The presentation began with the Palestinian Nakba of 1947-1949 and how it affected Lydd/Lod specifically. The speaker showed how 95% of the city’s Palestinian residents were expelled, while those who managed to return were housed in new neighborhoods with Hebrew names. She showed how the city went from being an important regional and commercial center, a beautiful city with a 6,000 year old history, into a neglected backwater in Israel’s “periphery,” a city “being erased before one’s eyes. She showed how 95% of the city was physically erased after the war, demonstrating that the Nakba is not just about the expulsion of people but the erasure of their homes and the physical landscape in which they lived. The plight of Dahamash, she argued, is simply a continuation of the policies of completely Judaizing Israel’s “mixed cities.” She cited recent quotations from top Israeli officials openly stressing the need to force Palestinians to emigrate out of the country. She suggested that the Judaization of street names and names of neighborhoods is part and parcel of this process, and she quoted senior officials who are “seriously considering” changing Ramle’s name to a Jewish name.

In years following the 1948 war, the responsibility for Judaizing Lydd/Lod was transferred from the military (who destroyed thousands of houses in the city in 1954) to the district planning commissions and the Lydd/Lod municipality. Since construction permits are nearly impossible for Palestinians to receive (even if their land is privately owned) it is estimated that the majority of Palestinian houses in the “mixed” cities are illegally built. She stressed that residents are forced into this situation by the municipality, who give them no choice but to build illegally or leave their city. Thus, entire neighborhoods in Lydd/Lod have been built without permits. Their inhabitants are heavily fined, they don’t receive even the most basic services from the municipality. This situation creates an economic incentive for the municipality to force Palestinians to build illegally since they receive tax and fine revenue but are not required to provide basic services. There are 500 active demolition orders in the city, and residents live in constant fear of demolition. The speaker noted that although the municipality frequently suggests that there is no money to provide services such as garbage collection and school buses, it costs far more to demolish one house than to provide services to an entire neighborhood like Dahamash. This shows quite clearly what the municipality’s priorities are.

The speaker discussed the relationship between Jews and Palestinians in the city over time. Following the 1948 war, Palestinian and Middle Eastern (Mizrahi) Jewish residents lived as neighbors in the Old City area in peace, but in ensuing years the Jewish and Palestinian neighborhoods were forcefully separated and separate neighborhoods were established for each. She stressed that impoverished Jewish residents suffer from the same policies of intentional neglect and gentrification that Palestinians suffer from, with any who succeed in attaining any economic security opting to leave the city instead of trying the dying city. All the residents desire, she stressed, is to live in dignity as equal residents in the city of Lydd/Lod, side by side with Jews.

Unfortunately, the municipality and the state of Israel’s policy of ghettoizing the Palestinian population and Judaizing Lydd/Lod and other “mixed” cities creates tremendous tension between the Jewish and Palestinian residents. To give us a sense of the state-sponsored ethnic conflict in the city, she discussed the fact that during election periods, mayoral candidates use pictures of demolished houses to demonstrate to their right-wing Jewish constituents that they will control the Palestinian population with a heavy hand. She quoted the current mayor of Lydd/Lod in an interview with the local newspaper, responding to a question about Palestinian community organizations’ request that streets in which Palestinians live be given Arab names. He demonstrated a deep race-based hostility to Palestinians that she said was the norm rather than the exception in mayors of “mixed” cities. For example, he said that “the first Arab to talk about national issues, I will shoot him, because whenever I shot Arabs in the past, I was the one left alive. They should go to hell.” The speaker showed us horrifying pictures of Israeli youths recruited by the municipality as volunteers to assist in the process of “preparing” a Palestinian home for demolition. She said that it was “much worse than the demolition itself” to see young Jews educated to demolish Palestinian houses. She mentioned the post-disengagement phenomenon of the religious Zionist movement seeing the “mixed” cities as a target for settlement and Judaization, sending Jewish “pioneers” to try to Judaize Palestinian neighborhoods. She differentiates between Jews who want to live in Lydd/Lod as a city, and Jews who want to Judaize Lydd/Lod, to dominate its Palestinian residents, and eventually to replace them with the aid of the municipality.

At this point, she discussed the specific case of Dahamash. This is a village located between Ramle and Lydd/Lod and is home to 500 Palestinians. Exceptionally, they are the recognized owners of the land, which is has not been the case in post-Nakba Lydd/Lod. They had to go to court to receive even the most basic services, such as garbage collection.. Unfortunately, their land has been zoned as “agricultural land” and all structures on it have been declared “illegal.” Thirteen demolition orders on houses in the neighborhood are imminent, while nearby, a construction project initiated by the aforementioned mayor of Lydd/Lod is taking place despite the fact that that land as also previously zoned as agricultural land. The race-based discrimination is apparent. For Palestinian residents who’ve lived on their land for decades and even longer, it is impossible to rezonetheir privately owned land for construction. For housing projects and construction for Jews, however, it is possible and frequently done. She stressed that the recent demolition orders are part of a plan approved in 2000, and that a plan called “Lod 2020” approved by the municipality threatens to bring the Judaization of Lydd/Lod and the condition of its Palestinian residents to new levels of hardship. These are not isolated cases, but well-thought-out plans approved before-hand which the residents of Dahamash see as the continuation of the Nakba of 1948.

On recommendation from members of the district planning council, the residents spent thousands of dollars developing an entire city plan for their neighborhood, in a bid to legalize the existing buildings. A few days ago, the well-thought out, professional, and expensive plan was rejected outright. In this, the residents of Dahamash join the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, who have submitted hundreds of plans, financed entirely from their own pockets, to the planning committees, all of whom have been rejected. Now the demolition orders have again become imminent, and are scheduled to be approved on July 14^th. On July 13^th, the Sheikh Jarrah solidarity activists will join with the residents of Dahamash and activists across the country to protest the impending race-based house demolitions.

During the teach-in, it was clear to those assembled that this event was not a simple educational opportunity, but also a political statement. Shortly after the presentation began, a police officer cruised by and pulled aside a Palestinian activist. Later, a dozen or so settlers stood beside the stolen Al Ghawi house and watched the presentation. Some clapped when the speaker showed pictures of destroyed Palestinian houses. They were obviously angry at our presence in what they consider to be their neighborhood Discussing the Nakba with the newly-made refugees of Sheikh Jarrah, amidst the glowering stares of orthodox settler youths, brought home to me how immediate and urgent the struggle against Judaization is, and how the struggle is entirely about the simple right of people to be present, when powerful institutions and racist movements just want them to disappear.

As I was riding my bike back across the unmarked border, the Green Line, to Jewish Jerusalem, I had to go through Me’a She’arim. One of the settlers from the neighborhood was there, and he recognized me. He started shouting “Traitor! Traitor! He helps Arabs! Traitor!” I saw the other ultra-orthodox people starting to look up, and I felt fear. I pedaled faster, appreciating a new knowledge of what a society headed for fascism feels like. I remembered that same settler confronting one of the Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah: “You are an Arab. You. Are an Arab. You are an Arab.” He responded: “Yes! I am a Palestinian, Muslim Arab” and the settler responded: “People should be ashamed when you call them Arabs.”

The shame of his shamelessness, and of the shamelessness of the state and non-state proponents of Judaiziation, turns my stomach anew every time.

In the Nablus shopping district, a woman with bags and a balloon waited for transportation. The removal of an Israeli checkpoint has made access to the city easier.-- NY Times

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently went public with an Israeli plan for ‘economic peace’ with the Palestinian people. This concept is distinct from political peace, which addresses the stated demands of the Palestinian authority, in that it ‘circumvents’ this neutered government to give Palestinians what the Israeli government knows they want deep down: economic growth. Netanyahu: “[Economic peace]…means that we have to strengthen the moderate parts of the Palestinian economy by handing rapid growth in those area, rapid economic growth that gives a stake for peace for the ordinary Palestinians.”

The next section is under the heading “Development mitigates” and explains Tony Blaire’s perspective that problems must be mitigated before they are solved. I get the feeling that there is a very specific set of characteristics that go into the “ordinary Palestinian” category. Palestinians who are reasonable, humble, profoundly apolitical and even anti-political, who are concerned only with protecting and feeding their family and/or business. It’s this Palestinian which is the human material the authorities hope to use to remake the region.

A few days ago the New York Times published an article that seems to act as an ode to this hypothetical Palestinian’s hopes and dreams. Some quotes that smell of cheap perfume:

“The International Monetary Fund is about to issue its first upbeat report in years for the West Bank, forecasting a 7 percent growth rate for 2009.”

“Two years ago I couldn’t have even gone to Nablus,” said Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who serves as international envoy to the Palestinians, after a smooth visit this week. “Security is greatly improved, and the economy is doing much better. Now we need to move to the next stage: politics.”

“The Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says it shares the goal of helping Mr. Abbas, which is why it is seeking to improve West Bank economic conditions as a platform for moving to a political discussion.”

“Palestinian troops have been training in Jordan under American sponsorship.

There are now several thousand men trained in that way, and their skills, along with those of the European-trained police force here, have made a huge difference.

An important element in making the Palestinian force effective, American and Israeli officials say, was taking young Palestinian men out of the ancestral grips of their villages and tribal clans and training them abroad, turning them into soldiers loyal to units and commanders.”

The last sentence is frightening. Loosening the human material from its backwardness and tradition in order to outsource pacification? An original yet unmistakable reiteration of the colonial dynamic. Tzipi Livni, an Israeli-Jewish Ashkenazi politician offered these sometimes confusing words of wisdom on the nature of the state of Israel:

Sporadic clashes were reported in the operations focussed on the Old City area of Nablus. February 25, 2007, news.bbc.co.uk

“A Jewish state is a matter of values. It is not a matter of religion, it is more a matter of nationality. And a Jewish state is not a monopoly of rabbis, it’s what each and everyone feels inside, it’s about the nature of the state of Israel,” she said.

“Its about the Jewish tradition, it’s about Jewish history. But we need to keep the nature, the character of the state of Israel as a Jewish state because this is – excuse me for using French – the raison d’etre of the state of Israel.”

Maybe the authors of the NY times article will explain these views as proof of the ‘ancestral grip’ that Livni’s village or family has on her. Perhaps they should send her train as a soldier in Jordan so that she can be loosened from them.

It seems that the powers that be are drilling Palestinians to replace the IDF in the population centers (not the majority of the West Bank), and that cooperation is rewarded with ‘economic growth.’ All the Palestinians interviewed were high-class managers and vice-presidents talking about the importance of the rule of law, but I’m not sure whether the Palestinian attacks or Israeli checkpoints were holding their back their purely economic agendas.

Law and order, security, and economics, totally apolitical things that can be endlessly and apolitically improved to mitigate, to contain, to clean up the wound so political surgery can finally be performed. But there are too many echoes from South Africa here; it seems that all these apolitical interventions comprise a very political aim, namely building the basis for a Palestinian ‘government,’ a group of heavily armed municipalities, who are recognized by the world as a somehow separate entity from the Israeli government, which actually calls the shots.

Economic growth is not a substitute for being recognized as human beings. One of us should look into ‘economic peace’ in South Africa, in the American south after slavery, and in other places.

Richard Silverstein talks about this NY Times article here.

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

New York Daily News photograph by Joseph Ambrosini of Stonewall uprising taken on Sunday, June 29, 1969 via OutHistory.org

Recently dozens of LGBT pride parades were planned in cities around the world to mark the annual pride week. For many people with commitments to LGBT liberation, this time is set aside in reflection on the struggle for the rights of LGBT people, their history and contributions, and on the need to reveal and oppose the separation and oppression of people with non-normative gender identities or sexual orientations. This year this spreading and increasingly accepted annual celebration has received extra attention in that it marks forty years since the “Stonewall Riots,” the unofficial ‘beginning’ of the contemporary LGBT rights movement in Euro-American world.

The fortieth anniversary celebrations have brought rare attention to an event that has historically been underrepresented and systematically forgotten in our society. In the week beforehand, the New York Times ran editorials and articles discussing the significance of the riots, while various LGBT activists were interviewed on the subject in the corporate media. President Obama himself commemorated the riots with an East Room reception. While many if not most other instances of insurrection, popular resistance, and grassroots activism go unmentioned except by radical intellectuals and historians, the pivotal Stonewall riots seem to have achieved a measure of attention that other uprisings have not, perhaps a testament to the rising acceptability of the LGBT issue as one of fundamental human rights and equal protection under the law.

I wholeheartedly celebrate the all too recent induction of this important event into the public consciousness. It’s not every day that an uprising that was not only spontaneous but also comprised physical force is honorably mentioned, much less honorably mentioned. However, I also believe that it is our responsibility to commemorate the memory of Stonewall not only through highlighting injustices that are uniquely (or exclusively) committed against people for their sexual orientation or gender identity but to draw connections between supposedly separate ‘issues,’ especially connections that cross the border between the acceptably and unacceptably rebellious.  We have the responsibility to examine historical continuities and similarities that extend to the present day and could prefigure unique ways to build solidarity, rather than section off ‘LGBT history’ from other histories of oppression and resistance.

For example, I was fascinated by a first-hand account published in the New York Times entitled “The Real Mob at Stonewall.” The article was written by a US army officer named Lucian Truscott who was one of the only reporters on hand to write on the riots. He mentions, for example, that the raid on Stonewall was not technically against gay people for being gay. Rather, the stated reason was based on the seemingly uncontroversial and much more palatable basis of ‘law enforcement.’ According to the police, the Stonewall (and many bars like it) had been raided for “…selling liquor without a license, which it was….”Truscott explains the process:

“It worked like this: citing disorderly behavior laws, the State Liquor Authority ruled that bars catering to openly homosexual patrons were not entitled to liquor licenses. Gay bars were thus made effectively illegal, which left them to the mob, which happily ran clubs without liquor licenses and paid the police to look the other way. Several more years would pass before the first clubs with openly gay owners would be licensed…and the mob lost its stranglehold, an early legacy of Stonewall.”

In this way, the systematic separation and oppression, the state-sanctioned culling of gay life from the face of cities across the United States, was both carried out through and obscured by the enforcement of liquor laws. Who knows, maybe many police officers themselves thought that that’s the only thing that they were doing as well, just keeping people safe from illegal alcohol rather than criminalizing LGBT community spaces. You’d need to dig just a little bit deeper to discover that gay people could not own bars and get liquor licenses in the first place, but unfortunately for most people that bit of depth accomplished its task.

This situation was immediately familiar to me as someone at least peripherally aware of the ‘law’ practiced in Palestine/Israel in general and the occupied territories in particular. After all, anyone familiar with house demolition practices under the occupation knows that demolitions are always explained as the simple application of laws applied equally to people regardless of their national identity. Palestinians simply build too many houses illegally, and that is why, we are told, there are tens of thousands of houses slated for demolition. But dig just a bit deeper, and you find that while Jewish West Bank settlers’ “natural growth” is staunchly defended by the Israeli government, you find that Palestinians are systematically denied construction permits on both sides of the green line, that no new housing or school infrastructure for Palestinians has been built in places like Jerusalem in forty two years, and that private Palestinian land is being confiscated for Jewish housing expansion. Akiva Eldar, an Israeli journalist and an expert on the settlements, published a straightforward piece on this phenomenon entitled “What about the Arabs’ natural growth?”

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1092430.html

I have also found these publications helpful from Ir Amim (“City of Nations” in Hebrew), an information-producing Israeli NGO working for equality in Jerusalem.

http://www.ir-amim.org.il/eng/_Uploads/dbsAttachedFiles/PlanningCrisisEng.pdf

http://www.ir-amim.org.il/Eng/?CategoryID=254

In this way, in both Stonewall era New York and present day Palestine/Israel, the essential injustice of each situation lies beneath a legalistic sheen, a stinking carcass sprayed with cheap perfume. This oppression, obstructed to outsiders by appeals to ‘the rule of law,’ is also something that both the patrons of Stonewall and the Palestinians of Israel/Palestine have learned and known about every day of their lives in one way or another. It seems to me that as spontaneous as the Stonewall rebellion was at the time, it was also based on deeply and widely shared experiences of oppression, a knowledge that every patron of the Stonewall possessed. And in a sense the Stonewall riots were not only a reaction to long-standing oppression of gay people in New York, but it also denied the police and the public at large the veneer of legality that justified the criminalization of gay life. After Stonewall, the police could still raid gay bars, but not with the notion that they were doing anything other than arresting people for who they were.

The connections between LGBT rights and Palestinian rights are not just comparative. They have been made flesh through activism and solidarity practiced by many activists. “Aswaat” (Voices) is an organization of Palestinian lesbian women who organize against the ‘circles of oppression’ they live as Palestinian and LGBT women. Al Qaws (the Rainbow) is the first Palestinian LGBT organization for all groups in the Palestinian population, based in Jerusalem but with related affinity groups in cities in the on both side of the green line. And of course, Ezra Nawi is a shining individual example of connecting his experiences as a working class gay man, a Mizrahi Jew, and an anti-occupation activist. His activism, like so many others’, was made famous by his recent arrest for “assaulting a policeman.” Writing on the situation in the Nation, Nawi writes of how the occupation apparatus uses his gay identity to undermine his work:

“Over the past eight years, I have seen with my own two eyes hundreds of abuses…and exposed them to the public–therefore I am considered a provocateur. I can only say that I am proud to be a provoker.

Because I am a provoker, the police together with their allies have threatened me, beaten me and arrested me on numerous occasions. And when I continued to “provoke” them, they did not hesitate to out me as a gay man; indeed, they spread rumors among the Palestinians with whom I work that I have AIDS.”

Nawi connects his own experiences of dehumanization to the dehumanization of the Palestinians he works with. Even though he is Jewish, the law enforcement and court systems and their participants see him as an Arab:

It is important to keep in mind, however, that the evil I confront every day in the West Bank could not have been carried out without the Israeli court system. Judge Eilata Ziskind not only mistakenly found me guilty but she instructed the court to invite a translator for the sentencing, as if I do not speak Hebrew; in her mind I, a Mizrahi Jew, am a Palestinian Arab–and Arabs are, almost by definition, guilty.

One the one hand, the oppression scantily clothed in the letter of the law, and on the other the utter dehumanization that Palestinians and to a lesser extent their allies face regularly, are both echoes of past and present experiences of the gay community in the United States. In my view, the lesson from Stonewall is to tear apart the tissue paper rules and legalistic justifications that paper over dehumanization and oppression, to require the apparatus to do its work in the light of day, and to resist in a manner that shatters the images that oppression engenders of the oppressed. When the gays were being arrested, they “…struck vampy poses, smiling and waving to the crowd. This was not the way gays were supposed to behave when they were arrested, and the officers started shoving them with their nightsticks.” What started the riots, then, was the fact that people not acting the way they were supposed to.