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Revision as of 06:38, 20 February 2011 by Andreas Kaganov (talk | contribs) (→Keller's account of his meetings with Arafat and other Palestinian leaders)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Adam Keller (born 1955 in Tel Aviv-Yafo) is an Israeli peace activist who was among the founders of Gush Shalom, of which he is a spokesperson.
Political views
A long-standing supporter of Yesh Gvul, Keller has served several prison terms for refusing reserve military duty in the 1967-occupied territories.
In the Adam Keller Court Martial which drew considerable public attention in April-May 1988, Reserve Corporal Adam Keller was charged with "insubordination" and "spreading of propaganda harmful to military discipline" in that while on active military duty he had written on 117 tanks and other military vehicles graffiti with the text: "Soldiers of the IDF, refuse to be occupiers and oppressors, refuse to serve in the occupied territories!" as well as placing on electricity pylons in the military camp where he was serving - and on inside doors of the stalls in the officers' toilet - stickers with the slogans "Down with the occupation!". Keller was convicted and sentenced to three months imprisonment. Keller was an active member of Yesh Gvul, but declared that he had done his act on his own without consulting anybody else. For its part, the movement did not take responsibility for his act, but did provide his wife with the financial support given to the families of refusers.
In April 2004 he was a member of a Gush Shalom delegation who visited Palestinian National Authority leader Yasser Arafat at his headquarters in Ramallah to protest at what they claim was an Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, threat against Arafat's life.
Publications
Keller has authored Terrible Days: Social Divisions and Political Paradoxes in Israel (CYPRES Amstelveen 1987; ISBN 90-71261-02-6).
Since 1983 he has been the editor of The Other Israel bi-monthly newsletter of the struggle for Israeli-Palestinian peace (ISSN 0792-4615)
Keller's account of his meetings with Arafat and other Palestinian leaders
In December 2010 the Dutch anti-Islamic politician Geert Wilders visited Tel Aviv at the invitation of the extreme right Israeli parliamentarian Arye Eldad. Left-wing Israelis of Dutch origin organized a protest demonstration against Wilders' visit, in which Keller became involved through his wife, Beate Zilversmit, who is originally from the Netherlands.
In the aftermath, Keller became involved in a long and often acrimonious online debate with Wilders' supporters (see links below). When accused of "supporting terrorism", Keller published the following account:
How and why I, together with various valued colleagues and co-workers, spent some twenty years of my life in (eventually succesful) efforts to bring about negotiations and mutual recognition between The Government of Israel and the The Palestine Liberation Organization, Headed by the late Yasser Arafat.
Well, to start at the beginning, there was the war in 1967 when Israel conquered in just six days quite a lot of territories and had the delusion that they could be kept in Israeli hands forever and that there was no need to talk to our contemptible neighbors because we were so strong and powerful. The Prime Minister we had then, name of Golda Meir (a regular participant in this blog, latté island uses her picture to identify – I really can’t understand why) embodied this mood of stupid arrogance and rebuffed the offers of Anwar a-Sadat, President of Egypt, to make peace based on Israel withdrawing from the Sinai Peninsula. She was also well known for stating that there was no such thing as a Palestinian People.
I was quite young at the time but already started to be politically involved. I well remember the feeling of suffocation, the cloying disgust whenever we saw the PM o television. And then came the war in October 1973, a hard war where Israel lost nearly 3000 soldiers, a war which could have been prevented had Golda Meir showed a bit more sense.
At the end of the war, Israeli and Egyptian soldiers were scattered in very convoluted along very convoluted front lines on both sides of the Suez Canal, still from time to time shooting at each other but in between fraternizing a bit and on occasions even playing football in no man's land. And soldiers who returned from the front demonstrated in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for two months until Golda Meir at last gave in and resigned – a glorious day that was!
Anyway, peace with Egypt seemed well set on its way, though it would take several more years and the dramatic personal visit of President Sadat to Jerusalem to finally clinch the deal. But what was needed was not only peace with Egypt, important as that certainly was, but also peace with the Palestinians, who are our direct neighbors, who have the deepest grievance against us because after all we did create our state in what had been their country, and without whom we would never real peace and acceptance in our Middle East environment. Making peace with the Palestinians necessarily meant talking with the organization and the leader which the Palestinians themselves accepted – i.e. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) headed by Yasser Arafat. The prospect was distasteful to many Israelis, who regarded Arafat as a blood-soaked terrorist. But then, the prospect of talking to the government of Israel was at least as distasteful to many Palestinians, who regarded Israelis as blood-soaked conquerors. Both sides' distaste had all too real reasons I n various bloody acts of the recent and less recent past. Nevertheless, for our own future as well as the Palestinians', this reluctance had to be overcome, our government had to be gotten to sit at the table with the Palestinians and vice versa, with a view to the only long-term sustainable solution: Two states, side by side, Israel and Palestine – Israel in its internationally-recognized borders, as they were between 1949 and 1967, with its capital in West Jerusalem; Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, its capital in East Jerusalem.
To further this aim the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace (ICIPP) was founded in 1975. The core group of its founders were dissident people who came from deep inside the Israeli political, military or economic establishment and who came to the conclusion that government policies as they were at the time were disastrous for our long-term survival.
There was for example Major General (ret.) Matti Peled, a career officer who had been a member of the IDF general staff during the 1967 Six Day War and later became a noted scholar, founder of the Arabic Language and Literature Department of the Tel Aviv University.
There was also Ya'akov Arnon, a noted economist who was born in Holland as Jaap van Amerongenm survived the Holocuase in hiding, headed the Zionist Federation of the Netherlands and then went to Israel and became director-general of the Ministry of Finance and later Chairman of the Board of the Israeli Electricity Company.
And Arie "Lova" Eliav who was Secretary General of the Israeli Labour Party, then Israel's ruling party, who had broken away out of disgust with PM Golda Meir's policies
And Uri Avnery, who was already then a well-known dissident with a long journalistic and parliamentary career to his credit.
And in addition to the VIP's there were the younger grassroots activists of whom I was one. I was then a history student at Tel Aviv University and involved in a group called CAMPUS which in Hebrew is the acronym of "Student Social and Political Involvement", a joint Jewish-Arab student group (that was where I met the whiskey-drinking Muslims who are my bosom friends up to the present).
We and the VIP's worked quite well together. Our VIP's engaged in alternative diplomacy, meeting with representatives of the PLO in Paris and London – first secretly, later more and more openly. Rabin, then in his first term as PM, was ready to meer Matti Peled who was his old army buddy and get messages from Arafat – but at that time was not willing send messages back, which would have been the effective start of negotiations. Still, there were built contacts and channels bypassing the Foreign Ministry which were very instrumental towards official negotiations decades later.
We, the younger activists, were active on the streets, picketing the Ministery of Defence and chanting "Talk to the PLO now – now, now, now!". We often got arrested since the Tel Aviv police considered picketing the Defense Ministry a "security risk". It took some years before the police gave in and let us demonstrate there freely. And we also went out in the night to cover Tel Aviv with graffiti calling for negotiations with the PLO.
Then Begin came to power and he did not want to see our people or get any messages from Arafat – except on issues of prisoner exchanges where our people were involved. And in 1982 he tried invading Lebanon in an effort to destroy the PLO altogether – which failed, though quite a lot of people got killed horribly. During the Siege of Beirut Uri Avery crossed the lines and met with Arafat, the first direct meeting with him. The interview with Arafat, expressing willingness to have peace with Israel, was printed in Avnery's paper Haolam Hazeh and we also distributed copies in the mass anti-war rally outside the Tel Aviv townhall.
Afterwards there were the years when any contact with members of the PLO was forbidden by Israeli law, between 1986 and 1993, and the act of shaking the hand of Arafat – or of any member of the PLO – carried a maximum penalty of three years' imprisonment. We embarked on the double-pronged strategy of on the one hand challenging the law, holding meetings with the PLO in defiance of it and getting people prosecuted and imprisoned and making political speeches in court and having demonstrations outside the prison walls to gather public support for the idea of negotiations with the PLO.
I remember Abie Nathan, who maintained the Voice of Peace pirate radio station broadcasting from a boat off the Tel Aviv shore, really a most bold and courageous man. He came back from meeting Arafat in Tunis, and was detained and told by the police investigator: "You are charged with having broken the Anti-Terrorist Ordianance by having shaken the hand of Yasser Arafat" to which Nathan replied: "Oh, sure I did it. Here are photos of the meeting, and video films, and recodings of every word he said to me and I said to him which shows he is willing to make peace provided the Palestinians get their state. Do you need more evidence that I broke your law or is this enough?" He got half a year in prison, there were huge demonstrations at the prison gates every Friday noon. When he finished his terms there was a cavalcade of hundreds of cars following him from the prison to his home in Tel Aviv. He rested at home three days, then went to meet again with Arafat and went through everyhtinh again – police, court, prison, demonstrations. I was involved in organizing the weekly demos.
And also we made full use of the loophole which the law left, that a meeting with the PLO was not a criminal offence if carried out in the framework of an academic conference – so we got many European and American universities to hold academic conferences and invite Israeli peace activists and Palestinians from the PLO who could meet with impunity as long as they stayed inside the conference hall and there were some European or American academics present as "chaperons".
Then in January 1993 this stupid law was repealed and the government embarked on secret negotiations with the PLO on its own, and then of course in September 1993 Rabin shook the hand of Arafat on the White House lawn. In fact, I myself did not meet Arafat face to face until he came over to Gaza after Oslo was signed, though I have long before that met several of his senior aides in various European cities. Then I was in several meetings. I think the photos which latté island uncovered on our website are from the meeting in Hebron in 1994, the third time that I met him. It was an especially cordial meeting, at the time we had very good reasons to expect that a definite peace agreement was just around the corner and that there would be no more bloodshed. There were many senior Israeli government officials waiting to meet him, too, ministerial aides to the Israeli Minister of Agriculture and the Minister of Trade and Industry who were due to meet Arafat on the following day with regard to their spheres.
Arafat was very completely honest about where he stood – he spoke quite openly to us and also to the Israeli government people. He had made a deal, he recognized Israel, he restricted himself to demanding the West Bank and Gaza which are just 22% of what had been Mandatory Palestine, he called off the armed attacks against Israel, he put in prison Palestinians who wanted to continue the armed struggle. All this was, however, based on one clear assumption – that Israel would keep its part of the deal, which means that there would be a Palestinian state in place by May 1999, according to the timetable stipulated in the Oslo Agreement. If this did not take place, then of course all bets were off, as Arafat ,ade very clear to everybody he talked to – Israelis, Americans, Europeans, everybody.
He meant to keep to the deal, had Israel kept its part. Not because of any special goodness in his heart (I don’t trust to the goodness in any politican's heart, be it a Palestinian, an Israeli, or any other nationality) but because he had every reason to keep it. A Palestinian state in 1999 would have been the fulfilment of the Palestinians' dream, Arafat would have gone down in their history as the great liberator – and he would have been a Head of State.
I think Rabin meant to keep his part of the deal, and had he survived things might have been very different. However, Rabin was assassinated, neither Netanayhu nor Barak who followed him were serious about keeping their part of the deal (Barak claimed he had made the Palestinians a "generous offer" which in fact included Israel keeping in its hands the Jordan Valley which is more than 30% of the West Bank.
So, the timetables were not kept, the Israeli obligation to end the occupation and let the state of Palestine come into being was not kept – and the bets were off, and there was very much violence and bloodshed which could have been avoided, and Yasser Arafar was again tainted as "the terrorist" quote unqote.
To sum up my own part: Twice, in May 2002 and again in September 2003, we had a information of PM Sharon intending to send commandos into the Presidential Compound in Ramallah to capture or kill Arafat (which would have come to the same, as he did not intend to be taken alive). Both times I organized a group of about 15 Israeli activists to come and stay the night, and once there we informed the media that we were there and that any commandos would need to deal with our presence. In the second of these cases we had a specific confirmation from a Sharon aide that the presence of Israeli citizens was indeed a complicating factor, one of several which led to the canceling of the commando raid.
A year later Arafat died. Many Palestinians believe that he was indeed poisoned at the order of Sharon, though this cannot be either proven or disproven. In any case the death of Arafat changed nothing in Israel's basic predicament, we still need to get out of the West Bank and make peace with the Palestinians. Having missed the chance to make and keep a deal with Arafat, we now need to have a deal also involving Hamas, which makes things more complicated but not impossible – as I already noted, I and my friends also had and have some contacts with Hamas.
See also
- Gush Shalom
- Uri Avnery
- Mordechai Vanunu
- Arab-Israeli conflict
- List of Middle East peace proposals
- Israeli peace camp
References
- Guardian article 'I realised the stupidity of it' - by Chris McGreal appeared in The Guardian, Tuesday March 11, 2003
- Nunn, Maxine Kaufman (1993) Creative Resistance: Anecdotes of Nonviolent Action by Israel-based Groups Alternative Information Center, p 22
- Gush Shalom: Gush Shalom Members Visit ArafatTemplate:Language icon
External links
- Adam Keller's blog
- Video of Keller's lecture at Tubingen, Germany, January 2011, on Youtube
- Adam Keller's debate with supporters of the anti-Islamic Dutch politican Geert Wilders (1)
- Adam Keller's debate with supporters of the anti-Islamic Dutch politican Geert Wilders (2)
- Adam Keller's debate with supporters of the anti-Islamic Dutch politican Geert Wilders (3)
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