Tag Archives: Yitzhak Rabin

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

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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

Why don’t the Abraham Accords look like peace?

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It has often been noted that it’s easier to represent war visually than it is to represent peace. When did you last go to see a peace movie? But peace agreements provide photo opps of the signing of peace agreements by leaders who synecdochically stand in for whole nations. This has certainly been the case for previous peace agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbours under the auspices of the USA.

Consider two previous occasions on which peace agreements were signed at the White House, first in 1979 between Israel and Egypt, then in 1993 between Israel and the PLO. The hands of the leaders portray reconciliation and the relinquishing of weapons in different ways. President Carter demonstrates his mediating role by joining hands with President of Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Begin of Israel, just six years after the two countries fought each other in a bitter war. President Clinton’s outstretched arms and tall stature seem to create through magnanimous power the space in which Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin come together in an allegedly reluctant handshake. Clinton was also there to observe a much warmer handshake between Rabin and King Hussein of Jordan when the two countries signed a peace agreement on their border in 1994.

If this is the simple iconography of peace agreements, it should be straightforward to represent the agreements signed at the White House between the governments of Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain as peace. Yet, it doesn’t look that way to me.

Perhaps its the absence of hand-shaking, which might be attributed to Covid-19 precautions if there were any evidence of such precautions being taken throughout the event. As it is, it looks as if Bahraini Foreign Minister Abdullatif al-Zayani, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan have all just received a certificate of good behaviour from Trump.

This picture of peace is lacking not simply because of an absent iconographic element, but because of what is missing from it as what scholar W.J.T. Mitchell calls an “imagetext.” An “imagetext” is a hybrid of picture and text and the accompanying texts to the pictures of signing these peace agreements are the stories and dramas for which the pictures are culminating events. If a picture is going to speak a thousand words, you have to know the story. In 1979, the story included wars between Israel and Egypt, the media event of Sadat’s surprise visit to Israel in 1977, and the setbacks and breakthroughs of the negotiations at Camp David. The backdrop to the signing of the Oslo accords was the first intifada, revelations about track-two diplomacy behind the scenes, the apparent conversion of two main protagonists, Rabin and Arafat, from men of war of to peacemakers. To some extent then, as many have said, this doesn’t look like a peace treaty because Israel has not been at war with the UAE or Bahrain. So there has been little drama – other than surprise – to provide the text for this image.

There is more to it than that. This doesn’t look like peace because, even while the agreement claims that the normalization of relations between states is intended to contribute towards peace in the region, including a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it does the opposite. Not only is its context the conflict between the Gulf States and Iran, but like its predecessor, Trump’s “Vision for Peace,” it undermines the prospects for a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Normalization of relations with Arab states was one of the diplomatic carrots held out in the 2002 Arab peace initiative for Israel to end its occupation and creeping annexation of the Palestinian Territories. As things stand, the occupation has become normalized by Israel, especially under Trump’s administration. Israel no longer pays any evident price for its relentless and continuing injustices, except perhaps for erosive moral corruption, as remarked by Raja Shehadeh. On the same day that the agreement was signed in Washington, Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported that a Jerusalem court had ordered the “eviction of dozens of Palestinian residents from their homes in East Jerusalem. The beneficiaries will be settler associations who argued that the homes belonged to Jews before 1948.” Needless to say, Palestinian refugees who owned property in Jerusalem until 1948 are not eligible to reclaim their homes as they are not Jewish. That is one of the injustices that the “Abraham Accords” sanctions, seemingly taking inspiration not from mythical shared ancestry but from the Biblical story of Abraham’s expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael, depicted here by Israeli artist Jakob Steinhardt in 1950, with the refugees of 1948 in mind.