Books reviewed - David Shulman on Israel: The Broken Silence
Popular Protest in Palestine: The Uncertain Future of Unarmed
Resistance
by Marwan Darweish and
Andrew Rigby
Return: A Palestinian Memoir
by Ghada Karmi
Disturbing the
Peace: The Use of Criminal Law to Limit the Actions of Human Rights Defenders
in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories
by the Human Rights
Defenders Fund
Al pi tehom [At
the Edge of the Abyss]
by Talia Sasson
The Conflict Shoreline: Colonization as Climate Change in the
Negev Desert
by Eyal Weizman and
Fazal Sheikh
Israeli human rights
activists and what is left of the Israeli peace groups, including joint
Israeli-Palestinian peace organizations, are under attack. In a sense, this is
nothing very new; organizations such as B’Tselem, the most prominent and
effective in the area of human rights, and Breaking the Silence, which
specializes in soldiers’ firsthand testimony about what they have seen and done
in the occupied territories and in Gaza, have always been anathema to the
Israeli right, which regards them as treasonous.
But
open attacks on the Israeli left have now assumed a far more sinister and
ruthless character; some of them are being played out in the interrogation
rooms of Israeli prisons. Clearly, there is an ongoing coordinated campaign
involving the government, members of the Knesset, the police, various
semiautonomous right-wing groups, and the public media. Politically driven
harassment, including violent and illegal arrest, interrogation, denial of
legal support, virulent incitement, smear campaigns, even death threats issued
by proxy—all this has become part of the repertoire of the far right, which
dominates the present government and sets the tone for its policies.
There is now a
palpable sense of danger, and also an accelerating decline into a situation of
incipient everyday state terror. Palestinians have lived with the reality of
state terror for decades—it is the very stuff of the occupation—but it has now
seeped into the texture of life inside the Green Line, as many on the left have
warned that it would. Israelis with a memory going back to the 1960s sometimes
liken the current campaign to the violent actions of the extreme right in
Greece before the colonels took power, as famously depicted in the
still-canonical film Z.
The witch-hunt began
this time with a targeting of the ex-soldiers’ organization Breaking the
Silence by a strident chorus on the right, including Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, and other members of the cabinet,
but also including prominent politicians and journalists from the wishy-washy
center, including the highly popular Haaretz correspondent Ari
Shavit. There have been calls to outlaw the organization entirely.
In Israeli parlance,
Breaking the Silence is one of a group of so-called “leftist NGOs” (amutot
hasmol) that are the object of a new bill now making its way through the
Knesset, an initiative of the fanatical minister of justice, Ayelet Shaked,
possibly the least just person in the country. Like many right-wing NGOs,
leftist groups such as B’Tselem receive funding from donors both in Israel and
abroad; the new law aims at forcing leftist and human rights organizations to
disclose all foreign sources of support every time they appear in a public
setting.
The proposed law is a
transparent attempt to humiliate these groups and to limit their freedom of
action. Initially, Shaked wanted representatives of left-wing organizations
that receive foreign funding to wear identity badges whenever they entered the
Knesset or other public spaces, but Netanyahu, still apparently capable of
seeing the invidious analogy to the badges the Nazis forced Jews to wear in
public, squashed this clause.
The steady stream of
government-fueled invective and threats has also been channeled into the
shadowy world of clandestine operations. In recent weeks several of the peace
organizations have uncovered right-wing spies and moles that had worked their
way into their ranks. It’s hard to know who has been orchestrating this wave or
how high up the operation goes. There are front organizations, including a
newly registered group of Israeli settlers who call themselves Ad Kan (This Far
and No Farther)... read more:
