Too Short Views

Israel's quick rejection of Hamas's truce offer reflects too short a view. A spokesman from the Prime Minister's office dismissed it as an attempt to buy time for Hamas to regroup and rearm. Put another way, Israel believes it has Hamas at bay and sees no gain in callling off the chase now. That is consistent with zbang ve-gamarnu, the Israeli version of "shock and awe," those crushing displays of power which are supposed to reduce populations to acceptance, but never seem to work as planned. The problem for Israel is that treating Hamas and its supporters only as targets and objects, rather than as a political player and people will not make them disappear, just more obstinate and vengeful. Israel will never reach an effective, durable agreement with the Palestinians, without admitting Hamas at some point, in some capacity to the discussions for it. So if Israel wants an accord, it should respond more encouragingly to any signs of reasonableness from Hamas.

Hamas's alter ego PA President Mahmut Abbas (Abu Mazan) fared no better with George Bush. He came to Washington with the hope of getting Bush to tell Israel to stop building settlements on the West Bank, a requirement of the "road map" and, on the Palestinian view, a very major obstacle to peace. Instead his meeting was just another opportunity for Bush to display his lack of reality regarding the Middle East. He ignored the settlements issue, saying that he wanted to focus on the big picture "how to define a state that is acceptable to both sides," as if he were writing a term paper for a first year course in political science. If Abu Mazan was disappointed by Bush, he was angered by Secretary of State Rice, who is supposed to know something about the Middle East, the interests of the Palestinians and facts on the ground. In his discussion with her, she did not include the 1967 borders as part of the context for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The Administration's was saying to him, in other words, "Take what we give you and shut up about the particulars."

So he returns home less confident about reaching an agreement with Israel whenever and probably less confident about his having a home.

Round Up

Today's big news in the Israel-Palestine perspective is Hamas's offer/ acceptance of a six-month truce over the Gaza Strip. Puts in the shade

1. UNWRA's stopping distribution of food in Gaza, because it lacks gasoline;
2. George Bush expressing his confidence that an agreement on a two state solution will happen before he leaves office (another "Mission Accomplished" statement? Or is he planning a coup that will declare him president for life?);
3. CIA officials identifying North Korea and Syria as part of a nuclear axis of evil;
4. Iranian president Ahmadinejad warning Syria against closer ties to the U.S. and Israel;
5. declarations by Israel settlers on the Golan Heights that they will not leave, regardless of any Syrian-Israel agreement that requires their removal.

Not your typical day, not even in the Middle East.

The Hamas offer comes after negotiations with Israel through Egyptian intermediaries and perhapas after a nudge from Syria. It does not extend immediately, as Hamas wanted, to the West Bank, so the Israel army will be free to hunt Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other militants there. The move is undoubtedly motivated by short term desperation -- Hamas's realization that it cannot provide welfare for Gaza, amid its low intensity conflict with Israel and the economic blockade. The announcement by UNRWA demonstrates as much and has forced Hamas to promise UNRWA some of its own stockpiled gasoline, a move that will reduce Hamas's very limited military capabilities . The offer is a grudging acknowledgment that the blockade itself is mainly a response to the rocket attacks it orders or sanctions upon the Israeli periphery of Gaza. It is a step on Hamas's part toward political realism.

Israel will likely agree to the offer with some minor modifications. Even if it does not include Hamas's commitment to stop smuggling arms and rocket makings into Gaza, a truce would provide quiet in the south for Israel's celebration next month of its 60th anniversary. Also Israel maintains an upper hand: The offer does not demand that it end the economic blockade. Instead it will consider the security conditions that are achieved under the truce and ease the blockade accordingly. Somewhere in Saul Bellow's late novels, a character, asked what he has learned, replies "Sydney Smith, an English clergyman's advice: short views." Not bad advice for Israel and the Palestinians now.

Digging Up the Past

Archeology in Israel, besides being a national pastime, has been a continuing source of contentions. Since the creation of the state in 1948, the government, universities and even private institutions have sponsored numerous digs with the primary purpose of uncovering the physical evidence of earlier Jewish life in the land, especially in the Biblical and Mishnaic periods (10th century BCE to 3rd century CE). Some digs have neglected, even damaged earlier and later strata evidencing non-Jewish habitants. Since the Land of Israel is highly contested resl estate, archeology poses the question whose history is being dug up and the secondary one of who owns the findings.

The digs might be obstacles to peace at several levels. The historical narratives that have been woven around or extended by the artifacts tends to strengthen some Israelis commitment to the entire land of Israel, making any territorial division a very painful idea. That is particularly true of the excavations in and around Jerusalem and the controversies over the ancient city's size in Davidic times. A more pragmatic matter is the control of digs, since 1967, at numerous sites in what would likely be the territory of a Palestinian state and the status of artifacts removed from those sites to Israel government and museum collections. A recently publicized initiative started five years ago by Israeli, Palestinian and American archaeologists provides a basis for answering these questions. The group has secured records of over 6,000 excavations and the tens of thousands of artifacts found there. It has proposed that the artifacts be repatriated to the future Palestinian state, with museums and laboratories be built to house them. It proposes with regard to Jerusalem, a zone up to the city's 10th century CE boundaries, where excavation sites would be accessible to anyone and research would be fully transparent.

Although there will be many problems for this plan, including that of funding, should Israel and the Palestinians reach a two-state solution, initial responsea from communities of Israeli and Palestinian archaeologists has been polite to favorable. The wonder is that a plan was reached at all. As could be expected where identity and cultural rights are the issues, early meetings of the group were described as tense and sometimes needed professional mediators.

A less productive struggle related to archeology in Israel concerned Nadia El-Haj's battle for tenure at Columbia University. El-Haj, the daughter of a Palestinian American, is a professor of anthropology whose dissertation turned into an award winning book Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society(U. of Chicago, 2002). The book analyzes how the findings at sites are woven into historical narratives that validate the Jews' right to various parts of the Land of Israel. When El-Haj came up for tenure in 2006 at Columbia's Barnard College, an American Jewish West Bank settler and graduate of Barnard organized a petition drive against her. The petition claimed El-Haj's work was an academically worthless, anti-Israel screed. The petition gained considerable support from Jewish Columbia students, graduates and faculty, many of whom were totally unfamiliar with El-Haj's material and methods. It also attracted the attention of outside agitators who fancy themselves the arbiters of informed discussion of Israel in university campuses, viz., David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes and Charles Jacob, the head of the David Project. Many of El-Haj's colleagues, within and without Columbia, rallied to her support and she was awarded tenure in November, 2007. This battle continued a series of controversies and interventions by fired up Jewish groups regarding Palestinian scholars and advocates at Columbia, dating back to the late Edward Said's publication of Orientalism. By the way, El-Haj's title Facts on the Ground is a tremendously rich, mordant multiple entendre, based on the popular Israeli Hebrew expression Kve'at 'Uvdoth. Its choice attests to El-Haj's' knowledge of Hebrew, understanding of scientific practice, insight into the politics of culture and wariness of Israel.

¡No Pasaran!

A sad irony is that Israel's celebration of Passover, the Festival of Freedom, includes blockades of Palestinians in the West Bank as well as the continuing blockade of those in the Gaza Strip. The Israel Defense Ministry announced earlier today that starting this evening until the end of Passover, Palestinians would not be allowed to pass through army checkpoints, except for the most urgent of humanitarian reasons. While it is thoughtful of Israel's government to include Palestinians in its holiday plans, this measure will have the effect of reducing yet further the trickle of traffic among the fragments of territory under Palestinian control in the West Bank. Such blockades are typically part of Israel's celebrations of its major holidays and are a significant aspect of the humiliations and discrimination that Palestinians suffer under Israel occupation. The traffic of Jewish settlers in the West Bank will, of course, not be restricted during the holidays.

Such legal discrimination brings up an interesting issue, related in another way to Passover. The Torah enjoined the Israelites to consider strangers and sojourners among them as their legal equals, reminding them that they were once strangers in Egypt. "You should have one law for yourselves and the stranger amongst you." (Exodus 12:49; Leviticus 24:22) This argument for equality seems based on empathy and the idea that people would choose that all be treated equally, if they did not know what fate held in store for them, viz., the choice under philosopher John Rawls's veil of ignorance. However over the decades of Israel occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel doves and human rights activists have rarely quoted this Biblical claim to the settlers and annexationists. Even such a selective reading of the Bible would on its face support annexation and invite responses with the Biblical verses that proclaim the entire Land of Israel the patrimony of the Jews. Besides it is rather absurd to call the Palestinians strangers in the land. The doves see Zionist polemicists who have argued that case as preparing the grounds for further expulsions of the Palestinians from west of the Jordan -- the ethnic cleansing that Israelis euphemistically call transfer. So the lesson of Passover, which has come in many places and traditions to symbolize freedom, cannot be applied unambiguously to the case of the Palestinians whose freedom has been denied by Israel. That leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

No Animals were Harmed in these Episodes

During the first intifada, Israel humorist and songwriter Dani Litani noted that the Palestinians must have a very large air force, because every time the Israel military spokesman reported that Israel soldiers were firing only into the air to break up demonstrations, five or six Palestinians fell down dead. Today it seems that many armed Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip have the magical power of turning into unarmed civilians once they are struck by Israeli bullets, shells or missiles.

After a brief lull two weeks ago, militant groups in Gaza and the IDF have resumed ratcheting up the violence. Today's series of incidents took the lives of three Israel soldiers, and, at least eighteen Palestinians, the majority of them unarmed civilians. The series began in the early morning when two armed militants, by approaching the border fence near Kibbutz Bari, drew an Israeli army unit into an ambush which killed the three soldiers. The Israelis replied with machine gun and tank fire, killing some Palestinian gunmen. Tanks and helicopters later fired shells and missiles at a nearby refugee camp, killing fifteen civilians. The Israel spokesman reported this shooting was directed at the source of the earlier fire. The Palestinians reported that the targets were actually two apartment buildings and a mosque and the dead included children and elders.

The sad truth is both sides long ago stopped caring how many Palestinian civilians get killed. Israel looks upon them as having gotten in the way of its soldiers killing as many Palestinian militants as possible, under current rules of engagement. Hamas and other organizations consider the civilian dead as both a recruiting tool and a reason for public opinion to sympathize with its cause.

Israel's overkill today might have also been meant as a "fuck you" to ex-President Carter for his hobnobbing with Hamas leaders. This is the Middle East, after all.