Quotes from Reservists about protest
ABCNEWS.com : Israeli Reservists Just Say 'No': "Some Refuse to Serve in Palestinian Territories; Allege Abuses | By Gillian Findlay | Feb. 8, 2002
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"You don't let the ambulance past. Every time one arrives you stop the entire section using APCs [Armored Personnel Carriers] and tanks. It can take an hour or more to check the ambulance. It doesn't matter how many people are inside it or if the sirens are blasting. The soldier has no choice," said Zonshein, a paratrooper reservist.
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"When faced with a demonstration we were told to bring in the snipers immediately. Shoot three or four of the organizers, not to let the event get out of hand because then we would have to shoot women and children and that doesn't look good in the media." Zonshein said.

"The rules of engagement in the first two weeks [of my service] were clear: anyone who picks up a stone, shoot him. Period," said Ishai Shagi, an artillery reservist.
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"And so you ask yourself after seeing such a thing if there's one Palestinian left who does not hate us, he is going to start hating us. But the army says it's necessary for security. It's outrageous," Itzkovitch said.

- posted by Editor @ 6:15 AM

Conflict within Jewish-American culture: Judaism's support for human rights versus Zionism's historical reaction against enlightenment
Daily Illini Letter - Conflicting versions: "David Green | University of Illinois employee | Oct 24, 2003

The tension that many Jewish students feel on college campuses reflects the conflicting narratives of Israelis and Palestinians and a growing general awareness of Palestinian grievances. But it also reflects a buried conflict within Jewish-American culture, between liberal Judaism's support for human rights and social justice and Zionism's historical reaction against enlightenment values in favor of a Jewish version of ethnic nationalism. This turn is highlighted by institutionalized discrimination against Palestinian citizens of the Jewish state and by the imposition of apartheid in the occupied territories.
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As Jewish-Americans, we support Israel with our tax dollars, private contributions and institutional ideologies. We are also instructed by some leaders of our mainstream institutions to support the neoconservative "war on terrorism," by which the U.S. policy to rule the world by force is tied to Israel's domination of the Palestinians and the region. Thus Jews retaining enough discernment to oppose the invasion of Iraq were warned of "anti-Semitism" within the anti-war movement, meaning that those who opposed the war made the obvious connection between American and Israeli policies — albeit with a clear understanding that the Israeli tail does not wag the American dog. While there has never been a greater affinity between a U.S. administration and extreme right-wing Israeli policies, leaders of Jewish institutions express their "moderate" views by muting criticism of Sharon, demonizing Arafat and disregarding the "regrettable" everyday brutality of the occupation.
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... That American Jews generally know little or nothing of such debates reflects the biases of the mainstream media and our institutional media and an unwillingness to explore serious journalistic and scholarly sources.

In this context, it is not surprising that illuminating efforts by DI columnists are met with unsupported assertions, accusations and non-sequiturs. Within the organized Jewish community, the choices of Jewish students are to adhere to the party line or remain silent. In politically civilized society, alternatives present themselves to those concerned with perpetuating our best ethical traditions.
- posted by Editor @ 11:46 AM

Nephew of former Israeli PM condemns "apartheid" against Palestinians
canadaeast.com - CP National News: "Nephew of hawkish former Israeli PM supports Palestinians in Montreal speech | Thursday, October 23, 2003

MONTREAL (CP) - The pacifist nephew of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu endorsed Palestinian rights Wednesday at the same university where a pro-Palestinian protest shut down Netanyahu's speech a year earlier.

Referring to the treatment of Palestinians as 'apartheid,' Eric Ben-Artzi told a Concordia University audience he would prefer not to be known as the nephew of the hawkish former politician. Ben-Artzi denounced Israel as an undemocratic country that persecutes Palestinians."
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Ben Artzi, whose brother Yoni is in jail for refusing to fight for Israel, urged young Jews to follow his brother's example and turn their backs on the Israeli army.
- posted by Editor @ 7:45 AM

The One-State Solution: Jewish state has become an "anachronism" in a multicultural world
The One-State Solution: "Posted October 16, 2003 | The One-State Solution | by Daniel Lazare [Not known a Jewish voide. ed.]

Is Zionism a failed ideology? This question will strike many people as absurd on its face.
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But consider the things Israel has not accomplished. In his 1896 manifesto The Jewish State, Zionism's founding document, the Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl predicted that such a country would be at peace with its neighbors and would require no more than a small professional army. In fact, Zionist settlers have clashed repeatedly with the Arabs from nearly the moment they began arriving in significant numbers in the early twentieth century, a Hundred Years' War that grows more dangerous by the month. Herzl envisioned a normal state no different from France or Germany. Yet with its peculiar ethno-religious policies elevating one group above all others, Israel is increasingly abnormal at a time when almost all other political democracies have been putting such distinctions behind them. Herzl envisioned a state that would draw Jews like a magnet, yet more than half a century after Israel's birth, most Jews continue to vote with their feet to remain in the Diaspora, and an increasing number of Israelis prefer to live abroad. Israel was supposed to serve as a safe haven, yet it is in fact one of the more dangerous places on earth in which to be Jewish.

Israel was also supposed to have been the final answer to "the Jewish question," an issue that is as old as--and has virtually defined--modernity itself. Herzl emphasized again and again that hatred and competition would melt away once Jews removed themselves from their increasingly reluctant host countries, returned to their ancient homeland and took their place as separate but equal members of the international community. Yet anti-Semitism is mushrooming in the Muslim world and, based on anecdotal evidence, may be undergoing a resurgence in Europe and the United States. Is this because the world is intrinsically anti-Semitic and is therefore always looking for an excuse to bash the Jews? Or does Zionism bear responsibility in any way for the upsurge?
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... In Israel, Avraham Burg, former speaker of the Knesset, recently warned that if Israel wishes to preserve what little democracy it still has, it must either withdraw to its pre-1967 boundaries or grant full citizenship to the approximately 3.5 million Palestinians in the occupied territories, a step that would spell the virtual end of the Jewish state. Meron Benvenisti, the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, has pronounced the two-state approach "inapplicable" to the problem of Israel and Palestine and is calling for a single binational state based on Arab-Jewish equality. In the United States the historian Tony Judt, declaring the Middle East peace process a dead letter in The New York Review of Books, says that the very idea of a Jewish state has become an "anachronism" in a multicultural world in which citizenship is increasingly separated from race, religion and ethnicity. "In today's 'clash of cultures' between open, pluralist democracies and belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno-states," he adds, "Israel actually risks falling into the wrong camp." ...
- posted by Editor @ 7:09 AM

US Jews renounce right of return (From correspondents in San Francisco, )
News.com.au - US Jews renounce right of return (From correspondents in San Francisco, )03Oct03

ABOUT 100 San Francisco Jews today renounced on their right to immigrate to Israel to protest the country's refusal to extend the same right to Palestinians expelled from their land.

'Palestine will be free,' protesters handed in a petition to the Jewish Community Federation in San Francisco declaring their renunciation of Israeli citizenship rights, know as Aliyah.

The group, which included 30 marchers carrying a petition of 100 names, called the act a ritual atonement in honour of the looming Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur on October 5.

The protesters claim that Israel's offering automatic citizenship to overseas Jews while denying the same right to Palestinians forced off their homeland in Israel and the occupied territories amounted to 'apartheid'.

'This is hypocritical,' said Eric Romain, one of the protest's organisers. 'It is a betrayal of our legacy as Jews.'"
- posted by Editor @ 7:50 AM

Israel Is Losing: Israel must return to the so-called Green Line: Genocide is out of the question
Israel Is Losing (washingtonpost.com): "Israel Is Losing | By Richard Cohen | Tuesday, October 7, 2003; Page A25
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In the perpetual war against Israel, its enemies are winning. The economy is awful. Parents do not want their children to go out. The beach is presumed safe, but not a cafe or restaurant. A commute on a bus (I have done it) is gut-wrenching. You watch everyone. What does a suicide bomber look like? The last one, the one who blew up a Haifa restaurant, was a 29-year-old woman, a law school graduate. She killed Arab and Jew alike. Even safe places are no longer safe.
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If you read the Israeli press, the despair is palpable. To some, especially those on the left, Israel has become virtually a dysfunctional society. The government can't protect its people. Corruption is endemic. Religious zealots have inordinate influence, and their vision, a Greater Israel, compels the building or thickening of West Bank and Gaza Strip settlements. With every suicide bombing, the rational course -- a withdrawal from Palestinian areas -- seems like weakness rather than wisdom.

Israel must return to the so-called Green Line -- the border before the 1967 Six Day War. It must dismantle most of the settlements. It must do this because occupation is corrupting and, in the long run, impossible. The more Israel expands or retains settlements, the more it gets stuck in a quagmire where the enemy is everywhere. From September 2000 until recently, some 17,400 attacks were recorded in the territories -- and 40 percent of all fatalities. Even when terrorists struck in Israel proper, they invariably came from the West Bank.

Yet Ariel Sharon recently decided to include two major settlements on the Israeli side of the fence that is being built to separate the Jewish state from the West Bank. By extending the fence to encompass the settlements, Sharon is only ensuring the continuation of his problem. He needs to get out.

For a people of the book, for a country created by history as well as by men, Israel acts as if nothing that went before has any bearing on what is happening now. But history admonishes Israel. The only places where a Western culture has successfully transplanted itself are those where great population pressure and genocidal methods were used to extirpate the indigenous peoples. This is what happened in the United States.

Genocide is out of the question. Neither the world nor Israeli morality would permit it. Yet Israel keeps lengthening the odds against itself. Instead of withdrawing to where Jews are a clear majority, it continues to cling to settlements where Jews are outnumbered. Every settlement, every day of occupation, puts Israel in greater and greater danger. Each settlement is a provocation. The deportation or killing of Arafat will do nothing but make him a martyr and exacerbate the chaos. The man himself is only a symptom of Israel's problem.

The idyllic Zionist dream is in tatters. No one wants to go to Israel. On the contrary, people want to leave. For every suicide bombing, countless others are thwarted -- 22 in the past month, according to Zeev Schiff, the esteemed military correspondent for the newspaper Haaretz.

Israel lashes out. It has now bombed Syria. What next? Iran? This is not strategy. It is fury. I can understand. But I can understand, too, why, after more than 20 years, that man I met left Israel. You could say he lost his nerve. He would say he lost hope.
- posted by Editor @ 9:57 AM

"Drop a one-ton bomb on a densely populated area, it's impossible to feign innocence "
Witness for the prosecution: "Witness for the prosecution | By Ari Shavit | Thursday, October 09, 2003

Playwright Joshua Sobol has decided to support the petition of the pilots against flying combat missions in the territories. Cautious of drawing historical analogies, he sees dangerous signs of fascism in the Israeli public's chorus of support of militantism.
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Joshua Sobol, in the past you were against refusal in the army. Now you are one of the writers who is supporting refusal. Why? What made you change your attitude?

"I became convinced that the Israeli government is not offering any alternative to the use of force. It took me time to reach that conclusion. Three years is no little time. But at the end of three years I found that the policy of this government is war. This government has no policy other than war."
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... The main thing is that these pilots are being sent to execute the policy of a government that is summed up by the use of force and solely by the use of force. They are being sent to carry out missions that are in the gray area of war crimes. When you drop a one-ton bomb on a densely populated area, it's impossible to feign innocence and say we didn't intend to kill innocent people. That's an oxymoron. It doesn't hold water."

Are you saying that Israel is today perpetrating a war crime?

"War crimes have a definition. The Geneva Convention and the annex to the Rome Convention stipulate that a systematic and prolonged policy of killing civilians is a war crime. So in the present case we have to examine whether such killing is being perpetrated or not. In retrospect, many civilians and children have been killed here. Too many innocent people have been killed here. And of the 2,400 Palestinians who have been killed, wanted individuals were not the majority. It's impossible to apologize day in and day out and say we didn't mean it. If there are so many civilian casualties on the other side, we have to stop. That is what the pilots wanted to say and in that they are right.

"There is also another point here. When the government adopts a mode of refusal, the citizens have to be war refusers. They have no other way out. The State of Israel is today refusing peace and that obligates its civilians and soldiers to refuse war."

What do you say to the fact that the vast majority of the Israeli public rejected the pilot's protest outright?

"That is exactly what is worrying me so much. The hysterical reaction proved how far uniformity of thought has taken hold in Israeli society. ...
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Do you consider Sharon a man of blood?

"I refrain from using crass expressions. But Sharon dragged us into the Lebanon War. Sharon established the settlements. And his visit to the Temple Mount sparked the conflagration. The conflagration brought him to power. In my opinion it is clear that a political solution will mean the evacuation of the settlements, and Arik Sharon is actually trying to distance the moment at which he will be forced to evacuate the settlements. ..."
- posted by Editor @ 9:42 AM

"Wanted" Palestinians save Jewish family from refugee camp lynch
israelinsider: security: "Wanted" Palestinians save Jewish family from refugee camp lynch: By Ellis Shuman October 14, 2003

'We were scared for our lives,' said Hannah Dickman, whose family accidentally drove into the Kalandia refugee camp north of Jerusalem on Monday afternoon. Angry Palestinians surrounded the vehicle and youths threw rocks at it. Palestinians, including an al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade member wanted by the IDF, rescued the Israeli family and helped them get to safety. "
- posted by Editor @ 6:38 AM

Ad supports "moral right of air force pilots to refuse to attack civilian population concentrations with missiles and bombs"
Pent up fury: "Pent up fury | By Sara Leibovich-Dar | Thursday, October 09, 2003

Following publication of the pilots' letter against participating in missions in the territories, some of the nation's top writers have joined the fray with their own different, but generally supportive petitions. Who signed what - and why.
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This past Sunday, Yom Kippur eve, an ad entitled "Writers' Petition on the Right to Refuse to Attack Innocent People" was published in Haaretz (Hebrew edition). The ad expressed support for "the moral right of air force pilots to refuse to attack civilian population concentrations with missiles and bombs, even at the price of the war against terrorism." The signatories assert: "A refusenik government that torpedoes every prospect for negotiations and utilizes only military force with regards to the Palestinians is obliged to heed the voice of the soldiers and commanding officers whom it sends to execute missions in which many innocent people are also hurt."

Among the signatories: David Grossman, Dahlia Rabikovitch, Sami Michael, Joshua Sobol, Natan Zach, Yaakov Besser, Ariel Hirshfeld, Batya Gur, Nili Mirsky, Ilana Hammerman, Haim Nagid, Amos Kenan, Ruth Almog and Shoham Smith.




- posted by Editor @ 5:38 AM

Suicide bombers: So, how does one explain the occupation to the occupier? How to explain to the tanks and planes what a little boy's fear is like?
Explaining the occupation to the occupier: "Explaining the occupation to the occupier | By Amira Hass | Wednesday, October 08, 2003

How can a tiny Palestinian organization like Islamic Jihad produce so many walking bombs, suicide bombers who choose babies in strollers and their grandparents as targets? And how does an organization that once declared it would only target soldiers send its latest suicide bomber to a mixed Jewish-Arab city ...

Intelligence experts and Arabists on our side say it's because of Islam, which sanctifies wars, ...
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In other words, the concept is that the historical, political and geopolitical connections, the sociological and psychological ramifications - none of it is relevant. The concept is that there is something inherent to the heritage of the suicide bombers and those who send them that is to blame, because the Palestinians won't give up their dream of destroying Israel and that Muslims only believe in the most radical interpretation of their religion.
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So, how does one explain the occupation to the occupier? The knowledge of daily life of 3.5 million people, whose future offers no chance of normalcy: the daily experience of the land of their grandparents and parents falling prey to this or that army order, for some "public" expropriation or pirate outpost? How does one explain to the bulldozer what it means to live when the land is constantly shrinking under your feet, when across the way, meanwhile, some rich settlement of Jews grows and a brand new road is paved just for them? How can the paper on which the army orders are written know what it's like to live for 37 years under the arbitrary rule of the representatives of the foreign occupation, many of whom are residents of the settlements, who make arbitrary decisions about who will be able to travel and who won't, who will get medical treatment and who won't, how many inches a water pipe can have as its diameter, if and when a water tanker reaches the village, which tree will be uprooted and which won't?

How to explain to the tanks and planes what a little boy's fear is like - not the fear of 10 or 100 but hundreds of thousands, not once a month or every other week, but daily, for three years, and what happens to a daughter and grandmother whose loved ones, civilians, are killed in front of their eyes, not by the dozens but the hundreds. How to explain to Israelis, who get only the most partial of reports about the horrors of the military occupation, that the Palestinians also suffer daily from horrific scenes, indeed, from the very first day of the renewed clashes, when they were still only throwing rocks and not blowing up in our cities?
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Yes, the suicide bombers feel they represent their society. That's their strength. ...
- posted by Editor @ 8:37 AM

Listen to the pilots: A state is not entitled to act in the same manner as a terror organization
Listen to the pilots: "Listen to the pilots | By David Grossman | Wednesday, October 08, 2003

Now that the furor over the pilots' declaration has abated a bit, perhaps the time has come to listen attentively to the essence of what they wanted to say in their protest.
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The pilots are reminding the Israelis that even if the aim of the military action is to hit a murderer who is to die, when a state orders its pilots to drop a 1-ton bomb into a residential neighborhood in the most densely populated place in the world, and with the clear knowledge that hundreds of innocent civilians are likely to get hurt, its action, to a significant extent, employs the methods of a terror organization. And when a state orders its pilots to use powerful missiles to hit a car that is driving in the midst of passersby, even if it does not want to harm them intentionally, the nature of the deed, as well as its results, are like those of a terror organization.
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A state is not entitled to act in the same manner as a terror organization.
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An obdurate government ... is condemning its soldiers to torture themselves with unbearable moral dilemmas. ...
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Something in the public's stormy and almost hysterical reaction that gives the impression that the "lynch mob" after the pilots does not derive only from the fact of the refusal to carry out missions: It seems that the more difficult thing, the unbearably difficult thing, that the pilots have done is that, in total surprise, they have torn off most Israelis the protective layer in which they
have wrapped themselves for years so as not to know or understand what is really being done in their name.

This, perhaps, is also what is behind the absurd accusation of treason that is being cast at the pilots: If they have betrayed at all, they have betrayed only the huge, consensual denial, the collective blindness.
- posted by Editor @ 8:36 AM