David Shulman writes: On March 16, I joined some twenty-five children, aged about eight to thirteen, who had gathered with Palestinian peace activists in a house in Hebron city to write letters to President Obama on the eve of his visit to Jerusalem. March 16 was the start of the third Selma-to-Montgomery march, led by Martin Luther King, in 1965, a defining moment in the history of the American civil rights movement, and the children—Palestinians who were mostly from the H2 area of Hebron under direct Israeli military control—had come to learn about Martin Luther King and nonviolent resistance.

Most of the letters began by begging the US president: “Open Shuhada Street”—once the main thoroughfare of central Hebron, now almost completely barred to Palestinians, its shops bolted, the doors of its houses welded shut by the Israeli army. Others said simply: “Enough Occupation” or “Free Palestine” or “Down with the Wall.” One slightly older boy quoted a line of poetry: “Either we live, all of us, or we die together.” Some drew pictures: a soldier in khaki uniform standing with his rifle under an olive tree; a child’s map of Hebron, encircled, closed, with its deserted main street, in blue, cutting through to the city center.

A visit to Hebron eats into one’s soul. As of last week, Israel has a new government which, like the previous one, is in the hands of the settlers. Their parties have control of the Housing Ministry and the crucial Finance Committee of the Knesset, among other plums. Their not-so-secret plan is to put a million Jews in the West Bank, and they now have the political means to carry it out. There will be a surge of construction in the West Bank settlements, and new “illegal outposts” will mushroom on the hills. No one should expect the so-called centrists, or moderates, in the coalition to hold back the extremists.

Yair Lapid’s party, optimistically named “There is a Future,” came in second in the elections. But like most of the Israeli mainstream, Lapid seems all too ready to go along with the extreme program of the right. Tzipi Livni, former head of the opposition, ran on a platform demanding that Israel re-open negotiations with the Palestinians; she has been given the Ministry of Justice, but she is entirely unequal to the task of pleading the cause of peace—and in any case, Netanyahu is committed to blocking any progress in that area. For his part, Barack Obama, on his belated first visit to Israel as president, has articulated the hope for peace and the urgent need for a free Palestinian state with a directness and clarity perhaps never heard before in Jerusalem. Netanyahu responded with his usual niggardly, narrow-hearted non-vision. [Continue reading…]

Noura Erakat writes: Due to the insistence upon maintaining a Jewish demographic majority, Israel’s establishment and maintenance has necessitated the ongoing forced displacement of Muslim and Christian Palestinians. Well before Israel’s establishment, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s chief architect and two-time prime minister, said that in order to be successful, Jews must comprise 80 percent of the population, hardly a plausible ratio in light of a vibrant Palestinian society in 1948. As put by the Israeli historian Benny Morris during an interview discussing his book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited,

Ben Gurion…understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst…that has to be clear, it’s impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen there.

And so based on that vision, Zionists demolished 531 Arab villages and expelled some 700,000 Palestinians from what is today Israel proper. The “problem,” so to speak, is that Zionist forces did not expel all Palestinians. Instead, the 100,000 Palestinians remaining within Israel at the conclusion of the 1948 war today constitute a 1.2 million-person population, approximately 20 percent of Israel’s total population.

Had Israel declared its borders along the 1949 armistice line, maintaining an 80 percent demographic balance may have been possible. Israel, however, has never declared any borders and, in accordance with a plan first elaborated by Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon immediately after the 1967 war, it has steadily expanded into the rest of Mandate Palestine, home now to 4 million Palestinians.

As of October 2012, the balance of Jews to non-Jews throughout Israel and the OPT was approximately 5.9 million Jewish Israelis, including the settler population, and 6.1 million Palestinians.

At this juncture, Israel could abandon its commitment to a Jewish demographic majority and establish a state for all its citizens without distinction to religion. Its leaders and supporters reject this pluralistic, democratic option outright and equate it with the destruction of Israel. [Continue reading…]

In Haaretz, Aluf Benn writes: U.S. President Barack Obama said Wednesday his visit to Israel was meant to be a reassuring one. He is here to make it clear to Israelis that America stands behind them and will ensure their security, even though the neighborhood has become tougher.

What President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted to hear was Obama making a firm commitment to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and to cushion the shock waves that could result from Syria’s disintegration.

It is premature to assess whether Peres and Netanyahu were satisfied by the promises made by the visitor, who asked for time for diplomatic negotiations with Iran and demanded that Syrian President Bashar Assad guard his chemical weapons.

The visit comes at a time when the United States is withdrawing from its deep involvement in the Middle East, amid the growing fear of Israel and other regional allies that America will abandon them to radical Islamic forces.

America entered the region with all its might, as its dependence on oil imports increased. But following the development of new oil and natural gas production methods in North America, the United States is gradually freeing itself of reliance on external energy sources.

In a few years it will become an oil exporter. The Middle East is still important, but it is less vital than it was a decade or two ago.

America has tired of the wars in the Middle East that consumed its resources and robbed its attention in the past decade, without resulting in a decisive victory. Obama has already pulled the U.S. Army out of Iraq, and will take it out of Afghanistan this term. The old regional order, with its reliance on secular military dictatorships and pro-American monarchies, has collapsed under the revolutions of the Arab Spring and the strengthening of the region’s Islamic movements.

The United States has discovered it cannot control these upheavals, and it doesn’t want to get involved in civil wars like the one in Syria. It prefers to stand by and see who wins.

Under these circumstances, pressure on Israel will increase. Until now, Israel has benefited from American safeguards in the region that have bolstered its deterrence capability, helped to safeguard the peace accords with Egypt and Jordan, and protected it from distant regional powers like Iran and Iraq. And when Israel is worried, or when it feels that its security concerns are not being given the attention they deserve in Washington, it has a tendency to take risks and use military force to perpetuate the strategic status quo.

Obama is projecting very different images domestically and overseas: He is trying to draw his country inward while telling his allies in the Middle East that, despite what they may be witnessing, the United States is just as committed to them as ever.

This attitude is reminiscent of Richard Nixon. In 1969 Nixon laid out the American foreign policy strategy that came to be known as the Guam Doctrine or the Nixon Doctrine, which made it clear that Washington would no longer undertake the defense of the free nations of the world. That was the first step toward an eventual American withdrawal from Vietnam, and Nixon, who had to sell the idea to his allies in Asia, assured them that everything would be fine.

The best way for Israel to ensure that the Americans remain committed is to threaten some unilateral action that would drag in the United States. That’s exactly what Netanyahu did Wednesday in his public appearances with Obama. He kept on talking about Israel’s right to defend itself. In rough translation from diplo-speak, that means, “If you don’t take action to get Iran to thwart its nuclear project, we will be forced to act alone − and you’ll suffer the consequences as much as we will.”

In the meantime, Obama has no clear-cut solution to the Iranian problem, or to the disintegration of Syria. He’s also finding it hard to bring his influence to bear on the political crisis in Egypt and to assuage Israeli concerns that the Muslim Brotherhood is planning to annul the Israel-Egypt peace treaty. So he’s playing for time by reassuring Israel, by whispering sweet nothings of unconditional love and support into the ears of the Israeli people, and by publicly referring to the prime minister by his nickname.

And there’s a good chance it will work. With every passing day, Israel becomes less capable of taking out Iran’s nuclear facilities by itself, while its dependence on the United States for military superiority just keeps growing.

Karl Vick reports: If there was any question about why President Obama came to Israel on the first overseas trip of his second term – and the question has come up – it vanished into the brilliant blue sky above Ben Gurion Airport when he reached the end of the red carpet and the microphone waiting there. The leader of the free world had come to issue a correction. Four years ago, delivering an address to the Muslim people in Cairo, Obama had irked Israeli Jews by citing the Holocaust as the justification for the 1948 founding of modern Israel. Israelis prefer to reach a bit further back — they find their deed to the land in the Bible – and the misapprehension was aggravated by what Obama did when he left Cairo: Fly past Israel to pay a call at Buchenwald, the World War II concentration camp.

There was none of that Wednesday. “More than 3,000 years ago, the Jewish people lived here, tended the land here, prayed to God here,” Obama began, getting right to it on the tarmac. “And after centuries of exile and persecution, unparalleled in the history of man, the founding of the Jewish State of Israel was a rebirth, a redemption unlike any in history. Today, the sons of Abraham and the daughters of Sarah are fulfilling the dream of the ages — to be ‘masters of their own fate’ in ‘their own sovereign state.’”

Benjamin Netanyahu looked on beaming. “I thought that was a wonderful line that I will cherish because it really gets down to the essence of what this state is about,” the prime minister said a few hours later, as the two leaders took questions at his Jerusalem residence. On the same page at last – somewhere in Psalms, just going by the praise-singing – the famously frosty pair appeared determined to project a budding buddydom. At the airport, when Obama shrugged off his suit jacket and flicked it over his shoulder, Netanyahu glanced over and, after first hitching up his pants, did the same, like a little kid imitating an older one. When they reached the display of Israel’s anti-missile systems, including Iron Dome, Netanyahu directed his guest through the exhibit by the colors painted on the tarmac: “Follow the red line.” Obama quipped: “He’s always talking to me about red lines.” An Iran joke. They can laugh about it now.

Obama kept calling Netanyahu “Bibi,” and choked both of them up a moment reading from the published letters of his brother Yonatan Netanyahu, who was killed leading the raid to rescue Israeli hostages at Entebbe. Netanyahu kept looking at Obama the way he spoke of him: approvingly. The handshakes were vigorous, the thanks effusive, and though they continue to differ on when it might be necessary to go military against Iran, the differences are no longer emphasized publicly. [Continue reading…]

That’s a headline in Israel’s leading daily Ynet: “Israeli doctor ready to operate on Obama.”

It’s not that Obama needs to be operated on, but just in case a surgeon is needed during the president’s visit, Professor Avi Rivkind, head of the department of surgery at the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, is on standby.

And just in case any of the close to one in five Israelis polled who say they hate Obama want to cause him harm, the same report helpfully includes his full schedule with locations and times when he will be present.

No doubt wherever a U.S. president travels, host governments make all kinds of contingency plans in anticipation of possible emergencies. Even so, I doubt that the press in any other country have seen fit to report on the availability of their surgeons to operate on the president.

With only 10% of Israelis viewing Obama favorably that makes him only slightly more popular there than he is in Pakistan. But whereas Pakistanis have a legitimate grievance — that hundreds of civilians have died in U.S. drone attacks — Israelis’ complaint is what? That 50% of U.S. foreign aid isn’t enough? Or is it just that he’s a black man with the middle name Hussein?

Ali Gharib reports: Call it a welcoming committee. Around noon here, just as Barack Obama’s plane was slated to touch down in Israel, a group of Palestinians donned masks bearing the American president’s likeness and took to Shuhada Street in Hebron, in the southern West Bank. Joined by international and Israeli activists, all wearing tee-shirts that read “I have a dream,” they caught the army unawares. Within minutes, five Israeli soldiers swarmed the group of just over 20 protesters, detaining seven or eight of them (reports remain unconfirmed), including the two Palestinians leading the protests. Their crime? Walking down the street.

“Obama, come here to Hebron,” shouted Issa Amro, a local protest leader, in English, just as a scrum formed between the demonstrators and a handful of soldiers, who rushed to the scene. “I am Obama,” he added as a young settler, perhaps 12-years-old, snatched the cardboard Obama mask from his face, crumpling it into his back pocket. Within minutes, Amro was shoved to the street. He rose briefly only to be knocked down again, before being dragged off into detention.

Segregation is too light a word to describe what happens in Hebron, a city of less than 200,000 that feels like ground zero of the Israeli occupation. Home to Jewish holy site, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, Israeli settlers began arriving in droves after Israel’s takeover of the West Bank in 1967 (joining a small, longtime community that coexisted peacefully here for more than a century). The city is now dotted by small settlements, each home no matter how remote guarded by a soldier from the Israeli army. Now, several hundred settlers live in directly in the city. Eventually, settlers seized Shuhada Street, narrow road that used to house a local market. Eventually, in perhaps the starkest act of discrimination here, much of the road was closed to Palestinians altogether in 1994. Palestinian life in the area has suffered dramatically since.

The protesters had marched down from a local house, joining a cadre of others and walking with Palestinian flags and a banner reading, “We have a dream/ Apartheid in Hebron/ Open Shuhada Street.” Other demonstrators held up photos of Martin Luther King, Jr.—some wore masks of his likeness, too—and Frederick Douglas. The protests took on King’s spirit of non-violence: no demonstrator hurled so much as an insult, let alone a rock. Just as they passed into the section where the road becomes “sterile”—meaning Palestinians are not allowed to walk—a group of five soldiers confronted them, attempting to form a barricade. A settler emerged from a nearby building and moved a white Volkswagen panel van across the street, bottlenecking the pedestrian traffic. But a few of the protesters broke through, only to be stopped a few meters down the road. [Continue reading…]

Daniel Levy writes: It was not always thus.

Despite the characteristic sense of entitlement conveyed by many in the Israeli elite in advance of Barack Obama’s first presidential visit: “You finally made it, what took you so long?” the must-go-to-Israel clause in the U.S. presidential contract is of surprisingly recent vintage.

Next week marks the ninth visit by a sitting U.S .President. But half of those previous eight trips were notched-up by Bill Clinton alone, and another two by George W. Bush in his very last year in office (yes, he waited eight years to say “Hi” in person). The nature of this Obama visit, most closely resembling the second Bush trip of May 2008, should tell us something about the changing contours of the U.S.-Israel relationship.

The first two presidential visits were in the 1970’s. Nixon came in 1974 (a quarter-century after Israel’s creation) and Carter in 1979, both unequivocally focused on advancing Israeli – Egyptian deals that served American regional interests: First, the post-1973 war separation of forces agreement, and later the Israel-Egypt peace treaty. Another fifteen years and two Presidents elapsed before Clinton became such a regular on these shores in the 1990s. All four of his trips were unmistakably dedicated to the peace process of the time – attending the Israel-Jordan peace agreement signing in 1994, Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral in 1995 (it would be absurd to de-link that occasion from the Israeli – Palestinian process), the post-bus-bombings and pre-election 1996 stop-over designed to save the peace process by hugging Shimon Peres (standing for election against Netanyahu), and finally a December 1998 visit to push the implementation of the Wye River Agreement, including an historic stop in Gaza (again, in part, a political visit to challenge Netanyahu). Even President Bush’s January 2008 jaunt was about pushing the Annapolis peace talks, however misguided and flawed those were.

So for thirty-plus years the ostensible driving factor for Presidential visits has been to align America’s Israel relationship with its national security interest, by promoting peace between Israel and its neighbors.

The second Bush visit in June 2008 broke that trend, dedicated as it was to celebrating Israel’s 60 anniversary and marking the primacy of the bilateral and political in defining American-Israeli interaction. The timing and anticipated content of the Obama visit would appear to continue that new orientation. It is again mostly about politics (U.S. domestic politics) and the bilateral relationship. The Palestinians will be mentioned and feature as part of the visit, yet expectations of a new Israel- Palestine initiative are low for good reasons. Obama is coming first and foremost to make a statement about the U.S.-Israel bond, not the illegal occupation, the unresolved conflict or American interests. [Continue reading…]

Ben Ehrenreich writes: On the evening of Feb. 10, the living room of Bassem Tamimi’s house in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh was filled with friends and relatives smoking and sipping coffee, waiting for Bassem to return from prison. His oldest son, Waed, 16, was curled on the couch with his 6-year-old brother, Salam, playing video games on the iPhone that the prime minister of Turkey had given their sister, Ahed. She had been flown to Istanbul to receive an award after photos of her shaking her fist at an armed Israeli soldier won her, at 11, a brief but startling international celebrity. Their brother Abu Yazan, who is 9, was on a tear in the yard, wrestling with an Israeli activist friend of Bassem’s. Nariman, the children’s mother, crouched in a side room, making the final preparations for her husband’s homecoming meal, laughing at the two photographers competing for shots from the narrow doorway as she spread onions onto oiled flatbreads.

On the living-room wall was a “Free Bassem Tamimi” poster, left over from his last imprisonment for helping to organize the village’s weekly protests against the Israeli occupation, which he has done since 2009. He was gone for 13 months that time, then home for 5 before he was arrested again in October. A lot happened during this latest stint: another brief war in Gaza, a vote in the United Nations granting observer statehood to Palestine, the announcement of plans to build 3,400 homes for settlers, an election in Israel. Protests were spreading around the West Bank.

That night, the call came at about 7:30. Twenty people squeezed into three small cars and headed to the village square. More neighbors and cousins arrived on foot. (All of Nabi Saleh’s 550 residents are related by blood or marriage, and nearly all share the surname Tamimi.) Then a dark Ford pulled slowly into the square, and everyone fell silent.

Bassem, who is 45, stepped out of the car, straight-spined, his blue eyes glowing in the lamplight. He seemed a little thinner and grayer than the last time I saw him, in July. He hugged and kissed his eldest son. Ahed was next, then one by one, in silence, Bassem embraced family and friends, Palestinian activists from Ramallah and Jerusalem, Israeli leftists from Tel Aviv. When he had greeted everyone, he walked to the cemetery and stopped in front of the still-unmarked grave of his brother-in-law Rushdie, who was shot by Israeli soldiers in November while Bassem was in prison. He closed his eyes and said a quick prayer before moving on to the tomb of Mustafa Tamimi, who died after being hit in the face by a tear-gas canister in December 2011.

Back at home, Bassem looked dazed. Nariman broke down in his arms and rushed outside to hide her tears. The village was still mourning Rushdie’s death, but the young men couldn’t keep up the solemnity for long. They started with little Hamoudi, the son of Bassem’s cousin, tossing him higher and higher in the air above the yard. They set him down and took turns tossing one another up into the night sky, laughing and shouting as if they never had anything to grieve. [Continue reading…]

Rashid Khalidi writes: What should Barack Obama, who is to visit Israel next Wednesday for the first time in his presidency, do about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

First, he must abandon the stale conventional wisdom offered by the New York-Washington foreign-policy establishment, which clings to the crumbling remnants of a so-called peace process that, in the 34 years since the Camp David accords, has actually helped make peace less attainable than ever.

When the most recent iteration of this process began with high hopes at the Madrid peace conference in 1991, which led to the Oslo accords two years later, there were 200,000 Israelis illegally settled in the occupied Palestinian territories: today, there are more than twice as many.

During this time, under four successive presidents, the United States, purportedly acting as an honest broker, did nothing to prevent Israel from gradually gobbling up the very land the two-state solution was to be based on.

Until 1991 most Palestinians, although under Israeli military occupation, could nonetheless travel freely. Today, an entire generation of Palestinians has never been allowed to visit Jerusalem, enter Israel or cross between the West Bank and Gaza. This ghettoization of the Palestinians, along with the unrest of the second intifada of 2000-5 and the construction of seemingly permanent settlements and of an apartheid-style wall, are the tragic fruits of the so-called peace process the United States has led.

The “peace process” has consisted of indulging Israeli intransigence over Palestine in exchange for foreign-policy goals unrelated to the advancement of peace and Palestinian freedom. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Palestinian officials said on Sunday a Palestinian detainee who died in an Israeli prison was tortured before his death, but Israel said autopsy findings were preliminary and inconclusive.

The death of 30-year-old Arafat Jaradat in an Israeli jail on Saturday and a hunger strike by four inmates have flared tension across the occupied West Bank, where stone-throwing protesters clashed with Israeli soldiers on Sunday.

The Palestinian autopsy findings could further fuel unrest that has surged in the Palestinian Territories weeks before U.S. President Barack Obama is due to visit the region. Israel demanded the Palestinian Authority restore calm to the area.

Palestinian Minister of Prisoners Issa Qaraqea said Jaradat died as result of torture. The Palestinian Authority state pathologist was present at the autopsy on Jaradat’s body, which was carried out in Israel.

“There were marks of torture on the back, marks of torture on the chest, a deep wound on the upper side of the shoulder, wounds alongside the spine and marks of torture underneath the skin,” Qaraqea said, based on the Palestinian doctor’s basic findings.

But Israel’s Health Ministry said the injuries found in the autopsy could have been caused by the medical emergency team’s efforts to resuscitate Jaradat.

Al Jazeera reports: The Palestinian government is alleging that a Palestinian man who died in Israeli custody was tortured to death, dismissing claims that his death was due to a heart attack.

Arafat Jaradat’s autopsy showed torture resulting from fractures in his body and skull while his heart was in good condition, said Issa Qaraqaa, the minister in charge of prisoner affairs, citing a Palestinian doctor who took part in the autopsy.

“These results prove Israel killed him,” Qaraqaa told a news conference on Sunday.

Jaradat died on Saturday in an Israeli jail from what prison authorities initially said appeared to have been a cardiac arrest.

The 30-year-old man from Sair near Hebron in the occupied West Bank was arrested last Monday for alleged involvement in a November 2012 stone-throwing incident that injured an Israeli, according to Israel’s Shin Bet domestic intelligence service.

The death of Jaradat set off more clashes between Israeli troops and Palestinian stone-throwers in several areas of the West Bank on Sunday.