These elderly Jews recounted disparate experiences of surviving the Holocaust. A Czech woman and a Hungarian woman survived as children because their parents sent them away to live as Christians – one in a convent, the other with a non-Jewish family in a different town. Another woman survived because she escaped from Poland to the Soviet Union and was sent at age 16 to a forced labour camp in Siberia. A man escaped occupied France as a 16 year-old by swimming a freezing river and climbing the Pyrenees, only to be arrested by Spanish police and interned in a labor camp under extremely harsh conditions. And another was shipped from Lodz to Auschwitz-Birkenau when he was 15, but survived the death camp due to remarkable good fortune. They told their stories with unusual candor and a notable lack of sentimentality. One of the men, Max Bornstein, said the extreme loneliness of being the only survivor of his family precipitated a nervous breakdown after the war, and that he had never really recovered emotionally.

But these five survivors were unanimous about one thing: The experience of writing their memoirs and seeing them published was immensely cathartic and meaningful. Their history was recorded now; it would not be forgotten after they died.

While I watched the films about these amateur authors who had survived, as one of them put it, due to a combination of sheer luck and the willingness of total strangers to risk their lives for them, a little part of my mind was busy worrying about the post I had promised to write about the Nakba – the Palestinian dispersal and dispossession of 1948.

Like so many conventionally educated Jewish children, I knew a lot about the Holocaust from a very young age – too much, perhaps. It is probably the most thoroughly documented historical event of all time, and I grew up at a time when there were middle-aged survivors everywhere – like the woman who taught me religion and Bible when I was 7 years old, or the woman with the camp tattoo on her arm who ran the snack concession at the Jewish Community Center, where I took my swimming lessons, or the distant cousin who had been a Mengele twin. Most of them are dead now, of course. It’s been nearly 70 years since the war ended.

Over and over, our teachers emphasized that the Holocaust was a unique event – that comparing it to any other crime was an insult to the memories of our dead. Genocide is not, unfortunately, a unique crime, although the Nazis did manage to add the unprecedented element of industrialized slaughter. It is important to record and remember one’s own history; we Jews understand that well, and have recorded our history carefully. The people who instigated the genocide of the Jews have acknowledged their crimes, asked forgiveness, made restitution payments, outlawed Nazism and made Holocaust studies part of their school curriculum. One can never really apologize for committing genocide, but acknowledgment and accepting responsibility are essential. Otherwise it’s not possible to move on.

Very few Israelis and / or Jews are willing to accept and acknowledge the pain caused the Palestinian people by the Nakba. We deny, deflect, turn away, ignore. We get angry. We accuse those amongst us who wish to remember and record, like Zochrot, of undermining the state of Israel or denying Jews their right to self-determination. Or of being traitors. How can the act of remembering be a betrayal?

We compare forced exile and dispossession to Auschwitz and Babi Yar and say the Palestinians couldn’t possibly know about real suffering. We claim that 800,000 Jews from Arab countries became refugees after 1948, as if that were the fault of the Palestinians or as if that justified the exile of the equivalent number of Palestinians from their homes. We ask what’s the matter with the Arab states, why don’t they take care of their fellow Arabs instead of leaving them to rot in refugee camps.

We praise MK Ahmed Tibi for addressing the Knesset with a moving, empathetic speech about the trauma caused by the Holocaust, but we jeer or ignore him when he points out that the Arab towns in Israel lack basic services and infrastructure, or that not a single new Arab town has been built since 1948, while new Jewish settlements are built constantly, both inside the 1948 borders of Israel and in the West Bank.

In 1950, the American journalist Dorothy Thompson narrated a 30-minute newsreel-style documentary about the Palestinian refugees, with footage and facts that I saw and heard for the first time when I watched it a few months ago. The film is called The Sands of Sorrow and I’ve embedded it below. It includes some odd orientalist commentary here and there, but the overall effect is powerful; it really brings home the meaning of the word ‘nakba,’ or catastrophe. I am sure that most Palestinians my age grew up listening to their parents and grandparents talk about this time in their history, just as I heard stories about Cossacks and pogroms and death camps. But no-one ever told me it didn’t happen or it was my fault or it wasn’t that bad compared to the suffering of other peoples. That kind of revisionism was considered socially unacceptable and ethically reprehensible. And rightly so.

Some of the more shocking statements in The Sands of Sorrow:

• Two years after 1948, 750,000 people were still living in tents or caves in the desert
• They were subsisting on 1,400 calories a day – 300 less than the necessary minimum
• Many of the camps had only one well to provide water for 10,000 people
• There was only one doctor and three nurses for every 20,000 people
•  Only one baby out of five survived past the age of six months

As a very good friend of mine, who grew up in a national-religious Zionist home, once said to me, “It’s not good for the Jewish soul to ignore these things.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

According to several news reports, Egypt has terminated a deal to supply Israel with natural gas. Egyptian sources say that the deal was canceled over a legal dispute, as well as Israel’s failure to pay for the gas over the past four months; Israeli government sources, meanwhile, insist they have paid all the money they owe. Several Israeli officials, including Kadima leader Shaul Mofaz and Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz, have expressed deep concern, with Mofaz calling the unilateral termination of the gas supply a “blatant violation of the peace treaty” that “requires an American response,” and Steinitz saying it was a dangerous precedent that threatens bilateral ties between Egypt and Israel.

The gas deal in fact has nothing to do with the Israel-Egypt peace treaty of 1979. It is a commercial deal that was negotiated between private Egyptian and Israeli business concerns in 2005; the deal was renegotiated in 2009, in the most opaque manner imaginable. No tenders were issued and the terms of the deal were not made public. The Egypt-Israel natural gas deal is resented by most Egyptians, who view it as a sleazy arrangement that allowed Hosni Mubarak, his sons and their cronies to pocket billions of dollars by selling one of Egypt’s most valuable natural resources at a price that is now well below market value – and to Israel, which is deeply unpopular in Egypt.

Egypt’s natural gas pipeline has been sabotaged 14 times since Hosni Mubarak was deposed in February 2011.

Egyptian economist Mohamed El Dahshan does an impressive job of armchair investigative journalism in this blog post, in which he demonstrates the extent to which the natural gas deal was, as he puts it, “a barely concealed cesspool of clientelism, personal relationships and private interests, breaches of government procedure, of transparency rules, and of corporate governance.”

The name Hussein Salem appears several times in El Dahshan’s investigative piece about the gas deal. Salem, 77, is a wealthy businessman who was close to Hosni Mubarak; he was also one of the main Egyptian players in the negotiation of the gas deal with Israel. A few days before Mubarak was forced to resign, Salem fled Egypt for Spain. A month later, he was arrested by the Spanish authorities, who froze assets that included $47 million in cash – this does not include his real estate assets, and this is only the money he kept in Spain. Bloomberg reports that Salem’s son has about $4 billion in hidden assets, according to an Egyptian judicial committee. Salem was held in custody for 11 months, pending a court decision regarding Egypt’s request for extradition. Last month Spain’s National Court ruled that Salem was to be extradited. He has already been tried and convicted in absentia on corruption charges, and sentenced to 15 years in prison. He is believed to have siphoned off $714 million in public money.

Israel currently relies on Egypt for about 40 percent of its natural gas needs. But this situation was set to change, whether or not Egypt terminated its supply of gas. In December 2010, the Israeli government announced the discovery of a huge natural gas field off the Mediterranean coast, named Leviathan; Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau (Yisrael Beiteinu) called it “the most important energy news since the founding of the state [of Israel].”  The field is so big that Israel is now poised to become an exporter of natural gas within about four years. The biggest financial beneficiary of this discovery will be private interests – specifically Yitzhak Tshuva, an immensely rich Israeli businessman who is a controlling shareholder in Delek Group, which has a 22.67 percent drilling interest in the oil field. Tshuva’s international real estate investments include New York’s Plaza Hotel. According to the Israeli financial newspaper Globes, Tshuva and several other companies are currently negotiating a $4 billion deal to supply natural gas to power plants and other companies. Drilling, which commenced in January 2012, is expected to yield 600 million barrels of oil.

Meanwhile, the government-appointed Sheshinski Committee recently recommended a very substantial tax increase on profits from offshore drilling, from 30 percent to between 52 and 60 percent. This, naturally, upset Tshuva and the other investors in the Leviathan natural gas field. No wonder Yuval Steinitz, the finance minister who supported the Sheshinski Committee and approved of its recommendations, is rather concerned at Egypt terminating its supply of natural gas to Israel – at a price that is below market value.

It is convenient for Israeli government officials to respond to Egypt’s termination of the natural gas supply by bringing up the peace treaty and making dark comments about harm to bilateral relations. This sort of thing is easy to sell to the Israeli public, with its fears of the post-Mubarak Islamist parliament and its anti-Israel rhetoric. But Yuval Steinitz and Shaul Mofaz know very well that the gas deal has nothing to do with the peace treaty. Finance Minister Steinitz is probably well aware, too, that without competition from Egypt, the Israeli companies that own the drilling rights to Leviathan have a lot more bargaining power.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As Haaretz reports, hundreds of  Beitar hooligans swarmed into the mall following a game at the nearby Teddy Stadium. They “hurl[ed] racial abuse at Arab workers and customers and chanting anti-Arab slogans, and filled the food hall on the second floor.” Then they mobbed three Arab women eating with their children in the food hall, yelling epithets and spitting on them. Some Arab men employed as cleaners came to the women’s rescue; they had only their broomsticks as weapons, but succeeded in chasing the hooligans away – albeit temporarily. But then…

… a few minutes later [the Beitar fans] returned and assaulted them. “They caught some of them and beat the hell out of them,” said Yair, owner of a bakery located in the food hall. “They hurled people into shops, and smashed them against shop windows. I don’t understand how none shattered into pieces. One cleaner was attacked by some 20 people, poor guy, and then they had a go at his brother who works in a nearby pizza shop and came to his rescue.”

The attackers also asked Jewish shop owners for knives and sticks to serve as weapons but none consented, witnesses said. Avi Biton, Malha’s security director, sent a force of security guards in an attempt to restore order, but they were outnumbered. He called the police who arrived in large numbers about 40 minutes after the brawl started. At about 10.30 P.M., they evacuated the mall and the management shut its doors.

Source: Haaretz

Gideon Avrahami, the director of the mall, called the riot “…disgraceful, shocking, racist incident” and apologized in person to the Arab workers. Avi Biton, the mall’s security director, promised to increase security measures when the next Beitar game was played at the nearby stadium.

Meanwhile, amongst the Israeli media only Haaretz newspaper published a report about this incident – even though it occurred five days ago. One would think that a major race riot in Jerusalem’s largest shopping mall, patronized by Jews and Arabs alike, would garner some significant local media attention. But no.

More shocking and insidious is the fact that, even though the riot was recorded by the Malha shopping centre’s CCTV cameras, no-one has been arrested. Why not? Well, said the police, because no-one filed a complaint.

Okay, let’s try a little thought experiment here. Imagine that a few hundred Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel rioted at the upscale Ramat Aviv mall in northern Tel Aviv. Imagine that they were fans of the Arab soccer team Bnei Sakhnin, that they waved team jerseys and scarves as they chanted “death to Jews” in Arabic and cursed and spat at some nice middle class Jewish women sipping cappuccinos with their children and sharing pains au chocolat at the Arcaffe. Imagine that they ran around the mall, asking for knives to attack the cleaning staff that was trying to protect the women from being attacked. And that they slammed some of those cleaners into plate-glass shop windows.

Imagine that all of this was was recorded on the Ramat Aviv shopping centre’s CCTV cameras.

And then imagine the police announcing to the media that they had not made any arrests because no-one had filed a complaint.

Over the past few years, there have been several cases of prominent Israeli citizens with Arab names who were subjected at Ben Gurion Airport to humiliating procedures so egregious that they were widely publicized in the media.

Sayed Kashua, a well-known Haaretz columnist, creator of the critical and popular hit television series Arab Labour  and author of three critically acclaimed novels (in Hebrew), has written several times about the onerous security checks to which he has been subjected, including having a member of the security staff escort him not just to the gate, but all the way to his seat on the airplane. In one recent column he writes: “I know I have written about this a million times, and I will probably write about it another million times. Because it’s simply humiliating.” The column is about his journey to Switzerland, where he was to read at a literary event. He was also a dinner guest of the Israeli ambassador and his wife. And yet a 20-year-old woman took it upon herself to take apart his suitcase and humiliate him with intrusive questions at Ben Gurion Airport.

Rania Jubran, the daughter of Israeli Supreme Court justice Salim Jubran, was a 26-year-old Israeli diplomat when she was subjected to humiliating security checks at Ben Gurion Airport, even though she presented her foreign ministry identity card. Ms. Jubran was the first Arab to be accepted to the foreign ministry’s cadet course. When Ms. Jubran resigned three years later for reasons she would only describe as “personal,” Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon described her as “extremely talented,” while another unnamed source in the ministry said that her departure was evidence of their “inability to retain quality personnel” (Hebrew link).

Ibtisam Mara’ana, a prominent, award-winning documentary film maker who lives in Tel Aviv, has represented Israel at many international film festivals. And yet she told me once that she turned down an invitation to one festival because she didn’t have the energy to face the humiliation at the airport.

Yara Mashour, a prominent Nazareth-based magazine editor, switched flights to another carrier after she was profoundly insulted by El Al staff at Milan’s airport. She is now considering suing the airline. In response to this incident, Haaretz decried racial profiling of Arab citizens in its editorial page.

In another case, two Arab brothers did successfully sue El Al after they were separated and humiliated at an airport in New York. The brothers had flown to New York on an organized group trip with their co-workers at an Israeli insurance company.

Few take the trouble to sue, because it is an exhausting and intimidating process. But the humiliation should not be taken lightly – as it is described here by +972 contributor Aziz Abu Sarah. In this post by +972 contributor Dahlia Scheindlin, she quotes her friend Adeeb Awad, a man who describes himself as a “proud Tel Avivian” and a “proud Palestinian,” an Israeli citizen who finds himself separated and described as a “kilo” by Ben Gurion Airport security personnel. And there are many, many similar stories – of Arab professors at Israeli universities traveling to academic conferences forced to fly without their laptops and mobile phones; of Arab actors who have appeared in well-known films taken aside and questioned for hours, forced to miss their flights, and so on.

These are the experiences of prominent Arab citizens of Israel who live fully integrated lives in the midst of the Jewish majority. So imagine what it must be like for those who speak Hebrew with an Arabic accent, who wear keffiyehs and hijabs rather than jeans and t-shirts.

With very rare exception, nearly every Arab citizen of Israel who has flown through Ben Gurion Airport has a story  of humiliation to tell.

One year ago, the Supreme Court demanded that the Shin Bet explain why it discriminates against Arab citizens at the airport, calling the onerous security procedures “unacceptable.” The court’s decision was handed down in response to a petition submitted by ACRI, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. As Dahlia Scheindlin writes, the petition reads like a chronicle of the dark side. The bottom line: No matter what their reason for flying, no matter who they represent or how prominent they are and no matter how early they arrive at the airport, Palestinian-Israelis cannot know if they will make their flights.

But the Shin Bet, despite assurances that it would examine and change its policies, has done nothing. In Israel, the security establishment is above the law: It can and does ignore with impunity years of official complaints, outraged newspaper editorials, litigation – and yes, even Supreme Court decisions.

And then imagine how an Arab-Palestinian citizen of Israel who was born and raised in the country, who speaks unaccented, fluent Hebrew, must feel upon reading that an American man glides through airport security simply because he is a Jew.

And I seriously doubt that a 20-year-old airport security staffer, who took this first post-army job in order to pay for a trip to India or his university tuition, is able to spot a terrorist based on how he answers a question about where he celebrated his bar mitzvah. The people who spot the terrorists are the armed ex-combat officers who stand above the terminal, behind one-way windows, surrounded by security cameras that monitor every movement below.

For 20 percent of the native-born population of Israel, Jeffrey Goldberg’s sense of privileged belonging is unattainable at Ben Gurion Airport, whether they are just ordinary citizens going on holiday, or prominent citizens traveling to represent the state at an academic conference or arts festival. This, as outgoing Supreme Court head Dorit Beinisch said, is unacceptable.

Pro-Palestine demo at Cairo's Tahrir Square, April 2011 (photo: Lisa Goldman)

When anti-regime activists attacked and burned the Israeli embassy in Cairo in September, the violent images seemed to underline Jewish fears. It is also true that one hears quite a lot of old-fashioned anti-Semitic talk in Egypt — conspiracy theories about Jewish lobbies, Jewish bankers and Jews in the media. Amongst the secondhand books for sale by a sidewalk vendor at Tahrir Square last spring, I saw an Arabic translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And an exhibition of political cartoons in downtown Cairo included some with caricatures of Israeli soldiers identified by their hooked noses, fang-like teeth and long, curly sidelocks.

Anti-Semitic cartoon at Cairo exhibition (photo: Lisa Goldman)

But Mohamed Abla, the artist and political activist who curated the exhibition said, in answer to my question, “We show cartoons that we disagree with, too.” Those anti-Semitic caricatures, he explained, were published in pro-Mubarak newspapers that presented the Egyptian revolution as an anti-Egypt conspiracy cooked up between the unlikely allies of Israel, Hezbollah and the United States.

Amr El-Zant, an Egyptian physicist and a columnist for Al Masry Al Youm, Egypt’s best-known independent daily newspaper, describes Mubarak as an old-fashioned anti-Semite who thought that by having a close relationship with the Jews, some of their power would rub off on him. “He couldn’t understand why Israel failed to save him from the revolutionaries at Tahrir Square,” said El-Zant, a former diplomat’s son who was once a postdoctoral fellow at Haifa’s Technion Institute.

The deposed dictator played sly games to maintain his grip on power. He cultivated his relationship with the Israeli elite — the politicians, the army and the business tycoons — while manipulating popular opinion at home by blaming opposition to his rule on “the Jews.” He convinced Israelis that he was all that stood between them and a howling, bloodthirsty mob, but he only visited Israel once in all the 30 years he ruled Egypt — to give a eulogy at Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral. He prevented normal contact by having his dreaded state security service investigate, harass and even arrest Egyptians who applied for a visa to Israel or maintained contact with Israelis. This is why young Egyptians are careful to differentiate between opposition to the State of Israel, which is widely reviled, and anti-Semitism. They saw how the regime used anti-Semitism to stir up conspiracy theories and manipulate public opinion in order to maintain its grip on power.

I did not meet any Egyptians who had read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But I did meet many who had read Andre Aciman’s Out of Egypt, and Lucette Lagnado’s The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit — memoirs by Egyptian Jews who were forced out of the country during the Nasser era. Both titles were prominently displayed at several bookshops I visited in Cairo and Alexandria.

Amongst the politicians elected in Egypt’s first democratic elections, one still hears the occasional anti-Semitic remark. Fayza Abul Naga, a secular 61 year-old woman who is a holdover from the Mubarak regime, recently claimed that Freedom House, an American NGO that conducts research into democracy advocacy, was ‘a tool of the ‘Jewish lobby.”’

This is ugly and regrettable, but not, I think, insidious — and not because there are almost no Jews left in Egypt, but rather because Jew hatred is a relatively new, imported phenomenon that has little history in Egypt and does not seem to run very deep.

Take, for example, Cairo’s Shaare Shamayim Synagogue. It is a big, imposing building on Adly Street, in the heart of downtown, about five minutes’ walk from Tahrir Square. It is one of only two synagogues in Cairo still in use — I attended a seder there last spring. Under Mubarak, Shaare Shamayim was heavily guarded: Men in uniform checked the identity cards of visitors before passing them through a metal detector, while plainclothes officers stopped passersby from taking photographs. The message was clear: Without a strong security presence, the synagogue was vulnerable to attack. But there were no police on the streets for 15 days during the January 25 uprising. The synagogue was left completely unprotected. While the headquarters of the NDP, Mubarak’s political party, was set alight by protesters, as were other edifices associated with the regime, it never occurred to the protesters to attack the synagogue. The Israeli embassy, meanwhile, is halfway across town — but it was attacked, albeit several months after Mubarak resigned.

Exterior shot of Cairo's Shaar Hashamayim Synagogue with its security barricade in front, sitting amid other local buildings on Adly Street, July 2011 (photo: Roee Ruttenberg)

So does this mean that average Egyptians wants to cancel the peace treaty with Israel and go to war? No, not that either. They don’t like Israel and they would probably like to downgrade the diplomatic relationship, but no one wants war. Poll after poll shows that the average Egyptian wants stability. And war is the opposite of stability.

Hisham Kassem, a prominent Egyptian journalist and editor who founded Al Masry Al Youm, put it succinctly when he told me, “Ask the average Egyptian taxi driver what he thinks about Israel and he’ll probably say he hates it. Then ask him if he is willing to send his son to fight Israel, and he will shout ‘no way.’”

This op-ed was originally published in the Forward. 

Soldiers released an attack dog on unarmed Palestinians at a Friday anti-occupation demonstration in the West Bank village of Kufr Qaddoum, report eyewitnesses that include an AP photographer. According to a report from Jonathan Pollack, a political activist, Border Police officers released an army dog at a group of protesters who were standing several dozen meters away. The dog chased the protesters, then locked his jaw on the arm of one of them – Ahmad Shtawi – sinking his teeth into the man’s arm. The dog refused for several minutes to respond to his handler’s order to release Mr. Shtawi’s arm.

IDF attack dog refuses to release his grip on Ahmad Shtawi's arm (photo: PSCC)

Although he was bleeding, in pain and in need of medical attention, soldiers decided to arrest Mr. Shtawi  after the dog finally released his arm. When Morad Shtawi, a member of the village’s popular committee, tried to reason with the commanding officer and convince him to release the wounded man, he was thrown to the ground, handcuffed and pepper sprayed – as documented in the video below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem has called several times for the Israeli army to stop using attack dogs on unarmed Palestinians. In February 2012, a 19 year-old Palestinian was attacked by an IDF dog; B’Tselem reported another five such incidents in 2011.

UPDATE: A video of the incident is now embedded, below

Three civilians were injured in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh today and required hospitalization, according to reports from several eyewitness. A French national, whose name is reportedly Amissy (unconfirmed), was hit in the neck with a projectile – either a tear gas canister or a rubber-coated steel bullet. The Israeli army reports that a border police officer was injured in the head by a rock.

French national injured at Nabi Saleh Friday demonstration (photo: ActiveStills / Oren Ziv)

Although photos show the woman bleeding profusely and obviously in pain, IDF spokesman Major Peter Lerner tweeted that she had been ‘lightly injured’ by a rock thrown by a ‘non-violent’ Palestinian.

Major Lerner’s tweet provoked jeers from eyewitnesses, with several tweeting that they had seen the incident. In a video of the shooting (below), unarmed demonstrators are standing and chanting slogans when IDF soldiers shoot tear gas canisters directly at their heads. The French woman, who is on the right side of the frame, is hit and falls to the ground at around 12 seconds. Note that the soldiers continue to shoot, not stopping to help the injured woman.

Click here to view the embedded video.

After this video was uploaded to the internet and widely shared online, Major Peter Lerner changed his story and tweeted that the IDF would investigate the incident of a tear gas canister that he now claims ‘ricocheted off the ground’ and injured the woman.

Ofer Ron, an Israeli, tweeted a sarcastic response:

 

Eyewitnesses report that soldiers beat Nariman Tamimi, a Nabi Saleh woman who is a trained medic, as she tried to help the injured French woman. Ms. Tamimi is the wife of imprisoned activist Bassam Tamimi, whose jail sentence was handed down based on coerced confessions taken from minors. Bassam Tamimi’s case has attracted the attention of French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé.

Ms. Tamimi’s cousin Mustafa Tamimi, 28, was killed at a Friday demonstration in early December 2011, when an Israeli border police officer shot a tear gas canister at his head from very short range.

Soldiers also reportedly shot directly at a photojournalist who was covering the demonstration, prompting several people present to comment that the Israeli army was targeting journalists. This would not be the first time journalists were targeted by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank. Photojournalist Mati Milstein wrote this report for +972 Magazine after he and several colleagues were targeted by Israeli soldiers shooting tear gas canisters at close range.

Proper use of tear gas canisters, according to both IDF training manuals and the tear gas manufacturers, is to shoot it from a safe distance in arcs over the heads of demonstrators, in order to avoid injury.

Nabi Saleh is a small village of approximately 500 people, located in the Ramallah District. It has been the scene of weekly demonstrations since December 2009, shortly after Jewish residents of the neighbouring settlement of Halamish forcibly confiscated a water spring that is on Nabi Saleh-owned land.

Cairo democracy activist wrapped in an Egyptian flag (photo: Lisa Goldman)

The Egyptian election results are in, and two-thirds of the vote went to the Islamist parties. According to the New York Times, 47 percent of the votes went to the Freedom and Justice party, representing the 84-year-old Muslim Brotherhood, which invented political Islam; and 25 percent to the Nour party, representing the fundamentalist Salafists. My colleague Larry Derfner writes that if he had known what the results of this first post-Mubarak election would be, he would not have supported the revolutionaries. He describes Islamist parties’ victory as a “demoralizing defeat” for “we liberals” and concludes that the Middle East has taken a “giant leap backward.”

Well. “We liberals” are citizens of the democratic state of Israel, which freely elected, as the largest faction in its governing coalition after the Likud, the quasi-fascist Yisrael Beitenu party. The head of that party, Avigdor Lieberman, is now the foreign minister. He cozies up to Vladimir Putin and once said that Israel should bomb the Aswan Dam. In our Knesset, we also have Kahanists and a large contingent from Shas, which is quite similar to the Nour party. So I don’t think we have all that much credibility when it comes to commenting on the election results of our neighbours.

I am also pretty sure that the Egyptians don’t care whether Larry or any other non-Egyptian supports their revolution. They particularly don’t care whether or not Israeli liberals support or oppose their revolution. We Israelis can be quite vain, but really – this revolution is not about us. At all.

More to the point, we have no say in the Egyptian revolution. Israel is not part of the discourse about the Arab world – by choice and by default. We removed ourselves from the discussion by tacitly supporting oppressive dictators like Mubarak, who crushed civil society in his country over a period of thirty years, and by refusing to end the military occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Who killed the liberal opposition parties of Egypt? Mubarak did – by jailing their members and refusing to allow them to run for parliament. The Muslim Brotherhood did sit in parliament, although it was subjected to periodic crackdowns by the secret police, so it understands the political system. In terms of votes, it benefits from being a known entity. The Brotherhood has nearly a century of experience in political organization. It has money, it is organized and it represents stability to millions of Egyptians who, while they were probably happy to see Mubarak gone, were tired of the revolutionary chaos. Beyond Tahrir, for most Egyptians, the army is a respected institution that also represents stability – much as the IDF is a respected institution for most Israelis.  Most Egyptians still believe that the army is with the people, despite all the evidence to the contrary. And so the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood and the ruling military junta struck a deal to cooperate also worked to the benefit of the Freedom and Justice party.

The Salafists, who surprised and shocked so many with their electoral success, benefited from both focused organization and a huge cash infusion from Saudi Arabia.

Then there was the liberal political coalition. They had no financial support from foreign governments, no long-established parties and no candidates with face recognition. They had five months to prepare for elections – to form parties from scratch, choose candidates, articulate a platform and then go out and campaign, while the chaos of the revolution continued. Egyptian blogger Sarah Naguib describes in this blog post some of the Herculean challenges the liberals faced going into these elections; in this podcast, Mahmoud Salem (aka the Sandmonkey), who ran as an independent candidate, describes the obstacles he experienced and voting irregularities he witnessed.

And yet, despite all these difficulties, the liberal parties won 30 percent of the vote.

Revolutions are messy, violent and protracted. The French revolution and the American revolution took years to achieve, and both were violent, chaotic affairs. The Egyptian revolution is only one year old and the situation will probably get worse before it gets better. But outsiders who wish for a return of the dictators are pushing against the inevitable tide of history. And Israelis who express a preference for Mubarak only contribute to the perception, widely held in Egypt, that the dictator who destroyed their civil society, impoverished them, spied on them, tortured them and humiliated them was able to survive because he was supported by ‘the Zionists.’

Hosni Mubarak is gone. He is not coming back. The Islamist parties have won a majority of seats in a rubber stamp parliament. The real power is still held by the military and this will continue to be the case for some time – a fact that might comfort Israelis who fear the Islamists. But if we’re going to assess reasons to fear for the Middle East, we Israelis don’t have to look very far. The danger is not with the Islamist parties. They have no love for Israel, but they have neither the power nor the will to express their dislike by mobilizing for war. The danger is with the Israeli governing coalition, which is passing anti-democratic legislation at home and behaving increasingly like non-rational players in the diplomatic arena.

In 1991, the Algerian military cracked down on the Islamists when they were poised to make a strong showing in the national elections. The result was a civil war that cost an estimated 200,000 lives. Surely no liberal – Israeli or otherwise – would wish for the Egyptian military to spark a civil war with a similar crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists.

One liberal Arab friend told me, “You Israelis have enough problems at home. You should mind your own fucking business.” And no liberal should think that 250 million Arabs are going to put their revolutions on hold because 7 million Israelis are worried about their security. We all need to get over Tehran Trauma: There is no Egyptian version of the Ayatollah Khomeini waiting in Paris for the right moment to fly to Cairo and co-opt the revolution.

When I was in Cairo last spring, I met a prominent Egyptian journalist – a liberal – who displayed an impressive knowledge of Israeli society and politics. He told me two things that I won’t forget. He said that there was not a single Israeli journalist who evidenced any true insight or deep knowledge of the Arab world. And he said that the Arab uprising was unstoppable.

Amira Hass (photo: Yossi Gurvitz)

UPDATE: Please read the clarification on +972 Magazine’s policy regarding BDS commentary at the end of this post (in italics).

According to a recently-passed  Israeli law, a citizen who advocates for a boycott of Israeli services, institutions or products, either in Israel or the West Bank, can be sued in civil court and a serious financial penalty imposed. A plaintiff need not show damages in order to win his case; it is enough to convince the judge that there is a potential for damage. Since +972 Magazine has no financial resources, we decided that we had no choice but to censor ourselves. None of the contributors to this site is permitted to express a position either against or in favour of the global BDS (Boycott, Divest and Sanctions) movement. Since +972 is also responsible for the comments, we delete any mention of BDS in the comment threads. I have never expressed my opinion on the matter in any public forum, and now I suppose I never will.

This is unfortunate, because BDS is a hot-button issue that stirs up a great deal of debate. For its supporters, BDS can be the litmus test of pro-Palestinian advocacy. At an October lecture hosted by the University of Toronto, Haaretz journalist Amira Hass responded to a question regarding BDS with remarks that I found particularly thought-provoking. Below are her comments, as they appear in my notes from that lecture.

You mustn’t make the means of the struggle into a religion. Palestinians used to believe in the armed struggle as a kind of religion. Now they do not. The use of weapons in the second intifada excluded the majority and actually made the occupation worse.

The problem is that Israelis have come to accept the dual life of occupation. They can have parties and gallery openings in Tel Aviv while a few minutes’ drive away water cisterns are destroyed, houses are destroyed, you need a permit to plant a tree, and so on.

Does boycott help? Well, $10 billion of Israeli military expertise (which Israel exports annually) will not be affected by BDS. Campaigns against Ahava, Elbit & Veolia were successful. The campaign against Caterpillar failed.

Boycott also raises the question of hypocrisy. Should we boycott Canada because of what it did to the First Nations *? Do not think of activism as a cult. Think. Ask questions. And by the way, not all Palestinians support BDS. As someone who grew up in a Marxist environment, I say, ‘don’t make a religion of it.’

*First Nations: indigenous people of Canada

Watch the entire lecture below: 

Click here to view the embedded video.

Clarification: In order to avoid legal and financial repercussions, +972 must avoid outright endorsement of BDS on its pages. That said, we are certainly allowed to broadly discuss the movement. Same goes for comments on the matter – we must delete outright calls for BDS,  but not any mention whatsoever.

A few thoughts on this incident:

>>This incident proves  - in case anyone had doubts – that the US Jewish community wields enormous influence over Israeli policy. Imagine if the Jewish Federations and Anti-Defamation League invested the same energy in expressing their displeasure at Israel’s continued occupation of the West Bank. Actually, Eli Valley does an excellent job of imagining that scenario in this piece for The Forward.

>> The expressions of outrage from US Jews seems a bit disingenuous to me. The cultural chasm between North American Jews and Israeli Jews cannot have escaped their notice. You can see it in the famous Saturday Night Live skit, “The Sabra Price is Right,” which is 20 years old, or in the more recent Adam Sandler comedy, “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan.” Both portray Israeli men as pushy, macho and crude, with the SNL skit making them look dishonest in business, too (this was a spoof of the electronic shops that sprang up in heavily touristed areas of Manhattan in the 1980s and early 1990s; they were run by Israelis who were experts at fleecing their one-off customers). The Sandler film is a sendup of US Jews’ ambivalence regarding Israelis: They can’t decide whether to admire them for being war heroes defending brave little Israel from the Arab hordes, or belittle them for being rough-mannered and provincial. Both images, of course, are ridiculously one-dimensional.

Secular Israeli Jews express their identity through the Hebrew language, army service, family and Bamba. The vast majority of non-Israeli Jews do not speak Hebrew, do not serve in the army and have no idea what Bamba is. For them, Jewish food is corned beef on rye, bagels and knishes. There is no corned beef in Israel, I never saw a knish there, and the bagels are just stale bread rolls with a hole in the middle. Only 30 percent of US Jews visit Israel once in their lifetime, Birthright or no Birthright; and their understanding of Israeli society often bears little resemblance to reality. Lately, I’ve noticed that hummus is making an appearance on the traditional Ashkenazi Shabbat table in the United States and Canada, as a condiment with the crudites, but it’s a strange, gray paste that does not at all resemble the hummus consumed in the Levant.

Israeli ex-pats tend not to assimilate easily into North American Jewish communities. The cultural clashes go both ways, with secular Israeli Jews not understanding the rituals and etiquette of the middle class North American branch of the tribe, with their high holy day synagogue attendance and their Jewish Community Centers.

The theme of the Ministry of Absorption’s video campaign – that Jewish life cannot be sustained outside of Israel –  is clearly nonsense, and this is part of the reason US Jews are so insulted. Jewish life in the States is extremely rich, whether it is expressed as Orthodox religious practice or secular celebrations of Jewish history and culture.

***

Some Israelis decided to parody the Ministry of Absorption’s campaign, which Jeffrey Goldberg calls the ‘anti-diaspora campaign‘. The one below, which is in English, is set in “Manchester, London” – a joke about Israelis’ ignorance of the world, perhaps. The participants don’t even try to imitate a British accent. Note that the Israelis who play the polite ‘English’ shop clerk and customer have a slight Russian accent, indicating they are immigrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union. Note also the ironic tagline, “They will always be Israelis, help them go back home.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Another video parody, which contrasts the ‘polite’ English manner of speaking with the hilariously exaggerated Israeli Hebrew, ends with the tagline, “They will always be Israeli; help them stay abroad,” adding that the campaign was conceived by the “Ministry of Rejection.”