Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Ann Scott Tyson, Gates Warns of Militarized Policy - washingtonpost.com, July 16, 2008

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates warned yesterday against the risk of a “creeping militarization” of U.S. foreign policy, saying the State Department should lead U.S. engagement with other countries, with the military playing a supporting role.

“We cannot kill or capture our way to victory” in the long-term campaign against terrorism, Gates said, arguing that military action should be subordinate to political and economic efforts to undermine extremism.

Anne Paq: Photostory, Breaking the Silence’s tour disrupted, EI, July 14, 2008

On 27 June, I took part in one of the regular tours of the West Bank city of Hebron and its settlements organized by the organization Breaking the Silence. Breaking the Silence is a group of Israeli army soldiers and veterans who work to expose the injustice of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Once more, the tour was disrupted because of the settlers.

Before the start of the tour, organizer Yehuda Shaul — one of the founders of Breaking the Silence and a former Israeli soldier who served 14 months in Hebron — warned the group that it was uncertain if the tour would proceed as planned. During the previous tour of Hebron, on 17 June, Israeli settlers attacked the tour group and threw boiling liquid at them, injuring a Spanish photographer. Nevertheless, Yehuda asked that we not answer answer to the settlers’ provocations no matter what happened.

At the first stop in Kiryat Arba settlement next to Hebron, a group of settlers, including children, were already waiting for the bus to arrive. As soon as we exited the bus, they quickly surrounded us and started to shout and prevented Yehuda from moving and talking about the settlement. Israeli police intervened but let the settlers continue their disruption.

One of the settlers was speaking through a loudspeaker so loud that it made it impossible to hear Yehuda. The tour was also prevented from visiting the grave of Baruch Goldstein, an American-born Israeli settler who massacred 29 worshipping Palestinians and injured many more when he attacked Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque in 1994. He is seen by many settlers as a hero and his gravestone celebrating the massacre has become a site of pilgrimage.

After the group returned to the bus to leave for the Old City of Hebron, the settlers sat on the road and stood in front of the bus to prevent it from moving. They blatantly disrupted public order and the police who stood nearby had no intention to fine them or intervene to allow the tour to proceed. In Hebron, there seems to be no law enforcement to keep the settlers in order, despite the impressively large number of soldiers and police available in the streets, greatly outnumbering the settlers.

The first time I spoke with Hilda Silverman, and the only time we ever had a real conversation, we were walking to the Harvard Faculty Club with Sara Roy and several other people. Hilda told me that Sara’s moving essay “Living with the Holocaust” was originally supposed to be published in both Tikkun and the Journal of Palestine Studies, but Michael Lerner refused to publish it in Tikkun because he felt it was too critical of Israel. We were both outraged by this.

Hilda Silverman

Photo: Linda and Steven Brion-Meisels.

JWA - We Remember - Hilda Silverman, 1938 - 2008

Remembering Hilda Silverman

by Alice Rothchild, Co-chair, Jewish Voice for Peace, Boston

My first memories of Hilda date back to the late 1990s as she climbed the three flights of stairs in my home to join in the formative meetings of a political group that became Jewish Voice for Peace, Boston. Slightly breathless, she was usually in animated conversation with Ruchama Marton, an Israeli psychiatrist doing a fellowship at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College and Elaine Hagopian, Professor Emerita of Sociology from Simmons College and a scholar and activist on Middle East affairs. These three women can best be described as the political mothers and mentors for many of us in the Jewish peace movement.

Hilda quickly distinguished herself as an extremely knowledgeable, thoughtful, moral voice who was able to maintain a strong sense of her own Jewish identity and a painful awareness of the Holocaust while articulating a consistent and powerful critique of Israeli policy. In a 2002 op-ed published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Hilda wrote, “I am a Jew with a profound consciousness of Jewish victimization through history. But for me, victim and victimizer, oppressor and oppressed are not mutually exclusive categories.”

As a younger activist trying to find my way in the bewildering maze of history, politics, trauma, and conflicting narratives, Hilda’s voice was a critical part of my education. In the book, Culture and Resistance, Edward Said told this story: “It was in 1988. There was a Tikkun conference in New York…I, and my friend Ibrahim Abu-Lughod were on a panel with Michael Walzer. At one point, in a moment of exasperation, Walzer said, ‘All right, you’re going to get your state, so I think it’s important to stop thinking about the past. You go have your state, we’ll have ours, and that’s the end of it.’ At which point, a woman in the audience, who I’ll never forget – her name was Hilda Silverman – got up in a state of rage, railing at Walzer, saying, ‘How dare you tell a Palestinian that he should stop reminding us of the past, when you and I belong to a people that is always reminding the world of how much we suffered, and asking people never to forget? How dare you tell a Palestinian to forget?’”

Levy, Twilight Zone / ‘Worse than apartheid’ - Haaretz, July 10, 2008

I thought they would feel right at home in the alleys of Balata refugee camp, the Casbah and the Hawara checkpoint. But they said there is no comparison: for them the Israeli occupation regime is worse than anything they knew under apartheid. This week, 21 human rights activists from South Africa visited Israel. Among them were members of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress; at least one of them took part in the armed struggle and at least two were jailed. There were two South African Supreme Court judges, a former deputy minister, members of Parliament, attorneys, writers and journalists. Blacks and whites, about half of them Jews who today are in conflict with attitudes of the conservative Jewish community in their country. Some of them have been here before; for others it was their first visit.

For five days they paid an unconventional visit to Israel - without Sderot, the IDF and the Foreign Ministry (but with Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial and a meeting with Supreme Court President Justice Dorit Beinisch. They spent most of their time in the occupied areas, where hardly any official guests go - places that are also shunned by most Israelis.
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On Monday they visited Nablus, the most imprisoned city in the West Bank. From Hawara to the Casbah, from the Casbah to Balata, from Joseph’s Tomb to the monastery of Jacob’s Well. They traveled from Jerusalem to Nablus via Highway 60, observing the imprisoned villages that have no access to the main road, and seeing the “roads for the natives,” which pass under the main road. They saw and said nothing. There were no separate roads under apartheid. They went through the Hawara checkpoint mutely: they never had such barriers.

Dan Izenberg, High Court ruling keeps Palestinian village in limbo, Jerusalem Post, July 10, 2008

The 200 Palestinians living in El-Nu’man, a village in the extreme southeast corner of Jerusalem, will continue to live in their never-never land, trapped without status between the West Bank and Jerusalem, in the wake of a High Court of Justice decision handed down earlier this week.

Israel does not recognize the residents of Nu’man as living in Jerusalem and has never granted them residency status. It claims that they moved illegally from the West Bank into the city after a post-Six Day War census that determined exactly which Palestinians lived in areas annexed to Jerusalem as a result of the war. Since the war, the city of Jerusalem has not provided the village with municipal services, including water and garbage collection, nor has it collected city taxes.

Since for many years there were no travel restrictions between Jerusalem and the West Bank, Nu’man residents had strong day-to-day ties there, including employment, commerce, social, family and religious connections.

Despite the de facto exclusion of Nu’man from Jerusalem, Israel built the West Bank separation barrier to include the village within the city, cutting it off from the rest of the West Bank. In order to maintain their West Bank ties, residents have had to pass through the fence gate and be subjected to security checks by soldiers. The residents claimed that the soldiers would regularly abuse their power and humiliate the residents.

Under this article’s title “It Takes a Village,” The Guardian has this phrase: “The iron resistance of one Palestinian hamlet to Israel’s ‘ring of steel’ has caught the imagination of the world’s media.” But the ongoing protests against the wall are not getting much coverage in the mainstream print and broadcast media in the US.

Seth Freedman: The village defying Israel’s wall, guardian.co.uk, July 11, 2008

After four days of curfew, the village of Nilin is not a pretty sight. Torched cars lie strewn on the sides of the road, bedroom windows sport gaping bullet holes, and debris is scattered the length and breadth of the town: evidence of the brutality meted out indiscriminately by the army against the locals.

As I followed the trail of destruction, the tales of woe grew ever darker and ever more indicting of the Israel Defence Force’s cruelty. “Look what they did to me!” screamed an elderly grandmother, hoisting up her robes to display the raw wounds inflicted by soldiers who had thrown her against a stone wall during a raid. She began sobbing as she recounted the events of earlier in the week, utterly bewildered as to how she had come to be mistreated so.

Upstairs, her middle-aged son clutched his two children to his side as he recounted the night the troops burst into his home.

“Imagine what it does to your son and daughter when they see you beaten by a soldier,” Hillal Khawaja said flatly. He showed us the wreckage of a room that had borne the brunt of the military’s ire: computers ripped from their sockets, beds smashed and furniture overturned, nothing had been spared the wrath of the marauding infantry.

In explaining why Darfur haunts him Nicolas Kristof lists the following images: “the young woman who deliberately made a diversion of herself so the janjaweed would gang-rape her and miss her little sister running in the opposite direction; the man whose eyes were gouged out with a bayonet; the group of women beaten with their own babies until the children were dead.”

Nicholas D. Kristof - The G-8 and Darfur, NYTimes.com, July 10, 2008

The Armenian genocide still festers after nearly a century; and former President Bill Clinton has said that his greatest foreign-policy mistake was his failure to respond in Rwanda. In the same way, the G-8’s collective shrug today about the Darfur genocide — because the victims are black, impoverished and hidden from television cameras — will be a lingering stain.

After five years of genocide, President Bush still hasn’t taken as simple a step as imposing a no-fly zone or even giving a prime-time speech about it. He gave Beijing a gift, his pledge to attend the opening ceremony of the Olympics, without pushing hard for China to suspend military spare-parts and arms deliveries to Sudan.

The Islamic world has been even more myopic, particularly since the victims in Darfur are all Muslim. Do dead Muslims count only when Israel is the culprit? Can’t the Islamic world muster one-hundredth as much indignation for the genocidal slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Muslims as it can for a few Danish cartoons?

This coming Monday, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is expected to seek an arrest warrant in connection with Darfur, and his past statements suggest that it may be for the Sudanese president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, for genocide. That would be a historic step requiring follow-through.

A personal note: I have seen children dying of AIDS and hunger; I have had malaria and been chased through the jungle by militias. I want the G-8 to address all the aspects of global poverty, yet nothing affects me as much as what I have seen in Darfur.

I tilt obsessively at the windmills of Darfur because, quite simply, its people haunt me: the young woman who deliberately made a diversion of herself so the janjaweed would gang-rape her and miss her little sister running in the opposite direction; the man whose eyes were gouged out with a bayonet; the group of women beaten with their own babies until the children were dead.

A Palestinian family crosses through a gap in the barrier in the village of Al-Ram on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Photograph: Gali Tibbon

Toni O’Loughlin, The great divide: Life in east Jerusalem, guardian.co.uk, July 9, 2008

Sufian Odeh used to be able to see his cousin’s house across the street from his apartment window - until Israel built a wall of concrete down the middle of their neighborhood two years ago.

Standing eight metres high and just 13 metres from his building, it overshadows Sufian’s second-floor apartment like the wall of a prison, darkening this once thriving Palestinian district.

“When I look from the window and see the wall, I immediately close the blinds and smoke a cigarette. It’s like living at the end of the world,” says Sufian, who asked to change his name to preserve his family’s privacy.

His neighbours fled long ago, as the West Bank barrier crept down the main street of al-Ram, dividing families, separating children from schools and patients from clinics, and severing the road back to Jerusalem. Stranded outside Jerusalem by the barrier, al-Ram has become a virtual ghost town.

Anyone wishing to understand Christian Zionism should see Max Blumenthal’s video of the 2007 Christians United for Israel conference entitled “Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour.” It is, as Nat and Natalie Cole might put it, unforgettable in every way. It is among the videos that Hagee’s lawyers have had removed from YouTube, although it is still accessible elsewhere. One can safely assume that Hagee’s security people will make sure that Blumenthal does not attend the 2008 conference.

Hagee’s Revenge? Videos Of Controversial Pastor Removed From YouTube, AlterNet, July 8, 2008

Late last week, with no prior notification, lawyers for the controversial evangelist John Hagee had a series of videos concerning the pastor removed from YouTube. The clips spanned from the contentious to the mundane; some included footage lifted from sermons Hagee had already made public, others involved documentaries made by filmmakers inside Hagee’s conventions. All told more than 120 videos were taken down in the abrupt sweep.

The timing was, perhaps, more peculiar than the move itself. Clips that had been online for well over a year were now being subjected to “third-party” copyright infringement claims. And while Hagee had not been in the mainstream press since he and Sen. John McCain ended their official relationship a month prior, Hagee’s Christians United for Israel annual summit is just days away, and at least one prominent McCain backer (Sen. Joseph Lieberman) is set to be in attendance.

Two individuals who have documented Hagee and posted clips on some of his more noteworthy sermons (including those interpreted as anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, and anti-gay — Hagee, Wilson noted, once claimed that the Anti-Christ will be German, gay, a “blasphemer” and “partly Jewish - as was Adolf Hitler, as was Karl Marx”) believe that nefarious motives were behind the YouTube shakedown.

“Obviously Hagee’s minions orchestrated this move to suppress bad publicity ahead of their July summit,” said Max Blumenthal, a freelance writer and videographer whose documentary on last year’s Christians United for Israel summit was viewed by hundreds of thousands. “This is a response to the McCain debacle and concern over bad publicity for Lieberman’s appearance,” he charged.

Democracy Now! | Award-Winning Palestinian Journalist Mohammed Omer Details Abuse

by Israeli Security Officials, July 7, 2008

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to award-winning Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer. The twenty-four-year-old journalist and photographer from Gaza was physically and psychologically abused by Israeli security officials late last month. He is a correspondent for the Inter Press Service, was on his way back home after receiving the prestigious Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in London.

Mohammed Omer says he was interrogated, strip-searched and beaten by eight armed Shin Bet officials. He was hospitalized for a week after the ordeal. The Shin Bet security service issued a response, saying Omer “received decent treatment and no extraordinary measures were taken against him.”

At twenty-four, Omer has seen most of his family killed or wounded. He is the youngest winner of the Martha Gellhorn award, named after the famous US war correspondent, given to journalists who expose establishment propaganda. His award citation reads, “Every day, he reports from a war zone, where he is also a prisoner. His homeland, Gaza, is surrounded, starved, attacked, forgotten. He is a profoundly humane witness to one of the great injustices of our time. He is the voice of the voiceless.”

Mohammed Omer joins me right now on the phone from Gaza. Welcome to Democracy Now!

MOHAMMED OMER: Thanks, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us what happened and when it happened? You were just coming back from London after receiving your award?

MOHAMMED OMER: Well, let me mention before I start that I’m also writing for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs in Washington, D.C.

When I was coming back from my award ceremony and also a speaking engagement, I was stopped for nearly one hour and a half before an Israeli Shin Bet officer came to me and started collecting my bags, which were securely checked already. I kept waiting for some time until they got my luggage and they started checking everything.

The Shabak officer just came to me and then said, “You are a crazy man.” And I just kept quiet and listened to what he’s going to say. And then he said, “Is there anyone who has been to the Netherlands, to France, to Sweden, to Greece and to the United Kingdom and come back to Gaza Strip? Gaza is a dirty place. Why do you come back to Gaza? Gaza is a dirty place, and the people there are dirty. Why do you come to live in such a place, where there is no electricity, there is no light, and there is darkness, and there is shortages of fuel, and there is lots of difficulties? Why don’t you live in France, instead?”

Margaret Nagle, Rethinking Islamic Fundamentalism, UMaine Today Magazine - March/April 2007

Why has American foreign policy in the Middle East failed? Part of the answer, says Munson, is the failure to understand people who do not see the world as it is seen by most Americans. This, in turn, is related to the failure to situate current events in their broader historical context. American policymakers often have failed to understand that the angry rhetoric reverberating in the Muslim world is rooted not just in religion, but also in nationalistic and social grievances.

“We must understand how the other side thinks,” says Munson. “And that’s not just an esoteric, anthropological, ivory tower view, but a fundamental point in understanding international affairs. Foreign policy is not just about natural resources or missiles, it’s about having a sense of others and why they do what they do. If we don’t understand others, we can’t respond appropriately,” a point that Sun Tzu’s The Art of War eloquently made more than 2,500 years ago.

Munson argues that fighting people whose motives one does not understand is like fighting blindfolded. That’s what we are doing in Iraq, he says.

Munson emphasizes that it is a mistake to assume that political movements have only one cause or distinctive feature. He has argued in a series of recent articles that militant Islamic movements definitely do have a fundamentalist dimension. They insist on strict conformity to a sacred text and require that all aspects of life, including the social and political, should conform to sacred scriptures believed to be inerrant and immutable. But Islamic fundamentalism usually also has a nationalist and anti-imperialist dimension. For many Muslim fundamentalists, militant Islam is to some extent a means to an end — overcoming foreign domination.

In the Quran, as well as in the minds of many traditional Muslims today, there is but one explanation for the subjugation of the believer by the unbeliever: God is using the latter to punish the former for his sins, including deviating from his laws, Munson says. Only a return to a strictly Islamic way of life will induce God to free the faithful from the faithless. A return to Islam is thus linked to overcoming foreign domination and a return to cultural identity. In 1972, the Ayatollah Khomeini told followers:

If the Muslim states and peoples had relied on Islam and its inherent capabilities and powers instead of depending on the East (the Soviet Union) and the West, and if they had placed the enlightened and liberating precepts of the Quran before their eyes and put them into practice, then they would not today be captive slaves of the Zionist aggressors, terrified victims of the American Phantoms, and toys in the hands of the accommodating policies of the satanic Soviet Union. It is the disregard of the noble Quran by the Islamic countries that has brought the Islamic community to this difficult situation full of misfortunes and reversals and placed its fate in the hands of the imperialism of the left and the right.

Munson stresses that understanding such rhetoric does not entail endorsing it. He notes that there are many aspects of Islamic militancy that are outrageous and deserve condemnation, notably the horrendous violence against civilians and the anti-Semitism. He describes the Holocaust conference held in Tehran in December 2006 as “sickening.” But he stresses that “it is in the interest of the United States to try to limit the appeal of militant Islamic movements. Invading Muslim countries has precisely the opposite effect, as we can see in Iraq.”

Barry Lynn, Americans United, Church & State, May 2000 Perspective

The previous Friday I attended Pat Robertson’s 70th birthday gala at the Hilton here in Washington. (Don’t worry; I didn’t use Americans United money for the $50 per plate dinner tickets. In fact, like most of the attendees, I got mine free.) This was an event filled with praise for Robertson from a raft of family members and colleagues, most of them fully engaged in all of his escapades to gain power and profit while preaching his version of the Gospel. (I noted that four of the eight United States senators who wrote special tribute letters for the fancy dinner brochure were the same people who asked the Justice Department to investigate Americans United last summer.)

Far from embracing differences, as the Feminist Expo crowd, some of these folks were as belligerent as you get outside of a prizefight. I took my new assistant Jennie Oberzan to the event because she had never heard Robertson speak. Prior to the dinner, she had a chance to meet some of my opponents in the “cultural war” including Col. Oliver North, Jay Sekulow and Jerry Falwell. They were predictably polite.

Our “dinner companions” were something else again. I neither hide nor brag about what I do at such events, and if people recognize me, we usually agree to disagree and talk about the weather, raising teenage children or baseball. The woman to our left was clearly suspicious of my presence and asked who I was. When I told her, she asked me how I could possibly support public schools since they now had “queers” in them.

I told her that I resented that language, which only encouraged her to repeat it. I told her that I wasn’t having any conversation if she was going to use such pejoratives. She persisted. I even told her that if my son used that word I would ground him for a month.

She then moved on to interrogating Jennie. When Jennie indicated that she was Jewish, the woman literally huffed: “Now I understand.” She later pursued Jennie into the hall and told her she was hell-bound, had a demonic presence in her and that only Christians were really Jewish. We left early.

Akiva Eldar, A binational reality - Haaretz, July 7, 2008

How nice that this time, too, the terrorist was a “lone wolf,” a drug addict or just a nut case. Just so long as Jerusalemite murderers are not acting on behalf of terrorist groups. “Wild weeds” can grow in any garden. We also once had a strange doctor who carried out a massacre in a mosque; his family erected a glorious tombstone in honor of the “saint.” No one proposed razing the family’s home for the purpose of “deterrence” - and justifiably so. If we assume that this was the case of a deviant, demolishing the home of his family will deter the next deviant in the same way that the death penalty deters people who decide to blow themselves up in a bus, in the hope of having fun with 70 virgins in paradise. Deterrence is relevant when it is applied to trends in the mainstream, not in the sidelines of society.

The murderer at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva and the terrorist with the bulldozer did not represent an organization. Worse still: They reflect the mood of thousands of residents in Israel’s capital. A terror organization can be tracked down, declared illegal and its leadership can be arrested. Discontent that originates at the grassroots needs no guidance, is not controlled by anyone’s decisions, and it is much more difficult to contain.

Does the Israeli-Palestinian conflict still matter? [PDF]

Shibley Telhami, Brookings, June, 2008

In 2006, for the first time since we began polling, Arabs were asked what step taken by Washington would most improve their views of the United States. They were asked to choose two steps among the following: Pushing for the spread of democracy in the Middle East even more; providing more economic assistance to the region, stopping economic and military aid to Israel; withdrawing American forces from Iraq; withdrawing American forces from the Arabian peninsula; and brokering comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace. More than 60% of respondents chose brokering Arab-Israeli peace as the number one answer, followed by withdrawal from Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula…

In 2008, 50% of the public identified brokering Arab-Israeli peace based on the 1967 border as the single most important step to improving their views of the United States-still the number one issue. Notable was the increase in the number of people who want to see an American withdrawal from Iraq (from 33% in 2006 to 44% in 2008) and the Arabian Peninsula (from 22% in 2006 to 46% in 2008), as more people were expressing less confidence in America’s ability to broker peace.

Richard Silverstein, Failing the Lynch Test, Proudly | Tikun Olam. July 5, 2008

In May, Akiva Eldar wrote in The Nation about a felicitous encounter he had with an Egyptian cab driver who picked him up in New York City. The man followed Eldar’s reporting religiously and praised it effusively. In the course of the article, Eldar notes an important column that Israel’s most popular daily columnist wrote criticizing Haaretz’s commentators for their attitude toward Palestinian terror:

…Nahum Barnea wrote in November 2000 (in a publication of the Israel Democracy Institute) that “there are Israeli reporters who do not pass the ‘lynch test.’” These, he wrote, are journalists who could not bring themselves to criticize the Arabs even when two Israelis were savagely murdered by a mob in Ramallah. Barnea…went on to argue that our [the journalists’] support for the Palestinian position is absolute. He concluded, “They have a mission.” I was honored to be mentioned as one of those journalists, alongside my fine colleagues Gideon Levy and Amira Hass.

I admit to being guilty as charged.

Me too. You see, I resent the fact that there is a “test” that you must pass in order to be considered truly supportive of Israel when it suffers a terror attack; that you must be prepared to bray for blood vengeance or else be insufficiently patriotic or pro-Israel or whatever term you’d like to use. Similarly, I’d like to think, in fact I know, there are Palestinians who don’t scream for vengeance whenever the Baruch Goldsteins, Natan-Zendas, or the IDF perpetrates a ritual act of bloodletting. There must be those on both sides who understand that the acts of individual terrorists do not mean that an entire people have hatred of the other inscribed in their DNA; or even that the horrific acts of a national army represents a destiny of perpetual war for both peoples.