For some people Passover/Pesach week is a gastronomic ordeal. In Israel, unless you are an unabashed sinner and have stocked up on leavened food products to tide you over till the bakers knead again, you will have to grin and bear it. However, the enforcement of the Matzot Law 2008 is very lax and if you are prepared to go the extra mile, you might find a minimart that sells “Chametz.” In our neck of the woods that extra mile stretches to Nazareth, a short drive from Ein Harod. Ironically supermarkets in Nazareth stock matzot all the year round. It appears the Arabs have acquired a taste for the “bread of our affliction.”
One of the affliction events in the Israeli Arab’s calendar is “Land Day,” an annual event that commemorates the violent clashes between the Israeli security forces (the army and the police) and Arab protestors at the time of first Land Day in 1976.
Despite rousing promos and advance preparations this year’s event was poorly attended. On Land Day which fell on the 30th of March, our borders were quiet. In fact the total attendance at protest rallies and marches held in Israel and the Arab states was far less than the number of participants in the Tel Aviv marathon held the same day. The organisers reported that 25,000 runners started the race and 100,000 supporters lined the marathon route.
The lack of response to the Land Day events can be attributed to a number of causes. The Tel Aviv marathon certainly wasn’t one of them.
For decades the Palestinian cause enjoyed broad-based support throughout the Middle East. Since the advent of the “Arab Spring,” the Palestinian Cause has largely been ignored. Unfinished business at home, namely, the ongoing political struggle throughout the Levant, has taken precedence over everything else.
For many years the Palestinian Cause was staunchly supported by the left flank of the Israeli political spectrum. For decades justice for the Palestinians was a defining issue succinctly worded in party manifestos. Now it is passé, omitted, largely forgotten. There were too many “initiatives” that fizzled out to maintain the support and interest of Israeli peaceniks. Arafat’s reluctance to really move forward at Camp David may not have been the “last straw,” but it was one of many last straws. There were too many shuttles between Jerusalem and Ramallah and too many agreements that were “almost signed.” Middle East affairs analyst Guy Bechor wrote the bottom line in an article he wrote for Yediot Ahronot this week. “When the Left discovered that the Palestinians have no interest in peace or negotiations, it replaced the Palestinian agenda with a new one, premised on social issues like cottage cheese and the tent protest.”
In his New York Times column Thomas L. Friedman gave the Palestinians some practical advice. The piece entitled “A Middle East Twofer” (I believe that’s an Americanism meaning two for the price of one) takes up the call made by Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti currently serving five life sentences. Friedman wrote, “His call for nonviolent resistance is noteworthy and the latest in a series of appeals to and by Palestinians — coming from all over — to summon their own “Arab Awakening,” but do it nonviolently, with civil disobedience or boycotts of Israel, Israeli settlements or Israeli products.
I can certainly see the efficacy of nonviolent resistance by Palestinians to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank — on one condition: They accompany any boycotts, sit-ins or hunger strikes with a detailed map of the final two-state settlement they are seeking. Just calling for “an end to occupation” won’t cut it.
Palestinians need to accompany every boycott, hunger strike or rock they throw at Israel with a map delineating how, for peace, they would accept getting back 95 percent of the West Bank and all Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem and would swap the other 5 percent for land inside pre-1967 Israel. Such an arrangement would allow some 75 percent of the Jewish settlers to remain in the West Bank, while still giving Palestinians 100 percent of the land back. “
A number of political observers claim that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s coalition government can’t, or doesn’t want to negotiate with the Palestinians. Furthermore, they say, “What incentive is there to make territorial concessions when they will only undermine Israel’s security.” Friedman believes he has the formula for an agreement. “The Iron Law of the peace process is that whoever makes the Israeli silent majority feel morally insecure about occupation but strategically secure in Israel wins.” ….” Unabated, disruptive Palestinian civil disobedience in the West Bank, coupled with a map delineating a deal most Israelis would buy, is precisely what would make Israelis feel morally insecure but strategically secure and revive the Israeli peace camp. It is the only Palestinian strategy Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu fears, but it is one that he is sure Palestinians would never adopt. He thinks it’s not in their culture. Will they surprise him?” Tom Friedman has said something similar in other articles he wrote. However, in last week’s column he didn’t mention the Palestinian demand for the repatriation of the Palestinian refugees. Abbas, Fayyad or even Barghouti would never be able to pen an agreement that states the refugees won’t be coming home. The vague chance of that happening has been compounded by the efforts for a rapprochement between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.
I could claim that we have every reason to be smug. The world, especially the Arab World has forgotten the Palestinians. We can continue building in east Jerusalem and the West Bank with impunity. Soon it will be impossible to draw the borders of a contiguous Palestinian state.
Israel is unquestionably the strongest state in the Middle East. We have learnt how to deal with the threat of asymmetric warfare. We build smart fences and walls, we devise defence systems that counter anti-tank and anti-personnel carrier projectiles. We have our Iron Dome, David’s Sling and the Arrow anti-ballistic missile system. Perhaps we’re not impregnable but we are damn hard to hit. Furthermore we are getting better at hitting our would be assailants before they can hit us. Pre-empting is our forte.
I think most Israelis are not too concerned that the Palestinians haven’t got a state. Nonetheless, they would probably accept Tom Friedman’s Iron Law, partly because they don’t expect it to happen soon.
However, we are concerned by boycotts and blacklisting exercised against Israelis and Israeli products. Once we were the darlings of the Western world. Now we are closer to being a Pariah state. That worries me, especially knowing that we won’t wake up one morning and discover that all the Palestinians have packed their goods and chattels and emigrated to the Yukon or Northern Territory. They are here to stay. We can’t push them over the border to Jordan or Egypt.
At this juncture I simply have to mention Günter Grass. The Nobel prize winning author published a nine stanza poem recently.
An article in the New York Times explained why Grass chose now to publish his diatribe “Why do I say only now, aged and with my last drop of ink, that the nuclear power Israel endangers an already fragile world peace? Because that must be said which may already be too late to say tomorrow.”
In an interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung the paper that published his poem Grass said he did not mean to attack Israel, but Mr. Netanyahu’s policies. “I should have also brought that into the poem,” he said.
In an interview with Der Spiegel, the Israeli historian Tom Segev said that the poem seems to be more about Grass's long silence about his own Nazi past than about German silence about Israel's nuclear programme.
However, what makes the publication of the poem significant is that it expresses a sense of anger against Israel that – justified or not – many Germans seem increasingly to share. This anger is partly a response to Israel's rightward shift during the past decade. But it seems also to be a product of developments in Germany and in particular the way that the Holocaust has receded in significance during the last decade. Increasingly, Germans seem to see themselves as victims rather than perpetrators.
Columnist Anshel Pfeffer who writes for Haaretz, entitled his column "The Moral Blindness of Günter Grass."
“Logic and reason are useless when a highly intelligent man, a Nobel laureate no less, does not understand that his membership in an organization that planned and carried out the wholesale genocide of millions of Jews disqualified him from criticizing the descendants of those Jews for developing a weapon of last resort that is the insurance policy against someone finishing the job his organization began,” … “Having served in the organization that tried, with a fair amount of success, to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth he should keep his views to himself when it comes to the Jews’ doomsday weapon.”
Our interior minister Eli Yishai declared Günter Grass persona non grata. I doubt if the author is perturbed by Yishai’s peevish knee-jerk reaction. Well maybe that was the last drop of ink from Günter Grass.
My closing comments this week reflect back to Pesach/Passover
This year too old and new doubts concerning the authenticity of the exodus narrative have been aired. Archaeologist Professor Israel Finkelstein’s book "The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts" raised quite a storm when it was published almost a decade ago. Finkelstein and others claim the exodus never occurred. Just the same he sees no contradiction between holding a proper Pesach Seder and telling the story of the exodus from Egypt, and his personal opinion.
Biblical scholar Israel Knohl’s latest book “Ha-Shem: The Secret Numbers of the Hebrew Bible and the Mystery of the Exodus from Egypt” also promotes the no exodus opinion. Knohl states there was no need for an exodus because Canaan was one of Egypt’s vassal states The Egyptians were here.. The sea crossed by the Israelites in the Exodus narrative was not the Red Sea. The original text refers to it as the Sea of Reeds. Knohl identifies it as Lake Hula in the north of Israel. There are no reeds in the Red Sea, however the Egyptians planted reeds in Lake Hula. According to Professor Knohl the Israelites were a Canaanite tribe that gained independence from their Egyptian overlords.
I’m waiting for interior minister Eli Yishai ( Shas religious party) to declare Israel Knohl persona non grata.
Last week I included a link to video of our Cutting of the Omer ceremony.
I am including here a hyperlink to this year’s ceremony:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GxAGA0vefM&feature=youtu.be
Chag Sameach
Beni 12th of April, 2012.
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