In a new book, smuggled out of jail page by page, Barghouti details his life behind bars in Israeli prisons. I have written a feature story about Barghouti’s new book, his current position inside Palestinian politics and where the campaign to free him is heading. You can read the whole piece at The National. Excerpts:

Fadwa Barghouti is a carefully appointed woman who has spearheaded her husband’s awareness campaign since the beginning of his current imprisonment. From the same village of Kober, Fadwa is a distant relative of Marwan, sharing the same fourth-generation great grandfather. Sitting in her comfortable office overlooking the Muqata compound where Yasser Arafat was confined by Israeli forces at the height of the Second Intifada, Fadwa remains confident that her husband will be released soon, but is visibly upset at the recent failure by Hamas to gain his freedom. “I know why he was not released,” she told me sipping sugary tea, “but I am not going to tell you.”

Sitting under the ubiquitous photo of her husband surrounded by Israeli prison guards with handcuffed hands held high, she glowingly reports that he is using his time in prison to enrich himself intellectually.

He is a ferocious reader, consuming books in English, Arabic, Hebrew and French on topics ranging from French colonial rule in Algeria to the latest biographies of the former US president Bill Clinton and Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister. He also has a deep respect for the work of Paulo Coehlo and the Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Liebowitz. Additionally, Barghouti has written two books and completed his PhD from the University of Cairo entitled, The Legislative and Political Performance of the Palestinian Legislative Council and its Contribution to the Democratic Process in Palestine from 1996 to 2008. His doctorate, like the recent book, was smuggled out of jail one page at a time and took years to complete.

Often protesters never even reach the edge of the village; crowd-control measures by the military regularly include barrages of tear gas and rubber bullets. Palestinian villagers claim that hundreds of protesters have been injured, some seriously, in the Nabi Saleh demonstrations. But no one had been killed there – until last week.

The death of 28-year-old Mustafa Tamimi may seem to have little in common with the more numerous deaths of protesters in Cairo over the past few days. Indeed the demonstrations are different from each other in many ways. But in protests from Tunis to Cairo to little Nabi Saleh, the use of tear gas by authorities, and the increasing number of related fatalities, has become a common thread in recent months.

Mr Tamimi’s injuries occurred amid a fairly common occurrence in the West Bank: protesters were throwing stones at armoured Israeli vehicles. As the demonstration slowed towards the end of the day, one Israeli jeep stopped as it was making its way out of the village. The vehicle’s back door opened wide enough for a tear-gas launcher, known to Israeli soldiers as a “ringo”, to fire a single canister of the gas.

Mr Tamimi, who was standing three metres behind the jeep, was hit directly in the face by the canister. The next morning he was pronounced dead in an Israeli hospital near Tel Aviv. Mustafa Tamimi was the 20th Palestinian protester killed by the Israeli army in the last eight years of unarmed West Bank demonstrations, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. Many of the deaths have resulted from the negligent and unlawful practices of Israeli soldiers.

Israeli army regulations stipulate that soldiers are not allowed to fire tear-gas canisters directly at protesters, since doing so can turn sublethal crowd-control devices into deadly instruments of war. There are also allegations that protesters in Cairo were killed just by inhaling the gas. Palestinians have opened court cases over violations of the Israeli regulation, but no case has resulted in the prosecution of soldiers. To make the situation more frustrating for Palestinians, Israeli soldiers often demonstrate extreme restraint when dealing with Jewish settlers who riot whenever an illegal outpost draws the army’s attention.

In 2009, Bassem Abu Rahman was killed instantly when an Israeli soldier fired a tear gas-canister directly at him from close range during a demonstration against the separation barrier in the village of Bil’in.

Then, last January, Jawahar Abu Rahmah, Bassem’s sister, was killed in the same village after prolonged exposure to tear gas used to disperse demonstrators. And an activist from the United States, Tristan Anderson, was left paralysed after he was hit directly with a canister during a demonstration in the village of Ni’ilin in 2008.

US companies like the Pennsylvania based Combined Systems Inc (CSI) are among the primary suppliers of tear gas used in the West Bank. After Jawahar Abu Rahmah died as a result of breathing CSI tear gas in Bil’in, a number of pro-Palestinian advocacy groups staged protests and launched a boycott of the company. CSI officials have remained silent on the use of their product by Israeli forces.

One important consequence of this year’s Arab revolutions has been renewed interest in the use of US-made tear gas to control social protests across the Middle East. A number of US tear gas manufacturers have ramped up production, while profits have been soaring as governments from Bahrain to Egypt demand more and more tear gas to suppress political revolt.

The result has been deadly. In January, the 32-year-old French photographer Lucas Mebrouk Dolega was killed by a tear-gas canister fired at close range by Tunisian police. And hundreds of protesters in Egypt have claimed that tear gas canisters made by CSI were fired at them, often at close range, by security forces. According to the leading Egyptian daily Al Ahram, port officials in Suez recently protested against unloading a shipment of CSI-manufactured tear gas destined for the Supreme Council of Armed Forces in Cairo.

Amnesty International has joined the port officials’ protest, issuing a sharply worded statement singling out the use of CSI tear gas in Egypt, and calling on the US government to stop approving sales of the product to Egypt because of its misuse against protesters. Tear gas has become the main instrument by which authoritarian regimes control social protests that challenge their power in the Middle East. Used tear-gas canisters litter the streets of Cairo and Tunis. Identical canisters allow the Israeli army to crush unarmed demonstrations throughout the West Bank, without attracting widespread condemnation from the international community. What seems certain is that until tear gas is viewed as the deadly weapon it can be, authoritarian governments will continue to use it with impunity.

This piece was originally published in The National on 17 December 2011

Ben Ehrenreich’s account of the unarmed demonstrations in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh perfectly captures the Palestinians’ everyday struggles for things Westerners take for granted, from freedom of movement to access to water [“Drip, Jordan,” Report, December]. Bernard Avishai’s “Abraham’s Children” [Essay, December], on the other hand, adopts an outdated, simplistic narrative, arguing that, through economic cooperation, peace could finally be achieved. Read together, Ehrenreich’s account of the events shaping the conflict on the ground and Avishai’s idealistic argument seem to demonstrate how we must move on from the hopeful but failed logic of the Oslo process in favor of a practical discussion of civil rights. As the Israeli occupation becomes more deeply entrenched, a Palestinian uprising is increasingly likely. Without more reported pieces like Ehrenreich’s, how will the Western observer understand these developments?

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The above is a letter which will be published in the January issue of Harper’s Magazine concerning Ben Ehrenreich’s recent piece about water in Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Few writers have the narrative ability to capture the subtitles of the perverse situation which exists in the West Bank like Mr. Ehrenreich. It is likely due to his keen writing eye, perfected in two challenging works of fiction that he was able to deftly capture the nuance which exists here and present them in a fluid and engrossing article. Indeed, the Kafkaesque system that Israel has created for Palestinians when it comes to all aspects of daily life requires the careful attention of a novelist in order to accurately capture the hardships that define life under Israeli rule. I have long thought that the situation which exists in the West Bank is ideal fodder from which a stimulating yet filthy novel can be written, and Ehrenreich’s piece confirms this feeling.

The piece takes the reader through a water journey in the West Bank—settlements with swimming pools and barren Palestinian villages—but ultimately addresses the structure of Israeli occupation with attention to detail that typifies the work of Amira Hass. Along the way, Ehrenreich dropped into the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh—a place which has been the subject of many +972 posts—and uses his outsider perspective to capture the human details of the greater fight between Occupied Palestinians and their Israeli handlers. His piece ends with a quote from an Israeli activist who shyly notes that, in two years of unarmed resistance, villagers and their supporters have yet to reach their stolen spring. That is it! It captures the tenacity of the movement and its ultimate helplessness in the sea of Israeli occupation.

Put simply, Ehrenreich has delivered a brilliant and deeply reported piece of writing which readers of +972 would be well served to read. I have uploaded a copy of the piece to Scribd, you can read it here… just don’t tell Harper’s.

Due to the great fear of factual discourse regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there is an unprecedented attack taking place on the free flow of information underway in Israel and the United States. In Israel, organizations like B’Tselem have been targeted with anti-democratic legislation in the Knesset. Even former Israeli combat soldiers brave enough to openly talk about their experience in the West Bank and Gaza are labelled terrorists and marginalized in society. Israel’s democratic safeguards, for the Jewish citizens of the country, are eroding at an astonishingly fast rate. Some might argue that this was bound to happen in a country which deprived the democratic rights of 1.7 million citizens since its inception.

The seamlessness of the occupation, its entrenchment and maintenance, is taking place on both sides of the Atlantic. Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich’s recent comments regarding the “invention” of the Palestinian people confirm that those who wish to defend or at least ignore Israel’s occupation are increasingly interested in the elimination of the Palestinian people from American minds. Surprisingly, or maybe not, this corrosive thinking is now a component of the US presidential election.

Supporters of Israel’s current polices have renewed efforts to smear journalists and policy pundits who engage in factual discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Josh Block, former hit man of AIPAC, was exposed last week as leading a campaign of conservative journalists to smear journalists as “anti-Israel” and “borderline anti-Semitic” if they fail to follow the carefully scripted narrative of Israel discourse in the United States.  Block’s attack strategy specifically targeted liberal policy outfits like the Center for American Progress (CAP) and Media Matters with the intention to paint them as anti-Semitic based on their Israel coverage. Jennifer Rubin, the conservative Washington Post blogger who has endorsed calls for the genocide of the Palestinian people, dutifully used her position to amplify the unfounded calls.

Nowhere is this tactic of intimidation and narrative control clearer than in the work of the self-appointed sage of all things Israel, Jeffery Goldberg. Perhaps it was his time as prison guard at the notorious Ketziot prison during the first Intifada where Goldberg learned the tenacity necessary to defend irrational behaviour in a seemingly rational way. Taken as a whole, Goldberg’s body of work will likely be studied when this conflict comes to an end as one of the most powerful examples of rationalizing the devolution of Israel’s democracy for its Jewish citizens and defending the entrenchment of occupation.

Last week, Goldberg used his prowess to attack American journalist Max Blumenthal. Blumenthal, an award winning journalist with deep knowledge of the conflict, recently wrote a lengthy piece in Al Akhbar on the growing influence of Israeli military tactics in the United States. In the piece, Karen Greenberg, the director of the Fordham School of Law’s Center on National Security, is quoted:

After 9/11 we reached out to the Israelis on many fronts and one of those fronts was torture,” Greenberg told me. “The training in Iraq and Afghanistan on torture was Israeli training. There’s been a huge downside to taking our cue from the Israelis and now we’re going to spread that into the fabric of everyday American life? It’s counter-terrorism creep. And it’s exactly what you could have predicted would have happened.

Goldberg, unwilling to engage in a factual discussion on the content of Blumenthal’s piece, went to Greenberg, acting on a tip from one of his readers. The Israel sage then wrote a post claiming that Greenberg told him in a phone conversation that “she never told Max Blumenthal any such thing [referring to the above quote].” With smoking gun in hand, Goldberg claimed that Blumenthal made up the quote.

Blumenthal responded to Goldberg’s nefarious claims, citing Greenberg’s publishing record on the torture issue:

Greenberg’s statement to me did not come out of the blue: A book she co-authored with Joshua Dratel, “The Road to Abu Ghraib,” contains a lengthy section on Israeli court rulings authorizing torture and torture techniques refined by the Shin Bet. In a subsequent article, Greenberg and Dratel proposed questions for Donald Rumsfeld about torture. Here is one: “Did your discussions of torture involve consulting experts in Israel..?”

Enter liberal Mother Jones blogger Adam Serwer. Continuing the Blumenthal smear campaign, Serwer proved that the entire thing was without merit and basically amounted to a personal attack for writing a bold piece. In a series of private emails with labor journalist Mike Elk, Serwer admitted that Blumenthal could have quoted Greenberg’s words more or less accurately, but he still does not believe the content of Blumenthal’s piece. The following is a direct quote from one of the emails:

[Karen] Greenberg is a frequent source of mine. She felt misquoted/taken out of context, and she doesn’t have the knowledge to back up the claim Max attributed to her. Even if Max quoted her words accurately, the underlying claim that Israeli interrogators trained the US in torture isn’t proven. I have no idea if it’s false or not, but it’s not proven, because (a) Max didn’t prove it and (b) the person he quoted to substantiate the claim says she doesn’t know if it’s true.

Jeffery Goldberg has failed to provide a comment on the developing story. I would not hold your breath for one either – that is not his function here.  Serwer’s piece, not unusual for the likes of Goldberg, is notable since it raises important questions concerning the editorial line of Mother Jones on such a sensitive topic. In light of Serwer’s admission, journalist Mark Ames asks the right questions about Mother Jones:

Is Mother Jones now in the business of smearing journalism that dares to investigate the ties between U.S. police departments responsible for violently crushing the Occupy protests, and Israeli occupation forces that violently repress Palestinians? What are the venerable labor-left magazine’s editorial guidelines and ethical standards?

A coordinated international effort is underway to smear and discredit those journalists and policy people who engage in factual discourse regarding Israel’s current policies in the West Bank and their effect on the country’s democratic institutions. Everyone from Israeli NGOs to Jewish American journalists bold enough to draw attention to the policies used to maintain and profit from Israeli occupation are legitimate targets. Given the absence of facts to support Israeli positions vis-a-via the Palestinians, narrative control is the only mechanism that Israel and its supporters can activate. Facile attempts to paint skeptics as anti-Semitic (Josh Block’s attacks on CAP, e.g.), or smear campaigns against journalists (Goldberg’s attacks on Blumenthal, e.g.) serve to demonstrate the precarious position of those defending irrational and even suicidal Israeli policies.

For the Israeli government and its people, the ultimate objective in all of this is maintenance of the status quo. Continued entrenchment of occupation, low levels of violence from occupied Palestinians and increased revenue from the mighty Israeli military-industrial complex must be protected. Those that detract will be side-lined, outcast and ignored at all costs, including the destruction of Israel’s democratic standards for its Jewish citizens.

Ultimately, the narrative is changing and Israel is failing to catch up. The reality of the occupation is becoming impossible to conceal in the social media age. The smug and heartless reaction of various Israeli army officials on Twitter to the killing of Mustafa Tamimi is the most recent example that Israel has lost its moral compass. Attacks on credible and courageous journalists like Max Blumenthal will intensify as McCarthyite smear campaigns are the last option for the defence of Israel’s current policies. All the while, Israel’s moral fabric will continue to disintegrate in plain sight. Unsustainable is an understatement.

*UPDATE*

An update on this story by Max Blumenthal:

Serwer’s source: a Holocaust survivor denier
Why did Serwer decide to publish his smear in the first place? Who inspired him to publish such a baseless screed? I have learned that Serwer’s original source was a small-time pro-Israel activist named Zachary Novetsky, who is better known as the full-time Twitter troll @ZachofArabia.

Novetsky is a Fordham University student whose anti-Palestinian sentiments are well known, and who once claimed that Hedy Epstein, a Palestine solidarity activist who escaped Nazi Germany before losing her entire family to the Holocaust, was not in fact a Holocaust survivor. Indeed, Serwer was taking his cues from a notorious nut job; a frenetic Twitter troll and Holocaust survivor denier who any self-respecting journalist would have immediately shunned.

After the publication of my piece, Novetsky said he approached Greenberg on campus to confront her about her statement. Then he approached journalists with the claim that I had “fabricated” Greenberg’s quote. “You know Blumenthal fabricated that Karen Greenberg [quote],” Novetsky wrote to a journalist who requested to remain anonymous [see embedded images]. “I asked her, she said it’s ‘misattributed’ and she’s ‘not happy about it.’”

Direct Twitter message from ZachofArabia to journalist who requested to remain anonymous

It is hard to know what Greenberg meant by “misattributed,” but she certainly did not tell Novetsky that I invented her quote, as he claimed. Neverthess, two days later, Novetsky queried Serwer on Twitter, claiming to him (before referring to me as “Maxi-pad”) that my quoting of Greenberg was “a lie.” “Wait you mean she literally DIDN’T say that? Not that she’s wrong?” Serwer breathlessly responded to Novetsky. “Literally,” Novetsky assured him [see embedded Tweets below]. After being egged on by Novetsky, aka @ZachofArabia, Serwer went straight to Greenberg to extract the quote he sought.

Zach of Arabia tweets to Adam Serwer

Zach of Arabia tweets to Adam Serwer

Serwer’s motives are now out in the open. He never intended to engage in a serious appraisal of my reporting on the Israelification of local law enforcement. His goal was the same as his source, the hasbarist Novetsky, who routinely uses Twitter to harass me and other critics of Israel with juvenile, insulting remarks — “Maxi-pad.”

For the past year and a half, I have written an average of one post every two days for +972. I have written about everything from South African political connections with Israel to Palestinian child prisoners in Israeli military jails. Using all media platforms at my disposal, I have refined a new form of journalism which mixes tweeting, photography and old-fashioned reporting, in order to present views from one of the world’s most news-saturated conflicts, which often go ignored in the mainstream media. +972 is a volunteer project, and unfortunately I’m unable to continue with this arrangement. That said, this project has been a labour of love from the start.

Journalism is at a transformative stage. Never before has it been so easy to quickly and widely publish information. Never before has it been so difficult to make a living as a journalist. +972 is a project in new journalism. When I joined the founding team of the site, I was hopeful that a new batch of voices would emerge as a source of respected information on the complex and emotional issues relating to Palestine/Israel. I’m happy to be able to say that after a year and a half, +972 has become a widely-cited legitimate English-language source of news and commentary from the region.

Today, I am announcing my departure from +972 on 1 January 2012. I leave +972 with a heavy but satisfied heart as I move toward more mainstream journalistic outlets with the hopes of bringing my new media experience to a larger audience. I am happy to announce that I will be airing my first piece of radio journalism in the following weeks on Monocle 24. Additionally, the first months of 2012 will see increased energy on a book project tackling identity issues on the ground in Israel/Palestine told through my personal journey. Naturally, I will continue reporting, writing and digesting the political and cultural events from my perch in Ramallah on a variety of platforms, including Twitter and in newspapers from South Africa to Abu Dhabi.  I plan to write a couple more posts in December on +972 before closing my channel on 1 January 2012.

I am confident that the new space of journalism which we helped create on +972 will continue to grow following my departure as my fellow writers perfect the “spooky craft” of blogging. I am indebted to my fellow writers and especially the founding team of +972 for the past year and a half of collaboration and even disagreement at times.  It has been an incredible and sometimes emotional experience, which has greatly contributed to my growth as a journalist and observer of Israeli and Palestinian politics.

In the polarized world of debate about Israel/Palestine, certain terms have acquired such strong connotations that an honest and factual discussion of important issues is almost at a standstill. From the family dinner table to college campus throughout the world, terms like “BDS,” “anti-Zionist” and “liberal Zionist” have become virtual conversation stoppers – depending on the circle. Yesterday, I wrote a strongly worded critique of Bernard Avishai’s new piece on the Palestinian Right of Return (RoR), which appears in this month’s edition of Harper’s Magazine. I accused Avishai of sloppy reporting, given the paucity of critical Palestinian voices in his piece. I argued that Avisahi abandoned a broad factual discussion of this complex issue in favour of pushing a tired Israeli narrative, often used by liberal Zionist writers, which assumes symmetry between the players and downplays the crucial barriers to the resolution of the issues on the ground.

While pointed, the piece was part of a larger attempt to expose the working conditions which many liberal Zionist writers employ when analysing Israel/Palestine. A specific point which deserves larger treatment is the incredible contempt which these writers often demonstrate to their audience by adopting positions of authority while willingly ignoring voices on the ground that to do not confirm their own viewpoints. Naturally, this criticism can be applied to all writing on the conflict, but given the ideological inconsistency of liberal Zionism, special attention is required to understand how the ideology has been so successful, especially in the American Jewish context.

The piece engendered the beginnings of a rich debate about the nature of Zionism in general, and specifically the liberal Zionist discourse. It is my belief that this is not only a crucial debate for Israeli/Jewish society but one of absolute necessity for Israelis and Palestinians to have in a joint and respectful capacity.

The following are a number of comments, some of which have been shortened for clarity (the language has not been changed). You can view the full comments on the piece itself. Using the handle Henry Weinstein, one commenter asked why I choose to address Avishai’s piece while the Israeli right presents many more problems for those concerned with Israel or, at least, an Israel with some semblance of morality:

Meanwhile, Joseph Dana, Israeli Far Right is blossoming….What’s worth is it to hunt liberal Zionists, when Fascists are hunting you? Remember Weimar. Food for thought.

My (shortened) response:

I think that liberal Zionism, as used today, is a dangerous and, in some profound ways, dishonest system of thought. While the wave of Israeli far right nationalism is abhorrent, one can’t claim that Liebermann is a dishonest politician. It can be debated that Israeli far right nationalism is the purest form of Zionism due to the fact that zero explanation or apologia can be detected in its rhetoric. Let’s quickly note that it was the Labour Zionists who have had the better track record of building settlements and starting wars. The right, for all of its hot rhetoric, is often left with nothing more than hot rhetoric while the left, the liberal labour Zionists, are the ones that really do the dirty business of starting wars and building settlements.

I used to think that liberal Zionism was THE proper Israeli political posture for retaining ‘Jewish self-determination’ (an exact definition for this term still evades me despite the compelling arguments of many a liberal Zionist) and espousing liberal values similar to those I had grown up with in the United States. Then I moved to Israel and meet a number of Mertez voters, liberal Zionists par excellence, who harboured no reservation about serving in the army or sending their children to the army. I found that many ‘liberal Zionists’ I spoke with actually maintained an incredible level of racism toward Arabs. Instead of being an honest about the racism and moving forward, they seemed to wrestle with it. As if in a constant battle of suppression and cognitive dissonance, these liberal Zionist types embraced the liberal zionist mantra that “it is the settlers and the crazy right wingers fault.’

You can see that a narrative has emerged from this type of thinking. Blame the ‘crazies’ but do not change the system which the crazies are a product of. I believe that Noam Sheizaf has written on this website about the notion, popular among liberal Zionists, that there exists a ‘good Israel’ and a ‘bad Israel.’ At its heart, Israel is a good place full of well-intentioned individuals with a strong connection with Europe but it is the ‘bad Israel’ of extremists and strange immigrants that are polluting the project for everyone.

Following this comment were a number of thoughtful responses from Ayla, a commenter. These comments will be presented together.

I actually won’t use the term “Zionism” anymore; it means too many different things to too many different people so you never know what you’re talking about in dialogue. You, JD, live in Ramallah, not Israel, so you don’t have to wrestle with hypocrisy as I do by living in Israel. then again, I don’t actually see my life as hypocritical (as some do), because I don’t break things down in such a black and white way. I see my life here more as paradoxical than hypocritical, and I believe that paradox is inherent in everything. Like you, JD, I don’t believe in the all good or all bad (country or citizens), though there is certainly good and bad behavior; more and less educated, etc. The more I learn, the less I know.

It may work better not to suggest we forget Zionism, but rather that we move into a post-Zionist — complete with new terminology — way of supporting (fighting for) an Israel we can believe in, which for Liberals (possibly with old-fasioned, Zionist ideals) is simply not this Israel.

My response:

Ultimately I claim that the Zionist ideology in so far as it privileges one ethnic group over another is at odds with liberal values. Therefore, liberal Zionist, by definition, is convoluted. One can respect the Zionist dream or idea but understand that its application is a barrier to genuine peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Gustav Landauer once said that socialism needs to be left, not destroyed but left. Perhaps the time has come in which Zionism needs to be left, not destroyed but replaced with something which prides itself on the idea of equality for all under Israeli rule. Is this an ‘anti-Zionist’ statement? Quite the contrary. Perhaps Zionism must be forgotten in order to achieve the Zionist dream of a state living in security and peace.

Finally, SH weighed in with the following:

For the same reasons as Ayla, I hardly dare use the term Zionist. To prove her point, growing up I saw Zionism as the certainty that we Jews belonged to the holy land and should have the right to live there, because coming from a religious, pacifist home that’s how it was put to me. Different to secular Zionism and even religious nationalist Zionism. My diaspora Jewish school had difficulty with Zionism but caved in to parental pressure concerning the Hatikva (national anthem of Israel) by changing the phrase “a free nation” into “a holy nation”. On immigrating to Israel as a teen, I found freedom of sorts for some, real holiness rarely and eventually concluded that Zionism must have been achieved upon independence. The bits of the declaration of independence that pleased me most confirmed that we were going for equality, which meant that when “they” came around to understanding that we were good people who didn’t want to harm them, they would learn to love us. Words turned out to be one thing and what was happening on the ground quite another, proof that Zionism had already been left. In truth, once the dream was realized, Zionism-on-life-support strait-jacketed Israel and its leaders into unimaginable contortions.
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Again like Ayla, I would not forget Zionism; no more memory blanks please, we’ve more than enough of those already. But I dislike the term post-Zionism too. If we need another “ism” to motivate us – not sure we do – it should refer to how we want to move on, not to what we have left.

What is presented in these comments is a clear tension in Zionist ideology. I maintain my claim that Zionism is an exclusionary ideology privileging one ethnic group over another, and this presents a major barrier to lasting reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. The unease which these commenters, and many Jews throughout the world, have with Zionism signals a possible space which could be opened if “Zionism” was abandoned for a more equitable form of Jewish nationalism, which necessarily includes open discussion about the rights of all under Israeli rule, whether they are in Gaza City or Haifa. But this is not just about what I think. How do you approach these issues?

Lastly, I would like to take this opportunity to invite Mr. Avishai to a formal debate on Zionism and its discontents in the avenue of his choosing.

Recent work by authors Bernard Avishai and Gershom Gorenberg reflect the inability of liberal Zionist champions to engage in an honest debate about the core issues of contention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The noted liberal Zionist writer, Bernard Avishai, has a longish piece on the Palestinian Right of Return (RoR) in this month’s edition of Harper’s Magazine (no online version yet). Before I discuss its content, I believe it crucial to note one general aspect of this piece. We must ask ourselves why an openly Zionist thinker who happens to be a Canadian immigrant is writing about Palestinian right of return without a Palestinian counter article. His penmanship of the article speaks volumes about the ability of the press in the United States on the ability to allow Palestinians to speak for themselves. His voice might be an important one, but the absence of a Palestinian view on an issue of such weight such as the Right of Return should be taken as a sign of how far the American press must go in changing the way it covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Avishai’s article is exhaustive and draws upon a variety of interviews, both from high level officials and intellectuals. While his recollection of history tends to be grounded, it is in the current debate where he gets into hot water. Curiously absent, however, from Avishai’s piece is any discussion of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, one of the primary Palestinian civil society vehicles in fighting for the RoR as specified in UN Resolution 194. Also absent is any discussion with rank and file Palestinians living in the West Bank, a mere twenty minutes’ drive from Avishai’s residence in the formerly Arab Baka neighborhood of West Jerusalem. Although to his credit, Avishai does cite anonymous “friends in Ramallah” at points in the piece in order to bring in necessary but vague Palestinian voice in the West Bank.

While narrowly exhaustive, Avishai’s article is potholed with images of Israeli-Palestinian symmetry that do not exist. His choice of imagery carefully conforms to the accepted Western narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which effectively adopts the Israeli understanding of events on the ground. Namely, that the conflict, thought to be fought between two relative equals, is about peace and security. Take this sentence, which comes three paragraphs from the end of the piece, as an example:

The populated areas of Israel and Palestine together are about the size of greater Los Angeles. The peoples share not only a business ecosystem but everything from water sources to the telecommunications systems. Neither side can set up a 4G network, neither side can manage even wastewater, without the permanent cooperation of the other.

You see, it is all so simple. Everyone is sharing and cooperation is crucial to lasting peace. Wait, what about the occupation, you ask? Could it be that Palestinians share a business ecosystem with Israel because Israel is occupying their land and using them as a captive market? The power of the Israeli narrative lays in its ability to ignore these factual components of reality.  Given Avishai’s inability or unwillingness to interview Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon or Jordan or even in the Qalandia refugee camp seven miles from Jerusalem, his reliance on the Israeli narrative is not surprising.

The piece offers an upbeat and almost pleasant outlook. Perhaps, this is only made possible by ignoring the viewpoints of representative Palestinians. Recently, Gershom Gorenberg, one of Avishai’s ideological peers and a fellow North American living in the same formerly Palestinian Baka neighborhood of West Jerusalem, recently noted the following about diaspora Palestinians in the United States, in a piece in the American Prospect:

Diaspora Palestinians with their own overdone nationalism and a small coterie of Jews whose express their disappointment with Zionism through mirror-image anti-Zionism—as if denying Jewish rights to national self-determination were somehow more progressive than denying Palestinian rights. But realistic, moderate progressives always face the challenge of portraying a more complex reality than extremists recognize.

Clearly, Gorenberg does not share the unbridled optimism of Avishai, but the sentiments he expressesd above can certainly be found lurking in between the lines of Avishai’s text. This is especially clear in their shared authoritarian understanding that as Western liberal Zionists living in Israel they are the true “realistic, moderate progressives” who will solve the region’s problems. Avishai’s hopeful look to the future, however, is welcome, due to the cynicism prevalent in Israeli and Palestinian society, but it also precariously borders on the naïve. In the piece, the major sources of Avishai’s hope are the Israeli tent protesters. Those brave revolutionaries provide Avishai with confirmation that Israelis are ready and able to think outside the box and approach the systemic problems of Israeli society with new vigor. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Had Avishai broached the idea of the Palestinian RoR to any of the tent protesters at the peak of their social justice movement back in July, the issue would have likely been labelled “political” and thus dismissed. In fact, other than the handful of protests which took place in mixed cities like Haifa, attended by both between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Israeli Jews, as well as one “1948″ tent in Tel Aviv, the tent protests was a movement not interested in Israeli-Palestinian political issues, let alone the Palestinian RoR. On the surface, the reason given for this was the horrible polarization which exists in Israeli society over these issues. But something else was at play.

Arguments over this issue were featured on this website. Many of these arguments are a testament to the fact that while Israelis desperately want to have their society to be understood as “normal,” they are simply unable or unwilling to challenge prevailing attitudes concerning Palestinians. These attitudes help maintain a system of occupation and outright institutional discrimination which has lead to an international consensus that Israel is far from a normal country, but rather one engaged in a form of ethnic racism similar to Apartheid or Hafradah.

The widely-held argument that the tent protesters offer a space inside Israel to negotiate issues like the RoR is at best hopeful naiveté and at worst, an effort to portray Israeli society as something it is not. At its peak, the protesters were able to draw 500,000 Israelis (the proportionate equivalent of 17 million Americans) on to the streets to demanding social justice without any mention of the occupation or the rights of all under Israeli rule. It is hard to interpret this as anything other than the fact that Israel is not ready to end its occupation by itself given the overwhelming support for the protests and their continued reticence on Palestinian issues. If the tent protesters were unwilling or unable to talk bout the occupation, why would anyone argue that they are ready to confront the much more difficult issue of the RoR, and or Israel’s culpability in creating the Palestinian refugee problem?

In 1948, Ben Gurion’s nascent army attempted to put the Zionist dream of separation from the natives into practice by forcibly removing as many of Palestine’s native inhabitants as possible and thus creating the Palestinian refugee problem. The 1967 war of conquest continued the trend and the current Kafkaesque occupation of a bureaucratic permit system has made life as hard as possible for West Bank and Gazan Palestinians, driven with by the misplaced hope that they will simply leave.

The 2011 Palestine Papers– secret minutes from the 2008 negotiations process between Israel and the PA released by Al Jazeera– confirm that “transfer” remains a driving component of Israeli policy towards native Palestinians. In the papers, Kadmina MK Tzipi Livini is quoted in meetings with senior PA officials as negotiating the terms of transferring Palestinians citizens of Israel into the West Bank in the case of a final status agreement.

The West Bank Separation Barrier is perhaps the most concrete confirmation of the Zionist separation principle in action. Its effect, both physically and psychologically, has been profound for Israeli society. Ironically exemplified in the Israeli tent protests, young Israelis no longer have connection with Palestinians outside of their army service in which they are thrust into a position of military power over occupied Palestinians. This has resulted in, among other examples, an Israeli public able to demonstrate for social justice while ignoring the rights of all under Israeli rule.

In order for Avishai to avoid these sober developments in Israeli society as it pertains to the settlement of the RoR issue, he must warp the situation on the ground through the creation of basic symmetry between Israelis and Palestinians. His reliance on interviews with Israeli and Palestinian politicians ensures that voices on the ground dealing with the separation principle in action remain invisible. Add ambiguously hopeful language which confirms the Western discussion narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and one is left feeling as though peace and reconciliation is just around the corner. It is not.

Quoting Ramallah- based political thinker Sam Bahour at the end of his piece, Avishai ultimately draws attention to the absence of equality and partnership between Israelis and Palestinians. In my estimation this is the core problem concerning the RoR issue. Avishai hints at the issue of rights by quoting Adam Shatz’s important piece in London Review of Books. While Shatz’s piece was a thoughtful addition to the discourse, I am unsure why Avishai, a resident of Jerusalem, did not go an interview the same or similar people that Shatz did. Why rely on irrational hope when you can go out and interview people on the ground who possess deep insight on this complex issue? Perhaps Avishai’s (and Gorenberg’s) form of Liberal Zionism can no longer function without a heavy dose of hope and clear contempt for overt Palestinian nationalism, grounded in the notion of the right of return as an inalienable right.

The Bill was meant to replace a piece of apartheid-era legislation that governed the classification of state secrets. [Ronnie] Kasrils [Former South African intelligence minister] sought to create legislation that would protect state secrets but also uphold the constitutional principal of transparent governance. It included a provision that would allow whistleblowers to leak information that was in the public interest without fear of reprisal.

According to Kasrils, this version of the Bill was never tabled in Parliament and was scrapped by ruling party representatives at the committee stage after he resigned from government in September 2008.

When the Bill reappeared, its provisions were even more draconian than before. The new draft sought to create a law that would allow any organ of state, from the largest government department down to the smallest municipality, to classify any document as secret and set out harsh penalties of up to 25 years in jail for whistleblowers.

Under the bill, which is an amendment to the existing defamation law, the maximum compensation in a libel suit will increase exponentially from NIS 50,000 (~$13,000) to NIS 300,000, a whopping $80,000. Most journalists I know in Israel make between $2,000 and $3,000 a month, tops.

[The Libel Law] carries a clause that says such lawsuits might be won without proof of damages; and another clause that stipulates a reporter must publish the comment of his subject in full. In other words, I can get sued for writing that the author of the bill is more dangerous to Israel’s future than Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah combined; and, if a newspaper wants to run a 300-words report suggesting a certain company is engaging in malpractice, it must also run the full comment of the company – even if it’s 5,000 words long. With the likely result the report will not run at all.

While the secrecy bill and the libel law are clearly addressing different facets of press freedom, the effect will likely be similar in both countries. Namely, journalists will have to go through a more rigorous form of self-censorship in order to avoid long jail sentences or heavy fines. One other notable difference has been the public reactions to the two bills.

In South Africa, media organizations have published editorials slamming the secrecy bill, and have started a massive campaign against the recent legislation. South African civil society has taken to the streets in protest of the draconian laws calling today “Black Tuesday.” Even the website of the University of Cape Town has ‘censored’ its homepage in protest to the bill.

In Israel, the press has reacted with anger to the proposed law. Earlier this week, an unprecedented conference on press freedom took place in Tel Aviv.  Even the legal adviser to the Government Press Office (GPO) has quit in protest over the libel law. An impromptu protest has been planned for this evening (22 Nov 2011) in Tel Aviv but numbers are expected to be small (roughly 6000 have registered on Facebook).

The major difference between South Africa and Israel is the engagement of the mainstream public. South Africans are taking to the streets in much larger numbers than Israelis, who have been dealing with attacks on freedom of speech for months. Perhaps these attacks on press freedom will provide the pretext for Israelis and South Africans to build more (and needed) civil society cooperation. On a governmental level, Israel and South Africa have enjoyed a close partnership for years. Attacks on the press should be the spark that get ordinary South Africans and Israelis (and Palestinians) talking to each other about democracy in a situation of Apartheid or Hafradah. Like it or not, South Africa and Israel are tragically connected at the hip in more than one way.

Update:

According to my fellow writers Noam Sheizaf and Dahlia Scheindlin, “Some 200 people demonstrated [this evening] in front of the headquarters of the ruling Likud party, blocking King George Street in the center of the city [Tel Aviv].” Call it apathy or what have you but the Israeli public is far from taking to the streets in protest over anti-democratic legislation.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Recent police violence at Occupy Wall Street events demonstrate a crackdown of legitimate political protest in the United States. Watching video (like the one embedded above) from a recent Occupy Oakland protest, one is certainly left with the feeling that American police are using increasingly violent methods of crowd control. Some Occupy events are beginning to look like Friday demonstrations in the West Bank. Last week, while giving a lecture at the University of Pittsburgh, I experienced some of the tactics used by police to stifle dissent and combat the occupy movement.

For the past two weeks, I have been touring around the East Coast, delivering lectures on the state of things in Palestine based on my reporting and commentary. Last Thursday, my tour stopped at the University of Pittsburgh for an event with Palestinian-American poet Remi Kanazi, organized by Students for Justice in Palestine.

The event started smoothly with Remi reciting his fiery poetry to an engaged crowd.  Midway through Remi’s set, a group of Occupy Pittsburghers triumphantly entered the cavernous auditorium where we were speaking, followed closely by an angry-looking group of police officers. Fists in the air, the occupiers announced that they were coming to the lecture. Within moments, the auditorium was buzzing. The organizer of our event, rather timidly, explained to Remi and I that an additional 30 occupy Pittsburghers were waiting to enter the lecture but the police were preventing them from attending. Now, the entire event was threatened with cancellation by the police.

An hour of chaotic back and forth between the organisers, protesters and police ensued as Remi and I kept speaking. We discussed the techniques which Israel uses to stifle Palestinian dissent in the West Bank. We talked about the rubber bullets that Israel fires on unarmed protesters in reference to what happen in Oakland, when police used similar bullets against Occupy Wall Street protesters (again, see video above).  I spoke about the first Intifada when Israel would routinely outlaw public political lectures. Even flying a Palestinian flag during those days was an offense punishable by long jail sentences. As we talked, police and protesters outside were loudly wrangling with one and other but those inside hung on every word.

Eventually, the head of the campus police entered the lecture hall and addressed the, by this time, rambunctious crowd. He explained that the police were simply trying to “protect campus property” and occupy Pittsburghers were not trustworthy. He reportedly told organisers of the event that he wished he “could pick and choose” who attended since he did not want to shut down the entire event. As he spoke, it felt as though something serious could kick off between the protesters and the police, despite his generally jovial personality. I joked with the crowd telling everyone that the police were actually paid actors in a plot to recreate the Israeli occupation in Pittsburgh. The police chief either did not understand the joke or did not find it very funny.

In the end, the police allowed us to finish our event but 30 occupy Pittsburghers were denied entry and  left standing outside. One person was arrested for “disobeying a police order” as we finished our lecture. The police attempt to shut down our lecture backfired as the incident clearly emboldened the occupiers.

After losing an important component of my freedom of speech in Israel due to the passage of the anti-boycott law, I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable with the entire episode in Pittsburgh. It was the first time that I experienced a clear attempt to stifle debate and selectively choose who can attend a free and open lecture in the United States. Before you know it, the Palestinian experience just might come to America.

*For those of you in the UK, I will be doing a number of events in London next week, including a lecture at LSE on Monday evening and a book launch event at Amnesty International Human Rights Centre on Thrusday. Event details can be found on my Twitter feed and Facebook profile.