Finkelstein’s doctoral thesis debunked a very influential forgery called “From Time Immemorial,” which fabricated data to show there were hardly any Palestinians in Palestine during the nineteenth century. Whatever your stance on the issue is, fabrications like that can be dangerously misleading, and Finkelstein exposed how the data was twisted, footnote after footnote. He wrote excellent rebuttals of some of Benny Morris’ more reactionary claims, showing how they were undermined by Morris’ own historical research. He has taken brave stances against many forms of injustice, and paid a high price.

(I want to note in parenthesis that while he does frequently mention that both his parents were Holocaust survivors, and does accept the validity of conventional histories of this event, there are some extremely irresponsible passages in his book on the “Holocaust Industry” which undermine survivors’ testimonies. But that deserves a separate discussion).

Recently Finkelstein has taken what many see as a disappointing stance regarding the right of return: citing his own experience after he was prevented from teaching in his academic institution, he advises Palestinians to “move on” and make more realistic demands:

“People get offended when I make the analogy – I’m going to make it tonight – I wish people would understand the point I’m making. I knew I had a right to return to DePaul. I knew I had that right, and I knew if I went to court for ten years, I would win. But then I have to make a judgment: Do I want to draw this out for ten years, or am I going to go for a settlement that’s going to give me less than my right to return, but it will give me something? And then I made my choice. I think it’s basically the same for the Palestinians. Do they have a legal right? Yes. But is it worth fighting this out through eternity, or do you cut your losses and move on?”

Feminism is the radical idea that women are people too. The right of return is the radical idea that if you’re born in a place, you get to live there – even if you’re an Arab! – and that you and your children are therefore not immigrants, but natives. Why would someone like Finkelstein be confusing people like that? Expecting people to give up their connection to their places of origin is no more “pragmatic” than telling women to settle for an inferior status in society.

Regardless of his personal quirks, what I think is going on here is something I’ve noticed among many Jews in the pro-Palestine movement, including myself. Even if we declare ourselves to be progressive, we still carry a lot of fear. There are ‘traditional’ Jewish fears of being a persecuted minority. There is the unavoidable nightmare of a new Holocaust, which we constantly project onto Arabs and Muslims. There are periods in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict where we or our relatives experienced physical threat, such as the suicide bombings of the second Intifada. And of course there are the never-ending manipulated fears that Israeli leaders drum up to gain more votes, or more support for their latest expansionist policy.

What I’ve noticed is that a way a lot of us deal with these fears is by giving Palestinians advice: if only they play nice, sound less angry, tone down their demands, and generally be reasonable, we and people we know will be calm enough to accept them. Now, clearly our Palestinian allies can sometimes be wrong, and we do get to disagree with them if we are to be a real part of this movement. But I think the ubiquity of this tendency to advise goes beyond that. Finkelstein should have known better than to tell Palestinians to compromise on this very personal right: I think the real reason was his fear.

The right of return, if implemented fully, will involve a huge upheaval. It is understandable that people would be afraid to take such a step. As allies, it is our responsibility to work through these fears and not allow them to prevent Palestinians from living in their own home. Anyone born in Jerusalem has the right to live there, whatever religion or ethnicity they belong to – this much should be obvious. Anyone whose family has lived in Yaffa/Jaffa for centuries belongs there, not in exile. Israel should be welcoming back its Palestinian inhabitants, instead of constantly devising tricks to keep them out.

None of this has to come at the expense of the true legitimate rights of Israelis like me. As Edward Said explained, in a very inspiring essay:

“What we never concentrated on enough was the fact that to counteract Zionist exclusivism, we would have to provide a solution to the conflict that, in Mandela’s […] phrase, would assert our common humanity as Jews and Arabs. Most of us still cannot accept the idea that Israeli Jews are here to stay, that they will not go away, any more than Palestinians will go away. This is understandably very hard for Palestinians to accept, since they are still in the process of losing their land and being persecuted on a daily basis. But, with our irresponsible and unreflective suggestion in what we have said that they will be forced to leave (like the Crusades), we did not focus enough on ending the military occupation as a moral imperative or on providing a form for their security and self-determinism that did not abrogate ours. This, and not the preposterous hope that a volatile American president would give us a state, ought to have been the basis of a mass campaign everywhere. Two people in one land. Or, equality for all. Or, one person one vote. Or, a common humanity asserted in a binational state.”

This may not happen anytime soon. But if you are interested in being a good ally to Palestinians right now, it helps to think about this, because your fears can get in the way of providing good support, or of simply getting close to people. In the end, this isn’t only about politics – it’s about friendship: I think of the right of return as having my best Palestinian friends as neighbors in Israel too, for them to be around me whenever I miss them.

Domination and the Arts of Resistance). Ideological manipulation interested Marx more in relation to the privileged – the self-delusions that they need to continue fulfilling their role. I’ve been thinking about this recently in relation to Israel.

In the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx writes about the bourgeois politicians who initiated the French Revolution to ease restrictions on their trading: “unheroic though bourgeois society is, it nevertheless needed heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war, and national wars to bring it into being. And in the austere classical traditions of the Roman Republic the bourgeois gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions, that they needed to conceal from themselves the bourgeois-limited content of their struggles and to keep their passion on the high plane of great historic tragedy. Similarly, at another stage of development a century earlier, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed from the Old Testament the speech, emotions, and illusions for their bourgeois revolution […] the awakening of the dead in those revolutions served the purpose of glorifying the new struggles”.

 You don’t always need to articulate what your privileges are, what exactly you are afraid of losing. But to convince themselves, to keep their own “passion on the high plane of great historic tragedy,” people need to dramatize. Americans who are afraid of paying more taxes to provide healthcare for the uninsured tell themselves they are fighting Stalin and Hitler (the record, so far, was set by this comparison of the health reform to the Holocaust, mocked brilliantly by Jon Stewart).

For those supporting the policies of the Israeli government, the equivalent is the battle against Islamic anti-Semitism. This self-presentation is much more prevalent than openly right-wing arguments: a friend was telling me that on a popular Israeli dating site, where people are asked to describe their political views (just like on Facebook profiles), almost no one says they are right-wing. Educated middle-class Israelis like to distance themselves from the likes of Avigdor Lieberman, just as they despised Kahane in the 1980s. Lieberman is vulgar, blatant, embarrassing, not what you would want people to remind you of on your next trip to Europe. So are the settlers – among these circles you will find many more people willing to denounce them than open proponents of the Greater Israel. Netanyahu’s “support” for a Palestinian state and his “freeze” are taken at face value, and seen positively – most people don’t read the fine print about the speeding up of construction in the settlements. So why aren’t these people taking an active stance to bring about this Palestinian state, which they say they support? Because, beyond their general wish for a peaceful resolution of the conflict, these people claim to be pessimists.

Round their dinnertables, Israelis talk obsessively about Islamic fundamentalism. Ahamdinejad’s supposed threat to wipe Israel off the map , the latest provocative statement by Nassralah, the sensible attitude of the Swiss who decided to protect themselves against four very threatening minarets  – all these are staples. But you also hear people developing hypothetical tragic scenarios: what are the present torments of the Palestinian refugees compared to what could possibly happen to Jewish Israelis if they were allowed to return and live with them? What is the prejudice that Arabs face in Israel compared to the terrifying possibility that they’ll have too many babies? There is always a very dramatic air to these dystopias: unlike those naive peace activists who keep getting tear-gassed every week in places like Bil’in, these speakers know everything there is to know about Muslims and Arabs. 1950s Existentialist philosophers recognized that Man must face his own mortality; these disillusioned realists understand that Jews will always face Islamic anti-Semitism. Therefore, there is no point in working for peace and justice.

As it was for Marx’s revolutionary bourgeois, this heroic struggle with anti-semitism makes material benefits too mundane to be mentioned: the fact that most Israeli communities are build on land taken from former Palestinian ones, as this new interactive map shows; the appropriation of water from West Bank aquifers not just for settlers, but for the Tel Aviv metropolitan region ;  Jewish-only roads that cut through the West Bank to lessen traffic jams between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem ; the huge security industry and its many beneficiaries – all these are ignored by the self-styled Emile Zolas who obsess about Haniyeh and Ahmadinejad.

This is not to say that no Arabs or Muslims have anti-Jewish sentiments. But as with Ahmadinejad’s fabricated “wiping off the map” comment, the extent of this hatred is wildly exaggerated by people who hardly take the trouble to visit their Arab neighbors in Jaffa/Yafa, certainly not to join any protests in the territories. This self-imposed segregation makes it is easy to transform every MEMRI-distorted headline (including this famous one about Hamas’ Mickey Mouse ) to a clearcut example of Arab public opinion.

The Israeli government represents its most violent policies as authentic embodiments of Judaism. It used an innocent children’s song about a Hanukka dreidel made of cast lead to provide a catchy name for its murderous operation in Gaza (the same song mentions a mother making latkes for her children – how does correspond to dropping phosphorus shells on  UN-run schools?). Combating anti-Jewish sentiments is impossible if people don’t speak up against such horrible distortions of Judaism.

Breaking any self-imposed isolation from Arabs and Muslims is the best cure for privileged pessimism. Joint political activism gives us the hope to imagine a better, more just Israeli-Palestinian future. There’s no time to waste.

Israel always seems to be somewhere you can’t talk about unless you’re currently there.  Because no one else, least of all American Jews, has enough experience to form an opinion. Maybe it’s time to explode this myth of Israeli Experience.

1. Did you know that Israelis frequently use the experience argument to silence each other? A year ago, I was marching in Tel Aviv with other Israelis protesting the attack on Gaza. People yelled at us that we didn’t know or care about the real suffering of the citizens in Sderot (as if we need to choose between a normal life for them, and the lives of dozens of Gazan children). We were supposed to stay silent because we didn’t live through the Qassam rockets. A few days later, a woman whose house had actually been hit by a rocket published an article against the war. You would think this was enough experience – but in fact it was too much: people commented she had “battered wives’ syndrome”: because her house had been hit she could no longer form an objective opinion. So you can never have enough experience to oppose a war, no matter what you’ve been through.
2. Have you ever heard someone say “as someone who doesn’t live in Israel, I’d support crazy militaristic policies, but maybe I don’t know enough”? The experience mystique only works in one direction.
3. Let me tell you: Jewish Israelis are very deeply ignorant about Palestinian experience. Most people rely on some tired clichés about Islam, and don’t have the foggiest clue about what it’s like to live under occupation. There are settlers who don’t know they live beyond the Green Line. I talked to a soldier who served in Bilin thinking he was protecting the 1967 border, not an annexation wall that runs deep into Palestinian territory (and this is someone who actually saw the reality in the West Bank – many Israelis only see it on TV).  
4. Everyone has an opinion about Iran. People see protestors being bludgeoned to death by the police, and very naturally feel outraged. It’s totally ok for Israelis to form an opinion about that, even if they have never set foot in Iran. Because when it comes to other countries, moral outrage is enough.
5. Most Israelis DON’T live under constant physical threat. Since 2005 there have been very few suicide bombings. Rocket attacks mostly affected areas close to Gaza. Since 1948 Israelis have always enjoyed more security and fewer threats to their lives than Palestinians, better access to food and water, less restrictions on health and education services. It is often more convenient to feel victimized or to bring up hypothetical dangers in order not to discuss actual privileges and complicity with the suffering of others. This moral laxity should never be encouraged.
6. Finally, there is never one unambiguous lesson to be drawn from experience. Take the Holocaust: some people saw it as a justification for a strong army, while others decided to show more solidarity in the struggle against racism. You always need to interpret.

Too often people allow the experience argument to silence them. How about trusting your outrage, and getting involved?

Dedicated to my comrades in Students for Justice in Palestine

I should have taken your email! People were all around us at the rally, shouting and singing, I really wanted to talk to someone but I didn’t notice how well you were listening, how you had patience to talk to me and read the flyer I was distributing. You had a red beard and skullcap, and a blue shirt with “Israeli Peace” on it. I wore the black shirt of Students for Justice in Palestine.

You read my flyer and asked me, “where it says in 1967 Israel occupied more territories populated by Palestinians, what do you mean by ‘more’? Are you saying Israel of 1948 was also conquered”?

I know what you are really asking: do “we people” recognize “your” right to exist, or… you know, want to throw you into the sea?

Dude, I’m an Israeli Jew, just like you! I don’t want to throw any Israelis into the sea, honestly. I’m a horrible swimmer and I have asthma, so although the sea in Tel Aviv is warmer than around here, I’d rather just look at the waves, maybe dip in my toes once in a while. Besides, the sea gets polluted: throwing people in could be dangerous!

But because I am Israeli, I know where you’re coming from. This question is one of our formulas, isn’t it? The ones we use when people tell us they were displaced in 1948, and we get really scared. You know them all by heart, don’t you? “These things happen in wars”; “If they had won they would have done the same”; “If they hadn’t rejected the partition plan in 1947, it wouldn’t have happened”; “the Arab states should have done more for them”, etc., etc.

I’ve tried not using those formulas and just listening to Palestinians telling me the place they are from, the place they can’t return to. I’ve tried looking at them straight in the eye when they say it, without responding. I feel so nervous it makes me sick in the stomach. I cringe. I feel like I’m going to explode.

Because when I look them in the eye, it stops being “us and “them”. For one moment, I wonder what if I was “them”. In Lydda, Yitzhak Rabin drove them out, firing shots above their heads; he tells the story in his memoirs. In Al-Majdal, which is Ashkelon today, they were loaded onto trucks after the fighting ended, and dumped on the other side of the border. In Jaffa they really were driven into the sea, under bombardment. Children were lost in the waves as their families fled to Gaza in fishing boats (did you know that? It was we who threw them into the sea, not the other way round!).  And then we took all of their property and they stayed refugees, for sixty years. For sixty years!

Now they are here, and here are their children, looking at me, straight in the eye. Do you see why we are so scared?

But they are just looking at me, actually they are smiling. You may not believe me, but I get regularly hugged by Palestinians. Not everyone hates us, Aryeh (I think you said that was your name?). I have Palestinian friends: they cook for me; they laugh at my jokes; we gossip; they burn discs for me; we get all mushy and cheesy with each other.

Yeah, don’t tell me: maybe my friends are nice, but how can I generalize? What about all the suicide bombers, all those photos of little babies dressed with weapons, don’t “they” teach their children to hate us? And then I could quote you some surveys about attitudes to Israel and willingness to compromise, and there we go, straight back to cliché-land.

Let’s go another way, and look at that fear again. A lot of it has got to do with this Right of Return thing. What do you imagine when you think of it? For a long time I was too scared to even try to picture it, but when I did, the first image that came up was from the Westerns I watched as a kid: the Indians swarming down the hills, shrieking, shooting arrows or whatever weapon people use nowadays: The attack of the barbarians.

But maybe imagine something different: a plane landing in Ben-Gurion airport with some “new immigrants” from the refugee camps in Lebanon. This really pompous politician is out to greet them, smiling from ear to ear. The first refugee comes down the steps and shakes people’s hands. The politician uses some fancy clichés, welcoming them to their homeland. These cute kids, third graders, are standing in line, with huge bouquets of flowers, too big for them to hold, pointing at the refugees who just got off the plane, looking a bit dazed by the strong sunlight and the humidity. And then some representative from the Ministry of the Interior goes up and gets their details. She’ll be calling them tomorrow about arrangements, where to go to from the hostel, when they can learn Hebrew, she’ll give them the contact information of the organizations that have volunteered to help them. And welcome back home, by the way.

There, isn’t that a nicer image than the previous one? But you think I’m totally crazy, don’t you? Don’t I realize the implications? What about the demographic balance? What about the Jewish nature of the state? What about all we have built over the last sixty years? Don’t Jews need a safe haven? And our right for self-determination?

So the options you are giving me, Aryeh, are these: we could get to keep our right for self-determination, our safe haven, my favorite bookshop-cafe in Rabin square in Tel Aviv, the songs my mother likes to hear on the radio on the holidays, our wonderful Hebrew slang, our “dugri” directness and our weather (well, maybe not our weather, at least not in August). But then I need to look my Palestinian friends in the eye and tell them: no matter how much you miss your homeland, you are never going back. Not you, not your parents, not your children, not your grandchildren, nor your grandchildren’s grandchildren. We got to miss the Holy Land for two thousand years, but you’re not Jewish, so you will never ever be allowed to return.

Or, we could completely destroy Israel, raze everything to the ground. Bring bulldozers, knock down all the beautiful buildings of Tel Aviv University, the mounds of grass, the corner outside the Arts building where students and teachers smoke weed together, the little frame-shaped sculpture that overlooks the sea, the café outside the university with the hot Moroccan shakshuka, we can knock down all of these and turn the university back into Sheikh Muwwanis, and let the refugees live in the village that was there before.

And you’re saying these are the only two possibilities. Seriously? Is that the best we Jews can come up with? We, the People of the Book? With Einstein and all our Nobel prize winners? With our Ladino love songs and marvelous Yiddish curses? With all of our films, winning prizes at every festival? Our thousands of years of poetry, from the Song of Songs to Amichai and Yonah Volach? The agricultural innovations we export to the whole world? Are you seriously suggesting that these two miserable options are the best we can think of? Why, I find that almost offensive. Aren’t we a little bit smarter than that?

Do I have a solution? I do have some ideas, but what I really want is to get people talking. I want to hear Palestinians telling us what they miss most, where they would like to live, what they would want it to be like. And we could tell them what is important to us, what we have learned over the last sixty years. It’s like two flatmates about to move in together – where shall we put the couch? What time do you get up in the morning? Oh no! Do you snore? Don’t waste all of that hot water in the shower! Those are the conversations we need to be having.

Now you really think I’m nuts, don’t you? We could be talking millions of people here, it’s a huge upheaval, where will we put them all?

The short answer is – we’ve done it before. Every time a wave of Jewish immigrants came to Israel, people said it would never work, there would be no room, everyone will starve. But we managed, somehow. This is no different. In fact, we’re stronger and more experienced now.

And the longer answer is that the reason this seems unimaginable is simply because of our fear. That fear has deep roots: Jews and Israelis have definitely been attacked and hurt, time and time again. It’s through this fear that we tend to think we are dealing with some kind of virus that must be kept in isolation. But Palestinians are human beings, and they deserve to be treated that way. We really could try and do that for a change, instead of forcing them to the other side of the border, setting up walls and checkpoints and prisons, and pretending any of that is a solution.

To truly overcome fear, reading this letter won’t be enough. What you need to do is to hang out with some of my Palestinian friends, see them celebrating Hanukka and Passover with us, stuff grapeleaves with them, all of that mushiness I was referring to earlier. You have no idea how much fun it is: let me know when you’re coming. Trust me, you’ll enjoy it! Just give it a try.

Recently I’ve been reading the second edition of the book (”The Birth of the Refugee Problem Revisited”), as well as a book by a young Palestinian scholar, Rosemarie Esber (”Under the Cover of War: The Zionist Expulsion of the Palestinians”), and excerpts from Hillel Cohen’s “Army of Shadows”, and Flapan’s brilliant “The Birth of Israel – Myths and Realities”. I used to think I was especially ignorant because the Israeli education system is still covering up a lot of what happened, but a lot of Palestinians have told me they know little more than their family’s history (if their relatives were even willing to talk about their experiences), and outside Israel/Palestine few are taught this history properly. It’s frustrating, because the information is out there – it just needs to get circulated.

I measure everything against what I was taught in school. I never learned about 1948 in a history lesson (these only extended as far as the Holocaust. We learned a lot about the pre-state Zionist movement, but almost nothing about proper Israeli history). What I received was more mythical versions – the children’s books I read in third grade (there was a series on Zionist martyrs with colored covers – my favorite guy was from the Haganah, while my friend’s was from the IZL (Irgun), and we used to fight about who was braver). There were the pieces in the reader for first or second graders (I remember very vividly one about a lone kibbutznik standing up to Arab tanks), and the tedious but affecting ceremonies every year for Remembrance Day, which were designed to make us identify with the fallen soldiers (I immediately think of the poet Alterman’s line “we are the silver platter, upon which you were given the Jewish state”). The essence, of course, was that in 1948 the Arabs attacked Israel. It’s amazing how quickly every political discussion of the present, or of the future (one state? two states?) with anyone who has had this kind of education reverts back to this very basic point. This where the books I mentioned come in handy.

It turns out there was no unified collective of Arabs in 1948. The strongest Arab army, that of Jordan, did formally enter the war, but this was primarily in order to capture the areas allocated to the Palestinian state – not the Jewish ones. King Abdallah’s forces never advanced westwards towards Tel Aviv. Quite the opposite – they evacuated whole cities like Lydda and Ramle, and enabled the Zionists to take them over and expel their inhabitants. There was fighting around Jerusalem, but overall, their reaction was more complacent than aggressive.

The Egyptian Minister of Defense declared “we shall never even contemplate entering the war officially. We are not mad” (Flapan, 1987:119). This was on May 12th, three days before the war broke out! The rhetoric of the Arab countries was belligerent, but the regimes made very few preparations for war and entered it reluctantly. A big reason for the decision to intervene was the pressure from their public to protect the Palestinian population: throughout April there had been massacres and atrocities, like the well-documented and well-publicized death of over a hundred villagers of Deir Yassin, and a huge stream of refugees from cities like Haifa. There were no guarantees for the safety of the huge Arab minority that would have become citizens of the Jewish state under the partition plan. Another factor was the internal rivalry, especially between the Hashemite Jordan and Iraq and the rest, leading to the attempt to carve up the future Palestinian territory. No one particularly liked the Palestinian leader, Haj Amin AlHusseini: the secretary of the Arab league referred to him as “the Menachem Begin of the Arabs” (Flapan, 1987:130).

Personally, I don’t have too much sympathy for him either: he did collaborate with Hitler, and was responsible for the 1929 massacre of Palestinian Jews in Hebron. However, the nationalist position of opposition to partition made sense: the Palestinian majority wanted to remain a majority in one state, instead of handing over a large portion of their population to become an eternal minority in a Jewish state. Jews at the time were only a third of the overall population of Palestine. This is apart from the terms of partition, which were clearly unfair (most of the country and its most fertile and developed areas were given to the minority).

But the Palestinian position was much more complex than that: because of the mufti’s previous violent record of executing his rivals, many opposed him and refused to join his forces. A whole series of Palestinian communities signed non-aggression pacts with their Jewish neighbors. Most were expelled anyway: for example, the inhabitants of Deir Yasin actually made an agreement with Giv’at Shaul, and refused to let Syrian and Iraqi volunteers to enter. Muhammed Nimer al-Hawwari, head of the Najjadah organization in Jaffa, went so far as to organize contingents to man Tel Aviv’s southern border so as to prevent attacks (Cohen, 2008:233). Many of these communities realized they would be unable to protect themselves in case of a war, and grudgingly accepted the partition plan.

Of course, there were also serious clashes and much intercommunal violence. The point is that the phrase “the Arabs attacked Israel” is false because there was hardly a coordinated Arab collective that attacked together, and also there was no pre-given Jewish Israel: almost half of the inhabitants of the Jewish state weren’t Jewish, so that the initial stages of the conflict were more of a mutual civil war. When the Arab states stepped in, they were entering a conflict with a state that had already expelled several hundred thousand of its potential citizens.

The trick with Morris is to skip his conclusions, which are bizarrely apologetic and tend to contradict his own findings, and just to concentrate on the evidence itself. Today I was reading about a crucial moment: on April 2, a brigade is ordered not to destroy a village if there is no resistance, but April 8-10 the order is reversed – there is a decision “to destroy villages in strategic areas or along crucial routes regardless of whether or not they were resisting” (Morris, 2004:236). Like so many crucial decisions in Israel, this begins as an initiative of medium-level army officials and ends up as an overall policy of clearing away Palestinians from most areas, although the government never makes an official decision to expel them, and several ministers and officials complain they are being left in the dark. (Morris explicitly calls this a policy numerous times, e.g. pages 167, 245, 505, but then in the conclusion he suddenly claims that there was no systematic policy).

Esber gives the other side of the story, basing her narrative on interviews with refugees. But as she points out, there is really a wide correlation between Morris’ army commands and her materials: there aren’t really two narratives – the main outline of what happened is common to both books. Army units are given commands to expel “the Arabs from Sumsum and Burayr and burn their granaries and fields” (Morris, 2004:258), or “to attack with the aim of conquest, the killing of adult males, destruction and torching” (2004:253), and the troops go systematically from village to village and do just that – as the survivors testify in heartbreaking detail. Esber estimates over 80% of the population was expelled, and 20,000 died in the process (through initial killings – almost every village was mortared before conquest – but also as a result of the life-threatening conditions that were imposed upon the refugees). At the end of the war the government decided to investigate the many reports of atrocities committed by the soldiers, but the conclusions remain censored.

This is the background for everything we are witnessing today. Pick up a copy of one of these books – they are very hard to read, but also very rewarding.

Yesterday, Students for Justice in Palestine held its first event of the year at UC Berkeley. The Multicultural Center at the MLK student building was packed – I had to sit on the floor between the aisles for most of the evening. Our speakers, Israeli refusers Maya Wind and Netta Mishly, gave a highly eloquent presentation not only about their movement, the Shministim (twelfth-graders refusing to serve in the army), but on basic facts of the occupation that necessitate this refusal. I could hear many productive and stimulating conversations going on around me all throughout the evening, involving not just hardcore I/P activists but many who came from a different perspective. The discussions continued into the night, as several of us went out to a local café and to a party, in true SJP style.

Maya and Netta insisted on a very openly structured Q&A session, well beyond the comfort level of the rest of us. Although the talk focused on the occupation, the inevitable one-state/two state question came up: did the two speakers want to dismantle Israel, as the evening’s sponsors want to do? Maya (I think) answered that as an Israeli, she cannot support dismantling Israel (for me, this is the common error of confusing the country with the regime – many Iranians or Chinese support dismantling their regimes without destroying their countries). Netta, on the other hand, said she is not afraid to live in one secular state. Representatives from SJP and from Jewish Voice for Peace insisted that neither organization had a position on one-state/two states.

For most Zionists, this seems like sacrilege: how can one not have a position on this most fundamental question, the right of Jews for self-determination? Can this stem from anything other than an anti-Jewish sentiment? How can one continue a conversation with anyone who doesn’t believe in this obvious right? I thought I would use this opportunity to articulate some of my own thoughts on the subject. I don’t claim to represent anyone but myself, a non-Zionist Israeli, active for almost three years in SJP.

A lot of people simply make Zionism a private case of nationalism, and then continue to debate whether nationalism itself is a good idea. I think this is unnecessary, because Zionism is an unusual and a-typical kind of nationalism. When the French, or even the Palestinians, began talking of themselves as a nation, this meant a transition from local or religious identities into a more comprehensive one (in the late eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, respectively). This was also the case for another form of Jewish nationalism, the East European Bund. Zionism is nationalism with a significant twist: it was all about creating a national home for Jews in a country where Jews were, originally, a small minority. Some the original Zionists fantasized about how excited the local natives would be about this project, promising to bring them progress and prosperity. But if they failed to do so, there were other options too: as Nur Masalha has documented, from the beginning, the option of transfer was on the table for those whose response to becoming a minority in their own country was less than enthusiastic.

Throughout its history, most Zionist practices created a basic asymmetry between the growing structures of the homeland for the Jewish people, and the bystanders, who were barred from participating. This is very clear, for example from the text of the Balfour Declaration: Jews deserve a national home and representative national bodies, while non-Jews (the vast majority of Palestine’s population at the time) have some religious rights, but nothing comparable. Wherever Israel would be established, wherever its borders would have been, this would have been the case: anyone belonging to the indigenous Palestinian population would have to have lived as a non-Jew in a Jewish state, an inevitable second-class citizen.

Or, of course, they could have moved elsewhere. It is incredible for me to witness how common this answer is, how deeply inculcated this Israeli attitude is: why can’t those pesky Palestinians just move already, if their nationality is so important to them? You hear this across the board, from extreme right-wingers to self-declared leftists.

I think this widespread expectation that Palestinians will just get up and leave comes from several sources: one piece is Zionist education, that skips directly from biblical times to the nineteenth century, teaching us almost nothing of what happened in between – including the roots of modern-day Palestinians in their land, going back many centuries. With the last two thousand years (since the destruction of the Second Temple) mostly erased from view, Palestinians can appear as temporary guests who just arrived yesterday and will be gone tomorrow. Where are the museums of Yaffa’s or Ramlah’s history? Why did my Tel-Aviv school take me to see archeological remains from the Philistine period, near Tel Aviv University, but not the last standing houses of Sheikh Muwwanis, the Palestinian village that existed on that very spot until 1948?

Another piece is the historical Jewish experience. Most Jews are from all over, not living in one country for too long, often as a result of persecution. On my mothers’ side, my family is from Britain, Turkey, Egypt, Italy and Spain, going back to the great expulsion of 1492. On my father’s side we’re from Syria, but also from Russia, six generations back. The idea of migrating from country to country comes so naturally to us that we have trouble understanding the depth of Palestinian connections to particular places, particular villages and towns where their families had lived for centuries. Different villages have typical accents, sometimes typical clothes or unique shrines. The same plots of land were passed on from generation to generation. Famous families were linked to specific cities. To expect someone to give up all of that and move elsewhere is crushingly cruel.

Continuing the Zionist project in the present means more than preserving Jewish identity. I have never heard any Palestinians object to playing Jewish songs on the radio for the holidays, or to teaching Hebrew in schools. The issue of providing a safe haven for persecuted Jews is complicated, but solvable (I would start from distinguishing true refugees who want to come to Israel from those who were pushed into doing so by the government. At every historical junction, most preferred to go to the US or other western countries, and it often took a lot of pressure from the Zionist leadership to direct them to Israel, where they would help solve the “demographic problem”. For instance, I remember how Israel pressured the U.S. in the nineties not to accept too many Jews from the former Soviet Union).

Zionism today, as the state is practicing it, means taking concrete steps to ensure Israeli Jews have the upper hand. It means constant surveillance of Israel’s Arab population, security service involvement in the appointment of teachers, confiscating land from Arabs for Jewish-only communities, preventing urbanization of Palestinian citizens because they are easier to control in villages. It means constant talk of the “demographic threat” as equivalent to the “security threat”: a tiny, smiling, laughing child is the same as a dangerous explosive – a dire threat to our lives and security. What does this racism do to us? How do we let our thinking be twisted in such a way, beyond the most basic human feelings and values?

It means projects like Birthright, that welcome American Jews to Israel, even if their families haven’t been there for at least two thousand years (if ever), but tell Palestinians who were actually born there that they cannot come – simply because they are Arabs. You could say Palestinians as a people are homeless, so that celebrating our privileges in this way is like eating a lavish meal in front of a homeless person.

So these are some of the reasons why I don’t think continuing with a Jewish state in the present is a good idea. Why, if so, doesn’t SJP endorse an alternative, such as a one-state solution? Our mission statement, written by Borderline Crimes’ very own Yaman Salahi, puts it best: “It is not within our rights to decide ourselves what that solution is, only to amplify those voices working against injustice”. I think that what is important here is that we resist the temptation to engage in pseudo-politics. Too many times people feel they are taking a serious stance by playing “if I were Prime Minister…”, but this is really nothing more than a parlor game, and a pretty clichéd one at that. We need to think in terms of effective actions we can take as the citizens that we are, not as high-up politicians. No one is waiting with baited breath to hear what a bunch of students at UC Berkeley think the whole regime should be like, but we do have other, more realistic options. One of them is what Maya, one of the refusers, called “economic activism” – putting pressure on specific companies (of whatever nationality) that profit from the occupation. SJP tries to think creatively about what we can do from our current position, with our current resources. This is one of the reasons we don’t have an official position about one-state/two states, and why we don’t devote our energies to advocating an overall solution.

But nevertheless, on a personal level, I have found it very beneficial to talk, or even just to imagine a one-state solution and what it would look like. Not because it could happen tomorrow, but because this is the equivalent of committing yourself to a long-term partnership: as an Israeli, I am always going to live with Palestinians, in a relationship that I will endeavor to make equal. With all Palestinians, regardless of how the state categorizes them at the moment – citizens of Israel, residents of the West Bank and Gaza, and the external refugees. I have my right of self determination and they have theirs, and neither trumps the other. It is my duty to distinguish my legitimate rights from illegitimate privileges, and to earn others’ respect for my rights by seriously committing myself to protect theirs.

I don’t have a blueprint for this state: it requires a long, ongoing conversation. In order to take part in this conversation, I had to go against my fears, every step of the way: my fear of the “terrorist language” Arabic; my fear of going to the occupied territories and getting shot or kidnapped (aren’t Palestinians inherently violent?); my fear of phrases like “the right of return”, which turned out not to be a codeword for “throw the Jews into the sea”, as I had heard so many times; my fear of finding out exactly what happened in 1948, including in my hometown Tel Aviv, including at the sites of my parents’ house and my university. And I learned not to use these fears as an excuse to legitimate my privileges.

Because I’m not doing my Palestinian allies any favors. My activism isn’t a form of pity or of guilt. It’s because I know my liberation is completely bound up with theirs. I can only work out of my racism, the racism and fears I internalized so deeply for so many years, with their help. And thanks to them, it truly is liberating. Every step of the way.

Shana Tova.

Protest in Ma'asara July 17, 2009 (MUSA AL-SHAER/AFP/Getty Images)

We hear too little about non-violent Palestinian resistance to the occupation. Today I was in the village of Ma’asara, south of Bethlehem, and this is what happened.

A friend from Berkeley arrived in Israel yesterday, and asked if I wanted to hang out. I was looking for someone to come with me to this protest, which I’d heared about through emails I receive from Ta’ayush – one of the most effective anti-occupation movements in the Israel left. The ride was organized simply and effectively: one activist receives phone calls and coordinates the rides, others volunteer their cars, meeting times are set outside houses in south Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and elsewhere. Within 40 minutes we pass the checkpoint easily with our yellow-plated Israeli car and enter the territories.

Most Israelis are too scared to go to protests in the territories.  This is one of the ways the occupation sustains itself: by isolating the Palestinian protestors from possible allies and witnesses. The media told us they will not report our rally unless some violence occurred: someone needs to pay with their blood so that people around the world know that in Ma’asara (and neighboring villages like Umm Salamuna) Palestinians have been coming out regularly every week for several years to protest the confiscation of their lands, the imprisonment of their children, and to say they deserve freedom like any other people. No one was hurt today (or in most of the previous rallies here), so you’ll only hear about this through blogs like ours.

(When I table for SJP on Sproul Plaza (in Berkeley), someone will inevitably come up and tell me, angrily or patronizingly, that “we people” (Palestinians like me?) need to try non-violence for a change. Husam has brilliant spontaneous reactions, like opening his cellphone and pretending to call all his “close friends” from Gaza who are currently working on the next suicide bomb (because we are obviously all coordinated). I’m a bit slower, so this is my belated reaction).

Yes, it is more dangerous than yelling at the TV or attending polite protests in the heart of Tel Aviv, where few Palestinians from the territories will hear us. But that is precisely the point: meeting people is more effective than a thousand speeches and slogans. You learn all the details firsthand, and you not only argue for an alternative – you are actually creating it, demonstrating how easy it is for Israelis and Palestinians to work together.

You learn, as my friend Haggai Mattar told me, that there is not a single Palestinian movement that hasn’t hosted Israelis for regular non-violent protests, including villages who support Hamas and Islamic Jihad. My inner Zionist was sounding alarm bells when he said this: how can Israelis cooperate with these people, if their movements committed such violence against Israelis? Then I reminded myself that in Tel Aviv there is no violence against Palestinians mainly because there are hardly any Palestinians left: we ethnically cleansed the villages of Sheikh Muwwanis, Summayl (al-Mas’udiyya), Jammasin el-Gharbi, Salama, Abu Kbir, the Fishermen’s village and Irshid, not to mention tens of thousands of Jaffa’s residents, some of whom drowned in the sea as they were escaping. http://www.palestineremembered.com/JaffaTownsSnapshot.html And after that, we used more violence to keep most of them in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank, more violence to take their water and land, more violence to prevent them from competing with Israeli industries so that they stayed poor, more violence to enable Israeli real estate moguls to profit from the confiscation of their land (as Gadi Algazi explains in his brilliant essay on Bil’in – http://www.taayush.org/new/fence/matrix-bilin-en.html), more and more and more violence. Ignorance cannot be an excuse for self-righteousness, because self-righteousness is incredibly dangerous http://borderlinecrimes.com/2009/07/10/on-self-righteousness/. My hands are bloody too, and non-violent cooperation with any Palestinians who are willing to work with us is the best alternative.

I learned about the quiet ways the army tries to suppress any form of resistance, including purely political non-violent protests: shootings and beatings, administrative detentions without a trial that can last years, and heavy fines that equal tens of thousands of dollars. And here they were, the people who suffer all this, much more patient than me in the presence of the soldiers who inevitably turn up to the rallies, blocking the proud slogans and the uplifting spirit with their barbed wires and commands. They endure all of this every week and come out again and again, waving huge Palestinian flags, chanting against the wall, speaking loudly about how they deserve freedom just like anyone else, bringing their little children with them so that the soldiers can see they are human beings just like them.

Ma’asara is not adjacent to the separation wall: the villages that are have lost much of their land, and have become dependent on employment in the nearby settlements. As a result they receive explicit threats that if they protest, they will lose their jobs. Ma’asarans are demonstrating out of solidarity with those who cannot.

It is impossible for me to convey how many times I was told how much the villagers yearn for peace, how glad they were to see Israelis and internationals come to support them, how they saw this cooperation as the opposite of their strangulation by settlements, surrounding them from all sides on their confiscated land, how our support was clearly contributing to their morale and ability to sustain this protest week after week, in spite of everything. Thankfully, both the army and the protestors in Ma’asara largely refrain from violence during the rallies, and there is actually an opportunity for us to speak to them, to attempt the impossible and try to convey our message. Palestinian women and men spoke fervently about their confiscated land and their desire for freedom, chanted “yes we can” and “down with the wall”, and promised that all the violence in the world would not deter them. Some French internationals sang songs from the French Revolution and waved their flag. And at some point one villager came up to me and asked me if I could speak in Hebrew to the soldiers!

I looked round to see if he was really speaking to me, and when I realized he was, I managed to walk closer to them and address them, on the other side of the barbed wire they placed in front of us. I was too scared to look them directly in the eye, but I did manage to convey some of my thoughts, and quite incredibly, they didn’t shout back or disturb or address me: they actually listened.

I told them they have no reason to fear us: the Palestinians, Israelis, and Internationals here aren’t a threat to the security of the state. We aren’t violent and we’re not anti-Semites, and we don’t hate them, or the settlers, or anyone else. We are all here together, because we think what they are defending isn’t just: people just want to live their lives and to keep their livelihood, and the wall is deeply harming their ability to make a living. There are capitalists profiting from the settlements that the wall has enabled – their interests are neither ours nor the soldiers’. There is no reason for them to defend them. One day, I said, after you’ll end your service, you’ll be sitting in India or somewhere else and wondering why you did all this. Why not make a difference now? Why not cross the barbed wire and join us? It’s more fun on our side.

Being an effective activist is a bit like learning to play a musical instrument. Your only real choice is to practice again and again, until you succeed.  The soldiers didn’t cross over. But I’ll be back next week to try again.

The first school’s lessons usually involve the deployment of military force. A typical example is the Israeli Chief of Staff, who used the setting of Auschwitz to promote his government’s campaign to equate Iran and Nazi Germany, by falsely claiming the Iranians called for the physical destruction of the Israeli population.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/979478.html

(in fact, Ahmadinejad said he hoped the current Israeli regime would disappear, just like the Soviet regime and that of the Shah – without wishing for the Soviet peoples and his own Iranian nation to be exterminated http://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/news/rumor-of-the-century/ I am no fan of this dictator, but there is no need to exaggerate his words). The current Prime Minister, Netanyahu, recently stated quite bluntly “It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany” http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/787766.html

Such Nazi comparisons have often been used in the past to justify military operations: for instance, when the IDF bombed Beirut, killing PLO fighters and several thousand civilians during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Prime Minister Begin wrote to President Reagan that the destruction of Arafat’s headquarters felt to him like he was destroying Hitler’s bunker. http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2004/11/11/arafat/index3.html

I find the universal interpretation much more appealing: never forget to show solidarity. Here, the famous words of the theologian Niemöller come to mind:

“In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then… they came for me… And by that time there was no one left to speak up”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came…

However, recently I’ve been thinking about a third interpretation, concerning the dangers of extreme self-righteousness. I read and re-read the text of the speech given by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, in Poznan, Poland, on October 4, 1943.  The address, of which there is a surviving recording, was given to his SS officers, and it seems to have been aimed at raising their motivation. Exterminating so many people was apparently difficult to cope with psychologically: Christopher Browning, in his wonderful “Ordinary Men”, recounts how sorry the members of the exterminating units felt for themselves decades later, because of the hard job they were expected to fulfill.

So Himmler wants to raise his listeners’ spirits. He tells them that many Nazi party members speak of extermination as if it is “a small matter”. But “none of them has seen it, has endured it”, unlike his audience: “most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when there are 500, or when there are 1000″. Actually exterminating people is much harder than it sounds, but Himmler has words of encouragement: his subordinates “have seen this through, and – with the exception of human weaknesses […] have remained decent”.

How do you exterminate decently? “We have taken away the riches that they had, and I have given a strict order [… to deliver] these riches completely to the Reich, to the State. We have taken nothing from them for ourselves. A few, who have offended against this, will be [judged] in accordance with an order, that I gave at the beginning: He who takes even one Mark of this is a dead man […]We have the moral right, we had the duty to our people to do it, to kill this people who wanted to kill us. But we do not have the right to enrich ourselves with even one fur, with one Mark, with one cigarette, with one watch, with anything. That we do not have. Because at the end of this, we don’t want, because we exterminated the bacillus, to become sick and die from the same bacillus”.

http://www.holocaust-history.org/himmler-poznan/speech-text.shtml

Incredible as it sounds, the Nazis felt the need to morally justify their actions to themselves as they were systematically murdering millions of men, women and children. To do this, and to distinguish themselves from the “bacillus” (germs) they were eliminating, Himmler came up with a criterion that, to him, really proved his subordinates’ basic decency: they may be busy piling up bodies, but at least they weren’t looting them. They showed honorable self-restraint throughout this ordeal, so difficult for them to perform.

Many sides in the Israeli-Arab conflict “Nazify” their opponents: I find these comparisons exaggerated and highly dangerous, and as I wrote, they are too often a prelude to more violence. I believe the Jewish Holocaust should only be compared to other cases of organized extermination. One variety is a bureaucratic apparatus implementing a systematic plan to wipe an entire group off the face of the earth within a limited timeframe (examples include the Armenian genocide of 1915, and Rwanda in 1994). Another is repeated attacks of colonial armies on indigenous populations over a longer period, which are frequent and violent enough to lead to full-blown extermination – as happened in Northern California in the 1850s and 1860s, or in Tasmania in the 1820s and 1830s. Without detracting from their seriousness, I don’t think we have any evidence to support framing current events in the Middle East in this specific way.

But I think the Poznan speech can serve us as a yardstick, as a warning: this is how far self-righteousness can go. People can undertake a vast project of killing off an entire people, and still convince themselves they are morally superior. Read this text:  it is really worth your consideration.

http://www.holocaust-history.org/himmler-poznan/speech-text.shtml

Every Saturday evening Teddy had a rite: he dressed up in the uniform of his favorite soccer team, including the shoes, and watched their weekly match. There was a proper way of doing this – for instance, I couldn’t disturb him, since I could cause “Nakhs”, or bad luck. For about two hours I could hear him from my room, yelling (”you idiot, make a pass!”, “kick it already!”, “no, no, not that way!”). Unfortunately, the players on the screen never seemed to listen, and they mostly lost. I think on some level he realized he was having very little effect on them by screaming at the TV, but every match it was the same.

Teddy’s soccer spectator attitude reminds me of the way most of us experience politics. “Why don’t those politicians do something already about all these problems?;” “Why aren’t the feminists/animal rights activists/vegans worrying about other issues?;” “Why are these people so violent? don’t they realize non-violence would work better?”… we complain to the nearest person, or the newspaper or the TV set, but unfortunately “those people” never seem to get it, no matter how loud we yell.

Over the years, I’ve come to recognize that there is another way of doing things, which can ultimately be more satisfying and fulfilling. It’s about taking baby steps outside of our comfort zone. People around me do small and large things to actually get involved in the issues they are passionate about. They’ve given up on waiting for someone else to fix things. There aren’t enough responsible adults around – it turns out we need to take responsibility ourselves.

Taking responsibility doesn’t have to mean pledging to do everything to save the world right now – it can just mean taking one small step you’ve never done before, which could potentially be effective: one small thing that will make you feel you actually are getting involved, that you’ve gone beyond bitching or being cynical.

Here’s one small idea: Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization I have huge respect for, sends one email a week about an issue you can influence (check out http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/ ).

Last week they wrote about Ezra Nawi, an Israeli human rights activist who tried to prevent the army from demolishing the shacks of some pretty poor Palestinians in the South Hebron hills, a discreet form of ethnic cleansing off land adjacent to a settlement. Publicizing this is important – it educates people about the issue and it could contribute to releasing him or shortening his jail time. All it takes is one email, and they give you the address – http://freeEzra.org

Here is his article in The Nation: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090713/nawi

I’m sure others could comment and provide links to more organizations. For instance, Amnesty International publishes regular calls for action about a whole range of issues. This one is to call on the Israeli  government to cooperate fully with the Gaza fact-finding mission:

http://www.amnesty.org/en/appeals-for-action/israel-must-co-operate-fully-with-independent-gaza-fact-finding-mission

Writing an email a week for a progressive cause is one example of how we can integrate political activism into our everyday lives. Note to self: keep asking – where is my comfort zone? what are my next steps for going beyond it?