Uri Davis says ANC should be model for Palestinians
by Jonathan Cook
Anti-war.com
August 22, 2009
If a single person deserves the title of serial thorn in the side of the Israeli
state, Uri Davis, a professor of critical Israel studies at al Quds University
on the outskirts of East Jerusalem, might be the one to claim it.
The crowning moment for Dr Davis arrived last weekend when he became the first
Israeli Jew to be elected to one of Fatah’s governing bodies, the Revolutionary
Council.
It is a public relations breakthrough for Fatah – which held its sixth congress
last week, this time under occupation in the West Bank city of Bethlehem – in
which Dr Davis clearly takes some pride.
His presence on the 120-member council, sometimes referred to as the Palestinian
parliament, is unlikely to make a significant difference to Fatah’s policies,
which will continue to be largely dictated by Mahmoud Abbas, the president, and
his inner circle. But it does have huge symbolic significance.
His polling in the 31st place for one of 80 seats contested by more than 600
Fatah members, he said in an interview, challenged Israel’s suggestion that the
Palestinian people and its leaders regard the Jews as their enemies.
Or as one local Palestinian pundit noted of the vote’s message: "It is not
Judaism that Palestinians are fighting, it is Zionism."
It also finally puts Dr Davis in a position from which he hopes to shake up the
complacency that has bedeviled the Fatah leadership and the PLO in their neglect
of supporters outside the Palestinian fold.
"In my view [Fatah] is conducting a struggle with one hand tied behind its
back," he said, sipping Arabic coffee in the garden of St George’s cathedral in
East Jerusalem.
"The PLO represents a democratic alternative for all, including the current
colonizer people, the current perpetrator of war crimes and crimes against
humanity," he said in reference to Israel and its Jewish population. "In the 25
years since my joining the Fatah and PLO, this message has been marginalized.
The mainstream went another direction, the Oslo accords direction."
He is loath to discuss the current tensions between Fatah and Hamas, claiming it
is "not my area of competence." However, he denounces Hamas for fanning the
threat of civil war.
His chief task, he said, will be to push Fatah to become a broad-based
resistance movement modeling itself on the African National Congress, which
brought down apartheid in South Africa.
The reference to South Africa is not unexpected. Dr Davis started describing
Israel as an apartheid state in the early 1980s, long before it had become
fashionable even on the far left.
His most recent book is Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within,
published in 2003, in which he argues that discrimination against Palestinians
is embedded in Israeli law and sets out what he regards as the four classes of
citizenship established by Israel’s parliament.
The country’s six million Jews, he said, occupied the most privileged place in
this hierarchy, followed by the country’s 1m-strong Palestinian minority with
its second-class citizenship. Lagging behind both are a quarter of a million
refugees living inside Israel, who are stripped of their right to inherit
property, and in final place come a further 5m refugees who had their and their
descendants’ citizenship nullified after the 1948 war.
Over the years, Dr Davis has experienced life in each of these categories.
He was raised an Ashkenazi Jew in Jerusalem and schooled in Kfar Shemaryahu, a
wealthy suburb of Tel Aviv. He then spent a decade in exile from Israel starting
in 1984, after his recruitment to Fatah by one of the founders of the PLO,
Khalil al Wazir, known as Abu Jihad.
He ran the party’s London bureau until the mid-1990s, when he was allowed to
return under the Oslo accords. He surprised friends by choosing to move to
Sakhnin, a Palestinian community in northern Israel, from which he led a
campaign against laws and practices that force Jewish and Palestinian citizens
to live almost entirely apart.
He is more circumspect about discussing his current circumstances. His marriage
to a Palestinian woman from Ramallah a year ago, his fourth, violated yet
another Israeli taboo.
Before the ceremony he converted to Islam, though he continues to describe
himself as a "Palestinian Hebrew of Jewish origin."
While he admits to no longer living in Israel, he is wary of saying more,
possibly for good reason: it is against Israeli law for an Israeli citizen to be
living in an area under the Palestinian Authority control. Equally, his wife,
Miyassar, has been denied a permit to live in Israel, as is the case for almost
all Palestinians in the occupied territories. A perfect illustration of the
apartheid nature of the Israeli state, he said.
The plight of the Palestinians under occupation has come into much sharper focus
since his marriage.
Last month, he had to watch the indignities heaped on his wife after her
brother, suffering from cancer, was transferred to a hospital in East Jerusalem,
which is illegally annexed to Israel. She was denied a visitor’s permit and
could only hear about her brother’s slow demise from Dr Davis and friends.
"This situation is not unique to my family, of course. It is part of the cruelty
perpetrated by the occupation authorities against the mass of the Palestinian
people in the West Bank and Gaza."
Dr Davis has yet to find out how Israel will respond to his regular attendance
at Revolutionary Council meetings in Ramallah.
He said his election had been greeted with an outpouring of support both
internationally and from the broader Jewish community that has surprised him.
The main hostility has come during interviews with the Israeli media, which have
taken offence at "my language referring to Israel as an apartheid state, to
Zionism as a settler colonial project, to the criminality of the Israeli
leadership."
His unpopularity among the majority of Israeli Jews is likely to grow as he uses
his new platform at the Revolutionary Council to push for a campaign of
boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel.
The ultimate goal, he said, was the enforcement of United Nations resolutions
that would in practice bring about a one-state solution.
Dr Davis concluded the interview with a story about the defining moment in his
disillusionment with Israel and Zionism. He was doing alternative civilian
service in the early 1960s guarding the perimeter fence of a kibbutz, one of
Israel’s collective agricultural communities, on the edge of Gaza. As a pacifist
at that time, he refused to carry a gun.
After one of many shouting matches, an exasperated kibbutz member led him into a
eucalyptus grove inside the fence and pointed to piles of stones. "Those aren’t
stones, they’re the ruins of a village called Dimra. Our kibbutz is cultivating
the lands of Dimra," he told the teenage Davis. "The families are refugees on
the other side of this fence [in Gaza]. Now do you understand why all the Arabs
must hate Jews and want to throw us into the sea?"
Dr Davis says he understood better the look he was shot by the man when he
replied that the kibbutz members should invite the refugees back to share the
agricultural land.
That way, the young Davis suggested, the kibbutz could "turn an enemy into a
friend."
A shorter version of this article originally appeared in The
National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.
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