tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-215701222024-02-28T09:19:58.329-08:00Saree Makdisi ArchiveThis site is an archive of the interventions published by Saree Makdisi in various media outlets.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger40125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21570122.post-3340482767509166512010-02-16T16:03:00.000-08:002010-02-16T16:06:58.816-08:00On the so-called Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem<span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:Times;font-size:medium;"><h2>A Museum of Tolerance we don't need</h2><h3>The Simon Wiesenthal Center should abandon its plan to build a facility on the site of a Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem.</h3><p>By Saree Makdisi [originally published in <i><a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-makdisi12-2010feb12,0,438264,print.story">The Los Angeles Times</a></i>]</p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium; ">The Simon Wiesenthal Center's plan to construct an outpost of Los Angeles' Museum of Tolerance atop the most important Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem is temporarily in disarray. This presents an opportunity to call on the center to abandon this outrageous project once and for all.<br /><br />The site in question is Ma'man Allah, or the Mamilla Cemetery, which had been in continuous use for centuries until 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled or driven into flight and their private property, including Ma'man Allah, was handed over to Jewish users.<br /><br />Like Muslim and Christian sites throughout Israel -- which, as a 2009 State Department report pointed out, implements protections only for Jewish holy sites -- the cemetery has long been threatened. Parts of it have been used as a roadway, parking lots, building sites and Israel's Independence Park. Among the trees in the park, Palestinian tombstones can still be seen, eerily and all too appropriately.<br /><br />In 2002, the Wiesenthal Center -- which had been given part of the cemetery by the city of Jerusalem -- announced that architect Frank Gehry would design a complex to be called the Center for Human Dignity-Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem. Ground was broken in 2004. Palestinian and Muslim concerns were ignored until a lawsuit led to the suspension of excavation in 2006. In 2008, the Israeli Supreme Court -- dismissing the appeals not only of Palestinians with relatives buried there but also the protests of Jews appalled by desecration of any cemetery -- cleared the way for the project.<br /><br />The center claims to see nothing wrong with erecting what its leader, Rabbi Marvin Hier, calls "a great landmark promoting the principles of mutual respect and social responsibility" on top of what remains of another people's cemetery. It has resorted to endless dodges to support its claim.<br /><br />To those protesting construction on ancient cemetery land, the center says it's merely using a part of the site that has been a parking lot for years. To Jews outraged at desecration, it says, in effect, that different standards apply to Muslim cemeteries than to Jewish ones. To Muslim clergy and legal scholars who insist on the inviolability of cemeteries in Islam, the center disagrees, in essence claiming that it knows more about Islamic jurisprudence than they do. To those who protest today, the center asks where they were in 1960, when an Islamic judge approved Israel's construction of the parking lot (it does not, however, mention that he was a state employee, nor that he was subsequently removed from office for corruption).<br /><br />To archaeologists who say the site should be spared construction, the center says that only a couple hundred bodies needed to be moved. And with reference to Palestinians who have filed legal actions and persisted in expressing anxiety over their families' remains, Hier had this message just last month: "The case is over; get used to it."<br /><br />That was his paraphrase of the high court's dismissal of a final appeal made by Palestinian families based on the testimony of Gideon Suleimani, the chief archaeologist at the museum site. Suleimani said that the Israel Antiquities Authority withheld from the court his opinion that construction should not be approved, and that the site still contains four layers of Muslim graves dating from the 12th century. "We're talking about tens of thousands of skeletons under the ground there," noted Suleimani.<br /><br />Last month, Gehry announced that he had decided to pull out of the project, citing other commitments. At the same time, the center said it was scaling back the museum; it is short of its original $200-million fundraising target. Now the center lacks an architect and a plan. Hence the opportunity to stop this project.<br /><br />This week, moreover, Palestinians with relatives buried in the cemetery made a last-ditch effort to end its continued desecration. They appealed directly to the United Nations, pointing out that the desecration violates international conventions forbidding discrimination and protecting cultural heritage, the manifestation of religious beliefs and the right to culture and family.<br /><br />Protecting the cemetery should never have become a legal issue. This project is something that any decent human being should recognize as wrong. And it can still be reversed -- if the Wiesenthal Center can be persuaded to turn "tolerance" and "human dignity" into principles for action, not just empty slogans.<br /><br />For all its sanctimoniousness, the center now presides over a big hole from which scores of bones have been unearthed. Those remains were disinterred without respect. As Suleimani put it: "The Muslim dead have no one to defend them." It is not, however, too late to safeguard the rest of those as yet undisturbed.<br /><br />In wanting to lay the dead to rest, however, we should think also of the living. Displacing living people -- something Israel does every single day -- is hardly any better than displacing dead ones. And this disgraceful episode is only part of a much longer history of displacement and dispossession dating to 1948.<br /><br />The real lesson of Ma'man Allah and the museum project is this: Peace will come to Palestine/Israel only when the blind insistence on displacement ends and both peoples are allowed to belong to the same land.<br /></span></p></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21570122.post-17806229920869939022009-10-18T09:42:00.000-07:002009-10-18T09:43:38.083-07:00<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 15px; color: rgb(75, 93, 103); font-size: 11px; "><p style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 24px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; "><strong style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; ">How Obama Can Earn his Nobel Prize</strong></p><p style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 24px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; ">[originally published in <em style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; "><a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-oe-nobel18-2-2009oct18,0,174864.htmlstory#turley">The Los Angeles Times</a></em>, 18 October 2009]</p><p style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 3px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; "><span style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); "><strong style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; ">Many people, including the president himself, were surprised this month when the Nobel committee awarded the peace prize to Barack Obama. His critics — as well as some supporters — questioned whether he deserved it. It was too soon, they said; he’d done too little. We posed a question to a variety of experts: What should the president do to earn the prize?</strong></span></p><p style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 3px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; "><span style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); "><br /></span></p><p style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 3px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; color: rgb(147, 0, 0); font-style: italic; "><span style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); ">Ariel Dorfman: Focus on Latin America</span><br /><a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-oe-nobel18-2-2009oct18,0,174864.htmlstory#halevi" style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-decoration: none; font-weight: normal; ">Yossi Klein Halevi: Stop Iran</a><br /><a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-oe-nobel18-2-2009oct18,0,174864.htmlstory#turley" style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-decoration: none; font-weight: normal; ">Jonathan Turley: Appoint a prosecutor for war crimes</a><br /><a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-oe-nobel18-2-2009oct18,0,174864.htmlstory#makdisi" style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-decoration: none; font-weight: normal; ">Saree Makdisi: Change our useless Mideast policies</a><br /><a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-oe-nobel18-2-2009oct18,0,174864.htmlstory#scheuer" style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-decoration: none; font-weight: normal; ">Michael Scheuer: Refuse the prize</a><br /><a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-oe-nobel18-2-2009oct18,0,174864.htmlstory#benedict" style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-decoration: none; font-weight: normal; ">Kennette Benedict: He’s already done so much</a></p><p style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 3px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; color: rgb(147, 0, 0); font-style: italic; "><br /></p><p style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 3px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; color: rgb(147, 0, 0); font-style: italic; "></p><p style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 3px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; color: rgb(147, 0, 0); font-style: italic; "><span style="font-size: small; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); "><span style="font-size: 13px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; font-weight: 700; "><span style="font-size: 13px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); "><span style="font-size: small; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; font-family: Arial; "><span style="font-size: 12px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; "><span style="font-size: 12px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; font-weight: normal; ">Change Washington’s useless Mideast polic</span><span style="font-size: 12px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; font-weight: normal; ">ies</span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: 13px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); "><span style="font-size: small; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; font-family: Arial; "><span style="font-size: 12px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; "></span></span></span></span></p><p style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 3px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; color: rgb(147, 0, 0); font-style: italic; "><span style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); "><span style="font-size: small; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; "><span style="font-size: 13px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); "><span style="font-size: small; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; font-family: Arial; "><span style="font-size: 12px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; ">Saree Makdisi</span></span></span><span style="font-size: 13px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); "><span style="font-size: small; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; font-family: Arial; "><span style="font-size: 12px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; "></span></span></span></span></span></p><p style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 24px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; ">President Obama would deserve the Nobel Peace Prize if he made a serious effort to help bring peace to the Middle East. He could begin by changing U.S. policies that uselessly embitter people and offer zero benefit to the United States.</p><p style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 24px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; ">In my grandparents’ time, people throughout the Arab and Muslim world looked to America as a beacon of light and hope: the great antithesis of the European empire builders. That attitude changed only when it became clear, after the destruction of Palestine in 1948, that America’s values are one thing and its policies quite another.</p><p style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 24px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; ">All Obama has to do is bring America’s policies in the greater Middle East into alignment with our values.</p><p style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 24px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; ">In Pakistan, he should end the catastrophic population displacements and immense human degradation and suffering that are a direct result of these policies, which are not President George W. Bush’s but his own.</p><p style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 24px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; ">In Afghanistan, he should end the war now — beginning with the absurd missile attacks and air raids that have killed hundreds of innocent men, women and children since he came to office — and contribute as much to help rebuild the country as he had been planning to spend on expanding the carnage.</p><p style="font-size: 11px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 18px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 24px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4em; ">And in Palestine and Israel — the source of much of the region’s unrest — he should end the shell game of trying to split a tiny piece of land into ethnic islands and instead bring about the creation of a single democratic and secular state for both Palestinians and Israelis that treats all of its citizens equally: the greatest of all American values.</p></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21570122.post-16189985899385000772009-10-08T06:49:00.000-07:002009-10-08T06:55:48.637-07:00Last Straw for the Palestinian "Authority"?<div>[Originally published by Saree Makdisi on <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saree-makdisi/last-straw-for-the-palest_b_309585.html">Huffington Post</a>, 6 October 2009; also on <a href="http://sareemakdisi.net/">sareemakdisi.net</a>]</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>If there were any lingering doubts concerning the status and integrity of the Palestinian National Authority -- and its so-called President, Mahmoud Abbas ("so-called" because his term of office, such as it was, expired almost a year ago) -- they were surely dispelled once and for all by its decision to <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gmWe_WoQ8DB6K0dpgNV7UVCRIefQD9B35N9O0">drop its support</a> for a UN resolution that would have referred the Goldstone Report on Israel's post-Christmas 2008 attack on Gaza to the UN Security Council.<br /><br />The 575-page <em><a href="http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/specialsession/9/docs/UNFFMGC_Report.pdf">Report of the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict</a></em>, which was led by South African judge Richard Goldstone, confirmed the already densely documented reports published by human rights organizations, including Amnesty International. Those <a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/MDE15/015/2009/en/8f299083-9a74-4853-860f-0563725e633a/mde150152009en.pdf">reports</a> had, in turn, systematically confirmed Palestinian claims that Israel had, for example, recklessly and indiscriminately used <a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/news/israeli-armys-use-white-phosphorus-gaza-clear-undeniable-20090119">white phosphorous</a> on the packed residential districts of Gaza; indiscriminately targeted civilian objects including<a href="http://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/f45643a78fcba719852560f6005987ad/90457dc2d8061b0d852575380069e3b7?OpenDocument"> UN schools</a> (as documented by the widely circulated -- other than in the US -- photographs of an Israeli phosphorous strike on a UN school in Gaza); used Palestinian civilians as human shields; and collectively punished the population of Gaza by imposing on them a suffocating siege, cutting off vital supplies of food, medicine, and fuel (not just during the recent assault and on to this day, but, to a greater or lesser extent, since 2005, and even, arguably, since 1991, when the Israelis first methodically sealed off the hapless territory from the outside world).<br /><br />The <a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/MDE15/015/2009/en/8f299083-9a74-4853-860f-0563725e633a/mde150152009en.pdf">Amnesty</a> report, published in July, found that "hundreds of civilians were killed in attacks carried out using high-precision weapons -- air-delivered bombs and missiles, and tank shells. Others, including women and children, were shot at short range when posing no threat to the lives of the Israeli soldiers. Aerial bombardments launched from Israeli F-16 combat aircraft targeted and destroyed civilian homes without warning, killing and injuring scores of their inhabitants, often while they slept. Children playing on the roofs of their homes or in the street and other civilians going about their daily business, as well as medical staff attending the wounded were killed in broad daylight by Hellfire and other highly accurate missiles launched from helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, and by precision projectiles fired from tanks."<br /><br />The Goldstone report (though it remarkably reserves its strongest language for Palestinian rocket attacks that killed 3 Israeli civilians, compared to the 1,400 Palestinians killed in Gaza, the vast majority civilians, and a third of them children) reiterates many of the same conclusions, and reports on case after case where Israeli forces launched "intentional attacks against the civilian population and civilian objects," including "the shooting of civilians while they were trying to leave their homes to walk to a safer place, waving white flags and, in some of the cases, following an injunction from the Israeli forces to do so. The facts gathered by the Mission indicate that all the [latter] attacks occurred under circumstances in which the Israeli forces were in control of the area and had previously entered into contact with or at least observed the persons they subsequently attacked, so that they must have been aware of their civilian status." These incidents -- all of which constitute war crimes -- indicate, according to the Goldstone report, "that the instructions given to the Israeli forces moving into Gaza provided for a low threshold for the use of lethal fire against the civilian population."<br /><br />Indeed, among its other findings, the Goldstone report corroborates the well-documented reports (all of them summarily dismissed by the Israeli army, which considers itself "<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/31/israeli-military-denies-war-crimes-gaza">the most moral army in the world</a>") that Israeli soldiers themselves <a href="http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/israeli-troops-reveal-gaza-abuses-20090401">admitted</a> to the brutality of the bombardment of Gaza, and left behind them -- as unmistakable evidence of their officially-encouraged attitude towards Palestinians -- both <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1071651.html">racist slogans</a> (e.g., "We came to annihilate you; Death to the Arabs; Kahane was right; No tolerance, we came to liquidate") and <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1068989.html">human feces smeared on the walls</a> of the Palestinian homes they looted and vandalized. "You feel like an infantile little kid with a magnifying glass looking at ants, burning them," one Israeli soldier <a href="http://www.shovrimshtika.org/oferet/news_item_e.asp?id=1">confessed</a> of the prevailing Israeli army attitude toward the Palestinians of Gaza, which was fueled in part by the <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1058758.html">proclamations</a> of the army's rabbinical corps, which compared Palestinians to the biblical Philistines and urged that Israeli soldiers "show no mercy."<br /><br />None of the conclusions of all these reports ought to come as a surprise. The Israeli army itself had openly <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1026539.html">proclaimed</a>, months before the bombing even started, that its strategy in both Lebanon and Palestine has been premised since 2006 on the sweeping and indiscriminate use of massive firepower: the so-called "Dahiyeh Doctrine," referring to the Dahiyeh, or southern suburb of Beirut, which the Israelis razed to the ground in their 2006 war on Lebanon, as they also did to many villages in the south of that country. "We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction," one Israeli general (Gadi Eisenkot) announced -- with contemptuous disregard for the law of war. "From our perspective, these are military bases," he added. "This isn't a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorized."<br /><br />Other than planning for -- and attempting (to its own satisfaction at least) to legitimate -- the massive and necessarily indiscriminate use of force, the Israeli military legal establishment had specifically <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1057648.html">authorized</a> premeditated attacks, such as the one that killed dozens of unarmed <a href="http://australiansforpalestine.com/bisharat-changing-the-rules-of-war">Gaza policemen</a> parading in their graduation ceremony, with which Israel kicked off its bombardment on 27 December 2008, that inherently involved manifest violations of the principles of proportionality and discrimination that are the pillars of international humanitarian law.<br /><br />Moreover, not only the Amnesty and Goldstone reports but Israeli commanders themselves openly said that overwhelming and indiscriminate force was used -- deliberately, and in a premeditated fashion -- again, in total disregard for the principles of proportionality and discrimination. "At the start of the ground offensive, senior command decided to avoid endangering the lives of soldiers, even at the price of seriously harming the civilian population," one Israeli media report <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1058460.html">revealed</a>. "This is why the IDF [Israeli army] made use of massive force during its advance in the Strip. As a Golani brigade commander explained, if there is any concern that a house is booby-trapped, even if it is filled with civilians, it should be targeted and hit, to ensure that it is not mined -- only then should it be approached. Without going into the moral aspects, such fighting tactics explain why there were no instances in which there was a need to assault homes where Hamas fighters were holed up."<br /><br />Ultimately, all that these inquiries, including Goldstone's, have done is merely to confirm Israel's own (repeatedly flaunted) contempt for international humanitarian law.<br /><br />Needless to say, from the beginning, Israel utterly refused to cooperate with the Goldstone inquiry, dismissing it -- as it has dismissed all previous attempts to investigate its conduct or to hold it accountable to the principles of international humanitarian law -- as "unfair" and "unbalanced" (as though there were anything "balanced" about the conflict between the sheer force of an occupying power and an essentially defenseless occupied people). Among the many previous investigative commissions which Israel has either summarily dismissed or refused to cooperate with are the <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/28/israelandthepalestinians.southafrica">investigation</a> led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu into the Israeli killing of 19 members of a Palestinian family in Gaza in 2008; the <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/israel-must-not-be-allowed-to-upset-the-jenin-investigation-658079.html">commission</a> appointed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2002 to investigate the indiscriminate destruction of civilian areas in the Israeli assault on Jenin refugee camp that spring (the actions of which a separate <a href="http://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/0/3ba59a4aea94ec5085256c680057ee04?OpenDocument">investigation</a>, by Amnesty International, found amounted "to grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention and are war crimes"); and the UN <a href="http://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/b86613e7d92097880525672e007227a7/62d5aa740c14293b85256324005179be?OpenDocument">investigation</a> of the Israeli artillery massacre of over a hundred Lebanese civilians huddling in a shelter at a UN compound in Qana, Lebanon in 1995, which found that "it is unlikely that the shelling of the United Nations compound was the result of gross technical and/or procedural errors," as the Israeli army said at the time -- as, indeed, it always says is the case when its soldiers kill dozens of civilians: not once has Israel actually held any of its officers or soldiers accountable for such crimes. In all previous cases, Israel's adamant refusal to be held accountable to the law has been upheld by the US, and the Obama administration proved that it had no intention of breaking that particular tradition<a href="http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/09/21/on_the_goldstone_report"> this time</a> either.<br /><br />Nevertheless, as Professor Richard Falk (the UN's Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories) <a href="http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10788.shtml">points out</a>, the Goldstone report could have provided a basis for referring Israel's conduct durng the war in Gaza to the International Criminal Court or other international courts, or to the establishment of a war crimes tribunal along the lines of those established after the catastrophes of Bosnia and Rwanda. That would have been the best way to finally hold Israel accountable for its grave breaches of international humanitarian law, its war crimes, and its crimes against humanity (not least the sealing off an entire civilian population from the outside world, denying it the ability to flee to safety, and then subjecting that same, defenseless, shelterless population -- most of it composed of children -- to an indiscriminate round-the-clock bombardment).<br /><br />The process of referral depended, however, on obtaining a vote within the UN to have the Goldstone report referred to the Security Council for further deliberation, the creation of a war crimes tribunal, and so on. And all of that depended in turn on the support of Palestinian diplomats appointed by and accountable to Mahmoud Abbas.<br /><br />But it is now clear that the Palestinian team representing Mahmoud Abbas at the UN (for they certainly do not represent the Palestinian people) has, on his instructions, dropped its support for the resolution that might have set the legal machinery of the international judicial system in motion. Other states can hardly be expected to stand up to US pressure and support a resolution on behalf of Palestinian rights that the Palestinian delegation itself is unwilling to support -- why should Venezuela or Nigeria or Pakistan be more Palestinian than the Palestinians?<br /><br />Reports have been circulating in the Arab, Israeli and European media that Abbas and his associates may have been prompted to take this extraordinary action because Israel had been <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/palestinians-cry-blackmail-over-israel-phone-service-threat-1796145.html">threatening</a>, had they continued with their support of the UN resolution, to withhold its release of a share of the radio spectrum that would have allowed the creation of a new Palestinian mobile phone company, Wataniyya: the product of a <a href="http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKL1783372">joint venture</a> between Qatari investors and the Palestine Investment Fund, to which Abbas himself and one of his wealthy sons have personal connections. Palestinians have <a href="http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10807.shtml">suggested</a> that simple corruption and cronyism may have motivated Abbas's decision. The PA and the circle of officials attached to it have certainly had their share of corruption charges -- most shockingly, perhaps, when Ahmed Qureia, then the so-called Prime Minister of the PA (again, "so-called" because Prime Ministers usually have countries to govern, and the PA is anything but a country), was <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/1454114/Palestinian-PMs-firm-helps-build-Israeli-wall.html">accused</a> of selling cement to the Israelis to build their wall in the West Bank. The corruption of the PA and the narrow circle of Fateh party officials running it, clinging to it, and benefiting from it, is one of the main reasons why Fateh was swept from office in the 2006 Palestinian elections in favor of Hamas: most people then were voting against Fateh and its corruption and general hopelessness, rather than for Hamas (which had, and has, little to offer other than simply not being Fateh: a credit which goes only so far).<br /><br />It's possible, of course, that corruption and cronyism were not the motivating factors for Abbas's decision to withdraw Palestinian support for the Goldstone report. There are two other possibilities.<br /><br />One of these is simple incompetence: that Abbas and his associates are so lacking in intelligence, imagination and political skill that they just bungled the whole affair. This is certainly not out of the question: Abbas himself is an extraordinarily unprepossessing and profoundly compromised man, and his circle of associates -- including men like Mohammad Dahlan and Saeb Ereikat -- hardly inspire any more confidence than Abbas himself. Quite apart from their sheer disregard for Palestinian suffering in Gaza (seeking redress for which ought to be their main priority), it ought to be clear that a party to a negotiation that wantonly throws a rarely-held card out of the window while attempting (or at least claiming) to negotiate is, to put it mildly, not qualified to negotiate in the first place, let alone to claim to "lead" a defiant and unvanquished people like the Palestinians. If the Ramallah leadership is really as hopelessly incompetent as this scenario would have it, that's reason enough for their removal from office, if not the dissolution of the PA itself. (It's difficult, though, to "dismiss from office" someone like Abbas who is not actually in office in the first place -- he is there because the Israelis and the Americans want him to be there, because the election for his successor after his term expired has been deferred at the behest of Washington and Tel Aviv, and not because he holds any legitimate mandate from the Palestinian people themselves, the overwhelming majority of whom have no faith in him whatsoever, as <a href="http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/jmcc100209.html">opinion polls</a> have regularly found).<br /><br />Another -- and I think more likely -- possibility is that Abbas, the PA and the essentially defunct PLO are not (and never were, at least since the time of Yasser Arafat's death) interested in serious negotiations with Israel that could have led to the creation of a genuine Palestinian state in the occupied territories. After all, one of the main criticisms of the Oslo Accords of 1993-95 which created the PA, is that, far from ending Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory, they merely served to shift the day-to-day burden and cost of administering the occupation to the newly-established PA, while allowing Israel to go on demolishing Palestinian homes, expropriating Palestinian land, and building Jewish colonies in the occupied territories in contravention of international law. Oslo formally separated the three main chunks of Palestinian territory that Israel has occupied since 1967 (Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem) from each other and the outside world, and, additionally, broke the West Bank itself into Areas A, B and C. It was only in Area A (about 18 percent of the total) that the PA had any kind of practical presence on the ground, and in Area C (60 percent of the West Bank), the PA had no role or presence at all -- and that's where Israel was (and still is) busy demolishing, expropriating and building. Oslo and the PA, in other words, far from ending the occupation and laying the basis for the creation of an independent Palestinian state, actually allowed Israel to consolidate the occupation and further cement its grip on Palestinian land. Which is exactly why the population of Jewish colonists in the West Bank and East Jerusalem doubled during the period of Oslo and has been increasing ever since -- and today numbers almost <a href="http://www.fmep.org/settlement_info/settlement-info-and-tables/stats-data/comprehensive-settlement-population-1972-2006">half a million</a>.<br /><br />As this latest episode so amply demonstrates, the PA serves Israel by facilitating the occupation -- which is why Israel invented it in the first place, just as, historically speaking, colonial powers have always attempted to create or coerce local elites into helping them deal with the population at large: an approach perhaps most gracefully summarized in Macaulay's <em>Minute on Indian Education<a href="http://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/rraley/research/english/macaulay.html">http://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/rraley/research/english/macaulay.html</a></em> of 1835 ("We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect"). Why would the PA want to bring to an end an arrangement from which it benefits? As the French scholar Regis Debray <a href="http://mondediplo.com/2007/08/05palestine">points out</a>, the status quo provides the PA elites in Ramallah "with a living, status, dignity and a raison d'être," and probably (e.g., if the mobile phone contract rumors prove to be true) much more in the way of emoluments besides that.<br /><br />Even if one were to grant the PA and Abbas and his associates the benefit of the doubt, and say that they really have their people's best interests at heart, it still remains the case that the PA, even under the best-case scenario, can claim to represent only a minority of the Palestinian people, since only a minority of Palestinians live in the occupied territories: the majority live either in the exile imposed on them by force during the creation of Israel in 1948, or (in the case of those Palestinians who survived that year's ethnic cleansing and remained in their homes) as second-class, non-Jewish citizens of the would-be Jewish state, which systematically <a href="http://www.adalah.org/eng/intl07/cerd-concluding-mar07.pdf">discriminates</a> against them simply because they are not Jewish.<br /><br />These, then, are the possibilities before us: not only does the PA not represent the Palestinian people, it is also, on top of that, either corrupt to an almost unimaginable level; or it is profoundly incompetent and guilty of squandering the rights and hopes of a people that it is unentitled to claim to lead; or it is interested not in its people's rights and hopes but rather in perpetuating its own status as the day-to-day caretaker of a permanent Israeli occupation -- in which case it is no less collaborationist than the Vichy "government" of Nazi-occupied France in the 1940s. Corruption; incompetence; collaboration: ah, the agony of choice.<br /><br />In the unlikely event that Abbas and his associates were to declare the "independence" of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories, as has been suggested by the current so-called Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad (another man whose claim to office has no legitimacy, since his arbitrary appointment, by Abbas, to replace the legitimately elected Hamas leadership -- whatever one thinks of it -- was never confirmed by the Palestinian Legislative Assembly, many of the members of which are in Israeli jails), it ought to be clearer than ever that such a "state" would offer Palestinians only more of the same choices (corruption, compromise, collaboration), while continuing to serve Israel's interests, if not actually to take direct orders from Washington and Tel Aviv.<br /><br />In any case, the Palestinian cause is a struggle for freedom and justice, not for the creation of a statelet in the occupied territories that would, as I said -- even in the best circumstances -- only address the interests of that minority of the Palestinian people who live there.<br /><br />What, then, are we to conclude from all this?<br /><br />Above all, that no Palestinian ought to look to the official leadership as a source of guidance and direction: it has betrayed the people and proved itself totally unworthy of their trust -- indeed, many Palestinians, including <a href="http://www.alquds.co.uk/index.asp?fname=yesterday%5C02z50.htm">Abdelbari Atwan</a>, editor of the newspaper<em> al-quds al-arabi</em>, are demanding that those behind this recent decision be apprehended and put on trial. And of course with a leadership this corrupt, inept or collaborationist, Palestinians can hardly expect better treatment from Washington and Tel Aviv than they are getting from Ramallah. And the Hamas opposition and its alternative leadership has little more to offer in the long run other than resistance for the sake of resistance, which is not, in itself, a blueprint for freedom and justice, and in any case has nothing to offer to Christian or secular Palestinians (and hardly much more than that to offer Muslim ones either, for that matter).<br /><br />The second immediate conclusion to be drawn from this experience is that, as more and more Palestinians are <a href="http://www.al-akhbar.com/ar/node/159706">demanding</a>, the PA ought to be dissolved once and for all -- the sooner, the better. This latest action really ought to be the last in a long and dismal record proving that the PA has not only not served the interests of the Palestinian people, but that, on the contrary, it fundamentally serves the needs and requirements of Israel.<br /><br />Bereft of any credible or legitimate leadership, the Palestinian people will have to look to themselves to continue their struggle for freedom, justice and equality. Indeed, their struggle has been at its best, for example, during the first intifada of the 1980s, when the official leadership -- at the time in exile in Tunis -- was actually least involved in it. No wonder, then, that the Israeli response to the grassroots autonomy of the first intifada was to usher the official leadership back into Palestine; the first intifada then stalled, and things have gone downhill ever since.<br /><br />In looking for a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then, we should once and for all stop looking to governments and officials (elected or otherwise), in the US, Israel, or among the Palestinians themselves. As the Obama administration has already demonstrated, the US government, in the present political conjuncture, will never put peace and justice in Palestine ahead of internal domestic pressures and politics; the Israeli government will not for one moment back down from its continually expanding colonization plan in the West Bank and East Jerusalem until it is compelled by outside pressure to do otherwise; and the Palestinian government -- well, there is no such thing. There is a people living partly under military occupation; partly in enforced exile; and partly as a racialized and discriminated-against minority inside Israel. What they need is to refocus their struggle in ways that they can all identify with, collectively and equally, and, moreover, in ways that people of good will around the world -- who have repeatedly demonstrated in their tens of thousands in support of justice for Palestine.<br /><br />Indeed, the Palestinians are not alone: they have the support of people around the entire world. And it is to that reserve of good will and good faith among ordinary people around the world that the Palestinians must also look, then. As the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa demonstrated, governments not only can, but do, act, when ordinary people of good will make them act. In fact, even as governments have dithered, a vibrant global campaign to boycott, divest from, and impose sanctions on Israel in order to bring it into compliance with international law and in order to realize the rights of the Palestinian people (all of it) has been recording one success after another, reminding us all that <a href="http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10562.shtml">boycotts really do work</a>.<br /><br />This is the direction in which all Palestinians, bereft of leadership, must now throw themselves. And their demand must be something that addresses and unifies the rights of all segments of the Palestinian people, not just those suffering under occupation, as well as addressing and recognizing the rights of Jewish Israelis -- something that most decent people in the world can readily identify with: justice, equality, one-person-one-vote: in other words, the creation of one democratic and secular state in which Palestinians and Israelis can live equally in a just and lasting peace. For without justice there will be no peace.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21570122.post-28846454126051844952009-09-09T09:18:00.000-07:002009-09-09T12:37:15.278-07:00The Last Crisis at the University of California?The Last Crisis at the University of California?<div><br /></div><div>[originally published by Saree Makdisi on Huffington Post, 15 July 2009]</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 20px; font-size:13px;"><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">About to declare a financial emergency, the University of California is entering what could turn out to be its last crisis, the outcome of which may determine the fate not only of the greatest public university system in the nation, but of California as well.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">For ultimately there are only two ways out of the present crisis, one of which will define the contours of California's future.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">Either the price of a UC education will leap far beyond the reach of most Californians, which, combined with the cuts that are simultaneously devastating the California State University system (barring tens of thousands of eligible students from places there next year), will mean that a declining percentage of the state's workforce will receive the university education that is vital to the knowledge economy of the 21st century. That would condemn California--and with it America--to irreversible decline.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">Or (and this will take considerable pressure from businesses, institutions, and voters) the governor and the legislature will do what it takes to enable UC and Cal State to carry out their missions, which will ensure that the state's higher education system continues to make California a place of innovation, invention and progress, and the engine of the national economy.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">And what it takes is not all that much, in the scheme of things.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">In the glory days of the 1970s, the UC system claimed a mere third of a percent of the state's personal income, or in other words 33 cents or so for every $100 earned. That's not much of a sacrifice compared to the benefits that a readily affordable and world-class university system returned to the state, enabling the development of its high tech economy through the 1980s.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">A return to that level of public investment from the present outlay (a difference of less than one percent of the state budget) would allow the university both to safeguard its mission and to bring tuition back down close to what it was in 2000 (less than half what it is today).</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">But if the opposite path is taken, further cuts in state support will inevitably be made up for by ever increasing tuition hikes. UC would go the way of other state universities, like Michigan's--which charges twice what UCLA and Berkeley do.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">A series of budget cuts since 1990 have sapped UC's vitality. State support once covered about 75 percent of the university's core spending: the money that is spent on its everyday educational mission. Today, it covers less than half, and it is set to decline even further.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">Tuition is the only source of funding that can compensate for such losses, which is why it has been increasing.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">The only other alternative is to cut spending, but reckless cuts cost far more in the long run than what they save in the short term.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">For example, UC faces a cut in state support of $637 million for the current academic year. It plans to compensate for this with a combination of devastating layoffs and furloughs for faculty and staff, tuition hikes, and enormous slashes to academic programs.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">Such cuts will have both immediate and lasting consequences for how the university functions. They are unsustainable.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">Research and teaching are the two inseparable missions of UC. Faculty members teach what we discover, and we train our students not merely what we know but how to make discoveries of their own. Not only is what (and how) I teach in my classes today not what was taught five or ten years ago, but even my freshman students have immediate access to the product of my research as I move between my two roles of research and teaching. If I did not have time and resources to conduct my research, I would only be able to teach what I already know. Knowledge would stand still; or, rather, it would be developed by--and for--others, primarily at private institutions whose gates are barred to all but a lucky few.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">The whole point of UC, in fact, is that it makes a research faculty equal to that of Harvard, Princeton and Chicago (UC has more Nobel Prize winners than any of those institutions) directly accessible to far more students, for a fraction of the tuition.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">If the people of California want to preserve that access for their children, they must act now.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">Reducing the size of the faculty while increasing the number of students per instructor--making classes larger and fewer--would diminish both the quantity and quality of instructional contact. Small seminars on specialized topics would go. Large anonymous lecture classes on general topics would prevail. Eliminating classes and majors would thin the academic offerings available to students and impoverish them. Professors would not get to know their students, to mentor and guide them, to write the highly personalized letters of recommendation that students depend on to get into graduate, medical or law schools. Students would pay far more and get far less than what was available to previous generations.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">It does not have to be this way.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">Now is the time to change course, by demanding that the state government do what is right for all Californians and save our higher education system from the devastation that otherwise might lie in store.</p></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21570122.post-66434173906816712352009-09-09T09:17:00.005-07:002009-09-09T09:18:28.713-07:00Netanyahu's Two State Goal?Netanyahu's Two-State Goal?<div><br /></div><div>[originally published by Saree Makdisi on Huffington Post, 8 July 2009]</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; "><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">To judge by the next day's headlines, Benjamin Netanyahu's policy speech last month was a great success. "Israeli Premier Backs State for Palestinians," declared the New York Times. "Israel Endorses Two-State Goal," said the Washington Post. "Netanyahu Backs Palestinian State," announced The Guardian.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">He did no such thing, of course, unless by "state" one understands an amorphous entity lacking a definite territory, not allowed to control its own borders or airspace, shorn of any vestige of sovereignty (other than a flag and perhaps a national anthem), not allowed to enter into treaties with other states--and permanently disarmed and hence at the mercy of Israel. It would make about as much sense to call an apple an orange or a piano a speedboat as to call such a construct a state, and yet those are the conditions that Netanyahu imposed on the creation of such an entity for the Palestinians (if they get that far in the first place).</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">The strange thing is that Netanyahu's speech marked both the definitive end and a symbolic return to the beginning of the two-state solution as that hapless notion has been peddled since the Oslo Accords of 1993-95. For what he said the Palestinians might--perhaps--be entitled to is pretty much what Oslo had said they might be entitled to fifteen years ago: a "self-government authority" not allowed to control its own borders or airspace, shorn of any vestige of sovereignty, etc. And on top of that they can also forget about Jerusalem--that is and will forever remain the eternal and undivided capital of the Jewish people.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">If it sounds so drearily familiar, that's because it is: we have come full circle. First time as tragedy, second time as farce.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">Oslo actually never mentioned the apparently magic words "Palestinian state," so Netanyahu actually outdid Rabin and Peres in terms of rhetorical magnanimity. But, rhetoric aside, by bringing the situation full circle back to what they "offered" Arafat back in the mid-nineties, Netanyahu also revealed to those last few Palestinians who might have believed otherwise that the only kind of Palestinian "state" any Israeli government has ever countenanced (or will ever countenance) will look like what was on offer at Oslo. Netanyahu is offering the same thing all over again because that's the only</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">Palestinian "state" that Israel will accept. Take it or leave it.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">The Palestinians who still cling to the idea of a Palestinian state to be achieved through negotiations (from a position of weakness) with Israel had better absorb this once and for all and move on to other objectives--and other strategies to succeed.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">That's why the return to the beginning also signals the coming of the end. For after all the agony of the past fifteen years no Palestinian in her right mind would want to go back to Oslo all over again. Those agreements led to three things: the permanent institutionalization of the Israeli occupation of Palestine; the permanent separation of the occupied territories into shards of land cut off from one another and the outside world (and hence what Sara Roy calls--and the World Bank implicitly acknowledges as--the de-development of the Palestinian economy); and the doubling of the population of Jewish settlers illegally colonizing the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">There were just over 100,000 Jewish colonists in the West Bank in 1993; there are around 300,000 there today, and a further 200,000 or so in occupied East Jerusalem. According to the UN, their population is increasing at a rate three times greater than that of Israel itself, and will double again to about a million within a decade.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">This phenomenal expansion is what is referred to as the "natural growth" of the colonies, which in his speech Netanyahu--brazenly defying President Obama--said he would protect. A few more years of this kind of growth and the territory that might once (maybe, long ago) have been considered as the basis for a Palestinian state will be all but eaten up by the sprawling colonies.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">There's hardly anything left of that territory anyway. The UN said two years ago that some 40 percent of the West Bank is already taken up by Israeli infrastructure off limits to Palestinians; the 60 percent that remains is broken up into an archipelago of islands so cut off and isolated from each other that a brilliant satirical map has been circulating on the internet representing the West Bank as a kind of Pacific island paradise, with dotted lines showing imaginary ferry routes from Ramallah to Nablus and Bethlehem to Hebron. It would be funny if it were not so sad. And even in most of that 60 percent, Israel retains security control (that's according to Oslo; today its army conducts raids wherever it likes--and it does so virtually every day).</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">What Netanyahu was saying to any Palestinians foolish enough to accept his terms is that if they want to stick a flag in their archipelago of little impoverished islands of territory and call it a state, they can go right ahead.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">But for them to get even that far, they must first, he now says, recognize Israel as a Jewish state. This is a new Israeli demand (it first came up during the buildup to the doomed Annapolis summit in November 2007), the latest in a sequence of such demands going back to the 1970s. First the Palestinians had to renounce terrorism; then they had to recognize Israel; then they had to rewrite their national charter; then they had to tear the charter up; then they had to say--again, louder--that they recognize Israel's right to exist; then they had to end all resistance to four decades of brutal military occupation. Tzipi Livni, Israel's previous foreign minister, even said that the Palestinians had to learn to purge the word "nakba" (referring to the catastrophe of 1948) from their vocabulary if they wanted to have a state. The one thing that Palestinians have not formally been asked to do is to say that they are terribly sorry for having dared to resist the occupation in the first place--and no doubt that demand is on the way as well.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">In return, Israel has had to commit to nothing other than a few vague and craftily-worded--and endlessly deferrable--promises. And it has carried out (at its own pace and according to its own terms) a few tactical redeployments of troops and colonists (from a grand total of 18 percent of the West Bank, at the very peak of Oslo). Some of those redeployments have actually, as in Gaza, made the process of dominating and controlling the Palestinians that much easier (Israel could never have subjected the people of Gaza to the indiscriminate violence it rained on them day and night in late 2008 and early 2009 had the Jewish colonists there remained in place).</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">The Israelis have always been able to find some Palestinian leader or other to go along with their endless demands, to jump ignominiously through one hoop after another, more like a third-rate court jester than the leader of an unvanquished and defiant people. When one leader finally said enough was enough (as Arafat did at Camp David), he was dismissed and another more pliant one (the hopelessly compromised and unimaginative Mahmoud Abbas) was found to take his place, from among the dwindling ranks of those candidates the Israelis deemed not worth assassinating or imprisoning in a campaign of violence going back to the 1970s. (Indeed, it bears repeating that Abbas and his hangers-on survived to this day only as the result of Israel's anti-Darwinian process of unnatural selection of potential Palestinian leaders, in which the fittest were eliminated and the most inept were allowed to reproduce).</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">But this latest demand is too much for any Palestinian leader--even one as endlessly obsequious as Abbas--to accept.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">For to recognize Israel as a Jewish state would be not only to renounce (which no leader and indeed no individual Palestinian has the authority to do) the right of return of those Palestinians ethnically cleansed from their homes during the creation of Israel in 1948. It would also be to abandon to their fate the remaining million or so Palestinians (including their descendants) who survived the nakba and have been living as second class citizens of Israel, and perhaps even to give Israel license to expel them all and complete the "job" (as Benny Morris puts it) of 1948.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">Israel today is no more Jewish than America is white or Christian. The big difference, though, is that, whereas America (for the most part) embraces its own multiculturalism, Israel still desperately wants to be Jewish. Its absurd demand to be recognized as such (no other state goes around impetuously demanding that others accept its own sense of its national character) is an expression of its own profound insecurity: not its military insecurity--the only serious military threat Israel faces on its own territory is imaginary--but rather its anxious awareness of its status as a botched, and hence forever incomplete, settler-colonial enterprise. Unlike Australia, there were too many aboriginals left standing when the smoke cleared over the ruins of Palestine in 1948. And to this day the Palestinians have refused to simply give up, go away or somehow annul themselves.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">That fact--and its attendant anxiety among Zionists--poses a real problem for the million Palestinians inside Israel, whose fate is far from settled.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">Western liberals consider Avigdor Lieberman to be right wing because he says openly that he wants the indigenous Palestinians removed from what he considers to be the Jewish land of Israel (to which he came as a Russian-speaking immigrant). What they fail to acknowledge is that Tzipi Livni, who ran in the recent Israeli elections as the voice of peace and moderation--the darling of Western liberals--hinted at exactly the same dark fate ("Once a Palestinian state is established, I can come to the Palestinian citizens, whom we call Israeli Arabs, and say to them "you are citizens with equal rights, but the national solution for you is elsewhere,'" she said during the electoral campaign--i.e., you are equal, but not really, and ultimately you must look elsewhere for a sense of home). And Netanyahu has long espoused a similar position.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">How could he not? This is not rocket science or linear algebra: it is what it means for a state to insist on having a single cultural identity irrespective of who happens to actually be living on the territory it considers its own. It is all too rarely thought of in the same terms, but the violent insistence on monoculture is just as ugly in Israel as it is in Iran, Saudi Arabia, among the cadres of the British National Party, the followers of Jean-Marie le Pen, the hoodlums of Aryan Nation or the hooded posses of the KKK. The drive to obliterate or expunge cultural difference from a homeland conceived of as an exclusive space will always be inherently ugly.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">And the fact of the matter is that the expulsion or "transfer" of Palestinians has been a core feature of Zionism as it has been practiced since 1948. It is inherent in Zionism as a political program--from right to left--because, if the idea behind Zionism is to establish an exclusively Jewish state (which it is), the only way for a would-be Jewish state to have been established on land that began the twentieth century with a population that was overwhelmingly (93 percent) non-Jewish was through the removal of the land's non-Jewish population. The sense that there is an inherently Jewish land inconveniently cluttered up with a non-Jewish population that needs to be dealt with somehow or other drove Zionist planning all through the 1930s (the "transfer" of the Palestinians was planned more than a decade before the 1948 war). And, as grotesque as ever, it was on full view in Netanyahu's speech.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">The key moment in the speech came when he said that "the truth is that in the area of our homeland, in the heart of our Jewish Homeland, now lives a large population of Palestinians." This attitude comes straight out of the primitive racialism and imaginary civilizational hierarchies of the nineteenth century. The Jews are a people with a homeland and hence they have a right to a state; the Palestinians are not a people at all, or certainly not one of the same order. They are merely a collection of vagabonds and trespassers intruding on the Jewish Homeland. They have no rights, let alone a centuries-old competing narrative of home attached to the same land, a narrative worthy of recognition by Israel.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">On the contrary: the Palestinians must accept that Israel is the state of the Jewish people, and they must do so on the understanding that they are not entitled to the same rights. "We" are a people, Netanyahu was saying; "they" are merely a "population." "We" have a right to a state--a real state. "They" do not. "They" have to recognize "our" rights; "we" owe "them" nothing in return, except, possibly, a curt nod of dismissal from "our" view into the walled-off ghettoes and cantons which we might (perhaps, if "they" behave well) be persuaded to build for "them" on "our" land--and "they" had better be grateful even for that.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">This racialized sense of inherent entitlement and unique superiority--fueled (in just the way that a child is spoiled by over-indulgent parents) by over $100 billion of our tax dollars, the endless deference of our elected representatives, the open-ended diplomatic cover provided on demand by all our presidents after Eisenhower--is what allows Israelis like Netanyahu (and Lieberman, and Livni, and Olmert, and Sharon, and Rabin, etc.) to threaten, bellow at and admonish the Palestinians. It is also what allows Israel to occupy Palestinian land, demolish Palestinian homes, starve Palestinian children, imprison and shoot Palestinian youths, tear up Palestinian olive trees, crush Palestinian aspirations, while believing--really sincerely believing--that Israel is the real victim of everything that has happened. And, unbelievable as it is, that idea too (that Israel is the real victim of Palestinian aggression) was repeatedly expressed in Netanyahu's speech. Make no mistake that he really believes it; it's astonishing to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the history, but most Israelis, and most of their supporters in this country, really do believe in this totally inverted--and perverted--view of history.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">Such attitudes, such views, are the inevitable products of endless indulgence.</p><p style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; margin-bottom: 14px; ">No matter what the best way forward is--two states or one--it is absolutely vital for the American people to call their leaders to account and to demand that this indulgence must end, for the sake of everyone involved. And until our politicians learn (or are persuaded) to do the right thing, it falls on each of us to do what we can to end the indulgence and to bring pressure to bear on Israel. Heeding the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions is the obvious place to begin.</p></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21570122.post-51778164870652646472009-09-09T09:12:00.000-07:002009-09-09T09:15:54.234-07:00The Language that Absolves Israel<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial; font-size: 12px; "><div id="title-subtitle" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(84, 84, 84); font-weight: normal; font-size: 225%; padding-bottom: 15px; "><h1 style="border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-style: inherit; font-size: 100%; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(84, 84, 84); margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-weight: normal; ">T<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">he language that absolves Israel</span></h1></div><div id="subtitle_sub" style="margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; vertical-align: baseline; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; line-height: 140%; margin-top: -7px; margin-bottom: 20px; "><h2 style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-style: inherit; font-size: 100%; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; font-weight: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">A special political vocabulary prevents us from being able to recognize what's going on in the Middle East.</span></h2></div><div id="article_content" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 100%; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; padding-bottom: 12px; margin-bottom: 7px; "><p class="byline" style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; margin-top: 5px; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; font-size: 100%; line-height: 140%; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">[Originally published by Saree Makdisi in the </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Los Angeles Times,</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"> 19 June 2009]</span></p><div id="article_body" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 100%; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; padding-top: 0px; "><div class="firstpara" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 100%; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; "><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 140%; font-size: 115%; margin-top: 2ex; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2ex; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">On Sunday night, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech that -- by categorically ruling out the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state -- ought to have been seen as a mortal blow to the quest for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.</span></p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 140%; font-size: 115%; margin-top: 2ex; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2ex; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">On Monday morning, however, newspaper headlines across the United States announced that Netanyahu had endorsed the creation of a Palestinian state, and the White House welcomed the speech as "an important step forward."</span></p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 140%; font-size: 115%; margin-top: 2ex; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2ex; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; "></span></p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 140%; font-size: 115%; margin-top: 2ex; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2ex; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Reality can be so easily stood on its head when it comes to Israel because the misreading of Israeli declarations is a long-established practice among commentators and journalists in the United States.</span></p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 140%; font-size: 115%; margin-top: 2ex; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2ex; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">In fact, a special vocabulary has been developed for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the United States. It filters and structures the way in which developing stories are misread here, making it difficult for readers to fully grasp the nature of those stories -- and maybe even for journalists to think critically about what they write.</span></p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 140%; font-size: 115%; margin-top: 2ex; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2ex; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">The ultimate effect of this special vocabulary is to make it possible for Americans to accept and even endorse in Israel what they would reject out of hand in any other country.</span></p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 140%; font-size: 115%; margin-top: 2ex; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2ex; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Let me give a classic example.</span></p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 140%; font-size: 115%; margin-top: 2ex; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2ex; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">In the U.S., discussion of Palestinian politicians and political movements often relies on a spectrum running from "extreme" to "moderate." The latter sounds appealing; the former clearly applies to those who must be -- must they not? -- beyond the pale. But hardly anyone relying on such terms pauses to ask what they mean. According to whose standard are these manifestly subjective labels assigned?</span></p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 140%; font-size: 115%; margin-top: 2ex; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2ex; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Meanwhile, Israeli politicians are labeled according to an altogether different standard: They are "doves" or "hawks." Unlike the terms reserved for Palestinians, there's nothing inherently negative about either of those avian terms.</span></p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 140%; font-size: 115%; margin-top: 2ex; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2ex; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">So why is no Palestinian leader referred to here as a "hawk"? Why are Israeli politicians rarely labeled "extremists"? Or, for that matter, "militants"?</span></p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 140%; font-size: 115%; margin-top: 2ex; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2ex; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">There are countless other examples of these linguistic double standards. American media outlets routinely use the deracinating and deliberately obfuscating term "Israeli Arabs" to refer to the Palestinian citizens of Israel, despite the fact that they call themselves -- and are -- Palestinian.</span></p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 140%; font-size: 115%; margin-top: 2ex; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2ex; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Similarly, Israeli housing units built in the occupied territories in contravention of international law are always called "settlements" or even "neighborhoods" rather than what they are: "colonies." That word may be harsh on the ears, but it's far more accurate ("a body of people who settle in a new locality, forming a community subject to or connected with their parent state").<br /></span></p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 140%; font-size: 115%; margin-top: 2ex; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2ex; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; "></span></p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 140%; font-size: 115%; margin-top: 2ex; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2ex; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">These subtle distinctions make a huge difference. Unconsciously absorbed, such terms frame the way people and events are viewed. When it comes to Israel, we seem to reach for a dictionary that applies to no one else, to give a pass to actions or statements that would be condemned in any other quarter.</span></p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 140%; font-size: 115%; margin-top: 2ex; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2ex; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">That's what allowed Netanyahu to be congratulated for endorsing a Palestinian "state," even though the kind of entity he said Palestinians might -- possibly -- be allowed to have would be nothing of the kind.</span></p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 140%; font-size: 115%; margin-top: 2ex; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2ex; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Look up the word "state" in the dictionary. You'll probably see references to territorial integrity, power and sovereignty. The entity that Netanyahu was talking about on Sunday would lack all of those constitutive features. A "state" without a defined territory that is not allowed to control its own borders or airspace and cannot enter into treaties with other states is not a state, any more than an apple is an orange or a car an airplane. So how can leading American newspapers say "Israeli Premier Backs State for Palestinians," as the New York Times had it? Or "Netanyahu relents on goal of two states," as this paper put it?</span></p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 140%; font-size: 115%; margin-top: 2ex; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2ex; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Because a different vocabulary applies.</span></p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 140%; font-size: 115%; margin-top: 2ex; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2ex; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Which is also what kept Netanyahu's most extraordinary demand in Sunday night's speech from raising eyebrows here.</span></p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 140%; font-size: 115%; margin-top: 2ex; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2ex; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">"The truth," he said, "is that in the area of our homeland, in the heart of our Jewish homeland, now lives a large population of Palestinians."</span></p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 140%; font-size: 115%; margin-top: 2ex; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2ex; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">In other words, as Netanyahu repeatedly said, there is a Jewish people; it has a homeland and hence a state. As for the Palestinians, they are a collection -- not even a group -- of trespassers on Jewish land. Netanyahu, of course, dismisses the fact that they have a centuries-old competing narrative of home attached to the same land, a narrative worthy of recognition by Israel.</span></p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 140%; font-size: 115%; margin-top: 2ex; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2ex; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">On the contrary: The Palestinians must, he said, accept that Israel is the state of the Jewish people (this is a relatively new Israeli demand, incidentally), and they must do so on the understanding that they are not entitled to the same rights. "We" are a people, Netanyahu was saying; "they" are merely a "population." "We" have a right to a state -- a real state. "They" do not.</span></p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 140%; font-size: 115%; margin-top: 2ex; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2ex; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">And the spokesman for our African American president calls this "an important step forward"?</span></p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 140%; font-size: 115%; margin-top: 2ex; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2ex; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">In any other situation -- including our own country -- such a brutally naked contrast between those who are taken to have inherent rights and those who do not would immediately be labeled as racist. Netanyahu, though, is given a pass, not because most Americans would knowingly endorse racism but because, in this case, a special political vocabulary kicks in that prevents them from being able to recognize it for exactly what it is.</span></p><p></p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 140%; font-size: 115%; margin-top: 2ex; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2ex; margin-left: 0px; text-align: left; "><br /></p><p></p></div></div></div></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21570122.post-6645481052834772832008-11-17T17:27:00.000-08:002008-11-17T17:37:25.815-08:00California Cuts Education Budget at its Own PerilCalifornia is cutting education funding at its own peril<br /><br />The costs to the state in the long run will be much greater than the expense of supporting our schools now.<br /><br />[Originally published by Saree Makdisi in <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-makdisi17-2008nov17,0,3541423.story"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Los Angeles Times</span></a> on November 17, 2008]<br /><br /><br /><br />With California's budget now facing an $11-billion shortfall, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed billions of dollars in spending cuts, most of them aimed at the state's already beleaguered schools, colleges and universities.<br /><br />The governor's proposal is now on the table of the special legislative session that he called to address the budget crisis, so this is the time to draw a line to defend our public education system, before any further damage is added to the toll already taken by years of budget cuts on the educational -- and hence life -- prospects of a whole generation of Californian students.<br /><br />Most of the prospective cuts -- more than $2 billion -- would be to California's public elementary, middle and high schools, on top of the $3-billion cut from K-12 funding in the current budget.<br /><br />According to the Census Bureau, California is already spending far less than the national average for each of its students, and about half what states such as New York and New Jersey and even the District of Columbia spend per student.<br /><br />There is nothing left to pare. "From Siskiyou County to San Diego, districts have spent reserves, reduced staff, eliminated transportation or increased class sizes over the past difficult year," warned Jack O'Connell, state superintendent of public instruction. "The governor's proposed additional $2 billion in cuts to K-12 education would not only create catastrophic disruption in our schools and harm to our students in the middle of the school year, they would damage our future economy."<br /><br />The governor is also proposing to slash $330 million from community college budgets, $66 million from the Cal State system and $66 million from the University of California -- all, again, on top of cuts that have already been made. In schools and colleges alike, spending cuts have immediate implications for the classroom (fewer instructors, fewer classes, more students per instructor, etc.).<br /><br />But universities don't just teach, they produce knowledge. In fact, what makes a great university great is that its students are taught by those engaged in state-of-the-art research. And cuts in spending on research can far outlast the transitory budget crises that produced them. A library that is forced to stop buying books may never recover, even if its budget is eventually restored. A lab that can't purchase needed equipment will fall behind. Faculty members whose research stalls can lose touch with their fields and spend years playing catch-up. Many will leave, and schools that develop reputations as underfunded second- and third-tier institutions will find it difficult to replace them. Merely restoring a budget sometime in the future will not instantly undo those kinds of losses.<br /><br />We live in a global-knowledge economy in which California developed a leading role in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s precisely because of the strength of its education system. Cal State and UC produced many of the highly skilled professionals working in science, computing, gaming, animation, writing and film production that together drive the state's economy. To under-fund our educational system is to jeopardize our position in the global economy.<br /><br />The problem is not simply a lack of money. We also have some of our spending priorities back to front. Even before the budget cuts, the state planned to spend $5,900 a student in California's higher-education system this year (including community college students) but almost 10 times that amount ($58,000) per inmate in our bloated prison system, which absorbs as much money from the state budget as Cal State and UC combined.<br /><br />Not only can we afford to spend more on education, but we Californians have repeatedly shown our willingness to tax ourselves for public projects we believe in: Witness the recent votes in favor of Proposition 1A and Measure R to raise transportation funds, and the passage of all 23 school bond measures on the L.A. County ballot, including the $7-billion Measure Q.<br /><br />No one likes to pay higher taxes, of course, especially in difficult economic circumstances. And the current crisis will force us to make some tough choices. But if we choose not to collectively finance the state's education budget at the required levels, more of a burden will fall on individual students and their families, many of whom simply won't be able to afford it. Cal State and UC both warn of fee increases next year of up to 10% if state cuts go through, and they may also have to deny admission to thousands of qualified students. Community colleges may have to turn away more than 250,000 current students.<br /><br />Not paying for the education system that made California an economic powerhouse is not an option: We can pay now, or we can pay much more later in lost opportunities carrying dollar price tags just as real as those of tax increases, not to mention the social cost of having a higher-education system beyond the reach of more and more Californians.<br /><br />California has a $2-trillion economy, the eighth-largest in the world, ahead of Canada, Russia, India and Brazil, among others. Not only can we afford to offer our children a first-rate public education from kindergarten through college, but we are cheating them, and ourselves, if we don't.<br /><br />But our ability to raise the necessary revenue is currently being blocked by conservatives in the state Legislature who have categorically refused to countenance new taxes -- and hence left the state no option but to cut. By starving our educational system of the funds it needs, they have chosen to protect the narrow interests of those who can afford to send their kids to private schools and universities, rather than the much broader public that voted them into office in the first place. That's a choice they may come to regret at election time.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21570122.post-47858451259614545962008-06-26T08:34:00.001-07:002008-06-26T08:36:47.073-07:00Occupation by BureaucracyOccupation by bureaucracy<br /><br />[Originally published in the <a href="http://http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/24/opinion/edmakdisi.php"><span style="font-style: italic;">International Herald Tribune</span></a>, 24 June 2008]<br /><br /><br />A cease-fire went into effect in Gaza last week, offering some respite from the violence that has killed hundreds of Palestinians and five Israelis in recent months. It will do nothing, however, to address the underlying cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.<br /><br />Intermittent spectacular violence may draw the world's attention to the occupied Palestinian territories, but our obsession with violence actually distracts us from the real nature of Israel's occupation, which is its smothering bureaucratic control of everyday Palestinian life.<br /><br />This is an occupation ultimately enforced by tanks and bombs, and through the omnipresent threat, if not application, of violence. But its primary instruments are application forms, residency permits, population registries and title deeds. On its own, no cease-fire will relieve the beleaguered Palestinians.<br /><br />Gaza is virtually cut off from the outside world by Israeli power. Elsewhere, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the ongoing Israeli occupation comprehensively infuses all the normally banal activities of Palestinians' everyday lives: applying for permission to access one's own land; applying for what Israel regards as the privilege - rather than the right - of living with one's spouse and children; applying for permission to drive one's car; to dig a well; to visit relatives in the next town; to visit Jerusalem; to go to work; to school; to university; to hospital. There is hardly any dimension of everyday life in Palestine that is not minutely managed by Israeli military or bureaucratic personnel.<br /><br />Partly, this occupation of everyday life enables the Israelis to maintain their vigilant control over the Palestinian population. But it also serves the purpose of slowly, gradually removing Palestinians from their land, forcing them to make way for Jewish settlers.<br /><br />Just in 2006, for example, Israel stripped 1,363 Jerusalem Palestinians of the right to live in the city in which many of them were born. It did this not by dramatically forcing dozens of people at a time onto trucks and dumping them at the city limits, but rather by quietly stripping them, one by one, of their Jerusalem residency papers.<br /><br />This in turn was enabled by a series of bureaucratic procedures. While Israel continues to violate international law by building exclusively Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem, it rarely grants building permits to Palestinian residents of the same city. Since 1967, the third of Jerusalem's population that is Palestinian has been granted just 9 percent of the city's official housing permits. The result is a growing abundance of housing for Jews and a severe shortage of housing for non-Jews - i.e., Palestinians.<br /><br />In fact, 90 percent of the Palestinian territory Israel claimed to have annexed to Jerusalem after 1967 is today off-limits to Palestinian development because the land is either already built on by exclusively Jewish settlements or being reserved for their future expansion.<br /><br />Denied permits, many Palestinians in Jerusalem build without them, but at considerable risk: Israel routinely demolishes Palestinian homes built without a permit. This includes over 300 homes in East Jerusalem demolished between 2004 and 2007 and 18,000 Palestinian homes in the occupied territories demolished since 1967.<br /><br />One alternative has been to move to the West Bank suburbs and commute to Jerusalem. The wall cutting off East Jerusalem from the West Bank and thereby separating tens of thousands of Jerusalem Palestinians from the city of their birth has made that much more difficult.<br /><br />And it too has its risks: Palestinians who cannot prove to Israel's satisfaction that Jerusalem has continuously been their "center of life" have been stripped of their Jerusalem residency papers. Without those papers, they will be expelled from Jerusalem, and confined to one of the walled-in reservoirs - of which Gaza is merely the largest example - that Israel has allocated as holding pens for the non-Jewish population of the holy land.<br /><br />The expulsion of half of Palestine's Muslim and Christian population in what Palestinians call the nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 was undertaken by Israel's founders in order to clear space in which to create a Jewish state.<br /><br />The nakba did not end 60 years ago, however: It continues to this very day, albeit on a smaller scale. Yet even ones and twos eventually add up. Virtually every day, another Palestinian joins the ranks of the millions removed from their native land and denied the right of return.<br /><br />Their long wait will end - and this conflict will come to a lasting resolution - only when the futile attempt to maintain an exclusively Jewish state in what had previously been a vibrantly multi-religious land is abandoned.<br /><br />Separation will always require threats or actual violence; a genuine peace will come not with more separation, but with the right to return to a land in which all can live as equals. Only a single democratic, secular and multicultural state offers that hope to Israelis and Palestinians, to Muslims, Jews and Christians alike.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21570122.post-83701086882910213252008-06-20T06:23:00.000-07:002008-06-20T06:45:30.100-07:00Banned in the USA (Almost)Banned in the U.S.A. (Almost)<br /><br />[A shorter version of this piece was originally published 8 June 2008 in <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/06/AR2008060603066_pf.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Washington Post</span></a>]<br /><br />I didn't think America was a place where bookstores barred people for their viewpoints, until it happened to me last month, right here in Washington, D.C., the city of my birth.<br /><br />I had been scheduled to appear at Politics & Prose, one of the city's best known bookstores, to talk about my latest book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Palestine-Inside-Out-Everyday-Occupation/dp/0393066061/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213968606&sr=8-1"><span style="font-style: italic;">Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation</span></a>.<br /><br />Then, at the last minute, the bookstore owners realized that my book questions the viability of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (mostly because, after 40 years of intensive Israeli settlement, there's no land left for a Palestinian state in the West Bank, almost half of which is now taken up by Israeli infrastructure)—and that it concludes with an argument in favor of a single democratic, secular and multicultural state in which Israelis and Palestinians could live peacefully as citizens with equal rights.<br /><br />My appearance at the bookstore was immediately cancelled.<br /><br />"I do not believe that your book will further constructive debate in the United States," one of the owners wrote, seeking to justify the sudden cancellation. "A single state is not a solution."<br /><br />Needless to say, I was dismayed to have had my invitation to speak on an urgent issue abruptly rescinded just because I express a different point of view from the one sanctioned not just by the White House and State Department but also, apparently, by a supposedly independent bookstore.<br /><br />My own cancellation fits into a larger pattern, however.<br /><br />The Irish poet Tom Paulin, of Oxford University, had been invited to speak at Harvard University a few years ago; apparently with the blessings of Harvard's president, his appearance was cancelled because of his views about Israel/Palestine.<br /><br />Professor Joel Beinin of Stanford University had been invited to speak about Israel/Palestine at a school in the Silicon Valley early last year; his appearance was cancelled when the school came under outside pressure.<br /><br />Professor Tony Judt of NYU had been invited to speak about Israel/Palestine at the Polish Consulate in New York the previous fall; his talk was cancelled after the consulate came under pressure from the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee.<br /><br />Both Judt and Beinin are Jewish, incidentally; but both believe that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as Israelis. Apparently that point of view has no place in American discussions of the conflict.<br /><br />Neither, it seems, does President Carter's assertion that—by creating two different road networks, maintaining two different legal systems, and granting rights to one population that it forcibly denies to another living in the same territory—Israel is practicing a kind of Apartheid.<br /><br />Nor does the assertion, by Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, that a powerful but informal lobby stifles the free discussion of Israel and Palestine in the United States: Mearsheimer too has had at least one long-standing invitation to speak abruptly rescinded—ironically confirming his and Walt's argument for them.<br /><br />The fact that senior scholars from the nation's major universities (and even elder statesmen) are prevented from speaking—or are drowned out by emotional invective—simply because they do not toe an official line suggests that the civic culture on which our country was founded has broken down, at least when it comes to the question of Palestine and Israel.<br /><br />However, the fact that more and more people are encountering silence, intimidation or censorship when they question the conventional wisdom, or official policy, on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is a sign that more and more people are starting to ask questions in the first place. So the attempt to deny alternative points of view a forum (or to angrily shout them down if they succeed in reaching a public) is a sign not of the strength but of the weakness of those who adhere to the official line. As the great English poet John Milton pointed out three centuries ago, only those who worry that their own position is faulty have something to fear from letting other points of view be heard.<br /><br />Today that fear has reached new levels.<br /><br />But can we as a nation really afford not to hear each other out as we evaluate our policies in the Middle East?<br /><br />And should Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular not be allowed to speak? Or should they be allowed to speak only if their erstwhile audience gets to tell them what they should say? What then is the point of a conversation? What is the alternative to conversation? Does foreclosing conversation not simply empower those who say that it's a waste of time?<br /><br />Anyway, what is so unspeakably wrong with saying that justice, secularism, tolerance and equality of citizens—rather than privileges granted on the basis of religion—should be among the founding values of a state?<br /><br />And what does it mean that one can be barred from expressing such a sentiment at a liberal bookstore in the capital city of the United States of America?<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">[Postscript</span>: After receiving letters of protest and eloquent entreaties by bloggers, Politics & Prose decided to reissue my invitation.]Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21570122.post-10875255459201879202008-05-16T14:34:00.000-07:002008-05-16T14:46:40.547-07:00Debate on Democracy Now!<span style="font-weight: bold;">As Israelis Celebrate Independence and Palestinians Mark the “Nakba,” a Debate with Benny Morris, Saree Makdisi and Norman Finkelstein<br /><br />Originally aired on <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/16/as_israelis_celebrate_independence_and_palestinians"><span style="font-style: italic;">Democracy Now!!</span></a>, 16 May 2008<br /><br /></span> Sixty years since the creation of Israel and displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, we host a debate on the legacy of 1948 and the possibility of a just future for both Israelis and Palestinians with three guests: Benny Morris, seen as one of the most important Israeli historians of the 1948 war and after; Saree Makdisi, UCLA professor and author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Palestine-Inside-Out-Everyday-Occupation/dp/0393066061/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210974066&sr=8-1"><i>Palestine Inside Out</i></a>; and Norman Finkelstein, author of several books, including <i>Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict</i> and <i>Beyond Chutzpah</i>.<br /><div class="intro"> </div><p>Guests:</p> <p class="guest_appearance"><b>Benny Morris</b>, Israeli historian of 1948. His latest book is <i>1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War</i>.</p><p class="guest_appearance"><b>Saree Makdisi</b>, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA and the author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Palestine-Inside-Out-Everyday-Occupation/dp/0393066061/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210974066&sr=8-1"><i>Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation</i></a>.</p><p class="guest_appearance"><b>Norman Finkelstein</b>, Author of several books, including <i>The Holocaust Industry</i>, <i>Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict</i> and <i>Beyond Chutzpah</i>.</p> <div class="red_box"> <h3><a name="transcript"></a>Rush Transcript</h3><a href="http://www.democracynow.org/get_involved/donate"></a> </div> <p><b>AMY GOODMAN: </b>We continue today on the sixtieth anniversary of the creation of the state of Israel. Today, a debate around the legacy of 1948 and a possibility of a just future for both Israelis and Palestinians.<br /></p><p>Benny Morris is seen as one of the most important Israeli historians of the 1948 war. From his first book twenty years ago, Morris has documented Israeli atrocities and the expulsion of Palestinians, considered part of a group of so-called “revisionist” historians who challenged conventional Israeli thinking about 1948. However, unlike his critics to the left, Morris did not consider the expulsions to be part of a systematic Israeli policy of transfer. His latest book, published in March by Yale University Press, is called <i>1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War</i>. He joins us here in our firehouse studio.</p><p>We’re also joined in California by Saree Makdisi. He’s in Los Angeles, professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA. His latest book is <i>Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation</i>, just out this month. <a href="http://sareemakdisi.blogspot.com/2008/05/forget-two-state-solution.html">His most recent op-ed</a> in the <i>Los Angeles Times</i> is titled “Forget the Two-State Solution: Israelis and Palestinians Must Share the Land Equally.”<br /></p><p>We are also joined on the telephone from Brussels by Norman Finkelstein, author of four books, including <i>The Holocaust Industry</i>, <i>Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict</i> and <i>Beyond Chutzpah</i>. He was in Brussels addressing a group of parliamentarians around the issue of Palestinians.<br /></p><p>And our guest remains on the line, Tikva Honig-Parnass, who fought in the 1948 war, now is a progressive writer in Israel and critical of what happened in 1948.<br /></p><p>Benny Morris, welcome to <i>Democracy Now!</i> Explain, from your perspective, from your research, what happened in 1948.<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>Well, based on a large amount of documentation, which I’ve gone through over the years, several decades, in fact, the international community in the wake of the Holocaust voted to establish two states in Palestine, to divide the land into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jewish side, the Zionist movement, the Jewish Agency Executive accepted the international decision and went about establishing their state.<br /></p><p>The Palestinian Arabs, backed by the Arab world, rejected the decision and went to war against the Jewish community in Palestine and subsequently against the state which was established half a year later. As a result of this war, some 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes, not really turned into refugees, most of them, because they were moved or moved from one place in Palestine to another. About one-third moved out of Palestine and were genuine refugees.<br /></p><p><b>AMY GOODMAN: </b>And on what do you base all of this?<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>Oh, on masses and masses of Israeli, American, United Nations, British documentation. The Arab documentation isn’t available. The Arab states, all of them being dictatorships, do not open their archives. But all Western archives, especially the Israeli archives, give a very good picture of what actually happened.<br /></p><p><b>AMY GOODMAN: </b>Can you talk about the significance of your finding within the state of Israel—you’re basing much of this on Israeli documents—how you broke with convention in Israel?<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>Yeah. The traditional Zionist narrative about what had happened in ’48, especially relating to the refugee problem, was that the refugees had been ordered, instructed, advised by their leaders, by Palestinian leaders or Arab leaders outside the country, to flee, and that is why 700,000 left their homes. The documentation gives us a much, much broader and a more nuanced picture of what happened. Most of the people who were displaced fled their homes. A small number were expelled. Most fled their homes as a result of the war, the fear of battle, the fear of being attacked, the fear of dying. A small number also left because of the economic conditions. And a small number were advised or instructed by their leadership, as in Haifa in April 1948, to leave the country. But it’s a mixed bag, with the war itself, the hostilities themselves and fear of being hurt being the main precipitant to flight.<br /></p><p><b>AMY GOODMAN: </b>You have written that the humiliation of the Arabs going back to 1949 is what underlies so much of the hostility today. Lay out what you see as the humiliations.<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>It’s a historic humiliation. It’s not a private, personal humiliation. I think the Arab world was brought up—the Islamic Arab world was brought up on tales of power and conquest dating back to the seventh century and the expansion of Islam and the Arabs out of the Arabian Peninsula and the conquest of the Mediterranean Basin, parts of Europe, and so on. And they had a self-image of a powerful people.<br /></p><p>And what happened in the—after the Turkish Ottoman conquests in the fifteenth century and subsequently belittled the Arab world, disempowered it. And then came the European imperial incursions, sometimes conquests in the nineteenth century. And topping all that came the Zionist influx and the unsuccessful Arab war against it in 1947-48. And this was a humiliation the Arab world could not take. 630,000 Jews had bested a 1.2 million Palestinians and 40 million Arabs surrounding that 630,000-strong community. And this humiliation is something which they have never been able to erase and still, I think, motivates them in large measure in their desire to erase the state of Israel.<br /></p><p><b>AMY GOODMAN: </b>How was it that for so many years the Zionist narrative was that there were either no Palestinians—it was an empty land—or the Palestinians left of their own accord?<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>These are different subjects, but I think the Zionists preferred not to see the 500,000-or-so natives who were there, as they regarded them at the end of the nineteenth century, because if they had sort of looked at them and they’d have seen the problem of what do you do with 500,000 people who don’t want you to arrive and settle in your—in what they regarded as their land, this would have knocked out the confidence from the Zionists and undermined their enterprise. It was better to see that the—to believe that the land was in some way empty. But if you look at the actual Zionist documentation, they did see the Arabs, and they knew there was a problem almost from the start.<br /></p><p>When it comes to the Palestinian so-called—most of them so-called refugees or the displaced of ’48—look, political movements, peoples like to feel good about themselves and to feel that their cause is just. My belief is the cause, the Zionist cause, was just, and they had good reasons to believe—to see themselves as good. But every war has its dark side, especially civil wars, which are notably vicious. And ’48 also had a dark side, which involved the displacement of 700,000 people and the decision by the Israeli government—and this is the crucial decision—there was never a decision to expel, but there was a decision not to allow back the refugees. And this, in some ways, is a dark side to the ’48 war, which was a glorious war of the creation of the state of Israel; the defeat of larger armies, ultimately larger countries, by a small and weak community. But they preferred not to look at the dark side.<br /></p><p><b>AMY GOODMAN: </b>Saree Makdisi, I wanted to bring you in, a professor at UCLA joining us from Los Angeles. Your response to Benny Morris?<br /></p><p><b>SAREE MAKDISI: </b>Well, I mean, I think the most interesting thing is the way in which Dr. Morris talks about there being a problem way before 1948, and he’s entirely right. When the Zionist movement decided to create a Jewish homeland or a Jewish state in a land that had a largely non-Jewish population at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was in fact a problem. He’s totally right. So the question is, as he puts it in his own work, what do you do with this big population that doesn’t want there to be a state that displaces them or ignores them or sidesteps them or overshadows them or whatever? And as his own research shows and as the research of other historians shows, from the—at least the mid-1930s on, there’s talk of removing the population.<br /></p><p>And that goes on to this very day in different forms. I mean, for example, there are people in Israel itself in Israeli politics to this very day, both within Israel proper and in the Occupied Territories, who talk about completing the process of transfer, of removal, of 1948.<br /></p><p>And as he also says, the other thing is that, irrespective of what language one uses—and notice how candy one can be with the use of language: are they “refugees”? Are they “displaced persons”? It doesn’t really matter what language one uses; the people who were removed from their homes, that’s what matters. And as he says himself in what he just said now, what matters isn’t so much that they were removed from their homes, it’s that they were never allowed back to their homes. So whatever the circumstances of the removals and expulsions of 1948, the more important fact is, that was seen as something—as an issue forty years previously, if not longer before that, and as an issue to be blocked when they decided—when they wanted to go back to their homes after the fighting stopped. And they’ve never been allowed to go back, as you know, despite their moral and legal right to do so. That’s what this is all about.<br /></p><p><b>AMY GOODMAN: </b>Norman Finkelstein, let me bring you into this conversation, author of a number of books on Israel-Palestine—his latest is <i>Beyond Chutzpah</i>—speaking to us from Brussels.<br /></p><p><b>NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: </b>Well, as it happens, on the plane ride over here, I read Benny Morris’s new book, and what was most surprising to me is that although the documentation remains pretty much the same as the past several books—he’s added some new material, but it’s pretty much the same as several previous books he’s written on the topic—the conclusions and the political framework has been radically changed.<br /></p><p>Now, it’s no problem for people to change their opinions on the basis of new evidence, but what happens in Morris’s new book, <i>1948</i>, is he radically changes his opinions by subtracting evidence. So let’s take just briefly, because we’re a radio program, some examples. In his previous book, he says transfer was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism, and this aim automatically produced resistance among the Arabs. And he goes on to say in another book that it was the fear of territorial dispossession and displacement that was to be the chief motor of Arab antagonism to Zionism. So we have two basis facts: number one, Zionism, inbuilt into it was the expulsion of the indigenous population; and number two, the Palestinians or Arabs opposed Zionism, because they were fearful of losing their homes and losing their country.<br /></p><p>But now, when you open up his new book, cause and effect have been reversed. It becomes now the Palestinians who are the “expulsionists,” to use his words, and it’s the Zionist movement which is reacting to the Palestinians, which causes them to be occasionally expulsionists. It’s as if to say the Native American population of the United States was expulsionist, because it refused to acquiesce in the European settlers taking over their homes.<br /></p><p><b>AMY GOODMAN: </b>Professor Morris?<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>I think Finkelstein has a blinkered view, and he sees only certain documents. What I try to do is look at actually the breadth of the documentation and derive conclusions about the past.<br /></p><p>The Palestinian National Movement, led by Haj Amin al-Husseini in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, wanted to expel the Jews. The Jews felt they had a moral right to live in the country and to reestablish their sovereignty in the country, at least in part of it. And the Palestinians thought not. They didn’t care about Jewish history. They cared nothing about Jewish tragedy or persecution over the 2,000 years and wanted to expel them from the country. They didn’t get the chance, because they lost the war. So the war—something like the reverse had happened.<br /></p><p>But the fact is—and this is something most Arab commentators ignore or don’t tell us—the Palestinians rejected the UN partition resolution; the Jews accepted it. They accepted the possibility of dividing the country into two states, with one Arab state and a Jewish state. And the Jewish state, which was to come into being in 1947-48, according to the United Nations, was to have had an Arab population of 400,000 to 500,000 and a Jewish population of slightly more than 500,000. That was what was supposed to come into being, and that is what the Zionist movement accepted. When the Arabs rejected it and went to war against the Jewish community, it left the Jewish community no choice. It could either lose the war and be pushed into the sea, or ultimately push out the Arab minority in their midst who wanted to kill them. It’s an act of self-defense, and that’s what happened.<br /></p><p>My facts in any—in all my books have not changed at all. They’re all there. But one has to look at also the context in which things happened, and this was the context: an expulsionist mentality, an expulsionist onslaught on the Jewish community in Palestine by Palestine’s Arabs and by the invading Arab armies, and a Jewish self-defense, which involved also pushing out large numbers of Palestinians.<br /></p><p><b>AMY GOODMAN: </b>Saree Makdisi, this issue of the acceptance of the partition, can you take it from there?<br /></p><p><b>SAREE MAKDISI: </b>Yeah. I mean, there are several things about it. For one thing, as Dr. Morris points out, it’s true that the mainstream Zionist movement accepted the partition plan. But on the other hand, as his own historical record shows, Ben-Gurion and others were very frank that the acceptance was meant to be tactical rather than sort of, you know, whole-hearted. So the idea was to accept and then go from there, not just to accept and then really settle down into the two states as envisaged by the UN partition plan.<br /></p><p>Meanwhile, the Arab rejection of the plan had to do with the fact that basically they were-–the Palestinians and Arabs were being told that they should become a minority in their own land. That’s what this is fundamentally all about, as well. So, the question is, which viewers have to contemplate is, what would they do if somebody came and told them that they should either become a minority in their own homeland—that is, second-class citizens—or be removed from their homeland? And I think almost anybody would say this is an unreasonable proposition. So, again, it comes back to the question of, what would you do in this situation?<br /></p><p>But more than that, I think what’s important to ask Dr. Morris, as long as we have him with us, is: when you talk about—Dr. Morris, when you talk about the events of 1948 in that famous interview with <i>Haaretz</i> in 2004, you say quite clearly that ethnic cleansing is justified and that the main problem, as far as you see it—then, anyway—was that Ben-Gurion didn’t go far enough in completing the ethnic cleansing, that he should have removed as much as possible of the non-Jewish population all the way to the Jordan River. So my question to you is, is this still a position that you hold? Do you still think it was justified? Do you still think that Ben-Gurion should have finished the job? And do you think still that in some ways that is the origin of the conflict as it persists to this day?<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>My point in the <i>Haaretz</i> interview, and I repeat it since then, is that a Jewish state could not have arisen with a vast Arab minority—40, almost 50, percent of its population being Arabs—which opposed the existence of that Jewish state and opposed their being a large minority in that state. And they went and they showed that by going to war against the Jewish state, which left the Jews in an intolerable position: either they give in and don’t get a state, or they fight back and in fighting back end up pushing out Arabs.<br /></p><p>My point also was that had—and this is really the point, and I think you would agree with it and understand it perhaps on the logical plane, if not on the emotional plane—had the war ended, the 1948 war ended with all the Palestinian population being moved—moving, it doesn’t matter how—across the Jordan River and there establishing their state in Jordan, across the river, a Palestinian Arab state, and had the Jews had their state without or without a large Arab minority on the west bank of the Jordan River, between the river and the Mediterranean Sea, the history of the Middle East, the history of Israel-Palestine, the history of the Palestinians and of the Jews, would have been much better over the past sixty years. Since ’48, all we’ve had is terrorism, clashes, wars, and so on, all of which have caused vast suffering to both peoples. And had this separation of populations occurred in 1948, I’m sure the Middle East would have enjoyed, and both peoples would have enjoyed, a much better future since 1948.<br /></p><p><b>AMY GOODMAN: </b>We’re going to go to break. Then we’re going to come back to this discussion. Our guests are Benny Morris, a professor, historian at Ben-Gurion University in Tel Aviv. We’re also joined from UCLA by Saree Makdisi, who is the author of the book <i>Palestine Inside Out</i>. On the phone with us from Brussels is Norman Finkelstein, among his books, <i>The Holocaust Industry</i> and <i>Beyond Chutzpah</i>. This is <i>Democracy Now!</i> We’ll be back in a minute.<br /></p><p>[break]<br /></p><p><b>AMY GOODMAN: </b>As we continue this discussion, I wanted turned, though, to an excerpt of an interview I did with former US President Jimmy Carter. This is President Carter talking about his book <i>Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid</i> and why he describes the situation in Palestine as one of apartheid.<br /></p><ul><p><b>JIMMY CARTER: </b>Well, the message is very clear. It deals with Palestine, not inside Israel itself, just the Palestinian Occupied Territories. […] And the word “apartheid” is exactly accurate. You know, this is an area that’s occupied by two powers. They are now completely separated. Palestinians can’t even ride on the same roads that the Israelis have created or built in Palestinian territory. The Israelis never see a Palestinian, except the Israeli soldiers. The Palestinians never see an Israeli, except at a distance, except the Israeli soldiers. So within Palestinian territory, they are absolutely and totally separated, much worse than they were in South Africa, by the way.</p></ul><br /><p><b>AMY GOODMAN: </b>Professor Morris, your response?<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>I think the image of apartheid is problematic and inaccurate. I think there are—there is a separation of the settlers—between the settlers and the local Arab population in the territories, between the soldiers, the Israeli soldiers, and the Arab population, but it all stems from a vast problem of security: Arab terrorism, Arab warfare by neighboring states who support the Palestinians. And the whole thing is simply a mechanism of self-defense, which has—which has obviously unpleasant and anti-humanitarian offshoots.<br /></p><p>But you have to remember—and this is something people also forget when they talk about history—in 1967, Israel was assaulted by Jordan in the West Bank. It didn’t go into the West Bank and East Jerusalem out of free will. The Jordanians opened up with cannon and machine guns against West Jerusalem and against the environs of Tel Aviv. And Israelis reluctantly went into the West Bank and started this occupation. It wasn’t something generated or initiated by Israel. It was defending themselves against Jordanian attack. I’m not talking now about the southern front, but the central front. The Jordanians were told twice on the morning of the 5th of June, ’67, “Do not shoot. We will not touch you.” And after they started shooting, King Hussein of Jordan was told by the Israelis through American and UN intermediaries, “Stop shooting, and we will not touch East Jerusalem or the West Bank.” He continued shooting and forced Israel’s hand. Unfortunately, Israel stayed there after ’67, until, in some ways, this very day. And this is a large part of the problem. But it’s worth looking at the root of the problem, as well.<br /></p><p><b>AMY GOODMAN: </b>Norman Finkelstein?<br /></p><p><b>NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: </b>Well, first of all, the comparison with apartheid at this point has become almost a cliche. If you opened up <i>Haaretz</i>, Israel’s most influential newspaper, just two weeks ago, it had an editorial, which read, “Our Debt to Jimmy Carter,” and it says that although Israelis feel uncomfortable with the apartheid analogy, they go on to say, quote, “the situation begs for the comparison.” So I don’t think it’s really controversial, what Carter said, in the real world.<br /></p><p>Number two, I think Dr. Morris is probably the only one on earth who still believes all of Israel’s actions in the Occupied Territories bear strictly on security. Does he really believe that all 460,000 settlers in the Occupied Territories, the settlements, the Jewish bypass roads, or Jews-only bypass roads—can he possibly believe still that these are there only for security and not because Israel wants to annex the territory? This is not very serious.<br /></p><p>Furthermore, Mr. Morris engages in all sorts of fantasies about what happened in 1967. Now is not the time to go through it. But if you read Tom Segev’s book, you’ll find, already in the third week of May, the Israeli officer corps was stating clearly that "Come what may, we’ll use the opportunity of the next war to occupy or to annex or to attack the West Bank.”<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>OK, can I—can I—<br /></p><p><b>NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: </b>It’s true—it’s true—it’s true that Mr. Hussein, keeping to his peace treaty with—or I should say his treaty with Egypt, joined in the attack after Israel launched its attack on Egypt. But this notion that the West Bank just by chance came to be occupied, just like Mr. Morris’s fantasy that 700,000 Palestinians just by chance came to find themselves outside their homes in 1948, is just not serious.<br /></p><p><b>AMY GOODMAN: </b>Professor Morris?<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>I don’t know why Norman Finkelstein calls what I write “fantasies.” Most of his work on the Middle East and on the Israeli-Arab problem is based on my work. Look at his footnotes. But that’s a separate issue.<br /></p><p>There is no fantasy at all in understanding that in ’67 Israel was under mortal—in mortal peril, under Arab threat and attacked by the Jordanians and by the Syrians. The business of the south and the Egyptians is more complex, but he also knows that the Egyptians closed the Straits—<br /></p><p><b>NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: </b>One second, Egypt attacked Israel in 1967?<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>No, do not—I didn’t—I didn’t bother you. I didn’t bother you. I didn’t interfere with you. Please let me finish.<br /></p><p>The Egyptians closed the Straits of Tiran, expelled the United Nations peacekeeping force and threatened Israel with destruction in May 1967, and this is what led to the crisis. You are right that there were expansionist urges among some parts of the Israeli population, including part of the officer corps, not <i>the</i> officer corps, but that isn’t what motivated the Israeli government to strike at Egypt on the 5th of June. What motivated the Israeli government—and it doesn’t matter what Tom Segev writes or doesn’t write in his book, which is a pretty bad book, but that’s not the point—the key thing was security in ’67. I think you even understand that.<br /></p><p><b>NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: </b>Security is always the key thing, Mr. Morris.<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>It’s not always—it <i>is</i> the key. It’s true. Since Israel—<br /></p><p><b>NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: </b>You can justify taking over a whole continent in the name of security.<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>Since Israel—since Israel was invaded—since Israel—<br /></p><p><b>NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: </b>That’s what Hitler did.<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>Since Israel is—the comparison of Israel with Hitler is ridiculous—<br /></p><p><b>NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: </b>Yeah, but the—no, the notion of security—<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>—the same as your book on the Holocaust is ridiculous.<br /></p><p><b>NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: </b>—to constantly justify expansion.<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>No, security is a fact of Israel—<br /></p><p><b>NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: </b>Every state does that, Mr. Morris.<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>The problem of—<br /></p><p><b>AMY GOODMAN: </b>One at a time.<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>The problem—no, he’s interfering with what I’m saying.<br /></p><p><b>AMY GOODMAN: </b>Right.<br /></p><p><b>NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: </b>That’s how we went from the East Coast to the West Coast. We called it “security.”<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>The problem of security has reigned, dominated over Israeli life since ’48 quite justifiably. Israel was attacked by the Palestinian Arabs. It was invaded by Arab states. It was threatened for decades with extinction by its Arab neighbors and is currently being threatened with extinction by the Hamas, by the Hezbollah and by the Iranian patrons who are trying to get atomic weapons. So don’t dismiss the problem of security in Israeli minds or objectively.<br /></p><p><b>AMY GOODMAN: </b>Professor Makdisi, I want to bring you into this discussion. Your response?<br /></p><p><b>SAREE MAKDISI: </b>OK. Well, I mean, there are several things to be said. The first of all is the business of security. And, you know, actually, I am convinced that Dr. Morris is speaking the truth, I mean that he’s being honest when he says that this is a question of security. In other words, I think that the Israelis really do think that security is what matters and that it justifies all of their actions.<br /></p><p>The question is, what kind of collective neurosis does it take when the fact that what they’re doing in the Occupied Territories isn’t just holding territory to defend their very existence, as he’s putting it, but actively settling, colonizing—illegally colonizing—the Occupied Territories? As he knows, or as he ought to know, to this very day, the Jewish settler population in the Occupied Territories is increasing at a rate three times greater than that of the rate of population increase of Israel itself. So there is a will here to settle the land. Now, are you going to tell me that the process of putting in civilians into militarily occupied territory is done on the basis of security? Whose security is safeguarded by—<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>Let me just add something.<br /></p><p><b>SAREE MAKDISI: </b>—actively—can I finish my sentence? Whose security is safeguarded by putting civilians into a war zone? That just doesn’t make any sense at all as an argument. That doesn’t mean that the Israelis don’t also think there’s a question of security.<br /></p><p>But the question is, when the Israelis look at these things, one has to understand a kind of collective neurosis is taking place, and I think that’s part of why we’re at loggerheads here, because they are convinced that everything—look at the way he’s talking. Before the break, what he was saying was, the conflict wouldn’t now have the shape that it does if the ethnic cleansing of 1948 had been completed all the way to the Jordan River. Another way of saying the same thing would—to go back to what he’s saying, which is why it’s justified, as far as he’s concerned—is if the Palestinian people had been literally annihilated in 1948, there also wouldn’t be much of a conflict now, because the other people wouldn’t be there. Now, is that justified? And how can one talk about the process of either mass expulsion or genocide, virtual or literal or whatever, in terms of security? So, and then also, how can one talk about—<br /></p><p><b>AMY GOODMAN: </b>Well, let’s put the question to Professor Morris.<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>Amy, please.<br /></p><p><b>AMY GOODMAN: </b>Are you for the completion of the expulsion of Palestinians?<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>No, I’ve always said that I’m opposed, both morally and on practical grounds, to expulsion in present circumstance—<br /></p><p><b>SAREE MAKDISI: </b>That’s not what you said in that interview.<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>—in present—that’s what I said in the interview, as well—in present circumstances. But projecting back on ’48, I said both peoples would have had a much pleasanter, a more pacific existence since ’48, if what had happened between Turkey and Greece in the 1920s had happened also in Palestine. But that’s the secondary subject here at the moment.<br /></p><p>You raised the subject of settlements, and I think we’re in partial or even more than partial agreement on the problem of settlements. I have always opposed Israel’s settlement venture in the territories, realizing that the establishment of settlements represented an obstacle to peace. But this doesn’t undermine the argument that some of the settlement was undertaken with security in mind. It’s true that other factors entered into it, such as a desire to return to historic homelands. Religious convictions and so on went into the settlement venture, as well. But there was always, underlying the settlement venture, especially along the Jordan River in certain places on the high ground of Judea and Samaria, there were security considerations in establishing settlements.<br /></p><p>These should have been overtaken by a desire for peace and a peace agreement by both peoples. Unfortunately, this desire for peace, I don’t think exists on the side of the Palestinians and on the part of some of their patrons like Iran, Hezbollah, and so on. I think, incidentally, if you look at any poll of Israel’s Jewish population, it will tell you that the Israelis, by and large, 70 percent, 80 percent, want to get out of the West Bank and to end the settlement venture. But Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran and others have not enabled them to leave, because they haven’t enabled or haven’t persuaded the Palestinians that peace is the right option and a two-state solution is the only possible settlement.<br /></p><p><b>AMY GOODMAN: </b>We have about forty-five seconds for each of you to talk about what has to happen right now. I want to begin with you, Norman Finkelstein. At this point, what needs to happen?<br /></p><p><b>NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: </b>What has to happen is, Israel has to join the international community and accept the principles for resolving the conflict that the entire world has accepted. You look at the last UN General Assembly resolution passed 161-to-7, the seven dissenting states being the United States, Israel, Nauru, Palau, Micronesia, Marshall Islands and Australia. 161 countries said a full Israeli withdrawal to the June ’67 borders and a just resolution of the refugee question. That’s what the whole accepts, and that’s what Israel rejected.<br /></p><p><b>AMY GOODMAN: </b>Benny Morris, what has to happen?<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>There has to be a change of mindset on the Palestinian side and acceptance of the two-state formula as the only necessary formula for a solution. Without the acceptance of two states, there will never be peace in Palestine.<br /></p><p><b>AMY GOODMAN: </b>Saree Makdisi?<br /></p><p><b>SAREE MAKDISI: </b>At this point, precisely because of the kind of aggressive colonization of the Occupied Territories, it’s no longer possible to separate the two populations, if it ever was. I’m not sure that it ever was, but certainly at this point it isn’t possible to do so. So the only way out at this point is for the two peoples to share the land equally and to realize that each—for each side to realize the other is not going to go away and that fantasizing about completing the process of 1948, as Benny Morris has done, is not going to lead to peace and that the only way out is peaceful, just coexistence.<br /></p><p><b>AMY GOODMAN: </b>And do you have hope that there will be peace, Saree?<br /></p><p><b>SAREE MAKDISI: </b>Yes, I do have hope, because, in fact, the situation we’re in now is a situation where there’s a country that rules over more or less equal populations of Jews and non-Jews, and it privileges Jews over non-Jews, it gives rights to Jews over non-Jews—<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>A one-state—<br /></p><p><b>AMY GOODMAN: </b>Benny Morris, do you have hope?<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>A one-state solution will end in anarchy and bloodshed. It will not exist for very long.<br /></p><p><b>SAREE MAKDISI: </b>Why? What’s wrong with the people in mixed populations?<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>Because Jews and Arabs are so different and have been in enmity for 120 years. Those are Muslims, and those are Jews. Those have Allah, and those have God, or at least they’re mostly secular, they cannot live together in one polity. They’re too different types of peoples.<br /></p><p><b>SAREE MAKDISI: </b>You know as well as I do, Professor Morris, that the great moments of Sicily and Spain, and so forth, and Baghdad, etc., were always moments where Jews and Arabs lived together and worked together—<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>Totally different circumstances.<br /></p><p><b>SAREE MAKDISI: </b>Well, circumstances change. It’s not one—<br /></p><p><b>BENNY MORRIS: </b>Totally different circumstances. [inaudible]<br /></p><p><b>AMY GOODMAN: </b>We’re going to have to leave it there, but we will certainly continue to discuss this. We urge you, folks, to write in; you can write to us at mail@democracynow.org. Saree Makdisi, Benny Morris, Norman Finkelstein in Brussels, we thank you all for being with us.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21570122.post-40887833905940750322008-05-16T14:29:00.000-07:002008-05-16T14:32:26.881-07:00Forget the Two State Solution<div class="orgurl"> <h1>Forget the two-state solution</h1> </div> <div id="wrapper_500"> </div> <div class="storysubhead" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 15px ! important; color: rgb(51, 51, 51) ! important;">Israelis and Palestinians must share the land. Equally.<br /><br />[originally published by Saree Makdisi in <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-makdisi11-2008may11,0,7862060.story"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Los Angeles Times</span></a>, 11 May 2008]<br /></div> <br />There is no longer a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Forget the endless arguments about who offered what and who spurned whom and whether the Oslo peace process died when Yasser Arafat walked away from the bargaining table or whether it was Ariel Sharon's stroll through the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem that did it in.<br /><br />All that matters are the facts on the ground, of which the most important is that -- after four decades of intensive Jewish settlement in the Palestinian territories it occupied during the 1967 war -- Israel has irreversibly cemented its grip on the land on which a Palestinian state might have been created.<br /><br />Sixty years after Israel was created and Palestine was destroyed, then, we are back to where we started: Two populations inhabiting one piece of land. And if the land cannot be divided, it must be shared. Equally.<br /><br />This is a position, I realize, which may take many Americans by surprise. After years of pursuing a two-state solution, and feeling perhaps that the conflict had nearly been solved, it's hard to give up the idea as unworkable.<br /><br />But unworkable it is. A report published last summer by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs found that almost 40% of the West Bank is now taken up by Israeli infrastructure -- roads, settlements, military bases and so on -- largely off-limits to Palestinians. Israel has methodically broken the remainder of the territory into dozens of enclaves separated from each other and the outside world by zones that it alone controls (including, at last count, 612 checkpoints and roadblocks).<br /><br />Moreover, according to the report, the Jewish settler population in the occupied territories, already approaching half a million, not only continues to grow but is growing at a rate three times greater than the rate of Israel's population increase. If the current rate continues, the settler population will double to almost 1 million people in just 12 years. Many are heavily armed and ideologically driven, unlikely to walk away voluntarily from the land they have declared to be their God-given home.<br /><br />These facts alone render the status of the peace process academic. <br /><br />At no time since the negotiations began in the early 1990s has Israel significantly suspended the settlement process in the occupied Palestinian territories, in stark violation of international law. It preceded last November's Annapolis summit by announcing the fresh expropriation of Palestinian property in the West Bank; it followed the summit by announcing the expansion of its Har Homa settlement by an additional 307 housing units; and it has announced plans for hundreds more in other settlements since then.<br /><br />The Israelis are not settling the occupied territories because they lack space in Israel itself. They are settling the land because of a long-standing belief that Jews are entitled to it simply by virtue of being Jewish. "The land of Israel belongs to the nation of Israel and only to the nation of Israel," declares Moledet, one of the parties in the National Union bloc, which has a significant presence in the Israeli parliament.<br /><br />Moledet's position is not as far removed from that of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as some Israelis claim. Although Olmert says he believes in theory that Israel should give up those parts of the West Bank and Gaza densely inhabited by Palestinians, he also said in 2006 that "every hill in Samaria and every valley in Judea is part of our historic homeland" and that "we firmly stand by the historic right of the people of Israel to the entire land of Israel."<br /><br />Judea and Samaria: These ancient biblical terms are still used by Israeli officials to refer to the West Bank. More than 10 years after the initiation of the Oslo peace process, which was supposed to lead to a two-state solution, maps in Israeli textbooks continued to show not the West Bank but Judea and Samaria -- and not as occupied territories but as integral parts of Israel.<br /><br />What room is there for the Palestinians in this vision of Jewish entitlement to the land? None. They are regarded, at best, as a demographic "problem."<br /><br />The idea of Palestinians as a "problem" is hardly new. Israel was created as a Jewish state in 1948 only by the premeditated and forcible removal of as much of the indigenous Palestinian population as possible, in what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe, which they commemorate this week.<br /><br />A Jewish state, says Israeli historian Benny Morris, "would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. ... There was no choice but to expel that population." For Morris, this was one of those "circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing."<br /><br />Thinking of Palestinians as a "problem" to be removed predates 1948. It was there from the moment the Zionist movement set into motion the project to make a Jewish state in a land that, in 1917 -- when the British empire officially endorsed Zionism -- had an overwhelmingly non-Jewish population. The only Jewish member of the British government at the time, Edwin Montagu, vehemently opposed the Zionist project as unjust. Henry King and Charles Crane, dispatched on a fact-finding mission to Palestine by President Wilson, concurred: Such a project would require enormous violence, they warned: "Decisions, requiring armies to carry out, are sometimes necessary, but they are surely not gratuitously to be taken in the interests of a serious injustice."<br /><br />But they were. This is a conflict driven from its origins by Zionism's exclusive sense of entitlement to the land. Has there been Palestinian violence as well? Yes. Is it always justified? No. But what would you do if someone told you that there was no room for you on your own land, that your very existence is a "problem"? No people in history has ever gone away just because another people wanted them to, and the sentiments of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull live on among Palestinians to this day.<br /><br />The violence will end, and a just peace will come, only when each side realizes that the other is there to stay. Many Palestinians have accepted this premise, and an increasing number are willing to give up on the idea of an independent Palestinian state and embrace instead the concept of a single democratic, secular and multicultural state, which they would share equally with Israeli Jews.<br /><br />Most Israelis are not yet reconciled this position. Some, no doubt, are reluctant to give up on the idea of a "Jewish state," to acknowledge the reality that Israel has <i>never</i> been exclusively Jewish, and that, from the start, the idea of privileging members of one group over all other citizens has been fundamentally undemocratic and unfair.<br /><br />Yet that is exactly what Israel does. Even among its citizens, Israeli law grants rights to Jews that it denies to non-Jews. By no stretch of the imagination is Israel a genuine democracy: It is an ethno-religiously exclusive state that has tried to defy the multicultural history of the land on which it was founded.<br /><br />To resolve the conflict with the Palestinians, Israeli Jews will have to relinquish their exclusive privileges and acknowledge the right of return of Palestinians expelled from their homes. What they would get in return is the ability to live securely and to prosper with -- rather than continuing to battle against -- the Palestinians.<br /><br />They may not have a choice. As Olmert himself warned recently, more Palestinians are shifting their struggle from one for an independent state to a South African-style struggle that demands equal rights for all citizens, irrespective of religion, in a single state. "That is, of course," he noted, "a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle -- and ultimately a much more powerful one."<br /><br />I couldn't agree more.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21570122.post-65591168088796021392008-05-04T09:37:00.000-07:002008-05-04T09:44:39.309-07:00Interview in Boston Globe<span class="breadcrumb utility"></span> <!--google_ad_section_start--> <div id="articleText"> <div id="article"> <div class="hideMe"><!-- <headline>Language and conflict</headline> <source>Boston Globe</source> <teasetext>Saree Makdisi, professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA, is the author of "Romantic Imperialism" and "William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s." His latest book, "Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation" (Norton, $24.95), is a lucid, invaluable chronicle of Palestinian daily life in the occupied territories. Makdisi, who alternates firsthand accounts with reports and interviews involving ...</teasetext> <byline>Anna Mundow</byline> <date>May 4, 2008</date> --></div> <div id="articleHeader"> <div class="overline">The Interview | With Saree Makdisi</div> <div id="headTools"> <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/globe/"><img src="http://cache.boston.com/bonzai-fba/File-Based_Image_Resource/from_provider_globe.gif" alt="The Boston Globe" title="The Boston Globe" class="providerlogo" align="right" border="0" height="20" width="105" /></a> <h1>Language and conflict</h1></div></div><div id="articleGraphs"><div id="page1"><p><span id="byline"> By Anna Mundow </span> </p> <span id="dateline"> May 4, 2008</span><p><br />Saree Makdisi, professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA, is the author of "Romantic Imperialism" and "William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s." His latest book, "Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation" (Norton, $24.95), is a lucid, invaluable chronicle of Palestinian daily life in the occupied territories. Makdisi, who alternates firsthand accounts with reports and interviews involving the United Nations, the World Bank, and Israeli and international human rights organizations, observes that "if the Palestinians will never recuperate Palestine as it was before the arrival of Zionism, and Israelis will never realize a purely Jewish state . . . they can at least put their two impossible ideals aside for the sake of a common future." <br /></p><div id="articleEmbed"><div class="embed" id="relatedContent"><div style="display: block;" class="relatedBox" id="informBox"><ul class="linklist" id="informLinks"><!--1--></ul>The son of a Lebanese father and Palestinian mother, Makdisi was born in Washington, D.C., raised in Beirut, and educated in the United States. He spoke from his home in California.</div> </div></div><p><b>Q. </b> <em>What is the link between your literary and your political writing?</em></p><p><b> A. </b> I'm primarily interested in the work of Romantic-era writers like Blake and [Percy Bysshe] Shelley who lived in times of tremendous upheaval and spoke out against the prevailing point of view, who questioned the orthodoxy. That's an inspiration for me.</p><p><b> Q. </b> <em>Which orthodoxy are you challenging here?</em></p><p><b> A. </b> The prevailing orthodoxy that in general Israel is the aggrieved party and the Palestinians are the aggressors, whereas it seems to me that the situation is exactly the opposite. Half of Palestine's people were forced from their homes during the creation of Israel, in 1948; they have never been allowed to return although they have the legal and moral right to do so. Instead we see the continuing existence of a system that keeps people displaced and unable to exercise their full human rights.</p><p><b> Q. </b><em>And you insist that language is central in this?</em></p><p><b> A. </b> Think of the way language is used to describe this conflict. For example, technically, legally, and morally, there's a distinction between "colony" and "settlement." You settle your own territory, you colonize somebody else's. What the Israelis are doing in the occupied territories is colonizing. So why is an activity that the dictionary defines as colonization portrayed as settlement? Yet even I use the term "settlement" in this book.</p><p><b> Q. </b><em>Because you don't want to confuse the reader?</em></p><p><b> A. </b> And be marked as an extremist. What does it mean when someone who uses language accurately can be dismissed as an extremist?</p><p><b> Q. </b> <em>But this conflict is hardly about language . . . .</em></p><p><b> A. </b> No, it's about land. From the late 19th and early 20th century on, the project was to establish a Jewish homeland or state - they're not the same thing, by the way - . . . on land that had an overwhelmingly non-Jewish population. If you think about it, such a project will always require violence.</p> </div> <p>Certainly from the early 1930s on, leading figures like [David] Ben-Gurion were clear that their project entailed the removal of as much of the Palestinian population as possible. That process continues to this day in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, with incredible pressure brought to bear on the indigenous Palestinian population.</p><p><b> Q. </b> <em>Why do you concentrate on everyday life?</em></p><p><b> A. </b> It's the least-known aspect of the occupation. So much of the conflict is portrayed in the mainstream US media in slogans or clichés. But when you hear from the guy who can't get to his cucumber farm or the woman who can't get to the hospital to give birth, it's very hard to argue with those things.</p><p><b> Q. </b><em>Have the Palestinians brought this on themselves?</em></p><p><b> A. </b> I don't think it's helpful to blame the victims. A better question is what does Israel get to do in order to assert its own security? According to international law, there are things you can and cannot do as an occupying power. If you don't like those constraints, don't be an occupying power. If the Israelis are unhappy with the results of their occupation, with what it has led people to do, let them end it. They will be much more secure if they do.</p><p><b> Q. </b> <em>You say that "the rights of Palestinians are inseparable from the rights of Israelis"? Explain.</em></p><p><b> A. </b> For all the talk of a two-state solution, only one state controls the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. In that state, the Jewish half of the population has full rights, the non-Jewish half doesn't. That is unjust. But neither side is going to go away. I favor a situation in which both Jewish Israelis and Palestinians Arabs live in equality in a single, democratic, secular, and multicultural state that does not discriminate on the basis of religion as Israel does. . . .</p><p><b> Q. </b> <em>Is that seen as a possibility?</em></p><p><b> A. </b> It is among Palestinians. I talked to everybody from politicians to ambulance drivers, and they all said it's one piece of land, the two populations are mixed, the only way is to live together. They want to get on with their lives. Among Israelis, only a small number thinks this way, because there's no pressure to do so. No sanctions, no boycott, no peaceful pressure from the outside, which is what I advocate - I'm against violence directed against civilians in any circumstances. . . . Historically speaking, no privileged group has voluntarily relinquished its privileges. That happens only when pressure is brought to bear. Prime Minister [Ehud] Olmert himself has said that as soon as Palestinians adopt the South African paradigm and set of demands - one person, one vote - the world will take the Palestinian side. I wish the Palestinian leadership would get that message.</p></div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21570122.post-72984755364314604382008-03-03T07:40:00.000-08:002008-03-03T07:41:53.345-08:00The Strangulation of GazaThe Strangulation of Gaza<br /><br />[Originally published in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Nation</span>, February 1, 2008]<br /><br />The people of Gaza were able to enjoy a few days of freedom last week, after demolition charges brought down the iron wall separating the impoverished Palestinian territory from Egypt, allowing hundreds of thousands to burst out of the virtual prison into which Gaza has been transformed over the past few years--the terminal stage of four decades of Israeli occupation--and to shop for desperately needed supplies in Egyptian border towns.<br /><br />Gaza's doors are slowly closing again, however. Under mounting pressure from the United States and Israel, Egypt has dispatched additional border guards armed with water cannons and electric cattle prods to try to regain control. It has already cut off the flow of supplies crossing the Suez Canal to its own border towns. For now, in effect, Suez is the new border: even if Palestinians could get out of Gaza in search of new supplies, they would have to cross the desolate expanses of the Sinai Desert and cross the canal, on the other side of which they would find the regular Egyptian army (barred from most of Sinai as a condition of the 1979 Camp David treaty with Israel) waiting for them.<br /><br />Now that Gaza's fleeting taste of freedom is beginning to fade, the grim reality facing the territory's 1.5 million people is once again looming large. "After feeling imprisoned for so long, it has been a psychological relief for Gazans to know that there is a way out," said John Ging, the local director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). "But it does not resolve their crisis by any stretch of the imagination."<br /><br />Indeed, all the frenzied shopping in Egyptian border towns brought into Gaza a mere fraction of the food that UN and other relief agencies have been blocked by Israel from delivering to the people who depend on them for their very survival. As long as the border with Egypt is even partially open, Israel refuses to open its own borders with Gaza to anything other than the bare minimum of industrial fuel to keep the territory's one power plant operating at a subsistence level, and a few trucks of other supplies a day.<br /><br />UNRWA has almost depleted the stocks of emergency food aid it had previously built up in Gaza. Only thirty-two truckloads of goods have been allowed to enter Gaza since Israel imposed its total closure on January 18; 250 trucks were entering every day before last June, and even that was insufficient to meet the population's needs.<br /><br />On January 30 UNRWA warned that unless something changes, the daily ration that it will distribute on the 31st to 860,000 destitute refugees in Gaza will lack a protein component: the canned meat that is the only source of protein in the food parcels--which even under the best of circumstances contributes less than two-thirds of minimum daily nourishment--is being held up by Israel, and the stock of those cans inside Gaza has been exhausted. The World Food Program, which feeds another 340,000 people in Gaza, has brought in nine trucks of food aid in the past two weeks; in the seven months before that, it had been bringing in fifteen trucks a day.<br /><br />Gazans have been ground into poverty by years of methodical Israeli restrictions and closures; 80 percent of the population now depends on food aid for day-to-day subsistence. With the aid, they were receiving "enough to survive, not to live," as the International Red Cross put it. Without it, they will die.<br /><br />All this is supposed to be in response to Palestinian militant groups' firing of crude homemade rockets into Israel, which rarely cause any actual damage. There can be no excuse for firing rockets at civilian targets, but Israel was squeezing Gaza long before the first of those primitive projectiles was cobbled together. The first fatal rocket attack took place four years ago; Israel has been occupying Gaza for four decades.<br /><br />The current squeeze on Gaza began in 1991. It was tightened with the institutionalization of the Israeli occupation enabled by the Oslo Accords of 1993. It was tightened further with the intensification of the occupation in response to the second intifada in 2000. It was tightened further still when Israel redeployed its settlers and troops from inside Gaza in 2005 and transformed the territory into what John Dugard, the UN's special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories, referred to as a prison, the key to which, Dugard said, Israel had "thrown away." It was tightened to the point of strangulation following the Hamas electoral victory in 2006, when Israel began restricting supplies of food and other resources into Gaza. It was tightened beyond the point of strangulation following the deposition of the Hamas-led government in June 2007. And now this.<br /><br />When Israel limited commercial shipments of food--but not humanitarian relief--into Gaza in 2006, a senior government adviser, Dov Weisglass, explained that "the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet but not to make them die of hunger."<br /><br />Israel's "diet" was taking its toll even before last week. The World Food Program warned last November that less than half of Gaza's food-import needs were being met. Basics including wheat grain, vegetable oil, dairy products and baby milk were in short supply. Few families can afford meat. Anemia rates rocketed to almost 80 percent. UNRWA noted at about the same time that "we are seeing evidence of the stunting of children, their growth is slowing, because our ration is only 61 percent of what people should have and that has to be supplemented."<br /><br />By further restricting the supply of food to an already malnourished population, Israel has clearly decided to take its "diet" a step further. If the people of Gaza remain cut off from the food aid on which their survival now depends, they will face starvation.<br /><br />They are now essentially out of food; the water system is faltering (almost half the population now lacks access to safe water supplies); the sewage system has broken down and is discharging raw waste into streets and the sea; the power supply is intermittent at best; hospitals lack heat and spare parts for diagnostic machines, ventilators, incubators; dozens of lifesaving medicines are no longer available. Slowly but surely, Gaza is dying.<br /><br />Patients are dying unnecessarily: cancer patients cut off from chemotherapy regimens, kidney patients cut off from dialysis treatments, premature babies cut off from blood-clotting medications. In the past few weeks, many more Palestinian parents have watched the lives of their sick children ebb slowly, quietly and (as far as the global media are concerned) invisibly away in Gaza's besieged hospitals than Israelis have been hurt--let alone actually killed--by the erratic firing of primitive homemade rockets from Gaza, about which we have heard so much. (According to the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem, these rockets have killed thirteen Israelis in the past four years, while Israeli forces have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in the occupied territories in the past two years alone, almost half of them civilians, including some 200 children.)<br /><br />Israel's squeeze is expressly intended to punish the entire population for the firing of those rockets by militants, which ordinary civilians are powerless to stop. "We will not allow them to lead a pleasant life," said Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert when Israel cut off fuel supplies on January 18, thereby plunging Gaza into darkness. "As far as I am concerned, all of Gaza's residents can walk and have no fuel for their cars."<br /><br />Olmert's views and, more important, his policies were reaffirmed and given the legal sanction of Israel's High Court. In what human rights organizations referred to as a "devastating" decision, on January 30 the court ruled in favor of the government's plan to further restrict supplies of fuel and electricity to Gaza. "The decision means that Israel may deliberately deprive civilians in Gaza of fuel and electricity supplies," pointed out Sari Bashi, of the Gisha human rights organization in Israel. "During wartime, the civilian population is the first and central victim of the fighting, even when efforts are made to minimize the damage," the court said. In other words, harm to the civilian population is an inevitable effect of war and therefore legally permissible.<br /><br />That may be the view of Israel's highest legal authority, but it is not how the matter is viewed by international law, which strictly regulates the way civilian populations are to be treated in time of war. "The parties to a conflict must at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants in order to spare the civilian population and civilian property," the International Red Cross points out, invoking the Geneva Conventions and other founding documents of international humanitarian law. "Neither the civilian population as a whole nor individual civilians may be attacked."<br /><br />Moreover, no matter what Israel's High Court says, what is happening in Gaza is not a war in the conventional sense: Gaza is not a state at war with the state of Israel. It is a territory militarily occupied by Israel. Even after its 2005 redeployment, Israel did not release its hold on Gaza; it continues to control all access to the territory, as well as its airspace, territorial waters and even its population registry. Over and above all the routine prohibitions on attacks on the civilian population and other forms of collective punishment that hold true in case of war, in other words, international law also holds Israel responsible for the welfare of the Gaza population. Article 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949) specifically demands, for example, that, "to the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate."<br /><br />Israel's methodical actions make it clear that it is systematically grinding down and now actually starving people for whose welfare it is legally accountable simply because it regards Gaza's 1.5 million men, women and children as a surplus population it would, quite simply, like to get rid of one way or the other: a sentiment made quite clear when Israel's chief Ashkenazi rabbi proposed, shortly after the current crisis began, that the entire Palestinian population of Gaza should just be removed and transferred to the Egyptian desert. "They will have a nice country, and we shall have our country and we shall live in peace," he said, without eliciting even a murmur of protest in Israel.<br /><br />The overwhelming majority of Gazans are refugees or the descendants of refugees who were expelled from their homes when Palestine was destroyed and Israel was created in 1948. Like all Palestinian refugees, those of Gaza have a moral and legal right to return to the homeland from which they were expelled. Israel blocks their return for the same reason it expelled them in the first place, because their presence would undermine its already tenuous claim to Jewishness (this is the nature of the so-called "demographic problem" about which Israeli politicians openly complain). As long as the refugees live, what Israel regards as the mortal threat of their right of return lives on. But if they would somehow just go away...<br /><br />"Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution, with the knowledge, acquiescence and--some would say--encouragement of the international community," the commissioner-general of UNRWA warned recently.<br /><br />The question now is whether the world will simply sit and watch, now that this unprecedented threshold is actually being crossed.<br /><br />Having taken matters into their hands and destroyed the wall cutting them off from the outside world, it is most unlikely that the people of Gaza will simply submit to that fate. A hermetic closure ultimately depends not merely on Israel's whims but on Egypt's willingness--or ability--to cut off the Palestinians of Gaza and watch them starve. For all the US and Israeli pressure on Egypt, and for all the steps Egypt is now taking, it seems most unlikely that it would let things go that far. Not intervening to save fellow Arabs from the Israeli occupation is one thing; actually participating in their repression is quite another. The Egyptian government would have to answer not only to the people of Palestine but to its own people, and indeed to all Arabs.<br /><br />Working together, Hamas and the people of Gaza have forced Egypt's hand and made much more visible than ever before the role it had been playing all along in the Israeli occupation and strangulation of Gaza; now that its role in assisting Israel has been revealed, it will be difficult for Egypt to go back to the status quo. Gazans have thrown Israel's plans into disarray, because Israel's leaders could do little more than watch with pursed lips as the people of Gaza burst out of their prison. And they have placed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the government of Ramallah in a corner: they will have to choose between defending their people's rights and needs or confirming once and for all--as indeed they are doing--that the PA is there to serve Israel's interests, not those of the Palestinians. In which case they too will one day be called to account.<br /><br />http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20080218&s=makdisiUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21570122.post-42067460568435527612007-11-20T21:19:00.000-08:002007-11-20T21:24:15.555-08:00The War on Gaza's ChildrenThe war on Gaza's children<br /><br />Israel's sanctions are leaving a generation of Palestinian children poorly educated and hungry.<br /><br />[Originally published by Saree Makdisi in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Los Angeles Times</span>, 22 September 2007]<br /><br /><br />An entire generation of Palestinians in Gaza is growing up stunted: physically and nutritionally stunted because they are not getting enough to eat; emotionally stunted because of the pressures of living in a virtual prison and facing the constant threat of destruction and displacement; intellectually and academically stunted because they cannot concentrate -- or, even if they can, because they are trying to study and learn in circumstances that no child should have to endure.<br /><br />Even before Israel this week declared Gaza "hostile territory" -- apparently in preparation for cutting off the last remaining supplies of fuel and electricity to 1.5 million men, women and children -- the situation was dire.<br /><br />As a result of Israel's blockade on most imports and exports and other policies designed to punish the populace, about 70% of Gaza's workforce is now unemployed or without pay, according to the United Nations, and about 80% of its residents live in grinding poverty. About 1.2 million of them are now dependent for their day-to-day survival on food handouts from U.N. or international agencies, without which, as the World Food Program's Kirstie Campbell put it, "they are liable to starve."<br /><br />An increasing number of Palestinian families in Gaza are unable to offer their children more than one meager meal a day, often little more than rice and boiled lentils. Fresh fruit and vegetables are beyond the reach of many families. Meat and chicken are impossibly expensive. Gaza faces the rich waters of the Mediterranean, but fish is unavailable in its markets because the Israeli navy has curtailed the movements of Gaza's fishermen.<br /><br />Los Angeles parents who have spent the last few weeks running from one back-to-school sale to another could do worse than to spare a few minutes to think about their counterparts in the Gaza Strip. As a result of the siege, Gaza is not only short of raw textiles and other key goods but also paper, ink and vital school supplies. One-third of Gaza's children started the school year missing necessary textbooks. John Ging, the Gaza director of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, whose schools take care of 200,000 children in Gaza, has warned that children come to school "hungry and unable to concentrate."<br /><br />Israel says that its policies in Gaza are designed to put pressure on the Palestinian population to in turn put pressure on those who fire crude home-made rockets from Gaza into the Israeli town of Sderot. Those rocket attacks are wrong. But it is also wrong to punish an entire population for the actions of a few -- actions that the schoolchildren of Gaza and their beleaguered parents are in any case powerless to stop.<br /><br />It is a violation of international law to collectively punish more than a million people for something they did not do. According to the Geneva Convention, to which it is a signatory, Israel actually has the obligation to ensure the well-being of the people on whom it has chosen to impose a military occupation for more than four decades.<br /><br />Instead, it has shrugged off the law. It has ignored the repeated demands of the U.N. Security Council. It has dismissed the International Court of Justice in the Hague. What John Dugard, the U.N.'s special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories, refers to as the "carefully managed" strangulation of Gaza -- in full view of an uncaring world -- is explicitly part of its strategy. "The idea," said Dov Weisglass, an Israeli government advisor," is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not make them die of hunger."<br /><br />http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-makdisi22sep22,0,2737657.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrailUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21570122.post-67533170021312774052007-11-20T21:14:00.000-08:002007-11-20T21:18:46.164-08:00Academic Freedom is at RiskAcademic Freedom is at Risk<br /><br />[Originally published by Saree Makdisi in <span style="font-style: italic;">Seattle Post-Intelligencer</span>, 17 October 2007]<br /><br /><br /><br />"Academic colleagues, get used to it," warned the pro-Israel activist Martin Kramer in March 2004. "Yes, you are being watched. Those obscure articles in campus newspapers are now available on the Internet, and they will be harvested. Your syllabi, which you've also posted, will be scrutinized. Your Web sites will be visited late at night."<br /><br />Kramer's warning inaugurated an attack on intellectual freedom in the U.S. that has grown more aggressive in recent months.<br /><br />This attack, intended to shield Israel from criticism, not only threatens academic privileges on college campuses, it jeopardizes our capacity to evaluate our foreign policy. With a potentially catastrophic clash with Iran on the horizon and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict spiraling out of control, Americans urgently need to be able to think clearly about our commitments and intentions in the Middle East. And yet we are being prevented from doing so by a longstanding campaign of intimidation that has terminated careers, stymied debate and shut down dialogue.<br /><br />Over the past few years, Israel's U.S. defenders have stepped up their campaign by establishing a network of institutions (such as Campus Watch, Stand With Us, the David Project, the Israel on Campus Coalition, and the disingenuously named Scholars for Peace in the Middle East) dedicated to the task of monitoring our campuses and bringing pressure to bear on those critical of Israeli policies. By orchestrating letter-writing and petitioning campaigns, falsely raising fears of anti-Semitism, mobilizing often grossly distorted media coverage and recruiting local and national politicians to their cause, they have severely disrupted academic processes, the free function of which once made American universities the envy of the world.<br /><br />Outside interference by Israel's supporters has plunged one U.S. campus after another into crisis. They have introduced crudely political -- rather than strictly academic or scholarly -- criteria into hiring, promotion and other decisions at a number of universities, including Columbia, Yale, Wayne State, Barnard and DePaul, which recently denied tenure to the Jewish American scholar Norman Finkelstein following an especially ugly campaign spearheaded by Alan Dershowitz, one of Israel's most ardent American defenders.<br /><br />Our campuses are being poisoned by an atmosphere of surveillance and harassment. However, the disruption of academic freedom has grave implications beyond campus walls.<br /><br />When professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer drafted an essay critical of the effect of Israel's lobbying organizations on U.S. foreign policy, they had to publish it in the London Review of Books because their original American publisher declined to take it on. With the original article expanded into a book that has now been released, their invitation to speak at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs was retracted because of outside pressure. "This one is so hot," they were told. So although Michael Oren, an officer in the Israeli army, was recently allowed to lecture the council about U.S. policy in the Middle East, two distinguished American academics were denied the same privilege.<br /><br />When President Carter published "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid" last year, he was attacked for having dared to use the word "apartheid" to describe Israel's manifestly discriminatory policies in the West Bank.<br /><br />As that case made especially clear, the point of most of these attacks is to personally discredit anyone who would criticize Israel -- and to taint them with the smear of "controversy" -- rather than to engage them in a genuine debate. None of Carter's critics provided a convincing refutation of his main argument based on facts and evidence. Presumably that's because, for all the venom directed against the former president, he was right. For example, Israel maintains two different road networks, and even two entirely different legal systems, in the West Bank, one for Jewish settlers and the other for indigenous Palestinians. Those basic facts were studiously ignored by those who denounced Carter and angrily accused him of a "blood libel" against the Jewish people.<br /><br />That Israel's American supporters so often resort to angry outbursts rather than principled arguments -- and seem to find emotional blackmail more effective than genuine debate -- is ultimately a sign of their weakness rather than their strength. For all the damage it can do in the short term, in the long run such a position is untenable, too dependent on emotion and cliché rather than hard facts. The phenomenal success of Carter's book suggests that more and more Americans are learning to ignore the scare tactics that are the only tools available to Israel's supporters.<br /><br />But we need to be able to have an open debate about our Middle East policy now -- before we needlessly shed more blood and further erode our reputation among people who used to regard us as the champions of freedom, and now worry that we have come to stand for its very opposite.<br /><br />http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/335667_academics17.htmlUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21570122.post-78701174063838937492007-06-20T09:03:00.000-07:002007-06-20T09:09:54.550-07:00Palestinians Think Otherwise...West chooses Fatah, but Palestinians don't<br /><br />[Originally published by Saree Makdisi in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Los Angeles Times</span>, 20 June 2007]<br /><br /><br />IN THE WEST, there's a huge sense of relief. The Hamas-led government that has been causing everyone so much trouble has been isolated in Gaza, and a new government has been appointed in the West Bank by the "moderate," peace-loving Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas.<br /><br />So why then do Palestinians not share in the relief? Well, for one thing, the old government had been democratically elected; now it has been dismissed out of hand by presidential fiat. There's also the fact that the new prime minister appointed by Abbas — Salam Fayyad — has the support of the West, but his election list won only 2% of the votes in the same election that swept Hamas to victory. Fayyad and Abbas have the support of Israel, but it is no secret that they lack the backing of their own people.<br /><br />There is a reason the people threw out Abbas' Fatah party in last year's election. Palestinians see the leading Fatah politicians as unimaginative, self-serving and corrupt, satisfied with the emoluments of power.<br /><br />Worse yet, Palestinians came to realize that the so-called peace process championed by Abbas (and by Yasser Arafat before him) had led to the permanent institutionalization — rather than the termination — of Israel's 4-decade-old military occupation of their land. Why should they feel otherwise? There are today twice as many settlers in the occupied territories as there were when Yitzhak Rabin and Arafat first shook hands in the White House Rose Garden. Israel has divided the West Bank into besieged cantons, worked diligently to increase the number of Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem (while stripping Palestinian Jerusalemites of their residency rights in the city) and turned Gaza into a virtual prison.<br /><br />People voted for Hamas last year not because they approved of the party's sloganeering, not because they wanted to live in an Islamic state, not because they support attacks on Israeli civilians, but because Hamas was untainted by Fatah's complacency and corruption, untainted by its willingness to continue pandering to Israel. Fatah leaders were viewed as mere policemen of the perpetual occupation, and the Palestinian Authority had willingly taken on the role of administering the population on behalf of the Israelis. Hamas offered an alternative.<br /><br />Here in the U.S., Hamas is routinely demonized, known primarily for its attacks on civilians. Depictions of Hamas portray its "rejectionism" as an end in itself rather than as a refusal to go along with a political process that has proved catastrophic for Palestinians on the ground.<br /><br />Has Hamas done unspeakable things? Yes, but so has Fatah, and so too has Israel (on a much larger scale). There are no saints in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.<br /><br />Palestinians, frankly, see a lot of hypocrisy in the West's anti-Hamas stance. Since last year's election, for example, the West has denied aid to the Hamas government, arguing, among other things, that Hamas refuses to recognize Israel. But that's absurd; after all, Israel does not recognize Palestine either. Hamas is accused of not abiding by previous agreements. But Israel's suspension of tax revenue transfers to the Palestinian Authority, and its refusal to implement a Gaza-West Bank road link agreement brokered by the U.S. in November 2005, are practical, rather than merely rhetorical, violations of previous agreements, causing infinitely more damage to ordinary people. Hamas is accused of mixing religion and politics, but no one has explained why its version of that mixture is any worse than Israel's — or why a Jewish state is acceptable but a Muslim one is not.<br /><br />I am a secular humanist, and I personally find religiously identified political movements — and states — unappealing, to say the least.<br /><br />But let's be honest. Hamas did not run into Western opposition because of its Islamic ideology but because of its opposition to (and resistance to) the Israeli occupation.<br /><br />A genuine peace based on the two-state solution would require an end to the Israeli occupation and the creation of a territorially contiguous, truly independent Palestinian state.<br /><br />But that is not happening. Fatah seems to have given up, its leaders preferring to rest comfortably with the power they already have. Ironically, it is Hamas that is taking the stands that would be prerequisites for a true two-state peace plan: refusing to go along with the permanent breakup of Palestine and not accepting the sacrifice of control over borders, airspace, water, taxes and even the population registry to Israel.<br /><br />Embracing the "moderation" of Abbas allows the Palestinian Authority to resume servicing the occupation on Israel's behalf, for now. In the long run, though, the two-state solution is finished because Fatah is either unable or unwilling to stop the ongoing dismemberment of the territory once intended for a Palestinian state.<br /><br />The only realistic choice remaining will be the one between a single democratic, secular state offering equal rights for both Israelis and Palestinians — or permanent apartheid.<br /><br />http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-makdisi20jun20,0,2672122.story?coll=la-opinion-centerUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21570122.post-5214328645424252752007-06-20T09:00:00.000-07:002007-06-20T09:03:17.142-07:00For a Secular Democratic StateFor a Secular Democratic State<br /><br />[Originally published by Saree Makdisi in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Nation</span>, 18 June 2007]<br /><br />This month marks the fortieth anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Four decades of control established and maintained by force of arms--in defiance of international law, countless UN Security Council resolutions and, most recently, the 2004 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice in The Hague--have enabled Israel to impose its will on the occupied territories and, in effect, to remake them in its own image.<br /><br />The result is a continuous political space now encompassing all of historic Palestine, albeit a space as sharply divided as the colonial world ("a world cut in two") famously described by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. Indeed, Fanon's 1961 classic still enables an analysis of Israel and the occupied territories as fresh, insightful and relevant in 2007 as the readings of Cape Town or Algiers that it made available when it was first published.<br /><br />Israel maintains two separate road systems in the West Bank, for example: one for the territory's immigrant population of Jewish settlers, one for its indigenous non-Jewish (i.e., Palestinian) population.<br /><br />The roads designated for the Jewish settlers are well maintained, well lit, continuous and uninterrupted; they tie the network of Jewish "neighborhoods" and "settlements"--all of them in reality colonies forbidden by international law--to each other and to Israel. The roads for the West Bank's native population, by contrast, are poorly maintained, when they are maintained at all (they often consist of little more than shepherds' trails); they are continuously blockaded and interrupted. A grid of checkpoints and roadblocks (546 at last count) strangles the circulation of the West Bank's indigenous population, but it is designed to facilitate the free movement of Jewish settlers--who are, moreover, allowed to drive their own cars on the roads set aside for them, whereas Palestinians are not allowed to drive their cars beyond their own towns and villages (the entrances to which are all blockaded by the Israeli army).<br /><br />The wall that Israel has been constructing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 2002 makes visible in concrete and barbed wire the outlines of the discriminatory regime that structures and defines everyday life in the occupied territories, separating Palestinian farmers from crops, patients from hospitals, students and teachers from schools and, increasingly, even parents from children (it has, for example, separated one parent or another from spouses and children in 21 percent of Palestinian families living on either side of the wall near Jerusalem)--while at the same time enabling the seamless incorporation of the Judaized spaces of the occupied territories into Israel itself. And a regime of curfews and closures, enforced by the Israeli army, has smothered the Palestinian economy, though none of its provisions apply to Jewish settlers in the occupied territories.<br /><br />There are, in short, two separate legal and administrative systems, maintained by the regular use of military force, for two populations--settlers and natives--unequally inhabiting the same piece of land: exactly as was the case in the colonial countries described by Fanon, or in South Africa under apartheid.<br /><br />All this has enabled Israel to transplant almost half a million of its own citizens into the occupied territories, at the expense of their Palestinian population, whose land is confiscated, whose homes are demolished, whose orchards and olive groves are razed or burned down, and whose social, economic, educational and family lives have been, in effect, all but suspended, precisely in order that their land may be made available for the use of another people.<br /><br />The result has been catastrophic for the Palestinians, as a World Bank report published in May makes clear. While the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem enjoy growth rates exceeding those of Israel itself, Palestinian towns and villages are slowly being strangled. While Jewish settlers move with total freedom, the combination of physical obstacles and the bureaucratic pass system imposed by the Israeli army on the Palestinian population has not only permanently separated the Palestinians of the West Bank from those of Gaza, East Jerusalem and Israel (movement among which is forbidden for all but a tiny minority) but has also broken up the West Bank into three distinct sections and ten enclaves. Half of the West Bank is altogether off-limits to most Palestinians; to move from one part of the rest of the territory to another, Palestinians must apply for a permit from the Israelis. Frequent bans are imposed on movement into or out of particular enclaves (the city of Nablus, for example, has been under siege for five years), or on whole segments of the population (e.g., unmarried men under the age of 45). And all permits are summarily invalidated when Israel declares one of its "comprehensive closures" of the West Bank--there were seventy-eight such days in 2006--at which point the entire Palestinian population stays home.<br /><br />The lucky few who are able to obtain passes from the Israelis are channeled from one section or enclave to another through a series of army checkpoints, where they may be searched, questioned, hassled, detained for hours or simply turned back. "The practical effect of this shattered economic space," the World Bank report points out, "is that on any given day the ability to reach work, school, shopping, healthcare facilities and agricultural land is highly uncertain and subject to arbitrary restriction and delay." Given the circumstances, it is hardly any wonder that two-thirds of the Palestinian population has been reduced to absolute poverty (less than $2 a day), and that hundreds of thousands are now dependent for day-to-day survival on food handouts provided by international relief organizations. Not only has the international community refused to intervene; it has actively participated in the repression, imposing--for the first time in history--sanctions on a people living under military occupation, while the occupying and colonizing power goes on violating the international community's own laws with total impunity.<br /><br />To all of these charges, Israel and its supporters have but one response: "security." But as the World Bank report argues, it is "often difficult to reconcile the use of movement and access restrictions for security purposes from their use to expand and protect settlement activity." Moreover, the Bank notes, it seems obvious that Israeli security ought to be tied to Palestinian prosperity: By disrupting the Palestinian economy and immiserating an entire population--pushing almost 4 million people to the edge--the Israelis are hardly enhancing their own security.<br /><br />Such arguments miss the point, however. No matter how fiercely it is contested inside Israel, there remains a very strong sense that the country is entitled to retain the land to which it has now stubbornly clung for four decades. Even while announcing his scheme to relinquish nominal control over a few bits and pieces of the West Bank with heavy concentrations of Palestinians, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert insisted on his country's inherent right to the territory, irrespective of the demands of international law, let alone the rights and claims of the Palestinians themselves. ("Every hill in Samaria and every valley in Judea is part of our historic homeland," he said last year, using Israel's official, biblical terminology for the West Bank.)<br /><br />Although some people claim there are fundamental differences between the disposition of the territories Israel captured in 1967 and the territories it captured during its creation in 1948--or even that there are important moral and political differences between Israel pre- and post-1967--such sentiments of entitlement, and the use of force that necessarily accompanies them, reveal the seamless continuity of the Zionist project in Palestine from 1948 to our own time. "There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing," argues Israeli historian Benny Morris, with reference to the creation of Israel. "A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on."<br /><br />Israel's post-1967 occupation policies are demonstrably driven by the same dispossessive logic. If hundreds of thousands have not literally been forced into flight, their existence has been reduced to penury. Just as Israel could have come into being in 1948 only by sweeping aside hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, Israel's ongoing colonization of Palestinian territory--its imposition of itself and its desires on the land's indigenous population--requires, and will always require, the use of force and the continual brutalization of an entire people.<br /><br />Indeed, the discriminatory practices in the occupied territories replicate, albeit in a harsher and more direct form, those inside Israel, where the remnant of the Palestinian population that was not driven into flight in 1948--today more than a million people--continues to endure the systematic inequalities built into the laws and institutions of a country that explicitly claims to be the state of the Jewish people rather than that of its own actual citizens, about a fifth of whom are not Jewish. Recognizing the contradiction inherent in such a formulation, various Israeli politicians, including Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman, have explicitly called for the territorial transfer--if not the outright expulsion--of as much as possible of Israel's non-Jewish (that is, Palestinian) minority. Although it would be intended to mark the ultimate triumph of the dispossessing settler over the dispossessed native (Lieberman is an immigrant from Moldova who enjoys rights denied to indigenous Palestinians simply because he happens to be Jewish), such a gesture would actually amount to a last-ditch measure, an attempt to forestall what has become the most likely conclusion to the conflict.<br /><br />For, having unified all of what used to be Palestine (albeit into one profoundly divided space) without having overcome the Palestinian people's will to resist, Zionism has run its course. And in so doing, it has terminated any possibility of a two-state solution. There remains but one possibility for peace with justice: truth, reconciliation--and a single democratic and secular state, a state in which there will be no "natives" and "settlers" and all will be equal; a state for all its citizens irrespective of their religious affiliation. Such a state has always, by definition, been anathema for Zionism. But for the people of Israel and Palestine, it is the only way out.<br /><br />http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070618/makdisiUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21570122.post-8800982346037041472007-04-22T17:15:00.000-07:002007-04-22T17:19:48.458-07:00War of WordsIn the war of words, The Times is Israel's ally<br /><br />(Originally published in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Los Angeles Times</span>, 11 March 2007)<br /><br /><br />'AS SOON AS certain topics are raised," George Orwell once wrote, "the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse." Such a combination of vagueness and sheer incompetence in language, Orwell warned, leads to political conformity.<br /><br />No issue better illustrates Orwell's point than coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the United States. Consider, for example, the editorial in The Times on Feb. 9 demanding that the Palestinians "recognize Israel" and its "right to exist." This is a common enough sentiment — even a cliche. Yet many observers (most recently the international lawyer John Whitbeck) have pointed out that this proposition, assiduously propagated by Israel's advocates and uncritically reiterated by American politicians and journalists, is — at best — utterly nonsensical.<br /><br />First, the formal diplomatic language of "recognition" is traditionally used by one state with respect to another state. It is literally meaningless for a non-state to "recognize" a state. Moreover, in diplomacy, such recognition is supposed to be mutual. In order to earn its own recognition, Israel would have to simultaneously recognize the state of Palestine. This it steadfastly refuses to do (and for some reason, there are no high-minded newspaper editorials demanding that it do so).<br /><br />Second, which Israel, precisely, are the Palestinians being asked to "recognize?" Israel has stubbornly refused to declare its own borders. So, territorially speaking, "Israel" is an open-ended concept. Are the Palestinians to recognize the Israel that ends at the lines proposed by the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan? Or the one that extends to the 1949 Armistice Line (the de facto border that resulted from the 1948 war)? Or does Israel include the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which it has occupied in violation of international law for 40 years — and which maps in its school textbooks show as part of "Israel"?<br /><br />For that matter, why should the Palestinians recognize an Israel that refuses to accept international law, submit to U.N. resolutions or readmit the Palestinians wrongfully expelled from their homes in 1948 and barred from returning ever since?<br /><br />If none of these questions are easy to answer, why are such demands being made of the Palestinians? And why is nothing demanded of Israel in turn?<br /><br />Orwell was right. It is much easier to recycle meaningless phrases than to ask — let alone to answer — difficult questions. But recycling these empty phrases serves a purpose. Endlessly repeating the mantra that the Palestinians don't recognize Israel helps paint Israel as an innocent victim, politely asking to be recognized but being rebuffed by its cruel enemies.<br /><br />Actually, it asks even more. Israel wants the Palestinians, half of whom were driven from their homeland so that a Jewish state could be created in 1948, to recognize not merely that it exists (which is undeniable) but that it is "right" that it exists — that it was right for them to have been dispossessed of their homes, their property and their livelihoods so that a Jewish state could be created on their land. The Palestinians are not the world's first dispossessed people, but they are the first to be asked to legitimize what happened to them.<br /><br />A just peace will require Israelis and Palestinians to reconcile and recognize each other's rights. It will not require that Palestinians give their moral seal of approval to the catastrophe that befell them. Meaningless at best, cynical and manipulative at worst, such a demand may suit Israel's purposes, but it does not serve The Times or its readers.<br /><br />And yet The Times consistently adopts Israel's language and, hence, its point of view. For example, a recent article on Israel's Palestinian minority referred to that minority not as "Palestinian" but as generically "Arab," Israel's official term for a population whose full political and human rights it refuses to recognize. To fail to acknowledge the living Palestinian presence inside Israel (and its enduring continuity with the rest of the Palestinian people) is to elide the history at the heart of the conflict — and to deny the legitimacy of Palestinian claims and rights.<br /><br />This is exactly what Israel wants. Indeed, its demand that its "right to exist" be recognized reflects its own anxiety, not about its existence but about its failure to successfully eliminate the Palestinians' presence inside their homeland — a failure for which verbal recognition would serve merely a palliative and therapeutic function.<br /><br />In uncritically adopting Israel's own fraught terminology — a form of verbal erasure designed to extend the physical destruction of Palestine — The Times is taking sides.<br /><br />If the paper wants its readers to understand the nature of this conflict, however, it should not go on acting as though only one side has a story to tell.<br /><br />http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-makdisi11mar11,0,2601983.story?coll=la-opinion-centerUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21570122.post-1167228163627185862006-12-27T06:00:00.000-08:002006-12-27T06:02:43.643-08:00Jimmy Carter, Israel and ApartheidOn the New Book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid”<br />Carter's apartheid charge rings true<br /><br />(Originally published in the <span style="font-style: italic;">San Francisco Chronicle</span>, 20 December 2006)<br /><br /><br /><br />Former President Jimmy Carter has come under sustained attack for having dared to use the term "apartheid" to describe Israel's policies in the West Bank. However, not one of Carter's critics has offered a convincing argument to justify the vehemence of the outcry, much less to refute his central claim that Israel bestows rights on Jewish residents settling illegally on Palestinian land, while denying the same rights to the indigenous Palestinians. Little wonder, for they are attempting to defy reality itself.<br /><br />Israel maintains two separate road networks in the West Bank: one for the exclusive use of Jewish settlers, and one for Palestinian natives. Is that not apartheid?<br /><br />Palestinians are not allowed to drive their own cars in much of the West Bank; their public transportation is frequently interrupted or blocked altogether by a grid of Israeli army checkpoints -- but Jewish settlers come and go freely in their own cars, without even pausing at the roadblocks that hold up the natives. Is that not apartheid?<br /><br />A system of closures and curfews has strangled the Palestinian economy in the West Bank -- but none of its provisions apply to the Jewish settlements there. Is that not apartheid?<br /><br />Whole sectors of the West Bank, classified as "closed military areas" by the Israeli army, are off limits to Palestinians, including Palestinians who own land there -- but foreigners to whom Israel's Law of Return applies (that is, anyone Jewish, from anywhere in the world) can access them without hindrance. Is that not apartheid?<br /><br />Persons of Palestinian origin are routinely barred from entering or residing in the West Bank -- but Israeli and non-Israeli Jews can come and go, and even live on, occupied Palestinian territory. Is that not apartheid?<br /><br />Israel maintains two sets of rules and regulations in the West Bank: one for Jews, one for non-Jews. The only thing wrong with using the word "apartheid" to describe such a repugnant system is that the South African version of institutionalized discrimination was never as elaborate as its Israeli counterpart -- nor did it have such a vocal chorus of defenders among otherwise liberal Americans.<br /><br />The glaring error in Carter's book, however, is his insistence that the term "apartheid" does not apply to Israel itself, where, he says, Jewish and non-Jewish citizens are given the same treatment under the law. That is simply not true.<br /><br />Israeli law affords differences in privileges for Jewish and non-Jewish citizens of the state -- in matters of access to land, family unification and acquisition of citizenship. Israel's amended nationality law, for example, prevents Palestinian citizens of Israel who are married to Palestinians from the occupied territories from living together in Israel. A similar law, passed at the peak of apartheid in South Africa, was overturned by that country's supreme court as a violation of the right to a family. Israel's high court upheld its law just this year.<br /><br />Israel loudly proclaims itself to be the state of the Jewish people, rather than the state of its actual citizens (one-fifth of whom are Palestinian Arabs). In fact, in registering citizens, the Israeli Ministry of the Interior assigns them a whole range of nationalities other than "Israeli." In the official registry, the nationality line for a Jewish citizen of Israel reads "Jew." For a Palestinian citizen, the same line reads "Arab." When this glaring inequity was protested all the way to Israel's high court, the justices upheld it: "There is no Israeli nation separate from the Jewish people." Obviously this leaves non-Jewish citizens of Israel in, at best, a somewhat ambiguous situation. Little wonder, then, that a solid majority of Israeli Jews regard their Arab fellow-citizens as what they call "a demographic threat," which many -- including the deputy prime minister -- would like to see eliminated altogether. What is all this, if not racism?<br /><br />Many of the very individuals and institutions that are so vociferously denouncing President Jimmy Carter would not for one moment tolerate such glaring injustice in the United States. Why do they condone the naked racism that Israel practices? Why do they heap criticism on our former president for speaking his conscience about such a truly unconscionable system of ethnic segregation?<br /><br />Perhaps it is because they themselves are all too aware that they are defending the indefensible; because they are all too aware that the emperor they keep trying to cover up really has no clothes. There is a limit to how long such a cover up can go on. And the main lesson of Carter's book is that we have finally reached that limit.<br /><br />http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/12/20/EDGOULJ69N1.DTLUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21570122.post-1161619823725595962006-10-23T09:09:00.000-07:002006-10-23T09:14:23.836-07:00Lebanon's War with Cluster Bombs[Originally published in <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-makdisi21oct21,0,332585.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions"><span style="font-style:italic;">The Los Angeles Times</span></a>, 21 October 2006]<br /><br /><br />OF ALL THE statistics to emerge from Israel's recent war on Lebanon, the most shocking concerns the number of cluster bombs that Israel dropped on or fired into Lebanon. <br /><br />A cluster bomb is made up of a canister that opens and releases hundreds of individual bomblets, which are dispersed and explode over a wide area, showering it with molten metal and lethal fragments. <br /><br />About 40% of the bomblets dropped by Israel (many of which were American-made) did not explode in the air or on impact with the ground. They now detonate when someone disturbs them — a soldier, a farmer, a shepherd, a child attracted by the lure of a shiny metal object. <br /><br />Cluster bombs are, by definition, inaccurate weapons that are designed to affect a very wide area unpredictably. If they do not discriminate between civilian and military targets when they are dropped, they certainly do not discriminate in the months and years after the end of hostilities, when they go on killing and maiming anyone who happens upon them. <br /><br />When the count of unexploded cluster bomblets passed 100,000, the United Nation's undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, Jan Egeland, expressed his disbelief at the scale of the problem.<br /><br />"What's shocking and, I would say to me, completely immoral," he said, "is that 90% of the cluster-bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when we knew there would be a resolution, when we really knew there would be an end of this." <br /><br />That was on Aug. 30, by which time U.N. teams had identified 359 separate cluster-bomb sites.<br /><br />Since then, the true dimensions of the problem have become even clearer: 770 cluster-bomb sites have now been identified. And the current U.N. estimate is that Israel dropped between 2 million and 3 million bomblets on Lebanon, of which up to a million have yet to explode. <br /><br />In fact, it is estimated that there are more unexploded bomblets in southern Lebanon than there are people. They lurk in tobacco fields, olive groves, on rooftops, in farms, mixed in with rubble. They are injuring two or three people every day, according to the United Nations, and have killed 20 people since the cease-fire in August. <br /><br />"What we did was insane and monstrous," one Israeli commander admitted to the newspaper Haaretz. "We covered entire towns in cluster bombs." <br /><br />As Egeland noted, the majority of these bombs were dropped in the last three days of the war — a time when the U.N. resolution to end the fighting had been agreed on, when the war was virtually over, when it was clear that Israel had failed to accomplish its declared objectives in launching this campaign.<br /><br />Dropped so late in the war, it's hard to imagine what specific military objective these bombs could possibly have been meant to accomplish. Instead, they seem to have been dropped as a final, gratuitous act of violence in a war waged against an entire population. The vast majority of the 1,200 Lebanese killed by Israeli bombardments were civilians; one in three was a child. <br /><br />With 100,000 innocent people trapped in the south because they could not, or dared not, flee on roads that Israel was indiscriminately bombing every day, Israel's justice minister declared that they were all — men, women and children — "terrorists who are related in some way to Hezbollah." <br /><br />Nor was this his view alone. The Israelis dropped leaflets warning that "any vehicle of any kind traveling south of the Litani River will be bombed, on suspicion of transporting rockets, military equipment and terrorists." The Israeli chief of staff was especially clear. "Nothing is safe" in Lebanon, he said. "As simple as that." <br /><br />Israel carried out 7,000 air raids and fired 160,000 artillery projectiles into Lebanon, a tiny country. That's about two air raids and 40 projectiles per square mile. <br /><br />But the punishment was not evenly distributed. Israel's war was aimed specifically at Lebanon's Shiite population. Shiite neighborhoods in Beirut were destroyed, but other neighborhoods remained untouched. Shiite villages in the south were obliterated — literally wiped from the surface of the Earth — while nearby Christian villages escaped unscathed, mercifully able to shelter their Shiite neighbors. <br /><br />Israeli officials said this was a war against Hezbollah, that Hezbollah was hiding in the midst of the population. But this wasn't a war against Hezbollah. It was a war to punish the entire population for its support of the guerrillas. <br /><br />Not only was Hezbollah not hiding behind civilians, it ought to be obvious that the violence was directed in the first instance at the civilians themselves. To direct such violence at one community, one religious group, one minority — and to deny them the ability to return safely home — was what this war was all about. <br /><br />To drop two or three bomblets for every man, woman and child in southern Lebanon — after having wiped out their homes, smashed their communities, destroyed their livelihoods — is to wage war against them all. <br /><br />And we supplied the weapons.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21570122.post-1156169217983944422006-08-21T07:05:00.000-07:002006-08-21T07:08:55.863-07:00Lessons LearnedLessons Learned<br /><br />[Originally published in <a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060828/makdisi"><span style="font-style:italic;">The Nation</span></a>, 20 August 2006]<br /><br /><br /><br />Hours before the UN ceasefire went into effect, Israel quietly announced that it would, after all, be willing to negotiate a prisoner exchange with Hezbollah to secure the return of the two soldiers whose capture sparked the recent war.<br /><br />Had Israel accepted Hezbollah's offer of a negotiated exchange five weeks ago, more than 1,000 people--the vast majority Lebanese civilians--would still be alive. In addition, more than a million people would not have been displaced from their homes; entire neighborhoods in Beirut and whole villages in the south of Lebanon would still be intact; and the Israeli army would not have reduced Lebanon to an environmentally devastated wasteland.<br /><br />Rather than negotiating an exchange (as they have in the past), the Israelis launched a wave of air and artillery attacks on civilian targets in Lebanon.<br /><br />When Hezbollah retaliated with several salvos of rockets, Israel angrily announced that no country--other than Lebanon, presumably--can tolerate such attacks, and it stepped up its bombardment of Lebanon, striking the international airport in Beirut as well as other civilian targets, and threatening to set the entire country back twenty years.<br /><br />Far too many people in the US accepted Israel's claims at face value.<br /><br />Hardly anyone bothered to put the capture of the Israeli soldiers (which was referred to as a "kidnapping," not a term normally used with reference to soldiers in wartime) in historical context. It was depicted as having come out of the blue, rather than being understood as one event in a continuous series originating with Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982-in whose aftermath Hezbollah was born. When the rockets started flying, no one seemed to notice that Israel had brought punishment on its own civilians by having chosen to respond disproportionately to a minor border skirmish, and to an attack on its army by bombing defenseless civilians.<br /><br />Overnight, as the captured soldiers faded into the background, a consensus seemed to emerge in the US, according to which the bombing of Lebanon was really about Israel's need to protect its northern border from Hezbollah rocket attacks.<br /><br />We were saturated with the message that Hezbollah is a shadowy terrorist organization that has spent years showering northern Israel with rockets--and that Israel had both the right and the duty to protect itself from such attacks once and for all. Thus was history instantaneously rewritten to Israel's own specifications.<br /><br />In fact, from the moment that Israel ended its last military occupation of Lebanon in 2000 until the explosion of the current war on July 12, UN observers report that there was not a single casualty as a result of a confirmed rocket attack by Hezbollah on civilian targets in northern Israel.<br /><br />A number of alternative explanations for Israel's bombardment of Lebanon have been proposed, most of them involving the Bush administration's regional ambitions. It may have been another attempt to create "a new Middle East," or, as Seymour Hersh suggests, it may have been a dress rehearsal for a future US war on Iran.<br /><br />Whatever its real motivations, however, Israel failed. For all the damage it inflicted on innocent civilians, Israel's lumbering army was resolutely beaten back by Hezbollah.<br /><br />We may never know the real reasons for Israel's attack, but there are lessons to be learned from the past few weeks of violence.<br /><br />First, we should learn never to accept at face value any government's justifications for its own actions. Government claims need to be viewed skeptically, placed in context, read against the grain.<br /><br />Second, we need to learn not to assess Israel's actions using Israel's own discourse. Not only, for example, do hundreds of millions of people not see Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, but to accept the Israeli designation is to ignore the material fact that Hezbollah is a massive social movement that gained prominence by resisting what would have been recognized in any other context as a brutal and illegal military occupation.<br /><br />Third, it is essential for us to disentangle American interests from Israeli ones. Our government supported Israel's war on Lebanon. We financed and supplied it; our Congress affirmed it; our representatives repeatedly blocked international appeals for a ceasefire that would have saved hundreds of lives. It is childish for us to imagine that we will not have further prices to pay for our blind support for Israel. We should demand from our government an explanation of what we receive in turn--especially if that is nothing.<br /><br />Finally, we must learn to see Israel for what it is. A state that punishes an entire population, flouts international law, commits war crimes, refuses to allow aid to reach beleaguered civilians, destroys ambulances, attacks civilians, and orders terrified people from their homes only to bomb them as they flee, is a rogue state. We need to ask ourselves what we gain by associating ourselves with it.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21570122.post-1154947463159321152006-08-07T03:42:00.000-07:002006-08-07T03:44:23.163-07:00Israel Should Call it QuitsIsrael's Raid on Baalbeck's Hospital: Time to call it Quits<br /><br />[Originally published by Saree Makdisi in <span style="font-style:italic;">Counterpunch</span>, 3 August 2006]<br /><br /><br />Israeli commandos staged a daring raid the other night on the ancient Lebanese town of Baalbeck, catching Hassan Nasrallah asleep, bundling him into a waiting helicopter, and spiriting him back to Israel.<br /><br />But as the dust settled and reports from the ground began to emerge, it turned out that the Hassan Nasrallah that Israel's most elite military unit had captured-with the assistance of the formidable intelligence capabilities of the legendary Mossad-was apparently not Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizballah, but rather Hassan Nasrallah, the owner of a small toyshop on the dusty outskirts of Baalbeck. They also nabbed his son, another relative, and a neighbor for good measure. Israel claims that the men are members of Hizballah, albeit not the ones they were hoping for. Their relatives and neighbors, and Hizballah itself, deny this.<br /><br />The raid was focused on the Dar al Hikma hospital, which was heavily damaged by the Israeli raiders and supporting fire from aircraft. The hospital, however, was found to be empty. The kidnapped men were, according to local sources, taken from their homes.<br /><br />To provide cover before and during the raid on the hospital, Israeli aircraft subjected residential neighborhoods of Baalbeck and neighboring towns to a withering bombardment, in which seventeen people, almost all of them civilians, were killed. The dead included the son of the mayor of al Jamaliyeh, his brother, and five other relatives. The mayor of al Jamaliyeh, incidentally, held a distinctly anti-Hizballah position in local politics.<br /><br />Israel's aerial torment of a population entirely lacking in air defenses and even proper air raid shelters has now killed some 900 people, the overwhelming majority of them civilians, and about a third of them children. It has displaced almost a million people from their homes. It has devastated Lebanon's civilian infrastructure. It has reduced entire towns in the south-including Bint Jbeil, once home to 30,000 people-to rubble. And it has left block after block after block of Beirut in total ruins. (All this while Israel is at the same time holding the 1.4 million destitute people of the Gaza Strip in the world's largest prison, bombarding them day and night, and sadistically depriving them of sleep at night by repeatedly breaking the sound barrier at low altitude).<br /><br />After three weeks of devastating bombardment, Israel's much vaunted army finds itself unable to fight its way more than a few kilometers into Lebanon. The heavy resistance they have encountered on the ground is the most obvious explanation for why the Israelis prefer on the whole to go on dropping bombs on children from a safe distance: not only is it less dangerous, it also involves much less effort.<br /><br />The "deep penetration" raid on Baalbeck was meant to show off the capabilities of Israel's armed forces, to make up for their humiliating performance on the ground and their repeated massacres of civilians from the air, including the refugees sheltering in Qana (an event whose cover story has gone through at least three variations, none of them convincing to anyone other than the Israelis themselves).<br /><br />Instead, it left a hospital in ruins, more than a dozen civilians dead, and elite forces in possession of an unfortunate middle-aged shopkeeper and an assortment of his friends and relatives.<br /><br />Surely this would be the right moment for Israel to give up and call it quitsUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21570122.post-1154947320037116692006-08-07T03:39:00.000-07:002006-08-07T03:42:00.053-07:00US Should not Abet Violence in LebanonThe US Should not Abet Violence in Lebanon<br /><br />[Originally published by Saree Makdisi in the <span style="font-style:italic;">Cleveland Plain Dealer</span>, 22 July 2006]<br /><br /><br />Never has the gulf between U.S. and Israeli interests been clearer than during the present crisis. And not since the shameful coverup of the 1967 Israeli bombing of the USS Liberty - in which 34 Navy crewmen were killed - have our politicians done so much to protect Israel's interests at the expense of our own.<br /><br />We have not been standing idly by as Israel destroys Lebanon's civilian infrastructure, obliterates entire neighborhoods and kills dozens of innocent people.<br /><br />Not only has our government provided Israel with the weapons with which it is now bombarding Lebanon, it also has provided virtually unlimited financial, military, political and diplomatic support to enable - even encourage - Israel to continue.<br /><br />Our government intervened to remove criticism of Israel from the G-8 Summit statement on the crisis. It stymied European efforts to call for a cease-fire to protect civilian life. It vetoed a U.N. resolution calling on Israel to stop its attack on Gaza's civilians. It rushed an additional $210 million of aviation fuel to Israel to help it "keep peace and security in the region." And it even granted Israel an additional week to continue its unrestrained pounding of Lebanon, according to diplomatic reports.<br /><br />Lebanon is facing a humanitarian catastrophe; 335 people have been killed. The United Nations estimates that up to half a million people have been displaced from their homes. With Israel having reduced Lebanon to a large-scale version of Gaza - cut off from the outside world, denied water and electricity, unable to import essential supplies of food and medicine - the country is on its knees. Four million people are now not merely terrified, but increasingly hungry and thirsty.<br /><br />It is absurd to consider this level of violence a legitimate act of self-defense. During its war with the IRA, Britain could have used the same argument to destroy Ireland's roads, bridges, ports and airports on the pretext that they were being used by the IRA to move weapons and supplies; it could have used it to launch massive bombardments of Catholic neighborhoods both in the Republic and in Northern Ireland.<br /><br />The absurdity of the justification aside, Israel has bombed targets in Lebanon that have no possible connection to Hezbollah. It has killed sleeping Lebanese army soldiers in the north of the country, even though the Lebanese army is not involved in the conflict and is, moreover, supposed to be the key to the solution, according to Israel itself. It has bombed milk factories, cutting off the supply of a vital nutrient to Lebanon's babies and children. It has bombed a desperately needed aid convoy heading toward Beirut from the United Arab Emirates. It has bombed hospitals, schools and ambulances. All of this, of course, is in blatant violation of the U.S. Arms Export Control Act, under which our weapons are provided to Israel.<br /><br />Why is our country supporting Israel's unlimited violence not only against an entire population, but a population that has historically been the most friendly to the United States in the entire Arab world? For decades, America has been a beacon of hope and liberty to the people of Lebanon. Its foremost university is an American institution. Its people have emigrated in tens of thousands to America (the majority of Arab-Americans are Lebanese), tying our two nations together.<br /><br />Justice aside, what do we gain from the bombing of these people?<br /><br />Are we really to believe that this attack will destroy Hezbollah? Israel enforced a draconian military occupation of Lebanon for over two decades; just as it failed to destroy Hezbollah then, it will fail again now.<br /><br />Are we then to believe that this attack constitutes a slap in the face for Iran and Syria? The destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure hurts neither of them. On the contrary, it will provide them another chance to give generously during reconstruction.<br /><br />This attack has nothing to do with Israel's self defense. Preparing for eventual negotiations, it is showing how it deals with those who dare question it: It reduces their country to rubble. In the name of combating one form of extremism, we are backing another - Israel's.<br /><br />We gain nothing in the process. But we will pay a price.<br /><br />Three hundred million Arabs and 1 billion Muslims are watching as one rational and peaceful and moral argument after another to restore peace is either denied or deflected or contemptuously spurned by our leaders in order to allow Israel to continue its bombardment. The next time one or three or 10 of them take it in their heads to launch a horrific attack on the United States - which they will regard as justified retribution - no one need bother to ask why they hate us. We will all know the answer.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21570122.post-1153301016935839482006-07-19T02:21:00.000-07:002006-07-19T02:23:36.953-07:00Israel's Outrageous AttacksIsrael's Outrageous Attacks<br />Its blanket bombardment of Lebanon amounts to collective guilt.<br /><br />[Originally published by Saree Makdisi in The Los Angeles Times, 19 July 2006]<br /><br /><br />APPARENTLY suffering from amnesia, Israel now says that its extraordinary collective punishment of the entire Lebanese population is intended to stop rocket attacks across its northern border. <br /><br />However, Israel's blanket bombardment of Lebanon was sparked not by rockets (which came in retaliation) but by a guerrilla operation against a military target, the aim of which was to capture soldiers as leverage for the release of some of the Lebanese prisoners Israel stubbornly refuses to free. Israel itself has repeatedly crossed into Lebanon to capture prisoners — including civilians — for use as bargaining chips. <br /><br />Indeed, although captures, negotiations and exchanges have long been part of Israel's relationship with Hezbollah, this time it categorically refused to negotiate the release of its soldiers — preferring instead to pummel hundreds of thousands of defenseless people on a scale out of all proportion to what it regards as the initial provocation. <br /><br />So far, Israel has killed more than 230 people — all but a handful of whom were civilians — including whole families. With its customary arrogance, it has issued peremptory warnings to entire communities to get out of its way or face the consequences: terrorism in the true sense of the word. It gave the residents of the town of Marwaheen in southern Lebanon, for example, a few hours to leave their homes. The terrified residents came under Israeli fire as they fled. More than 15 people, most of them children, were killed. <br /><br />Israel later warned the entire population of southern Lebanon to leave. No Arab can forget that terrorizing an entire population from its homes is the tactic that was used to seize possession of Palestine in the spring and summer of 1948. Not everyone will leave. Many will reject Israel's imperious warnings — what right, they will ask, does Israel have to terrify us into flight from our homes? In any case, most of them have nowhere to flee to — and even if they did, Israel has destroyed the bridges and is bombing the roads out of the south.<br /><br />In a week of vindictive bombardment, Israel has destroyed the infrastructure that Lebanon spent a decade building. Under the cover of misleading headlines, such as one that read "Israel Pounds Hezbollah Strongholds," Israel has in fact bombed towns and villages, provincial centers and Beirut. <br /><br />Israel has killed Christians, Sunnis and Shiites, old and young, men and women, from the great Phoenician cities of Sidon and Tyre to more humble towns — Chtoura and Juniyah, Damour and Naame, Jiye and Baalbek, Khiam and Batrun.<br /><br />It has wrecked roads, bridges, a lighthouse, ports, tunnels, electrical pylons, water mains, fuel depots, gas stations, power plants, houses, shops, schools — and even a milk factory. It has repeatedly blasted the international airport that was the symbol of Lebanon's rebirth from 15 years of war. <br /><br />Where, when or if Lebanon will ever get the funding to rebuild what Israel has smashed remain open questions. When Israel finally relents, it will leave Lebanon without a functioning infrastructure — and the lives of nearly 4 million people altered beyond recognition.<br /><br />That, of course, is explicitly the point of this outrage. Israel's army chief bragged that he would set Lebanon back "20 years." That is what is happening — as a silent world watches.<br /><br /><br />http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-makdisi19jul19,0,4920124.story?coll=la-opinion-centerUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21570122.post-1152947429533085762006-07-15T00:03:00.000-07:002006-07-15T00:16:17.626-07:00No Peace for Israel without Justice for PalestiniansNo Peace for Israel without Justice for Palestinians<br />[Originally published by Saree Makdisi in the <em>Houston Chronicle</em>, 14 July 2006]<br /><br />The civilian infrastructure — notably Beirut International Airport — was the first target of the attack that Israel unleashed on Lebanon in response to the capture of two Israeli soldiers this week.<br /><br />This mimicks Israel's earlier assaults on the essentially defenseless population of the Gaza Strip. Israeli missiles destroyed Gaza's only power plant, depriving half the population of electricity for the hot summer months (no fans, no fridges, no light after sunset). Israeli interdictions severely disrupted supplies of food, fuel, medicines and water. Midnight air raids, artillery bombardments, and sleep deprivation are taking a psychological toll, particularly on young children.<br /><br />Israel is, in short, now punishing more than a million men, women and children in Gaza for a Palestinian guerrilla attack on an Israeli army post (an obviously military target), and the entire population of Lebanon for a Hezbollah attack on Israeli troops on its northern border.<br /><br />As Israel lashes out indiscriminately, mocking international law, U.S. government officials and prominent pundits have expressed sympathy — not for the victims of these attacks, but for their perpetrators. Moreover, much of the arsenal that Israel uses against Lebanese and Palestinians is American, including the armored bulldozers it uses to crush homes, the missiles recklessly fired into crowded neighborhoods and the gunships that launch them.<br /><br />Such support tarnishes U.S. standing in a strategically vital region of the world. More and more Americans realize that we pay a price for Israel's abuses — and receive nothing in return.<br /><br />What we most urgently need to know is that the tragedy now unfolding in Gaza is not merely one more episode in a supposed "cycle of violence" (which implies proportionality), let alone a genuine military contest (for only one side has an army).<br /><br />But if the current Israeli attacks are utterly disproportionate to their alleged provocations, that is because far more is at stake than Palestinian pinpricks. What is happening in Gaza is an expression of Israel's political vision.<br /><br />Israeli politicians speak openly of that vision (indeed, the current Israeli government won recent elections with a pledge to fulfill it): the consolidation of a state with a Jewish majority in a land in which barely half the population is actually Jewish.<br /><br />There is no way to implement such a program without violence. That was the case in 1948, when half of Palestine's non-Jewish population was driven into flight — never to be allowed to return — in order for a Jewish state to be created on what had been Palestinians' land. And it is the case today, as Israel seeks to forcibly isolate the land's remaining non-Jewish population into barren islands cut off from each other and the rest of the world.<br /><br />Gaza is only one of these islands. The others are in the West Bank which, with Gaza and east Jerusalem, are what remained of Palestine after it was dismembered in 1948 — only to be captured by Israel in 1967.<br /><br />Jerusalem is already off limits to most Palestinians. Israel has broken the West Bank into three separate cantons. A grid of roadblocks further fragments each canton internally. Israel's separation barrier only adds to the fragmentation, as do a road network barred to Palestinians — and a sprawling array of illegal Jewish settlements — whose annexation to Israel, while bypassing areas of indigenous, non-Jewish population, is Israel's objective.<br /><br />Israel claims to hold the Palestinian "government" accountable for the raid on its Gaza outpost. But this archipelago of besieged territories does not — and it will never — amount to a "state." It is designed to be a collection of open-air holding cells for the land's non-Jewish population: spaces to detain them, isolate them from health-care, educational and infrastructural services, deny them access to land, resources and markets, until they either die or simply give up and go away. Gaza's suffocation over the past year illustrates this perfectly.<br /><br />Each departing Palestinian will be triumphantly checked off the tally by Israeli demographers like Arnon Sofer who, anxiously monitoring what they unabashedly call the "demographic threat" to their country, obsessively calculate ratios of Jews to non-Jews.<br /><br />Lacking an army, Palestinians do not pose a material challenge to Israel. They pose an ideological challenge. Raids like the one on the Gaza outpost remind Israelis that the Palestinians will not go away; this is why Israel cannot tolerate them.<br /><br />Israel's announcement that it now intends to create by force a depopulated "security zone" in northern Gaza is eerily reminiscent of its futile attempt to enforce such a zone in southern Lebanon. Israel's northern border fell silent — not when it had finally used enough violence against Lebanon — but when it decided to end its illegal military occupation of Lebanese territory. That lesson has apparently been forgotten already, as Israel again holds an entire country hostage.<br /><br />The same principle applies to Gaza. Israel's use of overwhelming force against civilian targets shows that it still fails to understand that occupation begets resistance — and that peace for Israelis is inseparable from justice for Palestinians.<br /><br />These are lessons that Americans should learn as well.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.chron.com/">HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com</a> <a href="http://www.chron.com/editorial">Section: Viewpoints, Outlook</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com