Protest against prisoner conditions in Israeli jails will not prevent anger and delegitimization of PA law enforcement system for its own violations.

A Palestinian prisoner being held on charges connected to a stabbing died in a Palestinian Authority jail in Jericho on Friday, according to a Jerusalem Post and Ma’an News Agency. The articles report that the Palestinian attorney general ordered and launched an investigation into the death and an autopsy. Palestinian officials have said that Ayman Samarah, 40, was not tortured, but suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure and was taken to a hospital on Friday after being arrested; there are conflicting reports about whether he died in prison or in the hospital and the Post cites Palestinians in Jericho saying he was beaten by other prisoners. Families of prisoners have reportedly held a sit-in near the prison.

The PA law enforcement system has been guilty of human rights violations its treatment of detainees in the past. The practice of arresting people and holding them without charges or trial has become familiar in Israel and Palestine, writes Human Rights Watch – familiar, one might add, for Palestinians. Also in 2008, a 27-year old died in PA custody; the Palestinian Center for Human Rights called for an investigation.

In a recent and highly publicized case, Zakaria Zubeidi – a former militant who turned to non-violent cultural resistance and co-founded the Freedom Theater in Jenin – was arrested last May and held for roughly five months without trial. He spoke of torture, solitary confinement and denial of access to lawyers, and went on a hunger strike to protest his detention before being released on bail last October.

For the time being, the Palestinian judicial system appears to retain some measure of legitimacy among the Palestinian people. When Zubeidi was released, he gave a press conference reiterating his accusations, but he also affirmed his faith in the system.

Is there growing realization within Israeli society that the social, political, moral, and military basis of the occupation is unsustainable? If so, perhaps ‘The Gatekeepers’ need not change people’s minds, so much as express them.

The Gatekeepers (photo: Sony Pictures)

A college professor once taught me that a decaying empire clenches onto power with a chokehold. Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian people may not be an empire, but after nearly forty-six years, it has become a sort of reigning paradigm of Israeli life. The Israeli Left has challenged, but never truly shifted, that paradigm.

In 2009 a particularly right-wing government was established after a particularly nasty war in Gaza, and the sense of urgency among left-wing Israelis increased. Suddenly new movements and parties were established, joint Israeli-Palestinian protest actions became routine, while new, independent media emerged in the cybersphere. Three films released in the last two years opened up highly original avenues of critical inquiry, to international acclaim. Two are currently Academy Award nominees for best documentary: The Gatekeepers and Five Broken Cameras; the third, The Law in These Parts, won a documentary prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012.

Together, the films provide a hard-hitting cinematic indictment of the occupation by Israeli filmmakers. Cameras (with Israeli and Palestinian co-directors) shows the Palestinian experience of protesting against the separation wall; The Law in These Parts is a fascinating exploration of how the military (in)justice system was elaborately tailored by some of the country’s best legal minds to legitimize and entrench the occupation. Despite their success abroad, both films remain somewhat remote for mainstream Israelis, for whom Palestinian resistance to Israeli security policy is of little interest, and legal intrigue of the occupation is no great scoop.

The Gatekeepers, directed by Dror Moreh, is poised to have the greatest possible impact on the Israeli public, because it tackles the arena closest to that public’s heart: the security establishment. The film is a candid series of interviews with six former heads of the legendary Shin Bet, Israel’s Internal Security Agency, who criticize the state’s policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians, inlaid with documentation and computer-simulated portrayals of historic events that are part of the Israeli national canon. It is also reportedly going to become a television mini-series on Israel’s state Channel 1.

Israelis...

One simple answer to the question of why elections matter is that I feel part of something when I vote in Israel. Being away for four months, living deep inside the world of other peoples’ conflicts, provided a few more answers.

Israelis voting in the 2013 Knesset elections (photo: Yotam Ronen / Activestills)

For the first time since moving to Israel 15 years ago, I was not in the county on election day yesterday. Since Israel has no absentee voting for regular citizens, I was not able to participate.

Given the wild demonization of the Left over the last few years, some people probably wonder why I even care. My colleagues at +972 Magazine and I regularly face numerous accusations, from being Israel-haters and extremists, to traitors.

Critics on the other side, and some Palestinians, question the legitimacy of elections in Israel in general. The elections yesterday not only didn’t end the occupation, a policy that destroys Israeli democracy, but even if a center-right government emerges it is likely to perpetuate the current policy. In that view, participating in these elections as an exercise in democracy is an act of auto-hypnosis, complicity in a hypocritical sham in order to languish in our privilege.

But I do care. When I received my Israeli identity card in 1997, I took it out for coffee on the busy thoroughfare of Ibn Gabirol Street, named after the 11^th century poet whose literature has been my father’s lifelong subject of study. I put it on the table, and said to my new ID card (silently, so I wouldn’t be taken for mad): “Now we’re in it for good, you and I. I hope we make each other into something better than we would be alone.”

It was young, it was romantic, it was probably even hubris. But one simple answer to the question of why elections matter is that I feel part of something when I vote in Israel.

Being away for four months, living deep inside the world of other peoples’ conflicts, provided a few more answers.

Cyprus, like Israel, has struggled with a tragic conflict for 50 years. Like Israel, the two sides can hardly even agree on the history of the conflict. For...

E1 should be a serious wake-up call for American policymakers, Michael Cohen argues below. If the controversial building project in the West Bank goes forward, he writes, it’s time to start saying what everyone in Washington knows – the two-state solution will die and the U.S. risks supporting a future of apartheid.

By Michael Cohen

If there is one singular, yet frustratingly unattainable idea that has animated the Arab-Israeli peace process for the past two decades it is that of a two-state solution to the conflict – a Zionist and a Palestinian state living next to each other in peace within the confines of the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

It is an aspiration mouthed by all sides in the conflict – by the current Israeli prime minister, the head of the Palestinian Authority and U.S. and European policymakers – even if confidence in the achievement of this long-sought after goal seems more distant than ever, even if the present Israeli government has demonstrated little apparent interest in seeing its realization and even if we are perhaps further away from its realization at any point since Oslo.

The fact that the two-state solution is receding is too rarely uttered. For this reason, the recent announcement by the Israeli government that it intends to ramp up settlement growth in the West Bank, and begin construction planning in the E1 area, which connects Jerusalem to the Israeli settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim, is both so controversial and also so clarifying.

Indeed, reaction to the Israelis government’s announcement has been loud and furious, from the threat of European countries to recall their ambassadors from Tel Aviv to the stern response from Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, one of only nine countries to support Israel in the UN General Assembly during the recent vote on Palestinian statehood at the United Nations. Even the United States has criticized the Netanyahu government and by all accounts gave its European allies a green light to apply diplomatic pressure on Israel.

The reason is not simply because of Israel’s continued flaunting of global public opinion, the spirit of the Oslo agreement and the positions of its allies in the United States and Europe (and also the humiliation of its one legitimate Palestinian ally, President Abbas) but rather because construction in E1 would make it practically impossible for a contiguous and viable Palestinian state with East...

It’s easy to disagree with Israelis about many things. But two new polls show that on key current issues, the public is at least thinking rationally and seeing clearly:

*On Gaza, the majority know that Israel is no better off after the war in Gaza, and that the ceasefire won’t hold.

*On the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the majority supports negotiations, supports the basic outlines of the Arab peace initiative and knows that the Palestinians cannot simply be beaten.

*The majority acknowledges discrimination against Arabs in Israel, and a strong majority believes democracy is either more important than Jewishness of the state, or that they are equally important.

The data here comes from the most recent survey by Shibley Telhami and Steven Kull of the University of Maryland (always an excellent resource) and the Peace Index by the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research and Israel Democracy Institute. Both samples were surveyed following the war with Gaza (Telhami and Kull’s research began just hours before the ceasefire began), with 600 respondents in the U. of Maryland poll, and 598 in the Peace Index. Both therefore have just a small sample of Arab respondents.

Gaza. Israelis do believe that the war was justified in light of the results – the Jews (84 percent), with Arabs evenly divided. Forty percent of Jews and one-quarter of Arabs believe Israel’s deterrence power is better than before the war, according to the Peace Index; the remainder think it is the same or weaker (or have no opinion).

But people hold no illusions about having solved any problems: just 19 percent believe that the ceasefire will last more than a year; the majority, 54 percent, believe it will last between a few months up to one year, in the Peace Index. The remainder say it’s only a matter of days or weeks until further fighting.

And just 37 percent believe that the government actually fulfilled its goals (without specifying what those goals were) – with no real difference between Jews and Arabs. Over half of both groups believe that only some or none of the goals were achieved. Only one-quarter (27 percent) in the U. of Maryland survey believes that a military approach can solve the Gaza problem at all.

So why do Israelis justify the war? Mostly because they believe Israel had to respond in self-defense to the rocket fire and this...

While commentators say the vote is merely symbolic, at least for Palestinians and the international community, the vote could be a game-changing  kind of symbol.

Celebration in Ramallah over the Palestinian statehood bid, November 29, 2012 (photo: Activestills)

One week ago, the request to the UN General Assembly to grant Palestine status as a non-member observer state looked like a poor stepchild of the highly anticipated first “UN route” just over one year ago. The buildup to September 2011 was long; yet until about a week ago, it wasn’t even clear whether the current vote would really happen.

The 2011 application for UN membership turned into an anticlimax. This year, the dark-horse diplomacy won: 138 member states voted in favor and the emotional echoes of 1947 were hard to ignore.

But, detractors say, the vote cannot change the Palestinians’ main complaints against Israel: settlement expansion, restrictions on movement, division between Gaza and the West Bank, life under military occupation. Therefore it’s “symbolic,” meaning, meaningless. And it’s true that at present, the vote may mean more in people’s minds than in their daily lives. But when did hearts and minds become insignificant? Consider how the lead-up and the vote itself has already resonated for three major actors: Palestinians (leaders and people); Israel; and the international community. Each of those, of course, contains essential sub-communities – this is just a broad-strokes starting point.

International Reaction

Despite anodyne comments like this New York Times editorial, the international community put on a fairly nail-biting drama leading up to the vote. That the U.S. rejected the bid is no surprise; but France’s support was a powerful victory for the Palestinians. Germany’s decision to abstain, when translated from diplo-speak into English, is a critical shift: given historical constraints on defying the Israeli government, this is a clear sign of support for Palestinian statehood. The UK first rejected the idea, then very nearly found a way to say yes, and settled on abstaining – a very weak no.  Spain’s support for the resolution is also major statement, considering that it breaks Spain’s with its own policy of not recognizing Kosovo. Spain has steadfastly resisted recognizing the latter, despite being one of the last five EU...

As if the heartache over the escalation and its appalling predictability isn’t enough, as if the pain of watching whole communities cower under rockets while planning the next decade of psychotherapy for children isn’t enough, as if fresh Israeli and Palestinian deaths isn’t enough, the IDF sent the following message on its Twitter feed:

Here’s what this poster says: 1. The IDF promotes extra-judicial killing as punishment for crimes committed with no due process (past terror attacks and kidnapping) 2. The IDF thinks that portraying Israel as the Terminator is a GOOD thing, showing fundamental disconnect with the language of modern diplomacy and current political sensibilities about the conflict.  3. The killing is absurdly divorced from the larger picture: the conflict, the Gaza policy, the occupation, actually it landed on us ex nihilo, or from the moon. 4. The whole conflict can be reduced to a big joke: if we present a Hollywood poster, preferably bathed in scary blood red, we’ll win! But personal commentary aside, what the poster is really trying to say is: we had no choice. This was our only option.

I find this an insult to all victims of the conflict and the current escalation.

Soon, there will be the inevitable chorus of voices self-righteously proclaiming why there cannot be negotiations, concessions, end of the conflict or at least end of occupation. I’ve had enough of the smug pride in insisting there’s no other choice but military force. If the escalation is viewed as ex nihilo, big bad terrorists against righteous Rambo, well – they are right.

So, while I usually prefer to concentrate on the future, it’s impossible never to consider what would or could have been. This time I can’t help considering just for a moment an alternate scenario.

Just over one year ago, the Fatah leadership presented its statehood bid to the United Nations. Had Israel not blocked the effort hermetically – forcing America to kill the process by steadfastly viewing statehood as an anti-Israel notion, what might have happened?

We can’t know. But Israel could have realized that Palestinian statehood basically along 1967 parameters was in its national interest. (For the record, I still don’t understand why it didn’t.) While the government would still have rejected the unilateral process through political posturing, Israel could have quietly unblocked...

Anat Hoffman, longtime crusader for the advancement of progressive Judaism in Israel and a tireless activist for the rights of women to partake in religious traditions, was arrested last month while saying the Shma prayer at the Western Wall. Hoffman, the Executive Director of the Israel Religious Action Center and one of the founders of Women of the Wall (and a former Jerusalem City councilwoman) is no stranger to the law: it was the sixth time she has been arrested. Yet she says she has never been charged. When I interviewed her nine days later at a conference in Germany, the 58-year-old still had pink scars on her wrist, a story better than Alice’s Restaurant, and a fighting spirit. 

Anat Hoffman of Women of the Wall (Nshot Ha-Kotel) arrested at the Western Wall, Old City of Jerusalem (photo: Women of the Wall)

What was the back story behind your recent arrest while praying at the women’s section of the Western Wall?

The Wall is totally managed by The Western Wall Heritage Fund, it’s quasi-governmental, but not managed like any NGO that I know. People sit there for decades and according to the NGO Registrar, they’re all Haredi (ultra-orthodox) men.

Rav Shmuel Rabinovich is the head. He decides to enforce the rules of the Kotel (Western Wall). Some he enforces, some he ignores. For example, he enforces modest dress, prohibition of performing religious acts that offend the feelings of others – these are the regulations within the laws of holy places. But he’s completely lax on regulation 7: no begging at the Wall.  it’s plagued with people who are begging, but I’ve never seen a policeman tell anyone to leave.

I can’t distribute a shred of paper at the wall; Chabad distributes parshat hashavua (the weekly Torah portion) regularly, I’m not allowed to bring my own prayer book to the Wall – we have our own … The wall is run like an ultra-orthodox synagogue.

So when women show up on Rosh Hodesh (the new moon), the rabbi knows when I’m coming. The people from his fund go straight to the police and schmooze with them devising a strategy for...

The question is no longer about whether one state should be considered, as there is only one state which governs over two people. The question is which kind of state it will be: the left or the right-wing version.

Palestinians workers walk in the early morning next to the Wall to cross the Eyal Israeli military checkpoint, November 2011. Despite the impression of border-crossing, they are in fact going from one Israeli-held territory to another (photo: Activestills)

The protests a few weeks ago in the West Bank against Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, once the hope for an institutional and economic state-builder for Palestine, look like one more sign of failure for the emergence of a de facto if not de jure Palestinian state.

In the lead-up to September 2011, the Palestinian state appeared poised to advance towards greater general legitimacy.

Internationally, the political zeitgeist was there. The UN has long acknowledged the Palestinians’ right to self-determination, and Palestine has more formal recognitions of its independence (declared by the PLO in 1988) than any other un- or under-recognized entity. Like in Kosovo, protracted bilateral negotiations have failed, and unilateral statehood seemed to be the only remaining, if second-best, answer.

And if formal UN support fell short, I believed that even Israel’s hard-line, nationalist leaders would increasingly accept that a Palestinian state was in their rational interest – to avoid annexation and integration of millions of Palestinian citizens. Every leader since Rabin, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, has publicly acknowledged the preference for two states. While denying statehood officially and rhetorically, I believed Israel would quietly cultivate a reality of two separate states – economically, bureaucratically, through increased de facto Palestinian control and by boosting the PA.

The PA would then have been motivated to show democratic reforms, redress corruption and generally demonstrate state-worthiness, like some of the other state-hopeful cases.

Instead, the opposite has happened. Over the last year, Israel has wielded military, political and legal power to continue its land grabs in the West Bank. It has entrenched the legal and physical infrastructure of control over area C, ensuring separation of the Israeli and Palestinian populations, and discrimination against...

In 1998, an Israeli film appeared called “Buzz.” It was based on a true story that had rocked the country four years earlier: two teenagers murdered a taxi driver, shooting him six times in the back. In the style of some great literature, there was no motive at all, just sheer thrill for boys who had already developed a pastime of petty crime.

Nobody is making films these days about stunningly random, lethal violence. We’ve grown ritually used to it. We have a few days to nurse our horror, then we return to the struggle to close out the month financially or implore the government not to bomb Iran, until the next incomprehensibly horrible thing has happened.

Violence in Israel, at least, is an equal-opportunity employer.

A couple of weeks ago, a group of Jewish youth attacked an Arab youngster in Jerusalem, nearly killing him. The perpetrators repeated time after time, and continue in their court statements to insist that they want him dead because he is Arab; they attacked him for this reason and with this intention. In my non-legalistic mind, that’s a hate crime if I ever saw one.

This March, four Arab youngsters – the shooter was 15 at the time, according to news coverage – killed a Jewish man in Ramla, a 51-year-old father of five who had gone out at night to walk his dog. The boys approached him, they said, and he just kept trying to walk away. This week the Yedioth Ahronoth daily revealed that in interrogations, the kids denied any specific motive at all. “Stam,” said the one who pulled the trigger: slang for “no reason.”

A few weeks ago, a Palestinian family driving through the West Bank settlements of Gush Etzion was firebombed with a Molotov cocktail, injuring all six people in the car. The primary suspects are 13 years old.

In 2009, a group of young men from the Arab town of Jaljulya got into a verbal scuffle with older man, Arik Karp, 59, who was walking with his family on the promenade just north of Tel Aviv. They beat him to death.

None of these incidents were retribution for the other, or for anything else for that matter – there was no chain of revenge. That means each assailant was murderously violent, perhaps enraged, in his own right.

It’s tempting...

Over the last few months, I have engaged in a series of conversations with Pakistani writers and academics through mutual friends. These talks have been a rare and fascinating opportunity to see their country through their eyes rather than through Western media sources. We’ve discovered some surprising common concerns and a mutual desire to stay in touch. We would like to write posts  occasionally for one another so that our audiences can share these understandings as well. The following is an introduction by Abdul, one of the participants, who writes his own blog tackling the stories of Pakistan that are seldom told abroad. Here he describes his site and his interest in our dialogue – I wrote a similar introduction last week for his readers. 

By Abdul Nishapuri

First of all I would like to send my appreciation to my friends Paul Rockower and Waleed Ziad in particular, for inviting us to engage in people-to-people contact between Pakistanis and Israelis.

I would also like to thank Dahlia Scheindlin (of +972 Magazine) for her recent post in this series in which she has outlined the need for such a dialogue between the two countries.

Let’s start with a brief introduction of the web magazine Let Us Build Pakistan (LUBP).

Let Us Build Pakistan

LUBP presents itself as Pakistan’s alternative media and is known for its non-mainstream views and discourses on issues of human rights, democracy and politics. It is a voluntary project and not sponsored or affiliated with any religious or political group.  It continues to publish on topics or positions that are considered taboos in Pakistan’s mainstream society and politics.

Given the increasing dominance of the Saudi-sponsored Wahhabi-Deobandi extremist ideology and the brutal treatment of dissenting voices of journalists and scholars by the military state, many of our contributors use pen names as a precaution for their personal safety.

Therefore, it was relatively easy for us to engage with Dahlia, and freely discuss our views on the informal contact between the two countries. From the Pakistani side, we have been able to express such views without any fear of reprisal from religious fanatics, politically correct political parties and repressive military apparatus.

What do we seek to gain from this dialogue? Here are a...

Listening to Israel’s political leaders, it sounds like the country might be at war by the time this piece goes to press.

The government is counting on profound levels of fear in Israel to buoy its policies. Indeed, in January a survey of mine showed that Jewish respondents chose nuclear Iran as the top threat to the future of the Jewish state. Fully 70% of the Jewish population does not trust American assurances and its diplomatic approach, according to the August Peace Index survey, by the Israel Democracy Institute and Tel Aviv University. In that poll, a 56% majority doesn’t even believe that the international efforts are serious.

It’s odd, therefore, that just a minority of Israeli Jews actually support a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran — barely more than one-quarter in the August Peace Index survey. Different polls from February through April this year showed the same range: Between 19% and 31% support a unilateral strike. In other words, even after months of feverish rhetoric from elected leaders about the urgency of Israeli action, attitudes have not moved at all. Instead of rallying, the public stopped trusting the vocal advocates of a strike, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Now just one-quarter accept their views, according to the Peace Index; the majority heed the high-level security officials who call for restraint.

Why do so many Israelis, so many of whom are right-wing, oppose the natural policy of the hawks? And if so many disagree, why have they remained silent? There’s no lack of protesting spirit around here lately. Yet the paltry nightly anti-war demonstrations at Barak’s residence, starting mid-August, have been so marginal (and so sweaty) that nobody even bothered to counterprotest.

Regarding the first question, it’s worth noting that large-scale security fears are old news. Already, in 1999, surveys for the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies showed a very high portion of Israelis who feared Iran and Iraq developing nonconventional weapons. Yet by 2009, studies by the same institute showed that nearly 80% did not believe that Iran would use a nuclear bomb against Israel and that 80% did not believe a nuclear Iran would affect their lives. Ironically, in the past nearly 60% have supported action from the Israel Defense Forces to stop Iran’s weapons program. Now it seems that Israelis just aren’t very afraid of fear itself.

In the cafes of Tel...

Rabbi Dov Lipman is soft-spoken and not even 41 years old, but has seen his share of action on the battleground of Israeli society. He’s taken verbal beatings and sustained physical injury. He’s won praise and publicity, and drawn fire too, for his tireless struggle against religious extremists literally next door.

Rabbi Dov Lipman, at Beit Shemesh rally against Haredi extremism, December 2011 (Photo: Dahlia Scheindlin)

Lipman is a Haredi-ordained educator (Haredi = ultra-Orthodox), and a religious Zionist with a liberal bent – a rare bird in these parts. His main political arena is his home, the city of Beit Shemesh not far from Jerusalem, with its growing Haredi population. This year, Beit Shemesh became ground zero for inter-Jewish religious tensions after a spate of attention to Haredi incidents and habits (not only in Beit Shemesh) that outraged the general public, including: gender-separated buses, separated sidewalks, and ultra-Orthodox soldiers staging a walkout protest against women singing at IDF ceremonies.

The public kicked back. Tanya Rosenblit refused to sit in the woman’s section of a public bus frequented by Haredim, and was rapidly labeled Israel’s Rosa Parks.

Then came Naama Margolese. A television item interviewed the eight-year old religious girl who related how she was harangued on her way to school in Beit Shemesh for not dressing modestly enough – not an isolated incident, but a regular occurrence. Naama was called a whore; her Haredi aggressors spit on her. The country went up in arms, and suddenly Dov Lipman was everywhere. Even before that, he had been accompanying the girls to school to protect them: “I was called all sorts of horrible names by them,” he says, referring to the “extremists” – “they turned on me – screaming, poking, and I was even spat on.”

Rabbi Dov Lipman, confronted by Haredim while escorting girls to school – Beit Shemesh, Sept 2011 (Photo: Michael Lipkin)

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