Cyber attacks are heating up in the Middle East but do they pose a real threat to regional security? In my latest report for Monocle 24, I interview a number of experts and journalists in Israel to find the real story behind the attacks. You can listen to the piece here (piece starts at minute 1:11.00) or you can download the podcast of the Monocle Daily on iTunes. I recommend that you incorporate Monocle 24‘s live streaming coverage from around the world into your day
Jan 262012
The plight of African refugees in Tel Aviv has been covered extensively but the recent passage of strict legislation in the Israeli parliament aimed at curbing the flow of refugees requires another visit to the subject. In my latest report from Tel Aviv for Monocle, I speak with refugees about their experience in Tel Aviv and what keeps them together as a diaspora community in the midst of a country usually associated with diaspora. You can listen to the entire program here [my report airs at the end of the show]. Additionally, I recommend that you download the podcast of The Globalist and incorporate Monocle 24‘s live streaming coverage from around the world into your day.
Palestine has a stock exchange. Actually, Palestine has a privately owned but independently monitored stock exchange which performed surprisingly well last year in the climate of Middle East revolutions. Political instability is built into the cost of doing business in Palestine. While regional markets in Egypt and Tunisia were turned on their head by political instablity, Palestine emerged as an ironically secure market.
In my latest radio piece for Monocle 24, I look at the Palestine Stock Exchange in an effort to analyse the true health of the Palestinian economy. You can listen to the piece here (Begins at minute 45:00) or download the podcast via iTunes. I recommend that you incorporate Monocle 24‘s live streaming with coverage from around the world into your day.
In my first radio piece for Monocle 24, I address the simple yet deceptive question; what makes a city new? In order to answer this question, I traveled to the West Bank uber-settlement Ariel along with my colleague Radio France’s Emilie Baujard. The piece aired on the weekly program The Urbanist, which explores various aspects of city living and urban theory. I suggest that you subscribe to podcast here if you find these issues to be of interest. In the meantime, you can listen to my segment here.
Palestinians across the West Bank and Gaza celebrated the return of their loved ones last Sunday as the final wave of prisoners were released in an exchange between Hamas and Israel. However, one prisoner was notably absent. Marwan Barghouti, the jailed Fatah leader known by many Palestinians as the “prince of resistance”, remains behind bars in Israel despite promises from the Palestinian leadership that his freedom would be secured through the exchange of captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. On the eve of the prisoner swap, Barghouti released a 255-page book, written secretly behind bars and smuggled out via lawyers and family members, detailing his experience in Israeli jails.
Barghouti is a figure of towering reverence among Palestinians and even some Israelis, regardless of political persuasion. Yet, he was reluctant to begin a life in the political spotlight. In fact, the Israeli occupation came to him, his long-time friend Sa’ad Nimer noted during a long conversation in a dank Ramallah coffee shop. When Barghouti was just 15, living in the small village of Kober just outside Ramallah, Israeli soldiers shot his beloved dog during a military sweep of the village. From that moment on, Nimer said in a haze of nostalgia, the occupation was a personal issue for Barghouti.
A natural leader with admirable charisma and an unwavering hatred of Israeli occupation, Barghouti has been an active political leader since the early 1980s. At age 18, during one of his early stints in an Israeli prison for political organising, he was elected the prisoner representative, a task which required him to unify competing political affiliations of prisoners and negotiate with Israeli authorities. The appointment foreshadowed a long career of uniting Palestinians regardless of political agenda.
Despite his vocal support for the two-state solution and attempts at reconciliation with Israeli civil society, Barghouti has remained a puzzling and aggressive figure for Israel. “When Marwan got out of jail the second time [in 1982 at age 23], the Israelis did not know what to do with him,” said Nimer, who is the director of the Free Marwan Baghouti Campaign based in Ramallah. In the early 1980s, Barghouti was a primary organiser in the Shabibia movement, a Fatah-based student group that campaigned for better education standards in Palestine. The movement, still active in the West Bank, was a primary organising vehicle of the First Intifada.
While not overtly against the occupation, Barghouti’s early political activity was understood by Israel as a threat and he was deported to Jordan under extraordinary circumstances. According to Nimer, “Jordan was not taking deportees at the time, so the Israelis just put him on a helicopter and dropped him into the middle of the Jordanian desert, desperate to get rid of him”.
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RAMALLAH // Celebrations marking the release of 550 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails stretched into the early hours of yesterday morning, but life outside prison will not necessarily mean freedom from the long arm of Israeli authorities.
Just ask Fakhri Barghouti.
Mr Barghouti walked out of jail in October, part of the first phase of the Egypt-brokered swap of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners for a captured Israeli soldier held by the Islamist group Hamas for five years.
A cousin of the imprisoned Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti, he discovered that liberation from an Israeli jail did not necessarily mean freedom from Israeli harassment – a cautionary tale for those prisoners released late on Sunday in the second and final phase of the exchange.
“Shortly after I was released, soldiers raided my house at 2am and gave me orders to come to the Ofer military prison the following day,” Mr Barghouti recalled from his home in Kober, a village near Ramallah. “It was all very threatening and they conducted a number of humiliating searches during the interrogation. The army wanted to send me the message that they are still in control. ”
Mr Barghouti, who was sentenced to life in prison in 1978 for killing an Israeli soldier with a knife near the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, said that many of his fellow prisoners who were released in the first phase of the swap have been subjected to similar searches and interrogations.
In one instance, Mr Barghouti said, Israeli soldiers raided the house of a recently freed prisoner and forced his family to stay outside for hours in the middle of the night, only to take him away for interrogation at Ofer.
Despite criticism from Palestinian officials involved in the exchange, Israel attached strict terms to the release of many of the prisoners. According to the Issa Qaraqe, the minister of prisoner affairs for the Palestinian Authority, most of those released in October are required to report weekly or monthly to Israeli authorities – an Israeli tool, Mr Qaraqe said, to track the movements of their former captives.
“It is like they were never really let out of jail,” said Kadoura Fares, the president of the Palestinian Prisoners Association in Ramallah. “I warned Hamas not to sign on to these conditions, which deprive prisoners their dignity to live in quiet freedom. But they did it anyway.”
Families of recently released prisoners have also paid a price. Israel has reportedly barred the relatives of prisoners from visiting them in Jordan, where they were deported after the release. Israeli authorities said the families were denied exit permits for unspecified “security reasons”.
A spokesman for the Israeli military refused to comment on the rules for freed Palestinian prisoners, saying “the information is spread across a number of departments including the ministry of defence”.
The release conditions have become a source of tension between the Fatah and Hamas. In the run-up to the prisoner swap, Hamas officials announced that they would not accept an agreement with Israel that included strict conditions on freed prisoners and the deportation of former prisoners.
In the end, however, they agreed to a deal stipulating that more than 200 prisoners would not be able to return home to the West Bank upon their release.
Eighteen prisoners from East Jerusalem and the West Bank were deported to the Gaza Strip for a period of three years, according to the Palestinian prisoner-rights organisation Addameer. Another 146 prisoners were transferred to Gaza for an indefinite period, and 41 were exiled to Jordan and other neighbouring countries.
“Hamas is claiming that conditions on recently freed prisoners and deportations were not part of the agreement. But in fact they were part of the officially signed document. Now they are trying to deny responsibility for these conditions,” Mr Qaraqe said.
Fakhri Barghouti is happy to be back with his people but has a hard time reconciling life under occupation and the conditions placed on his movement.
“I left prison but the occupation is still here. I have more freedom than in prison, but it’s still the same occupation,” he said. “It’s just that I have more freedom of movement.”
Published in The National on 20 December 2011
Residents of Nabi Saleh in the West Bank have been demonstrating, each week for the past two years, against the slow encroachment on their land by Israeli settlers.Gathering in the village centre on Friday afternoons, villagers along with Israeli and international activists attempt to march, under the watchful eye of soldiers, to a disputed agricultural spring which was confiscated recently by Israeli settlers.
Often protesters never even reach the edge of the village; crowd-control measures by the military regularly include barrages of tear gas and rubber bullets. Palestinian villagers claim that hundreds of protesters have been injured, some seriously, in the Nabi Saleh demonstrations. But no one had been killed there – until last week.
The death of 28-year-old Mustafa Tamimi may seem to have little in common with the more numerous deaths of protesters in Cairo over the past few days. Indeed the demonstrations are different from each other in many ways. But in protests from Tunis to Cairo to little Nabi Saleh, the use of tear gas by authorities, and the increasing number of related fatalities, has become a common thread in recent months.
Mr Tamimi’s injuries occurred amid a fairly common occurrence in the West Bank: protesters were throwing stones at armoured Israeli vehicles. As the demonstration slowed towards the end of the day, one Israeli jeep stopped as it was making its way out of the village. The vehicle’s back door opened wide enough for a tear-gas launcher, known to Israeli soldiers as a “ringo”, to fire a single canister of the gas.
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On September 23, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) chairman and PA president, officially submitted Palestine’s application for full membership in the United Nations, with a bold speech delivered to the General Assembly. During the address, cities throughout the West Bank were alight with excitement. Young and old celebrated almost as if the UN had already granted Palestine full membership to the international governing body. Palestinians appeared to momentarily disregard the daily burden of Israeli occupation and instead embrace the euphoric vision of independence, political rights and a state of their own. Yet, as is all too often the case, their euphoria was short-lived. The day after was met with the sharp reality of an interminable status quo.
For nearly two decades, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been characterised by a cycle of endless negotiations and episodic violence. Given the entrenchment of Israeli occupation, seen most clearly in its continued building of settlements in the West Bank, few observers see the viability of an equitable two-state settlement arrived at through negotiations.
The PA is now firmly engaged in what is perceived by many in the West Bank as a last-ditch effort to save the negotiations process by elevating their status inside Palestine and in the international community, thereby strengthening their position in relation to Israel.
Viewed from the standpoint of a negotiated two-state solution, the Palestinian statehood bid is not far-fetched, extreme or irrational. But the question remains, do the majority of Palestinians still believe in a process that has brought increased dispossession and a fracturing of the Palestinian political body?
“The Palestinians have lost confidence in the negotiations. How to get confidence again … I believe, this is the challenge,” says Ahmad Queri’a, former prime minister of the PA and current member of the executive committee of the PLO. Sitting in his office in Abu Dis on the outskirts of East Jerusalem, Queri’a noted: “I believe that we need to think about a new mechanism for negotiations.”
Underlying the statehood bid is a mounting crisis of legitimacy for a Palestinian leadership that has been unable to bring an end to the occupation through negotiations. According to a report released by the International Crisis Group in early September, this predicament has only been enhanced by the increasing economic strain being experienced by the PA, and the renewed motivation for change inspired by the Arab Spring.
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Non-violent methods being used by Palestinians and their international supporters are helping to reframe the conflict from a discussion of peace vs. violence, into a struggle for rights under Israeli occupation.
Next week, a group of young Palestinians will board Israeli settler buses in the West Bank with the intention of traveling to East Jerusalem. The activists will likely be greeted by fully armed Israeli settlers, as well as soldiers. The threat of Israeli violence has not deterred Palestinians who maintain that they are prepared to pay a price to highlight Israel’s segregationist policies in the West Bank.
While not officially segregated, Israeli bus lines often pass through Jewish-only settlements which dot the rugged West Bank landscape. Palestinian entry to Jewish settlements is strictly forbidden, unless, of course, Palestinians are engaged in construction of the settlements, most of which are considered illegal under international law.
The upcoming protest event is being labelled by organisers as the Palestinian “Freedom Rides”. In the early 1960s, white and black activists boarded segregated buses in the American south in an effort to draw attention to the racism of Jim Crow legislation. The protests caused panic in the south and helped chip away at segregation in the US. Palestinian organisers hope that the same effect will take place in the West Bank although they understand that their battle begins with challenging the narrative of the conflict.
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Recent work by authors Bernard Avishai and Gershom Gorenberg reflect the inability of liberal Zionistchampions to engage in an honest debate about the core issues of contention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The noted liberal Zionist writer, Bernard Avishai, has a longish piece on the Palestinian Right of Return (RoR) in this month’s edition of Harper’s Magazine (no online version yet). Before I discuss its content, I believe it crucial to note one general aspect of this piece. We must ask ourselves why an openly Zionist thinker who happens to be a Canadian immigrant is writing about Palestinian right of return without a Palestinian counter article. His penmanship of the article speaks volumes about the ability of the press in the United States to allow Palestinians to speak for themselves. His voice might be an important one, but the absence of a Palestinian view on an issue of such weight should be taken as a sign of how far the American press must go in changing the way it covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Avishai’s article is exhaustive and draws upon a variety of interviews, both from high level officials and intellectuals. Curiously absent, however, from Avishai’s piece is any discussion of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, one of the primary Palestinian civil society vehicles in fighting for the RoR as specified in UN Resolution 194. Also absent is any discussion with rank and file Palestinians living in the West Bank, a mere twenty minutes’ drive from Avishai’s residence in the formerly Arab Baka neighbourhood of West Jerusalem. Although to his credit, Avishai does cite anonymous “friends in Ramallah” at points in the piece in order to bring in a necessary but vague Palestinian voice in the West Bank.
While narrowly exhaustive, Avishai’s article is potholed with images of Israeli-Palestinian symmetry that do not exist. His choice of imagery carefully conforms to the accepted Western narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which effectively adopts the Israeli understanding of events on the ground. Namely, that the conflict, which is often understood as being fought between two relative equals, is about peace and security. Take this sentence, which comes three paragraphs from the end of the piece, as an example:,
The populated areas of Israel and Palestine together are about the size of greater Los Angeles. The peoples share not only a business ecosystem but everything from water sources to the telecommunications systems. Neither side can set up a 4G network, neither side can manage even wastewater, without the permanent cooperation of the other.
You see, it is all so simple. Everyone is sharing and cooperation is crucial to lasting peace. Wait, what about the occupation, you ask? Could it be that Palestinians share a business ecosystem with Israel because Israel is occupying their land and using them as a captive market? The power of the Israeli narrative lies in its ability to ignore these factual components of reality. Given Avishai’s inability or unwillingness to interview Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon or Jordan or even in the Qalandia refugee camp seven miles from Jerusalem, his reliance on the Israeli narrative is not surprising.
The piece offers an upbeat and almost pleasant outlook. This is made possible by ignoring the viewpoints of representative Palestinians. Recently, Gershom Gorenberg, one of Avishai’s ideological peers and a fellow North American living in the same formerly Palestinian neighbourhood of West Jerusalem, noted the following about diaspora Palestinians in the United States, in a piece in the American Prospect:
Diaspora Palestinians with their own overdone nationalism and a small coterie of Jews whose express their disappointment with Zionism through mirror-image anti-Zionism—as if denying Jewish rights to national self-determination were somehow more progressive than denying Palestinian rights. But realistic, moderate progressives always face the challenge of portraying a more complex reality than extremists recognize.
Clearly, Gorenberg does not share the unbridled optimism of Avishai, but the sentiments he expresses can certainly be found lurking in between the lines of Avishai’s text. This is especially clear in their shared authoritarian understanding that, as Western liberal Zionists living in Israel, they are the true “realistic, moderate progressives’ who will solve the region’s problems. Avishai’s hopeful look to the future, however, is welcome, due to the cynicism prevelenant in Israeli and Palestinian society, but it also precariously borders on the naïve. In the piece, the major sources of Avishai’s hope are the Israeli tent protesters. Those brave revolutionaries provide Avishai with confirmation that Israelis are ready and able to think outside the box and approach the systemic problems of Israeli society with new vigour. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Had Avishai broached the idea of the Palestinian RoR to any of the test protesters at the peak of their social justice movement back in July, the issue would have likely been labelled ‘political’ and thus dismissed. In fact, other than the handful of protests which took place in mixed cities like Haifa, attended by both Palestinian citizens of Israel and Israeli Jews, as well as one “‘1948”’ tent in Tel Aviv, the tent protests was a movement not interested in Israeli-Palestinian issues, let alone the Palestinian RoR. On the surface, the reason given for this was the horrible polarization which exists in Israeli society over these issues. But something else was at play.
Arguments over this issue were featured on this website. Many of these arguments are a testament to the fact that while Israelis desperately want to have their society to be understood as “‘normal’,” they are simply unable or unwilling to challenge prevailing attitudes concerning their treatment of Palestinians. These attitudes help maintain a system of occupation and outright institutional discrimination which has lead to an international consensus that Israel is far from a normal country, but rather one engaged in a form of ethnic racism similar to Apartheid orHafradah, to borrow the Hebrew term for separation.
The widely-held argument that the tent protesters offer a space inside Israel to negotiate issues like the RoR is at best hopeful naiveté and at worst, an effort to portray Israeli society as something it is not. At its peak, the protesters were able to draw 500,000 Israelis (the proportionate equivalent of 17 million Americans) to the streets to demand social justice without any mention of the occupation or the rights of all under Israeli rule. It is hard to interpret this as anything other than the fact that Israel is not ready to end its occupation by itself given the overwhelming support for the protests and their continued reticence on Palestinian issues. If the tent protesters were unwilling or unable to talk about the occupation, why would anyone argue that they are ready to confront the much more difficult issue of the RoR, or Israel’s culpability in creating the Palestinian refugee problem?
In 1948, Ben Gurion’s nascent army attempted to put the Zionist dream of separation from the natives into practice by forcibly removing as many of Palestine’s native inhabitants as possible and thus creating the Palestinian refugee problem. The 1967 war of conquest continued the trend and the current Kafkaesque occupation of a bureaucratic permit system has made life as hard as possible for West Bank and Gazan Palestinians, driven by the misplaced Israeli hope that they will simply leave.
The 2011 Palestine Papers– secret minutes from the 2008 negotiations process between Israel and the PA released by Al Jazeera– confirm that ‘transfer’ remains a driving component of Israeli policy towards native Palestinians. In the papers, Kadmina MK Tzipi Livini is quoted in meetings with senior PA officials as negotiating the terms of transferring Palestinians citizens of Israel into the West Bank in the case of a final status agreement.
The West Bank Separation Barrier is perhaps the most concrete confirmation of the Zionist separation principle in action. Its effect, both physically and psychologically, has been profound for Israeli society. Ironically exemplified in the Israeli tent protests, young Israelis no longer have connection with Palestinians outside of their army service in which they are thrust into a position of military power over occupied Palestinians. This has resulted in, among other things, an Israeli public able to demonstrate for social justice while ignoring the rights of all under Israeli rule.
In order for Avishai to avoid these sober developments in Israeli society as it pertains to the settlement of the RoR issue, he must warp the situation on the ground through the creation of basic symmetry between Israelis and Palestinians. His reliance on interviews with Israeli and Palestinian politicians ensures that voices on the ground dealing with the effect of separation principle remain invisible. Add ambiguously hopeful language which confirms the Western narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and one is left feeling as though peace and reconciliation is just around the corner. It is not.
Quoting Ramallah-based political thinker Sam Bahour at the end of his piece, Avishai ultimately draws attention to the absence of equality and partnership between Israelis and Palestinians. In my estimation this is the core problem concerning the RoR issue. Avishai hints at the issue of rights by quoting Adam Shatz’s important piece in London Review of Books. While Shatz’s piece was a thoughtful addition to the discourse, I am unsure why Avishai, a resident of Jerusalem, did not go and interview the same or similar people that Shatz did. Why rely on irrational hope when you can go out and interview people on the ground who possess deep insight on this complex issue?. Perhaps Avishai’s (and Gorenberg’s) form of Liberal Zionism can no longer function without a heavy dose of hope and clear contempt for overt Palestinian nationalism, grounded in notion of the right of return as an inalienable right.
The legal precedents set by the profligacy of Israel’s legal institutions were not extended to the evicted Palestinians, many of whom owned homes in Jaffa and West Jerusalem before 1948. Some Israeli critics decried the decision, claiming that Israel was making a two-state solution with East Jerusalem as Palestine’s capital impossible because of the high number of Jews living in Palestinian areas of the city.
The evictions spurred a handful of hearty solidarity activists into holding weekly demonstrations against the ruling. The small demonstrations grew as hundreds of Israelis started showing up on Friday afternoons to protest their government’s policies. The movement became a gateway drug of sorts for a new generation of activists who sought joint struggle with Palestinians as their preferred exercise of political expression.
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Addressing the Palestinian people from Ramallah, Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas announced last week that the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) would seek recognition in the United Nations Security Council of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders with Israel.
More than 100 countries, including South Africa, are expected to back Palestine’s claims for statehood at the UN General Assembly on Friday, although the United States is almost certain to veto the bid in the council.
For 63 years Israel has perfected one of the most effective propaganda machines in the Western world. Hasbara, the Hebrew word for propaganda, has become a near religion in Israeli society, with impressive results. Israel’s 44-year-long occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip has, until recently, been free of moral challenge from the West. The country enjoys a special relationship with the US in which the superpower provides diplomatic, economic and military cover for virtually every action Israel conducts against the Palestinians.
Ramallah– As a cool breeze engulfed Ramallah on Friday evening, crowds of Palestinians poured into the city’s recently renamed Yasser Arafat Square to watch Palestine Liberation Organisation chairperson and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas officially submit Palestine’s bid for full membership of the United Nations.
Throughout the West Bank, special gatherings were held in squares and cafés to watch the historic speech. Abbas’s ruling Fatah party sponsored an official viewing celebration in Ramallah which organisers estimated was attended by between 5 000 and 7 000 people.
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RAMALLAH — The mood on the streets of Ramallah can best be described as tempered excitement as the Palestinian leadership begins its bid for statehood recognition at the United Nations. Flags attached to car windows proudly feature the words U.N.-Palestine State. Massive billboards advertise the statehood bid with colorful depictions of the Palestinian flag flying at the U.N. Fatah-backed rallies are scheduled throughout this featuring dancing and singing.
But while people do seem genuinely jubilant, it is not reminiscent of the vintage film footage from celebrations that took place in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem after the State of Israel came into existence. Hardly anyone believes that life is going to change after the United Nations’ vote.
Just under the surface, seemingly lurking behind every conversation, growing discontent can be found all over Ramallah. In the middle of a straight razor shave, my barber, Abdallah, stopped and said, “Abu Mazen [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s sobriquet] works for Israel, not for Palestinians.” Abdallah’s sentiments are echoed inside the Ramallah Café, a local leftist hangout popular among older Palestinians and younger intellectuals alike. “The problem is that no one really trusts Abu Mazen anymore,” Ahmed Nidal, a freelance Palestinian photographer based in Ramallah, said between sips of sugary tea peppered with mint leaves. “Since no one trusts the man, no one really trusts the statehood bid.”
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Ramallah–During the first act of Samuel Beckett’s 1952 tragicomedy Waiting for Godot, one of the play’s protagonists, Estragon, turns to the other, Vladimir, and blankly notes to the audience, “Nothing to be done.” Vladimir returns, “I’m beginning to come round to the opinion.”
Jenin’s Freedom Theatre Company, whose spirited performance of Beckett’s seminal work opened this weekend at Ramallah’s National Theatre, has been anything but resigned to giving up on a theatre project which has garnered a boast of international attention since the murder of its creative director Juliano Mer Khamis last April.
One can’t think of a better suited play than Beckett’s existential work for the graduate students of the Freedom Theatre given the rough events of the company over the past six months. Their creative director and founder was shot to death by unknown militants as he emerged from a rehearsal in Jenin last March. Three members of the company, including a leading actor, were arrested and detained by the Israeli army and, to add insult to injury, the Freedom Theatre has been attacked by patrolling Israeli convoys numerous times in recent months.
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Despite its power and reach, the Palestinian Authority (PA) have made little effort to explain their controversial statehood bid in the United Nations to the rank and file living in the occupied West Bank. The plethora of opinion pieces, news articles and speeches by Palestinian Authority officials on the statehood attempt have not largely been directed at Palestinians and most have not appeared in Arabic. Conversations in Ramallah cafes over the past months have invariably drifted to the statehood discussion and the vacuum of factual information surrounding it. The PA’s lack of transparency has compounded an already mistrusted institution after Al Jazeera revealed, in the Palestine Papers, that the PA was negotiating away core rights, including as the right of return, in secret negotiations with Israel from 2007 to 2009.
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During his press conference on Saturday evening, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu compared developments in the Middle East to the events of the First World War. He was speaking just hours after the dramatic removal of Israeli embassy staff in Cairo following riots by Egyptian protesters.
According to news reports from the scene, protesters managed to enter the embassy after a day of increasing anger, including destruction of a security barrier and removal of the embassy’s Israeli flag. In a post-Mubarak Egypt, protesters had tapped into deep and growing discontent regarding Egypt’s relationship with Israel.
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The Israeli military legal system is one of the most under reported yet crucial components of Israel’s system of control over Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Since 1967, Israel has controlled the entire area of the West Bank using two forms of legal enforcement based on two different legal codes – one for Israeli settlers and one for Palestinians. Palestinians are subjected to military law administered by the Israeli army. Far from providing justice for Palestinians, the military legal system functions as a foundational control mechanism over Palestinian life in all realms. In a new book from Pluto Press, Israeli professor Anat Matar and Palestinian lawyer Abeer Baker edit a collection of informative essays regarding the military justice system and Palestinian prisoners in Israel.
The parity of research in English on Israel’s military court system is laughable given the amount of coverage the Israeli-Palestinian conflict receives in the international press. Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel, filles this vacuum of information in a dynamic and lasting way with essays written by Israeli and Palestinian lawyers, intellectuals and human rights advocates on a variety of subjects relating to the court system. Shortly after Israel’s 1967 takeover of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, military courts were set up throughout the territories to administer law and order among the residents under the command of the Israeli military.
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There is an old joke about two stocky Austrian men walking down a street in Vienna. One of the men turns to the other with an open newspaper and says, “Here you can see again how a totally justified anti-Semitism is being misused for a cheap critique of Israel!” Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek often uses this joke to demonstrate how potentially dangerous some Christian Zionist support for Israel can be for the Jewish community. Indeed, the sentiment expressed in Zizek’s joke was on display last Wednesday as American political pundit Glenn Beck began his ‘restoring courage’ spectacle in Jerusalem.
Glenn Beck is one of America’s most controversial political commentators due to his mix of radically conservative politics and fiery anti-left rhetoric. This year, Beck’s vicious attacks of Democrats like George Soros got him fired from Fox News, the conservative 24-hour news channel owned by Rupert Murdoch, but it did not impede his programme of stoking the flames of conservatism in the United States.
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Hope, one of the most powerful and fickle of human emotions, was a philosophical obsession of Baruch Spinoza, the 17th century Jewish philosopher. Spinoza paid a high social price in dedicating his life to the creation of philosophic system which valued rationalism above all else, especially hope and fear. The Israeli tent protests, which have rocked the country and this site over the last six weeks, have thrived on a momentum of hope in the absence of concrete language and goals. Similar to the historic presidential campaign of Barak Obama, the tent protests have been heavy on feelings but light on specific measures with which to carry them out.
Last week, Max Blumenthal and I published an article, based on extensive reporting, which described the core problems that we see in the tent protest movement. We argue that the separation principle and the form of cognitive dissonance which upholds it in Israeli society has been left untouched by the tent protests in an attempt to garner massive public support. Ultimately we claim that the tent protests are an example of the successful implementation of the separation principle in so far as they officially ignore the rights of all under Israeli rule.
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Aug 292011
Largely shielded from the European and American financial crises, the Israeli economy has been growing at an astonishing rate over the past five years: 4.7 per cent in 2010 alone. But the wealth isn’t evenly distributed: most Israelis living inside the 1967 borders struggle to make ends meet because of the high cost of living and relatively high taxes, which are largely spent on security and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Last month, a group of Tel Aviv residents in their twenties set up camp in the centre of Rothschild Boulevard to protest against housing costs in the city. They didn’t have a serious plan for political change, but the protest tapped into nationwide discontent. Within a few days, hundreds more people had joined them. The momentum spread quickly through the country, with camps appearing everywhere from Eilat on the Red Sea to Kiryat Shmona on the Lebanese border.
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Last weekend, more than 300,000 Israelis protested for economic reform throughout the country. In Tel Aviv, the epicentre of the housing protests, 250,000 Israelis marched to the defence ministry chanting the slogan “the people want social justice”. The demonstrations were some of the largest in Israel’s history and have pumped new life into the corpse of Israel’s leftist political movement.
But the one issue glaringly missing from these demonstrations demanding “social justice” is the most urgent social justice issue in the region: the equality of everyone under Israeli rule, including Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The demonstrations sweeping Israel started on July 14 as a group of young Israelis set up a number of tents on Rothschild Boulevard, one of the more affluent streets in Tel Aviv. The chief aim was rent relief. Protesters held signs complaining about rents for two-bedroom apartments in the centre of Tel Aviv, which average about 3,700 Israeli shekels (Dh3,840) per month while the average salary in Israel is 6,000 shekels.
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Aug 282011
How the largest social justice movement in Israel’s history managed to ignore the Palestinians
This piece was co-written with Max Blumenthal. A shorter version originally appeared on Alternet.
The men and women who set out to build a Jewish state in historic Palestine made little secret of their settler-colonial designs. Zionism’s intellectual author, Theodor Herzl, described the country he envisioned as “part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” “All the means we need, we ourselves must create them, like Robinson Crusoe on his island,” Herzl told an interviewer in 1898. The Labor Zionist movement’s chief ideologue, Berl Katznelson, was more blunt than Herzl, declaring in 1928, “The Zionist enterprise is an enterprise of conquest.” More recently, and perhaps most crudely, former Prime Minister and current Defense Minister Ehud Barak described the goal of Zionism as maintaining “a villa in the jungle.”
Those who dedicated themselves to the formation of the Jewish State may have formulated their national identity through an idealized vision of European enlightenedness, but they also recognized that their lofty aims would not be realized without brute force. As Katznelson said, “It is not by chance that I speak of settlement in military terms.” Thus the Zionist socialists gradually embraced the ideas of radical right-wing ideologue Vladimir Jabotinsky, who outlined a practical strategy in his 1922 essay, “The Iron Wall,” for fulfilling their utopian ambitions. “Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population,” Jabotinsky wrote. “This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population — an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs.” According to Jabotinsky, residents of the Zionist yishuv (community) could not hope to enjoy a European standard of life in the heart of the Arab world without physically separating themselves from the natives. This would require tireless planning, immense sacrifice and no shortage of bloodshed. And all who comprised the Zionist movement, whether left, right, or center, would carry the plan towards fulfillment. As Jabotinsky wrote, “All of us, without exception, are constantly demanding that this power strictly fulfill its obligations. In this sense, there are no meaningful differences between our ‘militarists’ and our ‘vegetarians.’”
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This article was jointly written by Dahlia Scheindlin and Joseph Dana, based on our shared experiences of the protests.
The popular, mass protests here that began as a cry of rage against housing prices have evolved admirably into a public outcry against a slew of deep-rooted problems in Israeli social and economic life. Visiting the tent camps early every day, we’ve watched the protest grow from a motley band of wishful Woodstockers at the tip of Rothschild Boulevard two weeks ago, to a sort of mini-metropolis spreading close to the end of the road. There’s a first aid tent courtesy of Physicians for Human Rights, “Settle the Negev and the Galil” tents, ideological discussions, guitar and drum sing-alongs, Kabalat Shabbat, Friday night dinner, outdoor films about revolutionary themes, families with babies, and endlessly creative slogans. There are tents down near the central bus station, in a cat and mouse game with the municipality, which is trying to break up their camp.
Every grievance is coming out: there are slogans against the huge concentration of the country’s wealth into the hands of a very few, slogans raging against enormous economic gaps between rich and poor in Israel, lists of demands for just resource distribution and for various elements of a welfare state, salary hikes and lower costs, better education conditions and health care; against the national housing committees law, against the government, for Tahrir. At 10pm on Friday night, when a song group spontaneously burst into chants of “The people! Want! Social Justice!” one young woman sang out beatifically, “The people! Want! All Sorts of Things!”
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Jul 102011
This piece originally appeared in The Nation on 1 July 2011
Athens—On Thursday, the passengers of the Audacity of Hope, the US boat in the “Freedom Flotilla 2” to Gaza—a convoy of ten boats, two cargo ships and some 300 civilians—emerged from their hotel on the edge of an Athens turned upside down. The air was heavy from the stench of garbage and tear gas, after two days of a general strike and fighting between police and demonstrators protesting the latest austerity measures. But the dramatic urban landscape barely caught the passengers’ attention as they boarded a chartered bus to a distant Athenian port, kept secret until then due to security concerns.
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