Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Gershom Gorenberg, The Case for Putting a Mideast Peace Agreement First | The American Prospect, Nov. 14, 2008
Barack Obama should address the need for an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement sooner rather than later.

Time’s up. Despite the bluster at George W. Bush’s Potemkin peace conference in Annapolis one year ago, Israel and the Palestinians will not reach a peace agreement by the end of 2008. Please folks, don’t all faint at once from surprise.

Barack Obama will inherit this mess, along with all the others. Very soon, he must decide how quickly to throw his weight behind Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, what to aim for, and how to succeed where so many others have failed.

The answer: Move fast, very fast. Ignore all advice from old diplomatic hands wholl tell you to avoid big, difficult issues and to stick to crisis management and interim accords. Seek a full end-of-conflict agreement. And apply lessons from your electoral campaign: Enforce absolute message discipline in your own team, and employ dramatic public events and rhetoric to restore peoples belief that change is possible.

The temptation for delay is obvious. The list of crises facing Obama starts with the economic collapse, Iraq, and Afghanistan. But as he’s said, “A president has to be able to do more than one thing at a time.”

Immediate, high-profile engagement with Israel and the Palestinians would be the clearest proof to frustrated American allies in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world that the Bush years of American unilateralism are over. Reaching an agreement would end the tension between American support for Israel and maintaining warm ties with moderate Arab regimes. It would eliminate one of the main causes of anti-Western resentment in the Arab world, reducing the influence both of Iran and of radical Sunni Islamicists.

By acting quickly — addressing the issue before he formally takes office and perhaps in his inaugural address, and by visiting the region early next year — Obama can exploit the awe that his election inspires. A small example: The daily Haaretz, normally a frighteningly staid newspaper, covered its entire front page on Nov. 4 with a photo of Obama, one hand held high, facing what looked like a pillar of cloud in the distance, as if he were Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt. The headline, in English, was “Yes We Can.” In January, Obama will still be a symbol of transformation. If he waits two or three years, he will be a shopworn president.

Prof. Sternhell: Supporters of occupation are not Zionist – Haaretz, September 29, 2008
By Akiva Eldar

Professor Zeev Sternhell’s house on Jerusalem’s Agnon Street is easily located by the iron gate with the broken glass. Sternhell says the bombing could have ended with him having to have both legs amputated.

Fortunately, last Thursday night he and his wife Ziva had returned from abroad and their suitcases, left in the narrow hallway, separated him and the pipe bomb that had been attached to the door.

The living room is filled with flowers and the telephone doesn’t stop ringing. The news is quoting ministers’ statements from the cabinet meeting.

Sternhell, while still in the hospital, drew a direct line between the state’s surrender to the extreme right rampaging in the territories and the terrorist or organization that tried to kill him.

“What are those ministers talking about,” he asks, when Vice Premier Haim Ramon blasts the government on the television news for fearing “those hooligans,” as Ramon called them.

Sternhell: “Who has to deal with the outposts? Me? You? Who’s to blame for the semi-autonomous state in the territories? Groups of settlers do whatever they feel like. Police officers and reserve soldiers go home with broken arms. How did they let things deteriorate to this lack of control in the West Bank? I told my students that not intervening for a weak child who needs help against a strong child is intervening for the strong child. Whoever fails to enforce the law and protect the Palestinians from the settlers who attack them is cooperating with the hooligans and lawbreakers.”

Dichter: Prof attack takes us back to days of Rabin assassination – Haaretz, September 26, 2008

By Shahar Ilan and Roni Singer-Heruti, Haaretz Correspondent, and Haaretz Service

Public Security Minister Avi Dichter joined senior political officials on Thursday in condemning a pipe bomb attack on the home of left-wing activist and Haaretz columnist Professor Ze’ev Sternhell, saying that the incident called to mind the days of the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Dichter described the event, which left Sternhell lightly wounded, an “assassination attempt” and a “nationalistic terror attack perpetrated, in all likelihood, by Jews, which pushes our society many years backward.”

Speaking at a police ceremony in Netanya, Dichter added that “the pipe bomb that was planted yesterday should be viewed as a bomb meant to kill. The law enforcement authorities will not rest until the terrorists are put where they belong ? [sic] in prison.”

Police suspect Jewish extremists of having carried out the pipe bomb attack earlier in the day. Sternhell walked out of his home in a quiet Jerusalem neighborhood shortly after midnight to shut a courtyard gate when the bomb went off, lightly wounding him in one of his legs, Jerusalem police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby said.

“We believe the background is ideological,” police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.

Sternhell, an internationally renowned expert on the history of fascism, was awarded the country’s highest honor, the Israel Prize, earlier this year. The award drew fire from West Bank settlers and their supporters, who unsuccessfully petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court to try to block it.

Shlomo Ben-Ami, A War to Start All Wars, Foreign Affairs, September-October 2008

A War to Start All Wars
Will Israel Ever Seal the Victory of 1948? (A Review Article)

1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. Benny Morris. Yale University Press, 2008, 544 pp. $32.50.

Summary: Israel should pull back settlements and give up its ‘67 gains in order to secure its ‘48 victory.

Shlomo Ben-Ami was Israel’s Foreign Minister in 2000-2001. He is Vice President of the Toledo International Center for Peace, in Spain, and the author of Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy.

For 60 years, both the Israelis and the Palestinians have used the past to illuminate the present and confer legitimacy on their nations’ respective founding myths. Of course, Zionists and Palestinian nationalists were not the first to embellish the stories of their nations’ births or make excuses for their tragedies. Throughout history, nations have been born in blood and frequently in sin. This is why, as the French philosopher Ernest Renan wrote, they tend to lie about their pasts.

The birth of the state of Israel in 1948 has long been the subject of self-congratulatory historiography by the victorious side and grievance-filled accounts by disinherited Palestinians. To the Israelis, the 1948 war was a desperate fight for survival that was settled by an almost miraculous victory. In the Arab world, accounts of the war tend to advance conspiracy theories and attempt to shift the blame for the Arabs’ defeat. In both cases, the writing of history has been part of an uncritical nationalist quest for legitimacy.

Refusing to admit that the noble Jewish dream of statehood was stained by the sins of Israel’s birth and eager to deny the centrality of the Palestinian problem to the wider conflict in the Middle East, the Israelis have preferred to dwell on their struggle for independence against the supposedly superior invading Arab armies. But the war between the indigenous Palestinian population and the Yishuv, the organized Jewish community of Palestine, was arguably the fiercest phase of the conflict. It was during this period — between November 30, 1947, and May 15, 1948 — that the fate of the nascent Jewish state really seemed to hang by a thread. Nevertheless, the popular notion cultivated since then has repressed the memory of this fighting and focused instead on the heroic stand of the tiny Yishuv against the invading Arab armies during the second phase of the war, from May 15, 1948, to the spring of 1949. When the war was over, the Palestinian problem practically disappeared from Israeli public debate, or it was conveniently defined as one of “refugees” or “infiltrators.” It was as if there were no Israeli-Palestinian conflict or Palestinian people. As Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously put it in 1969, “They did not exist.”

Gideon Levy / The last of the dreamers of peace – Haaretz, August 28, 2008

It was a Saturday afternoon in the late 1980s. We entered The Voice of Peace’s rickety Subaru truck and drove to Gaza to Mahmoud Zahar’s house. Afternoon coffee with the Hamasnik, just imagine. Imagine that once it was possible to visit Zahar on a Saturday afternoon. Just think  there once was a man here who dreamed of peace.

Picture a pilot who never drove a car. All those things sound like hallucinations now, even more than they used to.

Abie Nathan was perhaps the only Israeli who felt guilty about 1948. As a volunteer pilot from overseas he had bombed Palestinian villages and then wanted to make up for it. He didn’t shoot and whine about it but actually tried to make amends.

Today that sounds like science fiction. Israeli? Very doubtful. He lived among us for decades, but Abie dreamed in English and thought in Hindi. He helped Palestinian children, but also hastened to every disaster area in the world. In that, too, he was perhaps the last Israeli who saw compassion and aid as global notions. Our Mother Teresa.

Like another central figure in the Israeli peace movement, Uri Avneri (may he live long), he was both a bohemian and an ideologist. No party was comparable to Nathan’s roof parties in North Tel Aviv’s Zirelson Street. Nobody could be as treacherous as us, who lived it up at his parties and then abandoned him after he became sick and wheelchair-ridden many years ago. There are dozens of people around town who should feel deeply guilty today for neglecting him so criminally, including this writer.

Uri Avnery, The Devil’s Hoof, Gush Shalom, August 23, 2008

The “One-State Solution” is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. The One-State idea is not a solution, but an anti-solution. It is a recipe for an ongoing bloody conflict. Not a dream, but a nightmare.

There is no chance at all that the Jewish public will agree, in this generation or the next, to live as a minority in a state dominated by an Arab majority. 99.99% of the Jewish population will fight against this tooth and nail. The demography will not stop haunting them, but on the contrary, it will push them to do things which are unthinkable today. Ethnic cleansing will become a practical agenda. Even moderate Israelis will be driven into the arms of the fascist right-wing. All means of oppression will become acceptable when the Jewish majority adopts the aim of causing the Arabs to leave the country before they have a chance of becoming the majority.

True believers in the bi-national state idea will say: OK, let it be. We shall have one or two generations of bloodshed, of a state of civil war, but in the end we shall persuade or compel the Jews to accord the Palestinians citizenship and equality. But what normal people would take such a risk?

The real choice is, therefore: the “Two-State Solution” or the “Ethnic Cleansing Solution”.

Eve Spangler: The Deaths of Children, Counterpunch, July 18, 2008

We are not shown that far more Palestinian than Israeli children live in daily danger: lacking medical treatment in Gaza, on the verge of malnutrition, caught up in brutality at check points or simply walking home from school. We learn little of what every Israeli might easily know from consulting the B’Tselem web site (B’Tselem is dedicated to documenting and contesting human rights violations in the Occupied Terrirtories). Their data show, for example, that in the seven years between September, 2000 and August, 2007, the Israeli defense forces killed 4233 Palestinians and Israeli civilians killed an additional 41. During that same period, which includes the suicide bombings of the second Intifada, 320 Israeli soldiers and 471 Israeli civilians were killed by Palestinians. Even more to the point for people who wish to base their political arguments on the lives of children: during those same years, 857 Palestinian children were killed by Israelis and 119 Israeli children were killed by Palestinians.

And, of course the death toll is merely the tip of the iceberg. It does not count the school closures or ill-stocked clinics. It does not count the cost of watching the grown-ups in your world being humiliated. It does not count the fear that there is no reliable economy to sustain your future. It does not count the cost of sleep interrupted by missiles and rocket-fire.

Perhaps those 857 dead Palestinian children are best represented by the life and death of 9 year old Abir Aramin. On January 16, 2007, Abir Aramin was walking home from school when the Israeli Border Police, a branch of the Israeli army, swept through the town, as they had on many other days right around the time of school closing. Children fled before their jeeps. Abir took shelter against a store and was shot in the back of the head at close range. She died soon thereafter at Hadassah Hospital. She was the child of Bassam and Salwa Aramin. Her father, a member of Fateh, had been labeled a terrorist and served 9 years in an Israeli jail for his attempt to throw a grenade at an Israeli jeep. Upon emerging from prison, he became one of the Palestinian founders of Combatants for Peace and continues to work with his Israeli counterparts to bring an end to the occupation, even after Abir’s death. No Israeli soldier has been charged in the case.

An account of Abir’s death was written by Nurit Elhanan-Peled [Peled-Elhanan] , an Israeli mother whose daughter Smadar was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber . Nurit Elhanan-Peled is one of the founders of Parents Circle-Family Forum, a grassroots organization for bereaved Palestinians and Israelis. She offers these observations:

“I sit with her mother Salwa and try to say, ‘We are all victims of occupation.’ As I say it, I know that her hell is more terrible than mine. My daughter’s murderer had the decency to kill himself … The soldier who killed Abir is probably drinking beer, playing backgammon with his mates and going to discotheques at night. Abir is in a grave.”

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.

I am Bassam Aramin by Rami Elhanan – Common Ground News Service

JERUSALEM—Last Thursday evening, my family was invited to dinner at the home of Bassam Aramin, in Anata.

Anata is a twenty minute ride from Motza, twenty light years away from Jerusalem.

We ate a mountain of maqloube with almonds and yogurt. Bassam told us about his meeting with the actor Shlomo Wizcinski who is slated to play Bassam in a new play. And my wife gave his wife, Salwa, a gift: a silver pendant with the name of her daughter Abir, may she rest in peace, made by a Jerusalem silversmith.

We laughed. It was fun. It was emotional.

And then, on the television screen, we saw the images of the attack on the Jerusalem Merkaz Harav school.

And again a cold hand seizes your heart, and again the blood freezes in your veins, again that sword twists inside you, knowing again there will be no rest until that blood is avenged. On the side of the screen, a news ticker of stark updates from Gaza: eight dead in one hour.

And beside the television, Salwa is bitter with tears for the mothers of the dead.

It was hard. Truly hard.

“Alright,” said Bassam when we parted. “At least we’ll see each other in Warsaw on Sunday…”

The two of use were invited by Warsaw television and HBO for the premier of a new documentary about the Israeli-Palestinian bereaved families organization, Parents Circle-Families Forum. I was glad. I knew that together we would be able to pass on a message of hope to people who, for the most part, had not the faintest idea about the conflict. I knew that by virtue of our shared grief people would listen to us—and perhaps even talk about peace.

Amos Harel, Experts: Extreme rightists will use violence if settlements are evacuated – Haaretz, December 20, 2007

Extreme right-wing activists are expected to use severe violence to disrupt any move to evacuate outposts or settlements, even the destruction of a few homes, according to an evaluation recently presented to the government by the security establishment and law enforcement officials in the territories.

The evaluation states that the violence during any attempt at evacuation would be more serious than that seen during the evacuation of Amona two years ago.

However security officials do not at this stage foresee an increased threat to the lives of senior politicians, because the extreme right does not appear to believe the Annapolis process will succeed and therefore the settlements are not in danger.
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After the evacuation of Amona two years ago, the ideological foundations and plans of actions were reformulated against future evacuations. In a booklet distributed at one of the extreme-right rallies, the message was that violence might deter the government from additional evacuations.

“The war must be brought to the field of the enemy,” the booklet said. “In this matter and in this situation [evacuation], the IDF is the enemy.”

The security establishment believes that any attempt to evacuate settlements will result in violence against the security forces, large-scale disturbances, and endangerment of human life. The experts also see widespread refusal of orders in the IDF.

Spreading his wings – Haaretz, December 8, 2007

…a Channel 1 reporter asked: “Brigadier General Spector, are you a ‘refusenik’?”

Though he did not initially grasp its full significance, the question itself was enough to make him queasy. He asked the reporter to repeat it. “At the time I was not proficient enough … I was not effective enough at responding, I hadn’t yet completely organized things in my head. I admit that what bothered me most then was not the moral aspect of the IAF, but its combat level. I asked myself why it was necessary to kill 15 children in order to liquidate one terrorist.”

And what about the moral angle?

Spector: “With regard to the moral aspect, I thought at first that there had been a mistake – that maybe the pilots and their commanders didn’t know there were civilians there, even though it’s not so logical to expect that in a densely populated area like Gaza, Shehadeh, of all people, would be in civilian-free surroundings,” Spector notes, referring to the July 2002 operation in which the IAF bombed the apartment building in which Salah Shehadeh, the head of the Hamas military wing in Gaza, resided with his family.

Avraham Burg: Time to attack – Haaretz, August 28, 2007

There is no theological difference between certain rabbis from Hebron, the former Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and the evangelical preacher hoping for Armageddon at the site of our Megiddo. Those who say that “God’s law is first” are no different from one another, whether they wear a rabbi’s skullcap, Hezbollah’s turban or the cloak of a North American spiritual leader. They are all engaged in a cruel battle against me. They are the enemies of freedom and democracy, and are hostile to liberty, equality and the status of women.

In a world like this, we must form new coalitions. The division between “us” and “our enemies” cannot be based merely along national or familial lines, or in beliefs and genetics. The world is divided into a coalition of some Jews, some Christians and some Muslims, versus other members of their nations and religions. Democracy versus theology.

This is not a “gentle” argument, but rather war – the rabbi against the sovereign, the “Jewish” against the “democratic,” halakha and sharia against civil law, the church against the state. They cannot live under the same roof, and they are currently fighting the most ancient and most modern war – religion versus state.

And in war, like in war: The legal standing of the inciting rabbi is the same as that of the inciting sheikh, because both are equally hostile. One wants to see me dead physically, and the other wants to see me dead democratically and morally. Since I oppose the death sentence in all cases, I cannot thus condemn my domestic enemies. But the army of the democratic state, as well as its systems of governance, must purify itself from all the enemies planted by theocracy. The “army of God” must not be permitted to gain control of the institutions of state power.

The Magnes Zionist: Mazel Tov, Activists and Anarchists — the Latter-Day Maccabees (But with a Better Sense of Humor), December 5, 2007

In a clever and well-coordinated move (what happened to the Shabak?), seventy activists panned out through Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa, and plastered 10,000 electricity cut-off notices to the residents. Of course, the cut-off notices were bogus, but they served to literally bring home to the Israelis that Gaza has been threatened by Israel with a general electricity and fuel shut-off in reprisal for shelling Sderot.

Now, the average Israeli will point out how justified Israel’s actions are. I mean, let’s face it, if the Israelis wanted to, they could just wipe Gaza off the face of the earth. The fact that they only hold a million human beings hostage and pressure them collectively whenever they want to (and their High Court lets them) shows how moral they are. Hell, they are the most moral country in the world. What other country would let the little b-stards lob shells into the city. I mean, Israel pulled out of their overcrowded hell-hole, didn’t it? (”The better to squeeze them, my dear….”)

That’s what the average Israeli says, considering the responses on the websites.

Pity the average Israeli.

Read about it in Hebrew here and here and here and here and here (this has a video clip; you have to wait through a dumb commercial before you get to it, but it’s worth it). And in English here

This protest action was sponsored by a coalition of lefties calling themselves, the Front for the Liberation of Gaza. They include some of the “Anarchists” who have been protesting the systematic expropriation of the lands of Bil’in every week. Lately they have also been involved in protesting the Israelis-only road 443, the most notorious of the roads of hafradah (Hebrew for “separation”; I wouldn’t dignify the ideology behind it with the term “apartheid”) And many other groups were involved.

Remember when Israelis justified checkpoints and closures by saying that they were “inconveniences” at worst? Well, apparently, the inconvenience of removing posters on their doors has been driving some of them nuts. Imagine what they would do if some of them had to stand in line for hours to get past a checkpoint? Of if their wives died in labor, or their children were stillborn because they did not have the right permit? Some of them would be fighting each other to sign up for the Masada suicide terrorist brigade.