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| Dan Clore... |
 Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2009 11:58 pm |
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News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
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http://eatthestate.org/14-04/ResistingIsraeliDraft.htm
Resisting the Israeli Draft
by Rod Such
Two young Israeli draft resisters, Maya Wind and Netta Mishly, recently
toured the United States, with one of their first stops being in
Seattle. The tour was sponsored by Jewish Voice for Peace and Code Pink,
and also included visits to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tucson, New York
City, Boston, Providence, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, along with
various college campuses located in or near those cities.
The two 19-year-olds are part of the Shministim movement that began in
2008 with the publication of an open letter signed by high school
seniors announcing their refusal to serve in the Occupied Territories.
All Israeli high school seniors, including women, are expected to serve
in the military upon graduation; women for two years and men for three
years. ("Shministim" is Hebrew for "12th grade").
Both Wind and Mishly have been imprisoned for their refusal to serve.
Wind joined the Shministim in December 2008 and served a 40-day
sentence, ending in March 2009, in a military prison. About 100 Israeli
youth have so far signed the Shministim letter, which explains their
reasons for refusing to serve, citing the repressive measures used by
the Israeli military in the Occupied Territories, including checkpoints,
targeted assassinations, roads for Jews only, and other measures that
"serve the land-seizing policy, annex more occupied territories into
Israel and trample on Palestinian human rights." Their letter states,
"It is impossible to harm and imprison in the name of freedom, and thus
it is impossible to be moral and serve the occupation."
At the Seattle event, which was also sponsored by the American Friends
Service Committee (AFSC) and held at the AFSC's meeting hall in the
University District, a fairly large crowd for a Seattle weeknight event
turned out to hear the two resisters. The Seattle event was also notable
for being held on the same day that the South African jurist Richard
Goldstone released a 575-page report for the United Nations Human Rights
Council regarding Israel's incursion into and bombing of the Gaza Strip
in December 2008 and January 2009. The Goldstone report found that both
Israel and Hamas committed war crimes during Israel's invasion, but it
singled out the Israeli military for "a deliberately disproportionate
attack designed to punish, humiliate, and terrorize a civilian
population." The report strengthens the position of the Shministim that
they could be ordered to commit war crimes if they served in the Israeli
military.
The two young women began their presentation with a graphic display of
four maps showing the transfiguration of Palestine from 1948 to the
present. It included maps showing the two-state solutions proposed by
former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon, neither of
which constituted a viable state. Barak's plan, Wind noted, assigned all
the important water aquifers to Israel, cut off the proposed Palestinian
state from Jordan so that the West Bank would be completely surrounded
by Israel, and provided no capital for the Palestinians in East
Jerusalem. The map showing Sharon's plan for a Palestinian state was
perhaps the most graphic in making the case that it was never a serious
proposal. It displayed a "state" split into three sections, two of which
are surrounded on all sides by Israel. Many observers have compared this
proposal to apartheid South Africa's Bantustans, which sought to isolate
blacks on what were little more than large reservations.
Then Wind and Mishly showed a map of the present-day West Bank, dotted
with Israeli settlements and military checkpoints. Mishly noted that
since 1967, all Israeli governments, not just the right-wing Likud
governments but also the so-called left-wing Labor Party-led coalitions,
have supported the settlement projects. Wind explained that the purpose
of the ubiquitous military checkpoints is not security but to establish
a rigid control over Palestinian life. Many checkpoints are not barriers
between Palestinian villages and Israeli settlements or even Israeli
proper, but are checkpoints that separate Palestinians from their own
communities. Palestinians must obtain permits to go through the
checkpoints just to get to their farmland, hospitals, and schools, and
they cannot obtain permits if they're known to have taken part in
uprisings or if they belong to the "wrong" organization. Similarly,
Mishly pointed out, the wall Israel constructed in the West Bank was not
intended for security either, since it doesn't follow the so-called
Green Line, the borders established after the 1967 war, but instead
encroach on Palestinian land in the West Bank, in some cases cutting off
a Palestinian village from as much as 50 percent of its adjacent farmland.
Mishly touted the work of Anarchists Against the Wall, an organization
comprising Israeli Jews and Palestinian protesters, who hold weekly
nonviolent demonstrations against the wall at various places. Despite
the nonviolent nature of the protests, she pointed out that more than 20
demonstrators have been killed since 2005 by Israeli soldiers firing
rubber bullets and high-velocity tear gas canisters. A recent New York
Times article by Israeli correspondent Ethan Bronner discussed these
protests after former President Jimmy Carter and South African bishop
Desmond Tutu, both Nobel Peace Prize laureates, visited a vigil in Bilin
in the West Bank. The article quoted an Israeli military official who
justified harsh measures because demonstrators sometimes throw stones
and injure Israeli soldiers, but in typically unbalanced fashion the
article failed to mention these 20 Palestinian deaths, including one as
recent as April 2009.
Mishly and Wind argued that there are not just political but also
economic motivations behind the occupation. These include the
exploitation of Palestinian laborers who are often paid less than the
minimum wage in Israel and who cannot receive workers' compensation; the
creation of a captive Palestinian market dependent on Israeli exports;
and the development of a hugely profitable security and services
industry in Israel. This industry includes the manufacture of high-tech
surveillance equipment that Israeli companies test on Palestinians and
then sell abroad, especially in Europe. United States corporations have
also entered these markets, profiting from the Israeli occupation. (See
http://www.whoprofits.org .)
As bad as the Israeli occupation is for Palestinians, Mishly and Wind
maintained that it is also destroying Israeli society, creating a racist
and militaristic culture, brutalizing veterans, undermining Israel's
social welfare system, and resulting in a merger of the state and the
military. The racism is becoming more pernicious, they argued, pointing
to a recent attempt in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, to outlaw
observances or discussions of the Nakba, the Palestinian term for the
events of 1948 when Israeli military forces and paramilitary extremists
forcibly expelled or caused more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs to flee
their homes, farms, and villages. Mishly also debunked many of Israel's
foundational myths, including the claim that Jewish colonists turned a
barren, desert land into a green oasis, and that Israel's entire history
is one of responding to wars thrust upon it.
In the question-and-answer session that followed, one of the first
questions asked was what had caused the two young women to change their
attitude to the Israeli military. For Mishly, it was her first trip to
the West Bank and the experience of seeing innocent people shot. For
Wild, it was participating in an Israeli-Palestinian dialogue group and
hearing an account by a Palestinian girl of the treatment meted out to
her father by Israeli soldiers. The two women said they are being called
traitors, but they emphasized that they are not opposed to Israel, only
to the occupation, and that they regard the most urgent task as a
negotiated peace settlement.
Most of the audience in Seattle was supportive and gave the two young
resisters a standing ovation. A coterie of people associated with
StandWithUs, a pro-Zionist organization in the United States, attended.
During the question and answer session, one young woman who said she had
been an Israeli soldier in 2005 and helped oversee the forcible
evacuation of Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip described how
beautiful Gaza had been when Israeli soldiers were stationed there.
Without a trace of irony, she recalled how difficult it was to evict
people from their homes.
For more information on the tour, go to:
http://www.whywerefuse.org/
For more information on Israeli organizations resisting the occupation,
go to:
Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions:
http://www.icahd.org
Anarchists Against the Wall:
http://www.awalls.org
New Profile:
http://www.newprofile.org/english
Rabbis for Human Rights:
http://www.rhr-na.org
--
Dan Clore
New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
(Wait for the new edition: http://hplmythos.com/ )
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan" |
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