WASHINGTON – May 18 – After years of strenuous denial, Ahava Dead Sea Laboratories, an Israeli cosmetics firm with its main manufacturing plant in an illegal West Bank settlement, is proven by documentary evidence to be in violation of international law through its theft of Palestinian resources.  This evidence was recently discovered by Who Profits, a research project of the Israeli Coalition of Women for Peace, which documents corporate activity in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian and Syrian territory.

Merav Amir, Coordinator of Who Profits, said, “Ahava can no longer continue misleading consumers about where they get the mud used in their products.  This mud is from the Occupied West Bank and is stolen from the Palestinian people.”  Continue reading →

A short sharp video, just out, vividly illustrates the pioneering work of the Israeli grassroots organization Zochrot on Nakba Day (see previous posting below), and the stony ground in which Zochrot activists are determined to plant seeds of challenge and change:

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=6767

Check it out.  Pass it on.

This year on May 10, Yom Ha’atzmaut — Independence Day — Israel celebrates the triumphant conquest of a homeland 63 years ago.  No mention is made of a simultaneous catastrophe, the Nakba, when Palestinians lost theirs.

Everything that followed appears to confirm that these two experiences of history are deeply at odds.  As usual in the human story, the official version was written by the victor.

This year, for the first time, not only will the state of Israel ignore the Nakba, it will actually punish public expressions of mourning.

A new law passed by the Knesset (parliament) in March 2011 bars funding to any organization which commemorates the Nakba on the day reserved exclusively for celebrating Israel’s triumph.  (A 2010 version of this law would have made it a criminal act, but it was feared this would harm Israel’s image abroad.)

Some Israeli Jews have announced that they will join with Palestinians today in resisting the ban and commemorating the Nakba.  Present will be representatives of an organization called Zochrot, a Hebrew word that translates roughly as remembering.

On my travels for Our Way to Fight, in Tel Aviv I met Zochrot education coordinator Amaya Galili.  Born in 1977, she grew up on Kibbutz Amir in the Galilee, near Israel’s northern border with Lebanon.

After she completed her compulsory army service, Amaya decided to research the life of her grandfather.  He emigrated to Palestine in 1938, helped establish the kibbutz, learned Arabic, and functioned as an informal diplomat between the kibbutz and its Arab neighbours in the surrounding villages.  He died the year Amaya was born.

“I started to interview people who knew him,” she says.  “They told me a lot of nice stories about him, including how he helped the refugees after 1948.  But when I asked them what happened during the war, suddenly they were embarassed, they wouldn’t say much.  I couldn’t understand this, I felt that something was being hidden.  Later I found out that my grandfather was part of a unit in the Hagannah (pre-1948 Jewish army) that collected intelligence.  While he was building relationships with the Arabs, being their friend, at the same time he was collecting information about their villages, so the Hagannah could have a file on every village, which helped them a lot in fighting the war.  So here finally was the answer to a question I had been wondering about for years — how could the kibbutz have had so many Arab neighbours before the war, but now there are none?  It was really shocking to discover these two sides to my grandfather.  For me this was an important breakthrough.”

Four years ago, as Zochrot education coordinator Amaya began working with a group of Israeli teachers to grapple with the thorny question of how to introduce discussion of the Nakba into Jewish schools.  It would be her task  to organize their work into a formal curriculum kit.

In mid-2009, she and her colleagues introduced the completed Nakba learning kit to more than two hundred Israeli high-school teachers.  Using maps, literary texts, artwork, historical material, film and other media, it includes accounts of Palestinian communities before and after 1948, a history of events surrounding the Nakba, personal testimonies of refugees, a virtual tour of a destroyed village, and a discussion of the refugees’ right of return.

The Education Ministry reacted swiftly.  According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, a Ministry official declared: “’The education kit was not approved by the ministry.  Teachers using materials not approved by the ministry are acting against ministry procedure and policy.’  The ministry also said it would conduct ‘an immediate investigation.’”

Simultaneously, the Education Minister ordered that the word Nakba be deleted from all school textbooks for Arab students in Israel.  It had only been inserted for the first time two years before, when an earlier minister permitted its use, though in Arab schools only.  For Israeli Jewish students, the Nakba would remain a historical void.

Setbacks are not new to Zochrot activists.  For their insistence on acknowledging the Palestinian experience of “the ongoing Nakba,” they’ve been called anti-Semitic, a marginal organization of lunatics, murderers, an example of Jewish pathology, an expression of narcissism and moral obtuseness, and Hamasniks, collaborators with the enemy.  In 2009, after Zochrot founder Eitan Bronstein urged Israelis to join in Nakba commemorations, he received anonymous death threats.  (You’ll find Eitan’s story and Amaya’s in chapter 14 of Our Way to Fight.)

To an outsider like me, it makes perfect sense to acknowledge the Nakba; denial can only lead to more brutality, more suffering.  But then I wonder, how many North Americans can acknowledge the equivalent disaster for original peoples here?

How did Amaya herself come to terms with the triumph-catastrophe where she lives?  “Where I grew up,” she replied, “it’s a beautiful valley, mostly agricultural.  Often I walked through fields and forests, but I didn’t see the ruins of the Palestinian villages — even the ruins were invisible to me.  So now I want to help people to see the landscape through different eyes.  We also need to develop ways to hear the Palestinians – not just to hear that we all believe in peace, which is easy to say, but what did they really go through in the Nakba, what do they still go through today?”

Why is it so crucial for Israeli Jews to grapple with the Nakba?  “First, it’s an injustice against Palestinians, our neighbours,” she replied.  “But it’s also about us, about who we are.  My grandfather helped to throw out his Palestinian friends, and then he tried to compensate by helping the refugees.  My grandparents knew a lot about this, my parents less, and by my generation nobody talked about it.  This is the silence of ignorance, but then it also becomes the silence of ideology.  To talk about the Nakba raises a lot of fear and anger.  But we have to talk about it, we have to deal with it.”

But why?  Amaya is quiet a moment, then she says, “I want to stay here in Israel, in Palestine, this is my home.  But I don’t want to be part of a colony, always at war, more and more closed in by walls and fences.  To live here in peace, with justice, we have to integrate more into the Middle East.  That means we have to stop oppressing another nation and other communities within Israel.  The first step is to acknowledge the Nakba, and what we did to the Palestinians in 1948.  I don’t think we have any other option.”

Two events this week — one in Israel, the other in Canada — and the thread that connects them:

1) In Israel, the Zionist pressure group Im Tirtzu, which specializes in witch-hunts against peace and human rights activists, demanded this week that the Attorney-General investigate members of the Israeli women’s organization MachsomWatch for entering the Palestinian village of Awarta last month in violation of a curfew imposed by the Israeli army.  The village was under siege by the army following the murder of five Israelis in the nearby settlement of Itamar.

2) In Canada’s May 2 federal election, 60% of eligible Canadians electors voted.  Of these, 40% voted for the northern branch of the Republicans, known here as Conservatives, granting them 167 seats in Parliament, enough for a majority.

Judging by previous performance by the Conservatives in minority government, where they demonstrated spectacular contempt for democratic process, it is widely assumed they will take the election results as granting them absolute power.  While costing the rest of us dearly, their rule over the next four to five years will be very beneficial for a small elite, for corporations, and for their international allies, especially the increasingly isolated Israel.  Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman declared Canada — by which he means the regime currently in power — Israel’s best friend.  Not the richest or most powerful friend, but certainly the nicest.

While I was writing Our Way to Fight: peace-work under siege in Israel-Palestine, I used the working title My Way to Fight, a phrase borrowed from a young Palestinian film-maker at the Freedom Theatre in the Jenin refugee camp.  Mustafa Staiti told me, “Some fight with a gun, others fight by their talent.  This is what I do.  It’s my way to fight.”  However, since neither Mustafa nor anyone else featured in the book fights alone, but always in cooperation with others, in the book title ‘my’ became ‘our.’

It’s a crucial distinction.

The Canadian election was a triumph of I over We.  Tyrants everywhere – including the managers of managed democracies – appeal directly and compellingly to the lonely I, self-absorbed, driven by received impulse, desperate for security in a turbulent world, and easily frightened by the unknown, especially by any form of Other.  This fear sours easily into resentment and rage, on which tyrants happily feed.

At the same time, paradoxically, something else happened in the election: while the Conservatives increased their popular vote by only 2%, the New Democratic Party increased its share by more than 12%, winning a record 102 seats.  For the first time in Canadian history, the NDP will lead the official opposition in Parliament.

Here is the paradox: the NDP is the only party left in Canada (though not nearly as left as I would like) which still represents, even if only vestigally, an enduring Canadian sense of We.  It’s rooted in the idea that we all do better through connection, cooperation, and compassion — sensible human capacities, all of them anathema to the northern Republicans.  It was this sensible cooperative impulse that generated Canada’s government-funded universal health care system, and other similar programs in which care and risk are broadly shared.  All such not-for-profit programs are targets for destruction by the Conservatives.

Given ample evidence on the tyrannical nature of this regime even in a minority situation, how did the Conservatives win a majority?  In their campaign they made only one promise to Canadian voters: Stability. Minority government is inherently unstable, they said, and unstable is bad, even dangerous.  Only with a majority in Parliament could they deliver Stability, which is good and safe.  The mainstream media spread this mantra faithfully, far and wide; on election day a sufficient minority ignored the evidence, and voted for Stability.

Stability, aka security, is a stunningly powerful lure — literally, it stuns. It’s the promise that Mussolini offered to Italians in the 1920s, Hitler to Germans in the 1930s, Bush to Americans in September 2001, Netanyahu (twice) to Israelis, Mubarak (for four decades) to Egyptians, and now Stephen Harper to Canadians.  Huge numbers of Egyptians chose freedom, but a sufficient minority of Canadians chose Stability.

Though always an illusion, this promise of Stability/security appeals most powerfully to the isolated, fearful I.  The contract is clear and simple: The tyrant offers protection from the unknown, from The Other, and all that is required in return is unquestioning compliance.  Implicit in this arrangement is the subtext that anyone who questions or defies the tyrant will be unprotected and — as circumstances require — marginalized, vilified, silenced, and/or eliminated.

Last year in Israel, Im Tirtzu released a report attacking several Israeli peace and human rights organizations, including MachsomWatch, claiming they had provided critical data and testimonies to a UN Human Rights Commission report on the 2008-09 Israeli invasion of Gaza. Named after its chair Richard Goldstone, the report concluded that during its assault, the Israeli armed forces may have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.  (See The Goldstone Report.)

Im Tirtzu’s attack on MachsomWatch and other organizations is a vivid example of the lonely I on a mass level, self-absorbed, driven by received impulse, desperate for security in a turbulent world, and easily frightened by the unknown, especially by any form of Other.

By contrast, like other activists who share their stories in Our Way to Fight, the women of MachsomWatch insist on venturing beyond the fearful I, beyond the wall.  Their presence in Awarta was normal, it’s what they do.  Their chosen work is to see what Israelis are not supposed to see, to say what they are not supposed to say, and to connect with the Other, people that Israelis are either supposed to ignore or to regard as the enemy.

Daphne Banai’s first MachsomWatch shift is burned into her memory. At the height of the second intifada, she drove with another woman to Abu Dis, a Palestinian village in East Jerusalem where beatings of Palestinians had been reported at the Israeli military checkpoint.  The MachsomWatchers went to witness, and to report what they saw, so that Israelis and others could not so easily say, we didn’t know.

In Abu Dis the two women were terrified.  “Naturally we were surrounded by Palestinians,” Daphne recalls, “and every one of them I saw as a terrorist who was going to blow himself up or stab me.  Most people in Israel are driven by this kind of fear, we’re brainwashed with it.”

At the checkpoint, things were even worse than they had heard. “Thousands of people were trying to get through, elderly ones fainting in the heat, livestock dying, soldiers pushing and screaming.  There was a woman in labour, they wouldn’t let her ambulance through.  We called higher officers on the phone, and gradually people started to pass through.  But still they wouldn’t let the ambulance go.  We told the soldiers we wouldn’t leave until they let this woman pass.  Finally toward seven or eight they did.  As we walked to our taxi, the ambulance stopped farther down the road, its horn blaring.  The doctor got out, he shouted, Ladies, ladies, shukran, thank you!  We both burst out crying.  At that moment we knew this is what we wanted to do.”

These are the kind of people that Im Tirtzu wants to silence.  It will not be easy.  They are the vibrant We at work, caring, connecting, cooperating. Despite the overwhelming persuasive and punitive power of the tyrant, these women refuse his terms: to not know, to not care, to let fear govern their lives, to settle into the illusory refuge of Security-at-any-cost.

In Canada, the northern Republicans now fully control the persuasive and punitive machinery of state power.  But deeply embedded in their triumph are the seeds of their defeat: all of us I’s who insist on seeing ourselves as We.

On April 22, 2011, the Friday protest in the Palestinian village of Bil’in honoured Bassem Abu Rahmah, a beloved non-violent activist murdered here by Israeli soldiers two years ago today.

After prayers this Friday, Bil’iners marched from the center of the village to the wall, accompanied by Israeli and international peace activists.  As usual, the Israeli army fired high velocity tear gas canisters (one of which fatally crushed Bassem Abu Rahmah’s chest in 2009), sound bombs, rubber and live bullets; soldiers also beat protestors with batons and rifle butts.  At least a dozen people suffered moderate to severe injuries.  (See full report by journalist Hamde Abu Rahme.)

Among those beaten by soldiers was village leader Mohammad Khatib.  When I met Mohammed on my travels to research Our Way to Fight, he had already been assaulted more than once by soldiers, and imprisoned by the military court for organizing non-violent protests.

In 1991, Israel confiscated two hundred acres of Bil’in farm land to build the Kiryat Sefer settlement.  Villagers protested, without effect.  Then in the early 2000s, as the apartheid wall sliced through Palestinian land, most villages in its path resisted as well as they could.  When the bulldozers approached Bil’in late in 2004, the villagers learned that this time more than half their food-growing land would be stolen.

“When the wall comes,” said Mohammed Khatib, “the occupation comes to your door.  You have no chance to escape, so you have to resist.”

Village leaders called a public meeting, which launched the Popular Committee against the Wall and Settlements.  Mohammed Khatib would be its first coordinator.

“For three months we tried to stop the bulldozers, but from protests in other villages the army has learned how to keep people away from the bulldozers.  So we failed, the wall continued, and olive trees were destroyed.  But one day when they came to destroy more trees, they found us in their way.  This was new thinking for us, a change of strategy.  We went very early in the morning before the army came, chained ourselves to the olive trees, and waited for them to come.  For them it was a surprise.  From that day, this is how we have continued.”

Every Friday since, villagers have continued to invent creative tactics to resist the wall and the strangehold of military occupation.

Like other occupiers, from its inception Israel has met non-violent resistance with escalating violence.  Mohammed commented, “What we are doing is more dangerous than to shoot a gun and then run away.  If you tie yourself to a tree, you wait for the army to come, maybe to shoot you, to kill you.  You also have to learn how to control yourself, because when you react to violence with violence, you are out of control, and in that field your opponent will win.”

At their home in Bil’in, Mohammed’s wife Lamyaa Yassin described one of the regular night invasions by Israeli forces.  “When they surrounded our house, Mohammed wanted to talk to them, to find out what they wanted so they wouldn’t come into the house.  We were trying to protect the children.  But before he could get to the door they broke it open with their weapons.  The baby started to cry. Khaled (their son, aged three) was shocked, he just stood there. They put the whole family into one room, then they searched the house.  Three soldiers stood at the doorway with their weapons, and their faces painted black.  Khaled didn’t cry, he didn’t say anything, he just stared at them.

“We stayed in that room more than an hour while they searched. Then Captain Fouad, as he’s known, came and said, ‘As of now Mohammed is under arrest.’  Mohammed kissed the children, then they put a blindfold over him.  At that moment all the children started to cry, except for Khaled.  When the soldiers took Mohammed downstairs, we followed them.  I heard screams and calls for help from the neighbour’s house.  The soldiers had arrested three people there, they beat everyone.  When they took the arrestees out, the soldiers wouldn’t let us follow, so we watched through the window, we saw them push Mohammed into the jeep. When the soldiers left our house we went outside.  We heard ambulance sirens.  Then I saw my brother Abdallah covered in blood.  When we saw him like that, I put Khaled down, and he threw a stone at one of the army jeeps.  That was his only reaction the whole night.”  (For more on Bil’in, see chapter 18, The safety of sleep, in Our Way to Fight.)

In Bil’in, as in many other Palestinian villages, on one side of the wall are besieged villagers, with their Israeli and international peace activist allies.  On the other side are the Israeli settlers, government and army — by most accounts the most powerful military apparatus in the Middle East, unconditionally backed by the governments of the United States, Canada, Australia, and most governments in Europe.

Each of these governments considers itself democratically elected, and presumes to act in the name of all its citizens – in our name.

Next Friday, after prayers, Bil’iners will march again from the centre of the village to the wall.

“As time goes on,” said Lamyaa Yassin, “the soldiers get more violent.  I think they see that everyone here is still strong, still struggling, and this bothers them very much.  They must think that by now, after so many home invasions, jail and beatings, people would be too afraid, but this is a struggle for our land and our lives, so we continue.”