Why is the struggle changing? Why are perceptions of it changing? In large part through the cellular work of social media.
A week or two back Joseph Dana, an American-Israeli journalist, came to New York and showed the sensational video of Adeeb Abu Rahmah confronting the soldiers in Bil'in-- a video that has all the transformative power of the legends of the American civil rights movement.
Two days ago Dana gave a talk on the theme of social media at the Jerusalem Fund in Washington on Tuesday called Video from the Front Lines. Measured and factual, it was addressed to the new audience: "Everyone here in internet world." For at a time when the peace process is dead in the water, this is an area of real progress.
Notice his description at 26 and 27 minutes or so of the nature of this collective punishment. The Skunk is a chemical the Israeli soldiers shoot randomly into Palestinian villages, it gets on to people's skin with a noxious smell and they can't wash it off for three weeks. He shows photographs of the Israelis' repeated invasions of the occupied Palestinian village of Nil'in after they had killed a ten-year-old boy and the Palestinians had demonstrated their outrage at the killing.
Dana explained how Israel's only recourse to Palestinian nonviolence is to crush resisting villages and try and make the response violent, so that the resistance can then be processed and contained. He showed this photo of the tear gas blanketing the sky over the village due to a new Israeli device that shoots off scores of tear-gas canisters in no time, inside the village itself.
"It's really not fun... [Though] it's quite pretty to photograph. It's really chaotic...
"Oftentimes the Israelis are trying to paint these demonstrations as violent because of the stone-throwings."
The villages' popular committees are against youths' stonethrowing, as it plays into the Israelis' hands. But how to quell stonethrowing? Two months ago I went to Bil'in and watched the "cycle of violence:" I saw the occupying soldiers being aggressive against peaceful Palestinian villagers, I saw the young men crying Allahu Akbar as they took great risk to throw stones at the soldiers. I saw the international photographers rushing after them, wearing white vests so that the soldiers wouldn't shoot them.
Dana pointed out that stone-throwing is inevitable given the brute force of collective punishment. The Israeli court system has a 97 percent incarceration rate when it comes to Palestinian protest, and an average trial length of 13 minutes. What an outrage. If they put your father away under such a process, what would you do? He said that most injuries caused by the stones are to Palestinians themselves, because there are usually activists between stonethrowers and soldiers. I'm not condoning; I don't think stonethrowing achieves anything. But to think for one second that American teenagers would do any differently under similar circumstances... (And yes, if these demonstrations were happening in occupied Afghanistan, I believe we would read more about them in the mainstream than we do about the Israeli occupation.)
Palestinian protesters pulling down a section of the wall on the anniversary of the Berlin wall's fall.
Dana also spoke of coexistence. How astonishing that despite the radicalized environment, the Popular Committees have called for the release of Gilad Shalit, and they regularly do so in Hebrew statements to the invading Israeli soldiers....
And this experience has transformed Dana himself:
"I'm going to Nil'in every Friday... If you ask me why I am doing this, I would say I'm against the occupation, these are my friends. It's just that simple, it's not some grand political platform I'm trying to disseminate. It's that these are my friends. We talk about the sports, we talk about the weather."
He is regularly invited into Palestinian homes in the midst of all this to eat and rest. "I ask myself if I would have the moral clarity to behave as the Palestinians do if I were in their situation." Would Israelis do such a thing in Tel Aviv if Palestinian soldiers were gobbling their lands? (I think not; I think we are dealing with cultural issues here, including the Jewish history of ghettoization and, yes, the hospitality tradition...)
Yes the peace process is going nowhere; but Dana has noticed that the simple message he is bringing to the U.S. is having a profound effect on audiences. And it is difficult for him not to be hopeful when he sees their response to evidence of the grassroots movement of Israelis and Palestinians building friendships and a means of co-existence. The battle in the U.S. is to get these people oxygen, give oxygen to the new model of coexistence.
Look at the photo below that Dana showed, of an Israeli hugging a Palestinian (both men on the ground) to try and prevent the man from being arrested, and tell me that new ways of being are not emerging.
All photos are from Activestills.org. Joseph Dana will be speaking at Hunter College a week from Friday. Go to his site for the details.
just watched the video. Joseph Dana, activist and emissary…thank you from the bottom of my heart.
‘The Israeli court system has a 97 percent incarceration rate when it comes to Palestinian protest, and an average trial length of 13 minutes.’
Thanks to harsh federal sentencing guidelines, many US district courts have criminal conviction rates in the mid-90 percent range. Probably they can record a plea bargain in 13 minutes too.
Occupied Palestine, meet occupied America.
America has a new model: Israel. America’s trying to play catch-up, both on the Homefront, and in its reach overseas. But Israel has no Constitution and in contrast, the US does, alas a great handicap, but melting more each time congress and SCOTUS meets on relevant issues.
The moral clarity to censor others, the moral clarity to murder collaborators, the moral clarity to shoot rockets, the moral clarity to blow up children in buses, the moral clarity of the HAMAS charter.
Moral clarity.
To achieve true moral clarity you need to stop believing the Zionist propaganda, maximalistNarrative and, as Pixel says “work to make sense of things”. No suicide bombs from Hamas since Jan 2005. Israel provoked the return of Hamas rockets after a 6 month ceasefire by Hamas in 2008 by assassinating Hamas leaders. Yet, since 1948 and before and continuing to the present day, Israeli violent attempts to remove Palestinians from their land and destroy their infrastructure go on. The rockets and the suicide bombs just allowed the Zionists to paint themselves as the victims. Look at the relative numbers of deaths of Palestinians and Israelis and see the moral clarity!
link to ifamericansknew.org
Not through lack of trying have there been less suicide bombings.
The moral clarity of rocket attacks, the moral clarity of the HAMAS charter, the moral clarity of the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit, the moral clarity of the brainwashing of children.
Moral Clarity.
I will add that comparing the numbers of death’s on each side has nothing to do with morality and conveys the message that Israel would be morally equal if it let more of it’s own children be murdered, which is in fact the opposite, protecting ones children from murder is by far more moral.
I wonder if someone stole your land and drove you off it:
“We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?’ Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said ‘Drive them out!’” Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23
October 1979.
you would accept it with equanimity. You can’t do violence to another group of people without expecting resistance. What we are seeing is that Palestinians are trying (and perhaps not consistently but always have tried) the non-violent route and look where it has got them.
link to normanfinkelstein.com
Brainwashing children:
link to washington-report.org
Kidnapping Shalit:
link to youtube.com
And the Hamas Charter: When will Israel renounce violence against Palestinians and accept a separate Palestine within 1967 borders?
link to antiwar.com
As I said before Hamas gave Israel a 6 month ceasefire in 2008. Israel broke it! You can’t talk about rocket attacks without the Israeli violence that precipitates them. Let Israel renounce violence.
I don’t think anything will persuade you maximalistNarrative but at least less closed minds will read and understand.
In other words Max, the more Israelis the Palestinians kill, the more moral they are correct?
You must have been a big fan of Stalin and Hitler. You’d me hard pressed to get more moral than them.
Then again, why am I surprised. After all, you endorse a book that advocated genocide.
“I don’t think anything will persuade you maximalistNarrative but at least less closed minds will read and understand.”
Yes Max is a very useful tool for critics of Israel. In fact, I often wonder if he’s simply an anti Semite posing a fascist Zionist extremist, in an effort to make Israelis look bad.
2004. 2004. 2004. 2004. 2004. 2004. 2004. 2004. 2004.
Everything maximalistNarrative says is echoed daily in the US MSM and by the Israeli government and US congress. MaximalistNarrative comments on a samizdat blog, repeating the Pravda line. Hasbara bots are not programmed to incorporate irony.
“The moral clarity to censor other”
For an example, see the way demonstrators were handled at the GA in NO.
“the moral clarity to murder collaborator”
See how Jews killed Jews in the lead up to 1948.
“the moral clarity to shoot rockets”
The clarity to shoot three times as many shells and vilate ceasefires.
“the moral clarity to blow up children in buses”
From the air conditoned confort of an F-16 cockpit.
“the moral clarity of the HAMAS charter”‘
The luxury of being able to carry out what the autors fo the Hamas Charter could only dream of.
Shingo,
I understand you have the compulsion to respond to every comment. Although I’d like you to really look at them and think before responding. Otherwise it simply becomes tit-for-tat. Examples can be thrown back and forth ad-naseaum however, when one does not recognize the suffering of others, and the cruelty of the elements you represent, it hardens your heart to a peaceful solution.
Max
No I don’t have a compulsion to respond to every comment, just the lies. You happen to be a pathological liar, so you get a lot of personal attention.
For example, you have no regard for the suffering of others or the cruelty of the elements you represent, so why pretend otherwise?
You are too modest, maximalistNarrative. It’s not tit-for-tat. There’s no balance of power at all, a stone is not a Merkavah tank or an F-16 armed with phosphorous bombs. And Iran does not sit on the UN Security Council armed with a veto. There are recognized criminal limits to what a person or country can do even when self-defense and/or prevention of trespass/theft is claimed as justification. And nobody or state is ever tried or reprimanded for what they might conceiveably do if only they had the power. It’s not the creed, but the deed that makes a felon. Disproportionality is a key factor. Preemption is always suspect. As is collective punishment. Otherwise, what you advocate, and the way you advocate it, is a recipe for law much worse than the natural law of the jungle.
Please ignore the troll. If I wanted to hear more hasbara garbage from a troll, I would have called the Rabbi at my local synagogue who peddles the same nonsense as this dufus.
There’s a lot of indefensible “moral clarity”. To shoot rockets at a paraplegic in a wheel chair, to shoot children playing near a ghetto fence, to put 1.1 million people on a “diet”, etc.
The problem is that Israel claims to represent us Jews who don’t live there and expect lockstep support and agreement, some may even say they expect us to censor our dissent.
A conservative (non-neocon) author once penned a piece entitled “Everyone has his reasons”. Sometimes it’s worth putting yourself in other’s shoes before you judge.
“Unlike kitsch, moral clarity is hard to come by. It means working to make sense of things you do not even want to acknowledge. …”
— Susan Neiman
(Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists)
In a world in which not many Americans believe Israel is occupying anything it was a pleasant surprise to read “ISRAELI-OCCUPIED GHAJAR” in today’s Newsday which I found on the McClatchy web site.
==================================
Posted on Wednesday, November 10, 2010
It’s about to get more complicated for town on Israel-Lebanon border
By Sheera Frenkel | McClatchy Newspapers
ISRAELI-OCCUPIED GHAJAR — There’s no line marking the divide between the north and south Ghajar, a village that straddles Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, but soon there could be an international border between the two parts, thanks to Israel’s new decision to accept a United Nations demarcation line.
. . .
link to mcclatchydc.com
I visited Ghajar before Israel forces withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000.
During my visit I noticed that the Technical Fence (the Israeli de facto border) encircled the entire town of Ghajar where the fence was erected north of the entire town to separate it from Lebanon.
However, Ghajar was not Israeli territory prior to 1982. Later in 2000 when Israel withdrew and the UN drew an artificial line on the map, known as the Blue Line, that line divided Ghajar into two parts, north and south.
It’s no wonder that Israel accepted the UN’s demarcation as the Blue Line gives Israel more territory than it had prior to 1982.
Incidentally, former colonial powers, Britain and France, had a similar practice of drawing artificial lines throughout the Middle East and dividing communities haphazardly.
The photos say it all. Palestinians have the same moral clarity as the civil rights and anti-war marchers had back in the sixties, the same moral clarity as the Suffrafettes earlier in the 20th century, the same moral clarity as Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers had/have, the same moral claritythat Europe’s workers have today as they struggle to hold onto the gains of past victories. Has to do with putting one’s body, mind and soul on the line, not for self alone but for a better world, one in which each of us is of equal importance, not only in the day to day but in the total scheme of things, and where there are no have nots nor left outs. An impossible dream? Then check out those pictures again.
Only permanently non-violent effort has any prospect of success in the conflict. The setting is too tarnished by the brutality of oft-repeated suicide bombings in the very recent past.
That could realize equal rights for Palestinians within Israel, and a fair two-state solution.
There is possibility of limited right of return. There is no possibility of Israeli consent to maximalist interpretations of right of return.
Rock-throwing is not non-violent, both in appearance and in substance.
“Only permanently non-violent effort has any prospect of success in the conflict.”
So when will Israel start a non-violent effort?
As usual, Richard Witty blames “recent” and “oft repeated” suicide bombers for the lack of prospects for peace. And he adds that the only solution therefore is non-violent efforts in behalf peace; and he has continually added the further condition that said non-violent efforts be
sans any and all disorderly tactics in the context of any formal meeting discussing the relevant issues, or making pronouncements about such issues–even when the agenda speakers have been selected to bring only
one POV to the table. Anybody here likely knows that the suicide bombings originated as a less desperate attempt by people who had no other recourse to make an impact on what others had been doing with their lives. Witty ignores what activity led up to the suicide bombings, which were a reaction; they didn’t come out of thin air or the head of Zeus. The perfect mirror for Witty’s POV is the current and past peace process; and it has the same goal. More status quo, and expansion of Israel, plus retention of Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. And continued giant handouts to Israel by Uncle Sam. All of this in the name of Israel’s “security.” Remember the Holocast! Nakba what, who?
Ooops: last desperate attempt
Existentialist philosophy, allied with expressionist art/film, gained its popularity in post-war Europe because it offered, especially in Sartre’s hands, the most persuasive analysis of the situation created first by invasion and occupation and then by a rather unreal postwar ‘normality’. The existentialists made a powerful case that at least in these dire circumstances there is, however we might wish for it, no moral clarity to be had.
The late Richard M. Hare, who still has a name in the moral philosophy world, was teaching me a couple of decades after emerging from the deep moral mists of a Japanese PoW camp. He seemed to think that the French existentalists were rather ridiculous but was not so far from them in that he thought that moral clarity emerged only from the absolutely free decisions of individuals, taking the extremely frightening edge off this idea by suggesting in effect that we do the job best if we immerse ourselves in the practices and attitudes, though not really the beliefs, of religious tradition, the Church of England for preference.
I’m sure that the Palestinians of today are still influenced and restrained by religion in its quiet, traditional and reflective forms. But the ability of this influence to make people think that they can see a way through the moral mists and labyrinths must be waning.
Sartre wrote in the context of Vichy France; Camus, in the context of Algiers. Moral clarity resulting from the free decisions of individuals. Sartre on Anti-Semitism. Did he ever write on Zionism? Camus: The Rebel, The Myth Of Sisiphys. Surely, even without ever having read these guys, many Palestinians, about half of them kids or barely adults, living as they are beneath Israel’s punk teen age boots, must be intuitively sensing
said moral mists and labyrinths, feeling very directly the limits of the restraining elements in the religion of their ancestors. They will not go peacefully into that good night, but wail, wail at the dying of the light.
It’s not only Israel that has a Samson Option. But Samson never dreamed of Camus’s rebel, nor of Sisiphys’s rock. I bet they know of Jonah, and of that whale. For some reason I am reminded of that scene in Cabaret, when all the beer garden locals slowly rise across the generations to the sweet defiant song of the uniformed angel-faced Hitlerjugend boy–except that one old bespectacled guy in the cap–because he has seen it all before.
“Rage” at the dying of the light.
Revise your Thomas.
It’s important to emphasize that the official reason given for the construction of the Separation wall was to — allegedly — stop attacks against Israel. The real reason is a different story entirely.
One important feature of Joseph Dana’s speaking is that he saw, not from a distance.
That information is critical for the world to hear.
To the extent that he can present what he has seen without ridicule or even ideological interpretation, it can be heard widely.
If he can articulate a non-suicidal path for humane dissenting response, then it can be heard even more widely.