OUT OF ISRAEL

60

It's been sixty years, since David Ben-Gurion declared Israel's independence, since the "nakba" traumatized a whole generation of Palestinians. It is necessary to remember both.

But the picture is only complete if the years from the first aliya onwards are also taken into account. And if Israel and Palestine are not taken as two entities separate from the rest of the world: There were the Osmans, there were the British and the French, there was the Holocaust, there was the rejection of Jewish refugees, there was the rejection of Palestinian refugees. Without all this, independence day and nakba cannot be understood. Without all this, the happiness and horror of life between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river cannot be captured to the full. On the day Israeli and Palestinian historiography accepts and reflects that, peace will be a realistic option.

No, sorry. Peace ALWAYS IS a realistic option. But it will be perceived as such only from the moment on when we realize that yes, there have been wars, there has been flight and persecution, there has been death, but there also are mutual roots, symbols, beliefs and hopes. There is a future for both peoples, together.

Life in Palestine

I would like to point out to you an article written by a Norwegian who's currently living in Nablus in the Westbank. The author describes life in Palestine, and it is a good account of what many (including me) feel when visiting the Palestinian Territories for the first time. The most important message though is that perception and the feeling of injustice, frustration, tiredness are having a considerable impact on life, and by that, on political views and politics. This is something the leaders on both side will finally have to understand and deal with.

However, it is also necessary to underline that the conflict has left its mark on so many Israeli families, too. Looking at one side of the conflict is never enough, the puzzle can only be solved when all pieces are put together.

Read the piece here.

A message from history

Looking through material I am using for my dissertation, I found a statement made by Chaim Weizmann on the 21. Zionist Congress in Geneva (August 16-25, 1939). A month to go until war broke out; little more until the Holocaust became official German politics. I am giving you the German version and a translation into English, hoping to do Weizmann justice:

"Finsternis umgibt uns. Wenn wir, wie ich hoffe, überleben und unsere Arbeit fortsetzen können, wer weiß, vielleicht wird ein neues Licht aus der Finsternis kommen. Es gibt einige Dinge, die gewiss eintreten werden, Dinge, ohne die man sich die Welt nicht vorstellen kann. Die übrigen werden weiterarbeiten, weiter kämpfen, weiterleben bis zur Morgenröte einer besseren Zeit. Diese Morgenröte vor Augen, entbiete ich Ihnen meinen Gruß. Mögen wir in Frieden wieder zusammenkommen."

"Darkness has closed about us. If we, as I hope, will survive and be able to continue our work, who knows, maybe a new light will come out of that darkness. There are some things which will certainly happen, things without which the world wouldn't be imaginable. The others will continue working, fighting and living until the dawn of a better time. This dawn in mind, I greet you. May we reunite in peace."

The protocol states that after this statement, the congress was deeply touched. Dr. Weizmann hugged his colleagues on the panel. Many had tears in their eyes, hundreds of hands reached for Weizmann as he left the room.

(cited from Rolf Steininger (ed.), Der Kampf um Palästina 1924-1939. Berichte der deutschen Generalkonsuln in Jerusalem. München 2007, S. 24)

New publication

For those who read German and are interested in water and conflict, here's a new publication to check out:

Kampf um das knappe Gut - Zur Rolle der Ressource Wasser in Konflikten. In: FrauenRat, Informationsdienst des Deutschen Frauenrates, 5/2007, S. 22-24.

Other publications are pending, I will keep you posted.

Long time no see

Many things have been happening in the last couple of months that have kept me from writing. On a personal note, we have become proud parents of a healthy boy. Professionally speaking, I have, as mentioned earlier, finished working on the project I was occupied with while living in Heidelberg; the book will come out this fall/winter. I will keep you posted. Other publications are being printed as we speak, the details of which will be published here shortly.

I am now back at my desk, finally finishing my PhD thesis. It is difficult at times to get back into it after so many things have happened that so profoundly put things in new perspectives, but it is also surprisingly rewarding and not as embarrassing as I would have thought.

In Israel and Palestine, two weak leaders are currently trying to find a solution to the conflict that lies at the heart of everything that's happening in the region, being propped up by the one remaining superpower which is being lead by a man who knows his term will be over very soon, by a European Union that hasn't found a common voice (not even a whisper, really), and a Russian president who is ridiculing democracy by wanting to become prime minister. Not to speak of China and the rest of Asia, who are silently gaining strength in both the Middle East and Africa, with almost nobody reflecting on what this may mean.

It remains an interesting game, this. Let's see what will come of it all. Glad to be back.

Hamas

Alan Johnston has been freed after over 16 weeks of capture. Hamas has had an important part in getting him out of the hands of his kidnappers. However, Abbas and his Fatah argue that the release was staged to put Hamas back in position for new negotiations, as rightful and acceptable leader of the Palestinian people. They say Hamas had been involved in the kidnapping in the first place and cannot, therefore, be a legitimate, internationally accepted representative of the Palestinian society.
Now, the sub-text of this episode is, of course, the inner-Palestinian dispute over who gets to rule a country that doesn't even exist yet. The international community, with the USA and Israel at its forefront, are fuelling this dispute in order to weaken the (democratically elected) Islamists whom they have tried to isolate ever since they won the elections, regardless of the fact that the immense dependency of all Palestinian institutions on foreign aid will force any Palestinian administration to look for alternative sources if need be.
It is understandable that the international community is worried about fundamentalists and terrorists in their midst, no question about that. However, it should be clear by now that fresh thinking is needed with regard to the Israel/Palestine issue - and, with all due respect, concerning a world order that is getting more complex by the hour. Neither should the international community go back to structures which have been established in the Cold War, nor should it shy away from multilateralism and instruments of international law.
By the bye, until Hamas won the last elections, there had been cooperation with its institutions on numerous levels. This may not have made the headlines, but both Fatah and international donors have worked with their representatives, and, by the way, Israeli politicians have, too. There is always a way of "living and letting live" on the levels below of what is commonly called "high politics".
So why not focus on the Palestinian public, for a change, who is suffering from severe economic restraints and poor living conditions, and who is in many cases completely ignored by its political elites? How can the international community help them? Certainly not by fuelling the dispute between the two main fractions of Palestinian party politics, I dare say. Politics should be about the people, or at least that's what students of political science are taught around the world. So analyse before you judge, think out of the box, and take a risk that may turn out not to have been one in the first place.

A note on change

In Israel, PM Olmert is under severe pressure to give up his office and make room for either Livni or new elections, or both. As in many other places on this globe - I am thinking, among others, the UK, different places in Africa, and, no joke, Bavaria - the man in power has difficulties letting go. And of course, this also happens to women (remember that incident with Heide Simonis in the German county of Schleswig-Holstein?). Good politics does not necessarily have to be good for the state anymore, let alone the people, it seems, but should primarily be good for the office holder.
Sometimes I am truly sad that I can't say more on this topic, since I am not planning on becoming a politician any time soon, and it's oh so easy to criticize when you do not have to do it yourself. It's not like I envy you guys, it's just that I think there must be a better way ;-).
Talking to the young father in Israel (who is now father of two, congrats!) the other day, we talked about the political situation in IL and he seemed worried that old warhorses like Netanjahu or Barak may be elected yet again if there were new elections. I am not even going into what this would probably mean for the thing people still call "peace process". However, if only, say, 30 percent of the Israeli public thought like this and went for the one alternative, Livni, she will become the next prime minister. Not all hope lost - yet.
Apart from political changes which may be coming (or not), this blog has changed a little bit, too. You can now download a list of my publications from the left sidebar, as well as go straight to my XING-profile (which is part English, part German) by clicking on the logo there. Also, you can now find this blog under another address, www.christianefroehlich.de, which is so much easier to remember, isn't it?

Jewish Holidays, water issues and other things

The Jewish holiday Pessach was great this year. Not because I celebrated it, being Christian and all, but because there were a lot of orthodox Jews to be seen in Hamburg in the area around Hamburg university. It was simply great to see Jewish life be a normal part of German life - again. And it wasn't only orthodox Jews, who are, of course, easy to recognize, but also the fact that Hebrew is not so seldomly heard in the city these days. I'm glad about this.
On the watery side of things, April has not been good. Not for the land, not for plants or animals. Southern Europe is suffering from severe water stress - which is, by the way, not as unusual as the media is trying to make it sound - and even Hamburg is unusually warm: it is necessary to water the plants every day. This may be nice for us, enjoying the sun and all, but it has serious implications because it is yet another proof of climate change. Maybe it will help keep the topic in the news... Nevertheless, the damage is only economic up to now, at least in Europe. Nobody is suffering from water scarcity in the sense that there is not enough drinking water, and this scenario is far away.
For those who would like to understand the water conflict in the Middle East, however, it may be useful to experience rather closely how fast quality of life can decline due to water scarcity - I am talking about the lack of green spaces and the like - and starting from there it may be easier to see why agriculture and the land tend to have a high ideological value on the other side of the Mediterranean. This is part of the psychology of the Middle East conflict, and needs to be looked at rather closely when trying to solve it.
On a completely different note, the last couple of weeks have seen intense work on the historical chapter of my thesis: water in Israel and Palestine 1882-2005. Topics include economic structures, social changes, law aspects etc. pp. One of the rather interesting bits of information has to do with this last aspect: Both the British mandate government AND Israel adopted large parts of Ottoman and Islamic legal regulations concerning land and water governance, and parts of Israel's legal system still show their strong influence. The fact, for instance, that Israel allows the different religious groups living in the country extensive freedom and self-governance - Sharia courts illustrate this - is due to this strong link: The so-called Millet-system which was in place for most of the Ottoman empire established the principle of self-governance for different religious groups. Interesting, don't you think?

Many changes

Okay. Since my last post, I have lectured a 2-day-seminar on water conflict, participated in a panel on religion and conflict, written an article with another PhD-student on water in the MENA-region, and given talks on water in the middle east and my theoretical approach in my thesis. On a more private note, I am now located in Hamburg, since my work in Heidelberg is coming to a close.
You see, this way it doesn't sound so bad not to have written for such a long time.
This blog will see some changes, too. It will become more of a platform for me to communicate political and more general statements on the Middle East, even though I will still talk about my PhD, which I hope to finish by June, from time to time. However, since I am now officially on the lookout for new challenges job-wise, this blog will be a welcome tool.
For now, I would like to say a couple of words about a topic I have written on earlier: the IDF. When the young father came to visit Germany a couple of weeks ago, we talked about what it was like for him to be stationed in Ramallah during the Lebanon war as a substitute for the poor guys who had to go up north, and about serving in the IDF as a reserve soldier in general. One thing he said stuck to me, somehow: There would have been ways to be released from the reserve forces, he said, so when his regular time in the army was over, he sat down to debate with himself whether he wanted to continue serving or not. In the end, he decided he did. He said that instead of the 18-year-old, bored soldiers who usually serve at checkpoints, there should be people with more experience, with an own family and responsibilities, because they will in all probability have less of a hard time deciding how to deal with situations inducing fear, anger and other such emotions.
You see, this is, of course, only treating the symptom. The root of the problem lies deep behind the question why there are road blocks and checkpoints in the first place, and we talked about that, too. But in the small ways in which we can all change society a little bit, the young father had decided to put himself out there to make life a little easier at one checkpoint or another. I am not sure I would or could do that if I had the choice.
Okay, sorry for being pathetic. One last thing: My new publication mentioned above is coming out in April, here are the full details:
(with Annabelle Houdret): Wasser im Mittleren Osten und Nordafrika – rationiert, kontrolliert, politisiert, in: Jochen Hippler (ed.), Konfliktregion Naher und Mittlerer Osten, i.E. The English version will be coming out in a couple of months.

The banalities of everyday discourse analysis

It becomes harder and harder these days to find something to write about which I personally would find worthwhile as a reader. The technicalities and, truely, banalities of discourse analysis do not qualify as such, I think. On the other hand, the things I am doing right now - looking at the discourse fragments, counting and weighing the different topics and their mentioning against each other - have not really been described in any handbook or some such as yet, I mean beyond someone saying "and then you count the different topics and put them in some kind of order". This may be due to discourse analysis only just becoming a favoured method of analysis in the social sciences, or simply to the dryness of most of the actual analysing. Well. I can tell you that even though I had only asked for or given impulses on 60 different topics, all related to water in the Middle East, of course, the fragments I have analysed on the Palestinian side consist of about 500 different topoi. Even though this number still includes doubles (like Israeli control or politicising of the resource), this gives you an impression of what I am dealing with here. Currently, I am re-reading all fragments and counting how often one topic or another has been mentioned to get an indication for their respective importance. The same will have to be done, of course, with the Israeli fragments. Not exactly fun, but necessary.