Dear Friend,
FPI - Holland group should plan to trip to GR Monday and/or Tuesday March 14 and 15 to hear Mazin Qumsiyeh.
A well respected professor in the US, he moved back to Palestine to join with forces seeking Palestinian empowerment. He previously taught in Tennesee, but is now teaching in Bethlehem and at Bier Zeit in the West Bank.
Monday, March 14, at 7:00 p.m., Calvin College is sponsoring his appearance at the Calvin College Chapel.
Tuesday, March 15, at 5:45, he will speak at the Micah Center (Hope Ref. Church in GR).
Tuesday, March 15, at 7:00, he will speak at Raybrook Center
Professor Qumsiyeh has written a book, POPULAR RESISTANCE IN PALESTINE: a History of Hope and Empowerment, which summarizes and analyzes over 130 years of history.
What is happening in Isr/Pal is a classic case of confrontation between the forces of those who through the centuries have argued that to "conquer" a land and people gives you the right to settle and rule it as you see fit, only grudgingly giving rights to the conquered people; and the conquered people seeking their own rule on land now "occupied" by the conqueror. It is made more unique because it is historically true that Jews were living on that land 2000 years ago, under Roman occupation, seeking their own "right to rule" and then dispersed for centuries among all the countries of the known world, now wanting to re-congregate back there once again.
The situation in Israel is further compounded by a more and more vocal religious establishment claiming that "GOD" has given the right to rule all the land to the racial/ethnic descendants of Abraham and Sarah, not sharing rule with any of the conquered people. (The original Zionist ideal was secular, but religious forces now make Israel a quasi religious/racial/ethnic NATION STATE to die for.
It is to be known as a "Jewish Democracy", a democracy for Jews, whom "God" has finally restored to "Their Land" after 2000 years of exile, with staunch support from supposedly millions of "Christian" Zionists in the US of A.
And what is more, this rule has received the unflinching support of the world's greatest democracy, the US of A, while at the same time decrying the "Theocracy" of Iran and would-be fanatics who want to rule the world in the name of "ALLAH".
Most of the developed democracies are consistently opposed to the colonization of "conquered" territory in Palestine and are opposed to "settlements" in that conquered territory. The US is at best, ambivalent about it; at worst, it supports Israel's claim to all the territory (as seen by our veto of the UN Security Council effort to declare Israeli settlements "illegal" according to international norms).
Our FPI - Holland/Zeeland/South Haven group (40 on the list) has a chance to interact with Professor Qumsiyeh on Monday and/or Tuesday, March 14, 15. Mark it on your calendar NOW and plan on attending. Unfortunately, I will still be in Texas at the Tex/Mex border where we are wintering as usual. JRK
Friday, February 25, 2011
Friday, February 18, 2011
What I Think of the US Veto of the UN Security Council "Draft" Resolution
Statement on the USA Veto of a UN Security Council Draft Declaring the Israeli Settlement “Illegal” on West Bank Territory. February 18, 2011
John R. Kleinheksel Sr.
The Palestinians refused to let the US off the hook. It wanted the US to vote our convictions about Israeli settlements or prove to be hypocritical. We chose to be hypocritical, saying we were opposed to the settlements, but not allowing the UN Security Council to “intervene with binding resolutions on issues [the US] feels belongs to direct peace talks” (Reuters report). As though only the US can be involved with efforts to bring about “negotiations” between the parties, not the UN. Not the UN? How can you keep the UN from becoming involved in an issue that has festered for 62 years?
The truth of the matter is that the “negotiations” have been a sham. Whenever the Israelis and Palestinians “negotiate”, the Israelis concede nothing and the Palestinians are expected to concede everything: 1) such as, stop opposing Israeli confiscation of land for more settlements; 2) stop resistance to the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes; 3) go on record declaring the legitimacy of Israeli efforts to take over the whole of the land as a “Jewish democracy” (while accusing the Palestinians of wanting to “drive them into the sea”).
US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice said the draft “risks hardening the position of both sides” but in fact it only hardens the Israeli position that it need do nothing different in dealing with the Palestinians. It need only do more of the same. Give nothing. Concede nothing. Keep pressing for meaningless “negotiations” (talk, talk, talk) while continuing to build “facts on the ground” and the Palestinians come away empty handed.
The US wants it both ways. We want to support Israel and the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people for dignity, their own land (statehood). Guess what? We just may have to stand against Israel policies that are preventing Palestinians from attaining their goals. But we can’t do it. The political implications are too daunting. We may no longer be a “friend of Israel”. The President might lose his job come 2012. And that would not be acceptable now would it? Who is in charge of US Middle East foreign policy, the United States or Israel? It should now be clear to any with eyes wide open.
Ending the settlement activity is not a “precondition” for talks, as Israel insists. Ending settlement activity would be a sign of a “good faith” environment where talks could get down to business and make the moves required for a “two-state” solution. Israel wants a “one-state” solution where she is making all the decisions and Palestinians make none to their advantage.
The settlements ARE “illegal under international law” as the binding resolution would declare. The US was not able to put it its vote where its mouth is. It was sad day for US policy in the Middle East.
John R. Kleinheksel Sr.
The Palestinians refused to let the US off the hook. It wanted the US to vote our convictions about Israeli settlements or prove to be hypocritical. We chose to be hypocritical, saying we were opposed to the settlements, but not allowing the UN Security Council to “intervene with binding resolutions on issues [the US] feels belongs to direct peace talks” (Reuters report). As though only the US can be involved with efforts to bring about “negotiations” between the parties, not the UN. Not the UN? How can you keep the UN from becoming involved in an issue that has festered for 62 years?
The truth of the matter is that the “negotiations” have been a sham. Whenever the Israelis and Palestinians “negotiate”, the Israelis concede nothing and the Palestinians are expected to concede everything: 1) such as, stop opposing Israeli confiscation of land for more settlements; 2) stop resistance to the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes; 3) go on record declaring the legitimacy of Israeli efforts to take over the whole of the land as a “Jewish democracy” (while accusing the Palestinians of wanting to “drive them into the sea”).
US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice said the draft “risks hardening the position of both sides” but in fact it only hardens the Israeli position that it need do nothing different in dealing with the Palestinians. It need only do more of the same. Give nothing. Concede nothing. Keep pressing for meaningless “negotiations” (talk, talk, talk) while continuing to build “facts on the ground” and the Palestinians come away empty handed.
The US wants it both ways. We want to support Israel and the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people for dignity, their own land (statehood). Guess what? We just may have to stand against Israel policies that are preventing Palestinians from attaining their goals. But we can’t do it. The political implications are too daunting. We may no longer be a “friend of Israel”. The President might lose his job come 2012. And that would not be acceptable now would it? Who is in charge of US Middle East foreign policy, the United States or Israel? It should now be clear to any with eyes wide open.
Ending the settlement activity is not a “precondition” for talks, as Israel insists. Ending settlement activity would be a sign of a “good faith” environment where talks could get down to business and make the moves required for a “two-state” solution. Israel wants a “one-state” solution where she is making all the decisions and Palestinians make none to their advantage.
The settlements ARE “illegal under international law” as the binding resolution would declare. The US was not able to put it its vote where its mouth is. It was sad day for US policy in the Middle East.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Egypt's revolution and Israel: 'Bad for the Jews'
Ilan Pappe, a Jewish historian teaching in the UK, compares developments in Egypt with the reality of "Jewish democracy", (that oxymoron), which may be as unstable as the Mubarak regime turned out to be. And that's "bad news for Israel".
Because of its embarrassment (the Wiki leaks of "The Palestine Papers"), the entire West Bank Palestinian leadership has resigned and is looking for a new start with new elections soon. Read on. JRK
Egypt's revolution and Israel: 'Bad for the Jews'
8Share Monday, February 14, 2011
From time to time, the Palestine Center distributes articles it believes will enhance understanding of the Palestinian political reality. The following article by Ilan Pappe was published by The Electronic Intifada on 14 February 2011. To view this article online, please go to http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11803.shtml.
By Ilan Pappe
The view from Israel is that if they indeed succeed, the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions are bad, very bad. Educated Arabs -- not all of them dressed as "Islamists," quite a few of them speaking perfect English whose wish for democracy is articulated without resorting to "anti-Western" rhetoric -- are bad for Israel.
Arab armies that do not shoot at these demonstrators are as bad as are many other images that moved and enthused so many people around the world, even in the West. This world reaction is also bad, very bad. It makes the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and its apartheid policies inside the state look like the acts of a typical "Arab" regime.
For a while you could not tell what official Israel thought. In his first ever commonsensical message to his colleagues, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked his ministers, generals and politicians not to comment in public on the events in Egypt. For a brief moment one thought that Israel turned from the neighborhood's thug to what it always was: a visitor or permanent resident.
It seems Netanyahu was particularly embarrassed by the unfortunate remarks on the situation uttered publicly by General Aviv Kochavi, the head of Israeli military intelligence. This top Israeli expert on Arab affairs stated confidently two weeks ago in the Knesset that the Mubarak regime is as solid and resilient as ever. But Netanyahu could not keep his mouth shut for that long. And when the boss talked all the others followed. And when they all responded, their commentary made Fox News' commentators look like a bunch of peaceniks and free-loving hippies from the 1960s.
The gist of the Israeli narrative is simple: this is an Iranian-like revolution helped by Al Jazeera and stupidly allowed by US President Barack Obama, who is a new Jimmy Carter, and a stupefied world. Spearheading the Israeli interpretation are the former Israeli ambassadors to Egypt. All their frustration from being locked in an apartment in a Cairean high-rise is now erupting like an unstoppable volcano. Their tirade can be summarized in the words of one of them, Zvi Mazael who told Israeli television's Channel One on 28 January, "this is bad for the Jews; very bad."
In Israel of course when you say "bad for the Jews," you mean the Israelis -- but you also mean that whatever is bad for Israel is bad for the Jews all around the world (despite the evidence to the contrary since the foundation of the state).
But what is really bad for Israel is the comparison. Regardless of how all this would end, it exposes the fallacies and pretense of Israel like never before. Egypt is experiencing a peaceful Intifada with the deadly violence coming from the side of the regime. The army did not shoot at the demonstrators; and even before the departure of Mubarak, already seven days into the protests, the minister of interior who directed his thugs to violently crash the demonstrations had been sacked and will probably be brought to justice.
Yes, this was done in order to win time and try to persuade the demonstrators to go home. But even this scene, by now forgotten, can never happen in Israel. Israel is a place where all the generals who ordered the shootings of Palestinian and Jewish anti-occupation demonstrators now compete for the highest post of Chief of the General Staff.
One of them is Yair Naveh, who gave orders in 2008 to kill Palestinian suspects even if they could be peacefully arrested. He is not going to jail; but the young woman, Anat Kamm, who exposed these orders is now facing nine years in jail for leaking them to Israeli daily Haaretz. Not one Israeli general or politician has or is going to spend one day in jail for ordering the troops to shoot at unarmed demonstrators, innocent civilians, women, old men and children. The light radiating from Egypt and Tunisia is so strong that it also illuminates the darker spaces of the "only democracy in the Middle East."
Nonviolent, democratic (be they religious or not) Arabs are bad for Israel. But maybe these Arabs were there all along, not only in Egypt, but also in Palestine. The insistence of Israeli commentators that the most important issue at stake -- the Israeli peace treaty with Egypt -- is a diversion, and has very little relevance to the powerful impulse that is shaking the Arab world as a whole.
The peace treaties with Israel are the symptoms of moral corruption not the disease itself -- this is why Syrian President Bashar Asad, undoubtedly an anti-Israeli leader, is not immune from this wave of change. No, what is at stake here is the pretense that Israel is a stable, civilized, western island in a rough sea of Islamic barbarism and Arab fanaticism. The "danger" for Israel is that the cartography would be the same but the geography would change. It would still be an island but of barbarism and fanaticism in a sea of newly formed egalitarian and democratic states.
In the eyes of large sections of Western civil society the democratic image of Israel has long ago vanished; but it may now be dimmed and tarnished in the eyes of others who are in power and politics. How important is the old, positive image of Israel for maintaining its special relationship with the United States? Only time will tell.
But one way or another the cry rising from Cairo's Tahrir Square is a warning that fake mythologies of the "only democracy in the Middle East," hardcore Christian fundamentalism (far more sinister and corrupt than that of the Muslim Brotherhood), cynical military-industrial corporate profiteering, neo-conservatism and brutal lobbying will not guarantee the sustainability of the special relationship between Israel and the United States forever.
And even if the special relationship perseveres for a while, it is now based on even shakier foundations. The diametrically-opposed case studies of the so far resilient anti-American regional powers of Iran and Syria, and to some extent Turkey, on the one hand, and the fallen ultimate pro-American tyrants, on the other are indicative: even if it is sustained, American support may not be enough in future to maintain an ethnic and racist "Jewish state" in the heart of a changing Arab world.
This could be good news for the Jews, even for the Jews in Israel in the long run. To be surrounded by peoples who cherish freedom, social justice and spirituality and navigating sometimes safely and sometimes roughly between tradition and modernity, nationalism and humanity, aggressive capitalist globalization and daily survival, is not going to be easy.
Yet it has a horizon, and it carries hope of triggering similar changes in Palestine. It can bring a closure to more than a century of Zionist colonization and dispossession, to be replaced by more equitable reconciliation between the Palestinian victims of these criminal policies wherever they are and the Jewish community. This reconciliation would be built on the basis of the Palestinian right of return and on all the other rights the people of Egypt so bravely fought for in the last twenty days.
But trust the Israelis not to miss an opportunity to miss peace. They would cry wolf. They would demand, and receive, more funds from the American taxpayer due to the new "developments." They would interfere clandestinely and destructively to undermine any transition to democracy (remember what force and viciousness characterized their reaction to democratization in Palestinian society?), and they would elevate the Islamophobic campaign to new and unprecedented heights.
But who knows, maybe the American taxpayer would not budge this time. And maybe the European politicians would follow the general sentiment of their public and allow not only Egypt to be dramatically transformed, but also welcome a similar change in Israel and Palestine. In such a scenario the Jews of Israel have a chance to become part of the real Middle East and not an alien and aggressive member of a Middle East which was the figment of the hallucinatory Zionist imagination.
Ilan Pappe is Professor of History and Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. His most recent book is Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel (Pluto Press, 2010).
Because of its embarrassment (the Wiki leaks of "The Palestine Papers"), the entire West Bank Palestinian leadership has resigned and is looking for a new start with new elections soon. Read on. JRK
Egypt's revolution and Israel: 'Bad for the Jews'
8Share Monday, February 14, 2011
From time to time, the Palestine Center distributes articles it believes will enhance understanding of the Palestinian political reality. The following article by Ilan Pappe was published by The Electronic Intifada on 14 February 2011. To view this article online, please go to http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11803.shtml.
By Ilan Pappe
The view from Israel is that if they indeed succeed, the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions are bad, very bad. Educated Arabs -- not all of them dressed as "Islamists," quite a few of them speaking perfect English whose wish for democracy is articulated without resorting to "anti-Western" rhetoric -- are bad for Israel.
Arab armies that do not shoot at these demonstrators are as bad as are many other images that moved and enthused so many people around the world, even in the West. This world reaction is also bad, very bad. It makes the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and its apartheid policies inside the state look like the acts of a typical "Arab" regime.
For a while you could not tell what official Israel thought. In his first ever commonsensical message to his colleagues, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked his ministers, generals and politicians not to comment in public on the events in Egypt. For a brief moment one thought that Israel turned from the neighborhood's thug to what it always was: a visitor or permanent resident.
It seems Netanyahu was particularly embarrassed by the unfortunate remarks on the situation uttered publicly by General Aviv Kochavi, the head of Israeli military intelligence. This top Israeli expert on Arab affairs stated confidently two weeks ago in the Knesset that the Mubarak regime is as solid and resilient as ever. But Netanyahu could not keep his mouth shut for that long. And when the boss talked all the others followed. And when they all responded, their commentary made Fox News' commentators look like a bunch of peaceniks and free-loving hippies from the 1960s.
The gist of the Israeli narrative is simple: this is an Iranian-like revolution helped by Al Jazeera and stupidly allowed by US President Barack Obama, who is a new Jimmy Carter, and a stupefied world. Spearheading the Israeli interpretation are the former Israeli ambassadors to Egypt. All their frustration from being locked in an apartment in a Cairean high-rise is now erupting like an unstoppable volcano. Their tirade can be summarized in the words of one of them, Zvi Mazael who told Israeli television's Channel One on 28 January, "this is bad for the Jews; very bad."
In Israel of course when you say "bad for the Jews," you mean the Israelis -- but you also mean that whatever is bad for Israel is bad for the Jews all around the world (despite the evidence to the contrary since the foundation of the state).
But what is really bad for Israel is the comparison. Regardless of how all this would end, it exposes the fallacies and pretense of Israel like never before. Egypt is experiencing a peaceful Intifada with the deadly violence coming from the side of the regime. The army did not shoot at the demonstrators; and even before the departure of Mubarak, already seven days into the protests, the minister of interior who directed his thugs to violently crash the demonstrations had been sacked and will probably be brought to justice.
Yes, this was done in order to win time and try to persuade the demonstrators to go home. But even this scene, by now forgotten, can never happen in Israel. Israel is a place where all the generals who ordered the shootings of Palestinian and Jewish anti-occupation demonstrators now compete for the highest post of Chief of the General Staff.
One of them is Yair Naveh, who gave orders in 2008 to kill Palestinian suspects even if they could be peacefully arrested. He is not going to jail; but the young woman, Anat Kamm, who exposed these orders is now facing nine years in jail for leaking them to Israeli daily Haaretz. Not one Israeli general or politician has or is going to spend one day in jail for ordering the troops to shoot at unarmed demonstrators, innocent civilians, women, old men and children. The light radiating from Egypt and Tunisia is so strong that it also illuminates the darker spaces of the "only democracy in the Middle East."
Nonviolent, democratic (be they religious or not) Arabs are bad for Israel. But maybe these Arabs were there all along, not only in Egypt, but also in Palestine. The insistence of Israeli commentators that the most important issue at stake -- the Israeli peace treaty with Egypt -- is a diversion, and has very little relevance to the powerful impulse that is shaking the Arab world as a whole.
The peace treaties with Israel are the symptoms of moral corruption not the disease itself -- this is why Syrian President Bashar Asad, undoubtedly an anti-Israeli leader, is not immune from this wave of change. No, what is at stake here is the pretense that Israel is a stable, civilized, western island in a rough sea of Islamic barbarism and Arab fanaticism. The "danger" for Israel is that the cartography would be the same but the geography would change. It would still be an island but of barbarism and fanaticism in a sea of newly formed egalitarian and democratic states.
In the eyes of large sections of Western civil society the democratic image of Israel has long ago vanished; but it may now be dimmed and tarnished in the eyes of others who are in power and politics. How important is the old, positive image of Israel for maintaining its special relationship with the United States? Only time will tell.
But one way or another the cry rising from Cairo's Tahrir Square is a warning that fake mythologies of the "only democracy in the Middle East," hardcore Christian fundamentalism (far more sinister and corrupt than that of the Muslim Brotherhood), cynical military-industrial corporate profiteering, neo-conservatism and brutal lobbying will not guarantee the sustainability of the special relationship between Israel and the United States forever.
And even if the special relationship perseveres for a while, it is now based on even shakier foundations. The diametrically-opposed case studies of the so far resilient anti-American regional powers of Iran and Syria, and to some extent Turkey, on the one hand, and the fallen ultimate pro-American tyrants, on the other are indicative: even if it is sustained, American support may not be enough in future to maintain an ethnic and racist "Jewish state" in the heart of a changing Arab world.
This could be good news for the Jews, even for the Jews in Israel in the long run. To be surrounded by peoples who cherish freedom, social justice and spirituality and navigating sometimes safely and sometimes roughly between tradition and modernity, nationalism and humanity, aggressive capitalist globalization and daily survival, is not going to be easy.
Yet it has a horizon, and it carries hope of triggering similar changes in Palestine. It can bring a closure to more than a century of Zionist colonization and dispossession, to be replaced by more equitable reconciliation between the Palestinian victims of these criminal policies wherever they are and the Jewish community. This reconciliation would be built on the basis of the Palestinian right of return and on all the other rights the people of Egypt so bravely fought for in the last twenty days.
But trust the Israelis not to miss an opportunity to miss peace. They would cry wolf. They would demand, and receive, more funds from the American taxpayer due to the new "developments." They would interfere clandestinely and destructively to undermine any transition to democracy (remember what force and viciousness characterized their reaction to democratization in Palestinian society?), and they would elevate the Islamophobic campaign to new and unprecedented heights.
But who knows, maybe the American taxpayer would not budge this time. And maybe the European politicians would follow the general sentiment of their public and allow not only Egypt to be dramatically transformed, but also welcome a similar change in Israel and Palestine. In such a scenario the Jews of Israel have a chance to become part of the real Middle East and not an alien and aggressive member of a Middle East which was the figment of the hallucinatory Zionist imagination.
Ilan Pappe is Professor of History and Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. His most recent book is Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel (Pluto Press, 2010).
Friday, February 11, 2011
Apply Egyptian "Democracy" to Isr/Palestine
My colleague, Saliba Sarsar (raised in E. Jerusalem), urges the uniform application of human rights to Isr/Pal as well as Egypt.
He is a VP at Monmouth University in NJ, and a professor of Political Science there, an Arab raised in the Greek Orthodox tradition.
He is also closely related to the ATFP (American Task Force on Palestine), one of our key sources of information, based in D.C.
Below is his recently published article on the subject: Thank you professor Sarsar! (JRK)
http://www.themarknews.com/articles/4025-u-s-efforts-key-to-egypt-s-transition-to-democracy
American leaders must step up to the plate and generate positive change for Egypt.
It’s time for the U.S. to take a fresh look at its relationship with the Middle East. The “Tunisian Revolution,” the “Egyptian Popular Uprising,” and the demonstrations in Jordan, Yemen, West Bank, and Gaza, among others, ought to be taken as a wake-up call.
The U.S.’s response to the crisis in the Middle East was hesitant at first but is now taking shape and becoming more constructive. By simultaneously supporting the Egyptian people in their struggle for freedom and urging Egyptian leaders to initiate a transition to democracy, the Obama administration is standing up for cherished American values.
However, the U.S. government cannot stop at the tip of the pyramid; it needs to dig deeper. In order to be better prepared for the continuing challenges facing Egypt and the rest of the Middle East, U.S. leaders need to consider several basic ideas.
First, democracy is a generational project; it cannot be achieved by quick fixes or superimposed from above. Promoting it necessitates educating citizens in democratic practices that go beyond fair, free, and frequent elections. Good governance, civil society enhancements, and the end of corruption are key elements. Egypt’s democratization will take years – if not decades – to mature, and the U.S.’s patience and support will be essential in actualizing it.
Second, there are risks to advancing democracy, as there is always the danger that those who are desperate to control power will hijack the emerging democratic system. In 1992, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Edward P. Djerejian drew attention to this dilemma: We are suspect of those who would use the democratic process to come to power, only to destroy that very process in order to retain power and political dominance. While we believe in the principle of ‘one person, one vote,’ we do not support ‘one person, one vote, one time. Egyptians must take extra care in making their electoral choices so as to prevent an Iran- or Hamas-style regime from emerging.
Third, standing for democracy and freedom in one locale necessitates standing for them the world over. In his Jan. 28 remarks on Egypt, Obama explained, “The people of Egypt have rights that are universal. That includes the right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech, and the ability to determine their own destiny. These are human rights. And the United States will stand up for them everywhere.” If the U.S. is to be consistent in its application of foreign policy then it must reconsider its friendships with, and interests in, countries that dehumanize or disempower their inhabitants. If U.S. leaders continue to do “business as usual” with these countries, the double standard that they expose will create a credibility gap.
Fourth, things like economic and financial interests, oil, military assistance and alliances, and ties to elites in the Middle East cannot be divorced from the reality of people’s daily lives and aspirations. Top-down politics and policies and bottom-up initiatives must be synchronized or made to complement each other. The U.S. would be wise to reach out more vigorously to civil society organizations, democratic opposition groups, and the media as it carries out its foreign policy.
Fifth, while military power provides security and is often dominant in Middle Eastern politics, human security is crucial, as it makes it possible for people to live with dignity, free from want and fear. Creating a coalition for moderation contributes to the culture of peace and can bring about internal and external stability as well as prosperity.
If the U.S. is to maintain its position as a champion of universal rights and smooth transitions to democracy, it must press hard to end the Israeli occupation and eradicate the fear that has gripped both Israeli and Palestinian societies for decades. A doable and just solution would be to have Israel and Palestine – two sovereign states – living side by side in security, peace, and prosperity. As the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP) suggests, this solution would mean freedom for the Palestinians, peace for Israel, and enhanced national security for the United States.
Far from wavering, the U.S. must balance its principles and pragmatism – using its values and influence to engage others in serious democratic reform as it pursues its short-term and strategic goals. While obstacles abound, the careful guidance that the U.S. provides in an effort to generate positive change will receive much good will and trust, and will facilitate internal, regional, and international cooperation.--
He is a VP at Monmouth University in NJ, and a professor of Political Science there, an Arab raised in the Greek Orthodox tradition.
He is also closely related to the ATFP (American Task Force on Palestine), one of our key sources of information, based in D.C.
Below is his recently published article on the subject: Thank you professor Sarsar! (JRK)
http://www.themarknews.com/articles/4025-u-s-efforts-key-to-egypt-s-transition-to-democracy
American leaders must step up to the plate and generate positive change for Egypt.
It’s time for the U.S. to take a fresh look at its relationship with the Middle East. The “Tunisian Revolution,” the “Egyptian Popular Uprising,” and the demonstrations in Jordan, Yemen, West Bank, and Gaza, among others, ought to be taken as a wake-up call.
The U.S.’s response to the crisis in the Middle East was hesitant at first but is now taking shape and becoming more constructive. By simultaneously supporting the Egyptian people in their struggle for freedom and urging Egyptian leaders to initiate a transition to democracy, the Obama administration is standing up for cherished American values.
However, the U.S. government cannot stop at the tip of the pyramid; it needs to dig deeper. In order to be better prepared for the continuing challenges facing Egypt and the rest of the Middle East, U.S. leaders need to consider several basic ideas.
First, democracy is a generational project; it cannot be achieved by quick fixes or superimposed from above. Promoting it necessitates educating citizens in democratic practices that go beyond fair, free, and frequent elections. Good governance, civil society enhancements, and the end of corruption are key elements. Egypt’s democratization will take years – if not decades – to mature, and the U.S.’s patience and support will be essential in actualizing it.
Second, there are risks to advancing democracy, as there is always the danger that those who are desperate to control power will hijack the emerging democratic system. In 1992, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Edward P. Djerejian drew attention to this dilemma: We are suspect of those who would use the democratic process to come to power, only to destroy that very process in order to retain power and political dominance. While we believe in the principle of ‘one person, one vote,’ we do not support ‘one person, one vote, one time. Egyptians must take extra care in making their electoral choices so as to prevent an Iran- or Hamas-style regime from emerging.
Third, standing for democracy and freedom in one locale necessitates standing for them the world over. In his Jan. 28 remarks on Egypt, Obama explained, “The people of Egypt have rights that are universal. That includes the right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech, and the ability to determine their own destiny. These are human rights. And the United States will stand up for them everywhere.” If the U.S. is to be consistent in its application of foreign policy then it must reconsider its friendships with, and interests in, countries that dehumanize or disempower their inhabitants. If U.S. leaders continue to do “business as usual” with these countries, the double standard that they expose will create a credibility gap.
Fourth, things like economic and financial interests, oil, military assistance and alliances, and ties to elites in the Middle East cannot be divorced from the reality of people’s daily lives and aspirations. Top-down politics and policies and bottom-up initiatives must be synchronized or made to complement each other. The U.S. would be wise to reach out more vigorously to civil society organizations, democratic opposition groups, and the media as it carries out its foreign policy.
Fifth, while military power provides security and is often dominant in Middle Eastern politics, human security is crucial, as it makes it possible for people to live with dignity, free from want and fear. Creating a coalition for moderation contributes to the culture of peace and can bring about internal and external stability as well as prosperity.
If the U.S. is to maintain its position as a champion of universal rights and smooth transitions to democracy, it must press hard to end the Israeli occupation and eradicate the fear that has gripped both Israeli and Palestinian societies for decades. A doable and just solution would be to have Israel and Palestine – two sovereign states – living side by side in security, peace, and prosperity. As the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP) suggests, this solution would mean freedom for the Palestinians, peace for Israel, and enhanced national security for the United States.
Far from wavering, the U.S. must balance its principles and pragmatism – using its values and influence to engage others in serious democratic reform as it pursues its short-term and strategic goals. While obstacles abound, the careful guidance that the U.S. provides in an effort to generate positive change will receive much good will and trust, and will facilitate internal, regional, and international cooperation.--
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Sari Nusseibeh argues for Palestinian civil (but not political) rights
Maverick Sari Nusseibeh proposes an interim route to peace in the Middle East
Haim Watzman
The Chronicle of Higher Education
January 30, 2011 - 12:00am
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Mideast-Maverick/126057/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&u...
Sari Nusseibeh's socks match these days, he's clean-shaven, and he's a university president rather than an anarchist student or faculty union leader. But his hair, though a bit shorter and a lot grayer than it was in the 1970s and 80s, is still unkempt. Despite his establishment perch and his foothold in East Jerusalem, his head is still in the clouds. It might be the distance between his extremities that makes him the most politically incorrect political activist in Palestinian politics.
In his latest book, What Is a Palestinian State Worth? (Harvard University Press), he brings before the English-speaking readership a bundle of musings, heresies, and paradoxes, ideas that he's published here and there in the Palestinian press and broached elsewhere in the world in talks and lectures, at academic conferences and peace symposiums. The ideas might sound strange in their departure from conventional wisdom about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the positions of leaders and pundits on both sides, but it's good policy to pay attention. In the past, Sari Nusseibeh has taken positions that his fellow Palestinians condemned—and then, a couple of uprisings and aborted peace conferences later, embraced.
Standing behind his desk at Al-Quds University's small campus in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina, Nusseibeh greets me with a bashful and puzzled expression. He is frequently interviewed by foreign journalists, but he looks like he can't quite comprehend why anyone would want to discuss his book with him. I can't help being struck by the spacious office he now occupies, with its comfortable couches, armchairs, and coffee table, its walls a pleasant jumble of photographs and student artworks.
I first met Nusseibeh in the early 1980s, when he was a philosophy instructor at Birzeit University, near Ramallah. The university, then housed in a set of worn, cramped rooms around a walled courtyard in an out-of-the-way village, was both a ray of light for young Palestinians seeking to advance themselves through education, and a hotbed of impatient and militant Palestinian nationalism. Nusseibeh, with his beard, jeans, and sandals, looked much like his radical students. But he talked a different language. His students wanted action; he wanted to think. They sought firm spiritual and ideological foundations in clear-cut doctrines, whether Marxism or Islamic fundamentalism. Nusseibeh represented the intellectual tradition of the Western enlightenment, focused on the happiness and welfare of the individual rather than the destiny of the nation.
It wasn't that he was stuck in the ivory tower—one could hardly picture Birzeit's shabby campus that way, and the trip there and back inevitably meant passing by Israeli settlements and encountering Israeli Army roadblocks. His colleagues chose him to lead their faculty and employee union in its fight not only to increase salaries but also to institute democratic governance. He also helped lead the fight against Order 854, an Israeli military decree that threatened faculty members with deportation if they refused to cooperate with the Israeli administration. Those activities required coordination with the PLO leadership through its headquarters in Amman, Jordan.
Since contact with the PLO was a criminal offense under Israeli law, Nusseibeh and others developed a way of smuggling important documents in and out of the West Bank, as he describes in his 2007 memoir: "Messages were written in minuscule script on both sides of very thin paper. The message was carefully folded into a small tight roll. ... This was then wrapped in a layer of protective paper taken from the inside lining of a cigarette packet. Finally, it was rolled up into a piece of plastic cut from a shopping bag. Once the message was properly wrapped, the skillful smuggler lit a match, blew it out, and used the glint from the dying flame to melt the plastic together at both ends. Now the capsule was ready to be swallowed."
One of the main reasons Nusseibeh's Birzeit colleagues chose him to represent them was that he was one of the few who was not associated with one of the many Palestinian political factions. But his independent streak got him into trouble as well.
In 1977, when President Anwar Sadat of Egypt made his unexpected peace overture to Israel, nearly all Palestinian leaders and writers condemned him as a traitor to the cause. But Nusseibeh, then a graduate student at Harvard, was enthusiastic. Later, back in Jerusalem, he took part in back-channel negotiations with officials linked to the government of Israel's hard-right nationalist Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir—for which, in 1986, he got beaten up by a group of Birzeit students. Yet in the end, the Palestinian leadership and public came to realize they had to negotiate with Israel.
Nusseibeh still displays little respect for convention, whether of ideas or of protocol. I'm interviewing him, but he asks the first, wistful question, about the conflict that his people and mine have been locked in for a century: "So do you think there is any hope for our situation?"
Gloomily, he remarks that we're at a dead end. But then, brightening a bit, he notes that the desperation of the dead end can be an inspiration for new perspectives and original ideas.
More likely than not, press coverage of the new book will focus on one provocative idea that Nusseibeh suggests. He offers it as an interim way of improving the lot of the Palestinians in the West Bank without threatening the Jewish character of the Israeli state. It also might be a way, he thinks, of getting around the continuing debate over how many countries ought to exist between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
The prevailing view among both Israelis and Palestinians since the early 1990s has been that a Palestinian state should come into existence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, alongside Israel. But, in frustration over the failure to reach such an agreement, increasing numbers of Palestinians are arguing that there should be only one state, for both Jews and Palestinians. That idea is a nonstarter for nearly all Israelis, even those who have long advocated accommodation with the Palestinians. They see it as a plan for denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination and self-defense.
Since neither the two-state nor one-state proposals seem to be going anywhere, Nusseibeh has a new idea. He proposes that the Palestinians should be granted full civil, but not political, rights under Israeli law. In other words, their status would be much like that enjoyed by their compatriots in East Jerusalem today. Israel imposed its own legal system on East Jerusalem right after occupying it, the rest of the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip in the Six-Day War of 1967. It was a step that many, both in Israel and in the international community, took to be tantamount to annexation. East Jerusalem's Arab residents are not citizens of Israel; they cannot vote in Israeli national elections or be elected to office. But as legal residents they enjoy, in principle at least, equality under Israeli law, and are eligible for all government entitlements and services. Yet Nusseibeh stresses that this is not a plan that he sees as the answer to the current impasse in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, nor one he intends to promote in particular.
"I don't have a message in the book. It's more that I was given an opportunity to put my reflections down on paper. A lot of stuff in there is questions, things I haven't worked out properly," he explains. "I hope people who read it will be able to think about it, raise more questions, that it will allow them to find new ways of going forward."
In a lot of ways then, What Is a Palestinian State Worth? is, as one might expect from a university president who still teaches undergraduate philosophy courses, more of an educational project than a polemic. It's meant to get people to think, not give them answers. So it combines an analysis of the history and current state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with musings on the nature of identity, the concept of justice, and the proper role of the state.
The 600-page Ph.D. dissertation that Nusseibeh wrote at Harvard delves into the thought of Avicenna, the 11th-century Islamic polymath and philosopher who, according to Nusseibeh, stressed man's metaphysical freedom and rejected inherent identities of the self or the nation. But, tellingly, Nusseibeh's account of his discovery of and engagement with Avicenna and other Islamic philosophers, in his memoir Once Upon a Country (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), appears in a chapter titled "Monticello." There he describes how he was moved to tears during a visit, in the mid-1970s, to the estate of Thomas Jefferson. And he notes that the obelisk marking the founding father's grave omits mention of his service as secretary of state, vice president, and president. Instead, it cites as his memorable achievements "the authorship of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia." One could hardly characterize Nusseibeh better than by saying he is an Avicennist in the West and a Jeffersonian in the East.
Sari Nusseibeh was born in February 1949 to one of Arab Jerusalem's leading families. Israel and its Arab neighbors were negotiating the armistice agreements that ended the war that Israelis call the War of Independence and that Palestinians call the Nakba, the Catastrophe. But he wasn't born in his own city. His mother and siblings had fled to Damascus during the hostilities. His father, Anwar, a leading member of the Palestinian national leadership, who lost a leg in the war, was serving as a member of the Palestinian government-in-exile in Cairo. Following the armistice, the family reunited in what was then the Jordanian half of the divided city of Jerusalem.
After his indifferent career at St. George's, the Anglican school to which many members of the city's elite sent their children, Sari Nusseibeh's parents sent him to Rugby, the prestigious British boarding school—but he ran away. In the end, he ended up at Oxford a year after the Six-Day War, in which Israel defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan; occupied large swathes of their territories; and put the Nusseibehs, like the rest of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, under Israeli rule. He was 18, and had already been recruited into Yassir Arafat's Palestinian nationalist Fatah movement, which soon gained control of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Nusseibeh plunged headlong into the radicalism of the 60s and into pro-Palestinian activity. He handed out Fatah fliers and went to meetings. But he soon tired of that, and his political activity turned in a more intellectual direction. He made friends with Israeli students—in particular, with Avishai Margalit, now one of Israel's best known philosophers—and debated the conflict at a teahouse.
"It was easy to discuss politics with Avishai," Nusseibeh writes in his memoir, "because we both had sufficient distance from events back home to scoff at the bugle-blowing victors (his side) and the caviling complainers (mine)."
This independent streak led him to do things that no other young Palestinian dreamed of doing. After the war, Israel's borders were closed and Palestinians from the territories who had been out of the country when the war broke out had to sneak across the Jordan River to get home. Nusseibeh published an open letter in the London Times demanding that Israel allow him to return home openly. He was invited to the Israeli Embassy in London and he went, even though his Palestinian friends thought he should tear up the invitation from the enemy. A few days later, he boarded an El Al flight to Tel Aviv. Later, he attended an ulpan, one of the intensive Hebrew-language courses that Israel gives for new immigrants, and worked one summer as a volunteer on a kibbutz. At Oxford he fell in love with and married Lucy Austin, daughter of the philosopher of language John Austin.
After completing his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1978, Nusseibeh returned to Jerusalem and, true to type, took a teaching position at Birzeit and another at the Hebrew University. At Birzeit and other colleges and universities in the West Bank and Gaza, factions associated with Fatah, the Islamic movement, and several Marxist-nationalist splinter groups fought out student government elections that, because they were the only elections that Palestinians could vote in at the time, served as barometers of the political weather in the occupied territories. They were also closely watched by the Israeli army and security services, which periodically closed down the campuses in response to student demonstrations.
"The student atmosphere on the campuses then was one of independence, confidence, commitment, and strength of conviction," Nusseibeh recalls. "If you compare it with the situation now, you see it has become transformed. It's upside down, literally."
Many students, he says, are now in the employ of one of the numerous security organizations run by the Palestinian Authority, the self-governing body set up in the 1990s under the terms of the Oslo Accords. Like the classical political philosophers, Nusseibeh sees education as key to creating a just and virtuous state. As a university chief, a teacher, and a writer who frequently publishes articles in Palestinian newspapers and magazines, he sees his main role as encouraging his countrymen to think critically and independently.
What Is a Palestinian State Worth? seems almost deliberately designed to raise the hackles of everyone who reads it. It's not quite clear who its intended audience is. (When I ask Nusseibeh what reader he had in mind when he wrote it, he says—ironically? resignedly?—"Myself.") It is clearly part of Nusseibeh's larger educational project of getting his fellow Palestinians to question their assumptions, rather than adhere fruitlessly to outmoded categories, concepts, and political positions. His people, he argues, should use the moral force of nonviolence to transform, not defeat, their Israeli adversaries. And precisely because the Palestinians are weaker and under occupation, he argues, they have the power to do this.
"It's the paradox of being on top," he explains. "In a wrestling match, you have one contender down on the floor kicking and biting, and another one on top trying to hold him down. It looks as if the one on top has power and the one underneath is the victim. The one on top can never trust the one underneath. But the one underneath can afford to trust because he's underneath anyway." The victor fears losing his supremacy by trusting his rival, but the underdog can afford to trust his oppressor because he has nothing to lose, Nusseibeh explains.
And while he still thinks that the best recipe for coexistence is a two-state solution, one in which a Palestinian nation-state comprising the West Bank and Gaza Strip would exist side by side with the Jewish state of Israel, he stresses in his book that a state should not be an end in itself. "There is no need for us to have a separate or so-called independent state," he writes. A state is only a means of achieving collective well-being, of transforming oppression into freedom, he argues. And the Jewish and Palestinian states should exist only as long as they serve that purpose. Indeed, they might be the best way of allowing the two nations to evolve slowly toward a state of Jeffersonian ideals, one in which all citizens are equal and free regardless of their ethnicity, religion, or national identity.
The suggestion that the Jewish state might be just a way station toward some other political arrangement will ring alarm bells with Israelis. Most of the country's leaders and citizens fear that the Palestinian leadership's consent to set up a Palestinian state alongside Israel is merely tactical, and that the ultimate goal is to overwhelm Israel militarily or demographically and subsume it into the Arab world. And most Israelis, even fervent supporters of accommodation with the Palestinians, look at the Middle East and conclude that Jews living in an Arab state would almost certainly not enjoy equality, democracy, or physical security.
Most Israelis will also not be pleased that the Israelis that Nusseibeh mentions time and again in the book are radicals and outsiders who are seen even by many in the country's peace camp as hostile to the Jewish people's right to self-determination. He suggests, citing Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People, that the Arabs who lived in Palestine before the British conquest, rather than the Jewish immigrants who arrived in the 20th century, were probably the descendants of the region's ancient inhabitants. Sand, a professor of history at Tel Aviv University, is an avowed anti-Zionist whose book was condemned by nearly all Israeli reviewers, of all political stripes, as awful scholarship and unoriginal polemic. His Tel Aviv University colleague Anita Shapira summed up the book by saying "there is something warped and objectionable in the assumption that for Jews to integrate into the Middle East, they, and they alone of all the peoples in the region, must shed their national identity and historical memories and reconstruct themselves in a way that may (perhaps) find favor with Israeli-Palestinians." The mere mention of Sand, in the first chapter, as a respectable scholar is likely to make many Israeli and pro-Israeli readers put the book down at once.
Nusseibeh also makes much of Israeli peace activists such as Uri Avneri and Abie Nathan, colorful but not particularly influential radicals on the fringe of Israeli society. Nathan, for example, was the nascent Israeli peace movement's leading stunt man. In 1965 he flew his own airplane from Israel to Egypt with the goal of delivering a peace petition to Egypt's president, Gamal Abdel Nasser (Nasser refused to see him and had him deported). He staged hunger strikes to protest the construction of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories and was jailed for meeting with Yasir Arafat and other PLO leaders.
Nusseibeh clearly admires such figures because they were willing to say things and take positions that lay far outside their own community's consensus.
"These are the unsung heroes," he stresses. "Contrary to how many people think about them, that they are peripheral, one should look upon them as the visible points on the surface, underneath which something much more important and significant is happening. They are the human face, evidence of a deep human element that is not necessarily evident in Israeli society."
Nusseibeh seems to hope that Al-Quds University will produce some Palestinian versions of Avneri and Nathan—people who can see beyond the conventions and tropes in which the rest of their society is caught.
And he thinks that this is sorely needed right now. While large majorities of both Israelis and Palestinians claim to support a two-state arrangement, they vote for political parties that work against that goal—the Palestinians for the Islamicist movement Hamas, and the Israelis for the Likud and other parties that promote Israeli settlement in the West Bank. All the efforts of the leaders of both countries, and of the international community, to achieve a two-state solution have failed.
In despair, many Palestinians have abandoned the idea of two separate states—they demand a single state, comprising all the territory of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip, in which the majority would rule. Israelis point out that demographic trends are such that the Palestinians would soon be the majority, and that that would be the end of Jewish independence and self-determination.
That's why Nusseibeh is floating ideas like giving the Palestinians civil but not political rights.
"I'm not talking about a solution," he asserts. "It's not like going to the supermarket and they're out of two-states so you pick up a one-state. It looks like we are stuck, so the question arises: What are we to do?"
The question, he says, is what is the best alternative for the Palestinians, and for the Israelis too, under the current circumstances?
"Ideally, one would like to be guided by humanist principles. One should try to bring about as much equality as possible, given differences. I'm not a magician, but I think that human beings are capable of being creative and coming up with imaginative solutions if required," he explains.
Despite the current deadlock, there is cause for optimism, he thinks.
"Regardless of the fact that the Camp David talks collapsed, if you look at the relations of Jews and Arabs, we've come a long way toward finding some way to reach out for some mode of coexistence," he says. "It didn't work, but it was nevertheless an immense step forward, if you contrast where we were before."
At similar junctions in the past, Nusseibeh has been condemned by his fellow Palestinians as a traitor to the cause and dismissed by Israelis as, at best, a lone moderate Palestinian voice among the wolves and, at worst, a fanatic in dove's clothing (during the first Gulf War, in 1991, Israeli forces jailed him for 90 days without filing charges; according to press reports, he was suspected of spying for Iraq). When he teamed up in 2003 with the former chief of the Israel Security Agency (popularly known as the Shin Bet), Ami Ayalon, on a grass-roots peace initiative called "The People's Voice," he was condemned by other Palestinians for agreeing to a clause stating that Palestinian refugees would not be able to return to their former homes in Israel.
"People haven't reacted so far to this idea," Nusseibeh says, referring to the possibility of granting the Palestinians civil but not political rights in Israel. "But if you ask around, they'll tell you that I'm a person who has crazy ideas. I'm an optimist. I see things going in a good direction. Except I can't tell exactly what that direction looks like."
Haim Watzman is a Jerusalem-based writer and translator whose most recent book is A Crack in the Earth: A Journey Up Israel's Rift Valley (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). He blogs at southjerusalem.com.
Haim Watzman
The Chronicle of Higher Education
January 30, 2011 - 12:00am
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Mideast-Maverick/126057/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&u...
Sari Nusseibeh's socks match these days, he's clean-shaven, and he's a university president rather than an anarchist student or faculty union leader. But his hair, though a bit shorter and a lot grayer than it was in the 1970s and 80s, is still unkempt. Despite his establishment perch and his foothold in East Jerusalem, his head is still in the clouds. It might be the distance between his extremities that makes him the most politically incorrect political activist in Palestinian politics.
In his latest book, What Is a Palestinian State Worth? (Harvard University Press), he brings before the English-speaking readership a bundle of musings, heresies, and paradoxes, ideas that he's published here and there in the Palestinian press and broached elsewhere in the world in talks and lectures, at academic conferences and peace symposiums. The ideas might sound strange in their departure from conventional wisdom about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the positions of leaders and pundits on both sides, but it's good policy to pay attention. In the past, Sari Nusseibeh has taken positions that his fellow Palestinians condemned—and then, a couple of uprisings and aborted peace conferences later, embraced.
Standing behind his desk at Al-Quds University's small campus in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina, Nusseibeh greets me with a bashful and puzzled expression. He is frequently interviewed by foreign journalists, but he looks like he can't quite comprehend why anyone would want to discuss his book with him. I can't help being struck by the spacious office he now occupies, with its comfortable couches, armchairs, and coffee table, its walls a pleasant jumble of photographs and student artworks.
I first met Nusseibeh in the early 1980s, when he was a philosophy instructor at Birzeit University, near Ramallah. The university, then housed in a set of worn, cramped rooms around a walled courtyard in an out-of-the-way village, was both a ray of light for young Palestinians seeking to advance themselves through education, and a hotbed of impatient and militant Palestinian nationalism. Nusseibeh, with his beard, jeans, and sandals, looked much like his radical students. But he talked a different language. His students wanted action; he wanted to think. They sought firm spiritual and ideological foundations in clear-cut doctrines, whether Marxism or Islamic fundamentalism. Nusseibeh represented the intellectual tradition of the Western enlightenment, focused on the happiness and welfare of the individual rather than the destiny of the nation.
It wasn't that he was stuck in the ivory tower—one could hardly picture Birzeit's shabby campus that way, and the trip there and back inevitably meant passing by Israeli settlements and encountering Israeli Army roadblocks. His colleagues chose him to lead their faculty and employee union in its fight not only to increase salaries but also to institute democratic governance. He also helped lead the fight against Order 854, an Israeli military decree that threatened faculty members with deportation if they refused to cooperate with the Israeli administration. Those activities required coordination with the PLO leadership through its headquarters in Amman, Jordan.
Since contact with the PLO was a criminal offense under Israeli law, Nusseibeh and others developed a way of smuggling important documents in and out of the West Bank, as he describes in his 2007 memoir: "Messages were written in minuscule script on both sides of very thin paper. The message was carefully folded into a small tight roll. ... This was then wrapped in a layer of protective paper taken from the inside lining of a cigarette packet. Finally, it was rolled up into a piece of plastic cut from a shopping bag. Once the message was properly wrapped, the skillful smuggler lit a match, blew it out, and used the glint from the dying flame to melt the plastic together at both ends. Now the capsule was ready to be swallowed."
One of the main reasons Nusseibeh's Birzeit colleagues chose him to represent them was that he was one of the few who was not associated with one of the many Palestinian political factions. But his independent streak got him into trouble as well.
In 1977, when President Anwar Sadat of Egypt made his unexpected peace overture to Israel, nearly all Palestinian leaders and writers condemned him as a traitor to the cause. But Nusseibeh, then a graduate student at Harvard, was enthusiastic. Later, back in Jerusalem, he took part in back-channel negotiations with officials linked to the government of Israel's hard-right nationalist Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir—for which, in 1986, he got beaten up by a group of Birzeit students. Yet in the end, the Palestinian leadership and public came to realize they had to negotiate with Israel.
Nusseibeh still displays little respect for convention, whether of ideas or of protocol. I'm interviewing him, but he asks the first, wistful question, about the conflict that his people and mine have been locked in for a century: "So do you think there is any hope for our situation?"
Gloomily, he remarks that we're at a dead end. But then, brightening a bit, he notes that the desperation of the dead end can be an inspiration for new perspectives and original ideas.
More likely than not, press coverage of the new book will focus on one provocative idea that Nusseibeh suggests. He offers it as an interim way of improving the lot of the Palestinians in the West Bank without threatening the Jewish character of the Israeli state. It also might be a way, he thinks, of getting around the continuing debate over how many countries ought to exist between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
The prevailing view among both Israelis and Palestinians since the early 1990s has been that a Palestinian state should come into existence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, alongside Israel. But, in frustration over the failure to reach such an agreement, increasing numbers of Palestinians are arguing that there should be only one state, for both Jews and Palestinians. That idea is a nonstarter for nearly all Israelis, even those who have long advocated accommodation with the Palestinians. They see it as a plan for denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination and self-defense.
Since neither the two-state nor one-state proposals seem to be going anywhere, Nusseibeh has a new idea. He proposes that the Palestinians should be granted full civil, but not political, rights under Israeli law. In other words, their status would be much like that enjoyed by their compatriots in East Jerusalem today. Israel imposed its own legal system on East Jerusalem right after occupying it, the rest of the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip in the Six-Day War of 1967. It was a step that many, both in Israel and in the international community, took to be tantamount to annexation. East Jerusalem's Arab residents are not citizens of Israel; they cannot vote in Israeli national elections or be elected to office. But as legal residents they enjoy, in principle at least, equality under Israeli law, and are eligible for all government entitlements and services. Yet Nusseibeh stresses that this is not a plan that he sees as the answer to the current impasse in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, nor one he intends to promote in particular.
"I don't have a message in the book. It's more that I was given an opportunity to put my reflections down on paper. A lot of stuff in there is questions, things I haven't worked out properly," he explains. "I hope people who read it will be able to think about it, raise more questions, that it will allow them to find new ways of going forward."
In a lot of ways then, What Is a Palestinian State Worth? is, as one might expect from a university president who still teaches undergraduate philosophy courses, more of an educational project than a polemic. It's meant to get people to think, not give them answers. So it combines an analysis of the history and current state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with musings on the nature of identity, the concept of justice, and the proper role of the state.
The 600-page Ph.D. dissertation that Nusseibeh wrote at Harvard delves into the thought of Avicenna, the 11th-century Islamic polymath and philosopher who, according to Nusseibeh, stressed man's metaphysical freedom and rejected inherent identities of the self or the nation. But, tellingly, Nusseibeh's account of his discovery of and engagement with Avicenna and other Islamic philosophers, in his memoir Once Upon a Country (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), appears in a chapter titled "Monticello." There he describes how he was moved to tears during a visit, in the mid-1970s, to the estate of Thomas Jefferson. And he notes that the obelisk marking the founding father's grave omits mention of his service as secretary of state, vice president, and president. Instead, it cites as his memorable achievements "the authorship of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia." One could hardly characterize Nusseibeh better than by saying he is an Avicennist in the West and a Jeffersonian in the East.
Sari Nusseibeh was born in February 1949 to one of Arab Jerusalem's leading families. Israel and its Arab neighbors were negotiating the armistice agreements that ended the war that Israelis call the War of Independence and that Palestinians call the Nakba, the Catastrophe. But he wasn't born in his own city. His mother and siblings had fled to Damascus during the hostilities. His father, Anwar, a leading member of the Palestinian national leadership, who lost a leg in the war, was serving as a member of the Palestinian government-in-exile in Cairo. Following the armistice, the family reunited in what was then the Jordanian half of the divided city of Jerusalem.
After his indifferent career at St. George's, the Anglican school to which many members of the city's elite sent their children, Sari Nusseibeh's parents sent him to Rugby, the prestigious British boarding school—but he ran away. In the end, he ended up at Oxford a year after the Six-Day War, in which Israel defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan; occupied large swathes of their territories; and put the Nusseibehs, like the rest of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, under Israeli rule. He was 18, and had already been recruited into Yassir Arafat's Palestinian nationalist Fatah movement, which soon gained control of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Nusseibeh plunged headlong into the radicalism of the 60s and into pro-Palestinian activity. He handed out Fatah fliers and went to meetings. But he soon tired of that, and his political activity turned in a more intellectual direction. He made friends with Israeli students—in particular, with Avishai Margalit, now one of Israel's best known philosophers—and debated the conflict at a teahouse.
"It was easy to discuss politics with Avishai," Nusseibeh writes in his memoir, "because we both had sufficient distance from events back home to scoff at the bugle-blowing victors (his side) and the caviling complainers (mine)."
This independent streak led him to do things that no other young Palestinian dreamed of doing. After the war, Israel's borders were closed and Palestinians from the territories who had been out of the country when the war broke out had to sneak across the Jordan River to get home. Nusseibeh published an open letter in the London Times demanding that Israel allow him to return home openly. He was invited to the Israeli Embassy in London and he went, even though his Palestinian friends thought he should tear up the invitation from the enemy. A few days later, he boarded an El Al flight to Tel Aviv. Later, he attended an ulpan, one of the intensive Hebrew-language courses that Israel gives for new immigrants, and worked one summer as a volunteer on a kibbutz. At Oxford he fell in love with and married Lucy Austin, daughter of the philosopher of language John Austin.
After completing his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1978, Nusseibeh returned to Jerusalem and, true to type, took a teaching position at Birzeit and another at the Hebrew University. At Birzeit and other colleges and universities in the West Bank and Gaza, factions associated with Fatah, the Islamic movement, and several Marxist-nationalist splinter groups fought out student government elections that, because they were the only elections that Palestinians could vote in at the time, served as barometers of the political weather in the occupied territories. They were also closely watched by the Israeli army and security services, which periodically closed down the campuses in response to student demonstrations.
"The student atmosphere on the campuses then was one of independence, confidence, commitment, and strength of conviction," Nusseibeh recalls. "If you compare it with the situation now, you see it has become transformed. It's upside down, literally."
Many students, he says, are now in the employ of one of the numerous security organizations run by the Palestinian Authority, the self-governing body set up in the 1990s under the terms of the Oslo Accords. Like the classical political philosophers, Nusseibeh sees education as key to creating a just and virtuous state. As a university chief, a teacher, and a writer who frequently publishes articles in Palestinian newspapers and magazines, he sees his main role as encouraging his countrymen to think critically and independently.
What Is a Palestinian State Worth? seems almost deliberately designed to raise the hackles of everyone who reads it. It's not quite clear who its intended audience is. (When I ask Nusseibeh what reader he had in mind when he wrote it, he says—ironically? resignedly?—"Myself.") It is clearly part of Nusseibeh's larger educational project of getting his fellow Palestinians to question their assumptions, rather than adhere fruitlessly to outmoded categories, concepts, and political positions. His people, he argues, should use the moral force of nonviolence to transform, not defeat, their Israeli adversaries. And precisely because the Palestinians are weaker and under occupation, he argues, they have the power to do this.
"It's the paradox of being on top," he explains. "In a wrestling match, you have one contender down on the floor kicking and biting, and another one on top trying to hold him down. It looks as if the one on top has power and the one underneath is the victim. The one on top can never trust the one underneath. But the one underneath can afford to trust because he's underneath anyway." The victor fears losing his supremacy by trusting his rival, but the underdog can afford to trust his oppressor because he has nothing to lose, Nusseibeh explains.
And while he still thinks that the best recipe for coexistence is a two-state solution, one in which a Palestinian nation-state comprising the West Bank and Gaza Strip would exist side by side with the Jewish state of Israel, he stresses in his book that a state should not be an end in itself. "There is no need for us to have a separate or so-called independent state," he writes. A state is only a means of achieving collective well-being, of transforming oppression into freedom, he argues. And the Jewish and Palestinian states should exist only as long as they serve that purpose. Indeed, they might be the best way of allowing the two nations to evolve slowly toward a state of Jeffersonian ideals, one in which all citizens are equal and free regardless of their ethnicity, religion, or national identity.
The suggestion that the Jewish state might be just a way station toward some other political arrangement will ring alarm bells with Israelis. Most of the country's leaders and citizens fear that the Palestinian leadership's consent to set up a Palestinian state alongside Israel is merely tactical, and that the ultimate goal is to overwhelm Israel militarily or demographically and subsume it into the Arab world. And most Israelis, even fervent supporters of accommodation with the Palestinians, look at the Middle East and conclude that Jews living in an Arab state would almost certainly not enjoy equality, democracy, or physical security.
Most Israelis will also not be pleased that the Israelis that Nusseibeh mentions time and again in the book are radicals and outsiders who are seen even by many in the country's peace camp as hostile to the Jewish people's right to self-determination. He suggests, citing Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People, that the Arabs who lived in Palestine before the British conquest, rather than the Jewish immigrants who arrived in the 20th century, were probably the descendants of the region's ancient inhabitants. Sand, a professor of history at Tel Aviv University, is an avowed anti-Zionist whose book was condemned by nearly all Israeli reviewers, of all political stripes, as awful scholarship and unoriginal polemic. His Tel Aviv University colleague Anita Shapira summed up the book by saying "there is something warped and objectionable in the assumption that for Jews to integrate into the Middle East, they, and they alone of all the peoples in the region, must shed their national identity and historical memories and reconstruct themselves in a way that may (perhaps) find favor with Israeli-Palestinians." The mere mention of Sand, in the first chapter, as a respectable scholar is likely to make many Israeli and pro-Israeli readers put the book down at once.
Nusseibeh also makes much of Israeli peace activists such as Uri Avneri and Abie Nathan, colorful but not particularly influential radicals on the fringe of Israeli society. Nathan, for example, was the nascent Israeli peace movement's leading stunt man. In 1965 he flew his own airplane from Israel to Egypt with the goal of delivering a peace petition to Egypt's president, Gamal Abdel Nasser (Nasser refused to see him and had him deported). He staged hunger strikes to protest the construction of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories and was jailed for meeting with Yasir Arafat and other PLO leaders.
Nusseibeh clearly admires such figures because they were willing to say things and take positions that lay far outside their own community's consensus.
"These are the unsung heroes," he stresses. "Contrary to how many people think about them, that they are peripheral, one should look upon them as the visible points on the surface, underneath which something much more important and significant is happening. They are the human face, evidence of a deep human element that is not necessarily evident in Israeli society."
Nusseibeh seems to hope that Al-Quds University will produce some Palestinian versions of Avneri and Nathan—people who can see beyond the conventions and tropes in which the rest of their society is caught.
And he thinks that this is sorely needed right now. While large majorities of both Israelis and Palestinians claim to support a two-state arrangement, they vote for political parties that work against that goal—the Palestinians for the Islamicist movement Hamas, and the Israelis for the Likud and other parties that promote Israeli settlement in the West Bank. All the efforts of the leaders of both countries, and of the international community, to achieve a two-state solution have failed.
In despair, many Palestinians have abandoned the idea of two separate states—they demand a single state, comprising all the territory of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip, in which the majority would rule. Israelis point out that demographic trends are such that the Palestinians would soon be the majority, and that that would be the end of Jewish independence and self-determination.
That's why Nusseibeh is floating ideas like giving the Palestinians civil but not political rights.
"I'm not talking about a solution," he asserts. "It's not like going to the supermarket and they're out of two-states so you pick up a one-state. It looks like we are stuck, so the question arises: What are we to do?"
The question, he says, is what is the best alternative for the Palestinians, and for the Israelis too, under the current circumstances?
"Ideally, one would like to be guided by humanist principles. One should try to bring about as much equality as possible, given differences. I'm not a magician, but I think that human beings are capable of being creative and coming up with imaginative solutions if required," he explains.
Despite the current deadlock, there is cause for optimism, he thinks.
"Regardless of the fact that the Camp David talks collapsed, if you look at the relations of Jews and Arabs, we've come a long way toward finding some way to reach out for some mode of coexistence," he says. "It didn't work, but it was nevertheless an immense step forward, if you contrast where we were before."
At similar junctions in the past, Nusseibeh has been condemned by his fellow Palestinians as a traitor to the cause and dismissed by Israelis as, at best, a lone moderate Palestinian voice among the wolves and, at worst, a fanatic in dove's clothing (during the first Gulf War, in 1991, Israeli forces jailed him for 90 days without filing charges; according to press reports, he was suspected of spying for Iraq). When he teamed up in 2003 with the former chief of the Israel Security Agency (popularly known as the Shin Bet), Ami Ayalon, on a grass-roots peace initiative called "The People's Voice," he was condemned by other Palestinians for agreeing to a clause stating that Palestinian refugees would not be able to return to their former homes in Israel.
"People haven't reacted so far to this idea," Nusseibeh says, referring to the possibility of granting the Palestinians civil but not political rights in Israel. "But if you ask around, they'll tell you that I'm a person who has crazy ideas. I'm an optimist. I see things going in a good direction. Except I can't tell exactly what that direction looks like."
Haim Watzman is a Jerusalem-based writer and translator whose most recent book is A Crack in the Earth: A Journey Up Israel's Rift Valley (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). He blogs at southjerusalem.com.
Friday, January 28, 2011
J Street Policy on Isr Settlement Issue before the UN
Dear Friend,
In a carefully worded statement, J Street advocates for the US NOT to veto the resolution making the rounds of UN Security Council members, urging better US initiatives to create "borders" and "security arrangements" for Israel and Palestine.
The key paragraphs (in bold) are the three at the bottom of this post. JRK
Following the introduction of a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement expansion, J Street released a new policy statement:
J Street shares the growing global frustration at the lack of progress toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and at the Israeli government’s continued expansion of settlements beyond the Green Line.
J Street grounds its work in a deep commitment to the security, survival and character of the state of Israel as the democratic homeland of the Jewish people. As a pro-Israel organization and as Americans, we advocate for what we believe to be in the long-term interests of the state of Israel and of the United States. Ongoing settlement expansion runs counter to the interests of both countries and against commitments Israel itself has made.
For over forty years and across eight Presidential administrations, the United States has made it crystal clear that Israel needs to stop building settlements over the Green Line. As President Obama put it in his June 2009 Cairo speech, “the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.”
Our opposition to settlement expansion does not contradict our belief that ultimately some Jewish settlements and a clear majority of settlers on the West Bank close to the Green Line, and the Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, will be incorporated within the borders of Israel in return for swaps of equivalent land with the state-to-be of Palestine.
It pains us that against its own self interest and despite clear warnings from the United States and the rest of the international community, the Netanyahu government has nonetheless chosen to continue expanding settlements, rendering a two-state resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict increasingly hard to achieve.
The Resolution introduced in the United Nations Security Council this week condemns Israel’s ongoing settlement activity and calls on both parties to continue negotiating final status issues in an effort to resolve the conflict in the short term.
These are sentiments that we share and that we believe a majority of Jewish Americans and friends of Israel share.
We would urge the government of the state of Israel to recognize that it is in Israel’s own interest to stop further building over the Green Line, and to immediately sit down with the United States and the Palestinians to establish a border and security arrangements that define where it can and cannot continue to build.
Barring that, we urge the Obama administration to put forward quickly, and with strong international support, its own bold, proactive diplomatic initiative, including ideas for establishing borders and security arrangements.
The lack of movement on the diplomatic front has created the vacuum from which the present Security Council Resolution has emerged. By asserting clear leadership in a serious effort to reach a two-state resolution of the conflict, the United States can likely defer immediate consideration of this new Resolution by the Security Council.
Our preferred outcome would be Israeli or American action that averts the need for such a Resolution. However, if the Resolution does come to a vote, we urge the Obama administration to work to craft language, particularly around Jerusalem, that it can support condemning settlement activity and promoting a two-state solution.
While we hope never to see the state of Israel publicly taken to task by the United Nations, we cannot support a U.S. veto of a Resolution that closely tracks long-standing American policy and that appropriately condemns Israeli settlement policy.
In a carefully worded statement, J Street advocates for the US NOT to veto the resolution making the rounds of UN Security Council members, urging better US initiatives to create "borders" and "security arrangements" for Israel and Palestine.
The key paragraphs (in bold) are the three at the bottom of this post. JRK
Following the introduction of a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement expansion, J Street released a new policy statement:
J Street shares the growing global frustration at the lack of progress toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and at the Israeli government’s continued expansion of settlements beyond the Green Line.
J Street grounds its work in a deep commitment to the security, survival and character of the state of Israel as the democratic homeland of the Jewish people. As a pro-Israel organization and as Americans, we advocate for what we believe to be in the long-term interests of the state of Israel and of the United States. Ongoing settlement expansion runs counter to the interests of both countries and against commitments Israel itself has made.
For over forty years and across eight Presidential administrations, the United States has made it crystal clear that Israel needs to stop building settlements over the Green Line. As President Obama put it in his June 2009 Cairo speech, “the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.”
Our opposition to settlement expansion does not contradict our belief that ultimately some Jewish settlements and a clear majority of settlers on the West Bank close to the Green Line, and the Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, will be incorporated within the borders of Israel in return for swaps of equivalent land with the state-to-be of Palestine.
It pains us that against its own self interest and despite clear warnings from the United States and the rest of the international community, the Netanyahu government has nonetheless chosen to continue expanding settlements, rendering a two-state resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict increasingly hard to achieve.
The Resolution introduced in the United Nations Security Council this week condemns Israel’s ongoing settlement activity and calls on both parties to continue negotiating final status issues in an effort to resolve the conflict in the short term.
These are sentiments that we share and that we believe a majority of Jewish Americans and friends of Israel share.
We would urge the government of the state of Israel to recognize that it is in Israel’s own interest to stop further building over the Green Line, and to immediately sit down with the United States and the Palestinians to establish a border and security arrangements that define where it can and cannot continue to build.
Barring that, we urge the Obama administration to put forward quickly, and with strong international support, its own bold, proactive diplomatic initiative, including ideas for establishing borders and security arrangements.
The lack of movement on the diplomatic front has created the vacuum from which the present Security Council Resolution has emerged. By asserting clear leadership in a serious effort to reach a two-state resolution of the conflict, the United States can likely defer immediate consideration of this new Resolution by the Security Council.
Our preferred outcome would be Israeli or American action that averts the need for such a Resolution. However, if the Resolution does come to a vote, we urge the Obama administration to work to craft language, particularly around Jerusalem, that it can support condemning settlement activity and promoting a two-state solution.
While we hope never to see the state of Israel publicly taken to task by the United Nations, we cannot support a U.S. veto of a Resolution that closely tracks long-standing American policy and that appropriately condemns Israeli settlement policy.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Officials Oppose Co-Existence
Israel wants to enforce what Americans would call "segregation". Keep Arabs and Israelis separate. Make sure people understand their "place". And stay there.
Apparently, this is the goal of the present Jewish democracy. How can the US continue to "support it"? JRK
Israel's 'disobedient women' questioned over illegal trips for Palestinians
Harriet Sherwood
The Guardian
January 18, 2011 - 12:00am
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/view-from-jerusalem-with-harriet-sherwood/2011/j...
In a small village between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, I joined a remarkable group of women and children for lunch last weekend, a noisy and cheerful crowd enjoying plates of chicken, fish, rice and salad. All of them were breaking the law.
The party consisted of around 20 mostly middle-aged Israeli women, slightly fewer and younger Palestinian women and a handful of the latter's children.
The Palestinians were from villages in the West Bank and therefore forbidden entry into Israel without proper permits. The Israeli women had illegally brought them across checkpoints for a day out – a journey that is both just a few miles and an impossible distance.
This wasn't the first occasion; there have been previous trips to Tel Aviv and Jaffa and to the zoo in Jerusalem. For many of the Palestinians, it is their first trip across the Green Line into Israel. Earlier trips have been described by Ilana Hammerman, one of the organisers, in the Israeli paper Haaretz, and by Rachel Shabi in the Guardian last September.
But in recent weeks, the Israelis – who describe themselves as "women who disobey" – have begun to be questioned individually by the police about their actions. Some see this as part of a bigger picture of intolerance and harassment of groups and individuals supporting co-existence, civil and human rights, and opposing Israel's occupation of Palestinian land.
Many civil and human rights groups and politicians across the spectrum here detect a growing campaign against those challenging the "norm" of occupation. That, on a small and individual scale, is what these disobedient women are doing.
Two weeks ago, Nitza Aminov was questioned for an hour by police who took her fingerprints and photograph for their records. She refused to answer their questions. She told me that more women have been told to expect visits from the police this week.
Another, Meira, said police intimidation would not deter her from taking part in illegal days out. "If we have to sit in jail as a result, we'll sit in jail."
Hammerman has been questioned a few times, the first three months ago. "I've been public about challenging the law, acting in an illegal way," she told me.
The risks are greater for the Palestinian women, who are likely to face a harsh punishment if discovered illegally in Israel.
One of them, Fida – who by lunchtime had replaced the headscarf she had removed to get through the checkpoint – was not afraid of getting caught. "The Jewish people don't scare me – this is normal," she said.
As the group prepared to drive back to the West Bank in a sudden downpour, thoughts turned towards navigating their way back through the checkpoints. "We see that this is the way of life for Palestinians," said Meira.
Apparently, this is the goal of the present Jewish democracy. How can the US continue to "support it"? JRK
Israel's 'disobedient women' questioned over illegal trips for Palestinians
Harriet Sherwood
The Guardian
January 18, 2011 - 12:00am
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/view-from-jerusalem-with-harriet-sherwood/2011/j...
In a small village between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, I joined a remarkable group of women and children for lunch last weekend, a noisy and cheerful crowd enjoying plates of chicken, fish, rice and salad. All of them were breaking the law.
The party consisted of around 20 mostly middle-aged Israeli women, slightly fewer and younger Palestinian women and a handful of the latter's children.
The Palestinians were from villages in the West Bank and therefore forbidden entry into Israel without proper permits. The Israeli women had illegally brought them across checkpoints for a day out – a journey that is both just a few miles and an impossible distance.
This wasn't the first occasion; there have been previous trips to Tel Aviv and Jaffa and to the zoo in Jerusalem. For many of the Palestinians, it is their first trip across the Green Line into Israel. Earlier trips have been described by Ilana Hammerman, one of the organisers, in the Israeli paper Haaretz, and by Rachel Shabi in the Guardian last September.
But in recent weeks, the Israelis – who describe themselves as "women who disobey" – have begun to be questioned individually by the police about their actions. Some see this as part of a bigger picture of intolerance and harassment of groups and individuals supporting co-existence, civil and human rights, and opposing Israel's occupation of Palestinian land.
Many civil and human rights groups and politicians across the spectrum here detect a growing campaign against those challenging the "norm" of occupation. That, on a small and individual scale, is what these disobedient women are doing.
Two weeks ago, Nitza Aminov was questioned for an hour by police who took her fingerprints and photograph for their records. She refused to answer their questions. She told me that more women have been told to expect visits from the police this week.
Another, Meira, said police intimidation would not deter her from taking part in illegal days out. "If we have to sit in jail as a result, we'll sit in jail."
Hammerman has been questioned a few times, the first three months ago. "I've been public about challenging the law, acting in an illegal way," she told me.
The risks are greater for the Palestinian women, who are likely to face a harsh punishment if discovered illegally in Israel.
One of them, Fida – who by lunchtime had replaced the headscarf she had removed to get through the checkpoint – was not afraid of getting caught. "The Jewish people don't scare me – this is normal," she said.
As the group prepared to drive back to the West Bank in a sudden downpour, thoughts turned towards navigating their way back through the checkpoints. "We see that this is the way of life for Palestinians," said Meira.
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