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...

For Israelis wishing to participate in a common struggle, relieving ourselves of our ignorance and arrogance should be the top priority. Not for the sake of Palestinians – for our own sake, to restore our own humanity.

By Tom Pessah

Palmach troops overseeing the displacement of Palestinians from the central city of Ramlah in July, 1948. (Photo: Palmach Archive)

About a decade ago, when I was studying for my first degree at Tel Aviv University, I went to a weekend retreat organized by Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam to meet Palestinian students from the West Bank. The retreat took place at a location near Bethlehem that was relatively accessible for the Palestinians, but they still had to pass through checkpoints, some getting beaten or humiliated in order to meet us.

Neve-Shalom/Wahat al-Salam’s workshops are structured very formally. During the inter-Jewish meetings I was the perfect leftist, constantly scolding other participants for views that weren’t progressive enough. And when we met the Palestinians, I tried hard to be accommodating and supportive, hanging out with them after the meetings and using my primitive spoken Arabic to listen to their experiences and questions about Israelis.

Near the end of the workshop we split into groups to “solve” different aspects of the conflict together: Jerusalem, borders, one state or two? As the progressive I thought I was, I confidently chose the group on possibly the most explosive topic – the Right of Return. We Israeli Jews convened first, and came up with a generous proposal: we would allow 100,000 Palestinians into our own country! This would be difficult for us to “sell” to our public, it was much to the left of the Israeli consensus at the time, but we were still willing to take what seemed like a brave and generous step.

When we offered the limited entry into our country to the Palestinian students, they weren’t as grateful as we had anticipated. In fact, they were profoundly insulted, deeply disappointed. In the closing meeting of the workshop, they spoke of how disillusioned they had become, how they felt that in the end, Zionist upbringing influences all of us Israelis, even the ones that initially seem reasonable and open-minded. I tried...

The IDF clarifies that instead of removing an illegal outpost, it prefers to defend it – and Palestinian farmers pay the price.

By Yesh Din, written by Yossi Gurvitz

Border Police officer shaking hands with masked Israeli settler, March 2, 2013 (Guy, Ta’ayush activist)

In January 2001, as most of us were busy with the events of the Second Intifada, several outlaws built the Tapuach Ma’arav outpost in the West Bank. The outpost is about two kilometers away from the settlement of Kfar Tapuach, famous mostly because it was created by the supporters of Rabbi Meir Kahane, and also provided refuge (Hebrew) for the murderer Eden Nathan-Zada, who in 2005 killed four Israeli Palestinians in an attempt to halt the Gaza Disengagement Plan.

Tapuach Ma’arav was partly built on the lands of the village of Yassuf, and as an outpost its logical purpose is to prevent the access of Palestinians to their lands, so that later – through manipulation of the land laws – they can be dispossessed of their property. We examined this method in our report about the outpost of Adei Adi. As part of their dispossession attempt, the settlers erected an earth rampart blocking the road leading the farmers to their lands.

Yesh Din is assisting the villagers in their appeal to the Israeli High Cout of Justice, filed in December 2010. In response, the state announced its intention to change the situation on the ground, and lo and behold, it has. Instead of the piratical roadblock built by the settlers, the state installed – Israeli readers take note: this was done with your tax money – a massive steel gate, which is a much more effective barrier between the Palestinians and their lands. From now on, the army decided, Palestinians who want to work their lands will have to receive a permit in advance. So, if prior to the army’s involvement the Palestinians had their rights denied by settlers, now this denial is official policy of the sovereign forces — the Israeli army.

It’s important to note that Israel’s armed forces – whether they take their orders from the local military commander or from the Civil Administration – do not deny that Tapuach Ma’arav is...

Anyone who’s been to a checkpoint or a protest in the West Bank knows how arbitrary military rule can be. For the activist on the ground, some specific knowledge of the occupation’s byzantine legal framework can make a real difference.

By Raghad Jaraisy

IDF soldiers clash with demonstrators in Nabi Saleh, December 11, 2011 (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

Youtube is rife with videos of daily life in the West Bank – home demolitions, violent suppression of protests, unchecked settler violence, arbitrary arrests, etc.  But this video, from the organization Ta’ayush, is a little different. If other videos play out like action films, this one is more of a drama. No fisticuffs, no bulldozers, no tear gas or rubber bullets. It’s just talking. The army personnel barely even raise their voices. So what’s happening in this video?

A soldier walks up to a group of activists and tells them they are in a closed military zone. An activist asks, “Who issued the order?” and the commanding officer answers, “the general.”

“The general?”

“My mistake,” says the commanding officer, “it was the brigade commander. There’s an order-”

“I’d like to photograph the order.”

“You can’t photograph the order. You can see the order.” The commander then tells the group they have five minutes to leave the area because it’s a closed military zone. The activists ask to see the order, and the officer shows it to them (and us). It’s signed by “Dan.”

“Who’s Dan?” the activist asks.

“I signed [it].”

“You signed [it]? You’re job is… a captain?”

“Yes.”

“Dan what?”

“Dan.”

“That’s your name?”

“That’s the name.”

Captain Dan shows the activists the map, but only for a few seconds and doesn’t really give anyone an opportunity to understand where exactly the area becomes a closed military zone.

“Do you know the order is illegal?” the activist asks.

“There’s an order.”

“Do you know it contravenes the directive of the Military Legal Advisor?”

By now Dan and the other soldiers are walking away. “Do you know the directive of the Military Legal Advisor? Let me read it to you. The soldiers walk further into the distance. They pause for a second when the activist calls them lawbreakers, and then continue on. The video...

A profile of one of the most influential people in the struggle for social justice in Israel. Although he was kept out of academia, perhaps it was for the better. Who knows how much we would have lost had he wasted his days trying to sneak an article into the American Journal of Sociology.

By Yossi Dahan (Translated from Hebrew by Aviel Lewis, edited by: Ami Asher)

My first encounter with the name Shlomo Swirski was in the early 1980s as a student reading his book, Not Backward but Made Backward (1981). The rumor about the underground, green-covered book travelled by mouth among Mizrahi student activists. For many of us, reading the book was a formative event, a shaking intellectual, emotional and political experience which led to a political and perceptual turning point. After reading the book, Israeli society looked totally different. Shlomo’s class-oriented accounts of the Mizrahim’s socioeconomic status, the oppressive and exploitative relations that characterised their assimilation by the Ashkenazi establishment, and the idea they were not backward but made backward, coincided with our own and our families’ experiences of exclusion, marginalization and injustice. The clear and sharp picture Shlomo depicted matched raw, dim, and powerful intuitions we did not have the ability or tools to express at the time. Life experiences and feelings which were in striking contrast to the sociological explanations we heard in lectures, the academic texts we read, and the conventional established wisdom that explained and justified the Mizrahi Jews’ inferior status in Israeli society – by the cultural gaps between the traditional societies our families had originated from and the modern Israeli society they joined. The traditional society with its anti-modern culture, which was responsible for the Mizrahim’s corrupt values and limited rationality.

Not Backward but Made Backward gave our objection to the unequal reality, and the problematic and insulting explanations justifying it, a clear and sharp map for deciphering Israeli society, as well as an action plan for combatting injustice. It instilled confidence that the claims regarding ethnic inequality which were viewed with such contempt were not due to the speaker’s troubled personality, nor to the Mizrahim’s natural tendency to grumble, that it is not the case of an inferiority complex disguised as political demands, but rather legitimate demands rooted in values of universal justice. For the students and activists of the time, the book became a weapon loaded with arguments for instant...

For an Israeli who has only known occupied, subdued and desperate Middle Eastern cities, there is something exciting about rediscovering the cultural world of a confident, proud Levant, cognizant of its traditions and histories.

By Amos Noy / Café Gibraltar (translated by Matan Kaminer)

Istanbul, Turkey. (photo: John Virgolino/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

To ‘Amar, with fond remembrance.

Between the demand for “authenticity,” which, while conscious of itself, is impossible (and has something petty and repressive about it), and the option of assimilation, or “self-effacing imitation” – one form of cultural oppression (which is, of course, a form of political oppression) – there is also third option: cultural sovereignty.

I imagine that many visitors to cities such as Istanbul and Cairo have experienced, like me, the wonder that grows into a sort of joy at encountering a confident, proud city of the Levant, cognizant of its traditions and working within them. For an Israeli (that is, for me) who has only known occupied, subdued, desperate Middle Eastern cities and impoverished ghost towns sadly longing to be transported to the American Midwest, there is something about this experience – about the naturalness, the self-respect, the self-evidence of a language, music and poetry which have been denigrated by the dominant culture under which we have grown up – something exciting about the rediscovery of a cultural world, as well as of a hidden personal level, obscured, denied, deep within. A sensation of sovereignty.

Umm Kulthum performs “Enta El-Hobb”:

Or: sitting in an Algerian (Kabyle) bar in Paris, in a diverse, cosmopolitan space which is not the product of a flattening globalization, but that of a multicolored counterculture of “others.” There is solidarity between immigrants, where the soundtrack features Idir, Billie Holiday, Salif Keita, Janis Joplin, Anouar Brahem, Ilham Al-Madfai, Misia, Paco Ibañez doing Brassens and Rachid Taha covering The Clash, until it ends in tears when Umm Kulthum’s “Enta El-Hobb” (“You are the Love”) comes on. Not because we are at a conference on multiculturalism at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque or watching some gluttonous “Taverna” TV show [1], and not as part of a world-embracing declaration or a polemical demonstration or a damning statement, but just so – for no reason. Because that’s what...

More worrying than the institutional instruments that enable censorship are the multiple forms of self-censorship that are deeply ingrained in the journalistic practices and conventions of Israeli media.

By Ido Liven

Anat Kamm in court October 2011 (Activestills)

As the Hebrew proverb goes, “be a tail among lions rather than a head among foxes.” In Freedom House’s latest report, Israel’s state of press freedom demonstrates just that. In the organization’s 2012 report, Israel scored 30 on a scale of 10 to 97, putting its press freedom status at the bottom of the better “free” category. In the 2013 report, released on May 1, the country lost one point, enough to downgrade it to the top of the next lower category of “partly free,” together with Chile, Namibia and South Korea.

Several recent developments have rattled the country’s press freedom status, and have helped to raise important questions regarding both institutional censorship and self-censorship.

At least in the legal sense, Israel’s relationship with the press would seem to put it at odds with other modern democracies. 65 years since its establishment, Israel has never put into law either freedom of expression or freedom of the press. Moreover, a Press Ordinance, inherited from the pre-state days, stipulates that newspapers and their chief editors require a license, and even empowers the state to shut down publications at its discretion. A number of new laws and bills – such as an anti-boycott law, and a proposed amendment to the libel law – have been called a further threat to freedom of expression and the press.

***

Internationally, Israel is known as a major news hotspot, but those reporting from the country, predominantly on the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict, are at times restricted. Press freedom and human rights advocates often point to Israel’s conduct in the occupied Palestinian territories as inhibiting journalists – Palestinian and international alike – from operating freely. Moreover, Palestinian groups as well as the Foreign Press Association have accused the Israeli army of harassing, arresting and attacking reporters and avoiding carrying out thorough investigations into such incidents. Recent press freedom assessments harshly criticized Israel for targeting media personnel during Operation Pillar of Defense in Gaza in 2012, specifically for killing a crew from Hamas’...