For four short and inspiring months, I am an Israeli away from home as an Oak Fellow for human rights at Colby College in Waterville Maine. Having some (healthy) distance from the daily struggle, I watch with disappointment the reactions to the Goldstone report. I believed it to be a watershed that could have -- and should have -- changed the discourse on the conflict that torments us all. That my prime minister prefers to resort to demagogic arguments that Israel cannot expect justice from international institutions surprises me little, that the international community bends to such rhetoric is -- after some thought -- not surprising either. But that we Israelis do not comprehend the missed opportunity is both a surprise and a disappointment.
When my government refused to cooperate with the inquiry commission headed by Judge Goldstone, an esteemed and impartial professional, they put me and my fellow Israelis back into the place of perpetual victim. As if we can never expect nor demand justice from the UN. When it denounces the report as an obstacle to peace and an encouragement to terror, it opts to paint us all as fools. To make us believe that in order to effectively fight terror we must resort to war crimes, is like expecting Americans believe that Guantanamo and torture are necessary means in their struggle for security. Should it not have been a matter of pride and moral integrity that even when terror groups target our civilians we would always differentiate between civilians and combatants, that we would always do all within our power to evacuate and treat the sick and the wounded? And can my prime minister stop a moment to explain why are truth and the acknowledgment of one's wrong doings an obstacle to peace? Isn't it rather that truth and accountability are the first steps to reconciliation?
It is unfortunate that the international community too tries to block the discussion. It delineates Israel as a country deserving of special treatment and thus negates our place as equal members of the international community. I know that there are countries and people that will always deem Israel guilty and who do not believe in our right to exist, but I think that utilizing this argument to block an honest discussion is to play into their hands, leaving Israel always a "special case".
Jean Améry, a Holocaust survivor, wrote in “On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew”:
Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Question, as historical, socially determined conceptual phenomena, were not and are not any concern of mine. They are entirely a matter for the anti-Semites, their disgrace or their sickness. The anti-Semites have something to overcome, not I.
For years Israel has acted as if anti-Semitism is its problem, raising-generations of Israelis whom although they have the military might, and a homeland, have remained suspicious of the world. We are so intoxicated with victimhood, manipulated by our leaders, that we let it ruin our lives, blind our eyes to the evils that we commit, to the possibilities for peace that we miss.
The Goldstone report offered us a wakeup call by showing how far we have gone, how violent we allowed ourselves to become. The report demanded an honest internal investigation from both Hamas -- for its violent targeting of Israeli civilians -- and Israel, for its indiscriminate and disproportionate attack. It recommended that if we cannot do it, the international community should. But it seems that the three are not apt to this honest task. How these positions be an encouragement to the peace process (which in truth is not happening at all) is beyond my comprehension. Realizing that the Goldstone report is a unique opportunity to go back on the track of truth as a basis for future peace, Physicians for Human Rights Israel called for all parties to endorse its recommendations.
As an Israeli I will continue to call on my country to come back to its senses and investigate with full transparency, not only our conducts during the attack but our regime of occupation. I expect nothing less from my colleagues in Palestine with whom I share the task of building a safer and peaceful future for our children.
As an equal citizen of the world I will continue to demand true equality from my fellow citizens: true and unwavering acknowledgment of Israel's right to exist, and an equally clear unwavering demand to end the occupation and oppression of the Palestinians. While anti-Semitism is a disgrace anti-Semites should deal with, occupation is my disgrace, my guilt. Only by asserting myself as equal and demand from myself what I wish others would have demanded of themselves can I assert my true freedom, my equality.
Follow Hadas Ziv on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Hadas Ziv
The change we all want to see-justice for Palestine, security for Israel and peace in the Holy Land-will come about as more truth telling Israelis like Hadas Ziv are heard.
A few others to listen to are Jeff Halper, Founder of Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and Rabbi Arik Ascherman, Director of Rabbis for Human Rights and my favorite Anarchist Against the Wall, Jonathan Pollak, who said:
"Although Israel marketed the Wall as a security barrier, logic suggests such a barrier would be as short and straight as possible. Instead, it snakes deep inside the West Bank, resulting in a route that is twice as long as the Green Line, the internationally recognized border. Israel chose the Wall's path in order to dispossess Palestinians of the maximum land and water, to preserve as many Israeli settlements as possible, and to unilaterally determine a border.
""We believe that, as with Apartheid South Africa, Americans have a vital role to play in ending Israeli occupation. We are confident that Israeli occupation will one day be defeated, as were other US government supported repressive regimes - Apartheid South Africa, Pinochet`s Chile and racial segregation in the United States. There is no price too great to pay for freedom, and nothing will deter us from achieving this goal."
http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1338&Itemid=222
Thank you.
Al Jazeera on line, Oct. 22/09
Goldstone dares US on Gaza report
"Richard Goldstone, the jurist who authored a UN report accusing Israel of war crimes and crimes against humanity during its war on Gaza, has challenged the US to justify its claims that his findings are flawed and biased.
"Goldstone told Al Jazeera on Thursday that he had not heard from the administration of Barack Obama, the US president, about the flaws Washington claims to have identified in the report.
"'I have yet to hear from the Obama administration what the flaws in the report that they have identified are. I would be happy to respond to them, if and when I know what they are,' Goldstone said....."
A key insight.
No one can underestimate the impact of the horrible slaughter of Jews in Europe in the last century.
But Israel seems to be caught in an enveloping post traumatic stress disorder -- cynically manipulated by some, I'm sure, but way out of control and spontaneously self-reinforcing.
I doubt that a whole nation can be put on the couch and treated with therapy -- but something needs to be done because as this posting so clearly demonstrates, this out-of-control paranoia is creating its own self-fulfilling destiny.
Maybe there should be a national screening of The Pawnbroker.
Because crime victims can suffer anger and distortions of personality that are ultimately self-destructive and harmful to others. That doesn't absolve those who have hurt them, but it does seek to help them from harming themselves and bringing the suffering to an end.
What we're seeing is a set of self-reinforcing and out-of-control forces -- Israeli paranoia and the idea that the whole world hates them -- followed by actions they take, based on that assumption, which tend to make more and more people hate, dislike and disdain them.
The problem is that these irrational feelings -- a sense of superiority matched with feelings of persecution (Germans felt this way after WWI) seem to live in the vast majority of the Israeli population. . .
I'm not optimistic.
Actually, anyone who really wants to see the Israelis exterminated would be encouraging exactly what they are doing. American Mideast policy drawn up on the basis of domestic politics, and the inevitable debacle will see us sharing in the disaster.
By this do you mean a right to exist with present BORDERS? or previous borders or future borders yet to be determined? Because this is what the knesset means when it makes its "right to exist " demands.
It demands that Israels right to exist is a package which includes any land it now occupies plus a little extra for "natural growth", plus no right of return for the refugees of the nakba, plus no acknowledgement that the creation of the state of Israel was an injustice to the majority population who lived in the territory before that.
Needs an explanation.
Israel's right to exist is based on it's right to exist as a Jewish state. That's all.
Instead - they chose to bad mouth Goldstone at every opportunity. There were the oh so predictable charges of anti semitism, the usual hasbara, the usual deliberate obfuscation.
Fact.
Noone forced the Israeli govt to take this stance - they chose to.
Have a break mommamia - you're fighting an increasingly lost cause.
But let's start by realizing that Arabs are also Semites.
http://www.ict.org.il/Portals/0/Articles/ICT_Cast_Lead_Casualties-A_Closer_Look.pdf
You can't really think the Goldstone report is more factual - unless you're blinded by politics.