A television commercial for an Israeli telecom company has inspired a rare form of criticism: a real-life re-enactment. In the original, a group of Israeli soldiers jump from their vehicle in a panic when a soccer ball soars over the concrete "separation wall" and lands on their hood. A soldier kicks the ball back over the wall and a pass game breaks out between the soldiers and the invisible Palestinians. Responding the levity of it all, Ahmed Tibi, an Arab member of the Israeli Knesset, told Reuters: "The barrier separates families and prevents children from reaching schools and clinics. Yet the advertisement presents the barrier as though it were just a garden fence in Tel Aviv." 

A video response posted to YouTube is a chilling illustration of Tibi's critique. In it, a group of Palestinians kick a soccer ball over a portion of the West Bank barrier, and are answered with tear gas canisters fired from Israeli positions.

Here is the original commercial:

And here is the response:

Source: Haaretz 

When the BBC published its series of interviews with Gaza residents talking about Hamas, they pushed the most compelling conversation (and the only comments by a woman) to the bottom of the page. It’s a conversation with Tihani Abed Rabbu. Her teenage son Mustafa, her brother and her closest friend were killed during Israel's January assault, codenamed "Operation Cast Lead."

Journalist and Middle East analyst Helena Cobban took issue with the placement of Abed Rabbu’s story. On her blog, Just World News, she protests the placement of this woman’s story:

Too frequently decision makers in the [mainstream media] simply marginalize women's experiences. But women's work in holding families together in very tough times lies at the heart of the social resiliency that can either save or break a community that's in conflict. So it is not only a compelling 'human interest' story—it is also at the heart of the big 'political' story regarding whether, for example, the people of Gaza or South Lebanon end up bowing to Israel's very lethally pursued political demands, or not. Maybe the BBC could, at the very least, elevate Ms. Abed-Rabbu's story to the top of that page?

Here’s a profoundly unsettling excerpt from the interview with Abed-Rabbu:

"I'm afraid that after I have lost Mostafa, that I will lose somebody else as well. When my children go to sleep, and I look at them, I start to think 'who is next—is it Ahmad's turn, or his brother?'

"What worries me is the safety of my family, my sons and my husband. My husband is going through a difficult time, a crazy time. He wants to affiliate with Hamas, he wants to get revenge after what they have done to us.

"How do you expect us to be peaceful after they have killed my son and turned my family into angry people—as they refer to us, "terrorists". I cannot calm my family down.

Sources: BBC, Just World News 

Image by  Amir Farshad Ebrahimi , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Much has been said about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s first meeting with Barack Obama, yet little attention has fallen on Netanyahu’s gift to the president: a copy of Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, a satirized account of the author’s 1867 visit to Palestine.

Though Twain’s book is satire—of the noxious Western tourist trudging through unfamiliar lands with inauthentic reverence and deep contempt for local customs—it’s difficult to separate Twain’s actual observations from his vicious spoof. So much so that some Israeli historians and politicians have used Innocents Abroad as evidence that Israel was created atop a land without people—populated only by tribes living backwards lives.

Gifted into the hands of a U.S. leader, Innocents Abroad is a barely coded message about the history and inherent value of the land and culture Palestinians have fought and died for since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948.

Here, in Twain’s words, is the historiography that Netanyahu offered to Obama:

On pilgrim claims that they could not tear themselves away from the Holy Land: “It does not stand to reason that men are reluctant to leave places where the very life is almost badgered out of them by importunate swarms of beggars and peddlers who hang in strings to one’s sleeves and coat-tails and shriek and shout in his ears and horrify his vision with the ghastly sores and malformations they exhibit. One is glad to get away. I have heard shameless people say they were glad to get away from Ladies’ Festivals where they were importuned to buy by bevies of lovely young ladies. Transform those houris into dusky hags and ragged savages, and replace their rounded forms with shrunken and knotted distortions, their soft hands with scarred and hideous deformities, and the persuasive music of their voices with the discordant din of a hated language, and then see how much lingering reluctance to leave could be mustered” (p. 386)

On beautiful Arab men and their repulsive women: “Arab men are often fine looking, but Arab women are not. We can all believe that the Virgin Mary was beautiful; it is not natural to think otherwise; but does it follow that it is our duty to find beauty in these present women of Nazareth?” (p. 297)

On Arabs as savages (a theme Twain returns to again and again): “We rode a little way up a hill and found ourselves at Endor, famous for its witch. Her descendents are there yet. They were the wildest horde of half-naked savages we have found thus far.” (p. 306)

On the “hopeless, dreary, heart-broken” landscape: “Of all the places there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince. The hills are barren, they are dull of color, they are unpicturesque in shape. The valleys are unsightly deserts fringed with a feeble vegetation that has an expression about it of being sorrowful and despondent. . . . It is a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land.” (p. 391)

If you believe her most fervent critics, Palestinian journalist Taghreed El-Khodary's primary professional accomplishment is "vomiting Israeli propaganda" onto the front-page of the New York Times, her employer since 2001. As a passionate and talented journalist from Gaza employed by an American newspaper often accused of marginalizing or ignoring the issue of Palestinian rights, El-Khodary walks a near-impossible line.  In a piece for Columbia Journalism Review, El-Khodary writes about her struggles to walk that treacherous tightrope during the recent Israeli attack on the people and infrastructure of Gaza:

Israel did not let any international journalists into Gaza, so I feel the weight of responsibility, the need to explain to the world what is happening. And that is one of several kinds of pressure: I want to maintain my credibility, so I work hard not to exclude any element of the story. I deal with Hamas watchers and fighters, which I know how to do. I feel the pressure and possible death from Israeli drones, F16s, helicopters, and tanks.

The piece (only available online to subscribers) is also a catalog of the horrors she witnessed and reported:

I enter a location that has been hit five times by Israeli bombs. I worry that the drones could hit at any moment, but try to focus on the story. I attend a funeral for more than thirty people, and talk to a father while staring into his dead daughter's brown eyes. "From now on," he says, "I'm Hamas."

At the height of the Israeli attacks—which Israel dubbed "Operation Cast Lead"—El-Khodary gave a gripping television interview that makes a fool of any critic who declares her to be anything other than what she most certainly is: a journalist prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice to share the tragedy and complexities of the Palestinian story. Here she is:

Source: Columbia Journalism Review 

The issue of Palestinian statehood rode the Pope’s robe into the headlines this week. The pope opted to speak of a “homeland” for Palestinians, avoiding the word “state” like it was a dirty word. It’s the kind of acute linguistic caution that has poisoned the entire debate around Palestinian rights.  As an antidote, straight-talking Middle East analyst and historian Juan Cole confronts the statehood issue with blunt force in a post at his Informed Comment blog.

“The contemporary world is a world of states,” explains Cole, “and falling between the cracks because you lack citizenship in any state is a guarantee of marginality and oppression.”

Cole folds the stateless status of Palestinians into its proper historical context, and then makes his argument with a clarity that is all too rare in this notoriously contentious debate: “Statelessness was an attribute of slaves in premodern times. The Jews of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s were the primary victims of the crime of stripping people of their citizenship in a state. Make no mistake; it is Israel that deprived them of statehood, which the 1939 British White Paper pledged to them, and which other League of Nations Mandates, such as French Syria and Lebanon and British Iraq, achieved. Apologists try to shift the blame for Palestinian statelessness from Israel to someone else. But it won't work.”

Source:  Informed Comment  

"Rashid Khalidi" ranked ninth among Google's most-serched political buzzwords in 2008—sandwiched between "hockey mom" and "that one." Khalidi holds the Edward Said Chair in Modern Arab Studies at Columbia and has bee no stranger to controversy since taking position in 2003. Last year Republicans tried to use Barack Obama's friendship with the Palestinian scholar and activist to dull the front-runner's shine. A Chronicle Review profile picks up some of that mud for examination and, more importantly, provides a sober history and assessment of the field of Middle Eastern Studies, which Khalidi has made his home for decades.

And in the middle of all of this-—actually at the very end-—Khalidi provides a few short sentences on the topic he has given his career to: Palestine.

"Sitting in his office last month, the professor looks back on his career ... 'It has long been considered an offense against good manners to say the word 'Palestine' in certain quarters. Israel was established in 1948, a source of great joy for some people. Fine, that is well and good. But for Palestinians, that was a disaster in terms of their own history.'

"The Palestinians' national trauma, Khalidi says, has been subordinated to another people's joy: 'I wouldn't ask an Israeli to feel misery at the establishment of his state, so I don't see why a Palestinian should be asked to feel joy about the destruction of his society.'"

Source: Chronicle Review

The Israeli-Palestinian war has spread to the Internet, where hackers loyal to both sides are “defacing” websites to spread information and photos from the battlefield, Jon Gordon reports for Future Tense.

Jart Armin, who Gordon describes as a “cyber warfare researcher,” says the hackers have been fighting since 2001, but recently stepped up their efforts by attacking websites in Europe. Palestinian hackers have been particularly active, says Armin, breaking into websites to post photos of dead or injured people. Turkish hackers have enlisted too, which could spell trouble, according to Armin, because they’re among the best in the world. One Turk claims the world record for bringing down 20,000 websites in a single hour.

Indeed, the famed Turkish hackers are already living up to their reputation. According to the Sofia News Agency, “Two websites maintained by NATO and the US Army have been defaced by the Turkish group Agd_Scorp/Peace Crew as a protest against the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip.”

Photo by gutter, licensed under Creative Commons.

Coverage of the conflict in Israel and Gaza rarely has a nuanced human face. But citizens from both sides of the border are working to change that.

Peace Man and Hope Man, for instance, are friends who maintain a blog about the violence and their daily lives. Peace Man is a Palestinian, living in a refugee camp in Gaza, and Hope Man is an Israeli living in Sderot. Though the two live only about 10 miles from each other, Hope Man, whose real name is Eric Yellin, told NPR’s Melissa Block that they both knew virtually no one across the border before the blog.

“But as soon as I started meeting people,” Yellin said, “it created a real connection and understanding that on the other side of the border, there are people exactly like us who are suffering. We are suffering, too, through this conflict. But the only way to end this was through some kind of connection and dialogue.”

“Gaza Sderot: Life in Spite of Everything” is an online video project similarly aimed at fostering dialogue and understanding between Israelis and Palestinians. For two months, two two-minute videos—one following a resident of Gaza, the other an Israeli from Sderot—were posted to the site every day. The videos depict scenes of everyday life as its lived by normal people.

“When you realize that people have the same issues about work or about love, about raising your kids, in places where you don’t first think in these terms, well then I get the feeling that we’re doing good work. And that happened quite a few times,” the project’s executive producer, Serge Gordey, told The World’s Carol Zall.

These alternative lenses not only initiate dialogue, they effectively communicate the weight of the situation for both sides, a particularly important function given the lack of on-the-ground reporting from Gaza. In a recent post, Hope Man writes, "Many people of our region have left it for good over the years. Bringing up children in such a reality seems almost abusive and certainly irresponsible." Just above that, Peace Man's latest post from Gaza ends with this reflection: "I hope I will have the chance to write you again."

Image by Amir Farshad Ebrahimi, licensed under Creative Commons.

Time made note last week that Obama is bringing along adviser Dennis Ross when he stops in Israel, the Palestinian Territories, and Jordan during his current global jaunt. Ross was the chief Mideast envoy under presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Also on his resume is a gig as a commentator for FOX News. 

Ross is a controversial figure among those parsing the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians (but really, who isn’t?), and he’s often put in the conservative camp as a hawkish Israel-backer. Time parses the decision to have Ross in tow as, in part, a calculated play for the Jewish vote and foreign policy cred:

Israelis and some Jewish Americans distrust Obama's commitment to Israel — a recent Israeli newspaper poll found 27% of Israelis surveyed support him, compared to 36% for John McCain. And Obama's readiness to hold unconditional talks with Iran also makes him vulnerable among some voters to charges of being soft on Tehran. Both issues count in swing states like Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania where they could hurt Obama's support among Jewish voters and Reagan Democrats. But Ross is a reassuring presence on both counts.

There’s likely some truth to that. But the article notes that the Obama campaign reached out to Ross 15 months ago. That’s long before all the guffawing about Obama’s Jewish troubles and right around the time that Ross’s book, Statecraft: And How to Restore America’s Standing in the World, started making the rounds.

I spoke to Ross back then about what it would take to redeem the United States in the eyes of the world. Looking back, I’m struck by the pragmatic course Ross strikes. Here, for example, is Ross’s take on what the next president has to do: 

The most important thing is to strike a different posture and a different tone from day one. Make it clear that the United States has important interests in the world and that it's mindful that achieving those interests often means having to work with others. Whether it's global warming, nuclear proliferation, threats from nonstate actors, health pandemics, or failed states—these are not challenges we're going to be able to resolve on our own.

Obama’s been a punching bag among his supporters of late for allegedly scurrying toward the center in an unabashed and shameful voter grab initiative, but perhaps there’s a different way to look at his shift: as a move away from his appealing but comfortably vague rhetoric and as a step toward the pragmatic, give-and-take that’s necessary to execute his professed ideals.

The idea is pretty simple, but the message isn’t. Pay 30 Euros (around $45) to Send a Message and a group of Palestinians will spray paint your personal message on the security wall that closes off the West Bank. According to the website, the Palestinians want to show people beyond their cement borders that “We are human beings, just like you, with sense of humor and lust for life.” Most of the funds go to supporting various Palestinian NGO projects, with the remainder covering Send a Message’s expenses. 

Behind the newspaper stories and the political wrangling, there are human lives obscured by the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. While the project, which was developed in a Ramallah workshop by Dutch advertising professionals and Palestinian youths, might seem too light-hearted, I think that the levity is message enough: Something can come from this conflict that does more than make you throw up your hands in frustration.

—Brendan Mackie

President Bush just returned from a weeklong tour of the Middle East, which included his first trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories since becoming president. For such an important visit—one that Bush hopes might establish his legacy as a diplomatic peacemaker—a mere press release just wouldn’t do. So the White House tried something new, in the form of what looks to be a blog, aptly titled “Trip Notes from the Middle East.” But don’t get too excited: The Trip Notes, written by various White House staffers over the course of the visit, are anything but substantial. Posts from Bush’s January 8-16 visit include descriptions of the weather, lodging conditions, how the staff kept busy on the airplane, and the array of animals on King Abdullah’s ranch. But cheers to the White House for attempting to embrace modern technology.

(Thanks, Columbia Journalism Review.)

—Sarah Pumroy

Accompanied by only a computer-generated backing track run through a 12-track amplifier, Hosam Abu Abdu leads his band through its regular practice at a police station in Gaza City. Protectors of the Homeland, as they call themselves, aren’t the typical boy band. Abu Abdu is 40 years old, and his five bandmates don’t appear to be regular heartthrobs either. But Protectors of the Homeland do carry on the long tradition of singers providing inspiration in a time of need.

According to Britain’s Telegraph, the group pays homage to the party and its leaders with songs such as “Change” and “Reform”—and with lines like “By the shrouds of the dead we are inspired.” Abu Abdu and five others formed the group last summer as part of an arts initiative of Hamas’ domestic security service, the Executive Force. “It is our job to inspire the foot soldiers,” Abu Abdu told the Telegraph. “We want to urge the soldiers and officers to push on, to make the effort needed in the struggle to end the occupation.”

The group hopes to release an album, as well as build a theater and support public dancing. Successful or not, the band members said making music beats what they were doing in June: fighting rival faction Fatah in the streets.

Thanks, the Kicker! —Eric Kelsey