So for those of you who had anything better to do than say keep up with Princeton’s great hummus debate of 2010 may not have heard the news out of the Central Jersey Ivy League last week.
The referendum failed. According to The Daily Princetonian a total of 1,014 students voted against the referendum, while 699 students voted in favor (out of 4,878 undergraduates total).
In a follow-up article about the vote, both sides seem to claim victory and honestly I think the real winners are the food service workers who have to deal with both sets of entitled Princetonians.
As I wrote before, this is possibly the stupidest student government action I have ever heard of…however it did spark some sort of real conversation about boycotts and divestment. In the same article, Yoel Bitran, of the poorly named PCP, said, “We’re having a big panel on boycott, divestment and sanctions coming up next week, and we’re very excited to plan for next semester.”
Maybe the pro-Israel group can have an equally constructive conversation about the reasons building settlements is ok because God said it was cool.
A short article in the Independent talks about the work of Rabbi Arik Ascherman, director and Co-founder of Rabbis for Human Rights. The organization is perhaps one of a very few which represents rabbis of all branches of Judaism, who together stand up for Human Rights in Israel.
The organization has three main focii: “human rights education, including courses in pre-army colleges; social and economic justice in Israel, which has seen it, with other Israeli groups, win a signal victory in halting the country’s draconian welfare-to-work project; and Palestinian human rights. This last includes a legal initiative which has reversed the takeover of hundreds of acres of Palestinian land by the settlements.”
Of the three, the project which RHR is perhaps most famous for is the protection of the olive harvest in Israel. Despite ostensible legal protection for olive trees in Israel – not to mention the law of the Torah which forbids attacking trees and cutting them down wantonly, even at a time of war, olive trees have been a target of settlers who also may attack Palestinians, settle illegally on Palestinian land or engage in other un-Torah-like behavior.
The inspiration came in 2002, when Noaf abu Ghabia, a Palestinian deeply committed even at the peak of the intifada to co-existence and non-violence, and with whom RHR had joined in various symbolic Jewish-Arab tree plantings, appealed for help against settlers attacking harvesters in the village of Yanoun. RHR began bringing volunteers, and three years later won a crucial High Court ruling ordering the army to protect the harvest.
While it was, as he puts it, a “high maintenance victory”, requiring a constant presence of the volunteers, Ascherman says that this year the army has – despite some exceptions – largely fulfilled the first two requirements of the ruling: protection of access to the land and of Palestinian farmers as they pick the olives. “There are farmers reaching olive trees they haven’t been able to reach for 10 and 15 years,” he says. What the army has been much less good at – so much so that RHR is close to returning to the High Court for a new order – is preventing the destruction of trees and theft of olives by the settlers.
Ascherman has a theory that the settlers’ actions are a response to the nascent peace process, which they see as an “existential threat” to their way of life. He reels off a list of villages where olives have been stolen – sometimes before the harvest – or trees poisoned or cut down. Then he takes us to perhaps the saddest sight of this year’s harvest, the scorched fields within sight of the notably hard-line settlement outpost of Havat Gilad.
Here, between 1,500 and 2,000 trees were burned two weeks ago by settlers – according to some witnesses, with troops looking on – as the “price” for the destruction by the army of two illegal buildings in the outpost earlier in the day
By now you all have heard of the Princeton referendum being offered by a group of concerned students at the Ivy League campus in New Jersey. Sabra Hummus has been declared an enemy of Palestine and should be banned from campus there should be other options for students to purchase when they desire a creamy Middle Eastern dip.
Don’t get me wrong, I am all for meaningless political action in college; after all I was an elected member of the student senate back in college, so I know all about that. But when it comes to an elite institution of higher learning such as Princeton, I kind of expect more than a call to action that involves the inclusion other chickpea spreads. More »
(The following is a condensed report of an Israeli and Palestinian delegation I was part of two weeks ago in Istanbul)
“The word ‘peace’ has become hollow.It has lost its meaning,” said one of the participants.“That may feel like the case,” said another, “but we cannot let the voice of despair and violence re-appropriate our language for the world we hope to build.”
This excerpt came from a recent gathering of Israelis and Palestinian peace builders meeting in Istanbul, Turkey.The gathering was billed as a “Consultation” of bi-communal field experts. Over the course of three days, twenty participants acted as a think-tank to envision the seemingly impossible – the reemergence of a cross-border peace movement in Israel / Palestine.
The host organization was a Massachusetts based NGO called the Karuna Center for Peacebuilding (KCP), which specialize in bi-communal trainings for grassroots peace-building practitioners all over the globe.Istanbul was chosen as a compromise for an off-site location close enough but far enough away from the conflict zone.Ten Israelis and ten Palestinians, from places that included Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem, Jaffa, each with advanced level peace-building resumes, were invited.
The founder ofKaruna Center for Peacebuilding, Dr. Paula Green, organized this gathering with one goal in mind: to assess ‘what kind of bi-communal programming would be useful for this region.’In other words, what kinds of trainings or actions could bring Israelis and Palestinians together in joint cooperation under today’s reality? What could be helpful now, when the prospects for meaningful resolutions are not promising and the political will of the leaders are not inspiring.But this was not a gathering of politicians.The twenty men and women, ranging from their late twenties to their early sixties, were assembled in an effort to help make sure that grassroots collaboration projects between Israelis and Palestinians do not become extinct.
As irrelevant as co-existence work may often seem to a cynical person, this was a battle tested group of peace workers.More »
There has been quite a bit of conversation both on this blog and in the Jewish press and blogosphere on both the tactics and content of the recent JVP action at the GA. I have to say I was really inspired to see the coverage and conversation generated by these protests. More than that, I am inspired by the statements behind them. Talking back to Bibi was a way of getting heard. The message, contained in their Young Jewish and Proud declaration, makes it clear why we should, in the words of Peter Beinart, “expect more of this.”
We are not apathetic. We know and name persecution when we see it. Occupation has constricted our throats and fattened our tongues. We are feeding each other new words. We have family, we build family, we are family. We re-negotiate. We atone. We re-draw the map every single day. We travel between worlds. This is not our birthright, it is our necessity.
Not only should we expect to hear this message getting louder and stronger, we should be prepared to listen. Jews, committed to their identities, histories, and traditions, are increasingly seeing how the ongoing occupation and human rights abuses, the loyalty oath, and the stunted discourse on Israel and Zionism within the OJC are making a perversion out of the lessons of Jewish history (which illustrate that oppression and othering can be a deadly mix), and of Jewish teachings (which, in Rabbi Sid Schwarz’s formulation, are “dedicated to expanding the boundaries of righteousness and justice in the world“).
I’ve recently been corresponding with one of the organizers about JVP’s choice of message and their tactics. In light of the all the debate around that action, I wanted to share some of that correspondence here. In talking with her it is clear that there were significant conversations within the group about both tactics and messaging. The first thing she emphasized was that the goal of this action was not the disruption itself. “Our original idea,” she told me, “was actually the opposite, that the disruption of Netanyahu’s speech would be silent and dignified.” More »
Author and feminist powerhouse Jaclyn Friedman is currently on a delegation with the Nobel Women’s Initiative, traveling around Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, meeting women on both sides of the conflict involved in peacemaking work.
Jaclyn wrote from Ramallah:
Once again, I find myself strangely hopeful, despite the odds. Not because I think it will be easy to achieve any of what needs to be done. But because if these women, living in these circumstances, can find the strength to be hopeful enough to keep working to create the communities and lives they deserve, it would be a grand betrayal for me to not hope and work alongside them.
And, happily, there are plenty of places for us to hear what they’re talking about: Here‘s the Nobel Women’s Initiative blog with all the participants’ reflections on what’s happening; here‘s Jaclyn’s travel accounts at Feministing; here‘s a liveblog of a conversation with Palestinian and Israeli women peace activists in Nazareth. And she’ll be liveblogging her dinner with the International Women’s Commission starting at 12:15 EST TODAY, so ch-ch-check it out.
by Kung Fu Jew [➚] · Wednesday, September 29th, 2010
The British catamaran Irene, the “Jewish boat to Gaza,” was diverted to Ashdod without incident and without capturing world attention as during Israel’s boarding of the Turkish Mavi Marmara. This was the second boat following the Marmara to be diverted. Predictions of a media circus failed to bear fruit.
Apparently, the global media is bored of this stunt already. Frankly, I am too. It stinks of pageantry, now that both sides now how the game is played. The boat announces their operating rules, the IDF states its intent to intercept, both sides play nice, and the Gaza blockade goes on. Which is not to say the stunt abjectly failed to raise awareness, nor that the violent prior episode was in any way preferable. (God forbid!)
Pageantry consumes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When I volunteered to cover a house demolition in East Jerusalem in late 2004, then too the roles were clear. The family applied for a permit, knowing they’d be denied. The Jerusalem municipality took their fee and considered their application, knowing they didn’t grant permits to Arabs as policy. The family built anyway, knowing the one-room hovel would be demolished. And indeed, the municipality sent over two dozen Border Police along with the demolitions crane, knowing the family would resist. The family called in demonstrators to help them resist, knowing their home would ultimately fall. The police removed the activists non-violently, knowing the press stink that would follow if one were harmed. The demonstration happened; the demolition happened. Everybody knew their role. Pageantry.
It’s an infuriating constant. I am enraged that the state-imposed impoverishment and economic stagnation of 1.5 million Gazans has achieved epic banality. It burns my heart that few in America seem to give a shit either way, pro or con. Unless a protest has a new, creative gimmick, it will be ignored. It’s also a crying shame that the organizers of the flotillas are harmful to and a distraction from the importance of the message. Utter predictability fosters inhumane callousness. ”Israel fatigue” turns away so many passionate, progressive and particularly young Jews. We’ve seen these headlines before. It’s the pageantry that kills us.
For their part, many analysts are now using a “painted into a corner” metaphor to dissect the impact of the settlement freeze. Israeli analyst Nahum Barnea, for instance, recently opined that,
Three politicians – Barack Obama, Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas – painted themselves into a corner and didn’t know how to get out of it.
We all got painted into a corner on the issue of settlements, unfortunately, and where we should have concentrated was on territories and the borders of a future Israeli-Palestinian two-state solution.
It’s bewildering to me that the issue of settlements can somehow considered to be a pesky distraction to the peace process. How can talks on “territories and borders” proceed with anything resembling good faith if one side settles these disputed areas with impunity and the “honest broker” to the proceedings refuses to rein it in? How can we be expected to take such a process seriously?
We already know that one of the main reasons for Oslo’s failure was the inability to deal with the settlement issue directly. As a result, Israel took that as an opportunity to significantly expand its settlement regime during the course of the “peace process.” This has brought us to where we are today: in the wake of Oslo more than 500,000 settlers now live throughout the West Bank in settlements and small cities, with special Israeli-only highways that effectively cut Palestinian territories into individual cantons separated by military checkpoints.
Have we learned nothing from past experience? Here’s lesson #1: the settlements are not a side issue. The Israel’s settlement of the West Bank and East Jerusalem are – and have always been – a central obstacle to the peace process. Until it is made to cease and desist, I can’t see how the latest round of talks can be considered anything but a charade.
On a blistering, sunny Thursday morning in Jerusalem, I meet a group of folks from Shovrim Shtika (Breaking the Silence) for a tour of Hebron. In true Israel fashion, there’s someone I know taking the tour, S, a Phd student whose politics and life experience I am in deep admiration of. We sit together on the bus, and I admit to him that I’ve never been to the territories before. (What I don’t say is that I’m afraid that this significantly taints my political clout, in case I had any.) He’s surprised, and as we drive out of Jerusalem, he pushes the curtains away from the windows quickly, so that the landscape spills out before us. Be sure you look at everything.
The folks in the group, all English speakers, seem to be from everywhere, and I have no idea how many are Jews. Immediately, I know that what’s going to bother me here, and beyond today, is not just what I see, but the panic, the insane, habitual jerking of my knee. What are these people thinking about Jews? How can I make them stop thinking it?
At the Tapuz Gross checkpoint, we are able to cross into the Palestinian side of Hebron, loud and bustling. A woman in our group says, “This isn’t as bad as Nablus.” I wonder if she’s one of those people who’s condescending and self righteous about her work. What are her intentions? What are mine? I hate these thoughts, every single one of them. This is not who I am, this is not even someone I recognize.
We meet with Hani, a Palestinian man who lives near the military base in Tel Rumeida. He tells us about settlers who have burned his cars, how they come into a neighbourhood to have a barbecue, and never leave. “The Jews,” he says, “occupy, all they do is occupy.” This guy, he’s seen things I will never even be able to imagine, every Jew he meets is either a settler or a soldier-why should he think any differently? The way I find myself looking at these settlers, with disgust, with disbelief, is how the world is looking at Israel, at all Jews.
En route to Jerusalem again, I can’t hold my head up. It’s as though my brain is now covered with thick dust, and I’m too tired to wipe it away. “This isn’t activism,” A, our guide says over the microphone to the sweaty, barely conscious bus. “This is learning.” We have seen something most people never see, but we aren’t heroes, we’ve done what we should have, and this is only the beginning.
I go back to Katamon and proceed to become humbly and thoroughly ill. This always happens when I’m traveling intensely, but today I wonder if while something is clearly trying to get out, something else is also trying to get in.
If you had told me three years ago, when I first came to Israel, that I would be spending my Friday afternoons protesting in East Jerusalem, I never would have believed you. If you had told me that the behavior of this country and its residents was going to make it difficult for me to feel comfortable practicing Judaism, I would have believed you even less.
Since I started attending the weekly protests in Sheikh Jarrah, I’ve stopped going to shul on Friday night. In part, it’s logistics – I get home tired and sweaty at 6 or 6:30, and I want a break and a shower before dinner. Partially, though, it’s become uncomfortable for me. There’s something that Emily Schaeffer, an Israeli human rights lawyer who grew up in the Reform community outside of Boston, wrote once, which I increasingly feel in myself:
“Unless I’m with people who I am certain do not espouse Zionism or any form of oppression, I cannot comfortably honor the tradition, or even be sure I want to be part of it.”
Even in my struggle with Judaism itself, the past three years of studying gemara have oriented me toward the world through the lens of text and textual connections. So here’s the gezerah shavah I have to offer:
There is a liturgical similarity between Kabbalat Shabbat and the weekly protest. In L’cha Dodi, the line is “hitoreri, hitoreri, ki va orech kumi ori” – wake up, wake up, for your light has come, arise and shine. In the protest “liturgy,” one of the chants uses the same verb – “ezrachim lehitorer, hafascism kvar over” – residents, wake up, fascism has already passed (it works better in Hebrew).
I’ve been dwelling on those lines as representative of the tension that I’m feeling around typical religious practice (as opposed to, say, Heschel’s praying with his feet). More »
“We are extending our hand in peace,” said Ghawi. “We have lost hope that the Israeli establishment is able to make decisions, so we wish to talk directly to the Israeli public. Also, we are here to say that the prisoners are our sons and we favor their release. It is impossible to talk only about one side of the equation – the release of Shalit also means the release of Palestinian prisoners.”
Neither my wife nor I were able to make it to the rally last night. Before reading this story, it didn’t even occur to us to go. But we discussed standing in solidarity with Nasser – as Bassam Aramin, one of the founders of Combatants for Peace, said to me recently, “they’re all our children.”
I woke up this morning to discover that Nasser, his son, and one of the Jewish Israeli activists who was with him were stopped for questioning on their way to the protest last night. They were detained, searched, and humiliated by the police, for no reason other than being a Palestinian and a leftist walking together in Jerusalem.
“They told us it was their right to search, take our cell phones and interrogate us. I asked them ‘Why are you arresting me,’ and they replied ‘because we hate Arabs, but we hate people like you even more’.”
Yotam Wolf, the Israeli activist who was with Nasser last night, tells his version of the story here in Hebrew.
It seemed to me a profound act, for Nasser to stand in solidarity with the Shalit family – to say that their child, as well as the many Palestinian children currently (and in many cases illegally) held in prison, deserve to be able to go home to their parents. I thought back to the night of the flotilla, when two women who were sitting in the Shalit protest tent outside the prime minister’s house, came to shout at those of us protesting nearby – a protest organized, at least in part, by the Sheikh Jarrah activists. How wonderful would it have been to have been able to say to them that our Palestinian friends protested in favor of Shalit’s release as well – that we want freedom and security for everyone’s children.
But alas, the forces that be seem not to be interested in that kind of solidarity. Ynet reports that Nasser will try again to visit the protest tent in the coming days. I hope the next visit is less eventful.
Nicholas Kristof’s opinion piece today in the newspaper of record finally puts him on the side of the angels:
The Israeli occupation of the West Bank is widely acknowledged to be unsustainable and costly to the country’s image. But one more blunt truth must be acknowledged: the occupation is morally repugnant.
The whole piece is worthwhile, but this is his basic vort.
In the wake the Gaza Flotilla episode many labels were tossed about describing those on the Mava Marmara. It became clear quite early on that they were not peace activists solely interested in getting their cargo to Gaza. They were interested in provocation, in challenging the Israeli government against what they believed was an illegal blockade depriving Gaza’s citizens of food, clothing, and building materials. M.J. Rosenberg in the Huffington Post likened them to blacks who sat at all white lunch counters in the South during the Jim Crow era. They weren’t there for the pancakes. Some even called those on the Mava Marmara “terrorists.” This is an odd appellation given that they were not armed with deadly weapons nor were they travelling to Gaza to wage a battle against Israeli citizens.
The use of the term “terrorist” has become common nomenclature in Israel of many who openly and actively challenge its policies regarding the Palestinians. Of course, Israel had, and has, it own “terrorist” organizations (the Irgun and Lehi, more recently the Jewish Underground and today those who terrorize the Palestinians cave dwellers in the South Hebron Hills). And some of the members of the Irgun and Lehi ended up becoming prime ministers of the country, i.e., Menahem Begin and Yizhak Shamir. This irony rose to the surface this Sunday when I opened the New York Times Sunday Magazine and read Deborah Solomon’s interview with Tzippi Livni, the head of the Israeli Kadima party.
Solomon asked Livni:
Your parents were among the country’s founders.
Livni answered:
They were the first couple to marry in Israel, the very first. Both of them were in the Irgun. They were freedom fighters, and they met while boarding a British train. When the British Mandate was here, they robbed a train to get the money in order to buy weapons.
So, Livni’s parents, who were both members of the Irgun, an organization that not only engaged in acts of terror against the British Mandate but was also guilty of killing Arab civilians, are called freedom fighters. Livni proudly and without solicitation speaks of how her parents robbed a British train to take the money to buy weapons. One could only assume the illegal weapons were used to commit acts of violence. But Livni’s parents are not terrorists while those on the Gaza Flotilla who were engaged in what began as a non-violent act of provocation (that is, until their ship was boarded in a pre-dawn raid by Israeli navy seals) are called “terrorists”? Here is one dictionary definition of terrorism: Terrorism is the unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.
We all know the answers from both sides, repeated ad nauseum. However, given the volume of this crisis and the loose ways in which “terrorist” is used by Israel, I find Livni’s proud declaration of her parents criminal and ultimately violent behavior somewhat jarring. Freedom fighter’s indeed.
As a member of this blogging community, a fairly lefty one at that, I am sure I am the only person who got the hard-copy of the Wall Street Journal today. So I am taking on a personal responsibility to report to all of you that the Simon Weisenthal Center has provided all WSJ readers with a very important supplement to their papers:
“2010 Top Ten Anti-Israel LIES”
You can download the seven page document for yourself, but here are some of the highlights. More »
Left-wing Jews in NYC held a debate for and against boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) and the whole thing is on YouTube. Voices against feature JJ Goldberg and Kathleen Peratis; those in favor feature Hannah Mermelstein and Yonatan Shapiro.
American Jewish Committee’s David Harris wrote an op-ed in the International Herald Tribute — but what the eff is it saying other than how he can’t stop thinking about the Holocaust? This explains so much.
And in commentary, Gershom Gorenberg says despite American Jews’ dissonance on Israel’s illiberalism, there are now newvenues for the expression of your values. “Don’t give up. Get involved.”
PMO announces plan to ease Gaza siege, but no such decision made
The Prime Minister’s Office announced on Thursday that the security cabinet had agreed to relax Israel’s blockade on the Gaza Strip, but as it turns out, no binding decision was ever made during the cabinet meeting.
The Prime Minister’s Office issued a press release in English following the meeting, which was also sent to foreign diplomats, was substantially different than the Hebrew announcement – according to the English text, a decision was made to ease the blockade, but in the Hebrew text there was no mention of any such decision.
Many of us have been struggling to understand the ways in which the blockade of Gaza and the Flotilla disaster have benefited Israel. The answer of the Israeli government has always been that the blockade is necessary for security and that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza (needless to say UN relief representatives on the ground in Gaza have a different take on this). In an article today in Haaretz, “Blair Hails Deal with Netanyahu to Ease Gaza Blockade,” we read the following:
At their first meeting [between the British and Israeli teams], the envoy handed Netanyahu a document prepared by Blair’s staff that included suggestions for easing the blockade. The prime minister told Blair that he never thought the blockade as constituted was particularly wise, as he understood that the civilian population, and not Hamas, bore the primary brunt.
Wait a minute. Bibi said he “never thought the blockade as constituted was particularly wise,” and he “understood that the civilian population, and not Hamas, bore the primary brunt”? This contradicts Israel’s entire justification of the blockade and confirms what critics have been saying for years. The Israeli response has always been just the opposite! Now after the Flotilla disaster, after worldwide condemnation, after the deaths of nine civilians, after all this Bibi basically says what his critics have been saying all along?! Truly amazing. If this is so, Bibi, why have you let a poorly constituted blockade continue for three years when you knew it was the Gazan population and not Hamas that was suffering. And why have you consistently denied this was the case. In Israel there is a saying when one is not sure about the intentions of another’s incompetence, “is he a klutz or a putz?” You decide.
An important learning opportunity: blogger/journalist Ashley Bates will discuss life on the ground in Gaza this Thursday, June 17 .
Ashley has been living in and reporting from Gaza for the past several months and her blog Dispatches from Gaza offers invaluable, in-depth perspectives of life under the blockade. Her articles have appeared in such publications as Jerusalem Post, Jerusalem Post Magazine, Global Post, Huffington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, and Ha’aretz.
Author and feminist powerhouse 
follow us on Twitter
follow us on Facebook
subscribe to our email