Palestinians & Jews Used To Live Next Door - We Are Friends

As one young Arab-Israeli woman -- who will never be quoted in an 
article about the rising tide of anti-Semitism -- said so eloquently and 
passionately the last night of the conference, "Yes, I experience 
discrimination in Israel. But my friendship with Jewish Israelis is 
proof that it is a lie when both sides tell us we can't live together. 
We can live together. You must not believe the lie."

+++


*Anti-Semitism at the World Social Forum? A Personal Report*
Cecilie Surasky

/Cecilie Surasky is the Communications Director for Jewish Voice for 
Peace and a New Voices fellow with the Academy of Educational Development./

     It is my first morning at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India 
and I am at a workshop on Palestinian women and the occupation. In the 
audience is a woman who I first think might be Israeli -- she could 
easily be one of my friends and I feel an immediate kinship with her. 
She tells me she is 34 and has lived her whole life in Gaza except for 
college. I ask her if I can interview her.
     She cautiously eyes my card, on which I have purposely written in 
thick, visible letters: Jewish Voice for Peace. "I don't know, she says. 
"Do you support the occupation?" It seems such a surreal question. How 
could anyone support an occupation? The very word evokes domination, a 
kind of cruelty. No, I say, we want to end the occupation. We want a 
peace that is just.
     I ask about the checkpoints. She describes sitting in her car 
waiting to be allowed to drive through. The young Israeli soldiers are 
in sniper posts. You can't see them, but they can see you, she explains. 
They signal it's time to go by shooting their guns. She waits a long 
time until the soldiers say, "OK, now the dogs can go."
     "You think, 'Do I want to be called a dog, or do I just want to 
go?' " she tells me. "I don't care, so I start my car and they yell 'No! 
Not you, I said dogs!'  So she turns her car off, and sometime later 
they say, "OK, now humans can go!" She starts her car and they look at 
her and the others and say "No! I said humans." And she turns her car 
off and waits until finally this "other" category of Palestinian -- 
neither human nor animal -- is allowed to pass.
     "This," she says, "is my only contact with Israelis." And this, I 
think, and is my first contact with someone from Gaza.

*The WSF and the new anti-Semitism 
*
     The World Social Forum (WSF) is the populist answer to the World 
Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Instead of a gathering of the 
world's mostly wealthy, white, and male heads of state and captains of 
industry in Davos, the WSF is a cacophony of anti-globalization/human 
rights activists from all over the globe.
     The roughly 100,000 participants represent every imaginable cause 
-- from Indian "untouchables" and Bhutanese refugees to child 
trafficking and sexual minorities. They are seen in the hundreds of 
marches that seem to appear out of nowhere down the main thoroughfare, 
at the 500 information booths, in more than 1,000 workshops, and on the 
political posters filling every inch of available wall space.
     I have come because my New Voices human rights fellowship has 
decided to send the fellows to the WSF. But I have an additional reason 
for being here. The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) has cited the WSF as 
one of the centers of what it and others refer to as the "new 
anti-Semitism", and these charges have been picked up by various 
journalists as evidence of a dangerous new trend on the left.
     Upon closer reading, most of these accounts make little if any 
distinction at all between anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel, 
or between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. The SWC description of the 
"anti-Jewish" atmosphere at last year's WSF in Brazil is one of these 
accounts.
     And yet, their description of the WSF is so disturbing, even 
frightening, that I am prepared to encounter at minimum silent 
hostility, and possibly even physical attacks from my fellow attendees. 
I have come to the WSF to be loudly and visibly Jewish, to make a 
presentation that deconstructs the theory that Jews dictate U.S. policy 
in the Middle East, and to see for myself this purported new tidal wave 
of hatred of Jews from the rest of the global left.

*The conference is not what I expected
*
     It is surprising to find that the Israel-Palestine conflict and the 
occupation are not more prominently featured at the conference. Out of 
hundreds of ongoing marches, I witness only one small pro-Palestine 
march, which includes a prominent Israeli leftist marching in the front 
row.
     Out of about 500 information stalls, only two represent Palestinian 
human rights groups: PENGON, which is working to tear down the wall 
Israel is building through Palestinian land, and Al-Haq, which is 
launching a campaign identifying collective punishment as a war crime. 
Of the thousands of political posters, I see only one series -- Al-Haq's 
powerful posters on collective punishment -- related to the issue.
     I attend most of the workshops I can find on the Israel-Palestine 
issue. What I do not hear (or see) is anything I would consider 
anti-Semitic. In a global conference of 100,000 people, one expects to 
hear an enormous range of political perspectives, including the 
occasional extreme or intolerant remark. Given that I am prepared for 
the worst, I am shocked that the overwhelming majority of what is said 
in workshops critical of US and Israeli policies in the territories is 
milder than the articles and essays one can read in Israeli newspapers 
on any given day.

*Two realities, one anti-Semitism industry
* 
     After I return home, the Wiesenthal Center publishes an alarming 
piece entitled "Networking to Destroy Israel 
<http://ga3.org/ct/t1qKOuK1lBtY/>" in the Jerusalem Post. The article 
claims that this year's WSF was "hijacked by anti-American and 
anti-Israeli forces" and leads me to wonder whether we attended the same 
conference. In this piece, and for the second year in a row, they 
strangely declare themselves the only Jewish NGO to attend the WSF.(I 
personally saw participants from Brit Tzedek and Yesh Gvul, to name just 
a few -- and Jewish Voice for Peace is listed in the official program.)
     They go on to cite a litany of statements, including mine, as proof 
that the WSF is a place where people who want to destroy Israel meet to 
plot and recruit. Employing a form of twisted logic that would make 
Donald Rumsfeld proud, they essentially claim that the absence of any 
blatant anti-Semitism is not proof that there was none, but merely an 
indication of a more "sophisticated" kind of anti-Zionism (and therefore 
anti-Semitism) in which sympathetic Jews such as Jewish Voice for Peace 
(JVP) play a starring roll.
     The account is so riddled with errors -- I am misquoted, JVP is 
described as "campus-based", all of my colleagues are given the wrong 
attributions, and quoted either inaccurately or out of context -- that 
it is pointless to list them all. It contains bits of truth but strings 
together isolated statements to make them sound like a tidal wave of 
hatred and part of what they call an "orchestrated" and 
"insidious" campaign to destroy Israel.
     All this begs the question of why a group such as the SWC would 
want to fuel hysteria about anti-Semitism in general, especially in 
regard to the left. The SWC has an important history of hunting down 
former Nazis, exposing the activities of neo-fascists and other 
right-wing hate groups, and fighting genuine anti-Semitism.
     But the SWC is like many other mainstream Jewish organizations in 
the United States that have expanded their mission from fighting the 
oppression of Jews by others to attempting to silence critics -- 
including other Jews -- of Israel's human rights record. These 
organizations' new role as arbiters of acceptable opinion is a far cry 
from their proud past. And it is ironic, given the spirited debate about 
Israel's occupation that takes place in Israel, but apparently is 
unacceptable in the rest of the world.
     For many of these organizations, as evidenced in the SWC op-ed, the 
mere mention of the heartbreaking reality of Israel's occupation of the 
Palestinians is proof of an insidious plan supported by other Jews to 
wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Further, it is evidence of bias 
simply to point out causality-that groups like JVP or Al-Haq exist not 
because we are anti-Jewish or anti-Israel-but to end the injustices of 
Israel 's occupation and treatment of Arabs, and to stop the spiral of 
revenge that has become a horrible tragedy for /everyone/.
     To even the most casual observer, this is shocking for a community 
with a long tradition of protecting free speech, and an even longer 
tradition of embracing debate. It is also self-defeating given the now 
increasingly mainstream view both in Israel and the US that the 
occupation and militarization of Israeli culture is bad not just for 
Palestinians, but also for Israelis. 
     What is perhaps most troublesome is that by fueling the fires of 
fear through hyperbolic statements, (an easy thing to do to a people 
with our history of suffering and persecution) these groups--who say 
they represent all Jews-- play a critical role in giving the current 
Israeli government permission to violate virtually every moral and 
ethical standard central to the Jewish tradition in its effort to keep 
down the Palestinians.
     They make peace ever more distant by perpetuating the myth that 
Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians, have nothing to say to each 
other and are incapable of recognizing each other as full human beings 
with similar wants and needs. They get under our skin and seek to make 
Jews believe that indeed, the world is out to get us and we can trust no 
one.

*Acts of Lovingkindness at the WSF, the untold story
*
     In my own experience as a very "out" Jew at the conference, I felt 
no hate. Instead, I met a number of Palestinians and Arabs who, on some 
fundamental level, expressed the pain of separation. "I am Muslim, and 
we were raised to respect the Jewish tradition," a Palestinian woman 
living in Jordan told me. "We used to live next door to Jews, and we 
were friends."
     After I spoke at a session about suspending military aid to Israel 
until it ends its occupation, and identified myself as a member of 
Jewish Voice for Peace, a Palestinian woman thanked me and a 
distinguished Lebanese man from Jordan came up and gave me a huge hug 
and a kiss.
     Two of the Arabs that the SWC op-ed quoted most prominently in 
their description of what they called a campaign to destroy Israel were 
environmental scientist Rania Masri and activist journalist Ahmed Shawki.
     Thirty minutes after meeting me for the first time at the Forum, 
Ahmed Shawki offered to loan me the new digital camera given to him by 
his wife. He knew I was eager to take pictures and the airline had 
misplaced my luggage. Knowing nothing of my politics, only that I was 
from a Jewish peace group, he gave me his digital camera.
     The next day, the bag containing my passport, credit cards, and his 
camera was stolen. Our mutual friend and colleague from Lebanon, Rania 
Masri, handed me a hundred dollars from her wallet and absolutely 
insisted I take her ATM card and PIN number so I would have money for 
the rest of the trip. And Ahmed? To this day, Ahmed refuses to accept 
payment for the camera that was stolen.
     This is the real story of Jews, Arabs, and the World Social Forum 
that needs to be told; that is, the ways in which we so quickly and 
easily recognize each other's fundamental humanity. As one young 
Arab-Israeli woman -- who will never be quoted in an article about the 
rising tide of anti-Semitism -- said so eloquently and passionately the 
last night of the conference, "Yes, I experience discrimination in 
Israel. But my friendship with Jewish Israelis is proof that it is a lie 
when both sides tell us we can't live together. We can live together. 
You must not believe the lie."



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



"[C]apital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and 
dirt."
--Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 31

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