The Arava Institute’s online event “With Earth and Each Other,” held Sunday, November 14, exemplified why the Palestinian call for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions is vital. The event was billed as a celebration of Palestinians, Israelis and Jordanians working together for the environment. But it failed to educate viewers about the most basic facts of Israeli policies, and thus simply reinforced the status quo. The event, billed as not “political,” suggested that the Middle East conflict can be resolved if people of different religions and ethnicities are nicer to each other. It presented no information on the fundamental and systematic inequalities that are at the root of the conflict.
Adalah-NY and numerous other groups had urged participants, including religious and environmental organizations and performing artists like Pete Seeger, Dan Bern, and Mandy Patinkin, to respect the Palestinian boycott call and bow out. Arava Institute was targeted for boycott due to its failure to condemn Israel’s on-going ethnic cleansing of Bedouin residents of the Negev desert, where Arava is based, and Arava’s very close partnerships with the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and the Israeli government. The Israeli government and the JNF have been instrumental in cleansing the land of the indigenous Palestinian residents and planting over their villages with trees. While Arava extolls international cooperation in service of the environment, they remain silent about Israeli and JNF policies, including, as one recent example, the Israeli government’s destruction (five times in succession) of Al Araqib, a Bedouin village in the Negev, to make way for a JNF forest.
“With Earth and Each Other” was completely silent about Israeli colonialism, settlements, house demolitions, appropriation of water, and uprooting of olive trees. The tone of obfuscation was set in the first minutes when one of Arava’s Israeli Jewish students, Gavriel Vinevgard, introduced himself by saying, “My parents live in the Golan Heights here in Israel.” However, Israel has militarily occupied and illegally colonized the Golan Heights, part of Syria, since 1967. No country recognizes the Golan Heights as part of Israel.
At another point, the narrator gestured to a huge concrete wall Israel built and explained, “Behind me is the wall that separates Israel from Palestine. The water that we share doesn’t recognize the barriers that we build.” But Israel built 80% of that wall inside the occupied West Bank, separating Palestinians from Palestinians, rather than separating Palestinians from Israelis. And Israeli settlers live on both sides of the wall, siphoning off the West Bank’s most plentiful water resources while spewing polluted water into Palestinian communities.
Omitting basic facts that would challenge the regime of domination, the program focused on platitudes that promoted an undefined peace, excluding any mention of justice. Typical comments from participants included: “I must see the conflict from our joint shared side.” “Our past must not determine our future.” “We should join together to make this future closer to the present.” “I want us to really live like neighbors.”
Viewers and participants were told that water, air, and land must be shared by all peoples in the region, across borders. But they were not told that Israel monopolizes these resources for its Jewish residents and controls the borders in order to do so. Israelis use around three and a half times as much water as West Bank Palestinians. Israel is building settlements over two of the West Bank’s three main water aquifers in an effort to keep control of those resources. And in the Negev desert, where Arava is located, Israel denies entire Bedouin villages’ access to running water.
Land distribution is similarly skewed. In the West Bank, where 2.5 million Palestinians live, Israel’s military controls and administers approximately 60% of the land (known as Area C), with 500,000 Jewish settlers directly controlling 42% of the West Bank. Within Israel, Arava’s partner, the JNF,directly controls 13% of the land, and effectively controls 93% of Israel’s land through its role in the Israel Land Administration, renting and leasing only to Jewish citizens. This violates the rights of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who comprise 20% of Israel’s population.
Pete Seeger opened the hour-long program with a song about Martin Luther King Jr. and the importance of joining together to struggle nonviolently for change. Seeger may not know that most of the Palestinians and Israelis who are nonviolently protesting Israeli rights abuses together in the West Bank also support the economic, academic and cultural boycott of Israel, another proven nonviolent tactic. Seeger had promised to make a strong statement about Palestinian dispossession during the program, but the closest he came was a tangential reference to the Montgomery bus boycott.
The event leaves the impression of a project to corral idealistic youth into activities of friendly inter-communal cooperation that enforce a strict silence on issues of dispossession. Palestinians have called for a boycott of these types of activities, similar to the international boycott imposed on apartheid South Africa, because experience shows that they serve as a cover for the entrenching of discriminatory policies. Staged by an Israeli academic institution that calls itself “non-political,” “With Earth and Each Other” was a “feel good” event. The event implied that peace can be achieved without justice, and so unintentionally confirmed the importance of the Palestinian call for a boycott of these sorts of activities.
For more background on the event:
Letter to Pete Seeger from Jeff Halper, Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, http://icahdusa.org/2010/09/
Letter from over 40 organizations to Pete Seeger (including Adalah-NY), http://adalahny.org/letters/
Letter from 17 groups in the Gaza Strip to Pete Seeger, http://www.pacbi.org/
Letter to Pete Seeger from Israelis from BOYCOTT! Supporting the Palestinian BDS call from withinhttp://boycottisrael.info/
Fact Sheet: Boycott the Arava Institute’s “With Earth and Each Other,” Adalah-NY,http://adalahny.org/cultural-
Adalah-NY: The New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel is a grassroots strategic alliance of concerned organizations and individuals in New York, formed to demand an immediate, unconditional, and permanent end to U.S. and U.S.-sponsored Israeli aggression in the Middle East.
Pete Seeger has been a hero to many, as was I F Stone, but people who see some things “straight” cannot be expected to see everything “straight”. Maybe he’ll change, but he’s getting older. I’d say, keep telling him the story, and remind him of the Holocaust survivors who have joined the BDS protests, and their reasoning. Like others, he needs to see that he would have company and “permission” from those he respects to change.
And remind him what is happing to those who protest non-violently in Israel and the West Bank.
As the Philly BDSers so eloquently put it: No Justice, No Chickpeas!
By picking Arava to boycott, diminished its reputation greatly.
The willingness of Palestinian solidarity to arbitrarily demean progressives and progressive efforts, harms the movement for human rights.
Think exactly like us, or we’ll boycott you. Sounds like blackmail to me.
Hophmi,
Are you against all boycotts or only ones whose goals you disagree with?
I grew up in the community that WESPAC and Adalah are now centered, not all that far from where Phil lives.
WESPAC was originally organized by old radicals committed to communist/socialist/progressive efforts. In the 60′s-70′s-80′s, it was an impressive example of integration of old left with new left ideas and efforts.
WESPAC (where Adalah’s offices were once, I don’t know now) were in an area that had been a black community/ghetto in which the residents were removed and urban renewal (gentrification) occurred. When I was active in WESPAC its offices were on the border of the now very very commercial zone (if Greenwich and Stamford hadn’t gentrified, it would all be in White Plains).
That was Pete Seeger’s community (when Adalah disses). Odd bedfellows. I’m sure it makes a contreversy for the old WESPAC community, a big one.
Either that, or they’ve already purged those that don’t adopt the new “catholicism”.
You know peace activists.
I wonder why Phil does not investigate and write of conflicts between the new new left (Adalah) and the new left and old left, in WESPAC as an example.
Including some criticism of Adalah’s tactics, which have periodically condemned those that disagreed with them, particularly in this case, Pete Seeger. I haven’t spoken with others from WESPAC’s old days, but I imagine that others are similarly torn by the intensity and odd drawing of lines by Adalah.
I assume Pete Seeger also sang ‘Little Boxes’ in celebration of those jerry-built Israeli settlements that have sprouted up on every hilltop in the West Bank, and from whence vicious settlers descend to sabotage Palestinian agriculture and livelihoods, with the aid of the IOF.
No doubt about it; the West Bank ethnic cleansing will speed up; and America will still be ‘disappointed’.
After that, Israelis will concentrate on grabbing the East Bank, because some not-so-old maps link to bible.ca
show ancient Hebrew tribes present in certain parts (the best bits)
“failure to condemn” is a thoughtcrime. In contrast to actual crimes committed by settlers, the army, the state of Israel, the idea of going after folks for the crime of failing to express a particular opinion (which they may in fact hold) puts the silliness the anti-Arava Institute campaign into sharp relief.
failure to condemn is what McCarthyists used. What the folks who hound Muslim leaders and organizations use. It’s even what pro-Palestinian groups have to contend with, when right wingers accuse them of ‘failing to condemn terrorism.’
“failure to condemn” is a thoughtcrime.
No it’s not – at least not in this case. One of the Arava Institute’s partners and a sponsor of it’s “peace” event is complicit in ethnic cleansing in the Negev, an area in which AIES is particularly active. One would think that a word on the subject would be in order, no? Without such a word, WEAEO became a kind of a farce, and a fig leaf for actions that are clearly anti-peace. A call to boycott this particular event was thus perfectly reasonable. McCarthyism? Really?
You want to boycott this event because of JNF will be there? Fine. JNF is evil. You want to boycott this event because the Arava Institute itself because they didn’t say something you wish it did? That’s a thoughtcrime.
The call to boycott by Palestinian society, as expressed elsewhere in these pages, does NOT include a call for Israelis to participate in this boycott by boycotting Israel. The demand that the Arava Institute not cooperate with the JNF is essentially a call that it choose between being active in the Israeli environmental movement OR being active for peace and regional cooperation. That’s a false choice.
Like me, most Israeli supporters of peace can sympathize with the Arava Institute while condemning the JNF.
By going after the Arava folks, extremists are signaling the rabid refusal to accept even the most liberal and forward looking segments of Israeli society. It suggests there is no desire for peace and reconciliation, but only a threat based defeat of Israeli society itself, up to and including those parts of it that are active for peace.
The JNF has a long history of institutional racism, for example imposing covenants on land it bought or received from the government of Israel, which confiscated it from Palestinians, stating that such land may only be sold or used by Jews. It sponsored tree-planting in Israel to cover up razed Palestinian villages, and supported the government of Israel’s eviction of Palestinians from their villages by fundraising for parks where those villages used to stand. There is no way any organization can cooperate with the JNF, a sponsor of ethnic cleansing, and be active for peace and regional cooperation. They are only assisting a false appearance of liberalism or forward-looking attitude.
Does anyone know how to mail or email Pete Seeger? I’d like to express my disappointment.