Settlements are Jewish-only colonies which are illegally constructed on stolen Palestinian territory. Of course, the whole of Israel was once Palestinian territory, but here I am referring just to the 22% of historic Palestine which remains (outside the internationally-recognized Israeli border, aka. the 'pre-67 borders'), the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The Apartheid annexation wall encloses and protects these illegal settlements, the basis for an advisory opinion issued by the World Court which called the wall "ipso facto" illegal. The settlement enterprise is a vital instrument in the strategy to create “facts on the ground” which serve to carve the West Bank into 15 isolated bantustans, allow the Israelis to steal Palestinian land and water resources, and thus make the establishment of a viable Palestinian state impossible. If one looks at a map of the Apartheid annexation wall which shows the location of the water resources, the purpose of the route is immediately obvious. The Israelis are taking water and valuable land, while carefully excluding population centers, which are to be walled off and otherwise isolated into small enclaves.
The Israeli establishment strongly encourages citizens to move to the settlements through a variety of economic incentives including tax breaks, reduced housing costs (a house in Male Adumim, a large settlement on the outskirts of Jerusalem, costs about 1/3 of a place in Jerusalem), and now by linking the settlements to the urban centers using direct, modern bypass roads, which Palestinians are not allowed to use and which skirt around Palestinian villages, preventing the wealthy Jewish suburbanites from having to see the impact of the racist and repugnant Zionist project. Palestinian land is stolen and Jewish-only settlements are built on it, which the rightful owners of the land are then separated from by a large concrete barrier. At no time since the start of the program by a Labor government in 1967 has Israel frozen or even slowed its settlement activity, nor were they obligated to by any agreement with the Palestinians until the recent Annapolis Conference (international law, of course, is something else altogether, clearly forbidding “population transfer”). For this the Palestinians can thank the tragic mixture of incompetence, nonchalance, and cynicism exhibited by their leadership since Oslo, accomplishing nothing for the Palestinians, legitimizing the outrageous injustice of the present, and brushing those of the past under the carpet.
We spent the day today touring a few of the settlements with a representative of Yesh Din, an Israeli volunteer group that is doing much good work on the settlement issue. For instance, they have begun to file Freedom of Information requests with the Israeli government for records of land ownership. Through this process, they have discovered that even according to Israeli government records 84% of the settlements are built on land which is registered to private Palestinian owners. With this information, they build a legal case and file a suit showing that the land on which the houses were built, according the Israeli government, is stolen. An order is issued, and the property is returned to its owner. Granted, this has barely made a dent on the expansion of the settlement enterprise, but it has made some progress and hopefully it will continue in the future.
There are 500,000 settlers in the West Bank, 250,000 outside Jerusalem. The first neighborhood we visited, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, is called Male Adumim, one of the largest settlements. It is home to some 30,000-plus settlers, and looks like something straight out of Horatio Alger. It is the perfect American Dream; Hunter S. Thompson could have retired early and even Willy Loman could not ask for more. Each large house has a two-car garage, a perfect lawn, a fence, and children playing in the yard. There are new malls, parks, swimming pools, and other entertainment, all contained and protected behind the wall, guarded by the IDF. The streets are perfectly clean, the neat rows of houses each a perfect reflection of each other. After a few minutes, the flawless repetition, each house the same as the last, becomes almost monotonous. I am reminded of the Dave Matthews Band song “Don't Drink the Water,” written about the Trail of Tears but certainly applicable to this new colonial experiment:
Away, away, you have been banished;
Your land is gone and given to me;
And here I will spread my wings;
Upon these poor souls I'll build Heaven
and call it home
Each of the massive settlements is directly connected to the urban centers with brand-new, modern, Jewish-only “bypass roads,” highways which avoid Palestinian areas. Since their only purpose is to connect the settlements to the cities, the Palestinians wouldn't use them even if they were allowed. Meanwhile, the Palestinian roads are old, often unpaved, and winding, making travel a much more arduous process. We drove by an intersection and our tour guide asked the bus to stop for a moment. He pointed to the long line of traffic waiting on one of the roads at the intersection, while cars on the relatively open road we were on whizzed by. He told us that this intersection is one of the points where a Palestinian road crosses a bypass road. There was no traffic light, no soldier or cop directing traffic. Rather, the Palestinian road had a “yield” sign. Those using the Palestinian road, designed to service the needs of the 3.5 million Arabs living and working in the West Bank, were forced to sit and yield at the intersection with the bypass road, explicitly for the use of the 30,000 settlers living in Male Adumim. Sometimes, it seems, the smallest details can say a lot about the big picture; the image of a long line of Arab cars waiting for the few settler cars to pass is a perfect projection of Zionist ideology. Regardless of the needs and lives of the native inhabitants of Palestine, the Jews come first. Jews are free to take what they want, when they want it; the insignificant autochthones can have what's left and wait their turn.
I have no time, to justify to you;
fool, you're blind
move aside for me
One of the first, and most disturbing, things I noticed when traveling through the settlements is that the overwhelming majority (I might even say all) of the laborers are Palestinian. Desperate Palestinians, with nowhere else to turn, are forced to construct the Jewish settlements. This is just one example of the shortcomings of the Palestinian leadership. Stopping deprived Palestinian laborers from building the illegal Jewish settlements should be a top priority, which would at least salvage the dignity of these laborers and slightly increase the cost of building the settlements to the Israelis. Allowing Palestinians robbed of their land to then become a cheap source of labor at the service of the expansionist Zionist project is certainly not helping the Palestinian cause. By setting up pension funds or other kinds of unemployment benefit programs, the PA could, in some small way, stop some of the most disadvantaged Palestinians from having to take jobs of this sort. One can barely imagine the demeaning humiliation of building the Jewish colonies which are destroying Palestinian society, robbing them of their future, and attempting to erase their past.
What's this you say;
you're father's spirit still lives in this place?
Well I will silence you
Yet our guide told us that most of the settlers of Male Adumim would be surprised to hear that they are, in fact, living in colonies built on stolen land. The gigantic settlement is considered “a neighborhood of East Jerusalem,” a suburb which has been around for so long that no one considers its origins anymore. I looked at the children playing in the yards. To these children, this place is their home, the place of their birth. They have no knowledge of what was done, and what is being done, to the Palestinian people; their parents know little more. They are disconnected from the past, a collective amnesia that was validated by the actions of Yassir Arafat and his cadre of corrupt autocrats. The Israeli strategy has been to completely absolve themselves of “the Palestinian problem” and the needs of the natives, propping up selfish and nihilistic “chiefs” who can easily be pushed into signing away what remains of the future. More importantly, though, they have signed away the past. There was no “truth and reconciliation,” no admission of the responsibility of Zionism for the destruction of a whole society and culture, yet nothing could be more essential to a true, lasting peace. What happened in 1948 was not the Nazi holocaust, but it was a crime of the first order. As Israel's “new historians” have uncovered by opening government records, 1948 was a deliberate, planned, and systematic military campaign to empty Palestine of as many of its native inhabitants as possible. In the end, 70% of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine were forcibly removed from their land, forced onto the 22% of their land which remained. In 1967, Israel occupied the rest, and since then the portion which could be allocated for the creation of a Palestinian state has been slowly eroded by Zionist expansionism. In 1993, Arafat recognized this situation as legitamite, conceding the existence of Israel on 78% of historic Palestine and signing an agreement which allowed Israeli control over entries and exits to all major cities, the creation of the wall, the continued expansion of the settlements, and the erection of an ever-increasing number of checkpoints which make free movement impossible. The agreements did not create a Palestinian state, nor did they say a word about the full removal of the Israeli occupation; since their signing, Palestinians have gotten poorer, life harder, and territory smaller.
The basic assumption underlying Israeli policy is that given enough time and pressure, the Palestinians will eventually give up, surrender, or variously accommodate the permanent loss of what was once theirs; no admission of past guilt is necessary. Of course, before any peace settlement can even be considered most of the settlements will have to be dismantled; this is taken as a given by all parties (yet not even mentioned in the Oslo Accords). The problem is that the gigantic, expensive bypass roads, the huge new houses, the wall, are all creating a situation so permanent that the only thing that could remove them would be a magnanimous catastrophe. The settlements are thus a major obstacle to peace. But just as significant (probably more so) is the refusal of Israel to acknowlege the wrongs committed against the Palestinian people in 1948, and consistently since. To suggest that true peace can be brought about without, at minimum, an acknowledgment of what was done is to argue that somehow the present can be separated from the past, and therefore the future.
What's that you say?
You feel the right to remain, then stay;
But I will bury you
The children I see growing up in Male Admumim may never know, or care, what had to be done for them to live their perfect American dream, with their smiling white parents, their playgrounds, swimming pools, two car garages, and perfectly clean streets. They may never see the Palestinian children in the refugee camps, like al-Amari, barefoot and hungry, playing with broken toys, amidst 5,000 people fenced into a dark, 3 square kilometer world of filth and mud. They probably never learned about the nakba in 1948, where thousands of children, just like them, and their families were driven from their homes, where they had lived for generations, by soldiers making way for the new “chosen people.” They most likely don't think about the true consequences of the revolting Apartheid wall being built almost entirely on Palestinian land, in many cases right through the center of communities, separating friends and families and making some of the most valued portions of Palestinian territory totally off-limits. They, like everyone else in the world, do not think about the poor, the dispossessed, the hungry, or the disadvantaged until it is too late. The Palestinians, it seems, are doomed to become the Red Indians of the Middle East, as Edward Said used to say. Perhaps, 100 years from now, people will look back on the destruction of Palestinians society with pity and sadness, click their tongues and talk about how it is “too bad” what was done to “those people.” Maybe they will look at the arguments of the Israeli government for the wanton destruction of a whole people, culture, and history with shock and disbelief, as we do those of the US government for the genocide against our own native population. By then, though, it will be too late.
All I can say,
To you, my new neighbor,
Is you must move on,
Or I will bury you
My thoughts drifted to my home in the United States, where we are all settlers, with an amnesia not unlike that of the children in Male Adumim. And, like in Palestine, most of us go through our days, even our lives, with hardly a thought for the native inhabitants who we crushed, raped, and murdered, grinding not just them but their memory into the dirt forever. For them, there will never be justice. The world cannot, must not allow the same thing to happen again in Palestine. Just as the Jews demand worldwide recognition of the horrible crimes of the Nazi holocaust, so too do the Arabs for the crimes of the Zionists in 1948 and thereafter. Just as the Arabs must recognize Israel's right to exist, so too must the Israeli's recognize the Palestinians' right to have a state of their own, on some small portion of their ancestral land. Only once we realize that both Israelis and Palestinians are human beings, with histories, cultures, pasts, and the right to be treated fairly, as equals, will the conflict truly end. But this cannot occur unless what was done in the past and is being done in the present is acknowledged, allowing the very real wounds to heal.
As I rest my feet by this fire;
Those hands once warmed here,
Well I have retired them;
I can breathe my own air,
And I can sleep more soundly;
Upon these poor souls I've built Heaven,
And called it home
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Day 3 (June 5): Yed Vashem; Israeli Foreign Ministry
The Nazi holocaust was one of the most terrible crimes of the twentieth century. The systematic nature of the drive to exterminate an entire ethnic group as efficiently and quickly as possible represents not only a tragedy for the Jewish people, but for all of humanity. The commission of the crime itself was a tragedy for the Jewish people, while the breadth of the support it enjoyed reveals a dark side of human nature which should lead us to question the true end of the “progress” which the Enlightenment has convinced a large swath of mankind to pursue. In this sense, national socialism and the holocaust it produced are not counter to the enlightenment; they are rather radical exponents of it and were influenced by its methods and its emphasis on science to improve mankind. After all, the Enlightenment generated the “science” of phrenology, for instance, and Eugenics was believed in and advocated for by leading western scientists such as the infamous Watson and Crick. Such strong ideological linkages should lead us in the post-Enlightenment West to question the values which drive our societies and the very nature of “progress.”
Despite its almost unimaginable heinousness, I do not think that the case for the exceptionalism of the Nazi holocaust stands up to serious historical scrutiny. It is first important to distinguish between “uniqueness” and “exceptionalism.” To be unique means only to be different from all others, while exceptionalism means that all other cases fall into a like category, while one individual case stands out as the only unique case; all others are more or less similar. Further, the concept of ranking atrocities on some sort of moral scale is a pointless endeavor without serious philosophical grounding. Of course, we can say that murdering 5 million people is significantly worse than murdering one person. But can one say that it is worse to kill 6 million jews in gas chambers than it is to incinerate 5 million Indochinese with napalm? The Reaganite campaign of terror directed toward Latin America in the 1980s which killed, maimed, and tortured tens of thousands, leaving four countries in tatters, included the murder of more Nicaraguans per capita than those who have died in all US wars combined. The largest post WWII genocide, in East Timor, was supported by two US Presidents (Carter and Clinton) and resulted in the slaughter of 1/3 of the population of East Timor as well as the massacre of 1 million Indochinese. The list goes on and on. The point is that each of these crimes is somewhat unique, and each terrible. Why should we expend our efforts ranking them?
The Nazi holocaust, of course, should be remembered and commemorated, to examine ourselves and what we are capable of doing, not as nations or countries but as a species. The goal of such commemoration should obviously be to attempt to prevent so vile and ghastly an abomination from ever happening again, and to prompt the sort of criticism and questioning of the goals and indeed “values” which are all too often passively accepted and even enthusiastically championed. It is also a central aspect of Jewish collective memory and cultural history, with good reason. Thus the atrocity is rightly commemorated in the state established as a home for the Jewish people, a need which was advanced immeasurably in the wake of this horrendous act. Unfortunately, yet unsurprisingly, the power of the memory of the Nazi holocaust is manipulated by elites, in Israel and elsewhere in order to justify injustices imposed on others in the present, facilitating the commission of more crimes. Given the scale of the Nazi holocaust, comparisons to present circumstances, always distorted and wildly inaccurate, also allow elites to channel fear and direct hysteria on command toward current establishment enemies. The constant use of the Nazi holocaust to vindicate despicable behavior has been analyzed by many scholars and intellectuals, most famously Tom Segev in his book The Seventh Million and Norman Finklestein in The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. The employment of the memory of this savage act for such purposes denigrates its victims and detracts from the true importance of its remembrance in the service of short-term political gain. Such behavior is shameful and intolerable.
For all these reasons, I was nervous about the potential content of the presentation of the Nazi holocaust at Yed Vashem, the Israeli holocaust museum. The museum was very crowded, uncomfortably so, to a large extent by IDF soldiers who, by their age, I assumed to be cadets or in training of some form. Many of the others were young students, apparently on class trips or on part of a school program. I couldn't keep from contemplating the purpose, or at least the effect, of such education in the grand scheme. The focus on the constant exploitation of Jews throughout their history, culminating in the Nazi holocaust, justly reinforces the belief that the Jewish state of Israel is the most important possession of the Jews as a people. Indeed, the Jewish people coming together to remember and mourn the Nazi holocaust is an important part of cultural heritage and a vital chapter in the national narrative. But the view of all other national and ethno-religious groups as little more than several varieties of lynch mob waiting to “finish the holocaust” and continue the persecution and murder of the Jewish people which has, the view goes, been going on throughout recorded history can also be dangerous. It can generate fear and even hatred of the other; serious education about such history, when subsequently combined with deliberate, strategic manipulation and distortion by political elites, has contributed to Israel's fanatical militarism and the feeling that each surrounding hazard is an existential threat. At the beginning of the tour, our guide stated that “history seems to be repeating itself,” confirming in my mind that the usefulness of the Nazi holocaust for public manipulation was an important reason why the museum was overflowing with swarms of students and, more importantly, 18-year-old IDF soldiers in training. At the conclusion of the tour, she asked us to pray that the IDF would defend the country from the vicious “dwarf” (her term), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, presumably the one attempting to “repeat history.” After all, he had threatened to “wipe Israel off the map,” a stupid threat which the whole world knows to be baseless.
When I raised these issues at the Q&A session after the tour, I provoked much outrage from large segments of the group. The charge was that the tour guide had not intended to suggest that Israel should attack Iran, with some quoting her use of the word “defend.” Of course, it is essential to the proper functioning of aggressive militarist powers that the state be portrayed as taking a defensive stand most of the time. In the modern world, circumstances in which leaders can openly claim their truculent intentions are rare indeed. A good example from recent history is the invasion of Iraq in 2002, a textbook case of aggression (“the supreme international crime”). Despite this uncontroversial observation, at the time state leaders claimed that unless Iraq was attacked immediately there was significant chance of a nuclear attack from Iraq on the United States or Israel. Such rhetoric is pure nonsense, but its effect was to instill a fear in people that made them believe “we” are defending ourselves against an existential threat. Another great example is Nicaragua in the 1980s. In 1984, Ronald Reagan declared a State of Emergency in response to the Sandinista revolution, justifying this by reminding the US citizenry that the small, poor country was just three days' drive to Texas. He renewed this declaration annually throughout the remainder of his Presidency. The sheer absurdity of all this aside, the Emergency was an attempt by the Reaganites to illustrate that the US was terrorizing civilians in Nicaragua out of its own self-defense, not out of aggression. One must also not forget that the US Department of War is now called the “Department of Defense,” the Israeli Army named the “Israel Defense Force,” despite the total failure of the word “defense” to describe most of the activities of either institution.
Despite this misunderstanding, a showcase example of the success of Orwellian nomenclature, the charge that she had not intended to compare Ahmadinejad to Hitler, or to suggest that he would commit a second holocaust, is plainly absurd. This leaving aside the sheer lunacy of the claim that Iran poses any sort of threat to Israel, that according to each of the three major IAEA reports there is no evidence Iran has a nuclear program, and that even if it were the idea that Iran would resign itself to instant annihilation from the United States in order to target Israel with a nuclear weapon, which would also vaporize the Palestinians, is simply asinine. Why conclude a tour about the Nazi holocaust, which ended in 1945, by discussing Ahmadinejad at all? Surely the President of Iran had no hand in the genocide against the Jews in Europe during World War II, the topic of our tour. Is it so outrageous to suggest that no such comparison should be made, and that its only purpose can be to make use of the memory of the holocaust to incite hatred and fear of the man? If I were to conclude a tour about the American Civil War with a discussion about Mao Tse Tung, it would be reasonable, then, for someone to ask what the connection was between the two, why Mao was being brought up in an alien context. And she didn't just mention Ahmadinejad in a foreign context, she took advantage of our emotional vulnerability after learning about one the great horrors of all human history, asking us to pray that the IDF could defend Israel from that “dwarf” who “doesn't even deserve a name.” I ask again: why is this necessary on a tour about the Nazi holocaust?
Our next stop was the Israeli Foreign Ministry. The building was brand new and extremely luxurious. After waiting awhile at security, we walked through a large lobby with high, vaulted ceilings, a piano, and several sofas and chairs placed around the room. The floors were marble, the railings shiny, polished stainless steel. The walls were lit from behind in a very chic and post-modern fashion, with multi-colored lights. The contrast with the conditions in the Palestinian ministries could not have been greater. We took a staircase to a balcony, before entering the “situation room” where we would listen to the presentation. While I expected to be exposed to a warped picture of reality, nothing could have prepared me for the sickening racism and gross misinformation which we were fed. The presentation described how the ungrateful Palestinians had repeatedly turned down Israel's generosity, and that they (not the Israelis or the United States) were largely responsible for the situation as it exists today. This makes logical sense – it is the fault of the victim. If a man rapes a woman, it is her fault, not his, for wearing provocative clothing or for looking at him the wrong way. She was simply asking for it. Those ungrateful savages never knew a good deal when they saw it; Arafat was a rejectionist for turning down Israel's charitable offer at Camp David, which was to annex an additional 10% of the West Bank (perhaps more), leave settlements largely in place, leave Israel in unilateral control of water resources, borders, and security, give the Palestinians nothing in Jerusalem but an office for Arafat and the right to hang a flag, remove most aspects of real sovereignty, and let the Palestinians call what's left a “state.” This, of course, after Arafat had historically conceded 78% of historic Palestine already, agreed to overlook the Zionist campaign of ethnic cleansing in 1948, and well after Israel had already begun to violate most of the minimal requirements placed on it as part of the Oslo Accords.
He also cited this agreement as an example of remarkable Israeli kindness, and of continued Palestinian rejectionism. To illustrate, he focused on the “Letters of Recognition” which preceded Oslo, claiming that these represented the Palestinians and the Israelis recognizing each other. In fact, while the Palestinians recognized the existence of Israel on 78% of historic Palestine, Israel merely recognized Arafat as the leader of the Palestinians. Nowhere in the hundreds of pages of agreements signed as part of the Oslo process does it say that Israel will ever fully withdraw its army from Palestinian territory, nor does it say anything about the settlements, nor did the agreements give the Palestinians a state. What it gave them was a few symbols, the right for Arafat to be called “Mr. Chairman-President,” and for Arab police to replace the IDF in assuming municipal duties in the centers of the largest towns, while Israel retained control of the entries and exits. It legalized the illegal occupation by providing it with an Arab facade behind which to hide in the form of the corrupt and authoritarian Yassir Arafat.
At one point he asked why we believed there had been no peace, after (largely correctly) describing Arafat's sordid history of corruption, scandal, and authoritarian rule. He had also just finished describing Arafat's “rejection of peace” at Camp David, so I surmised that he was expecting an easy answer regarding the failure of the Palestinian leadership. The deceit, lies, and distortion was so great I was outraged, it totally outstripped anything I had expected. I raised my hand. “Because Israel has refused to abide by UN 242 and 338, failed to live up to any of its agreed upon obligations in Camp David in 1978, Oslo, the Roadmap, and most recently Annapolis, continued to reject negotiations with the elected representation of the Palestinian people, expand the settlements, checkpoints, and the wall, accelerated the theft of Palestinian land and resources; bomb, starve, and otherwise deprive innocents in Gaza...” I said, before he cut me off. “I understand where you are coming from politically,” he said, before moving on without addressing any of the points I had just made.
“Hamas is the same as Al Qaeda,” he said, a statement which made me hope he knew better. “That's outrageous,” I blurted out, detailing some of the significant differences between the two organizationally, politically, tactically. In fact, the two have very little in common, other than race and religion, which leads me to believe that it is those factors which drove him to lump them into the same category (a style of thought known as racism). “The point is they both believe in creating an Islamic world caliphate,” he said, “the similarities are in the goals.” Leaving aside the fact that Hamas has never supported any such notion, and certainly does not today having openly endorsed the two-state solution, I responded “then apples are the same as oranges, because you eat them both and they are both fruit.” Obviously, his line of thinking was totally irrational, which made his next comment all the more interesting. “Listen,” he began, “this is the Middle East, not the midwest. These people don't think rationally like you and me.” I again tried to respond to this almost unbelievable degree of racism, but was shouted down by Dr. Lukacs, our group leader, and told to sit down, which I did. “We try to negotiate with Hamas and what we get is this,” he said, pointing at me, “Israel has done this and this and this. You can't get anywhere.” Clearly, he was taunting me. “I never said I supported Hamas,” I tried to defend myself but was quickly told to be quiet by another member of the group, who said “we can listen to you anytime; right now we are here to listen to our esteemed speaker.” Again, I sat in silence, the rage inside me growing to the point where I wanted to walk out of the room and wait for the rest of the group on the bus. The worst part of it all was that the shameful distortions of our “esteemed speaker” were being bought hook, line, and sinker by at least some members of the group.
Someone raised a question about the checkpoints, and the difficulty for Palestinians to get through even in the case of medical emergencies. “What would you do,” he began, “if you were an 18-year-old soldier at a checkpoint and someone approaches you in a car claiming to have a medical emergency when you know that it could be used to bring in weapons or to commit a terrorist attack?” He turned to me, “what would you do, Steve?” “Well the checkpoints shouldn't be there in the first place...” was all I got out before he cut me off. “That's not what I asked,” he said, turning the question elsewhere. Clearly, he was simply trying to provoke me, an unprofessional and, in my view, embarrassing way for an Israeli government spokesman to behave. Then again, I thought, given the intolerable nature of Israeli policy, I shouldn't be surprised by this attitude. When confronted with serious facts and information, there is no defense other than shouting, distortion, or personal humiliation.
Despite its almost unimaginable heinousness, I do not think that the case for the exceptionalism of the Nazi holocaust stands up to serious historical scrutiny. It is first important to distinguish between “uniqueness” and “exceptionalism.” To be unique means only to be different from all others, while exceptionalism means that all other cases fall into a like category, while one individual case stands out as the only unique case; all others are more or less similar. Further, the concept of ranking atrocities on some sort of moral scale is a pointless endeavor without serious philosophical grounding. Of course, we can say that murdering 5 million people is significantly worse than murdering one person. But can one say that it is worse to kill 6 million jews in gas chambers than it is to incinerate 5 million Indochinese with napalm? The Reaganite campaign of terror directed toward Latin America in the 1980s which killed, maimed, and tortured tens of thousands, leaving four countries in tatters, included the murder of more Nicaraguans per capita than those who have died in all US wars combined. The largest post WWII genocide, in East Timor, was supported by two US Presidents (Carter and Clinton) and resulted in the slaughter of 1/3 of the population of East Timor as well as the massacre of 1 million Indochinese. The list goes on and on. The point is that each of these crimes is somewhat unique, and each terrible. Why should we expend our efforts ranking them?
The Nazi holocaust, of course, should be remembered and commemorated, to examine ourselves and what we are capable of doing, not as nations or countries but as a species. The goal of such commemoration should obviously be to attempt to prevent so vile and ghastly an abomination from ever happening again, and to prompt the sort of criticism and questioning of the goals and indeed “values” which are all too often passively accepted and even enthusiastically championed. It is also a central aspect of Jewish collective memory and cultural history, with good reason. Thus the atrocity is rightly commemorated in the state established as a home for the Jewish people, a need which was advanced immeasurably in the wake of this horrendous act. Unfortunately, yet unsurprisingly, the power of the memory of the Nazi holocaust is manipulated by elites, in Israel and elsewhere in order to justify injustices imposed on others in the present, facilitating the commission of more crimes. Given the scale of the Nazi holocaust, comparisons to present circumstances, always distorted and wildly inaccurate, also allow elites to channel fear and direct hysteria on command toward current establishment enemies. The constant use of the Nazi holocaust to vindicate despicable behavior has been analyzed by many scholars and intellectuals, most famously Tom Segev in his book The Seventh Million and Norman Finklestein in The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. The employment of the memory of this savage act for such purposes denigrates its victims and detracts from the true importance of its remembrance in the service of short-term political gain. Such behavior is shameful and intolerable.
For all these reasons, I was nervous about the potential content of the presentation of the Nazi holocaust at Yed Vashem, the Israeli holocaust museum. The museum was very crowded, uncomfortably so, to a large extent by IDF soldiers who, by their age, I assumed to be cadets or in training of some form. Many of the others were young students, apparently on class trips or on part of a school program. I couldn't keep from contemplating the purpose, or at least the effect, of such education in the grand scheme. The focus on the constant exploitation of Jews throughout their history, culminating in the Nazi holocaust, justly reinforces the belief that the Jewish state of Israel is the most important possession of the Jews as a people. Indeed, the Jewish people coming together to remember and mourn the Nazi holocaust is an important part of cultural heritage and a vital chapter in the national narrative. But the view of all other national and ethno-religious groups as little more than several varieties of lynch mob waiting to “finish the holocaust” and continue the persecution and murder of the Jewish people which has, the view goes, been going on throughout recorded history can also be dangerous. It can generate fear and even hatred of the other; serious education about such history, when subsequently combined with deliberate, strategic manipulation and distortion by political elites, has contributed to Israel's fanatical militarism and the feeling that each surrounding hazard is an existential threat. At the beginning of the tour, our guide stated that “history seems to be repeating itself,” confirming in my mind that the usefulness of the Nazi holocaust for public manipulation was an important reason why the museum was overflowing with swarms of students and, more importantly, 18-year-old IDF soldiers in training. At the conclusion of the tour, she asked us to pray that the IDF would defend the country from the vicious “dwarf” (her term), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, presumably the one attempting to “repeat history.” After all, he had threatened to “wipe Israel off the map,” a stupid threat which the whole world knows to be baseless.
When I raised these issues at the Q&A session after the tour, I provoked much outrage from large segments of the group. The charge was that the tour guide had not intended to suggest that Israel should attack Iran, with some quoting her use of the word “defend.” Of course, it is essential to the proper functioning of aggressive militarist powers that the state be portrayed as taking a defensive stand most of the time. In the modern world, circumstances in which leaders can openly claim their truculent intentions are rare indeed. A good example from recent history is the invasion of Iraq in 2002, a textbook case of aggression (“the supreme international crime”). Despite this uncontroversial observation, at the time state leaders claimed that unless Iraq was attacked immediately there was significant chance of a nuclear attack from Iraq on the United States or Israel. Such rhetoric is pure nonsense, but its effect was to instill a fear in people that made them believe “we” are defending ourselves against an existential threat. Another great example is Nicaragua in the 1980s. In 1984, Ronald Reagan declared a State of Emergency in response to the Sandinista revolution, justifying this by reminding the US citizenry that the small, poor country was just three days' drive to Texas. He renewed this declaration annually throughout the remainder of his Presidency. The sheer absurdity of all this aside, the Emergency was an attempt by the Reaganites to illustrate that the US was terrorizing civilians in Nicaragua out of its own self-defense, not out of aggression. One must also not forget that the US Department of War is now called the “Department of Defense,” the Israeli Army named the “Israel Defense Force,” despite the total failure of the word “defense” to describe most of the activities of either institution.
Despite this misunderstanding, a showcase example of the success of Orwellian nomenclature, the charge that she had not intended to compare Ahmadinejad to Hitler, or to suggest that he would commit a second holocaust, is plainly absurd. This leaving aside the sheer lunacy of the claim that Iran poses any sort of threat to Israel, that according to each of the three major IAEA reports there is no evidence Iran has a nuclear program, and that even if it were the idea that Iran would resign itself to instant annihilation from the United States in order to target Israel with a nuclear weapon, which would also vaporize the Palestinians, is simply asinine. Why conclude a tour about the Nazi holocaust, which ended in 1945, by discussing Ahmadinejad at all? Surely the President of Iran had no hand in the genocide against the Jews in Europe during World War II, the topic of our tour. Is it so outrageous to suggest that no such comparison should be made, and that its only purpose can be to make use of the memory of the holocaust to incite hatred and fear of the man? If I were to conclude a tour about the American Civil War with a discussion about Mao Tse Tung, it would be reasonable, then, for someone to ask what the connection was between the two, why Mao was being brought up in an alien context. And she didn't just mention Ahmadinejad in a foreign context, she took advantage of our emotional vulnerability after learning about one the great horrors of all human history, asking us to pray that the IDF could defend Israel from that “dwarf” who “doesn't even deserve a name.” I ask again: why is this necessary on a tour about the Nazi holocaust?
Our next stop was the Israeli Foreign Ministry. The building was brand new and extremely luxurious. After waiting awhile at security, we walked through a large lobby with high, vaulted ceilings, a piano, and several sofas and chairs placed around the room. The floors were marble, the railings shiny, polished stainless steel. The walls were lit from behind in a very chic and post-modern fashion, with multi-colored lights. The contrast with the conditions in the Palestinian ministries could not have been greater. We took a staircase to a balcony, before entering the “situation room” where we would listen to the presentation. While I expected to be exposed to a warped picture of reality, nothing could have prepared me for the sickening racism and gross misinformation which we were fed. The presentation described how the ungrateful Palestinians had repeatedly turned down Israel's generosity, and that they (not the Israelis or the United States) were largely responsible for the situation as it exists today. This makes logical sense – it is the fault of the victim. If a man rapes a woman, it is her fault, not his, for wearing provocative clothing or for looking at him the wrong way. She was simply asking for it. Those ungrateful savages never knew a good deal when they saw it; Arafat was a rejectionist for turning down Israel's charitable offer at Camp David, which was to annex an additional 10% of the West Bank (perhaps more), leave settlements largely in place, leave Israel in unilateral control of water resources, borders, and security, give the Palestinians nothing in Jerusalem but an office for Arafat and the right to hang a flag, remove most aspects of real sovereignty, and let the Palestinians call what's left a “state.” This, of course, after Arafat had historically conceded 78% of historic Palestine already, agreed to overlook the Zionist campaign of ethnic cleansing in 1948, and well after Israel had already begun to violate most of the minimal requirements placed on it as part of the Oslo Accords.
He also cited this agreement as an example of remarkable Israeli kindness, and of continued Palestinian rejectionism. To illustrate, he focused on the “Letters of Recognition” which preceded Oslo, claiming that these represented the Palestinians and the Israelis recognizing each other. In fact, while the Palestinians recognized the existence of Israel on 78% of historic Palestine, Israel merely recognized Arafat as the leader of the Palestinians. Nowhere in the hundreds of pages of agreements signed as part of the Oslo process does it say that Israel will ever fully withdraw its army from Palestinian territory, nor does it say anything about the settlements, nor did the agreements give the Palestinians a state. What it gave them was a few symbols, the right for Arafat to be called “Mr. Chairman-President,” and for Arab police to replace the IDF in assuming municipal duties in the centers of the largest towns, while Israel retained control of the entries and exits. It legalized the illegal occupation by providing it with an Arab facade behind which to hide in the form of the corrupt and authoritarian Yassir Arafat.
At one point he asked why we believed there had been no peace, after (largely correctly) describing Arafat's sordid history of corruption, scandal, and authoritarian rule. He had also just finished describing Arafat's “rejection of peace” at Camp David, so I surmised that he was expecting an easy answer regarding the failure of the Palestinian leadership. The deceit, lies, and distortion was so great I was outraged, it totally outstripped anything I had expected. I raised my hand. “Because Israel has refused to abide by UN 242 and 338, failed to live up to any of its agreed upon obligations in Camp David in 1978, Oslo, the Roadmap, and most recently Annapolis, continued to reject negotiations with the elected representation of the Palestinian people, expand the settlements, checkpoints, and the wall, accelerated the theft of Palestinian land and resources; bomb, starve, and otherwise deprive innocents in Gaza...” I said, before he cut me off. “I understand where you are coming from politically,” he said, before moving on without addressing any of the points I had just made.
“Hamas is the same as Al Qaeda,” he said, a statement which made me hope he knew better. “That's outrageous,” I blurted out, detailing some of the significant differences between the two organizationally, politically, tactically. In fact, the two have very little in common, other than race and religion, which leads me to believe that it is those factors which drove him to lump them into the same category (a style of thought known as racism). “The point is they both believe in creating an Islamic world caliphate,” he said, “the similarities are in the goals.” Leaving aside the fact that Hamas has never supported any such notion, and certainly does not today having openly endorsed the two-state solution, I responded “then apples are the same as oranges, because you eat them both and they are both fruit.” Obviously, his line of thinking was totally irrational, which made his next comment all the more interesting. “Listen,” he began, “this is the Middle East, not the midwest. These people don't think rationally like you and me.” I again tried to respond to this almost unbelievable degree of racism, but was shouted down by Dr. Lukacs, our group leader, and told to sit down, which I did. “We try to negotiate with Hamas and what we get is this,” he said, pointing at me, “Israel has done this and this and this. You can't get anywhere.” Clearly, he was taunting me. “I never said I supported Hamas,” I tried to defend myself but was quickly told to be quiet by another member of the group, who said “we can listen to you anytime; right now we are here to listen to our esteemed speaker.” Again, I sat in silence, the rage inside me growing to the point where I wanted to walk out of the room and wait for the rest of the group on the bus. The worst part of it all was that the shameful distortions of our “esteemed speaker” were being bought hook, line, and sinker by at least some members of the group.
Someone raised a question about the checkpoints, and the difficulty for Palestinians to get through even in the case of medical emergencies. “What would you do,” he began, “if you were an 18-year-old soldier at a checkpoint and someone approaches you in a car claiming to have a medical emergency when you know that it could be used to bring in weapons or to commit a terrorist attack?” He turned to me, “what would you do, Steve?” “Well the checkpoints shouldn't be there in the first place...” was all I got out before he cut me off. “That's not what I asked,” he said, turning the question elsewhere. Clearly, he was simply trying to provoke me, an unprofessional and, in my view, embarrassing way for an Israeli government spokesman to behave. Then again, I thought, given the intolerable nature of Israeli policy, I shouldn't be surprised by this attitude. When confronted with serious facts and information, there is no defense other than shouting, distortion, or personal humiliation.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Day 2 (June 4): PLO Negotiations Support Unit; Foreign Ministry; Al-Amari Refugee Camp
Crossing the checkpoint into Ramallah was an experience which I will remember for the rest of my life. The word “checkpoint” (or machsum as they are called here) doesn't really do the experience justice; it would be more accurately described as a gateway to another world. The tourist-friendly, historic atmosphere of Jerusalem, while only five miles away, is really light years from al-Bireh, the first town across the Qalandia checkpoint before entering Ramallah proper. The run down, poverty-stricken area is marred with dilapidated buildings, graffiti, and littered with disabled automobiles which are in various states of disrepair. The Arabs, in their tattered and worn rags, bear little resemblance to the wealthy Jewish nightclub patrons wearing fashionable designer clothes and carrying expensive handbags purchased from the large new malls on the other side of the wall, itself a sickening and enraging eyesore. The people here are penned in, excluded from the wealth and pomp of Israeli society not merely informally, as the Jerusalemite Arabs, but literally and directly by a massive concrete barrier complete with sniper towers to ensure its total impermeability.
The border between Israel and the West Bank is approximately 320 km, but the wall is 820 km long, snaking and zigzagging deep into Palestinian territory in order to annex the most valuable land and water resources, protect the illegal settlements, and divide what remains of Palestinian lands into isolated bantustans, destroying even the territorial contiguity within the West Bank. The checkpoints, which make movement from one bantustan to another a very time-consuming and often humiliating affair, also assist with these goals. Crossing to the Arab side of the wall and seeing for the first time “life on the the other side,” a sense of rage and despair overwhelmed me. My colleague, with whom I had been conversing, continued speaking to me as I nodded vacantly, my thoughts elsewhere. The grotesque injustice, the inhumanity, and the racism of Zionist ideology were immediately apparent. It was, to put it mildly, a total shock to the system. I felt like running away crying and screaming. I wanted to smash the wall down with my bare hands, and with it the whole establishment and rotten ideology which maintained and fed it. Surely this could not be the real world.
Our first stop, which we seemingly arrived at instantaneously, was the PLO negotiations support unit. What, I wondered, could there be left to negotiate about? What more could the people here concede before they would be permitted to live their lives, free of occupation, and put an end to the now 60-year-long destruction of their society and economic life? Why is it a concession for the Israelis to respect the basic human rights of these people whom they have oppressed, abused, and crushed? Entering the PLO building, I climbed several flights of stairs in a catatonic, zombie-like state, unable to think or even breathe. The hall was dark - it seemed the electricity was not working, along with the elevator. The contrast with the wealth and extravagance in Israel could not have been more stark. Arriving at the floor where we would have our presentation and exiting the hall, I was confronted with two large portraits, one of Abu Mazen, the other of Yassir Arafat, both US/Israeli cultivated leaders, at best incompetent and at worst dictatorial, self-interested autocrats who cared about nothing but their own wallets and positions of privilege. The endless series of negotiations and “compromises” have accomplished nothing for the Palestinian people, who have continued to get poorer, suffer from the building of the Apartheid annexation wall and the radical expansion of the settlements, and watch as what remains of their lands and resources are shamelessly pilfered by the Israelis. Everything they posses of value is stolen, while they have been ghettoized, shoved into cracks and crevices, forced onto reservations until they either die or simply go away, made to pay for a crime in which they had no hand by a people they have never wronged other than to be living on the land they wanted.
As our speaker entered the room, the somber mood felt heavy, the atmosphere dark and dreary. No one spoke. There was none of the joking or laughter that had characterized our previous interactions. As the PLO representative began to carefully and judiciously recount the consequences of the wall, settlements, and division of the little remaining Palestinian territory, I couldn't escape the feeling of hopeless despair that crept over my body like a disease, my usual capacity for rational thought, reflection, and analysis evaporated. She showed the maps I have seen a thousand times, illustrating the consistent erosion of Palestinian territory and rights, which now took on a whole new meaning. As she spoke, the Zionist project she was describing was being carefully and deliberately advanced just outside the window behind me. The Palestinian nation and “two state solution” were being crushed while the whole world watched, and none of us could do a damn thing about it. Israel, as other US allies, can and does act with total impunity, protected from rightful international opprobrium by the United States and by the sheer might of its economic and military power. I sat through the rest of the presentation in a state of nausea and disgust, unable to get a grip on myself or overcome the overwhelming feeling of despondency.
Our next stop was the Palestinian Foreign Ministry, the organization nominally charged with advancing the Palestinians' national interests vis-a-vis other nations. The display put on there by the leadership was, simply put, a stunning farce. As we entered the conference room, I noticed that at the head of the table there was an American and Palestinian flag side by side, as if to illustrate the wonderful friendship between the two groups. Once the Foreign Minister entered, I noticed that he was also wearing a lapel pin with the two flags crossed. Imagine for one moment, I thought to myself, that President Bush wore the same pin, the Palestinian flag featured side by side on his suit with the American one. One could barely imagine what the reaction would be. This says a great deal about he nature of the “friendship” between Palestine and the United States; the Americans dictate the policy, and the pathetic, whimpering Palestinian leadership trails happily along, conceding whatever is necessary to save their own skin and remain a “peace partner.” I wondered: would the Foreign Minister wear a pin with the Israeli and Palestinian flags crossed? There is, after all, very little difference between the two. Israel's lawless conduct in the occupied territories and elsewhere in the world would not be able to continue for one week (perhaps one hour) without radical US military and economic support, nor without its consistent diplomatic shielding which blocks Israel from condemnation at the UN and elsewhere. It is no secret in the world of international affairs that if one goes up against Israel, they are soon going to be staring down the greatest economic and military force the world has ever known, with a nearly unlimited capacity for ruthless destruction and outright brutality. Very few nations can afford the result of such a challenge, the minimum result of which would be membership in the “axis of evil,” a supporter of “terror,” and addition to the list of potential targets, subject to attack at any time, under any useable pretext.
It didn't take long for our speaker, the Foreign Minister himself, to reveal my unfavorable perception of the Ministry and the PA in general to be a drastic understatement. The real enemy, we were informed, is Hamas, while “President Bush is doing his utmost for the peace process.” Thus, the best thing the Palestinians can do is to follow “President Bush's vision of a two-state solution.” Of course, in some sense this is true, since the “peace process” in its post-Oslo form (the Taba Conference is the one exception) seems to entail little more than extracting concession after concession from the gang of authoritarian buffoons masquerading as Palestinian representatives, legitimizing Israel's grotesque occupation, its blatant and ugly system of apartheid, and overtly cheating the Palestinians out of any chance of achieving a viable state. In this sense, President Bush has achieved great progress toward achieving peace, supporting Israeli policy with the same zeal as previous, and predictably future, Presidents. “President Bush's vision,” shared by the Israelis, is to destroy the two state solution as a viable option by creating “facts on the ground” designed to sabotage its long-planned implementation. If the US and Israelis are at some point forced to break their long rejectionist streak and actually create a state for the Palestinians, one could imagine that it would be lacking real sovereignty, in accordance with the plan unveiled at Oslo. After giving his presentation, the Foreign Minister informed us that he had to attend a meeting, leaving his short, sniveling, and overweight underling to answer whatever questions we may have.
I decided that this time I would speak up. “The Foreign Minister made some interesting comments,” I began, my voice shaking with emotion, I felt myself on the verge of tears. “He said that Bush is doing his best for a two state solution, and that at worst, the Americans have been disengaged from the process. How can you say that Hamas is really the problem when Israel bombs Gaza every day, with US-supplied F-16s, murdering hundreds of civilians? How can you say the Americans are 'disengaged from the peace process' when they supply Israel with $7 million in aid per day and unrivaled, unconditional diplomatic support for their policies?” The deputy, quickly revealing himself to be an incompetent twit (imagine my surprise), began to mumble some idiotic response about the occupation having gone on too long, making little effort to answer the question. I sat in shock. This bumbling fool, wearing an American flag on his suit jacket and speaking about “President Bush's vision” was part of the cabal who had adorned themselves the responsibility of protecting the Palestinian's future as a people, fighting for their rights on the international stage. He and his fellow partisans were the rough equivalent of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, or Gandhi. The differences in attitude and moral fortitude are so tremendous it is barely worth contemplating. Imagine Gandhi wearing the Union Jack, and discussing how the best way forward for the Indian people is to follow the “vision” of Queen Victoria or the President of the East India Company. Dear God, I thought, this is hopeless.
Sometimes in such situations one finds hope in seemingly unlikely places. For me, I found it in the Al-Amari refugee camp, on the outskirts of Ramallah. The poverty was staggering; the people in the camp have nothing (the situation for the refugees in Lebanon is even worse). Children were running around everywhere, barefoot; destroyed cars and car parts littered the road. The children's toys were broken and dirty, the shabby, ramshackle living quarters filled with eyes staring at us as we walked by. A few of my group were passing out candy to the children, who greedily grabbed it and ran away. Kids walked up to us, asking us to take their photograph, shake their hand, meet their brother or sister. The sense of community and hopefulness in the camp was unmistakeable and unforgettable. There was a warmth and positivity which seemed to ooze out of every cracked wall, despite the desperate conditions all around. Many of the fighters from the intifada had come from this camp; their pictures adorned the walls in their memory alongside the holes from the bullets that aimed to kill them. As we walked through the camp with our cameras out, our Arab driver, Ayman, told me that from the conversations he overheard as we were passing he gathered that many of the people thought we were making a movie for American television. At one point, a young boy, with dirt on his face, approached me. “Are you from America?” he asked me. “Yes, I am,” I replied. “Is it beautiful there?” Surrounded by the filth, muck, and ruin of the camp, I did not know how to respond. Finally, I managed to choke out “yes,” before I walked away.
Aside from the positive feeling which permeated the camp, I realized that if I gave up hope, while living a life of privilege unimaginable to those stuck in this camp, how could I expect them to maintain it? Should I, like so many others, sit by and watch as the Arab inhabitants of Palestine are ground into the dirt by the boot-heel of the Israelis? No, I resolved. Such a decision would be immoral, especially given the large hand the US government plays in perpetuating this revolting policy of occupation and robbery. I will spend my life vocally opposing such injustice, drawing attention to such cruelty in the loudest way I can. I have been an activist for a good part of my life; now, working on my Master's degree, I am becoming an academic. I hope I never lose the rage I feel today. I will never complacently substitute my desire to rail against this and so many other crimes with petty concern for a larger salary, a bigger house, a nicer car. To do so would make me complacent in allowing it to continue. As the great historian and intellectual Howard Zinn put it, “you can't be neutral on a moving train.” Once again, Zinn is correct.
The border between Israel and the West Bank is approximately 320 km, but the wall is 820 km long, snaking and zigzagging deep into Palestinian territory in order to annex the most valuable land and water resources, protect the illegal settlements, and divide what remains of Palestinian lands into isolated bantustans, destroying even the territorial contiguity within the West Bank. The checkpoints, which make movement from one bantustan to another a very time-consuming and often humiliating affair, also assist with these goals. Crossing to the Arab side of the wall and seeing for the first time “life on the the other side,” a sense of rage and despair overwhelmed me. My colleague, with whom I had been conversing, continued speaking to me as I nodded vacantly, my thoughts elsewhere. The grotesque injustice, the inhumanity, and the racism of Zionist ideology were immediately apparent. It was, to put it mildly, a total shock to the system. I felt like running away crying and screaming. I wanted to smash the wall down with my bare hands, and with it the whole establishment and rotten ideology which maintained and fed it. Surely this could not be the real world.
Our first stop, which we seemingly arrived at instantaneously, was the PLO negotiations support unit. What, I wondered, could there be left to negotiate about? What more could the people here concede before they would be permitted to live their lives, free of occupation, and put an end to the now 60-year-long destruction of their society and economic life? Why is it a concession for the Israelis to respect the basic human rights of these people whom they have oppressed, abused, and crushed? Entering the PLO building, I climbed several flights of stairs in a catatonic, zombie-like state, unable to think or even breathe. The hall was dark - it seemed the electricity was not working, along with the elevator. The contrast with the wealth and extravagance in Israel could not have been more stark. Arriving at the floor where we would have our presentation and exiting the hall, I was confronted with two large portraits, one of Abu Mazen, the other of Yassir Arafat, both US/Israeli cultivated leaders, at best incompetent and at worst dictatorial, self-interested autocrats who cared about nothing but their own wallets and positions of privilege. The endless series of negotiations and “compromises” have accomplished nothing for the Palestinian people, who have continued to get poorer, suffer from the building of the Apartheid annexation wall and the radical expansion of the settlements, and watch as what remains of their lands and resources are shamelessly pilfered by the Israelis. Everything they posses of value is stolen, while they have been ghettoized, shoved into cracks and crevices, forced onto reservations until they either die or simply go away, made to pay for a crime in which they had no hand by a people they have never wronged other than to be living on the land they wanted.
As our speaker entered the room, the somber mood felt heavy, the atmosphere dark and dreary. No one spoke. There was none of the joking or laughter that had characterized our previous interactions. As the PLO representative began to carefully and judiciously recount the consequences of the wall, settlements, and division of the little remaining Palestinian territory, I couldn't escape the feeling of hopeless despair that crept over my body like a disease, my usual capacity for rational thought, reflection, and analysis evaporated. She showed the maps I have seen a thousand times, illustrating the consistent erosion of Palestinian territory and rights, which now took on a whole new meaning. As she spoke, the Zionist project she was describing was being carefully and deliberately advanced just outside the window behind me. The Palestinian nation and “two state solution” were being crushed while the whole world watched, and none of us could do a damn thing about it. Israel, as other US allies, can and does act with total impunity, protected from rightful international opprobrium by the United States and by the sheer might of its economic and military power. I sat through the rest of the presentation in a state of nausea and disgust, unable to get a grip on myself or overcome the overwhelming feeling of despondency.
Our next stop was the Palestinian Foreign Ministry, the organization nominally charged with advancing the Palestinians' national interests vis-a-vis other nations. The display put on there by the leadership was, simply put, a stunning farce. As we entered the conference room, I noticed that at the head of the table there was an American and Palestinian flag side by side, as if to illustrate the wonderful friendship between the two groups. Once the Foreign Minister entered, I noticed that he was also wearing a lapel pin with the two flags crossed. Imagine for one moment, I thought to myself, that President Bush wore the same pin, the Palestinian flag featured side by side on his suit with the American one. One could barely imagine what the reaction would be. This says a great deal about he nature of the “friendship” between Palestine and the United States; the Americans dictate the policy, and the pathetic, whimpering Palestinian leadership trails happily along, conceding whatever is necessary to save their own skin and remain a “peace partner.” I wondered: would the Foreign Minister wear a pin with the Israeli and Palestinian flags crossed? There is, after all, very little difference between the two. Israel's lawless conduct in the occupied territories and elsewhere in the world would not be able to continue for one week (perhaps one hour) without radical US military and economic support, nor without its consistent diplomatic shielding which blocks Israel from condemnation at the UN and elsewhere. It is no secret in the world of international affairs that if one goes up against Israel, they are soon going to be staring down the greatest economic and military force the world has ever known, with a nearly unlimited capacity for ruthless destruction and outright brutality. Very few nations can afford the result of such a challenge, the minimum result of which would be membership in the “axis of evil,” a supporter of “terror,” and addition to the list of potential targets, subject to attack at any time, under any useable pretext.
It didn't take long for our speaker, the Foreign Minister himself, to reveal my unfavorable perception of the Ministry and the PA in general to be a drastic understatement. The real enemy, we were informed, is Hamas, while “President Bush is doing his utmost for the peace process.” Thus, the best thing the Palestinians can do is to follow “President Bush's vision of a two-state solution.” Of course, in some sense this is true, since the “peace process” in its post-Oslo form (the Taba Conference is the one exception) seems to entail little more than extracting concession after concession from the gang of authoritarian buffoons masquerading as Palestinian representatives, legitimizing Israel's grotesque occupation, its blatant and ugly system of apartheid, and overtly cheating the Palestinians out of any chance of achieving a viable state. In this sense, President Bush has achieved great progress toward achieving peace, supporting Israeli policy with the same zeal as previous, and predictably future, Presidents. “President Bush's vision,” shared by the Israelis, is to destroy the two state solution as a viable option by creating “facts on the ground” designed to sabotage its long-planned implementation. If the US and Israelis are at some point forced to break their long rejectionist streak and actually create a state for the Palestinians, one could imagine that it would be lacking real sovereignty, in accordance with the plan unveiled at Oslo. After giving his presentation, the Foreign Minister informed us that he had to attend a meeting, leaving his short, sniveling, and overweight underling to answer whatever questions we may have.
I decided that this time I would speak up. “The Foreign Minister made some interesting comments,” I began, my voice shaking with emotion, I felt myself on the verge of tears. “He said that Bush is doing his best for a two state solution, and that at worst, the Americans have been disengaged from the process. How can you say that Hamas is really the problem when Israel bombs Gaza every day, with US-supplied F-16s, murdering hundreds of civilians? How can you say the Americans are 'disengaged from the peace process' when they supply Israel with $7 million in aid per day and unrivaled, unconditional diplomatic support for their policies?” The deputy, quickly revealing himself to be an incompetent twit (imagine my surprise), began to mumble some idiotic response about the occupation having gone on too long, making little effort to answer the question. I sat in shock. This bumbling fool, wearing an American flag on his suit jacket and speaking about “President Bush's vision” was part of the cabal who had adorned themselves the responsibility of protecting the Palestinian's future as a people, fighting for their rights on the international stage. He and his fellow partisans were the rough equivalent of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, or Gandhi. The differences in attitude and moral fortitude are so tremendous it is barely worth contemplating. Imagine Gandhi wearing the Union Jack, and discussing how the best way forward for the Indian people is to follow the “vision” of Queen Victoria or the President of the East India Company. Dear God, I thought, this is hopeless.
Sometimes in such situations one finds hope in seemingly unlikely places. For me, I found it in the Al-Amari refugee camp, on the outskirts of Ramallah. The poverty was staggering; the people in the camp have nothing (the situation for the refugees in Lebanon is even worse). Children were running around everywhere, barefoot; destroyed cars and car parts littered the road. The children's toys were broken and dirty, the shabby, ramshackle living quarters filled with eyes staring at us as we walked by. A few of my group were passing out candy to the children, who greedily grabbed it and ran away. Kids walked up to us, asking us to take their photograph, shake their hand, meet their brother or sister. The sense of community and hopefulness in the camp was unmistakeable and unforgettable. There was a warmth and positivity which seemed to ooze out of every cracked wall, despite the desperate conditions all around. Many of the fighters from the intifada had come from this camp; their pictures adorned the walls in their memory alongside the holes from the bullets that aimed to kill them. As we walked through the camp with our cameras out, our Arab driver, Ayman, told me that from the conversations he overheard as we were passing he gathered that many of the people thought we were making a movie for American television. At one point, a young boy, with dirt on his face, approached me. “Are you from America?” he asked me. “Yes, I am,” I replied. “Is it beautiful there?” Surrounded by the filth, muck, and ruin of the camp, I did not know how to respond. Finally, I managed to choke out “yes,” before I walked away.
Aside from the positive feeling which permeated the camp, I realized that if I gave up hope, while living a life of privilege unimaginable to those stuck in this camp, how could I expect them to maintain it? Should I, like so many others, sit by and watch as the Arab inhabitants of Palestine are ground into the dirt by the boot-heel of the Israelis? No, I resolved. Such a decision would be immoral, especially given the large hand the US government plays in perpetuating this revolting policy of occupation and robbery. I will spend my life vocally opposing such injustice, drawing attention to such cruelty in the loudest way I can. I have been an activist for a good part of my life; now, working on my Master's degree, I am becoming an academic. I hope I never lose the rage I feel today. I will never complacently substitute my desire to rail against this and so many other crimes with petty concern for a larger salary, a bigger house, a nicer car. To do so would make me complacent in allowing it to continue. As the great historian and intellectual Howard Zinn put it, “you can't be neutral on a moving train.” Once again, Zinn is correct.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Day 1 (June 3): Jerusalem Tour; Old City; Holy Sites
East Jerusalem, where our hotel (oddly named the “Christmas Hotel”) is located does not feel like a city under military occupation, nor does it have the air of a site of tremendous struggle and friction. The surroundings seem lush and full of life. One can feel the tension, however, between the many religious movements which have their holiest sites in the near vicinity, each in some sense trying to denigrate the other. On the surface, the fact that all this land is illegally occupied by the Israelis is barely noticeable; there are few tangible signs of this fact. There are soldiers with guns standing on the occasional corner, but none of the blatant illustrations of occupation one would expect to see. Perhaps the city has been properly cleansed of its discontents and rabble-rousers, successfully replaced with a victorious Jewish population. It is true, after all, that over 50% of the city's inhabitants are Jewish. The de-arabization of this land, begun in earnest by the likes of David Ben-Gurion in 1948, a vicious campaign of deliberate ethnic cleansing as Israel's new historians have revealed, seems like a distant memory or a fairy-tale. There are no apparent challenges to the hegemony of Israeli symbols. The Israeli flag flies everywhere; it is illegal for the Palestinian flag to match it. The kuffiya which are sold in nearly every market in the Old City are not adorned by anyone; they are seemingly little more than an item to amuse tourists fascinated by Orientalist images of “the Middle East” and “the Arabs.” It seems that I have seen more kuffiya in Washington DC than here in Jerusalem, the capital of Palestine.
The effort to cleanse Palestine of its native inhabitants has been extended, through various means, by each successive Zionist leader as part of the struggle to find “a land without a people for a people without a land.” The problem, of course, is that there were people on the land that was taken by force in 1948, 1967, and consistently thereafter by expanding settlements, constructing the wall, and forcing the Palestinians to accept it all at Oslo, beginning a “peace process” which serves as a shroud for the accelerated theft of Palestinian land and resources today. It is all a very familiar and depressing repetition of history, as the natives are stolen from, beaten back, and subjugated by the white man, while a corrupt and self-interested “chief” (Mr. Arafat) provides the enterprise legitimacy with a stroke of a pen. I wonder if I will ever be able to look at the countryside of the United States the same again.
Jerusalem, though, is a beautiful and historic city. As I toured the various religious sites, I tried to get my thoughts away from the idea that the land was stolen; occupied. The Dome of the Rock is of course the focal point of the historic city, its majestic golden dome dominating the landscape. As we slowly walked through the Haram e Sharif, I found it impossible to focus on the droning, monotonous recitation of ancient history by our tour guide. His presentation seemed unimportant and tangential in a place of such contemporary importance, an example of injustice on an unimaginable scale with so clear and tangible a culprit. In this the Palestinian cause is a separate phenomenon from, say, starvation in Haiti. It is not the result of abstract economic forces, or even of the inequities necessarily present in capitalist social organization. It is rather the result of deliberate, radical oppression, apartheid, and dispossession, all funded and perpetuated with American tax dollars and, theoretically, with the democratic consent of the American people. As I look around the haram, I am again struck that amidst all the strife it is a remarkably peaceful place; all around, men lounge in the shade of the trees, sitting around and absorbing the atmosphere, a pleasure and a peace denied to so many West Bankers. It is indeed a majestic site. The Al Aqsa mosque is a less inviting but also important structure, dwarfed by the beauty of the Dome of the Rock. The Muslims among us were alone allowed entry, a consequence of Sharon's arrogant intrusion in 2000 which began the 2nd intifada, and another subtle reminder of the destructive impact of Israeli policy.
We next proceeded to the “Temple Mount,” which is part of the Haram e Sharif (physically, not spiritually). The jews believe it to be the remnants of the 2nd Temple, destroyed several thousand years ago by the Romans. For them, it is a very holy site. Orthodox Jews were gathered at the wall, bobbing their heads in prayer while imagining what once stood. The segregation at the site was appalling, however, as the side for women was totally walled off from that of the men. It was much smaller, and very crowded, while the side for the males was open and at least twice as large. It struck me how Orientalist portrayals of Islam as the backward religion of male-female segregation and unusual dress and behavior (and focusing mainly on the rather conservative, Saudi-style Salafist Islam) seem never to take into account the practices of the more “western” (whatever the meaning of the term) religions which are often strikingly similar. Many of the Jews I have seen walking around Jerusalem cover their hair, while the men wear long beards and “ear-locks,” odd-looking growths of curly hair which hang down the sides of their faces just before the ear. Christians seem to be the most open, although I have of course seen nuns with their hair covered with bizarre hats of several varieties. Perhaps religious orthodoxy (or even religion itself) provokes the practice of eccentric ritualistic behavior, in any of its forms.
As I contemplate this, I am reminded of the consequences of the style of thought necessary to believe in religion. Insistence on holding an irrational belief, for which there is no evidence and indeed much to the contrary, requires the willingness to surrender one's faculties for critical reasoning and accept The Truth, regardless of its negligible connection to the observable, measurable world. It is religion, after all, that allows the continuing oppression of the Palestinian people, as radical Jewish settlers proclaim their right to settle “the land of Israel,” backed by the wealthy and powerful state apparatus. It is this same radically conservative religiosity which causes large segments of the Israeli population to reject even the rhetoric of peace, such as that purveyed by Yitzak Rabin until his assassination by a crazed fanatic in 1995. It is unfortunate that the Palestinian resistance is increasingly framed in religious terms, a consequence that is, in part, a result of the reality that it is the Jewish state they are opposing. The establishment of the state of Israel as an explicitly Jewish one also contributed to the rise in militant Islam as the preeminent resistance ideology throughout the Arab / Muslim world after the humiliating defeat of Nasser by the pre-emptive Israeli strike in 1967. It is natural to view members of other faiths as less than human, legitimating the theft of their land and resources and in some cases justifying their wholesale slaughter. It was a variety of this same irrational fanaticism which produced the Nazi holocaust; although in its more covert, state-worship form: fascism.
As we wrap up our tour near the wall of the Old City, our guide reminds us that this “used to be” the eastern Israeli border, before the 1967 war, another Truth. Of course, this still is the border, as recognized by the whole of the international community with the exception of Israel and the United States, supported by international law (the UN charter, for instance, speaks of “the inadmissibility of territory acquired by force). I wanted to speak up, but for some reason I held my tongue. After all, I reminded myself, we will be hearing a variety of viewpoints on this trip. But what really bothered me was the total indifference of our Jewish tour guide to the plain fact that this land belonged to others, and was being illegally and unjustly occupied by the Israelis while the Palestinians were herded onto “reservations;” bantustans of the most undesirable, resource-poor land. In her passivity it was clear that she made no effort to understand or incorporate the narrative and struggle of an oppressed and dispossessed people, the victims of the Zionist ideology espoused by her government. The problem, perhaps, is one of education. She was never taught in school, I would suppose (just as I wasn't), to listen to the pleas of the suffering and the weak; human beings who deserve equality and justice. To her, perhaps, this land was “liberated” and “reunited,” rescued from the barbaric clutches of the brown people and returned to the hands of the decent, civilized west. It is understandable, in this context, to see how so many of the people in this part of the world draw comparisons between Zionism and the Crusades. Underpinning both ideologies is the same racist assumption: “our” lives are worth more than “theirs;” “we” must succeed in wresting control of so important a place from the tentacles of the native savages so it can be protected and properly honored by the more “civilized” societies in the world. Photographs shown at one of our tour stops of a picture of one of the Jewish holy sites upon the “liberation” of Jerusalem, dilapidated and with a donkey tied up out front, contrasted with a photo of it in its restored splendor today, confirmed in my mind that this was indeed a prevailing mindset in Zionist culture.
The effort to cleanse Palestine of its native inhabitants has been extended, through various means, by each successive Zionist leader as part of the struggle to find “a land without a people for a people without a land.” The problem, of course, is that there were people on the land that was taken by force in 1948, 1967, and consistently thereafter by expanding settlements, constructing the wall, and forcing the Palestinians to accept it all at Oslo, beginning a “peace process” which serves as a shroud for the accelerated theft of Palestinian land and resources today. It is all a very familiar and depressing repetition of history, as the natives are stolen from, beaten back, and subjugated by the white man, while a corrupt and self-interested “chief” (Mr. Arafat) provides the enterprise legitimacy with a stroke of a pen. I wonder if I will ever be able to look at the countryside of the United States the same again.
Jerusalem, though, is a beautiful and historic city. As I toured the various religious sites, I tried to get my thoughts away from the idea that the land was stolen; occupied. The Dome of the Rock is of course the focal point of the historic city, its majestic golden dome dominating the landscape. As we slowly walked through the Haram e Sharif, I found it impossible to focus on the droning, monotonous recitation of ancient history by our tour guide. His presentation seemed unimportant and tangential in a place of such contemporary importance, an example of injustice on an unimaginable scale with so clear and tangible a culprit. In this the Palestinian cause is a separate phenomenon from, say, starvation in Haiti. It is not the result of abstract economic forces, or even of the inequities necessarily present in capitalist social organization. It is rather the result of deliberate, radical oppression, apartheid, and dispossession, all funded and perpetuated with American tax dollars and, theoretically, with the democratic consent of the American people. As I look around the haram, I am again struck that amidst all the strife it is a remarkably peaceful place; all around, men lounge in the shade of the trees, sitting around and absorbing the atmosphere, a pleasure and a peace denied to so many West Bankers. It is indeed a majestic site. The Al Aqsa mosque is a less inviting but also important structure, dwarfed by the beauty of the Dome of the Rock. The Muslims among us were alone allowed entry, a consequence of Sharon's arrogant intrusion in 2000 which began the 2nd intifada, and another subtle reminder of the destructive impact of Israeli policy.
We next proceeded to the “Temple Mount,” which is part of the Haram e Sharif (physically, not spiritually). The jews believe it to be the remnants of the 2nd Temple, destroyed several thousand years ago by the Romans. For them, it is a very holy site. Orthodox Jews were gathered at the wall, bobbing their heads in prayer while imagining what once stood. The segregation at the site was appalling, however, as the side for women was totally walled off from that of the men. It was much smaller, and very crowded, while the side for the males was open and at least twice as large. It struck me how Orientalist portrayals of Islam as the backward religion of male-female segregation and unusual dress and behavior (and focusing mainly on the rather conservative, Saudi-style Salafist Islam) seem never to take into account the practices of the more “western” (whatever the meaning of the term) religions which are often strikingly similar. Many of the Jews I have seen walking around Jerusalem cover their hair, while the men wear long beards and “ear-locks,” odd-looking growths of curly hair which hang down the sides of their faces just before the ear. Christians seem to be the most open, although I have of course seen nuns with their hair covered with bizarre hats of several varieties. Perhaps religious orthodoxy (or even religion itself) provokes the practice of eccentric ritualistic behavior, in any of its forms.
As I contemplate this, I am reminded of the consequences of the style of thought necessary to believe in religion. Insistence on holding an irrational belief, for which there is no evidence and indeed much to the contrary, requires the willingness to surrender one's faculties for critical reasoning and accept The Truth, regardless of its negligible connection to the observable, measurable world. It is religion, after all, that allows the continuing oppression of the Palestinian people, as radical Jewish settlers proclaim their right to settle “the land of Israel,” backed by the wealthy and powerful state apparatus. It is this same radically conservative religiosity which causes large segments of the Israeli population to reject even the rhetoric of peace, such as that purveyed by Yitzak Rabin until his assassination by a crazed fanatic in 1995. It is unfortunate that the Palestinian resistance is increasingly framed in religious terms, a consequence that is, in part, a result of the reality that it is the Jewish state they are opposing. The establishment of the state of Israel as an explicitly Jewish one also contributed to the rise in militant Islam as the preeminent resistance ideology throughout the Arab / Muslim world after the humiliating defeat of Nasser by the pre-emptive Israeli strike in 1967. It is natural to view members of other faiths as less than human, legitimating the theft of their land and resources and in some cases justifying their wholesale slaughter. It was a variety of this same irrational fanaticism which produced the Nazi holocaust; although in its more covert, state-worship form: fascism.
As we wrap up our tour near the wall of the Old City, our guide reminds us that this “used to be” the eastern Israeli border, before the 1967 war, another Truth. Of course, this still is the border, as recognized by the whole of the international community with the exception of Israel and the United States, supported by international law (the UN charter, for instance, speaks of “the inadmissibility of territory acquired by force). I wanted to speak up, but for some reason I held my tongue. After all, I reminded myself, we will be hearing a variety of viewpoints on this trip. But what really bothered me was the total indifference of our Jewish tour guide to the plain fact that this land belonged to others, and was being illegally and unjustly occupied by the Israelis while the Palestinians were herded onto “reservations;” bantustans of the most undesirable, resource-poor land. In her passivity it was clear that she made no effort to understand or incorporate the narrative and struggle of an oppressed and dispossessed people, the victims of the Zionist ideology espoused by her government. The problem, perhaps, is one of education. She was never taught in school, I would suppose (just as I wasn't), to listen to the pleas of the suffering and the weak; human beings who deserve equality and justice. To her, perhaps, this land was “liberated” and “reunited,” rescued from the barbaric clutches of the brown people and returned to the hands of the decent, civilized west. It is understandable, in this context, to see how so many of the people in this part of the world draw comparisons between Zionism and the Crusades. Underpinning both ideologies is the same racist assumption: “our” lives are worth more than “theirs;” “we” must succeed in wresting control of so important a place from the tentacles of the native savages so it can be protected and properly honored by the more “civilized” societies in the world. Photographs shown at one of our tour stops of a picture of one of the Jewish holy sites upon the “liberation” of Jerusalem, dilapidated and with a donkey tied up out front, contrasted with a photo of it in its restored splendor today, confirmed in my mind that this was indeed a prevailing mindset in Zionist culture.
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