A homeland is not a piece of cultivated land, nor the object of a war for pride. Homeland is not nationalism. Love has no place where land is a tool for control. Homeland is an idea through which we mold our hopes and our most secret fears. It is an unconditional love.

By Avraham H. Muthada / Café Gibraltar

Khaju Bridge in Isfahan, Iran (Photo: Hamed Saber/CC)

I often find myself yearning for Iran. Despite the fact that my feet have never stepped there, my mouth has never tasted its water, my lips have not sipped from its goblet. There, in the diaspora, where the dream of the promised land still burned and echoed. The longing that was part of us even before man met women, a longing for what does not exist – for a borderless purity amongst humans. The mullah (rabbi) stands at the gate of the city during every holiday with complete devotion, his face tilted toward the West – toward the sea – mourning a hill of stones and broken memories, quietly praising and calling for Zion. In his mind’s eye he sees the tribes of Israel and the Land of Judea and the Mediterranean – there he shall not pass.

My father shrinks into the blue, fur arm chair and sinks into a song of homesickness for a homeland left behind. “My Iran, my life and soul.” He glances upward, imagining the pathways of his childhood, weaving together notes and letters to form a pearl necklace of suffering. He is motionless. Like a national monument, he collects remnants of moments and gives them vitality. Soon his eyes will open and a sigh will leave his mouth.

“I am like a victim of your land / and helpless without you / every beat of my heart is the whispering of Iran,” the singer eulogizes the homeland, and my father continues, “Without you my home is full of sorrow / every moment is grief, the distance drives me mad / God knows that this world is a prison without you / life is dark and cold.” Indeed, Iran is the homeland of many expatriates, not all of them Muslims. Different religions, tribes and cultures are tied together to the forgotten homeland which has been painted...

A Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem found himself dehydrated in a Hebron hospital after border policemen and soldiers handcuffed, blindfolded and abadoned him in a car on a hot day in May. 

By Yesh Din, written by Yossi Gurvitz

About two weeks ago, A. was on his way from Hebron to Jerusalem. A is a resident of Abu Dis, and married to a resident of East Jerusalem; as such, he enjoys Israeli residency. But as he was about to find out, that didn’t help him all that much.

On his way home, A. passed through a checkpoint charmingly named “the humanitarian checkpoint,” where he ran into a surprise roadblock, manned by a mixed force of soldiers and border policemen. The soldiers asked A. to turn off his engine, leave the car, and hand them his papers. A. noted they spoke “poor Arabic.”

The soldiers first searched A. before searching his vehicle – they found nothing suspicious. But then the all-too-common occurrence turned surreal. A. says that two border policemen told him that he must speak Hebrew. A., who does not, denied it. The two began laughing, and then someone (A. was with his back to him, so he can’t say if it was a soldier or a policeman) held him from behind, handcuffed him, blindfolded him, put him in the vehicle and left him there.

The time of the year is May, and the days are hot. A., left blindfolded and handcuffed in the car, asked the person to speak with him in Arabic, saying he was in pain. There was no response, but A. remembers hearing them laughing. That’s the last thing he remembers from the incident.

A. woke up in a hospital in Hebron, after an IDF ambulance transfered him to a Red Crescent ambulance. A. reached the hospital in a state of total disorientation, likely as a result of dehydration and sunstroke. He was given a fluid infusion in the IDF ambulance.

A. is suspected of nothing. He was not detained. His vehicle was not confiscated but rather left near the checkpoint. A family member drove to the checkpoint and found the vehicle there. There, the family member asked the soldiers about the whereabouts of the vehicle’s owner. “The owner stopped the vehicle because he felt unwell,” they responded. A man handcuffs himself, blindfolds himself (what is that routine good for, except intimidating the detainee?) and climbs...

In their haste to unify Jewish youth in support of Israel, American Jewish institutions have bred an often unrecognized racism among the next generation of community leaders.

By Roi Bachmutsky

PM Netanyahu speaks at Taglit-Birthright Mega Event, 6.1.11. More than 250,000 young Jews have come to Israel on Birthright since the program’s inception. (photo: Amos BenGershom, GPO)

Demonstrations in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah have come alive again as of this past Friday, aiming to show solidarity with the Shamasneh family who have appealed the impending eviction from their home. Unbeknownst to many, the struggle in Sheikh Jarrah reaches far beyond the borders of Jerusalem. In fact, it affects ethnic tensions half a world away by influencing how American Jewish youth internalize the separation between “us” and “them.”

“I was just having a really hard time,” one Jewish student at UC Berkeley told me, speaking of her experience at a Sheikh Jarrah protest she was invited to attend while traveling through Israel. “It was the first time I’d ever talked to a real Palestinian,” she explained, “… [he] doesn’t want to kill me, he tells me he likes some Israelis, it was just crazy.” She would later explain to me that upon reflection, she was “raised, not explicitly but at least very implicitly, with racism towards Arabs, and Palestinians in particular.” I asked whether she meant that she had never explicitly said the words: “I hate Arabs.” “Frankly,” she admitted to my surprise, “I probably did say that.” The Palestinian man she encountered at Sheikh Jarrah was evidently not at all whom she was expecting, but the question remains – how did she imagine her first encounter with a Palestinian and where did this conception come from?

I found my answer in the summer of 2011, when I attended a Taglit-Birthright Israel trip with 39 other Jewish young adults – the vast majority of whom were receiving their first glimpse of the Middle East. Before we even boarded the plane, our Birthright staff were quick to explain that “Israel is a safe...

In his new documentary, ‘The Lab,’ Yotam Feldman explores how Israel’s weapons industries interact with the country’s politics, economy and military decision-making. Israeli weapons, military technology and know-how become more valuable because they have been field-tested in its wars and combat against Palestinians and neighboring countries. A conversation with Yotam Feldman about his film, arms dealers and Israel’s war economy.

By Ofri Ilani, translated from Hebrew by Ofer Neiman

Perhaps we should start with the question of Israel’s international standing. In recent years it is often termed as “growing global isolation.” This isolation may diminish at times, but there is a wall-to-wall consensus about Israel becoming less popular with every war and military operation. You say that in fact the opposite is true. In your film, one can see officers from armies the world over coming to Israel to purchase arms – from Europe, India, Latin America, and of course – the U.S. So is this talk of criticism and isolation a show in which everyone partakes? Or is this criticism another force that we need to take into account?

I think that a view of Israel as an unrestrained savage that resides in a brutal neighborhood and therefore has to exercise excessive/immense albeit necessary force, has taken hold. It follows that this view is usually condescending-forgiving. More importantly, I believe that Israel’s security marketing succeeds where Israeli Hasbara [advocacy] is less fruitful. Many people fail to make the connection between Israel’s hi-tech weapons and the unrestrained military force about which one can read in reports by human rights NGOs. People think of these as two disparate phenomena merely existing in spatial and temporal proximity. If you read the Goldstone Report about the bombing of the ceremony at the police academy in Gaza on the first day of Cast Lead, and then read a marketing brochure of Rafael about the operational experiment involving “Spike 4″ (the missile used by Israel in that incident), some effort is required in order for you to realize that these are different accounts of one historical event. The same goes for the drones used for assassinations in Gaza. On the other hand, It is possible that the Europeans understand all this and simply don’t care.

In the previous decade, following operation Cast Lead, there was a feeling...

The Mizrahi Jewish community is Israel’s largest ethnic group, and its historic links to the Middle East, along with its class position make it a critical component in any revolutionary coalition. Thus, running a Mizrahi candidate will be a clear sign to the residents of south Tel Aviv that they are a central priority.

By Matan Kaminer

MK Nitzan Horowitz. Horowitz recently announced his candidacy for mayor of Tel Aviv. (Jstreet CC BY NC SA 2.0)

Although municipal political party Ir LeKulanu is not considered “left” in Israeli terms, it embodies one of the greatest successes of the non-Zionist left in Israeli history. In national elections, the non-Zionist or “radical” left keeps slamming into the brick wall of privileges enjoyed by Israel’s Jewish citizens, including not only Mizrahi, Ethiopian and Russian citizens (whose Jewishness is the only thing separating them from the socio-economic abyss), but also the “liberal” Ashkenazi middle class.

However, the municipal arena is a bit different. Since most decisions pertaining to the state’s Jewish and colonial character are not made at the municipal level, it is possible to envision an alliance between victims of urban capitalism in the face of disagreement over so-called “national-political” issues. Under the aegis of Ir LeKulanu (“City for All”), radical activists whose opposition to Zionism is well known have been able to join forces not only with young middle-class people from the city center but also with an active, vocal group of south Tel Aviv residents. (At the same time, the movement has been only partially successful in connecting to the Palestinian residents of Jaffa, whose “Yafa” party ran separately but supported Ir LeKulanu mayoral candidate Dov Khenin.)

Five years have since passed over Tel Aviv-Jaffa, bringing with them two wars on Gaza, one Arab Spring and one wave of social protest which momentarily shook Israeli society. The party’s many members who expected it to develop into a full-fledged popular movement were disappointed. But Ir LeKulanu’s very survival under the bitter attacks it faced from the municipal opposition is not to be taken for granted – and most of the credit for this perseverance goes to the movement’s indefatigable council members.

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The violent takeover of the Mavi Marmara simply does not stack up to other violent mass executions of passive civilians. Referring a relatively minor incident to the ICC in the context of a highly politically charged conflict would confirm the suspicions that the court is no more than a political wolf camouflaged in the neutral trappings of criminal justice.

By Noam Wiener

Mavi Marmara. (Free Gaza movement/CC BY-SA 2.0)

On May 14, the Union of Comoros, represented by Turkish attorneys, sent the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) a referral requesting it commence an investigation into Israeli conduct, due to alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The complaint does not refer to Israel’s illegal settlement policy, nor does it refer to the use of phosphorous shells during Operation Pillar of Defense. The referral does not pertain to the rather liberal use of artillery by the Israeli military during Operation Cast Lead either. No, Comoros is alleging that war crimes and crimes against humanity of a gravity that ought to engage the ICC took place when Israeli commandos boarded the MV Mavi Marmara during the flotilla incident in May of 2010.

Comoros, a member of the ICC, can refer the case to the prosecutor because the Mavi Marmara was sailing under a Comorian flag. Thus, any alleged crimes committed on board the Marmara took place on Comorian sovereign territory, granting the ICC jurisdiction in the case.

I am a firm believer in the moral imperative to bring international criminals to justice, and thus am also a supporter of the ICC. Yet I think this referral is an abuse of the institution of international criminal law. The abuse is not the result of jurisdictional overreach – the grant of ICC jurisdiction over individuals who are citizens of non-member states is perfectly legitimate if these individuals commit crimes in the territory of a member state. Further, the reason I say it is an abuse of the ICC is not because the Israeli military did everything it ought to have done to minimize casualties – it did not, the Israeli operation was reckless and dangerous. It is simply that even if all the allegations are true, this is not a case of the magnitude or gravity that ought to take up...

It is a generally assumed that the Shah’s downfall led to the severing of ties between Israel and Iran, which up until that point resembled a love story. However, both Iran’s intellectual elite and the rest of the nation drastically changed their views of the Jewish State after 1967.

By Lior Sternfeld

Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, and his wife, Queen Farah, prepare to depart after a visit to the United States. (photo: WIkicommons)

The relationship between Israel and Iran dates back to the early years of the Jewish state, and constituted the basis of both countries’ geopolitical policies. This political relationship was not, however, merely a matter of the ruling elites. Insofar as Pahlavi’s Iran is concerned, even oppositional circles in the 1960s and 1970s had a complex and sometimes favorable approach to the State of Israel. Moreover, many of these viewed Israel and Iran as essentially exceptional in nature in the contemporary Middle East, a perception that would change definitively for the worse after the 1967 war.

Shortly after the establishment of Israel in 1948, a new love story began in the Middle East. In 1950, Iran granted Israel de facto recognition and opened an embassy in Jerusalem. At that time Iran was (and still is) a homeland to the largest Jewish community in the Middle East, and a safe haven for many Iraqi Jews who had fled persecution in Iraq throughout the 1940s.

Unlike the majority of Jewish communities in Arab countries, many Iranian Jews decided to stay in Iran after the establishment of Israel. While most other Jewish communities in the Muslim world vanished between 1948-1956 and migrated en masse to Israel, the vast majority of Iranian Jews stayed in their homeland and had a complex relationship with the Zionist movement and Israel. This is not to say Iranian Jews were anti-Zionist. However, due to their decision to stay in Iran, Iranian Jewish communities were generally not identified with Zionism. This was, of course, a sharp contrast to most Arab-Jewish communities from Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, and Libya. Many Arab-Jews emigrated to the newly founded State of Israel before 1956, due of increasing tensions (and at...

It is imperative that Jews around the world who cherish humanistic values publicly express their concern about the current situation in Israel, and call for the government to return to peaceful, moral, democratic, and humanistic values.

By Daniel Bar-Tal

A right-wing protester holds up Israeli flags while thousands march in the annual human rights march in Tel Aviv. (photo by Activestills)

Israel is a prosperous and well developed state with remarkable achievements in technological, educational, cultural, scientific and agricultural spheres by every account. These achievements are a source of pride to Israelis as well as to Jews around the world. But beside these undeniable successes, a considerable segment of the Jews in Israel, who love their country and care about its future, also see a glass half empty.

They see the growing dominance of nationalistic, expansionist, and anti-democratic ideologies – goals and policies which have already crossed democratic and moral red lines. The ongoing occupation of the West Bank and the expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories violate Palestinians’ basic human and collective rights and tear apart Israeli society’s democratic and moral fabric, as did past governments’ refusal to engage in meaningful negotiations with the Palestinians while ignoring the Arab Peace Initiative. In carrying out these policies, the government has not only violated international law, but at times also broken Israeli laws, thus seriously undermining the very foundation of Israeli democracy. We’ve witnessed systematic and often successful attempts to pass laws that contradict the fundamental democratic principle of equal treatment of minorities, along with institutionalized discrimination against minorities. In addition, we’ve seen organized attempts to silence criticism of Israeli policies and delegitimize dissenting voices in academia, the media and NGOs.

This deterioration, which has very serious practical implications, is taking place in the spheres of values, moral codes, norms and laws, so often people do not pay attention to them. They can live comfortably without exercising their right to freedom, without defending the rights of others or without observing discrimination, oppression or exploitation carried by their own society. This has happened in many places in the world, often directly affecting the fate of the Jewish people.

This is what is presently happening in Israel....

Achieving genuine conflict resolution requires a dedicated approach that incorporates building trust and relationships between communities from opposing sides of a deeply divided society. Lessons for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process from Northern Ireland.

A new joint identity? End sectarianism (Haggai Matar)

Israeli and Palestinian flags are frequently seen flying in Northern Ireland, often in Loyalist and Republican areas respectively. This is symbolic of how even in a place that is 15 years into its peace process, divisions still exist to the extent that some communities take sides in a different conflict as a continuation of their own.

Be wary when comparing “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland to the situation in Israel/Palestine, especially when it gives opportunity to public figures such as Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Ron Prosor to disingenuously proclaim a desire to export lessons from the Northern Irish peace process (his loud exclamations that “We [Israel] can learn from Ulster” are just another form of propaganda to sooth the international community).

Building peace allows communities to reconcile differences and hold on to one’s own identity, while respecting the “other’s” opposing identity and ideas for the future.

The existence of defined structures for delivering equal justice is key, which is why a continuous discussion is necessary when it comes to finding a civil pathway to peace (as Haggai Matar noted in his recent piece on Northern Ireland).

Two important points stand out in Haggai’s piece: the first accepting that “no two conflicts are alike,” and the second is the emphasis on realizing that “a solution that fits one conflict could never be copied successfully to anywhere else.”

True peace and reconciliation comes from being valued, respected and dignified. If there is no genuine relationship or respect among the parties involved, then the situation isn’t going to get anywhere and achieving peace remains little more than fantasy.

Thus, in order to reach genuine peace, a set of basic rules and stages is required. A recent article from Quintin Oliver, a man who helped run a non-party ‘YES’ Campaign in the 1998 Referendum on the Good Friday Agreement, illustrates this in his 15 laws of peace processes.

While Oliver’s laws discuss Northern Ireland, I find some points...

Just Vision’s Peabody Award winning film, My Neigbhourhood (directed by Julia Bacha and Rebekah Wingert-Jabi), tells the story of Mohammed El Kurd, a Palestinian teenager in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah whose family is forced to share a section of their home with Israeli settlers. Mohammed comes-of-age in the midst of unrelenting tension with his neighbors and unexpected cooperation with Israeli allies in his backyard.

The struggle against evictions of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah returned this week as the Shamasneh family stands to lose its home, which would be the neighborhood’s first eviction since 2009. An Israeli court is expected to order their eviction on Monday.

A number of films from Israel and Palestine have raised international awareness of the occupation and issues developing on the ground this year (5 Broken Cameras and The Gatekeepers). Considering that the Peabody Awards ceremony falls on the same day that the Shamasneh stands to be ordered out of their home, can international attention surrounding My Neighborhood impact reality on the ground?

Watch My Neighbourhood in full:

Related:
Spotlight on Sheikh Jarrah
No happy ending: Film documents the struggle in Sheikh Jarrah

One activist’s diary of the arrests and violence that Israeli police used against Palestinian protesters in East Jerusalem on Nakba Day, 2013.

By Sahar Vardi

Israeli police arrest a Palestinian man during protests commemorating Nakba Day at Damascus Gate, East Jerusalem, May 15, 2013. (Photo by: Ryan Rodrick Beiler/Activestills.org)

Scene 1:

A few dozen Palestinians march down Bab A-Zahara Street with a police van behind them, they head toward Damascus Gate for the Annual commemoration of the Nakba. Police cavalry pass the marchers, turn around, block the sidewalk on which the protesters are marching and start galloping towards them. Another line of border policeman prevents those who managed to pass from walking toward Damascus Gate, but they’re too late, half the protest is already at Damascus Gate.

Scene 2:

About 200 hundred Palestinians are chanting on the stairs in front of Damascus Gate when we hear yelling from the road. Half-a-dozen policemen gather around a Palestinian man standing on an elevated part of the sidewalk who is refusing to move. A policeman holds his hand and tells him he’s arrested. The man doesn’t resist, but doesn’t move either. Four or five border policemen surround him from all sides, grab him, punch him – and punch him. A border policewoman reaches over a low fence and punches him again and again, just because she can. The man is brought down to the ground; a policeman sits on his head and yells, “turn around onto your stomach!” The policeman next to me laughs and says, “why do they need so many policeman for one man?” The police push away everyone gathered around him, including photographers, using the police horses. I find myself squashed between a horse and the low fence. When the horse moves and I hold my aching back, a policeman comes to me and says, “you should really be more careful.”

An Israeli policeman kicks a fleeing Palestinian woman as riot forces charge into crowds during Nakba Day protests at Damascus Gate, East Jerusalem, May 15, 2013. The Nakba, literally, the “catastrophe”, names the massive deportation of more then 700,000 Palestinian, made refugees and driven...

How can a community which so highly regards deliberation and dissent demand such unwavering unity on what is, perhaps, American Jewry’s most controversial issue?

By Roi Bachmutsky

Graffiti on the Israeli separation barrier dividing East Jerusalem neighborhoods reads, “Boycott Israel”, March 26, 2012. (photo: Ryan Rodrick Belier/Activestills.org)

Uproar recently broke out regarding world-renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking’s recent decision to cancel his headline appearance at the fifth annual Facing Tomorrow Presidential Conference hosted by Israeli President Shimon Peres. Gil Troy penned an opinion piece in response, in which he argued that by boycotting the conference, “[Hawking] suggested that the dynamics of the conflict are mutually exclusive… to prove he is pro-Palestinian he had to act anti-Israeli.” My Facebook newsfeed is often filled with the reverse: friends who denounce Palestinians in order to prove their worth as sufficiently pro-Israel. Either way, Jewish organizations generally provide members with just two antithetical “sides” to choose between – for or against divestment, pro or anti-Israel. My research on Israel and American Jewish identity might help reveal the origin of this dichotomy, its role in the divestment debate, and its influence on the Jewish community.

As a recent UC Berkeley graduate, I am familiar with the wars over divestment, having been a freshman during the bill demanding UC Berkeley’s Associated Students of the University of California divest from certain companies’ “military support of the [Israeli] occupation of the Palestinian territories” in 2009. In the bill’s aftermath, I began interviewing Jewish students on campus and was shocked with what I found.

Overwhelmingly, Jewish youth described having knee-jerk reactions to divestment, often without room for reflection and contemplation. One student relayed to me that she had shown up to argue against divestment without having read the bill. “I walked in,” she recalled, “and I basically got a text just saying, ‘they’re being anti-Israel, just like, refute it,’ and I was like ‘OK, whatever.’” The call to action was unequivocal, as another student explained: “My relationship with Israel in that moment [was] very clear and one-dimensional: ‘I am going to defend [Israel] no matter what.’”

By creating a paradigm with two diametrically opposed camps, Jewish young adults felt tremendous pressure to align with the organized Jewish community, opposite the other side. “A lot of people associate...

What’s the importance of acknowledging the Nakba? Remembering it is the only way for both Jews and Palestinians to understand that this land is shared. It’s the only way of preventing the system from duplicating the same injustices over and over again.

By Muhammad Jabali

Palestinians march through the streets of Bethlehem to commemorate the Nakba, May 14, 2013. (Ryan Rodrick Beiler/Activestills.org)

A friend and I visited Ramallah last Saturday. It was a sunny afternoon; we took a friend’s car and hit the road so we could arrive in time for last minute preparations for the first screening of the Tunisian Documentary Film Month at Ramallah’s Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center. We are helping to organize the screenings as members of the Palestinema Group, an unregistered group of cinematographers, writers and cinephiles who work toward breaking down the Iron Wall between Palestinians in Israel and the Arab World. We work to better organize the Palestinian film industry inside Israel, and to improve connections between Palestinians inside Israel and those in the West Bank, Gaza and the diaspora.

The film was Degage, a first-hand Tunisian documentary of the country’s revolution. We were fully aware of the meaning of the date we chose for the festival. Launching screenings in the historical Palestinian cities of Jaffa, Haifa, Jerusalem and Ramallah in the month of May, Nakba month, is our way of expressing which regime we are demanding should fall. In effect, it is demanding our full rights – as one Palestinian people – both to live in the coastal cities as Palestinians, as equal citizens with equal access to political participation and urban planning, and to do so without either compromising our Palestinian identity or our cultural and natural connections with the Arab World. Somehow, altering the Arab Spring’s best-known slogan (“the people demand the fall of the regime”) to “the people demand that the Nakba end,” represents a wish that our spring too will come.

We had already held screenings in Jaffa on Friday afternoon and in Haifa the same evening, and we were eager for our first-ever collaboration with such a respected cultural center in Ramallah. We were thrilled that immediately after publishing the program we were invited to bring the...