Israel at 60: The Cost of US Support

by Ida Audeh
Boulder Daily Camera
May 15, 2008

Israel’s 60th anniversary is an opportune occasion to question why the U.S. government offers unlimited support to a country that persistently and routinely violates principles that Americans hold sacred.

The U.S. government finances an illegal military occupation in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip. Since October 1973, total direct U.S. aid to Israel amounts to well over $140 billion in 2003 dollars. What does this aid buy? Illegal Jewish-only settlements built on confiscated Palestinian land. Palestinian towns and villages encircled by walls more monstrous in most places than the Berlin wall. Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks between Palestinian towns that bring the normal movement of people and goods to a standstill and constitute daily humiliations. Gaza sealed and under siege, with food and fuel withheld. Since the second intifada started in September 2000, at least 4,719 Palestinians have been killed and 32,213 wounded.

Israel’s strategy seems to be to make life so unlivable for Palestinians that those with options will leave, and those without options are controlled by the Jewish state. Is this a strategy that Americans can support?

Israel’s supporters excuse Israel’s appalling violations of international law and human rights by insisting that it is a democracy and thus shares a lot with the United States. But that is not true.

Israel distinguishes between citizenship rights, such as the right to vote, which is available to non-Jewish citizens of the state, and nationality rights, which are reserved for Jews. This is not a feature of democracy as we know it.

Several laws have been enacted in Israel whose intention is clearly to maintain Jewish numerical superiority and to reinforce the Jewish character of the state, all of which belie the claim that Israel is a democracy. Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, has identified more than 20 laws in Israel that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel by working the Jewish character of the state into the text of the law. Israel defines “public good” in ethno-religious terms; lands expropriated from Palestinians for the “public good” benefit Jewish citizens only. The 20 percent of the population that is Muslim and Christian are regarded as a demographic threat. Obsession over the ethnic and religious composition of a country is also not a typical characteristic of democratic societies.

Support for Israel is garnered under false pretenses and enforced through coercive tactics. Americans should consider the effect of these strong-arm tactics on our public life.

A small but powerful lobby has had an inordinate influence on the executive and legislative branches of the government, on the media, and on our public culture. Neither a former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner like Jimmy Carter, or establishment professors from prestigious universities like John Mearsheimer (University of Chicago) and Stephen Walt (Harvard University), are immune from charges of anti-semitism if they question Israel’s policies.

These assaults on the personal integrity of people who express non-mainstream political views has had a profoundly corrosive effect on free speech and public debate.

Members of Congress of both parties accept pro-Israel political action committee money and in return, they support and initiate legislation in support of Israel.

Both the public and the media have been trained to accept without question the unseemly spectacle of presidential candidates and elected officials who swear allegiance to a foreign country, as though this should inspire the trust of U.S. voters.

Israel’s illegal policies toward Palestinians and its neighbors have been the subject of more than 65 U.N. resolutions. Israel routinely ignores General Assembly and Security Council resolutions, and its intransigence is defended by the United States. Supporting Israel puts the United States at odds with most of the people of the world, and it also means that the U.S. government grows accustomed to defending violations of international law. Yet neither Israel nor the United States is above the law.

Pro-Israel organizations and individuals have led the campaign promoting anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry in this country. Generalizations and smears that would be easily identified as bigotry if African Americans or Latinos were the subject trigger no objections when they are made about Arabs and Muslims.

Palestinians in growing numbers are demanding equal rights for all residents of Mandate Palestine.

Americans can hardly oppose this demand while at the same time claiming to be a beacon of freedom and democracy for all peoples.

Ida Audeh is a Palestinian who grew up in the West Bank and now works as an editor in Boulder.

The Other Side of Israel’s Birth

by Alice Rothchild
The Baltimore Sun
May 14, 2008

This spring we are obsessed with anniversaries: the fifth year since the invasion of Iraq, the 40th since the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and, of course, the 60th anniversary of Israeli independence. Each such marker shapes our understanding of history, framing how a story is to be told and how it is to be remembered. I am struck by one conspicuous anniversary that is not making many headlines.

On tour recently in the U.S., Eitan Bronstein, director of the Israeli organization Zochrot, explained that “zochrot” is the Hebrew word for “remembering,” intentionally used in its feminine form to imply that this organization is not about the standard history of schoolbooks but about a memory grounded in compassion. Zochrot focuses on educating Israelis about the other side of the 1948 War of Liberation, the dispossession and expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians living in what was to become Israel. Through careful documentation of the locations of more than 450 destroyed Palestinian villages, by interviewing and photographing Palestinians living in Israel and surrounding refugee camps, Zochrot creates a living human memory that encompasses the other side of history.

Mr. Bronstein has been touring with Mohammad Jaradat, a Palestinian activist, negotiator at the Madrid peace talks and co-founder of Badil, Arabic for “alternative,” a foundation that researches and advocates for Palestinian residency and refugee rights. He is part of a vigorous Palestinian movement for civil society that is largely unknown in the U.S.

Listening to these two men, I was struck by how memory shapes our understanding of history and how dangerous it is to blind ourselves to the realities of the past. For decades, Jews have shaped the memory of the Holocaust, honoring its victims and justifying the behavior of its survivors, creating a story in which we Jews are all at some level survivors, claiming Israel’s victories as our own. The narrative of indigenous Arab resistance to a Jewish state and acknowledgment of the human suffering that was a consequence of Israeli military victory and political policy thus become a personal as well as a political threat.

Mr. Bronstein contends that Israel’s failure to recognize its responsibility for Palestinian dispossession is a critical though invisible part of Israeli history, that embracing this history is the first step toward acknowledging Palestinians as fellow human beings, and that this process can lead beyond peace to permanent reconciliation between the two peoples. While the Palestinians clearly “lost the war” in 1948, the decision to prevent them from returning to their ancestral homes was a political decision that has led to a constant state of friction and war between Israel and its neighbors.

At a time when Jews and Palestinians express little hope for a peaceful future, Mr. Bronstein offers us a path where Israelis acknowledge the price of their victory and take responsibility for their share of the Palestinian catastrophe. At the same time, Mr. Jaradat is working for the kinds of civil rights that are enshrined in international and human rights law, reminding us that Palestinians deserve nothing less than we would expect for ourselves. Both men share the conviction that acknowledging the Palestinian refugees’ internationally recognized right to return and developing creative solutions — from resettlement to financial compensation — is the foundation of a lasting resolution of the conflict.

As Israel celebrates its 60th anniversary today, I wonder what would happen if this tragedy, Al Nakba, were to be publicly recognized alongside the Israeli victory. Perhaps taking the risk of acknowledging the pain of the “other” and seeing “the enemy” as a real person is how peace is ultimately made.

The dispossession of two-thirds of the Palestinian population in 1948, and the consequences borne by generations of families living in Israel, the occupied territories, refugee camps and the diaspora, can no longer be hidden. It is time to acknowledge that other anniversary and to move forward with eyes and hearts open to the suffering of all the children of Abraham.

Alice Rothchild, a physician, is the author of “Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience” and co-chairwoman of Jewish Voice for Peace, Boston.