Now that I'm looking into the "Nakba," or Palestinian catastrophe of '48, I've come to understand that division of water rights, land swaps, settlement of refugee issues etc. are all subsidiary to a spiritual process of recognition. Last night I went to a panel at Columbia University that furthered this belief. Two women activists, one Israeli, the other Palestinian, spoke of their work on the situation.
Esti Tsal was the Israeli. She is a small woman with a strong narrow face and short hair and hip glasses, about 45. She described herself as an artist. She lives in Tel Aviv and does abstract art, minimalist art. She was somewhat disorganized, throwing her bags down as she came in late, and was utterly familiar to me: a privileged Jewish artist, a little self-absorbed, with quiet, listening eyes.
Five years ago a friend associated with Machsom Watch urged her to come to the West Bank, to the place Israelis could go: Zone A, to see the checkpoints. "'You don't believe what is going on there," the friend said. "I couldn't even imagine what she's talking about." Tsal said, OK, the next time you go, I will go.
Then Tsal couldn't stay away. "What you see usually is soldiers--young--and citizens. Soldiers and citizens." She felt as if her entire vision of the world had corrected itself, become clear, and then she felt called to document what she was seeing. Because Israelis go on with their lives with no recognition of what is happening 25 minutes away from them, and the media are weary of talking about it. "Leave us alone," they say. "It doesn't sell. Nobody wants to hear about it."
Documentary was the last thing anyone would ever say about Tsal's art. But she began taking photographs. "I was really obsessed by documentary. I went four or five times a week." Tsal was very clear about what she was doing: documenting crimes. "The main reason our soldiers are there, the settlements. Why are they there? To defend Israelis, to defend the Jewish people, whoever they are."
Her photographs of interactions between soldiers and citizens at checkpoints were on easels, around the room in Lerner Hall. I wish they were online. I will describe them a little later.
The Palestinian woman was a lot younger than Tsal, and beautiful--a lawyer, named Lubna Hammad. Born in Jordan, as a girl she had visited her family's land in the West Bank every year so as to keep her papers up to date--and observed an ongoing process of what she called "ethnic cleansing" by Jewish colonists. By the time she got to college she vowed to undo the injustice with all her power. This led her to Columbia Law School. "I was so full of more than vengeance." Hammad aimed to sue every soldier, every politician. She studied international law, human rights law, war crimes law.
Then she took a course in something called Transitional Justice that brought her to study the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa. Hammad developed a new idea of justice that involved recognition, accountability. She told a story to explain it. In South Africa, a military officer testified in great detail about how he had arrested, tortured and then killed a young activist. The victim's mother sat watching in the courtroom. When the testimony was complete, the mother was asked what she wanted. "I want the red shirt he was wearing when he was killed." Hammad interpreted: "For her that was absolute justice. Another mother said, 'I want him to be prosecuted.'"
With this new understanding of justice, Hammad began pressing for acknowledgment and recognition of the Nakba of '47-48. "This is the root cause." She doesn't care whether there is one state, two states, or a million states, so long as this recognition of the ethnic cleansing in '48 occurs. This knowledge exists chiefly in Israel, she said: in the archives, and in the memories of the perpetrators.
Palestinians had little idea what was happening, she said. When a recent tour of activists on the right of return came to Brooklyn (the night after I saw it in Manhattan), Palestinian-Americans were stunned to hear Eitan Bronstein, an Israeli, describe the nascent movement inside Israel to come to terms with their history. She said that these efforts were encouraging Arab survivors of the Deir Yassin massacre in '48 to come forward with reports that "many" women were raped there. "It wasn't hard for them to say that women and children were killed." But the utmost symbol of humiliation, rape, had been hard to discuss. "Until today, you wouldn't find a single Palestinian to talk about this."
Tsal interjected that she had first heard the word Nakba a few years ago. "Now everyone's talking about Nakba, even our minister of education." Not in the U.S., Esti. I tried to get a magazine assignment to write about it. No dice.
Questions began, then an argument, led by a loud marketing executive seated in the front row, over how best to get images of the Occupation out to the world. There were 30 in the room. I raised my hand but wasn't called on. Then I had to go. My question was for Esti Tsal.
Her photographs are searing. They are pieces of minimalist art, alas I can't find them online (though here are a couple). In one, a soldier's disembodied arm sticks out of the narrow window of a concrete pillbox, gesturing for what he wants from a Palestinian. The caption said, "the ordering, pointing finger." In another a perfectly groomed old man held out his pita bread to the same window, to be inspected. Another man stood turning his empty plastic bag upside down. Two Palestinian youths carried an old man who could not walk through the concrete barriers of the checkpoint, to get him to a car.
The machinery of the checkpoint was all modern. Gleaming steel, turnstiles, sleek lines. The worst photo showed an Israeli soldier, looking like a cheder-student with his beard and wirerimmed glasses, holding a semiautomatic rifle and standing over a Palestinian taxi driver he had knocked to the ground as a group of dazed Palestinian young men stood around, unable to respond.
The photos were about power, humiliation, abasement, emasculation. They reminded me of the book my mother bought six new copies of when I was a teenager as an act of racial memory, so as to give one to each of her six children (and my mother never bought new books, ever): Roman Vishniac's photos of the Warsaw ghetto. Tsal seemed to be echoing the imagery many of us have of Jews oppressed in central and eastern Europe. I wanted to ask Tsal if these references were intentional.
What are you reading Phil?
i want to see war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes against peace, crimes against morality, crimes against decency trials. i want to see jewry and jewry's supporters/loafer lickers, quislings and collaborators and enablers necks in nooses hanging from gallows lining the DC mall, both sides and the middle and along pa ave and k st.
again, jewry and it zionist dept are far worse than the nazis. zionism combines the worst of SA apartheid, usa, english, and australian racism, and the soviet persecutions(much of which was jewish in origin and conception). zionism: the worst of the worst.
now let's wait for the mouths to squeal.
Brilliant essay!
"With this new understanding of justice, Hammad began pressing for acknowledgment and recognition of the Nakba of '47-48. 'This is the root cause.' She doesn't care whether there is one state, two states, or a million states, so long as this recognition of the ethnic cleansing in '48 occurs. This knowledge exists chiefly in Israel, she said: in the archives, and in the memories of the perpetrators."
It's getting perilously late for a Nakba commission to interview the perpetrators. In South Africa's case, the Sharpeville massacre occurred in 1960; Nelson Mandela's treason trial was held in 1964; the Truth & Reconciliation Commission began work in 1995, reviewing massacres as recent as the early 1990s.
In Israel, even a youthful 20-year-old in 1948 is now eighty years old. As they celebrate Israel's 60th birthday, Israel's rulers can also pat themselves on the back for having run out the clock on the living eyewitnesses of the ethnic cleansing which founded the Israeli state.
A critical question will be, what is contained in the Israeli archives? If the scribes did such a lovingly detailed job of documenting the massacres of Arabs as they did of recording their own peoples' suffering in the Holocaust, then maybe the truth will come out. One hopes that the early German Jewish immigrants had that same obsession with careful record-keeping as their nazi tormentors did.
When the tables turn one day, Israelis will hold up the example of Esti Tsal to their Arab compatriots to demonstrate that "See, we were not all evil. Some of us had a conscience. There were many Esti Tsals among us — REALLY!"
If only it were so. That would leave only the American Jews as the ones who see no evil, hear no evil … well, "speak no evil" is a different matter.
"again, jewry and it zionist dept are far worse than the nazis"
You don't know what you are talking about. Without people like – which are plainly frightening from a German perspective – the whole discussion would be much easier.
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"What are you reading Phil?" – R. Witty
He cited the author, and posted a link to the bookstore.
Are you a spambot?
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A quote from Hillary Clinton's campaign website:
"In 1999, Hillary first spoke out against the textbooks used in Palestinian schools, which reject Israel’s right to exist and describe Israel’s founding as "a catastrophe that is unprecedented in history." Hillary has led the charge against this propaganda which she says indoctrinates instead of educates Palestinian children and actively prevents these young people from seeing Israel as a neighbor to live beside in peace."
http://www.hillaryclinton.com/feature/israel/
I would bet you that the Palestinian textbooks: (a) reject Israel's right to exist *as a Jewish state*, a key phrase whose exclusion completely changes the meaning; (b) that "catastrophe" is an English translation of "Nakba" — an historical event, not the rhetorical hate speech which Hillary implies.
Not satisfied with this savage putdown of the Palestinians, Miss Hillary goes on to state:
"Hillary Clinton believes that Israel’s right to exist in safety as a Jewish state, with defensible borders and *an undivided Jerusalem as its capital,* secure from violence and terrorism, must never be questioned."
Can you believe it? An undivided, Israeli-ruled Jerusalem implies that the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem will have to be expelled, "ethnicly cleansed," whatever you want to call it. This is hardball Likudnik rhetoric, way beyond the pale of UN resolutions calling for Jerusalem to be an international city.
When it comes to Israel, Hillary Clinton's far-neocon stance recalls Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrat campaign for president in 1948. She's for Kosher Jim Crow, now and always. No wonder the queen of the Likudnik KKK earns such loyalty from the older generation of AIPAC supporters.
I just hope she doesn't burn Magen Davids on the White House lawn at night, as hooded ADL legions gallop round the grounds, to celebrate her zionist victory. Are olive trees tall enough to lynch folks on?
There are two important meanings of the word "ignorance".
1. To not be informed, yet.
2. To be informed and to ignore (selection by negation) what doesn't fit one's prejudice
""Hillary Clinton believes that Israel’s right to exist in safety as a Jewish state, with defensible borders and *an undivided Jerusalem as its capital,* secure from violence and terrorism, must never be questioned.""
If crossing AIPAC equals political suicide should we be so surprised by statements like this one? Obama has, at least indirectly echoed the same sentiments often enough.
RE: "There are two important meanings of the word "ignorance".
1. To not be informed, yet.
2. To be informed and to ignore (selection by negation) what doesn't fit one's prejudice" — Richard Witty
No, only one. #1
#2 is properly another term:
mendacious
.
Uri Avnery bores into the heart of zionism, the way worms killed my dog when I was little:
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WHAT IS the heart of peace? A border. The real Zionist vision does not recognize any maps.
In August 1968, after the occupation of the Golan Heights, before a rally of young Kibbutzniks, [Moshe Dayan] told the youth:
"We are fated to live in a permanent state of fighting against the Arabs. For the hundred years of the Return to Zion we are working for two things: the building of the land and the building of the people. That is a process of expansion, of more Jews and more settlements. That is a process that has not reached the end. We were born here and found our parents, who had come here before us. It is not your duty to reach the end. Your duty is to add your layer to expand the settlement to the best of your ability, during your lifetime … (and) not to say: this is the end, up to here, we have finished."
Dayan, who was well versed in the ancient texts, probably had in mind the phrase in the Chapter of the Fathers (a part of the Mishnah, which was finished 1800 years ago and formed the basis of the Talmud): "It is not up to you to finish the work, and you are not free to stop doing it."
That is the hidden agenda.
http://counterpunch.org/avnery04152008.html
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Very revealing. Zionism is one of those outwardly ambiguous ideologies, implicitly invoking religious themes while rarely citing scripture. Makes a lot of sense for its deepest foundation to lie in Talmud rather than Torah, so as not to rile the gentiles — and with even the Mishnah being accessible only to the more devoted and well-schooled of zionist adherents.
Uri's got it right: for Israel to imagine that it can carry on with ambiguous borders, stalling for more time to arrogate more land for "more Jews and more settlements," is nuts. It's not 1968 any more, and the "Holocaust free pass" expired a long time ago.
The main existential threat to Israel is the unchallenged insanity of zionism.
Uri's got it right but he doesn't go far enough. He accuses the government of Israel of not really wanting peace, of pursuing continual wars for the purpose of expanding the borders, and he hints at the root of its "hidden agenda," but he stops short of exposing it. Yes, he mentions the Mishneh but not the really offensive parts such as the laws against non-Jews. And although these laws are ancient, they have a real effect on the actions of Orthodox Jews today, and they in turn have a huge influence on the policies of the state of Israel and on the actions of the Israeli soldiers. For instance, according to the Talmud, the murder of a Jew is a capital offense but when a Jew murders a Gentile it is not punishable by a court. An example of this ancient influence on today's actions can be found in a booklet published in 1973 by the Central Region Command of the Israeli Army: "Under no circumstances should an Arab be trusted, even if he makes an impression of being civilized…In war, when our forces storm the enemy, they are allowed and even enjoined by the Halakhah to kill even good civilians, that is, civilians who are ostensibly good." If anyone is interested in reading more about this I would recommend Israel Shahak's book: "Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of 3,000 Years." As I see it, there has been no rejection of the racist foundation of this religion and there are people in positions of great power who actually believe that Jews and Gentiles are not members of the same species. This might even come as a surprise to atheist/secular Jews but they wield considerably less power in Israel/Palestine than the Orthodox rabbis, the settlers, and members of the Knesset like Avigdor Lieberman.
Uri is old enough and smart enough to know this. If he is sincere in his desire for a just peace, why doesn't he just say it?