“Sometimes you have to run very fast to remain in the same place.  But experience shows that when you’re active you build something, and if you don’t stop in the middle and leave in despair, it will bring results.  Even if you won’t live to see them, at least you know you’re doing something that’s needed.”  Michal Shwartz, Israeli activist.

For almost a month now, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have poured into the streets for massive, unprecedented protests against their government, whose ruthless neo-liberal policies systematically enrich a tiny elite at the expense of the vast majority.

To avoid being dismissed as ‘leftists’ (which PM Netanyahu did anyway), protest leaders disallowed any mention of the colossal, toxic elephant in the room: the ever-expanding matrix of  extravagantly subsidized settlements built illegally on Palestinian land, and the massive military apparatus that’s required to back them.

Several Israeli commentators like Uri Avnery worry that this bizarre denial of reality could fatally compromise the protests, and then all it would take to unravel them is a ‘security’ scare.  This tactic has always worked in Israel.

On Thursday August 18, several attacks were launched by unknown assailants near the southern Israeli town of Eilat: gunfire hit a bus carrying soldiers, an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) detonated under an army patrol vehicle, an antitank shell hit a civilian car, and shots were fired at Israeli soldiers.  One Israeli soldier, one border guard sniper and six Israeli civilians were killed.  (More detail here, from JNews, “alternative Jewish perspectives on Israel-Palestine”.)

Immediately, protest leaders in Tel Aviv called off their protests.  Instead they organized a “mass march for the dead.”  Israeli dead, that is.  Palestinians in Gaza killed by the most intense Israeli attacks since the 2008-09 invasion will not be mourned by the protesters in Tel Aviv.   (The current Israeli military escalation started on Thursday, despite the absence of any clear evidence that the perpetrators originated in Gaza.)  Nor will the Israeli marchers mourn the Egyptian soldiers killed on Thursday by Israeli rockets on the border between Gaza and Sinai.  (In response, Egypt has made a formal protest, and has threatened to withdraw its ambassador from Israel.)

None of this is new, except in the details.  From its inception, the Israeli state has been built on territorial expansion, military occupation and war.  The only ‘peace’ such a regime can allow – or even contemplate – is a dictated colonial peace, of the sort imposed on indigenous people in the Americas, Australia and other European colonies.  This is peace without justice, the deathly stillness of tyranny triumphant.  By contrast, a just peace is alive, mutually beneficial, democratic, and vibrant with possibilities.  Such a peace sidelines the military and is thus intolerable to a military state.

Still, defying impossible odds, ‘ordinary’ people in Palestine and Israel continue to search for traces of common ground, and in that rocky ground they determinedly plant seeds for a just peace.  It is to explore and honour this steady, grueling, sometimes dangerous work that I wrote Our Way to Fight.

So then, what is new?  Boycott, divestment and sanctions, at least in the Israel-Palestine context.  Despite escalating attacks by Israel and its backers, the international BDS movement continues to grow, slowly but surely.  Its impact can be measured in many ways, including the recent Israeli law outlawing support for boycott.  (A shocking threat to democracy which, ironically, some Israeli commentators suggest may have been one of the sparks for the tent protests!)

The Salit quarry strike is also a new phenomenon.  On the surface it is not such a big thing, but its implications are enormous, both for authentic democracy and for a just peace.

A little background:

When I travelled in Israel with Michal Shwartz and Dani Ben-Simhon of the Workers Advice Centre, they had just experienced a breakthrough at the Salit quarries.  For two years WAC-MAAN (MAAN is the Arabic translation of the acronym WAC) had been trying to organize diggers, manual labourers who work in archeological sites and stone quarries.  As in agriculture and trucking within Israel, in the excavation business bosses collaborate with manpower companies to create a virtual slave market, picking and choosing from the most excluded, and thus most desperate for work – Palestinians, Ethiopians, the elderly, women.  The official Israeli labour federation, the Histadrut, has no interest in such marginal workers.

In May 2010, after Salit management halted negotiations aimed at forming a union, the forty production workers at the quarries went on strike.  They refused management’s offer to resume negotiations without WAC as their union.  Three days into the strike, management agreed to marathon negotiations toward a collective agreement, the first in twenty-seven years at the quarry, and the first ever between Palestinian workers and an Israeli company.  (The quarries are located in Area C of the West Bank, under full Israeli military control, so the Israeli owners naturally assumed that this gave then full control over the Palestinian workers.)

But what do workers’ rights have to do with peace?  “In WAC,” Dani Ben-Simhon explained, “we are trying always to reinforce this idea of shared working class interest, regardless of nationality.  This is different from other organizations that talk about peace and co-existence here.  Either they talk and talk but say nothing about politics, or they eat hummus together and that’s it.  We’re talking about something much bigger, mutual working class interest to make a change in our society.”

The way I read history, this would be a long, steep uphill battle.  Since Michal Schwarz has been at this kind of struggle much longer than I have, I asked her how she reads history.  She replied:  “We are not people who lack patience, who think we can change history with our own hands.  We look around, we see how things have gone in the past and how they are going now, and we work at the tempo that history forces on us.  Sometimes you have to run very fast to remain in the same place.  But experience shows that when you’re active you build something, and if you don’t stop in the middle and leave in despair, it will bring results.  Even if you won’t live to see them, at least you know you’re doing something that’s needed.”

Which brings us to the strike.  After a full year of negotiations, in April 2011 a collective agreement was drafted between the Workers Advice Center and Salit Quarries.  The workers are seeking a gradual increase in wages, a pension plan, and safer, healthier working conditions.  But then Salit management engaged in a series of delaying tactics to avoid signing the agreement.  Finally on June 16 the workers voted to strike.

According to a WAC-MAAN update, “The strike has completely frozen the company’s activity.  Trucks from outside contractors which arrived in the first days of the strike to load up with sand and gravel no longer come. Traffic which on a regular working day constitutes some 100 trucks has stopped.  Damage to the quarry so far is estimated at about NIS 2 million [MR: currently about $555,000 Cdn].”

Two months into their strike, the quarry workers are surviving on a small support fund contributed by unions and individual donors in several countries.  WAC-MAAN has now set up a public strike fund to receive contributions via PayPal.

The appeal page includes reports on the strike from mainstream Israeli and Palestinian media, and a fascinating interview with Muhammad Fukara, who has worked in the quarries for 27 of his 52 years.

Many people are watching to see how this struggle develops.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports: “Most Palestinians working for Israelis in the West Bank suffer from poor working conditions.  Spontaneous strikes have broken out against such companies in the past, but this is the first time workers have organized and gone on strike to demand a collective wage agreement.”

The quarry workers’ appeal concludes: “Be part of this historic achievement!”

It will bring results.

More than 260 artists and supporters of the arts have signed a public letter to Israeli authorities decrying the Israeli military’s attacks on The Freedom Theatre in Jenin, a northern city in the West Bank, Palestine.  The signatories include dozens of prominent playwrights, actors, directors, filmmakers, producers and theatre professors from the U.S., New Zealand, Israel, England and other countries.

The statement was hand-delivered today to the Israeli Mission in New York and the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C.

The U.S. artists include Pulitzer prize-winning playwrights Edward Albee and Tony Kushner; actors Susan Sarandon, Olympia Dukakis, Alec Baldwin, Mandy Patinkin, Kathleen Chalfant and Mercedes Ruehl; prominent theatre educators such as James Bundy of the Yale Drama School, and Catherine Coray and Mark Wing-Davey of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

Their statement called the Theatre “a beacon for artistic expression, offering youth in Jenin a safe space in which to express themselves, and to explore their creativity and emotions.”

The signatories urged the Israeli military authorities to release those arrested or make their charges public and to pay compensation for the buildings they damaged.

The protest follows an Israeli army attack on the Jenin-based theatre at 3:30 a.m. on July 27.  Soldiers hurled rocks at the building, knocking out many of the windows.  The theatre’s facilities manager was arrested, along with the president of the theatre’s Board, whose home was also damaged.

On August 5, Israeli forces blindfolded and arrested a 20-year old acting student, part of The Freedom Theatre’s young acting troupe, at a checkpoint near Jenin.

“We have been very concerned about the health and safety of our colleagues since their arrests,” said Constancia Dinky Romilly, president of Friends of the Jenin Freedom Theatre, a New York-based support group.

“Our supporters,” Romilly continued, “have been calling the authorities in Jenin and in Washington, but no one has given us any information about their condition or the charges facing them, if there are any.  This is a truly shocking attack on a cultural institution in Palestine and one more horrific example of what goes on in a country under occupation.”

The full statement follows.  Continue reading →

From the Freedom Theatre, Jenin refugee camp:

On Saturday afternoon August 6, Rami Awni Hwayel, aged 20, a third-year graduating student at the Freedom Theatre acting school was detained by the Israeli army at Shave Shomeron checkpoint between Nablus and Jenin.  He was travelling with fellow students from Ramallah to Jenin.

[MR: The Shave Shomeron checkpoint is one of many dozens by which the Israeli military controls the movement of Palestinians within Palestinian territory.  The location of these checkpoints makes it abundantly clear that they are not at all about Israeli security, but entirely about the enforcement of military occupation within Palestine.]

Batool Taleb was one of the acting students in the car with Rami.  She describes what happened: “When the soldiers got to our car, they took all our IDs and then they told Rami to get out of the car.  They immediately handcuffed and blindfolded him and put him in the army jeep.”

The students had been rehearsing in Ramallah for their final graduation project, the Samuel Beckett play Waiting for Godot, directed by the Israeli-American film-maker Udi Aloni.

“This is devastating,” says Aloni. “Rami is playing Pozzo, the main role in the play, and he’s doing an amazing job.  He is so dedicated to the work.  He just left rehearsals today for the weekend to see his family for Ramadan.  This is terrible, we want our Pozzo back!”

Rami is the third member of the Freedom Theatre to be detained by the Israeli army since their 27 July assault on the theatre.  Head technician Adnan Naghnaghiye and chairperson of the board Bilal Saadi are still being held in “administrative detention,” without charge, trial or access to lawyers.

[MR: For more detail on the attack, see previous posts 41 & 42.  For a visit to the Freedom Theatre acting school, see chapter 2, Our Way to Fight.]

[According to Addameer, the Prisoners’ Support and Human Rights Association, since Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem in 1967, approximately 700,000 Palestinians have been detained by the Israeli military.  This amounts to approximately 20 percent of the total Palestinian population, and 40 percent of the male Palestinian population in the occupied Palestinian territories.]

The military has initiated a gag order to forbid any reporting in Israel about Rami Awni Hwayel’s arrest.

Once again the Freedom Theatre calls on friends and supporters around the world to put pressure on the Israeli authorities to stop this outrageous harassment of a unique cultural resource.

Don’t know about you, but most of the time I feel pretty helpless in the face of the government and corporate elites that sustain Israel’s occupation of Palestine.  I’m also frustrated by the ease with which they manage to control the news, at least in the mainstream media that many people rely on to interpret the world.

This is why I write.  My current book and this blog attempt to share other experience and insights from the ground, views that are systematically excluded from the official version.

I know it’s not enough.  So I’m grateful when a compelling initiative arises that I can support.  Roadmap to Apartheid is such an initiative.

It’s a full-length video documentary, created by a white South African woman and a Jewish Israeli man, and narrated by African-American writer Alice Walker.  In meticulous, often shocking detail, Roadmap to Apartheid compares the apartheid systems of South Africa and Israel.  While the former eventually collapsed under international pressure, the Israeli version continues to expand by the day.

The Israeli regime and its backers go to great lengths to deny and even suppress any comparison with South African apartheid.  In Canada, for example, if the current federal regime has its way, it could become a crime to write or speak in public the phrase “Israeli apartheid.”  They are that afraid of debate.

Few people are better equipped to appreciate the stark parallels than South Africans who resisted apartheid in their own country, and who have also witnessed it in Palestine.  For example, Archbishop Desmond Tutu:

“I have witnessed firsthand the racially segregated roads and housing in the Occupied Palestinian territories.  I have seen the humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children at the checkpoints and roadblocks.  I have met Palestinians who were evicted and replaced by Jewish Israeli settlers; Palestinians whose homes were destroyed even as new, Jewish-only homes were illegally built on confiscated Palestinian land.

“This oppression, these indignities and the resulting anger are only too familiar.  It is no wonder that so many South African leaders in the anti-apartheid struggle, including Nelson Mandela and numerous Jewish leaders, have found ourselves compelled to speak out on this issue.”

Such are the parallels that Roadmap to Apartheid explores. I have no doubt it will make a unique, powerful contribution to the struggle for justice and peace in Israel-Palestine.

A 10-minute excerpt from the video won first place in a video contest online.  Watch it here.

After four years’ work by the film-makers and “dozens of co-workers,” the full-length video is complete.  But they lack funds for the final stages of its production and release.

To cover these costs they’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign, to send Roadmap to Apartheid out into the world.

In terms of media production costs, they ask remarkably little to accomplish a lot: $40,000.  As they put it, “The money raised will:

• Pay for all the intense archival footage in the documentary that really helps to showcase the story.  We cannot release the film until this bill gets covered.

• Compensate the talented sound, color, design and motion graphics crew for the many days they will invest in this film for the next couple of months.

• Print DVDs.

• Organize screening and speaking tours in the U.S. and elsewhere.  (If you are interested in hosting a screening in your hometown, please get in touch with us at our website.)”

In case you’re not familiar with Kickstarter, it works like this:  The project will only be funded if at least $25,000 is pledged by Wednesday September 7, 7:00pm Eastern Daylight Time.

So far (to the time I wrote this), 155 people have pledged $11,796.

Here is something we can do.  And by the way, a pledge of $30 or more gets you a free copy of the DVD.

I find this appeal irresistible. Hope you do too.

Following my previous post, this August 1 update comes from the Freedom Theatre in Jenin refugee camp, Occupied Palestinian Territory:

After the Israeli army attack on the Freedom Theatre, Wednesday July 27, the two detained persons, Adnan Naghnaghiye (head technician at the theatre), and Bilal Saadi (chairperson of the theatre board), were taken to the Jalame and Meggiddo high security prisons inside Israel.

The Israeli army claims that the detained persons have “acted against the security of the region.”  [MR: this stock phrase is often used to justify the unjustifiable imprisonment of Palestinians.]

Jonatan Stanczak, co-founder of the Freedom Theatre, comments: “The reason behind the arrest is absurd and Kafka-like.  Although theatre and culture by their nature can be perceived by some as subversive, this kind of general accusation is nonsense.”

The authorities have refused to allow Israeli lawyer Smadar Ben-Natah to talk to or visit either of his clients, who are being held in “administrative detention.”  [MR: A leftover from the British occupation of Palestine, “administrative detention” means arrest and detention without charge, trial or access to a lawyer, all of which measures are illegal by international law.]

The authorities have arbitrarily extended administrative detention of the two men to August 4th.  Their lawyer will petition the Supreme Court for access to the prisoners, and for their release.

Not surprisingly, the Israeli army denies that it raided the theatre.  However, photo and video documentation confirms that the army not only raided the theatre, they also shattered windows in the multimedia centre and office building.  Eye-witnesses also report harassment and threats to several theatre employees.

“Raiding densely populated Palestinian civilian areas in the middle of the night to carry out wanton arrests is common practice for the Israeli army,” says Jacob Gough, acting general manager of the theatre. “The only difference this time is that it befell people related to the Freedom Theatre.”

[MR:  Though Jenin is in the so-called Area A, nominally under Palestinian jurisdiction, residents of the city are accustomed to regular Israeli army incursions.  This is the harsh reality of military occupation.]

The Freedom Theatre demands that the Israeli authority immediately provide access to lawyers for our kidnapped friends and colleagues, and that they be released immediately and given due compensation.

Until this happens, we urge all the friends and supporters of the theatre to contact their local Israeli representative office and their own government’s foreign office to convey these demands.