#not the assassination of rabin?? i feel like we should talk about that more

[victoriousscarf]

This article was from last October and thus does not take the most recent events into account but I often find myself going back to it lately... Excuse me while I also now quote excessively from it below:

ROBINSON

And this helps us to understand the development of Palestinian resistance to this project. Today, this is characterized often as being based on irrational anti-Semitism. But as you point out, when we understand the history of the development of this resistance, we see it differently. There are even early Zionists on the record saying things like I don’t know how you expect the Palestinians to react, they’re going to react the same way every indigenous population reacts when there is a colonial project to impose minority rule. [Ben-Gurion himself said: “If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country.”]

...

ROBINSON

There have been many attempts in the United States and Israel to make Palestinians completely unpalatable and impossible offers and then characterize Palestinians as unreasonable, uncompromising “rejectionists” when they won’t accept the offer.

KHALIDI

That’s a trope that goes back to Abba Eban: “Never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” There weren’t very many opportunities. There might have been one or two. I talk about the 1939 White Paper. It was a very limited opportunity. The Palestinians, in my view, were very foolish to fail to accept it. There might have been other opportunities. I was involved in the negotiations at Madrid and Washington [in the early 1990s] with an Israeli delegation in which we tried to achieve self-determination and statehood. And that was something that was systematically denied us by the ground rules laid down by the United States at the behest of Israel. The same ground rules ended up governing the Oslo process later on. So there was no opportunity there.

It turns out, I argue in the book, and I’ve argued elsewhere, that the maximum that would be offered, has ever been offered to the Palestinians, is some form of autonomy under Israeli sovereignty with complete and absolute Israeli security control. Israelis would have control of the borders, the airspace, the land, and the water under everything that Israel was willing to offer under every Israeli government. I go into Yitzhak Rabin’s shift in his willingness to accept the existence of a Palestinian people and his willingness to negotiate with the PLO. But even Rabin in his last speech made it very clear that there would never be a Palestinian state.

So self-determination, statehood, and independence are ruled out by the Americans and Israelis, then and now, I would argue. So what are we talking about? You can pick up your own garbage, but we’ll arrest anybody we want, any time we want, to torture them, beat them up, and drag them off to our jails. And we’ll do it to anybody who resists our dominance, and we make all the laws, and you obey our military rules. What kind of “state” is that? That’s not a very good deal.

ROBINSON

Let me dwell on this because it seems critical. To the extent that there has been talk of a “two state solution,” what has actually been on the table consistently in every negotiation for the last 50 years has never involved a concession by the United States and Israel—they negotiate together—that Palestinians should have anything that we would consider to be equivalent to a state in the sense that other states are states.

KHALIDI

The United States talks the talk, but it will not walk the walk. It will never say “this outcome has to include complete and absolute Palestinian independence.” It will never impose that in Israel. It will never lay that on the table as the outcome that has to be reached.

There are some Israeli governments that came closer to this than others. Rabin came closer. But none of them would have accepted the idea that Israel would give up its security control, that Israel would cease to control the borders, that Israel would cease to be the only sovereign power. I mean, if you don’t have your own army and your own borders, and your own economy, and your own ports and your own airports and your own airspace, you’re not sovereign. You’re not independent. You’re a dependent subunit of a larger sovereign state. And that’s all that Israel has so far been willing to offer. The United States has never pushed it to do anything more than what Israel was willing to do. The deference of the United States to Israel is limitless.

...

ROBINSON

When you said the Palestinians are not engaging in terrorism, one important point is that various means of resistance are denied them. You’re very critical in the book of attacks on civilians. But at every stage, the available ways that Palestinians can fight back have been constricted, and those things that horrify us come out of that. 

KHALIDI

I think there’s another point to be made. I argue in the book that various forms of armed action, including, especially, attacks on civilians, are horrific, immoral, and, very importantly, politically counterproductive. I go into this in some detail at one point in the book. But it has to be said that slaughtering civilians is slaughtering civilians. When Israel kills 16 children and five women in Gaza, using 2000-pound bombs and Hellfire missiles, if you don’t describe that as terrorism, and you describe the death of an Israeli child or an Israeli woman or another Israeli civilian as terrorism, this is Orwellian language. You are simply using the word “terrorism” as a bludgeon to demonize Palestinian resistance, whereas somehow the murder of children in Gaza … 16 kids were killed in these attacks, five women were killed in these attacks. Heaven knows how many other civilians were killed. Maybe a dozen militants were killed? I don’t know. But 30 or so civilians were murdered. If that’s not terrorism, then the word has no meaning. And this happens every single time. There were 240 civilians killed in one of these attacks a few years ago. Each time the toll is equally lopsided. Why are attacks on civilians not considered terrorism? If you use the same measure, I have no problem with the use of that term. But then you have to describe the use of Hellfire missiles and F-16s and heavy artillery in the same way. In the book I go into the kinds of weapons that are used by Israel— the artillery, the missiles, the aircraft, the helicopters—and the indiscriminate nature of the attacks on a population of a couple of million people in a tiny area. If that’s not terrorism, I don’t know what is. But of course, the term is only applied to the Palestinians. Somehow Ukrainian resistance is not terrorism yet Palestinian resistance is. I repeat, I think the killing of civilians is wrong and immoral. It’s a violation of international law. But if that’s true for the Palestinians, certainly it’s true for the Israelis as well and on a much larger scale.

[ourdallasvideofestthings]

Bart Chat 710/2020

Greetings all,

In last week’s chat, I talked about how long or short my chats should be and the feedback was split 50/50, so I will try to alternate between just the facts and rambling thoughts.   This week has been a good week for my 1970’s self. One of my students offered to transfer some audiotapes I made years ago, some from a band I played the drums, and some electronic music I composed at the Columbia Princeton electronic music center.  So, I added some ambient pictures and posted them on Facebook, and an old friend/teacher heard it and asked to put it on a soundtrack, which made me incredibly happy.  Then I saw the poster for a series of film screenings at Top Ten Records for some of my old 16 mm films, which was great. Then I realized I was in the same series as Craig Baldwin, Woody Vasulka, Chick Strand and Bruce Connor, which is some serious company—My 1970’s self would never have believed that my 1970’s work would be that relevant today. That was the 1970’s and as many of you know, in the 1980’s I was a VJ at On the Air and Video Bar. For the opening night of the Best of Fests, I will VJ as Video BARt—so, don’t miss it! The Best of Fests will be coming in a few weeks and I will share more details next week. We have 23 festivals in the Dallas Fort Worth area putting on ONE festival. VAD will have two screenings—International Falls, with Women’s Texas Festival and Flannery. In both cases, the filmmakers will be in attendance. So what is going on cinematically this week? The Angelika (and perhaps others) is playing The Assistant, the film for the moment.  Instead of making a noisy stand about Weinstein-esque behavior, it quietly lets you feel what it’s like to work in this world.  It’s a must-see. Probably no film is further away from the DC/Marvel Universe than this. At the Angelika, is Incitement, which takes us into the mind of the assassin who shot Prime Minister Rabin. They also have The Big Lebowski, Cyrano de Bergerac and the Bolshoi Ballet doing Swan Lake. The Texas Theater has another screening of the black and white version of Parasite, which I recommend. Also, they are showing the Life of Brian from the Pythons on Sunday. But the big news is another film by Matthew Barney called Redoubt: The new film by acclaimed artist and director Matthew Barney, creator of the CREMASTER Cycle and the film opera ‘River of Fundament’, unfolds as a series of hunts in the wilderness of Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains. The characters communicate a mythological narrative through dance, letting movement replace language as they pursue each other and their prey. The Magnolia is still showing Citizen K, which I also highly recommend. You can hear our interview with Alex Gibney about this film on Fog of Truth. Go see some films and have a great week.

Bart Weiss

Artistic Director, Dallas VideoFest

[thenoticeblog]

100 Days of Resistance: Day 2 “Donald Trump is the Most Anti-Israel US President in Generations”

by Dana Aliya Levinson

Now that Donald Trump is the President of the United States, I was thinking how can I resist his agenda? I decided on “100 Days of Resistance”. Every single day for the next 100 days I will post another piece that resists President Trump and his administration. This will come in the form of personal stories as a member of a marginalized group that is threatened under President Trump’s administration, as well as pieces on broader issues that face our nation thanks to him. Today’s piece is on the Israeli – Palestinian Conflict and moving our embassy to Jerusalem.

There has been much talk over the years and saber rattling from Republicans about moving our embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. While this has been a staple of a far-right agenda for over two decades, there has yet to be a President who is willing to carry it out. This is because once again, there is a lack of understanding of global flashpoints. Before diving into why this move is a yuuuuge mistake, it’s important to talk a little bit about the state of Israeli politics.

After the failure of the Oslo Accords at the end of Bill Clinton’s Presidency and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the so called ‘peace camp’ in Israeli politics experienced a major setback. The idea of a two state solution lost credibility for much of the Israeli electorate as they felt they took a risk, reached out an olive branch to the Palestinians and made what they felt were large concessions in an effort to make peace, and what they got was the second intifada. The assassination of Prime Minister Rabin by a far-right Jewish sympathizer splintered the Israeli electorate even further. Since Oslo, with the exception of a brief moment under Prime Minister Sharon and Tzipi Livni, the ‘peace camp’ has largely been decimated. Even many liberals in Israel are skeptical of reaching any sort of accord with the Palestinians, despite the fact that the Palestinians have different leadership than the Oslo era.

Going along with this growing skepticism about peace in the Israeli electorate is the growing acceptance of the settlement movement. The settlements in the Gaza Strip were all disassembled by Prime Minister Sharon. But since Sharon, under Prime Minister Netanyahu, the settlements in the West Bank have seen a major expansion. According to prior agreements, the West Bank is supposed to be the territory on which the Palestinians build their future state. The Israeli settlements have chipped away at that land, tacitly annexing what was supposed to be Palestinian territory and changing the facts on the ground in a way that will soon make a two state solution impossible, if it hasn’t already.

The settlements have not only chipped away at hope for a peace accord, but in real time they have destroyed Palestinian farmland, separated families, destroyed Palestinian water supplies, and given rise to increasing tensions between the settlers and the Palestinians. The issue is that Netanyahu needs the pro-settler parties to maintain his hold on power because they are part of his increasingly fragile governing coalition. The realpolitik of the situation for him is that supporting the settler movement is more politically advantageous than going against it. However, soon, the Israelis will either need to annex the West Bank entirely or let it go. Should that happen, Israel will have two options; they can either give all of the Palestinians living in the West Bank full Israeli citizenship, like the approximately twenty-five percent of Israel’s population who currently live within the recognized borders of the state of Israel who are Arab, or they can ethnically cleanse the West Bank, which some argue is already happening by way of the destruction of Palestinian land and communities to make way for Israeli settlements. The former would be a problem because the Palestinian birthrate is higher than the Jewish one. Demographically, within two generations, an Israel that annexed the West Bank would become a majority Palestinian state. At that point, Israel could either remain a democracy and would no longer be a ‘Jewish state,’ or, it would place restrictions on Palestinians being allowed to enter government and would retain its character as a Jewish state, but lose its character as a democracy. Former Secretary of State John Kerry wasn’t being hyperbolic. The second is a problem, because not only would it be a major human rights violation, but it would also destroy any international credibility that Israel has and would likely see large scale international calls for the overthrow of the regime even in Europe.

The Palestinians not only see the West Bank as part of their future state, but they see East Jerusalem, which includes the Old City, as their capital. The international community sees Jerusalem’s status as to be determined in a final agreement between the Israeli’s and Palestinians. The current de facto capital of Palestine is Ramallah, and the capital of Israel is Tel Aviv. The Israelis cite the historic Jewish ties to the Old City, including Judaism’s holiest site; the Western Wall, which is the only remaining piece of the ancient temple from antiquity which was the seat of Israelite rule for thousands of years, until the Babylonian exile and then the diaspora causing Roman exile and destruction of the temple. Islamic ties to the Old City of Jerusalem are also deep. The two mosques constructed on the site that the Ancient Temple once stood are among the holiest sites in all of Islam. The rock contained in the Dome of the Rock Mosque, according to Islamic theology, is where the Prophet Muhammad ascended into heaven. That very same rock, according to Jewish theology, is where Hashem tested Abraham’s faith by instructing him to sacrifice his son Isaac. Both the Palestinians and the Israelis say that the status of Jerusalem is for them, non-negotiable.

President Trump claims that he would like to be the one who finally solves the Israeli – Palestinian Conflict. Appointing a US ambassador who is pro-settler in David Friedman, and moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, will certainly not help. In fact, these two things could mark the final nail in the coffin for the two-state solution. As outlined earlier, overt support for the settlement movement will eventually make the two-state solution impossible and over time destroy the Jewish state from within. However, the far-right in Israeli politics sees the Old City as the rightful and historical capital for the Jewish people. Many in the far-right in Israel believe that Israeli dominion over it is divine right. The settler movement not only wants to de-facto take over the West Bank, they would like to see the Israeli capital officially moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The US moving our embassy to Jerusalem is a tacit recognition of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital. Meanwhile, Senior Palestinian officials have said that they would view such a move as an act of war. It could easily spark a third intifada as Mahmoud Abbas’ political power and therefore ability to stop it, gets weaker and weaker. Traditionally, the US has been the only country with significant enough leverage over the Israeli government to force them to make concessions in negotiations with the Palestinians. Rubber stamping the right wing and settler agenda will kill the two-state solution for  good, and this seems to be the position of the Trump administration.

I am a Jew, and I consider myself a liberal Zionist. My Great Uncle is a Holocaust survivor, and my family is descended from pogroms and destroyed villages. Despite high rates of US assimilation, anti-Semitism still exists in this country and around the world. In fact, the election of Donald Trump brought much of that latent ant-Semitism out into the open. The history of our diaspora has been one of discrimination and of genocide, first at the hands of the Spanish in the sixteenth century, and then at the hands of the Germans in the twentieth. I believe, as a Jew, it is important for us to have a voice on the world stage and a place we can call our homeland so that Jews can be advocated for worldwide. This said, I also consider myself pro-Palestinian, and I do not see these things as paradoxical. I do not support the settlement movement, I believe in the right of Palestinians to self-determination, and recognize what I feel are major human rights violations on the part of the Israeli government in the West Bank. If President Trump is viewed as legitimizing the idea of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital without a bilateral status agreement, or if he blesses continued settlement building, this will mean that a one state solution will be the only future. If the two state solution is killed, it will mark the beginning of the end of Israel as a Jewish State, or the end of Israeli Democracy. Because of this, President Trump is the biggest threat to Israel in generations.

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