Posts Tagged ‘Palestine’
Cry freedom
Last week, when Neve Gordon, an Israeli professor of political science, published an article in The New York Times arguing that boycotting Israel is the only way to make any progress towards justice for Palestine, Israelis and Jews all over the world called for his dismissal. Their excuse for opposing boycott is ‘academic freedom’.
Yet, as philosophy professor in Tel Aviv University Anat Matar reminded Ha’aretz readers, only when well-heeled Israeli academics begin to pay a real price for the continuous occupation of Palestine, will they take genuine steps towards ending the occupation.
Academic freedom is relative. On the one side of the fence we have Gaza’s children beginning the school year in shattered classroom, with no building materials allowed by Israel to rebuild their bombed schools, without school books, notebooks or writing utensils that cannot be brought into Gaza because of the Israeli embargo – Israel can boycott Gaza’s school, yet no one protests.
In the West Bank hundreds of students are under arrest in Israeli jails, and the ‘separation fence’ (otherwise known as the ‘apartheid wall’) preventing students and lecturers from reaching classes, libraries and research labs. Conferences abroad are an impossibility – yes, Israel can boycott Palestinian universities and no one protests.
On the other side of the fence Israeli academics guard their freedom of research what the regime wants them to research, appointing former army officers to university positions. Tel Aviv University prides itself on having 55 of its research projects funded by the Israeli Ministry of Defence; the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Defence Department is funding nine other projects. All Israeli universities offer special study programmes for the military. Yes, Israel can conduct military research and no one protests, and only a small number of academics speak against the occupation. And when brave academics like Gordon and Matar call for a boycott, they are accused of opposing academic freedom.
As Obama, Mitchell, Netanyahu and Abbas eventually get together to rekindle the ‘peace process’, let’s spare a thought about freedom. What is the meaning of freedom when you cannot send your child to study in a school building rather than rubble? What is the meaning of freedom when you never know whether you will reach your university lecture on time, due to the interminable checkpoint regime? What is the meaning of freedom if, as a Palestinian Israeli citizen, you can be detained for hours in the airport before you can reach the conference you were invited to give a keynote lecture in abroad - as has happened to a number of my Palestinian colleagues? What is the meaning of freedom if, brave Israeli academics who call for boycotting the occupation regime are met with international calls for dismissal as happened in Gordon’s case? I am an Israeli citizen, and I believe that boycotting Israel is the first step towards freedom.
The Israeli racial state
Israeli policemen beat and arrest women at a demonstration held by the feminist movement New Profile in support of six activists from the group who were arrested from their homes by the police, 30 April 2009. (Shachaf Polakow/ActiveStills)
Who is next?
On the eve of Israel’s 61th Independence Day last week, the Israeli police arrested six Israeli Jewish feminist political activists, members of New Profile, the Movement for the Civil-isation of Israeli society, including a 70-year-old woman, for assisting young Israelis to evade conscription.
The police entered the activists’ home, confiscated their computers and the computers of their partners, detained them for questioning because of their support for young people who declare themselves conscientious objectors, a status not recognized by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Indeed, many draft dodgers have served jail sentences.
Dead babies and zones of exception
Just a day after the revelations about what Israeli soldiers really did in Gaza came the story about the Jaffa T shirt factory, where 500 T shirts per month with dead babies, mothers weeping on their children’s graves, a gun aimed at a child and a bombed-out mosque accompanies with slogans such as ‘better use Durex’ (next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby with his weeping mpther and a teddy bear beside him), ‘1 shot, 2 kills’, (beside a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull’s eye superimposed on her belly), and ‘no matter how it begins, we’ll put an end to it’ (Uri Blau, Dead Palestinian babies and bombed mosques - IDF fashion 2009 - Haaretz - Israel News). Haaretz reports plenty of shirts with blatant sexual messages, such as a drawing of a soldier next to a young woman with bruises, and the slogan, ‘Bet you got raped!’
A few of the images describe actions whose existence the army officially denies - such as ‘confirming the kill’ (shooting a bullet into an enemy victim’s head from close range, to ensure he is dead), or harming religious sites, or female or child non-combatants.
The war after
The elections in Israel make us certain of the victory of the Israeli racial state. Livni, Netanyahu or Lieberman - the result is the same even though one speaks about ‘dialogue’ towards a ‘two state solution’, one speaks of ‘no dialogue’ and one speaks of conditioning citizenship on an oath of loyalty… In a sense, I agree with Gideon Levi who wrote in Haaretz a couple of weeks ago ‘Let Netanyahu win’, arguing that only with an extreme right-wing government will the world understand Israel’s trajectory towards a ‘final solution’ to the Palestinian question - more land, fewer Arabs - and will start to put real pressure on Israel military regime. Only with a governmetn intent on no surrender, might the Un ited States (although I am not holding my breath) close the military aid tap. Only then might Israel be forced to recognise that the time for a two-state solution has long gone. As David Theo Goldberg writes: ‘Debates, such as they are, about a two-state solution are a distraction. Israel has given no indication beyond soft rhetoric that it has any intention (ever?) of enabling a viable, sovereign, economically and politically independent Palestinian state, centered either in the West Bank or Gaza, hostile or peaceful. Landlocked, the West Bank would have to depend either on foreign countries (including Israel) or on an increasingly distant Gaza for its lifeline to a world beyond Israeli constraint. The legacy of relying on foreign countries, of course, is one of dependence and economic control, not self-determination and political viability’ (’Final death blow to the two-state solution?’ www.threatofrace.org).
Read the rest of this entry »
New year, new war
To be published in Metro Eireann, 15 January 2009.
(PHOTOS: http://gaza.haimbresheeth.com/gaza-carnage-archive/gaza-photos)
What a start for the new year!! On 27 December, the Israeli Defence Forces launched an attack of unprecedented scale on the Gaza Strip. According to the Israeli government, the attack was in response to unyielding Palestinian rocket and mortar fire into Israel since the end of the Egyptian negotiated ceasefire. Israeli F16 planes bombed more than 400 targets through the densely populated Gaza Strip, which Israel pulled out of but kept it under siege ever since, killing, at the time of writing, about 721 people, at least 169 of them young children, 46 women and 6 medical personnel, and injuring some 3200. Rather than succeed in stopping the rocket attacks, since the attack started Palestinian militants continue to fire short and long range rockets, some landing in major Israeli towns and cities. Only on the thirteenth day of the attack has President elect Barack Obama spoken for the first time about his plans to organise negotiations between Israel and Hamas, something Israel has rejected since Hamas was democratically elected.
Read the rest of this entry »