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Ed Webb

Jadaliyya - 0 views

www.jadaliyya.com/...abbani-on-Thirty-Years-of-Oslo

opinion analysis Palestine Israel israelpalestine Oslo MEPP

shared by Ed Webb on 11 Dec 23 - Cached
  • in exchange for a slew of Palestinian strategic concessions, Israel magnanimously agreed to negotiate the PLO’s terms of surrender.
  • The Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, as the Oslo Accord is formally called, is only a few pages long and largely free of technical jargon, and well worth reading for those who haven’t done so. It contains not a single reference to “occupation”, “self-determination”, “statehood”, or anything of the sort. Rather, Palestinians were to exercise limited autonomy, within limited areas of the occupied territories (excluding East Jerusalem), from which Israeli forces would “redeploy” rather than withdraw
  • the issues that had the greatest impact were the effective abandonment of the refugees, who constitute the majority of the Palestinian people, by the leadership; the political-institutional fragmentation of the Palestinian people; the indefinite suspension of the national agenda in exchange for economic reconstruction that was unlikely to materialize (as it stands the Palestinian economy is today but a shadow of what it was in 1993); and the transformation of the national movement into a local authority
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  • Things have turned out very much worse than Oslo’s bitterest critics could have imagined, particularly in the Gaza Strip and Jordan Valley
  • The second enabling policy was Israel’s relentless campaign of mass violence throughout the occupied territories, and the Gaza Strip in particular, to crush the 1987-1993 uprising. It didn’t succeed, but as Graham Usher perceptively noted at the time, it did lay the basis for widespread Palestinian acquiescence, and quite a bit of enthusiasm, in these territories for the false promises of Oslo. 
  • Colonization of course commenced immediately after Israel occupied and initiated the “creeping annexation” of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in June 1967, but Oslo was nevertheless a critical turning point. Although the settlement enterprise constitutes a grave breach of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention and a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (which is the primary reason Israel refused to ratify it), the Oslo Accords as a matter of design make no reference to international law. Further, the sponsor of the Oslo process, the United States, has spared no effort to ensure that international law is not applied to Israeli conduct towards the Palestinians beyond the confines of Oslo, that it is not held accountable for its actions, and that it can continue to act with unrestricted impunity. In other words, the United States ensured that Oslo was implemented beyond the purview of the norms and rules established to govern international conduct. 
  • Israel’s response to the 1994 Hebron Ibrahimi Mosque massacre by a fanatic Israeli-American settler, which it instrumentalized to further entrench its control over Hebron and the mosque rather than confront the settlers, provided an early, definitive indication in this regard. It bears recalling that this response was led by Rabin, his fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shimon Peres, and their military commander Ehud Barak, not Binyamin Netanyahu or Itamar Ben-Gvir.
  • Every time Israel engaged in a new act of colonization, such as the construction of the Har Homa settlement on Jabal Abu Ghnaim in 1997, it was tolerated on the pretext of keeping the process alive
  • If, for the sake of argument, we take claims that Oslo was supposed to conclude with Palestinian statehood seriously, ignoring reality on the ground on the pretext of preserving the diplomatic process helped ensure its failure.
  • A second key Israeli policy enabled by Oslo is Palestinian fragmentation
  • Israel succeeded in making Oslo’s transitional phase a permanent arrangement, in the process transforming the Palestinian Authority (PA) into a local subsidiary of the Israeli state
  • if a Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza Strip seeks to pursue a claim against Israel for an act committed between 1967 and 1995, let’s say against the Israeli military for unlawful use of force in 1976 or during the 1987-1993 uprising that rendered the claimant quadriplegic, the PA is under an obligation to ensure that the claimant brings the case before a Palestinian rather than Israeli court, and that any financial judgement by that court in the claimant’s favor is paid out by the PA rather than Israel. If the claimant despite the above brings the case before an Israeli court, and an Israeli judge rules in the claimant’s favor, on account of unlawful actions by the Israeli military years before the PA even existed, the PA is required to immediately reimburse Israel the full amount of compensation awarded to the Palestinian by the Israeli court. Article XX perfectly encapsulates the thoroughly lopsided nature of Oslo, the imbalance of power it codified, Israel’s insistence upon achieving retroactive impunity, and its determination to hold its victims responsible for its crimes against them. In my view nothing better demonstrates that this is a conflict between occupier and occupied and nothing else.
  • the enormous economic windfall Israel derived from the Oslo Accords and its integration into the global economy. Most importantly it led the Arab League to renounce its boycott of Israel and – crucially – of companies that do business with Israel. For all its shortcomings this boycott was exponentially more effective than the current Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and for example kept major Japanese and South Korean firms out of Israel and quite a few Western ones out of the Arab world. It is often forgotten that during the 1970s and 1980s Israel was something of an international pariah, but in the wake of the 1991 Madrid Middle East diplomatic conference and thereafter Oslo was able to normalize relations with much of Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia
  • While Oslo promised Palestinian economic development in exchange for political paralysis, growth materialized only temporarily from the desultory baseline where it stood in 1993 at the conclusion of a prolonged uprising. A sharp reversal in fact commenced in the years leading up to the 2000 eruption of the Al-Aqsa Intifada on account of Israeli policy, and this deterioration has continued at an accelerated pace ever since. What Oslo did achieve was to catapult Israel into the ranks of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), of which it has since 2010 been a full member. It is virtually inconceivable Israel would have acquired this status without Oslo.
  • Palestinians, whether within the West Bank and Gaza Strip, within Israel, in its prison system, or in the diaspora, have been organizing and resisting in myriad ways. Most importantly, they have despite massive and systematic state violence and repression, and betrayal by their own leaders and Arab governments, refused to surrender – putting into practice “the power of refusal” advocated by Said. In doing so the Palestinians have retained the overwhelming support of the international community, and even in the West public opinion increasingly recognizes that Israel is a structurally racist, colonial state
  • when the succession commences Israel is likely to promote a model where different Palestinian population concentrations – Hebron-Bethlehem, Ramallah, Jericho, Nablus-Salfit-Jenin, Qalqilya-Tulkarm – are administered by a series of local chieftains
  • even this model, a regional version of the failed Village Leagues of the 1980s, may prove unpalatable to the lunatics currently running the Israeli asylum. These are forces agitating for wholesale, formal annexation and then some, and which thanks to the inexorable rightward shift of Israeli society, and international and regional support and acquiescence (not unrelated phenomena) are only gaining in strength and power.
Ed Webb

US media talks a lot about Palestinians - just without Palestinians - +972 Magazine - 0 views

www.972mag.com/us-media-palestinians

US USA media newspapers Palestinians MEPP Rabin opinion analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 31 Oct 20 - Cached
  • many Americans’ memories of Rabin have long been colored by a relentless media narrative that deprived them of critical perspectives on his life and legacy. In fact, looking back at the Oslo years, the voices of Palestinians — the victims of Rabin’s decades-long career — rarely made it into the pages of influential U.S. publications. Had they been featured, many Americans may have had a more informed opinion about why Palestinians would oppose honoring Rabin.
  • I focused on opinion pieces for two reasons. First, scholarly analysis of major U.S. outlets has already demonstrated that their news coverage is heavily shaped by pro-Israel biases. Second, opinion pieces are playing a stronger role than ever in shaping our understanding of the news. As one newspaper editor explained, “In a 24/7 news environment, many readers already know what happened; opinion pieces help them decide how to think about it.”
  • I had expected to find relatively few opinion pieces by Palestinians, and I was correct. But what surprised me was how much Palestinians have been talked about in major U.S. media outlets over the decades. Editorial boards and columnists seem to have been quite consumed with talking about the Palestinians, often in condescending and even racist ways — yet they somehow did not feel the need to hear much from Palestinians themselves.
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  • In the New York Times, less than 2 percent of the nearly 2,500 opinion pieces that discussed Palestinians since 1970 were actually written by Palestinians. In the Washington Post, the average was just 1 percent.
  • While three of Said’s op-eds discussing Palestinians ran in the New York Times in the 1980s, from the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords until his death in 2003, the newspaper ran only a single letter to the editor authored by him in January 1997, in which Said criticized the Oslo framework. During that time, Said’s opinion pieces explaining Oslo’s fatal flaws appeared in The Guardian, al-Ahram Weekly, and even the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Yet readers of America’s “newspaper of record” were not able to hear from one of the country’s most eloquent and prescient Palestinian critics of the “peace process” narrative.
  • During the 1990s, Thomas Friedman wrote 33 columns discussing Palestinians; William Safire wrote 24, Anthony Lewis wrote 39, and A.M. Rosenthal penned 56. While they differed on various aspects of Oslo, none of them questioned the framing that “peace” was the ultimate goal, that Rabin was “a man of peace,” and that Palestinians who opposed Oslo were in fact opponents of peace.
  • It is unsurprising, then, that most readers of the mainstream U.S. press would not understand that Rabin only recognized the PLO as “the representative of the Palestinian people,” but did not recognize Palestinians’ right to establish a state along the 1967 lines. They would not know that illegal Israeli settlements continued to expand under Rabin’s watch.
  • a month before his assassination, Rabin reassured fellow Knesset members that the state Palestinians desired would be “an entity which is less than a state.” And they would not know that, in those same remarks, Rabin made clear that Israel’s borders would be “beyond the lines which existed before the Six Day War,” along with a “united Jerusalem, which will include both Ma’ale Adumim and Givat Ze’ev [West Bank settlements], as the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty.” This is the Rabin that Palestinians know all too well.
  • in 1999, Said wrote that the Oslo process “required us to forget and renounce our history of loss, dispossessed by the very people who taught everyone the importance of not forgetting the past.”
  • In 2020 so far, the New York Times has run 39 opinion pieces in its print and online platforms that discuss Palestinians; only three were actually penned by Palestinians
  • It is not just Palestinians: Black, Indigenous, Latin American, Asian American, and other people of color face ongoing racism in the newsroom, making it more difficult for alternative perspectives to make their way into these influential pages
  • Alternative news outlets (including +972 Magazine), along with many Palestinians on Twitter and other social media sites, are providing fresh perspectives that we can follow, engage with, and share. The avalanche of tweets and comments highlighting Rabin’s violent legacy is just one example of this. And as more Americans receive their news from social media (including politicians), those wanting Palestinian perspectives now have a much easier time getting them.
Ed Webb

Why a One-State Solution is the Only Solution - 0 views

www.foreignaffairs.com/...ere-will-be-one-state-solution

Israel Palestine israelpalestine MEPP opinion analysis constitution

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Dec 19 - Cached
  • As he tried to rescue what had become known as “the peace process,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told Congress that the two-state solution had one to two years left before it would no longer be viable. That was six years ago. Resolution 2334, which the UN Security Council passed with U.S. consent in late 2016, called for “salvaging the two-state solution” by demanding a number of steps, including an immediate end to Israeli settlement building in the occupied territories. That was three years ago. And since then, Israel has continued to build and expand settlements.
  • What Trump had in mind has become clear in the years that have followed, as he and his team have approved a right-wing Israeli wish list aimed at a one-state outcome—but one that will enshrine Israeli dominance over Palestinian subjects, not one that will grant the parties equal rights. 
  • Under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has abandoned any pretense of seeking a two-state solution, and public support for the concept among Israelis has steadily dwindled. Palestinian leaders continue to seek a separate state. But after years of failure and frustration, most Palestinians no longer see that path as viable.
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  • Netanyahu and Trump are seeking not to change the status quo but merely to ratify it
  • the only moral path forward is to recognize the full humanity of both peoples
  • Between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea live approximately 13 million people, all under the control of the Israeli state. Roughly half of them are Palestinian Arabs, some three million of whom live under a military occupation with no right to vote for the government that rules them and around two million of whom live in Israel as second-class citizens, discriminated against based on their identity, owing to Israel’s status as a Jewish state. Two million more Palestinians live in the besieged Gaza Strip, where the militant group Hamas exercises local rule: an open-air prison walled off from the world by an Israeli blockade.
  • the dilemmas posed by partition long predate 1967 and stem from a fundamentally insoluble problem. For the better part of a century, Western powers—first the United Kingdom and then the United States—have repeatedly tried to square the same circle: accommodating the Zionist demand for a Jewish-majority state in a land populated overwhelmingly by Palestinians. This illogical project was made possible by a willingness to dismiss the humanity and rights of the Palestinian population and by sympathy for the idea of creating a space for Jews somewhere outside Europe—a sentiment that was sometimes rooted in an anti-Semitic wish to reduce the number of Jews in the Christian-dominated West.
  • among Jewish Israelis, annexation is not a controversial idea. A recent poll showed that 48 percent of them support steps along the lines of what Netanyahu proposed; only 28 percent oppose them. Even Netanyahu’s main rival, the centrist Blue and White alliance, supports perpetual Israeli control of the Jordan Valley. Its leaders’ response to Netanyahu’s annexation plan was to complain that it had been their idea first. 
  • one national intelligence estimate drawn up by U.S. agencies judged that if Israel continued the occupation and settlement building for “an extended period, say two to three years, it will find it increasingly difficult to relinquish control.” Pressure to hold on to the territories “would grow, and it would be harder to turn back to the Arabs land which contained such settlements.” That estimate was written more than 50 years ago, mere months after the Israeli occupation of the West Bank began. Nevertheless, Israel has forged ahead with its expansion and has enjoyed unflinching U.S. support, even as Israeli officials periodically warned about its irreversibility. 
  • Under Oslo, the Palestinians have had to rely on the United States to treat Israel with a kind of tough love that American leaders, nervous about their domestic support, have never been able to muster.
  • As the failure of the peace process became clearer over time, Palestinians rose up against the occupation—sometimes violently. Israel pointed to those reactions to justify further repression. But the cycle was enabled by Palestinian leaders who resigned themselves to having to prove to Israel’s satisfaction that Palestinians were worthy of self-determination—something to which all peoples are in fact entitled.
  • Today, large numbers of Israelis support keeping much of the occupied territories forever
  • This formulation contained a fundamental flaw, one that would mar all future partition plans, as well: it conceived of the Jews as a people with national rights but did not grant the same status to the Palestinians. The Palestinian population could therefore be moved around and dismembered, because they were not a people deserving of demographic cohesion.
  • in the wake of the Holocaust, a UN partition plan presented a similar vision, with borders drawn to create a Jewish-majority state and with the Palestinians again divided into multiple entities. 
  • the nakba—the “catastrophe.” The 19 years that followed might be the only time in the past two millennia that the land of Palestine was actually divided. None of the great powers who had ruled over the territory—the Romans, the Byzantines, the Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Fatimids, the crusaders, the Ayyubids, the Mameluks, the Ottomans, the British—had ever divided Gaza from Jerusalem, Nablus from Nazareth, or Jericho from Jaffa. Doing so never made sense, and it still doesn’t. Indeed, when Israel took control of the territories in 1967, it actually represented a return to a historical norm of ruling the land as a single unit. But it did so with two systems, one for Jewish Israelis and the other for the people living on the land that the Israelis had conquered.
  • Actual progress in the talks would threaten Jewish control of the land, something that has proved more important to Israel than democracy.
  • Having led the armed struggle against Israel for decades, Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization was known and accepted by ordinary Palestinians. By the late 1980s, however, the group had become a shell of its former self. Already isolated by its exile in Tunisia, the PLO became even weaker in 1990 after its wealthy patrons in the Gulf cut funding when Arafat backed Saddam Hussein’s grab for Kuwait. On the ground in the territories, meanwhile, the first intifada—a grassroots revolt against the occupation—was making news and threatening to displace the PLO as the face of Palestinian resistance. By embracing the Oslo process, Arafat and his fellow PLO leaders found a personal path back to influence and relevance—while trapping the Palestinian community in a bind that has held them back ever since.
  • The time has come for the Palestinian Authority to abandon its advocacy of a two-state solution, an idea that has become little more than a fig leaf for the United States and other great powers to hide behind while they allow Israel to proceed with de facto apartheid.
  • Some will object that such a shift in strategy would undercut the hard-won consensus, rooted in decades of activism and international law, that the Palestinians have a right to their own state. That consensus, however, has produced little for the Palestinians. Countless UN resolutions have failed to stop Israeli settlements or gain Palestinians a state, so they wouldn’t be losing much. And in a one-state solution worthy of the name, Palestinians would win full equality under the law, so they would be gaining a great deal. 
  • A poll conducted last year by the University of Maryland found that Americans were roughly evenly split between supporting a two-state solution and supporting a one-state solution with equal rights for all inhabitants. Yet when asked what they preferred if a two-state solution were not possible (which it isn’t), the status quo or one state with equal rights, they chose the latter by a two-to-one margin. 
  • Israelis would benefit from a shift to such a state, as well. They, too, would gain security, stability, and growth, while also escaping international isolation and reversing the moral rot that the occupation has produced in Israeli society. At the same time, they would maintain connections to historical and religious sites in the West Bank. Most Israelis would far prefer to perpetuate the status quo. But that is just not possible. Israel cannot continue to deny the rights of millions of Palestinians indefinitely and expect to remain a normal member of the international community.
  • not only a new state but also a new constitution. That would both demonstrate their commitment to democracy and highlight Israel’s lack of the same. When the country was founded in 1948, Zionist leaders were trying to expedite the arrival of more Jews, prevent the return of Palestinians, and seize as much land as possible. They had no interest in defining citizenship criteria, rights, or constraints on government power. So instead of writing a constitution, the Jewish state instituted a series of “basic laws” in an ad hoc fashion, and these have acquired some constitutional weight over time.
  • Israelis and Palestinians should work together to craft a constitution that would uphold the rights of all.
  • despite national narratives and voices on either side that claim otherwise, both peoples have historical ties to the land
  • A new constitution could offer citizenship to all the people currently living in the land between the river and the sea and to Palestinian refugees and would create pathways for immigrants from elsewhere to become citizens. All citizens would enjoy full civil and political rights, including the freedom of movement, religion, speech, and association. And all would be equal before the law: the state would be forbidden from discriminating on the basis of ethnicity or religion.
  • they would be subject to a very high bar for amendment—say, a requirement of at least 90 percent approval in the legislative branch. This would ensure that basic rights could not be altered by means of a simple majority and would prohibit any one group from using a demographic advantage to alter the nature of the state.
  • the new state would also need a truth-and-reconciliation process focused on restorative justice
  • How many more decades of failure must we endure before we can safely conclude that partition is a dead end?
Ed Webb

Jordan's worst nightmare could be yet to come if US embassy moves to Jerusalem | Middle... - 1 views

www.middleeasteye.net/...assy-lose-it-forever-549298505

Jordan Israel Palestine MEPP Jerusalem diplomacy Trump politics

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Trump’s repeated vows to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem has disproportionately upset the Jordanian government which, at the moment, has no shortage of crises.
  • Key to understanding Jordan’s anxiety is the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty - sometimes called the Wadi Araba Treaty because of where it was signed – signed in October 1994 which stated that Israel would respect the special role that Jordan had historically played in Jerusalem’s holy places and, further, would give priority to the kingdom’s role during final status negotiations.
  • Israel also agreed at the time to refrain from changing – either geographically or demographically - the status of the holy city before reaching at a final agreement to which Jordan was a party.
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  • When Jordan annexed the West Bank in April 1950, Jerusalem became an integral part of the country whose constitution prohibits relinquishing or ceding any part of its territories.And even after Israel’s occupation of Jerusalem in 1967, Jordan maintained the right to oversee the city’s holy Islamic and Christian places. To this very day, the Jordanian Ministry of Awqaf (Endowments) continues to provide custodianship and services at Al-Aqsa Mosque and other religious places in Jerusalem.
  • Jerusalem’s legal and political status constitutes an important strategic file as far as the Jordanian regime is concerned. If the US changes the city’s status, from a Jordanian perspective, that would mean that the very mediator and guarantor of the Wadi Araba agreement is taking unilateral measures to change the status of a disputed territory over which negotiations have not yet been finalised
  • Jordan is the most anxious party in the region as a result of Trump’s pledges with regard to move the US embassy, a measure which would imply US acknowledgment that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel
  • recognition like this of Jerusalem as the Israel capital would breach the 1994 peace agreement, destroy all peace efforts and fatally end the final status negotiations in which the city is one of the most prominent and most crucial issues
  • the Al-Aqsa intifada in 2000 erupted and raged on for several years because of the holy city. The uprising saw the collapse of the Oslo agreement with the termination of the geographical designation of the West Bank territories into A, B and C as well as the unilateral decision to withdraw Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip without negotiations
  • Jordan is keen to avoid more chaos in the region, but especially because a large proportion of Jordanian citizens have Palestinian roots and are linked, through family and tribal ties, to Palestinians living in the West Bank
  • moving the embassy would breach the Jordanian-Israeli agreement that was signed thanks to US mediation and sponsorship. It would render final status negotiations into absurdity because the most important issue – Jerusalem - would have been settled as a fait accompli by the Israelis and the Americans
Ed Webb

The battle for Area C - Features - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...201289105546220691.html

occupiedterritories Israel Palestine israelpalestine MEPP

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Despite being inhabited since before the creation of Israel, Palestinian Susya isn't connected either to the electricity or water grids, and lacks school and health facilities. Israel has deemed the village "illegal".
  • In June, the Israeli Supreme Court issued six immediate demolition orders for Palestinian Susya. The destruction of more than 50 structures - including residential homes, water cisterns and solar energy panels - could happen any day now, and would effectively wipe the entire village off the map.
  • the village's fate is similar to nearly all other Palestinian communities located in what is known as "Area C" of the occupied West Bank. Area C was first delineated in the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self Government Arrangements, otherwise known as the Oslo I agreement, which divided West Bank territory into three separate categories. Area A is under the control of the Palestinian Authority and encompasses most of the major Palestinian cities. Area B comprises most Palestinian rural communities and is under Palestinian administrative and joint Palestinian-Israeli security control. Area C is under complete Israeli administrative and military control, and comprises all Israeli settlements - including roads, buffer zones, and other infrastructure - and Israeli military training areas. Less than five per cent of the Palestinian population of the West Bank lives in Area C - yet it covers more than 60 per cent of the Palestinian territory.
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  • Article 27 of this agreement stipulated that in Area C, "powers and responsibilities related to the sphere of Planning and Zoning will be transferred gradually to Palestinian jurisdiction" by 1999. But this transfer of powers has yet to be implemented.
  • In February, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu established a committee to determine the legality of Israeli settlement outposts in the West Bank. Known as the Levy Committee, it was composed of two Israeli former judges and an Israeli foreign ministry attorney, all major supporters of the settlement project. The committee concluded that Israel was not an occupying power in the West Bank, that Israeli settlements were legal and that the government should legalise outposts. These findings have led many Israeli, Palestinian and international analysts to conclude that Israel is preparing to annex parts of the West Bank, namely Area C.
  • "People are living their lives above themselves, for the betterment of the nation of Israel, not just because 'here's where I can live'," said Ariela Deitch, a mother of six and resident of the Israeli outpost of Migron.
  • An estimated 3,000 demolition orders remain in place in Palestinian communities of Area C. International agencies are becoming increasingly involved in projects in the area, in what appears to be an attempt to safeguard Palestinians against forced displacement.
  • some 150,000 Palestinians live in Area C, where they face severe restrictions on planning, building and accessing services and the area's natural resources. It is estimated that more than 350,000 Jewish-Israeli settlers now also live in Area C, an increase of more than 15,000 in the past year alone, in contravention of international law
  • "Do you really believe these conspiracy theories that Israel wants to depopulate area C? I mean, it's rubbish," Regev told Al Jazeera. "We are prepared to continue peace negotiations with the Palestinians and hopefully sign new agreements. But in the absence of signing new agreements, it's clear that Israel remains to have jurisdiction in Area C."
Ed Webb

Path to Success for One Palestinian Hacker: Publicly Owning Mark Zuckerberg | Threat Le... - 0 views

www.wired.com/...all

Palestine Israel israelpalestine hacking hackers Facebook

shared by Ed Webb on 31 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • It was August 14, and Shreateh had just reached halfway around the world to pull off a prank that would make him the most famous hacker in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. He’d discovered a Facebook bug that would allow him to post to another user’s wall even if he wasn’t on the user’s friends list. Demonstrating the bug on Zuckerberg was a last resort: He first reported the vulnerability to Facebook’s bug bounty program, which usually pays $500 for discoveries like his. But Facebook dismissed his report out of hand, and to this day refuses to pay the bounty for the security hole, which it has now fixed. Where Facebook failed, though, techies from across the world stepped in to fix, crowdfunding a $13,000 reward for Shreateh. Now that money, and Shreateh’s notoriety, is about to launch the former construction worker into a new life. He’s using the funds to buy a new laptop and launch a cybersecurity service where websites will be able to request “ethical hacking” to identify their vulnerabilities. And he’s started a six-month contract with a nearby university to find bugs as part of their information security unit. He hacks and reports flaws on other universities’ sites in his free time.
  • The West Bank is no easy place to be a hacker, or to do anything in the technology sphere. The occupied region depends on Israel for electricity, water and telecommunications, including the sluggish Internet that crawls into the South Hebron Hills. Shreateh has a well and three water tanks on his roof because Yatta only receives several days of running water every few months. Blackouts are common, and the town often goes without electricity for whole days in the winter. Partly to blame is a complex system established by the Oslo accords that splits the West Bank into three zones under different combinations of Palestinian and Israeli control. “It’s like Swiss cheese,” says George Khadder, a tech entrepreneur who worked in Silicon Valley for 13 years. He sketches how Zones A, B and C weave in, out and around each other, with chunks of Israeli settlement territory in between. “The West Bank is like an archipelago, in terms of contiguity and services. This is absolutely a problem.” This access gap is clear on the drive from Jerusalem to Yatta, which requires passing through a military checkpoint that bars Shreateh from entering Israel. The road to Yatta passes several Israeli settlements, sprawling over hilltops with their separate telecom systems, brightly lit streets and green, well-watered lawns. “The dogs in Israel drink more water than Palestinians,” the taxi driver laughs.
  • Shreateh has his own website and 44,156 followers on Facebook, many of whom spam him with questions about hacking into their boyfriends’ profiles or raising their exam grades online. Shreateh ignores them. “I am an ethical hacker,” he says. “I don’t damage or destroy.” That makes him different from some other Palestinian hackers. The same month as Shreateh’s Facebook prank, hacktivists hijacked Google’s Palestine domain, redirecting it to a page with a Rihanna background song and written message: “uncle google we say hi from palestine to remember you that the country in google map not called israel. its called Palestine” This month, another group called KDMS hacked the websites of security companies AVG and Avira, among other companies, redirecting to a site displaying the Palestinian flag, a graphic of Palestinian land loss, and a similar message: “we want to tell you that there is a land called Palestine on the earth,” it read in part. “this land has been stolen by Zionist.’
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  • As for Israeli hackers, he sees them as inferior, babied by the privilege of living without occupation. “Israeli hackers all come from university classes. They have companies and courses to teach them,” Shreateh scoffs. “Palestinian hackers come from Google search and YouTube videos. We all learned on our own.”
Ed Webb

'Killing a King' Examines Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin - The New York Times - 3 views

www.nytimes.com/...sination-of-yitzhak-rabin.html

Israel Palestine israelpalestine MEPP Rabin assassination history memory book review

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • “For decades, the protection unit was certain of only one thing when it came to assassination scenarios: The shooter would be an Arab,”
  • Shabak had begun watching the settler fringe, particularly in the Hebron area, where extremists lionized Baruch Goldstein, who had slaughtered 29 Palestinians at worship in February 1994. These gun-toting settlers in knitted skullcaps viewed Rabin’s decision to transfer parts of the West Bank to Palestinian control as an existential threat — a forfeiture of their biblical birthright
  • Members of the mainstream right-wing Likud Party had joined in many of these antigovernment protests. At one particularly raucous rally just after the signing of the Oslo II accords in September 1995, Benjamin Netanyahu — then an opposition leader and today prime minister — stood on a balcony with other hard-line leaders in Jerusalem’s Zion Square as the crowd below chanted “Death to Rabin.” Ephron notes that Netanyahu seemed “unfazed by the mayhem — even as protesters threw burning torches at the line of policemen.” When he spoke, Netanyahu excoriated Rabin, accusing him of having to rely on Israeli-Arab political parties for support
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  • Amir, Ephron explains, managed to “tip the balance in the right’s favor by killing the one man who had both a vision for peace with the Palestinians and the public confidence required to keep it going, even in the face of terrorist attacks.”
Ed Webb

This Palestinian Brewery Is Resisting Military Occupation, One Beer at a Time - MUNCHIES - 0 views

munchies.vice.com/...-occupation-one-beer-at-a-time

beer economy Palestine israelpalestine occupation

shared by Ed Webb on 19 May 18 - No Cached
  • Palestine’s Taybeh Brewery successfully transported 50-kilogram kegs of beer across military checkpoints on donkeys while an increasingly violent and repressive occupation escalated around them
  • “I don’t think that any brewery in the world has ever had to take beer through checkpoints on a donkey. We did it. Because there was a bar that said, ‘I want Taybeh.’ The roads were closed and no cars could pass.”
  • 25 years ago, during a period of optimism following the Oslo peace accords, the Khoury family returned to their homeland from Boston to open the first microbrewery in the Middle East. Their goal was to invest in and boost the local economy by introducing new styles of hand-crafted, micro-brewed beers. In 1994, the brewery bottled its first batch of beer—500 liters in total.
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  • the company produces 600,000 liters of beer each year and exports to 12 countries— including Japan, Germany, and the US
  • “We were determined to show the whole world that Palestinians are normal and want the right to practice our daily needs—to have a beer, to go to school, to have running water,”
  • The inequalities of water access on Israeli settlements, built on land captured in the 1967 war, can be extreme. Despite the population nearly doubling, Palestinians today survive on the amount of water allocated to them in the Interim Agreement of 1995. Contrary to the unfulfilled promise of a ‘temporary’ 5-year period before the establishment of a Palestinian state, Israel continues to retain 87% of water for exclusive use, controlling every well and pipeline in the West Bank. Since beer is almost 95% water, Taybeh brewery struggles under these restrictions.
  • “We have three settlements on Taybeh land and they have priority access to the water. We cannot schedule any brewing days because we never know when water will be available,”
  • The brewery had to purchase tanks of water to produce beer. Canaan says the cost was 7 times the amount what an Israeli company would have paid. “It limits our potential for expansion, it limits our export market. We simply cannot produce more beer,”
  • Taybeh has figured out how to eke out beer from less than 4 liters, reusing the water multiple times in production
  • “Because we’re under occupation, we can’t go through any road, we have to get permits, we have to go through commercial checkpoints, we have to pay extra fees for storage and security checks,” Canaan says.As a result, getting beer from the brewery to the port costs twice as much as getting it from the port to Italy does.
  • Taybeh brewery sells their beer as a product of Palestine all over the world—including Israel. The only exception is the United States. Since they don’t recognize Palestine as a country, Taybeh was made to change the label to ‘a product of the West Bank.’
  • “With Taybeh, you are getting the name Palestine, and a high-quality product out there. You are changing the way people see Palestinians.”
  • In February, Taybeh was expecting a bottle shipment from Eastern Europe. Israeli breweries also had an order on the same vessel. “We both had the same documents, same quality, same company. Everything was exactly the same. Yet, the Israeli breweries received their bottles roughly 2 months before we received ours,” Madees says. “Doing business in this country is unlike anywhere else in the world. It’s more difficult, and every year it gets worse and worse.
  • Canaan and Madees are children of the Intifada: the lost generation. Living in Taybeh, on average it took them 2 hours to get to school in Ramallah—normally a 20-minute drive. “I’ve been through a lot on the way there, from getting tear gassed, shot at and beaten, to getting psychologically tortured by the soldiers and having to stand up on one foot, take off my shirt and so on,” Canaan recalls.
  • every single element of the brewing process is compromised by the occupation
Ed Webb

25 years on, remembering the path to peace for Jordan and Israel - 0 views

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shared by Ed Webb on 02 Nov 19 - Cached
  • When the secret talks between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) were divulged in 1993, Jordan’s King Hussein felt betrayed. For years he had been secretly meeting with the Israelis to broker peace; now he discovered that they were secretly meeting with the Palestinians and making a deal without consulting him. The PLO, fellow Arabs, had not consulted the king either. He was devastated.
  • In September 1993, Rabin secretly came across the border from Eilat to Aqaba to address King Hussein’s concerns and assure the Jordanians that they would be kept informed about the future of the Oslo process. The meeting was arranged by Efraim Halevy, the deputy director of the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad. Hussein had been dealing with the Mossad and Halevy for years as a trusted clandestine back-channel
  • Clinton supported the peace process enthusiastically. A Jordanian treaty would get his support and help him sell the revival of bilateral relations with Jordan to Americans still angry over the Iraq war, especially in Congress
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  • Jordan had long held back from a peace treaty with Israel because it did not want to get in front of the Palestinians. It did not want a separate treaty with Israel, like President Anwar Sadat had done for Egypt. But now Arafat was engaging in direct talks with the Israelis to make a peace agreement: Jordan would not be alone. Even the Syrians were engaging with Israel via the Americans. Jordan was free to negotiate a peace treaty with Israel after decades of clandestine contacts begun by Hussein’s grandfather King Abdullah without fear of a backlash from the other Arabs
  • Jordan and Israel would keep the Americans informed, but the king did not want Washington using its leverage in a negotiation process given the Americans’ closer ties to Israel.
  • Rabin had met with the king secretly for almost two decades
  • The Rabin-Hussein relationship was crucial to the success of the negotiations. Both trusted the other. Hussein saw Rabin as a military man who had the security issues under his command. He was convinced that he had a unique opportunity to get a peace treaty and Rabin was central to the opening.
  • The king also saw the negotiation process as almost more of a religious experience than a diplomatic solution to the passions of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He spoke movingly of restoring peace between the children of Abraham. He wanted a warm peace, not the cold peace between Egypt and Israel.
  • Jerusalem was also a core issue for the Hashemite family. Despite losing physical control of East Jerusalem in 1967, the king had retained influence in the Muslim institutions that administered the holy sites in the city. The preservation of Jordan’s role in the administration of the third holiest city of Islam was a very high priority of Hussein then, and still is for his son King Abdullah today
  • Clinton had studied the Jordanian wish list carefully. The top priority was for debt forgiveness, amounting to $700 million dollars. Clinton told Hussein that this would be a tough lift on Capitol Hill. If Hussein would meet Rabin at a public ceremony in the White House hosted by the president, Clinton said he could get the debt relief and progress on Jordan’s other requests.
  • The king told his aides that this was the best meeting he had had with an American president since his first with Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1959. On July 9, the king told the Jordanian parliament that it was time for an end to the state of war with Israel and for a public meeting with the Israeli leadership. He wanted the meeting to take place in the region.
  • The Jordanian and Israeli peace teams met publicly on the border to start the rollout, followed by a foreign ministers meeting at the Dead Sea in Jordan — a way to bring Peres into the photo op but not the negotiations.
  • The Americans got a copy only on the night before the White House ceremony.
  • On July 25, 1994, Clinton read the declaration on the White House lawn and Rabin and Hussein signed it. It terminated the state of war. Israel formally undertook to respect the special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in the Muslim holy shrines in Jerusalem. All three gave speeches, but the king’s address got the most attention. His speech included a clear and unqualified statement that the state of war was over. He spoke of the realization of peace as the fulfillment of his life-long dream.
  • Clinton spoke of the king’s extraordinary courage in pursuit of peace. He compared him to his grandfather, who had been assassinated for his talks with Israel
  • Rabin and Hussein addressed a joint session of Congress. Hussein spoke about his grandfather’s commitment to peace. “I have pledged my life to fulfilling his dream.” Both received standing ovations. Behind the scenes, Halevy was lobbying Congress for debt relief. He returned to the region on the royal aircraft with the king and queen.
  • Teams from the two countries met every day, mostly at the crown prince’s house in Aqaba. Hassan supervised the day-to-day talks for his brother.
  • The toughest issues were land and water.
  • The final issues were addressed at another Rabin-Hussein summit meeting in Amman on the evening of October 16. The two leaders got down on their hands and knees to pour over a large map of the entire border from north to south and personally delineated the line. Two small areas got special treatment: Israel would lease the two areas from Jordan so Israeli farmers could continue access to their cultivation. By 4am, it was done.
  • On October 26, 1994, Clinton witnessed the signing of the treaty on the border by the prime ministers of Israel and Jordan. It was only the second visit to Jordan by a sitting American president
  • Many Jordanians felt it was dishonorable to make peace with Israel while the occupation of the West Bank continued. Some argue that it legitimates the Israeli occupation. It has gotten progressively more unpopular in the 25 years since the signing ceremony
  • Two years later, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dispatched a Mossad hit team to Amman to poison a Hamas leader. The botched murder attempt created a crisis in the new peace, and Halevy had to be called back from his new job in Brussels as ambassador to the European Union to smooth out the disaster and get the Mossad team released. He would then be appointed the head of the Mossad.
  • Hussein never trusted or respected Netanyahu after it, and the peace has been cold ever since
  • Hussein’s strategic goal of restoring bilateral relations with the United States was achieved
  • in December 1999, I traveled with Clinton and three former presidents to attend Hussein’s funeral in Amman in a strong demonstration of America’s commitment to Jordan.
  • The Trump administration has tilted dramatically toward Israel on all the issues that concern Jordanians about the future of the Palestinian issue, especially the status of Jerusalem. The movement of the American embassy to Jerusalem was a particularly important shock to the peace treaty. If Israel begins to annex parts of the West Bank, as Netanyahu has promised, the Jordanians will be in a corner. The treaty may be more endangered today than ever before.
Ed Webb

Three Decades After his Death, Kahane's Message of Hate is More Popular Than Ever - MERIP - 0 views

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Israel analysis politics terrorism extremism

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Feb 21 - Cached
  • on November 5, 1990, Rabbi Meir Kahane was assassinated in New York City, a seminal event in the annals of American and Israeli history. Years after his death, Kahane’s killing is considered the first terror attack of the group that would later coalesce into al-Qaeda.
  • Many of Kahane’s American acolytes followed him to Israel, including top JDL fundraiser and Yeshiva University provost Emanuel Rackman, who took over as rector, and then chancellor, of Israel’s Bar Ilan University. Under Rackman’s tutelage, Bar Ilan’s Law School became an incubator for the Israeli far-right. The most infamous of these students was Yigal Amir. Inspired by the Goldstein massacre, Amir assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, dealing a death blow to Israel’s liberal Zionist camp. Amir carried out the murder on the five-year anniversary of Kahane’s killing.
  • The victims of JDL-linked terrorist attacks in the United States were usually innocent bystanders: the drummer in a rock band who lost a leg when a bomb blew up the Long Island home of an alleged Nazi war criminal; the Boston cop who was seriously injured during his attempt to dispose of another bomb intended for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee; the elderly lady who died of smoke inhalation in her Brooklyn flat above a Lebanese restaurant torched after its owners were accused of sympathies with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO); the young Jewish secretary who was asphyxiated when another fire burned through the Manhattan office of a talent agency that promoted performances of Soviet ballet troupes.
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  • Kahanists are the FBI’s prime suspects in the 1985 assassination of popular Palestinian-American activist Alex Odeh who died in a bombing outside Los Angeles because he called for a two-state solution (which became the official policy of the US government less than a decade later).[2] Odeh’s murder had far-reaching implications, scaring off a generation of Arab-American activists from advocating on behalf of Palestinians.
  • even many sectors of the Israeli right were embarrassed by Kahane’s shameless racism, and by the end of his first term in 1988 he was banned from running again.
  • Six years later, in 1994, the Israeli government, then led by the Labor Party, declared his Kach party a terrorist organization. But by that point, the Kahane movement had already been active for over a quarter of a century, leaving a wake of destruction. To date it has produced more than 20 killers and taken the lives of over 60 people, most of them Palestinians.[3] Credible allegations put the death toll at well over double that number, but even the lower confirmed figure yields a higher body count than any other Jewish faction in the modern era.
  • For decades, Kahanists—as followers of Kahane are called in Israel—have repeatedly attempted to leverage their violence to trigger a wider war and bog Israel down in perpetual armed conflict with its neighbors. And once Israel’s military might is truly unassailable, Kahanists say, Jewish armies must march across the Middle East and beyond, destroying churches and mosques and forcing their Christian and Muslim worshippers to abandon their beliefs or die at the sword.
  • Just months after the Oslo Accords were signed in Washington, DC on the White House lawn, a former candidate for Knesset in Kahane’s Kach party, Baruch Goldstein, committed the largest mass murder by a single person in Israeli history, shooting dead 29 Palestinians and wounding over 100 more at a mosque in Hebron. During the protests that followed, the Israeli Defense Forces killed perhaps two dozen more Palestinians. Exactly 40 days later, at the end of the traditional Muslim mourning period, Hamas began its retaliatory campaign of suicide bombings. Over the next three years this campaign would claim over 100 Israeli lives and harden many Jewish hearts against the prospect of peace with Palestinians. Today, Kahanists can convincingly claim credit for crippling the fragile peace process while it was still in its infancy.
  • In Hebron in 1983, on the Jewish holiday of Purim, Kahanist Israel Fuchs sprayed a passing Palestinian car with bullets. In response, Israel’s defense minister ordered Fuchs’s Kahanist settlement razed to the ground. A decade later in 1994, when Goldstein carried out his massacre, also on Purim, Israel’s defense minister put Hebron’s Palestinian residents under curfew and ordered the local Palestinian commercial district locked and bolted. The market has been shuttered ever since. Last year, Israel’s defense minister announced that the market would be refurbished and repopulated—by Jewish residents. On the same day, the state renovated nearby Kahane Park, where Goldstein is entombed, and where Kahanists gather every year to celebrate Purim and the carnage Goldstein wrought.
  • Kahane had spent the previous 22 years calling for Israel’s parliament to be dissolved and replaced with rabbinic rule over a Jewish theocracy, based on the strictest interpretations of the Torah and Talmud. He openly incited the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians—and all other non-Jews who refused to accept unvarnished apartheid—from Israel and the territories it occupied. He outdid all other Israeli eliminationists with his insistence that killing those he identified as Israel’s enemies was not only a strategic necessity, but an act of worship.[1] His ideology continues to resonate: In the September 2019 elections to Israel’s parliament the explicitly Kahanist Jewish Power Party (Otzma Yehudit) got 83,609 votes, putting it in tenth place in a crowded field of over 30 parties.
  • Both American-born followers of Kahane, Leitner and Ben Yosef went from armed attacks against Palestinians to court room advocates for their fellow religious extremists. Both enlisted at Bar Ilan Law School after serving short prison sentences. Together with his wife Nitzana Darshan, who he met there, Leitner established the highly profitable Israel-based lawfare group Shurat HaDin or Israel Law Center (ILC). After Ben Yosef earned his law degree at Bar Ilan, his American allies founded the Association Center for Civil Justice (ACCJ), a US-based lawfare group that has earned millions of dollars and has for years funneled significant sums to Fuchs, Ben Yosef and other Kahanists.
  • After Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995, his Labor-led government was replaced by the secular right-wing Likud party, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who promptly appointed ex-Kahanists Tzahi HaNegbi and Avigdor Liberman to cabinet positions. But that did not satisfy the appetite of the Kahanists, who resolved to coax the Likud even further to the right. Founded by longtime Kahane supporter Shmuel Sackett, the Likud’s Jewish Leadership faction succeeded in catapulting its candidate Moshe Feiglin into the role of deputy speaker of the Knesset where he called on the government to “concentrate” the civilian population of Gaza into “tent camps” until they could be forcefully relocated.
  • Today, prior membership in the Kahanist camp no longer carries any stigma within the Likud.
  • the original Kach core group has rebranded itself to sidestep Israeli law, now calling itself Jewish Power, and are consistently courted by the rest of the Israeli right
  • Kahanists have had even greater success penetrating the halls of power at the local level where their representatives on Jerusalem city council have been included in the governing coalition since 2013. In 2014, Kahanist Councillor Aryeh King—now deputy mayor—used widely-understood religious references to incite an assembly of religious Jews to kill Palestinians. Later that very night, a group of religious Jews did exactly that, kidnapping and beating Palestinian teen Mohammad Abu Khdeir, forcing gasoline down his throat and torching him to death from the inside out.
  • After Kahane’s death, top Chabad rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, also an American immigrant to Israel, inherited Kahane’s position as the most unapologetically racist rabbi in the country. In 2010 Ginsburgh helped publish an influential and vicious religious tract authored by one of his leading disciples called The King’s Torah, which sanctions organ harvesting from non-Jews and infanticide (if a Jew suspects that the child will one day constitute a threat).[9] Ginsburgh’s frequent tributes to Kahane’s memory, including repeated proclamations that “Kahane was right” have cemented the loyalty of third-generation Kahanists, including the latter’s namesake grandson, settler youth leader Meir Ettinger.
  • Thirty years ago, even if Israeli rabbis thought like Kahane and Ginsburgh they would not dare to speak these sentiments out loud, much less publish and promote them. Under Netanyahu’s rule, however, such sentiments are routinely supported financially and politically by the institutions of the Israeli state. In 2019, Israel’s education minister presented Ginsburgh with the Torah Creativity award at an annual event sponsored by his ministry.
  • The principles that Rabbi Meir Kahane popularized—that liberal democracy is an undesirable alien idea and that non-Jews must be driven down, and preferably out of Greater Israel altogether—have seeped deep into mainstream Israeli society.
Ed Webb

The Israeli right's new vision of Jewish political supremacy - 0 views

www.972mag.com/t-jewish-supremacy-segregation

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shared by Ed Webb on 27 Oct 20 - Cached
  • The settlement project's success has led to an intertwined Jewish and Palestinian population, reviving the problem Israel tried to solve through expulsion in 1948. Now, the right's priority is segregation.
  • a new trend has emerged within the dominant stream of the Israeli political right: the nation, rather than the land, is now at the heart of right-wing discourse
  • This has manifested in the progression of anti-democratic legislation, incitement against Palestinian citizens of Israel and left-wing organizations and activists, and in emphasizing the idea of the “Jewish state.”
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  • The culmination of this process was the passing of the Jewish Nation-State Law in the Knesset in July 2018.
  • The Zionist project is committed to a well-defined ethnic-religious group, at a defined point in space and time. In that, Zionism is not unique, of course: the commitment of nationalistic movements in general is limited and defined a priori, and therefore exclusion, marginalization of, and separation from the Other (not to mention expulsion of that Other) are inherent to them and are their by-products
  • why the Jewish Nation-State Law was enacted 70 years after the state’s establishment rather than immediately thereafter
  • The common explanation for the rise of this new discourse is that years of occupation have weakened liberal values in Israel, and the nationalist right-wing governments are stronger than ever. As such, the right is now able to implement its ethnocentric and anti-liberal ideology and weaken the democratic character of the state’s institutions.
  • the nationalist discourse serves to shore up a new electoral project led by the right-wing political parties.
  • The logic is simple: if it is no longer effective to talk about the indivisible land (as belonging to the Jews), let us instead talk about the indivisible nation and mark external and internal enemies. According to this understanding, the wave of anti-democratic legislation, especially the Jewish Nation-State Law, serves as propaganda that bolsters the coalescing of the right wing around an ethnocentric agenda. In other words, the messianic-nationalist energy is directed inwards rather than outwards.
  • a state that grants a privileged status to Jews is no longer regarded as a self-evident phenomenon
  • the old tools that served to maintain Jewish political supremacy are no longer sufficient, and there is a need for active separation and active legitimization. Separation is no longer the result of history; rather, it must be inscribed on the political body by law and politics and must be enforced.
  • For a short time, from the beginning of the 1990s until the beginning of the Netanyahu era in 2009, it seemed possible to talk about the right of self-determination for both peoples, and the two-state solution appeared to be at hand.
  • The notion of “two states for two peoples” that took root in the collective Israeli consciousness as an optimal, realistic, and implementable solution to the conflict created an illusion of separation between the two populations — as if they were separate political entities. Although this separation was to be fully implemented at some point in the future and was repeatedly postponed, Israelis felt that the two-state paradigm implied that the Palestinians in the occupied territories were over “there,” on the other side of the border, on the way to their independent state with an anthem, a flag, and independent prisons, outside of “our” (i.e. of the Israeli-Jewish national collective) responsibility. Israel’s decision to restrict Palestinians’ freedom of movement between the territories and Israel during the First Intifada, and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority pursuant to the Oslo Accords, contributed to this experience of separation.
  • With the promise of the preservation of a Jewish majority within the ’67 boundaries — albeit through a future solution not yet fully implemented on the ground — it appeared easier for Israel to move, however slowly and tentatively, along the liberal path in their attitude toward Palestinian citizens. This tendency expressed itself in the “constitutional revolution” and the policies of the Rabin government in the early to mid-1990s. These policies strengthened the “democratic” aspect of the “Jewish and democratic” equation and began to advance the status of the Palestinians as citizens with equal rights, even if only rhetorically.
  • That era, which was one of partial optimism for Palestinian citizens and for human and civil rights in Israel, continued until the beginning of the 21st century, when the Second Intifada broke out during Ehud Barak’s government and Israeli police shot dead 13 Palestinian citizens as they were protesting in October 2000. This event marked a new rupture regarding the place of Palestinians in Israeli society. A few years later, with Netanyahu at the helm, a tendency to continually incite against Palestinian citizens of Israel developed, and the cautious optimism evaporated.
  • The new nationalist/ethno-religious discourse, and in particular the new law, which has been assiduously promoted for many years, is not merely a replay of history or its direct continuation. They are not merely expressions of anti-liberal and ethnocentric trends enabled by the strengthening of the right, or a mere reaction to the Palestinians’ vision documents. And they are not merely intended to create further political bias or to redefine the limits of political legitimacy. Rather, they constitute an innovation in the Israeli right’s political project, by serving the need to actively and legally enshrine Jewish privileges, despite the fact that these exist anyway, and to give them a new constitutional framing and anchoring. This effort has successfully rallied a significant part of the Jewish-Israeli population.
  • two groups figure prominently between the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea: the Palestinian citizens of Israel and the Jewish settlers in the West Bank
  • The crumbling of the two-state idea and the blurring of the Green Line led to a de facto single geopolitical entity in which both populations are mixed to some degree. The sharp distinction between the Palestinians “there” and the Israeli Jews “here” became hazy. Before, the two-state solution created the illusion of separation into two independent entities and removed the Palestinians from the Israeli political awareness; now, even this “calming” sensation diminished. Before, it could be claimed that the Palestinians in the territories were headed for their own separate and independent state; now, it has become clear that the territories are here, in a de facto Greater Israel, and so are the Palestinians.
  • The Jewish settlers, for their part, strengthened their presence in the occupied territories, and are no longer marginal or temporary inhabitants. The more their presence in the territories is perceived as natural, the more they bring the territories into Israel, creating a new geographic unity.
  • the Israeli right has had to pay a significant price for this success: in this unified space (unified only for Jews because Palestinians cannot move freely within it), the Jewish majority is no longer self-evident. The settlement project brought back the problem that Zionism solved through expulsion in 1948.
  • Expelling the Palestinians from the territories is no longer an option that can be openly discussed; neither can the Palestinians be offered full citizenship (though this possibility can be bandied about for propaganda reasons). The first possibility is untenable because of international pressure, the second because of the Jews. We are stuck in the situation that had existed during the British Mandate: one geopolitical entity with two peoples mixed together. This time, however, we are not under the Mandate, but under Israeli rule.
  • All of this helps clarify the role of the new nationalist/ethno-religious discourse: it is a discourse of segregation.
  • with the crumbling of the two-state paradigm, the blurring of the Green Line and the continuing effort to extend the Jewish state over the entirety of Greater Israel, the settler right sees a need to conceptualize Jewish privileges, this time within a patently non-democratic regime between the river and the sea, which is expected to be based on a Jewish minority. The 1948 expulsion, which was a solution to the demographic problem, is no longer feasible, and therefore the need arises to establish a new-fangled apartheid regime. The Jewish Nation-State Law embodies the core of this attempt
  • In contrast to the classical discourse of Greater Israel, which was focused on “unifying” two separate regimes on two separate tracts of land — Israel and the occupied territories — the new discourse is an attempt to push for the legal segregation of two populations intermixed within the same territorial framework.
  • The segregation inspired by the law is not a division between “here” and “there” but between “us” and “them” — between Jews and Palestinians, no matter where they live between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. It is not based on dividing the territory into two territories, but dividing the two people within one single territory.
  • True, the two-state paradigm is also a paradigm of separation, but it is a separation of two distinct political frameworks. Apartheid, on the other hand, separates populations that share a territory within one comprehensive political sovereign framework. Acting within a unified entity, such separation is surgical — i.e. violent and destructive.
  • the question of the Jewish democratic state and that of Greater Israel — the internal question and the external question — become two aspects of the same project: to legitimize the privilege of Jews over Palestinians between the river and the sea.
  • With the blurring of the Green Line and the return of the demographic threat, the logic of separation from the Palestinians has been abandoned and replaced with the logic of a segregating regime. It is a regime in which one group clearly dominates another; in which that domination is comprehensive and permanent, rather than temporary and security-based; and which is maintained by a legal system and reinforced by a violent and forceful state.
  • This dominating logic and the fact that the plan arranges for segregation, not separation, is clear when looking at the map included with the proposal. The Palestinian entity is surrounded on all sides by Israeli sovereignty: in the air and on the ground, from the north, south, east, and west. Segregation based on ethnicity, religion, and nationality, rather than on territory, is complemented by two other aspects in the plan, reflecting the demise of the Green Line: its treatment of settlers, and of Palestinian citizens in Israel
  • the current plan discards territorial logic and treats Palestinians’ citizenship as a problem to be solved, and the status of settlers as a given and immutable fact
  • it departs from the conflict management paradigm in order to impose a one-sided American-Israeli vision to “end” the conflict, or rather eliminate it without solving it.
Ed Webb

The colonial idea that built the Palestinian Authority - 1 views

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shared by Ed Webb on 26 Jul 21 - Cached
  • On social media and in public discussions, it has become common to label the PA as “collaborators” and its security forces as the “guardian of Israeli settlements,” while ridiculing the success of the “national project” depicted by PA apologists. Perhaps most strikingly, much of the Palestinian public today openly perceives the PA as an extension of Israeli colonial rule that is incapable of advancing their struggle. And they are correct.
  • given its inability to reiterate a similar campaign of large-scale ethnic cleansing like in 1948 — due to both local resistance as well as regional and international pressures — Israel has instead embarked on multifaceted strategies of population management and control to keep the territorial-demographic equation in favor of the settler-colonial project. After the 1967 occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, the priority became to ensure that Israel could continue colonizing the land while excluding the Palestinians from power and concentrating them into tiny slots of territory.
  • A fundamental pillar of this logic was the creation of a “native” institution charged with controlling Palestinians in densely populated areas. This idea derived from many historical precedents from Africa to Southeast Asia, where colonial powers routinely invented and cultivated local authorities to sustain their rule
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  • the First Intifada, which had produced new forms of national and grassroots leadership inside the occupied territories, had gradually begun to marginalize the PLO leadership in exile. Threatened by this challenge, the PLO sought to reinstate its hegemonic position by capitalizing on the uprising and secretly negotiating a peace settlement with Israel
  • Such a conscious encounter between a national liberation movement and a colonial power is unprecedented in the history of anti-colonial struggles. The result has been disastrous on the Palestinian national fabric, depriving it of the capacity to resist Israeli policies, while granting the state a comfortable position from which to intensify the colonization of the occupied territories.
  • Almost all of the PA’s institutions, including its modes of governance and its economic policies, are specifically designed to play a counterinsurgency function to pacify Palestinians — a central task of local authorities operating under colonial rule
  • The most prominent cases of this mutual partnership are the killings of the Palestinian activists Basel Al-Araj and Nizar Banat: whereas Al-Araj was killed by Israeli soldiers in the heart of the PA-controlled Ramallah after being released from PA prison, Banat was killed by PA forces in an Israeli-controlled area of Hebron.
  • The United States and European Union helped to establish, train, and equip the security forces to focus on internal security; that is, to forcefully prevent any form of organized and effective Palestinian resistance
  • ensuring PA compliance with Israel unavoidably requires both corruption to financially incentivize the PA elite, and authoritarian rule to protect them from public opposition. The PA elite and its cronies saw in this reality a lucrative industry: foreign aid, Israeli-granted privileges, monopolies over resources, involvement in private businesses, and embezzlement of public funds became major sources of personal enrichment
  • engagement of Fatah party constituents in patronage networks
  • the PA cannot be reformed nor can it be changed; it was precisely created to function this way
Ed Webb

Making It Work From the River to the Sea - New Lines Magazine - 0 views

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shared by Ed Webb on 28 Feb 24 - No Cached
  • Israelis, enjoying vastly superior power, remain maximalist, Palestinians slightly less so. Both seek national self-determination on their own terms. But the plain reality is that they cannot both have it, because — rightly or wrongly — they both seek it in the same place. For them both to be able to achieve true and lasting national self-determination, they must do so not in 2D, cartographically, but in 3D, holographically. Say hello to nonterritorial autonomy, a long-standing but little-discussed method of managing diversity within a state by granting dispersed groups self-government on the basis of identity rather than land, while also retaining a broader structure of power sharing.
  • Overlaying two nations on one country sounds like science fiction, but that is testament to the corrosive power of the nationalist thinking that drives the two-state solution. Partition says more about the preoccupations of the chiefly American and European politicians who cling to it than it does about the aspirations or real lives of the people who will have to live in the resulting states.
  • Partition has failed almost everywhere it has been attempted. Ireland is perhaps the starkest example, but we might also consider India and Pakistan in 1947, Pakistan again and Bangladesh in 1971, Korea, Vietnam, Cyprus, Yugoslavia, Sudan and a fistful of others. Partition has perpetuated conflict and embedded trauma down the generations. Millions have died thanks to the idea that separating supposedly irreconcilable populations solves everything.
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  • Christians can get on with Muslims. Muslims can get on with Jews. Jews can get on with Christians. Israel’s nationalist schemer Avigdor Lieberman may have told The New York Times in 2006 that “[e]very country where you have two languages, two religions and two races, you have conflict,” but decent folk need not go along with him. As much as the region’s history is marked by spasms of religiously inspired violence, it is also underpinned by long centuries of not just tolerance but productive coexistence.
  • while we should strongly resist the fantasy of Palestine as paradise, we should also acknowledge that, at least until about a century ago, people generally lived the daily reality of sharing limited space more or less amicably.
  • Zionism fit into Balfour’s worldview of racial supremacy and the social ideal of what we would now call ethnic cleansing. Its exceptionalism also led, as the historian Avi Shlaim has written, to another key assumption — that Jews and Arabs occupy exclusive and antagonistic ethnic categories. Shlaim himself asserts the falsity of that assumption in his self-identification as an Arab Jew, as do other notable figures including journalist Rachel Shabi, academic Ella Shohat, author Sasson Somekh and art curator Ariella Azoulay.
  • sectarian exclusivity is not a Middle Eastern ideal. It is European.
  • a group of European Jewish journalists and political pundits, seeking safe havens, borrowed from evangelical Christian millenarianism to promote the novel idea that Jews were a nation and so deserved self-determination in a state of their own.This was political Zionism, an ideology contrasting sharply with the spiritual longing for Zion expressed in Jewish liturgy, and it emerged in a vicious era. Civilization was understood to be an achievement of white Europeans. Its apogee, the summit of human enterprise, was the advanced ability of white people to create nation-states. They governed best, and it was the natural order for everyone else to be governed.
  • Arthur Balfour — famed for endorsing Zionism on behalf of the British government in 1917 — was able to glide effortlessly from stating that “the white and black races are not born with equal capacities” to the idea that a Zionist state in Palestine would “mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body [the Jews] which is alien and even hostile.”
  • A yearning for justice — for universal civil, political and human rights under the rule of law — is what drives the one-state solution.
  • the past few years have seen a shift in Palestinian opinion away from older generations’ lingering trauma around lost land to a new focus on attaining equality of rights wherever grossly unjust conditions prevail under Israeli control.This has illuminated a long-standing slogan of liberation: “From the river to the sea” (with or without “Palestine will be free” appended). Some — wildly mistaken — choose to interpret the sentiment as genocidal, a call for the erasure of Jewish presence. Public prosecutors in Germany even tried (and failed) to criminalize it.The phrase is not new: It has been said for 60 years or more by Palestinians and Israelis alike who oppose the reality of partition
  • Faced with such absurd cruelty, “From the river to the sea” is simply a plea to be rid of it. It seeks to sweep away the divisions, to reclaim equality. It is an uncomplicated rejection of Israel’s laws of classification and segregation and an assertion of the most basic right to dignity in one state. It highlights that partition represents calamitous political failure.
  • Even with land swaps and other adjustments taken into account, supporting a “solution” that hands four-fifths of the available territory to one party seems naive at best.
  • as the lawyer and Jerusalem expert Daniel Seidemann has identified, a minimum of 200,000 Jewish Israelis would have to be displaced from the West Bank in order to ensure the territorial viability of a Palestinian state. Short of a land incursion by international forces and a yearslong deployment of peacekeeping troops, such an operation is inconceivable.
  • When “safe passage” across the 30 miles separating Gaza from the West Bank was written into the Oslo II agreement, dreamers advocated all kinds of schemes for bridges, tunnels, corridors, roads and rail lines. Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Barak proposed an elevated highway in 1999, and 20 years later U.S. President Donald Trump imagined a tunnel. Either is achievable in terms of engineering. Neither is viable in terms of security.
  • Two million Israeli citizens, roughly 20% of the population, are Palestinian Arabs. Some, or many, might accept citizenship in a partitioned Israeli state, were it to be offered. But an offer is by no means certain. If — as many in Israel want — the new state decides it has no room for Arabs, are these millions to be driven across the border into Palestine, as Muslims and Hindus were driven across the newly drawn India-Pakistan border in 1947?
  • Inasmuch as any state has a right to exist, Israel and Palestine are on an equal footing. We can consign them to unending battles over ownership of every pebble, or we can enable both to exist simultaneously in the same space — to coexist.
  • Coercion is going to be essential. In Northern Ireland in the 1990s, public weariness with fighting helped pave the way for agreement. Today, though, Palestinians and Israelis remain as determined as ever. We, the outside world, must therefore demand accountability and force a sustainable resolution
  • Nathan Thrall wrote compellingly in his 2017 book “The Only Language They Understand” about how every peace proposal has failed because, ultimately, Israel has always preferred the status quo to any other outcome. Two-state solutions would also favor Israel, on land area alone. So, for the sake of peace, we must worsen the status quo for Israel — and if the U.S. continues to refuse to impose sanctions, and the Gulf kakistocrats continue to offer deals on arms and tech, that means we must erase the Green Line.
  • Some visions of a single state between the river and the sea belong to the extremists, plotting ethnic cleansing to rid “us” of “them” once and for all; the power asymmetries mean that Israeli eliminationists, who promote annexation and demographic engineering to perpetuate Jewish supremacy, enjoy far more traction than their counterparts in southern Lebanon and Tehran. But a politically viable, morally acceptable one-state solution does not involve driving anyone into the sea.
  • Ethnic and cultural diversity is a core human good. It is moral, it benefits societies, it boosts economies, and it is worth supporting. Nonterritorial autonomy would do what the judgment in Brown v. Board of Education did: It would enable Israelis, Palestinians and the many other minorities to be integrated for the good of all whether they like it or not, protected from themselves and one another, represented by their own linked administrations, governed within a single territory. It is progressive. It takes us from zero-sum to win-win.
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