Dennis Fox’s Weblog

Last night I went to hear a panel discussion featuring Noam Chomsky, Stephen Walt, Irene Gendzier, and Duncan Kennedy at Boston University’s Law School. The central topic was the US role in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. All four panelists are critical of US support for Israel; the moderator told us that academics on the other side who had been invited to attend had all refused.

The auditorium was pretty full, and at the end lots of people lined up to ask questions. Most were supporters of Israel incensed at what they tried to portray as one-sided inaccuracies. Several made points that would have been worth pursuing, but there was too much pro-Israel shouting and ranting to enable much actual discussion. The way this went added to my thinking that these sorts of panels with longish presentations and little time for actual back-and-forth discussion bring little clarity. I’ve been to enough similar talks to know that  the structure makes actual communication secondary regardless of which side the speakers are on.

Of the speakers, the one I had never met was Duncan Kennedy, a Harvard Law School professor and critical legal studies scholar. When I was teaching legal studies I used a classic piece of his on how law schools are essentially training in hierarchy. I had only learned recently that Kennedy has become outspoken on Israel/Palestine, and is now teaching a course on related legal issues. A quick web search found a lot of his work. Here, he begins a short piece last month about Gaza in the Harvard Crimson by referring to a point he made in somewhat different fashion last night, that too many otherwise progressive academics would rather avoid the subject:

When I told a friend, a former section leader in a large Harvard College course, that I had been offered a chance to do an op-ed for The Harvard Crimson on Gaza, she identified two fairly common, understandable undergraduate attitudes: “The situation is too complicated and I can’t make up my mind about it;” and “This is controversial and there are differences of opinion. No side is ‘right.’’”

I hope that the recent war, occurring at the beginning of the Obama presidency, will lead to enough discussion of Israel and Palestine in the Harvard community so that more of us feel able to take positions. With that in mind, I will use my space to present a factual picture one would think controversial, but which surprisingly is a matter of consensus of “informed observers.”

The bulk of the column presents an account that will probably strike some as less consensual than Kennedy suggests, though I think disputes would mostly be a matter of emphasis and tone. I especially appreciate his penultimate context:

Numerous observers have charged Israel with committing war crimes during the war. Without downplaying that aspect, I think it is important to understand the 1,300 Palestinian casualties, including 400 children as well as many, many women, versus 13 Israeli casualties, as typical of a particular kind of “police action” that Western colonial powers and Western “ethno-cratic settler regimes” like ours in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Serbia and particularly apartheid South Africa, have historically undertaken to convince resisting native populations that unless they stop resisting they will suffer unbearable death and deprivation. Not just in 1947 and 1948, but also in Lebanon in 1982 and 2006, Israel used similar tactics.

Causing horrific civilian deaths is often perfectly defensible under the laws of war, which favor conventional over unconventional forces in asymmetric warfare. The outright “crimes,” like the My Lai massacre, Abu Ghraib, or Russian massacres in Afghanistan and then in Chechnya, are less important for the civilian victims than the daily tactics of air assault, bombardment, and brutal door-to-door sweeps, meant to draw fire from the resisters that will justify leveling houses and the people in them.

Kennedy’s final paragraph makes sense to me, too:

Can this picture be right? If so, what is to be done? If not, what is to be done? If you are not already clear about what you think, it is crucial to try to find out for yourself. If the situation is as bad as I have painted, you might consider some small step, perhaps just a contribution to humanitarian relief for Gaza, or e-mailing the White House, or something more, like advocating for Harvard to divest.

Technorati Tags: Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Duncan Kennedy, war crime

One of the most common refrains of those who see through an Israel-centered lens is that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East.” Americans in particular assume that democracy, Israeli-style, is pretty much the same as democracy, US-style – that Israeli citizens regardless of religion or ethnicity have the same individual rights as those we think the Bill of Rights and other Constitutional provisions guarantee us. Setting aside for the moment the distortions of democracy right here in the US, it’s pretty easy to demonstrate how much Israeli democracy departs – in both theory and practice – from what Americans like to assume is basic to democracy.

I’ve written about various aspects of this disjunction throughout this blog as well as in other articles. The theoretical and practical incompatibility between being a Jewish state and a democratic state was a prime focus of the course I taught at Israel’s Ben Gurion University in 2006. If modern democracy means something beyond pure majority rule – if, as we like to think in the US, there are individual rights that even majorities cannot stamp out – then detailed comparisons between Israeli democracy and the theory and practice of other democratic states exposes Israel’s version as deeply flawed.

Today, Israel’s Central Elections Committee voted overwhelmingly to disqualify both of Israel’s small Arab political parties from running candidates in February’s election. As the Jerusalem Post explains it, quoting Section 7A of Israel’s Basic Law,

‘a candidates’ list shall not participate in elections to the Knesset if its objectives or actions, expressly or by implication, include one of the following: (1) negation of the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state; (2) incitement to racism; (3) support of an armed struggle against Israel by supporting an enemy state or a terrorist organization.

With many of Israel’s Palestinian citizens protesting the assault on Gaza, rifts in Israeli society are more exposed than usual. Israeli Arab leaders are indeed working as best they can to alter Israeli policy, which I gather is being termed a violation of the third clause of the quoted paragraph.

But over the past couple of years it’s been the first clause that’s seemed to me most relevant. That clause bars any political party calling for full equality between Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians in a state that prefers neither. Insisting that Israel become “a state of all its citizens” rather than “a state of the Jewish people” violates the demand that all parties accept Israel as a state in which Jewish concerns count most.

There is no fundamental barrier in the United States to a political party seeking to change the constitution or other political fundamentals. We’ve had Nazi parties, Communist parties, all kinds of parties seeking to use the ballot to transform the country. No government body decides whether a party platform itself is a disqualification.

In Israel, obviously and openly, that’s not the case.

Israel’s Supreme Court will get a chance to rule on the Elections Committee’s decision. Regardless of what it decides, the fact that the country’s Basic Law bans parties that seek to alter the Basic Law should be enough to stop Israel’s supporters from crowing about Israeli democracy. Not likely, though.

Technorati Tags: democracy, Israel, Jewish State, Zionism

Emails continue to pour in with heartbreaking accounts of Israel’s Gaza victims, details of worldwide protests, and analyses of events from conflicting perspectives. Some of these accounts come from Gaza residents I was in contact with before my recent Israel/West Bank visit, psychologists and artists I would have met at an October conference on Siege and Mental Health if Israel had granted us permits. I read obsessively.

Also on my mind are friends and relatives in Israel, some of whom live or work well within range of the missiles from Gaza. Some have children in the army and worry about their safety. Some worry just as much about what their young child-soldiers may do to innocent Palestinians, about their becoming brutalized in the name of ends they may not yet comprehend beyond the superficialities every government instills in its young.

I want to note here a few topics related to different ways of framing issues. Perhaps this effort reflects my background in social psychology, though I hope my general critical psychology perspective has helped me move beyond mainstream social psychology’s narrow, avowedly apolitical, empiricism. In the abstract, it’s easy to understand that how we frame an issue affects our evaluation. Framing matters in everything from the questions of journalists to the speeches of politicians to the proclamations of partisans, academics, and, yes, bloggers. But it’s not easy to keep framing’s centrality in mind in the heat of political hostility.

(There’s also a danger of the opposite: recognizing framing’s importance can lead to avoiding political commitment. If we know that “how you evaluate something depends on how you look at it,” it’s easy to avoid any commitment at all. This stance of either above-it-all cynicism or supposedly objective neutrality is a common academic and journalistic hazard, as I’ve addressed elsewhere. Although I do think it’s important to understand competing perspectives, I do not believe all perspectives are equally valid or just.)

Several questions come to mind related to Israel’s Gaza operations, all of which are reflected in more specific issues. Some of these different perspectives are obvious in comments to several earlier postings on this blog over the past couple of weeks; others have been obvious at protests and counter-protests, or listening to callers on NPR who seem to be living in different worlds. Here I mostly list questions and offer some related thoughts. Full answers, as always, await another time.

1. Who started the current hostilities? Instigators always blame the other side. The mainstream media generally parrot the argument that Hamas refused to extend the ceasefire and that Israel seeks only to stop missiles from leaving Gaza. They minimize or even ignore the fact that Hamas had managed to stop missile launches almost completely before Israel itself broke the ceasefire, an earlier violation that the media now fails to point out.
2. Who started the broader conflict? This is a central question, or would be if the rest of the world paid much attention. Interpretations vary depending on the starting point. Here are some possibilities: Hamas’s takeover of Gaza, Hamas’s election to office, the 1967 Six Day War leading to the Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, the 1948 establishment of Israel, the late-nineteenth century arrival in Palestine of Zionist immigrants determined to create a Jewish homeland, and even Napoleon’s plan to create a Jewish state in Palestine to defend French interests. Israel’s supporters – and Israeli negotiators in the never-ending “peace process” – refuse to go back in time, while Palestians’ supporters know that the further back you go, the more the violation of their rights is clear.
3. What kind of conflict is it? Is this a national conflict between Israelis and Palestinians? A religious conflict between Jews and (mostly) Muslims? A geopolitical conflict between Israel, the US, Western Europe, and their conservative Arab allies on the one hand, and on the other Arab states less beholden to the US, Iran, and other states at odds with US dominance? Alternatively: Does the conflict reflect the actions of two equally responsible enemies engaging in tit-for-tat retaliation, who might someday make peace as equals (the framework often adopted by “neutral” peacemakers and dialogue advocates)? Or is this a conflict between Occupier and Occupied, between a powerful nation and a weak but stubborn resistance? If the latter – as I have come to see it – are the sides so unbalanced that journalistic and academic “even-handedness” becomes a support for oppression?
4. Does Israel deserve, and does it get, exceptional treatment? This is very touchy. Is Israel held to an unjustified higher standard as its defenders claim, a standard that simply proves anti-Semitism? Or does Israel get away with actions that would not be tolerated for any other modern state, and certainly any modern democracy? Does Israel deserve a Jewish state simply because Zionists took it, following the colonial model of Western states arising over the objections of defeated native peoples, or does the development of international law and the creation of the United Nations after World War II mean statehood by conquest should no longer be tolerated even for a state that absorbed Europe’s Jewish Holocaust victims? Israel’s dismissal of international condemnation as proof of bias often seems to me a convenient excuse. Anti-Semitism exists, but doesn’t explain everything.
5. Where’s justice? As I’ve explored at length on this blog and elsewhere, there can be no final settlement until history is uncovered and justice addressed. Justice is tricky, I know, but having been on both sides of this issue over the decades, I think that defenses of Israel are more strained, more rickety, more based on exceptions to ordinary standards of justice and humanity than defenses of Palestinian rights.

For me, resort to tribal notions — often expressed as what’s best for the Jews, or the claim that only a Jewish state can defend Jews worldwide — are mired in comforting nostrums that long ago lost whatever validity they may once have had. If Palestine had really been a land without a people, a Jewish state would have gone differently, maybe even becoming the light unto the nations I learned about so long ago. But creating a Jewish state over the objections of people living on that land was a historical injustice that will never – never – be forgotten. It has led, ironically, inexorably, inevitably to Jews endangered precisely because they live in the Jewish state that was supposed to protect them. And it has led to Jews oppressing, and even today killing, innocent non-Jews in the name of that Jewish state.

Framing the conflict as tribal –  the core Zionist argument — justifies Israeli actions no matter how grotesque, from this latest invasion of Gaza to the four-decade occupation to the six-decade imposition of Jewish control over Israel’s own internal Palestinians. I might add it also justifies similarly particularistic views and actions by groups such as Hamas. I would much prefer framing the conflict as one between those committed to a tribal worldview and those embracing a more universal justice-based outcome. There are Israelis and Palestinians on both sides of that divide, and any justice-based future depends on them.

Technorati Tags: Gaza, justice, neutrality, Palestine, protest, social psychology, Zionism

Last Monday, my final day in Ramallah, I spent a couple of hours at the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling (the site’s English page should soon be working). Soraida, my contact there, said some of the staff wanted to see how the psychology/law/justice interface might relate to their own work. I was glad for the opportunity.

WCLAC’s work seems to me extremely useful and even more challenging. Essentially, this group of mostly Muslim feminists — a term that surely comes to many as a surprise — wants to revamp family law in Palestinian society. Since marriage, divorce, inheritance, and similar topics are controlled by religious courts, there is no civil-law method to get out of a bad marriage or deal with an abusive husband. This system, which was inherited from the Ottomans, lets each religion control its own families (Israel retains the same archaic system, which explains why Israelis who want to marry someone from another religion have to leave the country to do so).

WCLAC has about 40 staffers in three cities – Ramallah, Hebron, and East Jerusalem. These include seven lawyers, the same number of social workers, plus researchers, administrators, and support staff. I met with six staff members. Each explained her (or his, in one case) area of responsibility – training volunteers to pay attention to women’s rights issues, helping organize grassroots organization throughout the West Bank, advocacy work such as lobbying the Palestine Legislative Council for changes in the law, working with doctors and other medical personnel to focus them on recognizing signs of domestic violence, researching issues identified by other units as important (Soraida is the research director), and direct case work by the organization’s lawyers and social workers. They have published a wide variety of books and pamphlets, including reports of femicide (the killing of women by their “dishonored” families) and other serious problems.

The whole experience was very impressive. This organization, which began in 1991, came to me as a real surprise. I’ve known that Muslims differ greatly in their interpretations of religious doctrine and practice. But I didn’t know Palestinian society was open to organized efforts to change such a fundamental societal component. It was encouraging to see this sign of obvious resistance to conservative control, even if, as some of the women told me, they were often simply dismissed as “Westernized.” Still, despite their uncovered heads and egalitarian agenda, they say they are increasingly invited to work in small conservative villages to help women victimized by rape and sexual harassment. On that level they are encouraged, though their optimism is tempered by an awareness that Palestinian society overall is becoming more religious as Hamas’s influence grows.

WCLAC initially advocated the creation of a civil-law alternative to family courts. As in Israel, that met with little success. They have since turned to emphasizing flexibility in interpreting Islamic law, bringing in Islamic scholars who distinguish between traditional inegalitarian cultural norms and what they see as less rigid religious doctrine. The group has also studied the attitudes of Palestinian women, finding, for example, that in their sample only a minority covered their heads for religious reasons; most, including many young women, were either trying to avoid being seen as different or were pressured to cover up by husbands, brothers, or fathers. Their fashionable clothing and tight jeans often suggest the head covering is designed to follow the letter of religious law rather than the spirit.

In some ways, the issues WCLAC deals with remind me of the US feminist movement in the 1970s, trying for example to get police to take domestic violence seriously. In other cases the comparison goes back much further, to the 1800s when US courts began to limit how severely men could beat their wives and children. In any case, I found it refreshing to see so many determined activists trying to ensure that Palestine becomes a more egalitarian society. This effort from within has more potential for success, I think, than pressure from without to conform to Western norms.

Technorati Tags: Islam, feminism, law, Occupation, Palestine, Ramallah

This afternoon I took a service taxi out to Birzeit University to catch up on things with Asem Khalil, a constitutional law professor who directed the Law and Society research project I was briefly involved with during my 2006 visit. The campus was pretty empty, since the professors are now on strike for three days, and perhaps for longer. The main grievance is having gone 12 years without a salary increase. There seems to be a lot of money for new buildings, however, with several under construction. The campus, at any rate, seemed eerily quiet.

The researchers I worked with two years ago were then beginning a two-year project, which has now ended. The goal was to sort out the difficulties of creating a modernized, effective Palestinian legal system and come up with recommendations on how Palestine should proceed. My input, during a series of workshops on psychology and law, was to help the five researchers identify relevant issues. At the time, I thought they were doing a great job identifying barriers to democratic legal reform, but given differences among them on knotty issues such as the priority for advancing women’s rights, I wondered whether they’d be able to agree about the direction, pace, and method of legal change,

Based on today’s conversation with Asem, it looks like I had good reason to wonder. The final report, not yet finished, will focus on identifying problems – and there are many – and on summarizing the project’s analytical conclusions. it will, however, be short on specific recommendations. I’m not surprised, partly because I don’t think the many differences within Palestine can be resolved in a vacuum. Without a real state, the effort to create a fully functioning legal system seems somewhat abstract.

Technorati Tags: Jerusalem, law, Palestine