הצבע ארגמן - "The Color Purple" in Hebrew translation

By searching around a bit on the internet I discovered that "The Color Purple" has indeed already been published in Hebrew, in 1986. M. A. Orthofer of "The Literary Saloon" posted about the translation and even provides an image of the cover of the book in Hebrew, which I reproduce here.

I just checked on the website of the National Library of Israel to see if the book is found there, and indeed it is, under the catalogue number S 87 A 2447. I've ordered it and hope to look at it today when I'm in the library. It was translated into Hebrew by Shelomit Kedem (שלומית קדם). The publisher was Leduri (לדורי). 

Alice Walker refuses to have "The Color Purple" translated into Hebrew

This is no surprise, but it's still sad. Alice Walker refuses to authorize the publication of a Hebrew translation of her book "The Color Purple" because "Israel is guilty of apartheid." (For more on her views about Israel, Zionism, and Jewish self-determination, see my posts on her - Alice Walker).

Her opposition may not, in fact, prohibit the book from being published in Hebrew. Haaretz reports:

It was not clear when Yediot Books, an imprint of the daily Yediot Achronot newspaper, made the request, or whether Walker could in fact stop translation of the book. At least one version of the book has already appeared in Hebrew translation, in the 1980s.

The letter she wrote to Yediot Books refusing to let her book be published was posted on the PACBI website. Apparently when the book was made into a movie, the question arose as to whether it should be shown in South Africa, during the years of apartheid. She decided that it shouldn't be because "there was a civil society movement of BDS aimed at changing South Africa’s apartheid policies and, in fact, transforming the government." Walker is convinced that Israel is worse than both apartheid-era South Africa and the segregated South in which she grew up, particularly in how Israel treats the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and in how Arab citizens of Israel are treated.

I cannot speak to what it felt like to grow up in the segregated South as an African-American. I am white, and grew up in Massachusetts. My only taste of segregation was when I visited my grandparents in Washington, DC. What disturbed me was not the visible signs of segregation (for example, water fountains marked separately for "white" and "colored"), because I didn't see them, and they might have already been taken down by the time I was visiting. What disturbed me were the casual racist attitudes I encountered. And it's not as if there was no racism in the north - I lived in the Boston area throughout the period when the federal courts decided that the Boston schools should be integrated through busing. The courts did this because the Boston School Committee steadfastly refused to integrate the schools. It had members who engaged in the crudest racist demagoguery.

Despite what Israeli government spokespeople will tell you, the position of Israeli Arab citizens is not equal to that of Jews. As far as I can tell, the situation is quite mixed. Israeli Arab towns and villages suffer from decades of neglect by the government - the infrastructure in most of them is decidedly inferior to that in mostly Jewish cities and towns. Because most Israeli Arabs do not serve in the IDF, they have a great deal of difficulty in finding jobs in areas of the economy where IDF service is required. (Druze and Circassians are drafted into the IDF, and many Bedouin volunteer, but very few other Arab men serve in the IDF).

From what I can tell, the situation is improving slowly - the government is now running a program to encourage Jewish employers to hire Arab university graduates. There have been advertisements on the radio (and television also, I assume) urging Jewish employers to consider Arab applicants, and the government is also given monetary incentives to employers who hire Arab graduates. Arab Israelis go to colleges and universities (for example, the local college in Safed has a majority of Arab students, probably because of the large Arab population in the Galilee, where Safed is located). Hebrew University, which I am most familiar with, has Arab students - I don't know what percentage of the student population they are, but they are certainly visible on campus.

I do not think it is accurate to describe the situation of Arabs within Israel as "apartheid," or even "segregated" - I think it is accurate to say that they suffer from some discriminatory government policies and from widespread suspicion of them by Israeli Jews, which can lead to discrimination in employment or housing. The situation is hardly ideal, but it is not as bad as the segregated South or apartheid South Africa.

As for the description of the situation of Palestinians in the West Bank as "apartheid." I assume that is meant is the existence of separate, government-built infrastructure for Jews, including separate communities and roads. For example, Rte. 443 goes from Jerusalem to Modi'in through the occupied West Bank. There are parts of 443 that Palestinians are not permitted to drive on, for security reasons. (Israeli cars and cars belonging to West Bank Palestinians have different-colored license plates, so it's easy to tell - the Israeli ones are issued by the Israeli government, and I assume the Palestinian ones are issued by the Palestinian Authority). Is this apartheid? It definitely makes me feel uncomfortable, and I try not to drive on 443.

When I was first living in Israel in the late 1980s, as a graduate student, there were a lot fewer Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and there were no separate roads built to get to the settlements. If you wanted to ge to the Gush Etzion settlements, close to Bethlehem, you had to drive on roads that went through Palestinian towns. With the outbreak of the first intifada in December 1987, this became increasingly dangerous. I don't know when exactly the separate roads started to be built - the second intifada, which started in 2000, might have been the real impetus for the construction of separate roads, because it was so much bloodier than the first intifada.

In my opinion, the situation in the West Bank is getting close to apartheid, in the sense of government-imposed separation and favoring of one group (Israeli settlements) over another (Palestinians). This is one of the many reasons that I favor Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and the establishment of a Palestinian state with full sovereignty (unlike the partial control given to the Palestinian Authority in certain parts of the West Bank). I think that some of the settlements should become part of sovereign Israel, while others will remain under Palestinian state control - in other words, returning to the borders as of June 4, 1967, "with land swaps," as President Obama put it.

Is any of this relevant to whether Alice Walker's book should be published in Hebrew? I think that she should davka publish it in Hebrew, with a forward explaining her current political views. The book is very powerful, and I think that it could be influential, with sufficient publicity - not only with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also to the current disgraceful treatment of African refugees in Israel. If she refuses to publish it in Hebrew, she's taking herself out of any anti-racist and pro-peace movement in Israel, and that seems like a complete waste.

More interesting opinions about the Israeli anti-boycott law

False Dichotomies has an interesting post about the anti-boycott law:

An unholy alliance of the Zionist far-right and the anti-Zionist far-left is trying to bring Israel down. Like previous unholy alliances, the two partners despise one another, but realize that they are locked in a symbiotic relationship: without one another they will die. The far-right needs the hysteria of the far-left as a pretext for the legislation that fulfills the far-left’s fantasies.

The whole thing is worth reading.

Michael Weiss of the Telegraph (UK) also has an interesting column:

One of the more elegant ways pro-Israel activists used to be able to confront the absurdities of anti-Israeli activists was by referring to the tolerance and patience that Israel has for its many critics and enemies. An Islamist cleric whose answer to the Jewish Question is straight out of Torquemada? We’ll let him become mayor of an Arab village. A sinister campaign for the economic and cultural boycott of Israel? We’ll let the head campaigner work toward his doctorate at Tel Aviv University, where his oral defence will no doubt be an attack on his own academic viability. Even an Israeli Arab parliamentarian is allowed to sail on a blockade-busting “freedom flotilla” to denounce the very government to which she belongs.

Israeli democracy, in other words, has long been patient with its gadflies, cranks and nudniks who sometimes confuse that democracy with a banana republic. (Ben-Gurion was hinting at national self-definition when he joked about two Jews with three opinions.) Now, however, those doing the confusing are purportedly acting in Israel’s defence, which is deeply problematic for its democracy.

On Monday, the Knesset voted in favour of a bill that would allow citizens to sue anyone recommending a boycott of not only Israel but of West Bank settlements. This is a distinction with a difference. Salam Fayyad, the prime minister of Palestine, has long favoured a boycott of settlement goods, but not Israeli ones, as a way of forcing Israel to distinguish its GDP from its occupation economy. Diplomatically ill-considered though such a policy may be, and however skirted by the Palestinians themselves in practice, Fayyad’s policy was by no means “anti-Semitic” or belligerent in its logic.

On a related topic, Shiraz Socialist has published a very interesting critique of the BDS campaign written by Cathy N of Workers Liberty (a small left-wing group in the UK).

BDS may seem in the ascendant for now. It may make progress in places, on the back of the Israeli state’s next atrocity. BDS needs to be fought politically, because it stands in the path of two states, the only consistently democratic solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. But BDS is ultimately a pessimistic approach. It put the agency for change outside of the region. It wants civil society, which includes not only NGOs and unions but bourgeois governments and business internationally to make things right for the Palestinians. There is another road. The Palestinian workers in alliance with Israeli workers fighting for a two state democratic solution to the national question, is the force that could deliver peace and much more besides.

Other interesting articles: Jeff Goldberg - A self-defeating anti-boycott bill, and in Tablet - American Jews unite against Knesset bill: "Apparently the best way to unite American Jews is for the Knesset to do something particularly stupid, like pass a law that criminalizes calling for boycotts."

"Boycott Law" just passed by Israeli Knesset

The Knesset just passed (on its second and third readings) the "Boycott Law," which penalizes people and organizations that call for a boycott against Israel or against the settlements. Tomorrow a petition will be submitted to the Supreme Court against the law by the organizations Coalition of Women for Peace, Physicians for Human Rights, the Public Committee Against Torture, and Adalah. This is after the opinion of the Legal Adviser to the Knesset, who ruled today that the law suffered from a "real constitutional defect" and is a "violation of core political speech in Israel."

To protest against the law, Peace Now has just started a Facebook page calling for boycotting products from the settlements. The head of Peace Now, Yariv Oppenheimer, said tonight that "Someone who buys products from the territories himself funds building in the settlements and the outposts, damages Israeli exports, and deepens the occupation. As Israelis we will not surrender the right to protest and the freedom to say this."

As should be clear to anyone who reads my blog, I am opposed to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign, because I believe that it is fundamentally antisemitic and will never lead to peace between Israel and the Palestinians. On the other hand, I myself have grave doubts about buying products made in the settlements. As the Peace Now leader said, doing so directly supports the settlements financially and enables them to continue to exist.

I oppose the occupation and think that Israel should withdraw from most of the West Bank to enable the establishment of a Palestinian state. The continued building of settlements and the establishment of settlement outposts has continually diminished the amount of land that could be used for the Palestinian state. In addition, many settlers engage in illegal and violent acts against their Palestinian neighbors, up to and including setting fire to mosques in retaliation for Israeli government actions (usually quite mild) against the settlements (for example, tearing down an outpost consisting of a few caravans). I don't want to reward people for these actions.

The Peace Now Facebook page says (my translation): "Prosecute me, I boycott products of the settlements. This is an historic day in which the Israeli Knesset transformed itself from a representative of the people to the national thought police. It appears that the extreme right prefers to end the many years long debate about the settlements by means of an anti-democratic law. In the wake of the law, we will call (for the first time), tomorrow morning, together with thousands of supporters, to boycott the products of the settlements, and we will explain to the public that one who buys products from the settlements damages the state of Israel."

The point of this law is not to attack the BDS movement outside Israel, which will not be injured by it. It is to attack the Israeli left and its activism against the settlements. There are a few extreme Israeli leftists who support the BDS movement, but groups like Peace Now are certainly not among them. This law is part and parcel of the campaign by the Israeli extreme right to demonize and delegitimize the Israeli left, including such human rights organizations as B'Tselem. Israelis and Jews in the other countries may not like what Peace Now, B'Tselem, the Public Committee Against Torture, and other organizations say in criticism of Israeli governmental actions, but to deny them the right to free speech, on penalty of extensive fines, is a blow to Israeli democracy.

Antisemitic call for boycott of Hebrew University by McGill University student newspaper

I just came across an editorial in the student newspaper of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, calling for the university to cut its ties with the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It was just published, on March 28, 2011. The editorial finds problematic a new partnership with Hebrew University in several areas: epigenetics, human rights, international business, and food safety and water management.

How could these areas of cooperation possibly be problematic, especially human rights? According to the editorial, the problem is that the program doesn't mention the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement there, and the head of the Minerva Center for Human Rights at Hebrew University wrote an article in support of the security wall.

The Minerva Center is hosted at the law faculty of the Hebrew University, but their website hasn't been developed yet. It does, however, list two upcoming programs in November of 2011. The first conference, to be held on November 13-15, 2011 is on the "Potential Role of Transitional Justice in Active Conflicts." The second one, to be held on November 27-29, 2011 is a conference on "New Technologies, Old Law: Applying International Humanitarian Law in a New Technological Age." It is cosponsored with the International Committee of the Red Cross Delegation in Israel and the Occupied Territories, and one member of the conference academic committee is Mr. Charles Shamas, of the Mattin Group, Ramallah. Apparently the ICRC has decided that it's worth engaging with the human rights center at the Hebrew University, despite the fact that Israel still occupies the West Bank. Both conferences sound really interesting and the person who wrote the Daily McGill editorial could benefit from going to both of them to learn what academic research on human rights really consists of.

The editorial also condemns the Hebrew University because it has "expanded on occupied land in East Jerusalem and provided scholarships for those who participated in Operation Defensive Shield during the Second Intifada in 2002." Well, the first Hebrew University campus, on Mt. Scopus, existed before the establishment of Israel as a state. The cornerstone was laid on 1918, and the university campus was opened on 1925. At that time there was no "East Jerusalem" in the sense that people use the term today. All of the area of Jerusalem and the rest of Palestine was administered by the British Empire for the mandate of Palestine. During the 1948 war, the Mt. Scopus campus was cut off from the rest of Jewish Jerusalem and remained so until 1967. The Hebrew University had to build a new campus at Givat Ram in the center of what became West Jerusalem, near the Knesset and other government buildings. After 1967, the university returned to the Mt. Scopus campus and scores of new buildings were erected.

As for providing scholarships for those who fought in Defensive Shield against the Second Intifada - the Daily McGill editorial ignores why Israel fought Defensive Shield in the first place. This was the Israeli campaign to retake the cities of the West Bank, occasioned by the murderous rampage of suicide bombers in Israeli cities at the height of the Second Intifada. It began on March 29, 2002, after the Passover massacre in Netanya on March 27.

According to the Wikipedia article on Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel, there were 5 bombings in 2000 (all after the outbreak of the Second Intifada in September, 2000), 41 in 2001, 46 in 2002 (including the Passover massacre in Netanya on March 27, which killed 30 people, and the massacre of 9 people at the Hebrew University itself on July 31, 2002 - I knew one of the victims, Ben Blutstein), 24 bombings in 2003, 19 bombings in 2004, 9 bombings in 2005, 3 bombings in 2006, 1 in 2007, and 2 in 2008. In 2002, the worst year, 237 were killed in suicide bombings, and in 2003, 146 were killed.

The editorial also says that the presence of an IDF base on the Givat Ram campus is an additional reason to boycott Hebrew University. I have never heard this before and have trouble believing it is true. I studied at the Hebrew University's Rothberg School in the 1987-1989 academic years, had a Fulbright Fellowship at the Hebrew University in the 1992-1993 academic year, and held a Lady Davis fellowship in the 1998-1999 academic year. Throughout the 2000s, I have visited Israel almost every year and have done research at the National Library, which is housed at the Givat Ram campus. In all that time, no one has ever mentioned to me the existence of an army base on the campus. I have many Israeli friends who have served in the IDF or whose children have done so, and none have mentioned this supposed base.

In my opinion, this call to break ties with the Hebrew University is also antisemitic, in effect if not in intent. The Hebrew University is one of the world's centers of Jewish Studies. Every four years the World Congress of Jewish Studies is held at the Mt. Scopus campus. Jewish Studies scholars at McGill (and other colleges and universities around the world) cooperate with members of the various faculties of the Hebrew University on a constant basis. Calls for colleges and universities to break ties with Israeli universities are always antisemitic, because they attack this crucial academic link among Jewish Studies scholars.

Omar Barghouti, poster boy for Israel Apartheid Week

Elder of Ziyon has created some great posters to mock Israel Apartheid Week, and this one is the best. One of the leaders of the BDS movement is Omar Barghouti, who lives in Ramallah but is getting his PhD from Tel Aviv University!

 For more on Barghouti, see Richard Millett's account of a recent talk he gave in London: "Omar Barghouti: The non-Israel-boycotting Israeli boycotter."