I know that power - with all the authority, physical comfort, and quality of life it brings - strongly pushes a person into a world of material possessions, and people and things that stimulate their senses. Gradually, they start to protect this material paradise with walls to defend it from threats and keep from it anything that may unsettle life inside. As the blessings in that paradise increase, the walls around it multiply to the same degree.
Only great willpower and moral strength can enable a person to get to know those that live outside these walls, engage with their concerns and wounds, and even struggle for them. As a person embellishes their life in their paradise, the human and moral effort required to live the struggles of others increases. As I began to recognize this truth as someone who lives outside the walls, my understanding and respect grew for those who have been able to break through the walls of their paradise, for those who leave it and come towards me in solidarity to live my concerns and wounds, as a people who live under the oppression of occupation, lacking freedom and justice.
On December 27, prominent Israeli activist Jonathan Pollak was sentenced to three months in an Israeli jail for protesting the occupation. Jonathan's upcoming imprisonment highlights two little-known stories - the support of some Israeli activists for our growing movement of Palestinian-led unarmed civilian protests, and the Israeli government's effort to crush our joint struggle against the Israeli occupation. Over the last eight years, Jonathan has participated in hundreds of Palestinian-led protests in the West Bank against Israel's military occupation. Along with other Israelis and internationals, he participated in our successful protest campaign in my West Bank village of Budrus in 2003-2004, that pushed Israel to reroute its wall and saved our farmland.
Jonathan Pollak is a great man - as great as the material temptations that the paradise of his nation affords him, in which his skills as a graphic designer would allow him to live in safety and unimaginable affluence. He is as great as the human and moral effort he exerted to know the other, to understand them, and struggle on behalf of the other for their freedom. His greatness is also the more for its rarity. He may not be the only one who stands at the borders of his moral and humanistic principles, but he remains, along with his many colleagues, part of a small group in their society. Their unusual status increases the magnitude of their struggle for justice, freedom and true peace.
Jonathan Pollak, the Israeli, and his Israeli colleagues, possess the same human qualities, and believe exactly as I do as a Palestinian, and as does every Palestinian like myself. We believe that freedom, peace and justice are human rights that do not distinguish between one individual and another, wherever they are, whatever their color, ethnicity, religion or gender. We also believe that these rights must be seized by the oppressed from the oppressor and are not given as a gift. They also believe as we do, that the struggle for these rights is the duty of all in the world who are free and all who believe in freedom, and not just the duty of the oppressed. We also believe that this struggle has a price that we all must be willing to pay.
Jonathan Pollak is a friend whose friendship I am proud to share, despite all the efforts of the Israeli intelligence services that tries to depict the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis as either one of treachery or normalization based on our adoption of the notion that Israelis have the right to superiority over us in their daily lives and that we must get used to this or live as servants or traitors. Israeli intelligence tries to distort the image of any Palestinian-Israeli relationship based on joint resistance to occupation, an occupation that is the root of our problems in the region. We want to reach a point where there is no such occupation, and rather relations based on justice and true peace between equals, and not a peace between a slave and master.
I, a Palestinian, admit now that my friendships within Palestinian society are not all based on resistance to the occupation, but I wouldn't dare to build a friendship with an Israeli outside of resistance to the occupation, because of how the occupation distorts the meanings of human relationships, and because dignity would not allow me to have a relationship with someone who feels superior to me because of their power, gender, religion or ethnicity.
Jonathan Pollak is a man trying to prove that those who believe in occupation cannot claim to be humanitarian or civilized. He also wants to prove that resisting oppression and occupation does not mean being a terrorist or killing.
This freedom fighter, Jonathan Pollak, leaves a prison cell only to be sentenced again by the Israeli occupation authorities, and recovers from one of his solidarity demonstrations only to be injured again in the next one. We can't let his work be lost without our appreciation because we lack confidence in ourselves or in our relationships of joint struggle. Palestinians should be proud to give him the name "freedom fighter" against oppression, occupation and racism.
We have all the respect in the world for this freedom fighter and for all his colleagues from all parts of the world, from over forty countries. They left the temptations of life where they are from, and left their families and friends to join our struggle for humanity on this planet, choosing the path of those who sacrificed themselves for freedom in Palestine. International activists like the American Rachel Corrie and the British citizen Tom Hurndall, both killed by Israeli soldiers, are honored like Palestinians who died, and similarly Jonathan Pollak and his imprisoned Israeli colleagues are a part of the movement of imprisoned Palestinians.
We will struggle until we achieve freedom, and a just peace.
Jawaher Abu Rahmah was the sister of Bil'in activist, Bassem Abu Rahmah, who was shot dead with a high velocity tear-gas projectile during a demonstration in the village on April 17th, 2009...
New Years Eve 2010 in Bil'in: "The Last Day of The Wall" @ http://wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1933&Itemid=240
The indigenous people of Bil'in have declared the last day of 2010 will be "The Last Day of The Wall."
Today Ynet reported:
Three violent protests against the separation fence are taking place in the West Bank Friday. Hundreds of Palestinians, Israeli and foreign left wing activists are protesting in Bilin. They were joined by Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.
http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1933&Itemid=240
Maybe Obama can hand over his Nobel Peace Prize to Mr. Pollack who seems to have done more to deserve it.
The comment I wrote is... embarassing, to say the least.
"Today, there is in fact no Palestinian partner [for peace] - and the idiotic warring Palestinian factions can take 'credit' for that. There are of course those who make a living from the [intra-Palestinian] struggle, with their writing or their television programs, but they are not confronting the Palestinian [leadership] with this truth. But it's better to discuss the Palestinian problem like adults, not like adolescents.
The ones who oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state today are the Palestinians and the Israelis - in that order... "
Nonsense. Arafat was a clear leader of all Palestinain factions and diaspora for a number of decades.
And in that capacity he rejected two peace accords in favor of terrorist war on Israeli people that became sardonically knows as Oslo War.
It i seems Palestinain Muslims, who began believing their own press releases, are more interested in revenge than a state.
It also proves fairness and efficacy of Israeli judicial system
I would point out that one of the turning points in the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa came when a few Africaaners went beyond 'non-violent protest' against that, and actually took up arms against the system and society that they were priveleged members of. Though credit for the victory against that is often laid at the doorstep of the global BDS movement's success in basically cutting the society off from the world, the reaction of the society was mainly to lay the blame for that at the door of the rest of the world, rather than question their ideology. But having members of the 'in-group' turn on that 'in-group' shakes the sureties that that group is built on, and causes the members to start questioning the basic assumptions.
And for decades, all the priveleged Israelis have been indoctrinated in the idea that the world hates their society not because of what it does, but because of who they are, so to imagine that, even when the BDS campaign reaches the same level with Israel that it did with South Africa, Israelis are going to question the basic tennets of their society is farfetched.
You will, with considerable evidence to the contrary find my current meditations to create some place for love and common ground with Netanyahu naive. But with a never before exhibited Ghadiesque non-violence by the Palestinian side linking with our brothers and sisters in the Israeli dissent, well then moving the mountain is possible. And with an Abrahamic or Ibrimhamic openess to the stranger, as the movement grows who could stop it?
Unfortunately, that has not been the case, and realistically will likely prove not to be the case (I mean, it is possible that someone with all the abilities to be a demagogue, but who is driven to right the wrongs Israeel is and has done, but nothing more, will manage to overcome the limits that the 'acceptable public discourse' impose, overcome the limits that the Israeli political system imposes (which puts bigger obstacles in the path of someone trying to change things than the American one, which has crippled Obama's attempts to do some reform, does) but the odds of that are microscopically thin) and the social inertia that the Israeli education and military service (with the almost universal military service requirement, and how deeply the social structure of that is embedded in Israeli society, it is not a case of convincing Israelis that they have passively supported wrongdoing, it will be necessary to convince them that they have actively supported it, which is a harder task by orders of magnitude).
The Palestinians did indeed try the non-violent route (though of course that has been carefully minimised right out of the narrative of the last century) and it proved useless against the militaristic branch of Zionism, which created the Palestinian refugees in the first place, and became both the foundation of the most important social structures in present day Israel (the IDF, with the power structure there carrying forward into most of civilian life) and the bedrock of the foundational myths.
Yes, given enough time, and with the proper external pressures, a non-violent movement for justice coming from both those who are suffering the injustice, and those who those committing the injustice see as themselves, could indeed bring about a wonderful change, but to imagine that the conditions will first shift (the US will have to turn from its present policies, and convince the rest of the world that such a change is permament, and convince the emerging powers, some of whom identify closely with the Palestinians, that only the smallest pressures should be applied) and then last long enough (the better part of a century) while Israeli society heals itself is even more farfetched than the idea that an isolation campaign is all it will take to make most Israelis question the basic tennets of their society.
I guess Pollard and courageous Palestinians will be celebrating in separate rooms