VOICES FOR PEACE IN PALESTINE AND ISRAEL…
0522 by Jeff HessI still remember the a morning of 6 June 1982 in Athens, Ohio, sitting at my desk in a classroom waiting for Professor Gifford Doxsee to enter with our final exam for his class on the Late Ottoman Empire. When he arrived we joked that he should cancel the exam since Israel’s invasion of Lebanon changed everything.
We didn’t know how right we were.
Israel lost the political high ground that summer, but I can still justify, in my mind at least, the use of military force against Lebanon (or, for that matter, Iraq, Iran or any other sovereign nation) as a defensive action. Nearly a third of a century (and a second invasion in 2006) later, however, I cannot say the same for military incursion into the occupied territories and the continued sure and steady theft of Palestinian land by the government of Israel’s official policy of settlement.
Yes, the continued ineffectual firing of unguided rockets—essentially over-sized and deadly fireworks not all that different from those of Sir William Congreve that Francis Scott Key immortalized with his “red glare”—is wrong, but so too is Israel’s current response.
I commend to you the writing of two people whose work I respect—Glenn Greenwald and Mano Singham—for further, comprehensive insights, but this morning I read two pieces in The Guardian that I particularly want to discuss.
The first has a double byline: former presidents Jimmy Carter (United States of America) and Mary Robinson (Republic of Ireland). They are members of The Elders: …an independent group of global leaders who work together for peace and human rights. They were brought together in 2007 by Nelson Mandela.
Carter and Robinson write:
Israelis and Palestinians are still burying loved ones killed during Gaza’s third war in six years. Since 8 July, more than 1,800 Palestinian and 65 Israeli lives have been sacrificed. Many in the world are heart-broken in the powerless certainty that and despite the latest ceasefire, it seems that more willcould die yet; that more are being killed every hour.This tragedy results from the deliberate obstruction of a promising move towards peace, when a reconciliation agreement among the Palestinian factions was announced in April.
This was a major concession by Hamas, opening Gaza to joint control under a consensus government that did not include any Hamas members. The new government also pledged to adopt the three basic principles demanded by members of the International Quartet (UN, US, Europe, Russia): non-violence, recognition of Israel, and adherence to past agreements. Tragically, Israel rejected this opportunity for peace and has until now succeeded in preventing the new government’s deployment in Gaza.
Two factors are necessary to make the unity effort possible: at least a partial lifting of the seven-year sanctions and blockade that isolate the 1.8 million people in Gaza; and an opportunity for public sector workers on the Hamas payroll to be paid. These requirements for a human standard of life continue to be denied. Instead, Qatar’s offer to provide funds for the payment of employees was blocked by Israel and access to and from Gaza has been further tightened by Egypt and Israel.
There is no humane or legal justification for how the Israeli Defence Force is conducting this war, pulverising with bombs, missiles and artillery large parts of Gaza, including thousands of homes, schools and hospitals, displacing families and killing Palestinian non-combatants. Much of Gaza has lost its access to water and electricity completely. This is a humanitarian catastrophe.
Remember reading about the agreement in April? Me neither. The second piece is a report on the emasculation of peace movements in Israel by Giles Fraser. He writes:
Gideon Levy doesn’t want to meet in a coffee bar in Tel Aviv. He is fed up with being hassled in public and spat at, with people not willing to share the table next to him in restaurants. And now he is fed up with the constant presence of his bodyguards, not least because they too have started giving him a hard time about his political views. So he doesn’t go out much any more and we sit in the calm of his living room, a few hundred yards from the Yitzhak Rabin Centre. Rabin’s assassination by a rightwing Orthodox Jew in 1995 is itself a sobering reminder of the personal cost of peacemaking in Israel.
In his column in Haaretz, Levy has long since banged the drum for greater Israeli empathy towards the suffering of the Palestinians. He is a well-known commentator on the left, and one of the few prepared to stick his head above the parapet. Consequently, he is no stranger to opposition from the right. But this time it is different. Yariv Levin, coalition chairman of the Likud-Beytenu faction in the Knesset, recently called for him to be put on trial for treason – a crime which, during wartime, is punishable by death.
While the balance of Fraser’s piece describes the sobering paralyzation of Israeli peace advocates and movements, I found the concluding paragraphs particularly chilling.
Later I go for a drink at a friend’s flat in Tel Aviv with a group of broadly leftwing activists in their late 20s and early 30s, NGO types that I was expecting would share my exasperation. And I make a mistake, assuming too much common ground. I ask whether their fear of rockets is properly calibrated to reality, given that people are so much more likely to die in a car accident in Israel than at the hands of Hamas. And there is an awkward reaction. The question was insensitive. They have loved ones in uniform in Gaza. And I really do understand that. But suddenly I feel like an outsider. I haven’t appreciated that this threat is existential, they say. “People leave their liberalism at the green line [the 1967 border],” Levy had warned me earlier. “The young people are the worst. More ignorant. More brainwashed. They have never met a Palestinian in their lives.”
That is emphatically not true of this group. But even here, the mood for social justice does not seem to connect poverty in Israel with the vast financial cost of occupation, let alone allow empathy with the Palestinian predicament. If I’m not with them, I’m against them. I am made to feel a little like an apologist for Hamas. A thought dawns in my head: perhaps I too ought to shut up and keep the evening sweet. Of all the things seen on my trip, this was the most depressing conversation of them all.
I agree.
