Tag Archives: Machsom Watch

Are we safer, now that Huda Al-Sosi is dead?

1 Reply

Are we, Israeli and Diaspora Jews, safer now that Huda Al-Sosi is dead? Do we sleep more easily, feel more secure on the street, less wary at work, worry less about our children’s futures, now that she is dead? She “was killed in an Israeli air strike on Oct. 23 which also took the lives of relatives. The status of her two children is unconfirmed,” according to the tribute to her on the We are Not Numbers website. Huda had not yet had a chance to contribute to the project which “tells the stories behind the numbers of Palestinians in the news and advocates for their human rights.” Now more than ever it’s vital to cherish the personhood of those, Palestinian, Israeli and others, who are being killed in this horrendous war, the Black Shabbat and the War on Gaza. “Every person has a name” goes the Hebrew song that is used on memorial days for soldiers and the Holocaust. Her name was Huda. Her colleagues describe Huda as ” a beacon of strength and kindness,” having “a way of lighting up any room with her infectious energy and her radiant smile.” I imagine myself back in my days of university teaching. Would I enjoy Huda being a student in my class? I think so, very much.

Maybe that’s not good enough though. In this time of turmoil and tension, perhaps some readers will insist that Huda’s “love of Palestine” and determination “to reveal to the world the stories and struggles of those living in the shadow of the Israeli occupation” mean she was a propagandist, an enemy of we Jews. She loved her country; is that wrong? Don’t you? Perhaps some readers will doubt the good standing of the organisations behind the project, Nonviolence International and the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor because they are too Palestinian. Maybe I should have picked a better example, whose innocence could not be challenged. Here, then, is Reevana al-Hussain, a one year-old also killed in an Israeli airstrike. Nothing else is written about her on the Instagram post, but I saw a news clip of a despairing father crying at a bomb site somewhere in Gaza that his one year old daughter had been killed. When did she have time to become Hamas, he lamented. When indeed.

But we are safer, we’re told, not because Huda and Reevana are dead, but because they were “collateral damage” in the targeting of Hamas terrorists, who use the Palestinians civilian population as human shields. So, are, Israeli and Diaspora Jews, safer because Ibrahim Biari, a target of some of the intense, deadly and destructive bombing in Jabalia, is dead? He is said to have been responsible for some of the horrific Hamas attacks on October 7th, so he won’t be doing any more of that. But how many more Ibrahim’s will there be? Weren’t we told that we’d be safer after Hamas founder and leader Sheikh Yassin was assassinated in 2004, followed by his deputy Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi later the same year? And weren’t we told we would be safer after Yahya Ayyash, the Hamas “Engineer” who made the bombs for a series of horrendous suicide attacks from 1993-95, sabotaging the Oslo peace process, was killed in January 1996? No, his death was followed by four suicide bombings that killed seventy-eight Israelis in February and March 1996, undermining the authority of Shimon Peres as the successor of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister at the time of Oslo who was assassinated by a Jewish religious terrorist in November 1995. Netanyahu was elected in stead of Peres. There has not been another Rabin, another Israeli leader with the trust of enough Israelis to lead the country to peace.

None of the killing has made us safer, not in Israel-Palestine or in the Diaspora. Antisemitism always spikes when one of these wars happen, and this time even more so. Here in the UK, the official representative body of the organised community, the Board of Deputies, put out A GUIDE FOR JEWISH EMPLOYEES NAVIGATING WORKPLACE ISSUES ARISING FROM THE WAR IN ISRAEL. There’s some sound advice about addressing harassment, victimisation and discrimination. But when it comes to “How to handle difficult conversations” the guide offers Israeli hasbara talking points. The key point should be that Jews in the UK should not be held responsible for the actions of the Israeli government and military, just as Muslims in the UK are not responsible for the actions of Hamas. One is antisemitism, the other is Islamophobia. Instead, the Board of Deputies encourages UK Jews to make our safety dependent on defending what are almost certainly indefensible war crimes, if not genocide.

It cuts both ways, of course. Are Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank, in pre-1967 Israel, in the diaspora, safer because Hayim Katsman is dead? Hayim was an academic, someone I would have liked to meet as a colleague, who had also been active with Machsom Watch, given testimony to Breaking the Silence and (as I have done occasionally) spent time accompanying Palestinian farmers in the South Hebron Hills to protect them from settler and soldier harassment. No, Palestinians are not safer. Palestinians citizens of Israel are no closer to equality; Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are no longer closer to freedom, to independence; and Diaspora Palestinians are no closer to justice, to fulfilling their right of return.

Photo:  Hannah Wacholder Katsman

No, none of us are safer because of all the killing. And none of us will be safer if more Hudas, Reevanas and Hayims are killed, with whatever justifications. There must be an immediate ceasefire. It’s being called for in Israel, especially by those for whom freeing the hostages is the highest priority. It’s being called for by progressive Jews in the Diaspora, such as the anti-occupation group in which I’m active, Na’amod. The call for a ceasefire is also heard at the many solidarity protests with Palestinians. Because a ceasefire is what is needed now, I joined one of those protests in my home city, Nottingham. It was not always comfortable for me, and I did not join in all the chants. But what is my discomfort when the alternative to a ceasefire is more Hudas, Reevanas and Hayims?

Protestors against the war in Tel Aviv, October 28 2023. Photo: Oren Ziv

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.