Don't play it again Sam

An article by a US-born writer who relocated to the Middle East to reconnect with the home of his ancestors would normally raise indignant cries of ‘right-wing Brooklyn settlers’ or ‘ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population’ from many a CiF poster on most days of the week. But not the article published on March 1st, because the Ohio-born writer that day happened to be Sam Bahour; son of a Palestinian father who left America for Al Bireh rather than Beit El. Bahour’s article is one long conveniently blinkered presentation of the ‘facts’ about the Palestinian economy, but the most surreal part had to be this:

“So, when I must drive one hour farther to reach my destination because Israel erected an illegal separation barrier, or when roads throughout the West Bank are prohibited from being repaired by the Israeli military which causes constant damage to my car, this is all great news for Palestine’s GDP since I’m spending more on petrol and visiting my car repair shop more frequently.”

Well obviously it’s awfully inconvenient for Israelis too when they have to drive to Jerusalem via Tel Aviv because it’s too dangerous to travel through Judea and Samaria like they used to do. And of course those armoured Egged buses don’t come cheap and smashed windscreens or dented body work because of stone throwers doesn’t repair itself magically either. And whilst we’re at it, how about a quick mention of why that inconvenient anti-terrorist fence had to be erected in the first place? I’m sure Mr. Bahour is familiar with the English expression about lying in made beds.
Of course we are all too used to reading such one-sided representations of the situation from Palestinian commentators and their supporters, but what is particularly sad in Sam Bahour’s case is that someone who spent the first 31 years of his life in one of the world’s primary democracies and enjoyed equal rights and freedom of speech, as well as taking advantage of the excellent educational facilities has so readily embraced the attitude of ‘it’s not me Sir; it’s him’ all too prevalent in Palestinian politics. It must be perfectly obvious to any observer that the Palestinians are in desperate need of leadership which will put an end to the violent infighting and inter-factional murder and which will begin to take responsibility for at least some of the situation in which they find themselves so that a recognition that compromise is a necessary part of progress along the path to peace can come about. It is therefore all the more disappointing that a US born man of Bahour’s obvious intelligence and abilities does nothing to encourage his fellow countrymen to change tack and start working for a stable democratic state. Indeed it rather seems that Bahour has been only too happy to adopt the existing mindset of his new surroundings.
A prolific contributor to such forums as Electronic Intifada, Sabbah Report, Counterpunch and Open Democracy, Bahour has also worked with the Quakers’ Friends International Centre in Ramallah along with Amira Hass, ICAHD, Al Haq and Sabeel and was a guest speaker at the 2008 Sabeel conference alongside Jeff Halper, Uri Davis and others. So far, therefore, he seems to have all the necessary credentials required for contributing above the line on CiF, but one also wonders if the views Sam Bahour expressed only a week after the 9/11 terror attacks are so far removed from the Guardian World View.

“The average American has no inkling, whatsoever, of the possible ramifications of such actions which could further fuel the kind of inexcusable hatred as recently witnessed in these latest attacks. It is the duty and responsibility of U.S. policy makers to correct a foreign policy gone astray and to ensure that the country and, indeed, the world are not lead into an avoidable and preventable war. The public outcry for “war” in the U.S. must not be the basis for such actions, especially in light of the fact that these recent terrorist attacks seem to be the direct result of a failed U.S. foreign policy.
The U.S. should pause to re-evaluate the core issues that have brought an entire region to a boil, namely the blind support of Israel’s 34-year military occupation of the Palestinians and its oblivious complacency with non- democratic Arab regimes from Saudi Arabia to Morocco. “

One must however wonder about the state of mind of a man who wrote the following letter to a Jewish forum at the height of the Second Intifada on a day in which 11 Israelis were killed and 47 injured, including school children, in a bus bombing in Jerusalem.

Dear friends,
More sad days! I’m sure you are sharing in mourning of the Israeli victims of today’s suicide bombing in Jerusalem. More citizens,
more children, more human loss. We here feel much more than you, I’m sure. For we not only grieve the Israelis whose lives were taken today, but we also grieve our own losses as well. A 13-yr-old, a 15-yr-old and 5 more adult Palestinians were killed yesterday in Tulkarem. Another adult today. Your media no longer even sees the need to report these Palestinian deaths. It is as if we are an invisible people.
The world only moves from one disgusting bus bombing to the next, with no mention that in between is a mighty Israeli military,
collectively punishing an entire people and systematically creating the conditions for more violence, more responses, more nonsense!
I have much to say, especially as every Palestinian city, except Ramallah, goes to sleep tonight with IDF tanks back in every Palestinian city and Palestinian children are unable to attend school.
I have much to say, especially because today’s bombing almost took my best Israeli friend who lives around the corner of today’s tragedy. I have much to say, because, many of my Palestinian friends are sleeping tonight in Israeli jails, arbitrarily arrested. I have much to say, especially because more Israeli families – not settlers, not soldiers – just families, like mine, are missing loved ones tonight.
Tomorrow we will continue, for today was wasted with more unnecessary human loss, on both sides.
In memory of all the children, living and lost
Sam

With no surprises above the line – CiF once more hosts a writer incapable of a balanced view of the Middle East situation – there was little hope for anything other than the usual below the line too. The supporters of BDS and IAW and users of apartheid analogy were quick off the mark:

Sorcey
1 Mar 2010, 10:55AM
Excellent article, just in time for Israeli Apartheid Week.
But the conditions on the ground won’t change except for the worse in the short and medium term. Israel has a blank cheque from Obama to do what it will. And Bibi’s “economic peace” is exactly what it is doing.

Sorcey
1 Mar 2010, 11:49AM
Links for info on concrete steps that can be done here in Europe:
http://apartheidweek.org/
http://www.bdsmovement.net/
It’s obvious to all except the most die-hard defenders that Israel has no interest in ending the occupation – they lose a literally captive market, and all that valuable land. The only way Israel will end the occupation is if becomes too expensive for them to maintain, the obvious examples being Lebanon and Gaza.
So stop buying Israeli goods. Admit the truth – Israel is an apartheid state, with separate rules for Jews and non-Jews in the West Bank, and even in Israel proper now.

WebbMark
1 Mar 2010, 12:40PM
Another well-timed article.
An economic peace under continued colonisation isn’t a lasting peace. There is no need to expand into Occupied (not disputed) territory, just a political one.
Israel’s leaders are seemingly unaware of the outside world finally seeing the illegal colonies grow daily, the extra-judicial murders, the house demolitions, arbitrary detentions, road closures and punitive blockades.
It’s time that Israel grew up (inside its recognised 1967 borders, as Gush Shalom puts it ‘The Line of Peace’). Happily, Jewish people no longer have a need to flee from persecution, hatred and mistrust and can live fulfilled lives without the need to become part of an apartheid state.

And of course the advocates of a one-state ‘solution’:

sugarrush
1 Mar 2010, 10:57AM
This article reinforces my believe that a two state solution is dead. There is simply not enough land left to build a viable Palestine. Already it has been fractured into a handful of Bantustans.with Israel maintaining complete and total control over them
Israel must give all the Palestinians full citizenship and the full rights that go with that.
The Palestinians need to give up the armed struggle and abandon the dream of a homeland. It is just not going to happen
Refugees need to be allowed back and given the same rights as the other Palestinians
Israelis and Palestinians will have to work together to build a better future for all citizens
If the South Africans can do it, so can the Israelis and the Palestinians

SdeBoker
1 Mar 2010, 11:25AM
2 state solution wont work. the land needs to be united.

What would a CiF thread be without some historical revisionism?

PorkChopXpress
1 Mar 2010, 11:34AM
Those military ‘adventures’ were attempts by the Arab states to annihilate Israel and ‘throw the Jews into the sea’. And you forgot to mention their attack in 1973 by the way.
Why must you lie? Israel started the 1948 war by not recognising the right of the arabs to refuse 181. It also started the 1967 war, as admitted by many Israeli leaders. Also 1973 was an attempt by Eygpt and Syria to reclaim land that Israel had taken when it ATTACKED first in 1967. Sinai and Golan were not Israeli land. And please do not try and claim Golan was needed for security. Moshe Dayan himself disagrees.

Papalagi
1 Mar 2010, 11:53AM
Adding to my answer to millfield above:
Israel was almost bankrupt before the Russian immigration. They got one million people who had been educated in the Soviet Union and were highly qualified. Israel didn’t pay a cent for their education, but they profited from it greatly.

And finally, those who call for ‘justice’:

JRuskin
1 Mar 2010, 11:23AM
If only some of our Israeli posters would take the trouble to traverse the vast distances involved (a few miles) to see what is happening outside The Bubble;
then they would be able to acknowledge the essential truth of Sam’s article.
In a nut shell, while children are being abused by the Occupiers (see http://www.dci-pal.org/english/display.cfm?DocId=1377&CategoryId=1), Palestinians are denied access to their lands , homes,mosques and churches, the promise of a Starbucks or a Macdonalds in every bantustan is of limited appeal.
They-and we- want justice. Ask them.

gazagirl
1 Mar 2010, 12:02PM
JRuskin
They-and we- want justice. Ask them.
Yes, thank you. Peace with justice. Without justice there can never be a true peace. The Palestinian people are not sheep, they refuse to be led to the slaughter. This means that they also refuse to be herded into bantustans created by their own oppressors. What sort of justice could this ever be???
From you web link to Defence for Children International – we have a prime example of what Sam Bahour is talking about – brutality towards Palestinian children no less.
Summary of incident:
On 11 February 2010, at least 17 children were arrested from the Al Jalazun Refugee Camp in the middle of the night by Israeli soldiers. The children and their families report the use of excessive force during the arrests, and ill-treatment and coercion during subsequent interrogations. The children were interrogated in the absence of a lawyer and family member, and the interrogations were not video recorded. The children are accused of throwing stones, and in some cases, Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers in 2009 and 2010. The children are being prosecuted in military courts.
Background information:
At around 2:00am, on Thursday, 11 February 2010, Israeli soldiers entered Al Jalazun Refugee Camp near Ramallah, in the West Bank and went from house to house and started rounding up, beating and harassing residents of the Camp. According to information obtained by DCI-Palestine, at least 17 children were arrested and taken away. Reports indicate that the children were first taken to the Israeli settlement of Beit El, and then to Binyamin Police Station and Ofer Interrogation and Detention Centre, near Ramallah.
http://www.dci-pal.org/english/display.cfm?DocId=1377&CategoryId=1),
Yes, this is the good work of the oppressor – the mighty and moral “light unto nations”.

Inevitably these calls for ‘justice’ so often seen on CiF are based upon the premise that there is only one side which suffers in this conflict and writers such as Sam Bahour who nurture that same blinkered view cannot add anything to the discussion of the subject which will lead to an appreciation of the situation in a realistic and pragmatic light. That old song which Sam Bahour is playing has done nothing to benefit his people over the years; a change of tune is long overdue.