by James M. Wall
The New York Times‘ Ethan Bronner reports that West Bank Palestinian women and girls have again broken Israeli laws to go swimming in the Mediterranean Sea. This is Rosa Parks country, folks.
Bronner actually evoked Parks’ name in his report. Did his editors think we would not notice?
Blogger Philip Weiss noticed, and he made sure his Mondoweiss readers noticed. By including a brief reference to the iconic moment when Rosa Parks broke the law by sitting in the front of a segregated bus, the New York Times has connected the American civil rights movement to the Palestinian struggle for human rights.
Here is that connection: Rosa Parks deliberately violated an unjust Alabama segregation law. The Palestinian and Israeli women and girls who crossed the Israeli segregation border, broke Israeli laws.
Palestinians living a few miles from the coast reach adulthood without ever seeing or entering the Mediterranean Sea because they live behind a barrier of an occupation of their land that is illegal under international law.Illegal entry in and out of Israel by Israeli and Palestinian women and girls violates Israeli law. Rosa Parks violated Alabama segregation laws. For a group of Israeli and Palestinian women who went swimming together, this outing was their Rosa Parks moment.
Rosa Parks was 42 years old on December 1, 1955, when she refused to obey bus driver James Blake’s order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger. The segregation laws of Montgomery, Alabama, made Rosa Parks a criminal. An African American woman had crossed a barrier and sat in the front of a segregated bus.
Parks knew what she was doing. She was deliberately violating an unjust law when she joined a long line of rebels who sounded the call, “I’m as mad as hell, and I am not going take this anymore”.
That quote is a familiar line from the 1976 movie, Network. In that film, the cry was loud and noisy. Today, the Palestinian rebellion is being conducted in different venues and in different voices.
In September, at the UN Security Council and General Assembly meetings, the call will go forth in an assembly hall as the Palestinian Authority asks for membership in the UN.
This summer, on the beach at Tel Aviv, different voices sounded. This is how the Times’ Ethan Bronner, describes those voices:
Skittish at first, then wide-eyed with delight, the women and girls entered the sea, smiling, splashing and then joining hands, getting knocked over by the waves, throwing back their heads and ultimately laughing with joy. Most had never seen the sea before. . . . /
In the grinding rut of Israeli-Palestinian relations — no negotiations, mutual recriminations, growing distance and dehumanization — the illicit trip was a rare event that joined the simplest of pleasures with the most complex of politics. It showed why coexistence here is hard, but also why there are, on both sides, people who refuse to give up on it.Hanna Rubinstein traveled to Tel Aviv from Haifa to take part in defying her government’s immoral laws. She could no longer remain silent.
“What we are doing here will not change the situation,” said Hanna Rubinstein, who traveled to Tel Aviv from Haifa to take part. “But it is one more activity to oppose the occupation. One day in the future, people will ask, like they did of the Germans: ‘Did you know?’ And I will be able to say, ‘I knew. And I acted.’ ”
Take heed, you United Methodist Conference delegates, and listen up, you inter-faith Presbyterian and Episcopal leaders, the New York Times has granted you permission to consider a simple question: Do you wish to be with “the Germans” who refused to know and who refused to act. Or, will you join with women like Hanna Rubinstein and say, “I knew. And I acted”.
This Rosa Parks moment on the beach takes its place with those other Palestinian symbolic moments, the flotillas, the flytilla, the BDS movement, the resistance to the Israeli Wall.
According to Bronner, this latest act of defiance against Israel’s apartheid laws began a year ago. A single idea of an Israeli Jewish mother has become “a small, determined movement of civil disobedience”. It unfolded this way:
Ilana Hammerman, a writer, translator and editor, had been spending time in the West Bank learning Arabic when a girl there told her she was desperate to get out, even for a day.Israeli police have questioned 28 Israeli women who have smuggled in their West Bank guests. Charges against them are pending. So far, none of the Palestinian women and girls have been caught or questioned by the police.
Ms. Hammerman, 66, a widow with a grown son, decided to smuggle her to the beach. The resulting trip, described in an article she wrote for the weekend magazine of the newspaper Haaretz, prompted other Israeli women to invite her to speak, and led to the creation of a group they call We Will Not Obey. It also led a right-wing organization to report her to the police, who summoned her for questioning. . . .
Together these Palestinian and Israeli women and girls are building a relationship in their common rebellion. Some of the Israeli women are high profile, including, for example, Hagit Aharoni, a psychotherapist, the wife of the celebrity chef Yisrael Aharoni, and a member of the organizing group behind the illegal swim outings.
The beachgoers on this most recent swim-in had dinner on the roof of the Aharonis’ home, five floors above stylish Rothschild Boulevard, where, on the day of the Palestinians trip into Israel, hundreds of tents had been pitched by Israelis angry with the high cost of housing.
Bronner asked Ms. Aharoni about her rebellion. She replied:
For 44 years, we have occupied another country. I am 53, which means most of my life I have been an occupier. I don’t want to be an occupier. I am engaged in an illegal act of disobedience. I am not Rosa Parks, but I admire her, because she had the courage to break a law that was not right.It takes many people and a great deal of courage and sacrifice to win a revolution. It also takes time, as Palestinians and their allies can testify, but this is one revolution, like the battle for African American civil rights, that will be won because as Martin Luther King, Jr., said so often, “truth crushed to earth will rise again.”
Next up: The September United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York City, where the Palestinian Authority will formally request UN membership, and quite possibly, full statehood status. The first step will be a request to the Security Council, which has a membership of 15. It is in this body that, even if the PA obtains the necessary majority of 8 votes, the US has announced that it will cast yet another pro-Israel veto.
How certain is it that the US will cast its veto?In an interview with Pamela Falk, CBS News Foreign Affairs analyst, Ambassador Rosemary DiCarlo, U.S. Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN said, definitively:
My government has been clear all along. The only place where permanent status issues can be resolved, including borders and territory, is in negotiations between the parties — not in international fora [forums] such as the United Nations.Assuming the virtually certain US veto, the next step for the PA would be to go directly to the 193-member UN General Assembly, which now includes its latest member, South Sudan. The GA requires a two/thirds vote for a resolution to pass. The PA currently reports that it is close to obtaining that necessary two-thirds majority.
The General Assembly would not be able to grant full membership to the PA because that would require Security Council approval, which a US veto would have prevented. The GA, however, does have the authority to upgrade the current Observer status of the PA. What a majority vote for an upgrade would accomplish is that it would demonstrate to the world that two-thirds of the member states support PA statehood.
Whatever the outcome of the UN votes, the Palestinian revolution will continue in its steady, symbolic march to freedom. When Rosa Parks refused to move on that Montgomery bus, she acted for freedom. Rosa Parks moments will be repeated again and again, on the beaches of Tel Aviv, in flotillas and flytillas, and in all those other locations, too numerous yet to imagine, and in ways yet to be determined.
The picture above, on the Tel Aviv beach, is by Rina Castelnuovo. It was taken for The New York Times.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: James Wall is currently a Contributing Editor of The Christian Century magazine, based in Chicago, Illinois. From 1972 through 1999, he was editor and publisher of the Christian Century magazine. He has made more than 20 trips to that region as a journalist, during which he covered such events as Anwar Sadat’s 1977 trip to Jerusalem, and the 2006 Palestinian legislative election. He has interviewed, and written about, journalists, religious leaders, political leaders and private citizens in the region. Jim served for two years on active duty in the US Air Force, and three additional years in the USAF (inactive) reserve. He can be reached at: jameswall8@gmail.com
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Nahida's Comment:
"For 44 years, we have occupied another country. I am 53, which means most of my life I have been an occupier." Hagit Aharoni
NO Mrs Aharoni NO
YOU AND YOUR PEOPLE HAVE OCCUPIED PALESTINE FOR 63 YEARS, NO LESS
Taking some Palestinian girls out for a swim will NOT give you a pure conscience free from guilt of the DESTRUCTION of an entire nation, nor will give us our PALESTINE back!
We Palestinians were murdered, robbed, imprisoned, dispossessed, and exiled, so that YOU Jews can have a "state of your own"??? What a depravity in ethics and morality!
SEVEN MILLION of us are still languishing in exile because your people wanted a "state for the Jews", at our expense!!!
A whole lot of your people came from ALL over the world, STOLE our homeland, dispossessed and expelled us, took over our homes and farms, destroyed our villages, culture and history, occupied our country, oppressed those who stayed behind, killed and maimed who dared to demand their rights or attempted to assert their humanity, demonized and subjugated us to a racist, bigoted and ruthless set of laws that don’t apply to yourselves; then you come to con us and the world that by taking some of our girls out for swim, you are doing us a favour and helping our people to achieve their rights!!
The REAL help that you can do to wash your sins is to encourage YOUR people to LEAVE the land they have forcibly occupied to make room for the refugees who are preparing to come back home , and not try to deceive Palestinian women that Israelis are peace loving people, and they too have a right to this land
Have you ever questioned the morality of the actions of your people as multinationals who gave themselves the liberty to come to our homeland -which I am denied the right to live in- take it over by violence and bloodshed, then settle there on the ruins of the villages they’ve annihilated, dwelling in the homes of dispossessed Palestinians, for no other justifications than the "merit" of their Jewishness and the fact that we are not Jews?
The only crime that our people committed is that they existed on the land of their ancestors which your people proclaimed as a God given-right to Jews!
Your people have destroyed our culture, denied our existence as human beings, treated us for four generation with sheer cruelty, ruthlessness and contempt, and subjugated us to inconceivable savagery and humiliation, and denied us even the right to defend ourselves on our stolen Palestine under the pretext of “terrorism”
On top of all that your people have lied and lied, until they believed their own lies, they managed to brainwash themselves with packs of cover-ups and masks of reality until truth became so blur and obscured, so much so that most of your people refuse even to acknowledge their own crimes of theft of a whole country and disposition of a whole nation
You stole the land of our ancestors and forefathers under the claim that some few thousands years back in history, some people who followed your religion have lived there, and apparently secured a contract with God affirming the eternal ownership of this land to any one who belongs to their faith!!
How dare you give yourselves these abhorrent privileges of taking over someone’s home and homeland just because you belong to a particular faith?
What does an American Jew, a Russian Jew, an African Jew, a Japanese Jew, an Indian Jew or a German Jew has anything to do with the Land of Palestine?
God had sent your people many warnings; that you do not transgress or do mischief in the land, but their arrogance, self interest, greed and supremacy are blinding them from seeing the evil they are doing
Instead of acknowledging their crimes and establishing justice, they are still in a state of total denial, carried away with more crimes, more lies, and suppression of truth
Their Jewishness, their self interest, their love of material gains and their drunkenness by power is what they worship now not the God of goodness, peace and justice
My warning to your people now is the same warning given to your ancestors by many prophets and prophetic voices:
They are descending deeper in the hole that they have dug for themselves by their evil deeds, their denial of truth, and by their utter inability to ask for forgiveness
The crimes that they have committed against us are indeed painful and agonizing, but it’s only done against our physical bodies, our souls are out of your reach and forever intact; however, it’s their own souls that they are disfiguring and destroying, if only they knew
They have lost their humanity and killed their own souls if only they could see
The best thing that you could do to help us AND help your people now is to take this message to them:
Unless and until they acknowledge their crimes and CORRECT THE WRONGS they have committed by the immediate departure of the Land they've raped and and pay reparations for Palestinians, there will be a dark bleak and desolate future awaiting for them.
And this is not a threat; it is a promise
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River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian
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