Reports from international activists in Palestine:
1-Joint Palestinian and ISM direct action reclaims
Jerusalem Street, Nablus.
(Note: a great success. ISM is becoming an integral part of a wider
Palestinian non-violent resistance. This is what ISM was intended to be
and we are arriving there. Ghassan Andoni)
2-The Detention of Mustafa Shawkat Samha in Jayyous
3-A Young Man's Life: Barbara Thiel
Selection of Articles:
1-Liberman's Supreme Soviet -Uri Avnery 2-At least 40 Palestinians injured during protest at brutal treatment in prison camp 3-The '48 Nakba & The Zionist Quest for its Completion - Ilan Pappe 4-Interesting Arts about Palestine
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Reports from international activists in Palestine: ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1-Joint Palestinian and ISM direct action reclaims Jerusalem Street, Nablus.
Today, Sunday 5th January 2003 the two largest Israeli military roadblocks in the largest city in the West Bank, Nablus were opened by a joint Palestinian/International direct action between 11am and 4pm.
Over 200 Palestinians representing all political parties, medical committees, educational groups, and local democracies took part, supported by over 50 internationals working with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) .
The day began with a march towards the first and oldest roadblock that has been there for many months. Protesters brought picks and shovels to attack rocks and wrecked vehicles compacted into the huge mounds of earth. Banners demanding an end to the occupation and the increased fortifications of the Israeli Occupying Forces were exhibited in the sunlight in six languages as the work continued. The action was observed from a cliff top by an Israeli military post.
Then a road building machine arrived and internationals protected the brave Palestinian driver from a possible Israeli attack by riding with him on the roof and sides of the machine. Eventually a Bulldoser arrived and once again internationals rode the machine as it made the first road block passable by vehicles. A huge hole was made in the roadblock allowing buses, taxis,and trucks to pass by for the first time in months, to cheers and applause from the protesters.
Then the bulldoser moved on to the second and larger roadblock that was only built a few weeks ago, despite much resistance by local children with stones, against tear gas, live ammunition, and the tanks of the IOF that were protecting the D9 armoured bulldosers that built it.
Jerusalem Street was soon reopened in both directions and within ten minutes the streets beneath the Maquata, the bombed out headquarters of the Palestinian Authority thronged with yellow taxis.
The most immediate benefit to Nablus residents has been the reduction of the cost of a taxi ride from Balata refugee camp to Nablus city centre by 30%.
The ISM international activists who took part came from thirteen countries; Germany, Sweden, UK, USA, Italy, France, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Spain, Japan, Switzerland.
12 Photographs of the days action by Foad Rad are down loadable from: http://photos.yahoo.com/bc/qaliente2000/lst?.dir=/Makata+road+block&. view=t
Ceri Gibbons ISM Nablus cerigibbons@yahoo.com ==================================================================2-The Detention of Mustafa Shawkat Samha in Jayyous Area: Qalqilya Date: January 4, 2003 Author: Patrick O'Connors
Mustafa Samha of Jayyous was detained by the Israeli military on December 29th at a rally in Jayyous against the Apartheid Wall. Mustafa was accused by Israeli soldiers of throwing rocks at them. The internationals and Palestinians present at the march deny that Mustafa was involved in any rock throwing. Nonetheless, Mustafa has been detained for the last six days.
As part of the Qalqilya rally against the Apartheid Wall on December 29, over 500 Palestinian and about 100 international and Israeli participants converged in the village of Jayyous for speeches and a non-violent march to farmland they are being prevented from reaching because of the construction of the "security wall". After the non-violent march was met with sound bombs, tear gas, rubber bullets and clubs by Israeli soldiers and private contractor security, Palestinian youths began throwing rocks at the soldiers. A small number of Palestinians and internationals, among them Mustafa Samha, took shelter on the porch of a home in between the Israeli soldiers and the remaining Palestinians and internationals. According to eyewitnesses, when Israeli soldiers approached the home and Mustafa, he stepped forward to present them with his Palestinian press pass. When the soldiers began to grab Mustafa, american Radikha Sainath attempted to step in the way, but was thrown to the ground by the soldiers, who then took Mustafa away to Army and Border Police jeeps parked in the olive groves.
Aware the Mustafa was not a person who participates in any violence, within a few minutes, about fifteen international visitors began to walk slowly into the olive groves towards the jeeps to negotiate with the soldiers and Border Police. All attempts were made to appear non-threatening. As was the case earlier during the peaceful march, our polite requests for discussion were met by cocked rifles, screams that we stop and threats that we would be shot. After a standoff lasting about 20 minutes and continued threats from the soldiers, the soldiers and border police forced their jeeps through the group of internationals and into the village of Jayyous.
We caught up to the jeeps in the village and found soldiers forcibly entering homes and demanding the IDs of Palestinian men and youths. During those forced entries into homes, we were able to spot Mustafa in the back of one of the jeeps and exchange a few words with him. At that the same time I was able to briefly discuss Mustafa's situation with a few soldiers and the regional military commander Leon. Leon said that three of his soldiers had seen Mustafa throw rocks (the punishment for throwing rocks at heavily armed Israeli soldiers who enter one's village is at least six months in jail !).
I told them that foreigners and Palestinians all witnessed that Mustafa did not throw rocks at the rally, that furthermore we all knew that Mustafa is not an individual who used violence. I explained that we have all witnessed that Mustafa is one of the young men who tries and succeeds in stopping boys from throwing rocks. I asked Leon and the other soldiers what conclusion Mustafa and other community members who practice non-violence would draw from Mustafa's unjust detention, said that Mustafa was exactly the wrong type of person to detain, and suggested that this type of detention sent the wrong message to everyone. It implies that Palestinians who seek peaceful solutions will be punished by Israel, in the same way as those Palestinians who are involved in violence, and strengthens the arguments of Palestinians who suggest that Israel does not really want peace.
Leon repeated that three of his soldiers had seen Mustafa throwing rocks. Leon said Mustafa would be released unharmed after twenty-four hours if in fact he had done nothing. It is now six days later, and Mustafa is still being detained. A number of internationals have signed statements saying that Mustafa did not throw rocks during the protest. These statements have been forwarded to the Israeli Military Base in Qedumim where Mustafa is being held. Mustafa is being represented by the Israeli lawyer Shamai Leibovitz, also the lawyer for jailed Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti.
I last talked with Mustafa about a week before the Jayyous rally. Mustafa had recently received his press credentials from the Palestinian press union and was working on a story about the harassment of international journalists and peace activists by the Israeli Army. Typically, Mustafa was polite and thoughtful as he took gathered the information for this story. Other internationals have noted that Mustafa is one of the young men in Jayyous who is most supportive of non-violent activities. Most regard Mustafa as a model citizen.
We have been told by Mustafa's lawyer that an Israeli judge must make a decision by Sunday about whether to charge Mustafa and arrest him, or to instead release him.
Below is a brief story about Mustafa written in November by Barbara Thiel of the World Council of Churches' Ecumenical Accompaniment Program. Ironically, as Mustafa noted in the story below in commenting about his brother in November, it appears that Mustafa is being detained "because he is a Palestinian."
We hope that tomorrow Mustafa will be released. =======================================================3-A Young Man's Life: Barbara Thiel
I met Mustafa on his field, where he and his brother started to replant their olive trees. The field is now divided into one part in the West of the Israeli Security Fence and one in the East; the place for the fence itself has already eaten the place for 77 Olive trees. Mustafa and his brother rented a bulldozer to open new holes in the Olive field, to transport the trees and to bring them into the new holes. The work is hard; most of the trees are old and heavy, so, that at least for every tree 3 to 4 people are necessary to manage the replanting. Good that they have friends here to help. The bulldozer is on his way to bring the next trees. Mustafa now has time to tell me:
"It is very hard for me. I am not a farmer. I studied psychology at the University in Nablus and got my B.A. But in this time there is no way to continue, the way to reach Nablus - only 25 km far away from Jayyous - is very difficult because of different road blocks and checkpoints and long term closures and curfews in Nablus itself, and beside this it is too expensive. So I opened a small shop in Jayyous, but, of course, if most people don't have money, you can't sell so much. By the way, we are able to replant 55 Olive trees. We miss 22 trees. We believe, that the Israeli contractor took them to sell them inside of Israel."
Some days later we visited Mustafa again on his field. It was the time, when he started to water the replanted trees. On the field he has a water reservoir, where he can collect the rainwater. We can see, how Mustafa starts his work. First he has to chop the soil. Then he takes his bottle and goes to his water reservoir, the bottle goes down on a long rope, and he gets the bottle back, full of water. He turns to the tree, waters it, and goes again to the reservoir. Ten or twelve times. It is a hard job. After he finished one tree he needs a rest. "Please excuse me. You know, I am not a farmer", he says. The volume of the reservoir of 200 m3 is normally enough for the needs of one year. Now, short term before the raining period, it is nearly empty. But he needs in the next 3 or 4 years every year per tree approximately 3 times 100 l water. Then, after this time, he will know if his replanting was successful.
The cost's he has this year are:
Rent for the bulldozer: per h 120,- NIS, the need was 16 h or 1920, - NIS. Water tanks: per tank (10 m3) 100,- NIS, needed 3 tanks or 300,- NIS
Mustafa is 23 years old. He has 3 brothers and 5 sisters, but nobody has a job. His father worked as a teacher in Jayyous for many years, later he was the manager of a charity for disabled in Qalqylia, now he lost this job and stays at home because of the circumstances, the closures, curfews, troubles of the checkpoints. One brother studied sociology, the other one and one of the sisters religion. One sister studied English, two married early, the last one is studying teaching. One of the brothers studied sports. He recently came back from the prison, a prisoner's camp in the desert, where he had to stay for 16 months. I asked why. The answer was a laughing: "Because he is a Palestinian. May be, because he is religious. There was no court, now law, no right. This is our life."
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Selection of Articles: ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1-Liberman's Supreme Soviet -Uri Avnery I have received a lot of curses in my lifetime, and here and there some compliments, too. But I have never received a compliment like this one: an important party, represented in the Knesset, has mentioned my name in its official election platform. Under the heading "Legislation and strict supervision of organizations and activists of the extreme left", the National Union party's program says: "We shall anchor in legislation more severe measures, including the cancellation of citizenship, against people like Uri Avnery, Leah Tsemel and refuseniks of all kinds, who are defaming the country abroad." I don't know whether to be proud, laugh or be angry. To be proud, because my name is used to symbolize the whole peace camp. And also because I appear side by side with Leah Tsemel, the valiant lawyer who defends Palestinian prisoners, and the refuseniks, who represent the conscience of Israel. To laugh, considering the abysmal Chutzpa of this sentence. The leader of the National Union party is Avigdor (Ivette) Liberman, a person brought up in the Bolshevik education system of Stalin and who has absorbed – as we can see - the racist and power-hungry attitudes of the red tyrant. He has come here when everything was ready, to a state that we have created (literally) with our blood, and now demands, no more no less, to cancel our citizenship. To be angry, because Liberman, together with National Religious leader Effi Eytam and some of the Likud leaders, is in the vanguard of the dirty column that is besieging Israeli democracy. Last week they succeeded in inducing the majority of the politicians in the General Election Committee to disqualify two Arab Knesset-members (Ahmed Tibi and Azmi Bishara) and an Arab election list (Balad) from participating in the elections, expelling in practice 20% of Israel's citizens from the political arena. If some people still entertain the illusion that this attack is directed solely against the Arab citizens (a totally unacceptable act by itself), they should be reminded of one of the most important sayings of the 20th century, the murderous century of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini. The saying belongs to Martin Niemoeller, a German U-Boat commander in WWI who later became a Protestant pastor and pacifist. The Nazis threw him into a concentration camp. After miraculously surviving, he coined the following unforgettable sentences: "When the Nazis took the communists away, I was silent; after all, I was no communist. "When they put the social-democrats in prison, I was silent; after all, I was no social-democrat. "When they took the trade-unionists away, I did not protest; after all, I was no trade-unionist. "When they took me away, there was nobody left to protest." Liberman's program shows clearly that something similar is happening now in our country. They started with the incitement against the Arab citizens and their expulsion from the political system. Now they speak of eliminating the "extreme left". Is there any doubt, that in the next stage they will demand the elimination of all the left, "moderate" and "patriotic" as they may be? And then, following the historic precedents, it will be the turn of the "liberal" Likud members. An apocalyptic vision? Not really. The President of the Supreme Court, Aharon Barak, this week compared our situation with Nazi Germany. In the presence of the President of Israel, the Chief Justice, himself a Holocaust survivor, said that "if it has happened in the country of Kant and Beethoven, it can happen everywhere. If we do not defend democracy, democracy will not defend us!" (It will be interesting to see how he will conduct himself next week, when he will have to decide on the Tibi-Beshara expulsion case.) In Israel, we don't like to make comparisons with the dark regimes. The memories are too fresh, and nobody in Israel advocates genocide. But undoubtedly, parties and leaders who openly advocate "transfer", would have been called anywhere else in the world Neo-Fascists (even if the term "Neo-Bolsheviks" would be more appropriate, since it was Stalin who used to transfer whole peoples in the Soviet Union.) Joerg Haider does not propose to cancel the Austrian citizenship of people who disagree with his obnoxious views, nor does Jean-Marie Le-Pen propose to expel from the National Assembly every deputy who is not of pure French blood. For 54 years, the State of Israel has prided itself of being "the only democracy in the Middle East". All Israeli propaganda abroad, and especially in the United States, is based on this slogan. Now Liberman and the Libermen come and try to destroy Israeli democracy, our creation, and to set up a kind of Fascistan, somewhere between Pakistan and Afghanistan. If somebody is "defaming our country abroad", it is surely this person. ==============================================================2-At least 40 Palestinians injured during protest at brutal treatment in prison camp
At least 40 Palestinians were injured last night during a protest which began yesterday against conditions in the Ofer prison camp near Ramallah, which houses close to 1,000 Palestinian detainees.
The detainees were protesting their brutal treatment at the hands of Israeli authorities, and began an open-ended strike on 31 December -- citing beatings by Israeli border police during transportation from the detention center to Israeli military courts, even though the detainees are handcuffed. Their protest was met with tear gas and sound bombs.
According to figures recently released by Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem, Israel is now holding a record number of administrative detainees - 1,007 - who are being held indefinitely without charge or trial. The group said Israel is violating international law by using so-called administrative detentions on a wide scale, arbitrarily and in cases where there are only slight suspicions against people.
For more information contact: The Palestine Monitor, +972 (0)2 298 5372 or +972 (0)59 387 087 http://www.palestinemonitor.org ==================================================================3-The '48 Nakba & The Zionist Quest for its Completion - Ilan Pappe
Between The Lines
Dr. Ilan Pappe is a Profesor of History at Haifa University. This article is based upon the transcript of a lecture presented by Dr. Pappe to the Right To Return Coalition - Al Awda UK, held at the School for Oriental and African Studies in London Monday 16th September 2002. It is hereby published after receiving Dr. Pappe's consent and editorial remarks. [BTL] ___________________________________________________________________
I have come here to present the comprehensive story of the history of the expulsion and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948 and its relevance to the present and future agenda to peace in Palestine.
For Israelis, 1948 is a year in which two things happened which contradict each other: On the one hand, it was the climax of Jewish aspirations to have a state or to fulfill a long dream of returning to a homeland after what they regarded as 2000 years of exile. In other words, it was considered a miraculous event that only positive adjectives could be attached to, and that you could only talk about and remember as a very elated kind of event. On the other hand, it was the worst chapter in Jewish history. Jews did in 1948 in Palestine what Jews had not done anywhere for 2000 years prior. The most evil and most glorious moment converged into one. What Israeli collective memory did was to erase one side of the story in order to co-exist or to live with only the glorious chapter. It was a mechanism for solving an impossible tension between two collective memories.
Because so many of the people who live in Israel lived through 1948, this is not a distant memory. It is not the genocide of the Native Americans in the United States. People know exactly what they did, and they know what others did. Yet they still succeed in erasing it totally from their own memory while struggling rigorously against anyone trying to present the other, unpleasant, story of 1948, in and outside Israel. If you look at Israeli textbooks, curricula, media, and political discourse you see how this chapter in Jewish history - the chapter of expulsion, colonization, massacres, rape, and the burning of villages - is totally absent. It is not there. It is replaced by a chapter of heroism, glorious campaigns and amazing stories of moral courage and superiority unheard of in any other histories of people's liberation in the 20th century. So whenever I speak of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, we must remember that not just the very terms of "ethnic cleansing" and "expulsion" are totally alien to the community and society from which I come and from where I grew up; the very history of that chapter is either distorted in the recollection of people, or totally absent.
Zionist Leaders' Strategy: Settlement and Expulsion
Now, when you start reading the diaries of the leaders of Zionism, and researching their ideologies and ideological trends since the movement's conception in the late 19th century, you see that from the very beginning there had been the realization that the aspiration for a Jewish state in Palestine contradicts the fact that an indigenous people had been living on the land of Palestine for centuries and that their aspirations contradicted the Zionist schema for the country and its people. The presence of a local society and culture had been known to the founding fathers of Zionism even before the first settlers set foot on the land.
Two means were used in order to change the reality in Palestine, and impose the Zionist interpretation on the local reality: the dispossession of the indigenous population from the land and its re- populating with newcomers - i.e. settlement and expulsion. The colonization effort was pushed forward by a movement that had not yet won regional or international legitimacy and therefore had to buy land, and create enclaves within the indigenous population. The British Empire was very helpful in bringing this scheme into reality. Yet from the very beginning of Zionist strategy, the leaders of Zionism knew that settlement is a very long and measured process, which may not be sufficient if you want to revolutionize the reality on the ground and impose your own interpretation. For that, you needed something more powerful. David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Jewish community in the 1930s and later the first Prime Minister of Israel, mentioned more than once, that for that [imposing your interpretation on the ground] you need what he called "revolutionary conditions". He meant a situation of war - a situation of change of government, a twilight zone between an old era and the beginning of a new one. It is not surprising to read in the Israeli press today that Ariel Sharon thinks that he is the new Ben Gurion who is about to lead his people into yet another revolutionary moment - the war with Iraq - in which expulsion, and not a political settlement, can be used to further, indeed, to complete the process of de-Arabizing Palestine and Judaizing it, which had begun in 1882.
Towards the end of the British Mandate, there was a need to make these more theoretical and abstract ideas about expulsion into a concrete plan. I have been writing about 1948 since 1980, and for much of that time have been concerned with the question of whether there had or hadn't been a Zionist master plan to expel the Palestinians in 1948. Then I realized, (largely as a result of what I have learned in the last two years), that this was not the right track: neither for academic research nor from more popular ideological research of what has happened in the past. Far more important for ethnic cleansing is the formulation of an ideological community, in which every member, whether a newcomer or a veteran, knows only too well that they have to contribute to a recognized formula: the only way to fulfill the dream of Zionism is to empty the land of its indigenous population.
Mass Ideological Indoctrination Behind '48 Nakba
Master plans are not the most important component in preparing yourself for that time of a revolutionary juncture or for the contingency plans of how to practically make the idea of expulsion a reality. You need something else: you need an atmosphere, you need people who are indoctrinated, you need commanders in every link of the chain of command who would know what to do even if they don't have explicit orders when the time comes. Most of the preparations before the '48 War were less about a master plan (although I do think there was one). The commanders were busy compiling intelligence files for each Palestinian village for the use of Jewish commanders on all levels, so they would know how wealthy and how important each particular village was as a military unit etc. Armed with such intelligence, they were also aware of what was expected from them by the man who stood at the top of the Jewish pyramid in Palestine, David Ben Gurion and his colleagues. These leaders wanted only to know how each operation contributed to the Judaization of Palestine, and they made it perfectly clear that they did not care how it was done. The expulsion plan worked very smoothly exactly because there was no need for a systematic chain of command that had to check whether a master plan was fully implemented. Anyone who has done any research on ethnic cleansing operations in the second half of the 20th century knows that this is exactly how ethnic cleansing is achieved: by creating the kind of education and indoctrination systems that ensures that every soldier and every commander, and everyone with his individual esponsibility, knows exactly what to do when they enter a village, even if they haven't received any specific orders to expel its inhabitants.
Just recently, as a result of reading testimonies not only of Palestinians but also of Israeli soldiers, it became clear to me that the master plan, although significant in itself, pales in comparison to the whole machinery of indoctrination of a community. In 1948, the Yishuv's [the pre-'48 Zionist community] population was a little more than half a million, and before 1948 was even less. Those who had an active role in the military aspects of their community knew precisely what to do when the moment came and not one moment too soon.
But it should be remembered that the plan was successful not only because of the ideological indoctrination. It was done under the eyes of the UN, which had been committed ever since its General Assembly adopted Resolution 181 to the safety and welfare of those 'cleansed'. The UN was obliged to protect the life of the Palestinian people who were supposed to live in the areas allocated to the Jewish State (they were meant to make up almost half of the population of the prospective state). Out of 900,000 Palestinians living both in these areas and additional areas occupied by Israel from the designated Arab states, only 100,000 remained. Within a very short period during the time in which the UN was already responsible for Palestine, a massive expulsion operation took place within a very short period of time.
We have yet to be told the most horrific stories of 1948, although so many of us have been working as professional historians on that. We haven't talked about the rape. We haven't talked about the more than 30 or 40 massacres which popular historiography mentions. We haven't yet decided how to define the systematic killing of several individuals that took place in each and every village in order to create the panic that should produce the exodus. Is this a massacre or not when it is systematically repeated in every village? It is quite possible that some chapters will never be revealed, and many of them do not depend on archives, but rather on the memory of people whom we are loosing each day as vital witnesses. There were not specific orders written, only an atmosphere that has to be reconstructed. A glimpse into that atmosphere can be found on the bookshelves of almost every house in Israel - in the official books that glorify the Israeli army in its activity in 1948. If you know how to read them, you can see how the Palestinians were de-humanized to such a degree that you could rely on the troops, and that they would know what to do.
Israeli and Palestinian Leaders Accept the American Game: Shrinking Palestine Physically & Morally
Noam Chomsky was correct in his analysis that we in Palestine/ Israel and the Middle East as a whole were eagerly playing the American game ever since they decided to take an active role in the peace process, beginning in 1969 with the Rogers Plan, and then with the Kissinger initiatives. Ever since then, the peace agenda has been an American game. The Americans invented the concept of the peace process, whereby the process is far more important than peace. America has contradictory interests in the Middle East, which include protecting certain regimes in the area that preserve American interests (therefore entailing paying lip service to the Palestinian cause) while also has a commitment to Israel. In order not to find itself facing these two contradictory agendas, it is best to have an ongoing process which is not war and not peace but something which you can describe as a genuine American effort to reconcile between the two sides - and God forbid if this reconciliation works.
We were playing this game not only because the Americans invented it, but also because the replacement of peace with a "peace process" became the main strategy of the Israeli peace camp. When the peace camp of the stronger party in the local balance of power accepts this interpretation then the world at large follows suit.
Such a process, which can and should go on forever, coached by the only superpower and supported by the peace camp of the stronger party in the conflict, is presented as peace. One of the best ways of safeguarding the process from being successful is to evade all the outstanding issues at the heart of the problem. In such a way it was possible to erase the events of 1948 from the peace agenda and focus on what happened in 1967. The outstanding issue became the territories Israel occupied in the 1967 war. The concept of "territories for peace" was invented simultaneously in Tel Aviv, London, Paris and New York for United Nations Resolution 242. It presents a very concrete variable, in fact about 20% of Palestine, while wiping out the remainder 80% from the formula and juxtaposes it against "peace", which is in fact the never-ending peace process. A process that was not meant to bring a solution, let alone reconciliation. In return for a peace process, the Palestinians would be allowed to talk about and maybe gradually build something of a political entity on 20% of Palestine.
In 1988 [after the PNC accepted UN 242 in Algiers] and 1993 [at the Oslo Accords] even the Palestinian leadership joined this game. No wonder then that after Oslo, the American policy makers felt that they could round up the whole story. They had Palestinian and Israeli leaderships that accepted the name of the American game. This was the beginning of the process, which culminated with the "the most generous Israeli offer ever made about peace" in the Camp David summit in the summer of 2000. Had this process been successful, history would have witnessed not only the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland in 1948 but the eradication of the refugees, as well as of the Palestinian minority in Israel, and maybe even Palestine, from our collective memory.
It was a process of elimination that succeeded to a certain extent, were it not for the second uprising. I wonder what would have happened had the second Intifada not broken out. If the Palestinian leadership continued to partake in the ploy to shrink Palestine, physically and morally, it would have succeeded. The second Intifada was trying to stop this. Whether or not it will succeed, we do not know.
Agenda for Peace Activists in the Shadow of Transfer Scheme
The problem for us as peace activists, is that any coordinated pressure on Israel to stop its plans, can in an absurd way lead the Israelis to accelerate their plans for wiping out Palestine, namely to feel that the revolutionary circumstances have arrived. This is my greatest fear for the second Intifada. I fully support it and regard it as a popular movement determined to stop a peace process which would have destroyed Palestine once and for all. The uprising, and certainly on top of it the coming war against Iraq, have produced in the minds of Israelis - of all walks of life not only within the circles of the Right-wing camp - the idea that "we have reached yet another fortuitous juncture in history where revolutionary conditions have developed for solving the Palestine question once and for all." You can see this new assertion talked about in Israel: the discourse of transfer and expulsion which had been employed by the extreme Right, is now the bon ton of the center. Established academics talk and write about it, politicians in the center preach it, and army officers are only too happy to hint in interviews that indeed should a war against Iraq begin, transfer should be on the agenda.
This brings me to chart what I think are three agendas of peace, for anyone involved in supporting peacemaking in Israel and Palestine, otherwise we may miss the train, so to speak.
The first agenda is the most urgent one: we must all take the danger of a recurrence of the 1948 ethnic cleansing very seriously. This is not just paranoia when I directly - not indirectly - link the war against Iraq with the possibility of another Nakba.
Take it seriously, believe me. There is a serious Israeli conceptualization of the situation in which Israeli leaders say to themselves, "we have a carte blanche from the Americans. The Americans will not only allow us to cleanse Palestine once and for all, they even will help create the window of opportunity for implementing our scheme. We will be condemned by the world, but this will be short-lived and eventually forgotten. This is a rare opportunity to 'solve' the problem."
The second agenda is the immediate one, and that is ending the occupation. We should be very careful in adopting the American, the Israeli Peace Now, and I'm sorry to say, the Palestinian Authority discourse about a two-state solution. Because the two-state solution nowadays is not the end of the occupation but continuing it in a different way. It is meant to be the end of the conflict with no solution to the refugee problem and the complete abandonment of the Palestinian minority in Israel. Anybody who has not learned this after the Oslo Accords has a problem of understanding and interpreting reality. We have to make sure that the idea of peace is not hijacked by people who are seeking indirect ways of continuing the present situation in Palestine. This is not easy because the western media has already adopted within its main vocabulary that anyone who wants to present himself as a peacemaker or as a supporter of peace, must talk about a two-state solution.
Only after the occupation ends can we talk about what it entails. Then it is possible to discuss the political structure best needed to prevent a reoccupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But it should be clear that the political structure needed to end the conflict is a different one. It has to be one that enables us to end refugeehood and the apartheid policies against the Palestinians inside Israel. We have to be sure not to get caught in the same cul de sac that Yassir Arafat found himself in Camp David when he was asked to equate the end of occupation (when it wasn't even the end of occupation) with the end of the conflict.
Finally, and this is our third agenda, we have to keep on thinking about how to devise concrete plans for making the Right of Return feasible and for making possible the end of discrimination against Palestinians in Israel. These are the two pillars of a comprehensive settlement and they have to be specified. I think it is quite clear that we haven't done that job yet: we are still stuck with slogans of the 1960's, of a secular democratic state. These slogans have to be updated according to the reality of 2002. What was meant in the 1960's by a secular democratic state is a possible vision for the distant future. Our focus on the urgent and immediate agenda should not absolve us from long-term strategies. What people need to hear from us are concrete plans, even if they sound utopian given the situation on the ground. This is a delicate enterprise which entails not only creating a political culture and structure that would rectify past evils, and prevent another catastrophe, but also one which would not inflict another evil, or replace the past evil with a new one. We are not calling for the expulsion of the Jews. We do want the Right of Return. We do want equal rights for the Palestinian citizens.
I think many of us who think in such a long-term span would like to see one state or a political structure which has one state in it. But you cannot disseminate these ideas by just giving highlights, nuggets or slogans. There needs to be a very serious and detailed presentation of such a solution, to convince people of its feasibility.
Finally I want to come back to where I started. In the collective Israeli memory there are two 1948s: one is totally erased, and one is totally glorified. But there is a young generation in Israel - and I have ample opportunities to meet with young audiences - who may prove to have a potential to look differently at the reality in the future. The fact that you have generations of young people who are basically willing to listen to universal principles, provides the opportunity to break the mirror and show them what really happened in 1948, and what is going on in 2002. I think we shall eventually find partners, even to our wildest dreams, on how a solution should look like.
The problem is of course, that while we do this - educate, disseminate information etc. - the government of Israel is preparing a very swift and bloody operation. If it succeeds, even our best dreams and energies would be wasted. =============================================================4-Interesting Arts about Palestine http://www.sinkers.org/latuff http://www.44an.com/latuff/index.htm http://www.terrornapalestina.kit.net/cartoons/page_01.htm http://www.antiglobalizacion.org/Germinal/arte/ap00001.htm http://www.antiglobalism.net/ig/thumbnails.php?album=1
|