All posts in category Israel/Palestine

Where Israeli attack dogs lie in wait.

attack dog Mohammad Amla back

Mohammad Amla’s back after he was attacked by IDF dogs.

When you learn a second language—even if you live in that language for a decade and a half, work, pray, fall in love, go to parties in that language—even then, there are always new words to discover. Surprises when you open the newspaper.

The other day, on a beautiful, lazy Friday afternoon in the holy city of Jerusalem, I learned a new Hebrew phrase: leshasot klavim— “to set dogs [on a person].”

In this past weekend’s Haaretz, writer Gideon Levy interviewed Mohammad Amla, a Palestinian day-laborer who for the past twelve years has supported his family (including the health care expenses of his deaf daughter) with the money he makes as a handyman in central Israel. He lives outside of Hebron but there’s always a way to get through Israel’s Security Barrier; once on the other side, Amla more often than not has obtained a legal work permit through the ungentle and wildly expensive services of an Israeli contractor. Between travel to and from Tel Aviv, rent on the dilapidated apartment he shares with six other men, and bribing his handlers, Amla doesn’t have much left at the end of the month, but even so, he told Levy, the money has been just enough to make it worth the effort.

Except that a few weeks ago, soldiers waited in ambush at one of the holes in the barrier. They waited with dogs.

The soldiers started firing rubber bullets at [Amla and two friends], and then another group of seven soldiers emerged from the Palestinian side of the fence. They were masked and accompanied by dogs. The frightened young men tried to continue in their flight back to their village, and then the soldiers unleashed the dogs [shasu klavim] on them.

“The dog jumped on me,” says Amla, “grabbed me forcefully, put his claws on my back and then also grabbed me by the neck with his teeth…. I fell facedown. I was suffocating. I felt that I was dead, dead. Unbelievable pain. And I was shouting to the soldiers: ‘Take it [the dog], release me,’ and they didn’t do anything.”

This is far from the first time that Israel has been caught setting dogs on unarmed Palestinians. The military maintains it suspended the practice in 2011, but multiple eyewitnesses and/or victims have come forward and provided testimony that attack dogs are still in use. One case involves an innocent bystander; another, nonviolent protestors(click the second link for video of the latter event). Moreover, in each of these cases, including Amla’s, dogs were only one source of violence deployed by the soldiers in question: Palestinians typically also find themselves kicked, beaten, or shot at with rubber bullets, and in one case, a soldier dropped a rock directly on a man’s head as he lay—bitten, beaten, and bloodied—on the ground.

Each of these stories is horrible. Each is horrifying. But Amla’s contains two further truths that official Israel has long refused to admit.

The first: Palestinians get around the Security Barrier every day. They supply Israel with cheap, easily exploited labor, and are only stopped when the authorities want to make an example of someone—in which case permits are of no use because (as Amla’s story demonstrates) dogs, fists, and rubber bullets are unleashed before any questions are asked.

The second truth is buried so deep in the well-worn story of the decades-long occupation that it’s almost invisible: The dogs, and the soldiers who handled them, were on the Palestinian side of the fence. Israel is at complete liberty to do what it wants, where it wants, on the West Bank, and the point of its behavior is not merely to keep the respective peoples on their respective sides of a fence constructed ostensibly for that purpose. The point is to demonstrate Israel’s freedom to disrupt and control Palestinian lives at will, and to punish those who question that freedom.

It’s odd that after all these years and all this writing about the occupation and its inhumanities, I managed to miss “leshasot klavim,” but these things happen.

The real problem is that official Israel is banking on the fact that a lot of us will miss the phrase, and that even more of us won’t notice the activity. That we’ll sit under the bright Jerusalem sky or in our favorite coffee shops in Manhattan, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and Mohammad Amla will mean as little to us as he means to them. That we won’t give a moment’s thought to Jewish soldiers setting attack dogs on a refugee people.

Crossposted from Open Zion/The Daily Beast.

Photo source Alex Levac for HaAretz

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by emilylhauser on June 18, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by emilylhauser on June 18, 2013

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Israel and the Arab Peace Initiative – top-down ignorance.

Those obsessed with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are all talking about the fact that the Arab League has once again proffered the Arab Peace Initiative as a starting place for negotiations with Israel.

image

The API’s basic contours are identical to the basic contours of every other plan ever devised to resolve the conflict: two states, based on the 1967 borders; a shared Jerusalem; a mutually agreed-upon resolution of the refugee problem. The stated goal of the API is a comprehensive, regional peace, and normalized relations with the Israeli people.

What’s a little stunning is that this is the third time the League has tried to launch the API—the first time was in 2002. What’s more stunning is the fact that, short of a brief mention by Ehud Olmert at the 2007 Annapolis Conference (months after the League had reissued its offer), official Israel has largely ignored the Initiative. The only difference circa 2013 is that the League is now willing to openly consider mutually-agreed minor land swaps—and still Prime Minister Netanyahu is hinting that the API is an Arab effort to dictate terms.

What’s perhaps stunning-est, however, is this: Until very recently, the vast majority of Israeli Jews had little to no idea that all 22 members of the Arab League had offered to start talks with their government, with the goal of achieving a region-wide peace.

Late last month, veteran Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar revealed in al-Monitor that

even though the initiative has been on the shelf for over 11 years, 73.5 percent of the Hebrew-speaking public had never heard of it, or had heard just a hint of it but remains unfamiliar with the details. Of these, 20.5 percent were “slightly knowledgeable” about the initiative and only six percent were “very knowledgeable.”

As an Israeli who chose to leave rather than raise my family in a polity so enmeshed in military occupation, I’m often frustrated by my people’s apparent inability to see beyond the fears (genuine though they are) that serve to buttress so many of our politicians’ ideologies.

Currently home for a visit, I happen to be typing these words in a busy Jerusalem café—surrounded by laughter and chatter about birthdays and foreign travel, I watch the delivery of café au lait and pastries, and the cognitive dissonance, the ability of my fellow coffee drinkers to live quiet, coffee-sipping lives even as the people they fear labor under the control of the region’s mightiest military, is deafening. I want to ask the folks one table over how it is that we so often refuse to see the reality in which we live; I’m not sure I want to hear the response.

And yet, I can’t help but consider that statistic: Nearly three-quarters of Hebrew-speaking Israelis had no idea that the Arab world had offered to negotiate peace—not once, not twice, but three times.

When that many people are that ignorant of information that vital, it speaks to something much greater than a simple failure to stay up-to-date. It’s a kind of ignorance that serves those anxious to exploit it, those who have no interest in achieving rapprochement, those for whom fear is a stepping stone to hegemony and ethnic purity. It points to an unavoidable but largely unacknowledged fact: Israel’s elites have not found it in their interests to prepare their people for the possibility of an end to conflict—and so they’ve chosen not to.

Politicians haven’t talked about the Initiative, haven’t responded to the Initiative, haven’t floated the Initiative via influential proxies, and (perhaps most damningly) the press hasn’t paid it much attention, either. Instead, we’ve seen government efforts to cleanse the educational system of any reference to the Palestinian story, government insistence that any and all Palestinian demands are a threat to the Jewish state, and a press that’s too often willing to follow wherever the official narrative leads. After all, no one fails to report Palestinian violence—but nonviolent Palestinian activism? Meh.

So the question has to be asked: To what extent is a people responsible for knowing that which is knowingly kept from them? To what extent do they need to guess what no one is saying?

When the API’s general outline was spelled out, 55 percent of those surveyed said they’d support it to some extent; when asked whether they’d support Netanyahu if he reached a final status agreement based on those same principles, the yeses jumped to 69 percent.

No one has tried to prepare my fellow Israelis for the possibility of peace, and yet when presented with the truth about what’s actually on the table, nearly the same number that expressed prior ignorance expressed support.

We can’t know what the Middle East would look like today if Israel had pursued the API eleven years ago (or five years ago). We can’t know how Israelis would greet the Initiative today if they’d known about it all along.

But surely it matters that they didn’t know. Surely it matters that those with the power to tell them chose not to. And surely it matters that with just a little bit of knowledge, in spite of everything, Israelis say they want what the Arab League has to offer.

The most important question, though, is whether all this will matter to the politicians who kept the information from them in the first place.

Graffiti in upscale Jerusalem neighborhood reads “Those who believe him are afraid,” a play on the popular religious saying: “Those who believe are not afraid.”

Crossposted from Open Zion/The Daily Beast. (To follow the links embedded in the post – particularly those relevant to Palestinian nonviolence).

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by emilylhauser on June 14, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by emilylhauser on June 14, 2013

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Under Israel’s Lapid, poor get poorer.

Israel’s newest golden boy, Yair Lapid, is lurching through his first few months as Finance Minister, and losing quite a bit of sheen as he goes. As Haaretz reported last month, the budget he’s presenting to the government this week will cut deep into the everyday lives of the middle class and poor alike, and grand governmental plans (such as new limitations on budgets to the ultra-Orthodox and Arab sectors) are running into brick walls.

The most onerous items [in the budget] include a 1.5 percent increase in income tax rates, a [$2 billion] cut in government spending in the remaining months of 2013 and another [$4 billion next year]. VAT will rise 1 percent in June and children’s allowances will be cut to [$39] a month per child.

VAT, for instance, is just about the most regressive tax around: An extra 1 percent tax on life’s essentials will hardly be felt by the wealthy and will sting those in the middle—but the poor will find themselves struggling to choose between healthy food and cheap food, clothes for the kids or the electricity bill. As Ynet reported last month, another 40,000 Israeli families are likely to find themselves living under the poverty line if Lapid’s budget is passed, and the poor will simply, inexorably, grow poorer. Given that just last month, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found Israel to have the highest poverty rate among all its 33 members, additional burdens on the poor seem particularly cruel.

And all of that is, frankly, awful. But you know what makes it worse? This, reported just last week:

An analysis of the list of the 500 wealthiest Israelis reveals that the past year has been one of the best ever for the rich here. The value of their collective assets has climbed from [$23.2 billion] a year ago to [$26 billion] this year—a new record. The number of billionaires here has risen to 67—another record. Why is that? Most of the billionaires did absolutely nothing that would explain their bonanzas. For most of them, the money was like a gift from the heavens, just another manifestation of an extraordinary period for the global markets.

…Plain and simply, if you were rich 12 months ago, now you are richer—even if you never left home or took a year-long vacation from your business affairs.

Also reported just last week:

The Bank of Israel on Monday published a report on the banking system, exposing figures that had been kept secret for years… showing that the banks have tens of thousands of workers who earn five and ten times as much as the average wage. It isn’t just the top executives at each bank…. Billions are going to an entire caste. Call it the banking caste.

In the last two years, under pressure from the social justice protest and campaigns led by this newspaper [Haaretz], Israelis became aware of economic concentration: the ways that a handful of powerful connected people and thousands of their cronies bilk the public of millions each year. En route they have trampled the press, politics and the other watchdogs of democracy and the free market. But the true distortions in the Israeli economy are far deeper and wider. Alongside the economic-concentration clique is a long list of organized pressure groups, who through decades of lobbying organized the economy for their own greater good. The banking system is one such giant pressure group.

And, on a much smaller scale, there was of course this, about which I wrote last month:

Per Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office’s request, a special “rest chamber” was installed in the airplane which took the PM and his wife to Margaret Thatcher’s funeral in London.

… The airline received $427,000 for the flight, $127,000 of which were paid for the chamber and its complex installation, which required electricians, engineers, porters and additional workers.

A lot has happened since the Jewish State was established in 1948. Television, for instance (even in Israel). Peace with Egypt and Jordan. A virtual end to the original idea of the kibbutz. Israel even won the Eurovision Song Contest a few times, once led to the win by a transgender pioneer. Things change, is what I’m saying, and I don’t think we should be shocked that the social support and communal identity that once marked Israel’s particular form of socialism has essentially passed from the world.

But this? Literally forcing more children to go hungry while Bibi travels in style and bankers and billionaires add to their wealth by doing nothing?

This is not just a repudiation of musty notions of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”—this is a shanda of the first order. Yair Lapid, and this entire government, should be ashamed.

Crossposted from Open Zion/The Daily Beast. (To follow the links relevant to this post, please click through to the post on Open Zion).

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by emilylhauser on June 14, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by emilylhauser on June 14, 2013

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Gender inequality is not just an ultra-Orthodox issue.

If you’re hoping that Israel’s Orthodox community is coming around to a more egalitarian approach to life in the Jewish State—you know, an approach that doesn’t vandalize women’s faces on posters, doesn’t spit on women praying, and doesn’t make women ride at the literal back of the bus—well, I’m not sure your hope is well-placed.

Reporting on “Asi and Tuvia,” a new internet series produced for the dati leumi sector (“national religious,” that is: Israel’s largely right-wing modern Orthodox community) Tamar Rotem writes in Haaretz that:

[“Asi and Tuvia”] is actually pretty relatable, even for a secular audience…. It’s only when watching a whole batch of episodes in a row that one notices something startling: None of them feature a single girl or a woman.

Just to be clear: “Asi and Tuvia” isn’t geared toward the ultra-Orthodox. Israel’s ultra-Orthodox aren’t likely to have TVs or computers in their homes, and if they do, the kids aren’t sitting and watching smiling men in knitted kippot, they’re being kept very far away.

No, this woman-free landscape is created specifically with the modern Orthodox in mind.

Arutz Meir caters specifically to families from the religious Zionist sector, a population which has moved more and more in recent years toward gender-segregation and the exclusion of women…. Public singing by women, even by 4-year-old girls, is no longer permissible, let alone on-screen. In fact, any mention of women has been removed from many of the schoolbooks used in religious schools.

The absence of women has become especially prominent in illustrated Jewish texts, such as the Passover Hagaddah and the Megillat Esther for Purim. “It’s absurd that there are now Hagaddah books in which it looks as if only men left Egypt,” says Rachel Azaria, a Jerusalem councilwoman who represents the Yerushalmim Party and is one of the leading figures in the struggle against gender-segregation and the exclusion of women.

“Our religious Zionist kindergarten had a Passover Hagaddah in which Pharaoh’s daughter is pulling Moses out of the water. Only her hand could be seen; her face was hidden behind bushes,” says Azaria…. “What is of concern here is the question of what part women play in the Jewish story.”

Given the growing number of kids being taught in Israel’s religious schools—nearly a quarter of all Hebrew-speaking kids—this trend isn’t some little religious curiosity, it’s a real problem. Witness, for instance, the fact that these state-funded schools now enforce segregated classrooms from the moment the girls leave third grade.

Women have only ever clung to the margins of the Jewish narrative, and it’s only been in the past half-century or so that brave women and their male allies have begun to successfully push back against the denial of our reality. Half of history’s Jews have already had their history systematically erased—every textbook devoid of women’s faces just makes the problem worse.

Needless to say, the reason for the removal of women from public discourse is because we might tempt or distract the men—a policy which a priori sexualizes women (and, apparently, four year old girls) just as badly (if not, in fact, more so) than secular society.

Asi Tzobel, co-star and content manager for the internet channel on which “Asi and Tuvia” is broadcast, describes himself as “more liberal” than some of the families to which his show is geared, but says that, regardless of his own opinions, “the Orthodox person looks at secular culture and sees a breakdown, a real catastrophe…. I can sympathize with these sentiments.”
Tamar Rotem continues:

But why not show girls and women in modest attire? Why should they be completely left out, and how does this address the supposed breakdown in society?

Tzobel acknowledges that total segregation may be extreme. “In navigation there is a term called ‘deliberate deviation.’ You aim slightly off-target in order to find the right path,” he says. “What is happening in the other [secular] camp offers no real alternative. So we try to follow a safe path, knowing that we can make adjustments later, as is happening now with the advent of a [religious] cable channel.”

“The other camp offers no real alternative.” Huh.

How’s this for an alternative: How about having enough respect for the divine image that the Holy One Blessed Be He invested in all humans to not see all women (and girls) everywhere as sirens attempting to lure the pure-hearted and vulnerable males of the species into acts of depravity? How about holding men responsible for their own actions? How about not fetishizing the female form until it no longer holds any humanity? How about not being afraid of the very sexuality with which the Holy One gifted us, in all His mercy?

Oh well.  A woman can dream.

As long as she does it silently, and in the dark.

Crossposted from Open Zion/The Daily Beast (to get to the links embedded in the original post, please click through to the original post!)

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by emilylhauser on June 13, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Israel/Palestine, The Daily Beast

Posted by emilylhauser on June 13, 2013

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The anti-two-staters dominating Israel’s government.

As Ali Gharib wrote in these pages last week, Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister announced loud and clear on Thursday that the government in which he sits, the government put together and ostensibly headed by Prime Minister Netanyahu, would block any effort to establish a two-state peace with the Palestinians, and that moreover, the Likud, the party to which he and the PrimeT Minister both belong, is “legally” prevented from supporting any such resolution of the conflict. Interestingly, Danny Danon made this announcement in the course of an interview with the English-language website Times of Israel, and it’s worth remembering that the English-speaking world is where both Secretary of State Kerry and President Obama reside. Coincidence? Who can say?

Late yesterday, The Forward’s J.J. Goldberg wrote that Danon is hardly the only in-house refuesnik, and that indeed,

coalition whip Yariv Levin of Likud—he’s the guy in charge of rounding up Knesset votes whenever a bill comes to the floor—announced Wednesday that he would be assuming co-chairmanship of a new Lobby for the Land of Israel caucus within the Knesset to oppose any territorial concessions in the West Bank.

coalition whip Yariv Levin of Likud—he’s the guy in charge of rounding up Knesset votes whenever a bill comes to the floor—announced Wednesday that he would be assuming co-chairmanship of a new Lobby for the Land of Israel caucus within the Knesset to oppose any territorial concessions in the West Bank.

Levin is set to launch the new caucus with his fellow coalition hawks on Tuesday evening; Gil Hoffman reports in the Jerusalem Post that it will boast 35 Members of Knesset, “plus the outside support of several cabinet ministers who cannot join caucuses”—which, according to Arutz 7, includes Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, Housing Minister Uri Ariel, and Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, “to name a few.” Goldberg does the math and finds that Levin’s caucus appears to now be home to a majority of Netanyhu’s 68-member government coalition. (Also notable is the fact that two members of Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party have joined the caucus, despite of their party boss’s professed support for a two-state solution.)

Levin told the Jerusalem Post that “this is not intended to be a maneuver against the prime minister, and it should not be interpreted that way,” but it’s just a little bit hard for any observer of Israeli politics not currently under a rock to see it as anything but.

After all, Levin is also the author of a bill intended to render Israel’s democracy subservient to its Jewish nature, and is numbered among Likud’s hard-right younger generation, a group which includes not only Deputy Defense Minister Danon, but also Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Ze’ev Elkin (on record as wanting to extend Israeli sovereignty over “the maximum” of the West Bank) and Deputy Transportation Minister Tzipi Hotovely. As Goldberg notes,

after doing well in the Likud primaries last fall, the group was expecting that a few of their number would be appointed ministers in the new cabinet. Instead they all received deputy ministerships, a snub that’s only fueled their readiness to confront and embarrass Bibi.

Netanyahu has said that these MKs don’t speak for the government, and that neither does Danon. But if their views represent the opinion of more than half his coalition—who on earth does speak for the government? Four years ago, Netanyahu told an audience at Bar Ilan University that he would pursue a two-state peace—are we to honestly believe that that “commitment” carries more weight than the people who get to vote on it (should he, you know, ever bring it to a vote)?

Funny side note: Yariv Levin, founder of the Land of Israel Caucus, is also on recent record as being very annoyed with Justice Minister Tzipi Livni over appointments to the Knesset’s Judicial Appointments Committee. Venting his irritation to Haaretz, he said:

The main problem is that members of the current coalition are systematically seeking to hamper each other instead of working together … Ministers veto one another instead of looking for ways to cooperate with each other. That is the coalition’s main problem.

There’s a Hebrew word for people like Yariv Levin: Chutzpadik. And there’s an English word for governments like Netanyahu’s: Troubled.

That last word also applies, in case you’re wondering, to diplomatic efforts like those of John Kerry.

Crossposted from Open Zion/The Daily Beast. (There are also a bunch of links embedded in the original. If you want to follow the reporting trail, check the post out at OZ, please!)

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by emilylhauser on June 12, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Israel/Palestine, The Daily Beast

Posted by emilylhauser on June 12, 2013

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Gay, religious, and proud in Tel Aviv.

gay pride tel aviv“Pinkwashing”—the calculated exploitation by Israel’s government of the LGBTQ community’s hard-won  civil and social gains as a beard for the human rights abuses of the occupation—is a thing. It’s real, it’s documented, and the sheer cynicism becomes even clearer when we consider that the government that conducted a PR campaign around gay-friendly Tel Aviv is the same government that gives disproportionate power to religious parties that reject all that Gay Pride stands for.

But what is also a thing, what is also real, is Israel’s actual LGBTQ community, and the joyous celebration that is Tel Aviv’s Gay Pride Week—a multi-hued happening to which people travel from all over the world, because it’s a blast. Witness the fact that this year’s “Official Video of Tel Aviv Pride Week” (which, okay, I admit: I did not knowthat was a thing) is performed by the straight and wildly popular Mizrahi singer Omer Adam (video below). Gay or straight, Pride is one of the best weeks of the year to be in the city that I still consider my home.

The big event is, of course, the parade itself, which will take place on Friday. It’ll feature all the usual suspects—Adonises and Amazons in itty-bitty clothes; rainbow flags, clothes, and hair; the famous and the wanna-be. But participants will also find a quieter, ultimately more subversive presence, as well:

Havruta, the organization for religious gay men, and Bat Kol, the organization for religious lesbian women, have been marching in Pride parades in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa for the past four years.

“In the past few years, we realized we bring a different and unique voice to the march, especially in Tel Aviv,” says one of Havruta’s chairmen, Daniel Jonas, explaining how their presence helps bridge Judaism and the LGBT community. “We represent something else, more moderate, more communal,” he says.

He admits that the parade’s debauched atmosphere doesn’t totally jive with their taste – “It’s not exactly something you’d see in a synagogue” – but the visibility is important.

“Pride attracts many people and lots of media,” Jonas points out. “So many young religious people around the country are exposed to us. After Pride every year, I get tons of calls from people who realize they can contact someone.”

As wonderful as Pride Week is, it’s typically a week apart, much like the community doing all the dancing. Though there has been real movement, across the globe, toward the recognition of the civil and human rights of the LGBTQ community, we still have a mighty long way to go, not least in not insisting that the people line up neatly with the colorful stereotypes. As Haaretz reporter Brian Schaefer notes, “the delegation of proud, God-fearing religious gays and lesbians appearing in the parade… remind us that sexuality and spirituality are not mutually exclusive.”

Indeed, they are not. I would even suggest that they are, or can be, deeply and essentially linked, and that it is a mitzvah of the first order for straight Jews to welcome our LGBTQ brothers and sisters with open arms, and stand with them in their struggles.

The Jewish and LGBTQ narratives share a crucial parallel: The personal, in-the-flesh knowledge of being a stranger in a strange land. I’m grateful to Havruta and Bat Kol for their participation in Tel Aviv’s Pride events—they’re praying with their feet, and likely saving Jewish lives as they go.

*

P.S. For my money, the single most “Tel Avivi” moment of the video comes at the very end, when the performers happen to run into a couple of women just doing their morning yoga.

*****

Crossposted from Open Zion/The Daily Beast.

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by emilylhauser on June 6, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by emilylhauser on June 6, 2013

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Painting a green line through Jerusalem.

green line Jerusalem

An activist paints a literal Green Line on June 5, 2013 in Jerusalem, Israel. (A. Daniel Roth)

There is a green line that runs through the city of Jerusalem.

It exists only on maps, and pretty much only on maps not printed by the State of Israel or other Jewish institutions, but it exists, and it represents a part of the international border between Israel and the West Bank as of June 4, 1967.

It exists even though official Israel and its supporters have done everything within their not-inconsiderable power to erase it in word and deed, creating a municipal behemoth that is currently one hundred times larger than the city was a century ago, pushing Palestinians out of neighborhoods and family homes and rendering fundamentally unholy the very city towards which Jews pray three times a day.

Today is June 5, of course, the anniversary of the opening salvos of the 1967 Six Day War in which Israel captured Jerusalem and the West Bank from the Jordanian army, the day to which many Israeli and Diaspora Jews look as the beginning of a miraculous liberation of our holy city—which is why a small group of Israeli and Diaspora activists chose this day to remind the world that no amount of governmental sleight-of-hand can change the fact that a border exists, and it runs through the very heart of a city that is endlessly declared Undivided.

Anti-occupation collective All That’s Left brought out paint and brushes, got down on the ground, and painted a literal green line where it exists on maps and should exist in political reality. Presumably because they’re good citizens (in Hebrew parlance,yeladim tovim Yerushalayim), rather than paint directly on the ground, they painted on long pieces of cardboard, and as they painted, they engaged with onlookers.

“Some have joined in the painting, others have yelled ‘jerusalem is only for Jews!’,” activist A. Daniel Roth tweeted as he painted, and later: “Religious Jewish woman agrees extremism is a problem, but wont concede the occupation is the cause…. Now the police are reading our literature and asking about the greenline that we are painting.”

Activist Emily Schaeffer explains:  “It’s disturbing to me that the average Israeli or visitor to Israel is able to go about daily life without noticing the occupation and oppression that exist on the other side of the Green Line, and that is because that line has been erased, both literally and conceptually.”

And of course, Israel has erased the international border, the Green Line, in many, many places, all up and down the West Bank, via settlement construction, Israeli-only roads, and the land-grabbing Security Barrier. The simple act of brushing green paint down a Jerusalem sidewalk was intended, activists say, to call attention to the entirety of occupation—not just that in the nation’s capital—on the anniversary of its beginning.

Yet it’s undeniable that the occupation is most easily denied in Jerusalem. Israeli and Diaspora Jews know what and where the West Bank is—they might support Israel’s settlement in that land, but they can’t fool themselves that it’s anything but a military occupation, at least for now.

But the average Israeli long ago stopped thinking of Gilo, Pisgat Ze’ev, Ramat Eshkol, and French Hill as settlements. They’re just neighborhoods. Nice places to live, where the kids can run through the hilly yards behind sandstone apartment blocs.

Reminding them, the Diaspora community, and the world at large that these neighborhoods (and many more like them) are every bit as illegal as the West Bank hilltop communities they see on the nightly news is an important, subversive act.

Because if American and Israeli Jews are going to support the settlement project and all it entails—occupation, human rights violations, a possible end to the two-state dream—they need to be honest about it. They need to actually see what it means, especially in our holy city.

Green paint and cardboard are a good place to start.

Crossposted from Open Zion/The Daily Beast.

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by emilylhauser on June 5, 2013  •  Permalink
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http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/painting-a-green-line-through-jerusalem/

Kerry: Unliateralism is bad for Israel.

John_Kerry_official_Secretary_of_State_portraitNot every international diplomat has both flown an Israeli Air Force jet, and can do a credible impression of the Israeli accent. Speaking to the American Jewish Congress on Monday, John Kerry employed the latter as he related the former: “Senator!” he said, recalling the Israeli co-pilot with whom he had flown, “You’re about to go over Egypt! Turn!”

Furthermore, not every international diplomat would overtly link Golda Meir’s philosophy of nationalism to the very people whose existence she denied. After quoting Meir (“We only want that which is given naturally to all peoples of the world: to be masters of our own fate, not of others”), Kerry said “the best way to truly ensure Israel’s security today… [is]by reaching a negotiated resolution that results in two states for two peoples, each able to fulfill their legitimate national aspirations.”

And finally, not every international diplomat would say flat-out that Israel’s propensity for unilateralism is actually a problem:

Some are wary because of Israel’s experience following the withdrawal of Gaza and Lebanon. You have no idea how many times I hear people say, “We withdrew from Lebanon, we withdrew from Gaza, and what did we get? We got rockets.” Well, folks, it’s worth remembering—these withdrawals were unilateral. They were not part of a negotiated peace treaty that included strong guarantees for Israel’s security. [emphasis Kerry’s]

All in all, the event was a classic Obama Administration affair: Kerry spent the first third of his speech making his audience happy (“I’m so pro-Israel, they gave me the keys to one of the planes!”); the second spoon-feeding them what they already knew (“Palestinians deserve a state too, c’mon”); and the final third telling them what they didn’t want to hear (“unilateralism is terrible”).

Much as they might not have wanted to hear it, though, the entire back-end of Kerry’s AJC speech was something of an ode to the hopelessness of unilateralism: the Secretary went on to note that Israel’s bilateral agreements with Jordan and Egypt have served it well, and that even under the new regime, Egypt is working to maintain the Israel-Gaza ceasefire. Regarding Israel’s unilateral establishment of a border on the West Bank, Kerry said:

The people who think somehow because there is a fence and because there’s been greater security and fewer people hurt are lulling themselves into a delusion that that somehow can be sustained. It cannot be.

And as he approached the finish line, he also said this:

We will always stand up for Israel’s security. But wouldn’t we both be stronger if we had some more company?

It was, honestly, a terrific speech, not least because Kerry was honest about things that folks in the trenches have been begging the U.S. to be honest about for years—but terrific speeches can only do so much. And only if the stakeholders are actually interested.

I don’t know how Obama and Kerry look at the current Israeli government and think there’s any hope of any movement toward even the most basic requirements of any peace deal any time soon, much less in the next couple of weeks. It’s a government controlled by the settler agenda, with several ministries in the hands of actual settlers, and all that “Lead Peace Negotiator”/Justice Minister Tzipi Livni can do is what she’s already doing: be a fig leaf.

But surely Obama and Kerry know this. Neither man is a dim bulb, and neither is unfamiliar with the players. Are they hoping to provoke a governmental crisis? Trying to nudge Israelis (69 percent of whom have said they would support Netanyahu should he change his spots and pursue the Arab Peace Initiative, but who recently voted overwhelmingly for parties that didn’t in any way address the need for a two-state peace) into demanding action? Does the Administration know something we don’t (always a possibility)?

The status quo cannot be sustained. The one-state solution, while it may soon be reality, isn’t so much a solution as a disaster-in-waiting. As Kerry said, “the absence of peace is perpetual conflict.”

I’ve tried and failed to lose all hope for Israel/Palestine more times than I can count. I’ve been in two-state game since the first intifada, and probably should have moved on to Celtic Studies by now. Part of me genuinely thinks that Kerry’s efforts are doomed—but another part isn’t ready to let go.

It was a terrific speech. I’m going to hold out a sliver of hope that a man who knows Israelis well enough to nail the accent might also know them well enough to move the dial.

Because honestly: There’s no way to unilaterally achieve peace.

Crossposted from Open Zion/The Daily Beast.

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by emilylhauser on June 5, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Domestic Politics, Israel/Palestine, The Daily Beast
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Posted by emilylhauser on June 5, 2013

http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/kerry-unliateralism-is-bad-for-israel/

How Lapid reflects the ill-defined Israeli center.

yair lapidIn a recent interview with the New York Times, Israeli Finance Minister Yair Lapid said the following: “I used to have so many opinions before I learned the facts.”

He was talking about his transition from television to politics, and I have to say, that is a remarkable sentence from a man who was very recently elected based on his pre-fact opinions—particularly, but not exclusively, as he continues to function in a fact-free zone.

Thousands of Israelis protested the entire array of austerity measures in Lapid’s budget earlier this month, largely because they are so at odds with the promises he appeared to be making in his election campaign. As my colleague Gershom Gorenberg noted yesterday, among Lapid’s many fanciful notions is the idea that forcing hunger on the children of detested sub-cultures is an effective way to mainstream their parents into society—and given his position in the government, Lapid’s budget and opinions about the people it’s meant to serve are a pretty important indication of his ability to function without the constraints of reality.

But Yair Lapid is far more than just Finance Minister. He’s Benjamin Netanyahu’s greatest threat in the political arena, he reflects the views of Israel’s somewhat ill-defined “center” (non-religious Jews who, when polled, say they want to be shed of the occupation but are pretty sure the Palestinians are entirely at fault for the failure of the peace process), and as head of the second largest party in the Knesset, he’s instrumental in setting policy and shaping public opinion.

Thus, we must listen closely to his opinions about a wide variety of things, particularly (but not exclusively) regarding the conflict with the Palestinians (which, no matter how hard Israeli officials try to distract us, remains the country’s most salient, most defining concern)—and as I have noted before, a time or two, Lapid is very much wedded to creating his own reality.

For instance, in his interview with the Times, he said that a two-state peace is “crucial” to Israel’s future, but rejected curtailing settlement activity and/or any possibility of a shared Jerusalem, while also apparently questioning whether Palestinians really want a state, anyway.

He furthermore called Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas—who has supported a two-state peace since 1977 and led Palestinian negotiations in Oslo in 1993—“one of the founding fathers of the victimizing concept of the Palestinians.” Speaking with the Israeli outlet Yediot in the course of the same media blitz that brought him to theTimes, Lapid also pronounced Abbas “still not psychologically ready for an agreement with Israel, either partial or full.”

I don’t know—is Yair Lapid ill-informed? Under-educated? Spectacularly dim? Lying through his sizeable teeth? Or some combination of those things?

Short of the statement that a two-state agreement is crucial (a line that’s now de rigueur for all wannabe national leaders of the Jewish State), there is nothing even remotely reality-based in any of the above.

The Palestinians will not agree to an agreement if Israel doesn’t stop building on their land; they will not give up their generations-long dream of a national capital in their holy city of Jerusalem; they do, in fact want a state; Abbas is the man who’s been trying to tell Palestinians that they may have to give up on a full return of their refugees (and, frankly, one doesn’t need to invent a narrative of victimization—the Palestinians are, among many other things, victims); and Abbas has been “psychologically ready” for a two-state peace since Yair Lapid became bar mitzvah.That’s the truth, not whatever fatuities the Finance Minister holds in his mind and sends out through his mouth.

Lapid does get one thing very right, however: He reflects that ill-defined Israeli center, the one that wants peace but doesn’t seem to understand the role its country plays in the perpetuation of war.

A brave politician, a bold politician, an honest politician would start telling his or her people the truth. Such a politician would do everything within his or her not-inconsiderable power to finally help shift the discourse away from Israel’s own “concept of victimization” and toward an honest reckoning of responsibility and possibility.

As Noam Sheizaf notes in +972:

The public simply doesn’t want to deal with the Palestinian issue in any meaningful way…. There is an almost instinctive, little-spoken understanding that both alternatives—both one-state and two-state solution—are inferior to the status quo. Talks regarding the “unsustainability” of current trends seem very abstract. So far, the occupation seems to be the most sustainable thing this country has known.

Politicians understand this, and those who don’t lose elections (see: Livni). Lapid certainly understands.

Whether Lapid is ignorant, dumb, or dishonest about the facts doesn’t change the one thing about which he is very clever: Public opinion.

He doesn’t want to be brave, or bold, or honest. Yair Lapid wants to be elected. And he’s not going to risk that for anything so inconsequential as the truth.

Crossposted from Open Zion/The Daily Beast.

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by emilylhauser on May 21, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by emilylhauser on May 21, 2013

http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/how-lapid-reflects-the-ill-defined-israeli-center/

Israel legalizes ‘outpost’ settlements.

The illegal outpost of Givat Asaf is among the four outposts to be declared legal.

The illegal outpost of Givat Asaf is among the four outposts to be declared legal.

By now the story almost writes itself: A high-ranking representative of the U.S. government—in this case, John Kerry—is slated to arrive soon in Israel, part of an effort to reinvigorate a peace process described as “moribund” since at least the early aughts. That effort is already making everyone mad, and Israel has taken the same steps it always takes to ensure that the U.S. government understands exactly where it stands: It’s expanding settlements.

The state said that it will act to legalize four West Bank outposts for which a delimitation order was issued in 2003 by the Israel Defense Forces GOC Central Command. Such an order allows the army to demolish at any time structures located within the delimited area.

In 2007, attorneys Michael Sfard and Shlomi Zecharya petitioned the High Court on behalf of the Israeli anti-settlement organization Peace Now, to implement the order.

…construction in the outposts continued despite the order. The High Court requested clarification from the state, and on Tuesday a detailed opinion concerning each one of the four outpost[s] was submitted to the court. In the document, the government said it had taken steps in recent weeks to retroactively authorize the outposts, which were built without official permission.

Built illegally, even by Israel’s standards; acknowledged as illegal, and thus ordered demolished; construction continues, despite state acknowledgement of the illegality of the outposts’ very existence—so sure, ten years later, why not rejigger your country’s laws to provide a patina of respectability? Why not give cover and support to lawbreakers in a manner that is not only insulting to all Israelis who respect the law, but which also flies in the face of the very thing to which your greatest ally has called you to commit yourself time and again?

There’s plenty that’s infuriating in this story, but there’s absolutely nothing new. If you’re a settler, you learned long ago that if you just push hard enough, you can do whatever you want. You will not be held accountable for illegal construction, any more than you might be for setting fire to Palestinian fields, or attacking Palestinian villages.

And if you’re an American diplomat, you learned nearly as long ago that pretty much no matter what you say, no matter what you do, no matter what international law or the global community might say—Israel’s going to keep building. Keep expanding its hold on the West Bank until it has a complete and final hold on all those lands it now occupies illegally, and has ground down or kicked out as many of those lands’ legal occupants as humanly possible. Keep going until a two-state piece is literally impossible, the Palestinians have given up all hope, and Israel reigns triumphant.

At least, as an American and Israeli citizen, I would hope that the Administration and State Department understand by now that that’s the plan. Because that’s the plan. I mean surely, any sentient being with two eyes in their head can see that that’s the plan? Even just one eye?

The only people who might, conceivably, change the plan’s course are all those same Americans. Only if and when it becomes diplomatically untenable for Israel to continue down this illegal and destructive course will my Israeli government even consider throwing on the brakes. Only if and when a U.S. government takes a firm stand and sticks by it will Israelis and Palestinians have so much as a chance at the peace that Kerry is working so hard to achieve.

But let me stress: The plan’s end-goal is, despite everything, unachievable. Israel will not be able to convince the Palestinians to give up all hope, and the Jewish State will ultimately be lost in the effort. At best, all Israel will be able to achieve is a single political entity in which constant, low-level ethnic violence makes any semblance of normal life a distant dream (which is to say: an even worse version of what already exists). That’s the best case scenario. I shudder to think about the other options.

It may already be too late for Kerry to do anything, frankly. Nothing and no one in the current Israeli government gives me any reason to believe that Israel has any interest in turning the country’s Titanic around. For what it’s worth, those who support the settlement project (which is virtually the entire government) appear to be genuine in their assumption that they can force their will on the world.

And why shouldn’t they?

Just like the settlers, Israel’s governments have never been held accountable for their actions. Witness Kerry’s upcoming trip.

Crossposted at Open Zion/The Daily Beast.

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by emilylhauser on May 17, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Domestic Politics, Israel/Palestine, The Daily Beast
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Posted by emilylhauser on May 17, 2013

http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2013/05/17/israel-legalizes-outpost-settlements/

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