there really is not much choice, not if the preservation of the current system is paramount. It's either make radical changes in the way Israel sees itself and the Palestinians who live among them, or it is repression and militarism. And the Israeli leadership does not want to change. So it sinks into deeper militarism, and loses bit by bit all democratic rights, even for Israeli Jews. As the world and dissident Israelis respond to the regimes most brutal actions, the regime simply digs in and gets more repressive....
The Knesset approved on Wednesday an initial reading of a bill calling for heavy fines to be imposed on Israeli citizens who initiate or incite boycotts against Israel. If approved into law, the fines would apply to anyone boycotting Israeli individuals, companies, factories, and organizations. Haaretz
Another dot. We need to look at the other dots. We need to see the bigger picture.
Draw me a Monster
Op-ed, Boaz Okon [legal affairs editor], Yediot, June 22 2010 [Hebrew original here and at bottom of post]
Just like in a children’s connect-the-dots coloring book, where connecting random dots creates a picture, so in Israel, if you connect a number of horrifying, multiplying incidents, you begin to see a monster.
.....
Dot number two: MK Hanin Zoabi joined the flotilla to Gaza. As a result, Knesset members shouted at her "go to Gaza." Zoabi is an Israeli citizen. Even if her actions are infuriating, you cannot incite against her and call for her expulsion. In the US, when an elderly journalist suggested the Jews in Israel go to Poland, the president condemned her and she had to step down. Our legislators are trying to pass laws to block the funding of bodies such as the New Israel Fund or B’Tselem, only because they dare tell us the truth to our faces.
Dot number three: in Hebron there is segregation between Jews and Arabs, and entire streets are blocked to Arab Palestinians. This decree was passed after the Jewish Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of Arabs. And as if that weren’t bad enough, Israeli Arabs are not allowed to walk around the streets of Hebron. It turns out that Arab identity in itself constitutes a provocation and pretext for disturbances by Jews. The situation is considered normal, and therefore the segregation regime on Highway 443, which the court canceled on paper, continues to exist in practice.
...
These dots are growing evidence of the lack of the spirit of freedom and the emergence of apartheid and fascism. If you look at each dot separately you might miss the bigger picture. ....
Op-ed, Boaz Okon [legal affairs editor], Yediot, June 22 2010
We can continue with the dots, the protesters sentenced to years long prison terms, the farms uprooted here and there, the homes demolished, but these are merely the symptoms... but we must see the disease and make an accurate and honest diagnosis, which is the only thing that will give any real hope that we can lead to recovery. Telling a person suffering from brain cancer that they have a mere head cold will not help the patient.
Israel is not suffering from some disturbances from a few extremist settlers, it is suffering from the natural outcome of an ideology that oppresses millions of people who demand their freedom and their rights. The Palestinians refuse to accept their dispossession and displacement. Which is natural. The repression and the escalation of the tactics of Israel is also natural, as long as it chooses to cling to the old system. No minor adjustments are going to work... so it chooses the path of further repression.
Yet what is the response of US politicians? Mostly, solid support for the status quo. But at best, timid whispers that things might not be quite right. An example of that is President Obama's stating that the Gaza siege is "not sustainable".
A military siege that is causing misery (as it was designed to do) to 1.4 million people, destroying the lives and already caused permanent harm to tens of thousands of innocents... and the strongest terms he can come up with is... "unsustainable". It is not just "unsustainable", it is a catastrophe and a crime of the first magnitude and nothing less. Yet it is clearly US policy to support this action, and to now call for minor modifications... not to end the siege, but to better package it for acceptance.
One has to wonder what is worse, to commit a crime or to justify it? Who are worse, those who committed the Jewish holocaust, the Armenian genocide and the enslavement and murder of Africans? Or those who profit, justify or deny these horrors took place? Being Jewish and an Israeli myself, having had a father who was a general in the Israeli and having served in the Israeli army I say this: denying or justifying Israel’s actions is tantamount to denying or defending all crimes against humanity.
Sadly, all one hears from the US is that the situation in Gaza is "unsustainable." One has to wonder how many opinion polls were taken and how many brilliant communications experts it took to come up with this bland, overcooked and useless expression. I am sure they had to get the Department of State, the Israeli Embassy and AIPAC to OK it before the President uttered this unbearably lifeless word. The situation in Gaza is not ‘unsustainable’, the situation in Gaza and in all parts of Palestine is catastrophic.- Miko Peled
Miko gets it. It's the oldest truth. You are either with us or against us. Only not defining the "us" as Bush would define it (rich, white, americans)... the us must be all of us, or it is none of us. To deny the others humanity is really just another way of denying your own.
so what is to done, the disease is really serious, and more must be done than futile attempts to suggest that minor adjustments will fix everything, or that the Palestinians will surrender their rights, or even jump into "peace" talks (that Israel has already said will not touch on important issues) even as the steady mechanical sound of CAT bulldozers is heard destroying crops and homes.
Again, it is civil society that has the answer. We will respond to Palestinian cry for justice and peace, and not the self-serving foolish acts of ambitious politicians who care little or nothing for international law and human rights.
Boycott? As my Palestinian friends in the West Bank and Gaza sink deeper into depression, watching their lives ticking away without the chance to give their kids (never mind themselves) a wholly free and dignified place in the sun, the Palestinian-led BDS movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions doesn’t look to me like a nefarious "Arab plot" anymore. Now, with international energy behind it, it seems like the last best hope—both for Israelis and for Palestinians. Maybe the BDS campaign will really develop enough heft to counter Israel’s overwhelming military advantage, by upping the economic and social cost of self-defeating supremacist-separatist policies . . . until even total equality for Palestinians might begin to seem like the less scary alternative!
Deciding to endorse BDS was not something I have come to out of hatred for Israel, despite what the talkbacks will say. I live here, after all; I’d like to see this country get a life. Everything else has already been tried, and my friend Sam and his family are still locked up in Al Bireh and my friend Maha and her family are still locked up in Gaza City and I cannot, in good conscience, sit here in my pleasant little village near Jerusalem in silence and play it safe while they and millions of other Palestinians sit in their respective cages. I’m not an ideologue and I can’t say I much like the basic idea of boycotts: they are nonviolent but they run on a kind of negative energy (don’t buy, don’t sell, don’t invest, don’t visit . . . ). On the other hand, the relentless, intensifying dehumanization of people I love and respect would seem to leave me no choice. Inaction is not an option.
Note that the BDS strategy targets, not Israel itself or Israelis as such, but rather Israeli transgressions of international law and the Israeli authorities and institutions that drive those transgressions and the Israeli cultural icons who refrain from denouncing them and the Israeli universities that cooperate with them. As a law-abiding Israeli, I am not in favor of Israel’s (or anyone’s) transgressions of international law and therefore I must not support them with my silence. When I realized that the only thing still keeping me from publicly and prominently endorsing BDS was my fear of punishment (losing friends, losing a job, losing my personal freedom if the BDS activism here is finally, thoroughly, criminalized), I understood that it was time to speak out.
.....I learned soon enough that Palestinians are not the faceless, anonymous, scary "Arabs" I was led to fear in my youth. I know they are not the enemy. I know they are not dispensable. They are us, and we are them. I will go to jail, if necessary, rather than sit here passively while their lives are further blighted and more generations of children are cheated, on both sides. I know that our basic civic, economic and environmental burdens must be shared and that there is no way to shoulder them alone. We will prosper together or we will sink together—not driven by philosophy or ideology, but because nothing else works. The simple, empirical, pragmatic outcome of getting to know the other side personally is that I discovered that I am them and they are me. Now I know. That’s why the old-fashioned approach—Rule by Testosterone—just doesn’t make sense any more. It can’t take us to a secure shared future for All Our Children, because the admission tickets to that future are sold only in pairs: us and them, together. Emerson knew. He said: The only way to have a friend is to be one. -- Deb Reich
It is the courage of people like Deb Reich and Hanin Zoabi that will save the people of what is called the holy land. People who have grasped the idea of "an injury to one is an injury to all". You know, progressive values, that many of us live by, and are more important to us than loyalty to even Party or particular politicians.
This stuff about "they are us and we are them" is not really all that complicated, even a child gets that.
UPDATE: Take action! Call for responsible investment by the TIAA. Sign this petition by the Jewish Voice for Peace.
