Israel maakt gehakt van Palestijnse parlementarier op Mavi Marmara

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Maar 14 parlementariers werden verwijderd uit de Knesset, na uitbundige
kritiek op Hanin Zoabi, die als enig Israelisch parlementslid meevoer op
de Mavi Marmara.
Jammer genoeg wordt niet aangegeven van welke politieke kleur de
verwijderde politici zijn. Geert vragen om uit te zoeken? Of de nieuwe
politieke lijder van het CDA?

Groet / Cees

Monday, Jun. 21, 2010
Can Israel Learn How to Make Its Case?
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1995850,00.html
By Karl Vick / Jerusalem

As the only Israeli lawmaker aboard a vessel steaming toward an Israeli
blockade, Hanin Zoabi spent a fair amount of her time on the Mavi
Marmara talking to the media. Or trying to. The Turks understood only
Turkish, and a good many of the Arab reporters were flummoxed by what
they found before them. A petite, apparently sane Palestinian woman
serving in Israel's parliament had no place in the story they had been
telling one another for decades.

"The Arabs didn't understand why I am in the Knesset," says Zoabi, 41.
"They didn't of course like the fact that I am giving legitimization to
Israel. I sent a message to the whole world that Israel is a democracy."

Zoabi was below decks when her country's commandos descended to the Mavi
Marmara, found themselves in over their heads and opened fire, killing
nine civilians. But she saw her share of action back in the Knesset,
which as a representative body had absorbed the events at sea with all
the equanimity and quiet self-reflection of the Israeli public at large.

Which is to say, not much. "Traitor!" colleagues cried when Zoabi
returned to the Knesset. "Terrorist!" By the time she left, with a
phalanx of brand-new bodyguards, a record 14 lawmakers had been ejected.
"We need to make sure she isn't carrying a knife! She's a terrorist,"
one hollered on his way out. Speaker Reuven Rivlin had a sage reminder
for those who remained. "We are a democratic state," he said. "And the
entire future of our country is contingent upon what happens here."

The Divided Self
That sentiment comes pretty close to summing up the Marmara affair as it
was understood by much of the globe and a few worldly Israelis. Besides
fracturing the Jewish state's relations with Turkey, its most important
Muslim ally, and undermining a nascent rapprochement with the Obama
Administration in Washington, its most important ally of all, the
flotilla fiasco also invited fresh judgment of the kind of democracy
Israel has become: a conspicuously belligerent one, reflexively disposed
toward the military option whatever the problem at hand — and apt to
look bad doing it. The name-calling comes later.

"The qualities that once typified Israel and its leadership — freshness,
originality, creativity" — have not been in evidence for some time,
lamented David Grossman, the country's leading novelist. In their stead:
"Clumsy and calcified policy, which again and again resorts by default
to the use of massive and exaggerated force, at every decisive juncture,
where wisdom and sensitivity and creative thinking are called for
instead." Given those instincts, Grossman wrote in the Guardian, the
Turks spoiling for a fight on the top deck of the Marmara had an
advantage in the knowledge that "Israel is destined and compelled, like
a puppet on a string, to react the way it did."

In large measure, however, this is not the story Israel was telling
itself. Much more typical was a headline in Israel's largest daily,
Yedioth Ahronoth: "The world is attacking, we are saluting." The
population overwhelmingly embraced the elite team that fast-roped to the
boat. On a Tel Aviv billboard, a message in English hailing the navy
SEALS is barely legible under the messages spray-painted a hundred times
in Hebrew: "Well done."

"There's the way we see it, and there's a way it's being shown to the
world," says Hatsav Arad, 32, a computer engineer sitting down to
breakfast at the end of a brutal week. The way Israelis see it, the
failure of the commando mission was compounded by a failure to
communicate the danger in which Israel finds itself. The Gaza Strip,
besides being home to 1.5 million overwhelmingly poor Palestinians,
serves as a launching pad for missiles usually fired by Hamas, the
fundamentalist Islamic group that does not shy away from terrorist
attacks. The Qassam rockets that reach nearby Israeli towns are cobbled
together inside Gaza. The fear is that Hamas will one day be able to
stockpile larger rockets that could reach Tel Aviv. These would likely
be supplied by Iran and arrive by ship. Hence the blockade.

"The idea that you could have cargo going directly from the
Mediterranean to Gaza is a direct security threat to Israel," says Mark
Regev, a government spokesman. But Israel also controls the flow of
goods into Gaza by land and forbids not just weapons but also the
smallest of luxuries (coriander, for instance) in hopes, presumably,
that Gazans will blame Hamas for the blandness of their soup. As a
tactic, this has done little to animate the image of Israel as victim
but a good deal to promote the notion of Gaza as worthy of relief,
perhaps by flotilla. "This is totally the opposite from how we see it,"
says Shaul Goldstein, mayor of the Gush Etzion settlement bloc south of
Jerusalem. "Nobody will listen to us."

Which only makes everything worse. "On the one hand, there's an
automatic reaction to criticism from the world, which is the Holocaust
syndrome of collective victimhood, a kind of posttraumatic mental
condition," argues Yaron Ezrahi, a political scientist at Hebrew
University. To that special sensitivity add the posture of a right-wing
government elected partly in reaction to world criticism of Israel's
Gaza offensive that began in late 2008, the inflammatory rhetoric of
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and a few words from veteran
White House correspondent Helen Thomas to the effect that Israelis
should return to Poland and Germany. "It's almost like a chain
reaction," Ezrahi says. "It gets worse and worse."

Goldstein, in Gush Etzion, has no doubts. "We really feel that the world
is hunting us," he says. "It touches the deepest things in the Israeli
narrative." That narrative has always been the story of an underdog,
resilient but surrounded by enemies and endlessly vulnerable. It is a
story much of the world followed avidly until 1982, when perceptions of
Israel began to shift, notes Nachman Shai, a centrist lawmaker. That was
the year Israel invaded Lebanon in pursuit of Palestine Liberation
Organization guerrillas and ended up standing by as a Lebanese ally
murdered Palestinians in refugee camps. Until then, Israel had fought
conventional wars — crushing three Arab armies in six days in 1967, a
David slaying Goliath. But in the 1982 Lebanon war — and every operation
since — the quarry was indigenous militants, virtually impossible to
separate from civilian populations. By 1987 and the first intifadeh,
David and Goliath had swapped roles; the iconic image of the time became
a Palestinian youth facing an Israeli tank with a slingshot.

The occupation of the West Bank — now 43 years old — has corroded
everything it touches, not least Israel's image. Indie rockers the
Pixies canceled their Tel Aviv show after the Mavi Marmara incident,
following earlier cancellations by rocker Elvis Costello and soul-jazz
musician Gil Scott-Heron, a veteran of the cultural boycott against
apartheid South Africa. In global liberal circles, the sense that there
is a moral equivalency between the apartheid regime and Israel is
gaining ground. (See pictures of the Palestinian 'Day of Rage.')

Time to Be Nimble
For the engineer Arad, as for most Israelis, the occupation is a source
of distress, but so is the memory of the intifadehs: "Buses going boom
in Tel Aviv." The experience does not travel, however. "People just
remember one thing: you have the army, and they have the stones and
sticks," he says. "This is the whole problem."

The wonder is that in the space of two generations, Israel, of all
countries, has not figured out a way to shed the role of heavy. From its
founding, the place was synonymous with ingenuity — from the perfection
of drip irrigation, which made the desert bloom, to the Uzi, only the
best-known innovation of a defense sector that planted the seeds of
Israel's booming high-tech economy, which, ironically, may be part of
the problem. If Israel today boasts a phenomenal number of start-ups,
it's been at the comparative expense of the country's public sector.
Pollster Dahlia Scheindlin observes that the young Israel nurtured a
collectivist society more likely to channel bright ideas to government
than to the entrepreneurial class. Not so today. That may be one reason
for an Israeli officialdom less nimble and savvy than, say, the
Palestinian protesters who turned out after the Marmara incident
carrying flags of a dozen nations. So the footage depicted, once again,
Israel against the world.

"The dichotomy within Israeli society is this explosion of new ideas and
cutting-edge arts and convergence with the West on the one hand," says
Ron Pundak, director of the Peres Center for Peace. "And parallel to
this you have the occupation, the ship, the siege. From my point of
view, it's the fight over what will be the face of Israel in the future
— this rightist, unity face or the face that built the state. And it did
build the state."

Of course, some Israeli officials are as smart as the smartest Tel Aviv
software engineer. In the West Bank village of An-Nabi Salih, during a
June 4 demonstration, a savvy lieutenant colonel kept his troops on a
tight leash. "He's paralyzing my activism!" wailed an Israeli leftist
heading back to Tel Aviv with no bloody snapshots to upload to Facebook.
But the coalition government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu still
seems ham-fisted in the way it presents Israel's case to the world. Last
month the only Western-style democracy in the Middle East denied entry
to Noam Chomsky, the left-wing MIT professor. Ejected a few days
earlier: Ivan Prado, the most famous clown in Spain. Human-rights
organizations, paying a price for their reporting on the Gaza war, are
battling legislation they say will impose onerous new rules intended to
stifle dissent.

The stuttering official response to the flotilla fiasco flowed from the
same well of misgiving. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) at one point
claimed al-Qaeda was on board. Among the many videos featuring radio
traffic that the IDF posted online, the most obviously inflammatory — in
which a voice, allegedly from a flotilla radio transmission, can be
heard snarling, "Go back to Auschwitz" — was no less obviously edited.
"PR amateurs," sneered a Yedioth columnist lambasting a message effort
in disarray.

And Zoabi, whose presence on the vessel so confounded Arab journalists
accustomed to portraying Israel as evil incarnate? Might anyone in
authority be thinking of offering her as evidence that the "despised
Zionist entity" is no monolith? That 20% of Israelis are — a
little-known fact in most of the world — Palestinians, descended from
Arab residents who stayed put when the Jewish army made the final armed
push that created Israel? That the Israeli parliament seats elected
officials who are not Zionists?

Perhaps another time. Interior Minister Eli Yishai is moving to revoke
Zoabi's citizenship. His Cabinet colleague, Foreign Minister Avigdor
Lieberman, wants Arab Israelis to lose the right to vote unless they
sign loyalty oaths.

All of which might seem to make the Knesset Speaker's wise caution about
the future of Israel's democracy just more timely and relevant. "Yeah,
but he didn't let me finish," Zoabi says. "I was supposed to speak five
minutes, and after one and a half minutes he interrupted me. He said,
'That's enough.'" —With reporting by Aaron J. Klein / Jerusalem

**********
Dit bericht is verzonden via de informele D66 discussielijst (D66 at nic.surfnet.nl).
Aanmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SUBSCRIBE D66 uwvoornaam uwachternaam
Afmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SIGNOFF D66
Het on-line archief is te vinden op: http://listserv.surfnet.nl/archives/d66.html
**********