Life in spite of everything – Gaza Sderot

Two cities separated by a little more than three kilometre. Millions experiencing the same fears and horrors. Violence nourishing the same hate. If you listen closely what people from both side tell you, you understand at first sight simple fact of life. Everybody wants to have to pursue happiness for her- and himself and their descendants. In conflict the most common point you can find among enemies is the way people mourn over the loss of a child. So while we are divided by race, colour, social class, sex, religion, nationality and abilities we still are the literally identical. Today such a sentence should not need to be written, at least not again. To be honest, it’s with a sad feeling that I write these lines. We are constantly reminded through the action of ourselves or through external events that it is far more natural, or at least seems, to behave violently than to overcome this impulse. It is important to note that it is through our intellect and our experiences that we overcome it. But, and this is a crucial point, we are the result of evolution, of a natural fight for survival, to put it far to simply we fight for the right to procreate, we do nothing more than to protect the future of our genes.

Arte TV followed several citizen of both cities during the month before the military incursion. It is a documentary revealing, at close observation, more about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than many well known so-called ‘experts’.

See for yourself  – http://gaza-sderot.arte.tv/

Some passages On Bullshit

by Harry G. Frankfurt

Why is there so much bullshit? Of course it is impossible to be sure that there is relatively more of it nowadays than at other times. There is more communication of all kinds in our time than ever before, but the proportion that is bullshit may not have increased. Without assuming that the incidence of bullshit is actually greater now, I will mention a few considerations that help to account for the fact that it is currently so great.

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled – whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others – to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs. The lack of any significant connection between a person’s opinions and his apprehension of reality will be even more severe, needless to say, for someone who believes it his responsibility, as a conscientious moral agent, to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world.

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of scepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These “antirealist” doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.

But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things,and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to sceptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial – notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

On Ignorance

Yesterday I watched a video on Youtube that was send to me through a friend of my cousin. The movie was a Hamas propaganda movie. I’m not upset about the movie. During conflicts any side tries to win world public opinion for its cause. What caused me to write this note was a comment someone made. He wrote “One in a million is not enough”, reffering to the 1000 Palestinian deads of  Operation Cast Lead and the world Muslim population. I wondered:

Could it be that some german might have had a similar thought in 1936…

Loebbus Woods, Manifesto 1992

Architecture and war are not incompatible. Architecture is war. War is architecture.

I am at war with my times, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms. I am one of millions who do not fit in, who have no home, no family, no doctrine, no form place to call my own, no known beginning or end, no sacred or primordial site.

I declare war on all icons and finalities, on all histories that would chain me with my own falseness, my own pitiful fears. I know only moments, and lifetimes that are as moments, and forms that appear with infinite strength, then melt into air.

I am an architect, a constructor of worlds, a sensualist who worships the darkening sky. I cannot know your name, nor can you know mine.

Tomorrow, we begin together the construction of a city

Good 50×70 – War – 2007

http://good50×70.org/2007/

Après moi, le déluge

The ongoing violence in Gaza, the siege, the humiliation and the apathy of world leaders create the next generation of terrorists. While it seems that the blood which is currently spilled in this round of violence is mostly Palestinian, it will be the state of Israel and its citizens who will carry the final burden. However, long sightedness is not an Israeli virtue.

Karl Marx informs us that shame is a revolutionary sentiment. Jean Paul Sartre encourages us to inform ourselves so to feel that sentiment. The first time I really understood this idea was in 2002. At that time I was still soldier in the IDF. When I was off duty I lived in Tel Aviv.

We, that is a bunch of new immigrants, shared a single room flat plus a roof top. Two (Palestinian) friends of us had lost their jobs and flats due to the intifada and we, as friends do, invited them to stay with us. This were uneasy days for them. They had to hide constantly. Every small excursion turned into an adventure. Countless times did we have to go to the Abu Kabir jail in Holon to pick up our friends after they had been arrested. It was also a time of intense discussions and mutual understanding. I wouldn’t want you to think that this was some kind of ‘humanitarian’ action. We were friends, first and foremost.

One Saturday in spring Adel’s cousin Abed came from Nablus looking for work. He had just turned 20 and had never left Nablus before. We accommodated ourselves to make one more sleeping spot. In the afternoon then we thought to go to the beach.  Avoiding the patrolling police squads we reached the sea. While I was walking into the water, someone grabbed my hand. I looked up. It was Adel’s cousin. With tears in his eyes he confessed to me that he saw the sea every day from his home but had never sat a foot into it. He was afraid. In this moment, for the first time I understood what the occupation meant. It meant to have a world full of possibilities untouchable, right behind a glass wall. In this very moment I felt ashamed like I’ve never did before.

People like Abed are an exception. While he felt the humiliation of the occupation every single day as a young man unable to provide for his family, he did not fall into blind hatred. This in itself is not an accomplishment. However, separation leads to ignorance and ignorance to hate. Many others chose another path. The path of resistance and violence. They fill the cells of our prisons, planning their revenges.

In the streets of Gaza, somewhere there is a boy. He grew up in eternal violence. Violence against Israel, but also between rival palestinian factions. On the one hand he recognizes the limits of the Palestinian resistance movements to face the IDF. On the other he sees the incapacity of Arab leaders to unite in the face of the attacks on Gaza. He observes the sly smiles of senior Fatah members, stating that Hamas has brought this upon itself. He hears the helpless UN security council stumbling. He knows, only through more violence, more resistance will he one day be free. Free to travel, free to educate himself and his children, free to pursue happiness.

The price tag for our security is his freedom.

Tahadiye Now!

Divide et Impera

In 169-170 Flavius Josephus informs us about Gabiniuses’ efforts to divide the Jewish Nation into smaller fractions, which ultimately lead, a century earlier, to the destruction of Jerusalem and the defeat of the Judean Revolts. Flavius was referring to Maxim’s ‘Divide et Impera’ (Divide and Rule) which stipulated that in order to gain and maintain economic, military and political power, weakening the enemy by dividing it into opposing or at least conflicting interests was and remains to be a valid and successful strategy.

The current events in the Palestinian Authority are just another example. Israel would be satisfied to implement a ceasefire on its terms, the Fatah hopes to regain the public trust by showing how Hamas failed. In fact it is the international isolation of the Hamas government that is to be blamed for the current situation. Since month the peace movements have stopped calling for peace, but for ceasefire instead. So should the new grass-root organizations be called ‘Tahadiye Now!’. Hopefully not.

Since the rift between Hamas and Fatah took such dimensions Israel and Egypt, but also the EU and the US, have tried to isolate the Hamas government. It is of outmost importance to understand that Hamas, especially in Gaza, is not some sort of marginal group. It is a strong social movement supported by, first and foremost, the people.  Only few seem to remember that Israel ’supported’ Hamas in the early 1970s. It was seen as a sound counterweight movement to the PLO.

The blindness of the war hawks

If we are to promote democracy as a desirable value and the ideal form of social organization, we in no manner can approve a coup d’état of democratically elected governments. The EU and the incoming Obama administration should remove the Hamas from the list of terror organizations for some diplomatic achievement. I’m aware that this is a highly sensible issue. But we have to understand that it is only by upholding values of freedom of speech and of thought that we live up to our own expectations.

While the military removal of the Hamas government would lead to short term reduction of violence, similar to the wall in the West Bank, in the long term it will create more readiness for violence and escalation and a further incentive to acquire more and better military equipment. Examples are to be found all over the world. Weak ‘puppet’ governments are toppled sooner or later by an ‘authentic’ national movement. The resurrection of the Taliban in Afghanistan is just a last example.

Currently both sides are preparing for a ground offensive. The IDF knows that it won’t be able to stop the rocket launching without it. Hamas was well aware that this day would come and has prepared accordingly. Should it come to a ground offensive there will be a lot of causalities on both sides, however, most likely less civilians will be injured.

In 1907 Yitzhak Epstein wrote an article entitled ‘The hidden question’. In this article he mentioned the incapacity of the Zionist movements to understand the other national movement present, namely the Palestinian one. The article was largely ignored, as it would be today too. But it remains valid. The eternal problem lies in the incapacity to accept that there are two, and for now even three, national movements in Israel/Palestine which demand and won’t stop until they determine their lives themselves. In this sense the Hamas movement today is nothing else than the Irgun. Not a terror group but a paramilitary national movement.

Israel attacks Gaza – Goliath vs. David Round 13

by Raif Azoulay

Round 13 or Operation ‘Solid Lead’

The sirens haul anew throughout Gaza. Identical to the bell of a box match,  its sound marks the beginning of hostilities and unleashes the fighters from their respective corners. The sirens  seem to shout, ‘and here we go…Round 13′.

Suddenly the sirens mute and are replaced by the mind-numbing noise of fighter jet drones. Fighter jets are nothing new in Gaza. Ramy, an old friend, used to tell me that they were an integral part of the landscape. But this time it is different. With unprecedented strength today over sixty jets hit fifty targets killing over 200 Palestinians and injuring many more. According to Israel, the attacks came as a response to the ongoing rocket shelling on southern Israel, killing one and injuring four today.

Numbers don’t talk. However, those creating them do. In an interview with the Israeli Broadcasting Chanel Yossi Levy the Foreign Ministry’s spokesman for the Israeli media explained that Hamas was to face the responsibility for the many dead. He maintained that Israel was promoting human rights, which Hamas violated, and in an unprecedented effort (Annapolis) reached out to the Palestinians. Asked for a reaction to the numbers of casualities, he calmly replied that Gaza ‘is the densest place on earth’, carefully avoiding to reflect on how it became it. He further failed to mention that Gaza resembles rather a refugee camp than a city or region. The central point of his message was the need to promote a coherent message across the globe of an Israel fighting on behalf of the Palestinian and their rights – against the democratically elected tyrant which he sees in Hamas. Later in his speech to the nation, Olmert reiterated the points Levy made. Explicitly pointing out that he does not intend to fight the Palestinian people. The public was prepared for a prolonged fight. It seems Levy’s message already reached Olmert.

It is interesting to observe the media in the early hours of a conflict. The message that it is not Israels choice to fight and that Hamas brought this wrath upon themselves was repeated time after time. Ridicule examples were brought up, incoherent arguments, falsifications, omissions and possibly even lies.

A new reality and an ever newer one

Since the second Intifada only sporadic and local incursions have occurred in Gaza by the IDF. Hamas used this time effectively. Entering this round of clashes, the IDF is not fighting a terror organization anymore, but a well structured and disciplined para-military guerrilla. In the light of the events in Lebanon from 2006, Hamas improved its training facilities and has turned Gaza into a deadly mining field should Israeli ground forces decide to enter the strip. Hamas forces count fifteen thousand soldiers. Among them some thousand soldiers belonging to the Iz al-Din al-Qassam, the Palestinian ‘revolutionary guards’. It is predictable that Fatah, Hamas and the other factions will put their differences aside during the escalation.

Any violent military conflict entails tragedies. Nothing new under the sun.

However, the reasons why we fight are determinant. A deeper look at Israeli domestic politics could help shed some light on this incursion. While Prime Minister Olmert is preparing his suitcases, disconnected from reality, his possible successors all fall into strategic role games. According to any poll, at the current moment, opposition leader Netanyahu is set to win the elections. The disintegration of Ariel Sharon’s Kadima party seems inevitable, leaving two main protagonists of Israeli politics once again face to face. Labour vs. Likud.

It does not look good for Ehud Barak’s Labour party. These days he is exposed to a lot of pressure. In my opinion, Barak sees a crucial opportunity for himself in this conflict. He believes that he can show the public that he is a military mastermind and can provide the so cherished security to the Israeli society. The only chance for him to become PM again is to change reality in Gaza and southern Israel and he needs to do this quickly. I guess in his wildest dreams in two or three days he sees himself parading with the newly freed soldier Gilad Shalit. The timing of the ‘response’, in my opinion, reflects the understanding that with the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama pressure on Israel will rise. Change has come, and change scares Israel.

After all, no matter

One of the deadliest day in Gaza in 60 years of conflict

who the Israeli PM may be, Washington will set the tone for the future in the Middle East. While Netanyahu is hailed as a hard-liner able to defend Israel, people forgot that he was the PM who actually returned the biggest percentage of the occupied land. In any case, further escalation won’t bring the expected security. Not in the short-run and much less in the long-run.

As always, this conflict remains unpredictable. Whether Hizbollah will try to open a second front in the north and whether the sporadic uprises in the West Bank will turn into new large-scale revolts creating a third Intifada remains to be seen. In any case, the current events reveal once more the enormous disparities. During an entire month of shelling one Israeli was killed. In two hours over two hundred Palestinians. Truly, Goliath vs. David. The question therefore is; why does David keep standing up again?

Poem by Yehudah Amichai

‘God takes pity on kindergartners,
Less so on the schoolchildren,
And will no longer pity their elders,
Leaving them to their own,
And sometimes they will have to crawl on all fours,
Through the burning sand,
To reach the casualty station,
Bleeding.’

Religion in the Palestine-Israel conflict since 1967

by R. Azoulay

What role has religion played in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict especially since the Six Day War in 1967? First, it is important to clarify how the terms of Palestine/ Israel vary through different times.

Palestine refers to the period before 1948, from the Roman Empire to the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate. Israel refers to the period after 1948 with Jerusalem as its capital city, as of 1967, but without the temporarily occupied West bank and the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian Authority refers to Gaza and the West bank, the territories annexed by Israel during 1967 that were subject to the negotiations of Oslo II and led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority and mutual recognition between Rabin and Arafat, but even more important led to the recognition of the mutual right of the two people to coexist in peace, security and self-determination in two sovereign states.

How is religion used? Intentionally and symbolically. How does religion influence the achievement of political goals? Which segments of both societies have experienced an increase in the importance of religion since 1967 and has it had direct influence on the conflict? I will concentrate more deeply on interactions between Islam and Judaism since 1967.

One issue may be brought up right at the beginning. Using and emphasizing history as the foundation for claims over Palestine/ Israel provides endless possible nationalist claims, as Palestine was ruled by various empires and people across different eras in history. Or as a Jewish lawyer al-Kabir from Baghdad commented in the Iraqi times in 1936; “If one goes reconstituting history two thousand years back there is no reason why one should not go further back,… and presently have the world ruled by militant archaeology”. Of course, most Sephardic Jews, as al-Kabir, had neither experienced the brutal Pogroms in Eastern Europe nor would most of the Sephardic Jews have to experience the Holocaust to come.

It is important to remember that in Judaism there is no single, highest authority. This fact provides ground to very diverse groups and attitudes within the Jewish religious tradition. However, in the early 20th century Zionists were predominantly secular Jews. Orthodox Jews appeared to resist to the idea of a Jewish homeland without the installment of Jewish law, the “halakha”. Influenced by the spirit of colonial period secular Zionist groups even discussed the possibility of other locations for the Jewish homeland, such as the British Uganda Proposal first proposed by Chamberlain, who sought to give territory in British East Africa, more precisely the Mau Plateau in what is today modern Kenya. Besides the fact that Jews had no historical nor religious connection to the Mau Plateau in British East Africa, looking back on the disastrous outcomes of the colonial era it is more than questionable if such a decision would have led to peaceful coexistence.

However, after the Balfour declaration, no Zionist could anymore think of another homeland for the Jewish people than Palestine. Not only secular Jews called for resettlement in Palestine. For example, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, was among the first religious thinkers to advocate political activism for Palestine in the form of resettlement. Jerusalem seems to have had a very special place in the hearts and minds of Jews throughout the two thousand years of Jewish Diaspora. Nevertheless, during the first half of the twentieth century the symbolic importance of Jerusalem increased stedily and saw efforts being made by Zionist organizations to buy holy Jewish pilgrimage sites, such as the Wailing Wall from the Muslim trust that owned it.

According to scholars the nationalist claims of the Muslim majority of Palestine are based on a religio-legal concept called waqf, translated into trusteeship. It is understood that God has permanently entrusted Palestine to the Muslim people. This is maybe best exemplified in the words of Sultan Abd al-Hamid of the Ottoman Empire in his response to Theodore Herzl’s offer to buy Palestine for twenty million lire. “Please advise him never to mention this ever. … It does not belong to me. It belongs to my people. My people acquired this Ottoman Empire by their blood”.

However, the Palestinian nationalist movements were initially also mostly secular. In fact, the radical Islamic organizations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad were “a reaction to both; the spread of Islamic political activism and the increasing role of religious mobilization in Jewish nationalism” of the 1980s. We can see that prior to 1967 religious identification and symbolism was not as central to the main nationalist movements on both sides.

While I do not want to explore the reasons why, where, when and how the conflicts between Jews and Muslims began in general, since there is an endless number of reasons, but their impact on the conflict is most of the time contested from one side or the other; beginning with the Balfour, respectively McMahon declaration over to the UN proposition in 1947 to the displacement of Palestinian civilians in the early years of the state of Israel. Nevertheless, it seems that there wasn’t a political and diplomatic will neither on the side of the Palestinian leadership nor on the side of the surrounding Arab countries to tolerate the creation of a Jewish national-state, alongside the proposed Palestinian state. This is crucial because failure to accept the UN proposal has made return to normal terms very complicated since. With the Israeli declaration of independence and the following war, the civilian Palestinian population was the main victim of aggressions and confrontations between the new state of Israel and its surrounding Arab neighbours.

So what changed in 1967? The crucial event of this year in the Middle East was the Six Day War. The end of the Six Day War seems to have been the beginning of a new sort of conflict. The Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, Gaza and the West Bank were conquered and occupied by the Israeli army, but at the centre of these dramatic days was the liberation or occupation, depending on the standpoint, of East Jerusalem and the control over its religious sites sacred to all three monotheistic traditions. This had several far reaching consequences.

First, with the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank more than a million Palestinians came under Israeli control. Second, for the Muslim the loss of the sovereignty over the holy sites through the occupation of Jerusalem by Israel seems to have turned a regional, political conflict over territory into a religious war. Religious identity and symbolic became increasingly important. Not surprising then, that the Yom Kippur War in 1973 was launched on the most distinct Jewish holy day. The implementation of Jewish settlement in these years around the Palestinian cities is another example of how religion was used to legitimate occupation. It was promoted in form of the strongly ideological notion of expanding the boundaries according to the biblical Israel. The longer the occupation of Palestinian land continued the more the paradox between a Jewish and democratic state became apparent. If Palestinians were granted full citizenship, within a few years the state would have an Arab majority and would cease to be Jewish in its traits, character, ethos and legislation. If, on the other hand, Palestinians were denied citizenship an civil rights in order to preserve the Jewish character of the state, Israel would find itself in the uncomfortable situation of being a democracy only for Jews, and an apartheid regime for the rest of its inhabitants.

Unfortunately, it seems that Israel has chosen to remain an essentially Jewish state, and although I wouldn’t go that far and call the Israeli government an apartheid regime, remembering the fact that all Israeli citizens may vote and be elected, it seems that institutionally Jews are being favored. The 1990’s saw at the same time an Israeli government under Rabin reaching out and recognizing the Palestinian cause and Baruch Goldstein “opening fire on worshipers gathered in a Muslim holy site… killing 29 people and injuring a further 150”. For many radical, militant Jews Rabin betrayed the biblical Israel. These events culminated on the 4th of November 1995, when Yitzhak Rabin was shot by a Jewish fanatic named Yigal Amir after one of the biggeest Peace rallies ever held in Tel Aviv.

The phenomenon of militant Judaism as the Gush Emunim combines both “Orthodoxy and Zionism”. Striving for an expanded Jewish state, this right wing religious group has pushed for the extension of Jewish settlements into Palestinian territory and does not recognize the rights of non-Jews (Palestinians) to exist in a sovereign state.

On the Palestinian side there has been a radicalization since the first Intifada in 1987. Since then religion has become increasingly important. Islamic movements such as the Islamic Jihad or the Hamas have promoted the “notion of Palestine as an Islamic state, within which Jews would be a tolerated minority”. This reveals an interesting point; the difference between anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist. If the Jews would have renounced to political sovereignty they would have been tolerated by the Muslim population. We will never know whether under such circumstances Jews and Muslims would effectively have lived peacefully alongside each other.

Hamas is using distinct anti-Jewish rhetoric, as described in a leaflet published in 1988 the Jews are “brothers of the apes, assassins of the prophets, bloodsuckers, warmongers [and] only Islam can break the Jews and destroy their dream”. But the possibly most fundamental characteristic of the ideology of Hamas is the concept of “shahid” or “martyr” used to justify suicidal bomb attacks on Jewish civilians. This also involves the notion of “jihad”. We all saw the images of mothers sending their son into death of a “shahid”. Suicide bombings as an act of martyrdom seem to be so deeply embedded that the prohibition of Islamic law to both suicide and the killing of non-combatants is simply not respected.

In conclusion, it seems as both radical religious groups represented for a long period a small but influential minority in their societies. While the ongoing conflict has reduced the wide Israeli public support for settlements, the ongoing violence has further radicalized Palestinian society. In general it seems that during the 1990’s an opportunity to achieve peace was missed. The efforts of politicians in the name of the majority of the populations were torpedoed by small radical groups such as Hamas or the Gush Emunim.

The usage of religious symbols and reinterpretation of texts contain the potential to fool some segments of the population and to use them accordingly to achieve political goals. For example, to secure settlements on the Israeli side or to frighten and terrorize on the Palestinian side. Recent events have shown that the region is deeper then ever splitted across religious boundaries.

The overwhelming victory of Hamas at the Palestinian elections, has cast a shadow over a possible return to the negotiation table. Further the recent incursion of Israel into Gaza has not helped to stabilize the region. The renewed warfare with the Shiite Hezbollah (Party of God) in Lebanon is promising further bloodshed and retaliation.

In order to end on a more positive note I would like to cite in my opinion a great visionary man, who understood the need of both people to achieve long-lasting peace. “We say to you today in a loud and a clear voice: enough of blood and tears. Enough” because the “pain of peace is preferable to the agony of war” .