No successor of Rabin

Yesterday, I received Adam Keller’s translation of an op ed piece in last Thursday’s Israel HaYom ‘Israel today’. Moriah Shlomot, former Secretary General of Peace Now, writes,

Year after year, I return to the Rabin Square with devotion and determination. On years of near-despair as on better years, I feel obliged to share in the collective memory. This is the annual moment when the Peace Camp stands up to be counted, and in my view those who dig into details miss the main point.

That would doubtless be the peace camp as manifest in Peace Now, the organisation that spawned Amir Peretz, who served as Defense Minister during last year’s merciless bombing of Lebanon. The very Peace Now whose incumbent Secretary General, Yariv Oppenheimer, was recently observed harassing Palestinians at a Jordan Valley checkpoint and explained that among his three reasons for participating in the very occupation he purports to oppose,

The second reason derives from the will to maintain the democratic character of this country. As a citizen, it is my right to protest and act against decisions made on political and military levels. As a soldier, I must fulfill my duty and cannot pick and choose operations I wish to undertake. (Except for obviously illegal acts, for example the killing of innocents, undue violent behavior, humiliation, torture).

Not to mention ‘obviously illegal acts’ like occupying territory acquired by force of arms and restricting the movement of the occupied population.

This year, Shlomot hesitates, because

…Defence Minister Ehud Barak is due to speak at this year’s Rabin Memorial Rally. This is good enough a reason to doubt and hesitate, to think twice about attending. Barak is the worst of the leaders staffing the government ministries and taking charge of the people’s hopes.

Barak is no successor of Rabin - because Oslo, with all its faults and deficiencies, was based on mutual confidence. Barak has severely damaged the confidence between us and the Palestinians, as well as between Jews and Arabs inside Israel.

The beatification of Rabin as some kind of peacemaker is naïve in the extreme. Oslo had nothing to do with confidence. It was always a transparent stratagem to enlist a Palestinian elite in sharing the responsibility for social control and other administrative tasks in the occupied territories. I appreciate that honeyed phraseology confected with ‘peace’, ‘negotiations’, and ‘diplomacy’ can win the heart of any liberal, even while the confectioner’s boot is planted squarely on the neck of some untermensch.

The confidence she writes of exists only in the imagination of people who believe that dividing a Palestinian state, comprising 22% of historical Palestine in two separate enclaves, from a Jewish state in the other 78%, is the best approach to reconciling the two peoples. The principal difference between Rabin’s approach and Barak’s is the proportion of land they wanted to keep for themselves and the number of enclaves to divide the Palestinian state into.

What interested me about this paragraph was Shlomot’s apparent wish to distinguish ‘the Palestinians’ and ‘Arabs inside Israel’. As Jonathan Cook has pointed out, there is a long tradition of dividing people who identify as Palestinians into three groups: the refugees, ‘the Israeli Arabs’, and ‘the Palestinians’, that is, the subjects of the Palestinian Authority in the occupied territories. The division is real. Under the Oslo regime, only ‘the Palestinians’, as defined, are to be represented in any interaction with the Israeli state. With the dissolution of the PLO into the PA, the refugees lost any semblance of representation. And the Israeli Arabs are of course amply represented by their state – the Jewish state. They are no less occupied than their relatives in the territories, but it usually impacts less dramatically on their quotidian existence. So the only Palestinians Israel would have to negotiate with were the ones they could reduce to desperation by checkpoints, house demolitions, extrajudicial executions, etc.

At the same time, the distinction aims to deprive Palestinians of ‘peoplehood’ or ‘nationhood’. One of the populations achieved some recognition as a separate people precisely when Oslo saddled them with the PA. As Golda Meir famously quipped,

There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.

Sunday Times, 1969-06-15; The Washington Post, 1969-06-16

Presumably, had there been no ‘Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people’, it would be ok to take their land. It’s another one of those bizarre arguments that the Hasbara establishment has cultivated for decades and has gained the status of common sense. Like the argument that the refugees have no right to return because they are alleged to have left of their own accord. As if that deprived them of their right. What gives the refugees the right to return to their homes in ‘Israel proper’ is not that they were forced and stampeded out at gunpoint, although they were, it’s that they come from there. The reason I oppose the appropriation of any part of Palestine is not that the Palestinians did or did not conceive of themselves as a national group or a people at some point in time. Nor is it that their ancestors have been living in Palestine for hundreds, if not thousands of years, although they have. It’s that they were living there when the Zionist movement decided that it wanted their land to colonise with European Jews. The displacement of people from their homes is a very severe attack. All the more so when it is permanent, and especially when the motivation is the convenience of a settler population intent on ethnic cleansing.

It’s not for nothing that ‘The International Community’ has belatedly recognised ethnic cleansing as a crime against humanity. Ilan Pappe has demonstrated conclusively that the Jewish majority in part of Palestine that made the formation of the state of Israel a possibility was achieved through a quite deliberate and orchestrated campaign of precisely what is today known as ethnic cleansing.

Neither Israel, constituted as an ethnocracy, nor The International Community, with its well earned Holocaust guilt, is ever likely to take on the ramifications of the historic crime that gave rise to Israel. But I harbour some hope that at least the peace camp can someday jettison these downright puerile arguments that the Palestinians somehow deserved their dispossession.

[Hat tip to Sol Salbe.]

The prettiest sight

As Jimmy Stewart observed in Philadelphia story, ‘The prettiest sight in this fine pretty world is the privileged class enjoying its privileges.’

The best that medical science has to offer, tax breaks, government handouts and bailouts, first class travel…are all luxuries we know the rich enjoy. But surely a natural disaster sinks all boats? Apparently not, writes Kimi Yoshino in the LA Times. While ‘Firefighters across the region have complained this week that they simply did not have enough trucks, helicopters and airplanes.’

AIG's [American International Group Inc.] Wildfire Protection Unit, part of its Private Client Group, is offered only to homeowners in California's most affluent ZIP Codes -- including Malibu, Beverly Hills, Newport Beach and Menlo Park -- and a dozen Colorado resort communities. It covers about 2,000 policyholders, who pay premiums of at least $10,000 a year and own homes with a value of at least $1 million.

[Certified firefighter, Bryce] Carrier and his 15 crew mates sprayed retardant on and around more than 160 homes in Malibu, Lake Arrowhead and the hardest-hit areas of Orange and San Diego counties this week.

Yoshino quotes Naomi Klein,

"What we have is a dangerous confluence of events: underfunded states, increasingly inefficient disaster response, a loss of faith in the public sphere . . . and a growing part of the economy that sees disaster as a promising new market," said Naomi Klein, whose new book, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," looks at, among other things, the response to Hurricane Katrina.

Klein said AIG offers a glimpse into the future of what she calls "disaster apartheid," in which the affluent are better equipped for emergencies.

Nor is it just from such ‘natural’ disasters as the bushfires raging through Southern California that the rich are better protected. In this week’s Forward, Rebecca Spence celebrates the enterprise of 31 year old Beverly Hills born oleh Aaron Cohen, founder of IMS (Israeli Military Specialists) Security.

Hiring Israelis culled exclusively from the Jewish state’s top four special operations units, Cohen oversees the only private security firm specializing in bringing Israeli-style protection to the upper reaches of stardom. Guarding the likes of Brad Pitt, Jackie Chan and Eva Longoria, to name but a few, Cohen — with a minimum retainer fee in the range of $20,000 and a day’s work costing up to $1,000 — has applied the principles he learned detaining terrorists to keeping aggressive paparazzi and the occasional celebrity stalker at bay.

Cohen earned his spurs in ‘an elite Israeli commando unit responsible for capturing, and sometimes killing, Palestinian militants in the West Bank’.

His story, soon to be told in a forthcoming memoir co-authored by Douglas Century (a former contributor to the Forward), is one that would warm any Zionist heart. At 18, Cohen made aliyah and subsequently became the only American to finagle his way into the ranks of an elite military unit — a feat, even for those born in Israel. As a member of Duvdevan, created in the wake of the first intifada, Cohen was among those who disguised themselves as Arabs to infiltrate the West Bank. In 1999, after returning to Los Angeles, Cohen was hired as a bodyguard and administered security at the home of A-lister Pitt, who was fending off a stalker.

The following year, sensing a demand for his expertise, Cohen founded IMS Security. In order to recruit his employees, he returned to Israel, where he still owns a condominium in the affluent Tel Aviv suburb Herzliya. Cohen tacked up a note in the lunchroom of his unit, offering high-paying jobs in L.A. to anyone who had finished his service. Cohen now employs a staff of 22, and he rotates in new Israelis every one-and-a-half to two years. It is, he said, a way of returning the favor to those who took him in as one of their own and gave him the experience of being a top Israeli fighter.

In the years since the attacks of September 11, 2001, Cohen has also built a business training American law-enforcement and military units in Israeli counter-terrorism techniques. His client roster includes the Houston Metro SWAT team, the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services and the Department of Homeland Security’s Los Angeles office. He has also become a pundit, dispensing security acumen on Fox News and Court TV, among other networks.

Wealthy celebrities need the best protection money can buy, because after all, Cohen explains, ‘Stalking is a form of terror’.

Veterans of Duvdevan and other elite forces may find lucrative employment with Cohen’s outfit, but for the ordinary reservist grunts like Yariv Oppenheimer detaining, harassing, and humiliating Palestinians at West Bank checkpoints, General Secretary of Peace Now is good enough.

Two Machsom Watch activists report seeing Oppenheimer doing his military reserve duty at a checkpoint inside the occupied territories, in an area that is slowly being ethnically cleansed of its indigenous population, mainly through the use of checkpoints, which forbid almost any type of transportation or access between the main Palestinian cities of the West Bank and the Jordan Valley.

Oppenheimer, together with the other soldiers at the checkpoint, also refused a Palestinian family with seven children who were traveling to see their relatives in a nearby village to go through the checkpoint. The fact that this was the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fiter that ends the month of Ramadan, didn’t seem to soften the Peace Now soldier.

[Hat tip to Hulkegaard, in a comment on Jews sans frontières.]