turnabout:

In the face of UN recognition of a Palestinian state, 69% of Israelis thought that Israel should accept the decision and either start negotiations with the Palestinians about its implementation (34%) or not allow any change on the ground by the Palestinians (35%); 16% said Israel should oppose the decision and intensify the construction in the settlements; 7% think that Israel should annex the PA territory to Israel; and 4% think Israel should invade the PA territories and use force to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Faced with the same scenario, Palestinian participants of the survey said how they thought Israel might be made to withdraw from PA territory: 26% supported a return to armed attacks on army and settlers; 37% thought nonviolent resistance could be successful; and 30% supported negotiations with Israel. Fiftyfour percent of Palestinians in the West Bank said they would join large peaceful demonstrations in the West Bank and Jerusalem if they were to take place after the recognition of a Palestinian state.

I’m heartened by the statistics on both sides. 

(Source: brooklynmutt)

“The goal is to liberate the minds of our people,” says Najwan Berekdar, an Israeli-born Arab who is a women’s-rights activist. “We want to get past all the old identities—Fatah, Hamas, religious, secular, Israeli and Palestinian Arab —and create a mass nonviolent movement.” Berekdar has touched on an idea that might prove truly threatening to Israelis: a “one state” movement uniting Palestinians on both sides of the current border. But the young Palestinians have not focused on anything so specific. Their current political plan is to go back to the future—to achieve Palestinian unity by resurrecting and holding elections for a body called the Palestinian National Council, which took a backseat after the Oslo accords created the Palestinian Authority and its parliamentary component. This seems rather abstruse—the basic rule for people-power movements is, Organize first, bureaucratize later — and it would be easy to dismiss these young people as hopelessly naive but for two factors. The first is that they’ve seized the Palestinian version of a suddenly valuable international brand: the Tahrir Square revolution. “We cannot discount their importance,” a prominent Israeli official told me. “Not after what happened in Egypt.”

But equally important are their methods. Ever since Israel won control of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, the Palestinian national movement has been defined by terrorism, intransigence and, until recently in the West Bank, corruption. It has never been known for dramatic acts of nonviolence. “If they’d been led by Gandhi rather than Yasser Arafat, they would have had a state 20 years ago,” Kenneth Pollack of the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution told me. Israeli officials acknowledge that the recent, peaceful economic and security reforms led by Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad have been the most effective tactics the Palestinians have ever used in trying to create a state. But they haven’t gotten the Palestinians anywhere in their negotiations with the equally intransigent Israeli government. Jewish settlements continue to expand on Palestinian land. A mass nonviolent movement might tip the balance, especially if the world—including the Israeli public —began to see Palestinians as noble practitioners of passive resistance rather than as suicide bombers.

The Israeli leadership is as perplexed as everyone else about what the revolutionary tide in the region will bring. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he’d prefer dealing with democracies, but he isn’t so sure that the Tahrir Square movement will yield a democracy in Egypt (and there are already indications that Egypt’s new government will push harder for a Palestinian peace accord than Mubarak ever did). Netanyahu has wisely called for a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, an idea that the Saudis—who seem to agree with the Israelis on practically everything these days—have also quietly endorsed. “If you can’t get the young Egyptians involved in big public-works projects, like new housing, which is badly needed,” an Israeli intelligence expert told me, “then they’re back in the square for sure, only they’ll be supporting the Muslim Brotherhood this time.”

That seems unduly pessimistic. The Facebook rebels may have more influence on the suddenly antiquated Islamists than vice versa; if there is Shari’a, it will come with alternative-energy start-ups and a Coca-Cola chaser. “You have to wonder what sort of influence this revolution has had on Hamas,” a Palestinian Christian said to me. “Are they watching al-Jazeera and seeing nonviolence succeed where terrorism has failed?”
(Read full article)

jonathan-cunningham:

Israel informed the 15 members of the United Nations Security Council last week, as well as several other prominent European Union countries, that if the Palestinian Authority persists in its efforts to gain recognition in September as a state within the 1967 borders, Israel would respond with a series of unilateral steps of its own.

…

The Israeli diplomatic corps conveyed the message that support for international recognition, particularly by most of the members of the European Union, encouraged the Palestinians to forgo negotiations with Israel and to move more quickly toward recognition at the UN of Palestinian statehood. Israeli diplomats stressed that such a move violates the Oslo Accords and will not lead to a Palestinian state even if the General Assembly grants recognition, but could lead to violence on the ground.

To those who continue to say the Israeli/Palestine conflict is between two equal sides: how can you justify Israel not recognizing the existence of Palestine, killing six Palestinians (including civilians) with an armed, disciplined military for every Israeli killed, and continuing settlements/bulldozing/forced evictions?  There is only one ‘side’ of this conflict that can end the violence, and it’s definitely not Palestine. 

Unsurprisingly, even for Israeli Jews, democratic freedoms are eroding at an alarming rate. Israeli human rights groups and left-leaning NGOs are under attack from right-wing activists and the most extreme, racist government in Israel’s history. The Israeli Knesset will soon open an investigation into the funding of Israeli human rights groups, part of a wider campaign to suppress their work and prevent them from documenting Israeli human rights abuses. The political climate in Israel today resembles the Jim Crow South in the 1950s coupled with the McCarthyism of the time. Conscientious people are refusing to participate in these witch hunts.

Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories suffer many of the same injustices as the peoples of totalitarian regimes and more: torture and abuse at the hands of a repressive state security apparatus; bombardment, white phosphorus, and assassination; systemic inequality, both racial and economic; lack of political freedoms; poverty — in our case the result of deliberate Israeli government policies. And the same tear gas canisters, made in the U.S., are fired at demonstrators in Cairo, Tunis and the West Bank. Palestinian demonstrators in Israel are shot in the streets.

As Arab popular movements strive to establish democracy and Israeli officials move to constrain civil liberties, it is increasingly clear that calling Israel a democracy is a misnomer. At best, it is an ethnocracy, where only Jews enjoy the full rights and privileges of citizenship. Today, there is a de facto, virtual caste system within the territories that Israel controls, with Israel’s Jewish settlers at the top and Muslim and Christian Palestinians in the Occupied Territories at the bottom. Increasingly, people around the world are recognizing this situation for what it is: apartheid. Former Israeli Prime Ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak have both warned of an apartheid future if the status quo is maintained, and pro-Israel columnist Thomas Friedman recently did the same.

(Source: letthetruthlaugh)

newsflick:

Utterly Wrong: U.S. Will Veto The UN Resolution Condemning Settlements

Anyone who thought that the United States has learned anything from the various revolutions upturning the Arab world has another think coming. We didn’t.

On Thursday, as the Egyptian revolution was…

Recommended reading.

(Source: newsflick)