Sumud

Old City, Jerusalem, houses occupied by Jewish settlers, Israeli flag

The Palestinians have a word, sumud that encapsulates their practical philosophy with regard to their dealing with adversity, particularly the adversity of the Occupation. It roughly means resilience. It can take the form of various forms of resistance: violent or non-violent. But it comes from a mindset or historical consciousness of clinging to the land and outwaiting every new conqueror – be it the Jews, or the British, or the Ottomans or the Crusadors, or whoever boisterously asserts their claim to be the new power in the land. Sumud is a powerful force in the face of opposition: a “we will prevail, just like we have always done” statement. Invaders will come and go: the Jews will eventually go back to their countries, with their tail between their legs, just like the Crusaders did before them.

The Jews too have a form of sumud, which is integral to Zionism. According to their narrative, they do not come to Israel as did the early colonials (or as does every new hopeful immigrant) to the Americas. They return to Israel. They come back home. In their conception, they are not colonizers. Wherever else they have attempted to live in the world, they have been reviled, despised, oppressed, enslaved, kicked-out or gassed. Now they are coming home to their own country. Of course, there are other people living here, just as when they previously returned from Egypt in the Biblical period. It is they who are the true encroachers, who don’t belong here. The Arabs have 40 countries where they can live just as well. Let them go there instead.

This is the long-term goal that has guided the Zionist enterprise since Jews began to arrive in the 19th century. You obtain a little land, then another bit, and gradually you build a country. It just requires long-term, patient determination. That’s the policy now in the West Bank. You use a combination of tricks; confiscate land for military purposes, then re-zone it for settlement. Claim prior ownership by Jews. Take advantage of inadequate legal claims, such as that no-one registered the land, but just happened to live there; claim that an existing settlement requires additional land for “natural expansion”; take advantage of loopholes in Mandatory or Ottoman law, or the loose provisions of the Oslo agreements. If you are a settler, make it hard for Palestinian farmers to harvest their olives – or simply steal the crops, or uproot, burn or poison them. Make it hard for their children to go to school, use every creative tactic you can think of. Eventually “we will prevail” – we will get them out from what was ours to begin with.

So which sumud, and whose resilience will prevail here? What happens when an irresistable force meets an unmovable object?

Historically, what happened to a large degree was that the people living on and working the land maintained their position by gradual assimilation. They could change their customs, religions and languages to match those of the conqueror. The Palestinians of today, are to some extent, the Jews of yesterday. Under the Byzantines they became Christian, under the Arabs and Turks they became Muslim. And who is to say the Jews of yore were not for the most part Jebusites or Canaanites? Even the Biblical narrative shows intermarriage and assimilation. And, at the same time, the Jews who “came back” to establish modern-day Israel look suspiciously like the peoples in the lands from which they came: like Russians, Germans, Moroccans, Iraqis, Indians, Africans or Chinese.

People are first people and then something else; human beings with various accretions of religious, social, linguistic or tribal identity. Why is it so hard to see that we are all essentially the same?

What human beings have in common is that they do best under conditions of peace. Palestinian villagers just want to be left alone to live their lives. Jewish immigrants want a place to settle, educate their children, and make a living.

Peace is never a stable quality or level to be attained and then done with; it’s fragile and always something you need to work at. But the best way to establish peace is to allow the historical pattern of gradual assimilation to assert itself once again. Not to fight, but to integrate. Rather than trying to “liberate” the land from those who were there first, allow them the opportunity to become members or citizens in the new structure. Eventually you won’t need to get rid of them because they will become just like you. And you will also assimilate some of their qualities too; that cannot be avoided. In fact, that’s already happening too. Resistance to cultural assimilation is useless. Geography and climate are determining factors in themselves.

This is an unpopular story that hardly anybody; whether Jew or Palestinian, wants to hear, but given a hundred years, or a thousand, it’s the one that is likely to win, even if never acknowledged. And then, this being the Levant, before we know it, the next conquering hero will arrive to supplant the previous one, and the cycle will begin anew.

No democracy under apartheid

We went up to the demonstration in Jerusalem yesterday. There were said to be 80 – 100,000 which made some people feel hopeful. “The young are beginning to wake up” was something I heard there. But it’s not clear that even the large show of people had any real influence. The first stage of the legislation went ahead, after all. Politicians have the quality of being able to convince themselves that they are loved by the people even when everybody’s against them.

Of course, of the 100k people only a small faction carried signs against the occupation – MK Ayman Odeh borrowed one of these from my granddaughter to have his picture taken with it. The sign said “No Democracy with Occupation”.

I think a better sign would have been “No democracy under apartheid”, though I only thought about this later.

Because that’s the situation we are currently in, according to most of the human rights organizations. And the majority of Israelis still have an inability to internalize or admit this. No government is saying it. They are all promoting a two state solution” which is never going to happen. Israel is living under the pretense that it is merely administering the Palestinian territories, despite the obvious fact that it is never going to give them up. In the case of the Oslo Accords “Area A” (the Palestinian cities), it does not even admit to administering them, but those waters are muddy.

In fact, this is a terrible limbo to be in. The Geneva Conventions have a key flaw: there should be a maximum time period for what can be considered military occupation, after which the occupation should be considered de facto annexation. And if the occupying country continues to exert differential laws towards the population, then this has to be called what it is: apartheid.

The fact of apartheid is crystal-clear in areas that Israel has formally annexed, such as East Jerusalem. Those areas are, in every way, under Israeli law. But if a terrorist (or a mentally handicapped person) kills people, his family’s home can be demolished with out a shrug. Unless, of course, he’s a Jew. A Palestinian living in Jerusalem can only obtain citizenship with great difficulty. A Palestinian who moves from Jerusalem to the West Bank for a period can be denied the right to return. A Palestinian Jerusalemite who goes to live in another country forfeits their right to return to Israel or the Palestinian territories.

Through protracted military occupation, the granting of limited autonomy and continued settlement, Israel has created a chaotic reality from which it continues to reap both rewards and turmoil. But it is willing to put up with the turmoil forever, or for as long as this is viable and expedient. The focus has to be put on making the status quo inviable, by dropping the pretense of a two state solution and demanding that Israel guarantee full equal rights and citizenship for Palestinians living in Israel and the occupied territories. If it fails to do so, it needs to be held to account.

Photos from the demonstration

Fiber | Israel-Palestine

Yesterday we were connected to the fiber infrastructure and, hopefully will receive more robust internet connection, though that flimsy wire hanging flapping about among the bushes, leaves me feeling rather doubtful. In the newer section of the village, the cables are buried; in the older section where we live, we depend on wires and poles, which occasionally get hit and pulled down by passing trucks. The phone company technicians are known for their resourcefulness. For years, our connection was dependent on cables twisted together inside an old coke bottle on our roof. I suppose the technician didn’t have a proper connection box handy on his several visits.

Now we have a formal connection speed of 1 Mb, though stability, rather than speed will be the incentive of most of the village residents to adopt the new service.

I still haven’t got around to asking the phone company to give me a permanent ip and open port 80, so this post will be offline till I so so.

For the Thich Nhat Hanh sangha I suggested to share the Nextcloud folder I use, so that we’ll have a joint folder for sangha-related activities. It’s hosted at Disroot.org. They are a bit slow in responding to requests for new user registrations, so we’ll see if this actually works. Most people are used to instant responses for new registration from the big tech companies, so the idea of a sign-up taking several days is foreign to them. I’m also not sure exactly how the Nextcloud federation plays out in real life, so we’ll see. The service actually wasn’t working at all for me for the past several months, till I figured out that I need to update my client. Then it worked again. This is one of the problems with AppImage and the other newer Linux software installations. The Debian package management system is much more dependable by comparison. And the more that software developers come to rely on the newer installation methods, the less motivated they are to keep the repository versions updated. (The other main problem is the variety of competing installation types, so that one has to remember whether an application was informed from the repository or snap or appimage, or Git or compiled from a tar ball, or whatever. The result is chaos, whereas formerly it was a lot easier to manage to update a Linux system than in Windows.

Link

‘The land beyond the road is forbidden’: Israeli settler shepherds displace Palestinians This is typical of the painful story that happens beneath the radar of international attention. Shepherding weaponized and used simply to take over Palestinian lands. The occupation is violent in every one of its aspects, but when Palestinians resort to desperate means like blowing themselves up in order to protest the occupation, they are the ones who are castigated for being violent.

The phone company sub-contractor who came to install our new fiber line were Palestinians from East Jerusalem. He was impressed to hear that our village is shared by Arabs and Jews living together. “It’s the only one, unfortunately, I said.” – “Inshallah, one day there will be peace” . – “Sure, after we are dead,” I joked. His young worker, who hadn’t understand this exchange in Hebrew, asked him afterwards why he was hearing the teachers from the adjacent primary school speaking in Arabic. So his boss explained to him that the school has Arab and Jewish kids learning together. The two of them had nothing more to say about it. In the reality of East Jerusalem, such a reality is even more difficult to contemplate.

Crazy ironies

The scene of the terror attack in Tel Aviv yesterday was an ultra-orthodox Jewish neighborhood. Yet two of the five victims were non-Jewish Ukrainian workers. Another victim, an Arab policeman, was the hero who rushed to the scene and shot the attacker, preventing further killings. Two of the three policemen killed in the latest wave of violence have been Arabs.

So Ukrainians who probably thought themselves safer than the majority of their compatriots just happened to be in the line of fire of a gunman with different targets in mind, and finally a heroic Palestinian Israeli policeman ended up saving Jewish lives while dying at the hands of a shahid who was trying to take them.

In the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestinians, I won’t presume to judge which actions are legitimate and which not. Murder is repugnant, but is of course just one of the forms of violence being perpetrated. Both sides play a role in perpetuating this blood feud, though Israel has the greater responsibility as the occupying power. The conflict is intractable but Jews and Palestinians are highly creative and intelligent. As neither people is going to give up their homeland, ever, they owe it to themselves to find a way of living together in which everyone can enjoy dignity and respect.

Palestinians weren’t offered much respect this week in the summit meeting between Israel and other Arab states: they weren’t even invited.

Links of the Day

My Dear Russian Friends, Now is the time for your own maidan https://www.lemonde.fr/le-monde-in-english/article/2022/03/28/jonathan-littell-my-dear-russian-friends-now-is-the-time-for-your-own-maidan_6119497_5026681.html

SerenityOS Web Browser passes Acid3 Test – by Bryan Lunduke https://lunduke.substack.com/p/serenityos-web-browser-passes-acid3

2022-03-24 нет войне

I am home alone for a long weekend while D is away on a mindfulness retreat. Plenty of work to do though – both for the office and around the house – some gardening if the weather permits. Just woke up at around 5 AM and am sitting here listening to Cafe de Anatolia music [1], a little loud.

When I look at the headlines from Ukraine and Russia with an eye, a mind, and a back-of-my-mind understanding that there is disinformation everywhere, it still computes to the fact that a big military giant is bearing down on a smaller neighbour with an army that has recently been committing despicable and hardly noticed atrocities across Syria. I’m pretty certain that the Russian leader is facing a growing wave of discontent at home, and that this will eventually explode, in ways that we will probably be clueless about. I don’t think the guy is a madman, but just badly out of touch. And yet, with his help, Assad, similarly aloof, has managed to keep his chokehold on a nation. That’s the way it is with dictators and strongmen. Their rule eventually wizzens and dies, but not always according to a predictable time-frame.

Likely Zelenskiy is similarly facing opposition and discontent, although it hasn’t been reported, in the name of presenting a united front. His position is equally tenuous. Meanwhile Ukraine is being destroyed, and all for what? To score points against NATO? Wars serve no purpose other than allowing angry people to let off steam. The motivations and the outcomes are clouded in fog. The narrative can be made up, the facts doctored. History becomes a jumble of divisive narratives, as with the tkuma and the nakba. A people will always remember what it wants to remember. Meanwhile, humans die for stupid unnecessary reasons.

“Killing people is so easy,” I said to D after the stabbing attack that killed 4 in Beer Sheba the other day. Our bodies are fragile. Sometimes a disease gets us, or a storm, or a radicalized Islamic militant. It makes little difference. On a recent car journey, the truck just ahead swerved out suddenly into my lane, which meant that I swerved into the next lane, with no time to look. It could easily have been the end for me, my wife and for other unfortunates. We are fragile and can die for no reason at all, kill others senselessly. In the arithmetic of causes and effects nothing adds up but the final balance is always a zero.

If we want to look for the reasons behind the reasons, we need to look to the metaphysical. The other day, into the office walked a gardener. A big scary guy in dark attire; a beard in the style that only religious Muslims wear, a large skull cap. He was looking for work, but ended up giving me a sermon. He asked if I “believed” and I said sure – I believe that the god of the Muslims and all the other gods are one and the same. He was very happy with this answer, asked if I knew the kalima, and I repeated after him La Illaha Il Allah. He departed after giving me a hug.

It is the same god that sends militants on a stabbing spree, the same that rescues us from a car wreck, and both the killers and the rescued praise him. Both are right to do so. We are just agents in an agency at the top of which stands an aloof and unknown owner – an oligarch – sailing somewhere in his super-yacht. Perhaps even he is unsure whether the next port will allow him to dock, will turn him away, or will seize his boat in the name of trumped-up sanctions.

Amnesty Int’l report on Israel apartheid

Amnesty International says that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, whether in the OPT, in Jerusalem or in Israel itself amounts to the internationally recognized crime of apartheid (without making direct comparisons with S. Africa). As such it joins a string of Israeli and international human rights organizations. So the accusation is not new, but the report is certainly thorough, running to 278 pages. Such a report cannot easily be cast as based on “lies”, though that is what Israeli officials are attempting to claim. It may be easier to claim that the organization is using “double standards”, though I haven’t heard of Amnesty sparing any country from censure. If anything it is the governments of western countries who are using “double standards” in giving Israel so much slack. That’s true also of the news media. The report did not reach the front page of The Guardian today. I read what CNN, Aljazeera, The Guardian, HaAretz and the Times of Israel had to say about the report. Only AlJazeera had the link to the actual report – but I have often noticed that news organizations, when reporting on such matters, tend to leave out the links to the subject of their reporting – I don’t know what journalistic policy lies behind that terrible decision but I find it inexcusable. When an NGO publishes a report, it does so with the intent that it will reach the widest possible audience. News outlets are not doing their job if they don’t help them in that.

So is Israel an apartheid state? Of course it is. This is revealed by story after story in Israel’s own news media. But apartheid is a modern word for an ancient phenomenon. Until the 20th century most nation states discriminated against minorities. Minorities (such as Jews) were treated differently and if this was not systematized, it is only because systems were not so rigid as they have become in our times. “Modern” liberal democracies are beginning to move beyond apartheid, due in part to the legacy of their imperial past. But this is not so in most Asian countries. To be a member of a religious minority in Pakistan or Bangladesh, a Muslim in Myanmar, a Tamil in Sri Lanka, a Muslim in China, or even a person of foreign ethnicity in Japan or India, means that one is never going to feel quite at home in one’s own country. And not all of those examples involve the aspect of a national conflict. To the Israel-Palestine equation must be added the bitter conflict over territory and various other complications like the exile of the Jews from historical Israel and the mechanisms developed by Jews for self-preservation as a minority throughout the centuries.

It’s going to take more than a few negative reports by the world’s top human rights organizations to bring change. But in some ways, there is a greater potential for change here than in many other places. There is the aspect that Israel wants to be seen as a modern European country. There is the demographic aspect – it is hard to ostracize such a large minority. There is the aspect that eventually Israel and the Palestinian territories will probably end up being integrated. Creating an inclusive nation out of the current mess is going to take a while, but is eventually possible.

US says Israeli settlements no longer considered illegal in dramatic shift | World news | The Guardian

Declaration marks rejection of 2016 UN resolution that settlements on the West Bank are a ‘flagrant violation’ of international law

Source: The Guardian

This is why they say Trump is dangerous.

Unless the US is able to change something, Israeli settlement under occupation is and will remain illegal under international law expressed in past UN resolutions. And that’s the way it should be, for as long as their full individual and collective rights remain unrecognized. If they would be, they could vote to change the nature of the state that governs them into something new. No Israeli government would allow that. So we have a situation of apartheid, which the UN cannot accept.

By embracing the Israeli occupation, the US puts itself in the position of a rogue state. When superpowers do this, the whole panoply of international governance comes tumbling down, and that puts us all at risk. Precisely in an era when collective governance is necessary to overcome the huge challenges of climate change, horrendous weapons, vast movements of refugees, and all the rest, governments feel they can behave irresponsibly and do whatever they like. Fine. Let them. We will sink together.

Australian Labor candidate has pulled out after saying the way Israel treated Palestinians was “worse than the South African system of apartheid”.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/apr/13/labor-candidate-melissa-parke-pulls-out-of-curtin-contest-over-israel-comments

“I’ve had 20 years’ experience in international relations and law including living and working in the Middle East,” Parke said. “My views are well known. But I don’t want them to be a running distraction from electing a Labor government which will take urgent and strong action on climate change. That’s why I have decided to withdraw my candidacy.”