Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
The Negotiations
1. Palestine Liberation Organization: Palestinians Want Freedom
2. Amb. Chas Freeman: America’s Faltering Search for Peace in the Middle East:
Openings for Others?
3. Civil Society as Watch Dog in the Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations by Jeff Halper
4. Diana Buttu: direct talks bound to fail
5. Obama, Abbas, and calling the 'direct talks' bluf by Lara Friedman
6. Noura Erekat on Endless Negotiations: Palestinian Quicksand
7. Settlements and Anti Zionists by Gershon Baskin
8. A peace crime by Gideon Levy
9. Hanan Ashrawi on the negotiations
10. Henry Siegman: US Hamas policy blocks Middle East Peace
11. An excellent meeting by Gideon Levy
12. ICAHD denounces Israeli demolitions
13. Israel planning new West Bank train network, minister says
14. Don't Fall into the Direct Talks Hype by Stephen M. Walt
15. Why is Obama considering funding Israel's iron dome project? by Jimmy Johnson
16. Ramadan Kareem from Obama and Netanyahu by Jeff Halper
17. Separate Roads Increasingly Part of the West Bank map
18. Why I don’t give a damn about the peace talks – Ami Kaufman
Miscellaneous
1. Bianca Jagger: Jenin cinema reopening ofers Palestinians hope
2. EU Considering Aid to Israeli Military by David Cronin
3. The real war on 'terror' must begin by Mark LeVine
4. Press Release from Mairead Maguire: Free Mordechai Vanunu
5. Tony Blair Must be Prosecuted for War Crimes by John Pilger
6. The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment by Peter Beinart
7. Arundhati Roy on globalization
8. Juliane von Mittelstaedt: An Unsettled Issue -- settlement expansion during freeze
9. Letter to Mayor of Jerusalem from 'Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine'
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America’s Faltering Search for Peace in the Middle East: Openings for Others?
Remarks to staf of the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Afairs
and, separately, to members of the Norwegian Institute of International Afairs
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A peace crime
What more can Assad say that he hasn't already? How long must he knock in vain on
Israel's locked door?
Gideon Levy, 11th July, 2010
It couldn't have been spelled out more explicitly, clearly and emphatically. Read and judge for
yourselves: "Our position is clear: When Israel returns the entire Golan Heights, of course we
will sign a peace agreement with it .... What's the point of peace if the embassy is
surrounded by security, if there is no trade and tourism between the two countries? That's
not peace. That's a permanent cease-fire agreement. This is what I say to whoever comes to
us to talk about the Syrian track: We are interested in a comprehensive peace, i.e., normal
relations."
Who said this to whom? Syrian President Bashar Assad to the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir
last week. These astounding things were said to Arab, not Western ears, and they went
virtually unnoticed here. Can you believe it?
What more can Assad say that he hasn't already? How many more times does he have to
declare his peaceful intentions before someone wakes up here? How long must he knock in
vain on Israel's locked door? And if that were not enough, he also called on Turkey to work to
calm the crisis with Israel so it can mediate between Israel and Syria.
Assad's words should have been headline news last week and in the coming weeks. Anwar
Sadat said less before he came to Israel. In those days we were excited by his words, today
we brazenly disregard such statements. This leads to only one conclusion: Israel does not
want peace with Syria. Period. It prefers the Golan over peace with one of its biggest and
most dangerous enemies. It prefers real estate, bed and breakfasts, mineral water, trendy
wine and a few thousand settlers over a strategic change in its status.
Just imagine what would happen if we emerged from the ruins of our international status to
sign a peace agreement with Syria - how the international climate regarding us would
suddenly change, how the "axis of evil" would crack and Iran's strongholds weaken, how
Hezbollah would get a black eye, more than in all the Lebanon wars. And maybe even Gilad
Shalit, held by the Damascus-based Hamas, would be freed. Sound too good to be true?
Maybe, but Israel is not even trying. A prime minister who ignores this chance is no less than
a peace criminal.
Instead of the Shalit march that has just ended, a diferent march should have set out this
week, one more massive and determined, calling on the Israeli government, the peace
refuser, to do something. Hoarse shouts should have gone up: Peace with Syria now. But this
march will not go forward this week. Apparently it will never happen. Singer-songwriter
Shlomo Artzi, Zubin Mehta and the respectable demonstrators who marched on behalf of
one soldier will not do so to support a move that could save the lives of many soldiers and
civilians. Why? Because that takes courage. Why? Because Assad was right when he told La
Repubblica in Italy: "Israeli society has tilted too far to the right, and it is not capable of
making peace with Syria."
True, they say the Mossad chief thinks that Assad will never make peace because the whole
justification for his regime is based on hostility toward Israel. Our experts are never wrong,
but similar things were said about Sadat. True, Assad also said other things. Other? Not
really. He said that if he does not succeed through peace, he will try to liberate the Golan
through resistance. Illogical? Illegitimate? Not a reason to try to challenge him? What do we
have to lose but the chance? Even the latest fig leaf a few prime ministers have used here -
the assessment that the U.S. opposes peace with Syria - is absurd. Does anyone see U.S.
President Barack Obama opposing a peace move with Syria? What a pity that he is not
pressing Israel to move ahead with it.
And then there is the old refrain: "Assad doesn't mean it." When Arab leaders make threats,
they mean it; when they talk peace, they don't. And also: "We'll return the Golan and end up
with a piece of paper and missiles." Remember how that was said about Egypt? But we
persist: The prime minister is criminally missing a historic chance for peace, and we yawn
apathetically. Sounds logical, right?
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Appearing on Viewpoint with James Zogby yesterday, Dr. Hanan Ashrawi ofered the
perspective of Palestinians on the Israeli blockade of Gaza stating unequivocally, “It’s a cruel,
illegal, immoral war crime.” Declaring the Israeli changes to the blockade as a “verbal
exercise,” Ashrawi noted that Palestinians living under the brutal siege have yet to see any
real changes. “The Palestinians judge things by what happens on the ground and they see no
progress whatsoever,” she added.
On the issue of U.S. aid to the Palestinians, Ashrawi clarified an important point on the level
of support Washington is committing. Noting that the $400 million the Obama
Administration announced recently is not additional aid but rather part of the $900 million
pledged last year, Ashrawi ofered a diferent perspective than that held here in the U.S. by
analysts and policy makers alike.
Lastly, Ashrawi acknowledged the difficulty they continue to encounter in national
reconciliation talks with Hamas but believes that ultimately the interests of the people of
Gaza will prevail over those of Hamas or Fatah. Challenges aside, she affirmed the critical
need to make progress for a variety of reasons including, the need to allow for the re-
implementation of the access and movement agreement which would open Gaza’s crossings
and fully expects the European Union to honor the agreement & work with the Palestinians
once progress is indeed made.
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1
Daniel Byman, “How to Handle Hamas”, Foreign Afairs, vol 85, no. 5, September/October 2010,
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/66541/daniel-byman/how-to-handle-hamas, accessed 31 August 2010.
As argued in this paper, a more balanced approach to Hamas, addressing legitimate
grievances, could lead to its return to a Palestinian coalition government that would provide
Israel with a credible peace partner. If that outreach fails because of Hamas’ rejectionism, its
ability to prevent a reasonable accord negotiated by other Palestinian political parties will
have been seriously undermined.
The misreading of Hamas
Hamas’ democratic mandate
Mahmoud Abbas’s rule does not extend much beyond Ramallah. Although Fatah was
unopposed by Hamas (or by any other organized political party) in the local West Bank
elections of July 17, the party is so dysfunctional and unpopular that its candidates were in
danger of losing to local unaffiliated candidates, causing Abbas to call of the elections at the
last moment. By contrast, Hamas is not only the efective ruler of Gaza, but the only political
party that received a democratic mandate for its rule from the Palestinian electorate in the
2006 election that rejected Fatah.
The Oslo accords declared Gaza to be an inseparable part of Palestine, and obliged Israel to
provide an unobstructed territorial connection linking Gaza to the West Bank. That provision
was reinforced by a formal Israeli-Palestinian agreement (the Agreement on Movement and
Access) in 2005 for the free movement of people and goods between these two areas,
brokered by James Wolfensohn, then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice’s special envoy for
Gaza disengagement, an obligation Israel violated even before the ink on the document
dried.2
Hamas was denied its electoral mandate and excluded from the West Bank because Fatah
conspired with Israel’s government and the Bush administration to carry out a putsch by
Mohammed Dahlan’s militia forces in Gaza to overthrow Hamas. The attempted putsch was
pre-empted by Hamas in a bloody manner. 3 But the way Dahlan’s forces had previously dealt
with Hamas’ members that it had imprisoned (or the way Abbas’ Fatah has dealt with them
in the West Bank since) should not leave anyone with false illusions about the treatment that
awaited Hamas had Dahlan’s putsch succeeded.
Hamas’ obsolete charter
But can Hamas be engaged by Israel, or by the US, while it adheres to a charter that is racist
and anti-Semitic, and explicitly commits the organization to the violent expulsion of Jews
within Israel’s internationally recognized pre-1967 borders?
While the government of Israel does not have a charter promising the expulsion of
Palestinians from their homes and the confiscation of their land, it has been doing exactly
that – regularly and systematically. These confiscations and expulsions began even before
Hamas existed, yet no one in the West demanded Israel be quarantined, or even that it be
denied continued massive American financial and military assistance.
More to the point, Hamas has made it abundantly clear that its charter – like the PLO’s
charter which Arafat famously dismissed in 1989 as “caduque” (obsolete, expired) well
before it was formally annulled – no longer represents Hamas’ ideology. Its various proposals
2
Shahar Smooha, interview with James Wolfensohn, “All the dreams we had are now gone”, Ha’aretz, 19 July
2007, http://www.haaretz.com/magazine/friday-supplement/all-the-dreams-we-had-are-now-gone-1.225828 ,
acccessed 21 August 2010.
3
David Rose, “The Gaza Bombshell”, Vanity Fair, April 2008,
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804, accessed 21 August 2010.
for a long-term hudna (ceasefire) with Israel, if it were to agree to a Palestinian state within
the pre-1967 borders, clearly contradict its charter.
A more direct repudiation of the charter’s anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic diatribe came from
Khaled Meshal, the head of Hamas’ political bureau, in an interview conducted by the
Jordanian Arabic-language newspaper Al-Sabeel in July (translated into English by the Afro-
Middle East Centre in South Africa).4
Meshal was asked whether Hamas’ resistance was directed “against Zionists as Jews or as
occupiers.” Meshal replied, “resistance and military confrontation with the Israelis was
caused by occupation, aggression, and crimes committed against the Palestinian people, not
because of diferences in religion or belief.” He said that although “religion is a cornerstone
to our lives ... we do not make of religion a force for engendering hatred, nor a cause or a
pretext for harming or assaulting others, or grabbing what is not ours, or encroaching on the
rights of others” – referring, of course, to the Israeli settlers’ invocation of the Bible to justify
the theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank.
Contrast this to the declarations of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, a former Chief Rabbi of Israel and the
leader of the most important Orthodox political party in Israel, during a recent Sabbath
sermon: “Abu Mazen and all these evil people should perish from the world. God should
strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians.” In a previous sermon in 2001, he
told his followers: “It is forbidden to be merciful to [the Arabs]. You must send missiles to
them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable.”
Not a single member of Israel’s cabinet condemned Rabbi Ovadia Yosef for these
pronouncements.
Recognising Israel
At a press conference in April 2008, Meshal stated that within the context of a Palestinian
coalition government of which it was a part, Hamas would authorize Abbas as president of
the Palestinian Authority to conduct peace negotiations with Israel. If an accord were
reached, he said, Hamas would agree to have it submitted to a Palestinian referendum and, if
approved, would abide by the outcome even if Hamas itself were opposed to the accord. 5
(This arrangement was also part of the agreement reached in Mecca for a Hamas-Fatah unity
government that fell apart.)
Shortly after the press conference I told Usama Hamdan, a leading member of Hamas’
political bureau, that a Palestinian government cannot sign a peace agreement with Israel
and still maintain that it does not recognize it. Hamdan agreed, and told me that Meshal
agreed as well. He noted that since state-to-state recognition is a governmental
responsibility, not a function of individual political parties, Hamas’ refusal to recognize Israel
does not prevent a government of which Hamas is a part from granting that recognition. He
noted that Israeli governments – including the current one, whose prime minister claims to
want a two-state solution – have included political parties that oppose Palestinian statehood,
and no one has suggested this disqualifies these governments as partners for peace
negotiations, or made them candidates for sanctions of the kind imposed on Hamas.
4
Afro-Middle East Centre, “Hamas’ Meshal lays out new policy direction”, 30 August 2010, http://amec.org.za/index.php?
option=com_content&view=article&id=181:hamas-meshal-lays-out-new-policy-direction&catid=62:palestine-
israel&Itemid=75, accessed 30 August 2010.
5
Barak Ravid, “Meshal ofers 10-year truce for Palestinian state on ‘67 borders”, Ha’aretz,
http://www.haaretz.com/news/meshal-ofers-10-year-truce-for-palestinian-state-on-67-borders-1.244339 ,
accessed 21 August 2010.
Israeli contradictions
Israel’s government undoubtedly rejects that distinction between political parties and
governments as sophistry, and considers those who advance it as peddling pro-Hamas
propaganda. But it is a distinction that Netanyahu himself must invoke to explain the
contradiction between his declared acceptance of a two-state solution and the formal
opposition to a Palestinian state of his own Likud Party.
Indeed, not long after Netanyahu made that two-state declaration, most of his cabinet
ministers formed a parliamentary caucus in Israel’s Knesset, called the Land of Israel Caucus,
whose goal it is to defeat their own government’s efort to allow a Palestinian state in any
part of Palestine in the unlikely event it were to try to do so. (It is not difficult to imagine how
Netanyahu would have reacted to a “moderate” Palestinian government made up of parties
dedicated to the denial of Israeli statehood.)
More recently, in a TV interview with Charlie Rose, Khaled Meshal stated that Hamas will end
its resistance activities when Israel ends its occupation and accepts a Palestinian state within
the pre-1967 border. This reverses Hamas’ previous commitment to a struggle to recover all
of Palestine. Israelis and their supporters in the US ridicule anyone who credits such
statements, pointing out that in that same interview Meshal insisted on the Palestinian
refugees’ “right of return,” which he knows no Israeli government will accept. 6
Apparently they expect Hamas to concede that right – one that Abbas and Fatah also
demand – before negotiations have begun. But they do not similarly ridicule Netanyahu’s
declared support for a two-state solution even when he attaches conditions everyone knows
no Palestinian leader would ever accept. Defenders of Netanyahu insist he must be left with
negotiating room for the compromises he will have to make, but apparently believe
Palestinians do not deserve that same consideration.
It is this feigned Israeli ridicule of any Arab opening towards Israel that sank King Abdullah’s
peace initiative of 2002 ofering to normalize the relations of all Arab states with Israel;
“feigned,” because it is not scepticism of Arab seriousness that is behind Israeli leaders’
dismissal of Palestinian or Arab states’ outreach to them, but the fear that it may be sincere,
and would therefore compel serious Israeli responses that would expose Israel’s real
positions on final status.
That exposure is something Netanyahu has so far refused to risk, for it would prove that the
territorial and security constraints he intends to impose on Palestinian sovereignty amount
to a continuation of Israel’s occupation under some other name. It was Netanyahu’s refusal
to provide that information to Obama when they met at the White House on March 23 that
precipitated the crisis in Israeli-US relations that Obama sought to difuse so humiliatingly at
their meeting of July 6.
Hamas – pragmatic and opportunistic
But it is not only Israel that has ignored significant changes in Hamas. The United States and
Europe have done so as well, insisting that Hamas must first accept conditions for
engagement designed by Israel expressly to preclude the possibility of their acceptance.
There is no reason for the US to continue to support these conditions. Obama has not
imposed similar conditions for talks with the Taliban. To the contrary: he is encouraging the
return of the Taliban to a coalition government with President Hamid Karzai even as they are
killing American forces and Afghan civilians. Is the Taliban’s ideology more congenial to
6
Charlie Rose, transcript of interview with Khaled Meshal, 28 May 2010,
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11032#frame_top, accessed 21 August 2010.
Obama than that of Hamas, many of whose leaders and adherents are university graduates,
and who encourage rather than forbid and punish the education of their daughters?
Questioned by his interviewer in Al-Sabeel about the “marginalisation of women’s role in
political and social life,” Meshal stated that this marginalisation “does not come from the text
and spirit of the Sharia,” but is the result of “cultural backwardness.” He declared that Hamas
will not allow “the ages of backwardness or the weight of social norms and traditions that
stem from the environment rather than the religious text” to distort Islamic concepts,
“especially since the environment of Palestine is not a closed one but a historically civilized
one, enjoying plurality and openness to all religions, civilizations and cultures.”
A recent report7 revealed that the view that US policy towards Hamas is based on a serious
misreading of the movement is shared by senior intelligence officials at US Central Command
– CENTCOM. In a confidential report to CENTCOM’s commander, General David Petraeus,
these intelligence officials questioned the current US policy of isolating and marginalizing
Hamas and Hizbullah, and urged that Washington instead encourage them to integrate with
their respective political mainstreams. They reject Israel’s view that Hamas is incapable of
change and must be confronted with force. They maintain Hamas is pragmatic and
opportunistic, and that failing to recognize its grievances will result in our continuing failure
to get it to moderate its behaviour.
At the heart of Hamas’ grievances is the double standard that Israel, the US and Europe apply
to the entire range of issues the peace talks are intended to resolve. Hamas’ leadership
maintains that what distinguishes its movement from Fatah is its refusal to swallow this
hypocrisy. It insists on absolute reciprocity, especially with respect to the Quartet’s three
conditions for removing the political quarantine against it. These conditions require Hamas
to recognize the State of Israel, accept all previous agreements with Israel, and renounce
violence. Yet these three obligations – every one of them – have been regularly ignored and
violated by Netanyahu and preceding Israeli governments.
Settlements violate agreements
While insisting on Hamas’ recognition of Israel (a requirement to which Netanyahu has
added the demand that Palestinians also declare Israel the legitimate national home of the
Jewish people), Israeli governments have refused to affirm a Palestinian right to statehood
anywhere within Palestine’s borders. That right has been rejected not only rhetorically but by
the creation of so-called “facts on the ground,” ie, Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and
in the West Bank, intended to prevent a Palestinian state from ever coming into being.
The argument that the settlements are necessary to assure territorial adjustments required
for Israel’s security has no credibility. The settlement enterprise long ago exceeded the most
expansively defined Israeli security needs. It was not Israel’s Peace Now but former Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert who, while still in office, ridiculed such claims. Olmert said that for
Israel’s military and security establishments, “it’s all about tanks and land and controlling
territories and controlled territories (sic) and this hilltop and that hilltop. All these things are
worthless.” He added, “Who thinks seriously that if we sit on another hilltop, on another
hundred meters, that this is what will make the diference for the State of Israel’s basic
security?”8
7
Mark Perry, “Red Team”, Foreign Policy, 30 June 2010, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/06/29/red_team ,
accessed 21 August 2010.
8
Ethan Bronner, “Olmert says Israel should pull out of West Bank”, New York Times, 28 September 2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/30/world/middleeast/30olmert.html, accessed 21 August 2010.
Palestinian rights not recognised by Israel
Netanyahu’s acceptance of a two-state solution, which has not been taken seriously by
anyone in Israel, is not based on his recognition of the Palestinian right to national self-
determination. Netanyahu led the successful opposition to Ariel Sharon’s efort in 2002 to
prevent the Likud’s executive committee from declaring its rejection of a Palestinian state,
thus precipitating Sharon’s departure from the Likud to the newly-formed Kadima party.
As long as Israel’s government refuses to delineate its borders and to recognize the right of
Palestinians to a state of their own east of the 1967 lines, Hamas will reject demands that a
Palestinian state of which it is a part recognise Israel. As noted above, Netanyahu refused to
indicate his government’s definition of Israel’s borders even in the privacy of his meeting
with President Obama at the White House on March 23.
The second Quartet condition is that Hamas abide by all previous Israeli-Palestinian accords.
Clearly, neither President Obama nor the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, believe Israel has
abided by this obligation, or they would not have demanded that Israel halt all further
settlement expansion in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank. Israel’s violations of previous
accords have not been limited to borders and settlements, but include the “road map” and
the Oslo accords’ provisions that the future status of Jerusalem can be determined only by
agreement between the parties, not by unilateral fiat, as Netanyahu’s government seeks to
do.
Non-violent alternative lacking
As to the third condition, renunciation of violence, Israel again is as much in violation of that
requirement as is Hamas. On virtually every Israeli measure whose legality has been
challenged by the Palestinians – eg, the confiscations of Palestinian territory for Jewish
settlements, the expulsion of Palestinians from East Jerusalem, the demolition of Palestinian
homes and the construction of a security fence on Palestinian territory – Israel has prevailed
because of its unrestrained resort to violence to subdue or eliminate Palestinians who stand
in the way.
As a sovereign state, Israel enjoys a monopoly on the use of violence, but only within its own
borders. It has no greater claim to a right to resort to violence to implement measures – such
as the transfer of its own population to territories under occupation – that are clear
violations of international law, than does its subject population.
It is not reasonable, to say the least, to expect that Palestinians would renounce violence and
rely instead on their occupiers – who covet their land and are frantically settling their own
population on it – to serve as judge and jury of their grievances. The demand that they
renounce violence without being provided a credible non-violent alternative, such as a third-
party monitoring authority that is empowered to adjudicate grievances from both sides, is
neither defensible nor implementable.
Hamas’ religious agenda
What surprises about Hamas’ rule in Gaza is not the visible increase in public religiosity –
some of it undoubtedly out of fear of Hamas’ authorities – but Hamas’ relative restraint in
imposing such religious behaviour on Gaza’s population, especially when compared to
certain other Islamic regimes in the region.
That restraint, and Hamas’ formal commitment to democratic governance notwithstanding,
there is no greater danger to democracy – or to any kind of civilized existence – than the
toxic combination of religious zealotry and xenophobic nationalism. That holds as much for
Israel as for Islamic movements and regimes. When the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) prepared
their onslaught on Gaza, the chief chaplain distributed to the soldiers religious literature
authored by nationalist rabbis from the settler community, instructing them that Palestinians
must be considered descendants of the Biblical enemy of the ancient Israelites, the
Amalekites, whom God wants utterly destroyed. The pamphlet stated it is a sin to show
compassion towards Palestinian civilians, including children. What impact that “religious”
literature had on the appalling disproportion of Palestinian civilian casualties in that
operation, including large numbers of Gaza’s children, we will probably never know.
Hamas not an al-Qaeda proxy
Israel would like the world to believe that Hamas is nothing other than a terrorist enterprise,
and that Hamas’ “resistance” is in the service of a global Salafist efort to defeat the West
and restore an Islamic caliphate. That is a lie intended to place Israel in the vanguard of a
Western war on “global terrorism”, in order to justify its demand that the West make
allowances for the illegal measures it claims it must resort to if the terrorists are to be
defeated.
In fact, Hamas does not share al-Qaeda’s goals, or its hostility to the West and the US. It has
consistently rejected al-Qaeda’s urgings that it target American and Western interests,
limiting itself instead to the Palestinian national struggle, for which it would like American
and European support, understanding how critical that support is to the achievement of
Palestinian national aspirations. Opposition from more extreme anti-Western jihadist
factions and would-be al-Qaeda supporters within Gaza has been brutally put down by
Hamas, for ideological reasons no less than the threat these factions pose to Hamas’
hegemony.
In his interview in Al-Sabeel, Meshal rejected violence for its own sake, or as dictated by
ideology or religion. He argued violence may be necessary for pragmatic reasons, because
“negotiations and peace require a balance of power, for peace cannot be made when one
party is powerful and the other weak; otherwise this will be surrender.” Those who are
forced to negotiate out of weakness and on terms that disadvantage their rights “are the
ones that will pay the price of the negotiations,” he said.
Hamas is an ofshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Like its parent body, it has little in common
with a Salafist purism that calls for a literalistic Islam insulated from modernity and from a
modernizing pragmatism that seeks to adapt Islam to the modern world. 9 Predictions of its
likely behaviour when Palestinian statehood will have been achieved can no more be based
on its behaviour during a revolutionary struggle against a powerful occupier than the
Yishuv’s10 resort to terror during its pre-state struggle was an indication of its comportment
after the founding of the state.
Jewish terror
The targeting of Arab civilians by Jewish terror groups in the 1930s is documented in painful
detail by Benny Morris, Israel’s leading chronicler of the Jewish struggle for a homeland in
Palestine. In Righteous Victims, Morris writes that the upsurge of Arab terrorism in 1937
“triggered a wave of Irgun bombings against Arab crowds and buses, introducing a new
dimension to the conflict.” While in the past Arabs had “sniped at cars and pedestrians and
occasionally lobbed a grenade, often killing or injuring a few bystanders or passengers,” now
9
Marc Lynch, “Veiled truths: the rise of political Islam in the West”, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2010,
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/66468/marc-lynch/veiled-truths , accessed 21 August 2010.
10
The pre-state Jewish community.
“for the first time, massive bombs were placed in crowded Arab centers, and dozens of
people were indiscriminately murdered and maimed.” Morris notes that “this ‘innovation’
soon found Arab imitators.”11
That there may also have been yet untold Israeli violations of international law well after the
establishment of the state too incriminating to be revealed seems evident from Netanyahu’s
recent decision to restrict access to government archives on subjects that include, according
to a Haaretz editorial entitled “A state afraid of its past,” 12 expulsions and massacres of Arabs
during and following Israel’s War of Independence.
Zionist terrorism does not condone Hamas’ terrorism. But its history serves to make two
points: the inevitability of such abuses when non-violent paths to the achievement of
legitimate national goals are denied, and the fallacy of the Israeli claim that a state that
comes into existence by terrorist means must inevitably become a terrorist state. The leaders
of the two major pre-state Zionist terror organizations, Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin,
became prime ministers of what Israelis like to believe is “the only democracy in the Middle
East.” (Not that there are many other democracies in the region, but Israeli democracy
increasingly stands on the most fragile of foundations.)
The Israeli charge that, unlike the Zionists who abandoned past excesses once they achieved
statehood, Hamas continued its terror assaults on Israel even after Prime Minister Sharon
withdrew every Jewish settlement and settler from Gaza is disingenuous. The dishonesty of
that comparison lies in its implication that with the withdrawal from Gaza, Palestinians
achieved their goal of statehood and independence in a part of Palestine.
Not only the West Bank, but Gaza has remained under Israel’s occupation, for it has been
surrounded by the IDF on land, sea and air, and subjected to an Israeli campaign of de-
development that has completely devastated what had remained of Gaza’s economy. The
stability that Hamas has achieved in Gaza despite Israel’s relentless eforts to bring it down is
at least as impressive as what the Palestinian Authority (PA) has achieved in the West Bank,
given the vast European and American resources endlessly poured into the PA’s treasury. 13
Breaking the stalemate
Political Islam cannot be ignored
Having decided to join the Palestinian political process in 2005 and won a free and fair
democratic election (the first in the Arab Middle East) in 2006, Hamas is surely as legitimate a
stakeholder in the Israel-Palestine conflict as is Fatah, the party that lost that election. A
peace accord that ignores legitimate stakeholders cannot hope to succeed. But there are
fundamental reasons for changing Israeli and US policy towards Hamas that go well beyond
Hamas’ capacity to prevent a peace accord reached only with Abbas.
Political Islam has emerged as the dominant religious, cultural and political movement in the
Arab world and in much of the larger Islamic world. Most Muslim governments recognize this
reality and have come to realize that competition with political Islam “can neither be
11
Benny Morris, Righteous victims: a history of the Zionist-Arab conflict, 1881-2001, Vintage Books, 2001, p
147.
12
“A state afraid of its past”, Haaretz editorial, 29 July 2010, http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/a-
state-afraid-of-its-past-1.304711, accessed 21 August.
13
Yezid Sayigh, “Hamas rule in Gaza: three years on”, Middle East Brief 41, March 2010, Crown Center for
Middle East Studies, Brandeis University, www.brandeis.edu/crown/publications/meb/meb41.html, accessed
21 August 2010; Nathan Brown, “Are Palestinians building a state?”, Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, June 2010, http://carnegieendowment.org/files/palestinian_state1.pdf, accessed 21 August 2010.
suppressed nor ignored.”14 Israel is a Middle Eastern country, and cannot expect to achieve
security by conducting an endless war against political Islam. Its misguided efort to do so is
not a sustainable national policy.
If the unresolved Israel-Arab conflict is not to bring the region to more radical instability and
deeper conflict that will inevitably exact a heavy price from America as well, the Obama
administration must lead an international initiative to define the parameters of an Israeli-
Palestinian agreement and actively promote Palestinian political reconciliation. If Obama
cannot provide that leadership, Europe must do so, and hope America will at least follow.
Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet – not even American-sponsored parameters – that can
guarantee the goal of “two states living side by side in peace and security.” But President
Obama’s present course absolutely precludes it.
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An excellent meeting
Two statesmen met in Washington on Tuesday who are looking smaller and smaller, who
are taking smaller and smaller steps.
Gideon Levy, 8th July 2010
It really was an excellent meeting: The chance that a binational state will be established has
improved as a result; relations between Israel and the United States are indeed "marvelous."
Israel can continue with the whims of its occupation. The president of the United States
proved Tuesday that perhaps there has been change, but not as far as we are concerned.
If there remained any vestiges of hope in the Middle East from Barack Obama, they have
dissipated; if some people still expected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to lead a
courageous move, they now know they made a mistake (and misled others ).
The masked ball is at its peak: Preening each other, Obama and Netanyahu have proved that
even their heavy layer of makeup can no longer hide the wrinkles. The worn-out, wizened old
face of the longest "peace process" in history has been awarded another surprising and
incomprehensible extension. It's on its way nowhere.
The "warm" and "sympathetic" reception, albeit a little forced, including the presidential
dog, Bo, the meeting of the wives, with the U.S. president accompanying the Israeli prime
minister to the car in an "unprecedented" way, as the press enthused, cannot obscure reality.
The reality is that Israel has again managed to fool not only America, but even its most
promising president in years.
It was enough to listen to the joint press conference to understand, or better yet, not
understand, where we are headed. Will the freeze continue? Obama and Netanyahu
squirmed, formulated and obfuscated, and no clear answer was forthcoming. If there was a
time when people marveled at Henry Kissinger's "constructive ambiguity," now we have
destructive ambiguity. Even when it came to the minimum move of a construction freeze,
without which there is no proof of serious intent on Israel's part, the two leaders threw up a
smoke screen. A cowardly yes-and-no by both.
14
Ian S. Lustick, “Israel could benefit from Hamas”, Forbes magazine, 17 June 2010,
http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/17/israel-hamas-middle-east-politics-opinions-contributors-ian-s-
lustick.html , accessed 21 August 2010.
More than anything, the meeting proved that the criminal waste of time will go on. A year
and a half has passed since the two took office, and almost nothing has changed except lip
service to the freeze. A few lifted roadblocks here, a little less blockade of Gaza there - all
relatively marginal matters, a bogus substitute for a bold jump over the abyss, without which
nothing will move.
When direct talks become a goal, without anyone having a clue what Israel's position is - a
strange negotiation in which everyone knows what the Palestinians want and no one knows
for sure what Israel wants - the wheel not only does not go forward, it goes backward. There
are plenty of excuses and explanations: Obama has the congressional elections ahead of him,
so he mustn't make Netanyahu angry.
After that, the footfalls of the presidential elections can be heard, and then he certainly must
not anger the Jews. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is pressuring Netanyahu now;
tomorrow it might be Likud MK Danny Danon, and after all, you can't expect Netanyahu to
commit political suicide. And there you have it, his term in office is over, with no
achievements. Good for you, Obama; bravo Netanyahu. You managed to make a mockery of
each other, and together, of us all.
Netanyahu will be coming back to Israel over the weekend, adorned with false
accomplishments. The settlers will mark a major achievement. Even if they don't not admit it
- they are never satisfied, after all - they can rejoice secretly. Their project will continue to
prosper. If they have doubled their numbers since the Oslo Accords, now they can triple
them.
And then what? Here then is a question for Obama and Netanyahu: Where to? No playing for
time can blur the question. Where are they headed? What will improve in another year?
What will be more promising in another two years? The Syrian president is knocking at the
door begging for peace with Israel, and the two leaders are ignoring him. Will he still be
knocking in two years? The Arab League's initiative is still valid; terror has almost ceased.
What will the situation be after they have finished compromising over the freeze in
construction of balconies and ritual baths?
Two statesmen met in Washington on Tuesday who are looking smaller and smaller, who are
taking smaller and smaller steps. They have decided not to decide, which in itself is a
decision. When the chance of a two-state solution has long since entered injury time, they
have decided on more extra time. Get ready for the binational state, or the next round of
bloodletting.
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Don't fall for the direct-talk hype: The 'peace process' is still going nowhere
Stephen M. Walt , August 20, 2010
If you think today's announcement that the Israelis and Palestinians are going to resume
"direct talks" is a significant breakthrough, you haven't been paying attention for the past
two decades (at least). I wish I could be more optimistic about this latest development, but I
see little evidence that a meaningful deal is in the offing.
Why do I say this? Three reasons.
1. There is no sign that the Palestinians are willing to accept less than
a viable, territorially contiguous state in the West Bank (and eventually, Gaza), including a
capital in East Jerusalem and some sort of political formula (i.e., fig-leaf) on the refugee
issue. By the way, this outcome supposedly what the Clinton and Bush adminstrations
favored, and what Obama supposedly supports as well.
2. There is no sign that Israel's government is willing to accept anything more than a
symbolic Palestinian "state" consisting of a set of disconnected Bantustans, with Israel in full
control of the borders, air space, water supplies, electromagnetic spectrum. etc. Prime
Minister Netanyahu has made it clear that this is what he means by a "two-state solution,"
and he has repeatedly declared that Israel intends to keep all of Jerusalem and maybe a long-
term military presence in the Jordan River valley. There are now roughly 500,000 Israeli Jews
living outside the 1967 borders, and it is hard to imagine any Israeli government evacuating a
significant fraction of them. Even if Netanyahu wanted to be more forthcoming, his coalition
wouldn't let him make any meaningful concessions. And while the talks drag on, the illegal
settlements will continue to expand.
3. There is no sign that the U.S. government is willing to put meaningful pressure on
Israel. We're clearly willing to twist Mahmoud Abbas' arm to the breaking point (which is
why he's agreed to talks, even as Israel continues to nibble away at the territory of the future
Palestinian state), but Obama and his Middle East team have long since abandoned any
pretense of bringing even modest pressure to bear on Netanyahu. Absent that, why should
anyone expect Bibi to change his position?
So don't fall for the hype that this announcement constitutes some sort of meaningful
advance in the "peace process." George Mitchell and his team probably believe they are
getting somewhere, but they are either deluding themselves, trying to fool us, or trying to
hoodwink other Arab states into believing that Obama meant what he said in Cairo. At this
point, I rather doubt that anyone is buying, and the only thing that will convince onlookers
that U.S. policy has changed will be tangible results. Another round of inconclusive "talks"
will just reinforce the growing perception that the United States cannot deliver.
The one item in all this that does give me pause is the accompanying statement by the
Middle East Quartet (the United States, Russia, the EU and the U.N.), which appears at first
glance to have some modest teeth in it. Among other things, it calls explicitly for "a
settlement, negotiated between the parties, that ends the occupation which began in 1967
and results in the emergence of an independent, democratic, and viable Palestinian state
living side by side in peace and security with Israel and its other neighbors." It also says these
talks can be completed within one year. Sounds promising, but the Quartet has issued similar
proclamations before (notably the 2003 "Roadmap"), and these eforts led precisely
nowhere. So maybe there's a ray of hope in there somewhere, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Meanwhile, both Democrats and Republicans here in the United States will continue to make
pious statements about their commitment to a two-state solution, even as it fades further
and further into the realm of impossibility. Barring a miracle, we will eventually have to
recognize that "two-states for two peoples" has become a pipe-dream. At that point, U.S.
leaders will face a very awkward choice: they can support a democratic Israel where Jews
and Arabs have equal political rights (i.e., a one-state democracy similar to the United States,
where discrimination on the basis of religion or ethnicity is taboo), or they can support an
apartheid state whose basic institutions are fundamentally at odds with core American
values.
Equally important, an apartheid Israel will face growing international censure, and as both
former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and current Defense Minister Ehud Barak have warned,
such an outcome would place Israel's own long-term future in doubt. If that happens, all
those staunch "friends of Israel" who have hamstrung U.S. diplomacy for decades can explain
to their grandchildren how they let that happen.
As for the Obama administration itself, I have only one comment. If you think I'm being too
gloomy, then do the world a favor and prove me wrong. If you do, I'll be the first to admit it.
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Why I don’t give a damn about the peace talks
Ami Kaufman, September 3rd, 2010
Where are the days when I used to get all excited and hopeful ahead of peace talks?
Where are the days when I used to wait for the press conference, the photo op?
Where are those days when I used to watch the TV closely for facial expressions, in search of
sincerity or a genuine gesture of friendship?
Where are those days when I hung on the words of each analyst?
Where are they? Where’d they go?
Why don’t I give a f-ck?
Why haven’t I watched one single news report about this summit?
Is it because of the almost unbearable August going into September heat?
Is it because of my long hours at the paper?
Is it because I just moved flat and don’t have a second for myself?
Maybe it’s because I put my two kids back in kindergarden this week. And because I’m not
that impressed with the teachers.
Or the Israeli education system at all, for that matter. A system which has done a 180 degree
turn from being one of the best to one of the worst in the world.
And why should I even care about peace talks, when in 30 years a majority of the education
system will be made up of haredi children who don’t study math or english?
Why should I even care about peace talks when a much more devastating time bomb like
that will explode right in my face in less than a generation a way?
What kind of place am I raising my kids in?
How do I keep them from turning into Eden Abergil?
Why should I care about peace talks, when the chances are that my daughter will be
blindfolding Palestinians at checkpoints in 15 years time anyway?
Is that why I don’t give a hoot about summits?
Or is it because I moved to a lower rent flat because even though my wife and I work almost
100 hours a week we can’t aford to buy a reasonably sized flat in an area we like? Like
almost every young couple in Israel these days?
Is it because a 4 bedroom apartment in “luxurious” Netanya, half an hour from Tel Aviv, costs
over 400 thousand dollars? And because I make a fraction of what a journalist at my level
makes in the States, and all I can really think about is money?
Or maybe it’s because I kvetch too much, apparently…
Is that why? Is that why I couldn’t care less?
Or maybe it’s because I just don’t trust anybody anymore?
Maybe it’s because I know there’s actually no leadership.
On either side.
Including America.
Maybe I just don’t give a shit, because I’m an experienced Middle Easterner by now, and I
know that when leadership isn’t present, it’s the events on the ground that eventually
dictate the outcome. They fill up the leadership vacuum.
The new outpost, the slow rise in Palestinian attacks (not necessarily in that order, don’t
worry – I’m not taking sides), followed by the slow rise in Israeli responses, and before you
can blame who started it this time, BAM! You got yourself some Cast Lead or some Defensive
Shield. Yummy.
So, with all due respect to your summit, all I can say is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02tCGleIdcw&feature=player_embedded [“Frankly my
dear I don’t give a damn”]
and just leave me alone.
I have to clean the bathrooms.
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Buy Palestinian products
Akiva Eldar, 23rd July, 2010
Suppose some Palestinian group managed to set up a new settlement on land abandoned by
refugees of the 1967 war in the Jordan Valley. What would your average Israeli patriot have
to say about an Israeli contractor who agreed to build it, or about Jewish workers clambering
on Palestinian scafolds? What an outcry we'd hear from the Israeli right about such traitors!
Never fear, our forces would never allow the uncircumcised to fix even a peg in the occupied
territory under absolute Israeli control (some 60 percent of the West Bank ). The imagined
scenario of Jews building homes for Palestinians was created only for the sake of discussion -
specifically of the protests in Israel against the ban recently imposed by the Palestinian
Authority against Arabs working in the settlements.
It takes no small amount of audacity to threaten the Palestinians with harm to their economy
if they refuse to continue building Israeli settlements on their own land. Only we are allowed
to threaten boycotts every Monday and Thursday against countries that dare to criticize us.
After all, we, as is well known, have the monopoly on patriotism. Remember the treatment
the Etzel and Lehi underground militias meted out to Jewish girls who went to bed with
British soldiers?
"Buy Israeli goods" is an important ethos - with emphasis on the word "Israeli." Many Israelis,
including this writer, and peace-seekers all over the world boycott products made in the
settlements. But if Palestinian factory workers dare leave their jobs in the Barkan industrial
zone in the West Bank, the president of the Manufacturers Association, Shraga Brosh, says
he'll make sure that the government closes of the Haifa Port to Palestinian goods.
The entire world, with our American friends at the forefront, insists that the beefing up of
settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem cannot be reconciled with the "two states
for two peoples" solution. How can the Palestinian leadership be expected to stand by idly
while 25,000 Palestinian workers put a stamp of approval on the occupation through their
own labor and the sweat of their own brows? Just as the Paris Protocol - the economic
agreement between Israel and the PA - does not obligate Israel to employ Palestinian
workers in Kfar Sava, neither does it prohibit the Palestinians from imposing restrictions on
Arabs working in Ariel.
The commotion over the PA's economic campaign against the settlements indicates, more
than anything else, how the colonialist mindset has been branded into Israeli consciousness.
The protests over the threatened loss of the hewers of wood and drawers of water shows
how hard it is to shake of the master-servant attitudes that have taken root over the last 43
years. The gap between the economies of Israel and the occupied territories, the security
restrictions on entering Israel and movement within the territories, and the discrimination in
favor of Israeli goods, have all forced the West Bank's labor force into the settlements. The
settlers have also become dependent upon this asymmetrical relationship between
themselves and the natives: Why should they accommodate Chinese workers on their holy
land if they can get cheap Palestinian laborers who go home at the end of the day.
If the government of Israel were genuinely interested in the partition of the land, it would
follow in the PA's footsteps and cut itself of from the settlers. In addition to freezing
construction in the settlements, it would cancel the special benefits enjoyed by the industrial
zones in the territories, which attract greedy entrepreneurs. Instead of encouraging
settlement beyond the Green Line, the Israeli government would promote legislation for
compensating those settlers willing to come home. Instead of hiding behind the self-
righteous claim that it is providing livelihoods for thousands of indigent laborers, let the
government open the Israeli markets to more goods and workers from the territories.
Meanwhile, what will happen to the workers who the Palestinian Authority will compel to
leave the building sites, fields and factories that the settlers have established on the
Palestinians' land? Who is going to feed the tens of thousands of families whose
breadwinners will lose their jobs? The Palestinian economics minister, Hassan Abu Libdeh,
has promised that before the boycott regulations go into efect, the government of Salam
Fayyad will help those who work in the settlements to find jobs within the PA. The boycott of
settlement produce, he says, has already increased the consumption of goods manufactured
by Palestinian plants as well as the demand for local labor.
The economic divorce of Palestinians from the Jewish settlements is an important step
toward divorce from Israel's occupation policies. Buy Palestinian.
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Boycott by Irish artists marks a new way forward
David Landy, August 13, 2010
These days, victories in the cultural boycott of Israel have been piling up and it’s easy to
become blasé at what we’re achieving. But a new and important milestone has been reached
in Ireland – yesterday was the day that cultural boycott moved from being a reactive to a pro-
active campaign. Yesterday, the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) in association
with PACBI launched their cultural boycott pledge. Over 150 Irish artists signed the pledge
which stated:
"In response to the call from Palestinian civil society for a cultural boycott of Israel, we
pledge not to avail of any invitation to perform or exhibit in Israel, nor to accept any
funding from any institution linked to the government of Israel, until such time as Israel
complies with international law and universal principles of human rights."
Reports on the launch are here and (with photos) here. There’s the IPSC statement, with the
list of artists who signed updated regularly, here. I’ve also blogged before on this, at the Jews
Sans Frontieres site. In that blog I couldn’t contain my delight about the event. It was a
celebration. A coming together of musicians and writers and artists and political activists.
Many of the actions we do are grim and serious, focusing on massacres and injustice – it was
lovely being at something so joy-filled and positive. The event was less about what we were
against than what we were for – plain solidarity with Palestine.
There’s other reason for satisfaction. Partly it is the status of many of the artists. People
like Donal Lunny, Damien Dempsey, Robert Ballagh, Seamus Deane, Sinead Cusack and so on
– these are household names in Ireland. Getting respected well-established artists to sign
this pledge is a real achievement. At the same time, as Raymond Deane, the man who
organised the pledge, said, it was the less well-established artists who showed real courage
in signing – these are people trying to make their careers and yet they still went out on a
limb and signed the pledge. Political activists like myself often despair at artists not displaying
in the real world the talents and yes, bravery that they show in their works. These artists did
display this bravery – they gave me hope.
But there’s another even deeper reason for satisfaction – this pledge has moved the cultural
boycott campaign onto a new level. PACBI were right when they labelled this a ‘ground-
breaking initiative’. To date, most of our cultural boycott work has been reactive –
desperately chasing after artists who have already agreed to play Israel and pleading with
them to reconsider. This is often demeaning and depressing work – it feels like pleading with
power. More importantly, it’s not that efective – performers that have already agreed to play
in Israel are, let’s face it, the hardest group of artists to afect. It’s far far easier to reach
artists before they’ve made that decision. This way the approach won’t be seen as
threatening or disruptive to their lives. It’s a way of getting to artists before Israel does. This
is what we mean by moving the boycott campaign from a reactive to a pro-active stance.
More, a pledge like this will afect all artists, including those that don’t sign. It makes the
political nature of performing to Israel much more overt and creates a community of ethical
artists, a concrete thing that artists who are considering breaking the boycott have to
consciously reject – something they’d find difficult to do. Easier not to get involved in politics,
not to go to Israel. The pledge then is a tool to ensure that boycotting Israel becomes the
default position among performers and artists.
It was easier than we expected to get people to sign up (though it did still take a fair amount
of work and planning), since we were asking them to do something positive and join a
growing global movement. We want to get more Irish artists to sign this pledge, but more
important than this, we’re trying to encourage other countries to adopt this tactic. Ireland is
a small country and a pledge like this would have so much greater efect if signed by US
artists.
The same pledge could happen in the US. While Americans mightn’t be able to get as many
signatures proportionally as we did – 140 Irish signatures translates into some 10,000 US
ones – even getting a tenth that number or even less - getting five hundred artists to sign this
pledge would be a huge step. And once the pledge is there, others can sign up. It’s a process
of building up solidarity.
There’s historical precedent for this. Omar Barghouti reminded us of it when we were
working on the campaign. In 1964, 28 Irish playwrights pledged not to allow their work to be
performed before segregated audiences in apartheid South Africa; a year later this action
was followed by the first declaration of boycott from US artists. Hopefully we can ensure the
same sequence of events again in this, the new anti-apartheid campaign.
David Landy is the national organiser of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campagin. He is a lecturer in the
Department of Sociology in Trinity College Dublin, and currently writing a book on diaspora Jewish opposition to
Israel.
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I’ve just returned from Minneapolis, having attended the 219th General Assembly of the
Presbyterian Church USA at the invitation of the denomination’s Israel Palestine Mission
Network. The PC(USA) is at the epicenter of the struggle of the Christian community in the
U.S. to come to terms with the challenge of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
A victory had already been achieved before the start of the Assembly. Overtures from
presbyteries from around the country urging action on justice for Palestinians would amount
to over 40% of the actions considered by the Assembly. These included revisiting the 2004
decision to undertake phased divestment from companies implicated in the illegal
occupation of Palestinian land and an overture affirming that Israel’s actions meet the United
Nations definition for the crime of Apartheid. A centerpiece of Presbyterian actions was the
call to approve the report of the Middle East Study Committee. The MESC, commissioned by
the 2008 General Assembly, had produced a 170 page report entitled “Breaking Down the
Walls.” The report documents the committee’s first-hand observation of the Israeli
occupation’s impact on Palestinian society and includes specific recommendations, including
urging the U.S. government to make military aid to Israel contingent on ending the
occupation.
Predictably, the forces of opposition had gathered. As early as February of this year, the
Simon Wiesenthal Center attacked the report, calling it a “poisonous document by the
Presbyterian Church [that] will be nothing short of a declaration of war on Israel.” This
broadside by the Los Angeles-based Jewish advocacy group went on to declare that the
report “shakes the foundations of interfaith relations.” This is the tack that has been taken
for years by the mainstream Jewish community – both secular organizations like Wiesenthal
as well as the religious denominations — claiming that any questions about Israel’s policies
or the Zionist project itself partakes of anti-Semitism. The charge of anti-Semitism and the
prospect of a disruption in the “interfaith partnership” has been efective in stifling the
discourse and in thwarting actions directed at Israel’s policies. Implicit and sometime explicit
in these statements is the threat that such “unfriendly” behavior by Christians will result in
the removal of Jewish friendship. This strategy has intensified in recent years in response to
eforts by church denominations to take a principled stand on the Israel-Palestine issue. Most
recently, the biweekly Christian Century published an article by Ted Smith and Amy-Jill
Levine, professors at Vanderbilt Seminary. Appearing the week preceding the PC(USA)
General Assembly, the article, entitled “Habits of Anti-Judaism,” strongly critiqued the MESC
report. In the opening to a letter to the Christian Century I wrote the following:
“The intent of the Presbyterian Middle East Study Committee Report “Breaking Down the
Walls” is clear: “to break down these walls that stand in the way of the realization of God’s
peaceful and just kingdom.” But in their critique of the report published in your June 29
issue, Ted Smith and Amy-Jill Levine of Vanderbilt Seminary strike at the heart of this
message. They ask us to believe that the report advocates “a historical narrative that points
indirectly to a single state—a new social body—in which a Palestinian majority displaces
Jews.” In a shocking distortion of the Study Group’s evocation of Ephesians 2:14, they claim
that “’Breaking down the walls’ in order to form ‘one new humanity in the place of two’
evokes old echoes of theological supersessionism and transposes them into a political key.”
“Old habits die hard,” lament Smith and Levine. But it is the habit of crying anti-Semitism
whenever Jewish sensibilities are disturbed or the actions of the State of Israel are
questioned that we must urgently confront.” (Full text of the letter.)
The aim of the article was clear – to strengthen the hand of those who wanted to prevent
passage of the report. And why not? This is a time-honored approach — it has always
worked. I feared that it would prove just as efective in this case. I arrived in Minneapolis
convinced that, except for the eforts of a courageous but small and embattled minority
within the denomination, the natural commitment to social justice and support for the
oppressed on the part of most Presbyterians would again be trumped by concern for
preserving the relationship with the Jewish community. I was betting that the tactics of the
Wiesenthal Center and the arguments of Smith and Levine would serve, as they always have,
to muzzle the conversation and block actions that might ofend Jewish sensibilities or be
perceived as hostile to the Jewish state.
A thing of beauty
I was wrong. Yes, the concerns about the feelings of Jews when Israel is “attacked” are still
there, and they exert a powerful pull on Presbyterians’ decisions. But something wonderful
happened last week in Minneapolis.
I watched as the committee charged with studying “Breaking Down the Walls,” and
recommending action to the GA debated the matter. I listened to the arguments for and
against approval of the report. Those in favor passionately talked about the sufering of the
Palestinians under occupation. Those against spoke just as passionately about the report’s
seeming “anti-Israel” bias, claiming that to approve the report would be to cut of dialogue
with the Jewish community. I noted what seemed like a universe of disagreement between
the two positions. I despaired that anyone who, unlike the study group itself, had not seen
the occupation with his or her own eyes would understand that the report was not biased –
that it was simply telling the truth and recommending that the church respond accordingly.
But something happened. The committee clearly wanted to find a way to have the report
adopted. A group from the committee stayed up all night to craft a number of changes.
Problems with perceived bias against Israel were fixed. The obligatory language about Israel’s
right to exist was inserted. None of these changes touched the faithful witness and prophetic
heart of the report. While strongly asserting the church’s commitment to Israel’s security and
wellbeing, the Study Committee’s report as presented to the General Assembly clearly
presents the narrative of Palestinian dispossession and sufering. It asserts that Israel’s
actions, illegal and in violation of international law, are an “enduring threat to peace in the
region.” It receives the Palestinian Kairos document, a courageous and heartfelt call of
Palestinian Christians “from the heart of Palestinian sufering” to the churches of the world,
and recommends it for study by Presbyterians. It calls on the U.S. government to end aid to
Israel unless the country stops settlement expansion in Palestinian territories.
The report came before the 730+ commissioners on Friday July 9 and was approved by a vote
of 82%. When the results were displayed on the screen, the assembled broke into applause –
which is against the rules but in this case the moderator, smiling, allowed the spontaneous
outburst to go on! The applause, breaking through these restraints, meant one thing: this is
where the denomination wants to go. Then something else unusual happened – the
Moderator, Cindy Bolbach, ofered a prayer, thanking God for guiding the assembled to this
act, for breaking down the walls dividing people and standing in the way of peace. The
thousands of people in the hall bowed their heads in reverence. They knew that something
important had happened.
It is not always clear from down on the floor, in the thick of things. But looking back, I see
that the PC(USA) General Assembly is a thing of beauty. This church is committed to tearing
down walls. Watching the plenary, one witnessed a courageous and heartfelt struggle
with things that matter: gay and lesbian ordination and honoring of marriages; benefits for
civil union partners; how to respond to state laws that violate the rights of immigrants. With
respect to the Israel-Palestine question, the struggle will continue. Other overtures did not
fare as well as the MESC report. Even though overtures to divest denomination pension
funds — close to 10 million dollars — from Caterpillar (the company manufactures the
bulldozers that destroy Palestinian homes and build the separation wall) have been proposed
at every General Assembly since 2004 (actually it passed in 2004 and then withdrawn in the
face of a juggernaut of institutional Jewish pressure, but that’s another story), the overture
failed. In addition, Presbyterians could not bring themselves to approve the overture naming
Israel’s policies as Apartheid.
But here is the thing: it is clear to me that all but a small minority of the 36 who voted
against that overture in committee (the vote was 16-36) agree that Israel’s actions meet the
UN definition of the crime of Apartheid. What drove the vote was not the substance of the
overture but rather the belief, as stated in a comment on the vote inserted by the
committee, “that dialogue is hampered by words like ‘apartheid.’” It was also clear to me in
listening to the debate that, despite the stubborn unwillingness to move to divestment, all
but a fringe within the denomination agree that Caterpillar is building machines that illegally
and criminally destroy Palestinian life and that the denomination must pressure the company
to stop (the Assembly did pass an overture that “denounces” the corporation). The issues are
not in question. What is in question for a steadily decreasing percentage — again, this is clear
if you are paying attention — is the proper method for action.
To the Presbyterians: learning to love us
Sixty five years ago, Christians, confronted with the horror of the Nazi genocide, began a
painful, faithful process of reconciling with the Jewish people. Presbyterians today didn’t
choose to be in the difficult position of having to choose between their commitment to
justice and preserving their hard-won friendship with the Jews. But the hard fact is that there
has been no getting around this conflict. It has come about because of the policies of the
State of Israel and the choice, so far, of the American Jewish establishment to adopt a
bullying, defensive stance in response to Christian eforts to address the injustice. Under
these challenging conditions, you have had to struggle to learn how to love us well and
rightly. And that you are doing. The more you call us to account for our sins and challenge us
to be true to the values of our tradition, the more you show your commitment to our
friendship. The spirit and the specifics of the MESC report are fully in line with Jewish
aspirations and beliefs. More than that – in its powerful plea to break down the walls, it
takes my people where we urgently need to go today – to tear down the walls – both
psychological and physical – that we have erected between ourselves and the people with
whom we share a land and a common history. For thousands of years, our survival as Jews
depended on building walls. Now it depends on tearing them down.
In commissioning and producing this precious and faithful document of “Breaking Down the
Walls” you have demonstrated your love for us. It is love in the deepest, truest sense – love
as Jesus and Paul teach us to love – love the way Amos and Hosea, Isaiah and Jeremiah
taught us when they spoke truth to power and reminded us of our responsibility to our
fellow creatures and to the earth itself. In going back into the fray, year after year, to
consider divestment from the companies that are participating in our sin, and to call us to
account for building an apartheid state in full view of the world, you are loving us well. This
year, the arguments marshaled against these faithful actions of the denomination, calling
them biased and unbalanced, claiming that they will disrupt your “partnership” with us,
simply sounded tired.
Minneapolis is the beginning of the end of all that.
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Along with various political, religious and national interests, the Israeli occupation of the
West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights is fueled by corporate interests. Israeli companies
and multinational corporations lead real estate deals, develop the Israeli infrastructure and
settlements in the Palestinian occupied territories and the Golan Heights, contribute to the
construction and operation of an ethnic separation system, including checkpoints, walls and
roads, design and supply equipment and tools used in the control and repression of the
civilian population under occupation.
April Issue, 2010 What's New on Who Profits?
A subsidiary of Volvo, the Swedish company, provides buses used as mobile interrogation
rooms by Israel's General Security Services
The Swedish Volvo Trucks company owns 26.5% of Merkavim, an Israeli company which
manufactures buses. Merkavim proudly declares on its website that the Israel Prison
Authority is in the process of replacing all of its prisoner transportation fleet with buses
manufactured by Merkavim. The buses of the Israeli Prison Authority are not only used to
transport Palestinian political prisoners from the occupied territory to prisons inside Israel,
these buses are also used as mobile interrogation rooms for political prisoners. At the end of
this process, interrogation of Palestinian political prisoners by the Israeli General Security
Services (the Shabak) will have been conducted in Volvo buses manufactured by a Volvo
subsidiary. This marks an increase in the involvement in the occupation of Volvo Trucks,
which had already authorized auto-repair shops in West Bank settlements and whose heavy
machinery vehicles have regularly been used in the demolition of Palestinian homes, as well
as, in the construction of Israeli military checkpoints in the West Bank.
Danish companies provide services in West Bank settlements
Earlier this year two major Danish financial institutions announced in the press that they
would divest from companies with occupation-related businesses. Danske Bank
excluded Elbit Systems and Africa Israel from its investment portfolio for their respective
involvement in providing equipment for the Separation Wall and in constructing illegal
settlements. The Danish PKA pension fund decided to excludeElbit Systems, Magal Security
Systems and Detection Systems because of their involvement in the construction of the
Separation Wall, two weeks after it excludedAfrica Israel. New findings by Who Profits show
that some Danish firms are directly involved in the occupation. The Danish-British security
company, Group4securicor (G4S), has an Israeli branch, which provides security services in
Israeli settlements. The same company has previously provided Israeli military checkpoints in
the West Bank with luggage-scanning machines and full-body scanners. On the same note,
theDanish ISS company, which provides facility services for businesses, provides these same
services in West Bank settlements.
A Canadian firm is building a new settlement between Jerusalem and Bethlehem
A new settlement expansion in Jerusalem, called Yael Hill, is in the planning. This Jewish-only
settlement will engulf the Palestinian town of Walaja on three sides. This settlement seems
to be specifically designed to create an Israeli continuum between Jerusalem and the
settlement block of Gush Etzion. Yael Hill is a private initiative by several Israeli
entrepreneurs, in collaboration with CIM Lustigman, a subsidiary of the
Canadian Metrontario Group. This is not the first time that CIM Lustigman has taken part in
the construction of settlements: CIM Lustigman built the Israeli police station in
the contested E-1 area, near the Ma'ale Adumim settlement. Like Yael Hill, it seems that the
E-1 construction project was aimed at ensuring Israeli continuity between Jerusalem and
Ma'ale Adumim, cutting of the southern part of the West Bank (Bethlehem and Hebron)
from the central and northern parts (Ramallah, Nablus and Jenin) for Palestinians. Currently,
this company is in the process of building new apartments in French Hill, another settlement
neighborhood of Jerusalem.
Dexia Israel announces it will continue providing loans and financial services to local
municipalities of settlements in the occupied territory, while its controlling Dexia Group
announces it will stop all such settlement-related activity
Dexia Israel, a subsidiary of the Belgian-French Dexia Group, provides long-term loans and
other financial services to Israeli local authorities in the occupied territory. After Who Profits
exposed proof of that fact, and following months of protest and a public campaign led by the
Belgian Intal group, Dexia announced, in June 2009 that financing Israeli settlements is
contrary to the bank’s code of ethics, and that the bank would stop providing new loans to
West Bank settlements. However, when approached directly on Dec 30, 2009, the Dexia
Israel bank gave the following statement: "Dexia Israel Bank gives services to local
municipalities in Israel and there is no decision to discriminate [among them] by geographic
location; additionally, the option of stopping the provision of services to any of them is not
being considered". The bank's spokesperson made sure we understood that this reference to
"local authorities in Israel" included Israeli settlements in Jerusalem, the West Bank and the
Golan Heights.
By providing these financial services, the bank helps sustain these settlements, which are
illegal, according to international law. Moreover, the bank has failed to supply us with
answers about financial services provided to Palestinian local authorities in the West Bank. If
the bank provides services to Israeli settlements and not to their neighboring Palestinian
local authorities, it in fact implements the structural discrimination created by the
occupation.
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On the drive out of the modern Israeli city of Beer Sheva, the tin shacks scar the landscape. It
is a shanty town as poor and depressing as anywhere in the world.
These are the homes of the proud Bedouin Arabs. Once the citizens of the desert, the
Bedouin of southern Israel are now the poorest and unhealthiest citizens of the state of
Israel.
Take the "village" of Wadi Nam. Technically it does not exist; it is unrecognised by the
government and appears on no maps. The thousands of Bedouin clustered here have no
proper water supply and no sewage system.
The homes have no electricity despite the fact that there is a massive power plant in the
middle of the village, and high tension cables hum overhead. There is a chemical waste plant
on the edge of the village. A foul smell hangs in the air.
Generations
There are around 150,000 Bedouin in the Negev, close to the city of Beer Sheva. Some of the
villages claim to have been here for generations. Others sprung up when Israel moved the
Bedouin in the 1950s from their ancestral lands they used to cultivate and use to graze their
animals.
Khalil al-Amur says his family has lived in the village of As-Sira since before the foundation of
the state of Israel. Last year the whole village received notices of demolition. The authorities
say all the homes are illegal, built without permission.
Khalil says they are caught in a Catch 22 - with nowhere to go for permits. "I could come
home and not find my house, " he explained. "My children are very, very terrified and
uncertain, asking - are they really coming, when are they coming."
The Israeli housing minister, Meir Shitreet, is unapologetic. "The fact is that this land does
not belong to them, so they have no license to build on it," he argued.
"We are suggesting a very fair solution to each and every one of them. Every one of them can
get land, legally, with all the infrastructure legally to build their home. If they want their
children to be educated, to grow up in the right environment, with all the culture and
services, they cannot live in the desert. "
Townships
Many of the Bedouin have moved, with government encouragement, to several of these new
"townships".
They are notorious, crime-ridden slums, partly because of bad planning, partly because these
formerly nomadic people have not taken easily to urban life. Many Bedouin prefer to stay in
their villages, however poorly provided for. And even in the new townships it is extremely
difficult to get permission to build.
“The policy of Israel in the Negev and in other areas of the country is to 'Judaise' the land.”
Prof Yanni Nevo, Ben Gurion University
The Israeli policy seems confused. Nevertheless, Prof Yanni Nevo of Ben Gurion University in
Beer Sheva detects a theme:
"The policy of Israel in the Negev and in other areas of the country is to 'Judaise' the land, "
he said. "It does not mean that others will not exist here at all. It means Jewish settlements
are favoured. In the Negev they have established seven townships, not to the liking of the
population, against the cultural heritage of the population, and they have tried to
concentrate as many Bedouin in those townships in order to vacate as much land as possible
for mostly Jewish uses."
In its most extreme form, the Israeli policy denies there were any Bedouin here before the
State of Israel was established. More usually, Israel resorts to a narrow legalism, the
government arguing that the Bedouin have no rights to the land because they cannot
produce the necessary documentation.
Inevitably there is conflict. Sitting in the middle of the bedouin villages and townships is the
wealthy Israeli town of Omer. A private security firm patrols, protecting against what the
citizens of the town say is a mini- crime wave, emanating from the bedouin village next door.
Stalemate
The mayor of Omer, Pini Badash, says the Bedouin are out of control, building illegally, and
raising families of up to forty children: "They drive without registration, driving stolen cars;
they don't stop at red lights. This chaos must stop. The bedouin economy - it's a black
economy. The system considers them poor, but really they are driving Mercedes, Jeeps,
luxury cars."
The problem, for those who share the same outlook as Pini Badash, is that the Israeli
government is not prepared to be ruthless enough. Officially, there are thousands of illegal
Bedouin homes.
But the government does not have the stomach for the sort of mass demolitions, and
movement of people, that would dramatically change the situation.
So there is a stalemate. The Bedouin, poor, living on the edge. The Israeli authorities
unwilling to give them the sort of official recognition they crave.
"They have to find a new way to treat the Bedouin if they want to live in peace with these
people," argued Khalil al-Amur. "These people are existing here and living here before the
existence and establishment of the state. The people here are indigenous people."
It is, perhaps the fundamental issue facing Israel. How can this modern society make its
peace with the people who have lived here since before there was a Jewish state.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/6400501.stm
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Al Arakib Popular Committee --- Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality
Recognition Forum – Tarabut – Gush Shalom
Press Release: July 27, 2010
Police destroys a whole Negev village - 200 children left homeless
Destruction implemented although land ownership still pending in court
Netanyahu calls the Bedouin citizens of Israel “real threat”, and next an entire village in the
Negev is demolished.
Early this morning, police raided the unrecognised Bedouin village of al-Arakib in the Negev,
destroyed all 40 of its houses and evicted more than 300 residents. The residents, mostly
children, were left homeless. The unprecedented raid began at about 4.30 in the morning,
residents were surprised to wake up surrounded by a huge force of 1,500 police with guns,
stun grenades, helmets and shields, including hundreds of Special Riot Police (Yassam), as
well as mounted police, helicopters and bulldozers.
At the residents’ call, dozens of left-wing activists and volunteers arrived from all over the
country, helping them to ofer non-violent resistance. Several residents were bruised and
beaten by police, though not needing medical attention. One woman demonstrator was
detained by police. The police removed the residents’ property into prepared containers,
and bulldozers demolished the residential buildings and sheepfolds and destroyed the
residents’ fruit orchards and olive tree groves.
The villagers, mostly children and old people, were left stunned near the destroyed village,
shelterless and waterless under the blazing sun.
The destruction of the village was carried out despite dispute over ownership of the land still
pending in the courts. Residents of al-Arakib are neither squatters nor invaders: their village
has existed many years before the creation of Israel in 1948. Residents had been evicted by
the state in 1951, but returned to the land on which they live and which they cultivate.
Ownership of the land is now the subject of proceedings in the Be’er Sheva District Court,
where academic researchers have already testified in confirmation of the residents’
ownership right in the land.
The destruction’s declared aim is to facilitate plans by the Jewish National Fund to plant a
wood on the site. We regard this demolition as a criminal act. Bedouin citizens of Israel are
not enemies, and forestation of the Negev is not a reasonable pretext for destroying a
community which is more than 60 years old, dispossessing its residents, and violating the
basic rights of hundreds of Israeli civilians, men, women and children.
This act by the state authorities is no “law enforcement” – it is an act of war, such as is
undertaken against an enemy. This act cannot be dissociated from yesterday’s statement by
Prime Minister Netanyahu, who at the cabinet meeting sounded a warning about a “situation
in which a demand for national rights will be made from some quarters inside Israel, for
example in the Negev, should the area be left without a Jewish majority. Such things
happened in the Balkans, and it is a real threat.” Presenting the Bedouin citizens of Israel as
“a real threat” gives legitimacy to the expulsion of Israel’s Bedouin citizens from the Negev in
order to “judaize” it. We call on all who care for democracy to give their support to this
threatened community.
Contact: Anwar: 052-271 4020 / Sayach: 052-725 7951 / Orry: 050-833 3116
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We arrived in the darkness. The horizon was blurred from the desert night sky and all that
could be seen was ruin. Piles of concrete, steel reinforcing bars and wood in places where the
village once sat. In this maze of construction material there were small makeshift living
spaces, barely suitable for the harsh desert climate. Simple tent structures consisting of four
wood shafts and a black tarp was the only remains of this village.
We, Israeli and international activists, were invited to sit in these tents through the night and
sip cofee in the cool desert night with the villagers. They told us about their livelihood now
that the village is constantly facing demolition. Some talked about their military service in the
Israeli army and their disbelief that the country they served could behave in such a way as to
destroy their entire village. Others expressed hope that at least some Israelis understood the
grave nature of their government and were standing arm in arm with them.
As the night closed and the light began to change, the first sounds of the demolition crew
could be heard far of in the distance. Before we had time to blink, 200 fully clad police
officers were on microphones telling us to leave and that any violence would be met with
harsher violence. As soon as the voices on the microphones stopped, the bulldozers began to
work. The place we had been sitting and having cofee through the night was leveled before
our groggy, disbelieving eyes. We barely had time to register the fact that the village was
being leveled, as the police began pushing us away from the living structures with extreme
force.
The demolition crew worked efficiently and without pause. Every structure that served some
form of life in the village was leveled and all the building materials from it were trucked
away. As we were pushed further from the village, a couple of activists tried to sit inside or in
front of the tents. This was met with violence by the police as people were thrown to the
ground like rag dolls. At one point in the chaos, a professor of medieval history at Tel Aviv
University was grabbed by a police officer, who quickly wrenched his hand behind his back.
The professor was held like this for a number of minutes and then arrested. It is still unclear
under what terms.
Finally, the police confined us to a hilltop and had us look over the village as it was
destroyed. The water canisters, which are needed because Israel refuses to give the villagers
water pipes, were broken and then placed on flat bed trucks to be carted away. The image of
massive bulldozers flanked by heavily armed riot police destroying makeshift Bedouin living
structures is something that no one would be able to forget. As soon as the forces left, the
villagers began rebuilding what little they have left. Every week, their resources shrink and
yet they rebuild. They have no choice.
All of the police officers and members of the demolition crew this morning were simply
following orders. It was another day for them and due to the Israeli cultural understanding of
the Bedouins and Palestinians as "nearly people," they will probably not lose a wink of sleep
this evening. However, the complete destruction of the village of al-Araqib is yet another
powerful example of the Israeli banality of evil.
Joseph Dana, a writer and filmmaker living in Jerusalem, is active in direct action groups such
as Taayush and the Anarchists Against the Wall. His website is josephdana.com.
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In theory, a municipality demolishing illegal structures on its land should not raise any
eyebrows. In practice, however, such a measure should be viewed in the context of the wider
politics of the locality – and when it comes to the tinderbox of Israeli-Palestinian afairs, the
Israeli authorities' actions should be seen for the provocative and spiteful behaviour that
they are.
Ending a nine-month freeze on demolitions of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, municipal
workers this week razed three houses in the area, provoking a storm of controversy both at
home and abroad. The freeze came about as a result of diplomatic outrage last time Israel
carried out demolitions in East Jerusalem during Hilary Clinton's visit to the region in March
2009 – actions described by Clinton as "unhelpful" and a violation of Israel's Road Map
commitments.
Since then, Israel has continued to flout agreements for a moratorium on illegal construction
in Israeli settlements, while continuing to pursue a hardline, heavy-handed approach towards
Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem. Evictions of Palestinian families to make way for
incoming settlers continue apace in Sheikh Jarrah; in Silwan, 22 homes are slated for
demolition so that a landscaped public garden can be developed; and throughout the
eastern half of the city nonstop pressure is applied as part of what activists term the policy of
"quiet transfer".
According to Angela Godfrey-Goldstein of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions,
the "quiet transfer" denotes the gradual wearing down of the Palestinians to the point that
they throw their hands up in despair, quit the area and head east. Housing permits are also
part of the quiet transfer, she says.
Much of East Jerusalem has been declared an "open green zone", preventing houses being
constructed, which in turn leads to a severe housing shortage in the region. Fewer houses
than people means that the cost of property soars, pricing the locals out of the market and
forcing them to seek cheaper accommodation on the other side of the security wall. Once
they leave, they rescind their rights to Jerusalem ID papers, destroying any hopes of
employment in Israel proper – efectively keeping them caged in the poverty of the West
Bank for ever.
Meanwhile, green lights are given to settler construction left, right and centre – a blatant
case of double standards, Godfrey-Goldstein points out. In the rare event that Israeli courts
condemn settlement buildings as illegal – such as Bet Yehonatan in Silwan – eviction orders
are ignored by the settlers and unenforced by the authorities, proving the duplicity of the
municipality when it comes to building violations by those on either side of the political
divide.
On top of the awful implications for the families made homeless by the bulldozers this week,
the demolitions are another blow to Israeli-Palestinian relations. The destruction of the
homes in Issawiya and Bet Hanina are as clear a sign as any that Israeli leaders care little for
concessions and compromise, preferring to make quick political capital on the domestic front
by kowtowing to the ultra-nationalists in their midst.
Israeli politicians have been treading such a path for months, their resolve strengthened by
the toothless international response to their flouting of both international law and basic
moral codes.
Nir Barkat, Jerusalem's incumbent mayor, famously dismissed Hilary Clinton's criticism of
home demolitions last year as "air", summing up the sneering and self-confident attitude of
the majority of those at the helm of Israeli politics.
Unfortunately, it is not hard to see where their arrogance stems from: for years, no American
or European leader has dared match their angry words with concrete actions, such as
sanctions against Israel.
Despite all the hype surrounding Barack Obama's accession to the throne of American
politics, it is still business as usual in the relationship between the US and its client state in
the Middle East. Moves to deal sensibly and seriously with the issue of dividing Jerusalem
have stalled in line with every other major bone of contention – such as the issues of illegal
settlements, water rights in the West Bank and Palestinian refugees.
Against such a backdrop, Israel's resumption of demolition in East Jerusalem can be seen for
what it is: a brash statement of intent on both the micro and macro political levels.
"Judaising" East Jerusalem is a stated policy of numerous settler groups and their financial
and political backers, and every home demolition and family eviction expedites the process
of ethnic cleansing already embarked upon.
If nothing is done to stop the rot, the inevitable outcome will be a total breakdown in talks
between the two sides, likely sparking a wave of violent clashes in its wake.
The only way to prevent such a disastrous turn of events is for the US, EU and others to force
Israel's hand – for it is Israel who holds all the cards when it comes to negotiations. Anything
less will not do: time has all but run out to bring the two sides to the table, and the only
winners from the current status quo are the extremists. Israelis and Palestinians alike don't
deserve, nor can they aford, the consequences of another intifada, hence firm intervention
is a necessity.
Home demolitions are only the tip of the iceberg, but they are as combustible an issue as any
in terms of the political implications they engender. Israeli leaders have shown they couldn't
care less about the damage they are doing in both physical and emotional terms; it is high
time that they were made to care, for the sake of all parties concerned.
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Angela Godfrey-Goldstein, an Israeli peace activist, is Action Advocacy Officer with the Israeli
Committee Against House Demolitions (“ICAHD”) and has served on the Free Gaza
Movement’s media team since 2007.
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BRUSSELS, Jun 18 (IPS) - A leading Israeli supplier of warplanes used to kill and maim
civilians in Gaza is in the running for two new scientific research grants from the European
Union.
Israel's attacks on Gaza in late 2008 and 2009 provided its air force with an opportunity to
experiment with state-of-the-art pilotless drones such as the Heron. Although human rights
groups have calculated that the Heron and other drones killed at least 87 civilians during that
three-week war, EU officials have tentatively approved the release of fresh finance to the
Heron's manufacturer, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI).
Two projects involving IAI have recently passed the evaluation stages of a call for proposals
under the EU's multi-annual programme for research, which has been allocated 53 billion
euros (65.4 billion dollars) for the 2007-13 period.
The Union's executive arm, the European Commission, has confirmed that IAI is one of 34
Israeli "partners" involved in 26 EU-funded projects for information technology which are
under preparation.
Among the other Israeli firms being considered for such funding are Afcon, a supplier of
metal detectors to military checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territories, including the
Erez crossing between southern Israel and Gaza. Afcon was also awarded a contract in 2008
for installing a security system in a light rail project designed to connect illegal Israeli
settlements in East Jerusalem with the city centre.
Mark English, a Commission spokesman, said that the procedures relating to the projects
have not yet been completed. But the Israeli business publication Globes reported last
month that Israeli firms stand to gain 17 million euros from the latest batch of EU grants for
information technology. According to Globes, this will bring the amount that Israel has drawn
from the EU's research programme since 2007 to 290 million euros.
Israel is the main foreign participant in the EU's science programme. Officials in Tel Aviv say
they expect Israeli firms and research institutes will have received around 500 million euros
from the programme by the time of its conclusion.
Chris Davies, a British Liberal Democrat member of the European Parliament (MEP),
expressed anger at how the Commission's research department appears willing to rubber-
stamp new grants for Israeli companies. Such a "business-as-usual" approach is at odds with
tacit assurances from officials handling the EU's more general relations with Israel, he said.
In late 2008, the EU's 27 governments agreed to an Israeli request that the relationship
should be "upgraded" so that Israel could have a deeper involvement in a wide range of the
Union's activities. But work on giving formal efect to that agreement has stalled because of
the subsequent invasion of Gaza.
Approving EU finance for Israel Aerospace Industries "should be regarded as utterly
unacceptable, incoherent and outrageously naive," Davies told IPS. He argued that there
appears to be "no communication" between diferent sets of EU representatives on how
Israel should be handled. "Where's the joined-up thinking?" he asked.
While the European Commission claims that all of its scientific research cooperation with
Israel is civilian in nature, the Israeli government has been eager to publicise the almost
umbilical links between the country's thriving technology sector and its military. A brochure
titled 'Communications in Israel' published by its industry ministry earlier this year refers to a
"symbiosis" between the security and technology sectors in Israel. Several technology
breakthroughs - such as the invention of voice recognition devices for computers by the
Israeli army in the 1980s - have resulted from this "convergence", the brochure claims.
Other likely Israeli beneficiaries of the new round of EU funding do not conceal how they
have benefited from this convergence either. The Israeli subsidiary of SAP, the software
manufacturer, has issued publications about how it has provided specialist equipment for the
Israeli army. And both Emza and LiveU, two "start-up" companies, are examples of the
numerous makers of surveillance equipment in Israel that have seen their order books fill up
since the country tried to position itself as an indispensable part of the "war on terror"
declared by former U.S. president George W. Bush.
Marcel Shaton, head of the Israel-Europe Research and Development Directorate (ISERD) in
Tel Aviv, said that EU citizens should not have any qualms about financing Israeli arms
companies. "All research supports the arms industry," he said. "Non-military technology is
used for military purposes all over the world."
But Yasmin Khan, a specialist on the arms trade with the anti-poverty group War on Want,
said that the EU has been complicit in the occupation of Palestine through its support for
Israel's military industry.
She noted that drones made by IAI and other Israeli companies have been bought by several
European countries taking part in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. "The military industry is a
central point of the Israeli economy," she said. "The equipment it makes is sold as 'battle-
tested', which is a dark way of describing its use in the occupied (Palestinian) territories."
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That Luntz encountered indiference was not surprising. In recent years, several studies have
revealed, in the words of Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the
University of California at Davis, that “non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much
less attached to Israel than their elders,” with many professing “a near-total absence of
positive feelings.” In 2008, the student senate at Brandeis, the only nonsectarian Jewish-
sponsored university in America, rejected a resolution commemorating the sixtieth
anniversary of the Jewish state.
Luntz’s task was to figure out what had gone wrong. When he probed the students’ views of
Israel, he hit up against some firm beliefs. First, “they reserve the right to question the Israeli
position.” These young Jews, Luntz explained, “resist anything they see as ‘group think.’”
They want an “open and frank” discussion of Israel and its flaws. Second, “young Jews
desperately want peace.” When Luntz showed them a series of ads, one of the most popular
was entitled “Proof that Israel Wants Peace,” and listed ofers by various Israeli governments
to withdraw from conquered land. Third, “some empathize with the plight of the
Palestinians.” When Luntz displayed ads depicting Palestinians as violent and hateful, several
focus group participants criticized them as stereotypical and unfair, citing their own
Muslim friends.
Most of the students, in other words, were liberals, broadly defined. They had imbibed some
of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a
skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they
did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel. The only
kind of Zionism they found attractive was a Zionism that recognized Palestinians as deserving
of dignity and capable of peace, and they were quite willing to condemn an Israeli
government that did not share those beliefs. Luntz did not grasp the irony. The only kind of
Zionism they found attractive was the kind that the American Jewish establishment has been
working against for most of their lives.
Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox
world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel. And there are a great many liberals,
especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people,
Palestinians included. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in the younger
generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer
American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American
Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges
Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For
several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism
at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have
checked their Zionism instead.
Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral. If the leaders of groups like AIPAC and the
Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations do not change course,
they will wake up one day to find a younger, Orthodox-dominated, Zionist leadership whose
naked hostility to Arabs and Palestinians scares even them, and a mass of secular American
Jews who range from apathetic to appalled. Saving liberal Zionism in the United States—so
that American Jews can help save liberal Zionism in Israel—is the great American Jewish
challenge of our age. And it starts where Luntz’s students wanted it to start: by talking frankly
about Israel’s current government, by no longer averting our eyes.
Since the 1990s, journalists and scholars have been describing a bifurcation in Israeli society.
In the words of Hebrew University political scientist Yaron Ezrahi, “After decades of what
came to be called a national consensus, the Zionist narrative of liberation [has] dissolved into
openly contesting versions.” One version, “founded on a long memory of persecution,
genocide, and a bitter struggle for survival, is pessimistic, distrustful of non-Jews, and
believing only in Jewish power and solidarity.” Another, “nourished by secularized versions of
messianism as well as the Enlightenment idea of progress,” articulates “a deep sense of the
limits of military force, and a commitment to liberal-democratic values.” Every country
manifests some kind of ideological divide. But in contemporary Israel, the gulf is among the
widest on earth.
As Ezrahi and others have noted, this latter, liberal-democratic Zionism has grown alongside a
new individualism, particularly among secular Israelis, a greater demand for free expression,
and a greater skepticism of coercive authority. You can see this spirit in “new historians” like
Tom Segev who have fearlessly excavated the darker corners of the Zionist past and in jurists
like former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak who have overturned Knesset laws that
violate the human rights guarantees in Israel’s “Basic Laws.” You can also see it in former
Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s apparent willingness to relinquish much of the West Bank in
2000 and early 2001.
But in Israel today, this humane, universalistic Zionism does not wield power. To the contrary,
it is gasping for air. To understand how deeply antithetical its values are to those of Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, it’s worth considering the case of Effi Eitam.
Eitam, a charismatic ex–cabinet minister and war hero, has proposed ethnically cleansing
Palestinians from the West Bank. “We’ll have to expel the overwhelming majority of West
Bank Arabs from here and remove Israeli Arabs from [the] political system,” he declared in
2006. In 2008, Eitam merged his small Ahi Party into Netanyahu’s Likud. And for the 2009–
2010 academic year, he is Netanyahu’s special emissary for overseas “campus engagement.”
In that capacity, he visited a dozen American high schools and colleges last fall on the Israeli
government’s behalf. The group that organized his tour was called “Caravan for Democracy.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman once shared Eitam’s views. In his youth, he briefly
joined Meir Kahane’s now banned Kach Party, which also advocated the expulsion of Arabs
from Israeli soil. Now Lieberman’s position might be called “pre-expulsion.” He wants to
revoke the citizenship of Israeli Arabs who won’t swear a loyalty oath to the Jewish state. He
tried to prevent two Arab parties that opposed Israel’s 2008–2009 Gaza war from running
candidates for the Knesset. He said Arab Knesset members who met with representatives of
Hamas should be executed. He wants to jail Arabs who publicly mourn on Israeli
Independence Day, and he hopes to permanently deny citizenship to Arabs from other
countries who marry Arab citizens of Israel.
You don’t have to be paranoid to see the connection between Lieberman’s current views and
his former ones. The more you strip Israeli Arabs of legal protection, and the more you
accuse them of treason, the more thinkable a policy of expulsion becomes. Lieberman’s
American defenders often note that in theory he supports a Palestinian state. What they
usually fail to mention is that for him, a two-state solution means redrawing Israel’s border
so that a large chunk of Israeli Arabs find themselves exiled to another country, without
their consent.
Lieberman served as chief of staf during Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister. And when
it comes to the West Bank, Netanyahu’s own record is in its way even more extreme than his
protégé’s. In his 1993 book, A Place among the Nations, Netanyahu not only rejects the idea
of a Palestinian state, he denies that there is such a thing as a Palestinian. In fact, he
repeatedly equates the Palestinian bid for statehood with Nazism. An Israel that withdraws
from the West Bank, he has declared, would be a “ghetto-state” with “Auschwitz borders.”
And the efort “to gouge Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] out of Israel” resembles Hitler’s
bid to wrench the German-speaking “Sudeten district” from Czechoslovakia in 1938. It is
unfair, Netanyahu insists, to ask Israel to concede more territory since it has already made
vast, gut-wrenching concessions. What kind of concessions? It has abandoned its claim to
Jordan, which by rights should be part of the Jewish state.
On the left of Netanyahu’s coalition sits Ehud Barak’s emasculated Labor Party, but whatever
moderating potential it may have is counterbalanced by what is, in some ways, the most
illiberal coalition partner of all, Shas, the ultra-Orthodox party representing Jews of North
African and Middle Eastern descent. At one point, Shas—like some of its Ashkenazi ultra-
Orthodox counterparts—was open to dismantling settlements. In recent years, however,
ultra-Orthodox Israelis, anxious to find housing for their large families, have increasingly
moved to the West Bank, where thanks to government subsidies it is far cheaper to live. Not
coincidentally, their political parties have swung hard against territorial compromise. And
they have done so with a virulence that reflects ultra-Orthodox Judaism’s profound hostility
to liberal values. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Shas’s immensely powerful spiritual leader, has called
Arabs “vipers,” “snakes,” and “ants.” In 2005, after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon proposed
dismantling settlements in the Gaza Strip, Yosef urged that “God strike him down.” The
official Shas newspaper recently called President Obama “an Islamic extremist.”
Hebrew University Professor Ze’ev Sternhell is an expert on fascism and a winner of the
prestigious Israel Prize. Commenting on Lieberman and the leaders of Shas in a recent Op-Ed
in Haaretz, he wrote, “The last time politicians holding views similar to theirs were in power
in post–World War II Western Europe was in Franco’s Spain.” With their blessing, “a crude
and multifaceted campaign is being waged against the foundations of the democratic and
liberal order.” Sternhell should know. In September 2008, he was injured when a settler set
of a pipe bomb at his house.
Israeli governments come and go, but the Netanyahu coalition is the product of frightening,
long-term trends in Israeli society: an ultra-Orthodox population that is increasing
dramatically, a settler movement that is growing more radical and more entrenched in the
Israeli bureaucracy and army, and a Russian immigrant community that is particularly prone
to anti-Arab racism. In 2009, a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 53 percent of
Jewish Israelis (and 77 percent of recent immigrants from the former USSR) support
encouraging Arabs to leave the country. Attitudes are worst among Israel’s young. When
Israeli high schools held mock elections last year, Lieberman won. This March, a poll found
that 56 percent of Jewish Israeli high school students—and more than 80 percent of religious
Jewish high school students—would deny Israeli Arabs the right to be elected to the Knesset.
An education ministry official called the survey “a huge warning signal in light of the
strengthening trends of extremist views among the youth.”
America’s Jewish leaders should think hard about that rally. Unless they change course, it
portends the future: an American Zionist movement that does not even feign concern for
Palestinian dignity and a broader American Jewish population that does not even feign
concern for Israel. My own children, given their upbringing, could as easily end up among the
booers as among Luntz’s focus group. Either prospect fills me with dread.
In 2004, in an efort to prevent weapons smuggling from Egypt, Israeli tanks and bulldozers
demolished hundreds of houses in the Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip.
Watching television, a veteran Israeli commentator and politician named Tommy Lapid saw
an elderly Palestinian woman crouched on all fours looking for her medicines amid the ruins
of her home. He said she reminded him of his grandmother.
In that moment, Lapid captured the spirit that is sufocating within organized American
Jewish life. To begin with, he watched. In my experience, there is an epidemic of not
watching among American Zionists today. A Red Cross study on malnutrition in the Gaza
Strip, a bill in the Knesset to allow Jewish neighborhoods to bar entry to Israeli Arabs, an
Israeli human rights report on settlers burning Palestinian olive groves, three more
Palestinian teenagers shot—it’s unpleasant. Rationalizing and minimizing Palestinian
sufering has become a kind of game. In a more recent report on how to foster Zionism
among America’s young, Luntz urges American Jewish groups to use the word “Arabs, not
Palestinians,” since “the term ‘Palestinians’ evokes images of refugee camps, victims and
oppression,” while “‘Arab’ says wealth, oil and Islam.”
Of course, Israel—like the United States—must sometimes take morally difficult actions in its
own defense. But they are morally difficult only if you allow yourself some human
connection to the other side. Otherwise, security justifies everything. The heads of AIPAC
and the Presidents’ Conference should ask themselves what Israel’s leaders would have to do
or say to make them scream “no.” After all, Lieberman is foreign minister; Effi Eitam is touring
American universities; settlements are growing at triple the rate of the Israeli population;
half of Israeli Jewish high school students want Arabs barred from the Knesset. If the line has
not yet been crossed, where is the line?
What infuriated critics about Lapid’s comment was that his grandmother died at Auschwitz.
How dare he defile the memory of the Holocaust? Of course, the Holocaust is immeasurably
worse than anything Israel has done or ever will do. But at least Lapid used Jewish sufering
to connect to the sufering of others. In the world of AIPAC, the Holocaust analogies never
stop, and their message is always the same: Jews are licensed by their victimhood to worry
only about themselves. Many of Israel’s founders believed that with statehood, Jews would
rightly be judged on the way they treated the non-Jews living under their dominion. “For the
first time we shall be the majority living with a minority,” Knesset member Pinchas Lavon
declared in 1948, “and we shall be called upon to provide an example and prove how Jews
live with a minority.”
But the message of the American Jewish establishment and its allies in the Netanyahu
government is exactly the opposite: since Jews are history’s permanent victims, always on
the knife-edge of extinction, moral responsibility is a luxury Israel does not have. Its only
responsibility is to survive. As former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg writes in his remarkable
2008 book, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes, “Victimhood sets you free.”
This obsession with victimhood lies at the heart of why Zionism is dying among America’s
secular Jewish young. It simply bears no relationship to their lived experience, or what they
have seen of Israel’s. Yes, Israel faces threats from Hezbollah and Hamas. Yes, Israelis
understandably worry about a nuclear Iran. But the dilemmas you face when you possess
dozens or hundreds of nuclear weapons, and your adversary, however despicable, may
acquire one, are not the dilemmas of the Warsaw Ghetto. The year 2010 is not, as Benjamin
Netanyahu has claimed, 1938. The drama of Jewish victimhood—a drama that feels natural
to many Jews who lived through 1938, 1948, or even 1967—strikes most of today’s young
American Jews as farce.
But there is a diferent Zionist calling, which has never been more desperately relevant. It has
its roots in Israel’s Independence Proclamation, which promised that the Jewish state “will be
based on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew prophets,” and in
the December 1948 letter from Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and others to The New York
Times, protesting right-wing Zionist leader Menachem Begin’s visit to the United States after
his party’s militias massacred Arab civilians in the village of Deir Yassin. It is a call to recognize
that in a world in which Jewish fortunes have radically changed, the best way to memorialize
the history of Jewish sufering is through the ethical use of Jewish power.
For several months now, a group of Israeli students has been traveling every Friday to the
East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where a Palestinian family named the Ghawis
lives on the street outside their home of fifty-three years, from which they were evicted to
make room for Jewish settlers. Although repeatedly arrested for protesting without a permit,
and called traitors and self-haters by the Israeli right, the students keep coming, their
numbers now swelling into the thousands. What if American Jewish organizations brought
these young people to speak at Hillel? What if this was the face of Zionism shown to
America’s Jewish young? What if the students in Luntz’s focus group had been told that their
generation faces a challenge as momentous as any in Jewish history: to save liberal
democracy in the only Jewish state on earth?
“Too many years I lived in the warm embrace of institutionalized elusiveness and was a part
of it,” writes Avraham Burg. “I was very comfortable there.” I know; I was comfortable there
too. But comfortable Zionism has become a moral abdication. Let’s hope that Luntz’s
students, in solidarity with their counterparts at Sheikh Jarrah, can foster an uncomfortable
Zionism, a Zionism angry at what Israel risks becoming, and in love with what it still could be.
Let’s hope they care enough to try.
Peter Beinart is Associate Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New
York, a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, and Senior Political Writer for The Daily Beast.
His new book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, will be published in June.
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An Unsettled Issue
Israeli Settlement Construction Booms Despite Ban
By Juliane von Mittelstaedt in Jerusalem, 3rd September 2010
In Washington, the Israelis and Palestinians are discussing peace, but in the Jewish
settlements in the West Bank, construction is proceeding at full speed. A legal ban is being
ignored and the government is looking away. The thousands of new homes could hinder
reconciliation.
Officially, at least, this is the hour of diplomacy. For the first time in two years, Israelis and
Palestinians are meeting for direct peace talks. United States President Barack Obama has
invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud
Abbas to Washington. Settlement construction is one of the most sensitive issues at the
talks.
It's also an issue where the fronts are growing increasingly tense. "As far as we are
concerned, we will continue building after we have buried our dead," Naftali Bennett, the
general director of the settlers' association Yesha said hours before the start of peace talks.
Just a short time after his announcement, the settlers began erecting several symbolic
settlements in the West Bank. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, Bennett had threatening
words. "It is not good enough that the moratorium will end on Sept. 26," he said. "Ehud
Barak needs to act to approve 3,000 new housing units -- 1,500 of them right now."
The message is clear: After Hamas terrorists shot four Israelis near Hebron, the settlers no
longer want to adhere to the 10-month construction stop that expires at the end of
September. An army commander told the newspaper Maariv that the settlers threatened to
"flood" the West Bank "with thousands of homes." He said he was concerned that dozens of
cement mixers would drive in at night to pour the walls and that there was nothing the
military could do to stop it.
And why should they if they have the impression that the government doesn't even support
the moratorium?
Construction work could soon begin again in 57 settlements. The peace talks that began on
Thursday with an official reception thrown by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won't
change that. After all, construction of settlements also continued during previous rounds of
peace talks. From the start of the Oslo peace process in the 1990s until today, the number of
Israeli settlers living in the West Bank has tripled -- growing from 110,000 to more than
300,000 people living in 121 settlements and 100 outposts. In addition to that there are
200,000 more settlers in East Jerusalem.
The Land Is Practically Free
Construction may even proceed at a faster pace than before. In the West Bank, there are few
signs that the moratorium has even been put in place. In dozens of settlements, excavators
and cement mixers are a regular sight, and Palestinians work in temperatures of 40 degrees
Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). Around 2,000 homes are currently under construction --
and in most cases, work had begun shortly before or after the start of the moratorium.
One such place is Anatot, a settlement near Jerusalem, that is dotted with flower beds, trees,
cute street signs at every entranceway and a street lamp every few meters. Anatot is the
perfect suburban idyll. And it's just one of many settlements where inhabitants can quickly
forget that they are settlers.
Now there are plans to expand Anatot. A new neighborhood is being erected with 70
apartments, as the construction manager proudly states. The settlement is being expanded
by one-third from its current population of around 200 families.
A few of the new homes have already been completed. They're attractive cubes build of
creamy white Jerusalem sandstone. A colorful sign at the entrance to Anatot advertises
"cottages with quality of life." It's a dream that costs 1.02 to 1.4 million shekel (around
€280,000) -- less expensive than a small apartment in West Jerusalem. The construction in
the West Bank is massively subsidized by Israel. The land is practically free. After all, it is
"state" land. The development costs are paid by the state, and the residents get afordable
loans.
Nevertheless, construction is not actually permitted here. The building project is not
included in the list of 490 "legal exceptions" which the government managed to make to the
settlement moratorium.
The Moratorium 'Was a Fiction Right from the Outset'
"The construction boom here began shortly before the building freeze," says Dror Etkes, who
is perhaps the Israeli who knows the most about the settlements. For years he has been
documenting settlement construction and submitting complaints against illegal projects.
Etkes is sure that active construction is taking place in at least 46 out of 120 settlements.
Building projects have only actually been frozen in five settlements, he says. Even
government inspectors have found violations of the moratorium in 29 settlements. So far,
however, no construction firm has been called to account over those violations. That is
despite the fact that the building freeze, for the first time in Israeli history, is not just a
"political" requirement, but is actually enshrined in law -- meaning that any violation should
be legally punished.
Additionally, infrastructure projects are not included in the building moratorium. As a result,
a number of sewage treatment plants and water reservoirs are being built in settlements --
including on Palestinian land. In Beitar Illit, a new road is being built.
Neither were the associated financial incentives -- the only reason that many Israelis choose
to live in the West Bank -- afected by the moratorium. Those benefits include cheap loans,
subsidized rents, tax breaks and countless other perks, all of which could easily be cancelled.
"The diference between the level of construction before and during the moratorium is
much, much less than the settlers claim," says Etkes. "It's not just that the building freeze has
been undermined -- it was a fiction right from the outset." One of the consequences, he says,
has been that construction activities have become even more focused on the eastern
settlements -- in other words, those small, isolated and often radical settlements that would
need to be evacuated if a peace agreement were reached. It is expected that the inhabitants
of those settlements would defend themselves with force against such a move.
'Building Freeze Is More Harmful than Useful'
Construction work is also going on in Kfar Adumim. The settlement is significantly larger than
the norm -- 2,700 people live here in the hills between Jerusalem and Jericho. Among them
are two members of the Knesset, the two hardliners Aryeh Eldad and Uri Ariel. 30 houses are
to be built here and 50 Palestinian workers are employed on the site. One man, who is busy
laying bathroom tiles, says they started work a month before the building freeze came into
force. In the beginning, they had 300 men working at full speed to lay as many foundations
as possible in the short time.
Etkes sees the circumventing of the building freeze here as a "classic example of the
cooperation between the settlers and the government": Some of the foundations were
hastily laid before the building freeze came into force, some afterwards -- but nobody
bothers to police it. "The building freeze was discussed for half a year, that was enough time
for all parties to prepare."
This is no diferent from other settlements. Once the moratorium comes to an end, the
settlers immediately begin to build. Or, if they do not need housing right away, they can save
the foundations as a "reserve" in case of future building freezes. In addition, dozens of
settlers' organizations have submitted building applications to local authorities that could be
approved in the coming months.
The tiler will not give his name because he is afraid of losing his job, which pays him a
minimum of about €30 a day. But he did say that many of his colleagues began work on the
site two days before the construction moratorium in the settlements came into force. He also
said that building work is still going on in Har Homa in Bethlehem, even though the building
freeze is in force there. Carpenters work at night so as not to draw so much attention.
With Each Project, the Future Clearing of Settlements Becomes More Difficult
Whether that bothers the man as a Palestinian? "What should we do? As long as they are
allowed to carry on building here, we'll be here too," he says with a shrug. It is the
pragmatism of those who do not believe the Israelis will be leaving the West Bank anytime
soon. It is the same almost everywhere near Jerusalem. But what about the isolated
settlements, with those near Nablus, near the Jordan Valley, near Hebron. "It's a similar
situation," says Etkes.
Ten apartments here, 40 there. In no other place are the projects as massive as at Ramat
Shlomo, the Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem where, earlier this year, 1,600 new
apartments were approved -- just as US Vice President Joe Biden was travelling to Israel. The
Americans were irritated and insisted that the Israelis obide by the construction moratorium.
But even small projects bring with them thousands of new settlers -- and with each, the later
clearing of settlements becomes even more difficult. And without clearing the settlements
there can be no viable Palestinian state.
All it takes is a few figures from Israel's statistical office to determine that no reduction of
construction activity worth of mention has taken place. Israel's Channel 10 TV, for example,
has reported that 8,000 Israelis either moved to the West Bank or have been born there in
the past six months. Projected over the remaining months of 2010, that would be 16,000
people. In recent years -- without the construction moratorium -- the average growth rate
was 5.5 percent, which with 300,000 settlers in the West Bank, would mean an annual
increase of around 16,500 people. "In other words, the much-discussed construction
moratorium has brought us 500 fewer settlers," Etkes says.
'At the End of the Day, There Will Be Another 1,000 Homes'
For the Palestinians, the time elapsed since the start of the construction moratorium hasn't
been a good one. According to Human Rights Watch, the Israeli civil administration in West
Jordan has torn down a total of 267 Palestinian homes in recent months, more than ever
before. The homes had been built without permits, but that's the case with most new
Palestinian homes because they are hardly ever approved.
By contrast, says Etkes, he has no doubt that the homes in the settlement that have been
built illegally during the moratorium will, at least some of them, be legalized later. "At the
end of the day, there will still be another 1,000 homes more in the West Bank."
Photo Gallery: A Ban Won't Stop Them :
http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-58985.html
US Cash for Israeli Settlements: Making a Mockery of the Moratorium (07/23/2010) :
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,707691,00.html
Creeping Construction Boom: Jewish Settlements Threaten Viability of Palestinian State
(08/17/2009) :
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,643253,00.html
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