A Call for Livable Futures by Rela Mazali
What to do when the country I live in totally loses its compass? Totally loses its shame? What to do when the regime that collects my taxes uses them to deploy its high-tech military, armed to the teeth, against activists sailing to oppose a criminal siege? When this country’s politicians authorize soldiers to shoot-to-kill into a deck-bound crowd? And then tell me they are protecting me? What to do when the governments of the world are too deeply implicated to hold this regime, this country accountable?
I have watched government after government in Israel present itself as a respectable, normal member of the club of developed countries; open, democratic, cultured and liberal. Israel recently launched a major “re-branding” campaign, emphasizing diversity, richness, creativeness, to divert attention away from its warring belligerence. Israel’s leaders are deeply committed to keeping up their positive self-image.
I have noted the special privileges granted time and again on the pretext of this image. The US awards Israel billions every year for “defense” in the form of planes, missiles, guns and ammunition. Just this May, the organization of so-called developed countries (OECD) granted Israel full membership, after years of Israeli lobbying. Israel bases its equal footing in such clubs on its claim to democracy.
It is time for us all to hold it to that claim. Accountable. Not only privilege-able. Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) to end the occupation, reject, and actively remove, Israel’s mask of “business as usual.”
Each of us, each of you, can draw the line through BDS and act as a caring, responsible citizen of the world. To end Israel’s 43-year-old occupation. To end the unacceptable, criminal siege of Gaza. To end racist laws and policies inside Israel, openly targeting the Palestinian citizens of Israel. To end more than sixty years of ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people.
Inside Israel, BDS has already started to work. It is working where years of other civil society strategies have achieved far too little. For the first time in a very long while, many Israelis around me are sitting up and taking notice: Notice that there is still an occupation in place 43 years down the line, an occupation “out there” beyond their “normal” lives and beyond the self-perpetuated “existential threat.” Notice that millions the world over believe “ordinary” Israelis — both personally and collectively — have something to do with this occupation. Notice that it just may turn out to be too costly.
For weeks now, dozens of items in Israeli media have reported on BDS developments, speculating on its chances and consequences. Israel’s cabinet recently addressed the boycott of settlement goods by the Palestinian Authority. In May, a Harvard professor warned a Tel Aviv University conference of the grave strategic threat of Israel’s crumbling legitimacy. Ignoring the country’s record, he chalked up waning legitimacy to BDS, blaming individual activists who, he actually implied, were traitors. BDS activists in Israel regularly receive veiled and less veiled threats, including one recent death threat, in the media, through employers’ reprimands, in the form of (so far) threatened legal suits, through university email lists and colleagues’ petitions. A new bill making its way through Israel’s legislature would criminalize support for BDS, past or present — turning this op-ed into incriminating evidence against its author. Israel’s minister of education has preempted legislation, already pledging punishment for academics who support BDS. All this is clear evidence that BDS has started to make its mark on society here in Israel.
Meanwhile, internationally, civil society organizations are passing resolutions in support of BDS — trade unions, student bodies, municipalities, football teams, even one government — in Norway, South Africa, Britain, New Hampshire, California, Sweden, France.
In 2005, Palestinian civil society groups came together to voice a powerful joint call for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions. Activist groups all over the world and inside Israel have subscribed to this call and declared their support. BDS is a political tool claimed and operated by international civil society where other tools seem ineffective; When international institutions and governments are failing; When a long overdue need to end severe oppression is not being met. Today BDS may be the only non-violent tool capable of moving Israel beyond its patterns of militarized brutality.
Courageously and creatively, BDS faces violence with a firm commitment to non-violence. It stands in solidarity first and foremost with Palestinians, and then with humanity — with the thousands of internationals and Israelis who have chosen nonviolent resistance as their means to oppose and end the oppression of Palestine.
A tool, a strategy, not an end in itself, BDS is meant to work. As it did in the past when a 1953 boycott of segregated buses jump-started the crucial years of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States; when the African American community of Baton Rouge boycotted and faced down a Louisiana court ruling; when, two years later, Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of a Montgomery bus and initiated the Montgomery bus boycott; when the massive school boycott in 1965 galvanized the movement again in Cook County, as more than 100,000 African American students stayed home from disgraceful schools despite a court injunction; when the world movement to resist South African apartheid gradually gained ground throughout the sixties to the dismay of successive US and British governments; when this movement kept growing, refusing to go away.
Today, BDS can make it increasingly difficult for Israel’s government to keep up the occupation and the internal repression. Hiking up costs, it can make occupying unprofitable and racism disgraceful. Meanwhile, and no less important, it is already allowing Israeli society a clear reality check, reflecting what it looks like to international civil society, and capturing what it has become.
BDS is a means to justice for those to whom it has been denied. Not against, but rather for, both Israel and Palestine, it aims to end the policies destroying the lives of Palestinians and devouring the humanity of Israelis. BDS supports the livable, viable futures of all the people of this land.
Joint NGO report on child recruitment practices in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories
DCI-Israel, DCI-Palestine and New Profile release today their answers to the ‘List of Issues’ recently prepared by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in connection with Israel’s implementation of the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict (OPAC).
This report, entitled NGO Answers to the List of Issues, compiles data provided by seven organisations* and was submitted to the Committee in December 2009, ahead of the review of Israel’s compliance with OPAC in January 2010. It includes thorough and up-to-date information on the recruitment practices of the Israeli state armed forces, and Palestinian and Israeli non-state actors. It also expands upon the militarisation of Israeli society at large.
[Read the full report] [Read the CRC Concluding Observations on Israel] [Also on the same topic: The New Profile Report on Child Recruitment in Israel, 2004]
This is where I live
Seriously. It’s the building on the right, 6th floor. I also wanted to post pictures of my father’s and my mother-in-law’s houses, but I could only find photos with them right outside the frame.
And if there’s something in these photos that looks out of place to you (yes, that’s a real fighter plane), you probably don’t live in Israel.
For the past ten years I have been active in New Profile, a movement working to demilitarise Israeli society, so the issue of Israeli militarism is going to be on my agenda in this blog as well.
Now, the first thing to do about militarism is to start seeing it. From an outsider’s perspective it’s not that difficult. Ask a tourist visiting Israel what her impression of the country is, and you’re likely to hear at least one comment about there being soldiers everywhere. But for an Israeli all this military presence is just business as usual, a normal part of the scenery, just like those pieces of weaponry on public display around town.
The same selective blindness applies to military actions. When the Israeli army attacks in Gaza, Lebanon or the West Bank, these attacks are usually (albeit inconspicuously) reported in the Israeli news media. Thus, the daily bombings by the Israeli Air Force in Gaza over the last week or so (leaving several Palestinians dead) were noted in passing on Israeli news websites. But when the other side retaliates (e.g. by firing a few mortar shells into open fields near the Gaza border over the last couple of days), most Israelis invariably see it as the aggressor. It just doesn’t occur to them that the routine bombing of “terrorist targets” or “tunnels” in Gaza, even if it leaves some casualties, is a thing to notice, that it could actually provoke a response.
If we want to understand the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one important thing to realize is precisely this selective blindness to military presence that Israelis tend to suffer from. If we want to make the Israeli society into a society that is capable of living in peace, one thing to do could be to make people start noticing that there’s an effin fighter plane in the middle of the road!
PS: Here’s Amira Hass, in a new Op-Ed in Haaretz, making the same point from another perspective: “Once again we have displayed our talent for excluding from the discourse the daily violence inherent in our continued domination over the Palestinians and their land”.
Taken from Israel Palestine BlogCan you spot what’s wrong in this story?
Here’s a very short item that appeared in today’s Haaretz:
Fund-raising group inadvertently reveals information about top-secret IDF units
An association that fund-raises for the Israel Defense Forces revealed sensitive information, Haaretz has learned. The Association for the Wellbeing of the Israeli Soldiers revealed the names of classified IDF units on its Web site, as part of a list of units that received donations. The units use the money to fund entertainment and sports activities. This is part of the “Adopt a combat fighter” campaign, which raises $100,000 a year for each participating unit. The information was removed following Haaretz’s query. (Anshel Pfeffer)
The original Hebrew is slightly longer and adds a few details:
The list includes several units whose name has been barred from publication in the Israeli press for many years due to [military] censorship restrictions. In addition to the names of the units, the site published reports about the adoptions, including several details about the units, and in one case also the name of the CEO of one of the adopting companies, who was in the past the commander of one of the units.
Now, this is by no means major news. On the contrary, it’s a minor news item, not worthy of much comment in and of itself. But in a different sense, it is quite telling; it tells you a few things about the Israeli society. An external observer might be asking some questions:
- How come a country that advertises itself as a democracy has military censorship determining what can and what cannot be published in the (supposedly) free press?
- How come private donations are solicited for military units, when the Israeli military budget is all but unlimited?
- How come this quite unnecessary fund-raising effort is so successful (the photo above gives a hint; it’s taken from the website of Israel’s second largest bank, and shows some bankers at a special event with the soldiers they “adopt”; the bank used this for PR)?
- What exactly are the qualifications of the former head of a secret missions military unit for the job of corporate CEO (this would not have been so puzzling had it been an isolated case, but of course it is by no means an isolated case)?
- Last, but by no means least, why does a leading Israeli newspaper, which even has a reputation of being liberal, contact another publication, completely on its own initiative, to ensure the demands of the military censorship on that other publication are being met?
I’ll leave you, folks, to ponder these questions on your own…
Taken from Israel Palestine BlogThis post was not written in Switzerland
Any Israeli who’s ever argued against war has heard this mantra repeated time and time again by his or her compatriots: “We’re not living in Switzerland” (and then it goes on: “We’re living in the Middle East, and in the Middle East you have to be strong to survive”, or “Our neighbours are not that nice and peaceful”, etc. etc.) I’ve surely heard and read this statement repeated many dozens of times.
Now, one has to wonder why exactly was hyper-militarist Swizterland, of all countries, selected to serve as the proverbial locus of calm and serenity. Maybe it’s the lake view. Maybe it’s the peace-loving region in which that country is located. After all, it’s neighbours – France, and especially Germany – have a centuries-long history of… well, never mind.
A similar sentiment was expressed by Adv. Dov Weissglass, when he was Ariel Sharon’s Bureau Chief. In a famous interview he suggested some parts of the Middle East peace process can wait (with US approval) “until the Palestinians turn into Finns”.
Why Finns? Maybe because today Finland has this reputation to it. But actually, as any student of Finnish history would tell you, the Finns and the Palestinians do have some things in common. Like Palestine, Finland too did not constitute a sovereign state (it was a province of Sweden), when it was occupied, by Russia in 1809. And while Finnish independence was recognised peacefully by the young Soviet government of Russia in December 1917 (aye, the Palestinians would love to be Finns), the USSR did try to reoccupy Finland under Stalin in the winter of 1939-1940. To this the Finns responded by attacking the USSR together with Nazi Germany in 1941. The Finns gained a reputation of being even more ruthless to Russian civilians than the Germans were, putting a significant percentage of the Russian population under their control into concentration camps, where many died.
Come to think of it, maybe we’re lucky that the Palestinians are not Finns.
So what is it that stands behind that reference to Switzerland? Put simply – it’s good old bigotry. There were not too long ago many places in which it was considered common knowledge that black-skinned people are of lesser abilities than white-skinned ones, and women than men. There were places, in which it was also considered common knowledge that Jews are a greedy corrupting element in society. Israel is a place in which it is considered common knowledge that Arabs and Muslims are somehow inherently violent and murderous. I noted earlier that the actions of the Israeli army are usually not seen as possible triggers for Palestinian retaliation or revenge. This “common knowledge” provides the instant alternative explanation. When Israelis complain (as they often do) that people around the world just don’t understand Israel’s actions, what they mean is that people around the world don’t share that “common knowledge” of theirs (and alas, in recent years, more and more people, especially in the Fascist fringes of the right in Europe and the US, “understand”).
The truth is, though, that the Middle East is not such a bad environment for Israel. I mean, would any country be able to get away with the Naqba, the Military Rule, 42 years (and counting) of occupying another nation, and the general brutality of its actions, were it located near Switzerland?
Taken from Israel Palestine Blog