Joseph Dana » Page 2

Page by page, Marwan Barghouti’s anti-war tome walked out of prison

Dec 242011

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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24/12/2011

Palestinians prisoners are out of jail, but not yet free

Dec 222011

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

22/12/2011

US-made tear gas becomes fatal ingredient of protests

Dec 222011

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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22/12/2011

The long road ahead for Palestine’s statehood aspiration

Nov 302011

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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30/11/2011

Replacing the peace narrative with discussion of rights

Nov 302011

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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30/11/2011

A sad commentary on the state of liberal Zionist discourse

Nov 272011

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.
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27/11/2011

New Film Explores the Human Side of the Sheikh Jarrah Protest Movement

Oct 282011

The affluent Palestinian East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah has become, in the words of one observer, the new battleground of the Israeli left. By now, most readers of +972 are familiar with the story of struggle and dispossession which has typified the Sheikh Jarrah protest movement. In early 2009, Jewish settlers, backed by American-funded organizations like Ateret Cohanim, won a long court battle over ownership of a number of Palestinian houses in Sheikh Jarrah. Siding with the settlers, the Israeli government decided to evict waves of Palestinian families from their homes, claiming that Jews owned the houses before the founding of Israel in 1948.

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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28/10/2011

Palestinians need an audience for their story

Sep 252011

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.

25/09/2011

Palestinians take to the streets in celebration

Sep 252011

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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25/09/2011

Palestinians Wait for Statehood, With Mix of Emotions

Sep 222011

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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22/09/2011

Jenin’s Freedom Theatre premieres Waiting for Godot

Sep 142011

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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14/09/2011

Preparations for the statehood bid ignoring Palestinians

Sep 122011

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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12/09/2011

Diplomatic disasters incline Israel towards belligerence

Sep 122011

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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12/09/2011

Glenn Beck, fear and the South African Jewish community

Sep 032011

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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03/09/2011

The tragic consequence of hope and the Israeli tent protesters

Sep 012011

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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01/09/2011

J14: What about the Occupation?

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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29/08/2011

Israeli protests fight injustice – as long as it’s convenient

Aug 282011

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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28/08/2011

J14: The exclusive revolution

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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28/08/2011

The tent protest: neither social justice, nor revolution

Aug 022011

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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02/08/2011

The Battle Over the Gaza Aid Flotilla

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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10/07/2011

The Unlikely Alliance between Greek Activists and the Flotilla

Jul 102011

After a week of anti-austerity demonstrations and flotilla training, activists from both camps have emerged unified in their claim that Greek government no longer represents its people; rather it is now beholden to the interests of foreign bodies, be it Israel or the International Monetary Fund.

ATHENS – On a sleepy Friday afternoon in the Greek port city of Perama, just outside of the beleaguered Greek capital, a refurbished US flagged ferry boat, dubbed The Audacity of Hope, set sail for the Gaza Strip. With the attention of the international media and journalists on board from CNN and The New York Times, the boat’s captain, a sixty year old American known simply as Captain Jack, directly challenged the Greek Coast Guard to stop his ship. By nightfall, the boat and its passengers were detained after the Greek government announced, under clear Israeli diplomatic pressure, that no boats with the intention of sailing to Gaza would be allowed to leave Greek ports.
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10/07/2011

Non-violence and the narrative of peace

Jun 252011

Published in The Mail and Guardian South Africa

On Sunday June 5, hundreds of Palestinians gathered outside the Qalandia checkpoint separating Jerusalem and Ramallah. They were part of an unarmed demonstration marking the anniversary of Israel’s takeover of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, known as Naksa Day.

Simultaneously, thousands of Palestinians descended on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and attempted to mass on the Lebanese border with nothing more than their bodies. As the spring sun beat down on the demonstration, Israel killed 23 demonstrators with live ammunition and injured hundreds.
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25/06/2011

Greece: Israeli assault on the Flotilla is well underway

Jun 252011

ATHENS: Israeli diplomatic and economic pressure is looming large over preparations of the second Gaza aid flotilla, set to sail from a number Greek ports at the end of the month. Israel has clearly stated that it will use every diplomatic and military avenue to maintain its naval blockade of the Gaza Strip. The events of the past few days in Athens confirm that Israel is making good on its claim. Learning from last year’s botched military operation against the flotilla– which left eight Turkish civilians and one Turkish-American civilian dead– Israel is seemingly applying pressure directly on the Greek government to stop the flotilla boats from setting sail.

Early this morning, I discovered that a ‘private complaint’ had been filed against the US boat to Gaza. The complaint, it is still unclear who filed it, stated that the US boat to Gaza is not ‘sea worthy’ and requires a detailed inspection.The harbor master where the boat is in port has declared that until the compliant is resolved the boat is not permitted to leave. Currently, lawyers representing the US boat are looking into the origins of the complaint and weather it was filed as a result of Israeli economic or diplomatic pressure on the Greek government. The boat is US flagged and registered in the United States.

The government of Greece has been on the edge of collapse due to expected European Union austerity measures which are overwhelmingly unpopular among the majority of the population. Demonstrations and riots have been rocking Athens for the past two weeks. Greek officials have confirmed that Israel and Greece have met in recent days to discuss various issues including the flotilla.

Given the fact that the Greek government is fighting for its political survival, it is unlikely that Greece would bend to Israeli diplomatic pressure. However, it is more probable that Greece would bend to direct Israeli economic pressure. Israel and Greece have a strong economic relationship which includes a joint gas pipeline project in the Eastern Mediterranean.

If substantiated, rumors that Israel is threatening the Israeli-Greek trade relationship could have profound effects on the economy of Greece which, in turn, would make implementing upcoming austerity measure much more difficult. Right now, these sentiments are merely rumors and the Greek government is maintaining silence on economic relations with Israel in connection with the Flotilla. What is clear is that Flotilla ships are being targeted in Greek ports and might not sail.

10 ships are expected to sail as part of the Gaza aid flotilla. Currently three ships, including the US boat, have had complaints levied against them. US boat organizers believe that Greece will attempt to delay the ships indefinitely by using a serious of bureaucratic measures such as endless safety checks and cargo inspections. Despite the setbacks, organizers are continuing with their nonviolence and safety training. They are hopeful that the Greek government will allow the ships to sail next week as initially planned.

25/06/2011

From Arab Spring comes a new form of Palestinian unity

Jun 152011

Published on The National with Jesse Rosenfeld

On June 5, when Palestinian protesters tried to march from Ramallah to Jerusalem in observation of the 44th anniversary of Israel’s 1967 occupation, they were sent scrambling amidst clouds of Israeli tear gas and hailing rubber bullets.

Hours later on the Syrian border, Israeli soldiers responded to a separate demonstration by killing 23 unarmed Palestinian refugees, who were also trying to exercise their right of return.

Both of these incidents illustrate an often overlooked component of the Arab Spring: as Israel stands forcefully to oppose Palestinian rights, Palestinian unity is deepening. And as the wave of uprisings demanding freedom and equality sweep the Middle East, the struggle for unity has brought the Arab Spring to Palestinians’ door.

Using mass protest and direct action to demand their freedoms, Palestinians are collectively using a resistance strategy championed by a handful of West Bank border villages.

On May 15 – Nakba day, the anniversary of Israel’s displacement of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 – the strategy spread to all faces of the Palestinian struggle. Refugees in Syria, Lebanon and Gaza marched on Israel’s borders for the first time, while West Bankers clashed at checkpoints to Jerusalem. Meanwhile, despite new Israeli laws making Nakba commemoration illegal, Palestinian citizens of Israel marched in Jaffa.

Connecting these fronts has required the concept of inclusion, representation and a programme based on freedom through a shared, indivisible political future. Using shared grievance to unite and ignite resistance, a group dubbed the “March 15″ movement (so-named because of the mass demonstrations organised that day) has capitalised on the symbolic national anniversaries to articulate their plight.

These efforts have also galvanised Palestinian support beyond the street. By demanding a broad-based democratic overhaul of the Palestine Liberation Organisation as their core demand, the Palestinian Spring is using unity to push the struggle forward.

Caught off guard by the blunt and overpowering clarity with which Palestinians are now speaking, both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have been forced to embrace unity to maintain political relevancy.

Emerging with unexpected force and momentum, March 15 has found itself as representing an alternative to the status quo and the politics of the Oslo era. However, there are also risks of this struggle stagnating.

The movement’s strategy has been based on waiting for symbolic dates to rally around, and then using the fallout to mobilize for the next date, a problem especially acute during a summer with few notable events. This approach is based the understanding that Israel will respond to protests in the expected belligerent way.

“We do not know what is going to happen, but we have set something in motion,” said March 15 leader Fadi Quran at the Qalandia checkpoint during the Nakba demonstration. “It is now up to the Israelis and how they react.”

This date-specific approach has been borrowed from the anti-wall campaign in West Bank border villages such as Bil’in. An alternative to the armed struggle component of the second intifada, anti-wall demonstrations gained international media attention and modest gains in their efforts to reclaim lands annexed by Israel.

However, after several years this approach was also a source of the movement’s stagnation and decline prior to March 15. This concern already risks becoming reality in the Palestinian Spring.

The June 5 demonstrations in Qalandia, which were identical in preparation and planning to the Nakba day in May, failed to mobilise even half the number of demonstrators.

And even though Israel killed 23 unarmed demonstrators on the Golan Heights, the killings were followed by relative quiet which did not escalate demonstrations throughout the West Bank, Gaza or the refugee communities.

The events of June 5 reaffirmed the fronts, tactics and demands of the Palestinian Spring, but may ultimately fail to expand on the momentum in the streets or successfully build on past responses to repression. If Palestinians follow this spring’s current approach and wait until September, when the declaration of statehood is expected, protest organisers may find that the energy they have been seizing on has evaporated in the absence of action.

Still, the second international Gaza flotilla – set to sail at the end of this month – could provide an opportunity to break this pattern before it sets in.

If the flotilla breaks the Israeli siege and reaches the shores of Gaza, it will be the first meeting between the international Palestinian solidarity movement and the Arab Spring, a meeting that will add a new dimension to the unity struggle. If it is stopped, it will be a clear military statement by Israel of its current commitment to Palestinian division, generating much new grievance to mobilise with.

The flotilla will provide Palestinians with a context similar to the March 15 protests, where by setting the terms of the showdown, Palestinians will have the chance dictate the politics and announce their demands. The opportunity is theirs to seize.

15/06/2011

The No-Longer Temporary Occupation

Jun 082011

This piece appeared in the Jewish Daily Forward on 17 June 2011

One particular success of Israel’s 44-year control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip has been the government’s ability to convince the Israeli population of the temporary nature of the occupation. Every sector of Israeli society, except religious settlers and the military establishment, understand the occupation to be an ephemeral security measure necessary only in the absence of a peace agreement with the Palestinians. Ask any Israeli on the streets of Tel Aviv whether they think that Israel will permanently control the Occupied Territories and the immediate answer will be no, it is all about immediate security. This charade is exploited by successive Israeli governments as they proclaim a desire for peace while simultaneously creating permanent facts on ground like Jewish settler roads, checkpoints for Palestinians and new settlements.

Despite the proximity of the Occupied Territories to major Israeli population centers, few Israelis other than soldiers and settlers visit the Territories. Since the creation of Israel’s controversial separation barrier and the denial of thousands of Palestinian work permits to Israel, Israeli society has all but disengaged from Palestinian society. This allows the occupation to feel distant and outside the everyday lives of Israelis. Palestinians, of course, are still confronted with the daily presence of Israeli military power and mechanisms of control.

Some Israeli scholars, such as Bar Ilan University lecturer Ariella Azoulay, and Tel Aviv University professor Adi Ophir, have proposed that without this perceived temporariness and external character of the occupation, Israel would have a hard time maintaining its mandatory military conscription. A greater number of citizens would question the long- term objectives.
Israel’s occupation is a violation of no less than three international legal statutes, including the United Nations charter, The Hague Agreement of 1907 and the Geneva Convention of 1949, all of which forbid an occupying power from moving civilian populations into occupied land. However, whenever serious criticism of the occupation arises both within Israel and abroad, the state is able to claim that its presence in the territories is only about protecting Israeli civilians from security risks. Nothing more.
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08/06/2011

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