“We’ll come to your house.” Leaflets in Qadum (Lior Ben Eliahu)

This is most likely a private initiative by soldiers serving in the village. Just recently Ma’ariv published an extensive story (Hebrew) about soldiers who feel their hands are tied by army regulations when it comes to the dispersal of demonstrations in Qadum. The story was followed up by a campaign, led in part by Ma’ariv and Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home party, to loosen regulations, allowing a lighter finger on the trigger. According to Haaretz’s Chaim Levinson, the campaign is part of settlers’ efforts to get rid of Brig. General Nitzan Alon, mainly for political reasons.

The British Guardian on Wednesday reported that Prof. Stephen Hawking has cancelled his appearance at the fifth Presidential Conference due to take place this June, in protest of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. The report was later confirmed by Cambridge University. A spokeperson for the Jerusalem-based conference called Hawking’s decision “outrageous and improper.”

One of Haaretz’s leading lefty columnists, Carlo Strenger, wrote an open letter to Hawking echoing these feelings. After expressing pride in his own opposition to the occupation, Strenger accuses Hawking of hypocrisy and applying a double standard; he claims that Israel’s human rights violations are “negligible” compared to those of other countries in the world, and notes that the Israeli academia is for the most part liberal and therefore can’t be blamed for the occupation.

I would like to respond to some of the points he makes, since they represent a larger problem with the Israeli left.

______________

While Hawking responded to the call for academic boycott, it should be noted that the Presidential Conference is not an academic event: it’s an annual celebration of the Israeli business, political and military elites, whose purpose is unclear at best, and which has little importance in Israeli life (it didn’t exist until five years ago). The pro-occupation Right has a heavy presence at the conference – or at least it felt that way last year, when I attended. I will get back to the notion of “the liberal academia” and the Presidential Conference later.

Personally, I think we should put  the “double standards” line of defense to rest, since it’s simply an excuse against any form of action. The genocide in Cambodia was taking place at the same time as the boycott effort against South Africa. According to Prof. Strenger’s logic, anti-Apartheid activists were guilty of double standards; they should have concentrated their efforts on many other, and “much worse” regimes.

The notion according to which the horrors in Syria or Darfur make ending the occupation a less worthy cause represents the worst kind of moral relativism, especially when it’s being voiced by members of the occupying society.

I’m also not sure what makes Israeli human rights violations “negligible” compared to those of other countries. I certainly do not think that killing hundreds of civilians in one month during Cast Lead was “negligible,” but the occupation goes way beyond the number of corpses it leaves behind – it has a lot to do with the pressure on the daily lives of all Palestinians, and with the fact that it’s gone on for so long, affecting people through their entire lives (I wrote on the need to see beyond death statistics here). Plus, there is something about the fact that it’s an Israeli who is determining that those human rights violations are “negligible,” which makes me uneasy – just as we don’t want to hear the Chinese using the same term when discussing Tibet.

I will not go into all of Strenger’s rationalizations for the occupation – his claims that the Palestinians answered Israel’s generous peace offers with the second Intifada; that as long as Hamas is in power there is nobody to talk to, that Israel is fighting for its survival against an existential threat, and so on. I don’t think that a fact-based historical analysis supports any of these ideas, but Strenger is entitled to his view. If you think the occupation is justified, or at least inevitable, you obviously see any action against it as illegitimate and uncalled for.

Yet the thing that made Prof. Strenger jump is not “any action” but rather something very specific – the academic boycott. Personally, I think that his text mostly portrays a self-perception of innocence. Israel, according to Strenger, doesn’t deserve to be boycotted and the “liberal academics” – like himself – specifically, don’t deserve it because they “oppose the occupation.”

At this point in time, I think it’s impossible to make such distinctions. The occupation – which will celebrate 46 years next month – is obviously an Israeli project, to which all elements of society contribute and from which almost all benefit. The high-tech industry’s connection to the military has been widely discussed, the profit Israeli companies make exploiting West Bank resources is documented and the captive market for Israeli goods in the West Bank and Gaza is known. Strenger’s own university cooperates with the army in various programs, and thus contributes its own share to the national project.

I would also say that at this point in time, paying lip service to the two state-solution while blaming the Palestinians for avoiding peace cannot be considered opposing to the occupation, unless you want to include Lieberman and Netanyahu in the peace camp. We should be asking ourselves questions about political action as opposed to discussing our views: where do we contribute to the occupation and what form of actions do we consider legitimate in the fight against it?

But all this is beside the point right now. While I myself have never advocated a full boycott, I think that the least Israeli leftists can do is to not stand in the way of non-violent Palestinian efforts to end the occupation. It’s not only the moral thing to do, but also a smarter strategy because as long as Israelis don’t feel that the status quo is taking some toll on their lives, they will continue to avoid the unpleasant political choices which are necessary for terminating the occupation. Since the Israeli left is often unable to admit its own share in the occupation – and therefore acknowledge the legitimacy of Palestinian resistance – again and again it acts against its own stated goals.

2012 was the most peaceful year the West Bank has known in a long time (for Israelis, that is), and yet at its very end, Israelis chose a coalition which all but ignores the occupation. The problem is not just the politicians; Israelis are simply absorbed by other issues. I hope that Stephen Hawking’s absence will serve as a reminder for the generals, politicians and diplomats who will attend the Presidential Conference next month of the things happening just a few miles to their east – as “negligible” as they may seem to some.

Related:

Related:
Techwashing: Hasbara group strikes back after Hawking boycott
A Zionist defense of Hawking
No end in sight: Occupation marks 45th anniversary
Ending the occupation: No way around direct pressure on Israel

“Closing a paper = a damage to democracy”. Journalist facing guards at the offices of one of Ma’ariv’s owners (Yotam Ronen / Activestills)

One thing is certain: personally, it’s been a hell of a ride. About 18 months ago the new Union of Journalists in Israel (UJI) was set up and I quickly joined. It took us a couple of months of hard work until April 22, 2012 when the UJI announced it was officially representing journalists in 10 media organizations; I was appointed chair of the union (or Father of the Chapel) of the Ma’ariv daily newspaper. Little did I — or anyone else — know that within four months, what was once one of the largest newspapers in Israel, owned by one of the country’s strongest capitalists (Nochi Dankner), would collapse altogether. Around 2,000 workers were left at risk of losing their jobs without the paper paying what it owed them.

For more than two hot summer months the paper’s journalists and workers flooded the streets in protest. They blocked Tel Aviv’s main roads, stormed the 41^st floor of the Azrieli Towers, where Dankner’s headquarters is conveniently located, marched on the owners’ houses, visited the Knesset, took strike actions and utilized the paper and its website (NRG) as part of a struggle against the paper’s closure and mass layoffs without compensation.

It was a hard struggle but in part, we won. The paper was not closed but rather sold to Shlomo Ben-Tzvi, owner of the religious right-wing paper Makor Rishon. More than half the jobs were saved, full compensation was promised to all and a new collective bargaining agreement was signed, guaranteeing the rights of those who remained. It was the first such agreement in the private media sector for nearly 20 years (the old Journalists Association had become obsolete and ineffective for anyone outside government-owned television and radio, including for Haaretz journalists).

But there was also a personal price to pay. As the new owner came in, he chose not to hire me, and I was left unemployed. The union is still fighting the management in court over their choice, deliberate as the union has it, to sack the head of the union.

Channel Ten journalists in protest against political pressure to silence them (Oren Ziv / Activesitlls)

The new Journalists’ Union, which now has more than 2,000 members and is representing journalists in most of the large media organizations, brought back organized labor to the world of journalism after it was disintegrated by publishers during the nineties. It has not been the only place where organized labor is making a comeback. More than 30,000 Israeli workers joined unions over the past two years, some of them the first ever in their field. Such was the case of the high-profile struggle of thousands of Pelephone workers, who were the first-ever workers to unionize in an Israeli cellular company, and who had to lead a three-week-long strike in order to win recognition. This opened the door for other workers in their industry to join the union train. New locals were set up in countless companies, and teachers, social workers, doctors and nurses and factory workers went on strike for their rights.

Each and every company where workers choose the union has its own set of circumstances, be it the collapse of Ma’ariv or the dramatic change of legislation that opened the cellular market for competition last year. However, I believe that the phenomenon as a whole derives from the J14 protests that flooded the streets of Israel’s cities in the summer of 2011, including the largest demonstration in the history of the country.

The linkage between the protests and the unions can often be found in the rhetoric of union leaders and the activists themselves. Pelephone workers often referred to the J14 slogan, saying that the union is the only way to achieve true social justice. At Ma’ariv, as with the founding of the UJI as a whole, I felt that journalists had a new perspective on capitalism, worker rights and what proper journalism should be about; they themselves took part in the protests against the rising cost of living and demanding decent salaries and working conditions.

Ha’aretz journalists blocking a road outside their desk (Oren Ziv / Activesitlls)

So while J14, its banners, encampments and mass rallies disappeared over time, and although the splits in the movement were partly behind the election of Yair Lapid, its spirit lingers on in small activist groups, the sprouting of new cooperatives all over the country and especially, the return of organized labor.

There are, of course, many obstacles in the way. Unions are at times depicted as an extension of the de-legitimized radical left, or more often as powerful monopoles that are the cause of the rise in cost of living. In recent weeks there has been talk in the government of pushing forward anti-strike legislation and a possible cancelation of the labor courts, in addition to indefinitely postponing salary raises in the public sector, which were promised following several strikes in the past two years. However, the unions are already preparing for battle. Thus, May Day 2013 is a good day to celebrate our victories, as well as a day to recognize the challenges ahead.

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The price of turning Israel into another Scandinavia

By Hakim Bishara

‘Desire Dehau Reading a Newspaper in the Garden’ by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

It’s morning and I desperately need the news. Where I live, one needs to know what awful things to expect outdoors before leaving the house. I often think of those people who have a favorite newspaper of choice. They develop an easy kinship to the paper: “Have you seen my newspaper?”, they ask around the house; “I’m here, just reading my newspaper”, they shout from the garden. They meet their favorite paper every morning expecting it to inform, enlighten and at times amuse them. True, they might be critical of some writers, alert to some trends, but in general they trust their paper. If it is a serious relationship, they subscribe. That way, mornings are never completely bleak and coffee is never lonely. And isn’t that nice? How I envy them, those people who look forward to leafing through the Sunday paper or casually entering their favorite news website during the day, just to check what’s happening.

It’s morning, and I need a source to rely on. Without much thought, I type my way into the Israeli Haartez news website. Yes, I’m a Palestinian, but I live in Israel and I need to know the inner workings of the political and social structures here. Nevertheless, the task of jigsawing a fundamental — however relative — truth falls solely on my shoulders. How can I possibly trust the Israeli news? But then again, how can I do without them? Relying only on the local Arab press, poor, bitter and disenfranchised, is below the needs of my disposition. You cannot fully perform the role of the victim while living in the belly of the beast. So, it is morning and I enter the Haaretz website, “The paper for thinking people,” as its slogan reads. But what has long become a default choice, a habitual and involuntary tapping of my fingers on the keyboard, is now blocked by an unequivocal demand for commitment. Just like its role model, The New York Times, Haaretz decided to charge money for a subscription to its website. A dilemma now hovers above this helplessly passive pattern of consumption.

I scroll to see a special column written by Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken defending the restriction of free access to the website and advocating the subscription model to readers. Schocken claims that buying a subscription “is beyond a commercial contract. It’s also an important investment in the future of quality journalism in Israel; independent journalism that puts the public’s interest first, and in the case of Haaretz advances social, cultural and democratic values and protects them as much as it can.” Beyond the mere consumerist choice of subscribing or not (the price is not unfair), more substantial questions arose as I entirely re-examinated my relationship with this newspaper; I am, admittedly, a devout reader — whether a pleased one or not.

A word on Mr. Schocken is necessary before examining his bombastic praises of his own publication’s journalistic merits. Mr Schocken, the grandson of Haaretz founder Salman Schocken, oftentimes prides himself as being the patron of the free independent press in Israel. In an interview to The New Yorker, he once described it as “a cross I have to bear.” But Schocken, a reticent gentleman of European origin, is a business mogul in local terms with much cash and influence. In recent years, the Haaretz Group has been a profitable business by all indications. Schocken and family own a business conglomerate with a lucrative portfolio comprising Haaretz (the third biggest newspaper in Israel), a vast network of local tabloids, several websites, a magazine, a successful printing press, a publishing house, a slew of real estate assets and a mammoth art collection.

It is not beside the point that a shrewd businessman as he is, Schocken never lets righteousness stand in the way of a good deal. In 2011, Schocken Groups sold 20 percent of Haaretz’s shares to Russian billionaire Leonid Nevzlin for NIS 140 million. Nevzlin is wanted for extradition by the Kremlin for allegations of fraudulent abuse of Russia’s oil resources. Like several other Russian oligarchs who fled to Israel to avoid justice in Russia, he seeks legitimacy through lavish philanthropic donations and by discreetly forging close ties with politicians. Interfering in the newspaper’s content was never Nevzlin’s intention. His investment in Haaretz was designed to clear his dubious public image. Haaretz took the cash and made him Kosher.

Earlier in 2006, the Haaretz Group sold 25 percent of its shares to German publisher M. DuMont Schauberg, grandson of the founder of Cologne-based publishing company Kurt Neven Dument, with an estimated value of 25 million euros, reflecting a 100 million euro valuation of the Haaretz Group. Dument’s father was a member of the Nazi party in the Third Reich. His major publication, the Koelner Zeitung, was at best complacent with the Nazi regime’s propaganda. It may all be legitimate, but it does cast a chilling shadow over Schocken’s unobstructed moralism.

I might not be the target audience for Mr Schocken’s appeal: suggestively liberal Zionist, concerned about Israel’s future and anxious about its propensity to self-destruct. That constituency seems to be dwindling itself, judging by the general mood in Israel and the results of the past few elections. The shift of public opinion is vividly engraved in my memory.

I was a student in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem when the second Intifada (aka the Al-Aqsa Intifada) burst in flames. I remember the suicide bus bombings in my vicinity, the painful capital punishments on the other side, the fear, the tension and being occasionally stopped by the police just for being a ‘usual suspect.’ I should mention that in those days I was a proud Haaretz subscriber. Those awful bloody years between 2000-2005 shifted the entire political scale in Israel to the right. While Haaretz remains a relative refuge from its belligerent center-right alternatives, it too can fall silent when the guns roar. Such was the case during the second Intifada, the Second Lebanon War and the wars against Gaza. Haaretz is in its essence a liberal Zionist publication, profoundly conservative in many ways.

Like all media outlets in Israel, the paper is subject to a government and security-apparatus censorship on security issues, fortified by self-censorship. And although it is not as nationalistic as in its counterparts, the language Haaretz uses consistently fails to be unbiased. One stark example is the almost exclusive use of the passive voice in headlines, defying common editorial rules when reporting the killing of Palestinians (e.g. “A Palestinian killed by IDF bullets” versus when an Israeli is killed, “A Palestinian murdered an Israeli citizen”). The psychology behind that scrubbed language is not hard to understand – the national neuroses, the hysterical use of force, the collective denial, the pride, the arrogance and the ancient wounds. I try to neutralize its desired effect. Eventually, I find myself reading the news with a twitched face until I can no longer continue reading.

If I were to summarize the editorial stance of Haaretz, I would say that it calls for the end of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and for a two-state solution, primarily to discharge Israel from the moral hunchback of controlling more than 1.5 million Palestinians. Once the Palestinians are left to their own devices, Israel can then focus on the task of promoting an egalitarian society based on the tired notion of “respect for the other” (like in any banal children’s book, the Palestinian joins the African and Asian work immigrants in being the “other”). It’s a classic liberal thought that fails to understand its shortcomings. On that account, the newspaper maintains a token leftist column or two, a token feminist column and a token Arab writer with a weekly column. All very mainstream and mellow while xenophobic mayhem rages across the country.

And so, non-mainstream thought is rarely given a place in Haaretz. A proposed solution of a bi-national state, to mention a significant case in point, is outcast to the realms of the unthinkable. A Jewish-Arab state is presented in Haaretz only as a dystopian scenario that must be prevented with a quickly drawn two-state solution. It all corresponds with the publisher’s worldview, who when answering criticism from the Right for being “anti-Zionist,” vowed against the idea of a bi-national state or even the toned down notion of a “state of all its citizens.” Apologetic and vainglorious at the same time, he dubbed Haaretz as “Zionist through and through.” It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to claim that a truly open-minded debate would be more plausible with Jewish settlers than with the decadent mainstream left or the more hypocritical centre-left.

I’ll never be the ideal Haaretz reader as much as it can never be my ideal newspaper. Yet we’re bound in chains together in this small piece of land. If I could only switch off my mind, leave all historical contingencies aside and be a proud Israeli; then I could have the luxury of happily spreading my newspaper on the kitchen table, scattering the supplements around the house and clumsily forgetting the front page in the car. Right now, the best I could bring myself to do is to sign up for a free trial version for the undecided. Unable to take the train but unable to jump off of it, I’m fated to be a reluctant reader — and a reluctant citizen.

Hakim Bishara is a Palestinian freelance journalist and scriptwriter living in Israel. He has worked over the years in the Israeli and international press and was involved in several documentary films, including: Palestine the Lost Bride (AlJazeera), The Heart of Jenin (Eikon) and The Great Book Robbery (2911 Foundation). 

Hass speaks so directly and cooly about the situation as she sees it – saying plainly that Israel has become a foreign ruler in this place and cannot expect to survive this way. You can understand from her answers that she is portraying what she has been witness to as a reporter in the occupied Palestinian territories for 20 years.

Here are some choice quotes from her interview I want to highlight:

Any hegemonic group, sees its hegemony, and the violence it uses, as self-evident, as a natural thing. And we do everything possible to protect this hegemony.

I don’t like the term non-violent because it puts the onus on the occupied rather than on the occupier.

As some readers noted in the comments to my previous posts, there were several UN resolutions (not all of them having to do with Israel/Palestine) that affirmed this right, but there wasn’t much legal writing on the issue. However, John Locke, an English philosopher and one of the fathers of Liberal thinking, had very clear words to say (Second Treatise of Civil Government, Locke 1690, emphasis mine):

Over those then that joined with him in the war, and over those of the subdued country that opposed him not, and the posterity even of those that did, the conqueror, even in a just war, hath, by his conquest, no right of dominion: they are free from any subjection to him, and if their former government be dissolved, they are at liberty to begin and erect another to themselves.

(h/t Dotan Leshem)

UPDATE: Check out the quote in the first comment also. 

Related:
Settlers accuse ‘Haaretz’ of calling for violence against them
The undeniable Palestinian right to resist occupation

Palestinian youth throw stones near Ofer Military Prison [illustrative], May 15, 2012 (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

Hass this morning published a piece discussing the logic of stone-throwing and persecution in the occupied territories. Quotes:

Throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule. Throwing stones is an action as well as a metaphor of resistance. Persecution of stone-throwers, including 8-year-old children, is an inseparable part − though it’s not always spelled out − of the job requirements of the foreign ruler, no less than shooting, torture, land theft, restrictions on movement, and the unequal distribution of water sources.

[…]

Often hurling stones is borne of boredom, excessive hormones, mimicry, boastfulness and competition. But in the inner syntax of the relationship between the occupier and the occupied, stone-throwing is the adjective attached to the subject of “We’ve had enough of you, occupiers.”

This article, and especially the first sentence, can be read as a description of the reality in the occupied territories – or even the situation under any occupation – but it could also be seen as a call for action. Many on the Right chose the latter interpretation. My Israel, the online network established by the leaders of Jewish Home party, Naftali Bennet and Ayelet Shaked, called on its 100,000 Facebook followers to send Haaretz editor-in-chief Aluf Benn a photo of Adel Bitton, the Israeli child who was critically injured recently following a car accident last month, which was caused by stone-throwing.

Yesterday, a military court in Ofer prison convicted a Palestinian from Halhul with murder following the death of a settler from Kiryat Arba and his baby, also in a car accident which was caused by stone-throwing. Some people who commented on the military court’s verdict and Hass’ article noted that settlers’ stone-throwing almost always goes unpunished. But the real issue is the legitimacy of Palestinian resistance in the eyes of Israeli society – or more correctly, the lack of legitimacy.

Back when he was running for prime minister, Ehud Barak famously said – in a television interview to Gideon Levy – that had he been a Palestinian of the right age, he would have joined one of “the resistance groups.” At the time, it was widely understood that Barak referred to the armed struggle, and not to stone-throwing or general strikes. Mainstream Israelis, let alone mainstream Israeli politicians, do not usually acknowledge the moral legitimacy of Palestinian resistance (although there were always exceptions). More often than not, “understanding” the roots of Palestinian violence is a recipe for trouble in Israeli society, proved by the firing of Larry Derfner from The Jerusalem Post – over something he didn’t even publish in the paper itself. As soon as Hass’ article was published, it was clear that the Right would use it against her and against her paper.

In the Israeli political conversation, all forms of Palestinian resistance are forbidden. Those advocating for Israel view every Palestinian action as a form of terrorism, and as such, they become inherently illegitimate and justify repercussions and unilateral moves by Israel. The BDS movement – which is clearly non-violent – is often referred to as “cultural terrorism” and “economic terrorism,” the UN statehood bid was “diplomatic terrorism,” stone-throwing is “popular terrorism,” and so on. The Israeli government is taking active measures to suppress all those forms of resistance, and the debate in Israel isolates and punishes those who support them. The sad reality is that by doing so, Israel leaves more and more Palestinians to wonder on the value of such non-violent acts, as opposed to that of the real, armed terrorism.

Personally I think that some forms of resistance are illegitimate, and all have moral and legal consequences which should be debated (Hass said so too in her piece), but it’s not for Israelis to set the rules for the ways Palestinians should challenge our oppression, especially at times when Israeli society clearly lacks any interest in changing the status quo. Our role is to end the occupation.

One last comment: following a similar debate, I once asked law professor Aeyal Gross if the Palestinians have a legal right, according to international law, to fight the Israeli occupation, and if so, with what means (I didn’t ask about the moral right, which I believe exists, just about the legal side of the matter). His response was that this is one of the most underdeveloped sides of international law. Prof. Gross referred me to this Harvard International Law Journal by Richard Falk and Burns Weston which tried to make a legal case for the legitimacy of the first Intifada as a rare exception.

The First Additional Protocol (AP1) to the Geneva Conventions recognizes “armed conflicts in which peoples are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist régimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination…” However, Israel is not a party-state to the protocol. Prof. Gross also referred me to several U.N. GA resolutions (2625, 2649) that view resistance to foregin domination and struggles for self-determination as legitimate.

Related
The undeniable Palestinian right to resist occupation
When the stones fly the wrong way 

Welcome to Iqrit. The revivers of the village (Oren Ziv / Activestills)

In 1948, the Christian Orthodox village of Iqrit surrendered to the IDF without a fight. When soldiers ordered residents to leave for two weeks for security reasons, considering the village is extremely close to the Lebanese boarder, nobody thought twice about it. Three years later, in July 1951, when the High Court of Justice ordered the state to fulfill its promise and allow the displaced people, who were still living in temporary houses in other villages, to return to their homes and lands, the small community was thrilled. But on Christmas Eve of that year the IDF blew up the entire village, leaving only the church in place. The people of Iqrit realized that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.

Labeeb and Marth Ashkar holding a picture of the village they were deported from in 1948 (Oren Ziv / Activestills)

Since then, sixty-four years have passed. In the summer of 2012, like in all other summers since 1995, the entire displaced community organized a summer camp for their youth on village lands near the old church that they frequent on a monthly basis. They told the youngsters tales of village life and explained to them once again how they have been fighting for their right of return, a right which was guaranteed to them by courts and governments alike over the years. Iqrit is one of only two cases in Israeli history in which such promises have been made (the other being the nearby village of Bir’em).

The summer camp ended, and as everybody was returning home, some of the guides got to talking. They were sad to see how the generation of their grandparents was slowly fading away, and feared that whatever implementation of their recognized rights they had been unable to achieve in 64 years would not be achieved anytime soon. It was then and there that they decided to do something. They decided to return.

The young villagers of the New Iqrit enjoying lunch outside the church (Oren Ziv / Activestills)

Six months have passed since that day. While three Palestinian outposts in the West Bank were erected and swiftly destroyed by the army – the youth of Iqrit were able to stay. Indeed, whenever they try to build something outside the church and its single adjacent room, authorities quickly show up to demolish it. But other than that, they’ve been living rough and making it happen: planting and growing their own food, collecting timber for  fire, unearthing ruins of the old village, uploading pictures to their Facebook page from their mobile phones (there’s no electricity for computers), and making plans for the entire community’s future return.

Singer and theater man Walaa Sbeit in the outspost (Oren Ziv / Activestills)

Along with Activestills photographer Oren Ziv, I spent three days at this unique outpost/commune where young Palestinians are turning the dream of return into a reality. We interviewed them, as well as some of the older folk from the village who are fully supporting their young, and brought back with us their story. The piece I wrote was published in Haaretz a couple of weeks ago, but was not translated into English (the Hebrew origin can be found here). Last Friday, Channel 2′s “Ulpan Shishi,” the most watched news broadcast in Israel, ran a follow-up report to my Haaretz piece. It is quite unique that a mainstream platform seriously deals with the sensitive issue of the Palestinian Nakba, and the people of Iqrit hope that the massive (and mostly positive) attention they got will help them get back their lands – 64 years too late.

Dispite a unique rulling by the High Court in 1951 villagers are still not allowed to return (Oren Ziv / Activestills)

Read also:
Anti-Christian graffiti sprayed on church in destroyed Galilee village of Bir’em
Police brings down Palestinian outpost, activists resist peacefully
Palestinians erect third West Bank outpost, are attacked by IDF, settlers

Yair Lapid with “Yesh Atid” activists (photo: Yotam Ronen / activestills.org)

After 45 years of occupation and no end in sight, it would be better for Israel to have a completely right-wing/ultra-Orthodox government than a right-wing/centrist one with Yair Lapid, Kadima and possible other fig leaves. A purely hardline government would attract more opposition, especially abroad, while a right/center amalgam will fool a lot of people into thinking things aren’t so bad. In short, a Bibi/Lapid government is more beneficial to the occupation than a Bibi/Yishai government – and it looks virtually certain that a Bibi/Lapid government is what we’re going to get.

Yet while ending Israel’s rule over the Palestinians is the overriding need, and while a wall-to-wall extremist government is preferable to an extremist/moderate cabinet for that reason, there is one very important accomplishment that only a centrist party like Lapid’s Yesh Atid could make in the next government. I’m not talking about his goal of mainstreaming the haredim into the army and workplace, or of lowering the cost of living. I think the haredim are too numerous and zealous to be overpowered, and I don’t see a go-go capitalist system, which is what Lapid supports, making life much easier for average people. Instead, what I mean is putting an end to the radical right-wing politicization of Israeli schools and, to a lesser extent, universities at the hands of the education minister, which is what Likud’s Gideon Sa’ar has done over the last four years.

In an op-ed earlier this month titled “The subduing of academia,” Haaretz education writer Or Kashti listed the afflictions Sa’ar has visited on the schools:

[T]he minister’s nationalist indoctrination in the schools in recent years has included sending students on field trips to the settlement of Kiryat Arba outside Hebron, and to the City of David archaeological site in Jerusalem that is run by the right-wing Elad organization. It has also included close cooperation with the Israel Defense Forces to increase the rate at which high school graduates enlist in the army. That rate had been made a criterion upon which schools are judged and rewarded. The national anthem is now learned in preschools, consideration of the Palestinian viewpoint has been removed from history textbooks. Revisions have been made to civics curricula, which were perhaps the last domain that offered students a more complex view of reality. In the end, the person at the ministry responsible for the civic curriculum, Adar Cohen, was dismissed.

That was in the schools; in the universities, Kashti wrote, Sa’ar was responsible for “the threat to close the politics and government department at Ben-Gurion University, the upgrade to university status of the University Center of Samaria in the settlement of Ariel, and recognition … of the [right-wing] Shalem Center in Jerusalem as an institution authorized to award bachelor’s degrees for two programs.”

More than any education minister I can remember, Sa’ar has imposed the governing Israeli worldview – illiberal nationalism – on the teaching of the country’s young. He has had a chilling effect on educators. And while neither he nor the schools nor, certainly, the universities (which remain generally liberal) are completely to blame for the closing of the youthful Israeli mind, Sa’ar bears as much guilt for this as one Israeli education minister conceivably could. Here’s the latest evidence of how closed the youthful Israeli mind has become: A survey of 1,000 Israeli teenagers taken by the Massuah Institute for the Study of the Holocaust found 57 percent of them think “the whole world is against us and we have nobody to rely on but ourselves.” From today’s Haaretz:

According to Massuah director Aya Ben Naftali, “This feeling that was typical of the mood in the 1950s and ’60s was replaced in the ’80s and ’90s by expressions of international belonging and solidarity, as part of faith in the peace process.”

She notes that in the past two decades the discussion on the universal meaning of the Holocaust and the meaning for Israel and the Jewish people existed side by side. But “today we meet young people who put more emphasis on the national implications, and we are hearing the belief that we ‘have to rely only on ourselves.’ This phenomenon takes us back a generation, for the most part, to the atmosphere of Israel in the 1960s.”

During his campaign, Lapid said he wanted to become education minister. I think he should stick to that goal, or secure the job for somebody else in Yesh Atid; there are some very good people in that party’s Knesset faction. They’re not going to achieve the goals they campaigned on, while they are, unfortunately, going to be a fig leaf for the occupation. But they are not Gideon Sa’ar-style zealots and could certainly be expected to end the Greater-Israelization of the education system. If Lapid gave Yesh Atid control of the Education Ministry, which is his for the asking, he could free the schools and universities from Likud indoctrination, which would be at least a partial saving grace in his otherwise indefensible collaboration with Netanyahu’s next illiberal nationalist government.

Even if the best of intentions were behind this editorial, it seems to me like a patronizing act which reflects many of the problems of the Israeli left. First, there is something absurd about making a plea to the Palestinians only when something is needed from them. If Haaretz were to run articles in Arabic every now and then it would have been a different story. But the precedent is being set now – a week ahead of elections in which the Palestinians represent the only potential voting bloc that can save the left.

On a deeper level, this is clearly an act that was meant for Jewish rather than Palestinian eyes, and more than it seeks to generate political action, it tells us something about the way Haaretz wishes to perceive itself. After all, the Palestinian readers of Haaretz read Hebrew (or English) and therefore do not need a translation into their “own” language. If the editors of Haaretz truly wanted to address Arab citizens which do not read the paper, they could have published a piece in one of the local Palestinian media outlets, similar to the way many other Israeli Jews have done (this certainly won’t be beneath them – quite the opposite). Contrary to what some think, there is nothing “progressive” about the act of printing a piece in Arabic. After all, even racist members of Knesset like Michael Ben-Ari and Aryeh Eldad produced a television ad in Arabic, and the army prints orders in Arabic for the Palestinian population.

To be honest, there is something about this text that feels like an order. Here is one quote:

…the Arab public has no better alternative than the civic struggle, which demands patience [...]The Arab citizenry must get out and vote − for peace, for equality and for democracy.

If the editors of Haaretz were to say to the Palestinian citizens something along the lines of “we are in trouble, the left has zero chance for revival without you, we need you, come and vote” – it could have been okay. This would have been a direct approach that seeks real partnership (and naturally, it would come with a price since the Palestinians may ask something in return). But no, I have never heard a Jewish group talk to Palestinians this way. Thus, Haaretz is telling the Palestinians to vote in the name of their own interests. The natives can’t seem to understand the wonderful benefits of democracy, so the lords of the house will explain it to them. And naturally, the Palestinian cannot ask for anything in return, and he might even need to thank his overlords.

What made the editors of Haaretz think that they understand the interests of Palestinians better than Palestinians themselves? Perhaps the Palestinians are right in not showing up for the elections (I am not attempting to rule on this issue). And if the real Palestinian interest was in boycotting the elections, would Haaretz also publish a piece calling them to do so? Are those messages kept only for the times that they happen to benefit certain Jews?

Personally, I think that the populations who have high turnout are the ones that feel that they can get through the Knesset some things that they wouldn’t get in any other way. I think that the Palestinians perfectly understand the reasons for their indifference to Israeli democracy. But even if they don’t, the majority is not supposed to tell a disenfranchised minority how to fight for its own rights. The proper way to go is for Jews to use their privileges in order to change the system and express solidarity with the minority whenever its possible – both these concepts were almost never on the Zionist left’s agenda.