Unpetrified Opinion
Exploring debates on the Middle East and the international politics of human rights.
"Loyalty to petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human soul." - Mark Twain
Wednesday 1 January 2020
Saturday 13 October 2018
Saturday 4 August 2018
ESCWA Report on Israeli Apartheid now in Arabic
Euro-Med Monitor has produced an Arabic translation of the ESCWA Report, available here:
https://euromedmonitor.org/uploads/reports/Escwa_ar.pdf
https://euromedmonitor.org/uploads/reports/Escwa_ar.pdf
Tuesday 24 July 2018
Israeli Practices toward the Palestinian People and the Question of Genocide
For a long time, people were hesitant to call Israel an apartheid state. Not that the term wasn’t used – we had “Apartheid Wall” and so forth, not to forget earlier works such as Apartheid Israel by Uri Davis. So far as I’m concerned, it’s fine to use such terms polemically to describe practices that one finds racist and odious. But any serious claim that the whole State of Israel was practicing apartheid, and so should be treated as an international pariah like apartheid South Africa, was not covered by this loose usage and seemed a step too far for jurists and politicians. Only recently has this obstacle been seriously breached, first by a South African study of Israeli policy in the occupied territories conducted by a team of international lawyers (which I edited) and later by the UN project in which I had the privilege of working with Richard Falk, where we found that Israel’s practices toward the Palestinian people as a whole indeed conform to international legal definitions of apartheid. There is now no need for weasel words like “analogy to” or “elements of” apartheid. Israel is, according to the definitions in international law, an apartheid regime. If anybody doesn’t think so (and Israel has marshalled a fleet of people, such as Benjamin Pogrund, to deny it), the analysis is right there for someone to pick apart. (Works by John Dugard, John Reynolds, Ben White and others have followed up on this: I don't mean to leave anybody out.)
Each of these policy areas he later elaborates and illustrates with examples, always stressing how they intersect and complement each other. These sections provide illuminating reading. For example, in the “Economic” sphere, he describes what Sara Roy has called “de-development”:
I’ve remained chary, however, about using the term “genocide” for Israel’s practices toward Palestinians, a term arising more frequently these days especially regarding Gaza. Like all legal terms for crimes against humanity, “genocide” is specific to a certain aim: eliminating a group physically. I understand why people critical of Israel's policies want to use it; they want to emphasize that a whole people is under assault and indeed suffering physically, such that some are dying under conditions Israel imposes. But different ideologies, logics, practices and techniques operate in genocide relative to those operating in its evil cousins, such as ethnic cleansing. I therefore favor being careful with it in order to target these different logics appropriately. This isn’t to say that what is happening in Gaza doesn’t deserve immediate and overwhelming international action, only that we had best know exactly what we’re about so that the term “genocide” doesn’t blur past the point that people know what they are dealing with and how to stop it. And, not incidentally, Israel’s practices don’t accord with the definition of genocide in the Genocide Convention, which emphasizes the "physical destruction" of a group, "in whole or in part" (Article II).
This caution has been significantly reduced, however, by my recently reading Lemkin’s Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Lemkin was no mere commentator. He is usually credited with inventing the term “genocide” and presents it as his own neologism in his book. His analysis in this volume offers many precious nuggets: for example, he recognized how the Third Reich divided territory to control people: “The multiple administrative divisions of the occupied countries … serve the purpose of weakening and crushing the resistance of the captive nations by dividing and enclosing them in separate territorial units” (Preface, page x). Israel does exactly this by dividing Palestinians into different juridical and geographic "domains."
More pertinent here is his description of genocide as a totalizing strategy. Anyone familiar with Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians will read his definition with a shock of recognition:
More pertinent here is his description of genocide as a totalizing strategy. Anyone familiar with Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians will read his definition with a shock of recognition:
Genocide is effected through a synchronized attack on different aspects of life of the captive peoples: in the political field (by destroying institutions of self-government and imposing a German pattern of administration, and through colonization by Germans); in the social field (by disrupting the social cohesion of the nation involved and killing or removing elements such as the intelligentsia, which provide spiritual leadership—according to Hitler's statement in Mein Kampf, "the greatest of spirits can be liquidated if its bearer is beaten to death with a rubber truncheon"); in the cultural field (by prohibiting or destroying cultural institutions and cultural activities; by substituting vocational education for education in the liberal arts, in order to prevent humanistic thinking, which the occupant considers dangerous because it promotes national thinking); in the economic field (by shifting the wealth to Germans and by prohibiting the exercise of trades and occupations by people who do not promote Germanism "without reservations"); in the biological field (by a policy of depopulation and by promoting procreation [Israeli settlement?] by Germans in the occupied countries); in the field of physical existence (by introducing a starvation rationing system for non-Germans and by mass killings, mainly of Jews, Poles, Slovenes, and Russians); in the religious field (by interfering with the activities of the Church, which in many countries provides not only spiritual but also national leadership); in the field of morality (by attempts to create an atmosphere of moral debasement through promoting pornographic publications and motion pictures, and the excessive consumption of alcohol). [emphasis added]
Short of “mass killings” (on the German scale), most of this description is eerily close to Israel’s policies. (I’m curious about the last one – illegal drug use among Palestinians is one covert aspect of the occupation; is Israel involved?) The main point here, however, is that genocide is a system, not just one practice. The goal of eradicating groups as groups is sought through intersectional policies designed to debilitate groups and make them vulnerable to their own destruction.
Each of these policy areas he later elaborates and illustrates with examples, always stressing how they intersect and complement each other. These sections provide illuminating reading. For example, in the “Economic” sphere, he describes what Sara Roy has called “de-development”:
The destruction of the foundations of the economic existence of a national group necessarily brings about a crippling of its development, even a retrogression. The lowering of the standard of living creates difficulties in fulfilling cultural-spiritual requirements. Furthermore, a daily fight literally for bread and for physical survival may handicap thinking in both general and national terms. … In Slovenia the Germans have liquidated the financial cooperatives and agricultural associations, which had for decades proved to be a most efficient instrumentality in raising the standard of living and in promoting national and social progress. (85)
Physical destruction, the hallmark of genocide as it is understood today, was found by Lemkin to involve three techniques:
1. Food restrictions.” The German system to ensure racial supremacy included a policy to allot certain percentages of carbohydrates, protein and fats to each group, in declining proportions based on their place in the German racial hierarchy. For example, Germans received 100% of the meat allowance; Poles 71%; Serbs 36%; and Jews 0% (87-88). That Israel may have stooped o such a “scientific” approach is suggested by that infamous moment when Israelis planning the Gaza siege were heard to joke that a particular calorie count would be provided to people in Gaza, such that they were effectively “put on a diet.”
2. “Endangering of health. The undesired national groups … are deprived of elemental necessities for preserving health and life.” Lemkin cited here conditions among Poles in Poland, but also extreme overcrowding in the Warsaw Ghetto, which included a lack of heat and access to fresh air. “Such measures, especially pernicious to the health of children, have caused the development of various diseases.” (88) One must think of plummeting health conditions in Gaza. Another thought here is of the common Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide, in which people were force marched across terrain without shelter, food or water and roughly a million died. Turkey says this outcome was unintended; the defense does not fly.
3. “Mass Killings. The technique of mass killings is employed mainly against Poles, Russians, and Jews, as well as against leading personalities from among the non-collaborationist groups in all the occupied countries. In Poland, Bohemia-Moravia, and Slovenia, the intellectuals are being "liquidated" because they have always been considered as the main bearers of national ideals and at the time of occupation they were especially suspected of being the organizers of resistance.” (88-89) Although the selective persecution and occasional assassination of Palestinian intellectuals and leaders could be cited here, it is this last subcategory – mass killings – that has blocked use of the term “genocide” in Israel’s case. Zionist and Israeli forces have certainly committed mass murder: in 1948 as a tactic of war, such as the famous massacre of unarmed civilians at Deir Yassin. But all the evidence from the time suggests that the aim of such atrocities was to terrorize the Arab population into fleeing, not its physical elimination. Ben Gurion's Plan Dalat was a policy of ethnic cleansing – heinous indeed, but not reflecting the logics of genocide. Mass murder as a technique to rid Israel of an unwanted group, as the Germans did regarding Poles, Jews and Gypsies in Auschwitz, have not been part of Israeli history. If asked, the vast majority of Israelis still hope the Palestinians will somehow be "spirited across the border," in Herzl's words.
Still, Israel clearly does want to rid itself of an unwanted ethnic group and has subjected the Palestinians to some version of every other practice in Lemkin’s bestiary. If mass murder is taken as just one contributing element of Lemkin’s holistic definition of genocide, rather than the defining element, its absence withers in significance.
Two qualifiers to my point here. First, one could not prosecute Israel through, say, the ICC under Lemkin's definition. The legal definition today is expressed in the Genocide Convention; the Rome Statute, with its shorter definition, also holds. Just because Lemkin was first does not mean his analysis carries legal authority.
Still, even the Convention alludes to Lemkin's concern, in specifying that genocide consists of practices designed to eliminating groups as groups. This phrase appears in Article II of the Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as acts made "with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." The "as such" qualifier suggests precisely Lemkin's concern--that if a group ceases to exist as a group, in the sense of no longer being identifiable as a discrete group, this would constitute a form of genocide in his view. (Writers like Baruch Kimmerling have tried to capture this with terms like "politicide" or "ethnocide" but Lemkin's discussion embraces all those practices under the term "genocide.")
Second, much more has been written about genocide. Literature on the Holocaust has exhaustively explored Nazi values, logics and practices, as have studies of genocides elsewhere, so Lemkin's original formula is hardly the sole or even definitive work. Still, the case for asserting a policy of genocide by Israel arises forcefully from reading the original author of the concept. If one is careful to specify that this holistic definition is the reference used, the term "genocide" can be affirmed to fit.
[This post was updated on 25 July 2018, after valuable comments by Richard Falk.]
Two qualifiers to my point here. First, one could not prosecute Israel through, say, the ICC under Lemkin's definition. The legal definition today is expressed in the Genocide Convention; the Rome Statute, with its shorter definition, also holds. Just because Lemkin was first does not mean his analysis carries legal authority.
Still, even the Convention alludes to Lemkin's concern, in specifying that genocide consists of practices designed to eliminating groups as groups. This phrase appears in Article II of the Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as acts made "with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." The "as such" qualifier suggests precisely Lemkin's concern--that if a group ceases to exist as a group, in the sense of no longer being identifiable as a discrete group, this would constitute a form of genocide in his view. (Writers like Baruch Kimmerling have tried to capture this with terms like "politicide" or "ethnocide" but Lemkin's discussion embraces all those practices under the term "genocide.")
Second, much more has been written about genocide. Literature on the Holocaust has exhaustively explored Nazi values, logics and practices, as have studies of genocides elsewhere, so Lemkin's original formula is hardly the sole or even definitive work. Still, the case for asserting a policy of genocide by Israel arises forcefully from reading the original author of the concept. If one is careful to specify that this holistic definition is the reference used, the term "genocide" can be affirmed to fit.
[This post was updated on 25 July 2018, after valuable comments by Richard Falk.]
Saturday 18 February 2012
A Response to Norman Finkelstein
Virginia
Tilley
19 February 2012
Responding
to bizarre statements always risks magnifying their exposure and importance.
Hence I wouldn’t normally respond to Norman Finkelstein’s startling 32-minute video
attack on the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against
Israel, which was recently posted on YouTube to considerable fanfare by Zionist
blogs. Some other good writers have taken him on, like Sean O'Neill,
so I could leave it there. But having watched the whole video-taped
interview as well as the 5-minute version that someone cobbled together
of its
“highlights”, I’m sufficiently irritated to respond. Partly I'm
concerned to counter some fallacies he promotes that are floating around
more widely, but I also feel obliged to challenge people who use the
worst conceits of the academy—“it’s science!” “it’s law!”—to
trash people’s work while abusing the real rigor and subtlety of
academe. In
fact, some of Finkelstein’s points are flat wrong, others partly wrong,
some partly right and others flat right. I’ll start with
the wrong ones.
First,
it’s seriously irritating that Finkelstein goes on about international law in
ways that reduce international law to a parody of itself. You can’t take some
law and not all law, he says, as though law is a fixed box set. For one thing,
he cherry-picks law with abandon himself, as I'll discuss later. But mainly,
international law isn’t a frozen set of rules. Like any law, it’s a moving target. Rules
and norms develop incrementally, and are interpreted and reinterpreted over
time, as conditions and needs change. For example, when the United Nations
voted for partitioning Palestine in 1947, apartheid in South Africa hadn’t yet
been invented. Within a few more years, South Africa’s first apartheid laws were
on the books, yet it was another decade before the UN began to react seriously against
it and 1973 before the UN made apartheid a crime against humanity. Today, the
prohibition of apartheid is codified in the Rome Statute of the International
Criminal Court and what Israel is doing can be defined and denounced in terms
that did not exist a half-century ago.
This
is why Finkelstein botches international law in holding that, because “Israel
is a state,” no one has a jot to say about the situation of Arab citizens
inside Israel. Even when he talks about the 1947 partition resolution of the
UN, Resolution 181, which recommended partitioning Mandate Palestine into a
Jewish state and an Arab state, he gets it wrong. He forgets that Resolution
181 specified plainly that neither state could discriminate on the basis of
religion or race. When the General Assembly admitted Israel as a member of
the UN in 1949, on the basis of this history, its members relied (gullibly) on
Israel’s hints that it would not discriminate against Arabs inside the state.
So Israel’s discriminatory laws flew in the face of international opinion even
in 1949, let alone sixty-plus years later, when human rights law has gained so
much more strength in prohibiting racial discrimination and apartheid. Today, no
state anywhere in the world today has a “right” to discriminate among its
citizens on the basis of race, religion, or ethnic or national origin. Israel
has signed onto the international conventions which explicitly prohibit such
discrimination and is bound by its obligations on this score.
So
if Finkelstein and others try to rely on diplomatic recognition of Israel to
argue that international law has nothing to say about discrimination against
Arabs in Israel, they are flat wrong, because it is flatly prohibited. Yes,
Israel is recognized as a state, but so is South Africa, and that didn’t stop
the entire world from slamming apartheid as the racist abomination it was and
insisting that the apartheid regime be dismantled.
Finkelstein
is also flat wrong on another historical point: that the international
legal framework for resolving the conflict has always been partition
into two states.
For evidence, he mentions that when Arafat—that legendary legal mind—
proposed
two states in 1989, he invoked the 1947 partition resolution as
unfinished
business of the conflict. Yes, Arafat did cite this, but his point was
precisely to jump back over four decades during which the opposite was
true.
From 1947 to 1989, Israel flatly rejected creation of a Palestinian
state
anywhere in Mandate Palestine as an intolerable threat to Israel. The
formal
public position of the PLO from its creation until 1988 was also one
state. Since 1967, Israel has made deadly clear—in rhetoric, laws, maps,
settlement
construction, military rule and anything else we might care to check—its
intention is to keep all of Mandate Palestine under its supreme control.
And in all that time, the UN Security Council said nothing about two
states or even about Palestinian national rights. That’s
precisely why the Oslo Accords manifested to naive international public
as a
“historic compromise”, blah blah.
Finkelstein
calls for us to stick with this “historic compromise”. He dresses down the BDS
movement for not doing so and for seeking instead, if implicitly, to “eliminate” or
“abolish Israel”. We are all so sick of this language that I couldn’t normally
find energy to write this sentence, except that he extends the point to
delegitimizing the BDS organizers by saying that they “don’t want Israel to
exist”. So let’s go through it one more time: this old Zionist chestnut makes
open hash of international law by deliberately confusing two things—Israel as a
modern territorial state and Israel as a Jewish state. Finkelstein’s critique
of BDS doctrine is sort of right: yes, taken as a whole (as I agree with him we
should take it), the comprehensive effect of the BDS agenda would “abolish
Israel” as a Jewish state.
But is this logical implication—based entirely on international human rights law, by the way—illegitimate? I’d say, damn straight, Israel as a Jewish state must be abolished, just as white South Africa had to be “abolished”, and for the same reason—because ethnic states simply can’t exist without discrimination and oppression. But does this mean abolishing Israel as a modern territorial state? Of course not, just as South Africa was not “abolished” in this sense. So language about “eliminating Israel” is just pointless sophistry—scare-mongering, rhetorical sabotage—as Finkelstein well knows. Indeed, accepting his claim to senior experience of this conflict, we must assume he knows all about this manipulative language and his using it therefore can only mirror his accusations of hypocrisy back on himself.
But is this logical implication—based entirely on international human rights law, by the way—illegitimate? I’d say, damn straight, Israel as a Jewish state must be abolished, just as white South Africa had to be “abolished”, and for the same reason—because ethnic states simply can’t exist without discrimination and oppression. But does this mean abolishing Israel as a modern territorial state? Of course not, just as South Africa was not “abolished” in this sense. So language about “eliminating Israel” is just pointless sophistry—scare-mongering, rhetorical sabotage—as Finkelstein well knows. Indeed, accepting his claim to senior experience of this conflict, we must assume he knows all about this manipulative language and his using it therefore can only mirror his accusations of hypocrisy back on himself.
Indeed,
it is Finkelstein himself who avoids being honest—just saying straight
out that
he wants Israel to remain a Jewish state and won’t accept as
"reasonable" any
program that disagrees. Instead, he cites “international law”
selectively and
thinly as a cover for this. He also claims that the BDS movement
contradicts “international
law,” such as UN Security Council resolutions which call for creating
two
states. Yet here again, he cherry picks, and hoists himself on his own
petard.
He cites Resolution 1515 of 2003, which calls for two states, as
“international
law” yet then disparages Resolution 194, which calls for return of
Palestinian
refugees, as “indefensible”. Here more sophistry infuses his objection
that mass
return of millions of Palestinian refugees to Palestine would be
entirely "unreasonable". For one thing, at least one study has found
that the number of Palestinians actually wanting to return would be in
the hundreds of thousands, not millions. But, in any case, defending the
principle of Palestinian return hardly
precludes sensible policies to manage the pragmatic realities of it, and
activists firing questions from audiences in Finkelstein's talks (his
example) hardly define the range
of negotiation that must go into such questions. The very complexity of
resolutions, diplomatic initiatives and contradictory clauses in the
full
history of the conflict precludes table-thumping about any one of them.
All are
necessarily subject to the diplomatic process, power politics, real politik,
geographic constraints and evolving international views. Taking bits and pieces
in isolation to call some “unreasonable” and others “international law” is
meaningless.
It
is indeed by viewing all this as a whole process, contradictions and all, that
the “compromise” suggested by the Oslo Accords is revealed as a sham. Not
least, Finkelstein ignores the glaring fact, hardly irrelevant to his claims
about international consensus, that Israel itself has never agreed to a
two–state solution. Aside from one sentence in a letter by Ariel Sharon, which
was never formally endorsed by the Israeli Cabinet, Israel has never signed
onto any document in any way that actually commits its government to create two
states. Nor has it ever recognized the Palestinian people as a people or
endorsed the Palestinian right to self-determination. The BDS movement might
usefully address this farce and open discussions toward accepting that
"Israel" now embraces all of Mandate Palestine and therefore must be
reconceived as a secular-democratic state. But until that happens, the BDS
movement can't be criticized for standing silent on a geographic version of
Israel that Israel refuses to hold for itself. Here Finkelstein's citing the
International Court of Justice on the question of where Israel's exists is only more cherry-picking: a mountain of
international diplomacy confirms that Israel's final borders have not been set
and the question remains a "final status" issue.
Finkelstein
claims that BDS organisers will not admit to the true goals of BDS (the
elimination of Israel) because they don’t want to split the movement. This
isn’t a fact so much as an interpretation, but it’s easy to agree with him.
He’s flat right that the three-tier goals of the BDS movement—end the
occupation, return of refugees, equal rights for Palestinian citizens of
Israel—would “eliminate Israel” as a Jewish state. I’ve pointed this out
myself, and am convinced for several reasons that the BDS organizers are fully
aware of it. And I too have been bothered by the elision, but on reasoning
opposite to Finkelstein’s. I think that a strategic fuzziness on this point
deprives the BDS movement of its greatest potential, which is the unassailable
moral force gained by clearly rejecting discrimination in all its forms and
fighting for creation of a non-racial state, as in South Africa.
Finkelstein,
by contrast, denounces the campaign’s silence on this point as
deceptive, and failing to accept
the inevitable. In doing so, he tramples all over principles of
political
activism as freely as he abuses international law. His first fallacy is
to
deride the BDS movement’s fogginess on its ultimate vision of one
secular-democratic
state as “childish” and “silly.” In this view, he is strangely naive,
for a political scientist, about the politics of liberation movements.
It’s a very old and time-honoured
method in building mass movements to tread lightly around issues that
divide
people until consensus and trust build to the point where more difficult
internal differences can be productively debated. The Zionist movement
itself
has done this from its earliest years, in skirting deep internal
divisions
about Judaism and Jewish social values, but we can spot the same
manoeuvring in
any liberation movement over the past few centuries. So it’s hardly
"hypocritical" that the BDS leadership is treading gently by not
confronting its
constituency with divisive issues until the time has matured for some
respectful internal debate about what “eliminating Israel” will actually
mean
to the future and well-being of the Jewish national home in Palestine.
Perhaps
it’s time for those discussions to be opened, but meanwhile it’s truly
silly to
call the delay “dishonest”. (Perhaps Finkelstein’s sensitivity on this
score
traces to Maoism, to which, by his own account, he was loyal for decades
longer
than most people. Once in a cult, always see cults?)
Finkelstein’s
second fallacy about BDS is in disparaging its few “successes”. Here he fails
to grasp the essential character of a BDS campaign. Although any such campaign
naturally seeks and celebrates landmark victories, its true success is not
measured by the number of companies pulling out of contracts but by the
incremental growth of world public opinion. Let’s get this straight: the
primary purpose of BDS is public education. This is mostly an intangible or
qualitative matter, yet of immense importance, as Israel knows full well: hence
Israeli state rhetoric these days barely mentions “terror” and focuses almost
exclusively on “delegitimation”. I’d suggest it’s a far better indication of
the BDS movement’s success that Israeli ambassadors, meeting in Israel over the
New Year's break, reported that they had never before felt their diplomatic
environments so chilly. Sean O'Neall has observed the same constraints
confronting the stumbling Birthright Israel program, and other observers attest
similarly.
Finkelstein’s
third fallacy regarding activism is to protest that, if it’s honest about its
“eliminate Israel” goals, the BDS will never reach a “mainstream public”. This
objection about mainstream opinion, which he repeats several times, is bizarre
on its face. Since when do human rights campaigns adjust their arguments to
please mainstream opinion? Changing mainstream opinion is their
very task. If activists took mainstream opinion as the proper guide
to moral action,
we would never have had the anti-slavery abolition movement, or the
women’s
suffrage movement, and apartheid would flourish in South Africa to this
day. Indeed, we wouldn’t have most human rights campaigns.
The toughest ones, which are often the greatest ones, must often start
small and grow
slowly.
Still,
maybe Finkelstein is unintentionally helpful in drawing our attention to a
seamier camp of human rights activism, by publicly positioning himself in it:
some activists do tune their positions to what they think the majority wants to
hear, eschewing stands that “lack support”. They may believe themselves pragmatic, but I call these folks “human
rights entrepreneurs”, as they are essentially market-oriented. Like courtiers,
they position themselves just behind the cutting edge, with a keen eye for
trends, so they can surf a wave they didn’t actually have the courage or
insight to create themselves. In other words, they are not guided by the moral
principles of human rights but by how the rhetoric “sells”—how a human-rights
posture gets them into the "club", invited to conferences and onto
speaker circuits, and draws funds to their NGOs (although I make no assertion
about Finkelstein on the money question). I don’t work that way, and I’d submit
that the great human rights campaigns of human history have never built that
way. They build on principle, and the greatest movements, like the campaigns to
end slavery and apartheid, hammered away for decades through fog and darkness,
eventually succeeding when moral authority and changing conditions finally
synced. So were these all “cults” during those dark years? If so, call me a
cultist.
I'm not saying Finkelstein
is a money-grubber. On the contrary, he is clearly saying what he truly
thinks,
and, setting aside his unnecessarily rude and insulting language, I
respect his independence of mind. But his position is still
entrepreneurial in
approaching human rights audiences as markets, in the guise of being
pragmatic. If he remains dedicated to this approach, perhaps he can remember the power of
marketing: persuading people that they want something. That’s how the ANC did
it, anyway, eventually selling its idea of a shared state to what looked for many decades like unassailable white rejection.
In
stark contrast to Finkelstein's argument, human rights campaigns must indeed
assume, as a premise essential to their work, that public opinion—here, Jewish-Israeli
opinion and Palestinian public opinion—is not fixed, but responds to
persuasion, events and conditions. Especially, it responds to messages from the
other side. A clarion call by the ANC for a shared state is what tipped South
African apartheid leaders, once their world crumbled, to give up apartheid.
When Palestinians decide collectively that their future is a reunited and
shared Palestine, in which all citizens are equal in dignity and rights, the
political chemistry of the entire conflict will change. By creating a
“mainstream public” for themselves, they will ultimately create it for all.
This
brings us to the question of leadership. One point I think Finkelstein did get
right, and perhaps it was time to break ground by saying it. He decried the BDS
Council for presuming to direct solidarity activities elsewhere. He mentions
its squashing his own initiative in Gaza, which was a scandal, but also its
claiming authority over initiatives by solidarity people anywhere in the world.
I have to agree with him on this one: I’ve never seen anything like it,
either—not with the Vietnamese, the ANC, Sandinistas, the Mayas, the PLO, East Timor, or
any liberation movement I’ve ever supported or communicated with. The BDS
Council is an able body of activists promoting an international campaign, but
Finkelstein is right: it’s no more than an unelected, unrepresentative bunch of
volunteers, and it has zip to say about what anybody else does, ever, anywhere,
in support of the Palestinian people. Its only legitimate role is to serve as a
resource, not an authority. Language I’ve heard by international activists on
this score—that “proposals” for activity this or that must be “brought to the
BDS Council” for “deliberation” and decisions about whether they should go
forward—is gobsmacking and raises my political-alarm antennae. The same ugly
impression was gained by AdamSchatz in the London Review of Books:
The idea of living with Jews—a central tenet of large
sections of the Palestinian movement during the First Intifada—gave way to a
vision of struggle against a faceless coloniser. When Israel began to build the
wall, Palestinians retreated in pride and defiance behind a separation wall of
their own. Many now refuse to associate even with those Israelis who are in
sympathy with the Palestinian struggle. Amira Hass, the great left-wing Israeli
journalist for Haaretz, who is based in Ramallah, was prevented from studying
Arabic at Birzeit; Daniel Barenboim has been vilified by some leaders of the
boycott movement on the grounds that the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the
Arab-Israeli youth orchestra he created with Edward Said, is promoting
“normalisation” with the Zionist state. One BDS leader told me with eerie
self-assurance that Said would have shut down the orchestra in line with BDS
demands. There was even a debate within BDS about whether the Bilin
protests ought to be boycotted because of the participation of Israeli Jews who
might call themselves Zionists. ‘These people don’t go to Bilin, [Palestinian
lawyer Diana] Buttu said. ‘They prefer to issue fatwas from their laptops, and
if you question the logic behind the fatwas, you get called a traitor.
[emphasis added]’
Who
the flippin’ hell is the BDS Council to shut down the Barenboim
orchestra, or
turn away Amira Hass or anyone else from Birzeit University, or—god help
us—presume to assert that Edward Said, of all people, would kow-tow to
its
puerile diktat? What random NGO coalition is authorized to silence
dissent by denouncing people as traitors? This is not just arrogance but
dangerous arrogance,
ringing of proto-fascism—centralisation by authoritarian
personalities, claiming doctrinal and strategic control over a
liberation
movement in the name of ideological purity with racist overtones,
although
they have no popular mandate whatever, not even the democratic figleaf
provided by the (long-defunct) Palestine National Council. The dangers of this
distortion must not be underestimated and further submission to its
intimidation tactics is unwise. Perhaps Finkelstein has done the solidarity
movement a service, after all, by throwing open a window for true Palestinian
democrats to confront this tendency and nip it in the bud. Sometimes a bull in
a china shop does create an opportunity to sweep out the place.
Virginia Tilley is a professor of political science, author of The One-State Solution and
many articles and essays on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and
editor of a comprehensive study of international human rights law in
Israel-Palestine that is coming out with Pluto Press later in 2012. She
can be reached at virginia.tilley(at)gmail.com <http://gmail.com> .
Wednesday 8 February 2012
My Country Has Disappeared
This
morning I had a kind of activist epiphane. It happened when I found I’d skimmed
a lead BBC News article, “Mahmoud
Abbas to head interim Palestinian government” in about five seconds and
discarded it to give serious attention to a sidebar item, “Ping-Pong
Toddler is YouTube Hit”.
There he was, the podgy little guy, sitting on the
ping-pong table, his dad popping balls at him and him popping them back. I
suppose he was a better image for Abbas, heading up an “interim Palestinian
government”, than the dour shot of Abbas himself actually posted on that other
article. But I wasn’t thinking about that. I was just finding the kid far more
interesting.
It’s been happening a lot lately. Not that I don’t
care about the Middle East anymore, but there’s hardly any point reading most of
this stuff. After one has pondered the wildly varying and unverifiable
counts of the weekend’s civilian deaths in Syria (3500 or 55?), it only takes a
few seconds to see that the IAEA has opened new talks in Iran (skip rest of
article) or what new aircraft carrier group is threatening Iran outside the
Straits of Hormuz (skip rest of article). Hillary Clinton’s latest outraged
pronouncement about the Russian veto of a Security Council vote on Syria? The
title suffices: flip to something more illuminating, like measuring ice melt in
the Arctic. Latest desperate warnings that Israel is going to blow us all to
smithereens by attacking Iran “by April”? Right, go two or thee lines down …
no, flip to the latest review of “War Horse”.
I’m not alone. A lot of us are getting jaded, bored
with reading, pasting, emailing, posting and otherwise giving dutiful dogged
attention to the same rusty recycling of the latest empty gestures by the same
decrepit and deplorable political figures. The outrage, the frantic moral
crisis watching US and UK idiot foreign policies lead us all to ruin—it’s all
still there. But it’s stalling in a kind of limbo of ineffectual action. One
keeps watching, dully, as one watches a tatty old city parade of weary lodge
members in sagging uniforms stumping along blasting cracked marching songs on
tinny brass instruments, celebrating patriotic zeal. One feels obliged to do
it, but it's such a relief to go back to anything else afterward. Contemplate
the evening TV schedule, or pat the cat, moral uplift.
I know the problem, really. It's that the real
issues go so much deeper that the bedazzling daily media froth that
"news" just isn't registering the way it should. Not least, I’m
bothered by the realization that, sometime over the past decade or so, my
country disappeared. I used to have a country, by the way. It was full of flaws
but it had a good constitution and you could fight for things you cared about.
People were illegally detained, and beaten up in prison, but you could haul the
cops before a court and at least put up a fight about it. People in foreign
countries were assassinated, but at least the government denied doing it,
because it was Wrong. Our phones were tapped and our mail peeked into, our
credit cards observed, but there was something called a warrant, and if they
didn’t get a proper one, you could complain. I was proud of all this, in that
naïve way that nationalists are proud of things they have never created
themselves. Even while I wrote scathing critiques of US foreign policy, I did
it because I was loyal to the vision. I believed. I was a patriot.
Just this year, it dawned on me that I’m a stateless
person. Not in the sense of a passport, thank goodness, but in the sense of
having a country that I call my own. I don’t recognize the one I grew up in, it
has turned into something else. I don’t know where the Constitution went. It’s
in a locked drawer somewhere, or carted off quietly on a palette into an
Indiana Jones military storage facility. The new country, the one that replaced
mine, is a paranoid, self-righteous, anything-goes state, in which someone I
used to think was my very own president feels free to say happily on a Google
chatroom that drone technology is really far better in killing “suspects” in
mountainous terrain; authorizes the arrest, trial and conviction of US citizens
on secret state evidence -- or, hey, skip the trial; and orders that prisoners
going mad in Guantanamo must stay there indefinitely because the authorities
can’t face the international scandal of revealing that they should never have
been imprisoned in the first place. And he gets away with it, because it's a
new country now.
Come to think of it, my
country has turned into Israel. It's all there - detention without trial, convictions on secret evidence, torture, assassinations, black-box prisons, drone strikes, warrantless monitoring of citizens ... But there are lots of reasons to think the similarity goes beyond appearances, and that it isn’t accidental, either. From those skimmed articles,
info occasionally rises out of the muck confirming that the Mossad and US and
British intelligence are operating "in lockstep" (Obama's phrase), reminding us that
those daily top-secret White House morning intelligence briefings to President
Obama must now be saturated with Israel’s versions of what is going on in the
world. This is deeply scary. Not least, the White House seems to have absorbed
Israel’s twisted worldview that the whole Middle East is fundamentally steered
by ethnic passions, so the skill-set needed in these Times of Terror is how to
play on those passions and whip them up in US/Israel’s favour. And of course,
who has that skill-set? By golly, thank goodness we have the Israelis. They've
been trying to help us get it right for years-- and look how well it's worked
for them.
Of course, what the
Israelis didn’t mention is that inflicting these methods on scared civilian
populations is exactly how the Israelis got to be so hated, and that by doing
the same things, the US would be hated, which it now is. Instead, the entire US
government and whole realms of the US electorate, lobotomized by corporate
radio and Jesus stations, have swallowed the classic Zionist evasion--that
eternal logic of the paranoid--that Arabs and Muslims don’t hate you for what
you do but who you are. Hence the US has trotted along gladly,
making Israel's methods ours: lying so often that people forget to check (e.g.,
that Iran is planning to “wipe Israel off the map”); convincing people that
illegal measures are noble and extrajudicial actions heroic (e.g., shooting
“suspects” from the air); and that, should any patriots take the slightest
pause to wonder if this is what the country of their childhood is really all
about, their whiney voices are heard as just more drivelling squeaks from the
limp-dicked “left”.
Back in 1948, looking
appalled at the Zionist triumphalist moment, Hannah Arendt deplored a worldview
in which “only outmoded liberals believe in compromises, only philistines
believe in justice, and only schlemiels prefer truth and negotiation to
propaganda and machine guns.” Perhaps it’s because Arendt said it all in 1948,
and others have said it all every year since, that saying it all in 2012 has
waxed pale. One shouldn’t lose heart about this, I’ve always said. Mark Twain
observed the same thing in the nineteenth century. Plato and Aristotle observed
the same things in ancient Greece, for that matter. The struggle goes on. But
we also know that Hannah Arendt had zippo impact then and that most of us are
having zippo impact now, because the terrible truth is that the real work is
not being done.
The real work is on a scale
unimaginable to me, as a mere mortal. A national popular US referendum of
political salvation, organized by the caring patriotic populace through the
Internet, to ban all private funding of election campaigns and force all media
to provide free and fair exposure to all candidates as a condition for their
licenses. Another referendum to force restoration of discarded laws that limit
how many radio and TV stations one corporation can own, to restore real
diversity to the American media landscape. A class action suit to challenge
illegal detention, extrajudicial assassinations and secret state evidence,
brought to the Supreme Court. An international coalition to bring the
illegality of US drone strikes before the International Criminal Court. Another
international coalition to bring unilateral economic sanctions against Iran
before the International Court of Justice for violating the United Nations
Charter. And at the same time, a massive popular education and lobbying
movement, on all levels and in all dimensions of what’s left of my former
country, to drive Israel and AIPAC out of the US Congress and free the US
political system to restore the Constitution and stop waging wars in the Middle
East for Israel.
All this can imaginably
happen. But it’s not likely to happen, because of all the flotsam. People are
too busy trying to track the latest death counts in Syria; lobbying the UN for
another resolution authorizing devastating western intervention; doing
Kremlinology on military staff changes in Israel to see what they portend for a
strike on Iran; and reading, beginning to end, articles about Palestinian
“unity” talks on the weird notion that it’s worthwhile for the Palestinians to
hold elections under occupation after Israel has shown it will arrest anyone
who gets into office whom it doesn’t like. Cognitive dissonance, wilful
blindness, naked Emperor … the critiques are as jaded as the problem.
Twenty years ago, I
stood up in a UN forum and said that I thought all the human rights work of
NGOs consulting with the Division on Palestine would make no difference because
Israel’s basic policies to annex the West Bank would not be affected by it.
Nobody liked it and they got sour on me. In 1991, I went to Congress with a
large pile of documents showing that things were getting worse and the
settlements would make hay of any negotiations. Biden started a sidebar
conversation halfway through my five minutes of fame and that was that. In
1992, I went to the PLO with the same info. I was left in waiting rooms with the
evidence in my lap, while Important People in newly bought expensive suits ran
back and forth putting together the Oslo process, ignoring me -- for after all,
the whole conflict would be over in five years. In 2003, I wrote in the London
Review of Books that surely, now everyone saw beyond any controversy that the
settlements had done their work and the two-state story was a cheat, we could
start talking seriously about a one-state solution. Nearly a decade later, I’m
still standing with cold feet on a grey sidewalk in a crowd of people, in a
cold slow drizzle, watching the two-state brass band stump by in their saggy
outfits blowing their even more cracked instruments. Yet another Middle East
war looms, but even Abbas looks deadly bored.
Let’s give it up and go
back inside to heat our feet with the last of our affordable fuel and do
something more inspiring, like watching that round little kid pop those
ping-pong balls back to his beaming dad.
Wednesday 1 February 2012
Politics of Negotiations in Syria
Crying wolf, foreign agendas and Israel's role in destabilising Syria
Al-Jazeera, 1 Feb 2012
Suva, Fiji - It's been a dismally predictable, transparent and nasty lie by regimes under assault in the Arab Spring that the mass uprisings are being whipped up by foreign agitators - usually meaning Israel and the United States, maybe France, Europe generally, now sometimes Turkey or, heaven forfend, Al Jazeera journalists. Only the most gullible swallow these claims: their principal effect is to make the claimants look like buffoons. Still, a government's crying wolf doesn't mean a wolf isn't around somewhere. It's equally gullible to assume that foreign agendas have no role in Syria, for example. ... more
Al-Jazeera, 1 Feb 2012
Suva, Fiji - It's been a dismally predictable, transparent and nasty lie by regimes under assault in the Arab Spring that the mass uprisings are being whipped up by foreign agitators - usually meaning Israel and the United States, maybe France, Europe generally, now sometimes Turkey or, heaven forfend, Al Jazeera journalists. Only the most gullible swallow these claims: their principal effect is to make the claimants look like buffoons. Still, a government's crying wolf doesn't mean a wolf isn't around somewhere. It's equally gullible to assume that foreign agendas have no role in Syria, for example. ... more
Sunday 22 January 2012
Republican National Committee endorses one-state solution
Thanks a million to Mitchell Plitnick on The Third Way for
sharing the mind-boggling news that the RNC, probably without
fully realizing it, has unanimously endorsed a one-state solution in
Israel-Palestine. The full text of the resolution, which I
append below, which reads rather like the
Republican Party has suddenly fused with the Southern Baptist Church, confronts us with the following key paragraph:
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the members of this body support Israel in their natural and God-given right of self-governance and self-defense upon their own lands, recognizing that Israel is neither an attacking force nor an occupier of the lands of others; and that peace can be afforded the region only through a united Israel governed under one law for all people. (emphasis added)
So what intrigues me now is how the RNC can possibly back out of this. It can't exactly reverse this resolution in any way that would imply dividing the
biblical land, and it certainly can't call for NOT having one law for all the people. I'm not even sure that the Republicans will understand the problem even if they are told that Arabs are an approximate majority -- again, their idea of things is pretty simple and there's not really any reason why a Jewish national home can't coexist with a mixed population anyway, even a majority non-Jewish one.
At any rate, we can hope for some kerfluffle from this. RNC high-ups, alerted to the trouble, will probably try to bury this resolution and hope it just fades from all knowledge, or maybe put out a vague correction that it was intended as a general statement of principle pending the "final status talks" blah blah. But the contradictions of nice Christian values with actual Israeli policy are laid bare by this resolution, and it's just possible that a few Republicans themselves might get a wee learning curve out of this and find themselves with a seed of doubt. Hopefully enough publicity will assist this modest process.
Here's the full text, with thanks again to Mitchell:
WHEREAS, Israel has been granted her lands under and through the oldest recorded deed as reported in the Old Testament, a tome of scripture held sacred and reverenced by Jew and Christian, alike, as the acts and words of God; and
WHEREAS, as the Grantor of said lands, God stated to the Jewish people in the Old Testament; in Leviticus, Chapter 20, Verse 24: “Ye shall inherit their land, and I will give it unto you to possess it, a land that floweth with milk and honey”; and
WHEREAS, God has never rescinded his grant of said lands; and
WHEREAS, along with the grant of said lands to the Jewish people, God provided for the non-Jewish residents of the land in commanding that governance must be in one law for all without drawing distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish citizens, as contained in Leviticus 24:22, and
WHEREAS, the Nation of Israel declared its independent control and governance of said lands on May 14, 1948, with the goal of re-establishing their God-given lands as a homeland for the Jewish people; and
WHEREAS, the United States of America, having been the first country to recognize Israel as an independent nation and as Israel’s principal Mideast ally, has enjoyed a close and mutually beneficial relationship with Israel and her people; and
WHEREAS, indeed, Israel is the United States of America’s greatest friend in the Mideast; and
WHEREAS, the roots of Israel and the roots of the United States of America are so intertwined that it is difficult to separate one from the other under the word and protection of almighty God; and
WHEREAS, there are those in the Middle East who have sought to destroy Israel from its inception as a nation; and
WHEREAS, those same enemies of Israel also seek to destroy the United States of America; and
WHEREAS, the United States of America and the nation of Israel have enjoyed cordial and mutually beneficial relations since 1948, a friendship that should continue to strengthen with each passing year.
NOW, THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, by the Republican National Committee that the committee by this resolution commends the nation of Israel for its relations with the United States of America.
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the members of this body support Israel in their natural and God-given right of self-governance and self-defense upon their own lands, recognizing that Israel is neither an attacking force nor an occupier of the lands of others; and that peace can be afforded the region only through a united Israel governed under one law for all people.
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that a copy of this resolution be forwarded to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and Senate Leadership and each of the legislatures of the states within the United States of America with the request and recommendation of this body that a similar resolution to that stated herein be proposed within their respective bodies.
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