Can you really not see? by By Amira Hass

Let us leave aside those Israelis whose ideology supports the dispossession of the Palestinian people because "God chose us." Leave aside the judges who whitewash every military policy of killing and destruction. Leave aside the military commanders who knowingly jail an entire nation in pens surrounded by walls, fortified observation towers, machine guns, barbed wire and blinding projectors. Leave aside the ministers. All of these are not counted among the collaborators. These are the architects, the planners, the designers, the executioners.

But there are others. Historians and mathematicians, senior editors, media stars, psychologists and family doctors, lawyers who do not support Gush Emunim and Kadima, teachers and educators, lovers of hiking trails and sing-alongs, high-tech wizards. Where are you? And what about you, researchers of Nazism, the Holocaust and Soviet gulags? Could you all be in favor of systematic discriminating laws? Laws stating that the Arabs of the Galilee will not even be compensated for the damages of the war by the same sums their Jewish neighbors are entitled to (Aryeh Dayan, Haaretz , August 21).

Could it be that you are all in favor of a racist Citizenship Law that forbids an Israeli Arab from living with his family in his own home? That you side with further expropriation of lands and the demolishing of additional orchards, for another settler neighborhood and another exclusively Jewish road? That you all back the shelling and missile fire killing the old and the young in the Gaza Strip?


Could it be that you all agree that a third of the West Bank (the Jordan Valley) should be off limits to Palestinians? That you all side with an Israeli policy that prevents tens of thousands of Palestinians who have obtained foreign citizenship from returning to their families in the occupied territories?

Could your mind really be so washed with the security excuse, used to forbid Gaza students from studying occupational therapy at Bethlehem and medicine at Abu Dis, and preventing sick people from Rafah from receiving medical treatment in Ramallah? Will also you find it easy to hide behind the explanation "we had no idea": we had no idea that the discrimination practiced in the distribution of water - which is solely controlled by Israel - leaves thousands of Palestinian households without water during the hot summer months; we had no idea that when the IDF blocks the entrance to villages, it also blocks their access to springs or water tanks.

But it cannot be that you don't see the iron gates along route 344 in the West Bank, blocking access to it from the Palestinian villages it passes by. It cannot be that you support preventing the access of thousands of farmers to their land and plantations, that you support the quarantine on Gaza which prevents the entry of medicine for hospitals, the disruption of electricity and water supply to 1.4 million human beings, closing their only outlet to the world for months.

Could it be that you do not know what is happening 15 minutes from your faculties and offices? Is it plausible that you support the system in which Hebrew soldiers, at checkpoints in the heart of the West Bank, are letting tens of thousands of people wait everyday for hours upon hours under the blazing sun, while selecting: residents of Nablus and Tul Karm are not allowed through, 35-year-olds and under - yallah, back to Jenin, residents of the Salem village are not even allowed to be here, a sick woman who skipped the line must learn a lesson and will be purposefully detained for hours. Machsom Watch's site is available for all; in it are countless such testimonies and worse, a day by day routine. But it cannot be that those who are appalled over every swastika painted on a Jewish grave in France and over every anti-Semitic headline in a Spanish local newspaper will not know how to reach this information, and will not be appalled and outraged.

As Jews we all enjoy the privilege Israel gives us, what makes us all collaborators. The question is what does every one of us do in an active and direct daily manner to minimize cooperation with a dispossessing, suppressing regime that never has its fill. Signing a petition and tutting will not do. Israel is a democracy for its Jews. We are not in danger of our lives, we will not be jailed in concentration camps, our livelihood will not be damaged and recreation in the countryside or abroad will not be denied to us. Therefore, the burden of collaboration and direct responsibility is immeasurably heavy.

To a Skeptic: Why Sanctions VS Israel Can Work , by Andrew W Taylor

I am afraid I see that the ideology of religious/ethnic identity defines whose life and death matters. I have never seen this identity define human beings so markedly. As for "ideology" defining positions toward the Siege of Gaza, it is a very labile ideology that unites everyone from Bishop Tutu to Jimmy Carter to the UN General Assembly to me, nu ?

You as an individual may dismiss the right of the Palestinians to resist as ludicrous. I was in the ANC for a few years before Liberation Day and there were many saying the same thing about the outnumbered, outgunned Black South Africans and their resistance in the Townships. But what the naysayers didn't understand then was that the armed struggle was just one front of a many sided struggle that included the peaceful struggle in South Africa and the International Solidarity struggle demanding a boycott of South African products. Perhaps you know that the pinch of Sanctions (despite the US and Israel) helped bring South Africa to capitulation, and power sharing. The ANC won the first fair full Elections with its 2 partners COSATU and the SACP.

So now transpose these multi-layered fronts to the Palestinian struggle. Around the world a Sanctions on Israel Campaign is growing in strength. In the Streets of the world's cities, the people are now marching against Israeli Apartheid. As South Africa was a long arduous struggle on a number of fronts, so is the struggle for a Palestinian State, free of the Israeli Occupation. One thing you need not despair of, is the revolutionary patience and persistence of the world's "prisoners of starvation" and their allies in every land. Something in us wants freedom, but we seek it under a strategy. Bertholt Brecht wrote of this human project:

Forward, without forgetting
Where our strength can be seen now to be!
When starving or when eating
Forward, not forgetting
Our solidarity!

If we want to make this certain
We'll need you and your support.
It's yourselves you'll be deserting
if you rat your own sort.

Forward, without forgetting
Where our strength can be seen now to be!
When starving or when eating
Forward, not forgetting
Our solidarity!

All the gang of those who rule us
Hope our quarrels never stop
Helping them to split and fool us
So they can remain on top.

Forward, without forgetting
Where our strength can be seen now to be!
When starving or when eating
Forward, not forgetting
Our solidarity!

Workers of the world, uniting
Thats the way to lose your chains.
Mighty regiments now are fighting
That no tyrrany remains!

Forward, without forgetting
Till the concrete question is hurled
When starving or when eating:
Whose tomorrow is tomorrow?
And whose world is the world?

Bertolt Brecht

Where I stand on Israel: A Letter to an American Friend, by Andrew R. Taylor

Yes, I think Meretz is the most enlightened of the Zionist parties, but I am not a Zionist. With the Communist Party of Israel and Hadash, I believe the project of 'creating a Jewish State' in Palestine in the school of Ben Gurion the nice and M. Begin the nasty, turned out to involve Collective Punishment, Systemic Racism, Dispersion of the native population, Refugee Camps like Jenin or Gaza, Detention without habeas corpus, War Crimes... (Read: Simha Flapan's, Zionism and the Palestinians)

What can be done now? With the UN, and the political consensus of the broad Left, I have hoped that a Two State Solution would be possible and I have supported it - but its practicality is radically undermined by Israeli behaviour, Israeli mortar and walls and Israeli segmentation of the West Bank, Israeli racism, and Greater-Israel imperialism. As Tariq Ali wrote in a recent Guardian op-ed piece:

"The only acceptable alternative is a single state for Jews and Palestinians alike,
in which the exactions of Zionism are repaired. There is no other way."

Further, the Palestinians are having babies and Israelis are not, and what will Israel do then in terms of Zionist anti-democratic Measures to preserve the allegedly 'non-racist yet racial' character of their Zionism?

Please think of one more point: you live in and have been bombarded with USA imperialist ideology and extremely restricted, filtered,sound-byte non-analytical coverage of the World in US Mass Media. I watch both USA'nian and Canadian, French and UK News. These are two different ways of seeing the world. You said it was curious that I seemed more up in my knowledge of the situation. It is not odd when you think of the state of the USA media.


On the International Press: Based on living in Canada 40 years and the US for 10 years I have some experience of both realms of media over long periods of time. And I have been an activist since age 30 so I have been an avid, reflective student of issues. The principle that seems to hold true with the TV and Newspaper Press is that the USA as the centre of world imperialism offers a much more incoherent, compressed, fragmented News that is self-censored according to the very narrow American ideological spectrum. CBC, BBC, and Agence France are Establishment centre-left organs -- hardly revolutionary, but they offer extensive interviews from both sides, they are pro-United Nations and have frequent interviews from their envoy to the Palestinians etc. When I lived in Ohio I was unable to find such global coverage anywhere including PBS. As for NPR, its coverage during the Invasion of Iraq was blatantly on page with the Bush-Cheney-Israeli State Line.

Do you really want to get into the arithmetic of Palestinian VS Israeli dead and injured? I can -- and have the data. Let me only say that the civilians killed by Israel since (just picking a point) the Jenin Refugee Camp atrocities are widely disproportionate in comparison to the Israeli civilian dead.

Meeretz is a Zionist reformist party of the Jews. I endorse Meretz as a matter of tactics. It is the most progressive of the other side's political formations. But I am not a Zionist. I agree with the older UN position that Zionism (much of the founding theory and most of the practice) is a form of racism and racial discrimination.

Jews become more important/human than Palestinians in Israeli culture. Is this Israeli racism not the fruit of Zionism ?