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.]

What racism?

The latest Centre against Racism poll, conducted in December 2006, reveals an increase in anti Arab racism among the Israeli Jews surveyed. One interesting attitude that I didn’t notice reported in the media last year is that 55% of Israelis feel that “Arabs and Jews should be separated at entertainment sites”.

So who says Israel isn't racist?

Jimmy Carter, for one, keeps insisting, Israel is a ‘wonderful democracy with equal treatment of all citizens whether Arab or Jew’.

Meanwhile, the proportion who would not live in the same building as an Arab has increased from 68% in 2005 to ‘over 75%’ last year.

Over half of the Jewish population in Israel believes the marriage of a Jewish woman to an Arab man is equal to national treason.

About 40 percent of participants agreed that “Arabs should have their right to vote for Knesset revoked”. The number was 55 percent lower in the previous survey.

As I read it, that means that the proportion has more than doubled since 2005. The proportion who regard Arab culture as inferior has increased from 35% to 38%.

According to Yoav Stern reporting the same poll data in Ha’aretz, when they hear Arabic spoken,

30 percent said they reacted with hatred. In contrast, last year only 17.5 percent said they feel hatred…

Unfortunately, there appears to be a problem with the Center against Racism site, but I have emailed them to see if I can get more detailed results. If so, I may find there is more to say about the data.

Meanwhile, it’s not just the attitudes of Israeli Jews that evidence the apartheid nature of Israeli society. Covering the release of the 2004-2005 Sikkuy Report, Stern writes,

The life expectancy of Jewish citizens in Israel is four years higher than that of Arab citizens, according to the equality index published today by Sikkuy: The Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality in Israel. The data also reveals that the mortality rate for Arab infants under the age of 12 months is double that of their Jewish counterparts.

The data suggests that the Arab minority in Israel suffers worse conditions that those of the Afro-American minority in the U.S. or the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland. This, according to similar indexes published there.

The same report also detailed aspects of discrimination against Palestinian Israeli citizens in employment.

Among the Jewish population aged 15 and above, 57 percent work, compared to only 39 percent among the Arab citizens. One major contributing factor for this discrepancy is the fact that only 17.6 percent of Arab women work, compared to nearly 55 percent of Jewish women.

A closer evaluation also shows that the Arab population is employed at very high rates in less profitable jobs, such as construction. The average wage in construction is NIS 6,287, and the rate of Arabs employed in that field is 4.6 times higher than that of Jews.

On the other hand, in very profitable fields, the numbers of Arab workers is significantly lower than that of Jews. For example, in banking, finance and insurance, in which the average wage is NIS 13,500, there are 3.7 times more Jews than Arabs.

More recent data from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, in these two tables in the Statistical Abstract of Israel 2006, shows that the Employment/Population Ratio (EPR) for Jews in 2005 was 53.08%, while that for Arabs was 34.26%. What this means in real terms is that according to official Israeli government statistics, over 65% of the Palestinian population aged 15 and over does not have even one hour of paying work per week. In contrast, over 53% of Jews in that age group did have paying work. It is worth pointing out that both professional soldiers and conscripts, all drawn from the Jewish population, are not among those 53% even though they do have paying work of a kind.

The most recent available statistics from the Labour Force Survey, for the quarter ending in December 2006, show an EPR for Jews of 54.17%, even higher than the 2005 average. Unfortunately, it was not possible to disaggregate a comparable EPR for the Palestinian population, but the EPR for non Jews was 37.99%. In December 2006, Arabs comprised 82.08% of the non Jewish population. My guess is that the 18% of the non Jewish population who are not Arabs, that is, ‘population not classified by religion in the Population Registry, and non-Arab Christians’, brought the EPR for the entire non Jewish population up and that the Arab EPR remained at around 34%.

Move to the back

On Friday, Left I on the news reported on an article in Ha’aretz about a woman savagely beaten on the Egged No 2 bus in Jerusalem. According to Wikipedia, it transpires that

Some lines, mainly running in and/or between major Haredi Jewish population centers, are classified as 'Mehadrin' buses. These buses, while identical to others, can be used by anyone whether Haredi or not, but travellers should note that men and women (with the exception of husband and wife, or parents with children) are not supposed to sit next to each other, and women may be expected to sit in the back of the bus, while the men are supposed to sit in front. For women, a modest style of dress would also be recommended (meaning, no miniskirts or bare shoulders). These are guidelines that most of the riders of these specific lines insist on. These rules on these mehadrin buses are not 'law', and anyone can ignore them, but it is seen as disrespecting the local population.

Apparently anyone can ignore them, but at their own peril. I couldn’t find any corroboration on the Egged site, but it says that information on local bus routes is only in Hebrew.

So the days of ‘move to the back of the bus’ are not over yet in Israel, the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’. Even Jews haven’t achieved full civil rights, if they’re women. I wonder if that’s why observant Jewish men thank a supernatural being every morning she lo asani ishah ‘who didn’t make me a woman’?

Meanwhile, Jonathan Cook reports that Israeli security guards both in Israel and at overseas airports are racially profiling Arabs.

"The countries in which these [Israeli security] investigations take place do not supervise them, and prefer to ignore their discriminatory nature and the human rights violations committed on their own soil," the report [by lawyer, Tarek Ibrahim, on behalf of the Arab Association for Human Rights and the Centre Against Racism] states.

Israeli security staff identifies most Arab passengers through clothing, appearance or accent, or through questions about their name or where they live. If there is doubt, passengers are asked to show their Israeli ID card, which is believed to reveal their ethnicity in coding.

Once identified, Arab passengers' luggage and passports are marked with specially colour-coded labels.

And it’s not just their luggage that gets special treatment. The report includes accounts from several victims.

Ibtisam Maranah, a film director who represented Israel at an international film festival in the Netherlands in 2005 along with several Jewish colleagues, reports that Israeli staff took her off alone to an underground section of the Dutch airport, away from the rest of her group and local airport staff, where she was made to undress.

As Jimmy Carter says, ‘Israel is a wonderful democracy with equal treatment of all citizens whether Arab or Jew’, or indeed, woman.

Off the map

A reader emailed me with some thoughts on the ‘Page of time’ piece I wrote yesterday:

It seems to me that Ahmadinejad *did* mean "wipe off the map" - in the same sense as the USSR has been wiped off the map.

The problem is that there are only two forces which can do that:

(a) One or more Arab States, with the support or acquiescence of the US; or

(b) The Jewish & Palestinian workers of Israel/Palestine.

One of those will require a whole lot of bloodshed. The other one won't.

To which I replied, in part (with a correction or two):

I'm not sure what Ahmedinejad actually meant, nor does it much matter. As the linked article makes clear, the damage is done. That mistranslation, apparently attributable to Iran radio in the first place, has become one of the justifications for the buildup against Iran. But I doubt he meant for it to break up into lots of smaller successor states as did the erstwhile USSR?

I totally disagree with you about the forces. Of course any country or countries backed up by the US could probably defeat Israel militarily once the US withdraws its military support for Israel. But that wouldn't necessarily erase it from the map. Lots of countries have suffered military defeat and lived to fight another day.

As for the workers of historic Palestine uniting, well, that would do the trick, but I regard it profoundly implausible, bearing in mind the history of Jewish workers' organization, and the Histadrut in particular, all along, and the level of racism that persists among Jewish Israelis to this day if poll results are any indication.

Far more likely is a pan Arab revolt that will sweep aside all the US client regimes in the region, although I'm not 100% confident that could overcome the Jewish state without literally driving the Jews into the sea. In any case, I regard it as a scenario no more likely than the global anticapitalist revolution, which is what I think is really the only force that can solve the 'MidEast crisis', and as I say, is no less realistic than the alternatives.

That said, the scenario I expect to play out over the near term is the completion of the wall, leading to the Gazafication of the WB, and support for Abu Mazen's militia's, unless they get too strong, in which case, there may be support for Hamas, whatever it takes to keep the pressure cooking. I can certainly imagine a systematic attempt at genocide, or driving all the Palestinians into Jordan. But I think they'll want to shed the Israeli Arabs first, a la Lieberman. Or maybe they have a better idea.

……..

When I wrote that, I hadn’t yet read this article by Jonathan Cook, which outlines some scary scenarios were Palestinian Israeli citizens can be stripped of their citizenship for visiting relatives on the West Back or calling for a state of all its citizens. In case you missed it, you should definitely check out that Flashpoints interview I linked to on leftwrites yesterday morning, Cook sounded very pessimistic, as did the rappers form Dam. They are all anticipating a lot more bloodshed.

Welcome to Earth!

Today’s NY Times editorializes:

Badly weakened by criticism of his conduct of this summer’s inconclusive war in Lebanon, Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, has chosen to make an unwise and damaging trade-off. Bringing the pro-settler Israel Beiteinu party into his governing coalition reinforces his vulnerable parliamentary majority. But it makes it virtually impossible for Mr. Olmert to carry out the partial West Bank withdrawal program he ran on just seven months ago.

Well, the Times may consider it inconclusive, but others have managed to draw some conclusions – that Israel failed to achieve so much as one of its stated goals, that it succeeded in devastating Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure, that it enhanced Hizb’allah’s prestige throughout Lebaonon’s ethnic communities, and that it drove a wedge between the ‘moderate’ totalitarian regimes favoured by Washington and the people they oppress – the ‘Arab street’.

But what’s all this about a trade-off? After all,

Israel Beiteinu is the political vehicle of Avigdor Lieberman, who advocates annexing West Bank settlements and reassigning Arab Israeli citizens to a rump Palestinian state.

exactly Olmert’s ‘convergence plan’.

Meanwhile, the nasty terrorist extremist Hamas

refuses to take the most minimal steps required for diplomatic credibility — a clear rejection of terrorism, acceptance of prior agreements and acknowledgment of Israel’s legitimacy.

Unlike the kind and gentle and eminently diplomatically credible Israeli government, which has fully embraced nonviolence, implemented every agreement in both letter and spirit, and has gone to such lengths to acknowledge Hamas’s legitimacy.

It makes you wonder where they dig up these editorial writers who seldom seem to be able to follow their own argument from one end of a sentence to the other.