‫ﺇﺳﺮﺍﺋﻴﻞ‬/‫ﻣﻼﺣﻈﺎﺕ ﺣﻮﻝ ﻓﻠﺴﻄﲔ‬

Notes on Palestine/Israel

‫ישראל‬/‫רשימות על פלסטין‬

Volume Two
United for Peace and Justice in Palestine
Cornell University | April 2011
 — Carl Gelderloos Editor
— Jenn Dean Design, Layout
Credits
United for Peace and Justice in Palestine is a Cornell student group
comprised of undergraduate and graduate students working towards a just
peace in Palestine/Israel through advocacy and education. We meet regularly
throughout the semester, and hold several larger events – usually a lecture
from an outside speaker, but past events have also included film screenings and
debates – each year, in order to offer a critical perspective on the conflict that
we feel is otherwise lacking in mainstream discourse. To get on our emailing
list, email Dan at dns52@cornell.edu or find us on Facebook.

This is a free publication, funded by the GPSAFC. Cover Photo by Max Ajl.

Table of Contents
5 Max Ajl, Gaza Diary
9 Dan Sinykin, Birthright, In Contradictions
13 Beth Harris, Land and Childhood Stolen from Iraq Burin
16 Howard Botwinick, Jewish Voice for Peace Calls on TIAA CREF to
Divest from Firms that Profit from Israel’s Illegal Occupatioin
18 Kevin McGinnis, The Shining City on the Hill and a Light unto the
Nations
23 Sayres Rudy, Apartheid between Belonging and Expulsion

Much has changed, but in Palestine nothing has improved. The year
Editor’s foreword

since the publication of our first volume has seen risings, topplings, and
downfalls throughout North Africa and the Middle East, yet it is anybody’s
guess whether all this movement will result in a real shift, even revolution, or
whether the regional order will simply teeter, rock back and forth a couple
times, and settle into a renewed stasis amidst the accrued wreckage of broken
lives and unanswered claims. With Tunisia, and then Egypt, then in rapid
succession across the region, things suddenly seemed to be moving, after so
many decades on their preset geopolitical tracks, in a new direction, towards a
new, different, future. There was the sense that, after a long period of slumber,
the region suddenly awoke as a question mark. It is still an open question, but
the forces of reaction are quick, for much is at stake. Tahrir Square has been
cleared, restored for traffic and commerce; the current US-led intervention
in Libya is a cruelly farcical return to “humanitarian intervention,” as if to
hammer home, for everyone’s sake, the idea that we’re not only going nowhere
new, but we’ve never left wherever it was we were before.
It has been remarked that Palestine and Israel have remained strangely
quiet. In the middle of everything in more ways than one, this country
between the river and the sea seemed to lay low while the others rose up. Not
that there’s no future there – Cast Lead II and the Third Intifada are both
possibilities with plenty of currency – but Israel and Palestine seem strangely
stuck in various nightmare permutations of the same old future. Occupation,
exclusion, and transfer, along with their various subsets, are still the dominant
2 axes here; there’s room to move, but nowhere good. Clearly radical change is
needed, but what kind, and how? Presumably “change we can believe in” now sounds
to most ears like the cynical embrace of the least common denominator it probably
always was, a fitting slogan in a climate where the prevailing political imagination
helpfully continues to offer to shrink down even beyond the minimum bounds of bare
necessity.
The revolts of the past half year, besides the significant, tangible gains made, showed
how surprisingly, astonishingly close the latent possibility of Something Else can be
to the surface of the ruling order. They also showed how difficult it is to bring that
possibility the final gasping distance up through that surface.
And far from marginalizing Israel/Palestine, the uprisings in the region
demonstrated just how central that conflict is. If it was already a commonplace that
Israel & Palestine were a burning issue for the populations throughout the Middle
East, the last several months have been a crash course in geopolitics: the occupation of
Palestine will not end, but will only be managed differently, unless the regional system
of military aid, client states, and despotism – in a word, imperialism – also ends.
The good thing about a task this large is that one may start nearly anywhere. To
this end, we’ve assembled this second volume to contribute our voices, critiques,
and experiences to the mix, in the hopes that you find them informative, engaging,
provocative, and useful. Max Ajl presents a view of the occupation from within Gaza,
and Dan Sinykin relays his experience, on a Birthright trip, of the Israeli vision that
blinds itself to Gaza. Howard Botwinick describes the burgeoning TIAA-CREF
divestment campaign, and Beth Harris recounts her visit to the settler-targeted
West Bank village of Iraq Burin. Kevin McGinnis traces the colonialist affiliations
between the foundational myths of America and Israel, and Sayres Rudy concludes
the collection with an extended meditation on the uses and abuses of the apartheid
comparison.
Because so much has changed, because nothing has changed, I can only end this
foreword as I did last year: What we share is an awareness that things can’t go on
as before, and that the solutions offered – apartheid, permanent carceral enclosure,
forced population transfer, or worse – are to be rejected as incapable of bringing a just
peace to the region. We are anti-racist, anti-apartheid; we are for a respect for human
rights for all and an end to the conflict that takes full account of the needs, desires,
fears and dreams of all those concerned – all Israelis, Jewish and non-Jewish, and all
Palestinians, whether living within Israel, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, or
exiled by the war of 1948. To be sure, that is much to expect; it is everything. It is also,
this late in the day, the least one may expect if one is to expect anything at all.
- cg
Demonstration in the Gaza City port before the Mavi Marmara massacre,May 31 2010. Photo by M.A.

3
 Suggested Bibliography
(Disclaimer: like any bibliography of this
nature, it is limited, as well as necessarily
subjective and contingent. But it’s a good
start, nevertheless.)
Arendt, Hannah. The Jewish Writings.
Schocken, 2008. Print.
Burg, Avraham. The Holocaust is Over,
We Must Rise from its Ashes. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Butler, Judith. “No, it’s not anti-semitic.”
London Review of Books. 25/16, Aug.
2003, p. 19.
Gordon, Uri. Anarchy alive! : Anti-
Authoritarian Politics from Practice to
Theory. London: Pluto Press, 2008.
(Particularly ch. 6, “HomeLand:
Anarchy and Joint Struggle in Palestine/
Israel”)
Khalifa, Sahar. Wild Thorns. New York:
Olive Branch Press, 1989. (This is the
only literary text on the list. For more,
you might check out Mahmoud Darwish,
Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Ghassan Kanafani,
or Emile Habiby, to name a few.)
Machover, Moshe. “Conflict & resolution:
Israelis and Palestinians.” International
Socialist Review 65 (2009): 32-44.
Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian
Refugee Problem, 1947-1949.
Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987.
Nitzan, Jonathan, and Shimshon Bichler.
The Global Political Economy of Israel.
Pluto Press, 2002. Print.
Pappe, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of
Palestine. Oxford: Oneworld, 2006.
Pappe, Ilan. A History of Modern Palestine:
One Land, Two Peoples. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Quigley, John. The Case for Palestine: An
International Law Perspective. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2005.
4
Reinhart, Tanya. Israel/Palestine: How to
End the War of 1948. New York: Seven
Stories Press, 2005.
Roy, Sara. Failing Peace: Gaza and the
Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. Pluto Press,
2006. Print.
Sacco, Joe. Palestine. Seattle:
Fantagraphics, 2007.
Sa’di, Ahmad H. and Abu-Lughod, Lila.
Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims
of Memory. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2007.
Said, Edward. The Question of Palestine.
New York: Vintage Books, 1992.
Said, Edward, and Mohr, Jean. After the
Last Sky: Palestinian Lives. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1999.
Sand, Shlomo. The Invention of the Jewish
People. Verso, 2010. Print.
Sayigh, Yezid. Armed Struggle and the
Search for State: The Palestinian National
Movement, 1949-1993. Oxford
University Press, USA, 2000. Print.
Shafir, Gershon, and Yoav Peled. Being
Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple
Citizenship. Cambridge University
Press, 2002. Print.
Shatz, Adam (ed.) Prophets Outcast: A
Century of Dissident Jewish Writing
about Zionism and Israel. New York:
Nation Books, 2004.
Warschawski, Michel. On the Border.
Cambridge, MA: South End Press,
2005.
Weizmann, Eyal. Hollow Land: Israel’s
Architecture of Occupation. London:
Verso, 2007.
Zertal, Idith and Eldar, Akiva. Lords of the
Land: The War over Israel’s Settlements in
the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007.
New York: Nation Books, 2007.

Gaza Diary
I was in Gaza this past January after
being away for almost five months.
In the interim, almost nothing had
changed. F-16s continued to unload
their cargoes of heavy explosives on
“suspected” military sites nearly every
night, terrifying everyone in Gaza
as we all wondered if this was the
explosion which would herald Cast
Lead II, while “suspected militants,”
or any Palestinian male under the age
of 80, were consistently shot down
Max Ajl
by the IDF for loitering within a
couple hundred meters of the border,
especially if a bit of debris kicked
up by the wind scares a frazzled and
homicidal IDF sniper.
The rolling blackouts thankfully hit
Gaza in even more of a stutter than they
used to. Some days the power remained
on all day. The plastic greenhouses right
on the side of the road from Rafah
undulated constantly in the wind, the
garbage remained littered all over the
side of the highway, the children in their
school uniforms, constantly multiplying,
cluster on the side of the road, peering
into passing cars; and the 40 kilometers
from the Rafah terminal to the restaurant
in Gaza City port took me over an hour
on the over-crowded, under-maintained,
under-funded, crumbling and shattered
roadways. Meanwhile, Gaza isn’t so
much antediluvian – although it’s that,
too, with donkeys moving people up and
down main streets, jostling for space with
late-model Mercedes recently imported
into Gaza – as outside time; people wait
to come into time.
They have been waiting a very long
time: since 1948, when the Israeli
army ethnically cleansed hundreds of
thousands of Palestinians from the
territory that would become Israel. The
people there have been living in limbo
for decades, a peasant society uprooted
by massive violence, forced into flight
to a small coastal strip full of temporary
concrete homes, their wiring exposed on
the outside like entrails with no need
to be in their proper place. The refugees
never expected to be in Gaza so long, as
weeks piled up haphazardly into months
and years. There, the refugees still
cook corn on braziers in front of
their ramshackle concrete homes
when it is warm enough. And there,
the refugees remember fiercely the
names of the villages from which
they – but increasingly, their fathers
and mothers, their grandfathers and
grandmothers – were forced out over
60 years ago.
Gaza has become their home, and
there they have been warehoused
and imprisoned. There is, as people
told me again and again and again,
“no hope,” just the feelings of
psychic strangulation and induced
helplessness. Egypt does not want
Gaza, and Israelis regarded as leftists
publicly plan on how to dump Gaza
onto the lap of the European Union to
maintain a demographic majority in
Israel if it has to incorporate the West
Bank’s population into its political
system. No one wants anything to do
with them but they cannot simply be left
to die. Thus the Gazans are reduced to
animals. As the head of the Palestinian
Center for Human Rights, Raji Sourani,
has commented, “We live in a kind of
animal farm. We live in a pen, and they
dump in food and medicine.”1 “They” are
the Israelis in charge of the crossings and
their civilian managers in Jerusalem and
Washington DC.
This has been their fate since 1994,
when the siege effectively began as
Israel dropped concrete planks on Gaza’s
northern frontier and strung razor
wire along the eastern border in 1994
– turning Gaza from under-developed
hinterland, a bedroom community for
its 100,000 male workers who used
to work in Israel, into a ghetto. Those
men, incidentally, tend not to be so full
of hate. Quite a lot of them remember
fondly their time when they were free to
move back-and-forth through the Erez
crossing, when they could earn money
for their families by working in Israeli
enterprises – when they could go to built-
up Tel-Aviv or Jaffa or Jerusalem, work
there, stay overnight, bring in wages that
dwarfed those available in Gaza.
Those days are gone and they will 5
not be back.
It was in 1994, with the beginning
of the Oslo process, that Israel began
to systematically seal off Gaza from the
West Bank as part of its political project
of shattering the Palestinian nation into
atomized fragments, prevented from
coalescing politically, economically, or
socially. Fewer and fewer Palestinians
were allowed to cross from Gaza into
Israel proper or the West Bank. Thus
strangled, the Gazan economy began to
gasp. As Sara Roy of Harvard University,
the leading expert on Gaza, writes, “By
the time the second uprising broke out
[in 2000] Israel’s closure policy had been
in force for seven years, leading to levels
of unemployment and poverty that were,
until then, unprecedented . . . the closure
policy proved so destructive only because
[it took place] on a foundation already
undermined by thirty-eight years of
deliberate Israeli policies of expropriation,
integration, and deinstitutionalization
that had long ago robbed Palestine of its
developmental potential, insuring that
no viable economic (and hence, political)
structure could emerge.”2 An economy
reliant on wage remittances from workers
working in Israel – that was constructed
around them – could not function
properly when those wages stopped
flowing in, as the flow decreased to dribs
and drabs, then was totally stopped up
with the onset of “closure” in 2005.
That “closure” occurred in response
to Hamas’s victory over Fateh in the
2006 Legislative Council elections.
Fateh split its ticket, and Hamas won an
overwhelming majority of the seats. Some
donor countries and Israel suspended all
contacts with the Palestinian Authority.
Soon after, direct aid was suspended,
too, alongside the imposition of an
international financial boycott. Amidst
mounting violence, in June 2006 Israel
sealed the borders of Gaza. That summer,
Israel pummeled Gaza – an assault whose
reverberations are still being felt in the
rolling blackouts that afflict the strip. That
pummeling lasted until October 2006. In
2007, Fateh, with Israeli and American
support, attempted a coup d’état
6 against the Hamas government.
The Hamas retaliation effectively ejected
Fateh from Gaza, broke apart the
national unity government, and further
hardened the separation between Gaza
and the West Bank, as Hamas took up
full responsibility for administration and
governance in Gaza and the Mahmoud
Abbas government reigned in Ramallah.
The former was starved of funds, contacts,
and international legitimacy. Resisting, it
became a pariah. The latter was lavished
with funds and feted by the international
community. Collaborating, it became that
community’s darling.
On September 19 2007, the Israeli
cabinet decided to designate the Strip
a “terrorist organization”-controlled
“enemy entity.” Trade, including the life-
line agricultural export sector, was cut
off. Freedom of movement, theretofore
a pittance, was ended. The blockade
continued amidst retaliatory rocket
attacks. In June 2008, Egypt brokered a
ceasefire, according to which Israel was
supposed to gradually lift the blockade. It
did not. On 4 November of that year, Israel
broke the cease-fire by attacking Hamas
militia.3 Amidst escalating violence, it
tightened the crossings. The number of
trucks arriving with aid in November was
maybe 1 percent of its pre-closure norm.
Hamas repeatedly attempted to broker
another ceasefire, conditioning it on
Israel lifting the blockade. Israel refused,
and the ceasefire lapsed on December 18
2008. On December 27 Israel mounted a
major military assault against defenseless
Gaza from late December to January 18.
This was the visage of Gaza that
compelled me into deciding to go there –
a Gaza shifting in and out of the world’s
attention: starved, devastated, anguished,
besieged, repressed. The immediacy of
the devastation had waned by the time of
my second visit. Nothing else had. Least
of all the immediate palpability of the
occupation.
The first thing I did when I got
there was have a Turkish coffee in a café
overlooking the Mediterranean. The
calm was interrupted when the reports
from gunshots started ricocheting off
the water. When you’re sitting that close,
it’s hard to distinguish between bombs

Israeli armored bulldozers in Gaza. Photo by M.A.
falling far away and the echo of shots
from the big guns the Israeli navy uses to
harass fishermen. Then later people told
me that the shots I was hearing weren’t
the fishermen. That evening, my friends
walked into the apartment where I was
staying with more far composure than
I remember having when I saw Ahmad
Salem Dib, a 19-year old man from Gaza
City, hemorrhaging after being shot by
a dum-dum bullet in the femoral artery
at a non-violent protest last April east
of Gaza at the Nahal Oz crossing. That
protest was against the Israeli-imposed
“buffer zone,” a no-go swathe of land
running along Gaza’s borders with
Israel, which robs the farmers here of 36
percent of their arable land. That shooting
concluded with Ahmad dying from blood
loss and shock after desperate emergency
surgery at Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital,
as surgeons tried to repair his shredded
leg. This time, Israeli maintenance of the
illegal “buffer zone” meant the murder
of a 20-year-old shepherd, Salama Abu
Hashish, apparently shot through the
kidney from the back as he was herding
his animals a couple hundred meters
from the border.
Later, I went to Salama’s tent in Beit
Lehiya. The shepherd who had died was
freshly married. His child had been born
two days before. His father said, “I am
open,” indicating a line running along his
sternum. The young man who had died
had been his oldest son, leaving three
brothers and two sisters. My friends
working here, and the statistics, say that
these murders, even more, the injuries,
have been incessant since I left at the end
of July. Incessant, and marked in the West
by a thundering silence – the silence of a
racism that roars at the death of a Jewish
Israeli and does not even bother to shrug
at the death of a Bedouin living with his
sheep.
And what remains for his father? The
stink of Beit Lehiya’s open, fetid sewage
pits glittering in Gaza’s hot January
sun, and a kilometer or two north of
their home, the ghetto wall running
along Gaza’s northern frontier, with its
watchtowers and their minders, one of
whom put a hole in his son’s back for
being on the wrong part of his own land,
a mistake for which his child will pay by
never knowing his father. There will be
no apology forthcoming for that murder.
The family probably won’t bother
with an impotent lawsuit in the racist
Israeli court system, and that same
obdurate racism ensures that Salama’s
murder will be reprised – already has
been reprised – again and again in the
coming days and weeks while Israeli
snipers maintain Israel’s “security” in a
buffer zone already monitored by endless
surveillance towers, drones, motion
sensors, tanks, and automated machine
guns, all of it a constant reminder to his
parents that their child’s murderer walks
free somewhere north or east of that
concrete wall while they while away their
time fuming, anguished, asking us as we
visit, rhetorically rather than desperately,
“Where is our freedom?”
And all we could ever do was
pathetically look at the ground and
pretend we didn’t understand the
Arabic and didn’t know the answer. We
understood the Arabic, we understood
the question, we knew the answer, we
knew exactly where that freedom was,
where it is – under an Israeli-American
jackboot that’s trying to grind that desire
for freedom into nothingness, into human
dust, while Obama and Netanyahu
babble insanely about the Zionist need
for security, a security that can only be
secured by endless piles of Palestinian
corpses, with resistance quieted
and Ashkelon safe amidst the 7
secure tranquility of the killing fields to
its south.
As Israeli munitions fall nearly daily,
the next attack is on everyone’s mind.
They speculate: one university professor
told me that it would probably be a set
of “surgical” strikes, hitting government
targets, compressed into a two or three
day hell. “Any day now,” he said. And,
he asked, “Who would notice, or care? It
would pass like a quick storm and be gone
from people’s minds,” before the Western
journalists left their flats in Jerusalem
and Tel-Aviv to try to pass through
the Erez Crossing, with the aftereffect
of the government here being further
embittered, the population traumatized
by again seeing F-16s, missiles, and
Apaches filling the air, white phosphorus
glittering horribly in the sky.
A friend, 20 years old, told me in
response to my question of how she had
been that they are simply “surviving.” This
is what life is like here, in the penumbra
of death’s shadow, with death tomorrow,
or the next day, or the day after. What
they wish is so plain and regular that it’s
nearly breathtaking in its sheer normalcy,
and what’s sickening is the wrenching
denial of that wish by a state that insists
that it has the right to abuse another
people merely for being. What they want
is for the Goldstone Report’s findings to
be taken seriously.
They want what everyone wants:
decent, peaceful lives; they want to get
the good jobs that the Gazan economy
is structurally incapable of providing,
they want their children to grow up
8
unburdened by trauma and despair, they
want to see their children get married and
have grandchildren. They receive none of
that. Instead, as a young shopkeeper living
around the corner from my apartment
mimed to me with his hands around his
neck, they are choking, and when they
lash out at their tormentors with an
occasional Qassam, the Israeli-American
air force unleashes a fresh round of hell
on this child-filled ghetto, and to what
end? A young guy, a little younger than
me, cuts my hair, and told me that “we are
the ones that die and nothing happens
to Hamas.” Meanwhile, the government
here will never agree to reconciliation
terms with the collaborators in Ramallah,
and perhaps this is what the civilian
managers in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv wish
in the absence of Fateh rule in Gaza: a
split, divided populace, unable to unite,
unable to resist. And when, asked my
landlord, will it end, and what was there
to say but to impotently mutter, hopefully
soon?
Max Ajl is a doctoral candidate in
development sociology at Cornell. He has
done fieldwork in the Gaza Strip, and
maintains a blog at www.maxajl.com
1Li, Darryl. Disengagement and the Frontiers of
Zionism, MER Online, February 16 2008.
2 Roy, Sara. “Praying with Their Eyes Closed:
Reflections on the Disengagement from Gaza,”
Journal of Palestine Studies, Summer 2005, p 64.
3 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/
nov/05/israelandthepalestinians
Vigil after Mavi Marmara massacre. Photo by M.A.
Birthright, in Contradictions
1 3
On January 13th, 2009, ten days
into Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s
bombardment and invasion of Gaza,
I strolled into LAX and joined the
gathering crowd of young, anxious Jews at
the El Al desk, to await directions and the
airline’s customary interrogations. Some
twenty hours later, our coach bus rolled
north from Ben Gurion International
Airport. As we headed toward the hills
of the Galilee, our Israeli guide Ilan took
the microphone.
“I want to say something,” he said, as
we merged onto the freeway. “I need to
pause, because I promised myself I would
never make this a cliché.” He paused
and appeared 100% serious. “Welcome
home.”
So began my Birthright trip.
According to its website, “Taglit-
Birthright Israel provides the gift of
first time, peer group, educational trips
to Israel for Jewish young adults ages 18
to 26. Taglit-Birthright Israel’s founders
created this program to send thousands
of young Jewish adults from all over
the world to Israel as a gift in order to
diminish the growing division between
Israel and Jewish communities around
the world; to strengthen the sense of
solidarity among world Jewry; and to
strengthen participants’ personal Jewish
identity and connection to the Jewish
people.”1
2 After a quick breakfast at the hostel,
“This is not a brainwashing tour,”
said Ilan. We sat on folding chairs in a
misshaped oval in the conference room
of a hostel near the Sea of Galilee, dead
tired. We’d endured the bus ride from
Ben Gurion, a dinner of sub-par hostel
fare, and another in a series of awkward
icebreakers administered by our American
counselors. Ilan proceeded with our
orientation, which did not include an
introduction to the region, to Israel or
the Middle East, or any comment on
Cast Lead, except to insist on our safety.
Dan Sinykin
Here’s a brief explanation of how
Birthright works.Taglit-Birthright
is an umbrella organization,
funded by philanthropists – here’re
four of the largest donors and their
provenance of wealth: Charles
Bronfman, liquor; Michael Steinhardt,
hedge funds; Lynn Schusterman, oil
and natural gas; Sheldon Adelson, Las
Vegas casinos and development2 – which
contracts trip organizers to run specific
trips. Many of these trips have focuses,
like religion, or cultural connections, or
biking, though they all stick closely to
standards and itineraries established by
Taglit-Birthright. The trip organizer
Israel Outdoors ran my trip with a focus
on hiking, called Israel by Foot.
Each trip invites forty participants. I
would guess we had three fewer because
of late drop-outs with the outbreak of
Cast Lead. Two counselors who have
previous experience with Israel come
along to help facilitate and to support the
Israeli guide, Ilan. Each trip also has its
own armed security guard, in our case the
beefy Davir.
4
Early the next morning we stood on
a hillside high above the Sea of Galilee
as the sun rose with the red shadings of a
wet pomegranate. The Sea shimmered in
the low light. Water would be the theme
of the day.
we climbed on the bus and headed toward
the Golan Heights, a fertile region of
plateaus, mountains, and valleys in the
country’s far northeast, popular among
Israelis for vacationing. In 1967, during
the Six Day War, the Israelis captured the
Golan Heights from Syria. Syria holds
the claim to the Golan by, at the very
least, UN Security Council Resolution
242, which declares the region occupied
by Israel, and UN Security Council
Resolution 497, which says, “The Israeli
decision to impose its laws,
jurisdiction and administration 9
in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is
null and void and without international
legal effect.”3 Benjamin Netanyahu,
Israel’s Prime Minister, used the example
of Katzrin, the capital of the Golan, to
historically defend Israel’s sovereignty
over the region, “Suddenly we see a
thriving city in the Land of Israel, which
having been a gem of the Second Temple
era – roughly 2000 years ago – has been
revived anew.”4 Implied in Bibi’s words –
“Land of Israel,” “revived” – is the perverse
assumption that the Golan is and always
has been part of the Jewish homeland.
We arrived at Nimrod Castle on Mt.
Hermon’s slopes and, after a passing
glimpse of the medieval fortress, started
down the mountain toward the Banias
Nature Preserve. Crystal streams
gurgled over rocky beds. The Banias
Waterfall crashed and roiled in its lush
amphitheater. Ilan unfolded a map of
Israel. “We have a water problem,” he
said. “All this,” indicating Israel’s vast
nether regions, “Desert. We are in the
middle of our worst drought on record.
Here,” pointing to the Golan Heights
and the streams behind us, “We have
water.”
15-30% of Israel’s water comes from
the Golan, which makes up 3.5% of
Israel’s total size.
“Syria wants us to give up this land for
peace.” He smiled. “Do you think that’s a
good idea?”
5 The problem was, Palestinians lived
We delved further into history that
afternoon at Israel’s Independence Hall in
Tel Aviv, where more than sixty years ago
David Ben Gurion declared the creation
of the Jewish state. Meanwhile, the UN
General Assembly was demanding an
immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the
withdrawal of Israeli troops – though we
heard nothing about that.
Throughout history, Jews have
been persecuted and have longed for
a safe homeland. In the 19th century,
the Jewish Diaspora in Central and
Eastern Europe suffered another wave
of pogroms and anti-Semitism, out
of which rose Theodore Herzl,
10 father of Zionism. Herzl dreamed
of a modern incarnation of the Biblical
Jewish homeland, and organized the first
World Zionist Congress in 1897 to begin
the fulfillment of this dream.
During the end of the 19th century and
the beginning of the 20th, Jews began to
return to Palestine, then under Ottoman
rule. In 1917, Britain took control of
Palestine and that same year issued the
Balfour Declaration, looking with favor
on Jewish immigration to Palestine. We
viewed a film in the Hall that portrayed
the early, self-sacrificing Zionist pioneers,
raising Tel Aviv from the desert wastes
for the collective dream of Israel. “No
wonder we fight so hard to defend this
land,” said one our group’s gals, “Since
we worked that hard to create life where
there was nothing.”
From the viewing room, we sat before
the bench where Ben Gurion declared
the independence of the State of Israel on
May 14th, 1948. A local guide dramatized
the moment.
But there’s a lot of history that
we weren’t told. What Israel calls
Independence, Palestinians call the
Nakba, or Catastrophe.
In 1903, Joseph Chamberlain, the
British Colonial Secretary, offered the
Jews the British Uganda Programme to
establish a Jewish homeland in Africa.
The proposal passed at the sixth meeting
of the Zionist Congress, but after closer
inspection (lions, Maasai), the Jews
declined and set their will on Palestine.
there.
For a democratic Jewish state they
would need a Jewish majority. Herzl
himself said, “We shall try to spirit the
penniless population across the border
by procuring employment for it in the
transit countries, while denying it any
employment in our own country. The
property owners will come over to our
side. Both process of expropriation and
removal of the poor must be carried
out discreetly and circumspectly.”5 That
sounds so cloud-like and lovely, spiriting
a population. The reality would be far less
clean and simple.
In 1915, as WWI raged, Sir
Henry McMahon, the British High

Commissioner in Egypt, began a
correspondence with the Sharif of
Mecca, Husayn bin Ali, to encourage
the Arabs to revolt against the Ottoman
Empire, Britain’s enemy, then occupying
the Arab lands. In exchange, McMahon
offered Arab independence, crucially in
a letter from October 24th, 1915, where
he wrote, “I am authorized to give you
the following pledges on behalf of the
Government of Great Britain, and to
reply as follows to your note: That subject
to the modifications stated above [these
modifications excluded territory west of
Syria, but north of Palestine, from the
promise of independence], Great Britain
is prepared to recognize and uphold
the independence of the Arabs in all
the regions lying within the frontiers
proposed by the Sharif of Mecca,”6
frontiers that included Palestine. By early
1916, Husayn had agreed and, in June,
the Arabs revolted.
But not eighteen months later, the
British issued the Balfour Declaration,
which said, “His Majesty’s government
views with favour the establishment
in Palestine of a national home for the
Jewish people, and will use their best
endeavors to facilitate the achievement
of this object.”7 In 1922, after the fall
of the Ottoman Empire, the League
of Nations finalized the creation of the
British Mandate for Palestine, with the
Graffiti in el-Farahin. Photo by M.A.
express purpose of enabling the Balfour
Declaration.
The Arabs who fought the Ottoman
Empire in the hopes of an independent
state were left with a re-neged promise
and incoming waves of Jews who wanted
the land for a state of their own.
From 1922 to 1945, the Jewish
population in Palestine rose from 11%
to 33%, and landownership – procured
largely by the Jewish National Fund,
a non-profit corporation owned by
the World Zionist Organization, still
“planting trees” for Israel today – only
rose from 2.5% to almost 6%.
After WWII and the holocaust, the
question of a Jewish homeland became
urgent. On November 29th, 1947, the
General Assembly of the newly-formed
United Nations adopted Resolution 181,
by majority vote, though against all Arab
nations, recommending the partition of
Palestine into two states, one Arab, and
one Jewish. To the Jews, the UN allotted
56% of Palestine, though they constituted
no more than 33% of the population and
owned no more than 7% of the land.
Britain planned to leave Palestine in May
1948, giving the Jews six months to solve
their land and population problem.
Their solution? According to Israeli
historian Ilan Pappe, “In Plan Dalet,
adopted in March 1948 by the
high command of the Hagana 11
(the main Jewish underground in the
pre-state days), the Israeli objective of
1948 is clear. The goal was to take over
as much as possible of the territory of
Mandate Palestine and remove most
of the Palestinian villages and urban
neighborhoods from the coveted territory
which would constitute the future Jewish
state.”8
The word “remove,” applied to villages
and neighborhoods, sounds fairly benign
– but imagine the force and violence
required for such a removal. On April 9th,
1948, the Irgun and Stern Gang Zionist
militias massacred more than a hundred
Palestinian civilians in the village of Deir
Yassin, west of Jerusalem, putting the fear
of Yehova in Palestinian hearts.
Back on Birthright, in “Independence
Hall,” we listened to an archaic recording
of the initial declaration and to Israel’s
national anthem.
6 fear to quell questioning and promote
It was Friday, which meant Shabbat
began at sundown. We hurried from
Tel Aviv to a kibbutz in the hill country
outside Jerusalem.
The next day we lazed on the lawns,
chatting and reading, the world quiet
except for the occasional warplane
cruising overhead. We wondered, some of
us aloud, under a collective and macabre
mental cloud, Gaza? More than fifty
Israeli airstrikes were carried out in Gaza
that day.
We had been four days in Israel as
Cast Lead raged on, as hundreds more
Palestinians died, and no one had told us
anything. It was as if the invasion didn’t
exist. We asked Ilan about it, but he
deferred our questions for later.
7 For hours we posed, in various forms,
In the late afternoon of the next
day, after a hike to David’s Waterfall, a
swimming hole in the Ein Gedi Nature
Reserve, and a float in the Dead Sea, we
hopped on the bus and headed into the
desert toward Eilat.
Along the way, Ilan attempted
to address the Conflict. As the days
mounted without word about not
only Gaza but the Palestinians
12
and the Conflict in general, a number
of the participants began pressing Ilan
for an account. Into the microphone,
Ilan said something like, “Here is a
great explanation of our conflict with
the Palestinians.” He then quoted Golda
Meir, the former Israeli Prime Minister,
saying, “‘Peace will come when the Arabs
love their children more than they hate
us.’”
This did not go over well.
Ilan seemed to expect a got it response
from us. One gal, Beth, articulated the
obvious, that the quote was “awful, racist
bullshit.”
At this, Deborah, our frightful
American counselor, snapped. “I can’t
believe you guys,” she belted out, berating
us, “We’re having to defend Israel to
Jews! You of all people should be on
Israel’s side.”
Deborah’s reaction was defensive
and outrageous – fascist in resorting to
nationalism – but I’ve learned it was only
a sensitive case of one typical Zionist
response to criticism. Indeed, Ilan and
Ben, our other counselor, agreed with
Deborah, albeit less shrilly. They were
embarrassed to be caught on a bus with
us bad Jews. To them, a gentile critical of
Israel was anti-Semitic; a critical Jew was
a self-hating Jew.
Later, on the ride north we returned
to the topic of politics and peoples, this
time with the Israeli soldiers who had
joined our trip as our interlocutors.
“What do you think of Palestinians?”
we asked.
“They hate us,” was the general
response. “They want to destroy us and
throw us to the Sea. So we don’t like
them.”
the question, “Is there such a thing as a
good, peace-loving Arab?”But the soldiers’
minds ran a closed circuit, excluding even
this most modest possibility.
I wanted to know how the soldiers
thought I’d fare in my adventures after
Birthright, so I asked, “What would
happen were I to go to a Palestinian area,
like East Jerusalem?”
“You cannot go there,” said Amit, one
of the soldiers, “It’s too dangerous.”
“But what if I did?”
Amit’s face showed concern. “They
would throw stones at you or kidnap
you.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Right away.”
“What about the West Bank?” I
asked.
“Tch tch tch,” clucked Amit, scolding
the impossibility. The other soldiers and
Deborah agreed. They didn’t know my
intentions. They said I would be stoned
or shot. My death was imminent.
After the Birthright tour ended, I
moved to Beit Sahour, in the West Bank,
for five weeks. I lived in an apartment
in the middle of town, and frequently
walked home alone along the main strip
late at night from a friend’s house. I
traveled to Ramallah, Hebron, Nablus,
and elsewhere in the West Bank, and
only felt remotely threatened twice, both
times by nervous young Israeli soldiers.
Dan Sinykin is a graduate student in
English at Cornell.
Land and Childhood
Stolen from Iraq Burin
March 20, 2011 marked the first
anniversary of the murders of Usaid
Abd Qadous (19) and Mohammed
Ibrahim Abdel-Qadr Qadous (16) by
Israeli soldiers in Iraq Burin. When I
visited this village with an international
delegation in July 2010, the youth told us,
“Mohammed and Usaid were our bright
stars. The future of our village was robbed
Photo by B.H.
1 http:/www.birthrightisrael.com/site/
PageServer?pagename=about_main
2 http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-
3361888,00.html
3 http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/un/
un497.htm
4 http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/
News.aspx/130777
5 Smith, David Whitten, and Elizabeth
Geraldine Burr. Understanding World Religions:
a Road Map for Justice and Peace. Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. Print. P. 193.
6 Sanders, Ronald. The High Walls of Jerusalem:
a History of the Balfour Declaration and the Birth
of the British Mandate for Palestine. New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984. Print. P. 248
7 http://archive.timesonline.co.uk/tol/
viewArticle.arc?articleId=ARCHIVE-The_Times-
1917-11-09-07-010&pageId=ARCHIVE-The_
Times-1917-11-09-07
8 http://www.badil.org/ar/article74/
item/957-calling-a-spade-a-
spadethe-1948-ethnic-cleansing-of-
palestine?tmpl=component&print=1
Beth Harris
from us. Consequently we feel devastated.
The village has psychologically collapsed
and our lives are changed forever.”
Less than a year after the murders of
Usaid and Mohammed, on January 28,
2011, their cousin Oday Maher Hamza
Qadous was shot and killed by an Israeli
settler while farming his fields in Iraq
Burin. Abu Haytham, the village mayor
13

The road to Iraq Burin. Photo by B.H.
and local headmaster of the village,
had been a teacher for the three boys.
He lamented, “childhood has died in
Palestine.”
On Thursday, April 12 at 7:30pm
in Friends 309 at Ithaca College,
“Documenting Iraq Burin: Stories from
a Palestinian Village” offers a multimedia
portrait of Iraq Burin and the impact of
the murders on the boys’ families and the
village. This event is featured in the Finger
Lakes Environmental Film Festival.
Menna Khalil and Michael Kennedy
will present photographs and interviews
that narrate the struggle of Palestinian
villagers to protect their land and allow
their children a good future.
About 200 years ago, the Qadous
family left their village to build new lives
on the top of a mountain peak with a
spectacular view of the surrounding area.
In the new village, called Iraq Burin, the
majority have been farmers who have
cultivated crops such as figs, olives, grapes
and wheat. The village relies on services
such as hospitals and universities from
the neighboring city of Nablus. There
is only one road to the village, which is
easily closed off by the Israeli soldiers,
leaving Iraq Burin completely isolated.
The murders of the children of Iraq
Burin are a consequence of Israel’s
expansion of Jewish-only settlements
in the West Bank and the repression of
Palestinian villagers trying to defend their
land from confiscation. Abu Haytham
explained that students also face
increasing challenges with road closures,
stress and the constant threat of
14 violence by Israeli settlers and
soldiers. The youth added that it is hard
to concentrate on their studies when they
wonder which one of them will be killed
next.
The Bracha settlement, about one
kilometer south of Iraq Burin, was first
created as a military base in the early
1980s. After five years, it became a built-
up residential area, and now has nearly
twice the population of Iraq Burin. 90
dunams (23 acres) of Iraq Burin’s land
have been stolen by settlers. Many more
dunams have been confiscated by the
Israeli government, which has declared
part of the area a closed military zone.
According to a UNESCO report,
settler violence began escalating in 2009
with the burning of tens of dunams of
the Palestinians’ land. Abu Moammar
Ezzit Qadous showed members of my
delegation the area where the settlers had
burned his wheat fields, leaving only rocky
black patches. Of the 400 dunams of land
he owns, more than a third has been
confiscated by the Israeli government
with the justification that this land was
in a closed military zone. Subsequently
the land was transferred to the settlers
in Bracha, who now grow grapes on it.
The settlers in Bracha have also damaged
Palestinians’ wells, uprooted their trees
and obstructed the farmers’ access to
much of their land.
The Palestinian teenagers told us,
“The land is everything in our lives – our
income, our livelihood, our mother and
our honor.” During 2009, when settler
violence and land confiscations escalated,
the youth began to go the hills to
peacefully protest and protect their land
every Saturday. They said, “If we don’t
protest, the settlers, with the protection
of the Israeli soldiers, will swallow up our
whole village, too.”
On weekends students in the United
States go to football games, where
students from one school battle with
students from another school with the
same equipment. In contrast the Iraq
Burin youth enter a very uneven playing
field during their Saturday protests
against land being confiscated from their
village. The Palestinian youth explained,
“The Israeli military makes our village
a closed military zone every Saturday.
Their military jeeps block the road to our
village. Israeli soldiers occupy our land,
our homes and our weekends. Their tear
gas blinds our eyes and Israeli bullets fly.
It’s rare to see two boys walking down the
street in our village without one carrying
an injury.”
The Village Council of Iraq Burin
is constantly seeking resolutions to
the problems their village faces. Abu
Hatham travels to Ramallah, the seat
of administration of the Palestinian
Authority, and to Amman, Jordan to
present the plight of Iraq Burin to
the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli
District Coordinating Office, and the
United Nations, but to no avail. Even
council members have been arrested for
monitoring the protests.
After the murders of Usaid and
Mohammed, the UNESCO Chair on
Human Rights, Democracy and Peace
at An Najah University investigated the
murders and produced a report, which
concludes that the killings were a violation
of international law and legal principles.
First, the international humanitarian
law principles of “distinction, necessity
and proportionality” were violated. The
Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) made
no distinction between civilians and
combatants when they shot live fire in an
area without any combatants. Although
some of the Palestinian boys had been
throwing rocks, the lives of Israeli soldiers
who entered the village in armored jeeps
were not endangered by these rocks.
Using live ammunition in response to
rock-throwing is not a proportional
response. In addition, the willful killing
of civilians constitutes a war crime under
Article 147 of the Geneva Convictions
and violates Article 3 of the Universal
Declaration on Human Rights and the
Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Furthermore, the UNESCO
investigators reported that after the
shootings, the IDF obstructed the
victims’ access to medical care, which
violates Article 56 of the Fourth Geneva
Convention. After the boys were killed,
Israel neglected its responsibility to
investigate and punish those who were
responsible. Consequently, the UNESCO
report issues an “urgent appeal” to the
international community to assume its
legal responsibility “to sanction the State
of Israel and hold it accountable for
violation of international humanitarian
law,” which should include a preliminary
investigation of “war crimes” by the
prosecutor of the International Criminal
Court. Furthermore, the report urges
the Contracting Parties to the Geneva
Convention to hold Israel accountable for
violation of international law through the
continual building of Israeli settlements
in its Occupied Territories.
The international community has not
responded effectively to this appeal. In
February 2011, the United States thwarted
an effort by the United Nations Security
Council to pass a resolution supporting
the Israeli-Palestinian peace process
and declaring the illegality of Israeli
settlements in the Occupied Territories.
The United States provided the sole vote
against the resolution, a cavalier veto
that has far-reaching consequence in
the villages where Palestinian farmers
are losing their land, livelihoods and
children due to the aggressive expansion
of settlements.
The youth of Iraq Burin have
been abandoned by the international
community in their efforts to defend
their village. They told us, “The night that
Mohammed was martyred, we found his
blood stained his name on the sidewalk.
Since that day, Mohammed and Usaid
live in our hearts. Although we fear
that every day may be our last one, we
will continue to defend our legitimate
rights.”
Beth Harris is a professor in the Politics
Department at Ithaca College and founding
member of Jewish Voice for Peace, Ithaca
Chapter.
Sources and Resources
Iraq Burin website, http://iraqburin.wordpress.
com/ The quotes from Iraq Burin leaders,
farmers and youth in this article come from
this website, which our Research Journalism
Initiative delegation helped to create
during the summer 2010. The quotes
15
from the Iraq Burin youth include responses to
our questions from ten boys and young men.
For websites representing other Palestinian
villages that are resisting settlement
expansion, see http://www.bilin-village.org/
english/other-villages/.
UNESCO Chair on Human Rights, Democracy,
and Peace, An Najah University (2010)
“Investigative Summary Report” about facts
and circumstances related to the death of
Usaid Abd Qadus and Mohammed Ibrahim
Abdel-Qadr Qadus.
For biographical information the presenters
of “Documenting Iraq Burin: Stories from a
Palestinian Village”, see http://ithaca.edu/fleff/
fleffguests/?item=1508 and http://ithaca.edu/
fleff/fleffguests/?item=1507.
For the full text of the Security Council
resolution, see http://www.maannews.net/
eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=361385.
For an analysis of the significance of the U.S.
veto of the Security Council resolution, see
Stephen Zunes’s article “Obama’s Veto on
Israeli Settlements Demonstrates Contempt for
International Humanitarian Law,” http://www.
huffingtonpost.com/stephen-zunes/obamas-
veto-on-israeli-se_b_838060.html.
For documentation by international groups
that have demonstrated their solidarity
with Iraq Burin, see http://palsolidarity.
org/?s=Iraq+Burin (International Solidarity
Movement) and http://mptinpalestine.
blogspot.com/#uds-search-results (Michigan
Peace Team).

Jewish Voice for Peace Calls on TIAA

CREF to Divest from Firms that Profit
from Israel’s Illegal Occupation
One year ago, Jewish Voice for Peace took a lesson from the divestment

Howard Botwinick, JVP-Ithaca Chapter

campaign against apartheid in South Africa and launched a national petition
campaign to pressure our country’s largest academic pension fund (TIAA-
CREF) to divest from corporations profiting from Israel’s illegal occupation.
The JVP petition boldly and unequivocally begins with this statement:
We are TIAA-CREF participants, investors, and supporters who are deeply
concerned that TIAA-CREF invests in many companies that profit from Israel’s
occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
Some of these companies provide weapons and covert surveillance supplies that
maintain the occupation by force. Others take or exploit Palestinian resources,
including scarce water and even the land itself. All are profiting from Israel’s
violations of international law and international human rights standards.
After highlighting corporate offenders such as Caterpillar, Veolia, Northrop
Grumman and Motorola, the petition concludes with the following:
Out of commitment to equality, freedom and international law, we therefore
urgently request that TIAA-CREF divest from companies that:
Directly profit from or contribute to the Israeli occupation of the Gaza
Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
Provide products or services that contribute to the construction and
maintenance of Israeli settlements and/or the Separation Wall, both of which
are illegal under international law.
Provide products or services that contribute to or enable violent acts that
target civilians.
The JVP campaign initially gained national attention when members raised
their concerns at the annual TIAA-CREF stockholders meeting in July of 2010. In
September heads also turned when over 80 faculty members of UMass Boston
16 presented their petition to Roger Ferguson, the CEO of the giant pension
fund. He was in Boston delivering a convocation address.
Then on December 10th, Human Rights Day, JVP took their campaign to the next
level and organized visits to over one third of the pension fund’s offices across the
country and presented over 15,000 signatures of pension participants who didn’t like
how their money was being spent. Local JVP chapters called on offices in cities like
Ann Arbor, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Durham, NYC and LA. And yes, even
the newly formed Ithaca Chapter did its part and organized a demonstration outside
of the local TIAA-CREF office right here on the Ithaca Commons. In case you’re
wondering, it’s right upstairs from M&T Bank. Unfortunately, the Ithaca Journal
didn’t cover the event, so you might have missed it.
Why TIAA-CREFF?
Jewish Voice for Peace has decided to focus on TIAA-CREF for the
following three strategic reasons. First, TIAA-CREF is big. In fact it’s one of the
biggest funds of its kind in the world and its investments in companies like Caterpillar
are quite hefty – to the tune of over $250 million. Second, TIAA-CREF is accessible
to almost everyone. With 60 offices in the US and 15,000 client institutions in the
academic, research, medical, cultural and nonprofit fields, chances are that wherever
you may be in the country, you will find a network of TIAA-CREF participants close
to you. Third, TIAA-CREF cares about its reputation for being a “socially responsible”
investment fund. In 2009 it divested from companies involved in Darfur.
Most recently, JVP has designated April as “the right to education” month and
they have invited several young Palestinian activists to tour the country in order to
explain how current Israeli policies have been making it extremely difficult for young
Palestinians to get a decent education. Indeed, Palestinian students and teachers trying
to access education face unlawful detention, armed harassment, curfews, checkpoints,
closed schools, dorm raids, apartheid walls, apartheid roads, illegal arrest and bombed
schools and universities. And so, once again, petitioners will be asking why the world’s
premiere retirement fund for educators is invested in companies that help to create
these barriers! Palestinian students visited the Cornell campus on April 1st before
they went on to the Midwest.
As in the campaign against apartheid in South Africa, JVPers hope their growing
divestment campaign will play an important role in pressuring Israel to finally
come to terms with the just aspirations of the Palestinian people. At this point the
campaign has been endorsed by numerous organizations including the Palestinian
Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions National Committee, and the Popular Struggle
Coordination Committee. It has also been endorsed by large numbers of well known
artists, academics and activist intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Judith
Butler, Adrienne Rich, and Tony Kushner.
JVP understands that another key piece to this struggle will be to put pressure on
the U.S. government to change its policies towards Israel. Most important, the U.S.
must stop giving billions of dollars of annual military aid to Israel. As JVP’s mission
statement points out, “military aid allows Israel to avoid making serious efforts to
resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as conflicts with its other neighbors.
It enables the occupation, contributes to the devastation of Palestinian society and
fosters the militarization of Israeli society.”
One thing has become abundantly clear. Without the international community
putting a great deal of pressure on Israel, a non-violent solution to this conflict will be
next to impossible. Perhaps the divestment campaign will be a good way to begin to
shift the national and international discussion.

To sign the petition and for more information go to www.jewishvoiceforpeace.

org. To find out about our local JVP Chapter and our campaign at SUNY Cortland,
Ithaca College, and Cornell, email me at hbotwini@twcny.rr.com. We could
use some help. 17
The Shining City on a Hill &
the Light unto the Nations
In assessing the “special relationship” between Israel and the United States,

Kevin McGinnis
one may clearly see that the relationship is unlike the alliance between the US
and any other ally. No other ally is protected by US with such stubbornness or
stalwart fidelity. It is no surprise then to see Obama veto the condemnation of
the West Bank settlements in the UN Security Council. What does deserve
closer scrutiny is the fact that the US was the only Security Council member
to oppose this resolution. Why is there such a firm bond between these two
states? What can the founding legends and state mythology of each state tell
us and how can they point toward an outcome of the current Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict, which will be already 63 years old come Nakba Day this May 15th?
For the purposes of this discussion, let these words be defined in the following ways.
A nation is a group of people identifying themselves with a common past, practices,
and future. A state is a political entity governing a given area of land ostensibly for the
good of its citizens. A nation-state is a political entity governing an area of land claimed
by a group of people as their homeland, and the good which the nation-state governs
for is ostensibly the good of the particular nation. A state-nation is an ideological
attempt by a state to form a corresponding nation through mass propaganda aimed
at changing the self-perception of the state’s citizens to identify with the new state-
nation and vicariously with the state, legitimating the state. The ability of a state to
form over a particular area of land is rooted in the conquest of the land by a particular
group of people. The state is the institutionalization of that conquest for purpose
of maintaining the dominance of the conquerors and in particular maintaining the
privileges of the dominant class within the conquerors who guide the formation of the
state. This process of state formation relies on either the propagation of a state-nation
or the explanation of the new state as the nation-state of a particular people. The
choice is made between these two options on the basis of which one legitimates the
original conquest and the privileges of the ruling class, which may shift with changing
circumstances. With these definitions and processes in mind, we can compare the
colonization of North America by Europeans and the colonization of Palestine by
Zionists and the establishment of a state within those lands by each group for the
purposes of institutionalizing its conquest.
In the case of the US, it may be difficult for one raised in US society to gain
enough perspective to see clearly the privileges and institutionalized violence inherent
in the current system and to deal with the real effects that the founding ideologies are
responsible for. The very notions of colonization, imperialism, and eurocentric racism
are rooted in the ruling theory of bourgeois liberalism as explained by John Locke. In
writing on the colonization of the Americas, Locke justifies the appropriation of lands
held by native peoples based on the idea that they were not utilizing the land to its full
capacity thus European settlers by right may seize this land to make it productive to
its fullest extent. With this justification rooted in the perceived inability of the native
people to construct an economy deemed productive enough, the lands discovered
in the Americas belonged to any European who found them1. This idea of granting
rights to land based on productive use may be seen as the driving influence behind the
establishment of plantations based on slave labor throughout the Mid-Atlantic and
Southern colonies in North America. Thus the entire colonial economy was geared
to the production of cash crops using appropriated land and enslaved labor, giving
these colonies a comparative advantage in large scale agriculture. As every neo-liberal
professor will tell you today, the economy of a state is most efficient when producing
the good in which it has a comparative advantage.
18 The very act of declaring independence from Britain may be seen as
 Left: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Scene_at_the_Signing_of_the_Constitution_of_the_United_
States.png ; Right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Declaration_of_State_of_Israel_1948.jpg
another consequence of the justification of property appropriation due to inefficient
utilization. As the slogan of the pro-independence forces was “No Taxation Without
Representation,” the roots of the war can be said to be economic. The Declaration of
Independence, among other documents, lays out a case for altering or abolishing a
form of government when it no longer serves the needs of the people. In other words,
when a government becomes inefficient or under-utilizes a specific area, it is justifiable
to appropriate from that government the under-utilized territory to reconstitute a
state that protects those “inalienable rights” such as “life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness.” The fact that this ideology was turned against the colonial financiers of
Britain who profited from the early establishments of the colonies is an unintended
consequence of the emergence of a class of bourgeois merchants who managed the
American section of the Triangle Trade. This merchant class formed the nucleus of the
conquest of the colonies for the purpose of maximizing utilization of the resources of
the continent.
With the creation of a state the most important group that is created within the
state’s borders are the non-citizens. For the US, these groups historically include
non-property-owning men, women, enslaved Africans, and native peoples of North
America. The Indians are excluded from the US census conducted in 1790 and
during the War of Independence had campaigns waged against them to ethnically
cleanse them from the area that the US wanted to be included into its future state;
among these was one foray deep into Haudenosaunee (popularly known as ‘Iroquois’)
country in upstate New York, including the complete destruction of a Cayuga village
where Ithaca now stands. This is in a long line of ethnic cleansing and extermination
campaigns undertaken by every European power in the colonization of the Americas.
By cloaking itself in rhetoric of religion and civilization, the US suppressed
indigenous rights to lands as well as indigenous practices and judged indigenous
nations according to their acceptance of European practices. One such nation, the
Cherokee, should have had their private property rights respected by US liberal society.
However, gold was discovered on their land. A signed but unenforced agreement
between President Thomas Jefferson had promised to Georgia the removal of the
Cherokee from their land2. Although the Supreme Court upheld the land rights of
the Cherokee, President Andrew Jackson removed the Cherokee by force, leading to
the deaths of about a third of the Cherokee3. The ‘inalienable’ rights of the indigenous
and the recognition of the indigenous as ‘civilized’ are only respected when that respect
does not interfere with the access of the ruling class to valuable resources.
Stemming from these examples, the history of the US and its state mythology
of being “God’s country,” “the Shining City on a Hill,” and “the Melting Pot” and
its messianic claims to a “Manifest Destiny” of ruling the entire continent
and being the “Arsenal of Democracy” or “Leader of the Free World” are all
19
examples of attempts to form a state-nation comprising the various peoples who make
up the waves of immigrants and to unite them in a purpose of solidifying the power of
the ruling class who have been able to maintain their position by making concessions
to its exploited people whose gains were subverted by changes in the state mythology
to continue the legitimation of the standing order. The very existence of the US is
predicated upon the supposed right of Europeans to seize the land of non-Europeans;
the right being cloaked in language of efficiency.
It is a mistake to point to the Holocaust as a motivation for the founding of Israel
because the Zionist dream of a Jewish state goes back to the ghettoes and shtetls
of Europe. As minorities in Europe and victims of widespread antisemitism and
popular demonization, the European Jews were faced with a fraught choice between
preserving a distinctive ethnic identity but at the cost of isolation, oppression, and
brutalization on the one hand, and assimilation into the various European societies
on the other. The alternative of settling in Palestine, the historic homeland of the
Jewish people, and creating there a nation-state for the Jewish people scattered around
the world was a solution which preserved Jewishness and enabled an escape from
European persecution. There was a complication to this solution: Palestine was full
of Palestinians and had been for ages. They had their own national culture, their own
deep ties to the land, and any mass settlement by European Jews would amount to a
colonial project.
Taking advantage of British occupation of Palestine after the end of World War
I, Zionists, recognizing the infeasibility of establishing a Jewish nation-state without
the help of a sympathetic European power, sought to ingratiate themselves and their
project with the colonial power and accelerated their program of buying up Arab land
and then signing pledges to only sell that land to other Jews thereby establishing
enclaves exclusively Jewish in every aspect. Cheap labor was imported in the form of
Mizrahi Jews from Arab states. The Mizrahim speak Arabic as their first language, not
Yiddish like the Ashkenazim who made up the bulk of the leadership of the Zionist
movement. By relying on Mizrahi labor, the Ashkenazi Zionists were able to exclude
any participation of Arabs in the economies of the kibbutzim or Jewish settlements.4
This suited the propaganda used by Zionists to sway European states to their cause.
The Zionists presented themselves to Europeans as carrying the Enlightenment of
Europe to the Arab world to ‘civilize’ the Arabs and fulfilling the biblical role of Israel
as the “Light unto the Nations” of teaching their ‘backwards’ neighbors morality from
their divinely ordained homeland of Israel, or as Theodor Herzl said, “[the Jewish
state] can be the vanguard of culture against barbarianism.”5
No stranger to colonization, the British saw that the Zionists were undermining
the stability of British rule over Palestine and began limiting Jewish immigration to
Palestine and halted Jewish purchases of land in Palestine. This prompted a response
by Zionists: terrorism. Some chose to target Arab villages which could no longer be
legally depopulated by land purchases, and others chose to target the British colonial
authorities. The Haganah, the predecessor to the current IDF, targeted Arab villages
and civilians in campaigns of ethnic cleansing and intimidation to provoke the exodus
of Palestinians. The UN Partition Plan to create a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine
would have assigned the Jewish state 55% of the land when in reality they only owned
6%.6 The alternative offered by the Palestinians and other Arabs was the creation of a
single democratic, secular state in Palestine.7 The hopes for an UN-mediated solution
were dashed when the UN Emissary Count Folke Bernadotte was assassinated by
Zionist terrorists from Irgun, comprised of extremist Zionists and led by future Israeli
Prime Minister Menachem Begin, which targeted not only the British but engaged
in not just ethnic cleansing but massacres in Palestinian villages such as Deir Yassin.
Future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was the commander the Zionist forces
that massacred the Muslim men of Lydda and sent the rest of the population
20 into exile including the future founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation
 “Manifest Destiny.” John Gast, 1872. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:American_progress.JPG

of Palestine George Habash. The Palestinians who refused to be driven from their
homes or intimidated into exile make up the current Arab population of Israel, and
they were subject to martial law from 1948 until 1967.8
Israel’s propagandists routinely point to the dictatorships of the neighboring Arab
states as proof that Israel is important as “the only democracy in the region.” This is
just code for that same Zionist strategy in the late 1800s. Zionists really mean that it
exists in the region as a gendarme for the US ruling class and “Light unto the Nations”
of the Arab world. By destabilizing the region, the military-industrial complex which
is the backbone of the US economy is ensured customers among the Arab states in
fear of Israel’s bouts of invading their neighbors or their prerogative of intervening in
any state for their security without the need to justify themselves. Israel itself and its
occupied territories also act as proving grounds for US weaponry such as the drones
that rain death on the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Thus, the dollars spent
by US consumers on Arab oil is redistributed to the military-industrial complex and
Euro-American oil conglomerates. However, when the rhetoric of the West and Israel
is heeded by the Palestinian people, complications make the charade of the peace
process more difficult. In the case of the Palestinian elections of 2006, the Palestinian
people elected their leaders in elections recognized as free and fair and hailed by
everyone as proof of a step forward in the peace process. Unfortunately, the people
chose a leadership unpalatable to the powers that be, so they laid siege to Gaza; a
siege lasting to this day. Rather than deal with the legitimately elected representatives
of the Palestinian people, Israel would rather choose their negotiation partner, the
Palestinian Authority, whose kleptocratic leadership is as equally invested in the status
quo as Israel and the US. Just as in the case of the Cherokee, even when the indigenous
follow along with the demands of the occupiers, indigenous rights are only respected
as long as they are not contrary to the economic interests of the occupiers.
The fundamental tie between Israel and the US beyond the dollars of breeding
organized chaos in the Middle East is that each state is rooted in the notion that the
non-European world is raw putty not just available for shaping by Europeans but
in desperate need of such re-shaping due to the “backwardness” of non-Europeans.
For a US citizen to be supportive of Palestine is not just to reject the Zionist right
to seize Palestinian land; it also requires the recognition of and rejection of
the various arguments bandied about to justify the seizure of indigenous lands 21
in the founding of the US. In this aspect the US and Israel are the same: they are
states formed as the result of conquests which dispossessed the indigenous people and
formed a new majority of the desired nation for the state through ethnic cleansing.
This is one reason the US lags so far behind other states in dealing honestly with the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
is just as illegitimate now as it was in 1948. The final resolution of the conflict must
include the repatriation of the 1948 refugees to their original homes, not consignment
to the rump Palestinian state which would be formed from the leftovers of the Green
Line. A just solution must recognize the right of the Palestinian people to live in all
parts of historic Palestine with total freedom of movement along with full citizenship
coupled with recognition of responsibility for the 63-year-old refugee crisis and
reparations from the Zionist state. The ideas and dreams of Zionists have no right
to take precedence over the reality of Palestine which was obliterated in 1948. The
original solution proposed by the Arab Higher Committee remains the best solution
in respects to both Jewish and Palestinian people in Palestine: a single democratic,
secular state.
Kevin McGinnis is a sophomore from Boca Raton, Florida, majoring in German and
Government with a minor in International Relations.
1 Locke, J. (1689). Second Treatise on Government.
2 Morrow, C. (n.d.). Trouble on the Horizon. Retrieved April 2, 2011, from Southeast Missouri State
University: http://cstl-cla.semo.edu/cmorrow/ui339/lectures/Georgia%20Compact%201802.htm
3 Cherokee Removal. (n.d.). Retrieved April 2, 2011, from Georgia Encyclopedia: http://www.
georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-2722
4 Massad, J. (1996). Zionism’s Internal Others: Israel and Oriental Jews. Retrieved November 13,
2010, from JSTOR: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2538006
5 Segev, T. (2000). One Palestine, Complete. Metropolitan Books.
6 Said, E. (1992). The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Books.
7 Abunimah, A. (2006). One Country. New York: Metroplitan Books.
8 Said, E. (1992). The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Books.

For more information, including critical coverage you

won’t find with CNN or the New York Times, see the following:

Electronic Intifada — http://electronicintifada.net/

Alternative Information Center — http://alternativenews.org/
B’Tselem — http://www.btselem.org/English/index.asp
Breaking the Silence — http://www.shovrimshtika.org/index_e.asp
Global BDS movement — http://www.bdsmovement.net/
U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation — http://endtheoccupation.org/
Al Jazeera English — http://english.aljazeera.net/
Ha’aretz — http://haaretz.com/
Ma’an News Agency — http://www.maannews.net/eng/Default.aspx
International Middle East Media Center — http://imemc.org/
22
 Sayres Rudy2
Apartheid between Belonging and Expulsion1 School of Critical Social Inquiry
Again we read about brutality
in the Middle East. The ruthless
government’s fighter jets
massacre innocent civilians below,
their legally justified and morally
necessary resistance brutally
assailed by a sadistic regime
whose foreign mercenaries
attack with impunity unarmed
or defenseless citizens who
are slaughtered or maimed in
numbers wholly disproportionate
to those lost among their killers.
But enough about Israel, let’s talk
about Libya.3
This non-funny joke reminds
us that political struggle is
inherently a non-funny joke, in
which we all know the absurdity
that defines power and ideology,
coercion and mendacity, but we
carry on with our sincere faces,
our serious work, our unsparing
will, our inexhaustible critical
intelligence. This is why radicals,
and those who have seen the
worst, are funny, if in a specific
way – ironic or sarcastic or satiric
in their sensibility. This is because
of the homology between humor
and the way out: abuse juts one
out into the world in ways that
ramify into uproarious parody
and militancy. Hence we speak
of good political humor as brutal,
evincing the ironic inversion of
the brutality of power.
In his prologue to The Black
Jacobins CLR James wrote:
“[The Spaniards] introduced
Christianity, forced labor in
mines, murder, rape, bloodhounds,
strange diseases, and artificial
famine (by the destruction
of cultivation to starve the
rebellious). These and other requirements
of the higher civilization reduced the
native population from an estimated half-
a-million, perhaps a million, to 60,000 in
15 years.”4 These “other requirements of
the higher civilization” is James’s rhetoric
of brutality; fusing the gravity and levity
of monstrous inhumanity, it absorbs
and expels the absurdity of justified
decimation and suffering. It is a hilarious
phrase, but how does it work? How can
this sardonic fillip alone carry the horror
of genocide? The casually remarked
obviousness of Spanish hypocrisy does
this trick, of course, but also the revenge
of the subaltern on the absurd pretension
of the powerful – more deeply, in the
irony that it is “savage” wit that exposes
the contours of social power. We often
hear that the world needs a Swift to
expose the absurdity of its abuses and
justifications – but the world is already
Swift, and Swift would have been the
first to say he was the stenographer of
human violence, injustice, and idiocy. To
these things he added his genius, nothing
more.
I just implied that the “way out”
of a coercive or oppressive condition
begins with a jutting out into the world
that initiates humor and seriousness.
As Nietzsche said, we are serious like
children at play. But what does this jutting
out into the world entail? If we conceive
of coercion in Frantz Fanon’s conception,
we see it as a dialectical series of capturing
and dislodging. In his essay, “Concerning
Violence,” Fanon described:
A world compartmentalized, Manichean
and petrified, a world of statues: the state of
the general who led the conquest, the statue
of the engineer who built the bridge. A world
cocksure of itself, crushing with its stoniness
the backbones of those scarred by the whip.
That is the colonial world. The colonial
subject is a man penned in; apartheid is
but one method of compartmentalizing the
colonial world. The first thing the colonial
subject learns is to remain in his place and
not overstep his limits.5
But in the succeeding passages, Fanon
traces the escape from this capture in
a causal account, as if the capture itself
forced the escape.
The dreams of the colonial subject are
muscular dreams, dreams of action, dreams
of aggressive vitality. I dream I am jumping,
swimming, running, and climbing. I dream
I burst out laughing, I am leaping
across a river and chased by a pack of 23
cars that never catches up with me. During
the colonization the colonized subject frees
himself night after night between nine in
the evening and six in the morning.
The dream begins the revolution;
this quiver of unconscious muscularity
externalizes itself in the world: through
“blood feuds” among the colonized
that symbolically ignore the colonizer;
through re-“incorporation into the
traditions and history” of their land;
and finally, Fanon tells us, through
“the ecstasy of dance. Any study of the
colonial world therefore must include
an understanding of the phenomenon
of dance and possession. The colonized’s
way of relaxing is precisely this muscular
orgy during which the most brutal
aggressiveness and impulsive violence
are channeled, transformed, and spirited
away.” The “dance circle” is permissive,
protective, empowering. Finally, he says,
“During the struggle for liberation there
is a singular loss of interest in these
rituals. With his back to the wall, the
knife at his throat, to be more exact the
electrode on his genitals, the colonized
subject is bound to stop telling stories.”
Fanon’s writing is always stirring
enough to obscure its complexity. The
colonized is a subject hounded into
objectification, subjectivity reduced to
objectivity, in a stony land of statues
inhabited “by different species,” one full
and one famished, where, as Fanon says,
“the ‘thing’ colonized becomes a man
through the very process of liberation.”6
Note the paradox: the rebel must liberate
herself in order to begin the liberation
process. But how does a “thing” liberate
itself in the first place? How does an
object make itself a subject? How does a
“thing” dream of rebelling? How does a
dream about laughing become laughter,
a dream about muscularity become a
dance? How does this thing of apartheid
dream at all, such that oppression delivers
revolution? Locating this enduring urge
to freedom in dreams, Fanon denies
that the subject is ever extinguished. The
subject takes refuge in the unconscious, a
site split but not by the tragicomic.
Note, Fanon insists, that
24 “apartheid is but one method of
compartmentalizing the colonial world.”
He is registering here, if too subtly, that
apartheid may not be powerful or harsh
enough to convey harsh experiences
of colonial occupation, a consideration
imperative for the solidarity movement
with Palestine. Like the “outdoor prison,”
“zoo,” and “laboratory” comparisons,
“apartheid” may be too soft an image for
what the Palestinians have experienced
under Israeli prerogative and brutality.
Intended to shock the conscience by
insisting that Palestinians are treated as
prisoners or animals, these euphemisms
fail to convey conditions in Gaza and
the West Bank, which resemble torture
chambers more than prisons or zoos
or labs secured by guards, zookeepers,
or technicians.7 If people accept the
torture chamber itself – if only as an
“sayable unsayable”8 – as entailed by
the liberal democratic global war on
terror, how much radical traction comes
from referring to Gaza as a prison,
zoo, or laboratory? Perhaps those who
knowingly pay good money to warehouse
people in prisons, de-nature animals in
zoos, and re-design human subjectivity
in molecular biology labs9 will support a
regime that tortures and racializes people
in any event. But among still sensitized
people could the apartheid image
similarly provide inapt or unwitting
comfort by invoking a fallen regime less
pervasively and enduringly politicidal
than the occupation-systems in Palestine?
Is the apartheid trope a Fanonian dream,
invoked not for its accuracy but for its
South African precedent, its promise
of inherent self-eradication, of digging
its own grave? Does the long-standing
fight by Palestinians testify to this
eventual erasure or overcoming, or to the
opposite?
Let us ask, directly, does the colonial
occupation of Palestine constitute
apartheid? In 1973, the United
Nations General Assembly opened for
ratification the International Convention
on the Suppression and Punishment
of the Crime of Apartheid (ICSPCA)
[1] It defined the crime of apartheid
as “inhuman acts committed for the
purpose of establishing and maintaining
domination by one racial group of
persons over any other racial group of
persons and systematically oppressing
them.” The 2002 Rome Statute of the
International Criminal Court attaches
apartheid, as an inhumane act, to other
crimes against humanity and defines
it as “an institutionalized regime of
systematic oppression and domination
by one racial group over any other racial
group or groups and committed with the
intention of maintaining that regime.”10 I
will distill these principles into a simple
definition of apartheid as “institutional
racism to achieve the exploitation,
expulsion, or subordination of a physically
or ethnically identifiable subaltern
people.”11 The historical, juridical, and
political treatment of Palestinians as
2nd-class citizens in Israel, occupied
torture-victims, and expelled refugees,
render it obvious that Zionist Israel is
an apartheid state.12 Indeed, as a modern
state, Israel would be an exception were
it not based on apartheid, given the
definitions offered.13 I would like, then,
to ask different questions, for the sake of
discussion and provocation.
First, is Israel worse than an apartheid
regime? I intend this question not to
indulge in the mental disaster called
“competitive suffering” but to access
the mechanisms of social control in
Palestine. Facile comparisons among
Israel, South Africa, and other racial
regimes likely undermine our sense of
how Israeli Zionism endures. As a system
of political control – and, by extension,
of imposing political and social death
– Israeli apartheid is more invasive and
effective than South Africa’s, and can be
seen as a conscious effort to avoid the
vulnerabilities of the African apartheid
system. As detailed most impressively in
Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land,14 Israel’s
mode of domination is an ever-evolving,
improvisational “politics of separation”
based on endlessly re-configured
spaces and partitions that constitute
a “dynamic morphology,” “structured
chaos,” and “political plastic” of racial
and ethnic segregation. Weizman’s
account depicts a new apartheid that
abjures reliance on crude topographies
of racial bantustanization and perfects a
complex of sovereign, disciplinary, and
governmental technologies (assisted by
the rebarbative Palestinian Authority
collaboration).15 As Fanon foresaw, racial
domination improves apartheid, refining
and dissimulating the institutions,
discourses, and practices of segregation,
while retaining its underlying logic.
Israel’s regime of fragmented, surveillant,
vertical, invisible, and unaccountable
respatialization and dispossession, its
tactical de-re-territorializations of
Palestinian life, lubricated by global
accreditation or justification,16 are far
beyond anything the architects of past
apartheid could dream of accomplishing.
Second, is this “core racist logic” the
optimal framework for countering Israeli
apartheid? There are several problems
with the comparison between Israel and
pre-1990 South Africa and many other
cases of colonial apartheid. Minimally
Israeli apartheid differs in its production-
accumulation regime, market structure,
ethnic assimilation, ideological spectrum,
democratic practices, geographical
spatialization, demography, modes of
re-subjectivization and resistance, and
global norms of racial versus ethnic
partition. I merely list them, as the point
is not to identify the two forms but to
reclaim the concept of apartheid. But
given the strong association of apartheid
with South African institutional racism,
why invoke the same term to describe
Zionism’s institutional racism? In this
respect, it seems odd that the most
celebrated deployment of the analogy
ignores the class composition of resistance
movements against South African
and Israeli apartheid, located in labor-
retentive and labor-expulsive production
and accumulation regimes, respectively.17
This is not to insist that activists piously
derive opposition strategies from
material or social relations of production,
but rather to observe that awareness
of “structures” might illuminate the
possibilities of “agents.”18
Third, then, is apartheid a wise
rhetorical choice, worth the cost of
misdescribing Israeli oppression
or understating the suffering 25
of Palestinian within Israel, under
occupation, and in exile? Let us recall
that apartheid means “apartness” or
“separateness.” The two-state solution,
the partition, is apartheid. National-
states, founded on apartheid, rely on
amnesiac liberal dogma to put all that
in the past. In some sense, the apartheid
notion says too much and not enough.
What is the other of the politics of
occupation and apartheid? Given the
looming contradictions of identity
politics and the so-called heroic efforts
to separate “warring peoples” in Bosnia
and Palestine and elsewhere, apartness
in times of seemingly permanent conflict
will always seem in principle a good
starting point. It is also worth asking:
what does it signal to have to resort to
this word, “apartheid”? Does it register an
incapacity to refer to Palestinian suffering
without validating that suffering with
reference to some other group, much as
people insist on comparing Gaza to a
Nazi camp? Does the constant reference
to non-Palestinians deepen the sense
that Palestinians cannot matter on their
own, or that Israeli racism is not in itself
appalling – but only appalling inasmuch
as it approaches a widely de-legitimized
apartheid regime elsewhere? Does this
tactic not unwittingly invite quibbling
over the comparison, which is not a good
one historically or juridically, further
hampering activist argumentation?
Is apartheid not a distraction doing
disservice to the rhetoric of solidarity?
Fourth, does apartheid cost us in
any other way? I wish to ask this in a
provocative way: is Zionism per se best
understood through the actuality of
the occupation or opposed through the
language of anti-apartheid? Here I offer
only a cautionary, subterranean reading of
the politics of separation. My intuition is
that the obvious and necessary critique of
apartheid (of all manner of institutional
racism) has foreclosed, and perhaps
silenced, deliberation over the politics
of belonging. Still more directly, do
opponents of Israeli apartheid in any way
use the occupation to discredit Zionism
tout court, thus eliding ethical
26 dilemmas encountered in all, not
merely theocratic-ethnocratic, polities?
However unwittingly, then, does the
accusation of apartheid prevent thought
or discussion about of the validity of
membership criteria for any kind of sub-
universal social or political order?
To reject apartheid is to reject
apartness, presumably is to embrace
universalism as a condition of human
freedom. We may infer that this notion
of freedom is limited to the absence of
coercive separation unless it would hold
that two groups who expressly desire
to be separated be forced together on
some “universal” principle to which
neither accedes.19 In this case, the anti-
apartheid position would prefer coercive
universalism to coercive separation. As
far as I know the general anti-apartheid
position countenances the non-coercive
presence, retention, or restoration of
separation as the basis for a Good Life, a
defensible political ethics, or a condition
of freedom. But if freedom requires or
allows choices, values, priorities, criteria
of membership and belonging; if a
polity is based on any ties of identity or
bonds of affectivity; or if a society must
be grounded on a collective language,
sensibility, or law, from what position
does an activist argue against separation
among peoples? The reflections of Kant,
Hegel, Freud, and Arendt pervade these
remarks, but also the conundrums at
the heart of Fanon’s or Said’s thinking
on post-colonial political forms. All of
these thinkers have asked, once the clear
denunciation of institutionalized racism
is affirmed: How does one lodge oneself
politically in freedom and universality
without adopting the evacuated
subjectivity of a cipher blown about by
the various energies and passions of wars
and markets?
I grew up in an environment explicitly
devoted to such a politics of erasure, a
politics of hollowness that claimed no
ideology: no religion, no history, no
difference – in short, no separateness.
It was the vacuous fantasy-space of the
suburban monad, adrift and “purely
rational” and non-allegiant. This was
freedom defined scrupulously as the
absence of attachment, the absence of
commitment, of calling, conviction, or
purpose. It was an ethos in which one
miraculously embodied a theodicy that
was once deferred and is now transcribed
in pure, delusional ideology: it refused
to speak its classism, its racism, its
misogyny, or to name its bourgeois ethos.
And that refusal was its politics, the
ability to silence its own repression as an
unspoken institution. This is the politics,
too, of both the apartheid regime and
of liberal universalism: each is a totality
that silences its others in the smothering
ideology of universality-of-separation
or universality-as-transcendence. The
proof is, as we have seen in the “western”
reception of the Arab revolts, the doors to
the politics of universal-liberal democratic
non-apartheid freedom are always open
to the laborer, the person of color, the
woman, the refugee, the adoptee, as long
as the ideological and symbolic dues are
paid in full: no sectarians, no religionists,
no movements, no politics, no history,
no systemic grievances, no races, no
classes, and no radicals need apply.
Only an agreement on the absence of
disagreement. How do or can we situate
ourselves in such a politics – a politics
in which we would not give our life for
a principle, for a separation that fulfills
our need for meaningful belonging in the
world?
Endnotes
1 This is the written version of a talk given at
Hampshire College, 10 Mar 2011. Christopher
Clark and Max Ajl shared the panel with
me, providing complementary ethical and
political-economic assessments. I thank Omar
Dahi for discussion.
2 Sayres Rudy teaches political philosophy
and comparative politics at Hampshire
College, including courses on Palestine and
Occupation. He has published a trilogy of
articles on Islamism and globalization, the
war on terror, and sovereign prerogative; and
a recent essay on the strategic ambiguity of
post-sovereign violence. He has researched
in Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Palestine,
Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, and taught social
theory and politics at Columbia and Harvard
Universities and Amherst College.
3 I cannot help relaying this remark by
President Obama: "All the forces that we're
seeing at work in Egypt are forces that
naturally should be aligned with us, should be
aligned with Israel - if we make good decisions
now and we understand sort of the sweep of
history” [Lamis Andoni, “Obama does not get
it: If independent, democratic, governments
are formed in the Middle East, they won't
follow Washington's orders,” al-Jazeera (9 Mar
2011), at http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/o
pinion/2011/03/20113911948670383.html].
4 CLR James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint
L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
(Vintage 1989 [1938]), p. 4.
5 Frantz Fanon, “On Violence,” The Wretched of
the Earth, R. Philcox, tr. (2004 [1963]), p. 15.
6 Fanon, ibid., pp. 2-5.
7 Achille Mbembe depicts “the colony” and
“the apartheid regime” as “a peculiar terror
formation,” “a concatenation of biopower,
the state of exception, and the state of
siege” based on racism [“Necropolitics,” L.
Meintjes, tr. Public Culture, 15:1 (2003), p. 22.
He specifies that the occupied Palestinian
territories exemplify the particular “late-
modern” colonial occupation that combines
disciplinary, biopolitical, and necropolitical
forms of domination (pp. 27ff ). It is worth
pausing to note that even the best works on
the occupation disagree – sometimes with
themselves – over its colonial status. Weizman
declares that “despite the complexity of the
legal, territorial, and built realities that sustain
the occupation, the conflict over Palestine
has been a relatively straightforward process
of colonization, dispossession, resistance,
and suppression,” a claim in conflict with his
seminal depiction of the “political plastic” and
“structured chaos” by which Israel deepens its
hold on Palestine [Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land:
Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (Verso 2007),
pp. 5, 8-9].
8 Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy
and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford 1999),
p. 51.
9 Nikolas Rose, “The Politics of Life Itself,”
Theory, Culture, and Society, 18:6 (2001).
10 “Crime of Apartheid,” Wikipedia, Http://
En.Wikipedia.Org/Wiki/Crime_Of_Apartheid.
11 Note that ex-patriot Indians
launched anti-apartheid campaigns 27
in South African, most famously Gandhi in
the late 19th-century. This brings Palestine-
apartheid debates full-circle through the
image of Gandhi’s non-violence, often said to
be horribly missing from Palestinian resistance.
Here we may recall that “initially, Gandhi
was simply affronted that discriminatory
laws and bigoted custom lumped educated
well-to-do Indians like him with ‘coolies,’ the
impoverished mine, plantation and railroad
workers who made up the bulk of the region’s
immigrant Indian population” [Geoffrey
Ward, “How Gandhi Became Gandhi,” Review
of J. Lelyveld, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi
and His Struggle with India (Knopf 2011),
NYT (24 Mar 2011), at http://www.nytimes.
com/2011/03/27/books/review/book-review-
great-soul-mahatma-gandhi-and-his-struggle-
with-india-by-joseph-lelyveld.html?_r=1&h].
Anti-apartheid opposition has a strained
historical relationship to class politics, as
a central feature of the “choice” between
anti-capitalist and pro-democratic action [on
the institutional class logic of this dilemma
cf. Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social
Democracy (Cambridge 1986)]. In a chapter
called “Democracy Born in Chains” Naomi Klein
details the deliberate sacrifice of economic
for democratic equality by the ANC in the
transition from apartheid, sometimes called
the replacement of political with economic
apartheid [The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of
Disaster Capitalism (Metropolitan 2007), pp.
194ff.].
12 The racial institutionalization of the
Zionist-Israeli state capitalized on deliberative
post-war conditions, not wartime accidentality
or calamity, to consolidate and ethnically
cleansed political space [Meron Benvenisti,
Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the
Holy Land Since 1948, M. Kaufman-Lacusta, tr.
(California 2000), chs. 3-4]
13 Israelis may be forgiven for resenting that
their crime is to not have concluded their
ethnic cleansing or converted their political
apartheid regimes into capitalist apartheid
regimes more efficiently or invisibly. It may
take us far afield, but as Foucault noted,
“racism” emerges with the historical transition
from regnant sovereign to disciplinary and
governmental forms of power “as the basic
mechanism of power” [Michel
Foucault, Society Must Be Defended:
28
Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976,
M. Bertani and A. Fontana, eds., D. Macey, tr.
(Picador 2003 [1997]), p. 254].
14 Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land, ibid., pp. 5-8,
10ff.; cf. Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present:
Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Blackwell 2004),
pp. 76-143; Neve Gordon, “The Separation
Principle,” Israel’s Occupation (California 2008),
ch. 8.
15 Weizman shows that two supra-sovereign
technologies of power – disciplinary and
governmental – constitute Israel’s domination
of the OPT. Without excessive detail, these
forms of power can be likened to, respectively:
(1) training in a factory, school, clinic, prison,
etc., to create productive but docile bodies;
and (2) administering passengers in an airport,
where dominant figures can “disengage” from
direct physical imposition to create a set of
passageways and transit-points and switching-
stations and portals (all moveable and
removable). The latter, a version of what Gilles
Deleuze described as a “society of control,”
creates Palestine as, in essence, an ant farm of
dominated Palestinian self-regulation.
16 I am mostly setting aside peripheral
discussions about contributing factors like
the “lobby.” Still, such debates matter. One
account reasonably links the sub-optimal
pro-Israel American foreign policy bias to the
coincidence of the uniquely powerful Lobby
and uniquely privileged Israeli state. The
counter argument is that American policies
in the Middle East do not require or even
accommodate an exceptional causal factor
for the “special” US-Israel relationship. In any
case, “it is perfectly permissible to lobby on
behalf of a foreign country, or to write articles
favoring policies that would benefit a foreign
country” [Steven Walt, Taming American Power:
The Global Response to US Primacy (Norton
2005), p. 303, fn. 32], so it seems fruitless to
carry on bemoaning the Lobby here.
17 Ali Abunimah, “Learning from South Africa,”
One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-
Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan 2006), ch. 5.
The author provides something like a liberal
theory of ideological error and clarification,
with the hope of urging Palestinians to
become as insightful or visionary as the black
South Africans of the Freedom Charter. Alas,
unlike the wise South Africans, “Palestinians
[have] had no clear answer for what ought
to happen to Israeli Jews” in a post-apartheid
state, and thus “the Palestinian national
movement, which until the 1980s also
opposed partition,…was never able to build a
consensus around a clear, simple, and inclusive
alternative like the Freedom Charter…” (p.
147). For a similar institutional-ideological
framing of the comparison outside class,
production regimes, the structure of refined
apartheid mechanisms, and the ideological
demands of respective Afrikaner and Israeli
ruling elites, cf. Courtney Jung, Ellen Lust-
Okar, Ian Shapiro, “Problems And Prospects
for Democratic Settlements: South Africa as
Featured Organizations
Alternative Information Center, Beit
Sahour and Jerusalem, (AIC) is an
internationally oriented, progressive, joint
Palestinian-Israeli activist organization.
It is engaged in dissemination of
information, political advocacy, grassroots
activism and critical analysis of the
Palestinian and Israeli societies as well as
the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
The AIC strives to promote full
individual and collective social, economic,
political and gender equality, freedom
and democracy and a rejection of the
ideology and praxis of separation.
The most urgent regional task is to
find a just solution to the century-old
colonial conflict in Palestine and confront
the ongoing Israeli occupation-regime
within its international framework. The
AIC method of action develops from
the awareness that local struggle must
be practically and analytically situated
within the framework of the global
justice struggle.
The internal AIC structure and
working relationship aims to reflect the
above mentioned values.
http://www.alternativenews.org/
Anarchists Against the Wall (AATW)
is a direct action group that was
established in 2003 in response to the
construction of the wall Israel is building
on Palestinian land in the Occupied West
Bank. The group works in cooperation
a Model For the Middle East and Northern
Ireland?” Politics & Society, 33:2 (Jun 2005), pp.
282-283.
18 Cf. Mona Younis, Liberation and
Democratization: The South African and
Palestinian National Movements (Minnesota
2000).
19 It is not, incidentally, a proof against
universalism that the two groups prefer
particularism; they could be radically incorrect
or misguided about their true interests, and
soon to become aware of them when coerced
into togetherness.
with Palestinians in a joint popular
struggle against the occupation. Since its
formation, the group has participated in
hundreds of demonstrations and direct
actions against the wall specifically, and
the occupation generally, all over the West
Bank. All of AATW’s work in Palestine
is coordinated through villages’ local
popular committees and is essentially
Palestinian led.
It is the duty of Israeli citizens to resist
immoral policies and actions carried out
in our name. We believe that it is possible
to do more than demonstrate inside Israel
or participate in humanitarian relief
actions. Israeli apartheid and occupation
isn’t going to end by itself - it will end
when it becomes ungovernable and
unmanageable. It is time to physically
oppose the bulldozers, the army and the
occupation.
http://www.awalls.org/
B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center
for Human Rights in the Occupied
Territories was established in 1989 by a
group of prominent academics, attorneys,
journalists, and Knesset members. It
endeavors to document and educate the
Israeli public and policymakers about
human rights violations in the Occupied
Territories, combat the phenomenon of
denial prevalent among the Israeli public,
and help create a human rights
culture in Israel.
29
 http://www.btselem.org/English/
index.asp
Birthright Unplugged offers
opportunities for people to gain knowledge
through first-hand experiences and to use
that knowledge to make positive change
in the world. We reject the notion of a
“birthright” as embodied in Jewish-only,
fully-funded trips to Israel. Israel has
denied Palestinians the internationally
recognized right of return for refugees,
instead creating a “Law of Return” that
extends citizenship benefits to any person
of Jewish heritage, thereby excluding
millions of Palestinians from living in the
land in which they were born.
http://www.birthrightunplugged.org/
Breaking the Silence is an organization
of veteran combatants who served in
the Israeli military since the start of the
Second Intifada and have taken it upon
themselves to expose the Israeli public to
the routine situations of everyday life in
the Occupied Territories. We endeavor to
stimulate public debate about the price
paid for a reality in which young soldiers
face a civilian population on a daily basis,
and are engaged in the control of that
population’s everyday life.
Soldiers who serve in the Territories
witness and participate in military actions
which change them immensely. Cases of
abuse towards Palestinians, looting, and
destruction of property have been the
norm for years, but are still explained
as extreme and unique cases. Our
testimonies portray a different, and much
grimmer picture in which deterioration
of moral standards finds expression in
the character of orders and the rules of
engagement, and are justified in the name
of security. While this reality is known to
Israeli soldiers and commanders, Israeli
society continues to turn a blind eye,
and to deny that which happens in its
name. Discharged soldiers who return
to civilian life discover the gap between
the reality which they encountered in
the Territories, and the silence about this
reality which they encounter at home. In
order to become civilians again,
soldiers are forced to ignore what
30
they have seen and done. We strive to
make heard the voices of these soldiers,
pushing Israeli society to face the reality
whose creation it has enabled.
http://www.shovrimshtika.org/
index_e.asp
The Ecumenical Accompaniment
Programme in Palestine and Israel
(EAPPI) brings internationals to the West
Bank to experience life under occupation.
Ecumenical Accompaniers (EAs)
provide protective presence to vulnerable
communities, monitor and report human
rights abuses and support Palestinians
and Israelis working together for peace.
When they return home, EAs campaign
for a just and peaceful resolution to
the Israeli/Palestinian conflict through
an end to the occupation, respect for
international law and implementation of
UN resolutions.
http://www.eappi.org/
Electronic Intifada (EI) is a not-
for-profit, independent publication
committed to comprehensive public
education on the question of Palestine,
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the
economic, political, legal, and human
dimensions of Israel’s 40-year occupation
of Palestinian territories. EI provides
a needed supplement to mainstream
commercial media representations of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Launched 23 February 2001 at
electronicIntifada.net as a pioneering
online resource for media analysis,
criticism, and activism, EI has
progressively expanded its scope into new
arenas: reference materials, live reporting,
editorials, arts coverage, and satire, with
the aim of presenting an accessible,
credible, and responsible Palestinian
narrative of developments on the ground
to the American public and international
community.
Although EI addresses the prevailing
pro-Israeli slant in US media coverage by
offering information from a Palestinian
perspective, our views on the conflict
are based firmly on universal principles
of international law and human rights
conventions, and our reporting is built
on a solid foundation of documented
evidence & careful fact-checking.
http://electronicintifada.net/
Global BDS Movement
(BDSMovement.net) is born out of the
need to offer all those interested and
active in the Boycott, Divestment and
Sanctions (BDS) movement a shared
space for information, analysis, exchange
of ideas and experiences. This website is
overseen by the steering committee of the
Palestinian BDS National Committee
and has been adopted as a tool of the
ICNP (International Coordinating
Network on Palestine) to support efforts
of networking and coordination.
Since the Unified Palestinian call
for BDS, launched in July 2005, BDS
initiatives have been multiplying all over
the world. Building and strengthening
a global BDS movement has become
a core aim for many involved in today’s
solidarity work for Palestine. As well
as the growth of diverse actions on the
ground, an increasing number of websites
are taking up the issue. This site aims to
give an overview of the Palestinian calls
for BDS, the myriad local initiatives and
resources online, related background
information and analysis to inform and
guide visitors and activists.
The site is updated by a range of
Palestinian and global BDS activists
and is a continual work in progress. As
the movement develops, new interactive
tools and spaces will be added. The only
editorial policy we follow is adherence to
the Unified Palestinian Call for Boycott,
Divestment and Sanctions issued on July
9, 2007.
http://www.bdsmovement.net/
International Jewish Anti-
Zionist Network (IJAN) is an
international network of Jews who
are uncompromisingly committed to
struggles for human emancipation, of
which the liberation of the Palestinian
people and land is an indispensable part.
Our commitment is to the dismantling of
Israeli apartheid, the return of Palestinian
refugees, and the ending of the Israeli
colonization of historic Palestine.
http://www.ijsn.net/home/
The International Solidarity
Movement (ISM) is a Palestinian-led
movement committed to resisting the
Israeli occupation of Palestinian land
using nonviolent, direct-action methods
and principles. Founded by a small group
of activists in August, 2001, ISM aims to
support and strengthen the Palestinian
popular resistance by providing the
Palestinian people with two resources,
international protection and a voice
with which to nonviolently resist an
overwhelming military occupation force.
http://palsolidarity.org/
Jewish Voice for Peace members are
inspired by Jewish tradition to work
together for peace, social justice, equality,
human rights, respect for international
law, and a U.S. foreign policy based on
these ideals.
JVP opposes anti-Jewish, anti-
Muslim, and anti-Arab bigotry and
oppression. JVP seeks an end to the
Israeli occupation of the West Bank,
Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem; security
and self-determination for Israelis and
Palestinians; a just solution for Palestinian
refugees based on principles established
in international law; an end to violence
against civilians; and peace and justice for
all peoples of the Middle East.
http://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/
The Joint Advocacy Initiative ( JAI)
work aims to bring about change at the
local level through involving Palestinian
organizations and individuals to work to
gain their basic rights and to engage in
processes to effect social change.
At the international level, its work
aims to channel changes in the World
YWCA/YMCA, CROs and civil society
organizations to create a global movement
that puts pressure on Israel to implement
international law and respond to the UN
resolutions concerning the occupation
of Palestine by exposing injustice and
guiding actions.
http://www.jai-pal.org/
31
Project Hope (Nablus, Palestine)is a non-
profit volunteer organization whose goal
is to provide a participatory, educational
space for war-affected children in the
Near East. Committed to the principles
of international humanitarian law and the
Convention on the Rights of the Child,
our aim is support children denied access
to basic services: by providing educational
and recreational activities, medical and
humanitarian relief and practical training
that can empower them with hope and
skills for the future. We aim to achieve
these goals through an efficient, effective,
accountable and participatory approach
that focuses on child protection, with
gender equality and advancement as an
integral part of our mission.
‫ﺍﻟﻌﺪﺩ ﺍﻟﺜﺎﻧﻲ‬
2 ‫גליון‬
Demonstration against the buffer zone in north Gaza. Photo by M.A.
http://www.projecthope.ps/
projecthope/
Salon Mazal is a unique center in
Israel, spreading information and raising
awareness of a wide variety of issues
related to social change, including human
rights, animal rights, the environment,
globalization, social and economic
oppression, consumerism, feminism and
gender issues and many more. Salon
Mazal has a lending library, a shop and
a space for meetings, lectures, workshops
and film screenings. Salon Mazal is run
by an open, non-hierarchical collective of
volunteers.
http://salon-mazal.org/?page_id=16
Volume Two