The Coming French Resolution at the U.N. Security Council

The Coming French Resolution at the U.N. Security Council is designed to facilitate a Palestinian state.  It will specify the usual parameters.  If the U.S. does not fight it, the resolution will pass by a large margin and be the voice of the world.

This will be a win-win:

• ·       For the peoples of the world it will move the conflict closer to resolution if by nothing else than providing an updated framework to U.N.S.C. Resolution #242 (1967).
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• ·       For the Israelis it will be an affirmation of Zionism because it will declare Israel’s right to exist.
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• ·       For the Palestinians it will improve their seat at the negotiating table, and this conflict will in the end with a negotiated agreement.

We represent the people of the world in dealing with the Israel-Palestine issue because we are humanists.  As humanists our task is to end, or at least reduce, suffering.  We understand what the Buddha learned 2,600 years ago - that suffering is a characteristic of humanity.  Our pragmatic goal is to maximally reduce suffering.

Millions of Palestinians are suffering in the present situation.  There are two components to suffering:  extend of suffering and time that suffering is imposed.  A negotiated Palestinian state alongside Israel is the most effective path to reducing suffering.  As hard as a 2-state solution will be to obtain, it represents the shortest path to reduce suffering. 

Other options lead to more suffering. 

• ·       A single apartheid state, with or without a mass expulsion
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• ·       A single democratic state that may emerge at some unknown date.  Present levels of suffering will last longer than the time to a two-state solution, perhaps significantly longer.  And as a single democratic state in which they will lose their majority approaches, I predict that the suffering they impose on Palestinians will steadily increase, and the level of suffering can get far worse than now exists.

Palestinian solidarity activists have two objections.

·       French resolution will leave Israel intact as a racist state.  True, but that is the wrong criteria.  The criteria should be does the resolution reduce suffering, and it does.

·       French resolution essentially backs off a full right of return.  True.  And backing off the full right of return entails suffering.  The people enduring the suffering must make the call if future suffering from losing parts of the right of return adds more suffering than the French resolution will prevent.

Most Palestinians will see reduced suffering if the French resolution is adopted and implemented:

• ·       2.3 million Palestinians living in the West Bank, 40%$ refugees.  Remove the Israeli boot from their neck.
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• ·       1.8 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, 48% refugees.  Remove the Israeli and Egyptian boots from their neck.
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• ·       0.5 million Palestinians living in East Jerusalem, 40%$ refugees.
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• ·       4.2 million Palestinians, mostly refugees, in Jordan, Lebanon, and who had been in Syria and are now displaced again.
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• ·       1.75 million Palestinian citizens of Israel.  No longer will they be sees as an enemy within, which will help end internal legal and custom discrimination.

That means reduced suffering for 10-1/2 of the 13 million Palestinians world-wide.  That is 81% of Palestinians will see their lives improve.  Less directly the French resolution will reduce suffering for Palestinians in the Diaspora by likely shading public opinion away from Islamaphobia and irrational fear of Radical Islam. 

I also want to address leaving Israel as a racist state.  I remember when I was a sub-teen and a teen and suffered some bullying , not enough to distort my personality, but enough to want it to stop.  And it did stop for whatever reason.  I was thankful and wanted to move on with my life.  I was not obsessed with punishment for the bullier after the bullying ended, nor compensation for my suffering. 

I think that story gives us insight as to how Palestinians, or any people, will react to ending or reducing suffering so they can move on with their lives.

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Does Rebecca Vilkomerson Trust Palestinians

Mondoweiss summarizes a one- vs two-state debate between Peter Beinart and Rebecca Vilkomerson held at the October 2014 Open Hillel Conference

            http://mondoweiss.net/2014/11/nationalism-imagination-vilkomerson

and provides extensive quotes.

Vilkomerson worries that a two-state solution will end up with Palestine that is no more than a bantustan.  That is a valid worry. 

Vilkomerson may worry that Israel will force a sub-standard solution on the Palestinians.  But that is also a worry for a one-state solution.  Namely, that the Israelis will force boundaries on a one-state solution that perpetuates Jewish privilege.  After all, that is what happened during the Oslo negotiations.

But the Palestinians leaders have been strong enough to reject numerous Israeli proposals that did not meet their criteria since at least Camp David in 2000.  We have to assume that Palestinian leaders will continue to reject sub-standard proposals.  Another guard against a sub-standard solution is the Palestinian people who will be required to accept any solution by referendum (that is Hamas’ demand to accept what the PLO negotiates). 

Doesn’t Vilkomerson trust Palestinians?

How to Affect American Israel-Palestine Policy

Progressives who work on the Israel-Palestine issue are always seeking traction among the American public with the expectation that when enough Americans want a policy change, Congress will be receptive to change. 

Mitchell Plitnick gave us some insight in his interview on “The Sunday Show” on from Feb. 15, 2015 on KPFA (http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/111238 ).  He said that Americans view of Israel goes up and down, but Americans view of Palestinians is consistently low.  Plitnick explicitly said that Americans will change their understanding of Israel-Palestine because of anything Palestinians do.

Much of the progressive movement related to Israel-Palestine focuses on Palestinian suffering and Palestinian rights.  But Plitnick is telling us that that tactic will not work.  He is telling us that we much focus on Israel’s bad actions.

If Plitnick has any validity, why do we call ourselves the “Palestinian Solidarity Movement”?

What happened in England in 2009?

Aaron Dover (http://www.thezionion.com/2015/02/08/the-fraudulent-rise-in-uk-antisemitism/) calls the report on "Antisemiticism Incidents" "fraudulent."  He has a point.  But there actually is interesting information in the data (http://www.thezionion.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Screenshot-2015-02-08-19.40.02.png), namely the high number of incidents in 2009 and 2014.  Those positive anomalies occur across several types of incident.  If we knew what happened in 2009, maybe we can understand some of what is happening in 2014.

Even taking the "Antisemiticism Incidents" data at face value, the high number of incidents in 2014 are not predictive.  There is nothing in the data that says 2014 is the start of increasing number of incidents.  2014 could be high like 2009, and 2015 can be normal like 2010.  In other words, 2014 is like 2009, an anomaly.   

Israeli Election Will Not End Occupation

A friend who is a leader in APN asked me about the coming Israeli Election.  I responded by telling him about Gideon Levy’s piece the other day (reprinted by Jerome Slater http://www.jeromeslater.com/2015/02/the-great-gideon-levy.html ).  Levy says that without doubt Netanyahu will be a disaster, but he worries that Herzog may be a “worse disaster”  because he won’t make peace, but he will negotiate.  The very act of negotiating will dissipate international pressure from Israel, postponing the ultimate reckoning when it will be worse.  Netanyahu will continue racist and ill-advised policies and will lose more support from Europe and even the United States and hasten the day of reckoning.   

My friend asked, “what about Meretz?”  On one hand more Meretz (and Hadash) MKs is a good – they will work for many things we all want.  But in a larger sense, it doesn’t matter because in Israel the PM has considerably more power than the U.S. president.  If the Labor-led coalition of Hetzog and Livni known as the Zionist Camp wins, almost surely Meretz will be included in the government where the real power to make peace rests with Herzog and Livni.  In that sense, a vote for Meretz is little different than a vote for the Zionist Camp.  

Crime and Blame during Protective Edge

Rabbi Lerner captures much of my nuance in understanding crimes and blame during Protective Edge.  He blames Israel for instigating the war.  He blames Hamas for falling into Israel’s trap and shooting rockets at civilians because it terrorized Israelis, but equally as important giving Israel an excuse to bombard Gaza and for rejecting a cease-fire early in the conflict only to accept the same terms after so many more deaths and destruction.  He blames the international community for standing by and allowing the tragedy to happen. 

I reprint Lerner’s entire introduction below, although above ideas are just the first part of the essay.

The Shame of Israel and Hamas

Rabbi Lerner’s Editor's Note accompanying a report by Robert Tait describing children’s suffering in Gaza City in the aftermath of Protective Edge.

Feb. 1, 2015

The crimes committed against human rights this past summer linger both in the incredibly terrible suffering of the Gazan people, many of whom are facing winter with no shelter, and hundreds of thousands of children suffering from shell shock (see the story below), but also in the trauma that has moved millions of Israelis toward the political right and moral insensitivity at the suffering the Occupation is causing as those Israelis still recall a summer in which almost every day they were forced to run to shelters to protect themselves from the bombs sent from Hamas.

Both sides have acted in a shameful way.

Israel sought to punish Hamas for pursuing a path of reconciliation with the PA--Palestinian Authority (after Israel had canceled the negotiations)  and used the excuse of those bombings, which were (thankfully) totally ineffective, given the Iron Dome cover that Israel had been given by the U.S.

That reconciliation was sought by the Palestinian Authority after Israel refused to live up to its commitment to the P.A. and the U.S. to release Palestinian prisoners as part of the deal that had made it politically possible for the PA to enter into negotiations about the West Bank even as Israel kept building more settlements. After a rogue element of Hamas in the West Bank brutally kidnapped and murdered 3 Israeli youth, Israel started an assault on Hamas members in the West Bank, supposedly with the excuse of searching for the 3 disappeared youth, though Israeli intelligence already knew that the 3 were dead and that it was not Hamas that had ordered the murders. It then began to kill Hamas activists in Gaza by drone attacks. Meanwhile, lynch mobs wandered the streets of Jerusalem and other Israeli cities, beating anyone suspected of being an Arab. Israeli Palestinian citizens who had long sought reconciliation with the Jewish majority started to despair that it would ever be safe for them as a minority group amongst an Israeli majority that had abandoned the Torah teaching to "love the stranger."  A random Palestinian youth was snatched by Israelis near his home in East Jerusalem and burnt to death alive. That was no more an act of "the Israelis" than the murder of the Israeli youth had been an act "of the Palestinians" or even of "the Gazans."

Faced with almost daily assault on their operatives by Israel, Hamas responded with attempts to shell Israeli cities, which provided Israel with the excuse it needed to bomb and ground assault Gaza, killing more than two thousand Gazans, and wounding or maiming another 8,000 and destroying the homes of hundreds of thousands more during the summer assault. Hamas' targeting of civilians in Israeli towns was not only a clear human rights violation, but a terrible injustice to its own people who were suffering from the Israeli attack. Israel proposed a cease-fire which Hamas rejected, only to accept the same terms 6 weeks later after the Gazan population had faced a terrible slaughter from the Israeli assault. Hamas leaders justified this behavior by claiming that they would not follow the example of Jews in the Holocaust who had, according to them, not resisted and walked passively into the Nazi gas chambers. "We are being killed anyway, so why not die with dignity?" Hamas leaders said. But this was a distortion. Israel was in fact violating the human rights of the Palestinian people by occupying the West Bank and blockading Gaza. But it is simply not true that Israel was seeking to follow the Nazi policy of killing every possible Jew in its occupation and blockade--Israel’s actions were morally horrific but they were not the genocidal policies of the Nazis, and they did not leave Gazans with "no alternative" but to engage in what was quickly seen as a futile effort to bomb Israelis. That bombing only accomplished a tightening of Israeli anger at Palestinians, nothing more, and gave Israel the public relations excuse it needed to devastate Gaza. So Hamas leaders should be brought to trial for human rights violations, and so should Israeli leaders who pursued that policy this past summer. Meanwhile, the suffering of the people of Gaza continues at this moment--not only with the estimated 370,000 children who are shell-shocked, but with a million more homeless and the entire population without democratic means to repudiate their Hamas leadership.

This enormous human tragedy is both a stain on the credibility of the world community which has promised to rebuild Gaza but has not done so, on the Jewish people who uncritically rallied to support Israel's criminal acts this past summer, and on Hamas whose criminal acts this past summer should not be excused away as inevitable or without alternatives.

One need not hold any of the actors free of ethical culpability, but one can have compassion both for the Israelis who grew deeply fearful and angry (particularly when misled by their own government and media about why it was all happening) and the Gazans who had been suffering for years from the Israeli blockade and its consequent lack of adequate food and building supplies to repair past assaults by Israel. There are no guilt-free parties in this horrific reality, but the children of Gaza do not deserve to suffer any more, and massive aid from the West should be delivered immediately.

But does this even-handedness apply to the Israeli destruction of Palestinian homes within Israel? Answer this for yourself after reading the UN report that Israel demolished the homes of 1,177 Palestinians (with the usual ethnic cleansing scenario: Israel gives home permits for Jews to expand their homes and settlements, but refuses to grant permits for Palestinians to expand their homes to fit growing families; when the Palestinians then add a room to a crowded house the Israeli authorities destroy the entire house. This double standard is what gives the enemies of Israel their grounds for calling Israeli policy apartheid-like. Read the UN report or the article about this in Ha'aretz. Feb.1st. 

Ma'aln reports that the Israeli High Court ruled against an army plan to construct a section of the wall in the West Bank village of Battir (west of Bethlehem; http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=751709).  This is being celebrated as a "victory for Palestine as whole."

Not so fast.  Battir is famous for its ancient terraces and Roman-era irrigation system.  The site is a UNESCO World Heritage site recognized in 2014 as "in danger."   

It seems that the Israeli court ruled in favor of the historic landscape.

This ruling is good for Palestinians, but it does not indicate that the Israeli High Court is any more inclined to respect Palestinian rights than it was last week. 

To does us no good to self-delude.