My last day in Israel was a whirlwind of visits, as I tried to pack as much in as I could before having to head back home.
First stop was breakfast with Dror Etkes. A former coordinator for Peace Now's settlement monitoring project, he now directs the Land Advocacy Project for a group called Yesh Din. The group's name, as Dror told me, means "there is law." Like everything else here, "din" has two meanings: "law" in Hebrew, "religion" in Arabic.
"We see our role as law enforcement in the West Bank around land issues," Dror told me as he showed me with maps the ways in which land has been used by the Israeli government to move into the West Bank. According to Yesh Din, 30 percent of the land being used for the settlements is land the government considers to be private. And yet, according to Dror, there is no government agency that oversees the legal issues regarding the settlement land. Yesh Din is attempting to fill that void with legal challenges to force greater accountability.
From there, it was on to brunch -- like the Greeks, the Israelis and Palestinians do everything over food -- at the home of Erel Margalit, the founder of one of Israel's biggest venture capital firms, Jerusalem Venture Partners. He lives right next to where John the Baptist was born -- the Middle East equivalent of having a celebrity on your street.
Israel is one of the great digital powerhouses. And some of that is thanks to Erel Margalit. Prior to Jerusalem Venture Partners, Margalit served as Director of Business Development under Teddy Kollek, the legendary mayor of Jerusalem. During this time, he helped bring more than 70 high-tech and new media companies into one of the world's oldest cities. Now he continues to help that sector thrive with his company JVP, which focuses on new media, animation and gaming.
And like almost every Israeli parent I met, he is deeply connected to the Israeli state through his children -- in his case three daughters, one of whom is in the army, with another about to join her.
Of course, after brunch, what's next but...lunch. For that, I went to the home of prolific author and thinker Rabbi Daniel Gordis. Rabbi Gordis' most recent book title sums up his life's work: Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End. Gathered around the table were his wife and children. Rabbi Gordis, with one daughter just out of the army and a son and future son-in-law currently serving, told me how betrayed many Israelis felt by the West's reaction to Israel's incursion into Gaza last year. This sense of abandonment became even more intense, the rabbi said, with the release last week of the report by the UN fact-finding mission chaired by Justice Richard Goldstone. The report claimed to have found "strong evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Gaza conflict."
But Rabbi Gordis saw the report as completely ignoring what had led Israel to take action: rocket attacks that had been going on for years since Israel pulled out of Gaza. "As a result of the ongoing attacks," Gordis told me, "many children hadn't slept outside of their parents' bedroom for years, and twelve year-olds were still wetting the bed. The United Nation report does not take into account what it was like having rockets launched from Gaza on a daily basis for years. There don't have to be heavy casualties for there to be terrible day-to-day human costs."
"In 2000 we had promised my younger son that by the time he's of age to go to into the army, he won't have to," the Rabbi continued. " We were wrong."
From there it was on to tea at the famous American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem, site of many high level meetings among Palestinian leaders. Here, in a beautiful courtyard, I met with two Palestinian women, Ruba Abdel Hadi and Molly Toomey, working on a project called Rawabi, a $500 million planned community that promises to provide affordable housing for up to 40,000 Palestinians and include banks, shops, arts venues and a hospital. "It doesn't take more than ten or fifteen minutes to get here from where I live in Ramallah," Ruba, who heads marketing for the project, told me, "but I allowed two hours because you never know what you are going to encounter at the checkpoints."
Next up, a meeting with Elias Zananiri, a former spokesman for Mohammed Dahlan, the one time head of security forces under Arafat. Just as the Rabbi had been so eloquent about life under the threat of missile attacks, so was Zananiri on life under the daily hardships and humiliations of checkpoints in the West Bank. That is why he's using his background as a journalist to try to bridge the gap between the two realities by setting up a private satellite television station, Palestine Tomorrow, which will serve as an alternative to state controlled media and those controlled by partisan entities like Hamas.
As he wrote in July:
"Such a station can also play a very significant role in bridging gaps and mending fences with the 'enemy/neighbour' next door. For years, the Israeli public has been subjected to one kind of Palestinian media discourse, one that focuses more on the conflict and less on its resolution. In my opinion, most of the efforts made over the past years to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have failed only because of the lack of understanding between the two nations... Palestinians need a professional media outlet that tells their Israeli neighbours that across the Green Line, the Separation Barrier or the Israeli army checkpoints lives a nation that aspires to freedom and liberty no less than the Israelis themselves."
Headed toward the same goal, but by a very different route, is Frédéric Brenner, an amazing photographer and anthropologist. Brenner is in the middle of a five year-long venture called "Israel: Portrait of a Work in Progress." He wants people to see a different Israel -- literally. To accomplish this, he brings photographers to Israel for six-month residencies, with the mandate to "look beyond the dominant political narrative and to explore the complexity of the place and resonance for people around the world -- not to judge, but to question and reveal."
And that's exactly what the photos do. In a meeting that was far too short, Brenner told me: "In order to go beyond the dual narrative of victimhood, we need a poetic perspective and we want to capture it in photographs. We have so many different peoples living together in this land. We want the greatest photographers in the world to come here and use their photography as a tool of social anthropology. The goal is to foster a dialogue beyond the political narrative to move beyond the dual perspective."
My final meeting in Jerusalem was with Mikhael Manekin, a former officer in the Israeli infantry. We met at 8 o'clock, after sundown, because he was observing Shabbat. "My bearing witness to what is happening," he said "is an outgrowth of my religious principles."
What he's bearing witness to is what is happening in the occupied territories. As a member of the group Breaking the Silence, Manekin helps collect accounts of soldiers who have served in the Second Intifadah. As he wrote about the Gaza incursion on HuffPost:
"Soldiers experienced a huge disconnect between what they saw and did on the ground, and the claims, made by senior officers, that Israel has the most moral army in the world. As long as commanders continue to deny or dissemble about what happened, Israel's troops are left with two options: not to speak about what they saw, doing what is possible to shield those who gave the orders, or to break their silence and be accused of lying and betrayal."
By providing a safe harbor for those who choose to tell what happened, Manekin and Break the Silence are helping to document what this conflict is doing to both sides.
On my way to the airport in Tel Aviv, I stopped at the Dallal Restaurant for dinner with Gidi Grinstein and his wife, and my friend Dan Adler, an LA based entrepreneur and former CAA executive, who was also flying back to the U.S. Grinstein is the founder of the Reut Institute, which he describes as "a non-partisan non-profit innovative policy group designed to provide real-time long-term strategic decision-support to the Government of Israel." Funded entirely by private donations, Reut gives its services to the government pro bono.
"We don't provide the answers," he told me, "we frame the questions and help decision makers abandon old paradigms that no longer work and refocus their thinking."
To help identify these old paradigms and move beyond them, I have offered all these voices a platform on HuffPost -- so that the conversation can continue.
Follow Arianna Huffington on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ariannahuff
Arianna Huffington: Israel Diary: A Tale of Two Visits
HuffPost TV: Arianna Discusses Balloon Boy, Rush Limbaugh, More On Jay Leno Show (VIDEO)
Gush Shalom ad:
In the Tene-Omrim settlement
They quarrel about
The division of
Bathing hours
At the swimming pool
In the Karwat-Bani-Zeid village
There is no swimming pool.
There is hardly any water
In the pipes.
Israel takes for itself
Most of the water
In the West Bank.
For the millions of Palestinians,
Only drops are left.
Today, Israeli and Palestinian water convoys will converge at a protest meeting in the Karwat-Bani-Zeid village. Starting points: 12.00 at Reading parking lot Tel-Aviv, Paamon Garden Jerusalem, Manara Square Ramallah.
I'd bet most of these development aid funds were given in goodwill by foreigners... like USA $5 billion a year
This has gone on far to long.
I do not want to pay for their death-trip anymore. American "aid" amounts to three billion dollars plus a year, mostly in armaments from American taxpayers. No. No mas.
Might does not make right.
Even if we ignore the "who had it first" argument, which I'm willing to, why in the world do you think that people who were born, lived, and died on those lands in the last 60 years would be willing to just give it up? The best solution is a compromise where everyone can live on land they can call home in peace.
Until recently, Jews had not owned or indeed lived in Palestine since the Romans kicked them out about 1,900 years ago. The Romans acted against the Jews because of ongoing and horrendous terrorist acts by Jews against the Roman colonial government.
Palestinians have the best current claim on the land, including almost 2,000 years of continous use and ownership. While the plight of the Jews under Nazism was horrendous, two wrongs don't make a right, and forcible occupation and killing of Palestinians does not create some sort of moral imperative for the Jews.
The point is that the USA, Israel, use double standards, money, dishonesty and force to acquire land and wealth and i am sick of it.
As Americans we should put justice and truth above the impulse to conquer just because we can.
There IS...no moral equivalency, as Arianna suggests, between the indignity and DANGER of daily rocket attacks...and the indignity and NO DANGER of having to put up with checkpoints.
Israel is NOT required to admit or transit enemy people through its own territory. Israel is NOT...responsible for the welfare of an enemy people, or the economy of another territory not under its sovereignty.
The checkpoints EXIST...in the first place...BECAUSE OF...the rocket attacks and terrorism. Were there no threat and existential danger, there would be no checkpoints. However,
Israel, like any other nation on earth, is entitled to and OBLIGATED to control its own borders.
Consequently, Israel OWES NO APOLOGY OR EXPLANATION TO EITHER THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY OR ITS ENEMIES.
The Arabs shoot; Israel shoots back. The Taliban-backed al Q'aeda commit terror on United States interests, it is the OBLIGATION of the US government and ALL its politicians to take them out. There is nothing to negotiate.
How does one gauge the danger in particular situations? Is it not by outcomes.
The number of deaths attributable to the kazzam attacks on central Israel amount to less than twenty since 2000. The number of deaths attributable to delays at roadblocks are counted in the scores each year and that does not include unprovoked shootings of Palestinians at roadblocks.
One example is the death of 24 women and 27 newborns at checkpoints between June 2003 and February 2004.
I would say that you have no idea about that of which you speak, nor of the nature of "moral equivalency."
when hamas all but squelched rocket attacks coming from their territory, israel chose to violate the cease fire agreement...
those are facts...
After over 400 posts on the subject of the Middle East conflict, have we made any progress at all towards meeting in the middle, to work out the concept of a realistic solution? Or are we destined to simply go on repeating our mantras each time a story on the Middle East is published, deaf to each other, bent on destruction, rather than building up?
-- Ze'ev Jabotinsky, 1911
Ninety-eight years later, the tune is yet to change.
Unfortunately the dispute has been viewed as political and territorial when, in fact, it is legal.
If the Germans had not persecuted Jews, the United Nations, after World War 2, would not have to have resettled Jews to a place where they could live peacefully. Common sense at that time suggested that Jews be resettled in their ancestral homeland, where many Jews already resided.
As an unintended consequence, many Palestinians lost their property by fleeing or eviction.
The Middle East problem, in essence, was caused by the United Nations which has not taken responsibility.
Life has been miserable for both the evicted Palestinians and the Jews who have not had a day of peace in 60 years. The Palestinians justifiably harbor resentment as to the injustice that was done to them and Jews live under constant threat of attack.
Look at it this way: If this was a house and nothing worked right you'd go back to the builder to demand that it be fixed.
The parties ought to go to the UN and demand that the UN resolve this problem by offering compensation to the Palestinians who lost property in exchange for a Release of Claims. Palestinians will take their cash and buy property anywhere they choose. Even in Israel. They should not have to live in squalor.
You cannot take someone's property for no compensation and expect the victim to grin and bear it.
In terms of Foreign policy and Afghanistan and Pakistan - I advocate a Over-the-Horizon policy as a sustainable and effective counter terrorism strategy. This is more sustainable financially but it solves the global Threat, in Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, etc. What are we going to do if Somalis in US commit a act of terrorism? Nation build Somalia, Yemen, every poor country with radicals??? In terms of Afghan now pay off the local leaders to give information on terrorist camps to target Al-Qaeda first then the more militant taliban, we dont need to be involved in tribal conflicts.
True, the US had sent troops to Lebanon a number of times, back in 1958, and again in 1983, to try to help stabilized things. And yet when Kuwait asked for American help to push out Saddam's troops, we sent them to Saudi Arabia which relies on US protection. But was that an excuse to bomb the WTC back in 1993, or again more successfully on 9/11/2001?
The US hadn't bombed the Arabs before then, except for Saddam in 1991.
And the US can't be held responsible for what Israel does, as there is no treaty of alliance between ISrael and the US. Yes, Israel uses some American military equipment, but the Arabs had Russian equipment, Chinese, French, British. Jews don't bomb Russian skyscrapers for providing military equipment to the Arabs.
but not the ugliest of things:
the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling
which thinks that nothing is worth war
is much worse.
A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight,
nothing he cares about more than his own personal safety,
is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free
unless made and kept so by the exertions
of better men than himself.
John Stuart Mills
CANNABIS SATIVA