Caution: Settlers Ahead

"As a Jew, I was ashamed at the scenes of Jews opening fire at innocent Arabs in Hebron. There is no other definition than the term ‘pogrom’ to describe what I have seen.” This quote from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert came just before I returned to Palestine two weeks ago. In Syria and in Lebanon, I watched as Al Jazeera correspondents reported live from Hebron, showing settlers burning houses and soldiers standing by and watching.

One of my first stops upon return to Palestine was to the Salfit region in the north, quite far from Hebron, to visit friends. I wasn’t thinking about the settlers. I visited a friend whose house is surrounded by the Wall, and asked how things were going. “They,” she pointed towards the settlement behind her house, “have attacked us twice this week.” In the middle of the night, the family had woken to the sounds of stones hitting their house. This has happened before, but not usually twice in one week. No settler has ever been punished for throwing stones at their house, though they have broken windows and water tanks.

I stayed in the area and woke up in the morning to the news that settlers had attacked a nearby village, spray painting racial slogans and stars of David on the village’s mosque. I have seen stars of David painted by settlers before, mostly on the walls of Palestinian shops and homes in Hebron, but I am still taken aback each time I see it. Do they not remember Kristallnacht? Or do they specifically remember Kristallnacht?

Another friend told me she had been on a bus the week before that was stopped by Israeli soldiers. “You should turn around and go a different way,” said a soldier to the driver. “There are settlers up ahead waiting to attack.” So the bus turned around, went a different way, and narrowly avoided a different attack by a group of settler women gathered on the side of the road with stones.

Somehow this story is the most frustrating to me. When settlers attack, Palestinians get punished / sent home / re-routed. It is as though the settlers are a natural phenomenon. They could place a sign in the road saying, “Caution: Settlers Ahead” and it would seem as natural to the soldiers as a sign saying “Caution: Storm Conditions Ahead” or “Caution: Road Curves Ahead.” It is as though the condition of settler attacks is unpreventable.

Of course, it is easier for a soldier to re-route a busload of unarmed Palestinian people largely accustomed to occupation than to move a group of armed settlers used to getting their way. But if the Israeli government, with the 4^th largest military in the world, wanted to control a few (or a few thousand) extremist settlers, I am confident that they could. This is not about a natural phenomenon, an inevitable occurrence, an inability of the Israeli government to reign in their population. It is a lack of will.

So when the prime minister of Israel says that he is personally offended by the settler attacks, when he calls them pogroms, one wonders why the Israeli soldiers largely stood by and watched, or even accompanied the settlers on their attacks. One wonders why the perpetrators are not in prison (unless they also attacked soldiers). One wonders why the settlers have not been removed. And the answer is simple: These settlers serve the interests of the Israeli government. I am not sure the government is always thrilled when the situation gets out of control like this (and then reflects badly on Israel in international media), but in general, having a small group of right-wing extremists deflects attention from the root causes of the problem, and deflects responsibility from the government.

Indeed, many Israelis view these settlers with disgust, and think, “If only these people would move out of the West Bank, we would have peace.” The settler movement often retorts, “What is the difference between land we came to control in 1948 and land we came to control in 1967?” Their conclusion (that Jews should fight for exclusive control of all the land) is quite opposite from mine, but the analysis is the same.

And this is why there are three Israeli soldiers for every Israeli settler in Hebron. Because if the settlers were to be removed, and “peace” did not magically appear, then people might start to ask, “Wait, is there another problem?” People might start to realize that occupation is not defined solely by presence of settlers (Gaza is experiencing the worst of occupation right now, though the settlers left more than three years ago). People might start to realize that there are Palestinians inside Israel who are treated less than equally, to say the least. People might start to realize that half of the Palestinian population has never set foot in any part of Palestine, and that more than two thirds are not permitted to live in their original villages. In other words, people might get to the core of the issue.

The ideological settler movement is, in many ways, holding together the fragile house of cards that is Israel. It has worked for a while, but it will not work forever. In front of this house we can add one more sign: “Caution: Collapse of Zionism Ahead.”

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P.S. While settlers are not jailed, these Israelis are: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNjggLhQo6w

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Hello from Lebanon

Dear friends,

Thanks to all of you who responded to my last note from Syria. I wrote it while sick and a little down, so I just want to say to any of you who are thinking of visiting Syria, please do. It is an amazing place in many ways. Yes, I feel more comfortable in Palestine, but I have no regrets about my month in Syria. I’m now back in Palestine and my reports will likely start to take on their normal form again, but first, here’s another in the style of a travel blog, this time largely from Lebanon.

After my Arabic class ended, I left for Lebanon for a few days. I went to the bus station in Damascus, got in a shared taxi, paid $15, and was in Beirut a few hours later. Easy as that. There are street signs on the highways near Damascus with arrows pointing in different directions and the words “Lebanon” “Jordan” and “Iraq”. It reminds me of the arbitrariness of borders, and of how small this region is. I often think of Syria and Jordan as huge countries because they’re many times the size of Palestine and Lebanon, but Syria and Jordan combined are only slightly larger than Texas (which is a large state, yes, but it’s one of 50).

In my car ride to Lebanon (as in my car ride from Syria to Jordan the following week), there were several nationalities represented in the car: Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi, and American. When the Iraqi man heard that I was American, he began to talk to me in fluent unaccented American English. “I was an interpreter for the US army,” he told me, and began talking about all the medals he received. I was taken aback at first, and admittedly judgmental of someone working with the army, but I was also curious. I asked him why he started working with them, and he thought I asked why he stopped. “Too many threats to my life,” he said. “So now I’ve been in Syria for a couple years, and I’m trying to get to America but they say they don’t have me in the system anymore and won’t issue me a visa, even though I worked with them for 3 years and got all these medals.” We talked a bit about his status in Syria and how he’s able to go to Lebanon (he has work there as an engineer rebuilding some of what Israel destroyed in 2006). I asked him again why he chose to work with the army. “It’s not just about the money,” he said, “though the money was good.” He went on to say that at the beginning of the war, most of the interpreters were Arabs from other countries, not Iraqis. He heard many stories of slight mis-translations leading to what he called “unnecessary killings” (I would argue all the killings are unnecessary), and he wanted to try to help. He is Iraqi, and speaks excellent English, so he thought he could save lives, and indeed, feels that he did.

As we crossed the border into Lebanon, I was struck by its beauty. I was there last February, when the mountains were all covered in snow, a different kind of beauty. But the greenness this time, the different colors in fact, were gorgeous. We weaved in and out of the mountain roads, and I started to see billboards for tattoo removal and other signs that distinguish Lebanon from Syria. And then, of course, the destruction. I remember reading about the Israeli bombing of the only road from Lebanon to Syria, but the sight of the bridge, or rather the pillars with no road on top, still undergoing reconstruction, was eerie. I imagined people in their cars plunging hundreds of feet to their death in the rocky ravine below.

This abrupt entry of memories of war into otherwise normal life would be repeated again and again in the coming days. Sitting in traffic, a driver would point to the bombed bridge next to us and say, “Traffic wasn’t like this before the summer of 2006.” Walking to a fancy café in the evening, my friends would tell me how they walked there once during the war and were terrified. When we arrived at the café they told me the whole area had been closed during the war. “Was the Lebanese army here preventing people from entering?” I asked. “No,” they said, “the army wasn’t allowed in either. Hizbollah controlled the area.”

You can’t walk or drive in Beirut without seeing destruction, construction, and a plethora of martyr posters. Except for the hairstyles and clothing, it’s hard to tell if the martyrs are from 1976, 2006, or sometime in between. I walked by one poster that at first glance looked like another martyr poster. A young man wore military gear and held what looked like an automatic weapon. Then I noticed the word “paintball” at the bottom of the poster. It was an advertisement. Strikingly similar.

I took a day to visit the south with my friend. I spent only about a half hour in each of Saida, Sur, and Bint Jbayl, but even the ride was worth it. I saw the hills with olive groves and thought, “This looks like the rural West Bank.” I saw the sea to our right and thought, “This looks like the road between Haifa and Tel Aviv.” I saw the specific shade of green and thought, “This looks like Jenin.” And of course, it is all of those things. And probably, had Israel not taken over in 1948, northern Palestine today would look quite similar (almost like it does now, but without all the Hebrew and red rooves).

We arrived in Bint Jbayl, the town that successfully resisted a ground invasion by the Israeli army in 2006. Many buildings still show the scars from bombing, but mostly life just continues. I realized that while I think of Bint Jbayl and Qana (which we also drove through) as sites of resistance or massacre, they are first and foremost places, like any other, of daily life. I looked up at the mountain and thought about how Palestine (Israel) is just on the other side. As I walked around with my Palestinian Lebanese friend who will likely never set foot in Palestine, I again thought of the arbitrariness of borders.

In Beirut I went to a play with my host and the kids from the Palestinian organization she works with. It was a story of a family from a fictional island who has many adventures traveling by boat around the world, but they are always trying to find their way home. I asked my host later if it was a reference to the right of return for Palestinian refugees. For Palestinians, she said, and Iraqis, and everyone else. I wondered if the actors were Palestinian, or Lebanese, or Iraqi, knowing how ethnically divided Lebanon is. But I was then comforted by the thought that it doesn’t matter, that one thing I like about Lebanon is that it seems to have a strong, or at least visible, progressive scene that does cross those boundaries.

As I got ready to leave for Syria, my friend said she would love to come to Damascus with me, that she had never been. She had been talking about it for days and I wasn’t sure why it wasn’t set in stone yet. She finally convinced her mother to ask her father. His response: No, the situation is too uncertain. “The situation?!” my friend asked angrily. “It’s been the same for 30 years!” Yes, her mother said, and it’s too uncertain. We never know what might happen.

I think about the concept of security, something most certainly missing from people’s lives in Lebanon and Palestine, and something largely present for people in Syria and Jordan. I had a conversation with a Palestinian friend the other day in which he said, “I don’t like Syria. You always feel like Assad is breathing down your back, you can’t say what you think, especially if it has anything to do with him.” I argued, “But people there live mostly happy, secure lives, with government services (health, education) provided. And Palestinians there too.” He agreed. “Sure, in Lebanon the Palestinians’ conditions are awful, the law discriminates openly against them, but they are free to speak and associate as they want. I prefer Lebanon and Palestine to Syria and Jordan.” I had a similar conversation with another friend, but with the opposite perspective: “Talk is nothing. So what about freedom of speech if we don’t have our basic needs?” This is of course a simplification of the countries in this area, but it’s an interesting context to think about.

Of course, there are certain things that do cross all the boundaries, that unify all the people of the region, and that once again remind me of the arbitrariness of borders. Right now, there is one that stands out to me most: Turkish soap operas (dubbed into Arabic). :)

Hello from Syria

Dear friends,

This will be more of a “blog” than my usual e-mails. No deep thoughts or political analysis, and not a publication-style essay. Just a little “Hello from Syria” message after three weeks of being here and not writing.

What prompted me to write, to connect across the ocean to where most of you are, is that my host father told me this morning that he had just seen a report on Al Jazeera about a 20,000 person protest in the US, something about a military training school. When I realized he was talking about the SOA (School of the Americas) I got excited. “The SOA protest was on Al Jazeera?” I asked incredulously. I can only wonder whether it finally got some decent media in the US this year as well or not. [For those of you who don’t know the SOA: soaw.org]

So… I imagine you might want to hear a bit about Syria. I came here to study Fus’ha (written/classical Arabic) for a month and to live with a Palestinian family that I met when doing Re-Plugged work here last February. My class is in Damascus, but the family lives in the extension of a refugee camp 20km outside of town called Khan Eshieh. It is super quiet and peaceful out here, something that I loved for the first week or two as I took the time to study and read and sleep, but I’m starting to feel a bit stifled by being in such a rural area (even though I go to the city every day).

Damascus is a beautiful city, and is the oldest capital in the world. The market in the old city attracts foreigners and Syrians alike, all of whom are pretty much considered tourists in the market. For the most part, Damascus feels like a very Arab city with less foreign influence than other cities I’ve seen around here (Beirut, Amman). There are still no McDonald’s anywhere to be found, although there is the new KFC phenomenon.

Life is very affordable here. It costs me 30 cents to get into the city from Khan Eshieh. Food is cheap, education and healthcare are subsidized by the government for Syrians and Palestinians (most of the new Iraqi immigrants do not have the same services). While the government has changed a bit over the years, it is still pretty socialist and fully secular. It’s one of the more stable countries in an unstable region, and people generally seem pretty happy.

Which makes the Big Brother feeling a little confusing. There are pictures of the president (Bashar Assad) everywhere – on billboards, houses, stores, cars. I hear from people that there are secret police in more places than we might think. The government collects people’s names and ID numbers when getting on certain buses and going into certain buildings. There is definitely some sort of norm that people are expected to fit into, and then within that is freedom for diversity. Most people seem to happily fit into that norm. Not me. Part of it is just familiarity, I’m sure, but I feel more comfortable in Palestine than here. The major reasons:

1. Palestine. While most people here are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and are quick to criticize Israel, I can’t actually tell anyone that I’ve been there. See, the Syrian government prohibits people who have been to Palestine from coming here. Why? Because it’s all occupied by Israel and they see it as normalizing relations with Israel. So if they see an Israeli stamp on a passport (which could mean you’ve been hanging out on the beach in Tel Aviv or doing solidarity work in the West Bank or anything in between), they will deny you entry. So I have to keep a low profile about where I’ve been and where I’m going from here (my host family knows, of course, as do many of the other Palestinians I meet, but I can’t talk about it openly in Arabic class, for example, or even to taxi drivers – I’ve heard stories that may or may not be true of people getting turned in by taxi drivers and deported).

2. Being Jewish. I don’t understand the situation enough yet to know whether folks would be comfortable with my being Jewish, but my assumption is usually not. In Palestine people are more directly harmed by Jews on a daily basis, but there is also more contact in general, and thus more awareness that not all Jews are Israeli, not all Jews are Zionists, etc. Here I’m not quite sure that’s the case. So I’m worried that if I tell people I’m Jewish it could reflect badly on my host family, or that people might assume that I’m a spy. I could be wrong.

3. Gender. My hair is short. In Palestine, this often causes people to do a double take, or even sometimes to assume at first glance that I’m a man but to change their minds once I give a subtle cough (I do this sometimes when I know that men who are sitting next to me assume that I’m a man, because there is generally far less personal space between men in the Arab world than in the US and far more between men and women). Now, in Syria, I find that people don’t even look twice. I am almost consistently perceived as a man – and usually a Syrian man. Incredibly, I’ve found that even when I speak people often do not change this assumption (if I speak more than a few words, of course, they’ll hear my accent and figure out I’m not Syrian, but will still often think I’m a man). It’s interesting in many ways, but in such a gendered society it can also be awkward, like when the driver of a shared taxi orders me to squeeze in the front with him and another guy in order to let women get into the body of the car. Or when a man giving me directions puts his arm around me to push me in the right direction, something he clearly would not have done if he thought I was a woman. So I have to decide on a pretty constant basis whether to try to keep passing as male or to make my gender clear… I have more empathy right now for my trans friends than I ever have before (though of course it’s not the same and is only temporary for me).

I’ve also been sick for much of my time here, which I’m sure isn’t helping. First a cold, then stomach issues which seem (knock on wood) to finally be getting better.

The best thing as of late was my meeting a friend of a friend, a young woman who is a breath of fresh air in a way that almost makes me too un-self-conscious. She’s Syrian, but has gotten very interested both in Palestine and in Jews, having questioned her society’s assumptions about Jewish people. She’s planning to do Master’s work researching relations among Muslims, Christians and Jews in Andalusia, in pre-48 Palestine, and today in the Middle East, and how these relations have been affected by war. You can see how we might connect? So the other day we got together and I showed her a bunch of pictures of Palestine on my computer, occasionally saying, “Ramallah” and “Gaza” a little too loudly as I excitedly pointed to pictures I had taken. We’d look around nervously, but nobody was paying attention to us. We also talked about synagogues, Reconstructionist Judaism, and anti-Zionist Israelis.

I have another week here, then I will likely go to Lebanon for a few days and then make my way back to Palestine.

And that’s my update from Syria.

For those of you who I know, please send me your news. My being sick these last couple weeks has led to being homesick as well, and it would be great to hear from you.

Till soon,
Hannah

What We Know (aka why we must confront Zionism and boycott Israel)

What We Know
(aka Why we must confront Zionism and boycott Israel)
by Hannah Mermelstein

November 7, 2008

Story #1:

A protest tent in the middle of a neighborhood. Thirteen Palestinian families wait for Israeli authorities to demolish their homes in the coming days; dozens more live under constant threat of home demolition, though there is no telling if and when it might happen. After the demolition, the Israeli government will send these Palestinian families the bill for the demolition and the cleanup. Why is this happening? Officially their homes are “illegal.” Officially, each of the families has requested and been denied permits to build on their own land over the past several decades.

Story #2:

A 14-year-old Palestinian boy and his friend are arrested for seemingly no reason. They are not charged and are not told why they have been arrested, but are beaten severely for five hours as the police threaten that they will inject the kids with HIV and dump them on the beach to die.

Story #3:

A group of right-wing Jewish Israelis marches through the neighborhood that they are trying to “Judaize,” yelling “Death to Arabs” and throwing stones at Palestinian homes. They set homes on fire, sometimes with the residents still inside, and several homes are burned to the ground. The Palestinians who try to resist are arrested and held; the few Jewish attackers who are arrested are released right away. The police refuse to investigate and they tell the Palestinian residents there is not enough evidence to charge the attackers.


If you have some familiarity with the situation in Palestine, you might be thinking, “Occupying soldiers can be cruel” or “Hebron settlers are crazy/criminal” or, like Jimmy Carter, “There is apartheid in the West Bank.” You would be right, but incomplete. In fact, all three of the stories above took place inside Israel, and the Palestinian victims are all citizens of the Israeli state. The policies we so often attribute to occupation have actually been the cornerstone of Zionist practice since the inception of the movement.

The problem is not a few bad settlers or soldiers, nor is it, at its core, the ongoing military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The problem is Zionism. The problem is the false idea that a country can be democratic while it defines itself not as a state of its citizens but as the state of a particular group of people, regardless of citizenship. Under Israeli law, I, as a Jewish American without Israeli citizenship, have more rights to land in Israel than the Palestinian people who are from there, including both the Palestinian refugees around the world AND the Palestinian citizens of Israel.

We know these things. In the past several years Israeli leaders have talked more and more openly about the “demographic threat” of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. They talk about population transfer, about Judaization of the Galilee and the Negev, about the need for a Palestinian state so as to once and for all get rid of the “problem” of Palestinian people (the current Palestinian citizens of Israel would theoretically, in a two state solution, either move to the Palestinian state or give up all national rights within their own homeland).

We know these things. We know it is not just about occupation. We know that there is a contradiction between supporting secular democracy in the US and supporting an exclusivist Jewish state in the Middle East. And yet many of us still refuse to publicly acknowledge that Zionism is a form of racism, a form of colonialism. Many refuse to apply the term “apartheid” to Israel unless speaking only of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Many either think that working against military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is enough, or that it will necessarily lead to a broader analysis of the issues at large.

But it is not enough, and it will not automatically lead towards anything beyond itself. We must work to end the occupation, yes, but this must be within, and not before, a context of support for overall justice, equality, and self-determination for indigenous people.

To paraphrase a friend of mine, Zionism is able to survive primarily through the promotion of its ideological narrative, so this is where we must attack it, particularly in the Western world. Our task is to expose the contradictions within Zionist ideology, particularly liberal Zionist ideology, and to make it clear that Israel must choose between being a Jewish state and being a democratic state.

Our task is to support the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. [You can read the call, reasons, and demands at bds-palestine.net.] To those of you who say BDS against Israel will never work, remember that people said the same about South Africa. But things change, things always change, for better and for worse. We live in a dynamic world. Zionism will not end tomorrow, nor will any US political leaders make any significant strides towards anything resembling justice without a change in US mentality from the bottom up. This is a long-term and grassroots struggle, and it starts with our own moral consistency. It starts with open opposition to ethnic exclusivity. It does not require great political sophistication or memorization of every important date in the history of colonialism and nationalism in the Middle East. It starts simply with what we already know.

------------------------------------------------

There have been many BDS successes already, from the UK to South Africa to Canada and even to the US. Congratulations to the Somerville Divestment Project and others who worked on the ballot initiative in Massachusetts that received overwhelming support in Somerville (62%) and Cambridge (73%) on Tuesday. While the question was not specifically about boycott, it was about one of the major demands of the BDS call: equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel. The text of Question 4 follows: "Shall the State Representative from this district be instructed to vote in favor of a non-binding resolution calling on the federal government to support the right of all people, including non-Jewish Palestinian citizens of Israel, to live free from laws that give more rights to people of one religion than another."

another boycott call - and some context

Dear friends,

I recently sent you a letter that the No Time To Celebrate Campaign wrote to Paul McCartney, asking him not perform in Israel. This week, No Time To Celebrate has issued another letter to several Hollywood stars who plan to attend a $1,000-per-person event in LA on Sept 18 to celebrate Israel's 60th anniversary. You can find the letter at www.notimetocelebrate.org.

After the McCartney letter, some of you wrote to me, confused for a few different reasons about our call for boycott, and I realize now that I should have given it context. So, here it is:

On July 9, 2005, on the 1st anniversary of the international court decision against the wall that Israel is building on Palestinian land, hundreds of Palestinian civil society organizations issued a call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. The reasoning: When our governments do not enforce international law, we as citizens have the responsibility to do so. Boycott is a nonviolent tool that can be used by individuals and groups to hold institutions and governments accountable for their actions. The Palestinian call was rooted partially in the successes of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and around the world.

For the past three years since the call, hundreds of campaigns have sprouted up throughout the world, from academic and cultural boycott to consumer boycott to campus and city divestment resolutions. Some have been "successful"; others have not. Part of the thinking is that pointing out Israel's nature as an apartheid state, bringing that into the public realm for debate, is useful whether or not resolutions immediately pass. Ultimately, success comes not from the monetary damage of boycott but from its political damage. And so, here we are, trying to support local campaigns and lending our voice and support to the international campaigns.

I'll include part of the BDS call below. You can see that the demands are very clear and have to do with treatment of three different groups of Palestinian people. A lot of campaigns have been incorporating these demands into their own work, whether or not the campaigns are specifically about boycott. For the full BDS call, see www.bdsmovement.net (also has definitions and explanations of the different elements of the campaign, FAQs, etc.).

Here's the closing part of the call:

"...We, representatives of Palestinian civil society, call upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era. We appeal to you to pressure your respective states to impose embargoes and sanctions against Israel. We also invite conscientious Israelis to support this Call, for the sake of justice and genuine peace.

These non-violent punitive measures should be maintained until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people's inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law by:

1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall;
2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194."

I hope this is clarifying to folks, and perhaps even inspiring - Go out there, join campaigns, start your own campaigns, and be in touch if you want advice on any of this (or if you want to get involved in the next incarnation of No Time To Celebrate, which will be focusing on BDS).

-Hannah

Open Letter to Paul McCartney: Do Not Perform in Israel

The No Time To Celebrate Campaign (www.notimetocelebrate.org) has joined the Palestinian campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and other allies in issuing an open letter to Paul McCartney asking that he cancel a scheduled concert in Israel in late September. More information is available from PACBI in Palestine (www.pacbi.org) and the BIG Campaign (Boycott Israeli Goods) in the UK (www.bigcampaign.org).

Sir Paul McCartney,

We write to you with sadness and urgency as we hear that you are preparing to perform in Israel at the end of this month, and we ask that you cancel this performance. As Jewish North Americans, we are outraged at the policies the state of Israel has implemented in our names and with our government's financial support for more than sixty years. Palestinian people in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem live under occupation and siege; Palestinian citizens of Israel have fewer rights than Jewish citizens of Israel; and Palestinian refugees, who make up two thirds of the Palestinian population, have been denied their internationally recognized right to return to their lands and their homes since 1948.

At the same time, we write to you with hope that you will heed the unified Palestinian civil society call for boycott against Israel until it complies with international law. Boycott is a nonviolent tool that has been used by ordinary people countless times to hold countries responsible for atrocities when our governments fail to do so. In South Africa, the boycott movement helped bring about an end to the apartheid system. The boycott is both collective and individual. In this case, we call on you as an individual to take a stand against Israeli apartheid and cancel your performance.

Whether you perform or not, you are making a statement. If you perform this month, at a time when Israel is celebrating sixty years of existence, you indicate that you support the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people (now millions) and the ongoing policies of ethnic cleansing of an indigenous population from their land. If you cancel your performance, you indicate that you will not, in the name of profit, turn a blind eye to both the suffering and the call to action of millions of Palestinian people.

With stature comes responsibility, and we hope you do not take yours lightly.

Sincerely,

The No Time To Celebrate Campaign
a campaign organized and implemented by thousands of Jewish people in the US and Canada this past spring to protest Israeli Independence Day activities and to commemorate the Nakba (1948 displacement of Palestinian people)
www.notimetocelebrate.org

zine, gaza, refuseniks, return

Hello everyone!

I don't usually send out digest kinds of e-mails, but there are just too many exciting things to report.

1. Palestinian girls'/women's zine now online + lots more paper copies I want to mail to YOU!
2. Gaza siege broken by international activists
3. A new group of young Israeli refuseniks sentenced to prison
4. Zochrot, one of my favorite Israeli organizations, held a conference on the implementation of return (for Palestinian refugees) in June. Read the opening remarks below.
5. A personal request: If anyone has a cell phone from Palestine/Israel that you're willing to lend for the last 2 weeks of October, please e-mail me.


1. Zine now online + lots more paper copies I want to mail to YOU!

So, after many requests from people, I decided to take some photos of the zine, create a PDF and put it on my blog. However, it doesn't look nearly as good online as it does on paper - so you should get yourself a paper copy (or 10) too! Remember, send $3-5 for each copy (closer to $5 is best because of shipping costs). Or if you're going to use it for educational purposes, share it with other friends, organizations, etc. (or if you don't have money), I'll send it to you for free. Send me your address and tell me how many you want!

Also, there was some confusion about whether Shireen's article that I sent in my last e-mail was part of the zine. It is not, but Shireen has a couple other pieces in the zine and is one of the editors (and also lives and studies in the US and is available for radio interviews and more if you want...).


2. Gaza siege broken by international activists

I'm so glad I can say that many of you (most of you?) have probably already heard about this, because for once, most mainstream US sources actually covered this remarkable story. 46 activists from all over the world came together to do what all our governments refuse to pressure Israel to do: break/end the siege of Gaza! They arrived by boat on Saturday. While two small boats cannot come close to bringing to the Palestinians of Gaza their basic human needs that they have been deprived of for so long, the goal of raising awareness in the international community and bringing some sense of solidarity and hope to people in Gaza seems to have been reached. We must not let this be the end! The Free Gaza folks intend to continue taking boats in and out, but there is more. I don't ever want to read another story about women, men, and children dying in their homes or on the borders of Gaza because of lack of adequate health care and medicine. I don't ever want to read another story about people in Gaza calling radio stations instead of ambulances when they needed to get to a hospital, because there was a better chance that someone listening to the radio had fuel in his car than that an ambulance would. This is such a preventable disaster.

For more information on the Gaza boats and what the activists are doing now (and for photos!) see freegaza.org. You can also google "Gaza boats" and find lots of great photos and news coverage.


3. A new group of young Israeli refuseniks sentenced to prison

Many North Americans think that because Israel has conscription, Israeli citizens have no choice about whether to join the army or implement occupation and colonization policies. While it is still true that the easier path (socially) is to join the army, more than half of Israeli citizens do not finish their army service. A very small minority of those are people who declare publicly that they are opposed to Israel's policies (most people get out for other reasons). This year, a new group of high school seniors ("Shministim") issued a letter to the Israeli Prime Minister and Minister of Defense (among others), stating their refusal to serve. The letter begins, "We the undersigned, Israeli girls and boys, believing in the values of democracy, humanism and pluralism, hereby declare that we shall refuse to take part in the occupation and repression policy adopted by the Government of Israel."

One of the young Israeli women who has been sentenced recently is someone who I have worked with in the past. Sahar has been participating in Palestinian-led nonviolent resistance since age 12, and has been on the Israeli activist panel portion of our Birthright Unplugged and other delegations for the past few years. The story about her is at http://www.newprofile.org/showdata.asp?pid=1240. You can get more general information at newprofile.org.


4. Zochrot, an Israeli organization, held a conference on the implementation of return (for Palestinian refugees) in June.

One reason I've been optimistic since this summer is that I see more vision coming out of Palestine than I have for a while. A big part of this for me is the fact that among certain sectors of Palestinian and Israeli society, the discussion is shifting from talk of the right of return to talk of the implementation of return. In other words: Of course Palestinian refugees have the right to return to their/our homes, so let's talk about how that's going to happen and what our communities will look like when it does.

Below are the introductory remarks from the Zochrot conference, delivered by the director Eitan Bronstein. I am moved by the work of Zochrot, I was moved by the couple hours I spent at the conference, and I am moved by Eitan's words. I hope you are too.

Zochrot conference on right of return
http://www.zochrot.org:80/index.php?id-669
Introductory remarks
Eitan Bronstein
22-6-2008

I am moved and happy to open this conference: "Towards Return of Palestinian Refugees: Practices, Strategies and Visions." This title
promises a great deal, and if I may be permitted to do so right at the beginning, I'd like to be slightly more modest. I hope that today we
may begin a discussion of the actual return of the Palestinian refugees. It's a little like beginning to learn to walk, like a baby who begins talking without really having a command of language, so she tries, and fails, and stumbles. We're here today to begin to stumble over our words, in order to create a language that will allow civil discourse about the return of the Palestinian refugees. Perhaps, in fact, not only in one language, perhaps in many languages, speaking Arabic, English, Hebrew, Russian, Yiddish…about the Palestinian refugees who will one day return to Palestine. This will be a new language, and it's difficult to say much about it today. Because we don't know much about what that future will look like, and also because we don't really have the words to speak it. The title of one of Oz Shelach's writings can serve as an example: "Grandpa, how do you say 'decolonization' in Hebrew?"

The well-known Viennese Jew – Theodore Herzl – is one source of inspiration for our attempt to speak in an entirely different language
and about an entirely different place. In 1896 he published his book, The Jewish State, in which he proposed establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. That, incidentally, was after he asks: Argentina or Palestina? He set down his vision in a storm of emotions, before he even had visited the "homeland of the Jews," as he called it, for the first time. His book details a vision of what life will be like here,
and how the Jews will implement this project. All this - 64 years before it was implemented in the 1948 Nakba. His essay discusses
issues that are very relevant to us today: the constitution of the future state, labor laws that will apply there (he proposes a seven-hour work day), immigration regulations, where and how will people settle? Language (he proposes that each person speaks their own
mother tongue, as in multilingual Switzerland), separation of religion and the state, the flag, and more.

I suppose that today we won't design a flag for the post-colonial future – maybe we'd rather do without flags? But we will dare to
envision, to suggest possibilities, to argue about alternatives…?

Today's discussion can be viewed as the third leg of a tripod. The other two, I think, are more familiar – accepting the fact of the
Nakba, and accepting the right of return. Otherwise, any discussion of the decolonization of Israel is doomed to fail right from the
beginning, and we will remain in the same violent arena in which we now find ourselves – the current reality of our lives.

Knowing the Nakba, and taking responsibility for its consequences, is necessary if we are ever to understand where we ourselves stand, where we live. Here are two good examples: A few weeks ago Zochrot received an email from a concerned mother. Her adolescent daughter came home from school and told her that the teacher taught them that before the Jews arrived the country was empty. The mother began to tell her daughter about the Palestinians who had lived here, and been expelled. Her daughter got angry and replied: If I have to choose between your story, and the teacher's, I prefer to believe the teacher.

How is it possible to speak about the return of Palestinian refugees before we understand that we expelled them, that we prevented them from returning?

Three days ago Zochrot's web site received an email from Micha, who fought in 1948: "I'd like to correct an error in the above quotation,
from your web site. I was one of the soldiers in Battalion 52, which captured 'Aker. The village fell without a fight, after we fired only
a few shots. The inhabitants were brought to the village square and asked to hand over their weapons. They were given 24 hours to do so, and in the interim we left. When we returned at the time we had set to collect the weapons, the village was empty. The villagers left
voluntarily. No one was expelled. I'm proud to have been a soldier in the Giv'ati Brigade in 1948, the only one of the brigades in the War of Independence in whose sector not a single Arab remained, without having expelled people from their homes."

First he tells us that shots were fired and they ordered the Palestinians to turn over their weapons, and then he claims they left voluntarily.

And then he continues, and asks us: "The offices of Zochrot are located in the Zionist settlement of Tel Aviv, on the lands of Jaffa,
Sumeil, Jamassin and Sheikh Munis. Is that kosher?" It's not kosher, I answered, and invited him to come here today and
think about what could be done about it.

If Micha meets that teacher, perhaps he could teach her a thing or two about the Nakba and the ethnic cleansing that occurred in Palestine in 1948. Unless we know about it, how can we accept responsibility for it?

Whoever had to be reminded of how important it is to acknowledge the Nakba, was reminded by Tzipi Livni, Israel's Foreign Minister, who stated that peace will come only after the Palestinians remove the term "Nakba" from their vocabulary. From her point of view, she's absolutely correct. Acknowledging the Nakba, and preserving its memory, contradicts the Jewish state as it has existed so far.

The second leg on which the beginning of our discussion stands is the right of return, that is, the opportunity of each refugee, male and
female, to choose whether to return or receive compensation and be resettled elsewhere. The right of return also includes returning
property. When we know something about the Nakba, and understand the tremendous crime committed against inhabitants of the country, we also understand that the right of return is the "natural" moral and political response to it. It is also the basis for the discussion in this conference. International law, and in particular UN Resolution 194, adopted in December, 1948, calls for the return of the refugees to their homes in the near future. Israel was accepted as a member of the United Nations in May, 1949, only after it promised to fulfill this resolution, and the time has come to accept and act to implement it. In recent years there have been many important conferences in Israel and abroad devoted to this topic – the right of return. The most recent was held last weekend in Haifa,
and its scope was extremely impressive.

Now we come to the subject of today's conference, which is the third leg, and the title of our deliberations: the return of the Palestinian
refugees. Whenever we talk about the Nakba and the return of Palestinian refugees, we're asked, "Ok, so what do you propose? What
can we do now? Go back to the countries we came from? Swim away in the ocean?" All the fears of Israel Jews float to the surface. That, exactly, is what this conference is about. In fact, for the past two years and more we've been trying to develop answers to this question, the question of implementing the return of the refugees. We established a study group on the subject, and this conference is one of its products. The idea is to try to think about what might occur in the future when the refugees actually return. When we began to think this way we discovered, somewhat to our surprise, that almost no research, or developed ideas, exists on this issue. There's a great deal about the right of return and about the Nakba, as well as comparative research on refugee issues elsewhere in the world. But there are almost no serious attempts to propose how the return could actually come about, and what its implications would be for our lives here. It is important, in this connection, to mention what may be the only existing text, The Feasibility of the Right of Return, by Salman abu Sitte, which shows that most of the area of the Palestinian villages is still vacant today.

We want our discussion to peel away the layers of myth that have accumulated over the years. Here's a realistic example, from a
selction by Anton Shamas that appears in the third issue of Sedek. Shamas writes how it's impossible for A' to return to Palestine.
"Rahat Filistin, that is, going to Palestine. True, the territory didn't disappear in 1948. But their territory faded away – its name was changed, it was pulled out from under them, and so – it went. So there was no home to come back to. But A' wanted to go home to
Filistin." He goes on to cite the Lebanese author who once wrote, "It's impossible to return to Palestine; you must just go there. And if
that's also impossible a person must, perhaps, create a Palestine of his own." We simply want to begin going there, because if it's
really "impossible to return to Palestine" as it was, we should createsomething new that deals with what occurred here in 1948.

Discussion will begin with ideas about the actual return, and criticismof them. The second session will present projects prepared primarily by planning professionals. The third will deal with the situation after the return of the Palestinian refugees, and the final session will address what can be done now to bring about their return. Today's meetings will conclude with performances of song, some of them quite startling.

Before we begin, I would like to thank our speakers, who rose to a challenge that was by no means simple, given the topic. It should be
mentioned that, for a variety of reasons, it wasn't easy to find appropriate speakers.

Nor was it a simple matter to find a place to hold the conference. This setting, the home of the Zionist Organization of America, should
be seen not only as a cute joke, but precisely as an appropriate setting to begin a discussion of the decolonization of Palestine. Here, in the middle of the Hebrew city that is busy cleaning itself up for its centennial celebrations, 114 years after the appearance of Herzl's The Jewish State, and sixty years after his vision was realized, the time has come to think about a completely different reality. This is a necessary political act in the present circumstances, and we'll hear more about this during the day.

I would like to thank the coordinator of this conference, Rona Even, who landed in Zochrot in order to organize it – actually, it landed on
her – and who worked day and night under difficult circumstances to guarantee its success. Nor can I ignore the contribution of two partner organizations that are very important to us: the Committee of the Uprooted, and Badil. The Committee for the Defense of the Rights of the Uprooted in Israel, whose representatives will address us today, has been a partner since the beginning of our work, and we are particularly pleased that Wakim Wakim is here with us. Badil, from Bethlehem, has encouraged us since we started. Unfortunately, Mohammad Jaradat did not receive permission from the authorities who are finalizing the occupation of Palestine since 1967, to be with us here. A few months ago, when we began discussing the conference with them in Bethlehem, he said that the very fact that it is being held already represents a success. Today I understand just how right he was.

The Iris O'Brian Fund provides financial support for the conference, and we are grateful to it.

Yesterday an exhibit opened in Zochrot's offices, curated by Ariella Azoulay, on the architecture of destruction, fear and subordination –
in other words, on the destruction of buildings and other forms of repression in the territories that were occupied in 1967.

The third issue of Sedek, published by Zochrot, has just appeared in conjunction with the conference, in cooperation with Parhessiya and Pardes Publishers, and most of it also deals with the return of the refugees. Some of the texts it contains will be improved during the conference discussions.

In addition, Erased from Space and Consciousness, by Noga Kadman, a member of Zochrot, has just been published by November Books Ltd. It deals with the repression of the memory and the physical presence of the Palestinian villages that were captured and mostly destroyed in the Nakba. It is an exact, detailed study, and required reading for anyone who wants to understand the country in which they live.

The conference continues tomorrow, and your program provides details for everyone who wishes to participate in the planned activities.

I'm happy to invite our associate, Nada Matta, who will chair the panel, to open the discussion.

*****End of text*****


5. A personal request: If anyone has a cell phone from Palestine/Israel that you're willing to lend for the last 2 weeks of October, please e-mail me. :)


Thanks for reading, friends!

Love
Hannah