F. writes from London:

…My heart, soul, and mind is in Gaza and I feel I cannot concentrate or think about anything else. Like you, we are braving the bitter cold to demonstrate against Israel’s new holocaust. Today we were 200,000 people marching in London, even though the metropolitan police and BBC will say it was no more than 50,000. There was so much passion and support for Gazans and Palestinians.

I’m sitting here on my patio, taking in the cool night air, listening to Kate Bush, thinking of my trip to India in a few days. There, across the valley, in Na’alin, a family is grieving the death of their child, killed yesterday by live ammunition. His family had tried to keep him home, away from the daily demonstrations. Had he lived, he could have been proud that, even as a child, he resisted the stealing of his village’s lands by the occupying power. But he didn’t live, and I cannot be proud that I sit idle, while foolish children, with all their lives ahead of them, face the bullets of slightly older kids, in a game mapped out by adults.

Meanwhile, my email brings me the following story: “This month Adalah submitted a petition to the Israeli Supreme Court (SCt.) on behalf of a Palestinian Arab family from Nazareth whose land was confiscated by the state in 1958 for a “public purpose”. After many years of not using the land for a public purpose, it was put up for sale on the free market and offered to the highest bidder by Miftavim, Ltd., which received the land from the state after the confiscation. The petition demanded that the SCt. cancel the confiscation and return the land to the original Arab landowners who are citizens of the state. The petition relied on past precedent of the SCt. according to which lands were returned to their Jewish owners if there was no longer any public purpose for the confiscation or if a lengthy time had passed and the lands were not used for this reason. Despite prior precedent, the SCt. denied the Arab family’s request to freeze the bid for the sale of the land. As a result, the land was sold for NIS 183 million (US $53 million) which was received by Miftavim, Ltd. This case starkly illustrates how the state deprives Palestinian citizens of Israel of their land. The Israeli legal community treats issues of land confiscation as belonging to the past, to the era of the state’s establishment, and one which no longer affects Arab citizens. The SCt.’s decision proves that the land confiscation issue still exists and that the legal system concerning land is divided into two systems: one for Arab citizens and one for Jewish citizens. Undoubtedly, the legal meaning of confiscation for “public purpose” is not to benefit all the public but to deprive Arab owners of their land.”

It’s a matter of perception. Most Jewish Israelis – whether new army recruits or supreme court judges – are incapable of seeing injustice to Palestinians. It isn’t their fault. It’s just the way their brains have been wired. I too have my wiring. There are many things I do not see or have become inured to. But I have been speaking of injustices that I see, but nevertheless do nothing. Why? It’s so easy to find reasons to do nothing, so hard to find reasons to struggle, for as long as it’s comfortable not to do so.

M., originally from Barcelona and now in Jerusalem, had been a volunteer in Wahat al-Salam during the 2nd Gulf War. All the other volunteers had fled, before the airlines cut their flights Since that time I hadn’t seen her. I only knew that she had initially gone to live in Efrat (the West Bank settlement), where she had converted to Judaism. I assumed that she was still there and happily married to a religious Jew.

On Saturday afternoon, she suddenly showed up on our doorstep, together with a friend originally from Milano, and we spent an hour or two chatting.

M’s conversion to Judaism and settlement in Israel had resulted from an inner conviction that her true identity was Jewish. She was convinced, without much factual evidence, that she was descended from Spanish Jews. It wasn’t so much a spiritual identity: “I am not at all a religious person.” When we asked her how the conversion process had been for her, she said at first that it had been all right, then confessed, with a chuckle, that it had been terrible. The conversion, learning a language, and all the other hassles of adapting to a new country had been, she said, “a parenthesis in life”. During the process she had learned facts about Israel that would have daunted someone with a weaker personality or lesser sense of purpose.

Among the stories she told was her meeting during Hebrew studies with the “Jews of the Amazon”. Dorit and I had not heard that there were a group of people from Iquitos, Peru, who underwent conversion to Judaism, were brought to Israel, and then settled in Kiryat Arba, the Jewish settlement in Hebron. Dorit was incredulous at this story, and I resolved to check it. But apparently it’s true. I found a web page with an account by a progressive rabbi of his journey to meet them in Iquitos, in order to establish their connection with Judaism. They, like our friend M, believe that they are descended from Jews. The rabbi describes his encounter with them:

“Standard questions received very strange answers. “I think a Chassid is one that is glued”, said one, awkwardly correct. (Dvekut, the state of total attachment to God, is central in Chassidism). Some confused Purim with Chanukah and a Mezuzah with a Menorah, and yet with a little help, strange old stories came out: “My mother lit the seventeen candles every first of December”… “… Since the leprosaria is open every day 9 to 6, I arrive always a little late for washing the hands and go to Friday Shabbat services here in Iquitos…

“Tapir[13] is not kosher, but I don’t really know what is Kosher,” said a lady from Santa María de Nieva, six days away by boat into the deepest Amazon. And so the line between ignorance and different codes was, despite all our efforts, an uncertain line, adding up to our puzzle…”

He also mentions the Kiryat Arba connection:

“To make it even harder, reports of an orthodox nationalist Jewish preacher urging these people to settle in Kiryat Arba, Hebron, made us aware of a possibility for them that made our role as progressive Jews even more compelling, urgent. Our abstention could lead to a sin of omission, to a vacuum to be filled by a nationalistic, arrogant and humiliating Judaism, which may corrupt all we stand for as liberal Jews. We made it very clear that we were not signing the certificates for them to end up in a trailer on a Judean hilltop, thus blocking a peaceful, secure and democratic Israel, hopefully alongside a future peaceful Palestinian state. Danger loomed there as well.”

Well they ended up in Kiryat Arba after all, mate. The wonderful thing about Zionism is that its long arm can reach to the Amazonian jungles, the deserts of Africa, or the borders of Burma, discover people with the most marginal connection to Judaism, then spirit them away to Israel. All in order to win demographic points against Palestinians, many of whom are themselves descended from Jews.

I found myself turning the evening news off fairly quickly again tonight. The programme opened with an item about a government decision to investigate police wiretapping used as evidence in the investigation of a sexual harassment scandal involving a politician, several years ago. The TV news brings us stuff like that every evening, and I’m tired of it. The real news goes unreported, while this crap is placed in the spotlight. As if it weren’t bad enough that the politicians are doing a poor job of running the country, they also distract everyone else from crucial and pressing issues by their follies and crimes.

When people rely on TV news, they surrender to the editorial decisions of the TV news staffs. This is not true of newspapers, since readers simply choose the stories that appeal to them. And it is even less true of web media, where it is easier still to hone in on the topics that interest us.

Web media is still developing. Right now the situation is one of utter chaos. Traditional newspapers are going under since web advertizing revenues are not as lucrative as from print media. People look elsewhere, to sites like Craig’s List, for personal advertising and this robs the newspapers of one of their main sources of income.

Readers of web media are also widely different in their sophistication and preferences. Some are regular readers of news feeds, whereas others have never heard of them. Some prefer to read stories, others listen to podcasts, and others watch video clips. Some get their news emailed to them, some use services like Digg, Twine, or Google News. And the technology is changing all the time.

I’m personally an avid reader of news feeds, but have to admit that it isn’t easy to give myself a “balanced diet”. In my case, I find it easier to read the tech feeds like ReadWriteWeb and Slashdot, than to follow stories that are more important and relevant to my world. The reason is partly technical: the tech sites generally include whole stories in their news feeds, whereas newspaper sites are more stingy. They usually provide only a headline and a teaser, and hope that will be enough to get you to click through to their site for the rest.

Probably, as the technology develops, my habits will change accordingly. I bet I will find myself watching more video, and using various aggregators to pull in the items that most interest me.

But I have to admit that till today there is nothing as easy as watching half an hour of TV news. It’s so easy that after about ten minutes I’m gone – one way or another. Either way, I miss the weather.

This morning went to take pictures of the art workshop for the kids from Tulkarm – most of them are from the refugee camp. They arrived yesterday, and their main activity was to create some paintings, together with children from the WAS-NS school.

Roos, A woman from the Dutch Embassy, which sponsored the project, came along. As we watched the children painting, I asked Roos if she thought these could be Dutch children. She said “sure!” I remarked that the children in our region are known to be cheeky and undisciplined, but she said this was true also of Holland. Anyway, as we talked the children were fairly quiet and focussed on their work.

Children are children everywhere. It was hard sometimes to see which were the refugee kids and which were ordinary pupils at our school. But we know that the Tulkarm children come from very difficult conditions – the overcrowding and poverty of the refugee camp. Tulkarm is virtually a prison, blocked off by the separation barrier and army checkpoints. Although the children live close to the sea, they have never visited it, and for most of them this was their first trip beyond the narrow confines of military occupation. Some of their paintings showed explosions and people being shot and killed by the army. The military vehicles they drew were not the stereotyped tanks such as any child might draw, but armored personnel carriers, which they had obviously seen themselves.

In the afternoon, they visited the swimming pool. None of them can swim, but they had lots of fun in the water. One girl said she wanted to stay and go to our school. And that leads to the inevitable question about whether it is kindness or cruelty to take these children out for a day.

In the evening we went to Ruti’s birthday party. I sat next to Rabiah, an Arab woman who works at the hotel. She has a similar diet to me: vegetarian, with a dislike for garlic and eggs – basically a yoga diet, though she came to it naturally.

Having left her husband, Rabiah raises her three children alone. The youngest in high school, though Rabiah herself is quite young, having married early. During the meal the conversation turned to Hezzie’s surprise at meeting one of his former pupils, who is already married and pregnant, at the age of 15. Rabiah explained that in the village in which this girl lives it is the custom to marry young, illegal though it might be. They get the qadi to marry them, then wait for a few years to register the marriage with the civil authorities. In the adjoining village, where Rabiah lives, the attitude is different – with men and women often waiting until their late 20s before getting married.

Another subject of conversation was an Israeli-Palestinian encounter workshop that Norit had suffered through. She had found herself in a situation where her views diverged widely from those of the other Jewish participants. These were mostly moderate leftists, who weighted every statement in favour of peace and justice with strong “buts”, as Norit put it. She mentioned a former soldier who had talked about patrolling the streets of Hebron. He said that despite his armour and weaponry, he had felt more scared and confused than the Palestinians around him.

Norit said that she had an easier time with determined right-wingers than with these leftists. By agreeing with many of the statements of the Palestinians about Israel and the occupation, she managed both to alienate the Jewish participants and to irritate the Palestinians, who wanted someone they could argue with.

Norit said that the most memorable statements for her had been those of a Palestinian participant who, like her, was regarded as a traitor by his own group. He had praised a mukhtar of an Arab village who, in the 1948 war, had chosen to surrender to the Jewish side. As a result, the village had been spared, and is still there today, whereas otherwise it would have been wiped out and its citizens killed or forced into exile. “Sometimes the bravest decision is to surrender,” she said.

I’ve lived in Israel for 30 years but somehow evaded a visit to Yad VaShem, the Jewish Holocaust remembrance museum. My youngest son is now in his final year of high school – the year when Israeli schools place an emphasis on holocaust studies – and the teacher invited parents along for a day at Yad VaShem. Dorit and I took part.

The museum underwent a major alteration a few years ago, in an attempt to modernize and find a way of reaching people as the chronological distance from the Holocaust grows. As a result, the museum decided to adopt a more personal approach – placing testimony from the lives of individuals at the forefront, and adopting artistic elements and modern technology to make the presentation more vivid. Not having seen the earlier version of the museum, it’s not possible for me to say to what degree these attempts resulted in an improvement but, nevertheless, the current museum is very impressive – both artistically and in the amount of detail it captures. The viewer is engaged at every turn, and the physical space achieves its purpose of weighing in upon his soul.

Our visit was in the framework of a school field trip, so the guide’s purpose was to engage the attention of 17 year-olds, with which she was evidently highly experienced. She kept up a constant discourse, so that it was her narrative, rather than an unmediated viewing of the displays, that remained dominant throughout the visit. In addition, the museum was so full of similar groups that it was very difficult to move, and in many places only the fact that the exhibits were high up on the walls or suspended from the ceiling enabled us to see anything. If it weren’t for earphones, we also would not have been able to hear anything.

Many of the groups visiting the museum were soldiers. If, for some reason, Israeli teenagers miss the opportunity to visit the museum during their high school years, they get a second obligatory chance during their army service. The Holocaust is, after all, one of the principal underpinnings of Israeli national culture, the central event around which Israelis unite – although there is a certain difficulty to be overcome in that about half of Israelis come from countries which were not directly affected by the Holocaust. At one point, the museum guide asked what united the experience of a Jewish child in Europe to that of a child growing up in Libya – where, too, a few hundred Jews were killed. The answer was the totality of the extermination attempt that took place in the area.

Indeed it is amazing that Germany, involved in what increasingly became a war of survival, found time to hunt down a few Jews on remote islands in Greece, or shtetls dispersed throughout Belorussia. I began to wonder what would have happened to the Allies if Germany had not been so insanely fixated upon this activity. But probably the effort required to wipe out harmless civilians was not that great.

At a certain point in the tour, Dorit whispered that the guide, so immersed in her discourse, was not aware of how much her narrative reflected current realities. It was at the point where she was saying that in many cases, during the time that the Nazis swept through Eastern Europe towards the Ukraine, decisions over the fate of the Jewish population were often left up to individual commanders. These, having been brainwashed in school about the evils of the Jews, now had a chance to see them in person, and behave towards them as they pleased. A poster showed a group of soldiers laughing, while one of them shears the long black beard of a frightened Jew.

It is both inevitable and taboo in Israel to compare these acts to those that are perpetrated on Palestinians daily during the occupation. Yesterday, it was widely reported in world news media that Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai said that the Palestinians would bring upon themselves a Holocaust (Shoah). Later he clarified that he had used the term in the sense of “disaster” (which ironically is the translation for Nakba). On a day when 61 Palestinians were killed, half of them civilians, Hamas leaders responded they were seeing this Holocaust on the ground.

The way that Israel uses the Holocaust as a motivating factor for young soldiers, the way in which they sometimes unconsciously repeat behavior of Nazis towards Jews in their treatment of Palestinians, are very interesting from a sociological perspective. But still more interesting is the selectivity of our attention as human beings with regard to the suffering of other human beings.

The museum speaks a great deal about the silence and indifference of the world’s secular and religious authorities towards the treatment of the Jews in Germany of the 1930s and during the Holocaust itself. That is truly frightening, though it should not surprise us, with our more recent memories of the Balkans and Rwanda. Statements like that of Australia, during the Evian Conference, that it could not accept Jewish refugees because it did not wish to import racial problems in a country which had none, send a cold shiver down the spine.

The question is how a museum which is attempting to sensitize people to human suffering as a result of heartless state policies, does not succeed in sensitizing people more universally. How is it that young Israeli soldiers, presumably, leave the museum and then do not hesitate to obey orders that result in the harassment and humiliation of Palestinians, the murder of children, and all the other atrocities coincident with occupation, subjugation and ghettoization of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. I think that the reason the museum fails is that it does not aim sufficiently to provide a universal message. In placing the emphasis extensively upon “what they did to us” it misses the point that “this is what human beings did to human beings, and are capable of doing it again.” Only when we absorb that message, and react to it with abhorrence, will something change.

There should be a holocaust museum, as richly endowed as this one in Jerusalem, in every city of the globe. These should deal with the Jewish Holocaust and all the other recent holocausts that blight our history books and daily news. They should bring the message home with the latest technological wizardry and audiovisual tools. They should show what decent, civilized human beings are doing to other human beings who happen to be in a weaker position, and motivate us to prevent this from happening.

If peace ever comes to the Middle East it will be because certain people, who should have known better, have put aside their accumulated skepticism, suspended their disbelief for a time, and taken the plunge. And after peace is here, most serious, committed activists will say, “What this is peace? Nah! This is nothing like peace”, and proceed to enumerate all the missing components of “real” peace and what further sacrifices still have to be made to get there. But a relative peace will have arrived in the Middle East – it’s just that most of us refuse to admit it at the time.

Well that’s one possibility, another can be found in Tony Klug’s interesting article “How Peace Broke Out in the Middle East”

One thing for sure is that peace will need to be made by Israelis and Palestinians themselves, and the big question is how much well-meaning people and organizations from around the world can help them to reach it. This week American film director David Lynch was in Jerusalem promoting Transcendental Meditation as the answer, with an embarrassed Pres. Shimon Peres listening on.

Mr. Lynch, if there’s one thing I don’t want in my morning meditation, it’s worries about Middle East peace.

And then there was the One Voice or Million Voices for Peace campaign, with its canceled concerts. The latter was interesting and instructive – something that all future well-meaning organizations will need to study if they really want to succeed here. Unfortunately, there seem to be different versions. An article in Haaretz. Peace concert in Jericho called off over security concerns quoted one of the organizers: “”Extremist ideologists have threatened our participants in Jericho, and we felt it is our responsibility not to play with their lives, he said, but did not provide details about the threats.” It seems that later the planned Tel Aviv concert also was canceled when some of the artists dropped out.

That’s one version of the events. The other was expressed in a press release-> by the PACBI (The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel): “Facts about the Cancellation of the Jericho-Tel Aviv Normalization Event”. The PACBI claims victory for getting the event cancelled: “A solid partnership between diverse civil society organizations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory has succeeded in thwarting the event’s organizers’ attempt to mislead public opinion and to use deceptive slogans to market a political program that concedes some fundamental Palestinian rights.”

If, as I once found, the press release disappears from the PACBI web site, it can also be found here on the ISM website.

There is even a Palestinian organization, Another Voice, which was specifically set up to counter the efforts of One Voice. They planned an alternative concert for today in Ramallah (no idea whether it’s still on). They also issued a press release following the Jericho concert cancellation, “ONEVOICE CONCERT CANCELLED DUE TO GRASSROOTS MOBILIZATION” which can be found on the website of the International Solidarity Movement.

The Palestinian opponents of One Voice have explained, from their side, what is wrong with the movement. One of the objections was that those attending the concert would be expected to sign the (fairly innocuous) One Voice petition, which states:

“To our leaders, our fellow citizens, our neighbors, and the world:

We demand in one voice that our elected representatives work to achieve the following demands:

– Recognize the right of both peoples to independence, sovereignty, freedom, justice, dignity, respect, national security, personal safety, and economic viability;

– Implement concrete confidence-building measures that will improve the lives of the Palestinian and Israeli people, including ensuring freedom of movement for ordinary civilians and fostering education against incitement on both sides.

– Immediately commence uninterrupted negotiations until reaching an agreement, no later than October 18, 2008, for a Two-State Solution, fulfilling the consistent will of the overwhelming majority of both populations.”

The Palestinian opponents talk about a hidden agenda by the organizers, which hasn’t been made public: “We are discovering that many Palestinians and Israelis have signed on without access to the 10 pillars or proper understanding of the OneVoice initiative.” (from the Another Voice website).

If there is such a hidden agenda, does it actually matter?

Right-leaning Jews also found plenty to object to regarding One Voice, as can be seen from an article by Arthur Kohn (yet another meddlesome film director) in the Jerusalem Post, “Discordant Reality v. One Voice” . I managed to sympathize with at least the first paragraph of his article:

“Again and again, private organizations appear on the scene promoting agendas designed to advance peace in the Middle East. In many cases, their intentions may be good; unfortunately, however, they generally lack a minimal understanding of the situation, and their programs and proposals are based on mistaken assumptions. As a result, their contribution to an easing of the prevailing tensions between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs is of little or no value.”

As is usually the case, when we read the rest of the article, it becomes clear that the writer’s own “understanding of the situation” turns out to be decidedly quirky and one-sided.

So to sum up, a well-meaning (be-safek) group comes along to try to advance “peace” (yaaani) which conversely ends up upsetting Palestinians and Israeli Jews (though maybe not equally). This probably does not mean that the Middle East should be left alone to stew in its own juices.

NSWAS resident Maram Masarwi wrote an op-ed for Haaretz, Needed: An Arab Martin Luther King, Jr., in which she speaks of the influence of the Hamas takeover in Gaza upon Arab society in Israel. She says that this brings into focus the ambivalence Arab citizens feel towards Israel, and describes the continuing painful process of self-definition that has been forced on Arab citizens as they search for a cohesive group identity. The failure of this process, as described by Maram, would be the twin processes of a privatized identity and development of clanish and religious identities.

We can trust Maram to be in touch with the reality of Palestinian Arab society in Israel, and be sure that the processes she is describing are real. As someone who does not belong to her national group, what struck me was the loneliness of this reality. Even the Palestinian – Israeli conflict looks like a simple thing when compared with the kind of double-existence faced everyday by “Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel”. Due to our conditioning, the name itself seems to stick in the throat. But the truth is, no one, from the State of Israel, to the Arab states or the Palestinians under occupation and in diaspora, is making it any easier for them to come to terms with their identity. Even the option of a “privatized identity” does not truly resolve the identity issues that a Palestinian Arab citizen has to face on a day to day basis in Israel.

Maram is writing as if to other Palestinians, but by placing the article in Haaretz she is addressing a Jewish public. This is curious since she is making no demands or appeals upon them. A Jewish reader might say, “well I am very sorry to hear that the Arabs feel so bad, but that has nothing to do with me.” However, as she hints in the article, the solutions to which Arab citizens are likely to resort in order to resolve their dilemma are dangerous for Jewish Israeli society too. If Maram ends her article with the longing for a kind of Arab Martin Luther King to arise, who will unify Arab citizens while not alienating them from Israeli society, Jewish Israeli society should be working to integrate its Arab citizens {now}. This necessitates a broadening of the concept of what it means to be an Israeli, so that it can properly include citizens who are not Jewish. Especially, it means to include the almost 20% of the population who are Arabs. If a person like Maram, who has in so many ways manifested in her life a peaceful and conciliatory approach to her Jewish neighbours, still cannot feel at home in this country, then there is something that needs to be fixed.

Israel could go a long way towards creating the conditions for a more peaceful Middle East by showing that it is able to properly integrate its Palestinian population. This will involve work on many levels, from allocation of state funding to educational reform. But perhaps before any of this is likely to happen, there has to be a more fundamental change, in the hearts and souls of both Jewish and Palestinian Israelis.

The change that needs to come is really very simple: they need to embrace the reality that they are joint partners in a modern nation state, which like most others in the 21st century, has a heterogeneous population. Almost every modern state is making a painful transition from a confining self-definition to one that is more broad, and must face complex problems in this regard. Recently it was reported that Tony Blair may have been putting off an intended conversion to catholicism due to his state responsibilities in the appointment of officials in the Anglican church. Britain has never once had a Catholic prime minister, not to speak of a non-Christian one.

An even greater challenge with which every modern state must deal is the fact that some of its citizens share identities or affiliations with countries or groups with which the state is currently in conflict. In the 21st century, it is no longer practical to round up all citizens suspected of split loyalties and place them in internment camps, as did the US to Japanese Americans in the second world war.

If Palestinians, as an indigenous minority in a nation that is engaged in a struggle against their own people, need to maintain their group identity against all odds, Israel needs to demonstrate that it is able to fully embrace its Palestinian population as equal citizens, rather than to regard them as “the enemy”. It needs to sustain and afford protection to these citizens in the same way as to Jews, and to broaden its self-definition to reflect the actual diversity of its population. Israel will not cease to be a “Jewish state” any more than France will cease to be a Catholic state. It will be a Jewish state simply because it is a land of Jews. But as a nation, it has the responsibility to expand its self-definition if it does not wish to irrevocably alienate a very large section of its population and eventually precipitate an extension of the external conflict to within its own borders.

In these days, a new version of Microsoft’s operating system is due to appear. Windows Vista. And, today, I read through the forty pages of the first draft (in poor English) of The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel. Ze’ev Schiff, in an article currently online in Ha’aretz, wrote an article about it called “Self-inflicted Injury”, in which he says frostily that the document will win them few friends.

It isn’t surprising that the vista presented in the document would be opposed by left-leaning Zionists. Its intention is not to win instant acceptance, but rather to provoke a dialogue in Israeli society, and in Palestinian Israeli society for that matter. The document covers a broad spectrum of issues that require change, both in relation to the position of Palestinians in Israel and in the fabric of Palestinian Israeli society itself. It is unlikely that even Jewish Israeli society would unanimously be able to accept a social contract of this nature, as evidenced by the nation’s inability to create a constitution. Last week, by the way, the TV news reported that those who are trying to formulate such a constitution have decided that Israel should have only one official language, rather than the two (Hebrew and Arabic) that currently enjoy that status.

The importance of the document is that it fills a gap, for Jewish Israelis and particularly for all those who are working in the field of civil rights in the region: For some time now, editorialists in Ha’aretz, in writing about the increasingly nationalistic character of demonstrations, rallies and public events in Palestinian Israeli society, have been saying that the problem with the “Israeli Arabs” is that they do not say what they want, and what is their ultimate aim. Is it simply a matter of countering discrimination and gaining a more proportionate allocation of state funding, for example, or are they campaigning for a program that will challenge the Jewish nature of the state. Now, for the first time, Palestinian citizens of Israel are stating in a clear voice what they aspire to. If it is frightening, at least it is defined.

I won’t try to summarize the document here – it is short enough to be read and understood. Naturally, as a secular, non-Jewish, non-Palestinian resident alien, I did not feel threatened. To my mind, what any state must provide is a comfortable and secure framework in which each individual, religious or ethnic group can enjoy self- and group- expression, can fulfill needs, can grow and flourish. This is our right as human beings, wherever we find ourselves living.

I don’t see anything in “Future Vision” to oppose that. With regard to preserving “the Jewish character of the state”, I think that a country naturally takes on the character of the people who live there – all of them. This doesn’t and shouldn’t be controlled by government. A good government, like a good computer operating system, should simply provide a stable, supportive framework in which all the programs can run – not necessarily those produced by Microsoft. Otherwise there’ll be an anti-trust violation.

A couple of people in NSWAS, Nihaya Dawod and Michael Karyani, were part of the team that participated in Future Vision. We haven’t yet formally talked about it in the village, but a discussion evening is planned.