Antony Loewenstein

Steve Clemons, from the new website Palestine Note, interviews Hamas leader Khaled Meshal:

M J Rosenberg has a personal revelation at the J Street conference. A powerful sign that the event wasn’t simply about re-hashing tired slogans:

Between sessions at the amazing J Street conference, people mill around talking to friends and, sometimes, just a person standing near by.

I was lucky enough to find myself talking to a young man from Gaza, in Washington for the conference. He is not on the program. He is here to learn. And he is a remarkable person in every way.

Yusuf Bashir is 20. He’s tall and handsome and, if I had to guess based on his looks, I would have taken him for a well-off American Jewish college kid.

He most certainly is not.

Yusuf is from Gaza, specifically from Deir el-Balah. Until Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ended the military (and settler) occupation of Gaza in 2005, Yusuf, his parents, and four siblings, lived in a house next to the Israeli settlement of Kfar Darom, right next to a military base.

In 2000, the Israeli army decided to seize the house and use it as a sentry post. The army had already destroyed or taken other houses in the neighborhood.

But Yusuf’s father refused to move his family.

The Israeli army let them stay — but moved in with the family. They installed a lookout and a machine gun nest on the roof. And soldiers took over the top floors of the house.

Here is Yusuf’s description of life over the next five years (this section is from an article he wrote for the Seeds of Peace newsletter.

“We were not allowed on the second and the third floors of our house because the army told us that they were Area C where the Israeli military government runs everything and the Palestinians have no authority. The living room, where all seven of us had to stay at night, was Area B. We called it the jail. The bathroom, kitchen and bedrooms were Area B –where Palestinians administer themselves but Israel has security control. (Luckily they were not Area C ) My sister labelled the doors of the house. We had to get permission to go into the kitchen and a soldier would come with us if we had to go to the bathroom.”

This situation lasted for five years.

But for Yusuf, just four.

On February 18, 2004, a United Nations team received permission to visit the family. They spent a few hours at the house and then left. Yusuf, a teenager, was excited to see them and sad to see them leave. He followed them out of the house and, while saying goodbye, he was shot by an Israeli soldier who was patrolling across the street (the shooter was not one of the soldiers who lived with the family).

“The bullet stopped near my spine,” he recalls. .

“I crumpled to the ground. I was very sure it was my end and that I was dying. I even said the Shahadat, the words a Muslim says when he dies. But I did not die. In the hospital, I hoped that I would die because I was not able to move my legs.”

Yusuf was taken to Tel Hashomer hospital in Tel Aviv. The doctors and nurses saved his life but told him he would never walk again because of the bullet’s location.

The army apologized to Yusuf for crippling him. But the Tel Hashomer personnel, in Yusuf’s words, “cared for me with such love. They were so ashamed of what the army did. And after seven months, I could walk although I can’t play sports or do anything that could cause the bullet to move and cripple me forever. I’m in pain, but I walk. I’m better off than lots of Palestinian kids my age.”

So what was Yusuf doing at J Street. “After I recovered and went back to Gaza, my friends said, ‘now you must fight the Israelis.’ But my father told me that God didn’t save me so I can fight. He said that Israelis shot me but other Israelis saved me.”

Yusuf is now in Boston, in college. He intends to return to Gaza after he graduates to work to improve “my country.” Tragically, his father died a month ago and, due to Israeli restrictions on travel to and from Gaza, he could not return home for the funeral. He speaks of his father with tears in his eyes.

I asked him: how do you not hate?. He said, “Hate accomplishes nothing. My father taught me that to hate is the worst sin. Then Seeds of Peace found me and I went to their camp in Maine and met other kids from conflict areas being taught not to hate. Now I’m here at J Street.”

Yusuf’s story blew me away. I cannot imagine reacting like this. He was shot for no reason by Jews and yet he is here in Washington to work with Jews. I told him that his story gave me hope.

But an Israeli woman standing nearby, who listened to his story, said. “Hope? Yusuf is a lucky one. Yes, he was shot but he got out too. Most Palestinian children like him never get out. Israel has locked them into Gaza and thrown away the key. There are young men and women just like him, just as good, who will never have a moment of possibility. They are in a zoo. And they do not love us. They hate us, as I would hate them if the Palestinians did to us what we do to them.”

So, I asked, what’s the answer?

“The answer is right here. End the occupation. Free these Palestinian kids, and free my sons, one is already in the IDF, too. Otherwise, there will be so many more Yusufs and Yosefs and they aren’t going to be as lucky as this boy.”

Lucky? All things considered, I guess he is.

The J Street conference in Washington DC continues. Coverage here, here and here.

Forgive the minimal coverage. I’m snowed under with work commitments, so more about all this shortly.

Islamism in Indonesia is something I examined during my recent visit there (my thoughts picked up by the Atlantic). It’s a small issue that shouldn’t be over-estimated but the reality exists:

Racism in Israel, a daily occurence.

The Israel that many Jews, including at the J Street conference, would rather ignore; a serial human rights abuser:

Israel is accused today of denying the West Bank and Gaza access to adequate water through a “total” and “discriminatory” control that enables its own people to consume four times as much as the Palestinians.

An Amnesty International report paints a picture of many Palestinian families struggling – and often failing – to secure enough water for drinking, cleaning, and agriculture while Israelis, including residents of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, have all they need for lush, irrigated farmland, swimming pools and gardens.

Amnesty also suggests that taxpayers in countries who donate aid to the Palestinians are facing unnecessarily high costs to meet severe water shortages because their governments are unwilling to challenge “the most unreasonable” restrictions imposed by Israel on Palestinian access to the regionally scarce resource.

Here in Washington DC the J Street conference rolls on. It’s pretty thrilling to be around many like-minded people but also accepting that the mainstream view on Israel/Palestine is still imagining a Jewish state that doesn’t exist (democratic, free for all etc).

Here’s a collection of key links about proceedings: here, here, here, here and here. The smearing continues. Here’s Mondoweiss on the general atmosphere (I generally share his view but I’ll be writing a number of pieces over the coming weeks that say far more):

The main tedium of the conference is having to listen to Jews handwringing about Israel at panel after panel. J Street feels at times like a halfway house for ardent Zionists. They’ve been hooked on Zionism for years and they come here to handwring in a comfortable space. I find this stuff boring and upsetting too. It’s like, how long do the Palestinians have to wait for you to figure out how you feel about the Jewish boot being on their necks? I thought you were the smartest people in the world. This doesn’t take a long time to figure out; they just murdered 300 Palestinian children in self-defense and are ethnically cleansing Jerusalem. But the people who handwring are in agony. They talk about the Jewish “transformational” piece– the identity piece– and how hard they worked on atrocities in Darfur, and how it didn’t jibe with their work on Israel/Palestine.

And they say they worry about their funders if they speak out. Yes let’s talk about money. They talk about excommunication, too. I’ll get you quotes in days to come.

A bunch of Jews are way past the handwringing. God bless J Street for having the full Eastern European skirt that we can get under. There’s a lot of us on the left here.

But the leadership is to the right. Or positioning itself to the right. Against BDS, and in love with Israel. Everyone who goes up to the podium starts out by declaring their love for Israel.

This is the kind of attitude that I’m hearing constantly here at the J Street conference in Washington DC (time to redefine what it means to be Jewish, critical and pro-peace):

J Street’s university arm has dropped the “pro-Israel” part of the left-wing US lobby’s “pro-Israel, pro-peace” slogan to avoid alienating students.

That decision was part of the message conveyed to young activists who attended a special weekend program for students ahead of J Street’s first annual conference, which began on Sunday.

Students are seen as a key component of the 18-month-old organization’s constituency base and the conference itself. The multi-day event has incorporated new technology and interactive forums to harness their energy and garner feedback from the audience, which swelled to 1,500 on Monday and created overflow plenary and breakout sessions.

At their earlier weekend session, the 250 participating students mapped out strategies for bringing J Street’s approach to college campuses and encouraging students to join in the effort.

“We don’t want to isolate people because they don’t feel quite so comfortable with ‘pro-Israel,’ so we say ‘pro-peace,’” said American University junior Lauren Barr of the “J Street U” slogan, “but behind that is ‘pro-Israel.’”

Barr, secretary of the J Street U student board that decided the slogan’s terminology, explained that on campus, “people feel alienated when the conversation revolves around a connection to Israel only, because people feel connected to Palestine, people feel connected to social justice, people feel connected to the Middle East.”

She noted that the individual student chapters would be free to add “pro-Israel,” “pro-Israel, pro-Palestine,” or other wording that they felt would be effective on this issue, since “it’s up to the individuals on campus to know their audience.”

Yonatan Shechter, a junior at Hampshire College, said the ultra-liberal Massachusetts campus is inhospitable to terms like “Zionist” and that when his former organization, the Union of Progressive Zionists (which has been absorbed into J Street U), dropped that last word of its name, “people were so relieved.”

The Goldstone report over Gaza is a defining document. Israel’s crimes are clear to see.

For some in the Murdoch press – such as Alan Howe writing in Melbourne’s Herald Sun (the man has form) – “Jews prove easy catch“:

The none-too-smart and ideologically unsound United Nations works on more simplistic levels – it sets angry Arabs to catch its Jews.

Works every time.

There’s no shortage of angry, resentful and underachieving Arabs at the UN, nor will it run out of like-minded Africans too soon.

By and large, Arabs and Africans are not good at democracy. They don’t do personal freedoms all that well. Many of them are fond of cruel and unusual punishments – you know, public stonings for miscreant young women wanting to marry the man of their choosing, that sort of thing.

That the UN powerlessly condemns such behaviour is, apparently, beside the point.

In a sneering perversion of logic, some Arab and African nations, to whom human rights are an unnecessary indulgence, sit at some of the UN’s top tables – the UN Human Rights Council and even the Committee Against Torture.

Sharing leg space under the UN’s influential desks are such legendary stalwarts of democratic fairness and equality as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Cameroon, Madagascar, Jordan, Nigeria, Senegal and China. Tin pots, basket cases, thugs – take your pick.

They were just some of the countries that, as members of the Human Rights Council, initiated and sat on an inquiry into the Israeli actions in Gaza, which took place almost a year ago.

Led by esteemed South African jurist Richard Goldstone, they lived up to cheeky Oscar Wilde’s putdown of Britain’s then greatest poet, William Wordsworth. Wilde said of Wordsworth’s famous bucolic lessons that “he found in stones lessons he had already put there”.

The UN Human Rights Council had its finding sewn up in January when it sent “an independent … fact-finding mission” to the “occupied Gaza Strip”.

O CCUPIED by whom? The Israelis walked away from Gaza four years ago, courageously dismantling the settlements there and controversially forcing its grumpy civilians to leave.

The only Israeli in Gaza that I can think of is the kidnapped soldier, Gilad Shalit, who has been held by Hamas terrorists for more than three years. Now there’s someone Goldstone might have spoken to.

Gazans paid Israelis back in spades for the long-sought opportunity to be masters of their own fate: they sent thousands of Qasam rockets over the border and on to local towns, the deadly fusillade becoming a political imperative in democratic Israel.

Israelis wanted their Government to stop the shelling and end the terror. That’s why the Israeli army entered Gaza last December in a controversial invasion in which about 1400 people were killed, mostly Palestinians. That’s the thing when you take on the Israelis; they don’t come at you with some wobbly rockets that Uncle Ali knocked up out the back last night.

Gazans deserve their fate. They should love Israel. Israel is always right. The entire world is basically barbaric except for “us”.

The first J Street conference began tonight here in Washington DC. Over 1200 people attended, a few Jewish protesters outside accused the group of being worse than Nazis and the overall message inside was on opening up public debate on Israel/Palestine. On that level alone – and I have profound disagreements with the group on many issues – this can only be a good thing. Many young Jews spoke about widening the discussion and seeing the Palestinians as human beings. Sadly, this is actually progress in mainstream discussion over the Middle East. Debate online about this event rages.

The Israeli government continues to distance itself from the organisation. Frankly, probably not such a bad thing. When a bunch of thugs and pro-settlers speak for the Israeli people, the world should be concerned.

Here’s the J Street Twitter feed.

Much more in the coming days…

An Haaretz editorial worth considering:

The clashes yesterday between Israeli police who entered the Temple Mount plaza and Palestinian stone throwers and inciters seemingly ended calmly. There were “only” three policemen who suffered light injuries. In contrast to prior incidents on the Temple Mount, and using the standard wherein the number of casualties is the measurement by which one views the gravity of an incident, what happened yesterday was almost routine. Yet it is that very routine which indicates that the Temple Mount is behaving like an active, simmering volcano; the timing of its next major eruption is impossible to gauge. The government’s attitude, by which it views these events as just another competitive front between Israel and the Palestinians, is likely to foment a violent outburst which will ignite the entire Middle East.

The trepidation of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims from what is referred to as “the Judaization of Jerusalem,” or the Jewish takeover of the Temple Mount, cannot be overstated. Archaeological digs; the construction of Jewish neighborhoods and Jewish housing in and around the Old City; and the purchase of property and condemning of public parks with the intention of using the land to build Jewish residential neighborhoods are all apparently part of a deliberate policy being pursued by the government of Israel. Yet, while the battle against the building and inhabiting of apartments in East Jerusalem has been limited to a diplomatic tug-of-war between Israel and the American administration, the battle over the Temple Mount is being waged on the street.

This is a struggle in which Israeli Muslims stand alongside their coreligionists throughout the world, all of whom view themselves as custodians of one of Islam’s holiest sites. Political and diplomatic disagreements between the Palestinians and the Arab world go by the wayside in the face of the religious struggle at hand. Israel has been made fully aware that even friendly states like Jordan and Egypt cannot stand idly by while the Muslim world broods.

As the entity responsible for overseeing visits to the Temple Mount and ensuring the safety of guests, the Israel Police is caught between a rock and a hard place. It is wedged between a government which views strengthening the Jewish hold on the Temple Mount and its environs as a political and diplomatic objective, and Palestinians who view themselves as the fortifying wall standing in the way of such Israeli aims. Yet it is precisely the sensitive nature of the police’s task that requires it to adopt a more tolerant position of understanding and sound judgment. Its success will not be measured by an ostentatious show of force. Rather, it will be measured by its ability to hold a dialogue and reach understandings with the Muslim interlocutors in order to prevent a conflagration.

My following article is published in Crikey:

In the shadow of Aceh’s tsunami memorial museum sits a colonial, Dutch-era cemetery. Framed by overgrown grass and red flowers, graves lie disjoined, the result, I was told by writer Fozan Santa, of time and the tsunami’s raging water. At the back of the space, behind ornate statues to famed generals and soldiers, are four Jewish graves. Hebrew script and the Star of David run across the graves. These four Jews died in the 1800s and 1900s and remain in peace today in the heart of a devoutly Islamic society.

“Many Acehnese know about them,” Fozan said. “Holland sends funds to maintain the cemetery.”

It was not what I expected in a province ruled under sharia law. Although Jews are an abstraction and almost solely defined through brutal Israeli actions, I found no outright hatred of Judaism.

Fozan, with wavy shoulder-length hair, revealed that his definition of Islam was as contradictory and personal as could be. I asked whether he drank alcohol during a recent Ubud Writers and Readers Festival and he said he only asked for Coke. However, his friend, a Muslim from Jakarta, consumed wine and beer. “I’m Acehnese, not Muslim,” Fozan said. “I don’t drink alcohol but many Muslims do. We’re different.”

It was yet another sign that the Acehnese saw themselves as distinct from their Indonesian rulers. Jakarta may now control their lives but an independent streak still runs through the veins of the province.

Within minutes of arriving in Banda Aceh, my young hosts  — three girls in the final year of school, two of whom wore colourful headscarves  — were playfully asking me about girlfriends and life in the West. I was reticent to broach the subject of female circumcision but they were happy to take questions. One girl was mutilated at birth, “because it’s tradition and my mother said she had no choice”. She knew all about the reduced sexual feeling of the procedure but seemed resigned to the reality. They asked if I was circumcised.

That night I spent time at a cultural centre to watch rehearsals for a performance that will soon tour villages. It was aimed primarily at children as a way to teach Acehnese history before and after the 2004 tsunami. Resistance to the Dutch colonialists was a strong theme and the actors used bananas as ships as they stood inside a massively over-sized television set. Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment was referenced (my host said that many locals knew the work.)

Although cinemas are banned, pirated DVDs were widely available, including the latest Hollywood blockbusters. Like I noticed in Iran, images of American women in various states of undress were ubiquitous on covers. The Desperate Housewives women seemed to be missing quite a few buttons on their blouses. Satellite television and the internet makes the imposition of strict bans on “unIslamic” entertainment futile. Most people I met were proud to call themselves Muslim but tapped into the connected world that included nudity, violence and sexual proclivities.

During a public forum on writing and culture at a Western-style café in Banda Aceh — featuring my talk about Palestine and two guitarists who played songs eerily reminiscent of Nirvana’s Something in the Way — a young blogger said it was inappropriate to look at female nudity and porn. “We must have a moral responsibility,” he said. But others, commenting on a young artist who had recently caused controversy by painting female nudes, argued it wasn’t the role of society to tell artists what to paint. “As long as you’re true to yourself,” a girl said. It was a civil discussion over various interpretations of Islam that fundamentalists deemed unnecessary, even blasphemous.

Challenging these allegedly acceptable forms of Islam is Violet Gray, a support group for homosexuals and transsexuals. Understanding HIV and sexual orientation is something the Indonesian web does brilliantly and allows Acehnese of a particular orientation to feel less alone. We see similar trends in countless other societies (such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and China) where persecuted minorities gather to share and grieve.

Writer, teacher and publisher Fozan acknowledged the major shifts in his society since 2004 but lamented the lack of readers for his work. “We have too many writers here,” he said. “Everybody is just changing Facebook status updates every few minutes. Aceh is like France years ago when people used to use coffee shops to write books.”