Middle East Report Online
June 16, 2010
Jonathan Cook is a journalist based in Nazareth. He is author of Blood and Religion (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilizations (2008) and Disappearing Palestine (2008).
Salah is alive, but at the time his demise seemed confirmed when it emerged that large numbers of police had been drafted into northern Israel, where most of the Palestinian minority lives, in expectation of widespread violence.
At the first spontaneous demonstrations in the north, participants expressed shock that Israel had killed international peace activists in international waters -- a rumored number of 20 dead later dropped to nine. But in a community used to intermittent bouts of extreme violence from Israel’s security forces, few seemed to doubt that the order might have been given to execute Salah. The sheikh, who has repeatedly been arrested and is facing a series of trials, has long been public enemy number one among Israeli Jews for his campaign to protect the Haram al-Sharif from what he regards as an attempted Israeli takeover. The Haram al-Sharif is a compound of mosques in the Old City of Jerusalem that includes al-Aqsa and is believed by Jews to be built over two ancient Jewish temples. Half-jokingly, a protester in Nazareth wondered aloud whether a military commander had overheard the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, ask: “Who will rid me of this turbulent sheikh?”
The flotilla, which was attacked more than 60 miles off Israel’s coast early in the morning, was not the first to bear aid for Gaza, but it was the first to include a delegation of Palestinian leaders from inside Israel. Palestinians are roughly one fifth of Israel’s population.
Most of the main Israeli-Palestinian political factions and institutions were included: Salah and his counterpart in the Islamic Movement’s more moderate southern wing, Sheikh Hamad Abu Da‘bas; Muhammad Zaydan, head of the Higher Follow-Up Committee, the umbrella body dominated by local mayors; and Hanin Zu‘bi, a first-term member of the parliament, the Knesset, from the nationalist Tajammu‘ party (Balad in Hebrew). Alongside them was Lubna Masarwa, a resident of Kafr Qara‘ in northern Israel and an activist with the Free Gaza Movement, which organized the aid convoy.
Before they set off, the group of Palestinian-Israelis knew their participation would upset a broad swath of Israeli Jewish opinion. Since 2006, when Hamas won the Palestinian Legislative Council elections, Israel has been progressively tightening a blockade of Gaza to the point that today only a few dozen items are allowed in and less than a quarter of the cargo trucks that once entered the enclave each day are still permitted to do so. The policy has become more severe as its goal has become less clear: Is it to stop “arms smuggling” by Hamas, as Yuval Diskin, the head of the Shinbet, Israel’s secret police, claimed on June 15; or to wage “economic warfare,” as suggested by a recent Israeli document, punishing Gaza’s inhabitants for voting for Hamas; or to act as leverage on Hamas to stop rocket fire on nearby Israeli communities, although such attacks all but ceased long ago; or to force the release of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held captive by Hamas since 2006? Most Israeli Jews do not seem overly concerned which justification is deployed.
Meanwhile, in strenuously denying aid agency reports that the blockade has created a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Israeli officials have left the Jewish majority to conclude that those who oppose the blockade do so because they support Hamas -- “a terrorist organization committed to the destruction of Israel,” as commentators regularly remind the public. It was therefore hardly surprising that, a few days before the flotilla set sail for Gaza on its stated mission to “break the siege,” the popular news website Ynet claimed that Knesset member Zu‘bi would be traveling on a ship alongside “prominent Hamas-affiliated activists,” while the headline asked rhetorically: “MK in Service of Hamas?” But what Zu‘bi and the other Palestinian-Israeli leaders probably could not have appreciated was that this flotilla, unlike its predecessors, was about to make waves not only domestically but internationally. They were about to be thrown into a maelstrom of events that would provoke denunciations from around the globe, turn a spotlight on the legitimacy of Israel’s blockade, tear apart Israel’s key regional alliance with Turkey and further embarrass a weak US administration that is desperately trying to breathe life into a sham Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” as its own occupations, in Iraq and Afghanistan, continue to falter.
As a result, the participation of Palestinian-Israelis in the flotilla dangerously reinforced the Jewish majority’s perception of the minority as a fifth column.
War and Loyalty
‘Adil Manna‘, a Palestinian historian at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, notes that, when Israel feels isolated and under threat, “it becomes much more intolerant of criticism from inside the country, from the [Palestinian] Arab minority especially. Dissent is seen as a strategic danger.” And Israel has rarely felt so isolated or perceived its international standing to be so threatened.
An international consensus regarded the large-scale loss of civilian life in both confrontations as constituting at the very minimum a “disproportionate” Israeli response, whereas Israel maintained it had a right to wage its own version of the “war on terror.” A UN-mandated report on the Gaza attack by Richard Goldstone, a respected international jurist, tipped the balance of world opinion decisively against Israel by suggesting that, while both Israeli forces and Hamas had committed war crimes, Israeli forces had committed the bulk of them.
As international opprobrium has grown, Israel has subjected the leaders of its Palestinian citizens to ever greater scrutiny, not only over their positions on the long-running conflict between Israel and the Palestinians but also on Israel’s regional confrontation with Hizballah and wider confrontation with the international community. In the minds of most Israeli Jews, the question of where the Palestinian minority stands on these issues overlaps with the question of whether Palestinians can be trustworthy citizens. Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, and his Yisrael Beiteinu party rode to success in the 2009 general election, winning 15 seats and becoming the third largest faction in Knesset, by exploiting popular suspicions of the minority with the campaign slogan, “No loyalty, no citizenship.”
The issue of the minority’s loyalty had been widely debated since the beginning of the second intifada, in October 2000, when Palestinian citizens protested in support of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Police entered their towns and villages to greet the demonstrators with rubber bullets and live fire, killing 13 and injuring hundreds in a few days. Those events were misleadingly presented by the Israeli leadership as an internal uprising by rebels conspiring with the Palestinians under occupation to overthrow the state from within.
But the 2006 bombardment of Lebanon and the later attack on Gaza have been equally significant for majority-minority relations, expanding the dimensions of the loyalty debate. The Jewish majority perceived these two confrontations as the salient battles in a clash of civilizations that pitted Israel against the region and its aspiring hegemon, Iran. The Palestinian minority, on the other hand, regarded the confrontations as further proof that Israel was a militarized and militaristic state with an insatiable appetite for territory and no ability to make peace with the Palestinians and its other neighbors. This unbridgeable gulf in worldviews was bound to set Palestinian citizens on a collision course with their own state.
The Enemy Within
The first major political casualty would be Azmi Bishara, the outspoken leader of the Tajammu‘ party, who had been a thorn in Israel’s side for a decade with his popular campaign to reform Israel from a Jewish state into a “state of all its citizens.” In the wake of the 2006 war, Bishara found himself facing a new and potent “one-size-fits-all” accusation of spying for Hizballah. The charge, publicized by the Shinbet while he was abroad in the spring of 2007, left him in exile. The Gaza attack of 2008 further stoked suspicions of Palestinian citizens’ disloyalty. Reflecting the polarization of majority-minority worldviews, demonstrations against Israel’s three-week attack on Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, were organized and supported chiefly by the Palestinian minority.
Historians have noted the decades of quietism from the Palestinian minority that followed Israel’s establishment in 1948. That trait can be attributed, initially at least, to the destruction of Palestinian society before and during the 1948 war: Most Palestinians left in the new Jewish state following the flight of 80 percent of their compatriots lived in poor, rural communities that had little direct involvement in national politics and were administered by the Israeli army until 1966. For two decades, Palestinian society would struggle to regenerate a leadership under the strictures of military rule. When a leadership did belatedly emerge in the late 1970s and 1980s, the minority’s representatives remained largely passive, awaiting directions from the PLO leadership in exile.
In essence, they needed an answer to the question of what ultimate goal the Palestinian struggle aspired to: Was it to liberate the minority from its compromised existence in a Jewish state, presumably in some variation of the one-state model, or to trade the minority for peace in a partitioned territory?
When the answer came with the 1993 Oslo accord -- they were to remain inside Israel as an ethnic minority -- the Palestinian leadership responded with a tentative civil rights movement aimed at ending Israel’s self-definition as a Jewish state. Bishara’s “state of all its citizens” slogan would be the rallying cry through the late 1990s.
But the October 2000 events showed in lethal fashion that Israel was not ready to concede, or even debate, the privileges enjoyed by the Jewish majority. Change was not going to occur from within.
Looking to the Outside World
Faced with Israeli intransigence, the Palestinian minority’s leadership began looking outside Israel for support. Civil society organizations led the way by focusing on advocacy that highlighted the minority’s plight to international bodies such as the UN and the European Union. In quick succession in late 2006 and early 2007, two Palestinian NGOs, Mada and Adalah, and the Higher Follow-Up Committee each published a separate position paper in English -- collectively nicknamed the “Vision Documents” -- that argued for Israel’s transformation into a liberal democracy. The Shinbet signaled clearly that it regarded these documents as an “existential threat” to Israel. With the approval of the attorney general, the Shinbet’s director, Yuval Diskin, issued a stark warning to the authors: “The Shinbet is required to thwart subversive activity by elements who wish to harm the nature of the State of Israel as a democratic Jewish State -- even if they act by means of democratically provided tools -- by virtue of the principle of ‘defensive democracy.’”
This political backdrop was on view as Palestinian NGOs in Israel not only led non-violent demonstrations against Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 but also highlighted to the world the police repression of their protests, which led to the arrest of many hundreds of activists, including children. The involvement of Israeli-Palestinian NGOs in assisting the Goldstone investigations in 2009 only fueled the sense among Israeli Jews that the minority had been unmasked as a fifth column. And almost as background music to these developments, the separate prosecutions of two Palestinian MKs have gathered steam: Muhammad Baraka, head of the joint Palestinian-Jewish Communist party, Jabha (Hadash in Hebrew), is charged with attacking security personnel during protests; and Sa‘id Nafa‘, a Druze member of the Tajammu‘ party, is to stand trial for traveling to Syria with a delegation of Druze leaders.
During Cast Lead, Makhoul had been called in for interrogation by the Shinbet over his role in organizing the protests, and threatened that, if he continued his activities, he might be “disappeared to Gaza.” His brother, ‘Isam Makhoul, a former Jabha MK, said he now regarded that threat as tellingly prophetic. In early May, Amir Makhoul was arrested and effectively “disappeared” when a blanket gag order was imposed on his detention. The gag was only lifted when word spread on the Internet. After nearly two weeks, during which time Makhoul was denied access to lawyers and says he was repeatedly tortured, the Shinbet had the confession they were seeking. (At the same time, another community activist, ‘Umar Sa‘id, was arrested. Apparently his confession will provide a vital link in the Shinbet’s claims against Makhoul.) In a pattern now becoming familiar, Makhoul was charged with spying on behalf of Hizballah, supposedly providing the Lebanese militia with the locations of security facilities and, more vaguely, helping it with analyses of Israeli society and political trends.
Following the May 31 attack on the flotilla, Palestinians inside Israel waited anxiously all day for news of Sheikh Ra’id Salah’s condition, and that of the other four Israeli-Palestinian participants, as nearly 700 peace activists were forcibly brought to the Israeli port of Ashdod on their captured vessels. As the world debated the finer points of maritime law, Palestinian citizens who are Muslims wondered whether their state’s act of piracy -- or “state-sponsored terrorism,” as the Higher Follow-Up Committee referred to it -- had included executing their spiritual leader. In Umm al-Fahm, Salah’s home town in northern Israel, stone-throwing youths and police briefly clashed. Apparently keen to preempt further damage to Israel’s image from the sheikh’s presumed death, the Israeli media reported that commandos had fired at Salah in an act of self-defense, after shots had been seen coming from his cabin. Later, Salah’s wife was escorted to a hospital operating room by Israeli officials who appeared to believe the sheikh was the seriously injured man on the operating table. He was not.
A little more than 24 hours after the Israeli navy’s raid, it emerged that Salah and three other Israeli-Palestinians had been remanded into custody for a week, while suspicions that they had attacked the commandos were investigated. The next day, June 2, as Israel was forced to release the international peace activists under severe US and Turkish pressure, Adalah, a legal center for the Palestinian minority, pointed out that the four were facing “selective” investigation and possible prosecution for alleged acts committed outside Israel’s jurisdiction. The courts released them to a week of house arrest, though they are still being investigated for possession of weapons and conspiracy to commit an offense, and are banned from leaving the country.
In his court appearance, Salah confirmed the minority’s suspicions of an attempted assassination, saying the “soldiers tried to kill me. They fired in the direction of someone else they thought was me.” Salah’s deputy, Sheikh Kamil Khatib, claimed Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak had plotted to kill the sheikh.
One of the first people on the flotilla to be released, on the morning following the commando attack, was Hanin Zu‘bi, after police were advised that her parliamentary immunity ruled out her continuing detention. In the short time she was held, however, she says she was interviewed three times by police, who questioned her about possessing a weapon. Zu‘bi hurried back to her home town of Nazareth to hold a press conference. She offered an account of the commando raid that would be substantiated by the other passengers after their release but at this early stage was chiefly notable for conflicting in almost every respect with a narrative being hastily constructed by Israeli officials. Israel, which had seized all the passengers’ cameras and video equipment, slowly released heavily edited, and in some cases doctored, video and audio footage to try to support its claims. (Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American in the convoy, identified her own voice in recorded transmissions said by Israel to be from the Mavi Marmara. But Arraf had been aboard a smaller vessel.)
Israel argued that many of the passengers had been armed with knives and even guns; that they had attacked and tried to “lynch” soldiers who arrived “almost barefoot,” as minister Benny Begin told the BBC; that several soldiers had been “kidnapped” and their lives put at risk by armed passengers; and that the soldiers had held off opening fire until the last possible moment, when their lives were in substantial danger. To make this improbable story seem more plausible, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, also claimed that many of the passengers, particularly the Turkish contingent belonging to an Islamic humanitarian organization, were really terrorists allied with al-Qaeda -- an allegation the Foreign Ministry eventually had to withdraw, though the claim that there were terrorists on board the Mavi Marmara was maintained.
Zu‘bi, by contrast, argued that their ships had been attacked far out in international waters in darkness, creating confusion and panic; that the navy had opened fire on the lead ship, the Mavi Marmara, where most of the activists were, before a single commando had stepped onto the deck; that she was sure there were no weapons on board the Marmara and that a later search by the navy that she witnessed revealed none; that two of the three bodies she saw had gunshot wounds to the head, indicating executions (later autopsies in Turkey would reveal five had wounds to the head, and that the nine dead had been shot a total of 30 times, often from close range); and that she had witnessed two passengers slowly bleed to death after her attempts to alert the soldiers in Hebrew were ignored. She concluded: “Israel had days to plan this military operation. They wanted many deaths to terrorize us and to send a message that no future aid convoys should try to break the siege of Gaza.”
Fisticuffs in the Knesset
A brief but stormy debate between Palestinian and Jewish MKs on Israel’s attack on the aid flotilla took place the next day, June 2, but was cut short by Matan Vilnai, the deputy defense minister, who transferred it to the less public arena of the foreign affairs committee. Zu‘bi, however, managed to revive the debate in the chamber by demanding her right to make a five-minute statement. The ensuing scenes took aback even seasoned politicians such as Yossi Sarid, a dovish former minister. He observed: “For the first time in its history, the Knesset came dangerously close to fisticuffs, with only a small step separating an exchange of words and an exchange of blows.”
Many MKs, including ministers, had left the chamber in protest as Zu‘bi rose to speak. As she stood at the podium, a deputy speaker who had been left in charge struggled to contain the outpouring of loathing directed at Zu‘bi as Jewish parliamentarians shouted the epithets “traitor,” “terrorist” and worse at the novice legislator. Anastasia Michaeli, a far-right MK from Lieberman’s party, charged the podium and was intercepted by security guards as she tried to grab Zu‘bi. (Michaeli was later invited to address an anti-violence conference sponsored by the Interior Ministry in which she defended her actions, saying: “I couldn’t allow myself to stay silent. I acted out of a conviction that we will not allow anyone to harm Israel’s sovereignty.”) After five minutes of pandemonium, the speaker, Reuven Rivlin, arrived to try to restore order. Despite a dozen MKs being ejected, Zu‘bi barely uttered a few sentences, between long enforced pauses as MKs spewed out abuse and personal insults -- including one who yelled “Check if she has a knife!” -- before Rivlin brought her speech to an abrupt end.
Some observers were surprised that the insults hurled at Zu‘bi were not restricted to the right-wing MKs. In fact, legislators from the opposition Kadima party were as vehement and abusive in their denunciations. One, Yulia Shamalov Berkovitz, called out that the Palestinian MKs were “parliamentary spies.” Zu‘bi, an articulate woman who previously headed a media monitoring center, deftly pressed the buttons most likely to produce uproar in the Knesset. In her brief address, she told the MKs that it was a “mitzvah,” or Jewish holy commandment, to join the flotilla and break the siege of Gaza; she called for an international inquiry to hold Israel to account; and she demanded the return of photographs and video footage confiscated from the passengers, noting that this evidence would prove who was telling the truth about what had occurred.
Sarid, the former leader of Israel’s tiny left-Zionist party, Meretz, may have been appalled by the behavior in the chamber but he was no more sympathetic to Zu‘bi than the rioting MKs. He did not accuse her of treason like the right wing, but he was equally dismissive of her participation in the flotilla. He blamed her for grandstanding and, smugly positioning himself as if separating disputatious children, castigated her in the same terms as her near-assailant Michaeli. “Don’t think for a moment that the vitriol on either side was born of genuine outrage. Everything was pre-planned and calculated to gain the public’s adoration, whatever the constituency,” he observed.
A Darker Agenda
Sarid’s putdown was by far the gentlest treatment Zu‘bi would receive at the hands of Jewish politicians, public and the local media. In a poll conducted by Tel Aviv University for Ha’aretz, 80 percent of Israeli Jews said they thought Zu‘bi should be punished for joining the flotilla. Shortly after her Knesset appearance, a Facebook page in Hebrew was set up calling for her execution, quickly garnering thousands of members who appeared unashamed to put their names to such a campaign. Death threats poured into Zu‘bi’s office -- more than were ever sent to Azmi Bishara, according to Zu‘bi’s assistant who once ran Bishara’s office -- and flowed at a lesser rate into the offices of the other Palestinian MKs as well. Overnight Zu‘bi had swept Salah from the top slot in the Jewish majority’s list of monsters. Knesset officials outfitted Zu‘bi with a bodyguard after the Shinbet reported that it was aware of more than a dozen concrete plots to kill her.
The focus in the days following the commando raid has been chiefly on Zu‘bi. Eli Yishai, the interior minister and demagogic leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, got the ball rolling by announcing that he was applying to the attorney general for approval to revoke Zu‘bi’s citizenship. Legal safeguards should mean he is unlikely to succeed, but the struggle to do so will strengthen the right and weaken the already besieged legal establishment in Israel. Yishai has also promised to present legislation to revoke the citizenship anyone defined as a traitor, saying of such a bill: “I believe most of the people support this and that the Supreme Court will accept it.”
In a further indication of the right’s ascendancy, the Knesset’s house committee agreed a week after the attack on the flotilla to strip Zu‘bi of several parliamentary privileges, including banning her from leaving the country by confiscating her diplomatic passport and denying her the right to claim legal costs -- moves that are designed to look as though the ground is being prepared to put her on trial. State prosecutors told the committee that she is still being investigated for attempting to enter a closed military zone (that is, Gaza) and violence against commandos. Yariv Levin, head of the committee and a senior member of Netanyhu’s Likud party, claimed: “The committee’s decision expresses the feelings of the entire nation that harsh steps should be taken against MKs who harm Israel Defense Forces soldiers and question our ability to be here. MK Zu‘bi now knows that she will be made to foot the bill for her behavior.”
The campaign to denigrate Zu‘bi, as Levin’s comment and Yishai’s proposed bill suggest, has been hijacked by a darker agenda of suggesting more generally the treachery of the Palestinian leadership in Israel and, mostly implicitly so far, the Palestinian citizens whom they represent. The most significant move against the minority since the commando raid was the submission of a bill -- already nicknamed the “Zu‘bi law” -- that would allow a sitting MK to be expelled from the parliament if he or she does any of the following: deny Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state; incite racism; or support the armed struggle of a terrorist group. Given the highly distorted definitions used in Israeli political discourse, such legislation could easily be used to expel all ten of the Palestinian MKs serving in Palestinian parties or the joint Palestinian-Jewish Communist party. The bill’s backers appear to believe that this may be a more effective way to ban the Palestinian parties than their previous attempts during general election campaigns through the partisan Central Elections Committee. The courts have consistently, if narrowly, overturned the Committee’s decisions.
The Zu‘bi law is only the latest in a steady stream of what have been termed “loyalty laws” submitted since Netanyahu came to power in 2009. Ja‘far Farah, director of the Mossawa advocacy group for the Palestinian minority, says 23 bills have been proposed to limit the freedoms and rights of Palestinian citizens or their leaders over the past year. The flagrantly anti-democratic nature of these bills has resulted in most being rejected at an early stage by a ministerial committee on the advice of legal officials. But as pressure builds -- and incidents like Makhoul’s arrest and Zu‘bi’s defense of the aid flotilla outrage the Jewish majority -- breaches in the dam are widening. The Nakba Law, which can be used to end state funding for any organization or institution that commemorates the dispossession of the Palestinians in the 1948 war, is the most notable to have passed. Many similar loyalty bills directed at the minority and their leaders are in the pipeline. One being considered would require MKs to swear allegiance to Israel as a Jewish and Zionist state, and another would revoke the citizenship of anyone convicted of spying or terrorism.
In a commentary in the liberal Ha’aretz newspaper, Ruth Gavison, a distinguished law professor and founder of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the oldest and largest human rights group in the country, hinted at an emerging Jewish consensus against the Palestinian minority that cuts across all Jewish political divisions. While denouncing the demagoguery of the right, she observed that “it can be argued -- even if it is not necessary to do so -- that participation in international activities likely to embarrass the state and thwart its policies (such as unofficial visits to enemy states) should be seen as reason enough to prevent a person from serving as a member of Knesset, in accordance with reasonable judicial review process.”
Darker Still
Unlike the case of Operation Cast Lead, protests by Palestinian citizens against the lethal raid on the aid flotilla have been mostly muted, apart from the brief period when it appeared that Salah might have been killed. The relative quiet may in part reflect the short timeline of the events: The last peace activists had been deported within three days. But the strength of feeling among the minority was evident from the strict observation of a general strike called for June 1 by the Palestinian leadership. More likely, the reluctance by Palestinian citizens to come out onto the streets to protest can be ascribed to the current political climate in Israel. When Palestinian students demonstrated alongside small numbers of Jewish left-wing activists in the main universities, their numbers were dwarfed by counter-demonstrations by right-wing students, mobilized by a rapidly growing nationalist youth movement called Im Tirtzu. The defining image of Israel’s reaction to the commando raid was of mobs of young right-wing Jews, almost lost in a sea of blue-and-white flags, baying through the night in fury at the Turkish embassy in Tel Aviv.
If the blockade on Gaza is justified in the minds of Israeli Jews as collective punishment of the enclave’s Palestinian population for supporting Hamas, a similar skewed logic is being applied to Israel’s Palestinian citizens. According to this thinking, those who sent Zu‘bi to the Knesset and those who revere Salah should be held accountable -- and punished -- for their representatives’ actions. The minority seems only too aware that the calls to expel Zu‘bi from the Knesset or revoke her citizenship will not end there. A poll by Haifa University in May showed that 62 percent of Palestinian citizens feared they are under threat of expulsion from Israel. And Israel’s mood is likely to grow darker still.
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian
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