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Letter from New Profile to supporters May 17, 2009 Dear Friends and Supporters, So many have stepped forward to back New Profile during this time. We would like to thank you warmly. This has been deeply meaningful for us. In a truly amazing show of support, you have sent over 5,000 letters to Israel's Attorney General, protesting the criminalization of New Profile, via the Jewish Voice for Peace website (www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org ). You have, moreover, taken many other actions, as suggested on our website (www.newprofile.org/english). We are writing to let you know that your voice is getting through, apparently penetrating the indifference of Israeli authorities. The Israeli Human Rights and Foreign Relations Dept. has sent many of you a formal answer, indicating that they cannot afford to ignore the massive mobilization of New Profile supporters worldwide, and exposing their need to save face We are writing to ask you to keep up your meaningful work; please stay with us and write the government again that you are not convinced by their façade of human rights and legalese. (You can once again do this either through Jewish Voice for Peace or independently, to one of the addresses listed on our website at: www.newprofile.org/english.) New Profile is not an isolated case. Eleven New Profile activists were detained or summoned by police for interrogation on trumped up suspicions of incitement and assisting in the obtainment of fraudulent exemptions from the military. To date, they remain under police restrictions, four activists' computers are still being held and a court case, and even prison sentences, may be in the offing. (Check our website soon for ongoing updates.) All of this, however, is part and parcel of the sharply increased scapegoating, intimidation and harassment of Israeli citizens, and especially Palestinian citizens of Israel, who dare to voice opposing opinions. The Association of Citizen Rights in Israel (www.acri.org.il/eng/) notes an escalation of harassment and violence against Left Wing activists by Israeli government authorities and the police since Israel’s military incursion into Gaza in December 2008, in an apparent, systematic attempt to silence dissent and stifle political discourse. Here is a short list of some of the victims and incidents: 1) Samih Jabarin (41) – from Yaffa (Jaffa), is being held under strict house arrest at his parents’ home in the city of Um Al Fahim. He is charged with assaulting Chief of the Northern Border Patrol, during a demonstration on no evidence other than the officer's own statement. Jabarin, who is barred from his creative work, his studies, and his normal living environment, also serves as a blatant warning to other activists. http://www.atzuma.co.il/petition/friendsofsamieh/1/1000/ 2) Anarchists Against the Wall - Members of this organization also experience ongoing attempts to oppress their activities against Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its inhuman separation wall. Now, more and more, the Israeli military is targeting Israeli citizens, too, in addition to Palestinian and international protesters against the wall with lethal shootings, violent attacks, arrests and detention. (www.awol.co.il )
3) Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, is preparing a detailed report (soon to be featured on their website) on police violence against Arab university students who protested Israel's attack on Gaza, violence which was expressly allowed and aided by university authorities. Four of these students, Palestinian citizens of Israel, whom Adalah lawyers are representing, are currently facing charges and trials. (www.adalah.org)
4) Adalah also reports the ongoing detention of some ten activists from the town of Shefamr, in northern Israel, all detained following the attack against Gaza, on suspicion of stone-throwing and/or disturbing the peace.
5) Ezra Nawi, an activist known for his work in South Mt. Hebron, West Bank, is accused of having assaulted a police officer during a demonstration to prevent the demolition of yet another Palestinian home. His ongoing work in the area has brought the plight of the Palestinians into the spotlight and his arrest is an attempt by authorities to silence him. (www.supportezra.net) 6) At a demonstration on April 30th , protesting the politicized investigation of New Profile, organized by the Coalition of Women for Peace (www.coalitionofwomen.org/home/English),Tel Aviv police injured one of the women demonstrating and held eight demonstrators overnight, in a move that the court declared unjustified. (http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3708977,00.html)
This is just part of the accumulating evidence of Israeli authorities' systematic deployment of police and the military to stifle protest and paralyze civil activism, while terrorizing Palestinian civil society in particular. The repressive, undemocratic state revealed by such practices cannot be hidden by legalistic phrases or respectable-looking letter heads. It is very far from the democracy that Israel claims to be.
Thank you for helping us let Israeli authorities know that their abuses of state power are visible and shameful, while their formalistic claims are unconvincing.
Sincerely, Rela Mazali and Ruth Hiller, New Profile
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Here is a sample letter to use if you wish:
Dear Mr. Assaf Radzyner , Adv.,
Thank you for responding to my protest against the criminal investigation of New Profile. Despite the explanation offered in this response, it has come to my knowledge that the attempted criminalization of New Profile is merely one case in a process of sharply increased scapegoating, intimidation and harassment of Israeli citizens who dare to voice opposing opinions. I have recently learned of accumulating evidence of Israeli authorities' systematic deployment of police and the military to stifle protest and paralyze civil activism. The repressive, undemocratic state revealed by such practices cannot be hidden by legalistic phrases or respectable-looking letter heads.
Some of the cases that have come to my knowledge include: Samih Jabarin, Anarchists Against the Wall, Ezra Nawi, four academic students from Haifa, and the Coalition of Women for Peace.
I would like to voice my strong protest against this escalating abuse of state power.
Sincerely, Mirjam Hadar Meerschwam: INTIMIDATION My computer, today, is still at Tel Aviv police headquarters where it stayed after my two-hour interrogation last week. I am not given, I believe, to conspiracy thinking but the thought crossed my mind, comically rather, whether I’d ever written anything unkind about my neighbor or his family. This morning, when I brought my girl to school, the neighbour on our left just came out of his house. We greeted each other. I have known for years that he does something vague “in computers” and has lived abroad, doing something vague in diplomatic service. Following the “raid” on our house by two non-uniformed policemen, Miki and Eytan, at 7:15, last week, just as I was helping our daughter to get dressed for school, it occurred to me that our house, in a regular, boring suburb, is actually surrounded by “security” related individuals and organizations. On the left, there’s D., whom I just mentioned, and on the right it’s Y. who has a fairly senior job in the military industries and stopped being friendly once he understood our family were leftists. Very near is the ugly “duplex” – an ungainly two-family house which after standing empty for years was recently let to a nameless firm. Its windows are still as shuttered as they were during the empty times, and its front yard remains a garbage strewn desert as before – but casually dressed young men carrying various types of briefcases and rucksacks come in and out. It is common knowledge by now that this is what they locally call a “shoo-shoo house”: the army’s secret services use civilian property, everybody knows that. Nobody asked or informed us. At the bottom of the road is a huge, pastoral looking area – disenchantingly protected by electronic fencing and a number of forbidding guard dogs. This no-go park belongs, again, to Israel’s military industries: they develop explosives here – underground. At times our buildings shake with the impact. Much has been said and agitated about the way these underground adventures have affected our environment – there are fearful rumors about cancer incidence. Meanwhile work has not stopped. I’ve often thought and spoken about these things, one way or another. For instance during the recent attack of the Israeli army on Gaza, when the Israeli public was told about the cruelty of Hamas who presumably placed themselves squarely among Gaza’s civilian population. But this morning, in the context, now, of my own and my friends’ recent interrogations I thought specifically about the more subtle work of intimidation, delegitimization, social ostracizing. An Israeli feminist antimilitarist group and registered non-profit organization, New Profile, the group of which I am a member, is these days subject to an unprecedented attack carried out by means of the state and the police. New Profile addresses itself to Israeli society. It is our aim to raise public consciousness to what militarism is and how it affects civic society. We also give moral and legal support and information to young people who contact us having decided not to enlist in the military. This is information about the army’s own accepted and legal routes toward exemption. Typically, such information is not part of the eye-catching display in my son’s former high school. On that poster the various army units vie to win the favors of the not-yet recruits with promises of their various “challenges”. Across the entrance hall, facing it in sinister unselfawareness, the national flag gives permanent honor to a list of former pupils who lost their lives in military service. I am 52 years old, I work as a freelance translator and writer. I was born and raised in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. My partner teaches psychology at the university, and works as a psychotherapist. I have two children and live in a small town north of Tel Aviv. It is simple: even if you are as convinced as I am of being innocent, of being on the right side of the law; even if you have nothing to hide – now the police has picked you up as if you belonged to a dangerous underground network, now you have been interrogated by a man whose questions were formulated and asked as if you were a felon, now your computer has been confiscated as if it carries texts that encode a national threat. Words you and your friends formulated thoughtfully are stated back to you in a flat, accusing voice: you realize they are a half or quarter sentence that fails, even grammatically, to articulate what they accuse you of. But their ineptness is not what worries you – it is the arrogance that allows them this deep, enraged misreading. No wonder that nearly a week afterwards your “surrounded” position in the street flashes out at you. If you were given to such sentiments you would feel alone in the street, horribly alone. Intimidation, I am learning these days, is when you find that the law can turn against you: This does not come as a surprise to me: I live in a security-dominated country in which Palestinian citizens already live under a different interpretation and dispensation of the same law that still mostly protects someone like me. But now that I have been interrogated by a man called Amichai (literally: “My people live”) my knowledge has an added dimension: It takes a while into my interrogator’s list of questions until I figure out that this exchange is not conducted under the usual rules of conversation, of civilian communication. Nothing in my life has prepared me for this: every word I say not only freezes immediately (later I’ll have to sign the protocol and it feels as though I sign my words away, cut their lifeline) – it can and may well be used against me. In view of the misreading I mentioned before, I stand warned: even grammar stops counting here. Painfully, in Israel citizens are trained not to ask certain questions. This is what New Profile tries to open up to public consciousness. Questions about cancer incidence in your neighbourhood (“Our army is the most moral army in the world.”, “a people’s army”), questions about class, ethnicity and gender, and their interrelations with conflict and the abuse of power – the way these categories are blindly assumed to “order” the world, so that “the world” can then order you efficiently, without entering undue discussion or soul-searching. On the day after our brief detentions (some eight fellow New Profile members were subjected to the same treatment, and even today, as I am writing this, another member of New Profile is being examined at police headquarters), a friend, a successful academic, and non-activist dropped in and told me that she was delighted with the “progress” her newly enlisted son was making in the army. Only two weeks into a military service he was not at all sure he could cope with. On the eve of the national holiday, the new conscripts, who were all hoping to go home for a short break, had been lined up by their commander. Though they would soon be dismissed, he said there was just one little problem: two volunteers were needed to stay behind in camp. My friend was pleased because her son was one of the volunteers. Her self-centered, messy, irresponsible adolescent had undergone a sea-change in two weeks. “The army,” she says, “is what will straighten him out. And you know what, he came home, because it turned out to be a test, this thing about volunteering!” My heart and head ache for all of us. The machine works efficiently and fast, even on intelligent, privileged middle class boys. Capable, educated mothers are gratefully applauding it for teaching their children to become adults and law abiding citizens. The workings of authority and order make short shrift with doubt, reflection, and personal vulnerability. Israel, as Hannah Arendt envisioned at the state’s inception, has condemned itself to being (in) a state of perennial, iron fear. Ramat Hasharon, May 2009 Mirjam Hadar Meerschwam, mirjam.hadar@gmail.com |