Category: In the Media

The Guardian: Israel’s celebration remains a Palestinian catastrophe

By Ahmad Samih Khalidi

Published in The Guardian on the 12th May 2008. To view original article click here

As Israel celebrates the 60th anniversary of its establishment, an inescapable counter-reality lingers over the occasion that is inextricably twinned with it. It is the nakba or catastrophe, the 60th anniversary of the destruction of Arab Palestine in 1948.

Despite a public discourse that often claimed the opposite, the Zionist movement set out to build a Jewish state in Palestine with a Jewish majority. This could only come about at the expense of the local inhabitants, the vast majority of whom were Palestinian Arabs – both Muslim and Christian. From this perspective, neither the Zionists’ intentions nor the reactions of the Palestinians are at issue: Israel could not have been built as a Jewish state except on the ruins of Arab Palestine.

In 1948, about 750,000 Palestinians fled or were forcibly driven out of their homeland, creating what still stands today as the world’s largest and most longstanding refugee problem. The nakba created an entirely new politico-demographic reality. From a longstanding majority on their own soil, the Palestinians became a small, vulnerable minority and a tattered, broken nation living in exile or under foreign rule.

Nothing can convince the Palestinians that what happened to them 60 years ago was right and proper. They cannot be expected to hail the events that led to their own destruction and dispossession. They cannot be expected to extend their benediction to the establishment of Israel, or internalise its legitimacy. There can be no conceivable circumstances in which the Palestinians can concede their history in favour of the Zionist narrative, for to do so would be to deny their own.

But the conflict is not just over narratives. It is also about fundamental shifts in attitude and political perception. Almost all the major transformations have come in the wake of cataclysmic and usually unforeseen events. There is no need to welcome violence to understand its impact, neither does it follow that violence on its own necessarily leads to peace, but the history of the struggle over the land of Palestine stands in stark contrast to the adage that violence gets you nowhere.

The sad truth is that violent convulsions have always been part of the process of change in the political, psychological and material terms of the conflict. The 1948 war, including pre-state Jewish terrorism, established the state of Israel. The June 1967 war led to an Arab realisation that Israel was an irreversible reality. The 1973 war eventually brought peace with Egypt, and set the background for the Palestinian acceptance of a two-state solution. The 1982 Lebanon war resulted in the first comprehensive Arab peace offer to Israel. The 1987 Palestinian intifada drove Israel to talk to the PLO, culminating in the 1993 Oslo agreement.

Furthermore, Israel’s decision to withdraw from south Lebanon in 2000 was the result of a realisation that staying put was not worth the sacrifice. Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 was a direct consequence of the second 2000 intifada. The current debate about the need to engage Hamas is more a reflection of the Islamic movement’s military prowess than any real conviction that it is a potential partner in peace.

Today, the prospects of a final resolution of the conflict based on the two-state solution are fading as it comes up against settlement realties, Palestinian domestic divisions and the structural weaknesses of Israel’s political system. But even if such an agreement were to be reached, it would have to be ratified, implemented and sustained, and there is precious little to suggest that either side can see this through.

The alternative is unlikely to be yet another stab at a final status settlement. There is no real safety net that will allow for the process to proceed after such a failure, nor any agreed guidelines for doing so. The Palestinian Authority (PA) and its Israeli partner have no plan B, neither has the US, the putative sponsor of the process, with the international community in tow. Yet stasis is ahistorical and unsustainable. The history of the conflict suggests other alternatives, most of which point to a slide towards further and more extensive violence as an eventual catalyst of change.

As things stand, and in a situation where the vast majority of Israelis are impervious to the horrors of the occupation and shielded from its consequences, and where Palestinian aspirations are being dissipated by the daily changes on the ground and the PA’s own failures, it is hard to avoid the fear that the next shift in attitude is going to be the product of yet another cataclysm.

At the one end of the spectrum of possibilities is an open-ended and continuous spiral of conflict. At the other is a new set of relations between Arab and Jew, and new forms of association on the land of Palestine that go beyond the dying paradigm of a two-state solution towards different formulae for power-sharing, partition or sovereignty. One century after the first Zionist incursion into Palestine, and 60 years after the great determining event of 1948, it would take a brave soothsayer to predict which course will prevail.

· Ahmad Samih Khalidi is a senior associate member of St Antony’s College, Oxford

The Independent: The loathsome smearing of Israel’s critics

By Johann Hari

To view original article, published in The Independent on the 8th May 2008, click here

In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence – and to a large degree, it works. There is nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, even Holocaust survivors.

My own case isn’t especially important, but it illustrates how the wider process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me ‘a Jew-lover’, ‘a Zionist-homo pig’ and more.

Ah, but wait. I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week, I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage was being pumped from illegal Israeli settlements on to Palestinian land, contaminating their reservoirs. This isn’t controversial. It has been documented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes.

The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered. Instead, some of the most high profile ‘pro-Israel’ writers and media monitoring groups – including Honest Reporting and Camera – said I an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh, while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked.

Any attempt to describe accurately the situation for Palestinians is met like this. If you recount the pumping of sewage onto Palestinian land, ‘Honest Reporting’ claims you are reviving the anti-Semitic myth of Jews ‘poisoning the wells.’ If you interview a woman whose baby died in 2002 because she was detained – in labour – by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint within the West Bank, ‘Honest Reporting’ will say you didn’t explain ‘the real cause’: the election of Hamas in, um, 2006. And on, and on.

The former editor of Israel’s leading newspaper, Ha’aretz, David Landau, calls the behaviour of these groups ‘nascent McCarthyism’. Those responsible hold extreme positions of their own that place them way to the right of most Israelis. Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips are two of the most prominent figures sent in to attack anyone who disagrees with the Israeli right. Dershowitz is a lawyer, Harvard professor and author of The Case For Israel. He sees ethnic cleansing as a trifling matter, writing: ‘Political solutions often require the movement of people, and such movement is not always voluntary … It is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many respects to some massive urban renewal.’ If a prominent American figure takes a position on Israel to the left of this, Dershowitz often takes to the airwaves to call them anti-Semites and bigots.

The journalist Melanie Phillips performs a similar role in Britain. Last year a group called Independent Jewish Voices was established with this mission statement: ‘Palestinians and Israelis alike have the right to peace and security.’ Jews including Mike Leigh, Stephen Fry and Rabbi David Goldberg joined. Phillips swiftly dubbed them ‘Jews For Genocide’, and said they ‘encourage’ the ‘killers’ of Jews. Where does this come from? She says the Palestinians are an ‘artificial’ people who can be collectively punished because they are ‘a terrorist population’. She believes that while ‘individual Palestinians may deserve compassion, their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project’. Honest Reporting quotes Phillips as a model of reliable reporting.

These individuals spray accusations of anti-Semitism so liberally that by their standards, a majority of Jewish Israelis have anti-Semitic tendencies. Dershowitz said Jimmy Carter’s decision to speak to the elected Hamas government ‘border[ed] on anti-Semitism.’ A Ha’aretz poll last month found that 64 per cent of Israelis want their government to do just that.

As US President, Jimmy Carter showed his commitment to Israel by giving it more aid than anywhere else and brokering the only peace deal with an Arab regime the country has ever enjoyed. He also wants to see a safe and secure Palestine alongside it – so last year he wrote a book called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. It is a bland and factual canter through the major human rights reports. There is nothing there you can’t read in the mainstream Israeli press every day. Carter’s comparison of life on the West Bank (not within Israel) to Apartheid South Africa is not new. The West Bank is ruled in the interests of a small Jewish minority; it is bisected by roads for the Jewish settlers from which Palestinians are banned. The Israeli human rights group B’tselem says this ‘bears striking similarities to the racist Apartheid regime’. Yet for repeating these facts in the US, Carter has widely called ‘a racist’. Several universities have even refused to let the ex-President speak to their students.

These campus battles often succeed. Norman Finkelstein is a political scientist in the US whose parents were both Jewish survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. They lost every blood relative. He made his reputation exposing a hoax called From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters which claimed that Palestine was virtually empty when Zionist settlers arrived, and the people claiming to be Palestinians were mostly impostors who had come from local areas to cash in. Finkelstein showed it to be scarred by falsified figures and gross misreading of sources. From that moment on, he was smeared as an anti-Semite by those who had lauded the book. But it was when Finkelstein revealed two years ago that Alan Dershowitz had, without acknowledgement, drawn wholesale from Peters’ hoax for his book The Case For Israel, that the worst began. Dershowitz campaigned to make sure Finkelstein was denied tenure at his university. He even claimed that Finkelstein’s mother – who made it through Maidenek and two slave-labour camps – had collaborated with the Nazis. The campaign worked. Finkelstein was let go by De Paul University, simply for speaking the truth.

Are the likes of Dershowitz and Phillips and Honest Reporting becoming more shrill because they can sense they are losing the argument? Liberal Jews – the majority – are now setting up rivals to the hard-right organisations they work with, because they believe this campaign of demonisation is damaging us all. It damages the Palestinians, because it prevents honest discussion of their plight. It damages the Israelis, because it pushes them further down an aggressive and futile path. And it damages diaspora Jews, because it makes real anti-Semitism harder to deal with.

We need to look the witch-hunters in the eye and say, as Joseph Welch said to Joe McCarthy himself: ‘You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?’

j.hari@independent.co.uk

Non-violent demonstrations in Bil’in and Al-Khader

Bil’in:

On Friday the 9thof may, at the village of Bil’in around 100 hundred Israelis, Palestinians and Internationals gathered in solidarity to protest against the illegal wall separating the village and the local residents from their land.


Photo By IMEMC’s Haithem El Khatib

Shortly after mid-day, local villagers, Israelis and International peace activists marched towards the wall to show their support against the illegal occupation of the village’s land. Not long after reaching the wall, the Israeli Army began launching tear gas and firing rubber bullets into the crowd of peaceful protesters. The excessive use of tear gas even effected local villagers not participating in the demonstration as a number of canisters were fired at a nearby house.

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Al-Khader:

IMEMC: Protesters in Bethlehem affirm the right of return

To view original article published by IMEMC, click here

Around 200 Palestinians, internationals and Israelis demonstrated at military checkpoint placed at the southern entrance of Bethlehem, to protest the wall Israel is building on the lands of the Palestinian village of Al-Khader near Bethlehem on Friday morning.

The protest started with a prayer near the checkpoint, during which the preacher affirmed the right of return for the Palestinian refugees instated by the United Nations Resolution 194, as the 60th anniversary of the dispossession of the Palestinian people nears.

As soon as the protesters gathered for the prayer, at least 30 Israeli troops backed by 6 military vehicles, blocked the checkpoint in an attempt to foil the protest.

The nonviolent demonstration was organized by the Popular Committee against the Wall and Settlements as part of series of weekly protests against Israeli measures in Palestine.

Protestors carried Palestinian flags and banners reading, “Stop erasing Palestinian identity”, “Stop ongoing Nakba”, “End the Israeli occupation”, and called for the recognition of right of return for Palestinian refugees.

The demonstration ended peacefully after one hour with no friction with the army.

IMEMC: Hundreds mark the 60th Nakba by carrying the largest key in the world

By Ghassan Bannoura – IMEMC. To view original article, click here

At least 700 Palestinians from the southern West Bank district marched on Thursday (8th May) side by side next to the largest key in the world to mark the 60th anniversary of the Nakba.

photo by IMEMC’s Ghassan Bannoura

Today’s event, which was organized by the Palestinian Committee for commemorating the 60th Nakba year, started at around midday from the Duhyisha Refugee camp located in the southern part of Bethlehem.

The event started as a truck arrived with the largest key in the world, and then people followed all the way to Al Azah refugee camp then to Ayidah refugee camp were the key was installed on a concert gate. The key represents symbolize the right of retune to the Palestinian refugees.

Speeches were delivered as the key was installed on top of the gate. The first speech was delivered by an old man, Haj Abu Ahmad, who witnessed the Nakba first hand.

Later, speeches were given by local MPs and political leaders that restated the Palestinian demand of right of return

The commemoration of the Nakba – Palestinians remember the creation of the state of Israel on their land in 1948, which resulted in the displacement of over 700,000 people from their homes, and the imprisonment of the rest into refugee enclaves in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

J-Post: Defense Ministry allows E-1 caravan

To view original article, published in the Jerusalem Post on the 8th May, click here

Ma’aleh Adumim Mayor Benny Kashriel doesn’t plan to rest on the country’s laurels on its 60th Independence Day. Instead – in a gesture more fitting of settler youth – he is heading to a West Bank hilltop with a protest tent.

Top on his mind is the lack of construction permits, rather than the country’s achievements, the head of the second-largest settlement city told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.

So he intends to spend the day fighting for his community’s future by holding office hours under a tent he will set up on the contested hilltop in what is known as E- 1, a mostly empty area of 11.9 square kilometers located within the city’s municipal boundaries but on the opposite side of the highway from its developed sections.

Palestinians and the US have long opposed construction in that hilltop area, saying it would disrupt the contiguity of a future Palestinian state.

E-1 is bordered by Jerusalem’s French Hill neighborhood to the west, Abu Dis to the southwest, Kedar to the south, the rest of Ma’aleh Adumim to the east and Almon to the north.

Pledges by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and other officials that Ma’aleh Adumim is an integral part of Israel have not assuaged Kashriel’s fear that American policy and pressure will prevail in the end.

‘On the day that Israel is celebrating its independence, we want to remind people that our independence is total and we are not under the policy of [US Secretary of State Condoleezza] Rice,’ he said. ‘We want to show that E-1 is part of Ma’aleh Adumim,’ Continued growth of Ma’aleh Adumim can only happen there, he said. The government’s refusal to allow construction there will choke the city, Kashriel said.

On Hanukka, he shied away from a protest march held in E-1 by activists and city residents who tried but failed to establish an unauthorized outpost there.

But as the months dragged on with no resolution in sight, Kashriel, who previously relied on lobbying, has now opened a new phase of his campaign for E-1, also known as Mevaseret Adumim.

Moves to open a new Judea and Samaria Police Headquarters on the site have been more successful. The opening of the already-completed station was postponed last month, but the police have been slowly moving in and the station is expected to be operational within a few weeks.