Just World News with Helena Cobban

I’ve never met Dov Yermiya, a Jewish Israeli peace activist who is now 94 years old. But I read of course the book he published in 1983 in which he wrote with anguish about the torture and other gross mistreatment of civilians he witnessed directly during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon the year before.
I have it in my hand now.
I just learned, in this open letter published today by Uri Avnery, that Yermiya, recently renounced the ideology and practice of Zionism with these stirring words:

I, a 95 year old Sabra (native born Israeli Jew), who has plowed its fields, planted trees, built a house and fathered sons, grandsons and great-grandsons, and also shed his blood in the battle for the founding of the State of Israel,
Declare herewith that I renounce my belief in the Zionism which has failed, that I shall not be loyal to the Jewish fascist state and its mad visions, that I shall not sing anymore its nationalist anthem, that I shall stand at attention only on the days of mourning for those fallen on both sides in the wars, and that I look with a broken heart at an Israel that is committing suicide and at the three generations of offspring that I have bred and raised in it.
… for 42 years, Israel turned what should have been Palestine into a giant detention camp, and is holding a whole people captive under an oppressive and cruel regime, with the sole aim of taking away their country, come what may!!!
The IDF eagerly suppresses their efforts at rebellion, with the active assistance of the settlement thugs, by the brutal means of a sophisticated Apartheid and a choking blockade, inhuman harassment of the sick and of women in labor, the destruction of their economy and the theft of their best land and water.
Over all this there is waving the black flag of the frightening contempt for the life and blood of the Palestinians. Israel will never be forgiven for the terrible toll of blood spilt, and especially the blood of children, in hair-raising quantities…

Avnery’s response is fascinating. He too is a veteran peace activist, and of about the same generation as Yermiya. But in the letter he is, I think, pleading with Yermiya not to renounce Zionism completely, but rather to reconnect with the “idealistic” Zionism that they both experienced during their youth.
He writes,

When I think of our youth, yours and mine, one scene is never far from my mind: the 1947 Dalia festival.
Tens of thousands of young men and women were sitting on the slope of a hill in the natural amphitheater near Kibbutz Dalia on Mount Carmel. Ostensibly it was a festival of folk dancing, but in reality it was much more – a great celebration of the new Hebrew culture which we were then creating in the country, in which folk dancing played an important role. The dancing groups came mainly from the kibbutzim and the youth movements, and the dances were original Hebrew creations, interwoven with Russian, Polish, Yemenite and Hassidic ones. A group of Arabs danced the Debka in ecstasy, dancing and dancing and dancing on.
In the middle of the event, the loudspeakers announced that members of the UN Commission of Inquiry, which had been sent by the international organization to decide upon the future of the country, were joining us. When we saw them entering the amphitheater, the tens of thousands spontaneously rose to their feet and started to sing the “Hatikva”, the national anthem, with a holy fervor that reverberated from the surrounding mountains.
We did not know then that within half a year the great Hebrew-Arab war would break out – our War of Independence and their Naqba. I believe that most of the 6000 young people who fell in the war on our side, as well as the thousands that were wounded – like you and me – were present at that moment in Dalia, seeing each other and singing together.
What state did we think of then? What state did we set out to create?
What has happened to the Hebrew society, the Hebrew culture, the Hebrew morality that we were so proud of then?

Then, he pleads this:

You, Dov, have invested in this state much too much to turn your back on it in a gesture of anger and despair. The most hackneyed and worn-out slogan in Israel is also true: “We don’t have another state!”
Other states in the world have sunk to the depths of depravity and committed unspeakable crimes, far beyond our worst sins, and still brought themselves back to the family of nations and redeemed their souls.
We and all the members of our generation, who were among those who created this state, bear a heavy responsibility for it. A responsibility to our offspring, to those oppressed by this state, to the entire world. From this responsibility we cannot escape.
Even at your respectable age, and precisely because of it and because of what you represent, you must be a compass for the young and tell them: This state belongs to you, you can change it, don’t allow the nationalist wreckers to steal it from you!
True, 61 years ago we had another state in mind. Now, after our state has tumbled to where it is today, we must remember that other state, and remind everybody, every day, what the state should have been like, what it can be like, and not allow our vision to disappear like a dream. Let’s lend our shoulders to every effort to repair and heal!

These are very weighty issues that these two longtime Zionists are debating.
I remember the evening I had back in early March with longtime Jewish-Israeli nonviolence activist Amos Gvirtz. Gvirtz is “only” in his late 60s or early 70s. But like Avnery and Yermiya he grew up in Israel.
He told me in March,

I became an anti-Zionist after Oslo, when the government expelled the Arabs of Jahhaleenn to make room for the big new settlement area if Maale Adummim… Like the Zionists, I believe we Jews need a state of our own. But unlike the Zionists I don’t think this should be built on the ruins of someone else’s home. So our state need not necessarily be right here.

Gvirtz, too, like Avnery, identified a strong link between the events of 1947-48 and the situation today– though the nature of the link Gvirtz identified was very different from Avnery’s: “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.” In other words, he was quite unwilling to neatly divide Israeli history, as Avnery still does, between the idealized, pre-lapsarian days of the 1947 Dalia festival and the post-lapsarian era that was inaugurated– in Avnery’s view– only by Israel’s conquest of the West Bank.
Obviously, this is a very weighty issue for Zionists and their supporters to grapple with. Did 1967 mark a notable break between a laudable past and a troublesome present? Or were there indeed, as Gvirtz and many other current non- and anti-Zionists have argued, many elements of continuity from the 1947 period right through to the present?
Anyway, I’d love to see the whole text of the latest Yermiya letter from which Avnery is quoting, if anyone can provide a link to it, preferably in English. The only recent English text that I could find by him online was this letter, published in the Communist weekly Zo Haderekh in June 2008.
In it, Yermiya was returning to Defense Minister Barak the invitation he had been sent to attend a ceremony to honor all veterans of Israel’s 1948 “War of Independence”.
He wrote,

As a veteran of the 1948 war, who was already wounded in face to face combat two weeks before the Declaration of the State, I feel obliged herewith to return the invitation to you, as Minister of Defence. I do so regretfully but see this as my duty.
I consider you, Ehud Barak, as one of the top military commanders and prominent political leaders who were responsible for converting the army from “the Israeli Defence Force” to an army of occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people and defender of the criminal settlements in their country.
40 years of occupation have utterly corrupted the Israeli army and all strata of Israeli society.They are both characterized by the nationalist ‘east wind’ [the east wind brings the chamsin and locusts – C.A.] which blows and kindles conflagrations of endless wars, which threaten our people and land with the third and final destruction. Your share in the responsibility for all this is enormous, and therefore I return your invitation to you, without thanks…

The fearless Akiva Eldar does a great critique in today’s Haaretz of Netanyahu’s claim that his policies have already improved the economy of the West Bank.
(The other part of Netanyahu’s policy is to hope that Palestinians would be satisfied with only some degree of easing of their deep economic plight, and would therefore somehow miraculously “forget about” their even deeper political plight…)
Eldar writes,

During a sweaty and well-publicized visit he held last weekend at the Allenby Bridge crossing, Netanyahu boasted of the fact that economic growth in the West Bank had reached 7 percent.
At the cabinet meeting on Sunday the growth rate grew to double digits: 10 percent. Thus will be done to good Arabs who maintain Israel’s security and don’t launch Qassam rockets at the country.

I wish he had noted that actually, for many months now, there have been no Qassam rockets fired at Israel from Hamas-controlled Gaza.
But he goes on to note that,

Without the assistance, though, of the European and American taxpayer, who are paying the salaries of the Palestinian Authority’s over 100,000 policemen and officials, the economy of the West Bank would long since have collapsed along with the PA.
The Palestinian economy is not recovering thanks to Israel, but in spite of it.

The fact that the vast majority of the costs involved in administering Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza have since Oslo been paid by the EU and the US is an extremely important one to underline.
Prior to Oslo, those costs were borne mostly by the Israeli taxpayers themselves… Just as, from 2003 until now, American taxpayers have been paying nearly all the costs of administering our country’s military occupation of Iraq.
Running an occupation is, it turns out, a pretty expensive business. It’s expensive even when, as in the case of the OPTs, the “occupied” population can be used for decades as a captive market for the products of the economy of the occupying power. (Since it’s the occupier that, surprise surprise, totally controls the terms of trade between the two… As we saw in Iraq, also.)
Prior to Oslo, the costs to Israeli society– both financial and human– of maintaining the occupation of the OPTs were a significant factor in motivating Israelis to find a way to end the occupation. Back then, Israeli peaceniks produced numerous studies showing the size of the burden that the occupation placed on their economy, and how Israel could win a significant “peace dividend” if only it ended the occupation.
Bus after Oslo– poof!! Suddenly the fact of the continuing occupation became miraculously “sanitized” when Arafat shook Rabin’s hand, and the Europeans and Americans lined up to pick up the burden of paying for the administration of the occupation under the rubric of support “to the PA”.
As I noted in my latest article in Boston Review, the post-Oslo disappearance of the previous “economic argument for peace” was a significant factor in leading to the decline of he Israeli peace movement.
And yes, after Oslo, the occupation still continued. But the PA– more properly known as the PISGA, Palestinian Interim Self Governing Authority– soon enough started acting as the Israeli military’s principal contractor in this venture, its Halliburton if you like, and undertaking most of the time-consuming tasks of administering the occupation on the ground.
And now, suddenly the costs were all borne not by Israel but by EU and US taxpayers! Shazam!
Akiva Eldar refers to a lot of material from the IMF that shows that the “West Bank economic miracle” that Netanyahu is currently claiming is nowhere near as impressive as the PM makes it out to be…
We can also note that in addition to paying the operating costs of the PISGA, western taxpayers have two other forms of financial entanglement with aspects of Israel’s ongoing occupation of the OPTs:

1. Our governments give generous tax breaks to many supposedly “charitable” organizations that provide significant financial and other support to the ongoing project of illegally implanting settlers into the occupied lands; and
2. Our governments give tax breaks and a certain amount of actual government funding to a range of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the OPTs (and in Israel) that do many different things on a not-for-profit basis, ranging from the provision of vital health, humanitarian, and community development services to Palestinian communities under stress to monitoring the rights situation in the OPTs and in Israel itself, and advocating and organizing to end gross rights abuses.

Among these latter types of organization are the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, Anera, the courageous Israel organization Breaking the Silence, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, B’tselem, etc, etc.
In Eldar’s article, he notes that Netanyahu’s political adviser Ron Dermer has recently talked about “the need to silence… NGOs like Breaking the Silence (an organization of veteran Israeli soldiers that collects testimonies from soldiers).”
He adds, however, that Dermer,

forgot to do his homework. Had he checked the Knesset records, Dermer would have discovered that he is not the first right-wing politician to think of the brilliant idea of banning the transfer of money from abroad to NGOs of a political nature.
The late MK Yuri Stern of Yisrael Beiteinu suggested an almost identical legislative initiative in the 16th Knesset. The draft bill passed in the first reading and then disappeared into oblivion. During discussions it turned out that the law would require [all] NGOs in Israel that receive donations from abroad to present the record of their economic activity to the Registrar of Non-Profit Organizations.
The representatives of Shas and United Torah Judaism immediately became the leading opponents of the initiative.

Eldar notes this:

the grants given by these [European] governments to the human rights organizations are nothing compared to the hundreds of millions of tax-exempt American dollars that charity organizations of American Jews and Christians pour into NGOs identified with the right.
A legal opinion presented to the MKs anticipated that the court would find it difficult not to recognize a tax exemption on donations as de-facto government funding. That was the end of the [previous] legislative initiative.

He also quotes an un-named “leading European diplomat” as mentioning,

that European assistance to human rights organizations in Israel is a drop in the bucket compared to money that Europe channels to the Palestinian Authority.
He is not aware of Israel donating 1 billion euros every year in order to assist with any conflict in Europe.

Anyway, the bottom line here. There are many very significant ways in which tax monies or tax breaks from western governments do things that support not only the continuation of Israel’s occupation of the OPTs but also its illegal implantation of Jewish settlers into the West Bank. There are a few ways in which western governments send much, much smaller amounts of financial aid toNGOs that in various ways help save the resilience of the Palestinian people.
We who are citizens of these western countries are directly morally implicated in all these activities of our governments. We should take responsibility for them, and find ways to end the occupation now.
Really end it, that is. Not just put lipstick on it and throw a few sub-contracts for running it to a PISGA that has definitely, 15 years after its established, long outlived its sell-by date.

The Israeli authorities are continuing with their campaign to expel Palestinians from East Jerusalem and replace them there with Jewish settlers.
At some point before dawn this morning, black-clad Israeli riot police evicted 53 Palestinians, including 19 children from two homes in the occupied part of the city.
The BBC reported that “Jewish settlers moved into the houses almost immediately.”
The Israeli High Court has ruled that Jewish families hold legal title to the properties. And the Israeli government maintains that its legal institutions are sovereign in the whole of the occupied city– though the UN, the US government, and just about all the other governments of the world remain firm in their judgment that East Jerusalem is occupied territory under international law, and that implantation of Jewish settlers into East Jerusalem is therefore quite illegal under international law.
The eviction of Palestinian families from East Jerusalem is the latest in a long string of continuing Israeli governmental actions in the occupied West Bank (of which E. Jerusalem is the capital), that are aimed either at the expulsion/expropriation of Palestinians or the implantation of Jewish settlers, or both.
Pres. Obama has called for an end to the settlement activity and to the eviction of Palestinians from their longtime homes. But thus far neither he nor any other world leader has done anything concrete to hold Israel accountable for the continuing grave violations of international law that these actions represent.
Inside Israel, meanwhile, large numbers of Israelis have been mourning the killing of two people, and the wounding of eleven more, when a masked gunman took aim at the Tel Aviv Gay and Lesbian Association last night.
In that BBC story, PM Benjamin Netanyahu is reported as vowing “to bring the killer to justice.”
That is excellent news. But when will he be “brought to justice”– or even held in any way “accountable”– for the many continuing breaches of international law that his government is committing in the occupied territories?