An Interview with Bill and Kathleen Christison
By JEFF GORE - October 23, 2009
In 1979, Kathleen and Bill Christison retired from the CIA, where they worked as analysts. Ever since then, they've had an unorthodox retirement, to say the least. With only a couple relatively brief interludes, they've dedicated what could have been years of relaxation to fighting perhaps the most uphill battle imaginable: trying to bring the plight of the Palestinians to the public eye. The newest addition to the Christison canon is Palestine in Pieces: Graphic Perspectives on the Israeli Occupation, published in August by Pluto Press. During this decade the Christisons have made a habit of visiting Palestine at least once per year; they returned from their most recent trip earlier this month. Since the couple warned against the potentially endless nature of a conversation over the phone, I elected to send them a few questions via email, which they were gracious enough to answer.
Jeff Gore: Kathleen: In a recent interview with Laura Flanders on GRITtv, you said that based on your travels to Palestine over the past half-decade or so, you believe the situation of the Palestinians “has gotten worse, every year.” Given that the interview was conducted before your latest trip, would you still say this today, considering the downgrade or closure of several checkpoints this year, and, according to the New York Times, “a sense of personal security and economic potential...spreading across the West Bank?”
Kathleen Christison: This is an extremely important question. The supposed closure of checkpoints throughout the West Bank and what is being widely touted as an opening of economic potential are a fiction—a huge scam perpetrated by Israel and the U.S., intended to make it look to the world as though Palestinians are now prospering, that the Palestinian economy is thriving and Palestinian society is now content, all thanks to the beneficence and good will of the Israelis. The media—not just the New York Times, but other print and electronic media and various opinion-molders like Thomas Friedman—have fallen for this scam and indeed have been knowingly participating in it.
The objective is to delude us all, including the Palestinians, into thinking that a new era of peace and prosperity is dawning in the West Bank because Palestinians have stopped terrorism and Israel has responded in good faith by easing restrictions, all in contrast to the situation in Gaza, where all the misery is supposedly the fault of Hamas because it refuses to recognize Israel and refuses to end violence. We are meant to forget that the occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem continues and is continually being reinforced, that Israel launched an unprovoked murderous assault on Gaza early this year, that Israel continues to dominate every aspect of Palestinian daily lives.
In actual fact, things are no better for Palestinians in the West Bank, and in many cases they are worse. We’ve made two trips to Jerusalem and the West Bank this year, in April-May and October, and we’ve seen no substantial improvement in the situation Palestinians face on a daily basis. Despite the supposed removal of many checkpoints, most remain, and all can be reimposed at a moment’s notice. OCHA, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which has kept careful track for the last several years of Israeli movement obstacles, just issued a report indicating that the numbers of obstacles, which include checkpoints, roadblocks, earth mounds across roads, and gates blocking roads, had been reduced in recent months hardly at all—from 618 earlier in the year to 592 now. OCHA also suggests that there’s a good deal of subterfuge in Israeli reporting: although the Israelis promised the removal of 100 roadblocks by the end of Ramadan and issued GPS coordinates for these supposedly vanishing obstacles, OCHA did an on-the-ground survey and could confirm the removal of only 35. In numerous instances, the Israeli GPS locations weren’t even in the West Bank.
It’s true that there has been some improvement in a few showcase locations. The cities of Jenin and Nablus are rebuilding after the terrible destruction there during the Israeli siege of 2002 and 2003, and there’s a bit more economic prosperity. Even in Hebron, which lives under siege from the most vicious of Israeli settlers, some market areas are reopening. The most notorious checkpoint, Huwara just south of Nablus, has been opened up somewhat so that Palestinian cars may now drive through and people no longer have to walk through. But this is classic colonialism, designed to make things just enough better to take the edge off the anger of the colonized: you fill the natives’ stomachs and hope they become tame, that they won’t want to resist your oppression, that they’ll forget that they have no freedom, that they still live under oppression, always at the mercy of a colonialist oppressor who has no intention of relinquishing his domination or ending his exploitation of the oppressed and their resources.
The “model cities” in Jenin and Nablus and the “model checkpoints” such as Huwara are the exceptions in the Palestinians’ grinding life under occupation. Movement from one area to another is still severely restricted. Most West Bank Palestinians still cannot visit Jerusalem. Those who have work permits to enter Jerusalem must still wait for hours in endless lines to enter the city and pass through multiple security checks, including biometric checks that leave a record of when they entered the city and whether they have exited by the end of the day. Israeli settlements continue to be built and expanded on confiscated Palestinian land. The road network connecting the settlements to each other and to Israel, on which Palestinians may not drive, continues to be expanded, cutting off increasing numbers of Palestinians from each other. Palestinians are still harassed and physically attacked by aggressive Israeli settlers. Olive groves and other agricultural land continue to be confiscated, destroyed, burned, either by settlers or by bulldozers clearing land for more settlements or for the Separation Wall. Construction of the Wall is proceeding, cutting off more Palestinian land from its owners.
Non-violent protesters who demonstrate regularly against the Wall continue to be shot and killed or imprisoned. While newly trained, spiffily uniformed Palestinian security forces patrol city streets during the day, Israeli forces control the night and therefore control the entire territory. They conduct middle-of-the-night raids in villages throughout the West Bank, arresting young Palestinian men on suspicion merely of being Palestinian, beating or even shooting anyone who resists. In Jerusalem, where the Netanyahu government is currently concentrating its harshest oppression, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians continues quite openly. Palestinian homes continue to be demolished for no other reason than that they are in Israel’s way—in the way of the Wall’s advance, or of the next new or expanding Israeli settlement, or of Israel’s efforts to depopulate the land of Palestinians and create a Jewish majority. Palestinian families continue to be evicted from their homes so that Israeli settlers can live in them.
The catalog of horrors is long, and it is not ending, despite the hypocritical claims by the New York Times and others of an increased “sense of personal security,” despite all efforts by Netanyahu and the Obama administration to make us think peace has come. The occupation continues, and more harshly than ever. As Israeli journalist Amira Hass recently put it, the occupation “completely shrinks people’s lives,” and this has not changed.
JG: What are the advantages and disadvantages of being a white Westerner traveling in the Occupied Territories?
Kathleen & Bill Christison: Although we feel very comfortable among Palestinians, and have always felt very welcome, at the same time we always feel some embarrassment because we’re there basically as voyeurs watching other people’s misery. In fact, we feel we’re helping by bringing the Palestinians’ story, the facts of the occupation and what it means for Palestinian daily lives, to public attention in the West, but it’s still hard to get away from the feeling that we’re invading other people’s privacy by watching them line up at checkpoints and taking pictures of them, or watching them sob as their homes are demolished. Or, as happened to us once, talking to a man scheduled for surgery in Jerusalem who had been waiting for days for an Israeli permit to get into the city and who cried as he told us his story and asked us to take a picture of the medical certificate that attested to his need for surgery and should have provided his entrée to the city. We’ve told his story, but we knew, and he knew, that we couldn’t do anything to help him and that we would ultimately be able to go home to our comfortable lives in the U.S. while he waits—waits for his permit, waits for his freedom, waits for a decent life.
This is the principal reason, incidentally, that we’ve decided we won’t take any royalties or other profits from our new book, but will donate them to organizations that we feel most benefit the Palestinians. No book on the Palestinians will ever make much money in the first place, sad to say, but the idea that we personally should make any money because we’ve been witness to other people’s misery is unacceptable to us.
JG: I've always thought that the strongest argument for the two-state solution -- and against the one-state solution -- was Michael Neumann's assessment of Israel as unwilling to “abolish itself.” On the other hand, Kathleen, you've written critically about Neumann's remarks and advocated a single democratic state in Palestine. Ruling out any precipitous fall in American power, any miraculous surge in power of the Palestinian governing body, or God forbid, any catastrophic regional war, in what scenario can you envision Israeli Jews consenting to a bi-national secular state; to changing their flag, national anthem, even the name of their country?
KC: I have to say I object to the premise of Michael Neumann’s argument—that we should or should not pursue one or another solution simply on the basis of whether it meets Israel’s desires. I think, on the contrary, that we should pursue a solution for no other reason than that it is just, for both Palestinians and Israeli Jews. A two-state solution—which at its very best would give Palestinians a state in less than one-quarter of their original homeland and at it most likely would give them a non-viable, non-contiguous state in little pieces constituting quite a bit less than one-quarter—is simply not just. I recognize that realists like Michael disdain “dreamers,” as he’s called one-state advocates, as naïve and maybe other-worldly to be talking about unrealistic, impractical concepts like justice. But I don’t think, first of all, that it’s really so naïve or even futile to advocate and work for justice—justice does prevail on occasion. And, secondly, I think perpetrating gross injustice is ultimately totally impractical and cannot endure: a two-state solution, to my mind, is so grossly unjust—not to say also unlikely because Israel doesn’t want that either—that it is also impractical.
So my preference, if we’re faced with a situation in which Israel is not willing at the moment to “abolish itself” but is also not willing to give the Palestinians anything, not even a non-viable, cantonized state, is to work for the most just solution, which is a single democratic state in which Palestinians and Jews would live as equal citizens with equal access to the instruments of government and a constitution that would guarantee the equality of everyone. (I would not, by the way, call this a “bi-national” state, which I see as a state that maintains some de jure separation between the two peoples. This is something I fear would perpetuate the power imbalance and perpetuate Jewish domination of Palestinians. Although nothing would be easy for the Palestinians no matter what solution is pursued, a single integrated state with constitutional guarantees of equality would more readily assure them of some kind of political and economic parity.)
Those like Michael who argue on the basis of what Israel would not want to do are arguing from the premise that might makes right, that might makes a reality that we cannot counter, and that simply because the powerful party in this conflict doesn’t want something, it won’t come to be and none of us should even speak about it. This is absurd. Who would have expected in the mid-1980s when liberals throughout the world were fighting a seemingly futile battle of sanctions against apartheid South Africa, that the very powerful white leadership of that country would decide in the next few years to “abolish itself”? Who would have expected at that same time that the very powerful Soviet Union would “abolish itself”?
My crystal ball isn’t clear enough to be able to lay out a precise scenario, but I believe that Zionism and the racism and injustice inherent in it simply cannot endure and that Israel will collapse of its own weight at some time in the future, hopefully in our lifetime. No empire has lasted in history, and gross, systematic injustice does not last either. I also give Jews greater credit for having a conscience, for caring about justice and caring about the injustices perpetrated against the Palestinians in the name of world Jewry, than Michael or others like Uri Avnery do, who criticize us one-staters because we don’t seem to realize, as they say, that Israeli Jews will always want to screw the Palestinians if they all live in the same state. I just don’t buy that. If white South Africans and Soviet appartchiks could relinquish power voluntarily and non-violently, then I believe Jews will ultimately be led by their consciences to do the same.
My bottom line is, I don’t think we can or should shut our mouths about a just peace settlement—or, even more importantly, deliberately limit Palestinian options by refusing to speak about the possibilities—simply because Israel might not happen to like it, which is what I see as the principal argument of the anti-one-staters.
JG: Similarly, in your travels, what impression have you gotten from Palestinians as to which solution they advocate?
KBC: It’s hard to make a definitive judgment on this, but it is fair to say that support for a one-state solution is growing among Palestinians. Polls of Palestinian opinion still show this support in the minority, but growing. Many Palestinians whom we’ve talked to still favor two states and specifically reject one state, either because they fear Jewish political and economic domination in a single state or because they are closely enough connected to the Palestinian Authority that they are unwilling even to think of any alternative to the PA’s official support for two states, which is the position that gives them entrée into negotiations and whatever favors are bestowed by the U.S. But an increasing number of our acquaintances now more explicitly favor one state. They are increasingly dissatisfied with the PA’s position and its acceptance of the two-state solution, all of which they see as collaboration with the Israeli oppressor and a betrayal of fundamental rights in return for no benefit whatsoever for the Palestinians.
Much of Palestinian thinking is formed more around the possibilities than strictly on the basis of preferences, which is to say that as long as the two-state solution was the only alternative held out to the Palestinians, support for this option was quite high, but the more the possibility of a one-state solution is talked about—and, of course, the more the likelihood of a real, independent Palestinian state ever being formed in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem has receded—the more Palestinians are willing to think about and advocate a single state. As it has become clearer and clearer to the Palestinians that Israel under its current leadership has no intention of ever withdrawing from the occupied territories and no intention of allowing Palestinians any sovereignty in Jerusalem, support for a single state in all of Palestine has grown. More importantly, Palestinians increasingly recognize that their demand for the right of return is ultimately incompatible with a two-state solution, in which only limited numbers of refugees, if any, would be allowed to return to their homes and land inside Israel and the vast majority would have to be accommodated inside the tiny Palestinian state. It’s unlikely that an enduring peace settlement will ever be forged that does not address and provide a fair solution of the refugee issue and the right of return.
JG: In my recent interview with Jonathan Cook, he spoke highly of the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement, saying that in his view, “there is no way to end the occupation unless Israelis are made to see that they will pay a heavy price for its continuance.” Would you agree with this? If so, how would you respond to criticism about harming “innocent” Israelis with a blanket boycott or sanctions? Or is there even such a thing as an “innocent” Israeli when it comes to the issue of Palestinian suffering?
KBC: We do indeed agree with Jonathan on the wisdom of BDS and the notion that Israelis must be made to pay a heavy price for continuing the occupation if there’s to be any hope of ever ending it. As to whether “innocent” Israelis might be harmed by a blanket application of BDS, we would ask where one should draw the line on what harms Israelis. Does it harm innocent Israelis to cut off or cut back U.S. aid to Israel—which would be the ultimate sanction? Under a long-term ten-year agreement, the U.S. gives, not lends, Israel $3 billion of military aid every year—in cash, at the beginning of each fiscal year—plus additional increments of economic aid and loan guarantees on a year-by-year basis. Aid of this magnitude and given under these terms obviously greatly helps the Israeli economy. It also gives Israel virtually total impunity to commit whatever atrocities it wants against the Palestinians without fear that the U.S. will cut it off. So if we’re worried about harming individual Israelis, we have to worry about the guy in an electronics shop who is harmed economically because he no longer gets the subcontract for some airplane or tank part, but we also have to worry about the innocent Palestinians—the literally millions of innocent Palestinians—in Gaza particularly, but elsewhere as well, who are being killed by those airplanes and tanks and other military equipment that Israel uses with the impunity granted it by the U.S. If blind justice weighs these two groups of innocents and the harm done to them on her scales, we believe she would conclude that the “innocent” Israeli is after all not so innocent.
Although it may be clearer how the scales should balance when we’re talking about military aid, the same factors must be weighed when we deal with boycotts of non-military products and academic and cultural boycotts, and we think the same conclusions must be reached: ending Palestinian suffering at Israel’s hands is a more worthy, more just objective than saving the economic hide or the jobs of any Israelis. Maybe you’re right that there is no such thing as an “innocent” Israeli when it comes to Palestinian suffering. In a democratic state—democratic at least for Israeli Jews—all Jewish Israelis are responsible for the injustices and the killing and the atrocities visited upon the Palestinians. They elected the governments that have carried out these policies and actions; they have failed to put an end to them; they live in a state established on the suffering and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians over 60 years ago. We Americans are just as responsible for the killing and atrocities visited by U.S. forces on Iraqi and Afghan civilians and in past eras on civilians in places like Vietnam, and we would not claim that sanctions against the U.S. were unfair, even if these caused us to suffer personally. Perhaps this should be the criterion: that innocence lies in greater measure with the people being oppressed and bombed and occupied, and we must be more concerned with ending harm to them than with causing incidental harm to individuals in the oppressor-occupier nation.
JG: In your new book you briefly compare Israel's treatment of the Palestinians to the U.S's treatment of Native Americans. That said, I was wondering if you had an opinion on how to respond to one of the peskier questions addressed specifically to Americans that nobody seems to be able to answer. The question is: what right do I have to criticize Israel as a “colonial” or “settler” state when I am a descendant of colonists and settlers myself, enjoying the spoils of theft from an indigenous people?
KBC: This is indeed a difficult question to answer, and there is for sure a measure of hypocrisy in criticizing Israel without also rectifying our own nation’s sins. But we don’t believe that one injustice, even when perpetrated by our own country, imposes an obligation to remain silent about another injustice or requires that we stop working on Israel’s injustice until we’ve resolved the United States’ unjust policies. In fact, having acquired a conscience about what our country did, and continues to do, to our own native population has given us, we feel, a bit more moral authority from which to demand that the United States stop giving Israel the means—the political, military, and economic support—with which to commit a similar atrocity against the Palestinians.
We all pick our battles in this life, and we happen to have picked support for Palestinian rights as our battle. We did this initially from a position of considerable—and, we would acknowledge, shameful—ignorance about the history of U.S. treatment of Native Americans, but our focus on the Palestinians has helped open our eyes to the Native Americans’ situation, and we’re now more conscious of the need to work for justice for both peoples. If we personally continue to devote more of our attention to the Palestinians, this is because it’s a more easily resolvable situation and because we’ve already invested 30-plus years of our education and work in it. But to repeat, whatever inequity exists in our own allocation of attention, whatever hypocrisy exists in demanding of Israel what the U.S. has not done for its own native population, does not put any obligation on us to give Israel carte blanche to continue its oppression unopposed.
JG: Kathleen, in the GRITtv interview you described losing interest in the conflict for a few years before returning to it due to its "haunting" nature. Could you describe that in more detail, or in other words, what has compelled you to keep writing on behalf of the Palestinians for three decades, despite their situation growing increasingly worse over that time period?
KC: Maybe it’s precisely because the Palestinians’ situation has grown worse that I’ve been so “haunted” and so compelled to continue working on this issue. Although I had worked on the Palestinian question for several years before Bill and I left the CIA in 1979, I never actually met a Palestinian until the late 1980s, when I began interviewing Palestinian Americans about their attitudes toward Israel—which ultimately led to my book The Wound of Dispossession. It was only by doing these interviews, and doing a lot of reading on the history of Palestine-Israel, that I really learned the Palestinian story. And I was and continue to be shocked at how horribly that story has been distorted in the United States and the rest of the West. For me—and for Bill too—it’s been a kind of crusade to bring this story to greater public attention. The Palestinians are such a graceful people and the injustices perpetrated against them for six decades and more have been so horrific—and so deliberate—that we both feel we can’t give up.
JG: For those who don't have time or means to visit Palestine, but want to help the Palestinians, what would you suggest is the best thing that they can do?
KBC: This may be the most difficult of your questions to answer. The usual route, talking to one’s congressmen, is an almost totally futile pursuit on this issue. The Israel lobby, in all its aspects, has Congress so sewed up that it’s almost impossible to get any attention if one is talking about Palestinian rights or demanding concessions from Israel or advocating anything other than the current so-called international consensus on two states. We both think that at the popular level in the U.S. there’s been an upsurge in support for the Palestinians and a greater willingness to criticize Israel. This has been particularly true since Israel’s assault on Gaza early this year. But so far this change in viewpoint hasn’t reached up to the political level, meaning in the administration and Congress, because there simply aren’t enough people willing to mobilize, visit congressmen, write letters to the editor, etc. But this is what’s needed. We need to educate ourselves on the issue so that we can educate others, join whatever solidarity organizations exist in our areas, gain some political muscle by increasing our numbers, work together, lobby congressmen in numbers, write letters to the editor, force the media to pay attention to what’s happening on the ground, call out Israel’s supporters everywhere for their moral blindness, sign on to the many petitions and letters to politicians that circulate on the internet. In general, make ourselves known, make our position known, and make noise!
Jeff Gore is a freelance journalist based in Athens, GA. He is a frequent contributor to the Athens weekly Flagpole Magazine and has also written articles for Dissident Voice and The Comment Factory. His journal of his summer spent in Palestine can be read at holylanddispatches.blogspot.com . He can be reached at jgore00@gmail.com.
Source
October 23, 2009
Why I disrupted Olmert
By Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 23 October 2009
If former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had merely been a diplomat or an academic offering a controversial viewpoint, then interrupting his 15 October speech at University of Chicago's Mandel Hall would certainly have been an attempt to stifle debate (Noah Moskowitz, Meredyth Richards and Lee Solomon, "The importance of open dialogue," Chicago Maroon, 19 October 2009). Indeed, I experienced exactly such attempts when my own appearance at Mandel Hall last January, with Professor John Mearsheimer and Norman Finkelstein, was constantly interrupted by hecklers.
But confronting a political leader suspected of war crimes and crimes against humanity cannot be viewed the same way.
The report of the UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict last winter, headed by Judge Richard Goldstone, found that Israel engaged in willful, widespread and wanton destruction of civilian property and infrastructure, causing deliberate suffering to the civilian population. It found "that the incidents and patterns of events considered in the report are the result of deliberate planning and policy decisions" and that many may amount to "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity." If that proves true, then the individual with primary responsibility is Ehud Olmert, who, as prime minister and the top civilian commander of Israel's armed forces, was involved in virtually every aspect of planning and execution.
The killings of more than 3,000 Palestinians and Lebanese during Olmert's three years in office are not mere differences of opinion to be challenged with a polite question written on a pre-screened note card. They are crimes for which Olmert is accountable before international law and public opinion.
Israel, unlike Hamas (also accused of war crimes by Goldstone), completely refused to cooperate with the Goldstone Mission. Instead of accountability, Olmert is, obscenely, traveling around the United States offering justifications for these appalling crimes, collecting large speaking fees, and being feted as a "courageous" statesman.
In their 20 October email to the University of Chicago community, President Robert Zimmer and Provost Thomas Rosenbaum condemned the "disruptions" during Olmert's speech. "Any stifling of debate," they wrote, "runs counter to the primary values of the University of Chicago and to our long-standing position as an exemplar of academic freedom."
Was it in order to promote debate that the University insisted on pre-screening questions and imposed a recording ban for students and media? In the name of promoting debate, will the University now invite Hamas leader Khaled Meshal -- perhaps by video link -- to lecture on leadership to its students, and offer him a large honorarium? Can we soon expect Sudan's President Omar Bashir to make an appearance at Mandel Hall?
When I and others verbally confronted Olmert, we stood for academic freedom, human rights, and justice, especially for hundreds of thousands of students deprived of those same rights by Olmert's actions.
During Israel's attack on Gaza last winter, schools and universities were among the primary targets. According to the Goldstone report, Israeli military attacks destroyed or damaged at least 280 schools and kindergartens. In total, 164 pupils and 12 teachers were killed, and 454 pupils and five teachers injured.
After the bombing, Olmert and Israel continued their attack on academic freedom, blocking educational supplies from reaching Gaza. Textbooks, notebooks, stationery and computers are among the forbidden items. In September, Chris Gunness, spokesman for UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, publicly appealed to Israel to lift its ban on books and other supplies from reaching Gaza's traumatized students.
Israel destroyed buildings at the Islamic University and other universities. According to the Goldstone report, these "were civilian, educational buildings and the Mission did not find any information about their use as a military facility or their contribution to a military effort that might have made them a legitimate target in the eyes of the Israeli armed forces."
Gaza's university students -- 60 percent of them women -- study all the things that students do at the University of Chicago. Their motivations, aspirations, and abilities are just as high, but their lives are suffocated by unimaginable violence, trauma, and Israel's blockade, itself a war crime. Olmert is the person who ordered these acts and must be held accountable.
Crimes against humanity are defined as "crimes that shock the conscience." When the institutions with the moral and legal responsibility to punish and prevent the crimes choose complicit silence -- or, worse, harbor a suspected war criminal, already on trial for corruption in Israel, and present him to students as a paragon of "leadership" -- then disobedience, if that is what it takes to break the silence, is an ethical duty. Instead of condemning them, the University should be proud that its students were among those who had the courage to stand up.
For the first time in recorded history, an Israeli prime minister was publicly confronted with the names of his victims. It was a symbolic crack in the wall of impunity and a foretaste of the public justice victims have a right to receive when Olmert is tried in a court of law.
Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. This article was originally published in the University of Chicago's Chicago Maroon newspaper
 |
| Protesters demonstrated in the rain outside of the University of Chicago lecture hall where activists inside disrupted Olmert's speech, 15 October 2009. (Maureen Clare Murphy) |
If former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had merely been a diplomat or an academic offering a controversial viewpoint, then interrupting his 15 October speech at University of Chicago's Mandel Hall would certainly have been an attempt to stifle debate (Noah Moskowitz, Meredyth Richards and Lee Solomon, "The importance of open dialogue," Chicago Maroon, 19 October 2009). Indeed, I experienced exactly such attempts when my own appearance at Mandel Hall last January, with Professor John Mearsheimer and Norman Finkelstein, was constantly interrupted by hecklers.
But confronting a political leader suspected of war crimes and crimes against humanity cannot be viewed the same way.
The report of the UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict last winter, headed by Judge Richard Goldstone, found that Israel engaged in willful, widespread and wanton destruction of civilian property and infrastructure, causing deliberate suffering to the civilian population. It found "that the incidents and patterns of events considered in the report are the result of deliberate planning and policy decisions" and that many may amount to "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity." If that proves true, then the individual with primary responsibility is Ehud Olmert, who, as prime minister and the top civilian commander of Israel's armed forces, was involved in virtually every aspect of planning and execution.
The killings of more than 3,000 Palestinians and Lebanese during Olmert's three years in office are not mere differences of opinion to be challenged with a polite question written on a pre-screened note card. They are crimes for which Olmert is accountable before international law and public opinion.
Israel, unlike Hamas (also accused of war crimes by Goldstone), completely refused to cooperate with the Goldstone Mission. Instead of accountability, Olmert is, obscenely, traveling around the United States offering justifications for these appalling crimes, collecting large speaking fees, and being feted as a "courageous" statesman.
In their 20 October email to the University of Chicago community, President Robert Zimmer and Provost Thomas Rosenbaum condemned the "disruptions" during Olmert's speech. "Any stifling of debate," they wrote, "runs counter to the primary values of the University of Chicago and to our long-standing position as an exemplar of academic freedom."
Was it in order to promote debate that the University insisted on pre-screening questions and imposed a recording ban for students and media? In the name of promoting debate, will the University now invite Hamas leader Khaled Meshal -- perhaps by video link -- to lecture on leadership to its students, and offer him a large honorarium? Can we soon expect Sudan's President Omar Bashir to make an appearance at Mandel Hall?
When I and others verbally confronted Olmert, we stood for academic freedom, human rights, and justice, especially for hundreds of thousands of students deprived of those same rights by Olmert's actions.
During Israel's attack on Gaza last winter, schools and universities were among the primary targets. According to the Goldstone report, Israeli military attacks destroyed or damaged at least 280 schools and kindergartens. In total, 164 pupils and 12 teachers were killed, and 454 pupils and five teachers injured.
After the bombing, Olmert and Israel continued their attack on academic freedom, blocking educational supplies from reaching Gaza. Textbooks, notebooks, stationery and computers are among the forbidden items. In September, Chris Gunness, spokesman for UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, publicly appealed to Israel to lift its ban on books and other supplies from reaching Gaza's traumatized students.
Israel destroyed buildings at the Islamic University and other universities. According to the Goldstone report, these "were civilian, educational buildings and the Mission did not find any information about their use as a military facility or their contribution to a military effort that might have made them a legitimate target in the eyes of the Israeli armed forces."
Gaza's university students -- 60 percent of them women -- study all the things that students do at the University of Chicago. Their motivations, aspirations, and abilities are just as high, but their lives are suffocated by unimaginable violence, trauma, and Israel's blockade, itself a war crime. Olmert is the person who ordered these acts and must be held accountable.
Crimes against humanity are defined as "crimes that shock the conscience." When the institutions with the moral and legal responsibility to punish and prevent the crimes choose complicit silence -- or, worse, harbor a suspected war criminal, already on trial for corruption in Israel, and present him to students as a paragon of "leadership" -- then disobedience, if that is what it takes to break the silence, is an ethical duty. Instead of condemning them, the University should be proud that its students were among those who had the courage to stand up.
For the first time in recorded history, an Israeli prime minister was publicly confronted with the names of his victims. It was a symbolic crack in the wall of impunity and a foretaste of the public justice victims have a right to receive when Olmert is tried in a court of law.
Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. This article was originally published in the University of Chicago's Chicago Maroon newspaper
UNRWA official: Israeli refusal to allow stationary into Gaza illogical
| 23/10/2009 |
Allied Strategy at Risk as Afghan Police Run Out of Recruits
Low Pay, Dangerous Conditions a Recipe Most Afghans Eager to Avoid
by Jason Ditz, October 22, 2009
US efforts to dramatically expand Afghanistan’s domestic security forces are running into a brick wall as officials say they simply aren’t able to recruit enough people to meet the Western goals.
Perhaps even more worrisome is that about a third of the police force is quitting now in any given year, so the recruitment effort is having a hard enough time replacing the outgoing police, let alone adding to the force.
It’s not hard to see why. Afghan police make only $120 a month and are often placed on the front lines of the nation’s security, facing some of the most dangerous conditions possible. In the end only the desperate are willing to take such low paying jobs.
The low pay is likely also a source corruption, as $120 a month is only about half of what is required to support a family, and it is generally understood that recruits will make up the different with bribes. As one of the trainers put it “the best we can hope for is that if they are taking bribes, at least they know it’s wrong.”
But likely the ones who know it’s wrong are the ones leaving in droves, and those remaining are either those incapable of doing any better or those that have found ways to supplant their meager income in one of the most corrupt governments on earth. This is likely part of the reason why Western officials aren’t even willing to hazard a guess how much longer this war will take.
Barak Breaks the Israeli Silence on Iran Nuclear Deal
23/10/2009 A senior European Union official told Israeli officials this week that “Israel” is not privy to the details of the exchanges between Iran and the Western countries regarding its nuclear program. “You do not understand the extent to which you are not in the picture. You do not know how much you do not know and what is happening in Iran,” he said.
Accordingly, a number of senior Israeli officials backed the European official’s statements by saying that the release of the draft of an agreement with Iran caught Israel by surprise. However, a senior official in the U.S. administration told Haaretz Thursday that from the minute the talks began on a deal over the uranium enrichment program of Iran, Israel was updated on every detail by the United States, and was given detailed reports on the talks with the Iranians and the ongoing dialogue on a nearly daily basis.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s Bureau refused to comment.
However, Defense Minister Ehud Barak broke Israel’s official silence on a draft plan under which most of its enriched uranium will be exported abroad for processing into a form usable in its research reactor, saying there was a need to halt all uranium enrichment on Iranian soil.
“Iran received legitimization for enriching uranium for civilian purposes on its soil, contrary to the understanding that those negotiating with it have about its real plans – obtaining nuclear [weapons] capability,” Barak said. He acknowledged that the deal, if signed, would significantly reduce Iran’s stock of enriched uranium, but said what is needed is a complete halt to its enrichment program.
“The talks [with Iran] must be of short, limited duration,” he added. “The principle we are recommending to all the players is not, under any circumstances, to remove any option from the table.”
Iran is slated to sign the agreement Friday, along with the United States, France, Russia and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Many details of the agreement have not yet been published, but the bits released to the public call for Iran to transfer about 1,200 kilograms of low-enriched uranium – about 75 percent of its known stock – to Russia. There, it will be enriched to a level of 20 percent and then transferred to France, where it will be processed into nuclear fuel and returned to Tehran for use in its research reactor, which makes medical isotopes. The entire process will take about 18 months.
Israeli army force international activists out of the groves during olive harvest in Kafr Qalil
International Solidarity Movement - 21 October 2009
On Wednesday, 21 October 2009, several international activists accompanied Kafr Qalil farmers for the olive harvest in their land. The olive fields of the village of Kafr Qalil, in the Nablus region, are close to the illegal Israeli settlements of Bracha and Yizhar. During the olive harvest there is a potential threat of settlers coming to the olive fields and harassing the farmers, so the farmers feel safer with an international presence.
Today, the soldiers presented documents written in Hebrew and Arabic which they claimed to be an order stating that the area was prohibited for internationals to enter. They said that they would call the police to come and arrest the activists if they did not leave the area. They also threatened to interrupt the harvest and force the farmers to leave their land if the activists came back, and said that this had been done in other areas in the past. When the activists questioned why internationals are not allowed to accompany the farmers on their land, they were told that their presence would bother the settlers. Considering the threats, two activists left the area at 8 am, only two hours after the harvesting started. Two other activists that were higher up on the hill were not approached by the soldiers and were able to remain until the end of the day.
The olive groves are in an area declared a closed military zone, so the farmers are not allowed to access their land without a permit. Yesterday, the Israeli military called the village of Kafr Qalil and told them that they will be permitted to access their land for four days during the olive harvest. Some of the farmers need a week to pick their olives.
The restricted access to the olive fields during the rest of the year results in thistles and weeds growing all over the olive fields. Normally, farmers would keep these away in order to improve the conditions for the trees and make the olive harvest easier.
The farmers said that they were attacked by settlers during the olive harvest last year, while the Israeli soldiers that were supposed to protect the farmers just observed without intervening. In the fields, there are a number of scorched olive trees that were set on fire by settlers two years ago.
Book review: Shlomo Sand's "The Invention of the Jewish People"
Raymond Deane, The Electronic Intifada, 22 October 2009
In 1967 the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish published his poem "A Soldier Dreaming of White Lilies," only to be accused of "collaboration with the Zionist enemy" for his sympathetic depiction of an Israeli soldier's remorse of conscience. Forty years later that soldier has identified himself as the historian Shlomo Sand. He has translated his remorse into a book that has become a bestseller in Israel and France, where the award of the Prix Aujourd'hui has made the author something of a TV star.
Indeed, few recent books have aroused more interest and been more frequently reviewed in the US and Europe prior to the appearance of an English version. Translator Yael Lotan has chosen to follow the example of her French predecessors by telescoping the interrogative Hebrew title (When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?), which here becomes The Invention of the Jewish People, thus misleadingly and (deliberately?) provocatively implying that such inventiveness was unique to the Jews. However, Sand clarifies that worldwide in the 19th century "[t]he national project was ... a fully conscious one ... It was a simultaneous process of imagination, invention, and actual self-creation" (45).
Sand traces how Zionist ideology drove the project of Jewish nationalism by turning Judaism "into something hermetic, like the German Volk ..." (255). He argues that history and biology were enlisted "to bind together the frangible secular Jewish identity." Together, these engendered an "ethnonationalist historiography" which was typified by the mid-19th century German Jewish historian Heinricht Graetz and his friend Moses Hess, who "needed a good deal of racial theory to dream up the Jewish people" (256).
According to Sand, the destruction by the Romans of the Second Temple in 70 AD left the indigenous Jewish population of Judea and Samaria in place. "[T]he Romans never deported entire peoples. It did not pay to uproot the people of the land, the cultivators of produce, the taxpayers" (130). Furthermore, at that time there were already Jewish communities numbering up to four million persons in Persia, Egypt, Asia Minor and elsewhere (145). Palestine's status as the unique "ancestral homeland" of the Jews collapses together with the myth of David and Solomon's imposing kingdom.
Against the ethno-biological concept of a Jewish people -- a "race" -- whose linear descendants returned from exile to (re)found today's Israel, Sand posits a religious community proliferating throughout and beyond the Mediterranean region by means of proselytism and conversion. He offers a detailed rebuttal of the conventional wisdom whereby "Judaism was never a proselytizing religion," a view disseminated by historian Martin Goodman and others (150, note 42).
Most importantly, he concentrates attention on Khazaria, that "Strange Empire" that flourished in the Caspian region between the seventh and tenth centuries AD. By the eighth century the Khazars had adopted Hebrew as their sacred and written tongue, and "[a]t some stage between the mid-eighth and mid-ninth centuries, the[y] ... adopted Jewish monotheism" (221). Sand speculates that this conversion was calculated to save them from absorption into either the Roman or the Islamic empires. The Khazars, he contends, engendered those Askhenazi Jews of central and eastern Europe who would later invent the myths of Zionism to justify their colonization of Palestine, a land to which they had no "ethnic" connection and where they remain the dominant elite.
So if the exile was a myth -- fomented, Sand writes, by the Christian church as an image of divine punishment ("The Wandering Jew") -- what happened to the indigenous Jews? Sand's answer: they converted to Islam and survive as today's disinherited Palestinians. This seemingly radical thesis was once shared by, among others, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister who in 1918 still believed that (in Sand's words) "the ancient Judean peasants converted to Islam ... for material reasons ... Indeed, by clinging to their soil they remained loyal to their homeland" (186).
Ultimately, the case against the Jewish state cannot be based on an unseemly tussle for genetic primacy, but on a discourse of fundamental political and human rights. Sand turns toward such a discussion in the final chapter, describing it as the raison d'etre of The Invention of the Jewish People, which he admits essentially contains nothing not already found in the work of other historians and archaeologists.
Today's Israel is not a democracy but a "liberal ethnocracy" (307) that assumes its "growing and strengthening" Arab minority "will always accept its exclusion from the political and cultural heart" (309). Ultimately we may see "an uprising in the Arab Galilee, followed by iron-fisted repression," which would constitute "a turning-point for the existence of Israel" in the region. Hence, Sand states that the ideal solution would be the creation of a democratic binational state.
Sadly, Sand hastily dismisses this "ideal project." In terms all too drearily reminiscent of Zionist apologetics he states that to "ask the Jewish Israeli people, after such a long and bloody conflict, and in view of the tragedy experienced by many of its immigrant founders in the twentieth century, to become overnight a minority in its own state may not be the smartest thing to do" (311-312). Instead, he falls back on a sequence of rhetorical questions: "[h]ow many Jews would be willing to forgo the privileges they enjoy in the Zionist state? ... will anyone dare to repeal the Law of Return ... ? To what extent is Jewish Israeli society willing to discard the ... image of the 'chosen people,' and to cease ... excluding the 'other' from its midst?"
What is behind this sorry post-Zionist anti-climax to a book that seemed to presage a heady anti-Zionist conclusion? In an interview Sand admitted that he "waited until [he] was a full professor" before publishing the book, adding that there "is a price to be paid in Israeli academia for expressing views of this sort." In providing the premises for radical conclusions without either drawing or excluding those conclusions, Sand has the best of both worlds with few if any consequences.
Ultimately, Shlomo Sand is a little like Moses, unable to cross the Jordan into the Promised Land. The journey so far, however, is instructive, and very stylishly accomplished; one hopes that the "soldier dreaming of white lilies" may eventually be emboldened to complete it.
Raymond Deane is a composer and political activist (www.raymonddeane.com)
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Indeed, few recent books have aroused more interest and been more frequently reviewed in the US and Europe prior to the appearance of an English version. Translator Yael Lotan has chosen to follow the example of her French predecessors by telescoping the interrogative Hebrew title (When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?), which here becomes The Invention of the Jewish People, thus misleadingly and (deliberately?) provocatively implying that such inventiveness was unique to the Jews. However, Sand clarifies that worldwide in the 19th century "[t]he national project was ... a fully conscious one ... It was a simultaneous process of imagination, invention, and actual self-creation" (45).
Sand traces how Zionist ideology drove the project of Jewish nationalism by turning Judaism "into something hermetic, like the German Volk ..." (255). He argues that history and biology were enlisted "to bind together the frangible secular Jewish identity." Together, these engendered an "ethnonationalist historiography" which was typified by the mid-19th century German Jewish historian Heinricht Graetz and his friend Moses Hess, who "needed a good deal of racial theory to dream up the Jewish people" (256).
According to Sand, the destruction by the Romans of the Second Temple in 70 AD left the indigenous Jewish population of Judea and Samaria in place. "[T]he Romans never deported entire peoples. It did not pay to uproot the people of the land, the cultivators of produce, the taxpayers" (130). Furthermore, at that time there were already Jewish communities numbering up to four million persons in Persia, Egypt, Asia Minor and elsewhere (145). Palestine's status as the unique "ancestral homeland" of the Jews collapses together with the myth of David and Solomon's imposing kingdom.
Against the ethno-biological concept of a Jewish people -- a "race" -- whose linear descendants returned from exile to (re)found today's Israel, Sand posits a religious community proliferating throughout and beyond the Mediterranean region by means of proselytism and conversion. He offers a detailed rebuttal of the conventional wisdom whereby "Judaism was never a proselytizing religion," a view disseminated by historian Martin Goodman and others (150, note 42).
Most importantly, he concentrates attention on Khazaria, that "Strange Empire" that flourished in the Caspian region between the seventh and tenth centuries AD. By the eighth century the Khazars had adopted Hebrew as their sacred and written tongue, and "[a]t some stage between the mid-eighth and mid-ninth centuries, the[y] ... adopted Jewish monotheism" (221). Sand speculates that this conversion was calculated to save them from absorption into either the Roman or the Islamic empires. The Khazars, he contends, engendered those Askhenazi Jews of central and eastern Europe who would later invent the myths of Zionism to justify their colonization of Palestine, a land to which they had no "ethnic" connection and where they remain the dominant elite.
So if the exile was a myth -- fomented, Sand writes, by the Christian church as an image of divine punishment ("The Wandering Jew") -- what happened to the indigenous Jews? Sand's answer: they converted to Islam and survive as today's disinherited Palestinians. This seemingly radical thesis was once shared by, among others, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister who in 1918 still believed that (in Sand's words) "the ancient Judean peasants converted to Islam ... for material reasons ... Indeed, by clinging to their soil they remained loyal to their homeland" (186).
Ultimately, the case against the Jewish state cannot be based on an unseemly tussle for genetic primacy, but on a discourse of fundamental political and human rights. Sand turns toward such a discussion in the final chapter, describing it as the raison d'etre of The Invention of the Jewish People, which he admits essentially contains nothing not already found in the work of other historians and archaeologists.
Today's Israel is not a democracy but a "liberal ethnocracy" (307) that assumes its "growing and strengthening" Arab minority "will always accept its exclusion from the political and cultural heart" (309). Ultimately we may see "an uprising in the Arab Galilee, followed by iron-fisted repression," which would constitute "a turning-point for the existence of Israel" in the region. Hence, Sand states that the ideal solution would be the creation of a democratic binational state.
Sadly, Sand hastily dismisses this "ideal project." In terms all too drearily reminiscent of Zionist apologetics he states that to "ask the Jewish Israeli people, after such a long and bloody conflict, and in view of the tragedy experienced by many of its immigrant founders in the twentieth century, to become overnight a minority in its own state may not be the smartest thing to do" (311-312). Instead, he falls back on a sequence of rhetorical questions: "[h]ow many Jews would be willing to forgo the privileges they enjoy in the Zionist state? ... will anyone dare to repeal the Law of Return ... ? To what extent is Jewish Israeli society willing to discard the ... image of the 'chosen people,' and to cease ... excluding the 'other' from its midst?"
What is behind this sorry post-Zionist anti-climax to a book that seemed to presage a heady anti-Zionist conclusion? In an interview Sand admitted that he "waited until [he] was a full professor" before publishing the book, adding that there "is a price to be paid in Israeli academia for expressing views of this sort." In providing the premises for radical conclusions without either drawing or excluding those conclusions, Sand has the best of both worlds with few if any consequences.
Ultimately, Shlomo Sand is a little like Moses, unable to cross the Jordan into the Promised Land. The journey so far, however, is instructive, and very stylishly accomplished; one hopes that the "soldier dreaming of white lilies" may eventually be emboldened to complete it.
Raymond Deane is a composer and political activist (www.raymonddeane.com)
October 22, 2009
Whatever happened to the war for oil?
By on October 22, 2009
Critics of the Iraq war who claimed that it was a war for Israel, engineered by the neocons in the Bush administration and promoted by their allies in the media, were routinely disparaged by the well known pundits of the US Left and the leading organizations of the anti-war movement that insisted that it was a war for access and control over Iraq’s oil. This was, they declared, in so many words, a "no-brainer."
Without casting aspersions on the wisdom of the latter, this story, in which T Boone Pickens complains that US firms have been shut out of Iraq’s oil market, is but the latest to undermine the "war for oil" theory. But don’t expect what remains of the Left to admit their error anytime soon. Reuters:
the Iraqi government has awarded contracts to foreign companies, particularly Chinese firms, to develop Iraq’s vast reserves while American companies have mostly been shut out."They’re opening them (oil fields) up to other companies all over the world … We’re entitled to it," Pickens said of Iraq’s oil. "Heck, we even lost 5,000 of our people, 65,000 injured and a trillion, five hundred billion dollars."
“Netanyahu’s Plan to Change Laws of War an Admission that Israel Violated Them”
22/10/2009 The chair of the International Institute for Criminal Investigation on Thursday morning warned that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s aspiration to change the laws of war is unrealistic, and said the initiative was “almost an admission” Israel had violated international law during Operation Cast Lead.
Netanyahu directed the relevant ministries on Tuesday to look into ways of launching an international initiative to change the laws of war to deal with the modern-day scourge of terrorism. This new initiative comes fast on the heels of the Goldstone Report, which accused Israel of war crimes for its military operation in the Gaza Strip earlier this year.
“It’s one thing to claim that [the rules of war] should change, but that doesn’t give you an excuse to violate them until they’ve changed,” said William Schabas, professor of human rights law and the author of twenty-one books dealing with international human rights law, in an interview with Army Radio.
“I think the fact that Netanyahu says he wants to change the laws of war is almost an admission that Israel violated them,” Schabas claimed.
The world-renowned law professor went on to predict it was very unlikely the world would support the Israeli prime minister’s initiative. It is not realistic to say that the Geneva Conventions, which were intended to protect the lives of civilians in a military conflict, do not allow a state to handle terror threats, he said.
When Israel harmed civilians during Operation Cast Lead it broke laws based on ancient moral values, said Schabas.
One cannot change the rules by defining your enemy as cruel and vicious, Schabas stressed, adding, if you break the law, you are behaving like the terrorists against whom you are fighting.
Schabas, a supporter of the Goldstone Commission’s report, also said that the international community would probably not accept an Israeli army probe into the alleged war crimes. However, a committee of inquiry established by the government would be accepted, he assessed.
At a meeting of the Israeli security cabinet that focused on the Goldstone report and its ramifications on Tuesday, Netanyahu had said Israel’s challenge was “to delegitimize the continuous attempt to delegitimize the State of Israel.”
“In Lebanon, in Gaza and in other places, weapons are being piled up around us with the sole aim of firing them at the citizens of the State of Israel,” he claimed. “I want to make it clear to everyone: No one will undermine our ability and right to defend our children, our citizens and our communities.”
Leaving Waziristan
A force of 28,000 Pakistani army personnel is at the moment conducting an operation in South Waziristan. The operation was preceded by months of aerial bombing, and as the following Al Jazeera reports show the human cost in terms of lives lost, and displacement is high. A BBC crew earlier found the refugees so outraged with the Pakistani military’s operation that they were chanting slogans in support of Hakimullah Mehsud, the new leader of the Pakistani Taliban, and Maulvi Faqir Muhammad and other TTP leaders.
Thousands flee Pakistan conflict – 22 Oct 09
Civilians caught up South Waziristan fighting – 20 Oct 09
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