I am a Jewish Israeli woman who was born in Tel Aviv and has been living in Ramallah and Nablus in the occupied Palestinian territories for the last 12 years. When Israelis, or people who have spent a lot of time with Israelis, hear where I live they often ask me "aren't you scared?" And I tell them the truth. Yes, I am sometimes scared of Israeli soldiers and even more of Israeli settlers. But other than that I feel more at home than I do anywhere else in the world.

But this was not always the case. When I first started visiting the occupied Palestinian Territories I was, like most Israelis, terrified of Arabs. It took me years to chip my way through this fear. Years in which again and again my heart would race, and I would think that the Arabs around me, want to kill me, only to discover time after time, that people had other things on their minds rather than me. And that if they did interact with me it was in a way that was more open and honoring than what I was used to.

It is for this reason that I was shocked, but not surprised, by the images of an angry Tel Aviv mob attacking African immigrants. The vehement racism was very familiar it was only it's target thats shifted. For example a slogan on a woman's t-shirt read: "Death to the Sudanese", an obvious rehash of the well worn "Death to the Arabs". Ilan Tsion chairman of the Israeli advocacy group "Fence For Life" said in a panel in Ramlah that, "The migration from Africa and the Palestinain Authority and Arab countries is about to sentence every single one of us to death". Tsion explained:

"I have figures here prepared by demographic experts showing that if the present situation continues then by the year 2030 there will be a drastic reduction in the percentage of Jews in the population of Israel ...we are a country surrounded by twenty enemy countries that want to annihilate us. They are just waiting for a moment that our army will grow weak. For the moment that foreigners take control of the army so they can overcome us and murder us."

"Fence for life," which has advocated for the creation of Israel's separation barrier in the West Bank and for preventing family reunification of Palestinian families both In Israel and in the occupied territories, is now advocating for the expulsion of African immigrants from Israel. Their argument for all these issues are identical. They maintain that the existence of non-Jews in and around Israel is a mortal danger. This so called logic is something the vast majority of Israelis can relate to, at least on an emotional level. Most Israelis agree with Israeli Minister of Defense Ehud Barak's statement they are living in "a villa in the jungle".

I often wondered where all this fear came from? In my case, while it was true that I was exposed to the Israeli media that only presents Arabs as terrorists, was fed similar propaganda at school, and thus saw the world through a Holocaust paradigm, all these things could not explain the scope and depth of my fears. Eventually, I realized that despite the fact that no one talked about the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948 while I was growing up, my fear came from knowing that I was living on someone else's land. It came from knowing that the people who's houses and graves and trees and cactus plants I see everywhere around me are not allowed to be in this land but I am. I realized that this fear is not different than the fears that any colonialist or beneficiary of a racist system must develop towards the colonized or oppressed people in order to keep his peace of mind. The fact that this process happens unconsciously only makes it stronger.

My Israeli friend David lives with his family on a house surrounded by 5-6 dunams of land in Pardes Hanna near Haifa. David is exceptionally aware of his motivations. He told me that when he considers being engaged or opposed to what Israel was doing to the Palestinians, he asks himself, "Would I be willing to share what I have with a Palestinian refugee?" and since the answer is, "no", he does nothing. I think that it is essential to understand that it is greed, the desire to possess another's land and resources, and not fear that lies at the root of the Israeli-Arab conflict. The fear comes later, to justify having and not sharing what belongs to someone else.

But I no longer feel this way. I feel blessed that choices that I have made in my life have allowed me to remain in the country of my birth without feeling like I am stealing or taking the place of another people. This has allowed me to let go of the fear of the people around me and to enjoy and become a part of the Arab world in which I live.

A two-state solution that does not include the right of return of the Palestinian refugees is not only an unjust solution that would leave Palestinians with a non-viable, non-contiguous, so called state but it would leave Israelis trapped in their ethnocracy. As long as Israel wants to be a Jewish state, every non-Jewish ethnic minority is a threat to the "Jewishness" of the state, non Jewish Wombs are perceived as ticking bombs, babies as weapons in a never-ending demographic war.

Ethnic Cleansing / Land Theft & Destruction / Occupation & Apartheid / Exile & Restriction of Movement / Refugees

Report: Israel issued 13,000 demolition orders against Palestinian real estate
Haaretz newspaper said the Israeli civil administration issued 13,000 demolition warnings against Palestinians accused of unlicensed construction in Area C of the West Bank.
link to www.palestine-info.co.uk

Israeli military order expels Palestinian family from its land
The Israeli occupation forces expelled on Friday a Palestinian family from an area south of Al-Khalil, claiming that it is a closed military zone in which Palestinians are not allowed to live.
link to www.palestine-info.co.uk

All Palestinians between the River & Sea fall under 1 system of inequality aimed at empowering a Jewish majority nyti.ms/LsB1hD

— Yousef Munayyer (@YousefMunayyer) May 24, 2012

There will be a hasbara response, but the facts here are undeniable.

From "Not All Israeli Citizens Are Equal":

Two generations after the Nakba, the effect of discriminatory Israeli policies still reverberates. Israel still seeks to safeguard its image by claiming to be a bastion of democracy that treats its Palestinian citizens well, all the while continuing illiberal policies that target this very population. There is a long history of such discrimination.

In the 1950s new laws permitted the state to take control over Palestinians’ land by classifying them “absentees.” Of course, it was the state that made them absentees by either preventing refugees from returning to Israel or barring internally displaced Palestinians from having access to their land. This last group was ironically termed “present absentees” — able to see their land but not to reach it because of military restrictions that ultimately resulted in their watching the state confiscate it. Until 1966, Palestinian citizens were governed under martial law.

Today, a Jew from any country can move to Israel, while a Palestinian refugee, with a valid claim to property in Israel, cannot. And although Palestinians make up about 20 percent of Israel’s population, the 2012 budget allocates less than 7 percent for Palestinian citizens.

Tragically for Palestinians, Zionism requires the state to empower and maintain a Jewish majority even at the expense of its non-Jewish citizens, and the occupation of the West Bank is only one part of it. What exists today between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is therefore essentially one state, under Israeli control, where Palestinians have varying degrees of limited rights: 1.5 million are second-class citizens, and four million more are not citizens at all. If this is not apartheid, then whatever it is, it’s certainly not democracy.

The failure of Israeli and American leaders to grapple with this nondemocratic reality is not helping. Even if a two-state solution were achieved, which seems fanciful at this point, a fundamental contradiction would remain: more than 35 laws in ostensibly democratic Israel discriminate against Palestinians who are Israeli citizens.

For all the talk about shared values between Israel and the United States, democracy is sadly not one of them right now, and it will not be until Israel’s leaders are willing to recognize Palestinians as equals, not just in name, but in law.

You know the letters are coming, so write the Times at letters@nytimes.com to add your thoughts. The discourse is shifting quickly, let's encourage more voices like Munayyer's be heard.

Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background? How did you get involved in political activity?

Matan Kaminer in a still from the film "Raised to Be Heroes"

I was born to an activist family. My grandparents were among the founders of the New Left in Israel in the seventies. After they left the Communist Party of Israel (CPI) they were among the founders of SIAH (New Israeli Left) and then of SHASI (Israeli Socialist Left), which, together with the CPI and the Black Panthers, founded the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality -- as al-Jabha/Hadash. My parents also took the path from SIAH to SHASI, and my father was involved in Yesh Gvul, a movement of conscientious objectors to the occupation. He was imprisoned twice when he refused to fight in the First Lebanon War.

I became active in the Hadash youth group in Tel Aviv when I was fifteen. This was mostly a reading and discussion group -- we didn't actually do very much but it was formative for me intellectually and politically. Then I was involved in the "Shministim" movement of conscientious objectors and spent 21 months in prison for refusing to serve in the IDF. After that I travelled in South America and subsequently became active in solidarity work with migrants and refugees, particularly from Latin America but also in general. Last year I finished four years at Tel Aviv University, where I was also active in the Hadash branch, and I'm also a member of Ir LeKulanu, a municipal political front that also includes Hadash.

Talk a little bit about the origins of the current social inequality in Israel. Who put in place these programs? And how are they linked to the occupation?

These are difficult questions, and I'm not sure I know the answers to all of them. The regime in Israel-Palestine is capitalist and colonial. It is impossible to understand conditions in Israel proper -- that is, territorially speaking, within the "Green Line," or in terms of population categories, among citizens of Israel -- without taking the Palestinians into account. Very broadly speaking, the past two or three decades have seen the regime move from a closed, protectionist and developmentalist model of growth to integration into global neo-liberal structures, relying more and more on the export of security and related technologies. To this you can add the financialization that we have seen in the rest of the world, making for a very prosperous financial-military-high-tech bloc and for well-paid workers in these industries.

On the other hand you have the rest of the population, including the "old" service elites, which have seen a decline in living standards and life chances over recent years. PM Netanyahu recently said that if you "deduct" the Arab and ultra-Orthodox citizens -- the Palestinians in the territories were never part of this equation, of course -- the economic situation in Israel is quite good. This is not true, but it's telling, because I think the regime is worried about the impoverished middle classes making common cause with the "minority" poor.

Another thing the government is very good at pointing out is that the world financial crisis has left Israel alone so far, which has all sorts of strange effects. On the one hand we have low unemployment, but a very high (around 50%) level of precarious minimum-wage and/or part-time employment. In addition many of the poor (especially the ultra-Orthodox and Arabs) are just not counted as part of the workforce. On the other hand, we have a very high and rising cost of living, first and foremost in housing. I think this is partly an effect of capital fleeing from other parts of the world building up a bubble in the housing sector in Israel.

What is your take on the escalating racism among the Israeli population?

I may be in denial, but I tend not to take "vernacular" racism as seriously as the organized violence of the establishment. True, we have frightening incidents like the almost-lynching at the Malha shopping mall a few weeks ago; but Israeli society has always been structurally racist. It seems that lately a lot of the political correctness which used to envelop this racism has been dropping away. This is not a good thing. But it's dangerous to gauge the level of oppression only on the basis of what people say, because the most dangerous racists are always the clever ones who know how to keep their mouths shut and talk nice.

What is the current political scene in Israel? It seems that the summer tent protests largely disappeared. What has been going on beneath surface presented to us by the media?

Well, the tents did disappear over the winter. Now that the weather is nice again there's a lot of talk about the protests coming back, but so far it's mainly just talk. I mentioned the housing crisis. That was the main catalyst of the protests last year, and the problem hasn't gone away, but I think the movement will have to become more focused and more political this year. There will be a lot of fallout because many people will conclude from last year's experience that protests can't achieve anything. But those who remain will become more sophisticated.

Like I said above, because the financial crisis hasn't hit Israel yet, the economic situation here is quite different from other places that are undergoing political upheavals. This makes it possible for the establishment to pretend that there is no problem, but it also has another effect that is positive from their point of view: so long as unemployment is low, protests can't become really massive. If you look at Egypt, Spain, and Greece, as well as other places that have had revolutionary crises, it's always had to do with mass unemployment. The reason is very prosaic: so long as people have to go to work in the morning, there's only so much they can contribute to "occupying" public space, which is essential.

But if and when the Israeli bubble does explode, I think we will have a rapid change and escalation of the social situation. The problem will no longer be "just" the cost of living but the tenability of the entire structure. And this will bring people to question the colonial situation as well. I see the current stage -- maybe the next few years -- as a period for the formation of a revolutionary cadre which will be much bigger than the radical left has classically been here. Not the 400,000 people who came to the biggest demo last summer, probably, but a few thousand dedicated and experienced people.

What we should be most wary of is any electoral illusions. Unfortunately some of the leaders of last year's wave seem to be going that way, into the establishment political parties and particularly Labor. This is going to prove to be a dead end very quickly. Of course fringe parties like Hadash have a role to play, but there are not going to be radical changes at the state level for a long time. Municipal politics is a different matter; I think positions can be won there and used as a base for further struggles.

Can you talk about the difficulties involved in braiding together anti-occupation work and social justice work in Israel?

The difficulties are immense. A lot of anti-occupation and Palestinian solidarity activists are very suspicious of the social protest in Israel and decline to support it until it takes on the occupation. I think this position is wrong both in principle and in practice. In principle, because you do not condition your support of an oppressed group on its support for other oppressed groups, even ones that it is involved in oppressing. We do not condition our support of the Palestinian liberation movement, which is led by non-feminist men, on the liberation of Palestinian women. And the majority of the population in Israel is oppressed and exploited by the capitalist-colonial system; the fact that it is also participating in the oppression of the Palestinians is irrelevant in principle.

Strategically speaking it is no less important for Palestinian liberation. The lesson I take from what is happening in Syria, for example, is that so long as an oppressive regime can count on part -- even a minority -- of the population to support it out of fear of the alternative, it can survive. For Palestinians to win their freedom, they must offer oppressed Israelis their solidarity in the fight against the Israeli establishment. It is only on the basis of such solidarity -- which of course has to be reciprocal -- that a revolution here is imaginable.

What is easy to miss from abroad, I think, is the genuine terror that many Israelis feel when faced with the prospect of a Palestinian victory in the conflict. They know perfectly well how much suffering Israel has caused the Palestinians and they have every reason to expect retribution. From a radical point of view this is not a defensible reason to support the occupation, but it does have a kind of rationality, especially amongst those parts of the population without the resources to leave. Their fears are manipulated by elites, but they are quite real. Now again, look at Syria: you have a part of the population which may or may not "profit" from the regime as it is but is mortally afraid of what will happen when it falls -- so it will fight to the end. The Syrian revolutionaries will have to reach out to this population, to give it guarantees of safety and equality, if they want to win and not just to get bogged down in an endless civil war. The same is true for the Palestinians, and I think many Palestinian activists on the ground, both in Israel and in the OPT, understand this. Of course you can be irredentist and say everyone whose grandparents weren't in Palestine before 1927 or something like that has to go -- but then you are giving most Israeli Jews, who have absolutely nowhere to go, no option but to fight you to the end. And they are armed to the teeth, in case you didn't notice.

So we have to imagine a joint revolution. In which case the question of what grievances the Israeli majority has against the establishment and how these can be articulated with those of the Palestinians becomes cardinal. My beef with most "one-staters" is that they think in very liberal terms. One -- Itamar Mann -- even proposes the creation of a binational political party that will have absolutely no program apart from the demand for one democratic state. But this way you have no constituency in Israel other than a tiny minority of already radicalized leftists. A truly revolutionary Palestinian movement would agitate within Israel. This has been done in the past, most importantly by the CPI in the 1950s and through its union with the Black Panthers in the 1970s, and it can be done again. I have no doubt that it is the one eventuality most feared by the Israeli establishment.

And then of course you have the complementary problem: how to raise the Palestinian issue within the protest movement. I think we have to be very patient about it. It is only after you struggle alongside people that you can really share ideas with them. Most of the "leaders" of the movement of last summer have tried to avoid "politics," i.e. the Palestinian issue, but this makes them inconsistent and it makes the movement vulnerable to subordination to the "security agenda" -- whenever the establishment feels like it they can start a little war (or a big one) to shut it down. So again I'm being optimistic but I think we're going to see a new leadership rise organically out of this movement which will necessarily be in solidarity with the Palestinians.

Although I agree that it is only through opening spaces for consciousness-raising and the re-orientation of political horizons that the occupation can be raised, there are two serious criticisms that external observers have made, and which make it hard for those on the outside to offer unalloyed solidarity. One is that in the countries of the global North, unless issues of foreign policy are raised alongside internal redistribution, you create the social base for right-wing populism. I don't think that's outside of the realm of possibility for Israel.

So one: I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "right-wing populism," but I'm guessing you mean dispossessing poor people outside the polity and paying poor people inside the polity off that way. The funny thing is that the Israeli state has been doing precisely this for the past 30 years at least. There is a functioning and even rather luxurious welfare state available for anyone willing to go live in the Occupied Territories. The problem is that most people aren't. Perhaps their reasons aren't ideological, but that's the way things stand. Right-wing populism is the reality in Israel; to attempt to pre-empt it by denying the legitimacy of the protests is definitely a case of closing the barn doors too late.

But I want to answer this question on a more philosophical level as well: there is always danger inherent in any social change. If nothing else, it is the danger of the movement being crushed, people's lives destroyed, hopes dashed, etc. Of course Palestinian solidarity activists won't be losing any sleep over this, but it definitely worries people here, as it worries anybody who has ever been involved in social struggle. But of course this is a recipe for quiescence, for letting the worst come. There is nothing to do but oppose it with the principle of hope: that things can change for the better through the collective action of committed human beings. As you recently wrote, "the historical condition of the left is of failure." We have always failed. The only thing to do, and here I quote Beckett, is to fail again and fail better. Or of course, to succeed.

Two, there's a concern that solidarity or support for social mobilization in Israel could revive people's fantasies about Israeli "socialism" and undercut support for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions. What are your thoughts?

I don't see how the protest wave suggests the existence of socialism in Israel; rather the opposite. As for BDS, I'm rather ambivalent about it; I don't know if we want to get into that particular discussion here, but I'm rather impatient with the idea that presenting Israel as anything but a Death Star of the Empire "undercuts" support for the Palestinian struggle. Perhaps Israelis who speak out against the occupation are also "undercutting"? Maybe we should shut up and go to the army?

Do you think the J14 protests changed any consciousness within the Israeli population?

Definitely, I think a change has begun that will take a long time to realize itself. Hegel said (more or less) that, for something historic to really happen, it has to happen twice, because the first time people are not really aware of what they are doing. This was what we saw last summer, this incoherent but massive rising, people walking around at these protests in shock of what they had become a part of. It was a very trippy experience, and when it ended there was a lot of disillusionment. But again what this necessitates is a realization: if we make it happen again, it won't be as formless as it was. It will be a much tougher, more relentless organism, and of course it will be treated much more ruthlessly.

Why was the occupation so difficult to raise at the protests?

I think precisely because what you had there was people rising up for themselves. This is very easy to sneeze at, particularly because the "activist" point of view always equates between the oppressed and the (racialized) "other." But last summer people who had always seen themselves as the "salt of the earth," that is, the ones who own the system and whom it was built for, began seeing themselves as oppressed. This is a very important moment. For me too: for many years I have theoretically understood the importance of seeing my problems as social and not individual. But I never actually did it until last summer: I never conceptualized myself as oppressed. Even telling you this I feel a resistance -- what, upper-middle-class, educated me, on my way to a doctorate and (God willing) a living in academia -- oppressed? Exploited? But indeed I am, as all 99% of us are, and last summer was the moment when we realized this.

Of course this is not the whole story. People are racist, and most people definitely do not identify with the Palestinians or understand the necessity of making common cause with them. So raising the occupation at protests was something that would marginalize you, and most people don't enjoy that. Nevertheless there were some attempts, the most important of which was "Tent #1948" at the Rothschild encampment, where Palestinian activists raised consciousness about the issue. There was a telling incident there: they had a Palestinian flag flying, and someone came and took it down. One of the activists talked to him, and when he realized she was Palestinian he apologized and put it back. It wasn't legitimate for a "leftist" to put it up, but it was for her, because it was her own oppression she was protesting, not somebody else's. I think you see where I'm going with this.

How is the left planning on articulating itself with these protests?

This may be a bit of a tangent, but first thing I have to criticize the question, which is also a self-criticism because I also tend to think and write this way. There is no planning, articulating subject called "the left," at least not in Israel. What there is, is a very active leftist Hebrew blogosphere -- especially around Haokets. There is a lot of discussion in this sphere, much of it fascinating, but not much planning is going on. And there are two political groups which are relevant to the question: the Communist Party of Israel and Hithabrut-Tarabut, which are both members of the Hadash front -- which, absurdly enough, I am also a member of, although I am not currently part of either of these groups.

Within the CPI there is a small but extremely effective core group of activists around MK Dov Khenin, who ran for mayor of Tel Aviv-Jaffa and got 35% of the vote, which was completely unprecedented. The CPI is mostly Arab, but the group around Dov is mostly Jewish. The CPI's doctrine is that Israel is colonialist only in the occupied territories, where the Palestinians are a self-determining nation. Within Israel the Palestinians are a national minority which deserves individual and collective rights but not self-determination. In addition, because in class terms it is mostly proletarian, it has an interest in fighting alongside the Jewish proletariat for socialism, etc. This group in the CPI has a very "99%"-ish conception of class, i.e. almost everyone is working-class, our common enemy is the big bourgeoisie (what is today called "the tycoons" here), and there is no particular need to work on class contradictions within the movement.

This theory is obviously quite limited qua theory, but it enabled this group, and particularly a very gifted activist, Alon-Lee Green, to take a very important role in the leadership of last summer's wave of protest. The main achievement of this group was to bring a strong Palestinian Israeli contingent into the movement, putting up tents in Palestinian Israeli and mixed cities, bringing Palestinian Israeli speakers to the main rallies. It also offered a counterweight to the tendency of the movement to define itself as "middle-class," although the Communists by themselves were not instrumental in bringing lower-class Israelis into the movement.

Tarabut takes a different tack, and they are openly critical of the CPI despite being in the same front with them. They aimed from the beginning to work with underprivileged groups -- Jewish and Arab. They threw all of their energies into supporting the tent camps in what is known as "the social periphery" -- in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, the three encampments in Jaffa, Levinsky Park, and the HaTikva neighborhood. The central demand that they are fighting for is public housing, as opposed to the vague idea of "affordable housing" which is perceived as relevant only for the middle class.

So to be honest I think both of these tacks are invaluable, and the connection between them is even more so. The quarrels are quite counter-productive. There will be no revolutionary bloc in Israel without Arabs and Jews, impoverished middle-class people, and poor people who work together on common demands.

Were you at those encampments? Can you talk about what kinds of conversations you had there?

I was active at the encampment at Levinsky Park. This park, in South Tel Aviv, is the epicenter of the refugee crisis in Israel, mostly because the state and city authorities do everything to concentrate the tens of thousands of refugees from Eritrea and Sudan pouring into Israel in the neighborhood around it. It is also close to the centers of the drug and prostitution trades in Tel Aviv, as well as a social hub for migrant workers from around the world.

The encampment was created by a well-known Mizrahi feminist activist, Shula Keshet of the NGO Ahoti. It was perhaps the second one in Tel Aviv, and I had the honor of being one of the first people to sleep there, though I dropped out after things became very intense. In this area the salient conflict is mainly between the veteran residents of these neighborhoods, who are working-class Mizrahi, and "foreigners." The encampment was most vibrant and most political when it drew people from both of these groups together. Rage was vented mostly by the Mizrahis, but it turned very quickly away from the refugees and migrants who were sitting there listening and towards the establishment, which is quite obviously the main villain in this story if you care to think about it.

Another very important phenomenon was the encampment in Jaffa, which was created by Palestinian and Jewish activists, but also by Palestinians with genuine and acute housing problems -- homeless families, basically. So it was one of what were known as the "no choice" encampments and they quickly built up ties of solidarity with their sisters (and some brothers) in the HaTikva encampment, Mizrahi Jews in the same predicament. The ties continue through the "Periphery Forum," which works to coordinate activity, mainly on public housing.

Is there work being done to address the fact that the protests mostly did not draw their constituency from the poorest demographics in Israel, the Israeli Palestinians and Mizrahi?

I have partially answered this question, so here I can nitpick at its assumptions. If you look at support levels for the protests in polls, your assertion is just not true. Even at its ebb around September, you had massive support from Israeli Palestinians, Mizrahis, and religious people for the protest. Within all these groups support was positively correlated with perceived economic uncertainty. Of course at the rallies you mostly had middle-class young Ashkenazis. Many academics, both "radical" and mainstream, see this as the bottom line: it was a reactionary movement of the younger generation of a privileged stratum that had lost its privileges. But this totally denies the importance of the protests among underprivileged groups -- for example, the Ethiopian Jewish minority who have always been horribly oppressed but are just now getting organized in rising up. They conceive their demands entirely within the discourse opened up by the summer protests. The greatest danger in the dismissive view is that it denies the open nature of the movement at this moment in time. These young middle-class people are instinctively moving towards a cross-class coalition with poorer people, but they need leadership and theory. People on the left who deny this are evading their own responsibility at this juncture.

I agree with you that there was widespread polling support for the protests from all social groups, and that we should not discount it, but many have commented on the disproportionate representation at the protests themselves of the Ashkenazi middle or upper-middle class. Of course a protest led by the middle class is unlikely to be transformative. While too many "radical" observers refused to see the Israeli Palestinian participation, their participation did not seem proportional to either their demographic weight or their percentage of the country's poor. Can you talk a little about organizing and mobilizing within those communities so as to foreground their concerns, or to create cross-religious solidarity? For example, weren't some of them at the Kiryat Malakhi protest in January?

Well -- who goes to protests in general? Who has it in their "habitus," to be academic about it, to go to rallies, or to organize rallies, or to even think in terms of political action? Middle-class people, of course. This is as true for the left as for the right. I spent last spring working in an industrial warehouse (for my Master's thesis). One of my best friends there was a young worker of Russian origin -- he was extremely apolitical, but he was the one who told me about the cottage cheese protest, which began the avalanche of the summer. I was dismissive; he was enthused about it. Later on I asked him if he had been to any protests. He told me that he wished he could, but (obviously) he had to work.

So of course playing the statistics game this way will, as usual, bring you to the conclusion that there is nothing new under the sun. I don't agree that "a protest led by the middle class is unlikely to be transformative." What is the middle class anyway? I don't think there is a good economic definition (unless you want to say something arbitrary like "the 6th to 8th deciles of the population in terms of income"). I would define the middle class politically, as the keystone of hegemony, the critical mass of people that believe the system is working in their favor. From this perspective, there can never be transformation without the middle class, or at least a big chunk of it. Of course the middle class is not enough, but it is idiotic to dismiss it as necessarily reactionary. And of course, the people who make the mistake of sidelining the middle class are always middle-class themselves.

Unfortunately I can't talk too much about organizing within oppressed groups, as I am not really involved in it at the moment, except with migrant workers who are a bit of an exception. I can't really generalize about it; I used to believe that as soon as people realize their own oppression they will be open to solidarity with other oppressed people, but I'm not that naïve anymore. Nowadays I think it is mostly a matter of getting involved with a community, getting people's trust, being open with them about the reasons why you are there and what you expect, and then hoping that circumstances beyond your control will create the objective possibility of a revolutionary bloc emerging. The people who lead it will come both from the middle class and from the more oppressed groups. The better the organizing, the more heterogeneous the leadership will be. But there is no room for anti-middle-class bias of this kind.

What do you foresee will occur this summer?

So to recap: if I had to guess, I would say this summer we will see a smaller but much more focused movement, which will encounter a lot more repression. There will be a lot of reflection and people will search for new modalities of action. And then, if and when the financial crisis finally hits, there will be an explosion and a leadership ready for it. Then we will have a long and protracted struggle. If there is a parallel awakening among the Palestinians and a reciprocal solidarity, then we can properly speak of being on the road to a revolution. This is all very far away, but this is where we should aim to be heading.

This interview was originally published at MRZine

Detainees and Other Prisoner News

Palestinians arrest 10 Islamic Jihad members
Palestinian security forces arrested 10 members of the Islamic Jihad in the Jenin refugee camp on Monday, a local leader of the radical movement said.
link to news.yahoo.com

Islamic Jihad holds PA security responsible for assaults on its cadres
The Islamic Jihad said that the PA security men broke into houses of a number of the Islamic Jihad leaders and cadres, on Monday, in the Jenin refugee camp in Burkin town.
link to www.palestine-info.co.uk

IOF soldiers nab ten Palestinians including three children in Jerusalem and Al Khalil
Israeli occupation forces (IOF) rounded up ten Palestinians in Al-Khalil and Jerusalem over the past 24 hours including three children. 
link to www.palestine-info.co.uk

IOF soldiers detain child, summons liberated prisoner
Israeli occupation forces (IOF) detained a 15-year-old child in Beit Ummar village, north of Al-Khalil, on Monday evening, local sources said.
link to www.palestine-info.co.uk

Suspicion: Israelis harvested organs from the needy
Police suspect organ-harvesting network operated mainly in Kosovo, Azerbaijan; probe was launched after Turkish man told authorities in Kosov he was 'thrown out to the street' following operation.
link to www.ynetnews.com

Al-Jazeera's (R)Evolution?
In March of 2011, an unusually forthright editorial by an anonymous writer made its way into the Peninsula Qatar, an English language daily bankrolled by a member of the emirate’s ruling family. At the time of publication, protesters had already toppled the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt, uprisings were in full swing in Libya and Yemen, and in the Persian Gulf, Bahrainis were gearing up for what would prove a bloody battle only days after the op-ed ran. 
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/5610/al-jazeeras-(r)evolution

Lawyer: Jailed Bahrain activist granted bail
A court in Bahrain granted bail Sunday for a jailed rights activist, but he remained in detention to await another court hearing later this week, a defense lawyer said.
link to news.yahoo.com

Despite Being Granted Bill, Nabeel Rajab Still Detained
Although he was granted bill, prominent Bahraini activist Nabeel Rajab remained in jail of Al-Khalifa regime.
link to www.almanar.com.lb

Bahrain in UN spotlight over political prisoners
Bahrain faced calls at the United Nations on Monday to release its political prisoners, including prominent rights activist Nabeel Rajab who is charged with tweeting insults against the government.
link to news.yahoo.com

Bahraini Prince Should Not be Welcomed in UK, Petition Asserts
The petition drawn up by Avaaz, the world's largest and most effective online campaigning community for change, will call on the British Prime Minster David Cameron and Jacques Rogge, President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to prevent Sheikh Nasser's entry to the UK, declaring him as "persona non grata", the Ahlul Bayt News Agency reported.
link to www.albawaba.com 

The Lede Blog: Video of Street Fighting in Beirut
A Lebanese broadcaster captured harrowing footage of the fighting between rival Sunni factions that support opposite sides of the Syrian conflict, including armed men squeezing off rounds and darting through darkened streets.
link to feeds.nytimes.com

Beirut Battle: One Night, One Street, Photo Blog by Haitham Moussawi
Street battles between pro and anti Syrian groups in Beirut overnight left two people dead, a security official said on Monday, however the Lebanese capital was largely quiet on Monday morning. "During the night, groups of young men cut off the road in the Tariq al-Jdideh district and street battles followed," the official said, requesting anonymity. "Two people were killed and 18 were wounded," he said, adding that machineguns had been fired.
link to english.al-akhbar.com

Two dead after overnight street battles but Beirut calm
Street battles between pro and anti Syrian groups in Beirut overnight left two people dead, a security official said on Monday, however the Lebanese capital was largely quiet on Monday morning. "During the night, groups of young men cut off the road in the Tariq al-Jdideh district and street battles followed," the official said, requesting anonymity. "Two people were killed and 18 were wounded," he said, adding that machineguns had been fired. Supporters of the anti-Syrian Future Movement clashed with members of the pro-Assad Arab Movement, with fighting continuing until 3.00am.
link to english.al-akhbar.com

Qahwaji: We won’t Allow Sedition in any Area in Lebanon
Lebanese Army Commander General Jean Qahwaji stressed Monday that what happened in Akkar in North Lebanon after the killing of Sheikh Ahmad Abdul Wahid and his bodyguard was the result of political tension in the region. Lebanese armyIn an interview with Al-Jomhouriya newspaper, he urged Lebanese to put an end to sedition in the country, because people adhere to the state and army.
link to www5.almanar.com.lb

High Tension in Lebanon after Death of Sheikh Abdul Wahid
Several areas in Lebanon are witnessing high tension with roads being cut and gunshots heard after the Lebanese army fired at a convoy of cars which declined to stop at an army checkpoint in the town of Alkwykhat in Akkar.
link to www.almanar.com.lb
 
Protests after Lebanese sheikh killed in Akkar
A Lebanese sheikh was shot and killed by the country's army in the northern district of Akkar on Sunday, in circumstances that were initially unclear. Sheikh Ahmad Abdel Wahed and his companion Muhammad Hussein Merheb were killed in the town of Halba, the state run National News Agency (NNA) said.  The article claimed Wahed had been heading to a sit-in protest organized by the Future Movement but had failed to stop at a military checkpoint.
link to english.al-akhbar.com

US and Russia concerned by Lebanon security situation
The United States and Russia on Monday voiced concern about security in Lebanon after two clerics were shot and killed amid violence between between pro and anti Syrian groups. US State Department deputy spokesman Mark Toner issued a statement welcoming a pledge by the Lebanese authorities to probe the shootings and urged all sides to show restraint amid fears the violence in Syria was spilling into Lebanon.
link to english.al-akhbar.com

Russia Urges Lebanon to Take Stabilization Measures
Lebanon has largely managed to remain neutral in the conflict that began in neighboring Syria last March, but violence has recently spread to the country’s northern region, which saw frequent clashes between rival Sunni groups in the past two weeks.On Sunday, Lebanese troops shot dead a Sunni cleric at a checkpoint in northern Lebanon. At least two people were killed and 18 injured in Beirut in clashes overnight. “Moscow is seriously concerned over the rise of public discontent in Lebanon…we are calling on Lebanese politicians to show restraint and high patriotic responsibility in this uneasy moment both for the country and for the region,” the Foreign Ministry said urging Lebanese authorities to restore order in the country. The ministry also said that “forces that are unable to implement their destabilization plans in Syria have turned their attention to Lebanon.” 
link to en.ria.ru
 
Lies of the US government, As'ad AbuKhalil
The recent clashes in Tripoli started with the arrest of Shadi Al-Mawlawi, a man with Al-Qa`idah connection.  The arrest was widely condemned by the "pro-Western"--according to Western media--coalition of March 14.  The other side revealed that the arrest was at the behest of the CIA.  That embarrassed the sponsors of the March 14, so pro-Saudi/US media in Lebanon, LBC TV and An-Nahar, quoted US officials as denying that they were behind the arrest.  Now, Sulayman Franjiyyah, revealed on New TV that the CIA was behind the arrest of the Jordanian suspect, and that led to the arrest of Al-Mawlawi.  So the US government was being too cute in its propaganda through March 14 media in Lebanon.
link to angryarab.blogspot.com

"Armed kids on scooters were using the anarchy to try to assassinate soldiers from behind"

"The Shiites have [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah and [Amal leader Nabih] Berri to tell them when to fight and when to stop, and their people listen," one frustrated Beirut Sunni told me late in the evening as he checked the casualty reports on his phone. "The Sunnis? We have a poster of a dead man."

link to friday-lunch-club.blogspot.com 

 

Beirut Battle: The Day After Future’s Victory

A day after an all night battle in the Future Movement’s stronghold of Tariq al-Jdideh in the Lebanese capital, residents of the neighborhood have mixed feelings that range from the thrill of “victory” to the fear of what’s next.

link to english.al-akhbar.com 

America's favorite Salafites, As'ad AbuKhalil
The Hariri Salafites in Lebanon are of the Jihadi-Bin Ladenite type.  Those were the folks who recruited fighters in Iraq.  They have been burning Lebanon in the last few days and yet not a word against them from the US government.  They are those allies: this is one of the most unreported stories.  Western journalists who were going to Lebanon on media junkets paid for by Hariri family were introduced to the Whiskey sipping members of the Hariri media office and they were not introduced to the muscle on the street.  Can you imagine if the culprits were from Hizbullah? The UN Security Council would have met in an emergency session and sanctions would have been ordered against Lebanon. 
link to angryarab.blogspot.com

The Salafi monster in Lebanon and Jeffrey Feltman, As'ad AbuKhalil
I will write about that later but make no mistake about it: Jeffrey Feltman and US policies in Lebanon during the Bush administration are responsible for the rise of the Jihadi-Salafi monster in Lebanon.  They wanted a sectarian counter to Hizbullah and found one.  I hope that they are enjoying it.  Hariri camp has been speaking about "a civil state" in Lebanon (this is very much a code word by the Muslim Brotherhood to mask their aim at Islamization of society and state): I believe them but we did not know that they wanted Ayman Adh-Dhawahiri as its head.
link to angryarab.blogspot.com

Muhammad Ra`d: Hizbullah's second thoughts on Syria, As'ad AbuKhalil
On the sinking Syrian regime ship.  People did not notice the speech by Muhammad Ra`d (the head of Hizbullah parliamentary bloc who has a unique way of expressing his political views--he was a teacher of Arabic).  Ra`d spoke about Syria in a tone that can be contrasted with the rest of Hizbullah's rhetoric about Syria.  He spoke about the right of the Syrian people to determine their future, and spoke about the freedom of the Syrian people to chose.  The party must have realized how much fodder he has provided to his enemies in Saudi/Hariri media by his unconditional and unlimited support for the lousy regime.
link to angryarab.blogspot.com

Kuwait warns residents not to visit Lebanon
Kuwait's Foreign Ministry has told its citizens to leave Lebanon and avoid traveling to the country because of increasing violence fueled by the revolt in neighboring Syria, state-run news agency KUNA reported on Monday, citing a ministry source. "Kuwaitis...should not travel to Lebanon under any circumstances," KUNA quoted the source as saying. The decision follows similar announcements by Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE on Sunday. At least two people were killed in Beirut in heavy clashes between rival Sunni Muslim gunmen early on Monday. 
link to english.al-akhbar.com

Tripoli: Salafis Make Their Move
The repeated security breaches in the Northern Lebanese city of Tripoli raise questions about who’s in control of the security situation on the ground. There are no definitive answers to these questions, but the growing influence of Salafi forces is visible.
link to english.al-akhbar.com

Don't blame Syria – Lebanon's leaders are fuelling the fighting in Tripoli, Patrick Galey
The resulting flare-ups have been carefully managed by sectarian leaders and have helped maintain the real reason why Tripoli is such a hotbed for hostility. For behind all of Syria's influence in Lebanon, and underneath a past of political manipulation, the true cause of Tripoli's violent present lies in the city's appalling neglect. The figures speak for themselves. Close to 40% of all Lebanon's poor live in Tripoli or the surrounding areas. More than half of Tripoli residents are classed as either "poor" or "extremely poor." Of those families who live in the trouble hotspots of Bab al-Tabbaneh and Jabal Mohsen, 82% live on less than the equivalent of £336 per month. Illiteracy and unemployment rates in the city are way above the national average.  While it is true that all areas of Lebanon have suffered in recent decades as the country attempts to recover from its civil war and subsequent conflicts, Tripoli residents have endured special hardship. Compared for example to parts of southern Beirut and the south, where inhabitants worst affected by Hezbollah's 2006 war with Israel have had their homes rebuilt and infrastructure improved, the people of Tripoli receive precious little by way of financial support from either state or private sponsors.
link to www.guardian.co.uk

About Last Night
Last night the sound of gunfire punctuated the Beirut soundscape. Supporters of the anti-Syrian and majority Sunni Future Movement clashed with members of the pro-Assad and Sunni Majority Arab Movement. The fighting, which was most intense around the Beirut Arab University, continued until the early hours of the morning.
link to www.jadaliyya.com

The Number One Sunni in Lebanon, Qifa Nabki

The Future Movement has seized on these events to make a typically hamfisted play, pressuring Miqati to resign. I don’t see that succeeding unless the situation in Tripoli becomes far worse. And even in such a case, I continue to believe that Hariri has no desire to return to the limelight so soon. He is biding his time abroad not because of security threats but because the position of the Lebanese Prime Minister — the Number One Sunni in Lebanon — is precisely where he doesn’t want to be right now.

link to qifanabki.com

 

Syria

 

Bomb kills 5 in Syrian capital
A bomb that apparently struck a restaurant in the Syrian capital killed at least five people, the state-run news agency said Tuesday, as activists reported intense clashes between army defectors and soldiers in the restive north.

link to news.yahoo.com

 

Syria forces kill deserters as NATO rejects action
Syrian forces ambushed and killed nine army deserters in a north Damascus suburb on Monday, a human rights watchdog said, as NATO ruled out military action against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
link to news.yahoo.com

 

Ex-detainee: Syrian prisons are 'slaughterhouses'
A prominent Palestinian writer who was jailed in Syria for nearly three weeks described the facilities as "human slaughterhouses," saying security agents beat detainees with batons, crammed them into stinking cells and tied them to beds at night.

link to news.yahoo.com

 

NATO chief says 'no intention' to intervene in Syria
NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen on Sunday voiced concern about violence in Syria, but said the alliance has "no intention" of taking military action against the regime.

link to news.yahoo.com

 

Bomb detonates near UN observers in Syria
No casualties reported in blast in Damascus suburb, as UN peacekeeping chief urges all parties to exercise restraint.

link to www.aljazeera.com

 

Opposition groups report clashes in Syrian capital
A restive district of the Syrian capital that has been a hotbed of dissent against President Bashar Assad was rocked by fighting overnight between government forces and army defectors, opposition groups said Sunday.

link to news.yahoo.com

 

High-ranking Syrian officials deny reports of their own assassinations
Two high-ranking Syrian officials denied in interviews with state television on Sunday reports by pan-Arab channels that they, along with four other regime stalwarts, had been assassinated. 

link to english.alarabiya.net

Opposition Says it has Killed Top Six Regime Figures, But Claim is Doubtful

This photo of an opposition banner hung on a dormitory at the University of Aleppo shows the growing reach of the opposition in Aleppo. Another sign of the growing capability of the opposition is its ability to set off car bombs with growing regularity near intelligence offices and in Syria’s major cities, such as this one: Car bomb hits Syrian city of Deir al-Zour, killing 9 instantly and wounding 100. An intelligence headquarters was the target. 

link to www.joshualandis.com

Syrian opposition to announce new leader
Syria's opposition group, the Syrian National Council says it's almost ready to announce a new leader. The group's been in disarray, increasingly accused of being ineffective and out of touch with the armed struggle. Laurence Lee looks at whether a new chief might restore some of its legitimacy.
link to www.youtube.com
 

Inside Syria: An opposition divided 
The Syrian opposition appears to have come apart at the seams as different factions vie for leadership roles. James Bays discusses with Bassma Kodmani in Paris, Dr. Kamal al-Labwani in Cairo and Josh Landis in Oklahoma.

link to www.youtube.com

Syria: Losing Its Youth
The newly-politicized generation of young Syrians are constantly facing fresh challenges and bleak prospects. As employment opportunities dwindle, it becomes even harder to stay in their country.

link to english.al-akhbar.com

Other World News

 

US ambassador to Afghanistan quits amid worsening relations

The US ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, is to leave his post this summer, the embassy in Kabul confirmed on Tuesday. "Amb Crocker has confirmed with regret that he will be leaving Kabul this summer," the embassy said on its Twitter feed, a day after the conclusion of a NATO summit in Chicago in which leaders charted a path out of the Afghan war. The veteran diplomat, who was appointed to Kabul 10 months ago, previously served as the US envoy to Iraq, Pakistan and Syria.

link to english.al-akhbar.com

 

US protesters condemn NATO
Protesters gathering in Chicago for the NATO summit geared up on Sunday for the largest demonstration of the weekend, as thousands are expected to march from a downtown park to the lakeside convention center where President Barack Obama and other world leaders were meeting. Hours before the main demonstration was set to start, protesters – including peace activists, war veterans and those more focused on the economy – began arriving at Grant Park, holding signs denouncing NATO, including ones that read: "War(equals)Debt" and "NATO, Go Home."

link to english.al-akhbar.com

"No NATO, No War": U.S. Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan Return War Medals at NATO Summit
We broadcast from Chicago, site of the largest NATO summit in the organization’s six-decade history. On Sunday, veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as members of Afghans For Peace, led a peace march of thousands of people. Iraq Veterans Against the War held a ceremony where nearly 50 veterans discarded their war medals by hurling them down the street in the direction of the NATO summit. We hear the soldiers’ voices as they return their medals one by one from the stage. "I am giving back my global war on terror service medal in solidarity with the people of Iraq and Afghanistan," said Jason Heard, a former combat medic who spent 10 years in the U.S. Army. "I am deeply sorry for the destruction that we have caused in these countries and around the globe."
link to www.democracynow.org

Scott Olsen, U.S. Vet Who Nearly Lost Life at Occupy Protest, Brings Antiwar Message to NATO Summit
We’re joined at the NATO summit in Chicago by Scott Olsen, who survived two tours in Iraq but almost died when he was hit with a police projectile at an Occupy Oakland protest last year. Olsen returned four of his medals at Sunday’s antiwar march. When asked why he’s joined the Occupy movement and is protesting against the heavily-policed NATO summit, Olsen says, "I am going to make every effort I can to show them that we’re doing the right thing. No matter what they do to any of us, we’ve got each other’s backs and we’re going forward."
link to www.democracynow.org

U.S. Army Vets Join With Afghans For Peace to Lead Antiwar March at Chicago NATO Summit
Sunday’s antiwar march at the NATO summit in Chicago was led by members of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and Afghans For Peace. "We’re here to protest NATO and call on all NATO representatives to end this inhumane, illegal and barbaric war against our home country and our people," says Suraia Sahar, a member of Afghans For Peace who marched alongside Afghan war veteran Graham Clumpner during anti-NATO protest in Chicago. "I feel honored standing next to this veteran because in my opinion they are doing the right thing by speaking out against the occupation and war alongside us." Clumpner says, "I reject any affiliation with this war."
link to www.democracynow.org

Chicago Police Face Accusations of Entrapment, Brutality in Crackdown on NATO Protesters
Dozens of anti-NATO protesters have been arrested in Chicago over the past several days including five men who were jailed on domestic terrorism charges. Three of the men were accused of plotting to attack President Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s home and other targets. Their lawyers say they were entrapped by government informants. The Chicago police have also been criticized by activist groups for using violent force to break up protests and accused of targeting independent media activists who have been streaming the protests live over the Internet. On Saturday night three helping to live stream video of the protests were detained at gunpoint.
link to www.democracynow.org

 

Imagine the reaction if a Muslim cleric in the U.S. said this: North Carolina pastor: Send LGBT people to concentration camps to die

Pastor Charles Worley of the Providence Road Baptist Church in North Carolina recently told his congregation that LGBT individuals should be rounded up and detained in camps until they’re all dead. During a sermon on May 13, Worley berated President Barack Obama for claiming that same sex couples should be allowed to marry. “The Bible is against it, God is against it, I’m against it and if you’ve got any sense you’re against it,” he said. “I figured a way out to get rid of all the lesbians and queers. But it isn’t going to pass in Congress. Build a great, big, large fence — 150 or 100 mile long — put all the lesbians in there. Fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing for the queers and the homosexuals, and have that fence electrified so they can’t get out, feed em, and you know what, in a few years, they’ll die out. You know why? They can’t reproduce!” “I am not going to vote for a baby killer and a homosexual lover,” Worley added. “God have mercy, it makes me puking sick.”

link to www.rawstory.com

 

UAE ruler cancels debts of defaulting borrowers
Citizens of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates who defaulted on hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans could soon see their debts wiped away.

link to news.yahoo.com

Kuwaiti Shiite tweeter 'denies insulting prophet'
A Kuwaiti Shiite tweeter on Monday denied in court charges that he insulted Islam's Prophet Mohammed, his wife Aisha and some companions, his lawyer Khaled al-Shatti said.
link to news.yahoo.com
Suicide bombing kills nearly 100 soldiers in Yemen
A suicide bomber blew himself up at a military parade rehearsal Monday in Yemen's capital, killing 96 soldiers in one of the deadliest attacks in the city in years, officials said.
link to news.yahoo.com

Robert Fisk: Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi is dead. Now we'll never know the truth about Lockerbie
So the old scoundrel has died. Midday Tripoli time, at his home, peacefully, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, after a long struggle with cancer, "bravely borne" no doubt. But "scoundrel", nonetheless, not because he arranged the Lockerbie bombing – many have the gravest doubts he ever did – but because he was a member of Gaddafi's intelligence services and no-one who served the Great Leader as a "mukhabarat" agent had clean hands. If he was wrongly convicted, what did he do in the service of his master? Cliché time: his secret dies with him.

When will we learn that any land given to them will only be a launching pad for future attacks against us?

What will it take for us to understand this? How many will have to die? And still Dershowitz refuses to budge from his two state model.

Professor Dershowitz please reconsider.

The settlers have eaten the Israeli political structure and are getting ever more aggressive about pushing the Greater Israel brand. So will Dershowitz join Beinart who fears that Israel is committing national suicide? And what will that do to liberalism? To be continued.

Almost every other mainstream review of Beinart has been negative and ultra-Zionist. But Shulman's piece is a lot closer to Austin Branion's review here (which was negative and not Zionist). Shulman praises Beinart's bravery, and says he does not go far enough.

I'll post longer excerpts from the piece when it's online, but the revelations in the article are: What about that word apartheid?

"Those who recoil at the term 'apartheid' are invited to offer a better one; but note that one of the main architects of this system, Ariel Sharon, himself reportedly adopted South African terminology, referring to the noncontiguous Palestinian enclaves he envisaged for the West Bank as 'Bantustans.'"

What should Americans do? They should come to the West Bank and protect Palestinian civilians from "marauding settlers and the soldiers who inevitably back the settlers up."

What will the new coalition do for the Palestinians and the two state solution? Diddly.

"The new cabinet will continue to entrench the occupation and to legalize the massive theft of Palestinian lands while loudly complaining that the Palestinians are responsible for the collapse of negotiations."

And what should Americans prepare themselves for? It's one state, dears, it's inevitable, and it should be a democratic place.

"It is impossible to keep millions of human beings disenfranchised for long and to systematically rob them of their dignity and their land...

Thus the likelhood must be faced that unless the Occupation ends, there will also, in the not so distant future, be no Jewish state."

That's the ending. Without tears. Shulman stakes out the New York Review's historical territory, surveyed by Tony Judt in 2003 with his one-state argument. I hope that this great moral presence in our intellectual culture has resumed its work on this question, and the NYRB-- which is so outspoken about women's rights in Egypt, and the failure of Freudianism-- will now take up a vital role, leading Jews to embrace democracy.

Israeli police brutally arrest hunger strike demonstrators, threaten them with rape, Sawsan Khalife
Thaira Zoabi, a 27-year-old activist from Nazareth, also suffered injuries at the hands of police on 3 May. “As soon as the protest began, the Israeli Yassam and police forces first arrested the bus driver and eight protesters. That did not stop us from continuing our protest demanding to release them all,” she said. “I was first attacked by a police officer when he lifted me up the ground with my kuffiyeh [traditional checkered scarf] that was around my neck, suffocating me and making it hard for me to breathe. They arrested me and eight other protesters. There were also Israeli and foreign activists amongst us. “The Israeli forces used [taser guns] and I have bruises on my arms and legs. I saw them open a protester’s mouth by force and spit in it, and they spit in my face as well. They beat us and used massive verbal violence. They did a full body search. While being under custody, a police officer of Ramle district addressed both me and another female activist while being cuffed with verbal sexual harassment, threatening to rape us. I have to admit I burst in tears.”
link to electronicintifada.net

Land, Property & Resource Theft & Destruction / Ethnic Cleansing / Restriction of Movement / Refugees

On Monday, Akiva Tor, Israeli consul general of the Pacific Northwest, shed more light on the bitterness Israel feels towards the Arab Spring in a lecture at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Although the event was supposed to focus on the implications of political shifts in the region for Israel, Tor used the event to scapegoat the Palestinians for the stagnant peace process while all the audience wanted to talk about was Iran.

Beginning with Egypt, Tor decried the landslide of votes casted for the Salafis and Muslim Brotherhood, stating, "Political Islam won the elections." Continuing, "even when this earthquake will cease its tremor," relations with Israel will not likely improve. And while the former Mubarak regime was Israel's insurance for "peace with the Egyptian government for more than 30 years," the new leadership evoked apprehension for the diplomat. Tor then expressed concerns over the government not honoring treaties previously made with Israel because of their "religio-historical" worldview. Israel, by comparison he said, has a "secular historical" outlook.

Also relating to the Muslim Brotherhood, Tor stated Egypt would no longer act as an arbitrator between Hamas and Fatah, determining this will usher in the end of the possibility for Palestinian self-determination. "The opportunity for a peace process agreement has receded," said Tor, elaborating, while "both Israel and the Palestinian Authority [PA] believe that the correct way to establish peace between us is the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel," without an external push for unity, he explained, the peace process is over. Then again, Tor emphasized the moment for a Palestinian state has "receded." Yet, he applauded the PA's Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad for "incredible work to decrease corruption."

Moving on to the settlements Tor said, "Israel has not allowed new settlements in over a decade" stating they do "not at all" hinder peace with the Palestinians. Of course, during the past ten years there has been unprecedented settlement growth in the West Bank, however, exclusively from illegal construction. Even still, within the past two weeks Israel motioned to retroactively legalize Bruchim, Sansana, and Recheilim, violating the status quo settlement freeze, along with the 1965 Planning and Building Act, which forbids retroactively legalizing communities.

During the Q & A the audience was largely uninterested in discussing settlements, Palestinians, or the lecture's topic (the Arab Spring). Rather, Iran was the centerpiece. (Incidentally the only question on the Palestinians was from me. And when my comment card on the hunger strikers was read, the moderators voice was accompanied by a low, audible hiss from the attendees who averaged as white, affluent and 40 years my senior.) Four questions in a row noted fears of an Iranian nuclear program and displayed a disdain for diplomatic efforts. Tor addressed their concerns and advocated to prevent the Iranian "worldwide" threat by using "deeper and more stringent sanctions" supported by a consumer protest; effectively he endorsed a movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Iran.

After the lecture, I asked Tor if the three legalized outpost violate the freeze? He said no, elaborating that they were "not illegal" to begin with. (This is false.) I then asked if that meant Israel viewed the outposts as already legal? Tor did not answer directly and reiterated that the settlements were "not illegal," when they were established, though he did agree that their permits were changed. Tor then amicably handed me his card and offered to email me a position paper on this issue from the Israeli government.

Then last fall Bill visited Jordan and saw the lights of Israel and Palestine across the Dead Sea and felt a strong desire to go back, but he said he couldn’t justify it without a larger purpose. I said, What if you came with me and I wrote about our trip? I want to see the place through your eyes.

So for ten days in the middle of February we traveled together. This piece is a record of our experiences, with Bill's pictures. I'll run Part 2 next week. Bill wanted a pseudonym because he is not ready to be public yet.

------

On Sunday February 12, I picked Bill up at his hotel, the American Colony in East Jerusalem, and we went to Ramallah to meet friends for dinner. Then at 9:30 they gave us a ride back to Qalandiyah-- Bill’s first checkpoint.

Qalandiya, the first crossing

The Palestine side of the border square was bleak and desolate, wide open and poorly lit, like a charcoal drawing of a scene from the Soviet bloc. We went inside the wide steel-roofed border hut and passed through an entrance chute made of galvanized steel bars, which brought us to the actual checkpoint. A half dozen young Palestinian men lounged against the bars waiting at the large locked turnstile, which is operated by soldiers behind glass. You have to wait for a buzzer. The turnstile lets three people through at a time.

One of the soldiers was loopy. He kept getting on the microphone to sass the young men in Hebrew, and they called back at him in the same mocking tone. He switched into English, in falsetto.

“Don’t you like Israel? Do you like my country? It is beautiful. It is nice country.”

The turnstile finally buzzed Bill through with two Palestinians. He wore a scowl as he held up his camera to the glass and obeyed orders to open his passport to the right page.

When it was my turn, a little boy from a family that had arrived after us squirted forward and managed to get through the turnstile with me. Panic. His parents, suddenly separated by steel bars from him, grew frantic and called out to him and the soldiers. A soldier buzzed the father through. As he picked his boy up he met my eyes. “This is occupation.”

Qalandiya, the entrance chute

Bill stood waiting at the other side of the X-ray machine, face flushed, and we got onto the 18 bus and waited for it to fill up. A man in the row in front of us got on facebook on his computer.

“That’s one of the most disturbing experiences I’ve had in a while,” Bill said.

“You’re sensitive.”

He looked out the window. “I know that! Who designed this place? Do you think they could have done it any worse? They don’t try to disguise it at all.”

“I guess they could have done it modern, like an airport lounge. But we bring a lot to this.”

“You know what it reminds me of? Or am I just crazy to even think that?”

“No it reminds me of the same thing.”

“But you can’t say it. Because it’s crazy to say it.”

“You’re not allowed to say it,” I said, “but it’s not crazy to think it. Because we’re both thinking it without anyone telling us. Don’t you think a lot of Jews would think the same thing if they had to go through this?”

Bill has a way of sitting up straight on his feelings. He said, “They should all have to go through it. They should take all the Birthright trips through it. But I’ll tell you something, I felt the same way at Ben Gurion airport. It’s got a huge ramp going down with all these people crammed on it. It’s completely different from when I was here last. I found it disturbing. Let’s get a drink. I need to unwind.”

We got off the bus at the American Colony and had drinks in the cave bar in the basement.

Bill was still agitated. “Did you see when we were going out there was a sign saying 'Israel,' with an arrow? Israel! As if they don’t know. Why can’t it just say Exit?”

“I didn’t see that.”

“Yes, this is Israel. And that little boy who got stuck with you--can he not grow up hating Israel? Why wouldn’t he?”

I said, “We bring a lot to this, we project stuff.”

“I don’t see why that matters. Jews should be sensitive to this stuff. “

I said, “Imagine if we were in Jordan, on the road to Petra. Imagine that they said, well there’s a checkpoint on the road for security when you enter the Petra district.”

“But I’ve been there. That’s not there,” Bill said.

“But imagine if it was there and they said, it will add an hour to your trip and you had to go through what we just went through. You wouldn’t think twice about it.”

Bill flushed with impatience and shook his head, refusing to answer. He doesn’t suffer fools. He’s never been a journalist!

--------

The next day we took a cab to a Tel Aviv suburb and got dropped at the side of a highway to wait for Larry Derfner. We had our suitcases because we were headed on to Tel Aviv. Bill’s suitcase was huge and had rollers. That morning we’d heard about the Norman Finkelstein interview in which he criticized the boycott movement as a cult.

“Look, our side isn’t always right,” I said. “We can be imbalanced. Some folks think that Israel is going to be dismantled tomorrow. It’s not going away. Look at this place. It’s here to stay. I’m in Palestinian solidarity, because they’re the victims, but in a criminal case, the victimized family always wants the death penalty, and society doesn’t have to grant the death penalty. It doesn’t have to be inside that family. It has to balance other interests.”

Bill got impatient, pacing the shoulder of the road. “Ok fine,” he said. “Start balancing. You say there’s got to be balance, I agree with you. Start balancing. There’s never been any balance. You want a two state solution? The Arab Peace Initiative is still on the table. No one here has done anything to honor it. Where’s the balance? They can’t make a state this way.”

Larry Derfner came along and we stuffed our bags in his trunk and drove into Lydda. We went to a hummus place, and Derfner told us his story. He grew up in a neighborhood outside LA with eight Holocaust survivors of his father’s generation. Derfner’s a fiery American lefty, and that Holocaust chapter of Jewish experience seems to shadow his worldview. He didn’t want to hear about the one state solution. It’s pie in the sky. The one state solution is a prescription for unending violence and unrest, he said, you have to figure out the same territorial questions but now as one polity, it won't work.

We walked back through the market to the car past stands of bright strawberries sold by Palestinians.

--------

In Tel Aviv Bill checked into the Hilton because he’d stayed there with his grandparents years before. “This is a walk down memory lane.”

There were Ahava products in the bathroom, and I walked out on the balcony with him to look at the city.

“I can’t believe how much it’s changed,” he said. “It seems a lot smaller. That’s the Herod Hotel. It used to be the Moriah. I guess it seemed so big because I was small, and because I’d never been anywhere else.”

“When did you first come here?”

“I was two."

“Two! But you don’t remember anything.”

“Yes I do. I remember this view. I remember my father telling me there are sharks in the sea. I remember meeting my great grandmother. She lived in Bnai Brak. She went from Europe to Brooklyn to Israel.”

“Two, “ I kept saying. “And how many times did you come here?”

“Eight times.”

“Eight times! Jesus.”

“This is my ninth trip. By the eighth time I was pretty much done with it. I had talked to my cousin after trips six and seven and started to see the problems. Then on eight I was trying to find something worthwhile to cling to. That was the last trip.”

“And you’ve had nothing to do with it for 12 years?”

“Physically, nothing. But I’ve thought about it all the time. I’ve been thinking about it since I was 11. That was the trip that really got me. Just before the first intifada.”

We had drinks in the Business lounge on the 17th floor and watched Dov Weisglass’s entourage. They were flirting with a pretty blonde journalist, and a couple of the old men said they were jealous of the old American guy she’d come to talk to—probably some fatcat Israel lobbyist. The attitudes seemed very 1980s USA. Out over the sea, planes banked making the turn into the domestic airport to the north.

Bill said he was going out to see the cool new hip Tel Aviv, and I went to Jaffa to meet up with the friends I was crashing with. We were eating dinner at the bookstore café, Café Yafa, when Bill called.

I said, “I thought you were going down memory lane tonight.”

“I’m too upset. I’m lonely. Can I join you?”

“What about the cool Tel Aviv?”

“I tried. I didn’t find anything particularly appealing.”

We sat outside in Jaffa at a crowded alleyway restaurant with the journalists Lia Tarachansky and David Sheen.

Lia told a story about another friend who was a soldier. Almost everyone is a soldier. The man she talked about had killed people in Gaza. But Lia had grown up in a settlement in the West Bank. "So at the end of the day, how different is it?" she said.

Bill said, “The only thing that makes me feel good about this place is the people who are trying to change it. On the Jewish side anyway. People like Joseph Dana. That guy is totally legitimate. Otherwise I sort of hate it.”

Lia said, “At the same time, I have a lot of love for this place. Something lives here. I feel a part of it, this land and its air. I am a part of it with all its ugliness and nuance and terror."

Bill nodded. “I know. I don’t think I would be here if there wasn’t something I loved. I can see that. I think they did some really good things. You can’t think about something as much as we do and not love it. But it’s a different notion of love, it’s like not getting over someone you’ve had a toxic relationship with. And you tell yourself if you take away all the ugly parts, the ethnic cleansing, the discrimination, they’ve done a good job. For sure. I don’t deny it. And maybe I’m being occidentalist about it-- because I’m western and I look for western things. But even the good parts-- I still don’t think that goes very far in the whole scheme of things.”

The conversation had a tragic quality. These people all knew the place better than I did and none of them was fooling themselves about what is coming. Also, I’d been influenced by Bill’s Third Reich impressions. So the bar reminded me of Christopher Isherwood’s scene in Berliners-- hipsters and a beautiful waitress in black tights and a short black skirt and a slouched way about her. A guy came in with a dog. A group of four sat out on a building stoop. I kept looking at the sexy waitress with her black tights and short skirt and good jawline and tied-back hair. When she went into the kitchen across the alley, she sometimes ran into another waitress and she did a little dance as she passed her. She was wearing spectator pumps except they weren’t pumps, they were flats. She was cool but it felt decadent. I couldn’t believe that the galvanized steel of apartheid Qalandiya was less than an hour away. But maybe it was because of apartheid Qalandiya that she is this way.

---------

We took a cab from Tel Aviv to Tappuah Junction outside Nablus.

The big Israeli driver was disturbed that we were going to Nablus. I asked if he’d ever been there and he said, “There is a Hebrew saying. You don’t put a healthy mind in a sick bed. Why should I go to Nablus?”

I said, “The valley is very beautiful and dramatic.”

“OK, fine, my friend. Tell me about it when you come back.“

Bill was silent throughout the cab ride. Later he told me that he kept looking at the Israeli flag on the dashboard and thinking, we’re driving through the heart of the West Bank with an Israeli flag in the windshield. What is it saying? OK, shoot us. Or worse, Up your ass.

Riding to Tappuah Junction deep in the West Bank

We passed a field of olive trees. A few trees were burning. The driver said offhandedly it was probably settlers burning Palestinian trees.

Bill lurched forward. “Do you think there should be settlements on this land?”

The driver shrugged. ‘Why not? This is Jewish land. You are American so you don’t understand. They could have had peace twenty times already. But they don’t want it.”

He dropped us off with the warning that we shouldn’t tell any Palestinian we were from America, we could get in trouble.

We walked 100 yards around the circle at Tappuah junction to get to the Nablus road. A service was there, and the driver opened the back door so we could put in our suitcases.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

Bill said, “We’re Americans.”

“Welcome,” the driver said, and shook our hands.

All the ride into Nablus, Bill raged about our Israeli driver. “’We can’t live with them. They are Arabs.’ And they’re all afraid to step foot in an Arab area. It’s utter racism. And that accent. I hated it, it’s so throaty. Then that high whining tone they get. Why not? Why not? I hate this fucking country.”

“Every country’s fucked up,” I said.

“This is not a normal country. I’ve been to Iran. Iran is a normal country.”

“What does normal mean?”

“In Iran there isn’t this obsession with security and demographics. They have a 55 percent Persian majority, so the place is a mélange. The Supreme Leader is an Azeri. They’re doing a better job of getting along. The racial talk never stops here.

“Look," he said. "I’m for one state, I think that’s the most just solution. But I’m not a total pig. I could get behind an honest two state solution if these people could have a real state.”

“What does real mean?”

“It means, they have all the rights and privileges any other country has. It means, Control over its electro magnetic spectrum, control over its borders, the ability to enter into treaties with other countries, even a military if they want one. Control over their water.”

----

In Nablus we went out to dinner with Saed Abu Hijleh. Saed is a professor of geography and a poet and extremely animated. He drove us up on the south mountain overlooking Nablus to show off his city and tell us of its ancient history and cosmopolitcan traditions. His family’s house is halfway up the mountain. We went to his house and he asked us to use our right foot as we stepped over the threshold. It wasn’t religious, he said-- it’s his superstition.

Well that front walk was filled with meaning. At the front door Saed showed Bill the spot where his mother Shaden was cut down by Israeli soldiers while sitting outside, embroidering, ten years ago. He showed Bill where he and his father were standing when the Israelis pulled up. He showed us where the shots had hit his mother and grazed his father, and how the glass from the front door had splintered and a piece had cut him in the head.

I thought, that is when Bill said goodbye to Israel, when it killed Saed’s mother.

We went out to dinner and had a famous Nablus dish, and afterward Saed drove us east through the city. He was full of energy. We could see lights on the eastern end of the southern mountain, and Saed said the highest lights belonged to an Israeli army base. During the second intifadah, the army would shoot down into the city almost at random, killing people. “One night I had to drive out to pick up my nieces. My sister’s children. They were visiting their cousins and they were terrified to leave the house. I had to get them.”

Nablus at night

Bill said the scene reminded him of visiting Sarajevo. That city is also in a basin, and the Bosnian Serbs shot at Muslims down in the city. A scene of ethnic cleansing.

Later in the al-Yasmeen Hotel, Bill came into my room. His room was cold and he was troubled by seeing the scene of Abu Hijleh’s mother’s death.

“I wonder what would happen to me in that situation. If I could ever forgive that," he said softly.

I said, “Israelis know that they’ve screwed the Palestinians. And that’s what they’re afraid of. They’re afraid of the revenge if there were suddenly one democratic state.”

“It doesn’t have to work that way. I don’t see these people doing that. They just want their rights. Do they have to love each other? No. But they’re living alongside one another right now and they’re in ghettos and they don’t love one another now.”

“It could be like Iraq, that’s what they fear.”

“Iraq’s a different place. I think South Africa is the better model.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

Bill lifted his open hand like he was weighing the argument. “What if I am wrong? I don’t know why that changes anything. We might as well be on a different planet ever since we left Tappuah Junction, and the Israelis don’t care about this place. Did you see that huge industrial park next to Ariel Settlement. Do you think they’ll ever give that up? No.”

“There are differences like this back home,” I said. “You can go from uptown to midtown and it’s like a different planet.”

Bill got the irritated sneer he sometimes gets, and I said, “It’s the racial angle that upsets you.”

“It’s more than that. It’s that my race is doing this. So that I will have a safe place to run to in the highly unlikely event that I will be forced to leave New York. And when you come out here you see that it has nothing to do with security. Did you hear that soldier at Qalandiya asking me if I had taken any pictures of the checkpoint? ‘Are you sure?’ he said.

"If this was seriously about security would he say that, would he trust me? ‘Are you sure!’ It’s not about security. It’s about putting people in their place.”

--------

In the morning Bill wanted to get going. He didn’t want to see the famous Nablus soap factories. He was too upset.

“It’s like these people are living in a cage here. I wasn’t prepared for the intensity of the persecution here.”