In Memory of Iman Al-Hams, On the Third Anniversary of Her Murder

This was first published in 3QuarksDaily

The daily realities of living under an illegal military occupation are unimaginable to anyone who hasn’t lived under them. No matter how much one writes, it is impossible to convey the ghastliness, injustice, oppressiveness and inhumanity of being ruled over by a repressive military accountable to no one. The death of Iman Al-Hams, however, may provide an illustrative anecdote.

On the morning of the 5th of October, 2004, a morning as rudimentarily awful as any lived under a brutal occupation, 13-year-old Iman, wearing her blue and white school uniform and carrying her schoolbag, left her house in Rafah refugee camp to go to school. Iman wandered a few meters away from her usual route to school and ventured into the large security zone surrounding an Israeli military base, which is, as is common, located near Palestinian civilians’ houses and schools. What follows is a gruesome tale of sickeningly cold-blooded murder.

Iman was spotted by the Israeli military base’s watchtower. She was about 100 yards away from the military base when the following conversation took place between a soldier in the watchtower, an army operations room and a certain Captain R, who remains unnamed to this day:

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From the watchtower: “It’s a little girl. She’s running defensively eastward.”

From the operations room: “Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?”

Watchtower: “A girl about 10, she’s behind the embankment, scared to death.”

A few minutes later, Iman is shot from one of the army posts

Watchtower: “I think that one of the positions took her out.”

Captain R: “I and another soldier … are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill … Receive a situation report. We fired and killed her … I also confirmed the kill. Over.”

Captain R—along with another soldier—walks towards Iman, and shoots two bullets at point-blank range into her head to “confirm the kill.” He starts to head back to his base, before turning around again and emptying all the bullets from his machine gun into the body of Iman.

Captain R then “clarifies” why he killed Iman: “This is commander. Anything that’s mobile, that moves in the zone, even if it’s a three-year-old, needs to be killed. Over.”

**************

After she was taken to the hospital, doctors counted 17 bullet wounds in Iman’s body, and three in her head, though they were unsure of the exact number since her little body was shattered to the point where one couldn’t accurately count how many bullets had riddled it.

Anywhere in the world, you would expect such a murderer to be tried and to receive a very harsh sentence. Unfortunately, the laws that apply in most of the world do not apply to Palestinian children and their murderers. An Israeli military court, on October 15, 2004, cleared the soldier of any wrongdoing or unethical behavior, declaring that “confirming the kill” is standard procedure.

A few of the soldiers serving with Captian R seem to have not been satisfied. They were apparently motivated by racist animosity towards him (he is Druze, they are Jewish), and took the matter to a Military Police court. He was charged not with the murder of Iman, but with “illegal use of his weapon, conduct unbecoming an officer and perverting the course of justice.” He was cleared on all counts.

To add insult to fatal and gruesome injury, Captain R was then compensated with 80,000 Israeli Sheckels (around US$20,000) plus legal fees for the inconvenience of being taken to court over a triviality such as the life of a Palestinian child. The court also criticized the Military Police for investigating the case in the first place. Captain R was then promoted to the rank of Major, and continues to serve in the Israeli Army, where he may well have murdered other children in the past three years.

This is by no means an isolated incident or a freak failing of the “justice” system, but rather one example of many such stories that will shock anyone with an ounce of conscience or humanity in them. One could write whole books with the stories of children like Iman, killed in callous cold blood, whose murderers faced no repercussions whatsoever for their crimes. Since 2000, almost 1,000 Palestinian children have been murdered by the Israeli Army, and countless other thousands injured. Not a single Israeli soldier has faced any form of punishment, demotion, or even reprimand over any of these murders.

As The Guardian’s Chris McGreal put it back in June 2005:

B’Tselem argues that a lack of accountability and rules of engagement that “encourage a trigger-happy attitude among soldiers” have created a “culture of impunity” – a view backed by the New York-based Human Rights Watch, which last week described many army investigations of civilian killings as a “sham … that encourages soldiers to think they can literally get away with murder”.

In southern Gaza, the killings take place in a climate that amounts to a form of terror against the population. Random fire into Rafah and Khan Yunis has claimed hundreds of lives, including five children shot as they sat at their school desks. Many others have died when the snipers must have known who was in their sights – children playing football, sitting outside home, walking back from school. Almost always “investigations” amount to asking the soldier who pulled the trigger what happened – often they claim there was a gun battle when there was none – and presenting it as fact.

The tragedy of these stories is not just that these lives of innocent children have been lost, but that the Israeli Army, backed by the government, has made it entirely clear that all Palestinians are fair game to their soldiers. Had Iman’s murder been an isolated incident whose perpetrator was punished, one could argue that the Israeli army was not complicit in it. But by acquitting the proudly self-confessed murderer, along with hundreds of his likes, the army is sending a clear message to anyone who would listen that it is an institution that finds child-murder acceptable.

This is illustrative of the real injustice and tragedy of the occupation. Callow 18-year-olds, drunk on their power, sit behind some of the most sophisticated murder machinery in the world and unleash it on a civilian population. Their trigger-happy guns are the only judge, jury and executioner around. There are no moral imperatives, no accountability, and not even any incentive to attempt to minimize damage to civilians. The lives of those surrounding this murder machinery are dispensable.

This is why it is imperative that the occupation end. It is a fundamental right of the Palestinian people, like any other people, not to have their children murdered with impunity by an occupying army. Only when this happens can there be any prospect for peace. Ending the occupation is not conditioned on what the Palestinians do or how they behave, or whether they resist the occupation or not; it is a fundamental right for Palestinians, on a par with the right not to be enslaved.

Under occupation, every child, woman and man is collateral damage waiting to happen. Three years ago it was Iman’s turn. If the world lets the madness of this occupation continue, we will witness a new Iman Al-Hams every day, and our silence will make us complicit in her murder as well.
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European Hypocrisy

Tony Karon, a good friend of mine, is a South African who was part of the anti-apartheid movement before moving to America and becoming editor in chief of Time.com. He also writes regularly on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and Middle East politics in general. His personal blog, Rootless Cosmopolitan, is one of the best places to go for analysis of Middle East issues in particular, and global politics in general. And he is one of the few people that are as rabid as I am in supporting Liverpool FC!

A few weeks ago I wrote an article for his blog on European policy in the Middle East. Make sure you check out the rest of Tony’s excellent site for some really fascinating writing and excellent insight.

Excerpt:

“The tragic aspect of Europe’s policy with regard to Palestine today is not just that is practically indistinguishable from the policy of the US, but that it comes bundled with great self-righteousness and an unshakable belief that it is not only the correct policy, but is also vastly morally superior to anything anyone else is doing. The financial aid provided by Europe is the major rationale supporting this smugness.

“Here is a small microcosm of how this madness works: A Palestinian town has a wall built surrounding it from all sides, making it impossible for previously prosperous farmers to access their land, patients to reach their doctors and children to reach their schools. Naturally, the town is devastated. That’s when Europeans send in their conscience-assuaging, smugness-propping aid “experts” to “save” the town, in the process relieving Israel from having to deal with the consequences of its crimes. They provide the farmers with food instead of the food they could have produced themselves, and proceed with projects to teach Palestinians “alternative industries”, “new business models”, “good local governance”, “participatory development”, “creative educational techniques” and countless other meaningless prattle that the Palestinians would gladly give up for having the wall removed, an independent state and some sense of normalcy bestowed on their lives. Naturally, these projects have a short shelf-life; the funding soon dries up, the “experts” leave, but the apartheid wall remains, the livelihood of a whole town is devastated, and the mirage of Palestinian independence is even more distant.”

Read the rest of it here

How to Make Enemies and Destroy Cities

American taxpayer money at work in Jenin (left) and American taxpayer money not at work in New Orleans (right)

On my news feed, a few days ago, next to each other were two items that demonstrate two incredible, and not all too unrelated, phenomena that tell you a lot about America today.

New Orleans Pursues Foreign Aid
Washington to Increase Military Aid to Israel

As New Orleans struggles to rebuild itself, and the Federal money that was supposed to fund this rebuilding is trickling far slower than it was promised, President Bush announced an increase in the aid package to Israel and secured it for the next ten years.

The Big Easy, one of America’s most beautiful and diverse cities, languishes in debris two years after it was devastated by hurricane Katrina, the incompetence of the Army Corps of Engineers who never bothered to check the levies, and the criminal negligence of the Bush Administration and their countless cronies at all levels of government.

Only half of the promised $320million in Federal aid for infrastructure has arrived to New Orleans, leaving its mayor desperate enough to pick up the phone and call back all the world leaders who had made pledges for aid, including Saudi Arabia and Cuba.

On the other hand, the criminal government of Israel, which has murdered thousands of children over the last few years is given $2.4billion (rising to $2.9b) in military aid. This is the money that will go to fund tanks, aircrafts, machine guns that will eventually bomb Palestinian and Lebanese children. With each of these dollars, America is engendering the enmity of millions of Arabs who watch these weapons in action every day.

What was most fascinating was this snippet:

The prime minister asked U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates for his assistance in expediting the handling of a number of IDF procurement requests meant to complete the replenishment of equipment and stores used during the Second Lebanon War.

Gates pointed out that though there is no problem with the requests in principle, there is an orderly procedure. However, Bush intervened and directed the defense secretary to expedite approval of the IDF’s requests.

It must be reassuring for the millions of Americans who saw their President do nothing as New Orleans drowned that he “intervened” to “expedite” the IDF request. President Bush will go to any lengths to make sure that bureaucracy and “orderly procedures” do not get in the way of Israel’s bombing of children. As for the children drowning in New Orleans, he can trust Michael Brown to take care of them.

So in one case, the American government is not spending enough money to rebuild one of the country’s most beautiful cities, leaving thousands homeless; while in the other case, the government is spending money on weapons to destroy Arab cities, murder Arab children and win more enemies.

End the Occupation

This week marks the 40^th anniversary of the start of the illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza.  Generations of Palestinians have now lived their entire lives under the rule of a criminal military regime.  It is about time the world did something about this.  Let us all join together to work globally to end this atrocious occupation.

If you are in America, please try to make it to the End the Occupation Rally in Washington DC on June 10^th.  If you can not make it, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to support this incredibly important effort, and the US Campaign to End Israeli Occupation.  Adalah-NY are arranging for buses from New York; you can buy tickets from their website www.mideastjustice.org.

If you live in the UK, please try to make it to the National Demonstration against the Occupation in London on June 9^th, and make sure you stay up to date with all the actions of two great organizations in the UK: the Enough! Coalition and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

There are actions against Israeli apartheid all across the world this week.  You can see here a list of actions in over 25 countries.  And make sure you regularly read www.stopthewall.org, the website of the Grassroots Palestinian Anti-Apartheid Campaign for excellent news, analysis, maps and activist resources.

The United Nations today released a report with the most detailed map of the West Bank, showing the horrible reality of the apartheid regime Israel has installed in the West Bank, which makes apartheid in South Africa look like a picnic, as Ronnie Kasrils, a veteran South African fighter of apartheid, has said repeatedly.  He has a new interview with Gideon Levy in which he discusses why his opposition to Israeli apartheid is a consistent extension of opposition to South African apartheid, and why Israel’s oppression of Palestinians is much worse than anything the South Africans did.

Also, make sure you read this excellent piece by Tony Karon, a South African journalist who grew up a Zionist supporter of Israel, who reflects on how his perception of Israel has changed over time, and what the current situation means for Israel in the future, in light of the experience of South Africa’s own apartheid regime.

The reality today may be depressing but we should never lose hope.  Many oppressive regimes with incredible criminal power and no morality like Israel have been defeated before, as South Africa clearly shows.  As long as people from all over the world continue to work to support justice in Palestine there is no doubt that Israel’s despicable apartheid regime will fare no better than its counterpart in South Africa.

59 Years of Nakba

Today is the 59th anniversary of the saddest day in the history of Palestine, the day in which racist Zionist colonialism completed the destruction of more than 500 towns, the dispossesion of around a million refugees, the murder of thousands and the establishment of a settler colonalist regime that subsits to this day.

Never will Palestinians anywhere forget this day. And never will we stop working to end its tragic legacy which continues to this day to oppress millions.

Like Apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia, this settler colonial regime is destined to be defeated. It will be defeated simply because we Palestinians are incapable of being defeated.

Nothing that the criminals in charge of the racist Zionist regime ever do will succeed in destroying the Palestinian will to return and end settler colonialism in Palestine. The Palestinian will to return is stronger than ever.

In the refugee camps of Gaza, Jenin, Nablus and the rest of Palestine; in the refugee camps of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt; in their exiles in Arab countries, Europe, the Americas and the world over; millions of Palestinians–young and old– will reflect on this day and remember their inalienable right to return to their homes.

As an old song by Fairouz said:

Another day has passed

Our exile has increased by one day

And our return has drawn one day nearer

Make sure to check out www.PalestineRemembered.com, and excellent resource for everything related to the Nakba with full documentation of Zionist crimes, massacres and village destruction.

Also, George Bisharat has an excellent editorial in the San Fransisco Gate about what exactly the Nakba means to millions of Palestinians, and why its rememberance is not only vital for the sake of remembrance, but also vital for the future.

For Palestinians, memory matters
It provides a blueprint for their future

George Bisharat
Sunday, May 13, 2007

Why do some people have the power to remember, while others are asked to forget? That question is especially poignant at this time of year, as we move from Holocaust Remembrance day in early spring to Monday’s anniversary of Israel’s declaration of independence on May 14, 1948.

In the months surrounding that date, Jewish forces expelled, or intimidated into flight, an estimated 750,000 Palestinians. A living, breathing, society that had existed in Palestine for centuries was smashed and fragmented, and a new society built on its ruins.

Few Palestinian families lack a personal narrative of loss from that period — an uncle killed, or a branch of the family that fled north while the others fled east, never to be reunited, or homes, offices, orchards and other property seized. Ever since, Palestinians worldwide have commemorated May 15 as Nakba (Catastrophe) Day.

No ethical person would admonish Jews to “forget the Holocaust.” Indeed, recent decades have witnessed victims of that terrible era not only remembering, but also regaining paintings and financial assets seized by the Nazis — and justifiably so.

Other victims of mass wrongs — interned Japanese Americans, enslaved African Americans, and Armenians subjected to a genocide that may have later convinced Hitler of the feasibility of mass killings — receive at least respectful consideration of their cases, even while responses to their claims have differed.

Yet in dialogues with Israelis, and some Americans, Palestinians are repeatedly admonished to “forget the past,” that looking back is “not constructive” and “doesn’t get us closer to a solution.” Ironically, Palestinians live the consequences of the past every day — whether as exiles from their homeland, or as members of an oppressed minority within Israel, or as subjects of a brutal and violent military occupation.

In the West we are amply reminded of the suffering of Jewish people in World War II. Our newspaper featured several stories on local survivors of the Nazi holocaust around Holocaust Remembrance Day (an Israeli national holiday that is widely observed in the United States).

My daughter has read at least one book on the Nazi holocaust every year since middle school. Last year, in ninth grade English literature alone, she read three. But we seldom confront the impact of Israel’s policies on Palestinians.

It is the “security of the Jewish people” that has rationalized Israel’s takeover of Palestinian lands, both in the past in Israel, and more recently in the occupied West Bank. There, most Palestinian children negotiate one of the 500 Israeli checkpoints and other barriers to movement just to reach school each day. Meanwhile, Israel’s program of colonization of the West Bank grinds ahead relentlessly, implanting ever more Israeli settlers who must be “protected” from those Palestinians not reconciled to the theft of their homes and fields.

The primacy of Jewish security over rights of Palestinians — to property, education, health care, a chance to make a living, and, also to security — is seldom challenged.

Unfortunately, remembering the Nazi Holocaust — something morally incumbent on all of us — has seemingly become entangled with, and even an instrument of, the amnesia some would force on Palestinians. Israel is enveloped in an aura of ethical propriety that makes it unseemly, even “anti-Semitic” to question its denial of Palestinian rights.

As Israeli journalist Amira Hass recently observed: “Turning the Holocaust into a political asset serves Israel primarily in its fight against the Palestinians. When the Holocaust is on one side of the scale, along with the guilty (and rightly so) conscience of the West, the dispossession of the Palestinian people from their homeland in 1948 is minimized and blurred.”

What this demonstrates is that memory is not just an idle capacity. Rather, who can remember, and who can be made to forget, is, fundamentally, an expression of power.

Equally importantly, however, memory can provide a blueprint for the future — a vision of a solution to seek, or an outcome to avoid. My Palestinian father grew up in Jerusalem before Israel was founded and the Palestinians expelled, when Muslims, Christians and Jews lived in peace and mutual respect. Recalling that past provides a vision for an alternative future — one involving equal rights and tolerance, rather than the domination of one ethno-religious group over others.

Thus, what Palestinians are really being commanded is not just to forget their past, but instead to forget their future, too. That they will never do.

George Bisharat is professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. He writes frequently about the Middle East.

A Load of Scum Unto the Nations

In recent years, Israel has openly admitted that ISA (formerly the General Security Service) interrogators employ “exceptional” interrogation methods and “physical pressure” against Palestinian detainees in situations labeled “ticking bombs”. B’Tselem and HaMoked – Center for the Defence of the Individual have examined these interrogation methods and the frequency with which they are used, as well as other harmful practices. The report’s findings are based on the testimonies of 73 Palestinian residents of the West Bank who were arrested between July 2005 and January 2006 and interrogated by the ISA. Although it is not a representative sample, it does provide a valid indication of the frequency of the reported phenomena.

B’tselem and Hamoked have a new report out on Israeli torture of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. It is really disturbing reading, but adds nothing new to what everyone with an ounce of brains already knows.

Those who run the Israeli government have such an incredible racist outlook that they find nothing at all wrong with torture and cold-blooded murder of children. Truly, Israel offers an incredible insight into how humans that claim to be civilized and for peace can commit the most horrible atrocities and still go around the world saying they want peace. The hypocrisy is amazing even by Zionist standards.

This is not news for me, but it is news for juvenile American Zionists who still insist that Zionism as a doctrine can be reconciled with “humanist”, “progressive” or “liberal” ideals. These are people whose blindness is glaring that it wouldn’t matter if Israel murdered 4 million Palestinians in broad daylight, they would still find a way to justify it as the correct and necessary thing to do. As usual they will continue to ignore this and act like it never happened, and continue to trot out their usual idiotic claptrap about how they want to work for peace, and how the road for peace is blocked by terrorism.

It never occurs to these dumbfucks that the reason there is no peace is the occupation, ethnic cleansing, torture and cold-blooded murder that are the defining characteristic of this despicable Zionist movement since its inception.

And it never occurs to them that by continuing to support Israel and making the world’s only superpower offer unconditional support for Israel, they are the root of the problem.

And of course, the majority of American media will continue to ignore this report, and will continue to write that Israel does not torture.

Wolfowitz and Corruption Fetish

So today there is a huge showdown in the Bank over Wolfowitz, and it looks like he might actually be forced out. A decision will be made this week. Wolfie is protesting his innocence saying that he is subject to a “smear campaign” (which begs the question: Is it even possible to smear someone like him?) Steve Clemons has some of the gritty details (here and here), and George W Bush is, expectedly, speaking up in support of his demented crony.

I have to say, this is more than I had expected; I thought that this would be swept under the rug quickly, but all credit to the unity and determination of the Workers of the World (Bank) who, with nothing to lose but their very comfy contracts and 5-star junkets in starving countries, have made enough of a big deal about this that the Executive Board had to do something. It also helped that pretty much everyone in the development world despised Wolfowitz and couldn’t wait for a chance to lay into him.

On a more theoretical, academic and mundane note: I have always had a lot of trouble with the World Bank’s obsession with corruption and democratization, a fetish that started with Wolfensohn’s reign in 1994 and continues to grow.

The case the World Bank has incessantly tried to make since the mid-1990’s is that fighting corruption and democratizing are the keys to unlocking sustained economic growth and development. After a thorough review of the development literature, one will find that the simplistic relationship that everyone talks about between corruption and democracy and development has very flimsy support in the real world.

The theoretical, quantitative and case-study evidence on this is really missing, and relies heavily on some really shoddy statistical work that frankly makes very little sense.

My personal take from reviewing all this literature is this: corruption and democracy have very complex interactions with one another and with other factors that in turn influence growth and development. It is too complex to be able to generalize it across countries across different points in time, and it is misleading to attempt to study it in a simplistic cross-country regression. The simplistic mantras of “corruption bad” and “democracy good” are quite misleading and possibly as wrong as saying “corruption good” and “democracy bad”.

However, this does not just say that we should just forget about these things; we have to remember that these are important issues not just for their impact on development, but for their own right. It is a mark of the short-sightedness of some development economists that they only view the issue of democracy in terms of its impact on growth, ignoring its importance in its own right.

But what we should say about this is that the attempts from an international institution with as much clout as the World Bank or the IMF to crusade around the world with this message and packaging it as a necessary and sufficient precondition to development and growth has in itself possibly been harmful to the causes of development and growth.

This is at best irrelevant and promises false results that will lead to skepticism towards the virtues of democracy and anti-corruption; but at worst, could lead to political and economic implications that then complicate things for developing countries. The best example of this is how democratization and liberalization have, in many cases, lead to certain elites managing to capture power and special interests in their own hands, and weakened the government’s ability to undertake positive policies for development.

This is a very complex issue and I have not discussed it here thoroughly enough, but I will discuss this more in the future. Suffice to say for now: The World Bank should certainly tread very carefully when discussing these issues. However, they should certainly be very assertive in throwing Wolfowitz out on his ass for what are surely corrupt and despicable acts with no potential good for anyone but him and his cronies.

Walid Khalidi on Morris’ 1948

“Should the olives know who planted them… their oil will turn to tears.” Courtesy of Hanzala Art

Every now and then I come across something so beautifully eloquent, logical, powerful, rational and affirmative that it makes me happy that I was lucky enough to be enlightened by it; and makes me wish I had the intelligence to say it myself.

This below is what I have been trying to articulate for a while as the best response to Benny Morris and his nonsensical racist hodgepodge of explanations, justifications and exonerations for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948. From Walid Khalidi’s “Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine” in the Autumn 1988 issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies.

“Morris, for example, unequivocally and commendably confirms the death of the (albeit long-deceased) Arab evacuation orders. But along with the others he views the Palestinian exodus in an historical vacuum. To be sure, he mentions discussions before 1948 in the highest Zionist circles of the “transfer” (euphemism for expulsion) of the Arab population, but he sees no link between this and Plan Dalet. He regards the obvious linear dynamic binding together the successive military operations of Plan D as fragments in an, as it were, cubic configuration accidentally related to one another only through their joint occurrence in the dimension of time.

“From his perspective, no connection exists between the imperative to “transfer” the Arab population and seize its lands and the imperative to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of Jews it was planned to bring to the new Jewish state. Morris bravely admits the evacuation through force or fear of the bulk of the 369 Palestinian villages, which he meticulously lists (see Appendix D below). But he subliminally places the moral burden of this, not on the invader, but on the invaded, who by resisting or panicking brought permanent exile upon themselves. If their villages were blown up in order to prevent the return of their inhabitants and to parcel out their farms among existing Jewish colonies and new Jewish immigrants, this was only as an afterthought, an extemporized innovation, a lightning brainwave with no ideological, attitudinal, motivational, or strategic antecedents.”

Finkelstein demolishes Dennis Ross’ lies

If I were to be asked to give two words that summarize why there is no peace in Palestine, I could hardly think of any better candidates than “Dennis” and “Ross”.

This isn’t to say that this demented liar is the reason there is no peace; that would be giving a stupid minion like him too much credit. But what this says is that in a time when a despicable racist liar like Ross can get a job as a “mediator” of negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis; use that job as a mercenary for the Israelis; get a free pass in propagating outright lies about his role in the process and the process itself; have his lies published in a book that sells massively and is then used by “experts” to justify positions on the Middle East; and continue to make millions portraying himself as an honest peacemaker–no wonder there is no peace in the Middle East.

Ross is the “mediator” who was too upset that Barak offered too much concessions to the Palestinians, he even said: “If Barak offers anything more, I’ll be against this agreement.” Let’s remember that anything that Barak offered was at best a Bantustan solution that would’ve made the leaders of apartheid South Africa in the 1970’s look generous. Ross then made a career out of trumpeting these concessions as a “Generous Offer”.

I will write more when I have time about Ross and his lies and racist and fatal commitment to Israeli racist hegemony; but for now, I will leave you with this excellent, thorough and comprehensive demolition job carried out by Norman Finkelstein in the latest issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies.

This sentence from Finkelstein sums up perfectly the problem with Ross’ demented perception of the conflict:

“Palestinian demands appear maximal while Palestinian concessions appear minimal because Ross ignores international law.”

He goes on:

whether at Oslo or Camp David: the Israelis might have had to settle for much less than they wanted, but the Palestinians had to settle for much less than they were owed. To curb one’s desires is fundamentally different from surrendering one’s rights. In disregarding international law, Ross obscures this crucial distinction. Concomitantly, he obscures the fact that throughout the peace process, all the genuine concessions came from the Palestinian side.

Finkelstein ends his piece with this conclusion:

Judging from Ross’s account, Camp David failed because Palestinians stubbornly clung to the illusion that they had real needs. Had they understood that all they really needed was symbols, Palestinians would have leapt at the generous Israeli offer. The root of the problem, again, appears to be that Palestinian “sense of entitlement”: Camp David might have succeeded if only Palestinians grasped that they aren’t real, actual human beings.

Incidentally, the Journal of Palestine Studies is such an excellent scholarly resource for the conflict. One can only wish that people would read this journal instead of the bucket-loads of inimitable crap emanating from the likes of Ross, Thomas Friedman and Jeffrey Goldberg.

Is the Earth Round?

The excellent Phil Weiss has posted an item on his great blog about a recent event I attended entitled “Is Zionism Racist?” (part of the “Asking The Bloody Obvious” series of lectures which included such gems as “Is the Earth Round?” and ”Is Oxygen Important for Humans?” ) This piece is very well written, I have a few minor quibbles about it, but most significantly I really am surprised at the last point that Phil mentions, I did comment on it in his blog and am copying my reply at the bottom of the post here.

April 15, 2007
AT A HILLEL, ‘IS ZIONISM RACISM?’ BRINGS EXPECTED PALESTINIAN RESPONSE AND UNEXPECTED JEWISH ONE

A month back I went to a highly emotional talk at Columbia University Hillel that I’ve been meaning to blog about because it shows how much the discourse on Israel/Palestine is changing. Mine is a report from a liberal university, not a Washington thinktank, but it reflects shifting attitudes among young Jews.Amazingly, the title of the talk–“Is Zionism Racism?”—was chosen by Lionpac, Columbia’s undergraduate version of AIPAC, the Israel lobby. About 35 students jammed a small conference room on the fourth floor of Hillel–a room in which I’d seen two men studying Torah just an hour before. Just when it seemed no one else could fit in, a darkhaired man wearing a black kaffiyah slipped through the door and dropped his scarf on the back of his chair: a Palestinian graduate student.

The speaker was Anita Shapira, an Israeli Zionist scholar. Seated at the conference table, she began by dismissing the question. She likened it to an insult in a joke in which a man calls another man’s sister a whore. If you don’t like someone you accuse them of racism. “Why do you ask me if Zionism is racism?” Having spoken 7 or 8 minutes, she opened the floor to questions.

I’ll now reprise the Q-and-A. The explosive moments come during an exchange between Shapira and the Palestinian, Saifedean Ammous, that I found cathartic. But the more intriguing exchanges were between Shapira and young Jews, who are struggling with the same questions Ammous is framing, but in a more tentative fashion.

The first question was from such a student. “Aren’t Arab citizens always going to feel alienated in the Jewish state?”
Shapira: “Maybe this is true but this is not racism. Israel defines itself as the state of the Jews. But it has non-Jewish citizens.” For instance, about a quarter million of the recent Russian immigrants were not Jewish. It is true that many Israeli Arabs don’t feel at home. But then Israel had been in a constant clash with their Palestinian brethren, and so how could you expect them to identify with Israel. “This is a very tragic situation, but it has nothing to do with racism.”

Q. Why should we embrace Jewish nationalism?
Shapira: “Israel was founded according to a nationalist concept from Europe. That statehood goes with nation. The idea that state and people are more or less one and the same is not something that is considered illegitimate or out of place in Europe. Finland is the land of the Finns ….Maybe the idea of a nation having a state is an outdated concept. Maybe it’s time to move on to multinational units [and here Shapira spoke of American pluralism]. But why should we always be the first to try it?”

Q. Why should we rationalize the law of return, allowing any Jew to move to Israel tomorrow?
Shapira. “The fact of giving preference to a certain ethnic group in your laws because you want to promote the convergence between nationhood and statehood is something that many nations have and is not something we should apologize for. What is so awful about the fact that Jewish identity is a strange mixture of the ethnic and religious?” The Israeli population was diverse. “I come from Poland. There are Ethiopian Jews. There are Russian Jews. Ethnically we are anything but a race.”
At this point, Ammous, who had been seething in his chair, burst forth that Shapira was dishonestly trying to ennoble Israeli nationalism. “Why is there a clash between Jews and Arabs? Because Zionism is racism. That is why there is a clash…. I don’t believe in God. But my Jewish friends who were born to a religion which they don’t believe either can go and get my grandfather’s land from the Jewish National Fund.” This was a racial distinction; Ammous said that the Holocaust demonstrated how destructive such distinctions are.

Shapira seemed stunned. “The Jews are one of a kind. Both a nation and a people if you wish.”
Ammous: “I find it hard to believe that is an acceptable concept in the 20th Century. How’s that different from [Afrikaaners’ ideology in] South Africa?”

Shapira insisted that Ammous was racializing a simple conflict. “You have two national movements fighting for the same piece of land… This is a normal clash between people. There are hundreds around the world…. I do not accept the fact that because Jews are a strange mixture of religion and ethnicity, I have to deny my own identity.”
Ammous said that her definition of citizenship, involving religion/birth and all those non-Jewish Russians, was arbitrary. “You might as well base citizenship on the Horoscope. No Scorpios are allowed, and my family are Scorpios. I see that as equally irrelevant, and absurd. The reason there is a conflict is because you set up an identity that excludes me and my grandfather. Don’t you see the absurdity of this racism?”

Shapira was now upset. “I am what I am. The relationship between the Palestinians and Jews goes back more than 150 years. Putting the label of racism on it is unfair.”

A pretty blond girl broke in. She thanked Ammous for coming, then said, “Israel was created as a safe haven for Jews. Very few nations have such strong claims to nationhood as Israel: a common culture, common land of origin.”
To which Shapira added, “Bahai people found a refuge in Haifa. There are Christians living happily in Israel.” The Palestinian case was special. The refugees created by the founding of Israel in 1948 were “an unfortunate situation….I know a lot of the invading Arab countries told them to get out.”
Ammous. “Wrong… You had to ethnically cleanse the land in order to set up the state.”

The room was in shellshock. Finally a leader of Lionpac broke in to move the conversation along. “I really appreciate your coming,” she said to Ammous. “I appreciate the liveliness of the debate.” But she said that the ’48 war was not part of the topic.
I raised my hand. I was upset myself. In a calm tone, I said that on a trip to Hebron I took with an Israeli group last summer, religious settlers who had taken over the center of the city had thrown rocks at us. Later we watched a video of young settlers throwing rocks at Arab girls who were just trying to go to school. The Israeli next to me wanted to run from the room and vomit when he saw this. After I came home, Avigdor Lieberman, who believes in the transfer of Arabs out of Israel, became deputy prime minister, without significant protest from anyone. As a progressive Jew, I said, I want to wash my hands of the whole country. Why shouldn’t I?

Shapira said that such things make her want to vomit too. “The fact that Israel is not perfect, that is a fact. We have our better moments and our worse moments. We also make mistakes.” But she said that it was wrong to conclude “ that everything is premeditated and everything is a conspiracy to bring about the suffering and displacement of the Palestinians …. I wish other states would be so open and critical of their government.”

At this point, Ammous began playing a video game on his blackberry, and his role was taken over by a student named Noah Schwartz. “The issue of 1948– that’s the main argument we have here,” he said. “You couldn’t have a Jewish state without the displacement of another people. The idea of a distinct people in a vacuum may work for Antarctica. But the standard history, and it is not dispute, is that transfer arrangements were [discussed by]… the Jewish Agency, once the civil war broke out after Partition.” Because nobody believed the Jewish state could actually function, with a large Arab minority.
Shapira: “You take for granted what happened after that as if it were planned in advance. In ‘47 [at the time of Partition] Jews were so happy to receive even a small portion of the land…”

Schwartz seized on the issue of Jewish immigration during the Mandate period. “You live in Philadelphia, and all of a sudden 1 million Chinese move to the place. Speaking a different languge. You wouldn’t like it.”
Shapira: “The connection of Jews to Palestine was not the same as the connection of Chinese to Philadelphia.”
Now Saif Ammous broke in. “No, but how does that relate to the Palestinians living there.”
Shapira seemed to throw up her hands. “It’s a tragedy,” she said.
Ammous: “So we can just go fuck ourselves.”
(“a PhD candidate hurling an f-bomb at one of the world’s foremost experts on Zionism…”– per a mocking/defensive post on a Columbia blog)

Shapira gathered her dignity about her, and concluded with a discussion of refugees. “After the war, we are talking about a period in which all over Europe we had movements of population. There were many many questions of refugees. All of them found an answer in the country where they landed. Later, Israel received 1 million refugees from the Arab world. She absorbed them and didn’t claim that they are refugees. The Arabs refused to absorb their people in order to immortalize the problem. I don’t think it had to be like this. I am sorry for the Palestinians.”
It was a good point (one that Alan Dershowitz makes, too). I know Ammous, and need to challenge him about it. As I say, the discussion was cathartic. Thanks to Hillel and Lionpac, I left the room smarter than when I went in. Later I thought that I should have followed up my own question. “When you say that Israel is not perfect, I am sure segregationists defended their system in the American south in the 1960s in the same way, ‘It’s not perfect.’ At some point, as an outsider, you stop accepting rationalizations for injustice and just say, ‘This has got to change.’” That would have struck a chord with some of the young Jews in the room.

Here is my comment on Phil’s post:

On that last point:

I seriously do not understand how that can be a good point, and the reason I never answered it is that I thought it was too ridiculous to answer.

Does the fact that other refugees settle somewhere automatically make the plight of all other refugees in the world their fault?

If I stole your house, surely you wouldn’t accept that as OK if someone else, somewhere else in the world decided they were OK with someone else stealing their house.

There’s a name for kicking people out of their homes against their will: it’s called ethnic cleansing. It is no way justified, tempered or ‘placed in context’ by mentioning that it happened to other people who got over it.

The key thing to remember is that the people who were ethnically cleansed did NOT want to become citizens of other countries, they did NOT want to forget about it; they wanted to go to their homes, which is a very fair and legitimate demand.

It is a demand that is surely more fair and legitimate than millions of Jews from all around the world, who have never lived in Palestine, having an automatic right to migrate there at any time and set up their lives on the remains of the ethnically cleansed Palestinians.

Phil, placing the blame on the refugees that were ethnically cleansed for not accepting their ethnic cleansing more graciously, while exonerating the racist state that ethnically cleansed them and allows people from all over the world to take their place based on an anachronistic definition of race/religion/ethnicity is really not a good point.

Saif