Nicholas Kristof has a great column in the Times today on the two Israels, describing the abuses against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, including the baseball-bat beating of shepherds by colonists that I picked up here ten days ago. Times-watcher Jerome Slater says, and I agree, that "something is afoot" at the Times, this is a significant moment. I think Kristof is at last dusting off the Anthony Lewis chair, so long abandoned, that station on the Times Op-Ed page where the great emeritus Lewis once stood up for Arabs' human rights. Eclipsed since by war-drum-bangers Friedman and Kristol.
Kristof's other Israel--to the savage occupier--is the Israel of freedom, symbolized by human rights groups like B'tselem. That Israel is a thriving democracy, he seems to say. I don't know Israel, have only spent ten days there two years ago, but I wonder how toughened that society has become to its own corruption. Juliano Mer Khamis describes Israel as a place tilting more toward South Africa than Europe. I also received the romantic view of Israel as a young Jew in America, the view Kristof seems to endorse, but I wonder whether the Haaretz's and B'tselem's aren't the noble dissenters in a dark place. Dunno. In the meantime, this is a real step forward...
"I don't know Israel, have only spent ten days there two years ago, but I wonder how toughened that society has become to its own corruption. "
Thanks for acknowledging the limits of your experience there.
Don't those two clauses sound a bit contradictory to you Phil?
"I don't know Israel", but you can go on to decry its "corruption".
Can't you stay at "I don't know", and then do the research sufficient to get to "know".
Even if you know elements, can't you limit your comments to what you do "know", or at least accurately state your "suspicion".
I liked the Kristof article as well.
But, I wonder why you chose NOT to quote the part of the article stating
"The Palestinians are committing national suicide as well. By turning toward the zealots of Hamas, and toward the short-term thrill of sending rockets into Israel, they are building a tombstone for their state before it is even born."
and
"The settlers see the issue very differently, emphasizing the continuing Palestinian attacks on them and noting that the security steps were put in place only in reaction to Palestinian terrorism during the second intifada a half-dozen years ago.
“If people are trying to actively wipe you out and kill your people, then you have to take security measures,” says David Wilder, a spokesman for the settlers in Hebron. “If that antagonizes them, they should stop trying to kill us.”"
And why were Hamas launching rockets into Israel? Because Israel repeatedly turned down Hamas' offers of a truce if only Israel ceased it's policy of waging lawless extrajudicial assassinations of Hamas:
"What is being hidden from the embittered public is that the launching of the Qassams could be stopped tomorrow morning.
Several months ago Hamas proposed a cease-fire. It repeated the offer this week.
A cease-fire means, in the view of Hamas, that the Palestinians will stop shooting Qassams and mortar shells, and the Israelis will stop the incursions into Gaza, the "targeted" assassinations, and the blockade.
Why doesn't our government jump at this proposal?
Simple: in order to make such a deal, we must speak with Hamas, directly or indirectly. And this is precisely what the government refuses to do.
Why? Simple again: Sderot is only a pretext – much like the two captured soldiers were a pretext for something else altogether. The real purpose of the whole exercise is to overthrow the Hamas regime in Gaza and to prevent a Hamas takeover in the West Bank." – Uri Avnery
link to antiwar.com
And guess who provided Hamas with the initial startup funding and weaponry? It was terror-supporting state whose name begins with the letter "I" and ends in the letter "l". Seems they wanted to weaken the secular socialist organization of the PLO. Divide & conquer remains a time-tested strategy.
Oh yeah, here's a video of the Jewish settler who attacked and elderly Palestinian man and woman with baseball bats:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7451691.stm
^Considering that most settlers do not value physical fitness or work out, it looks to me like these are more likely to be special forces or a commando type militia oganized by the settlers. They certainly appear to be a lot taller and more physically fit than the average Israeli.
Watershed moment?
NY Times writes something critical of Israel?
Yeah,but Kristof had to posit a "balanced" picture of 2 Israel's, one even "more fair" than its opponents.
Consider:"Yet it is also here that you see the very best side of Israel. Israeli human rights groups relentlessly stand up for Palestinians. Israeli women volunteer at checkpoints to help Palestinians through. Israeli courts periodically rule in favor of Palestinians. Israeli scholars have published research that undermines their own nation’s mythologies. Many Israeli journalists have been fair-minded toward Palestinians in a way that Arab journalists have rarely reciprocated."
So among the oppressors there are a minority who fight against the worst abuses of the Jewish State. True, but the "two opposing Israel"s are not equal economically or politically. The Israeli Lobby in the US make sure of that. And why Mr Kristof do you have to end this comment with a slap at Arab journalists? Are you afraid of receiving tons of mail calling you an antisemite?
And have to cover yourself?
As far as something afoot? Lets see what comes from the Meeting with the oil producers. Perhaps a quid pro quo took place.
End the worst abuses for Saudi cooperation?
Saudi's have to show something for their alliance with the US in Iraq and Lebanon.
Is NYT preparing public opinion for a shift?
just a thought.
Shelling civilians for years is more than a "pretext".
May you or I be sufficiently blessed never have to live in such faux-experience.
Also, at the time that Israel provided a small portion of Hamas' funding, it was primarily a service organization, and secondarily operated moderate Islamic schools. Hamas changed.
A little disingenuous parallel, no?
""The settlers see the issue very differently, emphasizing the continuing Palestinian attacks on them and noting that the security steps were put in place only in reaction to Palestinian terrorism during the second intifada a half-dozen years ago.
“If people are trying to actively wipe you out and kill your people, then you have to take security measures,” says David Wilder, a spokesman for the settlers in Hebron. “If that antagonizes them, they should stop trying to kill us.”
Come on, Richard. I oppose attacks on civilians, including people as creepy as these settlers, but I'm not sympathetic to them. The innocent victims in that situation are the children of the settlers. If the parents are worried about their safety, then maybe they should stop trying to replicate apartheid South Africa, stop stealing land and treating Palestinians as subhuman.
And as for the shelling of civilians, again, that's wrong, but we all know which side has killed the vast majority of civilians. This is almost never made clear in the American press. You'd think it was always Arab terrorism followed by an Israeli response, sometimes a little harsher than necessary.
As for Kristof, himeankin is right–Kristof follows the usual American rule that you can't say anything critical about Israel without in some way saying that the Arabs are even worse. I have nothing against criticism of the Arab world, but that comment about Arab journalists was out of place here.
To put it another way, Richard, suppose the KKK had decided to establish "settlements" in some black neighborhood in Birmingham Alabama in the 1950's with the support of the local police. Suppose (which is unlikely in that time and place) the blacks had reacted violently. Would you be citing the head of the local KKK as though he had anything legitimate to say? That's pretty close analogy to the situation in Hebron.
I thought the Kristof article was clear, balanced (so as to accurate, rather than misrepresentative).
There was an interesting video on Haaretz today describing the absence of social services in Arab communities in East Jerusalem, even though they pay taxes to Israel.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/995124.html
a special tax strategy, which I haven't quite understood by now, seems to have started the first intifada, the war of stones.
Do you know anything about that, Richard?
I don't.
It is very unfair for Israel to not fulfill its civic responsibilities to Arab residents that pay taxes.
There really isn't any excuse for it.
I went to a presentation at my shul a few weeks ago by a rah-rah Israeli journalist for the Jerusalem Post, who a bunch of the shul's congregants visited in Israel last year.
One of the tourists was a mayoral candidate in the city I live, who was the victim of smeer campaign locally for being the former president of the shul, for being Jewish in essence.
I don't think they thought that town money was going to be spent on Israel. It was more prejudicial than that.
He confided that he had had a glowing experience in Israel, that he was changed, that he came to feel part of something.
At the presentation I asked why Israeli Arabs always got the short end of the stick in Israel, even though they were taxpaying citizens. The speaker cited that every group that is not represented in the majority party, experiences discrimmination, that it was an area of reform that Israel needed.
I responded that I thought his math was wrong, that in fact because the Arab communities were structurally excluded from participating in the majority coalition, that their subordination was permanent, and a wrong.
I later asked him if he thought that Israel was doing all that it could to make peace happen, and his response was a confident "yes".
While I was prepared for an answer of "yes, in context of the internal political circumstances", I wasn't prepared for an unequivocal "yes".
That rah-rah didn't match up with my perception and inference of reality.
But, the demonization of Israel similarly does not match up.
The truth is solidly in the middle, suggesting reform, and rejecting condemnation or solidarity with rejectionism.
"Shelling civilians for years is more than a "pretext"
May you or I be sufficiently blessed never have to live in such faux-experience."
How about "balancing" your account a little with the Palestinian side of the occupation issue, number of dead, number of prisoners, houses destroyed, trees uprooted …
or legal issues like: Israelis killing prisoner 1/2 year sentence, Palestinian tossing stones 5 years.
link to un.org
According to a UN report in 2000: "Israel had confiscated an estimated 60% of the West Bank, 33% of the Gaza Strip and an estimated 33% in occupied Jerusalem for public, semi-public and private use."
Do you understand what I mean when I say that "Shelling civilians is more than a "pretext""?
That its a chosen action on the part of Hamas, directed at civilians solely.
The notion that a truce is a sufficient compromise on their part, is ludicrous.
A sufficient compromise would be declared acceptance of Israel.
"The notion that a truce is a sufficient compromise on their part, is ludicrous."
Would a "declared acceptance of Israel" help them to get at least the occupied territories back?
We've seen this before, no? Didn't the PLO do exactly that? And what chanced after? More confiscation more settlements.
I can understand that the Palestinians ask themselves what is the secret meaning behind this: "declared acceptance of Israel". Could that be legally used? Could that be considered a declaration of acceptance of all the facts on the ground?
True,
Hamas could choose to not recognize Israel, and fight on and on and on and on and on.
The river of Zionist sentiment is NOT diverting as much as American and European "progressives" imagine.
Israel is there, and will remain. It can reform, but it will not dissolve.
To not recognize Israel is to imagine that the Mediterranean is dry land.
And, the state of war then continues, with the martial logic as rational, rather than the civil.
How about the Palestinians recognizing Israel when Israel apologizes for the ethnic cleansing of 1948? The two things could go together. The Israelis admit the crime that allowed Israel to be a majority Jewish state and the Palestinians accept the apology and don't ask for an unlimited right of return. Then something along the lines of the Geneva Accord are put into place.
I mean, if we're going for a compromise, that'd be the logical one. Just asking the Palestinians to acknowledge "Israel's right to exist" is asking them to say "You had the right to throw us out of our own homeland." It's also ironic that a country which has been practicing something close to apartheid in the West Bank for 40 years wants the people it is oppressing to recognize them. It's the kind of pathology Westerners are prone to–seeing ourselves as the main victims and bemoaning the irrationality of the people we step on.
.
.
Is it not possible to block the comments of 'Richard Witty'? It is quite adept at pushing the readers' buttons and reducing them to beating the dead horse, so that novel ideas are drowned. I believe in free speech for people but not for fabricated jamming mechanisms.
Personally I think that Israel should acknowledge the historical suffering of dispossession that they were partially cause of.
And, further than that, I believe that Israel should affirm the rule of law by opening title claims to 1948 lands taken by eminent domain or worse.
And, further than that, that Israel should fund communal Palestinian revival funds in compensation for a reasonable estimate of the current value for the lands taken that are not currently identifiable as to specific owner.
And, further than that, that Israel should compensate for those Palestinians that did not have written title, but only squatters' title (not to demean the status by the derogatory word "squatter").
But, not to be compensated by dispossession of current residents, but in some monetary form.
I think the same standards should apply in the West Bank.
Law.
The Palestinians, including Hamas, should acknowledge the current right of Israel to exist, as most have.
When Hamas does so, (a suitably brave and courageiously kind action) a great contributing force to the cycle of anger will be lifted.
.
~hlmeankin~ says
'Lets see what comes from the Meeting with the oil producers. Perhaps a quid pro quo took place.
End the worst abuses for Saudi cooperation?'
i'm with you. kristoff amassed much gravitas by crusading against abuses in darfur, while ignoring us abuses. are we to believe that he has suddenly been striken with conscience?
Richard, the more I read, the more I can understand that the Palestinians MUST deeply distrust Israelis and their law; just as deeply as the Israelis distrust Palestinians. (the reason why I consider a one state solution a fine vision for a better future only)
The high court e.g. once seems to have decided that in the West bank settlers are the inhabitents according to international law, not the Palestinians; the legal basis of the seizures?
The gist of the tax issue: Israel controlled the market in the occupied territories, which brought it an estimated return of a billion a year (from all including tourism), and about 700 million were raised in "occupation taxes" (Meron Benvenisti), about 2 1/2 times as much as Israel invested in infrastructure. During the intifada years in spite of the fact that the people in the community Finkelstein visited from 1987 on over the years considered the tax issue as the main force behind the intifada, taxes were fixed absolutely arbitrarily to add additonal pressure. If a community did not pay, the IDF closed in on it and confiscated goods, the bakers oven etc. that were auctioned in Israel.
Before the intifada there had been heightened tax pressure. A business man was odered to pay 100.000 in taxes which was more than he had earned the last 10 years.
In 2017 people can study the directives and ideas behind this; if they survived the shredders.
My source is Norman Finkelstein and his among others: Meron Benvenisti, 1986, Report – Demographic, Economic, Legal, Social and Political Developments in the West Bank; B'Tselem, The System of Taxation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Jerusalem 1990.I am reading the German version, since it seems an updated version his "Rise and Fall of Palestine".
We even have a manuscript copy of his original thesis in Frankfurt university library, which I of course ordered. All or nothing!
I don't know the specifics as I said earlier. It fits with the way that prejudice is and has been applied in much of Israeli law.
It conflicts with my views of what should be.
And, it clearly is personal, real, intimate.
And, it clearly diminishes the moral assertions that Zionism is good in the world.
Hence, the need for humane Zionists to convincingly argue for different approaches to apply, while still retaining the jewel that is the Jewish nation.