Archive for September, 2009

Beyond the two-state solution

by Editors on September 30, 2009 in Politics with 1 Comment

Osama Al Sharif - As is turns out that the Obama vision for a Middle East peace is a flop. Too
much hype and drumming about, but in the end the decade-old political stalemate
has become the proverbial elephant in the room. Washington has run out of ideas
and the Palestinians have no more chips to put on the table. The Arabs stand by
their peace initiative, a great accomplishment that was never really
appreciated by the international community. Israel, for the moment, appears
politically impregnable.

If the peace talks ever resume they will be an exercise in futility; too
much noise but no lasting breakthroughs. The stumbling blocks are real enough
and it now appears that the peace train has finally run out of steam. It’s a
great loss to all because the alternatives are horrifying. There are too many
scenarios to ponder, but none look good for the Palestinians who had struggled
heroically for decades, and against unbelievable odds, to achieve their
national aspirations.

The two-state solution, with all its drawbacks, had arrived at least twenty
years late. Even when it was seriously embraced by the United States, in the
early Bush Jr. years, the elements that were needed to put this thing together
had already unraveled.

At one point in time Israel had decided that it can give back Gaza,
negotiate over the Golan, delineate final borders with Lebanon and Jordan, but
it could never leave the West Bank, or allow the Palestinians to have their
independent state there. Whatever the Arab world was putting on the table, and
it was a lot, it could never equal in worth the territories Israel calls Judea
and Samaria. Jerusalem was always off limits.

It is a sobering reality, one that Arabs and Palestinians never fully
absorbed. It is one that Israel had invested in for decades in collusion with
the Americans. And as this reality sinks in, the daunting possibilities for the
future open up.

The demise of the peace process, the one that was launched in Madrid,
negotiated in Oslo and celebrated in the White Rose garden is dead. It is
foolish to believe otherwise. This is good news for the radicals on both sides
of the divide. The Israelis began their systematic dismantling of the peace process
right after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 by a Zionist zealot.

The Palestinians, and the Arabs behind them, hung on but failed to read the
scribbling on the wall. The election of both Ariel Sharon and George Bush in
2000 was followed by Al Aqsa Intifada and the siege of Yasser Arafat until his
mysterious death in 2004. Gaza was vacated by Sharon but was never free of
Israeli hegemony. The war on terror and Israel’s assaults on Lebanon and Gaza
left the region in tatters. The Palestinians were slowly nudged off the center
stage. Their historic tragedy of Palestine was cleverly diminished.

So it is no wonder that President Obama’s optimism, and that of the rest of
the world, vis-à-vis the prospects of realizing peace in the Middle East, was
greatly exaggerated. In truth the Road Map had become irrelevant as do all
previously agreed to understandings and agreements between Israel and the PNA.

None of the future scenarios look good or promising. Jewish settlements in
the West Bank have dynamited the foundations of the future Palestinian state.
For millions of Palestinian refugees and their host countries the gruesome
specter of resettlement is looming large. The best that the PNA can achieve is
a sort of enlarged self-rule over disjointed Palestinians enclaves with
lucrative economic incentives. Gaza is unlikely to be united, politically, with
the West Bank.

This is how the current Israeli government of Benyamin Netanyahu and his
ultra right allies see things. And this is precisely what they will keep
promoting to the Obama administration.

Countries which host large number of Palestinian refugees will reject this
scenario-as they had done for years. But the region is in disarray and no
sovereign government can survive without economic aid and political support. It
is easy to destabilize little countries, employ all sorts of pressure and
convince leaders to see things in a different light.

From Israel’s vantage point such schemes can work. Fundamental beliefs can
be amended and principles are always negotiable. Such change in perceptions is
already happening. In the view of many, Iran is more dangerous to the region
than Israel. Islamists terrorists hate both Arab governments and Israel.
America’s enemies can also be those of Arabs and Israelis. The strategic
doctrines that had governed this region for decades are shifting fast.

Israel’s vision for the future of the Middle East will likely permeate
through foreign and Arab capitals. Should we be shocked if Obama adopts
variations of this new vision soon?

Israel is an occupying power that has the force and the political backing to
maintain its occupation. The Palestinians can hardly rely on Arab support as
they fight their last political battle. Off course they could resist and they
must, but to do so they have to unite and find ways to get out of the
entanglements of almost 20 years of fruitless negotiations with their
tormentors.

Wanted: Middle East statesman

by Editors on September 30, 2009 in Politics with Comments Off

Roi Ben Yehuda - As last week’s trilateral meeting in New York showed, forces outside
the control of the offices of Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime
minister, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, have pulled
these leaders back into the peace camp.

This brought to mind a quote by the Roman statesman Seneca who once
wrote: “The fates lead him who will; him who won’t they drag.”

So, what is next for the peace process? One word: Leadership.

The historian J. Rufus Fears once noted that great leaders – from
Pericles to Lincoln to Churchill – share four characteristics. They are
anchored in principles, guided by a moral compass, posses a vision, and
have the ability to build a consensus to achieve their vision.

These are the qualities that distinguish them as statesmen, rather than mere politicians.

Shattering national myths

If Netanyahu and Abbas are sincere about bringing the century-old
Israeli-Palestinian conflict to an end, they must stop being
politicians and start being statesmen.

Click here to read the rest of my opinion piece on the Al Jazeera website.

 

 

Using and abusing the Holocaust: the world of Khaleed Mahameed

by Editors on September 29, 2009 in Society & Culture with Comments Off

Noam Sheizaf – Harvey Stein is a filmmaker/journalist, originally from New York, who
moved to Israel 3 years ago and now lives in Jerusalem. Harvey is working these
days on a documentary called “Heart of the Other“, which follows the work of Khaled
Mahameed. Just before Yom Kippur, he suggested writing something about it for
Promised Land, and I was more than happy to agree, as I think that Mahameed’s
is one of the most inspiring projects I’ve heard of in the last few years.

Besides working on “Heart of the Other,” Harvey has made short videos
for Time magazine website, CNN, ABC, and other TV stations and websites in
Europe and the United States. If you’d like to contact him, write me (my e-mail
is in the “about” page on my personal blog), and I’ll forward your mail.

From Harvey Stein:

Since moving to Jerusalem from New York three years ago, I have been
fortunate to spend considerable time with Khaled Mahameed . I am making a
documentary about his work called Heart of the Other. Watch the trailer below:

[View:http://vimeo.com/4130663:550:0]

Mahameed is a Palestinian-Israeli citizen who has received notice for his
“Holocaust education” for Arabs – both at his tiny museum in Nazareth, and in
villages, towns, and refugee camps in the West Bank.

Mahameed is a lawyer by trade, and a complex “intellectual in action” by
nature. Since at least age 18 (when his Jewish tutor at Hebrew University
responded to his request to study more about Nazi Germany with, “Why would an
Arab want to do that?”) he has basically been obsessed with the Holocaust -
unpacking its meaning and its effect on both Palestinians and Israelis, and
their fraught relationship.

I think Mahameed gets his contrarian nature from growing up in Israel (if
you haven’t been here, Israeli Jews specialize in it) – he relishes confronting
both Palestinians and Israelis – the former for their stubborn Holocaust
denial/ignorance, and the latter with a challenge something like: “You who have
experienced such great tragedy, why are you not more sensitive to the immense
suffering you are now causing us Palestinians?”

And yes, he gets his hands dirty – he presents lectures in Palestinian
refugee camps, armed only with 2′ x 3′ Holocaust photos he buys from Yad
Vashem. He also takes the photos to face off with Israeli soldiers at the
weekly tear-gassed demonstrations in West Bank villages whose land has been
confiscated by the path of the infamous Wall (the most well known village being
Bilin, which has begun to attract celebrity activists like “the Elders” – Jimmy
Carter, Desmond Tutu, et al.)

I love Khaled’s work because, unlike so many passionate activists, his
primary goal is not to prove the self-righteous rightness of any “side”, but to
creatively provoke, confront, stimulate debate (and sometimes a bit of
satyagraha-inspired shame) on both sides. I think he enjoys the angry confusion
when Israelis sometimes freak out after drawing their guilty conclusions that
he’s saying the Holocaust and the Occupation are similar (he would say, no
they’re not, but the comparision is revealing, and seeing the connection
between the two is important).

I think one source for his use of the photos as “evidence” is his work as a
lawyer. Likewise his emphasis on strategy and dialectic: he asks his
Palestinian audiences (after showing a photo of an emaciated, liberated Jew
standing over a pit full of his brethren’s bodies) – “How can someone who
experienced this have the mental space to think about our problems?” And then
(often engaging with young stone throwers at West Bank demonstrations) he
proposes that non-violent resistence to the Occupation is the only way: because
of the Holocaust wound and countless wars, Israelis only respond to violence
with 1000 times more in kind.

Mahameed’s non-ideological activism is courageous as well as intellectually
challenging, and – especially in light of all the changing political landscape
brought on by the Obama presidency – it needs to be seen and discussed more.

 

 

Israel diary: voices of peace, stories of conflict

by Editors on September 29, 2009 in Israel with Comments Off

The following was originally posted on Arianna Huffington’s blog at the Huffington Post.

My last day in Israel was a whirlwind of visits, as I tried to pack as much in as I could before having to head back home.

First stop was breakfast with Dror Etkes. A former coordinator for Peace Now’s settlement monitoring project, he now directs the Land Advocacy Project for a group called Yesh Din. The group’s name, as Dror told me, means “there is law.” Like
everything else here, “din” has two meanings: “law” in Hebrew,
“religion” in Arabic.

“We see our role as law enforcement in the West Bank around land
issues,” Dror told me as he showed me with maps the ways in which land
has been used by the Israeli government to move into the West Bank.
According to Yesh Din, 30 percent of the land being used for the
settlements is land the government considers to be private. And yet,
according to Dror, there is no government agency that oversees the
legal issues regarding the settlement land. Yesh Din is attempting to
fill that void with legal challenges to force greater accountability.

From there, it was on to brunch — like the Greeks, the Israelis and
Palestinians do everything over food — at the home of Erel Margalit,
the founder of one of Israel’s biggest venture capital firms, Jerusalem
Venture Partners. He lives right next to where John the Baptist was
born — the Middle East equivalent of having a celebrity on your street.

Israel is one of the great digital powerhouses. And some of that is
thanks to Erel Margalit. Prior to Jerusalem Venture Partners, Margalit
served as Director of Business Development under Teddy Kollek, the
legendary mayor of Jerusalem. During this time, he helped bring more
than 70 high-tech and new media companies into one of the world’s
oldest cities. Now he continues to help that sector thrive with his
company JVP, which focuses on new media, animation and gaming.

And like almost every Israeli parent I met, he is deeply connected
to the Israeli state through his children — in his case three
daughters, one of whom is in the army, with another about to join her.

Of course, after brunch, what’s next but…lunch. For that, I went to the home of prolific author and thinker Rabbi Daniel Gordis. Rabbi Gordis’ most recent book title sums up his life’s work: Saving Israel: how the Jewish people can win a war that may never end. Gathered around the table were his wife and children. Rabbi Gordis,
with one daughter just out of the army and a son and future son-in-law
currently serving, told me how betrayed many Israelis felt by the
West’s reaction to Israel’s incursion into Gaza last year. This sense
of abandonment became even more intense, the rabbi said, with the
release last week of the report by the UN fact-finding mission chaired
by Justice Richard Goldstone. The report claimed to have found “strong evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Gaza conflict.”

But Rabbi Gordis saw the report as completely ignoring what had led
Israel to take action: rocket attacks that had been going on for years
since Israel pulled out of Gaza. “As a result of the ongoing attacks,”
Gordis told me, “many children hadn’t slept outside of their parents’
bedroom for years, and twelve year-olds were still wetting the bed. The
United Nation report does not take into account what it was like having
rockets launched from Gaza on a daily basis for years. There don’t have
to be heavy casualties for there to be terrible day-to-day human
costs.”

“In 2000 we had promised my younger son that by the time he’s of age
to go to into the army, he won’t have to,” the Rabbi continued. ” We
were wrong.”

From there it was on to tea at the famous American Colony Hotel in
Jerusalem, site of many high level meetings among Palestinian leaders.
Here, in a beautiful courtyard, I met with two Palestinian women, Ruba
Abdel Hadi and Molly Toomey, working on a project called Rawabi,
a $500 million planned community that promises to provide affordable
housing for up to 40,000 Palestinians and include banks, shops, arts
venues and a hospital. “It doesn’t take more than ten or fifteen
minutes to get here from where I live in Ramallah,” Ruba, who heads
marketing for the project, told me, “but I allowed two hours because
you never know what you are going to encounter at the checkpoints.”

Next up, a meeting with Elias Zananiri, a former spokesman for
Mohammed Dahlan, the one time head of security forces under Arafat.
Just as the Rabbi had been so eloquent about life under the threat of
missile attacks, so was Zananiri on life under the daily hardships and
humiliations of checkpoints in the West Bank. That is why he’s using
his background as a journalist to try to bridge the gap between the two
realities by setting up a private satellite television station,
Palestine Tomorrow, which will serve as an alternative to state
controlled media and those controlled by partisan entities like Hamas.

As he wrote in July:

“Such a station can also play a very significant role in bridging gaps
and mending fences with the ‘enemy/neighbour’ next door. For years, the
Israeli public has been subjected to one kind of Palestinian media
discourse, one that focuses more on the conflict and less on its
resolution. In my opinion, most of the efforts made over the past years
to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have failed only because of
the lack of understanding between the two nations… Palestinians need
a professional media outlet that tells their Israeli neighbours that
across the Green Line, the Separation Barrier or the Israeli army
checkpoints lives a nation that aspires to freedom and liberty no less
than the Israelis themselves.”

Headed toward the same goal, but by a very different route, is

Frederic Brenner an amazing photographer and anthropologist. Brenner is in the middle
of a five year-long venture called “Israel: Portrait of a Work in
Progress.” He wants people to see a different Israel — literally. To
accomplish this, he brings photographers to Israel for six-month
residencies, with the mandate to “look beyond the dominant political
narrative and to explore the complexity of the place and resonance for
people around the world — not to judge, but to question and reveal.”

And that’s exactly what the photos do. In a meeting that was far too
short, Brenner told me: “In order to go beyond the dual narrative of
victimhood, we need a poetic perspective and we want to capture it in
photographs. We have so many different peoples living together in this
land. We want the greatest photographers in the world to come here and
use their photography as a tool of social anthropology. The goal is to
foster a dialogue beyond the political narrative to move beyond the
dual perspective.”

My final meeting in Jerusalem was with Mikhael Manekin, a former
officer in the Israeli infantry. We met at 8 o’clock, after sundown,
because he was observing Shabbat. “My bearing witness to what is
happening,” he said “is an outgrowth of my religious principles.”

What he’s bearing witness to is what is happening in the occupied
territories. As a member of the group Breaking the Silence, Manekin
helps collect accounts of soldiers who have served in the Second
Intifadah. As he wrote about the Gaza incursion on the HuffPost.

“Soldiers experienced a huge disconnect between what they saw and did
on the ground, and the claims, made by senior officers, that Israel has
the most moral army in the world. As long as commanders continue to
deny or dissemble about what happened, Israel’s troops are left with
two options: not to speak about what they saw, doing what is possible
to shield those who gave the orders, or to break their silence and be
accused of lying and betrayal.”

By providing a safe harbor for those who choose to tell what
happened, Manekin and Break the Silence are helping to document what
this conflict is doing to both sides.

On my way to the airport in Tel Aviv, I stopped at the Dallal
Restaurant for dinner with Gidi Grinstein and his wife, and my friend
Dan Adler, an LA based entrepreneur and former CAA executive, who was
also flying back to the U.S. Grinstein is the founder of the Reut
Institute, which he describes as “a non-partisan non-profit innovative
policy group designed to provide real-time long-term strategic
decision-support to the Government of Israel.” Funded entirely by
private donations, Reut gives its services to the government pro bono.

“We don’t provide the answers,” he told me, “we frame the questions
and help decision makers abandon old paradigms that no longer work and
refocus their thinking.”

To help identify these old paradigms and move beyond them, I have
offered all these voices a platform on HuffPost — so that the
conversation can continue.

The Loneliest Man in the World

by Editors on September 29, 2009 in Society & Culture, The Territories with Comments Off

Mona Eltahawy - Izzeldine Abuelaish could be the loneliest man on earth. A
Palestinian father who lost three daughters when Israeli shells struck
their home in Gaza two days before a cease-fire ended the war between
Israel and Hamas, he seems to be the only person left in this small
slice of the Middle East with its supersized servings of “us” and
“them” who refuses to hate.

We met during my recent visit to Israel at the Sheba Medical Center
at Tel Hashomer near Tel Aviv, where he works part-time as a physician
but where that day he was not the healer but the father of a patient -
his 17-year-old daughter Shadha whose eye was blown out of its socket
and who lost several fingers in the shelling. Exactly four months
earlier, his wife died of leukemia, leaving him with eight children.

“People asked me why didn’t you run away, but to where? Tell me one
safe place in Gaza I could’ve gone to for shelter,” he asked me, as his
eldest surviving daughter, Dalal, 19, handed out chocolates to
celebrate Shadha’s recovery from surgery.

“Why should I leave my home? How many times in our lives as
Palestinians must we leave our homes and why? My home was full of
children armed with hope, love of the world and knowledge, who wanted
to learn, live and build a future.”

He survived the shelling because seconds earlier he’d left the room
with his youngest son in his arms. When he returned, Bisan, 22, Mayer,
15, and Aya, 14, were dead.

“My youngest son Hamad told me, ‘Dad, don’t be upset. Mum called
them. She wanted them.’” Dr. Abuelaish told me, sobbing. My attempts at
condolence were woefully inadequate, so I just cried with him.

His 14-year-old niece Nour was also killed. Abuelaish said that just
a few days before the shelling, she’d left the refugee camp where she’d
been staying with her mother and siblings to join him and the extended
family.

“She told me, ‘I’d rather die here than stay in the camp. We haven’t
showered in 10 days. We don’t have any food; there are 30 or 40 people
to a room. What kind of life is that? I’d rather die here with you
all,” Abuelaish said. “She came to meet her fate.”

A Hebrew speaker, whose wails announcing the deaths of his girls on
live Israeli television moved the presenters to tears, Abuelaish’s
anguish translated Palestinian civilian suffering into a language that
Israeli viewers could understand.

His grief marked the moment Al Jazeera and its unblinking and often
overbearing war coverage entered their living rooms. Up until then,
most Israelis had been watching a very different war whose narrative,
focused on Israeli soldiers as the nation’s sons sent to stem an
eight-year tide of Hamas rocket attacks on southern Israel, was largely
free of Palestinian civilian suffering in Gaza.

Did he hate Israelis?

“God forbid. I have never hated a person in my life. And I will
never hate or bring up my children to hate anyone,” he told me. “I hate
a person’s act, I hate the murder itself, the crime, but I never hate a
person. Hatred is an illness.”

Abuelaish is a Palestinian who met Israelis on an equal footing -
not as the laborers, gardener or cleaner but as the gynecologist who
trained in two Israeli hospitals and at Harvard and who treated
infertile Israeli women and delivered their babies. He is a known peace
activist whose deceased daughters had attended a peace camp for Israeli
and Palestinian children. And he is an academic who studied the effects
of war on Gazan

and Israeli children and whose own heartbreak has now ironically enriched his research.

He told me he was distressed that it was soldiers at the Erez
checkpoint, who were the first Israelis his children saw when they left
Gaza en route to Tel Hashomer for Shadha’s surgery.

“I wanted them to come here to see the real Israelis, to see the
real human beings,” he said. “That’s what I want – to show the real
human beings on both sides.”

Gadi Kenny, an Israeli peace activist who took me to meet Abuelaish, told me he thought

the physician “can be the [Mahatma] Gandhi or [Nelson] Mandela or [Martin Luther] King we need so much.”

Indeed, Abuelaish has become a lightning rod for Israelis confused about a war both sides

have claimed as a victory but the death toll of which underlines its
essential asymmetry – some 1,300 Palestinians, including at least 600
civilians, and 10 soldiers and three civilians on the Israeli side.

Some, such as Levana Stern, the Israeli mother of three soldiers,
one of whom fought in Gaza, tried to blame him for his own tragedy when
she interrupted a news conference at the hospital to scream at the
doctor that he must have been hiding weapons in his home or that Hamas
must have used his house to fire at Israelis.

She later apologized and said she was sorry for his loss but that
she still believed that Israel had fought a war to defend itself.

For others, Abuelaish’s grief has inspired unsettling questions about Israelis’ lack of compassion for Palestinians.

“When and how and why did we become so uncompassionate?” asked the
weekly Tel Aviv Ha’Ir supplement. “Levana Stern didn’t attack
[Abuelaish]. She was protecting herself from him… He threatened her
view of Palestinians as terrorists.”

On the day we met, Abuelaish and his surviving children were
buffeted by a group of Palestinian and Israeli friends; he the stalwart
bridge, even in grief.

“I hope this is the last tragedy,” he told me. “We need to immunize
our people with love, respect, dignity and equality. That’s the most
important immunization that we need for both sides.”

Ever the doctor.

 

This article was just awarded Search for Common Ground’s Eliav-Sartawi award in the international category. It was originally published in the Jerusalem Report on March 2, 2009.

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