From the category archives:

Nakba

Israel’s existential crisis comes to New York

by Philip Weiss on March 10, 2010 · 24 comments

Often these days I hear people talk about how much progress the left has made in breaking open the Israel/Palestine issue in the U.S., and yes I make this claim myself, but last night offered clear evidence that we are doing so. At the behest of 20-odd peace groups, several hundred people marched around the Waldorf Astoria silently as the Israeli military held a million-dollar fundraiser inside. Now and then donors in black tie got out of cabs, but here we were in single file, most of us wearing black, stretching all the way round the hotel and holding signs naming 5-year-olds who were slaughtered in Gaza.

My guess is there were 700 of us. "We are marching single file in a silent, dignified, slow procession," our organizers had written on the slips of paper they handed out, and though they couldn’t stop us talking, we did as they planned for two hours as night fell. Slide show here.

The night was memorable for two things: the looniness of the counterdemonstators and a conversation I had about the possible end of Israel with a soulful Jewish friend.

The counterdemonstrators were unhinged angry. One of them followed people up and down the line talking about the training of three-year-old suicide bombers. Another screamed about the Arab countries being all dictatorships. Another said, "you don’t care what happens in Sudan, you don’t care when Assad senior kills 3000 people in Syria. [30 years ago!] No you only care when Israel was trying to defend itself." "You’re not liberals," an older guy in a suit kept shouting. A woman carried a sign with a Muslim crescent = a Swastika. Wow, creepy. A woman wrapped herself in an Israeli flag big as a bedsheet and tagged along with us for a while. The official sign of the counters was Hamas Is Destroying the Palestinian Future. A crazy statement, at many levels, beginning with the idea that Israel has no agency.

A friend said that the counterdemonstrators were getting aneurysms from the fact that we were so silent and in such abundance with our black signs saying "Israeli soldiers shot handcuffed civilians," "Israeli forces destroyed the Gaza water plant."

Their biggest signs asserted, "Israel has a right to exist and be secure." Or, "Israel has a right to exist and it is here to stay." So that is the ground they are choosing to fight on: the delegitimization issue.

That brings me to my conversation with my soulful Jewish friend. A couple years ago he told me he is a post-Zionist out of politeness, because he doesn’t want to take away the feeling of achievement that Jews in Israel have about what they created, and he understands the urgency that Israel came out of a generation ago. But tonight he told me he has very bleak feelings about the future. Israel is in crisis, and two states is over; and on the one hand he believes Israel will undertake a total ethnic cleansing operation, on the other that the South Africa declension is begun, and it won’t happen peacefully.

I said What if they have a handshake on the White House lawn, will you get behind that? He looked at me like I was crazy, then got a delighted smile. When that happens, I’ll give you an opinion, he said. Then: What could it be? I said, well, landswaps, warmed-over Geneva; that’s what Obama will announce.

Oh, he said, a deal with a bankrupt leadership for three Bantustans in the West Bank and Gaza? That will last another generation, and there will be no peace.

I said, how do you imagine the binational state comes about? He laughed and said he hadn’t really thought about it. But at best it is like South Africa and an Israeli leader understands that they have no choice. There is an internal crisis of national identity, there is no way forward, and they give in and say, let us give these people equal rights.

Sort of consociational, I thought, two federated entities? He shrugged. As more and more Jews leave and move to the west it becomes a mixed state, he said.

My friend was talking just like Henning Mankell, who sees the insurrection beginning from within, and also like a lot of Israelis who are trying to be creative now about civil outcomes.

I reflect that Noam Chomsky, who is for the two state solution, used to say that Israel has a right to exist but not on the land of its neighbors. It was a legitimate position for a long time, but you can’t promise people something forever, and Israel won’t disgorge that land and the Palestinians have balked at a piecemeal Jerusalem, and the world moves forward. I give the two state solution air time on this site, because I’m openminded and because I like status and power politics, but in spite of Chris Matthews and Ethan Bronner indulging happy-talk about the solution, it sure looks like the 25 years of the two state solution are over, the Palestinians helped kill it and so did the Israelis.

A lot of folks I know believe in Israel’s right to exist as much as China’s right to exist or Pakistan’s or John Gotti’s. I do myself. The problem is that the continued failure to base that existence on policies other than permanent war and ethnic cleansing means that American political support must be at stake, and as anyone who has set foot in West Jerusalem can tell you, American opinion is the ballgame. Some said there were 1000 of us last night, and what we stand for is pretty obvious: No more slaughter, no more Jim Crow, no more In-our-name (the lobby). 

The Jewish state has not figured out a way to be without Jim Crow and the lobby to grant it immunity, and so it is slowly destroying its raison-d’etre in the liberal discourse. That is what last night was about: 1, a wide consensus among progressives, many of them the Israel base (Jews) that we will condemn this behavior—-and 2, the resultant fear on the part of Israel’s supporters that our views are catching on, and that this grassroots process is undermining Israel’s legitimacy.

So the existential crisis has come here. Through its own actions, Israel is destroying the ground it stands on. The answer to the big sign is, Israel is not secure, it is casting away its own means of existence, it is not here to stay. Sorry but that is the news. The ultimate business of this site and the Jewish left too is to help those who were committed to Zionism out of a belief in the endurance of anti-semitism and the need for Jewish nationalism amid other nationalisms to understand that the moment is over, and that they should support other outcomes in the name of liberal democracy. The presence of Jews Say No and 20-odd other groups outside the Waldorf, as warmongers dined, suggests that there will be a lot of creative thinking towards those ends.

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Tom Friedman oversaw NYT’s purchase of J’lem house with Nakba legacy

by Philip Weiss on March 2, 2010 · 4 comments

A very moving piece of social history–and journalistic investigation– by Ali Abunimah, showing that Tom Friedman (who began his career lecturing his Minnesota classmates about Israel’s victory in the Six-Day war, and cemented it by explaining to American Jews that Lebanon ‘82 was necessary because Israel lives in a tough neighborhood, and extended it by urging the Iraq war on the U.S. because of suicide bombers in Israel) helped the Times buy a house with clouded Palestinian title in the 1980s. Making the Times a "protagonist," Abunimah alleges, in the conflict:

The New York Times-owned property [Ethan] Bronner occupies in the prestigious Qatamon neighborhood, was once the home of Hasan Karmi, a distinguished BBC Arabic Service broadcaster and scholar (1905-2007). Karmi was forced to flee with his family in 1948 as Zionist militias occupied western Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods. His was one of an estimated 10,000 Palestinian homes in West Jerusalem that Jews took over that year.

The New York Times bought the property in 1984 in a transaction overseen by columnist Thomas Friedman who was then just beginning his four-year term as Jerusalem bureau chief.

Hasan Karmi’s daughter, Ghada, a physician and well-known author who lives in the United Kingdom, discovered that The New York Times was in — or rather on top of — her childhood home in 2005, when she was working temporarily in Ramallah. One day Karmi received a call from Steven Erlanger, then The New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief, who had just read her 2002 memoir In Search of Fatima…

Today, Israeli real estate agencies list even small apartments in Qatamon for hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, and house prices can run into the millions. In Jerusalem, such homes have become popular especially with wealthy American Jews, according to [Ilan] Pappe. The New York Times did not disclose what it paid for the Qatamon property.

It was a curious decision for The New York Times to have purchased part of what must obviously have been property with — at the very least — a political, moral and legal cloud over its title. Asked whether The New York Times or Friedman had made any effort to learn the history of the property, the newspaper responded, "Neither The Times nor Mr. Friedman knew who owned the original ground floor prior to 1948."

As Friedman prepared to make the move to Jerusalem from Beirut where he was covering the Lebanon war in the early 1980s, The Times hired an Israeli real estate agent to help him locate a home. According to McCraw, Friedman’s wife Ann went ahead to Jerusalem and looked at properties "and she, working with the agent, made the selection for The Times." During the process Friedman visited Jerusalem and looked at properties as well, a fact he mentions in his book From Beirut to Jerusalem. By the time the property was selected, Friedman had moved permanently to Jerusalem and oversaw the closing.

The choice of the Qatamon property — over several modern apartments that the real estate agent also showed — makes The New York Times a protagonist and interested party in one of the most difficult aspects of the Palestine conflict: the property and refugee rights of Palestinians that Israel has adamantly denied. It also raises interesting questions about what such choices have on news coverage — with which the newspaper itself has had to grapple.

In 2002, an Electronic Intifada article partly attributed the pervasive underreporting of Israeli violence against Palestinians to "a structural geographic bias" — the fact that "most US news organizations who have reporters on the ground base them in Tel Aviv or west Jerusalem, very far from the places where Palestinians are being killed and bombarded on a daily basis" ( Michael Brown and Ali Abunimah, "Killings of dozens once again called ‘period of calm’ by US media, 20 September 2002).

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delegit

by Philip Weiss23 February 2010

Yesterday the Forward sent out an advertisers’ video, a new hasbara campaign aimed at the delegitimation of Israel on campus. Meantime, a neoconservative anti-Goldstone outfit announced a conference in New York aimed at stopping the delegitimizing of "democratic nations such as.. Israel."  It is very important to understand what people mean by "delegitimization" of Israel. [...]

44 comments

‘Exodus’ was published in 1958

by Philip Weiss30 January 2010

Forces in Israeli society are trying to save that society. I am sure they are trying to preserve the Jewish state, but the least we could do is give them some airtime in the U.S., so that Americans and yes American Jews open one eye. This is from Ynet; I have no idea why "the [...]

107 comments

‘We have not brought anyone to trial’

by Ahmed Moor29 January 2010

With so much attention rightly paid to the Goldstone report, we ought to dwell on the justice question. The perpetrators of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine evaded justice; the Ben-Gurions, Rabins, Shamirs, Meirs, Begins, and Trumans died – leaving behind progeny who cannot be made to answer for their crimes. Ariel Sharon and [...]

35 comments

The Gaza Freedom March

by Barnabe Geisweiller18 January 2010

"It was meant to be a historic non-violent protest in Gaza against Israel’s blockade. But forces are quick to converge in the Middle East against those who work for peace."
The author of the following report, Barnabe Geisweiller, a Canadian student at the Columbia Journalism School who has lived in Palestine, went to Egypt [...]

28 comments

Palestinians must stop dwelling on

by Philip Weiss20 December 2009

the past.

71 comments

Nakba never ends

by Philip Weiss25 November 2009

I know that Arutz Sheva is a rightwing news service, but here is their latest poll. Shiver-making.

Transfer of Arabs from the Palestinian Authority to actual Arab countries was the most popular solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, according to a poll this week by Israel National News. Of the more than 6,400 people surveyed, 53.2 said [...]

21 comments

sympathy issue

by Philip Weiss11 November 2009

Ben White says that the 850,000 Jews who left Arab countries in the years after the Nakba were not refugees, by and large, i.e., they were not forced to leave, and that many left for messianic/Zionist reasons, and did so in a somewhat orderly manner. Equating this migration with the Nakba is Zionist propaganda, he [...]

43 comments

Jeffrey Goldberg says ‘nakba’ never happened

by Philip Weiss14 October 2009

Jewish chauvinist Jeffrey Goldberg has undertaken a further declension of the Nakba, putting it not just in quotations, but lower-case. Take it away, Jeff:

Jeet Heer writes to ask: Quick question: why is Nakba in quotes in your recent post? Do you think that the Nakba didn’t happen?

[Goldberg, I presume] The war that gave Jews freedom [...]

12 comments

Nakba denial

by Anonymous11 October 2009

Did you see this? Jeffrey Goldberg picking up Israel lobbyist Robert Satloff, who is deeply offended that the Nakba might be considered to rank with other tragedies in history. In fact, the U.N.’s John Ging made no statement of moral equivalence of the Nakba as a "stain" on history to the Holocaust, but [...]

51 comments

New book on Nakba just underlines the growing historical understanding: it was ethnic cleansing

by Philip Weiss11 October 2009

At EI, Maureen Clare Murphy reviews Under the Cover of War: the Zionist Expulsion of the Palestinians, by Rosemarie Esber, and quotes the book:

75 comments

note new hasbara push: You did it to the Native Americans

by Philip Weiss2 September 2009
Mock Israeli-Indians on another anti-Palestinian propaganda rampage

There was a Bluestocking bookstore reading by Bill and Kathleen Christison, reported by desertpeace, which says the audience responded militantly to tales of Palestinian dispossession and nary a Zionist in the room.

Bill’s final reading was about Israelis comparing their treatment of Palestinians to the U.S. treatment of Native peoples in this country. Israelis use it [...]

128 comments

‘We are walking into the abyss’– Netanyahu’s sister-in-law

by Ira Glunts10 August 2009
Thumbnail image for ‘We are walking into the abyss’– Netanyahu’s sister-in-law

Even compared to the low ethical standards which most people, outside the United States, ascribe to the actions of the Israeli government of occupation,  the recent decision of their Supreme Court to evict long-time residents of Arab neighborhoods and to replace them with Jewish Israelis signals a particularly low point in [...]

20 comments

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