Dear Friend,
Here are my thoughts on the visit by the U.S. President to I/P. It also comes as an attachment. JRK
FPI director John Kleinheksel on the President’s Visit to Israel/Palestine (March, 2013)
I What happened? There was much to like about President Obama’s visit to friends and foreigners in Israel/Palestine, March 20-23, 2013. Yet, many questions remain to be answered.
I’m reminded of the contest between Sun and Wind, as to which of them could get the Traveler to shed his coat. “Watch me get it done,” boasted Wind, as he blew harder and harder. But the more Wind blew, the tighter the Traveler wrapped her overcoat around her. “Let me show you how,” spoke Sun, turning up the heat. The Traveler began loosening her coat. Sun’s warmth persisted until the Traveler finally shed her protective coat.
Obama has come to the Middle East both as Wind and Sun. When he first came (June, 2009) to Cairo, Egypt, to reset U.S./Arab relationships, his coming as Sun to Arabs was perceived as a gale-force Wind in the face of the Israelis. Consequently his insistence on a settlement freeze (from a distance) was perceived as a preference for Palestinians (and a nail in the coffin of Jewish State legitimacy).
So now, at the outset of his 2nd term, he goes in person to Jerusalem to reassure the Israeli leadership that he is fully supportive of the “Jewish State”. “Trust me”, he said, “You can now take risks for peace with their Palestinian neighbors”. But he doesn’t make this case to the Knesset, (the Israeli Parliament). Instead he goes to representatives of the newer generations of mostly Jewish, but some Muslim and Christian young people, at the Jerusalem Convention Center. He strongly encourages the more than 2,000, to build bridges to one another and bring about grass root changes that will have to be taken into account by reluctant “politicians”.
Call it a charm offensive or a visit to repair frayed U.S./Israeli relations, but hear him inviting the younger generation to compose new music to replace the discordant jangle so offensive right now. “You can transcend the deadly stalemate of the past years (and decades)”.
“Put yourselves in Palestinian shoes”, said he. They desire what you want for Israelis: A State of their own, a stake in an open economy, homes and education and the dignity of full citizenship.
He said these things right there in Jerusalem, the heart of the Jewish state, and from his own heart; the very things he would not be permitted to speak in Washington D. C. lest he be run out of town as an Anti-Semitic bigot. He came in person, not demanding, but appealing.
So, he clearly laid out the substantive issues (“Justice” for Palestinians, “security” for Israelis) as an insider “friend”, not an outsider “enemy”, urging youths to take actions for engagement.
II Of course, questions remain. Lots of them:
1) Will the settlers persist in their drive to colonize all the land?
2) Will the Palestinians doubt his sincerity in pressing for an independent, autonomous Palestinian state?
3) Is the Two-State option even alive, or must Palestinians press for full equality in a One-Jewish-Palestinian State.
4) Will a way be found to begin indispensable negotiations?
But the main question it seems to me is simply this:
5) Given the President’s virtual unconditional pledge of support to the existing Jewish State, why would Israel change course by meaningful engagement with Palestinian aspirations (for “Ending the Occupation”)? Why would the new Israeli administration be willing to move toward a true “Two-State” solution to the “conflict”, given the new strength of the settler movement in the new administration? [“Conflict? What conflict? We Israelis have things going our way. The US is “at our back” so it’s ‘business as usual’. Let the Palestinians continue to eat the crumbs falling from our table”.]
Obama: “It is in your long-term self-interest to diffuse the unrelenting resentment against the ‘Occupation’ (Yes! He actually used the term, much to the dismay of the Israeli right wing!)
Will Israel listen? Will the Arab Palestinians listen? Will bridge-building relationships deepen and bear fruit, or will rejectionist extremists from both sides reinforce the fences that block human interaction (and lead to violent carnage)?
Will the President’s visit be perceived as the Wind in your face, reinforcing intransigence, or as the Sun on your back, to bring about a thaw in frosty relationships on all sides? The newer generations of Arabs and Israelis will bring about a new Israel/Palestinian “Spring”. Participants take notice. Don’t miss out!
John Kleinheksel, “Friends of Palestinians and Israelis” (FPI)
There is no PEACE without JUSTICE; there is no justice without LOVE.
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Saturday, March 9, 2013
Abolish the Occupation!
Dear Friend,
Bradley Burston is an Israeli. A radical Israeli, willing to think the unthinkable, and then talk out loud about it; and write about it.
Below is his latest insight into I/P after watching LINCOLN, the Hollywood blockbuster movie, there in Israel.
He comes to a startling conclusion. "I am an abolitionist" he says, wanting to end the slavery that is the destroying the Palestinian population.
Please read it. Send it to your friends. Advocate for real change in Ending the Occupation! Consider BDS (boycotts, divestment and sanctions).
As Lincoln abolished slavery, Israel must abolish occupation
By Bradley Burston, Haaretz, Feb.26, 2013
I realize now that I am an abolitionist and that occupation is slavery. I also realize that I need to pay more attention to Abraham Lincoln, in his ability to remind us all of the wisdom hidden in the obvious.
I've been hearing people say lately, that if they hear one more negative thing about Israel, it will drive them nuts.
I've heard this from people who hate Israel to death, from people who adore Israel all but uncritically, and from the group I belong to, people who love this place and find it maddening in every sense of the term, painful to love, painful to leave, terrifying in prospect, an indelible, at times miraculous shadow sewn to the soul.
In theory, a movie house ought to offer a certain escape from this. No such luck. When my wife and I took the bus to see "Lincoln" this week, the driver let us off at the stop closest to the theater: Rabin Square, site of the 1995 assassination and, although we didn't know it yet, a lens through which to understand the darkness of Abraham Lincoln, an America torn to catastrophe by slavery, and, most of all, ourselves.
I know something of American history. I know much about the Civil War. But for my wife and I, the two and a half hours we watched "Lincoln," were spent watching our Israel tear itself to death over how we relate to, or manage not to relate to, Palestinians as people.
Over and over, in the film's debates over slavery, an endless, unbearable war, and their interconnections, it was impossible not to see the parallels to Israeli society, politics, warfare, and daily life.
It was impossible not to see, in this theater across the street from Rabin Square, what one determined, inspiring, all-too-human leader, in cooperation with the vast majority of a nation, could accomplish for the sake of fundamental human justice - and the price that one fuming, armed extremist might make that leader pay for any success in moving forward.
Sometimes you have to look away from what you're overused to, in order to see it at all. Sometimes you need to be in some faraway dark place, for there to be light shed on your own.
I realize now why "apartheid" is too easy, too slick, too Madison Avenue a term, for what occupation truly is and does.
Occupation is slavery.
In the name of occupation, generation after generation of Palestinians have been treated as property. They can be moved at will, shackled at will, tortured at will, have their families separated at will. They can be denied the right to vote, to own property, to meet or speak to family and friends. They can be hounded or even shot dead by their masters, who claim their position by biblical right, and also use them to build and work on the plantations the toilers cannot themselves ever hope to own.
The masters dehumanize them, call them by the names of beasts.
The clergy of this Old South in the new West Bank, claiming God and the Bible, preach that it is permissible to rebel against the government, against the army, in order to protect the plantations and the sanctity of the institution of occupation.
The spokesman of this Old South, speaking to us across the secession lines, trade in fear of those under oppression, warning that they will take us over and kill us, if they are allowed to be free.
The day we went to see "Lincoln," headlines spoke of 15 Jewish youths nearly killing an Arab Israeli in Jaffa, bloodying his head and one eye with bottles and glass shards, sending him to hospital in serious condition. The victim was attacked as he re-filled his vehicle with water, in order to continue to clean their streets. His wife quoted the attackers as saying as they beat him, that Arabs were "trying to take over the country."
I realize now that I am an abolitionist. I realize how many, many people I know, people in that unnamed, largely unorganized group I belong to, are abolitionists as well, people for whom the central, the crucial, the overriding issue facing Israel and Israelis – and Jews the world over – is how to bring the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem to an end.
I realize now that I need to pay more attention to Abraham Lincoln, in his ability to remind us all – in our natural desire not to hear one more bad thing – of the wisdom hidden in the obvious.
"Those who deny freedom to others," he once said, "deserve it not for themselves."
And this: “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”
--
There is no PEACE without JUSTICE; there is no justice without LOVE.
Bradley Burston is an Israeli. A radical Israeli, willing to think the unthinkable, and then talk out loud about it; and write about it.
Below is his latest insight into I/P after watching LINCOLN, the Hollywood blockbuster movie, there in Israel.
He comes to a startling conclusion. "I am an abolitionist" he says, wanting to end the slavery that is the destroying the Palestinian population.
Please read it. Send it to your friends. Advocate for real change in Ending the Occupation! Consider BDS (boycotts, divestment and sanctions).
As Lincoln abolished slavery, Israel must abolish occupation
By Bradley Burston, Haaretz, Feb.26, 2013
I realize now that I am an abolitionist and that occupation is slavery. I also realize that I need to pay more attention to Abraham Lincoln, in his ability to remind us all of the wisdom hidden in the obvious.
I've been hearing people say lately, that if they hear one more negative thing about Israel, it will drive them nuts.
I've heard this from people who hate Israel to death, from people who adore Israel all but uncritically, and from the group I belong to, people who love this place and find it maddening in every sense of the term, painful to love, painful to leave, terrifying in prospect, an indelible, at times miraculous shadow sewn to the soul.
In theory, a movie house ought to offer a certain escape from this. No such luck. When my wife and I took the bus to see "Lincoln" this week, the driver let us off at the stop closest to the theater: Rabin Square, site of the 1995 assassination and, although we didn't know it yet, a lens through which to understand the darkness of Abraham Lincoln, an America torn to catastrophe by slavery, and, most of all, ourselves.
I know something of American history. I know much about the Civil War. But for my wife and I, the two and a half hours we watched "Lincoln," were spent watching our Israel tear itself to death over how we relate to, or manage not to relate to, Palestinians as people.
Over and over, in the film's debates over slavery, an endless, unbearable war, and their interconnections, it was impossible not to see the parallels to Israeli society, politics, warfare, and daily life.
It was impossible not to see, in this theater across the street from Rabin Square, what one determined, inspiring, all-too-human leader, in cooperation with the vast majority of a nation, could accomplish for the sake of fundamental human justice - and the price that one fuming, armed extremist might make that leader pay for any success in moving forward.
Sometimes you have to look away from what you're overused to, in order to see it at all. Sometimes you need to be in some faraway dark place, for there to be light shed on your own.
I realize now why "apartheid" is too easy, too slick, too Madison Avenue a term, for what occupation truly is and does.
Occupation is slavery.
In the name of occupation, generation after generation of Palestinians have been treated as property. They can be moved at will, shackled at will, tortured at will, have their families separated at will. They can be denied the right to vote, to own property, to meet or speak to family and friends. They can be hounded or even shot dead by their masters, who claim their position by biblical right, and also use them to build and work on the plantations the toilers cannot themselves ever hope to own.
The masters dehumanize them, call them by the names of beasts.
The clergy of this Old South in the new West Bank, claiming God and the Bible, preach that it is permissible to rebel against the government, against the army, in order to protect the plantations and the sanctity of the institution of occupation.
The spokesman of this Old South, speaking to us across the secession lines, trade in fear of those under oppression, warning that they will take us over and kill us, if they are allowed to be free.
The day we went to see "Lincoln," headlines spoke of 15 Jewish youths nearly killing an Arab Israeli in Jaffa, bloodying his head and one eye with bottles and glass shards, sending him to hospital in serious condition. The victim was attacked as he re-filled his vehicle with water, in order to continue to clean their streets. His wife quoted the attackers as saying as they beat him, that Arabs were "trying to take over the country."
I realize now that I am an abolitionist. I realize how many, many people I know, people in that unnamed, largely unorganized group I belong to, are abolitionists as well, people for whom the central, the crucial, the overriding issue facing Israel and Israelis – and Jews the world over – is how to bring the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem to an end.
I realize now that I need to pay more attention to Abraham Lincoln, in his ability to remind us all – in our natural desire not to hear one more bad thing – of the wisdom hidden in the obvious.
"Those who deny freedom to others," he once said, "deserve it not for themselves."
And this: “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”
--
There is no PEACE without JUSTICE; there is no justice without LOVE.
Monday, February 25, 2013
BDS (Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions) are NOT Anti-Semitic!
Dear Friend,
A momentous event was held at Brooklyn College on Feb 7. It was vilified by persons and groups giving unqualified support to the Status Quo in I/P, but gave participants an opportunity to hear of practical ways of breaking into the Status Quo.
There was a time, many years ago, when the Reformed Church in America (the denomination with which I am affiliated) took the lead in pressing our friends in the Apartheid state of South Africa to "repent and reform" by means of BDS. That seems not to be the case today. There are other priorities and engaging in controversial actions is too costly for many. I wonder what the attitude of Jesus was toward the Herodian/Pilate/Caesar axis that ran things in I/P 2000 years ago, and what he did to support those on the margins, ground down by oppression and dispossession?
Others are taking the lead. Many from the Israel/Palestine Mission Network (of the PCUSA) are engaging with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), End the Occupation (Anna Baltzer) and others, in pressing for nonviolent actions that will draw attention to the injustices of the present administration in I/P.
Please at least scan his article by Omar Barghouti (in the NY Daily News) about what happened at Brooklyn College earlier this month.
This, especially in the light of the the upcoming visit to the region by John Kerry and our President Obama. Faithfully yours, JRK
The BDS movement explained
Monday, February 25, 2013
By Omar Barghouti
In many media reports on the recent panel held at Brooklyn College on the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel, BDS was subjected to relentless vilification and unfounded allegations.
This was yet another ruthless campaign to demonize and shut down all criticism of Israel. Following congressional Israel-centered bullying of secretary of defense nominee Chuck Hagel, it is further evidence of the rise of a new McCarthyism — one that uses unconditional allegiance to Israel as the litmus test of loyalty.
Indeed, suppressed in all media coverage of the Brooklyn College controversy were Palestinian voices — like mine — who can best explain why Palestinians have embarked on this nonviolent, rights-based struggle for our rights, and how it is deeply inspired by the South African anti-apartheid and the U.S. civil rights movements.
Despite the intimidation campaign waged against it, Brooklyn College — with support from civil libertarians and influential liberal voices — upheld academic freedom and allowed the BDS event on Feb. 7 to proceed.
Mayor Bloomberg indirectly compared attempts by politicians to impose their agenda on the college to North Korea’s despotic policies. Ironically, in a 2012 BBC poll of world public opinion, Israel ranked third among the countries with the most negative influence in the world, competing with North Korea. As many now recognize, BDS has played a considerable role in exposing Israeli policies and, as a result, engendering this steady erosion of Israel’s international standing.
The BDS call was launched on July 9, 2005, by an alliance of more than 170 Palestinian parties, unions, refugee networks, NGOs and grassroots associations. They asked international civil society organizations and people of conscience to “impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era.”
Specifically, BDS calls for an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967; an end to what even the U.S. State Department slams as Israel’s “institutional, legal and societal discrimination” against its Palestinian citizens; and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and lands from which they were forcibly displaced.
Our opponents call us “Jew haters.” That is a lie and a slander. BDS advocates equal rights for all and consistently opposes all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism. In fact, many progressive Jewish activists, intellectuals, students, feminists and others participate in and sometimes lead BDS campaigns in Western countries. The increasing impact of Israeli supporters of BDS has led the Knesset to pass a draconian anti-boycott law banning advocacy of any boycott against Israel or its complicit institutions.
Calling the boycott of Israel anti-Semitic is itself an anti-Semitic statement, as it reduces all Jews to a monolith that is absolutely equivalent to the state of Israel, is entirely represented by Israel and holds collective responsibility for Israel’s policies.
If boycott is “withdrawing . . . cooperation from an evil system,” as Martin Luther King Jr. teaches us, BDS fundamentally calls on all peace-loving U.S. citizens to fulfill their profound moral obligation to desist from complicity in Israel’s system of oppression against the Palestinian people, which takes the form of occupation, colonization and apartheid. Given the billions of dollars lavished by the U.S. on Israel annually, American taxpayers are effectively subsidizing Israel’s human rights violations.
Building on its global ascendance, the BDS movement is spreading across the U.S., especially on campuses and in churches. Multi-million-dollar campaigns by Israel’s foreign ministry to counter BDS by “rebranding” through art, science and cynically using LGBT rights to “pinkwash” Israel’s denial of basic Palestinian rights have failed to stem the tide.
Without increasing international pressure and accountability, Israel will carry on with total impunity its brutal and illegal blockade of Gaza; its untamed construction of illegal settlements and wall in the occupied West Bank; its strategy of “Judaization” in Jerusalem, the Galilee, the Jordan Valley and the Naqab (Negev), its adoption of new racist laws and its denial of refugees’ rights.
Israel and its lobby groups often try to delegitimize the Palestinian quest for equality by portraying the nonviolent BDS emphasis on equal rights and the right of return as aiming to “destroy Israel.” If equality and justice would destroy Israel, what does that say about Israel? Did equality and justice destroy South Africa? Alabama?
As the first edition of McCarthyism was defeated through the industrious and creative toils of brave, principled defenders of freedom and human rights, so will this new McCarthyism.
Barghouti is the co-founder of the BDS movement and the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. He is the author of “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights.”
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Jerusalem Fund.
To view this article online, please go to:
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/boycott-israel-article-1.1271226.
There is no PEACE without JUSTICE; there is no justice without LOVE.
A momentous event was held at Brooklyn College on Feb 7. It was vilified by persons and groups giving unqualified support to the Status Quo in I/P, but gave participants an opportunity to hear of practical ways of breaking into the Status Quo.
There was a time, many years ago, when the Reformed Church in America (the denomination with which I am affiliated) took the lead in pressing our friends in the Apartheid state of South Africa to "repent and reform" by means of BDS. That seems not to be the case today. There are other priorities and engaging in controversial actions is too costly for many. I wonder what the attitude of Jesus was toward the Herodian/Pilate/Caesar axis that ran things in I/P 2000 years ago, and what he did to support those on the margins, ground down by oppression and dispossession?
Others are taking the lead. Many from the Israel/Palestine Mission Network (of the PCUSA) are engaging with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), End the Occupation (Anna Baltzer) and others, in pressing for nonviolent actions that will draw attention to the injustices of the present administration in I/P.
Please at least scan his article by Omar Barghouti (in the NY Daily News) about what happened at Brooklyn College earlier this month.
This, especially in the light of the the upcoming visit to the region by John Kerry and our President Obama. Faithfully yours, JRK
The BDS movement explained
Monday, February 25, 2013
By Omar Barghouti
In many media reports on the recent panel held at Brooklyn College on the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel, BDS was subjected to relentless vilification and unfounded allegations.
This was yet another ruthless campaign to demonize and shut down all criticism of Israel. Following congressional Israel-centered bullying of secretary of defense nominee Chuck Hagel, it is further evidence of the rise of a new McCarthyism — one that uses unconditional allegiance to Israel as the litmus test of loyalty.
Indeed, suppressed in all media coverage of the Brooklyn College controversy were Palestinian voices — like mine — who can best explain why Palestinians have embarked on this nonviolent, rights-based struggle for our rights, and how it is deeply inspired by the South African anti-apartheid and the U.S. civil rights movements.
Despite the intimidation campaign waged against it, Brooklyn College — with support from civil libertarians and influential liberal voices — upheld academic freedom and allowed the BDS event on Feb. 7 to proceed.
Mayor Bloomberg indirectly compared attempts by politicians to impose their agenda on the college to North Korea’s despotic policies. Ironically, in a 2012 BBC poll of world public opinion, Israel ranked third among the countries with the most negative influence in the world, competing with North Korea. As many now recognize, BDS has played a considerable role in exposing Israeli policies and, as a result, engendering this steady erosion of Israel’s international standing.
The BDS call was launched on July 9, 2005, by an alliance of more than 170 Palestinian parties, unions, refugee networks, NGOs and grassroots associations. They asked international civil society organizations and people of conscience to “impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era.”
Specifically, BDS calls for an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967; an end to what even the U.S. State Department slams as Israel’s “institutional, legal and societal discrimination” against its Palestinian citizens; and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and lands from which they were forcibly displaced.
Our opponents call us “Jew haters.” That is a lie and a slander. BDS advocates equal rights for all and consistently opposes all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism. In fact, many progressive Jewish activists, intellectuals, students, feminists and others participate in and sometimes lead BDS campaigns in Western countries. The increasing impact of Israeli supporters of BDS has led the Knesset to pass a draconian anti-boycott law banning advocacy of any boycott against Israel or its complicit institutions.
Calling the boycott of Israel anti-Semitic is itself an anti-Semitic statement, as it reduces all Jews to a monolith that is absolutely equivalent to the state of Israel, is entirely represented by Israel and holds collective responsibility for Israel’s policies.
If boycott is “withdrawing . . . cooperation from an evil system,” as Martin Luther King Jr. teaches us, BDS fundamentally calls on all peace-loving U.S. citizens to fulfill their profound moral obligation to desist from complicity in Israel’s system of oppression against the Palestinian people, which takes the form of occupation, colonization and apartheid. Given the billions of dollars lavished by the U.S. on Israel annually, American taxpayers are effectively subsidizing Israel’s human rights violations.
Building on its global ascendance, the BDS movement is spreading across the U.S., especially on campuses and in churches. Multi-million-dollar campaigns by Israel’s foreign ministry to counter BDS by “rebranding” through art, science and cynically using LGBT rights to “pinkwash” Israel’s denial of basic Palestinian rights have failed to stem the tide.
Without increasing international pressure and accountability, Israel will carry on with total impunity its brutal and illegal blockade of Gaza; its untamed construction of illegal settlements and wall in the occupied West Bank; its strategy of “Judaization” in Jerusalem, the Galilee, the Jordan Valley and the Naqab (Negev), its adoption of new racist laws and its denial of refugees’ rights.
Israel and its lobby groups often try to delegitimize the Palestinian quest for equality by portraying the nonviolent BDS emphasis on equal rights and the right of return as aiming to “destroy Israel.” If equality and justice would destroy Israel, what does that say about Israel? Did equality and justice destroy South Africa? Alabama?
As the first edition of McCarthyism was defeated through the industrious and creative toils of brave, principled defenders of freedom and human rights, so will this new McCarthyism.
Barghouti is the co-founder of the BDS movement and the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. He is the author of “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights.”
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Jerusalem Fund.
To view this article online, please go to:
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/boycott-israel-article-1.1271226.
There is no PEACE without JUSTICE; there is no justice without LOVE.
Monday, February 4, 2013
Do Isr/Pal Textbooks Teach "Hate"?
Hello Friend,
It is politically correct to assume that Palestinian textbooks teach children to "hate Israelis"; and that they must "stop that" before they can be taken seriously.
Following is a peek at a new study done very responsibly by a group of Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders. It bears reading for more accurate assessment of what is in both Israeli "state" textbooks, and Palestinian textbooks.
It reveals that, in the main, there is not much "hate" on either side; except for the ultra-orthodox Jewish schools, and what we might call "Islamist" literature on the Palestinian side.
We must do all we can to promote the vast moderate "middle" that wants truth, balance, mutual respect and a way forward, beyond the pernicious extremes. JRK
The New York Times
February 3, 2013
Academic Study Weakens Israeli Claim That Palestinian School Texts Teach Hate
By ISABEL KERSHNER
JERUSALEM — An academic study of the contents of Israeli and Palestinian Authority textbooks, to be published Monday, finds that each side generally presents the other as the enemy, but it undermines recent assertions by the Israeli government that Palestinian children are educated “to hate.”
Though unusually comprehensive, the report is unlikely to resolve more than a decade of fierce wrangling about the textbooks — part of a broader debate about Palestinian incitement against Israelis — having set off a political furor even before its publication date.
Israel’s Ministry of Education issued a statement in late January dismissing the new research as “biased, unprofessional and significantly lacking in objectivity.” Referring to “bodies that wish to slander the Israeli education system and the state of Israel,” it said the findings were “predetermined” and did not “reliably reflect reality.”
An Israeli member of a scientific advisory panel of experts that oversaw the research, Daniel Sperber, a professor of Talmudic research at Bar-Ilan University, refused to comment on the report, saying its release was “premature.”
Arnon Groiss, another Israeli member of the advisory panel, an Arabist, and the researcher and author of many previous reports critical of the Palestinian Authority textbooks, also refused to endorse the report, saying last week that he had not seen a final version. But he insisted that the authority’s textbooks “prepare the pupils for a future armed struggle for the elimination of the state of Israel.”
A Palestinian member of the advisory panel, Mohammed Dajani, a professor at Al Quds University in the West Bank, countered that the new study was “a strategic vision rather than looking through narrow eyes at one side or another.”
“People who are critical of the report are not appreciative of the work that went into it,” Mr. Dajani added.
Fourteen of the 19 advisory panel members expressed support for the study in a statement on Sunday.
The report was commissioned by the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land, a group of Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders who advocate for mutual respect and understanding. It was financed by a grant from the United States State Department.
The research was led by two prominent academics with long experience in textbook studies, Daniel Bar-Tal, an Israeli professor of research in child development and education at Tel Aviv University, and Sami Adwan, a Palestinian associate professor of education at Bethlehem University.
The project was originated by Dr. Bruce E. Wexler, professor emeritus of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, who co-founded an organization to promote Israeli-Palestinian cooperation.
In a response to the Israeli Ministry of Education, the three professors cited the rigorous research methods employed and wrote of their hopes that the ministries on both sides would “be moved to prepare a plan of action” to help “advance the peace building process.”
Dr. Wexler added that all the advisory panel members were familiar with the report’s main findings.
Unimpressed with the quality of previous, more subjective studies, Dr. Wexler said that he had insisted on applying scientific research methods for this one, so as “to provide real facts about a controversial issue.”
This included employing research assistants from both sides who were fluent in Hebrew and Arabic and data entered remotely into a database at Yale, similar to a blind study.
The study examined books from Israel’s state secular and religious systems as well as those used in independent ultra-Orthodox schools, books issued by the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Education and used in the West Bank and Gaza, and a small number used in the few independent Islamic Trust schools. It did not include religious scriptures.
Previous studies of Palestinian textbooks by monitoring groups like the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education and Palestinian Media Watch suggested that they promoted the widespread dehumanization of Jews and Israel and a rejection of Israel’s right to exist.
The new study avoids harsh language and couches the bad news in a kind of symmetry.
It found that extreme examples of dehumanization and demonization were “very rare” on both sides. The few examples given included one from an ultra-Orthodox textbook describing an Israeli settlement established on the ruins of an Arab village that “had always been a nest of murderers.” A Palestinian language textbook included a reference to “the slaughterhouse,” explaining it as the nickname prisoners had given to an interrogation center “due to the brutality of the interrogators.”
The report said that both Israeli and Palestinian books provided unilateral national narratives that presented the other side as an enemy and that there was a lack of information about each other’s religions, culture and daily life.
The failure even to mark the existence of the other side on most maps, it said, “serves to deny the legitimate presence of the other.”
But another significant conclusion was that Israeli state textbooks provided more information and less negative characterizations of the other side and more self-criticism regarding certain historical episodes than the ultra-Orthodox or Palestinian books. Addressing the 1948 massacre in the Arab village of Deir Yassin, for example, a book used in the state secular and religious schools noted that the battle “developed into the killing of dozens of helpless Arabs.”
In many respects, the findings are similar to those of previous reports, but the interpretation largely differs.
There is little argument that most of the maps erase the presence of the other side or any kind of border between them. The Palestinians argue that there is no agreed border yet. Israelis counter that the state of Israel exists and should be named, while the West Bank is still a disputed area.
The study concludes that the maps reinforce each side’s self-narrative and fears — for the Palestinians, that Israel seeks to keep and expand occupied territories, and for the Israelis, that the Arab nations seek to wipe Israel off the map.
The textbook teachings on martyrdom and self-sacrifice are treated with similar evenhandedness. Palestinian sixth graders read in a language book that “every stone is violated, every square cries out in anger, every nerve is abuzz, death before submission, death before submission, forward!”
Israeli second graders are told the story of Joseph Trumpeldor, who died defending an early Zionist settlement from Arab attackers in 1920 and was said to have uttered in his last moments, “Never mind, it is good to die for our country.”
Coming after years of Palestinian suicide bombings, Israeli critics say, the Palestinian books glorify such acts of terrorism.
But Professor Bar-Tal said that “both societies are in the stage of mobilization,” with most Israeli students being prepared for compulsory army service.
He and others cautioned that the textbooks were only one factor influencing the younger generation, among others like teachers, the media and the Internet.
It is politically correct to assume that Palestinian textbooks teach children to "hate Israelis"; and that they must "stop that" before they can be taken seriously.
Following is a peek at a new study done very responsibly by a group of Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders. It bears reading for more accurate assessment of what is in both Israeli "state" textbooks, and Palestinian textbooks.
It reveals that, in the main, there is not much "hate" on either side; except for the ultra-orthodox Jewish schools, and what we might call "Islamist" literature on the Palestinian side.
We must do all we can to promote the vast moderate "middle" that wants truth, balance, mutual respect and a way forward, beyond the pernicious extremes. JRK
The New York Times
February 3, 2013
Academic Study Weakens Israeli Claim That Palestinian School Texts Teach Hate
By ISABEL KERSHNER
JERUSALEM — An academic study of the contents of Israeli and Palestinian Authority textbooks, to be published Monday, finds that each side generally presents the other as the enemy, but it undermines recent assertions by the Israeli government that Palestinian children are educated “to hate.”
Though unusually comprehensive, the report is unlikely to resolve more than a decade of fierce wrangling about the textbooks — part of a broader debate about Palestinian incitement against Israelis — having set off a political furor even before its publication date.
Israel’s Ministry of Education issued a statement in late January dismissing the new research as “biased, unprofessional and significantly lacking in objectivity.” Referring to “bodies that wish to slander the Israeli education system and the state of Israel,” it said the findings were “predetermined” and did not “reliably reflect reality.”
An Israeli member of a scientific advisory panel of experts that oversaw the research, Daniel Sperber, a professor of Talmudic research at Bar-Ilan University, refused to comment on the report, saying its release was “premature.”
Arnon Groiss, another Israeli member of the advisory panel, an Arabist, and the researcher and author of many previous reports critical of the Palestinian Authority textbooks, also refused to endorse the report, saying last week that he had not seen a final version. But he insisted that the authority’s textbooks “prepare the pupils for a future armed struggle for the elimination of the state of Israel.”
A Palestinian member of the advisory panel, Mohammed Dajani, a professor at Al Quds University in the West Bank, countered that the new study was “a strategic vision rather than looking through narrow eyes at one side or another.”
“People who are critical of the report are not appreciative of the work that went into it,” Mr. Dajani added.
Fourteen of the 19 advisory panel members expressed support for the study in a statement on Sunday.
The report was commissioned by the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land, a group of Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders who advocate for mutual respect and understanding. It was financed by a grant from the United States State Department.
The research was led by two prominent academics with long experience in textbook studies, Daniel Bar-Tal, an Israeli professor of research in child development and education at Tel Aviv University, and Sami Adwan, a Palestinian associate professor of education at Bethlehem University.
The project was originated by Dr. Bruce E. Wexler, professor emeritus of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, who co-founded an organization to promote Israeli-Palestinian cooperation.
In a response to the Israeli Ministry of Education, the three professors cited the rigorous research methods employed and wrote of their hopes that the ministries on both sides would “be moved to prepare a plan of action” to help “advance the peace building process.”
Dr. Wexler added that all the advisory panel members were familiar with the report’s main findings.
Unimpressed with the quality of previous, more subjective studies, Dr. Wexler said that he had insisted on applying scientific research methods for this one, so as “to provide real facts about a controversial issue.”
This included employing research assistants from both sides who were fluent in Hebrew and Arabic and data entered remotely into a database at Yale, similar to a blind study.
The study examined books from Israel’s state secular and religious systems as well as those used in independent ultra-Orthodox schools, books issued by the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Education and used in the West Bank and Gaza, and a small number used in the few independent Islamic Trust schools. It did not include religious scriptures.
Previous studies of Palestinian textbooks by monitoring groups like the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education and Palestinian Media Watch suggested that they promoted the widespread dehumanization of Jews and Israel and a rejection of Israel’s right to exist.
The new study avoids harsh language and couches the bad news in a kind of symmetry.
It found that extreme examples of dehumanization and demonization were “very rare” on both sides. The few examples given included one from an ultra-Orthodox textbook describing an Israeli settlement established on the ruins of an Arab village that “had always been a nest of murderers.” A Palestinian language textbook included a reference to “the slaughterhouse,” explaining it as the nickname prisoners had given to an interrogation center “due to the brutality of the interrogators.”
The report said that both Israeli and Palestinian books provided unilateral national narratives that presented the other side as an enemy and that there was a lack of information about each other’s religions, culture and daily life.
The failure even to mark the existence of the other side on most maps, it said, “serves to deny the legitimate presence of the other.”
But another significant conclusion was that Israeli state textbooks provided more information and less negative characterizations of the other side and more self-criticism regarding certain historical episodes than the ultra-Orthodox or Palestinian books. Addressing the 1948 massacre in the Arab village of Deir Yassin, for example, a book used in the state secular and religious schools noted that the battle “developed into the killing of dozens of helpless Arabs.”
In many respects, the findings are similar to those of previous reports, but the interpretation largely differs.
There is little argument that most of the maps erase the presence of the other side or any kind of border between them. The Palestinians argue that there is no agreed border yet. Israelis counter that the state of Israel exists and should be named, while the West Bank is still a disputed area.
The study concludes that the maps reinforce each side’s self-narrative and fears — for the Palestinians, that Israel seeks to keep and expand occupied territories, and for the Israelis, that the Arab nations seek to wipe Israel off the map.
The textbook teachings on martyrdom and self-sacrifice are treated with similar evenhandedness. Palestinian sixth graders read in a language book that “every stone is violated, every square cries out in anger, every nerve is abuzz, death before submission, death before submission, forward!”
Israeli second graders are told the story of Joseph Trumpeldor, who died defending an early Zionist settlement from Arab attackers in 1920 and was said to have uttered in his last moments, “Never mind, it is good to die for our country.”
Coming after years of Palestinian suicide bombings, Israeli critics say, the Palestinian books glorify such acts of terrorism.
But Professor Bar-Tal said that “both societies are in the stage of mobilization,” with most Israeli students being prepared for compulsory army service.
He and others cautioned that the textbooks were only one factor influencing the younger generation, among others like teachers, the media and the Internet.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Gaining from a New Perspective. Richard Forer
Dear Friend,
The failure of PM Netanyahu to get an overwhelming vote of confidence yesterday (Jan. 22, 2013), may show an openness to much needed changes. There have been no meaningful conversations between I's and P's for a long time now. We must find ways to truly engage with each other. But how? That is the question.
There are many trusted friends who address the root causes of the problems in I/P. Ask me, and I'll give you names, books and groups.
Today, I want to introduce you to a man who has undergone profound changes in his outlook, in his own person, who needs to be heard. There are root causes, and True Root Causes. The man I want you to meet addresses the True Root Causes.
His name is Richard Forer and the link to a recent interview he gave is here: http://www.breathingforgiveness.net/2013/01/anti-slavery-campaign-interview-series_3080.html If you don't have time now, don't delete this message. Come back to it later. Don't miss this interview!!!!!!
A bit more background if you will. The mindset he was given during his orthodox Jewish upbringing was: "[Palestinians] can never be trusted. They hate us. They want to eliminate us".
(If truth be told, there are Palestinians who have this same mindset toward Israelis!) Richard shows how we project our suffering onto others.
I'm reluctant to send you long articles such as this link. (Our attention span is getting shorter!) But I'm making an exception with this interview. It is that transformative. Are you listening? Do you have the time and courage to be engaged at another level?
Until our rejectionist stance toward each "Other" is transcended, there will be no justice for Palestinians and security for Israelis. How open are we?
The interview is with Father Yago Abeledo (Center for Justice and Peace Building). The link takes you to their site. http://www.breathingforgiveness.net/2013/01/anti-slavery-campaign-interview-series_3080.html
For a more in-depth view, go to Richard's book: BREAKTHROUGH: TRANSFORMING FEAR INTO COMPASSION, A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON THE ISRAELI/PALESTINIAN CONFLICT
The failure of PM Netanyahu to get an overwhelming vote of confidence yesterday (Jan. 22, 2013), may show an openness to much needed changes. There have been no meaningful conversations between I's and P's for a long time now. We must find ways to truly engage with each other. But how? That is the question.
There are many trusted friends who address the root causes of the problems in I/P. Ask me, and I'll give you names, books and groups.
Today, I want to introduce you to a man who has undergone profound changes in his outlook, in his own person, who needs to be heard. There are root causes, and True Root Causes. The man I want you to meet addresses the True Root Causes.
His name is Richard Forer and the link to a recent interview he gave is here: http://www.breathingforgiveness.net/2013/01/anti-slavery-campaign-interview-series_3080.html If you don't have time now, don't delete this message. Come back to it later. Don't miss this interview!!!!!!
A bit more background if you will. The mindset he was given during his orthodox Jewish upbringing was: "[Palestinians] can never be trusted. They hate us. They want to eliminate us".
(If truth be told, there are Palestinians who have this same mindset toward Israelis!) Richard shows how we project our suffering onto others.
I'm reluctant to send you long articles such as this link. (Our attention span is getting shorter!) But I'm making an exception with this interview. It is that transformative. Are you listening? Do you have the time and courage to be engaged at another level?
Until our rejectionist stance toward each "Other" is transcended, there will be no justice for Palestinians and security for Israelis. How open are we?
The interview is with Father Yago Abeledo (Center for Justice and Peace Building). The link takes you to their site. http://www.breathingforgiveness.net/2013/01/anti-slavery-campaign-interview-series_3080.html
For a more in-depth view, go to Richard's book: BREAKTHROUGH: TRANSFORMING FEAR INTO COMPASSION, A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON THE ISRAELI/PALESTINIAN CONFLICT
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
In Awe of Nonviolence
An Israeli in awe of a Palestinian act of non-violence
Bradley Burston
Haaretz (Opinion)
January 15, 2013 - 12:00am
http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/a-special-place-in-hell/an-israeli-in-awe-of-a-pale...
An act of non-violence is a fuse playing the role of a bomb. If the act of non-violence is creative enough, appropriate and resonant and shocking, and, therefore, dangerous enough, it will do what no bomb can: Change things for the better. Persuade. Put the lie to the liar. And cause a man like Benjamin Netanyahu to panic.
On Friday, nearly a hundred men women and children pitched tents on a Palestinian-owned plot of land in the patch of the West Bank called E1, a political and diplomatic minefield which Netanyahu has vowed to build on, and Washington has warned him not to. The place was given a new name - Bab al-Shams, the Gate of the Sun.
The Palestinians who staked down the tents were explicit in calling their rocky hilltop encampment a village. But the manner of its founding made it all too clear to Israelis what it was as well - a ma'ahaz, a settlement outpost, no less and no more illegal than the scores and scores of rogue farms, tent camps, rude shacks and proto-suburbs which Israeli settlers have staked across the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
We know it in our bones, Israelis and Palestinians as one. This is how the settlement movement began. This is how it grows. This is the very engine of occupation. This is the heart and the hand of the beast.
The founding of Bab al-Shams was genius. And no one knew that better than Benjamin Netanyahu. The encampment sent a message that was clear, piercing, and entirely non-violent. The proof: Netanyahu said it had to be destroyed at once.
It needed to be destroyed despite a High Court order that appeared to give the new villagers six days to remain on the site. But in a peculiarly contemporary reinterpretation of the Naqba, the police announced that the injunction only applied to the tents. The people could be taken out. In the dead of night.
So desperate was the need to destroy it quickly, that the head of the Justice Ministry's High Court division was pressed into service at midnight Saturday, to sign a statement to the court declaring "there is an urgent security need to evacuate the area of the people and tents."
The government also sent a sealed note to the court, containing further "security information" – classified Secret, as was the reason for its being kept from the public – as to why it was necessary to give the order immediately for 500 police to move in.
But everyone here already knew the secret.
Bab al-Shams needed to be destroyed because it was fighting facts on the ground with facts on the ground.
It needed to be destroyed for the same reason that a hundred similar, patently illegal Israeli West Bank outposts are coddled, honored by visits from cabinet ministers, and rendered permanent with state-supplied electricity, water, access roads, security protection, and retrofit permits.
Bab al-Shams did not simply touch a nerve. Bab al-Shams had to be destroyed because, where the occupation is concerned, it touched the central nervous system.
On Election Day next week, when I enter the voting booth, I will be taking a small piece of Bab al-Shams with me. My respect and admiration for people who cannot vote in this election, but who each cast an extraordinarily forceful absentee ballot in booths they set up themselves in E1.
They are fighting the Netanyahu government with the one weapon against which this government has no defense - hope. Hope is this government's worst enemy, more threatening by far than Iran.
For years and years we've been taught to believe that the occupation is irreversible, unassailable, so permanent that there is no occupation, there is just this Israel of ours – like its prime minister, sour, anxious, bloated, contradictory ... but Ours. We are told what to believe by settlers and their champions in places like Ra'anana. That there cannot be two states, one for Israelis and one for Palestinians. That we, the Jews, have been here forever and will stay in East Jerusalem in the West Bank forever and ever.
It turns out, though, that other people, on other hilltops, Palestinian people, have something else to teach us. May they succeed.
On Election Day next week, and into whatever future that day propels us, I will be taking a small piece of their hope with me. I will take strength in their words in founding a village, that - like its literary namesake, Elias Khouri's epic novel of Palestinian history - exists at once only in the imagination and also in a profound unassailable reality:
"We the people, without permission from the occupation, without permission from anyone, sit here today because this land is our land, and it is our right to inhabit it."
Let a hundred Bab al-Shams bloom. An outpost for an outpost. A blind eye for a blind eye. A flout for a flout. It's what our people on the hilltops call an appropriate Zionist response.
Monday, January 14, 2013
When Will We Go BEYOND Partition?
Dear Friend,
There is a perceptive article in the Jan. 9 issue of The Christian Century that I'm appending to this message. You should at least scan it.
Also, let me give you a summary of my "Three Visions" three-column grid, still the best summary of the ferment making the pot bubble in I/P today.
The ruling Vision now is #1, maintaining the STATUS QUO, with actions by Likud (the ruling party in Isr) supported by the USA (Isr occupies all the land)
Vision #2 is the stated policy of the Israel, the US and the UN, going back to the 1947 compromise of TWO STATES, equal, living side by side in peace and security (a farce, because the Likud party (and their allies) have no interest in sharing control with the divided Palestinians; indeed they don't trust them in any way, shape or form).
Vision #3 is the contested one, because down REALLY deep in the psyche of both the Israelis and the Palestinians is the profound belief that each has a right to ALL of the LAND and is not willing to share it with THE OTHER party.
So I basically disagree with Gershom Gorenberg. I DON'T THINK the issue is partition. The issue is whether there can be ONE COUNTRY with liberty and justice for all (as in the US ideal). Making room for one another. There are forces at work now that are inexorable, nameless (although we have attached names to Vision #3), and powerful. A "Jewish" State that dehumanizes its Palestinian residents is NOT sustainable.
(Watch the Senate debate later this month on the Chuck Hagel nomination. Is US foreign policy viz a viz the Israelis open for debate? Or must US support for Israel continue into the future as it has done in the past? With no progress in sight?
A land divided
The Christian Century, (Jan 9, 2013 issue)
The internal conflicts of Zionism
Jan 03, 2013 by Gershom Gorenberg
On December 2, the Sunday after the United Nations General Assembly voted to accept Palestine as an observer state, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened his cabinet’s weekly meeting with defiance. Not only did he declare that “the government of Israel rejects the . . . decision,” he equated it with the infamous UN resolution of 1975 that labeled Zionism as racism.
On the surface, this was a gut reaction to superficially similar circumstances: Israel again found itself nearly alone in the UN, and Netanyahu wanted to show that it would not be moved by immutable hostility. In the same mood, he approved steps to build a Jewish neighborhood in the West Bank linking Jerusalem with the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim—a step that even Israel’s closest allies vehemently oppose.
Examined thoughtfully, the content of the two UN decisions could not be more different. The “Zionism is racism” resolution negated the idea on which Israel is built: that Jews, defined as a national group, deserve political independence. The new resolution endorsed “the vision of two states . . . Palestine living side by side in peace and security with Israel.” Prima facie, it reaffirmed the original 1947 UN vote to partition British-ruled Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, the decision that led to Israel’s establishment. So why did Netanyahu, a man concerned with history and ideas, oppose it?
For an answer, look back to the 1947 partition vote. Partition was proposed as the least bad arrangement for two national communities, Jewish and Palestinian Arab, both legitimately claiming the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Arab leaders in Palestine and in neighboring countries rejected the partition plan. The mainstream of the Zionist movement, led by David Ben-Gurion, lobbied for it in the General Assembly. After partition passed, battles broke out between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, followed by war between Arab countries and newly independent Israel.
Ben-Gurion and his pragmatic colleagues believed Jews had a right to the Land of Israel, as Jews traditionally refer to the country between the river and the sea. But they settled for a piece of it. Other Zionists, especially on the radical right, regarded this as a betrayal of the Jewish homeland.
After independence, the first parliamentary motion of no-confidence against Ben-Gurion was submitted by Menachem Begin, leader of the hard-right opposition. His complaint: rather than conquer the West Bank, Ben-Gurion had signed an armistice agreement leaving it under Jordan’s rule.
At the Knesset (legislature) podium, Ben-Gurion answered that Israel could indeed seize the West Bank. “But then what?” he demanded. “We’ll create one state. But that state will want to be democratic, we’ll hold elections—and we [the Jews] will be in the minority. . . . When we faced the question of the whole land without a Jewish state, or a Jewish state without the whole land—we chose a Jewish state without the whole land.”
With these words, Israel’s founding father mapped its deepest ideological divide: between those who see Zionism’s goal as a democratic Israel with a Jewish majority, and those who insist that Zionism requires Jewish rule of the entire homeland.
The issue remained theoretical until the Six Day War of 1967 brought Israel’s unplanned conquest of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and other territory. For a decade after the war, political paralysis reigned in Israel. Successive governments were unable to decide whether to give up at least part of the newly conquered land, but they slipped into the dangerous pattern of establishing Jewish settlements in areas they hoped to keep. In 1977, Begin and his Likud Party took power. Now policy was clearer: Begin, predictably, wanted to keep the whole land under Israeli rule without annexing the West Bank or giving its Palestinian residents the vote.
The 1967 war also created a tension in U.S. policy. On one hand, the Johnson administration’s postwar goal was an Israeli-Arab peace based on the pre-1967 lines. On the other hand, the administration was intensely relieved that Israel had survived the war without a need for American troops. As former national security adviser McGeorge Bundy wrote in a secret memorandum to President Johnson, keeping Israel armed well enough to defend itself was “an interest of ours as well of the Israelis.” The most effective way to pressure Israel—withholding weaponry—created the risk of America getting dragged into a future Arab-Israeli war. Washington might want to influence Israeli policy, but it couldn’t lean too hard. The Bundy conundrum is a legacy passed on to every administration since, and it still applies.
By the 1990s, the question of partition fully reemerged in the Israeli and international arena, renamed as the two-state solution. Israeli advocates of partition present it as a way of achieving peace but also as a way of preserving Israel as a democracy with a Jewish majority. When Ehud Olmert, a lifelong follower of Begin, came out for a two-state solution in 2003, he quoted Ben-Gurion’s 1949 Knesset speech.
For Israeli politicians who explicitly oppose a two-state deal or who say it is unachievable, the inescapable question is how Israel can continue ruling over disenfranchised Palestinians without undermining its own democracy. For those who support a two-state agreement, the first question is whether the Palestinian side is ready to give up its claim to the whole of historic Palestine. Prime Minister Ehud Barak argued after the Camp David summit of 2000 that Yasser Arafat was not prepared to do that. Olmert negotiated with Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s heir as Palestinian Authority president, and has insisted that an agreement was possible.
Abbas arranged for the vote on Palestinian statehood to take place on November 29, the anniversary of the original 1947 partition vote. It’s true that Abbas’s General Assembly speech was harsh rather than conciliatory, and that turning to the United Nations broke the framework of direct negotiations with Israel. Nonetheless, the resolution was as much a belated Palestinian admission of the error of rejecting partition 65 years ago as it was a Palestinian victory.
Yet Netanyahu treated the resolution as a repeat of the UN’s 1975 rejection of Zionism, a response that makes intellectual sense only if one takes the contested position that Jewish rule of the whole land is essential to Zionism. And indeed, his cabinet issued a response stressing that nothing in the UN resolution could detract “from of the State of Israel’s, or the Jewish people’s, rights whatsoever in the Land of Israel.”
For Netanyahu is a loyal heir to Begin’s political tradition. Early in his term, under American pressure, Netanyahu said he would accept a Palestinian state alongside Israel. But in his actions he has aimed at preserving the status quo of Israeli rule. His decision after the General Assembly vote to move ahead on construction in the E-1 area between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim was intended as an unequivocal rejection of partition: building settlements in the E-1 area would create a wall of Israeli settlements cutting nearly across the West Bank, and it is designed to prevent establishment of a viable Palestinian state.
So when Israel forms a new government after its January 22 election, it will face the same question that has accompanied it from its birth: Is dividing the land an affront to Zionism or is it the way to preserve a Jewish and democratic state? The issue is still partition.
There is no PEACE without JUSTICE; there is no justice without LOVE.
There is a perceptive article in the Jan. 9 issue of The Christian Century that I'm appending to this message. You should at least scan it.
Also, let me give you a summary of my "Three Visions" three-column grid, still the best summary of the ferment making the pot bubble in I/P today.
The ruling Vision now is #1, maintaining the STATUS QUO, with actions by Likud (the ruling party in Isr) supported by the USA (Isr occupies all the land)
Vision #2 is the stated policy of the Israel, the US and the UN, going back to the 1947 compromise of TWO STATES, equal, living side by side in peace and security (a farce, because the Likud party (and their allies) have no interest in sharing control with the divided Palestinians; indeed they don't trust them in any way, shape or form).
Vision #3 is the contested one, because down REALLY deep in the psyche of both the Israelis and the Palestinians is the profound belief that each has a right to ALL of the LAND and is not willing to share it with THE OTHER party.
So I basically disagree with Gershom Gorenberg. I DON'T THINK the issue is partition. The issue is whether there can be ONE COUNTRY with liberty and justice for all (as in the US ideal). Making room for one another. There are forces at work now that are inexorable, nameless (although we have attached names to Vision #3), and powerful. A "Jewish" State that dehumanizes its Palestinian residents is NOT sustainable.
(Watch the Senate debate later this month on the Chuck Hagel nomination. Is US foreign policy viz a viz the Israelis open for debate? Or must US support for Israel continue into the future as it has done in the past? With no progress in sight?
A land divided
The Christian Century, (Jan 9, 2013 issue)
The internal conflicts of Zionism
Jan 03, 2013 by Gershom Gorenberg
On December 2, the Sunday after the United Nations General Assembly voted to accept Palestine as an observer state, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened his cabinet’s weekly meeting with defiance. Not only did he declare that “the government of Israel rejects the . . . decision,” he equated it with the infamous UN resolution of 1975 that labeled Zionism as racism.
On the surface, this was a gut reaction to superficially similar circumstances: Israel again found itself nearly alone in the UN, and Netanyahu wanted to show that it would not be moved by immutable hostility. In the same mood, he approved steps to build a Jewish neighborhood in the West Bank linking Jerusalem with the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim—a step that even Israel’s closest allies vehemently oppose.
Examined thoughtfully, the content of the two UN decisions could not be more different. The “Zionism is racism” resolution negated the idea on which Israel is built: that Jews, defined as a national group, deserve political independence. The new resolution endorsed “the vision of two states . . . Palestine living side by side in peace and security with Israel.” Prima facie, it reaffirmed the original 1947 UN vote to partition British-ruled Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, the decision that led to Israel’s establishment. So why did Netanyahu, a man concerned with history and ideas, oppose it?
For an answer, look back to the 1947 partition vote. Partition was proposed as the least bad arrangement for two national communities, Jewish and Palestinian Arab, both legitimately claiming the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Arab leaders in Palestine and in neighboring countries rejected the partition plan. The mainstream of the Zionist movement, led by David Ben-Gurion, lobbied for it in the General Assembly. After partition passed, battles broke out between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, followed by war between Arab countries and newly independent Israel.
Ben-Gurion and his pragmatic colleagues believed Jews had a right to the Land of Israel, as Jews traditionally refer to the country between the river and the sea. But they settled for a piece of it. Other Zionists, especially on the radical right, regarded this as a betrayal of the Jewish homeland.
After independence, the first parliamentary motion of no-confidence against Ben-Gurion was submitted by Menachem Begin, leader of the hard-right opposition. His complaint: rather than conquer the West Bank, Ben-Gurion had signed an armistice agreement leaving it under Jordan’s rule.
At the Knesset (legislature) podium, Ben-Gurion answered that Israel could indeed seize the West Bank. “But then what?” he demanded. “We’ll create one state. But that state will want to be democratic, we’ll hold elections—and we [the Jews] will be in the minority. . . . When we faced the question of the whole land without a Jewish state, or a Jewish state without the whole land—we chose a Jewish state without the whole land.”
With these words, Israel’s founding father mapped its deepest ideological divide: between those who see Zionism’s goal as a democratic Israel with a Jewish majority, and those who insist that Zionism requires Jewish rule of the entire homeland.
The issue remained theoretical until the Six Day War of 1967 brought Israel’s unplanned conquest of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and other territory. For a decade after the war, political paralysis reigned in Israel. Successive governments were unable to decide whether to give up at least part of the newly conquered land, but they slipped into the dangerous pattern of establishing Jewish settlements in areas they hoped to keep. In 1977, Begin and his Likud Party took power. Now policy was clearer: Begin, predictably, wanted to keep the whole land under Israeli rule without annexing the West Bank or giving its Palestinian residents the vote.
The 1967 war also created a tension in U.S. policy. On one hand, the Johnson administration’s postwar goal was an Israeli-Arab peace based on the pre-1967 lines. On the other hand, the administration was intensely relieved that Israel had survived the war without a need for American troops. As former national security adviser McGeorge Bundy wrote in a secret memorandum to President Johnson, keeping Israel armed well enough to defend itself was “an interest of ours as well of the Israelis.” The most effective way to pressure Israel—withholding weaponry—created the risk of America getting dragged into a future Arab-Israeli war. Washington might want to influence Israeli policy, but it couldn’t lean too hard. The Bundy conundrum is a legacy passed on to every administration since, and it still applies.
By the 1990s, the question of partition fully reemerged in the Israeli and international arena, renamed as the two-state solution. Israeli advocates of partition present it as a way of achieving peace but also as a way of preserving Israel as a democracy with a Jewish majority. When Ehud Olmert, a lifelong follower of Begin, came out for a two-state solution in 2003, he quoted Ben-Gurion’s 1949 Knesset speech.
For Israeli politicians who explicitly oppose a two-state deal or who say it is unachievable, the inescapable question is how Israel can continue ruling over disenfranchised Palestinians without undermining its own democracy. For those who support a two-state agreement, the first question is whether the Palestinian side is ready to give up its claim to the whole of historic Palestine. Prime Minister Ehud Barak argued after the Camp David summit of 2000 that Yasser Arafat was not prepared to do that. Olmert negotiated with Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s heir as Palestinian Authority president, and has insisted that an agreement was possible.
Abbas arranged for the vote on Palestinian statehood to take place on November 29, the anniversary of the original 1947 partition vote. It’s true that Abbas’s General Assembly speech was harsh rather than conciliatory, and that turning to the United Nations broke the framework of direct negotiations with Israel. Nonetheless, the resolution was as much a belated Palestinian admission of the error of rejecting partition 65 years ago as it was a Palestinian victory.
Yet Netanyahu treated the resolution as a repeat of the UN’s 1975 rejection of Zionism, a response that makes intellectual sense only if one takes the contested position that Jewish rule of the whole land is essential to Zionism. And indeed, his cabinet issued a response stressing that nothing in the UN resolution could detract “from of the State of Israel’s, or the Jewish people’s, rights whatsoever in the Land of Israel.”
For Netanyahu is a loyal heir to Begin’s political tradition. Early in his term, under American pressure, Netanyahu said he would accept a Palestinian state alongside Israel. But in his actions he has aimed at preserving the status quo of Israeli rule. His decision after the General Assembly vote to move ahead on construction in the E-1 area between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim was intended as an unequivocal rejection of partition: building settlements in the E-1 area would create a wall of Israeli settlements cutting nearly across the West Bank, and it is designed to prevent establishment of a viable Palestinian state.
So when Israel forms a new government after its January 22 election, it will face the same question that has accompanied it from its birth: Is dividing the land an affront to Zionism or is it the way to preserve a Jewish and democratic state? The issue is still partition.
There is no PEACE without JUSTICE; there is no justice without LOVE.
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