Tag Archives: Rabbis for Human Rights

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

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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.

Wrecking the world together

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Children watching Hyundai demolition machine: Demolition in south Hebron hills by IOF 6.11.2012, photo 50 of 96 by Operation Dove.

Images can have strange and strained relations with each other. In this case, the strained relation is between the corporate image of the Hyundai corporation and activists’ image of the Israeli occupation. The South Korean corporation is now best known for making Hyundai and Kia cars. As is the case with other global corporations, it is very conscious of its brand image. According to Hyundai’s Chairman and CEO Mong-Koo Chung’s corporate message of May 2012, its “brand value rose to over USD 6 billion, ranking 61st among the world’s top 100 brands.” Branding isn’t only about marketing; it’s not only about sales figures. The corporate message states that: “our goal is not to be the worlds’ biggest automaker, but to be the worlds’ most-loved automaker.” One of the ways in which Hyundai makes itself more lovable is by fulfilling “its duties as a global corporate citizen through its widespread corporate social responsibility programs.” So, on the corporation’s worldwide website one of the five heading options draws attention to Hyundai’s collaboration with UNICEF in its Global Endpoverty campaign, trumpeted under the slogan “Moving the World Together.”

Hyundai demolition monster: Demolition in south Hebron hills by IOF 6.11.2012, , photo 83 of 96 by Operation Dove

But Hyundai doesn’t only make cars. A photograph credited to “Operation Dove” displays the Hyundai brand name in a rather less lovable context, as a piece of its building equipment is put to use by the Israeli army to demolish a stone wall built by Palestinians in the south Hebron Hills area to pen in sheep. The Hyundai machine looks like a monstrous single-toothed dinosaur that has come not to move the world forward but to wreck it.

Another of the current five heading options on the corporate website leads visitors to Hyundai’s “live brilliant” branding campaign, one of the video advertisements for which features laughing children amazed at the world that they see during car journeys. The caption for the campaign is: “Hyundai makes every moment brilliant”. But in another photo of the same event, Palestinian children are pictured looking on in seemingly bored resignation as the Hyundai and other machines demolish another building. They may well remember this moment their whole lives, but not as a brilliant one.

The pictures (along with a description of the demolition operation, and a video posted by Operation Dove) will not only remind the children of this violent incident. They also threaten to damage Hyundai’s corporate image, which has been crafted as carefully as the dry stone wall. Like the flocks that can no longer be penned in by the wall, Hyundai’s brand value is in danger of becoming scattered. And if the brand value is lost, the corporation’s value could collapse like the house attacked by its machine.

The Israeli army is demolishing these structures in the South Hebron Hills region in Area C of the West Bank, which remains under full Israeli control following the 1993 Oslo agreement, on the pretext that it needs the land for live firing zone 918.  According to the Israeli military, the 1,800 or so Palestinians living in the area do so illegally, because the military law forbids residence in a live fire zone. And hence the army periodically demolishes buildings in the area that it also considers to be illegal. But a brief glance at a map of the area drawn by Israeli human rights organization B’tzelem suggests that the alleged military necessity for more training ground is underwritten by an Israeli political strategy of effective, creeping annexation of Area C, which comprises about 60% of the West Bank.

The photographs posted by Ta’ayush activists following this particular incident on November 6, 2012 are peace images that undermine Hyundai’s, and other corporations’, brand images. Ta’ayush is an Israeli-Palestinian grass-roots movement that engages in non-violent direct action to resist the occupation. It has been particularly active in the South Hebron Hills area in recent years, along with other Israeli peace groups such as Rabbis for Human Rights. These are peace images in that they vividly portray that the Israeli occupation is violent and oppressive, a state of affairs that must be ended to bring peace. They are also peace images in that they reflect Ta’ayush’s aim to “to break down the walls of racism, segregation, and apartheid by constructing a true Arab-Jewish partnership”. Building the partnership is peace-making.

Thus far, Hyundai has attracted less negative attention from the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement than other corporations whose equipment is used by the Israeli military in the occupied Palestinian territories, such as Caterpillar. Documentation of the incident shows the Israeli military deployed Caterpillar and JCB machines as well as the Hyundai monster, and the Electronic Intifada blog puts them in the same basket.  Hyundai’s brand managers should be aware that Hyundai will know no peace if the brand is associated with occupation and war.