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Recent Stories
March 26, 2003
Bruce Jackson
A Battlefield from Hell
Pablo
Mukherjee
Watch Their Lips
David Krieger
Shock But Not Awe
Linda
Heard
Winning Hearts and Minds Bush-Style
Imad Jadaa
The Beautiful Face of America
Adam
Engel
Buckets of Blood
Patrick Cockburn
Kurds Unimpressed
David
Lindorff
POWs, Torture and Hypocrisy
Robert Fisk
The Coup That Didn't Happen
April
Hurley, MD
A Doctor's Outrage in Baghdad
Gloria Bergen
Chretien's Shame
Reema
Abu Hamdieh
The Smell of Death Surrounds Me
March 25, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Life During Wartime
Gary
Leupp
What Democracy Looks Like: the Streets
of Cairo
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
An Interview with Hanan Ashrawi
Bruce
Jackson
Why Protest? Why Write?
Uri Avnery
Bitter Rice: Thoughts and Warnings on
the War
Jason
Leopold
Blood Indicator: Casualties and the Stock
Market
Ralph Nader
A Pre-emptive War on a Defenseless Country
March 24, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Ominous Signs
David
Lindorff
Peacekeepers at Ground Zero
Diane Christian
Blood Sacrifice
Kathy
Kelly
The Morning After Shock and Awe
John Stanton
US Bombs Iran
Wayne
Madsen
How to Live with a Rogue Superpower
Anthony Gancarski
Iraq and the Death of the West
David
Vest
Earth vs. Bush
Ahmad Faruqui
The Liberation of Iraq in Perspective
Robert
Fisk
We Bomb, They Suffer
March 22 / 23, 2003
Edward Said
The Other America
Saul Landau
The Threats of Empire
Kathleen and Bill Christison
On the Road in the West Bank
Joanne Mariner
Suing Seymour Hersh
Ann Harrison
The Battle of San Francisco
Robert Fisk
A Cauldron of Fire
Hani Shukrallah
The Gates of Hell
Chris Floyd
Memory Lane
Kathy Kelly
Imagine Chicago Under This Kind of Attack
Ramzi Kysia
Bombing Away a Chance for Joy
Linda Heard
Baghdad Burns While Bush Does Lunch
Bradley Burston
Could the US be at War for Years?
Salvador Peralta
Mass Murder as Liberation?
Tom Gorman
Now That's a Coalition!
Jorge Mariscal
Johnny Mack, When Are You Coming Back?
Cindy Milstein
The Grassroots Go Global
Josh Frank
Blocking Portland's Bridges
Elaine Cassel
The Case of Elizabeth Smart: Kidnapping and Insanity
Gordon Solberg
Drowning in Niceness: the Lessons of Elizabeth Smart
Tom Crumpacker
Getting to Know the Real Havana
Poets' Basement
Dobie, Guthrie, Alam, Wechsler
March 21, 2003
Ben Tripp
Blood for Oil:
the Exchange Rate
Cathy Breens
Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
Scott Handleman
Fourth
Generation Protesting: Shutting Down San Francisco
Vanessa Jones
Paint Them
Red
Brian J. Foley
Patriotic Protest
for Professors
Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
Inventing Demons
Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
Milan Rai
Blitz----------------Coup
Pepe Escobar
A Cheap Family Farce
Floyd Rudmin
The Nightmare at the Back Door: Nuclear Plant's as Terror Targets
Chris Floyd
See Rome (poem)
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
March 20, 2003
Stephen Banko
I Was a Soldier
Once
Kevin Alexander Gray
How Did We Become
an Outlaw Nation?
Shane Claiborne
Nomadic
Solidarity: Glimpses of Life in Baghdad on the Eve of War
Kathy Kelly
Waiting on the Baghdad Skies to Crack
Anthony Gancarski
Michelle
Makin's "Liberty Shields"
Rahul Mahajan and Robert Jensen
Myths and
Facts About the War on Iraq
Jason Leopold
Cheney's
Lies About Halliburton and Iraq
Ron Jacobs
If War is Business as Usual, There Should be No Business as Usual
Chuck O'Connell
Predictions About the Iraq War
Douglas Herman
US Air Force Veteran on the Coming Air Campaign
Ralph Nader
Come On Democrats,
Stand Up for Peace
William Hughes
War is Theft
Sima Saeedi
Dispatch from
Iran
Hammond Guthrie
John Philip Sousa
Website of the Day
Iraq
Body Count
Hot Stories
Gore Vidal
The Erosion
of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach Bush:
A Draft Resolution
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March
29, 2003
"Like Being Autistic With Power"
Jeff
Halper: an Activist's Activist
By KATHLEEN
and BILL CHRISTISON
East
Jerusalem.
“We’re
just pissed off [at the Palestinians], the way whites were with blacks
in the southern United States. They just don’t know their place.”
Jeff
Halper is the kind of activist that political analysts like us can get
our arms around, figuratively speaking: he is a political analyst himself,
an academic and researcher, as well as an activist, and his particular
talents encompass both the research and analysis for which many activists
have no patience and the hands-on activism for which many analysts and
academics have no talent.
Halper
is an Israeli anthropologist, until his retirement a year ago a professor
at Ben Gurion University, a transplant 30 years ago from Minnesota,
a harsh critic of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza,
and, as founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD),
one of the leading peace and anti-occupation activists in Israel.
We met with Halper
on a rainy afternoon in Jerusalem to discuss him, his activism, and
the dismal situation that he has dedicated his energies to resolving.
He thinks the notion of mixing activism with academics helps put issues
in context in a way that neither would do by itself, and he believes
anthropologists are uniquely qualified to work in both areas, specifically
because their academic work involves being out in the field and dealing
with people.
Halper writes voluminously,
in clear, accessible, blunt prose with accompanying maps and charts
and concrete facts about Israel’s control over Palestinian lives.
He is also an activist’s activist, slogging around in the mud
trying to prevent the demolition of Palestinian homes by Israeli bulldozers
and rebuilding homes that have been destroyed.
With the war in
Iraq raging, we begin by talking about the U.S. and its image in the
Middle East and move quickly over to Israel and its self-image.
Speaking about the
U.S., Halper says it has actually not joined the world. It is and has
always been isolationist, and Americans are disconnected from everyone
else’s reality. This leads to a revealing discussion of Zionism
and how it has molded the Israeli people and their thinking.
Halper touches on
political territory so sensitive that probably only an Israeli could
venture in. Zionism, he says, “is a very compelling narrative,
but it is totally self-contained, a bubble in which Israelis separate
themselves from all others.” Israelis regard everyone else as
irrelevant. When it is suggested that fear motivates this self-absorption,
Halper disagrees. “It’s not so much fear,” he says;
Israelis “just don’t give a damn. They make everyone else
a non-issue. They see themselves as the victim, and if you’re
the victim, you’re not responsible for anything you do.”
Anything goes if
you are the victim, he explains: you don’t care about the consequences
of your actions for other people, you need not take any responsibility
for the effect of your policies on others, you don’t care about
how others feel. Israelis always think they’re right, he says.
They believe everything they do is right because the Jewish nation is
“right,” because they are only responding to what others
do to them, only retaliating. “If you combine three elements:
the idea that we are right, with the notion that we’re the victim,
and with our great military power,” he says, you have a lethal
combination. “It’s like being autistic with power. You don’t
care about other people because you’ve cast the others as the
aggressors. You create a situation where Israel is off the hook.”
Israel can act with brutality, but the responsibility, the fault, lies
elsewhere.
This mindset plays
out in the Palestinian arena, Halper explains, through the widespread
Israeli assumption that the only way the Palestinians can achieve anything
is “if they accept our way. If they accept what we say, then we
can be generous. If they accept their place, we can get along.”
Israel sees its response to the intifada as a necessary effort to put
the Palestinians in their place.
“Why was there
so ferocious a reaction to the intifada?” Halper asks rhetorically.
It cannot be explained by what the Palestinians did, he says, since
in the early days after the intifada began, the Palestinians used no
arms and no Israelis were killed, while large numbers of Palestinians
were shot to death by Israeli soldiers. But, he says, “they had
the chutzpah to call into question our right to have the whole country,”
and Israel could not let this stand. “For Israelis, there are
not two sides. This is our country,” and Arabs have no rights
here. “You’ll notice,” he says, “that Israelis
refer to the Palestinians as Arabs, not Palestinians. For Israelis,
all Arabs are the same, they’re undifferentiated. If you point
out that Palestinians are distinct from other Arabs, they brush it off
with a dismissive ‘whatever.’ They say this is our country,
there’s a bunch of Arabs here, they should go live with other
Arabs.”
Halper tries to
be upbeat. He sees the “roadmap” drawn up by the U.S. and
its Quartet partners as a promising document because, among a few other
straws to grasp at, it actually uses the word “occupation,”
which Israel itself refuses to use. He wants to mobilize and coordinate
pro-Palestinian groups in Israel/Palestine and elsewhere around the
world to insert themselves into the process and try to work with their
governments to have some input in implementing the plan. He recently
talked to a State Department official who was hopeful. But for the most
part, what Halper says is gloomy and pessimistic.
Congress is the
principal problem in the U.S., he believes, which makes it particularly
hard for President Bush. For Bush really to move on the issue, it would
“cost him a lot of political capital.” He thinks it’s
an open question whether Bush will ever be willing to pay that cost,
so he is latching onto the “roadmap.” But then, right after
declaring the roadmap a promising document, he says, “Either you
just get rid of the occupation, period, or the two-state solution is
gone. If Israel keeps the main settlement blocs, it’ll control
90% of the West Bank.” But the roadmap shows little promise of
“just getting rid of the occupation, period.”
At the end, Halper
returns to the issue of Israeli fears and his blunt assessment of where
Israel’s actual thinking is centered. “It’s not fear,”
he says. “We’re just pissed off [at the Palestinians], the
way whites were with blacks in the southern United States. They just
don’t know their place.”
With such an Israeli
mindset, as well as a U.S. president clearly unwilling to pay the heavy
political cost necessary to move Israel, and an Israeli government clearly
unwilling ever to relinquish any settlements or any territory, it is
exceedingly difficult to share Halper’s tentative sense of hope.
But if anyone can make it work, people like Halper can.
Yesterday's Features
Daniel Wolff
A Road Trip in Wartime
Chris
Clarke
We Never Spit on Any Baby Killers
David Lindorff
Saddam, a Hero Made in Washington
Pierre
Tristam
Icarus on Crack: American Hubris and
Iraq
Jason Leopold
Richard Perle: the Enterprising Hawk
Saul
Landau
Technological Massacre
Carol Norris
The Mother of All Bombs
Riad
Abdelkarim, MD
Iraq War Lingo 101
Adam Engel
Schlock and Awe
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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