In struggling to come up with a Lenten discipline this year, I’ve arrived at this idea: I will post a photo on this blog every day until Easter. I know it’s not giving anything up, but it is a discipline. I don’t feel like my current struggle is eating too much chocolate—it’s failing to give expression to things that fail to rise to the point of profound insight. These things accumulate into a mental burden that often keeps me awake at night. So I’m going to experiment with relieving that burden in small doses, without feeling the need to be profound or even particularly original.

Today I’ve been thinking about Khader Adnan, and about how it’s interesting that his 66-day hunger strike ended the day before Lent began. I know very few specifics about Adnan’s politics—only variations on the allegations against him from official sources. Mostly I know that he’s wielded one of the most powerful nonviolent methods against a great and obvious injustice: Being arrested and held without charge or trial. His great sacrifice has further revealed the injustice of the Israeli occupation, and the apartheid justice system that treats Palestinians completely different from Israelis. May many others take up these and similar methods according to this example.

Also, I had planned to attend an Ash Wednesday service tonight at the home of the Lutheran pastor of the English-speaking congregation in Jerusalem, who lives across the street from us. Unfortunately, we got stuck at Kalandia checkpoint on our way back from Ramallah and missed the service. Gun-toting Israeli youths nonetheless served as a reminder of my mortality.

The rubble of a demolished Palestinian home on land slated for an Israeli national park.

The State of Israel wants to create a national park on the eastern slopes of Mount Scopus—land virtually in the back yard of my house on the Mount of Olives. If you want to know what could be wrong with that, there are several good articles describing the plan and the opposition to it. National parks and other green spaces are a common tool used by the Israeli occupation to prevent the growth of Palestinian communities, justify the demolition of Palestinian homes, and to cover up their remains.

But it was on a tour of this space that I learned some fascinating stories from the traditions of my Muslim neighbors. It’s relatively common knowledge that Jesus is revered as a prophet by Muslims, so it shouldn’t be surprising that they have parallel versions of the stories told by the Christian scriptures. One of the neighborhoods being squeezed by the proposed national park is Al-Issawiya. “Issa” is the Arabic name for Jesus—and a common name for Arab Christians and Muslims alike. Al-Issawiya gets its name from Jesus because of a Muslim tradition that this was the area where he was hiding before his arrest. This is only a short distance from the Garden of Gethsemane site on the Mount of Olives revered by Christians—which includes 2000-year-old olive trees! But Al-Issawiya has its own historic tree. Known as the Kharoub Al-Ashera (Carob of the Ten), it is purported to be a tree where Jesus hid prior to his arrest. “The Ten” was explained as a reference to the apostles—though even without Judas Iscariot around I can’t square that math with my own tradition. But this tree is still a pilgrimage site that Muslim believers will anoint with oil and tie ribbons as symbols of their prayers.

Abdallah Hamdan, the resident of Al-Issawiya describing this tradition, made an interesting application with an appeal to the Christian scriptures in which Jesus says, ”Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” (Luke 9:58)

“This prophecy is coming true today,” he said. “This national park will provide a place for animals, but not people!”

Mukhtar Darwish Darwish looks out over land near his community of Al-Issawiya.

Another resident of Al-Issawiya, mukhtar (community elder) Darwish Darwish, was featured in an earlier blog post where he played a contemporary Good Samaritan. He also spoke to the tour, helping to further explain how the proposed park would suffocate his community. Like all Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, annexed by Israel in a move not recognized by any other nation, building permits are nearly impossible to obtain for Palestinians. House demolitions are common, as growing families have no other choice but to build illegally or abandon their communities. This takes place while Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem continue to grow, despite international condemnation. It’s a well-documented strategy intended to demographically alter Jerusalem in favor of the Israeli Jewish population.

Ahmad Shabani and his home, which is threatened with demolition by Israeli authorities.

The last word on this tour came from a resident of A-Tur, the neighborhood on the other side of the proposed park, and the one in which our home on the Mount of Olives lies. There, Ahmad Shabani, said in his simple English, “This is my land.” Like many of his neighbors’ homes, Shabani’s modest cement block house is under a demolition order. It is the third iteration of his home, previous versions having been demolished by Israeli authorities. Previous demolitions also destroyed olive and other fruit trees.

“They don’t understand,” he says. Demolitions will not change his determination.

“I am not an Indian in America,”  he repeats several times. I interpret this to mean that he will not be pushed off his land.

Israeli soldiers at the Yad Vashem Holocause Memorial in Jerusalem.

There’s a saying I’ve heard a few times that’s attributed to a Jewish source (perhaps apocryphal): One of two lessons could be learned from the Holocaust. One is that such a terrible crime must never happen again. The other is that a Jew without a machine gun is a dead Jew. My condensed paraphrase: Never again to anyone, or never again to Jews.

Growing up in the U.S., it was generally the former that was emphasized. Visits to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, frequently included temporary exhibits about preventing genocides in other parts of the world. I remember attending a lecture there about atrocities in Sudan.

So I found particularly interesting this recent Haaretz headline, “Study: IDF officers less committed to Jewish values after visits to Nazi death camps.”

The study found that before going on the trip, officers expressed a very high level of commitment to the Jewish people and to preserving their Jewish heritage, and high levels of solidarity with the fate of other Jews. …

After they returned from the trips, however, the researchers found a drop in commitment to all values related to Jewish identity, including the importance of the Land of Israel for the Jewish people, the importance of the IDF’s existence, feelings of national pride in being Israeli, and a sense of a shared Jewish fate. The study found a particularly dramatic decline in the importance the officers attached to Jewish and Israeli symbols, and to Diaspora Jewry. The trips also produced a decline in IDF-related values, including commitment to the state and the army, feelings of leadership, and love of heroism.

Haaretz reports that, “Army sources said they were ‘stunned’ by the findings, which seem to indicate that the trips are achieving the opposite of their declared purpose.”

More soldiers at Yad Vashem.

But here’s the kicker:

In contrast, the trips produced no change in the officers’ commitment to universal democratic values such as human dignity, the sanctity of life and tolerance.

The article leaves ambiguous what the exact quality of the “commitment to universal democratic values” left unchanged by the trips. Seeing as they’re committed to defending a state that defines itself as a “Jewish democracy,” it’s hard to see just how universal their values would have been to start out. There’s also the decades of human rights abuses, wildly disproportionate casualty ratios, and a culture of impunity that might cause one to question their baseline commitment to “human dignity, the sanctity of life and tolerance.” But if visits to Nazi death camps is helping to shift the ratio of exclusive nationalist tribal values in favor of more universal democratic values, I’ll take that as a positive development, however modest.

UPDATE: Another Haaretz article offers some specific data on Israeli student attitudes:

This is how the Holocaust is taught in school, this how it is that Israeli students are taken to visit death camps – and how it came to be that, as Haaretz reported on Friday, just 2 percent of Israeli youth feel committed to democratic principles after studying the Holocaust and 2.5 percent identify with the suffering of other persecuted nations, but 12 percent feel committed to “significant” service in the Israel Defense Forces.

Some people shouldn’t use some words. Some stupid white people don’t understand why they’re not allowed to use the N-word when some black people use it all the time. Because you are not stupid, I won’t explain why. Similarly, it seems generally appropriate that public comparisons of anyone or anything to Nazis, Hitler, or the Holocaust should be policed by Jewish people, or maybe just actual Holocaust survivors, as these terms are frequently abused and trivialized by people who should know better. (Here’s a video of some Holocaust policing in action.)

It might seem reasonable that the term “apartheid” should fall into a similar category. As a reference to the horrific injustice and violence perpetrated against black South Africans, it is certainly a charged term. Not to be used lightly. Zionists tend to freak out when it’s applied to Israel. Just ask Jimmy Carter. Ben White’s book applies the international legal definition rather convincingly, and the recent Russel Tribunal in South Africa issued a guilty verdict on similar terms.Even a few Israeli prime ministers have made their own apartheid allusions.

But if anyone has the unquestioned moral authority to wield the term, it’s Rev. Allen Boesak, a veteran of the South African anti-apartheid struggle. In a recent interview, he describes how Israel’s oppression of Palestinians is worse:

It is worse, not in the sense that apartheid was not an absolutely terrifying system in South Africa, but in the ways in which the Israelis have taken the apartheid system and perfected it, so to speak; sharpened it. For instance, we had the Bantustans and we had the Group Areas Act and we had the separate schools and all of that but I don’t think it ever even entered the mind of any apartheid planner to design a town in such a way that there is a physical wall that separates people and that that wall denotes your freedom of movement, your freedom of economic gain, of employment, and at the same time is a tool of intimidation and dehumanisation. We carried passes as the Palestinians have their ID documents but that did not mean that we could not go from one place in the city to another place in the city. The judicial system was absolutely skewed of course, all the judges in their judgements sought to protect white privilege and power and so forth, and we had a series of what they called “hanging judges” in those days, but they did not go far as to openly, blatantly have two separate justice systems as they do for Palestinians [who are tried in Israeli military courts] and Israelis [who are tried in civil, not military courts]. So in many ways the Israeli system is worse.

On this last point, some stats: “Virtually all – 99.74 percent, to be exact – of cases heard by the military courts in the territories end in a conviction.” That means if you are a West Bank Palestinian who is arrested and tried by Israeli authorities, you will be convicted. Think about this when there is talk of a prisoner exchange.

Conversely, as all Palestinians are guilty until proven innocent, Israeli authorities rarely prosecute any criminal activity by Israelis against Palestinians. “90% of investigations of Israeli attacks against Palestinians are closed without indictments,” let alone convictions. And that’s just attacks by Israeli civilians, aka settlers, in the West Bank. When it come to abuses by the Israeli military against Palestinians:

[I]n the investigations of the full spectrum of offenses allegedly committed by Israeli soldiers against Palestinians and their property – from looting and theft, to beatings and shootings, to causing death. … [O]nly 6 percent of all cases in which a criminal investigation is opened lead to the indictment of suspected soldiers.

I’m not the first to respond to tired questions of “Where’s the Palestinian Mandela?” with the short answer, “in Israeli prison.” I also like to follow up with the question: “Where is the Israeli de Klerk?” I haven’t heard a good answer to that one, but the real F.W. de Klerk has had a few illuminating comments of his own recently:

What I supported as a younger politician was exactly what the whole world now supports for Israel and Palestine, namely separate nation states will be the solution. In our case we failed. There were three main reasons. We failed because the whites wanted too much land for themselves. We failed because the majority of blacks said this is not how we want our political rights. And we failed because we became economically totally integrated. We became an economic omelet and you can never again divide an omelet into the white and the yellow of the egg. And we realized in the early eighties we had landed in a place which has become morally unjustified.

The week leading up to Christmas, I got to photograph two activist art projects in Bethlehem’s Manger Square. Both were Christmas trees, one made of barbed wire, the other “Wall Tree” was designed by Palestinian artist Rana Bishara to symbolize the Israeli separation wall. Both were set up in Manger Square at one of the busiest times of the year for international tourists, with the hopes of educating some of them about the realities that Bethlehem residents face living life under the Israeli military occupation.

As the photo shows, Rana’s “Wall Tree” was garlanded with barbed wire and ornamented with spent tear gas grenades. I didn’t notice it until processing photos much later, but when checking my focus at high magnification, I recognized the letters, “CTS.” This rang a bell.

CTS, or Combined Tactical Systems, is a division of a U.S. company, Combined Systems Inc. (CSI). To be more specific, they’re based in Jamestown, Pennsylvania, my home state. As Israeli journalist Joseph Dana reported recently:

US companies like the Pennsylvania based Combined Systems Inc (CSI) are among the primary suppliers of tear gas used in the West Bank. After Jawahar Abu Rahmah died as a result of breathing CSI tear gas in Bil’in, a number of pro-Palestinian advocacy groups staged protests and launched a boycott of the company. CSI officials have remained silent on the use of their product by Israeli forces.

And it’s not just in Palestine:

One important consequence of this year’s Arab revolutions has been renewed interest in the use of US-made tear gas to control social protests across the Middle East. A number of US tear gas manufacturers have ramped up production, while profits have been soaring as governments from Bahrain to Egypt demand more and more tear gas to suppress political revolt.

The result has been deadly. In January, the 32-year-old French photographer Lucas Mebrouk Dolega was killed by a tear-gas canister fired at close range by Tunisian police. And hundreds of protesters in Egypt have claimed that tear gas canisters made by CSI were fired at them, often at close range, by security forces. According to the leading Egyptian daily Al Ahram, port officials in Suez recently protested against unloading a shipment of CSI-manufactured tear gas destined for the Supreme Council of Armed Forces in Cairo.

Amnesty International has joined the port officials’ protest, issuing a sharply worded statement singling out the use of CSI tear gas in Egypt, and calling on the US government to stop approving sales of the product to Egypt because of its misuse against protesters. Tear gas has become the main instrument by which authoritarian regimes control social protests that challenge their power in the Middle East. Used tear-gas canisters litter the streets of Cairo and Tunis. Identical canisters allow the Israeli army to crush unarmed demonstrations throughout the West Bank, without attracting widespread condemnation from the international community. What seems certain is that until tear gas is viewed as the deadly weapon it can be, authoritarian governments will continue to use it with impunity.

Well, one thing I discovered when tracking down more information about CTS/CSI and the grenades I photographed—at least they don’t claim that their products are “non-lethal”. The URL for their web site is “www.less-lethal.com”—small comfort to families of those for whom these weapons turned out to be deadly.

Why do Israeli riot police tear gas guns have precision sights?

Three months before Mustafa Tamimi of the West Bank town of Nabi Saleh died after being shot in the face with an Israeli tear gas grenade at close range, this ominous tid-bit appeared near the end of a New York Times article on preparations for the Palestinian UN statehood bid (emphasis added):

Brig. Gen. Michael Edelstein, the chief officer commanding the paratroopers and infantry responsible for preserving order this month, told reporters that the army had equipped itself with a broader range of nonlethal weaponry. It has acquired more than 20 water-cannon trucks that can spray water or a foul-smelling liquid known locally as skunk; huge loudspeakers that can also emit intolerable noise to scatter protesters; and tear-gas launchers fitted with sights to allow soldiers to aim better when firing the gas canisters.

I found this disturbing at the time because several Palestinian and international activists had already been killed or seriously injured by tear gas canisters. Can anyone explain why soldiers should be aiming tear gas canisters at all? As the Associated Press reports:

Tamimi is the 20th person to be killed over the past eight years at similar demonstrations in rural villages throughout the West Bank, said Sarit Michaeli of the Israeli rights group B’Tselem. … Others who have been struck by tear gas canisters include Palestinian Bassem Abu Rahmeh, who was killed in 2009 when one hit his chest. They also include Tristan Anderson of Oakland, Calif., who is suffering from brain damage, paralysis and seizures after he was hit in the head by a canister at a 2009 demonstration.

Go ahead and debate Mustafa Tamimi’s right to throw rocks at an armored military jeep that invaded his village. But do not for a moment debate the obvious murderous intent of shooting someone in the face at close range with a s0-called ‘nonlethal’ grenade.

Also, somebody please tell the AP that when a Palestinian is killed by Israelis, it is lazy, irresponsible, and downright pathetic journalism to quote only Israelis (even if some are left-wing Israelis) for comments on the events of his death. The voices of Nabi Saleh’s residents deserve to be heard first hand. Haven’t they suffered enough to deserve that right?

Luke 1:46-55

And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;

for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.

His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;

he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,

according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

On Tuesday, on the anniversary of the Palestinian Declaration of Independence, we visited Hebron—one of the most intense microcosms of the Israeli occupation. I’ve visited several times before, and saw similar sights: young men being harassed at checkpoints, settlers surrounded by platoons of soldiers, segregated pedestrians on Shuhada Street, military patrols through the old city, Palestinian shops with their doors welded shut. One new sight, pointed out by our EAPPI host: the recently repaired door of a Palestinian home that had been bashed in by Jewish tourists visiting the Israeli settlement of Beit Hadassa, which is embedded in the center of Hebron. There were also machine gun-toting settlers visiting holy sites in the back yards of Palestinian homes. I didn’t get photos of these last two items.

As we left the old city, we ran into members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, who had just hear that this weekend things were going to get worse in Hebron. A major settler celebration is taking place this weekend—including many foreign visitors—the kind of situation that usually means very bad news for Hebron’s Palestinian residents. This warning was corroborated by an article by Musa Abu Hashhash, a B’tselem fieldworker, writing in The Jerusalem Post:

Last week Israel’s Minister of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs called on Jews to come to Hebron for the “Life of Sarah” Saturday, in reaction to the recognition of Palestine in UNESCO. So it is expected that thousands of religious Israeli Jews will visit Hebron this weekend. …

For Palestinian  residents of H2 (the part of Hebron still under full Israeli control), festive weekends like the coming one, when thousands of Jews are expected to visit settlements in the city center, are very different from what the Jewish visitors will experience. Even during ‘normal’ times, life in H2 is extremely difficult for Palestinians. The severe restrictions on movement enforced by Israeli security forces for some 10 years have paralyzed Hebron’s old city center. Hundreds of days of curfew imposed by the Israeli army, and military orders closing stores and prohibiting Palestinian movement in key areas, coupled with the lack of law enforcement on settler violence, have turned a once thriving area into a ghost town, emptied of its inhabitants.

Special weekends like the “Life of Sarah” Saturday mean even more intense oppression. Palestinians are subjected to a de-facto closure: intrusive military and police checks are more frequent and residents report that the harassment that so often accompanies them is more hostile. The level of settler violence, an ongoing problem for Palestinians in H2, is higher.

In fact, my experience shows that the vast majority of incidents occur on Saturdays and on Jewish holidays. Walking around, even along streets that the authorities permit Palestinians to walk in, can mean facing large numbers of settlers; many Palestinian families are forced to spend the weekend indoors to avoid the possible ramifications.

Minaret of Hebron's Al-Ibrahimi Mosque, aka Tomb of the Patriarchs

Most people familiar with the Hebrew scriptures wonder how religious Jews can square the moral teachings of the Bible with their treatment of Palestinians. Rabbi Arik Ascherman of Rabbis for Human Rights, also writing in The Jerusalem Post, sheds some light on the settler mindset:

I once caught two Israelis in the act of stealing olives from Palestinianowned trees. I later found out that one of them was the leader of a group specifically created to steal olives. We were all religious Jews. A surreal discussion therefore developed out in the olive groves, even as they were trying to escape before the police arrived. What does Jewish tradition say about the property rights of non-Jews in the Land of Israel?

It was not a very productive discussion, and I can’t say that either side was listening to the other all that carefully. At one point, one of them said mockingly, “You must be reading from a warped Torah.” I confess that I descended to their level and answered in kind. “I think you’re right,” I said. “The Torah I read from has things that seem to be missing from yours, like ‘don’t steal’ and ‘don’t trespass.’”

Anything be justified if one tries hard enough. Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu once said that it should not be considered theft to take olives from Palestinian trees because God gave the Land to the Jewish people. Other rabbis eventually forced him to recant.

This week’s Torah portion is invoked to say that, beyond God’s promise, Abraham’s purchase of the Cave of the Patriarchs, Me’arat Machpelah, symbolizes the legal purchase of the entire Land of Israel.

One can counter the commandment to treat the ger (stranger) decently by arguing that this only refers to converts, although this contradicts the plain meaning of the text and the interpretation of classical commentators such as Ibn Ezra. One can cite the commandments to drive out other nations, although the Talmud clarifies that this refers to specific nations that no longer exist, because of specific sins.

Others recall the homes which were owned in Hebron by Jews before the 1929 massacre, though they would not agree that Palestinians should be returned to the lands they owned before 1929 or 1948. …

This, then, is the great Jewish divide. Many feel that mitzvot bein adam l’havero (commandments that govern behavior between human beings) apply only to fellow Jews. Some limit the scope of these commandments even further, fully implementing them only regarding those Jews who share their interpretation of the mitzvot. Others of us note that when the Torah teaches that humanity was created in God’s Image (Genesis 1:27), the Torah doesn’t limit this only to Jews or the wealthy, and makes a point of including both men and women.

Rabbi Ascherman offers some additional theological reflection that’s worth reading, but I didn’t want to reproduce the entire commentary.

But aside from being baffled, saddened, and horrified by the extremist settlers in Hebron and the throngs expected this weekend, I was also encouraged by my mother-in-law’s take-away from the day’s visit: The warmth and hospitality of the Palestinians that we encountered under such circumstances expressed a resilience and vitality of spirit that are just as baffling, though in a far more positive sense. The human spirit is capable of many extremes—positive and negative. Both are on continual display in Hebron.

Israeli border police soldiers stand near an Israeli public bus serving settlements in the West Bank city of Hebron.

Whenever pro-justice and anti-occupation activists draw parallels between the Israeli occupation and South African apartheid or the U.S. civil rights movement, critics are quick to point out examples of why such allusions are imperfect. Of course, all analogies from one freedom struggle to another are imperfect. But one of the biggest difference between Israeli oppression and these other examples is that Israel is careful not to codify many of its most discriminatory practices into explicit laws. (Though even this is changing.) Generally, it counts on de facto discrimination.

So for example, when Palestinian activists boarded Israeli buses as part of a “Freedom Ride” campaign, no, there is no law saying they can’t ride buses of Israeli companies like Egged pictured above that connect West Bank settlements to Jerusalem. West Bank Palestinians are just not allowed to enter most settlements—or Jerusalem–without special permission. Why? Like the answer to every question in Sunday school is “Jesus,” the answer to every question about why Israel discriminates on the basis of ethno-religious identity is “Security.”

Even the AP felt the need to inform the reader why their theme was inappropriate (emphasis added):

The Palestinian activists dubbed themselves “Freedom Riders” after 1960s American civil rights activists who worked in the U.S. South to counter racial discrimination and segregation there, though there were no security elements in the American rights struggle.

Tell that to the FBI official who wrote a memo after the March on Washington, describing Martin Luther King, Jr. as: “the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.” (emphasis added) “Democracies” have a long history of using security rationales to repress elements that resist oppression.

But just as the violence of segregated America was laid bare by the civil rights movement, that same AP article revealed a very interesting irony regarding the passengers of the Palestinian “Freedom Ride” bus:

The Palestinians paid their fares and boarded, as reporters jostled to board. Dwaik [one of the Palestinian activists] sat a row away from Haggai Segal, a 54-year-old Israeli from the settlement of Ofra once jailed for planting a car bomb that badly wounded a Palestinian mayor. The two did not interact.

That’s right—the Jewish terrorist bomber ex-con gets to ride the bus from his settlement home (built illegally according to international law) and ride into Jerusalem as he likes. The nonviolent Palestinian activists are dragged off the bus and arrested. Moreover:

Posted on the bus stop were posters praising the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, an extremist who argued that Palestinians should be expelled from Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.

So remind me—who’s the security risk here? And if you still don’t think apartheid or civil rights analogies are appropriate, check out the comments of some of the Jewish Israeli bus riders, courtesy of +972:

“I don’t think they need to be here,” Amir continued. “They can be in their villages and their houses, why are they in our area? Can we go to Ramallah? If we go into Ramallah, they’ll kill us. Can we go into their villages or their areas? We can’t enter.”

Amir added that, in her opinion, Jewish Israelis can’t trust Palestinians or believe in them. “They’ll do terror attacks,” she said.

…

A 16-year-old Jewish Israeli, who wished to remain anonymous, said that the Freedom Riders shouldn’t be able to board the bus because, “It’s an Israeli bus.”

“We live here, this is our land,” he said.

When asked about those who feel differently, the boy replied, “Those who say this is Palestinian land don’t have proof.”

He added that Palestinians enjoy a lot of freedom. “We give them identity cards and they can do whatever they want.”

+972 asked the boy, a resident of Maale Adumim who wished to remain anonymous, if Palestinians can do whatever they want, then why can’t they ride a bus to Jerusalem?

“Okay,” he said. “They can do what they need to… I don’t want them boarding the bus.”

…

A teenage girl with long, curly, blonde hair talked to a friend as she watched the activists get on the bus. “What are they doing? They have their own [buses]?” she said. She moved the phone away from her mouth and yelled at the male activists, “You sons of bitches!”

“You whore,” she said shouted at Arraf, the only female Freedom Rider.

No one can deny that some Palestinians have carried out acts of violence over the years. But the naked racism expressed here that attributes such acts to all members of a particular group is astonishing. Moreover, while instances of Palestinian violence have dropped significantly in the last few years, acts of violence and terror by Jewish Israeli extremists is increasing dramatically. Thankfully, as evidenced by the Israeli sites I’ve linked to in this post like Haaretz and +972, the debate within Israeli society about such issues is alive and well—if a bit stunted by the general rightward shift of Israeli society.

Let’s hope these debates go beyond the bounds expressed by some of this bus’s passengers:

On board, the Palestinians’ presence sparked an argument between two young Jewish Israelis girls, aged 13 and 17.

“They’re animals,” the younger said.

“No, not everyone,” the older answered.

Palestinian buses wait in line at the Qalandia checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem.

Is this man a Zionist? I don't know---you'd have to ask him. But he's probably not a Satmar Hasid, who avoid the Western Wall because of their strong anti-Zionist beliefs.

It’s always reassuring when you get ham-handed hasbara propaganda in response to your work—it means your preaching is reaching beyond the choir. I got a pair of such emails the other day—not sure what exactly they were in response to—but one of them claimed that my favored photo gear supplier, B&H Photo-Video, was “Pro-Israel, support & supply the IDF and most who work there are Zionists!” I wanted to fact-check that claim and boycott them if this was the case, because I don’t want the hard-earned money I spend on photo gear to support any military, let alone the IDF. Googling only turned up a few obscure anti-Semitic rants on woodworking forums of all places. But leave it to Wikipedia to reveal some pertinent facts:

1. B&H is owned by Satmar Hasidic Jews.

2. Satmar Hasidim are opposed to Zionism and the State of Israel:

The Satmar Hasidic movement has become known for its social isolation from all forms of secular culture and for its opposition to all forms of religious, secular, and political Zionism. After the Six-Day War in 1967 Reb Yoel told pious Satmar Hasidim not to approach the Western Wall of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, feeling it would show support for the secular government that claimed to have liberated it. This is true of other so called “holy places” that Satmar Hasidim do not visit, partly in protest of the secular Zionist government, which they view as an abomination.

Satmar Hasidim’s founder even goes as far as to blame Zionism for the Holocaust! Wow. I certainly don’t assume all or even very many of the B&H folks agree with that controversial belief, but I’d say that’s a pretty convincing factoid that this particular strain of Hasidic Judaism is not what you’d call “pro-Israel.” To wit:

In VaYoel Moshe [Satmar Hasidim founder] Teitelbaum explicitly declared that, from the time of the very inception of the Zionist movement in the 1890s, the Zionists violated the three oaths, and thereby caused the Holocaust, as well as all wars, terrorism, and violence in modern Israel, and most anti-Semitism around the world since that time, as a result:

“…it has been these Zionist groups that have attracted the Jewish people and have violated the Oath against establishing a Jewish entity before the arrival of the Messiah. It is because of the Zionists that six million Jews were killed.”^[11]

In keeping with the three oaths, Satmar Hasidim were strongly opposed to the creation of modern Israel through violence and antagonism against gentile nations such as the Ottomans and Britain. In the years following the Holocaust, Rabbi Teitelbaum undertook to maintain and strengthen this position, as did many other Torah Jews and communities. Rabbi Teitelbaum declared that the State of Israel was a violation of Jewish teachings.

So thank you, hasbara knucklehead, for not only reaffirming my loyalty to one of the greatest purveyors of quality photo gear in the world, but also for reminding us all that there are many many Jews, including other groups among the ultra-orthodox, who do not support the violence committed by the State of Israel.

Finally, after doing my initial wiki-homework, I went straight to the source and contacted B&H to see their response. I quote: “Whoever sent you that email is uninformed and should be upbraided for disseminating this sort of claptrap.” They went on to state what perhaps would be obvious in any large American workplace. B&H has many employees, some are Hasidic Jews, some orthodox Jews, some Jewish but not orthodox, and some are not Jewish at all. Given that diversity, according to their response, “I’m sure our politics on average run the gamut form one end of the spectrum to the other both for domestic and international issues.” They also cautioned about that the Wikipedia articles “oversimplified a considerably more complex and nuanced issue.” I’ve tried to make clear above that B&H owners and employers may not necessarily adhere to all of the opinions of their tradition’s founders—as is true of any religious group.

So there you have it. Life is always more complex than the assumptions one might make about any religious group. I guess it just goes to prove the old saying: Don’t assume a Jew is Zionist because he wears a distinctive hat.