New York City and Tri-State News, Pages 34-35

Israeli Journalist Akiva Eldar Calls for System of Checks and Balances

By Jane Adas

Haaretz columnist Akiva Eldar (Staff photo J. Adas)

“I AM NOT HERE to praise Israel and you are not here to have fun,” said Akiva Eldar in introducing his Oct. 22 talk on “Progressives’ Dilemma: Promoting Peace and Defending Democracy in Israel” at New York City’s Congregation Anshe Chesed. Eldar is a chief political columnist and editorial writer for the Israeli daily Haaretz, and co-author of The Lords of the Land, a critique of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Since witnessing the signing of the Oslo agreement at the White House in 1993, Eldar said he has come to realize that some people are not willing to pay the price for peace. He cited as an example former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who was all for peace so long as Palestinians gave up the territories. Although peace is the best way to reach security, Eldar said, he recognized that there can be no peace without security—meaning radical elements on both sides have been able to undermine peace efforts through violence.

To achieve its own security, Eldar explained, Israel has increasingly relied on checkpoints, the wall, closures, roadblocks and other measures which violate human rights, which then jeopardize democracy, and harm Israel’s standing in the international community. In Eldar’s view, Israel should accept the Arab peace initiative and get out of the territories. But since Israel is not ready to pay that kind of price for peace, and since the U.S. is not willing to use its leverage on Israel, Eldar advocates finding a balance between security and human rights in order to maintain a minimum kind of coexistence for Israelis and Palestinians.

This would require checks and balances that, in a normal democratic society, come from the political opposition, media, academe, and the legal system. Israelis, however, feel that it is “not kosher to have an opposition,” that they must unite, since the world is against them. Not a single Jewish member of the Knesset has peace as an issue, Eldar noted. With the Knesset not functioning as a watchdog, he added, it is difficult for the media to take on the role of the opposition. As for academe, he pointed out that Haifa University brought in police to arrest students who protested Israel’s Operation Cast Lead assault on Gaza. In all, 832 Israelis, the majority of them Palestinian minors, were arrested during Cast Lead; 80 percent of them were detained for the 22-day duration. Eldar quoted judges saying “demonstrating against our soldiers at this time is criminal.” (See his Sept. 23 article in Haaretz, “How Israel Silenced its Gaza War Protesters.”)

The last resort for checks and balances is the Supreme Court. In the last three years, Eldar observed, the government has ignored eight rulings of Israel’s Supreme Court, mostly having to do with settlements and the route of the wall—prompting its president, Dorit Beinisch, to remark, “Our ruling is not a recommendation.” This leaves only the human rights organizations. Without them, Eldar asserted, Israel would be in a much worse position.

Israelis are addicted to the status quo, he said. They want security and quiet more than peace, reasoning that if the situation is calm as in the Golan Heights, why give anything up? They should realize, Eldar concluded, that there is a price for occupation: Israelis already live in a binational situation, and it may be those Israeli settlers who say, “the land of Israel is my wife and the state of Israel is my cleaning lady” who undo democracy in Israel.

Richard Falk on Gaza After the Goldstone Report

Prof. Richard Falk. (Staff photo J. Adas)

In March 2008, Princeton University Professor Emeritus Richard Falk was appointed the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Human Rights. He spoke about “Gaza after the Goldstone Report: Challenging the U.N. and World Public Opinion” in Princeton on Oct. 25. The Goldstone Report, Falk noted, has clearly struck an Israeli nerve—despite the fact that no international jurist is more pro-Israel than Richard Goldstone, and Israel has had no problems in the past ignoring Security Council resolutions or advisory opinions of the International Court of Justice.

Moreover, Falk added, Palestinians have more grievances about the character of the report than do Israelis. The report does not mention the Israeli army’s Nov. 4 incursion into Rafah, which violated the cease-fire with Hamas in place since June, nor that, even after that, Hamas was willing to extend the cease-fire. Nor does the report address the fact that Israel and Egypt locked civilians in a combat zone, giving them no option to seek refuge. The report does not question Israel’s argument that it has the right to respond with force to rockets fired from Gaza; it only examines whether the force was disproportionate and aimed at civilians, not whether it was justified in the first place. Were the report to do so, Falk suggested, it might conclude that a one-sided war against an undefended civilian population is itself a crime against humanity.

Why then, Falk asked, does Israel respond with such agitation to a report that only confirmed earlier human rights accounts? He suggested two factors contribute to Israel’s frantic reaction. The cutting edge of the Goldstone Report is its call for accountability. If all other remedies fail, it even calls on countries to apply universal jurisdiction, as Israel did in 1962 when it captured Adolf Eichmann. As such, Falk said, the Goldstone Report poses challenges to the international community to live up to its pretensions that international criminal law is not only for Africa or enemies of the U.S. like Saddam Hussain, but must also apply to friends of the powerful.

The second factor, Falk continued, is that the Goldstone Report is a major development in the struggle over symbols of legitimacy and how civil society responds to the conflict. He called this the second war, as opposed to the first war, which is based on military dominance. Noting that the United Nations’ founding mission was to prevent the first kind of war, Falk said that the U.N. has been ineffective, almost dysfunctional, because it has been manipulated as a creature of geopolitics. It is, however, important in the war for legitimacy. In this context, Falk concluded, the Goldstone Report provides strong re-enforcement to those engaged worldwide in Palestinian solidarity work.

Omar Barghouti, George P. Fletcher Debate BDS

(L-r) Omar Barghouti, Laura Flanders and George P. Fletcher. (Staff photo J. Adas)

Arguing in the affirmative to the question “Is Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel counterproductive to the pursuit of a just peace in the Middle East?” was Columbia Law Professor George P. Fletcher, who stepped in when Rabbi Mordechai Liebling, president emeritus of the Shalom Center, withdrew from the debate. Omar Barghouti, a founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (see p. 41), argued against the question. The Nov. 5 event was sponsored by the Middle East Institute and hosted by the Arab Students Association of Columbia University. Laura Flanders of GRIT TV moderated the debate, warning both participants to stay on point.

In his opening remarks, and after a brief discourse on the Biblical roots of the Middle East problem, Fletcher said that if the goal of BDS is the return of land occupied in 1967, legal maneuvers are preferable to boycotts, which he said waste a lot of time and do not address issues of discrimination against women, gays, and minorities within both societies.

Barghouti stressed that the issue is a just peace, not a mere peace wherein the weaker party is forced to accept the status quo. Minimal justice for Palestinians, he insisted, is not only ending the 1967 occupation, but also ending discrimination against Palestinians within Israel and granting the right of return for refugees. He described BDS as an empowering nonviolent form of struggle that, in the wake of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, is spreading, in part because the international community has no confidence in Israel investigating itself and views Israel’s impunity as extremely dangerous.

After threatening to leave when the audience applauded Barghouti, Fletcher was persuaded to stay and present his rebuttal. He identified the basic question as: how to resolve a conflict when the conquered party does not agree to a peace treaty? Fletcher alleged the root cause to be the systematic propagation of hatred in Palestinian education at the earliest ages, and faulted Israel for not demanding a more rigorous curriculum before withdrawing. If BDS is committed to destroying Israel, he charged, then Barghouti should say so.

Concerning hatred, Barghouti responded that the testimonies of Israeli soldiers reflect a radicalization in Israeli society whereby Palestinians are viewed as less than human. BDS, he added, does not focus on any particular political solution, but is rather a rights-based approach focused on equality for all. He does not consider transforming a country from an ethnic racist state to a genuine democracy to be a call for its destruction, Barghouti said.

Fletcher said the use of “racist” is intolerable, irresponsible, and ignorant. “We in the United States don’t understand nationality,” he claimed. “It is not racist to recognize different peoples.” He added that the worst thing Israel has done is not allow Palestinians their own university in Israel, thereby leading to forced educational integration.

According to Fletcher, boycott is “a silly diversion that will only increase hostility.” Barghouti replied that BDS may well increase the fortress mentality in Israel, but when the cost becomes too great, as it did in the American civil rights movement and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, Israel will dismantle the structures of oppression.

Jane Adas is a free-lance writer based in the New York City metropolitan area.