palestine

There are 8 posts tagged palestine (this is page 1 of 1).

Diary

I’m still suffering from my by cold. We had a couple of guests over the weekend. C H, a Canadian citizen, who is associated with the Thich Nhat Hanh sanghas – a former “boat person” who escaped from Vietnam just after the war. She is a member of a Buddhist practice centre in Ontario, and on her way back to Canada, was about to visit another practice centre in Italy.

Our other visitors were G with his son. G is an Italian married to a Parsi woman from Bombay. They met years ago when on a bus to volunteer at the Freedom Theatre of the late Juliano Mir Khamees, in Jenin. G has been participating in a Feldenkreis course for the last four years, because he finds the therapy helpful for their son, who suffers from CP. They have been living partly in India and partly in Hongkong, but will be moving to the UK in the summer, as his wife has accepted an academic position there. When he was visiting the UK with his son, to find out about schools, he was amazed by the rough treatment they received at the airport – basically they were shut in a room and interrogated. That was because he had made the mistake of not purchasing onward tickets. A warm welcome to post-Brexit Britain.

The situation has been a bit tense in the Palestinian village Hares that we often visit, after a young person from the village went on a rampage in the settlement of Ariel and killed three Israelis, before eventually being shot dead by the army. One immediate result was that other members of the village were denied entry permits to their jobs at the nearby large Israeli industrial park there – where the culprit, Muhammad Souf, had been working. Our friend in Hares, Issa, happens to be a distant relative, with the same family name – and he also has a son called Muhammad. Issa is in a wheel chair for the last 20 years after being shot by an Israeli soldier’s bullet on his doorstep, during the second intifada. He is paralyzed from the waste down. But he was and has continued to be a peace activist. Like-minded Israelis are always welcome in his home and C.H., the Canadian Buddhist mentioned above, had just a few days prior to the current events, facilitated a day of mindfulness for Israelis and Palestinians there.

Hares is for the most part a peaceful village, but no one should be surprised that the desperation felt by the vast majority of Palestinians under military occupation results in occasional desperate acts of violence. In many cases it is simply an “honourable” way to commit suicide – though at terrible cost because the perpetrator knows that punishment will be visited on his entire family; all his loved ones, who in many cases have no idea of his intentions. As of Wednesday, the army was preparing to demolish the family home.

The way in which the violence of the occupation poisons the futures of Palestinian young people can be understood from the video Arna’s Children, a heartbreaking feature-length movie that can be watched on YouTube (I could not get it to load in Invidious). The movie was made by Juliano, mentioned above, about the work of his mother, a Jewish Israeli married to a Palestinian, with young people in Jenin. Juliano himself was assassinated some time afterwards by an unknown assailant.

photo from the film, "Arna's Children"

COP 27

I haven’t been keeping up so well with COP 27, which has been running for two weeks and is being extended due to a deadlock. In the news from today the “good news” is that

  • Annual electric car sales are on track to exceed 10m in 2022, up more than 60% year on year and more than triple the 3.1m sold in 2020.
  • More than 13% of new cars sold globally in the first half of 2022 were electric, up from 8.7% in 2021, and 4.3% in 2020.
  • Electric vehicle use in 2022 will avoid the burning of 1.7m barrels of oil per day – more than the total oil consumption of France or Mexico, both G20 economies.

I think that is good news only if the electricity itself is not coming from fossil fuels. This isn’t happening here.

The article also points out that electric vehicles are cheaper to maintain; and yesterday I read that they require less labour to produce (because less moving parts). So this will mean eventually that buying and owning them will be cheaper. That’s not necessarily good news for the environment though. I think that governments should be prioritizing and subsidizing public transportation.

Looking further down the Guardian’s live-blog for the conference there’s this:

Surprisingly large number of gas deals struck at Egyptian summit.

The announced deals include an agreement between Tanzania and Shell for an LNG export facility, a move by the French oil and gas giant Total to drill in Lebanon, a partnership between Saudi Arabia and Indonesia on oil and gas extraction and a deal spearheaded by the US to provide new renewable energy investment to Egypt, in return for gas exports to Europe.

It seems that over “600 fossil fuel lobbyists have attended, a record…” have attended the conference.

There have similarly been more than a doubling of representatives of Big Agriculture from the previous conference.

Meat, dairy and pesticide producers were all present at the climate conference, which this year had a focus on biodiversity.

Many have complained that there has been little discussion of how meat and dairy production is responsible for a large portion of both emissions and biodiversity degradation.

…the number of delegates linked to such businesses rose from 76 in 2021 to at least 160 this year – double the presence at COP26 in Glasgow. The world’s top five pesticide producers sent 27 representatives, according to the research, which is more than some country delegations.

There were 35 delegates linked to the biggest meat and dairy companies and associated industry lobby groups, which DeSmog worked out is greater than the combined delegations of the Philippines and Haiti, which are among the countries most affected by climate breakdown.

So it’s really amazing: the COPs have become annual opportunities for lobbyists from the oil companies and agrobusiness to do business and make deals that instead of mitigating climate change, help to accelerate it instead.

NSO, Yuli Novak

My younger son and his fiancée came over from TA and I brought D’s mom over from her retirement home. We kept her away from my daughter and her kids because they were exposed to someone who has been sick with the Omicron, lately. The weather started to clear up, though it remains cold.

NSO

There was an item in the TV news about NSO; an interview with one of the founders, and the CEO, Shalev Hulio. He doesn’t cut a very impressive figure and seemed nervous and evasive when asked key questions. A family man, maybe a little naive or unused to journalists. The TV news channel spent 2 days in the NSO headquarters in Herzlia and interviewed a few others there too. One guy demonstrated how what the company does is not simple interception of phones; it helps the clients to interpret the information collected and to construct an elaborate porfolio of the target and their network of connections. Sounds familiar from the descriptions of intelligence firm operations found in Cory Doctorow’s novel, “Attack Surface”.

The NYT story on NSO that I read yesterday had lots of new information. If it can be relied upon, it shows, in a more detailed way than known previously, how the sale of Pegasus went hand in hand with Israeli diplomacy and created friends among client countries who voted for Israel and against Palestinian interests in discussions at the UN. It also clearly states that India and Djibouti among others purchased Pegasus, despite denials or refusals to comment.

In the news item, Hulio is given the opportunity to make the case for the need for cyberweapons when facing sophisticated criminal or terrorist organizations. This is overshadowed by the fact that most of the countries to which the system was sold ended up using it against political opponents, critical journalists, ordinary citizens or diplomats of other countries. In this way, cyberweapons are not like other weapons. They are ideally constructed to undermine democracy wherever they land; even in supposedly democratic countries.

Yuli Novak

Haaretz runs stories in its English edition that have often appeared a few days earlier in its Hebrew edition. So today they have the story about Yuli Novak, a previous director of the Breaking the Silence organization. When the NGO and its members began to be hounded by rightwing groups, the media and politicians, and the group’s members began to receive death threats, she stepped down and away from Breaking the Silence and fled overseas for a time. Now she is reassessing her relationship with her country and with Zionism.

Breaking the Silence is an organization that publishes testimony of former soldiers as a means to help Israeli society reevaluate the meaning of its military occupation of Palestinian territories. It is not the radical political organization that it is made out to be in the Israeli media. It actually stays clear of direct criticism of Israel. It simply tries to show people the consequences of what the army is doing in the Occupied Territories; to “break the silence” about what is being done by the military. Like Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers, it spreads awareness of activities that are normally kept out of sight and removed from the consciousness of ordinary citizens.

As such, it does not need to take a political stance and it is actually better for its work if it stays out of politics. The organization is made up of former soldiers who, when they signed up, believed in the army’s mission, but got freaked out by what they saw happening on the ground. Whatever political conclusions they came to as a result are personal, and do not necessarily represent the organization itself. The point is to gather the soldiers’ testimony and to present it as part of a public education campaign, so that citizens can form their own opinions. At least that is what I understood after going on a tour of Hebron with one of the organization’s founders and listening to him at other times.

Choosing to target Breaking the Silence, and other organizations that are within the fold of the Zionist left, such as Betselem and the New Israel Fund, seems to have been a conscious choice of the Right. They obviously see them as more of a threat than truly anti-Zionist groups, whose numbers and resources are even more scant.

Yuli Novak – feminist, LGBT person and leftist as she is – seems to have taken quite a long time to question the narratives she grew up with and only recently has been coming around to opinions that many Israelis reached long ago. But eventually it dawned upon her:

“What sort of coexistence are you proposing here?” she asks rhetorically during our conversation, aiming the question at the Zionist left. “A coexistence that favors only you? That simply will not work. The moment we recognize that we are not living in a democracy in the deepest and most basic way, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to understand what is going on here. And it’s no longer chaotic.”

I guess by “chaotic” she means the dissonance between her received understanding of reality based on what she has been told, and what she actually sees. I’m not sure that she’s entirely out of it herself, just like all of us. A certain part of us always wants to believe that we are living in a fine sort of country that will basically be OK if we can only fix a few things. But that’s not true in any of the liberal (and increasingly less liberal) democracies. It certainly isn’t true of a society that is based on myths about selective group identity.

Nations, if we need them at all, should exist for the welfare of the totality of their citizens, not just for their elites, for particular ethnicities, castes, religious or ideological communities. They should provide us with a comfortable framework in which to live and maintain a peaceful relationship with other nations and the biosphere. The details may be difficult to work out but at least the mission statement should be clear.

Visit to a Palestinian peace activist

Lewis’s description of the Narnia children coming home to dear old England, having had adventures beyond the conception of the people in their narrow world; or Tolkien’s description of Bilbo Baggins coming home to the Shire, where the only thing that matters is intrigues among neighbours who have known each other all their lives… ring true because they remind us of the things we hide from our own parents and circle of friends; or, if we do try to relate them, we know that what we say will go over the top of their heads and they will immediately resume the talk about matters that are more intelligible to them. And probably there are matters that my own kids don’t discuss with me, though they might talk about them with their friends. There is a bubble effect even among people who know one another well. Most Israelis live in a bubble. They could not imagine visiting Palestinians in the West Bank, while people are being shot at and killed.

On Friday, during a period of Palestinian strikes and “days of rage”, we went into the West Bank to visit a disabled Palestinian peace activist; a victim of the second Intifada – he had been shot on his doorstep by a soldier while trying to usher some children out of the firing zone. Since then he is in a wheel chair and paralyzed from the waist down. But he remains committed to peace and reconciliation. We had gone to see him with a visiting French Buddhist monk. Our friend took us on an outing to a lovely wadi where both Palestinians and Jewish settlers were out picnicking and enjoying the fine Spring weather; though keeping a bit of distance from one another.

Our friend’s village, and the two adjoining villages have three entries. At the first entry there was a group of soldiers preventing access. They were armed to the teeth and carrying several kilos of military equipment. They said that there had been three incidents of throwing stones and molotov cocktails and they had orders to the close the village. At the second entry there was simply a locked iron gate, and nobody to argue with. At the third entry; reached after a lengthy detour, there was another group of soldiers, but these could be persuaded to let people in. In our case, they said that it was legally forbidden for us to go in – they pointed to a large sign – but that we could do so on our own responsibility. We had been warned. (Israelis are normally permitted under Israeli law to enter Area B, unless it is declared a “closed military area”, due to local tensions, as was the case on the day of our visit).

On the way back to lunch at his house, our friend also took us to see someone who some of us also knew. He had built a fine new house – one of the largest in the village, perhaps. In order to pay for it, he was working two shifts a day at a Jewish settlement industrial park, and was up to his neck in debt. A week ago he had received a demolition order on the house. Although, when he purchased the land and built the place, it was in Area B (i.e. under Palestinian administrative control), a more recent aerial survey had moved the line, and the Israeli authorities had decided it was in Area C (under Israeli administrative control), and, since building by Palestinians is virtually never permitted in Area C, they had served him with the demolition order. He’s attempting to fight it legally, but the fate of the house will probably be the same as the various other demolished houses in the village. The time between receiving a demolition order and the bulldozers is usually about a month.

Our nice meal was cooked by our friend’s Jewish partner. His own wife died of cancer a year ago, leaving behind a family of five children. But a Jewish woman peace activist quickly stepped in to take her place . A brave woman indeed. She manages to speak to the kids and the villagers in her Egyptian Arabic. There are two or three other mixed couples like this in the area.

In the course of our discussion following the meal I asked our friend what he would tell his eldest son if he too decided to “throw stones” (I think we both understood I might mean something worse). He said carefully that it is “not for him to tell any Palestinian how to resist the Occupation”. Violence is not our friend’s way and, I think, not that of any of his children, but still, it would be their right to resort to violence, however ill advised this might be, or how badly it might turn out. (This reminds me of Aurobindo Ghose’s early essays against British rule in India.) The tension is very high just now. A settler and a soldier had recently been killed not far away from the village, while in Bethlehem there had just been a horrendous incident in which it looks as if soldiers were culpable.

We returned home in the evening. The iron gate at the village entrance was still locked; but the soldiers had gone from the other one. A temporary peace had returned to our friend’s village. My wife was able to visit on Sunday with the other Buddhist monks and nuns for the bi-weekly meditation and meditation meeting in our friend’s home. The whole country is tense, however; a missile fell on a family home north of Tel Aviv; Netanyahu returned home from the US; reprisal attacks took place across Gaza; Palestinian rockets continued to be launched, and the army is today sending another infantry brigade and artillery battalion to the Gaza border. We’re a couple of weeks away from a general election.

Stoppage of USAID funding to West Bank, Gaza set to hit Palestinians hard

USAID, US NGOs leave Gaza, West Bank over terrorism law
‘It really hurts’: US aid cuts hit most vulnerable Palestinians
The Demise of USAID Efforts in the West Bank and Gaza
Trump admin to end all USAID projects in West Bank and Gaza by January 31
USAID to end all Palestinian projects on Jan. 31st
‘USAID to end all Palestinian projects on Jan. 31,’ former director says
After 25 years, USAID Palestinian mission set to close at end of month

The change even means the stoppage of funding to ongoing Israeli – Palestinian peace projects like the change agents courses of the School for Peace and its Palestinian partners.

Looking Beyond the Gaza War

Israel’s wars are usually a time of reflection for me. Other than follow what’s going on in the news, via Twitter and news sites, there isn’t a lot I feel I can do. I’ve given up trying to influence public opinion. I share stories and comments that disturb me or I find interesting. But that’s more a matter of keeping a log – as is is this post.

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