You can say it’s a year or so late, that Haaretz was on this a long time ago (or that Bronner privileges Israeli voices over Palestinians ones), but big deal: Hat’s off to Ethan Bronner for publishing a big story in the New York Times about Israeli women’s illegal smuggling of Palestinians from the West Bank to Tel Aviv to go to the beach. The piece ends with an invocation of Rosa Parks and includes a description of the hateful segregation of Palestinians as the work of “colonialist bureaucrats.” It even offers a glint of a vision of equality and does not include the words “suicide bombers.” And it includes facts about the cruel imprisonment of so many Palestinians for resisting these hateful conditions. Did I repeat the word hateful? Thanks to the New York Times for inspiring me with a horrifying story! Last paragraph:
Ms. [Hagit] Aharoni was asked her thoughts. She replied: “For 44 years, we have occupied another country. I am 53, which means most of my life I have been an occupier. I don’t want to be an occupier. I am engaged in an illegal act of disobedience. I am not Rosa Parks, but I admire her, because she had the courage to break a law that was not right.”
Hints of democracy, information about imprisonment:
The Palestinian visitors came with complicated histories. In most of their families the men have been locked up at some point. For example, Manal, who had never been to the sea before, is 36, the mother of three and pregnant; five of her brothers are in Israeli prisons, and another was killed when he entered a settler religious academy armed with a knife.
She brought with her an unsurprising stridency. “This is all ours,” she said in Tel Aviv. She did not go home a Zionist, but in the course of the day her views seemed to grow more textured — or less certain — as she found comfort in the company of Israeli women who said that they, too, had a home on this land.
