Salon.com > Sandy Tolan

Obama is missing the real Israel

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 14:18:00 +0000

President Obama’s current three-day trip through the Holy Land has gotten much attention, but his visit is notable for what he won’t see, and apparently doesn’t want to. Consider a territory the size of Connecticut, that's been around for nearly 47 years, and holds nearly three million people. It's carved up by hundreds of blockades, barriers, “special security zones,” “closed military areas,” “killing zones,” and roads accessible only to the privileged minority. It features an adult male population where nearly two of every five have been arrested or imprisoned, many without ever being charged. And yet, it remains essentially invisible.

I'm talking about the Occupied West Bank, 60 percent of which remains under the full military control of Israel. You’d be forgiven for not knowing, as references in the U.S. to Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank have fallen out of favor. Dennis Ross, President Clinton’s architect of the Camp David failure, spent a full page in a New York Times op-ed, making “recommendations” for “both sides” in preparation for the president’s visit to the region, without once mentioning the word, or the concept. The Los Angeles Times managed the same feat, in side-by-side op-eds, both by Israelis, including one by a settler who argued for the legitimacy of the West Bank settlements.

Our last Thanksgiving

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 01:00:00 +0000

I woke up shivering, my head rattling against the window of Kevin Walsh's old Ford Maverick. It was 1:30 in the morning, 33 Thanksgivings ago, and we were on the road near the Hoover Dam, bound for a reunion with friends in Chico, Calif.

I pulled my lumpy down coat tight against me in the frigid car. The heater was broken, Kevin had insisted when we left Flagstaff the night before; there was simply no point in testing it.

I looked over at his bony hand gripping the wheel, knuckles white. The other stroked a goatee to a sharp point below the chin. Kevin sat ramrod straight, glaring out at the road, his right eye narrowed ferociously.

Suddenly I was wide awake, feigning nonchalance.

“You okay, Thunderbolt?” I asked him, calling him by his stage name.

“Fine, Ace,” he replied sharply. That was my nickname back then. “Really just fine. Now why don’t you go back to sleep?”

His grip tightened. The radio crackled from a distant storm.

* * * * *

A few days earlier I’d gotten a call my friend John Zarske, like Kevin a bluegrass and folk musician. I’d recently moved to New York from Flagstaff, and was in my first semester at NYU.

Free speech and the “clash of civilizations”

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 14:45:00 +0000

Three hurtful words, scrawled in black circles under the eyes of a ballplayer named Yunel Escobar: Tu ere[s] maricón. The message, conveyed in the eyeblack of the Toronto Blue Jays shortstop during a recent game, means, "You’re a faggot." That’s hate language, and reaction was swift and stern. Major league baseball launched an investigation, the Blue Jays suspended Escobar for three games and enrolled him in “sensitivity training,” and he gave the obligatory apology in front of the microphones. Few if anyone publicly complained that, hurtful or not, homophobic or not, Escobar’s free speech rights trumped the concerns of others wounded by his words. No one said Escobar should be able to continue displaying the slur.

Palestine’s losing battle for land

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:01:00 +0000

It's the show that time and the world forgot. It's called the Occupation and it's now in its 45th year. Playing on a landscape about the size of Delaware, it remains largely hidden from view, while Middle Eastern headlines from elsewhere seize the day. Diplomats shuttle back and forth from Washington and Brussels to Middle Eastern capitals; the Israeli-Turkish alliance ruptures amid bold declarations from the Turkish prime minister; crowds storm the Israeli Embassy in Cairo, while Israeli ambassadors flee the Egyptian capital and Amman, the Jordanian one; and of course, there's the headliner, the show-stopper of the moment, the Palestinian Authority's campaign for statehood in the United Nations, which will prompt an Obama administration veto in the Security Council.

The Palestine Papers: A fact-based play in one act

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:01:00 +0000

Earlier this week, Al-Jazeera released a decade's worth of memos, emails, maps and minutes from high-level negotiations between the United States, Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The documents revealed that the Palestinians had offered far more significant concessions than previously reported. In the wake of these revelations, Palestinians expressed anger at their increasingly weak leadership, accusing them of capitulating, while some Israeli commentators accused the government of missing its chance for peace. The Americans, meanwhile, came across as intent on not offending the Israelis, even if it meant contradicting established U.S. policy. It was against this backdrop that Uncle Sam decided to spend some time on the couch this week…

Scene: A psychiatrist's office in a nondescript strip mall in suburban Virginia. Dr. Weller, a clean-shaven, balding man in his sixties, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, khaki pants and a loose knit sweater with suede elbow patches, moves across the carpeted floor to greet his new client. At the doorway stands a tall, rangy senior citizen with a pointed white beard and top hat with red and white stripes and a white star on a blue background. Dr. Weller extends his hand.

Israel and the psychology of “never again”

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Why does Israel continue to act against its own interests?

Over the years, and especially since 2006, the Jewish state's deadly, over-the-top military actions in response to provocations from Hamas and Hezbollah — and now from a flotilla ferrying humanitarian aid to Gaza — have backfired. And in each case, the Jewish state has grown less secure by increasing its international isolation and fueling fury much closer to home.

Four summers ago, Israel's war in Lebanon displaced a million people in an attempt to crush Hezbollah, which grew from the settling dust and resentment of an Israeli invasion a generation earlier. But the 2006 war only made Hezbollah stronger.

Israel could have predicted such consequences. In 1988, it tried to weaken Yasser Arafat and his secular PLO by encouraging the growth of Hamas and its Islamic adherents. This "enemy of my enemy is my friend" strategy didn't work either, leading to years of attacks and reprisals and, eventually, to the 2009 war in Gaza. Fourteen hundred Palestinians died, compared to 13 Israelis from rockets fired from Gaza. Yet this invasion, too, missed its targets: Hamas remains firmly in power, and a kidnapped Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, has still not been liberated from his Gazan captors.

Iran: “The guest is God’s friend”

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:15:00 +0000

Journalism's deepest, most honest contributions inevitably spring from on-the-ground reporting, unencumbered by policy agendas in Washington, London or other foreign capitals. That's what epitomizes the work of my friend and colleague Iason Athanasiadis, and it's why his detention by Iranian authorities, on June 17 when trying to board a flight out of Iran, is so troubling.

Iason, who has written for the Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times and publications across Europe and the Middle East, comes from that breed of journalist in pursuit of something beyond just "the story." To work in Iran, he learned Farsi; to understand its people, he lived with them for three years. His work, as a writer and photojournalist, reflects deep empathy with the Iranian people, an understanding of their historical legacy, and an analysis of the changes swirling around them. Those values lend an independence and credibility to Iason's work that allow him, on the one hand, to produce the revealing photo essay "Children of the Revolution," which captures the hopes of a new generation of Iranians; and on the other, to invoke, in his writing on the nation's history, "Britain's imperialist past and expert meddling in Iran's internal affairs," which "has left most ordinary Iranians nursing a distrust that endures."

When Barry passes Hank

Sat, 21 Jul 2007 13:46:00 +0000

On April 8, 1974, when Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's all-time career home run record with his 715th homer, one important person was not in Atlanta's Fulton County Stadium: baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn. Aaron had endured literally tons of hate mail and numerous death threats in gracefully ascending to the record of a white American icon. The commissioner had declined to witness the shattering of the greatest record in sports, in which a black American hero risked his life every time he came to bat, in favor of honoring a previous commitment to address the Wahoo Club, the Indians' fan club in Cleveland.

Thirty-three years later, another commissioner faces a choice: to be a witness to history, when Barry Bonds breaks Aaron's record, or to stay away. Although Bonds' journey to the home run record can scarcely be compared with Aaron's, baseball commissioner Bud Selig should not make the same mistake as his predecessor. Selig should be in the house when Bonds clubs home run No. 756. Maybe Bonds will make it easy on you, commissioner: If he hits three homers this weekend, you can watch the record fall at home in Milwaukee.

Rethinking Israel’s David-and-Goliath past

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 10:50:00 +0000

At a little after 7 on the morning of June 5, 1967, as Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's commanders were finishing their breakfasts and driving to work, French-built Israeli fighter jets roared out of their bases and flew low, below radar, into Egyptian airspace. Within three hours, 500 Israeli sorties had destroyed Nasser's entire air force. Just after midday, the air forces of Jordan and Syria also lay in smoking ruins, and Israel had essentially won the Six-Day War -- in six hours.

Israeli and U.S. historians and commentators describe the surprise attack as necessary, and the war as inevitable, the result of Nasser's fearsome war machine that had closed the Straits of Tiran, evicted United Nations peacekeeping troops, taunted the traumatized Israeli public, and churned toward the Jewish state's border with 100,000 troops. "The morning of 5 June 1967," wrote Israel's warrior-turned-historian, Chaim Herzog, "found Israel's armed forces facing the massed Arab armies around her frontiers." Attack or be annihilated: The choice was clear.

The catastrophe that never ends

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 11:44:00 +0000

Under the pretext of forcing the release of a single soldier "kidnapped by terrorists" (or, if you prefer, "captured by the resistance"), Israel has done the following: seized members of a democratically elected government; bombed its interior ministry, the prime minister's offices, and a school; threatened another sovereign state (Syria) with a menacing overflight; dropped leaflets from the air, warning of harm to the civilian population if it does not "follow all orders of the IDF" (Israel Defense Forces); loosed nocturnal "sound bombs" under orders from the Israeli prime minister to "make sure no one sleeps at night in Gaza"; fired missiles into residential areas, killing children; and demolished a power station that was the sole generator of electricity and running water for hundreds of thousands of Gazans.

Besieged Palestinian families, trapped in a locked-up Gaza, are in many cases down to one meal a day, eaten in candlelight. Yet their desperate conditions go largely ignored by a world accustomed to extreme Israeli measures in the name of security: nearly 10,000 Palestinians locked in Israeli jails, many without charge; 4,000 Gaza and West Bank homes demolished since 2000 and hundreds of acres of olive groves plowed under; three times as many civilians killed as in Israel, many due to "collateral damage" in operations involving the assassination of suspected militants.

No to Israeli unilateralism

Wed, 24 May 2006 03:36:00 +0000

When Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert meets with President Bush Tuesday, he will try to convince the White House that in the absence of a "partner for peace," an Israeli plan to draw its final borders, and wall off Israelis from Palestinians, is in the best interests of peace and stability in the region.

Yet the implementation of Olmert's "convergence" plan could have the opposite effect. By annexing West Bank lands, claiming Jerusalem's Old City and its holy sites exclusively as Israel's own, drawing a new "security border" along the Jordan Valley and keeping in place, at least for now, the military occupation in the West Bank, the convergence plan would essentially kill the decades-old Palestinian dream of self-determination. The plan is likely to lead to neither peace nor stability.

Now, with some signals emerging that the Hamas-led Palestinian government could indeed accept Israel's existence, American officials should think hard before embracing Olmert's unilateralism.

“The Lemon Tree”

Mon, 08 May 2006 11:38:00 +0000

The young Arab man approached a mirror in the washroom of Israels West Jerusalem bus station. Bashir Khairi stood alone before a row of porcelain basins and leaned forward, regarding himself. He turned his head slightly, left to right and back again. He smoothed his hair, nudged his tie, pinched his clean-shaven face. He was making certain all of this was real.

For nearly two decades, since he was six years old, Bashir had been preparing for this journey. It was the breath, the currency, the bread of his family, of nearly every family he knew. It was what everyone talked about, all the time: return. In exile, there was little else worth dreaming of.

Bashir gazed at his reflection. Are you ready for this journey? he asked himself. Are you worthy of it? It seemed his destiny to return to the place hed mainly heard about and mostly couldnt remember. It felt as if he were being drawn back by hidden magic; as if he were preparing to meet a secret, long-lost lover. He wanted to look good.

Bashir! yelled his cousin Yasser, snapping the younger man back to the moment in the bus station mens room. Yallah! Come on! The bus is leaving!

Early signs: Reports from a warming planet

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 12:13:00 +0000

In recent years, evidence has been emerging from various parts of the globe that climate change is not only real, it is beginning to have significant political, economic and human impact. Much of the reporting on the subject in the U.S. has focused on the "debate" over whether warming is occurring, and if so, whether humans are partly the cause. Scientists, however, have already answered these questions -- resoundingly in the affirmative -- as represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which comprises more than 2,000 scientists representing over 100 nations.

With early signs of climate change emerging, the time was right, it occurred to me, to send a team of reporters into the field to investigate. I approached colleagues at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, where I teach international reporting, and after several encouraging conversations, I determined that these early signs were sufficient for a full-scale investigation by a team of the school's reporters. Dean Orville Schell recommended we ask climatologist John Harte, of U.C.'s Energy and Resources Group, to join the team. Professor Harte readily agreed to be my co-teacher and our team's science advisor.