Haaretz February 4, 2016
Two million human beings, some of whom worked here for years, some of them even have friends here, live in abject poverty and petrifying despair, mainly because of Israel’s blockade.
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.701213
Gideon Levy |
Most Israelis cannot imagine the daily lives of Gazans.Credit: AFP
The latest news from the ghetto comes, as usual, from the outside. The addiction to fear and the eternal wallowing in terror in Israel suddenly reminded one of the existence of the neighboring ghetto. Only thus are we here reminded of Gaza. When it shoots, or at least digs. Residents of the communities surrounding Gaza hear sounds, perhaps the sounds of digging, and the ghetto is no longer abandoned. We recall its existence. Iran dropped off the agenda. Sweden isn’t scary enough. Hezbollah is busy. So we return to Gaza.
If the Ayelet Zurer affair loses steam heaven forbid, or the Moshe Ivgy affair doesn’t take off – the things that are really interesting – because then some bored commentators and editors and politicians and bloodthirsty generals are liable to drag Israel into another “war” in Gaza. And “war” in Gaza is always another controlled massacre, whose achievements are measured in the number of corpses and amount of destroyed buildings that it leaves behind. Isaac Herzog has already promised as much.
But the real news from Gaza doesn’t reach Israelis. Who here heard that jets of the most moral air force in the world poisoned in recent weeks the fields of a “buffer zone,” which Israel declared unilaterally, at a distance of 300 meters from the fence? Farmers in Gaza report that the dusters spread the poison up to 500 meters, and that 1,187 dunams (293 acres) were damaged in the last poisoning in December. The pilots, convinced that they are doing a good thing, reported hitting their targets accurately.
Pay attention to the sterile wording of the IDF spokesman: “Aerial spraying of herbicidal germination preventing material next to the security fence was carried out in order to allow optimal implementation of ongoing security missions in the area,” he stated.
Fishermen are forbidden from venturing more than six nautical miles out from shore. Sometimes they catch a fisherman or shoot him. Farmers are forbidden from going within 300 meters. Everything is done to serve Israel’s security, and its security alone – and the occupation of the Gaza Strip ended a long time ago.
Just an hour’s drive from Tel Aviv, there is a ghetto. Even without supplying “germination preventing materials,” almost nothing grows in it. Up-to-date data from Gisha-Legal Center for Freedom of Movement indicate 43 percent unemployment, 70 percent in need of humanitarian assistance and 57 percent suffering from nutrition insecurity.
And then there is the spine-chilling report that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency issued in August under the headline “Gaza 2020: A livable place?” By then the damage to the water infrastructure will be irreversible. The water today is already not potable. The GDP per capita, $1,273, is less than it was 25 years ago, perhaps the only one that declined. Another 1,000 doctors and 2,000 nurses will be needed in the besieged, collapsing health system. From where will they come, out the faculty of medicine in Nuseirat or from the students who left to study medicine at Harvard? Egypt tightened its grasp, the world shirked its commitments and Israel exploits this to continue the blockade.
They get three hours of electricity, sometimes six, in the cold and rain. After that, there is no electricity for 12 hours, and then again for three or six hours, day in, day out. There are about two million people, a million of them refugees and their families, made refugees directly or indirectly by Israel. About a million of them are children. No Israeli can imagine it. Few Israelis feel guilty about it. There are few Israelis who care at all. Hamas, you know.
When the next catastrophe in the world hits, be it an earthquake or flood, we’ll be there with a delegation from the Israel Defense Forces, the same IDF in the same fatigues in which they spray the fields in Gaza. We are always the first.
And meanwhile in the ghetto, two million human beings, some of whom worked here for years, some of them even have friends here, live in abject poverty and petrifying despair, mainly because of Israel’s blockade.
The “We left Gaza” operation is complete. Now we only need to wait for the tunnels to start bombing again.
Gideon Levy
Haaretz Correspondent
—
Uri Avnery
December 19, 2015
A Lonely Lawyer
BY NOW EVERY ISRAELI has seen the TV clip several times – showing a 14-year
old Arab girl being shot dead near the central market of Jewish Jerusalem.
The story is well known: two sisters, 14 and 16 years old, have decided to
attack Israelis. The clip, taken by a security camera, shows one of them,
clad in traditional Arab garb, jumping around on the sidewalk, brandishing a
pair of scissors.
The whole thing looks almost like a dance. She is jumping around aimlessly,
waving the scissors, threatening no one in particular. Then a soldier aims a
pistol at her and shoots her. He runs to the girl and kills her while she is
lying helplessly on the ground. The other girl is grievously wounded.
The soldier was lauded for his bravery by the Minister of Defense, a former
army Chief of Staff, and by his present successor. Throughout the political
establishment, not a single voice was raised against the killing. Even the
opposition was silent.
THIS WEEK one person raised his voice. Avigdor Feldman, a lawyer, informed
the Attorney General that he was going to apply to the Supreme Court, asking
it to open a criminal investigation against the soldier. He wants the court
to order the authorities to investigate all cases in which soldiers and
civilians have shot and killed “terrorists” after they had already become
unable to act.
In today’s Israel, this is an act of incredible courage. Advocate Feldman is
no crackpot. He is a well-known lawyer, prominent especially in the field of
civil rights.
I got to know him when he was still at the start of his career. He was still
a “stageur” – a lawyer who has finished his studies but is not yet a fully
licensed advocate – working in a friend’s office. He represented me in
several minor court cases, and even then I was struck by his sharp mind.
Since then, Feldman has become a prominent civil-rights lawyer. I have seen
him several times pleading in the Supreme Court, and noticed the reactions
of the court. When Feldman speaks, the judges stop their day-dreaming and
doodling and follow his arguments with rapt attention, interrupting him with
sharp questions, obviously enjoying the judicial jousting.
Now Feldman has done what nobody else has dared to do: taking the army by
the horns and challenging the high command.
In Israel, that is close to lèse majesté.
SINCE THE beginning of October, Israel has been experiencing a wave of
violence that has not yet acquired an official name. Newspapers call it a
“wave of terrorism”, some speak of “the intifada of the individuals”.
Its outstanding characteristic is that it lacks any organization. It is not
planned by a group, no orders are transmitted from above, no coordination
between cells is necessary.
Some Arab teenager takes a knife from his mother’s kitchen, looks for a
uniformed person in the street and stabs him. If no soldier or policeman is
available, he stabs a settler. If he sees no settler around, he stabs any
Israel he can find.
If he drives a car, he just looks for a group of soldiers or civilians
waiting by the road and runs them over.
Many others just throw stones at a passing Israeli car, hoping to cause a
fatal accident.
Against such acts, the army (in the occupied territories) and the police (in
Israel proper or in annexed East Jerusalem) is almost helpless. In the two
earlier intifadas and in between, the security organs incredibly caught
almost all perpetrators. This was achieved because the acts were committed
by groups and organizations. Almost all of these were sooner or later
infiltrated by Israeli agents. Once one of the perpetrators had been caught,
he or she was induced to inform on the others – either by bribes, “moderate
physical pressure” (as our courts call torture) and such.
All these proven measures are quite useless, when a deed is carried out by a
single person, or by two brothers, acting on the spur of the moment. No
spies. No traitors. No prior signs. Nothing to work on.
The Israeli security services have tried to work out a typical profile of
such perpetrators. To no avail. There is nothing common to all or most of
them. There were several 14 year old teenagers, but also a grandfather with
children and grandchildren. Most did not appear in any anti-terrorist
database. Some were religious radicals, but many others were not religious
at all. Some were females, one a mother.
What pushed them? The official Israeli stock answer is: sedition. Mahmud
Abbas incites them. Hamas incites them. The Arab media incite them. Almost
all these “incitements” are routine reactions to Israeli actions. And
anyway, a young Arab does not need “incitement”. He sees what’s going on
around him. He sees terrifying nightly arrests, Israeli troops invading
towns and villages. He does not need the lure of the virgins awaiting the
martyr in paradise.
SINCE THERE is no immediate remedy, politicians and other “experts” fall
back on “deterrence”. Foremost method: summary execution.
This was first discovered in April 1974, when an Israeli bus was hijacked by
four inexperienced Arab youngsters. It was stopped near Ashkelon and
stormed. Two of the four were killed in the shooting, but two were captured
alive. Three photographers took their pictures alive, but later the army
announced that they were also killed in the fighting.
This was a blatant lie, protected by army censorship. As the editor of
Haolam Hazeh magazine, I threatened to go to the Supreme Court. I was
allowed to publish the photos, and a giant storm erupted. The chief of the
Security Service (Shin Bet or Shabak) and his assistants were indicted, but
pardoned without a trial.
In the course of the scandal, a secret directive came to light: the then
Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, had issued an oral directive saying that “no
terrorist should remain alive after committing a terrorist act”.
Something like that must be in force now. Soldiers, policemen and armed
civilians believe that this is an order: terrorists must be killed on the
spot.
Officially, of course, soldiers and others are allowed to kill only when
their own lives or the lives of others are in direct and immediate danger.
According to the laws of war, as well as Israeli law, it is a crime to kill
enemies when they are wounded, handcuffed or otherwise unable to endanger
lives.
Yet almost all Arab perpetrators – including the wounded and the captured –
are shot on the spot. How is this to be explained?
Most frequently, the facts are simply denied. But with the proliferation of
security cameras, this becomes more and more impossible.
An argument often used is that a soldier has no time to think. He has to act
quickly. A battlefield is no courtroom. A soldier often acts instinctively.
Yes and no. Very often indeed there is no time to think. He who shoots first
stays alive. A soldier has the right – indeed, the duty – to defend his
life. When in doubt, he should act. No one needs to tell me that. I have
been there.
But there are situations when there is no doubt at all. If a handcuffed
prisoner is shot, it is clearly a crime. To shoot a wounded enemy, lying
helplessly on the ground, like the girl with the scissors, is disgusting.
These are clearcut cases. If the Minister of Police (now called Minister for
Interior Security) says in the Knesset that the girl-killer had no time to
think – he lies.
I dare to say that this minister, Gilad Ardan, an aggressive he-man who did
his glorious army service as a desk officer in the army personnel
department, has a bit less battle experience than I. What he said in the
Knesset is rubbish.
The soldiers shoot and kill because they think that their superiors want
them to. Probably they have been told to do so. The logic behind this is
“deterrence” – if the perpetrator knows that he is going to be killed for
sure, he may think twice before doing it.
There is absolutely no evidence for this. On the contrary, the knowledge
that he or she, the perpetrators, are probably going to be shot on the spot,
just pushes them on. Becoming a shahid, a martyr, will make their family and
the entire neighborhood proud.
Ah, say the deterrers, but if we also destroy the house of the perpetrator’s
family, they will think twice. Their family will beg them to abstain. Sounds
logical?
Not at all. There is absolutely no evidence for this, either. Quite the
contrary. Becoming the parents of a shahid is such an honor, that it
overrides the loss of the family home. Especially if funds provided by Saudi
Arabia and the other Gulf states will pay indemnities.
It is the clearcut opinion of the security experts that this kind of
collective punishment does not work. On the contrary, it creates more
hatred, which will create more shahids. In short, counter-productive.
The top army and security service commanders do not hide their opposition to
these measures. They are overruled by politicians and commentators who seek
popularity.
SUMMARY EXECUTIONS and collective punishments are, of course, diametrically
opposed to the international Laws of Warfare. Many Israelis despise these
laws and ignore them. They believe that such naive laws should not hinder
our army in the defense of our country and us.
This argument is based on ignorance.
The laws of warfare were initiated after the 30-year war, in the first half
of the 17th century, which brought untold misery to central Europe. When it
was finished, two thirds of Germany was destroyed and the one third of the
German population wiped out.
The originators of the laws, in particular a Dutchman called Grotius,
started from the sensible assumption that no law will hold if it prevents
the prosecution of war. A nation fighting for its life will not observe any
law that hinders it doing so. But in wars, a lot of atrocities are committed
which serve no military purpose at all, just out of hatred or sadism.
It is these acts – acts that serve no military purpose – that are forbidden
by the international laws of war. Both sides suffer from them. Killing
prisoners, letting the wounded perish, destroying civilian property,
collective punishments and such help no side. They just satisfy sadistic
impulses and senseless hatred.
Such acts are not just immoral and ugly. They are also counterproductive.
Atrocities create hatred, which creates more shahids. Dead prisoners cannot
be interrogated and provide no information, which may be essential for
forming new strategies and tactics. Cruelty is just another form of
stupidity.
Our army knows all this. They are against. But they are overruled by
politicians of the more detestable kind, which we have in abundance.
CONNECTED WITH this subject is the persecution of an organization called
“Breaking the Silence”.
This was formed by soldiers who, upon their release, started to publicize
their experience in the occupied territories, things they did and things
they saw. This has become a big operation. Their meticulous adherence to the
truth has gained the respect of the army, and testimony given by them is
respected by the army General Attorney’s office and often acted upon.
This has now led to a furious incitement campaign against the group by the
demagogues of the extreme Right. It has been accused of treason, of
“besmirching our boys”, of aiding and abetting the terrorists and such. Many
of the accusers are former office soldiers and shirkers, who accuse former
combatants.
This week the Rightist demagogues furiously attacked the President of
Israel, Reuben Rivlin, for committing treason. His crime: he appeared at a
political conference organized in New York by the liberal Israeli newspaper
Haaretz, where Breaking the Silence was also invited.
Rivlin is a very nice, very humane person. As President he is insisting on
full equality for Arab citizens. But he also entertains very right-wing
opinions and objects to giving up an inch of “Eretz Israel” territory for
peace. Yet no right-wing politician has come to his aid against the wild
accusations.
Breaking the Silence does not stand alone. Fascist groups – I use the term
with some hesitation – accuse many peace and human rights organizations of
“treason”, citing the fact that several of them do receive donations from
European governments and organizations. The fact that Israeli right-wing and
downright fascist organization receive vastly more money from Jewish and
Christian Evangelist organizations abroad does not matter.
ALL THIS shows how courageous Advocate Feldman is in his efforts.
As we say in Hebrew: All honor to him.
I Left Israel for Two Weeks. I Came Home to a Different Country
No chief, no plan, no security, no hope. There are times I think about resigning from the tribe.
Bradley Burston Oct 22, 2015 1:50 PM
An Isaeli soldier looks on at the scene of a West Bank stabbing attack near the settlement of Adam, north of Jerusalem. October 21, 2015Reuters
There was a time when I used to forget things, to lose things, with damnable frequency.
At some point, it occurred to me that I always lost things exactly when I was leaving one place for another. I forced myself to imagine, just before leaving anywhere, that I would never be able to return to that place, so I’d sure as anything better take with me everything I’d need for this trip.
It worked. In fact, this month, leaving Israel to visit my family in California, it worked so well that the lie-to-myself, the conscious fiction, the part about never returning, may have come true without me even knowing it.
Two weeks ago, in the middle of the night, I again told myself that lie, in order to make sure that I wouldn’t forget anything before leaving for the airport in Lod. Now I’m on a plane headed back to Israel. Six miles above a Utah escarpment, I am handed yesterday’s Yedioth Ahronot newspaper and begin to sense, headline by headline, that a million nonstop hours from now, this airplane will land in the same Ben Gurion Airport I’d taken off from – but not in the same country.
The day I left Israel, that mountaintop we’d uneasily lived with so long, the smoking summit which, we knew, capped a mountain of hatred, shuddered and blew entirely off. The ensuing eruption has claimed new victims daily, in every direction. And, with the speed and unstoppability of a volcano, its flow of fire is changing the landscape into something no one can quite recognize.
Just in the short time I’ve been gone, Israel’s eternal, indivisible capital has been physically divided. Palestinians have slashed, hacked, shot or run over dozens of Israelis, killing many of them. Israelis have shot hundreds of Palestinians, scores of them fatally, some for having attacked Israelis, some not.
Within Israel, street mobs have severely assaulted Arabs for being Arabs, and have mistaken Mizrachi Jews and an Eritrean man for terrorists, with tragic and even fatal results.
“You’re right,” social activist Ronny Douek wrote in an open letter to the prime minister in thatMonday edition of Yedioth, “that in the past we’ve seen terrorist attacks more severe, and that we’ve known more dangerous periods of time.
“But do you not see that this time, in fact, something has opened a crack inside us? That, in contrast to other periods of crisis, in which we knew how to come together and look forward, this time the horizon looks dark.”
I have lived in Israel for many years, decades in fact. But I know enough about this place – and the fear and the despair in which my loved ones there are now living – to know that I am coming back to a place about which I know nothing.
I have been a member of this tribe we call the Jews for my whole life. I have been schooled in the mechanics and the horrific if periodic works of pogrom and bloodthirst and genocidal persecution from the time I heard my first fairy tales.
But this, I fear, is something different. Something somehow more permanent.
In the past, when confronted with people who wanted Israel to cease to exist, people who believed Israel was doomed, fragile, unsustainable, and/or indefensibly, immorally evil, deserving of a death sentence, I would react with a faith-based defiance grounded in optimism for a better, more just, more humane future.
I won’t lie about this: For the present, my focus is elsewhere. I want my loved ones to live.
For the future though, I am left to wonder: How is my tribe to live like this? Lost. No chief. No security. No plan. No hope.
There have been times when I thought, Why not just resign from the tribe?
Truth be told, I get letters all the time from people – fellow members of the tribe – who recommend that I do just that, in one form or another. They inform me that my name’s not Jewish enough, my politics not Zionist enough, my complaints about Israel such that I should leave the country, my complaints about Israel such that I should die.
Maybe it’s time I listened to them. Maybe it’s time to resign from the tribe that these people belong to, and to realize, at long last, that all this time I’ve been a member of a different tribe. Not a rival, exactly. Just different.
Maybe it’s time I realized that the tribes of the Holy Land are not simply the mortal enemies we call Jews and Arabs. Maybe all the deafening, implacable, violence-espousing extremists, both disgusting sides of them, are actually in one tribe, together.
And, yes, that first tribe is winning. At this point, any kid with a cleaver, any meathead yelling for death, is a chief on his own.
But maybe there’s another tribe which loves this land so deeply, that it’s still willing to seek a way to share it among the people who live here. This is a tribe which wants to see human rights defeat hatred, democracy vanquish deity-based dictatorship. The tribe of humans.
If that second tribe is paralyzed, demoralized, delegitimized by the current reality, small wonder. But sometimes, under great pressures, things which you’re sure are lost forever, can reappear. Like love itself. So here’s my letter of resignation from that first tribe, a letter which I’m submitting here, because my tribe lacks a chief I could hand it to:
I hereby resign from the tribe that says killing unarmed people is a form of self defense, whose practitioners are heroes.
I hereby resign from the tribe that says: We deserve everything, all the land, and we’ve got the Book that says so.
I resign from the tribe which says the other guys are monsters, animals, out only for our blood and our land, undeserving and disqualified from having a country of their own.
I resign from the tribe that says settlers are not civilians and are fair game for murder. I resign from the tribe that says any Jew, because they’re Jewish, deserves to be stabbed.
I resign from the tribe that says Death to Arabs, the tribe which posts that hating Arabs is a virtue.
I resign from the tribe that says Palestinian kids suspected of throwing rocks should be put to death on the spot.
I resign from the tribe which blames the Palestinians for the Holocaust.
I resign from the tribe that says “We’ll knock flat the homes of the relatives of suspected terrorists – but only the Palestinian ones, never the Jews.” I resign from this tribe not only because this ritual is wrong and immoral and collective punishment. I resign also because it doesn’t work, only making a vicious circle that much broader and that much deeper and that much more vicious.
Maybe you have to leave a place in order to know what’s been lost there. But sometimes, as well, you have to come back, to appreciate what’s still there, what can improbably reappear.
Yes, I’m resigning. But I still I haven’t given up on all this.
And, for what it’s worth, I’m keeping my name.Bradley Burston
Haaretz Correspondent
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Philip E Taylor
14.5 Minute Version of GIDEON LEVY SPEECH
GIDEON LEVY, FAMOUS ISRAELI JOURNALIST, EXPLAINS WHY ISRAEL IS LIKE A ADDICT LIVING OFF THE LOOT FROM AMERICANS TO KEEP THEIR “OCCUPATION ADDICTION” GOING!
AIPAC + ROTHSCHILDS JEWISH MAFIA ARE FORCING MIDDLE CLASS AMERICANS TO KEEP FEEDING THE DANGEROUS ADICT!
Full version here :
An Israeli writes: “In the event of my death in the current wave of terrorism, in the event that a terrorist, male or female, runs me over or stabs me, I would like to announce in advance that my final words are:
“I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner. Really. What took you so long? Countless times, while passing a construction site on one of the city streets during the quiet, early hours of the morning, I’ve wondered why one of the Palestinian laborers there didn’t grab a drill bit or shovel, a saw or a hammer, and murder me.
“I have never believed in the myth of coexistence in this country. I don’t believe in coexistence based on extreme inequality when it comes to human rights, social status and economic opportunities…
“If I get killed in a terrorist attack, I ask that the endless broadcasts loop of the report about my murder, as is the custom currently, be dispensed with. It is not what I want. It will contain no information that the public would want or need to know about. It would just stir up hatred. I would ask that my killers, if they remain alive, be told on my behalf that I apologize. I am reconciled with them after my death.
“And if my murderers also die, I apologize to them at this time, in advance; not because I deserved to die, and not because they have the right to kill me, but so my death is worth something, so it has some value, some significance, no matter how small. I have no God. I don’t need the Temple Mount. I have no problem living with the Palestinians as full equals in a binational state or as a peace-loving neighbors in my country and next to their own. What use would I have for revenge on my behalf after my death? I apologize for my paltry role in the injustice of the occupation. Even after my death.”
If the Israeli government makes no distinction between Palestinians on either side of the Green Line, there is no reason for human rights activists to do so.
By Neve Gordon
Around 50 students sat on the concrete floor of a makeshift shack, absorbing the desert heat as they listened to Salim talk about the imminent destruction of Umm al Hiran and Atir, two unrecognized Bedouin villages located 20 minutes from my apartment in Be’er Sheva.
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On May 6, the Supreme Courtruled that the villages could be destroyed, paving the way for the government to proceed with its plan to build a Jewish settlement called Hiran in place of Umm al Hiran, as well as to replace the adjacent village Atir with a Jewish National Fund forest. If these plans are actualized, approximately 900 Palestinian Bedouin citizens will be forcefully relocated from their homes.
Salim told the students what the village was planning to do in order to reverse the verdict, while insisting that the solution would not come from the courts. The courts, he said, operate in the service of power; “therefore we need to approach power directly; we need to convince Bibi [Prime Minister Netanyahu] to retract the demolition orders. We need to gather forces and protest against this immoral act,” he said.
At one point I turned to Salim and asked him why the residents of Umm al Hiran do not join forces with the nearby residents of Susya, who were also being threatened with eviction and demolition?
Just 20 kilometers separate Umm al Hiran from the small Palestinian village Susya. For over two decades Susya’s residents have been struggling against the efforts of Jewish settlers and the Civil Administration to dispossess them of their small swath of land. On May 5, one day before the ruling on Umm al Hiran and Atir, the Israeli Supreme Court decided not to issue an injunction against Susya’s demolition and the expulsion of its residents. There, too, the government can legally carry out its demolition plans at any moment.
Salim turned to me and answered: “They are in the West Bank and we are in Israel, they are living under occupation and we are citizens. We have rights as citizens. We are not the same.”
Somewhere along the 20 kilometers that separate the two villages lies the Green Line. If once the Green Line was conceived as a border that could provide a just solution between Israelis and Palestinians, it currently serves as a very effective mechanism of colonial control. It operates primarily as a separating device that has, since 1967, produced the fictive promise of two states. In reality, however, this Green Line helps sustain a racist regime. After all, it functions to obfuscate that the logic motivating the effort to uproot the residents of Umm al Hiran and the residents of Susya is one and the same: the Judaization of space.
Paradoxically, the Green line is not only utilized by the Israeli government to help sustain Israel’s colonial rule—it has also been appropriated by an array of other actors, including foreign diplomats, donors, human rights NGOs, and the Israeli public at large—both Jews and Palestinians.
Consider the field of human rights. Most donors and human rights organizations focus on one side of the Green Line; they either give funding to NGOs promoting the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank, or, alternatively, they provide financial aid to NGOs working in the pre-1967 borders, thus helping to reproduce the difference between the residents of Umm al-Hiran and Susya.
To be sure, Salim from Um al-Hiran is an Israeli citizen and Nasser al Nuajah from Susya is not. This difference, as any human rights lawyer will be quick to point out can, in certain instances, be meaningful vis-à-vis Israeli courts. Indeed, Salim’s answer to me is probably influenced by the human rights NGOs that have been helping his village to strategize in the face of imminent expulsion. And, yet, at this historical juncture, this distinction is being used to elide the fact that both Salim and Nasser are Palestinians whose land is being expropriated in order to advance Israel’s Judaization project.
While it is true that colonial regimes have always used modes of divide-and-conquer to control the inhabitants, what is novel in the case of Israel\Palestine is that progressive donors and liberal human rights NGOs are unwittingly reinforcing these distinctions and the logic that produces them.
Knesset Member Ayman Odeh, the head of the Joint List, is well aware of the divisive impact of such distinctions, and recently went to speak with the residents of Abu Ghosh, one of two Palestinian towns on the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem that were not destroyed during the 1948 war. He told the residents that for years they had been stigmatized for having collaborated with the pre-state Zionist military forces, and then added: “You are not collaborators, you are Palestinians.” Odeh understands that the only way to resist domination is by uniting the dominated and overcoming the strategic division it has created on the ground.
Human rights organizations and their donors need to make a similar conceptual shift. Their work should focus on creating alliances rather than reinforcing colonial distinctions. It is therefore time that they internalize that the Green Line is not a solution but a fiction—and a violently destructive one at that.
Neve Gordon is the co-author (with Nicola Perugini) of the newly released The Human Right to Dominate. This article first appeared in Al Araby Al Jadeed.
If after everything, the Israeli phoenix succeeded in rising from the ashes and getting reelected, something is truly broken, possibly beyond repair.
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Zionist Union supporters wait for the appearance of Isaac Herzog at party headquarters in Tel Aviv after exit poll results March 17, 2015. (Photo: Reuters/Baz Ratner)
The first conclusion that arose just minutes after the announcement of the exit polls was particularly discouraging: The nation must be replaced. Not another election for the country’s leadership, but general elections to choose a new Israeli people – immediately. The country urgently needs that. It won’t be able to stand another term for Benjamin Netanyahu, who emerged last night as the man who will form the next government.
If after six years of nothing, if after six years of sowing fear and anxiety, hatred and despair, this is the nation’s choice, then it is very ill indeed. If after everything that has been revealed in recent months, if after everything that has been written and said, if after all this, the Israeli phoenix succeeded in rising from the ashes and getting reelected, if after all this the Israeli people chose him to lead for another four years, something is truly broken, possibly beyond repair.
Netanyahu deserves the Israeli people and they deserve him. The results are indicative of the direction the country is headed: A significant proportion of Israelis has finally grown detached from reality. This is the result of years’ worth of brainwashing and incitement. These Israelis voted for the man who will lead the United States to adopt harsh measures against Israel, for the man whom the world long ago grew sick of. They voted for the man who admitted to having duped half the world during his Bar-Ilan speech; now he has torn off his mask and disavowed those words once and for all. Israel said “yes” to the man who said “no” to a Palestinian state. Dear Likud voters, what the hell do you say “yes” to? Another 50 years of occupation and ostracism? Do you really believe in that?
On Tuesday the foundations were laid for the apartheid state that is to come. If Netanyahu succeeds in forming the next government in his spirit and image, then the two-state solution will finally be buried and the struggle over the character of a binational state will begin. If Netanyahu is the next prime minister, then Israel has not only divorced the peace process, but also the world. Piss off, dear world, we’re on our own. Please don’t interfere, we’re asleep, the people are with Netanyahu. The Palestinians can warm the benches at the International Criminal Court at The Hague, the Israel boycotters can swing into high gear and Gaza can wait for the next cruel attack by the Israeli army.
The battle for all these has yet to be officially decided. The next prime minister will be crowned by Moshe Kahlon and the heads of other small parties. At the time of this writing, Kahlon has yet to declare his intention. The ball is in these parties’ court; they will decide if Netanyahu continues. Most of them despise him, but it’s doubtful whether they will have the courage to turn their backs on the public. That will be their test. That will be the test of their courage and integrity. Moshe Kahlon and Aryeh Dery, do you truly believe Netanyahu is better than Isaac Herzog for the society and social welfare you purport to care for? Does the country’s decent and courageous president, Reuven Rivlin, believe Netanyahu will be a better prime minister than Herzog? There is a lot resting on his shoulders now – but the fact that a figure like Netanyahu and a party like Likud succeeded in maintaining power as the country’s leading faction already says a great deal.
Netanyahu is threatening to surpass David Ben-Gurion as Israel’s longest running leader. He is already in second place, and yet it’s hard to think of one significant achievement on his part. The list of damage he has done is long. But he is the nation’s, or much of the nation’s, chosen one. That choice must be respected, even if it makes it difficult to hope for a good outcome. The only consolation is that another Netanyahu term will prompt the world to act. That possibility is our only refuge.
source © 2015 Haaretz
Prof. Dr. Ilan Pappe speaks at IPMN Annual Conference in Chicago, Illinois. October 23, 2014, Church of Our Savior in Lincoln Park.
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