Archive for the 'Politics' Category

One American Jew’s Hopes for the Israeli Elections

Published by
Brad Brooks-Rubin
August 3, 2008 in Israeli Politics, Personal Reflections and Brad. 0 Comments

My introduction to Israeli elections came in 1992, when, as a fairly uneducated and certainly naïve 19-year old volunteer on Kibbutz K’far Menachem (about midway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv), I watched the elderly founders of the kibbutz cheer the election of Yitzhak Rabin. Now, they seemed to declare, we can rest easy, the country is in the proper hands. At that point, I understood about as much of what they meant and had experienced as the chickens I oversaw in the lul (or, chicken house), but their belief in the power of the election, in the power of the government – at least what they believed to be the right government – was inspiring.

That inspiration stayed with me and led me to study the country and the conflict that government was supposed to end more through my next three years of college, ultimately bringing me back to Israel in the April 1996, to volunteer for the Labor Party (although this election featured direct voting for prime minister, our work focused primarily on the election of Shimon Peres to be Prime Minister). The memory of the kibbutznikim and their passion for the future, rooted in so many dreams from the past, drove me to cash in my savings from my post-college jobs, crash in a Tel Aviv youth hostel, and show up at the Labor party offices to say I was there to help. I lucked out and was hooked up with a small group of volunteers who spent our days driving around the country, distributing the materials and the message of hope and strength that we believed Peres stood for.

In the end, Israelis decided they did not want those materials (they occasionally told me so with spit or a car door opened into my hip as I stood at an intersection with a banner) or the message. Even though I was an outsider, I nevertheless felt that I was a part of a real national debate, national discussion. For example, I will never forget my partner from Labor picking up an Orthodox hitchhiker in our decked-out Labor-mobile. One would have expected an intolerable level of hostility among us; it was somewhat surprising he took the ride in the first place. But although there was some hostility, it was less at a personal level and more about the fervor of the disagreement on the deeply-held views about the country’s future. The conversation flew from the moment his door closed, and although my college Hebrew studies caught about 25% of what was said between my partner and our passenger, I felt comforted by the notion that this was what an election could be: a moment for the country to speak with itself, to engage, to choose.

I have never been quite so engaged with American elections, and although I spend a lot of time thinking about them – probably never more than this one – I am admittedly never quite as engaged as I am with an Israeli election. Perhaps it’s these early experiences; perhaps it’s a notion that election results somehow “mean” more, impact the direction of the country and the future more directly in Israel than in the U.S. (although George W. Bush has gone a long way to dispelling that one); perhaps it’s a comfort in engaging with problems at a distance, rather than the ones closest to home.

So, with the Olmert announcement last week that he will not seek to continue to lead Kadima, again I find myself reading the Israeli papers more closely than the ones at home. But I keep thinking back to those kibbutznikim from 1992, most of them likely deceased by now, and all of the activity and energy I experienced in 1996, and wondering whether that energy, that sense of real possibility will be the tenor of the next several months, either within the Kadima primaries or in a likely general election.

Now that I have a “real” job and two kids (and debt), I know I can’t pick up for a couple of months and volunteer again. But I know what my hope is for the election, from afar: to believe that Israel is taking the moment to speak with itself, to engage, to choose. Not just a leader, but a national identity.

I think not of the debates over whether to engage with Hamas, how to continue with the Syria track, what the pace of settlement evacuation should be, if anything. I think instead of the issues that I have been thinking about over the past few weeks in the Israeli press:

n the head of the General Security Service indicating that Israel’s policy of deterrence through force may not be working;
n the government failing to live up to a special commission’s recommendations as to how to take proper care of Holocaust survivors, leaving many of them impoverished and voiceless (including Ha’aretz calling for survivors to block the entrance to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem);
n settlers threatening both daily retaliation — and a libel lawsuit — against the Israel Defense Forces because the settlers claim the IDF falsely accused them in the media of a knife attack;
n the continued criticism of human rights group B’tselem for distributing cameras to Palestinians so as to capture IDF abuses (with only tepid criticism of the soldiers themselves);
n the “citizenship law” (preventing Palestinians from the West Bank who marry Israeli citizens from obtaining residency permits in Israel, thus denying them unification with their spouses) continues to be extended;
n Only 46% of Israeli seniors in high school passed the matriculation exams.

All of these articles made me shake my head for one reason or another, and think that a new election might bring a moment of real change. I realize that many of these seem like mere policy issues: how can we educate kids better, or what are the best means by which to deal with external threats. But all of them touch on much deeper issues of what Israel is, both for its own citizens and for the Jews of the diaspora: who is an Israeli; how does Israel build a future for its children, what kind of social welfare system – and not merely welfare on the financial level — is appropriate in 2008; who is the IDF, and what is it protecting and defending? And why?

I am not an Israeli, and I don’t believe the answers I have come to over the years (by building on my earlier experiences to then spend time living in Ramallah, in Haifa, in Jerusalem, and working on a lot of Israel/Palestine-related issues) to the above questions are necessarily the right ones for Israel, even though I hope they are. In the end, all I hope is that another 23 year-old American Jew is flying to Israel now to engage in these debates, to see them first-hand. I hope he or she will leave behind what they have picked up in Hebrew School, from their Israel on Campus Coalition or AIPAC publications, or from their attendance at Students for Justice in Palestine events. I hope they travel around the country and attempt to engage with as many Israelis – Jewish and not — as possible, and I hope they find that these questions being posed, these issues on the table, as I know many of them already are on this site and so many others.

Ultimately, I hope we allow ourselves to see this election from afar beyond Olmert and Fayyad, beyond “negotiations,” beyond “final status.” But that we see it for what it can be, what we hope our own to be: a real conversation that leads to a real choice.

The Missing

Published by
Brad Brooks-Rubin
July 11, 2007 in Personal Reflections, The Settlements and Brad. 7 Comments

Probably the best way to start this is with a short bit of accidental wisdom from my older son. I should also probably stop there, too, but since it works so well with my thoughts on my recent trip to Hebron, that I thought I would add the two together. It has been quite hard for me to think about what to say about the essential elimination of life in the Old City of Hebron, or how to say it. Luckily I can always count on the brilliance of a 2.5 year old to help me out of a jam.

We have been trying to teach Eli a bit of Hebrew, or at least get him comfortable with it (he can actually count all the way to arba-im (40) quickly and without a mistake). One of the books we have been reading with him over time is a Hebrew translation of Shel Silverstein’s classic “The Missing Piece.” We always read the Hebrew first, then explain what it means in English, trying to instill at least a few words. But he knows the title primarily in English (it’s a mouthful in Hebrew).

Then, the other day, his class at the YMCA had their end of the year party. So we decided this would be a good occasion to break out a t-shirt of his that we picked up at home awhile back; it’s a red children’s shirt that simply has “Peace,” “Shalom” (in Hebrew) and “Salaam” (in Arabic) on it.

When I put the shirt on him, he looked down and saw the writing.

“What does the shirt say, Papa?”

“‘Peace’, Eli. It says ‘peace’ in English, Hebrew and Arabic.”

“Oh.” Pause. “Like ‘The Missing Piece’?”

I laugh. I then shake my head at how ingenious this is. Then I realize he is still waiting for an answer. “Well, not like the piece missing from the circle in the book. This peace means when people don’t fight with each other. But it’s kind of like the piece in the book, because this kind of peace is also missing.”

“Oh. That peace on my shirt is also missing?”

“Sadly, it is.”

By this time, he was more interested in the Lego blocks he had built into a small column and called his “saxophone,” which he then started to play, so that was that. But it was one of those moments with your kids that you never forget.

And, as I said, it helped me focus on a lot that has been on my mind. Of course, in any place in the world, it’s still a cute story and probably one that any parent would be proud to retell. But here, it comes with so much more.

Because, at any point in time, it’s important not just to know that peace is missing, but why it’s missing. And that changes over time, and is always somewhat different depending on whether you are talking about political/governmental peace or person-to-person/societal peace. Although the former type is what we spend far too much time talking about, it is the latter that really counts, in my mind.

And that peace, the peace between people, is missing because when you are in Israel, the Palestinians are missing. Almost entirely.

And when you’re in Palestine (Eastern Palestine, anyway), although Israel is everywhere – in the form of Jewish-only settlements, Jewish-only roads, the Army, the Air Force and the Wall — and although Israeli soldiers and settlers are all around, the Israeli people with whom the Palestinians must make peace are also missing.

I have remarked on this in other posts from here, but nowhere was this more evident than in Hebron. The Old City of Hebron, the area of the once vibrant souq/casbah, is, quite simply, gone. Military orders, settler violence, settler expansionism, soldiers changing policies from day to day, decimation of the Palestinian economy. Put them all together and you have what I saw in Hebron – shops welded shut, houses empty, streets barren, markets looted, bushes and vines growing in the middle of once-busy streets. (The activists I went with even had pictures from 1999 to prove it, but my memories from being in these bustling areas in 1997 and 1998 were pretty vivid).

(If you want more info, there’s a lot out there. But Meretz USA has a good archive of recent articles and some background pieces at its “Hebron Watch” page. But if you want the full story in one place, look no further than this, as-usual incredible report from B’tselem from this past May.)

I wandered around much of the day taking pictures of essentially the same thing: missing-ness and emptiness. Empty streets. Empty sidewalks. Empty shops (except for those which have been confiscated by settlers to use as new apartments). As B’tselem called it so aptly, it is a ghost town.

Or, at least, a town of Palestinian ghosts, as they exist only in memory. The number of settlers in the city itself is still small (approximately 600 or so, but it gets much larger if you include the ever-expanding Kiryat Arba and other area settlements), but not only are their numbers and their efforts to confiscate Palestinian property increasing, they are ever-present through graffiti that defiles probably 50% of the now-closed shops.

Graffiti like:

“There are Arabs, there are rats.” (Makes more sense as graffiti in the Hebrew, as it’s a bit of a play on words: “Yesh Aravim, yesh achbarim”)

“Arabs to the gas chambers.”

“Arabs are sand n—ers.” (the one I saw of this is signed by the JDL, or Jewish Defense League)

And perhaps most startling to me was that within a 2-minute walk of graffiti saying “Arabs out” was a sign showing the names of the Jewish congregations in the U.S. that had helped support the Hebron settlements with an ambulance. And who knows what else.

Settlers and right-wing American Jews present. Violently and terribly present. Nearly all Palestinians missing.

Such violence and hatred in a city so holy, within view of the reputed tomb of our ancestors Abraham and Sarah, who kept their tent open on all sides to welcome visitors. What would Abraham and Sarah think of a city that had been closed off to its former Palestinian residents, but done in their names?

I still have chills from hearing the muezzin’s call to prayer from the Machpelah/Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, which is now divided into a Jewish holy site and a mosque. What does it mean to hear the call to prayer when there is almost no one who can get there? After all, on one of the main streets that a Muslim could theoretically walk to in order to get to the mosque, I was stopped by a border policeman. And he asked me but one simple question.

“Are you Jewish?”

I hesitated. First because I hadn’t quite understood, or expected, the question. Then I realized what he was asking. And I hesitated again because those few hours had again shaken my beliefs, my understanding of Judaism.

Indeed, I had to answer “yes, I am a Jew” in order to even walk on this road.

Now, in the pre-Civil rights era U.S., unless you were participating in an action, the issue of which restaurant or hotel or drinking fountain you used was pre-determined, in some way, by circumstances and factors beyond your immediate control. Whether you were white or “colored” did not really need to be asked.

But, because I was not wearing a kippah or dressed in black and white, the answer was in my hands. And in some way, I reazlied that an answer of “yes, I am a Jew” was an answer of:

“Yes, I believe in segregation and transfer.”

“Yes, I believe I have the right to walk on this street, and the Palestinians who used to live here do not, nor should any other non-Jews.”

“Yes, I equate Judaism with the gun in your hands, with the settlers whom you protect, and with their ideology which you help implement.”

And, mostly because I am not quick enough on my feet (literally or figuratively) and my car was at the other end of this street, I, in fact, answered “yes.” And I am still thinking about everything it meant. And everything I would like it to mean.

But more than anything, I am thinking about the Palestinians I did not see. Those who are missing. In fact, they were also missing from much of the drive to Hebron. I even read in Ha’aretz that the Jewish National Fund, Ministry of Tourism, and Mount Hebron Regional Council are publishing tourist guides that describe the beauty of the region and its attractiveness as a hiking and travel getaway, in no small part because you can now go as a Jew without really having to encounter a Palestinian. The article is worth reading for some of the quotes, but I’ll excerpt this from the article:

In these publications, there is no separation wall, no bypass roads. There are no roadblocks set up next to almost every Palestinian village, limiting the residents’ freedom of movement to the point of feeling suffocated. There are no ridges that have been harmed to make way for settlements that look like fortified and alienated suburbs. There are no cave dwellers who have been banished from their homes on Mount Hebron, and no pupils who cannot go to school because their settler neighbors constantly harass them. No Palestinian communities appear on the map published in the booklet about the Hebron region.
…

The daily Palestinian nightmare gives way and disappears for the benefit of publications that realize the dreams of the Israeli hiker. Now, in addition to the transportation and security infrastructure that allows the Israeli tourist to avoid encountering nearly any Palestinians and only see their communities from afar, there is a marketing and publishing infrastructure. Awaiting the hiker, for the most part, is good food, amazing scenery and spectacular sunrises. The only thing that remains for Israeli hikers is simply to come, to forget all their troubles - and particularly those of the Palestinians.

More and more, Palestinians have simply been removed from the narrative in Israel, from the reality. They are somewhere else, on the other side of a wall, missing. And so too are the Israelis missing from the lives of Palestinians, whose reality grows more and more to be of one where Jews simply exist as Israeli soldiers, as settlers, as the American Jews who send money to support both groups (Friends of the IDF being the military support side).

As political developments evolve in Ramallah and Jerusalem and Gaza, as these discussions between leaders of peoples who do not exist for one another except in the media and in images of the past, I will wonder back to Hebron, wonder back to everything that is missing from this holy place. Palestinians are missing, Judaism is missing, Israelis are missing.

God is missing.

And ultimately, that is why the peace on my son’s t-shirt is missing. But perhaps, one day, like the circle in the Silverstein story, we’ll all find the right piece of peace.

To do that, of course, we have to find each other first.

Choice and Life

Published by
Brad Brooks-Rubin
June 19, 2007 in Personal Reflections, Peace Process, Brad and All Posts. 3 Comments

Reading Secretary of State Rice’s remarks yesterday about the situation in Palestine brought to mind a few questions and thoughts about “choice” and “life” in Eastern and Western Palestine and Israel. Here is what she had to say about the issue:

A fundamental choice confronts the Palestinians, and all people in the Middle East, more clearly now, than ever. It is a choice between violent extremism on the one hand and tolerance and responsibility on the other. Hamas has made its choice. It has sought to attempt to extinguish democratic debate with violence and to impose its extremist agenda on the Palestinian people in Gaza. Now, responsible Palestinians are making their choice and it is the duty of the international community to support those Palestinians who wish to build a better life and a future of peace.

Aside from the fact that this sounds a whole lot like the quote I posted from the American Jewish Committee’s statement from last week, I am somewhat amazed to hear that the Palestinians are confronted with a choice, at least as of right now. No doubt the Secretary knows far more than I do about what’s happening on the ground, but from where I sit, behind (in front of?) the Wall, I am hard-pressed to comprehend this “choice” that so clearly faces Palestinians on June 19, 2007.

First there are the Palestinians in Gaza (or maybe we just don’t consider them Palestinians anymore?). What choices do they have? Some would like to leave, perhaps they would like to choose “tolerance and responsibility.” But if they can get through Hamas checkpoints and arrests, Israel won’t let them leave. They’re stuck. Now the Israeli government won’t even let in Magen David Adom ambulances into the Erez crossing area, for fear of infiltration. So I have trouble seeing the choice there.

They could choose to try to sneak into Egypt, as a few hundred have chosen to. But again, even if they can get in to Egypt, I’m not so sure that’s a destination brimming with “tolerance and responsibility” or where they can find “a better life and a future of peace.”

Should they take to the streets? Well, if they do so with guns, they’ll likely be labeled terrorists. Or, even if supported nominally by the West, they will likely end up where Fatah has: running for their lives. And if they choose to stand up and take to the streets without guns, they’ll likely face the wrath of Hamas and its “violent extremism.” And since the international community is leaving Hamas to its own devices, without any kind of negotiations or interaction other than basic aid, there will hardly be much leverage should more such carnage happen.

Or should they simply sit back and wait? Well, if they simply do what they can to survive physically and economically to make sure they and their families live until tomorrow, then we will probably label them as Hamas sympathizers because they stayed in Gaza and did not rise up.

In the end, not a lot of real choices. Next there are the Palestinians in the West Bank. Sure, the aid is coming, the tax revenues are finally flowing, and the support seems steadfast.

But, of course, that’s support for Fayyad and Abbas and, apparently, for Fatah, not necessarily the people. Now, Fayyad has managed over the years to maintain a solid record and profile, so I can understand the move in his direction. But this is quite clearly a Fatah and Abbas-led government.

Yet it is Fatah, after all, that was deemed so corrupt that the Palestinian people so overwhelmingly voted for Hamas, despite most not agreeing with its ideology. And in spite of millions of dollars of aid from the U.S. directly to Fatah to help it try to win those elections. As the Washington Post editorialized – in a piece appropriately called “Hamas’s Choice” – after the elections:

Many Palestinians who voted for Hamas don’t support the Islamists’ fundamentalist agenda: Polls show that large majorities want an end to violence and a resumption of peace talks with Israel. Wednesday’s vote was not an embrace of extremism, but — as President Bush suggested yesterday — a rejection of the corrupt and incompetent clique of leaders left behind by Yasser Arafat. Since Arafat’s death more than a year ago, his Fatah movement had been unable to reform itself or control its violent elements, despite the good intentions of Mr. Abbas. Now, perhaps, a new generation of secular leaders will be able to purge Fatah and prepare to offer Palestinians a better alternative, while crooks and armed thugs are cut from the government’s payroll.

But here we are again: Fayyad is new, but this is still Fatah and Fatah is still led by Abbas. Can we really be sure there will be no corruption? That the government will actually work for the people?

And although the Palestinian people, both in Gaza and the West Bank, so clearly did not choose them in the open and fairly-contested elections in 2006, they are now supposed to choose them? Now that…what? Now that they have been routed in Gaza but held on and propped up in the West Bank?

I don’t necessarily believe Abbas to be the problem, but how can he be seen as the only “choice” for a “better life and a future of peace,” two things he clearly has not brought to the Palestinian people, even when he was in complete control?

What if the Palestinians in the West Bank want to choose someone else now, some party other than Fatah, because, unlike the Bush Administration apparently, their memories go back before January 2006? Will they be allowed? Will this be a choice they can make? Can they choose Marwan Barghouthi?

What if they wait six months or a year, and nothing much has changed? Or are they allowed to “choose” only if it means choosing the one choice we might approve of?

What if Palestinians in the West Bank would like to choose a “better life and a future of peace” that involves, say, being able to get to school or work on a road of their choice? Or getting to school or work at all? Or trying to find work in and enter Israel? Or pray at al-Aqsa? If they would like to live a future of peace and “tolerance and responsibility” on land not surrounded by settlements and the IDF? How about if they would like to build a larger home on land adjacent to their house, but for which their only title document may date from the Ottoman era? Can they choose to build and not have their home demolished?

What say you, Madame Secretary, can they make those choices? Will you stand so clearly behind them then as you do when it is Hamas on the other side? Will you stand with the Palestinians when the choices are a little harder to make, to implement? When they involve pushing Israel a bit more than you have chosen to so far? Will you support their choices then?

Now, I do not mean to imply the Palestinians have no choices to make, or have not had choices to make over the past decades of Occupation and Oslo. Surely they have, and in so many cases, some Palestinians have made terrible choices that have resulted in only more pain and tragedy for them and for so many Israelis.

But perhaps it’s time for the Administration, for Israel, for the American Jewish community, for the West to own up to their own choices here. To stand behind the Palestinians, to support the choices that they believe will lead to this future of peace the Secretary speaks of. Not just asking them to choose the choices that Israel would choose for them. Call that whatever you want, but do not call it choice.

No matter what you believe about how or why we got here, no matter whose choices or mistakes or ideology you would place blame on, I pray that we all realize these choices are not really for the Palestinians to make alone. They are for all of us to make.

Two final notes – one from the Palestinian author Raja Shehadeh and one from Moses (quite a duo). Shehadeh, as many of you will know, has written several must-read books on the situation here, both from legal and personal perspectives. One of his older memoirs is entitled “The Third Way.” As he explains about halfway down in this piece, the title is actually based on a saying from Treblinka:

Raja himself demonstrated in choosing the title of his book, The Third Way: A Journal of Life in the West Bank. On the back cover, the origin of the phrase “the third way” is explained: “From the wisdom of the Treblinka concentration camp: ‘Faced with two alternatives-always choose the third.’ Between mute submission and blind hate-I choose the third way. I am Samid [the steadfast].

For his part, Moses, at the end of Deuteronomy, while ending his leadership of the Jewish people, announces a second covenant of sorts with the people. That is, the first covenant under Moses’ leadership took place at Sinai, but Abravanel teaches us that this covenant was only with those souls present at Sinai. But as the people stood ready to enter the Land, a second covenant – binding on the souls of all those present and all future generations – is initiated.

And within that covenant, we read the following verses in Deuteronomy 30:

15 See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil,

16 in that I command thee this day to love HaShem thy G-d, to walk in His ways, and to keep His commandments and His statutes and His ordinances; then thou shalt live and multiply, and HaShem thy G-d shall bless thee in the land whither thou goest in to possess it.

17 But if thy heart turn away, and thou wilt not hear, but shalt be drawn away, and worship other gods, and serve them;

18 I declare unto you this day, that ye shall surely perish; ye shall not prolong your days upon the land, whither thou passest over the Jordan to go in to possess it.

19 I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore choose life, that thou mayest live, thou and thy seed;

On the Shabbat following 9/11, I gave a d’var torah on this passage and those around it (you can see most of the text excerpted on the Shalom Center’s website here). And I essentially suggested there that we should, perhaps in a sort of post-9/11 covenant, read the end of this passage to say not just “choose life” for you and your seed, but for you and all seeds to live.

So, since it did not exactly play out that way post-9/11, let me ask this again, post-Gaza. Let us not see only two choices, involving two failed options, innumerable failed leaders, tragically failed realities. Let us use this moment, all of us, to be like Shehahdeh, to choose neither submission nor hate, but to be steadfast: steadfast in our pursuit of what Moses commanded, to choose life.

Choose all life: Israeli, Palestinian, American, Iraqi, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and those of every seed on earth.

Obama watch

Published by
Andrew Schamess
April 24, 2007 in Politics. 1 Comment

This is from the JTA report on the National Jewish Democratic Council forum. All the Democractic candidates addressed Jewish leaders and donors on foreign policy issues.

It was a sharp turnaround from the Democratic message in 2004 – at least when that message was aimed at Jewish voters, who were believed at the time to be happy with President Bush’s strongly pro-Israel tilt. The Democratic pitch four years ago: We can be just as pro-Israel as Bush, but domestic policy counts as well….

There was… agreement… on the need to engage with Iran, while not counting out the military option to force that country to come clean on its nuclear program; the need for U.S. energy independence and distance from Saudi Arabia; and rejection of any attempt to force Israel to deal with Hamas, the terrorist group leading the Palestinian Authority government.

Only Obama said he expected movement from Israel toward peace.

“It is in the interests of Israel to establish peace in the Middle East,” he said. “It cannot be done at the price of compromising Israel’s security, and the United States government and an Obama presidency cannot ask Israel to take risks with respect to its security. But it can ask Israel to say that it is still possible for us to allow more than just this status quo of fear, terror, division. That can’t be our long-term aspiration.”

Obama seems to be leaving himself some leeway to challenge Israel if it takes positions that he sees as an impediment to peace.

The fact that he’s willing to risk losing some Jewish support to lay the groundwork for this also suggests that he’s thinking beyond the campaign to the goals his administration wants to achieve; and that an Israeli-Palestinian peace process may be an important one.

The Difference Between Don Imus and Lenny Bruce

Published by
Andrew Schamess
April 10, 2007 in Politics. 7 Comments

Question: What is the difference between Lenny Bruce and Don Imus?

Answer: Lenny Bruce was not sponsored by The New York Stock Exchange.

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Comedians can say things that other people can’t. Lenny Bruce said out loud all sorts of stuff that was, and still is, floating around in the American collective unconscious - racism, misogyny, bestiality - fear and hate of every kind, the stuff that drove Richard Nixon, the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan.

When Bruce talked, he talked as one of the oppressed - as a “Kike”, an object of hate and derision who had the guts to talk back to the Man. Listen to how he starts off with a racial slur and, by the time he’s done, he’s formed a sort of club of the dispossessed - all the ethnic groups who’ve been victims of racism at one point or another in this country. It’s like we’re suddenly sitting around in the living room together saying “Damn- he called you that?”

The shtick goes on- Bruce makes believe he’s talking to the head of the Klan, asking if he’d rather marry a white or a black woman. What if the white woman was Kate Smith, and the black woman was Lena Horne? He starts to sound like an auctioneer - an oblique reference to the slave trade that I think is not accidental.

The idea is that society labels people in order to objectify and ultimately commodify them. He’s auctioning off a black and a white woman to the head of the Ku Klux Klan, and he makes them celebrities, maybe to show that we’re all party to the process of racial objectification and commodification. It’s radical humor, and there’s no question whose side Bruce is on when he’s doing it.

Don Imus isn’t radical. Imus is the Man. He’s another face of corporate culture. When he calls black women prostitutes, there’s nothing inclusive about it. He’s just putting them down.

Which is right where the Money wants them to be.

New Old Peace Plan Emerges From Riyadh Summit

Published by
Andrew Schamess
March 29, 2007 in Politics. 3 Comments

The Los Angeles Times has some interesting articles on the summit meeting of Arab leaders in Riadh, and the prospect of a new (well, re-warmed) Israel-Palestinian peace plan. The lead report:

the festering conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, viewed by many as the wellspring for the region’s rising Islamic radicalism, took center stage at the summit. Abdullah, in a forceful speech, condemned the U.S.-backed aid boycott of the Palestinian Authority government led by Hamas militants who don’t recognize Israel’s right to exist.

“In wounded Palestine, the resistant (Palestinian) people are still suffering from oppression and occupation, deprived of their right to independence and to have a country,” the Saudi king told the arriving diplomats.

Saudis want to revive their 2002 peace plan in which they proposed granting Arab recognition of Israel in exchange for a host of concessions, including the withdrawal of Israeli forces from land occupied after the 1967 Middle East War and a “just solution” for Palestinians who fled their homes after Israel’s founding in 1948.

Both the Israelis and the Palestinians are staking out their bargaining positions, with Israel calling for a modified proposal that drops the right of return and the Palestinians insisting on no alterations. Still, Israel is not rejecting the plan out of hand, as it did the first time around:

Israel, which shunned the proposal in the past, has warmed to it in recent months under U.S. pressure. The nation called on the Arab League to revise the document and praised Saudi attempts at generating a dialogue.

“We see it as a positive — the fact that the Arab community wants to talk with Israel after years of isolation. It’s a positive change,” said Yariv Ovadia, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s deputy spokesman.

This doesn’t necessarily mean the initiative is going anywhere. The Saudis are in a strong position to push the proposal. Abdullah seems to have consolidated his leadership of the Arab League at the summit. The Saudis brokered the Mecca agreement that created the Palestinian unity government, and I believe they’re the main financial backer keeping it afloat, so they have influence (if not control) there.

On the other hand, just as with the Clinton-Barak proposal, this process comes at a time when the Israeli leadership is weak. It’s not clear how long Olmert’s government will last, and whether he has the clout to lead the country into meaningful peace negotiations.

Similarly, U.S. leadership is compromised by a beleaguered President with no political capital, and a Democratic congress that is in the pocket of the hard-line pro-Israel lobby.

Did I mention infighting? The other interesting piece in the LA Times is by Milton Viorst. He compares Condoleeza Rice’s current position to that of Richard Nixon’s secretary of State, William P. Rogers, whose effort to forge a land-for-peace deal in 1972 was scuttled by Henry Kissinger. The article has some fascinating historical details and I’d strongly advise reading the whole thing, but the most pertinent part is this:

Whether or not Secretary Rice knows it, she now walks in the haunted footsteps of her predecessor William Rogers. After years of near silence, she has made clear her conviction that the national interest requires Israeli-Arab peace. Like Rogers, she has been circuit-riding throughout the region to enlist support. At home, instead of Kissinger, Rice faces Vice President Dick Cheney and Elliot Abrams, deputy national security advisor — committed neocons who have the president’s ear. As a result, the peace campaign on which she has embarked has emerged as her policy, not Bush’s.

The Washington Note adds a few details and concludes:

Cheney is out there working hard to sabotage Condoleezza Rice’s efforts in the Middle East, particularly her Middle East Super Summit.

IPS reports that not only are a large majority of Palestinians in favor of the plan, but American Zionists on the left and the right are showing interest:

“The initiative is really gaining momentum,” said Ori Nir, a spokesman at Americans for Peace Now (APN), a Washington-based Zionist peace group. “Even a week ago, it wasn’t really on the (Israeli) public agenda, but now you have cabinet ministers talking about it.”

At the same time, a new poll released over the weekend by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that nearly three out of four Palestinian respondents in Gaza and the West Bank support the initiative…

The story also mentions that two prominent neoconservatives, Representative Steven Solarz and Kenneth Adelman, signed on to an International Crisis Group statement, which concludes that “there exists now a major opportunity to reach a comprehensive Arab-Israeli settlement.”

Occupied Territories Under Seige: Effects of the International Boycott

Published by
Andrew Schamess
March 19, 2007 in Politics. 2 Comments

Over the weekend, the Palestinian legislature approved the new Fatah-Hamas unity government that had been hammered out in principal in Mecca last month. Israel’s cabinet voted on Sunday to block any steps toward peace negotiations

until the new Palestinian government recognizes Israel and renounces violence.

In officially rejecting the Palestinian unity government that was sworn in over the weekend, the cabinet also stated that “Israel expects the international community to maintain the policy it has taken over the past year of isolating the Palestinian government.”

Here is a snapshot what the international aid boycott has done to Palestinian society. I hope that readers - whatever their opinion of the unity government - will take a few moments to imagine what life is like right now for ordinary people in Gaza and the West Bank.

Oxfam reports:

Two thirds of Palestinians now live in poverty, a rise of 30 per cent last year. The number of families unable to get enough food has risen by 14 per cent. More than half of all Palestinians are now ‘food insecure’, unable to meet their families’ daily requirements without assistance. The health system is disintegrating.

Public servants, such as doctors, nurses, teachers and police officers, are worst hit. They haven’t had a regular income since February 2006. Their poverty rate has risen from 35 per cent in 2005 to 71 per cent in 2006.

A paper by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East notes:

Deep consumption poverty is defined as inability to meet basic human consumption needs… In 2005, the last full year of the household surveys, there were an average of 820,000 deep poor Palestinians in the oPt (occupied Palestinian Territories)…

The PA fiscal crisis resulted in an estimated decline of more than USD 500 million in oPt household income in first-half 2006. As a result, real per capita consumption levels (including external assistance) declined by about 12 percent, with food consumption down by 8 percent and non-food consumption down 13 percent relative to second-half 2005. This increased the number of deep poor from an average of 650,800 in second-half 2005 to an average of 1,069,200 in first-half 2006–a 64.3 percent increase.

The International Crisis Group, in a February 28 report, offered some accounts of daily life from interviews conducted over the past few months:

Palestinians describe levels of poverty “that we never experienced nor even imagined would ever befall us”.

In the central Gaza Strip, a housewife relates the veritable transformation of the local fruit and vegetable market, “in which produce has become more scarce and expensive because of the closure, while people are poorer and buy less because of the sanctions”.

“Those who used to buy a ratl [three kilos]”, adds her daughter-in-law, “today settle for a kilo. Those who used to buy a kilo now buy only an uqiyya [250 grammes]. You always see people who inspect the produce, haggle with the vendor, then walk away because they arrived penniless – as if they came only to relive memories of better days”.

A charity worker in the same region relates the perceptible increase in beggars: “You almost never saw them, now you can’t go to the mosque without being approached by at least several. It’s heartbreaking”. Previously, he adds, “when I used to distribute cash during the holidays, some families that I know to be poor were too proud to accept anything and could at least scrape by without help. Now if I offer $20, they respond as if I’ve given them a bar of gold. And some go so far as to come to me”.

My association is to the scene in II Kings (6:24-25):

King Ben-hadad of Aram mustered his entire army and marched upon Samaria and besieged it. There was a great famine in Samaria, and the siege continued until a donkey’s head sold for eighty shekels of sliver, and a quarter of a kab of dove’s dung for five shekels.

Because what we are conducting is, essentially, a siege. Our goal is to force the Palestinians to capitulate, disarm, and accept the terms of surrender that we dictate to them.

UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Territories John Dugard, cited in the International Crisis Group report, calls it “the first case in which an occupied people have been subjected to international sanctions”.

Some readers may feel that all this is justified, necessary to protect Jewish lives, to ensure Israel’s security. This rationale seems to outweigh any harm we might do to innocent Palestinians.

I fear we will suffer the consequences. As the institutions of Palestinian governance slowly collapse and poverty, despair and lawlessness increase, there may soon really be no one left with whom to negotiate.

In any case, when I give thanks to the Almighty this shabbos for good wine, a wonderful meal, and a day of rest, I will think for a good, long time about Palestinian children sitting down to a nearly empty table. I will pray for their deliverance; and I will pray to God to uncover our eyes and ears, and give us the wisdom to make peace.

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