The family of an 18-month Palestinian baby and father killed in an arson attack by Jewish settlers reportedly will not be entitled to the same government compensation granted Israeli victims of terror. On Tuesday, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported the Israeli law governing such compensation applies only to Israeli citizens and residents, as well as West Bank settlers. Palestinian victims must apply to a special interministerial exceptions committee under the Israeli Defense Ministry. Earlier this month, thousands of mourners in the West Bank attended the funeral of the Palestinian father, Saad Dawabsheh, who succumbed to severe burn injuries just eight days after trying to save his son, Ali, from the arson attack.
Meanwhile, Jewish and Palestinian women are holding a hunger strike outside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s residence in Jerusalem to call for a renewal of peace negotiations. Members of the group Women Wage Peace have been fasting for the past month in alternating shifts, sitting in an open-air tent and inviting passersby to discuss how best to wage peace. The group has dubbed their mission Operation Protective Fast, a twist on Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s military operation that left 2,200 Palestinians, including 550 children, dead last summer. On the Israeli side, 73 people were killed, all but six of them soldiers. The attack destroyed 12,000 homes in Gaza; another 100,000 were damaged. None of the destroyed homes have been rebuilt so far, due in part to the ongoing Israeli blockade. Women Wage Peace are urging Israeli cabinet and Knesset members to prioritize peace talks with Palestinians.
Henry Siegman talking:
Netanyahu appointed Knesset member Ayelet Shaked as his justice minister. During Israel’s summer 2014 attack on Gaza, she approvingly posted an article on her Facebook page that called for the destruction of, “the entire Palestinian people, including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.”
Hotovely, who is now the deputy minister of the Foreign Ministry. But since there is no foreign minister, she, in fact, will be running the Foreign Ministry. The very first thing she did after her appointment was send out instructions to ambassadors, Israeli ambassadors across the world, to inform governments to which they have been assigned that the Bible specifically quotes God granting all of Palestine to the Jews, and consequently, the state of Israel will retain all of Palestine, because it follows the word of God. That’s Hotovely.
Then there is Shaked, and you have just the minute—this is the minister of justice. This is her concept of justice, how to deal with the Palestinians.
Then there’s Miri Regev, who was appointed the minister of culture. And her very first public statement in that capacity was that she just looks forward anxiously to—it’s the term she used—to censor the work of the artistic community and to prevent them from creating art that insults the state of Israel. That’s the minister of culture.
Then there’s the minister—the deputy minister of defense, Eli Dahan. Now, all of these appointments, every single one of them, is on record as opposing a two-state solution, a lifelong record of opposition to a two-state solution. And Dahan is the one who thought, along with his minister, the full minister of defense, both of them thought it’s a wonderful idea to have Palestinians limited to separate buses, the ones who live in the West Bank and travel to Israel, and not to permit them to travel in the same buses that Israeli Jews travel in. So that’s Dahan.
Then he appointed a Silvan Shalom as the new head of the—the new chief of peace negotiations, should they resume—again, a person who is on record as bitterly opposed to a two-state solution.
Dore Gold, who is the former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. He is now the new director of the Foreign Ministry. And he, too, has a lifelong record of total opposition to a Palestinian state.
when you look at that, you look at a government that is made up of people who are either racists, out-and-out racists, and people who are totally opposed to a two-state agreement, while at the same time being opposed to granting Palestinians in the West Bank Israeli citizenship. You somehow can’t avoid this terrible realization that this state of Israel, that the Jewish people has prayed for, has supported, has seen as a historic change in the situation of Jews worldwide, has a government that is a racist government.
On my way down here, I recalled that some years ago—I think about 15 years ago—the Austrian government formed a new government that included the head of a right-wing political party, Haider. And the American Jewish community, as well as every organization in Europe, led a global campaign to convince governments to boycott that government because of that one racist and an extreme nationalist, a xenophobe, who was in that government. And, in fact, Europe, the European Union, decided to boycott him.
Here we have a government that has at least a half a dozen xenophobes, right-wing nationalists and racists.
John Dugard, the former U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories. He compared Israel to apartheid South Africa. Several years ago, an Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert said that.
He said specifically that. He said that if we are not prepared to return virtually all, if not all—and this is a direct quote—”if not all of the territories” beyond the ’67 border to the Palestinians, and to share Jerusalem, he said, we are not serious about wanting peace. And he said the consequence of this will be that Israel, while we can—while we can have disagreements about the border, but if we do not follow through on what is necessary for a peace accord, we will be seen as an apartheid state, because we will be an apartheid state. Now, he said that. And he said this is the great danger, if we delay reaching an agreement with the Palestinian that gives them a state of their own along the ’67 borders. And he said, if we don’t do that, then we may lose the support of American Jews, because apartheid is something that they cannot accept.
I recall telling him at the time, “You are right about apartheid, but I’m afraid you probably are not right about American Jews, because, in fact, apartheid, you don’t have to wait until there is a majority of Palestinians, when you add the Palestinians who live—Arab citizens of Israel to the ones in the West Bank and in Gaza—you don’t have to wait until they are a majority and they are totally disenfranchised or are second-class citizens. Even as a minority, a minority that has to live under these conditions, you have apartheid today. It exists now. It’s not a future danger. And the problem is, if you keep identifying as a future danger instead of recognizing that it’s a present reality, you will never reach that future, you will never recognize the truth of the system that you have there.”
he said that this is why he has—why he negotiated with Abbas. And he claims—he has claimed ever since—that if it were not for the war in Gaza, for which he was also in large part responsible, if it were not for the war in Gaza, those negotiations would have produced a two-state accord. And Abbas has confirmed this. He confirmed what Ehud Olmert has claimed ever since, namely that they had—that Abbas never walked away from those negotiations. Because Abbas was accused by the Israeli right to have turned down the most generous terms ever offered him by Prime Minister Olmert. And he said that this is not true. Olmert has said, in fact, he never walked away. What happened was that the Gaza war interrupted the negotiations, and they never were able to resume it, because at that point he came under—you may recall, he came under very severe criticism for some of his dealings with the paper bags filled with cash that were being handed to him.
Tzipi Livni and Herzog can be counted on to spearhead an opposition, specifically on the issues of Israel’s democratic character, to oppose efforts that will be undertaken from the word go by this new government. We talked earlier about Ayelet Shaked. She declared that her—one of her main missions will be to undermine Israel’s Supreme Court and its ability to pass judgment on the constitutionality of laws passed by the Knesset that deprive the minority of its rights. So, I have no doubt that Herzog and Tzipi Livni will put up a very good fight and seek to prevent Shaked from achieving her goal, although there is a great deal of support within the Israeli Knesset today to do that to the Supreme Court.
But on the issue of the peace process, they are—the Labor Party and those affiliated with it, the other parties affiliated with it, are as incapable of reaching a two-state agreement without outside interference, without the Security Council or the United States taking a strong position, not very likely, but at least allowing the United States, allowing the Security Council to define very clear—a very clear framework for a permanent status agreement and not leave that up to the parties themselves. Without that, it’s not going to happen, because they have now—take this last election, this recent election. Despite the fact that different people, particularly in the media, tried to get a clear statement from Herzog and Livni about a two-state accord that is based on the ’67 lines, they refused to commit the party to that. So, there’s just no way that they will produce an agreement that is conceivably acceptable to even the most moderate Palestinian leader without resort to the Security Council.
I’ve changed my position basically for two reasons. First, because the Zionism that I was raised with is essentially the Zionism of the founders. The Zionist movement, from its very inception, was not a right-wing religious movement, not a religious/nationalistic movement. It was essentially a secular movement. The founders of the movement were socialists. They were left-wingers. They were people committed to democracy. Many of the Zionist founders did not even think in terms of a Jewish state. In fact, as someone pointed out to me recently, the title of Herzl’s founding document in German was not “The Jewish State,” but rather, “A State for the Jews,” a state in which Jews could live and develop their culture. And the assumption was—and incidentally, what few people are aware of today—is that overwhelmingly the religious community, the Jewish religious community in Europe and in—such as it was at the time in the United States, overwhelmingly rejected Zionism because of its democratic secular character, primarily its secular character.
The Agudat Yisrael was the organization with which I’d say 80 to 90 percent of the Orthodox community in Europe identified with, and it was bitterly opposed to the Zionist movement and saw it as a heresy, as a Jewish heresy. I recall going to a school, a yeshiva, where ultimately I received ordination. I went to that school, and my teachers there regularly referred to the leaders of the Zionist movement—to Ben-Gurion, to Chaim Weizmann and the others—whenever they mentioned their name, they would say, “Yemach shemam vezichram,” “May their name and their memory be wiped out.” And that is what they said when they referred to Hitler, as well, “Yemach shemo vezichro.” That was the Orthodox community at the time.
The Zionism that I identified with totally rejected that Orthodox Jewish sensibility when it comes to the Zionist movement. But that Zionism has been wiped out. It is not the—and perhaps even the memory of its leaders has been wiped out. And the kind of Zionism that exists today, as a Jew, I rejected completely, the one that’s exemplified by—it’s my Jewishness that leads me to reject it, to abandon it, to see it as shameful and as a betrayal of the very best and most important values of my religious and ethnic identity.
I reject the racism. I reject the sensibilities that these people, whose names we mentioned in the program, who are now all ministers, the anti-democratic sensibilities, the extreme—let me give you one example. Can you imagine—can you imagine if here in the United States we had two tracks for citizenship? One track to citizenship would be what our laws are today, but then there will be a fast track, run by the White House, which would be running—the White House, under the White House’s jurisdiction, would be running a conversion program with priests, Catholic priests or Protestant ministers, and who would give citizenship on a fast-track basis to people who convert to Catholicism or to Christianity. The Jewish community would be outraged. That would be just inconceivable. But that’s the situation in Israel today. There is a conversion office in the prime minister’s office, that works with people who want to fast-track their citizenship, but they can do it only by converting to Judaism. Had you suggested that to the founders of the Zionist organization in Basel when they first met, everyone would have walked out through the doors. Who would have accepted that?
It is very difficult for me to say that I can’t imagine that they will repeat this. But I can’t say—I can’t say that. I must be able to imagine that they will repeat it, because when this last Gaza war was playing out, and as you pointed out, over 2,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, were killed, and something like 500 Palestinian children were wiped out, the vast majority of Israelis not only supported it, but were critical of Netanyahu when he decided finally to bring it to an end. That, to me, was the most appalling thing I ever heard. I thought that there would be a sense of deep relief that this butchering, this turning of Gaza into a human abattoir, is coming to an end, even by those who felt it was necessary, but at least thank God it’s coming to an end. Instead, they turned against Netanyahu for ending it—Netanyahu, of all people, and the military. So, in light of that, how can anyone say, “No, it will never happen again”?
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Henry Siegman, former executive director of the American Jewish Congress. After his time at the American Jewish Congress, Siegman became a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He now serves as president of the U.S./Middle East Project. , Siegman has become a vocal critic of Israel’s policies in the Occupied Territories and has urged Israel to engage with Hamas. He has called the Palestinian struggle for a state, “the mirror image of the Zionist movement” that led to the founding of Israel in 1948.
— source democracynow.org