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The stick of boycott v the carrot of recognition

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The targeted boycott of Israel should be complemented with Arab recognition of the Jewish state and grassroots engagement with ordinary Israelis.

Monday 1 October 2012

In a YouTube video, Chili Peppers express their excitement about their imminent Tel Aviv gig.

It is a mark of the phenomenal success of a certain band from Los Angeles that the words Red Hot Chili Peppers are primarily associated in the minds of millions with a unique flavour of funky sounds that has all the spice and kick of the piquant fruit they are named after. The Chili Peppers were an important and integral part of the soundtrack to my youth.

Appealing to the band’s sense of justice, many Palestinians and supporters of the cultural boycott against Israel called on the Chili Peppers to cancel their recent concert in Tel Aviv but to no avail.

“Art alone cannot break down a wall that appropriates Palestinian land and resources,” Palestinian-American poet, writer and activist Remi Kanazi, who is a member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, wrote in an article for al-Jazeera calling on the band to cancel their Israel gig. “But artists and their art can inspire millions to take conscientious action against occupation and discrimination.”

In ignoring this outcry, were Kiedis and his crew guilty of putting profit over principle and of hypocrisy?

In the past, I might have responded with an unqualified, “Yes, they were”, and advocates of the boycott against Israel see the Chili Peppers as having sold out the Palestinians by coming here and behaving as if there were no occupation. And to their discredit and shame, the band which has dedicated so many memorable lyrics to the racism and segregation suffered by African-Americans and the plight of Native Americans, despite expressing strong love for Israel, did not seem able even to spare a single word for the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza who live in enforced segregation.

That said, the situation is not entirely black and white. The Chili Peppers have a special emotional link with Israel, because the group’s original guitarist Hillel Slovak was Israeli, and Kiedis and crew may have decided that Israelis cannot be held collectively responsible for the crimes and injustices committed by their state.

For myself and the majority of Arabs, the idea of boycotting Israel is almost second nature, given that it has been an integral part of Arab political culture for decades. Even in Egypt, which has had a peace treaty with Israel for most my life, those who deal with Israel or Israelis are often depicted as unscrupulous opportunists who are out to profit from the misery of their Palestinian brethren.

Prior to moving here, I did not buy any Israeli products and, given my commitment to ethical spending, I still believe that a targeted economic boycott is justified to ensure that people do not bankroll the occupation and the subjugation of the Palestinians. In fact, in addition to the popular boycott, Western governments should not effectively be rewarding Israel for its intransigence and there is a case to be made for the United States to suspend military aid and the EU to downgrade relations with Israel – which the EU’s former foreign policy chief Javier Solana once described as an EU member in all but name – until a peace deal is reached.

However, I do have serious misgivings about the cultural and academic boycott. Although institutions which perpetuate the occupation, such as military research centres or universities on occupied land, should rightly not be dealt with, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) effectively calls for a blanket boycott, arguing that, “unless proven otherwise”, all Israeli academic and cultural bodies “are complicit in maintaining the Israeli occupation and denial of basic Palestinian rights”. But presuming guilt until innocence is proven is unjust, and this is a form of collective punishment, albeit not on the scale of the Gaza blockade.

On a more pragmatic level, it is also counterproductive. Take the case of the German documentary about Jerusalem which was set to feature both Palestinian and Israeli residents to show the reality of life in the divided city. Pressure from campaigners caused many Palestinians to pull out of the project, the upshot of which will be that the film is more likely to show only Israeli perspectives.

The veteran Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab – who co-founded the now-defunct Bitter Lemons journal where Palestinian and Israeli intellectuals engaged in oft-heated dialogue – described the furor as a form of “intellectual terrorism”. Other activists who advocate joint action and dialogue I have spoken to have complained of a growing rejection of their approach.

“Some regard any encounter with an Israel as ‘normalization’. I am against normalization… but dialogue is not normalization,” a prominent activist who has spent years promoting Israeli-Palestinian dialogue told me. “Peace is too precious to be left only to politicians,” she emphasised.

Part of the reason for this hardening of positions appears to be disillusionment and scepticism at the entire apparatus – which put some emphasis on dialogue and collaboration between the two sides – put in place as part of the failed and discredited “peace process”.

“The aim of most of these so-called dialogues is to give the impression that there is an exchange going on,” one young activist involved in the BDS movement told me. “But this happens without the recognition of our rights, without the acknowledgement that there is a people being oppressed.”

But by punishing sympathetic Israelis along with hostile ones, this kind of unenlightened boycott alienates the doves more than it isolates the hawks. Although the cultural boycott claims to target institutions and not individuals, individuals who work for these bodies more often than not fall prey to the boycott, regardless of their politics.

“They will not invite me to Ramallah because I teach at Tel Aviv University,” complained Shlomo Sand, the maverick Israeli historian and one-time friend of the Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish, warning that the Palestinians were boycotting “the most liberal segment of the Israeli political culture”.

“It’s a very, very closed-minded tactic,” he told me.

Moreover, the Arabs have little to show for their decades of boycott, beyond perhaps the emotional satisfaction of not dealing with the enemy. Some suggest that it has even strengthened Israel. “I think that the reason for Israel’s prosperity is, ultimately, an unexpected result of the boycott,” believes Iraqi-Israeli poet Sasson Somekh, who was a close friend of Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz.

“I am against boycotts, even of your worst enemies,” he told me. “If you want to influence them and change the status quo, you need to have dialogue with them, not boycott them.”

Counterintuitive as it may sound to many Arab ears, the best way forward is for ordinary Arabs, not just Palestinians, to engage more with ordinary Israelis – both in dialogue and joint action – because there can be no resolution to this conflict without an Israeli partner, and gaining that partner requires the empowering of Israel’s increasingly marginalized and embattled peace movement.

Moreover, the blanket Arab boycott belies a profound and damaging misunderstanding of the Israeli psyche and the existential angst Jews have suffered following the deadly pogroms of the previous century and the Holocaust. The majority of Israelis do not see the boycott as a principled stand in solidarity with the Palestinians, but as a manifestation of Arab rejection of Israel’s right to exist.

To allay such fears and deprive Israeli hawks of their intellectual and emotional prey, I think that the majority of Arab countries who have not yet done so, perhaps through the Arab League, should immediately recognize Israel within its pre-1967 borders. This simple, highly symbolic act – which actually costs the Arabs nothing and does no harm to the Palestinian cause – can help the Arab world, rather like Anwar Sadat once did, to go over the intransigent Israeli leadership’s heads and appeal directly to the Israeli public.

Sadat believed that a psychological barrier existed between Arabs and Israelis – a “barrier of suspicion, a barrier of rejection; a barrier of fear, or deception” – which constituted “70% of the whole problem”. While the percentage is open to question, in this, Sadat, for all his failings, was largely right.

—

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This article first appeared in Haaretz on 19 September 2012.

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Nearly sisters: the common cause of Israeli and Palestinian women

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By Khaled Diab

The fog of war obscures the similar challenges facing women in Israel and Palestine and how the conflict hinders them from finding common cause.

Monday 13 August 2012

A photo of a presumed Israeli soldier exercising her right to bare arms – and legs and midriff – with a machine gun slung casually over her shoulder has gone viral.

While supporters of Israel have seized on this image to talk up the virtues of the IDF, pro-Palestinians are bound to view this as an attempt to sex up the ugly reality of the harsh occupation – after all, regardless of how “sexy” an assault rifle-bikini combo on a Tel Aviv beach seems to distant voyeurs, relocate it to a West Bank checkpoint, and it rapidly loses its questionable charm.

As the proud ‘Only in Israel’ caption accompanying the snapshot clearly demonstrates, this modern-day Jewish Amazon confirms Israel’s image amongst its cheerleaders as the land of tough, independent and sexy women who are every bit their men’s equal, unlike those oppressed, repressed and depressed Arab women.

Of course, like with all myths, there is a kernel of truth to this. Secular Israeli women are, judging by what I’ve seen, probably the most independent and empowered women in the Middle East, but their Palestinian “sisters” are hardly pushovers, as I’ve found out for myself through encounters with eccentrically philosophical doctors and capable professionals, frontline activists, articulate artists, and more.

Besides, there is, quite literally, another Israel. Only 60-odd km away from “decadent” and “hedonistic” Tel Aviv, lies “holy” Jerusalem, a theocratic stone’s throw away from Tehran. In the city’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods, where vigilante modesty patrols intimidate the streets, women must dress modestly, are segregated from men during religious festivals, often occupy the back of the bus, and their ‘offensive’ form is effaced from posters.

The main difference between Jewish and Muslim (and Christian too) patriarchy in the Holy Land is less one of substance and more about fashion – hijabs vs wigs and scarves. For moderately religious Jews, shorter skirts are ‘in’ and trousers are ‘sin’, while the fashion-conscious ‘muhajaba’ will don skin-tight jeans but not bare any part of her legs.

But fashion tastes amongst the ultra-conservative are converging, as reflected by the tiny but growing minority of Jewish women choosing to dress in Islamic-style black niqabs and loose gowns to protect their “chastity”. The Rabbinate has become so alarmed by this development that it has condemned this practice as a form of veiled sexual deviancy, though the leader of the “Jewish burqa” movement insists that it is an ancient Jewish tradition.

Of course, the public role some women play in fundamentalist Jewish and Islamic movements could be viewed as an emancipation of sorts, even if they do preach what secularists like myself view as the subjugation of women, but which they see as respect and honour.

Besides, even among secularists, chauvinism is not always far beneath the surface. Take the supposedly emancipating image of the bikini-clad soldier. While male fighters tend to be celebrated for their courage and bravery, the fawning, fondling hand of misogyny ensures that this “hot chick” is praised for her “Guns’n’Buns” and for putting the “ass in assassin”.

Similarly, while hard-talking male journalists the world over are often widely admired, even by their detractors, it can be a different story for women. Lisa Goldman, an award-winning journalist and co-founder of the independent leftwing +972 magazine, complained of the naked misogyny and the very personal nature of the attacks she has to endure from opponents. “The criticism directed at me is harsher than that directed at my male colleagues who often write more radical stuff than I do,” she told me.

Now back to the machine gun. The spectacle of women bearing arms in the Middle East is hardly unique to Israel (where women, with the exception of one infantry battalion, are actually not allowed to serve in combat), though in the Arab context, such as in Algeria, it has tended to be as paramilitaries.

The “poster girl” of Palestinian armed resistance has to be Leila Khaled, the first woman ever to hijack an aircraft, in 1969, heading from Rome to Athens – though it should be pointed out that she has claimed publicly that she never intended to harm, nor ever did in reality, the passengers. Although Israelis regard Khaled as terrorism personified, photos of her – smiling enigmatically or staring dreamily, while holding an AK-47 and wearing a ring made of a bullet and a grenade pin – have become iconic in many Palestinian circles.

Khaled was a member of the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which like much of the Palestinian secular left, and in a similar vein to early secular Zionism, saw the empowerment of women as a crucial prerequisite for national salvation and justice.

The unfolding reality of the conflict has both empowered and weakened women on both sides. An example of this is how Palestinian women have been empowered enough to take to the streets to protest the occupation but are, along with their families and male comrades who “let” them go out, mocked mercilessly by conservatives for emasculating the struggle and trying to usurp what should be men’s work, activists have told me.

And things are not improving or are getting worse, especially in Gaza.

“Palestinian women are highly educated but the positions they occupy are not commensurate to their abilities,” says Nancy Sadiq, who runs a pro-democracy and peace NGO, Panorama, in Ramallah. “At meetings or conferences, I am invariably one of the only women there.”

“In general, a woman tends be to a second-class citizen, whether here or in Israel, though Israeli women have better legal, social and economic rights. The difference is one of degree,” she adds.

In fact, machismo has been prevalent in Zionism which, after all, has sought to craft the tough and muscular new Jew who would never again go like a “lamb to the slaughter”. Even the ostensibly egalitarian kibbutzim were not able to dispel fully the spectre of traditional gender roles. This was something which shocked my compatriot, the maverick adventurer Sana Hasan, the first Egyptian civilian to visit Israel, in the mid-1970s, at a time when the two countries were still in a state of war. “It took me a while to realise that the glamorous image of women pioneers ploughing fields and carting manure… was largely mythical,” she wrote.

The conflict has threatened the gains Israeli and Palestinian women have registered, partly due to the rise in importance of “traditional values” and the religious fundamentalism which it has engendered. Though fundamentalism is partially a reaction to the insecurity bred by modernity, in the Israeli-Palestinian context, it is also a response to victory and defeat.

Fundamentalists and religious conservatives often connect Arab weakness to “immorality” and displeasing God. And returning to the “straight path”, in this worldview, involves restoring women’s “honour”. In addition, living under the autocracy of occupation, much like living under dictatorship, robs people of their freewill and men of their perceived “manhood”, leading many to exercise control over all that’s left to them: women and children.

But Israel’s victories and might have not enabled women to cast off the suffocating straitjacket of religious patriarchy. On the contrary, the idea that the whimsical Abrahamic God is apparently smiling on Israel has led to an upsurge in religious fundamentalism, much of it messianic in nature. As the demographic balance between “secular” and “religious” gradually shifts in the latter’s favour, the importance of women living by the laws of the Torah and Halakha is growing. Although Orthodox women now have the opportunity to study Rabbinic texts and train in particular areas of Jewish law, the basic outlines of the traditional patriarchy still remain intact in religious circles.

The fog of conflict obscures the fact that the gender wars in Israel and Palestine are remarkably similar, and that Arab and Jewish women share much in common in their struggle against the patriarchal order. In a less polarised context, women on both sides of the divide might have found common cause in their struggle against the wave of increasingly rigid religiosity, and its accompanying gender restrictions, engulfing both societies.

This is the extended version of an article which appeared in Haaretz on 9 August 2012.

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Behind the ‘Zion Curtain’

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By Khaled Diab

Living behind the ‘Zion Curtain’ reveals how alike Israelis and Palestinians are and how ordinary people must build common ground on this shared land.

Thursday 19 July 2012

Sharing the same land has caused Israelis and Palestinians to become more alike. Can this be used to build common ground? Photo: ©Khaled Diab

Not so long ago, an Iron Curtain split Europe. Similarly, a sort of “Zion Curtain” still divides the Middle East. But unlike communism and capitalism, Zionism and pan-Arabism are remarkably similar: both have sought to unify and empower diverse cultures who share a common religious heritage, on the one side, and a common language, on the other.

In addition to the physical barriers separating most Israelis and Palestinians from one another and the Holy Land’s isolation from the wider region, there are the apparently insurmountable psychological and emotional walls behind which each side takes cover, lest they unwittingly catch a glimpse of the human face peering across that political minefield littered with the explosive remnants of history.

Carrying as little political baggage as possible, I took the rare initiative – for an Egyptian – and stole across this no-man’s-land a few years ago in a personal bid to connect with ordinary people and see for myself the reality on the ground. Last year, I returned – this time with my wife and toddler son – to deepen my knowledge and do my little bit for the cause.

Egyptian intellectuals in the past who have preceded me on similar journeys have often faced censure and even ostracism, because their critics confuse dialogue and sympathy with Israelis with normalisation with Israel and approval of its policies towards the Palestinians. Despite the Camp David peace agreement, there is little traffic between Egypt and Israel. However, though I am a rarity in this land, I am by no means the only Egyptian who has made this journey. In addition to diplomats and some Christian pilgrims, a steady trickle of Egyptian pacifists has crossed the border.

Most Israelis are aware of the late president Anwar al-Sadat’s historic visit in 1977, but he was not the first Egyptian to cross the border. Some years earlier, when Egypt and Israel were still in a state of war, a young maverick and idealistic PhD student by the name of Sana Hasan threw caution to the wind and crossed the border. During her three-year sojourn, Hasan met just about everyone and did just about everything in her bid to understand her enemy and extend a hand of peace. She even wrote a memorable book about her exploits.

Another notable example is the leftist Ali Salem, the famous satirist and playwright who wrote perhaps the most famous Arabic-language stage comedy of the 20^th century. In the more optimistic early 1990s, the portly, larger-than-life Salem mounted his trusted stead – a Soviet-era Niva jeep – and set off on a conspicuous road trip through Israel, which he fashioned into a bestselling book.

Both these brave individuals faced more condemnation than approval for daring to cross enemy lines. Personally, despite some criticism, I have encountered a great deal of positive reactions and encouragement, especially from Palestinians themselves. For their part, many Israelis I encounter are thrilled to connect with a genuine McAhmed Egyptian, and ply me with so many questions that I sometimes feel like I’m the sole representative of an alien race from a faraway planet.

Viewed from the inside, one of the most striking things about this tiny land – whose combined Jewish and Arab population is barely half that of my hometown, Cairo – is its sheer, dizzying diversity, which could be its most powerful asset in the absence of conflict.

Not only do you have two self-identified nations and three main religious groups, you also have enormous ethnic, social and cultural variety within Israeli and Palestinian ranks. Jerusalem is a colourful – and often monochromatic – catwalk of the variously attired faithful, while Tel Aviv and Ramallah are the choice hangouts for the secular.

The downside of this variety is discord. While the outside world is acutely aware of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, less noticed are the fault lines within each society, between the religious and the secular, hawks and doves, maximalists and pragmatists, to take just a sample.

Another striking feature is how much Israelis and Palestinians have in common, despite their bitter political differences. For instance, though Israel is variously perceived as an “outpost” of Western civilisation or a Western “implant,” depending on your political convictions, culturally and socially it is also very Middle Eastern, not only because a significant proportion of its population is of Mizrahi Jewish descent, but also because of the direction in which Israeli society has evolved. I am sometimes surprised by how much Arab culture has sunk into the Israeli mainstream, despite the Ashkenazi cultural dominance. In fact, despite Israel’s European aspirations, Israel certainly does not feel like part of Europe: it is an odd blend of Middle Eastern colour and tradition, Eastern European austerity and communalism, and, like other parts of the region, sprayed over with a recent layer of superficial American consumerism.

In fact, I would hazard to say that Israelis, Palestinians and the people of the wider Levant resemble each other more than they do the Jewish Diaspora or Arabs from, say, the Gulf. Israelis and Palestinians share a wide range of attitudes to family, education, work, friendship, socialising, driving, and even creaking bureaucracies and rough-round-the-edges finishing. Moreover, even though many Israelis in public are somewhat abrasive and direct, they often have a Middle Eastern attitude to helpfulness and, in private, share regional notions of hospitality, as I have personally experienced.

Moreover, the close proximity in which Israelis and Palestinians live – and the very extensive contact that occurred between the two peoples prior to the current segregation, as recalled oft-nostalgically by older people – has profoundly influenced both sides. In Israel, the Arab influence is clear to see in the culture, music, cuisine and language, while the Israeli influence, as well as the necessities of the conflict, seems to have made Palestinians more individualistic and anti-authoritarian than many of their Arab neighbours.

In terms of language, modern Hebrew was profoundly influenced by Arabic, while Palestinian Arabic is increasingly borrowing from Hebrew. Sometimes Palestinians use Hebrew words, yet are convinced they are Arabic, such as “ramzor,” the word for “traffic light.” Moreover, young Palestinian-Israelis speak in a confusing mix of Hebrew and Palestinian Arabic, while older Iraqi Jews liberally inject Baghdadi Arabic into their Hebrew.

When it comes to cuisine, while Israel’s acquisition of hummus as its national dish has led to the so-called “Hummus Wars,” Palestinians too have borrowed, albeit to a lesser extent, food from their Jewish neighbours. The prime example is, as I discovered, the surprising popularity of schnitzel among Palestinians.

The decades-old conflict has also profoundly shaped the psyche of both peoples, though it takes a far greater physical and material toll on the Palestinians. Most Palestinians and Israelis alive today were born into conflict, and this has bred a deep level of insecurity, paranoia and despair. This translates not only into positive attitudes towards, for instance, education, solidarity and steadfastness, but also into self-destructive notions that the world is against them, and the conflict is insoluble.

But the conflict is resolvable, not in any dramatic, comprehensive, final manner, but gradually, inch by painful inch, as pragmatism and the need to coexist slowly defeat ideology and intolerance. And the key to that future lies not with the failed leadership on both sides, or the ineffectual international community, but with ordinary people, Israelis and Palestinians willing to work together to transform the land they share into a true common ground.

—

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This is the extended version of an article first published in Haaretz on 17 July 2012.

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Safeguarding Arab media heritage… in Israel

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By Khaled Diab

The world’s largest Arabic-language press archive is located in Israel. Should Arabs use it or boycott it?

Wednesday 6 June 2012

Some vintage Egyptian newspapers. Photo: ©Khaled Diab

After a lively encounter at Tel Aviv University with the renegade Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, author of the bestselling The invention of the Jewish people, I met a friend, the young Israeli Arabist and historian Ofir Winter who has a profound interest in Egypt and is researching Arab perceptions of Israel.

“I have a surprise for you. It’s one of the university’s hidden gems,” he told me as he led me to a poorly lit and rarely visited corner of the campus. Our destination: the university’s Arabic press archives which, its curators claim, is the largest collection of Arab print media in the world.

Pleasantly surprised by the unexpected visit from an Egyptian, the two Michaels who seem to be temporarily in charge following the untimely death of the archive’s founder Haim Gal proudly showed me around, including a couple of the seven massive halls containing some 24,000 boxes of publications of all sorts dating back to the 1950s. In the archive’s main hall was row upon row of leading and obscure Arab publications – not just newspapers and political journals, but also lifestyle and women’s magazines – not to mention Turkish and Persian titles.

Since the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions erupted last year, the archive’s resource-strapped team, mostly made up of volunteers, has struggled to keep up with the explosion in new publications that have emerged, especially online. “New titles are coming out all the time and we have to be fast in downloading them because some don’t stay online for long,” explained one researcher as she clicked away at her computer.

One of the Michaels showed me an item that seemed to hold pride of place in the collection, even though it was only a facsimile, the first-ever edition of Egypt’s oldest newspaper still in print, al-Ahram, dated 5 August 1876. Instead of the paper’s famous masthead featuring the three pyramids of Giza, the original showed only two pyramids and the Sphinx. Unlike today’s bulky version, issue one was one large sheet folded into four pages. It is also very difficult to read for the modern eye, because it contained no columns or headlines.

“The most exciting materials I found there were the October magazines from the time of Sadat’s peace initiative,” Winter tells me. “I was moved deeply when I saw images of Sadat arriving at Haifa port in September 1979, with happy Israeli children waving the flags of both Egypt and Israel.”

Of course, the very existence of this archive is likely to arouse suspicion in the minds of some Arabs, who are bound to view it as an intelligence-gathering apparatus. The archive’s management itself insists that it is a resource open to all academics, though the media and the government are welcome to consult it. Academics from Jordan, Iraq, Palestine and other Arab countries are also among its clients, despite the Arab boycott of Israel.

“I don’t know the exact motives of its founders,” admits Winter. “But maybe, just maybe, you can interpret this huge archive as an attempt to bridge the qualitative distance (or isolation) between Israel and the Arab world quantitatively.”

But this message of building bridges is likely to get lost amid the ding of the call for an international cultural and academic boycott of Israel. Omar Barghouti, who wrote a widely praised book on the subject of boycott, divestment and sanctions, calls on “every conscientious academic and academic institution to boycott all Israeli academic institutions because of their ongoing deep complicity in perpetuating the occupation and other forms of oppression”. Yet Barghouti holds a master’s degree in philosophy from Tel Aviv University, which he acquired after co-founding the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel – a contradiction he has refused to explain.

Although many Israeli academics are complicit in perpetuating the inhumane status quo, others are not. For instance, Sand, who I had come to meet, can hardly be described as an apologist for Israeli oppression, was friends with Palestine’s national poet Mahmoud Darwish, insisted that the Arabic version of his book should be published in Ramallah and not Cairo or Beirut, and advocates transforming Israel, in the framework of the two-state solution, into a truly democratic state for all its citizens.

Yet Sand finds himself in the bizarre situation of being effectively under boycott. “They will not invite me to Ramallah because I teach at Tel Aviv University,” he told me. “Any pressure that is not terror is welcome. But be careful. You have started to boycott the most liberal segment of the Israeli political culture.”

While I support a targeted economic boycott against Israel to ensure that the outside world does not bankroll the occupation and oppression of Palestinians, I find a blanket cultural or academic boycott to be unfair and counterproductive. Far better would be two parallel campaigns: one to boycott Israeli peacebreakers and another to embrace and engage with Israeli peacemakers.

This article first appeared in The National on 5 June 2012.

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حرية السينما الحقيقية في القدس الشرقية

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بقلم خالد دياب

هل تستطيع حرية الأفلام السينمائية مساعدة الفلسطينيين على تحقيق الحرية الحقيقية؟

الأربعاء 7 مارس 2012

أثّر الاحتلال في القدس الشرقية كثيراً على الخريطة الثقافية للمدينة. كان من آثار انعدام الاستثمار المزمن وتوسيع المستوطنات والجدار الهائل، الذي تقول إسرائيل أنها بنته لأهداف أمنية ويدّعي الفلسطينيون أنه يهدف إلى اختطاف المزيد من الأراضي، امتصاص الحياة من الجزء الفلسطيني في القدس وتحويل مركز الثقافة إلى رام الله في الضفة الغربية. إضافة إلى ذلك، يبدو أن العديد من الفلسطينيين المقدسيين لم يتمكنوا من التخلص من عقلية منع التجول التي سادت الانتفاضة، والتي انتهت قبل أكثر من سبع سنوات.

إلا أنه في السنوات الأخيرة، تم إطلاق جهود لإحياء وإغناء خريطة القدس الثقافية المتواضعة. آخر هذه الجهود إعادة إحياء سينما القدس القديمة، التي أغلقت أبوابها قبل ربع قرن أثناء الانتفاضة الأولى (التي استمرت من عام 1978 وحتى 1993). وهي الآن، رغم أنها لم تكتمل بعد، مركز يابوس الثقافي. إضافة إلى عرضها للأفلام، تستضيف السينما أحداثاً فنية ومسرحية وموسيقية، بما فيها عرضاً للصور الفوتوغرافية عن الثورة المصرية وحفلات لموسيقى الجاز.

استهل مركز يابوس إعادة افتتاحه بأسبوع أفلام الحرية. العنوان مناسب إذا أخذنا بالاعتبار العطش للحرية السياسية والاقتصادية والاجتماعية، الواضحة ليس فقط في أوساط الفلسطينيين وإنما للشعوب عبر المنطقة، بما فيها إسرائيل، حيث ثارت حركة احتجاج اجتماعي واسع الصيف الماضي. أعلن المحتجون الإسرائيليون جادة روتشيلد في تل أبيب “ميدان التحرير” الخاص بهم، كما أطلق المعلّقون العرب اسم “الربيع الإسرائيلي” على الحركة.

ومن الأفلام التي عرضت في يابوس فيلم “لن نترك”، الذي يعرض نضال الفلسطينيين ضد النزوح الإجباري في القدس، وفيلم “فليجة”، الذي يوثق الاعتصامات الملهمة والابتكارية التي نظمها الناشطون التونسيون بعد سقوط الدكتاتور زين العابدين بن علي، وفيلم “القاهرة 678″، الدراما التي حطمت الممنوعات عن التحرش الجنسي في مصر.

تقول ريما عيسى، منسّقة سينما يابوس ومسؤولة المهرجان أن الفلسطينيين المقدسيين عانوا من “غيبوبة سينمائية”. وهي ترى المهرجان ومركز يابوس الثقافي على أنهما “جسر لإعادة العلاقات التي انقطعت منذ وقت طويل بين الجمهور الفلسطيني في القدس ودور السينما”.

ولكن هل تستطيع حرية السينما مساعدة الفلسطينيين على تحقيق الحرية الحقيقية؟

“دور الثقافة حاسم”، تقول ريما عيسى، “وشعبنا يتوق إليها”. وهي تؤمن أن باستطاعة السينما المساعدة على الربط بين جيل جديد من الفلسطينيين المقدسيين الشباب مع المضمون العربي والعالمي الأوسع، الأمر الذي يمكنهم من نقل وضعهم وكفاحهم إلى العالم الخارجي وإنهاء سنوات طويلة من العزلة.

وقد تمكنت العديد من الأفلام والمخرجين الفلسطينيين في السنوات الأخيرة من زيادة الوعي بكونهم بلا دولة وسعيهم للحصول على الحرية وإنشاء الدولة، والاعتراف الدولي بهم. ومن الأمثلة البارزة على ذلك مخرج الأفلام الفلسطيني الإسرائيلي إيليا سليمان الذي أصبح فيلمه السوريالي الهزلي الأسود “تدخل إلهي” الذي أخرجه عام 2002، عن قصة حب عبر الحواجز بين فلسطيني وفلسطينية يقيم أحدهما في إسرائيل ويقيم الآخر في الضفة الغربية، أصبح ذو شهرة عالمية وصيت ذائع. كما حصل فيلمه الأول الطويل “قصص الاختفاء” (1996) على سمعة واسعة في أوساط النقاد السينمائيين.

إلا أن ريما عيسى، وهي مخرجة أفلام وأول فلسطينية تتخرج من أشهر مدرسة سينمائية إسرائيلية هي “سام شبيغل”، لا تؤمن أن باستطاعة السينما بناء الجسور بين الفلسطينيين والإسرائيليين بسبب عدم المساواة الكبير بين الطرفين.

يخالفها صانعو أفلام آخرون الرأي. على سبيل المثال، تشارك الفلسطيني عماد برنات والإسرائيلي غاي دافيدي في إخراج فيلم “خمس كاميرات محطّمة”، وهو فيلم يوثّق الكفاح اللاعنفي لسكان قرية بلعين الفلسطينية، المسلّحين بالكاميرات فقط، لوقف سلب الأراضي.

ومن الأفلام الرئيسية المثيرة للاهتمام دراما الجريمة “عجمي” الذي يخرجه صانعا الأفلام للمرة الأولى اسكندر قبطي وبارون شاني، والذي يصف بشكل واقعي الحياة في حي العجمي المحروم في مدينة يافا، وليتعمق في تعقيدات الحياة الإنسانية بين المسلمين والمسيحيين واليهود في إسرائيل. وقد حصل كذلك على جائزة “أوفير”، وهي أعلى جائزة إسرائيلية للأفلام وترشح لجائزة الأوسكار في الولايات المتحدة.

ولكن قوة الأفلام لا تتوقف عند قدرتها على تحويل أساليب الناس في التفكير وتحدي ضمائرهم. تساعد مسارح السينما نفسها على إيجاد شعور بالتماسك المجتمعي. على سبيل المثال، تستذكر جارتي الفلسطينية التي يقارب سنها التسعين عاماً فترة ما قبل التقسيم والحرب عندما كان جيرانها اليهود “أصدقاء” يجلسون أحياناً جنباً إلى جنب في دور السينما وعندما كانت الممثلة المصرية اليهودية الأثيرية ليلى مراد هي المفضلة بشكل خاص بين المجتمَعَين.

في المضمون الحالي المقسّم بشكل لا يخلو من المرارة، تظهر هذه الصور على أنها خيال سينمائي بعيد التحقيق. ولكن ذلك كان صحيحاً في يوم من الأيام، وقد يصبح كذلك في يوم قريب.

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‘Reel’ freedom in East Jerusalem

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By Khaled Diab

The reopening of a landmark East Jerusalem cinema could provide local Palestinians with a much-needed dose of ‘reel’ freedom.

Wednesday 7 March 2012

In East Jerusalem, the occupation has affected the city’s cultural landscape. Chronic underinvestment, expanding settlements and a massive wall – which Israel says it has constructed for security purposes and Palestinians allege is a land grab – have had the effect of squeezing the life out of the Palestinian quarter in Jerusalem and shifting the cultural centre of gravity to Ramallah in the West Bank. In addition, it seems many Palestinian Jerusalemites have not been able to shake off the curfew mentality of the intifada, which ended almost seven years ago.

In the past few years, however, efforts have been launched to revive and enrich East Jerusalem’s modest cultural topography. The latest of these is the reincarnation of the old al-Quds cinema, which closed down a quarter of a century ago during the first intifada (which lasted from 1987-1993). Now it is the state of the art, though still unfinished, Yabous Cultural Centre. In addition to film screenings, it hosts artistic, theatrical and musical events, including a photo exhibition about the Egyptian revolution and live jazz concerts.

Yabous marked its reopening with Freedom Films Week. The theme is appropriate given the thirst for political, economic and social liberty, evident not only amongst Palestinians but peoples across the region – including in Israel, where a broad-based social protest movement erupted last summer. Israeli protesters declared Rothschild Avenue in Tel Aviv their own “Tahrir Square” and Arab commentators dubbed the movement the “Israeli Spring”.

The films featured at Yabous included We Won’t Leave, which chronicles the Palestinian struggle against forced displacement in Jerusalem; Fallega, which documents the innovative and inspirational sit-ins organised by Tunisian activists following the fall of dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali; and Cairo 678, a taboo-breaking drama about sexual harassment in Egypt.

Rima Essa, Yabous’s cinema coordinator and the festival’s curator, says that Palestinian Jerusalemites have been in a “coma when it comes to cinema”. She sees the festival and the Yabous Cultural Centre as “a bridge to restoring the long-interrupted relationship between the Palestinian audience in Jerusalem and cinema theatres”.

But can ‘reel’ freedom help Palestinians achieve real freedom?

“The role of culture is crucial,” says Essa, “our people crave it.” She believes that cinema can help connect a new generation of young Palestinian Jerusalemites to the broader Arab and global context, enabling them to relate their situation and struggle to the outside world and end their years of isolation.

Love at a checkpoint. A scene from Divine Intervention

And numerous Palestinian films and directors have, in recent years, managed to raise awareness of their statelessness and their quest for nationhood, leading to international acclaim. One notable example is the Palestinian-Israeli film director Elia Suleiman, whose 2002 surreal black comedy Divine Intervention about a love affair across checkpoints between two Palestinians, one living in Israel and the other in the West Bank, became an international hit. His first feature film, Chronicles of a Disappearance, (1996) received widespread critical acclaim.

However, Essa, who is a film director and the first Palestinian to graduate from Israel’s foremost film school, Sam Spiegel, does not believe that cinema can build bridges between Palestinians and Israelis because of the stark inequality between the two sides. “I am in favour of a complete cultural boycott of Israel,” she opines, though she admits that she would not stop Israeli Jews who come to the cinema of their own accord.

Essa, who dreams of a single democratic state for Jews and Arabs, is convinced that engagement between the two sides in the current status quo “would not constitute a discourse of peace… because there is no balance or equality”. In addition, she believes that dialogue not only leads nowhere but provides Israel with a political smokescreen behind which it can continue to push ahead with its settlement enterprise. “You can go to as many debates as you like about water or land, but the occupation carries on unchanged,” she says.

But other filmmakers recognise the power of collaborative art to build bridges. For instance, Palestinian Emad Burnat and Israeli Guy Davidi were co-directors of Five Broken Cameras, a film which documents the nonviolent struggle of the residents of the Palestinian village Bil’in – who are armed only with cameras – to stop the seizure of their land.

One landmark co-production is the crime drama Ajami, directed by first-time filmmakers Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani, which realistically depicts life in the deprived Jaffa neighbourhood of the same name. The film not only manages to challenge Israeli stereotypes about the neighbourhood Ajami and delve into the complexity of human relationships between Muslims, Christians and Jews in Israel, it also won Israel’s top film accolade, the Ophir Award, and was nominated for an Academy Award in the United States.

But the strength of film does not stop at its power to alter people’s ways of thinking and challenge their conscience. Cinema theatres themselves help create a sense of community. For instance, my Palestinian neighbour, who is almost 90 years old, recalls a time before partition and war when her Jewish neighbours were “friends” and often sat side-by-side at the cinema, with the ethereal Egyptian Jewish actress Leila Murad a particular inter-communal favourite.

In today’s bitterly divided and segregated context, this image may appear like a far-fetched cinematic fantasy, but it once held true – and may again.

This is an extended version of an article which was published by the Common Ground News Service on 6 March 2012.

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Hebron settlers: “I don’t like Tel Aviv, does that mean we should tear Tel Aviv down”

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By Khaled Diab

Hebron settlement is as important as Tel Aviv, Israel is obliged to protect it and what Arabs lost in war should not be returned, says spokesman.

Monday 9 January 2012

Khaled Diab: What I’m gathering from what you’ve been saying is that you feel there’s a lack of understanding, comprehension and empathy and, even sympathy, towards your community and its aspirations. But how about if we turn the tables, do you feel your community understands and comprehends and empathises with mainstream concerns, such as, for example, you said that you were about 800 people here, yet you need several hundred, or a couple of thousand, soldiers to protect your presence here? Quite a lot of mainstream Israelis are relatively bitter about that. And how about the wider concerns, that your presence here has a humanitarian impact on the Palestinian population of Hebron.

David Wilder: That’s a big question, so let’s chop it up. Let’s start with the first part of the question. In terms of the military. First of all, it’s important to understand that the community here is here with the… the community here was re-established with the express consent and approval of the Israeli government. In other words, it’s not a pirate community. So, it’s real, it’s official, it’s not, you know, where somebody came in and they put up a tent, and then we grew and reached…

But the early settlers after the 1967 war, weren’t they like that?

We first came back… we came in 1968. People rented a hotel and then the Israeli government moved them to a military compound, and they lived there for two and a half years. After that, Kiryat Arba was established by the Israeli government, by Moshe Dayan, and they moved up there.

In 1979, a group of women and children moved into Hebron, to Beit Haddasa, which was a Jewish building, it was built by Jews in 1893 as a medical clinic which was used by both Jews and Arabs in Hebron. At that time, it was empty. The prime minister then, Menachem Begim, wasn’t overjoyed that they were there but he didn’t throw them out. He made their living conditions extremely difficult, but he didn’t expel them.

In 1980, following a terrorist attack here, when six men were killed, the Israeli government voted and re-established officially a Jewish community in Hebron. And a lot of, not all of, the buildings… but some of the buildings here, the rebuilding or the renovations, were done with funding from the Israeli government. So it’s something that’s real and official, ok.

The fact that there are people who don’t like it, you know. I don’t like Tel Aviv, does that mean we should tear Tel Aviv down and throw everybody out? No. I like this; they like that.

In terms of the military presence here, the Israeli military, or the Israeli government, has policies whereby they protect Jews wherever they are. And there are Jews here, so they also have to be protected. When I came to Israel in 1974, you didn’t have in Jerusalem security guards at bus stops, checking people getting on buses to make sure they’re not carrying bombs to blow up people on the bus. It’s a tremendous outlay to have security people at bus stops, you know, but Israel did it because it was a necessity. And the same thing is true in Hebron.

First of all, I’m not responsible for the fact that there are only 850 people here. The property that we have is full. If we’re allowed to build in Hebron on the property that we own, then we could have more people here. If we could buy from Arabs that want to sell us property, we could have more people. But as you’re very much aware, PA law says that Arabs who sell property to Jews will be summarily executed – it’s a capital crime [Ed: the PA has not actually executed anyone for this offence]. And they do it, so most Arabs, they’re not looking, you know, for all those virgins up there in the sky, so they don’t do it, because they’re not really interested in getting killed. It’s a very difficult procedure.

The military that is here have several different functions. They’re here to protect me, for sure. They’re also here to protect you, and all the other people that come here to visit, because we have a lot of people that come in to visit. Today, there’s a group of 400 people here.

But, as far as I’m concerned, the most important role of the military here has absolutely nothing to do with us. When Hebron was divided in 1997, the Hebron Accords, Israel pulled out of most of the city. It was given entirely to Arafat, and we pulled everything out. When we did that, the other side of Hebron turned into a terrorist nest, and you had people running around Israel from Hebron blowing themselves up, in Tel Aviv and Be’er Sheva and Haifa. There was a soccer team, a football team, in Hebron that they all turned into suicide bombers. There was an article about them in Newsweek.

In other words, when there was no Israeli intelligence, no Israeli security, on the other side of the city, it just, you know, it turned into a breeding ground for terrorism. And the same thing happened in Jenin. It happened in other places. And it cost us. It cost us a lot of lives. The Israeli military, as far as I’m concerned is here at least as much for, if not more, to protect the people in Tel Aviv than they are to protect me. Because if they can prevent someone from building a bomb and getting out to Tel Aviv or wherever they want to go to blow themselves up, then that’s certainly no less important than making sure that I’m safe and you’re safe. And that takes soldiers, you know.

Well, you can say that, if we pulled out of all of Hebron. Great! Well, then let’s just look at… if we want to learn a little bit from our recent past, we did that in Gush Katif. We pulled out of Gush Katif and we got 10,000 rockets back into Israel from what we gave them.

And you regard that as a pullout? I mean, the military is still in there.

They pulled out. They pulled out entirely.

Yes, but the military presence of Israel is still there. There’s the whole no-man’s-land. There’s the perimeter. There’re regular raids. The borders and economy are controlled by Israel.

No, no, of course not. The only reason you have raid is stop them throwing rockets at us. When we pulled out, the idea was… the Europeans invested a lot of money there. The Israelis who were down there, they had initiated and developed tremendous flower industries and the Europeans bought a lot of the hothouses that they used, which were… I don’t understand the field at all, but they were very sophisticated… So that the Arabs who then inherited what we left would be able to use them, and they destroyed them. They took them apart; they destroyed them.

When Israel pulls out of areas, they’ve turned into terrorist bases which have wreaked havoc in Israel proper, ok. I’m not talking about what they try to do in Hebron. I’m talking about what they try to do to people in Tel Aviv – and that, I think, is a major reason why the military is here and why the numbers have to be where they’re at.

So that’s the first part of the question. The other part of the question is dealing with… you asked me about, you know, well, there are people that don’t like us here… So, there are people that don’t like us, so what?

The concept of Hebron – i.e. Jews with horns and tails who breathe fire and eat one Arab for breakfast and two for lunch and three for dinner with the blood dripping off from your moustache from the one you’ve just finished – that’s the vision that people have. And they come in and it’s not like that. When I used to give tours… I still give tours but a different kind of tour… We would start in Kiryat Arba and the bus would come in and I’d just go around Kiryat Arba in the bus before coming down here into Hebron. And I used to watch people’s faces, and they didn’t believe it. They didn’t believe they were in Kiryat Arba, because Kiryat Arba is a settlement, and you know what a settlement is, a settlement is some tents, right? But that’s what people thought, that was the vision they had.

And a lot of Israelis who come in, not for a political tour, they can ask questions if they like, but forget the politics, just the historical element, the religious element, what Hebron means to the Jewish people, whether you’re religious or you’re not religious, it doesn’t make any difference. Everybody has a heritage, and they see it and they hear a little bit, and all of a sudden (clicks fingers): this isn’t what they taught me about Hebron. And it’s a totally different image. And that’s when mainstream Israelis who say may be we shouldn’t be here start saying, may be we should be. And we’ve had that happen.

It happened not so long ago. A major Israeli television entertainment personality was here and, after he was here, he said, yeah, there are problems with the community here and there, but we can’t leave Hebron, you know, and that happens when people see it, when they’re here, when they start to feel it a little bit. And we see that happen time and time and time again. It’s not an isolated kind of a thing.

To touch on something you said in passing about the taboo amongst Palestinians towards selling property to Israeli Jews. How does the community here and other groups among the Jewish community feel about selling land to Arabs, Palestinians? Look, if a Palestinian came and asked to buy your land…

Ok, look, there’s a major difference between what I like and what I don’t like and what is legally acceptable. I can say that I don’t like it, I can even oppose it, but the Supreme Court just ruled, up north in one of the moshavim, that when they had a tender to buy property, there was an Arab couple that wanted to buy and the community wouldn’t let them, the Supreme Court said you have to let them, you have to sell it to them, cuz they’re no different than anybody else.

Legally, according to PA law, which is based on Jordanian law, an Arab that sells property to a Jew is to be killed. Israeli law doesn’t say that. There can be reasons why yes and why know; there can be security elements; there can be all sorts of elements.

We used to have here, many years ago… They were building outside here, and there were Arab workers. One day, an Arab came inside here, with a gun, and he pulled them all together and told them if you come back here tomorrow, I’ll kill you. That was an Arab telling the Arabs. The next day nobody showed up.

In other words, there can be differences of opinion – pro, for, against, whatever – and that’s all legitimate. But when you take that and legalise it, and you say the law is…

But isn’t there a law, a form of legalisation, that says Israel officially owns all the land of Israel, like the Israeli government…

I wish that was true, but it’s not. I mean, you can ask me religiously what I believe, but in terms of what’s on the books, the president of the Supreme Court ruled, much to my own personal differing of opinion or opposition, but she’s the president of the Supreme Court, not me – at least, for a little while longer, she is. She ruled that any land that’s not registered as being owned by the Israeli government or the state of Israel belongs to the Arabs. Now I don’t know where she gets that from. But it’s just the opposite of what you just said.

There is land that’s owned by Arabs, I know that, and there’s land that isn’t. There’s land that’s owned by Jews, that’s owned by Arabs, there’s state-owned land. In any country in the world, there’s state-owned land.

And you think land captured by conquest is legitimate property?

You’re asking about…

Like what, for example, the international community regards as occupied territory?

Like the Jordanian conquest of 1948. The land that they took in 1948 by conquest. Is that legally theirs or not?

Or the land that Israel took in 1967. I mean, in all cases.

First of all, you see one of the anomalies of the conflict today is that there’s almost a given that violence, or different levels of violence, committed by one side is legitimate and accepted and understood and justifiable, and from the other side it’s not. There are consequences. If somebody declares war, or forget the war, if somebody walks into my office, and I start beating them up. You walked into my office just now and you said, my name is Khaled, and I jump on you and start hitting you, and you sue me, ok. You sue me for a million shekels. You take me to court. Then I’m going to have to pay the consequences for beating you up. May be you beat me up too. But I have to pay for what I did. It’s my problem. It might have hurt you, but I have to pay the consequences for what I did.

If somebody starts a war with you, then there are consequences for that. People can’t declare war and figure that even if they lose, they’re not going to have to pay a price. You know, when you say, as Nasser said, we’re going to throw them into the sea and, you know, he made a pact with the Syrians and the Jordanians, and he said, you know, let’s finish them off.

In 1967, the prime minister was Levi Eshkol…

But didn’t Israel start the 1967 war or don’t you regard that Israel started it?

I don’t know. The history books that I have say that Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran. That’s an act of war. The United Nations left. You know, that’s an act of war. The fact that he closed the Straits of Tiran, that he put a blockade on Israel, and said we’re going to throw you into the sea, formed a military pact with the Syrians and the Jordanians, I think that’s pretty much an act of war.

When Levi Eshkol was prime minister and he sent representatives from the state of Israel, including Golda Meir, to Hussein in Jordan saying to him, we don’t want anything, just leave us alone – we have enough to worry about up north and down south, just leave us alone. We’ll leave you alone, you leave us alone. And his response was to start shelling Jerusalem. He started shooting missiles from Jordan into Israel.

So, what, he thought he was going to do that and we were going to just ignore him? May be he thought that we would be finished, that they would defeat us and he would get everything. He wouldn’t just have East Jerusalem, he would get West Jerusalem too and a little bit more. But it didn’t work like that. You can’t start a war and expect that, if by chance you lose the war, it’s not going to cost you anything.

We came into Judea and Samaria and Gaza as a result of that war. And we stayed. Today, when people talk about the Geneva Convention and civilians and all of that, there are many different responses to all of those questions. The first one is, of course, if you want to say that we’re not allowed to be here, or that we’re occupying this, then who’s the legal owner, so to speak?

In other words, back in 1974 or 1975, Hussein relinquished all claims to Judea and Samaria. He said, I don’t want anything to do with it. It’s not mine any more.

But he relinquished them to the Palestinians, not to Israel.

No, he said, it’s not mine.

And he voted for the Palestinians, the PLO, as the representatives of the interests of the Palestinian people.

But that doesn’t mean just because he said so that it belongs to them. I mean, like, you know. The questions involved… I mean, legally, I don’t have any problems with international law. I mean, there are no problems. But if we take a place like Hebron, ok, and we take… I mean, right now, there was a… You know, for 700 years, Jews and Christians had no access to Machpelah, the Tomb of the Patriarchs.

Is that true?

Oh, yeah, unfortunately it’s true. In the year 1267… In 1260, the Mamluks pushed out the Crusaders. The Crusaders came in about 1100. And, ironically, the Crusaders in Hebron threw out the Jews. It was the first time I know of in a long, long time that there hadn’t been Jews in Hebron.

In 1260, the Mamluks threw out the Crusaders and let the Jews back in. The Mamluk emperor was a guy called Baybars and he closed off Temple Mount and, as an aside, he closed of Machpelah. He said, it’s a mosque. And for 700 years, we couldn’t go inside. There used to be stairs on the eastern wall. Jews could go up to the seventh step. That’s as far as we could go. They started to let Christians back in in the early to middle 1900s. Jews couldn’t go in. And for hundreds and hundreds of years, there were stairs on the eastern wall and Jews could go up to the seventh step.

And it’s only since we came back, is that side accessible to anybody. Anybody who wants to can go in. There are different sides, and this for this, and that for that, but anybody that wants to can go inside, with very, very few exceptions. Today, and you can read it, I’m writing about it now, the Arab mayor of Hebron… I say it to people all the time, but nobody really believes it, but now he’s said it… He said it, you know, and it was printed by, in Time magazine, by a writer who’s not a big friend of ours, so if he writes that’s what they said, then I think he’s accurate. The Arab mayor of Hebron today says that if he ever controls it, he won’t let Jews back in. He says it’s a mosque, always has been, always will be. He said, you know, we’ve been there as a mosque since, you know, 1260 or 1400 or whatever date.

If we’re not here, then there’s no access. It’s gone.

So, you feel yourselves to be guardians of the Jewish heritage of Hebron?

We… Let’s put it this way, if there wasn’t a Jewish community in Hebron today, it doesn’t matter whether I’m here or somebody else is here, if there wasn’t a Jewish community in Hebron today, Machpelah would’ve been lost a long time ago. We would’ve lost Machpelah in 1997. Arafat demanded it then, and they wouldn’t give it to him. And the people who wouldn’t give it to him weren’t rightwing extremists like me, they were leftwing extremists. Bu they were the ones running the show, and they took to Arafat the numbers, and they said this is how many Jews are visiting and how many Arabs are visiting. We can’t give it away, we can’t give it to you, there are too many Jews that go visit, and those numbers keep growing.

Part I – The art of peace

Part II - From secular America to religious Hebron

Part III – “We are not extremists”

Part V – Palestinian people do not exist, are “PR bluff”

Part VI – Living with Palestinian “dhimmis”