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.

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.

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.

From Activestills from a photoessay entitled "Life Under Occupation"

I don’t remember if that’s exactly how it went, but I do remember the teacher, Professor Gillian Hart, saying that apartheid was actually much more about what that old man was talking about than about even the most gruesome instances of physical violence. The violence of the white state was necessary to maintain and continue the unequal land and resource distribution created by hundreds of years of dispossession. The violence of the state and of the different militant organizations were all in the context of the systematic dispossession of black South Africans. Somehow, the TRC’s contributed to making reconciliation and truth all about confessing to different forms of physical violence while largely ignoring dispossession as the original, continuing, and fundamental form of violence that the modern apartheid regime itself was created to maintain.

This memory came to me during a recent discussion of the Israel/Palestine situation with a close friend. Though he recognized everything I had to say, he insisted on the familiar tropes of balance, symmetry, and “extremists on both sides.” When I pressed him on it, he recognized the power imbalances that made “balanced discussion” contrived and morally impossible, but he maintained that “both sides” have to stop using violence against each other, that nothing justified violence. Another close friend of mine recently posited a familiar Israeli perception, that if it hadn’t been for Palestinian attacks on Israelis there would be no checkpoints, no Israeli night raids, no hundreds of civilians mowed down and burned with white phosphorous in Gaza.

I began talking to him about how I am for the nonviolent resistance for this and that reason, and I mentioned the difference in casualties and how that reflects the power imbalance and so on and so forth. But at some point, I realized that when we were talking about violence, we were talking exclusively about a certain kind of violence: homemade rockets versus F-16 strikes, military assaults versus suicide bombings, even kidnapping vs. warrantless arrests. Our conversation was circumscribed solely by a particular kind of “point source” violence involving the violation by one human being of another’s physical body. I realized that this is how the conversation gets to be about how best to maintain Israeli security, because people see the conflict as one about physical violence: Palestinians attack Israelis, Israelis strike back, and so on and so forth about the cycle of (physical) violence. The problem then becomes about how to get each “side” to understand how badly each side wants to live without this physical violence. This probably explains why outsiders who accept the validity of this model become somewhat disgusted with the entire issue. After all, who doesn’t know that physical violence is not good? Do they really hate each other that much that they attack each other just for the hell of it? Good riddance to both of them.

Absent from the conversation is the entire question of Palestinian security. People can talk very well about Israeli security needs, which for most Israelis remains the only rationale that could come close to any justification for the occupation. But I think that the same people have a very vague idea of what the Palestinians’ “interests” are. Do they want a Palestinian state? Do they want more/our/the land? Maybe they just want to stop being attacked, or maybe they want to be richer and have their economy developed, or maybe they want to stop being humiliated at checkpoints, etc. etc. All these ideas are floating around, but the question of security never appears next to the adjective “Palestinian.”

I think that part of the reason that the question of Palestinian security is never asked is because it would immediately lead one to inquire about what happens to Palestinians when there is no physical violence,  before or laughter the latest round of fighting. One would have to ask, “when Israelis are secure, when they are safe, are Palestinians secure?

To anyone who is aware of the dispossession of Palestinians in the last 100 years, the answer is obvious. In the absence of physical violence or in its presence, in the absence of peace negotiations or in their presence, there is a systematic project of dispossessing Palestinians of their land and resources and turning them over to Jewish-Israeli purposes, on both sides of the Green Line of 1967. Palestinians who hold land are under constant attack from settlers, the army, and the occupation bureaucracy to give it over. Palestinians who have houses are in constant danger of having them destroyed, as construction permits are systematically denied to Palestinians and construction “violations” of this are enforced almost exclusively for Palestinian construction rather than Jewish settler construction. Palestinians are constantly in danger of being arrested for any reason. Palestinians who own businesses are entirely dependent on arbitrary permits to transfer buy, sell or transfer goods, and are in constant danger of having them taken away for any arbitrary reason. Palestinians who used to own land and now must sell their labor are in the constant mercy of this permit system as well. Palestinians are in danger of going thirsty, going poor or going hungry because of this ongoing dispossession, while settlers build subsidized villas beside them in an open bid to replace them.

In essence, Palestinians’ very existence is in danger in every part of Israel/Palestine, because as far as the authorities and the nationalist public are concerned, they are the only technicality standing between Israel and an empty, holy land awaiting their conquest. They can never be sure of what tomorrow will bring them.

In the ideal world my friend is implying, where no Palestinian lifted a single finger against Israelis for 100 years, then it is very possible that there would be less checkpoints, less raids, less soldiers having to perform them, and less dead Israeli and Palestinian children. But would the Israeli government be more interested in giving Palestinians equal rights as Israelis? Would those rights extend to control over land, resources, and equal protection before the law as well as voting rights? Would Israeli settlers and politicians be less interested in their land? When a village is demolished because an ancient synagogue was discovered beneath it (as happened in Susya), would the government step in because the Palestinians were nonviolent? Would Palestinians be allowed to harvest their olives in peace, or would the olive trees be burned and Palestinians beaten into submission, protected by Israeli soldiers counting the days to their release?

The forms of violence that fall under the heading of dispossession are unique in that Israelis never experience them. That is why these experiences are totally excluded or glossed over in coexistence discourse because Israelis would not be able to ‘balance’ the discussion as they are (to some extent) with experiences of physical violence. Talking about dispossession is a fundamental challenge to the idea that physical violence, rather than the violence of dispossession, is the problem. It would be impossible to insist on “quiet” for Israelis when one knows what continues to happen during that quiet for Palestinians. Physical violence can be an issue an issue that is ‘cyclical.’ Dispossession, on the other hand, is a crime in progress, a crime for its own sake, rather than a crime of passion or revenge. If there is a crime in progress, how can anyone apologize for it and expect its targets to move on? While physical violence can be a problem for two sides to resolve and reconcile about, dispossession is the relationship between colonizer and colonized, a relationship that has many sides but no symmetry, and many explanations but no justification.

All history of physical violence can be fully recognized, even apologized for, but a history of dispossession is off limits. The Nakba is not anathema to existing discourse because it was a physically violent act, not because of the cruelty of forcing Palestinians out of their towns, cities and villages. Rather, the Nakba is dangerous because it is about dispossession, land confiscation, and refugee camps; in essence, not allowing Palestinians to return and by doing so inscribing the act of violence into the very face of the land as “facts on the ground.” Physical violence, even the worst, is temporary. Dispossession has the flavor of forever, its influence stretching out into eternity.

Israel is not exactly like apartheid South Africa was, and I will point out some of the differences in another post. But if the TRC’s are any lesson to the future, then I believe they have one lesson to teach us. Right now as in the past, Israeli state policies are trying to dispossess as many Palestinians as possible and to bury their dispossession with thousands of cookie cutter Jewish-only villas and security fences, so that when the TRC’s/negotiations/enough pressure comes to Israel/Palestine, these “facts” will appear there, inscribing the dispossession of the Palestinians into the history books as an immutable fact. When the TRC’s come to Israel/Palestine, they must be about land. They must show the world that dispossession will not be forgotten, that it can be counteracted effectively, and if not reversed then at least written into the face of the land in such ubiquity that it will never be forgotten.

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.