Features- - Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper

The rational response to Israel’s state terror: #boycott
Amira Hass
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Israel has outsourced the occupation – it has turned the nations of the worlds into active participants. How? American citizens’ tax money funds the generous U.S. security aid to Israel and the close military cooperation with Israel. Their taxes, and taxes from other European and Western states, fund the partial reparations for the material and health damage caused by Israel’s rule and artificially resuscitates the existing order of violence. Gaza has not completely collapsed, because Western states and Qatar provide charity to the hundreds of thousands of people there whom Israel forbids to make a dignified living.

Western donations are not a safety net for the Palestinians, but rather a safety net for Israel’s prohibitions, restrictions and onslaughts. The donations, in their current form, come in lieu of clear and decisive political action against Israeli policy, which every World Bank report describes as a reason for economic disaster. And surely for more existential disasters to come. It is easier for these countries to spend their taxpayers’ money on expensive water tanks for villages without infrastructure. It’s easier for them to rebuild destroyed buildings for the third or fourth time than to order Israel to stop.

Why is it surprising, then, that people whose taxes are being used for hush money are beginning to enlist as guerilla fighters in the counter-offensive and boycotting? As unwilling sponsors, they are involved anyway, and it’s their democratic right to express their opinion about the illegitimate use of their money.

#Israel #terreur #occupation #Palestine #impunité #complicité “#communauté_internationale”

#BDS

After capturing Haifa, Ben-Gurion gave order to stop fleeing Arabs from returning
A letter going to auction reveals that Israel’s first PM tried to thwart British attempts to resettle ’the enemy’ in Haifa. The letter contradicts a testimony by Golda Meir.
By Ofer Aderet | May 26, 2015
Haaretz
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David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, gave an instruction aimed at preventing Haifa’s Arab residents who have fled the city during the 1948 War of Independence from returning to their homes as long as the fighting continued. This was revealed in a letter bearing Ben-Gurion’s signature, which will go on sale next week at the Kedem auction house in Jerusalem.

The letter was sent by Ben-Gurion on June 2, 1948, a month and a half after Haifa was captured and a few weeks after Israel’s independence was declared. It was addressed to Abba Khoushy, the secretary-general of the Haifa Workers’ Council, and later the city’s mayor.

“I hear that Mr. Marriot (Cyril Marriot, the British Consul in Haifa) is working to return the Arabs to Haifa. I don’t know how it is his business, but until the war is over we don’t want a return of the enemy. And all institutions should act accordingly” instructed Ben-Gurion.

The contents of this letter were published in 2002 in a book about Abba Khoushy that was written by Tzadok Eshel ("Abba Khoushy – Man of Haifa"). As with many of the letters that Ben-Gurion wrote to different people and institutions, this letter fell into private hands and is now up for sale. The opening bidding price is $1,800.

Ben-Gurion’s attitude to the Arab population that fled or was expelled from their homes during the war was not consistent. In Nazareth, he specifically instructed Israeli forces not to expel Arab residents: “Do not remove these residents from Nazareth,” he wrote. In Lod, however, there is one testimony according to which he instructed Yitzhak Rabin and other field commanders to expel the residents.

In her new biography of Ben-Gurion (‘Ben Gurion – Father of Modern Israel," published in English by Yale University Press) historian Anita Shapira states that Lod is the only case in which there is testimony to an instruction given by Ben-Gurion to deport Arabs. Shapira describes consultations held by field commanders and Ben-Gurion concerning the fate of the city’s Arab inhabitants, after the city’s capture in Operation Danny. “Ben-Gurion listened and did not respond. He had an exceptional capacity to remain silent when he wanted to. Only at the end of the discussion, as the commanders were about to return to the battlefield, he made, according to Rabin’s account, a waving-off gesture with his hand, muttering ’expel them.’"

David Ben-Gurion and Abba Khoushy (behind him, facing the camera). Photo by Fritz Cohen / GPO

What about Haifa? Here things get more complicated. Out of 70,000 Arabs who lived in the city when the war broke out, tens of thousands left during the first months. On April 22, 1948, when the city was captured by the Haganah (the Yishuv’s military forces), the Grand Mufti instructed Haifa’s Arab residents to leave rather than accept the terms of surrender. Shabtai Levy, the city’s first Jewish mayor, appealed to local leaders, asking them not to leave. The British tried to do the same, but to no avail. Except for a few thousand, the majority of Haifa’s Arabs left after the city was captured.
On May 1, after touring the area, Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary: “An amazing and terrible sight. a dead city… with barns, shops, small and large houses, old and new - with not a living soul except for some wandering cats… how did tens of thousands of people leave behind, in such panic, their houses and wealth?”

“What caused this flight? Was it just orders from above? It’s inconceivable that extremely wealthy people - and there were extremely wealthy people here, those with knowledge say, the richest in the whole land - would leave all their wealth behind just because someone commanded them to. Was it fear?”

A boat of Haifa refugees docking in Port Said, Egypt. Photo credit: Getty Images

Despite the shock felt by Ben-Gurion, the letter that surfaced and is now up for auction indicates that a month later he called for preventing Arab residents from returning to their homes. The letter contradicts the testimony of Golda Meir, who wrote in her book “My Life” that Ben-Gurion asked her to try and prevent the flight of Haifa’s Arabs.

“Ben-Gurion called me and said: ’I want you to immediately go to Haifa and see to it that the Arabs who remain in Haifa are treated appropriately. I also want you to try and persuade the Arabs who are already on the beach to return home. You have to get it into their heads that they have nothing to fear,’ he said. And so, I went immediately. I sat on the beach there and begged them to return home… I pleaded with them until I was exhausted but it didn’t work,” she wrote.

Meron Aran, one of the directors of the Kedem auction house, believes that Ben-Gurion ultimately preferred to prevent their return out of security considerations, but he also has another theory in mind. “It’s possible that he was already planning to house new immigrants who were already clamoring to get into the new country in the houses abandoned by the city’s Arabs.”

Haganah men walking in the streets of Haifa after the city was captured. Photo credit: Haganah archive.

Que sont devenus les descendants de Theodor Herzl : une succession de suicides, de morts d’overdose et de maladies mentales

Unveiling the tragedy of Theodor Herzl’s family - Features - Israel News | Haaretz
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Herzl has no direct descendants left today. His wife Julie died in 1907, three years after Herzl, after being hospitalized a number of times for mental illness and drug addiction. Their son Hans, who converted to a series of Christian denominations, shot himself in 1930, on the day of his sister Paulina’s funeral. Paulina also suffered from mental illness and drug abuse from a young age, and died at 40 of a heroin overdose.

Herzl’s youngest daughter, Margarethe (Trude), who had little contact with her siblings and also suffered from mental illness, died in the Thereseinstadt concentration camp in 1943. Her son, Stephan Theodor Neumann (who later Anglicized his name during World War II to Stephen Norman) – Herzl’s only grandchild – committed suicide by jumping off a bridge in Washington D.C. in 1946, after he learned of his parents’ death during the Holocaust. He was the only Zionist of Herzl’s descendants, and even made a quick visit to Palestine in 1945, a year before he killed himself.

A four-part television series that started this week on Channel 1, “The Herzls,” reveals that various relatives – some closer and some less so – of Herzl live among us in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Givatayim, Ramat Gan, Arad, Matat, Nazareth and Kibbutz Beit Hashita. Others were located in Vienna – living not far from Herzl’s home – Serbia, Croatia and Belgium. Some have hidden their relationship to Herzl from their children.

The work on the series was spread over five years, with breaks. The investigation discovered that the tragedy and drama continued to haunt the family even many years after Herzl’s death. One of the episodes focuses on the tragic figure of Frederika (Pnina) Herzl, a first cousin once removed of Herzl. Frederika was born in 1933 in Vienna to Max Herzl. In 1938, when she was 5, her parents felt it was dangerous for a Jewish girl bearing the name Herzl to live under the Nazi regime and sent her to her mother’s aunt and uncle in Czechoslovakia. In 1939, with the Nazi invasion of Prague, her parents signed a fictitious adoption order so Frederika could immigrate to Israel with her aunt and uncle. Her parents managed to escape the Nazis and survived the Holocaust, and in 1948 they too arrived in Israel – with a court order canceling the adoption. But when they asked to have their daughter back, they were told no.

In early 1948, before the founding of the State of Israel, an ugly and painful legal fight broke out over the girl, which further damaged the reputation of the Herzl family. The family’s legal battle received a great deal of local press coverage: Haaretz reported on February 24, 1948 on the court case, and other newspapers talked about the “tragedy of the Herzl family.”

The adoptive parents said they were worried her biological parents would return to Vienna with her, but the court ordered them to allow her parents to meet with her from time to time. Maariv reported that instead of bringing them closer, these meetings increased the suffering of her biological parents and she was very apathetic toward them, introducing her mother to her friends as her aunt.

In 1949 the Tel Aviv District Court ruled that Frederika would spend the holidays with her biological parents, “but even these meetings turned into a tragedy and the parents could not bear them. The two fell ill from their great sorrow,” reported the paper.

When she turned 18 in 1951, Frederika – who was called Pnina in Haaretz – asked to renew relations with her parents and met them. But even though her parents were very happy, the joy did not last for long and this was the last time they saw each other, reported the newspaper.

Max Herzl died in 1952, “broken and filled with suffering.” A relative said he committed suicide and later Frederika also attempted to kill herself, and was hospitalized under her adoptive parents’ name. After that people lost track of her, but the research for the television series found that she returned to Vienna and worked as a librarian, and was known in the local Jewish community. She died in 2009 – today only a cardboard sign marks her grave – and none of her relatives in Israel knew about her death.

“I read a lot of books written about Herzl,” Kipper Zaretzky told Haaretz. The book that influenced her the most was “Neguhot Min Ha’avar (Illuminations from the Past)” (in Hebrew) published in 1961 by historian Joseph Nedava, who also went on a search for Herzl’s relatives.

“He shows the difficult psychological journey Herzl’s children made,” she said. “Today, when you ask people on the street, they tell you: ‘Yes, they were all crazy.’ But it’s not so simple. In the series I try to show the long-suffering journey they traveled until the end,” said Kipper Zaretzky.

In 1949, Herzl’s remains were brought to Israel from Vienna for reinternment on the Jerusalem hill that bears his name. “Not a mourning parade was the funeral for Herzl’s bones in Jerusalem, but a victory march, victory of the vision that became reality,” Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion eulogized Herzl. In 2006, 56 years later, two of his children, Paulina and Hans, were reburied near him. A year later, his grandson’s remains were brought to Israel and in 2013 a memorial plaque was erected for Julia Herzl, who was cremated at her request and her ashes were lost over the years.

“The circle has been closed. All of the Herzl family have returned to be together, even if only symbolically,” Prof. Ariel Feldstein told Haaretz at the time. Feldstein was behind bringing Herzl’s children’s remains to Israel, as well as the plaque for Julia.

#Herzl-descendants

The downsides of Israel’s missions of mercy abroad
Disaster relief feeds the illusion that we can somehow be clever, creative and cooperative enough to make the world absolve us of everything else that is wrong with what we do.
By Anshel Pfeffer | Apr. 28, 2015 | | Haaretz
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Here are four things that Israel does well. Actually, it does them extraordinarily well. 

Few, if any countries, are so fast at using every means at their disposal to extricate its citizens in trouble abroad — whether it’s the foreign ministry, which expends a significant proportion of its limited resources on bailing businessmen out of jail and searching for lost trekkers on mountainsides, private specialists, who have made fortunes out of desperate parents of hikers in distress, and just about every other Israeli on Facebook quick to join an online search.

Ask any Israeli with a dual nationality which of his two governments will be there first in their hour of need. For all the longing of many Israelis for a second passport, they know who will be there when the chips are down. There really is no question. It’s a peculiar Israeli trait that no-one gets left behind in any circumstance and it really shouldn’t be taken for granted. Though it is. 

And even when no Israelis are involved, few countries are as fast as Israel in mobilizing entire delegations to rush to the other side of the world. It has been proved time and again in recent years, after the earthquake in Haiti, the typhoon in the Philippines and the quake/tsunami/nuclear disaster in Japan. For a country of Israel’s size and resources, without conveniently located aircraft carriers and overseas bases, it is quite an impressive achievement.

Another thing the Israelis are good at in this respect — and you wouldn’t normally expect it of them — is that, despite their usual brashness and know-it-all attitude, they don’t rush in immediately, but wait for a clear understanding of what the local authorities need most. Only then do they fly in with a tailor-made solution. After Fukushima, for example, the Japanese preferred for the Israelis to come later, after the rescue efforts were over, and open a field hospital to help with routine treatment in areas where the regular health services had been worst hit. 

And this of course highlights another field in which Israelis excel, often too much for their own good, but in these situations it’s just what you need — improvisation and off-the-cuff solutions.

As yet another rescue mission by the IDF and Israeli national and private rescue organizations is setting up in quake-hit Nepal, Israelis have every right to be proud of all this again. However, there are some flies in the ointment because there are also four things Israeli do rather badly which are also coming to the fore now.

For a nation of immigrants, whose young generation fly off to every corner of the world the moment they’re out of the army, Israelis are terribly parochial. The focus of the local media, professional journalists and Facebookers/tweeters was almost exclusively on the Israelis stuck in Kathmandu and on the hillsides. As of writing, there are reportedly still 11 Israeli tourists in Nepal who have yet to make contact with their families. All the rest of the Israelis there got out with at worst minor injuries.

Experiencing a massive earthquake is a traumatic experience, but for God’s sake, 10,000 people may have been killed, hundreds of thousands are homeless, historic landmarks have been obliterated. Most of the Israelis who wanted to leave are already on their way home, or back by now. Parents with their adopted surrogate children were flown out first by privately chartered business jets. Israelis found food and shelter in Kathmandu, both at the embassy and the Chabad house.

The headlines in some of the local papers of how they “went through hell” epitomize not only everything that is wrong with the Israeli media but the insularity of Israeli society in general. The media in other countries have similar tendencies, but also a certain sense of proportion. 

And now that nearly all the Israelis who were there during the quake are accounted for, the media have new local heroes to focus on. Our brave men and women selflessly working there to deliver succor to the Nepalese. Once again, when the saviors are Israeli, they will be getting much more attention than the victims they are aiding.

I’ve argued about this in the past with Israeli spokespeople who have insisted they are simply doing their jobs by informing the public about what the organizations they represent are doing, and they have a point. But it doesn’t fix the impression of an Israel that is trying to milk tragedy in a faraway country for PR benefit.

Disasters are sexy, every news editor and publicist knows that. The problem is that so much of Israeli assistance to developing countries is disaster relief and not nearly enough is the mundane, much less media-friendly work that is needed in-between the brief periods when the West’s attention is momentarily fixed on those parts of the world.

The sad reality is that Israel doesn’t do international development well. Sure, Israeli companies and researchers are world-leaders in various fields of agricultural technology and tropical medicine and are busy doing incredible work in every continent, but so little of that is publicly-financed. The OECD recommends that its members dedicate 0.35 percent of their national budgets to international development, Israel spends less than a quarter of that. This point shouldn’t detract from the contribution of the rescue delegations, but it does highlight the fact that they are woefully inadequate in fulfilling Israelis’ self-image.

And here’s the fourth way Israelis fail themselves. All the hype leads to the delusion that somehow these missions of mercy should earn us membership of the enlightened nations’ club. But it never can. Using hard-earned capabilities and a tiny fraction of your human and material resources to help those in need in countries far away is what a decent democracy does. It won’t make you one, no matter how much you expend on overseas aid.

The way Israelis embark on these laudable campaigns simply feeds the illusion that we can somehow be clever, creative and cooperative enough to make the world absolve us of everything else that is wrong with what we do. Footage of officers in IDF uniform extricating survivors from beneath ruined buildings and delivering babies in a sophisticated field hospital won’t replace other disturbing images.

The fact that Israel can mobilize itself so effectively and carry out complex operations thousands of miles beyond its borders won’t make the world regard us differently. If anything, it will increase the mystification of how such a nation can’t get around to fixing such fundamental flaws back home if it so badly wants to be a member of the club.

Newly released documents show a darker side of Ben-Gurion -
The minutes of a 1962 discussion about education reveals another facet of the racism of Israel’s first prime minister vis-a-vis immigrants from the Arab states.
By Gidi Weitz | Apr. 24, 2015 | Haaretz
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Here’s an intriguing historical fact: Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, wanted to prepare a future leadership of people of Mizrahi origin – that is, of North African or Middle Eastern descent. His idea was to cultivate a group of Mizrahi leaders that would govern the country beginning from the end of the 1970s.

Unfortunately, he came up with this idea for the wrong reasons.

In July 1962, a few officials met in the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem to discuss matters relating to the Teachers Federation. Quickly, though, the seemingly bland topic generated a stormy argument about Mizrahim (then known as the “Oriental communities”) and Ashkenazim. The question that split the participants was whether children should be educated within a common, uniform school framework, or whether a differential education system should be introduced at different levels. “We have come to the most vital question,” Ben-Gurion stated. To which the head of the Teachers Federation, Shalom Levin (afterward a Labor Alignment MK), responded, “It’s true that this is the most critical question of all,” and proceeded to explain why he preferred uniform education without making distinctions between children.

“We believe,” said Levin, “that if the children are divided according to their levels of intelligence, communication between the Oriental communities and the children of European origin will cease altogether.”

According to the minutes of the meeting, which are preserved in the Labor Party archives, Levin told the participants about a physician from Iraq named Dr. Sasson, who was employed by the Clalit HMO.

“He met me in a furious state and told me that his daughter’s class was divided into two groups of advanced and regular studies,” Levin related. “He thinks his daughter was placed in the regular-studies group because she is of Iraqi origin. This experiment failed in Tel Aviv, but I saw for myself how badly it wounded Dr. Sasson’s heart.”

Ben-Gurion, who was vehemently opposed to Levin’s philosophy, also cited a rationale relating to skin color. “The danger we face is that the great majority of those children whose parents did not receive an education for generations, will descend to the level of Arab children,” the father of the nation said, revealing his real opinion of both the Oriental and Arab communities.

He added, “In another 10-15 years they will be the nation, and we will become a Levantine nation, [unless] with a deliberate effort we raise them to [the level of] the customs you follow, as you, became used to them only among European Jewry, at a time when the Jewish nation was European. But it is not. If we [wanted to] make a joint effort to elevate talented people from those communities to [the level of] an elite who will possess values and will be able to manage the nation as we wish it to be managed – that would be impossible according to your interpretation…

“The problem is what the character of the Oriental communities will be. They will be the majority of the nation, they have six-to-eight children and the Ashkenazim only two children… The question is whether they will lower the nation or [whether] we will succeed by artificial means and with great efforts to elevate them.”

Ben-Gurion advocated the establishment of an institution that would cultivate the talented members of the Oriental communities, so that they would be able to take over the country’s leadership within less than a generation. “There are differences among them, too,” Ben-Gurion noted, and went on to heap praise on a Moroccan-born Tiberias teenager named Shimon Shetreet, who had won the Bible Quiz for Youth three years earlier, at the age of 13.

“He is first in Bible,” Ben-Gurion observed. “Not only he is a smart lad – his mother is sharp and his father is a splendid Jew… If we make efforts so that children of a family like this will receive a more excellent education… we will succeed… Not all of them, not the average, [because] an average nation will mean an Arab average – that is the way they were across the generations… In my opinion, this is the nation’s central concern at this time, this will determine the nation’s character.

“In another 15-20 years they will be the majority,” the prime minister continued. “They will not vote for people of European origin. We’re done with this business of European descent. If we do not make special efforts, the Iraqi father, too, will be angry because his son isn’t among those sent for advanced studies; we need to know that the talented children will receive more intensive education… [The nation] will not be elevated just by knowing Hebrew. All the Arabs can speak Hebrew, the way of speech itself already makes no different, all the children will speak Hebrew, that is not the worry.

“The question is what kind of Jews they will be. Will they be the Jews we want them to be, or will they be like the Jews of Morocco the way they were? The elite of the Oriental communities should be accorded education, and a special effort needs to be made to that end. If you are talking about average uniform education, then woe betide us. The law of the average will pull and elevate the few Ashkenazim upward. Is that what we want?”

Levin did not flinch. “It will not succeed,” he stated, “if the main effort is not aimed at their preschoolers… at the children of those communities… The preschool has to take the place of the home, the role that the home plays for Ashkenazi children.”

“Preschool alone will not elevate them,” Ben-Gurion responded. “They have to go to high school and university.” “

“Of course, but together with Ashkenazim,” Levin said.

“Don’t worry about the Ashkenazim,” Ben-Gurion said, adding, “How many Ashkenazim will you have in 20 years? Very few… We have to make an effort so that the future of the nation will be as though Europe [its Jewish population] was not annihilated… What will the country be like if it becomes Levantine? Will American Jewry take pride in us?”

Ben-Gurion’s prophecy did not come true: The Mizrahim do not constitute an overwhelming majority of Israel’s population. Individuals of European descent and their heirs have continued to hold the reins of government. The prejudices, however, are still with us. On the other hand, Shimon Shetreet, the kid from Tiberias whose singularity Ben-Gurion gloried in as compared to his inferior compatriots, became a professor of law, a Labor Party MK and a cabinet minister in the government of Yitzhak Rabin.

In 1980, three years after the members of the Oriental communities ousted Labor from power for the first time, and a year before the violent election campaign in which an anti-Mizrahi speech by the entertainer Dudu Topaz played a starring role, an internal forum of the Labor Party met to discuss the party’s alienation from the Mizrahim.

Shetreet told his fellow members at that time: “The negative image, which stuck with no justification to the communities that immigrated from the countries of the East, was in large measure created by the dominant group. Anyone who thinks that it started in the 1950s is wrong. I invite you to [examine] the historical files from the beginning of the century, to see the list of wages, which ranked the workers in the following order: Hebrew worker, Yemenite [Jewish] worker, Arab worker… Society here talks about people who are ‘Moroccan but nice,’ or someone who ‘was born in Iraq, but never mind.’”

“‘Never mind’ is also said about the Yekkes [German-speaking Jews],” someone interjected. Shimon Peres, Ben-Gurion’s disciple, quipped, “Does anyone want the floor in the name of the Yekkes?”

“People adopt the public image that others hold of them,” Shetreet continued. “When they’re asked where they were born, they reply apologetically, ‘I was born in Morocco.’ So what?”

Thirty-five years later, along came artist Yair Garbuz and his remark during last month’s election campaign about how “amulet-kissers, idol-worshipers and people who prostrate themselves at the graves of saints” are controlling Israel.

Un reportage très intéressant sur un couple d’Arabes Israéliens qui tente d’intégrer une communauté israélienne “multiculturelle” “unique, qui prône l’ouverture sur toutes les religions, la tolérance et l’acceptation de l’autre". Et qui essuie un refus.

But would you celebrate Israel’s Independence Day? - Features - Israel News | Haaretz
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Nes Ammim rejected an Israeli Arab couple who wanted to join the self-described open, tolerant, multicultural community because they answered the question wrong.
By Amira Hass

“What will you do if the community invites you to a barbecue on Independence Day?” asked one of the six selection committee members of the Nes Ammim community. He asked the question in English, for the benefit of two of his fellow committee members who were Dutch – members of this Christian community that was established between Acre and Nahariya in 1963.

In 2012, the community changed its original designation and started releasing agricultural land to allow for expanded housing construction, as part of the process of becoming a “multicultural” community. Despite this, none of the four Israelis on the panel was Arab. They did not introduce themselves by their full names to the interviewees, and two of the committee members them did not even live in the community when the interviews took place.

The two candidates appearing before the committee were both shocked yet also not entirely surprised by the question. They were human rights lawyer Abeer Baker and Ala Khalikhal, a writer, translator and editor. It didn’t surprise them because this is precisely the kind of question Palestinian citizens of Israel often hear on the street – reflecting ignorance, insensitivity or the desire to irritate. But it did surprise them since they weren’t expecting to hear it at a selection committee for a “unique, high-quality community based on the principles of openness to all religions, tolerance and acceptance of the other,” as is stated on the community’s website. They also were surprised since they thought that in an interview for this kind of community, the bar for measuring acceptance of the Other would be higher, and the horizons for a joint life wider.

Baker and Khalikhal, parents of 5-year-old Shada and 1-year-old Mohammed, surprised some of their friends when they decided to move to a newly emerging Jewish-Arab community. For both of them, though, this was a natural decision, compatible with their vision of a secular, democratic state for two nations in which the basic condition for its establishment is dialogue with the Jews of Israel, states Khalikhal.

In mid-2014, when the Nes Ammim initiative was in its second trial year, Baker and Khalikhal heard that not enough Arabs had registered and that an Arab marketing person had been employed to address this. Khalikhal was familiar with the swimming pool at Nes Ammim from his childhood, since Arabs swam there without hindrance. He knew that the Christian founders of the community wanted to live among Jews as a way of seeking atonement after the Holocaust. The definition of the community as a joint one appealed to him and his wife.

They also knew that the Western Galilee community was built on land that was legally and freely sold by a resident of the Arab town of Abu Snan, and not on terrain from which its Palestinian owners had been expelled in 1948 and then expropriated by the Israel Land Authority. As a result, they thought they wouldn’t have to face nagging questions every morning, such as who are the real and lawful owners of the land? Where are they now – perhaps in the embattled Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria? And what other tragedies befell them after the original one? And, yes, the idea of a house with a garden also attracted them – a small bourgeois dream within reach. “Bourgeois” is a self-directed barb used by Khalikhal. The price was 1,600,000 shekels ($405,000).

It’s important for them that there is a safe playground for the children and, of course, that “the values on which we raise them will find natural expression in their neighborhood, so they don’t live in dissonance between values they learn at home and their immediate surroundings,” explains Baker.

They aren’t concerned about being different. For example, Shada often hears them say they don’t believe in Allah – words not often heard in their community. “Who knows, maybe in her rebellious years she’ll wear a veil,” says Khalikhal, sarcastic as usual. A few weeks ago, when Baker muttered “With Allah’s help,” little Shada looked at her scoldingly and said, “But there is no Allah.” Khalikhal knows they could have made things easier by telling their daughter that God exists. But if they were looking for an easier life, perhaps the interview at Nes Ammim would have gone differently.

When asked about the Independence Day barbecue, Baker told the interviewers that they would turn down the invitation. Khalikhal added, “We live in Acre and there are fireworks on that day. People dance in the streets and we remain at home.” Another choice they could have made while their Jewish neighbors were celebrating their independence at a barbecue would be to participate in a march commemorating one of the Palestinian villages Israel destroyed in 1948.

“My philosophy is not to put a damper on anyone’s joy, but to insist on having my own space,” explains Baker. “On that day I have a right to live as I wish. [However], this is not accorded to us because of the Other’s refusal to accept my space, because of the Other’s difficulty in understanding that, logically – in essence and in principle – you can’t ask me if I’ll come and join Independence Day celebrations.”

Both of them are children of “internal” refugees, citizens of Israel whose lands were confiscated and homes destroyed by Israel after 1948. Baker’s father was from the village of Safuriyya (now Tzippori, near Tiberias). Khalikhal’s father is from Kadita, which is now an alternative-style Jewish community in the Galilee, built alongside cisterns and stone houses, including the one owned by his family. They often pass close to these strikingly beautiful places, in which they could have been living without the filter of a selection committee. These places are off-limits to them and their imaginations.

Up until the first interview in 2014, Baker and Khalikhal were under the impression that the committee phase was simply a technicality. They were encouraged to sign a contract before the interview took place, to choose a plot for their house and to pay an advance of 25,000 shekels. “It didn’t occur to us that we might not be accepted,” admits Baker. She believed that, of all communities, this one would recognize that there are different kinds of Arabs; that there is diverse political activity and multiple viewpoints among them.

The couple was asked why they had chosen Nes Ammim. Baker replied that she is frustrated by contemporary life in Acre. She was born and raised in that city and remembers the truly mixed neighborhood she lived in and the Jewish girls (from Georgia) who were her friends. It used to be and to feel like a binational and multicultural place, without the hiding of differences, but without obstacles to friendship. “I explained during the interview that today there are no spontaneous mixed social encounters between children and that this is dangerous” she recalls. “And then one of the Jewish interviewers interrupted and pointed out that his mother lives in Acre and still asks for and gets sugar from her Arab neighbors. I understood that for him, saying ‘Good Morning’ to an Arab in the elevator is enough for him to state that there is a Jewish-Arab communal life there.”

At the second interview, held last January, the Jewish Israelis were silent and the Dutchmen asked the questions. The woman on the committee told Khalikhal that she had Googled him and found an interview with him in which he likened the Knesset to a garbage dump. Khalikhal explained that he knows what goes on there since he had worked as a parliamentary assistant for half a year. To his surprise, the committee never asked about his literary work and only focused on the outspoken style of the opinion pieces he writes. “I told them that as a member of a minority I don’t have access to a microphone, as the majority does, so occasionally I have to yell.” Baker continues reconstructing the interview: “The Dutchman said that it’s bad to yell, that it’s impolite.” Khalikhal understood that his metaphor was lost on that person.

And then, says Baker, came the comment that blew it all up. “The Dutchman said that they thought we were a very interesting and intelligent couple, but that they were afraid that we would foster confrontations in the community.” Khalikhal replied: “Do you want to tell me that the people in this room are less intelligent than we are and that this is the reason you selected them as community members?” The two of them explained that they were not seeking confrontations and were not concerned about ideological differences. Baker explained that as one ages one realizes that it is possible to hold a dialogue even with ‘enemies,’ accompanying that last word with her fingers indicating quotation marks. One of the men then jumped up and asked in English: “Who are your enemies?” Baker explained in Hebrew that she meant “rivals.”

It didn’t take long for the letter of rejection to arrive. The deposit was returned. The two tried to appeal the verdict. “The community is not completely populated yet, and communal life has not yet been put to a real test,” they wrote. “Thus, disqualifying someone in advance could derive from prejudice on the part of people who have never experienced joint communal life. It’s highly doubtful that the committee members who have not yet lived in the community and have not yet internalized its principles in practical ways can judge our suitability. Our sense is that our disqualification stemmed from the wish not to hold a dialogue with someone expressing legitimate opinions that may not be acceptable by some of the community’s members.”

The selection committee replied: “We emphatically reject the claim that the decision to refuse your request was based on discrimination and unwillingness to dialogue. Nes Ammim is a mixed community of Jews and Arabs, Muslim and Christian. It espouses coexistence and interfaith tolerance. We currently have members of all faiths and ‘Arab’ (sic) candidates were accepted both before and after your rejection.”

The office at Nes Ammim did not respond to a query by Haaretz as to why the word Arab was put in quotation marks, as well as other questions, such as why there is no Arab member on the committee, why its members didn’t give their full names, how many Arabs applied and how many were accepted, and why the reasons for rejection weren’t given in writing, as required by law. The committee only responded by saying that the community is built on private land, so that it is not subject to the admissions committee law (which regulates the criteria by which communities established on state land can select or reject potential members.)

A request by Haaretz to meet with officials in Nes Ammim went unanswered. In a letter signed by the committee the community is again defined as a “tolerant and accepting community, open to all faiths and nationalities.” The letter states that out of “concern for privacy” the reasons for rejecting Baker and Khalikhal were not given in detail. The committee notes that they accepted “families of different religions and nationalities and any attempt to suggest that their rejection derives from their being members of a minority is erroneous, superficial and unfounded.”

David and Goliath in the Caucasus - Features - Israel News | Haaretz
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http://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.651057!/image/130237308.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_474/130237308.jpg

YEREVAN – Ever since I learned that I would be traveling to the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, my ears have hummed with the words of a song that I’d heard in my youth and that was still etched in my memory, though it had been many years since I heard it. The song was “At the Edge of the Volcano,” written by Dan Almagor and Danny Litani in 1972; I remembered Chava Alberstein’s hauntingly evocative rendition well. Even 40 years ago, the song left me restive and edgy. Since rediscovering it, I have been listening to it nonstop, singing the lyrics: “Why don’t they run away from there, and seek a safer place, where they can finally live in peace, once and for all… ”

#arménie #caucase #haut-karabakh #haut-karabagh

The Israeli guns that took part in the #Rwanda genocide

A Tel Aviv court has rejected a petition to reveal documentation of arms exports to the Hutu government in the ’90s.

http://www.haaretz.com/polopoly_fs/1.534119.1396812980!/image/2349077637.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_640/2349077637.jpg

The Israeli guns that took part in the #Rwanda #genocide
A Tel Aviv court has rejected a petition to reveal documentation of arms exports to the Hutu government in the ’90s.
By Uri Misgav | Jan. 3, 2015 |
►http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/.premium-1.635058

Attorney Mack ended his statement with a quote from an Israeli arms dealer who appeared in a report on the atrocities by Sara Leibowitz-Dar. The arms dealer expressed pride in his actions after a tour of the valley of death because his arms helped the victims die quickly — a bullet to the head instead of hacks by a machete. “I’m actually a doctor,” he said.

(...)

In those days, Yitzhak #Rabin was both prime minister and defense minister. #Shimon_Peres was foreign minister. They were deeply involved in the peacemaking efforts under the Oslo Accords. The petitioners say the arms could not have been sent from Ben-Gurion International Airport without their knowledge and approval.

Israeli teenagers: Racist and proud of it
Ethnic hatred has become a basic element in the everyday life of Israeli youth, a forthcoming book finds.
By Or Kashti | Aug. 21, 2014 | 2:53 PM
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“For me, personally, Arabs are something I can’t look at and can’t stand,” a 10th-grade girl from a high school in the central part of the country says in abominable Hebrew. “I am tremendously racist. I come from a racist home. If I get the chance in the army to shoot one of them, I won’t think twice. I’m ready to kill someone with my hands, and it’s an Arab. In my education I learned that ... their education is to be terrorists, and there is no belief in them. I live in an area of Arabs, and every day I see these Ishmaelites, who pass by the [bus] station and whistle. I wish them death.”

The student’s comments appear in a chapter devoted to ethnicity and racism among youth from a forthcoming book, “Scenes from School Life” (in Hebrew) by Idan Yaron and Yoram Harpaz. The book is based on anthropological observations made by Dr. Yaron, a sociologist, over the course of three years in a six-year, secular high school in the Israeli heartland – “the most average school we could find ,” says Harpaz, a professor of education.

The book is nothing short of a page-turner, especially now, following the overt displays of racism and hatred of the Other that have been revealed in the country in the past month or so. Maybe “revealed” isn’t the right word, as it suggests surprise at the intensity of the phenomenon. But Yaron’s descriptions of what he saw at the school show that such hatred is a basic everyday element among youth, and a key component of their identity. Yaron portrays the hatred without rose-colored glasses or any attempt to present it as a sign of social “unity.” What he observed is unfiltered hatred. One conclusion that arises from the text is how little the education system is able – or wants – to deal with the racism problem.

Not all educators are indifferent or ineffective. There are, of course, teachers and others in the realm of education who adopt a different approach, who dare to try and take on the system. But they are a minority. The system’s internal logic operates differently.

#enfants #éducation #haine #Israel

#Gaza diary: Israelis are completely misled about what’s going on
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Being left under crazy rockets, the lack of regional and international support and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ disappointing attitude is leaving people here hopeless and desperate. I now know why #Israel is violating international human rights laws, because no one in the world dares to cast a veto on its actions.

#impunité “#communauté_internationale” "#arabes_modérés"

Internal rift rattles Abbas’ Fatah (yet again) -
Abbas versus Dahlan
Haaretz By Amira Hass | Mar. 17, 2014 |
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Last Wednesday, while Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman was calling for an occupation of the Gaza Strip, Palestinian television saw fit to broadcast a long-winded speech by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in which he verbally attacked Mahmoud Dahlan and his supporters in the Fatah movement in terms unprecedented even in the long history of mutual attacks between the two. Dahlan himself (who was ousted from the Fatah Central Committee in 2011 and is living in Dubai) answered the attack with a Facebook post rejecting the accusations against him. His associates say he will be answering the accusations at greater length after Abbas returns from his meeting with United States President Barack Obama.

Forget about reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah, forget about a framework agreement the U.S. is cooking up between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization – the hottest story now is (once again) the internal antagonism within the movement that is supposed to be leading the Palestinian people to independence.

Abbas delivered his speech at a meeting of the Fatah Revolutionary Council on Monday, March 10. Present at the meeting were not only about 120 council members but also Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah and a number of cabinet ministers. All those present rose to their feet simultaneously in a standing ovation − a sign of their unreserved acceptance of what was said.

Beyond the direct attacks on Dahlan and his supporters in the Fatah movement, and the message these attacks sent to the rulers of Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, Abbas said: “If I were to detail all the pressure applied to me during the past three or four years, you would be concerned for my health. But I am acting for the benefit of my people and I want nothing [for myself]. I am 79 years old and am not prepared to end my life as a traitor, and I am not prepared to let anyone vilify the Fatah movement, of which I am one of the founders … It has become a grandchild of ours, the son of our son who is dearer than the son.”

Not apartheid, slavery - A new perspective on the Israeli occupation Haaretz

By Eva Illouz | Feb. 7, 2014
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Open Haaretz on any given day. Half or three quarters of its news items will invariably revolve around the same two topics: people struggling to protect the good name of Israel, and people struggling against its violence and injustices.

An almost random example: On December 17, 2013, one could read, on a single Haaretz page, Chemi Shalev reporting on the decision of the American Studies Association to boycott Israeli academic institutions in order to “honor the call of Palestinian civil society.” In response, former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers dubbed the decision “anti-Semitic in effect, if not in intent.”

On the same page, MK Naftali Bennett called the bill to prevent outside funding of left-wing NGOs in Israel “too soft.” The proposed law was meant to protect Israel and Israeli soldiers from “foreign forces” which, in his view, work against the national interest of Israel through those left-wing nonprofits (for Bennett and many others in Israel, to defend human rights is to be left-wing).The Haaretz editorial, backed by an article by regular columnist Sefi Rachlevsky, referred to the treatment of illegal immigrants by the Israeli government as shameful, with Rachlevsky calling the current political regime “radical rightist-racist-capitalist,” because “it tramples democracy and replaces it with fascism.” The day after, it was the turn of Alan Dershowitz to call the American Studies Association vote to boycott Israel shameful, “for singling out the Jew among nations. Shame on them for applying a double standard to Jewish universities” (December 18).

This mudslinging has become a normal spectacle to the bemused eyes of ordinary Israelis and Jews around the world. But what’s astonishing is that this mud is being thrown by Jews at Jews. Indeed, the valiant combatants for the good name of Israel miss an important point: the critiques of Israel in the United States are increasingly waged by Jews, not anti-Semites. The initiators and leaders of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement are such respected academics as Judith Butler, Jacqueline Rose, Noam Chomsky, Hilary Rose and Larry Gross, all Jews.

If Israel is indeed singled out among the many nations that have a bad record in human rights, it is because of the personal sense of shame and embarrassment that a large number of Jews in the Western world feel toward a state that, by its policies and ethos, does not represent them anymore. As Peter Beinart has been cogently arguing for some time now, the Jewish people seems to have split into two distinct factions: One that is dominated by such imperatives as “Israeli security,” “Jewish identity” and by the condemnation of “the world’s double standards” and “Arabs’ unreliability”; and a second group of Jews, inside and outside Israel, for whom human rights, freedom, and the rule of law are as visceral and fundamental to their identity as membership to Judaism is for the first group. Supreme irony of history: Israel has splintered the Jewish people around two radically different moral visions of Jews and humanity.

If we are to find an appropriate analogy to understand the rift inside the Jewish people, let us agree that the debate between the two groups is neither ethnic (we belong to the same ethnic group) nor religious (the Judith Butlers of the world are not trying to push a new or different religious dogma, although the rift has a certain, but imperfect, overlap with the religious-secular positions). Nor is the debate a political or ideological one, as Israel is in fact still a democracy. Rather, the poignancy, acrimony and intensity of the debate are about two competing and ultimately incompatible conceptions of morality. This statement is less trivial than it sounds.

Old manuscripts get face-lift at al-Aqsa mosque - AP/Haaretz

▻http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/1.571726

4,000 manuscripts, some dating back 900 years, to be digitized and made available to scholars across the Arab world unable to travel to Jerusalem.

The al-Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third holiest site, is located on a hilltop compound known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as the Temple Mount. The holy site is ground zero in the territorial and religious conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

The library and its 130,000 books are housed in two separate rooms in the compound, where modern steel bookshelves are affixed to ancient stone walls. Among the collection are some 4,000 manuscripts, mainly donations from the private collections of Jerusalem families. UNESCO, which is providing assistance for the restoration project, says the library contains “one of the world’s most important collections of Islamic manuscripts.”

The drive to restore the manuscripts and get them online is part of a greater global trend that has seen an array of historical documents digitized and uploaded to increase access to researchers worldwide.

Here, the gap to be bridged isn’t just physical distance. Residents of countries with no diplomatic relations with Israel, including much of the Arab world, are unable to visit Jerusalem and Palestinians living in the nearby West Bank or the Gaza Strip need to secure a permit from Israel to enter the city. Officials hope to circumvent those hindrances by putting the manuscripts online.

“A student in the Arab and Muslim world can’t access it. A student in Algeria or Saudi Arabia for example can’t come here and access (the manuscripts). We want to grant him the knowledge in his own house,” said Abu Teir.

Most of the manuscripts were donated in response to a call in the early 1920s from the Supreme Muslim Council, a religious governing body, said Walid Ahmad, an education professor at Israel’s al-Qasemi Academic College who has researched the library. He said the council sought to prevent Arabs from selling old manuscripts to foreign and Jewish buyers and preserve the Islamic heritage in one of its holiest sites.

The oldest book dates back 900 years, with some of the newer titles from the 19th century. Most of the texts are religious, but other subjects include geography, astronomy and medicine. Some of the pages contain personal letters about travel in the Middle East of the 18th century. Radwan Amro, who is leading the restoration process, said the most well-known manuscript in the collection was written by Imam Mohammed al-Ghazali, an Islamic scholar from the 12th century.

The manuscripts were stored in a library for the first few years of the 1920s, but when riots erupted in 1929 over disputes surrounding Jewish and Arab access to the sacred compound, the manuscripts were stored in bags and closets in a separate building nearby, Ahmad said. They would remain there for nearly half a century, when a new space was created for them.

But upon unpacking the books, officials realized they had been pillaged, with many snatched or destroyed.

About a quarter of the 4,000 manuscripts are considered in poor condition. Half of the books are already undergoing restoration, but the other half lie exposed in a small room in the library.

Many are in tatters. Shards of paper crumble off their pages. Insects have dug deep trenches into the unprotected leafs. Thousands of loose, fraying pages lie on a long table where an expert is attempting to match them to their original book.

The restoration and digitization project, funded by the Waqf, Jordan’s Islamic authority which manages the holy site, aims to preserve what remains.

In the six years since the project began, Amro said the 10-person team has restored 200 manuscripts as well as old maps, Ottoman population and trade registers and hand-written documents from the Mamluk period of the 13th to 16th centuries. But the painstakingly slow process of treating every individual page to protect the intricate text and the paper’s delicate fibers means restorers have a long road ahead of them.

La ville de Naples introduit des tests DNA obligatoires pour chiens

Neapel baut Gendatenbank für Hunde auf | Telepolis
▻http://www.heise.de/tp/blogs/8/155715

Die süditalienische Stadt Neapel folgt dem Vorbild von Jerusalem und führt in den Vierteln Vomero und Arenella DNA-Pflichttests für Hunde ein. Hundebesitzer, die eine Registrierung ihrer Tiere verweigern, müssen mit einer Zahlungsaufforderung in Höhe von 150 Euro rechnen. Mithilfe der durch die Tests aufgebauten Hunde-Gendatenbank soll ein neuer Kontrolldienst des städtischen Veterinäramtes die überall herumliegenden Kothaufen Verursachern und Verantwortlichen zuordnen und letztere mit 154,90 Euro zur Kasse bitten. Dass soll dem Zweite Bürgermeister Tommaso Sodano nicht nur dazu führen, dass Neapel weniger übel stinkt und weniger eklig aussieht, sondern auch Gesundheitsgefahren verringern – besonders für Kinder.

En Italie on suit l’exemple israelien
▻http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/woofdunnit-jerusalem-creating-doggie-dna-database-to-trace-droppings.premiu

#surveillance #chiens

Demeaned at Ben-Gurion airport: ’Now you know what Jews endured’
By Amira Hass | Jan. 6, 2014
Haaretz
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Only half an hour before her flight from Israel, D. was standing almost completely naked while an Eastern European-looking security inspector touched her arms, legs and hips. “She also put her fingers in the inside top rim of my underwear,” the young and – may I add, brilliant – doctoral student wrote to me.

I met D. several years ago on one of her research trips to Israel. She is neither Palestinian nor Jewish. She was born in the Middle East, but grew up in the West and carries a Western passport.

D. arrived at Ben-Gurion International Airport three hours ahead of her scheduled departure time. As on all previous visits, she was told to open her suitcase and two carry-ons for a thorough search.

But then, just 45 minutes before takeoff, D. was told she would have to undergo a body search and would not be allowed to board the plane with her laptop.

D. wrote me in an email: “I protested by saying, ‘I refuse to leave my laptop ... this has all of my archival research on it ... How can I trust that it will be returned to me?’” D. asked the young white woman with blue eyes and long, straight hair, and her supervisor, a young, brown-haired man. “A third, slightly older man (also brown-haired) in a suit came to me and said that if I continued to delay the search, I would miss my flight and would be responsible for that.

“I protested again, saying they were the ones who delayed the search of my suitcase, taking their time, getting distracted with other passengers around them, passing on tasks of checking my cellphone charger, my ceramics, my olive oil and such things to their colleagues, doing a lot of small talk and joking in the process.

"I told him that I arrived the full three hours before my flight and they made me wait for long periods while they were searching the suitcase, so if I missed the flight it would be their responsibility. And the three of them began to argue back and say that no, it would be my responsibility.”

None of three identified themselves and D. did not notice if they wore name tags.

I imagine D. with her black eyes staring at her inspectors and, after a quick consideration of the balance of power, softening her face and following them. In this instance, her sharp mind was no advantage.

While waiting to be frisked in a different area, D. overheard a conversation between a woman who spoke with an Arabic accent and an Israeli man.

“Why are you treating me like this?” the woman was saying. “I am an old woman. I am in a wheelchair. I was born in this country. I have citizenship here. Do you think I have a bomb?”

The last question set the young male officer off and he responded aggressively. “You’re not listening to me! We’re doing you a favour,” he snapped. “This way you don’t have to wait in line in the airport.”

D. was required to take off all her clothes except for her underwear. She was also required to remove the Band-Aid from a finger that had been cut a day earlier.

After the “Eastern European-looking” woman traced her gloved fingers over D.’s body, “she was also very interested in my hair,” D. wrote, “and worked her fingers along my scalp to see if there was anything in my hair.”

As the female officer touched her, D. wrote that the woman said, “‘Sorry for the inconvenience, ma’am.’ I told her not to call it an inconvenience. ‘Do not call it that. This is humiliation.’ She responded, ‘I’m sorry this is how you see it.’ I responded: ‘This is not how I see it. This is what you are doing. You are humiliating people.’

"And then, in all seriousness, she responds, ‘Well, now you know what they did to us in Germany.’ At that stage my back was to her. I had to stop and turn around to face her. I just glared at her and said ‘Really? And what does that make you then?’ With a blank face she responded, ‘I don’t know, ma’am.’”

I responded to D. in an email: “The security check, the wasting of your time, the condescension – I believe it all because I have heard similar testimonies. But such a stupid comment? If anyone but you were to tell me such a thing, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

D. wrote back: “I was totally shocked when I heard the comment, because of how candid and revealing it was. And at this point my body was reacting against me and my tears were already beginning to show and flow, despite my strong tone. I had to turn around and face her to make sure she was not joking. When I realized she was speaking in all seriousness, I asked her what I did.”

The body strip search took 20-25 minutes, according to D.’s estimate. There were still 25 minutes before the plane took off. The rest of the journey to the gate passed quickly, even giving the laptop away to the security people in exchange for some sort of receipt.

Several days after landing in the city where she lives, D. went to the airport to collect her laptop. Friends who know about computers checked the laptop and said they suspected that data was downloaded from it - perhaps for future monitoring as well.

I didn’t request a comment from the Israel Airports Authority. They would only give the standard response: “Everything is conducted according to the instructions of security officials [meaning the Shin Bet security service], according to the law, and we regret the discomfort caused the passenger.”

But that’s not the reason I gave up on asking. Both D. and I fear the vindictiveness of the bureaucratic–security apparatus. Openly reporting what happened behind the scenes at Ben-Gurion airport could cost D. in the future. She could be “denied entry for security reasons.”

The Palestinian calm before the storm
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A culture of resistance is not just an empty slogan in Palestinian society; it’s assumed, and apologies must be made when one does not stick to it. Currently, it seems there are more people apologizing than resisting.

The most prominent apologizers are senior PLO and Palestinian authority bureaucrats as well as the urban middle class. In the villages, and the refugee camps, no one needs to apologize: their very existence is constant resistance.

But both the activists and the apologizers can take comfort in the fact that like in the past, at some point, a moment will come where “people can’t take it anymore,” and join in.

The bubble of normality

But what is that point? People who think in terms of struggle, and people who want to take advantage of the situation to make a name or a career for themselves, are in a race against time. At some point, the bubble of normality under occupation will burst – that’s a basic assumption that we hear all the time.

The question is whether the bubble will burst before enough of a foundation has been laid to deal with a new conflict, in the form of a grassroots uprising, against the Israeli occupation, Even the PA people feel the way of negotiation, which has been followed for 20 months, is bankrupt.

The American tendency today to artificially engineer an agreement reminds one of its insistence on holding the Camp David summit in 2000. The newspaper al-Ayyam hinted on Friday that the proposed American framework agreement does not designate East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state; it also ignores the refugees. The American effort to force an agreement (or punish the Palestinians for refusing it) could be the breaking point. That would be bad for advocates of unarmed resistance.

Preparing for a coordinated effort

In recent years, various popular-resistance committees were formed, and they are trying to improve coordination among themselves. After years of isolated responses to the separation barrier in various villages and Hebron, the committees decided that the time has come to take the initiative. Blocking major roads, erecting tent encampments like Bab a-Shams and volunteering in villages, are only some of the initiatives that can be seen as preparation for more comprehensive efforts.

The boycott movement continues to spark imaginations. Its establishment in the West Bank roughly ten years ago forced the Palestinian Authority to declare a boycott on products manufactured in the West Bank. Enforcement of the boycott was spotty but now, informal organizations are considering boycotting goods from the other side of the Green Line as well.

“Boycotting 10% of Israeli goods is likely to increase Palestinian production by 10% and create tens of thousands of jobs,” said one activist. “When we call for boycott, we think not only of nationalist concerns, but also for the personal benefit of many unemployed people.”

Activists are in touch with other thinkers too: Palestinians elsewhere in the world and Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are also part of the unarmed resistance. One demand that arose out of the blue in the past – to dismantle the PA – is gradually ceding to thoughts about morphing the PA from a “contractor” of the Israeli occupation into a resistance authority. That would begin, says the activist, with canceling cooperation on security, as - “the police and top officials are also under occupation.”

Also, human rights organizations are pushing to take advantage of the opportunities created when Palestine was defined a non-member observer state by the UN. Popular resistance, as discussed by the activists, would include all of these things.

One activist points out that Palestinian society is very young: roughly 50% are under 18, and 75% under 35. Activists are placing their hopes on the youth, not the older generations.

Relying on the youth only highlights the race against time. Six or seven armed, masked men were at the funeral for Wajih al-Ramahi, the boy from the Jalazun refugee camp who was killed by Israeli army fire. The men fired machine guns into the air. Small children ran away and many adults were frightened as well. Only some children, around ten years old, came closer, and examined the men, outwardly curious.

Refugee camp residents are reluctant to join the popular resistance. The only ones who dare to carry weapons in the open at refugee camps are Fatah members. It’s possible that the armed men at the funeral were part of the security services. Perhaps they shot in the air to send a message to the PA, which employs them. Perhaps they shot in the air to let off steam. But within Palestinian society, which has been living in the shadow of Israeli weapons for almost 50 years, there have always been those who are enchanted by the Palestinian use of armed resistance. It is easy to see the immediate results that weapons can bring, as opposed to the ant-like work required for civil disobedience.

What does ’Israeli Apartheid’ mean, anyway?
Amira Hass, 9 december
Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/.premium-1.562477

What do those who say “Israeli Apartheid” mean?

They definitely don’t mean the official and popular biological racism that ruled South Africa. True, there is no lack of racist and arrogant attitudes here, with their attendant religious-biological undertones, but if one visits our hospitals one can find Arabs and Jews among doctors and patients. In that regard, our hospitals are the healthiest sector of society.

Those who say “Israeli Apartheid” refer to the philosophy of “separate development” that was prevalent in the old South Africa. This was the euphemism used for the principle of inequality, the deliberate segregation of populations, a prohibition on “mixing” and the displacement of non-whites from lands and resources for their exploitation by the masters of the land. Even though here things are shrouded by “security concerns,” with references to Auschwitz and heaven-decreed real estate, our reality is governed by the same philosophy, backed by laws and force of arms.

What, for instance?

There are two legal systems in place on the West Bank, a civilian one for Jews and a military one for Palestinians. There are two separate infrastructures there as well, including roads, electricity and water. The superior and expanding one is for Jews while the inferior and shrinking one is for the Palestinians. There are local pockets, similar to the Bantustans in South Africa, in which the Palestinians have limited self-rule. There is a system of travel restrictions and permits in place since 1991, just when such a system was abolished in South Africa.

Does that mean that apartheid exists only on the West Bank?

Not at all, it exists across the entire country, from the sea to the Jordan River. It prevails in this one territory in which two peoples live, ruled by one government which is elected by one people, but which determines the future and fate of both. Palestinian towns and villages suffocate because of deliberately restrictive planning in Israel, just as they do in the West Bank.

But Palestinians who are Israeli citizens participate in electing the government, unlike in South Africa?

That’s true. The two situations are similar, not identical. Arab citizens vote here, but they are removed from the decision-making processes that deal with their fate. There is another difference. In South Africa, an essential component of the system was a tight overlap between race and class, with the exploitation of the black working class in the interests of white-owned capital. Israeli capitalism does not depend on Palestinian workers, although cheap Palestinian labor played a major role in the rapid enrichment of different sectors in Israeli society following the 1967 war. South Africa had four racial groups (whites, blacks, coloreds and Indians.) Each one occupied a specific rung on the ladder of inequality, in order to perpetuate the privileges of the white population. The white race, English and Afrikaners, was defined as one nation, despite the large differences between them, whereas black Africans were divided into several tribe-based nationalities. This ensured that the whites were the largest group. Here, the separation is supposedly based on geography, designed to maintain and expand the privileges Jews enjoy.

But Jews too have sub-divisions and discrimination?

Definitely, according to origin (European Jews versus Arab Jews,) place of residence (center vs. periphery,) veterans vs. newcomers, or based on service in the military. However, compared to the Palestinians, even the most discriminated against and downtrodden Jews have more rights than the Palestinians living between the sea and the river. For example, the Law of Return applies to Jews of any origin but not to Palestinians, even those who themselves or whose parents were born here, but who now live in exile. Similarly, Jews can change their residence freely. Someone from Tel Aviv can re-locate to the West Bank, but someone from Bethlehem cannot move to the coastal areas.

The ladder of inequality has separate rungs for residents of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Palestinian citizens of sovereign Israel. These groups suffer from different degrees of violation of human and civil rights. There are sub-divisions at play that are designed to further fragment the other nation living here, with different approaches to “C”-designated areas on the West Bank, to Druze citizens, to Bedouin, Palestinians, Christians and Moslems. Any bureaucracy that creates such meticulous sub-divisions and classifications is guided by a principle of inequality that benefits one hegemonic group.

Are there other examples?

One can briefly mention the Afrikaner-style Prawer laws and Area C in the West Bank. From the 1950’s, the Afrikaner-led government in South Africa uprooted black, colored and Indian residents from their lands and homes to make room for white settlers. Everything was done in accordance with the prevailing white laws and legal logic. Those were the colonial underpinnings of the apartheid regime, which was established later. Here, too, the colonial component of uprooting the natives from their lands is proceeding in tandem with the policies of “separate development”.

Is there any hope?

Class-based apartheid in South Africa was not defeated. Critics on the left blame Nelson Mandela and other leaders for reaching an understanding with the previous regime whereby blacks would get the vote but whites would keep the money. While poverty remains “black” in South Africa, there is an alibi group of black Africans who became very wealthy. Nevertheless, one should not dismiss the transition to democracy and the social changes that took place in South Africa, as well as the methods of struggle demonstrated by Mandela and his comrades. That is why Israeli and Palestinian demonstrators last week carried his photos in demonstrations that the Israeli Defence Forces quelled by force.

But Shimon Peres eulogized Mandela warmly?

Mandela was a great forgiver. Peres played a major role in the security and economic ties Israel which established with the racist regime in South Africa and its pro-Nazi founders. As one of the founding fathers of the settlement enterprise in the West Bank and the instigator of the “functional solution,” he bears a large responsibility for the policies of “separate development” that prevail here.

Ich bin ein sub-slime Israelische
Asher Schechter, Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/.premium-1.551224

According to a Channel 10 survey, 51 percent of Israelis have considered emigrating because of the high cost of living and difficulty buying a home. In Berlin, buying an apartment takes 67 monthly wages on average. In Tel Aviv that’s 170.

Being a Palestinian intellectual’s daughter in post-9/11 New York -

Haaretz 7th of August 2013
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Najla Said, daughter of the late Palestinian intellectual and leading post-Modernist Edward Said, tried to ignore the Palestinian culture and heritage handed down to her by her parents in their Manhattan home when she was young. But the September 11 terrorist attacks, and the subsequent souring of attitudes towards Arab-Americans, caused her to think again. A

fter staging a one-woman show called Palestine in New York in 2003, Said decided to describe her childhood in her debut memoir, Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family.

Excerpts from the book were published on Sunday on the Salon cultural affairs website.

“I am a Palestinian-Lebanese-American Christian woman, but I began my life as a WASP,” writes Said in her new book. “I was baptized into the Episcopal Church and sent to an all-girls private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, one that boasts among its alumnae such well-groomed American blue bloods as the legendary Jacqueline Onassis. It was at that point that I realized that something was seriously wrong — with me.”

She tells of the differences between her and the other pupils. “I was proud of my new green blazer with its fancy school emblem and my elegant shoes from France. But even the most elaborate uniform could not protect against my instant awareness of my differences. I was a dark-haired rat in a sea of blond perfection. I did not have a canopy bed, an uncluttered bedroom, and a perfectly decorated living room the way my classmates did. I had books piled high on shelves and tables, pipes, pens, Oriental rugs, painted walls, and strange houseguests. I was surrounded at home not only by some of the Western world’s greatest scholars and writers — Noam Chomsky, Lillian Hellman, Norman Mailer, Jacques Derrida, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion — but by the crème de la crème of the Palestinian Resistance.”

Edward Said was born in Jerusalem to an Arab Christian family in 1935 and raised in Jerusalem and Cairo, where his father ran extensive business ventures. In 1951, Said went to study in the United States and later became a professor of literature at Columbia University in New York. Following the Six-Day War, Said began to take an interest in the Palestinian issue, and became close to the leaders of the PLO. His book, Orientalism, reached a wide audience, placing him in the center of controversy among intellectual circles worldwide. Orientalism, published in 1978, is a brilliant and eloquent critique of the West — of academia, scholars and artists who investigated the Eastern way of life, not necessarily in the interests of knowledge but to perpetuate the West’s conquest and domination of the East. Thus, according to Najla Said, the Arab world was seen as stagnant, submissive and backward — as opposed to the supposedly superior Western world.

Najla writes that when she pressed her father to explain the concept of orientalism in simple words, he said: “’Historically, through literature and art, the ‘East’, as seen through a Western lens, becomes distorted and degraded, so that anything ‘other’ than what we Westerners recognize as familiar is not just exotic, mysterious, and sensual, but also inherently inferior.” She adds: “You know, like Aladdin.”

In the book, Najla recalls that, like many children of immigrants, she grew up confused by the conflicting values to which she was exposed. “Growing up the daughter of a Lebanese mother and a prominent Palestinian thinker in New York City in the 1980s and ’90s was confusing and unsettling. I struggled desperately to find a way to reconcile the beautiful, comforting, loving world of my home, culture and family with the supposed ’barbaric’ and ’backward’ place and society others perceived it to be.” In an interview with Boise State Public Radio, Najla said that, after the September 11 attacks, she felt terrified and feared dying, but at the same time she feared the Americans who suddenly began to call her Arab-American.

Najla also tackles father’s political legacy in the autobiography. Edward Said’s struggle for Palestinian independence made him a controversial figure in Israel and in the American Jewish world. In 2000, a photograph of Said throwing a stone toward Israel from the Lebanese border earned him widespread publicity. For some people, writes Najla, “he is the symbol of Palestinian self-determination; a champion of human rights, equality, and social justice. And then still other people insist he was a terrorist, though anyone who knew him knows that’s kind of like calling Gandhi a terrorist.”