Dennis Fox’s Weblog

From Haaretz, about the weekly protests at Bil’in, which I’ve written about and attended:

… For the past two years, Bil’in residents and anti-fence activists have been holding demonstrations against the separation barrier in the Palestinian village, near Modi’in Illit. The fence cuts through the village, severing it from about half of its land.

… “The video … shows the soldiers used more violence than the demonstrators,” the judge concluded, releasing Borant under restriction. “The video is no credit to the defense forces. Even though they see the cameras, the soldiers do not restrain themselves from displaying the ugly face they adopt toward people at a democratic protest.”

This is not the first time judges have criticized actions of soldiers. The real test, though, is whether this will lead to  any change in the soldiers’ behavior. Judicial pronouncements typically have little impact, leading to the reasonable conclusion that the “ugly face” is intentional.

My parents’ copy of the Jewish newspaper The Forward arrived today, about the same time Jewish Voice for Peace sent an email reprinting a Forward article about an event this coming June:

United for Peace and Justice, the convener of the January 27 march [in Washington against the Iraq war], is joining with the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation to co-sponsor a two-day “mobilization” in June, titled “The World Says No to Israeli Occupation.” The event will include a mass rally, a “teach-in” and lobbying. It will mark the 40th year since Israel’s capture of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem in June 1967.

When the Occupation began at the end of the Six Day War I was in Israel during my post-high school year abroad. The war provided an emotional peak that helped nudge me along the Zionist path. Digging ditches to jump into in case invading Egyptians reached the kibbutz escalated my pro-Israel identity, changing the prospect of moving to Israel for the rest of my life from possible to definite. Or at least that’s what I remember my 18-year-old self thinking. When I get back to Boston I’ll read some of the letters I sent my parents at the time (they saved the letters and gave them to me a year or so ago, but I haven’t yet gone through them). Maybe I wrote them about my plan to return to Israel, but I’m not sure. I was trying not to worry them.

Things didn’t work out quite the way I expected, either for me or for Israel. Some of this I’ve touched on before, but maybe I’ll do more of that now that I’m thinking about it.

I’ve read a couple of things previously about the June rally, which comes at a time when Jewish opposition to Israeli policy is getting more attention. Another article in today’s email today claims “Jewish progressive criticism of Israel is now a movement.” Let’s hope so.

When I got to my parents’ house the other night, my father asked if I’d seen the latest Alan Dershowitz piece. The Harvard law professor once again accuses Jimmy Carter of being an anti-Semite who opposes Israel’s Palestinian occupation because he’s getting paid by the Saudis. My initial response, after spending the day reading Carter’s book Palestine: Peace not Palestine during my flights southward, was to say ”Dershowitz is an idiot.”

Living in Boston I already see more coverage of Dershowitz than I really need, so I know better than to spend much time on whatever screeds of his come in via email. But here in South Florida I’ve been hanging out with Jewish 80-somethings eager to believe Dershowitz’s explanation of why someone like Carter, who until now they admired, might criticize Israel. What Carter has to say troubles many people. Dershowitz makes them feel better, since it’s more comforting to think Carter hates Jews than to think Israel might be wrong. (Even the stuff I write troubles some of the people who know me, though unfortunately, as a former professor rather than a former president, I haven’t been offered any bribes.)

Of course, I used the term “idiot” loosely and conversationally. I wouldn’t call him that in a published article, for example, because I know he must do well on IQ tests. What I really mean is that he uses his formidable intelligence and sharp debating skills in a patently dishonest way so that people with a conventional pro-Israel mindset can comfortably reject conflicting information. So “idiot” is the wrong word. Maybe I should have called him an “intellectually corrupt propagandist.” 

But since he’s a prolific intellectually corrupt propagandist whose high-profile rantings are getting a lot of play right now, I’m glad Mitchell Plitnick, Director of Education and Policy of Jewish Voice for Peace, has had the patience to write a three-part response. Worth looking at if you care what Dershowitz thinks.

What I would add is this: If everything Dershowitz says about Carter were true (which it’s not), that would damage Carter personally but not his book’s substance. In other words, Dershowitz attacks Carter’s motivation because he can’t refute Carter’s basic facts beyond a few minor points that no doubt will be easily corrected in the next edition. Those facts come from many legitimate academics, journalists, political observers, and others, including Israeli sources. Carter is just the messenger.

So the real issue isn’t whether Jimmy Carter is a lackey of the Saudis or whether Israel’s oppression of Palestinians is really as bad as Carter says. The core question is whether Israel’s justifications for that oppression are sufficient or whether the oppression should stop. Carter thinks it should stop. Dershowitz thinks it should continue. I think Dershowitz is an idiot.

I read Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace not Apartheid on my flight to Florida yesterday. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have bothered. I’ve read so many long descriptions of it by both supporters and critics that I thoughtI knew what it was about. But I did want to see just how he phrased things, and I also figured figured that now I’ll be able to say “yes” when people aggressively ask if I read the book when I defend Carter’s basic critique of Israeli occupation policy. That critique holds up well, by the way, which I think is one reason his critics hate it so much.

Most of the book is Carter’s account of Israel/Palestine history, covering the high spots in a pretty straightforward manner but not in much depth. Some periods and events get mimimal attention, which would be a problem in a book purporting to be a comprehensive history but seems reasonable enough as what’s really a long introduction to recent and current events. His critics have seized on some of these gaps and generalizations, and I imagine if Carter were revising the book he could add a few sentences to respond, but most of the charges I’ve read don’t damage the crux of Carter’s analysis.

One inaccuracy I noticed seems to favor the Israelis. I’ll get to this later.

Carter gives himself a lot of credit for trying to resolve things when he was president. His central role allows him to offer a number of interesting anecdotes and quotations from key players.

One thing that did get on my nerves was his repeated use of the term The Holy Land, along with his repeated focus on how the conflict affects Christians. I understand he’s trying to reach a mainstream American Christian audience , so I suppose it makes sense strategically, but it leaves the impression that’s what’s really important is how things affect Christians.

During his first visit to Israel in 1973, when as he explains he was secretly planning to run for president, Carter met few Palestinians and internalized a traditional pro-Israel perspective. He says that at the time Israel was committed to a peace process that would end the occupation and that people were hopeful, but I suspect he would have heard a different perspective if he’d visited Palestinians. It was already clear by 1973 that ending the occupation was not something Israel took seriously.

Be that as it may, Carter gives an interesting account of his developing involvement and growing awareness of what was really going on. The key portions of the book come in the second half, when he describes the deteriorating situation in occupied territory. He offers what seem to me accurate descriptions of the separation barrier, the segregated roads, the impossible living conditions, the changing peace plans.

One thing that did surprise me was that Carter said almost nothing about the situation of Arabs within Israel. Based on reactions to his book and to Carter’s own descriptions in interviews, I expected to see repeated positive reference to Israeli democracy.  I’ve heard him emphasize that the book makes it clear he’s talking about Palestine, not what’s going on inside Israel where Arab citizens have full rights. Yet unless I missed it, in the actual book Carter makes no such sttrong statement. Mostly he ignores the subject of internal Israeli affairs, which in itself is problematic but may be more honest than explicit defenses.

At one point Carter refers to the free-wheeling debate within Israel as a sign of free speech, but mentions without elaboration that “only among some of the Israeli Arabs is there an obvious reluctance to speak freely.” He then talks about Israelis united about security because of a “common religion” and “shared history,” ignoring the 20% non-Jewish minority. Later, when quoting Syria’s Hafez al-Assad about Israel failing as a democracy because only Jews have political and social equality, Carter gives no indication of whether he agrees or not.

About that inaccuracy I mentioned:  Carter says that his initial reaction to the dispossession of Palestinians living in Israel was to compare it to when the U.S. government forced the Lower Creek Indians on what became his family’s land in Georgia to walk to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears. But he realized by his 1973 visit, he says, that there was a difference: the taking of Palestinian land in 1948 was in keeping with the UN partition plan and the Palestinains would be able to return to their homes or be compensated in the future. However, the UN did not call for Palestinians to be removed from their homes. I think Carter had it right the first time.

Next week at the University of Miami I’m scheduled to do a relatively informal talk-and-discussion that combines several pieces I’ve described here in more detail. The topic: “Critical Psychology, Justice, and Reconciliation in Israel and Palestine, or Why Jimmy Carter is Only Half Right.” I’m still trying to sort out some of the ambiguities.

In November, I spoke at Ben Gurion University in Be’er Sheva about critical psychology’s potential relevance to Israel. Critical psychology has more than one strain, but in large part it challenges mainstream psychology’s support for an unjust status quo. In that talk and in other Israeli settings I speculated about what an Israeli critical psychologist might find worth paying attention to. One thing I emphasized, especially in my course on Psychology, Law, and Justice, was the widespread insistence that Israel can be both a Jewish state and a democratic state. The failure to make democracy meaningful for all but the Jewish majority is so obvious that anyone who looks at the situation critically should wonder just why so many Israelis and their supporters abroad believe the impossible, or at least say they believe it.

That this topic is so touchy should make critical psychologists even more interested, because when an untenable assumption becomes part of the dominant ideology the logical consequences mount rapidly and even bureaucratically into outcomes that could never be justified if they were examined with an open mind. Example: yesterday’s matter-of-fact story in Haaretz about debates between demographers over how to alter Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries to ensure a Jewish majority. What does it mean that so many Israelis can read something like this and not be horrified? How would Israel’s American supporters react to a U.S. city’s declared plan to change its borders to exclude residents of the wrong race, religion, or ethnicity? This policy may be explained by nationalism or tribalism. But democracy?

After leaving Be’er Sheva in December for Ramallah, I talked at Birzeit University about law, justice, and reconciliation. I tried to distinguish between, on the one hand, dialogue groups and other formats designed to reach peace and co-existence through better understanding and empathy, and, on the other hand, a more substantive reconciliation based on taking justice seriously, acknowledging past misdeeds, and transforming the institutions and ideologies that created injustice to begin with. I think I need to work on this part, partly because the distinction is not easy to convert into action and partly because too often there are preconceived notions about just who is to become reconciled. It’s one thing to call for reconciliation between Israel and Palestine — accepting the official but probably impossible two-state goal — but it means something else to talk about reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians as people who live on the same piece of land, free of nationalist and religious bottom lines. That seems to many the most impossible prospect, but maybe it’s my pessimism about the traditional framework that makes me think something more far-reaching is worth aiming for.

Otherwise another horror from this week’s Haaretz will also escalate into matter-of-fact routine: the decision to move the Separation Barrier near Modi’in Ilit eastward a few miles to make sure 1500 more Jewish settlers are on the Israeli side of the future de facto border - even though this will strand 20,000 Palestinians in the no-man’s land west of the fence. 

After I returned home — more than a month ago now, and it seems much longer — I wrote a short piece on Jimmy Carter’s refusal to criticize Israel’s internal democracy even as he denounced its apartheid-like policies toward Palestinians under occupation (such as that decision to move the fence eastward). At his Brandeis speech last week Carter mentioned this issue in passing. He didn’t follow up on it, but just suggesting that visitors to Israel might examine Israel’s treatment of Arabs within its borders clarified that Carter knows more than he’s willing to say.

So where does all this leave me when I sit down in Miami for wine and cheese with what promises to be a small roomful of academics and psychologists? I dunno. I’ll let you know later where the discussion takes us.

Last night I finally read Livia Rokach’s Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, a presentation of excerpts from Moshe Sharett’s diaries. The slim 64-page booklet first published in 1980 has been sitting on my bookshelves alongside many others I haven’t yet gotten to. I’m sorry I didn’t read this one years ago, since it makes such an effective case against so many assumptions held by supporters of Israeli policy. Although I was aware of this issue’s broad claims, many of the details were completely new to me.

Rokach was the daughter of Israel Rokach, Israel’s Interior Minister in the 1950s when Moshe Sharett was Foreign Minister and, for two years after Ben Gurion’s temporary strategic retirement, Prime Minister. Sharett was a moderate Zionist, which meant, as Livia Rokach makes clear, that he too sought Israeli expansion and dominance but opposed the methods used by the more powerful Ben Gurion. As Sharett says in one typical 1955 excerpt,

I have been meditating on the long chain of false incidents and hostilities we have invented, and on the many clashes we have provoked which cost us so much blood, and on the violations of the law by our men - all of which brought grave disasters and determined the whole course of events and contributed to the security crisis.

Looking back at this period in 1961, Sharett writes:

All this must bring about revulsion in the sense of justice and honesty in public opinion; it must make the State appear in the eyes of the world as a savage state that does not recognize the principles of justice as they have been established and accepted by contemporary society.

Rokach provides details and context along with many excerpts. Sharett’s son said they were fair representations of the eight volumes of diaries published in Hebrew. Uri Avneri wrote about this when the book came out, in an article published as the book’s final Appendix:

Livia Rokach did clean work. All her quotations are real. She did not ever take them out of context, nor did she quote them in a way that contradicts the intention of the diary writer. To any person who is familiar with Israeli propaganda, such quotations may have a stunning effect . . .

He added this:

The Israeli reader who read the excerpts from Sharett’s diary which were serialized in Maariv, or even the eight volumes of the diary themselves cannot be shocked by these revelations, in spite of their severity. However, the impact of such a publication abroad is bound to be sharper. Indeed, the lack of legal intervention by the Israeli Foreign Office prevented a wide spread dissemination of the booklet [because it minimized publicity]. The Arab-American organization that published the booklet does not have the means required to disseminate it widely, especially when faced with the conspiracy of silence imposed by the pro-Israel American media ….

Avneri was right that the book would not be disseminated widely, though it’s now available online and cited by more recent work as evidence of Israel’s false policy justifications. Yet those who support Israel are unlikely to come across it. If they do, and if they are open to absorbing new material that violates their assumptions, this book should cause a great deal of welcome discomfort.

Rokach’s introductory paragraphs could have been written today. I’m excerpting them at length because I think they’re so significant:

POPULAR SUPPORT of Israel over the last quarter of a century has been based on a number of myths, the most persistent of which has been the myth of lsrael’s security. Implying the permanent existence of grave threats to the survival of Jewish society in Palestine, this myth has been carefully cultivated to evoke anxious images in public opinion to permit, and even encourage, the use of large amounts of public funds to sustain Israel militarily and economically. “Israel’s security” is the official argument with which not only Israel but also the U.S. denies the right of self-determination in their own country to the Palestinian people. For the past three decades it has been accepted as a legitimate explanation for lsrael’s violation of international resolutions calling for the return of the Palestinian people to their homes. Over the past thirteen years Israel has been allowed to evoke its security to justify its refusal to retreat from the Arab and Palestinian territories occupied in 1967. Security is still the pretext given by successive Israeli governments for widespread massacres of civilian populations in Lebanon, for expropriations of Arab lands, for the establishment of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, for deportations, and for arbitrary detentions of political prisoners. …..

… The following pages present extracts from Sharett’s diary demonstrating the following points:

1. The Israeli political /military establishment never seriously believed in an Arab threat to the existence of Israel. On the contrary, it sought and applied every means to exacerbate the dilemma of the Arab regimes after the 1948 war. … In other words, the Arab threat was an Israeli-invented myth which for internal and inter-Arab reasons the Arab regimes could not completely deny, though they constantly feared Israeli preparations for a new war.

2. The Israeli political/military establishment aimed at pushing the Arab states into military confrontations which the Israeli leaders were invariably certain of winning. The goal of these confrontations was to modify the balance of power in the region radically, transforming the Zionist state into the major power in the Middle East.

3. In order to achieve this strategic purpose the following tactics were used:

a) Large- and small-scale military operations aimed at civilian populations across the armistice lines, especially in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, then respectively under the control of Jordan and Egypt. …..

b) Military operations against Arab military installations in border areas to undermine the morale of the armies and intensify the regimes’ destabilization from inside their military structures.

c) Covert terrorist operations in depth inside the Arab world, used for both espionage and to create fear, tension and instability.

4. lsrael’s achievement of its strategic purpose was to be realized through the following means:

a) New territorial conquests through war. Although the 1949-50 armistice agreements assigned to Israel a territory one-third larger than had the UN partition plan, the Israeli leadership was still not satisfied with the size of the state, the borders of which it had committed itself to respect on the international level. It sought to recover at least the borders of mandate Palestine….

b) Political as well as military efforts to bring about the liquidation of all Arab and Palestinian claims to Palestine through the dispersion of the Palestinian refugees of the 1947-49 war to faraway parts of the Arab world as well as outside the Arab world.

c) Subversive operations designed to dismember the Arab world, defeat the Arab national movement, and create puppet regimes which would gravitate to the regional Israeli power.

….

The occupation by Israel of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 has been described, and is still widely understood today, as an Israeli defensive action in the face of Arab threats. Sharett’s Diary offers unequivocable evidence that the occupation of Gaza and also of the West Bank was part of lsrael’s plans since the early fifties. American Zionist leaders were informed about these plans in 1954, In 1955, Jewish and Arab lives were sacrificed in a series of provocative attacks undertaken to create a pretext for the occupation of Jordanian territory. The chief obstacle postponing this occupation was Britain’s residual presence in Jordan upholding the Hashemite throne….

This short book makes a devastating case against the heart of pro-Israel propaganda.  Unlike more recent histories that expose many of the same details with the benefit of newly discovered documents and accounts, the diary written by Israel’s Prime Minister during the 1950s can’t be tarnished with the “revisionist history” label.

That I only just now read it, and have never heard it discussed, makes it look like Avneri was right after all.

The Brandeis University website has a transcript of Jimmy Carter’s Tuesday speech with the ten pre-screened questions he was asked, along with his answers. Also a video. As I expected, none of the pre-selected questions pressed him on his repeated admiration for Israeli democracy, a topic I discussed last week.

Carter did say this, though:

It would be an intriguing experience for a group of Brandeis professors and students to visit the occupied territories for a few days, to meet with leaders and private citizens, and to determine whether I have exaggerated or incorrectly described the plight of the Palestinians. While there, you could also assess a subject that I have not mentioned: whether treatment of Arabs inside Israel is fair and equitable.

Better than nothing, I  guess. I’d have liked more. Maybe if he said more, his single phrase hinting that all is not well inside Israel might have been picked up by news outlets that, as far as I can tell from Google searches, ignored it completely.

The ten selected questions did raise the main issues Carter’s pro-occupation critics keep repeating.

Carter also had this to say:

Let me refer now to my use of the word “apartheid.” I realize that this has caused great concern in the Jewish community. The title makes it clear that the book is about conditions and events in the Palestinian territories and not in Israel. The text makes clear on numerous occasions that the forced separation and the domination of Arabs by Israelis is not based on race and should give no aid or comfort to any of those who have attempted to equate racism with Zionism. The driving force for the resulting oppression and persecution comes from a minority of Israelis and their desire for Palestinian land.

I’m not sure I agree with his last sentence, that only a minority of Israelis support government policy on this issue. Maybe a big minority, because it’s tied up with the supposed rationale that the occupation is necessary for national survival as a Jewish state. I’d like him to be right, though.

As I write this, I’m listening to the video of Alan Dershowitz’s response to Carter. He’s droning on. And on.

A Boston-area art student emailed to tell me about a project that’s produced a series of striking posters. This description is from their About Us page:

Although the authors of this website come from many different places, we are a group of students from Lesley University located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Some students are from The Art Institute of Boston, and some are from Lesley College, both part of the University.  In January 2007 about twenty of us all traded in our winter vacation to take a three credit, three-week intensive class titled Modern Middle East History.  The subject matter was completely new to us and honestly we didn’t even know what that term even meant without stereotyping.

In only three weeks the class has learned a ton of information from lectures by our Professor Jo-Anne Hart, as well as several movies, documentaries, slide shows, maps, and many reliable web sources.  Together as a class we have learned about:

a) the evolution and formation of the middle east
b) European imperialism, Islamic reform, nationalism, and
c) more contemporary issues such as the evolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Iranian Revolution, the Iraq war, and US policy in the Middle East.

It turned out that these events and topics were not completely new to us.  As Americans we are constantly overwhelmed with images of the Middle East through our television sets.  As college students living in New England, we have a good sense of what is valid or trustworthy information.  Before doing any research many of us can assume that what we hear on the news is false.

Thanks to this class, we have a much clearer view of the issues in the Middle East both currently and in the not so distant past.  We have gained an ability to take matters into our own hands.  We realize that accurate information does exist and it is out responsibility to find it and use it to spread the word, and offer help to peace in the Middle East.

The result of this 2007 Lesley winter session class is a web project completed by a small group of LU students of all different ages, backgrounds, and beliefs.  The website is an attempt to showcase our new understanding of the Middle East, through a poster project.

Two things in particular interest me about this project. One is the artistry involved in humanizing complex political issues. The other is the ability, within a short three-week period, to learn how to approach in a more serious way previously unexplored controversial topics.

Each poster has a useful description of the background, with some links to other sources.

Nice job!

Back in November I described a visit to Rahat, the Bedouin city a few miles north of Be’er Sheva. Later I described an article I read about black Bedouin women in Rahat making films about their difficult situation. Both postings drew comments with many other details and links.

One person who commented was Uri Rosenwaks, the Israeli filmmaker who taught the Rahat women to become filmmakers themselves. His own film, The Film Class, portrays the project’s impact on his students. The film’s distributor has links to reviews and other details.

Uri sent me the DVD, which my wife and I watched two weeks ago. I was hoping my 13-year old daughter would get around to watching it before I commented on it here, but so far she’s been too busy being 13. I’ll suggest it to her again, though, because I know she’ll find it fascinating.

The film itself is short, just under an hour, perhaps designed to fit into a standard television time slot. I would have liked it longer, because there’s so much more to Film Class than just a film class. As some of the reviews explain in more detail, this is really a story of self-discovery by women who finally confront an issue they had avoided their entire lives: how did black people come to be living in the Negev to begin with, and what does that origin have to do with their low status today? With Bedouin at the bottom of the Israeli status ladder and black Bedouin on the very bottom rung, black Bedouin women are as far down as it’s possible to get. They have a disarming sense of humor, though, amidst the heartache.

Once the students begin to explore their origins — complete with a visit to the slave-trade center on Zanzibar — they confront more directly the tensions between Rahat’s blacks and whites — between descendants of African slaves and descendants of whiter Bedouin slaveowners in a society where the good guys and bad guys are all Muslim. When they interview Rahat’s mayor, he insists that under Islam everyone is equal, with no racial distinctions allowed. Then why, he is asked, did one of the students’ cousins who married a white Bedouin woman have to leave Israel because of threats against him? The answer: Tradition — in this case the tradition that parents decide whom a daughter marries. Since this woman’s parents refused, no marriage was possible. Not a race thing at all.

I hope Film Class gets wide distribution, but suspect it will have trouble outside Israel. A friend saw it in Be’er Sheva last month, at a series organized by a Negev co-existence group, but the theme may be too touchy for less-motivated forums. It doesn’t fit into the more common narratives — Israel’s treatment of its own Arab citizens, for example, or its treatment of Palestinians across the Green Line. Of course, the departure from these important politically palatable categories is what makes it so eye-opening.
The story of Rahat’s black women, though not the film, is embedded in the broader issue of how Israel’s national institutions deal with Bedouin more generally. I don’t mean the obvious repressive policies, like destroying homes in unrecognized Bedouin villages to force the residents into larger places like Rahat. I was told over and over again, for example, that there simply is no place in Israel for Bedouin women to go to escape unwanted marriages, polygamous or otherwise. Should the authorities step in to protect those women, or should they let traditional cultures sort things out as the men in charge decide? Should they enforce the law against polygamy by infringing on local tradition? Israel’s response seems to be avoidance.

That’s also an issue within Palestine. The researchers I worked with at Birzeit University in December hope to develop a modern Palestinian legal system, but have not yet sorted out how and when to deal with women’s equality in a mostly-Muslim society. Touchy issue there, too.

Positive note: Uri Rosenwaks writes that the Step Forward Foundation that backed his film has received new funding to buy professional television equipment, which 20 Rahat women are now learning to use. The goal is a Rahat community television station. Now that could be interesting.

With Jimmy Carter at Brandeis yesterday and Alan Dershowitz continuing his tantrum, I thought a lot of Carter’s critics, annoyed they weren’t allowed inside to challenge the former president personally, would be massed outside. Maybe the cold weather kept most of them home, because at least half the crowd of maybe 40 people were there to thank Carter for his book.

I did get there late — a wrong turn didn’t help — but news reports give the same low numbers. By the time I got there, the Boston chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, the group I travelled to the West Bank with in October, had been out in the cold for some time supporting Carter’s efforts to focus attention on Israel’s Occupation policies.

Jonathan Demme — the filmmaker working on a documentary about responses to Carter’s book, who Brandeis also refused to let inside — was also still there, reaching the end of interviews with JVPers outside in the darkening cold.

Demme interviewed the anti-Carter side, too. I’ve been told the guy in the cap is Charles Jacobs, head of the David Project I mentioned yesterday that’s trying to keep the new Boston mosque from opening.

For the hour or so I was there, things were pretty good-natured, with some debate between pro- and anti- forces, most of it milder in tone than I’ve seen in the past. Veterans for Peace, AntiwarLeague.com, and others added to the mix of signs and advocates.

The Dhimmi Jimmy sign is an accusation that Carter is subservient to Islamic interests. That seems to be the right-wing bloggers’ favorite insult.

Last evening, at a benefit for ICAHD (Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions), someone who had gone to Cambridge earlier in the day where Carter was signing books at the Harvard Coop reported large numbers of people were walking out of the store with piles of books to give to friends and relatives. That seems positive to me. Despite my posting last week pointing out Carter’s refusal to criticize Israel’s internal democratic failures, his book does raise issues in a way others with less public clout have little chance of matching.

Jessica Masse, the interfaith coordinator of the Islamic Society of Boston, writing in The Boston Globe:

The public has questions for Muslims in America and we have responded. We have opened our mosque to the public, taken part in  outreach efforts, and worked extensively to foster understanding of Islam and Muslims. We have been answering questions for years and we will continue to do so. However, asking questions and providing answers is a two-way street.

Here are a few  questions  of our own: What are the true reasons a political advocacy group decided to organize a media campaign and initiate a lawsuit against us? Why are Muslims in Boston, who are without a single structure designed and built as a mosque, sued and defamed when they purchase a vacant parcel of land from the city as part of an urban renewal program, even though 17 other such transactions were made with churches and synagogues? And why, when we have offered to sit down with those people asking questions over the past two years, have they refused to talk to us, preferring to hurl accusations without listening to our answers?

Today’s Boston Globe reports the latest skirmish between the pro-Israel David Project, which opposes creation of a large new mosque in Boston, and the Boston Redevelopment Authority, which was instrumental in arranging building space across from Roxbury Community College:

Leaders of the David Project have questioned the BRA’s deal with the Islamic Society of Boston, under which the society is building the mosque. They have also suggested the BRA is trying to keep details of the arrangement secret by blocking the release of public information.

I won’t repeat the legal skirmishes here because this is one of those many cases where law is used not as a reason but as a weapon. Joachim Martillo & Karin Friedemann recount much of this history in an article focused on Boston Globe coverage, appropriately titled as a question: Is Islamophobia the New Anti-Semitism?

Back in Israel another city is trying to prevent a mosque from opening. Be’er Sheva’s mosque closed when the city’s Arab population fled during the 1948 war.

According to today’s Haaretz:

The mosque was originally constructed in 1906 and converted into the Negev Museum in the 1950s. The museum has been abandoned since 1994, when the city’s engineers determined it was unsafe for use. … The current public struggle over the fate of the mosque began in July 1997, when local Muslims and activists from the Islamic Movement began praying at the site. In response, a member of Be’er Sheva’s city council dumped bovine manure at the entrance to the mosque.

As a lawyer working for Be’er Sheva told me last month, plenty of legal arguments support  the city’s refusal to let Be’er Sheva’s only mosque become a mosque once again. It was clear, though, that the technicalities were convenient excuses for something much more obvious: a determination not to hand Muslims a victory. According to the news story,

The Be’er Sheva municipality has said in the past that opening the mosque for prayer would harm relations between the local residents. Adalah [The Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel] believes, however, that the city’s motives are political, and that keeping the structure closed would cause more damage to the social fabric.

Israel’s Supreme Court seems to be trying to sidestep the issue. They proposed converting the mosque into  “the Museum of Islamic Culture and the Peoples of the East” but Adalah has now refused, pointing out “that there is one synagogue for every 700 Be’er Sheva residents, [but] more than 5,000 Muslim residents of the city, as well as some 180,000 Bedouins in the surrounding areas.”

Did you catch the part about dumping cow shit?

Here are three interrelated questions I’ve touched on at different points. They still need more-organized and more-detailed discussion. Maybe someday I’ll do that. In the meantime, some short answers in progress:

1. To help end Israel’s occupation and “mov[e] skeptics and hostile individuals closer to a progressive view of the I-P conflict”, should we, like Jimmy Carter, avoid criticizing Israel’s internal democracy?

This is my re-phrasing of a comment today by blogger Richard Silverstein, who frames the issue as one of effective strategy.

Since I think the two issues are intertwined, as I touched on briefly in yesterday’s posting, avoiding Israel’s inner workings makes its occupation policy harder to get a handle on. Mainstream Americans who believe Israel is a democracy find it hard to believe the occupation could be as harsh or as unjustified as critics claim. That’s why, it seems to me, it should be easier to demonstrate Israel’s democratic failure inside its borders, where its actions against its own citizens violate American mainstream notions of what democracy means, than to attack only its apartheid-like policies in Gaza and the West Bank, which Americans will continue to support if they believe they are necessary to defend against terrorism (Question 3). Once outsiders understand the practical tension between being a Jewish state and being a democratic state (Question 2), they should become better able to see through Israeli justifications for its policy across the Green Line.

This issue of whether and how to criticize Israel’s internal workings comes up repeatedly in many different contexts among organizations opposing Israeli policy. Sometimes the focus, as Richard’s, is on strategy: What will work best? This is where some organizations, to avoid being labeled anti-Semitic, make a point of supporting Israel more generally and focusing only on the occupation. That’s what Carter is doing, and as Richard says there’s a certain logic to it.

Sometimes, though, the effectiveness argument seems a convenient out for those reluctant to follow the logical trail toward criticizing the whole Zionist enterprise. Can a democracy categorize a fifth of its population as people the state would be better off without? Should Palestinian refugees be allowed to return in numbers that threaten Israel’s Jewish character? Should a one-state outcome be within the spectrum of possibilities? These are touchy questions. Addressing them gets messy, but avoiding them means never getting to fundamentals.

2. Is there any way Israel can remain a Jewish state and give full equality to non-Jewish citizens?

This question is emailed from another reader, who adds that most of the injustices I noted in yesterday’s posting “don’t seem to be inherent in the Zionist vision vision for Israel — even if that’s the way things are now.”

Like the questioner, I too can “imagine East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state, while the rest of Jerusalem was the capital of Israel. Similarly, one could imagine Israel adhering to its own laws about settlements; running bus service to Rahat; and the like.”

Beyond some of these basics, however, full equality seems to me impossible so long as the term “Jewish state” means anything beyond the symbolic and historic. Other countries have official religions. My impression is that those that are arguably democratic either don’t give much substance to the official recognition or don’t have a large proportion of non-favored citizens. When a national religion really takes on substance, democracy falls behind.

Maybe Israel will someday write a constitution guaranteeing full legal equality, and maybe it will even enforce anti-discrimination laws. That might work so long as Jews remained the large majority. But Jews will not remain the large majority for long. Even today, in the north, Arabs slightly outnumber Jews, and that’s the direction the country as a whole is moving. As long as this demographic change is perceived as a national crisis demanding government action, as long as the state’s fundamental connection is to Jews abroad rather than to Arabs who live there, I don’t think equality is possible. If it does come about, then someday Israel will not be a Jewish state.

I’ve written before about my own early Zionist vision. That was 40 years ago, even before the occupation began, when at least some segments of Zionism were still humanitarian, utopian, socialist, even critical of Israel’s treatment of its Arab citizens. Those days are over, though. That Zionist segment is barely recognizable, its adherents either dead or bitter, their ideological heirs as likely to emigrate as to try to change Israel’s direction. They can tinker, but they can’t really change their country’s course.

Behind this question lies a different set of questions: Was Zionism wrong from the beginning? Were those humanitarian Zionists of old really any different from the right-wingers who demanded Both Sides of the Jordan, or were they only fooling themselves? Did a Jewish State ever make sense? What’s the right way to answer these questions — What’s best for the Jews? What’s just? What’s possible?

3. In evaluating checkpoints, roadblocks, and similar Israeli mechanisms, which is more important, stopping inconvenience (and even the unnecessary humiliation) for non-violent citizens, or stopping the unnecessary murder of many non-violent citizens?

This question, from a relative back in December in response to a posting on checkpoint difficulties, is an obvious one, routinely asked by those who defend Israeli policy. Several quick points for now.

First, although the checkpoints and separation wall and all the rest might be justified if they were built on Israel’s side of the border, their placement inside the West Bank makes the defensive justification less convincing. Instead of defending Israel, many of these barriers defend Jewish settlers living on stolen land in the West Bank in violation of international and even Israeli law and make it impossible for ordinary Palestinians to travel from one part of the West Bank to another, from one village to the next. So the inconvenience and humiliation of Palestinians often seem in practice to be less defensive than offensive, part of the structure of control.

Second, as I’ve noted before, many barriers can be gotten around by anyone willing to take a detour. Car thieves do it all the time. So do taxi drivers with East Jerusalem license plates. So do hikers. Given the degree to which a determined Palestinian can get across the border if they do a little planning, a system that makes life miserable for millions of Palestinians who just want to get to work is overkill and is easier to explain as intentionally disruptive than as necessary for defense.

And third, the essence of the hard question, ignoring what I’ve said so far: Is it justified to use a security measure that effectively saves innocent lives if it also makes ordinary life impossible for other innocents? I don’t think this is the situation that actually exists, but it is the situation Israel’s supporters perceive, so it’s worth thinking about.

One response is that most of Israel’s supporters don’t really understand how miserable life under occupation really is. It goes far beyond inconvenience and humiliation, though humiliation breeds enough resentment to feed hostility for generations to come.

If it’s a balancing test, then how many lives can be made miserable on one side to prevent one death on the other? A hundred? A thousand? A million? How do we count those who die at checkpoints because they’re not allowed to pass through to a hospital? Those unable to farm their land? Those who have to quit school or who are fired from jobs they can no longer get to?

Supporters of Israel see little of this, or claim that these Palestinian costs are self-inflicted, or that saving even one life justifies everything. It’s easier to think this, I suppose. Israelis fear for their children’s lives, worry about suicide bombings. All these things are terrible. Anything that promises to stop it must be done.

Anything? Given the disparity in death rates, the disparity in power, Palestinians have even more to worry about when their children go out the door. This is something Israel’s supporters don’t balance into the equation. They don’t see Israel’s own soldiers as oppressors and killers. Palestinians know better.

Israel’s supporters also don’t wonder much, beyond stereotypes and superficialities, why Palestinians see Israel as their enemy. Murder is murder. Innocents are innocent. That’s easy to say, and understandable, but if that’s the only response it leads nowhere. It assumes one side is all Good, the other side all Evil. It assumes one side counts, the other doesn’t. It assumes harsher and harsher measures are always justified.

An end to violence requires an end to the conditions that spawn it. That’s an issue for another day.

First published on eTalkinghead.com
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Jimmy Carter will finally speak at Brandeis University on Tuesday about his critique of Israel’s occupation policy. If his incensed critics don’t keep interrupting, the former president will easily justify his title: Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. He’ll have more trouble countering criticism from a less obvious source: those who appreciate his stance on the occupation but object to his laudatory description of Israel’s own internal democracy.

Carter’s claim that Israel is democratic at home but oppressive across the Green Line makes sense only to those who have internalized the widespread cliché that Israel is the Middle East’s sole democracy. Yet refusing to distinguish between legal technicality and institutionalized discrimination makes it harder for those new to the issue to figure out what’s going on. How could a real democracy, after all, impose so much suffering on innocents just a few miles away? Israel’s hard-nosed approach toward Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank becomes more understandable once one understands democracy’s weak institutionalization inside its own borders.

I followed the initial furor over Carter’s book during a ten-week visit to Israel and the West Bank. The students in my seminar on Psychology, Law, and Justice at Be’er Sheva’s Ben Gurion University were well aware of their country’s fundamental legal and existential dilemma: whether Israel should be a Jewish state or a democratic state. They easily recounted examples of just how far and how often rhetoric departs from reality. Indeed, some Israelis I met were as critical of Israel’s democratic pretensions at home as were the Palestinians I worked with at Birzeit and Al Quds Universities on the West Bank.

Some Israelis, of course, hope discrimination will someday lessen, helped along by well-meaning activists, public interest lawyers, and others working to defend individual rights. Even the Israeli Supreme Court sometimes enforces individual rights, though it too has trouble wishing away the disjunction between Jewish statehood and democratic fundamentals.

Nothing clarifies this dilemma better than Israel’s “demographic problem,” the fear that someday Jews will be a minority in a state no longer defined as Jewish. Proposals to prevent this disaster include reducing the Arab birthrate, encouraging Jewish immigration, and “transferring” hundreds of thousands of Arab citizens out of their own country whether they want to leave or not. Making their lives miserable is one way to encourage Arabs to depart. Many Israelis take it for granted that this is their state’s undisclosed but necessary policy, not just in occupied territory but inside Israel as well.

Our own democracy is far from perfect, but after centuries of legal slavery, official segregation, and genocidal wars against indigenous nations, the majority of Americans finally accept, or at least say, that government should treat all citizens equally. The state can no longer officially declare some citizens more valuable than others. Among Israelis, though, the suggestion that Israel should become a “state for all its citizens” rather than the state of the global Jewish people is widely considered not just anti-Zionist but anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. In a very real sense, Israel’s dominant culture does not envision equality for all.

That’s why Israel imposes on a fifth of its population a national anthem extolling the Jewish return to Zion and a national flag emblazoned with the Jewish Star of David.

That’s why more significant impositions are so routine they’re better explained as consistent with public policy than as departures from it: demolishing Arab-owned homes in East Jerusalem and refusing to recognize Bedouin villages but allowing construction of West Bank Jewish settlements illegal even under Israeli law; failing to enforce housing and labor anti-discrimination laws; failing even to provide bus service to Be’er Sheva for the 40,000 residents of nearby Rahat, a legal Bedouin city in the Negev. For many Israelis, it turns out, democracy means the majority can do whatever it wants.

I was glad to meet many Israelis appalled by this situation. Too many, though, look away because a direct gaze would demand reforms that could someday end Israel’s Jewish dominance. Maybe that’s why Jimmy Carter, too, looks away. If he looks again, he could more easily demonstrate how Israel’s refusal to give its own citizens meaningful equality helps explain its refusal to allow a functional and equal Palestinian state just across the border.

Press release from the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme:

…The Palestinian prisoner, Jamal Hassan Al-Sarahin, 36 years old, died yesterday, in the Negev Detention Center resulting from serious deterioration in his health condition. Al-Sarahin is from Biet Ola, a village of Hebron, who was “administratively detained” by Israeli army eight months ago. Commenting on this tragic incident, the Ministry of Prisoners and Ex-detainees reported that the death of Al-Sarahin was due to Israeli Prison Authority’s deliberate medical carelessness as he was suffering from several diseases including; blood problems and inflammation in his respiratory system, long before his death. The Ministry added that the prison administration refused to transfer him to the hospital; instead, the administration offered him simple medical interventions and painkillers, which led to more deterioration in his health condition causing death.

According to the Ministry of Prisoners, the death of Al-Sarahin sheds light to the file of medical negligence committed by Israeli Prison Authorities. More than 1000 Palestinian prisoners, 28 of whom are fighting death, are suffering from medical negligence.

More than 11,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons are currently living in appalling and inhuman conditions. They have been subjected to cruel and degrading treatment. Reports from the Ministry of Prisoners indicate that prisoners are exposed to several humiliating practices by the Israeli Authorities. Such practices include; indiscriminate beating and firing of tear gas, frequent invasive strip-searching, delaying or withholding medical treatment, arbitrary revocation of visitation rights including denying relatives travel permits, and providing inappropriate quality and quantity of diet. All of such measures and others are blatant violations of international law and the basic principles for the treatment of prisoners….

An article in The Economist makes points I’ve commented about over the past couple of months:

… It is sometimes hard to fathom the logic of the checkpoint regime. One route from Ramallah, the Palestinian administrative capital, to Jerusalem, involves a careful inspection of documents, while on another the soldiers—if they are at their posts—just glance at cars’ occupants to see if they look Arab. …

This is apparently a comparison between the main Qalandia checkpoint, where I described the three-turnstile wait, and the easy drive through the Hizma crossing, where the soldiers never even looked inside the taxi I was in.

The Economist again:

…Israeli law strictly forbids Israeli citizens from visiting the main Palestinian cities, but they can drive straight into Ramallah and Hebron without being challenged, while other cities, such as Jericho and Nablus, remain impermeable. In many places the barrier that Israel is building through the West Bank for security purposes (though in Palestinian eyes to grab more land) is monitored with all the care of an international border, while around Jerusalem the army turns a blind eye to hundreds of people who slip through cracks in the wall as part of their daily commute.

When anyone with a bomb can easily find an alternate route, any increased safety resulting from the checkpoint/roadblock system seems less significant than the disruption to ordinary Palestinians’ daily lives.

Because of the internal travel restrictions, people who want to move from one Palestinian city to another for work or study must register a change of address to make sure they can stay there. But they cannot. Israel’s population registry, which issues Palestinian identity cards as well as Israeli ones, has issued almost no new Palestinian cards since the start of the second intifada in 2000. And that means no address changes either. This also makes it virtually impossible for Palestinians from abroad to get residency in the occupied territories, which are supposed to be their future state, never mind in Israel.

This is the most-Catch 22 part:

Like Israelis, Palestinians who commit a traffic offence on the West Bank’s highways have to pay the fine at an Israeli post office or a police station. But in the West Bank the only post offices and police stations are on Israeli settlements that most West Bank Palestinians cannot visit without a rare permit. If they do not pay, however, they lose their driving licences the next time the police stop them. They also get a criminal record—which then makes an Israeli entry permit quite impossible.

Rula Khalidi, a Palestinian-American nurse, was part of the Jewish Voice for Peace’s Health and Human Rights Delegation I traveled with in October. She is a thoughtful, caring person, and I was glad to get to know her. Last time i saw her, she and another delegation member and I took a taxi from Ramallah to Jerusalem, where we all went our separate ways. Rula walked with her luggage into the Old City to visit a relative.

Rula writes in Sunday’s Arizona Daily Star about her final moments in Jerusalem before her ride to the airport. A short excerpt:

It’s hard for me to accept my own anger and cynicism regarding all that I’ve seen and heard during the past two weeks traveling through the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Nothing can prepare you for the cruelty of an occupation that hangs in the air so thickly and pervasively that you’re forced to breathe it in every second of the day.  There isn’t an inch of the West Bank or East Jerusalem where one can escape its suffocating heaviness.

My journey has been filled with bitter ironies. I’ve waited my whole life to visit Palestine, something that was practically impossible for me (and other Palestinians in exile) to do before I became an American citizen about 10 years ago. My father was born and raised here, walked and played through these very streets of Jerusalem as did countless generations of our family before him. After the Israelis occupied Jerusalem in 1967, he was not allowed to return until he became a Swedish citizen almost 25 years later.

At the airport in Tel Aviv, I watched as the mostly Jewish members of our group passed through Israeli customs and immigration in a matter of minutes, while I was interrogated repeatedly for almost six hours when I arrived.
From the moment I landed and throughout my visit, my American citizenship was negated by my name and place of birth. I simply became a Palestinian woman born in Lebanon — a combination apparently too dangerous to overlook.

And this:

The one-dimensional media images one sees of the occupation are fundamentally different from the ones that float in and out of my mind’s eye. The missing quality is spite. Malice for the sake of it. Cruelty for the fun of it.

The essay is worth reading. Also instructive, for a different reason, are the 23 comments now posted at the end. The paper has a comment system where other registered commenters can give comments thumbs up or down. If there are more thumbs down, the comment isn’t visible when you scroll down unless you click on it. Sadly, but not surprisingly, aggressively pro-Israel comments blasting Rula’s piece get plenty of thumbs up, whereas those who found the piece moving, thoughtful, and useful were rated into invisibility.

This disparity in reaction is so common that it’s always hard to know how to respond to such different frames of reference. That’s about what Jimmy Carter is dealing with these days, a lot more publicly than Rula.

Carter has the facts down pretty well, at least in dealing with the occupation. Rula gets the feelings.

Thanks, Rula.

I’ve added several more photo galleries from my recently concluded Israel/Palestine trip, including Ramallah, Bethlehem, and West Bank Jewish settlements. I hope to get more galleries organized and uploaded. Soon.

My photos from my 2004-2005 visit still turn up near the top of the page on Google searches (”Israel Palestine photos”). I’ve never known why, since the photos don’t get all that much traffic except for just a few of the 20 galleries. Go figure.

Otherwise, I’ve been working on a couple of short opinion pieces related to the trip, so far not published, and I’ve just arranged a talk-and-discussion session in Miami in a few weeks. All in all, back here in Boston life seems more mundane than it did in Ramallah. But I have been paying attention to the news, and will likely have more to say soon enough about how things are still always getting worse.

Back on Christmas Day my Internet connection wasn’t cooperating so I couldn’t post photos from my day’s wandering around Jerusalem’s Old City. Here’s a sample, soon to be part of a larger gallery.

Beyond the usual lip service, I don’t suppose Condoleeza Rice will have much to say in Israel this week about West Bank Jewish settlement expansion. Maybe she’ll compliment last Thursday’s Israeli High Court decision to fine two construction companies $23,000 for building a new neighborhood on the outskirts of Modiin Ilit, the largest Jewish settlement.

It turns out construction took place in defiance of an earlier court order. But she won’t press Israel to demolish the rows of apartment buildings. She knows that, with rare exceptions, Israeli bulldozers go into action only against Arab-owned homes, as they did once again in the Negev less than a week ago.

The new buildings, like much of the rest of the settlement, are on land taken from the Palestinian village of Bil’in. I first visited Bil’in two years ago with a delegation from Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace when residents still hoped to prevent construction of the Separation Barrier that would keep villagers from reaching more than half the village’s land. They failed. Today their access is blocked by a series of fences and roads, part of the long barrier winding its way throughout the West Bank, often in the form of an actual wall.

Every Friday since fence construction began more than 20 months ago, villagers and their supporters have staged a peaceful march and rally that gains the attention of the mainstream media only because Israeli soldiers routinely attack the nonviolent protesters with little or no provocation. I saw this myself during two recent protests, in October and December.

According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz,

the new neighborhood is being built on the private land of the Palestinian village Bil’in. The land was purchased by land dealers through dubious powers of attorney, then rezoned as state land and leased or sold to settlers’ building companies.

Israel has built Jewish settlements in the West Bank since the Palestinian occupation began following the 1967 Six Day War. Generally considered illegal under international law, and often even under Israeli law, construction continues despite periodic court orders, political pronouncements, and occasional pro forma American objections. Law is one thing, practice quite something else.

The International Solidarity Movement, whose members regularly attend the weekly Bil’in protests, explains it like this:

Occupation authorities annexed 1,100 dunums (275 acres) of the land of Bil’in in 1991. At the time, the confiscation was justified by reference to an old Ottoman-era law allowing for confiscation of unused land. Much later, it was revealed that in order to demonstrate that the coveted land was “unused,” the State made use of photos of seasonal crop farm land taken when the crops were not yet in season. More than a decade after the confiscation, Israeli colonial settlements began to be built, following a typical pattern of settlement expansion, whereby first, Palestinian land is declared State property and then eventually distributed to Israelis.

Israel’s difficulty maneuvering between competing pulls to be a Jewish state and a democratic state magnifies the universal tendency to use law when it’s convenient and ignore law when that’s more convenient. Unfortunately for Palestinians who happen to be in the way, Condoleeza Rice won’t try too hard to get Israel to change much of anything.

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First published in eTalkinghead.com.

In 1966, when I first visited Israel for a year between high school and college as part of the Young Judaea Year Course, the group arranged a meeting with Jerusalem’s mayor, Teddy Kollek. For a young Zionist in training, it was a big-enough deal, but I don’t remember much about it other than a big room and smiles. Israel Swings, the ad on the wall between my two roommates reminded me every day. So did Kollek.

Kollek’s death last week drew endless accolades to the mayor who unified Jerusalem after the 1967 war. During that war my group was on a kibbutz further to the west. Just a couple of weeks later we got a triumphant tour through the newly occupied West Bank.

The highlight, of course, was reaching Jerusalem’s Old City, which was unreachable and even unthinkable during our Jerusalem stay a few months earlier. There was a wall in the way, dividing east from west.

As this blog makes clear, my political analysis has shifted a lot since 1967. That’s why I appreciate Gideon Levy’s column about Kollek in Haaretz. Excerpts of The greatest settler:

…
This phenomenon reached its peak in Jerusalem, which will celebrate 40 years of its “unification” this year. This act of unification was an act of occupation and the fact that a charming and charismatic figure like Kollek presided over it does not change a thing. Kollek demolished a neighborhood in the Old City and built the new neighborhoods on Palestinian land for Jews only - apartheid at its worst - and this should also be remembered in the balance of his considerable achievements. 

The Jerusalem mayor Kollek left behind is a divided and wounded city, despite and because of its enormous development, replete with explosives that will yet explode in our faces. In fact, it was never unified. Like any colonialist city, there is a dark backyard for the natives. To this day, most Israelis do not set foot in Palestinian neighborhoods and the Palestinians avoid Jewish neighborhoods. The city remains divided, despite all of the lofty words about its unification for eternity. Regarding equality, there is nothing to say of course. It is sufficient to travel to the Shuafat camp or even to Sheikh Jarrah to note the outrageous disparity between the services in the eastern and western parts of the city. 

Societal neglect, piles of garbage, no playgrounds or community centers, no sidewalk and no streetlights. Gaza in Jerusalem, all on the basis of abominable ethnic discrimination. This did not begin with Ehud Olmert nor with Uri Lupolianski. This began with the wily Kollek. A city whose rule in the Palestinian section is conducted through the strength of arms, with surprise checkpoints and hundreds of violent Border Policemen routinely patrolling the streets, and whose residents are subject to prohibitions that violate their fundamental liberties, is not a “unified” city. Teddy is responsible for this.

My visits to Jerusalem over the past couple of months help me understand the sad accuracy of Levy’s description. The wall between the two sides is gone, the old Green Line unmarked, but in the central part of the city the difference is stark. A walk of just a few blocks changes everything — language, signs, moods, sounds. Allegiances, too.

Further north and south a bit, in new Jewish neighborhoods over the Green Line but within Jerusalem’s expanded borders despite the violation of international law, many residents don’t even know they are living on occupied land. This is Jerusalem, too, thanks to Teddy.

The December Bil’in protest I went to was relatively quiet, unlike the one in October. In October, as happens during most of the Friday protests supporting villagers who try to reach their land on the other side of the Separation Fence, Israeli soldiers let loose plenty of tear gas and sound grenades before moving on to more serious weaponry. In mid-December, though, the soldiers were unaccountably restrained, at least near the fence.

They had already provoked kids closer to the village to throw stones, which the soldiers responded to with gunfire, but this time they didn’t extend the action to the fence. So at the main protest things were edgy but calm enough. That left time for other things to transpire, related to fence signs like this one, for example.

Protesters, including members of the village organizing committee, were taking signs off the fence.

Soldiers were running around trying to get them back.

It was all kind of comical for a few moments.

Of course, other soldiers were photographing the action. Constantly.

And then there was all that razor wire fencing, just sitting there.

I wondered what was going on.

So I was glad the day after I returned to Boston to see this: Anarchists Against the Wall block Central Tel Aviv. This photo explains just about everything. Too bad I wasn’t around to take it myself:

And this is how Haaretz described it:

About 20 activists from the Anarchists Against the Fence organization on Thursday briefly blocked Basel Street in north Tel Aviv with a piece of barbed wire fence taken from the separation fence. Signed hanging from the barbed wire, also taken from the separation fence, stated: “Mortal danger - military zone: Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.”

The act of protest created a traffic jam at the site, and police forces were called to the scene, but the activists dispersed before police arrived. The activists said they wanted to bring the daily Palestinian reality to the residents of Tel Aviv to remind them of the movement restrictions and land theft taking place in their name only a few kilometers away.

Good action, it seems to me.

In my previous posts I’ve suggested Israelis should find out more about what life is like in occupied Palestine for ordinary people affected by Israeli actions. Short of going to visit first-hand — technically illegal but in actuality feasible — it’s easy to find material to read - even material by other Israelis. There’s also plenty to read about Israel’s treatment of its own Arab citizens, much of which fails to reach the mainstream press.

I’m still on the email list of ActLeft.org, an Israeli announcement-only list that distributes a variety of reports of activities around Israel and in occupied territory. Scanning the messages is a good way to get a broader sense of issues needing attention.

ActLeft regularly distributes reports compiled by Arik Ascherman of Rabbis for Human Rights, which focus on issues such as home demolitions in East Jerusalem, checkpoint difficulties, and olive harvesting. Good resource.

Three weeks ago I met Dana Shalash, an English student at Birzeit University In Ramallah who commented on this blog back in October. She showed me around campus, and we sat for a while in the cafeteria talking about her life as a student, about her small village nearby, about her plans for the future.

She’s now written on her own blog about Thursday’s Israeli raid on Al Manara Square in central Ramallah. A couple of excerpts, but the whole thing is worth reading.

I have just come back from Ramallah where together with my sister I was locked inside a building at Al Manara, Ramallah’s city center, for four hours. While we were shopping this afternoon, people started running, stores began closing up, and the Palestinian policemen fled from Al Manara. Everyone was pointing somewhere upwards and there were two Israeli helicopters flying in Ramallah’s skies. …

…I would never wish this to happen to anyone because it is much worse than death. I am still unable to put things together at the moment, but I am so glad that I got back home. The only irony is that once I got here, Al Jazeera was covering the Olmert-Mubarak press conference. While they were sucking up, we were under attack. They were discussing peace (I guess), and they made sure it is being perfectly applied this afternoon in Ramallah.

Perhaps it’s wrong to express special concern about people we know personally, but  I’m glad Dana wasn’t one of the four Palestinian civilians who Israeli soldiers killed that day.

Back in October, I also briefly met Sam Bahour in Ramallah, the Palestinian-American who’s been in the news in recent months because he’s fighting Israeli demands that Palestinians without residency permit leave the country no matter how modernized, urbanized, and professionalized they happen to be. Sam, too, has a personal story about Thursday’s Israeli raid, which began as he walked into Angelo’s Pizzeria with his family, including six-year old Nadine.

…My friends, I write this not to bore you with one family’s experience during 2 hours of occupation, but rather to scream to the world that we need your help!  4 Palestinian civilians were killed last night in this attack, 20 were injured, 5 of them seriously.  I have no statistics on the number of children, like Nadine, whose skin become thicker during this latest Israeli adventure.

Israel has lost her way and the US is Palestinian-blind.  Israel is creating yet another generation of Palestinians that are more numb to their military occupation than any other.  Likewise, it is creating a generation of Israeli occupiers that see my city as the wild, wild, west.  It is stripping children, Palestinian and Israeli, of their childhood.  It must stop and NOW.  We need your active support….

Most Israelis, I know, focus only on their government’s justifications, partly because that’s all they know. But every Israeli attack has consequences well beyond those its planners might intend. At some point it becomes irresponsible to ignore consequences completely by reiterating only one-sided justifications. That point came a long time ago.

In November I commented on the case of Tali Fahima after seeing a documentary about her situation. After further delays, she has now been released from prison. The Guardian has her first post-prison interview, headlined ‘My crime was to protest at Israeli assassinations’ .

The part that interests me most, because it highlights the possibility of progress, is this:

Ms Fahima had been an apathetic legal secretary who voted for the rightwing Likud party and carried Israeli prejudices about Palestinians until in 2003 she decided she wanted to understand why the Palestinians were attacking Israel.

Perhaps that’s the real reason Israel officially bars Israelis from Palestinian territory. Nothing more dangerous for the established order than having people see things for themselves.

In actuality, though, Fahima is the only person I’m aware of who’s been prosecuted for crossing the line. Other Israelis, mostly activists, do so routinely, with no apparent consequences. The law’s main effect, thus, is on non-activist Israelis whose curiosity about life on the other side isn’t strong enough to overcome concerns about breaking even a law that’s almost never enforced.

I’ve been back in Boston for two days now. I’ve barely begun to wade through the piles of things to do that have piled up during the ten weeks I was away.

Leaving Israel through Ben Gurion Airport proved as easy as the last time I made the trip. Even easier, since this time Security didn’t open my luggage. They asked a few questions - the purpose of my visit, where did I learn my Hebrew, the names of my relatives in Jerusalem, things like that. Once again the hours I spent removing traces of my West Bank visit from my luggage and my computer proved unnecessary. It could have gone differently, though. In Ramallah I met Europeans who had been investigated much more intensively, including being strip searched. It helps that I’m an older Jewish guy with a lot of contacts in Israel. Also helpful was my six-week Fulbright to Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva.  I didn’t mention my West Bank visit.

The list of experiences I didn’t have time to blog about over the past two and a half months remains on my to-do list, but I suspect that instead of going back and recreating what’s now in the past I’ll mostly refer to those events as they’re relevant to new activities and news items. One of the tasks I do hope to accomplish over the next few weeks is to post more photo galleries of this trip and to write a couple of articles for outlets other than this blog.

In the meantime, this is the last photo I took on this trip. Not a great photo — just a sign, with the edge of a car window at the upper right. But it seems a fitting symbol of this region’s complexities of identity, history, religion, and politics.

The place is Abu Ghosh. The Crusader Church is next to the mosque, across the street from some of the many restaurants that draw Israelis to this Arab village west of Jerusalem. Its residents have had historically amicable ties to Israel following their return after being expelled in 1948. Its majority-Muslim residents serve in the Israeli army, despite some dissension about participating in Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, which lies just a few minutes’ walk to the north. Further back in history, there’s archeological evidence of a Roman fortification, and before that the Ark of the Covenant was kept here before King David moved it east to Jerusalem.

Crusaders and occupiers. Hummus and tourists. Complicated.

On my way out of Jerusalem today I detoured through Har Nof, now a nice-looking orthodox Jewish neighborhood within Jerusalem’s expanded city limits. There’s a mental hospital there, Kfar Shaul, behind a fence. I took some photos, until the guard told me to stop. (When I get my own computer connected to the Internet I’ll post some of the day’s photos.)

Kfar Shaul stands on the spot where the Arab village Deir Yassin used to be. Many of its residents were massacred in 1948 by members of two Jewish military organizations. Although details have always been contested, the massacre’s basic contours seem now to be generally accepted by historians. Jewish forces disseminated reports of the massacre to spur other Palestinians to flee from the villages and cities where they lived.

After the war, Israel placed Jewish immigrants in many of the vacated houses, except in the hundreds of Arab villages Israel simply leveled, some of them now covered by pretty forests planted by the Jewish National Fund. I had hoped to swing by Park Canada, built on another vanished village, but ran out of time.

Many of those Palestinians who fled in 1948 to avoid becoming victims themselves, and their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, want to return to their homes, or at least to the region they came from. I don’t think the conflict between Israel and Palestine will be resolved until this happens — which means, I suppose, that regardless of any deals that might be struck between Olmert and Abu Mazen, if the refugee problem is shunted aside the conflict will continue.

If my laptop could connect to the Internet here in Jerusalem like it did a couple of weeks ago, I’d upload some photos of my Christmas day in the Old City. But it doesn’t, so I can’t.

Soon, though.

In my last posting I described the hassle of getting through the Qalandia checkpoint last Sunday. And that was without any luggage to juggle through those three turnstiles (the kind that stretch from floor to ceiling, where you push the bars and sqeeze through). Today, instead, I’m using my privilege as a US citizen and ability to pay for a taxi. This will let me avoid maneuvering my luggage from my Ramallah hotel to the bus station or Palestinian-licensed service group taxis, then through the checkpoint and back on a bus (or maybe leave the luggage on the bus and then find the same bus again on the other side, as it’s been explained to me), then from the bus to my next hotel in East Jerusalem. This will cost more - probably 100 shekels with the driver someone recommended. He’s coming from East Jerusalem and will be here in half an hour. A local taxi with yellow Israeli plates (the kind that can avoid the Palestinian checkpoint) would cost 150 or so. 100 shekels is about $23. Looking at my luggage, the price doesn’t seem that high.

Palestinians don’t have that option.

Yesterday Israel’s Olmert and Palestine’s Abbas agreed, among other things, that Israel would remove some of the 600 roadblocks it now maintains in Palestinian territory. 600! Most of these are internal, not between Palestine and Israel. Most of these are arbitrary and even temporary.

Last night, during my last Ramallah dinner with a shifting group of mostly Europeans, a German woman who works at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation that funds the Legal Encounter series I spoke at last week told me that the lawyer and judges and government types from Ramallah who usually attend these lectures couldn’t get there because there was a sudden temporary roadblock between Ramallah and Birzeit University. That explains the small audience. She was troubled.

Time to check out of the hotel, and to leave Ramallah until my next trip.

Update: The taxi ride, going the long way through Hizme (no checkpoint) instead of Qalandia, took all of 25 minutes door to door. Life on the West Bank would be a lot different without checkpoints.

I leave Ramallah tomorrow morning, after 11 days now and another 5 in October. Wish I could stay longer.

One of my reasons for spending time on the West Bank was to get a better first-hand sense of the difficulties posed by Israel’s occupation. It’s easy enough from afar to read about the bigger issues in the alternative press or directly from Palestinian sources, but sometimes the little details stand out even more.

Like the words moving across the screen at Qalandia checkpoint, right above one of the four or five long, slow lines of Palestinians waiting to cross through three turnstiles, a baggage X-ray check, and an identification check. On the other side of the checkpoint south of Ramallah are taxis and buses for the rest of the short ride to school or work or family in Jerusalem, though what counts as “Jerusalem” is a lot more inflated now than it was before Israel expanded its boundaries. Palestinians live on both sides of the checkpoint.

At the checkpoint last Sunday morning, my US passport got me through a short line for the first turnstile, but I ended up on the same line with everyone else for the next set. Well, not everyone. Cars with Israeli license plates drive through a separate road altogether. No turnstiles. Just the Palestinians wait, and foreigners who don’t bother to get a taxi with Israeli license plates.

In front of me on line stood half a dozen kids with school books. One girl’s said Beginning Hebrew. A couple of younger boys joked around, trying to figure out which line was moving fastest. Most people in my line were working age, though, mostly men. A woman with two young kids looked very tired. Five well-groomed middle-aged men in suits stood behind me, looking business-like and mostly patient; one held a bouquet of flowers. Another just behind me said in Arabic “one by one” when people crowded the second turnstile, and then repeated it in English; when I turned to him and said it looked like I was the only one there who might need the translation, he asked where I was from.

A couple of minutes later he said “This is what causes terrorism.” Probably enough to outnumber any actual terrorists who get caught trying to go through the turnstiles instead of taking a somewhat longer route and bypassing Qalandia completely.

The sign above the lines, repeating itself over and over? Welcome. Welcome. Welcome.

It will take a long time to go through the thousands of photos from this trip, some of which I really like. For now I’ve added three more galleries to my photo site: Rahat (Israel’s neglected and marginalized Bedouin city, which I’ve blogged about; Dimona’s Hebrew Israelites (Black Hebrews); and last Friday’s Bil’in demonstration, which I haven’t had time yet to describe. Lot’s more to come, eventually.

In the meantime, one more photo: Jericho from the Wadi Kelt, near the end of Sunday’s hike.

Right now I’m going out for a bit. I had planned to go to Jerusalem today and then on a tour to Hebron’s Jewish-settler-controlled streets. I was there two years ago, and would have gone again but ran out of steam. Figured I’d catch up on things, or at least start to.

Here’s my current list of topics I’ve been too busy to blog about since getting to Ramallah last week:

• Friday’s Bil’in protest, which varied significantly from the one I went to in October
• My experiences at Birzeit teaching my workshops, meeting people, walking around
• Passing through Qalandia checkpoint on the way to Jerusalem
• Sunday’s bus and walking tour from Jerusalem to Jericho
• Hanging out in the twin cities Ramallah/Al Bireh, at Zyriab’s, Stars and Bucks, my hotel, elsewhere
• The view from my hotel room of Psagot, the Jewish settlement on the hill overlooking Al Bireh

Maybe I’ll get back to some of these, maybe not. In the meantime, here’s Psagot on the hill, with Al Bireh below, looking out through my window.