by James M. Wall
The New York Times‘ Ethan Bronner reports that West Bank Palestinian women and girls have again broken Israeli laws to go swimming in the Mediterranean Sea. This is Rosa Parks country, folks.
Bronner actually evoked Parks’ name in his report. Did his editors think we would not notice?
Blogger Philip Weiss noticed, and he made sure his Mondoweiss readers noticed. By including a brief reference to the iconic moment when Rosa Parks broke the law by sitting in the front of a segregated bus, the New York Times has connected the American civil rights movement to the Palestinian struggle for human rights.
Here is that connection: Rosa Parks deliberately violated an unjust Alabama segregation law. The Palestinian and Israeli women and girls who crossed the Israeli segregation border, broke Israeli laws.
Palestinians living a few miles from the coast reach adulthood without ever seeing or entering the Mediterranean Sea because they live behind a barrier of an occupation of their land that is illegal under international law.
Illegal entry in and out of Israel by Israeli and Palestinian women and girls violates Israeli law. Rosa Parks violated Alabama segregation laws. For a group of Israeli and Palestinian women who went swimming together, this outing was their Rosa Parks moment.
Rosa Parks was 42 years old on December 1, 1955, when she refused to obey bus driver James Blake’s order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger. The segregation laws of Montgomery, Alabama, made Rosa Parks a criminal. An African American woman had crossed a barrier and sat in the front of a segregated bus.
Parks knew what she was doing. She was deliberately violating an unjust law when she joined a long line of rebels who sounded the call, “I’m as mad as hell, and I am not going take this anymore”.
That quote is a familiar line from the 1976 movie, Network. In that film, the cry was loud and noisy. Today, the Palestinian rebellion is being conducted in different venues and in different voices.
In September, at the UN Security Council and General Assembly meetings, the call will go forth in an assembly hall as the Palestinian Authority asks for membership in the UN.
This summer, on the beach at Tel Aviv, different voices sounded. This is how the Times’ Ethan Bronner, describes those voices:
Skittish at first, then wide-eyed with delight, the women and girls entered the sea, smiling, splashing and then joining hands, getting knocked over by the waves, throwing back their heads and ultimately laughing with joy. Most had never seen the sea before. . . . /
In the grinding rut of Israeli-Palestinian relations — no negotiations, mutual recriminations, growing distance and dehumanization — the illicit trip was a rare event that joined the simplest of pleasures with the most complex of politics. It showed why coexistence here is hard, but also why there are, on both sides, people who refuse to give up on it.
“What we are doing here will not change the situation,” said Hanna Rubinstein, who traveled to Tel Aviv from Haifa to take part. “But it is one more activity to oppose the occupation. One day in the future, people will ask, like they did of the Germans: ‘Did you know?’ And I will be able to say, ‘I knew. And I acted.’ ”
Hanna Rubinstein traveled to Tel Aviv from Haifa to take part in defying her government’s immoral laws. She could no longer remain silent.
Take heed, you United Methodist Conference delegates, and listen up, you inter-faith Presbyterian and Episcopal leaders, the New York Times has granted you permission to consider a simple question: Do you wish to be with “the Germans” who refused to know and who refused to act. Or, will you join with women like Hanna Rubinstein and say, “I knew. And I acted”.
This Rosa Parks moment on the beach takes its place with those other Palestinian symbolic moments, the flotillas, the flytilla, the BDS movement, the resistance to the Israeli Wall.
According to Bronner, this latest act of defiance against Israel’s apartheid laws began a year ago. A single idea of an Israeli Jewish mother has become “a small, determined movement of civil disobedience”. It unfolded this way:
Ilana Hammerman, a writer, translator and editor, had been spending time in the West Bank learning Arabic when a girl there told her she was desperate to get out, even for a day.
Ms. Hammerman, 66, a widow with a grown son, decided to smuggle her to the beach. The resulting trip, described in an article she wrote for the weekend magazine of the newspaper Haaretz, prompted other Israeli women to invite her to speak, and led to the creation of a group they call We Will Not Obey. It also led a right-wing organization to report her to the police, who summoned her for questioning. . . .
Israeli police have questioned 28 Israeli women who have smuggled in their West Bank guests. Charges against them are pending. So far, none of the Palestinian women and girls have been caught or questioned by the police.
Together these Palestinian and Israeli women and girls are building a relationship in their common rebellion. Some of the Israeli women are high profile, including, for example, Hagit Aharoni, a psychotherapist, the wife of the celebrity chef Yisrael Aharoni, and a member of the organizing group behind the illegal swim outings.
The beachgoers on this most recent swim-in had dinner on the roof of the Aharonis’ home, five floors above stylish Rothschild Boulevard, where, on the day of the Palestinians trip into Israel, hundreds of tents had been pitched by Israelis angry with the high cost of housing.
Bronner asked Ms. Aharoni about her rebellion. She replied:
For 44 years, we have occupied another country. I am 53, which means most of my life I have been an occupier. I don’t want to be an occupier. I am engaged in an illegal act of disobedience. I am not Rosa Parks, but I admire her, because she had the courage to break a law that was not right.
It takes many people and a great deal of courage and sacrifice to win a revolution. It also takes time, as Palestinians and their allies can testify, but this is one revolution, like the battle for African American civil rights, that will be won because as Martin Luther King, Jr., said so often, “truth crushed to earth will rise again.”
Next up: The September United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York City, where the Palestinian Authority will formally request UN membership, and quite possibly, full statehood status. The first step will be a request to the Security Council, which has a membership of 15. It is in this body that, even if the PA obtains the necessary majority of 8 votes, the US has announced that it will cast yet another pro-Israel veto.
How certain is it that the US will cast its veto?
In an interview with Pamela Falk, CBS News Foreign Affairs analyst, Ambassador Rosemary DiCarlo, U.S. Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN said, definitively:
My government has been clear all along. The only place where permanent status issues can be resolved, including borders and territory, is in negotiations between the parties — not in international fora [forums] such as the United Nations.
Assuming the virtually certain US veto, the next step for the PA would be to go directly to the 193-member UN General Assembly, which now includes its latest member, South Sudan. The GA requires a two/thirds vote for a resolution to pass. The PA currently reports that it is close to obtaining that necessary two-thirds majority.
The General Assembly would not be able to grant full membership to the PA because that would require Security Council approval, which a US veto would have prevented. The GA, however, does have the authority to upgrade the current Observer status of the PA. What a majority vote for an upgrade would accomplish is that it would demonstrate to the world that two-thirds of the member states support PA statehood.
Whatever the outcome of the UN votes, the Palestinian revolution will continue in its steady, symbolic march to freedom. When Rosa Parks refused to move on that Montgomery bus, she acted for freedom. Rosa Parks moments will be repeated again and again, on the beaches of Tel Aviv, in flotillas and flytillas, and in all those other locations, too numerous yet to imagine, and in ways yet to be determined.
The picture above, on the Tel Aviv beach, is by Rina Castelnuovo. It was taken for The New York Times.
Wallwritings 
Rosa Parks’ violation of the law was an act of protest against an inhuman and racist state policy. Rosa Parks had a large protest movement behind her, and a very articulate and powerful spokesperson in the likeness of Dr. Martin Luther King. It was the combination of the perseverance of those three that broke the back of Southern intransigence and hatred. Can this be replicated in Middle East culture? Besides the obvioius “act” of protest by the taking back the sea, where is the broad-based movement and articluar spokesperson who can bring people together, non-violently? Thank you, Jim, for bringing this event to our attention. Maybe it will evolve into something larger and more prophetic. I certainly would hope so. Bill Gepford
Jim,
Thank you for highlighting the linkage with Rosa parks. Thank you because “You knew and you acted”, and you have been spreading Hope amongst Palestinians and illuminating the path for many Americans and Christians who know and are yet to act.
The brilliant image of the Israeli and Palestinian ladies and girls jointly taking a “FreedomSwim” on forbidden Israeli shores, ruptured the net of Israeli Apartheid, at least in one important spot . It is as if these brave women against apartheid were being baptised in the Holy waters of the Holy Land, inspired by Rosa Parks and their love of freedom.
The path to truth is inexorable, demanding, and worth it. Lying and covering up lies, while pervasive in human experience, will never have the star quality of truth and seeking truth. My hat is off to these courageous Palestinian and Israeli women. It is not okay to be ignorant, to be lied to and accept the lies, nor to accept a U.S. veto protecting the secular zionist project, Israel. Thank you for the inspiration to speak the truth!
On the question of recognition of the State of Palestine and Member status at the UN, I find the US threat to veto the Palestinian move at the UN Security Council as immoral and a blatant betrayal of what America is supposed to stand for.
When the US ambassador to the UN disingenuously calls for “negotiations” between the Israeli Goliath and the Palestinian David as, effectively, the only option to get Israeli recognition, and consequently UN recognition of a Palestine State, it is tantamount to asking the victim of occupation to cry “Uncle” and completely acquiesce to the viciously unjust demands and conditions of the occupier.
The caged Christian prisoners thrown out in the arena in old Rome had a much more even chance of survival in fighting the lions or Galdiators than the Palestinians do today in gaining their rights from the new Rome, that chose the title, “Israel”.
Bravo. May be it is the women both Palestinian and Israeli who will eventually be able to liberate the land and its people and bring about justice and peace where so much injustice and suffering have prevailed for decades.
In Israel/Palestine, the conflict is now all about human rights and equality under the law. Jewish Israelis are able to go wherever they want, in Israel or the occupied territories, and non Jews cannot, as the article shows. There are even roads for Jews only. Not even South Africa had that.
The overall silence of Americans, and American Christians in particular, is something that churches should not be proud of, to say the least. It is never too late however, to stand squarely and strongly for justice and equal rights under the law in Israel/Palestine
Our country gives billions of dollars a year to a nation that practices apartheid, in law, while our own citizens are facing drastic cuts in programs they desperately rely on. So not only is our nation silent about apartheid, but we support it by sending our annual billions to Israel. We should be outraged about this, and let our Congresspeople that we want this ended now.
Fred
Father, forgive them, for they know not what thet do.
Unfortunately, John, I think the the Israelis know exactly what they’re doing. They simply don’t care who gets hurt. They want all of Palestine, without having to share political power or have equality with the non Jews, and that’s exactly what they’ve gotten, without a peep fron the rest of the world.
For the Israelis and their supporters around the globe, it’s been a huge success. Morality? It clearly doesn’t matter among the vast majority of Israelis, or Americans either, judging by our Congress and mainstream media.
Fred
Fred hit the nail on the head. Morality is not what this is about, greed for more land and power is what it is about. And in our Congress, the greed for the Jewish lobby money and voter influence dominates. It is a sad and immoral day for the USA to threaten a veto for freedom.
Fantastic post Jim, and thanks for making a point of Bronner’s article (and step forward in my view of his writing). When I lived in Palestine, some friends and I snuck a friend who was studying on the West Bank into Accra to spend a weekend by the sea. He was originally from Gaza and loved the ocean but had not seen it in 10 years. To be there to witness his reaction was a moment of grace.
Concerning Bill’s comment above, I think there have been both non-violent leaders and movements throughout the occupation, although they have largely been ignored by the West, namely by those who are far more comfortable dismissing Arabs has intrinsically violent and incapable of such high-minded efforts. The names Rev. Dr. Naim Ateek, Mazin Qumsiyeh, Omar Barghouti, Dr. Edward Said, and others come to mind. And of course the first Intifada was a largely non-violent movement. I don’t know if it’s the lack of Palestinian leaders and movements or the lack of American vision, compassion, and responsiveness to these courageous acts.
The state of Israel was created by the United Nations. Why not Palestine?
Somebody should tell Ambassador DiCarlo, the State Department and the administration, what Clyde Farris so cogently points out. DiCarlo et al. should bone up on the relevant history.
Jim: The power of non violence should never be underestimated.
Thanks to each of you for your comments. I will share this with as many as possible through my contacts. Especially to Clyde Farris, “thank you” for saying what we all know in one brief sentence.