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What I’ve Been Up To Lately
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OneVoice, saying a lot of nothing, loses Palestinian support
OneVoice founder Daniel Lubetzky
In his January 2000 Veridian manifesto, Bruce Sterling told of a future in which pressing political issues, in particular environmental sustainability, would not find resonance with the mainstream public until the championing of such causes was seen as fashionable and chic.
Sterling, who had already long verified his penchant for prophecy — coining the term “cyberspace” when describing a yet-to-exist-in-present-form Internet in 1982 — couldn’t have been more correct. Some current examples of this phenomenon that come to mind are PETA’s “I’d rather go naked” campaign, Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong campaign, the celebrity frenzy surrounding Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and Live Earth concert, and Bono’s One and Red campaigns.
The impression I got from OneVoice, following my visit to their blogger meetup in Manhattan a couple of weeks back, was that it too is essentially another example of Sterling’s prophecy come fulfilled — a shallow attempt at making the cause of Israeli-Palestinian “peace” (as opposed to the ever popular cause of “resistance to the occupation”) hip and chic, and hence more desirable. OneVoice has thus enlisted the support and visibility of folks like Brad Pitt, Natalie Portman, Edward Norton, and Muhammad Ali to tell the world it’s time for two states for two people.
On the slate for our evening of free pricey beers and cheeses, at a posh downtown gallery/facility for corporate focus groups adorned with high-quality die-cut OneVoice brochures, were talks from Craig (Craigslist) Newmark and Arianna Huffington, who both seemed to offer relatively little insight into the matzav or even the purpose of OneVoice, and who further seemed disinterested in engaging directly with those of us beneath their class, politely dismissing the nobodies they were supposedly there to inspire, to instead rub elbows with the other money in the room.
Even so, had Newmark and Huffington been brilliant and warm, nonetheless, OneVoice wouldn’t have impressed me much. The amorphous peace that the organization is hawking — that elusive peace of moderation and self-deception — is not the same as the rigidly-defined peace that Palestinians and Palestinian solidarity activists desire. This fact became glaringly evident earlier this week.
At the blogger meetup, when pressed for solutions, OneVoice founder Daniel Lubetzky had little more to offer than a joint statement signed by over half-a-million Israelis and Palestinians renouncing extremism and calling for an expedited resolution to the conflict that results in two states (a statement, it has been alleged, that many Palestinians have been encouraged to sign under false pretenses). When I asked Lubetzky whether the organization took a position on settlements, the status of Jerusalem, and the Right of Return, he said that they could not find consensus between their Israeli and Palestinian participants on these subjects. He then made an out of place remark invoking his cred as a child of Holocaust survivors before moving on to people he also seemed to have felt mattered more.
I was not alone in my reservations. An August 30 article in The Economist (which also takes a swipe at Corner Prophets, my Israeli-Palestinian hip-hop concert series), states:
A joint lobby group, OneVoice, hopes to get a million of their signatures on a petition calling for immediate peace talks; it has 435,000 so far. But their views on the details, such as the borders and the fate of Palestinian refugees, remain far apart, and most doubt it will happen in the next few years. When Israel’s main peace groups called a rally in June to mark 40 years of occupation, perhaps 4,000 people turned up. The many hundreds of Israeli and thousands of Palestinian deaths during the second intifada have hardened hearts; Israeli security measures have rendered most of the projects that brought together Israelis and Palestinians across the Green Line (the pre-1967 border) impossible.
Continuing in this vein, on October 9, in an open letter to OneVoice, Israeli journalist and activist Gideon Spiro took the organization to task for a position that, he says, “presumes symmetry between occupied and occupier.”
“There is no symmetry between the Israeli occupation force that has been brutally persecuting Palestinians for 40 years, and those who struggle against it,” wrote Spiro.
He also wrote that OneVoice has “fallen into the trap of being all-embracing,” going so far as to allow an Israeli politician that supports the radical settler movement and another who has promoted the use of extra-judicial assassination to be counted among its “moderate” supporters.
(Don’t even get me started on my interaction with OneVoice’s Israeli participants who were present at the blogger event, one of whom told me that “If it came down to a choice between saving a hundred Jewish lives or killing a million Palestinians, I wouldn’t even blink, I would kill them all.” He’s a moderate?)
Spiro’s letter came just in advance of OneVoice’s One Million Voices to End the Conflict event that was to take place on Thursday of this coming week (Oct. 18). Initially, there were to be multiple concerts staged around the world, the two most prominent of which were to take place in Tel Aviv and the West Bank town of Jericho. The Jericho event, however, has as of today been canceled amidst great controversy. (As of Sunday evening, the Tel Aviv event has been canceled as well.)
On October 4, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) called for a boycott of the event, stating that, “the event falls under the category of normalization projects and violates the call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), endorsed by over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations, trade unions, political parties, and grassroots movements.”
The statement continued:
We believe this event is being organized to promote a “peace” agreement that is devoid of the minimal requirements of justice, and that will leave the Palestinian people as disenfranchised as previous agreements have. The unfortunate and harmful support of Palestinian businessmen, religious and political figures, among others, for this event indicates either ignorance of the hidden agenda inherent in the whole initiative, deceptively camouflaged as a collective call for peace, or willingness to forfeit the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people in return for advancing selfish interests.
PACBI’s boycott resolution was followed by the launch of a Palestinian grassroots initiative called Another Voice, which, led by members of the International Solidarity Movement among others, has arisen specifically to counter OneVoice. In an October 11 statement, the group writes:
The OneVoice formula for ending the “conflict,” (i.e. occupation), outlined in a 10-point document, is oversimplified and misleading. It fails to mention key elements required for a just and lasting peace. From justifying settlement blocs to avoiding the refugees’ right to return, the OneVoice plan avoids the framework of international law, and serves to subordinate Palestinian rights to Israeli interests. Such high profile initiatives serve as a dangerous distraction to the facts that Israel continues to create on the ground and will only obstruct any real solution that is based on justice.
Though their statement itself is misleading (whereas OneVoice doesn’t seem to have an agenda for the content of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, but rather expresses only a simple desire to see negotiations take place, and furthermore, whereas Another Voice has misrepresented an unofficial poll on OneVoice’s website as an official policy statement), Another Voice nonetheless garnered the support of many Palestinian entertainers who were scheduled to perform in the OneVoice event, including DAM, Reem Talhami, and Jamil Al Sayeh. The artists subsequently withdrew from the OneVoice event and intend to perform instead at an alternate concert organized now for the same day by Another Voice itself.
OneVoice subsequently canceled their Jericho event, inexplicably claiming that Palestinian extremists had threatened their artists, and that the cancellation was in the interest of security. McClatchy Newspapers reports:
After an eleventh-hour protest by Palestinian activists, the Oct. 18 “people’s summit” was effectively scuttled Friday when organizers canceled the West Bank half of the OneVoice concert and decided to go forward only with the Tel Aviv event, featuring Canadian rock star Bryan Adams.
Citing security concerns, Daniel Lubetzky, a founder of the OneVoice peace organization, accused “extremists” of sabotaging the event by threatening Arab musicians who were planning to take part in the Jericho concert.
Lubetzky and OneVoice offered no evidence to support the contention, and the event already had been in the process of unraveling after one of the headline artists in Jericho Palestinian rap group DAM decided to pull out to support the last-minute boycott.
Today OneVoice issued a press release, lambasting an unnamed “fringe group” for its “slanderous” claims against OneVoice, stating that “Palestinians have been misled by a sinister campaign of hate, coupled with vicious threats of violence from extremists that have spiraled out of control.”
The release concludes:
These enemies who use intimidation, fear and manipulation to protract the conflict through absolutist ideologies do not have any actionable proposals that will fulfill the wish of the Palestinian people. They have enchained the people for far too long.
I had initially decided to give OneVoice the benefit of the doubt, and even promoted their initiative here on Orthodox Anarchist as well as on my Facebook profile. I also believe that OneVoice has, in fact, been misrepresented. However, following Mr. Lubetzky’s inappropriate response to the challenge posed by the Palestinian campaign against OneVoice, I can no longer consider myself even a passive supporter of their initiative.
Frankly, I find Mr. Lubetzky’s confusion of adamant non-violent resistance against the occupation with violent extremism to be a far greater disservice to the Palestinian people than the loss of a Bryan Adams concert. Mr. Lubetzky apparently does not know “the wish of the Palestinian people” when he sees it.
The Palestinian people, sir, wish to be free; not simply to have lip service paid to this notion.
[Update 10/14 @9PM] I’ve just received word that the Tel Aviv event has now also been officially canceled.
Tags: israel, Music, Occupation, palestine, security, west bank
Am not getting it. OneVoice (from my reading) is calling for negotiations. Yes, it’s a blabfest calling for more blabfests, but I don’t see that it’s got a specific final-status agenda beyond that, per se.
And while I’m at it, the various negotiable issues that you take it to task for (settlements, right of return, etc.) are supposed to be negotiable issues. They’re not supposed to be P-right/I-wrong end-of-story. Which is how you’ve presented them.
The occupation sucks. My children having to go into the army sucks. But both sides are looking for justice, not just one. And to insist that the Palestinian view of what they want to walk out with is the only position of justice is, well, unjust.
Adding a post from mideastweb.org that elaborates on the issue of the petition/One Million Voices event vs. the claims against One Voice.
http://www.mideastweb.org/log/.....000631.htm
great article!
another even funnier part of his slandour campaign against the “other voice” was calling them “supporters of a one state solution” and “ISM activists”.
I am also happy that you became more critical of “peace intiative” that are just masking the occupation.
greets from Berlin
Dan, beer and cheese? That makes my German palate cringe
I wanted to ask, why is Shalom Auslander your literary hero?
BTW, Saul Friedlander has been awarded the German Book Fair’s Peace Prize. cf. http://www.dw-world.de/dw/func.....l-1573-rdf
personally, i’m quite relieved that palestinians did not have to endure a bryan adams concert. it must have been a shabak torture strategy from the 80’s forgotten in some drawer and finally about to materialize. phew!
Well Yossi, one just has to go to the other voice’s facebook group and you can see for yourself that more than one name is identifiable as a known ISM activists.
Several people involved in another voice are involved with ISM as well, but this doesn’t mean that ISM is “behind” Another Voice. What pisses me off about this One Voice response is that they act as though Palestinians are too stupid to determine what they support without outsiders convincing them. The document that they are now calling a poll was listed, before the bruhaha erupted, on their site as “one voice pillars.” The document has since been taken down and they have destroyed all reference to the pillars in the past few days and have introduced this new story that ISM used a poll on their website to distort the truth of what they were doing. Bullcrap. If you call something “pillars,” people are going to think you believe in them!
Hi there, I’ve had a look through their website – they do talk explicitly about the need to end the occupation- in fact it says that on the mandate. And I don’t see that they are equating suffering- if anything it’s quite refreshing to not see the consistent who’s right and who’s wrong argument throughout history but instead try to mobilise people around the fact that negotiations must start in a meaningful way, not just be paid lip service as with what’s happening in November.
You may have problems with the organisation’s founder but you can’t judge a 600,000 person strong organisation on his personality and remarks alone.
poolie, these pillars? that are clearly defined as a poll even in 2003? http://blog.onevoicemovement.o.....e/2004/06/
“OneVoice’s Pillars” (they’ve now been removed from the One Voice website) were represented during the last two weeks as central by none other than One Voice Founder and President Daniel Lubetzky on his own blog. Why should we not have believed that OneVoices’s Pillars represented their views on a settlement? At a minimum, Lubetzky is guilty of sowing confusion about his organizations’ positions.
FROM THE FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT’S BLOG
http://blog.peaceworks.net/200.....uncovered/
October 4, 2007
“the fact is that the ONLY solution out there is the Two-State-Solution embodied in the Clinton Parameters – and the OneVoice Pillars available at http://www.OneVoiceMovement.org/negotiate.”
http://blog.peaceworks.net/200.....palestine/
October 6, 2007
What are the contours of a two state solution? The answers are clearly outlined in the Clinton parameters, , same which Chairman Arafat endorsed in the Taba negotiations as he affirmed the path of the “peace of the braves.”
The answers are further enshrined in the OneVoice Pillars for Conflict Resolution, http://www.OneVoiceMovement.org/negotiate, CRAFTED WITH THE PARTICIPATION OF HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PALESTINIAN AND ISRAELI PEOPLE,
Wow–this goes way further down the rabbit hole than I’d previously imagined. Thanks for bringing that information to my attention Matt.
Oh dear matt, this is sad, you know i’m going to expose your rubbish on Harry’s Place so you come find other blogs and cut and paste your post where you think they won’t get answers. I guess i’ll just cut and paste my answer then.
I joined the organisation almost 3 years ago when it was very small because I was told, not that they were trying to define an answer to the conflict, but because they believed very much in the importance of empowering the process. I was told that they had worked on a series of questions which had taken the most general and basic points of Clinton/Taba/etc. and put them out on teh street to see if there was consensus on them. They had done this for 2 years, and not only had they not done it privately, they had sought to do it as publicly as they possibly could. It was a means through which to see whether the populations actually supported these things, or not. But now, they were going to concentrate on youth leadership development and civil society building with a view to provide a platform through which Israelis and Palestinians could play an active role in re-energising the peace process from the grassroots.
I think it’s fairly powerful to note that the Clinton Parameters, the Taba Agreement and the content of these questions, were they to be turned into the form of a statement, WOULD SAY DIFFERENT THINGS. THEY ARE NOT ALL THE SAME DOCUMENT AND DO NOT EMBODY ALL THE SAME EXACT ANSWERS. So the founder of the movement believes simultaneously in 3 different resolutions to the conflict, and, if I may chime in, I think that the Arab Peace Initiative is somthing worth working with after some negotiations. This makes us look kind of stupid, but i guess that’s because WE DON’T FOCUS OUR WORK OR ENERGIES ON CONTENT OF FINAL STATUS NEGOTIATIONS.
Now, i’ll tell you what is disingenuous, is people taking these questions, suggesting they are statements, THEN posting the one about inclusion of settlement blocks without posting the one about equal land exchange on any settlement blocks that were to be incorporated.
Now, i understand that you think you’ve ‘caught us out’ and exposed our fraud because you don’t understand the issues, so let me explain them.
Even if those questions were statements, and even if OneVoice secretly endorsed them, the following is still true…
In 3 days time, for the first time in the history of the conflict, mainstream nationalists on both sides were going to take to the streets of their respective communities to deliver this message to their leaders:
‘We, the people, have not done enough to support you. We are not here to dictate answers to you, but to tell you that we will stand by you if you are able to find mutually acceptable answers – and we want you to do all you can to find them.’
The coverage would have been incredible – with Yahoo! streaming the events live, live coverage from al Jazeera live, camera crews from BBC, CNN, etc. and ‘Echo’ events in 10 different places outside the Region.
The effect? It would have raised both pressure and support for leaders going into the November negotiations and beyond. It would have shown both populations that they can’t hide behind the excuse that there is no partner on the other side and would have de-legitimised hardline groups who are seeking to wipe out the other side.
It wouldn’t have mattered even if we had been blatantly lying about these questions, because they weren’t going to play any role in this event anyway.
Instead? Israelis think the Palestinians don’t want peace, the world thinks Palestinians are defined by extremists, everyone, anywhere, who says that the Palestinians can’t be worked with looks good, i quit my job and the occupation continues. Well done Poirot, great victory today.
Posted by: Jake Hayman at October 15, 2007 10:48 AM
Hey Jake and All,
Funny that those ten pillars keep popping up, even today, again!
http://www.engageonline.org.uk.....hp?id=1479
Its approach is iterative, parallel consensus building which has given 180,000 Israelis and Palestinians the opportunity to vote and comment on the ten most contentious aspects of the conflict – the issues which need to be resolved prior to a lasting peace settlement, and the issues which the elected representatives must keep in mind in order to represent their people. We know from One Voice’s work that 76% of both Israelis and Palestinians want a two state solution.
You may be interested to know that Erin Pineda, Communications Coordinator of One Voice Movement, stated the following in an email to me:
“The pillars are still at the core of who we are as an organization”
Hi Jake II,
Would you be willing to provide more of the information from that email?
I think this is the kind of thing that the public has a right to know.
As you can tell, Jake is claiming all over the internet that the pillars are irrelevant and that claims to the contrary are simply deceptive smears.
Matt
Jake Hayman needs to stop dissembling and just admit that OneVoice screwed up and wasn’t clear with many of the people they approached about what the group subscribed to. If you are so confident that the document was a poll and not ‘pillars’ (which is a strange thing to call a poll if you ask me) then why have you moved so swiftly to remove the document so no one can see what OneVoice’s critics were referring to in the first place? If OneVoice had come out and said, ok, we shouldn’t have called this document our pillars, we see how people might have taken it to mean something different from what we intended, but this isn’t what we intended and it shouldn’t keep our work from moving forward. Instead, you and Lubetsky have chosen to lash out at dedicated and hardworking supporters of Palestinian rights. You chose to call these people who work for an end to occupation, both with Israeli and Palestinian groups, extremists. I think that that is really sad. You may disagree with these people, but you certainly aren’t doing much to ‘empower the process’ if you alienate people who are so deeply involved in this work. You could have used this as an opportunity to win people over, or to change course slightly based on their experiences. But you labeled them and treated them like shit instead. Good going!
Sorry, folks, I’ve been reading it and watching it and you’ve got it off.
Pillars, poll, whatever it is/was/will be, isn’t meant to be a “do this, you government negotiators you.” It’s meant to be “see, this is a poll of our peoples and our peoples are rallying around these general concepts. Now sit down and talk and hammer out details and know that you have many citizens behind you for concessions, for stopping terror, for improving our futures.”
You can snark all you like about it not being what you in all your righteous indignation would like to see in the end, but in the end, if BOTH sides don’t sit down, and BOTH sides don’t see that the compromises that BOTH sides will have to make will bring peace, then ALL of us are up shits creek.
Your comments make it apparent that you’re interested in ONE side getting its points, ONE side getting “justice,” ONE side being full of righteous indignation that will send ALL of us up that creek, too.
Thanks. For nothing.
OneVoice’s Jewish supporters need to realize that they are not helping the Jews by mischaracterizing the problem and trying to fault both sides in an effort to shield Israel from reproach. What supporters of the pro-Israel ideology don’t realize (because they themselves seem to think that they hold the monopoly on righteous indignation) is that ONE side lives at the mercy of the other’s military and lawmakers. ONE side is rendered invisible by an apartheid wall and ONE side is getting its land stolen because the other side keeps protracting the peace process and gobbling up more and more resources. The problem is not extremism on both sides, the problem is the way Israel is treating its indigenous. You aren’t combatting anti-Semitism by denying this and it only makes it worse to pretend that ‘extremists’ are keeping the process from moving forward. The Israeli government’s refusal to implement a settlement freeze is the problem. And if they are so concerned about Palestinian extremists committing acts of violence against their citizens, then why do they keeping building homes for their civilians in the middle of Palestinian population centers? Telling Israel and it’s American supporters what they want to hear is not the way forward, we have to start telling the truth, no matter how painful it is for people who still believe the myths about Israel and Zionism. Sorry honey, but those leaders can negotiate and negotiate and negotiate and it won’t make any difference, because until Israel agrees to equality and power sharing, there will be pain and suffering both for the people you care about and the Palestinians.