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Welcome, Palestine!

Posted November 30th, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

So here’s where all you sophisticated cynics get to tell me I’m being naïve, and yesterday’s UN recognition of Palestine as a non-voting member state is merely symbolic, and it makes no difference to what’s actually happening etc etc.

To which my reply is:  Never underestimate the power of symbolism.  Or the sense of an alternate historical inevitability strengthened by this move.

Historical inevitability is exactly what Israel has been trying to create since 1967 with “facts on the ground,” aka “settlements” — a totally misleading term since it calls up images of small outposts, while the bulk of the Israeli settlement project in the West Bank is by now huge swathes of urban and suburban housing.  As if to underline this, today’s Israeli reaction to the UN move was to formally announce yet another urban expansion, this one intended to cut off Ramallah and Bethlehem from Jerusalem.

The New York Times seems to imagine that this is in retaliation for the UN vote, but they’re wrong.  It’s part of Israel’s long-term plan, which has been, since the late 1960s, to create an “irreversible” pattern of Israeli settlement in Palestine — I reported on this way back in the 1970s — and to make daily existence so burdensome for Palestinians in so many ways that they will up and leave “of their own accord” (a kind of ethnic cleansing lite.)

But history is nothing if not a long pattern of reversals.  And it now looks very much like both Israel and the United States (along with Palau, Panama, Micronesia, Canada, and the Czech Republic — the less-than-impressive array of countries voting against acceptance of heightened status for Palestine) are on the wrong side of history.

I have absolutely no idea how this might work out in the long run.  In fact when I try to imagine it, I find myself in despair.  The hard truth is that a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza is in all probability economically, geographically, and politically non-viable — a “two-state solution” that solves nothing at all.  And while the “one-state solution” thus seems the only logical outcome, logic has nothing to do with the politics of identity.  One state would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state, since it would then have a non-Jewish majority;  whether you support the idea of a Jewish state or not, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see that Israel will never agree to dissolve its foundational raison d’être. 

Which leaves us where?

Without a vision of a positive outcome, the all-or-nothing hardliners are in the ascendance, promising nothing but more violence.  So could the rest of us be suffering from a dismaying lack of imagination?  Is there a third way?  Or a fourth or a fifth?  I have no answers, just the stubborn faith that there has to be.  For the first time in over a decade, the UN decision gives me a sense of forward movement.  If that’s illusory, I’ll take it for now.

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File under: Middle East | Tagged: Tags: Gaza, Israel, one-state solution, Palestine, settlements, two-state solution, UN, West Bank | 4 Comments
  1. cloakedmonk says:
    November 30, 2012 at 1:40 pm

    Reblogged this on Cloaked Monk's Blog and commented:
    Some thoughts from Lesley Hazleton on the recognition of Palestine as a non-voting member state. For all those advocating for a one state solution, what does it do to Israel’s identity to have to create a world that is not inherently Israeli? Hmm. I must think on this.

  2. Trying God's Patience says:
    November 30, 2012 at 1:56 pm

    I’ll take your naivete and raise you.
    Perfectly put.
    As usual.

  3. zummard. says:
    December 2, 2012 at 6:40 am

    Don’t despair. Make a prayer.

    ” Oh God of SARAH, HAGAR, MARIAM, KHADIJA and everyone else!!!!!!
    Mothers are running out of tears for their children.
    WHEN WILL YOU RUN OUT OF PATIENCE?
    Our moral decadence has desensitized us to the misery of humanity. So YOU do something to restore peace and justice on earth.

  4. Ibrahim says:
    December 3, 2012 at 2:02 pm

    Isn’t it strange, as soon as one mentions the need for collective action to come up with a plan that has concrete contribution to resolving a situation, how few of us immediately appeal to the mothers of Ismail and Ishaq.
    Leaving the occupied territories has less existential challenge for Israel than the one-state solution. The “settlements” should present no important issue as it did not in the 1978 agreement with Sadat.
    What we need to do is to convince the politicians that the other alternative is Kissinger’s prophecy.
    This can be done if we were to force the issue of military assistance from US to become contingent upon move in that direction.
    If prayers were helpful, i am sure the issue would have been resolved as thousands of good people from both sides have been praying for a long time for a miraculous resolution.

Anti-Semitism = Islamophobia

Posted March 8th, 2011 by Lesley Hazleton

This past weekend, I spoke to a Hadassah meeting – the Women’s Zionist Organization of America.  The subject, of my choosing, was “What’s a ‘nice Jewish girl’ doing writing so much about Islam?”

The easy answer to the question I’d self-imposed was “Why not?”  A perfectly reasonable answer, perhaps, but not with bigots like Peter King about to begin his witch hunt this week in the form of congressional hearings on the alleged “radicalization” of American Muslims.

The real answer is that it’s precisely because I’m Jewish that I find myself writing so much about Islam these days.  Because as a Jew, I know the dangers of prejudice.  And I can smell it a mile off.  When I hear someone talk about “the Jewish mentality,” I know I’m listening to an anti-Semite.  How else stereotype millions of people that way?   Just as when I read someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali talking about “the Muslim mentality,” I know — no matter how pretty she is, how soft-spoken, and how compelling her life story – that I am listening to an Islamophobe.

And I recognize that anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are two sides of the exact same coin:  the stereotyping of millions of people by the actions of a few.  That is, prejudice.

So it’s particularly painful, let alone absurd and self-defeating and dumb, to see that some Islamophobes are Jewish.  And equally painful – and absurd and self-defeating and dumb – to see that some Muslims are anti-Semitic.

I have no statistics to say what proportion of Jews are Islamophobic or what proportion of Muslims are anti-Semitic (though I could doubtless make some up and throw them out there with such an air of authority that they’d be repeated ad infinitum until they achieve the status of “fact”).   But the Muslim Brotherhood, for all the changes it has undergone, still distributes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.  And while anti-Zionism does not necessarily mean anti-Semitism, there is a clear overlap, with a venemous hatred finding its outlet in what is now the more acceptable form of anti-Zionism.

So we need to be clear.  We badly need it.

“Islam” did not attack the US on 9/11;  eighteen people with a particularly twisted and distorted idea of Islam did.  “The Jews” do not shoot Palestinian farmers in the West Bank;   Bible-spouting settlers with a particularly twisted and distorted idea of Judaism do.

The Quran is no more violent or misogynistic than the Bible.  In fact it’s less so.  If you insist, as Islamophobes do, on highlighting certain phrases, then you should turn around and do the same with the Bible, which you will find ten times worse, with repeated calls for the destruction of whole peoples. Only the dumbest, most literal, hate-filled fundamentalist, Jewish or Muslim, takes the rules of ancient warfare as a guide to 21st-century life.

We have to stop this stereotyping.  Now.  All of us.

We have to recognize prejudice not only in others, but in ourselves, Jewish or Muslim.

We have to be able to see that the anti-Semitic trope of “the Jews” trying to take over the world is exactly the same as the Islamophobic one of “the Muslims” trying to take over the world.

We have to acknowledge that an Islamophobic Jew is thinking exactly like an anti-Semite.  And that an anti-Semitic Muslim is thinking exactly like an Islamophobe.

We have to realize that American Jews need to stand up with Muslims against Islamophobia just as American Muslims need to stand up with Jews against anti-Semitism.

Because Islamophobia is, in essence, another form of anti-Semitism, and vice versa.  And it’s in the direct interest of both Jews and Muslims — of all of us — to stand up and confront both forms of prejudice.

In the famous words of an anti-Nazi Protestant pastor during World War II:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.

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File under: Christianity, fundamentalism, Islam, Judaism | Tagged: Tags: 9/11, American Jews, American Muslims, anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bible, bigotry, Hadassah, Islamophobia, Martin Niemoller, Peter King, prejudice, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Quran, radicalization, stereotypes, West Bank | 33 Comments
  1. Mykolas Kimtys says:
    March 8, 2011 at 9:40 am

    You go girl!

    • Maisha says:
      March 11, 2011 at 1:35 pm

      I agree with much of what was said in this post and have no problem with a Jew telling others what they know about Islam. That is, when the information is correct and for the most part, Leslie is correct.. But I think that her knowledge may be confinded to Quran, with out much knowledge of Haditn. And it is kind of hard to separate one from the other because Hadith gives a better understanding of Quran. According to Hadith, the “ancient warfare guide” for Muslims is: no killing of women, old people, non combatant men, and children,no killing of priest, nuns, monks etc., no destruction of holy places such as churches, synagogues,no destruction of crop and livestock.
      Considering that war is horror. Since it appears that war is here to stay. Some of that horror of war could be cut if armies and etc. followed this “ancient warfare guide”

  2. Herman says:
    March 8, 2011 at 10:23 am

    What you are stating makes sense theoretically,

    but practically I have seen very, very few people

    ready to stand up with the Jews when anti-semitism

    appears. Almost no Muslims.

    • JJ says:
      March 14, 2011 at 8:16 pm

      BS

      http://www.thestreetspirit.org/Feb2005/mosque.htm

      http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/4/4/854131/-Film-on-Arab-Schindlers-who-saved-Jews-in-WWII-premieres-at-MOTLA

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmEw5M-xK64

    • JustBob says:
      March 15, 2011 at 6:51 am

      Agreed Herman. We should hope more people, especially the Left, speak out against Holocaust denialism that has gone so far where nation states actually sponsor conferences on whether the Holocaust actually happened or not.

      To this day, I have yet read one single person condemn the anti-Semitic beliefs in many parts of the world who believe New York Jews were in on 9/11 and did not show up to work that day.

      Most would rather ignore Antisemitism. This type of selective silence proves some are only interested in pushing their agenda rather than combating all forms of hatred and paranoia.

  3. Tea-mahm says:
    March 8, 2011 at 11:04 am

    This is great. Wish you could have this conversation on CNN. Tm

  4. Adila says:
    March 8, 2011 at 4:04 pm

    Lesley, I like you. You have sight.

    🙂

    Herman, I’d like to think I’d stand.

  5. sa says:
    March 8, 2011 at 10:20 pm

    Islam is the only faith tradition that declares “There is no Compulsion in Religion”. Its founder, Prophet Mohammed, created the Charter of Medina which protected the rights of both Muslims and non Muslims alike living in Medina. The 47 clause document contains all the characteristics of the preamble to the US constitution. Similarly, the charter of privileges gave protection and rights to the St Catherine’s Monastary in Alexandria, Egypt. This was all necessary because Islam was founded in an unjust and hostile environment and giving protections and creating protectorates was necessary. Today these cultural dynamics are still at play as are geo political issues and other complexities around the world.

  6. Lynn Rosen says:
    March 8, 2011 at 10:58 pm

    You nailed it. You simply nailed it.

  7. Meezan says:
    March 9, 2011 at 1:21 am

    Hear hear.

  8. Yazid Erman says:
    March 9, 2011 at 2:16 am

    I totally agree with you Lazely, and i am a very strict Muslim! 😉

  9. Kamil says:
    March 9, 2011 at 3:13 am

    I’m a Muslim who currently live in London. I studied Jewish Philosophy and the holocaust for A-Levels when I grew up in Hong Kong. I absolutely agree with everything you wrote in this blogpost. I am shocked by the level of anti semitism I find in the communities today and I guess you will find the same vice-versa.

    Thank you for blogging this and hopefully we can all wake up and understand each other’s struggles in so many decades (and centuries). I think what the Muslims are going through today in the western world (at least here in Britain) has a lot of parallel with the Jewish emancipation in the 1800s and we have a lot to learn from each other.

    May Allah swt bless you for your work.

  10. Aijaz says:
    March 9, 2011 at 4:27 am

    I don’t know how much anti semitism is anti Israeli and anti Jewish…Islamophob is anti Islam, not anti Muslims or anti extremism.
    Whoever had invented anti semitic had cleverly covered all the zionist and Israeli crimes under one flag of anti semitic and then made it a Taboo.
    A stand up comedian in Chritian majority USA can easily make Jesus the butt of his joke but before making anti semitic remarks he will think twice.

    IMO theres no equivalence between anti semite and Islamophob.

    I have no idea Iran is making nuclear bomb or not but if they were making bomb then its the result of propaganda under Islamophob.
    After 1979 revolution Iran ban on all nuclear activities but then they were forced into 10 years war with western supported Sadam.
    War mongers in arms industry are loaded with money so same fear was used but as shiaphob.

    In this video a Muslm is protecting a Jewish couple from Christian mob…Had he known their ID would he still protect them….answer is simple…..YES.

    No Christian, no Muslim, no Jew is devoid of human feelings….all are made with same heart with bloody flesh which pump harder when witness human misery.
    The only difference is greed for power and money…that desire of few benficiaries is trying hard to keep hostage the human feelings and to supress extra pumping of human heart…

    The key is fear and promotion of fear through propaganda.
    The war mongers in the name of religion are used as a tool…the beneficiaries are power brokers and Arms industry and Arms traders and media. I am afraid all three primary beneficiaries are zionist based, the secondary beneficiaries are Arab Tyrants, Kings and Dictators.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrjMl3ISkTE&feature=related

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      March 9, 2011 at 7:38 am

      Alas, you demonstrate my point. Anti-Semitism is a Zionist ‘invention’? You might want to read some history.

      Meanwhile, this from Jean-Paul Sartre, as relevant I think for Muslims as for Jews: “If Jews did not exist, anti-Semites would have had to invent them.”

      • Aijaz says:
        March 9, 2011 at 8:29 am

        I think I am getting closer
        Perhaps anti semitism is just like Taliban and Al Qaida, as no one literally knows who they are and what they are but everyonee knows why they are.

  11. Aijaz says:
    March 9, 2011 at 4:41 am

    Drawing U.S. Crowds With Anti-Islam Message
    By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
    Published: March 7, 2011

    FORT WORTH — Brigitte Gabriel bounced to the stage at a Tea Party convention last fall. She greeted the crowd with a loud Texas “Yee-HAW,” then launched into the same gripping personal story she has told in hundreds of churches, synagogues and conference rooms across the United States:

    As a child growing up a Maronite Christian in war-torn southern Lebanon in the 1970s, Ms. Gabriel said, she had been left lying injured in rubble after Muslims mercilessly bombed her village. She found refuge in Israel and then moved to the United States, only to find that the Islamic radicals who had terrorized her in Lebanon, she said, were now bent on taking over America.

    “America has been infiltrated on all levels by radicals who wish to harm America,” she said. “They have infiltrated us at the C.I.A., at the F.B.I., at the Pentagon, at the State Department. They are being radicalized in radical mosques in our cities and communities within the United States.”

    Through her books, media appearances and speeches, and her organization, ACT! for America, Ms. Gabriel has become one of the most visible personalities on a circuit of self-appointed terrorism detectors who warn that Muslims pose an enormous danger within United States borders.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/us/08gabriel.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&emc=eta1&pagewanted=1&adxnnlx=1299610962-NGSvRzNNaIjSLZ0vYlUW9Q

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      March 9, 2011 at 7:43 am

      This article is linked to in the original post. Always a good idea to read before commenting.

      • Aijaz says:
        March 9, 2011 at 8:24 am

        forgive me for I am as clumsy as I could be.

        I try hard again to find the link about this NYT article or anything about Brigitte Gabriel in original post but miserably failed.

  12. Anti-Semitism = Islamophobia | :: MUSLIM DIALOGUE :: says:
    March 9, 2011 at 8:20 am

    […] http://accidentaltheologist.com/2011/03/08/anti-semitism-islamophobia/ March 9th, 2011 | Category: MUSLIM DIALOGUE, […]

  13. Lavrans says:
    March 9, 2011 at 10:19 pm

    It’s funny as I was just having this very argument with a friend who happens to be… a vegetarian.

    No, it’s not a joke. He was talking about how meat is bad, and brought up a video that made some valid points (animals raised on mega-ranches take lots of land and more resources than the average vegetable), and a lot of points that are subjective and meant to tug at a person’s visceral response (animals are tortured and killed just for human pleasure). My argument that the argument was self-righteous was taken as an indictment of vegetarians as a whole.

    The politics of religion is the same action. That video that was posted isn’t the view of all vegetarians, and while most vegetarians would laugh at it and agree with some of the points, not all are vegetarians for the same reason and not all subscribe to the same beliefs; not all will find the entire argument True. Groups always carry with them a certain amount of prejudice against other groups, the question is really to what degree and whether it’s a prejudice that diminishes their ability to empathize with that other group.

    What we have, in my opinion, is too many people who just can’t get past the concept that any large group carries many opinions. What one person or one part of that group says isn’t necessarily a Truth for the entire group, and very likely to be seen by some as ridiculous.

    I maintain that the most dangerous food out there is processed food. Factory food. Food that is barely recognizable in any part as what it came from. The soda that’s really a corn and oil distillation. The steak that’s softened by force feeding an animal that is kept alive only by the use of large amounts of antibiotics.

    I can’t help but see that as so true of the politics of religion. What’s dangerous isn’t the raw belief; the stories and tales that seeded the tree that has grown up and spread across the world; no, what’s dangerous is what’s been done when a branch is taken from the tree, chopped and processed into a new thing that is barely (if at all) related to what it was distilled from.

    That danger is to the tree itself, in that it adds something that may be a poison. That danger is to the tree in how it is seen by the person on the outside; if they don’t know what’s been done to make that processed, transformed thing, then they may ascribe all the dangers as inherent within the tree itself (rather than the processing).

    And that is the danger to those outside that tree’s canopy; ignorance and doubt are easy forms of belief that are hard to eliminate. If you’ve been taught that the tree is poisonous, it may take a stronger act than most could muster to risk grabbing a piece of fruit from the tree and eating it. Even when done, it will still take a long time to overcome that prejudice. See how many people still think that tomatoes are poisonous.

  14. Aijaz says:
    March 11, 2011 at 5:32 am

    Things could be more complex than complicated as presented by Lavran.
    Simplicity is the beauty of arguments and this simplicity adopted by all religions because religion is for masses not specifically for bunch of intellectuals.

    Theres nothing beyond scope of right and wrong…a complex or complicated aspect of right does no make it wrong.
    All the animals slaughtered for food are fast multiple and has short life span…when reaching a natural death their disposal may cause a serious problem and environmental mayhem.
    Torturous slaughter is valid argument by a vegetarian….every living thing has to endure the pain of death one day…people should be careful to cause minimum pain when slaughtering as much as they can learn scientifically….unfortunately none knows the pain of death and pain of slaughter.

    Disintegration of bones and losening of muscles with diminish senses as growing age, I believe is a mercy on mankind thats about time when natural death is happened.
    So in my guess natural death for all living things should be less painful than slaughtered.

    All of these are God sanctioned slaughters so argument can not be restricted to science only besides science can not prove for sure the amount of pain caused in both kind of deaths.
    A vegetarian can not love the rats and roaches damaging his clean home and furniture.
    Probably he will show mercy on a pop up snake in his household to capture and hand it over to wildlife…but roaches and rats he is forced to kill with poisonous torture.

    A very valid example of Tree and its branches was given…..A branch when seperated does not seek its ID but try to make its own ID…An ID which has no roots is the root cause of all problems.

    Religiously if we take Tree as one God and branches as group of people and leaves as people then it will be easy to understand the concept of Unity of God.
    The one leaf or branch which detach itself from Tree is living a life of its own not a borrowed life.
    This owned life knows its origin from father’s seed to mother’s womb then in being and vanished in darkness…this being which probably achieved status of self during the course of life but after death it becomes a number which was added once but now reduced.
    A self which is not more than a number is not different from an ant which was crushed to death among its flock and this is the result of a branch which try to make its own ID after seperated from Tree.

    Let me present an example to emphasize the simplicity of religion through simplicity of its personalities.

    One day an old woman, who had for many years heard of the greatness and magnificence of the Prophet, came before him. She stood tongue tied in awe of his presence. The Prophet, softly, kindly and simply took her by the shoulder and said, “Why are you afraid? I am the son of that Quraish woman who milked sheep. Who are you afraid of?”

    Though I am thankful to Lavran for generating such a beautiful idea of Tree and its branch to help me elaborate my views

    • Lavrans says:
      March 11, 2011 at 4:25 pm

      True- things are always more complex. The main point to the vegetarian is that it isn’t any more unnatural for people to eat meat than any other omnivore or carnivore.

      Complexity comes in with the addition of civilization (that is, living in cities). Then you have many food pressures- we know of no groups that were voluntarily vegetarian until after the introduction of cities and religion- and all of the reasons for a vegetarian diet are religious.

      With wealth comes the ability and freedom to choose whether you’re a vegetarian or not, and with that also comes other reasons for being a vegetarian- and yet, almost all of them still center on man as apart from and different from nature.

      That’s also a commonality of the monotheistic religions (well, most modern religions; at some point religions move from man being a special animal, but still an animal, to being something other than an animal); man as apart from nature.

      Thus, one’s food becomes a choice. This is part of the “processing” I mention. That thought is as much a process as removing the fat from milk or monofarming corn. The thought process is no more “natural” than a million acres of corn, or the idea that man is not just another animal.

      Continue the processing of thought and action and you can come to the point where raising an animal with the intent to eat it becomes morally suspect and the vegetarian starts thinking that the raising and killing is a callous act done in order to sate a taste for killing. When it’s really not that different from raising carrots with the intent to eat them; the main difference is that we see the animal as closer to us and, therefore, closer to god.

      Why is it not possible for the carrot to have a soul? If it does, is it morally problematic to eat the carrot? Or would that God have designed the various animals and plants to do and eat what they do?

      Again- it’s not the act, but the process by which one gets to that act. Very much like in religions, where all of the religions have the same basic rules and tenets, yet the process used to interpret them gives rise to all these opposing sects that become willing to denigrate or do violence to any “other”.

      That, to me, is the genesis and life blood of prejudice. Ignorance fueled by a processed idea that labels itself a morality while demanding an action in violation and opposition to that morality.

      • Aijaz says:
        March 12, 2011 at 1:28 am

        All things are true in their essence perhaps you mean Truth about certain things is complex.

        Truth of the matter is we don’t know how many things are living things of the total things known to us.
        Anything which breath has a life and subject to feel the pain.
        All the plants,vegetables,fruits,grass etc are living thing…sign of their life is they breath they get their naurishments and they grow….if not eaten mercilessly by a vegetarian in their lifetime they also die as they rots and thats their natural life span.
        A vegetarian, if he must eat apple then he has to wait until its rotten or in other words completely dead to cause no pain to partially alive apple.

        I see no difference between growing apples for the purpose to eat when they are ripe and still fresh and breathing AND breeding animals for the purpose to slaughter and to eat.

        Grass is alive as long as its green and it subject to feel pain also….a proud vegetarian feel no remorse to tread torturously on a lviing thing.

        All this fuss to complicate the simplicity of life into unnecessary complexity is the result of not having real issues faced by humanity and they are in abundance.

        Some says stones also breath but this much I know from Quran that everything living or dead to our knowledge praise God but we know not.

        I have no knowledge how other things are alive other than Human Being…are they ensoul or not…perhaps Lavran has more knowledge, he may enlighten.

        Soul in Quran is described as Amre Rab “Decree of God”.
        Amazingly in whole Quran nowhere plural is used for soul….so this is singular act of Al-Mighty to enliven a thing.
        Self(Nafs) has plural in Quran which is exclusively for mankind not other living things.

        So we are composed of three things…Body,soul and self.
        When soul leave the body we are dead and we are left with body and self…in few hundred years body also disnitegrate..the only thing left is self which is resurrected on judgment day and according to Islamic faith body testify against the self which it used to carry.
        The reality of mankind is SELF which is accountable not the body and soul.

  15. Muslim says:
    March 19, 2011 at 7:37 am

    Why do people claim anti-semitic as only referring to jews..
    semitic is relating to people who are of the groups that speak of Afroasiatic languages that includes Akkadian, arabic, Aramaic, Ethiopic, Hebrew, and Phoenician.

    so american english speaking jews are NOT semitic
    but on the flip side.. christian and muslim arabs alike in the middle east are ALL semitic.. so if you discrimate against a middle eastern muslim, you are being anti-semitic

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      March 19, 2011 at 8:50 am

      Strictly speaking, of course, you’re quite right, but such a definition then excludes the 80% of Muslims who are not semitic. You also ignore the fact that, though many centuries removed, Ashkenazi American Jews are semitic in origin, while Sephardi Jews are semitic in culture too.

      I can see the ironic appeal of saying “Hey, we’re all semites,” but A. it’s not so, and B. challenging prejudice on the basis of strict definitions really evades the problem, and could even deepen it by leading to the weirdly racist game of trying to figure out what percentage of blood origin — a quarter? an eighth? a sixteenth? — makes someone black or Jewish or Arab.

    • hossam says:
      March 20, 2011 at 1:40 am

      Why do we have to discuss what semitic means instead of discussing the actual issue, you are right in saying that semic peoples are not only jews, but to answer your question, the term anti-semitism has been coined and generally accepted to mean prejudice towards jewish people. Would it make a difference if it was called anti-judaism or anti-jew or jewophobia instead?

      we can also spend time criticizing the term islamophobia rather discuss the actual issue

  16. Maisha Liwaru says:
    March 20, 2011 at 8:59 am

    As an African American Muslim, I say we can spend our time comparing and licking our wounds and arguing over semantics or we can come together for human rights. Rather than anti Semitic, Islamaphobia, racism etc. why not use the words humane and inhumane.

  17. Rachel Thomas says:
    March 22, 2011 at 12:58 pm

    This is a really good article, and as a Jew I also see Islamophobia as the flip side of anti-Semitism. I shudder when I see members of my government targeting “the Muslim community” as a whole.

    I do want to make one suggestion/correction to your article. You seem to imply in paragraph 6 that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is about anti-Zionism. However, it also speaks directly about Jews without connection to the modern movement of Zionism. I think the word “Zion” in the title refers not to that modern movement but to the biblical term for Jerusalem. It’s important that people should know that The Protocols is primarily anti-Judaism, not anti-Zionism.

  18. Mazhar says:
    March 30, 2011 at 12:49 am

    I am extremely grateful for the way you have presented this issue. And I am touched by your ability to speak out with the analogy of Anti-Semitism.

    I have read Quran for more than 25 years. Yes it speaks about how jews interacted
    during the time of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), but it also speaks about polytheism,
    about christians and about muslims who accepted islam but in their heart planned against the Prophet , and they are the worst [….] If you truly understand Quran, ALLAH’s displeasure is on any one who violates his instructions and that of his Prophet…may that be a muslim even. So I agree with you that to take as all Jews are worst is actually UN-ISLAMIC.

    In fact one of the wives of Prophet Muhammad was a Jew who accepted Islam….and sometime people would say that to her (that you were Jew) and Prophet (PBUH) would show great displeasure on such people. And one of the great companions of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) was Abdullah-Bin-Salam (blessing of Allah be upon him), who was a jew who accepted islam. And once a funeral of Jew (who had not accepted islam) was passing by and Prophet (PBUH) stood up in respect…and some people differed and the Prophet (PBUH) said his account was with Allah and as a fellow human being he demonstrated respect on his passing away.

    I am sorry the comment became lengthy…But I really wanted to appreciate your
    approach and share mine. We need more like you on both sides to put and end
    to this cycle of hatred, blame and violence.

  19. Anand Rishi says:
    April 15, 2011 at 3:14 am

    Well, any hate campaign against any community is deplorable. Those at its receiving end must fight this menace unitedly.

    Sorry for delayed comment. I am a new comer to this very sensible blog.

  20. Rabeeh Zakaria says:
    May 5, 2011 at 12:52 pm

    As a non-radical muslim, I salute you .. We need such a balanced look

    Thank you

  21. Zack says:
    May 16, 2011 at 6:49 am

    To the author of this article.

    Great article. I have posted it everywhere.

    Keep up the good work.

    God bless your kind soul

  22. Anti-Semitism = Islamophobia - Page 11 - Political Wrinkles says:
    January 28, 2012 at 11:47 pm

    […] Posted by Coyote Source: Anti-Semitism = Islamophobia The Accidental Theologist She makes good points No kidding. Some of us know this. And nice people like you come along […]

Believing in Peace

Posted February 24th, 2011 by Lesley Hazleton

“I can’t believe you don’t believe in anything!” someone wrote on this blog a while back, commenting on my agnosticism (actually, she used capital letters and lots of exclamation marks, but I’ll refrain).   And I was a bit shocked by that.  What kind of human being can I claim to be if I don’t believe in anything?  A nihilist?  A god-forsaken creature left to the whims and mercies of fate?    A craven whimpering coward afraid to commit herself?

So in between keeping up with what’s happening in Egypt and Tunisia and Bahrain and Yemen and Jordan and Iraq and Iran and oh-my-god Libya, I’ve been haunted by what she said — and have realized that she placed the stress on the wrong word.  It doesn’t belong on the word ‘anything,’ but on the word before it:  ‘in.’

Of course there are things I believe.  I just don’t generally feel the need to believe in them.  I may well believe that such-and-such a thing is true, though in fact this is much the same thing as saying “I think that…” or the more amorphous “I feel that…”  and I’m trying not to be amorphous here.  And in fact there are some things I do believe in, prime among them the possibility of some seemingly impossible form of peace between Israel and Palestine.

If I look at Israel/Palestine rationally right now, I see no way to a peaceful resolution.   So in the lack of empirical evidence, I have no choice but to fall back on belief – that is, on the conviction that peace is possible, despite all evidence to the contrary.

I’m not being over-idealistic here.   The first step in any thinking about peace is to get rid of all those images of doves fluttering around all over the place and everyone falling on each others’ shoulders in universal brother/sisterhood.  Peace is far more mundane than that.  It’s the absence of war.  It’s people not being killed.  It’s the willingness to live and let live.  And that will do just fine.

There’s no love lost between England and Germany, for instance, but they’re at peace after two utterly devastating wars in the first half of the 20th century.  There’s less than no love lost between Egypt and Israel – in fact it’s safe to say that for the most part, they detest each other —  but that peace treaty, signed by an Egyptian dictator and an Israeli former terrorist, has lasted three decades.  It’s nobody’s ideal of peace, but however uneasily, it’s held, and will likely hold whatever the changes in Egypt – a frigid kind of peace, but peace nonetheless.

But even thinking in terms of pragmatic, undramatic, boring peace, which once seemed as impossible for England and Germany, and for Egypt and Israel, as for Israel and Palestine, I still can’t see it.  Of course this may simply mean that I have a very limited imagination, and so can’t see the forest for the trees.   But to think that something is impossible because I can’t see it is not only an absurd assumption, but also a dangerous one.

What we believe affects how we act.   If we stop believing that Israel/Palestine peace is possible, or even desirable, as the Israeli government seems to have done, then that affects how we act:  we really do make it impossible.  That is, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy of unending conflict.   We act in our own worst interests.

I’d rather be naïve than nihilistic.  So in face of the despair that often overtakes me at the latest news from Gaza or from the West Bank, I have to fall back on belief in the possibility of peace, no matter how seemingly irrational.  After all, if it was rational, it wouldn’t require belief.

One definition of despair is in the inability to imagine oneself into the future.  It is, in a very real sense, a failure of the imagination.  So perhaps this is what belief really is:  an act of imagination.   The astonishing human ability to imagine something into existence, and to act in accordance with that imagination.

That’s what we’ve seen these past few weeks in Tunisia and Egypt and Bahrain (and maybe even in Libya), and that’s what’s been so inspiring about it:  belief transformed into possibility.   Belief not as faith in the divine, but as faith in the human ability to act and to change the future.   Belief, that is, in ourselves.

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File under: agnosticism, existence, Middle East | Tagged: Tags: Bahrain, belief, conflict, Egypt, faith, Gaza, Germany, imagination, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Libya, nihilism, Palestine, peace, Tunisia, West Bank, Yemen | 15 Comments
  1. Sue says:
    February 24, 2011 at 2:44 pm

    Thank you for your distinction between ‘believing’ and ‘believing in’ – I think that’s fabulous.
    Regarding ‘Peace’ – I believe it to be more than just the absence of war – it is a whole other force in itself. It’s people’s determination to live differently and better and to care for each other and their communities, and so much more.
    And perhaps something to think about – it occurs to me that you use the word ‘believe’ (ie. you choose to believe in peace in the Middle East despite all evidence to the contrary) is used in the same sense as others would use the word ‘faith’, eg. I have ‘faith’ that there will be peace in the middle east. I do love words and how we use them, and I do love it when people can string a fabulous sentence together – you do that so well – thank you.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      February 25, 2011 at 2:34 pm

      So glad you pointed put my conflation of ‘belief’ and ‘faith’, Sue — it’s one of those things I was vaguely aware of doing, but hadn’t really paid attention to. Yes, I think there is a difference, but will have to work on figuring it out (it has to do, I think, with intention — a kind of willed decision — but am not sure, so will muse, and write about it at a later date). Thanks for the sharp eye. — L.

  2. Kate McLeod says:
    February 24, 2011 at 3:10 pm

    What these countries who want to go to war with each other need are football teams. They can take out their aggression in the viewing stands, wear war paint, wave flags–all that.
    Also my new rules about war in the world must be followed: no one under the age of 50 goes to war. I think it’s probably the fastest route to peace.

  3. Sana says:
    February 24, 2011 at 7:37 pm

    My husband always tells me that what I lack is belief. I give up too easily, hence abandoning any fight in me. My husband is the opposite, if he believes he achieves – and he makes it happen no matter what the odds are. Your article has made me realize how dangerous it is not believe….. its a bit daunting actually. Now comes the hard part – what do i believe? …….

  4. Lynn Rosen says:
    February 24, 2011 at 10:37 pm

    There is no point in believing IN war as an inevitable solution. Peace is the default. That is in what I believe.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      February 25, 2011 at 2:35 pm

      Perfectly in-put!

  5. Lana says:
    February 24, 2011 at 11:26 pm

    Thank you 🙂
    i hope u add a “like” button under your posts … sometimes i realy like an article but has nothing else to add 🙂

    best wishes

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      February 25, 2011 at 2:36 pm

      Thanks Lana — will poke around and see if I can find out how to do it. — L.

      (Best way to ‘Like’ — click the Facebook button!)

  6. Moes says:
    February 25, 2011 at 9:05 am

    I enjoyed very much your TED talk about Kuran.
    We have a woman a bit like you in France, Annick de Souzenelle (except she’s not an agnostic). She has read the Bible in the languages it was written (she studied years and years to learn Aramean and Hebrew, symbology and theology). If you go back to the source, it’s the best way not to be misguided by translations and interpretations. And her books about the bible explain how deep and beautiful this book is. Far away from the interpretation men have made of it through the centuries, trying to control people out of it. Much more universal than we think it is (not to mention the stupid and childish “creationist” interpretation of it.)
    I guess Kuran is the same. It’s the fragility of beauty, when taken over by gridy and bad intentional people.
    Please continue your struggle for beauty and peace (and excuse my poor english.)
    all the best.

  7. Elisa Sparks says:
    February 26, 2011 at 9:29 am

    Have you seen the bumper sticker: “Militant agnostic: I don’t know, and neither do you”? Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephens, was famous for his statement of rational agnosticism.

  8. Anneza Akbar says:
    March 1, 2011 at 10:39 am

    Very interesting piece,
    I am curious as to what your view is on the idea of:

    “Peace is not the absence of war but the presence of justice”
    in comparison to:
    “peace is the absence of war”

    Could it be that perhaps “no war” and therefore “peace” could come about after a sense of justice is established?

    of course then the question would arise what would be justice in any specific case?

    Thank you for sharing your thoughts 🙂
    Anneza

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      March 1, 2011 at 1:12 pm

      Good question, and a tough one. “Peace and justice” is a much-used phrase, yet how exactly they go hand-in-hand is not clear, at least to me. The core problem being, of course, what we mean by justice. Are we talking justice as harmony, as moral rightness (and if so, whose morality?), as retribution, as equitability, as divine justice (in which case, whose concept of the divine?).

      I do think that any kind of peace, however minimal in concept, does have to involve a sense on both or all sides that nobody is being advantaged to the disadvantage of others. In practice, I think that might well mean that both/all sides will have to feel not that they’ve gotten what they think is right or what they deserve, but that they’ve had to give up a certain amount of what they think is right or what they deserve. In other words, that far from being perfect, peace is an imperfect compromise on all sides. And possible only when everyone is willing, finally, to make those compromises. I know it seems like there should be a “win-win” option, but in fact “lose-lose” may be the only realistic one — and thus, paradoxically, in fact a win-win.

      Have you heard of the Prisoner’s Dilemma? It’s a central paradigm in conflict resolution, in which the only rational solution is the one in which both sides lose an equal amount. Hard-headed, and worth thinking about. Here’s the Wikipedia entry on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

  9. Sunny says:
    March 1, 2011 at 5:12 pm

    War and peace are two sides of the same coin, just as light and darkness are. Just as light cannot exist without darkness, peace cannot exist without war – just as God and Satan cannot exist, atleast in two Abrahamic religions, by themselves. The principle of duality seems to be all-encompassing.

  10. Kathleen says:
    March 4, 2011 at 12:50 pm

    Very though provoking and written – as usual – Leslie. 🙂 I came across a book’s paragraph about an underlying social dynamic (‘bargains with God) that are suppose to guarantee peace (except the world keeps cheating on the bargain by going to war) : During WWI. The protagonist is looking at a stained glass window in a cathedral of Abraham’s sacrifice of his son. ‘Behind Abraham was the ram caught in a thicket by his horns and struggling to escape…You could see the fear. Whereas Abraham, if he regretted having to sacrifice his son at all, was certainly hiding it well, and Isaac, bound on a makeshift altar, positively smirked’. …[This represents] ‘the bargain on which all patriarchal societies are founded. If you, who are young and strong, will obey me, who am old and weak, even to the extent of being prepared to sacrifice your life, then in the course of time you will peacefully inherit, and be able to exact the same obedience from your sons. [and this one sacrifice to the gods is enough to appease them, instead of thousands] Only …. [being at war is ] ‘breaking the bargain… all over the inheritors were dying…. while old men, and women of all ages, gathered together and sang hymns. *”Regeneration” by Pat Barker, pg 149 (book 2 of a trilogy based on a Psychologist trying to heal shell shocked solders in England during WWI.) Just an interesting twist on the concept that older men (and women) sit in hallowed-halls and declare war and it’s planning, while the young die to execute the plan. Don’t know that it adds anything to your dialogue on peace but just thought to add it. No comment back needed 🙂

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      March 4, 2011 at 4:44 pm

      I totally agree: the Pat Barker trilogy (‘Regeneration,’ ‘Eye in the Door’ and ‘Ghost Road’) is stunning, and perhaps the most sustained and subtle anti-war fiction ever written. — L.

The Language of Guns

Posted January 6th, 2011 by Lesley Hazleton

In the Middle East, it’s sometimes the small moments that stay with you longest.  Not the bombs, the injuries, the deaths – the things that make the headlines – but almost inconsequential moments, so small that they slip past the mind’s defenses and haunt you.

I’ve written here (and here) about such moments.  This is another.

It happened one evening in the fall of 2005, at the Qalandia crossing between Ramallah and East Jerusalem.  I’d spent the day traveling in the West Bank with two Palestinian archeologists and a German NGO worker, whose car we used.  We drove on ‘Arab’ roads (as distinct from ‘Jewish’ ones, which are reserved solely for Israeli settlers – in this part of the world, even roads have ethnicity) and went through so many military checkpoints I lost count.  Since the car had a large German flag painted on the hood, we were waved to the front of the line to wait a mere ten or twenty minutes at each checkpoint instead of three or four hours like everyone else.   As we eased with bad consciences past the long lines of ‘Arab’ cars and trucks, companiable talk gave way to a tight-lipped, eyes-straight-ahead silence.

The language of guns is a language all its own.  Israeli soldiers with mirrored sunglasses hardly speak.  They just gesture this way or that with their guns.  You don’t look at their eyes;  you look at the guns.  The guns do all the speaking.

Since I was in the front passenger seat, it fell to me to hand our passports and papers through the open window.   When he saw my American passport, one soldier broke his silence.   “Why you go with them?” he asked me in English, pointing his gun at my companions.  He dragged his finger across his throat: “They do this to you.”    When another asked where we were heading and I said Nablus, he leaned in to me with a loud stage whisper:  “Nablus? You want to die?”

I swallowed hard and kept my mouth shut, knowing that if I opened it, it wasn’t me who would pay, but the Palestinians I was with.   It struck me how hard it must be to keep your mouth shut under this kind of provocation every day, and yet the two archeologists seemed more embarrassed than anything – for me, and for the soldiers.

Now, as the sun was setting, I approached Qalandia, the largest checkpoint of all, on foot.  My companions had dropped me off from Ramallah, but could not cross.  I’d pick up a shared taxi to Jerusalem on the other side.

Two tunnels formed of wire-mesh and barbed-wire ran the length of the crossing, with well-guarded turnstiles either end.   I was halfway through when I heard a gun being cocked just a few yards away.  I looked over in alarm and through the wire saw two soldiers, a boy and a girl.  She was holding the gun, and he was pressed up against her from behind, his arms around her and his hands over hers on the gun.  They were both flushed and laughing.

She looked directly at me, and I could see the arousal in her eyes.  And then scorn as she registered my existence as what she doubtless called “an Arab-lover.”   She didn’t look away;  still in the embrace of the boy behind her, still cradling the gun, she held my eyes as though defying me to say a word.  “Look all you like,” she seemed to be saying.  “There’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”

I felt demeaned, dehumanized, even as I realized I was over-reacting.  It was such a little thing, after all.  Nothing really, not compared with everything else that was happening.   Just horny kids horsing around.  In public.  With loaded guns.  In a position of absolute power.

I wanted to break the moment, to shout something in protest, but I felt a gentle hand in the small of my back — a head-scarved Palestinian woman behind me gesturing me onward.  “Quietly,” her eyes indicated.  “Don’t start an incident that’ll only make trouble for us all.”  And I walked on with my mouth shut, full of the bitter taste, for just a moment, of the sheer, god-awful insult of life under occupation.

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File under: Middle East, ugliness | Tagged: Tags: checkpoints, Israel, occupation, Palestine, Qalandia, West Bank | 8 Comments
  1. Frank Nichols says:
    January 6, 2011 at 1:31 pm

    Dear Ms. Hazleton,
    After watching your TED lecture yesterday I went to the library to see what books they had on the Baha’i Faith and found only one but right next to it was your book on the split of Islam. I was wondering if you have ever researched the stories of The Bab and Baha’u’llah?
    Best, Frank

  2. CJ says:
    January 6, 2011 at 5:09 pm

    All too vivid, Lesley. It’s a life hard to imagine, where guns are part of simple everyday lives. I can count on one hand how many guns I have seen close up, in my 64 years. I am thinking it is probably just as hard for the people in your story to imagine my sheltered life here in the NW of the USA. You are a good go between to help us all understand … just a bit more.

  3. Catherine says:
    January 6, 2011 at 6:21 pm

    Better than a picture or a thousand words. Painful, even, and true. So awfully true.

  4. lavrans says:
    January 6, 2011 at 8:52 pm

    Not quite the same, but Paris in the winter of 85-86 was interesting. I was 18 when I got there, and had just enough for 1 night at Hotel Henry IV.

    I spent the next 3 nights sleeping under Pont Neuf or one of the benches near the Musée de Sculpture en Plein Air. Then I had a brilliant thought: I should go to the American Embassy to see if they will let me make a phone call home to see if I could find someone to send me some cash. So, off I trudge, through the rain, feeling less than romantic. I find the embassy and ring the bell at the gate to the courtyard, which is locked. There are two US military men in full gear with machine guns. They don’t acknowledge me at all. Finally a well dressed diplomatic sort comes out and asks what I want.

    I tell him I’d like to call home. Tell him about the bank that my money was supposed to be at that was telling me they had been affected by a bomb and couldn’t find any record of my money. He is uninterested, but tells me to wait in the courtyard and takes my passport. Then he tells the guy with the machine gun to “keep your weapon on him”. I didn’t think anyone was going to shoot me, but it was disconcerting to have someone actively point an M16 at me.

    The well dressed diplomatic type came out, returned my passport and told me I couldn’t come in and told the Marine to escort me from the premises. And that’s about as helpful as the US government has ever been in my experience.

    For some reason, that was more upsetting than when a French military (Paris was under martial law at the time- I never saw any normal gendarmes) patrol decided to do a full cavity search in the middle of St. Michelle Metro station a month or so later. They wer just French military bastards, and I wasn’t afraid they’d shoot me, but I was worried they’d club me, having seen them do a bit of that to other people who were living on the streets.

    I’ve also had thugs point guns at me, but that wasn’t nearly as upsetting as the experience of having the powers that be, the people who are supposedly keeping the peace, point their weapons at me or others. It’s a greater betrayal. Or a greater proof that you are alone against a force that is vicious and malevolent and that owns both the guns and the farcical courts.

  5. Lynn Rosen says:
    January 6, 2011 at 11:12 pm

    I am speechless with heavy heart reading your recount. Thank you for all you do to contribute to a deeper understanding of reality in Israel.

  6. Chemical _turk says:
    January 7, 2011 at 7:11 am

    Your account was written well enough to convey the atmosphere brilliantly. I am sympathetic of the people that have grown up in this situation and must live the life head down and under the gun.

    Reality is, all the people that live in that situation choose to live that way. They cannot see any other way to live or they would have chosen it by now. I have Arab and Palestinian friends that got out of that situation.

    Looking at the Middle East purely from a geographical perspective without politics or religion, it would be a resort town and port like all the rest found in the area, nothing special or distinctive.

    I fail to grasp why this area is important in the world today. I fail to see any compelling religious or political argument that would sway me.

    Here’s a radical idea, how about more guns, arm everybody, that way you have equality of the gun and everyone will be speaking the same language.
    At least that way you’ll reach a tipping point, a resolution of some sort, not the toxic status quo.

  7. Dr. Anwar Shah says:
    January 7, 2011 at 9:44 am

    Dear Lesley,
    Its really heart warming to come across articles like these which are objectively impartial and unbiased through your experience of only one crossing of occupationists dominating the region whilst the whole world just impassively watches on. Like you said,” Look all you like,” she seemed to be saying. “There’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”
    Will it end some day? This is the question one has to ask about the occupiers and the occupied??With US and Western support so strong and lavish and a great stock pile of nuclear armament, Palestinians do not stand a chance of one in a million to get the status of a free country and a free nation.

  8. paul skillman says:
    January 7, 2011 at 9:54 am

    What all these people of Isrial & Palestine need is a big engineeriing project that they can all praticipate in. Like why can’t they build a canal from the Mediterain to the Sea of Galilee down through the Dead Sea, down to the Red Sea. This would bring compition to the Suez Canal,bring life & fresh salt water to the Dead Sea and keep a million people employed for a hundred years.Maybe they woud be so busy building the canal they they would not have time to kill each other.
    Please excuse the spelling errors.
    Just an idea.
    Sencerely yours, P.A.Skillman

Poisoned Fruit

Posted October 13th, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

This is my olive tree, and yes, that’s a boat in the background:

It doesn’t ‘fit’ with anything else on my floating garden here in Seattle (pines, maples, bamboo, herbs), but I don’t care.  It reminds me of the Middle East (so what if it’s a European olive instead of a Middle Eastern one) — of sitting on an ancient terraced hillside sheltering from the noon sun under the silvery-green canopy of a mature olive, my back against its gnarled trunk, the gentle clatter of its leaves shaking in the breeze mixing with the bleating of goats and sheep wafting up from the valley below.  It was as though time itself were reaching out and enfolding me, cradling me in centuries of life.

Mine is just a newborn as olive trees go:  six years old, a blink of an eye for an olive.   These trees live 800 years, at least as far as we can be scientifically sure.  There are plenty of legends of 2000-year-old olive trees.  But 800 seems a sufficiently ripe old age for veneration.

Unless, of course, you happen to be a right-wing Israeli settler.

Then what you do is poison olive trees.

By the dozen.

Whole groves of them.

TURMUS AYA, West Bank — Palestinians from villages like this one in the West Bank governorate of Ramallah still remember when the olive harvest was a joyous occasion, with whole families out for days in the fall sunshine, gathering the year’s crop and picnicking under the trees.

“We considered it like a wedding,” said Hussein Said Hussein Abu Aliya, 68.

But when Mr. Abu Aliya and his family from the neighboring village of Al-Mughayer — 36 of them in all, including grandchildren — drove out to their land this week in a snaking convoy of cars and pickup trucks with others from Turmus Aya, they found scores of their trees on the rocky slopes in various stages of decay, recently poisoned, they said, by Jewish settlers from an illegal Israeli outpost on top of the hill.

Branches drooped.  The once lush, silver-green leaves were turning brown and the few olives still clinging on, which should have been plump and green or purple by harvest time, were shriveled and black. Dozens of trees nearby that Mr. Abu Aliya contended were similarly poisoned with chemicals last year stood like spindly skeletons, gray and completely bare.

I’m glad NYT reporter Isabel Kershner finally got a piece about this in the paper, even if it was edited mealy-mouthed Times-style to include phrases like “they said” and “they contended.”

But what Kershner didn’t write is that this has been going on for years.   Decades, in fact.

At first the settlers tried burning the trees.  But olives are phoenix-like:  you can burn one down, but within a few  months, new shoots will spring up around the burned-out core.  Then they tried bulldozing them, only to find that unless you use a deep backhoe, those shoots will still spring up again.   Then they took to shooting at Palestinians who came to tend and harvest the trees, which is why they can now do so only under Israeli army protection and for just a few days each year.   So now the settlers have turned to poison.

My revulsion at this is incalculable.  Of course there are so many greater causes for revulsion at the Israeli occupation and land grab in the West Bank — the continual harassment, checkpoints, beatings, arbitrary jailings, maimings, murders.   But olive trees?

When you poison so potent a symbol, you poison something deep and integral to the spirit.   You poison the very idea of the olive branch of peace.  Of the dove with the live branch in its beak that arrived at Noah’s ark as a sign of renewal.   Of the olive oil that kept miraculously burning in the temple at Hannukah, one of the holidays these religious settlers claim to honor.  Of the olive tree as the source of light, of shelter, of nutrition, of life itself.

The State of Israel once practically fetishised trees.   Remember all that stuff about making the desert bloom?  As a child, I happily contributed pennies from my allowance to the Jewish National Fund, thinking that I was planting trees in Israel.   They’d send a paper outline of a tree and I’d buy little stick-on leaves which I’d paste onto the branches, each in its proper place.  Then every time a tree was fully leafed, I’d proudly send it off, imagining each tree with a little plaque in front of it with my name inscribed as the donor.  I don’t remember what age I was when I realized that there were no trees with little plaques on them, but I count that as one of those moments when the disillusion of adulthood pierces a child’s view of the world.   A Jewish there-is-no-Santa-Claus moment, perhaps.

For all those American and Israeli Jews inured to the violence and thuggery of occupation, perhaps the poisoning of olive trees will slip through their defenses and rationalizations (“but what can we do?”  “but they hate us!”  “but we need security,” “but we don’t have any choice”) and wake up what tiny remnant of conscience and decency may or may not still exist.

Because these dead olives are literally the poisoned fruit of occupation.

These settlers don’t just use poison.  They are poison.

And they have all but killed Israel’s soul.

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File under: ecology, Judaism, Middle East, ugliness | Tagged: Tags: Israel, olive trees, Palestine, poison, settlers, West Bank | 10 Comments
  1. annetraver says:
    October 14, 2010 at 5:46 am

    we are going up to Tuscany to help harvest olives this weekend — your poignant enumeration of the larger meaning of the olive tree will be much in mind.

  2. charlotte gerlings says:
    October 15, 2010 at 4:02 am

    As you say, such a potent symbol, the olive branch stands for so much. I shall continue to avoid Israeli produce in the supermarket – together with boycotting all Nestlé brands, my shopping has become pretty circumscribed over the years.

  3. Yusuf says:
    December 23, 2010 at 6:48 am

    Your last line struck me as a tad naieve. I have been taught that if you build something on a rotten foundation it will also be rotten. The Zionist political entity in Palestine was built on a foundation of theft, lies, violence and bigotry. How then could it have a soul in the first place?

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      December 23, 2010 at 9:43 am

      It might help some if you tried looking at it from both ‘sides.’ Israel was also built on a foundation of idealism — as badly blinkered as idealism often is — and early Zionism was also a national freedom movement. If the seeds of its corruption were there from the start, alas I think we can say the same of any idealism, including, I now fear, the more radical parts of the Palestinian one. My point being that there is more than enough rhetoric to go round, and that finding some way out of this terrible impasse requires going beyond judgment to understanding. (I will think more about this and post in the near future.)

      As for the ‘soul’ issue, I am guilty as charged: it’s a tired cliche to even think of any country as having a soul, and one I need to be wary of.

      • Yusuf says:
        December 31, 2010 at 10:33 am

        I’m sorry Leslie. I cannot see this from a Zionist perspective. It was a wrong headed idea from the beginning, even if I concider the tragedy of the Jewish diaspora, the anti-Jewish laws of Europe, the holocaust etc…one of the foundation stones of Israeli apologists is the “chosen people” line which, you must admit smells very much like the “master race” slogan used by you know who. The core of this ideology is racism, which I suppose could be considered an ideal but not the kind of idealism I would laud.

        • Lesley Hazleton says:
          December 31, 2010 at 11:35 am

          Yusuf, I am as averse to the ‘chosen people’ line as you, and appalled at what Zionism has become, let alone at the fact that there are such things as Jewish racists. But here are the essential facts: Israel is a state, and Palestine, sooner or later, and I very much hope sooner, will also be a state. The only way to get there, it seems to me, is to go beyond mutual blame and accusation — I say this in full knowledge of how easy that is to say and how immensely difficult it is to do — to the pragmatic question of how these two states are to co-exist: not in fluttering-dove idealistic kind of peace, but in what you might call “cold peace,” much as exists, perhaps (I know you’ll hate this analogy, but here goes anyway), between Egypt and Israel.

  4. Yusuf says:
    January 4, 2011 at 7:05 am

    Lesley, with respect, I think you are missing…well, a lot. If you examine the “peace process” with open eyes, you will see that there is zero possibility for a two state solution. The Zionist agenda, as openly stated by many, includes control of territory beyond the jordan river, beyond the Golan heights and beyond the Siani.
    I will concede that, for the average Jew perhaps, the dream of a homeland has some aspects which are not totally reprehensible, but when those aspirations became actions, with the ethnic cleansing the process required, all honor was lost.
    I assume you have lived in occupied Palestine and have or had friends or even family involved in this crime and I’m sorry if my opinions cause you anger, but I really don’t see how a person with any love of justice could defend or even excuse the punishment of the Palestinian people for the crimes if the Europeans and others

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      January 4, 2011 at 8:03 am

      Oh no, Yusuf, either you misread me or I have not been clear. I neither defend nor excuse this. The whole project of Israeli occupation of the occupied territories, the ongoing ugliness it entails, and the increasing denial and right-wing entrenchment inside Israel, all fill me with anger and with a disgust so deep I did not know I was capable of it. Like you, I fail to see exactly how a two-state solution would work, with the West Bank and Gaza non-contiguous and lacking in natural resources. But my failing to see something does not mean that it is impossible. However this is to be resolved, even partially, compromise will be needed, on all sides: a ‘solution,’ in other words, that will please nobody but that everybody can live with. What I’m saying is that there is a huge gap between the ideal and the possible, and we can only work toward the future from where we are now. Call me an unhappy pragmatist, perhaps.

      • Yusuf says:
        January 5, 2011 at 4:30 am

        Thank you. I think I understand your position now. To me, a just solution would be to allow everyone who has history there to return(if they want) and let them decide, on an equal basis what the system should be, and they can call it Israel, Palestine or kookamunga, as long as everyone gets a chance to live and worship as they see fit. Maybe we’re on the same page, or at least the same chapter.

  5. Lesley Hazleton says:
    January 5, 2011 at 9:22 am

    The same chapter — I like that. The insistence that we all have to be on exactly the same page may be part of what’s holding us back.

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