I confess that it is incongruous for a peace theorist to recommend that people go to see a flag-waving war movie. The contradictions of this notwithstanding, I hope that people will go to see Red Tails, the movie about the Tuskegee Airmen produced by George Lucas and directed by Anthony Hemingway. I urge people to see the movie so that it will make money and thereby take away one Hollywood excuse for why it does not make more movies about African-American heroes and sheroes. If this movie makes money, perhaps it will be easier to get big-screen movies or television movies or mini-series made about people such as African-American diplomat Ralph Bunch or activist and educator Mary McLeod Bethune and others.

George Lucas spoke with Jon Stewart about the difficulty in getting Red Tails made. African-Americans are supporting the movie; however, this is an important movie for everyone to support.

First, I say and say again that war is the worst crime that humanity perpetuates against itself. Mahatma Gandhi was correct when he called war organized murder. Former French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin was also right when he said “war is always the sanction of failure.” When the first projectile flies, we see a failure of imagination, communication and diplomacy. Just peace theory hopes to make the principles of just peace accepted universal principles that will guide the moral thinking and political commitments of people across the globe.

When people ask me the wolf at the door question – what does the world do with people such as Hitler and regimes such as the National Socialists in Germany when they threaten the world’s security? – I say that peacemaking is a day to day work and that the logic of peace ought to make the logic of war unthinkable. We stop the wolf before he gets to the door. The world is not there yet.

Congress is taking up dangerous legislation which appears to be designed to pave the way for war by taking the unprecedented step of effectively preventing any kind of U.S. diplomatic contact with Iran. The Iran Threat Reduction Act of 2011 (H.R. 1905), sponsored by the right-wing chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, contains a provision (Section 601, subsection (c)) which would put into law a restriction whereby

“No person employed with the United States Government may contact in an official or unofficial capacity any person that. . . is an agent, instrumentality, or official of, is affiliated with, or is serving as a representative of the Government of Iran;”

Never in the history of this country has Congress ever restricted the right of the White House or State Department to meet with representatives of a foreign state, even in wartime. If this measure passes, it will establish a dangerous precedent whereby Congress would likely follow with similar legislation effectively forbidding any contact with Palestinians, Cubans and others.

The starting point for the conflict was material, the land both groups wanted as living place. But in addition to living place, for both groups the same land had special meaning. For Jews, it was the land they prayed to return to for two thousand years, and also the land on which they believed they could avoid the persecution they have suffered for many centuries, culminating in the Holocaust, the murder of about 6 million Jews in Nazi Europe. For Palestinians it was the land on which they have lived for a long time, on which they suffered repressive rule by various countries – Turkey, England, then Israel– the land that has been their home. The same land is not only needed as living place but is central to the identity of both groups.

by Stephen Zunes

During the Bush administration, I wrote more than a dozen annotated critiques of presidential speeches. I have refrained from doing so under President Barack Obama, however, because – despite a number of disappointments with his administration’s policies — I found his speeches to be relatively reasonable. Although his September 21 address before the UN General Assembly contained a number of positive elements, in many ways it also contained many of the same kind of duplicitous and misleading statements one would have expected from his predecessor. Below are some excerpts, followed by my comments.

On Palestinian Statehood and Middle East Peace:

Obama at the U.N.

One year ago, I stood at this podium and I called for an independent Palestine. I believed then, and I believe now, that the Palestinian people deserve a state of their own. But what I also said is that a genuine peace can only be realized between the Israelis and the Palestinians themselves. One year later, despite extensive efforts by America and others, the parties have not bridged their differences… It’s well known to all of us here. Israelis must know that any agreement provides assurances for their security. Palestinians deserve to know the territorial basis of their state.

Obama’s stated support for the establishment of a Palestinian state based roughly on Israel’s pre-1967 borders is far more explicit than that of any previous president, subjecting him to harsh criticism from both Republicans as well as a number of Congressional Democrats. However, given that the Palestine Authority has already “provided assurances” for Israel’s security by agreeing to, as part of a final peace settlement,an internationally supervised disarming of any and all irregular militias, a demilitarization of their state, and the banning of hostile forces from their territories, only to be met by Netanyahu’s continued refusal to withdraw from the occupied territories, it raises questions as to why Obama implied that both sides needed to “bridge their differences.”

The Western Wall is busy during Tish B'av.

1. “What are you doing here?”

On the last night of Ramadan – the month-long fast observed by Muslims – I pass through the Jordanian-Israeli border at a crossing called the Allenby Bridge. This is the only border crossing open to West Bank Palestinians. It is the only way Palestinians can come and go from their country. This border is patrolled and controlled by Israel.

I am here to renew my visa. But most of the crowd is made up of Palestinian families wheeling enormous suitcases and coming to Palestine for the four-day Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr that immediately follows Ramadan.

At the border, I’m quickly pulled aside by Israeli security. Because I live in the Palestinian West Bank and write – for this website and others – about Palestinians, Israelis, the conflict and the occupation, I’m regularly questioned.

Though I was surprised the first few times, now I’m used to this, to being pulled aside, interrogated and asked to wait.

“Where are you going?” one Israeli official asks me. “Why are you coming to Israel?”

“I’m going to Ramallah,” I say. “That’s where I live.”

He nods and squints at my passport.

“Samuel?” he frowns. “Are you Jewish?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say. “I am.”

He pauses.

“What are you doing here?”

The official leafs through my passport and makes a quick phone call. An armed guard appears behind me. “We’re going to ask you some questions.” The guard presses me forward, through a set of doors and to a row of chairs. He doesn’t say anything. I take a seat next to a Palestinian father and his two daughters, who have also been set aside for questioning.

The family next to me – and most of the crowd here – are Muslims. They’re fasting, waiting for sundown to eat, drink and smoke their cigarettes. There are no windows inside and no one can see the sun set, but people glance at their watches. One man unpacks a woven prayer mat and slings it over his shoulder. It’s almost time to pray.

A protester holds a sign reading "In Solidarity with the South (Israel) & Gaza."

On Saturday evening, with rockets falling upon southern Israel and bombs falling on Gaza – with the innocent dying on both sides – approximately 10,000 social justice protesters convened in Tel Aviv for a silent march. The gathering, which intended to both recognize the violence occurring and to remind government officials that social justice reforms cannot be jettisoned with the security situation intensifying, was mostly silent at first, with thousands carrying signs and torches while marching to the sea.

However, not long into the march, an Arab-Jewish group (Hadash) began chanting, “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies.” The chant was picked up by a large contingent, but it was also met with heated rhetoric, particularly from a group Ami Kaufman in 972 Magazine described as “right-wing racists.” The situation was tense, particularly in the shadow of the tragedy that occurred that afternoon, in which a rocket fired from Gaza hit a home in Beer Sheva, killing one Israeli citizen and injuring many more.

Teenage Hands of Peace participants from Israel, Palestine, and the United States pose in the shape of a peace sign.

Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations remain mired in gridlock and violence seems likely to escalate. Amidst this sobering news, I’d like to introduce the Tikkun community to some courageous teenagers who spent this summer waging their own tikkun olam.

Mahfouz Kabariti sits inside his former fishing boat, which he's converting into a tour boat. The Israeli naval blockade made it impossible for him to earn a profit.

Dozens of Gazan fishermen went to retrieve boats this week that had been confiscated by the Israeli Navy over the last 18 months. Their excitement quickly turned to sorrow as they found empty boat shells stripped of all equipment and supplies. According to an August 4 press release from Adalah and Al-Meezan Center for Human Rights, Israel also charged the fishermen with the transportation costs of confiscation. The fishermen refused to take their boats, and returned home without them.

The massive tent protests currently sweeping Israel, originally triggered by the country’s young, urban middle class over unsustainable housing costs, have morphed into a movement representing a multitude of social justice issues. In fact, during rallies now, one of the most frequent chants is “האם דורש צדק חברתי” – “The People Demand Social Justice.”

On Tuesday, protest leaders officially championed a vast array of social justice causes when they presented Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu with an expansive list of demands – among them lower taxes, health care reforms and the broadening of free, public education.

by Jim Knapton

Fourteen trillion dollars is a lot of money. That is the size of our national debt. Someone said recently that if it were in five-dollar bills placed end to end, they would almost reach the moon. That’s what the USA owes the world, from the newest born to the oldest still with us: $40,000 each! Yet we’re at war in Afghanistan wasting billions on what? Fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda apparently. If we are the greatest military machine the world has ever known and they are a bunch of “desert derelicts” (quoting Mark Steyn’s delicate words in America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It), after a hundred months of conflict, why is President Obama “winding it down”? Isn’t it because we can’t afford it? In other words, thirty-six years since the end of the Vietnam War, haven’t we lost again?

I am sure President Obama doesn’t wish to see it that way. Motivated by pressure from the military-industrial complex, whose only interest is its own profit and expansion, “benign imperialism” – or what George W. Bush proclaimed as “ensuring democracy” – is the fool’s gold of our foreign policy. Worse still, it is the cornerstone of our self-made slide into an unimaginable economic black hole, brought on by our shameless waste of resources and feigned ignorance of our own internal corruption. Come to think of it, hasn’t weaponry become the only substantial export we have left?

Oy, the war makers are now pretending to be ending the war. But they are not doing so.

Credit: Truthout.org.

How long will we tolerate these deceptions? Our tax money is paying for the continued use of drones against the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden is dead. Al-Qaida is relatively crippled. We don’t need to continue fighting in Afghanistan.

Last night, President Obama announced a plan for Afghanistan that will leave nearly 70,000 troops on the ground at the end of his first term. That’s still almost double the number of troops President Bush had in Afghanistan.

Call the White House now at 1-202-456-1111 and tell them you’re disappointed in President Obama’s plan and want to see the war end sooner.

Then, write to me to tell me how your call went.

While the press is portraying this plan as a large withdrawal from Afghanistan, the fact is that the administration is still investing billions of dollars and risking thousands of lives for a failed strategy. And risking the lives of so many civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And we still don’t know when those 70,000 soldiers will come home to their families, because under the guise of withdrawing troops, this latest plan keeps the longest war in American history going indefinitely.

That’s why the NSP (Network of Spiritual Progressives) is teaming with Peace Action West to urge that President Obama bring all the troops home by September 2012, not just a symbolic fraction of the troops who are there.

Pres. Obama’s much publicized speech on the Middle East at the State Department on May 19th caused a stir by advocating an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement based upon the pre-June 1967 borders (the so-called Green Line), with modifications in the form of “land swaps” negotiated between the parties. This has been the general framework that moderate and pro-peace Israelis and Palestinians have promoted since at least 1995, when it was realized that most West Bank settlers live in thickly-populated “settlement blocs” contiguous with the Green Line. Unfortunately, too many people (most importantly, Prime Minister Netanyahu) seized upon Obama’s statement about the pre-June ’67 lines, disregarding his call for trading territory.

That Netanyahu and so many others found this controversial, illustrates how far we’ve come from a peace agreement almost arrived at in 2008. It also indicates that the US needs to be more assertive in helping the parties finally achieve peace.

Jeremy Ben-Ami

I awoke on Friday morning, May 20, to watch Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, on Democracy Now, and I’m glad I did. He performed well under difficult circumstances, being double-teamed by anti-Israel author Norman Finkelstein and Palestinian-American human rights lawyer Noura Erakat, who argued that international law and justice demand that Israel simply withdraw to the pre-’67 lines, without requiring an exchange of territories.

The program led me to some insights. For one thing, although he does not advocate Israel’s destruction (as many assume), Norman Finkelstein seems emotionally consumed by hostility toward Israel. (He’s suffered as a result–e.g., not obtaining tenure at a university–but he is a caustic polemicist and not a fair-minded scholar.) He–along with the very articulate and impressive Ms. Erakat–epitomizes doctrinaire and rigid thinking in insisting that Israel totally withdraw to the pre-June ’67 lines.

At a time when people are suffering from the economic downturn, political battles are still raging over how to cut the budget and the nation is still involved in several wars, we believe our nation’s priorities need to change. FY 2011′s military budget is the largest since the end of World War II, even though the Cold War is over and there is no longer the threat of aggression from a major power. The purpose of the “Move the Money” conference is to help change our nation’s priorities by promoting the reduction of military spending by at least 25% and “Moving the Money” from nuclear weapons, their support systems and unnecessary defense items to humanitarian, social and environmental needs. Ultimately all nations will need to greatly reduce their military spending and eliminate nuclear weapons in order to address human needs and make the world safe for our children. Here’s the info:

by Ervin Staub

The Israeli government reacted with hostility to the reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah. If Prime Minister Netanyahu were to give the right speech when he addresses the U.S. Congress later in May, the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict could move onto a fast track. Here’s the speech I propose:

Credit: Creative Commons/Truthout.org.

The beginning of reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah should inspire us, Israelis, and you Palestinians, to make peace. We have been harming each other, and we both have missed many opportunities to bring our hostility to an end. We wish you had been ready to come to an agreement when we made substantial offers to you in the past. We wish we had been wiser when Hamas won the 2006 election that we and the United States both wanted to take place. We should have waited to see if having the responsibility of power would moderate Hamas, rather than immediately responding with hostility.

Contrary to our initial reactions, the government of Israel is now prepared to see what unfolds, as reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah begins. Peace between Hamas and Fatah makes peace between us more realistic. An agreement would be less likely to be sabotaged by terrorist attacks. There are questions, of course, whether an agreement is possible with Hamas involved. But Hamas has expressed willingness in the past to accept a binding peace treaty, if approved in a plebiscite.

With Hamas a part of the peace process, we realize that initially a peace agreement may not bring all we want, such as the recognition of Israel. But we also realize that as people, including groups and nations, begin to move in a positive direction, they change. We have faith that as we walk on a shared path, our relations will improve and true peace will become possible. As a start we must engage in negotiations and not stop, as we have done again and again in the past, but continue until we reach an agreement about the issues we must resolve for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Two days before the start of Passover, I get stuck at the Israeli border. I’m re-entering the country from a weekend trip. It’s early in the morning, but already hot and there’s no breeze.

“Please sit outside and keep waiting,” an Israeli guard tells me. “Thank you.” She speaks with a thick accent and smiles. I’ve already been waiting two hours.

I wonder why I’ve been stopped. I’m not part of any activist groups. I don’t go to demonstrations or protests. I don’t think I’m a security threat. I haven’t hurt anyone.

An Israeli border check.

I’m waved inside and motioned to sit down on a plastic chair. A phone is put in my hand and a voice comes through the receiver. It’s an official, someone’s superior. The line crackles; he sounds far away.

“How long have you been in Israel?” he asks.

“Around three months,” I say.

“We know you’ve been to the West Bank. Is that right?”

“Yes,” I say. “I have.”

I feel like this was the wrong answer. There’s a long pause.

“What is your relationship with the Arab?”

Doves fly over the Israeli Separation Wall in a graffiti art piece near the military checkpoint in Qalandia.

Abu keeps rabbits on the roof of his family’s home. There are five of them and they’re brown, white and black. He tosses them a handful of yesterday’s pita and they scamper underfoot, nibbling on the edges of the bread.

“You see the fat one?” he points, “She’s the mother. The first one I owned.”

Downstairs, Abu lives with his wife and his newborn daughter. They stay on the third floor; his father and mother live on the second and his two brothers live on the first floor. Abu also has two sisters who live in Jerusalem.

It’s early in the morning, but the sun is bright. I shade my eyes with my hand to look into the light. Abu wants to show me the view from the roof. Ramallah, he explains, is behind us.

“And you see that building?” Abu says, stretching his arm out and pointing to the west. The building that he’s pointing to looks like it’s on the same block, but it isn’t. It’s in another city. “That’s my sister’s house. That’s Jerusalem.”

He takes me by the arm, to the edge of the roof. “And right there is the Israeli wall,” he points down.

Photo from giaitri59

I was at a recent conversation event with 16 reasonably well informed, educated people who came together to discuss the recent political unrest in the Middle East. One interesting thread in the conversation was that most of the people in the group were at a loss to understand why this was happening now or what started it. We realized that we had no cultural narrative or ideology that would explain what was going on, or how it would turn out. Perhaps there was one evolving narrative that explained some of it in hindsight though. When those in power maintain their power through fear, they can be overthrown by the population when people lose their fear. That loss of fear can spread like wildfire fueled by a combination of being inspired by others, and a belief that they have nothing to lose because of a bleak outlook for their current situation. When a system maintained by fear is teetering on the brink in an increasingly unstable situation, the efforts of single individuals can have a major impact on what happens next. That brings me to my two nominations for the Nobel Peace prize for this year.

As I followed the events on February 11, 2011 in Egypt, a day that no doubt will be considered Egyptian Independence Day, I heard an Egyptian say: “This is ours. We own it.” That observation crystallized much of what I had been thinking about the character of this regime change in contrast to the regime change that the United States brought to Iraq at the point of a gun. This was a just peace revolution.

Security, truth and respect are three important values of my interpretation of just peace theory. Just peace theory, the middle way between pacifism and just war theory holds that while nonviolent means bring nonviolent ends, the hard power of military force is sometimes needed for the sake of security. Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had used the argument of security and stability to justify his brutal and kleptocratic governance of Egypt. The United States, including the Obama administration, had used this logic to justify the money this government sent to Egypt over the years. The United States trained the Egyptian military, and significant personal relationships developed over the years between individuals in the Egyptian military and individuals in the United States military. It seems that those relationships may have made an important difference in bringing about the end of Hosni Mubarak’s rule.

The Egyptian military provided security for the protesters during most of the 18 days of revolution. There was a moment when the military stood by and watched while so called pro-Mubarak demonstrators engaged in violent conflict with the anti-Mubarak protesters. But the cries of outrage from the international community brought the end of that kind of intimidation. God only knows what kind of person-to-person communication was happening military to military. God only knows what subtle effects time spent in classrooms in the United States had on the Egyptian military to help them see the advantages of civilian control of a democratic government.

Courtesy of MachsomWatch.org

What I originally took to be WikiLeaks were actually internal Palestinian documents leaked to Al Jazeera by dissident Palestinians to embarrass Mahmoud Abbas and the PLO leadership who attempted (apparently in good faith) to negotiate a two-state solution with the Kadima-led Israeli government of Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni. What the Guardian and Al Jazeera are blasting as a betrayal of Palestinian rights was precisely the kind of deal that could work for both parties in bringing this conflict to an end.