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 has seen fifteen years of a peace process, divides 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 identities whilst respecting the “others’” opposing identity and ideas for the future.

Having 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 is the acceptance 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 a 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 fifteen laws of peace processes.

Whilst Oliver’s laws discuss Northern Ireland, I find some points give an inkling as to what may be lacking in Israel today:

1. Citizenship should be clarified and open to all. Those under Israel’s direct control are not afforded the right to citizenship, and therefore to democratic participation and other benefits that come with it. Palestinians and Israelis must be free to make and exercise their own choices with relation to citizenship and national self-determination within either Palestine, Israel or both.

2. Security must be guaranteed for all, without fear or partiality. Achieving a stable situation is desired in order to bring about an end to violence. Confidence among communities can only increase when Israel and Palestine reach a consensus on the primacy of evenhanded application of security, where both parties can be trusted with ensuring a commitment to one another’s safety and rights.

3. Interpretation and implementation of the law must be assured through an independent judiciary. There cannot be room for a politicized application of the law, as this will only deepen the sense of injustice towards those who are being or perceive themselves to be oppressed by structural discrimination.

4. Truth will always vie with justice as we try to understand what happened to us. A robust process of managing and dealing with the past is essential.

5. Armed groups must be subject to full disarmament, disbandment and reintegration. All armed groups must agree to an internationally observed decommissioning, an agreement to lift the siege on Gaza and an Israeli military withdrawal from the West Bank must follow.

6. International and external forces must be eased out of the day-to-day decision-making. Though important in order to kick start the first stages of a peace process, there must be space for standalone interaction as over-dependence on international actors providing dishonest brokerage has given Israel ample opportunity to continue its occupation 20 years after the Oslo Accords were signed.

7. All legal voices must be included, so as to absorb their political views appropriately. A solution cannot simply involve the Palestinian Authority alone. There needs to be inclusivity, and the question one must always ask is whether the voiceless are being heard.

8. Societal infrastructure must be based on equality and sharing, or risk intensifying division. If the Israeli government and some Palestinian groups continue to institutionalize discrimination using the education system, public transport, housing, teacher training, arts and sports then division will remain in both societies.

9. A free press which would hold the powerful to account without interference is self-evident. The need for a critical and proactive approach within Israel to push creative policy development is obvious. Israeli society seems dominated by nationalist discourse propagated by the government. Furthermore, there is a need for freedom to criticize the Palestinian Authority and Hamas on legitimate issues affecting the areas under their control.

10. Each party to the conflict must be afforded the right to argue for its own vision of the future with impunity. There are still political groups that advocate the destruction of Northern Ireland as an entity, and yet there has been an end to violence, discrimination, checkpoints etc. A strong desire to end conflict on all levels must be expressed by all sides. Israel requires a fundamental societal shift to achieve circumstances in which other visions are given space for peaceful expression. Of course, the advocation of hatred, murder and other crimes must not be ignored.

If civil society demands a peace process that adheres to the above groundrules, we can remain optimistic about achieving peace between Israel and Palestine.

Gary Spedding is a student at Queen’s University in Belfast and a member of his university’s Palestine Solidarity Society and QUB’s students’ union. Follow him on Twitter.

Related:
Maintaining conflict, stopping bloodshed: Lessons from 15 years of peace in Northern Ireland

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

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 out of what became the State of Israel in 1948. (Photo by: Ryan Rodrick Beiler/Activestills.org)

Scene 3:

The protest tries to enter the Old City, but a line of riot policeman stand there blocking the way. The protest turns to march back up on the wide sidewalk of Bab A-Zahara along the walls of the Old City but police block this path as well. A young Palestinian is trying to walk down the stairs, slips and falls. The people around him try to catch him on the way down, including myself. Medics come running, I move aside, look at my hand and see his blood. Second injury of the day.

Scene 4:

The policemen try to push us back from all directions to in no direction. They run into the crowd swinging their batons at people’s legs, their fists at people’s faces, pulling and pushing. A young Palestinian man selling something tries to quickly pack everything up as the policeman yells at him to move, and pushes him. A young Palestinian woman is being pushed and pulled next to me. I try to stand between her and the policeman but there are so many of them. I feel my hair pulled back, a hand on me, and I’m on my back, on the ground. I get back up and run up the stairs again; a young Palestinian is with his back against the wall, he is being handcuffed and they are still kicking him. A spraying sound and we all start coughing, including the policemen. Pepper spray. I can see the medics running in to where the Palestinian girl from before is now, still surrounded by policeman. They manage to lift her and take her away to safety.

A mounted Israeli policeman charges Palestinian crowds during protests commemorating Nakba Day at Damascus Gate, East Jerusalem, May 15, 2013. (Photo by guest photographer: Tali Mayer/Activestills.org)

Scene 5:

Water cannons arrive. Everything is wet. A soaking-wet cameraman tries to protect his camera, as his friends lead him away from the ‘line of water.

Members of the media take cover behind a Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance targeted by Israeli water canons during Nakba Day protests near Damascus Gate, East Jerusalem, May 15, 2013. (Photo by: Anne Paq/Activestills.org)

Scene 6:

People running; six or seven border policemen run after them with their guns pointed straight at us. A young Palestinian woman finds herself alone next to them. One of them is pointing his gun right at her from three meters away.

Scene 7:

Up the road next to one of the Palestinian central bus stations, the police horse riders play a game – they gallop into the station that is laid out around a building, circling it from both directions. Stones are thrown at them, they call in the infantry, border policemen run in shooting sound bombs, tear gas, sponge bullets and grab people to arrest them. The horses stand by the fence on the side by pushing into smaller and smaller enclaves against the walls.

Scene 8:

Damascus Gate is mostly empty, and soaking wet. The two water cannons, one on each side of the road, turn to the already wet and mostly empty beginning of Damascus Road. A falafel stand is still open; they spray it completely. One table of Ca’ack bread is still visible, they spray it as the owner screams at them, “Why?!”. A number 74 Palestinian bus comes by, and it’s windows are completely sprayed.

Scene 9:

Dozens of policemen come running in suddenly. Next to the falafel stand, they grab some people. Some were running from them, some were just standing there in between the stands, seeking shelter from the water cannons. I try to get closer but there’s a barrel of a gun pointed straight to my face and behind it a border policeman with a dark look in his eyes. I walk back and then find my way through. There’s a shoe on the floor, I pick it up and try to get through to the Palestinian on the floor beside me, surrounded by policemen beating him up. He has both his shoes on, so I move to the next one. Yes! He’s missing a shoe. The border policeman next to me pushes me back so I tell him I just want to give the man his shoe, and he’s so confused he does nothing. I get close to him, and put his shoe back on while two policemen hold him because he can’t really stand steadily at this point. I see a stream, not drops, but a stream of blood running down from his nose, blending with water on the soaked floor. I get pushed back. I yell at them, “It’s his shoe! It’s the market. You’re in their city!” I feel a hand on my throat, can’t talk and find myself outside of the crowd of policeman. I walk away and feel that my hands are wet; I look down and they’re full of blood, as are my trousers. It’s not mine.

Israeli border policemen 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 10:

An American tourist stands next to me and picks something up from the ground. “It’s a sound bomb,” I tell him. “How often do they throw these here?”, he asks, and I stop to explain to him what happened today. He lifts his video camera. “That’s what occupation looks like,” I tell him as I run to the other side of the road where the water cannons start shooting again.

Scene 11:

A parked police car gets stoned: once, twice. A policeman jumps into it, makes a U-turn to where the stones came from, jumps out of the car and starts running like crazy with a tazer gun pointed ahead.

Scene 12:

I’m sitting in a bus. The adrenalin fades. I can start feeling my blood boiling hot, pumping to all the bruises. From the window I can see another chase in the bus station, I don’t know if they caught who they were chasing in the end, or someone else, or anyone at all. At the end of this, I can go home. But the dozens of people arrested can’t, some who were probably hospitalized can. But much more importantly, this is happening in the biggest market in the biggest Palestinian city. For Palestinians this is reality, not something you can choose to leave and go back home. I take my privilege and go home.

Sahar Vardi is a Jerusalem activist, mostly active in struggles against the judaization of East Jerusalem and militarization of Israeli society.

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 [being] pro-Israel with being anti-Palestinian,” the first student began, “but I don’t see that.” On the other hand, she told me, “if somebody were to put me in a room and be like, ‘you have to go to one side that is [either] pro-Israel or anti-Israel,’ I would go to the pro-Israel side. Does that make sense?” I asked her if she ever felt forced to choose. “Yeah, absolutely,” she replied without hesitation, “…I guess that happens all the time.”

How can a community which so highly regards deliberation and dissent (two Jews, three opinions after all) demand such unwavering unity on what is, perhaps, American Jewry’s most controversial issue? The key to the mystery lies in a 1979 New York Times Article reporting on American Jewish divisions with respect to Israeli settlement policy of the West Bank. It is no coincidence that this article was published just two years after the rise of Israeli Right with the ascendance of Menachem Begin and Likud, a time in which public criticism of Israel by the predominantly liberal mainstream Jewish leaders began to surface.

The article quotes Seymour Siegel, a famous Conservative Rabbi of the time and advisor to three presidential administrations, delineating American Jewish divisions into three: (1) Those in favor of the Israeli government (2) Those opposed to the Israeli government and (3) Those who feel hesitant to publicly criticize the Israeli government yet could be swayed either way depending on the policy. The public divisions must have been troubling enough to impel Siegel to emphasize a more fundamental Jewish unity by asserting that all three groups were joined “under a tent of intense pro-Israel sentiment.”

Therein lies the idea holding together a warring Jewish community in faux public unity. The pro-Israel tent – or “broad”/”open” tent as it has been called – has since come to be widely recognized as symbolic of the boundary of acceptable thought and discourse about Israel. The realm of pro-Israel lies within, while anti-Israel is without – each cleanly severed from one another – with divestment clearly beyond the pale.

The tent has by now trickled down to a healthy majority of Jewish institutions. In large part, it has been cemented by Jewish Federations, which have instituted Israel policies prohibiting grantees from enabling programs undermining the legitimacy of the State of Israel (including condoning boycott, divestment, or sanctions, as is done by most Palestinian groups). To engage with divestment, the community proclaims, is to be against the American Jewish people.

Notably, a grassroots student movement by the name of Open Hillel has recently sprouted out of Harvard University in opposition to the momentum of Federation policies. The campaign particularly targets Hillel International’s Standards for Partnership, which “exclude certain groups from Hillel based on their political views on Israel.” What if Harvard students, for example, wanted to host Stephen Hawking to discuss why he chose to respect the academic boycott of the Israeli Presidential Conference? Whether Open Hillel succeeds in challenging the status quo or not, it is undeniable that the Jewish community is anything but united under one tent. It fiercely remains a house divided.

Roi Bachmutsky is a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. You can follow him on his blog and on Twitter (@roibachmutsky).

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 Film Month to Gaza. We can’t actually visit Gaza, but the thought of screening the films there brought out a childlike excitement. Just knowing that we could have brightened some peoples’ day there would have been priceless.

But we still fight and live in a very divided, sliced-up and segregated country and communities within it. This is the direct result of whoever – in Europe and the U.S. in the late 19^th and early 20^th century – thought it was logical to divide a land. A land, which back then was a normal extension of its Arab surroundings divided into two units, one Arab and the second Jewish.

The ironic tragedy is that this mindset of creating a “Jewish entity” on a land that was predominantly Arab didn’t seem to bother any of the European minds creating the project’s master plan 100 years ago. It didn’t even bother them that the plan inherently meant displacing hundreds of thousands of locals, or subjecting them to eternal foreign control. Because back in the beginning of the 20^th century, population transfer was “conflict resolution,” and foreign control was common.

The sad and not-so ironic part is that today, this same idea of separation and denying Palestinian rights in the coastal area is perpetuated in current peace talks, which turn the unbelievable situation created by the atrocities of 1948 into permanent facts. For Palestinians like me, who were teenagers in the 1990s, the Oslo peace process was about ending military rule over the West Bank and Gaza and a healing reconciliation process containing some transitional justice to redeem this conflicted land. It was about acknowledging the simple fact that there were people on the land that Israel claimed for so many years was “a land without a people for a people with a land.” But on the contrary, the peace process, as designed by Israel, is actually a direct continuation of the same old mentality. Through peace, the Israeli establishment just wants to achieve what the first Intifada prevented it from obtaining through war: when the Palestinian revolt threatened Israeli control, peace talks were supposed to help, but Israel gave no recognition and the settlement free-for-all continued.

Approaching the West Bank, driving with my friend who herself is a descendent of an internal displaced refugee family from the village of Ma’lul near Nazareth, we couldn’t help but notice the never-ending one-sided change in the landscape. Israel is building everywhere. Checkpoints move further and further into the West Bank, restricting the areas in which Palestinians can move through with relative freedom and pushing them into smaller and smaller ghettos. In addition to all that, we couldn’t get over the similarity between two Israeli policies: first, using the curtain of the peace process in order to prevent West Bank Palestinians from moving inside Israel through the creation of the permit system, in addition to pushing millions of Jewish immigrants into Israel and diverting many of them into the settlement creations; and second, between 1948 until the mid 1950s, when refugees were prevented from returning, were shot at when they tried to cross the borders and prevented from cultivating their lands. At the same time, the young Israeli state doubled its numbers by bringing more than half a million new immigrants and doubling the number of settlements, all while an Israeli regime of martial law imposed restrictions on the movement of our parents.

Same same, a copy-paste system. What was implemented back then is still being implemented now, not to mention the continued use of shared public space exclusively for settling Jews inside Israel.

That’s the main reason why it is important to acknowledge 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 to prevent the system from duplicating the same injustices over and over again. As long as the so called “left wing” in Israel sticks to the righteousness of “redeeming the land” and doesn’t acknowledge the basic injustice of 1948, it is only legitimizing a colonial project, and more and more directly legitimizes the same settlement of the land – both in the West Bank and inside Israel.

Repeating the mantra of a “Jewish homeland” will only keep this land hostage to world Jewry, without giving its residents the ability to enjoy it.

Read more:
PHOTOS: Palestinians commemorate Nakba Day with rallies and protests
The Nakba: Addressing Israeli arrogance
The Palestinian Nakba: Are Israelis starting to get it?
Despite efforts to erase it, the Nakba’s memory is more present than ever in Israel
Report: Forced displacement on both sides of the Green Line

Muhammad Jabali is a Palestinian Israeli activist and facilitator. He is a coordinator for the Ayam Association’s Jaffa Project-Autobiography of a City, which works to reconcile memory and space for a cosmopolitan Jaffa. He writes for Palestinian media and blogs within Israel, and has published poems in both Hebrew and Arabic. He is also a part of the Palestinema Group, which promotes films from the Arab world inside Israel-Palestine. He is also an occasional DJ.

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 to argue with them, explain to them, but it was too late. I remember watching them leave, climbing over the fences of the compound to circumvent the Israeli soldiers in the area, in order to try and avoid being arrested. I was sobbing. I felt I had disappointed them and disappointed myself, despite my best intentions.

We don’t talk enough about Israeli arrogance as a huge barrier to any form of Israeli-Palestinian cooperation, even co-resisting the occupation. So we keep assuming that the land is simply ours, even if Palestinians were born there, even if their families lived there for generations. We’re sure our violence is better because we only hit civilians by accident. We try to teach them to be reasonable and to accommodate themselves to our higher moral standards if they want us to listen to them. Intended or not, the arrogance is there, and not just among right-wing extremists.

Where does this arrogance come from? Consider a quintessential example, Golda Meir’s notorious statement to the Sunday Times in 1969:

There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.

“It is not as though… we came and threw them out and took their country away from them.” Meir felt confident proclaiming this in 1969, 20 years after over 750,000 people, about 80 percent of the Palestinian population of the area that became Israel, were either driven out by force or violently prevented from returning. Twenty years of impunity, when generals like Yigal Alon, who had systematically cleansed the areas they conquered of every single Palestinian village and town, served as government ministers alongside Meir.

But few of those who have heard of this statement know of Meir’s history during 1948 itself. Yaakov Lublini, the Israeli military ruler of Haifa, recalls an incident in April, when the city was conquered and most of its Palestinians left or were expelled:

We walked up some stairs. The apartments on the first two floors were abandoned. When we reached the third floor, an old Arab woman approached us, carrying some bundles. When she saw Golda she stopped and burst into tears. Golda stopped, looked at her, and tears streamed down her face. The two women stood there and cried.

Weeks later, Meir described her own experiences:

It’s a shocking thing to see the city dead […] near the port I found children, women and old men waiting to a way out. I went into the houses, there were houses where the coffee and the pita-bread were left on the table. I couldn’t but see with my eyes that this must have been the picture in many [East European] Jewish towns [ayarot yehudiyot]

I do not wish to idealize the Meir of 1948. Despite her tears, she never seriously challenged the massive expulsion and prevention of return orchestrated by her colleagues in the ruling Mapai party, led of course by Ben-Gurion. But these moments of humanity and identification across ethnic boundaries are a reminder of what could have been, before years of arrogance and denial hardened her heart.

Israelis born after the Nakba rarely cry about it. We rely on our formulas: “these things happen in wars”; “this wouldn’t have happened if they accepted the UN partition resolution”; “you cannot set the clock back.” All this in a country that grants Jewish immigrants significant financial benefits under the Law of Return – a law that aims to correct injustices caused 2,000 years ago by the Roman Empire. Persecution of Jews in Europe, and the Holocaust in particular, are an unavoidable part of every discussion of the occupation, or of Israel’s policy towards Iran. The destruction of over 400 villages and towns six decades ago is within living memory, but Israeli Jews treat it as an obscure historical detail that Palestinians just need to get over already.

History forms people’s identities, and Palestinians are no more likely to shed their history than Israelis. Both peoples are destined to live together and the only true alternative to remaining separate and unequal is a common struggle. For Israelis wishing to participate in such a 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.

Go and learn: if you want to educate yourself about this hidden history, watch Palestinian and Israeli testimonies here and here. Learn here about life in the largest pre-1948 Palestinian town. Go on a tour of former Palestinian villages guided by refugees. Attend ceremonies organized around the country on May 15^th. Learning the details can be hard, it can be distressing, but the reward is sweet – liberating ourselves from our racism.

Read more:
PHOTOS: Palestinians commemorate Nakba Day with rallies and protests
Despite efforts to erase it, the Nakba’s memory is more present than ever in Israel
Report: Forced displacement on both sides of the Green Line
Remembering the Nakba, understanding this is a shared land
The Palestinian Nakba: Are Israelis starting to get it?

Tom Pessah is an Israeli graduate sociology student at the University of California, Berkeley.

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 an illegal outpost. They are perfectly aware of that, and have affirmed it to the courts. They are also well aware of the demolition orders against it, given that the Civil Administration issued them itself. Those orders, needless to say, were not carried out. And as if this wasn’t absurd enough, the limitations on access are enforced only against the legal owners of the land; the outlaws come and go as they please.

The presence of an illegal outpost near Yassuf brought about the usual result: a long series of attacks on the Palestinians by Israelis. Several Yassuf residents were physically attacked: some 10 vehicles were smashed or torched and someone set the village mosque ablaze on December 2009. The village became a marked target of Jewish terrorism (aka “price tag” attacks): about 700 trees were uprooted and dozens of incidents of stealing crops and livestock were noted. The residents presented police with a large number of complaints; so far, no one has been indicted. Following the torching of the mosque, the authorities said they were “shocked!”, shocked – but, again, no one was indicted.

About two months ago, we finally managed to arrange a tour of the scene, alongside the sector’s brigade commander, Col. Yoav Marom. Coordinating the tour itself took months. A day before the tour, the incident described here took place: Despite coordination with the army, settlers disrupted the work of the farmers and later stole a donkey from them along with some of their tools. According to the District Coordination Office report, they noticed the theft on a CCTV camera present. If the authorities bothered opening a criminal case against the thieves, they haven’t informed us of it.

During the tour, the colonel said unequivocally that as far as he is concerned, Kfar Tapuach and the Tapuach Ma’arav outpost are one settlement, and he is committed to defending Tapuach Ma’arav and the road connecting it with Kfar Tapuach. The colonel admitted that the outpost is illegal, but said he does not see that as a consideration. His position was that the presence of the outpost “challenges” his forces in carrying out their security mission – and hence, instead of removing the illegal outpost, the landowners’ access is to be restricted. The colonel refused to consider the possibility of imposing similar restrictions on the criminals living in the outpost. He admitted, however, that without the presence of the outpost the situation would be significantly different, and that a significant part of the restrictions on the Palestinian farmers would not be imposed.

During the tour, two incidents worth noting took place. The civilian security officer (CSO) of Tapuach – see here for an explanation of the CSO issue – used foul language against one of Yesh Din’s female workers, in the presence of the colonel. The latter was outraged and promised that the CSO would be removed from office on the following day. As far as we know, he is still in his position.

In the second incident, the representative of the DCO reprimanded the representatives of Yassuf and demanded to know why they even asked for legal support, telling them it would have been better for them to talk to him directly and not through attorneys. It’s hard to see these remarks as anything other than an implicit threat that the farmers will be harmed if they dare to claim their legal rights. It’s worth noting that contrary to the officer’s words, in the past, appeals to the DCO – made without legal representation – were not answered.

The following day, everything went back to normal: the farmers went to their lands after coordinating it with the army; hoodlums who were seen coming from Kfar Tapuach or Tapuach Ma’arav prevented them from accessing the land with the use of violence and firearms; and IDF troops ordered the Palestinians to return home.

So it goes. The IDF’s default action in the West Bank is collaboration with criminals. It is not the IDF’s fault alone; its policy is the result the entire government’s policy, and all of its branches.

Written by Yossi Gurvitz in his capacity as a blogger for Yesh Din, Volunteers for Human Rights. A version of this post was first published on Yesh Din’s blog.

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 ends.

Anyone who’s been to a checkpoint or a protest in the West Bank knows how arbitrary military rule can be. The chaos is apparent and systemic. It begins with the contradictions inherent to the use of military law in a civilian context, which themselves are clouded by anomalies specific to Israel’s military law in the occupied territories, and then further muddied by inconsistent application of the law and inadequate oversight. Organizations like ACRI challenge these policies on an ongoing basis – in correspondences with military officials, by impact litigation, through public outreach campaigns, advocacy and lobbying.

But for the activist on the ground, some specific knowledge of the occupation’s byzantine legal framework can make a real difference. Take the example in the video. The military declares areas as closed military zones all the time, many times in a clear violation on the rules and instructions set by the High Court of Justice and the military legal advisor regarding the use of closed military zone orders. Soldiers must present an actual valid order, without which they cannot legally prevent activists from being in a given area. Of course not all commanding officers will respect and abide by the law, even when the law is made apparent to them.

This, in and of itself, is another example of knowledge as power in the West Bank. The military used to prohibit filming and regularly confiscate cameras. After years of legal battles and complaints, the army has finally internalized the fact that activists are allowed to film. Today cameras are very rarely confiscated and activists and human rights organizations like B’Tselem are able to document human rights violations more effectively than ever.

So in the spirit of empowering (as much as possible) activists and protestors in the West Bank, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel is proud to announce the launch of its tri-lingual information center for protesting in the West Bank. The site contains information about the legal basis underpinning the right to protest as well as a range of practical information about the rights of protestors during demonstrations that take place in the West Bank.

In the Occupied Territories, protestors can and need to stand up for their rights and fight for the opportunity to demonstrate. When the automatic suppression of protests is the norm, it is important to know when the army is legally utilizing military law and when it is illegally ‘taking the initiative.’ We can and should fight over the minor details. Even if the struggle does not yield immediate results, it can have a cumulative effect.

The information center answers questions like:

• When is it permissible for the army to disperse a demonstration and when have they overstepped their legal authority?

• What legal means can the IDF use in order to disperse demonstrations?

• What is the difference between a valid legal closed military zone and an illegal order?

• What can we do when the army prevents protestors from accessing a certain area?

• When are soldiers allowed to arrest or detain a protestor?

• Where can we lodge formal complaints, and to whom can we turn when our rights are infringed upon?

Despite the risks and dangers that come with protesting against the occupation in the territories, demonstrations are one of the most effective ways to take a stand and make a difference. In the case of the West Bank, demonstrations are one of the few legitimate ways in which residents, together with Israeli and international activists, can protest against the occupation and fight against the oppression and discrimination that emerges from military rule. These actions are essential to trying to improve the lives of Palestinians living under occupation.

We invite you to enter the Information Center and make use of the vast range of materials contained within it. Knowledge is power, and we must use it, especially when facing off against a military authority.

Information Center, English
Information Center, Hebrew
Information Center, Arabic

Attorney Raghad Jaraisy leads the Freedom of Protest in the Occupied Territories program at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.

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 use, a compilation of instructions on how to rebut your opponent’s case, a truly powerful catalyst for the organizing of second-generation Mizrahi activists who began emerging at the time.

Shlomo Swirski. ‘Unlike the traditional intellectual who identifies with the institutions of the hegemonic order and justifies them, the organic intellectual attempts to promote an anti-hegemonic agenda.’

Shlomo is a typical example of what neo-Marxist Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci called an “organic intellectual.” It is worth noting here that in my opinion Shlomo is less a neo-Marxist than Gramsci. In the familiar youth-movement debate on the causal contest between material reality and consciousness, for Shlomo, material reality has a causal privileged status in its relation to consciousness. According to Gramsci, the organic intellectual is recruited in support of one specific class, the have-nots and the powerless, the working class. Unlike the traditional intellectual who identifies with the institutions of the hegemonic order and justifies them, the organic intellectual attempts to promote an anti-hegemonic agenda. But Shlomo took his “organicness” even further. His organic activity was expressed not only in poignant critical writing against the existing order, but also in many years of hard work within the civil society organizations, in realizing the moral and intellectual values he holds in Israeli society and for those living on its margins.

Educational and class segregation

I will mention but two enterprises Shlomo initiated and became identified with. The first was the Hilla for Equality in Education (in Hebrew), an NGO of parents for improved education in inner-city neighborhoods and development towns, one of whose founders and dauntless directors for many years, Tikva Levi, passed away a few months ago. Another key activist in Hila is Noga Dagan-Bouzaglo, who is also a researcher in Adva Center. Hilla has been operating for more than 25 years now. Its activists wander far and wide to places like Ar’ara and Sderot to organize groups of hard-working parents so they can fight the bureaucratic systems so accustomed to ignoring them – parents who fight for a decent and equal educational system for their children, who insist, despite opinions to the contrary by so-called “education experts,” that their children are no less talented and worthy than children living in affluent neighborhoods in central Israel. Contrary to the policymakers’ and experts’ views, they declare that a high-school diploma is not an achievement their children ought to be excluded from.

The late Tikva Levy, one of the founders of the Hila organization.

Over the past two decades, educational and class segregation has become the Israeli education system’s organizing principle: segregation of classes, tracks and unique schools. An entire network has been created recently by the upper middle class in order to bail their children out of the state system and create their own state-sponsored private educational autonomies. Shlomo, Meir Amor, Tikva and others, together with Hilla staff and volunteers, have been active in the opposite direction: counter-segregation. They are preoccupied with realizing the moral concept of integrating groups of children from different classes, nationalities and ethnicities. They have led a revolution in the education system’s approach to children with special needs through a battle waged against a years-long arbitrary policy of principals and placement committees who are involved in the wholesale exclusion, without due process, of perfectly normal students – overwhelmingly Mizrahi, Ethiopian and Palestinian children – to the special education system, in order to achieve industrial peace in the classrooms.

By the way, Meir Amor is an Israeli sociologist living and teaching in Canada, because he could not make a living as an academic in Israel. Here is a proposition for an interesting research topic and for a session at the next conference of the Sociology Society: why are so many Mizrahi academic researchers leaving Israel for academic institutions abroad? This is an invitation for a profound review of the idea of meritocracy, and the operation of social networks in Israeli academia.

In his research and activities, Shlomo is a democrat in the deepest sense of the word, unlike many intellectuals who document inequalities and attribute their origins to socioeconomic and political structures, whilst basically remaining suspicious of ordinary citizens’ intelligence and doubtful of their ability to transform reality. Shlomo is an avid supporter of democratic participation and empowerment, especially of those whose voice is not heard and who lack access to the corridors of power.  Shlomo’s political action is free of the paternalistic approach typical of centrist do-gooders who assume they know exactly what is best for those living in socioeconomic peripheries, who would rather the people living there not complicate things with their own opinions. Shlomo’s community empowerment activity expresses itself in daily, often frustrating hard work of organizing parent groups to enable them to take part and be effective players in the design of their collective lives.

This social and democratic approach is expressed also in another project cofounded and actively promoted by Shlomo. Together with Sami Shalom Chetrit, Shira Ohayon, the late Dudi Mahleb and many others, they tried to set up a network of alternative schools called Kedma (“eastward”). This was an initiative to open schools in inner-city neighborhoods and development towns as an alternative to the failing schools of the formal education system, schools based on the obvious principle of equality of opportunities, a principle recited by every politics freshman, only to be violated in a variety of creative ways in the reality of Israeli education. Opening a school that seriously believes in equal opportunities means not selecting students who want to join it, avoiding dropping them and profoundly believing in their ability to succeed throughout the course of their studies – a multicultural school whose curriculum and educational ethos treat all who enter its gates with dignity and respect, and instils in them a sense of self-worth and pride in their backgrounds.

But the Kedma network was never to happen. A determined and persistent coalition stretching from former Education Minister Limor Livnat to former principal and current Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai, including some liberal ethnic ghost-busters, succeeded in its efforts to bring about the failure of the first school opened in downtown Tel Aviv and prevent the opening of another one in Kiryat Malachi. But they could not prevent from thriving and flourishing a special school in Jerusalem, headed by Klara Yona Meshumar, Ilana Yona and a wonderful team of teachers.

Education is central to Shlomo’s research. His Education in Israel: Schooling for Inequality was published in 1990 by Breirot, the independent publishing house cofounded with his partner Barbara. It is difficult to imagine an established reputable publisher who would agree to publish such blasphemies at that time. Given the dependency of education research on funding and data provided by the education ministry, it is also hard to imagine an established researcher who would dare write in such a spirit.

Education in Israel is a comprehensive and radical book based on thorough research which offers an alternative historical narrative of Israel’s education system, documenting accurately and in detail the enormous gap between its self-image as a universal, modern system championing equal opportunities and gap reduction, and a reality in which it “acts as a huge selection system that methodically and meticulously differentiates and separates groups and subgroups”, Jews and Arabs, Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, men and women, lower and higher classes. As documented by Shlomo, it is a system whose designers and chief researchers have presented racist views and prejudices as scientific truths which in turn served as a basis for policies promoting educational injustice. This book too was vital in its influence on numerous activists, mostly Mizrahi, acting as a source of inspiration and a roadmap for action in the field of education.

Talking Swirskish          

I got to know Shlomo upon returning from my studies abroad. In 1991 we met in the little office on Tel Aviv’s Sheinkin Street where Barbara and he made their living with their small publishing house, publishing radical texts which never stood a chance of even being looked at by established publishers. Barbara directs Adva Center and is one of the founding members of the Israeli feminist movement. It would have been fitting to dedicate a special session to her work and activity in areas such as the right for health and reducing healthcare inequalities, social safety nets and her studies on gender inequality and gender-based analysis of the state budget. There, in the small office together with other friends including the late Vicky Shiran, we founded Adva Center, which undertook to describe and analyze Israeli society from a social justice point of view.

The aim was to create a research and advocacy center that would analyze the various manifestations of inequality in Israeli society and promote policies for reducing it. The model that inspired us was the similar Washington DC-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which examines the impact of the federal budget and policies on people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Our idea was to found a research institute with an explicit ideological stance that will insist on presenting the bare facts in short and clear documents free of vague jargon and baffling theoretical discourse. For us, accuracy proved critical, because immediately upon being issued by Adva, our documents were ambushed in the media by ethnic ghost-busters from the Israeli academia and like-minded reporters, always eagerly awaiting the slightest stumble to discredit the center and refute its data and argumentation.

Thus, Adva’s main products are clear and accurate documents analyzing socioeconomic and political issues on Israel’s agenda. Some have become annual publications, such as the state budget analysis – an alternative analysis focused on inequality and the budget’s impact on marginalized populations; our Annual Social Report, which traces Israel’s socioeconomic landscape and forces it to face the mirror; an annual document analyzing high-school final exam success rates in geographic and class terms; and additional documents, some of which are concerned with a specific socioeconomic policies on the Israeli agenda. Issuing clear documents for the educated reader, for the busy Knesset member, and for the lazy editor accustomed to receiving short and pre-edited texts from PR firms.

Since the budget is written in a nearly indecipherable code with much hidden between its enigmatic lines, Adva Center’s documents bring to light Shlomo’s rare ability to separate the wheat from the chaff. He has the ability to decipher which twisted money transfers hide behind the rows of numbers and obscure code words, to delve into the Central Bureau of Statistics’s data to discover exactly where the inequality lies, to pinpoint the datum concealing benefits to privileged individuals and sectors, to compare benefits and burdens and contrast poor, marginalized municipalities in the periphery with strong ones in central Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and present all those clearly and persuasively every few years in documents such as “The Price of Occupation,” and then present the conclusions to Knesset members, municipality officials or community activists.

Shlomo has been Adva’s academic director since its foundation, but also its most effective worker. The extent of his analyses, reports, and policy papers is staggering in any context, as is the range of subject he is dealing with. In this sense, Shlomo is a true socioeconomic Renaissance figure without parallel.

It seems that Adva Center’s research approach and ideological stance is gaining increasing appreciation and influence. The status of the fundamentalist neoliberal discourse dominating Israel and the world in recent years has been eroding slightly, particularly following the 2008 financial crisis. The basic assumptions of the neoclassical orthodoxy’s economical paradigm are also being badly shaken so that the economic discipline is once again exposed for the “dismal science” it is, to quote Thomas Carlyle. Following the 2011 social protest, Adva’s policy papers and reports were in great demand amongst activists. In the course of the protests, Shlomo managed to produce 13 reader-friendly articles on this website, collectively titled “Towards a New Salary Pyramid,” and bound into a booklet that was distributed in the protestors’ encampments. A significant shift is also noticeable in the media and universities: it seems more and more people are undergoing a process of conversion, starting to talk Swirskish without even being aware of it.

Shlomo began his path in academia, but he could not find his place in it. In retrospect, paradoxically, his exclusion by academic gatekeepers proved a blessing in disguise. It is hard to imagine the loss to public discourse and the struggle for social justice in Israel had these gatekeepers had the intellectual openness and integrity to accept him. How great the damage would have been had Shlomo wasted his days trying to sneak an article into the American Journal of Sociology or similar journals.

The text is adapted from a speech given at the plenary meeting of the 44^th Annual Conference of the Israeli Sociological Society, dedicated to Shlomo Swirski’s research.

This post was first published in Hebrew on Haokets. Haokets is a non-profit, independent, progressive Israeli web magazine that hosts critical discussion where hundreds of writers publish professional and original pieces on socioeconomic, cultural and philosophical issues, human rights activism, feminism, and Mizrahi politics. Visit their English-language blog.

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 the owner ‘Amar likes to hear. ‘Amar doesn’t ask anybody what to like and what (and why) to play, and sometimes he happens to get what his clients – free of complicated theories – like, or at least are curious to hear. They unknowingly help him create a bubble of cultural sovereignty.

Rachid Taha’s cover of The Clash’s “Rock the Casbah”:

Generally, many more subscribers of the Cairo Philharmonic listen to Mozart besides Ismahan and Leila Mourad, without knowing or caring that some boorish and uncultured European bourgeois or Tommy Lapid [2] type (and perhaps some finicky authenticity-loving purists from the “other” direction) demand that they choose between them. Because they are acting out of “cultural sovereignty” just as ‘Amir Benayoun does Tchaikovsky, without agonizing too much over West and East. Without “Tulkarem has conquered us“[3] or “you’re becoming Ashkenazi, bro.” Because if music is war, then I surrender in advance to all the belligerent parties. Woodie Guthrie’s wrote “this machine kills fascists” on his guitar, and Bob Marley sang: “one good thing about music – when it hits you feel no pain.” Because sovereignty is good.

Amir Benayoun covers Tchaikovsky’s Op. 50:

Laila Mourad’s “Laih Khalettny Ahebek”:

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