Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Levy, Demands of a thief, Haaretz, November 25, 2007

Israel is not being asked “to give” anything to the Palestinians; it is only being asked to return - to return their stolen land and restore their trampled self-respect, along with their fundamental human rights and humanity. This is the primary core issue, the only one worthy of the title, and no one talks about it anymore.

No one is talking about morality anymore. Justice is also an archaic concept, a taboo that has deliberately been erased from all negotiations. Two and a half million people - farmers, merchants, lawyers, drivers, daydreaming teenage girls, love-smitten men, old people, women, children and combatants using violent means for a just cause - have all been living under a brutal boot for 40 years. Meanwhile, in our cafes and living rooms the conversation is over giving or not giving.

Israeli students stand at checkpoints as part of their army reserve duty, brutally deciding the fate of people, and then some rush off to lectures on ethics at university, forgetting what they did the previous day and what is being done in their names every single day.

The incarceration must be ended and the myriad of political prisoners should be released unconditionally. Just as a thief cannot present demands - neither preconditions nor any other terms - to the owner of the property he has robbed, Israel cannot present demands to the other side as long as the situation remains as it is.

…we have no right to do what we are doing: Just as no one would conceive of killing the residents of an entire neighborhood, to harass and incarcerate it because of a few criminals living there, there is no justification for abusing an entire people in the name of our security.

After 40 years, one might have expected that the real core issue would finally be raised for honest and bold discussion: Does Israel have the moral right to continue the occupation?

Gideon Levy, The tahini trail, Haaretz, November 23, 2007

It started at my supermarket in Ramat Aviv. Suddenly huge wooden pallets piled with raw tahini (known in Hebrew as tahina) appeared in the store. The packaging was old-fashioned, the labels tattered, the graphic design uninspired, the Hebrew riddled with errors. But the taste was marvelous. The telephone number listed on the underside of the plastic jar piqued my curiosity. The dove of peace is not dead, nor even bleeding. More and more jars with doves on them have appeared on the shelves of the supermarket. There is Dove Symbol tahini from Nablus, Peace Dove tahini from Mishor Adumim (a Jewish industrial area in the West Bank), and the tahini I discovered, which the supermarket poster calls Dove Tahini, also from Nablus.

But this week we discovered that the dove-like bird on the blue label is not a dove at all, but a karawan, or sand partridge. Karawan Tahini is my house recommendation; I always take some to my good friend Imad Saba, who is in exile in Holland. This item, probably just about the last Palestinian product sold in Israel - and made in the West Bank’s most confined city - has become a hit. It’s the New Middle East, and we are hot on its trail….

There is no sign at the entrance to the plant: We followed the pungent smells. There are two floors - a basement and a ground floor - each 600 square meters in area, with seven employees, 13 at the height of the season, with steam boilers and millstones. Welcome to Karawan Tahini. This is a fourth-generation sesame enterprise, in a Dickensian setting: a few workers in ragged dress are stirring, mixing, pouring and packaging amid swirling steam saturated with the aroma of tahini. Workers in the plant make an average of NIS 50 a day. Politicians and purveyors of the occupation need not apply….Thanks or not, the tahini has to pass through at least two checkpoints on its way to Israel: one that dominates Nablus, the other being the Taibeh checkpoint next to Tul Karm, at the entrance to Israel. You will not hear a word of criticism or complaint from the Tamams. Their tahini passes through the checkpoints quickly and has never been held up for more than a few hours.

What do you mean when you say ‘no’? - Haaretz, November 18, 2007

Of all Israel’s iniquities in the occupied territories - the brutality, the assassinations, the siege, the hunger, the blackouts, the checkpoints and the mass arrests - nothing serves as witness to its real intentions than the settlements. Certainly for the future. Every home built in the territories, every light pole and every road are like a thousand witnesses: Israel does not want peace; Israel wants occupation. Whoever is serious about peace and a Palestinian state does not put up even a shed.

From Oslo through Camp David and on to the road map, Israel has not put an end to the most criminal enterprise in its history. A short memory refresher: In article 7 of the Oslo Accords, Israel promised that “no party would undertake unilateral steps to alter the situation on the ground, prior to the completion of negotiations for the final status.” That really made an impression on Israel. During the 10 years that followed, the number of settlers doubled. What about the heroic peace efforts of Ehud Barak as prime minister? During the 18 months of his government, Israel began the construction of 6,045 residential units in the territories.

And why did Israel sign up to the road map two years later? “The government of Israel will freeze all its settlement activities, in accordance with the Mitchell report, except for natural growth in the settlements.” And what happened in practice? Accusations that the Palestinians are not implementing the agreements, and a boatload of new settlers. This was also the case in 2005, another major “year of peace”: the disengagement. And what did Israel do in its own backyard? Another 12,000 new settlers.

This terrible enterprise, whose purpose is to foil any chance for peace, is also a criminal enterprise. According to Peace Now, based on Civil Administration data that have been kept hidden for years, about 40 percent of the settlements were built on privately owned land of Palestinians helpless to safeguard what is in most cases their sole property that was robbed in broad daylight by an occupying state. This took place years after the Supreme Court ruled in 1979 that it is illegal to build on private Palestinian land. Indeed, while Israel is debating whether it is a state of laws, whether the prime minister was given a discount for the house on Cremieux Street, and whether we want a powerful Supreme Court, we should remember that what is happening in the territories is the real corruption that engulfs us.

Now we are on the eve of another peace event, yet during the past year another 3,525 new residential units were built in the territories, under the auspices of a government that talks incessantly about the end of occupation and two states. All the grandiloquent statements are void of substance when we read the data: Construction is at a peak in 88 settlements.

Twilight Zone / ‘We saw death a thousand times’ - Haaretz, November 15, 2007

Think of your elderly parents. Imagine them sitting on the sofa, cringing with fear, for a whole night, in their tiny apartment, unprotected. Outside a fierce firefight is raging. The night is a cacophony of gunfire and explosions. Dozens of soldiers are moving through the adjacent alley. Then an order is given to come out. Think of your father opening the door, frightened and helpless, in his pajamas, then calling to his wife to go back inside and bring their ID cards. One glance into the courtyard - and he is hit instantly. Five bullets in the stomach and legs, fired by three soldiers sitting on the steps of the house across the way. He falls, writhing in his blood, as his wife looks on, horrified.

Think of your aged mother, trying with all her strength to pull her husband inside and the soldiers prohibiting his evacuation for long, fateful minutes, until the ambulance arrives. Imagine her pangs of terror, impotence, rage and frustration. “Now I am sorry that I did not pick up a big stone and throw it at the soldiers,” says the widow, Subhiya al-Wazir, whose husband, Abed al-Wazir was killed at the threshold of their home in the Ras al-Ayyin neighborhood in the western part of Nablus.

Al-Wazir was a retired accountant who had worked for the Nablus Municipality. He was also the cousin of Khalil al-Wazir, a.k.a. Abu Jihad, the legendary deputy of Yasser Arafat, who was assassinated by Israel on April 16, 1988, in his seaside home in Tunis. A few days ago, his widow, Umm Jihad, a former Palestinian welfare minister, paid a condolence visit in the small home in Nablus. The manner of Abed’s death made him one of the oldest of the shaheeds (martyrs for the cause), but his widow’s nights of horror have not ended. The Israel Defense Forces continues to enter the neighborhood almost every night, plunging fear into the hearts of Subhiya and her neighbors.

Levy, Good news from Gaza, Haaretz, November 11, 2007

We have always acted this way. Without violent Palestinian resistance, life in occupying Israel is great and no one pays any attention to the need to end the occupation. No resistance - no Palestinians. No terrorism - no progress. If not for the Qassams, no one would give any thought to life in Gaza after the disengagement. Ours is a country that has been ready to make concessions only after blood is spilled. Since the interim accords following the Yom Kippur War and through the withdrawal from Lebanon and the disengagement, Israel has needed a relatively strong enemy to get its act together. If not for Hezbollah, we would still be in Lebanon; if not for Hamas, we would still be in Gaza.

Now the time has come for the next chapter: Did we think leaving Gaza and imprisoning it was enough for life in Israel to be hunky-dory? Hamas comes along and reminds us that this does not suffice. The West Bank is quiet in the meantime? Until an organized and strong resistance movement is revived there, we will not consider evacuating even one little outpost. We will conduct talks every two weeks with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, we will go to Annapolis, but we will not discuss, heaven forbid, the “core” issues there. And our terrific lives will continue, while in the West Bank the masses will crowd together at the checkpoints for hours, be subject to humiliation and risk their lives every time they go outside.

Gideon Levy, ANALYSIS: Rabin memorial offers pop stars and empty cliches - Haaretz, November 4, 2007

Banot Nechama, this year’s pop music discovery, was not there last year, but this year the group joined Aharon Barnea, Shimon Peres, Aviv Gefen, Achinoam Nini (”Noa”) and Sarit Haddad, these memorial rallies’ house bands. Last year the writer David Grossman, then a newly bereaved father, was at the podium, crying out against our hollow leaderships, and hearts were briefly stirred. Last year not a single speaker - neither the authors nor the the intellectuals - had anything meaningful to say at the hollow memorial rally for Yitzhak Rabin, which resembled a late-summer Caesarea reunion of the legendary Israeli group Kaveret more than anything else.

The audience was, as always, the same: self-described Ashkenazi, secular, leftist and peace-loving. How good and pleasant it is to stand in the square once a year and feel a part of this warm family, with these excellent Hebrew songs in the background, with the last-minute decision to have the newly bereaved Hagashash Hahiver member Shaike Levy singing “Shir Hare’ut.”

For a moment last night, everyone awoke from a year-long coma: Peace Now, the Labor Party, Meretz, Hashomer Hatzair and the Noar Ha’oved youth movement with their blue shirts. Journalist Aharon Barnea once again put on the angry-prophet suit he wears once a year in early November: “We shall not forget and we shall not forgive,” he thundered, uttering the slogan that was once the province of Holocaust memorial assemblies.

The cliches washed over the square, the “hope,” the “legacy,” the “victory,” the “peace” - no one knows what they really mean.

Levy, The importance of a failed summit - Haaretz, October 29, 2007

Israel is going to Annapolis as if by force. The prime minister’s hands are tied. If he were to dare to raise the core issues, which are the only thing to be discussed there, then his political fate would be sealed. Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu have already announced that in such an event, they will bring down his government. One can assume that Ehud Olmert, the survivor, is aware of this danger. Despite the lofty agreements that he will achieve - or not, it will seem as if his biweekly talks with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas never took place. Eli Yishai won’t permit it, Avigdor Lieberman is making threats and even Ehud Barak is making sour faces. An Israel that refuses to discuss the core issues is an Israel that does not want peace. There’s no other way to put it.

All this is made even more serious by the context in which the summit is being held: Israel never had as few excuses for evading progress toward peace, the ambient climate was never more conducive to progress. The terror card cannot be played again, because the terror has abated. Qassams landing on Sderot and a childish assassination attempt are not a reason to evade the peace process. This low level of terror will, unfortunately, continue to accompany Israeli-Palestinian relations for years to come. We must learn to live with it, and above all recognize that it will not stop in the absence of an agreement that will put an end to the occupation.

There is more. The security issue is much greater today on the Palestinian side. Israel can no longer continue to mouth slogans about security, after seven years in which it killed 4,267 Palestinians, 861 of them children and teens, in comparison to 467 Israelis who were killed, according to data from B’Tselem.

Another excuse that no longer washes is the “no partner” one. Israel has never had an easier peace partner than Mahmoud Abbas. True, he represents barely half the Palestinian people - Olmert represents an even smaller proportion - and true, it would be preferable if the Palestinian team going to Annapolis were to include Hamas, but that is no reason not to try. We destroyed Yasser Arafat as a partner - and the time has come to regret it - but we can no longer use the weakness of his successor as an excuse: Israel did all it could to create that situation. The Arab world, too, is more open to Israel and to peace than ever. Israel is methodically destroying the Arab League’s resolution and the Saudi peace plan, but they are still on the table and sending out an unprecedented message of hope to Israel.

Levy, ‘Everything fell apart’ - Haaretz, October 25, 2007

Shifa, the only medical institution in the Gaza Strip that can somehow be called a hospital, was quiet last week. A deathly silence also pervaded the construction site of what is supposed to be the new surgical wing: There are no construction materials to be had anywhere in Gaza, because of the embargo imposed on it by Israel, and work at the hospital has been frozen for several months, too. The wooden scaffolding stands abandoned. There is no shortage of medicines at the hospital, and fuel for the generators that ensure the electricity supply is provided by a donation from the European Union. The holes in the building’s walls were made by gun battles between Hamas and Fatah, which took place here as well. The elevators are not working, which is not unusual.

In the surgical ward, high up on the fourth floor, lies Assad Mahmoud. Upon entering his room, a visitor is perplexed at first: What is this lying here in the bed? It takes a few seconds for the eye to adjust to the unbearable sight. A boy. Half a boy. What’s left of his upper body is exposed, a bandage covers his stomach, to which a drainage bag is attached; bandages cover his three stumps, a blue sheet covers what’s left of his body. His expression is blank, staring, dead. His father Jabar tenderly clutches the remaining wounded hand, his eyes bleary with grief and lack of sleep. For the last three weeks, 40-year-old Jabar has not left his son’s bedside except for occasional trips home to change clothes. He sleeps on the hospital floor at night. The boy’s right leg is amputated above the knee, the left leg below the knee and his entire left arm, up to the shoulder, is gone. A tank shell left its mark on Assad.

Mohammed al-Dura lives on - Haaretz, October 7, 2007

The concern Israel demonstrates for the fate of one Palestinian boy touches the heart: Again, note what a fuss is being made about the case of the killing of Mohammed al-Dura. Our heart is impervious to the fate of other children who have been killed. Just little Mohammed continues to haunt us. But the question of who killed al-Dura is not important. And maybe he is even alive, as some eccentrics claim. Perhaps he committed suicide, as the strange investigations are liable to suggest.

All of these are tasteless questions designed to divert attention from the truly important issues: According to data collected by human rights group B’Tselem, Israel is responsible for killing more than 850 Palestinian children and teenagers since al-Dura was killed, including 92 in the past year alone. Last October, we killed 31 children in Gaza.

Gideon Levi [Levy], Twilight Zone / Black holes - Haaretz, October 4, 2007

A visit to Ein Beit-Ilma refugee camp on the outskirts of Nablus. We proceed from house to house through the holes made by soldiers in the walls of the rooms. From the home of the Yunes family, our hosts, we make our way to the Rajab family through the hole in the stairwell. From the Rajabs we go on to the Namruttis, this time through the hole in the bedroom wall. From there to the Taha family, now through the living room. “Let’s go back to the street,” says Dr. Ghassan Hamdan, director of Palestinian Medical Relief Services in Nablus, after we have passed dustily through half a dozen homes without having emerged into the street. “We are not soldiers,” he says.

The neighborly relations in this shabby camp are now more open: You can ask a neighbor for salt without having to leave the house. Whole streets can now be traversed indoors, through the walls, one gaping hole after another. The Israel Defense Forces banged its head against the wall, so to speak, until its soldiers found the terrorist who planned to commit suicide, as well as his squad, which had already sent the explosive belt to Tel Aviv.

Along the way, the IDF killed a disabled man, half of whose body was paralyzed, though the IDF claimed he was armed with an M-16 rifle; demolished a five-story building, leaving five families homeless; damaged dozens of other houses around the demolished building; and made the many holes in the walls. One soldier was killed here, Staff Sergeant Ben-Zion Henman, from Moshav Nov, in the Golan Heights, and we are now standing at the spot where he fell.

The IDF was here for three days and four nights in mid-September. Hundreds of soldiers went from house to house, leaving destruction and terror in their wake, arresting many dozens of camp residents, before leaving in the early morning hours of September 21. A large-scale terrorist attack was prevented, and the refugee camp is licking its wounds and calculating the damage.

Gideon Levy, The war for the house - Haaretz, September 30, 2007

Does the fact that the commander of the Popular Front in the camp lives in the house justify demolishing the entire five-story building? When will the IDF learn that the next terrorists will sprout from among these very ruins? Was not the urge for revenge aroused in the heart of the child who searched for the bicycle among the ruins of his home, who saw his world destroyed? Anyone wishing to become acquainted with the real “infrastructure of terror” is invited to travel to Nablus, to see the ruins of the home at the edge of the Ein Beit Ilma camp.

Levy, Puppet leader - Haaretz, September 23, 2007

Mahmoud Abbas has to stay home. As things stand right now, he must not go to Washington. Even his meetings with Ehud Olmert are gradually turning into a disgrace and have become a humiliation for his people. Nothing good will come of them. It has become impossible to bear the spectacle of the Palestinian leader’s jolly visits in Jerusalem, bussing the cheek of the wife of the very prime minister who is meanwhile threatening to blockade a million and a half of his people, condemning them to darkness and hunger.

If Abu Mazen were a genuine national leader instead of a petty retailer, he would refuse to participate in the summit and any other meetings until the blockade of Gaza is lifted. If he were a man of truly historic stature he would add that no conference can be held without Ismail Haniyeh, another crucial Palestinian representative. And if Israel really wanted peace, not only an “agreement of principles” with a puppet-leader that will lead nowhere, it should respect Abbas’ demand. Israel should aspire for Abu Mazen to be considered a leader in the eyes of his people, not only a marionette whose strings are pulled by Israel and the United States, or affected by other short-term power plays.

Gideon Levy, ethnographer of despair and rage, Haaretz
“For the first time in my life I see my mother suffering and I can’t help her. For 46 years, from the time I was born, such a thing never happened - that I couldn’t help my mother,” says the son sadly, after he tried in vain to take his mother from their home in east Barta’a to the government hospital in Jenin, a 20-minute drive during ordinary times, which haven’t been ordinary for a long time.

It’s possible that it was his mother’s time to die in any case, but why did it have to be such a humiliating death, on the floor of a van at the checkpoint? How many more such articles will still be written, and how many times will the Israel Defense Forces explain that “humanitarian cases” are allowed to pass through the checkpoint, an explanation that repeatedly contrasts with reality? On Monday three weeks ago, Kamela Kabha, 78, died that way at the Reihan (Barta’a) checkpoint, while her son Tawfik pleaded for her life.

Levy, there are students and teachers, doctors and patients, children and the elderly, the sick and the healthy, 2002