Jewish Peace News

Monday, August 24, 2009

More critical thinking from Ben Gurion University

While Ben Gurion University professor Neve Gordon is attacked and threatened by university and government officials for supporting a boycott of Israel in the Los Angeles Times, the oppositional work of Haggai Ram, another faculty member of Ben Gurion Univ., has just been warmly reviewed in Dawn, the largest, most influential English-language daily in Pakistan. The review, by Joel Gordon, of the University of Arkansas, placed on the first page of the Books and Authors section of Dawn, says, "Iran's revolution appears to hang in the balance. … Yet the Israeli government, as if stuck in a time warp, continues to publicly promote its right — and ultimate readiness — to launch an attack against the Islamic republic." Critiquing this stand and offering a nuanced analysis of its context and history, "Haggai Ram's provocative, even 'blasphemous' study confronts the 'logic' — or illogic — of Israel's 'obsession' with the Islamic republic."

"Are fears of 'nucleotheism' engendered to perpetuate a national myth of perpetual holocaust and exploit western terror of international jihad?" Gordon asks. Ram and his book, he says, suggest "that the end game is a body politic that is distracted from more pressing unsolved local issues."

Rela Mazali

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http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/in-paper-magazine/books-and-authors/end-of-the-affair

End of the affair
Reviewed by Joel Gordon
Sunday, 23 Aug, 2009 | 07:00 AM PST |

Iran's revolution appears to hang in the balance. As rifts within the ruling elite are played out in the streets, the world watches with anticipation, not least the United States which struggles to walk a fine line between encouraging dissent and forging a new understanding with the clerical regime.

Yet the Israeli government, as if stuck in a time warp, continues to publicly promote its right — and ultimate readiness — to launch an attack against the Islamic republic. Israelis may well have reason to look upon Iran with suspicion, even apprehension. Yet the 'rising tide of anxiety' amongst average citizens is, according to the author of Iranophobia, 'utterly irrational and exceedingly disproportionate' to any threat that may emanate from Tehran.

Haggai Ram's provocative, even 'blasphemous' study confronts the 'logic' — or illogic — of Israel's 'obsession' with the Islamic republic. An Israeli historian of Iran who is tied to neither the defense establishment nor intelligence community — a rare commodity — Ram is well positioned to place Israeli-Iranian relations in context, to dismantle persistent mythologies, and to even suggest that Israel's worst nightmares are rooted deeper within its own changing society and polity than in Iran's aggressive intentions or capabilities.

If the Islamic revolution has run out of energy, as many asserted well before recent elections, Ram recalls it as a central moment in the 20th century. Israelis, much like discontented Iranians, especially those too young to recall the Peacock throne, have fallen victim to the 'art of forgetting' history. Israeli Iran experts, perpetuate this by engaging in 'massive self-censorship.'

In the early days of the revolution they sought to convey 'the complexity of events' and the diversity of social forces that toppled the Pahlavis. Some even celebrated the popular uprising — at least until it turned in Khomeini's favour, after which it became all too common to bemoan Iran's turn from the Shah's modernisation project, however brutal, back to the 'dark ages.'

Not all to be sure. Ram recalls one Iran hand calling on the Shah to save his throne by massacring his own people. He reminds his readers just how close Israeli-Pahlavi ties were. As an emergent nation Israel successfully positioned itself as an ally of other 'third world' Afro-Asian states, but Iran was always special.

The Zionist and Pahlavi nation-building projects shared a desire to stand outside and above the wider Arab and Muslim world in which they found themselves trapped, to produce 'new' Jews and Iranians who were 'deracinated replicas of Europeans.'

Israel's 'unqualified endorsement' of the Shah's 'oppressive modernity' translated into a relationship with SAVAK, the secret police, which was second only to the Americans'. The recollections of a 'wondrous love affair' that Ram has read in the memoirs of secret agents, diplomats, and businessmen, is of course understood differently by many Iranians.

Israeli anxieties regarding the course of Iran's revolution cut much deeper than the loss of trading privileges and non-Eastern cultural affinity. Ruhollah Khomeini's power grab paralleled a revolution in Israeli politics; the rise of Menachim Begin's right-wing Likud coalition, fueled by the rage of Israel's disenfranchised 'Oriental' Jewish population.

To the European secular socialist Zionist pioneers who founded the state, the foreign, overwhelmingly religious crowds that carried Begin on their shoulders and anointed him 'king' looked strikingly similar to the rebellious Iranians who embraced Khomeini and the mullahs. Shimon Peres bid them 'go back to Persia'; the leftist Meretz party, standing against the threat of a state ruled by religious law, proclaimed that Israel was 'not Iran.'

In recent years Iranophobia is clearly focused on Iran's resurgence as a regional power, particularly in light of links to local antagonists in Lebanon and Palestine. Is Iran merely a scapegoat for Israel's inability to defeat Hizbollah in 2006 — an offensive war depicted as a defensive campaign versus Iran — and Hamas last winter?

Are fears of 'nucleotheism' engendered to perpetuate a national myth of perpetual holocaust and exploit western terror of international jihad? Ram downplays conspiracy theories, but suggests that the end game is a body politic that is distracted from more pressing unsolved local issues.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad 'may very well be a despicable anti-Semite,' but he deserves to be quoted properly. Rather than threaten to 'wipe Israel off the map,' he has asserted that Zionism has — as many argue about his own revolution — reached an historical impasse.

The ongoing attachment of Iranian Jews to their ancestral homeland, the unwillingness of so many to leave Iran in the early years of Israeli statehood, and their vocal support for Iran's nuclear programme and its attachment to Palestinian nationalist aspirations challenges the Zionist 'redemptive' narrative and raison d'etre of the Jewish state.

Ram sees a glimmer of hope in growing reluctance to blindly accept state dogma regarding Iran (recent polls suggest that most Israelis no longer favour military action). If his book is read and not simply dismissed as blasphemy, Israelis might better understand and question their complex relationship with an old ally.

Joel Gordon is a professor of history at the University of Arkansas

Iranophobia: The logic of an Israeli obsession
By Haggai Ram
Stanford University Press, CA
ISBN 978-0-8047-6068-3
220pp. $19.95

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Jewish Peace News editors:
Joel Beinin
Racheli Gai
Rela Mazali
Sarah Anne Minkin
Judith Norman
Lincoln Z. Shlensky
Rebecca Vilkomerson
Alistair Welchman
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Jewish Peace News archive and blog: http://jewishpeacenews.blogspot.com
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Saturday, August 22, 2009

Yonatan Preminger: The Strategy Behind Israel's Migrant Labor Policies / CounterPunch

At present, only 4% of Palestinians who are citizens of Israel live off agriculture. The fact that most Palestinian land was confiscated and given to Jewish agricultural settlements turned Palestinian society from being a primarily agrarian society to a landless populace.

Here are some startling statistics:
According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2008 only 40 per cent of Arab men of working age participated in the workforce, compared with 56 per cent for Israel as a whole, and only 19 per cent of Arab women, compared with 56 per cent of Jewish women. Half of Israel's Arab citizens live below the poverty line. Many would jump at the opportunity to work, though a job in Israel today is not always a way of escaping the poverty cycle.

Unfortunately for them, a major aim of Israel's labor policies is: anyone but Palestinians.

Read more in Yonatan Preminger's informative article.

Racheli Gai.

http://www.counterpunch.org/preminger08202009.html

Yonatan Preminger: The Strategy Behind Israel's Migrant Labor Policies
Aug. 20, 2009

As an increasing number of people feel the grip of the global financial crisis, Israel's familiar bugbear has been wheeled out yet again: deport the foreign workers! True to form, the newly appointed Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz has decided that the deportation of 100,000 migrant laborers will improve the economic situation.

We've been here before. In 2003, Israel launched its first major campaign to reduce the number of "foreign workers," as they are known in Hebrew (ovdim zarim). Now the workers are preparing themselves for another round of brutal operations by the infamous immigration police.

In Israel's labor market, deportations of "foreign workers" are followed by imports of others to take their place. Yet, Israel has an abundant supply of local workers – why does it still prefer the migrant laborers? Because they are not Arabs.

There are about 250,000 migrant laborers in Israel, mostly from the Philippines and Thailand, working mainly in agriculture, nursing and construction. For a country of just under 7.4 million citizens, this is an enormous number. More than half are considered illegal – some have outstayed their allotted time, some are victims of fraud, and some have violated the terms of their employment, often through no fault of their own. With unemployment rising again, it seems logical to employ Israel's citizens before turning to outside labor, but, as usual, the picture is more complicated.

The truth is, Israel is confused. Since the 1980s, when the country began a process of deregulation with the aim of hitching its markets to the global economy, Israel has been torn between the myth of Jewish solidarity and the Zionist enterprise on the one hand, and the demands of the growing economic elite on the other. Bluntly put, it wants to keep the country open to Jews only but have access to workers willing to do the dirty work for peanuts.

In the past, Israel employed Arabs as cheap labor – both Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians from the Occupied Territories (who have no Israeli citizenship). Then, in the 1990s, as Israelis opened their eyes to the Oslo Accords, watched their economy grow, and enjoyed the "quiet" that the promise of peace granted them, Palestinians from the Occupied Territories found themselves stuck, cut off from their source of livelihood in Israel by renewed policies of military closures around the Territories. Meanwhile, Palestinian Israelis watched their jobs disappear as factories were moved abroad and as they competed with a million newly arrived Russian olim (Jewish immigrants) for the remaining labor-intensive work.

Changing government priorities, the Intifada and globalization opened the way for migrant laborers. Companies owned by the Histadrut (the General Federation of Labor), publicly owned enterprises, were sold off. State support for agriculture diminished as the long-declining ideology of working the land finally collapsed. The new owners of Histadrut companies, building contractors and farmers, sought sources of labor that would enable them to compete in the now unprotected market. Migrant labor fitted the bill.

Farmers and contractors explain their preference for foreign labor by claiming there is no local workforce. "Israelis aren't willing to do those kind of jobs," so the mantra goes. And it does, indeed, seem that few Israeli Jews are willing to do hard manual labor anymore. But there are Israelis willing to do those kinds of jobs – Israel's Palestinian citizens.

Anyone But Palestinians

The "Arab sector," as it is known here, struggles against insufficient investment and inadequate infrastructure. Before 1948, the Palestinian Arab economy was mostly agrarian. Today, only about 4 per cent of the Palestinian Israeli population lives off agriculture, yet other options for earning a living are scarce. Few Arab towns have any significant industrial parks, and the primary industry that once employed Arabs – textiles – has been moved overseas.

According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2008 only 40 per cent of Arab men of working age participated in the workforce, compared with 56 per cent for Israel as a whole, and only 19 per cent of Arab women, compared with 56 per cent of Jewish women. Half of Israel's Arab citizens live below the poverty line. Many would jump at the opportunity to work, though a job in Israel today is not always a way of escaping the poverty cycle.

And, if these workers prove insufficient, there are thousands more on the other side of the "security fence." Israel has administered the West Bank and Gaza since 1967, flooding the Territories with its products, thereby – deliberately or otherwise – preventing the development of local industry and discouraging entrepreneurship. Residents of the Territories have also provided Israel with builders, cleaners and agricultural laborers for thirty years. The result is an underdeveloped Palestinian economy, entirely dependent on Israel, and a huge workforce eager to work in Israel.

The proof of their willingness to work can be found at Israel's major intersections, where Palestinians from the West Bank wait each morning in the hope that some contractor will offer them work. Most of them have gone through hell to get around the checkpoints and across the separation wall, a dangerous – occasionally fatal – journey of many hours. Many sleep in makeshift camps such as abandoned building sites just minutes from Tel Aviv's chic boulevards, and return to the West Bank and their families only on the weekends.

It is difficult to estimate the number of West Bank residents working in Israel. According to the Workers Advice Centre, an NGO active mainly among agricultural and construction workers, in 2005 there were around 20,000 working legally (with a permit), in addition to at least that number working illegally. The difficulties involved in entering Israel enable employers to claim that Palestinians from the West Bank are an unreliable labor force.

Police raids, a common nightmare for illegal Palestinian workers, aim to intimidate the workers and put on a show for Israelis, so fearful of "infiltrators." The workers are deported and may lose whatever job they were lucky enough to find, but everyone knows that they will be back as soon as they have negotiated their way through the porous "security" system: work in Israel is in great demand.

Clearly, Israel has easy access to willing labor, so why does Israel maintain such a large migrant labor force? The principal reason has little to do with the lack of a local workforce. The migrant workers are simply cheaper and easier to exploit.

Thais and Filipinos

Most migrant laborers in Israel today are Thais, working primarily in agriculture, and Filipinos, working primarily as caregivers. Many arrive with huge debts after paying middlemen between $6,000 and $9,000 in mediation fees (through arrangements that are mostly illegal). However, their wages in Israel amount to less than the legal minimum because some of the long hours they work are not remunerated.

Their employers save money also by not paying any peripheral benefits such as pension fund payments, sick pay, annual leave or maternity leave. Migrant workers rarely receive dismissal compensation, seniority-based wage increases, or overtime pay. In addition, wages are often paid in arrears, obliging the worker to remain with the same employer for fear of losing earnings.

Migrant workers are legally subject to the collective agreements negotiated by the Histadrut, but law enforcement is minimal, and the state's representatives almost invariably take the employers' side in any dispute.

The Israeli and Thai governments have been in contact with the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in the hope of controlling the black market in mediation fees and permits, but so far without results. In 2006, Israel's Foreign Ministry refused to sign an agreement with the IOM, but in 2007 the IOM signed an agreement with Thailand that will facilitate supervision of recruitment of Thai workers destined for Israel. Also, since June 2008, only workers from countries that have bilateral agreements with Israel have been permitted to enter.

It remains to be seen whether these agreements will reduce the exploitation of migrant labor. Unfortunately for the workers, there are interests vested in the current system: many agencies in Israel as well as in the workers' countries of origin stand to lose an extremely lucrative business if mechanisms for control are put into place.

However, the issue of Israel's labor preferences goes beyond economic calculations and concerns the identity of the workers themselves. In any discussion about the use of Palestinian labor, security concerns are invariably voiced: "When my father used to go to work in the fields with Arabs," says E. from a kibbutz in the north, "he would take his pistol and be looking over his shoulder all the time. With the Thai workers he feels safe."

Though not everyone feels the threat in quite this way, the government of PM Ariel Sharon decided in 2005 that, by 2008, Palestinians from the Occupied Territories would no longer be working within Israel. Keeping the Palestinian workers out, then, is part of a deliberate policy that borders on demagoguery, playing on the fears of Israeli Jews and strengthening the misleading consensus of "us here, them over there" – misleading, because Israel is "over there" too, with its ever-expanding settlements, and "they" are here in the form of Israel's largely unseen Palestinian citizens.

But security, as always, tells only part of the story. After all, if workers can get into the country from the West Bank, so can others with more insidious objectives. The preference for migrant labor over Palestinian labor stems from something for which "security" serves as a fig leaf: Israel's striving to reduce the Arab presence on this piece of land.

The ideology of separate economies for Jews and Arabs goes back to the days of Jewish settlement in Palestine, when it was feared that cheap Arab labor would discourage European Jews from immigrating. After 1948, freedom of movement for Arab citizens was restricted until 1966, when the military administration was finally lifted. After 1967, Palestinians from the Occupied Territories had the advantage of "disappearing" at the end of the workday, but they, too, were a constant reminder of the local population, which Israel was not ready to acknowledge.

Migrant workers, on the other hand, pose no "demographic threat," particularly if the immigration police keep working. Though many have been here for years, and their children speak Hebrew just like Israeli children, they are deemed a temporary presence. The situation has plumbed new depths of absurdity: farmers consider the migrant Thais to be permanent workers and the local population – Arabs – as seasonal laborers who fill in during temporary labor shortages.

Israel has also succeeded in depoliticising the issue. The hiring of migrant labor is perceived simply as an economic necessity, while questions of identity, the closure of the Occupied Territories, the "security fence" and the "demographic threat" (not to mention workers' rights) are held to be unrelated.

Thus, despite the economic crisis and associated rising unemployment, it is unlikely that Israel will wean its employers off cheap "foreign workers" in favor of opening more employment opportunities to the Arab sector or Palestinians from the Occupied Territories. The current situation is too convenient: migrant labor has enabled Israel to open its borders to the globalized economy without endangering its Jewish identity, while bolstering the myth that Israel can be a country for Jews alone.

In fact, Israel has finally succeeded in doing what it failed to do during the years it was still reliant on cheap Arab labor: it has taken the Arabs out of the market.

Yonatan Preminger lives in Tel Aviv and is active in the field of workers' rights. He can be reached at yonatanpreminger@yahoo.co.uk.

Friday, August 21, 2009

Neve Gordon on Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions

In a Los Angeles Times op-ed Neve Gordon, an American-born Jew who has lived in Israel for nearly 30 years and teaches political science at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, reluctantly comes to the conclusion that boycotting Israel may be the only way to save the country from itself. The author of the recent book, Israel's Occupation, Gordon argues that "'on the ground,' the one-state solution (in an apartheid manifestation) is a reality." Arguing that the two-state solution is the only way to reverse apartheid, he has decided to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign launched by Palestinian activists in July 2005. – Joel Beinin

Lincoln Z. Shlensky adds:

Neve Gordon cites the Bilbao Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Initiative <http://bit.ly/7AI0g> as an appropriate model for creating international pressure on Israel to end the occupation. In Gordon's reading of it, the Bilbao Initiative proposes a process of imposing sanctions that begins by punishing companies doing business in the Occupied Territories and those that reinforce the occupation in other structural ways, and gradually extends such sanctions.

While one may disagree with Gordon's resolutely gradualist interpretation of the Bilbao Initiative, it would be hard to disagree that there is a need for the kinds of initial sanctions he mentions. Indeed, many of those individuals and organizations which do not claim to be advocates of a formal BDS campaign have long argued that punishing the direct beneficiaries of occupation and acting to end Israel's continuing confiscation of Palestinian land are urgent.

Other elements of the Bilbao Initiative that Gordon does not mention, however, are more controversial. For example, Point 5 of the Initiative proposes to "build pressure on the United Nations, governments, local authorities, multilateral bodies, such as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the private sector to suspend cooperation with Israel." Such proposals are controversial for two reasons: some believe that they unfairly single out Israel among many rights-violating nations, and should be opposed for this reason alone. Others believe that, tactically, the appearance of singling out Israel for special sanctions may create a backlash against broad-based international efforts to end Israel's occupation at a time when the American administration seems more serious than ever about achieving a resolution.

Such concerns have merit. They need to be addressed directly by supporters of the BDS movement if proposals like the Bilbao Initiative are to gain wider support.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-oe-gordon20-2009aug20,0,888884.story

Boycott Israel

An Israeli comes to the painful conclusion that it's the only way to save his country.

By Neve Gordon
August 20, 2009

Israeli newspapers this summer are filled with angry articles about the push for an international boycott of Israel. Films have been withdrawn from Israeli film festivals, Leonard Cohen is under fire around the world for his decision to perform in Tel Aviv, and Oxfam has severed ties with a celebrity spokesperson, a British actress who also endorses cosmetics produced in the occupied territories. Clearly, the campaign to use the kind of tactics that helped put an end to the practice of apartheid in South Africa is gaining many followers around the world.

Not surprisingly, many Israelis -- even peaceniks -- aren't signing on. A global boycott can't help but contain echoes of anti-Semitism. It also brings up questions of a double standard (why not boycott China for its egregious violations of human rights?) and the seemingly contradictory position of approving a boycott of one's own nation.

It is indeed not a simple matter for me as an Israeli citizen to call on foreign governments, regional authorities, international social movements, faith-based organizations, unions and citizens to suspend cooperation with Israel. But today, as I watch my two boys playing in the yard, I am convinced that it is the only way that Israel can be saved from itself.

I say this because Israel has reached a historic crossroads, and times of crisis call for dramatic measures. I say this as a Jew who has chosen to raise his children in Israel, who has been a member of the Israeli peace camp for almost 30 years and who is deeply anxious about the country's future.

The most accurate way to describe Israel today is as an apartheid state. For more than 42 years, Israel has controlled the land between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Sea. Within this region about 6 million Jews and close to 5 million Palestinians reside. Out of this population, 3.5 million Palestinians and almost half a million Jews live in the areas Israel occupied in 1967, and yet while these two groups live in the same area, they are subjected to totally different legal systems. The Palestinians are stateless and lack many of the most basic human rights. By sharp contrast, all Jews -- whether they live in the occupied territories or in Israel -- are citizens of the state of Israel.

The question that keeps me up at night, both as a parent and as a citizen, is how to ensure that my two children as well as the children of my Palestinian neighbors do not grow up in an apartheid regime.

There are only two moral ways of achieving this goal.

The first is the one-state solution: offering citizenship to all Palestinians and thus establishing a bi-national democracy within the entire area controlled by Israel. Given the demographics, this would amount to the demise of Israel as a Jewish state; for most Israeli Jews, it is anathema.

The second means of ending our apartheid is through the two-state solution, which entails Israel's withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders (with possible one-for-one land swaps), the division of Jerusalem, and a recognition of the Palestinian right of return with the stipulation that only a limited number of the 4.5 million Palestinian refugees would be allowed to return to Israel, while the rest can return to the new Palestinian state.

Geographically, the one-state solution appears much more feasible because Jews and Palestinians are already totally enmeshed; indeed, "on the ground," the one-state solution (in an apartheid manifestation) is a reality.

Ideologically, the two-state solution is more realistic because fewer than 1% of Jews and only a minority of Palestinians support binationalism.

For now, despite the concrete difficulties, it makes more sense to alter the geographic realities than the ideological ones. If at some future date the two peoples decide to share a state, they can do so, but currently this is not something they want.

So if the two-state solution is the way to stop the apartheid state, then how does one achieve this goal?

I am convinced that outside pressure is the only answer. Over the last three decades, Jewish settlers in the occupied territories have dramatically increased their numbers. The myth of the united Jerusalem has led to the creation of an apartheid city where Palestinians aren't citizens and lack basic services. The Israeli peace camp has gradually dwindled so that today it is almost nonexistent, and Israeli politics are moving more and more to the extreme right.

It is therefore clear to me that the only way to counter the apartheid trend in Israel is through massive international pressure. The words and condemnations from the Obama administration and the European Union have yielded no results, not even a settlement freeze, let alone a decision to withdraw from the occupied territories.

I consequently have decided to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement that was launched by Palestinian activists in July 2005 and has since garnered widespread support around the globe. The objective is to ensure that Israel respects its obligations under international law and that Palestinians are granted the right to self-determination.

In Bilbao, Spain, in 2008, a coalition of organizations from all over the world formulated the 10-point Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign meant to pressure Israel in a "gradual, sustainable manner that is sensitive to context and capacity." For example, the effort begins with sanctions on and divestment from Israeli firms operating in the occupied territories, followed by actions against those that help sustain and reinforce the occupation in a visible manner. Along similar lines, artists who come to Israel in order to draw attention to the occupation are welcome, while those who just want to perform are not.

Nothing else has worked. Putting massive international pressure on Israel is the only way to guarantee that the next generation of Israelis and Palestinians -- my two boys included -- does not grow up in an apartheid regime.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Two Letters

The first is from Maher Hannoun, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem who was evicted with his family on August 2nd from the house in Sheikh Jarrah in which he was born and has lived for 51 years. The eviction of the Hannoun and Ghawi families has brought widespread international condemnation. (See the JPN post and video of the day after the eviction at http://jewishpeacenews.blogspot.com/2009/08/israels-hamas-sheikh-jarrah-evictions.html) Nevertheless, less than an hour after the families were evicted, settlers moved into their houses. The Hannoun and Ghawi families are now homeless, living in the street right outside their homes. As Maher Hannoun points out, even now graciously addressing the Israeli people, this is but one case of many in East Jerusalem.

The second letter is from Udi Aloni, renowned filmmaker and son of Shulamit Aloni, longtime civil rights activist and former Minister of Education, to Leonard Cohen. Cohen, scheduled to play in Tel Aviv in September, has been the target of a concerted international boycott campaign. (JPN also recently posted the guidelines by PACBI for cultural boycott efforts here: http://jewishpeacenews.blogspot.com/2009/07/pacbi-guidelines-for-applying.html)As a result he added a concert in Ramallah, had the concert cancelled by Palestinians, and is now donating proceeds from the concert to a fund administered by Amnesty International.

Aloni's moving letter, originally published in YNet, the website of Israel's second largest newspaper, was not translated into English by the paper. It was published in English by Occupation Magazine. Money quote (but please read the whole thing):

" After endless consideration, I finally realized that the question that should be asked is not whether we support or oppose a cultural boycott. It is not even whether the Palestinians were right for cancelling your concert in Ramallah. The question is really whether we should comply with the request of those Palestinians who have chosen the path of non-violent resistance in their struggle against occupation and racism. It may be difficult for me, emotionally, to accept a cultural boycott; I already described how I failed in my attempt to raise that placard during your show in New York. That is why this time I will comply with their wishes. With my actions I will offer those denied self-determination the right to determine their response. By accepting their right to decide, I will empower those who've been disempowered for so long and help to restore the sovereignty they lack. That is what solidarity really means."

--Rebecca Vilkomerson

A Letter to the Israeli People

I am appealing to you as an Israeli citizen:

When your government denied my family our rights in the past, many ordinary Israelis did not look away. Instead, they stood with us. They showed us that Israelis are able to look past our differences and stand up for what is right.

I call on the Israeli people once again to help.

Early on Sunday August 2nd, more than 200 armed police smashed our windows, barged into our house and threw us out. They said we were living in the house illegally because Jews owned the land upon which our homes were built- over a hundred years ago. But, immediately after we were forced out, extremist settlers took over and occupied our home. They are still there now.

My wife, children and I have spent the past seven days and nights in the streets, and there is no end for us in sight. Overnight, we were made homeless. I hope you can help us seek the justice denied to us.

Israel calls itself a democracy. If so, the government is answerable to you, the Israeli people.

My family's situation is not an isolated case. Stories like ours are being played out all the time in Jerusalem and will continue. It is being perpetuated by the government of Israel in your name, in the name of the Israeli people, against UN resolutions and international law.

Please, stand with us again in our time of need, and help my family and I and those like us, to get our homes back.

We need your support. With each new day spent in the streets, our time is running out. Please stop the Israeli government from abusing us in Sheikh Jarrah in your name.

Maher Hannoun,
Sheikh Jarrah,
Jerusalem

For more information, please visit www.standupforjerusalem.org

http://www.kibush.co.il/show_file.asp?num=34900

And Who Shall I Say Is Calling?

Dear Leonard,

It was two months ago that I had the privilege of seeing you perform in New York. You might say I'd been waiting thirty-five years for it. I remembered the first time I'd heard your music in Israel, and you could tell from my smile "that tonight would be fine." As I arrived outside the show, I met some old friends—partners in the struggle—who were demonstrating across the street: "Leonard, don't play Israel!" After all the kissing and warm embraces, I told them that I really must go in so that I wouldn't miss the opening song. They nodded and slipped a small placard in my hand, then warily asked if I would hold it up during the show: "Leonard, don't play Israel!" Amid those hearts that burn like coal, the sign seared my hands like hot coal too.

I was there with my only daughter. Your wonderful voice had been a soundtrack to my life, and now I wanted to share that with her. I recalled the day, when we were living in New York, that her grandfather died in far-off Beersheba. She lit candles around her bed to the strains of "Hallelujah," and the two of us wept over Grandpa Jukey. Jukey was a wonderful man, who apparently died from a cancer he contracted at the Dimona nuclear reactor, a modern-day temple to the new God that has "become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds." My daughter had never heard "Hallelujah" before, and I hadn't yet told her about the reactor in Dimona, but that's when she first fell in love with your music. Now, in New York, we had come to take advantage of that brief moment of kindness that you so generously shared with us.

Who am I to tell you: "Don't play Israel"? Your voice, so mature, so moving, so shattered, could shatter even a heart of stone. And yet, that placard still seared my fingers—fingers belonging to an Israeli and a Jew who believes that we are ultimately responsible for the fact that the Palestinian people have lived in exile in their own land for the past sixty years. I was hesitant about raising that sign, but just then you came on stage, and sang in your broken, heart-rending voice, "Like a bird on the wire, Like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free." The placard slipped from my hands and the romantic idealism that still fills my soul quivered and shook off years and years of accumulated dust. I sang along as if I was you or you were me. I remembered you well in the Chelsea hotel … and it was if we were there with Janis Joplin herself … I never wanted it to end. You knew who I am and you gave me your all. Then, when the concert was finally over, I got up and
laid the sign gently on my seat. Maybe someone else would raise it.

I was very excited when I first heard that you would be playing in Ramallah. I said to myself, "It's different with him." I always knew that you are not like Paul McCartney and the others. You are a true symbol of art, who is (still) trying to make this world a better place. In New York I heard you sing, "I'm your man." It's true: you are my man, indeed. I called my friends in Ramallah and said, "Let's go see Leonard together," and only then did I learn that the Palestinians had decided to cancel your show. It goes without saying that I was quite disappointed. You are someone who listens, who cares. You are different from all the others. Why must they be so stubborn? Why can't they finally reap the fruits of their success—"Leonard Cohen plays in Palestine!" What right do they have to rob their fellow Palestinians of this chance to hear the best that music has to offer? What could they possibly gain from this boycott of the arts? The very idea of mixing art and politics is very
problematic, to me at least.

But then my daughter looked me right in the eye, and said in her straightforward way: "Dad, write to Leonard and explain to him why the Palestinians are right to cancel his concert. They don't have the privilege of free access to culture that we have in Tel Aviv or New York. They're tired of all the goodwill gestures and the petty benefits we concede to as an alibi for our own dirty consciences. They want justice, and that's why they are asking: 'Don't go and amuse our occupiers, and then come to us with a consolation prize.'" Her words were so simple, so wise, that as soon as I heard them I knew I had to write to you.

Well, Leonard, maybe you should only play in Palestine. Maybe you should open your heart to the oppressed and not to their oppressors. If you cancel your show in Israel, no other self-respecting artist will perform here. At first, the self-indulgent audience in Tel Aviv will be annoyed at those artists and say that they are all anti-Semites. Over time, however, they will come to realize that they cannot gain acceptance in some escapist fantasy as long as the Occupation continues. Israelis will not join the struggle against the Occupation as long as the Occupation doesn't hurt them directly. Israelis must be told: "The Occupation is not normal. Nothing here is normal, God dammit!"

The Palestinians can afford to miss your show, not because they don't like you or admire your art, and not because they necessarily believe that art should be political. They simply think that the artist Leonard Cohen should side with the oppressed. So much so, in fact, they are even willing to sacrifice this chance to hear a truly great artist like you so that they too can be like that "bird on the wire," finally free. Leonard, I just want you to know that even if you did play in Ramallah, you would not be able to give a show in Gaza, because the 1.5 million people living there are trapped in a prison, where no one comes or goes. To paraphrase you, "The walls of this prison still surround them, and they cannot break away."

You might ask: Why me? Why Leonard Cohen? What about all the other artists who perform in Israel? All I can say is that yours is the fate of the last of the troubadours—the same fate shared by Moses on Mount Nebo. Take it as a compliment that the Palestinians chose you. Someone there must believe that you represent the human conscience. And if Madonna, Depeche Mode, McCartney, and the rest can play only in Israel and only for Israelis, then you can play only in Ramallah and only for Palestinians.

After endless consideration, I finally realized that the question that should be asked is not whether we support or oppose a cultural boycott. It is not even whether the Palestinians were right for cancelling your concert in Ramallah. The question is really whether we should comply with the request of those Palestinians who have chosen the path of non-violent resistance in their struggle against occupation and racism. It may be difficult for me, emotionally, to accept a cultural boycott; I already described how I failed in my attempt to raise that placard during your show in New York. That is why this time I will comply with their wishes. With my actions I will offer those denied self-determination the right to determine their response. By accepting their right to decide, I will empower those who've been disempowered for so long and help to restore the sovereignty they lack. That is what solidarity really means.

Leonard, I truly admire you as a poet. My admiration for you and your work is unconditional, and will continue unabated regardless of whether you decide to play Israel or not. I am not boycotting you at all, and I will send all my friends to hear you sing anywhere else in the world that you might play. Here, however, in response to the calls of the Palestinian people, in solidarity with a people denied their basic rights for the past sixty years, as a Jew, and as a citizen of Israel who supports the non-violent struggle of the Palestinian people for freedom, equality, and justice, I regret that I will not be able to attend this show, this time. This is the one place where I cannot allow the placard to slip from my hands. I cannot be derelict in my duty to help tear down the roadblocks and walls. Because here in Israel-Palestine, only when all of the inhabitants who share this very special place can come to see your show, regardless of their race or ethnicity, could I possibly sit
back
in my seat, close my eyes, and sing with you: "The holy or the broken, Hallelujah!"

With Deepest Regrets,

Sincerely Yours,

U. Aloni

Hebrew version, with hundreds of hateful talk-back comments:

http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3756087,00.html

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

A response to the murders at the Tel Aviv LGBT center

The following talk was given by Tamara, a queer activist from Tel Aviv, at a demonstration held in Berlin on August 7th, in solidarity with the Lesbian Gay Bi Trans community in Israel, following the mass shooting at the Tel Aviv LGBT youth center, killing two and injuring 15. Tamara's words at the Berlin demo, attended by some 2000 people, expressly and clearly linked the gun violence let loose at the LGBT center with Israel's militarized hypermasculine gun culture and connected the institutional persecution of queers in Israel with the violent institutional persecution and oppression of other groups and minorities; Palestinians, migrant workers, dissenting protesters. "Homophobia is racism," Tamara said. "Racism is homophobia."

For a video of the Berlin demonstration and Tamara's talk, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQlxsH43zDQ

Rela Mazali

--------------------------------------------------

Last Saturday a nightmare came true: we were hunted down.

A faceless man went into a room full of youngsters and opened fire.

Now 2 of them are dead many wounded. Some teenagers outed on a hospital bed.

When the news of the murder came, it was all too easy for me to picture the scene - I used to spend most of my waking hours in this secluded basement flat in central Tel Aviv, the offices of the Israeli GLBT association, Haaguda, working on Pride and AIDS awareness events.

We felt very safe there. Confidant. We had the of City Tel Aviv on our side, hanging rainbow flags on demand. We had the police doing our bidding instead of detaining and forbidding.

Ok, we had to swallow a few LGBT - phobic jokes from officers, bureaucrats, and commercial sponsors. But we thought it was a small price to pay for ten's of thousands marching in the streets of Tel Aviv, safe and proud, landing courage to countless kids across the country.

The price we paid now isn't small. It is immeasurable. The life of 2. The health of 15 , a collective trauma.

I do not feel safe now In Tel Aviv. Our strong hold. Our ghetto. I feel grief stricken and furious and betrayed.

I want to know who was this man in a ski mask dealing death in whose name. Was it a homophobic zealot? A fascist? A crazed family member or even a lover? How can I spot his kind and seek shelter when I recognize danger?

Maybe I should simply watch out for man with machine guns.

But this if far from simple In Israel, where most young men are drafted at 18, many issued a gun. Reserves soldiers – the entire able boded male population – often take their gun home too. There are guns on the bus, guns in Cafes, guns in restaurants, guns on the trains and the beach. Security guards and police have pistols. Settlers carry fire arms where ever they go.

In fact, there are probably only 3 segments of the population in Israel that are less likely to have access to guns: Work migrants, Palestinians, and ultra religious Jews.

Yesterday the Israeli police accused the LGBTQ communities of prematurely calling the murders a hate crime. Of inciting hate against other minority populations.

I agree with the police- it is too easy to point the finger at the extreme religious parties. Or at immigrants. Better look for the real villains: Better accuse the policemen who on Sunday called the supporters of the evacuated families in east Jerusalem, filthy fagots - When Many of them arrived directly from a memorial demo protesting the murders in Tel Aviv. Better investigate law enforcers calling conscientious objectors stupid dykes while smashing their heads on the pavement. Better be ware of the police arresting and bashing queer activists in Central Tel Aviv on the very same day as the murders, after they have tried to protect refugees and their children from being deported.

Better point the finger at the soldiers who kill peace loving men and youth in none violent demos in Palestine, and round up others in the dead of night.

I accuse them of creating a society of hatred and brute force where no minority is safe.

But it is also too easy to blame the police. The police is only a symptom, a tool of the government and the state. The same government who did nothing when calls for our blood where heard from its benches. The same state that it's president, Shimeon Peres, objected in 2007 to the Pride parade in Jerusalem in – where 3 people where stabbed only 2 years earlier.

Many of us in the Jewish LGBTQ community in Israel believed we would be safe if we will "be like everyone else" be mothers, solders, consumers. Be poster boys and girls for "the only democracy in the middle east". Be a tourist attraction.

We were told that we could be safe if we distance ourselves from any hint of otherness. Because "the other" draws fire.

We are not safe. We are being murdered. And in order to protect our self we should be nothing like everyone else. We should demand they put away the guns they use to shoot us. We should denounce violence and repression of other minorities. We should honor the murdered by remembering – Homophobia is Racism. Racism is Homophobia.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Israel's "Hamas": the Sheikh Jarrah evictions

The eviction by Israeli authorities of two Palestinian families (53 residents in total, including 19 minors) from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem on August 2 has produced extensive international condemnation. The evictions were authorized by Israeli courts in a highly controversial decision (here's a timeline of the 37-year case: <http://bit.ly/3xrPNd>), and the Netanyahu administration's effort to hastily enforce the ruling seems intended to fortify Israel's disputed claim to sole sovereignty over Jerusalem. Beyond the shameful events themselves, what is particularly outrageous, writes Jerry Haber (the pseudonym of an Orthodox Jewish Studies professor who divdes his time between Israel and the US), is how Israeli national radio has dishonestly framed the information about the evictions of the al-Ghawi and al-Hanoun families.

Haber's article <http://bit.ly/ZlcuG> is a must-read, because it details a typical case in which the Israeli government-run media presents a version of events that fits the government's deeply distorted ethno-nationalist narrative, rather than the facts. He also dissects the blatant falsehoods of the Netanyahu administration's claim that Arabs can live anywhere in Jerusalem, and therefore so should Jews.

Haber concludes: "if you are a decent human being, you cannot but shout, My God, how long will this robbery -- or to use the Biblical Hebrew word, this 'Hamas' --continue? Isn't what we stole after 1948 and 1967 enough?"

In response to tensions between the Obama and Netanyahu administrations generated by incidents such as this, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman adds some surprisingly blunt criticisms <http://bit.ly/2RPn5U> of Israel's ongoing settlement activity -- which, he remarks, has been greatly abetted by major American Jewish organizations:

"For years, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the pro-Israel lobby, rather than urging Israel to halt this corrosive process, used their influence to mindlessly protect Israel from U.S. pressure on this issue and to dissuade American officials and diplomats from speaking out against settlements. Everyone in Washington knows this, and a lot of people -- people who care about Israel -- are sick of it.

"The Times's Jerusalem bureau chief, Ethan Bronner, captured the we-are-untouchable arrogance of the settlers last week when he quoted Rabbi Yigael Shandorfi, leader of a religious academy at the settlement of Nahliel, calling Mr. Obama in a speech 'that Arab they call a president.'"

--Lincoln Shlensky

Sarah Anne Minkin adds:

These evictions are also a story about the abuse of the law by a supposed democratic regime. Both Jerry Haber's post and this article by Marcey Gayer <http://bit.ly/zqWts> describe the ways in which the courts and other governmental bodies, including the Israel Lands Administration, use the legal methods at their disposal to dispossess Palestinians and make material and symbolic claims -- of both land and history -- for Israel's Jewish inhabitants. Note, too, the heavy involvement of the American doctor and casino magnate, Irving Moskowitz, who has a hand in much of the settlement building and dispossession of Palestinians in Jerusalem.

Mairav Zonshein and Joseph Dana have a new video on the evictions, including an interview with the father of the Hanoun family, evicted yesterday: <http://bit.ly/n75Lk>

In July, President Obama called on Israel to halt settlement expansion in East Jerusalem; Israel continues to defy the U.S., evicting Palestinians and moving Jewish settlers into their homes under the protection of the Israeli Defense Force. A short video on the Judaization of East Jerusalem, focusing specifically on the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, is posted here: <http://bit.ly/1XNcJ>

Here is short testimony from Ofra Ben-Artzi about being arrested while trying to visit the evicted Palestinians: <http://bit.ly/sqOLi> (she's Netanyahu's sister-in-law and mother of the long-jailed military refuser Yonatan Ben-Artzi)

And here is Ha'aretz's article on Clinton's objection to the evictions, which also includes quotes from Egyptian & Swedish diplomats about them: <http://bit.ly/AkhW8>

Joel Beinin adds:

Stand Up for Jerusalem has posted videos <http://bit.ly/xu92J> of Israeli police evicting two Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem at 5:00 am on August 2. One of the families, the Hijazi family, claims to have deeds to the property dating to the 19th century. The Sephardic Community Committee also claims to have owned the properties before the 1948 War. Twenty-eight Palestinian refugee families were resettled in Sheikh Jarrah by the UN and the Jordanian government, which occupied East Jerusalem during the war. After Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967 they were granted the status of "protected" tenants (meaning ordinarily they could not be evicted). The putative Jewish owners claimed the two families were delinquent in their rent and therefore subject to eviction. With the consent of the Sephardic Community Committee, settlers have already occupied the homes.

This appears to be a further step in the process of "judaizing" Sheikh Jarrah, a project which has been under way for some time. Nahalat Shimon International, a settler-related real estate group which also claims to have an Ottoman-era deed, has been seeking to build a 200-unit settlement named Shimon Ha-Tzadik in the area. Settlers already occupy several other houses in the neighborhood.

A full report on the legal background to the case is available at the website of 'Ir 'Amim, an NGO that seeks an equitable and shared Jerusalem in the framework of an agreed political future. <http://bit.ly/1bu3Fd>

The Sheikh Jarrah evictions have aroused a storm of international protest from the USA, UK, the EU, Sweden, Egypt, and others. Secretary of State Clinton called the eviction "a very regrettable action," and the Israeli Ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, was called in for a scolding. Verbal protests seem unlikely to be enough to halt the Netanyahu government's determination to build more Jewish colonies in East Jerusalem.

Monday, August 3, 2009

Academia in Israel implicated in war crimes

A few of our recent postings have reflected the currently growing discussion of, and rising support for, employing BDS--Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions--as practical ways to undo the impunity with which Israel continuously violates international law and breaches human rights. Facing the threat of a cultural boycott that would include academic institutions and scientific institutes, many official and self-appointed representatives of the Israeli regime repeatedly invoke "academic freedom". The following two pieces (both published on the Electronic Intifada website) provide detailed, fact-based descriptions of Israeli academia's extensive involvement in the forceful military maintenance of occupation and in the many material profits afforded by occupation and deep-running militarization. They unveil the claim to "academic freedom" as a convenient ploy towards silencing dissent and a control mechanism aiding maintenance of the current balance of power.

The first piece reports on the prestigious Harvard appearance of Colonel Pnina Sharvit-Baruch, a lecturer in the Law Faculty at Tel Aviv University, to which she "graduated" immediately after serving as head of the International Law department (ILD) at the Israeli Military Advocate General's office. She is known, for instance, this article explains, for "green-lighting the bombing of a police graduation ceremony in Gaza that killed dozens of civil policemen. … According to one Israeli jurist speaking to the Israeli daily Haaretz, the ILD is considered 'more militant than any other legal agency in Israel, and willing to adopt the most flexible interpretations of the law in order to justify the [Israel army's] actions.'"

The second item reports on an extensive, detailed study of the intricate interconnections and mutual dependency between Tel Aviv University and the Israeli security sector. "Demonstrating the complicity of TAU in the commissioning and enabling of ongoing war crimes is a relatively straightforward task," the item states. "At the same time, this transparency discloses the extent to which the institution's overt roles in illegal and oppressive military programs go unchallenged, which reflects troubling patterns of acquiescence across Israeli academia and reveals the degree of mobilization obtaining in wider Israeli society."

The full (10 page) study is available online at: http://www.electronicintifada.net/downloads/pdf/090708-soas-palestine-society.pdf

Rela Mazali

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10673.shtml

Israel Lobby Watch
Israeli officer promotes war crimes at Harvard Maryam Monalisa Gharavi and Dr. Anat Matar, The Electronic Intifada, 22 July 2009 ________________________________________
On 9 July Harvard University's Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research (HPCR) invited Colonel Pnina Sharvit-Baruch, former Israeli military legal adviser, to their online Humanitarian Law and Policy Forum. The stated aim was to bring "objective" discussion to the principle of distinction in international humanitarian law, or what the forum organizers called "combat in civilian population centers and the failure of fighters to distinguish themselves from the civilian population."

Although billed as a lecturer in the Law Faculty at Tel Aviv University -- and therefore as a detached humanitarian law analyst -- Colonel Sharvit-Baruch was in fact deeply involved in Israel's three-week onslaught in Gaza in December and January, that counted its 1,505th victim found under rubble earlier this month. With the devastating operation condemned and mourned worldwide, many asked why a ranking member of an occupying army that flouts its legal obligations should herself receive safe havens at two major universities.

What troubled many of the 200 or so participants who "attended" the talk via a virtual chatroom was that Sharvit-Baruch was cut off from public or legal scrutiny as she relayed her PowerPoint presentation. Questions were posed by the moderators, sanitized of any critical content. Yet the indisputable fact is that the army for which Sharvit-Baruch worked has been accused by all major human rights organizations of committing war crimes in Gaza. Some wondered why Sharvit-Baruch was being given the opportunity to offer a carefully prepared presentation unchallenged in an academic setting, rather than giving testimony to a tribunal or inquiry such as that being conducted Judge Richard Goldstone, the South African jurist heading an independent fact-finding mission into human rights violations during Israel's attack at the request of the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Since the event organizers did not ask pointed questions about Colonel Sharvit-Baruch's actual role in Gaza, it is worth doing so here. As head of the International Law department (ILD) at the Israeli Military Advocate General's office, Sharvit-Baruch is known for green-lighting the bombing of a police graduation ceremony in Gaza that killed dozens of civil policemen. This was no ordinary airstrike. It was premised on a legal sleight-of-hand: that even traffic cops in Gaza could be considered "legitimate targets" under international law. In a conversation with conscripts at a military prep academy in Israel, school director Danny Zamir noted, "I was terribly surprised by the enthusiasm surrounding the killing of the Gaza traffic police on the first day of the operation. They took out 180 traffic cops. As a pilot, I would have questioned that."

Further, the Israeli army used heavy artillery and white phosphorus munitions in densely populated areas of Gaza, against the UNRWA's headquarters and a UN school in Beit Lahiya. As reported by Judge Goldstone, Gazans trying to relay their civilian status were also hit. Even though the Israeli military tried several times to deny its use, the Human Rights Watch (HRW) report on white phosphorous use in Gaza quotes an unnamed Israeli official: "at least one month before [white phosphorus] was used a legal team had been consulted on the implications." HRW found that "in violation of the laws of war, the [Israeli army] generally failed to take all feasible precautions to minimize civilian harm" and "used white phosphorus in an indiscriminate manner causing civilian death and injury."

Such reckless disregard for the lives of civilians and pathological cover-ups of military operations are recognized by many Israelis within the system itself. According to one Israeli jurist speaking to the Israeli daily Haaretz, the ILD is considered "more militant than any other legal agency in Israel, and willing to adopt the most flexible interpretations of the law in order to justify the [Israel army's] actions." Although the ILD personnel "are now very proud of their influence upon the combat" in Gaza, human rights groups have stated that "residents weren't advised then as to which places were safe, and the roads by which they fled were bombed and turned into death traps."

One of the most indelible perspectives about Israel's legal gymnastics to justify its actions comes from Colonel Sharvit-Baruch's predecessor, Daniel Reisner. "What is being done today is a revision of international law," Reisner has said, "and if you do something long enough, the world will accept it. All of international law is built on that an act which is forbidden today can become permissible, if enough states do it." In expressing how the ILD moves forward by turning back the pages of legal jurisdiction, Reisner says, "We invented the doctrine of the preemptive pinpoint strike, we had to promote it, and in the beginning there were protrusions which made it difficult to fit it easily into the mold of legality. Eight years later, it's in the middle of the realm of legitimacy."

Sharvit-Baruch herself explained her vision of international law at a presentation for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs: "International law is developed according to practices. It changes based on what is happening in the field. These laws must be based on precedents, what already exists. There is flexibility in every law." By this law of flexibility, the more aberrations of international law a state can legitimize, the more hoary actions it can continue to execute and justify.

Since the attack on Gaza, numerous testimonies of Israeli soldiers published in Israel, have corroborated the accounts of Palestinian witnesses and human rights organizations that serious war crimes were endemic.

Despite the blunt admissions of Israeli soldiers widely published in the Israeli press, it was clear from her calm presentation that Sharvit-Baruch and her cohort live in their own rhetorical universe where even language is assaulted. In the Colonel's own terminology, non-existent vocabulary in international law such as "capacity builders" and "revolving doors" is coined to pass over accepted terms such as "civilians" and "non-combatants." Like the US government's "torture memo" authors -- who in contrast to Israel's were not uniformed ranking members of the army -- the Israeli military attempted to reclassify a "civilian" in a manner making it easier to strip them of protections provided by international humanitarian law. "Architecture of words," said one participant

Despite all this, by her own standards, Sharvit-Baruch and her team could not be faulted for their efficiency: in Gaza, banning all media from entering; assaulting the population with air missiles, sniper ground troops, and white phosphorus; condemning all criticism of military actions as contrary to state security; keeping a chin above the law; attaining a teaching position at Tel Aviv University and finally a prestigious opportunity to address Harvard students and faculty.

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature with a Secondary Field in Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University. Her three-part film Inessential (2008) about the siege of Gaza screened at the Townhouse Gallery of Art in Cairo, Boston Palestine Film Festival, and Providence Palestine Film Festival.

Dr. Anat Matar is a senior lecturer of philosophy at Tel Aviv University and head of the Israeli Association for the Palestinian Prisoners.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10652.shtml

Activism News
Study: Tel Aviv University part and parcel of the Israeli occupation Report, SOAS Palestine Society, 9 July 2009 ________________________________________
As part of Tel Aviv's centenary celebration, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London hosted a Tel Aviv University Special Lecture Series from January to March 2009. Taking place in the midst of Israel's war on Gaza -- which had already mobilized SOAS students to organize a number of activities in solidarity with Gaza, including the first student occupation in the UK -- students and a number of lecturers expressed their opposition to the lecture series.

The student union overwhelmingly passed a motion criticizing the lecture series' attempt to whitewash Tel Aviv's colonial past and present and called for the end of SOAS's collaboration with Tel Aviv University (TAU) in hosting the series on the grounds of its role in giving key legal, technological and strategic support for maintaining and expanding Israel's colonial occupation. The School's Director, Professor Paul Webley, opposed the cancellation and defended the continuation of the lecture series by invoking a prerogative of freedom of speech and citing the pedagogic value of diversities of opinion. Conspicuously absent in the Director's defense was any engagement with the nature and scope of TAU's research portfolio.

In response to the director's failure to acknowledge the serious implications of collaboration with TAU that undermined the reputation, integrity and fundamental ethical principles of SOAS, the SOAS Palestine Society prepared a briefing paper for him and the Governing Body outlining TAU's intensive, purposive and open institutional contributions to the Israeli military. While the signatories of the briefing paper recognized the importance of freedom of speech, they were also keenly aware of the need to uphold the rights of the oppressed and expressed that no right reigns absolute over the fundamental right to life. It is precisely therefore that it is wholly untenable that partnerships with institutions facilitating, advocating and justifying ongoing war crimes can be legitimized with recourse to an ideal of academic freedom.

The briefing paper presented irrefutable evidence of TAU's deep investment in the facilitation and prosecution (at both the material and conceptual level) of what amount to war crimes. Along with many other examples of expansive institutional culpability, it identified the leading role played by TAU in developing an explicit military doctrine of "disproportionality" calling for the targeting of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians and civilian infrastructures. All of the data assembled and clearly sourced in the briefing paper is publicly available and widely known both at TAU and to the wider Israeli public. Indeed, TAU's valorization of its contributions to the military is an emphatic feature of its domestic public image, repeatedly underlined by university president Zvi Galil and celebrated in public relations campaigns. It is in part for this reason that demonstrating the complicity of TAU in the commissioning and enabling of ongoing war crimes is a relatively straightforward task.
At the same time, this transparency discloses the extent to which the institution's overt roles in illegal and oppressive military programs go unchallenged, which reflects troubling patterns of acquiescence across Israeli academia and reveals the degree of mobilization obtaining in wider Israeli society.

When the SOAS director and the Governing Body of the school were confronted with the evidence in the briefing paper and the repeated demand to cancel the lecture series was made once again, the school's response was that:

"[N]either SOAS as an institution nor the governors as a group have decided to take a stand on the issue of continuing to work with TAU and ... it is unlikely that they would do so. Whatever the sympathies of individual governors may be, it would be virtually impossible and inappropriate for SOAS to take a political stand of this nature with regard to an individual academic institution or group of institutions in a particular country. This would go against the basic principles of academic freedom to which SOAS is legally and constitutionally bound."

This response utterly -- and most likely willfully -- ignored the evidence implicating TAU's role in death, destruction and oppression and stands testimony to the abject failure of educational institutions such as SOAS to place even minimal pressure on TAU to dissociate itself from oppression, illegality, and war-craft. Yet even this failure of omission, casting a shadow on the ethical integrity of scores of academic institutions such as SOAS, is translated into a far more serious failure of commission when universities offer themselves (their institutional reputations along with those of their faculty and studentship) as partners in the production and projection of an occlusive image of TAU as an unproblematic center of higher learning. This failure cannot be glossed over by recourse to notions of academic freedom or assertions about the pedagogic value of diversities of opinion unless these principles are elevated to an absolute status, absolving academia itself from an entire
field
of ethical responsibility.

SOAS has previously lived up to such ethical responsibilities when challenged to do so. In 2005, the institution responded to revelations about its holdings in weapons industries on the part of the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) by immediately divesting from these companies. In doing so, SOAS implicitly recognized the need to fully dissociate itself from institutions profiting from war and producing its technologies. TAU's overt privileging of military research and development, its institutional primacy in the authoring and propagation of illegal military doctrines and its celebratory self-definition as a "front line institution" in the production of Israel's "military and technological edge" makes its embrace at SOAS a betrayal of the ethical principles upheld in 2005.

Undoubtedly, SOAS's collaboration in the production of a celebratory public image of TAU and the oppressive and criminal activities fostered, facilitated and celebrated by that institution signals a profound disregard for the consequences of such institutional partnerships on SOAS's integrity and ethical reputation as an institution. Perhaps this should not come as a surprise given that the restructuring of universities into profit-orientated organizations in much of the western world, and in the UK in particular, means that university managements perform and conform with the interests of the powers that be more than ever before. The boycott, divestment and sanctions movement that is gaining rapid support across many campuses in the UK remains the only effective tool to confront collaborating universities and demand the boycott of Israeli academic institutions involved in the perpetration of war crimes.

Jewish Peace News

Monday, August 24, 2009

More critical thinking from Ben Gurion University

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Yonatan Preminger: The Strategy Behind Israel's Migrant Labor Policies / CounterPunch

Friday, August 21, 2009

Neve Gordon on Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Two Letters

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

A response to the murders at the Tel Aviv LGBT center

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Israel's "Hamas": the Sheikh Jarrah evictions

Monday, August 3, 2009

Academia in Israel implicated in war crimes

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