Will Israel Attack Iran Or Is It Selling Wolf Tickets?

Today will be the first test of how well the Iranian people’s movement has rebounded from the wave of repression that hit it two weeks ago and weathered the arrests and repression of suspected activists that have become business as usual as the Revolutionary Guard assumes more and more power.

An Iranian friend wrote me yesterday:

By the way, do you know that a massive silent demonstration is planned for tomorrow. The government has closed the universities for two weeks, but the student are organizing. The streets that marches are going to take place have been published on the web and the organizers have asked people who are afraid to march help the protesters by parking their cars at the end of route or even pretending that there is a car accident so as to block the road and make it difficult for the police to attack.

(Yesterday’s FotM post on Iran and even moreso the Freedom Road “Statement on Iran” of June 28 provide crucial context for today’s events.)

But in the last few days, Iran has been back in the news for a more familiar reason—a renewed buzz in the mainstream media and the blogosphere alike about the imminence of an Israeli missile and bombing raid on Iran. This would target Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons program, which means its very real nuclear power program.

What’s up?

I have been among the skeptics about such reports for years, starting when it was supposed to be the Bush administration launching the attacks back in 2004 or so. I remain skeptical but there are issues about the current situation that need some thought.

I first became aware of the new discussion when the worthy Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies forwarded this note from Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force colonel and progressive military analyst:

Six months ago I was a non-believer. I did not think Israel had the military capability to pull off an effective strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. New pieces of information have pushed me to believe otherwise.

First, within the past few months, we have read that production of a conventional Jericho missile has been stepped up. This is an important new capability. This is a new strategic condition

On Friday, there were numerous reports that Egypt has recently allowed Israeli submarines to transit the Suez Canal. (Some sources say all three submarines; some sources report only one transited.) These boats have been operating in the Mediterranean for many years but have not moved into waters that would give them greater access to Iran with their conventional cruise missiles. This is a new strategic condition.

This morning the Times Online is reporting that Israel and Saudi Arabia have an agreement that would allow Israeli aircraft to transit Saudi airspace to conduct an attack. That makes sense from the Saudi perspective, given their position on the Iran nuclear program. This is a new strategic condition.

My new position, Israel is putting the pieces together to conduct an attack on Iran.

Note that Gardiner doesn’t predict an attack, simply argues that Israel is seeking to develop a capacity to conduct such a criminal assault which it has not heretofore had.

The Administration’s Twostep

What put this whole kerfluffle on the front pages, though, were the bizarre remarks Vice President Biden made on ABC's "This Week" when asked about Israeli saber-rattling toward Iran:

Israel can determine for itself -- it's a sovereign nation -- what's in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else. Whether we agree or not. They're entitled to do that. Any sovereign nation is entitled to do that. But there is no pressure from any nation that's going to alter our behavior as to how to proceed.

For starters, this is hypocrisy of a very high order—hey, never mind anyplace else the US is meddling in, Iran is a sovereign nation and the US is hell-bent on interfering with their building of nuclear power plants or weapons.

More striking to most observers, it seemed like a barely disguised endorsement of an Israeli attack, “You’re sovereign; do what you gotta do.” So great was the outcry at Biden’s statement that the White House made a particular point of “walking it back.” From a Russian trip President Obama denied that this was a green light to Israel, “Absolutely not.” The head of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Mullen, hastily chimed in about what a bad idea it is.

Is An Attack Likely?

A lot of this makes very little sense. Take Saudi Arabia. Sure, its feudal ruling family is Sunni and Arab; Iran is Shi’ite and Persian. Let’s stipulate that they are afraid of a nuclear armed Iran and glad that someone else is going to do something about it. Still complicity in an attack by Israel on a Muslim nation would destabilize the rule of the Sa’ud family and its bought and paid for influence within Islam.

What are the calculations in Israeli ruling circles? A go-it-alone attack just might do real damage to Iran’s nuclear program, but bear in mind that those facilities are considered to be widely scattered, seriously hardened and located in some cases in or near population centers. A truly serious effort would have to try and degrade a lot of Iran’s industrial and research capacity, and its military establishment to pull the teeth of a retaliatory strike. This is still well beyond Israel’s capacity—unless, of course, it employs its own nuclear weapons in the attack.

The international rage and disgust aroused by even a conventional attack with low (i.e. in the thousands) casualties would be a heavy price to pay. It may be that the Israeli government and the IDF feel that the tide of global opinion is turning irreversibly against the Zionist experiment after the Gaza invasion and the Obama election in the US, so striking where there’s still goodwill on the plus side of the ledger makes a certain sense. I have seen little to suggest that this is really the case.

Last fall Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was leaving office and gave an interesting interview to The New York Review of Books. In it he fretted:

One senses a megalomania and a loss of proportion to the things that are said here about Iran. We are a country that has lost a sense of scale. The assumption is that if America, Russia, China, England, and Germany don’t know how to deal with the Iranians, but we, the Israelis, will know, and that we’ll do something, we’ll act, is an example of this loss of proportions.

Now that’s a little frightening.

Another Explanation?

Although this is only my speculation, let’s start with the fact that all the previous the-US-and/or-Israel-are-about-to-bomb-Iran scares did serve a political purpose even as they evaporated. They contributed to the demonization of Iran as part of the Axis of Evil invented by Bush’s speechwriters. And in foreign policy think tanks, the task of the day became figuring out really bad but less dangerous things the US and countries following its lead could do to isolate Iran and harm its economy.

Can it be mere happenstance that all this is happening on more time in the midst of an unanticipated mass upsurge in Iran? I sure don’t think so. Remember that the Israeli rulers and their amen corner among US neo-cons have been ardently rooting for Ahmadinejad to come out on top. Meir Dagan, the head of the secret service, the Mossad, told the Knesset: “If the reformist candidate Mousavi had won, Israel would have had a more serious problem because it would need to explain to the world the danger of the Iranian threat, since Mousavi is perceived internationally as a moderate element.”

What has happened is a nightmare for them. As the FRSO/OSCL statement points out:

Perhaps the most important effect so far has been to humanize the people of Iran in the eyes of millions here. The courageous millions who are risking and indeed giving their lives to protest repression and dictatorship have struck a chord in the hearts of freedom-loving people everywhere.

So with this as background, the beating of the war drums takes on another meaning—it amounts to campaigning for Ahmadinejad and his backer, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The threat of military intervention strengthens their call for national unity, directed at the protesters and at disgruntled clerics and makes it easier to paint opposition as unpatriotic. If the regime can be provoked into bellicose rhetoric and thus more easily isolated so much the better.

This is not to say an attack is impossible, but to point out that the best way to forestall one right now is for us to spread the word on the popular movement there and build support for it and to expose Zionist and neo-con schemes to strengthen the Iranian reactionaries’ hold on power.

Read more!

The Israeli Terror

by David Rovics

I was in Olympia, Washington driving towards Evergreen State College when I got a phone call from someone in the occupied West Bank of Palestine. An Evergreen graduate named Rachel Corrie had been killed a few days before by an Israeli soldier in an armored bulldozer, and someone with an Australian accent on my cell phone named Tom was wondering whether it was OK for the International Solidarity Movement to use the lyrics to a song I had just written about the incident on their website. Rachel's murder was followed quickly by the murder of a British ISM activist named Tom Hurndall.

And now, almost six years to the day after the murder of Rachel Corrie, my friend and comrade Tristan Anderson has been critically injured by the IDF. He joins ISM activist Brian Avery, who was also shot in the face. Brian survived, seriously disfigured but otherwise intact. Tristan lies in a coma in a hospital near Tel Aviv and may or may not be as lucky as Brian. His brain was exposed by the tear gas canister fired at close range at his face, and as I write, large parts of his frontal lobe have had to be removed by the surgeons.

Rachel, Tom, Brian and Tristan join the ranks of the thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese civilians killed and the tens of thousands maimed by the IDF since 2000 alone. Being privileged foreigners (at least before they were killed or maimed), they did not have the opportunity to join the ranks of the millions of Palestinians and Lebanese who have been driven into desperate poverty, malnourishment and homelessness by the Israeli invasion and occupation of their lands.

There are many other contemporary and historical examples of genocidal regimes. A few of them – contemporary Turkey, Indonesia or, chiefly among them, the United States – lay claim to the notion that they are democratic countries. Others, such as Saddam's Iraq, apartheid South Africa, and Nazi Germany also made such claims, but nobody believed them. It's challenging to make comparisons between them, at least in terms of trying to figure out which one should deserve the title of Most Genocidal Regime. There are issues of scale, longevity and historical circumstances that make such judgements difficult. Other types of comparisons, though, are not only easy to make, but seem as unavoidable as the elephant in the living room.

It probably didn't help that as the Israeli military was laying siege to the Gaza Strip two months ago I was on a tour of Australia, free from my responsibilities as a father and thus with more free time than I ever have when I'm home these days. I did then what I normally do in my free time – read. The book I happened to be reading at the time was one I had been meaning to read for decades, which I had just picked up at a book store during a visit to Canada – William Shirer's 1,200-page tome, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. As Israel's massive armored divisions and ultra-modern Air Force was laying waste to an already-occupied walled ghetto filled with nearly starving refugees armed with nothing more than rocks and the occasional small arms, mostly home-made, I was reading about the siege of the Warsaw Ghetto.

The comparisons are not exact. At the height of what was then widely known as the Nazi Terror, in Auschwitz the SS killed thousands of Jews and Russians every day. No such gas chambers exist or have ever existed in Israel. But for those of you reading this who have not already decided that I am a self-loathing Jew or some kind of anti-Semite, I would like to share with you some of the streams of consciousness that were passing through my head as I was attending protests in Australia against the bombing of Gaza, in between the unavoidable visits to the ubiquitous Australian war memorials and the next chapter of Shirer's history of Nazi Germany.

There I was, bearing witness to the siege of a walled ghetto already under occupation. There have been many sieges of cities over the centuries, but sieges of already-occupied walled ghettoes are far fewer, and for any student of history the similarities are obvious, the comparisons inevitable.

When I first visited Israel in 1999 I was struck by what a nation of trauma survivors it was. I was reminded immediately of my first visit to Ireland some years before, where the great famine that wiped out half the population over a century before seemed like it had happened perhaps a generation ago. In Israel the Nazi Holocaust seemed to have happened yesterday, and in the mindset of many Israelis it seemed as if it were carried out by Palestinians rather than Germans. I encountered anti-Arab racism daily in Israel. When I sang songs about the horrors of the sanctions against Iraq (around a half million Iraqi children dead as a direct result at that point according to UNICEF) I was told by middle-class, middle-aged Israeli folk music fans that killing Iraqi children was OK because they were just going to grow up to become terrorists anyway. I was told that “the Arab mindset” was hopelessly backwards and that They just wanted to “drive us into the sea.” (I even heard Israeli Jews refer to “Latin numerals” when it was clear from the context that they meant Arabic numerals – a Freudian slip I'm sure.)

Most of the Israeli Jews I met seemed confident of the historical persecution of Jews in the Middle East. Actual history bears no resemblance to their version of it, but this did not get in the way of their fantasies. It was in Europe where the Catholic Church and the Nazi movement carried out pogroms and built death camps, not in the Muslim world, but these Jews identified culturally with their European inquisitors, not with their historical Muslim and Christian friends with whom their Arab and Persian Jewish brethren had lived in peace for thousands of years.

And now after decades of the so-called “peace process” Israel's new Foreign Minister openly advocates for the ethnic cleansing of Israel, for the driving out of the million or so Palestinians living within Israel's 1948 borders. In this nation of survivors of the Nazi Terror, race laws reign supreme. There is one set of laws for Jews, and another set of laws for everyone else. As in Nazi Germany, “everyone else” is then divided into groups with relative privileges in comparison with each other (for example, “Israeli Arabs” vs. West Bank Palestinians vs. those condemned to live in Gaza, the world's largest open-air prison and the most densely-populated place on Earth).

Like the Zionists, the Nazis also came to power on the backs of trauma and claims of victimhood. For decades, history has been written by the victors, so it is hard to imagine how well Hitler was able to sell the case to the German people (and to many others around the world) that Germany was a nation oppressed by their neighbors as well as by “the enemy within,” the Jews.

Millions of Germans had been slaughtered -- along with millions of Russians, French, Brits, Australians, etc. -- in the War to End All Wars (WWI). German Jews were disproportionately of a leftwing persuasion, and many of the leaders of the social democrats who signed the Treaty of Versailles were, in fact, Jewish. Thus the Jews could be blamed for Germany's defeat (never mind the Kaiser's imperial ambitions) and could also somehow be blamed for the devastating economic depression that followed it (never mind the fact that much of the rest of the world was also in the throes of a similarly devastating depression). The Nazi solution to the “Jewish problem” was to create a society based on racial laws that systematically discriminated against Jews, took away their property, prevented them from joining the military or doing any number of other jobs, drove them out of the country or into ghettoes around which the Nazis built walls, and then ultimately invaded many of the countries into which the Jewish refugees had fled, laid siege to the ghettoes, starving and ultimately killing most of the residents.

Fast forward a few years to 1948, to Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel's father and others in the Zionist movement. The propaganda to try to encourage Jewish emigration to Palestine was that Palestine was a “land without a people for a people without a land,” but the Zionist movement actually on the ground in Palestine knew better. For them, the Palestinian people were all too real, and were an obstacle, a problem to be fixed through systematic, brutal ethnic cleansing. The Zionist movement in Palestine, followed by the State of Israel, dealt with the Palestinian problem (that is, the problem of the existence of Palestinians), by creating a society based on racial laws that systematically discriminated against Palestinians, took away their property, prevented them from joining the military, drove them out of the country or into ghettoes around which the Jews built walls, and then ultimately invaded many of the countries into which the Palestinian refugees had fled, laying siege to their cities, ghettoes and refugee camps, starving and killing thousands upon thousands of the residents, oftentimes in the form of wholesale slaughter that in some instances rivalled the intensity of the Nazi genocide.

The Irgun and other groups whom the British administrators of Palestine referred to as terrorists blew up buses full of Palestinian civilians, attacked Palestinian towns and cities with naval bombardment, laid siege to towns with tanks and automatic weapons on three sides in order to force the residents to flee. This is how the Zionist movement formed their state, this was the Israeli “war of independence.”

The Zionists who were flooding into Palestine and quickly changing the demographics of Palestinian society claimed they were being persecuted. There were many isolated incidents that could be called persecution, and many more incidents of Zionist settlers in pre-1948 Palestine persecuting the residents with whom they were sharing a country. By the same token, the Nazis made mostly baseless claims that German-speaking citizens of Poland and Czechoslovakia were being persecuted – the Germans were being persecuted and had to defend themselves by invading their neighbors. By the time the Nazis invaded and occupied France, and Britain finally decided to make good on its treaty obligations and fight fascism, the Nazis could – quite rightly – claim that they had been attacked by Britain. The Germans were the victims of Britain was the Nazi line.

Fast forward again to 1948. The Arab countries neighboring Palestine belatedly sent in a force to defend their fellow Arabs from the Zionists – a force that was numerically and militarily no match for the Zionist army and was quickly defeated. But in the annals of Zionist propaganda this was not Arabs coming to the defense of their brethren who were being slaughtered and driven from their land, it was an “unprovoked attack,” like the British assault on poor Germany. Like the Germans surrounded by hostile neighbors bent on keeping the Germans down, “the Arabs” wanted to “wipe Israel off the map.”

One of Hitler's favorite methods of managing, at least in the Nazi-run press, of appearing to be the voice of reason in the face of his “war-mongering” European neighbors was to make a pretense of “peace negotiations” which were generally last-minute ultimatums that could be accepted or not without any actual negotiating at all. For example, Czechoslovakia (and its ostensible allies, Britain and France) was told it could give up the Sudetenland and other Czech territories and thus avert destruction at the hands of the German military. It actually acquiesced to all German demands (with the encouragement of Britain and France) and was annexed by Germany anyway, on the grounds that the Czechs were being unreasonable, that Czechs were terrorizing ethnic Germans within its borders, etc.

Similarly, the Israeli government regularly asserts that if countries like Syria and Lebanon and political movements like Hamas would only “recognize Israel's right to exist” then there could be peace. The Arab states are consistently portrayed by Israel as the unreasonable parties, and any efforts on the parts of Arab countries to obey the will of the majority of their people and stand up to Israel's daily theft of Palestinian land and slaughter of Palestinian people is portrayed by Israeli leaders as proof that they want to “wipe Israel off the map.” Yet when the Israeli government is asked the very simple question, where are your borders, no answer is forthcoming. Like Nazi Germany, the neighboring countries are expected to acquiesce to all Israeli demands or be portrayed as the aggressors. But how can any reasonable country be expected to recognize a nation that will not itself recognize its own borders? What is Israel, and where does it end and its neighbors' lands begin? Also, on what grounds should Israel be recognized, when it is daily involved in violating all sorts of international laws, daily involved in theft and murder, daily involved with the subjugation of the Palestinian people, and refuses to give back land it took by force of arms from Lebanon and Syria?

Resistance to Nazi tyranny within Germany or in occupied countries was dealt with through incredible brutality. Entire families of dissidents would routinely be sent to concentration camps and often killed. If an occupation soldier was killed, collective punishment was the modus operandi of the Nazi regime. Oftentimes a hundred people in a village would be killed in retribution for the murder of one German soldier.

Similarly, whereas the families of partisans would be sent to the camps, the houses of the families of resistance fighters from the West Bank and Gaza are routinely destroyed. An attack on Israeli territory is routinely responded to (even when the attack itself was generally a response) with massively disproportionate collective punishment, including attacks by helicopter gunships on densely-populated areas where multiple families are killed in order to take out one Hamas or other political leader. Border closures resulting in loss of employment for hundreds of thousands are another routine Israeli response to any resistance to their occupation. Thousands of children and adults are routinely arrested and held indefinitely in Israeli prisons without ever being charged (in courts that are themselves illegitimate anyway). As in Nazi-occupied Europe, no Palestinian man or boy can ever be confident that he will not be dragged out of bed on any given night, taken from his home and arrested.

We are told by the Israeli government not to pay attention to the numbers, that proportionality doesn't matter. There often seems to be a clear effort on the part of the IDF and its political leaders to kill a hundred Palestinians for every Israeli killed, as was the case in the most recent Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. If proportionality is irrelevant and morality has no numerical measure, then presumably it would be morally justifiable from the Israeli government perspective if a hundred Israelis were killed for every Palestinian the IDF shoots, but if such a thing were to happen we could be sure to hear from the Israelis all about Palestinian monstrousness, no doubt. This, however, is extremely unlikely ever to happen, since there is no Palestinian military, no Palestinian tanks, no Palestinian Air Force, etc. It's jet fighters versus home-made bombs and ineffective “rocklets” that rarely hit any target.

The Nazis became famous for, among other things, developing methods of torture that make the Spanish Inquisition look humane. Israel has also excelled at developing new ways to cause horrible physical and emotional suffering to human beings. During the most recent Israeli “war” against Lebanon, among the many buildings demolished from the air was the old Khiam Prison in southern Lebanon. When I visited Lebanon in 2005 I toured the Khiam Prison, which was in an area abandoned by the Israelis in 2000 after years of fighting between the IDF, their Lebanese collaborators, and Hezbollah. In Khiam Prison one could see where the US military got its ideas for torturing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib. There were specially-designed boxes just big enough for a man to kneel, far too small to stand up or lie down, in which men would be held for weeks at a time and subjected day and night to loud music, regularly taken out of their boxes to be beaten.

We are told by the Israelis that the massive civilian death toll among Palestinians is unavoidable, since Palestinian “terrorists” hide among the civilian population when they carry out their attacks on occupation soldiers. We are also told that the Palestinians are targeting civilians in the (now almost nonexistent) suicide attacks inside Israel. It's an interesting form of two-faced logic, since the main form of transportation used by Israeli soldiers are public buses. This is abundantly obvious to anyone who takes a public bus in Israel. In this highly militarized society where most men and women over the age of eighteen are either active-duty soldiers or reservists, you can hardly find a public bus that is not transporting at least one uniformed soldier with a machine gun hanging off of his shoulder.

It's also an interesting form of dual logic, since the ghetto fighters of Warsaw so justifiably revered by Israeli society were fighting entirely from civilian areas, since they were themselves civilians, fighting from and for their homes, armed with home-made or occasionally smuggled weapons, just like the Palestinian fighters today.

The Nazis found collaborators within the Jews of Warsaw, who became their Jewish Police, or Judenrat. Prior to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, it was the Judenrat who arrested or rounded up Jews wanted by the Nazis, and brought them to the border of the ghetto, to be safely (for the Nazis) handed over, and generally sent to their deaths. Taking a page from this history, the Oslo “peace process” involved a dividing up of Palestinian territory into areas A, B and C. Area A is the downtown, or the area within the ghetto walls that now surround so many of the bombed-out shells that were once thriving Palestinian towns and cities. Area A is the part that Israelis have generously allowed to be policed by Fatah, which has increasingly become, in the eyes of many Palestinians, Israeli collaborators. Israel regularly invades Area A parts of the West Bank whenever it wants to, but otherwise it tries to get the Fatah police to do their policing for them.

Hamas, which refuses to go along with the program, is then painted as a terrorist group that simply must be wiped out, because they doggedly refuse to be collaborators. Like the Jewish Fighting Organization (the ZOB was their Polish acronym) in Warsaw, Hamas does not deal gently with collaborators or with the Israeli occupation forces. Facing impossible, overwhelming odds and essentially certain death, Hamas does what they can to mount some kind of a resistance to the Israeli Terror. ZOB fighters referred to themselves as the “walking dead.” Like the ZOB and other valiant resistance groups throughout the history of every continent, Hamas also embraces martyrdom. Embracing martyrdom is often painted by Israelis and others as some kind of peculiar trait of “Islamic fundamentalists,” which is ridiculous and completely ahistorical, as well as an insult to the memory of the very ghetto fighters in Warsaw who helped inspire the Zionist state in the first place.

Hitler loved to portray his “Aryan” soldiers as icons of morality and good behavior, which of course was nonsense. Like the IDF, the German soldiers fought very well and bravely, especially from the inside of a tank. And like the IDF, who are also widely viewed within Israel as the world's most moral army, the German soldiers consistently engaged in acts of sadism against civilians throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. And like the IDF, they were almost never punished for such acts.

Reminders of the sadism that permeates the Israeli military are never far away, and are often described most eloquently by former occupation soldiers who turned against their commanders in the Knesset. (Thankfully, there are many such soldiers. Unfortunately, there aren't nearly enough of them to make a difference.) The tendency of IDF soldiers to shoot children in the head with live ammunition is well-known and well-documented.

I vividly recall the outrage of many of my Jewish Israeli fans when Ariel Sharon “visited” the Al-Aqsa Mosque, along with hundreds of soldiers, prompting some stone-throwing from local Palestinian youths, to which the soldiers responded with live ammunition, killing many, leading to the Al-Aqsa Intifada and thousands more deaths, overwhelmingly of Palestinian children.

My fans weren't outraged at Sharon, however, they were outraged at me for writing my first of a series of songs about the Israeli occupation, “Children of Jerusalem.” What many people took particular offense to was the line about the general (Sharon) grinning. They told me this couldn't be accurate, because IDF soldiers carried out their duties with a grim sense of necessity, never enjoying the killing of the kids who were always shot because they were in the way of the ubiquitous “Palestinian gunmen” who were always firing first, at the poor defenseless tanks which for some reason were in the middle of their cities. For my outrageous accusations they called me a fascist and all sorts of other things.

But unfortunately they're wrong. The soldiers often are grinning. Like the smirking soldier who was standing in the ambulance that was trying to transport Tristan Anderson to the hospital just a few days ago, refusing to move to allow the medics to close the door. Tristan was only one of a multitude of victims of the Israeli Terror, and this sadistic soldier was only one of many other sadistic Israeli soldiers obeying the whims of a government run by sadistic, racist men and women.

Israel bears many of the hallmarks of a fascist regime. What's more, it is, like Nazi Germany, a very popular regime among its people. Like Nazi Germany, it is justly reviled by people around the world, but actively supported by so many of its people. Like Nazi Germany, governments and corporations around the world prefer to profit from trading with it rather than standing up to it and isolating it. Like Nazi Germany, it is dependent on the outside world for food, fuel and other basic necessities of life.

Unlike Nazi Germany, Israel possesses hundreds of nuclear weapons. Unlike Nazi Germany, Israel is not going to be defeated militarily. But it can be defeated if the people of the world – especially in the US -- pressure their governments to recognize Israel for the aggressive, racist state that it fundamentally is and has been since 1948, cut off the aid and impose trade sanctions of the sort that were imposed on South Africa under apartheid. The beginning of the process of isolating this small country from the world community that allows it to prosper is to educate people about the true nature of Zionism.

The Middle East has been and must be shared by Muslims, Christians and Jews as it was since long before the Zionist armies expelled 700,000 Palestinians from their lands in 1948. Nothing, including the Nazi Holocaust, justifies what has been done and, most importantly, continues to be done to the Palestinians. The time is long since past to call the Jewish state out for the fundamentally racist regime that it is. In the name of the ghetto fighters of Warsaw, let us strive to see a world where no one needs to die with a stone in their hand trying to defend a starved, walled ghetto against an army of tanks and planes, where people like Tristan don't need to have their brains blown out for trying to prevent a wall from being built around yet another ghetto.

Read more!

Eight Points on Gaza

1. Who won? In an immediate military sense, Israel. What do you expect? The Israeli Defense Forces made 2,500 plus F-16 and 'copter air sorties against a densely populated urban area where the only opposing armed forces possessed no anti-aircraft guns, no surface to air missiles and no planes. It is estimated that repairing the damage suffered by the already desperate inhabitants of this colossal open air prison, the ones who survived, will run over $2 billion. 80% of the agricultural infrastructure of Gaza is reported to have been been destroyed.

Beyond the horrific destruction visited to the Palestinian people, though, the Israelis appear to have picked up a stone only to drop it on their own feet. They will have an uphill slog in the battle for summation, with direct political consequences in increased isolation as sympathy and even material support from people around the world flow to Gaza.

2. Despite careful timing--to take advantage of reduced attention to news during the Christian holiday season and to finish before administration change in the US--Israeli aggression caught world attention. Some analysts have pointed out that Israel dominated the "war of words," banning foreign journalists from Gaza and working to see that discourse was laced with terms like terrorism, Islamic fundamentalists, security and the like. However, it decisively lost "the war of images" as photos and video provided by the Palestinian news agency Ramattan appeared on al-Jazeera and other news outlets, even CNN. This showed the people of the world the carnage, and the agony of those still living, and it documented IDF attacks on homes, schools, hospitals, mosques and UN facilities.

3. At the level of international government, Israel pretty much got a free ride at first, due in part to splits among Palestinians and between Arab states, and in part to US intransigence in blocking meaningful action in the UN Security Council. But while governments started out largely sitting on their hands, an unprecedented outpouring of mass anger and protest in country after country forced institutions like the news media and the international Red Cross and then governments to speak up in criticism of Israel. (Still, only Venezuela and Bolivia broke ties with Israel over the attack).

Three choice examples of the popular struggle, from Europe alone:
Norway, where over 85 pro-Palestinian protests and broader peace marches took place in 59 towns (in a country of 4.5 million!), saw the most intense rioting in recent memory in central Oslo as police tried to repress militant young protestors. (See the nifty interactive map--in English--from Frontlinjer magazine here.)

In the United Kingdom, even after the truce/ceasefire, students at sixteen (16, count 'em, 16) universities seized campus buildings around a series of anti-Israel and pro-Palestine demands. Most are still on. Students at the London School of Economics and Oxford report victories in negotiations with administrators.

In Greece, a January 9 news story from Reuters sent Greek activists and bloggers into research mode. They were able to identify a contracted shipment of GBU-39 bunker buster bombs scheduled to go from Sunny Point, NC through the port of Astakos en route to Israel. They started organizing for an embargo of US and Israeli shipping including outreach to dockworkers. By the 16th, one week later, the contract was cancelled!

4. In the United States, the astonishing power of the Israel lobby once again gave it unchallenged sway in the media and government. The Senate passed by unanimous voice vote and the House with a total of 5 courageous Nays (Dennis Kucinich, Gwen Moore, Maxine Waters, Nick Rahall and Ron Paul) a resolution hailing the aggression and blaming Hamas for all the Palestinian deaths. Candidate Obama last July signaled his stance, saying, "If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. I would expect Israelis to do the same thing." (No one in the media asked him about whether he had stolen his house at gunpoint and was keeping the former residents and their children in a concentration camp in his back yard.)

Considering the propaganda barrage and the "conventional wisdom" in the very air we breathe here, the fact that Americans generally (according to a Rasmussen poll) "are closely divided over whether the Jewish state should be taking military action against militants in the Gaza Strip" (44-41%, with 15% undecided) and that non-Republicans oppose it solidly is a remarkable development

5. A more advanced pro-justice and anti-imperialist sentiment was reflected in the high tide of demonstrations here in the US. During the fighting there were almost daily protests in NYC, the Bay Area, Boston and other cities. Even more important was the eruption of demonstrations in places that hadn't seen actions on this scale before, or at all--Lexington, KY, Ft. Lauderdale, FL, Charlotte, NC, Fayetteville, AR, Sioux Falls, SD and dozens more. Additionally, progressives made good use of the blogosphere to circulate material exposing the criminal character of Israel's aggression, and explain the background to the crisis in Israel's longstanding violation of international law and humanity.

6. The core of the protests in places like NYC and the Bay Area was young Palestinians, whose rage was tempered by determination and discipline. They turned out day after day and developed powerful organizing and mobilization networks. Importantly, their principle allies were anti-Zionist Jews, full of anguish at the crimes being committed in the name of the Jewish people and at the blind support of Israel by many of their loved ones. I am not talking here about the mediagenic black-hatted Hasidim of the Neturei Karta, but young and middle-aged Americans of Jewish descent, largely pretty secular, who were brought up in the shadow of the Holocaust. Their numbers are now being augmented by a trickle of rabbis and other more religious Jews who find they cannot stomach what they see.

It is also heartening that the anti-war movement, which is at a difficult and critical juncture in the fight to end the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, refocused on Gaza. Especially noteworthy was the role of the big United for Peace and Justice coalition, which has caught flak for downplaying Palestine on occasion. In addition to protest demos and vigils, UFPJ mobilized member groups to call local talk radio shows and write letters to the editor at local papers, a key step in countering the hegemonic position of pro-Israel views in the mass media.

7. There are many problems in building support for the Palestinian cause and ending US backing. The biggest problem, if you ask me, isn't the strong support for Israel by many American Jews and Christian fundamentalists. It's not even the incredibly well-financed and organized Israel lobby. It is the view, held very broadly in this country, that: "All those people are crazy. They're religious maniacs. They've been killing each other for thousands of years and nothing anybody can do is going to stop them." This thinking will take time and effort to uproot.

On the positive side, there is evidence that the Israel lobby is overplaying its hand. When President Obama chose George Mitchell (main US negotiator in the Northern Ireland peace process) as Mideast envoy, Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League expressed concern: "“Sen. Mitchell is fair. He’s been meticulously even-handed, But the fact is, American policy in the Middle East hasn’t been ‘even handed, it has been supportive of Israel when it felt Israel needed critical U.S. support.” Taking a stand against fairness probably isn't the best way to argue your case in the public eye, especially when you are increasingly perceived as an amoral bully.

8. The increased exposure of Israel's crimes, the spread of protest in the US and internationally, and the high level of anger we are seeing may make a big leap in the Palestine solidarity movement possible. It has in recent years been made up of a determined and single-minded crew spread among many small and locally-based organizations, best able to respond and mobilize sympathizers when a real crisis like the attack on Gaza erupts. Now, I think there is a possibility of a leap to the level achieved by, say, the anti-apartheid movement in the '80s, a solidarity movement capable of sustained high-visibility campaigns which can show the reality behind Israel's expensive PR efforts and deal material blows to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

The Palestinian movement in this country has emphasized the importance of building such a campaign around BDS--boycotts, divestment and sanctions. As with South Africa, the threat of political isolation and economic hardship can put fear in the hearts of even the most brutal oppressors. In working to swing public sentiment to our side, our biggest target is also our one of our strongest arguments--the $4 billion dollars annually the US pumps to Israel in aid, loan guarantees, "joint projects," etc., including financing 20% of Israel's entire military budget. Why should Israel, a relatively prosperous state, get over 20% of the entire US foreign aid budget when it uses the money to maintain the occupation, steal more Palestinian land, and wage war on those it oppresses?

Read more!

Beth Meets Righteous Rabbis

[FotM's friend Beth has returned from from Palestine and Israel, where she had not been since the 1967 War. This post continues her account of conditions there, following earlier reports here, here, here and here.]


Before I left New York, I made plans to see two feminist and left activists, friends of friends: one an Israeli Palestinian woman in Nazareth, the other an Israeli Jew in Haifa. Unfortunately, only the woman in Haifa was available when I could make it, so I took the bus from Jerusalem to Haifa, with a young soldier as my seatmate. Perhaps I should have tried, but this was the only time I could not bring myself to start talking with the person I was with for two hours.

I talked with Dahlia, along with her partner Chana, extensively over a wonderful meal in an Arab restaurant in an upscale area of Haifa that featured a dozen similar places to eat. They are active in the Coalition of Women for Peace and they participate in the Women in Black vigil in Haifa. Two of the long-term projects of the Coalition are:

Re-framing Security: In Israel, the concept of "security" is a powerful one. It is used to justify all military activity and the occupation of Palestinian territories. "National Security" is a phrase invoked not just to increase military budgets, but also to silence criticism and prevent transparency. The "Re-framing Security" Project explores this term from the broadest feminist-civil perspective, thus challenging the narrow militaristic understanding of security. Security in its civil forms includes aspects such as economic security (having a job, a roof over one's head, access to health care), security in the family and the community (safety from gender-related violence, protection from crime, having one's children safe in schools), environmental security (clean tap water, clean air), etc. The project generates critical discourse through lecture series, workshops and tours for groups of formal and informal educators, young leaders, social activists and other agents for change.


The occupation industry research project: “Who profits from the occupation?” In addition to various political, religious and national interests, the occupation is also fueled by corporate interests. Civilian companies and transnational corporations are increasingly involved in real estate deals, the development of settlements, the construction of fences and walls on Palestinian land, the paving of a separate road system for settlers, and the sale of equipment used for human rights violations and the repression of the civilian population. This project began in 2006 and involves systematic research about Israeli and international companies which directly profit from investments in the occupied Palestinian Territories and the Golan Heights. After rigorous research, the results are posted on the whoprofits.org website, which provides the public in Israel and internationally with accurate information about business interests invested in maintaining the occupation.

Our discussion ranged over many topics, from Barack Obama to the one-state vs. two-state solution to feminism within the left. Following is an excerpt of our discussion. Despite, or perhaps due to, the tone that comes across, they remain and will continue to be committed activists.

Beth: Haifa is a city with many Palestinians in its population. At the same time, in the Jerusalem municipality, there appear to be serious attempts to reduce the number and percentage of Palestinians. What is your take on these plans?
Dahlia and Chana: In 1948, they did it and that’s it. It was a period where the world didn’t react. Like Benny Morris (Righteous Victims, 1999 and The Birth of the Palestinian, 2004) said, they missed the opportunity and didn’t do ethnic cleansing altogether in ’48. But what do they say? Do it now. Let’s do whatever we can.

But they cannot do it.

(Then ensued disagreement over what the Western powers would ultimately allow)

C: Why? Europe supports Israel. United States supports Israel.

D: They cannot do it because the US is supporting Israel, because Europe is supporting Israel.

C: Everything that has been done since ’48, who supported these things? Germany, Europe, the United States. Without the support of those countries, Israel could not have become a state in ’48.

D: But not now. Not any more. This is also why she cannot wipe out all the Palestinians that are here.

C: Okay. But she can oppress them, change the landscape, erase every memory of what happened here. And look at what happened in the last forty years. With the support of the US and Europe and Germany.

D: In Jaffa, there is a museum. Jaffa is a Palestinian city. So they have a city museum there and in the museum they have the story of all the history of Jaffa, the Ottoman, the Crusades, the Romans, everybody, so on – no Palestinians, no Palestinians whatsoever are mentioned in the history of Jaffa. Jaffa was an Arab city. I saw this book about the history of Jaffa, From A Major City to a Poverty-Stricken Neighborhood, this is the name of the book about the history of Jaffa. Whole neighborhoods were wiped out. The whole piece of land between Tel Aviv and Jaffa is now hotels and so on. There were hundreds and hundreds of houses. Jaffa itself, all the old city of Jaffa, there are no Palestinians, only Jews.

C and D: There are 5 million Jews in Israel. There are 5 million Palestinians in greater Palestine. They will not get rid of these 5 million people. Their intention is one big Israel. They will kill many, as many as they can. They will break their spirit. Anyone who can go will leave. The poorest will stay, those with no power of resistance, no ability to fight, depressed.

B: And if you ask them, if I could sit down with a bunch of the religious, what would come out of their mouths about the Palestinians?

C and D: You don’t have to be religious to be racist. The whole public. You can sit with a group of left-wing people, labor, Meretz and it’s amazing the racism you will hear and you think okay, if a racist is a racist, then okay, but if a leftwing person is a racist, then where is hope? If you have a place based on support of one people, from one ethnic group, one religion, it has to be racist. In 2000, at the university, it was the first time we heard people say aloud racist things against Arabs. And now it’s PC to be racist.


Back in Jerusalem, my friend R got a text message from Rabbis for Human Rights asking for help the next day to paint the home of a Palestinian family that had been firebombed two weeks previously by settlers. She was busy at the office but I decided to go, meeting up with Rabbi G at 7 the next morning.

The house was on the outskirts of the village of Burin, just south of the checkpoint into Nablus. Two weeks previously, the family had been away for a few nights. Settlers from one of the two nearby settlements, either Yitzhar or Bracha, smashed the bedroom window, lit an oil soaked rag and threw it into the room. The baby’s crib was incinerated. Smoke filled the house, and once the fire was put out by people from the village, soot covered the walls.

This was not the first problem with these settlers. Two months ago, they set fire to the olive trees along an entire hillside, damaging years of growth. The hill was in flames. Another human rights group, B’tselem, has been giving cameras to Palestinian villagers. If photos document abuses like burning a hillside of olive trees, there is a chance that perpetrators could be prosecuted. The following is from the B’Tselem website:

In January 2007, B'Tselem launched "Shooting Back," a video advocacy project focusing on the Occupied Territories. We provide Palestinians living in high-conflict areas with video cameras, with the goal of bringing the reality of their lives under occupation to the attention of the Israeli and international public, exposing and seeking redress for violations of human rights. "Shooting Back" works with families who live in close proximity to settlements, to military bases, or at the sites of frequent army incursions. Settlers daily harassing a family in Hebron or attacking farmers in the South Hebron Hills, soldiers invading Qalqilya, …these are just some examples of the material filmed by over 100 cameras that we have distributed to families throughout the Occupied Territories. B'Tselem has succeeded in airing this material on major Israeli and international news networks, exposing global audiences to the previously unseen.

There were more of us than were necessary to do the painting but that gave us time to interact and take stock of the situation. The family and the young men from the village who helped out and the young boys who hung around expressed their thanks with gestures and a few words of English and a few of Hebrew. They fed us figs and grapes fresh from the trees.

Rabbis for Human Rights formed in 1988 to be the rabbinic voice of conscience in Israel with the purpose of giving voice to the Jewish religious tradition of human rights. Current membership is about 100 – 12 orthodox, the rest a mix of Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist and Renewal. At first, they involved themselves in interfaith work relating to the Muslim community, including condolence visits to families of Palestinians killed by the army. They had no money in the beginning. Now, with contributions from individuals and congregations around the world, they have eight employees. Their education department is the largest part of the budget. It provides for seminars on human rights for Israelis, a hotline number for soldiers who are facing dilemmas regarding what they are being told to do at the checkpoints and in the defense of settlers, and literature given out at employment agencies to let immigrant workers, as well as Israelis, know their rights.

In recent years, RHR has become a more activist organization, doing a great deal of work against abuses of human rights in the territories. They get involved with Bedouin rights, women’s rights, building permits, home demolitions, and access to agricultural land, harvesting crops for Palestinians where they are cut off by the wall/fence from their land.

As an American Jew, raised in the religious traditions, I was encouraged by my talk with Rabbi G, originally from Melbourne, and Rabbi A, a woman from Philadelphia, both of whom decided to make Israel their home in the mid-70’s. The RHR website clarifies their overview:

Alongside efforts to prevent human rights abuses, Rabbis for Human Rights endeavors to introduce an authentic and humanistic understanding of Jewish tradition and sources into Israel’s public discourse. While the increasingly dominant nationalistic and particularistic understanding of Judaism echoes loudly, Rabbis for Human Rights gives voice to the tradition’s concern for the stranger and others vulnerable within society.

They have not abandoned the principles that drew them to become rabbis. I grew up learning, in addition to all the rules of behavior, that I was to look out for those less fortunate, that giving charity was a crucial part of life and that what I did not want my neighbors to do to me, I should not do to them. These rabbis look at the scriptures from that perspective.

Would that such a perspective could take hold throughout the Jewish community, especially in its two major centers, Israel and the United States. Insh'Allah.

Read more!

Beth Reports, Part 4: Ramallah

[This is the fourth in series of first-hand reports from Palestine and Israel, written by FotM's friend Beth. The first three are here, here and here.]

We walk to the East Jerusalem bus terminal and get the local Arab minibus to Ramallah, making sure to carry our non-Israeli passports to show at the checkpoint. (Israelis, by law, are not allowed in Ramallah.) After an uneventful 40 minute drive, we come to the outskirts of this city of about 50,000 people where, one after another, new apartment buildings are under construction. It appears to be a booming metropolis, with hundreds of new apartments soon to be available, all of white or pinkish white stone, pleasing to the eye.

Yet unemployment is high and getting higher as people move there from villages where the apartheid wall separates them from their land and they can no longer make an adequate living. Palestinians from the educated middle class from the smaller cities and towns are also moving there because it is easier to move around, do research, meet with colleagues, to simply enjoy life. According to the World Fact Book put out by the CIA, West Bank unemployment in 2006 was 18.6%. I’m certain it’s higher now.

We met up with Z, a 23 year-old Jewish-American graduate student in Middle East Studies who is living there while studying Arabic at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah. The previous day he had gone to Bilin, where Palestinians have combined civil disobedience with legal petitions to fight Israeli policies. An Israeli court decision said that the wall should be moved back, which would allow farmers access to their land, but this has not been done.

Every Friday, for more than three years, there have been non-violent protests against the wall. That Friday, the Israeli military dispersed the protesters with toilet water, that is, water from the toilet. I’ve heard the same story from three people, though one said it was chicken, not human, feces in the spray of water.

At a café on the top floor of a huge shopping center overlooking the main square where we go for a glass of juice, we are the only women. As tourists, we are welcomed. Luckily, I take pictures of the central square before being told not to. Watching from above, I was struck that there were no traffic lights or stop signs despite streets converging on the center of town filled with cars and trucks. Somehow, the traffic managed to flow as local people went about their routine. The souk, much more tightly packed with people and stalls than the one in Jerusalem, had an abundance of produce and clothing. Women shopped, almost all of them with their hair covered, many in brightly colored hijabs, children trailing behind.

The center of political activism in Ramallah is at the university, where young men and women participate in many different political groups, demonstrations and other activities. As recently as ten years ago, Z has been told, almost none of the women at the university wore the hijab; now at least half do. Z tells us that there is also a thriving night life which he is a part of, with young men and women coming together for various cultural activities – art, music, dance and poetry.

The Israeli army can come into town whenever they want. The police from the Palestinian Authority do not have much authority but they are in the street carrying rifles. There was recently a demonstration in the City Center which was dispersed by Palestinian Authority police in riot gear.

As it has been every day, it is 90 degrees or more. As we walk around downtown Ramallah, we try to stay on the shadier side of the street. We look for actual shade, maybe a park, but there is none to be found. We see trees up a hill but when we get there realize that they are behind the walls of a police station.

Everywhere, young boys approached the three of us, especially Z, to buy chewing gum, “one shekel, one shekel.” The currency in Ramallah, and throughout the territories. is the Israeli shekel. Many of the items we see for sale on the street--hardware, toys, clothing--are brought from Israel to be sold there. As we pull away from four 8 to 10 year old boys who surround us, and keep walking, I see a large Palestinian flag and a skeleton key (symbol of the Palestinian people’s desire to return to the homes they fled or were forced out of in 1948), painted on a wall, but in general, I am surprised to find little graffiti and only a few Palestinian flags atop buildings.

For us, leaving Ramallah is no big deal, but for the Palestinians on our minivan, it is a different story. My friend R writes:

Minivan from Ramallah back to Jerusalem--entering the van I hardly notice anyone--the seats are deep and I go sit by the window, hiding; Beth, next to me, snaps pictures. At the Kalandia checkpoint the van stops, young guys and older men go off and young women too--all with hijabs--I look around me and see an elderly man, a woman with a baby, and to my surprise, since I hadn't noticed before, some Western-looking people sitting in the back, and behind me, two young women who could be Palestinians but clearly have foreign passports--segregation in action--from passengers in a van we were 'profiled', categorized, privileged and co-opted. Next time we ought to step out and walk through the prison-like "terminal'"/checkpoint.

The next day, we go to the Dead Sea to relax. Before 1967, and when I was there right after the war, this trip would have taken three to four hours, traveling west from Jerusalem, then south to Beersheva, then around the southern land of the (prior to June, 1967) Jordanian-controlled West Bank, back east and north up the edge of the Dead Sea.

But Israel has built a highway, Route 1, straight across the West Bank, from Jerusalem to just south of Jericho; from there another highway travels south along the Dead Sea. An hour after we leave Jerusalem’s central bus station, we are at the public beach at Ein Gedi. It’s the polar opposite of travel for Palestinians living in the West Bank, which in the same period has devolved from simple and direct hour-long trips into convoluted day-long projects.

The Dead Sea is 1,378 ft below sea level; its shores are the lowest point on the surface of the Earth on dry land and it is the deepest hypersaline lake in the world. Because of the lake’s buoyancy, you lie back in the water and float for as long as you want, which for me was more than an hour. Or you just stand there in the water, perhaps talking with people around you. I got to talking with a young man from Burma. He called it Myanmar. His government sent him and eleven other young men to study agriculture and veterinary science at the university in Netanya. Despite the recent cyclone and political upheaval he said that everything is going well in his country.

I met another woman, from Mauritius, a nanny for the children of a well-to-do Parisian Jewish family on vacation (thousands of French Jews own vacation homes in Israel). The nanny knew about the occupation, and when I talked about home demolitions and checkpoints, she wanted to know more. She said that the family she works for, like those Burmese kids, preferred not to pay attention to what was really going on. Turns out keeping one’s head in the stand is not exclusively an American trait--or, to put it another way, where you stand depends on where you sit.

Taking a break from relaxing in the hot water under the hot sun, I came out of the water and found R sitting at a bench in the shade with two Israeli men from Tel Aviv, traders in spices from Iran and Turkey. They offered us home-made falafel and a type of delicious peanut I had never seen before. I asked how many people there are in Israel. One of them said: about 5 million. With the Arabs? I asked. No, just Jews, he said. To him, the Palestinians, even those living within the borders of the state of Israel, were not worth counting.
In reality, according to the CIA Fact Book , there are 7,112,359 people in Israel. This count includes about 187,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank, about 20,000 in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and 177,000 in East Jerusalem (7/08 est). Of these, 76.4% are Jewish and 23.6% are non-Jewish (16% Muslim, 1.7% Arab Christian, l.4% other Christian, 1.6% Druze and 3.9% unspecified).

This Israeli blind spot to the existence of The Other in their midst is perhaps the major obstacle to the achievement of peace with justice in the area.


[The fifth and last of Beth's reports can be read here.]

Read more!

Beth & Tel-Aviv's Women In Black

[This is the third in a series of articles by Beth, an activist and friend of Fire on the Mountain, on her first visit to Israel in 41 years. The first two reports are here and here.]

The next morning, I went to walk around in the Old City. The streets are narrow; shops line either side. Tourists and local people are everywhere. I can't imagine finding my own way around. A guide approached me, asking, in English, if I wanted a tour, including a visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the plaza of the Dome of the Rock, open for tourists for an hour that afternoon. The Dome of the Rock plaza is magnificent. I was not moved in a religious or spiritual way but by the splendor of the structure. Walking all around the plaza for the full time allotted, taking pictures from many angles, I just soaked in the beauty and historical significance of the place.

Yusef, my guide, was born and still lives in Silwan, a neighborhood of about 5,000 Palestinians, legal residents of Israel since 1967 as they are in the part of Jerusalem that is now occupied, or annexed, depending on who you ask. He was surprised by my concerns and more openly expressed his own as we walked. He said that thirty Jewish families have moved into Silwan. "We get along o.k., they are not the problem, the problem is the Palestinians who sold their homes to the Jews and moved away. Sadly, there will be more."

He was apparently not aware that in another part of his town, I learned later, a Palestinian home was recently exploded. The streets are so narrow that they could not fit a bulldozer so, because the Jerusalem master plan had that spot designated as "green" where a park would be built, a family's home was destroyed. He tells me he feels much more comfortable in the Jewish Quarter than in the Arab Quarter because, there, he can be who he is, a forty-year old unmarried Arab, formerly a teacher who now makes his living showing the tourists around, an alcoholic two years in recovery, who thinks politics is "a zero."

He likes all people, he says, but it becomes clear that he does not like what he calls the nudniks, Arab and Jew, who mess in each other's business and want to tell other people how to live their lives. As he showed me the religious sites and showed me the many beautiful crafts available in the Arab Quarter, he taught me a few words of Arabic. Now I know the words for: my name is, grandparent, water, butcher, vegetarian, respect and congratulations. I bought Palestinian pastry and beautiful glasses from the factory in Hebron.

I needed a break. We went to Tel Aviv to hang out with another friend who had lived in NY for a while. I wanted to see the beach. But first, I found my way to the office of the Hotline for Migrant Workers. Thousands of people have come to Israel from Eritrea and the Sudan, from the Philippines, Romania, Nepal and many other countries since Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza are no longer allowed to work in Israel. The Africans are usually fleeing war in their countries; others come to find work to feed their families back home. Others are under a form of indentured servitude: they are allowed to work for five years for the specific employer who brought them to Israel. If that employer treats them unfairly or even abusively, they have no legal recourse. If they leave the job, they can be arrested and deported. This organization works with all of them, as refugees, and then as workers.

Two attorneys are employed by the group, trying to get the government to change rules and to enforce existing legislation. In one recent case, a Filipina was taking care of an elderly Israeli Jewish woman until she died. The woman had not paid everything that was owed and when she died, 13,000 Israeli shekels (about $3,500) was owed to the home care worker but the son refused to pay, saying he didn't have the money. The lawyers are still working on the case.

There is sex trafficking in Israel, women with no legal status are confined in houses by their pimps servicing 30-40 clients a day. These women, mostly from Eastern Europe, are also clients of the Hotline, seeking help to get out of their desperate situations.

I met with N, a volunteer for the organization for nine years. She is an upscale secular woman, with fashionable clothes, jewelry and make-up. She used to employ a woman from Ghana to clean her house. She paid her well and "even" paid into the Israeli social security and health care funds on her behalf. One day, the woman called frantically from jail. She was picked up by the immigration police and someone had given her a card with the Hotline number. N called, got help to get her Ghanaian domestic worker out of jail and then went to find out more about the group.

She says, "How could I just keep living my life knowing there is such important work being done?" She has been involved ever since. She visits immigrant workers in jail when they are picked up for being in the country illegally. She lets them know what there rights are and finds donations of clothing and toys for when they are let out of jail after 6 or 8 or 10 months.

N explains that the country as a whole does nothing for the 150,000 migrant workers. While Israel initially took in many thousands of refugees after the Second World War, there has been no policies or programs put in place to deal with these refugees from the Sudan and Eritrea. The Tel Aviv-Yafo municipality does assume some responsibility for the estimated 35,000 foreign workers in the area. It is the first city in Israel that does not completely ignore the problems of its foreign residents, providing a center with staff to assist with employment problems, treat children at risk, and raise awareness among policymakers on a national level of the needs of these residents of Israel.

I reconnected with my friends and we went to the beach. We sat, drinking, looking out at the magnificent sunset, relaxing. And the next morning, Friday, we did it again, swimming and resting.

Friday and Saturday are the weekend here so Women In Black, which started in Israel in 1988, holds its vigils on Fridays, usually 1-2. I found my way to the Tel Aviv vigil in a busy shopping area. It looked similar to the one in Union Square where I stand every Thursday – a dozen women and a few men, dressed in black. But the signs, of course, were all in Hebrew. I stood with the group and watched passers-by. One young woman kneeled down to read 3 or 4 paragraphs on a poster headlined "Is this what we want for our country?"

I wondered what was going through her head. Most people, like in New York, ignored us. The women that day were in their 40's and 40's but I was told that two young women have recently gotten involved, having just refused military service. One woman, an academic, is writing a book about Women In Black vigils around the world. We will stay in touch so that she can ask questions about our group in New York.

While the people on the street in Jerusalem are overwhelmingly many varieties of religious, in Tel Aviv, in 24 hours, I only saw a dozen men with skull caps, (cipot), and one or two with earlocks, (payes). And yet, amid the din of throngs of shoppers, the vast majority of them secular Jews, across the street from the vigil, there were two ultra-Orthodox young men, missionaries to the non-religious, getting teenage boys to put on the prayer straps, (t'fillin), and say a few prayers.

One of the Women In Black, a native of Cleveland, offered to drive me back to my friend's apartment. She moved here from the States in 1958, part of the Habonim Zionist youth movement. She says that she has always been a fighter for human rights. When I ask if she is still a Zionist, she says "I'm not an anti-Zionist, I don't like how it's interpreted today. My interpretation is to strengthen Israel as a democratic state I can be proud of where human rights are maintained, where it is not controlling other human beings. A lot of mistakes were made in the name of Zionism. I'd like to see these mistakes rectified. At this point I am ashamed of my government, of my country as a whole. I want to live in a place I am not ashamed of."

As an American activist, I express that I, too, am ashamed of what my country has been doing. She says that the majority of Jews in Israel are so scared and this is fed by the religious community. And many people are angry that the ultra-Orthodox have too much power. When I ask if she feels hopeful, she says, "Sometimes, yes, but most of the time, no. What we do as women, the small things, the day-to-day meetings with Palestinian women, lays the groundwork for coexistence at the personal level but we really cannot influence policy."

Back to Jerusalem on Friday night, R explained that our best bet for the next day, Shabbat, would be to go to one of the Palestinian cities so we made plans to visit Ramallah.

[Beth's next report, Part 4, is here.]

Read more!

Beth Checks In: I'm Back In Jerusalem

[It is far too easy for progressives and lefties in the US to let the occupation of Palestine fall off the radar, and awfully hard to keep organizing and protesting our own government's complicity in that crime, in the face of omnipresent pro-Israel propaganda and the depressing "facts on the ground." FotM has been guilty of this neglect, too.

Now Fire on the Mountain is proud to publish the first of what we hope will be several reports from the skirmish lines there, hot from the keyboard of a friend who has not faltered in the fight for justice. Beth is an East Coast trade unionist and antiwar activist, who has returned for a two week visit after last being in Israel in 1967, in the immediate aftermath of the Seven Days War.]

I came to Israel to spend time with a good friend, R, and to see with my own eyes what I can about the situation here. I arrived at Ben Gurion airport a few minutes early and got through customs easily. I think it helped that I said "yerushahlayim" instead of "Jerusalem" when the woman who checked my passport, the fifth time it was checked that day, asked where I was staying. Going to get my bag, there was a line of men holding signs to identify themselves to the people they were there to pick up; the first sign I saw was "AIPAC". Welcome to Israel.

R is an Israeli woman I met in New York. She has lived in NY for many years, came back to Israel in February and is now working with the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). The first nights, we went to dinner at her friend's home in a nearby neighborhood, previously home to many poor Mizrachi Jews (those from the Arab countries) and now being gentrified.

Her friend Y has been an activist in the feminist and the women's peace movement in Jerusalem for many years. She no longer wants to act out of anger and despair. She has seen so much conflict and burnout among colleagues here who are committed to a just peace. Now she has decided to work on developing forms for promoting and protecting the well-being of activists.

Also visiting was a dance therapist from France who is here for a few weeks doing workshops with groups of Palestinians and Jews. This is one small piece of the work Y wants to do with activists. Emphasizing the rhythm of the breath and the beating of hearts, the same for Israeli Jews and for Palestinians, using percussion instruments and dance forms, the hope is that people can go beyond their differences to the core rhythms and find community. So far, the workshops have been for Israeli Jews one day and for Palestinians the next, with only a small amount of integration.

A, Y's partner, is a human rights lawyer who defends individual Palestinians in criminal and security cases. I find myself wanting to write "so-called" in front of so many words. Throwing stones at a tank, for instance, is a "so-called" breach of Israeli security. It used to be that 90% of Palestinians who were arrested in such cases were tortured. Not Abu Ghraib torture, but torture none the less-- being made to sit on a slanted stool with your hands shackled behind you, hooded, with music blaring, for hours. That has alleviated somewhat, since the early '90's, he says, in the less serious cases.

When the suicide bombings began, Israel would destroy the house, the home, where that Palestinian had lived. His parents, and/or wife, siblings, children became homeless. There are still many, many Palestinian homes being demolished (more on that in my next post), but, with appeals to the High Court, since 2005, none for security reasons.

Thousands of Palestinians were kicked out of Kuwait when Iraq invaded in 1990; they fled and swamped towns and villages in the West Bank. Many of them had West Bank identification papers but those papers only allowed them to remain for a few months as they had been gone for years and had lost their residency rights.

A took cases of groups of twenty at a time to court to get their visas extended so they and their families could stay in the West Bank. Close to 1,000 cases were brought to the court. Eventually, an agreement was made, out of court so it was not a binding legal decision, and they were allowed to remain in the West Bank. (In fact, there was no where else they could go).

The first morning I woke up in Jerusalem, I decided to do the standard tourist tour at the City Hall. Arriving a few minutes late at Safra Square, just across from the walls of the Old City, I joined a large group of about 30 Israelis from other cities. The guide, speaking in Hebrew, was explaining the history of the area. I listened, and understanding only half of what was being said, searched for the English tour guide. I found her, with a small group, 2 women, 6 girls, all American, all religious. I was in shorts and a t-shirt, like all the Israelis in the other group. These 8 were all in long skirts and long sleeved tops

First in 1890, a wealthy British businessman had a municipal building established in that spot. Then, in 1930, the British Barclay Bank agreed to put up the money for a City Hall if they could use part of the building as a bank. The requirements of providing services to the growing Jerusalem meant that more and more space was required. Eventually, in the late 1980's, the Safra Brothers company from South America, put up the money for the current complex of buildings if the area would be named for them. And so, Safra Square.

The guide talked about the educational system, all four parts of it – the secular national schools, the religious national schools, the ultra-religious schools and the schools for the Arabs. These are all separate systems. I found out later that day that there are 9,000 Palestinian children living in Jerusalem who are not going to school. No new schools are being built.Those who are able to attend school have forty children in a class and they are on double shifts.

We were taken to the City Council chambers and then to see the view from the roof of the building. There are now 750,000 people in what is called the Jerusalem municipality, much of it annexed since the 1967 war. 1/3 of them are Palestinians. There are 31 members of the City Council. The Palestinians have no representation.

"But they get everything," said one of the women in the tour. The guide weakly said that no, the services are not equal. Ambulances often don't go the East side of Jerusalem because there is little signage indicating names of streets so they can't find locations. In fact, I later found out that while 1/3 of the tax money that flows into the Jerusalem tax coffers comes from the Arab population, only 10% of the services go to their neighborhoods.

The tour guide explained that during the last election, the Palestinian Authority told the Arabs not to vote because that would show support for the Zionist state. She said perhaps this time, later in 2008, they would take part in the election and if so, 1/3 of the Council could be Arab. "Which way do you want it?" she said.

For many reasons, this is totally not going to happen. At this point, there are only three members of the Council who are to some extent opposed to the policies of expansion into the Palestinian neighborhoods and the demolition of homes. Most of the other 28 are from the right wing religious parties.

We went to the building's basement to see the City Model for Jerusalem, which now goes, they tell us, from Atarot to Har Homah, Both of those neighborhoods that have been built in the area I would call "occupied" since 1967, and they call "annexed". The model (according to the brochure) depicts "the existing state in the town center and the adjacent neighborhoods and in particular future projects that are being planned in Jerusalem."

It is a huge display of all the buildings, streets, parks that exist and that are planned. She pointed to an area in between French Hill and Maale Adumin, two areas that have been built on land that was part of East Jerusalem until, as the guide said "we came back after 19 years". She showed the plans for that area, saying that the United States is not letting it happen, that Condoleezza Rice has said it is not allowed because of international law.

The Geneva Convention, which Israel has signed on to, has rules against changing the population balance of an occupied land. The annexation of Jerusalem has not been recognized as legal by the world, not even by the United States. The religious woman said, "We’ll see!" When the guide pointed out the Museum of Tolerance--which is being built, I found out later, on the ruins of a Muslim cemetery--I choked at the irony, the chutzpah, of such a project.

I walked back toward my friend's apartment through a large park. There were people out for a walk, with their rifles. I saw two couples, husband and wife with a baby carriages and the men had rifles slung over their soldiers. There's a pervasive sense of tension.

After that, I had to get a reality check. I went to the Alternative Information Center, (AIC), founded in 1984 by Jewish and Palestinian activists who believe that ending the occupation is the immediate goal, but go on to argue that ending the conflict means much more than that and that Palestinians and Israelis have to live together and work together for the society to function in a healthy way.

I met with C, born in the US, living here since the mid-‘70's. She said that it seems to her harder to be an antiwar activist in the States than to be active in the fight here. When she comes back to visit, she sees so many ways to not pay attention to what's going on, while, here, it is in your face all the time. It cannot be ignored so she feels she has less choice but to do what she does.

I argued the contrary, that she was much braver than I doing her work here. She talked about how much money is being made with the expansion of the Jewish areas into what was East Jerusalem and into the West Bank with construction of houses and roads and tunnels. And then, of course, there's the wall, the largest infrastructure project ever undertaken in this country. There is no discussion of this process in the mainstream Israeli media, of whether or not this is the kind of society they want to have. She said, "They don't acknowledge we're in the Middle East".

AIC does not get into the endgame of 1 state or 2 states. Rather, they work based on universal principles of justice, equality and feminism. There is a second office near Bethlehem. AIC works to get a Palestinian voice heard on the issues being discussed – keeping a bridge open between the two societies, showing that it is possible to work together long-term. She stressed that the Palestinians should not have to wait for Israeli society to understand what has been going on before they can speak out for justice for themselves.

AIC compiles and distributes information about Palestinian and Israeli society since both are, for the most part, stereotyped in the media. She talked about how the majority of people in both societies have lost ground since Oslo. One in three Israeli children are living in poverty.

Since Palestinians are no longer allowed to come into Israel for work, much of the manual labor is done by migrants. The agricultural workers are Thai; people from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Eastern Europe are home care workers, Chinese do construction and Africans do cleaning. The situation is, of course, much worse in the West Bank and even worse in Gaza. Israel now has the second largest gap between rich and poor in the developed world--second only to the US.

The group hosts international delegations when they visit and is well-connected with activists around the world in the World Social Forum. They get funding from progressive Christian organizations in Europe and England and from a few governments in Europe. I asked how she, as an individual, functions within her society.

She talked about the importance of being who she really is day-to-day, that Israelis need to be confronted on a personal level. For example, when the bus driver, for no reason, gives the Palestinian who comes onto the bus a hard time, she asks the driver why and stands up for the Palestinian rider as the driver argues and other passengers start defending the driver.

I ask if she feels hopeful. She says that, incredibly, her Palestinian colleagues are more hopeful than she is, so that gives her hope.

{Part 2 in Beth's report can be found here.]

Read more!