Wednesday, November 30, 2011

[ePalestine] Souciant: Home and Garden (by Mitchell Plitnick)

The Harper's article mentioned in this article may be found here:

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Souciant

Geographies / Near & Middle East 

Home and Garden 
by Mitchell Plitnick on Nov 30, 2011 

This week, Iceland became the first European country to recognize the State of Palestine. The declaration had a curious clause: “Iceland recalls also the right of Palestinian refugees to return to former homes in accordance with numerous UN resolutions.” 

To be sure, this carries little weight; Iceland is a country of less than 320,000 people. It’s a political maverick, frequently charting its own course, and is not a member of the EU. While it’s unlikely that other European states will follow Iceland’s lead, the fact remains that a first world country has formally endorsed the return of Palestinian refugees. 

Coincidentally, the issue of the Palestinian Right of Return (RoR), made some waves a few days earlier when the noted Zionist dove, Bernard Avishai, published a piece in Harpers (print only, but available here) which took on the issue directly and tried to find some resolution to it that both Israelis and Palestinians can live with. 

This was no small task Avishai took on. For the overwhelming majority of Israelis, including most of the Israeli left, Right of Return is nothing more than code for the end of Israel as a Jewish state. For most as well, this has connotations of mass expulsions or fleeing the country at best, violent dangers at worst. Thus, even among most supporters of peace and withdrawal from all the Occupied Palestinian Territories, RoR is anathema to Israelis. 

For Palestinians, the Right of Return is not just a negotiating point. It is the very heart of their nationalism, the focus of their historical claim to lands from which they were driven. It is both a national right, which can be negotiated by their leaders, but also an individual right, which cannot. It is at once the key elderly Palestinians still keep with them to the homes from which their families were driven more than 60 years ago; it is also the grievance they feel must be addressed, the fact of that expulsion, if there is ever to be reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis. 

In more than a decade of activism, including many visits to Palestinian towns, cities and refugee camps, I have spoken with Palestinians from all parts of the political, cultural, religious and economic spectrum. I have heard many views regarding the implementation of RoR. But not a single man, woman or child has ever said they would give it up. 

Except for the tiny minority of Israeli Jews who support the Right of Return, the mere mention of the idea casts a pall of terror across their faces. Many Israelis will withdraw from the West Bank, abandon the settlements and in smaller numbers, share Jerusalem. But RoR is an absolute non-starter. 

It is little wonder, then, that there has been virtually no serious discussion about the Right of Return, in or outside of Israel/Palestine. There have been repeated declarations by both sides of the heartfelt, and absolutist, stances, but little real discussion. In peace proposals, the “refugee issue” is left to vague wording that promises nothing to the Palestinians, yet still raises Israeli anxiety to a boiling point. For this reason, both Iceland’s declaration and Avishai’s article are extremely important. 

The Icelandic statement is a reminder to the West that this issue cannot be skirted around. The well-worn cliché about the only resolution being negotiations between the parties conducted in a fair and balanced atmosphere (that is, one where outside parties strive to balance the skewed power dynamics between the regional superpower, Israel, and the occupied, stateless and powerless Palestinians) is absolutely true in this case. 

But instead of taking that on, the United States, Europe, and all the other major players have tried their best to avoid it. Frankly, this is absurd, and always has been. 

No peace deal yet devised has ever taken a real look at RoR. Discussions ensue about what “the people” will accept, and it is usually, if quietly, assumed that the Palestinian position is so weak that they will swallow forgoing the Right of Return in order to end the occupation and build their state. Those making that assumption have never bothered to talk to an actual Palestinian. Whether in a café in Ramallah, a workshop in Gaza City, a refugee camp in Lebanon or an organizers’ meeting in Paris, they would have gotten a clear message that RoR must be seriously addressed if any peace proposal is to garner even moderate Palestinian support. 

Avishai, who has come under some justifiable criticism for an approach to this issue reflective of his privileged Israeli position, must be applauded for finally bringing this question into mainstream US discourse. 

It is the discourse, in the US, Europe and most of all in Israel and the Occupied Territories that has been missing for all these years. On all other issues, there have been the stated demands on both sides and then public discussion, within and across borders, about how to reconcile pragmatism with ideology, historical wrongs with present-day realities. But on RoR, there has been only the tense exchange of absolutism. 

Avishai’s proposed solution may not seem realistic to many. However, the solution isn’t the point right now. Opening a discussion about this, allowing Palestinians to make their case in a public forum, and Israelis and their advocates to respond, like every other issue, is the task at hand. 

Already, Avishai’s piece stirred up intense debate on the very nature of Zionism and the Jewish State. And that is precisely the discussion that Right of Return is going to provoke. Instead of running away from that discussion, it should be embraced. 

More than any other issue, RoR both challenges the status quo and stirs serious legal and ethical questions of history. Until they are grappled with, we are likely to see a continuation of the polarization we have seen in recent years and an ongoing stalemate which only leads to more violence and insecurity. 

The Right of Return is the very heart of the conflict, the definition of Palestinian dispossession and the cause of the fear, born (for the many Israelis of conscience) of historical guilt in Israel. Resolving it in a manner that both sides can live with is indispensable. Who knows. Maybe Avishai is right, and the road to resolving it, whether on his path or some other, contains the key to resolving the conflict as a whole. 

- Jaffa tanner’s home portrait courtesy of gnuckx. Published under a Creative Commons license. 




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Friday, November 18, 2011

[ePalestine] NEWSWEEK: Moshe Dayan's Widow Ruth: Zionist Dream Has Run Its Course

"We move from war to war, and this will never stop. I think Zionism has run its course.” ~Ruth Dayan

NEWSWEEK 

Moshe Dayan's Widow Ruth: Zionist Dream Has Run Its Course 

By Rula -Jebreal 

These startling words were uttered last week in Tel Aviv by 95-year-old Ruth Dayan, widow of one of Israel's founding fathers 




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Monday, November 14, 2011

[ePalestine] Rafeef Ziadah - 'We teach life, sir', London, 12.11.11

RAFEEF ZIADAH is a Canadian-Palestinian spoken word artist and activist. Her debut CD Hadeel is dedicated to Palestinian youth, who still fly kites in the face of F16 bombers, who still remember the names if their villages in Palestine and still hear the sound of Hadeel (cooing of doves) over Gaza. 




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Tuesday, November 01, 2011

[ePalestine] bitterlemons.org: The Quartet facade (By Sam Bahour)

bitterlemons.org 

The Quartet facade 

Sam Bahour 

Israel and the United States have perfected, almost to a science, the management of international players who dare to intervene in trying to advance peace in the Middle East between Palestinians and Israelis. The most recent political configuration to serve this purpose is the "Quartet on the Middle East", better known as just "the Quartet", a self- appointed foursome of nations and international and supranational entities involved in mediating the peace process in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

The Quartet is comprised of the United Nations, United States, European Union and Russia. The group was established in Madrid in 2002. Given that the United States dominates the Quartet, one does not need to be a political scientist to conclude that the entire setup merely serves as a facade for continued American unwillingness to uphold its legal obligations, under international law, to hold its strategic ally, Israel, accountable for maintaining an unlawful four-decade military occupation of Palestinians. 

In the opening paragraph of their first joint statement in Madrid on April 10, 2002, the Quartet members stated that, "We reviewed the escalating confrontation in the Middle East and agreed to coordinate our actions to resolve the current crisis." Note the timing of their actions and their focus. The Quartet emerged in an attempt to negotiate a ceasefire between then- Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat and Israel, the occupying power, who at the time had re-invaded all Palestinian cities and surrounded Arafat's Ramallah headquarters with tanks. Also interestingly, their scope of work--as defined in their own statement--was aimed to "resolve the current crisis" and not necessarily bring about a lasting peace among the parties, even as the same statement paid lip-service to a supposed peace process that would lead to the end of the conflict. 

This poor excuse for a balancing act between maintaining an Israeli security agenda while assuming to advance peace has been the mantra that the Quartet has become known for. Fast forward to the Quartet's most recent statement, issued on September 23, 2011, the same day Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas submitted an application to the secretary general of the United Nations for full membership for Palestine. In this statement, the Quartet called for "an agreement within a time frame agreed to by the parties, but not longer than the end of 2012". What they have failed to advance, one iota, for over more than nine years, they now want to do in a single year, utterly ignoring that their repeated failures, purposeful or not, have caused serious damage on the ground: they have allowed for not only the total collapse of any serious resemblance of a peace process, but more importantly allowed Israel to continue building more facts on the ground, such as tripling the Jewish-only settlement enterprise in the West Bank, as well as building the internationally-condemned Separation Wall cutting deep into Palestinian lands and communities. This is not to mention the Quartet turning a blind eye to the ongoing onslaught by Israel on Gaza and continued siege of the Gaza Strip. 

As if the Quartet itself was not enough, the group has created another layer of the facade of being genuine mediators by creating the Office of the Quartet and appointing high-profile envoys to this office. The current envoy is the United Kingdom's ex-prime minister Tony Blair, who succeeded James Wolfensohn, the former president of the World Bank who resigned from his post at the Quartet in disgust with American hegemony and unwillingness to allow the Quartet to play a real role in making peace. 

Much has been reported about the office of the Quartet representative and its style of leadership, but this is all a sideshow. The core of the matter is political, not personal. Regardless of who the special envoy is, the parties to the Quartet are political and have a political role to play. They cannot shed their political responsibility--and legal one, too--by laying blame on the envoy. 

In an extended interview with Haaretz more than a year after he resigned from his 11-month ordeal as Quartet special envoy, James Wolfensohn said it best: "I feel that if anything, I was stupid for not reading the small print. I was never given the mandate to negotiate the peace." Haaretz noted in reporting the interview that, "The mandate he received, he says--which is identical to the one Tony Blair has now been given--was solely to try to improve the economic situation in the territories and to improve the Palestinians' situation in general, whereas he naively thought that this included intervention to advance peace." 

Sadly, it is not surprising that the nation states represented in the Quartet would play along with this sham. What is unacceptable is that the United Nations itself, the body tasked with holding nations accountable for their actions, would accept to play along. The history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will reveal much more than how the Holy Land was torn apart; it will also feature how the Palestinians' struggle for freedom and independence became the Achilles' heel of an international system of governance that has become broken beyond repair.-Published 31/10/2011 © bitterlemons.org 

Sam Bahour is a Ramallah-based management consultant.




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