Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

What’s Driving the Jerusalem Attacks – by Uri Avnery, AW, July 28, 2008

From the utterances of the commentators this week, one can gather that they cannot even imagine the anger that accumulates in the mind of a young Arab in Jerusalem throughout the years of humiliation, harassment, discrimination and helplessness. It is easier and more amusing to go into pornographic descriptions of the 72 virgins waiting for the martyrs in the Muslim paradise – what they do with them, how they do it to them, who has enough energy for them all.

One of the main contributing factors for the stirring up of hatred is the demolition of “illegal” homes of Arab residents, who are quite unable to build “legally”. The dimension of official stupidity is attested to by the demand of the Shin-Bet chief, voiced this week again, to destroy the homes of the attackers’ families, for the sake of “deterrence”. Apparently he has not heard about the dozens of studies and the accumulated experience, which prove that every destroyed home becomes an incubator for new hate-driven avengers….

This week, a lot of proposals were presented, such as building a Berlin-style wall through the middle of Jerusalem (in addition to the one going around it). To punish whole families for the acts of their children, much like the Nazi “sippenhaft”. To expel the families from the city or to cancel their resident status. To demolish their homes. To take away their social insurance benefits, even if they have paid for them.All these “solutions” have one thing in common – they have been tried in the past, here and in other places, and found wanting.

Except one, clear solution: to turn East Jerusalem into the capital of the State of Palestine, to enable its inhabitants to set up their own municipality, while keeping the whole city as an urban entity united under one super-municipality in which the Arabs will be equal to the Jews….

The attacks are the result of despair, frustration, hatred and the sense that there is no way out. Only a solution that will remove these feelings can bring security to both parts of Jerusalem.

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.

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.

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.

Bernard Avishai Dot Com, July 3, 2008

Abed has a quick mind, infectious smile and Zhivago-like eyes. He could have been anything he set his mind to becoming. He once told me the story of how he and his closest friends had dreamed of studying the law, that a couple of them actually went to Cairo to get law degrees, but that he wanted to start making money and missed the boat, you know, for reasons young men later come to regret. But he did go to work and did begin saving his money–6 a.m. to 4 p.m., every day for 20 years.

When Abed had finally squirreled-away enough, just around the turn of the millennium, he started building himself a stately house in the northern Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina, just beyond Shuafat, but before the Jewish neighborhood of Neve Yaacov. He and his family finally moved into the house, his dream palace, in 2003. This was, of course, the height of the Al-Aqsa Intifadah.

In 2004, the government announced that the security wall was going up. Beit Hanina was going to be on the other side of it. Abed and his family were given days to find a place inside the wall, or he would be considered a resident of the Palestinian territories, not Jerusalem; he would lose his job, and they would lose their social insurance and health benefits (which his taxes had paid for all those years).

Abed told me this story with resignation. Who lives in the house?, I asked him at the time? “The birds,” he said, and added: “God is great.” His family squeezed into a two bedroom flat. The only time his eyes teared up was when he explained how he had to pull his kids from school and tell them they could no longer play with their friends. In all the years I have known him, I’ve heard nothing but words of revulsion for violence of any kind.

Daoud Kuttab: Life is an ID Card for a 16-Year-Old in Palestine, August 9, 2003

For most teenagers, the world over, the age of sixteen is supposed to be a happy one. However, reaching 16 for Palestinians, especially those living in East Jerusalem, is not much fun. This is the age that they are supposed to start carrying the dreaded identification card and in turn the soldiers (not much older than them) can take pot shots at them without much concern or worry. Any young Palestinian looking close to 16 better have an ID or a birth certificate showing that he/she is under this age.

My daughter Tamara who spent her 16th birthday as a senior in an Ohio High School as an exchange student, came home for the summer to obtain her ID. Her cousin, Manuel Abu Ali, who just turned sixteen, has been moving around Jerusalem with difficulty, using his mother’s ID (which has his name listed) along with his school picture ID. For Palestinians of Jerusalem, getting a personal ID, which ought to be a simple affair, has become the new via de la Rosa. Unlike Israelis who get a five or ten year passport, Palestinians in Jerusalem can travel only on a laisser passier which can be issued for only a year, thus adding to an exasperating problem where 250,000 Palestinians are served by a single office of the Ministry of Interior and are denied the right to use any other office to get official document they need.

Palestinians in Jerusalem wishing to obtain any of these official government certificates (birth, marriage license, travel document or even death certificates) face the impossible task of simply entering the Interior Ministry offices.

“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.

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.

A woman walking down steps in the old city of Jerusalem, November 18, 2007. Photo by Michal Fattal/Flash90.

Flash 90

Uzi Benziman, A strange struggle for Jerusalem – Haaretz, December 9, 2007

Jerusalem as a whole is losing its productive backbone and is deepening its dependence on state handouts. Young, secular, educated people able to earn a wage are leaving it in droves, followed by their parents. The city leadership is in the hands of ultra-Orthodox elected officials who imbue their managerial style with concepts derived from their world and priorities. This process stems from demographics whose significance is highlighted by the following projection: In about eight years the number of students in Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox elementary schools will be more than three times the number of students in secular and religious public schools.

That is the backdrop against which we should judge recent statements by groups that call on the public to keep Jerusalem united. A ludicrous gap exists between the organizations’ rhetoric and the forces shaping the city. The fiery slogans the heads of these organizations spout, the noisy rallies they initiate, the poetic declarations by Knesset members when they try to hold the state to its obligation to keep Jerusalem unified are about a city looking more and more like Safed (with all due respect to that city). Some areas of Jerusalem are increasingly more reminiscent of Umm al-Fahm (with all due respect to that city).

Hatem Moussa/Associated Press

JERUSALEM Thousands of Israeli demonstrators gathered Monday to show their opposition to concessions to the Palestinians.

Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

GAZA Two of Hamas’s top leaders, Ismail Haniya, center, and Mahmoud Zahar, right, at a Palestinian conference on Monday.

Hamas Urges Taking Hard Line Against Israel, New York Times, November 27, 2007

By ISABEL KERSHNER and TAGHREED EL-KHODARY
Published: November 27, 2007

JERUSALEM, Nov. 26 — The leaders of Hamas espoused a hard line against Israel at a conference that they and the militant Islamic Jihad faction convened in Gaza on Monday, the eve of the American-sponsored Middle East peace gathering in Annapolis, Md.
Also on Monday, Israeli right-wing activists stepped up their campaign against possible concessions to the Palestinians with demonstrations in Jerusalem.

In Gaza, Ismail Haniya, Hamas’s leader, said, “Let the whole world hear us: We will not relinquish a centimeter of Palestine, and we will not recognize Israel.” Mr. Haniya, who is usually associated with the more pragmatic wing of the Islamic movement, was responding to a refugee from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war who came up to the podium showing the deed for land he had left behind in what is now Israel.

Daniel Seidelmann, Annapolis and the “Jerusalem paradigm” | openDemocracy, October 31, 2007

Sit any Friday afternoon on the corner of el-Wad Street and St Stephen’s Road in Jerusalem’s Old City, just opposite the Austrian hospice. Thousands of Muslim worshippers throng to the mosques on Haram al-Sharif. Additional thousands of Orthodox Jews flock to prayers at the Western Wall. And the brown-robed Franciscans bearing the cross turn the corner and proceed to the Third Station of the Cross. Lest this picture appear overly idyllic: CCTV security cameras are ever-present, as are patrols of the Israel border police, while a handful of messianic Jewish settlers dart out of the Muslim quarter alleys.

In that one small scene, you can see it all. Three mutually incompatible religious narratives (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) and two mutually incompatible national narratives (the Israeli and the Palestinian) cohabit the same sacred and secular space, not larger than three square kilometres in size. Jerusalem has an undeserved reputation for being nitroglycerin – any random jolt causes it to explode. That’s nonsense. For the past 1,300 years, Jerusalem has been the counter-paradigm to a “clash of civilisations”. It isn’t “fuzzy-warm” or “touchy-feely”, and no “it’s-a-small-world-after-all” tunes waft in the air, but it works.

That’s the good news. Here’s the bad news. Jerusalem’s Old City is also the playground for Muslim, Christian and Jewish exclusionary fundamentalists who seek, respectively: jihad, armageddon and wars of Mitzvah. Jerusalem may not be nitroglycerin, but if handled poorly, i.e., by allowing the radical fundamentalists to romp freely, it becomes a small atomic device.

The crucible

The forthcoming Annapolis meeting – at a date yet to be confirmed (possibly 26 November 2007) – is not merely an attempt to substantively address the core issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is also (and perhaps foremost) an attempt to realign the forces of moderation in the middle east into a powerful, albeit uneasy, coalition that will not only combat but provide a positive option in face of an ascending radical Islam. As such, Jerusalem will not only be a prominent item on the Annapolis agenda. It will also be the physical embodiment of Annapolis’s goals – a non-violent interface between Islam, the Arab world and the west; or alternatively, an embodiment of Annapolis’s worst dreams – the place where the tectonic plates of Islam and the west crush and grind one another, with all that ensues.

For decades, Jerusalem has been peddled as the “most difficult to solve” and left to some undetermined future date. No longer: Jerusalem’s time has come. Regardless of how counterintuitive this may sound, seriously addressing the final-status issues relating to Jerusalem is one of the easier ways of generating high dividends at a reasonable cost.