falling over themselves to construct and sign up to the intrusively monitored demilitarization regimes and other measures that would be necessary to provide those guarantees.
And Israel would still have the awesome deterrent power of its army, to hit back extremely hard at anyone who violated the guarantees!
Ben Gurion would be safer than it’s ever been.
What more do they want?
That’s why the whole “security” argument that Menachem was trying, so agonizedly, to make this afternoon was such an unnecessary diversion.
Just end the occupation! Just withdraw! And the successor regime in the West bank will form itself!
Well, he seemed to be edging towards this; but he affiliated it with so many complex arguments about “security netto” and “security bruto”– and about the need to engage with Israelis’ security arguments deeply, rather than just cutting through all the nonsense and hyperventilation that they involve– that it was a little hard to see what he was arguing, exactly.
Also, he never challenged the proposition that of the parties involved, it is only the Israelis who have any valid security concerns at all.
Excuse me??? Starting to see security as a factor of deep interdependence between Israelis and Palestinians is surely the very fount of the wisdom and transformed self-understanding that Jewish Israelis will need if they are ever to start thinking outside the ugly and self-defeating box the securocrats have shut them up into.
Israel is currently a total poster child for the phenomenon known as the “security dilemma”– that is, that one state or party will take actions that so undermine the security of another party that the second party then takes actions against the first party, making it less rather than more secure…
Bottom line: you can’t base a longterm vision of Israel’s security on a policy of perpetuating the insecurity of its neighbors.
… As I understand it, Klein’s argument for withdrawal was based on three kinds of reason (rather than on the one truly principled reason that it has no right to the territories occupied in 1967.) The first was the extremely convoluted argument he used about “security bruto and security netto”. The second was a demographic argument– that “the de facto one state we have is not democratic and it’s not even really Jewish since in a few years Jews will be a minority in the area of Mandate Palestine”. The third was somewhere between an esthetic and a moral argument, expressed in such terms as “I just don’t like the kind of state that we have become.”
For myself, I really don’t like the demographic argument. If you have the total disfranchisement of all the Palestinians of the occupied territories– and all the diaspora Palestinians– then what does it matter if there are more ethnic Palestinians west of the river than “ethnic” Jews, or fewer?
Surely, it’s the disfranchisement that counts, not the relative numbers in the area west of the river.
Because if you buy too deeply into the “demographic” argument, then the Zionist “solution” to it is, surely, simply to reduce the number of Palestinians west of the river.
But the demographic argument seemed to make a big impression on Klein. Maybe it partly underlay the fervency with which he proclaimed his continued adherence to the two-state solution?
For my part, having heard the very lucid description he laid out of the “five categories of Palestinians” over whom Israel currently rules, and of the increasingly close– one might even say organic– ties he described between the settler movement and Israel’s securocracy, I would say that by far the most logical course would seem to be to go directly from the “de facto one state” that currently exists to thinking about a real, transformative, and fully democratic one-state outcome.
Pull out all the half-million settlers to make the two-state solution work? A crazy idea! Pulling out even 20% of them, as Taba and Geneva envisaged, looks increasingly infeasible, if not, by now, totally un-doable. Going back to the old idea of a unitary binational state, as espoused in the past by great thinkers inside both national communities, is looking like a more and more compelling way forward.
(I see that an interesting group of Israelis and Palestinians had a whole conference about the one-state idea, in Boston over the weekend. I’m going to meet some of them at the Georgetown conference over the next couple of days.)
And that brings be back to why, I suspect, these days Menachem Klein really dislikes the apartheid analogy… Because the “answer” to apartheid in South Africa was the unitary and gloriously multinational state.
And the best answer to Spartheid or Z-partheid, in Israel/Palestine will be– ??

Give me a break! The Palestinians have had nearly continuous negotiations with Israel since the Madrid Conference, held 17.5 years ago.
‘Negotiations’ aren’t lacking. Successful peace negotiations– that is, negotiations that (a) result in a peace agreement and (b) that leads to implementation: Those are what is lacking.
‘Negotiations’ as a cover for continued pursuit of the colony-building project is all that Netanyahu is promising.
Analogous to ‘shooting while crying’, this could be summed up as ‘colony-building while [endlessly] negotiating.’
No-one should be fooled. This charade known as ‘negotiations’ has gone on W-A-Y-S too long already.
When I interviewed Salam Fayyad a month ago, he said the only thing that would make returning to the negotiating table worthwhile would be if there is a complete halt on settlement-building. “Not a brick” in the words of some Palestinians.
I would describe that as a pretty minimal demand.
Between 1991 and 2007, the numbers of settlers in the West Bank including East Jerusalem rose from 227,600 to above 372,000.

On March 4, I had a delightful evening at the home of Amos
Gvirtz in Kibbutz Shefayim,
on the Mediterranean coast north of Tel Aviv.  Gvirtz is a longtime member of the kibbutz—maybe
he was born there? I’m not sure. 
Today, Gvirtz still lives in one of its simple, late-1950s-style homes. He
has a day job running one of the kibbutz factories but spends most of his
discretionary time doing peace work.  He’s a longtime pillar of the Israeli nonviolence movement,
and was a founder of Palestinians and Israelis
for Nonviolence.  He was also chairperson of the Israeli Committee
Against Home Demolitions, and every week since summer 2006 he has published
a short essay under the title “Don’t Say We Did Not Know.” You can find some
older samples of these essays here,
along with the email through which you can subscribe to them.

Gvritz had invited me to dinner at
the suggestion of our mutual friend Rabbi Moshe Yehudai,
an inspiring guy who sits on the board of Rabbis
for Human Rights. Yehudai describes himself as
both a pacifist and a Zionist, and makes about the best case I’ve ever heard
for how one can be both things.  Gvirtz, by contrast, says he’s no longer a
Zionist—see below. But the two men have worked together for a long time
and clearly get along very well despite that difference.

Yehudai picked me up from my hotel
for the evening on the kibbutz. I wish it had been lighter by the time we got
there, as I’d have loved to have a look round. But it had gotten pretty late
and it was dark, so we went straight to Gvirtz’s home,
where he served us an excellent vegetarian dinner. 

We had a good conversation with the meal, but it was only
later that I pulled out my notebook and I’m afraid I can’t reconstruct the
earlier portion of what we said.  So
join us as we sit on the low, Scandinavian-style seats in the sitting area of Gvirtz’s home, drinking herbal tea after the meal.  This is where I picked up my pen…

Gvirtz was talking about the continuity
of the practice of settling new areas with Jewish settlers and dispossessing
the native Palestinians, from the pre-state era right through to the
present.  (Later, he made the point
that “The Nakba wasn’t really a single event that
happened in 1948, so much as a long-drawn-out process, that continues to
this day.”)

He said,

Continue reading “Israelis, mainly peaceniks, Pt. 4: Amos Gvirtz”

Moshe Ma’oz is a veteran Israeli
peacenik and a retired prof of Middle East Studies at
Hebrew University who has done a lot of great research and writing on
Syria.  Jewish Israelis are often
very wary of agreeing to come to meetings in East Jerusalem.  As Benny Morris once told me: “It’s
simply because we don’t know our way around here; we come here so rarely.” Ma’oz, to his credit, was happy to come over to the little
hotel I was staying in there—I think I’d told him about the attractions
of its restaurant; plus, crucially, he seemed to know where it was.

But on March 3, as the time for our meeting approached even
he was defeated by the horrible parking situation, so he called and asked if we
could meet at the American
Colony instead.

For
those who don’t know it, the AC is named after a group of quixotic Presbyterian
utopians from Chicago who made their way to Jerusalem in 1881 with the aim of
setting up a utopian colony dedicated to various good works.  They attracted many participants from
both the US and Sweden, and eventually ended up in a beautiful, courtyarded old home outside the Old City’s walls to the north,
in the neighborhood known as Sheikh Jarrah after a
famous local mosque.  At some
point, the colony had declined to the point that the remaining members of it
decided to turn the beautiful old house and a couple of others the colony owned beside it into a hotel. One of the colony’s last surviving members/descendants, Val Vester, lived in a cool basement apartment there till her
death a couple of years ago.

Back
in the 1980s 
before the hotel’s Swiss management company jacked up the prices
quite inordinately, they used to always keep a few rooms at low rates for
visiting journalists and researchers, and my husband and I often stayed
there.  Sometimes we would go and
visit with Mrs. Vester and hear all her great stories
about the old days.

Also
in the 1980s, the AC was one of the places where George Shultz or other
visiting American dignitaries would visit Palestinian leaders like Faisal Husseini or Hanan Ashrawi. Those were “the good old days”—before the
Israelis started to completely prohibit any Palestinian political activity in
Jerusalem at all. (That came with Oslo.)

Anyway,
if you can spring for the price of two cups of coffee, it’s still a pleasant
place to sit and do an interview with someone. The internal courtyard is truly
lovely—planted with orange trees, vines, and flowers.  But it was ways too cold for us to sit
there, so I would plant myself and my interviewee in
one of the lounges, instead.

When Ma’oz walked in, he was
pretty depressed, but he expressed it in his usual friendly and half-joking
(maybe?) way:

Helena, I am so depressed! Do you
think Denmark has room for six million Jews? There is no future for us here! …
Honestly, I am ashamed to be an Israeli.

The main message he wanted to convey was this:

Continue reading “Israelis, mainly peaceniks, Pt. 3: Moshe Ma’oz”