Footage of the Muhammad al-Dura shooting (Screenshot: France 2)

In the 13 years since Muhammad al-Dura was killed in an Israeli-Palestinian shootout in Gaza while cowering behind his father, masses of right-wing Jews have eagerly embraced a conspiracy theory of the 12-year-oid boy’s killing – that it was staged, a hoax perpetrated by Palestinians to blacken Israel’s name. This theory, promoted most avidly by Boston University Prof. Richard Landes and French media analyst Philippe Karsenty, depends on a view of Palestinians being superhumanly clever and fiendish, and a view of reality that comes from the movies. The mentality here is essentially the same one that drives the 9/11 “truthers,” the anti-Obama “birthers,” those who say the Shin Bet assassinated Rabin, or those who say ultra-rightists assassinated JFK – a fevered imagination activated by political antagonism that knows no bounds. In the right-wing conspiracy theories of the al-Dura shooting, the boundless antagonism goes out to the Palestinians and their supporters.

This week, the State of Israel officially joined the movement. Its report on the al-Dura affair adopts the conspiracy theory in full. (To be precise, it adopts the relatively “restrained” conspiracy theory – that the al-Duras were never shot. The other, wholly unrestrained conspiracy theory in circulation holds that the Palestinians killed the boy deliberately to create a martyr.) The report was commissioned last September by Netanyahu and current Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, the “investigative” committee was headed by Yossi Kuperwasser, the former director-general of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and staffed by officials in the Foreign Ministry, Defense Ministry, IDF Spokesman’s Office and Israel Police. The panel’s conclusions were pronounced by Netanyahu to be “the truth.” This is the State of Israel talking.

The most fitting adjective I can think of for the report, and for the thinking behind it, is “creepy.” The government suggests that such a line-up (whose members aren’t even named) is somehow going to be fair or objective; this is how the State of Israel now goes after the truth. There are several prominent American and French journalists who investigated the al-Dura shooting, and who are entirely unconvinced that it was staged – but they are not mentioned in this report. The possibility that what appears to have happened in September 2000 actually happened – that Muhammad al-Dura was shot to death and his father Jamal badly wounded, that the boy’s death was confirmed in detail by doctors at Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, that he was buried in Gaza, that his father was treated for severe gunshot wounds at Shifa and afterward at a Jordanian hospital – is not even considered. The report just spins this outlandish hoax narrative, with very little explanation of where all the “facts” came from, while citing only people who back up the story and never anyone who disputes it. The Kuperwasser Committee report is a product of the echo chamber in which Israel and its most zealous overseas supporters live.

I’m not going to recap the whole al-Dura controversy; here’s a long op-ed I wrote about it for The Jerusalem Post in 2008. (The only update I have is that one of the anti-hoax investigative journalists I cite, German documentary filmmaker Esther Schapira, evidently has since gone over to the conspiracy camp.) But I want to mention a few things that aren’t mentioned in the new Israeli report that I think illustrate its dishonesty and that of the movement it grew out of, and which show why the claim that the al-Dura shooting was staged is plain garbage.

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Referring to the original, exclusive news report of the shooting broadcast by France 2 television, the Kuperwasser Committee states:

Contrary to the report’s claim that the boy was killed, the committee’s review of the raw footage showed that in the final scenes, which were not broadcast by France 2, the boy is seen to be alive.

This is one of the key claims of the conspiracy theorists: that in the unedited video of the “alleged” shooting, the last you see of Muhammad al-Dura is him lifting his arm, moving his head and looking into the distance, something he obviously couldn’t do if he was dead. The problem is that this is not true: the last you see of Muhammad al-Dura in the unedited video – after he lifts his arm, moves his head and looks into the distance – is him drooping little by little into his father’s lap, which he might well have done if he was dead, and which certainly is no evidence that he was alive. This segment of the video is all over YouTube: here’s one copy. Watch the last seconds, after the boy lifts his arm. Somehow the Kuperwasser Committee didn’t mention this.

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Another familiar “proof” of the hoax cited by the Kuperwasser Committee is that “the injuries and scars presented by Jamal [al-Dura, Muhammad's father] as having been inflicted during the incident were actually the result of his having been assaulted in 1992 by Palestinians wielding knives and axes …” This revelation was supplied by Dr. Yehuda David, a hand surgeon at Israel’s Tel Hashomer hospital who treated Jamal for those earlier injuries in 1994. His statement to the committee says the Jordanian hospital medical reports on Jamal “support my assertion that the paralysis of Mr. Al-Durrah’s right hand was not a result of an injury allegedly suffered at the Netzarim junction several days before, as he claimed, but had been caused by the earlier injuries which I had treated in 1994.” (Underlined in the original.)

When a French appeals court in 2012 overturned David’s conviction for libel in a suit brought against him by al-Dura, Netanyahu said he had “proved Israel’s righteousness to the world,” and assured him the state would foot his legal expenses. (The appeals court did not find that David’s account was accurate, only that he’d given it in “good faith”; meanwhile, a French journalist who used David’s account to denounce al-Dura, and who was included in the original libel suit, was ordered to pay al-Dura 6,000 euros.)

Shortly after David’s victory in court and blessing from Netanyahu, Dr. Rafi Walden, deputy director of Tel Hashomer Hospital  and co-chairperson of Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, wrote an op-ed in Haaretz about Jamal al-Dura’s injuries and David’s claims.

My sole intention is to address testimony provided by Dr. David, who has been praised by the prime minister for having acted with integrity and persistence to defend the reputation of the state of Israel. The facts are completely different. After the incident in 2000, Jamal al-Dura was treated in Gaza, and transported the next day to Amman’s King Hussein Hospital. His entire medical file has been relayed to me; it is 50 pages in length, and features pictures of the wounds and x-rays.

Dr. David claimed it was indisputable that the wounds were identical to ones treated eight years previously. The fact is that the medical documentation compiled in Amman shows completely different wounds: there is a gunshot wound in the right wrist, a shattered forearm bone, multiple fragment wounds in a palm, gunshot wounds in the right thigh, a fractured pelvis, an exit wound in the buttocks, a tear in the main nerve of the right thigh, tears in the main groin arteries and veins, and two gunshot wounds in the left lower leg.

Diagnoses in this file also provide detailed documentation of the 1992 wounds, including a paralyzed nerve in the right hand which was, in fact, treated by Dr. David. Photographs, x-rays, surgery reports, expert consultation reports and the rest of the data compiled in this medical file corroborate the diagnoses. I regretfully state that the statements made by my colleague, formulated as though “there isn’t a shadow of doubt,” are not well founded.

But Walden, a very well-known figure in Israel (he’s also Shimon Peres’ son-in-law), was not consulted by the Kuperwasser Committee, which left David’s statement, like all the other “factual information” in its report, to stand unchallenged.

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Probably the most vital contributor to the al-Dura conspiracy theory has been Nahum Shahaf, a prominent Israeli physicist, engineer and developer of defense technology. In an April profile of him in the Times of Israel, he is described taking a phone call from Kuperwasser to discuss the progress of the libel suit against Karsenty. Shahaf’s reconstructions of the shooting scene at Netzarim Junction and his examination of videos from the incident are bedrock material for the movement. His so-called findings are all over the Kuperwasser report, for instance his discovery that what appears in the France 2 video to be blood on Muhammad al-Dura’s stomach is actually a “red rag” the boy is holding there so it will look like blood (!!!). Shahaf has been interviewed in the media since the report came out; he’s the go-to guy in Israel on al-Dura hoax theory. Yet his name is not mentioned in the committee’s report; a look at the Hebrew Wikipedia, which cites some of his other “findings” with links to his blog, might explain that:

He also investigates the Rabin assassination, claiming that the photo of the “Shir Hashalom” lyric sheet stained with Rabin’s blood was faked, and he supports the conspiracy theory of the murder…

Here is what Shahaf had to say about the 2008 Na’alin shooting affair, in which an IDF battalion commander held a blindfolded, bound Palestinian while a soldier shot him in the toe from close range, and which was filmed by a Palestinian resident with a camera provided by B’Tselem:

In October 2010, prior to the verdict in the Na’alin shooting affair, Channel 10 aired a report that featured Shahaf’s alleged evidence that the film published by B’Tselem, and which served as key evidence in the trial of the soldier who did the shooting and of the battalion commander, had important scenes edited out, and that the Palestinian was not hit at all by the rubber bullet fired by the soldier.

The shooter and the battalion commander were convicted in court and a police forensics expert testified that the film was authentic and undoctored. This, of course, hasn’t affected Shahaf’s status as the Sherlock Holmes of the al-Dura conspiracy movement, the fountainhead of so much of the State of Israel’s “proof” that it was all staged.

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When individuals buy into this theory, it’s one thing; when official Israel buys into it too, it’s, well, creepy. These people are not stupid (neither, by any means, is Shahaf, nor many other people in the movement), but they’ve been stupefied by their radical antagonism toward the Palestinians and anybody else who goes against Israel, and so they’ve come to believe in demonstrable absurdities. Look at the original video of the shooting by France 2′s Charles Enderlin: at the beginning you see bullets hitting the wall a couple of feet from the al-Duras. Did father and son agree to sit still for such a “staging”?

Think about it: the France 2 cameraman who shot the footage in Gaza, Talal Abu Rahme, couldn’t have known beforehand the extraordinary effect his footage would have – yet according to the Kuperwasser Committee and Co., this was a pre-ordained plot between the cameraman and the al-Duras. In the middle of a crossfire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians, Abu Rahme and the al-Duras were faking it – there were no real bullets, no real fear, no real blood, no real wounds, no real death. As if a Palestinian cameraman in Gaza on the second day of the intifada had no hope of getting footage that would inspire hatred of Israel, and so he had to make it up.

Think about it: if Mohammed and Jamal al-Dura were never shot, that it was all a hoax, how many people would have to be covering it up all this time? Start with the al-Dura family, then the people near the scene of the shooting, at least some of the people at the funeral, plus doctors and nurses at the Gaza hospital and the Amman hospital, plus the Jordanian ambassador to Israel who brought Jamal al-Dura to Amman for treatment – and that’s just off the top of my head. Each and every one of them would have had to keep this incredible secret for 13 years. Yet with all the legions of Palestinian collaborators Israel has managed to conscript over the years despite the danger to their lives, not one Palestinian has ever been found to corroborate the al-Dura conspiracy theory.

These are just some of the inconvenient details that have to be ignored to believe that the al-Dura killing was a hoax – and official Israel, starting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, believes it.

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The ironic thing, though, is that the Kuperwasser Committee’s minimal finding – that there’s no proof Israeli soldiers shot the al-Duras – is absolutely true. What’s more, the same prominent foreign journalists who were wholly unmoved by the hoax theory – American James Fallows and Frenchmen Denis Jeambar and Daniel Leconte, as well as Israeli communications expert Gabriel Weimann – were also thoroughly unconvinced by France 2’s claim that Israeli soldiers had fired the bullets that hit the father and son. Because of the angles and obstacles on the impromptu battlefield, they all concluded it was much more likely that the al-Duras had been shot accidentally by Palestinian gunmen in the crossfire.

That’s also the explanation I believe. On the basis of the known facts (as opposed to “facts”), that’s the most reasonable explanation, the easiest to accept – and it clears Israel of the terrible, almost certainly false accusation that its soldiers deliberately, demonically gunned down a frantic 12-year-old boy trying to hide behind his father, who was pleading vainly for the shooting to stop.

So why couldn’t Netanyahu and the Kuperwasser Committee defend Israel with a simple, plausible explanation, instead of this bizarre, through-the-looking-glass bullshit? Because as keepers of the consensus in 21^st century Israel, they are naturally vulnerable to the al-Dura conspiracy theory. Finally, all you have to do to believe it is believe that Palestinians – doctors, patients, ambassadors, whoever – will tell any lie, no matter how gargantuan, to score a point against Israel, and that they are capable of performing uncanny feats to that end. And that’s what the defenders of Israel believe – about Palestinians and the rest of the neighbors, too. Which is why they so readily drank the Kool Aid on the al-Dura affair.

Even though I’ve always agreed with the stated goal of the “social protest” – to redistribute Israel’s wealth more equitably – I can no longer sympathize with it. While many if not most of the people in the streets would like to turn the movement against the occupation and not only against “swinish capitalism,” this hasn’t happened after two years of protest. It’s not going to happen, either, because the moment it does, the social protest loses its legitimacy to speak in the name of “the people,” because “the people” of Israel couldn’t care less about the Palestinians. This was clear to everyone from the beginning; left-wingers hoped that what began as a demand for economic justice would extend to a demand for justice for the Palestinians, but that hope remains as hollow today as it did in the summer of 2011.

Regardless of the politics of the street protesters and the organizers, the masses at home who identified with the cost-of-living protests two years ago, and who identify today with the protests against the new budget, are dominated politically by the Jewish middle-class and their concerns. Those concerns not only exclude the Palestinians, they exclude the Arab citizens of Israel – and they largely exclude the genuinely poor Jews of this country, too. While many middle-class demands happen to coincide with those of the poor – for instance, opposition to higher consumption taxes and to cuts in education – the poor are hangers-on in this movement. (Again, I’m not talking about the protests in the street, but the wave of popular discontent over the economic policies of Finance Minister Yair Lapid and the government.)

The days when poor Jews from the urban slums and peripheral “development towns’ could mount an attention-getting protest in this country are over. (For Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, of course, they never began.) Those days ended in the early-to-mid 2000s when then-finance minister Netanyahu outlasted the single mothers’ hunger strike led by Vikki Knafo. At the same time, he was slashing aid to the poor amid the worst recession and terrorism in the country’s history, which in turn expanded poverty and economic inequality to levels never before seen here and which have not diminished since. But because overall economic growth returned (based largely on the vast enrichment of the prosperous minority) and unemployment went down (while a giant class of “working poor” was created), the consensus today is that Netanyahu, in his years as finance minister, saved the Israeli economy.

With this sort of thinking taking over the country in the last decade, the poor and their problems are no longer a national concern: if they’re not working, it’s because they don’t want to; if their schools are lousy, it’s because of the parents; if their neighborhoods are slums, let them earn the money to move out. Poverty and poor people haven’t been an issue in Israeli politics since the 1999 election campaign, when Ehud Barak made effective use of the image of “the old lady lying on a gurney in the corridor of Nahariya hospital.” By now, the only economic victims anybody wants to hear about are the middle class, and their problems are the only ones that count – not homelessness or unemployment or “food insecurity,” but rather high prices and, now, slightly rising taxes.

In line with this mentality, the “social protest” began over the high price of cottage cheese, moved on to problem of high rents in Tel Aviv, then to the high cost of daycare for working moms. If there is a poster family of the social protest, it is the young, college-educated, hard-working couple in their late 20s with a kid or two, and who don’t know how they’re going to afford to buy their own home in the center of the country with housing prices going up like they’ve been. People of the middle-class who are finding it hard to hold onto their standard of living, and whose grown children are finding it even harder to attain it – these are the voices of economic protest that count today. Whether they’re in the streets or not, these are the masses who make the “social protest” the powerful mass movement that it is.

These people’s greatest moment during the last government was the lowering of the price of cellphones; that it was accomplished by a communications minister who was a hardline Likudnik (Moshe Kahlon), did not stop “the people” from hero-worshipping him. Likewise, the Israeli masses’ greatest moment during the current government was the “open skies” agreement that will soon lower the price of airline flights to and from Europe; that it was carried out by a vicious Arab-hating transportation minister, Yisrael Katz, didn’t hurt him a bit, either. Lapid, too, was a hero regardless of his newfound allegiance to the settlers and disparagement of the “Zoabis.” Only now that the middle-class is coming in for some budgetary pain is he in trouble; when Lapid was showing nothing but callousness to the Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and Jewish poor, he was an Israeli middle-class hero, and the chief political beneficiary of the social protest.

If this is a social protest, it’s about the most smug, bourgeois one I’ve ever heard of. It’s a social protest that shows contempt for this society’s No. 1 victims, the Palestinians, and No. 2 victims, Israeli Arabs, while showing indifference to its No. 3 victims, the Jewish poor.

When the masses behind this mass movement don’t give a damn about people here who have it so much worse than they do – and in the case of the Palestinians, who live under their country’s military dictatorship – why should anyone give a damn about them? When they are deaf to complaints ranging from poverty to tyranny, why should anyone listen to their middle-class blues?

Nakba Day protest May 15, 2012 (Activestills)

In 2008, a fascinating, little-known study asked 500 Israeli Jews about Israel’s behavior throughout the history of the conflict.  The study was conducted by Rafi Nets-Zehngut, at the Teachers College of Columbia University and Daniel Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv University’s School of Education. Bar-Tal is an internationally regarded expert in political psychology. Some of the findings were striking:

• More than six-in-ten said that prior to the arrival of the “Jewish pioneers” in the late 19th century, Palestinians were a majority in the region (“majority,” “vast majority,” or “exclusive inhabitants”).

• A majority, albeit very slim (50.2 percent), said that Jews and Arabs share the blame equally (46 percent) or primarily Jews (4.2 percent) are to blame for the outbreak and continuation of the Israeli-Arab conflict, while 43 percent blamed primarily Palestinians and Arabs.

• Most important for Nakba Day, when asked who was responsible for the “departure” of Palestinian refugees during the 1948 War of Independence, 41 percent chose the traditional Zionist narrative that they left due to fear and exhortations of Arab leaders; but 39 percent chose a response that cited fear and calls of Arab leaders, but also due to expulsion by Jews. Another eight percent cited only expulsion by Jews. That means that nearly half – a 47 percent plurality – accepted the Jewish role in creating Palestinian refugees.

Further, by using the terms “Palestinian” to refer to the pre-state days through 1948, the questions themselves implicitly tested people’s acceptance of the terms of the debate. The fairly standard rate of “don’t knows” indicates that people had little problem with the assumptions in the text of the questions. Also, fewer than one-fifth of Jewish Israelis describe themselves as left wing these days, so a significant portion of those respondents are either center or right wing.

The findings imply a potentially significant shift in Israeli attitudes compared to the past, when the Palestinian refugees were the greatest obstacle of all. During the Camp David negotiations of 2000, when I was working with American pollster Stanley Greenberg supplying public opinion data to then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak almost nightly, the refugee issue tended to be the toughest problem, even as the Jewish public advanced significantly toward unprecedented compromises on Jerusalem (documented in Greenberg’s 2009 book). Just after the talks collapsed, a Hebrew University survey in late July, 2000 asked Israelis (and Palestinians) whether they thought their respective leader’s compromises on each item had been appropriate, too much or too little. Among Israelis, the perception of Barak’s proposed compromises on Palestinian refugees gathered the highest “too much of a compromise” response of all (64 percent gave this answer, compared to 57 percent for Jerusalem).

Twelve years later, in a December, 2012 survey by the same authors (Jacob Shamir and Khalil Shikaki), the Palestinian refugee question no longer holds the most-rejected-clause spot. That distinction now goes to the proposals on Jerusalem, based on the old Clinton framework (59 percent rejected them, 38 percent supported them). Respondents were asked about a refugee compromise which reflects the Clinton, Geneva Plan and Arab Peace Initiative approach:

Both sides agree that the solution will be based on UN resolutions 194 and 242. The refugees would be given five choices for permanent residency. These are: the Palestinian state and the Israeli areas transferred to the Palestinian state in the territorial exchange mentioned above; no restrictions would be imposed on refugee return to these two areas. Residency in the other three areas (in host countries, third countries, and Israel) would be subject to the decision of these states. As a base for its decision Israel will consider the average number of refugees admitted to third countries like Australia, Canada, Europe, and others. All refugees would be entitled to compensation for their “refugeehood” and loss of property.

Among the 600-person sample, which included Arabs, 42 percent accepted this and 49 percent rejected it – a significant decline from nearly two-thirds who felt it was “too much of a compromise” in 2000.

Behind the numbers lies a potential drama. First, they confirm what Noam Sheizaf elegantly argued, that the anti-Nakba onslaught under the previous government has failed to erase the Nakba from the public sphere, while general usage and awareness of the term has only increased. Bar-Tal also noted in a more recent study that the Israeli education system is increasingly open about exploring critical versions of history – findings that were met with a wall of resistance by the Israeli government, for the crime of comparing Israel and the Palestinians’ education system.

But the data shown here hints at something both deeper and more pragmatic. They suggest a growing realization among the Israeli people that the Nakba is not only a feature of history but alive in the present-lived reality of Palestinians and that it must be addressed in the negotiations.

Indeed, for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the Nakba lives on in the form of daily occupation. Symbolically, Israel’s denial and until recently the world’s general dismissal of their historical and present symbolic narrative is a fresh death each day for the Palestinian collective psyche.

Despite the positive shifts, half of Israelis still reject the refugee compromise in the December 2012 poll; tempers rage around public debate on the topic, and a 2009 survey for the peace movement One Voice found that 60 percent of Israeli Jews totally rejected a compromise that included “recognition of the suffering” of Palestinian refugees.

Yet I cannot agree with a guest post here today that the rejection is due to “arrogance.”

In a phone interview with Daniel Bar-Tal for this article, he explained that the ongoing Jewish resistance to dealing with the Nakba is simply a reflection of the fact that the Jewish people as a nation are no more or less immune to the human characteristics of collective identity than any other people:

On the most universal level: why is it hard for any nation [to acknowledge the damage it has caused in the past]? It’s very, very universal [to resist this]. All nations do it.

He cited the very recent British acknowledgment of responsibility for its actions in Kenya, and former French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s difficulty acknowledging France’s behavior in Algiers. “Nations have a hard time opening their Pandora’s box,” he said. “We’re no different.”

Bar-Tal believes that the story of the Nakba, a symbolic narrative of the Palestinian nation, clashes with the Zionist national narrative.

This reason is more psychological, but critical: identity. The Nakba … is viewed as the identity of the whole nation in the eyes of its people. And accepting the narrative of the other cancels my identity. If you have to accept that 1.3 million Palestinians were here, all the Zionist rationale begins to be thrown into doubt.

Bar-Tal then explained that when Netanyahu introduced the demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish State, the negotiations were now about symbolic and identity dimensions, rather than, by implication, just technical and pragmatic solutions.

He brought that into the conflict – up to then we could have solved the problem without narratives. The moment you ask them to recognize that this land is and belongs to Jews, they can’t accept that.

Perhaps it was at this point that the Nakba was increasingly embraced among Palestinian activists. And by contrast to Bar-Tal’s implication, I believe that the symbolic, narrative element of conflict would inevitably enter resolution efforts regardless of Netanyahu’s particular condition.

In other words, when Israelis or any people are asked to acknowledge historical facts and their own role in creating traumas, they are less defensive. But when dry history doubles as the mythical story of the founding of a rival nation, acknowledging those facts means legitimizing the other side’s fundamental beliefs. Since the Israeli image of the Palestinian national vision includes the certainty that Palestinians seek destruction of the Jews, the national narratives – like in most conflicts – are mutually exclusive. Accepting this keystone of Palestinian symbolic national history is tantamount to self-destruction.

Surely, similar conflict psychology can be seen on the Palestinian side too. Even when a conflict is asymmetrical, psychological dynamics overlap. But that would be a separate article.

Both sides will need to exorcise their demons regarding the other, not to gloss over the present but in order to unlock the door to the future. Here are the fundamental questions for the Israel side: first, can the Right’s frenzied efforts to stifle consciousness of the Nakba succeed? The results seem to say no. Activism recalling the Nakba has only heightened and the data here implies that the Israeli public is ahead of its leaders in acknowledging not only history, but the implications of history on conflict resolution.

Secondly, how can the large swath of the Israeli public that is prepared to reconcile with its past in the present be expanded and leveraged? How can this political maturity be brought to bear on future negotiation efforts or any other effort to resolve the situation? Surely, beating a guilt-fatigued population with more historic guilt will backfire (if it hasn’t already). Is there a less threatening way to address and redress history that does not undercut Jewish identity in this land? This is one of the vital challenges of the day, that the Nakba (and perhaps the “Jewish state” definition, for Palestinians) symbolizes for all parties in the conflict: can each side acknowledge the most sensitive and frightening aspects of the other party’s identity without losing its own, and then lashing out violently to protect it?

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

I would not join a BDS protest; I’m a “two-stater” who believes Israel should remain a Jewish state because the alternatives would be worse, who believes Israel’s “original sin” is the occupation, not Zionism, and so I don’t think I’d really feel at home at your average BDS demonstration. There seems to be way too much loathing for everything about Israel in the movement – which is not to say everyone in the movement thinks that way; I know that’s not true. But the main thrust and tone of the BDS campaign is such that there’s no way I can identify with it.

But when I read Wednesday that Stephen Hawking was boycotting the President’s Conference, I was glad. He doesn’t hate Israel; he’s been here four times. In his letter canceling his participation, he wrote that he’d originally planned to come because “this would not only allow me to express my opinion on the prospects for a peace settlement but also because it would allow me to lecture on the West Bank. … Had I attended, I would have stated my opinion that the policy of the present Israeli government is likely to lead to disaster.” What Hawking hates is the occupation, not Israel, and he believes that by striking a blow against Israel’s rule over the Palestinians, he is helping not only the Palestinians but Israel as well. I think he’s right, and what’s more, I think he succeeded in a seismic way.

Israel and its advocates can wave off boycotts by some college students and left-wing professors, even by a few well-known pop musicians, but not by a giant and hero of the Western world like Hawking. What he’s done is a threat to the status quo – and except for the potential that lies in the Palestinians’ UN strategy, (specifically their plan to take the occupation to The Hague), Hawking’s boycott is the only such threat that’s appeared in a very, very long time.

I wish there were kinder, gentler ways than such acts of ostracism to get Israel to end its 46-year dictatorship over the Palestinians. Ideally, of course, the public would elect a government that would do it. Failing that, its best friend, America, would prod the public and its leaders with “tough love.” Failing that, the Palestinians would rally the world against the occupation through diplomacy and nonviolent protest.

Like a lot of other people, I put my hope in one after another of the above tactics, and one after another, they have so far come to nothing.

So, as they say, desperate times require desperate measures, and for the cause of Israeli justice and Palestinian freedom, that means ostracizing Israel, including by such means as boycotting the President’s Conference.

At this point, at least, I can’t lay down a precise rule on which means would be fair and which ones foul, but I know, for instance, that I would be sickened at the sight of a shopper in a foreign supermarket refusing to buy Bamba; that’s pathological, that’s treating Israel as if it’s got the cooties. Likewise, I wouldn’t want Hawking or anyone else to refuse to visit Israel privately. I loathe the idea of a hands-off policy toward everything and everybody Israeli.

But if Madonna were to announce that she won’t play here again until the occupation is over, I would cheer. What I’m in favor of above all is a psychological campaign aimed at Israelis and their leaders – declarations by the democratic world, backed by action, that it will ostracize Israel until it stops denying the Palestinians their independence. That is the one thing that can succeed, the one thing that can scare Israelis into a radical change of course, and when a boycott can advance that goal without indulging in Israel-hatred – which the BDS campaign in the West has largely failed to do – then it’s a good thing. Harsh medicine, but ultimately, excuse the expression, good for the Jews as well as the Palestinians.

The strongest argument against punishing Israel for the occupation, in any way, is that Israel shouldn’t be singled out, that there are other countries doing much worse things than what we do to the Palestinians, so why not punish them? I have nothing against boycotting all sorts of countries, but the problem with that question is that it looks at a boycott of Israel, of any sort, as punishment and nothing else – and even while much of the BDS movement intends it that way, that is not necessarily the effect. A boycott is, of course, punishment, but if Israel learns the right lesson from it – that the occupation is wrong and must be ended – then it’s a punishment that will save this country.

Again, if Israel would reverse the status quo of its own volition, through elections, or do it in response to pressure from its friends like the U.S. and European governments, then I’d oppose punishing it by any means. But the fact is that there’s no rational hope of this happening; the right wing owns Israeli politics, while the U.S., European Union and the other democratic states, for a variety of reasons, won’t force Israel’s hand. The kinder, gentler ways haven’t worked on this country, so it’s either acts of ostracism or occupation forever, and given those two choices, I’d say Israel is best served by the former.

In retrospect, the sanctions on South Africa were a gift to that country. If Israel ends its long tyranny over the Palestinians, such conscientious boycotts as that of Stephen Hawking will be remembered for having been a gift to this one.

Related:
Stephen Hawking’s message to Israeli elites: The occupation has a price
Techwashing: Hasbara group strikes back after Hawking boycott

Garbage piles up in the Kufr Aqab neighborhood of East Jerusalem (Photo: Mya Guarnieri)

Every day, investors knock on the door of a small home in Kufr Aqab, a village on the Palestinian side of the separation wall but inside Jerusalem’s municipal borders. The tidy, one-story, two-room house is surrounded by new apartment buildings, some reaching nine stories high. Contractors are currently finishing more than 1,000 units in the area; billboard advertisements suggest many more are to come.

The same phenomenon is occurring in other Palestinian neighborhoods that are technically part of Jerusalem, but separated from the ancient city sites by the huge concrete wall.

Apartment buildings are popping up like mushrooms in these areas. The sound of construction fills the air.

Kufr Aqab – once full of open, green spaces – is now “crowded” and “dirty,” says Amira, an 18-year-old Palestinian woman who lives here. She asked not to be identified by her real name out of fear of endangering her Israeli-issued Jerusalem residency permit.

Residents pay taxes to the Jerusalem Municipality but receive far fewer services than the neighboring Jewish districts of Jerusalem. While Palestinians constitute approximately 35 percent of the city’s population, only eight to ten percent of the municipal budget is allocated to their communities. “We have to hire someone to come and take [the garbage] because the city won’t come,” Amira says. “They will pick up everything on the main street but not behind it.”

Refuse collection is a long-standing issue for Palestinian East Jerusalemites; even Israeli officials have raised concerns about the issue, and the influx of new residents means things will only get worse.

Numerous requests for comment from the Jerusalem Municipality for this article have been unsuccessful.

Unplanned growth has already stretched Kufr Aqab’s infrastructure to the point of breaking, Amira and other residents say. “What once was a spacious entrance into the neighborhood is now a small, rough, tight road that does not allow cars to pass through it. The entrance [has been narrowed] by two new buildings on each side that have taken space from the road to enlarge their buildings,” Amira explains.

Residents say contractors are left to their own devices. And the investors who knock on Amira’s door everyday – asking the family to sell their home so they can tear it down to make way for even more apartment buildings in the already stressed area – are said to be more concerned with turning a profit than making sure that the neighborhood is livable.

Munir Zughayer, chairman of the local neighborhood committee, says the building damages infrastructure. “In too many places, [contractors] have built over [water] drains. [The buildings] are pushing [on the sewage system] and it’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller,” he said. “It’s a mistake to build on it but we don’t have the power to tell people not to build.”

With nowhere to go, runoff pools in the streets, damaging the roads. After heavy snowfall in January, dozens of potholes opened up in the streets. Because the drainage systems are no longer functioning properly, the melted snow ran into a number of houses – Zughayer estimates that more than 40 homes incurred water damage.

Mohammed Reith, a contractor, agrees with Zughayer’s claim that the area’s sewage system can’t handle the influx of residents. Reith estimates that the area’s population has doubled since 2005 and that there remains a huge demand for land and apartments in the neighborhood. “At the moment, the area is not prepared for this number of people.”

It’s not just the streets, garbage, and sewage system. Kufr Aqab, like all of East Jerusalem on both sides of the wall, does not have enough schools. And on this side of the wall, there are no police. Emergency services are also lacking, as Israeli ambulances and fire trucks cannot pass the Qalandia checkpoint, which is just outside Kufr Aqab.

“No one is responsible for security [here] – not the Israelis or the Palestinian Authority,” Reith says. “If there is a problem, no-one will come. The PA needs permission from the Israelis to enter and the Israelis are interested in making chaos [in Palestinian areas].”

But, as Reith and Zughayer correctly point out, the areas on the Palestinian side of the separation wall, such as Kufr Aqab, are the only places in the city that East Jerusalemites can build.

Israel rejects more than 90 percent of Palestinian requests for building permits; structures built without permission in the Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem on the Israeli side of the wall are threatened with demolition and steep fines. These restrictions have created a housing shortage that critics say is intended to push Palestinians out of Jerusalem and into the West Bank. Critics call this “quiet transfer.”

But the separation wall has actually had the opposite effect. It has fuelled demand for homes on the Israeli side of the wall as Palestinian East Jerusalemites fear losing their residency and access to health care, schools, jobs, and their families. The wall and checkpoints have also made commuting more difficult and time consuming, so many Palestinians prefer to live inside the enclave created by the wall, in order to shorten their travel time.

As the wall has pushed Jerusalem ID holders into a confined space, prices have skyrocketed. But most Palestinian East Jerusalemites cannot keep up with the rising rents, nor can they afford to buy homes in this increasingly expensive market. So they move to areas such as Kufr Aqab, where apartments cost a third of the asking price on the other side of the wall. Because these areas remain a part of Jerusalem, the Palestinians who live there can keep their residency.

However, Israel says it has no development plans for the area. And many residents are concerned that Israel will redraw the municipal lines of the city, excluding Palestinian areas beyond the wall and revoking residents’ Jerusalem IDs. This fear isn’t unfounded – Israel unilaterally redrew Jerusalem’s borders following the 1967′ Six-Day War.

In the meantime, Zughayer and other members of the neighborhood committee are trying to force the city to take responsibility for the municipal areas on the Palestinian side of the wall. They have sued for better garbage services. And because there are not enough traffic lights in the area, locals have pooled their money to build roundabouts. Zughayer intends to pass the bill along to the Jerusalem Municipality.

Zughayer says their work is “an example of regular people who aren’t battling with weapons but are battling with their words for our rights. We’re not working for ourselves – we’re working for our people, the residents, to help the person who has water entering his house.

“As long as the municipality is taking the taxes, we have to get our rights as human beings, to have everything like we are in Israel – streets, garbage and schools. We live like we’re in the middle of Africa, not in a democracy. Where is democracy? Where is it?”

This article was originally published in Al Jazeera English.

According to Guy, the Israeli activist who filmed the video below, this is private Palestinian land (the Otniel settlement is nearby) that the IDF and settlers routinely try and keep the Palestinian residents out of.  In the video below, the soldier can be seen first approaching the Palestinian shepherd, screaming in his face in Arabic: “You better watch it!”  Then Guy tells the soldier not to scream at him and to leave him alone, to which the soldier turns to Guy, screaming: “Get out of here you Israel haters, I’ll kick the crap out of you. You are worse than the Arabs.”

He then turned to one of the female Israeli activists and said: “Shut up, Israel hater who goes to bed with Arabs.”

In a statement responding to the incident in Hebrew media, the IDF Spokesperson said the matter would be investigated as this is not the “kind of behavior that security forces should be engaging in.”

If you Google “Gazans celebrate Boston Marathon bombings” or variations of that entry, you will have your reading cut out for you. Such a scene was reported by Pamela Gellar, possibly America’s best-known Muslim-basher, on her website Atlas Shrugs. The story was headlined “DANCING IN THE STREETS OF GAZA OVER BOSTON BOMBINGS,” and carried the intro, “End US aid to these savages. Now.”

Such a spectacle in Gaza was also mentioned in a column by Ruthie Blum in the English-language website of Sheldon Adelson’s Israel Hayom, this country’s most widely-circulated newspaper:

This is the same Hamas that runs Gaza, the terrorist enclave that celebrated last week’s bombings in Boston by cheering, dancing in the streets and handing out cake and candy to passersby. It was like 9/11 all over again, and the residents of Gaza were rejoicing.

Another of America’s most prominent Islamophobes, David Horowitz, carried the story on his Frontpagemag.com in a column by Ari Lieberman:

On April 16, Palestinians in Gaza cheered. They danced in the streets and handed out candy and sweets to motorists and pedestrians alike. They were not however celebrating the inauguration of a new school or the completion of a hospital. Instead, they were celebrating death. On April 16, Palestinians of Gaza celebrated the Boston marathon atrocity. While our first responders were picking up severed limbs and tending to the wounded, Palestinians reveled in Boston’s misery.

The spectacle of Gazans dancing in the street and handing out sweets after the Boston Marathon bombings was reported as well in the website of The Jewish Press, an Orthodox paper that bills itself as “America’s largest independent Jewish weekly.”

Likewise, the tale was repeated on all sorts of far-right pro-Israel/anti-Muslim blogs, on YouTube, on Twitter. By now, it is no doubt an article of faith among this crowd that Gaza was jubilant over the massacre in Boston.

Where did they get this idea? From going through the links posted, the origin was a story written on the day of the bombing by Israel News Agency, a right-wing pro-Israel website run by Joel Leyden, a long-time New York Jewish immigrant to Israel who describes himself on the site as a “journalist, media consultant, social media and SEO [search engine optimization] pioneer working with both the Israel Defense Forces and the US Army in Haiti.”

Datelined Jerusalem, the story is headlined “Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah Celebrate Boston Terror Attack.” It shows a photo of a boy handing out pastries to a smiling man in a car. The photographer isn’t identified, and the caption is somewhat less than precise and verifiable, though it does at least acknowledge that the photo was NOT taken after the Marathon bombing. It reads: “The above photo was taken after a recent terror attack.”

Everything the story has to say about the reaction in Gaza is contained in the opening sentence, which leads a long story about the bombings:

Shortly after terror bombs exploded and murdered at least three people at the Boston Marathon, members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah were reported to be dancing in the streets of Gaza, handing out candies to passerbys.

The story says the celebrations “were reported.” By whom? It doesn’t say. No news agency with journalists in Gaza reported such sights and sounds, and since Israelis aren’t allowed into the Strip, I was interested to know where Leyden (whom I met 25 years ago, and who is a Facebook friend of mine) got this information. I asked him on FB, and he wrote back that he got it from “security sources.” Whatever.

So until further notice, it appears that the words “were reported” constitute the complete body of evidence that Palestinians in Gaza celebrated the Boston Marathon bombing, as first “reported” by Israel News Agency and circulated as fact by Pamela Gellar, Israel Hayom, David Horowitz’s website and many, many other pro-Israel/anti-Muslim mass media.

Not that it will matter, though; the great crowds of people who want to believe this story will keep on repeating it.

NOTE: This post has been corrected to show that Israel News Agency is run by Joel Leyden and not by the pro-settler radio station Arutz Sheva (whose English-language website Israel National News, not surprisingly, also picked up Israel News Agency’s “scoop”).

This article was originally published in The Forward on April 15, 2013.

Veteran Israeli journalist Amira Hass stirred up a controversy in the media here with an op-ed in Haaretz on April 3 that opens: “Throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule.” Hass, who has been living and reporting from the occupied Palestinian territories for 20 years, goes on to suggest that Palestinians should develop an educational curriculum on resistance to Israeli occupation that, for example, teaches to distinguish between soldiers as legitimate targets vs. civilians.

It was published just days after an Israeli court convicted a Palestinian of murder for throwing stones at a car in 2011, resulting in the death of the driver and his baby – and was the main argument of those who condemned her and the paper. Some went as far as to accuse her of inciting to violence.

Regardless of what one concludes about the article, or one’s stance on what constitutes (if at all) legitimate resistance to Israel’s violent and protracted occupation, Hass is an example — albeit somewhat extreme — of an Israeli who has “crossed the line.” She has chosen to be exposed to life under occupation first hand, and thus capable of empathy with the Palestinians. Empathy doesn’t necessarily mean agreement or support, but it does mean having the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. This is something practically impossible for the average Israeli to do, whose only experience in the West Bank, if at all, is either as a soldier, a settler, or maybe a tourist to a historical site.

Most Jewish Israelis will admit the “occupation” is bad, but few have ever gotten a taste of what it feels like to be anywhere near the receiving end of it. To do that you’d have to choose to experience it as a civilian alongside the Palestinian population, confronted with Israeli soldiers or settlers, which almost no Israelis do. No matter how liberal an Israeli you are, if you have not experienced it in some way, first hand, the concept of Israeli occupation has an entirely different meaning to you than someone who has.

This fact separates the majority of Israelis from the tiny minority of activists, journalists and NGO workers who have experienced it. I remember the first time I was in a West Bank village when the IDF entered and started shooting live gunfire. I remember the first time I saw little children in settlements no older than eight or nine throwing stones at Palestinians and myself and other Israeli activists; the first time an IDF soldier laid his hands on me and pushed me and repressed my right to protest. I remember being in the Bedouin village Al-Araqib (demolished over 40 times) when dozens of special army forces showed up at dawn in armored personnel vehicles, fully armed, to dismantle the homes of these citizens of Israel.

I remember when IDF soldiers stood and monitored Palestinian youths trying set up a little soccer field in the South Hebron Hills, just to make their presence known. I remember being arrested and watching countless other Palestinians and Israelis being arrested over and over again, for breaking absolutely no laws and causing no one harm.

These are incidents I had to see to believe. Once I experienced the plausibility of incidents that seem so implausible, they became a part of my working assumptions and impacted how I read every news item in the media about life here. I was an anti-occupation leftist before these experiences, but after them, I actually had a cognitive and physical understanding of just a bit of what it is like to be a Palestinian living under Israeli control.

An American journalist friend highly critical of Israel who recently visited the region for the first time told me that until he actually spent time in the West Bank, he found some reports he read back home showing Israel in a bad light so far-fetched that they were hard to believe. For example, a Palestinian detained after being assaulted in Hebron by a settler, who was not detained because, as the policeman explained, it was already the Sabbath. (Yes this happens, it just happened recently).

Most Jewish Israelis either don’t know what the government and army are capable of, or more likely are in denial about what the Israeli occupation is. Without actually spending time in the West Bank, it is impossible to comprehend how much violence Israel inflicts against Palestinians on a daily basis.

Hass’s empathy with the Palestinians’ right to resist Israeli control is deeply rooted in her exposure to and knowledge of the implications of that control, which she has been writing about for two decades. Her article addresses all those Israelis who have not crossed the geographic, ethnic, national, political and cognizant lines to see Israeli occupation with their own eyes. Out of sight really is out of mind, even in this tiny place. This is what ultimately separates the majority of Israeli society from the paucity of citizens who can see her article as an honest depiction of Palestinian life under Israeli rule. Jewish Israelis may have forms of resistance they understandably prefer, but it is ultimately not up to us as the occupier to decide how the occupied can resist.

This article was originally published in The Forward on April 15, 2013.

Related:
WATCH: Israeli journalist discusses her article defending Palestinian stone-throwing
Settlers accuse ‘Haaretz’ of calling for violence against them

The separation wall in Walajah (Photo: Haggai Matar)

According to a poll* released Sunday, a majority of Jewish Israelis (57 percent) believe Israel should determine its borders unilaterally according to the current route of the separation wall, which cuts deep into the West Bank, winding through Palestinian land well east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (Green Line).

This confirms that 1) Israelis are admitting the country does not have defined and recognized borders 2) Israelis are perfectly happy (including 87 percent of Meretz voters) pushing forward unilaterally despite repeated claims by both the Israeli and U.S. governments that no unilateral steps should be taken by either side in the conflict, and  3) Israelis don’t care that the bantustans created by the separation wall and the settlements are unacceptable to Palestinians or the international community, thus ignoring the impracticality of this option as a long-term solution – not to mention an unjust one.

But what is even more telling and interesting about the poll is that while 61 percent support a two-state solution (39 percent oppose), a substantial 23 percent said they support a bi-national state “without giving Palestinians full civil rights” (up substantially from last year’s 13 percent). In other words, this can be understood to mean that 23 percent of Jewish Israelis want to live under an Israeli apartheid regime where Palestinians are institutionally disenfranchised – though the poll does not mention the word apartheid anywhere.

The poll also mentions that 13 percent think the situation should remain as it is (“de facto Israeli control of Palestinians without annexation of Judea and Samaria”), which means maintaining the status quo. The situation we live in right now is de facto a bi-national state (or ‘one state’), in which every person between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean lives under varying degrees of Israeli rule, so I think it is fair to add this 13 percent to the 23 percent  - which essentially means that a whopping 36 percent of Jewish Israelis support Israeli control of the West Bank without Palestinian civil rights – what I think can safely be called apartheid.

This may not come as such a surprise to some – as back in October, we reported about a Haaretz poll that showed if Israel annexed the West Bank, a majority of Israelis would not want Palestinians to get the right to vote for Knesset.

It should also be noted that the seven percent of the polled Jewish Israelis said they support giving Palestinians full civil rights within a bi-national state – not so tiny considering how marginalized the left-wing one-state vision is in Israel.

The questions in the poll about the bi-national state are worded thusly (translated from Hebrew): “Which of the following scenarios would you prefer in order to maintain Israel’s character as a Jewish and democratic state 20 years from now?” I think this wording is quite telling since the very notion that we need to try very hard to “keep” Israel Jewish and democratic inherently reflects that being both Jewish and democratic isn’t really working out.

The poll was commissioned by an organization called Blue White Future, who published it in Hebrew. The poll questioned 500 Jewish Israelis, representing the adult Jewish population of Israel.

*The poll cannot be found online but here is a copy of it in Hebrew.

Related:
Liberal Zionism at 65: Fantasy and reality 
One or two states? The status quo is Israel’s rational choice

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.