Israel's Titanic moment: Does Obama want Bibi's head?
By Bradley Burston
JERUSALEM - Hamas has designated this day, in this place, its Day of Rage. Why, then, the smiles on the faces of Mahmoud Zahar and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?
Perhaps it's because after more than 22 years of costly trial and error, Hamas has finally come upon the secret of how to bring down the Jewish state:
Let the ship sink itself.
This month, down here in the engine room of the Titanic, a single coherent order continues to sound from the officers shrouded in fog on the bridge: "More power!"
To the delight of Mahmoud Zahar and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Israel's homemade weapons of mass destruction - pro-settlement bureaucrats with conflicts of financial and ideological interest - have done in one meeting what Israel's foes have sought for generations: driving a stake through the heart of Israel's relationship with the White House.
We should have known. But in the swamp of anomaly and impossibility that is Jerusalem, you can easily lose sight of, and belief in, the basics:
One of the curses of endless war, is the tendency to become one's own worst enemy - in every sense.
Forget, for the moment, the parallels with Iran. Forget, also, that Ahmadinejad would like nothing more in life than to focus Muslim anger and Western displeasure on Israel's policies in Jerusalem.
Consider, instead, that with Hamas literally at the gates, Israel is not only doing the Islamic Resistance Movement's bidding - Washington is beginning to relate to the Netanyahu government as if it were Hamas.
Israelis woke on Tuesday to an Army Radio report that George Mitchell had abruptly cancelled his scheduled visit to Israel, and that the U.S. Mideast envoy would not resume his discussions with Jerusalem until Israeli leaders agreed to three conditions set by Washington - an uncomfortably familiar echo of the U.S. position on contacts with Hamas.
One focus of debate in Israel was the question of how an insulted and incensed Obama administration preferred to see the imbroglio turn out. Specifically, is the president after Benjamin Netanyahu's head?
Judging from the administration's responses thus far, it appears far more likely that what the president would like to see laid low is not the Netanyahu government's head, but rather the part that often verbally functions as its butt end - specifically Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu party and Interior Minister Eli Yishai's Shas.
In the current Israeli political constellation, these two men, and these two parties - a volatile alliance of ultra-secular Russian-born immigrants and ultra-Orthodox sabras with roots in the Muslim world and the Mediterranean - are the effective veto both to the peace process as a whole and to a settlement freeze of any substance.
They represent a total of 26 of the 61 Knesset seats needed for a Netanyahu majority. More crucially, they are the primary roadblock to the entry of the centrist Kadima party, which at 28 seats is larger even than Netanyahu's ruling Likud.
Obama, whose math and history skills are as good as anyone's, knows both that Israeli government concessions are a near-monopoly of the center-right Likud. It is thus reasonable to assume that the president would like to see a Netanyahu-led coalition anchored by Kadima and Labor, whose 68-seat cushion could allow for the inevitable resignations of "rebel" Likud backbenchers.
For the time being, however, Lieberman and Yishai are enjoying the kind of shadenfreude that Hamas, for its part, has been trying not to make obvious. All three are the beneficiaries of a campaign by rightist Israeli activists which has seen trouble-making become a goal in its own right.
The Holy City, meanwhile, has the held-breath wariness of a fuse whose end had been lit, but whose other end was not in sight. For some on the right, there was evident relish in the situation, and not a little pride.
In one of the more remarkable, and ill-advised, editorials in its 77-year history, the Jerusalem Post poured oil on the smolder this week, rewriting Jewish history and tradition to declare that the newly dedicated Hurva synagogue in the Old City, "symbolizes, perhaps more than any other site, the Jewish people's yearnings to return to its homeland."
The piece is an extraordinary example of internal logic, and an indirect confirmation of fundamentalist Islamic fears of hopes to encroach on the Muslim shrine of Al Aqsa for the ultimate purpose of building a third Jewish Temple. Referring to the literal meaning of the Hurva, the editorial goes on to state that "To name something that is built a 'ruin' reveals a stubborn unwillingness to accept the present reality as unassailable."
Friday, March 19, 2010
For months, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) anticipated that this year’s annual Washington, DC policy conference, slated to kick off Sunday, would focus on U.S. pressure to deter Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But much to AIPAC’s dismay, two recent events threaten to blunt that message, alter the tone and content of the conference and, more broadly, the U.S.-Israel relationship.
One event involves the highly publicized U.S.-Israel disagreement over settlements that simmered to the surface during Vice President Joe Biden’s recent trip to Israel. The other—less publicized but far more consequential—centers on a top military commander’s recognition of the negative impact that Israel’s behavior is having on U.S. credibility in the region.
Each year, thousands of pro-Israel Americans travel from around the country to the Israel lobby’s biggest event of the year to meet, network, and hear speaker after speaker praise Israel and the U.S.-Israel relationship. On the final “lobbying” day of the conference, attendees travel en masse to Capitol Hill to communicate their ideas and concerns to Congress.
The focus of this year’s conference was supposed to be Iran. The threat to Israel’s security posed by Iran has been a central concern of AIPAC for over a decade now, but the last year has seen an unprecedented push by the organization for tougher sanctions on the Islamic Republic. In keeping with its well-deserved reputation for effectiveness, AIPAC successfully helped advance far-reaching economic and energy sanctions bills through both the House and Senate.
In an attempt to move the sanctions bills through reconciliation and onto the president’s desk, earlier this month AIPAC sent a letter to every member of Congress demanding that the U.S. government “impose crippling new sanctions on Iran,” including “provisions barring federal contracts to companies which are investing in Iran’s energy sector.” Increased pressure on Iran was queued up to be the number one issue for the conference, with conferees traveling to the Hill with one message: Raise the pressure on Iran now.
But that message discipline was disrupted just two weeks before the conference. On March 9, shortly after Vice President Joe Biden had arrived in Israel and assured Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that there was “no space between the United States and Israel when it comes to Israel’s security,” Netanyahu’s government announced plans to build 1,600 new homes in a Jewish settlement in an area it claims around Jerusalem, but which the rest of the world recognizes as the occupied West Bank.
Though Netanyahu claimed to have been blindsided by the announcement, Biden condemned it. Over the course of the week, the disagreement escalated. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a 45-minute phone call to Netanyahu. Israeli ambassador Michael Oren, after being summoned to the State Department for a dressing down, reportedly called the dispute a 35-year nadir of the U.S.-Israel relationship. Subsequently, in an attempt to tamp down concerns, Oren took to the op-ed pages of the New York Times to deny that he had engaged in such a characterization, and to minimize the event as a blip on the “unassailably solid” relationship between the two countries.
For such conflict to boil to the surface on the eve of the biggest event on AIPAC’s calendar was disastrous. AIPAC’s stated mission is “to help make Israel more secure by ensuring that American support remains strong.” A crisis like this cuts right to the core of AIPAC’s very purpose.
Clearly recognizing the threat both to its reputation and its goals of stepped-up Iran sanctions, on March 14 AIPAC’s director of media affairs Josh Block issued a strident press release calling on the Obama administration “to take immediate steps to defuse the tension with the Jewish State” (while saying nothing to indicate any displeasure with the Israeli government’s gratuitous insult of the American vice-president). Other conservative pro-Israel organizations, both Jewish and Christian, soon followed suit, ignoring (as they always have) the settlements provocation and blaming the American administration for the disagreement. The progressive pro-Israel group J Street was virtually alone in recognizing the crisis as generated by the Israeli government’s provocation with the new settlement construction.
While recent statements from both governments indicate that the crisis may be contained, another looms. On March 13, journalist Mark Perry published a story on Foreign Policy’s website detailing a briefing given by the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen. According to Perry, “the briefers”—who had been dispatched by CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus—“reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM’s mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, [and] that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region.”
In testimony (pdf) before the Senate Armed Services committee on March 16, Gen. Petraeus reiterated these concerns. Petraeus, one of the most respected military men in the country, told the committee that the Israel-Palestinian conflict “foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel,” and that “Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR [CENTCOM’s Area Of Responsibility, the Middle East] and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world.”
Though these comments might strike many as stating the obvious—because indeed they are—they represent something that AIPAC and others in the hawkish pro-Israel community, including their congressional backers, greatly fear: the linkage of the U.S.-Israel relationship to the U.S.’s other security challenges in the region. Right-wing scholar-activist Martin Kramer, a favorite AIPAC conference panelist, regularly dismisses linkage is a “myth.” The Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman has called it a “fantasy” that “smacks of blaming the Jews for everything.” The concern is understandable—but if the American people understood the negative impact that some Israeli behavior has had on U.S. interests in the region, they might begin to take a closer look at that relationship, or at the very least demand more cooperation in return for the billions of dollars in aid the U.S. delivers to Israel every year.
In 2006, the Iraq Study Group was excoriated by many on the pro-Israel right for making the linkage argument,stating in its final report (pdf): “The United States cannot achieve its goals in the Middle East unless it deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict and regional instability.”
The Bush administration largely ignored the ISG’s recommendations and decided instead to undertake the Iraq “surge.” It’s hugely ironic, then, that one of the ISG’s most controversial conclusions has now been brought safely within bounds by the hero of that surge, Gen. Petraeus.
None of these developments are likely to deter AIPAC’s big Iran sanctions push, but they do indicate some real, if subtle, shifts in the U.S.-Israel relationship.These shifts have come as a result of the U.S. stationing so many thousands of troops in the region, who are confronted almost every day with the radicalizing effects of the Israeli occupation on the region’s populations, and the U.S.’s perceived support for that occupation. And the experience of those troops, and commanders like Petraeus, is something that AIPAC won’t be able to ignore or deny for much longer.
One event involves the highly publicized U.S.-Israel disagreement over settlements that simmered to the surface during Vice President Joe Biden’s recent trip to Israel. The other—less publicized but far more consequential—centers on a top military commander’s recognition of the negative impact that Israel’s behavior is having on U.S. credibility in the region.
Each year, thousands of pro-Israel Americans travel from around the country to the Israel lobby’s biggest event of the year to meet, network, and hear speaker after speaker praise Israel and the U.S.-Israel relationship. On the final “lobbying” day of the conference, attendees travel en masse to Capitol Hill to communicate their ideas and concerns to Congress.
The focus of this year’s conference was supposed to be Iran. The threat to Israel’s security posed by Iran has been a central concern of AIPAC for over a decade now, but the last year has seen an unprecedented push by the organization for tougher sanctions on the Islamic Republic. In keeping with its well-deserved reputation for effectiveness, AIPAC successfully helped advance far-reaching economic and energy sanctions bills through both the House and Senate.
In an attempt to move the sanctions bills through reconciliation and onto the president’s desk, earlier this month AIPAC sent a letter to every member of Congress demanding that the U.S. government “impose crippling new sanctions on Iran,” including “provisions barring federal contracts to companies which are investing in Iran’s energy sector.” Increased pressure on Iran was queued up to be the number one issue for the conference, with conferees traveling to the Hill with one message: Raise the pressure on Iran now.
But that message discipline was disrupted just two weeks before the conference. On March 9, shortly after Vice President Joe Biden had arrived in Israel and assured Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that there was “no space between the United States and Israel when it comes to Israel’s security,” Netanyahu’s government announced plans to build 1,600 new homes in a Jewish settlement in an area it claims around Jerusalem, but which the rest of the world recognizes as the occupied West Bank.
Though Netanyahu claimed to have been blindsided by the announcement, Biden condemned it. Over the course of the week, the disagreement escalated. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a 45-minute phone call to Netanyahu. Israeli ambassador Michael Oren, after being summoned to the State Department for a dressing down, reportedly called the dispute a 35-year nadir of the U.S.-Israel relationship. Subsequently, in an attempt to tamp down concerns, Oren took to the op-ed pages of the New York Times to deny that he had engaged in such a characterization, and to minimize the event as a blip on the “unassailably solid” relationship between the two countries.
For such conflict to boil to the surface on the eve of the biggest event on AIPAC’s calendar was disastrous. AIPAC’s stated mission is “to help make Israel more secure by ensuring that American support remains strong.” A crisis like this cuts right to the core of AIPAC’s very purpose.
Clearly recognizing the threat both to its reputation and its goals of stepped-up Iran sanctions, on March 14 AIPAC’s director of media affairs Josh Block issued a strident press release calling on the Obama administration “to take immediate steps to defuse the tension with the Jewish State” (while saying nothing to indicate any displeasure with the Israeli government’s gratuitous insult of the American vice-president). Other conservative pro-Israel organizations, both Jewish and Christian, soon followed suit, ignoring (as they always have) the settlements provocation and blaming the American administration for the disagreement. The progressive pro-Israel group J Street was virtually alone in recognizing the crisis as generated by the Israeli government’s provocation with the new settlement construction.
While recent statements from both governments indicate that the crisis may be contained, another looms. On March 13, journalist Mark Perry published a story on Foreign Policy’s website detailing a briefing given by the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen. According to Perry, “the briefers”—who had been dispatched by CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus—“reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM’s mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, [and] that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region.”
In testimony (pdf) before the Senate Armed Services committee on March 16, Gen. Petraeus reiterated these concerns. Petraeus, one of the most respected military men in the country, told the committee that the Israel-Palestinian conflict “foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel,” and that “Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR [CENTCOM’s Area Of Responsibility, the Middle East] and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world.”
Though these comments might strike many as stating the obvious—because indeed they are—they represent something that AIPAC and others in the hawkish pro-Israel community, including their congressional backers, greatly fear: the linkage of the U.S.-Israel relationship to the U.S.’s other security challenges in the region. Right-wing scholar-activist Martin Kramer, a favorite AIPAC conference panelist, regularly dismisses linkage is a “myth.” The Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman has called it a “fantasy” that “smacks of blaming the Jews for everything.” The concern is understandable—but if the American people understood the negative impact that some Israeli behavior has had on U.S. interests in the region, they might begin to take a closer look at that relationship, or at the very least demand more cooperation in return for the billions of dollars in aid the U.S. delivers to Israel every year.
In 2006, the Iraq Study Group was excoriated by many on the pro-Israel right for making the linkage argument,stating in its final report (pdf): “The United States cannot achieve its goals in the Middle East unless it deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict and regional instability.”
The Bush administration largely ignored the ISG’s recommendations and decided instead to undertake the Iraq “surge.” It’s hugely ironic, then, that one of the ISG’s most controversial conclusions has now been brought safely within bounds by the hero of that surge, Gen. Petraeus.
None of these developments are likely to deter AIPAC’s big Iran sanctions push, but they do indicate some real, if subtle, shifts in the U.S.-Israel relationship.These shifts have come as a result of the U.S. stationing so many thousands of troops in the region, who are confronted almost every day with the radicalizing effects of the Israeli occupation on the region’s populations, and the U.S.’s perceived support for that occupation. And the experience of those troops, and commanders like Petraeus, is something that AIPAC won’t be able to ignore or deny for much longer.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
New York Times fails to disclose Jerusalem bureau chief's conflict of interest
Report, The Electronic Intifada, 25 January 2010
The New York Times has all but confirmed to The Electronic Intifada (EI) that the son of its Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner was recently inducted into the Israeli army.
Over the weekend, EI received a tip suggesting this had been the case and wrote to Bronner to ask him to confirm or deny the information and to seek his opinion on whether, if true, he thought it would be a conflict of interest.
Susan Chira, the foreign editor of The New York Times wrote in an email to The Electronic Intifada this morning:
"Ethan Bronner referred your query to me, the foreign editor. Here is my comment: Mr. Bronner's son is a young adult who makes his own decisions. At The Times, we have found Mr. Bronner's coverage to be scrupulously fair and we are confident that will continue to be the case."
The Electronic Intifada also wrote to Clark Hoyt, the public editor of The New York Times, to confirm the information and ask for an opinion on whether this constituted a conflict of interest, but had yet to receive a response.
Bronner, as bureau chief, has primary responsibility for his paper's reporting on all aspects of the Palestine/Israel conflict, and on the Israeli army, whose official name is the "Israel Defense Forces."
On 23 January, Bronner published a lengthy article on Israel's efforts to refute allegations contained in the UN-commissioned Goldstone report of war crimes and crimes against humanity during its attack on Gaza last winter ("Israel Poised to Challenge a UN Report on Gaza").
As'ad AbuKhalil, a frequent critic of Bronner's coverage, blogged in response that "The New York Times devoted more space to Israeli and Zionist criticisms of the Goldstone report than to the [content of the] report itself" (The Angry Arab News Service, "Ethan Bronner's propaganda services, 25 January 2010)
Bronner's pro-Israeli bias reporting on Israel's attack on Gaza last year was also criticized by the media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) (See "NYT and the Perils of Mideast 'Balance'," 4 February 2009).
The New York Times' own "Company policy on Ethics in Journalism" acknowledges that the activities of a journalist's family member may constitute a conflict of interest. It includes as an example, "A brother or a daughter in a high-profile job on Wall Street might produce the appearance of conflict for a business reporter or editor." Such conflicts may on occasion require the staff member "to withdraw from certain coverage."
After Israel's invasion of Gaza last winter, Israeli military censors banned local media from printing the names of individual officers who participated in the attack for fear that this could assist international efforts to bring war crimes suspects to justice. This followed the publication of a number of soldiers' personal testimonies in the Israeli press describing atrocities they had seen committed by the Israeli army in Gaza.
The Times' treatment of Bronner sets an interesting precedent. Would the newspaper's policy be the same if a reporter in its Jerusalem bureau had an immediate family member who faced Bronner's son across the battlefield, as a member of a Palestinian or Lebanese resistance organization?
It would appear that despite the highly sensitive nature of Palestine/Israel coverage, and the very high personal stakes for Bronner and his son that could result from full and open coverage of the Israeli army's abuses of Palestinians, The New York Times does not consider this situation to be a problematic case. It had not even disclosed the situation to its readers -- until now.
Report, The Electronic Intifada, 25 January 2010
The New York Times has all but confirmed to The Electronic Intifada (EI) that the son of its Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner was recently inducted into the Israeli army.
Over the weekend, EI received a tip suggesting this had been the case and wrote to Bronner to ask him to confirm or deny the information and to seek his opinion on whether, if true, he thought it would be a conflict of interest.
Susan Chira, the foreign editor of The New York Times wrote in an email to The Electronic Intifada this morning:
"Ethan Bronner referred your query to me, the foreign editor. Here is my comment: Mr. Bronner's son is a young adult who makes his own decisions. At The Times, we have found Mr. Bronner's coverage to be scrupulously fair and we are confident that will continue to be the case."
The Electronic Intifada also wrote to Clark Hoyt, the public editor of The New York Times, to confirm the information and ask for an opinion on whether this constituted a conflict of interest, but had yet to receive a response.
Bronner, as bureau chief, has primary responsibility for his paper's reporting on all aspects of the Palestine/Israel conflict, and on the Israeli army, whose official name is the "Israel Defense Forces."
On 23 January, Bronner published a lengthy article on Israel's efforts to refute allegations contained in the UN-commissioned Goldstone report of war crimes and crimes against humanity during its attack on Gaza last winter ("Israel Poised to Challenge a UN Report on Gaza").
As'ad AbuKhalil, a frequent critic of Bronner's coverage, blogged in response that "The New York Times devoted more space to Israeli and Zionist criticisms of the Goldstone report than to the [content of the] report itself" (The Angry Arab News Service, "Ethan Bronner's propaganda services, 25 January 2010)
Bronner's pro-Israeli bias reporting on Israel's attack on Gaza last year was also criticized by the media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) (See "NYT and the Perils of Mideast 'Balance'," 4 February 2009).
The New York Times' own "Company policy on Ethics in Journalism" acknowledges that the activities of a journalist's family member may constitute a conflict of interest. It includes as an example, "A brother or a daughter in a high-profile job on Wall Street might produce the appearance of conflict for a business reporter or editor." Such conflicts may on occasion require the staff member "to withdraw from certain coverage."
After Israel's invasion of Gaza last winter, Israeli military censors banned local media from printing the names of individual officers who participated in the attack for fear that this could assist international efforts to bring war crimes suspects to justice. This followed the publication of a number of soldiers' personal testimonies in the Israeli press describing atrocities they had seen committed by the Israeli army in Gaza.
The Times' treatment of Bronner sets an interesting precedent. Would the newspaper's policy be the same if a reporter in its Jerusalem bureau had an immediate family member who faced Bronner's son across the battlefield, as a member of a Palestinian or Lebanese resistance organization?
It would appear that despite the highly sensitive nature of Palestine/Israel coverage, and the very high personal stakes for Bronner and his son that could result from full and open coverage of the Israeli army's abuses of Palestinians, The New York Times does not consider this situation to be a problematic case. It had not even disclosed the situation to its readers -- until now.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Imposing Middle East Peace By Henry Siegman
Israel's relentless drive to establish "facts on the ground" in the occupied West Bank, a drive that continues in violation of even the limited settlement freeze to which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu committed himself, seems finally to have succeeded in locking in the irreversibility of its colonial project. As a result of that "achievement," one that successive Israeli governments have long sought in order to preclude the possibility of a two-state solution, Israel has crossed the threshold from "the only democracy in the Middle East" to the only apartheid regime in the Western world.
Statesmen instead should have the moral and political courage to end the massive hoax the peace process has become. The inevitability of such a transformation has been held out not by "Israel bashers" but by the country's own leaders. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon referred to that danger, as did Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who warned that Israel could not escape turning into an apartheid state if it did not relinquish "almost all the territories, if not all," including the Arab parts of East Jerusalem.
Olmert ridiculed Israeli defense strategists who, he said, had learned nothing from past experiences and were stuck in the mindset of the 1948 war of independence. "With them, it is all about tanks and land and controlling territories and controlled territories and this hilltop and that hilltop," he said. "All these things are worthless. Who thinks seriously that if we sit on another hilltop, on another hundred meters, that this is what will make the difference for the State of Israel's basic security?"
It is now widely recognized in most Israeli circles--although denied by Israel's government--that the settlements have become so widespread and so deeply implanted in the West Bank as to rule out the possibility of their removal (except for a few isolated and sparsely populated ones) by this or any future Israeli government unless compelled to do so by international intervention, an eventuality until now considered entirely unlikely.
It is not only the settlements' proliferation and size that have made their dismantlement impossible. Equally decisive have been the influence of Israel's settler-security-industrial complex, which conceived and implemented this policy; the recent disappearance of a viable pro-peace political party in Israel; and the infiltration by settlers and their supporters in the religious-national camp into key leadership positions in Israel's security and military establishments.
Olmert was mistaken in one respect, for he said Israel would turn into an apartheid state when the Arab population in Greater Israel outnumbers the Jewish population. But the relative size of the populations is not the decisive factor in such a transition. Rather, the turning point comes when a state denies national self-determination to a part of its population--even one that is in the minority--to which it has also denied the rights of citizenship.
When a state's denial of the individual and national rights of a large part of its population becomes permanent, it ceases to be a democracy. When the reason for that double disenfranchisement is that population's ethnic and religious identity, the state is practicing a form of apartheid, or racism, not much different from the one that characterized South Africa from 1948 to 1994. The democratic dispensation that Israel provides for its mostly Jewish citizens cannot hide its changed character. By definition, democracy reserved for privileged citizens--while all others are kept behind checkpoints, barbed-wire fences and separation walls commanded by the Israeli army--is not democracy but its opposite.
The Jewish settlements and their supporting infrastructure, which span the West Bank from east to west and north to south, are not a wild growth, like weeds in a garden. They have been carefully planned, financed and protected by successive Israeli governments and Israel's military. Their purpose has been to deny the Palestinian people independence and statehood--or to put it more precisely, to retain Israeli control of Palestine "from the river to the sea," an objective that precludes the existence of a viable and sovereign Palestinian state east of Israel's pre-1967 border.
A vivid recollection from the time I headed the American Jewish Congress is a helicopter trip over the West Bank on which I was taken by Ariel Sharon. With large, worn maps in hand, he pointed out to me strategic locations of present and future settlements on east-west and north-south axes that, Sharon assured me, would rule out a future Palestinian state.
Just one year after the 1967 war, Moshe Dayan, then defense minister, described Israel's plan for the future of the territories as "the current reality." "The plan is being implemented in actual fact," he said. "What exists today must remain as a permanent arrangement in the West Bank." Ten years later, at a conference in Tel Aviv whose theme was finding a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, Dayan said: "The question is not, What is the solution? but, How do we live without a solution?"
Prime Minister Netanyahu's conditions for Palestinian statehood would leave under Israel's control Palestine's international borders and airspace, as well as the entire Jordan Valley; would leave most of the settlers in place; and would fragment the contiguity of the territory remaining for such a state. His conditions would also deny Palestinians even those parts of East Jerusalem that Israel unilaterally annexed to the city immediately following the 1967 war--land that had never been part of Jerusalem before the war. In other words, Netanyahu's conditions for Palestinian statehood would meet Dayan's goal of leaving Israel's de facto occupation in place.
From Dayan's prescription for the permanence of the status quo to Netanyahu's prescription for a two-state solution, Israel has lived "without a solution," not because of uncertainty or neglect but as a matter of deliberate policy, clandestinely driving settlement expansion to the point of irreversibility while pretending to search for "a Palestinian partner for peace."
Sooner or later the White House, Congress and the American public--not to speak of a Jewish establishment that is largely out of touch with the younger Jewish generation's changing perceptions of Israel's behavior--will have to face the fact that America's "special relationship" with Israel is sustaining a colonial enterprise.
President Barack Obama's capitulation to Netanyahu on the settlement freeze was widely seen as the collapse of the latest hope for achievement of a two-state agreement. It thoroughly discredited the notion that Palestinian moderation is the path to statehood, and therefore also discredited Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, moderation's leading Palestinian advocate, who announced his intention not to run in the coming presidential elections.
Netanyahu's "limited" freeze was described by the Obama administration as "unprecedented," even though the exceptions to it--3,000 housing units whose foundations had supposedly already been laid, public buildings and unlimited construction in East Jerusalem--brought total construction to where it would have been without a freeze. Indeed, Netanyahu assured the settler leadership and his cabinet that construction will resume after the ten-month freeze--according to minister Benny Begin, at a rate "faster and more than before"--even if Abbas agrees to return to talks. In fact, the Israeli press has reported that the freeze notwithstanding, new construction in the settlements is "booming." None of this has elicited the Obama administration's public rebuke, much less the kinds of sanctions imposed on Palestinians when they violate agreements.
But what is widely believed to have been the final blow to a two-state solution may in fact turn out to be the necessary condition for its eventual achievement. That condition is abandonment of the utterly wrongheaded idea that a Palestinian state can arise without forceful outside intervention. The international community has shown signs of exasperation with Israel's deceptions and stonewalling, and also with Washington's failure to demonstrate that there are consequences not only for Palestinian violations of agreements but for Israeli ones as well. The last thing many in the international community want is a resumption of predictably meaningless negotiations between Netanyahu and Abbas. Instead, they are focusing on forceful third-party intervention, a concept that is no longer taboo.
Ironically, it is Netanyahu who now insists on the resumption of peace talks. For him, a prolonged breakdown of talks risks exposing the irreversibility of the settlements, and therefore the loss of Israel's democratic character, and legitimizing outside intervention as the only alternative to an unstable and dangerous status quo. While the Obama administration may be reluctant to support such initiatives, it may no longer wish to block them.
These are not fanciful fears. Israeli chiefs of military intelligence, the Shin Bet and other defense officials told Netanyahu's security cabinet on December 9 that the stalled peace process has led to a dangerous vacuum "into which a number of different states are putting their own initiatives, none of which are in Israel's favor." They stressed that "the fact that the US has also reached a dead-end in its efforts only worsens the problem."
If these fears are realized and the international community abandons a moribund peace process in favor of determined third-party initiatives, a two-state outcome may yet be possible. A recent proposal by the Swedish presidency of the European Union is perhaps the first indication of the international community's determination to react more meaningfully to Netanyahu's intransigence. The proposal, adopted by the EU's foreign ministers on December 8, reaffirmed an earlier declaration of the European Council that the EU would not recognize unilateral Israeli changes in the pre-1967 borders. The resolution also opposes Israeli measures to deny a prospective Palestinian state any presence in Jerusalem. The statement's endorsement of PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's two-year institution-building initiative suggests a future willingness to act favorably on a Palestinian declaration of statehood following the initiative's projected completion. In her first pronouncement on the Israel-Palestine conflict as the EU's new high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, Baroness Catherine Ashton declared, "We cannot and nor, I doubt, can the region tolerate another round of fruitless negotiations."
An imposed solution has risks, but these do not begin to compare with the risks of the conflict's unchecked continuation. Furthermore, since the adversaries are not being asked to accept anything they have not already committed themselves to in formal accords, the international community is not imposing its own ideas but insisting the parties live up to existing obligations. That kind of intervention, or "imposition," is hardly unprecedented; it is the daily fare of international diplomacy. It defines America's relations with allies and unfriendly countries alike.
It would not take extraordinary audacity for Obama to reaffirm the official position of every previous US administration--including that of George W. Bush--that no matter how desirable or necessary certain changes in the pre-1967 status may seem, they cannot be made unilaterally. Even Bush, celebrated in Israel as "the best American president Israel ever had," stated categorically that this inviolable principle applies even to the settlement blocs that Israel insists it will annex. Speaking of these blocs at a May 2005 press conference, Bush affirmed that "changes to the 1949 armistice lines must be mutually agreed to," a qualification largely ignored by Israeli governments (and by Bush himself). The next year Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was even more explicit. She stated that "the president did say that at the time of final status, it will be necessary to take into account new realities on the ground that have changed since 1967, but under no circumstances...should anyone try and do that in a pre-emptive or predetermined way, because these are issues for negotiation at final status."
Of course, Obama should leave no doubt that it is inconceivable for the United States not to be fully responsive to Israel's genuine security needs, no matter how displeased it may be with a particular Israeli government's policies. But he must also leave no doubt that it is equally inconceivable he would abandon America's core values or compromise its strategic interests to keep Netanyahu's government in power, particularly when support for this government means supporting a regime that would permanently disenfranchise and dispossess the Palestinian people.
In short, Middle East peacemaking efforts will continue to fail, and the possibility of a two-state solution will disappear, if US policy continues to ignore developments on the ground in the occupied territories and within Israel, which now can be reversed only through outside intervention. President Obama is uniquely positioned to help Israel reclaim Jewish and democratic ideals on which the state was founded--if he does not continue "politics as usual." But was it not his promise to reject just such a politics that swept Obama into the presidency and captured the amazement and respect of the entire world?
Henry Siegman, director of the U.S./Middle East Project in New York, is a visiting research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.
Israel's relentless drive to establish "facts on the ground" in the occupied West Bank, a drive that continues in violation of even the limited settlement freeze to which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu committed himself, seems finally to have succeeded in locking in the irreversibility of its colonial project. As a result of that "achievement," one that successive Israeli governments have long sought in order to preclude the possibility of a two-state solution, Israel has crossed the threshold from "the only democracy in the Middle East" to the only apartheid regime in the Western world.
Statesmen instead should have the moral and political courage to end the massive hoax the peace process has become. The inevitability of such a transformation has been held out not by "Israel bashers" but by the country's own leaders. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon referred to that danger, as did Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who warned that Israel could not escape turning into an apartheid state if it did not relinquish "almost all the territories, if not all," including the Arab parts of East Jerusalem.
Olmert ridiculed Israeli defense strategists who, he said, had learned nothing from past experiences and were stuck in the mindset of the 1948 war of independence. "With them, it is all about tanks and land and controlling territories and controlled territories and this hilltop and that hilltop," he said. "All these things are worthless. Who thinks seriously that if we sit on another hilltop, on another hundred meters, that this is what will make the difference for the State of Israel's basic security?"
It is now widely recognized in most Israeli circles--although denied by Israel's government--that the settlements have become so widespread and so deeply implanted in the West Bank as to rule out the possibility of their removal (except for a few isolated and sparsely populated ones) by this or any future Israeli government unless compelled to do so by international intervention, an eventuality until now considered entirely unlikely.
It is not only the settlements' proliferation and size that have made their dismantlement impossible. Equally decisive have been the influence of Israel's settler-security-industrial complex, which conceived and implemented this policy; the recent disappearance of a viable pro-peace political party in Israel; and the infiltration by settlers and their supporters in the religious-national camp into key leadership positions in Israel's security and military establishments.
Olmert was mistaken in one respect, for he said Israel would turn into an apartheid state when the Arab population in Greater Israel outnumbers the Jewish population. But the relative size of the populations is not the decisive factor in such a transition. Rather, the turning point comes when a state denies national self-determination to a part of its population--even one that is in the minority--to which it has also denied the rights of citizenship.
When a state's denial of the individual and national rights of a large part of its population becomes permanent, it ceases to be a democracy. When the reason for that double disenfranchisement is that population's ethnic and religious identity, the state is practicing a form of apartheid, or racism, not much different from the one that characterized South Africa from 1948 to 1994. The democratic dispensation that Israel provides for its mostly Jewish citizens cannot hide its changed character. By definition, democracy reserved for privileged citizens--while all others are kept behind checkpoints, barbed-wire fences and separation walls commanded by the Israeli army--is not democracy but its opposite.
The Jewish settlements and their supporting infrastructure, which span the West Bank from east to west and north to south, are not a wild growth, like weeds in a garden. They have been carefully planned, financed and protected by successive Israeli governments and Israel's military. Their purpose has been to deny the Palestinian people independence and statehood--or to put it more precisely, to retain Israeli control of Palestine "from the river to the sea," an objective that precludes the existence of a viable and sovereign Palestinian state east of Israel's pre-1967 border.
A vivid recollection from the time I headed the American Jewish Congress is a helicopter trip over the West Bank on which I was taken by Ariel Sharon. With large, worn maps in hand, he pointed out to me strategic locations of present and future settlements on east-west and north-south axes that, Sharon assured me, would rule out a future Palestinian state.
Just one year after the 1967 war, Moshe Dayan, then defense minister, described Israel's plan for the future of the territories as "the current reality." "The plan is being implemented in actual fact," he said. "What exists today must remain as a permanent arrangement in the West Bank." Ten years later, at a conference in Tel Aviv whose theme was finding a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, Dayan said: "The question is not, What is the solution? but, How do we live without a solution?"
Prime Minister Netanyahu's conditions for Palestinian statehood would leave under Israel's control Palestine's international borders and airspace, as well as the entire Jordan Valley; would leave most of the settlers in place; and would fragment the contiguity of the territory remaining for such a state. His conditions would also deny Palestinians even those parts of East Jerusalem that Israel unilaterally annexed to the city immediately following the 1967 war--land that had never been part of Jerusalem before the war. In other words, Netanyahu's conditions for Palestinian statehood would meet Dayan's goal of leaving Israel's de facto occupation in place.
From Dayan's prescription for the permanence of the status quo to Netanyahu's prescription for a two-state solution, Israel has lived "without a solution," not because of uncertainty or neglect but as a matter of deliberate policy, clandestinely driving settlement expansion to the point of irreversibility while pretending to search for "a Palestinian partner for peace."
Sooner or later the White House, Congress and the American public--not to speak of a Jewish establishment that is largely out of touch with the younger Jewish generation's changing perceptions of Israel's behavior--will have to face the fact that America's "special relationship" with Israel is sustaining a colonial enterprise.
President Barack Obama's capitulation to Netanyahu on the settlement freeze was widely seen as the collapse of the latest hope for achievement of a two-state agreement. It thoroughly discredited the notion that Palestinian moderation is the path to statehood, and therefore also discredited Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, moderation's leading Palestinian advocate, who announced his intention not to run in the coming presidential elections.
Netanyahu's "limited" freeze was described by the Obama administration as "unprecedented," even though the exceptions to it--3,000 housing units whose foundations had supposedly already been laid, public buildings and unlimited construction in East Jerusalem--brought total construction to where it would have been without a freeze. Indeed, Netanyahu assured the settler leadership and his cabinet that construction will resume after the ten-month freeze--according to minister Benny Begin, at a rate "faster and more than before"--even if Abbas agrees to return to talks. In fact, the Israeli press has reported that the freeze notwithstanding, new construction in the settlements is "booming." None of this has elicited the Obama administration's public rebuke, much less the kinds of sanctions imposed on Palestinians when they violate agreements.
But what is widely believed to have been the final blow to a two-state solution may in fact turn out to be the necessary condition for its eventual achievement. That condition is abandonment of the utterly wrongheaded idea that a Palestinian state can arise without forceful outside intervention. The international community has shown signs of exasperation with Israel's deceptions and stonewalling, and also with Washington's failure to demonstrate that there are consequences not only for Palestinian violations of agreements but for Israeli ones as well. The last thing many in the international community want is a resumption of predictably meaningless negotiations between Netanyahu and Abbas. Instead, they are focusing on forceful third-party intervention, a concept that is no longer taboo.
Ironically, it is Netanyahu who now insists on the resumption of peace talks. For him, a prolonged breakdown of talks risks exposing the irreversibility of the settlements, and therefore the loss of Israel's democratic character, and legitimizing outside intervention as the only alternative to an unstable and dangerous status quo. While the Obama administration may be reluctant to support such initiatives, it may no longer wish to block them.
These are not fanciful fears. Israeli chiefs of military intelligence, the Shin Bet and other defense officials told Netanyahu's security cabinet on December 9 that the stalled peace process has led to a dangerous vacuum "into which a number of different states are putting their own initiatives, none of which are in Israel's favor." They stressed that "the fact that the US has also reached a dead-end in its efforts only worsens the problem."
If these fears are realized and the international community abandons a moribund peace process in favor of determined third-party initiatives, a two-state outcome may yet be possible. A recent proposal by the Swedish presidency of the European Union is perhaps the first indication of the international community's determination to react more meaningfully to Netanyahu's intransigence. The proposal, adopted by the EU's foreign ministers on December 8, reaffirmed an earlier declaration of the European Council that the EU would not recognize unilateral Israeli changes in the pre-1967 borders. The resolution also opposes Israeli measures to deny a prospective Palestinian state any presence in Jerusalem. The statement's endorsement of PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's two-year institution-building initiative suggests a future willingness to act favorably on a Palestinian declaration of statehood following the initiative's projected completion. In her first pronouncement on the Israel-Palestine conflict as the EU's new high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, Baroness Catherine Ashton declared, "We cannot and nor, I doubt, can the region tolerate another round of fruitless negotiations."
An imposed solution has risks, but these do not begin to compare with the risks of the conflict's unchecked continuation. Furthermore, since the adversaries are not being asked to accept anything they have not already committed themselves to in formal accords, the international community is not imposing its own ideas but insisting the parties live up to existing obligations. That kind of intervention, or "imposition," is hardly unprecedented; it is the daily fare of international diplomacy. It defines America's relations with allies and unfriendly countries alike.
It would not take extraordinary audacity for Obama to reaffirm the official position of every previous US administration--including that of George W. Bush--that no matter how desirable or necessary certain changes in the pre-1967 status may seem, they cannot be made unilaterally. Even Bush, celebrated in Israel as "the best American president Israel ever had," stated categorically that this inviolable principle applies even to the settlement blocs that Israel insists it will annex. Speaking of these blocs at a May 2005 press conference, Bush affirmed that "changes to the 1949 armistice lines must be mutually agreed to," a qualification largely ignored by Israeli governments (and by Bush himself). The next year Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was even more explicit. She stated that "the president did say that at the time of final status, it will be necessary to take into account new realities on the ground that have changed since 1967, but under no circumstances...should anyone try and do that in a pre-emptive or predetermined way, because these are issues for negotiation at final status."
Of course, Obama should leave no doubt that it is inconceivable for the United States not to be fully responsive to Israel's genuine security needs, no matter how displeased it may be with a particular Israeli government's policies. But he must also leave no doubt that it is equally inconceivable he would abandon America's core values or compromise its strategic interests to keep Netanyahu's government in power, particularly when support for this government means supporting a regime that would permanently disenfranchise and dispossess the Palestinian people.
In short, Middle East peacemaking efforts will continue to fail, and the possibility of a two-state solution will disappear, if US policy continues to ignore developments on the ground in the occupied territories and within Israel, which now can be reversed only through outside intervention. President Obama is uniquely positioned to help Israel reclaim Jewish and democratic ideals on which the state was founded--if he does not continue "politics as usual." But was it not his promise to reject just such a politics that swept Obama into the presidency and captured the amazement and respect of the entire world?
Henry Siegman, director of the U.S./Middle East Project in New York, is a visiting research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.
Your Palestinian Gandhis Exist ... in Graves and Prisons
Calling Bono
By ALISON WEIR
Dear Bono,
In your recent column in the New York Times, "Ten for the Next Ten," you wrote: "I’ll place my hopes on the possibility — however remote at the moment — that...people in places filled with rage and despair, places like the Palestinian territories, will in the days ahead find among them their Gandhi, their King, their Aung San Suu Kyi."
Your hope has already been fulfilled in the Palestinian territories.
Unfortunately, these Palestinian Gandhis and Kings are being killed and imprisoned.
On the day that your op-ed appeared hoping for such leaders, three were languishing in Israeli prisons. No one knows how long they will be held, nor under what conditions; torture is common in Israeli prisons.
At least 19 Palestinians have been killed in the last six years alone during nonviolent demonstrations against Israel’s apartheid wall that is confiscating Palestinian cropland and imprisoning Palestinian people. Many others have been killed in other parts of the Palestinian territories while taking part in nonviolent activities. Hundreds more have been detained and imprisoned.
Recently Israel has begun a campaign to incarcerate the leaders of this diverse movement of weekly marches and demonstrations taking place in small Palestinian villages far from media attention.
The first Palestinian Gandhi to be rounded up in this recent purge was young Mohammad Othman, taken on Sept. 22 when he was returning home from speaking in Norway about nonviolent strategies to oppose Israeli oppression and land confiscation. He has now been held for 107 days without charges, much of it in solitary confinement.
The second was Abdallah Abu Rahma, a schoolteacher and farmer taken from his home on Dec. 10, the only one to be charged with a crime. After holding him for several days, Israel finally came up with a charge: “illegal weapons possession” – referring to the peace sign he had fashioned out of the spent teargas cartridges and bullets that Israel had shot at nonviolent demonstrators. (One such cartridge pierced the skull of Tristan Anderson, an American who was photographing the aftermath of a nonviolent march, causing part of his right frontal lobe to be removed.)
The third was Jamal Jumah’, a veteran leader in the grassroots struggle, who was taken by Israeli occupation forces on Dec. 16th and is now being held in shackles and often blindfolded during Kafkaesque Israeli military proceedings.
Palestinians have been engaging in nonviolence for decades.
When I was last in Nablus I learned of a massive nonviolent demonstration that had occurred in 2001 – estimates range from 10,000 to 50,000 Palestinian men, women, and children taking part in a nonviolent march. All sectors of Nablus had joined together in organizing this – public officials, diverse parties, religious, secular, Muslim, Christian.
Modeling their action on images of Dr. Martin Luther King, they marched arm-in-arm, believing that Israel would not kill them and that the world would care. They were wrong on both counts. Israeli forces immediately shot six dead and injured many more. And no one even knows about it. At If Americans Knew we are currently working on a video to try to remedy the last part; there’s nothing we can do about the dead.
But there’s a great deal you can do, Bono. You can use your talent and celebrity to tell the world these facts. You can write a New York Times op-ed about the Palestinian Gandhis in Israeli prisons and call for their freedom. You can sing of these Palestinian Martin Luther Kings you wished for, and by singing save their lives.
For the reality is that nonviolence is only as powerful as its visibility to the world. When it is made invisible through its lack of coverage by the New York Times, the Associated Press, CNN, Fox News, et al, its practitioners are in deadly danger, and their efforts to use nonviolence against injustice are doomed.
In the New York Times you publicly proclaimed your belief in nonviolence. Now is your chance to demonstrate your commitment.
* * *
Killed by Israeli forces while demonstrating against the Israeli wall being built on Palestinian land [http://palsolidarity.org/2009/06/7647]
5 June 2009:
Yousef ‘Akil’ Tsadik Srour, 36
Shot in the chest with 0.22 calibre live ammunition during a demonstration against the Wall in Ni’lin.
April 17, 2009:
Basem Abu Rahme, age 29
Shot in the chest with a high-velocity tear gas projectile during a demonstration against the Wall in Bil’in.
December 28, 2008:
Mohammad Khawaja, age 20
Shot in the head with live ammunition during a demonstration in Ni’lin against Israel’s assault on Gaza. Mohammad died in the hospital on December 31, 2009.
December 28, 2008:
Arafat Khawaja, age 22
Shot in the back with live ammunition in Ni’lin during a demonstration against Israel’s assault on Gaza.
July 30, 2008:
Youssef Ahmed Younes Amirah, age 17
Shot in the head with rubber coated bullets during a demonstration against the Wall in Ni’lin. Youssef died of his wounds on August 4, 2008.
July 29, 2008:
Ahmed Husan Youssef Mousa, age 10
Shot dead while he and several friends tried to remove coils of razor wire from land belonging to the village in Ni’lin.
March 2, 2008:
Mahmoud Muhammad Ahmad Masalmeh, age 15
Shot dead when trying to cut the razor wire portion of the Wall in Beit Awwa.
March 28, 2007:
Muhammad Elias Mahmoud ‘Aweideh, age 15
Shot dead during a demonstration against the Wall in Um a-Sharayet – Samiramis.
February 2, 2007:
Taha Muhammad Subhi al-Quljawi, age 16
Shot dead when he and two friends tried to cut the razor wire portion of the Wall in the Qalandiya Refugee Camp. He was wounded in the thigh and died from blood loss after remaining in the field for a long time without treatment.
May 4, 2005:
Jamal Jaber Ibrahim ‘Asi, age 15
Shot dead during a demonstration against the Wall in Beit Liqya.
May 4, 2005:
U’dai Mufid Mahmoud ‘Asi, age 14
Shot dead during a demonstration against the Wall in Beit Liqya.
February 15, 2005:
‘Alaa’ Muhammad ‘Abd a-Rahman Khalil, age 14
Shot dead while throwing stones at an Israeli vehicle driven by private security guards near the Wall in Betunya.
April 18, 2004:
Islam Hashem Rizik Zhahran, age 14
Shot during a demonstration against the Wall in Deir Abu Mash’al. Islam died of his wounds April 28, 2004.
April 18, 2004:
Diaa’ A-Din ‘Abd al-Karim Ibrahim Abu ‘Eid, age 23
Shot dead during a demonstration against the Wall in Biddu.
April 16, 2004:
Hussein Mahmoud ‘Awad ‘Alian, age 17
Shot dead during a demonstration against the Wall in Betunya.
February 26, 2004:
Muhammad Da’ud Saleh Badwan, age 21
Shot during a demonstration against the Wall in Biddu. Muhammad died of his wounds on March 3, 2004.
February 26, 2004:
Abdal Rahman Abu ‘Eid, age 17
Died of a heart attack after teargas projectiles were shot into his home during a demonstration against the Wall in Biddu.
February 26, 2004:
Muhammad Fadel Hashem Rian, age 25
Shot dead during a demonstration against the Wall in Biddu.
- Hide quoted text -
February 26, 2004:
Zakaria Mahmoud ‘Eid Salem, age 28
Shot dead during a demonstration against the Wall in Biddu.
Notes and Sources:
(1) Israeli was first exposed in the West by the London Times in the late 1970s. Foreign Service Journal [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/opinion/03bono.html] wrote about Israeli torture of Americans in June, 2002, and Addameer [http://addameer.info/?p=496] gives specifics today.
(2) Al Haq, the West Bank affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists – Geneva, writes: [http://freemohammadothman.wordpress.com/2010/01/] “…as part of their repression campaign, which coincided with the release of the Goldstone Report, the Israeli forces have re-launched daily dawn raids in villages affected by the Wall, arresting youths and children, for the purpose of extracting confessions about prominent community leaders advocating against the Wall, and continued to intimidate activists by destroying their private property and threatening them with detention. Finally, Israel has directly targeted the Grassroots “Stop the Wall” Campaign [http://stopthewall.org/index.shtml]by arresting and intimidating its leaders…His village, Jayyous, has been devastated by the Apartheid Wall
(3) Human Rights Watch [http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/12/04/israel-end-arbitrary-detention-rights-activist] found that “"The only reasonable conclusion is that Othman is being punished for his peaceful advocacy...”
(4) Abdallah Abu Rahma was taken [http://www.popularstruggle.org/freeabdallah]when “eleven military jeeps surrounded his house, and Israeli soldiers broke the door, extracted Abdallah from his bed, and, after briefly allowing him to say goodbye to his wife Majida and their three children — seven year-old Luma, five year-old Lian and eight month-old baby Laith, they blindfolded him and took him into custody.”
On Jan. 6th Abdallah wrote: [http://palsolidarity.org/2010/01/10429]:
“I mark the beginning of the new decade imprisoned in a military detention camp. Nevertheless, from within the occupation′s holding cell I meet the New Year with determination and hope…. Whether we are confined in the open-air prison that Gaza has been transformed into, in military prisons in the West Bank, or in our own villages surrounded by the Apartheid Wall, arrests and persecution do not weaken us. They only strengthen our commitment to turning 2010 into a year of liberation through unarmed grassroots resistance to the occupation.
“The price I and many others pay in freedom does not deter us. I wish that my two young daughters and baby son would not have to pay this price together with me. But for my son and daughters, for their future, we must continue our struggle for freedom…”
(5) Tristan Anderson was shot [http://palsolidarity.org/2009/03/5324] with a high-velocity canister after photographing a nonviolent protest in Ni’lin on March 13, 2009. His ambulance was held up for a period of time by Israeli forces before finally being allowed to take him to a hospital. Video of parents’ press conference [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcK_4ksR1fw]
(6) Israeli forces interrogated Jamal Juma’ and then “brought him back home, handcuffed, and searched his house while his wife and three children watched. Then they took him off to prison.” – CounterPunch [http://www.counterpunch.org/hijab12242009.html ] Despite being held for 20 days, [http://stopthewall.org/latestnews/2152.shtml] no charges have yet been brought against Jamal.
(7) The Nablus march mentioned above took place on March 30, 2001, on Jerusalem Street in the south of Nablus, leading to the Huwara checkpoint. This was on what Palestinians call the "Day of the Land" or "Land Day" (information on Land Day can be seen at http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/255.shtml).
(8) In our study of the Associated Press, “Deadly Distortion,” [http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/ap-report.html] we commented: “…our analysts looked at hundreds of articles that AP published on topics relating to the Israel/Palestine issue, and noted a number of additional patterns that merit further examination… Nonviolence movement. Palestinian resistance efforts have included numerous nonviolent marches and other activities, many joined by international participants, Israeli citizens, and faith-based groups. This nonviolence movement has been an important topic in the Palestinian territories, with growing numbers of people taking part – in 2004 the Palestinian News Network reported on 79 major demonstrations that were exclusively nonviolent. Yet, we did not find any reports in which AP had described a Palestinian demonstration or other activity as nonviolent or utilizing nonviolence.
Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew, [http://www.ifamericansknew.org/] which provides information about Israel-Palestine. She can be reached at contact@ifamericansknew.org. She phoned and faxed Bono’s management company Principle Management [http://www.fanmail.biz/25157.html] at both their New York and Dublin locations in an effort to contact him but has not yet received a reply. She suggests that others may wish to do this as well: 212.765.2330 / fax: 212.765.2372.
Calling Bono
By ALISON WEIR
Dear Bono,
In your recent column in the New York Times, "Ten for the Next Ten," you wrote: "I’ll place my hopes on the possibility — however remote at the moment — that...people in places filled with rage and despair, places like the Palestinian territories, will in the days ahead find among them their Gandhi, their King, their Aung San Suu Kyi."
Your hope has already been fulfilled in the Palestinian territories.
Unfortunately, these Palestinian Gandhis and Kings are being killed and imprisoned.
On the day that your op-ed appeared hoping for such leaders, three were languishing in Israeli prisons. No one knows how long they will be held, nor under what conditions; torture is common in Israeli prisons.
At least 19 Palestinians have been killed in the last six years alone during nonviolent demonstrations against Israel’s apartheid wall that is confiscating Palestinian cropland and imprisoning Palestinian people. Many others have been killed in other parts of the Palestinian territories while taking part in nonviolent activities. Hundreds more have been detained and imprisoned.
Recently Israel has begun a campaign to incarcerate the leaders of this diverse movement of weekly marches and demonstrations taking place in small Palestinian villages far from media attention.
The first Palestinian Gandhi to be rounded up in this recent purge was young Mohammad Othman, taken on Sept. 22 when he was returning home from speaking in Norway about nonviolent strategies to oppose Israeli oppression and land confiscation. He has now been held for 107 days without charges, much of it in solitary confinement.
The second was Abdallah Abu Rahma, a schoolteacher and farmer taken from his home on Dec. 10, the only one to be charged with a crime. After holding him for several days, Israel finally came up with a charge: “illegal weapons possession” – referring to the peace sign he had fashioned out of the spent teargas cartridges and bullets that Israel had shot at nonviolent demonstrators. (One such cartridge pierced the skull of Tristan Anderson, an American who was photographing the aftermath of a nonviolent march, causing part of his right frontal lobe to be removed.)
The third was Jamal Jumah’, a veteran leader in the grassroots struggle, who was taken by Israeli occupation forces on Dec. 16th and is now being held in shackles and often blindfolded during Kafkaesque Israeli military proceedings.
Palestinians have been engaging in nonviolence for decades.
When I was last in Nablus I learned of a massive nonviolent demonstration that had occurred in 2001 – estimates range from 10,000 to 50,000 Palestinian men, women, and children taking part in a nonviolent march. All sectors of Nablus had joined together in organizing this – public officials, diverse parties, religious, secular, Muslim, Christian.
Modeling their action on images of Dr. Martin Luther King, they marched arm-in-arm, believing that Israel would not kill them and that the world would care. They were wrong on both counts. Israeli forces immediately shot six dead and injured many more. And no one even knows about it. At If Americans Knew we are currently working on a video to try to remedy the last part; there’s nothing we can do about the dead.
But there’s a great deal you can do, Bono. You can use your talent and celebrity to tell the world these facts. You can write a New York Times op-ed about the Palestinian Gandhis in Israeli prisons and call for their freedom. You can sing of these Palestinian Martin Luther Kings you wished for, and by singing save their lives.
For the reality is that nonviolence is only as powerful as its visibility to the world. When it is made invisible through its lack of coverage by the New York Times, the Associated Press, CNN, Fox News, et al, its practitioners are in deadly danger, and their efforts to use nonviolence against injustice are doomed.
In the New York Times you publicly proclaimed your belief in nonviolence. Now is your chance to demonstrate your commitment.
* * *
Killed by Israeli forces while demonstrating against the Israeli wall being built on Palestinian land [http://palsolidarity.org/2009/06/7647]
5 June 2009:
Yousef ‘Akil’ Tsadik Srour, 36
Shot in the chest with 0.22 calibre live ammunition during a demonstration against the Wall in Ni’lin.
April 17, 2009:
Basem Abu Rahme, age 29
Shot in the chest with a high-velocity tear gas projectile during a demonstration against the Wall in Bil’in.
December 28, 2008:
Mohammad Khawaja, age 20
Shot in the head with live ammunition during a demonstration in Ni’lin against Israel’s assault on Gaza. Mohammad died in the hospital on December 31, 2009.
December 28, 2008:
Arafat Khawaja, age 22
Shot in the back with live ammunition in Ni’lin during a demonstration against Israel’s assault on Gaza.
July 30, 2008:
Youssef Ahmed Younes Amirah, age 17
Shot in the head with rubber coated bullets during a demonstration against the Wall in Ni’lin. Youssef died of his wounds on August 4, 2008.
July 29, 2008:
Ahmed Husan Youssef Mousa, age 10
Shot dead while he and several friends tried to remove coils of razor wire from land belonging to the village in Ni’lin.
March 2, 2008:
Mahmoud Muhammad Ahmad Masalmeh, age 15
Shot dead when trying to cut the razor wire portion of the Wall in Beit Awwa.
March 28, 2007:
Muhammad Elias Mahmoud ‘Aweideh, age 15
Shot dead during a demonstration against the Wall in Um a-Sharayet – Samiramis.
February 2, 2007:
Taha Muhammad Subhi al-Quljawi, age 16
Shot dead when he and two friends tried to cut the razor wire portion of the Wall in the Qalandiya Refugee Camp. He was wounded in the thigh and died from blood loss after remaining in the field for a long time without treatment.
May 4, 2005:
Jamal Jaber Ibrahim ‘Asi, age 15
Shot dead during a demonstration against the Wall in Beit Liqya.
May 4, 2005:
U’dai Mufid Mahmoud ‘Asi, age 14
Shot dead during a demonstration against the Wall in Beit Liqya.
February 15, 2005:
‘Alaa’ Muhammad ‘Abd a-Rahman Khalil, age 14
Shot dead while throwing stones at an Israeli vehicle driven by private security guards near the Wall in Betunya.
April 18, 2004:
Islam Hashem Rizik Zhahran, age 14
Shot during a demonstration against the Wall in Deir Abu Mash’al. Islam died of his wounds April 28, 2004.
April 18, 2004:
Diaa’ A-Din ‘Abd al-Karim Ibrahim Abu ‘Eid, age 23
Shot dead during a demonstration against the Wall in Biddu.
April 16, 2004:
Hussein Mahmoud ‘Awad ‘Alian, age 17
Shot dead during a demonstration against the Wall in Betunya.
February 26, 2004:
Muhammad Da’ud Saleh Badwan, age 21
Shot during a demonstration against the Wall in Biddu. Muhammad died of his wounds on March 3, 2004.
February 26, 2004:
Abdal Rahman Abu ‘Eid, age 17
Died of a heart attack after teargas projectiles were shot into his home during a demonstration against the Wall in Biddu.
February 26, 2004:
Muhammad Fadel Hashem Rian, age 25
Shot dead during a demonstration against the Wall in Biddu.
- Hide quoted text -
February 26, 2004:
Zakaria Mahmoud ‘Eid Salem, age 28
Shot dead during a demonstration against the Wall in Biddu.
Notes and Sources:
(1) Israeli was first exposed in the West by the London Times in the late 1970s. Foreign Service Journal [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/opinion/03bono.html] wrote about Israeli torture of Americans in June, 2002, and Addameer [http://addameer.info/?p=496] gives specifics today.
(2) Al Haq, the West Bank affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists – Geneva, writes: [http://freemohammadothman.wordpress.com/2010/01/] “…as part of their repression campaign, which coincided with the release of the Goldstone Report, the Israeli forces have re-launched daily dawn raids in villages affected by the Wall, arresting youths and children, for the purpose of extracting confessions about prominent community leaders advocating against the Wall, and continued to intimidate activists by destroying their private property and threatening them with detention. Finally, Israel has directly targeted the Grassroots “Stop the Wall” Campaign [http://stopthewall.org/index.shtml]by arresting and intimidating its leaders…His village, Jayyous, has been devastated by the Apartheid Wall
(3) Human Rights Watch [http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/12/04/israel-end-arbitrary-detention-rights-activist] found that “"The only reasonable conclusion is that Othman is being punished for his peaceful advocacy...”
(4) Abdallah Abu Rahma was taken [http://www.popularstruggle.org/freeabdallah]when “eleven military jeeps surrounded his house, and Israeli soldiers broke the door, extracted Abdallah from his bed, and, after briefly allowing him to say goodbye to his wife Majida and their three children — seven year-old Luma, five year-old Lian and eight month-old baby Laith, they blindfolded him and took him into custody.”
On Jan. 6th Abdallah wrote: [http://palsolidarity.org/2010/01/10429]:
“I mark the beginning of the new decade imprisoned in a military detention camp. Nevertheless, from within the occupation′s holding cell I meet the New Year with determination and hope…. Whether we are confined in the open-air prison that Gaza has been transformed into, in military prisons in the West Bank, or in our own villages surrounded by the Apartheid Wall, arrests and persecution do not weaken us. They only strengthen our commitment to turning 2010 into a year of liberation through unarmed grassroots resistance to the occupation.
“The price I and many others pay in freedom does not deter us. I wish that my two young daughters and baby son would not have to pay this price together with me. But for my son and daughters, for their future, we must continue our struggle for freedom…”
(5) Tristan Anderson was shot [http://palsolidarity.org/2009/03/5324] with a high-velocity canister after photographing a nonviolent protest in Ni’lin on March 13, 2009. His ambulance was held up for a period of time by Israeli forces before finally being allowed to take him to a hospital. Video of parents’ press conference [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcK_4ksR1fw]
(6) Israeli forces interrogated Jamal Juma’ and then “brought him back home, handcuffed, and searched his house while his wife and three children watched. Then they took him off to prison.” – CounterPunch [http://www.counterpunch.org/hijab12242009.html ] Despite being held for 20 days, [http://stopthewall.org/latestnews/2152.shtml] no charges have yet been brought against Jamal.
(7) The Nablus march mentioned above took place on March 30, 2001, on Jerusalem Street in the south of Nablus, leading to the Huwara checkpoint. This was on what Palestinians call the "Day of the Land" or "Land Day" (information on Land Day can be seen at http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/255.shtml).
(8) In our study of the Associated Press, “Deadly Distortion,” [http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/ap-report.html] we commented: “…our analysts looked at hundreds of articles that AP published on topics relating to the Israel/Palestine issue, and noted a number of additional patterns that merit further examination… Nonviolence movement. Palestinian resistance efforts have included numerous nonviolent marches and other activities, many joined by international participants, Israeli citizens, and faith-based groups. This nonviolence movement has been an important topic in the Palestinian territories, with growing numbers of people taking part – in 2004 the Palestinian News Network reported on 79 major demonstrations that were exclusively nonviolent. Yet, we did not find any reports in which AP had described a Palestinian demonstration or other activity as nonviolent or utilizing nonviolence.
Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew, [http://www.ifamericansknew.org/] which provides information about Israel-Palestine. She can be reached at contact@ifamericansknew.org. She phoned and faxed Bono’s management company Principle Management [http://www.fanmail.biz/25157.html] at both their New York and Dublin locations in an effort to contact him but has not yet received a reply. She suggests that others may wish to do this as well: 212.765.2330 / fax: 212.765.2372.
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