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Israeli dissidents

Israeli academics hit back over bid to pass law that would criminalise them

Backlash over threat to outlaw supporters of boycott movement aimed at ending the continued occupation of the West Bank

Rachel Shabi in Jerusalem and Peter Beaumont

The Observer, Sunday 11 July 2010

A Palestinian woman shouts at an Israeli soldier as clashes erupted with Palestinian protesters on Friday during a demonstration against the expansion of the Israeli settlements at Nabi Salih village near the West Bank City of Ramallah. Photograph: Alaa Badarneh/EPA

An academic backlash has erupted in Israel over proposed new laws, backed by the government of Binyamin Netanyahu, to criminalise a handful of Israeli professors who openly support a campaign against the continuing occupation of the West Bank.

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel has gained rapid international support since Israeli troops stormed a Gaza-bound flotilla of aid ships in May, killing nine activists. Israeli attention has focused on the small number of activists, particularly in the country’s universities, who have openly supported an academic boycott of Israeli institutions.

A protest petition has been signed by 500 academics, including two former education ministers, following recent comments by Israel’s education minister, Gideon Saar, that the government intends to take action against the boycott’s supporters. A proposed bill introduced into the Israeli parliament – the Knesset – would outlaw boycotts and penalise their supporters. Individuals who initiated, encouraged or provided support or information for any boycott or divestment action would be made to pay damages to the companies affected. Foreign nationals involved in boycott activity would be banned from entering Israel for 10 years, and any “foreign state entity” engaged in such activity would be liable to pay damages.

Saar last week described the petition as hysterical and an attempt to silence contrary opinions. While the vast majority of the signatories do not support an academic boycott of Israel, they have joined forces over what they regard as the latest assault on freedom of expression in Israel. The petition states: “We have different and varied opinions about solving the difficult problems facing Israel, but there is one thing we are agreed on – freedom of expression and academic freedom are the very lifeblood of the academic system.”

Daniel Gutwein, a history professor at Haifa University who is one of the signatories, described the minister’s intervention as an attempt “to make Israeli academia docile, frightened and silent”.

Although the BDS campaign – in various forms – has been running for over half a decade, it has become an increasingly fraught issue inside Israel in the past year since a small number of academics publicly declared support for a boycott, including Neve Gordon, author of Israel’s Occupation and a former paratrooper who was badly injured while serving with the Israeli Defence Force.

Speaking to the Observer last week, Gordon said that many Israelis saw support for the BDS as “crossing a red line”. Adding that he had received recent death threats, he said: “I am worried about what is happening to the space for debate in Israel. I find that there is a proto-fascist mindset developing. One of the slogans you hear a lot now is no citizenship without loyalty. It is an inversion of the republican idea that the state should be loyal to the citizen.”

Israeli campaigners believe the Gaza flotilla incident represents a tipping point in raising support for boycotts. Musicians including Elvis Costello, Gil Scott Heron and the Pixies have cancelled shows in Israel. Hollywood actors also snubbed Jerusalem’s international film festival and internationally acclaimed writers have supported the BDS movement, which is gaining support in dozens of countries.

“It’s a different world to what it was even a month ago,” says Kobi Snitz, member of an Israeli BDS group. “Suddenly, all sorts of people are supporting it – people that you wouldn’t expect.”

What is most interesting, however, has been the impact in Israel itself. Israeli journalist and blogger Noam Sheizaf wrote recently that such actions are now forcing Israelis “to think about the political issues and about their consequences… For a country in a constant state of denial regarding the occupation, this is no small thing.” Sheizaf does not promote the boycott, but says: “I will gladly return concert tickets if that is the price for making Israelis understand that the occupation cannot go on.”

Adi Oz, culture editor on the Tel Aviv weekly Ha’ir, appeared on Israeli national radio explaining her support for recent boycott activity. “When the Pixies cancelled their concert here I was disappointed,” she says. “But I was not critical of the Pixies, I was critical of our government, because they are responsible for Israel’s isolation.” She adds that, post-flotilla, the cultural boycott is “something that everyone has a stand on – and some people are realising that they are in favour of it, without having thought about it before.” There has also been a spate of boycott-related discussion in the financial press. The daily business newspaper Calcalist ran an uncritical profile of the Israeli campaigners behind Who Profits, an online database of Israeli and international companies involved in the occupation of the West Bank.

The project’s co-ordinator, Dalit Baum, of the Coalition of Women for Peace, says: “Every day there is an article about this issue in the Israeli media, which creates a discussion about the economy of the occupation and raises the fact that there’s a problem.”

0

Gaza Siege: Catastrophic, Not ‘Unsustainable’

By Miko Peled

There is still doubt in the minds of serious people about Israel’s attack on the Free Gaza flotilla and the events that lead to the death of 9 of the activists aboard. There can be little surprise of course because the commander of the Israeli Navy, Admiral Eliezer Marom, claims the mission was a success. According to him, thanks to the restraint shown by the Israeli soldiers no innocent activists were hurt, the soldiers returned safely to their base and “9 terrorists were killed.” So there are people, perhaps you event know them, who feel that we should “cut Israel some slack.” Well, I say no!

The people aboard Free Gaza flotilla were brave peace activists and were it not for a work commitment I would have been on that flotilla with them. The claims that they were connected to terrorist organizations are utter nonsense. They had three objectives: to bring much needed humanitarian supplies to Gaza, to provoke and embarrass Israel, and to get world attention to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Nine of these activists gave their lives to achieve this.

Armed Israeli commandos attacked the flotilla in international waters in an act of piracy. The people aboard the boat did what every navel officer would tell you was their duty: they heroically defended their ship and their cargo and, as we know, nine people gave their lives in this act of heroism. The Israeli commandos in panic and cowardice fired into the unarmed crowd, killing nine, and thus turned a mishap into an unspeakable tragedy.

Had I been able to go on the Free Gaza flotilla this would have been my third attempt to enter the besieged Gaza where Israel has imprisoned and is slowly starving 1.4 million civilians, including 800,000 children. Palestinians have never had an army, a navy, a tank or a plane, yet they are being held under siege and are constantly attacked, suffering countless civilian casualties, horrific disease and inexcusable misery.

There are claims that the activists upon the Free Gaza flotilla wanted to provoke Israel and that they were not merely innocent peace activist. Well, activism is meant to provoke. Activist is not sitting idly by and watching the world go around. Contrary to the myth many white Americans like to believe, when Rosa Parks boarded a bus and took a seat designated for white people she was not just an African-American woman who was tired. She was an activist who was on a mission; she was there to provoke a system that was rooted in the crime of systemic racist segregation with which parts of this country was plagued. When four African-American students staged the Greensboro sit in February 1960, they did not sit at the whites-only lunch counter just because they were hungry. If we recall MLK Jr., Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela it is clear that activism is meant to provoke and expose evil, to call attention to it and then to get rid of it. The siege on Gaza is one such evil. The people aboard the flotilla were doing the right thing.

One has to wonder what is worse, to commit a crime or to justify it? Who are worse, those who committed the Jewish holocaust, the Armenian genocide and the enslavement and murder of Africans? Or those who profit, justify or deny these horrors took place? Being Jewish and an Israeli myself, having had a father who was a general in the Israeli and having served in the Israeli army I say this: denying or justifying Israel’s actions is tantamount to denying or defending all crimes against humanity.

Sadly, all one hears from the US is that the situation in Gaza is “unsustainable.” One has to wonder how many opinion polls were taken and how many brilliant communications experts it took to come up with this bland, overcooked and useless expression. I am sure they had to get the Department of State, the Israeli Embassy and AIPAC to OK it before the President uttered this unbearably lifeless word. The situation in Gaza is not ‘unsustainable’, the situation in Gaza and in all parts of Palestine is catastrophic.

– Miko Peled is a writer and Israeli peace activist living in San Diego. His father was the late General Matti Peled, his grandfather Avraham Katsnelson signed the Israeli declaration of independence and his niece Smadar was killed in a suicide attack in Jerusalem. He is the co founder of the Elbanna-Peled Foundation.

Visit: mikopeled.wordpress.com.

source

1

Essay of the week: What drives Israel?

Hearld Scotland

By Ilan Pappe
Published on 6 Jun 2010

Probably the most bewildering aspect of the Gaza flotilla affair has been the righteous indignation expressed by the Israeli government and
people.

The nature of this response is not being fully reported in the UK
press, but it includes official parades celebrating the heroism of the
commandos who stormed the ship and demonstrations by schoolchildren
giving their unequivocal support for the government against the new
wave of anti-Semitism.

As someone who was born in Israel and went enthusiastically through
the socialisation and indoctrination process until my mid-20s, this
reaction is all too familiar. Understanding the root of this furious
defensiveness is key to comprehending the principal obstacle for peace
in Israel and Palestine. One can best define this barrier as the
official and popular Jewish Israeli perception of the political and
cultural reality around them.

A number of factors explain this phenomenon, but three are outstanding
and they are interconnected. They form the mental infrastructure on
which life in Israel as a Jewish Zionist individual is based, and one
from which it is almost impossible to depart – as I know too well from
personal experience.

The first and most important assumption is that what used to be
historical Palestine is by sacred and irrefutable right the political,
cultural and religious possession of the Jewish people represented by
the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel.
Most of the Israelis, politicians and citizens alike, understand that
this right can’t be fully realised.

But although successive
governments were pragmatic enough to accept the need to enter peace
negotiations and strive for some sort of territorial compromise, the
dream has not been forsaken. Far more important is the conception and
representation of any pragmatic policy as an act of ultimate and
unprecedented international generosity.

Any Palestinian, or for that matter international, dissatisfaction
with every deal offered by Israel since 1948, has therefore been seen
as insulting ingratitude in the face of an accommodating and
enlightened policy of the “only democracy in the Middle East”. Now,
imagine that the dissatisfaction is translated into an actual, and
sometimes violent, struggle and you begin to understand the righteous
fury. As schoolchildren, during military service and later as adult
Israeli citizens, the only explanation we received for Arab or
Palestinian responses was that our civilised behaviour was being met
by barbarism and antagonism of the worst kind.

According to the hegemonic narrative in Israel there are two malicious
forces at work. The first is the old familiar anti-Semitic impulse of
the world at large, an infectious bug that supposedly affects everyone
who comes into contact with Jews. According to this narrative, the
modern and civilised Jews were rejected by the Palestinians simply
because they were Jews; not for instance because they stole land and
water up to 1948, expelled half of Palestine’s population in 1948 and
imposed a brutal occupation on the West Bank, and lately an inhuman
siege on the Gaza Strip.

This also explains why military action seems
the only resort: since the Palestinians are seen as bent on destroying
Israel through some atavistic impulse, the only conceivable way of
confronting them is through military might.

The second force is also an old-new phenomenon: an Islamic
civilisation bent on destroying the Jews as a faith and a nation.
Mainstream Israeli orientalists, supported by new conservative
academics in the United States, helped to articulate this phobia as a
scholarly truth. These fears, of course, cannot be sustained unless
they are constantly nourished and manipulated.

From this stems the second feature relevant to a better understanding
of the Israeli Jewish society. Israel is in a state of denial. Even in
2010, with all the alternative and international means of
communication and information, most of the Israeli Jews are still fed
daily by media that hides from them the realities of occupation,
stagnation or discrimination.

This is true about the ethnic cleansing
that Israel committed in 1948, which made half of Palestine’s
population refugees, destroyed half the Palestinian villages and
towns, and left 80% of their homeland in Israeli hands. And it’s
painfully clear that even before the apartheid walls and fences were
built around the occupied territories, the average Israeli did not
know, and could not care, about the 40 years of systematic abuses of
civil and human rights of millions of people under the direct and
indirect rule of their state.

Nor have they had access to honest reports about the suffering in the
Gaza Strip over the past four years. In the same way, the information
they received on the flotilla fits the image of a state attacked by
the combined forces of the old anti-Semitism and the new Islamic
Judacidal fanatics coming to destroy the state of Israel. (After all,
why would they have sent the best commando elite in the world to face
defenceless human rights activists?)

As a young historian in Israel during the 1980s, it was this denial
that first attracted my attention. As an aspiring professional scholar
I decided to study the 1948 events and what I found in the archives
sent me on a journey away from Zionism. Unconvinced by the
government’s official explanation for its assault on Lebanon in 1982
and its conduct in the first Intifada in 1987, I began to realise the
magnitude of the fabrication and manipulation. I could no longer
subscribe to an ideology which dehumanised the native Palestinians and
which propelled policies of dispossession and destruction.

The price for my intellectual dissidence was foretold: condemnation
and excommunication. In 2007 I left Israel and my job at Haifa
University for a teaching position in the United Kingdom, where views
that in Israel would be considered at best insane, and at worst as
sheer treason, are shared by almost every decent person in the
country, whether or not they have any direct connection to Israel and
Palestine.

That chapter in my life – too complicated to describe here – forms the
basis of my forthcoming book, Out Of The Frame, to be published this
autumn. But in brief, it involved the transformation of someone who
had been a regular and unremarkable Israeli Zionist, and it came about
because of exposure to alternative information, close relationships
with several Palestinians and post-graduate studies abroad in Britain.
My quest for an authentic history of events in the Middle East
required a personal de- militarisation of the mind.

Even now, in 2010,
Israel is in many ways a settler Prussian state: a combination of
colonialist policies with a high level of militarisation in all
aspects of life. This is the third feature of the Jewish state that
has to be understood if one wants to comprehend the Israeli response.
It is manifested in the dominance of the army over political, cultural
and economic life within Israel. Defence minister Ehud Barak was the
commanding officer of Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, in a
military unit similar to the one that assaulted the flotilla. That
background was profoundly significant in terms of the state’s Zionist
response to what they and all the commando officers perceived as the
most formidable and dangerous enemy.

You probably have to be born in Israel, as I was, and go through the
whole process of socialisation and education – including serving in
the army – to grasp the power of this militarist mentality and its
dire consequences. And you need such a background to understand why
the whole premise on which the international community’s approach to
the Middle East is based, is utterly and disastrously wrong.
The international response is based on the assumption that more
forthcoming Palestinian concessions and a continued dialogue with the
Israeli political elite will produce a new reality on the ground. The
official discourse in the West is that a very reasonable and
attainable solution – the two states solution – is just around the
corner if all sides would make one final effort. Such optimism is
hopelessly misguided.

The only version of this solution that is acceptable to Israel is the
one that both the tamed Palestine Authority in Ramallah and the more
assertive Hamas in Gaza could never accept. It is an offer to imprison
the Palestinians in stateless enclaves in return for ending their
struggle. And thus even before one discusses either an alternative
solution – one democratic state for all, which I myself support – or
explores a more plausible two-states settlement, one has to transform
fundamentally the Israeli official and public mindset. It is this
mentality which is the principal barrier to a peaceful reconciliation
within the fractured terrain of Israel and Palestine.

How can one change it? That is the biggest challenge for activists
within Palestine and Israel, for Palestinians and their supporters
abroad and for anyone in the world who cares about peace in the Middle
East. What is needed is, firstly, recognition that the analysis put
forward here is valid and acceptable. Only then can one discuss the
prognosis.

It is difficult to expect people to revisit a history of more than 60
years in order to comprehend better why the present international
agenda on Israel and Palestine is misguided and harmful. But one can
surely expect politicians, political strategists and journalists to
reappraise what has been euphemistically called the “peace process”
ever since 1948. They need also to be reminded that what actually
happened.

Since 1948, Palestinians have been struggling against the ethnic
cleansing of Palestine. During that year, they lost 80% of their
homeland and half of them were expelled. In 1967, they lost the
remaining 20%. They were fragmented geographically and traumatised
like no other people during the second half of the 20th century. And
had it not been for the steadfastness of their national movement, the
fragmentation would have enabled Israel to take over historical
Palestine as a whole and push the Palestinians into oblivion.

Transforming a mindset is a long process of education and
enlightenment. Against all the odds, some alternative groups within
Israel have begun this long and winding road to salvation. But in the
meantime Israeli policies, such as the blockade on Gaza, have to be
stopped. They will not cease in response to feeble condemnations of
the kind we heard last week, nor is the movement inside Israel strong
enough to produce a change in the foreseeable future. The danger is
not only the continued destruction of the Palestinians but a constant
Israeli brinkmanship that could lead to a regional war, with dire
consequences for the stability of the world as a whole.

In the past, the free world faced dangerous situations like that by
taking firm actions such as the sanctions against South Africa and
Serbia. Only sustained and serious pressure by Western governments on
Israel will drive the message home that the strategy of force and the
policy of oppression are not accepted morally or politically by the
world to which Israel wants to belong.

The continued diplomacy of negotiations and “peace talks” enables the
Israelis to pursue uninterruptedly the same strategies, and the longer
this continues, the more difficult it will be to undo them. Now is the
time to unite with the Arab and Muslim worlds in offering Israel a
ticket to normality and acceptance in return for an unconditional
departure from past ideologies and practices.

Removing the army from the lives of the oppressed Palestinians in the
West Bank, lifting the blockade in Gaza and stopping the racist and
discriminatory legislation against the Palestinians inside Israel,
could be welcome steps towards peace.

It is also vital to discuss seriously and without ethnic prejudices
the return of the Palestinian refugees in a way that would respect
their basic right of repatriation and the chances for reconciliation
in Israel and Palestine. Any political outfit that could promise these
achievements should be endorsed, welcomed and implemented by the
international community and the people who live between the river
Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea.

And then the only flotillas making their way to Gaza would be those of
tourists and pilgrims.

Ilan Pappe is professor of history at the University of Exeter, and
director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies. His books
include The Ethnic Cleansing Of Palestine and A History Of Modern
Palestine. His forthcoming memoir, Out Of The Frame (published this
October by Pluto Press), will chart his break with mainstream Israeli
scholarship and its consequences.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/guest-commentary/essay-of-the-week-what-drives-israel-1.1032971

———————————————————————–
ePalestine Blog:
http://www.epalestine.com

1

Shooting and Sobbing


June 18, 2010 at 8:20AM AuthorGilad Atzmon

Hold your breath. This in not a joke, this is not a satire. It is real almost as much as it is pathetic. Israeli Ynet just reported that the images of captured Israeli commandos published in Turkish papers opened “…old wounds among those Israeli commandos involved in similar circumstances. Thus far, at least four combat soldiers have reported worsening of their (mental) condition”

read on

0

Ilan Pappe : What drives Israel?

Essay of the week: What drives Israel

Probably the most bewildering aspect of the Gaza flotilla affair has been the righteous indignation expressed by the Israeli government and people.

The nature of this response is not being fully reported in the UK press, but it includes official parades celebrating the heroism of the commandos who stormed the ship and demonstrations by schoolchildren giving their unequivocal support for the government against the new wave of anti-Semitism.

As someone who was born in Israel and went enthusiastically through the socialisation and indoctrination process until my mid-20s, this reaction is all too familiar. Understanding the root of this furious defensiveness is key to comprehending the principal obstacle for peace in Israel and Palestine. One can best define this barrier as the official and popular Jewish Israeli perception of the political and cultural reality around them.

A number of factors explain this phenomenon, but three are outstanding and they are interconnected. They form the mental infrastructure on which life in Israel as a Jewish Zionist individual is based, and one from which it is almost impossible to depart – as I know too well from personal experience.

The first and most important assumption is that what used to be historical Palestine is by sacred and irrefutable right the political, cultural and religious possession of the Jewish people represented by the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel.

Most of the Israelis, politicians and citizens alike, understand that this right can’t be fully realised. But although successive governments were pragmatic enough to accept the need to enter peace negotiations and strive for some sort of territorial compromise, the dream has not been forsaken. Far more important is the conception and representation of any pragmatic policy as an act of ultimate and unprecedented international generosity.

Any Palestinian, or for that matter international, dissatisfaction with every deal offered by Israel since 1948, has therefore been seen as insulting ingratitude in the face of an accommodating and enlightened policy of the “only democracy in the Middle East”. Now, imagine that the dissatisfaction is translated into an actual, and sometimes violent, struggle and you begin to understand the righteous fury. As schoolchildren, during military service and later as adult Israeli citizens, the only explanation we received for Arab or Palestinian responses was that our civilised behaviour was being met by barbarism and antagonism of the worst kind.

According to the hegemonic narrative in Israel there are two malicious forces at work. The first is the old familiar anti-Semitic impulse of the world at large, an infectious bug that supposedly affects everyone who comes into contact with Jews. According to this narrative, the modern and civilised Jews were rejected by the Palestinians simply because they were Jews; not for instance because they stole land and water up to 1948, expelled half of Palestine’s population in 1948 and imposed a brutal occupation on the West Bank, and lately an inhuman siege on the Gaza Strip. This also explains why military action seems the only resort: since the Palestinians are seen as bent on destroying Israel through some atavistic impulse, the only conceivable way of confronting them is through military might.

The second force is also an old-new phenomenon: an Islamic civilisation bent on destroying the Jews as a faith and a nation. Mainstream Israeli orientalists, supported by new conservative academics in the United States, helped to articulate this phobia as a scholarly truth. These fears, of course, cannot be sustained unless they are constantly nourished and manipulated.

From this stems the second feature relevant to a better understanding of the Israeli Jewish society. Israel is in a state of denial. Even in 2010, with all the alternative and international means of communication and information, most of the Israeli Jews are still fed daily by media that hides from them the realities of occupation, stagnation or discrimination. This is true about the ethnic cleansing that Israel committed in 1948, which made half of Palestine’s population refugees, destroyed half the Palestinian villages and towns, and left 80% of their homeland in Israeli hands. And it’s painfully clear that even before the apartheid walls and fences were built around the occupied territories, the average Israeli did not know, and could not care, about the 40 years of systematic abuses of civil and human rights of millions of people under the direct and indirect rule of their state.

Nor have they had access to honest reports about the suffering in the Gaza Strip over the past four years. In the same way, the information they received on the flotilla fits the image of a state attacked by the combined forces of the old anti-Semitism and the new Islamic Judacidal fanatics coming to destroy the state of Israel. (After all, why would they have sent the best commando elite in the world to face defenceless human rights activists?)

As a young historian in Israel during the 1980s, it was this denial that first attracted my attention. As an aspiring professional scholar I decided to study the 1948 events and what I found in the archives sent me on a journey away from Zionism. Unconvinced by the government’s official explanation for its assault on Lebanon in 1982 and its conduct in the first Intifada in 1987, I began to realise the magnitude of the fabrication and manipulation. I could no longer subscribe to an ideology which dehumanised the native Palestinians and which propelled policies of dispossession and destruction.

The price for my intellectual dissidence was foretold: condemnation and excommunication. In 2007 I left Israel and my job at Haifa University for a teaching position in the United Kingdom, where views that in Israel would be considered at best insane, and at worst as sheer treason, are shared by almost every decent person in the country, whether or not they have any direct connection to Israel and Palestine.

That chapter in my life – too complicated to describe here – forms the basis of my forthcoming book, Out Of The Frame, to be published this autumn. But in brief, it involved the transformation of someone who had been a regular and unremarkable Israeli Zionist, and it came about because of exposure to alternative information, close relationships with several Palestinians and post-graduate studies abroad in Britain.

My quest for an authentic history of events in the Middle East required a personal de-militarisation of the mind. Even now, in 2010, Israel is in many ways a settler Prussian state: a combination of colonialist policies with a high level of militarisation in all aspects of life. This is the third feature of the Jewish state that has to be understood if one wants to comprehend the Israeli response. It is manifested in the dominance of the army over political, cultural and economic life within Israel. Defence minister Ehud Barak was the commanding officer of Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, in a military unit similar to the one that assaulted the flotilla. That background was profoundly significant in terms of the state’s Zionist response to what they and all the commando officers perceived as the most formidable and dangerous enemy.

You probably have to be born in Israel, as I was, and go through the whole process of socialisation and education – including serving in the army – to grasp the power of this militarist mentality and its dire consequences. And you need such a background to understand why the whole premise on which the international community’s approach to the Middle East is based, is utterly and disastrously wrong.

The international response is based on the assumption that more forthcoming Palestinian concessions and a continued dialogue with the Israeli political elite will produce a new reality on the ground. The official discourse in the West is that a very reasonable and attainable solution – the two states solution – is just around the corner if all sides would make one final effort. Such optimism is hopelessly misguided.

The only version of this solution that is acceptable to Israel is the one that both the tamed Palestine Authority in Ramallah and the more assertive Hamas in Gaza could never accept. It is an offer to imprison the Palestinians in stateless enclaves in return for ending their struggle. And thus even before one discusses either an alternative solution – one democratic state for all, which I myself support – or explores a more plausible two-states settlement, one has to transform fundamentally the Israeli official and public mindset. It is this mentality which is the principal barrier to a peaceful reconciliation within the fractured terrain of Israel and Palestine.

How can one change it? That is the biggest challenge for activists within Palestine and Israel, for Palestinians and their supporters abroad and for anyone in the world who cares about peace in the Middle East. What is needed is, firstly, recognition that the analysis put forward here is valid and acceptable. Only then can one discuss the prognosis.

It is difficult to expect people to revisit a history of more than 60 years in order to comprehend better why the present international agenda on Israel and Palestine is misguided and harmful. But one can surely expect politicians, political strategists and journalists to reappraise what has been euphemistically called the “peace process” ever since 1948. They need also to be reminded that what actually happened.

Since 1948, Palestinians have been struggling against the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. During that year, they lost 80% of their homeland and half of them were expelled. In 1967, they lost the remaining 20%. They were fragmented geographically and traumatised like no other people during the second half of the 20th century. And had it not been for the steadfastness of their national movement, the fragmentation would have enabled Israel to take over historical Palestine as a whole and push the Palestinians into oblivion.

Transforming a mindset is a long process of education and enlightenment. Against all the odds, some alternative groups within Israel have begun this long and winding road to salvation. But in the meantime Israeli policies, such as the blockade on Gaza, have to be stopped. They will not cease in response to feeble condemnations of the kind we heard last week, nor is the movement inside Israel strong enough to produce a change in the foreseeable future. The danger is not only the continued destruction of the Palestinians but a constant Israeli brinkmanship that could lead to a regional war, with dire consequences for the stability of the world as a whole.

In the past, the free world faced dangerous situations like that by taking firm actions such as the sanctions against South Africa and Serbia. Only sustained and serious pressure by Western governments on Israel will drive the message home that the strategy of force and the policy of oppression are not accepted morally or politically by the world to which Israel wants to belong.

The continued diplomacy of negotiations and “peace talks” enables the Israelis to pursue uninterruptedly the same strategies, and the longer this continues, the more difficult it will be to undo them. Now is the time to unite with the Arab and Muslim worlds in offering Israel a ticket to normality and acceptance in return for an unconditional departure from past ideologies and practices.

Removing the army from the lives of the oppressed Palestinians in the West Bank, lifting the blockade in Gaza and stopping the racist and discriminatory legislation against the Palestinians inside Israel, could be welcome steps towards peace.

It is also vital to discuss seriously and without ethnic prejudices the return of the Palestinian refugees in a way that would respect their basic right of repatriation and the chances for reconciliation in Israel and Palestine. Any political outfit that could promise these achievements should be endorsed, welcomed and implemented by the international community and the people who live between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea.

And then the only flotillas making their way to Gaza would be those of tourists and pilgrims.

Ilan Pappe is professor of history at the University of Exeter, and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies. His books include The Ethnic Cleansing Of Palestine and A History Of Modern Palestine. His forthcoming memoir, Out Of The Frame (published this October by Pluto Press), will chart his break with mainstream Israeli scholarship and its consequences.

source

1

An open letter to the Israeli Jewish public: support the Gaza Flotilla!

By Jeff Halper

12 June 2010

Jeff Halper exhorts Israelis to shun the “victim” mentality that blinds them to Palestinian suffering. In an open letter specifically to the Israeli Jewish public, published in Hebrew on the popular website Ha’oketz before the attack on the Freedom Flotilla, he says Israelis must embrace the campaign to end the Gaza siege – for the sake of humanity and their own self-interest.

If we were not Israeli Jews, if the nine ships bringing 800 peace-makers from 40 countries would be sailing with humanitarian aid to an imprisoned population of a million and a half to, say, Haiti, the flotilla now on its way to Gaza would be hailed as a monumental event and the government of Israel would donate another 50 tons of food and materials and a brigade of army volunteers from the “rescue corps”. But we are Israelis, and the fact that such an operation is being launched against a siege we imposed on a civilian population three years ago – actually, the blockade goes back to the late 1980s – should cause us all to reflect upon how we and our country have arrived at this sorry state – how the “light unto the nations” has become one of the most oppressive states on earth, subject to international protests like this one.

“In a policy frightening reminiscent of other dark regimes in which Jews suffered from controlled malnutrition, our government has imposed a regime of ‘counting calories’ on the Gaza population – imposing a ‘minimal dietary regime’ on a million and a half people who receive as little as 850 calories a day, less than half the recommended daily intake.”

The flotilla is sailing with a number of messages. First and foremost, to the government of Israel: Lift the siege on Gaza! The siege is absolutely illegal in international law, and for those of us who believe that the rule of law and human rights is the only recipe for a better world, it is incumbent upon us to join the flotilla’s call to lift the siege. Civilians cannot be the object of military and political attacks, as is the case in Gaza (which the Goldstone report roundly criticized), nor can they be collectively punished for the policies of their political leaders. The very idea that people can be brought to their knees and forced to accept being permanently controlled and dominated, which is the thrust of Israeli policy, is both unconscionable and counter-productive. As the situation in Gaza shows, it has only stiffened resistance to the occupation.

And then there is the urgency of addressing the humanitarian situation in Gaza, the flotilla’s second message. In a policy frightening reminiscent of other dark regimes in which Jews suffered from controlled malnutrition, our government has imposed a regime of “counting calories” on the Gaza population – imposing a “minimal dietary regime” on a million and a half people who receive as little as 850 calories a day, less than half the recommended daily intake. (Dov Weisglass, Sharon’s chief of staff, made a joke out of this. “It’s like a meeting with a dietitian,” he said. “We need to make the Palestinians lose weight, but not to starve to death.”) Instant coffee, fresh meat, rice, beans, spices, honey, chocolate, jam, bananas, coriander and pasta, among many others, are considered by Israel “luxury foods” for Palestinians. All this might be funny if it weren’t for the fact that, according to the World Health Organization, more than 10 per cent of Gazan children suffer from chronic malnutrition. Two-thirds of the Gazan population face hunger on a daily basis.

Gaza is today an unreconstructed war zone. Israel long ago destroyed the sewage system, so that people have drowned in periodic floods of sewage that have engulfed whole communities. Raw sewage flowing into the Mediterranean has polluted the only waters in which Palestinians are allowed to fish – the Israeli navy fires on fishermen who attempt to reach cleaner waters more than three miles out. Having destroyed Gaza’s only power station, much of the area suffers from blackouts, and Israel prevents adequate amounts of fuel from entering, with severe effects on hospitals. Gazans also have nowhere to live. More than 2,400 homes were destroyed in the invasion of last year and Israel, by prohibiting the import of raw materials, has prevented their being rebuilt.

Thus the flotilla is bringing to Gaza 10,000 tons of humanitarian materials: temporary shelters, playgrounds for children, cement, steel and other construction materials, medical equipment and medicines and school supplies – a drop in the bucket of which is actually needed. The list alone is an indictment of our policies.

“We Israeli Jews live in a managed information environment in which reality is carefully framed for us. Our government’s explanation for everything it does is ‘security’, and we accept that almost without question.”

We Israeli Jews live in a managed information environment in which reality is carefully framed for us. Our government’s explanation for everything it does is “security”, and we accept that almost without question. But we have to understand a basic fact of life: four million Palestinians live under a cruel occupation that we have nurtured for the past 43 years and which has deprived them of their fundamental rights (such as electing their own political leaders), robbed them of their land and homes (Israeli governments have demolished some 24,000 Palestinian homes in the occupied territories since 1967), reduced them to impoverishment and has led, in the case of Gaza, to their literal imprisonment.

Why do I have to repeat facts that seem so self-evident, that everyone knows? Because, though every informed person abroad knows these things, we Israeli Jews don’t – and we don’t care. Most Israelis know far less about what our government is doing in our name, in Gaza and elsewhere in the occupied territories, than the activists on the Free Gaza ships. We seldom if ever use the term “occupation” in our everyday speech (in fact, our government denied the very existence of an occupation), and we minimize the impact that our settlements, our separate roads, the Wall, hundreds of checkpoints and other facets of the occupation have upon the political process, which we no longer believe in. Living in a prosperous “bubble”, we do not see Palestinian suffering, only ourselves as “victims.” (And so our Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman characterizes the Gaza flotillas as “violent propaganda” against Israel, as if we have nothing to do with conditions of life in Gaza or the very fact of occupation.) But this is not reality. For the Palestinians there is no minimizing their suffering or their yearning for freedom. Why, with our history, is it so difficult for us to understand resistance to oppression?

“The Palestinians are not our enemies; our own political leaders are. The very fact that I, an Israeli Jew, was welcomed by the people of Gaza makes that very point, and it is the message they asked me to convey to you. But they also insist on their rights: self-determination.”

And so the third message of the flotilla is directed towards us: Take responsibility for your government’s policies! When I entered Gaza on the first Free Gaza boats in August, 2008, I issued an appeal to the Israeli public to stand in solidarity with us. I argued that ordinary people have often played key roles in history, particularly in situations like this where world governments, who should end the siege, shirk their responsibilities. We must resist the self-serving and disempowering statements of our political leaders who would have us believe that there is no solution to the conflict with the Palestinians, that there is “no partner for peace,” that we are doomed to perpetual war and, therefore, we must become permanent oppressors. The Palestinians are not our enemies; our own political leaders are. The very fact that I, an Israeli Jew, was welcomed by the people of Gaza makes that very point, and it is the message they asked me to convey to you. But they also insist on their rights: self-determination.

We of the Israeli peace camp refuse to be enemies with our Palestinian neighbours. We recognize that as the infinitely stronger party in the conflict, we Israelis must accept responsibility for our failed and oppressive policies.

In the meantime, the flotilla to Gaza has already succeeded. If the Israeli government allows the ships into Gaza, the power of the people will have prevailed once more. If it chooses to stop the flotilla, it will only highlight the existence of the illegal and inhumane siege and bolster international efforts to end it. In both cases Israel loses the battle for legitimacy in the international community. This is the beauty of non-violent direct action. It is only a matter of time before it will be forced to relinquish control over the Palestinians and their lands.

Let us, Israeli Jews who aspire to become an integral part of this region rather than a foreign implant at war with its inhabitants, begin to take our fate in our own hands. We must side with the people of Gaza and the activists on the boats against the unjust and immoral policies of our own government. This is what the good people of the flotilla are trying to tell us, what people all over the world are trying to tell us: unless we take responsibility for our actions and end this terrible conflict with the Palestinians, we will not remain here. And unless we find a way to a just peace rather than stand on the side of occupation, oppression and injustice, we may delay that day by force, but our society will not survive. For our sakes as well as the people of Gaza, let us, the Israeli Jewish public, join the boats to end the siege of Gaza.
Jeff Halper is Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, a peace and human rights organization dedicated to achieving a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

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Not by cement alone

The flotilla, like its predecessors and the ones still to come, serves the Israeli goal, which is to complete the process of separating the Gaza Strip from the West Bank.
By Amira Hass

The achievement of the failed flotilla to Gaza – mainly, it must be conceded, by its dead – is that the demand is being heard from everywhere that Israel halt its policy of siege. The government of Israel was not willing to listen to the desperate supplications of John Ging, the head of UNRWA in Gaza. Now it must heed French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But unknowingly, this flotilla, like its predecessors and the ones still to come, serves the Israeli goal, which is to complete the process of separating the Gaza Strip from the West Bank. The process, it will be said here for the millionth time, started in 1991 and not after the rise of Hamas rule. It’s purpose was to thwart the two-state solution, which the world understood at that time as based on all of Gaza and the West Bank, and the link between them.

Since the method of sailing to Gaza started about two years ago, none of its initiators purported to meet the need for this or that product. Israel is attempting by signs and wonders to prove there is no hunger in Gaza. The initiators are actually thinking about hunger of a different kind: a very human hunger for a direct link to the world, to freedom of movement of people, not just goods. The seaborne method was later switched to overland breaches to the Strip via Rafah, to Egypt’s displeasure and Israel’s joy.

Israel brought the closure to grotesque and petty proportions, attracting attention with its prohibition on macaroni and permission for cinnamon, the counting of calories and delaying cement even for a sewage treatment plant. Israel expanded the closure to the extent of prohibiting Gazans from working, creating, manufacturing and earning a living, with the declared goal of bringing down Hamas. But it achieved the opposite. That rule only grew stronger, proving its resourcefulness, its ability to suppress internal opposition and engender support by international activists who are ideologically opposed to its methods and philosophy. The siege strengthened Hamas to such an extent that Palestinian conspiracy theorists are convinced this was Israel’s intention from the outset.

Most Israelis, who have given up on real information, find it difficult to absorb that some people in the world are shocked at the existence of a huge prison whose warden is the Jewish state. But those who are shocked have become partners in the pressure campaign – supported, if not instigated by Hamas – against Egypt to unilaterally open the Rafah crossing, as if it is the occupier and not Israel.

And what serves the goal of separating Gaza from the West Bank better than forgetting the sealed the Erez crossing between Gaza and Israel, and focusing on Rafah and cement? Unintentionally, the runners of the maritime and media blockade focused attention on aspects that do not undermine the essence of Israel’s closure of Gaza. And that essence is denying the right and thwarting the will of Gazans to be an active, permanent and natural part of Palestinian society.

Long before Israel prohibited the entry of cement into the Strip, it prohibited Gazans from studying in the West Bank. While it still permitted guavas to be exported from Khan Yunis to Jordan, it forbade Gazans to enter the West Bank even via the Allenby Bridge or to meet relatives and friends. Step by step, Israel developed draconian restrictions on Palestinians’ freedom of movement, until it declared every Gazan in the West Bank, now and especially in the future, an illegal alien and an infiltrator. These are the essential prohibitions that must be breached. These are the prohibitions about whose existence Erdogan and U.S. President Barack Obama must be taught, and their abolition demanded.

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15 000 communist and peace activists marched in Tel Aviv yesterday evening

dimanche 6 juin 2010, par Davidi

15 thousands of communist and peace activists marched in Tel Aviv yesterday evening (Saturday, June 5) to mark 43 years of Palestinian and Arab territories occupation while taking the opportunity to slam recent IDF murder raids on Gaza-bound ships.

Dozens of fascist counter-protesters periodically attempted to disrupt the demonstration, and at one point a smoke grenade was hurled at the protestors outside the Tel Aviv Museum in face of the Defense Ministry. No injuries were reported in the incident. Later, right-wing protesters tried to attack veteran peace activist Uri Avneri, snatching signs he was carrying.

The demonstration, which was held under the slogan “The government is drowning us all,” was originally planned by the Communist Party of Israel (CPI) and Hadash (the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality) solely to protest the occupation, but following last Monday’s Israeli deadly raid on a Turkish vessel trying to run the Gaza blockade, the rally also addressed the criminal government’s policies in regard to the Gaza Strip and the military operation that left nine foreigners dead.

“The government is drowning us all” read a large sign in the rally. Dov Khenin, a legislator for Hadash and leading communist militant, charged that “Barak has refused to move on the path of peace and leads [us to] a dangerous deterioration. The same people who sent the soldiers to take over the flotilla in the middle of the night are liable to send Israel to a new and terrible war”. Hadash chairman Mohamed Barakeh declared, “We will not let the crazy right wing push aside the left and the Arab sector into political isolation.”

A spokesman for the organizers of the rally told journalists it “was an even bigger success than he expected” and that he believes the past week’s events had led to an increase in the number of participants. That it showed that “people are opposed to this government that is driving us toward international isolation and a new war.”

The communist and pacifist protestors, who were walking from Rabin Square to the Tel Aviv Museum, were holding up signs reading “The government is sinking all of us – we must aspire for peace”. Other marchers held up signs reading “Israel, Palestine, two states for two people”. The rally has been organized by a communist and peace coalition that includes Hadash, CPI and Meretz parties, the Young Communist Guard (Banki-Shabiba), Peace Now, Gush Shalom, Yesh Gvul, Physicians for Human Rights, and other organizations. The march was being lead by CPI chairman Muhammad Nafah, Knesset Members Muhammad Barakeh, Dov Khenin, Afo Agbarie and Hanna Sweid (from Hadash) and Knesset Members Haim Oron and Nitzan Horowitz (from Meretz).
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Israeli Protest at Ashdod for Freedom Flotilla Aid for Gaza

rageunderground — 1 juin 2010 — A day after a botched Israeli raid to stop the Gaza “Freedom Flotilla” from carrying some 700 activists and 10,000 tons of humanitarian aid to the besieged territory, details remain scant about the operation, in which at least nine activists were killed.

Several ships were towed into the port around noon on Monday. The largest passenger ship, the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara arrived about 6:45 p.m. Monday as the sun was setting on a day that saw at least nine of the approximately 600 activists on board killed in a skirmish with Israeli commandos.

Israel has also barred journalists from accessing the Ashdod port to which the ships, and their passengers, were towed — and even the wounded were being treated at hospitals under heavy military guard.

Apache helicopter gunships buzzed noisily over the otherwise sleepy Israeli seaport of Ashdod, where dozens of local activists and foreign journalists had descended on the waterfront in anticipation of the seized fleet’s arrival.

“We are trying to express our solidarity with the activists and with the people of Gaza by maintaining a presence at the port,” said Inna Michaeli, one of about 100 left-wing Israeli activists and coordinator with the Coalition of Women for Peace, on Monday. “But we are being stopped by the police and by the army. They have turned our country into a military zone.”

At the port there were hundreds of Israeli’s in support of the IDF, as this footage shows.

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