Israel
Forbidden Territory, Promised Land
Ilan Halevi, A History of the Jews (trans. A. M. Berrett) (London: Zed Books, 1987).
Shlomo Swirski, Israel: The Oriental Majority (trans. Barbara Swirski) (London: Zed Books, 1989).
Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1989).
A “Miracle” Made in Moscow and Washington
If the intifada has been an Israeli nightmare, upsetting a reality with which most Israelis had grown comfortable, the immigration wave of Soviet Jews to Israel which began in December may turn into a “miracle” that will lift the morale of many Israelis for years to come. The Soviet immigration wave of the 1990s may have an impact like that of the 1930s, when 250,000 non-ideological, well-educated German Jews settled in Palestine and made the victory of Zionism in 1948 possible.
Aspersion and Intrigue
Question: What is more popular reading in the West Bank than the UNLU’s leaflets? Answer: Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari’s Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising — Israel’s Third Front, now translated into Arabic and serialized in the daily al-Quds this spring.
Like the fake manifestos written by Israel’s intelligence service, the book, published in Hebrew in Israel and just out in English, has sown confusion and discord in the Occupied Territories. The authors, both Israeli journalists, rely heavily on interrogation files (referred to as “exclusive inside documents” on the inside cover flap) and tapped telephone conversations for their analysis of the popular uprising.
Eyeless in Judea
One of the major problems confronting the Israeli security forces during the Palestinian uprising was the disintegration, by June 1988, of Israel’s system of penetration and control over the clandestine national movement. First, the apparatus of the military government received a considerable blow with the wholesale resignation of the local police force and tax collectors during the first months of the intifada; second, in March and April 1988, the popular upheaval compelled many collaborators to recant publicly and surrender their weapons. These developments contributed to the paralysis of two major Israeli instruments of control over the Palestinians: the institutional and the coercive.
The Intifada in Israel
Our visitors — activists coming to express solidarity with the Palestinians, human rights workers documenting the latest atrocities, itinerant journalists doing the definitive intifada story — sometimes see things clearer than we do. Here, in the eye of the storm, it is easy to be misled. The signs are confused, the omens change from week to week. For a moment, a mood of optimism sweeps through. Peace Now appears radicalized. More than half the population agrees with talking to the PLO. Masha Lubelsky (the secretary of Na‘amat, the establishment Histadrut women’s organization) pays a public visit to Faisal Husseini. A thousand new peace activists (not old lefties) sign up for a “peace bus” to Cairo to meet Arafat.
US Aid to Israel
The US has provided over $50 billion in economic and military aid to Israel since 1949, more than to any other country. Israel has the highest GNP per capita of all US aid recipients ($6,810). In 1991 Israel will receive more US aid per capita ($686) than the total GNP per capita of many countries, including Egypt ($670), Morocco ($620), the Yemen Arab Republic ($590), Mauritania ($440), Sudan ($330) and Somalia ($280).
Total US Aid to Israel By Decades
Fiscal Year $ Millions, Current Percent Military
The Money Tree
How much money flows from US taxpayers’ pockets into the Israeli treasury each year? Is it the $3 billion figure so often quoted in the press? And what is it used for?
When Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-IN) asked the State Department these questions, he learned that the total for fiscal year 1989 was actually $3,742,100,000 — almost 25 percent more! [1]
From the Editors
Events elsewhere in the world — elections in Nicaragua, death squads in South Africa and recent decisions by the European Commission — hold much instruction for people concerned with the Middle East. Elections, after all, are not the same as democracy. After ten years of US armed intervention and economic aggression, a majority of Nicaraguans voting on February 25 chose an alternative to 10,000 percent inflation, to pervasive shortages, to the killings and sabotage of the Contras. “Sandinistas Lose the Hunger Vote” was the accurate headline in the Financial Times. The winning opposition front was cobbled together and financed by the State Department.
Editor’s Bookshelf
Since late 1988, MAPAM (The United Workers’ Party) has been among the Israeli political forces favoring Israeli-PLO negotiations which might lead to the creation of a Palestinian state. Yossi Amitay’s Ahvat amim bamivhan: MAPAM 1948-1954: emdot besugiyot araviyei eretz yisra’el [Brotherhood of Nations on Trial: MAPAM, 1948-1954: Positions on Palestinian-Arab Issues] (Tel Aviv: Tcherikover, 1988) provides a timely opportunity to place MAPAM’s current views in historical perspective. Amitay examines MAPAM’s stand on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict during the first six years of Israel’s statehood, when the party represented a kibbutz-based alliance of all the socialist-Zionist tendencies to the left of Ben Gurion’s MAPAI.
Blitzer, Territory of Lies
Back in 1976, a college student acquaintance of mine, Jay Pollard, used to talk in great detail about his work for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. I listened for hours, even if I never quite believed his stories. Eleven years later, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger would tell the court that convicted Pollard, a Navy intelligence analyst, of stealing 360 cubic feet of classified material for Israel: “It is difficult for me, even in the so-called year of the spy, to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by the defendant in view of the breadth, the critical importance to the US and the high sensitivity of the information he sold to Israel.”
From the Editors
The government of Israel fiercely maintains its rejectionist stance toward any political accommodation with the Palestine Liberation Organization. This is not merely a diplomatic posture, but undergirds the ideological structure of its policies of dispossession and occupation. Ha’aretz reported last June that close to 50,000 Palestinians have been jailed in the first 18 months of the uprising. The number continues to climb — some 250 administrative detention orders in October alone, according to the DataBase Project on Palestinian Human Rights, plus the many arrests stemming from Bayt Sahour’s tax revolt.
Black Hebrews in the Promised Land
The Black Hebrews are a group of African-Americans who have settled in Israel, where their controversial presence has fed charges of Israeli racism. Who are these Black Hebrews, and why have they attracted so much attention? Ben-Ami Carter, leader of the Kingdom of God Nation, as the community formally designates itself, was born in Chicago in 1940 as Gerson Parker. In the 1960s he became a storefront preacher at the Abeita Culture Center, an evangelical church on Chicago’s South Side, and developed his Black Hebrew theology. The basis for the Black Hebrews’ faith is the claim that the original Israelites of the Old Testament, exiled from Israel 4,000 years ago, were blacks. Descendants of those blacks, they believe, should now go back and claim that land.
Poems
Hey Jeep, Hey Jeep
Sami Shalom Chetrit
1. Eight kids in an army jeep
Eight soldiers, one major:
eight kids and one minor
2. Hey Jeep, Hey Jeep [1]
3. And his son Ishmael was thirteen years old
at the cutting of his uncircumcised flesh.
4. And eight of his sons in the army jeep
and his son cries to the Lord but no one hears
5. And behold his father running:
Run, Muhammad, run,
your son’s spirit is coming towards you
6. Lord, Lord, where is the lamb for a burnt offering?
“Wounded Kinship’s Last Resort”
Ironically, the latest junkets featuring liberal Israelis and recently domesticated Palestinians threaten to finally collapse the intricate history of Jews and Arabs in the Middle East into two streamlined, easily recognizable blocs: enlightened, idealistic and well-intentioned Zionists (“wounded spirits” as the title of a symposium on Israeli culture in New York had it); and articulate, mild-mannered, well-dressed Palestinians ready to interpret the desires of their less articulate, less well-dressed, stone-wielding and still somehow overly Arab constituents in the occupied territories.
Primer: Where They Stand
I. All states in the region, including a Palestinian state, have the right to independence and security.
US / Israel / PLO / Arab States / USSR / EEC States (bold = support; plain text = opposition)
Reading an El Al Ad
The declaration of the state of Palestine just five days earlier, nearly a year of the intifada, and a paralyzed but uncompromising Israeli politics are the immediate background of the full page El Al advertisement on page 57 of the Sunday New York Times on November 20, 1988. The ad has a rather peculiar content and form, especially given its likely audience — metropolitan New York and surrounds, educated readers across the country, others with a half-Sunday to waste, and the largest Jewish population in the world — people as unlikely as any in the world to have large numbers of children.
You Can’t Go Wrong Pushing Peace
The Palestinian intifada is proving a headache to Israel’s image managers on American campuses. “Recent events in the territories in Israel have spilled over on to the US university campuses [and] our work has been made harder,” complains a recent book — let from the University Service Department of the American Zionist Youth Foundation. [1] Pro-Israel groups on campus have lost “the initiative,” the booklet warns. Instead of promoting “positive Israel activities” such as Israel fairs and Israel cafe nights, campus groups now find themselves “in the position of defending Israel.”
“We Are Willing to Pay for Settlements But Not for Health Care”
One key to understanding how the Israeli economy (malfunctions is that the Histadrut (The General Federation of Workers in Israel; up to 1965 the “Jewish Workers in Israel”) was never simply a trade union.
“Transfer” and the Discourse of Racism
Saturday night I decided to go to a campaign meeting of the Moledet Party in Kfar Shalem, a rough neighborhood in the south of Tel Aviv. In the past, houses there were periodically served with demolition orders by the Tel Aviv municipality; in 1982 one inhabitant pulled a gun on demolition crews who had come to tear down an illegally-built extension to his house. Some people consider the violence of the state in Kfar Shalem as a form of racism against Oriental Jews. The slogan “Askhe-Nazis!” with a swastika beside it appeared on the walls of mainly Ashkenazi (Jews of European origin) neighborhoods of north Tel Aviv, as well as on memorials of the 1948 War of Independence.
The Elections, the Peace Camp and the Left
The November 1988 Israeli election confirmed a pattern set in 1981 and 1984: the vote was nearly equal between the two large bourgeois parties, the Likud and the Alignment (Labor), and both these parties lost strength to their left and right.