Baltzer, Corrie and others: a small tribute
A reader was kind enough to point me in the direction of this blog by Anna Baltzer, a Jewish American graduate of Columbia University, a Fulbright scholar, and volunteer with the International Women’s Peace Service in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Have a look.
Baltzer's also written a book entitled "Witness in Palestine: A Jewish Woman in the Occupied Territories". So that might be worth checking out as well.
Volunteers like those of the International Solidarity Movement are a huge inspiration. They're young people, generally from comfortable Western backgrounds, who choose to place themselves in great danger to defend Palestinian civilians from the epic brutality of the IDF. The movement aims to document Israeli abuses in the territories (to make sure they don't go unnoticed), protect Palestinian civilians by for example accompanying kids to school to deter any harrassment from settlers and the IDF, and taking action to prevent abuses like the bulldozing of people's homes.
It was in standing in the way of one of those bulldozers that the American volunteer Rachel Corrie was murdered by the IDF. Unlike the famous tank in Tiananmen Square 1989, it seems the bulldozer not only ran her over, but then reversed back over her prone body. The late, great Edward Said wrote a good tribute to her here, which is worth reading.
A few years ago I saw a play on Corrie's life which was made up entirely of entries from her diary. It revealed an intensely intelligent, curious, moral and driven young woman possessed both with uncommon levels of bravery and a genuine gift for expressing herself. Pathetically, the New York theatre that was scheduled to show the play pulled out following political pressure. But you can still buy the book.
People like Corrie and Baltzer are, as I say, hugely inspiring. They show us that the world's injustices need not simply be accepted as though they are ordained from on high. They remind us that there are practical things we can do to make our own small contribution to addressing these issues (if not volunteering to go to Palestine then spending a bit of time here in the West trying to raise some awareness about what's going on over there). They remind us that compassion for others is a natural human trait which need not lead to frustrated feelings of impotence, but can instead find expression in specific practical action. So if I can give them a mini-plug on this blog then I'm happy to do it.
Labels: Activism, Israel/Palestine
8 Comments:
I had a brief, indirect encounter with Anna on the Daily Kos blog - she had been banned from the site, along with a couple of other pro-Palestinian activists, and a few of us decided to try and get them all reinstated - and I absolutely recognise your description of her. Courageous and dedicated - those interested can read her diaries here.
Thank you for the post...
It's reassuring to know that in some ways this will not go unnoticed :-)
Rgrds,
P.
BTW anyone can help by contacting Anna from the contact link on her blog.
I'm trying to help by doing a very small (very very ;-P) exhibition of her photo's and I contacted her for permission and she not only gave me that but also sent me a PDF of her newest book.
No one's impotent :-)
Rgrds,
P.
thanks, both of you
Jamie - what reason did Daily Kos give for banning her?
Well, she wrote a diary about a visit to Nablus, where she met with a leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades. She quoted from him in the diary, and this was deemed unacceptable. The bit with the quote has now been replaced with:
'Edited. Information being conveyed to Americans from designated recognized terrorist groups is not allowed on the site. Thus, it has been deleted and the user is banned.
We strongly disallow messages to be conveyed to the site from such groups. The writer has been banned and any user who does it in the future will be banned.'
Here's the actual quote she used:
'I am from the Palestinian armed resistance to the Occupation. I am opposed to violence against any civilians, whether they are Palestinian or Israeli, Muslim or Jewish. I hate fighting, but when soldiers invade our homes, our land, and our lives, it is our duty to resist them, to resist the theft of our water, our self determination, and our dignity. We are human just like you. We want to live, to have families, a normal life. But if we must fight to our death to protect what is ours, our land, the future of our children, we are ready to do so.
I invite you to look at maps and statistics of this conflict over time. I lament the killing of innocent people on both sides, but the tremendous disproportion of land and water rights, civil liberties, and civilian casualties on the two sides is undeniable. The international community calls us terrorists, but we would welcome any objective international presence to bear witness to what is happening here and come to their own conclusions. Is beating unarmed children, medical workers, and even internationals not terror? Is taking advantage of lulls in violence -- when the press isn't watching -- to accelerate expansion of settlements in land and water rich areas not a crime?
Palestinians have coexisted harmoniously with Jews in the past, and we are ready to do so again. After all, Jews are our brothers and sisters, people of faith just like us. As our party Fatah has said many times before, we are ready to live in peace with Israel if there can be a just and viable resolution to the issues of borders, distribution of water, settlements, Jerusalem, and the refugees. These are our conditions, and they are also our rights.'
According to the Daily Kos administrators, this constituted advocacy by Anna of terrorism, and so she was banned. This despite her explicitly pointing out, below the quote, that:
"I relay Moussa's message not to defend violence, but because I believe his perspective has a right be heard. Different sides of any conflict deserve to have a voice, but the mainstream media is unlikely to pick up Moussa's speech, just as they haven't picked up anything but the most sensationalistic aspects of the invasion."
In a diary we wrote requesting her (and others') reinstatement, we commented,
'Speaking of Anna – she herself was recently banned, apparently on the grounds that one of her diaries included the conveying of a conversation with a member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the armed wing of the Fatah movement and a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. Again, this action appears totally unjustifiable. Anna was simply reporting what she heard the man say – is it not important to hear what people on both sides of the conflict think, even those (or, perhaps, especially those) who pursue illegal and immoral tactics? It is interesting to note that, on this topic at least, Daily Kos has actually fallen behind the mainstream press. Last year, for example, the Washington Post published an article by Ismail Haniyeh, the Palestinian Prime Minister and leader of Hamas – itself a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. If the Washington Post felt able to publish the views of the leader of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, why can’t Daily Kos? It seems the problem was not a legal one – after all, surely the WaPo is bound by the same if not stricter rules – and so the decision was evidently a moral one. If so, it is difficult to understand the reasoning behind it. If it is forbidden and punishable by banning for a diarist to quote a member of a Palestinian terrorist organization in the interests of bringing to the community eye-witness testimony invaluable to understanding the motives and thoughts of the relevant actors in the conflict, without ever once associating herself with those views, it should surely be forbidden for diarists to quote senior IDF generals who, without even a sliver of doubt, have perpetrated terrorism on a scale that dwarfs anything the al-Aqsa Brigades are capable of. In the course of last year’s war on Lebanon, for example, the IDF killed over 1,000 Lebanese civilians and caused the displacement of hundreds of thousands more. As a result of Israeli bombing, Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure suffered "destruction on a catastrophic scale" (Amnesty International). Israeli forces "pounded buildings into the ground, reducing entire neighbourhoods to rubble", whilst "[e]ntire families were killed in air strikes on their homes or in their vehicles while fleeing the aerial assaults on their villages." Amnesty concludes, "[t]he evidence strongly suggests that the extensive destruction of public works, power systems, civilian homes and industry was deliberate and an integral part of the military strategy, rather than "collateral damage". Human Rights Watch concurs. This amounts to state terror on a massive scale, and yet one can regularly find people quoting those responsible for it (Ehud Olmert, Gen. Halutz, Amir Peretz, etc. etc.) on this site with impunity. It is therefore rank hypocrisy to ban a Palestinian peace activist who is obviously not a troll (check her diaries out – they are long, thoughtful and detailed on-the-ground accounts of life in occupied Palestine) for quoting a member of a Palestinian terrorist organization even as diarists regularly quote members of Israeli terrorist organizations (or institutions).'
Being the reasonable person she is, and feeling guilty the her banning also led to two other bannings, Anna apologised for the way some people had misread the diary, and she was allowed to return. Unsurprisingly, though, she's hardly been back since.
That's the gist of it, anyway! ;)
Thanks very much for that, Jamie. As I read this I was already working myself up to writing a stiff email to the Kos people, but then I saw that you and others had written precisely what I would have written.
An ugly episode, showing the pathetic state of what passes for liberalism in the West, and well done to you for taking Daily Kos up on it.
I've said it many times: people who are genuinely interested in peace will have no problem in dialogue with so called terrorists, because its dialogue that ends violence. Those who want to stifle that dialogue have to accept that all they are achieving is shutting off an alternative to violence, which makes a mockery of their affected moral stance
Cheers. Totally agree with your last paragraph - surprisingly enough, Barack Obama put it quite well himself during the famed YouTube presidential candidates debate:
'The notion that not talking to people is somehow punishment to them is ridiculous.'
He was referring to Iran, I think, but it applies across the board (although I doubt he would apply it so). He's not quite correct, though - the policy of not talking to both the Iranian government and Hamas does punish some people, specifically those within the two organisations that favour dialogue and compromise, who as a result lose out to the hardliners and the extremists.
As for Daily Kos, it's a very good site in many ways, but the problem is that it's also an explicitly partisan site. The stated purpose of Daily Kos is to help Democrats get elected. Thus, particularly on the Israel/Palestine issue, on which the Dems are as appalling as the Republicans, criticism of policies that enjoy bipartisan support, or the support of a majority of the public, often has to be quite tame and mild if it is not to attract the kind of hostility and smears Anna received.
Obama is possibly referring to the White House habit of seeing inter-state dialogue as a privilege to be bestowed or denied to subject nations depending on the acceptability - to the White House - of those nation's behaviour. That's something. But sadly, I doubt that he grasps the additional, important point that you've made
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