MCC Palestine Update #40
We received disappointing news the past week from our partner, the Applied Research Institute-Jerusalem (ARIJ). ARIJ staffer Nader Hreimat called to tell us that Israeli bulldozers had plowed under several acres of crops planted by farmers participating in an ARIJ- directed field study of what seed varieties can best thrive in rain-fed farming conditions. The farmers' land, it turned out, had been confiscated for the construction of a bypass road to connect illegal Israeli colonies in the Bethlehem area with Jerusalem. More land confiscation’s, more despair, less hope for a dismantling of illegal Israeli colonies and a just sharing of Palestine/Israel. To learn more about ARIJ's work, look up its website: http://www.arij.org/
Below are three pieces. The first, from the on-line journal Palestine Report, details conversations in the occupied territories about the possibilities of nonviolent direct action against the occupation. The second, by Israeli journalist Ran HaCohen, is a powerful analysis of occupation, terrorism, and their relationship. The final (third) piece is by a Palestinian staff member of Save the Children, reporting on his trip home to Nablus: unfortunately, his story is the daily reality for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
1. How to fight back
Joharah Baker
PalestineReport.org, 13 February 2002
ASK PALESTINIANS what they think of Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. and the answer will most likely be full of admiration and respect for the two activists. Some Palestinians have even memorized the famous phrase, “I have a dream…” coined by King in his fiery speech in August of 1963. In the same breath, however, most Palestinians will tell you that they do not have a Gandhi or King of their own nor do they think these men’s ideologies could ever be emulated in the Palestinian resistance movement.
The subject of non-violent resistance has recently become recurrent in Palestinian discourse, mostly among intellectuals, expatriates, politicians and internationals who have come to the Palestinian territories in solidarity with the Palestinian people and in protest of the ongoing Israeli occupation.
As Palestinians enter the 17th month of the Palestinian uprising, local and international individuals and groups are thinking up alternative ways to fight the injustices of the occupation without shedding so much blood. “Our tools of resistance have been wrong,” contends Haidar Abdel Shafi, former Palestinian negotiator and head of the Palestine Red Crescent Society. “It is wrong if we think we can win militarily - it is not realistic.”
But Abdel Shafi does not say that the Intifada must take on completely nonviolent methods, for the simple reason that he believes fire must be fought with fire. “You can fight through armed struggle,” he says. “If an armed settler comes to take your land or home by force you can meet him with arms. This is self-defense.”
He believes, however, that the armed struggle must draw a more direct cause and effect relationship between Israeli actions and the Palestinian response. Self-defense, Abdel Shafi says, must be focused against Israeli actions such as home demolitions, the uprooting of trees and the overall Israeli goal of breaking the Palestinian will. This responsibility falls on the shoulders of the leadership, says the Palestinian personage.
When Abdel Shafi speaks of nonviolence, he speaks in terms of resistance through endurance. “[The leadership] must help the people to remain steadfast,” he says, since the battle will be long and difficult. This entails aiding the Palestinian people economically and with moral support in the face of the Israeli assault. But Abdel Shafi shuns the suggestion that Palestinian circumstances are comparable to that of the Indians under British colonialism when asked if those same nonviolent methods of civil disobedience could be incorporated into the Palestinian resistance. “The British were not in India as a colonial occupation,” he notes. “Their goals were economic.” In contrast, Palestinians are fighting a battle for their very survival, he points out.
Israeli intentions, implemented through settlement construction and making Palestinians illegal on the land, remain expansionist in nature. Fateh general secretary in the West Bank Marwan Barghouti also rules out substituting military actions with nonviolent demonstration. “An occupation that is so heavily armed cannot be answered with nonviolence,” he says definitively. But, he compromises, the Palestinians can and do utilize peaceful means in their struggle against Israeli occupation. “All resistance is legitimate for the Palestinians - strikes, sit- ins and conferences, alongside armed confrontations.”
Historically, the Palestinian revolution has never adopted nonviolent resistance as an ideology. From the start and with the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964, Palestinians pledged armed struggle against the usurpation of their land. Even when PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat made his dramatic appearance before the United Nations General Assembly in 1974, he made it clear that if forced, the Palestinians would continue their armed struggle against Israel. “I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun,” he told the international community. “Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”
With the continuation of Israeli occupation over Palestinian land captured in the 1967 War, Palestinians felt they had no other choice but to resist this occupation, a right enshrined in the Fourth Geneva Convention. As the Palestinian leadership in exile continued to support armed struggle against Israel, some voices emerged inside the occupied territories calling for a less violent approach.
In the early eighties, a soft-spoken Palestinian-Christian by the name of Mubarak Awad began to address Palestinians on the virtues of nonviolent resistance. In 1985, two years before the outbreak of the first Intifada, Awad started the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence. Although Awad’s views found a limited audience among Palestinians, they were never fully implemented. Israel, however, saw the activist as a threat. In June 1988, Awad was deported and settled in the United States where he set up an organization called Nonviolence International. Awad’s views did not get the widespread support that he had been hoping for among his fellow Palestinian citizens.
Today, Awad attributes this to his people’s lack of knowledge and understanding of nonviolence ideologies. “In the Arab mind, nonviolence is just surrendering to the one who has more power,” he told a Canadian interviewer.
But during the uprising of 1987, there were tangible signs that Palestinians were exercising some of the general concepts of non- violent resistance. The underground leadership of the Intifada called on Palestinians to boycott Israeli goods and work towards self- sufficiency by planting their own gardens. Neighborhood committees popped up throughout the different Palestinian cities, villages and camps, teaching children whose schools had been shut down and showing housewives how to can their own tomatoes, make their own pickles and knit their own sweaters.
But it was in the town of Beit Sahour near Bethlehem that the residents showed the most determination to fight the occupation using nonviolent means. In 1988, the residents not only boycotted Israeli goods, but started a town-wide refusal to pay Israeli taxes. As their civil disobedience continued, Israel raided Beit Sahour, seizing cars, refrigerators, televisions and other properties.
That movement and its tactics never spread to other areas and eventually died off. Its memory, however, has not. As Palestinians and the outside world assess the approaches of the current Intifada, Beit Sahour is an experience that has not been forgotten. “I think this is a more courageous act than shooting at Gilo [Israeli settlement],” says Italian European Union parliamentary member Louisa Morgantini. “Their act of civil disobedience had a very strong effect in the first Intifada.” Morgantini does not deny that Palestinians have the right to resist the occupation. However, she feels that shooting, even at Israeli military targets, will not bring about positive results. “There is no strategy in this Intifada,” she says, mirroring Abdel Shafi’s thoughts. “The Intifada came as a reaction; people were fed up.” She says that the leadership must think in political terms of what could help the struggle, which she adds regretfully, has not happened in this uprising.
Morgantini still expresses hope that nonviolent tactics could eventually take over the guerilla activity prevalent in this Intifada. As part of an international campaign in support of the Palestinians, Morgantini has forced herself through Israeli checkpoints, brought down roadblocks and--along with Israeli peace activists--broken through the blockade around President Yasser Arafat to meet with him in his Ramallah headquarters. Still, she does not romanticize her actions and knows that the real beneficiary of these protests will be the audience in her own country. “We know that when we open a roadblock, the Israeli soldiers will come and close it again,” she says realistically. “But we were there and we take this back to our own countries and try to put pressure back home.”
She believes these kinds of supportive activities are important because Palestinians are less at risk when internationals are involved. Israeli soldiers are more wary of shooting live ammunition into a crowd when there are Europeans, Americans or Israelis among the Palestinian protestors. But she does not blame the current atmosphere on Palestinians alone. She believes that developing a culture of nonviolence is a matter of concern for the whole world--not just Palestinians. At this moment in time, she says, the world is far from this goal. “The culture in Europe and in the US is a culture of war not of peace,” she says. Besides, she continues, the world demands too much of Palestinians. “Everyone in the world asks of the Palestinians - who are the most oppressed - to be perfect. I don’t ask that.”
Other foreigners engaged in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are more passionate about the option of nonviolent resistance on the ground. In an article published on the website Palestine Chronicle, American writer Paul Larudee says in simple terms why nonviolent resistance should be given a chance in the Palestinian uprising. “It is not that violence or even certain types of violence are immoral or that nonviolence is somehow nobler. It is that violent resistance plainly is not getting the job done,” he writes. By obeying Israeli soldiers at the checkpoints and producing their identification cards on demand, he says, Palestinians are following the rules laid down by the occupier. “The power of an occupier, an oppressor or a government is its ability to control a population. In order to do so, the people must consent to be controlled. Once this consent is removed, the occupier is powerless,” Larudee writes.
On the ground, these ideas seem to be taking root within a limited circle. The International Solidarity Movement - a group of international, Israeli and Palestinian activists - come together periodically to protest the ongoing Israeli occupation and to show their support for the Palestinian struggle for freedom. According to their press material, they break through roadblocks, stop tanks, rebuild demolished homes and peacefully protest unjust Israeli measures. Their coordinated actions are based on the idea that without internationals among them, Palestinians would be much more vulnerable to Israeli violence. But according to some Palestinians, what is needed more than a shift to nonviolent methods of resistance is a reorganization of strategies for this resistance. If this were accomplished, the resistance would develop a life of its own, they say. “We can tolerate and endure suffering much longer and much better than the Israelis,” says Abdel Shafi confidently. The battle, he argues, is an extended one and Palestinians need better planning to persevere. “I think the Palestinian people are a miracle,” says Louisa Morgantini. “I don’t understand how they can continue to resist such aggression - how do they not explode.”- Published 13/2/02© 2002 Palestine Report.
2. Letter From Israel
Ran HaCohen
Antiwar.com, 15 February 2002
http://www.antiwar.com/hacohen/h-col.html
Terrorism vs. Occupation > >Readers very often accuse me that I do not write about Palestinian terrorism against Israel. A typical reader writes: "if Israeli gunmen were going in Palestinian pizza places, weddings, buses, discos, shoe stores and deliberately massacring Palestinian civilians, Ran HaCohen would go on a tirade against Israel. Yet he remains silent on Arab terrorism against Israeli civilians." I would like to relate to this accusation. But before doing that, let me pay a small tribute to a brave Israeli soldier who refuses to serve in the occupied territories any longer.
The Tel-Aviv weekly "Ha'Ir" last week printed forty short evidences of such refusers; here is one of them. Not the most shocking one. The harder stuff sometimes makes it to the news. But it illustrates some of the daily, banal routines of occupation, countless similar scenes that take place every day, every night, in endless variations. And they all count as "no news".
A SOLDIER'S STORY "Jabaliya (a refugee camp near Gaza). Terrible heat. It's after midnight, we are on our way to arrest "wanted people" - small criminals and tax-evaders whom the Shin Bet wants to blackmail. We surround the area and storm into the house. The officer quickly climbs the wall and I, his signalman, close behind him. We break into the "house": a single small room, blankets on the floor, four kids aged two to six or seven. They and the parents - a young woman and a not so young man - all wake up in panic, weeping and yelling. They are hysteric, and we, very young soldiers, too.
We shout at them to shut up and at the man to dress up, and "search" the home. There is nothing to find, nothing to look for. Handcuffs, and out to the lorry. Several arrested Palestinians have been gathered there, and someone from the Civil Administration is 'taking care' of them: slaps in the face, kicking. I want to say something, but off we go to the Shin Bet camp.
The man we have arrested is smashed at the lorry's floor, weeping, sobbing in fear, with a broken voice, 'I beg you, I beg you...'" (written by Sergeant (res.) Yotam Cohen)
ALTRUISM AND DISTRACTION Now back to why I don't write on terrorism. Surprisingly, this accusation comes mostly from American readers. At first I thought I should be grateful for this rare token of altruism: Are people living in the US actually more concerned about my well-being than I am?! But as all too often the complaints ended with such cordial blessing as "you racist anti-Semite", I gathered that pure altruism might not be the true motivation.
So why do people want me to talk about terrorism? Surely not because they know too little about it. As a mourning Palestinian mother said last week, international press would pay more attention to a Jewish settler's dog injured in a terrorist attack than to her dead child.
Terrorism is the most popular term in Middle East media coverage, and still people want me to talk about it too. So why? I believe it is because those people do not want me to talk about another term: occupation. Note how seldom this term is used when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is dealt with. In fact, when you hear someone say "terrorism" over and over again, you can be certain he won't use the term "occupation".
TERRORISM VS. OCCUPATION Terrorism and Occupation may look like twin brothers. Both are illegitimate: occupation is acknowledged by international law, but for a limited time, not for 35 years; resistance to occupation (which is what Palestinian terrorism is about) is legitimate too, but not when innocent people are targeted. Both are murderous: innocent Israelis fall victim to terrorism, innocent Palestinians fall victim to occupation.
Terrorism is pervasive: it threatens all Israelis;
Occupation is even more pervasive: all Palestinians are under occupation, and as we have seen above, while terrorism can get Israelis in pizza places or discos, occupation visits Palestinians in bed, either by a missile or because some Shin Bet agent wants to blackmail them into collaboration.
Needless to say, the number of Palestinian victims of the occupation overwhelmingly exceeds the number of Israeli victims of terrorism - if you like, one more reason to talk about occupation more than terrorism. Israel, especially since September 11th but even long before, has been trying to convince the world that the Palestinian Authority, not just individual Palestinians, is engaged in terrorism.
True or not, the uncontroversial reality is that the State of Israel, not individual Israelis, is running the occupation. Israel sometimes claims that the occupation has been forced upon it against its will. It is one of the most ridiculous claims I have ever heard, but this is actually what Ehud Barak's celebrated "analytical mind" was trying to sell us: that because he had supposedly made some "generous offers" to the Palestinians, and because they had supposedly rejected these offers, Israel could not stop the occupation. Sounds ridiculous? Ask some Israel fans and you'll see how seriously they take this joke.
WHY OCCUPATION? The simple fact is that Israel is occupying the territories because it wants to occupy them. It does not withdraw from them, because it wants to take the land for settlements, for water and for regional strategic considerations. It does not annex them, because it does not want to give citizenship to three million Palestinians. Occupation is the only way to satisfy both aims. It may be direct occupation, it may be an indirect one: in fact, Israel is generously offering the Palestinians both options. Israel's present message to Arafat is expressed clearly and shamelessly: either you comply with the occupation, or we replace you with some other "leaders" who will. Shimon Peres prefers the former option, Sharon prefers the latter. They both support the occupation, they have both done more than any other Israeli politician for the sake of the Israeli settlements, they differ in tactics but share the same cause.
ENLIGHTENED OCCUPATION Centuries of colonialism have proved that "an enlightened occupation" is a contradiction is terms. Occupation cannot be tolerable and therefore cannot be tolerated. Expecting a people to live without political rights is both unreasonable and immoral. The occupied Palestinians, in order to get rid of the occupation, use violence - verbal violence, physical violence, violence against soldiers and settlers and deplorable violence against innocent people. Thus, the occupation becomes ever more violent and the deprivation of political rights is inevitably followed by violations of human rights.
You cannot oppress one people for the sake of another without resorting to atrocities. It starts with exploiting one's weakness (a sick elderly mother, a sick child) to blackmail one into collaboration, it goes all the way through torture, siege, starving and killing and it ends in letting a pregnant woman die with her infant at a checkpoint. As Friedrich Schiller said, this is the curse of the evil deed: it inevitably gives birth to ever more evil.
Indeed, Palestinian terrorism has increased step by step with occupation; the cruelest stage of occupation, with the whole world singing the praises of Oslo while the settlements were expanding rapidly and the canonization of the territories by checkpoints and highways was advancing in an unprecedented high pace, gave birth to the appalling phenomenon of Palestinians whose despair had overwhelmed them to the point of being ready to die in order to kill their oppressors. Just like the 200,000 settlers, just like the hundreds of checkpoints, the suicide bombers haven't always been there: they emerged in a specific historical context.
HOW TO STOP TERRORISM So why don't I talk of terrorism? Because Palestinian Terrorism is not the Occupation's twin brother, but rather its murderous offspring. Like father, like son. Terrorism is horrible; but occupation too, and the former is the result of the latter. To stop the circle of violence, to stop terrorism, the occupation must stop first. Since a one-state solution seems unlikely under the present circumstances, Israel must end the occupation by withdrawing all its forces, dismantling all its settlements and letting the Palestinians establish a true independent state in the entire territories occupied in 1967.
This is the only way to uproot terrorism, not bulldozing the Gaza strip or aiming a cannon at imprisoned Arafat's head. Talking of terrorism has become a way to keep silent about occupation. This is what some readers want me to do: to stop talking about occupation and to talk about terrorism instead. Sorry, guys: talking about Palestinian terrorism will not save anyone's life. It's talking about occupation that will hopefully bring both occupation and terrorism -in this order - to an end.
3. Dear all,
Although you might be experiencing something similar every day, the story of my trip home yesterday is something I want to share with you. After 2 days of not being able to get to Nablus, where I live with my family, I thought obeying Israeli army orders to be back at the checkpoint before 16:00 hours will help me reach home. So I shortened my working day and was able to reach the entry checkpoint of Huwara at 15:00.
An Ethiopian soldier rudely shouted at me and told me that I did not have the right to enter the city. His colleague supported him and threatened violence if I did not leave the area. Of course I called Rania [SC’s Program/Admin. Assistant] so that she could contact the appropriate people to facilitate my journey home.
Obviously, this level of coordination has become tiresome to Palestinian professionals always asking for better treatment; and when none of the phone calls to the IDF Civil Administration paid off by 16:15, I decided to try another entry point.
At the other entry point (Awarta), a Russian soldier was again denying the right of the locals to reach their families at the other side of the checkpoint. Interesting! Witnessing all that from my viewpoint and in order to save time, I decided to park the car at Huwara village and walk through Till. On my way to park the car, I encountered a flying checkpoint with other Ethiopian soldiers blocking the way for another 30 minutes and after parking the car, I joined a group of pharmacists to walk through Till.
When I reached Till, it was already dark and there was no one around. Even the donkey Othman [SC’s EEGP Project Manager who is also from the North] used earlier this morning was tired and he ended his day. As a result, I had to walk 13 kms through the mountains to reach the first point to get a taxi home. On our way, fearing the soldiers above the hill on the left side, we were listening to Israeli soldiers singing songs in different languages and this helped keep us calm.
I felt really angry that somebody all the way from Ethiopia or Russia has the nerve to stand at the door of my house and prevent me from reaching Nasha`at (my 4 -year old son) and his mother. On the lighter side, the walk through Till was good exercise. The walk had obviously increased the level of endorphins (hormones that the body produces and have a similar effect as morphine) in my blood and when I reached home, I was in a good mood.
This is my story for today! Enjoy it.
Ali
Saturday, February 16
Thursday, February 7
MCC Palestine Update #39
MCC Palestine Update #39
The drive from Jerusalem to Hebron was surprisingly smooth, only thirty minutes while the same road several weeks before had taken one hour. In the fragmented, canontized reality that is the West Bank, accessibility varies greatly. Hebron and Jericho, for example, have been open for the past week or two, with fewer restrictions on Palestinian movement imposed by the Israeli military. In the north, however, travel to and between cities such as Nablus and Tulkarem proves challenging to impossible.
The reason for this trip was to attend the graduation of 40 women from a backyard gardening course organized by the Union of Agricultural Work Committees in Beit Kahl village next to Hebron. In addition to giving the women skills in providing food for their families in a time of rampant unemployment, the course also meant a carton (24 cans) of MCC canned beef for each graduate. MCC has done very little material relief in Palestine since the 1950s and plans to do very little in the future; unfortunately, however, the 18 months of siege in the West Bank have pushed unemployment in the Hebron district to 70 or so percent. So when MCC in Akron had some extra canned beef, MCC in Palestine offered to distribute it through the Union's food-for-work and food-for-training program. It is our sincere hope that the need for such programs will soon disappear.
Below are four pieces. The first, by Hebrew University professor Baruch Kimmerling, updates Emile Zola's "J'accuse!" for today. The second, by Ha'aretz journalist Amira Hass, provides a poignant reminder to all who preach the path of nonviolence to Palestinians: yes, nonviolence may in fact be the most "effective" form of resistance, we can note how counterproductive Palestinian violence has been, but we must also recognize that mass nonviolent action (and even limited nonviolent action) by Palestinians against the occupation would most likely be met with violence. That does not make nonviolence wrong, of course, but provides a sober reminder to those of us in relative comfort and safety who would advise others to use nonviolence. The third piece, by a Christian Science Monitor reporter, gives a chilling overview of what is becoming increasingly respectable within Israeli political discourse: discussion of the "transfer" of Palestinians from the "Land of Israel." Could this horrifying discourse be translated into reality? Finally, four, Edward Said provides more of his typically astute analysis of the current moment in Palestine/Israel.
1. I Accuse
Baruch Kimmerling
Kol Ha'Ir (Israeli Hebrew Weekly), 1 February 2002
I accuse Ariel Sharon of creating a process in which he will not only intensify the reciprocal bloodshed, but is liable to instigate a regional war and partial or nearly complete ethnic cleansing of the Arabs in the "Land of Israel."
I accuse every Labor Party minister in this government of cooperating for implementation the right wing's extremist, fascist "vision" for Israel.
I accuse the Palestinian leadership, and primarily Yasir Arafat, of shortsightedness so extreme that it has become a collaborator in Sharon's plans. If there is a second Naqba (Palestinian Holocaust), this leadership, too, will be among the causes.
I accuse the military leadership, spurred by the national leadership, of inciting public opinion, under a cloak of supposed military professionalism, against the Palestinians. Never before in Israel have so many generals in uniform, former generals, and past members of the military intelligence, sometimes disguised as "academics," taken part in public brainwashing. When the judicial committee of inquiry is established to investigate the 2002 catastrophe, they too will have to be investigated alongside the civilian criminals.
I accuse the administrators of Israel's electronic media of giving various military spokespeople the access needed for an aggressive, bellicose, almost complete takeover of the public discourse. The military is not only controlling Jenin and Ramallah but the Israeli radio and television as well.
I accuse those people, of all ranks, who order the black flag hoisted above them, and those who follow their unlawful orders. The late philosopher Yeshayahu Leibovitz was right-the occupation has ruined every good part and destroyed the moral infrastructure upon which Israeli society exists. Let's stop this march of fools and build society anew, clean of militarism and oppression and exploitation of other people, if not worse.
I accuse everyone who sees and knows all of this of doing nothing to prevent the emerging catastrophe. Sabra and Shatilla events were nothing compared to what has happened and what is going to happen to us. We have to go out not only to the town squares, but also to the checkpoints. We have to speak to the soldiers in the tanks and the troop carriers-like the Russians spoke to their soldiers when they were ordered to retake control in Red Square-before entry into Palestinian cities turns into a murderous urban warfare.
And I accuse myself of knowing all of this, yet crying little and keeping quiet too often.
* Baruch Kimmerling is a professor of sociology at Hebrew University.
2. On the edge of the non-violent demonstrations
Amira Hass
Haaretz, 6 February 2006
If Israeli TV cameras had bothered to follow the Israeli peace activists from the coexistence group Ta'ayush last Saturday when they went to Ramallah, they could have provided Israelis an answer to the question of what the IDF would do if thousands of unarmed Palestinians marched on the army's positions.
Some 300 men and women from the Israeli group, which calls itself a Jewish-Arab partnership, met last Saturday in Ramallah with Yasser Arafat and central activists from Fatah, feminists, and representatives from Palestinian non-governmental organizations. After a meeting in Arafat's office, they went outside to demonstrate opposite the tanks poised on a hill outside the Palestinian government complex. They marched toward the tanks. They were not armed. Not with guns, stones, or even posters.
All they had was a single hand-held loudspeaker, and people aged from 17 to 75, 300 in all. They were exposed, open, and walked toward the soldiers, also Israelis, who hid inside four tanks and a single jeep. It would have been very difficult to think the soldiers weren't there, because they did what every IDF force in the territories does: They started their engines with a deafening noise, moved the cannon barrels up and down and left to right, as if aiming it at the demonstrators, issued white and black smoke from the engines, and rolled back and forth on the tank treads, those steel teeth that have chewed up the asphalt and sidewalks that European countries spent a lot of money improving.
It's doubtful the voice coming from the loudspeaker reached the soldiers. But they must have known that every person marching toward them was an Israeli. The IDF takes a great deal of pride in its sophisticated technology, which enables daylight or nighttime identification of sources of fire. That day in Ramallah, a pair of opera glasses would have sufficed for the soldiers in the tanks to know who was marching outside. Who knows, maybe they recognized a neighbor, or their older sister's philosophy teacher.
In fact, maybe the Hebrew voice reached the soldiers. The speaker, a Ph.D. in history, was emotional as he shouted "We invite the soldiers to come home." The rest of the marchers began chanting "Soldiers come home," and with perfect orchestration, the soldiers responded immediately with two stun grenades. Don't be afraid, said an Israeli woman with some experience in these kinds of events. That's nothing but noise. It's just meant to frighten us.
That's not exactly true. When a stun grenade falls inside a crowd, and not away from it, the way they are supposed to, it can burn, harm eyes, wound, even break a bone. Dozens of Palestinians who stood unarmed over the past year opposite soldiers have been wounded that way. During the last 16 months, the Palestinians tried dozens, if not hundreds, of times to hold non-violent demonstrations against IDF forces.
It's impossible to march on the settlements. Banks of tanks and machine guns, fortifications, reinforced outposts and roads for Jews only block direct access to the settlements. The IDF Spokesman's Office has spun a myth that every clash that ended with Palestinian casualties was a conflict between two armed sides.
IDF and Border Patrol troops have made clear innumerable times that any gathering of people opposite its forces is considered a dangerous "disturbance of the peace" that requires a response. Sometimes clubbing and violent dragging, then come the stun grenades, maybe tear gas, and very quickly firing live ammunition into the air and then shooting rubber-coated steel pellets into the crowd. The steel pellets are covered with a thin layer of rubber, sometimes it's live ammunition.
Sometimes the shooting starts before any of the demonstrators have managed to throw a stone. Often, the shooting is in response to stone-throwing by teenagers who hide behind improvised barricades. Sometimes they are shot in the head, sometimes the pellets strike protesters standing in albeit dangerous places, but dozens of meters away from the stone-throwers. To someone who has been at these non-violent demonstrations in recent months, it appears the IDF has long since gone past what was thought to be its limits. The Israelis that day in Ramallah decided not to test the limits, and dispersed on their own, going to their next meeting with the Palestinians.
For Palestinian activists to organize dozens of non-violent demonstrations that would march simultaneously toward IDF forces, they would need some guarantee that the soldiers wouldn't cross the red lines into mass murder. Only Israeli society can provide that guarantee. Israeli society must widen the circle of those asking about the nature of the IDF's activities in the territories captured in 1967. It must ask what its frightened and frightening children are doing at the checkpoints, before those children become casualties of the "Let me die with the Philistines" war. Israeli society must ask more and more questions about the IDF's rules of engagement and the money the government spends on developing the settlements and on the welfare of their residents, while its disabled citizens are left to live as beggars.
3. Israeli Expulsion Idea Gains Steam: The Moledet party's media blitz for the mass expulsion of Palestinians is gaining momentum.
Ben Lynfield
The Christian Science Monitor, 6 February 2001
Spurred on by public despair, Israeli advocates of a mass expulsion of Palestinians are gaining strength and legitimacy as the toll of Palestinian attacks inside Israel continues to rise.
Tourism Minister Benny Elon of the far-right Moledet party this week launched a campaign advocating "transfer," a euphemism for expulsion, which he says can also connote an agreed relocation of Palestinians.
In addition to Mr. Elon's push for transfer in a series of interviews on Israel's television channels and in major newspapers, Moledet has put up billboards in Tel Aviv saying that "Only transfer will bring peace."
The idea of a removal of Arabs - voluntary or otherwise - is almost as old as Zionism itself, but today it is taking on fresh legitimacy with the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the demise of the implicit bargain of land and eventual Palestinian statehood for peace.
Elon says that under conditions of war, Israel has the right to bring upon the Palestinians "another nakba," or catastrophe, similar to 1948, when an estimated 700,000 of them were expelled or fled during the Arab- Israeli war.
"There is great disappointment and confusion. People are saying we have had enough, we have seen wars and we have seen the Oslo agreement with all of its bloodshed," says Elon. "I want to
remind them of this platform and to remove the taboo from public discussion. It is intolerable that the Arabs should think that, every time, they can drain our blood and then we will negotiate with them."
The transfer idea is dismissed outright by Likud Justice Minister Meir Shetreet, who often reflects centrist Israeli opinion. "It is unacceptable to us in every form. We want to live with the Arabs in peace and quiet," he says.
But significantly, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has not repudiated the idea of a mass expulsion. Sharon, says his spokesman, would like to expel the Palestinians, but does not believe this can be carried out under the present conditions.
"There is a difference between wishful thinking and realpolitik," explains Sharon's spokesman, Ra'anan Gissin. "If the Palestinians would have a change of heart and move elsewhere, OK, but Sharon realizes transfer cannot be done because of the stance of the Israeli public. What Elon is saying is not something that today seems possible."
Mr. Sharon appeared to endorse mass expulsions of Palestinians in October. In a Knesset speech, he lauded assassinated Tourism Minister Rehavam "Gandhi" Zeevi of Moledet, whose career was based on the transfer idea, as a true heir of Zionist founding fathers and vowed: "Gandhi, we will be victorious."
Ha'aretz newspaper called on Sharon Sunday to expel Elon from the coalition or else be tainted by "the disgrace of the transfer idea."
Intensified espousal of extremist solutions on the right is coinciding with increasingly strident voices at the other end of the political spectrum: doves who argue that it is the Jewish settlers, not the Palestinians, who should leave the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
They have been boosted by a protest letter from 50 reserve officers and soldiers who announced two weeks ago that they would refuse to serve in the West Bank and Gaza Strip because of moral difficulties with army practices.
Dozens more have since signed on to the letter, which derides the fighting as "the war for the peace of the settlements."
According to Israeli media, the number of soldiers refusing to serve had reached 147 at the start of the week. A Likud minister, Tzahi Hanegbi, has called for the soldiers to be stripped of their ranks and released from the army.
The heightened espousal of the "transfer" idea also parallels a surge of extremism within Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement and an increase in Palestinian support for Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement that advocates Israel's replacement by an Islamic state.
Mr. Elon is part of a seven-member bloc in the Knesset known as the National Union-Israel Beiteinu, among whose legislators statements of sympathy for the idea of expelling Arabs have been increasing in recent months. Right-wing rabbis allied to the settler movement have also issued a series of writings advocating expulsions and, in one case, leveling entire Palestinian villages as a deterrent to suicide bombings.
And within Sharon's Likud party, a plan has been put forward by legislator Michael Eitan to erect high fences around each of the Palestinian self-rule enclaves. "We are not talking about ghettos, people will be able to enter and exit through a security gate," explains Yossi Yair, an aide to Mr. Eitan.
Tom Segev, a left-wing commentator, says "the idea of transfer is very embedded in original Zionist ideology and was very much on the minds of some of the fathers of modern Israel, such as David Ben-Gurion. The idea has been very central, but usually it was not conceived of as violent."
He says Chaim Weizman, a Zionist leader prominent in the 1930s and 1940s, played with the idea of raising money to pay Arab leaders in Saudi Arabia to take the Palestinians in. The transfer idea receded after Israeli statehood and during and after the 1967 Middle East war there was a sense that the expulsions of 1948 should not be repeated, Segev says.
Segev says frequent Palestinian attacks against Israeli civilians since the latest confrontation broke out in Sept. 2000 "have made it legitimate for Israelis not only to hate Arabs but to wish them away. I'm afraid this idea does have a chance to catch on."
Sharon, he says, "is capable of initiating transfer as part of a war. He can expel whole populations. He will say this is necessary and that the Arabs brought it on themselves."
But Hebrew University political scientist Yaron Ezrachi, pointing to the letter of the army reservists, says there is "no way" a mass expulsion could be carried out. "They won't have an army to do it. Even if only 10 percent of the soldiers refused, it would paralyze the army."
4. The screw turns, again
Edward Said,
Al-Ahram Weekly, 31 Jan. – 6 Feb. 2002
http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2002/571/op2.htm
It falls to the victim to show new paths of resistance, writes Edward Said
History has no mercy. There are no laws in it against suffering and cruelty, no internal balance that restores a people much sinned against to their rightful place in the world. Cyclical views of history have always seemed to me flawed for that reason, as if the turning of the screw means that present evil can later be transformed into good. Nonsense.
Turning the screw of suffering means more suffering, and not a path to salvation. The most frustrating thing about history, however, is that so much in it escapes language, escapes attention and memory altogether. Historians have therefore resorted to metaphors and poetic figures to fill in the spaces. And this is why the first great historian, Herodotus, was also known as the Father of Lies: so much in what he wrote embellished and, to a great extent also, concealed the truth. That it is the powers of his imagination that make him so great a writer, not the vast number of facts he deployed.
Living in the United States at this moment is a terrible experience. While the main media and the government echo each other about the Middle East, there are alternative views available through the Internet, the telephone, satellite channels, and the local Arabic and Jewish press. Nevertheless, so far as what is readily available to the average American is drowned in a storm of media pictures and stories almost completely cleansed of anything in foreign affairs but the patriotic line issued by the government, the picture is a startling one. America is fighting the evils of terrorism. America is good, and anyone who objects is evil and anti-American. Resistance against America, its policies, its arms and ideas is little short of terrorist.
What I find just as startling is that influential and, in their own way, sophisticated American foreign policy analysts keep saying that they cannot understand why the whole world (and the Arabs and Muslims in particular) will not accept the American message. And why the rest of the world, including Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, persists in its criticism of American policies in Afghanistan; for renouncing six international treaties unilaterally, for its total, unconditional support of Israel, for its astonishingly obdurate policy on prisoners of war. The difference between realities as perceived by Americans on the one hand and by the rest of the world on the other, is so vast and irreconcilable as to defy description.
Words alone are inadequate to explain how an American secretary of state, who presumably has all the facts at his command, can without a trace of irony accuse Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for not doing enough against terror and for buying 50 tons of arms to defend his people, while Israel is supplied with everything that is most lethally sophisticated in the American arsenal at no expense to Israel. (At the same time, it needs to be said that PLO handling of the Karine A incident has been incompetent and bungling beyond even its own poor standards.) Meanwhile, Israel has Arafat locked up in his Ramallah headquarters, his people totally imprisoned, leaders assassinated, innocents starved, the sick dying, life completely paralyzed -- and yet the Palestinians are accused of terrorism.
The idea, much less the reality, of a 35-year military occupation has simply slid away from the media and the US government alike. Do not be surprised tomorrow if Arafat and his people are accused of besieging Israel while blockading its citizens and towns. No, those are not Israeli planes bombing Tulkarm and Jenin, those are Palestinian terrorists wearing wings, and those are Israeli towns being bombed.
As for Israel in the US media, its spokesmen have become so practiced at lying, creating falsehoods the way a sausage-maker makes sausages, that nothing is beyond them. Yesterday, I heard an Israel Defense (even the name sticks in one's throat) Ministry official answering an American reporter's questions about house destruction in Rafah: those were empty houses, he said, without hesitation; they were terrorist nests used for killing Israeli citizens; we have to defend Israeli citizens against Palestinian terror. The journalist didn't even refer to the occupation, or to the fact that the "citizens" were settlers. As for the several hundred poor homeless Palestinians whose pictures appeared fleetingly in the US media after the (American-made) bulldozers had done their demolition, they were gone from memory and awareness completely.
As for the Arab non-response, that has exceeded in disgrace and shamefulness the already abysmally low standards set by our governments for the past 50 years. Such a callous silence, such a stance of servility and incompetence in facing the US and Israel is as astonishing and unacceptable in their own way as what Sharon and Bush are about. Are the Arab leaders so fearful of offending the US that they are willing to accept not only Palestinian humiliation but their own as well? And for what? Simply to be allowed to go on with corruption, mediocrity, and oppression. What a cheap bargain they have made between the furtherance of their narrow interests and American forbearance!
No wonder there is scarcely an Arab alive today for whom the word "regime" connotes more than amused contempt, unadulterated bitterness, and (except for the circle of advisers and sycophants) angry alienation. At least with the recent press conferences by high Saudi officials criticizing US policy towards Israel there is a welcome break in the silence, although the disarray and dysfunction concerning the upcoming Arab summit continues to add to our already well-stocked cupboard of poorly-managed incidents that demonstrate needless disunity and posturing.
I do think that the adjective "wicked" is the correct one here for what is being done to the truth of the Palestinian experience of suffering imposed by Sharon on the West Bank and Gaza collectively. That it cannot adequately be described or narrated. That the Arabs say and do nothing in support of the struggle., That the US is so terrifyingly hostile. That the Europeans are (except for their recent declaration, which has no measures of implementation in it) so useless. All this has driven many of us to despair, I know, and to a kind of hopeless frustration that is one of the results aimed for by Israeli officials and their US counterparts. To reduce people to the heedlessness of not caring anymore, and to make life so miserable as to make it seem necessary to give up life itself, comprise a state of desperation that Sharon clearly wants. This is what he was elected to do and what, if his policies fail, will cause him to lose his office, whereupon Netanyahu will be brought in to try to finish the same dreadful and inhuman (but ultimately suicidal) task.
In the face of such a situation, passivity and helpless anger -- even a kind of bitter fatalism -- are, I truly believe, inappropriate intellectual and political responses. Examples to the contrary still abound. Palestinians have neither been intimidated nor persuaded to give up, and that is a sign of great will and purpose. From that point of view, all Israel's collective measures and constant humiliation have proved ineffective; as one of their generals put it, stopping the resistance by besieging Palestinians is like trying to drink the sea with a spoon.
It just doesn't work. But having taken note of that, I also firmly believe that we have to go beyond stubborn resistance toward a creative one, beyond the tired old methods for defying the Israelis but not sufficiently advancing Palestinian interests in the process. Take decision-making as a simple case in point. It's all very well for Arafat to sit out his own imprisonment in Ramallah and to repeat endlessly that he wants to negotiate, but it just is not a political program, nor is its personal style sufficient to mobilize his people as well as his allies. Certainly it is good to take note of the European declaration in support of the PA, but surely it is more important to say something about the Israeli reservists who refused service on the West Bank and Gaza. Without identifying and trying to work in concert with Israeli resistance to Israeli oppression, we are still standing at square one.
The point, of course, is that every turning of the screw of cruel collective punishment dialectically creates a new space for new kinds of resistance, of which suicide bombing is simply not a part, any more than Arafat's personal style of defiance (all too reminiscent of what he said 20 and 30 years ago in Amman and Beirut and Tunis) is new. It isn't new and it isn't up to what is now being done by opponents of Israel's military occupation in both Palestine and Israel. Why not make a specific point of singling out Israeli groups who have opposed house demolitions, or apartheid, or assassinations, or any of the lawless displays of Israeli macho bullying? There is no way that the occupation is going to be defeated unless Palestinian and Israeli efforts work together to end the occupation, in specific and concrete ways. And that, therefore, means that Palestinian groups (with or without the PA's guidance) have to take initiatives that they have been shy of taking (because of understandable fears of normalization), initiatives that actively solicit and involve Israeli resistance as well as European, Arab and American resistance. In other words, with the disappearance of Oslo, Palestinian civil society has been released from that fraudulent peace process's strictures, and this new empowerment means going beyond such traditional interlocutors as the now completely discredited Labour Party and its hangers-on, in the direction of more courageous, innovative anti-occupation drives. If the PA wants to keep calling on Israel to return to the negotiating table, that's fine, of course, if any Israelis can be found to sit there with the PA. But that doesn't mean that Palestinian NGOs have to repeat the same chorus, or that they have to keep worrying about normalization, which was all about normalization with the Israeli state, not progressive currents and groups in its civil society that actively support real Palestinian self-determination and the end of occupation, of settlements, of collective punishment.
Yes, the screw turns, but it not only brings more Israeli repression, it also dialectically reveals new opportunities for Palestinian ingenuity and creativity. There are already considerable signs of progress (noted in my last column) in Palestinian civil society: an intensified focus on them is
required, especially as fissures in Israeli society disclose a frightened, closed-off and horrifyingly
insecure populace badly in need of awakening. It always falls to the victim, not the oppressor, to show new paths for resistance, and the signs are that Palestinian civil society is beginning to take the initiative. This is an excellent omen in a time of despondency and instinctual retrogression.
The drive from Jerusalem to Hebron was surprisingly smooth, only thirty minutes while the same road several weeks before had taken one hour. In the fragmented, canontized reality that is the West Bank, accessibility varies greatly. Hebron and Jericho, for example, have been open for the past week or two, with fewer restrictions on Palestinian movement imposed by the Israeli military. In the north, however, travel to and between cities such as Nablus and Tulkarem proves challenging to impossible.
The reason for this trip was to attend the graduation of 40 women from a backyard gardening course organized by the Union of Agricultural Work Committees in Beit Kahl village next to Hebron. In addition to giving the women skills in providing food for their families in a time of rampant unemployment, the course also meant a carton (24 cans) of MCC canned beef for each graduate. MCC has done very little material relief in Palestine since the 1950s and plans to do very little in the future; unfortunately, however, the 18 months of siege in the West Bank have pushed unemployment in the Hebron district to 70 or so percent. So when MCC in Akron had some extra canned beef, MCC in Palestine offered to distribute it through the Union's food-for-work and food-for-training program. It is our sincere hope that the need for such programs will soon disappear.
Below are four pieces. The first, by Hebrew University professor Baruch Kimmerling, updates Emile Zola's "J'accuse!" for today. The second, by Ha'aretz journalist Amira Hass, provides a poignant reminder to all who preach the path of nonviolence to Palestinians: yes, nonviolence may in fact be the most "effective" form of resistance, we can note how counterproductive Palestinian violence has been, but we must also recognize that mass nonviolent action (and even limited nonviolent action) by Palestinians against the occupation would most likely be met with violence. That does not make nonviolence wrong, of course, but provides a sober reminder to those of us in relative comfort and safety who would advise others to use nonviolence. The third piece, by a Christian Science Monitor reporter, gives a chilling overview of what is becoming increasingly respectable within Israeli political discourse: discussion of the "transfer" of Palestinians from the "Land of Israel." Could this horrifying discourse be translated into reality? Finally, four, Edward Said provides more of his typically astute analysis of the current moment in Palestine/Israel.
1. I Accuse
Baruch Kimmerling
Kol Ha'Ir (Israeli Hebrew Weekly), 1 February 2002
I accuse Ariel Sharon of creating a process in which he will not only intensify the reciprocal bloodshed, but is liable to instigate a regional war and partial or nearly complete ethnic cleansing of the Arabs in the "Land of Israel."
I accuse every Labor Party minister in this government of cooperating for implementation the right wing's extremist, fascist "vision" for Israel.
I accuse the Palestinian leadership, and primarily Yasir Arafat, of shortsightedness so extreme that it has become a collaborator in Sharon's plans. If there is a second Naqba (Palestinian Holocaust), this leadership, too, will be among the causes.
I accuse the military leadership, spurred by the national leadership, of inciting public opinion, under a cloak of supposed military professionalism, against the Palestinians. Never before in Israel have so many generals in uniform, former generals, and past members of the military intelligence, sometimes disguised as "academics," taken part in public brainwashing. When the judicial committee of inquiry is established to investigate the 2002 catastrophe, they too will have to be investigated alongside the civilian criminals.
I accuse the administrators of Israel's electronic media of giving various military spokespeople the access needed for an aggressive, bellicose, almost complete takeover of the public discourse. The military is not only controlling Jenin and Ramallah but the Israeli radio and television as well.
I accuse those people, of all ranks, who order the black flag hoisted above them, and those who follow their unlawful orders. The late philosopher Yeshayahu Leibovitz was right-the occupation has ruined every good part and destroyed the moral infrastructure upon which Israeli society exists. Let's stop this march of fools and build society anew, clean of militarism and oppression and exploitation of other people, if not worse.
I accuse everyone who sees and knows all of this of doing nothing to prevent the emerging catastrophe. Sabra and Shatilla events were nothing compared to what has happened and what is going to happen to us. We have to go out not only to the town squares, but also to the checkpoints. We have to speak to the soldiers in the tanks and the troop carriers-like the Russians spoke to their soldiers when they were ordered to retake control in Red Square-before entry into Palestinian cities turns into a murderous urban warfare.
And I accuse myself of knowing all of this, yet crying little and keeping quiet too often.
* Baruch Kimmerling is a professor of sociology at Hebrew University.
2. On the edge of the non-violent demonstrations
Amira Hass
Haaretz, 6 February 2006
If Israeli TV cameras had bothered to follow the Israeli peace activists from the coexistence group Ta'ayush last Saturday when they went to Ramallah, they could have provided Israelis an answer to the question of what the IDF would do if thousands of unarmed Palestinians marched on the army's positions.
Some 300 men and women from the Israeli group, which calls itself a Jewish-Arab partnership, met last Saturday in Ramallah with Yasser Arafat and central activists from Fatah, feminists, and representatives from Palestinian non-governmental organizations. After a meeting in Arafat's office, they went outside to demonstrate opposite the tanks poised on a hill outside the Palestinian government complex. They marched toward the tanks. They were not armed. Not with guns, stones, or even posters.
All they had was a single hand-held loudspeaker, and people aged from 17 to 75, 300 in all. They were exposed, open, and walked toward the soldiers, also Israelis, who hid inside four tanks and a single jeep. It would have been very difficult to think the soldiers weren't there, because they did what every IDF force in the territories does: They started their engines with a deafening noise, moved the cannon barrels up and down and left to right, as if aiming it at the demonstrators, issued white and black smoke from the engines, and rolled back and forth on the tank treads, those steel teeth that have chewed up the asphalt and sidewalks that European countries spent a lot of money improving.
It's doubtful the voice coming from the loudspeaker reached the soldiers. But they must have known that every person marching toward them was an Israeli. The IDF takes a great deal of pride in its sophisticated technology, which enables daylight or nighttime identification of sources of fire. That day in Ramallah, a pair of opera glasses would have sufficed for the soldiers in the tanks to know who was marching outside. Who knows, maybe they recognized a neighbor, or their older sister's philosophy teacher.
In fact, maybe the Hebrew voice reached the soldiers. The speaker, a Ph.D. in history, was emotional as he shouted "We invite the soldiers to come home." The rest of the marchers began chanting "Soldiers come home," and with perfect orchestration, the soldiers responded immediately with two stun grenades. Don't be afraid, said an Israeli woman with some experience in these kinds of events. That's nothing but noise. It's just meant to frighten us.
That's not exactly true. When a stun grenade falls inside a crowd, and not away from it, the way they are supposed to, it can burn, harm eyes, wound, even break a bone. Dozens of Palestinians who stood unarmed over the past year opposite soldiers have been wounded that way. During the last 16 months, the Palestinians tried dozens, if not hundreds, of times to hold non-violent demonstrations against IDF forces.
It's impossible to march on the settlements. Banks of tanks and machine guns, fortifications, reinforced outposts and roads for Jews only block direct access to the settlements. The IDF Spokesman's Office has spun a myth that every clash that ended with Palestinian casualties was a conflict between two armed sides.
IDF and Border Patrol troops have made clear innumerable times that any gathering of people opposite its forces is considered a dangerous "disturbance of the peace" that requires a response. Sometimes clubbing and violent dragging, then come the stun grenades, maybe tear gas, and very quickly firing live ammunition into the air and then shooting rubber-coated steel pellets into the crowd. The steel pellets are covered with a thin layer of rubber, sometimes it's live ammunition.
Sometimes the shooting starts before any of the demonstrators have managed to throw a stone. Often, the shooting is in response to stone-throwing by teenagers who hide behind improvised barricades. Sometimes they are shot in the head, sometimes the pellets strike protesters standing in albeit dangerous places, but dozens of meters away from the stone-throwers. To someone who has been at these non-violent demonstrations in recent months, it appears the IDF has long since gone past what was thought to be its limits. The Israelis that day in Ramallah decided not to test the limits, and dispersed on their own, going to their next meeting with the Palestinians.
For Palestinian activists to organize dozens of non-violent demonstrations that would march simultaneously toward IDF forces, they would need some guarantee that the soldiers wouldn't cross the red lines into mass murder. Only Israeli society can provide that guarantee. Israeli society must widen the circle of those asking about the nature of the IDF's activities in the territories captured in 1967. It must ask what its frightened and frightening children are doing at the checkpoints, before those children become casualties of the "Let me die with the Philistines" war. Israeli society must ask more and more questions about the IDF's rules of engagement and the money the government spends on developing the settlements and on the welfare of their residents, while its disabled citizens are left to live as beggars.
3. Israeli Expulsion Idea Gains Steam: The Moledet party's media blitz for the mass expulsion of Palestinians is gaining momentum.
Ben Lynfield
The Christian Science Monitor, 6 February 2001
Spurred on by public despair, Israeli advocates of a mass expulsion of Palestinians are gaining strength and legitimacy as the toll of Palestinian attacks inside Israel continues to rise.
Tourism Minister Benny Elon of the far-right Moledet party this week launched a campaign advocating "transfer," a euphemism for expulsion, which he says can also connote an agreed relocation of Palestinians.
In addition to Mr. Elon's push for transfer in a series of interviews on Israel's television channels and in major newspapers, Moledet has put up billboards in Tel Aviv saying that "Only transfer will bring peace."
The idea of a removal of Arabs - voluntary or otherwise - is almost as old as Zionism itself, but today it is taking on fresh legitimacy with the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the demise of the implicit bargain of land and eventual Palestinian statehood for peace.
Elon says that under conditions of war, Israel has the right to bring upon the Palestinians "another nakba," or catastrophe, similar to 1948, when an estimated 700,000 of them were expelled or fled during the Arab- Israeli war.
"There is great disappointment and confusion. People are saying we have had enough, we have seen wars and we have seen the Oslo agreement with all of its bloodshed," says Elon. "I want to
remind them of this platform and to remove the taboo from public discussion. It is intolerable that the Arabs should think that, every time, they can drain our blood and then we will negotiate with them."
The transfer idea is dismissed outright by Likud Justice Minister Meir Shetreet, who often reflects centrist Israeli opinion. "It is unacceptable to us in every form. We want to live with the Arabs in peace and quiet," he says.
But significantly, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has not repudiated the idea of a mass expulsion. Sharon, says his spokesman, would like to expel the Palestinians, but does not believe this can be carried out under the present conditions.
"There is a difference between wishful thinking and realpolitik," explains Sharon's spokesman, Ra'anan Gissin. "If the Palestinians would have a change of heart and move elsewhere, OK, but Sharon realizes transfer cannot be done because of the stance of the Israeli public. What Elon is saying is not something that today seems possible."
Mr. Sharon appeared to endorse mass expulsions of Palestinians in October. In a Knesset speech, he lauded assassinated Tourism Minister Rehavam "Gandhi" Zeevi of Moledet, whose career was based on the transfer idea, as a true heir of Zionist founding fathers and vowed: "Gandhi, we will be victorious."
Ha'aretz newspaper called on Sharon Sunday to expel Elon from the coalition or else be tainted by "the disgrace of the transfer idea."
Intensified espousal of extremist solutions on the right is coinciding with increasingly strident voices at the other end of the political spectrum: doves who argue that it is the Jewish settlers, not the Palestinians, who should leave the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
They have been boosted by a protest letter from 50 reserve officers and soldiers who announced two weeks ago that they would refuse to serve in the West Bank and Gaza Strip because of moral difficulties with army practices.
Dozens more have since signed on to the letter, which derides the fighting as "the war for the peace of the settlements."
According to Israeli media, the number of soldiers refusing to serve had reached 147 at the start of the week. A Likud minister, Tzahi Hanegbi, has called for the soldiers to be stripped of their ranks and released from the army.
The heightened espousal of the "transfer" idea also parallels a surge of extremism within Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement and an increase in Palestinian support for Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement that advocates Israel's replacement by an Islamic state.
Mr. Elon is part of a seven-member bloc in the Knesset known as the National Union-Israel Beiteinu, among whose legislators statements of sympathy for the idea of expelling Arabs have been increasing in recent months. Right-wing rabbis allied to the settler movement have also issued a series of writings advocating expulsions and, in one case, leveling entire Palestinian villages as a deterrent to suicide bombings.
And within Sharon's Likud party, a plan has been put forward by legislator Michael Eitan to erect high fences around each of the Palestinian self-rule enclaves. "We are not talking about ghettos, people will be able to enter and exit through a security gate," explains Yossi Yair, an aide to Mr. Eitan.
Tom Segev, a left-wing commentator, says "the idea of transfer is very embedded in original Zionist ideology and was very much on the minds of some of the fathers of modern Israel, such as David Ben-Gurion. The idea has been very central, but usually it was not conceived of as violent."
He says Chaim Weizman, a Zionist leader prominent in the 1930s and 1940s, played with the idea of raising money to pay Arab leaders in Saudi Arabia to take the Palestinians in. The transfer idea receded after Israeli statehood and during and after the 1967 Middle East war there was a sense that the expulsions of 1948 should not be repeated, Segev says.
Segev says frequent Palestinian attacks against Israeli civilians since the latest confrontation broke out in Sept. 2000 "have made it legitimate for Israelis not only to hate Arabs but to wish them away. I'm afraid this idea does have a chance to catch on."
Sharon, he says, "is capable of initiating transfer as part of a war. He can expel whole populations. He will say this is necessary and that the Arabs brought it on themselves."
But Hebrew University political scientist Yaron Ezrachi, pointing to the letter of the army reservists, says there is "no way" a mass expulsion could be carried out. "They won't have an army to do it. Even if only 10 percent of the soldiers refused, it would paralyze the army."
4. The screw turns, again
Edward Said,
Al-Ahram Weekly, 31 Jan. – 6 Feb. 2002
http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2002/571/op2.htm
It falls to the victim to show new paths of resistance, writes Edward Said
History has no mercy. There are no laws in it against suffering and cruelty, no internal balance that restores a people much sinned against to their rightful place in the world. Cyclical views of history have always seemed to me flawed for that reason, as if the turning of the screw means that present evil can later be transformed into good. Nonsense.
Turning the screw of suffering means more suffering, and not a path to salvation. The most frustrating thing about history, however, is that so much in it escapes language, escapes attention and memory altogether. Historians have therefore resorted to metaphors and poetic figures to fill in the spaces. And this is why the first great historian, Herodotus, was also known as the Father of Lies: so much in what he wrote embellished and, to a great extent also, concealed the truth. That it is the powers of his imagination that make him so great a writer, not the vast number of facts he deployed.
Living in the United States at this moment is a terrible experience. While the main media and the government echo each other about the Middle East, there are alternative views available through the Internet, the telephone, satellite channels, and the local Arabic and Jewish press. Nevertheless, so far as what is readily available to the average American is drowned in a storm of media pictures and stories almost completely cleansed of anything in foreign affairs but the patriotic line issued by the government, the picture is a startling one. America is fighting the evils of terrorism. America is good, and anyone who objects is evil and anti-American. Resistance against America, its policies, its arms and ideas is little short of terrorist.
What I find just as startling is that influential and, in their own way, sophisticated American foreign policy analysts keep saying that they cannot understand why the whole world (and the Arabs and Muslims in particular) will not accept the American message. And why the rest of the world, including Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, persists in its criticism of American policies in Afghanistan; for renouncing six international treaties unilaterally, for its total, unconditional support of Israel, for its astonishingly obdurate policy on prisoners of war. The difference between realities as perceived by Americans on the one hand and by the rest of the world on the other, is so vast and irreconcilable as to defy description.
Words alone are inadequate to explain how an American secretary of state, who presumably has all the facts at his command, can without a trace of irony accuse Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for not doing enough against terror and for buying 50 tons of arms to defend his people, while Israel is supplied with everything that is most lethally sophisticated in the American arsenal at no expense to Israel. (At the same time, it needs to be said that PLO handling of the Karine A incident has been incompetent and bungling beyond even its own poor standards.) Meanwhile, Israel has Arafat locked up in his Ramallah headquarters, his people totally imprisoned, leaders assassinated, innocents starved, the sick dying, life completely paralyzed -- and yet the Palestinians are accused of terrorism.
The idea, much less the reality, of a 35-year military occupation has simply slid away from the media and the US government alike. Do not be surprised tomorrow if Arafat and his people are accused of besieging Israel while blockading its citizens and towns. No, those are not Israeli planes bombing Tulkarm and Jenin, those are Palestinian terrorists wearing wings, and those are Israeli towns being bombed.
As for Israel in the US media, its spokesmen have become so practiced at lying, creating falsehoods the way a sausage-maker makes sausages, that nothing is beyond them. Yesterday, I heard an Israel Defense (even the name sticks in one's throat) Ministry official answering an American reporter's questions about house destruction in Rafah: those were empty houses, he said, without hesitation; they were terrorist nests used for killing Israeli citizens; we have to defend Israeli citizens against Palestinian terror. The journalist didn't even refer to the occupation, or to the fact that the "citizens" were settlers. As for the several hundred poor homeless Palestinians whose pictures appeared fleetingly in the US media after the (American-made) bulldozers had done their demolition, they were gone from memory and awareness completely.
As for the Arab non-response, that has exceeded in disgrace and shamefulness the already abysmally low standards set by our governments for the past 50 years. Such a callous silence, such a stance of servility and incompetence in facing the US and Israel is as astonishing and unacceptable in their own way as what Sharon and Bush are about. Are the Arab leaders so fearful of offending the US that they are willing to accept not only Palestinian humiliation but their own as well? And for what? Simply to be allowed to go on with corruption, mediocrity, and oppression. What a cheap bargain they have made between the furtherance of their narrow interests and American forbearance!
No wonder there is scarcely an Arab alive today for whom the word "regime" connotes more than amused contempt, unadulterated bitterness, and (except for the circle of advisers and sycophants) angry alienation. At least with the recent press conferences by high Saudi officials criticizing US policy towards Israel there is a welcome break in the silence, although the disarray and dysfunction concerning the upcoming Arab summit continues to add to our already well-stocked cupboard of poorly-managed incidents that demonstrate needless disunity and posturing.
I do think that the adjective "wicked" is the correct one here for what is being done to the truth of the Palestinian experience of suffering imposed by Sharon on the West Bank and Gaza collectively. That it cannot adequately be described or narrated. That the Arabs say and do nothing in support of the struggle., That the US is so terrifyingly hostile. That the Europeans are (except for their recent declaration, which has no measures of implementation in it) so useless. All this has driven many of us to despair, I know, and to a kind of hopeless frustration that is one of the results aimed for by Israeli officials and their US counterparts. To reduce people to the heedlessness of not caring anymore, and to make life so miserable as to make it seem necessary to give up life itself, comprise a state of desperation that Sharon clearly wants. This is what he was elected to do and what, if his policies fail, will cause him to lose his office, whereupon Netanyahu will be brought in to try to finish the same dreadful and inhuman (but ultimately suicidal) task.
In the face of such a situation, passivity and helpless anger -- even a kind of bitter fatalism -- are, I truly believe, inappropriate intellectual and political responses. Examples to the contrary still abound. Palestinians have neither been intimidated nor persuaded to give up, and that is a sign of great will and purpose. From that point of view, all Israel's collective measures and constant humiliation have proved ineffective; as one of their generals put it, stopping the resistance by besieging Palestinians is like trying to drink the sea with a spoon.
It just doesn't work. But having taken note of that, I also firmly believe that we have to go beyond stubborn resistance toward a creative one, beyond the tired old methods for defying the Israelis but not sufficiently advancing Palestinian interests in the process. Take decision-making as a simple case in point. It's all very well for Arafat to sit out his own imprisonment in Ramallah and to repeat endlessly that he wants to negotiate, but it just is not a political program, nor is its personal style sufficient to mobilize his people as well as his allies. Certainly it is good to take note of the European declaration in support of the PA, but surely it is more important to say something about the Israeli reservists who refused service on the West Bank and Gaza. Without identifying and trying to work in concert with Israeli resistance to Israeli oppression, we are still standing at square one.
The point, of course, is that every turning of the screw of cruel collective punishment dialectically creates a new space for new kinds of resistance, of which suicide bombing is simply not a part, any more than Arafat's personal style of defiance (all too reminiscent of what he said 20 and 30 years ago in Amman and Beirut and Tunis) is new. It isn't new and it isn't up to what is now being done by opponents of Israel's military occupation in both Palestine and Israel. Why not make a specific point of singling out Israeli groups who have opposed house demolitions, or apartheid, or assassinations, or any of the lawless displays of Israeli macho bullying? There is no way that the occupation is going to be defeated unless Palestinian and Israeli efforts work together to end the occupation, in specific and concrete ways. And that, therefore, means that Palestinian groups (with or without the PA's guidance) have to take initiatives that they have been shy of taking (because of understandable fears of normalization), initiatives that actively solicit and involve Israeli resistance as well as European, Arab and American resistance. In other words, with the disappearance of Oslo, Palestinian civil society has been released from that fraudulent peace process's strictures, and this new empowerment means going beyond such traditional interlocutors as the now completely discredited Labour Party and its hangers-on, in the direction of more courageous, innovative anti-occupation drives. If the PA wants to keep calling on Israel to return to the negotiating table, that's fine, of course, if any Israelis can be found to sit there with the PA. But that doesn't mean that Palestinian NGOs have to repeat the same chorus, or that they have to keep worrying about normalization, which was all about normalization with the Israeli state, not progressive currents and groups in its civil society that actively support real Palestinian self-determination and the end of occupation, of settlements, of collective punishment.
Yes, the screw turns, but it not only brings more Israeli repression, it also dialectically reveals new opportunities for Palestinian ingenuity and creativity. There are already considerable signs of progress (noted in my last column) in Palestinian civil society: an intensified focus on them is
required, especially as fissures in Israeli society disclose a frightened, closed-off and horrifyingly
insecure populace badly in need of awakening. It always falls to the victim, not the oppressor, to show new paths for resistance, and the signs are that Palestinian civil society is beginning to take the initiative. This is an excellent omen in a time of despondency and instinctual retrogression.
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