Palestine and Israel at the Oscars

Posted on January 31, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

I’m usually no fan of the Oscars.  The “Academy” seems to have an unerring bias toward the showy and the obvious.  But this year I’m excited.  Not only because the stunningly un-showy and un-obvious Amour has a decent chance for the big Best Picture award (see my take on it here), but even more because the documentary section has two nominees that I really really want to see (yes, double really):  5 Broken Cameras, and The Gatekeepers.

5brokencamerasThe five broken cameras belong to the occupied:  Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat.  He got the first one the week his sixth son was born, and began using it as a kind of record for his children.  Over the next five years, he documented life in his village of Bilin, the focus of weekly demonstrations against the construction of Israel’s “separation barrier,” aka The Wall (another excellent documentary than never got such recognition, despite an unforgettable long opening shot of the last concrete panel being put into place, cutting off the landscape).

One by one, Burnat’s cameras were smashed — by an IDF teargas canister, by rubber bullets, by angry Jewish settlers.  Each time, he found another and went on filming, then teamed up with Israeli co-director Guy Davidi, who managed to partially fund the movie with a government grant — money, in suitably Middle Eastern irony, from the same government that broke at least two of Burnat’s cameras.  (See the trailer here.)

thegatekeepersThe gatekeepers are the occupiers:  six retired heads of Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, the Shin Bet (the acronym of sherutei bitahon — security services).  It’s a talking-heads movie, yes, but these six are unprecedentedly candid about their actions and decisions, including torture and targeted assassination.   Faced with the consequences of their actions as the Israeli right-wing becomes more intractable than ever, they wrestle openly with doubt and conscience, and this wrestling adds up to biting criticism of the occupation from deep within Israel’s defense establishment.  (TimeOut New York has an interesting interview with director Dror Moreh, and you can see the trailer here.)

But the Oscars are still the Oscars, where “American” wins out over “foreign” and sub-titles are considered an undue tax on the moviegoer’s mind.  So I doubt that either of these two will win the documentary award, which will probably go to Searching for Sugarman, a movie about trying to track down a Detroit singer-songwriter who dropped out of sight years ago.

And there’s a far tougher reason why neither 5 Broken Cameras nor The Gatekeepers is likely to win:  Both lead to the same place, which is the urgent need to end the Israeli occupation, and find a way for Israelis and Palestinians to coexist.  Oscar voters are doubtless terrified of taking such a basic political stand, let alone of recognizing either movie over the other and thus be seen as “taking sides.”  Politics at the Oscars?  The horror!

So in the spirit of both movies, here’s an idea:  Give a joint award for best documentary this year, Oscar voters!  5 Broken Cameras and The Gatekeepers together.  Wouldn’t that be a terrific statement?

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[Note:  both movies are scheduled for general release in the US in the next few weeks.  I have no idea why the delay.]

 

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Morsi’s Anti-Semitism

Posted on January 16, 2013 by Lesley Hazleton

I wish I could say that Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi’s anti-Semitism surprised me half as much as it seemed to surprise The New York Times.  (“Egyptians should nurse our children and grandchildren on hatred” for Jews and Zionists, Morsi declared in a videotaped speech three years ago. “They have been fanning the flames of civil strife wherever they were throughout history. They are hostile by nature.”)

But the rampant use of anti-Semitic imagery in political rhetoric both in Egypt and in other Muslim countries (“apes,” “pigs,” “bloodsuckers,” said Morsi) is hardly news.  It comes right out of the convoluted paranoia of The Protocols of the Elders of the Zion, which far too many Egyptians still take for fact instead of the fictional fake it was long ago proved to be.  What concerns me is how it seeps into even the best-intentioned minds, in far less obvious but nonetheless insidious ways.

Consider, for instance, an exchange like this one, which I seem to have had a number of times over the past several years:

– “What do the Jews think they’re doing in Gaza?”

– “The Jews?  All Jews?  Which Jews?”

– “The Israelis, of course.”

– “Which Israelis?”

– “Well, the Israeli government.”

– “So why do you not say ‘the Israeli government’ instead of ‘the Jews’?”

This is what you might call the low-level shadow of anti-Semitism.  My interlocutors (I love/hate that word) would never dream of using Morsi’s inflammatory language of hatred.  They’re liberal and moderate American Muslims (some are believing mosque-goers, others self-described agnostics or atheists).  And yet even they are not always immune to that conflation of politics and ethnicity, of Israeli policy and Jewishness.

Each time such an exchange occurs, there’s a pause in the conversation — a moment of discomfort as my interlocutor (that word again!) realizes what I’m responding to.  And then comes a nod of acknowledgement, one that takes considerable courage, since none of us appreciate being called to account.  Call it a small moment of sanity.

I recognize this because it’s mirrored in Israel, where talk of “the Arabs” — a generalization as bad as “the Jews” — veers more and more not just into outright racism, but into a kind of gleeful pride in that racism, as shown in David Remnick’s long piece on “Israel’s new religious right” in the current New Yorker.

Israeli politicians have taken to presenting themselves as defenders of “the Jewish people,” regularly using “Jew” as a synonym for “Israeli,” even though — or because — over 20% of Israeli citizens are Muslim or Christian Arabs.  They do this deliberately, of course, just as the Morsi-type anti-Semitic rhetoric is deliberate.  The emotional resonance of “Jew” is deeper and far older than that of “Israeli,” and thus far more useful as a carrier of both covert and overt pride and prejudice.

As a Jew I find this political claim to represent me both insulting and obnoxious.  Like an increasing number of American Jews, I’m appalled by the policies of the Netanyahu government (let alone those of its predecessors), and at the development of what has clearly become an apartheid regime.  I deeply resent being lumped together with the Netanyahus of this world — and I equally deeply resent the attempt by the Netanyahus of this world to lump themselves in with me and define my Jewishness.  How dare they?  And how dare Morsi?

I’d ask “have they no shame?” but the answer is obvious.

Filed under: Islam, Judaism, Middle East, sanity, ugliness | Tagged: , , , , , , | 9 Comments »

Welcome, Palestine!

Posted on November 30, 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.

Filed under: Middle East | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

No Gaza Ceasefire

Posted on November 20, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

Hillary Clinton’s tight-lipped glare says it all.  The expected ceasefire in Gaza today did not materialize.  Israel still bombing, Hamas still launching rockets.

I watch as the hardliners on both sides reinforce each other — delegitimizing not Israel, nor Hamas, but the Palestinian Authority.

Worse still,  they knowingly do so at the cost of other people’s lives.

I watch in wordless misery.

Filed under: Middle East, ugliness, war | Tagged: , , , , , | 18 Comments »

Breaking Through On Iran?

Posted on October 21, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

Today the NYT reports that “the United States and Iran have agreed in principle for the first time to one-on-one negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.”

(I’m not at all sure what to make of that phrase “one-on-one negotiations.”  I’m assuming it means face-to-face meetings between American and Iranian officials as opposed to “back-channel” contacts, but in the land of diplo-speak, who knows?  Moreover, this is hardly “the first time” the US and Iran have negotiated over nuclear issues, not least since Iran’s nuclear program began with full-on American support decades ago, under the Shah. But I’ll stop with the cavils for now…)

The new agreement is still informal.  It comes after “intense, secret exchanges between American and Iranian officials that date almost to the beginning of President Obama’s term,” the NYT reports, but it’s unclear if Ayatollah Khamenei has yet signed off on it, or even when negotiations might begin.  “After the US elections” is all that’s being said.  And of course if Romney wins, forget it.

If this works out, it’s excellent news.  Long overdue.  There’s no way this whole standoff is going to be resolved without direct talks.  So it was hardly a surprise to see the Israeli reaction, via ambassador Michael Oren:  “We do not think Iran should be rewarded with direct talks.”  Instead, he said, sanctions and “all other possible pressures on Iran” should be increased.

“Rewarded?”  More sanctions?  “Other pressures?”  Does he imagine that Iran will simply collapse and disappear?  That it can be bombed into submission?  That no direct talks are ever necessary?  Where exactly does he see any form of resolution in all this?

The answer is:  he doesn’t.  Conflict resolution is not the aim so far as he’s concerned.  That’s his government’s stand toward Palestine:  no negotiation, no resolution, and yes, per Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, bomb ‘em into submission.  No give and take, no flexibility, no live and let live.  Just build more walls.

If US-Iran negotiations do indeed take place, the logical outcome would be that Iran ends up with nuclear energy but not nuclear weapons.  From Iran’s point of view, that’s a huge concession:  Israel has nuclear weapons, after all, and the US has been one of the world’s largest exporters of nuclear-arms technology.  It doesn’t take much to see why Iran objects to being lectured on nuclear issues by two nuclear powers, or that the very idea of “allowing” Iran to develop nuclear energy — “allow” is a word that crops up often in the NYT article — stinks of paternalistic hypocrisy.

But Iran’s leaders — its real leaders, that is, not front-man clowns like Ahmadinejad — may turn out to be a lot more realistic than Israel’s ones.

One thing is for sure: This news is going to figure large in Monday’s foreign-policy debate between Obama and Romney.  And Obama couldn’t do better than quote R. Nicholas Burns, whom the NYT cites as the man who “led negotiations with Iran as under-secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration.”  Burns sounds as though he’s had quite enough of diplo-speak:  “While we should preserve the use of force as a last resort,” he says, “negotiating first with Iran makes sense.  What are we going to do instead?  Drive straight into a brick wall called war in 2013, and not try to talk to them?”

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Update, Monday October 22: The NYT reports that  everyone’s back-tracking.  Looks like someone was pushing a little too hard.  Or to use an unfortunate metaphor, jumping the gun.

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A Bitter End

Posted on August 27, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

Bitter Lemons is one of the few sites I list here as recommended. I’d have done so just for the perfect irony of both title and sub-title, but the e-zine lived up to its aims and beyond. For eleven years, principals Yossi Alpher and Ghassan Khatib have led a dynamic exchange of views between Palestinians and Israelis. But even the best can be beaten down by the relentless momentum of events.

The same day that three 12- and 13-year-old Israeli settler kids were arrested for firebombing a Palestinian family in their car — and barely a week after a lynch mob of Israeli teens tried to beat a Palestinian man to death in the main square of West Jerusalem, with one hundred onlookers doing nothing to stop them — Khatib and Alpher announced that they will cease publishing Bitter Lemons as an e-zine.

Alpher cites many forms of fatigue involved in this decision, including donor fatigue (essentially a childishly impatient “what, you haven’t made peace yet?”) and what he calls “local fatigue”:

There is no peace process and no prospect of one. Informal “track II” dialogue–bitterlemons might be described as a “virtual” track II–is declining. Here and there, writers from the region who used to favor us with their ideas and articles are now begging off, undoubtedly deterred by the revolutionary rise of intolerant political forces in their countries or neighborhood.

Khatib details it further:

Despite the feeling among many in the Arab world that contact with Israelis is tantamount to accepting Israel’s occupation, seldom did authors decline an invitation. Lately, we have observed that this has changed, that even once-forthcoming Palestinians are less interested in sharing ideas with Israelis just across the way. Still, we have been able to present the voices of security chiefs and political prisoners, military generals and farmers losing land, spokespersons for armed groups and peaceniks in an equal and fair manner–rather differently than the situation on the ground.

Nevertheless, this achievement is bittersweet as the scenery around us grows ever more dark and uncertain. Two decades after the signing of the Declaration of Principles that many hoped would usher in the creation of a Palestinian state and independence, freedom and security, Palestinians and Israelis are barely conversational. The structures created by those agreements have atrophied, corrupted by an increasing imbalance in the Palestinian relationship with Israel. Every day, there is new word of land confiscations, arrests, demolitions, and legislative maneuvers to solidify Israel’s control. Israel’s political leaders are beholden to a tide of right-wing sentiment and Palestinian leaders are made to appear ever-smaller in their shrinking spheres of control.

We are now, it appears, at the lowest point in the arc of the pendulum, one that is swinging away from the two-state solution into a known unknown: an apartheid Israel. How this new “one-state” option will be transformed into a solution that provides freedom and security for all remains to be seen.

That last sentence of Khatib’s has to be a model of restrained understatement.

But I totally understand Khatib and Alpher’s fatigue. In fact I am continually amazed at the sheer steadfastness of those Israelis and Palestinians who document the conflict and the occupation, thanks to whom we know so much about the checkpoints, about demolition of homes, about confiscation of land, about arbitrary arrest and detention, and about the Orwellian attempts to “legalize” all of the above. I have no idea how they manage to do it, day in and day out, year in and year out, without feeling that they are sinking into an ever-larger black hole of depression and despair. In fact I know that they do feel that way, but continue nonetheless. Which is even more astonishing.

Alpher and Khatib aren’t going away. They’ll be pursuing other paths for their activism, ones hopefully less dependent on donors with short attention spans, childlike expectations, and increasingly limited funds. I wish them godspeed. Meanwhile they’ll be maintaining Bitter Lemons in the hope that it will serve as an invaluable archive. It will. And it remains on my list of recommended sites.

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Is This How Pogroms Begin?

Posted on June 8, 2011 by Lesley Hazleton

AIPAC types will doubtless argue that the young Israelis in this video are just clean-cut high-spirited high-schoolers drunk on nationalism on Jerusalem Day, June 5.   But for Jews with better memories, it’s hard not to see the ominous signs of a pogrom in the making.  And the police are clearly doing nothing to break it up.

A  shorter version of the video looks like it’s about to go viral, and ugly as it is, that’s fine by me, since maybe it will shock more American Jews into paying attention to what’s really happening.  Me, I wish I was shocked.  But the fact is that having a screaming mob parading in front of your house and calling for your death at four in the morning is just another part of what Palestinians have to put up with on a daily basis.

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Note:  The ‘Nablus Gate’ entrance to the Old City of Jerusalem is misidentified in the subtitles:  it’s Damascus Gate.

Filed under: Middle East, ugliness | Tagged: , , , , , , | 20 Comments »

Sleaze

Posted on May 27, 2011 by Lesley Hazleton

File this under Annals of Ugliness.  And have paper towels handy to wipe off the sleaze if you watch it.

It’s Dutch über-racist Geert Wilders at a ‘Christian’ megachurch in Nashville, TN, getting standing O’s for tripe like “Muhammad was a terrorist worse than Bin Laden ever was” and “If Jerusalem falls, Nashville falls.”  Which makes me think that if this is Nashville, its fall might be a thing much to be desired.  And that with friends like this, Israel needs no enemies.

Transcript follows, courtesy of Loonwatch:

Geert Wilders: “Its Islam Stupid (raucous applause). We must stop the Islamization of our countries, more Islam means less freedom”…”And now, now Europe is looking slowly but gradually like Arabia”…”It was the land of our fathers, it is our land now, it is our values, our values are based on Christianity, Judaism and Humanism and not Islam, it is that simple (applause)”…”and I have a message for all those people who want to rob us from our freedoms, and my message is stay in your own country (loud applause)”…”we are not going to allow Islam to steal our country from us (applause)”…”if Jerusalem falls, Athens, Rome, Amsterdam and Nashville will fall therefore my point is we all are Israel (applause)”…”the only place where Christians are safe in the Middle East is that beautiful country called Israel (loud applause)”…”Make no mistake, please make no mistake, Islam is also coming to America, in fact Islam already is in America. America is facing a stealth jihad, the Islamic attempt to introduce Sharia’ law bit by bit”…”what we need my friends, what we need to turn the tide is a spirit of resistance, what we need I repeat it again is a spirit of resistance”…”we must repeat it over and over again, especially to our children, our Western values and culture based on Christianity and Judaism is better and superior to the Islamic culture (applause), and leaders who talk about immigration without mentioning Islam are blind (applause)”…”we must stop the immigration from non-Western countries and we must forbid the construction of new hate palaces called mosques (applause)”…”the press calls it an Arab spring, I call it unfortunately an Arab winter (applause), Islam and freedom, Islam and democracy are incompatible (applause)”…”the so called Prophet Muhammad was a terrorist worse than Bin Laden ever was (applause)”…”neutrality my friends, neutrality in the face of evil is evil itself (applause).”

I’d say that Wilders should stay in his own country, but that’s not fair to the Dutch.  So Harold Camping, where are you now that we need you?  Could you please arrange for this scumbag to be Raptured?

Filed under: Christianity, Islam, ugliness | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Awaiting Comment from the Saudis and the Taliban

Posted on April 30, 2011 by Lesley Hazleton

A girl can get really tired of writing about burqas, so I’d sworn I’d give it a rest.  But this is just so nuts I had to break my vow:

The first time I saw this photo, some months ago, I knew it had to be a hoax.  You know, one of those photoshop deals.  Besides, it could be anywhere, right?   Nothing to indicate that it was, as claimed, in the Israeli town of Beit Shemesh, and that these women weren’t ultra-conservative Muslims but ultra-Orthodox Jews.

Still, who could resist such a delicious idea?  Clearly not that grande dame of British journalism, The Daily Telegraph, which today ran the same photo with an accompanying story from its Israel correspondent:

At the insistence of the husbands of some burqa-wearing women, a leading rabbinical authority is to issue an edict declaring burqa-wearing a sexual fetish that is as promiscuous as wearing too little.

“A sexual fetish?”  Interesting.  “As promiscuous as wearing too little?”  Have the venerable rabbis been reading The Accidental Theologist?  My previous post on Sluts and Veils?

Clearly we’re in Daily Show country here.  Jon Stewart couldn’t have done better than the way The Telegraph went on to report, with the print version of a straight face, that several hundred ultra-Orthodox women in five Israeli towns have taken to the burqa (though disappointingly, it fails to follow up on the rabbinical view of the slutty erotics of fleshlessness).

If I needed any further confirmation that The Telegraph had really taken a bath on this story, it was right there in the by-line:

By Adrian Blomfield in Jerusalem 6:40PM BST 30 Jul 2010

That is, dated nine months ago.  QED!  Hoax!  Suckers!

Except then the reporter in me stood up on its hind legs and said “Hold on a moment:  double check.”  So I did.  And I’m truly sorry I did.

Because the only mistake in the whole Telegraph story is the date of that by-line.

Yes, Veronica, there is indeed a new ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect in Israel in which women wear burqas (with full-face veils — not even a slit for the eyes).  Apparently they even shower in them, so that they never lay eyes on their own bodies and thus, presumably, avoid the devilish temptations of auto-eroticism.

Once again, extremism trumps faith.  It really is a religion all its own, and its fanatical adherents the real co-religionists.

With which, I hereby renew the Accidental Theologist ban on burqas.

This time, I hope it lasts…

Filed under: absurd, fundamentalism, Islam, Judaism | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Alice Walker on What Humanity Means

Posted on April 16, 2011 by Lesley Hazleton

Pulitzer prizewinner Alice Walker (‘The Color Purple’) just gave a great talk at TEDxRamallah (God bless livestreaming).  She was sharp and true from the beginning:

– detained for 9 hours at the Allenby Bridge, she told the Israeli interrogator (yes, she was interrogated):  “Do you understand what you’re doing?  It’s wrong.  Just wrong.  And it’s not good for you.”

to the end:

– “Humanity means to show up when we need each other.  Just show up.  Be there.”

Only thing wrong:  it was far too short.

I’ll run the video here as soon as it’s posted on YouTube.

Filed under: art, existence, Middle East, war | Tagged: , , , | 5 Comments »

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