Obama's Bubble of Ignorance
Solving Palestine While Israel Destroys It
By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON
To a greater degree than perhaps ever before, Washington today is engulfed in denial about Israel and its stupefying behavior, about its murderous policies toward the Palestinians, about the efforts of Israel and its U.S. defenders to force us to ignore its atrocities. Blinders have always been part of the attire of U.S. policymakers and politicians with regard to Israel and Israeli actions, but in the wake of the three-week Israeli assault that laid waste to the tiny territory of Gaza -- an assault ended very conveniently just before Barack Obama was inaugurated, so that he has been able to act as though it never occurred -- the perspective from which Washington operates is strikingly more blinkered than ever in the past.
At a symposium on Capitol Hill sponsored by the Middle East Policy Council just days before Obama took office, Ali Abunimah, a sharp Palestinian-American commentator who runs the website ElectronicIntifada.net, declared frankly that Washington exists in a bubble of ignorance and denial. While the rest of the world, particularly at the level of civil society, is talking about war crimes tribunals for Israeli leaders and about sanctions against Israel, Abunimah observed, Washington and those world leaders beholden to it are trying to move ahead as if nothing had changed. “We have to expect,” he said, “that the official apparatus of the peace-process industry -- the Hillary Clintons, the Quartets, the Tony Blairs, the Javier Solanas, the Ban Ki-Moons, the whole panoply of official and semi-official Washington think tanks -- will carry on with business as usual, trying to make believe that, through their ministrations, a Palestinian state will come into being.” But in the real world, this state won’t happen, he said, and the time has come to speak frankly about what is going on.
So far, three months into the Obama administration, there is little evidence that Obama sees clearly or is ready to speak frankly. Another very savvy Palestinian political commentator and activist, Haidar Eid, who lives and endures Israel’s constant punishments in Gaza, recently told an interviewer that the international reaction to Israel’s Gaza assault was like the reaction to some kind of natural disaster -- as if no human hand had had a role in the destruction and nothing but money and aid was required to resolve the problem. As if, he said, the disaster had not been “created by the state of Israel to annihilate the Palestinian resistance and Palestinian society.”
Eid was commenting on an international conference of donors that convened in Sharm el-Sheikh in early March and made themselves feel magnanimous by pledging almost $5 billion in aid to relieve the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza -- but not to do anything to resolve the political reality of Israeli occupation that is at the root of Gaza’s humanitarian plight. The donors -- the same “peace-process industry” leaders Abunimah spoke of -- were there only to pretend concern and to dole out money, always the easiest way in the minds of political elites to make messy human problems go away. Thus do they relieve their own consciences and at the same time tell Israel it can proceed with impunity to destroy Palestine and Palestinians; the international community will pick up the pieces and pick up the tab. Israel has not failed to get the picture.
Any thought of forcing Israel to cease its gross oppression of Palestinians, any thought of doing anything to deprive Israel of the carte blanche it enjoys, was apparently beyond these do-gooders. Any realization that their aid pledge was merely part of an endless destructive cycle was also lost on them -- a cycle in which these same donors, led by the United States, arm Israel with the world’s most advanced weapons and the absolute political power that comes with the weapons, and Israel then uses the arms and the political license to destroy the Palestinians, and the donors convene again to pay to repair the destruction. The hypocrisy was further underlined by the firm U.S. demand that, before Gazans receive any of this international largesse, Hamas must recognize Israel’s right to exist -- in other words, Hamas must recognize the right to exist of the very state that just tried to destroy it and its people, and even the land they live on.
Were Israel’s behavior not so loathsome, the U.S. and international denial would be something to laugh at. But the aid pledge and the endless loop of Western-financed misery -- and the myopia they signify -- together constitute but one striking example of the willful ignorance, arising from a thought process wholly oriented toward Israel’s perspective, from which the United States and the international community always approach this conflict. The end of George W. Bush’s long tenure and the advent of Barack Obama have now given rise to other initiatives that are as naïve and myopic as the aid pledges -- myopic because, wittingly or not, they come from a starting point that is totally centered on Israel and its demands and totally oblivious to Israel’s barbaric behavior.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton speak earnestly of the “inevitability” and the “inescapability” of a solution based on two states, without regard to the growing impossibility of a real Palestinian state or to the fact that Israel is killing off any prospect for such a state and is in fact openly killing off the Palestinians. The early months of the administration, and the appointment of George Mitchell as special Middle East envoy, are bringing out others who, more enamored of the process than of any prospect of genuine peace, blindly pursue the “peace-process industry” regardless of realities on the ground or the virtual guarantee of failure.
Probably the most detailed plan purporting to lay out a path toward a two-state solution was actually written before Obama took office and is only now being publicized. This plan -- entitled “A Last Chance for a Two-State Israel-Palestine Agreement” -- was drawn up in December by a group of well meaning U.S. elder statesmen, including Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Lee Hamilton, and Paul Volcker, the only one of the ten to enter the Obama administration. The elders were drawn together by Henry Seigman, a former head of the American Jewish Committee and scholar of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict who has distinguished himself in recent years by his frank, realistic criticism of the Israeli occupation.
The proposal is a 17-page blueprint for achieving the impossible. It approaches the conflict from an Israel-centered perspective and indeed, by heavily emphasizing the need to meet Israel’s security needs, contains the prescription for its own failure. The report devotes a remarkable one-fifth of its entire length to an annex on “Addressing Israel’s Security Challenges,” in addition to considerable verbiage devoted to this subject in the body of the document. There is no mention whatsoever of any need to ensure Palestine’s security against threats from Israel.
The impulse behind this plan is admirable: it recognizes the centrality of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to other issues and U.S. interests in the Middle East; it urges that the new administration overturn the Bush administration’s eight years of disengagement from the conflict and do so quickly; it calls for engaging Hamas; and it urges that the peace effort be undertaken even at the cost of angering “certain domestic constituencies.” But the plan itself is naïve and oblivious to the brutal realities of the situation, which existed even before the Gaza assault. Because it takes no account of Israel’s lethal intentions toward the Palestinians or its responsibility for the current level of violence, the report actually encourages Israeli intransigence while blithely assuming that this rigidity can be overcome by issuing a plan on a few pieces of paper while the U.S. continues to send Israel the arms necessary to destroy Palestine.
The report exists in a never-never land in which Israel has no responsibility for occupying Palestinian land and has concerns only for its own security but no obligations to the Palestinians. The report refers repeatedly to the “chicken and egg” security situation in the occupied territories -- as if it cannot be determined whether Israel’s occupation or Palestinian resistance to it came first, as if the occupation is not the reason for Palestinian resistance, as if the Palestinian suicide bombings that the report says cause Israel “understandable anxiety” might have arisen out of nowhere rather than precisely out of Israel’s oppression.
The plan addresses the requirements of peace between the two envisioned states almost solely in terms of Israel’s needs -- not only its security needs, but its settlements needs and its concerns about Palestinian refugees’ right of return. For instance, while it calls for the border between the two states to be “based on” the lines of June 1967 with only minor reciprocal modifications, it recommends that the United States “take into account areas heavily populated by Israelis in the West Bank.” Although the language minimizes the magnitude of this issue, this passage means that accommodation must be made for major Israeli settlement blocs, which include approximately ten percent of the small Delaware-sized West Bank, cover virtually the entirety of East Jerusalem, and include fully 85 percent of the 475,000 settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
In April 2004, George Bush gave Ariel Sharon a letter that officially granted U.S. approval to Israel’s retention of what Bush called “major [Jewish] population centers” in the West Bank, thus altering what had been almost 40 years of U.S. policy supporting a virtually full Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. Bill Clinton’s “parameters” outlined in 2000 had done the same on a somewhat smaller scale by proposing to allow Israel to retain its settlements -- referred to by the anodyne term “neighborhoods” -- in East Jerusalem. The latest proposal by the elder statesmen repeats this Clinton dictum and in general endorses both Clinton’s and Bush’s declarations unilaterally ceding Palestinian land to Israel, without negotiation or consultation with Palestinians.
This proposal also gives away the Palestinians’ right of return. Although it gives a nod to the refugees’ “sense of injustice” and calls for “meaningful financial compensation,” it declares, again unilaterally and pre-emptively, that resolution of the refugee problem should “protect Israel from an influx of refugees” -- meaning that the right would not be available to all or even most refugees who might choose to return to the homes and land inside Israel from which they were expelled. This provision would “protect” Israel from any requirement that it rectify the massive injustice it perpetrated in 1948 and would require that the victims be satisfied, after 60-plus years, with a little money and a home somewhere outside their own homeland.
The major element of the elders’ report proposes that the Palestinian state would be non-militarized and would be policed by a U.S.-led, UN-mandated multinational force that would function for five years but would have a renewable mandate, the intention being to permit Palestinians to control their own security affairs (and of course be able to guarantee Israel’s security) within 15 years. The force would be a NATO force supplemented by Jordanian, Egyptian and -- amazingly enough -- Israeli troops. The Alice-in-Wonderland aspect of this particular proposal is the elders’ assumption that Palestinian sovereignty would somehow be respected even as the Palestinians were being forced to turn their security over to a multinational force that included not merely elements of multiple outside armies, but troops from the very oppressor the Palestinians are presumed to have just shed by attaining statehood. This is the kind of “peace-process industry” nonsense that renders proposals such as this utterly meaningless.
The proposal gives away, before negotiations have begun, more than any state-to-be could ever possibly afford to give. It cedes territory in what would be the Palestinian state before Palestinians are even able to sit down at the negotiating table. It cedes, without cavil or apology, the Palestinians’ right to redress of a gross injustice that is, and has been from the beginning 60-plus years ago, the fundamental Palestinian grievance against Israel. It cedes Palestinian sovereignty and security by inviting in an international security force including troops of precisely the occupying force that the Palestinians seek to be rid off. And it cedes any viability in the new so-called state.
The elders who composed this document should know better. Some of them have actually worked as specialists on the Arab-Israeli conflict in the past, and the proposal’s convener Henry Siegman has been working on this issue for decades. But the proposal exhibits so little understanding of the extent to which Israel has already absorbed the West Bank into itself that it would appear that none of these individuals has ever even visited the region. Nor, in its blithe assessment that it will be possible to induce Israel to agree to any withdrawal at all from the occupied territories, is there much understanding that no Israeli government of any political stripe, and particularly none of the rightwing governments that have led Israel for the last decade and more, has any intention of permitting the Palestinians any degree of true independence and sovereignty anywhere in Palestine.
Finally, just like the donors’ conference that treated the Gaza disaster as if some natural force beyond human control had descended like a hurricane on the territory, this proposal gives no sign of recognition that Israel is the responsible party in this conflict. Israel is the party with all the power, controlling all the territory; Israel is the party that is in occupation over the Palestinians, in defiance of international law; Israel is the party that demolishes homes, bombs civilian residential neighborhoods, drops white phosphorus on civilians, imposes checkpoints and roadblocks and other movement restrictions, builds walls to close off Palestinians, blocks imports of food to an entire Palestinian population, confiscates land to build settlements and roads for Israeli Jews only. Israel is the party that has carried out 85 percent of the killings in the conflict since the intifada began eight and a half years ago.
But the ignorance of these statesmen and their denial of the realities of Israeli occupation, Israeli brutality, Israeli aggression are indicative of just how much Israel is able to get away with in the atmosphere of adulation for Israel that prevails in the United States. One wonders, in fact, if these people are truly as ignorant as they seem to be of what is going on, with U.S. facilitation, in Palestine. Do they believe it is all right and that it advances U.S. national interests in some way to continue arming Israel and grant it total carte blanche to continue oppressing Palestinians? Or have they been so sucked into the Israel-centered discourse in this country that they are literally afraid to oppose Israel and confront its U.S. lobbyists?
The house of cards that is the “peace-process industry” that Abunimah referred to -- that house of cards that pretends Israel is not a rogue nation rampaging through its neighborhood whenever it feels like it -- must soon collapse. As Abunimah told the Capitol Hill conference, what people know in Europe and in Chicago, where he lives and works, is quite different from what people in Washington and New York think they know and, as he noted, silence about the realities on the ground in Palestine is no longer an option. When the history of this period is written, Abunimah said, “Gaza will be seen as the moment after which it became impossible for Israel to be integrated into the region as a so-called Jewish-Zionist state.”
Kathleen and Bill Christison have been writing on the Middle East for several years and have co-authored a book, forthcoming in June from Pluto Press, on the Israeli occupation and its impact on Palestinians. Thirty years ago, they were analysts for the CIA. They can be reached at kb.christison@earthlink.net.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Obama-Netanyahu Showdown posted by Robert Dreyfuss on 04/28/2009 @ 08:31am
President Obama got some strongly worded advice yesterday on how to deal with Israel's Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, who'll be making his first visit to the United States as Israel's new leader in mid-May. The Obama-Netanyahu meeting promises to be a showdown.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, the veteran strategist and hardliner -- who was Jimmy Carter's national security adviser -- told a conference yesterday that in the history of US peacemaking in the Middle East, the United States has never once spelled out its own vision for what a two-state solution would look like. That, said Brzezinski, is exactly what President Obama needs to do. And fast.
Brzezinski was speaking at a conference on US-Saudi relations sponsored by the New America Foundation and Saudi Arabia's Committee on International Trade. Brzezinski, who advised Obama early in the presidential campaign, was exiled from Obamaland after his less-than-devout support for Israel made him a liability.
"The United States has to spell out the minimum parameters of peace," said Zbig. Perhaps in deference to the conference's Saudi sponsors, Brzezinski said that there is an "urgent need for a US-Saudi alliance for peace in the Middle East." Other speakers on a star-studded opening panel were Chuck Hagel, the former Republican senator from Nebraska and Prince Turki al-Faisal, who served for decades as the head of Saudi Arabia's intelligence service.
Turki, who also served as Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, warned Obama to preempt Netanyahu, who intends to tell the president that there can't be progress in the Israel-Palestine conflict until the United States solves the problem of Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons to Israel's satisfaction. Obama, said Turki, should tell the Israeli leader: "Mr. Netanyahu, you have to listen to me first." Rita Hauser, the veteran conservative strategist on the panel, agreed: "Netanyahu has to learn very quickly that the president means business."
Hauser, long associated with the RAND Corporation and other thinktanks, also said bluntly that the United States is going to have to deal with Hamas, which she called a "central element" of Palestinian politics. "Hamas will control Gaza," she said. She urged the administration to take steps to encourage the formation of a Palestinian unity government, involving Hamas and Fatah, the central pillar of the old Palestine Liberation Organization.
Obama, said Hauser, will find it politically difficult to talk to Hamas. (Translated: She means that the Israel lobby and its friends in Congress would go ballistic.) So she recommends that Washington encourage the Europeans in their dialogue with Hamas and allow Saudi Arabia to help broker a deal. (Egypt is already trying to swing a Fatah-Hamas deal.) The current chaos in Palestinian circles benefits Israel, she said, and she accused former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of deliberately splintering the Palestinians by withdrawing from Gaza, an action that allowed Gaza to fall to Hamas.
A Hamas-Fatah accord is an important, even crucial, first step in making any progress toward an Israel-Palestine two-state solution, which Obama says he supports strongly -- and which Netanyahu opposes. Getting it done won't be easy, however. At the conference, Turki pointed out that "the popularity of Hamas skyrocketed" after the December-January invasion of Gaza by Israel. "In the eyes of the Palestinians," he said, "Hamas came out a winner." As a result, it might be a lot harder to convince Hamas to make concessions.
But both Saudi Arabia and Egypt, of course, are suspicious of Hamas, not only because of its radicalism but because of its ties to Iran. According to the Egyptians, who are sponsoring talks in Cairo between the two Palestinian factions, Iran is pressing Hamas to resist a deal. Writing in the Wall Street Journal today, Abdel Monem Said Ali of Egypt's premier thinktank said:
After the war [in Gaza] ended, Egypt resumed its efforts to reach a long-term cease-fire. Iran pressured the Hamas leadership to resist. Cairo's ongoing effort to build a Palestinian unity government, by bringing together Fatah and Hamas, has also been undermined by intense Iranian pressure on Hamas.
Obama needs to tell Netanyahu, in public or privately, that he supports a Hamas-Fatah accord and that the United States will deal with a Palestinian unity government. He needs to explain to Netanyahu that he won't be diverted by Israel's alarmist cries about Iran, instead maintaining the focus on the two-state solution. And, as Brzezinksi says, Obama needs to outline his vision for a deal. The world knows what it means: the removal of Israel's illegal settlements in the West Bank, the withdrawal of Israel to its '67 borders, the partition of Jerusalem in some fashion to allow the Palestinians to have their capital in East Jerusalem, and an equitable deal over the Palestinians right-to-return to the former Palestine, involving a hefty financial compensation to those who were forced to flee their homes in 1948 and 1967. The world knows it. Now, Obama has to say it.
The Obama-Netanyahu Showdown posted by Robert Dreyfuss on 04/28/2009 @ 08:31am
President Obama got some strongly worded advice yesterday on how to deal with Israel's Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, who'll be making his first visit to the United States as Israel's new leader in mid-May. The Obama-Netanyahu meeting promises to be a showdown.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, the veteran strategist and hardliner -- who was Jimmy Carter's national security adviser -- told a conference yesterday that in the history of US peacemaking in the Middle East, the United States has never once spelled out its own vision for what a two-state solution would look like. That, said Brzezinski, is exactly what President Obama needs to do. And fast.
Brzezinski was speaking at a conference on US-Saudi relations sponsored by the New America Foundation and Saudi Arabia's Committee on International Trade. Brzezinski, who advised Obama early in the presidential campaign, was exiled from Obamaland after his less-than-devout support for Israel made him a liability.
"The United States has to spell out the minimum parameters of peace," said Zbig. Perhaps in deference to the conference's Saudi sponsors, Brzezinski said that there is an "urgent need for a US-Saudi alliance for peace in the Middle East." Other speakers on a star-studded opening panel were Chuck Hagel, the former Republican senator from Nebraska and Prince Turki al-Faisal, who served for decades as the head of Saudi Arabia's intelligence service.
Turki, who also served as Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, warned Obama to preempt Netanyahu, who intends to tell the president that there can't be progress in the Israel-Palestine conflict until the United States solves the problem of Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons to Israel's satisfaction. Obama, said Turki, should tell the Israeli leader: "Mr. Netanyahu, you have to listen to me first." Rita Hauser, the veteran conservative strategist on the panel, agreed: "Netanyahu has to learn very quickly that the president means business."
Hauser, long associated with the RAND Corporation and other thinktanks, also said bluntly that the United States is going to have to deal with Hamas, which she called a "central element" of Palestinian politics. "Hamas will control Gaza," she said. She urged the administration to take steps to encourage the formation of a Palestinian unity government, involving Hamas and Fatah, the central pillar of the old Palestine Liberation Organization.
Obama, said Hauser, will find it politically difficult to talk to Hamas. (Translated: She means that the Israel lobby and its friends in Congress would go ballistic.) So she recommends that Washington encourage the Europeans in their dialogue with Hamas and allow Saudi Arabia to help broker a deal. (Egypt is already trying to swing a Fatah-Hamas deal.) The current chaos in Palestinian circles benefits Israel, she said, and she accused former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of deliberately splintering the Palestinians by withdrawing from Gaza, an action that allowed Gaza to fall to Hamas.
A Hamas-Fatah accord is an important, even crucial, first step in making any progress toward an Israel-Palestine two-state solution, which Obama says he supports strongly -- and which Netanyahu opposes. Getting it done won't be easy, however. At the conference, Turki pointed out that "the popularity of Hamas skyrocketed" after the December-January invasion of Gaza by Israel. "In the eyes of the Palestinians," he said, "Hamas came out a winner." As a result, it might be a lot harder to convince Hamas to make concessions.
But both Saudi Arabia and Egypt, of course, are suspicious of Hamas, not only because of its radicalism but because of its ties to Iran. According to the Egyptians, who are sponsoring talks in Cairo between the two Palestinian factions, Iran is pressing Hamas to resist a deal. Writing in the Wall Street Journal today, Abdel Monem Said Ali of Egypt's premier thinktank said:
After the war [in Gaza] ended, Egypt resumed its efforts to reach a long-term cease-fire. Iran pressured the Hamas leadership to resist. Cairo's ongoing effort to build a Palestinian unity government, by bringing together Fatah and Hamas, has also been undermined by intense Iranian pressure on Hamas.
Obama needs to tell Netanyahu, in public or privately, that he supports a Hamas-Fatah accord and that the United States will deal with a Palestinian unity government. He needs to explain to Netanyahu that he won't be diverted by Israel's alarmist cries about Iran, instead maintaining the focus on the two-state solution. And, as Brzezinksi says, Obama needs to outline his vision for a deal. The world knows what it means: the removal of Israel's illegal settlements in the West Bank, the withdrawal of Israel to its '67 borders, the partition of Jerusalem in some fashion to allow the Palestinians to have their capital in East Jerusalem, and an equitable deal over the Palestinians right-to-return to the former Palestine, involving a hefty financial compensation to those who were forced to flee their homes in 1948 and 1967. The world knows it. Now, Obama has to say it.
Monday, April 27, 2009
No more make-believe in the Middle East
By Norman H. Olsen Norman H. Olsen – Mon Apr 27, 5:00 am ET
Cherryfield, Maine – Let's not be so hard on Bibi.
The squealing on the Israeli and American left is making Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu out to be a minority radical, a warmonger among the majority progressives who want a just peace with the Palestinians.
In reality, the bad news – and the good – is that Mr. Netanyahu doesn't pretend to be a peacemaker.
Let's look at the record.
Settlement construction, including the massive developments encircling Jerusalem, has continued for four decades. All of Bibi's predecessors – even the "doves" – never once slowed settlement construction, despite their repeated assurances. Throughout, despite intensive US monitoring and reporting on growth, the US has always pretended to believe them.
In the early 1990s, then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin told the US that settlement sites such as Har Homa were merely in the planning stages. When site work began, he claimed that it was only preparatory work with no approval for construction. When ministry approvals for construction were given, he and his successors claimed that they would prevent construction. Today Har Homa stands as one of the many monuments to the success of deny, deny, deny.
The latest and final major link in the chain of Jerusalem-encircling settlements, known as E1, has followed exactly the same progression. E1 is important, because if it is allowed to become a town, it will effectively split the West Bank in two, ending hopes for a two-state solution. US observers, myself included, reported during the past six years the clear evidence of site preparation, only to be told by the highest levels of the Israeli government that roadbeds, drainage systems, terracing, and other clearly observable major works were "erosion control." Again, the US pretended to believe the official spin.
Former Israeli Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert told the US repeatedly that the separation barrier would not be used for political purposes, and that its route through the West Bank, rather than along the internationally accepted "Green Line," was to provide security "setback" for towns on the Israeli side of the Green Line. Again, the US pretended to believe them.
Today, the tens of thousands of acres of West Bank land between the Green Line and the separation barrier are the fastest-growing areas for settlement construction, all built right up against the barrier, with no security setback, ensuring Israeli facts on the ground.
This pattern of pretending holds true for promises to ease travel for Palestinians within the West Bank. At the time of the Nov. 15, 2005, Agreement on Movement and Access, which was pressed on the Israelis and Palestinians by then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, there were some 320 roadblocks. At the time, some US embassy staff openly termed the agreement toothless. Secretary Rice and her team termed it a historic achievement. Today, there are 632 roadblocks.
Ditto for the growth in Israeli-settler-only road systems in the West Bank, the thousands of Palestinians held prisoner for years without charge in Israeli "administrative detention," and the continuing blockage of Palestinian commercial traffic into and out of the Occupied Territories.
Ditto, too, for the talk in the late 1990s – by Bibi no less! – about weaning Israel from the billions in US aid it gets each year. The Israelis assured progress and the US pretended to believe them. For cash-strapped American taxpayers, the 10-year agreement signed in 2007 for $30 billion in military assistance to Israel, plus another billion or so a year in assorted other US-funded programs, amounts to a lot of pretending.
Palestinians, unlike Americans, are under no illusion about change under a Netanyahu government; hence the lack of public outcry over the Netanyahu-Avigdor Lieberman alliance. Despite the regular meetings that the US insisted take place since 2002 between Israeli prime ministers and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, Mr. Abbas never won a single substantive, realized concession. Israel and the US pretended that meetings equaled progress, but, each time, Abbas returned to Ramallah weakened, the object of increasing scorn not only from Hamas, but from his own Fatah supporters.
From the field, the relationship was always reminiscent of the scene from the 1967 comedy "A Guide for the Married Man," where a man and his mistress, caught in flagrante by the wife, simply deny, deny, deny until they have calmly dressed and the mistress has departed, leaving the wife wondering whether to believe her eyes.
Once he became prime minister in the 1990s, even firebrand Netanyahu played the "we pretend, you pretend" game, signing on to the 1998 Wye River Memorandum, which, among other things, provided billions in US funding for Israel's redeployment out of the West Bank and Gaza.
Now, though, Netanyahu appears to have ended the charade, although perhaps only until political expediency warrants another metamorphosis. His policies may be misguided, but his intellectual honesty may prove salutary. The Israeli right and its American supporters have a hard time claiming Israeli moderation and reasonableness when Netanyahu and his ministers openly oppose a two-state arrangement; affirm the blockade of Gaza, preventing reconstruction there; tout settlement expansion; brag of undermining US efforts to talk with Iran; and threaten an attack on Iran – across US-controlled Iraqi airspace – that could jeopardize US troops and interests throughout the region.
In lifting the veil on Israeli policy and the criticism-stifling fiction of US-Israeli mutual interest, Netanyahu leaves the US open, finally, to voice and pursue its own positions and interests.
Finally, Washington can say, clearly and forcefully, that Israel's occupation harms US interests; that an attack on Iran is unacceptable and will get no US support, even in the UN Security Council; that settlement construction must stop and barriers be removed; that meetings are no substitute for progress; that Palestinians must be granted the opportunity – a real one – to form a viable state; and that the time has come for one of the world's wealthiest countries to be weaned off American largess.
Norman H. Olsen is a former senior United States Foreign Service officer. He served at the US Embassy in Tel Aviv from 1991 to 1995, and from 2002 to 2007, including four years as chief of the political section.
By Norman H. Olsen Norman H. Olsen – Mon Apr 27, 5:00 am ET
Cherryfield, Maine – Let's not be so hard on Bibi.
The squealing on the Israeli and American left is making Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu out to be a minority radical, a warmonger among the majority progressives who want a just peace with the Palestinians.
In reality, the bad news – and the good – is that Mr. Netanyahu doesn't pretend to be a peacemaker.
Let's look at the record.
Settlement construction, including the massive developments encircling Jerusalem, has continued for four decades. All of Bibi's predecessors – even the "doves" – never once slowed settlement construction, despite their repeated assurances. Throughout, despite intensive US monitoring and reporting on growth, the US has always pretended to believe them.
In the early 1990s, then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin told the US that settlement sites such as Har Homa were merely in the planning stages. When site work began, he claimed that it was only preparatory work with no approval for construction. When ministry approvals for construction were given, he and his successors claimed that they would prevent construction. Today Har Homa stands as one of the many monuments to the success of deny, deny, deny.
The latest and final major link in the chain of Jerusalem-encircling settlements, known as E1, has followed exactly the same progression. E1 is important, because if it is allowed to become a town, it will effectively split the West Bank in two, ending hopes for a two-state solution. US observers, myself included, reported during the past six years the clear evidence of site preparation, only to be told by the highest levels of the Israeli government that roadbeds, drainage systems, terracing, and other clearly observable major works were "erosion control." Again, the US pretended to believe the official spin.
Former Israeli Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert told the US repeatedly that the separation barrier would not be used for political purposes, and that its route through the West Bank, rather than along the internationally accepted "Green Line," was to provide security "setback" for towns on the Israeli side of the Green Line. Again, the US pretended to believe them.
Today, the tens of thousands of acres of West Bank land between the Green Line and the separation barrier are the fastest-growing areas for settlement construction, all built right up against the barrier, with no security setback, ensuring Israeli facts on the ground.
This pattern of pretending holds true for promises to ease travel for Palestinians within the West Bank. At the time of the Nov. 15, 2005, Agreement on Movement and Access, which was pressed on the Israelis and Palestinians by then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, there were some 320 roadblocks. At the time, some US embassy staff openly termed the agreement toothless. Secretary Rice and her team termed it a historic achievement. Today, there are 632 roadblocks.
Ditto for the growth in Israeli-settler-only road systems in the West Bank, the thousands of Palestinians held prisoner for years without charge in Israeli "administrative detention," and the continuing blockage of Palestinian commercial traffic into and out of the Occupied Territories.
Ditto, too, for the talk in the late 1990s – by Bibi no less! – about weaning Israel from the billions in US aid it gets each year. The Israelis assured progress and the US pretended to believe them. For cash-strapped American taxpayers, the 10-year agreement signed in 2007 for $30 billion in military assistance to Israel, plus another billion or so a year in assorted other US-funded programs, amounts to a lot of pretending.
Palestinians, unlike Americans, are under no illusion about change under a Netanyahu government; hence the lack of public outcry over the Netanyahu-Avigdor Lieberman alliance. Despite the regular meetings that the US insisted take place since 2002 between Israeli prime ministers and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, Mr. Abbas never won a single substantive, realized concession. Israel and the US pretended that meetings equaled progress, but, each time, Abbas returned to Ramallah weakened, the object of increasing scorn not only from Hamas, but from his own Fatah supporters.
From the field, the relationship was always reminiscent of the scene from the 1967 comedy "A Guide for the Married Man," where a man and his mistress, caught in flagrante by the wife, simply deny, deny, deny until they have calmly dressed and the mistress has departed, leaving the wife wondering whether to believe her eyes.
Once he became prime minister in the 1990s, even firebrand Netanyahu played the "we pretend, you pretend" game, signing on to the 1998 Wye River Memorandum, which, among other things, provided billions in US funding for Israel's redeployment out of the West Bank and Gaza.
Now, though, Netanyahu appears to have ended the charade, although perhaps only until political expediency warrants another metamorphosis. His policies may be misguided, but his intellectual honesty may prove salutary. The Israeli right and its American supporters have a hard time claiming Israeli moderation and reasonableness when Netanyahu and his ministers openly oppose a two-state arrangement; affirm the blockade of Gaza, preventing reconstruction there; tout settlement expansion; brag of undermining US efforts to talk with Iran; and threaten an attack on Iran – across US-controlled Iraqi airspace – that could jeopardize US troops and interests throughout the region.
In lifting the veil on Israeli policy and the criticism-stifling fiction of US-Israeli mutual interest, Netanyahu leaves the US open, finally, to voice and pursue its own positions and interests.
Finally, Washington can say, clearly and forcefully, that Israel's occupation harms US interests; that an attack on Iran is unacceptable and will get no US support, even in the UN Security Council; that settlement construction must stop and barriers be removed; that meetings are no substitute for progress; that Palestinians must be granted the opportunity – a real one – to form a viable state; and that the time has come for one of the world's wealthiest countries to be weaned off American largess.
Norman H. Olsen is a former senior United States Foreign Service officer. He served at the US Embassy in Tel Aviv from 1991 to 1995, and from 2002 to 2007, including four years as chief of the political section.
Clinton’s Mideast Pirouette
By ROGER COHEN
Published: April 26, 2009
The sparring between the United States and Israel has begun, and that’s a good thing. Israel’s interests are not served by an uncritical American administration. The Jewish state emerged less secure and less loved from Washington’s post-9/11 Israel-can-do-no-wrong policy.
The criticism of the center-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come from an unlikely source: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She’s transitioned with aplomb from the calculation of her interests that she made as a senator from New York to a cool assessment of U.S. interests. These do not always coincide with Israel’s.
I hear that Clinton was shocked by what she saw on her visit last month to the West Bank. This is not surprising. The transition from Israel’s first-world hustle-bustle to the donkeys, carts and idle people beyond the separation wall is brutal. If Clinton cares about one thing, it’s human suffering.
In fact, you don’t so much drive into the Palestinian territories these days as sink into them. Everything, except the Jewish settlers’ cars on fenced settlers-only highways, slows down. The buzz of business gives way to the clunking of hammers.
The whole desolate West Bank scene is punctuated with garrison-like settlements on hilltops. If you’re looking for a primer on colonialism, this is not a bad place to start.
Most Israelis never see this, unless they’re in the army. Clinton witnessed it. She was, I understand, troubled by the humiliation around her.
Now, she has warned Netanyahu to get off “the sidelines” with respect to Palestinian peace efforts. Remember that the Israeli prime minister and his right-wing Likud party have still not accepted even the theory of a two-state solution.
In House testimony last week, Clinton said: “For Israel to get the kind of strong support it is looking for vis-à-vis Iran, it can’t stay on the sidelines with respect to the Palestinians and the peace efforts. They go hand in hand.”
That was a direct rebuke to comments from Netanyahu aides who told the Washington Post Israel would not move on peace talks until it sees the United States check Iran’s nuclear program and rising regional influence.
Although I don’t agree with the forms of linkage being made by Netanyahu and Clinton between Iran and an Israeli-Palestinian peace — the issue is not how to threaten Iran but how to bring it inside the tent — I agree with both of them that a link exists. At Madrid, at Oslo and at Annapolis, over a 16-year span, attempts were made to advance peace while excluding Iran. That doesn’t work; it won’t work now.
The trick is to usher Israel-Palestine peace efforts and the quest for a U.S.-Iran rapprochement along in parallel.
That’s why it’s so important that Clinton told Netanyahu that he can’t slip away from working for peace — and that means stopping settlements now — by taking an Iran detour.
Clinton also indicated an important shift on Hamas, which the State Department calls a terrorist group. While stressing that no funds would flow to Hamas “or any entity controlled by it,” she argued for keeping American options open on a possible Palestinian unity government between the moderate Fatah and Hamas.
So long as a unity government meets three conditions — renounces violence, recognizes Israel’s right to exist and abides by past agreements — the United States would be prepared to deal with it, including on $900 million in proposed aid, Clinton indicated. Washington does business with a Lebanese government in which Hezbollah controls 11 of 30 seats, although Hezbollah is also deemed a terrorist group.
Such a changed U.S. policy makes a lot more sense than the previous one, which insisted on Hamas itself — rather than any Palestinian unity government — meeting the three conditions. No peace can be made by pretending Hamas does not exist, which is why advancing Palestinian unity must be a U.S. priority.
This sensible shift will anger Israel, although it deals indirectly with Hamas through Egypt. Israel’s de jure stand on Hamas — that it must recognize Israel before any talks begin — is wildly at odds with Israel’s de facto methodology since 1948.
So it’s a week in which I cheer Clinton, although her reference to “crippling sanctions” against Iran if the proposed rapprochement fails was a mistake. Sanctions haven’t worked and won’t.
Tehran will not come to the table if it sees Obama’s extended hand as just a deceptive prelude to “crippling” measures. My advice to Tehran: watch what Obama says. He’s driving Iran policy.
Obama’s doing it in a way that means the Israeli-American friction evident in Clinton’s remarks will be a theme of his first year in office. As Lee Hamilton, the president of the Woodrow Wilson Center, told me: “Initiatives are underway that show the United States is going to have some major differences with Israel.”
He also said Netanyahu is “a little more flexible than maybe he’s given credit for.”
Netanyahu as Begin the peacemaker? It’s not impossible. Nor is Obama to Tehran. Provided the president pushes on the two fronts at once.
By ROGER COHEN
Published: April 26, 2009
The sparring between the United States and Israel has begun, and that’s a good thing. Israel’s interests are not served by an uncritical American administration. The Jewish state emerged less secure and less loved from Washington’s post-9/11 Israel-can-do-no-wrong policy.
The criticism of the center-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come from an unlikely source: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She’s transitioned with aplomb from the calculation of her interests that she made as a senator from New York to a cool assessment of U.S. interests. These do not always coincide with Israel’s.
I hear that Clinton was shocked by what she saw on her visit last month to the West Bank. This is not surprising. The transition from Israel’s first-world hustle-bustle to the donkeys, carts and idle people beyond the separation wall is brutal. If Clinton cares about one thing, it’s human suffering.
In fact, you don’t so much drive into the Palestinian territories these days as sink into them. Everything, except the Jewish settlers’ cars on fenced settlers-only highways, slows down. The buzz of business gives way to the clunking of hammers.
The whole desolate West Bank scene is punctuated with garrison-like settlements on hilltops. If you’re looking for a primer on colonialism, this is not a bad place to start.
Most Israelis never see this, unless they’re in the army. Clinton witnessed it. She was, I understand, troubled by the humiliation around her.
Now, she has warned Netanyahu to get off “the sidelines” with respect to Palestinian peace efforts. Remember that the Israeli prime minister and his right-wing Likud party have still not accepted even the theory of a two-state solution.
In House testimony last week, Clinton said: “For Israel to get the kind of strong support it is looking for vis-à-vis Iran, it can’t stay on the sidelines with respect to the Palestinians and the peace efforts. They go hand in hand.”
That was a direct rebuke to comments from Netanyahu aides who told the Washington Post Israel would not move on peace talks until it sees the United States check Iran’s nuclear program and rising regional influence.
Although I don’t agree with the forms of linkage being made by Netanyahu and Clinton between Iran and an Israeli-Palestinian peace — the issue is not how to threaten Iran but how to bring it inside the tent — I agree with both of them that a link exists. At Madrid, at Oslo and at Annapolis, over a 16-year span, attempts were made to advance peace while excluding Iran. That doesn’t work; it won’t work now.
The trick is to usher Israel-Palestine peace efforts and the quest for a U.S.-Iran rapprochement along in parallel.
That’s why it’s so important that Clinton told Netanyahu that he can’t slip away from working for peace — and that means stopping settlements now — by taking an Iran detour.
Clinton also indicated an important shift on Hamas, which the State Department calls a terrorist group. While stressing that no funds would flow to Hamas “or any entity controlled by it,” she argued for keeping American options open on a possible Palestinian unity government between the moderate Fatah and Hamas.
So long as a unity government meets three conditions — renounces violence, recognizes Israel’s right to exist and abides by past agreements — the United States would be prepared to deal with it, including on $900 million in proposed aid, Clinton indicated. Washington does business with a Lebanese government in which Hezbollah controls 11 of 30 seats, although Hezbollah is also deemed a terrorist group.
Such a changed U.S. policy makes a lot more sense than the previous one, which insisted on Hamas itself — rather than any Palestinian unity government — meeting the three conditions. No peace can be made by pretending Hamas does not exist, which is why advancing Palestinian unity must be a U.S. priority.
This sensible shift will anger Israel, although it deals indirectly with Hamas through Egypt. Israel’s de jure stand on Hamas — that it must recognize Israel before any talks begin — is wildly at odds with Israel’s de facto methodology since 1948.
So it’s a week in which I cheer Clinton, although her reference to “crippling sanctions” against Iran if the proposed rapprochement fails was a mistake. Sanctions haven’t worked and won’t.
Tehran will not come to the table if it sees Obama’s extended hand as just a deceptive prelude to “crippling” measures. My advice to Tehran: watch what Obama says. He’s driving Iran policy.
Obama’s doing it in a way that means the Israeli-American friction evident in Clinton’s remarks will be a theme of his first year in office. As Lee Hamilton, the president of the Woodrow Wilson Center, told me: “Initiatives are underway that show the United States is going to have some major differences with Israel.”
He also said Netanyahu is “a little more flexible than maybe he’s given credit for.”
Netanyahu as Begin the peacemaker? It’s not impossible. Nor is Obama to Tehran. Provided the president pushes on the two fronts at once.
Apr. 27, 2009
Gershon Baskin , THE JERUSALEM POST
A peace process occurs between nations transferring them from a state of war between enemies to a state of peace between partners. A successful peace process requires a shift of attitudes in a cross section of the society and must be built between the peoples. This lengthy process also requires formal education that should take place through the educational system.
Education is a powerful agent of change and socialization into society's values; unfortunately, it sometimes also acts as a transmitter of conflict-producing and conflict-sustaining myths. Hence the need for serious and systematic educational approaches that teach conflict-solving values and skills and brings together Israeli and Palestinian teachers and students, on equal footing, to encourage discussion, to empower both sides and to emphasize the role of education as an agent of change. This process empowers the teachers to use their newly learned skills in their classrooms with generations of students to come.
Textbooks and curricula are determined and issued by governments. Textbooks reflect the official values that societies wish to impart to their citizens. Beyond the main task of ministries of education to provide the young people with international standards and high levels of academic education, the Israeli and Palestinian Authority ministries of education also face the significant task of providing their children with a strong values-based education aimed at building their respective society and the future of their states. An essential aspect of this values-based education is imparting and building the national identity with all of its many facets. This kind of task is complicated under the best circumstances, and when faced with a 100-year violent conflict with the neighbors, it becomes extremely problematic and difficult.
THERE IS ALMOST nothing in Israeli and Palestinian text books that teaches the students something objective or positive about the people they are in conflict with and with whom they hope to some day soon live with in peace.
Teaching about commonalities in culture can also serve as an open door for exploration (in textbooks of both sides). Whether looking at common foods, similar music and dance or even through looking at the Arabic and Hebrew languages, there are endless possibilities for new discovery and ways to develop a more positive attitude toward fostering a desire among the children to want to know more about people on the other side. Educators should not fear that by teaching about the "other" they are in any way weakening their national identity or collective solidarity. In fact, the opposite is quite true.
In this context, it is also worthwhile to point out the importance of teaching not only commonalities between the two peoples, but also the differences. A culture of peace fosters an appreciation of diversity and encourages the ability and desirability to celebrate those diversities as well.
Because of the inextricable link between education and values, Palestinian and Israeli actions taken regarding the review and revision of textbooks and curricula would be an undeniable fact that could not be overlooked regarding their intentions for making peace with each other. The decision of what to teach the young generation is perhaps the most accurate litmus test of what the future may have in store.
The government of Israel and the PA need to pick up the challenge. Both sides should appoint a national advisory committee on textbooks empowered to review the textbooks taking into account the critiques that have been raised over the past years and working on a set of agreed criteria. There is a need for both governments to revise and reform textbooks. Israeli textbooks teach too little about Arabs and Palestinians. If Israel is calling for the Palestinians to revise and reform their textbooks in the spirit of making peace, it must also look inside its own classrooms and do the same. This would also be a serious indication of intentions to make peace with the Palestinians.
Both sides should progress on this issue without regard for what the other side is doing. This is not a question of negotiations, mutuality or reciprocity. Each side must demonstrate the values that it holds dear without regard for what the other side does. The true test of the ability of both sides to make peace will be to degree to which both sides take positive action in educating the next generation in a true spirit of pursuing peace.
PALESTINIAN AND ISRAELI societies have spent the last years trying to come to terms with the viability of peace between them. This period has been marked with periods of cautious optimism that peace might be a reality, coupled with periods of great pessimism and lost hopes. The past years have been marred with extremely violent conflict during which time the hope of peace has almost entirely vanished. Both societies began a process of developing and incorporating elements of peace education within their formal school systems. Most of these efforts have ceased now.
Yet is has become increasingly clear that the lack of ability of individuals and collectives from both sides to understand the perspectives of the other side points to an acute lack of tools, skills and cognitive training to understand the underlying interests, concerns, needs and fears which are the root causes of the conflict. Providing youngsters and their teachers with the training, skills and cognitive understandings of conflict resolution, management and prevention and nonviolence, we can begin a process of leading the region toward a more secure and realistic peace process.
Those who live under conditions of an ongoing violent conflict may find themselves accustomed to attitudes and behaviors which derive from such a situation of violence and distrust. This context refuels attitudes and behaviors that construct and reinforce it, and so we find ourselves imprisoned in a vicious cycle of violence.
The goal of peace education is to bring about change, social change, a change in awareness and patterns of thought which will bring forth a change in the behavior patterns of all those who are involved in the educational process (students, teachers, school principals, the program's staff, etc.); a structural change in which the vision of an equal, just society, that contains and accepts the other within will be actualized; a society that regards just peace as a state of mind, a chosen value and a way of life.
Even though real peace seems quite distant during these days, there is a need to penetrate deeply into both societies so that real peace in the future will be firmly rooted on both sides. Supporting the incorporation of peace education into the formal curricula of both sides could potentially advance peace even as the conflict continues today.
The writer is the co-CEO of the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information. www.ipcri.org
Gershon Baskin , THE JERUSALEM POST
A peace process occurs between nations transferring them from a state of war between enemies to a state of peace between partners. A successful peace process requires a shift of attitudes in a cross section of the society and must be built between the peoples. This lengthy process also requires formal education that should take place through the educational system.
Education is a powerful agent of change and socialization into society's values; unfortunately, it sometimes also acts as a transmitter of conflict-producing and conflict-sustaining myths. Hence the need for serious and systematic educational approaches that teach conflict-solving values and skills and brings together Israeli and Palestinian teachers and students, on equal footing, to encourage discussion, to empower both sides and to emphasize the role of education as an agent of change. This process empowers the teachers to use their newly learned skills in their classrooms with generations of students to come.
Textbooks and curricula are determined and issued by governments. Textbooks reflect the official values that societies wish to impart to their citizens. Beyond the main task of ministries of education to provide the young people with international standards and high levels of academic education, the Israeli and Palestinian Authority ministries of education also face the significant task of providing their children with a strong values-based education aimed at building their respective society and the future of their states. An essential aspect of this values-based education is imparting and building the national identity with all of its many facets. This kind of task is complicated under the best circumstances, and when faced with a 100-year violent conflict with the neighbors, it becomes extremely problematic and difficult.
THERE IS ALMOST nothing in Israeli and Palestinian text books that teaches the students something objective or positive about the people they are in conflict with and with whom they hope to some day soon live with in peace.
Teaching about commonalities in culture can also serve as an open door for exploration (in textbooks of both sides). Whether looking at common foods, similar music and dance or even through looking at the Arabic and Hebrew languages, there are endless possibilities for new discovery and ways to develop a more positive attitude toward fostering a desire among the children to want to know more about people on the other side. Educators should not fear that by teaching about the "other" they are in any way weakening their national identity or collective solidarity. In fact, the opposite is quite true.
In this context, it is also worthwhile to point out the importance of teaching not only commonalities between the two peoples, but also the differences. A culture of peace fosters an appreciation of diversity and encourages the ability and desirability to celebrate those diversities as well.
Because of the inextricable link between education and values, Palestinian and Israeli actions taken regarding the review and revision of textbooks and curricula would be an undeniable fact that could not be overlooked regarding their intentions for making peace with each other. The decision of what to teach the young generation is perhaps the most accurate litmus test of what the future may have in store.
The government of Israel and the PA need to pick up the challenge. Both sides should appoint a national advisory committee on textbooks empowered to review the textbooks taking into account the critiques that have been raised over the past years and working on a set of agreed criteria. There is a need for both governments to revise and reform textbooks. Israeli textbooks teach too little about Arabs and Palestinians. If Israel is calling for the Palestinians to revise and reform their textbooks in the spirit of making peace, it must also look inside its own classrooms and do the same. This would also be a serious indication of intentions to make peace with the Palestinians.
Both sides should progress on this issue without regard for what the other side is doing. This is not a question of negotiations, mutuality or reciprocity. Each side must demonstrate the values that it holds dear without regard for what the other side does. The true test of the ability of both sides to make peace will be to degree to which both sides take positive action in educating the next generation in a true spirit of pursuing peace.
PALESTINIAN AND ISRAELI societies have spent the last years trying to come to terms with the viability of peace between them. This period has been marked with periods of cautious optimism that peace might be a reality, coupled with periods of great pessimism and lost hopes. The past years have been marred with extremely violent conflict during which time the hope of peace has almost entirely vanished. Both societies began a process of developing and incorporating elements of peace education within their formal school systems. Most of these efforts have ceased now.
Yet is has become increasingly clear that the lack of ability of individuals and collectives from both sides to understand the perspectives of the other side points to an acute lack of tools, skills and cognitive training to understand the underlying interests, concerns, needs and fears which are the root causes of the conflict. Providing youngsters and their teachers with the training, skills and cognitive understandings of conflict resolution, management and prevention and nonviolence, we can begin a process of leading the region toward a more secure and realistic peace process.
Those who live under conditions of an ongoing violent conflict may find themselves accustomed to attitudes and behaviors which derive from such a situation of violence and distrust. This context refuels attitudes and behaviors that construct and reinforce it, and so we find ourselves imprisoned in a vicious cycle of violence.
The goal of peace education is to bring about change, social change, a change in awareness and patterns of thought which will bring forth a change in the behavior patterns of all those who are involved in the educational process (students, teachers, school principals, the program's staff, etc.); a structural change in which the vision of an equal, just society, that contains and accepts the other within will be actualized; a society that regards just peace as a state of mind, a chosen value and a way of life.
Even though real peace seems quite distant during these days, there is a need to penetrate deeply into both societies so that real peace in the future will be firmly rooted on both sides. Supporting the incorporation of peace education into the formal curricula of both sides could potentially advance peace even as the conflict continues today.
The writer is the co-CEO of the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information. www.ipcri.org
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Israel, Iran and Fear
ROGER COHEN
Published: April 19, 2009 NEW YORK — When I lived in Germany in the 1990s, the return of the capital from Bonn to the scene of the crime, Berlin, prompted agonizing over how to memorialize the Holocaust. Germans thirsted for a “Schlussstrich” — closure with Hitler — even as they acknowledged its impossibility.
A large Holocaust memorial was built in Berlin, but not before a leading writer, Martin Walser, had prompted outrage by railing against “the permanent presentation of our shame” and use of Auschwitz as “a moral stick.”
Closure on the Nazi mass murder is of course impossible. There is no such thing as inherited guilt, but inherited responsibility endures. Germans, through responsibility, have built one of the world’s most successful democracies, a wonder from the ashes.
In the German mirror stands Israel, another vibrant democracy birthed from the crime, albeit one, unlike Germany, that has not found peaceful coexistence. Israel, too, craves closure on a past that holds the insistent specter of annihilation.
As Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist, has written, Israel was supposed not only to take the Jewish people out of exile but ensure that exile was “taken out of the Jewish people.” In this, 61 years after its creation, Israel has fallen short.
Uncertainty does not so much hang over the country as inhabit its very fiber. Existential threats — from Iran, from Hamas and Hezbollah, from demography — are forever invoked. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refuses — for now — to support even the notion of Palestinian statehood.
I’ve been thinking about corrosive Israeli anxiety since I read a response to my recent columns on Iran from Eran Lerman, the director of the Israel/Middle East office of the American Jewish Committee. Lerman framed his piece around his “vulnerable” 17-year-old daughter, who, he wrote, often asks him what he’s done “to make sure that she gets to be 25,” given Iran’s annihilationist rhetoric and nuclear program.
Israel, Lerman suggested, faces “simply the challenge of staying alive in a hostile environment.”
But it’s not that simple. How frightened should an Israeli teenager really be, how inhabited by the old existential terror, the perennial victimhood, the Holocaust fear and vulnerability from which Israel was supposed to provide deliverance?
Yes, Israel is small — all the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea is scarcely bigger than Maryland — and its environment hostile. This, as former President Jimmy Carter notes in a fine new book, makes it vulnerable. But as Carter also writes in “We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land,” Israel has a “military force that is modern, highly trained and superior to the combined forces of all its potential adversaries.”
Not only that, Israel has a formidable nuclear arsenal; it has made peace with Egypt and Jordan; it has a cast-iron security guarantee from the United States; it has walled, fenced, blockaded and road-blocked the roughly 4 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza into a pitiful archipelago of helplessness; its enemies, Hezbollah and Hamas, only declared victory in recent wars by preventing their own destruction.
Israel has the most dynamic and creative society in the region, one that does not convict American journalists in shameful secret trials, as Iran has just done with Roxana Saberi; it has never fought a war with Iran; and it knows — despite all the noise — that Persia, at more than 3,000 years and counting, is not in the business of hastening its own suicide through militarist folly.
Some of this, no doubt, Lerman has told his daughter. It should reassure her. Fear is the worst of foundations.
Far from Iran, and the tired Nazi analogies misleadingly attached to it, there is another threat. As Gary Sick, the prominent Middle East scholar and author, suggested to me recently: “The biggest risk to Israel is Israel.”
A core contradiction inhabits Israeli policy. While talking about a two-state solution — at least until Netanyahu redux — Israel has gone on building the West Bank settlements that render a peace agreement impossible by atomizing the 23 percent of the land theoretically destined for Palestine.
As Ehud Barak, now the defense minister, remarked in 1999: “Every attempt to keep hold of this area as one political entity leads, necessarily, to either a non-democratic or a non-Jewish state, because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state ...”
That’s right. The population of Arabs in the Holy Land, at about 5.4 million, will one day overtake the number of Jews. So a two-state solution is essential to Israel’s survival as a Jewish state. Persisting in the 42-year-old occupation and the building of settlements gnaws at the very foundations of the Zionist dream.
Netanyahu now wants Palestinian leaders in the West Bank, who have recognized Israel, to go further and recognize it as a Jewish state, even before he accepts a hypothetical Palestinian state. That’s a sign of the Israeli angst occupation has institutionalized.
Closure is the overcoming of horror. It is the achievement of normality through responsibility. It cannot be attained through the inflation of threats, the perpetuation of fears, or retreat into the victimhood that sees every act, however violent, as defensive.
Israel, Iran and Fear
ROGER COHEN
Published: April 19, 2009 NEW YORK — When I lived in Germany in the 1990s, the return of the capital from Bonn to the scene of the crime, Berlin, prompted agonizing over how to memorialize the Holocaust. Germans thirsted for a “Schlussstrich” — closure with Hitler — even as they acknowledged its impossibility.
A large Holocaust memorial was built in Berlin, but not before a leading writer, Martin Walser, had prompted outrage by railing against “the permanent presentation of our shame” and use of Auschwitz as “a moral stick.”
Closure on the Nazi mass murder is of course impossible. There is no such thing as inherited guilt, but inherited responsibility endures. Germans, through responsibility, have built one of the world’s most successful democracies, a wonder from the ashes.
In the German mirror stands Israel, another vibrant democracy birthed from the crime, albeit one, unlike Germany, that has not found peaceful coexistence. Israel, too, craves closure on a past that holds the insistent specter of annihilation.
As Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist, has written, Israel was supposed not only to take the Jewish people out of exile but ensure that exile was “taken out of the Jewish people.” In this, 61 years after its creation, Israel has fallen short.
Uncertainty does not so much hang over the country as inhabit its very fiber. Existential threats — from Iran, from Hamas and Hezbollah, from demography — are forever invoked. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refuses — for now — to support even the notion of Palestinian statehood.
I’ve been thinking about corrosive Israeli anxiety since I read a response to my recent columns on Iran from Eran Lerman, the director of the Israel/Middle East office of the American Jewish Committee. Lerman framed his piece around his “vulnerable” 17-year-old daughter, who, he wrote, often asks him what he’s done “to make sure that she gets to be 25,” given Iran’s annihilationist rhetoric and nuclear program.
Israel, Lerman suggested, faces “simply the challenge of staying alive in a hostile environment.”
But it’s not that simple. How frightened should an Israeli teenager really be, how inhabited by the old existential terror, the perennial victimhood, the Holocaust fear and vulnerability from which Israel was supposed to provide deliverance?
Yes, Israel is small — all the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea is scarcely bigger than Maryland — and its environment hostile. This, as former President Jimmy Carter notes in a fine new book, makes it vulnerable. But as Carter also writes in “We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land,” Israel has a “military force that is modern, highly trained and superior to the combined forces of all its potential adversaries.”
Not only that, Israel has a formidable nuclear arsenal; it has made peace with Egypt and Jordan; it has a cast-iron security guarantee from the United States; it has walled, fenced, blockaded and road-blocked the roughly 4 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza into a pitiful archipelago of helplessness; its enemies, Hezbollah and Hamas, only declared victory in recent wars by preventing their own destruction.
Israel has the most dynamic and creative society in the region, one that does not convict American journalists in shameful secret trials, as Iran has just done with Roxana Saberi; it has never fought a war with Iran; and it knows — despite all the noise — that Persia, at more than 3,000 years and counting, is not in the business of hastening its own suicide through militarist folly.
Some of this, no doubt, Lerman has told his daughter. It should reassure her. Fear is the worst of foundations.
Far from Iran, and the tired Nazi analogies misleadingly attached to it, there is another threat. As Gary Sick, the prominent Middle East scholar and author, suggested to me recently: “The biggest risk to Israel is Israel.”
A core contradiction inhabits Israeli policy. While talking about a two-state solution — at least until Netanyahu redux — Israel has gone on building the West Bank settlements that render a peace agreement impossible by atomizing the 23 percent of the land theoretically destined for Palestine.
As Ehud Barak, now the defense minister, remarked in 1999: “Every attempt to keep hold of this area as one political entity leads, necessarily, to either a non-democratic or a non-Jewish state, because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state ...”
That’s right. The population of Arabs in the Holy Land, at about 5.4 million, will one day overtake the number of Jews. So a two-state solution is essential to Israel’s survival as a Jewish state. Persisting in the 42-year-old occupation and the building of settlements gnaws at the very foundations of the Zionist dream.
Netanyahu now wants Palestinian leaders in the West Bank, who have recognized Israel, to go further and recognize it as a Jewish state, even before he accepts a hypothetical Palestinian state. That’s a sign of the Israeli angst occupation has institutionalized.
Closure is the overcoming of horror. It is the achievement of normality through responsibility. It cannot be attained through the inflation of threats, the perpetuation of fears, or retreat into the victimhood that sees every act, however violent, as defensive.
All Things Considered, April 22, 2009 · King Abdullah of Jordan had a warning for President Obama on Tuesday when the two met at the White House: Time is running out for a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The king's wife, Queen Rania al-Abdullah, who is also in Washington, is reinforcing that message.
The queen, who is Palestinian, has used her position to talk about a range of issues, from finding peace in the Middle East to educating women and girls, and addressing stereotypes about Muslims.
Last year, she launched her own YouTube channel. She explained why in a send-up of David Letterman's "Top Ten." The No. 1 reason on her list is because "intolerance and mistrust are driving us apart."
Queen Rania tells NPR's Michele Norris that she knew she was exposing herself when she created the channel to help foster debate over the Middle East peace process. But she says that through the exercise, she was able to hear the "various points of view unedited, unfiltered."
"When you're a public personality, no matter how much you try to remain open, invariably there will be filters around you — and you may not hear it as it is," Queen Rania says. "It's not until you really interact with the other side, where you put yourself in their shoes and try to see things from their eyes, that you start to empathize. That's where you get more tolerance and acceptance among people of different cultures."
The queen says though the world's financial markets are integrated, the world's cultures are not. She says it is important to keep trying to integrate the world's cultures, especially to fight one of the "greatest enemies" plagues the Israel-Palestinian peace process: cynicism.
She says that the world cannot to afford to be cynical, because then it would be "writing off the futures of hundreds and thousands, if not millions of people, condemning their lives to hardship and really saying that there's no future for them."
"We know what the solution is to this problem," Queen Rania says. "What we need is the political will and the commitment from all parties to really take the steps that need to be taken on the ground. We mustn't let the extremists on both sides dictate the agenda and the path toward this process."
In an interview with NPR's Michele Kelemen, Queen Rania's husband, King Abdullah, said that Israel has to decide if it wants to be a part of the neighborhood or continue to be "fortress Israel."
Queen Rania says her husband was talking about the Arab Peace Initiative, which was endorsed by 22 Arab states and supports the two-state solution.
"Ultimately, peace for Israel is going to come from being accepted regionally," she says. "It's not going to come from building walls or barriers from conflict and from war and from isolation. That is not the kind of life that Israelis want or deserve."
Queen Rania also says that she wants the Obama administration to hold both sides accountable.
"The new president enjoys an incredible amount of credibility all over the world, as you know, and particularly in our region," she says. "And we hope that his administration is able to articulate and map out a vision for our region — and to be able to expend his political capital in the right way, and to invest it in really trying to find a final solution to this long-standing issue."
She says she thinks the U.S. has "the opportunity to put its best face forward."
"I believe that, unfortunately, [for] many in our region, the only American face that they have been exposed to is that of a military personnel," she says. "With all due respect to the military, I think what Americans really excel at is innovation, is their humanity, their philanthropy, the way they like to help people. We need to see more of that face in the Arab world."
The king's wife, Queen Rania al-Abdullah, who is also in Washington, is reinforcing that message.
The queen, who is Palestinian, has used her position to talk about a range of issues, from finding peace in the Middle East to educating women and girls, and addressing stereotypes about Muslims.
Last year, she launched her own YouTube channel. She explained why in a send-up of David Letterman's "Top Ten." The No. 1 reason on her list is because "intolerance and mistrust are driving us apart."
Queen Rania tells NPR's Michele Norris that she knew she was exposing herself when she created the channel to help foster debate over the Middle East peace process. But she says that through the exercise, she was able to hear the "various points of view unedited, unfiltered."
"When you're a public personality, no matter how much you try to remain open, invariably there will be filters around you — and you may not hear it as it is," Queen Rania says. "It's not until you really interact with the other side, where you put yourself in their shoes and try to see things from their eyes, that you start to empathize. That's where you get more tolerance and acceptance among people of different cultures."
The queen says though the world's financial markets are integrated, the world's cultures are not. She says it is important to keep trying to integrate the world's cultures, especially to fight one of the "greatest enemies" plagues the Israel-Palestinian peace process: cynicism.
She says that the world cannot to afford to be cynical, because then it would be "writing off the futures of hundreds and thousands, if not millions of people, condemning their lives to hardship and really saying that there's no future for them."
"We know what the solution is to this problem," Queen Rania says. "What we need is the political will and the commitment from all parties to really take the steps that need to be taken on the ground. We mustn't let the extremists on both sides dictate the agenda and the path toward this process."
In an interview with NPR's Michele Kelemen, Queen Rania's husband, King Abdullah, said that Israel has to decide if it wants to be a part of the neighborhood or continue to be "fortress Israel."
Queen Rania says her husband was talking about the Arab Peace Initiative, which was endorsed by 22 Arab states and supports the two-state solution.
"Ultimately, peace for Israel is going to come from being accepted regionally," she says. "It's not going to come from building walls or barriers from conflict and from war and from isolation. That is not the kind of life that Israelis want or deserve."
Queen Rania also says that she wants the Obama administration to hold both sides accountable.
"The new president enjoys an incredible amount of credibility all over the world, as you know, and particularly in our region," she says. "And we hope that his administration is able to articulate and map out a vision for our region — and to be able to expend his political capital in the right way, and to invest it in really trying to find a final solution to this long-standing issue."
She says she thinks the U.S. has "the opportunity to put its best face forward."
"I believe that, unfortunately, [for] many in our region, the only American face that they have been exposed to is that of a military personnel," she says. "With all due respect to the military, I think what Americans really excel at is innovation, is their humanity, their philanthropy, the way they like to help people. We need to see more of that face in the Arab world."
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Palestinians in Gaza: Besieged & Attacked w/ U.S. Weapons
On December 27, 2008, Israel launched
a full-scale air and naval attack on the
occupied Palestinian Gaza Strip. On
January 3, 2009, Israel expanded its
attacks on the Gaza Strip by launching a
massive ground invasion.
Israel's three-week war on the occupied
Gaza Strip exacted a terrible toll on the 1.5
million Palestinians living there, killing more
than 1,300, injuring more than 5,000,
destroying 4,000 buildings, and causing an
estimated $2 billion in damage to civilian
infrastructure.
Israel's attacks come on top of a brutal
siege of the Gaza Strip, which has created
a humanitarian catastrophe of dire
proportions for Gaza's 1.5 million
Palestinian residents by restricting the
provision of food, fuel, medicine, electricity,
and other necessities of life.
Israel's war and siege on the Gaza Strip
would not be possible without the
weapons provided by the United States
and its veto at the UN preventing the
international community from holding
Israel accountable for its human rights
violations .
Here is a snapshot of the U.S. weapons
Israel is using to kill and besiege
Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip:
* Israel carried out its aerial bombardment
of the Gaza Strip with U.S.-provided F16
fighter jets and Apache helicopter gunships.
From 2001-2006, the United States
provided Israel with more than $200 million
in spare parts for its fighter jets and
more than $100 million in spare parts for
its helicopter gunships.
* In July 2008, the United States provided
Israel with 186 million gallons of JP-8
aviation jet fuel to fly its fleet of F16's and
Apaches.
* Israel bombarded the Gaza Strip by sea
with naval combat ships and on December
30, the Israeli navy intentionally rammed a
boat in international waters which was
carrying medical supplies to the Gaza Strip,
nearly causing it to sink. The passengers of
The Dignity included doctors and recent
Green Party Presidential candidate
Cynthia McKinney. In July 2008, the
United States signed a contract to transfer
$1.9 billion of naval combat ships to
Israel.
* Israeli aircraft and ships fired missiles and
bombs provided by the United States. In
October 2007, the United States signed a
$1.3 billion contract with Raytheon to
transfer to Israel thousands of TOW,
Hellfire, and "bunker buster" missiles.
Israel also is dropped GBU-39 small
diameter bombs on the Gaza Strip.
According to weapons experts, these
bombs contain uranium oxide and have
left behind radioactive contamination in
places such as Kosovo, Iraq, and
Afghanistan. In September 2008, Boeing
received a $77 million contract to
transfer 1,000 of these bombs to Israel.
* Israel invaded the Gaza Strip by ground
using tanks, armored personnel carriers,
and other military vehicles with troops
wearing night-vision goggles. Since 2001,
the United States has given Israel more
than $300 million in tank components
and spare parts and various military
vehicles, and nearly $150 million in
night-vision goggles and scopes.
Israel is the largest recipient of U.S.
military aid. In August 2007, the United
States and Israel signed an agreement to
increase arms transfers to Israel to $30
billion over the next decade. President-
Elect Obama already has pledged to
implement this agreement without any
conditions.
All U.S. aid programs, whether military or
economic, have built-in mechanisms to
prevent that aid from being used by
countries to commit human rights abuses.
According to U.S. law, countries that
commit human rights abuses with U.S. aid
are to be sanctioned and aid is to be cut off.
The Arms Export Control Act (P.L. 80-
829) stipulates that countries purchasing or
receiving U.S. weapons cannot use them
against civilians and must restrict their
usage to “internal security” and “legitimate
self-defense.” Israel repeatedly uses U.S.
weapons to commit human rights violations
against civilians in the Occupied Palestinian
Territories and in Lebanon. Indeed, Israel
could not maintain its illegal 41-year military
occupation and siege of the Palestinian
West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza
Strip without these weapons.
According to the Foreign Assistance Act
of 1961 (P.L. 87-195), “No assistance may
be provided under this part [of the law] to
the government of any country which
engages in a consistent pattern of gross
violations of internationally recognized
human rights.” As documented not only by
Palestinian, Israeli, and international human
rights groups, but by the U.S. government
as well, Israel has an atrocious human
rights record and therefore should be
ineligible for any form of U.S. aid.
TAKE ACTION
* Take to the streets and make your
opposition public. Hundreds of
protests are scheduled to take place
across the country. Find one near you or
add details of your own protest.
* Educate and organize people in your
community. Sign up to organize people
in your community to oppose military aid
to Israel and get an organizing packet.
* Contact the White House, State
Dept. and your Members of Congress.
Write a letter and set up a meeting with
your Members of Congress to demand a
lifting of the siege of Gaza, and
investigation into Israel's misuse of U.S.
weapons.
* Get the message out to the media.
Download talking points and make your
voice heard.
* Step up the pressure on President
Obama and the new Congress. Sign
our open letter and come to our Feb. 1-2
Grassroots Advocacy Training and
Lobby Day.
* Make a tax-deductible donation to us
and give less of your tax dollars to
Israel.
FOR MORE DETAILS, VISIT:
http://www.endtheoccupation.org
US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation | PO Box 21539 | Washington, DC 20009
202-332-0994 | www.endtheoccupation.org | us_campaign@endtheoccupation.org
Take Action to Protest Israel's Misuse of U.S. Weapons
On December 27, 2008, Israel launched
a full-scale air and naval attack on the
occupied Palestinian Gaza Strip. On
January 3, 2009, Israel expanded its
attacks on the Gaza Strip by launching a
massive ground invasion.
Israel's three-week war on the occupied
Gaza Strip exacted a terrible toll on the 1.5
million Palestinians living there, killing more
than 1,300, injuring more than 5,000,
destroying 4,000 buildings, and causing an
estimated $2 billion in damage to civilian
infrastructure.
Israel's attacks come on top of a brutal
siege of the Gaza Strip, which has created
a humanitarian catastrophe of dire
proportions for Gaza's 1.5 million
Palestinian residents by restricting the
provision of food, fuel, medicine, electricity,
and other necessities of life.
Israel's war and siege on the Gaza Strip
would not be possible without the
weapons provided by the United States
and its veto at the UN preventing the
international community from holding
Israel accountable for its human rights
violations .
Here is a snapshot of the U.S. weapons
Israel is using to kill and besiege
Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip:
* Israel carried out its aerial bombardment
of the Gaza Strip with U.S.-provided F16
fighter jets and Apache helicopter gunships.
From 2001-2006, the United States
provided Israel with more than $200 million
in spare parts for its fighter jets and
more than $100 million in spare parts for
its helicopter gunships.
* In July 2008, the United States provided
Israel with 186 million gallons of JP-8
aviation jet fuel to fly its fleet of F16's and
Apaches.
* Israel bombarded the Gaza Strip by sea
with naval combat ships and on December
30, the Israeli navy intentionally rammed a
boat in international waters which was
carrying medical supplies to the Gaza Strip,
nearly causing it to sink. The passengers of
The Dignity included doctors and recent
Green Party Presidential candidate
Cynthia McKinney. In July 2008, the
United States signed a contract to transfer
$1.9 billion of naval combat ships to
Israel.
* Israeli aircraft and ships fired missiles and
bombs provided by the United States. In
October 2007, the United States signed a
$1.3 billion contract with Raytheon to
transfer to Israel thousands of TOW,
Hellfire, and "bunker buster" missiles.
Israel also is dropped GBU-39 small
diameter bombs on the Gaza Strip.
According to weapons experts, these
bombs contain uranium oxide and have
left behind radioactive contamination in
places such as Kosovo, Iraq, and
Afghanistan. In September 2008, Boeing
received a $77 million contract to
transfer 1,000 of these bombs to Israel.
* Israel invaded the Gaza Strip by ground
using tanks, armored personnel carriers,
and other military vehicles with troops
wearing night-vision goggles. Since 2001,
the United States has given Israel more
than $300 million in tank components
and spare parts and various military
vehicles, and nearly $150 million in
night-vision goggles and scopes.
Israel is the largest recipient of U.S.
military aid. In August 2007, the United
States and Israel signed an agreement to
increase arms transfers to Israel to $30
billion over the next decade. President-
Elect Obama already has pledged to
implement this agreement without any
conditions.
All U.S. aid programs, whether military or
economic, have built-in mechanisms to
prevent that aid from being used by
countries to commit human rights abuses.
According to U.S. law, countries that
commit human rights abuses with U.S. aid
are to be sanctioned and aid is to be cut off.
The Arms Export Control Act (P.L. 80-
829) stipulates that countries purchasing or
receiving U.S. weapons cannot use them
against civilians and must restrict their
usage to “internal security” and “legitimate
self-defense.” Israel repeatedly uses U.S.
weapons to commit human rights violations
against civilians in the Occupied Palestinian
Territories and in Lebanon. Indeed, Israel
could not maintain its illegal 41-year military
occupation and siege of the Palestinian
West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza
Strip without these weapons.
According to the Foreign Assistance Act
of 1961 (P.L. 87-195), “No assistance may
be provided under this part [of the law] to
the government of any country which
engages in a consistent pattern of gross
violations of internationally recognized
human rights.” As documented not only by
Palestinian, Israeli, and international human
rights groups, but by the U.S. government
as well, Israel has an atrocious human
rights record and therefore should be
ineligible for any form of U.S. aid.
TAKE ACTION
* Take to the streets and make your
opposition public. Hundreds of
protests are scheduled to take place
across the country. Find one near you or
add details of your own protest.
* Educate and organize people in your
community. Sign up to organize people
in your community to oppose military aid
to Israel and get an organizing packet.
* Contact the White House, State
Dept. and your Members of Congress.
Write a letter and set up a meeting with
your Members of Congress to demand a
lifting of the siege of Gaza, and
investigation into Israel's misuse of U.S.
weapons.
* Get the message out to the media.
Download talking points and make your
voice heard.
* Step up the pressure on President
Obama and the new Congress. Sign
our open letter and come to our Feb. 1-2
Grassroots Advocacy Training and
Lobby Day.
* Make a tax-deductible donation to us
and give less of your tax dollars to
Israel.
FOR MORE DETAILS, VISIT:
http://www.endtheoccupation.org
US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation | PO Box 21539 | Washington, DC 20009
202-332-0994 | www.endtheoccupation.org | us_campaign@endtheoccupation.org
Take Action to Protest Israel's Misuse of U.S. Weapons
At a time when Western governments refrain from using their power to stop Israel's ongoing violations of international law, many civil society organizations silently watch the moral corrosion of their governments. At the "Israel Review Conference" in Geneva this month and the Russell Tribunal slated for early 2010, however, civil society will use its power and call Israel to account.
The Israel Review Conference is organized in response to the efforts to leave out the case of the systematic violation of the rights of the Palestinian people from the United Nations Durban Review Conference in Geneva from 20-24 April. The World Conference Against Racism adopted a Program of Action to combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance in Durban, South Africa in 2001. The progress made will be reviewed at the UN Durban Review Conference. Israel has tried to avoid a review of its policies and practices by staying away from Durban II, and it successfully influenced its allies to do the same.
In October 2008 the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC), representing more than 170 Palestinian civil society organizations, published a solid position paper for Durban II. It gives many examples of Israel's systematic and institutional discrimination against the Palestinian people. This includes the continued prevention of the return of the Palestinian refugees, the ongoing appropriation of Palestinian land in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and in Israel, the adoption of new discriminatory laws to limit the fundamental human and civil rights of Palestinians, the siege of the Gaza Strip, the ongoing segregation and house demolitions of property owned by Palestinians in Israel, and the denial of due process and effective remedies for Palestinians in Israeli prisons.
It is obvious Palestinians have not enjoyed much improvement towards equal rights since Durban I. However, the Durban Review Conference will not examine this issue. To ensure that Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people will be assessed, the Israel Review Conference is organized by a civil society coalition in Geneva on 18-19 April. The partners collaborating on the conference are the Palestinian BNC, the Civil Society Forum for the Durban Review Conference, the European Coordinating Committee on Palestine, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and the International Coordinating Network on Palestine. Internationally renowned experts and actors for social and political justice will examine how the UN anti-racism instruments apply to Israel's policies and practices towards the Palestinian people, and develop practical recommendations on how to hold Israel accountable to international law and protect the rights of the Palestinian people.
The exclusion of a review of Israel at Durban II and the formation of the Israel Review Conference follows Israel's deadly assault on Gaza earlier this year, and questions of what international mechanisms exist to hold Israel accountable.
United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, Richard Falk stated that Israel's offensive in the densely populated Gaza appeared to constitute a war crime of the "greatest magnitude." Falk also mentioned that Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip violated the Geneva Conventions. He further suggested that the UN Security Council set up an ad hoc criminal tribunal to establish accountability for war crimes in Gaza. The reluctance of the Security Council to call for an immediate ceasefire to end the bombing and killing in Gaza does not give much hope that meaningful action will be taken at the UN level.
The option to hold Israel to account at the International Criminal Court (ICC) is uncertain. Israel does not recognize the authority of the ICC, because it wants to deal with war crimes in its own way. What this entails becomes clear by how it dealt with serious allegations from Israeli soldiers that included the commission of war crimes and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions in the Gaza Strip. After an inquiry of 11 days, military Advocate-General Avichai Mandelblit closed the case. However, the Palestinian Authority expressed its recognition of the ICC's authority in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in January, with the intention to give the ICC jurisdiction to launch an investigation in Gaza. ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo announced in early February that he will start a preliminary investigation that would include whether the ICC has the authority to proceed further. There are serious doubts that the ICC will bring the abettors of war crimes in Gaza to The Hague.
In this environment of lack of accountability for Israel at the level of international organizations, citizens took the initiative for the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in response to Israel's impunity vis-a-vis its violations of international law. The tribunal aims to reaffirm the primacy of international law as the basis for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and hopes to raise awareness of the responsibility of the international community in the continuing denial of the rights of the Palestinian people. Experts and witnesses committees will establish the facts and build the legal arguments that will be presented to the Russell Tribunal in several world capitals in early 2010. A jury of well-known personalities respected for their high moral standing will consider the reports and hear witness testimony. The jury will announce its conclusions which certainly will attract widespread international public and political support.
The first Russell Tribunal or International War Crimes Tribunal investigated and evaluated American foreign policy and military intervention in Vietnam after the defeat of French forces in 1954. At the establishment of the Russell Tribunal, Bertrand Russell quoted the Chief Prosecutor of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, Robert H. Jackson, stating that "If certain acts and violations of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them. We are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us." Civil society initiatives towards freedom, justice and equality for the Palestinian people confirm that the same counts for Israel.
Adri Nieuwhof is a consultant and human rights advocate based in Switzerland.
The Israel Review Conference is organized in response to the efforts to leave out the case of the systematic violation of the rights of the Palestinian people from the United Nations Durban Review Conference in Geneva from 20-24 April. The World Conference Against Racism adopted a Program of Action to combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance in Durban, South Africa in 2001. The progress made will be reviewed at the UN Durban Review Conference. Israel has tried to avoid a review of its policies and practices by staying away from Durban II, and it successfully influenced its allies to do the same.
In October 2008 the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC), representing more than 170 Palestinian civil society organizations, published a solid position paper for Durban II. It gives many examples of Israel's systematic and institutional discrimination against the Palestinian people. This includes the continued prevention of the return of the Palestinian refugees, the ongoing appropriation of Palestinian land in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and in Israel, the adoption of new discriminatory laws to limit the fundamental human and civil rights of Palestinians, the siege of the Gaza Strip, the ongoing segregation and house demolitions of property owned by Palestinians in Israel, and the denial of due process and effective remedies for Palestinians in Israeli prisons.
It is obvious Palestinians have not enjoyed much improvement towards equal rights since Durban I. However, the Durban Review Conference will not examine this issue. To ensure that Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people will be assessed, the Israel Review Conference is organized by a civil society coalition in Geneva on 18-19 April. The partners collaborating on the conference are the Palestinian BNC, the Civil Society Forum for the Durban Review Conference, the European Coordinating Committee on Palestine, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and the International Coordinating Network on Palestine. Internationally renowned experts and actors for social and political justice will examine how the UN anti-racism instruments apply to Israel's policies and practices towards the Palestinian people, and develop practical recommendations on how to hold Israel accountable to international law and protect the rights of the Palestinian people.
The exclusion of a review of Israel at Durban II and the formation of the Israel Review Conference follows Israel's deadly assault on Gaza earlier this year, and questions of what international mechanisms exist to hold Israel accountable.
United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, Richard Falk stated that Israel's offensive in the densely populated Gaza appeared to constitute a war crime of the "greatest magnitude." Falk also mentioned that Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip violated the Geneva Conventions. He further suggested that the UN Security Council set up an ad hoc criminal tribunal to establish accountability for war crimes in Gaza. The reluctance of the Security Council to call for an immediate ceasefire to end the bombing and killing in Gaza does not give much hope that meaningful action will be taken at the UN level.
The option to hold Israel to account at the International Criminal Court (ICC) is uncertain. Israel does not recognize the authority of the ICC, because it wants to deal with war crimes in its own way. What this entails becomes clear by how it dealt with serious allegations from Israeli soldiers that included the commission of war crimes and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions in the Gaza Strip. After an inquiry of 11 days, military Advocate-General Avichai Mandelblit closed the case. However, the Palestinian Authority expressed its recognition of the ICC's authority in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in January, with the intention to give the ICC jurisdiction to launch an investigation in Gaza. ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo announced in early February that he will start a preliminary investigation that would include whether the ICC has the authority to proceed further. There are serious doubts that the ICC will bring the abettors of war crimes in Gaza to The Hague.
In this environment of lack of accountability for Israel at the level of international organizations, citizens took the initiative for the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in response to Israel's impunity vis-a-vis its violations of international law. The tribunal aims to reaffirm the primacy of international law as the basis for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and hopes to raise awareness of the responsibility of the international community in the continuing denial of the rights of the Palestinian people. Experts and witnesses committees will establish the facts and build the legal arguments that will be presented to the Russell Tribunal in several world capitals in early 2010. A jury of well-known personalities respected for their high moral standing will consider the reports and hear witness testimony. The jury will announce its conclusions which certainly will attract widespread international public and political support.
The first Russell Tribunal or International War Crimes Tribunal investigated and evaluated American foreign policy and military intervention in Vietnam after the defeat of French forces in 1954. At the establishment of the Russell Tribunal, Bertrand Russell quoted the Chief Prosecutor of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, Robert H. Jackson, stating that "If certain acts and violations of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them. We are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us." Civil society initiatives towards freedom, justice and equality for the Palestinian people confirm that the same counts for Israel.
Adri Nieuwhof is a consultant and human rights advocate based in Switzerland.
America is not a Christian nation
Religious conservatives argue the Founding Fathers intended the United States to be a Judeo-Christian country. But President Obama is right when he says it isn't.
By Michael Lind
April 14, 2009 | Is America a Christian nation, as many conservatives claim it is? One American doesn't think so. In his press conference on April 6 in Turkey, President Obama explained: "One of the great strengths of the United States is … we have a very large Christian population -- we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values."
Predictably, Obama's remarks have enraged conservative talking heads. But Obama's observations have ample precedent in American diplomacy and constitutional thought. The most striking is the Treaty of Tripoli, ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1797. Article 11 states: "As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility [sic], of Mussulmen [Muslims]; and, as the said States never have entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."
Conservatives who claim that the U.S. is a "Christian nation" sometimes dismiss the Treaty of Tripoli because it was authored by the U.S. diplomat Joel Barlow, an Enlightenment freethinker. Well, then, how about the tenth president, John Tyler, in an 1843 letter: "The United States have adventured upon a great and noble experiment, which is believed to have been hazarded in the absence of all previous precedent -- that of total separation of Church and State. No religious establishment by law exists among us. The conscience is left free from all restraint and each is permitted to worship his Maker after his own judgment. The offices of the Government are open alike to all. No tithes are levied to support an established Hierarchy, nor is the fallible judgment of man set up as the sure and infallible creed of faith. The Mohammedan, if he will to come among us would have the privilege guaranteed to him by the constitution to worship according to the Koran; and the East Indian might erect a shrine to Brahma, if it so pleased him. Such is the spirit of toleration inculcated by our political Institutions."
Was Tyler too minor a president to be considered an authority on whether the U.S. is a Christian republic or not? Here's George Washington in a letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island in 1790: "The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy -- a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support ... May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants -- while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid."
Eloquent as he is, Barack Obama could not have put it better.
Contrast this with John McCain's interview with Beliefnet during the 2008 presidential campaign: "But I think the number one issue people should make [in the] selection of the President of the United States is, 'Will this person carry on in the Judeo Christian principled tradition that has made this nation the greatest experiment in the history of mankind?'" Asked whether this would rule out a Muslim candidate for the presidency, McCain answered, "But, no, I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles ... personally, I prefer someone who I know has a solid grounding in my faith. But that doesn't mean that I'm sure that someone who is a Muslim would not make a good president. I don't say that we would rule out under any circumstances someone of a different faith. I just would -- I just feel that that's an important part of our qualifications to lead."
Conservatives who, like McCain, assert that the U.S. is in some sense a Christian or Judeo-Christian nation tend to make one of four arguments. The first is anthropological: The majority of Americans describe themselves as Christians, even though the number of voters who describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated has grown from 5.3 percent in 1988 to 12 percent in 2008. But the ratio of Christians to non-Christians in American society as a whole is irrelevant to the question of whether American government is Christian.
The second argument is that the constitution itself is somehow Christian in character. On that point, candidate McCain said: "I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States as a Christian nation." Is McCain right? Is the U.S. a Christian republic in the sense that according to their constitutions Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan are all now officially Islamic republics? What does the Constitution say? Article VI states that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust in the United States." Then there is the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ... "
True, over the years since the founding, Christian nationalists have won a few victories -- inserting "In God We Trust" on our money during the Civil War in 1863, adding "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance during the Cold War in 1954. And there are legislative and military chaplains and ceremonial days of thanksgiving. But these are pretty feeble foundations on which to claim that the U.S. is a Christian republic. ("Judeo-Christian" is a weaselly term used by Christian nationalists to avoid offending Jews; it should be translated as "Christian.")
The third argument holds that while the U.S. government itself may not be formally Christian, the Lockean natural rights theory on which American republicanism rests is supported, in its turn, by Christian theology. Jefferson summarized Lockean natural rights liberalism in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights … that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed …" Many conservatives assert that to be a good Lockean natural nights liberal, one must believe that the Creator who is endowing these rights is the personal God of the Abrahamic religions.
This conflation of Christianity and natural rights liberalism helps to explain one of John McCain's more muddled answers in his Beliefnet interview: "[The] United States of America was founded on the values of Judeo-Christian values [sic], which were translated by our founding fathers which is basically the rights of human dignity and human rights." The same idea lies behind then-Attorney General John Ashcroft's statement to religious broadcasters: "Civilized individuals, Christians, Jews and Muslims" -- sorry, Hindus and Buddhists! -- "all understand that the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator."
In reality, neither Jewish nor Christian traditions know anything of the ideas of natural rights and social contract found in Hobbes, Gassendi and Locke. That's because those ideas were inspired by themes found in non-Christian Greek and Roman philosophy. Ideas of the social contract were anticipated in the fourth and fifth centuries BC by the sophists Glaucon and Lycophron, according to Plato and Aristotle, and by Epicurus, who banished divine activity from a universe explained by natural forces and taught that justice is an agreement among people neither to harm nor be harmed. The idea that all human beings are equal by nature also comes from the Greek sophists and was planted by the Roman jurist Ulpian in Roman law: "quod ad ius natural attinet, omnes hominess aequales sunt" -- according to the law of nature, all human beings are equal.
Desperate to obscure the actual intellectual roots of the Declaration of Independence in Greek philosophy and Roman law, Christian apologists have sought to identify the "Creator" who endows everyone with unalienable rights with the revealed, personal God of Moses and Jesus. But a few sentences earlier, the Declaration refers to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." Adherents of natural rights liberalism often have dropped "Nature's God" and relied solely on "Nature" as the source of natural rights.
In any event, in order to be a good American citizen one need not subscribe to Lockean liberalism. Jefferson, a Lockean liberal himself, did not impose any philosophical or religious test on good citizenship. In his "Notes on the State of Virginia," he wrote: "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
The fourth and final argument made in favor of a "Christian America" by religious conservatives is the best-grounded in history but also the weakest. They point out that American leaders from the founders to the present have seen a role for otherwise privatized and personal religion in turning out moral, law-abiding citizens. As George Washington wrote in his 1796 Farewell Address:
"Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and Citizens. The mere Politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them."
In Washington's day, it may have been reasonable for the elite to worry that only fear of hellfire kept the masses from running amok, but in the 21st century it is clear that democracy as a form of government does not require citizens who believe in supernatural religion. Most of the world's stable democracies are in Europe, where the population is largely post-Christian and secular, and in East Asian countries like Japan where the "Judeo-Christian tradition" has never been part of the majority culture.
The idea that religion is important because it educates democratic citizens in morality is actually quite demeaning to religion. It imposes a political test on religion, as it were -- religions are not true or false, but merely useful or dangerous, when it comes to encouraging the civic virtues that are desirable in citizens of a constitutional, democratic republic. Washington's instrumental view of religion as a kind of prop was agreeable to another two-term American president more than a century and a half later. "[O]ur form of government has no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith," said Dwight Eisenhower, "and I don't care what it is." And it's indistinguishable from Edward Gibbon's description of Roman religion in his famous multi-volume "Decline and Fall": "The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord."
President Obama, then, is right. The American republic, as distinct from the American population, is not post-Christian because it was never Christian. In the president's words: "We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values." And for that we should thank the gods. All 20 of them.
Religious conservatives argue the Founding Fathers intended the United States to be a Judeo-Christian country. But President Obama is right when he says it isn't.
By Michael Lind
April 14, 2009 | Is America a Christian nation, as many conservatives claim it is? One American doesn't think so. In his press conference on April 6 in Turkey, President Obama explained: "One of the great strengths of the United States is … we have a very large Christian population -- we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values."
Predictably, Obama's remarks have enraged conservative talking heads. But Obama's observations have ample precedent in American diplomacy and constitutional thought. The most striking is the Treaty of Tripoli, ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1797. Article 11 states: "As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility [sic], of Mussulmen [Muslims]; and, as the said States never have entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."
Conservatives who claim that the U.S. is a "Christian nation" sometimes dismiss the Treaty of Tripoli because it was authored by the U.S. diplomat Joel Barlow, an Enlightenment freethinker. Well, then, how about the tenth president, John Tyler, in an 1843 letter: "The United States have adventured upon a great and noble experiment, which is believed to have been hazarded in the absence of all previous precedent -- that of total separation of Church and State. No religious establishment by law exists among us. The conscience is left free from all restraint and each is permitted to worship his Maker after his own judgment. The offices of the Government are open alike to all. No tithes are levied to support an established Hierarchy, nor is the fallible judgment of man set up as the sure and infallible creed of faith. The Mohammedan, if he will to come among us would have the privilege guaranteed to him by the constitution to worship according to the Koran; and the East Indian might erect a shrine to Brahma, if it so pleased him. Such is the spirit of toleration inculcated by our political Institutions."
Was Tyler too minor a president to be considered an authority on whether the U.S. is a Christian republic or not? Here's George Washington in a letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island in 1790: "The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy -- a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support ... May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants -- while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid."
Eloquent as he is, Barack Obama could not have put it better.
Contrast this with John McCain's interview with Beliefnet during the 2008 presidential campaign: "But I think the number one issue people should make [in the] selection of the President of the United States is, 'Will this person carry on in the Judeo Christian principled tradition that has made this nation the greatest experiment in the history of mankind?'" Asked whether this would rule out a Muslim candidate for the presidency, McCain answered, "But, no, I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles ... personally, I prefer someone who I know has a solid grounding in my faith. But that doesn't mean that I'm sure that someone who is a Muslim would not make a good president. I don't say that we would rule out under any circumstances someone of a different faith. I just would -- I just feel that that's an important part of our qualifications to lead."
Conservatives who, like McCain, assert that the U.S. is in some sense a Christian or Judeo-Christian nation tend to make one of four arguments. The first is anthropological: The majority of Americans describe themselves as Christians, even though the number of voters who describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated has grown from 5.3 percent in 1988 to 12 percent in 2008. But the ratio of Christians to non-Christians in American society as a whole is irrelevant to the question of whether American government is Christian.
The second argument is that the constitution itself is somehow Christian in character. On that point, candidate McCain said: "I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States as a Christian nation." Is McCain right? Is the U.S. a Christian republic in the sense that according to their constitutions Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan are all now officially Islamic republics? What does the Constitution say? Article VI states that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust in the United States." Then there is the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ... "
True, over the years since the founding, Christian nationalists have won a few victories -- inserting "In God We Trust" on our money during the Civil War in 1863, adding "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance during the Cold War in 1954. And there are legislative and military chaplains and ceremonial days of thanksgiving. But these are pretty feeble foundations on which to claim that the U.S. is a Christian republic. ("Judeo-Christian" is a weaselly term used by Christian nationalists to avoid offending Jews; it should be translated as "Christian.")
The third argument holds that while the U.S. government itself may not be formally Christian, the Lockean natural rights theory on which American republicanism rests is supported, in its turn, by Christian theology. Jefferson summarized Lockean natural rights liberalism in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights … that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed …" Many conservatives assert that to be a good Lockean natural nights liberal, one must believe that the Creator who is endowing these rights is the personal God of the Abrahamic religions.
This conflation of Christianity and natural rights liberalism helps to explain one of John McCain's more muddled answers in his Beliefnet interview: "[The] United States of America was founded on the values of Judeo-Christian values [sic], which were translated by our founding fathers which is basically the rights of human dignity and human rights." The same idea lies behind then-Attorney General John Ashcroft's statement to religious broadcasters: "Civilized individuals, Christians, Jews and Muslims" -- sorry, Hindus and Buddhists! -- "all understand that the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator."
In reality, neither Jewish nor Christian traditions know anything of the ideas of natural rights and social contract found in Hobbes, Gassendi and Locke. That's because those ideas were inspired by themes found in non-Christian Greek and Roman philosophy. Ideas of the social contract were anticipated in the fourth and fifth centuries BC by the sophists Glaucon and Lycophron, according to Plato and Aristotle, and by Epicurus, who banished divine activity from a universe explained by natural forces and taught that justice is an agreement among people neither to harm nor be harmed. The idea that all human beings are equal by nature also comes from the Greek sophists and was planted by the Roman jurist Ulpian in Roman law: "quod ad ius natural attinet, omnes hominess aequales sunt" -- according to the law of nature, all human beings are equal.
Desperate to obscure the actual intellectual roots of the Declaration of Independence in Greek philosophy and Roman law, Christian apologists have sought to identify the "Creator" who endows everyone with unalienable rights with the revealed, personal God of Moses and Jesus. But a few sentences earlier, the Declaration refers to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." Adherents of natural rights liberalism often have dropped "Nature's God" and relied solely on "Nature" as the source of natural rights.
In any event, in order to be a good American citizen one need not subscribe to Lockean liberalism. Jefferson, a Lockean liberal himself, did not impose any philosophical or religious test on good citizenship. In his "Notes on the State of Virginia," he wrote: "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
The fourth and final argument made in favor of a "Christian America" by religious conservatives is the best-grounded in history but also the weakest. They point out that American leaders from the founders to the present have seen a role for otherwise privatized and personal religion in turning out moral, law-abiding citizens. As George Washington wrote in his 1796 Farewell Address:
"Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and Citizens. The mere Politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them."
In Washington's day, it may have been reasonable for the elite to worry that only fear of hellfire kept the masses from running amok, but in the 21st century it is clear that democracy as a form of government does not require citizens who believe in supernatural religion. Most of the world's stable democracies are in Europe, where the population is largely post-Christian and secular, and in East Asian countries like Japan where the "Judeo-Christian tradition" has never been part of the majority culture.
The idea that religion is important because it educates democratic citizens in morality is actually quite demeaning to religion. It imposes a political test on religion, as it were -- religions are not true or false, but merely useful or dangerous, when it comes to encouraging the civic virtues that are desirable in citizens of a constitutional, democratic republic. Washington's instrumental view of religion as a kind of prop was agreeable to another two-term American president more than a century and a half later. "[O]ur form of government has no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith," said Dwight Eisenhower, "and I don't care what it is." And it's indistinguishable from Edward Gibbon's description of Roman religion in his famous multi-volume "Decline and Fall": "The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord."
President Obama, then, is right. The American republic, as distinct from the American population, is not post-Christian because it was never Christian. In the president's words: "We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values." And for that we should thank the gods. All 20 of them.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Israel's recent bombing and ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, Operation Cast Lead, killed 1,417 Palestinians; thirteen Israelis were killed, five by friendly fire. Thousands of Palestinians were seriously wounded and left without adequate medical care, shelter or food. Among the Palestinian dead, more than 400 were children. In response to this devastation, Caryl Churchill wrote a play.
While some British critics greatly admired the play, which was presented by a Jewish director with a largely Jewish cast, a number of prominent British Jews denounced it as anti-Semitic. Some even accused Churchill of blood libel, of perpetrating in Seven Jewish Children the centuries-old lie, used to incite homicidal anti-Jewish violence, that Jews ritually murder non-Jewish children. A spokesman for the Board of Deputies of British Jews told the Jerusalem Post that the "horrifically anti-Israel" text went "beyond the boundaries of reasonable political discourse."
We emphatically disagree. We think Churchill's play should be seen and discussed as widely as possible.
Though you'd never guess from the descriptions offered by its detractors, the play is dense, beautiful, elusive and intentionally indeterminate. This is not to say that the play isn't also direct and incendiary. It is. It's disturbing, it's provocative, but appropriately so, given the magnitude of the calamity it enfolds in its pages. Any play about the crisis in the Middle East that doesn't arouse anger and distress has missed the point.
The now-rote hysteria with which non-Israeli criticism of Israel is met--most recently dismayingly effective in quashing Chas Freeman as President Obama's nominee to chair the National Intelligence Council--has a considerable and ignoble record of stifling opinion and preventing unintimidated, meaningful discussion, in the cultural sphere as well as in the political. The power of art to open us to the subjectivities of others is especially threatening to those who insist on a single narrative. Hence efforts to shut down exhibitions of Palestinian art all over the country, most notoriously, perhaps, in 2006, when Brandeis University officials removed paintings by Palestinian teenagers from a campus library exhibit, "The Arts of Building Peace."
Theater, arguably the most humanizing of art forms because it begins and ends with human presence, with an encounter between spectators and living actors, has often attracted the ire of people grimly determined to maintain the invisibility of others. It's been twenty years since liberal stalwart Joe Papp caved to pressure and canceled appearances at the Public Theater of a visiting Palestinian troupe, El Hakawati. In the decades since, American discourse around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has only become more vituperative and polarized, as the New York Theatre Workshop learned three years ago when it announced, and then retreated from, plans to present My Name Is Rachel Corrie.
With its title, its subject matter, its distillation of that subject matter, of a long, tangled, bloody and bitter history down to a few simple strokes, it's hardly surprising that Churchill's play has elicited outrage. The hostile reaction to Seven Jewish Children has been amplified by the context of a frightening wave of anti-Semitism in Britain and elsewhere, and exacerbated by the tendency to misread a multivocal, dialectical drama as a single-voiced political tract.
Even among those who are anguished and appalled at the catastrophe in Gaza and repulsed by the invective being hurled at Churchill, some are likely to be startled, if not to say troubled, by the play's blunt assertion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a Jewish-Palestinian conflict. Even those familiar enough with Churchill's work to recognize in Seven Jewish Children another installment in her recent move toward poetic compression--and Beckett proved how profound dramatic minimalism can be--may be taken aback by the play's brevity, by the playwright's implicit rejection of the idea that the situation in the Middle East is too complicated, too impacted, too needful of historical exegesis and balancing points of view to be responsibly explored at anything other than great length.
There are passages, particularly in an ugly monologue near the play's conclusion, that are terribly painful to experience, especially for Jews.
It's difficult to imagine that the author didn't intend to court outrage, whether or not she anticipated its ferocity. This imputes nothing to Churchill of the mischievous or sensationalistic. Her play's political ambitions are at least as important as its aesthetic ambitions. Moreover, it would be disingenuous and, in a sense, a betrayal of Seven Jewish Children to insist upon a calm, quiet reading or hearing free from the voluble passions it has enflamed. The fury that rises up around this conflict, and the cowed silence that is that fury's inevitable concomitant, are simultaneously the object and subject of the play. It's an incitement to speech and an examination of silence; in its content and through its inevitably controversial reception, it describes what can and cannot be said.
Why is the play so short? Probably because Churchill means to slap us out of our rehearsed arguments to look at the immediate human crisis. No wonder it smarts. The play dares reduce the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the kind of stinging simplicity of Neruda's lines, "and through the streets the blood of children flowed easily/like the blood of children."
Why does the title use "Jewish" rather than "Israeli"? Because all the children the play revolves around are Jewish, but not all are Israeli. And because not all Israelis are Jewish; a sizable minority is Arab. More important, because her play addresses the worldwide Jewish community. Our history of diaspora and persecution led to the founding of the State of Israel, which claims to act on behalf of all Jews. We have an impact upon its policies. Many Jews, including the two of us, feel profoundly connected to Israel and concerned for its fate; Seven Jewish Children is speaking to us.
Why does the play feel, even to those of us who admire its virtues, so peculiarly and, at times, almost brutally painful? It is an exigent text, a rapid public response to and at the moment of slaughter; and, remarkably, as few such texts are, it is contemplative, interior, almost entirely soft-spoken, and demanding.
The play consists of seven sequences, each composed of approximately twenty simple sentences, almost all of which begin with the words "Tell her" or "Don't tell her." There is no place-and-time setting specified for the sequences, and the lines are not assigned to specific characters. In fact, there isn't a character list or even a suggested number of performers, and the text looks less like a play than the poem it also is. Nonetheless, it's clear that these are discussions between the parents, adult relatives and guardians of a young girl, presumably a different little girl in each sequence, who the playwright specifies is not on stage, not seen. It's also clear that the first of the seven sequences begins during the Holocaust; then the play moves successively to the founding of the State of Israel, the displacement of its Palestinian population and the intensification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, arriving, finally, in a very dark, very dangerous moment--probably, although this is not made explicit in the text, concurrent with the military operation and humanitarian disaster in Gaza that occasioned the play. All else--the cast's size, gender, age (as long as all the players are adults) and ethnicity, as well as all staging choices--the playwright leaves to the director and actors.
The central issue being discussed, in each of the sequences, is what the little girl should or shouldn't be told regarding her circumstances; the tenor of the debate changes as the circumstances change. In the first section, the child faces immediate danger of arrest and murder by the Nazis. Her survival requires that she have an awareness of the seriousness of her situation without being traumatized into paralysis or dissociation. The play begins:
..Tell her it's a game
Tell her it's serious
But don't frighten her
Don't tell her they'll kill her
Tell her it's important to be quiet
Tell her she'll have cake if she's good
In the next sequence, which takes place sometime immediately post-Holocaust, telling or not telling revolves around questions of memory and mourning, of protecting a child from the emotional annihilation of a grief too weighty and of a knowledge of evil too imponderable for her youthful capacities.
Tell her this is a photograph of her grandmother, her uncles and me
Tell her her uncles died
Don't tell her they were killed
Tell her they were killed
Don't frighten her.
Tell her her grandmother was clever
Don't tell her what they did
Tell her she was brave
Tell her she taught me how to make cakes
Don't tell her what they did
Tell her something.
In subsequent sequences, what can and can't be talked about are the anxieties of relocating (to pre-state Israel, although it isn't named), then the presence and forcible displacement of others (the Palestinians, again not named), the roadblocks, the bulldozing of homes, water rights. There's a shift at this point in the dialogue: the tension between assertions and their negation becomes tighter, more suggestive of conflict within the family or community, as the speakers struggle over how to deal with conflict from without.
Don't tell her she can't play with the children
Don't tell her she can have them in the house
Tell her they have plenty of friends and family
Tell her for miles and miles all round they have lands of their own
Tell her again this is our promised land.
Don't tell her they said it was a land without people
Don't tell her I wouldn't have come if I'd known.
Tell her maybe we can share.
Don't tell her that.
Just before the play ends, the back-and-forth of the dialogue is stopped for the first time by a monologue. Though it's ostensibly an answer to the question of what the girl can or can't be told, that question becomes mere pretext for an explosion of rage, racism, militarism, tribalism and repellent indifference to the suffering of others. It's important to note that this monologue is neither the last word in the play nor any kind of summation or harmonizing of the play's disputatious voices. But it's near enough to the end; and expansive as it is, after so much compression, it unavoidably feels like a dreadful conclusion; to some, it's manifestly an indictment.
Tell her, tell her about the army, tell her to be proud of the army. Tell her about the family of dead girls, tell her their names why not, tell her the whole world knows why shouldn't she know? tell her there's dead babies, did she see babies? tell her she's got nothing to be ashamed of. Tell her they did it to themselves. Tell her they want their children killed to make people sorry for them, tell her I'm not sorry for them, tell her not to be sorry for them, tell her we're the ones to be sorry for, tell her they can't talk suffering to us. Tell her we're the iron fist now, tell her it's the fog of war, tell her we won't stop killing them till we're safe, tell her I laughed when I saw the dead policemen, tell her they're animals living in rubble now, tell her I wouldn't care if we wiped them out, the world would hate us is the only thing, tell her I don't care if the world hates us, tell her we're better haters, tell her we're chosen people, tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? tell her all I feel is happy it's not her.
This monologue is the "proof text" for those who've charged Churchill with anti-Semitism and worse, with blood libel, which her accusers discern in the last lines of the speech.
When the two of us first discussed Seven Jewish Children we turned immediately to those lines. We both winced when we read them; we both became alarmed. One of us was disturbed by the line "tell her we're better haters," resonant of Shylock and Alberich the Nibelung. The other focused on "tell her we're chosen people," contending that in this context it reflected a misunderstanding of the term "chosen people," casting Jewish chosen-ness as an expression of divine right and exceptionalism rather than of religious/ethical responsibility. We speculated that these two lines added fuel to the willful misreading as blood libel of the lines that follow: "tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? tell her all I feel is happy it's not her." Those who level the blood-libel accusation insist that Churchill has written "tell her I'm happy when I see their children covered in blood."
But that is not what Churchill wrote. Distortion, misrepresentation and name-calling are tactics familiar to anyone who's spoken out about the Middle East. There's no blood libel in the play. The last line of the monologue is clearly a warning: you can't protect your children by being indifferent to the children of others.
There's a vast difference between making your audience uncomfortable and being anti-Semitic. To see anti-Semitism here is to construe erroneously the words spoken by the worst of Churchill's characters as a statement from the playwright about all Jews as preternaturally filled with a viciousness unique among humankind. But to do this is, again, to distort what Churchill wrote. The monologue belongs to and emerges from a particular dramatic action that makes the eruption inevitable and horrifying.
The play traces the processes of repressed speech. The violence forcing that repression comes initially from without; the monologue gives voice to a violence that's moved inside. The play stages the return of the repressed, an explosion of threatened defensiveness that, unexpressed and unowned, has turned into rage. Encountering it is terrifying; we don't want to own it. But that doesn't mean we don't recognize it. And sad to say, there's no sentiment in the monologue's spew that we have not heard or read at some point from presumed "defenders" of Israel (as even a cursory survey of the Internet demonstrates: for example, the chilling story in the March 20 Ha'aretz about some Israeli army units making T-shirts celebrating civilian casualties and rape in Gaza).
The siege of Gaza over the past several years, which nearly starved a high proportion of the population, was unconscionable in humanitarian terms, but an even worse corner was turned this past winter. A placard at a peace-movement demonstration in Tel Aviv in January proclaimed, Slaughter Is Not Security. Apart from some brave thousands who took to the Israeli streets throughout the weeks of Operation Cast Lead, a large majority of Israelis--and their supporters in America--were convinced that the carnage was, indeed, justified as defense. Some even boasted about it. In America's weekly Jewish newspaper, the Forward, the president of the Reform movement, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, in an op-ed defending the Gaza invasion, disparaged more hawkish Israel supporters for "the obscene, cowboy-like delight" in "the damage Israel's army is able to inflict." But even when softened into Yoffie's remorseful notion of the Gaza offensive as a "tragic necessity, unwelcome but inevitable," the justification amounts to the same thing: better them than us. Such dehumanizing rhetoric is common in mainstream Jewish-American and Israeli discourse (and, in fact, in all military conflicts). Churchill, a non-Jew, had the chutzpah to strip that rhetoric of its hangdog, contrite camouflage and reflect it back to us: "tell her all I feel is happy it's not her."
..That hideous sentiment, however, is not the play's final word. There are three more lines:
Don't tell her that.
Tell her we love her.
Don't frighten her.
A playwright's presumptuous job is to imagine others, and the others Churchill has imagined in this play are Jews. If there's anger in the writing, there's also empathy, tenderness and intimacy. Nothing is more intimate than discussions between parents about what to tell their children; no act of speech is more carefully weighed or more fiercely protected. This is a family play, told from within the family. It concludes with love, and it concludes with fear.
Seven Jewish Children is a play. It must be read with an awareness of the incompleteness of plays on paper, destined as they are for collective rather than singular experience, for warm bodies speaking the lines, for empathy, for the variability of interpretation. All plays require that directors and actors make considered choices. Performance produces meaning. If an actor stresses "tell" in the line "Don't tell her that," it might suggest, That's true, but don't let her know. But if "that" is emphasized, it might mean, How can you even think such an outrageous thing? And much will depend on how the actor strikes the first word, "Don't"--collegially or adversarially.
Churchill ups the interpretive ante by leaving everything, beyond the lines themselves, to her interpreters. The monologue and the lines that follow it will carry different meanings if spoken, say, by a grandmother with a Yiddish accent or by a young man in an Israeli army uniform. Or by, say, a Korean-American man or a Chicana. Or, since the play is so short and could be watched three or four times in a row, with the lines spoken each time by different actors. Any director and company approaching the play will have to decide whether and how the audience will be made aware of the radical degree to which the written text has insisted, through its lack of character identification or stage action, on collaboration. Surely it's essential to understanding Seven Jewish Children that against the specifics of the script, the playwright, relinquishing nearly all traditional authorial control, engineers a far-greater-than-usual slippage among text and performance and audience reception, producing an unusually large amount of room for variant readings.
And it is perhaps only on stage that the central characters of the play come into their own: the eponymous seven Jewish children who are its heroines. We never see them. Our empathic imaginations are enlisted by the playwright. We have to conjure them.
In the opening scene of Churchill's Far Away, a girl asks her aunt about beatings she's seen her uncle commit. What's most terrifying is how easily the aunt placates, justifies and quells her niece's will to question. But in Churchill's play for Gaza, the girls never stop asking.
This is a powerful trope in Jewish culture; it's the questioning child around whom the Passover Seder is built. We're left to hope that this girl we've never seen, the last scene's girl, won't become one of the Israeli teenagers who recently gave the truly frightening Avigdor Lieberman the highest share of the votes in a high school election poll. Perhaps she's a pain in the ass, this girl; perhaps she'll keep questioning. Perhaps she refuses to succumb to those in her family whose loving desire is to protect her by not speaking, by not saying. Perhaps she's realizing that their repression of the truth has become not only misguided and immoral but fatal; for nothing survives on lies, on a denial of reality; eventually, reality wins. Perhaps she's found out about a relative of hers, mentioned earlier: "Don't tell her her cousin refused to serve in the army."
Perhaps this girl will grow up to work for justice.
This article was published in THE NATION and written by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon.
About Tony Kushner
Tony Kushner is a playwright whose most recent work is Homebody/Kabul. more...
About Alisa Solomon
Alisa Solomon teaches at Columbia University's School of Journalism and is the author of Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender
While some British critics greatly admired the play, which was presented by a Jewish director with a largely Jewish cast, a number of prominent British Jews denounced it as anti-Semitic. Some even accused Churchill of blood libel, of perpetrating in Seven Jewish Children the centuries-old lie, used to incite homicidal anti-Jewish violence, that Jews ritually murder non-Jewish children. A spokesman for the Board of Deputies of British Jews told the Jerusalem Post that the "horrifically anti-Israel" text went "beyond the boundaries of reasonable political discourse."
We emphatically disagree. We think Churchill's play should be seen and discussed as widely as possible.
Though you'd never guess from the descriptions offered by its detractors, the play is dense, beautiful, elusive and intentionally indeterminate. This is not to say that the play isn't also direct and incendiary. It is. It's disturbing, it's provocative, but appropriately so, given the magnitude of the calamity it enfolds in its pages. Any play about the crisis in the Middle East that doesn't arouse anger and distress has missed the point.
The now-rote hysteria with which non-Israeli criticism of Israel is met--most recently dismayingly effective in quashing Chas Freeman as President Obama's nominee to chair the National Intelligence Council--has a considerable and ignoble record of stifling opinion and preventing unintimidated, meaningful discussion, in the cultural sphere as well as in the political. The power of art to open us to the subjectivities of others is especially threatening to those who insist on a single narrative. Hence efforts to shut down exhibitions of Palestinian art all over the country, most notoriously, perhaps, in 2006, when Brandeis University officials removed paintings by Palestinian teenagers from a campus library exhibit, "The Arts of Building Peace."
Theater, arguably the most humanizing of art forms because it begins and ends with human presence, with an encounter between spectators and living actors, has often attracted the ire of people grimly determined to maintain the invisibility of others. It's been twenty years since liberal stalwart Joe Papp caved to pressure and canceled appearances at the Public Theater of a visiting Palestinian troupe, El Hakawati. In the decades since, American discourse around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has only become more vituperative and polarized, as the New York Theatre Workshop learned three years ago when it announced, and then retreated from, plans to present My Name Is Rachel Corrie.
With its title, its subject matter, its distillation of that subject matter, of a long, tangled, bloody and bitter history down to a few simple strokes, it's hardly surprising that Churchill's play has elicited outrage. The hostile reaction to Seven Jewish Children has been amplified by the context of a frightening wave of anti-Semitism in Britain and elsewhere, and exacerbated by the tendency to misread a multivocal, dialectical drama as a single-voiced political tract.
Even among those who are anguished and appalled at the catastrophe in Gaza and repulsed by the invective being hurled at Churchill, some are likely to be startled, if not to say troubled, by the play's blunt assertion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a Jewish-Palestinian conflict. Even those familiar enough with Churchill's work to recognize in Seven Jewish Children another installment in her recent move toward poetic compression--and Beckett proved how profound dramatic minimalism can be--may be taken aback by the play's brevity, by the playwright's implicit rejection of the idea that the situation in the Middle East is too complicated, too impacted, too needful of historical exegesis and balancing points of view to be responsibly explored at anything other than great length.
There are passages, particularly in an ugly monologue near the play's conclusion, that are terribly painful to experience, especially for Jews.
It's difficult to imagine that the author didn't intend to court outrage, whether or not she anticipated its ferocity. This imputes nothing to Churchill of the mischievous or sensationalistic. Her play's political ambitions are at least as important as its aesthetic ambitions. Moreover, it would be disingenuous and, in a sense, a betrayal of Seven Jewish Children to insist upon a calm, quiet reading or hearing free from the voluble passions it has enflamed. The fury that rises up around this conflict, and the cowed silence that is that fury's inevitable concomitant, are simultaneously the object and subject of the play. It's an incitement to speech and an examination of silence; in its content and through its inevitably controversial reception, it describes what can and cannot be said.
Why is the play so short? Probably because Churchill means to slap us out of our rehearsed arguments to look at the immediate human crisis. No wonder it smarts. The play dares reduce the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the kind of stinging simplicity of Neruda's lines, "and through the streets the blood of children flowed easily/like the blood of children."
Why does the title use "Jewish" rather than "Israeli"? Because all the children the play revolves around are Jewish, but not all are Israeli. And because not all Israelis are Jewish; a sizable minority is Arab. More important, because her play addresses the worldwide Jewish community. Our history of diaspora and persecution led to the founding of the State of Israel, which claims to act on behalf of all Jews. We have an impact upon its policies. Many Jews, including the two of us, feel profoundly connected to Israel and concerned for its fate; Seven Jewish Children is speaking to us.
Why does the play feel, even to those of us who admire its virtues, so peculiarly and, at times, almost brutally painful? It is an exigent text, a rapid public response to and at the moment of slaughter; and, remarkably, as few such texts are, it is contemplative, interior, almost entirely soft-spoken, and demanding.
The play consists of seven sequences, each composed of approximately twenty simple sentences, almost all of which begin with the words "Tell her" or "Don't tell her." There is no place-and-time setting specified for the sequences, and the lines are not assigned to specific characters. In fact, there isn't a character list or even a suggested number of performers, and the text looks less like a play than the poem it also is. Nonetheless, it's clear that these are discussions between the parents, adult relatives and guardians of a young girl, presumably a different little girl in each sequence, who the playwright specifies is not on stage, not seen. It's also clear that the first of the seven sequences begins during the Holocaust; then the play moves successively to the founding of the State of Israel, the displacement of its Palestinian population and the intensification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, arriving, finally, in a very dark, very dangerous moment--probably, although this is not made explicit in the text, concurrent with the military operation and humanitarian disaster in Gaza that occasioned the play. All else--the cast's size, gender, age (as long as all the players are adults) and ethnicity, as well as all staging choices--the playwright leaves to the director and actors.
The central issue being discussed, in each of the sequences, is what the little girl should or shouldn't be told regarding her circumstances; the tenor of the debate changes as the circumstances change. In the first section, the child faces immediate danger of arrest and murder by the Nazis. Her survival requires that she have an awareness of the seriousness of her situation without being traumatized into paralysis or dissociation. The play begins:
..Tell her it's a game
Tell her it's serious
But don't frighten her
Don't tell her they'll kill her
Tell her it's important to be quiet
Tell her she'll have cake if she's good
In the next sequence, which takes place sometime immediately post-Holocaust, telling or not telling revolves around questions of memory and mourning, of protecting a child from the emotional annihilation of a grief too weighty and of a knowledge of evil too imponderable for her youthful capacities.
Tell her this is a photograph of her grandmother, her uncles and me
Tell her her uncles died
Don't tell her they were killed
Tell her they were killed
Don't frighten her.
Tell her her grandmother was clever
Don't tell her what they did
Tell her she was brave
Tell her she taught me how to make cakes
Don't tell her what they did
Tell her something.
In subsequent sequences, what can and can't be talked about are the anxieties of relocating (to pre-state Israel, although it isn't named), then the presence and forcible displacement of others (the Palestinians, again not named), the roadblocks, the bulldozing of homes, water rights. There's a shift at this point in the dialogue: the tension between assertions and their negation becomes tighter, more suggestive of conflict within the family or community, as the speakers struggle over how to deal with conflict from without.
Don't tell her she can't play with the children
Don't tell her she can have them in the house
Tell her they have plenty of friends and family
Tell her for miles and miles all round they have lands of their own
Tell her again this is our promised land.
Don't tell her they said it was a land without people
Don't tell her I wouldn't have come if I'd known.
Tell her maybe we can share.
Don't tell her that.
Just before the play ends, the back-and-forth of the dialogue is stopped for the first time by a monologue. Though it's ostensibly an answer to the question of what the girl can or can't be told, that question becomes mere pretext for an explosion of rage, racism, militarism, tribalism and repellent indifference to the suffering of others. It's important to note that this monologue is neither the last word in the play nor any kind of summation or harmonizing of the play's disputatious voices. But it's near enough to the end; and expansive as it is, after so much compression, it unavoidably feels like a dreadful conclusion; to some, it's manifestly an indictment.
Tell her, tell her about the army, tell her to be proud of the army. Tell her about the family of dead girls, tell her their names why not, tell her the whole world knows why shouldn't she know? tell her there's dead babies, did she see babies? tell her she's got nothing to be ashamed of. Tell her they did it to themselves. Tell her they want their children killed to make people sorry for them, tell her I'm not sorry for them, tell her not to be sorry for them, tell her we're the ones to be sorry for, tell her they can't talk suffering to us. Tell her we're the iron fist now, tell her it's the fog of war, tell her we won't stop killing them till we're safe, tell her I laughed when I saw the dead policemen, tell her they're animals living in rubble now, tell her I wouldn't care if we wiped them out, the world would hate us is the only thing, tell her I don't care if the world hates us, tell her we're better haters, tell her we're chosen people, tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? tell her all I feel is happy it's not her.
This monologue is the "proof text" for those who've charged Churchill with anti-Semitism and worse, with blood libel, which her accusers discern in the last lines of the speech.
When the two of us first discussed Seven Jewish Children we turned immediately to those lines. We both winced when we read them; we both became alarmed. One of us was disturbed by the line "tell her we're better haters," resonant of Shylock and Alberich the Nibelung. The other focused on "tell her we're chosen people," contending that in this context it reflected a misunderstanding of the term "chosen people," casting Jewish chosen-ness as an expression of divine right and exceptionalism rather than of religious/ethical responsibility. We speculated that these two lines added fuel to the willful misreading as blood libel of the lines that follow: "tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? tell her all I feel is happy it's not her." Those who level the blood-libel accusation insist that Churchill has written "tell her I'm happy when I see their children covered in blood."
But that is not what Churchill wrote. Distortion, misrepresentation and name-calling are tactics familiar to anyone who's spoken out about the Middle East. There's no blood libel in the play. The last line of the monologue is clearly a warning: you can't protect your children by being indifferent to the children of others.
There's a vast difference between making your audience uncomfortable and being anti-Semitic. To see anti-Semitism here is to construe erroneously the words spoken by the worst of Churchill's characters as a statement from the playwright about all Jews as preternaturally filled with a viciousness unique among humankind. But to do this is, again, to distort what Churchill wrote. The monologue belongs to and emerges from a particular dramatic action that makes the eruption inevitable and horrifying.
The play traces the processes of repressed speech. The violence forcing that repression comes initially from without; the monologue gives voice to a violence that's moved inside. The play stages the return of the repressed, an explosion of threatened defensiveness that, unexpressed and unowned, has turned into rage. Encountering it is terrifying; we don't want to own it. But that doesn't mean we don't recognize it. And sad to say, there's no sentiment in the monologue's spew that we have not heard or read at some point from presumed "defenders" of Israel (as even a cursory survey of the Internet demonstrates: for example, the chilling story in the March 20 Ha'aretz about some Israeli army units making T-shirts celebrating civilian casualties and rape in Gaza).
The siege of Gaza over the past several years, which nearly starved a high proportion of the population, was unconscionable in humanitarian terms, but an even worse corner was turned this past winter. A placard at a peace-movement demonstration in Tel Aviv in January proclaimed, Slaughter Is Not Security. Apart from some brave thousands who took to the Israeli streets throughout the weeks of Operation Cast Lead, a large majority of Israelis--and their supporters in America--were convinced that the carnage was, indeed, justified as defense. Some even boasted about it. In America's weekly Jewish newspaper, the Forward, the president of the Reform movement, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, in an op-ed defending the Gaza invasion, disparaged more hawkish Israel supporters for "the obscene, cowboy-like delight" in "the damage Israel's army is able to inflict." But even when softened into Yoffie's remorseful notion of the Gaza offensive as a "tragic necessity, unwelcome but inevitable," the justification amounts to the same thing: better them than us. Such dehumanizing rhetoric is common in mainstream Jewish-American and Israeli discourse (and, in fact, in all military conflicts). Churchill, a non-Jew, had the chutzpah to strip that rhetoric of its hangdog, contrite camouflage and reflect it back to us: "tell her all I feel is happy it's not her."
..That hideous sentiment, however, is not the play's final word. There are three more lines:
Don't tell her that.
Tell her we love her.
Don't frighten her.
A playwright's presumptuous job is to imagine others, and the others Churchill has imagined in this play are Jews. If there's anger in the writing, there's also empathy, tenderness and intimacy. Nothing is more intimate than discussions between parents about what to tell their children; no act of speech is more carefully weighed or more fiercely protected. This is a family play, told from within the family. It concludes with love, and it concludes with fear.
Seven Jewish Children is a play. It must be read with an awareness of the incompleteness of plays on paper, destined as they are for collective rather than singular experience, for warm bodies speaking the lines, for empathy, for the variability of interpretation. All plays require that directors and actors make considered choices. Performance produces meaning. If an actor stresses "tell" in the line "Don't tell her that," it might suggest, That's true, but don't let her know. But if "that" is emphasized, it might mean, How can you even think such an outrageous thing? And much will depend on how the actor strikes the first word, "Don't"--collegially or adversarially.
Churchill ups the interpretive ante by leaving everything, beyond the lines themselves, to her interpreters. The monologue and the lines that follow it will carry different meanings if spoken, say, by a grandmother with a Yiddish accent or by a young man in an Israeli army uniform. Or by, say, a Korean-American man or a Chicana. Or, since the play is so short and could be watched three or four times in a row, with the lines spoken each time by different actors. Any director and company approaching the play will have to decide whether and how the audience will be made aware of the radical degree to which the written text has insisted, through its lack of character identification or stage action, on collaboration. Surely it's essential to understanding Seven Jewish Children that against the specifics of the script, the playwright, relinquishing nearly all traditional authorial control, engineers a far-greater-than-usual slippage among text and performance and audience reception, producing an unusually large amount of room for variant readings.
And it is perhaps only on stage that the central characters of the play come into their own: the eponymous seven Jewish children who are its heroines. We never see them. Our empathic imaginations are enlisted by the playwright. We have to conjure them.
In the opening scene of Churchill's Far Away, a girl asks her aunt about beatings she's seen her uncle commit. What's most terrifying is how easily the aunt placates, justifies and quells her niece's will to question. But in Churchill's play for Gaza, the girls never stop asking.
This is a powerful trope in Jewish culture; it's the questioning child around whom the Passover Seder is built. We're left to hope that this girl we've never seen, the last scene's girl, won't become one of the Israeli teenagers who recently gave the truly frightening Avigdor Lieberman the highest share of the votes in a high school election poll. Perhaps she's a pain in the ass, this girl; perhaps she'll keep questioning. Perhaps she refuses to succumb to those in her family whose loving desire is to protect her by not speaking, by not saying. Perhaps she's realizing that their repression of the truth has become not only misguided and immoral but fatal; for nothing survives on lies, on a denial of reality; eventually, reality wins. Perhaps she's found out about a relative of hers, mentioned earlier: "Don't tell her her cousin refused to serve in the army."
Perhaps this girl will grow up to work for justice.
This article was published in THE NATION and written by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon.
About Tony Kushner
Tony Kushner is a playwright whose most recent work is Homebody/Kabul. more...
About Alisa Solomon
Alisa Solomon teaches at Columbia University's School of Journalism and is the author of Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender
In recent years, increasing numbers of individuals around the world have begun adopting and developing an analysis of Israel as an apartheid regime. This can be seen in the ways that the global movement in support of the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle is taking on a pointedly anti-apartheid character, as evidenced by the growth of Israeli Apartheid Week ( http://apartheidweek.org/). Further, much of the recent international diplomatic support for Israel has increasingly taken on the form of denying that racial discrimination is a root cause of the oppression of Palestinians. This has taken on new levels of absurdity in Western responses to the April 2009 Durban Review Conference, a follow-up to the 2001 World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa in which Palestinians were identified as victims of racism (the US, Israel, Canada and Italy have already announced that they will not participate because of the potential for criticism of Israel).
Many of the writings stemming from this analysis work to detail levels of similarity and difference with apartheid South Africa, rather than looking at apartheid as a system that can be practiced by any state. To some extent, this strong emphasis on historical comparisons is understandable given that boycott, divestment and sanctions is the central campaign called for by Palestinian civil society for solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle, and is modeled on the one that helped end South African apartheid. However, an over-emphasis on similarities and differences confines the use of the term to narrow limits. With the expanding agreement that the term "apartheid" is useful in describing the level and layout of Israel's crimes, it is important that our understanding of the "apartheid label" be deepened, both as a means of informing activism in support of the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle, and in order to most effectively make use of comparisons with other struggles.
The apartheid analogy
It is perhaps understandable that some advocates of Palestinian rights look at the "apartheid label," in its comparative sense, as a politically useful tool. The struggle of the South African people for justice and equality reached a certain sacred status in the 1980s and '90s when the anti-apartheid struggle reached its zenith. The reverence with which activists and non-activists alike look to the righteousness of the South African struggle, and the ignominy of the colonial apartheid regime, are well placed. Black South Africans fought against both Dutch and British colonization for centuries, endured countless hardships including imprisonment and death, and were labeled terrorists as the powers of the world stood by the racist apartheid regime. They remained steadfast in their struggle, raising the cost of maintaining the apartheid system until South African capital found it no longer profitable and white political elites found it impossible to maintain. The comparison is further enhanced due to the relationship between the respective Palestinian and South African liberation movements, the Palestine Liberation Organization and the African National Congress, as well as the unabashed alliance between Israel and the South African apartheid regime, which remained strong even at the height of the international boycott against South Africa.
A further impetus for confining the "apartheid label" to a comparison with South Africa is that the commonalities and similarities between the liberation struggles of South Africa and Palestine are quite stark. Both cases involved a process of settler-colonialism involving the forced displacement of the indigenous population from most of their ancestral lands and concentrating them in townships and reservations, dividing the colonized community into different groups with differing rights, strict mobility restrictions that suffocated the colonized, and the use of brutal military force to repress any actual or potential resistance against the racist colonial regime.
Both regimes have enjoyed the impunity that results from full US and European support. Accompanying these and countless other similarities are a host of uncanny details common to both cases: both regimes were formally established in the same year -- 1948 -- following decades of British rule; approximately 87 percent of the land was off limits to most of the colonized population without special permission, and so on. While we speak here in the past tense for South Africa, this still applies to present-day Palestine.
As the Israeli apartheid label has gained ground, some have adopted the approach of describing the differences between the two regimes, albeit for various purposes. In general, Israel has not legislated petty apartheid -- the segregation of spaces such as bathrooms and beaches -- as was the case in South Africa. However, Israeli laws form the basis of systematic racial discrimination against Palestinians. The 1.2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel (approximately 20 percent of Israel's citizens) do indeed have the right to vote and run in Israeli elections while the Black community in South Africa, for the most part, did not. The South African version of apartheid's central tenet was to facilitate the exploitation of as many Black laborers as possible, whereas the Israeli version, although exploiting Palestinian workers, prioritizes the forced displacement of as many Palestinians as possible beyond the borders of the state with the aim of eradicating Palestinian presence within historic Palestine. South African visitors to Palestine have often commented on the fact that Israeli use of force is more brutal than that witnessed in the heyday of apartheid, thus leading several commentators to adopt the position that Israel's practices are worse than apartheid and that the apartheid label does not go far enough.
Israel and the crime of apartheid
In terms of law, describing Israel as an apartheid state does not revolve around levels of difference and similarity with the policies and practices of the South African apartheid regime, and where Israel is an apartheid state only insofar as similarities outweigh differences. In 1973, the UN General Assembly adopted the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (General Assembly resolution 3068 entered into force on 18 July 1976 -- the year of the Soweto uprising in South Africa and the Land Day uprising in Palestine). The resolution set forth that the definition of the crime of apartheid was not limited to the borders of South Africa. The fact that apartheid is defined as a crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which entered into force in 2002 -- long after the apartheid regime was defeated in South Africa -- attests to the universality of the crime.
While the wording of the definition of the crime of apartheid varies between legal instruments, the substance is the same: a regime commits apartheid when it institutionalizes discrimination to create and maintain the domination of one "racial" group over another. Karine Mac Allister, among others, has provided a cogent legal analysis of the applicability of the crime of apartheid to the Israeli regime (see "Applicability of the Crime of Apartheid to Israel," al-Majdal #38, Summer 2008). The main point is that like genocide and slavery, apartheid is a crime that any state can commit, and institutions, organizations and/or individuals acting on behalf of the state that commit it or support its commission are to face trial in any state that is a signatory to the Convention, or in the International Criminal Court. It is therefore a fallacy to ground the Israeli apartheid label on comparisons of the policies of the South African apartheid regime, with the resulting descriptions of Israel as being "apartheid-like" and characterizations of an apartheid analysis of Israel as an "apartheid analogy."
Recognition by the international community of such universal crimes is often the result of a particular case, so heinous that it forces the rusty wheels of international decision-making into motion. The Transatlantic Slave Trade is an example where the mass enslavement of peoples from the African continent to work as the privately owned property of European settlers formed an important part of the framework in which the drafters of the 1956 UN Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery thought and acted. An even clearer example is the Genocide Convention (adopted in 1948, entered into force in 1951) in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust in which millions of Jews, communists, Roma and disabled were systematically murdered with the intention to end their existence. We do not describe modern day enslavement as "slavery-like," nor do we examine the mass killing of hundreds of thousands of mainly Tutsi Rwandans through a Rwandan "genocide analogy."
Two points made by Mac Allister in her legal analysis of Israeli apartheid deserve to be reiterated because they are often confused or misconstrued even by advocates of Palestinian human rights. First, Israel's crimes and violations are not limited to the crime of apartheid. Rather, Israel's regime over the Palestinian people combines apartheid, military occupation and colonization in a unique manner. It deserves notice that the relationship between these three components requires further research and investigation. Also noteworthy is the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Campaign National Committee's "United Against Apartheid, Colonialism and Occupation: Dignity & Justice for the Palestinian People" position paper, which outlines and, to some extent, details the various aspects of Israel's commission of the crime of apartheid, and begins to trace the interaction between Israeli apartheid, colonialism and occupation from the perspective of Palestinian civil society. [1]
The second point worth reiterating is that Israel's regime of apartheid is not limited to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In fact, the core of Israel's apartheid regime is guided by discriminatory legislation in the fields of nationality, citizenship and land ownership. This discriminatory legislation was primarily employed to oppress and dispossess those Palestinians (refugees and internally displaced) who were forced from their land and property during the 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe, as well as the minority who managed to remain within the 1949 armistice line (referred to as the "green line"), who later became Israeli citizens. Israel's apartheid regime was extended into the West Bank and Gaza Strip following the 1967 occupation of those territories for the purpose of colonization and military control over the Palestinians who came under occupation. Using again the example of South Africa, the crime of apartheid was not limited to the Bantustans -- the whole regime was implicated and not one or another of its racist manifestations.
The analysis of Israel as an apartheid state has proven to be very important in several respects. First, it correctly highlights racial discrimination as a root cause of Israel's oppression of Palestinians. Second, one of the main effects of Israeli apartheid is that it has separated Palestinians -- conceptually, legally and physically -- into different groupings (refugees, West Bank, Gaza, within the "green line" and a host of other divisions within each), resulting in the fragmentation of the Palestinian liberation movement, including the solidarity movement. The apartheid analysis enables us to provide a legal and conceptual framework under which we can understand, convey and take action in support of the Palestinian people and their struggle as a unified whole. Third, and of particular significance to the solidarity movement, this legal and conceptual framework takes on the prescriptive role underpinning the growing global movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it complies with international law.
Colonialism and the role of comparison
I have argued that the question of whether apartheid applies cannot be determined by means of comparison with South Africa, but rather by legal analysis. This, however, does not mean that comparative study is not useful. Comparison is in fact essential to the process of learning historical lessons for those involved in struggle. A central point of comparison with South Africa is the fact that it was, and for the indigenous people of Palestine and the Americas, continues to be a struggle against colonialism.
Focusing on the colonial dimension of Israeli apartheid and the Zionist project enables us to maintain our focus on the issues that really matter, such as land acquisition, demographic engineering and methods of political and economic control exercised by one racial group over another. Comparison with other anti-colonial struggles provides the main resource for understanding this colonial dimension of Israeli oppression, and for deriving some of the lessons needed to fight it.
One of the key lessons for Palestinians from the struggle against apartheid in South Africa was the pressure placed on the African National Congress leadership to compromise on its economic demands such as land restitution. Only a tiny proportion of white-controlled land in South Africa was redistributed to Blacks after 1994. As such, while the struggle of the South African people defeated the system of political apartheid, the struggle against economic apartheid continues in various forms including anti-poverty and landless peoples' movements today. The centrality of the demand for land restitution should be highlighted as part of the demand for refugee return as Palestinians and those struggling with them work to reconstruct a political strategy and consensus on how to overcome the political challenges that have emerged since the launching of the peace process and the transformation of the Palestinian liberation movement leadership into a non-sovereign authority dependent on Israel for its international legitimacy and financial solvency.
A second key lesson is in response to the paradigm currently guiding most mainstream accounts of how to achieve the elusive "peace in the Middle East," which is the idea of partition often referred to as the "two-state solution." In the 1970s, South Africa tried to deal with its "demographic problem" -- the fact that the vast majority of its population was Black but did not have the right to vote. The apartheid regime reconstructed South Africa as a formal democracy by reinventing the British-established reservations (the Bantustans) as independent states (British rule in South Africa established reserves in 1913 and 1936 on approximately 87 percent of the land of South Africa for the purpose of segregating the Black population from the settlers). These 10 "homelands" were each assigned to an ethnicity decided by Pretoria, and indigenous South Africans who did not fit into one of the ethnicities were forced to make themselves fit in order to become nationals of one of the homelands. Through this measure, members of the indigenous population were reclassified as nationals of a homeland, and between 1976 and 1981 the regime tried to pass the homelands off as independent states: Transkei in 1976, Bophuthatswana in 1977, Venda in 1979, and Ciskei in 1981.
Each of these Bantustans was given a flag and a government made up of indigenous intermediaries on the Pretoria payroll, and all the trappings of a sovereign government including responsibility over municipal services and a police force to protect the apartheid regime, but without actual sovereignty. The idea was that by getting international recognition for each of these homelands as states, the apartheid regime would transform South Africa from a country with a 10 percent white minority, to one with a 100 percent white majority. Since it was a democratic regime within the confines of the dominant community, the state's democratic nature would be beyond reproach. No one was fooled. The African National Congress launched a powerful campaign to counter any international recognition of the Bantustans as independent states, and the plot failed miserably at the international level -- with the notable, but perhaps unsurprising, exception that a lone "embassy" for Bophuthatswana was opened in Tel Aviv.
Israel has employed similar strategies in Palestine. For example, Israel recognized 18 Palestinian Bedouin tribes and appointed a loyal sheikh for each in the Naqab (Negev) desert during the 1950s as a means of controlling these southern Palestinians, forcing those who did not belong to one of the tribes to affiliate to one in order to get Israeli citizenship (see Hazem Jamjoum, "al-Naqab: The Ongoing Displacement of Palestine's Southern Bedouin," al-Majdal #39-40, Autumn 2008/Winter 2009). In the late 1970s, the Israeli regime tried to invent Palestinian governing bodies for the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the form of "village leagues" intended to evolve into similar non-sovereign governments -- glorified municipalities of a sort. As with apartheid's Homelands, the scheme failed miserably, both because the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had established itself as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and because Palestinians largely understood the plot and opposed it with all means at their disposal. The main lesson for Israel was that the PLO would have to either be completely destroyed or would have to be transformed into Israeli apartheid's indigenous intermediary. Israel launched a massive campaign to destroy the PLO throughout the 1980s and early '90s. With the demise of the PLO's main backers in the Soviet bloc at the end of the Cold War and its strained relations with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait after the first Gulf War, Israel capitalized on the opportunity, and worked to transform the PLO from a liberation movement to a "state-building" project that was launched by the signing of the Oslo Accords, seven months before South Africa's first free election.
The push for the establishment and international recognition of an independent Palestinian state within the Palestinian Bantustan is no different from the South African apartheid regime's campaign to gain international recognition of Transkei or Ciskei. This is the core of the "two-state solution" idea. The major and crucial difference is that in the current Palestinian case, it is the world's superpower and its adjutants in Europe and the Arab world pushing as well, and armed with the active acceptance of Palestine's indigenous intermediaries.
Hazem Jamjoum is the editor of al-Majdal, the English language quarterly magazine of the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights in Bethlehem, Palestine.
Many of the writings stemming from this analysis work to detail levels of similarity and difference with apartheid South Africa, rather than looking at apartheid as a system that can be practiced by any state. To some extent, this strong emphasis on historical comparisons is understandable given that boycott, divestment and sanctions is the central campaign called for by Palestinian civil society for solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle, and is modeled on the one that helped end South African apartheid. However, an over-emphasis on similarities and differences confines the use of the term to narrow limits. With the expanding agreement that the term "apartheid" is useful in describing the level and layout of Israel's crimes, it is important that our understanding of the "apartheid label" be deepened, both as a means of informing activism in support of the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle, and in order to most effectively make use of comparisons with other struggles.
The apartheid analogy
It is perhaps understandable that some advocates of Palestinian rights look at the "apartheid label," in its comparative sense, as a politically useful tool. The struggle of the South African people for justice and equality reached a certain sacred status in the 1980s and '90s when the anti-apartheid struggle reached its zenith. The reverence with which activists and non-activists alike look to the righteousness of the South African struggle, and the ignominy of the colonial apartheid regime, are well placed. Black South Africans fought against both Dutch and British colonization for centuries, endured countless hardships including imprisonment and death, and were labeled terrorists as the powers of the world stood by the racist apartheid regime. They remained steadfast in their struggle, raising the cost of maintaining the apartheid system until South African capital found it no longer profitable and white political elites found it impossible to maintain. The comparison is further enhanced due to the relationship between the respective Palestinian and South African liberation movements, the Palestine Liberation Organization and the African National Congress, as well as the unabashed alliance between Israel and the South African apartheid regime, which remained strong even at the height of the international boycott against South Africa.
A further impetus for confining the "apartheid label" to a comparison with South Africa is that the commonalities and similarities between the liberation struggles of South Africa and Palestine are quite stark. Both cases involved a process of settler-colonialism involving the forced displacement of the indigenous population from most of their ancestral lands and concentrating them in townships and reservations, dividing the colonized community into different groups with differing rights, strict mobility restrictions that suffocated the colonized, and the use of brutal military force to repress any actual or potential resistance against the racist colonial regime.
Both regimes have enjoyed the impunity that results from full US and European support. Accompanying these and countless other similarities are a host of uncanny details common to both cases: both regimes were formally established in the same year -- 1948 -- following decades of British rule; approximately 87 percent of the land was off limits to most of the colonized population without special permission, and so on. While we speak here in the past tense for South Africa, this still applies to present-day Palestine.
As the Israeli apartheid label has gained ground, some have adopted the approach of describing the differences between the two regimes, albeit for various purposes. In general, Israel has not legislated petty apartheid -- the segregation of spaces such as bathrooms and beaches -- as was the case in South Africa. However, Israeli laws form the basis of systematic racial discrimination against Palestinians. The 1.2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel (approximately 20 percent of Israel's citizens) do indeed have the right to vote and run in Israeli elections while the Black community in South Africa, for the most part, did not. The South African version of apartheid's central tenet was to facilitate the exploitation of as many Black laborers as possible, whereas the Israeli version, although exploiting Palestinian workers, prioritizes the forced displacement of as many Palestinians as possible beyond the borders of the state with the aim of eradicating Palestinian presence within historic Palestine. South African visitors to Palestine have often commented on the fact that Israeli use of force is more brutal than that witnessed in the heyday of apartheid, thus leading several commentators to adopt the position that Israel's practices are worse than apartheid and that the apartheid label does not go far enough.
Israel and the crime of apartheid
In terms of law, describing Israel as an apartheid state does not revolve around levels of difference and similarity with the policies and practices of the South African apartheid regime, and where Israel is an apartheid state only insofar as similarities outweigh differences. In 1973, the UN General Assembly adopted the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (General Assembly resolution 3068 entered into force on 18 July 1976 -- the year of the Soweto uprising in South Africa and the Land Day uprising in Palestine). The resolution set forth that the definition of the crime of apartheid was not limited to the borders of South Africa. The fact that apartheid is defined as a crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which entered into force in 2002 -- long after the apartheid regime was defeated in South Africa -- attests to the universality of the crime.
While the wording of the definition of the crime of apartheid varies between legal instruments, the substance is the same: a regime commits apartheid when it institutionalizes discrimination to create and maintain the domination of one "racial" group over another. Karine Mac Allister, among others, has provided a cogent legal analysis of the applicability of the crime of apartheid to the Israeli regime (see "Applicability of the Crime of Apartheid to Israel," al-Majdal #38, Summer 2008). The main point is that like genocide and slavery, apartheid is a crime that any state can commit, and institutions, organizations and/or individuals acting on behalf of the state that commit it or support its commission are to face trial in any state that is a signatory to the Convention, or in the International Criminal Court. It is therefore a fallacy to ground the Israeli apartheid label on comparisons of the policies of the South African apartheid regime, with the resulting descriptions of Israel as being "apartheid-like" and characterizations of an apartheid analysis of Israel as an "apartheid analogy."
Recognition by the international community of such universal crimes is often the result of a particular case, so heinous that it forces the rusty wheels of international decision-making into motion. The Transatlantic Slave Trade is an example where the mass enslavement of peoples from the African continent to work as the privately owned property of European settlers formed an important part of the framework in which the drafters of the 1956 UN Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery thought and acted. An even clearer example is the Genocide Convention (adopted in 1948, entered into force in 1951) in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust in which millions of Jews, communists, Roma and disabled were systematically murdered with the intention to end their existence. We do not describe modern day enslavement as "slavery-like," nor do we examine the mass killing of hundreds of thousands of mainly Tutsi Rwandans through a Rwandan "genocide analogy."
Two points made by Mac Allister in her legal analysis of Israeli apartheid deserve to be reiterated because they are often confused or misconstrued even by advocates of Palestinian human rights. First, Israel's crimes and violations are not limited to the crime of apartheid. Rather, Israel's regime over the Palestinian people combines apartheid, military occupation and colonization in a unique manner. It deserves notice that the relationship between these three components requires further research and investigation. Also noteworthy is the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Campaign National Committee's "United Against Apartheid, Colonialism and Occupation: Dignity & Justice for the Palestinian People" position paper, which outlines and, to some extent, details the various aspects of Israel's commission of the crime of apartheid, and begins to trace the interaction between Israeli apartheid, colonialism and occupation from the perspective of Palestinian civil society. [1]
The second point worth reiterating is that Israel's regime of apartheid is not limited to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In fact, the core of Israel's apartheid regime is guided by discriminatory legislation in the fields of nationality, citizenship and land ownership. This discriminatory legislation was primarily employed to oppress and dispossess those Palestinians (refugees and internally displaced) who were forced from their land and property during the 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe, as well as the minority who managed to remain within the 1949 armistice line (referred to as the "green line"), who later became Israeli citizens. Israel's apartheid regime was extended into the West Bank and Gaza Strip following the 1967 occupation of those territories for the purpose of colonization and military control over the Palestinians who came under occupation. Using again the example of South Africa, the crime of apartheid was not limited to the Bantustans -- the whole regime was implicated and not one or another of its racist manifestations.
The analysis of Israel as an apartheid state has proven to be very important in several respects. First, it correctly highlights racial discrimination as a root cause of Israel's oppression of Palestinians. Second, one of the main effects of Israeli apartheid is that it has separated Palestinians -- conceptually, legally and physically -- into different groupings (refugees, West Bank, Gaza, within the "green line" and a host of other divisions within each), resulting in the fragmentation of the Palestinian liberation movement, including the solidarity movement. The apartheid analysis enables us to provide a legal and conceptual framework under which we can understand, convey and take action in support of the Palestinian people and their struggle as a unified whole. Third, and of particular significance to the solidarity movement, this legal and conceptual framework takes on the prescriptive role underpinning the growing global movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it complies with international law.
Colonialism and the role of comparison
I have argued that the question of whether apartheid applies cannot be determined by means of comparison with South Africa, but rather by legal analysis. This, however, does not mean that comparative study is not useful. Comparison is in fact essential to the process of learning historical lessons for those involved in struggle. A central point of comparison with South Africa is the fact that it was, and for the indigenous people of Palestine and the Americas, continues to be a struggle against colonialism.
Focusing on the colonial dimension of Israeli apartheid and the Zionist project enables us to maintain our focus on the issues that really matter, such as land acquisition, demographic engineering and methods of political and economic control exercised by one racial group over another. Comparison with other anti-colonial struggles provides the main resource for understanding this colonial dimension of Israeli oppression, and for deriving some of the lessons needed to fight it.
One of the key lessons for Palestinians from the struggle against apartheid in South Africa was the pressure placed on the African National Congress leadership to compromise on its economic demands such as land restitution. Only a tiny proportion of white-controlled land in South Africa was redistributed to Blacks after 1994. As such, while the struggle of the South African people defeated the system of political apartheid, the struggle against economic apartheid continues in various forms including anti-poverty and landless peoples' movements today. The centrality of the demand for land restitution should be highlighted as part of the demand for refugee return as Palestinians and those struggling with them work to reconstruct a political strategy and consensus on how to overcome the political challenges that have emerged since the launching of the peace process and the transformation of the Palestinian liberation movement leadership into a non-sovereign authority dependent on Israel for its international legitimacy and financial solvency.
A second key lesson is in response to the paradigm currently guiding most mainstream accounts of how to achieve the elusive "peace in the Middle East," which is the idea of partition often referred to as the "two-state solution." In the 1970s, South Africa tried to deal with its "demographic problem" -- the fact that the vast majority of its population was Black but did not have the right to vote. The apartheid regime reconstructed South Africa as a formal democracy by reinventing the British-established reservations (the Bantustans) as independent states (British rule in South Africa established reserves in 1913 and 1936 on approximately 87 percent of the land of South Africa for the purpose of segregating the Black population from the settlers). These 10 "homelands" were each assigned to an ethnicity decided by Pretoria, and indigenous South Africans who did not fit into one of the ethnicities were forced to make themselves fit in order to become nationals of one of the homelands. Through this measure, members of the indigenous population were reclassified as nationals of a homeland, and between 1976 and 1981 the regime tried to pass the homelands off as independent states: Transkei in 1976, Bophuthatswana in 1977, Venda in 1979, and Ciskei in 1981.
Each of these Bantustans was given a flag and a government made up of indigenous intermediaries on the Pretoria payroll, and all the trappings of a sovereign government including responsibility over municipal services and a police force to protect the apartheid regime, but without actual sovereignty. The idea was that by getting international recognition for each of these homelands as states, the apartheid regime would transform South Africa from a country with a 10 percent white minority, to one with a 100 percent white majority. Since it was a democratic regime within the confines of the dominant community, the state's democratic nature would be beyond reproach. No one was fooled. The African National Congress launched a powerful campaign to counter any international recognition of the Bantustans as independent states, and the plot failed miserably at the international level -- with the notable, but perhaps unsurprising, exception that a lone "embassy" for Bophuthatswana was opened in Tel Aviv.
Israel has employed similar strategies in Palestine. For example, Israel recognized 18 Palestinian Bedouin tribes and appointed a loyal sheikh for each in the Naqab (Negev) desert during the 1950s as a means of controlling these southern Palestinians, forcing those who did not belong to one of the tribes to affiliate to one in order to get Israeli citizenship (see Hazem Jamjoum, "al-Naqab: The Ongoing Displacement of Palestine's Southern Bedouin," al-Majdal #39-40, Autumn 2008/Winter 2009). In the late 1970s, the Israeli regime tried to invent Palestinian governing bodies for the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the form of "village leagues" intended to evolve into similar non-sovereign governments -- glorified municipalities of a sort. As with apartheid's Homelands, the scheme failed miserably, both because the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had established itself as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and because Palestinians largely understood the plot and opposed it with all means at their disposal. The main lesson for Israel was that the PLO would have to either be completely destroyed or would have to be transformed into Israeli apartheid's indigenous intermediary. Israel launched a massive campaign to destroy the PLO throughout the 1980s and early '90s. With the demise of the PLO's main backers in the Soviet bloc at the end of the Cold War and its strained relations with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait after the first Gulf War, Israel capitalized on the opportunity, and worked to transform the PLO from a liberation movement to a "state-building" project that was launched by the signing of the Oslo Accords, seven months before South Africa's first free election.
The push for the establishment and international recognition of an independent Palestinian state within the Palestinian Bantustan is no different from the South African apartheid regime's campaign to gain international recognition of Transkei or Ciskei. This is the core of the "two-state solution" idea. The major and crucial difference is that in the current Palestinian case, it is the world's superpower and its adjutants in Europe and the Arab world pushing as well, and armed with the active acceptance of Palestine's indigenous intermediaries.
Hazem Jamjoum is the editor of al-Majdal, the English language quarterly magazine of the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights in Bethlehem, Palestine.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)