Race to a million "mixed" couples

7 November 2011, Alternative Information Center (AIC) המרכז לאינפורמציה אלטרנטיבית

http://www.alternativenews.org (Israel)

Uri Yacobi Keller for the Alternative Information Center (AIC)

Jewish Israelis who advocate for separation between Jews and Arabs feel threatened by mixed couples, like the one on the Israeli reality show "Race for the Million." How might romantic connections and chance encounters between Jews and Palestinians happen in Israel, which is increasingly becoming openly racist?

Participants in the Israeli reality TV show, "Race to a Million."

Walla! Culture recently ran a story pointing out that one of the couples competing in the popular Israeli reality TV show, “Race for the Million,” is “mixed”. Meaning: a male, Muslim Palestinian citizen of Israel and a Jewish Israeli woman who dare to openly flaunt their romantic relationship on prime time television.

But before this couple came to Walla!’s attention, they were under fire from an organization called LEHAVA (“flame” in Hebrew, it’s an acronym for “Preventing [Jewish] Assimilation [with non-Jews] in the Holy Land”), which has published a pamphlet calling for a boycott of the show.

In a short interview with Walla! Culture Benzi Goopstein, the chairman of LEHAVA, remarked, “[Jewish] assimilation is the continuation of the Holocaust.” He also claimed that mixed couples result in violence against women.

However, Mr Goopstein did concede that “allegedly” the mixed couple “looks nice” on TV.

Suffice it to say that Mr Goopstein’s comparing romantic relationships between Jews and Arabs to the systematic genocide of millions of people is, at the very least, a slight exaggeration. And never mind that banning “mixed” romantic relationships between Jews and Germans was a fundamental of the Nazi regime’s discriminatory, anti-Semitic policies.

What I would like to expand on here is this: the very day I heard about the whole thing I went, as I often do, to a certain bar in downtown West Jerusalem. This bar is owned by Jews and Palestinians and its customers are Jews and Palestinians. And it is not uncommon to hear English, Spanish, German, French and other languages there. On the evening that I went, I noted two Palestinian girls chatting in Arabic over beers, some Arab guys, a few Germans, and many Jewish Israelis in various stages of drunkeness.

The place opened about a year ago during the football world cup. Without anyone forcing them, Jews, Palestinians, and “others,” sat down together to watch men chasing balls across a field. The bar has been running ever since.

But it’s just a bar. The fact that Jews and Palestinians drink beer there together, have some sort of fun, flirt with each other and, perhaps, do even more than that, is not artificial or encouraged by anyone. Nor is it very interesting or important to anyone. It happens because they’re young people doing what young people do.

That, more than any demonstration, is threatening to the likes of Mr Goopstein.

This bar is still far from representing the vast majority of the Jerusalem or Israeli nightlife. The Israeli public is, most definitely not on “our” side--it remains a base for the mainstream Israeli politicians who seek to continue occupation. But that same public also watches television where, in reality shows, there happen to be Jews and Palestinians who share their lives in peace. And that same public includes young people who go to bars to have fun where they might end up meeting Palestinian youth who are there for the same reason.

The road from randomly drinking beer together to a meaningful, substantial reduction in racism in Israeli society is still extremely long. And as long as these social meetings between Jews and Palestinians remain as nothing more than “fun” (or reality television) and are not accompanied by loud political contemplation, they hold little importance or political interest.

But if it annoys the likes of Mr Goopstein, it could be some sort of start.

Translated by the Alternative Information Center (AIC)

THE GRUMPY DIPLOMATS OF THE ROGUE STATE

22 July 2011, The Electronic Intifada http://electronicintifada.net (USA)

Ilan Pappe*

The Israeli ambassador to Spain, Raphael Schutz, has just finished his term in Madrid. In an op-ed in Haaretz’s Hebrew edition he summarized what he termed as a very dismal stay and seemed genuinely relieved to leave.

This kind of complaint now seems to be the standard farewell letter of all Israeli ambassadors in Western Europe. Schutz was preceded by the Israeli ambassador to London, Ron Prosor, on his way to his new posting at the United Nations in New York, complaining very much in the same tone about his inability to speak in campuses in the United Kingdom and whining about the overall hostile atmosphere. Before him the ambassador in Dublin expressed similar relief when he ended his term in office in Ireland.

All three grumblers were pathetic but the last one from Spain topped them all. Like his colleagues in Dublin and in London he blamed his dismal time on local and ancient anti-Semitism. His two friends in the other capitals were very vague about the source of the new anti-Semitism as both in British and Irish history it is difficult to single out, after medieval times, a particular period of anti-Semitism.

But the ambassador in Madrid without any hesitation laid the blame for his trials and tribulations on the fifteenth century Spanish Inquisition. Thus the people of Spain (his article was entitled “Why the Spanish hate us”) are anti-Israeli because they are either unable to accept their responsibility for the Inquisition or they still endorse it by other means in our times.

This idea that young Spaniards should be moved by atrocities committed more than 500 years ago and not by criminal policies that take place today, or the notion that one could single out the Spanish Inquisition as sole explanation for the wide public support for the Palestinian cause in Spain, can only be articulated by desperate Israeli diplomats who have long ago lost the moral battle in Europe.

But this new complaint — and I am confident that there are more to come — exposes something far more important. The civil society struggle in support of Palestinian rights in key European countries has been successful. With few resources, sometimes dependent on the work of very small groups of committed individuals, and aided lately by its biggest asset — the present government of Israel - this campaign has indeed made life quite hellish for every Israeli diplomat in that part of the world.

So when we come and assess what is ahead of us, we who have been active in the West are entitled to a short moment of satisfaction at a job well done.

The three grumpy ambassadors are also right in sensing that not only has Israeli policy in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip come under attack, but also the very racist nature of the Jewish state has galvanized decent and conscientious citizens — many of them Jewish — around the campaign for peace and justice in Palestine.

Outside the realm of occupation and the daily reality of oppression all over Israel and Palestine, one can see more clearly that history’s greatest lesson will eventually reveal itself in Palestine as well: evil regimes do not survive forever and democracy, equality and peace will reach the Holy Land, as it will the rest of the Arab world.

But before this happens we have to extricate ourselves from the politicians’ grip on our lives. In particular we should not be misled by the power game of politicians. The move to declare Palestine, within 22 percent of its original being, as an independent state at the UN is a charade whether it succeeds or not.

A voluntary Palestinian appeal to the international community to recognize Palestine as a West Bank enclave and with a fraction of the Palestinian people in it, may intimidate a Likud-led Israeli government, but it does not constitute a defining moment in the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. It would either be a non-event or merely provide the Israelis a pretext for further annexation and dispossession.

This is another gambit in the power game politicians play which has led us nowhere. When Palestinians solve the issue of representation and the international community exposes Israel for what it is — namely the only racist country in the Middle East — then politics and reality can fuse again.

And slowly and surely we will be able to put back the pieces and create the jigsaw of reconciliation and truth. This must be based on the twofold recognition that a solution has to include all the Palestinians (in the occupied territories, in exile and inside Israel) and has to be based on the construction of a new regime for the whole land of historical Palestine, offering equality and prosperity for all the people who live there now or were expelled from it by force in the last 63 years of Israel’s existence.

The obvious discomfort the three diplomats felt and expressed is not due to any cold shoulder shown to them in local foreign ministries or governments. And therefore while many Europeans can make their lives miserable, their respective governments can still look the other way.

Whether it is financial desperation and external Israeli and American pressure that bought Greece’s collaboration against the Gaza Freedom Flotilla or it is the power of intimidation that silences even progressive newspapers like the Guardian in the West, Israel’s immunity is still granted despite its diplomats’ misery.

This is why we should ensure that not only Israeli ambassadors feel uncomfortable in European capitals, but also all those who support them or are too afraid to confront Israel and hold it to account.

Ilan Pappe is Professor of History and Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. His most recent book is Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel (Pluto Press, 2010).

THE CHARGE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES or - Baksheesh for the Doorkeeper

23 July 2011, Gush Shalom גוש שלום http://zope.gush-shalom.org (Israel)

Uri Avnery אורי אבנרי

A Riddle: Which fleet did not reach its destination but fulfilled its mission?
Well, it’s this year’s Gaza solidarity flotilla.

It could be said, of course, that last year’s “little fleet” – that’s what the word means in Spanish, much as “guerrilla” means “little war” – is also a reasonable candidate . It never reached Gaza, but the commander of the Israeli navy could well repeat the words of Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, whose victory over the Romans was so costly that he is said to have exclaimed: “Another such victory, and I am lost!”
Flotilla 1 did not reach Gaza. But the naval commando attack on it, which cost the lives of nine Turkish activists, aroused such an outcry that our government saw itself compelled to loosen its land blockade of the Gaza Strip significantly.

The repercussions of this action have not yet died down. The very important relations between the Israeli and Turkish militaries are still ruptured, with Turkey demanding an apology and indemnities. The victims’ families are pursuing criminal and civil proceedings in several countries. An ongoing headache.

Flotilla 2 reached its end this week, when a huge naval action led to the capture of 1 (one!) little French yacht and the detention of its sailors, journalists and activists –all 16 (sixteen) of them. Even our tame broadcasters could not help themselves from sneering: “Why didn’t they send an aircraft carrier?”

The 14 boats that were prevented from sailing, and the one that did sail, not only kept our entire navy on alert for weeks, but also helped to keep the Gaza blockade in the news. And that, after all, was the whole point of the exercise.
WHAT HAPPENED to the 14 boats which did not sail?

Incredible as it sounds, the Greek navy and Coast Guard forcibly prevented them from leaving Greek ports. There existed no lawful grounds for this, nor was there any pretense of legality.

It would be no exaggeration to say that the Greek navy was acting under orders from the Israeli Chief of Staff. A proud sea-faring nation with a nautical history of thousands of years (“nautical” even happens to be a Greek word) degraded itself to perform illegal actions to please Israel.

It also ignored acts of sabotage carried out by naval commandos – guess whose - against the boats in Greek harbors.

At the same time, the Turkish government, the defiant sponsor of the Mavi Marmara, the ship on which the Turkish activists were killed last year, prevented the same ship from sailing this year.

Also at the same time, groups of pro-Palestinian activists who tried to reach the West Bank by air were stopped on their way. Since there is no direct access to the West Bank by land, sea or air except through Israeli territory or Israeli checkpoints, they had to travel via Ben-Gurion International Airport, Israel’s gateway to the world. Most did not make it: under instructions from our government, all international airlines blocked these passengers at check-in, using “blacklists” provided by our government.

It seems that the long arm of our diligent security service reaches everywhere, and that its orders are obeyed by countries large and small.

A HUNDRED years ago, the secret police of the Russian Czar, the dreaded “Okhrana”, forged a document called “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”.

(In those times, the secret police everywhere was still called Secret Police, before being dignified as “Security Services”.)

The document reported a secret meeting of rabbis in the old Jewish cemetery of Prague, to decide upon strategy to secure Jewish rule over the world. It was a crude falsification, which lifted entire passages verbatim from a novel written decades earlier.

In its pages, the real situation of the Jews was grotesquely distorted – they actually had no power at all. In fact, when Adolf Hitler – who used the Protocols for his propaganda – set in motion the Final Solution, almost nobody in the whole world lifted a finger to help the Jews. Even US Jews were afraid to raise their voices.

But if the authors of the falsification were to return to the scene of their crime today, they would rub their eyes in disbelief: this figment of their sick imagination looks like coming true. The Jewish State – as Zionists like to call us – can order around Greek naval authorities, get Turkey to climb down, instruct half a dozen European states to stop passengers at their airports.

How do we do it? There is a simple answer, consisting of three letters: USA.
ISRAEL HAS become a kind of Kafkaesque doorkeeper to the world’s sole remaining superpower.

Through its immense influence on the American political system, and especially on the Congress, Israel can levy a political tax on anyone who needs something from the US. Greece is bankrupt and desperately needs American and European help. Turkey is a partner of the US in NATO. No European country wants to quarrel with the US. Ergo: they all need to give us a little political baksheesh.

To cement this relationship, Glenn Beck, the obnoxious protégé of Rupert Murdoch, visited us and was enthusiastically received in the Knesset, where he told us “not to be afraid”, because he (and, by implication, Fox and all of America) was supporting us to the hilt.

IT IS because of this that a few lines, which appeared this week in the New York Times, caused near panic in Jerusalem.

The NYT is, perhaps, the most “pro-Israel” paper in the whole world, including Israel itself. Anti-Semites call it the Jew York Times. Many of its editorial writers are ardent Zionists. A news story critical of Israeli policies has almost no chance of appearing there. No mention of the Israeli peace movement. No mention of the dozens of demonstrations in Israel against Lebanon War II and the Cast Lead operation. Self-censorship is supreme.

But this week, the NYT published a blistering editorial criticizing Israel. The reason: the “Boycott Law”, passed by the right-wing Knesset majority, which forbids Israelis to call for a boycott of the settlements. The editorial practically repeats what I said in last week’s article: that the law is blatantly anti-democratic and violates basic human rights. The more so, since it comes on top of a whole series of anti-democratic laws that were enacted in the last few months. Israel is in danger of losing its title as the “Only Democracy in the Middle East”.

Suddenly, all the red lights in Jerusalem started to blink furiously. Help! We are going to lose our only political asset in the world, the pillar of our strength, the basis of our national security, the rock of our existence.

THE RESULT was immediate. On Wednesday, the right-wing clique that now controls the Knesset, under the leadership of Avigdor Lieberman, brought to final vote a resolution that would appoint two Committees of Inquiry into the financial resources of human-rights NGOs. Not all NGOs, only “leftist” ones. This was another item on the long list of McCarthyist measures, many of which have already been adopted and many more of which are waiting for their turn.

The day before, Binyamin Netanyahu appeared specially in the Knesset to assure his followers that he fully approved, and indeed had sponsored, the Boycott Law. But after the NYT editorial, when the Commission of Inquiry resolution came up, Netanyahu and almost all his cabinet ministers voted against it. The religious factions disappeared from the Knesset. The resolution was voted down by a 2 to 1 majority.

But one ominous fact emerged: Apart from Netanyahu and his captive ministers, all the Likud members present voted for the resolution. This included all the young leaders of the party – the coming generation of Likud bosses.

If the Likud remains in power – this group of ultra-rightists,[] will be the government of Israel within ten years. And to hell with the New York Times.
FORTUNATELY, THERE are signs that a new phenomenon is in the making.

It started innocently with a successful consumer strike on cottage cheese, in order to compel a cartel of fat cats to reduce prices. This has been followed by a mass action by young couples, mostly university students, against the impossibly high prices of apartments.

A group of protesters put up tents in the center of Tel Aviv and have now been living there for over a week. Soon after, such encampments sprang up all over the country, from Kiryat Shmona on the Lebanese border to Beer Sheva in the Negev.

It is much too early to tell whether this is a short-term protest or the beginning of an Israeli Tahrir Square phenomenon. But it clearly shows that the takeover of Israel by a neo-fascist grouping is not a foregone conclusion. The fight is on.
Perhaps - just perhaps! - even the New York Times could be starting to report on the reality of our country.