Palestinians who live in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, Huckabee said, should settle in "territory that [is] in the hands of Muslims, in the hands of Arabs," as determined by the "international community."
I don't comment on Israel a whole lot, mostly because there are so many people out there who know more about the Middle East than I, particularly Alterdestiny alum Matt Duss.
However, I am struck by the sheer stupidity of Israel's attack on the flotilla attempting to break the Gaza blockade. Just amazing stupidity. Does Israel simply not want peace with its neighbors? Does it not want Turkey, one of the only nations in the region willing to work with it, to continue that parternship? Does the IDF really think that overwhelming military force is the only way to meet any conceivable threat?
There are certainly many unanswered questions about the attack. Did some of the flotilla members indeed have arms? Why did Israel send their version of the Green Berets out to deal with this instead of a less aggressive group? Who started the shooting?
But whatever the answers are, this is Israel's greatest diplomatic disaster since at the beginning of the Second Intifada.
Moreover it's worth mentioning that Israel's policy in Gaza is just evil. In the West Bank it's wrong and stupid. Jimmy Carter is right in calling it apartheid. But by blockading Gaza, they are essentially creating a giant concentration camp for those people. And yes, I used that term intentionally. Because that's essentially what it is. Like the United States with the Japanese in World War II, Israel has identified an entire group of people as a national security threat, locked them up in a tiny piece of land, and isolated them from the world. This cannot continue without some kind of blow up.
Why wouldn't someone from Gaza become a terrorist? I can't think of a single good reason. There is no economy. No hope of a better future. Nothing. Nothing at all except poverty, isolation, depredations from Israel, and hopelessness. We might say that being a terrorist is wrong and that's why they shouldn't do it, but that's real easy for us to say from our computers in the U.S., Europe, or Israel.
Of course, Israel is primarily able to engage in these policies because it knows the U.S. has its back. The decline of the Israeli left has allowed right-wing elements to treat the Palestinians with ever increasingly contempt, knowing that AIPAC will support whatever the Netanyahu government decides or possibly even criticize it from the right.
I don't know what Obama will do here. He doesn't have a lot of great options. There are many reasons why he can't simply condemn Israel. Though a denunciation might be the right thing to do, it would expose him to massive criticism from the very powerful right-wing Israeli lobby. Besides, it doesn't really fit his pragmatist foreign policy doctrine.
But either way, Israel has struck another blow against itself being accepted by its neighbors. If Israelis think an apartheid policy can protect itself against a rapidly growing Muslim population, they have another thing coming. Provoking violence and creating regional strife probably isn't a good idea.
One of the refrains I've heard from some in Latin American and in the U.S. is that Obama is no different than Bush in terms of policies. These claims are clearly laughable at face value, and every value beyond that. Still, some still make those claims, based mostly on a "reasoning" that (and I paraphrase) "Obama hasn't stopped the wars, and Obama's a leader of an empire, just like Bush was." Again, stupid and simplistic arguments, but they exist.
In the face of such baseless and unrealistic accusations, this week offered yet another reminder of just how different the two administrations are:
President Obama sent a letter on Sunday to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil reiterating the American position on Iran’s nuclear program, a day before Iran’s president made his first state visit to Brazil, an aide to Mr. da Silva said Tuesday.The differences between Bush and Obama should be fairly clear here. In Bush's black-and-white, with-me-or-against-me vision of foreign relations, I just don't see how he would have been nearly as nuanced in his letter-writing (if he even bothered to write a letter). Instead, we probably would have gotten some tired mashup of the "axis of evil" rhetoric, with no efforts to use Ahmadinejad's trip to Brazil to try to emphasize the policy we felt should be taken (which, to be fair, called for war against Iran during the Bush years - not exactly a policy to push at any time).Mr. Obama did not explicitly criticize Mr. da Silva for hosting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, implying instead that he hoped Mr. da Silva would use the occasion to express support for the international effort to forge a compromise on Iran’s nuclear ambitions, according to two American officials.
In the three-page letter, Mr. Obama restated his support for a proposal by the International Atomic Energy Agency that would try to steer Iran into developing nuclear energy for peaceful, civilian purposes. The proposed accord calls for Iran to export most of its enriched uranium for additional processing into a form that could be used in a medical reactor in Tehran.
Lula enjoys considerable respect internationally, and the incorrigible talker believes problems can be resolved through dialogue. Before Ahmadinejad arrived, Lula pointedly declared, "It is important that someone sits down with Iran, talks with Iran and tries to establish a balance so we can get back to a kind of normality in the Middle East."Exactly. Treating Iran's trip to Brazil as some isolated incident totally misses the point. Lula isn't meeting with Iran to thumb his nose at the U.S., or to show his support for "terrorism," or any such matter. The Iranian visit is part of a month-long effort to accelerate peace efforts in the Middle East, and Lula is well aware that Iran would be central to any such efforts. And it's not like it was some sycophantic, "best friends forever!" trip:
Of course, Lula has plenty of differences with his guest from Iran. He has made it clear he supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has made a point of repudiating all acts of intolerance or terrorism, and has subtly criticized Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust and of homosexuality in Iran.
Those are messages that Ahmadinejad needs to hear from friends, notes Anoush Ehteshami, a professor at the Centre for Iranian Studies at Durham University in England. Since Iran does not appear to be listening to the West, especially not the United States, on the issue, the emergence of interlocutors who could help bridge the gap between the two sides ought to be welcomed. "Hearing [these messages] from Lula will be a little bit better received than if it were coming from U.S. President or E.U. leaders," Ehteshami says.
Once again, that's exactly right. This latest trip is just another example of Lula's model of diplomacy throughout his career. Diplomacy depends on talking, on dialogue, and not on rejecting other leaders or countries simply because you disagree with them. And any effort towards peace, no matter who is leading it, is a valuable step. Sometimes, other countries may be in a better position for these kinds of talks than the U.S. is, and this is one of those instances. And anybody who insists Brazil is suddenly "palling around" with terrorists or directly contradicting the U.S. intentionally simply has no understanding of how diplomacy and foreign relations do and should work.
I'm still recovering from driving home for the holidays, and am drowning a bit in things I need to get done, but I have a few things up at other places that I wanted to cross-post here in case anyone was interested.
My piece on Gaza, at GlobalComment, which took me far too long and far too much agonizing to write.
I’m an American Jew, and when I state that fact, I invite a wealth of assumptions, not all of them anti-Semitic in nature. Renee Martin recently addressed the conflation of criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, so I don’t have to (though I would like to note that Modern Mitzvot has a very good point too).
Daniele Archibugi pointed out that upcoming elections in Israel and Palestine most likely have something to do with the timing and force of the Israeli attack. But being in the U.S., I have to see it through the lens of the election we just had, here, and one of the Republican party’s favorite anti-Obama attacks.
I picked up DMZ #1 way back in 2005 and reviewed it for Best Shots (wow, I’ve been doing this way too long). Since then, I’ve read and dropped many other monthly comics, but DMZ has stayed on my pull list. I’ve given it as a gift, made my professors read it, and flogged it mercilessly on this very site.
But aside from being an excellent story, it’s a story that at its core is about all the major questions of the Bush era.
DMZ picks all of us up and drops us into the middle of a war zone. But Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli (and some excellent guest artists) transfer that war back home, to a place we all know. New York City is the most familiar landscape in America even to people who haven’t been there, and it was the central point of the crises we’ve dealt with in the last eight years...
DMZ holds us all responsible for the failures of our government under Bush. No one gets a free pass. Each time you think you know who Wood is pointing the finger at, you find it twisting around to point squarely back at you.
Via Ezra Klein , Tony Karon has an excellent, detailed post that gets at a lot of what I've been thinking about the tendency of some liberals to damn Walt and Mearsheimer with faint criticism, and to resist engaging with the actual facts of Israel's occupation and colonization of Palestinian land.
[Mearsheimer and Walt] share with Jimmy Carter that ability to call forth a rather unfortunate habit among sections of America’s liberal punditocracy, in which sharp and fundamental criticisms of Israel must be discredited and squashed, even at the cost of the cool reason for which the pundits in question are usually known. To put it unkindly, when Israel is under the spotlight, many liberal commentators feel compelled to embarrass themselves in its defense.
I noticed this phenomenon last year when Jimmy Carter made the entirely valid comparison between Israel’s West Bank regime and the apartheid system that prevailed in South Africa until 1994. That prompted Michael Kinsley — a well-known and generally smart liberal pundit — to denounce Carter’s comparison in an op-ed that only served to show how little he knew about either the Middle East or apartheid South Africa. Clearly, though, the idea that Israel was committing crimes equivalent to apartheid clearly made Kinsley so uncomfortable that he felt compelled to blurt out something — anything, really, to negate Carter, and make the discomfort he caused go away. (I critiqued his lame response to Carter in an earlier post.)
This phenomenon is reflective of a trend that has been confirmed to me anecdotally dozens of times, both in the U.S. and at home in South Africa, where some Jewish liberals of faultlessly progressive politics on every other issue turn into raving tribal belligerents of the Ariel Sharon hue when the conversation turns to Israel.
In response to Mearsheimer and Walt, New Yorker editor Remnick offers a fresh specimen of the denial pathology.
What is most strking about his piece, however, is that it is more of a kvetch, designed to discredit M&W in the eyes of New Yorker readers, than a serious engagement with their argument.
[...]
While denying that M&W are anti-Semites, Remnick nonetheless questions the bona fides of their intervention. His message to his readers is, don’t worry about what these guys are saying, they’re just grinding an axe. Wink. “Taming the influence of lobbies, if that is what Mearsheimer and Walt desire, is a matter of reforming the lobbying and campaign-finance laws,” but he suggests that, intead, the authors are a product of a polarized political moment, reducing all ills to a single cause — the Israel lobby. But Remnick hasn’t honestly engaged with their arguments aside from clucking over the settlements: Does Remnick agree, for example, that the U.S. should leave Israel no choice but to withdraw its West Bank settlements, by threatening to cut off the spigot if it doesn’t stop and reverse its colonization of the West Bank? Should the U.S. not use its considerable power over Israel to march it back to its 1967 borders? That, really, is what’s at issue here.
[...]
But he’s substantially correct in challenging the M&W idea that the lobby is singularly responsible for policing America’s public discourse on Israel. After all, nobody asked Remnick to write these pieces. Nor did anyone tell Kinsley to try and shoot down Jimmy Carter’s apartheid argument. Just as important as challenging the Israel lobby is drawing attention to the deep-rooted tropes of knee-jerk defensiveness in sections of the liberal-Jewish intelligentsia that allows them to avert their eyes and cling to fantasy when Israel is an agent of oppression.
Last night's CNN documentary on Israeli religious extremists, and their Jewish and Christian supporters in the U.S., was something we don't often get in U.S. media: An honest look at institutionalized and systemic Israeli violence against Palestinians, and the way that violence is directly supported by American money, rhetoric, and policy. There's simply no credible argument for classifying Hamas as a terrorist organization, but not Gush Emunim.
The section on NY Assemblyman Dov Hikind surprised even me. Here's a man, a legislator, who openly and proudly raises money to expand and construct new illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, in clear, blatant violation of U.S. law. If he were raising money for Palestinian kindergartens, you can bet the FBI would be all over him. But thanks to the double-standard which exists in regard to Israeli violence against Palestinians, as well as general American ignorance of the nature of the Israeli occupation and colonization of Palestinian land, Hikind has no reason to fear any repercussions from going on national television and essentially declaring his support for ethnic cleansing.
Following up on last week's post about Christians Impatient for Armageddon, here's an article about a letter written by group of moderate Christian evangelical leaders who support the creation of a Palestinian state, and a more even-handed approach by the United States to the Israel-Palestine conflict. By "moderate," I simply mean that they don't subscribe to a brand of eschatology that mixes populist ressentiment with a plotline drawn from a prog-rock concept album, and that they believe Jesus probably wouldn't be in favor of Israel's colonization of Palestinian land, and the misery which this produces among the Palestinians.
CUFI's ruling cleric, Rev. John Hagee, responded:
"Bible-believing evangelicals will scoff at that message.
"Christians United for Israel is opposed to America pressuring Israel to give up more land to anyone for any reason. What has the policy of appeasement ever produced for Israel that was beneficial?" Hagee said.
"God gave to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob a covenant in the Book of Genesis for the land of Israel that is eternal and unbreakable, and that covenant is still intact," he said. "The Palestinian people have never owned the land of Israel, never existed as an autonomous society. There is no Palestinian language. There is no Palestinian currency. And to say that Palestinians have a right to that land historically is an historical fraud."
Max Blumenthal just posted this documentary taken at last week's Christians United for Israel rally in DC. As Blumenthal's footage makes abundantly clear, these people are extremists committed to bringing about the Apocalypse. Think I'm kidding? You really have to watch it to understand the bigotry, zealotry, and resentment which powers Christian Zionism. And then shudder at how many conservative leaders were in attendance.
Here's the text of Joe Lieberman's speech to the rally, in which he compares CUFI founder John Hagee to Moses. What do you think would be the response if a U.S. Senator had spoken before a gathering of Muslim fundamentalists who refused to recognize any Jewish claim to Palestine, who who claimed all of Palestine for Islam? An organization that was actively raising funds to support the expulsion of Jews from Palestine? Why do I think we'll never find out?
The mutually cynical relationship here is stark: The largely secular Israeli right cultivates support of loony American Christian fundamentalists in order to help maintain the unquestioning support of the U.S. Congress for the occupation. Loony American Christian fundamentalists support the expanionist policies of the Israeli right in order to speed the return of Jesus, at which time the Jews will be given the opportunity to convert, or go to hell. No, really, literally: Hell. At one point the rally organizers approach Blumenthal and request that he not engage attendees in discussions about eschatology, lest anyone out themselves as barking mad, I suppose. Oops, too late. In a brief interview with former Sharon adviser Dore Gold, Gold perfectly embodies Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit by denying that CUFI is at all concerned with "moving the clock of eschatology forward," claiming that "the only one who believes that [he can do that] is Mahmoud Ahmedinejad." Gold clearly knows what he's saying is false, he just doesn't care.
For the effects of the policies supported by CUFI, see this morning's Washington Post article on life in Israeli-occupied Hebron in the West Bank. Hebron provides us a view of the Israeli occupation in perfect miniature: Palestinians are coralled within a series of ghettoes, watching from behind barbed wire and concrete as their crops die, as their homes and lands are taken over by radical Jewish settlers, enduring daily harassment and violence by those settlers who are supported by the Israeli army. Any resistance by Palestinians is immediately labeled "terrorism," brutally suppressed, and used to justify more closures, stricter curfews, and the expropriation of more land. It's a considerable understatement to say that U.S. support for this sort of thing doesn't win us friends, at least not the friends that we want.
The various bozos of the wingnut circus have had their little chortle about the rumor of Yasser Arafat's having died of AIDS (much like their sporadic concern for women's rights, wingers care deeply about homophobia if and when it can be used as a weapon against their political enemies), but leave it to Marty Peretz's Mini Me to go the extra mile and try to spin the story into a slander of the Palestinians in general. I give you James Kirchick:
Of course, no amount of evidence will convince the Palestinians that Arafat was a homosexual, or that his death was caused by anything other than Israel's machinations. I found this out a few weeks ago in the West Bank, where everyone I spoke to told me that Israel killed Arafat. The denials that will inevitably spill forth about the causes of Arafat's death will mirror the rejection of a two state solution: both are part and parcel of the Palestinians' self-delusion.
There have been some reports that Israel is considering releasing Marwan Barghouti as part of an exchange for Gilad Shalit, to bolster Fatah against Hamas. While this should have been done years ago, it's certainly a positive development now.
Israel's Ha’aretz editorialized last month:
One of the leaders of the Palestinian people has been incarcerated for approximately five years now in Hadarim Prison, in central Israel. The time has come to release him. For years, Marwan Barghouti has tried to persuade Israelis to end the occupation through negotiation. He has gone from one Israeli party headquarters to the next, meeting with politicians across the political spectrum. He tried to persuade them in order to preempt the next confrontation.
During his years in prison, Barghouti has acted to restrain the armed struggle and bolster his people's moderate leadership, using envoys to achieve this goal. Barghouti never left his native West Bank, never took to the habits of power characteristic of the Palestine Liberation Organization leadership in Tunisia. He became a popular leader - especially in the West Bank, and to a lesser degree in the Gaza Strip.
Modern history - including Israel's - has known national leaders who turned to violence and were jailed for years, until they were released to become political leaders who marched their peoples toward independence peacefully. Nelson Mandela is one such example. The leaders of the Zionist undergrounds in prestate Israel are another. Now, Barghouti's turn has come.
The crowning era is over. Reality in the Territories shows that those released on the initiative of the Israeli government are tainted as collaborators and as such become a target for assassination or are destined to be forgotten. Alternately, such a person would become more radical than he was before just so he can clear the collaborator stain. The early release of Barghouti just because Israel is searching for an agreeable partner for negotiations on the future of the Territories would no doubt taint Barghouti as the "ultimate collaborator." In the early 1980s Israel already "crowned" the "Village Committees" in the West Bank and supported several local leaders and mayors.
In Sunday's Outlook section, Warren Bass wrote a short profile of Hamas, and about the competition between it and Fatah which has now boiled over into a Palestinian civil war. For some reason, however, while noting that Hamas grew out of the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, he did not mention the role that Israel played in cultivating the Brotherhood as a pan-Islamic alternative to the secular nationalist Fatah. While the true extent of Israeli support for the Brotherhood is not known, that it took place is not questioned. Sari Nusseibeh, whose memoir Bass recommends, writes about this in some detail, noting that while the Israel occupation authorities harassed and detained Palestinian activists of every stripe, Sheikh Yassin and his organization were left strangely unmolested, as Brotherhood-run social services and study centers went up at a peculiarly high rate throughout the territories. In addition to being rather relevant to Hamas’s story, you’d think that a bitter irony such as this, Israel now frantically trying to prop up Fatah against Hamas as it earlier propped up Hamas's precursor against Fatah, would be attractive to any writer.
Curious at why Bass ignored this low hanging fruit, I wrote and asked him about it. He responded that because of “limited space” he was not able to include every little bit of information on Hamas than he might have wanted. You will notice, however, that he devoted some of this very precious space to referencing a satirical Onion article about Hamas. Heh, indeed.
I wrote last week that I don't think the boycott of Israeli universities is appropriate. Having considered Alan Dershowitz's argument against the boycott, however, I have concluded that I'm still against it.
I do think it's interesting, though, that, according to Dershowitz, when British academics undertake a boycott against Israeli universities for their alleged support for, and complicity in, four decades of occupation, colonization, and expropriation, that's anti-Semitism, but when the Israeli military undertakes to bomb, displace, and kill thousands of Lebanese civilians for their alleged support for, and complicity in, Hezbollah terrorism, that's tough luck.
Dershowitz claims that the boycott "wildly overstates the significance of the Israel/Palestine conflict," and then goes on to claim that "the fight against the boycott is one aspect, perhaps the most urgent aspect, of the contemporary fight against anti-Semitism." Right. As usual, when defending Israel, or rather, when attacking Israel's critics, Dershowitz permits himself the sort of arguments for which his TA's would fail a freshman.
I don't endorse everything Martha Nussbaum has to say here, but I strongly agree with her central argument that that academic boycott declared by British scholars against Israel is not appropriate.
I know that I tend to focus in this blog on the abuses of the Israeli occupation regime, but I do recognize that there is a great amount and variety of excellent work being done in Israeli universities, much if not most having nothing whatever to do with conflict with the Palestinians. Trying to subsume all of the Israeli academy under the heading "in service to the occupation," as the boycott essentially does, seems to me kind of bullshit. For those scholars whose work does serve to justify and support the Israeli occupation and settlement project, their work should be (and repeatedly has been, most devastatingly by their fellow Israelis), singled out and refuted. I don't think that boycotting and attempting to silence those scholars, who, by virtue of their being in and of Israel, are in a unique position to produce work on various aspects of Israeli culture and society (which, again, is obviously not reducible to its conflict with the Arabs), will be productive. If anything, Israeli scholars who oppose the occupation should be engaged and supported by those hoping and working toward a just resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Dennis Ross’s op-ed in this morning's Washington Post is, to my mind, sadly typical of the U.S. media's treatment of the Israel/Palestine issue. Read it: Nowhere in his discussion of the conflict between Hamas and Fatah does he make a single mention of the Israeli occupation. I tend to think that if someone were writing about the violence between Sunni and Shi'i factions in Iraq, it might be considered important to mention the fact that the U.S. invaded Iraq, toppled the government, and has occupied the country for the last four years. If it were also the case that the U.S. Army were bulldozing Iraqi neighborhoods, constructing huge American settlements, and diverting vast amounts of Iraqi water to service those settlements, one might consider that relevant as well. One might even be inclined toward the idea that this were contributing to Iraqi unrest.
Regarding the rather entertaining dustup between Matt Yglesias and a small confederacy of dunces, let me just say, first, that having your views on Palestinian politics recommended by Marty Peretz and Jonah Goldberg is a bit like being hailed as the world's greatest living poet by Jewel and the person who cleans Jewel's pool.
Second, any analysis of the Fatah-Hamas conflict which attempts to ignore or exonerate forty years of Israeli occupation, and the cultivation of Palestinian disunity which has been a central goal of that occupation, is, quite simply, not to be taken seriously. Blaming the factional violence in Gaza on the supposedly inherently violent nature of Palestinian Arab society (which, remember, doesn't really exist, according to Peretz), while turning a blind eye to the myriad ways in which the Israeli occupation has proscribed, manipulated, and handicapped Palestinian political life during the last four decades, is as racist as it is daft.
“Real lasting peace is made between peoples, not governments,” writes Sari Nusseibeh near the end of his excellent memoir, Once Upon a Country. Nusseibeh is a philosopher and some-time Fatah activist who has dedicated himself to making that peace a reality by, among other things, cultivating relationships with like-minded Israelis. In this, he and his allies have been repeatedly undermined by the suspicion, mistrust, and belligerence of extremists on both sides, and in both governments, Israeli and Palestinian.
Nusseibeh comes from a noted Palestinian Arab family, whose ancestors entered Jerusalem along with caliph Omar in the seventh century. Having family roots in Palestine that go back thirteen centuries, Nusseibeh repeatedly confronts and eviscerates the notion that the Palestinians “aren’t a real people,” as well as the frankly preposterous idea that some dude just off the plane from Kiev or Brooklyn should somehow have more of a moral claim than he to the land in which he was born and raised.
One of the central themes of the book, unfortunately little remarked upon in the reviews and interviews which have followed its publication, is the way that the efforts by Palestinian activists to develop democratic institutions, such as trade unions and academic associations, organizations which could support and strengthen a mature Palestinian state, have consistently been frustrated and crushed by Israel. Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, virtually all efforts by Palestinians to organize around the principle of their own nationhood have been vigorously stamped out by an Israeli government that saw the very existence of Palestinian political consciousness as a national security threat. Israeli support for the pan-Islamic Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood, the precursor of Hamas, as a means of diluting support for the secular nationalist PLO is just one example, one with particularly severe consequences.
Nusseibeh has no illusions about his own side. He recognizes that tragic mistakes have been made, and good opportunities missed, by the Palestinian leadership. He recognizes that the use of terrorist violence has been both morally disastrous and politically counterproductive. But neither is Nusseibeh willing to give any credence to the lazy “equal blame to go around” dodge, a form of rhetorical hand-washing that works decidedly in Israel’s favor, that unfortunately characterizes so much mainstream American liberal thinking on the issue. The root cause of the conflict in Palestine is, and has always been, the attempt by one group to realize its own national aspirations at the expense of another’s, and Nusseibeh is very clear that the Israeli occupation, and the illegal settlement enterprise which it facilitates, is, has been, and continues to be the single biggest obstacle to peace between the two peoples.
I know that I cannot be the only one who finds Marty Peretz’s smug satisfaction at the escalating violence in Gaza to be reprehensible, even if it isn’t the least bit surprising. There is literally nothing that transpires among the Palestinians that Peretz will not attempt to use as a prop for his rancid bigotry, as he rehearses yet again the utterly discredited, racist hasbarist myth that “there is no such thing as Palestinians.”
Let's face facts. Only if you are "Eyeless in Gaza" can you believe that these people are a "nation."
There were no Palestinians until there were Israelis. And there will be no Palestine until Israel imposes it. Then it will be a nation-state like most of the other non-nation-states in the Middle East. Yes, a fraudulent nation-state.
Why are men wearing ski masks on the streets of Gaza? So that they will all look alike, and people will think that this proves the unity of the Palestinian people.
And, as Steve Erlanger reported, the Palestinian death toll from Palestinian killing rose to 17 on Wednesday. Any bets on high it will go on Thursday?
Today, May 15, is the day in which Palestinians remember al-Nakba ("the catastrophe"), the events surrounding the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes and lands by the paramilitary forces of the Zionist Yishuv, the subsequent war between the newly declared state of Israel and surrounding Arab countries, and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem which continues to this day.
As an American of Ukrainian descent, I approach the remembrance of this event in several ways. The year 2007 represents the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement, and the founding of the colony of Virginia. Amid all the articles, celebrations, and visits by the Queen, I recognize that my own country, indeed, my own newly adopted state, was founded on the lands and destroyed villages and homes of indigenous peoples, whose diverse cultures and societies were disregarded and crushed by European colonists.
My father's family were themselves refugees, forced to flee their homes by war. My grandparents were able to make a great life for themselves, their children, and for me, here in the U.S., but my grandmother always spoke of her homeland with a longing and an aching that never went away. I can only imagine how much more painful it would have been for her had she regularly been confronted with people insisting that the Ukrainians never existed, or that the events which caused her and her family to flee never took place, or, most ludicrously, that the Ostapenkos and a few hundred thousand of their neighbors had simply picked up and fled of their own accord. This is the sort of deeply offensive propaganda, the attempted erasing of an entire people and society from history, with which the Palestinians have had to contend since 1948.
By recognizing the tragic events of al-Nakba, and accepting the Palestinian narrative of dispossession, a narrative which has largely been vindicated by a majority of historians, both within Israel and without, my intention is not to delegitimize the state of Israel, nor to justify acts of terrorist violence against its citizens, any more than recognizing the destruction of Native American societies delegitimizes the existence of the United States. I'm very much aware that there are many who use anti-Zionism and a false solidarity with the Palestinians as cover for their anti-semitism, and I reject this, as I reject all forms of bigotry, including that which denies the existence and national aspirations of the Palestinian people.
The fact remains, unfortunately, that the government of the state of Israel is still very much in the process of dismembering Palestine, with the virtually unquestioning support of my own government. In addition to the obvious, ongoing nightmare that this has been for the Palestinians, it has had disastrous consequences both for Israel and for the U.S. It's long past time that my government used appropriate measures to stop it, and to facilitate a just resolution to the conflict.
You’d never know from reading this article on Jewish and Arab growth rates in Jerusalem that Israel’s attempts to de-Arabize the Holy City represent a gross human rights violation.
Israel is facing a challenge it never expected when it captured East Jerusalem and reunited the city in the 1967 war: each year, Jerusalem’s population is becoming more Arab and less Jewish.
For four decades, Israel has pushed to build and expand Jewish neighborhoods, while trying to restrict the growth in Arab parts of the city. Yet two trends are unchanged: Jews moving out of Jerusalem have outnumbered those moving in for 27 of the last 29 years. And the Palestinian growth rate has been high.
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While it is virtually impossible for Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza to move to Jerusalem if they were not born there, natural population growth and restrictions on building in Arab parts of the city mean large families often share very small apartments.
An estimated 18,000 apartments and homes, or a third of all the Arab residences in East Jerusalem, were built illegally because permits are so hard to obtain, Mr. Nasrallah said, adding that Israel has not approved the development of a new Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem since 1967.
“Israel sees Jerusalem as a demographic problem,” he said, “and sees the solution as getting rid of Palestinians.”
In contrast, Israel has established many Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and more than 200,000 Jews now live in the eastern part of the city.
Benny Elon, an ultra-nationalist member of the Knesset who is spearheading the settlement effort, puts it this way: "If you don't create facts on the ground, everything blows in the wind. We saw that during Barak's time – Jerusalem was on the negotiating table."
Mr. Elon says the new sites are links in a map of Jewish territorial contiguity in East Jerusalem. His plan is to ring the old city with 17 settlement points, some just a few houses, but one, with 130 planned units. Many of the points already exist, the houses or land purchased privately but the security, roads, and infrastructure paid for by the government.
In Sheikh Jarrah, at the traditional burial site of the Judean sage Simeon the Just, authorities last month paved a road for three closely guarded settler houses. The left fork, which accesses Palestinian homes, remains a dirt path.
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Sprawling Jewish settlements, considered suburbs by Israelis, have also been built in East Jerusalem territory on land expropriated from Palestinians.
Elon says he looks forward to a time when there will be no Palestinians living around the tomb of Simeon the Just and in Simeon's Heritage, the names he prefers to Sheikh Jarrah. "It was a Jewish neighborhood and it will be a Jewish neighborhood."
At a Jerusalem Day party organized by Elon, many among the thousands of young revelers draped themselves in Israeli flags. Some sported stickers reading: "The solution: Expel the Arab enemy."
