Tag Archives: bibi netanyahu

When Peace Became a Dirty Word: John Kerry and the Peddling of Pseudo-Peace

2 Replies
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is greeted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prior to their meeting in Jerusalem on May 23, 2013. [State Department Photo/ Public Domain]

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is greeted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prior to their meeting in Jerusalem on May 23, 2013. [State Department Photo/ Public Domain]

Peace is generally thought to be a good thing, conjuring up positive, pastoral images of lions lying down with lambs, swords being beaten into ploughshares, and each person sitting unafraid under their vine and fig tree. Yet, this near-universal and enduring admiration of peace has been perverted in Israel/Palestine, not because of any honest, outspoken preference for war but because ‘peace’ has been contaminated by pseudo-peace. A key trigger for my project on Israeli peace images was a report in Ha’aretz on June 10th 2004 that some 40 Israeli and Palestinian media and public relations professionals would be meeting in Jordan ‘to try and find a way to promote the brand name of peace,’ and ‘to create a ‘local and international campaign to promote the image of peace’. The campaign was initiated by the director of the Peres Center for Peace, Ron Pundak, who was one of the negotiators of the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO. He acknowledged that the ‘image of the peace brand …. has been worn down over the past few years,’ but hoped that the public relations experts could achieve what the diplomats had been unable to do, namely ‘to define certain concepts, such as coexistence, in a way that will be acceptable to both sides’. As it happens, the peace branding campaign never got off the ground, because the Israelis and Palestinians participating in it could not agree on a concept of peace to promote. But what had tarnished the image of peace, and how has it been corroded even further since 2004?

The most obvious answer is that by 2004 the Oslo process had lost all credibility, in the wake of the failed Camp David talks between Israeli Prime Minister Barak and Palestinian President Arafat in 2000 and the violence of the Second Intifada. That answer suggests that the image of peace has been eroded because the promise of peace has not been fulfilled, and raised expectations have been dashed. Yet, equally significant in the context of 2004 was the international Quartet’s April 2003 road map for peace, which offered nothing that had not already been proposed under Oslo (It did, however, cover the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from the positions they reoccupied inside the Palestinian areas during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002). Ironically, it is pursuit of the pseudo peace of the ‘peace process’ that has tarnished the image of peace among the very people in Israel (and Palestine) that do the most to build peace.

When I visited Israel in the summer of 2009, an academic colleague who has been active in anti-occupation groups and refused reserve military duty in the Palestinian Occupied Territories put it this way – that only a charlatan still speaks about peace. Retroactively, he considered the organization he co-founded, The Twenty First Year, and other groups to the ‘left’ of Peace Now during the first intifada such as End the Occupation, to have been directed against the occupation rather than for peace. Yet, one of our common protest chants at the time was ‘Peace – Yes! Occupation – No’, while the most concrete notion of peace we had in mind was of two states for two peoples, a proposal that was then radical if not unthinkable in Israeli political culture. It seemed clear to us in 1988 that ending the occupation and bringing peace implied each other. However, in June 2009, the charlatan-in-chief, Prime Minister Netanyahu, publicly and cynically endorsed the ‘two state solution’, while his government did as much as it could to ensure that such peace could not be achieved (such as expanding settlements).

It is not surprising, then, that currently Israeli and Palestinian peace-builders often do not identify as peace activists. In her book Struggling for a Just Peace: Israeli and Palestinian Activism in the Second Intifada, Maia Carter Hallward noted an accentuation of this trend between 2004-5 and 2008 among activists in Ta’ayush, Machsom Watch, Rabbis for Human Rights, and other groups (151, 158). For the mainstream Jewish Israeli public disillusion with ‘peace’ deepened because Israeli’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005 was taken to be a step towards peace taken by Israel to which Hamas responded with Qassam rockets. So much, then, for the formula of ‘territories in return for peace’. But for the activist peace camp, following the Israeli withdrawal Gaza was still under occupation, now out of reach for nearly all Israelis and West Bank Palestinians, and in effect under siege. Hallward considers it crucial as a researcher to focus on ‘peace work rather than peace words’ (54), noting how the latter has become so discredited that is has become a dirty word among activists (164).   

Last week saw the end of yet another international effort to ‘revive the peace process’ that further eroded the image of peace. Unable to bring the Palestinian Authority and Israeli government any closer than they had been before, US Secretary of State John Kerry ended a spell of intensive diplomatic toing and froing with an announcement that the two sides needed to think about their positions and a plan to boost the Palestinian private economy (meaning the West Bank economy), so as to reduce the PA’s dependency on the foreign aid that actually supports the status quo. Under such circumstances, I can only agree with Noam Sheizaf of the +972 blog that:

what this moment calls for, more than anything else, is some honesty. Kerry would have done his own cause justice if he simply stated that there is no peace process, nor has there been one in recent times, and that the current trends on the ground are likely to continue in the foreseeable future.

The peace process is a pseudo peace, a ‘peace’ in which there can be endless negotiations  while at the same time occupation continues, settlements expand, a permit system and checkpoints obstruct Palestinian movement, the separation wall is completed, Palestinians can be imprisoned without trial, and the Palestinian economy is subordinated to the Israeli one. There is ‘peace’ and there is just peace, and the peace that Kerry has been peddling is the snake oil of the charlatan.

How should we picture the blood of Occupation?

Leave a reply

Lubna al-Hanash

Lubna al-Hanash

Gerald Scarfe's Sunday Times cartoon

Gerald Scarfe’s Sunday Times cartoon

Picturing oppression by portraying blood can cause wounds, a lesson that the British Sunday Times and its political caricaturist Gerald Scarfe learned following the publication of a cartoon on January 27th 2013. The cartoon depicts Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who had in effect been re-elected for another term of office earlier in the week, building a block wall in which the bodies of people are crushed, using blood as mortar. That Sunday was also Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK and other countries (but not in Israel). The response was swift. In The Commentator blog, Raheem Kassam wrote that the cartoon shows ‘the large-nosed Jew, hunched over a wall, building with the blood of Palestinians as they writhe in pain within it’, accusing the newspaper of repeating the infamous mediaeval anti-Semitic blood libel that was repeated by the Nazis in their Der Sturmer propaganda paper. Less polemically, a piece by Mark Gardner, of Britain’s Community Security Trust, republished by The Guardian on January 29th, argued clearly that the cartoonist’s intentions were beside the point. Rather, what matters is the association between the blood (that appears often in Scarfe’s work) in this case and the ‘blood imagery, sometimes explicitly as Blood Libel, [that] is commonly found in obscene anti-Israel propaganda in Arabic and Iranian media’. Because of its visual motifs, its iconography, the cartoon belongs to ‘the canon of contemporary antisemitic imagery’. In the face of such criticism, the cartoonist, the newspaper and its owner, Rupert Murdoch, did not take long to apologise for the timing and content of the cartoon.

I do not want to rehearse the argument about whether the cartoon is anti-Semitic, or whether it should have been published that day or another day. I want to ask another question, which is: how should we picture the blood of occupation? The critical responses to Scarfe’s cartoon adamantly insist: ‘not this way!’ But they focus on this cartoon blood at the expense of the blood that is shed by Palestinians subject to Israeli occupation. In the weeks leading up to the Israeli election, and in the days that followed it, there was a rash of fatal shootings of Palestinians by Israeli forces using live ammunition in circumstances that did not, even by Israeli military standards, seem to justify the use of such deadly force. Israeli human rights watchdog B’tselem reported five such fatalities in January 2013, their report being the basis for coverage in The Guardian on Sunday 27th January of the spate of bloodshed. One of the dead Palestinians, 17-year old Samir ‘Awad, was shot on January 15th by soldiers beside the Separation Barrier near Budrus, a location where anti-wall demonstrations are so frequent that a documentary film has been made about the village. So, when Scarfe depicted the bloody wall in his cartoon, he illustrated one of the occupation’s most potent symbols and most damaging, concrete, practices. His caption written beneath his illustration, ‘Will cementing peace continue?’ is an apt comment on the continuity of the occupation in its most vicious form following Netanyahu’s re-election.

There is blood spilled by Israeli forces in the occupation to be depicted. How else, then, to show it, if not in political caricatures with risky associations? There is always the practice of photojournalism, now more widespread because of the common use of cameras and the open publicness of social media. The blood of Lubna al-Hanash, fatally shot by soldiers on January 23rd near al-‘Arrub Refugee Camp is shown in this way, among a torrent of photographic images of the occupation that appear each day, attracting far less attention or concern than Scarfe’s cartoon. And some of the attention her death did attract shows the vile abuse of anti-Semitism. Blogger Aussie Dave simply accepted the Israeli military’s initial justification of al-Hanash’ killing, given the conflicting eye-witness accounts of her shooting he could find (in English) on the web, calling the incident a Palestinian blood libel. Once again, the victims are turned into the victimisers in the logic of denial that sustains the occupation.

Is, then, the picturing of the blood of occupation too contentious, too repetitious, or too open to denial for it be worth bothering? No, this blood needs to be pictured, it needs to be acknowledged. We need to take responsibility for it. In the painful documentary film, To See if I’m Smiling one of the women soldiers who served in the occupied territories during the second intifada tells of how she is haunted by her experience. Rotem knew that her observation procedures led directly to the shooting of a boy. After her release from service, she tells the camera that she called a friend and pretended to be joking about the blood she could not wash off her hands. Rotem is horribly traumatized by the blood. She needs to find a way to picture it, to talk about it. We all need to picture it, because the path to peace is through the trauma we have wrought and brought on ourselves, and because if we do not, Lady Macbeth’s madness awaits us.