Dear Peace Forum,
sunday dec 14 2003
I finally went into the occupied territories so I have something to report back. I am sad to say that most of my time has been spent reading the paper and not doing much about the war. We got the English edition of Haaretz delivered at home so that is what I mostly read. The daily news section is better than the other main dailies but unfortunately it
shares their basic assumption. Army actions are almost always called "retaliation," and much of the editorial page is dedicated to debating the question of the existence of a Palestinian partner for peace. the assumption is that Palestinians do not have the right to choose their own representative. small recent settlements are described as "illegal" in the pages of Haaretz, implying there is anything legal about the rest of them.
Any Palestinian connected in any way to the use of violence can be described as a "terrorist," a word reserved almost exclusively for Palestinian or other Arabs. For example, when an organized crime gang set off a bomb in Tel Aviv a few days ago killing 3 (but not the intended target) it was not a terrorist act, not to mention the army's bombing of refugee camps. Another point about the mob bombing, actually made to me by a junior editor at Haaretz, is that in this case the discussion was about what a bad guy the target mobster was, and almost nothing about the criminality of the bombers. You can imagine that the reaction is different when the bombers are presumed to be Palestinian.
Even within these ideological parameters there is a lot of good and important reporting in Haaretz. This shows up mostly in the weekend section. People like Amira Has, Gideon Levy, and Akiva Eldar cover the day to day humiliation of Palestinian life and are featured very prominently on the first pages of the weekend section. Others on the staff are very willing to show that the army is lying when there is clear evidence, though it still is editorial policy to report army claims as fact. For example every victim of army assassinations is reported as a "senior member of hamas or Islamic jihad".
Almost every single person in my social class and background is a Meretz voter; Meretz has 6 seats out of 120 in the Israeli parliament and is by reputation, the "extreme left". They strongly support the recent Geneva deal and their stated position is that they are against the occupation, which they like to blame on the settlers. However, the top people in meretz (including founders of Peace Now) were in favor of the wall long before Sharon was. Now they are just shocked that the Palestinian are imprisoned by the wall and more land is stolen for construction. Also, both Meretz and Peace Now have always been against any form of refusal to serve in the army. Again, these groups are by reputation the extreme left. I still don't think i know much about the state of the peace movement here, there are a lot of capable people doing good stuff but i can't tell where they stand. not that there is direct connection between how radical a person's actions are and how radical the person's positions are. For example, almost all of the recent refusnicks make the point that they are "mainstream" people, who are only critical of the government for going too far or tarnishing israel's otherwise humane morality. The great majority of them strongly reject a more fundamental questioning of the basic goals of the state. Yet over a thousand of them are risking jail and thousands more (no one can tell how many) resist passively by making up excuses to get out of reserve service. I think that the refusenik movement is a very effective and important even if i don't like their line.
The only demonstrations I went to in the first few months were a peace now demo and the memorial rally at the 8th anniversary of rabin's assassination. To different degrees, both turned out to to be anti-Sharon rallies, especially the Rabin business. Pretty useless i think, especially when labour has been worse than likud is many ways. For example, the current wall caging the Palestinians is a new version of the labour party's plan from the 70's called the Alon Plan. The last two days were better demonstrations. First to a-ram for an anti-wall demo with Palestinians and today with the Mes'ha coalition to try to help growers to their lands.
The a-ram demo was against the wall which is planned for the center of town. The organizers on the Israeli side were Taayush and Gush Shalom. About 3000 people showed up and everyone agreed that the highlight was when the students from a-ram got to demolish a life size styrofoam wall. You can imagine that they were not really acting in this bit of street theater.
Today we tried to help some folks from Mes'ha get through a gate in the wall (which is actually a series of fences for most of the way) to their fields from which they were separated. The hope was that with internationals (International Women Peace Service) and Israelis the army would be more reasonable. They jerked us around all morning but would not open the gate. In fact for the past two weeks the gate has been closed without explanations- it looks like the Palestinians don't even get to be jerked around, just ignored. see 
http://www.womenspeacepalestine.org/news14dec03.htm for the IWPS report.
On the way out we met a guy who told the women from IWPS that the settlers are harassing his brother Daud who is working his land. We went over and Daud told us that the settlement security guy (Gadi Kind) comes to him a few times a day and asks him to sell the him his land. Daud says he will never sell but he knows that the wall is coming to his village and when it is up it will separate him from his land and he will soon not have any access to it. When that happens, the state will probably confiscate Daud's land for being uncultivated. The settlers know this very well and think they can make Daud an offer he can't refuse. The reason the settles want to buy rather than wait for the land to be confiscated is that they think they can get a good price under this conditions and would rather "own" it than have to lease it from the state after it confiscates the land. This is not an unusual situation and so no one was very exited and the confrontation with the settlers and soldiers was very low. Kind (the security guy) emphasized what good friends he is with Daud and accused us of disturbing the peace.
The same day that Gadi makes offers to daud for his land, the army keeps coming over and telling Daud to leave. Daud is no fool, he probably suspects that gadi is the one who calls the army. In fact, i saw Gadi call the army to try to have them kick us out when we came to see what he is up to. Whatever he might suspect, Daud does not as much as tell us that he is angry at Gadi. i think in this case Daud can not afford to be angry at Gadi who can probably make something up and have Daud barred from his fields or worse. In other cases, the interaction is more complicated.
The part of Palestine we were at is at a relatively peaceful area. The fact is that many settlers are friendly towards Palestinians and many Palestinians at least carry on the pretense of friendliness in day to day interactions where those still exist. Many settlers will also say that they are interested in good relations with their neighbors. I would not be surprised if some settlers can pass for lets-all-get-along liberals. Of course that does not change the criminality of settlements- it means that daily life in settlements has been normalized to a point that not only the racist hard core can live in them but also the nicer kind.
I had a similar type of interaction with the soldiers. They were polite to me and the rest of us today and most of the soldiers we talked to told us in different ways that they are against the occupation. The highest ranking soldier we talked to that day apologized on behalf on the army and said that unfortunately, the army is not something that runs according to his wishes. He told my comrade (another Israeli) that if he was out of uniform he would have been on the other side of the fence with us. I don't believe him, but I think that unlike settlers, friendly soldiers are significant for more than an efficient occupation. Many of them are reserve soldiers and it might be possible to reach them in civilian life. Reservists come from diverse background, at least two of the soldiers I met today claimed to be lefties against the occupation. They rationalize their presence there as working from within and preventing worse abuses by the right wingers in the army. the argument should not be taken seriously but the fact that they feel that they need to come up with such an argument and justify themselves to me is important I think. Next time i should bring some refusnick propaganda to hand out to soldiers.
Peace, kobi.