A Modern Day Trail of Tears in Jerusalem

Trail of Tears: Painting by Robert Lindneux (1942)
Trail of Tears: Painting by Robert Lindneux (1942)

If you were uncertain about the parallels between our country’s treatment of Native American peoples and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, this article in today’s Haaretz should help clarify them.

The headline is:

Israeli government plans to forcibly relocate 12,500 Bedouin.

Concentrating the Bedouin into a few permanent towns represents the culmination of a 40-year process of limiting their pasturage, restricting their migrations and refusing to let them build permanent homes in places where they have lived for decades. This process accelerated after the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993.Since then, the Civil Administration has issued thousands of demolition orders against Bedouin tents and shacks, to which the Bedouin frequently responded by petitioning the High Court of Justice.

Shlomo Lecker, a lawyer who represented the Bedouin in nearly 100 such cases, told Haaretz that while the court never addressed his claim that the Bedouin were being discriminated against in comparison to Jewish settlers, it did accept his argument that they can’t be evicted when they have no other place to live. That is what prompted the Civil Administration to start planning new towns for them.

The Bedouin, of course, are the semi-nomadic desert tribes. The claim that Israelis were a “people without a land for a land without people” was never really true, even for the Negev which was held up as an example of how Israel would “make the desert bloom”. Palestine also contained major population centers with long histories like Haifa, Lydda, Jaffa, Acre, etc. etc.

If you were wondering why Steven Salaita was appointed to the American Indian studies program at UIUC, this is pretty much why. His work focused on the parallels between the Palestinian and Native American experience and writing.

In 67 years of existence, Israel has built hundreds of new towns and settlements for its Jewish population. The only towns built for the Palestinian Arab population are for Bedouins who are being dispossessed of their pastoral lands. This is part of the reason most serious observers say the expulsion and cleansing of Palestinians continues to this day.

Jamil Hamadin, a member of the Jahalin tribe, told Haaretz the Civil Administration never consulted with his clan or any other Jahalin clans about the plan. He added that not only does putting different tribes into the same town run counter to Bedouin customs, but so does putting different clans from the same tribe into the same town.“We’ve replaced wool tents with tin shacks and prefab homes, but that doesn’t mean we’ve changed our customs and laws, which obligate us to live and herd at a great distance from each other, or our need to live in open spaces,” he said.

Israel’s government spares no expense or effort to re-create historical Jewish settlements, whether they’re towns or archeological parks. Not so much when its Palestinian or non-Jewish traditions and culture practiced by living people.  To deal with those, there’s an active program to erase history and replace it with pine trees.  Some people are more equal than others.

This should all remind us of our own terrible history with the native peoples of America. Netanyahu’s administration looks a lot like Andrew Jackson’s.

Peace in Israel/Palestine is easy as 1, 2, 3

Israel announced last week that it would annex 1,000 acres of land owned by Palestinians to build a city for Jewish citizens. The state department noted this is “counterproductive… to a two-state solution”. Someone should let the State Department onto a secret. The two-state solution is dead, and has been dead for almost 40 years.

It died when Menachem Begin’s very first Likud government dramatically expanded settlements in the West Bank. No Likud government since has deviated from this path. No Palestinian leader will ever tell their people they should give up Jerusalem or the Jordan Valley, and nor should they. The Israeli electorate is not ready to make peace either, since they’ve been told a fairy tale about the expulsions of 1948. The hard right has begun to fantasize that they might be able to get away with another mass expulsion.

The only real question facing Israelis and Palestinians is one of timing. When will the Palestinian population be granted equal rights in the one state that has existed for 47 years.

This will happen when US policy changes (unless Israel decides to become a Russian client state like Assad’s Syria). US political institutions are not sympathetic to Palestine. Individual politicians may be sympathetic, but in their official capacity they cannot be. They cannot be supportive while the American population at large is uninterested. Remedying this will take three steps.

1. Stop talking about a “two-state solution”

Outside of diplomatic circles in Geneva, New York and DC, no one knows what the “two-state solution” is. Most Americans certainly don’t. Every failed summit costs the Palestinian people more years under a brutal military occupation. Worse, if Israel decided to give up the entire West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza tomorrow (how likely is that), the resulting Palestinian state would cover 22% of Israel-Palestine, be split in two unconnected pieces, and need to support over half the people (not counting refugees outside Israel/Palestine).

Israel’s government is content to participate in “Peace Talks” that go nowhere while building settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem. It’s time to change the dynamic.

2. Speak in terms Americans understand like “Equal Rights” and “Freedom”.

Tragically, not enough minds will be changed by images of dead children and innocent civilians. That did not work in the 1982 Lebanon war, it did not work in the Intifada, it does not work in the dozens of West Bank towns that stage protests every week, it did not work in Gaza in 2009 or 2012 nor in 2014.

But the Palestinian cause does resonate strongly with American ideals like: “Civil Rights”, “Equal Opportunity”, “Voting Rights”, “All Men are created Equal” and “Freedom”. It will not be  with “Liberty” for example, that is a term co-opted by the American right, and Bibi Netanyahu is far more effective at speaking to them than any Palestinian will ever be. Israel’s official policies carry negative connotations, and they should described as “Jim Crow Laws”, “Separate and Unequal”, “Housing Discrimination”.

Terms such as “Right of Return”, Green Line” or “Pre-67 Borders” are not part of the American experience and we tune out when we hear them.

To have an impact, the Palestinian struggle for freedom must be presented as:

  • A Civil Rights Movement: To gain a vote in the government that controls your lives and the right to travel, live and work where you wish in your country.
  • Jim Crow on the Jordan: Palestinians and Israelis live under two sets of unequal laws that are enforced unequally, point out how similar this is to South African Apartheid or the American South prior to the 1960s.
  • Native Americans in the 1900s: The treatment of the Negev bedouin is very similar.
  • American Revolution: This is perhaps the most powerful image. Come up with your own list of Israeli grievances, like the Declaration of Independence.

3. Be prepared to act.

The current Israeli administration will not easily accept a single, “bi-national” state in Israel-Palestine with equal rights for all. They will try to Palestinians that a shrunken West Bank could become San Marino and Gaza could turn into Monaco. They use every argument to limit the independence of any Palestinian state and shrink its territory.

If you do manage to change American opinion though, then Israel will be forced to negotiate and stay till there is a resolution. Before this happens, the Palestinian people have to know what they want. Do they want a state in 20% of the land your grand-fathers inhabited?

In my view, a partition will eventually lead to more bloodshed because neither Palestinians nor Israelis will be satisfied with it nor should they.

A just solution is one where all Palestinians and all Israelis are treated as human beings who have the right to live and work in their land where-ever they please. This was the original aim of the Palestinian resistance. This was the dream of many Zionists till the few who dreamed of a state with a Jewish majority became ascendant. Of course, that state had to be built on the rubble of Palestinian villages and neighborhoods, it has to be sustained by a system of inequality and a military occupation. A single state is the only for Palestinians to save themselves from oppression and rescue their Israeli brothers and sisters from becoming oppressors.

5 unexpected things people will do with the Apple Watch

Hint: Most of them have to do with naughty stuff using the Taptic interface.

apple-watch-release-date-578-80The world is awash with analysis of the Apple Watch. The best round-up is probably Hoodinke’s review from a watch guy’s perspective, Anandtech hasn’t done a teardown, so we don’t know what exactly goes into the guts.

The health applications will drive a lot of people to the device (I’ve held off buying a tracker). Doctors may end up recommending it to track patient health.

But it’s the “Taptic” engine will make or break the watch. Either the world loves it, or we hate it. And I suspect the use cases will be legion. Including:

  1. Taptic Booty calls: Yes, soon you’ll be sending one tap, pause, two tap sequence, instead of “U up?”.
  2. Taps in class: Yep, high school kids are going to use it to pass notes in class. We may see a resurgence in morse code and then boy-scouts may get some play!
  3. Someone will use it as a vibrator: That is, if one of the beta-testers hasn’t already done it. Perhaps the male use case is why Apple is offering the Milanese bracelet with self-adjusting magnetic closure…
  4. Tapped in church: Yep, people are going to get together to be tapped by Jesus.
  5. It’ll revolutionize the phone sex industry: Yes, expect to see offers to drive your taptic engine to a happy ending.

How cute, Tim Cook thought we’d be sending each other heartbeats. Someone should clue him in, we’re far more creative than that.

The two state solution is a zombie

As the most cursory political conversation with an Israeli or Palestinian will make clear, past is present in their minds. The “pre-1967 lines”  which conventional wisdom states are the basis for any two state solution in fact gloss over more deep rooted issues. For many Palestinians, including those living outside Israel-Palestine, it is about 1948 and the Nakba. For many Israelis it is about the Shoah and creating a “Jewish refuge”. For a few Israeli Jews it is about 586 BC. There will be no lasting peace in Israel-Palestine that does not account for these sentiments.

That is why Palestinians have always insisted on a “right of return” for their ’48 refugees. This is why Israel has a “Jewish right of return” and the Israeli right has never lost an opportunity to expand settlements in the West Bank or Jerusalem.

This is why the parties winning majorities among the Israeli and Palestinian populations clearly say their goal is to control all the territory of Israel/Palestine. We know this is Hamas’s position (i.e. the “destruction of Israel/Zionist-entity”), but Likud has held this position from the day it was created.  Here’s the relevant excerpt of Likud’s 1977 platform (which brought them into power for the first time):

The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace; therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.

This was 10 years before there was such a thing as Hamas or a “Hamas charter”. The platform then goes on to discuss the paramount importance of building settlements in the West Bank.

Successive Likud governments have continued to appropriate land for settlements and act consistently with this position. The 1,000 acre appropriation last week was consistent with their commitment to use every opportunity to appropriate land in the West Bank. Begin, Shamir, Sharon and now Netanyahu run for elections on a platform of sovereignty between the Jordan and the sea. No Likud leader has told them painful concessions of territory will need to be made. The two-state solution that would be acceptable to the party and its base is a middle-eastern version of San Marino, with Gaza as Monaco perhaps.

Not only is the two-state solution impractical, it is fatally flawed as well. It will leave the right-wing in both Palestine and Israel chafing at territorial concessions neither is willing to accept. This is why there’s been no agreemtn over 40 years of negotiations and no peace will hold between two states.

The “two-state solution” also suffers from a deeper and more insidious flaw. It is unjust to the people of Israel and Palestine. It is unjust towards Palestinians whose families were expelled from Haifa, Lydda, Beersheba and 500 small villages or communities they were intimately connected to. It will be unjust to the 500,000 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem who feel deeply, intimately connected to that land.

The only practical solution is a single, secular, democratic state in Israel-Palestine where all are equal under the law.

A single or bi-national state proposal is considered laughably naive by many. There is no dearth of voices who say there is no way for the Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities of Israel-Palestine to live in peace. This prejudice has left Israelis and Palestinians wandering diplomatic deserts for the past 40 years, chasing the mirage of a “two-state peace process”.

Perhaps the time has come to think with greater creativity than the current Israeli and Palestinian leaders can muster and consider a single, secular state in Israel-Palestine. Perhaps it is time to give a Mediterranean culture that includes Jewish, Muslim and Christian elements a chance to exist under a truly secular, non-denominational government.

The beginnings will not be easy, nor will they be painless. Two people who have been told for decades they are enemies will not overnight turn into pleasant neighbors. Yet there is hope for an eventual reconciliation, and it comes from the most unexpected quarters. Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger lives on a Jewish settlement in the West Bank and is part of a dialog group between settlers and their Palestinian neighbors. He was quoted last month in the Israeli daily Haaretz:

When you only live among your own and only know your own narrative, you are naturally very suspicious of the other who is just an intruder and just a thorn in your side and something that doesn’t belong there. But when you open up your heart and you see the other, you begin to see the truth is complex – that my truth is true, but it’s a partial truth and there’s another truth that’s also partial and I have to learn to put them together and make the larger truth. I believe we can do that.

The people of Israel-Palestine will have to choose between these voices and the unyielding rhetoric of Likud and Hamas. We all know, in our hearts, which points the way to a just and lasting peace.

On the Moral Equivalence between Hamas and Likud

HK_Central_Statue_Square_Legislative_Council_Building_n_Themis_sRockets and F-16s have stopped flying over Gaza and Israel, but the propaganda war continues. Netanyahu recently said “Hamas is ISIS, ISIS is Hamas”. Israeli spokesmen have routinely asserted that Israel holds the moral high-ground even when confronted with outcomes and policies that bring this into question. For instance, the bombing of homes and killing entire families to assassinate a single Hamas operative would be morally unjustifiable unless faced with an imminent threat. Yet Israeli forces have done this repeatedly. Criticism of the Israeli administration’s conduct in Operation Protective Edge has been muted, except in the most egregious instances. I suspect this is partly because too many fear being branded “Hamas supporters”. And few among us want to be seen as supporters of a party founded by terrorists. Netanyahu and his colleagues in the Likud coalition are ill-placed to claim the moral high ground since they themselves are inheritors of a party founded by terrorists.

The specter of Hamas’ 25 year old charter and the prior actions of its leaders has been raised repeatedly to question the organization’s current stance on negotiations and commitment to compromise. Hamas is a political organization, and like many others it can and has changed its positions over time. Netanyahu’s party, Likud has also modified its positions, but we can say with virtual certainty that if Likud were placed in the same position as Hamas, its behavior would be no different. We know this because we know that when Likud’s founders were looking to gain Palestinian territory, they did indeed turn to terrorism. Likud, like Hamas, was founded by people who used terrorism to further their political goals.

Likud was created in 1973 by Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir among others. It came to power for the first time in 1977, in an election that marked a  dramatic shift from left to right in Israeli politics. So much so, that it is often called “the revolution”. Begin became Prime Minister and Shamir served as Speaker of the Knesset. This was a remarkable change of fortune since for the two, who had been virtual pariahs in Israeli politics.

In the late 1940s, Begin led the Irgun, and Shamir was part of the leadership of the even more extreme splinter group Lehi. During the 1930s and 1940s, the two groups bombed hotels, markets and bus stops, killing hundreds of civilians. They had also targeted British soldiers and policemen. Most notoriously, in 1947, they kidnapped two British seargents. The parents of the two soldiers made personal appeals to Irgun leaders to release their children. Under Begin’s direct orders, both soldiers were hanged. The parallels with Hamas’ abduction of Israeli soldiers is striking.  Lehi, under Shamir, assassinated the UN appointed mediator, Folke Bernadotte in 1948 when it was clear he would recommend the unconditional return of all Palestinian refugees and a re-assessment of the UN partition plan. Bernadotte, by the way, had rescued hundreds, perhaps thousands of Jews from Nazi concentration camps. That’s part of the reason Israel had agreed to his appointment as mediator. The nascent Israeli government branded Lehi a terrorist group and briefly imprisoned all its members. They were pardoned within months.

Lehi and Irgun were also responsible for some of the worst violence during the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from what was to become Israel. This included multiple instances where civilian homes were bombed while residents were inside.

On May 22, shortly after Likud’s victory, William Farrell wrote in the New York Times:

“In 1946, the [Irgun] fighters blew up a wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem where British Government officials maintained offices, killing 91 persons and injuring at least 100. To this day, Mr. Begin maintains that the casualties were the fault of the British authorities who ignored a telephone warning to abandon the premises. During the fight for Jerusalem in 1948, Mr. Begin‘s band was involved in a battle in the suburban Arab village of Deir Yassin. Two hundred Arabs were killed. Again, he said, a warning to evacuate all non-combatants had been ignored.”

To a modern reader, it is striking that Mr. Begin’s logic on the King David Hotel bombing is indistinguishable from Mr. Netanyahu’s assertions that he bears no responsibility for the deaths of civilians in Gaza, even that of children sleeping in their homes. I would suggest this is not accidental. It is an integral aspect of Likud’s stance, inherited from Begin and Shamir. It permits no introspection on actions deemed necessary to maintain control over the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, which Likud’s platform claims is “eternally and indisputably” a part of Israel . In the article, Mr. Farrell continued:

The Word “terrorist” incenses Mr. Begin and he chided newsmen who used the term when asking him about his experiences in the 1940’s… “Freedom Fighter” is the correct description, he insisted.

Mr. Begin’s actions in resisting the British mandate (which Irgun considered an occupation) were not that different from that of the most violent elements in the Palestinian resistance (including Hamas). Yet we can only imagine the howls of protest if we referred to Hamas activists as “freedom fighters”?

To round out the trinity, Ariel Sharon, another leading light of Likud, led the Israeli army unit responsible for the Qibya massacre in 1953. Most notoriously, it was on his watch that the massacres at Sabra and Shatila occured during the disastrous Lebanon war of 1982.

There are few political factions in this conflict whose hands have not been stained with blood. Few whose founding was not infected by vengeance of some form. We do not have to excuse or accept this, but we do have to recognize it to identify reasoning  that smacks of hipocrisy.

We also have to recognize that, like most indigenous people subjected to colonization, the Palestinians have borne the brunt of the suffering in this conflict. Only once we have recognized these facts can we evaluate the actions and statements of Palestinian and Israeli factions.

11 good reasons we’re all obsessed with Israel and Gaza…

Israel-2013(2)-Aerial-Jerusalem-Temple_Mount-Temple_Mount_(south_exposure)

A friend asked me what I thought of this piece in Tablet titled An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story in the World. It claims the media establishment is obsessed with Israel, suggests everyone hates the Jews, and that there are a lot of other stories we should be talking about and covering. I agree with the last.

This is a very long rebuttal to the article. The short explanation of the obsessive interest though, goes like this:

  1. Most people who buy newspapers and watch hard news are upper-middle class. Most gentiles in the UMS have friends who are Jewish, and rightly or wrongly that makes us interested. Few have Syrian or Egyptian or Iraqi or Irani friends (I do, some of them are even Jewish). Resources follow the interest of the audience, not vice-versa. The audience is interested, ergo the AP is interested. Matti’s editors told him to focus on Israel-Palestine because that’s the story that gets the clicks. When in doubt, follow the money.
  2. The Western audience is sadly not interested in tales of woe and suffering from the third-world (i.e. Asia, Africa, South America), except for brief moments when our conscience is pricked. We’ve got parochial interests, like all humans. And for whatever reason, Israel “feels closer” than the Congo or Chiapas. That’s also why we’re dumping buckets of ice-water on our heads and cutting checks to find a cure for a disease that afflicts a few thousand people a year. Meanwhile we continue on our merry lives oblivious to the 600,000 thousand a year dying of malaria and 700,000 of dysentry. They’re mostly kids, and both are easily preventable. We suck mightily. Mad props though to Bill Gates who cares about the right stuff when it comes to humanitarian causes.
  3. Most people know Wahabi clerics, ISIS, Al-Queda, Assad, Sisi or the al-Sauds don’t really care what we think about them (Hezbollah and Iran are not on this list, more about them later). The Israeli political establishment does, and it’s a two-way street. They give press conferences, they want the attention and get it. In any case there’s no debate about the others. Well, I did have one guy on my feed say “the Zionist media was misrepresenting ISIS”, but I took that to mean I’m not in an echo chamber.
  4. Some Americans are also upset about military aid to Israel and feel this makes the US complicit. In my view that’s a misunderstanding, the military aid to Israel and Egypt come as a package deal after the resolution of the Suez/Sinai crisis. It’s 4bn in payola to keep the Suez canal open for American trade vessels and the Fifth/Sixth fleets. It is difficult to stomach seeing US bombs dropped on civilians in Gaza, but all the Middle-Eastern countries have our bombs and planes and they use them, on their own people too.
  5. This is Israel-Palestine and once again, rightly or wrongly all three Middle-Eastern monotheist faiths consider the region and Jerusalem important. If everyone in the west were Buddhist or Hindu or Zoroastrian, we would be obsessed with Bengal/Bihar, Ayodhya/Hrishikesh or Iran/Turkey. But that is not the case, so we’re left with the obsession over Israel. Most people go to church every once in a while and hear stories that are set in that landscape. Their ears perk up when they hear the story in the news. Personally I think Cairo, Baghdad/Babylon, Istanbul/Constantinople and Tehran/Rey are as or more important historically and culturally. But I’m also agnostic.
  6. Some people look at Israel as the last bastion of European colonialism in Africa/Middle-East.
  7. There’s a huge discordance between the opposing views and their recollected histories of events. For what it’s worth, the “Israeli camp” hews to the account in Leon Uris’ Exodus. The “Palestinian camp” relates a different story, not as well known in the west, much of it corroborated by the New Historians (Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim etc). People end up with very strong feelings about who’s telling “the truth”.
  8. We’ve all been hearing and talking about Israel/Palestine for about 75 years. There are some huge themes involved if you live in the West. WW-2, The Holocaust, The Middle-East, The Clash of Civilizations, etc. etc. etc. These themes and the length of the conflict spark interest. It keeps flaring up every few years and for the past seven US administrations, there’s been some sort of “peace effort”. We’re all told we should be interested in this.
  9. Many of us are shocked that a country that we consider a vibrant democracy has been running a brutal occupation for 50 years and is killing hundreds of children a few miles away seemingly without much debate and when the threat appears minimal. This is disproportional. We expect that from the Assads and Sisis of the world, we don’t expect it from Israeli leaders who claim to be democratic. Yes, the US has done these things and worse, there’s no excuse except they were in the past or far-away. And we elected a president who said he’d shut those wars down (though he’s kept the drones going). Also note when the US went in to get Osama, his wives and children were left alive.
  10. Israel currently has a PM (I hope this is temporary) who evokes very strong partisan reactions in the US because he’s closely aligned with the hard right and uses American idiom (supplied conveniently by the same consultants who came up with such gems as Gingrich’s “Contract with America”). Suffice it to say, Netanyahu pushes a lot of American buttons.
  11. But really it’s because everyone seems to have an opinion on Israel-Palestine and so Duty Calls:
http://xkcd.com/386/
What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they’ll keep being wrong!

While you’re here, do take a look at the White House petition to support a single, secular state in Israel-Palestine with equal rights for all. That’s what I would like to see.

Now for the long form rebuttal:  Continue reading “11 good reasons we’re all obsessed with Israel and Gaza…”

Misquoting Golda Meir

The Hollywood Reporter, Variety and The Jewish Journal ran an advertisement/letter, paid for by the Anti-Defamation League, which numerous Hollywood celebrities signed.

Unfortunately, Golda Meir was misquoted in the ad in a manner which twists the meaning of her statement. Two separate quotes were presented as one. In her oral autobiography “A Land of Our Own”, these quotes appear on page 242, in an section titled “Plain Talk – On Peace”:

Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us. (National Press Club, Washington, 1957)

When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. (Press conference in London, 1969)

The ADL’s ad changed the word “sons” to “children”. In addition, they combined the two separate quotes delivered on two separate occasions. This transforms the meaning of her words since Golda Meir was referring to soldiers when she said sons.

The only source for the “children” formulation is David Beiden, a right-wing Israeli blogger who in 2000 published a note claiming he heard Golda Meir use this formulation in 1972.  Golda Meir’s autobiography was published in 1973 and uses the word “sons”.

While we’re quoting her and discussing the Palestinian condition, this is what she had to say after she visited Arab Haifa right after the Nakba:

It is a dreadful thing to see the dead city. Next to the port I found children, women, the old, waiting for a way to leave. I entered the houses, there were houses where the coffee and pita bread were left on the table, and I could not avoid [thinking] that this, indeed, had been the picture in many Jewish towns [i.e., in Europe, during World War II]. (as quoted in “The birth of the Palestinian Refuge problem revisited” by Benny Morris, p.309/10)

Golda Meir recognized the Palestinian tragedy that accompanied the founding of Israel when she saw it with her own eyes. This expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from their homes has been extensively documented by the Israeli “New Historians”(including Benny Morris, Ian Pappe, Avi Shlaim), as has the role that Israel’s leaders played in it. This tragedy continues in the form of the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.

Grassroots peace: Israeli settlers and Palestinian villagers talk it out

Haaretz published a piece on West Bank settlers and Palestinian villagers reaching out to each other for dialog. To quote one of the leaders, Shaul Judelman:

Our goal here is empowering moderate voices on both sides to be able to stand with their communities and look beyond the other side as a pure enemy and see that our destiny here in some way is together.

and one of his Palestinian partners:

We want to show the children another side of the enemy. At the end of the day, they are the ones who pay the price for the conflict. They are not responsible for what the grown-ups are doing. They are just the victims of the grown-ups and their lack of responsibility. We want to encourage them to have hope for the future.

There are many more who think like this and will be able to look past the fear fomented by politicians on both sides. It’s the reason a single state solution can work and may be the best option in the long-run. Do your small bit and sign the White House petition asking Obama to make it a policy option.

Absent a move towards equal rights for all, Israel-Palestine is likely to descend into a version of Jim Crow on the Jordan. You already have two sets of laws. One for Israelis, one for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. They’re not enforced equally. This will lead to further calls of Apartheid, Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions.

The settlers quoted in the article recognize this, and they see clearly what this is doing to their own communities:

…it’s also an awareness that we’re not getting here from equal places at all and there’s a lot of work to do within both of our communities for that vision to come alive, and we both have a lot of responsibility to make a lot of change.

The settlers have become one of the most ostracized bad words in Israel. Nobody talks to us. The more our communities feel vilified, we play the role. I really see that happening.

If you truly respect the rights of Israeli Jews to settle in what they consider their ancestral homeland, you should also respect the equal-rights for Palestinians including their right to return to Jaffa or Haifa if they’re from there. That’s why the one-state solution is the only just option.

Sadly, extremism on both sides is undermining hopes for peace of any kind. Here in the US we hear a lot about Hamas terrorism, rocket attacks, kidnappings and hate. But the same sort of forces are gathering on the Israeli side as well, and you see hate crimes, mobs attacking Palestinians, arrests of anti-war protesters and callousness towards the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian children.

But that is not the whole story, and not what we should focus on if we want to see peace. These settlers recognize that as well and don’t like what it’s doing to their children:

Our children need to know that to hit an Arab because they are an Arab is the same as to hit a Jew because they are a Jew.

Part of this is because of how segregated the two populations have become. To quote one of the settlers:

I said I never thought I’d talk to a Palestinian. He said he never thought he would talk to a settler. He described to me how my kippa to his children is a symbol to be feared. I described to him how for me his village was a place you go and don’t come back. He tells me how afraid the Palestinians are of the settlers. I say: You’re afraid of me? I thought I was afraid of you.

Moderate voices who want to live in peace together deserve our support.

I’ve spent the last four years meeting Palestinians, hearing their side and learning how they see us. I realize, of course, that they hate us. They don’t believe that Israel is connected to the Jewish people. They think Israel is a colonial entity from the outside with no connection to this land. They construct a narrative of us just like we construct a narrative of them. For me it’s very important to bring people who are connected to this land to tell the story of what it means to be in the area of Bethlehem to Hebron for us. It has to be part of a dialogue.

We believe the Jewish people have a connection to the land. We believe in some sense that it’s right and proper that we’re here. But at the same time we know, or we’re coming to realize, that other people are here also, and we have to balance those conflicting truths. When you only live among your own and only know your own narrative, you are naturally very suspicious of the other who is just an intruder and just a thorn in your side and something that doesn’t belong there. But when you open up your heart and you see the other, you begin to see the truth is complex – that my truth is true, but it’s a partial truth and there’s another truth that’s also partial and I have to learn to put them together and make the larger truth. I believe we can do that.

I say amen to that. Or ameen if you prefer.

Why Doesn’t the US Support Equal Rights For All People In Israel/Palestine?

Israel_Palestine_Flag

I suspect it’s due to widespread mis-understandings and lobbying. I’ve created a White House petition, please sign it, it reads:

 

Support a single, secular state in Israel-Palestine with equal rights for all.

The Israel-Palestine “peace process” has been underway for over 40 years. Two generations of Palestinians and Israelis have come of age amid violence, occupation and still-born “peace summits”.

End this charade.

The ancient Mediterranean culture of Palestine and the followers of Judaism must find a way to inhabit the country they hold dear through dialogue as equals.

Palestinians and Israelis deserve equal rights in their native land. They deserve security, the right to live where they choose and freedom from fear.

This will come when they live together in peace and heal their wounds. When occupation, unequal laws, violence against civilians and political imprisonment ends.

As a secular, multi-cultural nation, the USA should not support any plan of partition along religious lines.

 

If you’re not convinced this is a good idea or necessary, do read and listen to the following writers. They convey the need and urgency for a single state solution more eloquently than I’ll ever be able to:

If you still want to know what I think…

The fact is that Israel-Palestine today is one state and has been for 47 years. It has one army and one government.  It is a state where fully half the population is disenfranchised and has limited or no rights.

The “two-state peace process” does not serve the interests, or secure a positive future for Israelis and Palestinians. All it does is fuel the careers of the consultants who are in the “peace process industry”. They’ve been milking this rich cow for almost 50 years, and would be happy to milk it for another 50.

Partition of Palestine was never a good idea. How did it make sense to give over half the country of Palestine to the Jewish population when they were less than a quarter of the population? What right did the Allied Powers, the UN have to do this? They took away the people’s right to determine their own future. This is why a Palestinian Muslim or Christian who was born in Haifa or Jaffa cannot return. It is an injustice.

Today, Palestinians within Israel number almost 6 million, they’re half the population. The two state “solutions” being discussed would leave them with less than 20% of the country. And that number is falling every day since Israeli state has been illegally building settlements in the West Bank for 50 years.

I have some experience with partitions. In 1947, the country I was born in (India) was partitioned (by an Allied power). My father is from Punjab, a state that had a roughly equal Muslim, Sikh and Hindu population. Each half of Punjab was ethnically cleansed and a culture centuries old torn apart.  Incidentally, the Roma/Gypsies are from this part of India and look remarkably like my family, so there’s the Holocaust connection.

The same thing happened in Israel-Palestine, though the Palestinians bore the brunt of the suffering there and still are.

India is a secular democracy with many, many minorities. They are linguistic, religious, caste based, regional. You name it, we have a minority for it (including 150 million Muslims)[1].  Pakistan was meant to be a refuge for united India’s muslims.

Of course, once you’ve asked whether everyone’ Muslim, the next question is whether everyone is the right kind of Muslim. So today, in Pakistan, which was meant to protect India’s Muslim minority, Sunnis are murdering Shia and blowing up Sufi shrines.

The same thing eventually happens to any country built along religious lines. So a “Jewish State” of Israel can look forward to divisions between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, between Orthodox and Reform, between North African Jews and Arabian peninsula Jews. That is just human nature.

This is why the country I chose as my home (USA) and thankfully, the country I was born in (India) are secular democracies. This is why it is critical to separate church from state to ensure the rights and primacy of the individual.

The only right position to have is that faith is a personal matter. The state has no role to play in it. The moment you deviate, both your religion and your state will be captured by power-hungry charlatans who want to use these powerful tools for their own ends.

In the end, I support a one state solution because I want everyone to live in a country like the USA, where all people equal under the law (though we too are still perfecting the union).

  • 1. India also had a small (in Indian terms) number of Jews who had lived in peace for centuries in India but whose ranks have been decimated by emigration. The city I grew up in, Bombay, has numerous structures named after Baghdadi Jews who migrated there. India also took in a number of Holocaust refugees.

What happened to Ben-Gurion’s Oasis in the Desert?

After reading Mark Levine’s response to Jon Voigt’s open letter, I had to write about why many people like think as Jon Voigt does, and how political trends in Israel make his views rather quaint.

Sunset in the Negev
Sunset in the Negev

A desert in bloom

There is a lot to admire in the words, and many of the deeds, of Israeli leaders in the early years. Mapai/Labor were in charge and the kibbutz movement was ascendant. Ben-Gurion’s oft-quoted dream of making the “Negev desert bloom” is what people are thinking of when they see Israel as a project to create an oasis in the desert. The residual goodwill from that period are part of the reason an earlier generation sees the whole period with rose colored glasses and that is where Voigt is coming from (and Woody Allen as well).

Ben-Gurion’s powerful image of the desert oasis suggested a barren, sparsely populated land. This is part of the reason so many people still believe that all of Palestine was populated by nomadic tribes prior to 1948. This may have been true about the Negev Bedouin, but even they alone were over a 100,000 in 1948. In comparison, the entire Jewish population in then Palestine was around 600,000.

Of course, the West Bank is not the Negev, and neither was much of the coast with its heavily populated Palestinian villages and towns. They were both parts of a thriving Mediterranean culture that had traded with and influenced the entire area for millenia. In Palestine, there was a mixed community of Muslims and Christians, along with some Jews who had lived side by side for centuries. In 1948, that community was torn asunder in what they call the Nakba. Some 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes by the Jewish militia, or fled in fear. Many of their villages were razed to the ground. It was this that moved Golda Meir to say, after a visit to Arab Haifa in 1948:

It is a dreadful thing to see the dead city. Next to the port I found children, women, the old, waiting for a way to leave. I entered the houses, there were houses where the coffee and pita bread were left on the table, and I could not avoid [thinking] that this, indeed, had been the picture in many Jewish towns [i.e., in Europe, during World War II]‘.

To come back to the desert though. The Negev Bedouin had a way of life which deserves respect. They had lived and survived on that unforgiving land for centuries. After 1948, they were forced into settlements, and thousands expelled into Jordan or Egypt. This has diminished their culture (not to mention dispossessed them of their lands). So even that ostensibly inoffensive project is more questionable than many claim. In some ways, the treatment of the Bedouin parallels our own country’s treatment of the Native American tribes living on the Great Plains.

“I have heard you intend to settle us on a reservation near the mountains. I don’t want to settle. I love to roam over the prairies. There I feel free and happy, but when we settle down we grow pale and die. A long time ago this land belonged to our fathers, but when I go up to the river I see camps of soldiers on its banks. These soldiers cut down my timber, they kill my buffalo and when I see that, my heart feels like bursting.” — Satanta, Kiowa Chief 

Continue reading “What happened to Ben-Gurion’s Oasis in the Desert?”