Dennis Fox’s Weblog

Presented at the “First International Academic Conference on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Pathways to Peace” - New Britain, Connecticut, March 2008.

I have previously discussed my hesitations about whether to attend this conference. The next posting describes my post-conference frustrations.

This paper is also posted on my website.

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Academic Objectivity, Political Neutrality, and Other Barriers to Israeli-Palestinian Reconciliation

The declared goal of this conference is to “highlight the contribution that social scientific and humanistic research and scholarship can bring towards peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians” in order to achieve a “just and equitable solution.” That sounds pretty good. Unfortunately, I come here today skeptical that traditional academic research and scholarship will bring a lasting solution that is also just and equitable. Before turning to Israel and Palestine, though, I want to make three brief points about the relevance of academic assumptions and practices to political issues more generally, and then a word about underlying assumptions in conflict resolution.

Academic Assumptions and Practices

First, academic research is not as objective and value-free as traditionally imagined. Even in the hard sciences, our personal, professional, and political biases inevitably come into play, from the choice of theoretical model and framing of research questions to the scramble for funding and selection of methodology to the analysis and presentation of findings and policy recommendations (Rein, 1976). Most significantly, the pose of objectivity and ethical neutrality that often masks personal preferences and institutional inertia favors the powerful at the expense of others. This point may seem obvious to those of you in disciplines where critical approaches have received significant attention, such as sociology (Levine, 2004) and anthropology (Gupta & Ferguson, 1997), law (Kairys, 1998; Unger, 1986), pedagogy (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1985; Freire, 1970; Illich, 1971), and maybe even geography (Mitchell, 2000). But in my own field of psychology, which is central to much of this conference, endorsement of traditional values, assumptions, and practices remains particularly strong despite abundant activist, feminist, radical, and postmodern critiques (Brown, 1973; Fox & Prilleltensky, 1997; Fox, Prilleltensky, & Austin, 2009; Martín-Baró, 1994; Sarason, 1981; Tolman, 1994; Wilkinson, 1986).

Technorati Tags: dialogue, international law, Israel, Jewish State, Moises Salinas, one-state solution, Palestine, Reconciliation, social psychology, two-state solution

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Book Review of Moises F. Salinas (2007), Planting Hatred, Sowing Pain: The Psychology of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.

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This is an electronic version of an article published in the online journal of SPSSI, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. Citation: Dennis Fox, Can Social Psychology Depoliticize the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict? Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy (OnlineEarly Articles). doi:10.1111/j.1530-2415.2007.00130.x
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Moises F. Salinas seeks in Planting Hatred, Sowing Pain: The Psychology of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict to outline “some of the social and psychological factors that are central to the conflict and its resolution.” The author deserves credit for bringing this sensitive subject to an undergraduate psychology audience. Perhaps unsurprisingly for such a complex conflict, though, this brief book promises somewhat more than it delivers.

After a useful introductory overview emphasizing competing historical narratives, the book’s four main chapters review research findings demonstrating the impact of stereotypes and prejudice, hate (extremism, dehumanization, and violence), pain (trauma), and hope (reconciliation and the psychology of peace). Some of the summarized research is particularly revealing of Israeli and Palestinian attitudes and perceptions, and the level is appropriate to the target audience in social psychology, Middle East studies, and similar courses. Each chapter ends with two illustrative interview transcripts, one of a Jewish Israeli, one of a Palestinian from either Israel, Gaza, or the West Bank. A brief epilogue reiterates the book’s main point: “the obstacles to achieving peace are more psychological than political.”

Despite its helpful literature review, Planting Hatred, Sowing Pain has several perplexing omissions. At the methodological level, Salinas tells us almost nothing about his “dramatic ethnographic interviews” (p. xxv). Instead of an extended description of what must have been a challenging enterprise, a single paragraph notes the “innovative methodology” and the help of “250 Palestinian and Jewish Israeli student interviewers.” Eight transcripts, varying widely in scope, method, and style, appear after the relevant chapter without explanation or assessment of interviewees’ statements, some of which are confusing, disjointed, and even shocking. Student readers accustomed to standard research reports will wonder about many details, such as whether the interviewers received course credit and what their instructions were. The author does not explain how he used these interviews to help identify his themes or whether instead they merely illustrate the traditional social psychological points he intended to make anyway. I could find no citation to a more extensive research report.

Also left hanging is the 32-page appendix, which presents the full text of the Geneva Accord, a peace agreement proposed in 2003 by prominent Palestinian and Israeli political figures without official authorization. Salinas explains that the proposal parallels similar efforts supported by “the majority of both peoples [who] agree (or at least are resigned) on the broad parameters” of “a two-state solution with borders approximating the pre-1967 armistice lines; compensation to all 1948 and 1967 Palestinian refugees, while only a smaller group of them would be allowed to return to Israel proper; [and] a joint solution for Jerusalem that will allow both sides to claim some sovereignty” (p. xiii). Instead of using this document’s many controversial specifics and omissions to demonstrate how a future reconciliation process might fare, however, Salinas does little more than point to the proposal as the basis for a solution.

A more substantive concern is that the book’s even-handed tone studiously avoids the politics behind its analysis. Some will consider this an advantage, required by academic norms demanding at least the appearance of objectivity. Sometimes, though, avowed neutrality deflects the gaze from much that is relevant. Readers should always wonder how an author’s background and commitments affect choices about what evidence to credit and what lessons to draw.

In this case, the author’s insistence that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is social psychological rather than political and that “perception is more important than reality” may reflect more than just straightforward reading of the research and traditional academic awareness of complexity. Indeed, the best clue to Salinas’s own views comes not in his endorsement of the Geneva Accord but in the book’s concluding “About the Author” page. Here we learn that the Mexican-born Salinas, who lived in Israel for several years and took part in left-Zionist peace activities before moving to the United States, was “one of fourteen young Zionist leaders worldwide to be honored with the first Herzl Awards from the World Zionist Organization [in 2004 ] … for his contributions to the Zionist movement.” At the risk of impoliteness, it is worth asking if this personal history might affect the book’s structure and conclusions. Salinas doesn’t say.

One example is the book’s shunting aside Middle East history after the brief introduction. That makes sense if one considers all perceptions equally valid or even equally invalid, or if conflict is defined as a technical problem rather than an indication of injustice and oppression, or if the proposed ahistorical process leads to a politically preferred result. It might make less sense to Ibrahim, one of Salinas’s interviewees, who says the only “really unlikely” alternative to permanent total war is that “the large countries will force Israel to sign and agree with international law.”

Salinas doesn’t tell us if Ibrahim’s appeal to an external legal standard should matter. Instead, the chapter on reconciliation emphasizes relevant but incomplete subjects: paying more attention to different negotiation and communication styles, creating more effective procedures, providing alternative cultural and educational settings, and so on. Although Salinas notes Israel’s superior negotiating power, he does not address a central issue: whether meaningful reconciliation requires acknowledging past injustice and committing one’s side to end it. It is not just the violent extremists the author criticizes who reject splitting the difference through decontextualized dialogue and then moving on.

What form reconciliation might take is particularly touchy now that Israel’s Arab citizens increasingly define themselves as Palestinian and insist that their country become a “state for all its citizens” rather than a state for the worldwide Jewish people, while Palestinian society in Gaza and the West Bank continues to fragment. Which assumptions are up for grabs? Which aren’t? A text designed to help students understand complexity should broaden exploration rather than narrow it.

The problem is not that Salinas is a Zionist activist. The problem rather is that he does not consider how his own political identity might shape his argument, a possibility very relevant to the book’s discussion of negotiation complications. Knowledgeable readers on both sides, thus, are likely to find the author’s approach frustratingly off the mark. More troubling, those less knowledgeable won’t be able to dissect Planting Hatred, Sowing Pain’s ideological underpinnings unless their instructors also assign more varied supplemental readings. Those supplements might help students recognize that Moises Salinas may be his own best example of how preexisting assumptions can shape both political and social scientific analysis.

Technorati Tags: conflict resolution, international law, Israel, academic objectivity, Palestine, social psychology, Zionism

I’ve been asked to publicize this March conference. First the publicity, then my hesitations.

“Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Pathways to Peace”

March 28-30, 2008

CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS DUE NOVEMBER 30, 2007

Sponsored by:

• Central Connecticut State University
• Jewish Academic Network for Israeli-Palestinian Peace
• American Task force for Palestine
• Geneva Initiative North America

The goal of the conference will be to highlight the contribution that social scientific and humanistic research and scholarship can bring towards peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. Presentations and panels will focus on research examining the factors fueling the longest conflict of modern times, and contributions with instrumental ideas to achieve a just and equitable solution to the conflict.

The meeting will include keynote speakers, concurrent presentations and panels. We will strive to maintain a balance between Israeli, Palestinian and other U.S. and  international speakers and encourage researchers from all sides of the conflict to send their proposals.

Presentations will highlight research regarding obstacles and opportunities to the achievement of peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to) research in:

• Social and psychological factors in the conflict
• Historical, philosophical, and theological issues
• Economic factors and cooperation
• Demographic realities and solutions
• Geographic obstacles to peace
• Negotiations – Models, perceptions and strategies

Given my recent experience participating in the Dialogue on the Wall in Minneapolis, which left me feeling burned by the moderator’s acknowledged failure to treat Palestinians in the audience even-handedly, I’m proceeding cautiously. Besides, conferences based on conventional academic norms about appropriate topics and styles generally leave me frustrated and worn out; that problem is likely to be magnified when the focus is Israel and Palestine.

Another issue: The chair of the conference is Moises Salinas, a JANIP member who has written a new book called Planting Hatred, Sowing Pain: The Psychology of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. My critical review of the book will soon appear in ASAP, the online journal of SPSSI (Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues). The book, which so far has gotten positive reviews elsewhere, reflects what seems to me a narrowly focused social psychological conflict-resolution analysis, devoid of political context, that happens to match Salinas’s own position as a left-Zionist Meretz member who supports the Geneva Accord. In brief, the book emphasizes things like taking into account the different negotiating styles of Israelis and Palestinians and downplays or ignores history, justice, and law — crucial concerns also dismissed by the rabbi who moderated last month’s Minneapolis panel.

Perhaps not coincidentally, neither justice nor law appears in the conference’s list of suggested topics.

So when Salinas asked me to spread word of the conference, I asked in return if it would be open to people who do not share the two-state goal of the sponsoring organizations or who depart from mainstream perspectives in other ways. Encouragingly, he responded by saying the organizers had already said yes:

[A]s long as a paper was methodologically sound (for the discipline) and that it was an analysis of obstacles/opportunities to end the conflict (not ‘Side Bashing’), it should be welcome. We have a wide field of reviewers that espouse many points of view, but we’ll do our best to keep political views out of the reviewing process.

Salinas added that a panel on the issue of Single State/Two-State Solution would be welcome.

That’s encouraging. So right now I’m leaning toward submitting something, probably along the lines of things I’ve written about here and on my website. Several other possible panels come to mind, such as the relevance for peace and justice of Israel’s effort to be both a Jewish and a democratic state and the Palestinian divide over how much compromise is feasible or acceptable. For the moment I’m assuming political criteria won’t be imposed later, perhaps masked by overly zealous “academic” concerns. But after Minneapolis, I’m taking nothing for granted.

Technorati Tags: critical psychology, Israel, Palestine, social psychology, Zionism

I won’t be at next week’s American Psychological Association convention in San Francisco, but those of you in the area may want to join a series of talks and a Friday rally in opposition to APA’s weak policy on psychologists who participate in interrogations and torture. Schedules and other details at Psychologists for an Ethical APA.

A primary theme of my course on Psychology, Law, and Justice at Ben Gurion University last fall was the consequences for Israelis of the ideological proposition that a Jewish state can be a democratic state in the Western sense of ensuring full legal equality and protecting individual rights for every citizen (at least in theory, even if rarely in practice). My Israeli students, as well as other Israelis I met, fully understood the inconsistency and acknowledged their government did not live up to its reputation as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” though they remained divided and uncertain about what to do about the situation.

One topic that came up in class was an Israeli Supreme Court decision that the Israeli Land Authority could not discriminate against Arab citizens. We wondered together if this would have any real impact or if the government would find a way around it. As it turns out, the Knesset has now passed new legislation to make the Supreme Court decision irrelevant. There’s now a petition circulating to protest the Knesset action:

We the undersigned express our profound disapproval and sorrow at the Israeli Knesset’s recent passage, on first reading, of the Jewish National Fund bill.  The bill would prohibit Israel’s Arab citizens from leasing land owned by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and managed by the Israeli Land Authority (which administers 93% of Israel’s land). The Israel High Court had earlier ruled that the ILA cannot discriminate against Arabs in leasing such land. This new legislation is an attempt to circumvent that ruling.

We applaud the High Court for putting an end to a discriminatory practice that should never have existed within a democratic state. We also applaud the Israeli MK’s, Jewish and Arab that voted against the amendment.  If Israel is to be truly democratic, all its citizens must have the right to lease land held in trust by the government of Israel.  Israel must not settle for anything less.

We call upon to the Knesset to defeat the amendment when it comes up for its next reading and to embrace values of equality and tolerance for all its citizens.

You can sign here.

Philip Zimbardo’s response to critics of his new book, The Lucifer Effect, includes a useful paragraph relevant to a wide variety of situations, ranging from the prison abuses Zimbardo addresses here to a wide variety of contexts, including the actions of Israelis and Palestinians that outsiders often find so incomprehensible.

Zimbardo says this:

Before turning to the criticism that is most personally distressing regarding understanding of the Abu Ghraib abuses, it is important to mention that while personality and social psychologists spar about the relative contributions of dispositions and situations, we have ignored the most significant factor in the behavioral equation–the System. “The System consists of those agents and agencies whose ideology, values, and power create situations and dictate the roles and expectations for approved behaviors of actors within its spheres of influence. “Bad Systems” create “Bad Situations” create “Bad Apples” create “Bad Behaviors,” even in good people. (Lucifer, p. 445-6) It is not possible to really understand what happened at Abu Ghraib without a comprehensive appreciation of the influences of the Military and Civilian chain of command operating top-down in that prison and other detention centers that were created as part of the “war on terror.” When understanding complex behavior in the real world, beyond our laboratories or classroom surveys and personality scale data collection, it is essential to begin with a systems level top-down analysis because that is where the real power lies. Such understanding gives us the necessity leverage to develop public health paradigms designed to change unacceptable situations as well as the perpetrators of evil functioning in those situations (See Haney & Zimbardo, In press).

This is a touchy issue on many accounts, but I think Zimbardo is right to remind us that we all operate within systems we had no part in creating. Part of the touchiness has to do with blame within the criminal justice context. If bad acts are caused by circumstances rather than by choice, then what justification is there for legal-system judgments of guilt and punishment?

Within the Israeli/Palestinian context that has concerned me most directly in recent years, it is common to hear people on both sides ascribe purely personality-related attributions for the destructive actions of those on the other side. Even within the recent Fatah-Hamas warfare in Gaza, supporters of one faction often jumped to personality attributions to explain the actions of those on the other.

A couple of years ago I noted a meeting in Tel Aviv with members of Breaking the Silence, a group of former Israeli soldiers who amassed photographs and testimonies documenting the abuses they and their peers had perpetrated on ordinary Palestinians living in Hebron. They generally blamed themselves for having failed to live up to their own sense of morality — a dispositional account — but they also described the situational pressures leading them and so many others to commit what they considered to be evil acts.

This is the System Zimbardo emphasizes. In teaching social psychology, the tendency is to focus on the immediate situation (if not, increasingly and unfortunately, simply on the individual’s own inner perceptions). That’s often how Zimbardo’s classic work on the Stanford Prison Experiment is presented. Here, though, Zimbardo emphasizes the larger system and looks for accountability higher up the chain. That may not be the only place to look within a criminal law context, but it’s the first place to look if the goal is to end evil-producing systems.

One of the thing that attracts me to anarchism is its opposition to hierarchical systems of authority. Most anarchists have a somewhat rosier view of human nature than do people who think strong authority is the only thing that keeps evil in check. But I’ve always liked this quote from Paul Goodman’s Humanizing our Future, which I used in an article I wrote more than twenty years ago when I was a graduate student at Michigan State University. Coincidentally, that’s where many of the signers of the criticism Zimbardo is responding to are situated:

[T]he beauty of the decentralist, anarchist position is that nobody can do much harm….[If] people are corrupt as hell, therefore don’t give anybody any power…because the people who have power are not going to be any better.

This still makes sense.

I’ve never considered in any detail whether Israel has a “right to exist.” I don’t see the phrase anywhere in this blog, either pro or con, and my website uses it  just once in reference to Israel. In connection with another project, though, I’ve been asked to clarify my views. So although it’s not an issue that interests me particularly, and although I’m not fully versed in everything that’s relevant, and although as usual I don’t have time to go into a lot of detail, here’s how I would begin answering the question.

At a general level, since my leanings are more anarchist than nationalist, I don’t believe any state has a right to exist. States are structural mechanisms allowing groups of elites to control a larger population by establishing a monopoly on the use of force within specified borders. What makes states “legitimate” is that they establish this structure according to internationally recognized rules created by other states that have already done the same thing and have agreed among themselves that statehood is the desired level of manageable political organization. Once a group becomes a legitimate state, it has the right to use force to prevent internal groups from establishing their own smaller states, in a process that legitimizes the rights of some groups and disadvantages others.

As a matter of political philosophy, I don’t believe any group has a “right” to do this, even in alleged democracies where elite-dominated electorates formally approve what is done in their name.  The mechanisms used to enforce this system, from international military alliances to international law to a globalized economy, become dominant through a combination of force, threats, and increasingly sophisticated ideological measures rather than through any truly democratic process. Since I am opposed to this system whether it benefits Israel or Palestine or Saudi Arabia or the United States, arguments about the right to exist as a state seem to me beside the point. I don’t care what flag flies overhead, anywhere. We would be better off without them.

I know this doesn’t really answer the usual question about Israel’s right to exist. As typically posed, it assumes the legitimacy of the international framework in which statehood is the norm. If this is accepted for the sake of discussion, the question of Israel’s right to exist becomes a legal one. And as I understand it, Israel does have that right under international law, stemming from the 1947 United Nations partition plan establishing the states of Israel and Palestine in the old British Mandate.

That Palestine never became a state would not, it seems to me, eliminate Israel’s legal status, and so far as I know legitimate international bodies accept Israel’s statehood despite arguments that the UN plan was itself illegitimate. Even if that plan was an unjust political compromise forced on the Arab world by the colonial powers, it does not become illegitimate any more than countless other injustices that have become institutionalized over time. As I’ve written about extensively in other contexts, law has less to do with justice than with rules and power.

Still, defenders of Israel’s right to exist are inconsistent and dishonest when they point to the UN partition plan but endorse Israel’s refusal to abide by international law since 1948. Israel’s refusal to allow the return of Palestinian refugees, required under international law, is just the longest-standing example. More recently is international law relating to the post-1967 occupation. A few years ago the World Court ruled that the Separation Wall is illegal where it’s built on Palestinian land instead of along the border, but construction continues as more Palestinian land is stolen. Using scarcely credible legal justifications accepted by almost no one else, including in many cases the US, Israel shrugs off as irrelevant International law related to water access, home demolitions, settlement construction, and on and on. But even though Israel’s continuing occupation of Palestinian territory is probably fully illegal under international law, I don’t think a case can be made under ordinary standards that Israel itself has no legal right to exist.

This question ordinarily comes up in connection with whether Israel should allow a Palestinian state whose government does not formally recognize Israel’s right to exist. That debate seems to me a red herring, especially given Israel’s refusal to allow a viable Palestinian state more than two decades after the Palestinian Liberation Organization accepted a two-state solution and when even Hamas has been willing to go along with a long-term truce. National states exist when their power over their territory is endorsed by international law. It doesn’t matter whether neighboring states “recognize” them. All that should matter is whether neighboring states agree to halt hostilities once basic requirements of justice are met.

As readers of this blog know, I don’t believe Israel has come close to meeting what justice requires. Increasingly, I don’t believe it can ever do so without altering its fundamental underlying assumptions. So what interests me most is not whether Israel has a right to exist but whether Israel should continue to subordinate democracy , equality, and human rights to its formal character as a Jewish state. Do states have the right to prefer one group over another, or do they only have the power? Can a state that refuses to constitutionalize full equality be considered a democracy? Can a Jewish state that occupies Palestinian land decade after decade retain much that is recognizably Jewish to anyone other than right-wing nationalists and ultra-orthodox sectarians? These questions, more existential than legal, are what’s on my mind.

Here’s the sentence from the article I mentioned in the first paragraph where I once used the phrase “right to exist.” It makes as much sense to me now as it did when I wrote it in 1983: “Support for Israel’s right to exist does not mean knee-jerk support for every policy enforced by a government bent on committing national suicide by refusing to face reality.”

The previous posting linked to Jeff Halper’s assessment of Israel’s plans for apartheid in Palestine.This article in Haaretz, which describes the latest destruction of Bedouin homes in the Negev, makes it clear that apartheid or the functional equivalent forms part of Israel’s internal plans as well:

The Israel Land Administration (ILA), with the assistance of an unusually large police force and IDF soldiers, demolished dozens of tin shack homes Monday in unrecognized Bedouin villages Um Al-Hiran and A-Tir in the northern Negev.The ILA is destroying the village and evacuating the inhabitants so that a Jewish Community named “Hiran” can be established in the area. Fourteen shacks, which housed some 100 people, have been destroyed by bulldozers so far…..

Young men, roughly 18-years of age, wearing orange shirts are taking part in the evacuation, removed the Bedouin’s property from their homes and put it in piles on the ground outside. Haaretz has discovered that these teenagers are outsourced workers who are employed by a contractor hired by the ILA. According to the evacuators, they are being paid in cash without any labor rights.

According to Adallah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, the residents of the village have been living there for 51 years. They were transferred to the site in 1956 while under martial law. The land they originally owned was transferred to Kibbutz Shoval, while the Bedouin were leased 3000 dunam of land for agriculture and grazing.

In August 2001 the ILA submitted a report on the establishment of new communities, which included Hiran. The Bedouin residents living in the area appeared under the title of “special problems” that may affect the establishment of the community.  The government approved the establishment of Hiran in 2002, and in 2004 the state submitted a court order claiming that residents of Al Hiran should be evacuated as they are using state lands without permission.

Additional background appears on the site of Dukium, the Negev Coexistence Forum in Beersheva.The site includes a list of home demolitions and crop destruction that makes for numbingly depressing reading.

And here’s more background and an appeal for a letter-writing campaign to support Negev Bedouin.

Haaretz today editorializes about the legitimization of land theft in Modi’in Ilit that I’ve noted before:

The theft of private land and lawless construction, with the authorities’ collaboration, have long been routine in the land of the settlers. The scope of these deeds and their seriousness are described extensively in the report on illegal outposts compiled by Talia Sasson, formerly a senior state prosecution attorney. The report was buried almost two years ago.

However, the decision of the Supreme Planning Council (SPC) for Judea and Samaria, which was revealed in Haaretz on Sunday, to legitimize  the plan to build the Matityahu East neighborhood in Modi’in Ilit, beyond the Green Line, marks a nadir.

The plan is to legitimize 42 high-rises, which are in various stages of construction, some of them on land allegedly stolen from the villagers of Bil’in. All of the high-rises being built contravene the planning and construction laws. Peace Now and Bil’in’s residents petitioned the High Court of Justice two years ago to have construction stopped. The legal counsel of Modi’in Ilit warned in writing of “construction offenses of such colossal proportions, ignoring the law and planning regulations, that words cannot describe [them].”

Haaretz says this about the weekly demonstrations at Bil’in in support of the village:

Peace Now is to be commended for its legal aid to Bil’in residents - as are the Israeli and international peace activists who come every week to demonstrate against the fence being built there.

The paper also notes this:

Matityahu East is the latest in a series of such affairs in which the separation barrier, supposedly serving Israel’s security needs, is used to annex West Bank territory to expand the settlements. The defense minister is dragging his feet on everything concerning the evacuation of illegal outposts. At the same time, bodies he is responsible for - led by the civil administration - are colluding in land grabbing and legitimizing illegal construction throughout the West Bank.

…The High Court did not hesitate to halt the construction in Matityahu East until the planning procedures and inquiry into the ownership issue could be completed. If the government does not quash the planning council’s decision to allow construction to continue, the High Court will have no choice but to respond to the recent petition. It will have to abrogate that decision, to protect both the rule of law and the rights of those victimized by its breach.

It’s hard to know whether Haaretz is right about this last point. Will the High Court go further than it has, or will it find a way to allow the construction to continue? We’ll see…

Eleven Israeli activists, found guilty of blocking a Tel Aviv road to protest the Separation Wall. were given suspended sentences. Anarchist Against the Wall member Jonathan Pollak demanded the court send him to jail rather than suspend his sentence. Pollak’s statement to the judge:

From the first moment of this trial we took responsibility for our acts. We’ve never denied, even for an instant, that we sat on the road. Quite the opposite - we fully admitted this, and we explained why we did so. The defense was revolved around two central axes - exposing the police’s lies and their invention of fictional accusations, which the court has already addressed, and on the principals of civil resistance. In its decision, the court stated that we were attempting to drag this court into the political arena, which it should avoid like fire, lest it get burned. In fact, the state prosecution was the one doing the dragging. In every crime and in every trial, the question of motive is a central one. Our so called crime is clearly a political one, and so are its motives.

This trial, had it not taken place in a court of the occupation, in the democracy imposed on 3.5 million Palestinian subjects devoid of basic democratic liberties, would have been the trial of the Wall; that same wall that was defined as illegal by the highest legal authority in the world; that same wall that is used as a political tool in the campaign of ethnic cleansing being undertaken by Israel in the Occupied Territories; that same wall that in its previous route, that route of the relevant days, was thrown out even by Israeli courts! It was not us who should have been standing accused here, but rather the architects and enforcers of Israeli Apartheid.

To our assertion that there is a duty to violate the law at times, the court answered that in such times, one must accept the punishment as well. This response contains an obvious moral failure. The correct response would be that those who violate the law must expect punishment. Expect it, but under no circumstances accept its legitimacy.

I am not surprised that we were found guilty. But in spite of that, I cannot accept the legitimacy of the punishment. That is the reason I refused to cooperate with the parole agency, and I will refuse community service as well.

I believe that at this stage of the trial the defense tends to state that this is the defendant’s first conviction, that he is a normal human being, who is well within the bounds of civil society, that he works a steady job and so on and so forth. I will argue otherwise. I will state that while this is indeed my first conviction, it is unlikely to be my last. I still believe that what I did was necessary and morally correct, and that resistance to oppression is the duty of every human being, even at a personal price.

It is customary to ask for leniency - not to impose an active sentence, and to be satisfied with a conditional sentence. I will ask not to have a conditional sentence imposed on me, but an active one, since as things are, any demonstration taking place in the Occupied Territories is declared illegal assembly, according to the extensive and anti-democratic system of closed military zone warrants. In this state of affairs, any conditional sentence imposed upon me will quickly become an active one. If your honor believes one should be sent to prison for such acts, please take the liberty and personally send me to prison here and now.

Here’s the headline from Ha’Aretz:

IDF soldier, three Israelis lightly hurt at Bil’in anti-fence protest

Here’s the story from Anarchists Against the Wall, a primary organizer of the weekly nonviolent protests at Bil’in:

Eleven people were injured today, after the army attacked the demonstration with a volley of teargas, concussion grenades and rubber coated steel bullets. An Israeli anarchist, Kobi Snitz, was repeatedly hit in the head with metal concussion grenades, used as brass knuckles. The scene took place as Snitz tried, together with others, to prevent a provocative arrest of a Palestinian demonstrator. He was later evacuated to Tel Hashomer hospital and had three of his wounds stitched….

Based in part on my own participation in a November Bil’in protest, I know the Israeli mainstream media routinely and seriously present a one-sided take on these protests, misrepresenting the sequence of events to make it appear hundreds of protestors attack Israeli soldiers. That’s a lie.

So I know there’s always more to the story than Ha’Aretz says. Even the background information is falsified:

The protestors claim the fence in the area is being built on land that belongs to Bil’in, and will cut off the village’s residents from their lands.

As anyone who has been to Bil’in knows, or anyone who has followed the court battles or the ruling of the World Court, the fence is indeed being built on land belonging to Bil’in and it does indeed separate village residents from their fields. The only policy question is whether Israel should build the wall on Bil’in land despite these consequences. Israel says yes. The villagers losing their land say no.

Today’s story bothers me more personally than usual because I’ve met Kobi, the injured Tel Aviv anarchist, several times. I was impressed by his commitment as well as by his level-headedness. I hope he’s okay.

Next Friday marks the two-year anniversary of these weekly Bil’in protests. It should draw a larger crowd than usual. I suspect Kobi will be among them.

Today’s New York Times reports that this might no longer be legal in New York City, but I’m not sure:

According to the Times:

In a rebuke of a surveillance practice greatly expanded by the New York Police Department after the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal judge ruled yesterday that the police must stop the routine videotaping of people at public gatherings unless there is an indication that unlawful activity may occur.

Four years ago, at the request of the city, the same judge, Charles S. Haight Jr., gave the police greater authority to investigate political, social and religious groups. In yesterday’s ruling, Judge Haight, of United States District Court in Manhattan, found that by videotaping people who were exercising their right to free speech and breaking no laws, the Police Department had ignored the milder limits he had imposed on it in 2003.

As I read the article, it sounds like the cops can still videotape whenever they claim something illegal might happen, but they have to follow the rules to get higher approval. Not really much protection, when you think about it.

So I think this will continue, but maybe they’ll hide the cameras better:

These photos are from the 2004 legal protest outside the Republican National Convention in New York City. More photos of the event in my galleries.

A friend’s email today eventually led me to this Jerusalem Post story about a company offering homes in the West Bank hills to wannabe American Jewish landlords. As the Post explains:

On February 25 settlers will be in Teaneck, New Jersey hoping to entice ideological Americans to buy homes in places like Karnei Shomron, Eli, Otniel, Kiryat Arba and Shiloh. “Almost all communities in Yesha (Judea and Samaria) are full, with no possibility of accepting new young couples or families,” said the Amana Settlement Movement in a letter to potential American buyers.

American buyers wouldn’t actually have to move into the homes they build in the middle of Occupied Palestine:

The idea is that Americans would purchase the homes and rent them out to settlers, without having to deal with the hassles that accompany rental properties. Everything from property management to rent collection and transfer will be handled by Binyanei Bar Amana, a subsidiary housing organization of the Amana organization.

…Houses will be sold starting at $93,000 and will be rented out at a minimum of $250 per month, though prices will vary. Amana has agreed to arrange financing, and provide guided tours of the communities in question….

The hope is to kill two birds with one stone: Americans who ideologically support the settlements can secure land in the territories by building more houses, and at the same time ensure that young families can continue to repopulate the settlements. In Karnei Shomron for example, said Amrusi, 100 couples married last year. In her home settlement of Talmon one third of the residents live in caravans or rented basements because there is no housing.

Although all Jewish settlement in the West Bank is illegal under international law, Israel says it intends to keep large settlement blocs like Ariel, Maalei Adumim, and Gush Etzion. But despite the website’s claim that “your investment is insured, protected, and 100% legal,”  this sale goes even outside those unilaterally declared boundaries:

While Amana welcomes American buyers in all legal West Bank settlements, in a move that highlights the ideological aspect of the campaign, Amana has promoted 10 small and mid-size settlements of which at least seven are outside the boundaries of the security fence. They are also outside of the settlement blocs which Israel assumes it will retain in a final-status agreement.

The Amana website describes the ten settlements they’re pushing, scattered from up near Ariel to down to Hebron. Several are near Ramallah, and looking at the map I see I passed by a couple while I was there. Some are tiny, plunked down on hilltops Palestinians see only from below.

The descriptions contain the usual real estate jargon about beautiful views, great climate, and convenient travel to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Swimming pools, schools, grocery stores, and clinics. Everything invading suburbanites need.

My friend’s email includes this:

In addition to violating international law, this fair probably violates any number of domestic anti-discrimination laws, as it is a fair assumption that if any of Teaneck’s Arab or other non-Jewish citizens were to show up at this exclusive real estate fair they would be denied the right to make a purchase.

That sounds accurate to me. Maybe a group should try to buy a place and test this. A group with money, I guess, though from here near Boston $93,000 sounds like a bargain.

Might be better to do as my friend says: Help shut this fair down. He suggests the following:

Contact Teaneck, NJ mayor Elie Katz at 201-715-5179, email  help@katz07666.com

Contact Congressman Steve Rothman’s District Director Michael Soliman 201-646-0808. 
(Rothman is unavailable at the present time as he is in Iraq.)

Contact Senator Frank Lautenberg  http://lautenberg.senate.gov/contact

Contact Senator Robert Menendez  http://menendez.senate.gov/contact/contact.cfm

Contact the State Department International Law Section 1-202-776-8342

During my October-December Israel/Palestine trip and for the period before and since, I’ve increasingly focused on the connection between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and its treatment of its own Arab citizens. I’ve criticized Jimmy Carter for ignoring this connection, and have speculated about the cognitive self-deception required to believe that Israeli can be both Jewish and democratic.

Yesterday, on my flight home from Florida, I read the introductory chapter of Jonathan Cook’s recent book Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State, which I bought just before heading south a week earlier. I’m sorry I didn’t get to this sooner. The Nazareth-based British free-lance journalist makes a detailed case for many of the points I’ve been talking about more generally. I now see his website provides access to many of his articles.

The evening before my flight home I talked to a small group at the University of Miami about my recent trip, trying to tie together a variety of strands — my presentations at Ben Gurion and Birzeit Universities, my travels around Israel and the West Bank, and my impressions of a variety of projects I encountered related to this fundamental split between democratic values and Jewish statehood. The discussion mirrored others I’ve had recently with people who eventually say that Israel’s inability to satisfy Western assumptions about democracy is less important than its survival as a Jewish state open to Jews escaping anti-Semitism. Some Israelis and supporters of Israel speak with regret and angst about the effect of Jewish need on innocent Palestinians; others are more belligerent, frankly pronouncing that what’s best for the Jews is the bottom line standard. Either tone is at least more honest than trying to maintain the democratic facade.

Before I got to Cook’s book on my way back to Boston I went through the New York Times, which had four letters responding to an article earlier in the week titled Noted Arab Citizens Call on Israel to Shed Jewish Identity. The article described a December call for Israel to become a fully democratic state. I remember when this document was released the response in Israel was immediate and nasty, with Arab citizens accused of being traitors and enemies. As one letter writer wrote in yesterday’s Times, 

This recommendation, issued as part of a report issued under the auspices of the Committee of Arab Mayors in Israel, should finally spur Israel to accept fully and with no hesitancy its status as a Jewish state. If this were a utopian world with universal peace and no anti-Semitism, there indeed could be no need for a Jewish state. But history has taught us differently. Israel should proclaim what it is along with the inevitable consequences. It cannot be a pure democracy, but it certainly can be more democratic than most other countries.

Its flag and anthem are symbolic of the country, and just as American citizens do in the United States, every citizen of Israel of any religious belief or ethnicity should offer a pledge of allegiance to Israel, the Jewish state.

Cook’s book and website offer many details, plus a framework for understanding many seemingly disconnected events and trends. Some supporters of Israeli policy will dismiss what he has to say as biased and insist Israel’s democracy is in fine shape. Others, more honestly, will acknowledge his facts but resist the implications for democratic policymaking. Still others will shrug their shoulders and say democracy is dispensable. That stance at least has the virtue of bringing out into the open the barriers facing those seeking to advance democracy, equality, and justice for all.

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.

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.

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.

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
——————-

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.

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.

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.

It’s been days since my last blog entry, and my list of unwritten postings grows longer. Most of what would have been my free time was taken up by writing the paper I presented, in unfinished form, Tuesday afternoon. Since then I’ve finally finished it, more or less, and it’s now on my website. It’s too long to post here, but what follows are some pieces of it.

The occasion for the paper was a Legal Encounter organized by the Birzeit University Institute of Law, where I’ve spent the past week doing a series of workshops for five researchers on selected topics in psychology and law. The newly formed interdisciplinary Law and Society research unit is beginning a two-year research project on Legal Reform and the Process of Decolonization and State-Building in Palestine. That’s not going to be so easy to accomplish, but the researchers are doing a good job identifying a long list of difficult issues that will need to be addressed for a Palestinian legal system to function. I don’t think the issues will be easily resolvable, however, given Palestine’s internal disarray and continued occupation, so I look forward to seeing the research that develops.

As requested by my Birzeit University hosts, I presented this talk to generate discussion. It did do that. There were only about 15 people in the audience, mostly from the university, but they represented a pretty wide range of views. At one end was someone who advocated ending all religious affiliations in order to reduce conflict.

At the other was a student whose language generated an immediate yanking away of his microphone by the moderator, who said no one could talk like that in a university discussion. The student had apparently started insulting Israelis, Jews, and me as soon as he began– I’m not really sure, since this was in Arabic and the simultaneous translator got into trouble when three people began shouting at the same time, so he just started describing for me what was going on. I was told later the student said something about Israelis being monkeys, but no one really filled me in on the details. For the remaining 10 minutes or so of the discussion the student glared steadily at me in a way that made me look behind my back when I left the building.

Another audience member, one of the researchers I’ve been working with all week, also heatedly criticized the whole notion of reconciliation, but at least she did it in a reasonable way. Her main point was that it’s unjust to expect people to share their land with those who stole it, an issue obviously needing a lot more discussion.

Otherwise the post-presentation discussion was pretty academic, with a lot of good questions and comments and enough interest in talking it through to make me glad I gave the paper.

Still, that glare stayed with me for a spell. That this all went on during the past week’s Fatah-Hamas tension, some of which led to shooting in Ramallah on Friday and Sunday, added escalated my adrenaline flow.

It’s not so easy here, especially for Palestinians.

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Law, Justice, and Reconciliation in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Abstract

A critical social psychologist, an outside observer of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, assesses the roles of law, justice, and different forms of reconciliation. Although law can sometimes help achieve justice, it is less likely to resolve entrenched conflict. Justice is crucial but complex. Reconciliation between conflicting parties cannot succeed if the effort is limited to the kinds of understanding and empathy possible through even-handed dialogue. Instead, reconciliation must incorporate a commitment to take justice into account.

Excerpts

Efforts to resolve the long and complex conflict between Palestinians and Israelis typically emphasize some combination of law, justice, and reconciliation. During today’s Birzeit Legal Encounter I’d like to make several loosely connected comments and ask a number of questions about what I see as some of the difficult choices facing Palestinians. These comments and questions reflect both my academic interests in critical social psychology, primarily at the intersection of psychology and law, and my status as an outsider. Both of these, I hope, can sometimes help identify problematic assumptions that those who are enmeshed in a situation sometimes take for granted, even though I have less first-hand knowledge of the conflict’s complexities than do those of you living here in Palestine.

The points I focus on today are not the only relevant factors, and in the long run they may not be the most important, but they are impossible to ignore. Other concepts are also part of the discussion: power, rights, history, tradition, religion, compromise, peace. Politics, the use of power, underlies it all, and throughout this discussion I use a lens that is simultaneously political, psychological, and personal. I aim not to resolve issues for you but to generate discussion of a variety of relevant issues.

So what stands out in this landscape of law, justice, and reconciliation, or perhaps (as I’ll soon suggest) law, justice, and three kinds of reconciliation? Several questions are obvious. What is the connection between law and justice? Between justice and reconciliation? Is law a useful tool to bring about justice? Is justice the only or most important goal? Is resolution of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, with roots more than a century old, possible? And what can be attained in light of events just this past week, which clarify all too well the lack of Palestinian consensus about priorities and methods?

…..

Can reconciliation mean more than simply the absence of war and a patently unfair compromise that institutionalizes injustice? If so, what does it require?

One answer is “Peace with Justice.” A common slogan among activists, Peace with Justice is a counter to those for whom peace alone is everything. Clarifying that meaningful, long-term, stable peace requires resolution of past grievances as well as of current issues, Peace with Justice insists that justice cannot be ignored, that any compromise must be principled and honest, not a muddle forced upon those too weak to resist.