Israel

The wonderful world of Guy Bechor

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Guy Bechor, while exemplifying the legitimate fears of Israelis and Jews, writes a confused mess, seemingly sent from some mythical world invented by 20th-century European fascists.

Deep breaths. I just finished reading an article on Ynet, by Guy Bechor, titled “A Middle Eastern lesson“; it was shared by Peace Now on Facebook to “give insight to Israeli fears”. That it does. It also gives insight into a romantic populist world-view, forged of myth and nationalism, in which countries are populated not by people, but by peoples (German: Völker), embodied by their leaders (German: Führer). And while writing this imaginative nonsense, he manages to call those who would strive for peace “gullible”. Deep breaths.

But let’s start at the beginning.

Fable

Bechor begins with a fable of Aesop’s… Something about wolves and sheep and dogs. This is a good way to start, as it puts the reader in exactly the mindset needed to believe Bechor’s hysteria. There are three kinds of players in Bechor’s world: the wolves, who are really bad, the sheep, who are just helpless, and the dogs, who are not wolves and no simple sheep, but can at least defend themselves.

(BTW, is this fable the original version of the allegory in Team America, where it’s “assholes”, “pussies” and “dicks”, respectively, in exactly those roles?)

Genius

Having set the stage, we now go on to discuss the actual complex realities of one of the most politically difficult regions currently to be found on our planet. Except there are no complex realities, since Bechor is so much more intelligent than us morons.

Allow the genius to teach us the ways of the Middle East: it boils down to Arabs being brutal and violent, and Jews and Christians having to create heavily-armed nation-states to defend themselves. I kid you not, ladies and gentlemen! At last, Bechor has revealed to us the simplicity of the Middle East, and there it is, in one sentence! Thank me later.

Facts, of course, are irrelevant. In Bechor’s world, things are simpler, and more fantastic. In Bechor’s world, Christians are being “butchered” in post-revolution Tunisia and Egypt (citation needed). In Bechor’s world, what’s happening in Syria is about Arabs killing minorities. There is no context, there are no politics to speak of, just a people being evil.

Sin

What Bechor does here is, to me, an immense sin. Like certain Führers of times gone by, Bechor sees the world as composed of peoples, acting as united wholes. There are Arabs, there are Christians, there are Jews. Wolves, sheep, and dogs (his words, not mine). Never mind that someone can be an Arab and Christian at the same time, that kind of complexity is incompatible with this simple, simple world. It is divided into nations, these nations are in some kind of eternal struggle, and, hence, they need armies. End of story.

What’s worse, when it comes down to choosing who represents these nations, again Bechor sides with evil. It is the Assads and the Mubaraks and the Ghaddafis and the Ben Alis, and their paid thugs, who show Bechor’s “true Middle East” — not the masses of people, oppressed by those asshats for decades, who finally take to the streets, put their lives on the line, and demand their freedom. Not the soldiers and officers who defect or desert when ordered to fire on civilians. No, the Führer is the nation, and the people must follow.

Excuse me while I throw up.

Morality

But if all that weren’t enough, of course Bechor must also paint the Left as a dangerous enemy. ((Fun fact: Dachau, the first German concentration camp, was built just weeks after Hitler took power, and its first inmates were German lefties, imprisoned for being in the opposition.))

[…] outside elements – and to my regret domestic elements as well – try to weaken the IDF via needless commissions of inquiry, incitement and criticism, propaganda, and an effort to taint the army’s moral prestige.

I don’t know, Guy, don’t you think the army’s moral prestige might also be tainted by soldiers trashing houses, systematically humiliating civilians and prisoners as a kind of sport then (sometimes) posting photos on Facebook, or firing white phosphorous on residential neighborhoods? Don’t you think that being put in the position of policing an occupied, largely civilian population, with mainly just combat training as preparation, might be having some ill effects on the army’s morality as well? Don’t you think commissions of inquiry might help make sure soldiers stick to the IDF’s moral code, and incidentally increase its moral prestige by proving it can take scrutiny? And most of all, is a reputation for morality really more important than actual moral behavior?

I don’t know, man.

Truth

The Middle East is a difficult place to be. Bechor is right in that the dictators’ response to the Arab Spring is revealing. It reveals the dictators’ true colors to anyone who had a doubt.

Yet the revolutions themselves are revealing a reality that should have been clear, but is clearly lost on Bechor and his ilk: the Führer ist not the Volk. The people under dictatorship are not represented by their so-called “leaders” — they are their victims.

Rivers of blood flow through the Middle East, as usual. This is a difficult time, and even more difficult is to guess what comes next.

But the basic and obvious reality — one which I’ve incidentally heard from at least two Arabs I’ve spoken with here in Germany — is that peace is in everyone’s best interest. Most Israelis know it, on some level. Most Arabs know it on some level. And finally, we may just see some governments in the Middle East which strive for everyone’s best interest, and not just the interests of the dictators and the elites behind them.

Education

Taking our network to a new level

EUDEC is a pretty unusual kind of organization. After three years, we are still completely volunteer-driven, our funding is independent and based almost exclusively in our membership, and we are growing every day.

As one of the active volunteers on Council I’ve been part of working on all of the different things EUDEC wants to be —  a network of school, individuals and organizations; a source of information; an advocacy group; an engine for change in the European education world.

Visible achievements are pretty small and far between when everyone involved is only as involved as their job, personal life and education allows. The biggest benefits so far, I think, are the invisible benefits of networking: schools find teachers, parents find schools, people find other people to start schools with, and more and more people slowly hear from mouth to ear about democratic education.

Right now, we’re starting to work on pooling our resources to hire a full-time coordinator. I believe this will change everything, since we will finally have someone dedicating their time to maintaining the network, coordinating all of the volunteers to make sure our individual projects can fit together and people can find others who can help them. There are already so many people in our network that this is basically impossible to manage with a small Council of volunteers that also has to work on day-to-day EUDEC stuff and develop different projects at the same time.

To continue being independent and able to work on our vision without time-intensive projects and reports serving solely to fit into some funding application, we are working to raise funds by increasing our membership and asking for personal donations. That’s where you come in. :P

If you have any questions about EUDEC or the donation first, feel free to leave a comment below.

If you’re already convinced, become a member now or donate as much or as little as you like via PayPal (10€ would be nice):

 

Thanks for any support you can give us!!

(Note: This is my personal post and should not be seen as an official appeal by EUDEC.)

Israel

Not funny. Gaza again.

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This blog started with a post about Gaza. In recent days, Israel has been escalating the conflict on the Southern front while Hamas pursue aggressive diplomacy, i.e. firing rockets while asking for a ceasefire. I feel like I have to do something. Yet all I can really do is write.

The enigmatic Six in Battlestar Galactica incessantly reminds us: “all of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again”.

Remember, in late 2008 we embarked upon the very same path, unleashing massive amounts of firepower on Gaza, killing at least 700 civilians and launching us into Israel’s most isolated couple of years in its history. Back then the idea was the same: hit them so hard that they can’t hit us back.

The problem is that this logic never, ever works. We’ve been trying it for decades. We kill them, even demolish their infrastructure, but in the process we give so many people cause to hate us that within a few years their ranks are replenished and out to get us again.

Chatting with a right-wing friend the other day, I said something about the families of the victims and how they’ll feel about us after we take their siblings/children/parents away. He said the mistake is to leave any family. (I’m not sure whether he was serious or not — this was a textual conversation and I didn’t feel like pursuing the topic.)

Yet even if we follow this sick logic to its conclusion — total annihilation of the rival tribe — we will gain no peace. We will only push the frontier a little further, gaining enemies in places where nobody used to give a damn about us. We will only gain international isolation and brain drain, as people leave what has become of our country, a country created by and for the victims of genocide.

Observation: there are some 11 million Palestinians in the world (according to Wikipedia). Total genocide of the Palestinians will give Israel the dubious honor of having surpassed the Nazis’ genocide of Jews. (I suppress nausea, breathe deep, continue.)

Incidentally, it will not end all of our haters.

So long as we use violence, we invite violence. The more we kill, the more people will want to kill us. So long as we continue acting as we’ve acted, we will not break the cycle. Hamas could try to break the cycle as well. But bombing Gaza is not the way to convince them to do so. Israel’s citizens and few remaining allies must demand and enforce a ceasefire.

We now have Iron Dome, a system that can destroy rockets fired out of Gaza in mid-air. Instead of financing another war, build more Iron Dome units. Fund peace proposals. Pay Arabic-speaking copywriters, pay printers, and bomb Gaza with flyers. Stop wasting money and lives on a cycle of violence in which Israelis and Palestinians – especially the poorer of both groups – have their everyday lives disrupted or destroyed, every day.

 

All I can do is write, but for days I have not been able to. Every time violence flares up against Israel, I am reminded of how urgent it is to strive towards peace. There is always a sense of the inevitable to it; knowing that my country continues to use violence, I know we will be faced with violence.

It’s painful, and all I can do is write. It seems like so little. I don’t know if I’ll write about this again any time soon.

For now I’ll just continue to try not to think about it, while thinking about it all of the time. I’m an Israeli; denial’s my life.

 

UPDATE (two hours later):

I’ve just read that there’s some kind of tacit cease-fire, apparently as of last night. I hope this lasts and the rhetoric of “final escalation” loses out to some common sense. A strategy that has failed us dozens of times will continue to fail us no matter how many times we try.

Israel

In Israel, denial isn’t a river

Written on March 30

Demonstration in Sheikh Jarrah.
Demonstrators at Sheikh Jarrah. Even the fiercest anti-occupation activists benefit from the state of things.

I am on my way to Augsburg, where I will be giving two talks about democratic education. But while my the train heads to Southern Germany, my mind is in the Middle East, where my involvement in democratic education began, where people are killing one another, perpetuating the conflict while convincing themselves and each other that they are acting to end it.

After preparing notes for tonight’s talk, I watched Occupation 101, a pro-Palestinian (but not anti-Israeli) documentary. As always when confronted with a non-Israeli, non-Zionist view of the conflict, watching the movie was highly uncomfortable. As much as I read and write about my country’s wrongs, there’s still something deeply unpleasant about having it criticized from without. I found myself constantly checking how much longer the movie runs, but managed to watch through to the end, feeling it was important to see that side of things. The movie is not perfect, but I do recommend it. It illustrates the horrors of our conflict, including Palestinian terrorism, but focussing on the unimaginable ongoing suffering of the Palestinians.

Many Israelis are going to dislike what I’m about to write, but it has to be said: Israeli existence is a state of denial. From the violent ideological settler to the fiercest anti-occupation activist, every Israeli profits from the state of things (me and my family included, of course). Not only do we profit, but one had best not think about what previous generations have done to ensure we do so well. It is utterly awful to think about the (few?) massacres and the destruction of (many!) villages ((Yuval Ben-Ami at +972 recently found a curious old map documenting some of these.)) that led to the fleeing of so many Palestinians and subsequently to the post-1948 situation, in which Jews are a vast majority within sovereign Israel. It is particularly awful to think about because it stands in such stark contrast to the kind of society that has developed within that land in these past 63 years. How can we understand our existence as a fundamentally cosmopolitan, modern, diverse society while thinking about what was essentially an ethnic cleansing, one understood as such by its perpetrators (who may have used the euphemism “Judaization”)? ((Apropos Judaiziation, Max Blumenthal has a pretty good overview of the Jewish National Fund’s role in this ongoing project.)) And how can our limited human minds possibly reconcile between the terrific life one can lead in Tel Aviv and the hellish desperation of Gaza refugee camps?

The answer is that we, all of us, every single Israeli, try to reject agency over the bad things. ((Emily L. Hauser has an excellent post on this topic.)) Personally, my way of rejecting agency has been to leave the country and, for a while, try not to know about what goes on there. (This blog is a testament to the failure of that approach.) For many on the Left, the way is to blame the mainstream, or the Right, or the settlers. For the center, I guess the way is to blame the “extremists” on both sides, particularly ideological settlers and Palestinian terrorists. For the Right, the way is apparently to blame the Palestinians and occasionally the Left.

But blaming other people, whether or not they are factually to blame, is counter-productive to improving the situation. No one group is entirely to blame for the conflict or its continuation — not the terrorists, nor the settlers, nor the governments, nor Israelis in general, nor Palestinians in general. When we blame others, we deny our own ability to change the situation. This absolves us for all those many moments in which we did nothing to stop the conflict, all the myriad ways in which we benefitted from the situation. It allows us, with clear conscience, to continue standing by while the conflict persists, to continue to benefit from the Israeli economy that thrives on it. Unfortunately, this is necessary to some degree, because tossing and turning all night for shame and guilt certainly won’t help our ability to change things.

However, the least we can do is to acknowledge reality, warts and all. Reality is that, one way or another, our side used force to cause hundreds of thousands of people to leave the land in 1947-8. ((Whether or not there were massacres, whether these people could be said to have been driven out or merely to have fled, and whether or not they considered themselves Palestinians at the time.)) Reality is that our side has never treated the Arabs under Israeli control equally — inside or outside of our borders, with or without citizenship. Reality is that we have been part of making the lives of a few million people incredibly difficult over generations. Reality is that while we have a state, the victims of ’48 and their offspring are for the most part consigned to life of destitute poverty in refugee camps. ((As is often pointed out, this could have been resolved by our Arab neighbors offering them citizenship and housing. But clearly they are no more disposed to offer these to the refugees than we are.))

Make no mistake: one can acknowledge these basic, undeniable realities while holding any opinion on the political spectrum. One may hold that all of these realities are justified because of a Biblical claim to the land or the necessity of a Jewish nation-state. One may hold that these realities were the right and just response to violence and pressure towards Jews and towards Israel. Or one may hold that these realities obligate us to make amends and seek ways to right our wrongs. But we will make no progress while in denial of reality.

 

A final note

I don’t know my way around Palestinian politics, but it’s fair to assume similar issues apply there. I imagine those in favor of violent resistance — which keeps the conflict alive and heated — claim they have no choice and are forced into this course of action. I’m sure many Palestinians are in denial of the suffering violent resistance has caused, or simply choose to see that suffering as a necessary price for their liberation. But due to my near-total ignorance, I’ll leave it to Palestinian activists to deal with Palestinian denial and continue to focus on the Israeli side.

Israel

The occupation defiles the Holy Land

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Barbed wire near the south edge of the West Bank

Yesterday morning, me and my mother embarked on a tour of the South Hebron Hills guided by Breaking The Silence. I highly recommend the tour, if you ever have an opportunity to take it. I was impressed at how positive it was. No anti-Zionistic sentiment seemed to be involved, just a sense of collective responsibility. During the tour, one of the things that repeatedly struck me was how beautiful the West Bank is — and what an eye-sore the occupation is, with its soldiers, vehicles, barriers and all.

Just now I was at the weekly demonstration in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, and again I was struck by the ugliness of the occupation. The Palestinian houses seem to be in much better shape than the homes occupied by settlers, which in one case sported badly graffiti’d stars of David all around its door.

I can easily understand why someone would want to build a house on the West Bank and live there, somewhat in isolation, surrounded by the charming hilly landscape. The thought is quite tempting, really.

But what are we doing to this country? The occupation disrespects not only the people who live here, but the very land itself! How do self-professed lovers of Israel support the regime that scars the landscape with vandalism and the colors of concrete and steel, jeeps and uniforms? You’d expect them to take better care of what they call a Holy Land.

Do those in favor of the settlements and occupation have some kind of fetish I’m not aware of, or are they simply intent not only on performing ugly deeds but on deforming a beautiful landscape?

Internet, Israel

Burning racism: Eden Abergil, at it again


Via Room 404 / Ido Kenan

Remember Eden Abergil, the young Israeli woman who became an instant Internet meme after posting photos from her army days in which she poses with bound and blindfolded Palestinian detainees? (If not, Google her.)

Ido Kenan over at Room 404 brings us some news from the famous Facebook profile. The Itamar massacre has prompted her to re-post one of the most memorable photos from, as the album was called, “the most beautiful time in her life” and spew some fresh unreflected racist hatred into the net.

Seen on the right, we have, from top to bottom, a video of (reportedly) soldiers abusing bound detainees, with the charming caption “death to the Arabssssssss”; then the picture that made Abergil famous with the caption of, roughly, “fuck you, stinking Arabs!!!”; and finally a video of images from the murder of the Fogel family in Itamar with the caption “let’ssssss do a Holocaust for the Arabs nowwww and immediatelyyyy!!!!!!!!!!!”.

Kenan reports that when a friend half-jokingly warned Abergil this all might wind up on TV, she replied “Death to the Arabsssss!!!! Let it show up!!!”

It’s worth noting that back after her “beautiful” pictures originally surfaced, she apologized.

H/t to Itamar Sha’altiel. This post is not a direct translation of Ido Kenan’s post, but still  mainly reproduces the information he posted, in English. Credit is due to him, I just thought this worth sharing in a way accessible to non Hebrew-speakers.

Israel

Settlement construction as counter-attack?

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A lot has already been said about the despicable murder of a sleeping family in the settlement of Itamar on Friday night. A lot has also been said about what has been said about the murder. In particular, I’d like to point to Dimi Reider’s critique over at +972 about the lousy response from most of the activist Left, and to the pointed words of Rehavia Berman (Hebrew), with which I agree entirely. (As he says, the state has to, unfortunately, apprehend the murder, try them, and let them rot in jail — “unfortuantely” because the barbarous killer deserves to be tortured extensively and left alive, perhaps after removing some useful organs like hands, feet and eyes. But alas the state has no right to do that kind of thing and really shouldn’t exercise justice in that way.)

I just wanted to point out something particularly intriguing: the government’s lightning-fast decision to approve a bunch of new settlement houses in the West Bank in response to the heinous attack. As far as I’m aware, this is the first time the Israeli government admits that construction in the settlements is an attack against Palestinians. How surprising that they aren’t constructed purely out of love of the land!

Government, Israel

What should our protest achieve?

International Solidarity Movement activists
International Solidarity Movement activists

I just talked with my mother about a certain Israeli-Palestinians protest movement which people she knows are involved in but she has decided not to take part in. Like many such discussions, it came down to a general question of what the goal of non-violent protest is supposed to be. Is it supposed to be about changing the minds of the Israeli public? Is it about informing people about wrongs being done in their name? Is it about giving the world an alternative to the official narrative? Is it just about generally getting the authorities to overreact so as to draw attention to their abusive behavior?

I think this is an important debate to have, so long as it doesn’t get in the way of actually doing something. My thinking in the past months has been that one very important goal is indeed re-education of anyone who’s willing to listen. Israelis are taught that we have a highly moral army used only for defense; it took me years to realize how inaccurate that is. Most people accept the occupation as a necessary evil without knowing quite how ridiculous, abusive and petty it has become. A lot can be achieved by just making sure concrete, current examples of this are out there. Many who accept the occupation might change their mind once they realize what it has made Israel become.

But there are problems with focussing on the ills of the occupation. First of all, it’s a hard thing to sustain. Following these abuses eventually just gets you down. What’s worse, many Israelis are disinclined to believe it when lefties report this kind of thing. They are distrustful and take us for dupes under hostile foreign influence. So if any change is to happen, the left certainly has to do a better job of creating public debate, and we have to be more convincing to average Israeli nationalists.

I don’t know. What do you think? Comments are open.

Image via Wikipedia

Internet

Internet in the meeting room

Council and its laptops (photo by Benni)

So, the EUDEC Council meeting has been over for almost a week, and until yesterday I was on self-enforced vacation, which went very well. Chloe Duff and Or Levi — who are organizing the IDEC@EUDEC 2011 Conference — were here, and a great time was had by all.

Anyway, some of has felt that during this Council meeting we reached a whole new level of effective collaboration. There are many different aspects to this and I’m proud of what we’ve achieved. We spent a lot of time developing our methods, and in this post I want to share a few of the ways the Internet has become a vital part of how we work in Council. Perhaps some of you will find them useful.

What it all boils down to is simultaneous collaborative use of Google Docs, with each member working on their own laptop and the meeting moderator selectively using a projector. ((Of course, other tools, like Etherpad or whatnot, can be used instead. I like Google Docs and it seems to suit Council’s needs very well, but that’s not what this post is about.))

Here are the main ways we use GDocs. Some or all may be relevant to other organizations or endeavors. Scroll through until you find something you like, and let me know if you have any more ideas or any questions in the comments below!

Collaborative text editing

When Council has to create a text and we decide everyone should work on it together, we just put the text in a document, all open it, and start carefully going through it. We can add comments or make changes and everyone else sees them live. Whenever anyone wants to try something out, they can do it right away and we can discuss it immediately. It works surprisingly well, especially for putting the final touches on something that’s basically done. I would generally recommend not trying to edit any text in a group of more than three people unless you’re sure it’s very near done.

Live collaborative minute-taking

We noticed during our weekly VoIP conference calls that we can use Google Docs to take minutes live, which lets everyone contribute and improve the minutes, and saves us the bother of approving last meeting’s minutes every week. When everyone can give their input as the minutes are being written, they always end up better reflecting the collective understanding of what was discussed and decided. In this last live meeting we took all minutes this way from the start, and it worked great.

The live workplan

This one’s a tiny bit trickier to set up and makes use of spreadsheets rather than just plain documents. The live workplan is a spreadsheet in which each sheet is a day of sessions, and each row lists the title, moderator, goal, starting time, duration and ending time of an agenda slot, break or other activity. The columns where time is kept are set up so the starting time (except for the first slot) is set by the end of the previous slot, and the end of each slot is calculated from the starting time and the duration (in minutes). This means you only have to set the starting time of the first session for each day

We originally used this format ((We got this format from either Leslie Ocker or Christel Hartkamp, I can’t remember who)) to just create a plan for how we’ll use our time, but it eventually evolved into a live workplan, in which we can extend a session ad hoc and immediately see what that means for later sessions. This means we can be flexible about time and take extra time when we need it, but we can also tell when we’re taking too much time and starting to push important sessions off the back end of the schedule. It’s especially good to combine this system with “open work sessions” — slots at the end of a day where sit together and work on different things separately or in small groups and talk freely. These are useful if the time remains available, but not crucial when the time gets eaten up by earlier sessions.

It’s usually too complicated to start really moving things around in a full discussion, so whenever things got complicated we just decided on the immediate change or extension and one or two of us worked out the rest of the details during the next break or meal-time.

The virtual WHITEBOARD

This document is perhaps the coolest of our tools. It starts as just an empty document which we can all use for jotting down ideas and thoughts. During difficult discussions, it’s often the document we beam on the wall. The moderator can use it to write up the points we should be focussing on, adding details as they come up.

We also use the whiteboard to collaboratively keep a speakers’ list. People can add and remove themselves independently, meaning the moderator can better pay attention to the discussion itself. Having the list in a place where everyone can see it also means nobody is ever stuck wondering when it’s their turn, and any mistake made when adding people to the list (wrong order, wrong name, etc.) can be corrected without losing a moment of discussion.

We started using the whiteboard in live meetings and have just figured out they would be equally useful for our weekly “chat”. I look forward to trying it out there for the first time tomorrow.

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