Thoughts About Israel : Houston Indymedia

Israeli and Jewish authors like Seth Farber, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Anna Baltzer, David Hirst, Norton Mezvinsky, Israel Shahak, and Ilan Pappé, along with Palestinian and Arabs authors like Ahmad H. Sa'di, Lila Abu-Lughod, Saree Makdisi, Susan Abulhawa, Samir El-Youssef, Jaffer Ali, and Edward Said have made important contributions to the historical analysis of Israel / Palestine. Their contributions have led many to come to question their support of Israel, and to think of the occupation as unacceptable.

However, there is also another kind of book, books like The Haj by Leon Uris that have painted a mindless, unrelenting hatred of Jews, that fills the hearts of the majority of the Arab world and is being fed to their children "with their mothers' milk." And books that teach similar conclusions about Israelis, and that all Jews are full of hatred. They tend to shut down dialogue and understanding, instead of opening it up -- they leave most feeling anger rather than learning or loving more. I reject these books. I have had the opportunity in my life to have many long relationships with Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians, with Zionists and with anti-Zionists. I have been to countless presentations, ceremonies, speeches, debates, discussions, and films and I know first hand that Arabs and even Palestinians don't have a mindless, unrelenting hatred of Jews.

A Jewish friend of mine wrote me: "When I was in the West Bank and Gaza in 1990, I was shocked by how little 'anti-semitism' I experienced from Palestinians. Almost everyone i met (even children) distinguished between governments and policy and Jews. I sometimes heard things like, how can people who were treated so badly, treat us like animals? Or 'I don't care if it's called Palestine or Israel, I just want equal rights' Not so when I went into Israel where I saw racism like you wouldn't believe (and was spit on for walking with Palestinians). Of course things have changed since 1990." An Israeli friend of mine who made a film about the separation wall wrote to me "I can tell from my own experience, that as a person who meet a lot of Palestinians, who lives under the occupation, they always emphasize that their problem is not with the Jews, but with the occupation."

The hatred that exists on both sides is not mindless or unrelenting -- it is like all human hatred, and can eventually melt into forgiveness. Families can forgive their son's murderer. It is beautiful and it is real. There are many groups focused on dialogue and reconciliation, like Children of Abraham. Reconciliation is real. Here are two pieces from a series about forgiveness in Israel / Palestine by Latuff, followed by the map:

Palestinians have suffered tremendously under the occupation. Throughout the conflict, Palestinians have expressed real world concerns about land, rights, access, law, and human rights. Under the occupation, Palestinians have consistently lost more and more territory. Arabs and Jews were not enemies before the conflict and expulsions started. I find it difficult to understand any conclusions that the occupation is not a main cause of the conflict, and I don't think of my position here as terribly radical, as even Israeli leaders understand that it is a war over land. In 1938, Israel's first Prime Minister, Ben-Gurion, made it clear of his support for the establishment of a Jewish state on parts of Palestine only as an intermediary stage, he wrote: "[I am] satisfied with part of the country, but on the basis of the assumption that after we build up a strong force following the establishment of the state--we will abolish the partition of the country and we will expand to the whole Land of Israel." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 107, One Palestine Complete, p. 403). He also said "This is only a stage in the realization of Zionism and it should prepare the ground for our expansion throughout the whole country through Jewish-Arab agreement .... the state, however, must enforce order and security and it will do this not by mobilizing and preaching 'sermons on the mount' but by the machine-guns, which we will need." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 108).

In a speech addressing the Zionist Action Committee on April 6, 1948, Ben-Gurion clearly stated that war could be used as an instrument to solve the so called "Arab demographic problem." He stated: "We will not be able to win the war if we do not, during the war, populate upper and lower, eastern and western Galilee, the Negev and Jerusalem area, even if only in an artificial way, in a military way. . . . I believe that war will also bring in its wake a great change in the distribution of Arab population." (Benny Morris, p. 181 & Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 181). He also said "They [Mishmar Ha'emek people] faced a cruel reality ... [and] saw that there was [only] one way and that was to expel the Arab villagers and burn the villages. And they did this. And they were the first to do this." (Benny Morris, p. 116)"

Territorial expansion is not an accident, nor a reaction to Intifada, it was part of the plan from the beginning. The declaration of war against Israel was not the first violence of the conflict. Ben-Gurion writing in 1947 about the first uprising of 1938 (ten years before the Arab attack): "The strategic objective [of the Jewish forces] was to destroy the urban communities, which were the most organized and politically conscious sections of the Palestinian people. This was not done by house-to-house fighting inside the cities and towns, but by the conquest and destruction of the rural areas surrounding most of the towns. This technique led to the collapse and surrender of Haifa, Jaffa, Tiberias, Safed, Acre, Beit-Shan, Lydda, Ramleh, Majdal, and Beersheba. Deprived of transportation, food, and raw materials, the urban communities underwent a process of disintegration, chaos, and hunger, which forced them to surrender." (Simha Flapan, p. 92-93).

Ben-Gurion's "Plan D" included laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centers; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning. It included forcible expulsion of hundreds of thousands of unwanted Palestinian Arabs in urban and rural areas accompanied by an unknown number of others mass slaughtered to get it done. Once begun, it took six months to complete. It expelled about 800,000 people, killed many others, and destroyed 531 villages and 11 urban neighborhoods in cities like Tel-Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem.

Arabs and Israelis both exploit the conflict. While there are suicide attacks going on, Israel is continually expanding, building new settlements. If there were no attacks, they would have no basis to justify the expansion. Arab leaders can point to the menace of Israel to build nationalism and support for their rule. There are people on both sides of the conflict who owe their power and influence to the conflict itself and have little reason to want it solved. This is true in many wars. Suicide attacks have been used throughout the history of war for brief periods. In this conflict, suicide attacks started at a fixed point, and they can end just as decisively. Americans are not worried about being blown up by suicide attacks from Japanese men today, or even five years after World War II, because the conditions changed and the attacks ended. Israel has the power to work towards changing conditions there, which could alter the dynamic. But suicide bombings are not the only way to kill people -- Israel has more sophisticated ones. If we stop imagining that one form of blowing up civilians is better than another, we are left with the statistics that in 2007, there were 25 Palestinians killed for every one Israeli.

I have, in my life, fought many battles for peace, and have won and lost. My first activism was anti-apartheid and we won. And on Iraq I was marching, drumming, writing letters to Congresspeople and editors, doing anything I could think of to stop them before it started. We held the world's biggest protest ever, but we lost. Peace lost. War and destruction won. We are up against powerful forces and the few victories we have were because enough people believed that we could accomplish something.

Every aspect of the struggle is part of accomplishing any eventual victory. If it were not for the boycotts, the articles, the petitions, the University students, the protests, the concerts, all of it, we would never have defeated apartheid in South Africa. Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and so many others have told us that again and again. It was all part of the victory. And we won, and it is important for us who were involved in the struggle to tell the story so that no American gets discouraged when all they can do to contribute is one little thing. Even if the other side is brutal, even if they are more brutal, it is still essential for us to acknowledge our brutality. We can never justify brutality with "but they do it too."

I support negotiations with Hamas. I want Hamas to improve its behaviors just as I want Israel to improve its behaviors, and I believe in talking it through. Diplomacy requires talking to the people you don't get along with. Israel has turned down many opportunities to talk to Hamas about cease fires, and instead chooses to shell Gaza. That's a bad choice and it falls on us to tell them so. Agreements are always better than violence, and leaders who are unwilling to lower themselves to sit in the same room with their enemies will continue to subject their people to suffering.

The community of peace activists on both sides of the conflict has been working together for years. We are not blame-generating machines, we are practical, caring, and optimistic that eventually the two sides will listen to us. Hope that people will read and support Anarchists Against the Wall, Gush Shalom, and The International Middle East Media Center.