Antony Loewenstein

The following interview by Stu Harrison appears in this week’s Green Left Weekly:

“The war could have finished the day before I arrived”, independent journalist and author Antony Loewenstein told Green Left Weekly of his recent trip to the besieged Palestinian territory of Gaza.

His trip in July was months after the December-January war, in which more than 1400 Palestinian deaths were recorded. Gaza remains under a near-total land, sea and air blockade by Israel and Egypt.

“The devastation still exists and people are undoubtedly angry, they are frustrated, they’re disillusioned with Israel certainly, with Egypt undoubtedly and with the international community”, he said.

Loewenstein recently released a fully updated third edition of his best-selling book, My Israel Question. The book explores the Jewish identity and its attachment to Zionism and the state of Israel.

It was first released in 2006 and has since been the subject of heated debate in Australia and around the world.

Loewenstein told GLW the war still loomed large over life in Gaza: “Being there, you get the sense that people are being forgotten. The war has only led to further desperation. You see massive areas of destruction, neighbourhoods destroyed, houses flattened, and because Israel and Egypt don’t allow any cement into the [Gaza] strip nothing is being repaired.”

But despite this, Loewenstein said he found a people trying to move on with their lives.

“I found that people were determined to continue the struggle for more self-determination whatever that might mean. Whether they believe in a one state solution, two state solution, whatever. Those arguments, in some ways, seem rather academic when you’re talking to people who have just experienced war.

“People are essentially living on life support. What astounds me is that there is an ability to ignore these facts by much of the international community and focus on the supposed terrorism committed by Hamas.”

Despite Hamas being democratically elected as the Palestinian government in 2006 and subject to a US-backed coup by Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party in 2007, the international community has fiercely condemned Hamas. Hamas is labeled a terrorist organisation in the United States and much of the western world.

However, Loewenstein said the decision by Israel and the US to not engage with Hamas was a mistake.

“There is no doubt that Hamas is trying very hard at the moment to be engaged by the international community, particularly the US under Barack Obama and I’m a bit sceptical about that actually happening. But they are hoping that by showing pragmatism that they can be accepted by the international community.”

Much of the recent international media reporting has reflected on the growing Islamisation within Gaza.

Last month, Hamas helped suppress an extremist Islamist group who called for an Islamic emirate in Gaza. But Loewenstein said Israel’s subjugation and oppression of the Palestinian people was responsible for a rising fundamentalist militancy in Palestinian popular opinion.

“Every human rights group in the world […] notes that the cause of extremism in Gaza and throughout much of the Palestinian territories is the occupation”, he said.

“Inevitably, extremism breeds when you lock the people down and tell them that they have to reject the leaders they have voted for, such as Hamas.

“People feel like they have to prove themselves and they have to stand up for very strong beliefs.”

Instead of negotiating with Hamas, Israel and the US have consulted with only Fatah, which they label as the “moderate” Palestinian opposition. But Loewenstein said Fatah had become a tool of Israel and the US.

“The US is very keen and does negotiate with Fatah because they have essentially bought them off”, Loewenstein told GLW. “They prop them up, they financially support them, they militarily support them, and they train their troops.

“The Palestinians [in the West Bank, which Fatah seized in the 2007 coup] themselves are now managing the Israeli occupation for them [Israel]. In that way, Fatah is a very handy friend and Hamas on the other hand is not. Hamas will simply not accept those rules and it shouldn’t.

“The fear is that there will be some very unjust solutions pushed through in the next year agreed upon by the Palestinian Authority under Fatah, which leaves the Palestinians and Palestine in very bad shape.

“The real question is whether the international community actually wants the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians as a whole, to be independent. All that they have said and done suggests that they don’t. [The] occupation is just far too beneficial for too many people.”

In June, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu endorsed a call for a demilitarised Palestinian state to be developed. In response, the US issued a press release saying the announcement was “an important step forward”.

On August 25, Fatah-aligned Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad released a report that sets forward a plan to create a de facto Palestinian state within two years regardless of the “peace plan”.

But falling in line with Israel’s apartheid regime has not gained Fatah more support with the international community or the Palestinian population. Calls from the US and the European Union to halt illegal settlement construction on Palestinian land in the West Bank have been ignored by Israel.

Fatah’s congress last month was held amid vicious infighting, with claims of corruption and of the congress being “hijacked” by the party’s old guard.

Loewenstein said: “Even if they have a state of their own, and that’s a big if, it will be incredibly weak and lacking in any kind of viability.”

When more than 175 Palestinian civic organisations signed on to a callout for an international boycott, divestments and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel in 2005 it was hailed as a new direction for the Palestinian rights campaign that was international and non-violent.

Loewenstein described the boycott campaign as a “blunt instrument” in the first edition of My Israel Question. Now, he is a strong supporter of the campaign and believes it to be a key measure in the fight for Palestinian justice.

“I think the situation now has got so dire in Palestine that to simply wait and hope that the international community will somehow wakeup and move toward peace is delusional. It’s too late to hope for that anymore.

“So for that reason, the BDS movement, which is a non-violent movement, is an attempt to try and make Israeli Jews realise, along with the international community, that we simply won’t stand by and watch apartheid deepen and deepen.

“Israel is an occupying nation and as long as Israel occupies the Palestinian people, the Israeli state and Jewish Israelis have to feel like white South Africans felt 20 years ago.”

The international movement against the South African apartheid regime promoted a similar strategy of boycotts, divestment and sanctions. The campaign played a part in apartheid’s downfall in 1994.

Loewenstein said: “The only reason, in the end, that white South Africans realised that the status quo of apartheid couldn’t continue was enough of the world said we will not treat you as a normal country until you end this apartheid [and] that is what happened. Not because a lot of white South Africans went: ‘Gee suddenly we like blacks.’

“No. Of course there were some that did. But the majority did not because their lives were good.”

He recounted accusations raised by pro-Israeli activists at a September 15 meeting he addressed at the University of Sydney. They asked him why Israel should be “singled out” for criticism.

Loewenstein said: “The reason we are picking on it [Israel] is because it calls itself a democracy and democracies behave in certain ways and Israel is not behaving in any kind of way which is even vaguely democratic.

“If you’re a Jew in Israel life is pretty good, but if you’re a Palestinian it sure isn’t. And in the West Bank and Gaza even less so.

“I think it is important there is an attempt to try to open Israeli Jewish eyes that if they continue behaving in this way they will be treated as a pariah, which is how they should be.

“I think what the boycott movement does is to say that so-called normal life, having a situation where the Israeli Jews are able to enjoy cultural events and political events in a normal way is not going to be sustainable any more.”

The New York Times has clearly taken the decision to not overly focus on the devastating UN report over Israel’s war against Gaza.

Today they publish an odd piece by David Landau, the former editor of Haaretz:

Israel intentionally went after civilians in Gaza — and wrapped its intention in lies.

That chilling — and misguided — accusation is the key conclusion of the United Nations investigation, led by Richard Goldstone, into the three-week war last winter. “While the Israeli government has sought to portray its operations as essentially a response to rocket attacks in the exercises of its right to self-defense,” the report said, “the mission considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole.”

The report has produced a storm of outraged rejection in Israel. Politicians fulminate about double standards and anti-Semitism. Judge Goldstone, an eminent South African jurist and a Jew, is widely excoriated as an enemy of his people.

The report stunned even seasoned Israeli diplomats who expected no quarter from an inquiry set up by the United Nations Human Rights Council, which they believe to be deeply biased against Israel. They expected the military operation to be condemned as grossly disproportionate. They expected Israel to be lambasted for not taking sufficient care to avoid civilian casualties. But they never imagined that the report would accuse the Jewish state of intentionally aiming at civilians.

Israelis believe that their army did not deliberately kill the hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including children, who died during “Operation Cast Lead.” They believe, therefore, that Israel is not culpable, morally or criminally, for these civilian deaths, which were collateral to the true aim of the operation — killing Hamas gunmen.

It is, some would argue, a form of self-deception.

When does negligence become recklessness, and when does recklessness slip into wanton callousness, and then into deliberate disregard for innocent human life?

Here it is once again; the deliberate victimhood, the desire to minimise the Palestinian casualties, the need to focus on Israeli Jewish suffering (ignoring the rather small fact that over 1400 Palestinians were killed) and the hand-wringing.

Zionist angst never looked so grostesque.

Global protests against firms invested in a light-rail system in the occupied Palestinian territories refuse to die.

The latest, courtesy of Jonathan Cook:

An ill-fated light railway under construction in Jerusalem was originally heralded by Israeli officials as a way to cement the city’s “unification” four decades after the city’s Palestinian half was illegally annexed to Israel.

But the only unity generated among Jewish and Palestinian residents after four years of disruptions to the city’s traffic and businesses is general agreement that the project is rapidly becoming a white elephant.

After engineering problems, rows between the contractors and the municipality and delays caused by archaeological discoveries along the route, completion of the first 14 kilometers section of track is not expected until the end of next year at the earliest — more than 18 months behind schedule. The budget overspend is estimated at more than $500 million.

This week, in an indication of the deepening crisis, Israel’s Dan bus company was forced to step in to buy the five percent stake of Veolia, a French company that is supposed to operate the line for the next 30 years. Dan, which is waiting for the Israeli government to approve its bid, has no prior experience of running a rail system.

Shmuel Elgrably, a spokesman for the transit system, told the Haaretz newspaper last week that the loss of Veolia had “screwed” the project.

Veolia’s unexpected withdrawal from City Pass, a French-Israeli private consortium backed in part by public finances, is being claimed as a victory by Palestinian officials and activists whose boycott and lobbying efforts appear to have forced the company to quit the project.

They have accused Veolia and another French firm, Alstom, which is laying the tracks and providing the rail cars, of violating international law by working on a project designed to benefit Jewish settlements in the occupied part of Jerusalem.

With news that Barack Obama, Mahmoud Abbas and Benjamin Netanyahu will meet this week in the US for a completely empty photo-call, this comment on Friday from Hamas legislator Mushir al-Masri at a rally in Gaza’s Beit Lahia is ominous:

The choice of negotiations has proven a failure, and it’s time that Palestinian negotiators abandon this worthless and destructive tool and go back to holy war.

Joseph Dana, an American Jew with whom I spent considerable time recently in Israel and the West Bank, is currently living in Europe. He struggles, like many Jews, with the appalling use of violence meted out by Israel to the Palestinians.

His latest essay is an interesting examination of the desperate need for contemporary Judaism to react against anti-Semitism, real or imagined. Is it the glue that holds the Jewish world together?

The Zionist experience in Palestine has exposed the Jewish people to a number of modern experiences which were previously unknown. The governance of a state, the construction of an army and the maintenance of a civil society are but a few of the tasks which the Zionist movement has thrust upon the Jewish people. This exposure has come at the cost of state politics, class creation and, in the case of Israel, ongoing violent conflict. Perhaps the most taxing cost of the Zionist experiment is the creation of a new internal Jewish politics, one which does not tolerate challenge to its authority. In the past twenty years, the discourse surrounding the holocaust has reached a point in which any genuine challenge to its position as the single most horrific event in human history is met with attacks and dismissal from the official organs of the Jewish community…

So it is clear that Europe, while trying officially to be inclusive and ‘multicultural’, still harbors classic anti-Semitic problematic among its population. What has been the Jewish response to this episode of modern European anti-Semitism and ultimately, targeted genocide? Unfortunately the response has not been a radical push for inclusion and continued emancipation in European society instead in many sectors of Jewish life there has been an internalization of anti-Semitic understanding of modernity. Take for example the attacks on liberal Jews who openly criticize the actions of the state of Israel in the West Bank. Amos Elon was often targeted as a ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ because of his move to Italia and his political stance. To use another example, Tony Judt is often criticized for his views and the fact that he does not live in Israel…

The use of the holocaust by the Jewish communities in Israel and the United States is another problematic that has responded to the European model with internalization. Contemporary Jewish identity has been constructed around two opposites, which cannot function without each other, the holocaust and the State of Israel. The American Jewish community, one of the strongest and most secure in history outside of the German Jewish community before the holocaust, have elevated the events that transpired against European Jews to a level of their own identity in the United States. This can clearly be seen in the creation of the US holocaust memorial.

I mentioned in early September a forthcoming blogger conference in Israel as a way for Zionist forces to co-ordinate propaganda for the state. Let’s call them whores for Israel.

Evgeny Morozov, writing on his Foreign Policy blog, has a long post about the event and it’s worth quoting in full:

Times are changing. 60 Minutes, one of Australia’s most popular commercial current affairs programs, has done a story on the West Bank. The journalist, Liam Bartlett, has written this:

Trying to understand the Middle East peace process is a bit like attempting to unscramble an egg so we travelled to Israel to get a first-hand look at just how hard it might be to even begin a so-called ‘road map to peace’.

At the very heart of the problem are the Jewish settlers, now occupying large tracts of land that the Palestinians say are really theirs. The settlers are essentially squatting on whatever piece they choose and constructing houses and towns in a defiant gesture of “now that I’m here – it’s all mine”.

Nowhere was this sentiment more strongly expressed than at a settlement on the eastern fringe of the West Bank, south of Jerusalem, when Nadia Matar told me that her people had: “Inherited the land from God and they were not going anywhere”.

Nadia is one of the founding members of the “Women in Green” movement, which is dedicated to supporting Israel’s military and has pledged to never give back an inch of territory to the Palestinians. At best, they will let them live in Israel but without the right to vote. Indeed, Nadia told me she didn’t really care where any of the Palestinians decided to live as they had: “Over 20 Arab states to choose from so they can go to any one of them”.

Nadia’s extremism was repeated tenfold by many of the settlers we spoke to and especially through the video footage we saw from a group called B’Tselem. This unique human rights organisation has started a project that was originally dubbed the “Shooting back campaign”. As the name suggests, they armed dozens of Palestinians, not with guns but with video cameras and taught them how to ‘shoot’ when they were on the receiving end of any conflict with Jewish settlers. The result is that the rest of the world, through programmes like ours, can now begin to see that perhaps the violence and confrontations are not as one-sided as the Israeli’s would have us believe.

Certainly, there are still deadly rocket attacks from extremist Arab groups and the seriousness of these should in no way be downplayed but when you witness up close how the average Palestinian is controlled, it puts that violence into perspective.

The case of Palestinian Doctor Mustafa Barghouthi is a prime example. A trained doctor and also an independent member of the Palestinian Parliament, Dr Barghouthi was born and raised in Jerusalem and worked in a local hospital for 14 years. Despite now working only 30 minutes away in nearby Ramullah, he is never allowed to return to his town of birth. His sister is there, his friends and former work colleagues, but he is prevented from ever going back. The Israeli’s deny him access through any one of hundreds of checkpoints. I asked him if they suspected him of being a terrorist, even though he is blatantly independent of either Hamas or Fatah. He said: “Well, they never said so, but I think it’s one way of oppressing me from telling the truth.”

Nowhere is the upheaval these settlers are causing more obvious than in the West Bank city of Hebron. There, the Israeli government has allowed settlers to live smack, bang in the middle of a Palestinian town and, in so doing, has turned a once thriving shopping precinct into a virtual ghost town. Its streets are now strewn with weeds, all the shop fronts are boarded up, and the dusty footpaths are constantly patrolled by Israeli soldiers, stationed there to protect the settlers.

Overall, it’s an extremely sad part of the world, especially when you are visiting from such a blessed country as Australia. The constant animosity is incredibly depressing to observe. In some parts, the argument has become something of a blood sport. At one Palestinian village, Nilim, just north of Ramullah, the local youths protest every Friday at the fence of the adjoining settlement. And like clockwork, the Israeli police and military turn up and fire tear gas at them. Sometimes it escalates, sometimes not, but I can tell you, being on the receiving end of that gas is not a comfortable thing. It snaps your eyes shut, stings your skin and leaves a nauseating taste in the mouth.

That said, it’s preferable to rubber bullets and that’s always a possibility, too. This is the third time I’ve covered a story in Israel and whilst it never gets any easier, it is such a key plank to wider world peace, that you have to remain optimistic that things can change for the better.

This is an important story. Any fair-minded person who visits the West Bank is struck by the ever-expanding occupation and fundamentalist Jews. The occupation is the obstacle, no matter how Israel and the Zionist lobby try to hide it.

Public opinion is shifting and Israel only has itself to blame.

Jerusalem Post editor David Horowitz reminds us that peace in the Middle East will never happen because Israel’s “enemies” are ready to strike again. Zionists, to the barricades! Endless war awaits:

In the coming year, despite the current tranquility, Israel’s best and brightest may have to act again in order to protect us.

Listen to that quiet. In the communities adjoining Gaza, where children grew up drawing rudimentary pictures of square houses with grass, sun and incoming missiles, there’s an unfamiliar tranquility only rarely disturbed by the occasional Kassam.

Give or take the odd rogue Katyusha, all is calm on the Lebanese border, too, as Hizbullah jockeys further north to cement its political position in the drawn out process to form a new government in Beirut.

Most conspicuously, all is intriguingly silent on the Iranian front. Israeli officials who, until weeks ago, spoke openly and frequently about the viability of Israel’s “military option” should all else fail in the struggle to thwart Iran’s nuclear drive, have now largely clammed up. “The less said the better,” they intone nowadays. Which is absolutely true, of course. It’s just not quite what they were saying before…

But for all the shock, and after the pause for grief, Israel must now rise again, take to the skies again, as a new year dawns. We have no choice. We survive, we thrive, only because the very finest of our youth are prepared to protect us from our enemies. At all cost.

And we know that the current quiet is deceptive…

In the coming year, despite the current tranquility, Israel’s best and brightest may have to act again in order to protect us. And act they will, Judge Goldstone, within our own clear moral parameters.

We will strive and we will pray for peace and pragmatism to preempt that need. Our modern history suggests a different preemption may be deemed necessary.

Following this month’s release of the film about leading US Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein, American Radical, it’s worth recalling how he made his name. Below is taken from Noam Chomsky’s 2002 book, Understanding Power:

How many of you know about Joan Peters, the book by Joan Peters? There was this best-seller a few years ago [in 1984], it went through about ten printings, by a woman named Joan Peters—or at least, signed by Joan Peters—called From Time Immemorial. It was a big scholarly-looking book with lots of footnotes, which purported to show that the Palestinians were all recent immigrants [i.e. to the Jewish-settled areas of the former Palestine, during the British mandate years of 1920 to 1948]. And it was very popular—it got literally hundreds of rave reviews, and no negative reviews: the Washington Post, the New York Times, everybody was just raving about it. Here was this book which proved that there were really no Palestinians! Of course, the implicit message was, if Israel kicks them all out there’s no moral issue, because they’re just recent immigrants who came in because the Jews had built up the country. And there was all kinds of demographic analysis in it, and a big professor of demography at the University of Chicago [Philip M. Hauser] authenticated it.

That was the big intellectual hit for that year: Saul Bellow, Barbara Tuchman, everybody was talking about it as the greatest thing since chocolate cake.Well, one graduate student at Princeton, a guy named Norman Finkelstein, started reading through the book. He was interested in the history of Zionism, and as he read the book he was kind of surprised by some of the things it said. He’s a very careful student, and he started checking the references—and it turned out that the whole thing was a hoax, it was completely faked: probably it had been put together by some intelligence agency or something like that. Well, Finkelstein wrote up a short paper of just preliminary findings, it was about twenty-five pages or so, and he sent it around to I think thirty people who were interested in the topic, scholars in the field and so on, saying: “Here’s what I’ve found in this book, do you think it’s worth pursuing?”

Well, he got back one answer, from me. I told him, yeah, I think it’s an interesting topic, but I warned him, if you follow this, you’re going to get in trouble—because you’re going to expose the American intellectual community as a gang of frauds, and they are not going to like it, and they’re going to destroy you. So I said: if you want to do it, go ahead, but be aware of what you’re getting into. It’s an important issue, it makes a big difference whether you eliminate the moral basis for driving out a population—it’s preparing the basis for some real horrors—so a lot of people’s lives could be at stake. But your life is at stake too, I told him, because if you pursue this, your career is going to be ruined.

Well, he didn’t believe me. We became very close friends after this, I didn’t know him before. He went ahead and wrote up an article, and he started submitting it to journals. Nothing: they didn’t even bother responding. I finally managed to place a piece of it in In These Times, a tiny left-wing journal published in Illinois, where some of you may have seen it. Otherwise nothing, no response. Meanwhile his professors—this is Princeton University, supposed to be a serious place—stopped talking to him: they wouldn’t make appointments with him, they wouldn’t read his papers, he basically had to quit the program.

The Obama administration comes down on the side of war criminals over its role in the Gaza war. When will more people start to realise that Washington is not an honest broker in the Middle East?

The Obama administration sharply criticized a UN report Friday alleging that Israel committed multiple war crimes in its Gaza war this year. The State Department statement ended nearly a week of muted reactions to findings already rejected by Israel.

The State Department said the conclusions of a UN commission headed by South African Justice Richard Goldstone were unfair to Israel and did not fully deal with the role in the conflict of the militant Palestinian group Hamas. It said the United States objected to a recommendation that Israeli actions be referred to the International Criminal Court.

“Although the report addresses all sides of the conflict, its overwhelming focus is on the actions of Israel,” spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters.

Back in January, Assa Doron, an Israeli/Australian research fellow in the research school of Pacific and Asian studies at the Australian National University in Canberra, wrote a piece in the Australian about Jewish dissent over Israel:

No one has a monopoly on patriotism or what constitutes national loyalty. Like many others, I too feel for those Israelis whose lives are routinely affected by the barrage of bombs falling on their homes in southern Israel.

However, I become deeply suspicious when their experiences are used as an authenticating and authoritative view, to the exclusion of other equally important voices, especially when pitching Israel as the sole democracy in the region.

In August, Doron published a powerful piece in Hebrew in the Israeli political blog Haoketz and he has sent me the English translation:

A recent article from Haiir (July 17), a Tel-Aviv newspaper, reports on a cartoon depicting an Israeli and a Palestinian soldier in a face off, rifles aimed at each other, with a baby pram –a symbol of parental nurture and future generations – beside each. The difference between the two almost identical soldier figures is that the pram is in front of the Palestinian who hides behind it, while an identical pram is located behind the Israeli soldier, who guards it.  The article reports on the production and distribution of what it calls a caricature by a senior high school teacher during the Gaza war. The caricature was sent to students in an email with a caption underneath noting ‘there is no need for debates in school when a caricature is worth a thousand words’.

The caricature came to the attention of parents and more recently of the newspaper. Both parents and students were dismayed at the cartoon’s message; which along with other incidents in which the teacher conveyed religious and nationalistic principles and values, were viewed as at odds with the schools’ secular mandate. The school is not in a settlement in the occupied territories. This is a school in Ramat-Aviv, the liberal and secular bastion of Israeli society. In response to queries by the newspaper, however, the school’s Principal was unequivocal in her praise for the senior teacher whom she described as an excellent educator and teacher.

My concern with such caricature is to emphasize how such an image is located within a broader process of dehumanization taking place across Israeli society and its state institutions. The most significant point is that such a sketch is but one way in which Israeli youth are subjected to methods of inculcation by their teachers: those who the state places as one of the most important moral authorities.

Through the sketch the teacher exercises political persuasion in the classroom in ‘innovative’ ways that powerfully target the young. When parents began questioning such methods, the senior teacher replied she merely put into drawing what the government (Peres, Nethanyahu and Barak) and the media have been saying all along: that the terrorists (synonymous with ‘the Palestinians’) are hiding behind women and children and the IDF is protecting our citizens: that was the consensus.

Curiously, in the same week another debate erupted in Israel over a report by an Israeli Human Rights Organization called, ‘Breaking the Silence’ that documented testimonies by soldiers who served in the ‘Cast Led’ operation in Gaza, conceding that they used Palestinian civilians as human shields to protect themselves in battle.  The report immediately triggered a vehement response by the well-oiled army PR machinery against those anonymous testimonies by soldiers.  The spokesmen claiming that the organization is out to tarnish the IDF, which Israel regularly proclaims as the most moral army in the world.

Unfortunately, the image drawn by the teacher received far less attention by the state authorities, but to my mind is equally revealing of the process of dehumanization that is in full swing in Israeli society. The recent exposure in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz of Israeli soldiers wearing t-shirts sporting an image of a pregnant Palestinian woman in a rifle’s cross-hairs with the slogan “1 Shot 2 Kills” is a case in point. There are many more such disturbing mass produced t-shirts. It should be clear, these are t-shirts are produced privately by soldiers, often with approval of senior officers. However, even if they are not official army issue, the fact that so many soldiers approve of them and wear them, as noted in Haaretz, points to a deep-set attitude of hatred, stretching beyond professional concerns, that seems to afflict many soldiers.

Perhaps more concerning is the fact that the dehumanizing process is now fully entrenched in schools, as part of the mechanisms reproducing the widespread maxim that there can be no partner for peace in the Middle East. Such simplistic sketches, closely mimicking the cartoon genre beloved to all children, normalize state discourses about the other as being undeserving of any sympathy whatsoever.

There are a number of grave concerns that emerge from such an ‘innocent’ sketch – one that as the teacher said, merely ‘reflects the consensus’. Some of these concerns have been hinted at above, such as the way in which the future generation is indoctrinated into viewing the Palestinian as the mirror image of a morally upright Israel – i.e., non-human. How else can one explain a person using a defenseless baby to shield himself from the enemy (from the Israeli soldier)? The Israeli soldiers’ moral superiority is clear – the baby in the pram is behind him. He represents Israel whose sole role in the conflict is to defend itself from an inhuman enemy. The Israeli soldier guards the future generation while the Palestinian other sacrifices it.

But the visual text is equally powerful because of its sterility. This is not old fashion Nazi depiction of a stereotypical Jew, with his big nose, greedily chasing after defenseless children or trying to trick people out of their hard-earned money. No, as Israelis we are wary of such stereotypical depictions. After all, this common practice is found elsewhere: something we regularly hear about with relation to Israel’s portrayal in the Arab world.

To be sure, such demonizing portrayals of Israel and Jews across the world still exist, but the image drawn by the teacher is powerful precisely because it lacks such attributes. Its potency lies in the visual sterility and fixity of the situation it seeks to portray. Indeed, other than the head gear and the flags (Palestinian and Israeli) located next to the two opposing soldieries there are hardly any distinguishing markers. The power of the sketch lies in both the medium and the context. Cartoon and caricature are potent formats because they convey so much in such a concise fashion. Caricatures often induce us to think outside the box. This type of sketch, however, is simply another brick in the separation wall that we as Israelis have come to accept as part of our everyday reality and encounter with Palestinians. In other words, this sketch reproduces what is routinely peddled by state authorities and the media: that Arabs are inhuman – they don’t even care for the most vulnerable in their midst, their own children become mere fodder for feeding the conflict.

The ‘sterile’ nature of the image is also revealing because of what is absent from the static scene of an Israeli and Palestinian soldier in a face-off. It suggests that all things are equal in this war, apart from the moral system symbolized by the location of the baby prams. There is no mention of the economic and military might employed by the Israeli forces, ranging from battleships, tanks and cutting-edge unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), nothing about the crippling occupation and sufferings experienced by Palestinians in their everyday encounters with the Israeli state. Moreover, the absence of actual caricature – such as distorted features – makes the image seem more ‘truthful’ and undistorted.

One can only commend the parents who complained about such depictions. The same cannot be said about the principal, the teacher and Israeli state, all of whom seem to endorse it.

Assa Doron is a researcher in the Australian National University and a member of the The Ein Bustan project and kindergarten promoting an intercultural dialogue between Arabs and Jews in Israel

The following article by Philip Mendes and Nick Dyrenfurth appears in today’s Australian newspaper: