Dear Friend of Palestinians and Israelis,
There is a vacuum in our troubled region. Into that vacuum come "extremists" with a religio-political agenda. When all else fails (negotiation, real changes on the ground), bring back the Caliphat. When our religion is "pure", then God will bless us and give us redress against our enemies. Read on: (JRK, with thanks from our friends at the ATFP, American Task Force on Palestine)
Palestine: Hizb Al-tahrir Flourishes Where Hope Withers
By Omran Risheq
In Carnegie Endowment: The Arab News Bulletin
July 9, 2008
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=20288&prog=zgp&proj=zdrl,zme#rish
The failure of the Palestinian national movement and its shaken credibility in the public eye are giving strength to religious movements, which are expanding to fill a widening gap. But the movements that are gaining are not Hamas or Islamic Jihad, which gained their legitimacy more or less as other Palestinian movements did: by taking part in the liberation struggle while upholding the aspiration to establish an independent national state. Rather, there are now other Islamist parties and groups that deny the national project and are hostile toward democratic and social freedoms.
Perhaps the most influential of these movements, and the one with the clearest political platform, is the Hizb al-Tahrir al-Islami (the Islamic Liberation Party), which was founded in Jerusalem in 1953 by the Islamic judge Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani. Hizb al-Tahrir made the idea of resurrecting the caliphate a permanent watchword of its political activity and a religious duty, in addition to being a panacea for the political, economic, and social problems of the world’s Muslims. According to its beliefs, the caliphate will not be founded through popular revolution, but rather through a military coup in a Muslim country. The caliph will then proceed to conquer the world, including liberating Palestine from the Jews. It is worth noting that this theory largely replicates the Marxist-Leninist vision of revolution as led by a vanguard adopting its ideas as a way to take power.
As with other Salafi movements, Hizb al-Tahrir sees a return to fundamentals and “righteous ancestors” as the way to overcome the bitter present and build a prosperous future. Various branches of the Muslim Brotherhood have in one way or another absorbed such modern ideas as democracy and human rights, which could no longer be ignored after Brothers became active in civil society, professional organizations, and universities as well as entering into the political arena in elections and parliaments. Hizb al-Tahrir, however, openly rejects these concepts, describing them as undisguised apostasy and a Western conspiracy to tighten control over Muslims.
Until recently, Hizb al-Tahrir had not earned Palestinians’ trust. It is a party of rhetoric, whose political activity has been limited to giving sermons and issuing calls to resurrect the caliphate while other Palestinian factions were making sacrifices to end the occupation. But now—with the Palestinian national movement having exhausted the options of negotiation and of resistance with making significant accomplishments on the ground and with a new balance of power favoring Israel, which is uninterested in peace-- it has become possible for Hizb al-Tahrir to claim that its approach was right.
The party’s progress over the past two years clearly indicates its burgeoning influence. Benefiting from the faltering of Hamas’s experiment in power, in August 2007 Hizb al-Tahrir gathered some 10,000 supporters in a festival in Ramallah commemorating the fall of the caliphate. Hizb al-Tahrir has also been helped by Palestinians’ dwindling hopes over negotiations, and held angry marches in most Palestinian cities in November 2007 under the slogan “Palestine Will be Freed by the March of Armies, not the March of Negotiations,” protesting against the Annapolis peace conference.
Hizb al-Tahrir’s base also has become more socially diverse. Once restricted to the traditional merchant class largely originating from Hebron (the most conservative Palestinian area) or those who had migrated to Jerusalem in search of new markets, the party has begun asserting itself among other classes. Now one can see thousands of the poor and farmers, many of them young, bringing along their wives wearing the head coverings or face veils and their children in segregated buses going to party rallies, where wealthy patrons cover the cost of food, drink, and transportation.
Although Hizb al-Tahrir takes a non-confrontational stance towards Israel (and to a lesser degree towards local society, particularly the more vulnerable groups such as women), one cannot ignore the fact that its popularity reflects anger and frustration that might one day explode into violence. Hizb al-Tahrir shares with extremist Islamist organizations the same hard-line points of reference derived from the writings of Abu al-A’la al-Mawdudi (as interpreted by the Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb), which divide the world into a “House of Islam” and a “House of Apostasy” —war being the only language of dialogue between them.
Unfortunately, the Palestinian cause would be the first victim of this explosion, which explains why Israel turns a blind eye to Hizb al-Tahrir’s activities. In addition to its disavowal of the principle of a Palestinian state, Hizb al-Tahrir’s rhetoric, if it prevailed over that of the nationalist movement, would recast the Palestinian cause as a religious conflict. Furthermore, the party’s growing popularity is a grave danger to the progressive ideas and structures that Palestinians have worked hard to consolidate, as well as to decades of effort to convince the international community of the legitimacy of the Palestinian cause.
Hizb al-Tahrir offers a straw to a drowning man. But the disasters through which Palestinians have passed require a new sense of seriousness from them, before the occupation and desperate Palestinians themselves uproot what remains of the dream of independence and democracy.
Friday, July 11, 2008
Monday, July 7, 2008
Reconciliation: the Long, Long Road
This is from our new friends as MUSALAHA, whose goal is "reconcilation", certainly not "popular" in the media, and not easy to wrap your arms around. But here is a full-orbed discussion of what it will take for Israelis and Palestinians to move ahead instead of backward. John Kleinheksel (FOIP)
Where Truth, Justice, Mercy, and Peace Meet
"Truth and Mercy have met together,
Justice and Peace have kissed."
~ Psalms 85:10 ~
How can we deal with difficult and divisive issues such as truth, or justice, as they relate to the process of reconciliation? This is the challenge that faces all who attempt to work towards reconciliation. Musalaha has developed a strategy of first building up relationships, and then dealing with these issues. This personal interaction is widely recognized as essential to reconciliation. In the words of John Paul Lederach, "People experience deep pain, turmoil, and loss. In response, they build layers of protection and insulation…However, the work of reconciliation calls for relationships and a journey through those layers of isolation" (John Paul Leaderach, The Journey Towards Reconciliation, Herald Press, 1999, p. 63)
In recent Musalaha events and activities, the topics for discussion can be controversial ones, such as historical narratives, or identity, which is a good, positive sign of progress. However, the problem is that often the way people deal with these issues causes pain and hurt, and can produce more problems than it solves. This is why, in our most recent conference, a Women's Conference that was held in Aqaba Jordan in late March 2008, Psalms 85 was taken as our guide, to lead us down the hard road to reconciliation. This trip was made possible thanks to support by Open Doors.
Truth, justice, mercy, and peace are four powerful concepts that we hear invoked again and again in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, especially within a believing context. Many people focus on one or two of them at a time, but do not see how all four of them can coexist. Very few of us understand that to achieve true reconciliation, all four must be present, hanging in perfect balance and harmony. Certainly this is not possible to achieve fully and completely, since we humans are flawed and unable to achieve perfection. It is also true that our attempts will require a lot of effort, as striving for these lofty goals does not come easily or naturally to us. But as believers we have a comforting hope that through God we have the strength to arrive at this balance, and the love to help others get there as well.
The process of reconciliation is linked with time in an intimate way. There are a number of different frameworks for dealing with these four elements, each of them with their own complications and chronology. Should we first deal with the past, emphasizing truth, or should we focus on peace and hope for the future? Since every situation is different, there can be no rigid, set way of approaching this problem. Instead, we must learn to address each of these four concerns at the same time, "Like a dance, we simultaneously have activities taking place related to the past (Truth), the present (Justice and Mercy), and the future (Hope and Peace). Each contributes and each can change the view of the others and the impact of the others. Each needs a voice. Each depends on the others to reach full potential" (Leaderach, ibid).
We all know what truth is, and often we also know what the truth is, but in this modern world where most of what we consider the truth is given to us by the media, and by politicians, the truth can easily be obscured. Our perception of truth is affected by our culture, our education, and the information we receive. This is not to say that truth is relative, however both sides in this conflict have valid claims to truth on their side. Although there is only one absolute truth, it can be experiences in a plurality of ways. This is exactly the dilemma. We must be able to recognize that others see the truth differently than we do, and view their perspective as a valid representation of truth. Then through reconciliation, we are exposed to the other side, and are able to understand and learn from the other side's truth. Especially in this country, where we live so close to each other, and yet remain so ignorant of each others living conditions, this exchange of perspectives is vitally important.
In conflict, hearing the truth from the other side can be painful. But we have a duty to seek the truth, and not dwell on things we know to be untrue. Are we willing to hear the truth, even when it is painful? This is another reason we must seek to understand each others perspectives on the truth, because hearing from the other side helps us identify how we contribute negatively to the suffering and the conflict. It is also a humbling process, because it entails us admitting that we do not know the whole truth, and are given but a glimpse of the big picture, which only God can see. However this does not allow us to stop, in resignation, from seeking after the truth. Just because we can never know the whole truth does not mean that pursuing it is not a worthy, indeed required, activity. It absolutely is. We are simply called to be humble about it.
Those who believe strongly in truth are often reluctant to embrace mercy. This is because they think that mercy drowns out truth's call for justice. But this is wrong, for mercy is not given to us so that we may ignore the sin of injustice. It is a gift that came with God's salvation, that we should extend to others. Mercy is not supposed to cover up the truth, but to accept it, support it, and move ahead towards a new beginning. Mercy is here to provide healing to the bitter sting of truth. With mercy comes forgiveness which is also commonly misunderstood. It does not consist of excusing sin, sin is still sin. Neither does it avoid the conflict, or try and cause people to forget it. What forgiveness does is bring healing for both parties.
This leads us back to the call for justice. Justice has become a hot topic in the Middle East, and I think that most of the inhabitants here, not to mention the politicians, have misunderstood the meaning and implications of justice. Justice means accountability, righteousness, and the restoration of broken relationships. Many people demand full justice, without any mercy. In other words an eye for an eye. What they forget is that when justice stands alone it becomes revenge and punishment, not justice. The only real justice for a death is to bring the dead back to life, a restoration. Killing someone else in response is not justice, it is pure revenge. Making someone else suffer as much or more than you suffer is not justice; it does not set anything right. Can anyone really feel your pain? When someone else suffers, does it really make you feel better? Justice is setting right the wrong, justice is not about punishment. Because many people have misunderstood this, they do not see how justice and mercy/forgiveness can go together.
Sometimes, we as believers avoid justice because we are afraid of the consequences. We are often guilty of using mercy as a cover to avoid discussion of justice, claiming "We're forgiven" and wanting to bask in the glory of our redemption. After all, according to the dictates of true justice, we all fall short of God's glory, and deserve His judgment. This is justice, but we are forgiven through mercy, and thus redeemed. True, we are forgiven, however, we do not receive God's mercy until we confess our sins. This confession is related to justice, for even though mercy allows us to escape judgment and damnation, we have to confess the truth about of sins and our sinful nature, in order to receive forgiveness. This is similar to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Perpetrators of violations of human rights were given amnesty from prosecution, but only if they were willing to publicly confess to their actions, and tell the truth about what they did. The thinking behind this was that even though restoring a life is impossible, hearing the truth about what happened is a form of justice, and can help to restore the broken relationship.
While it is clear that we are solely responsible for confessing our own personal sins, another related issue has arisen during our reconciliation meetings and seminars. Should one individual be allowed to apologize on behalf of their people or community? Some people see the symbolic aspect of this act as highly significant and advocate this method. Others see no need for someone to apologize for the sins of others, or are even against it. While this is not the appropriate setting to deal conclusively with this topic, the issue has been raised and will need to be discussed and analyzed in the future.
One reason why peace seems impossible to obtain is that it has become a meaningless slogan in our society. We hear it everywhere, all the time. Everyone is saying how much they want it, but no one is doing anything to obtain it. Peace is not just the ending of war or conflict. It is so much more than that. It is wholeness, restored relationships, and rest. If we do not have peace in our midst, truth cannot be heard, justice cannot be done, and mercy will not be considered.
Reconciliation is the meeting place of truth, mercy, justice, and peace where all four are given a voice. As such, the primary task of peacemakers is to provide a forum where all four voices can meet together, and compliment each other. This is the purpose of Musalaha. We strive to "create a place where the energies of Truth, Justice, Mercy, Peace, and Hope are given life and interact. We need this kind of image to help us see interconnectedness, simultaneity, and interaction as necessary in polychronic understanding of reconciliation and time" (Leaderach, ibid).
Written by Louise Thomsen
Musalaha Women's Project Coordinator
Edited by Joshua Korn
Musalaha Publications Manager
Where Truth, Justice, Mercy, and Peace Meet
"Truth and Mercy have met together,
Justice and Peace have kissed."
~ Psalms 85:10 ~
How can we deal with difficult and divisive issues such as truth, or justice, as they relate to the process of reconciliation? This is the challenge that faces all who attempt to work towards reconciliation. Musalaha has developed a strategy of first building up relationships, and then dealing with these issues. This personal interaction is widely recognized as essential to reconciliation. In the words of John Paul Lederach, "People experience deep pain, turmoil, and loss. In response, they build layers of protection and insulation…However, the work of reconciliation calls for relationships and a journey through those layers of isolation" (John Paul Leaderach, The Journey Towards Reconciliation, Herald Press, 1999, p. 63)
In recent Musalaha events and activities, the topics for discussion can be controversial ones, such as historical narratives, or identity, which is a good, positive sign of progress. However, the problem is that often the way people deal with these issues causes pain and hurt, and can produce more problems than it solves. This is why, in our most recent conference, a Women's Conference that was held in Aqaba Jordan in late March 2008, Psalms 85 was taken as our guide, to lead us down the hard road to reconciliation. This trip was made possible thanks to support by Open Doors.
Truth, justice, mercy, and peace are four powerful concepts that we hear invoked again and again in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, especially within a believing context. Many people focus on one or two of them at a time, but do not see how all four of them can coexist. Very few of us understand that to achieve true reconciliation, all four must be present, hanging in perfect balance and harmony. Certainly this is not possible to achieve fully and completely, since we humans are flawed and unable to achieve perfection. It is also true that our attempts will require a lot of effort, as striving for these lofty goals does not come easily or naturally to us. But as believers we have a comforting hope that through God we have the strength to arrive at this balance, and the love to help others get there as well.
The process of reconciliation is linked with time in an intimate way. There are a number of different frameworks for dealing with these four elements, each of them with their own complications and chronology. Should we first deal with the past, emphasizing truth, or should we focus on peace and hope for the future? Since every situation is different, there can be no rigid, set way of approaching this problem. Instead, we must learn to address each of these four concerns at the same time, "Like a dance, we simultaneously have activities taking place related to the past (Truth), the present (Justice and Mercy), and the future (Hope and Peace). Each contributes and each can change the view of the others and the impact of the others. Each needs a voice. Each depends on the others to reach full potential" (Leaderach, ibid).
We all know what truth is, and often we also know what the truth is, but in this modern world where most of what we consider the truth is given to us by the media, and by politicians, the truth can easily be obscured. Our perception of truth is affected by our culture, our education, and the information we receive. This is not to say that truth is relative, however both sides in this conflict have valid claims to truth on their side. Although there is only one absolute truth, it can be experiences in a plurality of ways. This is exactly the dilemma. We must be able to recognize that others see the truth differently than we do, and view their perspective as a valid representation of truth. Then through reconciliation, we are exposed to the other side, and are able to understand and learn from the other side's truth. Especially in this country, where we live so close to each other, and yet remain so ignorant of each others living conditions, this exchange of perspectives is vitally important.
In conflict, hearing the truth from the other side can be painful. But we have a duty to seek the truth, and not dwell on things we know to be untrue. Are we willing to hear the truth, even when it is painful? This is another reason we must seek to understand each others perspectives on the truth, because hearing from the other side helps us identify how we contribute negatively to the suffering and the conflict. It is also a humbling process, because it entails us admitting that we do not know the whole truth, and are given but a glimpse of the big picture, which only God can see. However this does not allow us to stop, in resignation, from seeking after the truth. Just because we can never know the whole truth does not mean that pursuing it is not a worthy, indeed required, activity. It absolutely is. We are simply called to be humble about it.
Those who believe strongly in truth are often reluctant to embrace mercy. This is because they think that mercy drowns out truth's call for justice. But this is wrong, for mercy is not given to us so that we may ignore the sin of injustice. It is a gift that came with God's salvation, that we should extend to others. Mercy is not supposed to cover up the truth, but to accept it, support it, and move ahead towards a new beginning. Mercy is here to provide healing to the bitter sting of truth. With mercy comes forgiveness which is also commonly misunderstood. It does not consist of excusing sin, sin is still sin. Neither does it avoid the conflict, or try and cause people to forget it. What forgiveness does is bring healing for both parties.
This leads us back to the call for justice. Justice has become a hot topic in the Middle East, and I think that most of the inhabitants here, not to mention the politicians, have misunderstood the meaning and implications of justice. Justice means accountability, righteousness, and the restoration of broken relationships. Many people demand full justice, without any mercy. In other words an eye for an eye. What they forget is that when justice stands alone it becomes revenge and punishment, not justice. The only real justice for a death is to bring the dead back to life, a restoration. Killing someone else in response is not justice, it is pure revenge. Making someone else suffer as much or more than you suffer is not justice; it does not set anything right. Can anyone really feel your pain? When someone else suffers, does it really make you feel better? Justice is setting right the wrong, justice is not about punishment. Because many people have misunderstood this, they do not see how justice and mercy/forgiveness can go together.
Sometimes, we as believers avoid justice because we are afraid of the consequences. We are often guilty of using mercy as a cover to avoid discussion of justice, claiming "We're forgiven" and wanting to bask in the glory of our redemption. After all, according to the dictates of true justice, we all fall short of God's glory, and deserve His judgment. This is justice, but we are forgiven through mercy, and thus redeemed. True, we are forgiven, however, we do not receive God's mercy until we confess our sins. This confession is related to justice, for even though mercy allows us to escape judgment and damnation, we have to confess the truth about of sins and our sinful nature, in order to receive forgiveness. This is similar to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Perpetrators of violations of human rights were given amnesty from prosecution, but only if they were willing to publicly confess to their actions, and tell the truth about what they did. The thinking behind this was that even though restoring a life is impossible, hearing the truth about what happened is a form of justice, and can help to restore the broken relationship.
While it is clear that we are solely responsible for confessing our own personal sins, another related issue has arisen during our reconciliation meetings and seminars. Should one individual be allowed to apologize on behalf of their people or community? Some people see the symbolic aspect of this act as highly significant and advocate this method. Others see no need for someone to apologize for the sins of others, or are even against it. While this is not the appropriate setting to deal conclusively with this topic, the issue has been raised and will need to be discussed and analyzed in the future.
One reason why peace seems impossible to obtain is that it has become a meaningless slogan in our society. We hear it everywhere, all the time. Everyone is saying how much they want it, but no one is doing anything to obtain it. Peace is not just the ending of war or conflict. It is so much more than that. It is wholeness, restored relationships, and rest. If we do not have peace in our midst, truth cannot be heard, justice cannot be done, and mercy will not be considered.
Reconciliation is the meeting place of truth, mercy, justice, and peace where all four are given a voice. As such, the primary task of peacemakers is to provide a forum where all four voices can meet together, and compliment each other. This is the purpose of Musalaha. We strive to "create a place where the energies of Truth, Justice, Mercy, Peace, and Hope are given life and interact. We need this kind of image to help us see interconnectedness, simultaneity, and interaction as necessary in polychronic understanding of reconciliation and time" (Leaderach, ibid).
Written by Louise Thomsen
Musalaha Women's Project Coordinator
Edited by Joshua Korn
Musalaha Publications Manager
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Where are the Moderate, Arab Reformers?
Where are the "Moderates", Reformers?
Dear Friends ,
This is from our friends at ATFP (The American Task Force on Palestine).
Note the criticism that both Israel and her lap-dog, the US, have not taken seriously, serious proposals by "moderates", leaving the field to "extremists". When extremists rule the agenda, it better allows for Israel (and the US) to go our own confiscatory way, quite completely discrediting "moderates" in their efforts to "get things done" on the Arab street.
Further into this summary are pointed criticisms of Arab behavior as well. For example, reform is in the interest of Arab states and not just to placate the US/Israel.
Another point is that the framework for solutions is in place (no thanks to the US), and that conversations are taking place. Pray for good-faith negotiations. JRK
Marwan Muasher Stresses Importance of A Two-State Solution for Arab Reform
On Friday, June 27, the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP) and the Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP) hosted a discussion the National Press Club in Washington of “The Arab Center: The Promise of Moderation” (Yale University Press, 2008) with its author, Dr. Marwan Muasher. Dr. Muasher is a former Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign and Information Minister of Jordan, as well as Jordan’s first Ambassador to Israel.
Dr. Muasher opened the discussion by emphasizing the importance of moderates in the Arab world today, while noting that Arab moderation has been typically conceived in the West as only having relevance to the peace process so far.
However, there is a direct relationship between progress in peace negotiations and the fortunes of moderates in the Arab center. This is why, in his opinion, moderates are on the defensive and decline today. Although most Western thinking has focused on extremists, he pointed out, Arab moderation has been very proactive in producing initiatives for peace, such as the Arab League Peace Initiative of 2002. Unfortunately, he stated, Israel, the United States and others have not taken these initiatives as seriously as they should have. Muasher pointed out that the Arab Peace Initiative would have guaranteed Israel’s security by all 22 countries of the Arab League.
So, he said, if there is no peace, it is not because there was no effort by the Arab center. Muasher went on to explain that most active Arab moderates do not document their experiences in English and he was departing from this trend with his book. He said he tried to “make the Arab center human” and to explain the dilemmas and challenges it faces to Western audiences. Among other points, the book explains why the “Arab center” is on the defensive today. Muasher noted that the Arab center in government has, for the most part, only been moderate on peace thus far. When it comes to reform, however, it is hard to find a center. He said many “people are selectively moderate”, and without the necessary reforms to society, publics are increasing drawn in by religious extremists.
Muasher contrasted two schools of thought: the traditional and the reform perspectives. In the traditional viewpoint, if one opens the government to reform, then “religious forces come in”. Muasher strongly argued that history does not support this perspective, as Hamas, Hezbollah and other groups continue to gain strength with or without domestic reforms. Reformers, on the other hand, assert that “religious forces come in” when one does not open the system.
Muasher pointed out that the closed system has allowed religious groups to claim the mantle of good governance and to pose as reformers themselves. He also pointed out that opponents to the reform often accuse reformers of being “US agents.” Still, he urged Arab reformers to persist in their efforts, despite the slander, because Arab reform is for the Arab society not for the interests of the United States.
Muasher stated that the main conclusion of his book is that diversity strengthens society. He also said he no longer believes in a gradual approach to peace, because opponents from both sides will utilize the time to interrupt the process. According to him, the framework for the agreement is in place, not in thanks to the United States, but because both sides have continued the talks.
He then offered advice to the incoming US president: take on the Arab-Israel issue within your first term in office. He asserted that dealing with this issue during a second term in the Oval Office has never resulted in success. However, he doubted that any president would take on this issue right away.
Muasher warned that the Arab world, Israel and the West would be dealing with radicalism for a long time unless all parties can agree on the two state solution. “We are all guilty of not supporting Abu Mazen,” he explained.
He concluded by stressing Israel’s need to accept a two state solution, as the Palestinian population will continue to grow and will overwhelm the Israeli population in the area of historical Palestine in the near future.
Moreover, Muasher noted, if the current decline in diplomacy continues, there may not be an Arab center remaining with which Israel can negotiate.
Dear Friends ,
This is from our friends at ATFP (The American Task Force on Palestine).
Note the criticism that both Israel and her lap-dog, the US, have not taken seriously, serious proposals by "moderates", leaving the field to "extremists". When extremists rule the agenda, it better allows for Israel (and the US) to go our own confiscatory way, quite completely discrediting "moderates" in their efforts to "get things done" on the Arab street.
Further into this summary are pointed criticisms of Arab behavior as well. For example, reform is in the interest of Arab states and not just to placate the US/Israel.
Another point is that the framework for solutions is in place (no thanks to the US), and that conversations are taking place. Pray for good-faith negotiations. JRK
Marwan Muasher Stresses Importance of A Two-State Solution for Arab Reform
On Friday, June 27, the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP) and the Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP) hosted a discussion the National Press Club in Washington of “The Arab Center: The Promise of Moderation” (Yale University Press, 2008) with its author, Dr. Marwan Muasher. Dr. Muasher is a former Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign and Information Minister of Jordan, as well as Jordan’s first Ambassador to Israel.
Dr. Muasher opened the discussion by emphasizing the importance of moderates in the Arab world today, while noting that Arab moderation has been typically conceived in the West as only having relevance to the peace process so far.
However, there is a direct relationship between progress in peace negotiations and the fortunes of moderates in the Arab center. This is why, in his opinion, moderates are on the defensive and decline today. Although most Western thinking has focused on extremists, he pointed out, Arab moderation has been very proactive in producing initiatives for peace, such as the Arab League Peace Initiative of 2002. Unfortunately, he stated, Israel, the United States and others have not taken these initiatives as seriously as they should have. Muasher pointed out that the Arab Peace Initiative would have guaranteed Israel’s security by all 22 countries of the Arab League.
So, he said, if there is no peace, it is not because there was no effort by the Arab center. Muasher went on to explain that most active Arab moderates do not document their experiences in English and he was departing from this trend with his book. He said he tried to “make the Arab center human” and to explain the dilemmas and challenges it faces to Western audiences. Among other points, the book explains why the “Arab center” is on the defensive today. Muasher noted that the Arab center in government has, for the most part, only been moderate on peace thus far. When it comes to reform, however, it is hard to find a center. He said many “people are selectively moderate”, and without the necessary reforms to society, publics are increasing drawn in by religious extremists.
Muasher contrasted two schools of thought: the traditional and the reform perspectives. In the traditional viewpoint, if one opens the government to reform, then “religious forces come in”. Muasher strongly argued that history does not support this perspective, as Hamas, Hezbollah and other groups continue to gain strength with or without domestic reforms. Reformers, on the other hand, assert that “religious forces come in” when one does not open the system.
Muasher pointed out that the closed system has allowed religious groups to claim the mantle of good governance and to pose as reformers themselves. He also pointed out that opponents to the reform often accuse reformers of being “US agents.” Still, he urged Arab reformers to persist in their efforts, despite the slander, because Arab reform is for the Arab society not for the interests of the United States.
Muasher stated that the main conclusion of his book is that diversity strengthens society. He also said he no longer believes in a gradual approach to peace, because opponents from both sides will utilize the time to interrupt the process. According to him, the framework for the agreement is in place, not in thanks to the United States, but because both sides have continued the talks.
He then offered advice to the incoming US president: take on the Arab-Israel issue within your first term in office. He asserted that dealing with this issue during a second term in the Oval Office has never resulted in success. However, he doubted that any president would take on this issue right away.
Muasher warned that the Arab world, Israel and the West would be dealing with radicalism for a long time unless all parties can agree on the two state solution. “We are all guilty of not supporting Abu Mazen,” he explained.
He concluded by stressing Israel’s need to accept a two state solution, as the Palestinian population will continue to grow and will overwhelm the Israeli population in the area of historical Palestine in the near future.
Moreover, Muasher noted, if the current decline in diplomacy continues, there may not be an Arab center remaining with which Israel can negotiate.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
The Ring of Truth
GOD’S DREAM FOR ISRAEL/PALESTINE
Desmond Tutu (at the Boston Conference of SABEEL, October, 2007)
WHENEVER I am asked if I am optimistic about an end to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I say that I am not. Optimism requires clear signs that things are changing - meaningful words and unambiguous actions that point to real progress. I do not yet hear enough meaningful words, nor do I yet see enough unambiguous deeds to justify optimism.
However, that does not mean I am without hope. I am a Christian. I am constrained by my faith to hope against hope, placing my trust in things as yet unseen. Hope persists in the face of evidence to the contrary, undeterred by setbacks and disappointment. Hoping against hope, then, I do believe that a resolution will be found. It will not be perfect, but it can be just; and if it is just,
it will usher in a future of peace. My hope for peace is not amorphous. It has a shape. It is not the shape of a particular political solution, although there are some political solutions that I believe to be more just than others.
Neither does my hope take the shape of a particular people, although I have pleaded tirelessly for international attention to be paid to the misery of Palestinians, and I have roundly condemned the injustices of certain Israeli policies that compound that misery. Thus I am often accused of siding
with Palestinians against Israeli Jews, naively exonerating the one and unfairly demonizing the other.
Nevertheless, I insist that the hope in which I persist is not reducible to politics or identified with a people. It has a more encompassing shape. I like to call it “God’s dream.” God has a dream for all his children. It is about a day when all people enjoy fundamental security and live free of fear. It is about a day when all people have a hospitable land in which to establish a future. More than anything else, God’s dream is about a day when all people are accorded equal dignity because they are human beings. In God’s beautiful dream, no other reason is required.
God’s dream begins when we begin to know each other differently, as bearers of a common humanity, not as statistics to be counted, problems to be solved, enemies to be vanquished or animals to be caged. God’s dream begins the moment one adversary looks another in the eye and sees himself reflected there.
All things become possible when hearts fixed in mutual contempt begin to grasp a transforming truth; namely, that this person I fear and despise is not an alien, something less than human. This person is very much like me, and enjoys and suffers, loves and fears, wonders, worries, and hopes. Just as I do, this person longs for well-being in a world of peace. God’s dream begins with this mutual recognition - we are not strangers, we are kin. It culminates in the defeat of
oppression perpetrated in the name of security, and of violence inflicted in the name of liberation.
God’s dream routs the cynicism and despair that once cleared the path for hate to have its corrosive way with us, and for ravenous violence to devour everything in sight. God’s dream comes to flower when everyone who claims to be wholly innocent relinquishes that illusion, when everyone who places absolute blame on another renounces that lie, and when differing stories are told at last as one shared story of human aspiration. God’s dream ends in healing and reconciliation.
Its finest fruit is human wholeness flourishing in a moral universe. In the meanwhile, between the root of human solidarity and the fruit of human wholeness, there is the hard work of telling the truth. From my experience in South Africa I know that truth-telling is hard. It has grave consequences for one’s life and reputation. It stretches one’s faith, tests one’s capacity to love and pushes hope to the limit.
At times, the difficulty of this work can make you wonder if people are right about you, that you are a fool. No one takes up this work on a do-gooder’s whim. It is not a choice. One feels compelled into it. Neither is it work for a little while, but rather for a lifetime - and for more than a lifetime. It is a project bigger than any one life. This long view is a source of encouragement and perseverance. The knowledge that the work preceded us and will go on after us is a fountain of deep gladness that no circumstance can alter. Nothing, however, diminishes the fear and trembling that accompany speaking the truth to power in love. An acute awareness of fallibility is a constant companion in this task, but because nothing is more important in the current situation than to speak as truthfully as one can, there can be no shrinking from testifying to what one sees and hears. What do I see and hear in the Holy Land?
Some people cannot move freely from one place to another. A wall separates them from their families and from their incomes. They cannot tend to their gardens at home or to their lessons at
school. They are arbitrarily demeaned at checkpoints and unnecessarily beleaguered by capricious applications of bureaucratic red tape. I grieve for the damage being done daily to people’s souls
and bodies.
I have to tell the truth: I am reminded of the yoke of oppression that was once our burden in South Africa. I see and hear that ancient olive trees are uprooted. Flocks are cut off from their pastures and shepherds. The homes of some people are bulldozed even as new homes for others are illegally constructed on other people’s land. I grieve for the land that suffers such violence, the marring of its beauty, the loss of its comforts, the despoiling of its yield.
I have to tell the truth: I am reminded of the bitter days of uprooting and despoiling in my own country. I see and hear that young people believe that it is heroic and pious to kill others by killing themselves. They strap bombs to their torsos to achieve liberation. They do not know that liberation achieved by brutality will defraud in the end. I grieve the waste of their lives and of the lives they take, the loss of personal and communal security they cause, and the lust for revenge that follows their crimes, crowding out all reason and restraint.
I have to tell the truth: I am reminded of the explosive anger that inflamed South Africa, too.
Some people are enraged by comparisons between the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and what happened in South Africa. There are differences between the two situations, but a comparison need not be exact in every feature to yield clarity about what is going on. Moreover, for those of
us who lived through the dehumanizing horrors of the apartheid era, the comparison seems not only apt, it is also necessary. It is necessary if we are to persevere in our hope that things can
change. Indeed, because of what I experienced in South Africa, I harbor a vast, unreasoning
hope for Israel and the Palestinian territories. South Africans, after all, had no reason to suppose that the evil system and the cycles of violence that were sapping the soul of our nation would ever
change. There was nothing special or different about South Africans to deserve the appearance of the very thing for which we prayed and worked and suffered so long.
Most South Africans did not believe they would live to see a day of liberation. They did not believe that their children’s children would see it. They did not believe that such a day even existed, except in fantasy. But we have seen it. We are living now in the day we longed for.
It is not a cloudless day. The divine arc that bends toward a truly just and whole society has not yet stretched fully across my country’s sky like a rainbow of peace.
It is not finished. It does not always live up to its promise. It is not perfect - but it is new. A brand new thing, like a dream of God, has come about to replace the old story of mutual hatred and oppression.
I have seen it and heard it, and so to this truth, too, I am compelled to testify – if it can happen in South Africa, it can happen with the Israelis and Palestinians. There is not much reason to be optimistic, but there is every reason to hope.
Desmond Tutu is the former archbishop of Cape Town, an internationally renowned peace activist, and the patron of Friends of Sabeel International.
Desmond Tutu (at the Boston Conference of SABEEL, October, 2007)
WHENEVER I am asked if I am optimistic about an end to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I say that I am not. Optimism requires clear signs that things are changing - meaningful words and unambiguous actions that point to real progress. I do not yet hear enough meaningful words, nor do I yet see enough unambiguous deeds to justify optimism.
However, that does not mean I am without hope. I am a Christian. I am constrained by my faith to hope against hope, placing my trust in things as yet unseen. Hope persists in the face of evidence to the contrary, undeterred by setbacks and disappointment. Hoping against hope, then, I do believe that a resolution will be found. It will not be perfect, but it can be just; and if it is just,
it will usher in a future of peace. My hope for peace is not amorphous. It has a shape. It is not the shape of a particular political solution, although there are some political solutions that I believe to be more just than others.
Neither does my hope take the shape of a particular people, although I have pleaded tirelessly for international attention to be paid to the misery of Palestinians, and I have roundly condemned the injustices of certain Israeli policies that compound that misery. Thus I am often accused of siding
with Palestinians against Israeli Jews, naively exonerating the one and unfairly demonizing the other.
Nevertheless, I insist that the hope in which I persist is not reducible to politics or identified with a people. It has a more encompassing shape. I like to call it “God’s dream.” God has a dream for all his children. It is about a day when all people enjoy fundamental security and live free of fear. It is about a day when all people have a hospitable land in which to establish a future. More than anything else, God’s dream is about a day when all people are accorded equal dignity because they are human beings. In God’s beautiful dream, no other reason is required.
God’s dream begins when we begin to know each other differently, as bearers of a common humanity, not as statistics to be counted, problems to be solved, enemies to be vanquished or animals to be caged. God’s dream begins the moment one adversary looks another in the eye and sees himself reflected there.
All things become possible when hearts fixed in mutual contempt begin to grasp a transforming truth; namely, that this person I fear and despise is not an alien, something less than human. This person is very much like me, and enjoys and suffers, loves and fears, wonders, worries, and hopes. Just as I do, this person longs for well-being in a world of peace. God’s dream begins with this mutual recognition - we are not strangers, we are kin. It culminates in the defeat of
oppression perpetrated in the name of security, and of violence inflicted in the name of liberation.
God’s dream routs the cynicism and despair that once cleared the path for hate to have its corrosive way with us, and for ravenous violence to devour everything in sight. God’s dream comes to flower when everyone who claims to be wholly innocent relinquishes that illusion, when everyone who places absolute blame on another renounces that lie, and when differing stories are told at last as one shared story of human aspiration. God’s dream ends in healing and reconciliation.
Its finest fruit is human wholeness flourishing in a moral universe. In the meanwhile, between the root of human solidarity and the fruit of human wholeness, there is the hard work of telling the truth. From my experience in South Africa I know that truth-telling is hard. It has grave consequences for one’s life and reputation. It stretches one’s faith, tests one’s capacity to love and pushes hope to the limit.
At times, the difficulty of this work can make you wonder if people are right about you, that you are a fool. No one takes up this work on a do-gooder’s whim. It is not a choice. One feels compelled into it. Neither is it work for a little while, but rather for a lifetime - and for more than a lifetime. It is a project bigger than any one life. This long view is a source of encouragement and perseverance. The knowledge that the work preceded us and will go on after us is a fountain of deep gladness that no circumstance can alter. Nothing, however, diminishes the fear and trembling that accompany speaking the truth to power in love. An acute awareness of fallibility is a constant companion in this task, but because nothing is more important in the current situation than to speak as truthfully as one can, there can be no shrinking from testifying to what one sees and hears. What do I see and hear in the Holy Land?
Some people cannot move freely from one place to another. A wall separates them from their families and from their incomes. They cannot tend to their gardens at home or to their lessons at
school. They are arbitrarily demeaned at checkpoints and unnecessarily beleaguered by capricious applications of bureaucratic red tape. I grieve for the damage being done daily to people’s souls
and bodies.
I have to tell the truth: I am reminded of the yoke of oppression that was once our burden in South Africa. I see and hear that ancient olive trees are uprooted. Flocks are cut off from their pastures and shepherds. The homes of some people are bulldozed even as new homes for others are illegally constructed on other people’s land. I grieve for the land that suffers such violence, the marring of its beauty, the loss of its comforts, the despoiling of its yield.
I have to tell the truth: I am reminded of the bitter days of uprooting and despoiling in my own country. I see and hear that young people believe that it is heroic and pious to kill others by killing themselves. They strap bombs to their torsos to achieve liberation. They do not know that liberation achieved by brutality will defraud in the end. I grieve the waste of their lives and of the lives they take, the loss of personal and communal security they cause, and the lust for revenge that follows their crimes, crowding out all reason and restraint.
I have to tell the truth: I am reminded of the explosive anger that inflamed South Africa, too.
Some people are enraged by comparisons between the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and what happened in South Africa. There are differences between the two situations, but a comparison need not be exact in every feature to yield clarity about what is going on. Moreover, for those of
us who lived through the dehumanizing horrors of the apartheid era, the comparison seems not only apt, it is also necessary. It is necessary if we are to persevere in our hope that things can
change. Indeed, because of what I experienced in South Africa, I harbor a vast, unreasoning
hope for Israel and the Palestinian territories. South Africans, after all, had no reason to suppose that the evil system and the cycles of violence that were sapping the soul of our nation would ever
change. There was nothing special or different about South Africans to deserve the appearance of the very thing for which we prayed and worked and suffered so long.
Most South Africans did not believe they would live to see a day of liberation. They did not believe that their children’s children would see it. They did not believe that such a day even existed, except in fantasy. But we have seen it. We are living now in the day we longed for.
It is not a cloudless day. The divine arc that bends toward a truly just and whole society has not yet stretched fully across my country’s sky like a rainbow of peace.
It is not finished. It does not always live up to its promise. It is not perfect - but it is new. A brand new thing, like a dream of God, has come about to replace the old story of mutual hatred and oppression.
I have seen it and heard it, and so to this truth, too, I am compelled to testify – if it can happen in South Africa, it can happen with the Israelis and Palestinians. There is not much reason to be optimistic, but there is every reason to hope.
Desmond Tutu is the former archbishop of Cape Town, an internationally renowned peace activist, and the patron of Friends of Sabeel International.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Voices of Jewish Dissent
Dear Friends,
Thanks to Habeeb Awad for digging out this prophetic letter written 20 years ago: words that still apply to the situation today.
It is long, somewhat dated, relating to events on the ground then. As you skim and pick up speed going through the letter, you will sense that Arthur Hertzberg's words still have the ring of truth. His is a lone voice to be sure. Christians too need to be brought to account for our moral failures in resisting injustice.
Be aware that PM Olmert (now talking with Pres. Bush) is still carrying out the policies of Ariel Sharon, the Likud (later Kadima) leader, with no let up in the settlement policy, to the extreme detriment of the native inhabitants, Muslim and Christian Palestinian Arabs. JRK
Volume 35, Number 13 · August 18, 1988
An Open Letter to Elie Wiesel
By Arthur Hertzberg
Dear Elie,
You and I met almost half a lifetime ago, in the late 1950s, when you had just written your first book, Night, and I had just finished my own first book, The Zionist Idea. In those days very few people in America were much interested in either the Holocaust or in Zionist ideology, and so we established a comradeship of the ignored. Much more important, we were among the few who still spoke Yiddish, as we continue to do when we meet, for neither of us can let go of the world of our childhood.
You will remember what I told you when you asked about my own family. My mother and her children were the only survivors of her family. Her father, all of her brothers and sisters, and all of their children were murdered in Poland. On the eve of Yom Kippur, in 1946, when it was certain that all were dead, my mother lit thirty-seven candles in their memory. I entered your life, so you told me, because I carried with me, then and to this day, the guilt of my good fortune, for my parents emigrated from Poland in the mid 1920s and brought me to the United States as a child; I was spared what you suffered and what you saw. We are, both of us, part of what is left of the Hasidic communities of your birthplace in Vishnitz and of mine in Lúbaczów. What have we learned from the murder of our families? How must we live with their memory? You and I read and reread the Bible and Talmud: What do the sacred texts command us to think, to feel, and to do?
Many Jews are deeply troubled these days by Israel's behavior in response to the intifadah, the uprising of the Palestinians against their occupation by Israel. Both in Israel and in the Diaspora many—you and I among them—have been expressing our deep distress in public (and some even more so in private) over the rocks and firebombs hurled by Palestinians and the beatings and shootings by Israelis. You have expressed sympathy for the "anger of young Palestinians," writing that the Palestinians are "treated as nonpersons," as "objects of pity, at best." "Why," you say, "shouldn't they have chosen violence as a means of attracting attention to their existence and their dreams of obtaining a national identity?" (The New York Times, June 23, 1988). You have deplored "the extremists in both camps."
I know of no one in the Jewish community who would not agree with your appeal to the Palestinians to "stop using stones and start using words." But you do not accompany such an assertion with an appeal to the Israelis to do anything at all—in particular to move away from the policy of repression and toward negotiation. In those of your statements that I have seen, you seem to have avoided saying anything about the content of Israel's policies. In a speech in Washington on March 13, after saying that American Jews behave "appropriately" when they question actions by Israel, you quickly added that "I am afraid of splitting the Jewish community with regard to Israel." How appropriate are the questioners, in your view, if their questions "split" the community and thus, so you clearly imply, do harm to Israel? You have reduced the political questions before Israel to all-or-nothing choices. You condemn the "right-wing Israeli fanatics" for the "disgraceful suggestion" of transferring all the Palestinians immediately to Jordan; you are equally critical of "some liberals who are ready to give up all the territories immediately," for there is, in your view, no one to whom to give them. Thus you are able to throw up your hands, as you have done repeatedly in interviews and statements since January, and say, "What are we to do?"
The effect of what you have been saying is this: the present situation is deplorable, and Israel has even behaved badly on occasion, but for Jews abroad to say so is less an act of conscience than a sign of weakening resolve. All of the currently discussed political choices, from "territories for peace," the policy of both the Labor party and the US administration, to movement toward a demilitarized Palestinian state (which at least some Palestinian leaders are willing to discuss in public), you do not mention. For all the nuances in your statements, and the distress that you feel as a Jew and as a moral human being, your position amounts to an elegant defense of the Likud hard line. When it comes to policy, you have said little that Yitzhak Shamir could not countersign. When you refer to opposition to Israeli policy you simply ignore the measured criticism that comes from the moderate half of Israel and you refer mainly to "malicious attacks," and to "left-wing Jews who oppose Israel or its recent policies."
I have looked in your statements that deplore the "extremists in both camps" for a definition of who these extremists are, and I have found many paragraphs about Arabs who practice terrorism. You have even quoted from a Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, who has "recently stirred up angry passions in Israel" with a poem that has been read as demanding that all the Jews get out and leave Palestine, including Haifa and Tel Aviv, to the Arabs. These passages of yours seem to require some balancing comments. You know of the incantations by Meir Kahane and his followers in which the Jews are commanded to expel Muslims and Christians from the Holy Land. That a former chief of staff, Rafael Eitan, called the Palestinians "drugged cockroaches" has, surely, not escaped your attention. I wonder whether you, and I, would have been silent if a Russian general had uttered a comparable slur about Jews demonstrating in Red Square. You know that the prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir, has been saying that he will not return a single inch of the West Bank to Arab sovereignty; he has thus stalled even the beginnings of negotiation.
A basic premise of your position is that "Israel is the only country that feels its existence threatened." This, too, is a staple argument of Israel's hard-liners; because Israel feels endangered, it must use force to protect itself, even if the excesses of this force are sometimes deplorable. The same rhetoric is often used by the Likud and the parties to the right of it, in order to excuse intransigence. On this issue, Israel's moderates take a different view. Abba Eban knows as much about Israel's strategic position in the region as anyone else, not least because he serves as chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of Israel's Knesset. Speaking last March in Jerusalem to a meeting of the New Israel Fund, Eban said:We have reached a point at which we can say that Israel has never been stronger in power and in quantitative measure. Never has Israel been less existentially threatened. Never has Israel been more secure against external assault and never more vulnerable to domestic folly. The major perils that now face us come from within ourselves. And they would emerge from the stupendous folly of attempting to enforce a permanent Israeli jurisdiction over the one and a half million Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza.
Eban went on to argue—and he has said this repeatedly since, in speeches both in Israel and in the United States—that all who care about Israel will help her best by uttering the very criticisms that you, Elie, do not acknowledge.
You have suggested that some of the Jewish critics of Israel's conduct, and especially those who live outside the state, are "intellectuals who had never done anything for Israel but now shamelessly use their Jewishness to justify their attacks against Israel." This may be true of a few, but is that all that you, who have been morally so sensitive, have heard in the outcries of Israel's critics? You have found no place, so far, in any of your writings or statements that I have seen to suggest that there are Jews in the world who have been devoted to Israel for many years and who have expressed outrage at such actions as dynamiting houses in the Arab village of Beta. Some of these villagers had tried to protect a group of Jewish teen-agers who were on a hike against stone throwers. In the melee a girl was shot by accident by one of the group's Jewish guards. The army then blew up fourteen houses in the village. According to accounts in the Israeli press, this was done not to punish anyone who was guilty but to appease the angry hard-line settlers in the West Bank. You were not among those who said anything in public after this and all too many other such incidents. Are such figures in the Diaspora as Sir Isaiah Berlin, Philip Klutznick, Henry Rosovsky, and the president of Yeshiva University, Rabbi Norman Lamm, and hundreds of others like them, who have spoken up in criticism of actions that they could not countenance, simply to be written off as people whose public statements endanger Jewish unity?
"No one says," you write, that Israel should "be above criticism." Yet when you refer to public criticism you mainly warn of the "risk" it poses to Israel. But the view of many Israelis who have fought for their country is different. Are the reserve generals and colonels of Israel, more than 130 of them, who have launched a public campaign for territorial compromise to be discredited because they are pointedly critical of the occupation of the West Bank? They keep saying that only compromise can end the conflict, and that repression is unworkable. Four of these generals have recently been on tour in the United States, to enlist support for such views among all those who care about Israel. Is it a betrayal of Israel to take seriously what these men say?
As you know better than anyone else, silence is a form of interference. In all your writings you have insisted that no one has the right to be silent in the face of injustice, any injustice. Those who throw up their hands and who, to use your own recent words about Israel, can say no more than that they "would like to believe in miracles" appear to have abdicated responsibility. This seems all the more an abdication now, because there is no authoritative demand from Israel that the Jews of the Diaspora be silent. On the contrary, the leaders who speak for the more moderate half of Israel have been saying over and over again that it is perfectly legitimate for Jews who care to speak their minds.
On May 18, Shimon Peres made the point unmistakably when he spoke to the leaders of the Jewish establishment organizations in New York: "Whoever wants can be involved. We are a free people." He made it clear beyond any doubt that dissent and criticism do not in any way weaken one's commitment to Israel. Nor has the half of Israel that is led by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir really asked the Jews of the Diaspora to leave decisions to Israel. The most effective device of these hard-liners has been to suggest that any criticism of their position is a self-hating assault on the state when such criticism is uttered by Jews, and that it is a form of anti-Semitism when it is spoken by non-Jews. This strategy is used in Israel itself. The Likud likes to call itself the "national camp"; it insists that moderates are not sufficiently patriotic, that they are enemies of the Jewish people. You, Elie, do not believe such canards. But I must ask: Are you not lending aid and comfort to this view?
To your repeated question "What are we to do?" there are two orders of answer: political and moral. If, as you have written, "self-determination is a sacred principle," one that you believe should apply to the Palestinians, then how and where is it to express itself? If the Palestinians were to take the step that you have suggested of choosing to talk rather than throw rocks or Molotov cocktails, are they to leave the West Bank and go to Jordan? But you have ruled out, on moral grounds, the forced transfer of Palestinians from the West Bank to the East Bank. On your own premises, Palestinian nationalism and self-determination require from the Israeli-Jewish side a counterstatement that the two peoples involved will finally enact peaceful partition, that Jews will agree that Palestinians have a right to a territorial base for their national life. It is this principle that your own statements make unavoidable—but you have avoided it. I cannot help thinking that you know, at least as well as I, that there are rhetoricians in the mainstream of Israel's right wing who manage to find ways of asserting that they will give the Palestinians very limited local autonomy (this they now call national rights) while retaining control of land, water, and everything else that matters in the West Bank. "What is Israel to do?" It must accept the principle of partition—but to say this is to put oneself on the side of Israel's moderates and to break one's ties to the Likud.
Morally, Jewish tradition commands us to act justly, especially when actions seem imprudent and embarrassing, and never to be silent, even to protect Jewish unity. This Jewish morality has taken one form, recurrently, throughout the ages. Even in bad times, when Jews were under fierce attack, their moral teachers gave no exceptions. The prophets knew that Assyria and Babylonia were far more wicked than Judea, but they held Judea to account, even as the Assyrians and the Babylonians were advancing. "Only you have I known among all the nations of the world; therefore I will hold you to account for all your sins."
There were other voices in the days of the prophets. The prophets Amos, Elijah, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and all the rest, were opposed, generation after generation, by prophets who belonged to the royal courts, who assured the king that his conduct was beyond reproach. The biblical prophets were harassed as traitors who weakened the resolve of a small people—but it is their "treason," and not the prudence of the court prophets, that is our unique Jewish tradition. While the official soothsayers denounced the enemies of the king, the prophets whom we revere followed after Nathan, who dared to confront King David with murdering Uriah and stealing his wife. Nathan defended this Hittite stranger against a divinely appointed Jewish king: "You are the man," he said to David: you are morally responsible.
In the memory of the Holocaust we have been reminded by you that silence is a sin. You have spoken out against indifference and injustice. Why are you making a special exception of Israel? Do you think that our silence will help Israel? The texts that we study and restudy teach the contrary. "Israel will be redeemed by righteousness, and those who return to it, by acts of loving kindness." To be silent is an act of misplaced love. Such silence gives free reign to the armed zealots of ages past, and of this day. Several times in our history, armed zealots have led the Jewish people to glorious disasters. Encouragement by silence, of the kind some of the rabbis gave the zealots when they declared war on Rome in the first century, has a long history of being tragically wrong. We dare not repeat this mistake.
The excesses of the zealots may succeed today, briefly, as they succeeded for a moment several times before, but such excesses are likely to lead again to disaster. Teachers of morality must not indulge the zealots of today, and not only because zealotry does not work. To suppress the weak because of our own supposed weakness is against the very essence of our tradition. When we were a group of hunted former slaves in the desert, Moses proclaimed, as divine teaching, that we should not oppress strangers, for we had been oppressed as strangers in the land of Egypt. This injunction is unconditional.
We should both be haunted by one recent image. Several days after the incident in Beta, an Israeli patrol tried to stop some Arab youths to question them. The youths were unarmed; they had not been throwing rocks, and they were guilty of nothing except not wanting to be interrogated. These young men were fired on, and one was killed. Now I know, as you do, about the dangers for Israeli soldiers in the West Bank and Gaza. I have nieces in Israel's army, and I have said to them that their moral obligation does not include allowing themselves to be slaughtered. But killing those who are simply unwilling to be questioned is another matter entirely. How can we be silent?
I agree with you that ahavat Yisrael, the love of the Jewish people, is a great virtue, but I can find little trace in all the Jewish texts through the centuries that this love must be uncritical. Even Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev, the eighteenth-century Hasid who wrote in defense of the conduct of the Jews, was not silent about their misdeeds. He accepted the moral responsibility to lead. "Love can bend a straight line": it can mislead the lover, so that, with the highest motives, he does grave injury to his beloved. You, Elie, care far too much about the Jewish people, and about Israel, to indulge falls from grace and, de facto, to lend comfort to zealots. If you are persuaded that the policies of the Likud are right, say so, but, in fairness, cease treating so dismissively the political and moral views of the many moderate Jews who reject the politics and morality of the hard line.
I keep thinking these days of the saying that both of us have quoted many times, and sometimes at each other, especially in those early years when we were closest. Menachem Mendel of Kotsk, the tortured Hasid of the last century, once said that when the Evil One wants to destroy us, he tempts us not through our wicked desires but through our most virtuous inclinations; we do good deeds at the wrong time, with the wrong intensity, and in a setting in which they do devastating harm. I fear that for all your love of Israel, you, in what you say, sometimes risk falling into the moral trap that Menachem Mendel described.
You belong among those who speak the truth, even to Jewish power, and who do not look away because of real or invented Jewish weakness. We show the truest love of Israel and the Jewish people when we remind ourselves that, in strength or in weakness, we survive not by prudence and not by power, but through justice.
Your friend,
Arthur Hertzberg
Thanks to Habeeb Awad for digging out this prophetic letter written 20 years ago: words that still apply to the situation today.
It is long, somewhat dated, relating to events on the ground then. As you skim and pick up speed going through the letter, you will sense that Arthur Hertzberg's words still have the ring of truth. His is a lone voice to be sure. Christians too need to be brought to account for our moral failures in resisting injustice.
Be aware that PM Olmert (now talking with Pres. Bush) is still carrying out the policies of Ariel Sharon, the Likud (later Kadima) leader, with no let up in the settlement policy, to the extreme detriment of the native inhabitants, Muslim and Christian Palestinian Arabs. JRK
Volume 35, Number 13 · August 18, 1988
An Open Letter to Elie Wiesel
By Arthur Hertzberg
Dear Elie,
You and I met almost half a lifetime ago, in the late 1950s, when you had just written your first book, Night, and I had just finished my own first book, The Zionist Idea. In those days very few people in America were much interested in either the Holocaust or in Zionist ideology, and so we established a comradeship of the ignored. Much more important, we were among the few who still spoke Yiddish, as we continue to do when we meet, for neither of us can let go of the world of our childhood.
You will remember what I told you when you asked about my own family. My mother and her children were the only survivors of her family. Her father, all of her brothers and sisters, and all of their children were murdered in Poland. On the eve of Yom Kippur, in 1946, when it was certain that all were dead, my mother lit thirty-seven candles in their memory. I entered your life, so you told me, because I carried with me, then and to this day, the guilt of my good fortune, for my parents emigrated from Poland in the mid 1920s and brought me to the United States as a child; I was spared what you suffered and what you saw. We are, both of us, part of what is left of the Hasidic communities of your birthplace in Vishnitz and of mine in Lúbaczów. What have we learned from the murder of our families? How must we live with their memory? You and I read and reread the Bible and Talmud: What do the sacred texts command us to think, to feel, and to do?
Many Jews are deeply troubled these days by Israel's behavior in response to the intifadah, the uprising of the Palestinians against their occupation by Israel. Both in Israel and in the Diaspora many—you and I among them—have been expressing our deep distress in public (and some even more so in private) over the rocks and firebombs hurled by Palestinians and the beatings and shootings by Israelis. You have expressed sympathy for the "anger of young Palestinians," writing that the Palestinians are "treated as nonpersons," as "objects of pity, at best." "Why," you say, "shouldn't they have chosen violence as a means of attracting attention to their existence and their dreams of obtaining a national identity?" (The New York Times, June 23, 1988). You have deplored "the extremists in both camps."
I know of no one in the Jewish community who would not agree with your appeal to the Palestinians to "stop using stones and start using words." But you do not accompany such an assertion with an appeal to the Israelis to do anything at all—in particular to move away from the policy of repression and toward negotiation. In those of your statements that I have seen, you seem to have avoided saying anything about the content of Israel's policies. In a speech in Washington on March 13, after saying that American Jews behave "appropriately" when they question actions by Israel, you quickly added that "I am afraid of splitting the Jewish community with regard to Israel." How appropriate are the questioners, in your view, if their questions "split" the community and thus, so you clearly imply, do harm to Israel? You have reduced the political questions before Israel to all-or-nothing choices. You condemn the "right-wing Israeli fanatics" for the "disgraceful suggestion" of transferring all the Palestinians immediately to Jordan; you are equally critical of "some liberals who are ready to give up all the territories immediately," for there is, in your view, no one to whom to give them. Thus you are able to throw up your hands, as you have done repeatedly in interviews and statements since January, and say, "What are we to do?"
The effect of what you have been saying is this: the present situation is deplorable, and Israel has even behaved badly on occasion, but for Jews abroad to say so is less an act of conscience than a sign of weakening resolve. All of the currently discussed political choices, from "territories for peace," the policy of both the Labor party and the US administration, to movement toward a demilitarized Palestinian state (which at least some Palestinian leaders are willing to discuss in public), you do not mention. For all the nuances in your statements, and the distress that you feel as a Jew and as a moral human being, your position amounts to an elegant defense of the Likud hard line. When it comes to policy, you have said little that Yitzhak Shamir could not countersign. When you refer to opposition to Israeli policy you simply ignore the measured criticism that comes from the moderate half of Israel and you refer mainly to "malicious attacks," and to "left-wing Jews who oppose Israel or its recent policies."
I have looked in your statements that deplore the "extremists in both camps" for a definition of who these extremists are, and I have found many paragraphs about Arabs who practice terrorism. You have even quoted from a Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, who has "recently stirred up angry passions in Israel" with a poem that has been read as demanding that all the Jews get out and leave Palestine, including Haifa and Tel Aviv, to the Arabs. These passages of yours seem to require some balancing comments. You know of the incantations by Meir Kahane and his followers in which the Jews are commanded to expel Muslims and Christians from the Holy Land. That a former chief of staff, Rafael Eitan, called the Palestinians "drugged cockroaches" has, surely, not escaped your attention. I wonder whether you, and I, would have been silent if a Russian general had uttered a comparable slur about Jews demonstrating in Red Square. You know that the prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir, has been saying that he will not return a single inch of the West Bank to Arab sovereignty; he has thus stalled even the beginnings of negotiation.
A basic premise of your position is that "Israel is the only country that feels its existence threatened." This, too, is a staple argument of Israel's hard-liners; because Israel feels endangered, it must use force to protect itself, even if the excesses of this force are sometimes deplorable. The same rhetoric is often used by the Likud and the parties to the right of it, in order to excuse intransigence. On this issue, Israel's moderates take a different view. Abba Eban knows as much about Israel's strategic position in the region as anyone else, not least because he serves as chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of Israel's Knesset. Speaking last March in Jerusalem to a meeting of the New Israel Fund, Eban said:We have reached a point at which we can say that Israel has never been stronger in power and in quantitative measure. Never has Israel been less existentially threatened. Never has Israel been more secure against external assault and never more vulnerable to domestic folly. The major perils that now face us come from within ourselves. And they would emerge from the stupendous folly of attempting to enforce a permanent Israeli jurisdiction over the one and a half million Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza.
Eban went on to argue—and he has said this repeatedly since, in speeches both in Israel and in the United States—that all who care about Israel will help her best by uttering the very criticisms that you, Elie, do not acknowledge.
You have suggested that some of the Jewish critics of Israel's conduct, and especially those who live outside the state, are "intellectuals who had never done anything for Israel but now shamelessly use their Jewishness to justify their attacks against Israel." This may be true of a few, but is that all that you, who have been morally so sensitive, have heard in the outcries of Israel's critics? You have found no place, so far, in any of your writings or statements that I have seen to suggest that there are Jews in the world who have been devoted to Israel for many years and who have expressed outrage at such actions as dynamiting houses in the Arab village of Beta. Some of these villagers had tried to protect a group of Jewish teen-agers who were on a hike against stone throwers. In the melee a girl was shot by accident by one of the group's Jewish guards. The army then blew up fourteen houses in the village. According to accounts in the Israeli press, this was done not to punish anyone who was guilty but to appease the angry hard-line settlers in the West Bank. You were not among those who said anything in public after this and all too many other such incidents. Are such figures in the Diaspora as Sir Isaiah Berlin, Philip Klutznick, Henry Rosovsky, and the president of Yeshiva University, Rabbi Norman Lamm, and hundreds of others like them, who have spoken up in criticism of actions that they could not countenance, simply to be written off as people whose public statements endanger Jewish unity?
"No one says," you write, that Israel should "be above criticism." Yet when you refer to public criticism you mainly warn of the "risk" it poses to Israel. But the view of many Israelis who have fought for their country is different. Are the reserve generals and colonels of Israel, more than 130 of them, who have launched a public campaign for territorial compromise to be discredited because they are pointedly critical of the occupation of the West Bank? They keep saying that only compromise can end the conflict, and that repression is unworkable. Four of these generals have recently been on tour in the United States, to enlist support for such views among all those who care about Israel. Is it a betrayal of Israel to take seriously what these men say?
As you know better than anyone else, silence is a form of interference. In all your writings you have insisted that no one has the right to be silent in the face of injustice, any injustice. Those who throw up their hands and who, to use your own recent words about Israel, can say no more than that they "would like to believe in miracles" appear to have abdicated responsibility. This seems all the more an abdication now, because there is no authoritative demand from Israel that the Jews of the Diaspora be silent. On the contrary, the leaders who speak for the more moderate half of Israel have been saying over and over again that it is perfectly legitimate for Jews who care to speak their minds.
On May 18, Shimon Peres made the point unmistakably when he spoke to the leaders of the Jewish establishment organizations in New York: "Whoever wants can be involved. We are a free people." He made it clear beyond any doubt that dissent and criticism do not in any way weaken one's commitment to Israel. Nor has the half of Israel that is led by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir really asked the Jews of the Diaspora to leave decisions to Israel. The most effective device of these hard-liners has been to suggest that any criticism of their position is a self-hating assault on the state when such criticism is uttered by Jews, and that it is a form of anti-Semitism when it is spoken by non-Jews. This strategy is used in Israel itself. The Likud likes to call itself the "national camp"; it insists that moderates are not sufficiently patriotic, that they are enemies of the Jewish people. You, Elie, do not believe such canards. But I must ask: Are you not lending aid and comfort to this view?
To your repeated question "What are we to do?" there are two orders of answer: political and moral. If, as you have written, "self-determination is a sacred principle," one that you believe should apply to the Palestinians, then how and where is it to express itself? If the Palestinians were to take the step that you have suggested of choosing to talk rather than throw rocks or Molotov cocktails, are they to leave the West Bank and go to Jordan? But you have ruled out, on moral grounds, the forced transfer of Palestinians from the West Bank to the East Bank. On your own premises, Palestinian nationalism and self-determination require from the Israeli-Jewish side a counterstatement that the two peoples involved will finally enact peaceful partition, that Jews will agree that Palestinians have a right to a territorial base for their national life. It is this principle that your own statements make unavoidable—but you have avoided it. I cannot help thinking that you know, at least as well as I, that there are rhetoricians in the mainstream of Israel's right wing who manage to find ways of asserting that they will give the Palestinians very limited local autonomy (this they now call national rights) while retaining control of land, water, and everything else that matters in the West Bank. "What is Israel to do?" It must accept the principle of partition—but to say this is to put oneself on the side of Israel's moderates and to break one's ties to the Likud.
Morally, Jewish tradition commands us to act justly, especially when actions seem imprudent and embarrassing, and never to be silent, even to protect Jewish unity. This Jewish morality has taken one form, recurrently, throughout the ages. Even in bad times, when Jews were under fierce attack, their moral teachers gave no exceptions. The prophets knew that Assyria and Babylonia were far more wicked than Judea, but they held Judea to account, even as the Assyrians and the Babylonians were advancing. "Only you have I known among all the nations of the world; therefore I will hold you to account for all your sins."
There were other voices in the days of the prophets. The prophets Amos, Elijah, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and all the rest, were opposed, generation after generation, by prophets who belonged to the royal courts, who assured the king that his conduct was beyond reproach. The biblical prophets were harassed as traitors who weakened the resolve of a small people—but it is their "treason," and not the prudence of the court prophets, that is our unique Jewish tradition. While the official soothsayers denounced the enemies of the king, the prophets whom we revere followed after Nathan, who dared to confront King David with murdering Uriah and stealing his wife. Nathan defended this Hittite stranger against a divinely appointed Jewish king: "You are the man," he said to David: you are morally responsible.
In the memory of the Holocaust we have been reminded by you that silence is a sin. You have spoken out against indifference and injustice. Why are you making a special exception of Israel? Do you think that our silence will help Israel? The texts that we study and restudy teach the contrary. "Israel will be redeemed by righteousness, and those who return to it, by acts of loving kindness." To be silent is an act of misplaced love. Such silence gives free reign to the armed zealots of ages past, and of this day. Several times in our history, armed zealots have led the Jewish people to glorious disasters. Encouragement by silence, of the kind some of the rabbis gave the zealots when they declared war on Rome in the first century, has a long history of being tragically wrong. We dare not repeat this mistake.
The excesses of the zealots may succeed today, briefly, as they succeeded for a moment several times before, but such excesses are likely to lead again to disaster. Teachers of morality must not indulge the zealots of today, and not only because zealotry does not work. To suppress the weak because of our own supposed weakness is against the very essence of our tradition. When we were a group of hunted former slaves in the desert, Moses proclaimed, as divine teaching, that we should not oppress strangers, for we had been oppressed as strangers in the land of Egypt. This injunction is unconditional.
We should both be haunted by one recent image. Several days after the incident in Beta, an Israeli patrol tried to stop some Arab youths to question them. The youths were unarmed; they had not been throwing rocks, and they were guilty of nothing except not wanting to be interrogated. These young men were fired on, and one was killed. Now I know, as you do, about the dangers for Israeli soldiers in the West Bank and Gaza. I have nieces in Israel's army, and I have said to them that their moral obligation does not include allowing themselves to be slaughtered. But killing those who are simply unwilling to be questioned is another matter entirely. How can we be silent?
I agree with you that ahavat Yisrael, the love of the Jewish people, is a great virtue, but I can find little trace in all the Jewish texts through the centuries that this love must be uncritical. Even Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev, the eighteenth-century Hasid who wrote in defense of the conduct of the Jews, was not silent about their misdeeds. He accepted the moral responsibility to lead. "Love can bend a straight line": it can mislead the lover, so that, with the highest motives, he does grave injury to his beloved. You, Elie, care far too much about the Jewish people, and about Israel, to indulge falls from grace and, de facto, to lend comfort to zealots. If you are persuaded that the policies of the Likud are right, say so, but, in fairness, cease treating so dismissively the political and moral views of the many moderate Jews who reject the politics and morality of the hard line.
I keep thinking these days of the saying that both of us have quoted many times, and sometimes at each other, especially in those early years when we were closest. Menachem Mendel of Kotsk, the tortured Hasid of the last century, once said that when the Evil One wants to destroy us, he tempts us not through our wicked desires but through our most virtuous inclinations; we do good deeds at the wrong time, with the wrong intensity, and in a setting in which they do devastating harm. I fear that for all your love of Israel, you, in what you say, sometimes risk falling into the moral trap that Menachem Mendel described.
You belong among those who speak the truth, even to Jewish power, and who do not look away because of real or invented Jewish weakness. We show the truest love of Israel and the Jewish people when we remind ourselves that, in strength or in weakness, we survive not by prudence and not by power, but through justice.
Your friend,
Arthur Hertzberg
Thursday, May 29, 2008
The Roots of Enmity
Prophecy of retribution
The 1907 writings of one traveller to Palestine vividly describe the roots of the region's enmity
David Goldberg
The Guardian
Thursday May 29 2008
The 60th anniversary of the state of Israel provoked a slew of media coverage, predominantly focused on the intractable Israel-Palestine conflict. As a consequence of the 1948 war of independence (for Arabs the nakba, or catastrophe), up to 750,000 Palestinians were dispossessed. Their continuing homelessness, so the standard version goes, has been the cause of all subsequent wars, Arab terrorism, Israeli incursions and civilian casualties.
That is grim enough, but unfortunately the root of the enmity goes back even further, to the first small-scale Zionist immigration to Palestine in the 1880s. The fact is that never in history has one people willingly invited another into its territory. The unresolved dilemma at the heart of Zionism has been how to respond to that unpalatable truth and reach an accommodation with the native Arab population.
While Jewish pioneers were few, it could be evaded. Writing in 1907, when there were about 10,000 settlers, Isaac Epstein, a Russian-born teacher who had come to Palestine in 1886, called attitudes towards the Arabs "the hidden question". He criticised the leaders of the Zionist movement who engaged in politics while ignoring that "there resides in our treasured land an entire people which has clung to it for hundreds of years ... The Arab, like all other men, is strongly attached to his homeland".
Epstein, like so many of his background, was a disciple of Achad Ha'am - "One of the People", the pen name of Asher Ginsberg - the intellectual doyen of Russian Jewry and mentor to a galaxy of talented younger admirers. He was, wrote the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, the star around which the lesser planets revolved. He was also the bitter rival and implacable critic of Theodor Herzl, the feted crowd-pleaser who announced after his starring role at the first Zionist Congress in 1897: "At Basel I founded the Jewish state." Ha'am noted, "At Basel I sat solitary among my friends, like a mourner at a wedding feast."
In 1891, Ha'am had made his first visit to the Jewish settlements in Palestine. It resulted in an important essay, The Truth from the Land of Israel. What distinguished his report from the gushing accounts of other Jewish visitors was the sober realism with which he noted the many problems. High among them was the existence of an indigenous population. "We tend to believe abroad that Palestine is nowadays almost completely deserted, an uncultivated wilderness, and anyone can come there and buy as much land as his heart desires. But in reality this is not the case. It is difficult to find anywhere in the country Arab land which lies fallow."
Ha'am makes short work of the argument that lesser breeds can be duped about Zionist intentions and bought off with the benefits of colonialism. "The Arab, like all Semites, has a sharp mind and is full of cunning ... [They] understand very well what we want and what we do in the country, but ... at present they do not see any danger for themselves or their future in what we are doing and therefore are trying to turn to their advantage these new guests ... But when the day will come in which the life of our people in the Land of Israel will develop to such a degree that they will push aside the local population by little or by much, then it will not easily give up its place."
In contrast, Herzl has the Arab spokesman in his utopian novel Altneuland (Old-new land) proclaim that Jewish settlement had been a blessing. Landowners have gained from higher prices, peasants from regular employment and welfare benefits. "The Jews have made us prosperous, why should we be angry with them? They live with us as brothers, why should we not love them?"
Ha'am has no truck with such wishful thinking. The behaviour of settlers disturbed him. They had not learned from experience as a minority, but, like a slave who has become king, "behave towards the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, infringe upon their boundaries, hit them shamefully without reason, and even brag about it". The Arab did indeed respect strength, but only when the other side used it justly. When his opponent's actions were unjust and oppressive, then "he may keep his anger to himself for a time ... but in the long run he will prove to be vengeful and full of retribution". Prophetic words.
In 1913, after a correspondent had complained of the contemptuous attitude of settlers and the Zionist Organisation's Palestine Office, Ha'am wrote back, "When I realise that our brethren may be morally capable of treating another people in this fashion and of crudely abusing what is sacred to them, then I cannot but reflect: if such is the situation now, how shall we treat others if one day we actually become the rulers of Palestine?"
·Dr David J Goldberg is emeritus rabbi of The Liberal Jewish Synagogue, London
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/29/israelandthepalestinians
The 1907 writings of one traveller to Palestine vividly describe the roots of the region's enmity
David Goldberg
The Guardian
Thursday May 29 2008
The 60th anniversary of the state of Israel provoked a slew of media coverage, predominantly focused on the intractable Israel-Palestine conflict. As a consequence of the 1948 war of independence (for Arabs the nakba, or catastrophe), up to 750,000 Palestinians were dispossessed. Their continuing homelessness, so the standard version goes, has been the cause of all subsequent wars, Arab terrorism, Israeli incursions and civilian casualties.
That is grim enough, but unfortunately the root of the enmity goes back even further, to the first small-scale Zionist immigration to Palestine in the 1880s. The fact is that never in history has one people willingly invited another into its territory. The unresolved dilemma at the heart of Zionism has been how to respond to that unpalatable truth and reach an accommodation with the native Arab population.
While Jewish pioneers were few, it could be evaded. Writing in 1907, when there were about 10,000 settlers, Isaac Epstein, a Russian-born teacher who had come to Palestine in 1886, called attitudes towards the Arabs "the hidden question". He criticised the leaders of the Zionist movement who engaged in politics while ignoring that "there resides in our treasured land an entire people which has clung to it for hundreds of years ... The Arab, like all other men, is strongly attached to his homeland".
Epstein, like so many of his background, was a disciple of Achad Ha'am - "One of the People", the pen name of Asher Ginsberg - the intellectual doyen of Russian Jewry and mentor to a galaxy of talented younger admirers. He was, wrote the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, the star around which the lesser planets revolved. He was also the bitter rival and implacable critic of Theodor Herzl, the feted crowd-pleaser who announced after his starring role at the first Zionist Congress in 1897: "At Basel I founded the Jewish state." Ha'am noted, "At Basel I sat solitary among my friends, like a mourner at a wedding feast."
In 1891, Ha'am had made his first visit to the Jewish settlements in Palestine. It resulted in an important essay, The Truth from the Land of Israel. What distinguished his report from the gushing accounts of other Jewish visitors was the sober realism with which he noted the many problems. High among them was the existence of an indigenous population. "We tend to believe abroad that Palestine is nowadays almost completely deserted, an uncultivated wilderness, and anyone can come there and buy as much land as his heart desires. But in reality this is not the case. It is difficult to find anywhere in the country Arab land which lies fallow."
Ha'am makes short work of the argument that lesser breeds can be duped about Zionist intentions and bought off with the benefits of colonialism. "The Arab, like all Semites, has a sharp mind and is full of cunning ... [They] understand very well what we want and what we do in the country, but ... at present they do not see any danger for themselves or their future in what we are doing and therefore are trying to turn to their advantage these new guests ... But when the day will come in which the life of our people in the Land of Israel will develop to such a degree that they will push aside the local population by little or by much, then it will not easily give up its place."
In contrast, Herzl has the Arab spokesman in his utopian novel Altneuland (Old-new land) proclaim that Jewish settlement had been a blessing. Landowners have gained from higher prices, peasants from regular employment and welfare benefits. "The Jews have made us prosperous, why should we be angry with them? They live with us as brothers, why should we not love them?"
Ha'am has no truck with such wishful thinking. The behaviour of settlers disturbed him. They had not learned from experience as a minority, but, like a slave who has become king, "behave towards the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, infringe upon their boundaries, hit them shamefully without reason, and even brag about it". The Arab did indeed respect strength, but only when the other side used it justly. When his opponent's actions were unjust and oppressive, then "he may keep his anger to himself for a time ... but in the long run he will prove to be vengeful and full of retribution". Prophetic words.
In 1913, after a correspondent had complained of the contemptuous attitude of settlers and the Zionist Organisation's Palestine Office, Ha'am wrote back, "When I realise that our brethren may be morally capable of treating another people in this fashion and of crudely abusing what is sacred to them, then I cannot but reflect: if such is the situation now, how shall we treat others if one day we actually become the rulers of Palestine?"
·Dr David J Goldberg is emeritus rabbi of The Liberal Jewish Synagogue, London
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/29/israelandthepalestinians
Friday, May 23, 2008
A Short History of Israel in Palestine
60 Years of Apartheid
By SHARON SMITH
South Africa’s white minority government was finally overthrown in 1993, after decades of black popular and working-class resistance. That year, the black majority democratically elected the African National Congress--previously derided as a “terrorist” organization by apartheid’s imperial supporters, including the U.S.--to lead its government. Freedom fighter Nelson Mandela, having spent 27 years in a South African prison and reviled as an international terrorist, was reinvented in the Western press as an elder statesman.
Now the apartheid state of Israel fears it will meet the same fate from its own oppressed, and growing, Palestinian population. While Israel’s proponents continue to rhetorically claim that the Zionist state is the only bulwark against another Holocaust, its leaders also continue to openly express its true identification with South Africa’s racist regime. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert remarked recently in the New York Times, “We now have the Palestinians running an Algeria-style campaign against Israel, but what I fear is that they will try to run a South Africa-type campaign against us.” If international sanctions are imposed as they were against apartheid, “the state of Israel is finished.”
Indeed, stripped of rhetoric, the parallels are striking. The state of Israel was enshrined as a sovereign state in 1948, the same year the white supremacist National Party came to power in South Africa. Both the Zionism and apartheid had been decades in the making, with the backing of British imperialism. Both colonial projects were designed to violently disfranchise and subjugate the indigenous majority that occupied both countries.
Their methods, however, were different. While South Africa’s white supremacists imposed minority rule over its vast African population, Israel intended to distinguish itself as the only “democracy” in the Middle East. This was accomplished by driving out Palestine’s majority Arab population, thereby creating a Jewish majority. In 1947, Jews owned just 6 percent of Palestinian land and made up just one-third of its population. In 1948, the UN nevertheless relegated Jewish control over 55 percent of Palestinian land, overruling Palestinian demands for a democratic state. But this was not enough for the Zionist project.
Armed Zionist gangs, including the Irgun, led by future Israeli Prime Minister Menachin Begin, and the Stern Gang initially massacred 254 unarmed Palestinian men, women and children in the village of Dier Yassin. The terror spread to 40 other Palestinian villages as tens of thousands of Palestinians fled their homeland in desperation, with only their clothes on their backs. By 1949, Israel controlled 78 percent of Palestine and had driven approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. They have never been allowed to return.
Times have changed. The majority of Palestine’s Arab population is now hermetically sealed and relegated to sub-human status within Israel’s occupied post-1967 borders. But what Israel fears most is the imposition of one person/one vote—destroying any claim to the “democratic” model so carefully engineered to give Jews a majority—should those borders ever reopen. If Israel were to return to a democratic, secular state, Palestinians will soon outnumber Jews.
The parallels of these two racially segregated regimes remain stunning. When South African anti-apartheid activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu visited the occupied territories in 2003, he described Palestinians’ existence "much like what happened to us black people in South Africa.”
----
Israel’s sixtieth anniversary celebrations were designed as a public relations exercise, intended to reinstate Israel’s victim status. But they failed miserably in this regard, starting with their keynote speakers. As George W. Bush’s approval ratings plummeted lower than any president since Gallup began polling 70 years ago—including those of Richard Nixon before his forced resignation—the idiot president traveled to the Israel to join in the pomp and circumstance. Bush knew that in Israel, if nowhere else, his presence would be greeted enthusiastically, for Israel’s colonial fate so closely overlaps with that of U.S. imperialism. On May 15th, Bush shared a Jerusalem stage with his scandal ridden Israeli counterpart, Olmert, in a bumbled effort to resurrect the moral authority of the increasingly discredited apartheid state of Israel.
The Israeli celebrations were marred by the tenacity of its occupied Palestinian population, who insisted on calling attention to their desperate existence at the receiving end of the Zionist project. Tens of thousands of Palestinians demonstrated in their largest numbers since the start of the second Intifada in 2000, inside and outside Israel’s pre-1967 borders. As Bush spoke, he miraculously managed to ignore the plight of the Palestinian protesters assembled on the other side of the nearby separation wall, in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Indeed, as Israel celebrated, the Gaza Strip lay in darkness on Saturday, May 10th, with no fuel for its only power plant. Before Israel bombed this power plant two years ago, it was able to provide 100mW of electricity; today, it provides less than half that amount. Israel has exacerbated the shortage of electricity by withholding fuel allowed into Gaza.
Israel’s sweeping blockade of basic necessities has reduced Gaza’s population to a "subhuman existence," according to a senior UN official. The World Bank estimated that poverty rates in Gaza stood at 67 percent in April, with the UN suspending food aid for four days due to a lack of fuel for its delivery vehicles. By these means, Israel has reduced the calorie intake of the Palestinians in Gaza, according to a UN report, to just 61 percent of the average daily requirement. Lack of electricity has also drastically reduced drinkable water for the 70,000 Gazans who rely on wells using fuel pumps, while “60m liters of raw and partially treated sewage are being pumped straight into the sea every day,” according to the Guardian newspaper.
In the West Bank, where Palestinians are caged in by 8-meter high separation walls, pass laws, curfews and 600 separate military checkpoints prohibiting their ability to travel even within the Israeli-occupied territories, Jewish-only settlements and roads have expanded to control coveted water resources and dominate roughly 40 percent of the land within. B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the OPT stated recently, “the restrictions of movement that Israel has imposed on the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories over the past five years are unprecedented in the history of the Israeli occupation in their scope, durations and in the severity of damage that they have caused to the three and half million Palestinians who reside there.”
Between February 27th and March 3rd, Israeli troops murdered 106 Palestinians, including 54 civilian bystanders and 25 children. This year’s death toll on May 12th numbered at least 312 Palestinians--197 who were unarmed civilians and least 44 children, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.
Israel has justified its ongoing blockade and daily assassinations of Gazans as a legitimate response to the “violent takeover” of Gaza by Hamas. But Palestinians democratically elected Hamas to a majority in the Palestinian Authority parliament in 2006, verified by international observers. The violence ensued only after both Israel and the U.S. refused to recognize the results of this democratic election. This uncomfortable fact negates Bush’s claim to be bringing “democracy” to the recalcitrant Arab populations of the Middle East, so he did not mention it in his extensive speeches to Israeli revelers during his visit.
On the contrary, Bush called Israel a homeland for God's "chosen people,” while claiming that European Jews arrived “here in the desert" in 1948, as if it had been an empty, unoccupied land. That same day, addressing the Israeli Knesset, Bush praised former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as “one of Israel’s greatest leaders” and “a man of peace.”
* * *
By referencing Sharon (one of Israel’s most blood-thirsty ethnic cleansers, lying blissfully in a persistent vegetative state since 2006), Bush unwittingly forced attention on Israel’s conscious identification with South African apartheid since the 1970s. Following South Africa’s example of moving its African population into segregated cantons without citizenship rights, Sharon infamously argued that “the Bantustan plan was the most suitable solution to [Israel’s] conflict,” as reported in Haaretz on June 18, 2007.
The Zionist regime was not deterred by the fact that apartheid leaders, including South African’s violent Prime Minister John Vorster, were open Nazi enablers during the Second World War—because a similar system of racial segregation also suited the Israeli state. Like South Africa’s apartheid regime, Israel sought to relegate its majority indigenous population to the status of non-citizen in their own homeland, through a combination of armed terror and racist segregation laws.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin welcomed Vorster at a state banquet in 1976, noting the two countries’ common fight against "foreign-inspired instability and recklessness.” South Africa was more blatant in its government yearbook published a few months later, noting, "Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples."
As the Guardian reported in 2006, Alon Liel, former Israeli ambassador to South Africa described the relations between Israel and South Africa in 1976 as “a love affair between the security establishments of the two countries and their armies.” He continued, "We created the South African arms industry. They assisted us to develop all kinds of technology because they had a lot of money. When we were developing things together we usually gave the know-how and they gave the money.”
* * *
U.S taxpayer dollars have funded Israel's war on Palestine since its inception 60 years ago. Since 1948, Israel has remained the largest recipient of foreign aid, with more than $108 billion from the U.S. government. Over the last ten years, U.S. military aid reached $17 billion—including $2.4 billion this year alone—while Congress endorsed Israel's most recent assault on Gaza by a vote of 404-1.
It would be wrong, however, to conclude as many do, that the “Israeli lobby” guides U.S. Middle East policy. On the contrary, Israel’s most powerful lobby resides inside the Pentagon. The U.S. funds Israel for its own reasons in the Middle East, because it needs this well-armed and hostile combatant state, however unpredictable, that shares a similar interest in quelling Arab rebellions wherever they occur.
Indeed, Egypt is the second largest recipient of U.S foreign aid, receiving roughly $1.3 billion a year in military aid since 1979, and an average of $815 million a year in economic assistance. Egypt will receive 1.3 billion in military aid and $415 million in civilian aid this year. This is money well spent, as witnessed in January, when Palestinians swarmed the Rafah border into Egypt to buy basic necessities—and Egyptian riot police turned water cannons on the starving Palestinians. Despite the desperation of Gazans fleeing occupation, Egypt closed its border as soon as possible.
Yet the populations of neighboring Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan identify with the Palestinian struggle, even if their despotic leaders do not. Regional solidarity provides the eventual solution to the struggle for Palestine.
Israel’s greatest fear, that Palestinians will outnumber Jews despite their careful engineering, will soon become a demographic reality. As former Knesset member Yossi Sarid, noted recently, comparing Israel to South African apartheid, “One essential difference remains between South Africa and Israel: There a small minority dominated a large majority, and here we have almost a tie. But the tiebreaker is already darkening on the horizon… “[T]he Zionist project will come to an end if we don’t choose to leave the slave house before being visited by a fatal demographic plague.”
As in South Africa, Israeli apartheid can only survive for so long before it is overthrown from below. Indeed, if Israel’s current starvation tactic toward Palestinians, currently locked down in their future “Palestinian state,” is any indication the Camp David solution is dead. Only a genuine democracy encompassed by one–person/one-vote, that Israel so fears, points the way for the future—in a single, secular state in which all citizens are equal, without regard to race or religion.
Sharon Smith is the author of Women and Socialism and Subterranean Fire: a History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States.
She can be reached at: sharon@internationalsocialist.org
http://www.counterpunch.org/sharon05222008.html
By SHARON SMITH
South Africa’s white minority government was finally overthrown in 1993, after decades of black popular and working-class resistance. That year, the black majority democratically elected the African National Congress--previously derided as a “terrorist” organization by apartheid’s imperial supporters, including the U.S.--to lead its government. Freedom fighter Nelson Mandela, having spent 27 years in a South African prison and reviled as an international terrorist, was reinvented in the Western press as an elder statesman.
Now the apartheid state of Israel fears it will meet the same fate from its own oppressed, and growing, Palestinian population. While Israel’s proponents continue to rhetorically claim that the Zionist state is the only bulwark against another Holocaust, its leaders also continue to openly express its true identification with South Africa’s racist regime. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert remarked recently in the New York Times, “We now have the Palestinians running an Algeria-style campaign against Israel, but what I fear is that they will try to run a South Africa-type campaign against us.” If international sanctions are imposed as they were against apartheid, “the state of Israel is finished.”
Indeed, stripped of rhetoric, the parallels are striking. The state of Israel was enshrined as a sovereign state in 1948, the same year the white supremacist National Party came to power in South Africa. Both the Zionism and apartheid had been decades in the making, with the backing of British imperialism. Both colonial projects were designed to violently disfranchise and subjugate the indigenous majority that occupied both countries.
Their methods, however, were different. While South Africa’s white supremacists imposed minority rule over its vast African population, Israel intended to distinguish itself as the only “democracy” in the Middle East. This was accomplished by driving out Palestine’s majority Arab population, thereby creating a Jewish majority. In 1947, Jews owned just 6 percent of Palestinian land and made up just one-third of its population. In 1948, the UN nevertheless relegated Jewish control over 55 percent of Palestinian land, overruling Palestinian demands for a democratic state. But this was not enough for the Zionist project.
Armed Zionist gangs, including the Irgun, led by future Israeli Prime Minister Menachin Begin, and the Stern Gang initially massacred 254 unarmed Palestinian men, women and children in the village of Dier Yassin. The terror spread to 40 other Palestinian villages as tens of thousands of Palestinians fled their homeland in desperation, with only their clothes on their backs. By 1949, Israel controlled 78 percent of Palestine and had driven approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. They have never been allowed to return.
Times have changed. The majority of Palestine’s Arab population is now hermetically sealed and relegated to sub-human status within Israel’s occupied post-1967 borders. But what Israel fears most is the imposition of one person/one vote—destroying any claim to the “democratic” model so carefully engineered to give Jews a majority—should those borders ever reopen. If Israel were to return to a democratic, secular state, Palestinians will soon outnumber Jews.
The parallels of these two racially segregated regimes remain stunning. When South African anti-apartheid activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu visited the occupied territories in 2003, he described Palestinians’ existence "much like what happened to us black people in South Africa.”
----
Israel’s sixtieth anniversary celebrations were designed as a public relations exercise, intended to reinstate Israel’s victim status. But they failed miserably in this regard, starting with their keynote speakers. As George W. Bush’s approval ratings plummeted lower than any president since Gallup began polling 70 years ago—including those of Richard Nixon before his forced resignation—the idiot president traveled to the Israel to join in the pomp and circumstance. Bush knew that in Israel, if nowhere else, his presence would be greeted enthusiastically, for Israel’s colonial fate so closely overlaps with that of U.S. imperialism. On May 15th, Bush shared a Jerusalem stage with his scandal ridden Israeli counterpart, Olmert, in a bumbled effort to resurrect the moral authority of the increasingly discredited apartheid state of Israel.
The Israeli celebrations were marred by the tenacity of its occupied Palestinian population, who insisted on calling attention to their desperate existence at the receiving end of the Zionist project. Tens of thousands of Palestinians demonstrated in their largest numbers since the start of the second Intifada in 2000, inside and outside Israel’s pre-1967 borders. As Bush spoke, he miraculously managed to ignore the plight of the Palestinian protesters assembled on the other side of the nearby separation wall, in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Indeed, as Israel celebrated, the Gaza Strip lay in darkness on Saturday, May 10th, with no fuel for its only power plant. Before Israel bombed this power plant two years ago, it was able to provide 100mW of electricity; today, it provides less than half that amount. Israel has exacerbated the shortage of electricity by withholding fuel allowed into Gaza.
Israel’s sweeping blockade of basic necessities has reduced Gaza’s population to a "subhuman existence," according to a senior UN official. The World Bank estimated that poverty rates in Gaza stood at 67 percent in April, with the UN suspending food aid for four days due to a lack of fuel for its delivery vehicles. By these means, Israel has reduced the calorie intake of the Palestinians in Gaza, according to a UN report, to just 61 percent of the average daily requirement. Lack of electricity has also drastically reduced drinkable water for the 70,000 Gazans who rely on wells using fuel pumps, while “60m liters of raw and partially treated sewage are being pumped straight into the sea every day,” according to the Guardian newspaper.
In the West Bank, where Palestinians are caged in by 8-meter high separation walls, pass laws, curfews and 600 separate military checkpoints prohibiting their ability to travel even within the Israeli-occupied territories, Jewish-only settlements and roads have expanded to control coveted water resources and dominate roughly 40 percent of the land within. B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the OPT stated recently, “the restrictions of movement that Israel has imposed on the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories over the past five years are unprecedented in the history of the Israeli occupation in their scope, durations and in the severity of damage that they have caused to the three and half million Palestinians who reside there.”
Between February 27th and March 3rd, Israeli troops murdered 106 Palestinians, including 54 civilian bystanders and 25 children. This year’s death toll on May 12th numbered at least 312 Palestinians--197 who were unarmed civilians and least 44 children, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.
Israel has justified its ongoing blockade and daily assassinations of Gazans as a legitimate response to the “violent takeover” of Gaza by Hamas. But Palestinians democratically elected Hamas to a majority in the Palestinian Authority parliament in 2006, verified by international observers. The violence ensued only after both Israel and the U.S. refused to recognize the results of this democratic election. This uncomfortable fact negates Bush’s claim to be bringing “democracy” to the recalcitrant Arab populations of the Middle East, so he did not mention it in his extensive speeches to Israeli revelers during his visit.
On the contrary, Bush called Israel a homeland for God's "chosen people,” while claiming that European Jews arrived “here in the desert" in 1948, as if it had been an empty, unoccupied land. That same day, addressing the Israeli Knesset, Bush praised former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as “one of Israel’s greatest leaders” and “a man of peace.”
* * *
By referencing Sharon (one of Israel’s most blood-thirsty ethnic cleansers, lying blissfully in a persistent vegetative state since 2006), Bush unwittingly forced attention on Israel’s conscious identification with South African apartheid since the 1970s. Following South Africa’s example of moving its African population into segregated cantons without citizenship rights, Sharon infamously argued that “the Bantustan plan was the most suitable solution to [Israel’s] conflict,” as reported in Haaretz on June 18, 2007.
The Zionist regime was not deterred by the fact that apartheid leaders, including South African’s violent Prime Minister John Vorster, were open Nazi enablers during the Second World War—because a similar system of racial segregation also suited the Israeli state. Like South Africa’s apartheid regime, Israel sought to relegate its majority indigenous population to the status of non-citizen in their own homeland, through a combination of armed terror and racist segregation laws.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin welcomed Vorster at a state banquet in 1976, noting the two countries’ common fight against "foreign-inspired instability and recklessness.” South Africa was more blatant in its government yearbook published a few months later, noting, "Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples."
As the Guardian reported in 2006, Alon Liel, former Israeli ambassador to South Africa described the relations between Israel and South Africa in 1976 as “a love affair between the security establishments of the two countries and their armies.” He continued, "We created the South African arms industry. They assisted us to develop all kinds of technology because they had a lot of money. When we were developing things together we usually gave the know-how and they gave the money.”
* * *
U.S taxpayer dollars have funded Israel's war on Palestine since its inception 60 years ago. Since 1948, Israel has remained the largest recipient of foreign aid, with more than $108 billion from the U.S. government. Over the last ten years, U.S. military aid reached $17 billion—including $2.4 billion this year alone—while Congress endorsed Israel's most recent assault on Gaza by a vote of 404-1.
It would be wrong, however, to conclude as many do, that the “Israeli lobby” guides U.S. Middle East policy. On the contrary, Israel’s most powerful lobby resides inside the Pentagon. The U.S. funds Israel for its own reasons in the Middle East, because it needs this well-armed and hostile combatant state, however unpredictable, that shares a similar interest in quelling Arab rebellions wherever they occur.
Indeed, Egypt is the second largest recipient of U.S foreign aid, receiving roughly $1.3 billion a year in military aid since 1979, and an average of $815 million a year in economic assistance. Egypt will receive 1.3 billion in military aid and $415 million in civilian aid this year. This is money well spent, as witnessed in January, when Palestinians swarmed the Rafah border into Egypt to buy basic necessities—and Egyptian riot police turned water cannons on the starving Palestinians. Despite the desperation of Gazans fleeing occupation, Egypt closed its border as soon as possible.
Yet the populations of neighboring Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan identify with the Palestinian struggle, even if their despotic leaders do not. Regional solidarity provides the eventual solution to the struggle for Palestine.
Israel’s greatest fear, that Palestinians will outnumber Jews despite their careful engineering, will soon become a demographic reality. As former Knesset member Yossi Sarid, noted recently, comparing Israel to South African apartheid, “One essential difference remains between South Africa and Israel: There a small minority dominated a large majority, and here we have almost a tie. But the tiebreaker is already darkening on the horizon… “[T]he Zionist project will come to an end if we don’t choose to leave the slave house before being visited by a fatal demographic plague.”
As in South Africa, Israeli apartheid can only survive for so long before it is overthrown from below. Indeed, if Israel’s current starvation tactic toward Palestinians, currently locked down in their future “Palestinian state,” is any indication the Camp David solution is dead. Only a genuine democracy encompassed by one–person/one-vote, that Israel so fears, points the way for the future—in a single, secular state in which all citizens are equal, without regard to race or religion.
Sharon Smith is the author of Women and Socialism and Subterranean Fire: a History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States.
She can be reached at: sharon@internationalsocialist.org
http://www.counterpunch.org/sharon05222008.html
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