Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Uri Avnery, The Mother of all Pretexts - Gush Shalom, October 13, 2007

The salvation came from America: a professor named Samuel Huntington wrote a book about the “Clash of Civilizations”. And so we found the mother of all pretexts.

THE ARCH-ENEMY, according to this theory, is Islam. Western Civilization, Judeo-Christian, liberal, democratic, tolerant, is under attacked from the Islamic monster, fanatical, terrorist, murderous.

Islam is murderous by nature. Actually, “Muslim” and “terrorist” are synonymous. Every Muslim is a terrorist, every terrorist a Muslim.

A sceptic might ask: How did it happen that the wonderful Western culture gave birth to the Inquisition, the pogroms, the burning of witches, the annihilation of the Native Americans, the Holocaust, the ethnic cleansings and other atrocities without number - but that was in the past. Now Western culture is the embodiment of freedom and progress.

Like Gideon Levy, Amira Hass is not simply a great journalist. She is a great human being.

Amira Hass, Disrupting the separation policy, Haaretz, September 25, 2007

Last Friday morning, the eve of Yom Kippur, Machsom Watch activists had to spend hours making frantic telephone calls and using their connections with high-ranking officials to enable three sick people to traverse the Qalandiyah checkpoint and reach Jerusalem for urgent treatment. Media reports had promised that despite the hermetic closure, humanitarian cases would be allowed through the checkpoints, but by noon, most of those cases had given up and returned home.

In other cases, Machsom Watch’s female volunteers try to alert commanders when soldiers are harassing people passing through the checkpoints. Months of correspondence and requests, reports in Haaretz and monitoring by B’Tselem resulted in two commanders being removed from the Taysir checkpoint. This did not stop a soldier from harassing people at that checkpoint a few months later, nor did it prevent similar abusive conduct at other checkpoints.

Danny Rubinstein, How many were arrested last night? - Haaretz, September 24, 2007

Shortly before his death three years ago, the sociologist Gadi Yatziv wrote that in the IDF struggle against terrorism, victory is part of failure. It is impossible to win because every raid, assassination, arrest and roadblock stir[s] rage and hatred and broaden[s] the pool of conscripts for terrorist cells. But it is also impossible to fail because the spokesmen of the Israeli security establishment will always claim that without these raids and roadblocks, terrorism will be much worse. It is an argument that cannot be refuted.

A meeting at Qalandiyah - Haaretz 

The Web site Mahsanmilim - Reports from the West Bank (www.mahsanmilim.com) - grew from a 31-second video clip in which Palestinian teacher and poet Hatem Hushi stands next to the Ofer Blockade, a roadblock erected by the Israel Defense Forces on Al-Khader Road, at the entrance to Bethlehem. He stands in front of the camera reciting a poem, in Hebrew, that speaks of his longing for the city of Holon (tinyurl.com/2awa3t). When he finishes the last line of the poem, he smiles self-consciously, and the clip ends.

“There is something in that scene that is so absolute. It sheds light on everything, unravels everything,” says Aya Kaniuk. She and Tamar Goldschmidt, who filmed the scene, have been running the site for about two years.

“It was at one of the blockades. Hatem was carrying a cane, and he suddenly came up to us and said, ‘I am the only Palestinian poet who writes in Hebrew.’ He wanted to read us a poem, a love poem to Holon. Later, we discovered he was a cancer patient, and he was on his way to chemotherapy treatment. But he didn’t want to talk about the fact that, because of the blockade, he couldn’t get to his treatments. He wrote a poem and presented it to the outside world.”

The clip about Hatem Hushi is only one of the films, pictures, and texts that comprise the Mahsanmilim (word warehouse) site. It is one of the most interesting political sites in Israel. There are provocative scenes, like the one documenting soldiers abusing peddlers in Qalandiyah (tinyurl.com/32xsba) or the young girl bursting into tears in front of a soldier at the Hawara checkpoint (tinyurl.com/2eugss). But the site does not promote sensational documentation of one type of event or another.