1. I’m leaving for Greece on Saturday for a week. Not sure yet if computer is coming with me, but it would probably be safer in my bag than in my room, since people keep getting stuff stolen even when their doors are locked.
2. JAMES CARVILLE FOR MAYOR OF NEW ORLEANS (why didn’t I think of that?). He’s competent, and I think an outsider with political savvy like him could do a decent job at the least. Granted, of course, he does not do any of the following: take Mary Matalin to lunch on the city credit card, deny that entire email inboxes were deleted “accidentally”…you get the picture.
3. Today I climbed the Mount of Olives. It was really steep and the stones were so smooth that I almost slipped a few times, but I got to the very top and the view was INCREDIBLE. Ogling is allowed:
First picture: I was so high up that I could see the walls wrapping around the Old City, which was cool because it gave me a good idea of its size. Second picture: The white buildings in the center are the k’far dorms.
The Mount of Olives is also a huge burial site (see third picture) with an estimated 150,000 Jewish graves. Menachem Begin is buried there instead of at Mount Herzl national cemetery. The first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, Abraham Isaac Kook, is also buried on the site. The hillside is the holiest Jewish cemetery because the tradition says that the Messiah will appear there first, and therefore the bodies buried there will be resurrected first. Talk about prime real estate!
On our walk there we randomly wandered into Mary’s Tomb (where Mary is supposedly buried), located in the Kidron Valley between the Old City and the foothills of the Mount of Olives:
Everyone in this Polish tour group was going into the left side of the tomb. You could crawl in just like at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. I think there’s a sarcophagus inside. Tres cool, as my mother would say.
We stopped in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City for lunch, and it was quite evident that Sukkot (“sukkot” = “booths”) preparations are in full swing there:
Sukkot are already everywhere:
I’m seriously thinking about finding the Chabad in Athens just so that I can eat in a sukkah at least once during the holiday since I’ll be gone for all of it. If anyone has recommendations for what to do in Athens or on the various islands, please email me or leave a comment!!!
Yom Kippur in Jerusalem. Where to start? Well, I had no set plans until just a few days before the holiday, but Sam called me up and said she was coming down from Haifa with a few girls from her program. We started to get worried after I contacted numerous hostels in the city only to find out they were full, but Sam ended up finding A Little House in Bakah, a hostel that was more like a hotel in the Bakah neighborhood. Best of all, it was a mile away from Kol Ha’Neshama.
Late Sunday afternoon our crew headed over to Hebrew Union College, the Reform Movement’s Rabbinical and Cantorial school, for Kol Nidre. Kol Nidre is my favorite service of the year because you watch the sun set as a cantor, hopefully accompanied by a cellist, chants the beautiful, ancient Aramaic declaration which begins Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The HUC service was in this glass hall that overlooks the Old City and there was a cellist, which I liked. I did not like, however, the amount of English and skipping around in the service, but that’s what you get when you go to an American-style synagogue. Also, some of the cantorial students that participated did not have great voices.
During Kol Nidre, I was in the Twilight Zone both physically and metaphorically. As late afternoon turned into evening, a procession of high-schoolers arrived to the service led by none other than Baruch Kraus, the principle of EIE. After the service Sam and I went up to him and reintroduced ourselves, and he said he remembered our faces. As if that wasn’t enough, we also stumbled upon someone from our EIE semester who made aliyah after high school and joined the army, who also remembered us. And, from across the room, I spotted my friend’s younger brother who is on EIE right now. Then I’m outside in the big hall when someone screams my name and it is none other than a friend of mine from Vassar who graduated in May.
We walked back to the hostel a different way than we had come, and I was trying not to trip over the uneven street when a sign on a gate caught my eye: the building inside was the French Consulate. Sam and I shared a squeal of delight and launched into our story, which goes like this:
Our crazy French teacher on EIE, Liliane, made us enter a French short story contest sponsored by the consulate. After submitting our painstakingly amateur creative works, the consulate hosted a reception for the contestants to congratulate us on our noble attempts to not mangle the French language and to announce the winners. I remember being mesmerized by the grandeur of the consulate, so far removed from the Tzuba bubble, which we only left for field trips. After some serious noshing and ogling of the glasses of wine we were not “allowed” to touch, a consulate official announced the winners, and in first place was none other than Sam, who wrote about a boy who was allergic to everything.
Besides the French consulate, the most notable thing about the walk back was that there were no cars in the streets, except for the occasional police vehicle. Even the Arab cab drivers don’t drive on Yom Kippur because they know the ultra-Orthodox will throw rocks at them. I was able to walk in the middle of the street for the first time since getting here, and every single kid was enjoying this freedom as well.
Yom Kippur morning was spent at Kol Ha’Neshama, which I thought was much better than on Rosh Ha’Shanah. Even though Yom Kippur is supposed to be a somber holiday, I was uplifted by the amount of singing and the truly communal ambiance. I much preferred the all-Hebrew thing, too, and I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to understand most of the sermon. One of the Jewish History teachers from my EIE semester was also there.
Another 15-minute leisurely walk, and we were back at the hostel for some rest and relaxation before Mincha (afternoon service), Yizkor (memorial service), and Neelah (concluding service). On this walk we passed many an Orthodox neighborhood shul, and we could hear everyone inside chanting and reciting the prayers. For once, I felt like we were all doing the same thing despite the denominational differences that tend to divide more often than unite Israel’s Jews.
Neelah was great because I sat where I could see the sun setting over the Old City skyline, but I was not a fan of the rabbi who gave a sermon about how the verb “to turn” is both transitive and intransitive (his examples of transitive versus intransitive were “I eat food” and “I fast”) because by 6 p.m. I was ravenous. The best part of all, though, was hearing the shofar at the end. Rosh Ha’Shanah fell on Shabbat, when it is forbidden to play musical instruments.
An addendum: At the end of Neelah we sang Ha’Tikvah, Israel’s national anthem. I cried. Really hard. It was an emotional moment that was very real for me. To sing Ha’Tikvah at the close of Yom Kippur, in a synagogue overlooking the Old City, that to me is what being in Israel is all about. It reinforced my comfort level, my gut feeling of knowing that I will always have a home in Israel, and that a 3 1/2-year absence only makes the heart grow fonder. Also reminded me of EIE when we were on the flight from Poland back to Israel because when that plane landed we started singing it and everyone cried.
After Havdalah, my group and I stuffed our faces with challah and then broke the fast at a non-kosher restaurant on Emek Refaim where, as it just so happened, Sam spotted someone else from our EIE semester who is also at Haifa University this fall.
That was my Yom Kippur in Jerusalem, which I hope is only the first of many.
Remember that sit-in I mentioned in an earlier post? I went to see what it was all about. This was the scene at Agranat Square, directly in front of the offices of the Prime Minister in the heart of the Government Quarter:
I went up to that guy in the green hut and asked in Hebrew if he spoke English, he told me no, I asked if there was anyone else around who spoke English who could explain to me what was going on, he shrugged, and then he followed me as I walked around the square and said things to me in Hebrew that I didn’t understand, and I got the picture that he didn’t want me around there, and so I left. Nothing epic, but I thought these pictures were worth posting on here.
I thought it was really cool that I had seen the Prime Minister. I was telling everyone at the hotel: the doorman, the receptionist, etc. No one seemed particularly ecstatic. At lunch the next day, I told Hakan (our guide) about my run-in with Erdogan, and this was his reaction: “Did you throw an apple at him? Some stones? If you had told me you were going to see him I would have given you something to throw at him.”
Okay, I thought, maybe it wasn’t so cool? Hakan got his degree from Northwestern University in Political Science and considers himself an American at heart, but I wanted to know what the down-home locals really thought about their country’s leader. And thus, I took to the hotels, going on the theory that all hotel receptionists must have some competency in the English language because they have to communicate with the tourists. I “interviewed” 3 hotel receptionists, all men, who basically told me that no one likes Erdogan, that they don’t have much faith in Obama, and that the Turks are fine with Israelis but don’t like Israel’s government or its army. They all spoke English to some degree, but I had to do a lot of finagling with what they told me in order for it to make sense.
My first victim was Sercan at Sultan’s Inn Hotel (most hotels in the Sultanahmet district have kitschy names), a secular Muslim who told me he was not fasting for Ramadan. I asked him his opinion on the veil issue, and he said that he did not support the 2007 bill because “the universities are government buildings. It’s a government building, and religion and democracy are separated from each other here.” Sercan obviously does not support the AKP, but he said he identifies with the CHP, the secular party that Ataturk belonged to. He definitely had the harshest words for Obama out of all three: “I don’t like him because i don’t believe in him. The US always gives us promises about Iraq and Israel and doesn’t keep them. I don’t think he’ll do anything good for Turkey or for the world.” Sercan was also the most vocal about Israel: “Most people here support Palestinians because Israel killed babies. They are not guilty, they were just babies. They [Israel] destroyed all the hospitals, all the government buildings.” And, according to him, most people in Istanbul support the Palestinians “because the Turkish people, we are so sensible.”
Tuncay, a receptionist at the Albatross Hotel and also subject number two, spoke the least but really got to the point. He told me that “Erdogan is o.k., but we don’t like him because he made many things religious. There is no bright future about that. In Turkey you find every religion, so they separate the people by doing that.” In fact, Tuncay has no faith in any political party at all because to him “they’re all the same.” Tuncay also supports the Palestinian cause, but when I asked him about Israel he said: “We like the people but we don’t like their government and their army. I don’t blame the people for any of that.”
I got lucky at Hotel Deniz Konak, because even though Kerem the receptionist had kind of sort of passable English, his tour guide friend who happened to be there was able to translate some of what he said for me (and let me tell you, he had a lot to say). Kerem on the political situation in Turkey: “Our politics are shit, but this government now is the most dangerous government. They use Islam. After Ataturk, Turkey is a democracy, but then after him slowly all the ladies started to cover themselves. Now in the last eight years especially it’s very bad because this government uses Islam and we love our democracy and liberty.” He does not want Turkey to join the EU “because Turkey itself is big enough and has potential.”
America isn’t a favorite of Kerem’s, either. In his words, “US and other countries use our government. America has a big world political plan, and the Middle East is a very important area, and we’re in the zone near there, so we are unfortunately in this game.” His reason for not liking Obama, however, shed light on a deep political chasm that has plagued Turkey for almost a century: the Armenian Genocide. From 1914 to 1918, the Ottomans systematically rounded up, brutalized, and massacred over 500,000 Armenians. However, the Republic of Turkey does not accept that the Ottoman authorities attempted to exterminate the Armenian people. Interesting, reminds of someone I know by the pneumonic device of “I’m-a-dinner-jacket” who was recently given forum at the UN to deny the Holocaust.
When Obama visited Turkey in April, he stood by his January 2008 assertion that Ottoman Turks carried out widespread killings of Armenians in the early 20th century, and he also pushed for the normalization of Turkey-Armenian relations. Kerem obviously did not like this: “Obama is too friendly to the Armenians. After Bush, Obama is better, but I am angry at him for his speech. He said we must accept that we destroyed the Armenians in 1915. This is not the reality. We said, Armenians, please make your archive so that we can say what is the reality.”
On the subject of Israel, Kerem said that “Israel is the twin of the US…Israel has a very dangerous politic for this world, and we don’t like it.” But he has no problem with the people: “I don’t have a problem with the people, with the tourists…especially in Turkey tolerance is very important for us.”
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a wrap.I must say that my first experience with interviewing people in a foreign country, people who were not fluent in English, was quite frustrating. But in the end, I learned a lot more about the real Turkey than what is just printed in all the guide books, of which my grandparents had several. The only way to get the real scoop is to go out and talk to the people!
It was my first day in Istanbul. Fresh off a 10:30 a.m. flight and the previous night’s 21st birthday celebration, my body was telling me to take advantage of the jacuzzi tub and heavenly mattress instead of taking a 5-minute shower and heading out to explore my surroundings. Not listening was one of the best decisions I have ever made.
I walked around, made a few circles, and decided to go deeper into the Old City. Eventually, I ended up in what I later found out was the Hippodrome. But something was happening. Hoards of people were gathered on the edge of the Hippodrome on the curb, mostly men. There were policemen and other official-looking people in the street and also across the street on the sidewalk. I elbowed my way to the front of the crowd and found myself among dozens of cameramen and television reporters (including a woman holding a mic that said “CNN Turk”), and I found myself literally pressed up against a policeman.
I asked one of the cameramen in English where I was and what was going on, and he told me that the building across the street was the Blue Mosque and that the Prime Minister had been praying there that day for Ramadan and was about to come out. Cool much? I couldn’t believe my luck, either.
So I waited. After about 10 minutes, the Turkish secret service began to exit the building, and the Prime Minister’s car arrived (black, obviously, with tinted windows):
And then about 10 minutes after that, people started yelling, the media assumed the position, I crouched down, and the frenzy began. Prime Minister Erdogan appeared, and I was literally 4 feet away from the man:
I then returned to the Eresin Crown, my curiosity piqued, because I knew nothing about Erdogan. So here’s the short version of what I found: Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been Prime Minister since March 2003, and before that was the mayor of Istanbul in the 1990s. He belongs to the Justice and Development Party, or AKP for short, a moderate-conservative and pro-Western bloc that advocates a liberal market economy and Turkish membership in the European Union. Under Erdogan, has brought on many changes interpreted as being non-secular or rooted in Islam. For example, the AKP passed abill in 2007 that lifted the head scarf ban in universities, which was criticized by the secular parties. He was convicted and imprisoned in 1998 for “publicly reading a militarist/jihadist poem.”
Erdogan’s relationship with Israel has been quite fickle. In 2008, Erdogan mediated 4 rounds of indirect talks between Israel and Syria, but no agreement was reached and Operation Cast Lead sent Israel-Turkey relations into a nosedive. The Jerusalem Post reported that “In December, less than a week before Operation Cast Lead, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was in Ankara, and—with Olmert in a room next door—Erdogan reportedly had Damascus on the line, trying to get the two sides to agree on a formula to begin direct negotiations.” This past January, he called for Israel to be barred from the United Nations, and that same month he “stormed out of” a debate at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on the Gaza conflict that included Israel’s president Shimon Peres. Then at the end of March he said he was ready to resume mediation between Turkey and Israel. The current position of the Israeli government is that Turkey is a “legal channel” and “legitimate negotiator” for talks with Syria.
That wasn’t so short, but there’s more. Part 2 is the really good stuff, I promise!
My second installment in the Miscellany News‘ “Travel Notes” blog, and thus another round of shameless self-promotion:
One of the many perks that attracted me to a fall semester in Jerusalem was that I knew I would get to ring in Rosh Ha’Shanah, the Jewish New Year, in the Jewish homeland. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but what I ended up with was very rewarding.
I was in my apartment after a day of prayer services and napping, pondering dinner when I remembered that Jeff Seidel, an absolute caricature of a man who runs a Jewish student center near my university, had mentioned something about setting students up for meals with his contacts in the Old City during the holiday. On a whim, I called my friend Alyssa, and we met up with Mr. Seidel at the Western Wall to receive a dinner placement…
You should read the rest to find out more about my host, Rabbi Schloss. Apparently he’s a fixture in the Old City, because I told one of my floormates I ate dinner at his house and he said he had heard about him from other people, and that it was so cool that I got to go to his house. Unfortunately, I couldn’t take any pictures inside because it was only the first night of Rosh Ha’Shanah, meaning it was still a chag, but this is his front door (that Hebron sticker plus lots of Messiah-y things):
Obama is finally getting down to business on the Middle East, and to my surprise it took him a long 8 months. I know he only has a 2 year window to make things happen in the U.S., but the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead should have instigated some sort of turbo-speed Obama administration Middle East peace initiative, it should have been a priority much earlier on. And believe me, I get that health care reform is important, but his one-on-ones with Netanyahu and others cannot replace the face-to-face of trilateral meetings. He did appoint an envoy, but the envoy is not the president, and they have never been that effective in this region. George Mitchell is no Kissinger (the master of shuttle diplomacy), and the meeting was called because the U.S. envoy to the Middle East failed to make any headway during a week of shuttle diplomacy. For some background, click here for a brief history of the trilateral summit, courtesy of Tablet Magazine.
So Netanyahu and Abbas jetted to the States yesterday for what was the first Israeli-Palestinian meeting since Netanyahu took office back in March. Obama met with each separately on the sidelines at the U.N. General Assembly this morning (hence the Waldorf Astoria, I guess?) and presided over a three-way session at the swanky Waldorf Astoria after that. As reported by The Jerusalem Post, Obama told the press at the opening of the meeting that “‘despite all the obstacles, and history,’ Washington believes ‘permanent status negotiations must begin, and begin soon…It’s time to show the flexibility, common sense and compromise which is necessary to achieve our goals,’ he said.” Obama also stressed the two-state solution as the way to achieve comprehensive peace in the Middle East.
After these opening remarks, Netanyahu and Abbas shook hands. I’m sure it wasn’t easy for either of them, and that both probably wanted to vomit. The White House said it has “‘no grand expectations out of one meeting.’” Well, at least the administration is being realistic. In the video below Obama says he believes his administration has made progress on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, but from what I’ve experienced here and from what I’ve read in the local newspapers, I would have to disagree. Other notables like Secretary of State Clinton, Israeli Defense Minister (and past Prime Minister) Ehud Barak, and Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman (everyone’s favorite) are in attendance. I really hope for Israel’s sake that Lieberman doesn’t do or say something crazy. I strongly dislike Fox News, but this was the best clip I could find on YouTube:
I have no expectations, either, much less grand ones. One meeting does nothing. For Obama to get anything done it would take carefully orchestrated meetings that are not organized on a whim; numerous visits to Israel, the territories, and the surrounding Arab countries; a clear agenda; and a firm hand that is firm without seeming forceful, which is a nearly impossible balance to achieve. I feel like at this point the Obama administration is coasting and doing some wait-and-see. Like President Jimmy Carter did with Camp David in 1978, Obama must organize a summit in the U.S. that is planned in advance, to give Netanyahu and Abbas enough time to prepare. But first, Obama has to actually visit Israel and show the people that he cares. All formal peace treaties must be approved by the Knesset, Israel’s representative legislative body that speaks for the people. As for the firm hand thing, Obama seemed “to step back from his call for a total settlement freeze, saying that Israel now is discussing ‘restraining settlement activities.’” It’s a tough issue, but he can’t even appear to waiver on anything. As of right now the tripartite meeting is still in session, so we’ll see what happens. I’ll probably be in bed for the night before the White House issues anything newsworthy.
UPDATE: Netanyahu has said Israel and the Palestinians have agreed to relaunch peace talks without any preconditions.
Netanyahu: “There was general agreement, including on the part of the Palestinians, that the peace process has to be resumed as soon as possible with no preconditions.”
UPDATE #2: George Mitchell said that an “Israeli settlement freeze is not essential for peace talks with Palestinians to resume.”
Mitchell: “We do not believe in preconditions. We do not impose them and we urge others not to impose preconditions.”
Update #3 (the last): After the meeting Netanyahu announced that the Palestinians had dropped their preconditions for negotiations, but Abbas said that “nothing less than an Israeli withdraw to the 1967 borders would enable resuming peace talks.”
Abbas: “As for resuming talks, this depends on a definition of the negotiating process that means basing them on recognizing the need to withdraw to the 1967 borders and ending the occupation…This was reiterated in the talks with President Obama and in the trilateral talks.”
Our second item comes straight from Facebook. Yes, I am writing about Facebook, but I promise it’s important: JERUSALEM (CNN)– Logging onto Facebook as a resident in the Golan Heights, should you enter Syria or Israel as your home country?
When Facebook first created the Golan Heights network, residents “could only choose Syria as their country of origin or else leave it blank.” Naturally, a pro-Israel website “sought to change that, starting a group called ‘Facebook, Golan residents live in Israel, not Syria.’” After a couple thousand people joined the group, Facebook “enabled users in Golan Heights to choose either Syria or Israel in the listings.” Also, the Facebook spokesperson notes, the social networking site also has the “‘same dual-listing options for the West Bank settlement, which is listed in both Palestine and Israel.’”
Well, it’s about time. The Golan Heights hasn’t been in Syria since 1967, and whether or not the people living there feel Syrian or Israeli, the fact remains that the area is within Israel’s boundaries, and every real map says so. I have nothing against this “dual-listing option,” but it’s weird that Facebook didn’t originally list Israel as an option when it always has for the West Bank. I think this item is an interesting example of how the turmoil and conflict in the Middle East permeates every element of society. Facebook, with all of its network options, applications, groups, and millions of members, is truly a microcosm of the overarching political battle.
I hope that was interesting. Hopefully I’ll be back with an update once the talks end and all parties release statements. On the docket are the following: politics in Turkey (last Turkey post), West Bank settler sit-in across from Netanyahu’s office (if I end up going), and a report on a lecture about the Geneva Conventions and the Palestinian Territories (if I end up going instead of studying for my ulpan final). Over and out!
What would a U.N. report on Israel be without recommendations that are extremely one-sided? The grand tally in this case is 10 recs for Israel, 2 for “Palestinian armed groups,” and 3 for the “responsible Palestinian authorities.” Let’s begin.
To the United Nations Security Council
The Mission recommends that the Security Council require the Government of Israel…within a period of three months, to launch appropriate investigations…into the serious violations of International Humanitarian and International Human Rights Law reported by the Mission…
The mission wasn’t supposed to reach any judicial conclusions in the first place, but apparently they found “serious violations” of international law. There’s no similar recommendation for either the Palestinian armed groups or for the responsible Palestinian authorities. If what Israel did is a violation of international law, surely attacks on Israel by Palestinian groups do as well and necessitate comprehensive investigations. But then again, this report is biased and completely one-sided.
To the General Assembly
The Mission recommends that the General Assembly establish an escrow fund to be used to pay adequate compensation to Palestinians who have suffered loss and damage as a result of unlawful acts attributable to the State of Israel during the December-January military operations and actions in connection with it, and that the Government of Israel pay the required amounts into such fund.
The mission is asking Israel to pay reparations (see below). There could have been some legitimacy to this, but the same thing is not asked of the Palestinian armed groups who have launched thousands of rockets into Southern Israel for almost a decade. These attacks have wreaked economic damage on the area, and it is outrageous to ask Israel to pay reparations to Gazans and to not ask the terrorists/Palestinian Authority to pay for what they have done over a period of years. If they had asked both parties to pay reparations, I could have understood the logic.
To Israel
The Mission…recommends that reparation to the United Nations be provided fully and without further delay by the State of Israel…
Israel should forthwith cease interference with national political processes in the OPT, and as a first step release all members of the Palestinian Legislative Council currently in detention…
Unfortunately, as long as a terrorist group, i.e. Hamas, remains the dominant political party in the Palestinian Territories, Israel will have no choice but to interfere for the sake of defending its own citizens, which it has a right to do. On the same note, Hamas currently has the majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council. Hamas is a militant terrorist organization that never ceases its vows to destroy Israel. If the PLC is dominated by Hamas, there must be at least some members currently being detained by Israel that identify with Hamas and its ideology. I’m not saying that all of these detainees have been rightfully imprisoned, but Israel has the right to detain any member of Hamas it deems a threat to national security.
To Palestinian armed groups
The Mission recommends that Palestinian armed groups undertake forthwith to respect international humanitarian law, in particular byrenouncing attacks on Israeli civilians and civilian objects, and take all feasible precautionary measures to avoid harm to Palestinian civilians during hostilities.
The Mission recommends that Palestinian armed groups who hold Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in detention release him on humanitarian grounds. Pending such release they should recognize his status as prisoner of war, treat him as such, and allow him ICRC visits.
The first one is the most appalling because the mission only asks Palestinian armed groups to “renounce” attacks on Israeli civilians, and it doesn’t recommend them to stop the attacks altogether. I believe this is because the U.N. views these groups as freedom fighters exercising their right to self-determination, but if the U.N. is going all human rights-y they should at least step in line with their values and renounce terrorism as a path to self-determination. The so-called “impartiality” of this report would be so much more plausible if the U.N. actually asked terrorist groups to stop terrorizing people. Please also note that the above is the complete text of the recommendations the mission makes for the Palestinian armed groups. Three measly sentences that don’t even take up one fourth of the page.
Those, in a nutshell, are my opinions, but here are some reactions from the people who actually matter.
The Jerusalem Post reported on Thursday that Netanyahu “termed the report a ‘prize for terrorists’ that makes it more difficult for democratic countries to combat them…Netanyahu said the commission, headed by South African Constitutional Court Judge Richard Goldstone, was a ‘kangaroo court’ whose conclusions were drawn up before the hearings even started.”
In the words of Israel’s president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres:
The Goldstone Commission Report is a mockery of history. It fails to distinguish between the aggressor and a state exercising its right for self-defense…held by every state as enshrined in the UN Charter.
The U.S. has also been vocal about the situation, and some administrative offices have released statements that reprimand the U.N. mission and its resulting report. In the words of Ambassador Susan Rice, the permanent U.S. representative to the U.N., “We have very serious concerns about many recommendations in the report.” She denounced in particular the report’s recommendation that “if no appropriate independent inquiry takes place within six months, the Security Council should refer the matter to prosecutors at the International Criminal Court,” and responded with, “We will expect and believe that the appropriate venue for this report to be considered is the Human Rights Council.”
The U.S. State Department also objected to that same recommendation and said Friday that the commission’s conclusions “were unfair to Israel and did not fully deal with the role in the conflict of the Palestinian group Hamas,” as reported by the Jerusalem Post:
“Although the report addresses all sides of the conflict, its overwhelming focus is on the actions of Israel,” spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters.
“While the report makes overly sweeping conclusions of fact and law with respect to Israel, its conclusions regarding Hamas’s deplorable conduct and its failure to comply with international humanitarian law during the conflict are more general and tentative,” he said.
To the best of my knowledge, neither the Palestinians nor the Arab states have released statements about the report, and I have yet to find unofficial reactions from those parties as well. However, Goldstone did speak to Al Jazeera English:
It was Wednesday afternoon. I was minding my own business on the elliptical machine at the gym, as usual, watching CNN in order to keep myself in the current events loop. When I go to the gym at this time of day, CNN tends to be pretty boring: maybe the story of the hour is the plight of an almost-extinct species, or a new estimate of casualties from the world’s latest natural disaster. So as you can imagine, I certainly wasn’t expecting to see Richard Goldstone‘s press conference at the United Nations about his U.N. fact finding mission on Operation Cast Lead and other relevant events in the Gaza Strip. Below is the entire press conference, but you’ll want to fast forward to 7:05 to get to the newsworthy sound bytes:
Before I launch into my analysis, critiques, and musings in general, a very quick summary of our esteemed Mr. Goldstone: a Jewish South African, he is a former South African Constitutional Court Judge who served as the chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda before leading the Gaza fact finding mission in 2009.
The report comes in at a grand total of 575 pages, and the bottom line is that it’s blatantly biased against Israel and basically ignores the true nature of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups. It wasn’t hard to find a complete copy, so please have at it if you’re feeling ambitious. After a quick skim, I decided to only bother with the summary and recommendations, whose items seem to be making the most noise at the moment, but once I began to read I found the “Introduction” and “Methodology” sections to be pretty loaded as well.
In the introduction, the Commission thanks Gaza for being so cooperative: “During its visits to the Gaza Strip, the Mission held meetings with senior members of the Gaza authorities and they extended their full cooperation and support to the Mission.” In June, when asked if the team had met with Hamas fighters, Mission team member Hina Jilani, a Pakistani lawyer and human-rights activist, had said Hamas had been “‘very cooperative.’” How nice that the terrorists were so friendly! Apparently it’s ok to write a report based on their testimonials and cooperation that’s biased against Israel, seeing as Israel didn’t cooperate and so of course there can’t be anything more to the big picture.
The report also claims that its “findings do not attempt to identify the individuals responsible for the commission of offences nor do they pretend to reach the standard of proof applicable in criminal trials.” You will find below that this is definitely not the case, and that the report makes gross allegations and does pretend to use “evidence” to reach judicial conclusions. Even though Justice Goldstone “repeatedly insisted that the Mission was was not a judicial inquiry and so ‘could not reach judicial conclusions,’” the report reaches “conclusive judicial determinations of guilt, and including ‘detailed legal findings’ even in the absence of the sensitive intelligence information which Israel did not feel able to provide.” Read the report, and you tell me if it doesn’t seem to find Israel guilty of anything. Below are a few snippets from the summary that I deemed worthy of attention and commentary:
The issue: IDF attacks against Gaza police facilities
33. The Mission examined the attacks against six police facilities…resulting in the death of 99 policemen and nine members of the public…The circumstances of the attacks and the Government of Israel July 2009 report on the military operations clarify that the policemen were deliberately targeted and killed on the ground that the police as an institution, or a large part of the policemen individually, are in the Government of Israel’s view part of the Palestinian military forces in Gaza.
34. …the Mission analysed the institutional development of the Gaza police since Hamas took complete control of Gaza in July 2007 and merged the Gaza police with the “Executive Force” it had created after its election victory. The Mission finds that, while a great number of the Gaza policemen were recruited among Hamas supporters or members of Palestinian armed groups, the Gaza police were a civilian law-enforcement agency…The Mission accepts that there may be individual members of the Gaza police that were at the same time members of Palestinian armed groups and thus combatants. It concludes, however, that the attacks against the police facilities on the first day of the armed operations failed to strike an acceptable balance between the direct military advantage anticipated (i.e. the killing of those policemen who may have been members of Palestinian armed groups) and the loss of civilian life (i.e. the other policemen killed and members of the public who would inevitably have been present or in the vicinity), and therefore violated international humanitarian law.
So Israel should put its own 6 million citizens at risk because the U.N. wants it to “strike an acceptable balance?” Who has the authority to create a scale for determining an acceptable balance? The U.N. complained that the Israeli government refused to aid or participate in the mission, and yet the report answers for Israel’s actions by saying that the “balance between the direct military advantage anticipated…and the loss of civilian life,” when the truth is that the U.N. actually has no idea what the anticipated military advantage of killing those policemen was because the Israeli government would not tell them.
Israel like any other legitimate state, has a right to self-defense, which Goldstone apparently thinks is a violation of international humanitarian law. The report even acknowledges that some of the policemen could have been “combatants,” despite the fact that the Gaza police is considered in this context to be a “civilian law-enforcement agency.” In my opinion, no police force is a civilian law-enforcement agency if there’s any doubt whatsoever as to the activities of even one of its members. The U.N. could neither confirm nor deny the existence of, shall we say, unsavory persons within the Gaza police force, an ambiguity that I think speaks for itself.
I also have a problem with the word “combatant,” and I think my dear philosopher friend Jürgen Habermas would as well. One of the best classes I have ever taken at Vassar is “Terrorism and Political Philosophy.” The last reading of the semester was the post-9/11 Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida by Giovanna Borradori, Professor of Philosophy at Vassar. There is one place in the book where Habermas speaks directly to the Palestinian method when Borradori asks him to define terrorism:
In one respect, Palestinian terrorism still possesses a certain outmoded characteristic in that it revolves around murder, around the indiscriminate annihilation of enemies, women, and children—life against life.
I’d have to say that I agree, and that the only word to use for a Hamas militant is “terrorist.” What Habermas describes as “indiscriminate guerilla warfare,” which is one of his three types of terrorism, is exactly what Hamas aims to do. But even if you aren’t convinced that Hamas’s cause isn’t entirely illegitimate, Habermas says that it’s still terrorism, and that participants are still terrorists. Borradori writes:
For Habermas, linking the political scope of terrorism to the accomplishment of its goals offers the possibility of distinguishing at least three different kinds of terrorism…The model of paramilitary guerilla warfare is proper to the national liberation movements and is retrospectively legitimized by the formation of the state.”
There’s another point in the book that is particularly relevant to the deaths of the Gaza policemen. I could not find a quote because, no matter amazing Google Books is, they don’t upload complete books. But I promise I have an excellent memory. The thing is, you can never tell who is a terrorist and who is not at any given moment. The IDF is tops in weaponry and technology, but it still hasn’t created an effective means for reading minds or for manipulating them. When the safety and security of an entire country is at stake, it becomes necessary to err on the side of caution. In the case of Israel, it’s even more important because in addition to the turmoil in Gaza, neighboring countries have also been known to harbor anti-Israel terrorist entities.
The issue: Protecting Palestinian civilians
35. The Mission examined whether and to what extent the Palestinian armed groups violated
their obligation to exercise care and take feasible precautions to protect the civilian population in
Gaza from the inherent dangers of the military operations…the Mission found that Palestinian
armed groups were present in urban areas during the military operations and launched rockets from urban areas.
36. The Mission did not find any evidence to support the allegations that hospital
facilities were used by the Gaza authorities or by Palestinian armed groups to shield military activities and that ambulances were used to transport combatants or for other military purposes…While the conduct of hostilities in built-up areas does not, of itself, constitute a violation of international law, Palestinian armed groups, where they launched attacks close to civilian or protected buildings, unnecessarily exposed the civilian population of Gaza to danger.
The evidence that Hamas launched rockets in densely populated urban areas is overwhelming, so at least the U.N. acknowledged that, even though it failed to expound on the gravity of the situation and only stated the obvious. However, the report fails to mention something else that “unnecessarily exposed the civilian population of Gaza to danger,” which is the use of private residences as sites for manufacturing weapons. Israel has photographical evidence(p. 21) that, in addition to facilitating the production of rockets, private residences also housed weapons caches. If that isn’t putting civilians in danger, then I don’t know what is.
As for the fact that the U.N. “did not find any evidence to support the allegations that hospital facilities were used by the Gaza authorities or by Palestinian armed groups to shield military activities,” I honestly don’t know how the mission came up with that. It was no secret that Hamas used Gaza’s Shifa Hospital as a headquarters and place of operations in December 2008 and January 2009 during the conflict. On January 12, Public Security Minister and former Shin Bet head (Israel Security Agency) Avi Dichter told the Jerusalem Post that Hamas memebers clustered there to receive their salaries and that “‘you can hear from the Palestinians who visit there – it is somewhat of an open secret – that Hamas commanders walk around the hospital, in some instances wearing doctors’ robes…In some cases the Hamas commanders kick medical teams out of rooms so that they can hold meetings.’” So a bunch of Hamas militants congregate in a hospital full of innocent civilians, and yet the U.N. doesn’t seem to think that this qualifies as either shielding military activities or intentionally endangering civilians. I must admit, I am confused.
Something else the report forgot to mention: Hamas’s use of civilians as human shields. Israel dropped leaflets and made thousands of phone calls to warn Gazans about IDF attacks, but Gazan media outlets like Al-Aqsa TV repeatedly called upon Palestinians to gather at specific private residences to “protect” them from IDF airstrikes. I remember this in particular being something that the international media focused on during Operation Cast Lead, so I was surprised to see that the U.N. paid it no attention at all. What the U.N. did focus on, however, is the IDF’s alleged use of Palestinians as human shields.
The issue: Gilad Shalit
76. The Mission notes the continued detention of Gilad Shalit, a member of the Israeli armed forces, captured in 2006 by a Palestinian armed group…during an enemy incursion into Israel…
78. The Mission is concerned by declarations made by various Israeli officials, who have
indicated the intention of maintaining the blockade of the Gaza Strip until the release of Gilad Shalit. The Mission is of the opinion that this would constitute collective punishment of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip.
Well, it’s really simple. All Hamas has to do is free Gilad Shalit. It’s been over three years, and he wasn’t captured because he knew military secrets. He is of no value to Hamas except as a trade-off for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, but if Hamas truly cares about Gaza citizens, it will release Shalit. Also using “enemy incursion” to classify what exactly happened in 2006 is misleading because it makes it seem like just another casualty of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, when indeed it is not. He was captured by terrorists, has been held by them for over three years, and his family has no information about his conditions, as the U.N. report suggests that Hamas release. Numerous diplomatic summits have been convened for the sake of bringing him back. This issue is much more serious than the U.N. implies in its report.
The issue: Restriction of movement in the West Bank
92. In the West Bank, Israel has long imposed a system of movement restrictions. Movement is restricted by a combination of physical obstacles such as roadblocks, checkpoints and the Wall…Palestinians are denied access to areas expropriated for the building of the Wall and its infrastructure, for use by settlements, buffer zones, military bases and military training zones, and the roads built to connect these places. Many of these roads are “Israeli only” and forbidden for Palestinian use.
First, the security barrier is not a wall. It is 95 percent fence and only 5 percent wall, which would make it a fence that has some parts that are wall. Movement may be restricted by what the report calls “the Wall” but, once again, Israel has the right to defend itself against terrorists, and the barrier has significantly decreased these attacks. Second thing, remember my Hebron guide Norman? If so, you might also remember that his wife was murdered when an Arab terrorist attacked their car when they were driving from Rachel’s Tomb in Hebron to Jerusalem. The “Israeli only” roads certainly restrict Palestinian movement, but then again no one wants to get blown up by a roadside sniper.
The issue: Rocket and mortar attacks by “Palestinian armed groups” on southern Israel
103. Palestinian armed groups have launched about 8000 rockets into southern Israel since 2001…the range of rocket fire increased to 40 kilometres from the Gaza border, encompassing towns as far north as Ashdod, during the Israeli military operations in Gaza.
108. …The Mission has further determined that these attacks constitute indiscriminate attacks upon the civilian population of southern Israel and that where there is no intended military target and the rockets and mortars are launched into a civilian population, they constitute a deliberate attack against a civilian population. These acts would constitute war crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity.
This is the only part of the summary in which it appears that the U.N. actually understands the definition of “terrorist.” A terrorist is in the business of both indiscriminate and deliberate attacks, and that is what Hamas continues to do. It is true that “Palestinian armed groups” are formally accused of war crimes, but “may amount to crimes against humanity” pales in comparison to the various violations of the right to life, violations of the right to water and sustenance, and crimes against humanity that the report accuses Israel of. Is it not a violation of the right to life to bombard civilian communities with rockets for years and years, creating both physical and psychological trauma? The report’s statement that the rocket and mortar fire “would constitute war crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity” is a mere rap on the knuckles compared to the unsubstantiated claims it makes about the conduct of Israel (because remember that no matter how many IDF soldiers and officials appeared at the Commission’s public hearings, the top dogs who know everything refused to participate), for example that “the conduct of the Israeli armed forces constitute grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention in respect of wilful killings and wilfully causing great suffering to protected persons and as such gives rise to individual criminal responsibility.”
To wrap up Part 1 (I know, finally), I leave you all with some more food for thought from Habermas:
BORRADORI: Should terrorism be distinguished from ordinary crime and other types of violence?
HABERMAS: Yes and no. From a moral point of view, there is no excuse for terrorist acts, regardless of the motive or the situation under which they are carried out…Historically, however, terrorism falls in a category different from crimes that concern a criminal court judge.
Part 2 (the Mission’s recommendations) coming soon!
Istanbul and Turkey in general have rich roots in both Christianity and Islam. The Romans were Catholic and the Byzantines were Greek Orthodox, and then the Muslim Ottoman Empire conquered Istanbul in 1453 and subsequently took over the Byzantine Empire. The Hagia Sophia is the perfect example of a place of worship that was used by each of these very different groups (note: some of these pictures are not mine because the lighting inside was terrible):
The “epitome of Byzantine architecture” was built by Emperor Justinian between 532 and 537, and was actually the 3rd “Church of the Holy Wisdom” to occupy the site (the 2nd one was destroyed by a group of pagans in 532 who rebelled against Justinian). It was also the first building in which a dome was not attached to a base through a column. Everything went pretty well until some earthquakes in the 550s caused cracks in the main dome and the eastern half-dome to appear, and the main dome collapsed completely during an earthquake in 558, which was in part caused by the fact that it had originally sat on top of a circular base. The architect who repaired the church used lighter materials, elevated the dome and made it elliptical, changed the base, and connected the dome to the rest of the church. Reconstruction ended in 562, and now the weight of the main dome is distributed among the Hagia Sophia’s seven total domes.
During Roman-Byzantine rule, the Hagia Sophia was the seat of the Eastern Roman Patriarchate, and after the joint empires split in 395 it was the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, Orthodox Christianity’s version of the Roman Catholic Pope. As always, this switcheroo is best explained through art:
You don’t have to look that closely to see the crucifix, the cross of the Catholics, but the upright one has something drawn over it, and that something would be a crux quadrata, the equal-armed Greek cross; at the center of the big Greek cross is a tiny Greek cross. The Hagia Sophia was also very important to the Byzantines because its emperors were always crowned there, since there was no separation between church and state:
The 2nd floor belonged to the Empress, and there are some interesting things up there, too. There’s a marble gate, for example, which was called “the Gate of Heaven and Hell,” which is decorated with floral motifs on its right side (representing heaven) and is undecorated on the other (representing hell), and the Orthodox holy synod (the Church council) always met behind it:
And this blog post would obviously not be complete without mention of the gorgeous mosaics, most of them from the 11th and 12th centuries (the one on the right is of Mary, Jesus, and St. John the Baptist):
So what’s interesting about these mosaics, besides the fact that they’re nice to look at? You might have noticed that they’re partially covered up with plaster, and if you didn’t, I just told you. This time, the art tells the story of Byzantine Constantinople’s transition into Ottoman Istanbul. The Hagia Sophia was converted into a mosque after the Ottomans conquered the area in 1453, and “icon-making and drawing of people is strictly forbidden in Islam.” When they put the plaster on the mosaics, they were also preserving them, which is why they’re in such good condition today. Here’s some more Islamic art:
And this is the main dome, which is also decorated with Arabic calligraphy:
Just for the record, no one prays in the Hagia Sophia anymore; today it’s just a museum. All the same, it was a huge treat for me to see this cultural crossroads.
However, the Blue Mosque, which is the national mosque of Turkey, continues to function as such. Sultan Ahmed I began building the mosque in 1609 and finished it in 1616, which is purposefully located directly above the ruins of the palace of the Byzantine emperors. It’s only one of two mosques in the country that has six minarets, and as a nod to the genius architecture of the Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque also has a main dome whose weight is distributed between several smaller domes:
I was lucky to be in a predominantly Muslim country during Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting, because there was such a festive atmosphere. The Blue Mosque is across the street from the Hippodrome, where every night they had musical entertainment and a slew of food vendors selling everything from kebabs to roasted chestnuts. Before we were even in the entrance gate to the Blue Mosque, we could hear the muezzin, who leads the call to prayer. But he wasn’t chanting as is normal for the five daily prayers, he was speaking. In the Islamic tradition sermons are made during Friday prayers, but we were there on a Saturday, and Hakan told us that sermons are much more frequent during Ramadan. Again, we were lucky that we visited the mosque during one of the five requisite daily prayers, and it was my first time in a mosque where people were actually praying. I saw this on my way to the visitors’ entrance:
Those men were performing the ablution (washing the hands, face, and feet), a ritual that the Qur’an says is required before entering a mosque to pray. Once we took off our shoes and entered, we were confined to a special visitors’ area, and this was the view (plus a close-up of the muezzin):
And this is the dome, which is decorated with stunning Arabic calligraphy:
So why is it called the “Blue Mosque?” What’s so “blue” about it? If it weren’t for the dim lighting, you would be able to tell from my pictures that the entirety of the mosque’s interior is covered in blue tiles, all from the Turkish city of Iznik:
The Blue Mosque was truly magnificent, and I’ll never forget standing on the carpet in my socks next to my grandfather while listening to that muezzin. It’s the type of thing I wish I could do more of here in Jerusalem, but under the current circumstances visiting mosques isn’t exactly a cake walk. The Blue Mosque was also the site of my most spellbinding tale of my trip to Istanbul, but I guess you’ll just have to keep checking the blog to find out what I’m talking about. Until then, all of my Istanbul photographs are up on Photobucket. Enjoy!
