dreamer_easy | (no subject)

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Many Jews, and many Israelis, oppose the current intense military action in Gaza. I think it's important these voices be heard, for many reasons. One is the common attitude that if you're not for us, you're against us: you don't have to agree with everything these dissenters say to see that isn't true.

Leading British Jews call on Israel to halt 'horror' of Gaza

A Call from Within, an open letter signed by over 500 Israeli citizens

You should also know that dissenting Palestinians have condemned Hamas for breaking the truce.

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My bus to the gym goes past the Israeli embassy - there's been a crowd of Jews outside protesting against the slaughter every time I've been past so far this year. Some of them wave Palestinian flags, and I think a few Arabs have started to join them, it all looks very chummy.

In 2006 I had the pleasure of meeting numerous Israeli peace activists who engaged in common acts of civil disobedience with Palestinians whose villages were being demolished by the Wall. Others were Israeli Defence Force refuseniks, who bravely rejected subsequent postings in the Occupied Territories, against overwhelming pressure, after failing to square their ethics with what they witnessed there. I met an Israeli filmmaker with balls of steel, who documented the utter depravity of Jewish-fundamentalist settler violence. The latter can be combined with the resigned testimony of Israelis wrestling with the fact that settlements in the West Bank are so radically government-subsidised that they feel that they've been trapped by the Israeli economy into stealing land from Palestinians in order to survive.

These stories have largely been hidden. They need to be told. The more such stories are re-situated in a wider and less essentialist narrative (e.g. one comparable to the US's War on Terror, to which the possibility of visible and popular dissent is much more imaginable) the less any kind of fundamentalism -- from Jewish fundementalism to Islamic fundamentalism, to liberal-fundamentalist hand-wringing over what is typically presented as a whacky religious feud ("oh, those Arabs and Jews at it again") -- can monopolise a conflict that should be contextualised in terms of how concepts like security and peace have been radically abused by government power (familar?), and how more disturbing notions of "demographic supremacy" can seemingly go unquestioned *in this day and age*.

I agree that Hamas' Qassam strategy is deranged; the increasing (and largely ineffectual) militarisation of Palestinian resistance, from the Al-Aqsa Intifada onwards, is very much what is killing it. But that said, perhaps this is exactly what the Israeli authorities want -- they encouraged the rise of the Islamic resistance in the first place, as a bulwark against secular-democratic alternatives that might actually make some sort of difference. In this current adventure into mass slaughter, I can't help but think that those in control of the IDF are relishing the creation of a new generation of utterly unhinged young Palestinian survivors, who can imagine nothing but absolute revenge on those responsible for indiscriminately killing their mothers, brothers and cousins with burning white phosphorous and anti-personnel weapons -- all in order to bring the lines of conflict into even sharper relief, as preparation for some final land-clearing operation.

I'm very suspicious of the idea that Hamas "broke the truce" -- as if the truce ever involved two sides equally observing a common peace. I'm sure those Israeli activists I met would agree, too. From Israel putting Gaza "on a diet" with their appalling blockade, as Olmert's adviser Dov Weisglass put it (in language straight out of another disturbing textbook, I would think), leading to what is widely acknowledged as a humanitarian disaster, to performing murderous provocations like actively blowing up lines of escape from what is basically a prison territory, such Israeli actions do not constitute a real observance of any "truce" that I can imagine.

This *isn't* a game of "but he started it" in the playground -- it's an acknowledgment of the underlying contours of the conflict.

(As an aside: the fanatical blockades of places like Gaza and Cuba by Israel and the US have been so ideologically successful that they're usually presented as legitimate, international efforts against immoral pariah states, somehow akin to the sanctions against Apartheid South Africa. Amazing! And no, objecting to this in no way implies support for Hamas or the Castro regime.)

[Edited for shit grammar.]

Edited 2009-01-13 06:01 (UTC)

Some other Jewish voices I've been reading;

rootless cosmopolitain (http://tonykaron.com)
Jews sans Frontieres (http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/)
Mondoweiss (http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/)
Tikun Olam (http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/)

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