Israel and Palestine: Can parallel struggles converge?

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Above : Maintaining the "Peace" ; Palestine Authority police in Ramallah.
Below: "From the Jordan to the Sea, Democracy for Everybody"; young people try a new slogan, simple but thought-provoking , on downtown Tel Aviv demonstration.

CAN the "social justice" movement in Israel - which despite attacks by establishment media has almost 70 per cent support in polls from mostly Jewish Israelis - continue to be effective in mobilising opinion if it starts to risk its position by taking up a stand on the occupation and relations with the Palestnian people?

On the other hand, how can the movement seriously hope to change anything or expect to continue being taken seriously if it ignores he injustice being perpetrated on Palestinians both within Israel's borders and the territories, and for that matter by the siege on Gaza? Israeli Labour ran the country for decades by combining social democratic ideals and institutions that had been useful with military strength, underwritten by American aid. Many immigrants who fell outside its "protektsia" and were treated as inferior voted for the parties of the Right as a form of rebellion.

But both Labour and the Right have gone for privatisation and letting capital rip, while money that should be going to the poor and public housing is channeled to the ever-growing requirements of the military and the privileged settlers. Shas, the Orthodox religious party that favours welfare will only try to get handouts and consideration for its supporters, in return for delivering their votes to the establishment.

Labour leader Yitzhak Rabin paid with his life for trying to make peace after making his career as a military man. His successors seem to have thought they could con the Palestinians, or at least the Americans, by talking about peace while building the separation wall and continuing settlements. In the career of Amir Peretz, the Moroccan-born Histadrut militant from Sderot who became Labour leader then defence minister in the Lebanon war, we see how Israelis too were taken in to believing that both the cake and the halfpence could be kept.

We might note too that Tel Aviv's mayor Ron Huldai, whose police turned nasty last weekend, is ex-Army, but a Labour man.

Netanyahu and his companions in crime no longer bother with pretending to be serious about peace. They leave that to some remaining hasbara'niks trying to defend the indefensible Israeli policies abroad and any naive politicak friends Israel still has. "Two States"? They mean one they call "Tel Aviv" and "Judea and Samaria", perhaps. And at home the message is, if you want to be strong you must shut up about welfare, and stop imperilling national unity by criticising the government and attacking the rich.

If that's not enough, the Right has another answer, and its one which Jews conscious of our history have to be familiar with. It's no accident that the settler racists and the Right wing politicians set out to stir antagonism against immigrant minorities, and whipped up a pogrom in south Tel Aviv.

You can ignore the occupation and the reactionary politics it feeds, but it won't leave you and your "democracy" alone.

There are some Israelis taking part in the social struggles and making these points, and they just got a helpful illustration last weekend, as described in a report for +972 mag:

Sunday, July 1 2012|Noam Sheizaf

Occupation comes home: What was a military surveillance vehicle doing in TLV last night?

Protesters taking part in the #J14 march last night couldn’t help noticing a large army vehicle near the route of the protest, on the corner of Ibn Gvirol and Frishman streets (basically under my house). The car, nicknamed Raccoon, is a modified Hummer with special surveillance equipment. It is often used in the occupied territories against unarmed Palestinian protesters (you can see it used in army training in this link).

IDF surveillance vehicle, usually in service in the
West Bank, used against #J14 protesters in central
Tel Aviv (photo: Ariella Azoulay)

Update: Before reaching the corner of Rabin square, where this
picture was taken, the vehicle waited opposite the Defense Ministry
on Kaplan St., accompanied the march to Azrieli junction, and only
then reunited with the procession at Ibn Gvirol.

Bystanders and families tried to peep inside the military car,
in what seemed like a sign of days to come in Israel - more
evidence that the occupation does not end with the Green Line.
If there is no democracy in Ramallah and Nablus, there will be
none in Tel Aviv.

class="wp-caption alignnone" id="attachment_49845" style="width: 620px;">Update II: A military spokesperson told the site mako.co.il that
the Raccoon didn’t belong to the army, but to the Border Police,
a quasi-military unit under the command of the Israel Police,
deployed mostly in the West Bank, but which also carries out
missions west of the Green Line. The police refused to comment
on the deployment of the surveillance vehicle inside Tel Aviv.

Update III: MK Zehava Galon from Meretz wrote on her
Facebook wall: “Those criticizing the police for deploying
a surveillance car in the demostration yesterday don’t
understand the achievement here - it’s the first time
the government is listening to the protest!”

SEE FULL REPORT:
http://972mag.com/occupation-comes-home-what-was-an-idf-surveillance-vehicle-doing-in-tlv-last-night/49842/
Incidentally, a few years ago when some people were in Whitehall
one cold night chanting "From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will
Be Free!", an Arab reporter - from Tunisia as it happened - asked me
what I thought of this. I replied that I had no problem with the slogan,
though it might be interpreted in different ways. He nodded agreement
and we both laughed, before proceeding with the rest of the interview.

With the slogan carried in our picture above, I don't think anybody
could reasonably disagree, "Democracy for Everyone, From the Jordan
to the Sea!" To paraphrase a famous saying, that is the principle that
must underly any political solution, the rest, what kind of state
arrangements are agreed along the way, is merely a matter of
practical interpretation.

An Authority without a State,
or a State bereft of Authority?


PALESTINIANS too have been getting a lesson
about the state, as if they needed it, or at least
about the Palestine Authority.

As usual, even when demonstrators in Tel Aviv were
experiencing rough handling from the police, it was
the Palestinians who took harder knocks, but this time
from their "own" police.

Back when football player Mahmoud Sarsak was still
on his third month of hunger strike, Maan News Agency reported
that Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud
Abbas (whose term ended in January 2010 but still
hasn’t budged from his position) would be meeting
with Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz in Ramallah.

Mofaz commanded the Israeli army from July 1998 to
July 2002 and then as defense minister.
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights notes:

Under his the Israeli Army implemented “Operation Defensive Shield”
in the West Bank. This Operation, which started on 29 March 2002,
resulted, inter alia, in the massacre in Jenin refugee camp in
the north of the West Bank. On 04 November 2002, Mofaz was
appointed as the Israeli Defense Minister. When he was serving
in these 2 positions, the Israeli occupation forces committed many
war crimes in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, resulting in the
death and injury of hundreds of innocent Palestinian civilians.
PCHR has filed several cases before a number of European courts
against Mofaz for his responsibility for such crimes.

Palestinians reacted against this. Even the Fatah student party
in the universities issuing a statement condemning the meeting
and accusing Abbas of being a traitor. Once the angry reaction
reached the ears of the PA headquarters,
Abbas “postponed” the meeting.

The youth network Palestinians for Dignity,
formed in January this year, issued a statement
and announced a protest would go ahead on
Saturday, 30 June - the day before Mofaz was
initially set to be received by Abbas in Ramallah.
We will meet on Saturday
at 5pm and then march
on towards the PA compound al-Muqata’a to
express our categorical rejection of the meeting
with the murderer Mofaz, ex Israeli war minister
and currently Netanyahu’s deputy prime minister,
either in Ramallah or any other place. We will
protest because the meeting is postponed
and the policy of meeting with Israeli politicians
is still the same."

Protestors made a strong argument for their opposition to the Mofaz visit. They explained that Mofaz cannot make it to many countries around the world because of his role in executing war crimes against Palestinians, including the killings in Jenin and the crimes that took place during the Israeli army’s reoccupation of major West Bank cities in 2002. They also accused Mofaz of assassinating PFLP leader Mustafa Abu Ali and Hamas’ handicapped leader Ahmad Yassin, and of the imprisonment of Fateh leader Marwan Barghouthi.

Although the Mofaz visit was called off, the demonstration continued and was met with a violent crackdown. Linah Alsafin, a young woman student who took part in the march has written a graphic account for the Electronic Intifada website:

Young women braved the blows from the police batons as they tried to protect the male protesters from getting dragged away. Some were verbally assaulted, and were sneeringly told to back home “where they belong.” Journalist Mohammad Jaradat was filming the protest with his camera before a plainclothes officer came up to him, threatened him, and then proceeded to beat him up. Pictures of Jaradat lying on the floor while getting punched have been circulated widely. He was then dragged to the police station near Manara Square.

And there was more. Both uniformed and plain-clothes police were involved in the attacks, and women police officers were just as violent as the men. We might note that Palestinian police and security forces have been British and American-trained.

Writing in the Jordan Times, Daoud Kuttub says something more than bones were broken:

"Regardless of the reason, the violent attacks against protesters brought to the front images of the Arab Spring. The acts of plainclothes security under the eyes of the head of the Ramallah police reminded many of similar attempts by thugs and shabiha in various Arab countries.

The scores of injured in the July 1 demonstration triggered a second demonstration the following day, in protest of the crackdown, and again Palestinian security used violence to prevent hundreds of demonstrators from reaching the Palestinian Authority’s Muqata headquarters.

While the successive crackdowns received minor coverage in the Palestinian press, and even on some of the most read websites, the news and pictures of Palestinian violence trended on social media. To her credit, the PLO executive committee member Hanan Ashrawi was among the first to publicly denounce the violence against nonviolent protesters. It took Palestinian human rights organisation and civil society groups a few days to gather the evidence and issue a strong statement of protest.Eventually the Palestinian minister of interior issued a statement saying that an investigation will be conducted into what happened. Few Palestinians trust such statement, based on previous promises when investigations either never took place or the results were not made public.

The fact that the latest protests came from young people that do not belong to either PLO factions or Hamas seems to have made the security apparatus feel that it can act with impunity against them. This has proved to be a mistake and if it continues, it will bring long-term damage to the Fateh leadership.

It is unlikely that the current protests will produce anything close to the two intifadas that shook the earth of the occupiers. If anything, the current protests and the dynamism created by the security’s crackdown will produce large protests against the Palestinian Authority.

Palestinian resentment at the unending West Bank-Gaza split and the disgust with the negotiation process will most likely lead to a strengthening of this popular anti-PA movement. And if the demands and aspirations of these protesters are not taken seriously, the very foundation and legitimacy of the current Palestinian leadership will be seriously put to test.

The Arab Spring might have taken some time to reach Palestine, but as one Arab leader said, spring is a season that comes back every year."

Can the growing movements against existing leaderships either side the border ever be united? Of course it would be foolish and dishonest to pretend that Israelis and Palestinians are simply divided by national antagonism and propaganda, when one nation is in reality ruling over another, even if by doing so it is "forging its own chains". as the saying goes. It does make a difference that Israelis already have a state, whatever their discontents, whereas Palestinians are still fighting to live in their own country, and have only a stooge authority. The police who were lashing out at their own people so hard must swallow their own shame that they cannot do anything to protect Palestinians from settler violence.

No one has the right to preach unity and peace without recognition that the Palestinians have been victims of a historic and continuing national injustice, and supporting policies that try to rectify this. If there is to be peace, it has to include national freedom, and be not just "peace" but a just peace. Rather than make false moral parallels, we can see that the struggles in Israel and Palestine are developing in practical parallel.

Can parallel lines ever converge? Centuries ago Arab mathematicians worked out that, contrary to what Euclid's geometry said, parallel lines could converge if another dimension was joined. If that sounds weird and way out, remember that the lines of longitude which appear parallel on a Mercators map of the world do converge at the poles in global reality. Providing the dimensions of democracy and social justice are brought out we might also see that in politics.

http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=501119

http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/linah-alsaafin/first-hand-ramallah-protests-against-mofaz-meeting-attacked-pa-police-thugs?utm_source=EI+readers&utm_campaign=d0fa6114a6-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGhN&utm_medium=email

http://jordantimes.com/share-content/also-broken-in-ramallah.html

http://electronicintifada.net/content/pa-repression-feeds-flames-palestinian-discontent/11456