Asa Winstanley, The Electronic Intifada, 26 July 2010

The small volume The Punishment of Gaza is a selection from Gideon Levy’s columns on Gaza in Israeli daily Haaretz since 2006. The dissident Israeli journalist reminds us that the brutal Israeli assault on Gaza has not been a matter of isolated wars of aggression, but an ongoing, long-term policy directed at the population of that small, refugee-packed fraction of Palestine.

Despite his ideological limits, Levy is a searing critic of Israeli brutality, as anyone who has read him will know. Right from the beginning, he named the last major Israeli massacre of Gaza “a war crime” — in his 27 December 2008 article “The Neighborhood Bully Strikes Again.” And he criticized it on moral grounds, not merely as the “mistake” or “blunder” that hypocritical Israeli pundits, masquerading as critics, would label it much later on.

At his best, Levy has a way with words that leads him to some brilliant indictments of Israel. He speaks of “the basic, twofold Israeli sentiment that has been with us forever: to commit any wrong, but to feel pure in our own eyes. To kill, demolish, starve, imprison and humiliate — and to still be right, not to mention righteous.” He describes how the 2008 feature film Waltz With Bashir, Ari Folman’s apologia for the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, “outraged” him on a second viewing: “Art has been recruited here for an operation of deceit” and, “this is not an antiwar film.” He also seems to implicitly support the movement to boycott Israel with statements such as “Israelis don’t pay any price for the injustice of the occupation, so the occupation will never end” and the piece “A Just Boycott.”

Yet reading Levy can be a frustrating experience. In a July 2006 piece about an attack on Gaza after the capture by Palestinian fighters of a soldier involved in shelling the Strip, Levy writes: “The legitimate basis for the [Israeli army's] operation was stripped away the moment it began.” This is an odd and convoluted phrase. Why not just say it was illegitimate to begin with? But there is worse than that. In an article arguing for negotiations with Hamas, he describes the first Palestinian intifada as “unnecessary and cursed.” Palestinians would beg to differ — the popular uprising is widely regarded as a high point of legitimate and mostly unarmed resistance.

Even in “The Neighborhood Bully Strikes Again” Levy says of the winter 2008-09 massacre of Gaza that “Hamas brought this on itself and its people, but this does not excuse Israel’s overreaction.” As is the conventional Israeli-Western line, the Palestinians always “attack,” and the Israelis only ever “respond.” After Haaretz published Breaking the Silence’s interviews with soldiers testifying to Israel’s deliberate war crimes against civilians waving white flags in Gaza, Levy wrote that the army “has long ceased to be the most moral army in the world.” And yet he says nothing of the fact that this army he implicitly alleges was once “the most moral in the world” ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians in 1947-48.

There are other such criticisms to be made, as fundamentally, Levy’s perspective is an Israeli one — even a “patriotic” Israeli one, as he explicitly argues in one essay. I highlight these ideological limits, to make a wider point as my argument is not really with Gideon Levy (whose writing is probably the most critical of Israel that we can ever expect to appear in the Israeli media): there still seems to not be enough books on Palestine-Israel by Palestinians or other Arabs published in English.

Are British and American publishers still so afraid of false accusations of anti-Semitism when putting out works critical of Israel that they have to put up the ideological shield of the Jewish critic? Or is there still an undertone of racism — the colonial conviction that the Arabs are notorious liars so cannot be trusted as journalists or historians?

Perhaps things are changing. Ramzy Baroud recently had his My Father Was a Freedom Fighter published, and an English translation of Shafiq al-Hout’s memoir of his Palestine Liberation Organization years is forthcoming — both from Pluto Press. But if so, things are not changing quickly enough. Since Edward Said’s death, London Review of Books for example, seems to publish articles on Palestine-Israel almost exclusively by Israeli and/or Western writers, instead of Palestinians themselves.

Until the Western media can allow the voice of the oppressed to speak directly, without being constantly filtered through members of the oppressor society (even if they are allies such as Gideon Levy) then the chances of us getting a real picture of the history and current reality of Palestine are limited, to say the least.

As to whether or not you should buy this book: in all honesty, £8.99 or $15.95 is pretty expensive for a 148-page collection of essays that can be read for free on the Haaretz website. However, it is quite a good overview of Levy’s op-eds on Gaza from this period. A wider selection that included his writings on the second Lebanon war would perhaps have justified the price somewhat more.

Asa Winstanley is a freelance journalist based in London who has lived in and reported from occupied Ramallah. His website is www.winstanleys.org.

Asa Winstanley, The Electronic Intifada, 13 October 2009

In his new book The Making of a Human Bomb: An Ethnography of Palestinian Resistance, Nasser Abufarha examines the phenomena of Palestinian suicide operations. It is based on extensive fieldwork conducted in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, mostly in and around the northern town of Jenin. A native of the city, Abufarha interviewed families of suicide bombers, observed demonstrations and studied Palestinian cultural products that addressed suicide attacks. He also conducted interviews with activists from three different armed factions to explain suicide bombings, or “martyrdom operations” as they are more commonly known in the Arab world.

Abufarha traces the development of the concept of self-sacrifice in Palestinian society from the 1960s to the first Palestinian intifada (1987-1992). During the 1960s, Palestinian resistance fighters were known as the fedayeen or those who sacrifice for a cause. Contrary to common portrayal in the Western media, anyone fallen in the course of resistance to the Israeli occupation is honored in Palestinian society as a shahid, or a martyr, whether armed guerrilla or unarmed protestor.

Following the signing of the Oslo accords in the mid-1990s, the bombings by Hamas and Islamic Jihad were not supported by the majority of Palestinians, who mostly still hoped the “peace process” would lead to a Palestinian state. The two Islamic groups had to actively recruit for such operations.

By the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada in 2000, the stone-throwing children of the first intifada had grown up. Having watching their friends fall as martyrs to Israeli brutality, volunteers began to offer themselves to the armed factions: if they were to be killed anyway, it was surely better to choose the manner of their death. In the words of one of Abufarha’s interview subjects: “we are all martyrs with execution on hold.” The new concept of istishhad arose: actively seeking martyrdom as an act of resistance.

During the first three weeks of the second intifada, when popular demonstrations had been in full flow, Israeli army records state that its forces fired a million bullets — before the first Palestinian bombing. By November, Palestinian armed factions began to strike back. The more brutal Israeli repression got, the more the intifada militarized in response.

Abufarha says the aim of Palestinian martyrdom bombings was to cause “mimetic terror and fear” in Israeli society. He explains that the long years of Israeli terrorism in the West Bank and Gaza began, finally, to be mimicked by the victim.

Abufarha does not focus on international law or the morality of armed resistance. As an anthropologist, he instead studies cultural meaning and perception. He argues that martyrdom operations were primarily a “cultural performance” and that they “cannot be entirely understood without expanding the analysis to social and cultural realms.” He argues that “we have to give equal attention to victims and perpetrators” of violence.

Abufarha emphasizes that suicide attacks are not perpetrated by mad bombers but are a product of the violent environment of the Israeli occupation, arguing that they are an example of “how violence may become a logical, meaningful and intelligible practice.” Moreover, Abufarha makes a compelling case that the notion of the martyr’s life after death is mostly not religious in nature. He offers evidence that more emphasis tends to be put on the secular notion of living on in memory and reputation. This “explains why both Islamic and secular groups organize martyrdom operations.” He cites examples from popular Palestinian demonstration slogans, graffiti, literature and art in which a shahid is considered to have made a willing sacrifice to the land of Palestine itself. He or she will thus live on in the cultural memory of the people.

It is undeniable that the wave of Palestinian bombings against both Israeli military and civilian targets during the second intifada developed a certain degree of support among the Palestinian population. As Abufarha explains, after Palestinian hopes for international support for their unarmed popular uprising came to nothing during the first intifada, “no longer did the Palestinians rely on the international community as a supporter that would be swayed” during the second intifada. Indeed, during the bloodiest days of the second intifada the armed wings had more volunteers than they knew what to do with. “We started to tell people to look after their kids,” recounts Kamal, a local leader of the al-Aqsa Brigades in Jenin. This counters conventional wisdom claiming suicide bombers are coerced into the attacks.

Abufarha does not take a moral position either for or against suicide bombings. He calls them both “legitimate” and “illegitimate” in different contexts, depending on which population is perceiving them. At times, he is in danger of cultural relativism, as such dichotomies ignore Palestinian arguments against attacks on Israeli civilians. However, he does note the illegality of targeting civilians under international law. Abufarha concludes the book with the assessment that martyrdom operations did not defeat the occupation, but they did prevent Israel from “settling the conflict on its own terms” (i.e., incorporating the occupied territories, without Palestinians, into Israel).

The Making of a Human Bomb does have some shortcomings. There are several minor errors that closer editing should have identified, such as references in the text to books missing from the bibliography. There are also minor factual errors. For example, Abufarha claims that the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) was one of the Palestinian groups “engaged in organizing martyrdom missions” during the second intifada. However, unlike the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the DFLP has never performed a suicide bombing, and is not on the State Department’s list of US Government Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Abufarha could have been referring to a handful of DFLP “no escape” attacks against Israeli military targets, but this should have been clarified in the text. Moreover, as an ethnography published by an academic press, it is not necessarily written for a general readership and the narrative suffers at times from excessive jargon.

Abufarha’s focus on cultural perception sometimes leads to a neglect of history and facts. For example, he does not give an account of the outbreak of the second intifada, so it may not be clear to some readers that, until the first Palestinian bombing on 2 November 2000, the first month of the intifada had been mostly unarmed on the Palestinian side (fully armed on the Israeli side, of course). For those unfamiliar with the chronology of events, the book should be read alongside another work, for example Tanya Reinhart’s Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948. It also could have benefited from a wider account of the tactical and strategic goals of suicide bombings. However, these factors are addressed in other studies that Abufarha critiques, such as Robert Pape’s Dying to Win and Mia Bloom’s Dying to Kill.

One could be forgiven for wishing that the book had focused on critical reassessment of suicide bombings as a well as a greater discussion of cause and effect. In addition, a mention of Hamas’s various offers (rejected by Israel) of a moratorium on targeting civilians, would also have been instructive. Ultimately, however, this is not a general history of Palestinian resistance. It is certainly an important contribution to the understanding of this bloody chapter in the history of Palestinian resistance, as it addresses the issue from the perspective of the Palestinians themselves. As the author concludes, understanding this perspective is vital if we are to “develop an effective response to violence.”

Asa Winstanley is a freelance journalist who has lived in and reported from occupied Ramallah, working for the Palestine Times and the Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre. His website is www.winstanleys.org.

It is not a history book per say, but it is a highly readable journalistic summary of the main events in the history of the occupation, with a big emphasis on the Nakba (the ethnic cleansing of half the population of the Palestinians from their homeland in 1947-48 by Zionist militias and terrorist gangs). The second half of the book is about the reality on the ground right now. It combines interesting (and often shocking) facts and figures with anecdotes from individual Palestinians on the ground: many of whom were recorded in conversations with White himself.

It is all highly readable and only about 120 pages long. It includes an excellent “Frequently Asked Questions” section, a solid bibliography recommending further reading, and a huge list of action, news and information websites.

The book also avoids the infernal BBC curse of “balance”. It is not balanced: it is against occupation, against ethnic cleansing and against apartheid. But at the same time, it is not polemical, and never less than factual and humane.

The book fills a perfect gap. I’ve lost count of the times people have asked me “can you recommend one book to start learning about Palestine-Israel?” For the first time, I now have a definitive answer.

White defends his book from Hasbara attacks on his blog here.

However, all is not what it seems. The book was written before be became a politician, and he mentions in the new forward to the 2004 edition that there were a few things he would not have written now, but that he decided to leave the book basically as it was, even though they are politically inconvenient (p. ix — incidentally it would be interesting to get hold of an original 1995 edition of the book to see what changes were made). This is presumably a reference to things that Republican opponents could theoretically use for campaign ammunition, like his college drug use and his Black Nationalist acquaintances (horror of all horrors, he even admits while in Chicago to buying Louis Farrakhan’s newspaper “occasionally” (p. 201)). Look at things from another perspective though, and it seems pretty obvious that Obama decided to “come clean” about these things early on so as to sidestep such attacks. This was a smart move, as it mostly seems to have worked — for example, past drug use was never an issue in the presidential election.

He gives little indication that he wanted to be become a politician. He says he wanted to bring a new legal expertise from Harvard “like Promethean fire” (p. 276) back to the South Side to continue to fight on behalf of local communities. To be fair, he did return to Chicago after law school.

Evidence abounds, though, that Obama was thinking of becoming a politician as early on as the late 1980s, and certainly before Dreams From My Father was published. Writing in the New Yorker, Ryan Lizza says “Obama was writing ‘Dreams’ at the moment that he was preparing for a life in politics, and he launched his book and his first political campaign simultaneously, in the summer of 1995″ (2). This seems credible, and for all its honesty, Dreams should still be read with a proverbial pinch of salt, perhaps not so much in what it claims as what it omits. For example in recounting the part of his childhood spent in Indonesia, he mentions the huge massacres orchestrated by the dictator Suharto as he came to power in a military coup in 1965-66 (pp. 43-44:”The death toll was anybody’s guess: a few hundred thousand, maybe; half a million. Even the smart guys at the Agency had lost count” ). But he underplays the extent of CIA involvement: and more glaringly fails to mention that Suharto was supported by every US president from Nixon to Clinton (3).

The more I read this book, the more it became clear it is empty of conclusions. A memoir need not take political positions, but he poses so many questions and offers no answers. By the end of the book, you just find yourself wishing he would take a stand on something. Obama was clearly thinking more like a politician than a lawyer and wanted to avoid offending the wrong people. This fits well with his later “Change” and “Hope” slogans, which proved so popular precisely because they can pretty much mean what you want them to mean.

In summary then: a good read, and in fairness it raises some good points about about Black consciousness, Black Nationalism and race. But I can’t help but feel it is ultimately hollow, a politician building up his “narrative”.

(1) For example, his alleged past support for the Palestinians. While it does seem that he previously took a more balanced approach than his more recent conversion to the church of AIPAC, willing to hear from both Israelis and Palestinians, it is also true that he never made any concrete promises. See Ali Abunimah, “How Barack Obama learned to love Israel“, Electronic Intifada, 4 March 2007.

(2) Ryan Lizza, “Making It: How Chicago shaped Obama“, The New Yorker, 21 July 2008.

(3) See, for example, John Pilger, “Our model dictator“, The Guardian, 28 January 2008.

Reviewed 7 December 2008.

Keeping to what is revealed by the account of the documentary record, this is a pretty useful summary. One of the most interesting points that comes out is the fact that Israel’s supposed wish for peace with it’s neighbors was always clearly a lie. Something I learned was that Jordan and Egypt offered full recognition of Israel (in return for withdrawal the the 1949 ceasefire lines) as early as November 1967 (p 95) — with nothing for the Palestinians. Also Israel demanded control of Gaza and possibly the West Bank before it would even negotiate over withdrawal. There are other interesting such facts that come out.

But it is a bit of a missed opportunity in that it does not discuss how the Israeli aggression of 1967 led the US to start a massive military aid program to Israel. However it does quote the NSC Planning Board from August 1958: “if we choose to combat radical Arab nationalism and to hold Persian Gulf oil by force if necessary, a logical corollary would be to support Israel as the only strong pro-West power left in the Near East” (p 57). Beyond delusions, this is the key to understanding the last 40 years plus of extreme pro-Israel US foreign policy.

Reviewed 1 July 2008.

Reviewed 22 May 2008.

This book is extremely over-rated and was critically acclaimed at the time, probably because it was seen as something “new” and “gritty”. Spare me. You could forgive the ideology if the book worked as art unto itself. But once you remove that, little remains.

Compare this to the work of Alan Moore at the time. “V For Vendetta” stars a protagonist who is essentially sympathetic to the writer’s political views, but Moore wisely makes him a genuinely ambiguous figure, whose actions are often morally questionable. Compare this to Miller’s two-dimensional Batman. To the original dimension of the Batman character (“heroic”), Miller’s oh so great achievement was to add a second dimension: “gritty”. Oh, well done.

You get the feeling this book wishes it were Moore’s “Watchmen”. A masterful work, “Watchmen” is a complete and successful deconstruction of the superhero genre. “The Dark Knight Returns” on the other hand, is another desperate attempt to shock life into the long-since rotted corpse of yet another ridiculous superhero character.

Reviewed 4 April 2008.

She also demolishes the myth of Camp David, showing that it was Barak that effectively destroyed the mainstream Israeli peace consensus, not Sharon. The best section of the book is the part in chapter 9 titled The Two Poles in Israel’s Politics. Here, she irrefutably shows how mainstream Israeli politics is in fact divided not between “hawks” and “doves” but between the road of apartheid under the guise of endless negotiations (the Alon-Oslo road) and outright ethnic cleansing (often with the slogan “Jordan is Palestine” — Sharon).

Here, she quotes from an article she wrote in 1994, which seems amazingly prescient in light of the recent rise of Hamas: “From the start, it has been possible to identify two Israeli conceptions that underline the Oslo process. One is that it will reduce the cost of the occupation, using a Palestinian patronage regime, with Arafat as the senior cop responsible for the security of Israel. The other is that the process should lead to the collapse of Arafat and the PLO. The humiliation of Arafat, and the amplification of his surrender, will gradually lead to loss of popular support. Consequently, the PLO will collapse, or enter power conflicts. Thus, the Palestinian society will loose its secular leaderships and institutions.”

But she also argues fairly convincingly that the majority of Israelis support withdrawal from the occupied territories and forced evacuation of the settlements.

The appendix — another 1994 article — is also brilliant. Even back then she saw the inherit problems in Oslo, describing the 1994 Gaza-Jericho agreement signed in Cairo as the beginning of apartheid. This analysis has by now been totally borne out, with even mainstream figures like Jimmy Carter describing Israel’s rule in the occupied territories as apartheid (although ANC veterans describe it as far worse than apartheid these days).

The only really negative point of this book is in its copy-editing: it is pretty poor in several places and there are what appear to be editor’s notes mistakenly left behind. But there is a second edition out by now and I assume these problems are fixed there.

In reply to the previous review by Bren Carlil [see comments section below]: it appears you belong to that category of thinkers who “refuse to be grounded by the reality” of what is actually happening, as opposed to state propaganda. You have swallowed several key Israeli government propaganda themes whole. Firstly the idea that the “security fence along or near the Green Line” protects Israel. In fact 80% of the apartheid wall is built on the Palestinian side of the Green Line, mostly deep inside the West Bank. This is illustrated clearly by the fact that the length of the wall is more than twice the length of the Green Line. If it was genuinely built with the security concerns of normal Israelis in mind, it would have been built on the Israeli side. In fact the wall is, in large part, the latest in a long line of land-grab policies, following a long held doctrine of “maximum land, minimum Arabs”, something that goes back to the “a land without a people” Zionist delusions of the 1920s and 30s (but never abandoned since then).

Suicide bombs in fact stopped because Hamas and the other armed groups went into a truce. And since coming into power in the PA, Hamas has continuously offered Israel a comprehensive ceasefire, but Israel has simply refused to even discuss the idea, preferring instead to escalate its attacks and siege on Gaza, forcing Hamas’ hand. As to the main points of the rest of your argument, you may be right, but you fail to mention that you are essentially weighing the difference between apartheid (“Sharon intended to annex the major settlement blocs”) and ethnic cleansing (Olmert in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank).

Reviewed 3 April 2008.

No doubt this is all typical Israeli terminology, but I thought Amira Hass was supposed to be “radical”? Maybe the selection of articles is bad (the editing of the volume is frankly pathetic with several amateurish typographical errors). But this still does not excuse the problems such as those described above.

On the plus side, her reporting has some very good moments. The best article here is probably the one in which she famously grills an Israeli sniper, extracting the news that they are told to shoot dead 12-year-old Palestinian children since they are considered adults: “he’s already had his bar mizvah”. Her reports on internal Palestinian issues are also very good, such as the interviews with unemployed workers and the families of those detained by the PA. Her report from Jenin is very good too. For moments such as these, the book gets three stars.

Reviewed 22 March 2008.

All, in all good, but it left me wanting to read Hroub’s more detailed book on Hamas.

Reviewed 3 March 2008.

Lloyd’s artwork is great, but the only thing stopping me giving this volume 5 stars is the colour work. To my mind, the whole thing would have worked 100% better in black and white, in which the original serialization of the first two books was apparently published in Warrior. The whole art style is made up of shadows and light. This may be just DC’s fault (and indeed, their reproduction here is pathetic — the pages are far too small as they are trying to squeeze the larger page size of British comics into the US format), but the authors apparently colourized it for the final volume when DC picked it up, allowing them to finish the story.

All in all, a political, noir classic, but I wish DC would issue a black and white version in the Absolute format. Because this work does indeed deserve the Absolute treatment. Read it, but I advise hold off buying it since they may well release an Absolute version (probably in colour though — bah).