Karl Vick reports for Time:
After more than 100 Palestinians breached Israel's border with Syria on Sunday, knocking down a fence and striding into a village in the Golan Heights, overmatched Israeli security forces scrambled to glean what they could from the protesters who had just, without so much as a sidearm, penetrated farther into the country than any army in a generation.
Under close questioning, the infiltrators closed the intelligence gap with a shrug and one word: Facebook. The operation that had caught Israel's vaunted military and intelligence complex flat-footed was announced, nursed and triggered on the social networking site that has figured in every uprising around the Arab World — and is helping young Palestinians change the terms of their fight against Israel.
The headlines Sunday were all about the violence of the day: at least four people were shot dead by Israeli forces on the Syrian fence line, and as many as 10 were killed either by Israeli or Lebanese army gunfire at a similar demonstration on the nearby frontier with southern Lebanon. The death toll, along with the accounts of stone-throwing and tear gas, comport with the familiar narrative of the conflict, one constructed over years of Israel describing efforts to defend itself. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu encouraged that narrative on Sunday, arguing that the protesters were undermining the very existence of the State of Israel.
But those closer to events found in the day the makings of a new narrative. The Palestinians in Syria, Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian enclaves of Gaza and the West Bank approached Israeli gun positions on Sunday without arms of their own. If some teenagers threw rocks, a protest leader said they had apparently failed to attend the workshops on nonviolence the organizers arranged in what they call a new paradigm for the conflict. The aim, which appears to be building support, aims to re-cast the Palestinian-Israel conflict on the same terms that brought down dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia.
Massive non-violent protests are aimed at winning international sympathy for the Palestinian perspective, and as a result, forcing Israel to pull out of territories its army has occupied since 1967. As the dust settled Sunday, senior Israeli officers acknowledged their vulnerability to the approach, which dovetails with the strategy of Palestinian leaders to ask the UN General Assembly to recognize a Palestininian state in September.
"What we saw today was the promo for what we might see in September on the day the United Nations declares a state: Thousands of Palestinians marching toward Israeli checkpoints, Israeli settlements and the fence along the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians coming with their bare hands to demonstrate," a senior Israeli officer tells TIME. "This is a huge problem. Well have to study what happened today to do better."
Read the entire article "Palestinian Border Protests: The Arab Spring Model for Confronting Israel" here. And for a more indepth report on the background to the protests see Matthew Cassel's article "Refugees march to return" in the Electronic Intifada.
Update: Tony Karon hits a similar note writing on the Time website putting the protests in the context of the "post-peace process" world and the discourse's shifting center of gravity from 1967 to 1948:
Welcome to the post-peace process: The drama that unfolded on Israel's boundaries on Sunday as 12 Palestinians were killed in a wave of unarmed civil disobedience was but a taste of things to come. That was the warning from Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Sunday night, and he's certainly got reason to worry: Rather than pin their hopes on a moribund peace process, Palestinians have begun instead to align themselves with the Arab Spring by pressing for their own rights through acts of people power. Even if there's no immediate followup to Sunday's protests, they represent a political crisis of epic proportions, not only for Israel and the United States, but also potentially even for the Palestinian leadership of President Mahmoud Abbas (and even, possibly, for his new Hamas partners in government).
Israel's security establishment has always seen mass unarmed civil disobedience as far more threatening than rocket fire or suicide bombers, because military responses to non-military challenges weaken Israel's diplomatic and political standing. The protests also represent a challenge for Abbas, whose proclivity to compromise on issues such as the rights of Palestinian refugees in order to achieve an agreement with Israel is not shared by those taking to the streets.
And while Sunday's protests that turned deadly on the border with Lebanon and on the cease-fire line with Syria will have suited the agenda of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, those refugees -- whose families have lived in squalor since their dispossession by Israel in the conflict over its founding in 1948 -- do not need the Assad regime to spur them to stake their (often downplayed) claims in the outcome of any Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Not that there is any Israeli-Palestinian peace process left to speak of. Just last Friday, Obama's Middle East Special Envoy, Sen. George Mitchell, gave up the pretense that defined his position and resigned. And Sunday's events were a sharp reminder that the collapse of the peace process does not mean ordinary Palestinians are simply going to accept their lot. Indeed, the conflict is now heading into uncharted waters in which many of the assumption of the past two decades are called into question.
Are you serious Adam?
You want the “success” of this week’s actions with an additional 3 0′s?
That will literally kill the prospect of a Palestinian state, that is so close.
Thanks for the daily dose of humor. I really enjoyed that.
That will literally kill the prospect of a Palestinian state, that is so close.
It’s been “so close” for decades, hasn’t it? And the “closer” it gets, the more Palestinian land Israel steals.
Nothing makes me more pessimistic about the future for Palestinians and Israelis than people like Witty. He has all the facts right here in front of him, reads them (presumably) pretty frequently on MW, and still insists on spouting intellectually insulting statements like what is above. The current regime in Israel will fall within our lifetimes, but I tremble to think how long reconciliation between the two peoples there will take with the kind of obstinacy we witness.
Richard Witty said, ‘Even though the Palestinian people are skeptical they will achieve a genuine state any time soon, I, Richard Witty, know better. Even though I am here in western Massachusetts, and I have not been in Israel/Palestine since 1986, I can tell the Palestinians they are all wrong and their state is actually close.’
September if three months away.
Is that not close?
Do you want it to happen?
Witty:
That is a canard and you know this very well.
So let me get this straight: Based on your comments you are alleging that more protests like this will endanger the creation of a Palestinian state. Right?
Now explain to me how these protests are going to somehow derail a symbolic vote recognizing a weak and non-contiguous Palestinian state by a toothless international assembly? What say you?
And hey, Witty, one of my former law professors and a scholar of this conflict wrote an excellent book recently called The Statehood of Palestine: International Law in the Middle East Conflict. In it he argues persuasively that the 1924 League of Nations mandate recognized the state of Palestine. Not only that, but also “Palestine remained a state after 1948, even as its territory underwent permutation, and this book provides a detailed account of how Palestine has been recognized until the present day.” He’s talking about the entire land of Israel/Palestine, not the West Bank and Gaza, Witty, in case you didn’t get that.
Practically speaking, might makes right, I guess, but the truth is out there for anyone to find.
link to amazon.com
You can’t stop it, Witty, so don’t bother making idle, laughable threats.
When I see Witty’s posts now, I almost miss Robert Weidine’s comments. The guy was no less a pthological liar, but at least one got the sense you weren’t debating someone from a parallel universe.
What have you got against parallel universes?
;)
Press accounts about Palestinian protesters ‘approaching Israel from four directions’ illustrate a difference between Egypt’s Tahrir Square demonstrations and those of Palestinians: Egyptians at least owned their own capital, if not the regime which controlled it.
Symbolically, Palestine’s Tahrir Square should be — probably will be — in Jerusalem. The horrific irony is that the vast majority of yesterday’s protesters have never been there, and under the current Israeli checkpoint regime, have no prospect of going there.
Reuniting a dispersed diaspora was the idea behind the foundation of Israel. Turns out another diaspora wants to reunite there too, and perhaps more fervently than the previous one.
Onward to al-Quds!
“Massive non-violent protests are aimed at winning international sympathy for the Palestinian perspective, and as a result, forcing Israel to pull out of territories its army has occupied since 1967″
Massive non violent Palestinian marches have been taking place for decades. Folks should not pretend that this is new. Just that the news is starting to pay attention and turn their well controlled spotlights in the direction of Palestinian protest.
There is an odd thing going on in the MSM spinning these Palestinian protest as something new. As if the protest tide just hit there. Total bull
“The headlines Sunday were all about the violence of the day”
These headlines clear the way for Netanyahu’s congressional song and dance, Israel is being threatened more than ever before, bad bad Iran and we need more money.
“Under close questioning, the infiltrators closed the intelligence gap with a shrug and one word: Facebook.”
“Facebook is the most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented.” (Julian Assange) Link to May 5, 2011 RT interview below. The quote starts at about 2 minutes into the video, however, just prior he makes some interesting comments about the Libyan intervention.
link to zcommunications.org
Facebook has a huge personal information database that is readily available to US intelligence. People are literally spying on themselves. Use it if it works for you, but always use discretion. If Facebook is as important to the “Arab Spring” as some commentators assert, then this has fascinating implications. I suspect, however, that Facebook is not nearly as central as some romanticists would have us believe.
“… The headlines Sunday were all about the violence of the day: at least four people were shot dead by Israeli forces on the Syrian fence line, and as many as 10 were killed either by Israeli or Lebanese army gunfire…”
Violence of the day? Lebanese army gunfire?
When reading something out of American MSM, one has to always expect land mines planted by Zionist “influences”, to not get into another “who really controls the American press” argument.
In a day or two, we’ll start hearing how the Palestinians baited the IDF into killing them because they wanted to be martyrs or some silly thing or other about virgins in Muslim heaven.
“The aim, which appears to be building support, aims to re-cast the Palestinian-Israel conflict on the same terms that brought down dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia.”
It doesn’t need to be “recast”….or wouldn’t if the truth was told about Israel and the occupation. But I am sure our zionist controlled press and media will ‘recast’ it that way to bury the truth of what it is the Palestines are really revoling against.
I spent part of the morning reading thru the subpoenaed internal reports of the American Zionist Council obtained during the 1963 Senate hearings on the US Zionist lobby. Most interesting were the ones about their “Magazine and Press committees”, describing how they paid reporters and editors to publish favorable info on Israel and condemn the Arabs and organized Jews across the nation to do campaigns on the press.
If you take what they were doing before ’63 and multiply it by a thousand fold today and four decades of efforts since we can undestand that they do indeed control a huge segment of the US public press and media and publishing industry. If was interesting also how they would take the executives heads and producers of TV companies to Israel. I wonder how often what happened in Israel didn’t stay in Israel.
link to irmep.org
Between 1962-1963 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee subpoenaed internal reports of the American Zionist Council during its investigation into the activities of registered agents of foreign principals. They discovered that more than $5 million in tax exempt (and possibly overseas donations) had been laundered through the Jewish Agency’s American Section into the American Zionist Council. The Jewish Agency functioned as a quasi-branch of the Israeli government, received Israeli government funding, and was able to review legislation before it went to the Knesset under its Covenant Agreement.
This violated IRS regulations on the use of tax exempt charitable funds and the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act.
The following reports detail how the American Zionist Council used the funding in a sophisticated campaign to cajole and intimidate news media, subvert open debate about Israel and undermine reporting about key issues of the day such as Israel’s Dimona nuclear weapons facility, operation Susannah terror attacks on the United States, and the return of Arab refugees to their homes. The AZC tracked and targeted professors and engaged in covert operations obliquely referred to in the following internal reports.
After the Justice Department ordered the American Zionist Council to register as a foreign agent in late 1962, it transferred responsibilities to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which refuses to register as a foreign agent of the Israeli government.
On May 19, 1970, the Dow Jones Observer reported, “In 1963 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigated the Jewish Agency and uncovered a ‘conduit’ operation run by an organization called the American Zionist Council. Over an eight-year period, this council received more than $5,000,000 from the Jewish Agency to create favorable public opinion in this country for Israeli government policies. The Senate investigation closed down the conduit, but the extensive propaganda activities still go on.”
If I’m not misreading this, this is plainly false.
Tell me, someone, which countries on this earth have recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights? I’ll wait.
This is a ruse designed to indicate that the protesters had endangered themselves by crossing some Israeli red line. I don’t understand why no one is exposing this.
“Israel’s border” ? what border?
Regardless, the Palestinians want to be part of the Arab Spring, and the Golan Heights is no longer immune: link to thenational.ae
Watch how Mr Change Obama ignores this, partnering with Bibi. Dennis Ross will write up the weasel words for Obama to say with last minute spin deviations from the script already prepared for Obama by AIPAC.
Agreed.
“United Nations Security Council Resolution 497, adopted unanimously on December 17, 1981, calls on the State of Israel to rescind its de facto annexation of the Golan Heights. The most important provision is “the Israeli decision to impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is null and void and without international legal effect” (section 1).”
link to en.wikipedia.org