Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Bereaved Parents for Peace, the Los Angeles Times, November 27, 2002

Palestinians and Israelis who have lost children to the conflict make use of their moral authority to speak out together against hatred
by Tracy Wilkinson

RAANANA, Israel — Both Israeli and Palestinian societies bestow a special, if undesired, status on parents whose children have been killed in conflict. It is an unhappy collective that has grown tremendously in a war now staggering through its third year.

Their status gives these families a moral authority to speak out, and a group of Israelis and Palestinians is using the platform to fight an atmosphere of hate. Calling themselves the Parents’ Forum, they first came together seven years ago; what is remarkable is that they continue even now to meet and reach out to an increasingly resistant audience.

Their message is the antithesis of today’s mainstream: No to revenge. Turn the other cheek. Peace over pain.

Choosing a potent symbol for one of their latest projects, they gave blood to the other side one day last month: Jerusalem resident Rami Elhanan and other Israeli parents trudged past their army’s machine guns, across the dust-caked Kalandiya checkpoint, and donated blood at a Ramallah hospital. Palestinians did likewise at a Red Star of David emergency-services center in Jerusalem.

When Elhanan, a graphic designer whose daughter was killed in a suicide bombing five years ago, went on Israeli TV that night to talk about it, the artist applying his makeup demanded: “How could you give blood to the enemy?”

That’s a typical reaction, said Elhanan, a man of boundless energy and indomitable spirit.

“In Israel, bereaved families are sacred. We can say anything, do anything,” he said. “We use this admiration to push a new way of thinking through a narrow hole …. The whole point of this is to show that if those who paid the price, the ultimate price, can talk to each other, then anyone can.”

To prove the point, Elhanan and Palestinian lumber contractor Khaled Awwad drove to Ostrovsky High School in Raanana, a middle-class suburb of Tel Aviv, on a recent sunny morning.

The Parents’ Forum had written to dozens of schools offering to address pupils on the need for peace and reconciliation; only a few have taken them up on the offer. This was one of them, thanks largely to the principal, a former combat pilot who supports the project.

Elhanan is relaxed; he has spoken to such groups before. But it is the first time they’ll bring a Palestinian to an Israeli school, and Awwad is both nervous and exhilarated.

Two of Awwad’s brothers — 14-year-old Said and 30-year-old Yusuf — were killed within six months by Israeli soldiers who invaded their West Bank village of Beit Ummar during the current fighting. Awwad’s mother, Fatima, a 60-year-old stalwart, joined the parents organization and then drew Khaled into its activities.

Standing before the chalkboard, Elhanan opens his talk to a classroom of 29 seniors, most of whom will be going into the army in a few months. They are slumped in their chairs. Most of them have their arms crossed.

He tells them that on the fourth of September — 1997 — Thursday — at 3 p.m. — a Palestinian suicide bomber killed his 13-year-old daughter Smadar as she shopped for school supplies in Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall. A friend with her was also killed. Another was seriously injured.

It gets their attention.

Combatants for Peace

WHO ARE WE?
The “Combatants for Peace” movement was started jointly by Palestinians and Israelis, who have taken an active part in the cycle of violence; Israelis as soldiers in the Israeli army (IDF) and Palestinians as part of the violent struggle for Palestinian freedom. After brandishing weapons for so many years, and having seen one another only through weapon sights, we have decided to put down our guns, and to fight for peace.

WE BELIEVE
That only by joining forces, will we be able to end the cycle of violence, the bloodshed and the occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people. We no longer believe that it is possible to resolve the conflict between the two peoples through violent means; therefore we declare that we refuse to take part any more in the mutual bloodletting. We will act only by non-violent means so that each side will come to understand the national aspirations of the other side. We see dialogue and reconciliation as the only way to act in order to terminate the Israeli occupation, to halt the settlement project and to establish a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem, alongside the State of Israel.
WHAT ARE OUR GOALS?

* To raise the consciousness in both publics regarding the hopes and suffering of the other side, and to create partners in dialogue.
* To educate towards reconciliation and non-violent struggle in both the Israeli and Palestinian societies.
* To create political pressure on both Governments to stop the cycle of violence, end the occupation and resume a constructive dialog.

“Jeremiah Haber,” Two More (Palestinians) for the Road – The Ethnic Cleansing Continues, The Magnes Zionist,June 27, 2008

If I were a Palestinian, and spend some time out of the country, then I could lose my residency rights in Palestine. If I were a Palestinian who lived all my life in Jerusalem, and then married a Palestinian from the US, who lost his residency privileges in his native Palestine, then ipso facto I would lose mine – even if I spent most my time in the land where my family has lived for generation. Just marrying a Palestinian living in the US would jeopardize my status in my native land.

That is what is known as “ethnic cleansing lite”. The Zionists have always done their best to rid Israel of Palestinians – not so much through murder, rape, or torture, which would be ethnic cleansing of the sort we expect in Rwanda or Bosnia, as through more banal methods, such as telling a Palestinian who has been living in the West Bank with his family for fifteen years, and who during that time has had to renew his tourist visa every 3 or 6 months, that he will not be able to renew it again. Oh, and about that “tourist” visa; you see, that’s the best a Palestinian can do in the Palestinian territories, which are controlled by Israel.

Some part of me wants this policy to be part of a master Israeli plan in which Palestinian Americans, and upper middle-class Palestinian professionals are driven from the territories in order that they become centers for poverty, terrorism, and Islamic fundamentalism. Such centers will ensure the requisite number of Jews being blown up in order to justify before the world Israel’s continuing existence as an ethnonationalist state that controls and settles the territories. I say that some part of me wants this policy to be part of such a plan, only because that would indicate some degree of intelligence on the part of those who framed such a policy.

But no, I really think that there is no master plan; it is simply bureaucratic evil, an expression of the need to humiliate Palestinians. Otherwise I cannot explain why Israel has gone to such lengths to stick to this policy, despite US “pressure” and despite its promises to work out “humanitarian” solutions.

The first letter is from Mona Nasir Tucktuck; the second from Zeina Ashrawi Hutchison, who happens to be the daughter of Hanan Ashrawi. For these two there are many, many more, of course.

Among the most shocking passages in Bernard Chazelle’s account of his recent trip to the West Bank are these:

Fifty shekels!” shouted the cab driver. I said fine but warned him that, for that price, it had better be an interesting ride. It was. The driver, an immigrant from Morocco who had served as a tank crewman in the Six-Day War, let me in on his peace plan: “Kill them all! Men, women, and children: all of them, like you did in Hiroshima.”

If going to Ramallah was easy, returning was not. I’ll fast-forward a few days and tell you why. The bus stopped at the imposing Qalandiya checkpoint and several passengers got out for X-ray screening. The line inched along at a snail’s pace until a female soldier boarded the bus to check our papers. She was strikingly beautiful, a sort of James Bond girl in training. She stepped in and smiled gently at the children in the front rows. Then suddenly, unprovoked, she metamorphosed into a rottweiler, barking orders at the parents in Arabic. Why a 20-year-old would feel the need to yell at older people sitting quietly is a mystery to be filed under “Pathology of the Armed in the Presence of the Unarmed.” She singled out an elderly couple and ordered them off the bus. The man protested meekly and followed his wife out. I turned around and through the rear window watched the old couple shuffle away in the dark, carrying their belongings in small garbage bags. They would have to wait for a bus back to Ramallah. Not sure if it was the old age, the hobbled walk into the night, or the raggedy plastic bags: all I know is that it was a sight of crushing sadness.

The Ramallah-Jerusalem trip took 3 hours and 45 mins. The two cities are 6 miles apart.

A woman reminisces about her high school friend who had to run the “beauty line” gauntlet at checkpoints. Israeli soldiers would divide up the women’s line into two: the “pretty girls” line and the “ugly girls” line. To spice up the fun, they would force the women to choose the suitable line and shove them to the “correct” one if necessary. Another woman tells me how a guard ordered her to kiss the men in the line. And so on. Humiliation is the dominant theme.

For up-close-and-personal encounters, there’s nothing like the Hawara checkpoint. Travelers split into three lines: women; men under 35 (often denied entry); others. The mood in the line is somber. The soldier who checks my US passport comments, “You were born in France, it says here.” He pauses, then asks, “Why?” Why? “You know, those things happen,” I reply ruefully. He smiles. He is young, friendly, and completely out of his depth. He seems distraught, fearful, and, perhaps, ashamed. He shakes his head in disbelief as, a few feet away from us, a frail elderly woman is verbally abused by soldiers while she stands squeezed in a dusty cattle chute, waiting to be processed. Guards laugh as they turn away a large family.

Bernard Chazelle’s West Bank Trip in March 2008

For all the Americanization of Israeli society, Tel Aviv is very much a European city, not an American one. I hadn’t been there in a decade and I was struck by the changes: not so much the glittering skyline of shiny high-rises but the stunning Bauhaus buildings renovated to their former glory. Tel Aviv is easy to like: it is a city of cafés, beaches, conversation, and cats-and, for me, friends and memories.

The bus ride to Jerusalem was packed with religious passengers. It was so eerily quiet on that bus I wondered if perhaps I hadn’t volunteered by mistake to join one of those Jewish monastic orders known for their vow of silence. Then I remembered there was no such thing, so I relaxed and dozed off. Once I reached my destination, I got past the metal detector and left the bus depot for my next stop, Damascus Gate. “Fifty shekels!” shouted the cab driver. I said fine but warned him that, for that price, it had better be an interesting ride. It was. The driver, an immigrant from Morocco who had served as a tank crewman in the Six-Day War, let me in on his peace plan: “Kill them all! Men, women, and children: all of them, like you did in Hiroshima.”

BBC NEWS, India baby girl deaths ‘increase’, 21 June 2008

The number of girls born and surviving in India has hit an all time low compared to boys, ActionAid says.

A report by the UK charity says increasing numbers of female foetuses were being aborted and baby girls deliberately neglected and left to die.

In one site in the Punjab state, there are just 300 girls to every 1,000 boys among higher caste families, it says.

ActionAid says India faces a “bleak” future if it does not end its practice of cultural preference for boys.

ActionAid teamed up with Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) to produce the Disappearing Daughters report.

More than 6,000 households in sites across five states in north-western India were interviewed and statistical comparisons were made with national census date.

Under “normal” circumstances, there should be about 950 girls for every 1,000 boys, the charity said.

But it said that in three of the five sites, that number was below 800.

In four of the five sites surveyed, the proportion of girls to boys had declined since a 2001 census, the report said.

The research also found that ratios of girls to boys were declining fastest in comparatively prosperous urban areas.

ActionAid suggested the increasing use of ultrasound technology may be a factor in the trend.

The document says that Indian woman are put under intense pressure to produce sons, in a culture that predominantly views girls as a burden rather than an asset.

It says many families now use ultrasound scans and abort female foetuses, despite the existence of the 1994 law banning gender selection and selective abortion.

The charity also blames other illegal practices - such as allowing the umbilical cord to become infected - for the growing gender imbalance.

“The real horror of the situation is that, for women, avoiding having daughters is a rational choice. But for wider society it’s creating an appalling and desperate state of affairs,” Laura Turquet, women’s rights policy official at ActionAid said.

“In the long term, cultural attitudes need to change. India must address economic and social barriers including property rights, marriage dowries and gender roles that condemn girls before they are even born.

“If we don’t act now the future looks bleak,” Ms Turquet said.

Some 10 million female foetuses have been aborted in India in the past 20 years, the British medical journal the Lancet has said.

Breaking News - JTA, Jewish & Israel News, June 19, 2008

A swastika and cross were drawn on the home of a leading Jewish critic of Christian activity in the U.S. military.

The vandalism was committed Sunday night on the Albuquerque home of Mikey Weinstein, the founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, according to news reports.

Weinstein, an alumnus of the U.S. Air Force Academy, has been a vocal critic of Christian proselytizing within the ranks of the military. He says he has been the target of regular harassment since filing a lawsuit charging that the military has violated the religious liberties of its members.

“This is the first time I think I’ve ever felt outrage, humiliation and embarrassment at the same time,” Weinstein told the Albuquerque television station KOAT.

Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research Unit

PSR - Survey Research Unit: Public Opinion Poll # 28, 12 June 2008

These are the results of the latest poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip between 5 and 7 June 2008. This period witnessed the declaration by the President of the Palestinian Authority (PA) Mahmud Abbas of his desire to renew dialogue with Hamas. It also witnessed continued closure of the Rafah border crossing despite Hamas’s attempt to open it. Indirect negotiations between Hamas and Israel on a ceasefire failed to produce agreement while the threat of a possible Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip escalated further. Total size of the sample is 1270 adults interviewed face to face in 127 randomly selected locations. Margin of error is 3%.

2) Ceasefire, the One-State Solution, and the Peace Process

* An overwhelming majority supports a ceasefire with Israel, but a similar majority opposes the ceasefire if it does not include the West Bank or does not stipulate the immediate opening of the Rafah crossing to Egypt.
* In a comparison between the one-state solution and the two-state solution, 58% prefer the two-state solution and 27% prefer the one-state solution.
* Stability in the position of Palestinians regarding a permanent settlement along the lines of the Clinton Parameters and the Geneva Initiative; 46% support it and 52% oppose it.
* 56% support and 43% oppose mutual recognition of Israel and the state for the Jewish people and Palestine as the state for the Palestinian people after reaching a permanent settlement.
* 67% support and 28% oppose the Saudi peace initiative.
* 50% support the Roadmap and 47% oppose it.
* An overwhelming majority prefers a permanent settlement and only 15% prefers an interim one.
* 66% believe that the chances for the establishment of a Palestinian state during the next five years are either low or non existent.
* 76% believe that the negotiations launched by the Annapolis conference will fail.
* 68% believe that Olmert-Abbas meetings are not useful and should be stopped while only 27% believe they are useful and should continue.
* Support for armed attacks against Israelis drops from 67% to 55% during three months; similarly, support for launching rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip drops from 64% to 57% during the same period.
* Two thirds believe that success in the Syrian-Israeli track will not have a negative impact on the Palestinian-Israeli track.

NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, Strengthening Extremists, NYTimes.com, June 19, 2008

The yearlong siege of Gaza may soon end with the new cease-fire there, marking the eclipse of one more American-backed Israeli policy that backfired by strengthening extremists.

Here in Gaza, sulfurous with fumes from cars burning cooking grease because the siege has made gasoline scarce, the entire last year of the blockade feels not only morally bankrupt — a case of collective punishment — but also counterproductive. The fragile new truce between Hamas and Israel just might create a new opportunity to stabilize the Palestinian territories, but only if we absorb the lessons of what has gone wrong.

Consider Adham Sharif, a 26-year-old man whose only child, a baby girl named Mariam, had a tiny hole in her heart and needed surgery to repair it. Gaza hospitals were unable to perform such an operation, but doctors said that surgeons in Israel or in neighboring countries could save her.

Like Gershom Gorenberg and a lot of other people, I was disturbed by Obama’s pandering to AIPAC–no matter how his advisors have tried to “clarify” his remarks. But when you compare Obama’s views on foreign policy in general with McCain’s, the sensible choice is obvious.

Undivided Jerusalem, South Jerusalem: Gershom Gorenberg and Haim Watzman, June 2008

An adviser to the Obama campaign has responded to my criticism of O’s statement to Aipac, “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” The adviser, remaining anonymous, says that that the candidate really means physically undivided: Obama “has said before that Jerusalem is a final status issue to be negotiated by the parties, but that two principles that should guide any outcome is that it will remain Israel’s capital and it should never be redivided by barbed wire and checkpoints as it was from 1948-67.” I’m satisfied with that as a position. I still think it was disingenuous and damaging to use the formulation he used before Aipac. The audience - in the hall, and around the world - heard “undivided Jerusalem” in the way that official Israel constantly uses the phrase, meaning politically undivided. That was red meat for the Aipac crowd. Saying “physically undivided” would have been a red flag. Afterward, Obama had to clarify, or backtrack, or write a midrash on his own words, in order to maintain his dedication to effective diplomacy. Better not to have raised the issue. But then, Obama was talking to a crowd inclined to believe both Pinocchio Pipes and the frontier fallacy. He faced the classic dilemma of a high school kid at the wrong party - being yourself and being popular just don’t fit together.

Rory McCarthy talks to Ahmad Abu Me’tiq, who lost his wife and four of his children in an Israeli air strike, The Guardian, May 14, 2008

Her bed is on the third floor of Gaza’s Shifa hospital, where shafts of warm afternoon sunshine reach in from the window. The ward is crowded, and the bed on which Asma’a Abu Me’tiq lay is curtained off from the rest and surrounded by the blankets her sister-in-law uses when she sleeps on the floor next to her at night.

It may be the best hospital in Gaza but even the poorest families, like the Abu Me’tiqs, must provide extra food themselves. Asma’a’s father, Ahmad, returns from downstairs with a cheap electric hot-plate, which he bought on credit from a shopkeeper he knows. He plugs it into the wall to heat a pot of thin homemade soup for his 13-year-old daughter, but there is either no electricity or the hot-plate didn’t work. “What bad luck,” he says quietly to himself.

Then he reaches over to his daughter, who is coughing and struggling to breathe from the deep wound in her chest. She hasn’t touched her food since she was rushed to hospital 10 days earlier: the day an explosion in the street outside demolished the metal front door of their house as the family were eating breakfast, impaling her and her younger sister, Shaima, seven, with shrapnel and killing outright four other brothers and sisters and her mother too.

Pew Global Attitudes Project: Overview, June 12, 2008

U.S. Favorability Edges Up

…positive views of the United States have risen sharply in Tanzania (by 19 points) and South Korea (12 points), and by smaller but significant margins in Indonesia, China, India and Poland. Overall, opinions of the United States are most positive in South Korea, Poland, India and in the three African countries surveyed this year - Tanzania, Nigeria and South Africa.

However, positive opinions of the United States have declined by 11 points in Japan - a traditional U.S. ally - and in neighboring Mexico (by nine points). The image of the United States also remains overwhelmingly negative in most of the predominantly Muslim countries surveyed, though no more so than in recent years.

Fewer than a quarter of respondents express positive opinions of the United States in Egypt (22%), Jordan (19%), Pakistan (19%) and Turkey (12%). Large majorities in Turkey and Pakistan say they think of the United States as “more of an enemy” rather than as “more of a friend” (70% in Turkey; 60% in Pakistan). In Lebanon, 80% of Shia Muslims consider the United States to be more of an enemy.

As in recent years, favorable views of the United States remain fairly low among the publics of a number of its traditional Western European allies. Solid majorities continue to express unfavorable opinions of the U.S. in France, Germany and Spain. Great Britain is the only country - of four Western European nations surveyed - where a majority (53%) expresses a positive view of the U.S.

I read Haaretz because of people like Akiva Eldar, Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, Danny Rubinstein, Tom Segev–and Daniel Ben-Simon. No one has described Israel’s “development towns” and the everyday lives of poor Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern origin) more eloquently than he has.

Daniel Ben-Simon: Why I’m leaving journalism for politics - Haaretz, June 13, 2008

I don’t know when it happened. Maybe on that day when the composition teacher was handing back eighth-grade essays. He went from student to student, making comments and returning graded papers. He skipped only me. We sat straight and tense, as befitted students at the Ecole Normale Hebraique boarding school in Casablanca, Morocco, considered the country’s best.

I didn’t know what to do with myself. Was the teacher about to humiliate me? And then he stood up and read my entire essay out loud to the class. It was about a classmate who had disappeared secretly from school, as if the earth had swallowed him, until I found out he had gone to the Holy Land with his family.

“I don’t know what you want to be when you grow up,” Solly Levy told me after reading my essay, “but if you’ll pardon me, I suggest you become a journalist or an author.” The idea had never before occurred to me, but after that, nothing could deter me.

Immigrating to Israel, and particularly the absorption experience, shaped my journalism, positioning me on the underside of Israeli society. I spent my first years here in the company of students whose choppy Hebrew attested to their incomplete integration. They were sent to agricultural boarding schools to acquire vocational skills. They studied welding, mechanics and farming. Only a few got to study academic subjects.

Iraq, perceived hypocrisy fuel record anti-Americanism: report, June 11, 2008

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Anti-Americanism is at record levels thanks to US policies such as the war in Iraq, and Washington’s perceived hypocrisy in abiding by its own democratic values, US lawmakers said Wednesday.

A House of Representatives committee report based on expert testimony and polling data reveals US approval ratings have fallen to record lows across the world since 2002, particularly in Muslim countries and Latin America.

It says the problem arises not from a rejection of US culture, values and power but primarily from its policies, such as backing authoritarian regimes while promoting democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

“Our physical strength has come to be seen not as a solace but as a threat, not as a guarantee of stability and order but as a source of intimidation, violence and torture,” said Bill Delahunt, chairman of the subcommittee on international organizations, human rights and oversight.

“We have dangerously depleted what (former president Ulysses S.) Grant… identified as our greatest source of international power — our reputation for what he called conscience. I would substitute the phrase ‘moral authority’,” Delahunt added.

The report blames specific policies for falling approval ratings, notably the war in Iraq, support for some repressive governments, a perception of bias in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and the “torture and abuse of prisoners” in violation of treaty obligations.

BBC, ‘Jewish settler attack’ on film, Thursday, 12 June 2008

‘Jewish settler attack’ on film
By Tim Franks
BBC News, Jerusalem

Footage from a video camera handed out by an Israeli human rights group appears to show Jewish settlers beating up Palestinians in the West Bank.

An elderly shepherd, his wife and a nephew said they were attacked by four masked men for allowing their animals to graze near the settlement of Susia.

The rights group, B’Tselem, said the cameras were provided to enable Palestinians to get proof of attacks.

A spokesman for the Israeli police said that an investigation was under way.

So far, no-one has been arrested.

For the past year, B’Tselem has handed out video cameras to Palestinians as part of its “Shooting Back” project.

The BBC has been given exclusive access to the footage of this particular attack, which happened earlier this week. The date and time on the camera footage shows that it is Sunday afternoon.Over the brow of the hill walk four masked men holding baseball bats. To the right of the screen, in the foreground, stands a 58-year-old Palestinian woman.

Thamam al-Nawaja has been herding her goats close to the Jewish settlement of Susia, near Hebron in the southern West Bank.

Within a few seconds, she, along with her 70-year-old husband and one of her nephews, will be beaten up.

As the first blows land, the woman filming - the daughter-in-law of the elderly couple - drops the camera and runs for help.

Mrs Nawaja spent three days in hospital after the attack.

Saree Makdisi’s Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation is excellent insofar as it conveys a sense of the everyday agony of Palestinian life under occupation. But by advocating a “one-state solution” in the book’s “Coda,” Makdisi will alienate many readers outraged by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians but nonetheless absolutely committed to the idea of a Jewish state where Jews will never again be at the mercy of gentiles. Makdisi criticizes Israeli peace activists like Amos Oz and Yossi Beilin for insisting on a state with a Jewish majority. While it is easy to understand why Palestinians would reject such a position, it should also be easy to understand why most Jews cannot. A two-state solution along the lines of the Geneva Accord is not perfect, but it is the best Palestinians can hope for. Unrealistic talk about a one-state solution simply encourages Israelis sympathetic to the views of Oz and Beilin to embrace the hawkish views of Netanyahu and the Likud.