A Jewish refugee from Iraq (source: The Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center)

The pages are yellowing, nearly disintegrated. For decades they have lain forgotten, stuffed into crates piled high in the archives of Israel’s Ministry of Justice. No one reads them; no one even shows interest. Even now, nearly sixty years after the painful experiences of loss and flight they recount, they still wait for their stories to be told.

In one, a Jewish woman from Alexandria describes her youth in Egypt:

After the [1948] war broke out, my mother was arrested in her ninth month of pregnancy, and they wanted to slaughter her; they threatened her with bayonets and abused her…. One evening a mob came to kill our family with sticks and anything they could lay their hands on, because they heard we were Jews. The gatekeeper swore to them that we were Italian, and so they only cursed us, surrounding my parents, my brothers, and myself, only a small baby. The next day my parents ran away, leaving everything—pension, work, and home—behind.

On another page, Mordechai Karo, also Egyptian-born, testifies about an explosive device planted in a Jewish neighborhood in Cairo in the summer of 1948: “The tremendous explosion killed and injured scores of Jews in the neighborhood. One of these casualties was my young daughter Aliza.”

Thousands of pages of similar testimony have been collecting dust in various government offices since the 1950s. Under the bureaucratic heading “Registry of the Claims of Jews from Arab Lands,” they tell of lives cut short, of individuals and entire families who found themselves suddenly homeless, persecuted, humiliated. Together they relate a tragic chapter in the history of modern Jewry, a chain of traumatic events that signaled the end of a once-glorious diaspora.

Yet for all its historical import, this chapter has been largely repressed, scarcely leaving a mark on Israel’s collective memory. The media seldom mentioned it then, and rarely do so today. Schools do not devote comprehensive curricula to it, and academia pays it little attention. Indeed, in the past decade only one doctoral dissertation was written on the devastation of Jewish communities in Arab countries. Furthermore, of all the parties represented in Israel’s Knesset, not one has included in its platform an explicit demand for the restitution of these Jews’ property, or the recognition of their violated rights.

This dismissive attitude toward one of the greatest tragedies in the history of the Jewish people should be cause for astonishment. After all, the heritage of Jews from Muslim lands is enjoying something of a renaissance today, both in academic circles and within the general public. Yet not even the outspoken proponents of this heritage are particularly eager to discuss the historical circumstances under which their deep roots in the Arab world were severed. This prolonged silence becomes even more incomprehensible when we take into account the centrality of the refugee problem to the Arab-Israeli conflict. While Palestinians and their advocates repeatedly emphasize the need to correct the historic injustice done to the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who left or were expelled from their lands and dispossessed of their properties in the 1948 Nakba (“catastrophe”), Israel’s international representatives and spokespeople have refrained from highlighting the plight of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who fell victim to systematic persecution and attacks throughout the Middle East and Maghreb at the same time.

How to explain this omission? The answer, as we will see, is neither simple nor easy to digest. It involves a number of motives, some of them pragmatic and some ideological, all of which deserve close scrutiny. Our investigation will raise difficult questions, concerning not only various Israeli governments’ policies in both the past and the present, but also the conceptual foundations of the Jewish state itself. And yet, before we can address these sensitive topics, we must recall certain facts that have been buried for too long in dusty ministerial archives.

(Read here the whole article, or here in PDF format).

Cairo, February 2011

The British Foreign Office published at the end of March its annual Human Rights and Democracy report for 2010. One could have imagined that due to the tremendous ongoing turmoil in the Arab world, Britain would prioritize promoting human rights issues exactly there. The whole world’s eyes are fixated since last December not only on the cruel brutality of Arab autocratic regimes facing huge demonstrations, but also on the decades-long systemic violations of basic human rights that sent so many millions of people to the streets in the first place.

But it seems that the British Foreign Office has a different agenda.

Most of the official document is dedicated to 26 “countries of concern”, but Egypt, for example, is not one of them. It is the most populated Arab country, with paramount regional importance. It is also a place where tens of thousands of people were arrested and tortured by virtue of the draconic emergency law enacted in 1981, and it is where the ruling party managed to get more than 80 percent of the votes in the elections in December 2010. But Egypt is apparently not concerning enough, and does not merit a chapter of its own.

The few references to Egypt appear in a handful of paragraphs, and all in all there are no more than 778 words dedicated to the country. Would the 846 Egyptians that lost their lives in the uprising write the same report?

And who are the 26 countries that do bother Britain? One of the most prominent of those is Israel, with a long and detailed chapter (2,918 words). A bit less worrying apparently is the situation in Syria, the same one which Bashar Assad is currently flooding with rivers of blood (2,647 words). Even less worrying is the situation in Libya, where according to Western officials more than 10,000 people lost their lives, some of whom were shelled with cluster bomb by the Kaddafi regime (1,772 words).

Israel and Colombia are the only democratic states among the 26 “countries of concern”. The report is very careful not to criticize any other Western or democratic state, despite many human rights violations by them in 2010, such as killings of civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan by the American army, the inhuman conditions in which immigrants and asylum seekers are held in Greece, the deportation of thousands of Roma from France, and so on. None of these, it seems, bothers Britain.

The document has a very brief and gentle reference to the Guantanamo detention camp. Regarding a British resident held there, Shaker Aamer, the document politely states: “Ultimately, any decision regarding Mr Aamer’s release remains in the hands of the US government”.

The report states in its introduction that “it is not an exhaustive list, nor should it be seen as a league table”. Nonetheless, someone in the Foreign Office had to decide which countries to include in it. Someone also had to decide how elaborate and detailed should every chapter be. And after all this decision making process, the British Foreign Office concluded that Israel is worth a much longer discussion than Syria, Libya and Egypt.

In order to understand better the rationale behind this thinking, I approached the British Embassy in Tel Aviv with a few questions:

1. Why is Israel considered a “country of concern”?
2. Since Israel and Colombia are the only democratic countries in the report – is Britain not concerned by human rights violations in any other democratic country?
3. How come there’s more on Israel in the report than on countries with far worse human rights record?

The Embassy ignored the second and the third questions, and sent the following response to the first question: “The featured countries of concern are those countries where we had the most serious and wide-ranging human rights concerns during 2010, but it is not an exhaustive list. When deciding on which countries to include, we also considered whether highlighting that country could have broader positive impacts in the wider region should their human rights record improve”.

It is hard to know if Britain fully understands how severe a blow to its reputation is a report that treats Kaddafi and Assad in a lighter way than it treats Israel. What is crystal clear, however, and is even worse, is the harm done to the justified cause of fighting for human rights. If remorseless leaders such as Kaddafi and Assad are of less concern to London than Israel, then who will hold them accountable?

If someone really wanted to promote the cause of human rights, he would write a totally different document.

It was a message from Paideia, The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden, which was putting together a delegation of foreign journalists for a week-long tour of Israel and the Palestinian Territories. They were looking for an Israeli-based journalist to join the group.

Kids with a Palestinian flag (source: Whewes)

I thought it would be interesting, and so I found myself about a month ago on a tour with 12 journalists: 9 from Sweden (4 of them Jewish and one Palestinian who’d emigrated from Syria), one from Russia, one from Turkey and one from Germany. The printed media, radio and television were all represented. The first three days were devoted to a seminar at “Yad Vashem”, the holocaust memorial museum. One day was spent in Hebron, another in Bethlehem, another in Tel Aviv and another in Sderot.

I quickly felt that the experience was a microcosm of everything that goes on between Israelis, Palestinians and agents of all nationalities in the international arena. I found the criticism, the accusations and the dynamics within the group to be marred with harsh intellectual violence. Naturally, I couldn’t respond and react to everything, but I put my thoughts and impressions down in writing. I am now publishing a diary of sorts for those days, which differs in essence from the format of a straightforward journalistic account, yet is of just as much value, in my opinion.

A few days before the tour started, a close friend of mine asked me “what’s the point”. Usually, he said, these guests are not here to listen. They feel they already know everything beforehand.

That’s not exactly true, though. Some of the journalists did come here to listen, or at least would have listened, had they been given an opportunity. But the schedule, the speakers and the organizer made it practically impossible. Almost all of the speakers were affiliated with the most radical factions of the Israeli left wing, the same people that blame Israel for anything they possibly can, and would explain in all seriousness and with deep self-conviction that this is not a democratic state. The speakers were people like Gideon Levy, Noa Ben Hagay, Hillel Cohen, Shirel Horvitz and Yehuda Shaul from “Breaking the Silence” – who told the visiting journalists everything they’d already heard plenty of times back in Europe.

The first evening, when each one of us was asked what his or her expectations were of the coming week, one of the Swedish journalists said that back home he only hears the Palestinian side, and that he came to Israel to get a better understanding of the Israeli side of the story, too.

This is a question worth asking – why is only the Palestinian side heard in Sweden? – but at least this man said he’d come to listen and to understand. There is no doubt in my mind that the tour, in its current form, did everything to prevent him from hearing or understanding the Israeli side of the story this time around as well.

1. The first evening, Prima Royal Hotel, Jerusalem

During the group’s first introductory meeting, we were asked to split into pairs and perform a short exercise, part journalistic and part psychological. Each of us had to tell his or her partner about their most formative experience regarding the topic of “Israel-Palestine”. My partner was also the group’s organizer.

Her story was somewhat confused, but the experience described was a trip she’d made to Hebron in the late 90s. She is a Jewish woman, whose mother escaped Communist Poland in 1968 and found refuge in Sweden. Only at the age of 10 did her mother tell her about her Jewish identity. I couldn’t really figure out how this revelation had shaped her as a child, but she said that when she was younger “it was cool” to be Jewish, kind of like being black, or part of any other persecuted minority. As a teenager in Sweden, she’d visited the Auschwitz death camp.

Many years later, in 2006, she visited Hebron again. This time she was amazed to see that in the aftermath of the agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and the deterioration that followed, the market not far from the Cave of the Patriarchs is now empty of Arabs. She then said that when she saw the vacant market booths, she remembered the pictures she’d seen in the museum in Auschwitz.

The connection she made was a rather loose one. She didn’t say that Hebron is Auschwitz, but she did say: “It was as if I was standing before the destroyed Jewish world, the villages and the Jewish townships (shtetls) that were in Europe before WW2 and don’t exist anymore”. Meaning that somehow, they’re the same thing: the deserted market in Hebron and the European Jewish township. And if Hebron is one of the destroyed Jewish townships, it doesn’t take a genius to understand that in one case it was the Nazis who did it, and in the other case it was the State of Israel.

What’s amazing is that she is an ordinary Jewish woman. She is not a terrorist, and she isn’t waving signs that read “Toss the Jews in the sea”. She is not the biggest enemy of the State of Israel, and yet what she considers to be her most formative experience regarding Israel-Palestine comes down to this: in some way, Israel and the Nazis are alike. Yes, something there makes them similar to each other.

And this was the first evening.

2. The first day, Yad Vashem

Grand Mufti of Jerusalem with Adolf Hitler meeting in Berlin, December 1941 (source: The German Federal Archive)

The next morning we started a three-day-long seminar at Yad Vashem. During one of the first lectures, we were shown a letter sent by a Nazi officer to his wife and children in October 1942, while he was massacring Jews in Eastern Europe:

“Dear mommy and kids,
I would call it a weakness to have trouble seeing dead people before you. The best way to overcome this is to do it more often. Then it becomes a habit…”

When the speaker asked if someone had anything to say, one of the journalists – a Palestinian who’d immigrated to Sweden from Syria in the early 80s – raised her hand. She said this passage reminded her of things she’d read recently in documents released by Wikileaks, because in both cases she sees the personal side of the “Banality of Evil”. These are the small details that make the big horror.

I asked myself – what on earth is she talking about? I have also read Wikileaks. Do the documents include any letters by American officers, writing to their wives about shooting Iraqi or Afghan children in the head? What is she talking about?

I don’t know what she was trying to achieve. After all, Wikileaks has nothing to do with Israel. Maybe the purpose was cheapening the Holocaust, or claiming that the American army is the same as the Nazi army. In any case, it’s total nonsense – lacking historical truth or intellectual integrity.

Nobody uttered a word, nobody asked a question. Apparently, this was her “narrative”, and she could say any foolish thing that came to mind.

From the start we were told by the organizer that the purpose of the tour was to listen to both narratives – the Palestinian one, as well as the Israeli one. That’s fine, but it doesn’t mean that everyone can just throw out every foolish thought he has, and then we’ll just calculate the average. The whole point of using the term “narratives” is that each side of the conflict “narrates” the story differently, and in order to reach a compromise these narratives should be checked and analyzed. Allowing a Palestinian journalist to present her “narrative” as historical truth, without posing any questions, is to miss the point entirely.

This phenomenon happened time and again. My feeling was that the group was afraid of confronting the Palestinian journalist, and tried to please her. She kept saying that the Palestinians were “ethnically cleansed” in the war of 1948. That’s also not a question of narrative but of historical facts, and it merits an examination. According to the history books that I’ve been reading (such as Benny Morris’ “1948″, for example),

“During the war of 1948, which was clearly perceived by the Jewish side as an existential war, the expulsion of the Palestinian people was never the accepted or declared Zionist policy, though there were expulsions… on the other hand, tendency to expel Jews, and wherever possible acts of expulsions, characterized the mainstream of the Palestinian national movement. When they had the chance, Palestinian militia men acted consistently to expel Jews and to destroy their communities” (my translation from pages 439-441 of the Hebrew version).

Maybe the visiting journalists didn’t know their history, but what happened during the tour was that the Palestinian journalist was in a position where she could say everything she wanted, whether it was true or false. I, on the other hand, was constantly criticized, sometimes in a harsh and violent manner.

At one point I mentioned that the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Hussaini, the leader of the Palestinian people in the 30′s, chose to move to Berlin during WW2. That’s a non-disputed historical fact. For some reason, a Yad Vashem representative named Yiftach Ashkenazi, supposedly responsible for historical accuracy, hushed me and told me in a not so well-mannered way that it is not true that the Palestinians caused the Holocaust.

That, of course, was not what I had said. I asked him, “Isn’t it true that of all the places in the world the Mufti chose to live in Berlin during the war?”

“Yes, it’s true”, he said, but kept covering up for him, as if it wasn’t an issue for a discussion. The organizer, sitting next to me, silenced me and said “let him speak”.

I insisted. I asked him what the Mufti did in Berlin. He said: “He was helping Hitler”. I asked what kind of help. He said that the Mufti helped Hitler to recruit Muslims to the SS in Bosnia. I asked – what for?

Under every possible definition, the Mufti’s actions would be considered collaborating with the Nazis. The German journalist in the group told me later that in today’s reality, the only person that wouldn’t be considered a collaborator in these circumstances was a Muslim. That’s crazy – a person decides, in the middle of WW2, to live in Berlin and help the Nazis in recruiting people to the SS, and you can’t call him a collaborator. Does it mean that he or the Palestinians are guilty for the holocaust? Of course it doesn’t (and I hadn’t said that either). But it’s still an important historical fact.

So when it came to something like this, a solid historical fact, the organizer hushed me. But when the Palestinian journalist said she read what she read on Wikileaks or that the war of 1948 was about ethnic cleansing – that was considered her narrative, and no one questioned it. The group was much more willing and inclined to hear her side. She could say any foolish thing that came to her mind and nobody would confront her, but when I said something, a thousand eyes and a thousand ears examined my every word. If I dared open my mouth, I had to be much more confident than her.

If only ten percent of the criticism and questions that were directed at me had been addressed to her as well, we would have put an end to the Israeli-Arab conflict a long time ago. The fact that the Israeli-Jewish narrative is heavily criticized while the Palestinian narrative remains criticism-free is making peace less achievable. As one of the journalists told me: “On the first day, everyone said they came to listen, but it’s not really true: the Palestinian can say whatever she wants, and you can’t”.

3. The first day, Yad Vashem (cont.)

The statue of Gad Manela in Kibbutz Tel Yitzhak (photo: Avishai Taicher)

Another issue worth mentioning is the position taken by the Jewish journalists from Sweden. I felt great reluctance on their behalf to be identified with or feel empathy towards the “uprising Jew”, the one who wants to fight back and gain control over his destiny and future. Frankly, this disgusted me: after all, this is why the Jews now have a state, so we wouldn’t have to rely on other people’s mercy or beg to them – please, do us a favor, open your country to us, bomb the railways to Auschwitz…

During one of the lectures at Yad Vashem, the speaker told us about a Holocaust survivor, an old Dutch lady, who’d told him how each night, before going to bed, she watches a video of the hanging of her warder from the Majdanek death camp. Her Polish warder was caught at the end of the war, tried as a war criminal and executed, and the survivor somehow got hold of the hanging’s documentation. That warder tortured, beat and murdered the lady’s relatives and friends in front of her own eyes, and so she told our speaker that only after watching her execution every night can she fall asleep.

This is of course a difficult and hair-raising story, but it’s a story of revenge. This is her personal revenge. After all the suffering and humiliation she’s been through, she has to see the woman who tortured her hanged. To her, this means there’s justice in this world, and only then can she fall asleep. Until justice is done, she cannot sleep.

One of the Jewish journalists from Sweden raised her hand and said angrily: “That’s terrible; that’s not a good thing. She should have received some sort of treatment”. For some reason she felt that the speaker had told the survivor’s story in a positive way. But it seemed to me that what bothered her was the urge to take revenge. In this case, it’s not even real revenge but a virtual one, maybe some kind of repair. So what would be a good thing – that a Jew gets smacked down, yet manages to sleep soundly? What’s so wrong with someone who suffered horrific violence and humiliation wanting to hit back, and even do it through someone else? That’s the whole point of punishment, isn’t it?

There is no doubt in my mind that this journalist doesn’t think that what happened to the old lady in the Holocaust is somehow “ok”. It was obvious: later on that day she walked the corridors of Yad Vashem, looking for an expert that would help her trace her grandfather who never returned from the war. Yet somehow, Jews have to “behave”. They shouldn’t complain. So what, you’ve been slapped in the face, what’s the big deal?

There were endless examples of this. One of the journalists, himself a Jew from Sweden, stood next to me while we toured the Yad Vashem campus. We were told that the regulations until a while ago forbade giving an address in German inside the Hall of Remembrance. I heard him mutter quietly, something along the lines of “what kind of regulation is that”.

I thought to myself: hasn’t he got even a grain of empathy for these people? After all, why was the German language forbidden? Because these were people who wanted to pray for their father, and brother, and grandmother and sister, and what did the German language represent to them if not the language of the people who caused their biggest catastrophe? So is it really that horrible that the victim asks not to hear the language of the perpetrator while he prays in remembrance for his dead father? Apparently, Jews after the war were supposed to think that the German language is the most natural thing in the world. It is almost impossible to believe the alienation and violence embodied in this thought. I think the non-Jews were much more accepting of it.

Later that day, when we left the hall dedicated to the 1.5 million Jewish kids murdered in the Holocaust, the speaker who guided us through it said that usually, when young Israeli step out of this hall, they feel proud for serving in the army or express their wish to serve in it in the future. The Swedish organizer of the group, who was with us all along, cried out all of a sudden – the army? What’s the connection?

So yes, these young Israelis who’d just seen how children like them or like their young brothers – 8, 10 or 12 year olds – were mercilessly killed, and they felt a desire to protect themselves, their brothers and their families. That’s the most natural thing in the world, but as far as she was concerned it was unnatural; it was wrong.

So what would have been ok – that the Jews keep on waiting? How much longer should they wait? I think the Swedish Jews in the group felt much more comfortable with a complicated and tortured (and tragic) Jewish story, than with a Jew who fights for himself, builds his life anew and even succeeds – that was difficult for them to handle.

There’s a statue in Kibbutz Tel Yitzhak commemorating Gad Manela, an Israeli army officer who was killed in battle in 1968. One of his hands is held out as if to embrace, and the other one signals “halt”, as if saying: I will be your friend if you really want to be my friend, but if you try to kill me, I will do everything in my power to kill you first. That’s an impressive ideal, even if it’s not always easy to differentiate between the two possibilities.

But our organizer’s ideal is different: no matter what you do to me, even if you try to kill me, even if you’ve killed me before – that’s fine by me. I forgive you.

4. The second evening, Prima Royal Hotel, Jerusalem

Former Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser

That evening we had a lecture by Dr. Yadin Rofe on the changing attitude of Israelis toward the Holocaust. He mentioned that survivors were nicknamed “soaps” in the 50′s and were mocked, and touched upon the survivors’ assimilation in Israeli society, as well as the different forms of remembrance that the young state tried to establish (coining terms such as “sheep to slaughter”, establishing “Holocaust and Heroism remembrance day”, etc).

At one point, the Palestinian journalist raised her hand and asked – and where are the Palestinians in this “narrative”? They are not in this “narrative”, I said to myself, since the issue is the relationship between Israelis and the Holocaust. On the one hand, you’re not allowed to say that the Mufti was in Berlin, but on the other hand, she wants to be part of this story.

I think I understood later on what lies at the heart of it – she was told, many times I guess, that the Holocaust gave birth to the State of Israel, which means that she should undermine the Holocaust. Or at least say that there were other Holocausts, and maybe her people were also victims of one. Well, maybe the Nakba is not exactly the Holocaust, she says to herself, but it’s practically the same.

What could the speaker have said? The topic discussed was the Israelis’ feelings regarding the Holocaust, yet there she was, asking him what about the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. He replied that he believed many people would take offense at her definition of “ethnic cleansing”. At that moment she started crying, and said, “I’m sorry, it’s about my family from Safed (Tzfat)”. She stood up and left the room in a storm. There followed, of course, a very unpleasant atmosphere, and the speaker sat there in silence. So what did this scene result in? It resulted in her being the poor victim. We were talking about the Holocaust, and about how the Israeli society dealt with it, and the one who found it too difficult to bear, bursting into tears, was a Palestinian Arab who now lives in Stockholm.

What does one thing have to do with the other? It’s not because of the Holocaust that her family lost her house, but because of their refusal to share this land with its Jewish inhabitants (and Tzfat was, in any case, within the territory of the Jewish state according to the partition plan of 1947). But the “narrative” that she tells herself is that there was ethnic cleansing, and that no Palestinian ever fought in the war of 1948, and that she is simply a victim, she never raised a hand or did a thing. The Palestinians were just sitting there, doing nothing, and the Jews came and kicked them all out.

The worst thing is that nobody puts this historical perception, this “narrative”, to the test. In Israel, over the past couple of decades “New Historians” have been testing the Israeli narrative. Most Israelis know and understand that they are not alone in this land, and that even 100 years ago the Jewish pioneers did not arrive to an empty land. And who’s been testing the Palestinian narrative all these years?

This is, for example, what Benny Morris writes about the battle in Tzfat, a city with 1,500 Jews and 10,000 Arabs, “known to violently harass the local Jewish community…

The British forces evacuated the city on April 16th 1948… that same night, the Arabs attacked the Jewish quarter. The local Arab militia, numbering 200 fighters, was reinforced with 200 more soldiers from the ‘Army of Salvation’ and Jordanian volunteers… the Jews of Tzfat, most of them Haredim (Ultra-Orthodox), were fearing a massacre, and the Syrian commander of the local militia validated this fear. He sent a telegram to his superior, saying: ‘morale is high, the youngsters are riled up, we will slaughter them’”. (page 179)

After the Palestinian journalist stormed out of the room, the speaker continued describing the changes in the Israeli attitude towards the Holocaust. He reached 1967, when he said Israel was gripped by an atmosphere of “imminent holocaust”, since people were convinced they faced extermination by Arab armies, who were going to “shut the state down”. As far as I know, that was the feeling among many people abroad too, but the speaker described this as just another phase in the Israeli relationship towards the Holocaust, unrelated to the actual environment in the Middle East. One could understand that the Israeli feeling on the eve of the Six Day War was their own inner feeling, an internal-psychological feeling of the Jews, fearing they were close to extermination once again.

That’s outrageous: the Jews in Israel weren’t troubled over nothing. In June 1967, and in the months before the war, the Jews in Israel faced real external threats. The threats voiced by Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leader of the biggest country in the Arab world, were real and concrete. The speaker didn’t attack the Israelis for their fears, on the contrary – he was sympathetic, but what’s the logical conclusion to be reached from what he said? That the Jews, those mentally damaged Holocaust survivors, those who had the Holocaust experience in the back of their minds, kept seeing themselves as being near extermination, even when there was no reason to feel that way, as if they were living in New Zealand or on an island in Antarctica, where nobody threatened them. So – these Jews are psychotic. They are paranoid.

No, they aren’t. If it really had happened in New Zealand, then maybe he’d have had a point. If Jews from Europe had really come to a place where nobody threatened them, then you’d have the laboratory conditions that would allow you to see if that really was the case. But that’s not what happened. The Jews gathered in Israel, a country that was surrounded by people outspoken in their desire to kill the Jews and to put an end to their state.

On May 28th 1967, for example, the UP news agency reported that the President of Iraq, Abdul Rahman Arif, said that “Iraq and the rest of the revolutionary Arab states have reached a decision to annihilate Israel”. On another occasion he said that “the existence of the State of Israel is a mistake that has to be corrected. This is our chance to wipe the disgrace that’s among us since 1948. Our aim is clear: to wipe Israel off the map. We will meet, with the help of God, in Tel Aviv and Haifa”.

On May 28th the Israeli newspapers reported that the Egyptian President Nasser said that he “is waiting for the opportunity to annihilate Israel”. When journalists asked the then-chairman of the PLO, Ahmed Shukeiri, what will happen to the Israelis after the Arabs win the war, he replied: “those who will survive will stay in Palestine. I assume not even one will survive”.

So this is what Israelis heard on the eve of the Six Day War, and not the baa of sheep in New Zealand. If it reminded them of Auschwitz, it was rightfully so, except of course that this time around they had their own army. What was so annoying and irritating about our speaker’s description was the complete focus on the Israeli side. It was as if, once again, none of the other actors exist on the world stage. The Arabs are not agents in history and they are powerless. Nasser is nothing – he had no power at all. If the Jews were afraid, it was because of themselves, because of their own psychological problems, something existing in their own minds.

I’m sure Edward Said would have a lot what to say about this: The Arabs don’t wage war, they don’t make peace. Everything is up to the Jews – only the Jews can decide between war and peace. The Arabs are nothing, merely shadows on the wall. This is truly a racist approach, which for over 50 years has been widely recognized as colonial in nature. Yet the people who hold these thoughts and conceptions are the ones who consider themselves to be the most enlightened and progressive people on earth.

5. The third evening, Prima Royal Hotel, Jerusalem

Members of Hamas forces arrest a Fatah party supporter in Gaza

Unfortunately, I could not attend a meeting the group had with the Jerusalem Post reporter, Khaled Abu Toameh, an Israeli-Arab who covers the Palestinian territories and the Palestinian Authority. Three different journalists approached me the day after and whispered – maybe because they didn’t want the others to hear – that they really enjoyed meeting him. I asked – what did he say?

It was suddenly clear that the visiting journalists did in fact want to hear other stories. According to their accounts, Abu Toameh told them that he’d even prefer being a second-grade citizen in the State of Israel than a full citizen in a future Palestinian state. He blamed Arafat and the Fatah movement for the failure of the Camp David negotiations in 2000, claimed that the Palestinian Authority is corrupt, and said that in the Palestinian territories he could never enjoy the freedom of expression that he enjoys in Israel – basically, he told them what most Israelis know, but rarely makes the news in Sweden.

Abu Toameh said that in internal fights between Hamas and Fatah in the last couple of years, more than 2,000 Palestinians were killed – more than the number of Palestinian casualties in the war between Hamas and Israel in the beginning of 2009. He said that for some reason nobody mentions this. The journalists that told me this did not dare say it aloud, but it looked as if they were very much influenced by it.

The Palestinian journalist had once again allowed herself more than anyone else, and on a few occasions had called Abu Toameh an “asshole” – apparently because he did not fit so well into her “narrative” of awful Jews and miserable Palestinians. In any case, what I wanted to ask my European colleagues, and did not have the chance, is how come in Sweden and elsewhere in the world Gideon Levy is constantly heard, and here they have an Arab journalist, who speaks fluent Arabic and can describe and analyze his society from within, yet they’ve never heard of him. In the eyes of the media, he’s a great “story”, and there is no doubt that he should have been quoted often.

So why doesn’t this happen?

6. The third day, Yad Vashem

Barack Obama speaks to reporters at Louisiana, May 2010 (photo: U.S. Coast Guard)

One of the meetings we had at Yad Vashem was with the head of the library, Dr. Robert Rozett, about current forms of Anti-Semitism. We discussed a few issues, such as a news report according to which France is considering making it illegal for someone to call Israel an “Apartheid state”. Some of the journalists asked Rozett if he thought it was a good idea. They did not raise the question of why Israel is called an Apartheid state, but were bothered by the possibility that such an act would be considered illegal.

When one of them asked me what I thought, I told him that in principle, telling people “you can’t say this” is not the right way to solve problems in one’s society. But this usually happens as a last resort, when society refrains from taking any other action. The preferable way, of course, would be for the French education system, the French political elite and the French media to confront the radical leftists and the Muslims who usually make these accusations, and ask – how come that the Apartheid comparison is made only when Israel is discussed and in no other case? What was the Apartheid all about, who makes this comparison now and how is it that of all the policies in the world and of all the possible “separations” – between men and women, majorities and minorities, sectors, religions and sects – only one is called Apartheid, and all this to achieve a political goal? Nobody does any of this, and then you wind up asking if it’s ok to make it illegal.

One of the journalists said that there’s no point in making stupidity illegal. Ok, he said, so Israel is called Apartheid, after all you can’t make stupidity illegal. That’s quite true, but society still has to deal with it, especially if it happens again and again. You can’t outlaw stupidity, but you have to deal with it, because when there are many stupid people in a certain society, that society has a problem.

Immediately following the discussion with Rozett, one of the Swedish journalists came to me and asked me what I thought about the Israeli reaction to a false publication a while ago in the Swedish press, according to which the Israeli army is involved in harvesting organs from Palestinians for profit. He said that until the Israeli government got involved and asked for an apology, everything was fine, everyone in Sweden condemned the publication and the reporter who made it, but when the official Israel raised its voice, the story got a turnabout and everyone in Sweden started “defending freedom of speech from external interference”. For some reason, it seems that the most noble and esteemed manner in which people can express themselves nowadays is by saying that Israel is an Apartheid state and that its soldiers are harvesting organs. What an impressive intellectual masterpiece.

I told him that I remembered the story a bit differently. As far as I remember, the Swedish embassy in Israel condemned the publication, but then the Swedish Foreign Ministry in Stockholm ordered the embassy to take the condemnation off their website. This angered the Israeli government very much. I asked him if it’s the classic case of – “the Jews are guilty for Anti-Semitism”. Even from what he said, it was clear that he thought the newspaper and the reporter were in the wrong, so why let them off the hook and blame Israel again? Even if you are a Swede, and freedom of expression is very dear to you, you can still look inward at your society, and ask if it acted correctly.

Nobody in Israel expected the reporter would be taken to court for being stupid, or for not having adequate sources, or for not checking his story. Thank god, in Israel we have enough reporters who write very bad stories and none of them are in jail. The Government of Israel asked, as far as I can remember, that Sweden officials condemn the publication.

I reminded him what the American president, Barack Obama, did when he feared for his country’s reputation, after a priest declared he was about to publicly burn the Koran. The president, head of the executive branch, could not take any action, and nobody expected him to do a thing. Still, Obama stood before the cameras and condemned the act, because he understood how badly it affected the image of his country. What would have happened if the Swedish prime minister or the foreign minister would have stepped in front of the cameras and said that the publication was offensive and that it should not have occurred?

I felt he understood what I was saying. Later on, another Swedish journalist approached me, one who’s visited Turkey many times and is familiar with the situation there, and asked me for my thoughts on the deteriorating relationships between Israel and Turkey, about the Turkish film in which Israeli soldiers are depicted as rapists and murderers, and the incident in which the Israeli deputy Foreign Minister humiliated the Turkish ambassador by seating him on a low chair. Since he is familiar with the situation there, I asked him if he remembers other Turkish films that dealt with any other soldiers in the world.

Actually yes, he replied. Not so long ago, he said, after the Swedish Parliament decided to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide, the Turkish television made a film about “what the Swedes had done to the Sami”. Since I was not familiar with the issue, I asked him what exactly the Swedes had done to the Sami. He replied: “There were some mistakes made by the Swedish Government a long time ago”.

I asked what kind of mistakes. He answered: forced sterilization.

I asked him what he meant when he said “a long time ago” – the 10th century? The 18th century? He said “until the 50′s” (I later discovered that it continued until 1975).

What I found most interesting about all this was the way the journalist “framed” the issue. He’d called them “mistakes”, meaning this is not how Sweden usually acts. This is not the Swedish norm. This is the exception, since Sweden is normally a good and decent country. Therefore this is not part of its usual policies. From what I managed to find (and it is not easy to find material on this in English), the Swedish discrimination of the Sami is anything but a “mistake”: it’s obvious, systemic and has been going on for decades, if not centuries. Still, for this journalist it was a “mistake”, and that enables him to keep on believing that Sweden is a civilized and decent place – a country where ethnic minorities were forcefully sterilized until 35 years ago.

7. The fourth evening, Prima Royal Hotel, Jerusalem

Rejoicing in the streets of Tel Aviv at the UN announcement of the Partition Plan, November 1947 (source: Harvard University Library)

Dr. Hillel Cohen’s lecture was about the war of 1948, and as I learned quite a few times over the last period, history is still very much relevant. Most of the time, when Israelis talk about the “peace process”, they talk about technical issues – settlements and outposts, borders and Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem. This, I think, is the dominant discourse for many Israelis, and the same is true for many Europeans.

My impression is that for the Palestinians there’s something more important and more fundamental – the feeling of a horrible historical injustice, culminating in the events of 1948. Therefore, their official statements mention the technical issues such as the settlements, but also the demand to “correct” that historical injustice. And when they talk about doing justice, they’re not necessarily talking about dismantling settlements in the territories captured by Israel in 1967, but about the State of Israel itself. I can’t say this of all Palestinians, but it was obvious that for the Palestinian in our group, the most important issue and the most sensitive one was the war of 1948 (I couldn’t participate in the visit in Bethlehem, but was told that the journalists heard similar things there too).

Therefore, the question of what exactly happened in 1948 is crucial. Was it really, as the Palestinian in the group presented it, that the Jews slaughtered all the Arabs, that it was a terrible conspiracy and that the whole world was against them? Or maybe it was something else: a war, which the Arabs initiated and which the Arabs eventually lost.

One of the Swedish journalists asked whether Israel was established at the expense of others. The Palestinian journalist, for her part, presented time and again the view that the State of Israel is an unnecessary endeavor, born in sin. She said that what the Palestinians perceive to be their “right of return” is a “holy right”, and that her return to the house where her family had lived in Tzfat is non-negotiable.

This is maybe the place to reflect on the difference between “understanding the other side’s narrative” and “accepting the other side’s narrative”. The whole point of using the term “narrative” is to understand that the story I am telling myself is just a story, and it is not the only one possible. Meaning, that the other side has his own story, and a possible way for conflict resolution is to say, “I have my story, he has his story, maybe neither of us is right, but without annulling any of them, we should try to look for a practical way to solve the conflict”.

Here we have something else. Not only do we listen to the Palestinians or try to understand them, but we accept their narrative. In what sense was Israel established at the expense of others? This is true only if we fully and unquestionably accept the Palestinian narrative, according to which the Jews are foreigners in this land and don’t have any rights here. But there’s a parallel Jewish narrative – saying that the whole of this land belongs to us, and that there’s no room for a Palestinian state. In fact, there isn’t even a Palestinian people, and there never was one.

I think that certain Israelis (as well as non-Israelis) not only listen to the Palestinians, but also decide that they are right. And these are two very different things: If we want to reach a solution, the point is to examine each other’s narrative, but if we do this in order to prove that my narrative is wrong and the other narrative is right, the outcome would only be anger and bitterness.

From every possible aspect, the phrase “the State of Israel was born in sin” is groundless. The State of Israel was clearly established despite the Arab world’s rejection of it, that’s obvious. But defining it as a sin, as one can hear quite often on campuses and in certain circles in Europe and in the US, would be to utterly accept the Arab worldview, according to which – “everything is mine, and the situation before the establishment of Israel was perfect”.

The opposite is true: the establishment of the State of Israel was a natural and direct outcome of all the international treaties and accords that were signed in the first half of the 20th century. The mandate given to Great Britain in 1922 by the League of Nations – i.e. the representatives of the family of nations – was specifically given in order to establish a national home for the Jewish people, or in the original text,

“The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home.” (Article 2, view the full text here)

Since then, the Jewish people’s right over the land of Israel was mentioned in every possible British and international document, including of course the partition plan of 1947, but even beforehand, in the conclusions of the Peel commission, sent by the British authorities in 1937:

“An irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country. About 1,000,000 Arabs are in strife, open or latent, with some 400,000 Jews… Their national aspirations are the greatest bar to peace. Arabs and Jews might possibly learn to live and work together in Palestine if they would make a genuine effort to reconcile and combine their national ideals and so build up in time a joint or dual nationality. But this they cannot do…National assimilation between Arabs and Jews is thus ruled out. In the Arab picture the Jews could only occupy the place they occupied in Arab Egypt or Arab Spain. The Arabs would be as much outside the Jewish picture as the Canaanites in the old land of Israel… In these circumstances to maintain that Palestinian citizenship has any moral meaning is a mischievous pretence”. (Pages 370-371, note that the word “Palestine” refers to a geographical unit and not to any political entity)

And in another paragraph,

“Under the stress of the (First) World War the British Government made promises to Arabs and Jews in order to obtain their support. On the strength of those promises both parties formed certain expectations. The application of the mandate system… implied the belief that the obligations undertaken towards the Arabs and the Jews would prove to be mutually compatible… This belief has not been justified, and we see no hope of its being justified in the future”. (Page 370)

The Palestinian journalist said, on several occasions, that before Zionism, there was paradise here: Jews and Arabs lived together peacefully, and the whole problem started with the Zionists. Which means that the Jews don’t really need a state of their own, and this is the original sin – that Jews thought they deserve at all a state of their own. This too was received very quietly in the room – telling Israelis 63 years after the creation of their state that it shouldn’t have been established in the first place is somehow not considered to be violence.

One could also contemplate the paradise she described. What was it all about? A place where Jews lived as a minority in a Muslim society. This is her paradise. Ok, that’s perfectly logical: she was the majority, so she thinks of it as paradise. Did she ever ask the Jews who lived here for hundreds of years under Muslim rulers if it was paradise for them too? These Jews suffered systemic discrimination, had inferior status and paid special taxes, were scorned by society and from time to time suffered pogroms and physical attacks.

Even if we put European Jewry aside for a moment, there’s still the question of the million Jews who lived in the Middle East before 1948 – where were they supposed to fulfill their national aspirations? If we talk about justice and equality – isn’t it appropriate that in the vast area called the Middle East there would be 25 thousand square kilometers for the Jewish people where they could govern themselves?

Obviously, Zionism was a revolutionary movement that changed the status-quo. But why is it, from the Palestinian journalist’s point of view, that she deserves a state, as well as the Lebanese, and the Syrians, and all kinds of political entities which are no more than autocratic rulers who got concessions from foreign empires – but men and women who really felt themselves to be a separate people, in this case the Jews, don’t have the right for self-determination?

Another question would be: what is the meaning of all this today? The Palestinian journalist said time and again that it would pose no problem, living together in one state – Jews and Palestinians together. She would return to Tzfat, along with a few other millions of Palestinians, and all would be perfect. Let’s put aside for a moment her real motivations, and face reality: Sweden and Norway have yet to become one state, same with Australia and New Zealand, so of all the places in the world, precisely in the heart of the Middle East, amidst one of the most difficult conflicts that has lasted over 100 years, here of all places, it’s supposed to work? And it’s not as if it hasn’t been tried before. Why did the British recommended partition back in 1937? Because it was clear all those years ago that it couldn’t work.

The Palestinian journalist knows very well that if millions of Palestinians (4 million? 6? Maybe 8?) settled in Israel, as she’d like, the population would become overwhelmingly Muslim, and Jews would again become a minority. I’m sure that sounds like a fantastic idea, especially if you’re the new majority.

The thing is, I don’t want to rule her. If it were up to me, there would be two states. But apparently this is not what she wants, or certainly not the only thing. It is not freedom that she seeks, but my subjugation. She even said it explicitly. She said that as a first stage the Palestinians should have a state in the Territories, and then “we will see”.

I asked her what she meant.

She answered that she believes that with time there will be no borders in the Middle East, and therefore there won’t be borders between the Palestinian state and the State of Israel, which means there would be one state.

Something makes me think she won’t be able to talk Syria and Lebanon into erasing their borders, or any other borders for that matter. So the only place without borders would be the State of Israel. And if so, what’s my incentive? I’m making “pretend” peace with the Palestinians, while they keep thinking and hoping and educating their children that in just a little while, five years, or 10 or 20, their moment will come and they’ll be back in Israel, and all the while they’re holding on to their keys and inflating the number of refugees? What have I got to gain from all this? What will happen to me – where am I in this joyful “narrative”?

8. The fourth evening, Prima Royal Hotel, Jerusalem (cont.)

A Jewish fighter laid to rest in Kfar Etzion, December 1947

There was something very strange in the speaker’s behavior towards the Palestinian journalist. Hillel Cohen tried very much to be her “friend”, be it during the dinner before his lecture or in the lobby discussions afterwards. I couldn’t understand why it was so important for him to be her friend. In principle, I have no problem with befriending anyone, I just don’t see it happening right after she tells me how I won’t have a country of my own anymore.

I really don’t get the way people such as Hillel Cohen think. How is it possible that she tells him outright “let’s have one state, where I’d just happen to be the majority and you’d happen to be the minority”, and he becomes her friend. I really can’t get it. It poses an explicit threat to his life.

In his lecture, Cohen also made the claim that the heart of the problem is the Palestinian dogmatism and fixation, and that to this day the Palestinians view the establishment of the State of Israel as the most terrible injustice on earth. Yet during his lecture he reiterated a few myths that sustain that very feeling of horrible injustice.

He mentioned Dir Yassin, but did not talk about massacres of Jews in the war of 1948, for example in Gush Etzion:

“Towards noon, the commanders of the kibbutz ordered the fighters in their posts to surrender. Groups of people, who had defended the kibbutz, waiving white flags, came out of the bunkers… most of them, more than 100 men and women, gathered in an empty lot in the heart of Kfar Etzion. Arab soldiers ‘ordered them to sit and then to stand up… suddenly an armed vehicle appeared from the direction of the dining room, with machine gun muzzles on each side… the fire came from everywhere. People who weren’t hit from the first shots tried to clear a path between the Arabs and run in different directions’… at the end of the day only a handful of the defenders of the kibbutz survived: three were rescued by officers of the Jordanian army, and one escaped… 106 men and 27 women were killed in battle that day or murdered in the massacre that occurred afterwards”. (“1948″, pages 193-194)

Cohen also mentioned that there were more Jewish fighters than Palestinians. One could ask why – why is it that the Arabs of Ramallah and Nablus did not help their brothers in Jaffa and Haifa, and why were the Palestinian militias so divided? In any case, the picture changed dramatically on May 15th 1948, a day after the proclamation of Israeli independence, with the invasion of five Arab countries, with regular armies and heavy weapons. Then the number of Arab fighters was much greater than the number of Jewish fighters. Why did Cohen not mention this too? Maybe because it does not fit so well with the thesis of the horrible injustice done to the Arabs?

9. The fourth day, Hebron

The cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron

Yehuda Shaul from “Breaking the Silence” guided us on a tour that started in Jerusalem, continued in the South Hebron hills and ended in the Jewish part of Hebron. At the beginning of his tour, Shaul tried to convey information, but as the hours passed, it became an onslaught on the State of Israel. He talked again and again about massive war crimes committed by the Israeli army in the territories (I don’t remember him talking about himself), about deliberate Israeli policy to humiliate, attack and harm Palestinians, and about the Jews of Hebron, the masters of the city according to him. He lost me halfway through: when I am presented with such a one-sided picture, I stop listening.

Surprisingly, at the beginning of the tour in Hebron itself, Shaul said that “the violence of the Jewish settlers in Hebron is far less than the violence of the Palestinians in the city”. That’s an exact quote of his. He knew the name of every Jew killed in the city and the exact location of the fatal attack on Shalhevet Pas, a 7-month old Jewish baby killed by Palestinians. But still, for hours and hours, he talked about the way the settlers in Hebron – and only them – harass the Arab residents.

I asked myself – what are his moral standards then? How can he say that the Arabs in the city are much more violent towards the Jews, yet say nothing about that violence? Maybe he just doesn’t have any moral standards. If someone says that the Arabs are more violent but decides to talk only about what the Israelis are doing wrong – then he is not a human rights organization, he is a political organization whose aim it is to attack Israel.

We heard from him that Israel is not democratic, and that it breaks every possible law. That’s also interesting: according to his own testimony, one day after he and his friends presented a “Breaking the Silence” exhibition in the heart of Tel Aviv, he was invited to the Knesset. Another day passed – again, according to him – and the state’s attorney general, together with the army’s attorney general, opened an inquiry regarding his claims that soldiers abuse Palestinians (he again did not mention if he himself was interrogated).

So what is a democracy? We know now how Britain and the US conduct their wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Seven or eight years after the war started, Wikileaks published documents according to which more than 100,000 civilians were killed in Iraq, some of them by western armies. And America is stunned. Where were they all this time? Couldn’t they count the bodies all those years? And here we have a guy, who after the first day of his exhibition in central Tel Aviv is invited to the parliament and to every possible TV channel. But this is not a democracy.

It really is unbelievable that people like him talk in the name of democracy. Democracy is a place where there’s an exchange of thoughts and ideas, where there’s rule of law and accountability, where there’s a certain degree of transparency. It’s a place where there’s freedom of expression, and where ordinary people can talk freely and publicly. But democracy is not a place where we have to do what one person says (for instance, Yehuda Shaul), especially if he is in the minority. That sounds much closer to dictatorship.

I oppose building settlements, and my political view is that the settlement project is not wise and not useful for the State of Israel. But he pretends to be a human rights organization, not a political party. Again, according to his own words, at least in half of the cases in which land was confiscated, Palestinians turned to the Israeli court, and in many cases the court ruled in their favor. It is well known that the court forced the state to move the route of the separation fence in some places. That’s exactly the difference between a democracy and a dictatorship: in the latter, someone decides everything and nobody can object to it; in a democracy there’s procedure, and the executive can decide this or that, but then the citizens may disagree and turn to the court if they wish. In this case, these are not even citizens; they are residents of a hostile entity.

We also met the spokesperson of the Jewish community in Hebron, David Wilder, who said that until the massacre of 1929 by the Arabs, Jews had lived in Hebron for hundreds of years. Shaul told us that under Muslim rule, Jews could not enter or pray inside the Cave of the Patriarchs, even though it is considered to be the second holiest place for Judaism. Today, under Israeli rule, entrance to the tomb is allowed to Jews, Muslims and everyone else.

I don’t know how much money and energy the State of Israel should put into maintaining control over the Cave of the Patriarch. But if we think in terms of justice and human rights – why shouldn’t Jews be able to pray in the Cave while Muslims can pray in the Al-Aqsa mosque? That, for some reason, seems even an outrageous question (though I understand it’s only the third holiest place for Muslims). The past teaches us that if Muslims have control of the tomb, Jews will not be able to pray there. That’s what happened in the Tomb of Joseph in Nablus (Shechem), and that’s what happened in the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem when it was under Jordanian occupation from 1948 to 1967. I don’t have a good solution for the situation on the ground, but if someone is bothered with questions of human rights, he must address this issue too.

That same night we had a group discussion about the events of the day. One after the other, the journalists expressed their anger and revulsion with David Wilder. When it was my turn to speak, I asked them why it is that they find it odd when a Jew says that the whole land is his, but when a Palestinian says it, it seems natural. If the first is “wrong”, the second must be also “wrong”. In our group, we had a Palestinian woman that did not hesitate to say that the State of Israel is hers too. Why did she receive better “treatment” than Mr. Wilder? What’s more – while the spokesperson of the Jewish community in Hebron is far from representing the majority of Israelis, insisting on the “right of return” is a prominent characteristic of the Palestinian mainstream.

The territorial dimension of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is clear – if a Palestinian state is ever to become reality, it would have to materialize somewhere, on a certain piece of land. But what became obvious to me as well during this trip is that the territorial question is not the fundamental issue. The Israeli settlements in the West Bank are discussed day and night, everywhere. And then we discover that there’s just another small issue – something like 8 million Palestinian who are waiting to “return” to Israel. And not only to “return”, but return with the objective of creating one state, where everybody would live “in peace”.

The truth is that I was also surprised by this intellectual fixation, and by the fact that the Palestinians we met still refuse to recognize the Jewish sovereign state in the land of Israel. When I asked the Palestinian journalist directly, she didn’t even hesitate, and answered immediately, “Yes, I want my house in Safed. The right of return is a holy right”.

That same night, over an ice-cold beer in a Jerusalem pub, one of the Swedish journalists told me that he was “astonished” to hear her. How could she think this was even negotiable, he asked, how can she not understand that this is impossible? Maybe this is where people who want to bring peace to the Middle East need to focus their energies – explaining to the Palestinians how much the dream they nurture is impossible, and that it’s high time they recognize the fact that this land is also the land of the Jews.

The international community is putting immense pressure on Israel regarding the settlements, but there isn’t even a frail voice out there demanding that the Palestinians abandon their wish to fulfill their “right of return” – a wish which is destructive, violent and immoral, with which there will never be any peace accord.

10. The fifth day, Bethlehem

The entrance to Aida camp (photo: Reham Alhelsi)

I could not join the group on its tour in Bethlehem, since the organizers refused to guarantee my safety and sign the waiver liability that the IDF requires in order to let Israeli journalists into Palestinian-controlled territories. But the next day, a few journalists told me about the recurring demand that they heard from the people they met to fulfill their “right of return”. The German journalist, Ingo Way, passed his notes to me. He published his impressions from that day in German and in English, and here’s a short summary:

“Aida refugee camp has been in Bethlehem since 1950. Today just over 3,000 people live there. It doesn’t look like one would imagine a ‘camp.’ It consists of massive houses and is thus more like a neighborhood than a camp – not even a slum. The entrance to the refugee camp is decorated with a gigantic key, written in English and Arabic, which reads: ‘Not for Sale’.

I enter the Lajee Center, a kind of community center for residents of Aida, with lounges, a tea kitchen, an Internet cafe and an exhibition space. Upstairs I meet Khouloud Al Ajarma, the ‘Arts & Media Coordinator of Lajee Center.’ Khouloud was born 23 years ago in Aida; her grandmother came from a village in Israel that does not exist anymore. She studied in England, so she speaks with marked British accent.

After her graduation, Khouloud returned back to Aida. She is aiming to ‘return’ to Israel, although she has not been there before. ‘To remain a refugee is a political decision,’ she admits. Hence it is for her and for the other inhabitants of Aida out of the question to start a new life elsewhere, or to even become ordinary citizens of Bethlehem. ‘We want no normalization,’ says Khouloud. ‘We want to remain refugees to exercise our right of return one day.’

It is therefore not surprising that Khouloud doesn’t grant any importance to the negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. ‘Our people do not want a two-state solution. Our leadership is not acting in our name. And the Israelis know that as well.’

She speaks very clearly of what they wish for: a single state from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, in which all Palestinians, the descendants of refugees from 1948, which are now scattered all over the world, can return to live.

For Khouloud it seems to matter little that this will never happen by peaceful means. ‘Why do we need a Jewish state?’ Khouloud asks rhetorically. ‘Surely we can all live together in a democratic state of Palestine.’ This would, she says, of course, have a ‘Palestinian majority.’ And what would happen to the Jewish minority in such a state? ‘Such small things,’ says Khouloud, ‘are not important. For them a solution will eventually be found.’

What I find so frightening about Khouloud Al Ajarma is (that) no representative of the UN, who built the schools and community centers in Aida, nor the EU, who gives the refugee camps financial support, nor the employees of all the Western aid agencies and NGOs that are active here – none of them would tell Khouloud straight out that her demands are not only inhuman – because of course they count on the expulsion and disenfranchisement of Jews in Israel, and this is still the most favorable interpretation – but also unrealistic. Not one says, ‘You will not get your demands. Work instead towards a peaceful compromise with the Israelis, advocate for a two-state solution and waive your threatening right to return. Finally take over responsibility for yourself and your own people, build an infrastructure and tear down the refugee camps. Stop getting nannied by the UN and the EU, get a grip on things yourselves.’”

11. The sixth day, Tel Aviv

Author Yosef Haim Brener

Shirel Horvitz led us through the neighborhood of Neve Tzedek in Tel Aviv. On the steps just outside The Authors’ House (Rokah Street and Neve Tzedek Street), she told us about the Jewish aspirations in the land of Israel through the revival of the Hebrew language. Then she showed us the sign on the wall, commemorating Yosef Haim Brener, Yosef Aharonovitch and Dvora Baron.

Brener is mentioned first, and he is a much more important author then the others, but for some reason she did not even mention him. She talked about Aharonovitch and Baron, who went mad and ordered that all her writing be burned. And I asked myself, why won’t she talk about Brener? After all, he is much more dominant in the history of the Hebrew language. Is it possible that she omitted him just because he was murdered by Arabs in 1921? And to my great amazement, she got up and simply moved on to the next location. I stopped her and asked, “And what about Brener? Isn’t he worth a mention?”

She looked at me bewildered, and with no other choice started telling the group about Brener’s life. And she knew quite a lot about it. So why hadn’t she said a single word about him beforehand?

This is an important matter: is it possible that we have to erase from the historical records all accounts of Arabs portrayed in a negative way? Brener was an author who was murdered by Arabs in Tel Aviv, many years before 1948, and many years before the territories were captured by Israel in 1967. If we want to talk about the two sides’ narratives, we must mention this too. It must be an important issue in the conflict. So why did she omit this exact point? If this is the case, it’s not that our goal is to listen to both sides. Our goal is to cleanse history of any incidence than might explain the Jewish-Israeli narrative. And this is a very grave matter.

On top of all things, now that she had broached the topic of the Arab riots in Jaffa in 1921, she described it as follows: “The Arabs started rioting against the Jews, but the Jews retaliated”. And the more I think about it, the more I am enraged. What did she mean by “but”? Is it abnormal to retaliate when you are under attack? And what would have been normal – if the Jews hadn’t retaliated at all? Maybe they should not have retaliated, maybe they should have waited patiently for the Arabs to kill every last one of them, on their own time – it might end at 4 o’clock, or 5, or even as late as the next day.

This means that the optimal situation can be found in what happened to the Jews during in the Holocaust. Retaliation was rare, and they were surely “in the right”, since they did not resist and were not at all violent. I guess they would get an “A” from Shirel. What a pity they are not here with us to enjoy that grade.

12. The seventh evening, documentary films screening, Tel Aviv

The poster of Noa Ben Hagay's film, "Blood Relation"

We were invited to watch a few documentary films at Assaf Saban’s place behind the Noga theatre in Jaffa. He showed us two films of his: one about a soldier who commits suicide while on vacation, and the second about “the march of the living” in Auschwitz.

I’m not going to criticize the films on an artistic level, but I couldn’t avoid the feeling that the director’s purpose – in fact, the whole evening’s purpose – was to show how corrupt and crumbling Israeli society is. The two subjects he chose are surely interesting and important issues: suicide in the military is a sensitive matter that’s worth dealing with, and the same is true for the educational activity which involved taking teenagers on tours of the Nazi death camps.

But regarding suicides – is this a particular characteristic of the Israeli society? In Sweden there are much more cases of suicide, as well as in all the Nordic countries. So what am I supposed to think – that Swedish society is corrupt, rotten and twisted? I don’t think that one shouldn’t deal with problems such as soldiers committing suicide, but the question is, what does it mean, and why it was a part of our trip? If you wanted to see “something” about Israeli society, you could have seen any number of other things – successful Israeli companies, tomatoes growing in the desert, researchers in universities, and so on. For some reason, all these were not represented in our trip.

The way Saban talked about Israeli society, about “the Israelis” and about Israel was very alienated. It is, of course, ridiculous to tell a film director which films to make, and this is definitely not my point, but the way he talked was emblematic of a whole week in which all we were shown was a violent and harsh face of Israeli society. It was a pre-meditated choice to bring to us only speakers who perceive this country as a horrible place, where nothing works and everything is screwed up, and whose perceptions are often expressed on a budget given to them by that very same state.

The same evening we watched Noa Ben Hagay’s film, “Blood Relations”, which tells the story of her family. Her grandmother’s sister, Pnina, married an Arab man during the British mandate and since then was torn from her family. First she moved to Jaffa, then to Nablus. The family lost touch with her, and hid the whole story from future generations. Noa discovered all this by chance, and tried to fix this by contacting her “family” in Nablus. She found them, but was unable to reunite the two families.

I’ve known Noa for many years, and my name appears in the credits at the end of the film (we had a few discussions about the film in its early stages). She was lucky to have discovered such a complicated personal story, combining history, politics and human beings. Every author, journalist or film-maker would love to be in her place. But for Noa it’s not only about the story, but about horrible guilt (“toxic”, said the German journalist), as if every catastrophe that has happened to her Palestinian relatives is her fault. In fact, everything is her fault.

The war of 1948, after which Pnina moved from Jaffa to Nablus – her fault. The war of 1967, after which Nablus fell under Israeli control – her fault. The dire economic situation of her Palestinian family – also her fault. Noa has even given thousands of dollars from her pocket and recruited her uncle to sign court bails for her Palestinian cousins (who’ve then skipped bail and made the uncle pay thousands of Shekels). It is even implied in the film that her “new” relatives are engaged somehow in terrorist activity – but Noa doesn’t care. That’s apparently her fault too.

Noa came to talk to us after the screening. She said her film was shown in many film festivals around the world and was received very well. But, she said, “This is not good, since it sends a message to the world that Israel is a democracy”. In a festival in Canada, some protesters stood outside the hall and called on people to boycott her film and Israel. “I wanted to join them”, she said.

And all this from a person who was raised and educated in Israel, and whose film studies were surely subsidized by the state to some extent. Her film is shown again and again on TV and in the Tel Aviv Cinematheque to thousands of viewers, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak gave her a hug and told her how important her film is – yet none of this is a democracy. If that is the case, she doesn’t know what democracy is all about. She must be thinking that Israel would be a democracy only when everybody did what Noa Ben Hagay told them to do. That would really be a democracy.

Democracy is something else: it is a place where film directors can make whatever film they wish to make, and if it has certain artistic qualities, it might even get the state’s funding, and nobody will arrest her or spit in her face. Noa said that the face of her cousin in Nablus has to be blurred when the film is screened on TV, because if her Palestinian neighbors knew that she has relatives in Israel, they would most probably boycott her, hit her or even rape her. In Israel, on the other hand, nobody has said a word to Noa for having an Arab cousin. That’s also a sign of democracy and of an open and tolerant society. But not for Noa – for her this is not a democracy.

At the end of the evening I told her that a day earlier, in Bethlehem, the group heard that the “right of return” is a “holy right” and that the Palestinians have no intention of giving it up. She smiled to me and said: “The right of return is something they used to talk about in the 1980s”.

By coincidence, the Palestinian journalist was standing there with her back to us. I told Noa, “Here’s a Palestinian, why don’t you ask her yourself”.

“No way”, she said, “That’s irrelevant. They don’t want the ‘right of return’”.

“Ask her yourself”, I insisted. I saw she was afraid, but I urged her to get an answer.

She had no choice in the end, so she tapped the Palestinian woman on her back, and said: “Adi wants me to ask you…’. I stopped her and said: “It’s not me who wants to know. You should also want to know the answer, right?”

She started over: “Do you want your ‘right of return’? Would you like to have your family’s house in Safed?”

The Palestinian didn’t even blink, and naturally said, “yes”.

A silence followed.

I saw that Noa was stunned. She tried again: “Do you want to tell me that without the right of return, there won’t be a peace agreement?”

The Palestinian again answered without even thinking: “No”. Now Noa really got pale.

What did I learn from all this? First, that Noa is out of touch with reality. She sits with her Jewish friends in cafés in Tel Aviv, and they explain to one another that Netanyahu and Lieberman are fascists, and that everything would be so simple and wonderful without them. She just never bothered to ask a Palestinian what it is exactly that he or she wants. She told me, speaking on their behalf, that it was “something they used to talk about in the 1980s “. But maybe instead of trying to guess what the Palestinians want, we should simply ask them.

This person goes around and calls herself a pro-peace activist. But what does that mean, “pro-peace”? Does it mean sitting at home, blaming yourself for every possible thing and having no idea what the other side wants or what their aspirations are?

One thing is for sure: she is certainly not pro-peace.

13. In between, on the bus and on the road

George Kara and Moshe Katzav

On the breaks between the lectures and while driving on the bus, I heard several whispers among the group about the fact that “Israel is a racist country”. Why? Because it is the Jewish state.

I think there’s a mistake here (thought there’s probably no mistake, it seems to be pure political motivation), because there’s no problem at all with the fact that Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people. The Jewish people are indeed a bit unique, in the sense that their nation developed out of a religion, but this fact is not so essential. Italy is the nation-state of the Italian people, and Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people. Is it that easy to join the Italian nation? I doubt it. When I look at minorities in European countries or anywhere else, I’m really not too sure.

And what kind of racism are we talking about? The Palestinian journalist said on one occasion that her relatives back in Syria cannot study at the university, because the Syrian authorities discriminate against Palestinians. On the other hand, Arabs in Israel can attend universities freely. So a sister Arab country treats the Palestinians much worse than Israel. And who’s the racist here? Refugees from Africa, Muslim and non-Muslim, try to find shelter in Israel. In Egypt they are shot at from time to time, but that’s apparently not a sign of racism. The conclusion then is that this country is the least racist in the region, even if it is the nation state of the Jewish people.

We could have this discussion seriously, if it was real and impartial, and if we had unified standards according to which we examined all the countries in the world. Then, I presume, we would find that all the countries in the region get a much, much lower grade. But what happens in reality is that the discussion is politically motivated in order to de-legitimize Israel. It’s not a discussion about minorities’ rights or racism. It’s about saying “Israel is bad”, and now we have another reason for saying that.

Hillel Cohen told us that Arabs don’t get equal rights in Israel and that they are discriminated against in terms of state budgets. He did not say though that the Supreme Court, Israel’s most respected institution, has an Arab judge (Salim Jubran). He also did not say that the President of Israel, Moshe Katzav, was given his verdict recently by an Arab judge, George Kara (a fact so trivial that no one even mentioned it). He also did not say that the head of the Political Studies Department at Tel Aviv University is an Arab (Amal Jamal). And he also did not say that Arab members of parliament such as Ahmad Tibi (not considered a radical) go around the world and tell whomever wishes to listen that Jews live in houses they stole from Arabs (in Israel itself, not the territories).

Not long ago, a group of rabbis published a call not to rent apartments to Arabs. This call was denounced by every possible politician, including the Prime Minister and including many right-leaning members of parliament. Important rabbis, some of them much more important than the ones who signed the letter, also denounced it, and some of the original rabbis retracted their signatures because of that. This story – obviously – attracted the curiosity of the visiting journalists.

But one should remember: there are Arab minorities in Jewish-dominated cities. There are Arabs in Acco, Haifa and Lod. But there are no Jewish minorities in Arab cities – not in Nazareth, not in Shfaram and nowhere else. And there have been Jews who’ve wanted to live there. A few years ago I met an elderly person in Acco who told me that due to economic reasons he’d left Acco and tried to move to the Arab village of Judeide-Maker, but on his first day there a few Arab thugs appeared at his doorstep and told him to beat it, otherwise they’d burn the house down with him in it. For some reason, nobody talks about this.

So maybe there isn’t total equality between Jews and Arabs in Israel. I don’t think there ever will be, and I don’t think that there’s any country in the world where if you’re a minority or a foreigner, you’ll have perfect equality. Being a minority is never pleasant – and Jews know it better than others. And I’m not even talking about Iran or Egypt, where Christians Copts are shot at in the street.

The question is are they discriminated against legally, and in this sense I don’t think that Israel is different than France, Germany, Slovakia or Great Britain, where if you are Pakistani, or Indian, or Algerian or a Jew, then you might be discriminated against, not because there’s a law, but because you are a minority.

Not to mention what the Samis have been through in Sweden.

Smoke over Haifa University (photo: Hila Shaked)

Two teenage brothers are under arrest on suspicion of negligent conduct that police say was responsible for the blaze. The fire has left 12,000 acres of burnt forest, and damaged five million trees, with the government estimating immediate losses at $70m (€52m).

Endless hours of TV coverage and grieving family members recounting the lives of their loved ones caused a war-like atmosphere, with Israelis asking themselves if such a disaster could have been prevented. Long accustomed to being a leading exporter of humanitarian aid, Israel has had to rely this time on foreign aid, including the largest fire-fighting aircraft of its kind arriving from the US. And despite the deteriorating relationship, Ankara sent two fire-fighting aircrafts – seen here positively as a reciprocal gesture for the Israeli aid given to Turkey during the heavy earthquakes of the 1990s.

Political fallout might still lie ahead for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Writing in Sunday’s Haaretz, columnist Amir Oren called the fire “Netanyahu’s Hurricane Katrina”. Ben Dror Yemini, on the other hand, writing for the daily Maariv, warned of the Israeli almost-automatic tendency to blame each other, and instead called for cool-headedness in finding future solutions.

But aside from technical issues, serious policy adjustments regarding the impacts of global warming seem to be needed. According to the Israel Meteorological Service, last month was the hottest and driest November in the last 40 years. Furthermore, the last 11 months (starting January 2010) are the hottest ever recorded.

Alon Tal, Professor of Environmental Policy from Ben Gurion University and Chairman of the Israeli Green Movement, says that the global climate change caused this wildfire to be a whole new ball game. “We are witnessing an unprecedented situation: December is here and we haven’t had a drop of rain yet. Fire fighters in the Carmel told me that they have never encountered so rapid and strong fires. Everything caught fire immediately because it was so dry.”

After the war with Lebanon in 2006, says Tal, in which thousands of missiles caused fires all across northern Israel, many fire trucks were replaced with new ones. “Millions of dollars were spent,” he says, “but even with the modern trucks, the last few days seemed like fighting cannons with pistols. This time they just didn’t have a chance.”

(Published originally in Monocle on December 6th 2010).

John Ging, head of UNRWA operations in Gaza (photo: Heinrich Böll Foundation)

The Israeli negative view of UNRWA is perfectly understandable. Palestinians will not achieve their rights through illegal activities, such as firing rockets into Israel. UNRWA shouldn’t exist after so many years – and due to history, people in Gaza have to prove to their neighbors that they are truly committed to peace.

These are some of the most interesting remarks that John Ging, head of UNRWA operations in Gaza, made in a special interview. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees’ (UNRWA) mission is to provide welfare and education services to 4.8 million people defined by it (as of today) as refugees – in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

I had two long face-to-face meetings with Ging in the last month. After them, and in between, we continued emailing each other with additional questions and answers. 44 years old, Ging is an Irish lawyer and an ex-military officer. He came to Gaza in February 2006 after doing humanitarian work in Rwanda and the Balkans. He had two objectives in the interview: one was to open a dialogue with the Israeli public, and the second was to convince the Israelis that the political conflict should be separated from the humanitarian situation in Gaza. The two, according to Ging, should not be related.

“I want to open a new chapter in the relationship of UNRWA with the Israeli public”, says Ging. “I have come to realize that there are key misunderstandings of UNRWA’s role. We haven’t communicated effectively and we haven’t been providing answers to questions that arise. I perfectly understand the Israeli negative view towards my organization and I understand that there is a basis for people to be skeptical. There are tough questions to be answered, and they should be addressed. There hasn’t been the depth of discussion that would enable people to make a better informed opinion”.

UNRWA did not create the Arab-Israeli conflict, says Ging, and it should be judged by its actions in the relevant fields – especially education and welfare. “UNRWA has no political role, and you don’t go to the Ministry of Education to criticize the foreign policy. We have a specific mandate for civil services”.

Ging takes special pride in UNRWA’s schools, where he says children “are taught to take responsibility for their actions and to realize the contribution that Palestinians have made to their current situation. We have to convince the children of Gaza that the way forward is through adoption of universal values. We teach them from grade one that in order to attain your rights you must first act according to the standards of responsible behavior. We teach them about Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and Gandhi, to show them how other people have succeeded to achieve their human rights, and it’s not by firing rockets into Sderot”.

Are people in Gaza aware to the fact that they are responsible for their situation?

“Not enough aware. We teach the children of Gaza the consequences of suicide bombing and of throwing rockets in Israel. They cannot turn around and be self indulgent of irresponsible behavior. We also teach them that on the other side there are good human beings who want nothing more than a peaceful solution to the conflict but their legitimate concern is that of security because of their experience. Due to history, people in Gaza have to prove to their neighbors that they are truly committed to peace”.

Ging’s relationship with Hamas, the Islamic movement that controls the Gaza Strip, are far from being good, and he was even the victim of an unsuccessful assassination attempt in 2007. “We have a component of the population in Gaza which is very violent, destructive and extremist”, he says. “There is violence against Israel and also inside Gaza, for example against UNRWA’s schools. The extremists accuse us of the feminization of the society, which is the equal opportunity that we are teaching and of which we are proud. The violence is directed towards anyone who seeks to promote universal values”.

What role is Hamas playing in the Gaza Strip? Is it helping the human development of the population?

“The economy of Gaza has collapsed during the period of Hamas governance creating unprecedented levels of impoverishment. The public services are overstretched and overburdened as there is no investment or development. The impact that Hamas has made on the economic status of the general population is negligible, as it is the donations of the international community that sustain the population”.

Hamas in Gaza (photo: Mateus)

But Ging is optimistic. The good news, he says, is that only a minority of Gazans are extremists, whereas the majority is committed to a peaceful two-state solution. “I hope that also on this side people will reignite talks and know that on the other side there are people who in their core share our universal values”.

Not everyone is so optimistic. Reporters for The New York Times spent some two weeks in Gaza last July, and published this large reportage. In it they say,

“Ask Gazans how to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict – two states? One state? – and the answer is mostly a reflexive call to drive Israel out… ‘All the land is ours’, says Ramzi, a public school teacher from Rafah, ‘we should turn the Jews into refugees and then let the international community take care of them’… Abdel Qader Ismail, 24, says ‘we believe in Israel’s right to exist, but not on the land of Palestine. In France or in Russia, but not in Palestine. This is our home’.”

Why do you think Israelis should care about the humanitarian situation of someone who wants to turn them into refugees?

“There are tens of thousands of extremists in Gaza, but I can bring more than tens of thousands who would say that there is need for a just solution for this conflict. The State of Israel is here to stay and anyone who is professing an alternative agenda is not acceptable by our standards and we categorize these people as extremists”.

So Hamas would be defeated in case of an elections?

“The moment you try to simplify the politics of the region, you fall into many traps. I am saying that an overwhelming part of the population is good and descent, and demonstrated its capacity to peacefully coexist”.

What are the signs for that? Where are the articles they write, the demonstrations, the NGO’s that are actively pro-peace?

“Why do the parents of Gaza send their children to our schools? And in the business community, with the smallest opening in the last months, the tunnel industry has collapsed. That’s standing up for what is right and what is lawful. It shows that they have intent to do commercial business with their neighbor”.

The fact that people gave up a dangerous route of commerce shows they are committed to peace?

“Yes, otherwise they would continue work with the tunnel”.

People in Iran and North Korea also pay for their governments’ actions. The people of Gaza made a choice to elect Hamas, who made a choice to ignore all agreements and to not recognize Israel. So the international community isolates them.

“The question is what choice they had. There is no blame on Israel but the international community has questions to answer about the ballot in Gaza (that took place in 2006 and in which Hamas won, AS)”.

Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon (photo: Zingaro)

Ging said some tough questions should be answered, so I decided to ask him some of them. The first one regards the agency’s mere existence. UNRWA was established by the United Nations General Assembly under resolution 302 of December 1949. For some reason, the UN decided that the Palestinians would be the only ethnic group to have a special agency – and all the rest, tens of millions of refugees around the world (mainly in Africa and Asia, but also in the Balkans and in Latin America) are taken care of by another UN agency, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

UNRWA was criticized harshly during the years: while one of the UNHCR’s main tasks is to resettle refugees – and its success is measured accordingly – UNRWA is only dealing with welfare and education. While in all other ethnic groups the number of refugees diminishes with time, the number of Palestinian refugees is just growing: from 700,000 in UNRWA’s inception to 4.8 million currently.

One reason for that is the unique and different way UNRWA defines a Palestinian refugee. Throughout the world, a refugee who receives new citizenship in another country is no longer considered a refugee (thus, hundreds of thousands of Jews who fled Arab countries as refugees in the 40′s and 50′s stopped being refugees when resettled in Israel). But Palestinian refugees continue to enjoy UNRWA’s services even after receiving new citizenship (there are about 2 million Palestinian refugees in Jordan, most of them Jordanian citizens). In addition, UNRWA unprecedently widened the definition of refugee to include also the descendants of refugees, so that every newborn baby is automatically considered to be a refugee.

“We shouldn’t exist after so many years”, says Ging, “and I perfectly understand the Israeli negative view towards my organization, because it is the manifestation of the political failure of the international community to resolve the conflict. Our 60th anniversary was not a moment of celebration but a commemoration of failure because we should not have had to exist after 60 years”.

Why don’t you resettle the refugees?

“This is not our mandate. I am by mandate given for action, not to resolve the conflict. The question of the refugees is an issue that should be decided upon in the negotiations between the parties themselves”.

Gaza is under Palestinian control. Have you tried to initiate a resettlement project there together with Hamas?

“Why would I do that? You are asking me to solve one of the protracted issues of the conflict. This is not our mandate”.

Every reasonable person understands that Israel will never let into its territory 4.8 million Palestinians, because it will stop being the State of the Jewish People. Not settling the refugees is not a neutral act: You thus perpetuate the conflict, and even make it worse, since every day the number of refugees increases.

“UNRWA gets its mandate from the General Assembly. Our mandate is to act, not to solve the conflict”.

Girls school of UNRWA in Gaza (photo: Begemot)

Ging refused to comment on the fairness or the reasonableness of the Goldstone report, on the true nature of the Turkish Marmara ship that tried to reach Gaza, or on the feeling shared by many Israelis that their country is prejudiced against in many UN bodies. He said he is a UN official who cannot pass judgment on these issues. I asked him if it is reasonable in his view that a democratic country – of the sort the UN was supposed to promote – would be subject to endless attacks from totalitarian countries such as Libya and Cuba (as happens in the Human Rights Council), Ging answered: “I cannot answer such a straightforward question”.

But he could not ignore the criticism coming from within. In January 2009 UNRWA suffered a devastating blow when one of its most senior officials published a damning report on its activities. James Lindsay, legal advisor and general counsel for UNRWA from 2000 until 2007, criticized the agency for issues that were raised previously by Israel and by other players in the international community. Only this time it came from within.

In a lengthy report (read it here), Lindsay wrote that “UNRWA’s failure to match UNHCR’s success (in resettling refugees, AS) obviously represents a political decision on the part of the agency”, and that “UNRWA has gradually adopted a distinctive political viewpoint that favors the Palestinian and Arab narrative of events in the Middle East. In particular, it seems to favor the strain of Palestinian political thought espoused by those who are intent on a ‘return’ to the land that is now Israel”. By that, concluded Lindsay, “UNRWA encouraged Palestinians who favor refighting long-lost wars, (and) discouraged those who favor moving toward peace”.

Lindsay referred also to UNRWA’s education system, quoting a few American researches, the most moderate of which concluded that the curriculum “is not a peace curriculum”, that the textbooks “fail to identify Israel on maps”, and that they “avoid discussing Jews or Israelis as individuals”.

These are very harsh words. Why don’t you replace these books so they befit universal values?

“It was disappointing to find these paragraphs in Lindsay’s report. I don’t agree, and I think he has no basis to say that it is UNRWA’s decision because our mandate is given to us. I agree that it is a political failure, but we don’t set up the mandate, we are only the implementers. As for our schools, we use textbooks of the Palestinian Authority. Are they perfect? No, they’re not. I can’t defend the indefensible. We acknowledge the weaknesses and that is why we enrich the curriculum with our human rights program, for all ages. We teach the children about the history of the human rights movement. We grounded our program in the universal declaration of human rights, which is borne out of the horrors of the Second World War. So we teach the children the horrors of the war, including the Holocaust. We are also teaching the kids about the unanimously adopted resolution on Holocaust remembrance, which is a 2005 UN resolution proposed by the state of Israel adopted in the General Assembly”.

Holocaust classes in Gaza gained publicity a year ago, following press reports that UNRWA was starting such classes in its schools. A huge uproar succeeded those reports: UNRWA spokesman Adnan Abu Hasna told Reuters that “there is no mention of the Holocaust in the current syllabus”. Ging himself was quoted in the Palestinian news agency Maan as saying: “it was inconceivable that the Palestinian students should learn about the Holocaust while Israel had eliminated everything related to Palestine from the curricula… UNRWA had no intention whatsoever of incorporating (in its curriculum any) materials or subjects against the wishes of the Palestinian society”.

Ging denies vehemently the quote and says he never gave an interview to Maan on this subject. He insists that children in Gaza are taught about the Nazi concentration camps, about the Ghettos and about Auschwitz.

Such classes are tremendously important in understanding the history of the Jewish people. Moreover – in the prevalent discourse of the Middle East, where Holocaust denial is legitimate and sometimes even openly encouraged, this is indeed an achievement. I tried therefore to learn more about the students’ reactions and the classes themselves. I asked Ging if someone ever visited such a class. His answer was that “anyone who comes to visit us is welcomed to go to our human rights classes”.

I asked Ging again if any western journalist ever visited such a class and published his impressions. He said that Donald Macintyre from The Independent visited and published this story. But from reading the story, it is obvious that Macintyre did not visit such a class. It remains a mystery to me why Ging said that Macintyre visited such a class, and how come no journalists visited such an obvious success story of UNRWA.

Ging had very harsh words towards Israel during operation Cast Lead. He gave numerous interviews to newspapers and TV stations around the world, calling upon the international community to do all it can “to stop immediately” the violence and the killings. Here is one example for an interview to the BBC:

Since Ging said time and again during our meetings that his main concern is humanitarian and not political, and that he is not taking sides in the conflict, I asked him if he ever gave an interview to the BBC, calling upon the international community to “stop immediately” the rockets fired to Sderot or the suicide attacks in Israeli cities. He sent me two examples of such interventions: one is a speech he gave in Cleveland US in March 2009, where he said that an Israeli mother, who does not know if her child will be picked off by a rocket fired aimlessly from Gaza is a victim of terrorism. The second was an event in Kibbutz Zikim in the south of Israel, where in front of about 50 people Ging condemned the rockets being fired into Israel.

So – on the one hand we have a live interview, given to an internationally respected broadcaster, viewed by tens if not hundreds of millions of people all around the world. And on the other hand, we have two small events attended by a few dozen Israelis and Americans. That’s ridiculous! There is no comparison in the content either, since I asked Ging whether he called upon the international community to “stop immediately” the violence, and there is no such call in the examples he sent me. If I were supposed to be convinced that UNRWA is a neutral a-political agency, these examples are not doing a very good job.

Another issue I discussed with Ging was repeated claims that UNRWA’s beneficiaries list includes many terrorists. The US State Department is monitoring this issue, since The US is one of UNRWA’s largest donors, and since taxpayers’ money is not supposed to fund terror. In a State Department report sent to the US Congress in May 2009, one can read the following paragraph (page 9):

“UNRWA told us it has screened all staff, contractor, and beneficiary names against a UN Security Council list of potential terrorists and found no matches. However, the list is restricted to individuals and entities affiliated with Al-Qaida and the Taliban and thus does not specifically include major regional groups, such as Hamas and Hezbollah”.

Is it possible that behind this entangled wording lays the incredible assertion that UNRWA is checking if there are Taliban members on its payroll, but not Hamas members? Ging answered the following: “UNRWA is in compliance with funding conditions of the US Foreign Assistance Act, which prohibits any direct or indirect assistance to terror groups as defined by the US. UNRWA prohibits the employment of members of Hamas or any regional group, in fact UNRWA prohibits its employees to engage through membership or otherwise in any outside activities. As part of UNRWA’s efforts to ensure full transparency and accountability, UNRWA submits its entire list of staff to the Government of Israel”. I asked Ging if this means the American report is wrong, but I did not get an answer. It is again a mystery to me how these two assertions can be reconciled.

During operation Cast Lead Palestinians fired at Israeli soldiers from the vicinity of UNRWA schools. When the Israeli army returned fire and civilians were hurt, Israel was harshly criticized. Why do they shoot from there in the first place?

“I condemn people who fire rockets from next to UNRWA compounds, and in fact I condemn that from everywhere else. I have huge respect for Israeli staff in the land borders who are on the front lines every day. I tell Palestinians to look at the risks that Israeli people are taking to enable passage of supply into Gaza. And who’s firing rockets at them? Palestinians. And what are you doing about that is my question to the Palestinians”.

(A shorter version of this interview was published in the weekend edition of the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom on November 5th 2010. See also an analysis based on Mr. Ging’s quotes that I published in The Jewish Chronicle on November 26th 2010).

Clinton, Netanyahu and Abbas (photo: State Department)

Direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority were re-launched a month ago in Washington, so how come they’re derailing so quickly? The issue now in the forefront is Israeli settlements in the West Bank, after the Israeli government announced last November a 10-month moratorium on construction as a trust-building step. It took the international community nine of those months to get the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas on board, and the Israeli prime minister is now under intense pressure to prolong the moratorium further. Abbas has threatened to leave the talks if it is not renewed.

But many people here feel that the settlements issue is just a red herring. Jonathan Dahoah-Halevi, former adviser for policy planning at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, says that problems are far greater, and that “chances for successful negotiations are slim, as Israel is ready for an historic and painful compromise while the Palestinians insist on implementing what they call ‘justice’, which means evacuating Israeli cities for absorbing millions of Palestinians”.

Other commentators point to the fact that more than a dozen Jewish settlements in the Gaza strip were evacuated by the Israeli army in just one day in August 2005. Moreover, Palestinians have already agreed to some kind of “territory swap”, according to which major Jewish settlements in the West Bank will remain in Israeli hands, in return for territory now in the State of Israel.

“The real problem is neither borders nor security issues,” wrote Amos Gilboa, a commentator for the daily Maariv, suggesting what most Israelis believe: that the aspirations of the Jewish and of the Palestinian national movements are currently unbridgeable – what Israel can yield seems not enough for the Palestinians, and what they consider minimal is impossible for Israel.

The core issues are the real problem, and the thorniest of these, according to Dahoah-Halevi, is the refugees issue, created after the Palestinians lost the war of 1948. A senior Palestinian negotiator recently told a group of Israeli journalists in Tel Aviv that “no Arab leader can give up the demand that Palestinian refugees resettle in Israel”. The problem for Israel, though, is that there are currently almost five million Palestinian refugees and about the same number of Jews in Israel, so resettling the refugees in Israel would end it as a Jewish state.

A collapse in talks might lead to the familiar blame game and even to a renewed wave of violence. A more optimistic view, though, sees the current crisis as yet another example of the brinksmanship nature of regional politics. This being the Middle East, expect the unexpected.

(Published originally in Monocle on October 16th).

The Israeli pavilion in Shangahi, Expo 2010

Love is in the air between Israel and China, no doubt about that. Data just released by the Israel Export and International Cooperation Institute for the first half of 2010 indicates that China, which was previously ranked 11th among Israel’s export destinations, is now rated 5th, with $755m (€593m) worth of exports – a 115 per cent increase compared with 2009. Exports to China have surpassed those to long-time pillars of Israeli bilateral trade, such as Germany.

“That’s a natural and ongoing process”, says Amir Lati, Israeli deputy consul general in Shanghai. “The Israeli and Chinese economies do not compete with each other, they complete each other. Israel is not involved in heavy industry, and on the other hand China is thirsty for technology and other fields where Israel is very strong. I think this process will only accelerate.”

Growth in trade is of course somewhat due to China’s faster recovery from the global recession, but improved relations between the two countries can be seen in other fields as well. Israeli education minister, Gideon Saar, has decided to include the Chinese language in the matriculation exams. During the summer, Israel’s leading teachers’ preparatory school launched its first-ever programme for training Chinese teachers. From as early as next year, it’ll be possible to test Israeli teenagers in Chinese – on the same level as mathematics or English.

There are at least a billion reasons for doing that, says Dr Shlomo Alon, responsible for Chinese teaching in the education ministry. “It is our understanding that the world around us is changing,” he says, “and China becomes ever more important. It is also proof of our far-reaching contacts with China, and we believe that language and culture are crucial tools.” Alon added that the tests are being formulated with the assistance of Chinese academic institutions.

Chinese officials visiting the Israeli pavilion in Shanghai’s Expo are fascinated, says Lati, and it seems this “beginning of a beautiful friendship” has a lot of potential ahead.

(Published originally in Monocle on August 29th).

Muammar Gaddafi (photo: James Gordon)

The main protagonist of the night-time drama was Rafael Hadad, a 34-year-old Israeli photographer, who was arrested in Libya five months ago for allegedly spying for Israel. Two days before his arrest, he updated his Facebook status, writing, “I have just seen Muammar Gaddafi driving his own car, no bodyguards. Gaddafi is great”. The next day he updated again: “I’m in trouble”.

Thus started a vigorous effort by the Israeli foreign ministry to free Hadad, and according to media reports here, Silvio Berlusconi, Nicolas Sarkozy and Tony Blair were involved in trying to persuade the Libyan authorities to free him. He arrived eventually at the Austrian capital aboard a private jet owned by Martin Schlaff, an Austrian entrepreneur with excellent connections in both Jerusalem and Tripoli.

Hadad was sent to Libya by the Or Shalom Center, an association of elderly Libyan Jews who fled their native country in the 1940s and 1950s due to attacks on Jewish quarters and harassments. Or Shalom’s chairman, Pedatzur Ben-Atia, told reporters that Hadad’s mission was “to document buildings and remains of buildings from the heyday of the Libyan Jewish community”, as part of the association’s mission to preserve and commemorate Libya’s Jewish legacy.

Hadad’s risky trip drew attention to the little-discussed phenomenon of Jews from Arab countries who left behind private and public properties estimated to be worth billions of dollars. In what has been dubbed “The Jewish Naqba” (“catastrophe” in Arabic), the Jewish population of Arab countries has dropped from about a million in the middle of the 20th century to practically zero today, due to discrimination, stripping of citizenship and physical attacks that occurred amid the Israeli-Arab conflict.

Rachel Machtiger, a senior research fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, says that bringing up the issue could have positive effects on the current peace process. “When one side to the negotiating table considers himself to be the ultimate victim, as the Palestinians now do,” she says, “he is not in the position of bargaining about anything. Recognising that Middle Eastern Jews had to flee their native countries as refugees because of the conflict would not only make justice, but also show the Palestinians that they are not the only victims.”

Direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians are to resume later this month, and creative thinking is much needed to reach an agreement. So why not also consider Hadad’s Libyan adventure?

(Published originally in Monocle on August 14th).

A beach in northern Greece (photo: Revital Mozes)

Timing was no coincidence. Soaring temperatures and baking-hot afternoons in the eastern Mediterranean mean that the soundest thing to do is to look for a relaxing refuge. But this time around, due to the sinking relationships between Israel and Turkey, the holiday map is being redrawn, with all players trying to cash in.

Until 2008, about one million Israelis visited Turkey each year, of whom hundreds of thousands did so during summer, heading to all-inclusive resorts along the Turkish Riviera. But then came Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s outburst at Davos towards the Israeli president Shimon Peres and his call to bar Israel from the United Nations, causing offended Israelis to look for other options.

“Tourism to Turkey this year has virtually disappeared,” says Galit Zakay, marketing manager for Eshet Tours travel agency, adding that “the last straw was the Turkish reaction to the battle with Israeli soldiers aboard a Gaza-bound ship”, which ended in nine Turkish deaths. Israelis watched their flag burning in Istanbul, and sensed that Erdogan was trying to achieve hero status in the Arab world through attacking their country, and decided to rethink their holidays.

The Turkish daily newspaper Hurriyet estimated last week that the loss for the Turkish tourism industry would be $400m, so the competitors were quick to offer alternatives.

“As with any other product on the shelf, when one leaves the market, others try to fill its place,” says Louisa Varaclas, director of the Cyprus Tourism Organisation in Tel Aviv. Sensing the opportunity, she brought more than 50 hoteliers and businessmen to Israel at the end of June, and says the reaction was “enthusiastic”.

And that’s not all. New charter flights began recently to Corfu and to Paphos, and tourist retailers are now providing attractive deals to Crete, Rhodes, Bulgaria and Palma de Mallorca.

When it comes to size, though, Israel is in apparent deficit, and the Turkish tourism minister was quick to say last week that “Turkey expresses itself in millions and Israel in thousands”. But still, a group of prominent Muslim religious leaders, including the leading Sunni cleric Yusuf al-Qardawi, thought it’s important enough to call upon “families and groups planning to travel to Europe, the US or elsewhere, to choose Turkey as a vacation destination instead”. Here, it seems, vacations are never just about getting a tan.

(Published originally in Monocle on July 8th).

Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz

The OECD has hailed “Israel’s scientific and technological policies” that have produced “outstanding outcomes on a world scale”. Despite huge waves of immigrants from underdeveloped countries in the past six decades and even though a constant security threat has drained a large portion of the annual budget, Israel apparently boasts a much healthier economy than many of its new colleagues.



Israel’s economy grows much faster than in most developed countries (5 per cent annual average between 2003 and 2008), and its unemployment rate, currently at 7.3 per cent, is lower than the EU’s 9.6 per cent. In fact, analysts say, if it was only down to economics, Israel should have been admitted to the club much earlier.

Joining the prestigious group, therefore, was more of a political matter, something the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, understood. To Israel’s dismay, Fayyad (together with an Arab-Israeli Member of Parliament) campaigned against Israel’s inclusion.

Some Israeli critics have warned against euphoria but the overall reaction is one of jubilation. The Jerusalem Post wrote that it is “undoubtedly a victory for the embattled Jewish State”, while the left-leaning Haaretz suggested that “the timing says it all: this is what Prime Minister Netanyahu is getting from the international community in return for starting proximity talks with the Palestinians.”

The economic analyst of Israel’s most-read daily, Yedioth Ahronot, went so far as calling it a “historic moment”, since “for a state that is merely 62 years old, with a population of a mere 7.5 million and which so many would like to destroy, full membership in OECD is an act with deep national and international significance”.

Joining the OECD will hardly affect the lives of ordinary Israelis – at least not in the near future. According to the Israeli Finance Ministry, the most important outcome would be the possibility to attract bigger loans and on better terms.

”The significance is more diplomatic,” says Daniel Doron, founder and director of the Israel Center for Social and Economic Progress, who has served as an adviser to Benjamin Netanyahu since the early 1990s. “There is a lot of hostility today towards the State of Israel in Europe, and this could help in toning it down. On the economic side, it is an important step of course, but we must remember that Greece, for example, is a proud and veteran member of the OECD, and it didn’t really help it in the current crisis.”

OECD secretary general Angel Gurría added a note of caution, saying that Israel has to tackle its high poverty rate. But still, at least for one day, Israel felt that the western democracies saw it as a thriving and free nation.

(Published originally in Monocle on May 12th)