RETHINKING ISRAEL AFTER SIXTY YEARS
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- Written by Jeff Halper Jeff Halper
- Published: 14 May 2008 14 May 2008
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A lot, it turns out, though most of it exists beyond the bubble that insulates the Israeli public from its wider reality, and so does not dampen public celebrations. After sixty years, however, several fundamental developments have materialized which were not anticipated by the Zionist movement nor Israel's founding, but which must be squarely acknowledged and addressed. First, the vast majority of Jews did not and will not come to Israel. Israeli Jews represent, if emigrants are factored in, less than a third of the world Jewish community. Only 1% of American Jews ever came, and most of them are religious, even ultra-orthodox Jews, or the elderly, who live there only part-time. The reservoir of potential Jewish immigrants has been exhausted. Second, some 30% of Israel's population - almost 50% if we include the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories who, it seems, will stay permanently under Israeli rule - are not Jews. This is the Demographic Bomb, made even more threatening to a "Jewish state" by the fact that the Palestinians are a people whose national rights can no longer be denied. Israel/Palestine is a b-national country which somehow must either be partitioned or shared. And finally, the greatest irony of all, it is Israel, by its own hand, through its massive settlement project, that has foreclosed partition and created a thoroughly bi-national entity which can only lead to a one state or apartheid.
'We are almost dead. We have no money, nothing'
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- Written by Rory McCarthy in Beit Hanoun Rory McCarthy in Beit Hanoun
- Published: 13 May 2008 13 May 2008
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In the third part of our series on Gaza, Rory McCarthy talks to Ahmad Abu Me'tiq, who lost his wife and four of his children in an Israeli air strike
Her bed is on the third floor of Gaza's Shifa hospital, where shafts of warm afternoon sunshine reach in from the window. The ward is crowded, and the bed on which Asma'a Abu Me'tiq lay is curtained off from the rest and surrounded by the blankets her sister-in-law uses when she sleeps on the floor next to her at night.{josquote}"This house is empty. There is nothing for us here."{/josquote}
It may be the best hospital in Gaza but even the poorest families, like the Abu Me'tiqs, must provide extra food themselves. Asma'a's father, Ahmad, returns from downstairs with a cheap electric hot-plate, which he bought on credit from a shopkeeper he knows. He plugs it into the wall to heat a pot of thin homemade soup for his 13-year-old daughter, but there is either no electricity or the hot-plate didn't work. "What bad luck," he says quietly to himself.
Then he reaches over to his daughter, who is coughing and struggling to breathe from the deep wound in her chest. She hasn't touched her food since she was rushed to hospital 10 days earlier: the day an explosion in the street outside demolished the metal front door of their house as the family were eating breakfast, impaling her and her younger sister, Shaima, seven, with shrapnel and killing outright four other brothers and sisters and her mother too.
"I'm waiting to see you eat," says her father. "Later," says Asma'a. Several minutes passed. "Let me see you eat," he says again. "Tomorrow," she replies.
Siege of Gaza squeezes life out of the land
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- Written by Rory McCarthy in Beit Lahiya Rory McCarthy in Beit Lahiya
- Published: 13 May 2008 13 May 2008
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Abid Razzaq Ouda faces intimidation by Palestinian militants, the Israeli authorities, and the dire consequences of the economic blockade of Gaza
The field is planted with shoulder-high rows of corn and is so close to Israel that the tall concrete boundary wall is well within sight, along with the Israeli military jeeps on their regular patrols into northern Gaza.
For Abid Razzaq Ouda, 40, who farms this land, this brings its own complications. His field is sometimes used by Palestinian militants to fire rockets or mortars into southern Israel and the Israeli military mounts so many operations here that the farmers dare not risk going out at night for fear of being hit.
Last month, after militants used the field for a rocket attack, the Israeli military sent in armoured bulldozers which carved sweeping paths through his corn, tearing down the crops and wrecking the extensive plastic irrigation pipes. Then a bulldozer demolished the cement hut housing the water pump in the corner of the field. Ouda, still heavily in debt from the shortfall in his earlier strawberry crop, has no money to repair the pump and so this season's half-matured corn is already lost.
He is critical of the Israelis and of the militants too, an indication that there is considerable, and perhaps growing, frustration across Gaza with the armed groups who continue their attacks on Israel. "The fighters are very bad for us," Ouda said. "Many times we have tried to talk to them but they just threaten us."
Bush should stay home
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- Written by Akiva Eldar, Haaretz Akiva Eldar, Haaretz
- Published: 13 May 2008 13 May 2008
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Bush is an accomplice to an offense far worse than all of the criminal offenses of which Olmert is suspected combined. Every speech made by the president is one more bit of exposure of the nakedness of the Palestinian circles who tied their collective fate to the Annapolis declaration, which pledged to `make every effort to conclude an agreement before the end of 2008.` In light of the stasis in the negotiations, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) seems likely to resign even before Olmert does.
The failed gamble of the United States also undermines the standing of leaders in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Every fruitless visit by Bush to Israeli Jerusalem pushes the Arab League further and further away from its own peace initiative of March 2002, and provides more ammunition to Iran and Syria in their struggle for hegemony in the Middle East, over and above the moderate Sunni axis. Gaza and Lebanon are just the beginning.
A Prophetic Judaism of Human Rights
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- Written by Jeff Halper | ICAHD Israel Jeff Halper | ICAHD Israel
- Published: 12 May 2008 12 May 2008
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A Prophetic Judaism of Human Rights
May 22nd, 2007Jeff Halper | ICAHD Israel
Rene Cassin and Resistance to the Israeli Occupation
Needless to say, the European Enlightenment had a profound if uneven impact on world Jewry as it moved steadily throughout the nineteenth century from Western through Central and finally to Eastern Europe, where the vast majority of Jews lived. By the time Russian Jews, including my grandparents, established themselves in the U.S., Talmudic-based ultra-Orthodoxy had given way to more secular forms based, if on anything beyond a vague sense of Jewish “culture,” “tradition” and “community,” then upon universalistic values generally associated with the prophets. When I taught Sunday School in our rabbi-less Conservative synagogue in Hibbing, Minnesota, I learned that Judaism can best be defined as “ethical monotheism.” Although the monotheism never took root in me, a Judaism defined by ethics certainly did. And I found confirmation in the movements for social justice, civil rights and anti-war during the Sixties, in which I proudly noted the disproportionate number of Jews who participated along with me.
One of the books issued by the Conservative movement was entitled Jewish Heroes. If I remember correctly it dealt with truly formidable figures such as Rabbi Akiva, Maimonides, Hanna Senesh, and David Ben-Gurion. Written in the 1950s, it could not yet have included such Jewish civil rights martyrs as Michel Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, or Abby Hoffman, or Betty Friedan or the Jewish hero of my day, Sandy Koufax. Nor did it mention the five whites arrested with Nelson Mandela, all of whom were Jews or – well, the list goes on. Yet one of the great Jewish heroes, perhaps the greatest, René Cassin, could have been included by that time. Instead, he has been forgotten by all except perhaps his own French Jewish community.