Foaming At The Mouth

Via Detroit

2009-03-20T15:19:00.000-07:00

Feeling restless in Montreal, watching the housing crisis in the US unfold through the three-by-four-inch screens of handycam YouTube videos, sitting in my kitchen, I was looking for a place to go during reading week, my roommate said,“There’s got to be a tent city somewhere in striking distance.” Tennessee was my best bet; everything I read on the web suggested that Nashville had a strong homeless outreach network, and the tent community was fighting the city’s plan to demolish the encampment.

I was on a tight budget, I wanted to avoid the Greyhound as much as possible, and I lucked out when I found this post by a woman named Jean in the online classifieds for rideshares leaving from Detroit: “We are headed for New Orleans for Mardi Gras week and there is more room in the motorhome. The cost will be low for your travels. We have food to prepare. Using biodiesel; for most of the trip. Looking for more biodiesel too.” Damn cool, I thought.

The day before I left for Michigan, Chrysler and General Motors demanded that a further $14 billon be injected into their bailout package.

On the bus from Toronto to Detroit, there was a guy sitting across the isle from me with long, blue-dyed hair and a can of Pringles poking out from his knapsack. I must have watched him solve his Rubix cube at least seven times.

We stopped briefly in Windsor. The local GM plant would soon be closing, meaning that 1,400 Windsorians would be out of a job. I stepped into a corner store across the street for some matches.

“Ten cents,” said the guy behind the counter. “We’ve gotta charge for ‘em these days.” I was soonafter told not to smoke of the platform of the bus station.

At the American border five minutes away, the bus offloaded and we all stood with flawlessly rigid postures as we waited in line to have our bags x-rayed and be asked if we had ever been in trouble with the law before. The driver lackadaisically kicked sludge off the tireflaps until a man in sunglasses and a CBP cap hopped out of it and cried, “Bus is good!” We were readmitted to the vehicle and Bluehair turned his attention back to the Rubix cube as the bus passed under the giant banner that read “Welcome To Michigan. Great Lakes. Great Times.”

Detroit is a good reason to worry about recessions. As I walked past the empty lots, dilapidated Victorian-era houses and closed pawnbrokers on my way to Jean’s I thought about the prospect of seeing more Detroits in the near future.

I arrived in front of Jean’s house to see her throwing junk out of the motorhome into a plastic bin on the sidewalk. Her yard was full of intriguing artifacts: manikins, plastic horses, oil drums, a grandfather clock. She was wearing a block toque and a mechanic’s jumpsuit with a patch that had the word “Fuck” in Ford-logo cursive. Vintage accoutrements and doodads populated the shelves of her kitchen and living room: bean cans from the fifties, hats, wigs, featherscarves. The vehicle’s dashboard was sitting in her bathtub, its edges covered with pinecones and clots of old grime, and she asked me to clean it, which I did. And she introduced me to a couple of the students who live in the house – each pay about $150 a month in rent. I spent a lot of time smoking cigarettes in the kitchen, listening to NPR, occasionally asking for other ways that I could be of use. “Right now I’m just trying to find my brain and stuff,” she said.

Jean told me that she had been working on the engine all week and persistently mentioned her excitement at how well it was running. The motorhome, nicknamed Janice, was a Westphalia 1985 James Cook Mercedes. When she bought it about three years ago, the dealer told her that it was the only one of its kind in the country. “I knew I’d have a hard time finding spare parts, and there aren’t any mechanics who know how to work it,” she said, “but I’m in love with it, so –” she shrugged.

I asked her if she knew of any homeless encampments around the city, and she said that there had been one in the neighbourhood up until a couple of years ago when it was demolished by the city.

“A lot of squatting goes on in Detroit. There were about three hundred people living in one of the buildings down there until they had the Super Bowl at Ford Field a couple years ago, and they evicted everyone,” she said.

She had done a lot of volunteering in New Orleans since Katrina, she said, but these days she does most of her humanitarian work in Detroit. Her plan is to start a small non-profit organisation by running a soup kitchen on wheels. This time Louisiana would mainly be a pleasure trip, but she would stick around to “see what needs to be done.”

Gradually we stocked the van up with about 150 gallons of vegetable oil, a cooler, and our knapsacks. A friend of Jean’s named Lindsay was also headed down to New Orleans, and she was bringing a bundle of hoola hoops which she had made out of PVC, and planned to sell once she got down there. She was in her mid-twenties, had recently finished her undergraduate degree and had only about twenty dollars to her name. The plan was that we’d be picking up another six people in Toledo. This vehicle was only 22 feet long, and 10.5 tall, but apparently the van had taken nine people before, with three of them lying on the bunk. First we had to drive downtown so I could get some cash out of the bank.

The jugs of oil and other unsecured detritus slid around in the back of the motorhome and the door to the would-be shower kept swinging open as we drove towards the cluster of skyscrapers at the center of town. The van lugged along making a cartoonishly awful putter. When we stopped in the parking lot, the engine had overheated and Jean couldn’t even turn the thing back on. “Shit,” she said. She sat with her head leaning despondently against the steering wheel for a few minutes while considering What To Do Next.

“I could bring the Beast over here and try to give her a jump,” said Lindsay.

“No, the Beast has a shitty battery,” she said. “And I don’t think that’s the problem.”

Eventually the decision was made to call AAA. It was cold as hell and I turned one of the elements of the gas stove on and we huddled around in the kitchen.

“Let’s pack a bowl. Do you know where the herb is?” said Lindsay.

It was a pretty raucous forty-five minutes. I imagined clouds of pot smoke wafting conspicuously out of the car when AAA arrived.

The only problem was that a maximum of two people can ride in a towtruck. It was far too cold for any of us to walk, so I jumped into the bunk and hid there while the vehicle was towed back to Jean’s.

In the morning I spent more time waiting for Jean and Lindsay to get their bags together. I scrounged around for food and smoked more cigarettes. The radio reported that Alan Greenspan supported the nationalization of insolvent banks. I drank half a can of PBR that somebody had left on the counter. Lindsay delved into a bag of potatoes that had been thrown away by a local grocer – subsequently picked up by Jean – and fried them with slices of tofurkey.

It looked like Jean could borrow the car of one of her friends – a Ford, much to her chagrin – and we got on the road by about four in the afternoon. We talked about urban degeneration and conspiracy theories the whole way down through the relentlessly industrial landscape of Michigan and Ohio. "Living in Detroit is a little bit like living on a reservation," she said. “The population here has been declining for the past fifty years strait.”

I said that the story of Detroit seems to share a lot of characteristics with many of the post-industrial cities of the former Soviet Union, which led the conversation in an interesting direction. She told me that her uncle had held some administrative position in the UAW, and that he moved to the USSR in the early thirties when Stalin contracted Ford to build a plant in Nizhny Novogorod. He wound up being trapped in a work camp until the seventies when a friend of his managed to pressure a Michigan Senator into pulling some diplomatic strings and got him home.

The sun had started setting and the criss-cross of jetstreams were turning into neon beams. “Do you believe in chemtrails?” she asked. Then she told me about chemtrails.

A three-storey illuminated billboard that said “LIQUOR” marked our arrival in Kentucky. Jean wanted to switch with Lindsay and take a nap, so we pulled into a gas station. I went into a Waffle House next door.

“What can I get ya bozz?” The first thing you notice when you arrive in the South is the shortage of teeth in people’s mouths. I asked for a burger and Coke. He went off to put the patty on the grill and a diminutive blonde woman rung it up. 20.06 – 4.06, she punched into a calculator on the counter.

More worrisome than the tremendous amount of grass that we were all smoking in the car was the fact that Lindsay had never driven a stick before. As we were pulling away from the gas station she stalled the car eleven times and as we approached the highway Jean had to shift the gears up for her. Lindsay would scream, “Okay shift me up to fourth. Ready? Clutch!”

I dug into a plastic bag full of cassettes that Jean had brought from the house. We put on Purple Rain. It sounded like shit.

“I think I wore that tape out the last time I drove up from New Orleans. I must have listened to it seven times,” said Lindsay as she popped it out of the tape deck and handed it back to me.

It was shitty to say goodbye to the two of them in Nashville, but I was also on the cusp of exploring another exciting, tragic American narrative.

Waiting For The New World To Begin: Reflections on Obama

2009-01-23T16:51:00.000-08:00

Things turned out for the better on November 4.

Or did they...

Nearly a year ago I was in the midst of a debate about American politics with my mother and I told her that I was willing to bet that whoever won the Presidency in 2008 would lose it in 2012. While it may have been premature for such ambitious soothsaying, the reasons that I gave were and economy and Iraq. Solving the mammoth problems of both will be the defining traits of Obama’s tenure and I seriously doubt that either of them will look as good four years from now as they did the day that George W. Bush was inaugurated.

I could not have possibly asked for a better farewell to the old regime than seeing Cheney being wheeled around like a James Bond villain; all he needed was a puffy white cat on his lap and the outfit would have been complete. And watching Bush clap sheepishly to a speech that had incisively, if obliquely, torn him to shreds also had a satisfying aspect of justice to it.

III

The President’s job above all else is to embody the American understanding of Sanity. Tuesday was significant not because the political and economic makeup of the United States will be radically changed over the course of the next four years. Change may not come and if it does it may not be for the better; and if it is for the better, it may not come from the top down. Obama’s inauguration is significant rather because it means that change already has occurred in America; that change may not yet be tangible, but the zeitgeist’s definition of reason is different from what it was four years ago. Torture and climate change, both of which Obama addressed in his speech, had posed tremendous challenges to America’s historic self-conception, and the ex-President’s stance on both of them was not only politically imprudent – it was insane.

Bush came about due in part to electioneering, but also to the gin-swigging devil-may-care jocularity of his age. He represented the culmination of an era of self-congratulatory, ultra-conservative indulgence in America. Like the 1950s, the 1990s saw a phenomenal regression into hair-parting and shirt-tucking. Whereas American pop stars ever since Elvis had achieved the status of sex symbols by means of self-destruction, suddenly the age of the angelic boyband was at hand. The Cold War was over and the victors had nothing on their consciences, and Bush embodied the immaculate inheritance of prosperity that so defined America’s fin de siécle. As though to drive home the triumph of the arrogance and apathy that had inspired the decade, none but the cockiest, whitest and most over-privileged frat boy would do. In George Bush America finally paid the price for winning.

And that price has been dear: roughly 80 per cent of the country’s annual GDP is owed by the federal government – and that’s just the monetary side of the equation. This was a government that sold itself off to the private sector like a suicidal vendor in the underground organ trade. Washington has been radically outsourced, and only now will a clearer picture emerge of what remains of the national government.

“What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long, no longer apply,” Obama said in his address on Tuesday. I apparently am one of those cynics. The problem with saying so, though, is that pessimism is rightfully vulnerable to the accusation of being a way of setting one’s self above the crowd. And especially now. Do I believe that Obama has stronger “moral fibre” than any other President in history? Yes. But he is not a clean slate.

VII

I was extremely disconcerted last June by his decision to reject public campaign financing. And having demolished every fundraising record in American electoral history, I still worry that some of these time-honoured quid pro quos will work their way into his administration. But that being said, I’m tremendously impressed that Obama has been so quick to impose a more stringent set of regulations on K Street lobbyists, which includes a gift ban that aims to "[aggressively reduce] the influence of special interests." Lobbies have plagued Washington for decades if not centuries, but no administration in history has gone quite so whole-hog on the idea of institutionalized corruption as the last one, and my sincere hope is that the clout of private interests, and especially AIPAC, will be dramatically attenuated under the current President.

VIII

And beyond all the messianic insanity surrounding Obama, and the fact that his victory has been hailed as a historic moment for African Americans, I am less confident that he will manage to address the deep-seated problems of race and class in America. A recession may be an ideal time to reconstruct social security, but I have no doubt that hard times will hit blacks harder. According to data released in 2006, white households earn about 66 per cent more than blacks’, and 40 per cent more than Hispanics’. These numbers are what I most want to see changed in the US and they are reason for my instinct to roll my eyes whenever I hear Obama’s election extolled as a “watershed moment in American race relations”. Much work has to be done.

The Numbers Game: Qualifying Victimhood

2009-01-23T16:27:00.000-08:00

Oh, the internet

[This post is written mainly in response to some of the tripe that's been getting into the McGill Daily lately, partly in response to my piece Hamas Must Be Talked To. This one and this one I found especially aggravating.]

Much of the PR war manifests itself as an overt competition for the status of the victim. The dialogue tends to regress into a futile chicken-egg argument which can go on for hours: how many Palestinians were killed there and then and did that not justify this particular attack? How many Israeli children can be wounded until the IDF can justify shooting dead a stone-throwing child? If you are a human shield, do you still have human rights? The logic of these arguments I find both cynical and perverse, and I do my best to abstain.

The conversation inevitably leads back to 1948: was Israel’s fight for its existence justified, or did it amount to an act of ethnic cleansing? Some believe both to be true. At this point Zionism plays its trump card and brings up the Nazi Holocaust. How could any people possibly suffer more than we have, says Zionism, as though the mere historical fact of Jewish suffering and marginalization absolves us of our basic moral obligations.

Unlike many Jews, I refuse to believe that I have somehow genetically inherited the trauma of the Holocaust. I come from a relatively privileged middle-class background; I have no complaints about what history has allotted me. I am satisfied with the degree of restitution and reconciliation that has taken place in the wake of the Holocaust, and I certainly don’t believe that that restitution should come at the expense of another people.

What I am saying is not simply that the Holocaust needs to be excluded from our discourse on Israel-Palestine, but that there are dozens of stories from each camp that could tug at your heartstrings.

I would rather talk about facts: no more than 27 Israeli civilians, including seven settlers at Gush Katif, have been killed by Gazan mortar and rocket fire since the beginning of the second intifada in 2000. Whereas in Gaza in the past month alone over 400 children were killed. Not only are Palestinians a stateless people, but their resources – especially in the West Bank – have been systematically expropriated by the Israeli state and their economy consequently has been crushed to a fraction of what it could be. Forty per cent of Palestinian men have been imprisoned and 80 per cent of those, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, were tortured or physically abused. The recent hostilities have turned over a ratio of one Israeli death for every hundred dead Gazans. Little wonder a member of the American Enterprise Institute, in defense of Israel's attacks on Gaza, said that it is "pointless to play the numbers game."

People of the Israel camp rag on about the situation in Sderot ad nauseum, but nobody is actually making the argument that Palestinians are suffering less than Israelis; what is implicit in their argument – especially when they point, for instance, to the democratic election of Hamas – is that they deserve it.

It is precisely this façade of Israel’s eternal victimhood and moral infallibility that so sickened me when I read Golda Meir’s quote: “We can forgive you for killing our children, but we can never forgive you for making us kill your children. We will only have peace when you love your children more than you hate ours.” The implications of a nation that conceives of itself as the victim regardless of who is doing the killing is both dangerous and disturbing. But beyond that, there could not be a more inappropriate time as now to assert that Israel has gone to any such lengths to minimize the violence.

A study of the conflict since September 2000 that was released two weeks ago by European and Israeli academics at Tel Aviv University has concluded that 79 per cent of all “conflict pauses” – a period of one or more days during which no one on either side was killed – were broken by Israel. Eight per cent were broken by Palestinians and in the remaining 13 per cent of cases, Israelis and Palestinians killed each other on the same day.

Amidst all the clamour about Sderot that has plauged the North American blogosphere lies one peculiar fact about the place that has been drastically overlooked only for its unsettling implications: Israel's Housing Ministry has been giving land within five miles of the Gaza Strip away for free. Its Housing Minister Ze'ev Boim is actively encouraging Israelis to settle in the 50 newly-created communities in the vicinity. So a few lower-class Misrachis get impaled by Qassams for an excuse for Israel to stage a massacre in Gaza, stall talks with the PA, and continue building settlements in the West Bank.

Will the Arabs never let us live in peace?

Isratine

2009-01-22T21:27:00.000-08:00

Following his comments to a lecture hall full of students at a teleconference held at Georgetown University today, Muammar Qaddafi has been given Foaming At The Mouth's first-ever Person of the Week Award.

Although we may want to think twice about giving the future one-state a name that sounds like a brand of mouthwash.

The Only Democracy: Israel’s Arabs

2009-01-20T17:42:00.000-08:00

A mosque in one of the unrecognized villages of the Negev desert. Many of the structures in these communities are constructed of corruggated steel due to the frequency of demolition by Israeli authorities.

Yesterday, Israel’s Attorney General Menachem Mazuz stated that the Central Elections Committee had no right to disqualify the United Arab List-Ta’al and Balad from running in the upcoming election.

The two Arab parties were accused last week of “incitement, supporting terrorist groups and refusing to recognize Israel’s right to exist.” Scarcely any evidence substantiating these accusations were presented. The clear tactic of the more right-wing parties controlling the CEC, Labor and Kadima included, was to capitalize on the nationalist fervour drummed up by the offensive in Gaza. They did not even accuse the two parties of being connected to Hamas, yet seemed to feel that the overwhelming anti-Arab sentiment that triumphed during the violence would give them license to override the basic tenets of democracy.

As the CEC meeting broke up, MK David Tal of Kadima and the Arab party representatives almost got into a scrap in the halls of the Knesset, but for a security guard who dutifully stepped in and separated them.

Explaining why I am a pro-one state anti-Zionist often feels like a chore, but in cases such as this I feel like the news does the talking for me. This kind of overt oppression of Israel’s Arab minority may be what it takes for North Americans to understand that the state’s system of apartheid, or “hafrada” – the Hebrew term – extends far beyond the West Bank and Gaza.

Moreso than anything else that I saw while there, the issues being faced by the Bedouin in the unrecognized villages of the Negev underscored the inherent problems of the Jewish state. Roughly half of Israel’s Bedouin population lives in these desert ghettos, most of which hover on the outskirts of Be’er Sheva. They are bereft of drinking water, electricity, adequate roads, schools or medical facilities. According to a 2003 report conducted at Ben-Gurion University, 71% of Negev Bedouin suffer from hunger. As in the West Bank, there are somewhere between two and three hundred house demolitions there per year. In the past their crops have been sprayed with herbicide and their livestock confiscated. Walls topped with barbed wire have been constructed around the suburbs of Be’er Sheva, some of which boast of the highest standards of living in the country. The parallels between these gated communities and the West Bank settlements are uncanny.

Moreover, the residents of the unrecognized villages have had no political representation whatsoever, save an NGO called the Regional Council for the Unrecognized Villages of the Negev, which, with its meagre budget, has tried to provide some of the social services necessary for these communities’ sustenance. Ultimately, the Bedouin of the Negev, though Israeli citizens, are living under occupation too.

But in spite of the scale of this disaster – and in spite of ongoing attempts on part of Israeli civil rights groups like the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and Adalah – discussion of the subjugation of the Negev Bedouin is more taboo a subject in mainstream Israeli journals than the West Bank or Gaza. As though the very existence of Israeli Arabs were a dirty secret, it would seem that these communities would have to take up arms against the state to make their voices heard in national and international arenas. An article that ran in Haaretz last year made a daring if sensationalist prophesy in its title, The Bedouin Intifada: It’s not if, but when.

Yeela Raanan, the spokesperson for RCUV, had been arrested while protesting the demolition of a house in one of the Bedouin communities just a few days before I met with her. I asked about her thoughts on the mainstream Jewish left’s neglect of the issues being faced by Arab Israelis, and her response carried a message heard far too seldom in the North American press, so devoted is it to “the only liberal democracy in the Middle East”: Jewish Israelis tend to ignore the subjugation of their Arab compatriots because of the challenge it poses to the fundamental ethics of Zionism.

Within the borders of pre-1967 Israel, 93% of the land is owned by the state, the vast majority of which was appropriated by the nascent government of David Ben-Gurion after its Arab owners had been pushed into refugee camps in 1948. The state’s ongoing campaign to “Judaize” as much of the land in its possession as possible is manifest in the basic statistics of its distribution. A report released last March by Human Rights Watch states:

“While Arab citizens of Israel comprise roughly 20 percent of the country's population, just 2.5 percent of the land of the state is under the jurisdiction of Arab local governments. In the northern Negev region, Bedouin municipalities have jurisdiction over 1.9 percent of the land, while Bedouin citizens comprise 25.2 percent of the population in that area.”

The litany of civil rights abuses and methods of overt subjugation faced by Israeli Arabs could go on.

Recently, however, the more extravagantly racist elements of the Israeli government are finally being reigned in by the state’s judiciary. A commission appointed to assess the issue of the unrecognized villages submitted a report last month to the government recommending that most of the villages be granted recognition.

The recommendations, which have not yet been adopted by the Knesset, were denounced by many of the region’s upper-class Jewish communities. One resident asserted that recognition of the villages would “undermine the rule of law, encourage thuggish and criminal behavior, and make the Bedouin problem in the Negev worse.”

A week after the report was released, an ecologically friendly mosque in the unrecognized village of Wadi Na’am was demolished by Israeli authorities.

As soon as the state took some of the first substantial steps towards remedying the problems that have plagued its Bedouin communities since its beginning, it counteracts itself with a satisfying bout of recidivism. This is clearly a country in the constant throes of an identity crisis – profoundly in need of counciling and rehab. Weaning the nation off its self-destructive habits is a daunting project, and few have put it more poignantly than Mark Levine when he asked “Who Will Save Israel From Itself?”

The problem Israel continues to face is one of self-definition. After its six decades of existence, there remains no understanding of how the Jewish State should approach gentiles. The fundamental Zionist tenet of Jewish settlement of the land makes civil rights of this sort a zero-sum game for Israeli Arabs, so that the more equal the country, the more racially integrated and diverse it is, the more the state ruefully sees its own identity disintegrating under the currents of democracy.

Self-fulfilling Prophesies

2009-01-13T12:31:00.000-08:00

“Nothing good is gonna come out of this unless they keep fighting all the way with this, until they’ve wiped them all out.”

“They are forcing us to kill their children to defend our children.”

“Don’t mess with the Jews ‘cause we kick butt.”

“This is a repeat of the holocaust. We’re being persecuted again, for the trillionth time ever.”

“There are great prophesies that great wars will precede the coming of the moshiach”

“We should just go in and get them all.”

–Pro-Israel demonstrators in New York, January 11. Quoted on Democracy Now!

Hopefully this war will be looked back upon as a last hurrah of Bush-era Middle-East cowboyism. Americans seem less and less willing to buy Israel’s side of the story these days, and with a new President set to be inaugurated next week, one can only hope that Israel will be reigned in and eventually held accountable to international law.

I never thought I would see the day that a news article in the New York Times would be more condemnatory of Israel than myself. Yet yesterday, they published a story entitled, Israelis United on War as Censure Rises Abroad, which spelled out more or less the same endemic problem of Israeli belligerence that I pointed to in my last post. The article wrote:

“Voices of dissent in this country have been rare. And while tens of thousands have poured into the streets of world capitals demonstrating against the Israeli military operation, antiwar rallies here have struggled to draw 1,000 participants. The Peace Now organization has received many messages from supporters telling it to stay out of the streets on this one. As the editorial page of The Jerusalem Post put it on Monday, the world must be wondering, do Israelis really believe that everybody is wrong and they alone are right? The answer is yes.”

And in a similar vein, I was astonished at how profoundly I agreed with Oxford Professor Avi Shlaim’s column in this week’s Guardian. His analysis of Israel’s historic relationship with Hamas is extremely incisive; and I take issue with him only where he says the following:

“I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line.”

Israel’s raison d’etre rests on the presumption of anti-Semitism. The whole point is that there can be no reconciliation. Which is why I have difficulty seeing the events of 1948 as being extricable from all of Israel’s subsequent history. The perceived permanency of anti-Semitism is a part of the underpinnings of the ethnic state in the same sense that racial superiority is part ofIsrael’s own national mythology.

This is, in part, why the two-state solution remains so elusive after all these years. Why exactly did Jews have the right to consecrate their homeland by pushing three quarters of a million Arabs into refugee camps at gunpoint? Whatever the answer may be, if they could do it then, why was it so wrong for them to do the same thing only nineteen years later? Seeing this essential similarity between the wars of 1948 and 1967 is something I have in common with the vast majority of hardline Zionists.

But for Israel to acknowledge that in 1948 the basic human rights of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were violated would necessarily be the undoing of the state’s national identity, so fundamentally intertwined is it with the justness of their narratives. The Israeli state’s existence is therefore predicated on this notion of the absence of Arab rights.

These past weeks have seen protests around the world getting more and more enflamed with anti-Semitic rhetoric. On Saturday a white-supremacist group called the Aryan Guard showed up at a Gaza-solidarity demonstration in Calgary. Firebombs were thrown at a synangogue just outside of Paris on Sunday night and a London Rabbi this week stated that “people are afraid to walk around town wearing a kippa.”

Yes, anti-Semitism exists and yes, it is despicable. But is Israel not fanning the flames?

Unnerving as it is, perhaps we should not be surprised at this. If racism against Jews worldwide were to simply peter out, would Israel not lose the moral foundation of its existence?

Jewish communities – even families – around the globe are becoming bitterly divided. Do they realize what they are doing to Jewry in the diasopra? Do they care?

What is meant by "postmodern warfare"

2009-01-12T20:09:00.000-08:00

"This is one of the few wars that I think is unanimous - I've never seen the people come together, the right-wing and the left, in this way and agree that this had to be done."
-Rachel Schwartz, mother of two Israeli soldiers

The last time that I remember feeling so disturbed by the news was when Josef Fritzl’s name and face started turning up in the headlines last April. Fritzl had kept his daughter and her children locked in his basement for twenty-four years, where they were kept alive, it would seem, simply so that he could continue tormenting them at his whim.
But that particular occasion was trumped this week as Israel’s convoluted tactics in prolonging the violence in the Gaza Strip became more and more apparent. Barring the unbelievable fact that aid workers with the UN and the Red Cross themselves have been attacked by the IDF, (which forced UNRWA to suspend its operations four days ago and has prompted accusations of war crimes,) there is something significant to be said about the three-hour cease-fires that Israel has given for humanitarian organisations to operate for the past few days. Neve Gordon, a Professor of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University, commented this week on the Israeli media’s framing of this merciful approach Israel has taken with those trapped inside the Strip:

“Explaining to those viewers who might be wondering why Israel allows humanitarian assistance to the other side during times of war, he [the news anchor] declared that if a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe were to explode among the Palestinian civilian population, the international community would pressure Israel to stop the assault. There is something extremely cynical about how Israel explains its use of humanitarian assistance, and yet such unadulterated explanations actually help uncover an important facet of postmodern warfare. Not unlike raising animals for slaughter on a farm, the Israeli government maintains that it is providing Palestinians with assistance so that it can have a free hand in attacking them.”

There is an essential similarity between what went on Joseph Fritzl’s basement and what is happening currently in Gaza; people are held hostage, and are fed by their captors only insofar as it will facilitate further misery.
Last week the CBC pointed out a historical trend indicating that Israel has a habit of escalating its violence against Palestinians in the lead-up to an election. For several months, the ultra-right Likud party has been ahead in the polls, with its leader, former-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at about 35% support in July when Olmert announced that he would be stepping down. But that margin has narrowed significantly. On Friday, an Angus-Reid poll reported that Kadima and Likud are tied at about 23%. So following the hardline political currents of the Israeli public has paid off for Kadima’s candidate and current Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. And naturally I would rather see her win the upcoming election than Netanyahu.
What repulses and disturbs me, inter alia, is the way that she and Ehud Barak – the leader of the Labour Party who was brought into the Kadima coalition by being appointed Minister of Defense – have been competing for a greater claim to the bloodshed in Gaza.
Having ruled out an operation to overthrow Hamas or a serious diminution of Hamas’s firepower – which is outlandishly unrealistic – the recent shift in the polls is the sole tactical reason for the Israeli government to undertake the offensive at all.
But in light of Israel’s recalcitrance on the diplomatic front, we can always count on the zany ingenuity of the state’s military-industrial complex as a source of problem-solving inspiration. In recent weeks a number of ideas have been suggested as to how Israel might foil those pesky smugglers who keep digging tunnels under the 9-mile Gaza-Egypt border to bring fuel, food, and munitions into the Strip. One of them involved an “underground moat” which would waterlog the soil in such a way that any tunnel built near it would collapse. The military had already started auctioning a contract for the project when it was vetoed by the Israel's Attorney General on the grounds that it would pollute Gaza’s aquifers. (And to this man I am genuinely grateful.) Other suggestions involved a subterranean concrete wall that would have to run at least 75 feet deep. The odds that Egypt would take a stand against such a barrier seem slim at the moment.
This is what Israel is talking about when it speaks of “securing the peace”. What such a barrier would do, though, is complete the hermetic seal that Israel has been established around all other sides of the Strip; its people would be fully subject to the vicissitudes of the blockade. In other words, the source of food which has been preventing Gazans from scrounging in dumpsters like so many of their compatriots will have been sealed shut.
Things are getting ridiculous. The death toll is mounting toward 1,000. Meanwhile Israel’s apathy to the situation on its doorstep, and its ignorance – in particular the ignorance of its media – expresses an attitude so deeply colonial and in many ways sadistic that it makes me wonder if Israel, as a historic experiment, has turned out to be an absolute failure.
More than feeling disgusted at Israel’s behaviour, though, what I have been feeling is a shitload of embarrassment on Israel’s behalf. A riot broke out in London about a week after another protest there had ended with hundreds of demonstrators throwing their shoes at the residence of their Prime Minister. Cars were set on fire in Paris, and a benefit concert was held in Malaysia. It is at times like this that I, a person who doesn’t consider himself to be all that Jewish, suddenly find myself clinging to my own Jewish identity as though it were the mast of a sinking ship, if only to look more authentically desperate as I scream out that I am opposed to these things being done in the name of my people.

Why Abbas's Days Are Numbered

2009-01-12T20:08:00.000-08:00

Amidst all the turmoil in Gaza, the press seems to have forgotten that Mahmoud Abbas’s term as Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority ends today, January 9. The Palestinian constitution states that in the absence of an election, the PM must hand his position over to the elected speaker or deputy speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council for a sixty-day interim during which the postponed election must be held.
Both of these men are representatives of the Hamas government that was overthrown by Israel – with American backing – in 2006. The speaker of the PLC, Aziz al-Dewik has been in Israeli prison ever since, and last month was sentenced by Israeli court to an additional three years in prison. The elected deputy speaker, Ahmed Bahar, like most of the senior Hamas brass lucky enough not to have been arrested in the June 2006 coup, remains in Gaza. Abbas, who was elected Prime Minister in January 2005, insists that extenuating circumstances entitle him to another year in office.
What this means is that in January 2010, both the Prime Minister and the legislative council will be elected simultaneously.
It is very likely that Benjamin Netanyahu – who, it has been said, makes Olmert look like a “flaming liberal” – will win the Israeli elections set to be held next month. Mahmoud Abbas will continue to prove himself a lame duck in defending Palestinian rights against a government which will go on requisitioning land and building settlements in the West Bank. So unless some sort of historic reconciliation is made between Fatah and Hamas within the next twelve months, West Bank Palestinians will be very likely to begin fighting a unified and overt campaign to bring down the man that many have started calling a cronie and a collaborator.
Ultimately, Palestinians will demand that their next election be free and fair. Hamas, though surpressed, already has tremendous support in the West Bank, and it will probably continue to garner sympathy due to the situation in Gaza. If they are excluded, there will almost certainly be riots.

-----

For more information on rising anti-Abbas sentiment in the West Bank, I would recommend reading Jesse Rosenfeld's article which was published on Tuesday in Haaretz.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1053215.html
The New York Times also reported this week that for the first time in its history, the PA has started using tear gas on its own people.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/world/middleeast/06westbank.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&sq=gaza%20&st=cse&%2334;&scp=5&%2334;Palestinian%20Authority

Hamas Must Be Talked To

2009-01-12T19:55:00.000-08:00

When Barack Obama won the presidential election, Hamas immediately sent a letter of congratulations the President-elect. Khalid Mishal, the leader of Hamas’s politburo, told the British press that he was willing to hold talks with the new President, and that he hoped that Obama would reciprocate. "Yes we are ready for dialogue with President Obama and with the new American administration with an open mind, on the basis that the American administration respects our rights,” he said. He added that sitting down with Hamas would be the new administration’s only option if it is serious about bringing about a lasting resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian quagmire.
One of very few events that took place while I was living in Ramallah last year that seemed to give Palestinians some hope that a just and diplomatic solution to the conflict may one day come about occurred when former-US president Jimmy Carter flew to Damascus, where he met with Mishal, as well as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. As though concerned he might be infected with the cooties of Islam, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert refused to meet with Carter during his trip to the region – though his official explanation was that he did not want to be perceived as holding indirect negotiations with Hamas.
Carter’s visit came at a time of sporadic fighting and rocket attacks around Gaza between the Israeli Defence Forces and Hamas, and he told the press that he was recommending that Hamas undertake a “unilateral ceasefire”. The day following their meeting Mishal publicly announced that Hamas would be willing to settle for a two-state solution. "We agree to a [Palestinian] state on pre-67 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital with genuine sovereignty without settlements but without recognizing Israel," he was quoted as saying.
I was glad to hear it, for two reasons: if Israel were to withdraw its military to the Green Line, I still wouldn’t recognize the principles of Zionist ethnocratism either. (I say this primarily because of Israel’s mistreatment of its own Arab population and its other non-Jewish minorities.)
But that is another matter.

Appeals for peace
When I went to cover the student elections at Birzeit University for the Palestine Monitor that month, I talked to a member of the Hamas-aligned Wafaa Party. It was one of few opportunities I got to talk with a member of Hamas while I was there, as the group has been forced underground in the West Bank since June 2007. About a month prior, “GKMH” (he preferred not to disclose his real name) had been released after four years in Israeli prison. He had been arrested when he tried to cross the separation wall to help release a friend from an IDF security compound. One of his co-conspirators, it turned out, was an informant and upon crossing they barrier he was detained.
“For any solution to come about, Hamas must be talked to,” he told me. “Whether it is negotiated by Carter, or Egypt, or the French, the conflict will not end until Hamas is approached.”
Two weeks after Carter’s visit, eleven other Palestinian factions present in the Gaza Strip – including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Islamic Jihad – joined Hamas in its proposal for a halt to rocket attacks on Israel. But the proposal was immediately shot down by spokesperson for the Prime Minister’s office Mark Regev, who said that the abatement of illicit arms smuggling across the Gaza-Egypt border was a precondition for the IDF to halt its ongoing bombardment of the Strip. That any Israeli politician, following Israel’s 2005 pullout from Gaza, would have the gumption to be legislating arms control there isn’t surprising; the degree to which Israel’s ongoing blockade has brought the Strip to its knees explains why any Israeli politician might think he has the prerogative to play Simon Says with the people of Gaza.

The Siege on Gaza
Israel’s siege began when Hamas took control of Gaza in June 2007. The humanitarian situation there has since reached levels more dire than any seen in the region’s entire recorded history – barring, maybe, 1948.
Gaza is one of the most densely populated places in the world. 1.5 million people live there, seventy per cent of whom are refugees or descendents of refugees. There is not nearly enough arable land there for it to be self-sufficient, nor is there adequate access to water and irrigation, and its meagre crops of strawberries and carnations have often been barred from being exported.
In the past 18 months its residents have resorted to digging tunnels into Sinai and smuggling Egyptian goods across the border; precious little makes it into the Strip. Israel has largely blocked the entry of fuel. As a result, cars and ambulances have been unable to run, and the only power generation plant in the Strip that has not been bombed to rubble is frequently forced to shut down. The utter lack of medical supplies that has been sporadically mentioned in the press in the past two weeks is nothing new; humanitarian organisations have been screaming about the crisis for a year and a half now.
Prior to this current spate of hostilities, the UN reported that tens of thousands have extremely limited access to water, and more than half of Gazan children were undernourished. For months it’s been reported that some have been scrounging in dumpsters for scraps of food.
This is what Dov Weisglass, a top adviser to Olmert, has called putting Gazans “on a diet”; I would call it collective punishment and a war crime.

To bomb or not to bomb
The humanitarian situation is what Hamas points to when criticised for its attacks on southern Israel; to Israel, their possession of guns and makeshift mortars apparently makes Gazans a legitimate target.
Whatever talks led to the six-month cease-fire – which was brokered by Egypt and expired two weeks ago – they were done as covertly as the Israeli government could possibly manage. The simple reason is that negotiating with Hamas is more unpopular amongst Israelis than conflict of the sort we’ve seen these past few days.
This morning, Olmert told Haaretz that he was seriously engaged in dialogue with numerous world leaders on bringing about a “diplomatic solution” to the crisis. The Israeli newspaper also reported today that Tzipi Livni, Israel’s Foreign Minister and incoming leader of Olmert’s party Kadima, responded to an offer by Russia to relay messages to Hamas by saying, “We have nothing to discuss with Hamas.”
Thus Israeli diplomacy in a nutshell: bomb, or don’t bomb. Never discuss. Indeed, this tact has prevailed in Israel’s relationship with the government of Syria, which has offered on numerous occasions to rescind its military support of both Hezbollah and Hamas in return for the Golan Heights, which Israel also seized and has continued to occupy since 1967. And, like Hamas, Syria has been met with closed doors.

A word on the PA
I didn’t expect much when I read that Prime Minister of the Fatah head and Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas would be travelling to New York to attempt to bring a halt to the ceasefire. And indeed, the visit has hardly made a splash in the diplomatic sphere. To most Palestinians, Abbas’s inability to bring about any solution regarding the Gaza crisis speaks to the PA’s diminishing power and relevance. An inchoate and legally ambiguous government to begin with, the PA only has full control of 3% of the West Bank, including Ramallah, and partial civil jurisdiction in another 27%. But it is the fact that it relies upon Israel for all of its revenue that has made it fully subject to Israeli co-optation.
In March 2006, after a landslide victory in its first major election following the death of Yasser Arafat, Hamas took control of the Palestinian Legislative Council. Foreign governments immediately halted their aid to the Palestinian territories; Israel cut off all communication with the PA and refused to transfer its tax revenue to Ramallah in an attempt to foment civil unrest against the new government. Three months later, in an operation that was largely undertaken with American logistical and diplomatic support, the IDF moved into Ramallah, arrested a third of Hamas’s cabinet and twenty three of its legislators, and bombed a number of government buildings. This single event, I believe, has demoralized Palestinians moreso than any other since the beginning of the intifada in 2000. Hamas had been overthrown and Fatah now ruled the PA once more. The whole operation went down without the lifting of a single diplomatic finger from any Western nation.
But all this means that for Fatah to maintain its control of the PA, it has become wholly dependent on support from Israel. And since June 2007, when Hamas wrested Gaza from the PA, Fatah has been supplied guns and munitions on the condition that it clamp down on Hamas in the West Bank.
Most West Bank Palestinians are grossly disillusioned about Fatah’s ability to make headway with Israel. Since the overthrow of Hamas in June 2006, the PA has no longer been able to even feign being democratically run. Accusations of Fatah’s collaboration with Israel were becoming increasingly widespread in the months that I was living in Ramallah. And, this week, as a general strike has been called across the West Bank and PA troops have been breaking up peaceful rallies, talk of a new intifada that would target the PA is becoming increasingly common. When the same thing was happening last March in Ramallah – as Israel undertook an aerial assault on Gaza that killed about 140 people, and with increasing incidents of Palestinian boys throwing stones at PA police as a result of these crackdowns – it was hard to avoid the thought that a popular uprising against the Abbas regime may be inevitable.

Closed doors
Like almost anyone else, I don’t support the targeting of civilians, nor do I think that for West Bank Palestinians to attack the Israeli military – even though, as an occupying force there, the IDF is a legitimate target under international law – is a particularly wise strategy. And with the Obama administration preparing to take the helm in Washington, Hamas’s rocket attacks on southern Israel play into their characterisation as Islamist crazies in the American press.
But Gazans also do not have the means of civil disobedience against Israel as West Bank Palestinians do – nor are West Bank Palestinians facing a humanitarian crisis of the scale that Gazans have experienced in the past year and a half. With no friends in the international community, but for the United Nations itself which has continued to report on the crisis there and provide humanitarian aid, the people of Gaza have little or no recourse to their suffering whatsoever.
The resumption of violence is a result of the fact that Hamas has found nothing but closed doors in the diplomatic sphere – in its relationship with other countries too, but especially with Israel. They have exhausted all of their available options and have determined that they have no other means of bringing the world’s attention to their plight.
Hamas obviously knows that it cannot possibly beat Israel militarily. With nearly 600 Gazans dead, the hostilities so far have resulted in the deaths of fewer Israelis than you could count on your fingers. And with Gaza being the tiny enclave that it is (about 25% smaller than the island of Montreal), Hamas knows that it would stand no chance of rebuffing the IDF as Hezbollah did in the summer of 2006.
Israel has maintained its absurd line that the operation is being undertaken to destroy Hamas’s ability to attack its border towns, and has expressed that it has no intention of reoccupying the Strip, which is wise; with somewhere between ten and twenty thousand trained fighters loyal to Hamas in the Strip, a operation similar to the 2006 coup would come at an extremely high cost.
And yet, Israel would lose nothing by lifting the siege.
All this leads us to the inevitable question as to what Israel thinks it will get out off its unrestrained pummelling of the place, the levelling of schools which had served as refuge to dozens of women and children, the bombing of apartment buildings and other non-military targets. In essence, it is the same question that I was hoping my Israeli family might answer for me while I was there, although my patience for their bullheaded racism eventually ran out.
And it’s the same question that was being faced by the Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Dan Gillerman, during the 2006 war in Lebanon. The IDF was in the process of killing 1,100 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians after Hezbollah had kidnapped three soldiers and kidnapped two others, and with charges that Israel was perpetrating a grossly disproportionate counter-offensive coming from virtually every country on the globe, what Gillerman said was, “You’re damn right we are.”

A Victory for Settler Machismo

2008-03-16T20:31:00.000-07:00

NB: This entry and the two others that follow were initially published at www.annapolismonitor.net, while I was working with ICAHD in Jerusalem.

There was no shortage of anger and violence three nights ago at the settler rally in Armon Hanatziv,as a crowd of over 500 ultra-Zionists flocked together with the intention of bringing the house of the yeshiva gunman to the ground. Parallels of religious and racist fanaticism were manifested once again as the crowd chanted “Death to the Arabs” in unison and a number of teenagers broke into the adjacent Arab neighborhood of Jabil Mukhaber to throw stones at the vacated house and smash up whatever cars were in the vicinity.

I went to the rally with little intention but to witness first-hand the kernel of racialized nationalism that so dominates the Knesset’s agenda – that has brought discussion of ethnic cleansing and bald-faced apartheid into the arena of acceptable political discourse of this country.

“If [Palestinians] want a state with no Jews in it, then we can’t have a state with them in it,” said a middle-aged woman named Vered who had come with a sign reading “Expel the Arab Enemy.” She admitted she had no compunctions about such an act of ethnic cleansing.

“If it brings peace,” she said. “I would give anything for peace.”

This is the vocal minority – to an unfamiliar observer it would appear a dispossessed fringe group – willing to speak out for the 55 per cent of Jewish Israelis who believe the state should actively support Arab emigration, and the 67 per cent that support a large-scale military operation in Gaza.

“You can’t negotiate with someone that wants to kill you,” said Vered. “They don’t know the word negotiate.”

As the mob clustered along the police fence, the atmosphere became increasingly tense. The group breached the barrier by force, but the police buffered the crowd until someone threw a cherry bomb at them. The police refused to respond, but the protesters had had their fix, and the demonstration gradually dissolved.

All present seemed completely unaware – or perhaps took for granted – that the week had marked a momentous victory for them, and it had come in the apologetic form of housing tenders.

The relationship between Ehud Olmert and Mercaz Harav, where the killing took place, has cooled significantly since his days as mayor when he was regularly invited to the yeshiva as a guest of honor. His proud declaration that he would “cooperate” with Bush’s Road Map, and be willing to negotiate a two-state solution with the PA has won him few friends in the ultra-Zionist community.

Two days after the shooting, minister of education Yuli Tamir visited the yeshiva to pay her condolences – a move far bolder than Olmert could have ventured, especially after the school's head rabbi, Ya’akov Shapira, had denounced the Prime Minister as weak and a heretic. Tamir was forced to leave by an angry mob of students who had gathered to scream profanities at her, calling her a murderer.

The following day it was announced that the Prime Minister had approved the construction of 750 new housing units in the settlement of Givat Ze’ev. Palms ruefully smacked foreheads everywhere from Washington to Damascus upon the announcement, but this didn’t quite satisfy the demands of the Women in Green – who spearheaded Sunday’s rally – that "the Jewish Zionist revenge must be an immediate revenge by establishing eight new communities throughout Judea and Samaria in memory of those murdered.”

Olmert’s decision came largely at the behest of the Shas, which has extremely strong ties to the settler right, and has wielded an inordinate amount of power over the PMO ever since Yisrael Beitenu pulled out of the government in January. But the response was far more civil than I had feared. When the yeshiva shooting took place I was in my office on Zion Square, about a fifteen minute walk from the scene. Sirens faded in and out of earshot, and the normal clamor of Ben Yehuda on a Thursday night was noticeably muted. I called a friend in Montreal, and expressed my fear that “if one to one-hundred is the working ratio,” referring to the previous week’s events in Gaza, “then the West Bank is on the verge of a massacre.”

The family of the gunman was arrested of course, and the security in the East Jerusalem community of Jabil Mukhaber was increased, but the explosion of military reprisals that I expected never came.

During the Gaza offensive, with clashes between demonstrators and the IDF or PA all over the West Bank, protests going on throughout Israel, and Hamas calling on Mahmoud Abbas to form a Palestinian unity government, the ever-anxious-looking Olmert had good reason to worry that a third intifada was in the making. So rather than undertaking a new military escapade after the yeshiva shooting, Olmert opened talks with Hamas for the first time in his tenure. The talks focused on the prospect of allowing PA guards to operate five of the crossings into Gaza, including Rafah, and a limited lifting of the blockade. Reaching a settlement on a cease-fire seems unlikely, though, as Hamas insists that the cease-fire would be all-encompassing, and Israel refuses to end arrests of suspected militants in the West Bank.

As surprising and significant as the choice to open negotiations was, it came with no explanatory announcement, no momentous speech that Israel had suddenly decided to alter the policy of provocation it has pursued with Hamas for the past two decades.

Indeed, such a speech would have been unwarranted, as the day after it was reported that talks had opened in Cairo, Ehud Barak ordered the assassinations of five militants in the West Bank. The move appeared a deliberate attempt on the part of the defense establishment to forestall any cease-fire deal that would curtail its right to rain missiles on Gaza at its whim. But the talks appear to have resurged, with Amos Gilad, the head of the defense ministry's political-security bureau, meeting Hamas officials in Cairo yesterday.

For all the talk of negotiations versus war with Gaza, the main test for the Olmert administration, now that it has finally shown some interest in peace around the Strip, (albeit to avoid another widespread Palestinian uprising,) will be if he can reign in the fanatics in the Shas and the settler right, and persuade Barak to let his finger off the trigger for more than a week.

Provoking Peace

2008-03-03T20:26:00.000-08:00

Over two weeks have passed since the assassination of Hezbollah commander Imad Mugniyeh by car bomb in Damascus, and all the while the Israeli public has waited with baited breath for a missile to land in Haifa, an explosion in Tel Aviv, or a counter-assassination in Jerusalem. That the bitter peace has somehow held on the Lebanon border has come to the surprise of many in Israel: the situation looked particularly grim in the wake of Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah’s declaration of “open war” at Mugniyeh’s funeral, which was followed by reports that tens of thousands of Hezbollah militants and “activists” were moving into southern Lebanon.

The press was flooded with contradictory reports about the killing: Mugniyeh’s widow blamed the Syrian government, and pointed to the fact that Iranian investigators had been blocked from investigating the case; American Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell claimed there was evidence that members of Hezbollah itself had carried out the bombing; Syrian officials claimed that other Arab countries had conspired to kill the veteran saboteur.

But suspicion of Israeli culpability took the fore. Despite Israel’s denial of involvement in the assassination, most experts agreed that the bombing bore all the trademarks of Mossad. Olmert’s rebuttal to the accusations was even more vapid and ambiguous than any of the evidence against him. "Israel rejects the attempt by terror groups to attribute to it any involvement in this incident," read a statement released by his office.

One report stated that Israel had knocked off the Hezbolloah leader because it had caught wind that he and the Syrian intelligence were planning an attack on Israel in response to the mysterious IAF bombing of a building in Syria that took place last September.

If Israel was behind the assassination, it would add yet another page to the volumes of covert illegal actions by the state. In September 2004 for example, a senior Hamas official, Ez El Din Al Sheikh Khalil, was blown up when he started his car in a prominently Palestinian neighborhood of Damascus. That assassination too was preceded by an IAF strike on a military base in Syria*, which came as Israel’s first attack on Syrian soil since 1973. Israel initially denied involvement in the car bombing, but it was soon leaked to the press that the assassination had in fact been executed by Mossad.

Raanan Gissin, advisor and spokesperson for the Sharon government, then defended the attacks by saying, "Just because Hamas leaders are operating from Damascus, this does not grant them immunity…There are no geographical boundaries when it comes to fighting terror."

As Seymour Hersh points out in reference to the more recent IAF strike, “The seemingly unprovoked bombing…was, by almost any definition, an act of war.” Following the disastrous 2006 Lebanon War, one would expect Israel to show more deference towards its neighbors. But it has pursued its characteristic mold of belligerence where it should be diplomatic; recklessness where it should err on the side of caution.

Hezbollah presents a particularly vexing problem for the Israelis – and Olmert should be counting his prayers that Israel has not yet been attacked; unlike Syria, the PA or even Hamas, Israel has no means by which to negotiate with Hezbollah. Israel's only means of undermining and placating the faction therefore are oblique. It would have to negotiate with Syria on the Golan and begin making tangible progress on the Palestinian peace process – meaning that Hezbollah is set to remain a force in the region for quite some time.

The group's interests in attacking Israel would come as a means to bolster its popular support in Lebanon, in the hopes that it may form the next government in Beirut. It already proved it can manage an invasion, and another war, following the chiding Winograd Report, would send Israel into political chaos.

But it’s a mistake to think that Hezbollah would have nothing to lose in the event of another war. If we are to find any explanation as to why we haven’t seen Katyushas flying over the Blue Line in the past two weeks it’s in a statement made by Nasrallah shortly after the 2006 war. In a televised interview, he stated that he would not have ordered the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers if he had known that it would spark a war that ultimately resulted in the deaths of over 1,100 Lebanese civilians and the unbridled decimation of south Lebanon’s infrastructure. Hezbollah, said Sheikh Nasrallah, would ignore Israel’s “provocations” in the future.

The Israelis apparently thought they had saved face with the general-secretary’s testimony; it was hailed as “Nasrallah’s mea culpa”, and was pointed to as proof that Hezbollah had lost the war. The Lebanese terrorists will think twice before retaliating against attacks on Arab soil. At last – Israel has secured the peace.

*The military base in Syria was reported to have been a Palestinian training camp, and was bombed in October 2003.

Tickertape for a Dysfunctional Peace

2008-02-14T20:15:00.000-08:00

The peace conference at Annapolis last November represented nothing unexpected or even unique in the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Faced with unprecedented levels of unpopularity, the Bush administration made yet another vague attempt at peace in order to remind his disaffected constituents and the people of the Arab world that – regardless of what may or may not transpire – the President of the United States cares about the people of Palestine.

There was an ecstatic nostalgia amongst the GOP party base, eager to harken back to that glorious moment in 1993, when, after months of exhaustive and though ambivalent negotiations in Norway, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands in the White House Rose Garden. The new spate of negotiations meant a three days in a quaint Maryland suburb, delicately couched by the North American press with all the affectionate, interpersonal analysis that international relations inevitably demand: whose hand touched whose shoulder, what Bush and Olmert were wearing as they ruminated about their families and hobbies over a couple of smouldering cigars. “This is the holy grail of diplomacy,” quipped one American official.

But despite the clamour and hoopla surrounding Annapolis, most journalists were wary enough of the precarious situations of all three leaders not to lend the negotiations much faith. Nearly five years since the advent of the paralytic Road Map, and well aware of the convoluted tit-for-tat dynamic that has developed between Olmert and Abbas, few were expecting much from a negotiating cohort that proved itself incapable of even issuing a joint statement that committed to more than “vigorous, ongoing and continuous negotiations.” “Ongoing” and “continuous” being perfect synonyms, it’s fairly obvious the team was struggling to boost the word count.

Even Washington’s efforts to garner support for the negotiations somehow rang of pretence. Desperate for a show of support from the Arab League – perhaps as part of its ongoing campaign to snub the Iranians – the Bush administration doled out invitations across the Middle East, hastily acquiescing to an abstentious Syria by agreeing to grant the Golan Heights a token spot on the agenda of official negotiations. The New York Times noted with relish Prince Saud al-Faisal’s refusal to shake hands with any Israeli officials, and leftist pundits of US foreign policy resurrected their perennial question as to why, if Israel is not complying with American demands, the administration does not withhold its lavish $3 billion in military aid.

Progress at the talks was chronically frustrated by the Israelis’ insistence that ongoing missile attacks by Hamas nullify Israel’s obligations under the Road Map. But while Israeli deaths at the hands of Palestinian militants reached a nine-year low in 2007,** Olmert continues to insist that Palestinian aggression during this time justifies his own non-compliance with Bush’s Road Map to Peace. In what has caused pervasive ire on the peace front, Olmert has repeatedly insisted that he will not curb the growth of settlements that he intends to retain in any final-status agreement, in effect overruling land negotiations before they even take place. Olmert’s childish behaviour on the settlement issue, coupled with the ongoing construction of the separation wall, serve merely to exacerbate the peace process, and undermine any future negotiations over the West Bank.

Annapolis may prove a footnote in the annals of the conflict, likely to be buried under the mountains of drama and front-page developments this conflict has yet to bear, and dwelt upon only by the die-hards and nanohistorians of future generations. But it is also the most recent in a series of pledges to reach a viable, just, and final-status peace. Both leaders stated they were committed to the establishment of a Palestinian state by the end of this year. The purpose of Annapolis Monitor is to hold them accountable, to keep tabs in particular on the Israeli government, because of the two sides it is the one whose dictates will determine the viability of the nascent Palestinian state, and who must make concessions towards that end.

**There were only 13 Israelis killed, including seven civilians, whereas 377 Palestinians were killed during the same time period, 132-172 of whom were not participating in hostilities when killed.

The Schtup Agenda

2008-01-15T13:42:00.000-08:00

I was not enticed, per se, by birthright’s web pages inviting me to Experience Israel! adorned consistently with photos of youths huddling happily together, advertising how incredibly intimate they had become over the course of their ten days together – in fact I suspected these were amateur models posing to receive generous stipends from Taglit’s overflowing coffers. I was more attracted by the free airfare.

Before arriving at the airport I knew that my ten days on birthright would have to be an exercise in self-control in the face of political beliefs entirely at odds with my own. After all, I didn’t agree with the idea of having a right, by birth, to a free trip of roughly $4,000 value – certainly not moreso than any diaspora Palestinian. But considering that I wasn’t giving Taglit my money – just the opposite was effectively the case – it wouldn’t make sense to boycott.

In the terminal we played an acquaintance game, drank coffees together. On the plane I sat next to a girl who defended Israel’s right to incarcerate Palestinians without fair trial because, “Don’t they all want kill us?” I cut the conversation and went to sleep.

As we recovered our luggage in Tel Aviv and began carting it toward the exit sign, a portly Israeli man in a kippa materialized and vigorously began taking pictures of our weary faces. He energetically pushed the button, yelled something to someone in Hebrew, laughed, and repeated.

Our tour guide’s name was Erad – a fit and outdoorsy man in his forties or fifties. Over the bus’s PA he informed us that we were driving down to a canyon in the Negev desert where David Ben-Gurion was buried. We were also introduced to Yaniv, our official medic and bodyguard, IDF alumnus, who would accompany us throughout the trip, and wore a rifle around his shoulder at all times. The gun felt grotesquely inappropriate – indictable, like indecent exposure. But the plan was to spend the next several months there, and I knew I would have to get used to it.

We became acquainted at an incredible pace. Boys and girls talked about how they love it here, how grateful they were to be out of their parents house, or wherever they had been two days prior. They would take deep drags on a cigarette, and maybe share it with a member of the opposite sex. Zionist, angst-ridden teenage love was in the air. On the first night at our hostel in the desert one of my assigned roommates accomplished his apparent mission of getting laid. I slept right through it, but my other roommate filled me in on the details the next morning.

A group of ultra-Zionist lubovich boys was in my cohort. We were passing around shots of whisky in our dorms when one of them offhandedly said that the land “should belong to the Jews,” I asked him what makes him think we deserve it more than Palestinians.

“We were here first,” he said.

“You live in Montreal. Were the Jews there first too?”

I can’t remember how he responded, but the discussion continued until they all lost interest and one of them tried to end it by saying, “Look, we don’t want to share the land; they don’t either. If I were them, I would hate us too. That’s just how it goes.”

The night of Shabbat we were told to dress nicely, and we were introduced to Rabbi Tsvi. We were given pamphlets about the “Israel Shabbat Experience”, which read more like single’s profile on J-date: “Tzvi enjoys snowboarding, winter sports and running. A great lover of the Jewish people, Tzvi has conducted Shabbat Experience-esque programs in Des Moines, Iowa and in South Carolina. A former public school teacher, he is also a talented breakdancer and public speaker.”

After the candle-lighting he got the room clapping and singing, then let loose and started moonwalking, roboting, doing the wave, and so on. The girls laughed hysterically and their faces changed colour. The boys asked him what other moves he could do. After that he sat down and probably started talking about the meaning of the Sabbath: I started dozing off. My head and eyelids sank down towards my chest, every now and then jerking epileptically upwards – to reveal our group leader frowning caustically at my impudence – before sinking into slumber once again.

When it was finally over, we all brought our Duty Free liquor to the precipice of the ravine, got hammered and made out with each other.

Buffets of halva, cottage cheese, boiled eggs, and instant coffee quelled our headaches in the morning.

Our next overnight was in a Bedouin outpost somewhere in the Negev. On the bus ride there somebody asked Erad if boys and girls would be sleeping in separate tents.

“No,” he said, “because, as everyone knows, birthright is all about making Jewish babies.” We giggled at how earnestly we had been adhering to the agenda.

The camp was designed more or less to satisfy our limited and exoticised assumptions about Bedouin culture; we sat on the floor and ate dinner with our hands; the following morning we went on a camel ride.

After supper we settled in the massive tent. A small group had gathered in the corner to listen to Yaniv espouse his political analysis of the situation: “Do I hate them? Of course I hate them, but I don’t go and kill them at every opportunity I get; that’s the difference between us and them,” he said. The birthrighters nodded sympathetically. I bit my tongue.

The following day we assented Masada, we were told about the heroic massacre that the rebel Jews committed against their families and themselves before the Romans breached their fortress in the morning. We swam in the Dead Sea, and then were driven to Tel Aviv to hear a lecture on “the political situation.”

Our orator was a sharply dressed “expert in the field of Israel advocacy and effective communication training,” whose English accent seemed to lend him greater credibility. He introduced himself as Neil Lazarus, a British-born Israeli. He told some self-deprecating Jew jokes, then sombered the tone with stories of people he had known who were killed by “Arabs”. Were watched a video presentation which included clips of an al-Aqsa TV’s children’s show – in which a ten-year-old girl speaking to a bumbling character in a Mickey Mouse suit called for the extermination of the Jews – and a Hezbollah propaganda video boasting of civilian deaths in Haifa. Everyone squirmed in their seats, gasping and making desperate motions with their hands. He went on to explain that a Palestinian state would be problematic, more or less, because Jerusalem and Tel Aviv would be vulnerable to Palestinian rocket attacks. I scoffed quietly but never raised my hand. Finally he dispensed his card around the room, directing us towards AwsomeSeminars.com, and bid us adieu.

The vast majority of time on birthright the group spent being herded from one landmark and the next. We sat on the bus, the group posed while our tour guide snapped pictures of us with clusters of digital cameras dangling from his elbows.

In Zefat, a bespectacled rabbi in crocs and a threadbare gabardine distributed stickers of one of the numerous moshiachs of the past half-century, we were shown the coffin-sized cave where Kabbalah was born, we climbed things and were told to come down while we waited for girls who had run off to the bathrooms to confess sexual misadventures to each other like Catholics between the stalls. We were briefed on the significance of the next stop on our itinerary.

It was never explained to us what the idea was behind having a group of IDF soldiers accompany us for five days of our trip, but in any case, we were introduced to them the next morning, told to make friends. We got on the bus and drove to a kibbutz in the Golan Heights.

I had trouble sleeping the first night there, and wandered into the mess hall to read. As soon as I entered, I heard the voice of a soldier yell, “Don’t turn on the light!” I looked in, and through the darkness saw the ghostly outline of naked bodies.

“Shit, sorry,” I said, and quickly retreated.

Jerusalem was our next destination. This would be my home base for the next few months. The old city was plagued with pedestrian traffic jams of orthodox processions and groups of tourists wearing identical yellow baseball caps. Neon signs celebrating the 40^th anniversary of the Six Day war decorated the corridors of downtown West Jerusalem. Ultra-orthodox who walk around averting their gaze from women, post-traumatic pack-a-dayers, and bored security guards on every corner.

After spending an afternoon at Yad Vashem, and listening to a speech by a holocaust survivor, one of the girls told the group that she had decided she wanted to serve in the IDF and make aliyah. We were drawn into a discussion about whether or not we have an obligation to come to Israel and defend it.

A few people asserted that non-Jews and non-Israelis have no right to question or oppose the Israeli government. The moral superiority of the state was a given. I was getting pretty agitated and I wanted to stir things up anyway, so I put my hand up and went on a little diatribe about the fact that every racist state in history has faced violence, that ethnocracies themselves rely on violent forms of coercion. I ended it by asking, “When a population is displaced by war, and denied re-entry, while others are granted citizenship only because of their ethnicity, how is that not ethnic cleansing?”

I felt like a dick dropping those two words on a group still recovering from images of emaciated Jewish corpses getting pushed into trenches by bulldozers.

“Excuse me – Are you comparing this situation to the Holocaust?” asked our group leader.

“There are different types of ethnic cleansing,” I said. “Transfer is one of them.”

One of the IDF girls suggested that the important thing is that Israel is a democracy. Another birthrighter later said that regardless of whether or not this was a case of ethnic cleansing, it’s just not helpful to use terms that get people wound up like that.

We spent our second Shabbat at the Kotel. There were men with IDF kipas, Cannabis kipas, kipas with Spongebob on them. Hassidics swarmed towards the holiness lying somewhere behind the stones. Dozens of other birthright groups had convened in the plaza. None of us had any idea what the appropriate prayer was.

There were at least five hookups in our group and three people said they wanted to make aliyah. If three out of every 31 birthright participants make aliyah, Israel’s population will grow by an extra 14,226 every eight years; a fragment of an ongoing campaign to defuse the “demographic bomb” in Palestine. The rest of the campaign consists of house demolitions, the Wall, the ID system in the West Bank, the settlements.

When we returned to Ben-Gurion Airport the JAPs burst into tears and we all promised to facebook each other. I shook hands with everyone officiously; they said goodbye and good luck with whatever you’re doing.