Articles (MECR)

Stealing Success Tel Aviv Style

2012-01-30T09:41:00.003-05:00

By Philip Giraldi, AntiWar.com, January 28, 2010

A curious op-ed "The Tel Aviv Cluster" by the reliably neo-connish David Brooks appeared in the New York Times on January 12th. Brooks enthused over the prowess of Israel’s high tech businesses, attributing their success in large part to Jewish exceptionalism and genius, which must have provided the ultimate feel good moment for Brooks, who is himself Jewish. That Israel has a booming technology sector is undeniably true, but Brooks failed to mention other contributing factors such as the $101 billion dollars in US economic and military aid over the course of more than four decades, which does not include the additional $30 billion recently approved by President Barack Obama. American assistance has financed and fueled Israel’s business growth while the open access and even "preferential treatment" afforded to Israeli exporters through the Israel Free Trade Implementation Act of 1985 has provided Israelis with the enormous US market to sell their products and services. By act of Congress, Israeli businesses can even bid on most American Federal and State government contracts just as if they were US companies.

Brooks was characteristically undisturbed by the fact that American taxpayer subsidized development of Israeli enterprises combined with the free access to the US economy and government contracts eliminates jobs and damages competing companies on this side of the Atlantic. And there is another aspect of Israel’s growing high tech sector that he understandably chose to ignore because it is extremely sleazy. That is the significant advantage that Israel has gained by systematically stealing American technology with both military and civilian applications. The US developed technology is then reverse engineered and used by the Israelis to support their own exports with considerably reduced research and development costs, giving them a huge advantage against American companies. Sometimes, when the technology is military in nature and winds up in the hands of a US adversary, the consequences can be serious. Israel has sold advanced weapons systems to China that are believed to incorporate technology developed by American companies, including the Python-3 air-to-air missile and the Delilah cruise missile. There is evidence that Israel has also stolen Patriot missile avionics to incorporate into its own Arrow system and that it used US technology obtained in its Lavi fighter development program, which was funded by the US taxpayer to the tune of $1.5 billion, to help the Chinese develop their own J-10 fighter.

The reality of Israeli spying is indisputable. Israel always features prominently in the annual FBI report called "Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage." The 2005 report states, "Israel has an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States. These collection activities are primarily directed at obtaining information on military systems and advanced computing applications that can be used in Israel’s sizable armaments industry." It adds that Israel recruits spies, uses electronic methods, and carries out computer intrusion to gain the information. The 2005 report concluded that the thefts eroded US military advantage, enabling foreign powers to obtain expensive technologies that had taken years to develop.

A 1996 Defense Investigative Service report noted that Israel has great success stealing technology by exploiting the numerous co-production projects that it has with the Pentagon. "Placing Israeli nationals in key industries …is a technique utilized with great success." A General Accounting Office (GAO) examination of espionage directed against American defense and security industries described how Israeli citizens residing in the US had stolen sensitive technology to manufacture artillery gun tubes, obtained classified plans for a reconnaissance system, and passed sensitive aerospace designs to unauthorized users. An Israeli company was caught monitoring a Department of Defense telecommunications system to obtain classified information, while other Israeli entities targeted avionics, missile telemetry, aircraft communications, software systems, and advanced materials and coatings used in missile re-entry. The GAO concluded that Israel "conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any US ally." In June 2006, a Pentagon administrative judge overruled an appeal by an Israeli who had been denied a security clearance, stating, "The Israeli government is actively engaged in military and industrial espionage in the United States. An Israeli citizen working in the US who has access to proprietary information is likely to be a target of such espionage." More recently, FBI counter intelligence officer John Cole has reported how many cases of Israeli espionage are dropped under orders from the Justice Department. He provides a "conservative estimate" of 125 worthwhile investigations into Israeli espionage involving both American citizens and Israelis that were stopped due to political pressure from above.

Two recent stories that have been reported in the Israeli media but are strangely absent from the news on this side of the Atlantic demonstrate exactly what is going on and what is at stake. The first story confirms that Israeli efforts to obtain US technology are ongoing. Stewart David Nozette, a US government scientist who was arrested on October 19, 2009 in an FBI sting operation after offering to spy for Israel has been waiting in jail to go to trial on espionage charges. New documents in the case were presented in the Federal court in Washington last week. The documents confirm that Nozette was a paid consultant for Israeli Aerospace Industries (IAI) and it is believed that he passed to them classified material in return for an estimated $225,000 in consulting fees. Examination of his computer by the FBI revealed that he was planning a "penetration of NASA" the US space agency and that he was also trying to crack into other scientists’ computers to obtain additional classified material. Other documents demonstrate that he was cooperating with two Israeli scientists who were administrators with IAI, Yossi Weiss and Yossi Fishman. Nozette made several trips to Israel without reporting them, which he was required to do because of his high security clearance. The FBI reportedly also has incriminating letters and other documents that were obtained from the computer.

The second story relates to the pending sale of twenty-five F-35 fighter planes to Israel. The F-35 is one of the most advanced fighter planes in the world. The $130 million planes would be purchased with US military assistance money, which means they would effectively be a gift from the US taxpayer. But Israel is balking at the sale reportedly because it wants to install some of its own local content in the aircraft. The Pentagon has already made some concessions but is disinclined to grant approval for all the changes because to do so would require giving the Israelis full access to the plane’s advanced avionics and computer systems. Israel also wants to independently maintain the aircraft, which would also require access to all systems. It would be nice to think that the Pentagon wants to keep the maintenance in American hands to preserve jobs, but the Defense Department has never cared about US workers before when the issue is Israel, and the real reason for the standoff is that Lockheed-Martin and the Pentagon both know that Israel will steal whatever it can if it gains access. It would then use the technology to market its own products at a price below that of US defense contractors. The result would be a triple whammy for Uncle Sam: the expensive planes are given to Israel free, the technology is then stolen, and future sales vanish as our Israeli friends market their knock down versions of weapons systems reliant on the stolen technology.

So to David Brooks I would say that there is most definitely an economic surge taking place in high tech Israel, but it is less a miracle than the fruit of a long series of thefts and manipulations fueled by American tax money and the connivance of a Congress that is always willing to do favors for the country that it appears to love beyond all others. I’m sure most Americans would wish the Israelis well and would applaud the prosperity that derives from their own industry and inventiveness but it is also time to put the brakes on business as usual and to take the Israeli hand out of our pocket. I’m sure Brooks’ job is pretty secure and well paid, but many Americans are out of work and suffering, so let’s take some steps to protect our economy from the information thieves from Tel Aviv and keep our money and jobs over here.

Will Israel Attack Iran?

2012-01-28T16:08:00.004-05:00

By RONEN BERGMAN, January 25, 2012, The NY Times

As the Sabbath evening approached on Jan. 13,Ehud Barak paced the wide living-room floor of his home high above a street innorth Tel Aviv, its walls lined with thousands of books on subjects rangingfrom philosophy and poetry to military strategy. Barak, the Israeli defenseminister, is the most decorated soldier in the country’s history and one of itsmost experienced and controversial politicians. He has served as chief of thegeneral staff for the Israel Defense Forces, interior minister, foreignminister and prime minister. He now faces, along with Prime Minister BenjaminNetanyahu and 12 other members of Israel’s inner security cabinet, the mostimportant decision of his life — whether to launch a pre-emptive attack againstIran. We met in the late afternoon, and our conversation — the first of severalover the next week — lasted for two and a half hours, long past nightfall.“This is not about some abstract concept,” Barak said as he gazed out at thelights of Tel Aviv, “but a genuine concern. The Iranians are, after all, anation whose leaders have set themselves a strategic goal of wiping Israel offthe map.”

When I mentioned to Barak the opinion voicedby the former Mossad chief Meir Dagan and the former chief of staff GabiAshkenazi — that the Iranian threat was not as imminent as he and Netanyahuhave suggested and that a military strike would be catastrophic (and that they,Barak and Netanyahu, were cynically looking to score populist points at theexpense of national security), Barak reacted with uncharacteristic anger. Heand Netanyahu, he said, are responsible “in a very direct and concrete way forthe existence of the State of Israel — indeed, for the future of the Jewishpeople.” As for the top-ranking military personnel with whom I’ve spoken whoargued that an attack on Iran was either unnecessary or would be ineffective atthis stage, Barak said: “It’s good to have diversity in thinking and for peopleto voice their opinions. But at the end of the day, when the military commandlooks up, it sees us — the minister of defense and the prime minister. When welook up, we see nothing but the sky above us.”

READ more at
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/magazine/will-israel-attack-iran.html

Israel's silence on Iran is deafening

2012-01-28T16:06:00.004-05:00

by: John Lyons, Middle East Correspondent, The Australian

January 28, 2012 12:00AM

JUST before 10 am on Tuesday, something highly unusual happened. Seventeen foreign journalists were escorted into one of the most secure facilities in Israel - the Kirya military base in Tel Aviv.

When Israel is at war, this sprawling compound serves as the command centre.

We were taken into a secured room inside the main tower. Right on 10 o'clock, in walked one of the the most important figures in Israel's defence and security establishment.

We cannot name him, that was the condition of this rare briefing, but we can quote him as a "senior security source" or such like.

Some may see these briefings as further attempts to manipulate journalists.

Indeed, many of those in the room, from outlets including The New York Times, Reuters and the BBC, were in some sense cynical. The material presented was obviously authorised, not leaked documents that the IDF did not want published.

Inevitably, there was an element of spin to it all.

But there were also valuable insights into how Israel sees the changing Middle East and what it may be planning.

Perhaps the most important insight was the official's refusal to discuss Iran.

Iran's nuclear program is clearly the most urgent and serious challenge that Israel faces. The official presented us with a series of slides, one of which described Iran as "an existential threat" to Israel.

One journalist became irritated when the official would not take questions on Iran.

The journalist argued that if the official was going to say Iran was an existential threat then surely questions should be taken about it.

But one of the several military officers sitting in the room quickly announced that no questions would be taken on Iran - it was clearly too sensitive an issue.

The official who gave the briefing is likely to be engaged in a momentous decision in coming months about whether Israel launches military strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities.

The boasts by Iran's leadership that it will "wipe Israel off the map" give Israel a legitimate reason to fear Iran becoming a nuclear power.

As The New York Times noted recently, while the debate about sanctions continues "the centrifuges keep spinning".

One slide showed weapons movements around the Middle East. The map was based on Israeli intelligence assessments, and, like all intelligence assessments, they need to be taken with caution. But much of what they highlighted rings true.

The map showed a significant movement of weapons into Gaza. This is consistent with the view of one European country, as expressed recently to The Weekend Australian, that many weapons leaving Libya have been finding their way into Gaza through the Sinai in Egypt.

The Israeli official then discussed the region, country by country, and how Israel saw it.

Egypt: "Still under a military regime, but slowly moving towards democracy."

Despite the Muslim Brotherhood emerging as the big winners in the parliamentary elections, the Israeli military continues to deal directly with the Egyptian military.

The Sinai is increasingly falling under the control of Bedouin gangs, and is among Israel's biggest concerns.

Syria: President Bashar al-Assad is "bleeding to death".

Israel does not know what will replace the embattled President's regime and estimates more than 6000 civilians and up to 2000 security forces have been killed since the Syrian uprising began last March.

Israel is preparing for refugees on its border with Syria, which it will try to manage with UN officials in the demilitarised zone.

Lebanon: Hezbollah, which has "a significant military capacity", continues to consolidate power.

Iran: it is leading "the radical camp" and the source of many of the weapons finding their way into Gaza, particularly through Sudan.

Gaza: After two years of "relative quiet" Hamas, and even more so the Islamic Jihad, are increasing the number of rockets fired into Israel.

The official made clear Israel would have no hesitation in engaging in another Gaza war if "dragged in" by Hamas's continuation of rocket fire.

Israel's current assessment held there was currently "a low likelihood" of an "initiated" military campaign against Israel.

That is particularly significant: it means Israel understands that, despite Hezbollah having some 40,000 missiles in Lebanon near the border, it does not expect them to be used in the near future.

That may change should Israel strike Iran and Tehran urge Hezbollah, its Shia ally, to retaliate.

One of the most interesting features of the briefing was how low the Palestinian issue rates for Israel.

The official noted that the Palestinian Authority was doing "a good job" in security in the West Bank but, clearly, given the divisions between Hamas and Fatah, which rules the West Bank, Israel does not expect to be sitting opposite a united Palestinian negotiating team any time soon.

SOURCE: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/world-politics/israels-silence-on-iran-is-deafening/story-fn9hkofv-1226255662529

Letter to the Woodstock Times

2012-01-24T13:09:00.001-05:00

To the editor:

We recently attended the Modern Language Association conference in Seattle, where we took part in a number of discussions inspired by the Arab Spring. Throughout the conference there was a high level of excitement and of admiration for all the struggling, freedom-loving people of the Middle East and North Africa. This movement, carried out for over a year by the ordinary people of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and a number of other countries, including Syria and Palestine, has fired the imagnations of the world and helped spark a popular uprising against economic and social injustice in the USA. With these connections in mind, we returned to Woodstock with a renewed sense of purpose and solidarity.

Imagine our dismay, then, on opening the Woodstock Times to the diatribe by Susan Puretz against MECR, an organization of which we are proud members, and against anyone who dares criticize Israel while "neglecting" to speak out against the Assad regime in Syria. Ms. Puretz' attack is both inaccurate and misleading!

Her letter is inaccurate in claiming that MECR members do not care about the struggle against Assad. MECR members have protested and continue to protest the murderous brutality of the Syrian regime, just as we protest against all brutality and repression everywhere, whether in Syria, in Egypt, in Tunisia, or in Palestine or in the USA. The fact that we focus on the brutal and violent repression and killing of Palestinians, who are simply trying to live their lives in peace with justice, by the IDF and the Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories of Palestine, is logically and morally tied to the worldwide struggle for human rights.

Ms.Puretz is also misleading in that she relies on a specious line of argument, popular among unthinking "knee-jerk" supporters of the Netanyahu/Barak regime, which poses outrageous and false alternatives. The line that asks "Why don't you protest against ----- instead of criticizing Israel?' is a classic red herring. This is the logical fallacy that proposes we redirect our attention to something new away from the subject at hand. It also uses the related fallacy of the "excluded middle": either we support the Syrian people or we support the Palestinians. The middle position -- that we support both and equally criticize the Syrian and Israeli regimes -- becomes a non-possibility. The writer wants to force us up against the wall and into categories of her own making -- or rather of the making of Israeli propagandists over the course of the last generation. Ms. Puretz is consciously or unconsciously attempting to provoke us, while continuing to believe she is right!

This reminds us of a story of a husband who comes home early from work to find his wife in bed with another man. The suprised wife blurts out,"Why did you come home so early?" The husband furiously snaps, "Why do you have another man in our bed?" The wife calmly replies, "I asked you first...Don't change the subject!" In a sense, Israel and its supporters, like Ms. Puretz, ask the Palestinians, "Why are you so angry with us?"....While the Palestinians ask Israel, "Why are you illegally occupying our land, building walls and checkpoints,demolishing our homes, building new settlements ,confiscating our olive trees, and killing our people?" And Israel replies, "Don't change the subject, I asked you FIRST!"

To Ms. Puretz' arguments we say NO! They conceal the truth. The same UN to which Puretz refers has not only condemned the Syrian government. It has for over 40 years continued to call upon Israel to end its violent and illegal occupation of Palestinian land and to stop building settlements there in contravention of the Geneva Treaties. There is only one law for the weak and the strong, the oppressor and the oppressed. Moral indignation does not stop at the borders of Israel -- or at those of the United States, which has maintained a hands-off policy with regard to both the protestors in Syria and the Palestinian masses, while continuing to pour billions in money and weapons into Israel. Most of the world, including the best and brightest of our own country, recognizes these simple truths.

Perhaps Ms. Puretz should find out why. To us, it's a no-brainer!

Barry Fruchter Amber Rose members of Middle East Crisis Response (MECR)
Woodstock NY

New Book 'Palestinians In Israel' Explores The Contradiction Of The ‘Jewish And Democratic’ State

2012-01-22T14:32:00.001-05:00

by Ben White on January 21, 2012 24;mondoweiss.net

More and more, thediscrimination and repression faced by Israel’s Palestinian citizens issurfacing in the mainstream, through media reports and alarmed NGO briefings.The stories just keep on coming: this week, Arab Knesset Members like HaneenZoabi were accused of treachery, and threatened with expulsion from the Knessetand criminal proceedings (the ‘crime’ was to meet with the PalestinianLegislative Council speaker in the West Bank, a Hamas politician).

Then there was the HighCourt’s rejection of an appeal against the Citizenship Law which separatesPalestinian families where one spouse has Israeli citizenship and the other isfrom the Occupied Territories. Praise for the ruling came from hard-liners and‘liberals’ alike, and was explicitly framed as a victory in the battle tomaintain a ‘Jewish majority’.

The various laws andproposed laws that have emerged in recent years – like the targeting of Nakbacommemoration or the official legalisation of ‘selection committees’ inhundreds of communities – are laying bare a systematic pattern ofdiscrimination that has been present since 1948. From the years of militaryrule over Palestinian citizens (which did not technically end until 1966), tothe demolition of homes in an-Naqab (the Negev) in 2012, the aim has been thesame: to ensure Jewish privilege and control over the indigenous Palestinians.

The mainstreaming of acritique of the occupation – and in particular, the settlements, or the actionsin ‘Operation Cast Lead’ – has been undoubtedly beneficial, but has often beenaccompanied by an affirmation that Israel is, for all its ‘mistakes’, a beaconof democracy. This routine endorsement of Israel’s “democracy” goes hand inhand with a taboo on questioning Israel as a ‘Jewish state’, a juxtapositionthat points towards the tension in Western liberal support for a state ofaffairs many would consider appalling in other circumstances.

Israel only has a ‘Jewishmajority’ because of the expulsion and legislated dispossession ofPalestinians. Israeli policies with regards to land, housing, immigration, andbudgets, explicitly and implicitly favour Jewish citizens (and even Jewishnon-citizens) at the expense of Palestinian citizens (and those Palestiniansstill excluded from their homeland).

This is the reality I haveattempted to highlight in my new book, Palestiniansin Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracyhttp://palestiniansinisrael.wordpress.com/ (which I’m thrilled to say comeswith a foreword by MK Haneen Zoabi). This is what Israel advocacy groups don’twant to talk about: the truth behind the myth of a ‘Jewish and democratic’state, and how that contradiction is at the heart of the conflict.

Newspaper Editor: Israel Should Consider Assassinating Obama

2012-01-22T14:29:00.003-05:00

Andrew Adler, the owner andpublisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, a weekly newspaper servingAtlanta's Jewish community, devoted his January 13, 2012 column to the thornyproblem of the U.S. and Israel's diverging views on the threat posed by Iran.Basically Israel has three options, he wrote: Strike Hezbollah and Hamas,strike Iran, or "ordera hit" on Barack Obama. Either way, problem solved!

Here's how Adler laid out"option three" in his list of scenarios facing Israeli presidentBenjamin Netanyahu (the column, which was forwarded to us by a tipster, isn'tonline, but you can read acopy here):

Three, give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents totake out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vicepresident to take his place, and forcefully dictate that the United States'policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.

Yes, you read "three" correctly. Order a hit on apresident in order to preserve Israel's existence. Think about it. If I havethought of this Tom Clancy-type scenario, don't you think that this almostunfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel's most inner circles?

Another way of putting "three" in perspective goessomething like this: How far would you go to save a nation comprised of sevenmillion lives...Jews, Christians and Arabs alike?

You have got to believe, like I do, that all options are onthe table.

It's hard to tell whetheror not Adler is just some crank. But the Atlanta Jewish Times, whichhe purchased in 2009, appears to be a realcommunity newspaper. It was founded in 1925 and, according to Wikipedia, claims a circulation of 3,500 and staff of five. To judgefrom its web site, it's a going concern.

A nervous Adler told meover the phone that he wasn't advocating Obama's assassination by Mossadagents. "Of course not," he said.
But do you think Israelshould consider it an option? "No."
But do you believe thatIsrael is in fact considering the option in its most inner circles? "No.Actually, no. I was hoping to make clear that it's unspeakable—god forbid thiswould ever happen. I take it you're quoting me?"
Yes. "Oh, boy."
When I asked Adler why, ifhe didn't advocate assassination and didn't believe Israel was actuallyconsidering it, he wrote a column saying he believed that the option was"on the table," he asked for a minute to compose himself and call meback. He did a few moments later, and said, "I wrote it to see what kindof reaction I was going to get from readers."
And what was the reaction?"We've gotten a lot of calls and emails."
Nothing from the SecretService, though. Yet.

UPDATE: Adler has told JTA that he"regrets" the column and plans to publish an apology. Oh, and the Secret Service says it will "make allappropriate, investigative follow-up in regard to this matter," according to ABC News.
Source: Gawker, 1/20/2012,http://gawker.com/5877892/

Gaza Youth Hear About Israel Lobby’s Role

2012-01-22T14:27:00.002-05:00

by Yousef M. Aljamal on January 19, 2012, mondoweiss.net

Ali Abu Nima addresses CPDS via Skype Jan. 15, 2012

For the second week in arow, the Center for Political Development Studies holds a video link on therole of the Zionist lobby in US elections. Ali Abunimah, the founder of TheElectronic Intifada, joined Gaza activists via Skype and emphasized the reasonsfor this "unshakable" relation between Israel and the US, which isknown to Palestinians more than any other nation in the world.

"The reason of thiswould be briefly put up into two theories. Some people say Israel plays animportant role in U.S imperialism, in allowing it to control the Middle Eastand its resources. Meanwhile, there are other people (theory) that say thereare powerful organizations and networks that consider support for Israel veryimportant and they influence the politics of the United States throughelections and contributions to political campaigns to make candidates adopt toIsrael's position," he emphasized.

Still, America is a countryof institutions and it has its own political interests, so that no one can sayIsrael controls all walks of life there, or it gets its way to everything itwants.
"We have seen ahistorical battle in the United States over the role of Israel and the Israelilobby and it's focus on Iran more than Palestine, where there is a lot ofpressure from pro-Israel groups to take a very hard line towards Iran and evento launch a war against it. Some of these battles are taking place behind thescenes. There is a growing feeling in the United States that Israel is turninginto a burden and a problem for the United States. That’s why America isfavoring a diplomatic solution to this issue. The is an emerging idea thatIsrael and US interests are not identical and conflict with each other,"he added.

General David Petraeus wasquoted, saying the activities of Israel are making the position of the USharder. There is a conflict about the value of Israel to the United States, andthe Israel lobby is worried about this and they are fighting to maintain theidea that Israel and the United States have the same interests.

"Palestinians are fewin number, though they take an important place in the primary elections, whichasserts the role of the Zionist lobby. A candidate called Palestinians invented[people] while another went further by saying they never existed at all,"Abunimah clarified.

This happens while millionsof people in the US are jobless and the country is going through crisis. Someanalysts shed light on the unusual rise of the Republican nominee Ron Paul, whobelieves in pulling US forces out of military bases all around the world.

"The very unique andpublic thing about him is that he said he wants to cut aid to Israel to zero.What I think is that he is not going to be the Republican candidate and he hashis own reasons to believe in this. The message is that many voters voted forhim, though he says he wants to cut aid to Israel. They don't care enough aboutIsrael and this does not mean they are pro-Palestine," he continued."An indication that politics is changing in the U.S."

There has been anincreasing political marriage between supporters of Israel and extremeIslamophobia in the U.S., particularly after September 11th. They did theirbest to make use of the attacks to spread the Israeli propaganda.

"On September 12th,Benjamin Netanyahu, who was in opposition in Israel at the time, said to TNTnewspaper 'I think the attack was very good,' but he corrected himself later bysaying 'It's good for Americans to understand the terrorism we face,'"Abunimah noted.

"Islamophobia was verybeneficial to Israel in the short run, but in the long run, it will backfire onIsrael. The reason is that there is a change in the character of support forIsrael in the last 30 years. In the past, all parties, leftist or rightist,used to support Israel. Nowadays, things are changing," he disclosed.

"In the short run,this is not in our interest, for the world is turning to the right, but in thelong run, things will be in our favor, especially among young people in Europewho are pushing towards universal and open politics. They are interested inequality and understanding. More and more young people are attracted to thekind of politics that oppose this kind of domination and racism. We see that alot of pro-Israel groups in the US are worried about this. They teach youngpeople about Israel and organize trips to Israel to show how wonderful Israelis. The next election will bring the most Islamophobic and anti-Palestinianpeople. But later, things will change to the favor of Palestinians,"Abunimah added.

Abdel Aziz Duaik, Palestinian Parliament Speaker For Hamas, Reportedly Arrested By Israeli Soldiers

2012-01-19T21:11:00.002-05:00

RAMALLAH, West Bank — Hamas officials say the speaker of the Palestinian parliament has been arrested by Israeli soldiers.

A Hamas official said Abdel Aziz Duaik was arrested Thursday near Ramallah. He was speaking on condition of anonymity citing security reasons.

The Israeli military had no comment.

The Palestinian parliament has not functioned since Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007 from the rival Palestinian Fatah Party.

Since then the Western backed Fatah governs the West Bank while Hamas rules Gaza.

Israel, the U.S., EU and others list Hamas as a terror group due to its suicide bombings and other attacks aimed at Israeli civilians that killed hundreds.

Duaik was arrested along with other Hamas officials in 2006 after militants abducted an Israeli soldier. He was released in 2009.

Huffington Post 1/18/2012

U.S. Cancels Joint Missile War Games With Israel

2012-01-19T20:59:00.004-05:00

Israeli media is full of a major news story: that a major war games exercise planned for April which involved thousands of U.S. troops joining the IDF for missile exercises simulating an Iranian attack on Israel have been cancelled. This would’ve been among the most elaborate exercise the two countries had ever implemented. It would’ve involved 3,000 U.S. troops, Patriot missile batteries and naval warships and brought a U.S. admiral to Israel to witness them. The Jerusalem Post reports:

The drill was supposed to include the simulation of various missile defense scenarios with the objective of creating a high level of interoperability so that, if needed, US missile defense systems would be able to deploy in Israel and work with local defense systems during a future conflict.

The official version is that the exercise has been postponed till this coming summer. But it seems clear that they were cancelled. Now the question is why.

Did the U.S. cancel them to show displeasure to Israel? And if so, why? Does Obama know something about Israeli intentions we don’t know? Are plans underway to strike Iran? Is Obama seeking to show his displeasure? Or is he trying to soothe Iran by not going through with a highly provocative military exercise which would’ve placed thousands of U.S. troops in the heart of Israel as a show of solidarity with Israel in its crusade against Iran? Another related option being suggested in the Israeli media is that the U.S. is signalling its displeasure over the latest Iranian assassination by the Mossad. If this is the case, then the U.S. is saying that such black ops programs are a sideshow that achieve little and could serve as the catalyst to send the entire region into cataclysm.

Maariv adds that the reason involved:

“broad IDF operational considerations, including military preparations for achieving complex objectives.”

I don’t know if this means that Israel wanted them cancelled because it was preparing to attack Iran. Or because the IDF wants Iran to believe this.

Further, Naval Today reports that the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln is steaming from Thailand to join the two carrier groups already patrolling off the Iranian coast. Again, the question is–is this designed to pressure Iran and show it we mean business, up to and including an attack on its nuclear facilities? Some observers expecting a U.S. attack presume that in preparation we would require force redundancy in case Iran succeeded in disabling or sinking a U.S. carrier. Or is it designed to tell Israel that we will prevent an Israeli attack?

In addition, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey is due in Israel Thursday to continue pressure on Israel to tell us what its plans are concerning Iran. Or if Israel has already decided to attack, presumably he would be consulting with them about what would be involved and letting them know what the U.S. would or would not allow to happen.

Source: http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2012/01/15/u-s-cancels-joint-missile-war-games-with-israel/

Omertà, Mainstream Media-Style: The Oath of Silence When It Comes to Unfavorable News About Israel

2012-01-19T20:58:00.001-05:00

On Jan. 11, the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Economist Intelligence Unit released the results of a study of the security precautions taken by the 32 countries that possess nuclear materials able to fuel atomic bombs.

Later that morning, the New York Times Web site featured—briefly—a story on the study’s findings. The story appeared on page A6 of the next day’s print edition.

Noted reporter William J. Broad: “The study is full of surprises and potential embarrassments: for instance, Australia takes first place in nuclear security and Japan comes in at No. 23, behind nations like Kazakhstan and South Africa.

“The United States? It ties for 13th place with Belgium. Last place goes to North Korea,” Broad continued. Britain, with a security score of 79 out of a possible 100, came in top among “the nine countries known to possess nuclear arms.” The U.S. scored 78, Japan 68, Iran 46, Pakistan 41, and North Korea 37. (The lower the security score, the fewer precautions each country has in place.)

A New York Times reader wanting to know where Israel ranks, however, was out of luck. Not a word about the only nuclear-armed country in the volatile Middle East. For that one must go to the report itself—which, of course, we proceeded to do:

www.ntiindex.org/countries/israel/.

Turns out Israel earned a security score of 56, and ranked No. 25—like Japan, “behind nations like Kazakhstan and South Africa.” Moreover, it scored 0 (of 100) in the categories of “control and accounting procedures” and “nuclear security and materials transparency.”

So much for “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”

The Washington Report deems it fit to print the ranking and scores of all 32 countries surveyed:

RANK 1	COUNTRY Australia	SECURITY SCORE 94
2	Hungary	89
3	Czech Republic	87
4	Switzerland	86
5	Austria	85
6	Netherlands	84
7	Sweden	83
8	Poland	82
9	Norway	81
=10	Canada	79
=10	Germany	79
=10	United Kingdom	79
=13	Belgium	78
=13	United States	78
15	Ukraine	76
=16	Argentina	74
=16	Belarus	74
=16	Italy	74
=19	France	73
=19	Mexico	73
=19	South Africa	73
22	Kazakhstan	71
23	Japan	68
24	Russia	65
25	Israel	56
26	Uzbekistan	55
27	China	52
28	India	49
29	Vietnam	48
30	Iran	46
31	Pakistan	41
32	North Korea	37

“=” denotesa tie among countries.

"Price Tag" or Pogrom? West Bank Settlers Now Running Amok in Israel as Well

2012-01-19T14:31:00.003-05:00

By Jonathan Cook

The interior of the mosque in the Bedouin village of Tuba Zangariya in northern Israel was left charred and blackened in early October, its stacks of Qur'ans burned beyond recognition. On the outside walls, scrawled in charcoal, were the words "Revenge" and "Price tag." The extremist wing of the settler movement had left its calling card.

As part of their "price tag" policy—a euphemism for a campaign of terror—the settlers have for the past two years been intermittently setting fire to mosques in the West Bank. For much of the past decade, they have been mounting regular pogrom-style attacks against isolated Palestinian villages, beating the inhabitants, setting fire to fields, uprooting olive trees, killing livestock and poisoning wells. At this time of year, during the olive season, armed gangs of settlers roam the West Bank assaulting Palestinians trying to harvest their crops.

But this was the first time the settlers had torched a mosque in Israel. A few days later, two cemeteries—one Muslim, one Christian—were vandalized in Jaffa, a mixed Jewish-Arab town next to Tel Aviv. The phrases "Price tag" and "Death to the Arabs" were sprayed on the headstones.

The "price tag" policy originally was devised as a way both to punish Palestinians for attacks on the settlements and to deter Israel from enforcing the rule of law on the settlers. On the rare occasions when the Israeli authorities have done so—by, for instance, removing a caravan from one of the more than 100 unauthorized settlement outposts dotted across the West Bank, or by arresting a lawbreaker—Palestinian villages have suffered the consequences.

More recently, however, the settlers' attacks have been intended to penalize Palestinians for the smallest political developments in peace talks. The hard-liners, in particular, are so blinkered by their religious-nationalist fundamentalism that they have failed to grasp the reality that Israel's leaders, including Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, voided the peace process long ago.

It was almost certainly not a coincidence that the two attacks inside Israel came a short time after Mahmoud Abbas submitted an application for statehood to the United Nations, in defiance of both Israel and the U.S. The Palestinian Authority president raised the stakes on Palestinian statehood—and so did the settlers.

The attacks marked a dramatic escalation of a recent campaign by Jewish extremists to expand their low-intensity war against West Bank Palestinians to include Israel's 1.5 million-strong Palestinian minority. These latter Palestinians, descendants of those who remained on their land during the 1948 war, have Israeli citizenship—even if of a very inferior kind—and comprise a fifth of Israel's population (a higher percentage than that of African Americans in the U.S.).

The settlers' goal, according to analysts, is to generate a civil war, creating the momentum toward an apocalyptic confrontation that unites the Jewish population behind the settlers' vision of a Greater Israel by pitting Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line against the "Chosen people."

According to Jafar Farah, director of Mossawa, an Arab advocacy organization inside Israel, "They [the settlers] want us to react. Then they can claim that the Arabs are trying to drive the Jews into the sea, and that no political solution is possible."

Since Israel's disengagement from Gaza in 2005, disillusionment has grown among the extremist settlers, many of whom are convinced that they must intensify their struggle to stop further concessions in the peace process. The settlements, armed by the Israeli army for decades, are in a position to wreak havoc.

In recent years the most militant elements among the settlers have been increasingly focusing their energies on Palestinian Arab communities in Israel, with the intention of stoking tensions and provoking conflict. They have used a two-fold approach.

In Israel's half a dozen so-called mixed cities, where Jews and Arabs live in close proximity, even if usually in separate neighborhoods, religious extremists have been taking over areas within traditional Arab enclaves. Typically, they have begun by setting up a hesder yeshiva, a seminary where young Jewish men combine religious studies with military service. Effectively, the yeshivas are armed encampments within Arab neighborhoods. The settlers then seek to intimidate and drive out Arab residents so they can take over nearby buildings and gradually spread out, in a variation of the established Zionist tactic of the tower-and-stockade used by the first European Jewish immigrants to take over land in Palestine during the British Mandate.

But the settlers also have targeted some of the largest and most independent Arab towns in Israel. In recent years Baruch Marzel, one of the leaders of an ultra-nationalist group of settlers based in and around the West Bank Palestinian city of Hebron, has been leading provocative settler marches—with Israeli police protection—into Arab communities such as Sakhnin and Umm al-Fahm.

Sakhnin has a reputation as one of the most nationalist Arab communities in Israel, famous for its role in resisting a large state-organized land grab in the Galilee in 1976. In clashes the army killed six protesters, an event commemorated every year by Palestinians as Land Day.

Umm al-Fahm, meanwhile, is notorious among Israeli Jews as the hometown of Sheikh Raed Salah, leader of the increasingly influential Islamic Movement. For similar reasons, the city is the primary target of a plan put forward by Israel's far-right foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, to swap Arab areas of Israel for the settlements in the West Bank under a future peace deal.

In this regard, the Jewish extremists chose the locations of their latest attacks carefully. They selected two Palestinian-Arab communities in Israel that have the opportunity and possible incentive to respond to the settlers' provocation with violence. Both communities are also distinctive for being surrounded by Jewish populations that have recently become rabidly anti-Arab.

Militant settlers hoped they were throwing a lit match on to a bonfire.

By contrast, Tuba Zangariya is one of a few fervently "loyal" Arab communities in Israel. While many Bedouin were expelled during the 1948 war that created Israel, the tribes of Tuba and Zangariya were given an area next to Jewish communities as a reward for fighting alongside Israel's armed forces.

Deprived of jobs and facing the same discrimination suffered by the rest of the country's Arab minority, many young men there still serve, like their grandfathers and fathers, in the Israeli army. After the mosque attack, a community leader boasted to an Israeli reporter: "We were among the founders of the state of Israel."

But as news of the mosque's desecration spread, enraged youths burned government buildings, fired their army-issue rifles into the air and clashed with police, who responded with tear gas and stun grenades. The police claimed their tough approach was needed to stop the youths of Tuba from marching on to Rosh Pina and Safed, two Jewish towns only a few kilometers away.

Anti-Arab sentiments in Safed, in particular, have reached a boiling point under the town's chief rabbi, Shmuel Eliyahu, a municipal employee who has been leading a campaign to expel Safed's small Arab population, mostly students attending the local college. He has accused young Arab men of seeking to "corrupt" the town's Jewish women, and along with dozens of other rabbis signed a letter last year threatening reprisals against Jews who rented properties to non-Jews. There have been sporadic assaults on Arabs in Safed ever since.

The despoiling of the graves in Jaffa could have triggered a spiral of violence as well. A day after the attack, Molotov cocktails were thrown at a synagogue in the town.

Jaffa, once the commercial hub of Palestine, is now little more than a seaside suburb of Tel Aviv containing one of the most deprived Arab communities in the country. Most of the residents are descendants either of Palestinians forced out of their Jaffa homes at gunpoint in 1948 and corralled into a small neighborhood named Ajami, or of poor Palestinian laborers brought from the rest of the country to help build Tel Aviv.

Jaffa's Arab population, still penned up in Ajami and living precariously as tenants in neglected properties confiscated by the state decades ago, were brought to global attention in 2009 in an Oscar-nominated film called simply "Ajami." It portrayed the neighborhood as a breeding ground for crime and violence.

However, it did not show two further indignities currently being suffered by Ajami's Arab residents: a gentrification program that is demolishing areas of the neighborhood to attract wealthy Jews who prefer a beachfront residence to overcrowded Tel Aviv (see July 2008 Washington Report, p. 24); and the gradual infiltration of Jewish religious extremists, who have switched location from the settlements to Jaffa and other mixed cities.

In this pressure-cooker atmosphere, the graves' vandals presumably hoped they could fuel the mounting antagonisms on both sides of Jaffa's ethnic divide.
Fueling Antagonisms

Significantly, the attacks inside Israel suggested that militant factions among the settlers are now committed to a strategy that blurs the Green Line—the pre-1967 border between Israel and the occupied territories—in a way designed to make the citizenship status of Palestinians inside Israel irrelevant. More terror attacks on the minority can be expected.

An editorial in Israel's Haaretz newspaper noted that the settlers were exploiting the prevailing anti-Arab mood that has been generated both by two years of overtly discriminatory legislation from the Israeli parliament and by growing numbers of rabbis espousing trenchantly racist views. Reports of the arson attack on the mosque in Tuba Zangariya spawned anti-Arab graffiti across Israel.

The editorial also pointed out that such incitement and violence posed a severe challenge to Israel's professed democratic credentials and its image internationally. That is why Israel's political leaders, including Netanyahu, and its chief rabbis condemned the attacks with a haste and vehemence entirely missing from their reactions to Jewish terror aimed at Palestinians in the occupied territories.

The gauntlet thrown down by the settlers is directed mainly toward the security services, especially the Shin Bet internal intelligence agency. The police and Shin Bet have a woeful track record of solving crimes against Palestinians committed by the settlers, despite the increasing use of video cameras by Palestinians to record the attacks. The price tag campaign of recent years has come at almost no cost to the settlers.

The burning of the mosque in Tuba Zangariya neatly illustrated the double standards. A Jewish youth from a West Bank settlement was arrested a few hours after the attack, but released days later for lack of evidence. Meanwhile, the police arrested more than 20 youths from Tuba for firing their weapons into the air, and vowed they would be making many further arrests.

In September the Shin Bet claimed it was struggling to track down those responsible for the price tag attacks because they were religious zealots who had organized into a network of discrete terror cells to avoid infiltration and surveillance.

Yossi Melman, Haaretz's security correspondent, was dismissive of the reasoning: "The Islamic Hezbollah [in Lebanon] and Hamas organizations are also religious zealots. They, too, study their enemy, but nonetheless the Shin Bet and the intelligence agencies manage to infiltrate them and obtain accurate intelligence information about them."

The few Jewish extremists who had been arrested for attacks, Melman added, benefited from "the lenience of judges" and from "incompetence that appears to have been deliberate on the part of the police and the army."

A more probable explanation for the Shin Bet's failure is that its much-neglected "Jewish section," which investigates the settlers' security crimes and is overshadowed by a larger and better-funded "Arab section," draws many of its officers from among the ranks of the settlers.

The impunity granted the settlers is having serious consequences inside Israel, as even the Shin Bet has begun to notice. It has emboldened the extremists to widen their operations of late to include not only the Palestinian minority but also Israeli Jewish peace activists and, on a few occasions, Israeli soldiers.

A few days before the attack on Tuba Zangariya's mosque, a large group of West Bank settlers from Anatot, close to Jerusalem, assaulted and terrorized a group of left-wing Jews who had come to support a Palestinian couple trying to work their land. Many of Anatot's settlers work in the security services, and video shows police officers who were called to the scene standing by as the peace activists are beaten and some of the women sexually abused.

Despite its failure to trace the culprits of such crimes, the Shin Bet has warned that the most fanatical elements in the settler movement need restraining if there is not to be a rapid escalation of violence on both sides of the Green Line. In August it ordered 12 youths from Yitzhar, a notorious settlement close to Nablus, barred from the West Bank. A month later the government ignored the Shin Bet's advice to the Education Ministry to cut funding to Yitzhar's yeshiva, whose rabbis recently published a book advocating the murder of non-Jews, including children.

Because Israel's politicians so far have shown great reluctance to act against the militant settlers, their campaign of violence against Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line is sure to intensify.

--------------------------

Jonathan Cook is a journalist based in Nazareth and a winner of this year's Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His most recent book is Disappearing Palestine.

Source: http://www.wrmea.com/home/374-2011-december/10906-the-nakba-continues-qprice-tagq-or-pogrom-west-bank-settlers-now-running-amok-in-israel-as-well.html

Haaretz Publishes Fraudulent Ad Supporting Settler Price Tag Attacks with Forged Peace Activist Names

2012-01-19T14:28:00.001-05:00

There is a brewing media scandal inIsrael that has received scant attention. Let’s try to change that. Earlier this week, a fictitious settler group published an ad in Haaretzsupporting price tag attacks. One point they made in their support wasthe claim that price tag attacks are civil disobedience in the same sense thatIlana Hammerman’s group, We Do Not Obey,is. She is the activist who began a protest movement by drivingPalestinian mothers and children from the West Bank into Israel in order totake them to the beach, amusement parks, zoos, etc. For her efforts,she’s been rewarded by three police summonses for questioning including awarning of criminal prosecution. It is illegal both for Palestinians toenter Israel without proper permits and it is illegal for Israeli citizens tobring such individuals into Israel.

We Do Not Obey acts in ways that aretotally non-violent and designed to promote tolerance and peaceful co-existencebetween Israelis and Palestinians while price tag is a violent, abusive andillegal form, not of civil disobedience, but of hooliganism and even terror. Thevery comparison of the two is an act of outrageous chutzpah.

What is even more shocking about thead than the bogus logic of the argument offered in it, is the fact that the adpurported to be signed by settler women who support the price tag acts ofvandalism and defacement of Palestinian mosques, cemeteries, etc. It alsolisted the purported settlements in which each endorser lived. Inreality, every woman’s name included in the ad is a member of Ilana Hammerman’sgroup of peace activists. In other words, the individual who created thead engaged in an act of fraud and Haaretz abetted the fraud by accepting the adand asking no questions to verify the authenticity of those names. Nordid it verify the authenticity of the fake group which purported tosponsor the ad.

Further, after Haaretz discovered ithad been duped, it notified Hammerman that it would no longer accept any op-edpieces by her about her work with We Do Not Obey (as it had in the past). It appears that Haaretz, instead of blaming the person who perpetratedthe fraud, is washing its hands of Hammerman and her entire movement. Aclear case if there ever was one of blaming the victim. Instead ofshowing respect for fairness and freedom of speech, and apologizing for theirerror in helping defame these women, Haaretz takes a typically liberal approachand absconds from the entire controversy.

We now know who is the author of thefraud. He is Benny Katzover, a notorious settleractivist. Here is the audiotranscript of the interview in which he took credit for the ad. Amonghis recent claims to fame (or better yet, infamy) is an interviewhe published in a Chabad journal, claiming the Israeli democracy hadoutlived its usefulness and should give way to a state governed by Jewish law(“We didn’t come here to establish a democratic state”). Does anyonebesides me find it ironic (or possibly sociopathic) that a radical settler whorejects Israeli democracy defends price tag attacks as legitimate forms ofcivil disobedience?

We don’t know who paid for the$1,000-1,500 cost of the ad. Haaretz knows, but I doubt they’re going totell. A source I’ve consulted who is knowledgeable about the storybelieves that the funding came from either a settlement or a settler agency,which may mean that the State itself paid for the ad (either directly orindirectly). In fact, a statementon the group’s Facebook page declares the ad was likely paid for throughpublic funds. This would mean that this act of fraud was actuallyendorsed and paid for by a government entity and the taxpayers of Israel. Further, it would mean that public funds were used to endorse the acts ofhooliganism and lawlessness represented by the price tag movement. In theevent that this claim is true, it would mean that while Israel’s leaders arepublicly decrying price tag pogromism, other parts of the Israeli government orits public agencies are actually endorsing it. Does this surprise anyone?

It also shouldn’t surprise anyonethe government would smear Hammerman since her activism is considered a primeexample of delegitimization, the right-wing concept du jour. YuliEdelstein’s Hasbara ministry is charged with combatting delegitimization andEdelstein himself is a prominent settler leader. It wouldn’t be beyondthe realm of possibility that his agency could’ve played some role in theattack, though I’m still exploring this angle of the story.

The women of We Do Not Obey havebeen consulting an attorney to decide how to proceed. It’s ironic thatthe draconian proposed defamation law that may shortly pass the Knesset andbecome law would greatly aid these women in their pursuit of justice. Itwould allow them to personally win substantial financial compensation of up to$75,000 each (for 40 women) from Katzover without having to prove any financialdamage to them. The Israeli far-right devised this cockamamie law to useagainst the Israeli NGO and peace activist community. It never occurred tothem that it could be used against them as well by the Israeli left. That’s how smart these dullards are.

Source:http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2012/01/16/haaretz-publishes-fraudulent-ad-supporting-settler-price-tag-attacks-signs-names-of-peace-activists/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+richardsilverstein%2FZOfh+%28+Tikun+Olam-%D7%AA%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%9F+%D7%A2%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%9D%3A+Make+the+World+a+Better+Place%29

UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

2012-01-13T10:11:00.005-05:00

1. Settlements are illegal under international law as they violate Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits the transfer of the occupying power’s civilian population into occupied territory. This illegality has been confirmed by the International Court of Justice, the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention and the United Nations Security Council.

2. Seizure of land for settlement building and future expansion has resulted in the shrinking of space available for Palestinians to sustain their livelihoods and develop adequate housing, basic infrastructure and services. Settlement expansion plans have led to extensive demolitions of Palestinian homes and the forcible displacement of people.

3. The failure to respect international law, along with the lack of adequate law enforcement vis-à-vis settler violence and takeover of land has led to a state of impunity, which encourages further violence and undermines the physical security and livelihoods of Palestinians. Those protesting settlement expansion or access restrictions imposed for the benefit of settlements (including the Barrier) are regularly exposed to injury and arrest by Israeli forces.

4. Israeli civil law is de facto applied to all settlers and settlements across the occupied West Bank, while Israeli military law is applied to Palestinians, except in East Jerusalem, which was officially annexed to Israel. As a result, two separate legal systems and sets of rights are applied by the same authority in the same area, depending on the national origin of the persons, discriminating against Palestinians.

5. Continuing settlement construction, expansion and encroachment on Palestinian land is an integral part of the ongoing fragmentation of the West Bank, including the isolation of East Jerusalem. This fragmentation undermines the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, which is to be realized with the creation of a viable and contiguous Palestinian state alongside Israel.

AT THIS POINT I WAS ORDERED TO STOP SPEAKING

2011-12-13T09:27:00.000-05:00

TALK FOR THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES, DECEMBER 7, 2011 - SUNY Nassau Community College on Long Island

Mr. Chair, Mr. President, Members of the Board:

My name is Barry and I am addicted to the truth. I am a professor of English and coordinator of Jewish Studies.

I was raised in an atmosphere which had zero tolerance for lies and hypocrisy and maximum distrust of power. You see, we lived in a period of great tension in which J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, told us school children that there were communists among us and they looked just like you and me. But the message was redundant and unnecessary since we already knew that: they were our friends and relatives. And they suffered for their beliefs.

What, you may ask, would create this atmosphere of vigilance on all sides, those who tenaciously supported the existing order as well as those who tenaciously clung to the vision that that order would be overthrown to be replaced by pure economic and social democracy, a classless society?

The answer is that we took two different messages from the war which had ended just before our childhood, WWII. Those on the right gathered that the threat from Hitler had been the general threat of totalitarianism everywhere, of Big Brother, and that we were therefore obligated to eternal vigilance against the totalitarianism of our day, no matter what the cost. But those on the left ascertained that Hitler had come to power in the traditional capitalist manner: manipulating the buying public, buying cheap and selling dear. They focused on his method of using nationalism, ‚Äúservice,‚Äù and ‚Äúduty‚Äù to the Homeland to justify setting classes against one another and sparking a crusade against ‚Äúracial inferiors‚Äù which ultimately led to the genocide known as the Holocaust.

Hitler became the paradigm for all monstrous evil. But one thing all of us caught the gist of: Hitler demanded and got total control over the means of communication. [NOTE: AT THIS POINT I WAS ORDERED TO STOP SPEAKING AND SIT DOWN.] In his regime the media were reduced to puppetry; they were tamed parrots of the state, of the SS, of the Nazi Party. As for those who disagreed, they were quickly eliminated first by being objectified and then by being executed. The first step was the muzzling of free speech; all else followed. As Heinrich Heine had said a century earlier, ‚Äúwhere they burn books now they will someday burn people.‚Äù And so it was!

Members of the Board, we see the same first step being taken by the administration you have hired and rehired,the muzzling of today‚Äôs organ of free speech, email. Pres. Astrab tells us that the argumentative and unreasonable interchanges on the campus intranet are somehow connected with threatening and even criminal activity. Alas, absent any substantive proof, we can only view this explanation as an excuse for shutting us down, as the Reichstag fire was an excuse, as the staged Polish attack on the German border post was an excuse. And most of us now know that the ‚ÄúSaint‚Äù Oskar Schindler was the businessman who provided the props for the ‚ÄúPolish attack‚Äù escapade, which led immediately to the greatest war in history. Corporate greed, unless and until put aside in favor of humanity, can lead to this!

But threats to our basic liberties do not have to pass through Hollywood central casting. Those who seek to muzzle free and open discussion of the issues vital to our professional, personal, and civic lives do not have to dress in black or brown and wear swastika armbands. They can wear suits and speak the language of American corporate business. But when they act to cut our tongues out, the result is the same as if they had been wearing the swastika and giving the stiff-arm salute!

Thank you, Members of the Board. You saluted the American flag before starting your session, the flag that stands for freedom of thought, speech, press, and peaceful assembly. I know you will agree that these sacredrights should be upheld, by any means necessary! I salute them! I hope that you do too!

Barry Fruchter

No freedom in the land of false prophets

2011-12-02T11:28:00.002-05:00

I ask, how can the Jewish state find freedom as occupier?

Two occupations have eaten Israel where mosques burn and a faux Museum

Sits on desecrated Muslim tombs. They call it Museum of Tolerance, I call it

Muslim cleansing, killer of those deemed inferior.

False prophets, destroyer of 800.000 olive and citrus plants, subjugation.

Collective abuse, fishermen attacked likes vermin by Israeli killer boats.

Apartheid! Word we dare not whisper, write or speak.

Condemned by true believers, the Zionist story makes one shudder.

I’ve heard the racist words before, when Jews were driven from their homes and vilified.

Now I hear it all again from a big Rabbi contender for The Jewish Heroes competition.

Asked how Jews should treat their neighbors he said:

“The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way. Destroy the holy sites,

Kill men, women children and cattle.”

I remember another time, “No Jews Allowed.” Germany nearly succeeded.

Now false prophets decree Arabs not allowed, a Zionist story.

No Palestinians to live life with dignity for “We” are the chosen people.

It’s written in the Old Testament.

Lillian Rosengarten 11/29/11

The necessary elimination of Israeli democracy

2011-11-27T20:34:00.000-05:00

Haaretz

http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/week-s-end/the-necessary-elimination-of-israeli-democracy-1.397625

Published 08:20 25.11.11 Latest update 08:20 25.11.11

The necessary elimination of Israeli democracy

Haaretz publisher and owner Amos Schocken says there is a difference between the apartheid of South Africa and what is happening in Israel and in the territories, but there are also similarities.

By Amos Schocken

Speaking in the Knesset in January 1993, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said, "Iran is in the initial stages of an effort to acquire nonconventional capability in general, and nuclear capability in particular. Our assessment is that Iran today has the appropriate manpower and sufficient resources to acquire nuclear arms within 10 years. Together with others in the international community, we are monitoring Iran's nuclear activity. They are not concealing the fact that the possibility that Iran will possess nuclear weapons is worrisome, and this is one of the reasons that we must take advantage of the window of opportunity and advance toward peace."

At that time, Israel had a strategy - which began to be implemented in the Oslo accords, put an end to the priority granted the settlement project and aimed to improve the treatment of Israel's Arab citizens.

If things had gone differently, the Iran issue might look different today. However, as it turned out, the Oslo strategy collided with another, stronger ideology: the ideology of Gush Emunim [Bloc of the Faithful*], which since the 1970s, apart from the Oslo period and the time of the withdrawal from Gaza, has established the concrete basis for the actions of Israel's governments. Even governments that were ostensibly far removed from the Gush Emunim strategy implemented it in practice. Ehud Barak boasted that, in contrast to other prime ministers, he did not return territory to the Palestinians - and there's no need to point out once again the increase in the number of settlers during his tenure. The government of Ehud Olmert, which declared its intention to move toward a policy of hitkansut (or "convergence," another name for what Ariel Sharon termed "disengagement" ) in Judea and Samaria, held talks with senior Palestinians on an agreement but did not stop the settlement enterprise, which conflicts with the possibility of any agreement.

The strategy that follows from the ideology of Gush Emunim is clear and simple: It perceives of the Six-Day War as the continuation of the War of Independence, both in terms of seizure of territory, and in its impact on the Palestinian population. According to this strategy, the occupation boundaries of the Six-Day War are the borders that Israel must set for itself. And with regard to the Palestinians living in that territory - those who did not flee or were not expelled - they must be subjected to a harsh regime that will encourage their flight, eventuate in their expulsion, deprive them of their rights, and bring about a situation in which those who remain will not be even second-class citizens, and their fate will be of interest to no one. They will be like the Palestinian refugees of the War of Independence; that is their desired status. As for those who are not refugees, an attempt should be made to turn them into "absentees." Unlike the Palestinians who remained in Israel after the War of Independence, the Palestinians in the territories should not receive Israeli citizenship, owing to their large number, but then this, too, should be of interest to no one.

The ideology of Gush Emunim springs from religious, not political motivations. It holds that Israel is for the Jews, and it is not only the Palestinians in the territories who are irrelevant: Israel's Palestinian citizens are also exposed to discrimination with regard to their civil rights and the revocation of their citizenship.

This is a strategy of territorial seizure and apartheid. It ignores judicial aspects of territorial ownership and shuns human rights and the guarantees of equality enshrined in Israel's Declaration of Independence. It is a strategy of unlimited patience; what is important is the unrelenting progress toward the goal. At the same time, it is a strategy that does not pass up any opportunity that comes its way, such as the composition of the present Knesset and the unclear positions of the prime minister.

The term "apartheid" refers to the undemocratic system of discriminating between the rights of the whites and the blacks, which once existed in South Africa. Even though there is a difference between the apartheid that was practiced there and what is happening in the territories, there are also some points of resemblance. There are two population groups in one region, one of which possesses all the rights and protections, while the other is deprived of rights and is ruled by the first group. This is a flagrantly undemocratic situation.

Since the Six-Day War, there has been no other group in Israel with the ideological resilience of Gush Emunim, and it is not surprising that many politicians have viewed that ideology as a means for realizing personal political ambitions. Zevulun Hammer, who identified this ideology as the way to capture the leadership of the National Religious Party, and Ariel Sharon, who identified this ideology as the way to capture the leadership of Likud, were only two of many. Now Avigdor Lieberman, too, is following this path, but there were and are others, such as the late Hanan Porat, for whom the realization of this ideology was and remains the purpose of their political activity.

This ideology views the creation of an Israeli apartheid regime as a necessary tool for its realization. It has no difficulty with illegal actions and with outright criminality, because it rests on mega-laws that it has adopted and that have no connection with the laws of the state, and because it rests on a perverted interpretation of Judaism. It has scored crucial successes. Even when actions inspired by the Gush Emunim ideology conflict with the will of the government, they still quickly win the backing of the government. The fact that the government is effectively a tool of Gush Emunim and its successors is apparent to everyone who has dealings with the settlers, creating a situation of force multiplication.

This ideology has enjoyed immense success in the United States, of all places. President George H.W. Bush was able to block financial guarantees to Israel because of the settlements established by the government of Yitzhak Shamir (who said lying was permissible to realize the Gush Emunim ideology. Was Benjamin Netanyahu's Bar-Ilan University speech a lie of this kind? ). Now, though, candidates for the Republican Party's presidential nomination are competing among themselves over which of them supports Israel and the occupation more forcefully. Any of them who adopt the approach of the first President Bush will likely put an end to their candidacy.

Whatever the reason for this state of affairs - the large number of evangelicals affiliated with the Republican party, the problematic nature of the West's relations with Islam, or the power of the Jewish lobby, which is totally addicted to the Gush Emunim ideology - the result is clear: It is not easy, and may be impossible, for an American president to adopt an activist policy against Israeli apartheid.

Legalizing the illegal

Because of its inherent illegality, at least in democratic terms, an apartheid regime cannot allow opposition and criticism. The Gush Emunim ideology is obliged to eliminate the latter, and to prevent every effort to block its activity, even if that activity is illegal and even criminal, meant to maintain apartheid. The illegal activity needs to be made legal, whether by amending laws or by changing their judicial interpretation - such things have occurred before, in other places and at other times.

Against this background, we are now seeing the campaign of legislation against, and the unbridled slandering of the Supreme Court, against human rights organizations and against the press, as well as the so-called boycott law, which is aimed at preventing the possibility of dealing with Israeli apartheid in the way South African apartheid was dealt with. It is against this same background that legislation has been submitted that is directed against the Arab citizens in Israel, such as the Loyalty Law and the proposal for a "Basic Law of Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People." It is against this background that a campaign of incitement and intimidation is being waged against the necessary and justified critique being voiced by members of academia.

The Supreme Court, which permitted the settlement project and effectively collaborated with the Gush Emunim ideology, has now become an obstacle that needs to be removed - in the eyes of those who still adhere to that ideology - primarily because the court refuses to recognize the possibility of settling on privately owned Palestinian land and did not overturn the government decision to evacuate the settlements in the Gaza Strip. Because the land belongs to the Jews by divine decree and history (from this perspective, there are similarities between Gush Emunim and Hamas ), there is no choice but to elect to the Supreme Court justices who live on Palestinian land, possibly private land, and those who understand that there is no such thing as "land under private Palestinian ownership."

Similarly, this line of thinking goes, the Supreme Court's interpretation of human rights laws also requires its elimination in its present format. Judgments such as those relating to the Kaadan family (allowing an Arab family to build a home in a Jewish community ); the selling of Jewish National Fund land to Arab citizens of Israel; the amendment to the Citizenship Law (no ruling has yet been handed down, but there seems to be a possibility that a majority of justices will rule it illegal ); the opening of a highway to Palestinian traffic - all these rulings conflict with essential elements in Gush Emunim ideology: the discrimination between Jews and Palestinians (in Israel and the territories ) and the deprivation of the Palestinians' rights, which transform them into second-class people, absentees or, best of all, refugees.

Does an Israel of this kind have a future? Over and beyond the question of whether Jewish morality and the Jewish experience allow such circumstances to exist, it is clear that this is a flagrantly unstable and even dangerous situation. It is a situation that will prevent Israel from fully realizing its vast potential, a situation of living by the sword - a sword that could be a third intifada, the collapse of peace with Egypt and a confrontation with a nuclear Iran. Yitzhak Rabin understood that.

(*)Gush Emunim

Gush Emunim ( Block [of the] faithful) is an Israeli messianic and political movement committed to establishing Jewish settlements in the West Bank (biblical Judea and Samaria). The movement sprang out of the conquests of the Six-Day War in 1967, though it was not formally established as an organization until 1974, in the wake of the Yom Kippur War. It encouraged Jewish settlement of the land Judaism maintains God gave to the Jewish people, according to the Torah.

To the Editor:

2011-11-15T10:26:00.000-05:00

Are the Jewish State of Israel and the American Jews who blindly support Israel contributing to the rise in anti-semitism (recently reported by the Anti-Defamation League)? It is sometimes difficult, even for those of us who are Jewish, to make a clear distinction between Israel and Jewishness. It is, after all, not simply Israel, but it is the "Jewish" State of Israel. Israel's behavior is brutal; engaging in land theft, assassination, torture, and human rights violations. Israel's behavior is belligerent; establishing aggressive, illegal settlements, and refusing to negotiate. Israel's behavior is bellicose; threatening to attack Iran (while Israel maintains 200--400 nuclear warheads in it's own arsenal). Clearly, world opinion expressed through the UN rejects and condemns Israel's illegal and immoral behavior. Unfortunately, many American Jews and organizations continue to support Israel's self-destructive path towards delegitimization, isolation, and potential extinction. With American Jews cheerleading Israel's flagrant violations of human rights and thuggish suppression of Palestinians and those who would help Palestinians (like the Freedom Boats to Gaza) is it any wonder that the specter of ugly and dangerous anti-semitism and anti-Jewish sentiment is on the rise?

Eli Kassirer

Letter to a friend

2011-10-20T12:15:00.000-05:00

I absolutely saw no antisemitism in the Freedom Plaza "Stop the Machine" occupation and actions in Washington DC or in the Occupy Wall Street actions Saturday in NYC. I certainly would have been appalled had I witnessed any. I have absolutely zero tolerance for that kind of shit, as do my friends and colleagues in progressive causes.

I became aware yesterday, however, of a conservative link http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/wall-street-protests-antisemitism/2011/10/18/id/414817?s=al&promo_code=D48A-1 documenting some instances of antisemitism with the Occupy movements around the country. Some of the instances featured in that link are indeed troublesome--even disgusting (harassing a Jewish person, for example), but I personally saw nothing of the sort.

I will say that a couple of the instances on that link that are labeled antisemitism I would not label such: support for Palestinians in the West Bank or in Gaza, support for the flotillas to Gaza, denunciations of aggressive, expansionistic Israeli Zionist policies (such as the expanded Jewish settlements in the occupied territories and/or the demolition of Palestinian homes). I believe it is possible to denounce such inhuman policies, to be very critical of the Zionist project, without being antisemitic. (I refer you to an interview with a former Israeli Minister of Education for insights about the glib accusations of antisemitism in http://flagindistress.com/2011/09/former-israeli-minister-of-education-shulamit-aloni-discusses-how-to-use-the-charge-of-antisemitism/>http://flagindistress.com/2011/09/former-israeli-minister-of-education-shulamit-aloni-discusses-how-to-use-the-charge-of-antisemitism

I am deeply troubled by the clearly antisemitic instances featured in the conservative newsmax link in my second paragraph, and I would like to know more about it. What have you seen that led you to write your note about the "number of anti-Semites"? Though I have not seen such ugly things myself, I do not doubt their possibility. That said, I have my suspicions when or if the source of these accusations are Fox News or Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh or other such.

I was part of an action at the Air and Space Museum in DC where a provocateur stirred up trouble (pushing a museum guard), making it seem that we are not as nonviolent as we claim. I've heard of several other cases of provocateurs (a la Andrew Breitbart) infiltrating us. I would not be surprised (and, of course, would be relieved) if the truly antisemitic instances were actually acts of provocateurs.

That said, I acknowledge that we Wall Street Occupation protestors might very well attract ugly "allies" in our ranks. I recently unfriended a Facebook "friend" in Egypt (whose comments about the plight of the Palestinians I had liked) after I learned that a "book" he called his inspiration was the fraudulent and forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The original clip of the Minister of Education interview had comments that were disgusting (such as that Hitler didn't finish the job), and I had to find a way to put the very valid interview on my blog without attaching those comments. If ever I encounter any such an "ally," I will be sure to confront him or her.

I lend my support to a local group dedicated to inform people about the Palestinian plight and to counter the overly weighted support our country gives to Israeli policies right-or-wrong: the Middle East Crisis Response http://www.mideastcrisis.org, and I hope you don't mind that I have copied our correspondence with some of my friends in that group. Perhaps they have some insights into this problem of attracting ugly "allies" or of the complete story behind reports of antisemitism.

Thanks for your note and for your valid concerns, Annie. Please keep me posted with documentation about incidents that truly besmirch our good cause.

Your friend,
Allan

Humanitarian crisis in Gaza

2011-07-18T10:54:00.000-05:00

To the Editor:

For many years Israel has intentionally been creating a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Israel denies this but the suffering has been documented by Amnesty International, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, UNRWA (UN Relief Works Agency), CARE, SAVE the CHILDREN (UK) and others. Many people living in Gaza have no electricity, medicine, food or water. Over the years the mass destruction, death and suffering inflicted by Israel upon the captive population of Gaza would not have been possible without US weaponry and US foreign aid (paid for by your tax dollars). In the West Bank of Palestine house demolitions, land theft, and attacks by Israeli Defense Forces occur regularly.

Israel and her supporters do not want this ugly truth (or others) to be exposed and carefully manipulate politicians at home and abroad, like successfully pressuring the Greek government to scuttle the humanitarian Freedom Flotilla before it set sail to Gaza. Unfortunately, Israelís callous and brutal behavior and apartheid policies towards the destitute and disenfranchised Palestinians are causing much of the world to question the legitimacy of the state of Israel. For long term peace and stability Israel must cease her inhumane and self-destructive policies and embrace a course which will allow both Israelis and Palestinians to "stay human."

Eli Kassirer

What issues are we missing?

2011-07-12T09:12:00.002-05:00

Dear editor:

The articles in the Woodstock Times are more and more feeling like a kind of PR for our local Chambers of Commerce-- (pumping up the Playhouse and Shandaken's eateries in the last issue for example.) Why can't we expect some authentic journalism in our weekly paper? We already know Woodstock's radio station is doing "international" rock muzak and couldn't give a hoot about anything of consequence in our area.

However up the road there exist some pretty impressive journalism models. There are two new radio stations (WIOX Roxbury and WGXC in Catskill/Hudson) which take their communities quite seriously. The Catskill Mountain News is doing world class research into local issues covering the local environment with responsible reporting in depth.

What issues are we missing? Well, fracking for one. Does anyone in Woodstock want to know the status of local leases and the position of the DEC and the NYS forestry service? Or what about our local legislators? What is their position on fracking? The New York Times took fracking quite seriously with extensive FOIA work and a comprehensive look at the economics of what some have called the "Enron of the environment". And how about Round Up? Recent reports indicate that the ubiquitous herbicide has caused birth defects and cancer in lab animals. Why is it being sprayed copiously next to the tourist rail tracks and our state highways-- often just a few inches away from reservoir feeder streams.

And there is real international news in which Woodstockers are a crucial element. This story has made headlines from China to Paris to Johannesburg. The US Boat to Gaza was organized by Woodstock citizens. Three of our neighbors have put their lives on the line to stand up for justice in the Middle East: Richard Levy, NIck Abramson and Gail Miller have been on the boat and have been active in the actions with include hunger strikes and attempts to run the blockade enforced by Greek officials doing the bidding of Israel and the U.S. Woodstock and Saugerties residents Jane Hirshman, Laurie Arbeiter and Helaine Meisler are key support persons in Greece for this action.

There is no community of this size in the United States that has sent so many people in the defense of Palestinian rights. And this is not newsworthy?

For shame,
DeeDee Halleck

Local video: Why 9/11?

2011-06-26T09:30:00.001-05:00

Why 9/11?

This video was shot by Greg DeSylva, local activist living in Rhinebeck, NY.

Imagine yourself driving to work

2011-06-06T10:52:00.000-05:00

Imagine yourself driving to work, and instead of the quick 10, 20, 30, or even hour long commute, it took you several hours. Often you aren’t able to make it to work because you have to pass through checkpoints where security has the right to arbitrarily deny you passage. Imagine yourself as a college student unable to complete your education because you can’t get to school on a regular basis because of these same checkpoints. Imagine that you or a loved one has a medical emergency, and you or your loved one dies because you aren't allowed through the checkpoint. Imagine yet again, being a farmer who has a truck of produce to sell and you can’t because you have had to sit for hours at the checkpoint and your harvest has rotted in the heat of the day. Or imagine yourself as another farmer who always had easy access to your fields, but now you have to walk hours to get to an opening in a separation wall that has been built. Often, after you have walked for hours, you get to an opening and it has been arbitrarily closed for the day, and you have to go back home, unable to tend your land. How would these situations thwart and affect your physical and mental health, the ability to live a full life, and your society as a whole? These are some of the hardships faced on a daily basis by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The ability to lead a life - go to school or work, farm your land, even visit family in another town, are civil rights that have all been strictly curtailed and denied to Palestinians by the Israeli government. A government supported by our government and our tax dollars despite flagrant violations of human rights and international laws.

Alison Francis

To the Editor:

2011-05-01T20:42:00.002-05:00

Most Americans want millionaires and corporations to pay their fair share of taxes. We want universal health care, affordable education and housing, Social Security, and Medicare. Americans want clean renewable energy and safe, healthy food. We want freedom and liberty. We donít want endless wars, hydro-fracking, bailouts of big banks, or fat cat lobbyists dictating government policy. Reliable surveys support all of the above statements.

What do we get? Tax cuts for the rich and gaping tax loopholes for corporations. Skyrocketing health costs and 40 million without health insurance. Foreclosures galore and attacks on Social Security and Medicare. We get endless wars bankrupting us fiscally and morally. We get oil spills, nuclear leaks, GMO frankenstein foods, fracking, drilling and extreme weather from climate change. We are spied upon, lied to, frisked at airports, and subject to assassination by Presidential decree because of the so called ìwar on terror.î

We canít have what we want because the USA is an occupied territory. It is occupied by a military/industrial/corporate ìpower eliteî which is driven by radical greed and an insatiable appetite for profits and power. An occupied people never get what they want. Just ask the Palestinians.

The Palestinian people have been occupied militarily by Israel for decades. There are lots of things the Palestinians want; like enough food, water, electricity, and fuel to survive from day to day. They would like their stolen land and homes back, and to be free from attacks, abuse and daily humiliation by the Israeli Defense Forces and violent Jewish settlers. Palestinians want their freedom and many Israelis support this. Nearly the entire world wants this (look at the UN votes critical of Israel). So why canít they get what they want?

For the same reason we canít! The same powerful interests that stifle the true aspirations of the American people are working to maintain the status quo in Palestine/Israel. The $3 Billion dollars of US taxpayer money that goes to Israel each year is one way our military/ industrial complex exerts influence over the Middle East. The tentacles of occupation are crushing all of us in a death grip from which we must all struggle to break free.

Eli Kassirer New Paltz, NY

Packaging the Revolution: Muslims' Communications Lessons Post 9/11

2011-04-01T12:17:00.000-05:00

Packaging the Revolution: Muslims' Communications Lessons Post 9/11
ZMag April 2011

By Jacqueline O'Rourke

Almost two months into what is being packaged as the "Arab" revolution, the international community is struggling to counteract the messages of an historical communication success for predominantly Muslim communities. Both the protests in Tunisia and Egypt demonstrate a media savvy on the part of a new generation of Muslims, which clearly has learned lessons of the past decade when it comes to positioning any protest originating in Muslim majority communities. All attempts, by both Arab dictators and early attempts by American and European media, to label the revolution "Islamic" have failed, thanks to the youth who initiated the movement. This generation grew up in the rhetoric of the "war on terror" and are familiar with the tenuous categorization of "good" and "bad" Muslims - the" bad" ones being responsible for the 9/11 attacks and the "good" ones being anxious to disassociate themselves from the "bad" ones. These young people are aware that the binary of traditional Orientalism - Islam versus the West - has been replaced by a new binary of "good" and "bad" Muslims and that the "good" Muslims, represent liberalism, moderation and compatibility of Islam with Western modernity. They are well aware that throughout periods of high alert, Islam and Muslims are routinely denigrated and stereotyped as enemies of freedom and civilization, victimized as potential holders of a threatening ideology, and even tortured to satiate the public need for perceived security. They also know that diverse players, from neo-cons to liberals to leftists, fragment Islam into convenient differentiations between various "types" of Muslims: the progressives, moderates, fundamentalists, neo-fundamentalists, and jihadists. They have lived in a world where simply being Muslim has become a highly contentious and visibly political stance. And even more important than all of these lessons, they know that the binary between "good" and "bad" Muslim is highly unstable and that the objectives of "good" Muslims are often quickly appropriated for both neo-liberal imperialist and leftist agendas. What they must be careful to remember, however, a lesson etched in recent Arab history, is that an ally today can become an enemy tomorrow.

This communication strategy of the youth movement began with a conscious decision to articulate a revolution by Muslim masses in secular language, contrary to various movements which pre-dated it which often expressed secular political ambitions in religious language. By positing the uprisings as revolutions rather than jihad, Muslims are demonstrating that to be Muslim does not necessarily mean to aspire to live in a theocratic state. They are also demonstrating, however, that being Muslim is actually an impetus to rise up against oppression which can be articulated in the indigenous vocabulary and lived experience of millions of Muslims across the region. This new communications plan is a direct attempt to create a counter-narrative to the predominant one which has dominated Western discourse for the past decade. That narrative runs roughly like this: The Muslims are jealous of the freedom and technological advantages of the West. Their society has been in decline after their scientific advances of medieval Europe. Instead, they try to use the West's technology against itself. Whether airplanes, viruses, or chemicals, Muslims have appropriated science for the purposes of terrorism. Consider for example Thomas Friedman's post 9/11 assertion that

"äterrorists can hijack Boeing planes, but in the spiritless monolithic societies they want to build, they could never produce them. The terrorists can exploit the U.S. - made Internet but in their suffocated world of one God, one truth, one way, one leader, they could never invent it" (Longitudes and Attitudes 46).

These days, however, even Friedman's tune has changed slightly as he writes admirably of the insatiable spirit of youth who have used social networking to inspire a revolution. At the same time, there is something ominous in this admiration which is exemplified in Friedman's recent New York Times op-ed in which he poses the major challenge to youth is to deconstruct the meta- narrative of the region, which he argues, of course, is false:
"That narrative says: 'The Arabs and Muslims are victims of an imperialist-Zionist conspiracy aided by reactionary regimes in the Arab world. It has as its goal keeping the Arabs and Muslims backward in order to exploit their oil riches and prevent them from becoming as strong as they used to be in the Middle Ages - because that is dangerous for Israel and Western interests.'

"Today that meta-narrative is embraced across the Arab-Muslim political spectrum, from the secular left to the Islamic right. Deconstructing that story, and rebuilding a post-1979 alternative story based on responsibility, modernization, Islamic reformation and cross-cultural dialogue, is this generation's challenge. I think it can happen, but it will require the success of the democratizing self-government movements in Iran and Iraq. That would spawn a whole new story".

The ominous echo in Friedman's analysis is his contention that this meta-narrative is paranoid and should be replaced by a mantra of neo-liberal ideology, which, conveniently, will not challenge American and Israeli interests.

Likewise,the left has been particularly euphoric with the youthful secular messaging of the "Arab" revolution and is hopeful that it can be appropriated to universally invigorate the left. For example,Hardt and Negri, in a recent article in The Guardian, place hope that the Arab revolutions will be this generation's Latin American struggle, as " a laboratory of political experimentation", a kind of "ideological house-cleaning, sweeping away the racist conceptions of a clash of civilizations that consign Arab politics to the past". They argue:
"This is a threshold through which neoliberalism cannot pass and capitalism is put to question. And Islamic rule is completely inadequate to meet these needs. Here insurrection touches on not only the equilibriums of North Africa and the Middle East but also the global system of economic governance".

Hardt and Negri are right to note that the revolutions rejuvenate some basic principles of the left which had been discarded as outdated: principles of justice and universalism and popular power, but they ignore that these principles which they praise are the very foundations of Islam itself, the cultural foundation from which these revolutions are being generated. This nostalgia to migrate the nature of the revolution into a communist agenda betrays a need, not to understand how Islamic societies harbor the same instincts toward social justice as the left, but to leave Islam out of any serious inquiry into both the reason behind the revolution and the future of its achievement.

Slavoj Zizek is, perhaps, a noted exception, though his ideas on Islam are often inconsistent. Zizek's Iraq: the Borrowed Kettle, which Zizek admits is not a book about Iraq, was reminiscent of Baudrillard's The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. In fact, Zizek used Iraq to elaborate his Lacanian theories, while in his post 9/11 Welcome to the Desert of the Real, he saw an opportunity for radical Islam to be articulated into a socialist project:
"This means the choice for Muslims is not either Islamo fascist fundamentalism or the painful process of Islamic Protestantism which would make Islam compatible with modernization. There is a third option, which has already been tried - Islamic socialism. The proper politically attitude is to emphasize, with symptomatic insistence, how the terrorist attacks have nothing to do with real Islam, that great and sublime religion- would it not be more appropriate to recognize Islam's resistance to modernization? And, rather than bemoaning the fact that Islam, of all the great religions, is the most resistant to modernization, we should, rather, conceive of this resistance as an open chance, as "undecidable": this resistance does not necessarily lead to Islamo fascism, it could also be articulated into a socialist project. Precisely because Islam harbors the "worst" potentials of the Fascist answer to our present predicament, it could also turn out to be the site for the "best" (133-4).

This plea for a type of Islamic socialism remains consistent in Zizek's work on the Arab revolution, from his opinion editorial in The Guardian to his recent appearance on Riz Khan's show on Al Jazeera. Ironically the country where so called Islamic socialism has been tried, Libya under Gaddafi's Green Book program, is now very much under attack.

In fact, the discussion which took place on Riz Khan's Al Jazeera show, where both Tariq Ramadan and Slavoj Zizek offered their insights is representative of the lenses being used to interpret this revolution and steer it away from the reality that it is a revolution by Muslims, but not necessarily Islamists. Ramadan carefully argued that the revolution is not ideologically inspired and that the we must be cognizant of the reality that Western power wants changes in the region which at the same time enables the global situation to remain the same. Ramadan confronted head on the concerns about the involvement of Islamist politics, now that Arab dictators are disappearing, and argued that the fear of a monolithical, radical Islam is merely a guise upon which the West and Israel maintain hegemony over Muslim populations. Using the example of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which he argued is diverse in ideologies, he longingly looked to the example of Turkey, not Iran, where Islamism and political life has been successfully integrated, be it, under the eye of very watchful military. ?i?ek used the occasion to comment on universalism, and expressed his admiration of the Arabs who he argued truly understand democracy much better than does the West. Echoing his argument in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, and not responding to Ramadan's contention of the diversity contained under the umbrella of Islamist politics, he claimed that the choices open to the revolution are not just "Muslim fundamentalist Islam" or liberal democracy, but must include the left and argues for a synthesis of Islamic and leftist ideologies. Unfortunately, however, ?i?ek's well-intentioned conclusions betray similar biases to those that lurk in Friedman's neo-liberalism: that is that the Arab revolution must speak the language of the West - whether it be the left for ?i?ek or the ideology of liberalism for Friedman. The reality is, right now, the revolution is speaking many languages, as it contains diverse aspirations. It is speaking the language of universalism, which is neither left nor neo-liberal, but at the very foundation of pluralistic Muslim societies.

Perhaps what Friedman and ?i?ek fail to mention, and Ramadan merely hints at, is that the silence of Islamists of various stripes has helped the revolution immensely. That doesn't mean, however, that the Muslim social structure of the societies under upheaval is not related to the revolution itself. The struggle against injustice is the root of Muslim civil life and the young revolutionaries have been raised in this tradition where five pillars organize both social and spiritual life. The first pillar is to worship no God, but God and to recognize Muhammad as his messenger. This pillar, when applied to a contemporary reality, puts spiritual life and equality of all people as a first priority over the striving for global capital and Western liberalism. To place more attention on the material at the expense of the good of the whole community is against the major principle of tawheed in Islam, which always places God as the priority. Further, this very first pillar, by recognizing the role of revelation in the acquisition of knowledge, challenges one of the major contentions of the Western metaphysical tradition - that knowledge is secular, learned in the world, only, not transcendental. The recognition of the validity of both secular and transcendental knowledge poses a major philosophical challenge to this paradigm. The second and third pillars of daily prayers and fasting, also focus social life on the spiritualand identification with the poor and the dispossessed. The fourth pillar of zakat, institutes a system for the distribution of community wealth. The fifth pillar, the hajj, is a spiritual and politically symbolic ritual of the equality of all human beings, regardless of race or gender.

This rather rudimentary description of how basic pillars of Islam are related to an agenda for economic, social, and political equality, as well as the right of self governance, demonstrates how these pillars are present in the spirit of the contemporary revolution. The point is that the revolutionaries have been socialized in this Islamic context and thus they are articulating this context. The revolution does not need to turn to theprinciples of secular liberalism or the left to express its vision. The roots of the revolution are in Muslim societies and as such contain the roots of Islam which are now being articulated to Western audiences through action, in a manner which has been impossible over the past decade under the oppression of the "war on terror". If traditional Islamic political ideology belongs to the last generation, then the living Islam belongs to the present. The youth's success has been their remarkable ability to package this living tradition in a secular language. The revolution is ending the monopoly that the conservative Islamists have had over dissent, and this fresh articulation is from within a living Muslim tradition, which is secular, leftist and Muslim, all at once. There is hope that this new political space will be fertile ground for moving beyond simplistic divisions of 'religious' versus 'secular', another misnomer in understanding the politics of the region.

One critical reality is that this revolution is not only a revolution against Arab dictators, but a revolution against the humiliation Muslims have been facing in the post 9/11 global landscape. In other words, the Arab/Muslim people are not just enraged with political, social and economic oppression, they are also angry with their rulers' complicity with imperialism, particularly American and Israeli. In short, the revolution has erupted from Muslim societies as a result of internal oppression and as a response to political, economic and cultural imperialism, with which the post 9/11 youth are intricately familiar. In this regard, the international community must get the message that this revolution is as much against its hypocritical and condescending manner of dealing with Muslim societies as it is against Mubarak, Ben Ali or Gaddafi.

When the international community issued its response on February 28th to the violence in Libya, from the vantage point of the politically savvy Arab masses, its hypocrisy, once again, became obvious. While American warships prepare to enforce a no fly zone, as of yet announced but seemingly inevitable, freeze Gaddafi's assets and impose an arms embargo on Libya, a few days earlier this same American government vetoed a United Nations Security Council Resolution, voted on by 14 out of 15 members, to make Israeli settlements illegal. After the horrendous and condemned Operation Cast Lead on Gaza in 2009 and the attack on the fictional "humanitarian terrorists" of the Mavi Mamara in 2010, the memory of "international" inaction to violent suppression of human rights and dignity in the region is still very much alive. This is not to mention, of course, the ongoing violations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the now transparent subservience of the Palestine Liberation Organization to the United States and Israel as evidenced in the Palestine papers. The Arab and Muslim masses are accustomed to such hypocrisy: one rule for Israel and another for all others, but this time the situation is even more precarious.

In a unipolar world where America manipulates the umbrellas of NATO and the UN to fabricate an "international" consensus, the Arab revolution is in danger of being co-opted and appropriated for the goals of global capital and American "security". Talks of the necessity of humanitarian aid and access of humanitarian workers to Libya, the installment of their presence in Tunisia and Egypt, are warning signs for a region well accustomed to the connection between humanitarianism and following military intervention. The memory of the simultaneous dropping of food baskets and bombs on Iraq and Afghanistan is fresh in the minds of the activists on the streets, who are asserting, unequivocally from Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, that while they welcome diplomatic support, they do not wish military intervention in their struggles. The United States is well aware of this, of course, and although a slow learner, has no doubt learned some lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan. Hence, it is catapulting the European Union and the United Nations to the forefront as the key messengers of international humanitarian concern. What the Americans have learned from Iraq particularly, is not to go it alone, but to use the umbrella of "international" outrage at human rights to secure its intervention in a revolution which could threaten its control over oil resources and its military supremacy in the region. The argument it has used for the past 50 years that Israel is the only outpost of democracy in a dark, medieval Muslim heartland is now being radically deconstructed as the Arab masses demonstrate not only their desire for democracy, but also their willingness to break from neo-colonial rule. It is the latter, of course, which is problematic for the Americans, the European Union and the Israelis.

The recent diplomatic flurry, and the impending imposition of a no fly zone on Libya is an attempt to ensure that Western interests are not subverted by too much anti imperialist sentiment. And this will be the turning point of the revolution. Tunisians, Egyptians, Yemenis, Bahrainis, Libyans, and certainly yet others to come forward, are simply fed up with having their resources raped for the benefit of the North and selected locals who trade their nations' resources for the embellishment of their own personal power. They are fed up with being treated as perpetual Muslim infants who cannot grasp the adult complexities of concepts such as liberalism, leftism, or democracy. Meanwhile the United Nations, the EU and the Americans are all singing in the same choir, claiming to welcome and even champion these popular democratic movements, expecting that the Arabs will be amnesiac to the reality that they have supported these dictators for over 40 years, and that wretched memory of Muslim persecution, particularly over the past decade, will magically disappear.

The Arab masses, which now include not only the youth but opposition figures, rebels, peasants, the cosmopolitan middle class and others, are well aware of the international politics at play as well as the impending world economic crisis of historic proportions. They are not only ousting their leaders, but demanding accountability for the corruption, and simultaneously challenging the success of global capital - a world economy that has been organized to benefit the few at the expense of the many. And they are also spearheading a social and cultural revolution, organizing across class and ideology from within their own indigenous Muslim social fabric which provides the universality of such an enabling mobilization.

This is why Libya has become the frontline of this dual battle against internal dictators and imperialism. Gaddafi provides the international community the opportunity, under the guise of a hypocritical concern for humanitarianism, to intervene in a challenge to American hegemony throughout the Arab region. And it is evident that the Muslim majorities of Libya, and across the Middle East and North Africa, have learned a painful lesson over the past decade- a lesson in communication, a valuable lesson in employing the West's own language of secularism to frame its aspirations. The revolution may have been started by media savvy youth who led the way in framing the argument in a secular, liberal or leftist, narrative understandable to the accepted discourse of the West. It will be carried forward, however, by Muslim societies which have truly come of age in giving birth to a new political space that the entire world is watching being born.

Jacqueline O'Rourke is a consultant in research and communications who lives in Doha, Qatar. She has written academic materials for language acquisition, recently published a book of poetry and is currently awaiting the publication of her PhD thesis titled Representing Violence: Jihad, Theory, Fiction. She can be reached at jacmaryor@...

Letters to the Editor - December 23, 2010

2010-12-24T10:46:00.000-05:00

BRIBE MONEY NOT WELL SPENT
Another bad deal for Americans. A three billion dollar offer to Israel for a three month respite from the latterís illegal colonization of the West Bank. Thatís $500 million a week to bribe Israel not to commit war crimes. And the money wasnít even enough to get Israel to stop the settlements.

How many American teachers, social workers, and state employees would this have been? We face massive layoffs in our society because we are broke. Our corrupt politicians canít wait to break into the Social Security trust fund to bleed it dry for future workers. We are in crisis, but payments to Israel always come first.

Is our government, in fact, unduly influenced by Israel? Has the Israeli lobby in the U.S. learned to buy politicians as effectively as our major corporations? Have our disastrous wars in the Middle East been planned by Israel?

Obama, the consummate appeaser, is much more intent on pleasing the Israeli lobby than the American people. Congress grovels just as pathetically to Zionist influences and money. What politician would dare suggest that the Israeli invasion of Gaza was a killing spree, a blood bath? What politician beside former president Jimmy Carter would even whisper the word ìapartheid.î

Our countryís leaders have abandoned their obligation to the American people in their consistent support and funding of right wing Israelís war and occupation agenda. In another era, that would be seen as simply treason, the betrayal of our countryís citizens in exchange for bribes from a foreign government. May our leaders one day face a jury of their peers: we the people.

Fred Nagel

Rhinebeck

WE WILL RESIST
There is a major disconnect in this country in relation to veterans. We are honored by everyone, all the time, until we speak out against the status quo of ongoing wars. Doing that is not acceptable to the Establishment. We had assembled peacefully and while were speaking out, 131 of us were arrested and taken to jail for standing next to the fence around the White House, the former ëpeoplesí house. This happened this past Thursday, the 16th of December. Veteransí For Peace from all over the country led a civil resistance there. We were joined by hundreds of other citizens demanding the end ≠ not tomorrow or next year but now ≠ of the never-to-end wars our country is maintaining, at the cost of innocent lives, at the cost of the degradation of our infrastructure, at the cost of making new enemies for us around the world, at the cost of this countryís soul. We were endorsed by every Peace oriented organization that heard of our plan, we were joined in being arrested by many luminaries like the war correspondent and author Chris Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon papers renown, retired CIA agent Ray McGovern and many more courageous and moral citizens.

The weather was freezing cold, it snowed, and after a brief rally in Lafayette park where every one of us made a non-violent pledge, we proceeded solemnly around the park to the barricades in front of that wrought iron fence, accompanied by the sound of a single drum and ëTaps,í played beautifully on a harmonica. After mounting the concrete base of the fence, we stood in the snow for several hours, singing Peace songs, and delivered thousands of cards through the fence addressed to the President, with a Peace message on one side. On the other was a color photograph of a terrified child, covered in blood, standing next to the soldiers who had just killed her parents, with the statement ìthis what your wars do in our name.î

After being arrested, we were taken to the National Park Police station on the Anacostia Flats, across the river from DC. What goes around comes around, History repeats itself. This location is where the 43,000 Bonus Marchers of 1932 camped when they came to Washington to demand early payment of their promised War Service bonus. It would not have been paid until 1945, but the Depression then was murderous and the bonus money was desperately needed. People today have no real idea of its depth. President Hoover ordered Gen. MacArthur to remove them from government property when they came to the steps of Congress to wait for the Congress to vote on their demands; ìRemove them but donít pursue them.î MacArthur convinced himself those WW1 vets were Communists, and along with Majors Eisenhower and Patton, did pursue them across the river with tanks, fixed bayonets, Adamsite gas, and burned their camp to the ground. Four vets and one baby died in that 1932 action. Today, in this economic and moral recession brought on by the greed of the fat cats, we veterans are demanding our Bonus ≠ peace now!

As a combat Infantry veteran, as a person with a conscience, being there with my brothers and sisters was gratifying and inspiring. We are keeping the spirit of Resistance alive. I am ashamed of what my country has been doing to itself and to others with lies and terror. We will resist until the ëleadersí of this nation and the ëleadersí of the corporations that thrive on the suffering of human beings stop their hideous activities. We will continue to resist evil, our numbers will grow, our influence will expand as other people with a conscience realize that keeping silent ties them to the ìgood Germansî of WW2. We will win, maybe not tomorrow, but we are committed and we will win. Truth will overcome looking the other way.

Jay Wenk

Woodstock

THINK GLOBAL, GIVE LOCAL
As war and climate disasters cause more pain and death around the world, we try at this time of year to look for ways to give a little something to alleviate the suffering that our taxes and carbon consumption have caused. I have grown cynical about the big ìNGOî charities that suck money into their own bloated bureaucracies. The Woodstock community is lucky to have several activists who work tirelessly all through the year to make the earth a better place, whose organizations are exemplary of that adage ìsmall is beautiful.î If you are writing year-end checks, think local:

ïThe Haitian Peopleís Support Project goes directly to amazing work that Terry and Pierre Leroy do in that tormented country: HPSP, PO. Box 476, Woodstock NY 12498

ï Woodstock International, a small collective that puts out one of the very best newspapers in the country with international information from a local perspective. Woodstock International, PO Box 1362 Woodstock, 12498

ï Mary Frankís tireless dedication to solar cooking has introduced many of us to the wonderful work of Solar Cookers International, c/o Mary Frank, PO Box 695 Bearsville, NY 12409.

Give the gift of solidarity with the global community this year!

DeeDee Halleck

Willow

O LITTLE TOWN
I was in Bethlehem two years ago at Christmas when the gates to the city were opened for the arrival of the Jerusalem Patriarch. Families lined the streets to the Nativity Church, chanting carols and singing Jingle Bells, as they viewed joyous parades of bands and scouts. After the two-week holiday (when West Bank Palestinians fortunate enough to receive permits from the Israeli authority could cross into Jerusalem), the gates were closed and the 25-foot high Separation Wall surrounding Bethlehem assumed once more its massive and crushing reality.

Last spring, on returning to Bethlehem, I saw an animated film Warda (Flower), that Palestinian children had created based on Little Red Riding Hood. Every day Warda brings her grandmother a basket of home-made goodies. One day, Warda finds a huge Wall obstructing her path. She sits by its side and cries. An artist arrives and gives Warda a pencil and she draws a bird on the Wall. The bird comes alive and Warda hops on its back and flies over the Wall. Every day from then on, Warda reaches her grandmother by flying on the birdís back. A caption reads: ìBuilding of the dividing wall began June 2002. It encloses much Palestinian land and separates many people from their villages and families.î

The children of Bethlehem and their families are experiencing terrible segregation built into Israelís Wall: confiscation of land and water; settlement building (There are now 27 settlements surrounding Bethlehem); devastation of forests and orchards; demolition of homes by US Caterpillar tractors swathing paths for the Wall, the settlements, by-pass roads that cross their land.

Uprooted in 1948, many Christians from Ein Karem (where the Holocaust Museum was later built), fled to become refugees in Bethlehem. Since 1967, along with Muslim families, they have struggled under Israeli military occupation. More than six million Palestinian Christians and Muslims have emigrated and only two percent of the Christian community remains.

Uri Avnery, famed Israeli peace activist, spoke two years ago at a conference in Bethlehem: ìI apologize for the terrible things done in the name of Israel to the Palestinian people. Iím ashamed for the killing. Iím ashamed for the settlements that are being enlarged while our government speaks about peace...î

The carols we sing today ìOh little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie...î belie a sacred space that exists no more. Bethlehem ≠ like the other villages and cities in the West Bank and Gaza ≠ has been made into a ghetto that confines its Palestinian Christians and Muslims and excludes them, burying their reality from the Zionist state.

Let us confront this Wall, the damages wrought by the politics of exclusion ≠ within and outside ourselves ≠ and work towards the creation of one state/one world where all people can experience equality and justice. Let us bring Bethlehem alive again with the promise that birth holds.

Jane Toby

Catskill

My meeting with Henry Waxman (thanks, Eldad)

2010-11-11T12:29:00.002-05:00

http://mondoweiss.net/2010/11/my-meeting-with-henry-waxman.html

Disclaimer: I wrote the following a couple of hours after my encounter with Congressman Henry Waxman today. This is not verbatim, it is not a transcript, but it is my recollection of the conversation. I've kept in everything from our discussion as I remembered it - including the things I said that could have been much better.
*****

It's not every day you see a Representative of the House outside of the coffee shop you're about to enter. Well, at least not one as recognizable as the liberal titan Henry Waxman. But there he was: talking on his phone on the street corner, only ten feet away from me.

Dear lord, I thought to myself. Should I say something to him? Should I say something about ending military aid to Israel, ending the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan? Oh god, I should, but I hate confrontations.

The congressman continued to walk around on his phone, talking to someone who was probably Very Important about a Seriously Important Subject. Should I say something?

Waxman went into a next door restaurant and sat down to eat with another man, someone I didn't recognize. Oh damn, there went my opportunity, I thought. I don't want to interrupt his lunch – that would be rude.

And I almost walked away. But then I thought: Our two wars and occupations are rude - they don't give a damn if they interrupt anyone's lunch. I'm never going to get this opportunity again. So I quickly contacted some friends and asked – what should I say to Henry Waxman? Several people told me: just tell him you're young, you're Jewish, and you're disappointed in the way congress has dealt with Israel and Palestine. Let the conversation go from there.

I waited around for a few minutes outside, deliberating with myself if I should spark what was sure to be a tense conversation in a crowded place. And just as I was about to chicken out – this was a Congressman, after all – I saw Mr. Waxman and his companion exit the restaurant, walking directly towards the car I was standing next to.

Excuse me, I said as Waxman approached, before I really realized what I was doing, are you Henry Waxman?

Yes I am, he replied, strolling up to me, ready to talk with this random citizen on the street. This was actually a pleasant surprise – I was expecting him to shake my hand and then quickly rush off to whatever Important Meeting he had next.

It wasn't to remain pleasant for very long.

My name's Brian Van Slyke, and I'm a young Jewish American, I said.

Okay, nice to meet you, he said as he stuck out his hand for me to shake.

I took his hand and shook , and the words just spilled out: I just want to say that I'm really disappointed in the way your Democrat-led congress has dealt with the Palestine/Israel issue.

Well, there was no going back now.

He nodded his head slowly, as if he already knew where this were going.

I can't believe that Congress continues to provide Israel with 3 billion dollars in military aid every year, I continued. To me, this is in direct opposition to the promotion of freedom, democracy, and human rights you liberal Democrats claim to promote.

He stood up a little straighter and his eyes widened – this certainly wasn't what we was expecting to hear.

That money is supporting an apartheid wall, it is being employed to expand Israel's illegal colonies, it is maintaining a deadly and unjust occupation, it -

Wait a minute, he said, waving his hand. Let me stop you right there before you take your rhetoric too far.

Okay, I had had my say – I was ready to hear his response.

There are nations in the Middle East that want nothing more than to wipe Israel off the map, and that money we give is to protect them from that threat. The Separation Wall was installed to stop terrorist attacks. It was put up and it has stopped Palestinians from blowing themselves up and killing innocent Israelis.

I could almost see him mentally going down the AIPAC checklist of responses.

You can't - I began to interject.

Wait a minute, he insisted, waving his hand again. Let me say what I have to say. You said your part, let me say mine. That was fair, I thought. I don't like when people interrupt me, so I was willing to respect that for him as well – even though he had certainly cut me off only moments ago.

He went on: And the settlements, he seemingly emphasized his watered-down choice of the words - settlements – to contrast my far more accurate term (colonies), well they are another story. If you are talking about the settlements in Jerusalem, that's one thing. If you're talking about the settlements in the West Bank, that's another. The settlements in East Jerusalem are a difficult matter, as they are in the capital of that state [Israel]; but if you're going to have a Palestinian state, they are going to want East Jerusalem for their capital. The settlements in the West Bank, well I certainly agree that those have to stop in order to bring about a two-state solution. But the Separation Wall, that has saved innocent people's lives.

This was just too much – I had so many rebuttals boiling inside of me that I nearly blurted them all out at once. But I took a deep breath and decided to take him point-by-point: I think you're completely wrong there. That Wall, which is enforcing apartheid rule, is not maintaining peace but fostering misery. It makes life unbearable for many Palestinians – it has stolen countless Palestinian land; it has cut families and towns off from each other; trips to work or school that were once normal now take hours or are just impossible to make at all. Its destroying lives, towns, and economies while stealing land. You can't say that's saving innocent lives because -

He cut me off: Look, before terrorists were killing Israelis in buses and now they're not.

I'm sorry, I said, slightly indignant, I let you finish, so will you let me finish what I was saying?

No, you said your thing, then I said my thing, and now I have to go. We don't have time to talk about this whole issue in this small discussion. By the way, I think you're understating some of your case and overstating other parts. He, along with the man he had been dining with, started to make towards the car next to me. But I wasn't ready to let him get off that easily.

The military aid to Israel which you and the rest of congress provide is the thing that is killing innocent people. That money goes to build weapons that kill Palestinians, bulldoze homes, and maintain Gaza as the world's largest open air prison camp! It -

There are Arab nations in the Middle East that want to destroy Israel! He stammered, still heading towards the car. Some of those include Palestinians!

Now, that just made no sense. He was obviously frustrated.

First of all, I began (okay, I was losing my cool too – my voice was on the rise), that just has no basis in reality! Palestinians don't have a nation. You can't just make things-

They were supposed to! Israel withdrew from Gaza and said have this country, we will help you build an economy - but their will was to elect Hamas! He was reaching for the car door, opening it, but still facing me and arguing.

There were so many absurd statements in that single sentence that I was simply flabbergasted. Honestly, my next reply should have been more thoughtful, but I was just at a loss for words. I had no idea how to reply to a man that was so detached from reality.

You honestly don't understand the situation, do you? You don't seem to know the issue at all, it's as though-

I know what apartheid is! He insisted as he climbed into the passenger seat and his companion entered the driver's side. I know what apartheid looks like. That is not apartheid.

He closed the door without another word.

I bent down and looked into the window, but he refused to make eye contact with me and stared straight ahead as his companion put the keys into the ignition.

No, I raised my voice loud enough so that the car window wouldn't be a barrier. You know who knows what apartheid looks like? That would be Desmond Tutu! I'm pretty sure Desmond Tutu is more familiar with apartheid than yourself. And he says that there is apartheid in Israel and Palestine!

The congressman just shook his head and did not respond. The engine had started and his companion, who hadn't said one word the whole time, shifted the car into drive.

By the way, that's Archbishop Desmond Tutu, I continued, perhaps louder than I should have, Nobel peace prize winner, who lived under and struggled against apartheid in South Africa. Are you really going to disagree with Desmond Tutu on what apartheid looks like?

The car drove off without another response.

I looked around and saw that there were people looking at me oddly – but I didn't feel ashamed, I just became aware that my heart was pounding from nervousness and adrenaline. I was glad that I had overcome my initial trepidation.

I finally went and got that coffee I was initially after.
***

I don't think our little argument will change Congressman Waxman's mind in anyway, nor do I suspect that he will he wake up tomorrow suddenly aware of the errors of his way. Yet, I do think our encounter shook him up. I'm fairly positive that the last person he would've expected to challenge him on military aid to Israel would be a young Jewish kid on the street. But alongside my Jewish peers that openly challenged Prime Minister Netanyahu just yesterday, I think we're beginning to show the old guard that we do not share the loyal-to-Israel-no-matter-what mentality. Instead, that identity is rapidly fading for many Jews who are instead reclaiming their long legacy of standing for social justice.

So, I hope Mr. Waxman tells his colleagues – Democrats and Republicans alike – of this unfortunate, annoying, and surely frustrating occurrence. And this is the message I hope he carries: whether you are the Prime Minister of Israel speaking to a massive gathering of Jews, or you are a Congressperson outside of a coffee shop who happens to meet a young Jew, it is no longer safe to assume that we all abide by the blind allegiance to a state that falsely claims to speak for everyone of us. Rather, our allegiance is to our fellow human beings, and especially to those that are oppressed - and that means challenging the apartheid and colonialist policies of Israel wherever we find them.

I hope they are beginning to understand that we are everywhere.

Brian Van Slyke is an activist as well as an educator. He has facilitated workshops and classes on everything from organizing protests to the history of colonialism and slavery. He was raised by a Jewish mother who taught him solid non/anti-Zionist principles.

Boston Celebrates Its 4th Palestine Film Festival

2010-10-14T18:44:00.000-05:00

Boston Celebrates Its 4^th Palestine Film Festival

by Lisa Mullenneaux

Boston Celebrates Its 4th Palestine Film Festival by Lisa Mullenneaux Stormy weather didn’t dampen the spirits of a capacity crowd gathered Oct. 1 to kick off Boston’s annual tribute to Palestinian cinema. Michel Khleifi’s Zindeeq (2009) was featured, and the director present to answer audience questions. Zindeeq tells the story of M, a filmmaker born in Nazareth but living in exile in a European country (Khleifi lives and teaches in Belgium). M is played by the popular Palestinian actor Mohammad Bakri, Racha, his pretty young colleague, by the actress Mira Awad. M’s on location in Ramallah filming eyewitness accounts of the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) when he gets a crisis call from his sister. His nephew has killed a man in a fight, and every male in the family is now subject to vendetta. Instead of fleeing to save himself, M stays in Nazareth, but no hotel will accept him.

The acknowledged “father of Palestinian film,” Khleifi participated in a panel discussion following screening of his 1990 film Canticle of the Stones. “Zionists would have us believe that we (Arabs) are outside history. I believe it is Zionists who are outside history.” Nazareth-born Khleifi defined his people as “victims of the ultimate victims,” ie. victims of the Nazi holocaust. “Palestine is an open wound,” he explained, “yet I try to be inclusive. I am not just the inheritor of the Palestinian past, but the Jewish past as well.”

Khleifi was joined by Mahasen Nasser-Eldin, who represents a new generation of Palestinian activist-artists. Her film From Palestine with Love (2010) was presented in a program of women’s films. “We are very conscious of how Palestinians are represented on the screen. It’s not enough to show them as victims; they are agents of change as well.”

Mohammed Alatar has campaigned for human rights and in 2002 was nominated for the Martin Luther King, Jr., Award for Humanity. Asked how important his heritage is, he responded: “Being Palestinian guides my work. Our films need to tell our story, and our story is conflict.” Later he was asked about the dangers of trying to make a film in Palestine: “We used two crews: one to film and the other to get arrested. You know the risks, you expect abuse.” Alatar’s 2008 documentary Jerusalem: The East Side Story depicts that ongoing struggle.

Nadia Yaqub, associate professor of Arabic Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, also participated in the panel. She authored the book Pens, Swords, and the Springs of Art and many articles on Arabic literature and Palestinian cinema. Dr. Thomas Abowd of U. Mass-Amherst and Tufts, author of the upcoming Colonial Jerusalem, moderated.

Like Zindeeq, the shorts, documentaries, and features on view this year explore how Palestinians—under occupation or in exile—deal with their collective trauma. In Fragments of a Lost Palestine (2010) Norma Marcos battles with French and Israeli authorities for permission to visit family and, once with family, to nurture hope their lives will improve. Taha Awadallah’s The Thyme Seller (2009) portrays his stoical mother’s daily struggle to eke out a living selling her home-grown herb. As she goes door to door, finding few customers, we hear her labored breathing.

Catherine Deneuve, on location in Beirut, wants to see the aftermath of 2006 Israeli bombings in Je Veux Voir (2008). Her guide, local actor Rabih Mrouh, becomes lost and confused more than once. Of his childhood neighborhood, he admits “I can’t recognize anything.” Later they see bulldozers dumping truckloads of debris in the sea. The experience seals a bond between the survivor and the celebrated actress. To himself Mrouh promises: “We will rebuild. We will live again. But, Catherine, will you come back?”

Till Roeskens’ simple but powerful documentary Video Mappings (2009) allows children to draw mental “maps” of their experiences in Aida Camp (Bethlehem). Children of Aida Camp also produced Digital Poetry (2009), shown with an award-winning tribute to Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Nasri Hajjaj’s As the Poet Said (2009).

Provocative documentaries by Israeli filmmaker Rachel Leah Jones included her 2007 Ashkenaz that follows European Jews from the Rhineland to the holyland, Dunam on the Moon (2002) about the destroyed Arab village of Ayn Hawd, and Targeted Citizen (2010) about discrimination against Israel’s Palestinian citizens. Eyal Sivan’s prize-winning Jaffa, The Orange’s Clockwork (2009) uses archival footage and experts’ commentary to show how the iconic orange became a tool of colonization. Gaza was the focus of five films and an eye-witness account by Col. Ann Wright of the 2010 Israeli attack on the Mavi Marmara.

The Boston Palestine Film festival has enjoyed increased attendance in its four years, 42% in 2009, and increased recognition. Citing Palestinians’ invisibility, organizer Kate Rouhana says one of the festival’s goals is to “empower and inspire Palestinians to tell their stories through the medium of cinema.” “In our own small local way,” she adds, “we are providing one such forum, a model for other Palestine film festivals to follow.” And follow it they are, says co-curator Katherine Hanna. “When we started four years ago, there were just two other Palestine film festivals (London and Chicago).

Now there are events like this one in Houston, Toronto, Ann Arbor, and more starting that we’ve helped organize.” Growing popularity may raise Americans’ awareness of Palestinian rights and the horrors of life under Occupation. At least co-curator Salma Abu Ayyash hopes so. “The more people attend our festival,” she says, “the closer we are to presenting the Palestinian narrative in a way that will give people a clearer understanding of the Palestinian struggle and bring us closer to achieving true peace in the region.”

To the Editor: (Woodstock Times)

2010-09-26T19:40:00.003-05:00

Admirably, Rabbi Kligler advocates ambivalence, being able to see both sides of a question. Sounds good, high minded, logical, and fair. Often works well when both sides are of equal power. Unfortunately, in Palestine/Israel there are huge discrepancies in military, economic, and political power. The Palestinians are virtually powerless and have been subjected to ongoing brutality, humiliation, and domination by Israel (with the support of US tax dollars) for years.

In some cases the imbalance of power can be so great that it renders the concept of ìambivalenceî absurd and useless. Did the Indians need to see the side of the conquistadors or of the US Cavalry as they were slaughtered mercilessly? Did terrified, kidnapped, enslaved Africans need to see the side of their masters as they were beaten and brutalized? Do tortured prisoners need to see the side of their torturers as they gag and drown strapped to waterboards? Should the Jews have practiced ìambivalenceî regarding Nazi atrocities ?

Abused and oppressed people (and animals) may strike back at their abusers in desperate, violent, and often senseless acts. The Palestinians, the Indians, the slaves, the prisoners, and the Jews all committed understandable acts of retaliation. Had there been no oppressor there would have been no need to retaliate.

Rabbi Kligler mentions the Jewish Peopleís just claim on their ìhistorical homeland.î I truly hope that should the Indian People ever have the power and political clout to reclaim their historical homeland that they treat us better than the Zionists treated the Palestinians.

Eli Kassirer New Paltz, NY

On The Uses Of Ambivalence

2010-09-26T19:38:00.000-05:00

Rabbi Jonathan Kleiglerís use of the term ìambivalenceî as the need to be able to see more than one side of the question in resolving conflicts is exactly correct in the most general of all senses. It feels right, itís easy to understand, and it appears to stand on the moral high ground. However, when applied to the Palestine-Israeli conflict, it fails to measure up to the basic requirements of fairness and justice; it does not address the facts on the ground.

What we find are two wholly unequal actors. One who holds all the power and uses it to completely control the other in totally unacceptable ways (siege of Gaza, apartheid-like restrictions, etc), and the other who lives in poverty, has no power, and occasionally strikes out in completely unacceptable ways (suicide bombings, rockets, etc). This is not particularly different than a domestic violence situation, one of batterer and victim. We donít ask the victim to compromise with the batterer in order to find a just peace. We insist on the cessation of the battering and put the batterer in jail. We are not interested in whether the batterer thinks that he has justification for his brutality, nor do we ask the victim to relinquish any of her rights.

Yes, we understand that the batterer often was battered himself and is usually in the need of help, but that is offered only after the cessation of the battering. We donít, nor should we, allow the battererís history to have any impact on the fair resolution of the conflict. Justice is justice, and there is no peace without it, certainly not through the use of ambivalence.

Nicholas Abramson

Letter to the Editor, Woodstock Times:

2010-09-13T08:49:00.000-05:00

Rabbi Jonathan Kliger, of the Woodstock Jewish Congregation, in his September 9 column, “The Virtues of Ambivalence,” calls for a sustained debate on Israel. An excellent idea. But as the title suggests, he wants to take the side of ambivalence in this debate, going so far as “Thank God for ambivalence.” And that’s a terrible idea.

Kligler would have us believe that “ambivalence” is a gift of God to the Jewish people, and their “difficult, unsatisfying, risky and ennobling Jewish discourse.” But I would say that this is to insult the Jewish people by denying them moral and intellectual clarity; indeed, Kligler denies Jews their own tradition.

Give me the Prophet Amos any day over a hundred comfortable Rabbis uneasy about the gathering storm of criticism of the Jewish State. Amos wrote in the 8th Century BCE, a time of territorial expansion and military power for an early version of Israel. Most Jews thought this was pretty neat, but not Amos. He wrote:
I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.

Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,

I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals

I will not look upon.

Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps,

But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

(Amos: 5: 21-24)

Justice is the touchstone that gives meaning to history. Its eternally running waters can never be comprehended by a term like ambivalence, or any kind of flimflam. Kligler treats justice like an annoyance. “Where is the balance of justice?” intones the Rabbi, meaning, let’s figure out a way to dispose of it while preserving the precious reputation of Jews for moral elevation. His discourse is what a later and considerably more famous Jewish Prophet had in mind when he denounced the “scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.” (Matt. 23: 23). These are they who “love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi.” (23: 6-7).

Israel is seen as a refuge for an abused people scattered over the nations and held together only by a common religion. To put justice in the foreground instead of ambivalence means to cast a cold eye over its history. Coveting another’s lands, Zionist Jews embarked on a path of settler-colonialism. They needed a strong state for the purpose, and critically, an imperial patron who would help this state do the dirty work. In the process, the worst aspects of the religion came to the forefront. The legacy has been war, ethnic cleansing, racism of every stripe, the rise of vile fundamentalism, nuclear terror, and ceaseless criminality, including 450,000 illegal settlers and the wanton destruction of 24,000 Palestinian houses since 1967, using US-donated bulldozers, part of the phenomenal degeneration of our own society thanks to the Zionist power configuration.

If you want peace, build justice. Return to people what you have robbed them of, and undo the hellish life you have imposed upon them.

By the way, the Jews did not heed Amos’ warning. This led to the destruction of the First Temple, and the Babylonian captivity.

Joel Kovel

Willow

Dark days for the “sovereign Jewish entity”

2010-08-25T11:43:00.003-05:00

Joel Kovel

Tony Judt had barely left this world when the Jerusalem Post lashed out at him with a nasty editorial on August 8. Clearly, Judt has never been forgiven for writing in 2003 in the New York Review that Israel lacked legitimacy because of its structural Jewishness and deserved to be replaced with a “a single, integrated, bi-national state.” Heresy is unforgivable; and to call for the downfall of the Jewish State is heretical, because the ostensibly secular state of Israel has to see itself as the guarantor of Jewish survival, spiritual and physical alike. Anytime a Jew with an audience, i.e., an intellectual, critically examines this relationship, the alarm bells go off. Another existential threat! So Tony Judt was a dangerous man when he was alive and will be so as long as the memory of his deed remains.

I am happy to say that I am in his good company. According to the Post, Judt’s “categorical rejection of Zionism put him in a class with other contemporary Jewish intellectuals of the Diaspora such as Jacqueline Rose, Michael Neumann and Joel Kovel, who have chosen to single out Israel for opprobrium that is rarely, if ever, directed at other countries that choose to adopt unique religious or cultural-based nationalities.” Accordingly, our views constitute “a recipe for national suicide for the sovereign Jewish entity.” [italics added] In other words, we, too, pose existential threats to the Jewish State.

I feel obliged to reply, not to speak in Judt’s place, nor in the expectation that he would have agreed with what I am about to write. We never met nor were we political comrades, Tony being a self-declared social democrat and I, well, several degrees to the left of that. Nor have I met Jacqueline Rose and Michael Neumann. But categorical rejection of Zionism is a common ground I am pleased to share. So here is a brief account of what I take to be the reason for giving a lot of attention to Israel vis a vis the other awful countries, and why I want to bring down the Jewish state itself rather than settling for eliminating one or more of its human rights abuses.

The Jewish Question

The Post’s editorial person starts from the premise that people like Judt, Rose, Neumann and I are doing something that, as Jews, we should be ashamed of: singling out Israel and calling for the end of the Jewish state. (I’ll return below to the rather heated way this latter allegation is framed.) The assumption here is that Israel is for all the Jews and all the Jews should stand behind Israel, because it is self-evidently good to have an organic-national relation to Judaism.

I see things oppositely. I was born into a Jewish family and through this, share in a colorful history that has produced a lot of contributors to civilization, played an ambivalent yet fascinating role in the development of Western society, and suffered a good deal over the centuries for its “otherness.” All of this I keep in mind and have no disposition to deny. So I am a Jew. That’s nice, and that’s all it is. But as for the extension of this identity fragment, whose only common ground across history is a religion, into an organic nationalism which needs a state to set itself on the ground, this is another thing entirely. If you will forgive me a little Biblicism, it is an abomination and a desecration. I share this view with many fellow Jews, including the Neturai karta, whom I have joined at many a demonstration, and whose resoluteness and integrity I admire. I don’t care for their religion, however, or any variant of the Jewish faith. I think that Judaism got trapped in the first century CE by rejection of its prophet Jesus’s call to make the religion universal rather than tribal. As a result—a result made far worse by Christian persecution—the Jewish faith has never really been able to transcend an inward focus on the community of Jews, that is, the Jewish “People.” The jokingly offered and endlessly repeated query as to whether something is “good for the Jews” is, to my view, the sign of a profound and spiritually damaging ethnocentricity. Thus when the possibility opened up to make this People into a nation, a power-grabbing nation in league with imperialism and given a militarized state by its imperial patrons, many Jews fell into line (including most of my family), and especially insofar as they had been handed the all-purpose justifier provided by the history of anti-Semitism and its culmination in the monstrosity of the Shoah.

For me, however, Jewish nation-building proved a time to part ways—an extended time, I might add, and no epiphany. As the Jewish state has continued to tear its brutal path through the history of our time, and chiefly, through the lives of its indigenous victims, I simply see no other place to stand than in utter opposition to the endless chain of its crimes and lies—and with this, to the very construction of “Jewishness” that has enabled this and become canonical for so many, and in the United States especially, essential for the sustenance of the Israeli abomination. So to follow along with the above-mentioned identity construction, I am still a Jew and neither can nor wish to erase the fact, but no longer consider myself Jewish. Thus, following the great Isaac Deutscher, a “non-Jewish Jew.” I think a lot of Jews are these days wrestling with the same dilemma. Needless to add, there are other ways of addressing it besides mine. In any event, I wish them good cheer: life is a lot better once that dreary burden is laid down.

So to the editorial person of the Jerusalem Post, I would say, paraphrasing a certain President: Ask not what Israel can do for the Jews, because all answers to this question have become corrupted by the militarized and racist state Israel has become. Ask rather what Jews can do to earn forgiveness for the wrong turn taken in their history and for all the suffering their precious state has imposed. And lay off criticizing Jews who are stepping forth to “single out Israel.” There are going to be lots more of them. Remember, each person only has one identity and has to live with it.

But there is much more . . .

Though every theocracy and/or ethnocracy is appalling and should be opposed by all folk of good will, the peculiar case of Israel has a far wider radiation and so deserves “singling out,” as the Post puts it, irrespective of the religious/ethnic issue. This has to do, of course, with the nightmarish relation between Israel and the United States, and the shadow it casts over the present world. By the time I first became aware, during the Vietnam era, of US imperialism as a malignant force, Zionists had been insinuating themselves into the American political process for twenty years, since Harry Truman’s political orphanhood gave them the opening. But there was nothing “special” about this, except that the Jewish state depended for its existence upon its great benefactor. It took a while for the creature spawned by this embrace to mature, chiefly through the growth of AIPAC and the entry of ultra-Zionist neoconservatives into state and civil society. With this, however, it must also be said that the beast had mutated; hence one can no longer talk about the United States and Israel as separate political entities. Now we have a second Zionist occupation, of our civil society and state alongside the occupation of Palestine, and necessary for the occupation of Palestine to continue. For reasons of space we need to set aside the intricate matter of who wags whom, or the astounding degree to which the normalization of Zionism has blunted outrage, even among leftists of great repute. Consider only some of the fruits of this creature:
• the degree to which US foreign policy is configured to give Israel its impunity, one small instance being Obama’s recent threat to Turkey that he would cut off military contracts unless it lays off Israel for the Mavi Marmara incident; meanwhile the US reinforces Israeli military superiority with the latest in free ultra technology for its F-16 fighter fleet;

• the shameless debasement of our Congress, with hundreds of elected officials doing the bidding of a foreign power, again to whitewash the Mavi Marmara murders, thereby granting impunity once again;

• the plague of Islamophobia now raging, inflamed by fury over the “Ground-zero Mosque,” and more generally, over the terrors stirred up by 9-11. But who pauses to reflect upon that awful day and the fact that it provided the one incontrovertible instance of highly suspicious involvement by a foreign state in the havoc, namely, the most odd finding of five “moving men,” who turned out to be Mossad agents filming from New Jersey the collapse of the towers while jubilantly giving each other high fives, who were released back to their home country after 71 quiet days in FBI custody, and whose “employer” moved very hastily back to Israel, after stripping his office of all evidence? How did they know to be there, cameras primed, at that time? Why were they so happy? No point in asking. The propaganda machine has constructed mass consciousness so as to obscure any thinking about the matter, which no longer exists so far as official political culture goes. Such questions are highly impertinent. After all, one does not want to “single” Israel out. That would be anti-Semitic, wouldn’t it? This Reichstag Fire leads in another direction, that of the Islamic Threat.

• and then, mere war, as in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and now the latest looming danger, the Persian menace. That this mainly exists in the mind of the Zionist Power Structure, here and in Israel, is anything but reassuring, given the authority of that mind. Suppose, then, that the exquisitely positioned pundits and opinion-makers get their wish of precipitating us into a bombing war with Iran, Israel’s #1 existential threat, and Iran bombs back. This could be a new Board Game: there goes the global economy; and there looms, as ever, our friend and ally’s “Samson Option” using its nuclear arsenal that nobody is to know about, but that has, in the meantime, totally wrecked any efforts to bring nuclear proliferation under control thanks to universal knowledge of the bad faith of the United States for its complicity over the years under the influence of a certain “lobby” . . .

In sum, if you care about the baleful influence of the United States in the world you cannot set Israel aside as an isolated issue. This is the precise opposite of “singling Israel out.” It is, rather, a demand to integrate Israel within the manifold of imperial/economic/military power, and taking the steps necessary to bring this power under rational control.

Signing off to the editor of the Post, who is unquestionably unimpressed with these arguments.

What are trivialities like ethnocide, racism and war weighed against the sovereignty of the Jews? For Jews were once merely a “People,” but now, having achieved the greatness of nation-statehood, have become, hurrah!, a “sovereign Jewish entity,” doubtlessly pleasing Yahweh no end. And it is this triumph that Tony Judt and people like myself would spoil with our “recipe for national suicide.”

I’ve got to hand it to the Jerusalem Post for forcing me out of my self-imposed exile from psychoanalysis (well, it is the Jewish Profession) with this frankly hysterical statement, which is bundled, typically, with a manipulative, guilt-tripping threat: if you people don’t stop doing that, we’re going to kill ourselves! Freud pointed out that every delusion contains the germ of a historical fact. In this instance it is the legendary event of 73 CE, when the Sicarii, a Jewish sect active in the wake of the Roman destruction of the Second Temple, hurled themselves from the cliffs of Masada mountain to avoid capture by the Legion. An archeological museum now occupies the site, which has become deeply inscribed as a symbol of Zionist resolve and desperation.

I hope the Israelis don’t follow this example. Maybe they should keep in mind that the Sicarii were more extreme than even the Zealots, and by some accounts were common bandits, as much opposed to other Jews as they were to Rome. Nonetheless, the imminence of mass catastrophe, however induced, remains active in the Zionist imaginary, where it is stoked by propagandists of the Shoah, so that 1938 is made to eternally return.

There is another, much more deeply rational approach to history, which is to understand it in depth, encounter it, learn its lesson, actively transform it, and, by so doing, let it go. For Israel—and Jews everywhere, and indeed, everyone affected by the conquest of Palestine—the lesson is not really that complicated. It is to face the truth that the Zionist epoch has been a dreadful mistake, for the Jews as well as Zionism’s victims, and that they will have to do what grown-up people do who realize they have been wrong, if they want to have a decent life and rejoin the human race.

Woodstock Green

2010-08-25T11:40:00.000-05:00

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Barbara Mullen questions our right to demonstrate on the Woodstock Green without a permit, citing that the town center is church property. The privatization of public space is an epidemic in this country now, with the "charterization" of public schools and the wholesale giveaway of public forestland resources. †However our green is "defacto" public space and the selective enforcement of rules is illegal, no matter how "ugly" the demonstration is. †How much of Woodstock taxes have been spent designing, building and maintaining the community space there?†

How ironic that there is an attempt to silence demonstrations seeking to bring attention to the need for peace in the very shadow of the town "peace pole".

DeeDee Halleck, Willow, NY

John Mearsheimer: Sinking Ship

2010-07-01T21:20:00.002-05:00

By John J. Mearsheimer, The American Conservative – 1 August 2010 issue http://amconmag.com/article/2010/aug/01/00010/

The attack on the Gaza relief flotilla jeopardizes Israel itself

Israel’s botched raid against the Gaza-bound humanitarian flotilla on May 31 is the latest sign that Israel is on a disastrous course that it seems incapable of reversing. The attack also highlights the extent to which Israel has become a strategic liability for the United States. This situation is likely to get worse over time, which will cause major problems for Americans who have a deep attachment to the Jewish state.

The bungled assault on the Mavi Marmara, the lead ship in the flotilla, shows once again that Israel is addicted to using military force yet unable to do so effectively. One would think that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would improve over time from all the practice. Instead, it has become the gang that cannot shoot straight.

The IDF last scored a clear-cut victory in the Six Day War in 1967; the record since then is a litany of unsuccessful campaigns. The War of Attrition (1969-70) was at best a draw, and Israel fell victim to one of the great surprise attacks in military history in the October War of 1973. In 1982, the IDF invaded Lebanon and ended up in a protracted and bloody fight with Hezbollah. Eighteen years later, Israel conceded defeat and pulled out of the Lebanese quagmire. Israel tried to quell the First Intifada by force in the late 1980s, with Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin telling his troops to break the bones of the Palestinian demonstrators. But that strategy failed and Israel was forced to join the Oslo Peace Process instead, which was another failed endeavor.

The IDF has not become more competent in recent years. By almost all accounts—including the Israeli government’s own commission of inquiry—it performed abysmally in the 2006 Lebanon war. The IDF then launched a new campaign against the people of Gaza in December 2008, in part to “restore Israel’s deterrence” but also to weaken or topple Hamas. Although the mighty IDF was free to pummel Gaza at will, Hamas survived and Israel was widely condemned for the destruction and killing it wrought on Gaza’s civilian population. Indeed, the Goldstone Report, written under UN auspices, accused Israel of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity. Earlier this year, the Mossad murdered a Hamas leader in Dubai, but the assassins were seen on multiple security cameras and were found to have used forged passports from Australia and a handful of European countries. The result was an embarrassing diplomatic row, with Australia, Ireland, and Britain each expelling an Israeli diplomat.

Given this history, it is not surprising that the IDF mishandled the operation against the Gaza flotilla, despite having weeks to plan it. The assault forces that landed on the Mavi Marmara were unprepared for serious resistance and responded by shooting nine activists, some at point-blank range. None of the activists had their own guns. The bloody operation was condemned around the world—except in the United States, of course. Even within Israel, the IDF was roundly criticized for this latest failure.

These ill-conceived operations have harmful consequences for Israel. Failures leave adversaries intact and make Israeli leaders worry that their deterrent reputation is being undermined. To rectify that, the IDF is turned loose again, but the result is usually another misadventure, which gives Israel new incentives to do it again, and so on. This spiral logic, coupled with Israel’s intoxication with military force, helps explain why the Israeli press routinely carries articles predicting where Israel’s next war will be.

Israel’s recent debacles have also damaged its international reputation. Respondents to a 2010 worldwide opinion poll done for the BBC said that Israel, Iran, and Pakistan had the most negative influence in the world; even North Korea ranked better. More worrying for Israel is that its once close strategic relationship with Turkey has been badly damaged by the 2008-09 Gaza war and especially by the assault on the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship filled with Turkish nationals. But surely the most troubling development for Israel is the growing chorus of voices in the United States who say that Israel’s behavior is threatening American interests around the world, to include endangering its soldiers. If that sentiment grows, it could seriously harm Israel’s relationship with the United States.

Life as an Apartheid State

The flotilla tragedy highlights another way in which Israel is in deep trouble. Israel’s response makes it obvious that its leaders are not interested in allowing the Palestinians to have a viable state in Gaza and the West Bank, but instead are bent on creating a “Greater Israel” in which the Palestinians are confined to a handful of impoverished enclaves.

Israel insists that its blockade is solely intended to keep weapons out of Gaza. Hardly anyone would criticize Israel if this were true, but it is not. The real aim of the blockade is to punish the people of Gaza for supporting Hamas and resisting Israel’s efforts to maintain Gaza as a giant open-air prison. Of course, there was much evidence that this was the case before the debacle on the Mavi Marmara. When the blockade began in 2006, Dov Weisglass, a close aide to Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, said, “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” And the Gaza onslaught 18 months ago was designed to punish the Gazans, not enforce a weapons embargo. The ships in the flotilla were transporting humanitarian aid, not weapons for Hamas, and Israel’s willingness to use deadly force to prevent a humanitarian aid convoy from reaching Gaza makes it abundantly clear that Israel wants to humiliate and subdue the Palestinians, not live side-by-side with them in separate states.

Collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza is unlikely to end anytime soon. Israel’s leaders have shown little interest in lifting the blockade or negotiating sincerely. The sad truth is that Israel has been brutalizing the Palestinians for so long that it is almost impossible to break the habit. It is hardly surprising that Jimmy Carter said last year, “the citizens of Palestine are treated more like animals than human beings.” They are, and they will be for the foreseeable future.

Consequently, there is not going to be a two-state solution. Instead, Gaza and the West Bank will become part of a Greater Israel, which will be an apartheid state bearing a marked resemblance to white-ruled South Africa. Israelis and their American supporters invariably bristle at this comparison, but that is their future if they create a Greater Israel while denying full political rights to an Arab population that will soon outnumber the Jewish population in the entirety of the land. In fact, two former Israeli prime ministers—Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak—have made this very point. Olmert went so far as to argue, “as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished.”

He’s right, because Israel will not be able to maintain itself as an apartheid state. Like racist South Africa, it will eventually evolve into a democratic bi-national state whose politics will be dominated by the more numerous Palestinians. But that process will take many years, and during that time, Israel will continue to oppress the Palestinians. Its actions will be seen and condemned by growing numbers of people and more and more governments around the world. Israel is unwittingly destroying its own future as a Jewish state, and doing so with tacit U.S. support.

America’s Albatross

The combination of Israel’s strategic incompetence and its gradual transformation into an apartheid state creates significant problems for the United States. There is growing recognition in both countries that their interests are diverging; indeed this perspective is even garnering attention inside the American Jewish community. Jewish Week, for example, recently published an article entitled “The Gaza Blockade: What Do You Do When U.S. and Israeli Interests Aren’t in Synch?” Leaders in both countries are now saying that Israeli policy toward the Palestinians is undermining U.S. security. Vice President Biden and Gen. David Petraeus, the head of Central Command, both made this point recently, and the head of the Mossad, Meir Dagan, told the Knesset in June, “Israel is gradually turning from an asset to the United States to a burden.”

It is easy to see why. Because the United States gives Israel so much support and U.S. politicians routinely laud the “special relationship” in the most lavish terms, people around the globe naturally associate the United States with Israel’s actions. Unfortunately, this makes huge numbers of people in the Arab and Islamic world furious with the United States for supporting Israel’s cruel treatment of the Palestinians. That anger in turn helps fuel terrorism against America. Remember that the 9/11 Commission Report, which describes Khalid Sheik Muhammad as the “principal architect of the 9/11 attacks,” concludes that his “animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experiences there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.” Osama bin Laden’s hostility toward the United States was fuelled in part by this same concern.

Popular anger toward the United States also threatens the rulers of Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, key U.S. allies who are frequently seen as America’s lackeys. The collapse of any of these regimes would be a big blow to the U.S. position in the region; however, Washington’s unyielding support for Israel makes these governments weaker, not stronger. More importantly, the rupture in Israel’s relationship with Turkey will surely damage America’s otherwise close relationship with Turkey, a NATO member and a key U.S. ally in Europe and the Middle East.

Finally, there is the danger that Israel might attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, which could have terrible consequences for the United States. The last thing America needs is another war with an Islamic country, especially one that could easily interfere in its ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is why the Pentagon opposes striking Iran, whether with Israeli or U.S. forces. But Netanyahu might do it anyway if he thinks it would be good for Israel, even if it were bad for the United States.

Dark Days Ahead for the Lobby

Israel’s troubled trajectory is also causing major headaches for its American supporters. First, there is the matter of choosing between Israel and the United States. This is sometimes referred to as the issue of dual loyalty, but that term is a misnomer. Americans are allowed to have dual citizenship—and in effect, dual loyalty—and this is no problem as long as the interests of the other country are in synch with America’s interests. For decades, Israel’s supporters have striven to shape public discourse in the United States so that most Americans believe the two countries’ interests are identical. That situation is changing, however. Not only is there now open talk about clashing interests, but knowledgeable people are openly asking whether Israel’s actions are detrimental to U.S. security.

The lobby has been scrambling to discredit this new discourse, either by reasserting the standard argument that Israel’s interests are synonymous with America’s or by claiming that Israel—to quote a recent statement by Mortimer Zuckerman, a key figure in the lobby—“has been an ally that has paid dividends exceeding its costs.” A more sophisticated approach, which is reflected in an AIPAC-sponsored letter that 337 congresspersons sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in March, acknowledges that there will be differences between the two countries, but argues that “such differences are best resolved quietly, in trust and confidence.” In other words, keep the differences behind closed doors and away from the American public. It is too late, however, to quell the public debate about whether Israel’s actions are damaging U.S. interests. In fact, it is likely to grow louder and more contentious with time.

This changing discourse creates a daunting problem for Israel’s supporters, because they will have to side either with Israel or the United States when the two countries’ interests clash. Thus far, most of the key individuals and institutions in the lobby have sided with Israel when there was a dispute. For example, President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu have had two big public fights over settlements. Both times the lobby sided with Netanyahu and helped him thwart Obama. It seems clear that individuals like Abraham Foxman, who heads the Anti-Defamation League, and organizations like AIPAC are primarily concerned about Israel’s interests, not America’s.

This situation is very dangerous for the lobby. The real problem is not dual loyalty but choosing between the two loyalties and ultimately putting the interests of Israel ahead of those of America. The lobby’s unstinting commitment to defending Israel, which sometimes means shortchanging U.S. interests, is likely to become more apparent to more Americans in the future, and that could lead to a wicked backlash against Israel’s supporters as well as Israel.

The lobby faces yet another challenge: defending an apartheid state in the liberal West is not going to be easy. Once it is widely recognized that the two-state solution is dead and Israel has become like white-ruled South Africa—and that day is not far off—support for Israel inside the American Jewish community is likely to diminish significantly. The main reason is that apartheid is a despicable political system that is fundamentally at odds with basic American values as well as core Jewish values. For sure there will be some Jews who will defend Israel no matter what kind of political system it has. But their numbers will shrink over time, in large part because survey data shows that younger American Jews feel less attachment to Israel than their elders, which makes them less inclined to defend Israel blindly.

The bottom line is that Israel will not be able to maintain itself as an apartheid state over the long term because it will not be able to depend on the American Jewish community to defend such a reprehensible political order.

Assisted Suicide

Israel is facing a bleak future, yet there is no reason to think that it will change course anytime soon. The political center of gravity in Israel has shifted sharply to the right and there is no sizable pro-peace political party or movement. Moreover, it remains firmly committed to the belief that what cannot be solved by force can be solved with greater force, and many Israelis view the Palestinians with contempt if not hatred. Neither the Palestinians nor any of Israel’s immediate neighbors are powerful enough to deter it, and the lobby will remain influential enough over the next decade to protect Israel from meaningful U.S. pressure.

Remarkably, the lobby is helping Israel commit national suicide while also doing serious damage to American security interests. Voices challenging this tragic situation have grown slightly more numerous in recent years, but the majority of political commentators and virtually all U.S. politicians seem blissfully ignorant of where this is headed, or unwilling to risk their careers by speaking out.

John J. Mearsheimer is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and coauthor of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

The complete IOA coverage of the Gaza Flotilla

Read the IOA Fair Use Notice

Unconscionable. Offensive. Hurtful. Bigoted. Terrible. Hateful.

2010-06-14T21:59:00.000-05:00

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-oe-makdisi-palestinians-20100613,0,3488415.story?track=rss

Unconscionable. Offensive. Hurtful. Bigoted. Terrible. Hateful.

These are the words being used to describe Helen Thomas' recent comment about Israel and Palestine. Editorialists across the country have condemned her statement that Jews should "get the hell out of Palestine" and "go back" to Europe.

Let's agree that she should not have said those things, and that a just and lasting peace in the Middle East fundamentally requires reconciliation between Palestinians and Israeli Jews. We need also to agree on a formula that allows them both to be at home in the same land (I have long advocated the idea of a single democratic and secular state for both peoples; a state that treats all citizens as equals). Insisting that either people does not belong is not merely counterproductive; it lies at the very root of the conflict.

If, however, it is unacceptable to say that Israeli Jews don't belong in Palestine, it is also unacceptable to say that the Palestinians don't belong on their own land.

Yet that is said all the time in the United States, without sparking the kind of moral outrage generated by Thomas' remark. And while the nation's editorialists worry about the offense she may have caused to Jews, no one seems particularly bothered by the offense felt every day by Palestinians when people — including those with far more power than Thomas — dismiss their rights, degrade their humanity and reject their claims to the most elementary forms of decency.

Are we seriously to accept the idea that some people have more rights than others? Or that some people's sensibilities should be respected while others' are trampled with total indifference, if not outright contempt?

One does not have to agree with Thomas to note that her remark spoke to the ugly history of colonialism, racism, usurpation and denial that are at the heart of the question of Palestine. Part of that history involves vicious European anti-Semitism and the monumental crime of the Holocaust. But the other part is that Palestinians were forcibly removed from their homeland in 1948 to clear space for the creation of a state with a Jewish identity.

Europeans and Americans were, at the time, willing to ignore or simply dismiss the injustice inflicted on the Palestinians, who, by being forced from their land, were made to pay the price for a crime they did not commit.

But this callous carelessness, this dismissal of — and refusal even to acknowledge in human terms — the calamity that befell the Palestinians, and of course the attendant refusal to acknowledge their fundamental rights, did not end in the 1940s. It continues to this very day.

Mainstream politicians, civic leaders, university presidents and others in this country routinely express their support for Israel as a Jewish state, despite the fact that such a state only could have been created in a multicultural land by ethnically cleansing it of as many non-Jews as possible. Today, Israel is only able to maintain its Jewish identity because it has established an apartheid regime, both in the occupied territories and within its own borders, and because it continues to reject the Palestinian right of return.

Where is the outrage about that?

Where was the outrage in 1983 when Israeli Gen. Rafael Eitan looked forward to the day that Jews had fully settled the land, because then "all the Arabs will be able to do about it is scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle"? Or when Alan Dershowitz suggested in 2002 that Israel summarily empty and then bulldoze an entire Palestinian village as a punitive measure each time it was attacked? Or when New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman claimed in 2006 to have discovered a "pathology" that caused some Arabs to "hate others more than they love their own kids"? Or when Avigdor Lieberman (who now serves as Israel's foreign minister) said in 2004 that Palestinian citizens of Israel should "take their bundles and get lost"? Or when Israeli professor Arnon Sofer, one of the country's leading demographic alarmists, said that to preserve the Jewish state, Israel should pull out of Gaza, though that would require Israel to remain at the border and "kill, and kill, and kill, all day, every day"?

An endless deluge of statements of support for the actual, calculated, methodical dehumanization of Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular goes without comment; whereas a single offhand comment by an 89-year-old journalist, whose long and distinguished record of principled commitment and challenges to state power entitles her to respect — and the benefit of the doubt — causes her to be publicly pilloried.

To accept this appalling hypocrisy is to be complicit in the racism of our age.

Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA. He is the author of, among other books, "Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation."

A nightmarish experiment

2010-06-13T11:09:00.002-05:00

http://www.haaretz.com/misc/article-print-page/a-nightmarish-experiment-1.295530?trailingPath=2.169,2.225,2.227

A nightmarish experiment

By Sefi Rachlevsky

Israel gave itself a nice present to celebrate the 43rd anniversary of losing its borders. The raid on the Gaza flotilla in international waters is like the first Lebanon War - as if in a nightmarish experiment, we seem to be examining the question: What happens when a country has no borders?

Israel's maritime attack did not happen by chance. A border is one of the fundamental factors that defines a country. Decades without one have distorted Israel's thinking.

It is self-evident that, just as a person cannot build in an area that he does not own, a country cannot build settlements outside of its borders. And yet Israel has settled hundreds of thousands of its citizens in areas that, according to its laws, are not part of the State of Israel.

It is self-evident that any couple can marry "without regard to religion, race or gender." And yet in Israel a Jewish man and a non-Jewish woman cannot legally marry. It's self-evident that there is no arbitrary discrimination, and yet it's enough to use the magic words "I'm a religious woman" or "I'm an ultra-Orthodox man" and the obligation to serve in the military evaporates.

It's self-evident that the education provided to children be based on democracy and equality. And yet in Israel, 52 percent of first-graders defined as Jews study in various religious school systems that teach students things like "You are considered a human being and the other nations of the world are not considered human beings."

They are taught that a non-Jew is not a human being, and that anyone who kills a non-Jew is not supposed to be killed by human hands; that women are inferior, and it is an obligation that males and females be separated; and that secular people, or anyone with secular family members, cannot enter these schools.

It is self-evident that racist education cannot be funded by the government and is illegal. And yet most of the country's first-graders receive such "compulsory education" from their government.

The results of this nightmarish experiment are self-evident. In the most recent elections, 35 percent of voters defined as Jews cast their ballots for avowedly racist parties - Yisrael Beitenu, Shas, National Union and their friends.

Critics in the Israeli media wake up only when mistakes are made. That is why - after initially cheering the declaration that "the flotilla will not pass" - they changed their tune following the imbroglio, turning into advocates of the twisted logic "be smart, not right." But what justice is there in an attack on civilians by soldiers on the open seas?

Like the territories, international waters are not Israel; they are outside its borders. A Turkish ship on the open sea is, in effect, a floating Turkish island. An Israeli attack on such an island is not all that different from sending the Israel Defense Forces to take on demonstrators at the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. There, too, unpleasant people who are not friends of Israel can sometimes be found.

Turkey, which is a member of NATO, was not in a state of war with Israel before the attack. Attacking its citizens on territory that is by definition Turkish is another expression of the Israeli lunacy that lacks any kind of boundaries.

An attack beyond the border must be reserved for extreme cases involving a military target that represents an entity fighting against the country and when citizens are in danger. But civilian ships, that are not carrying weapons, but are bringing civilian aid to a population that is denied chocolate, toys and notebooks, are not nuclear reactors in Iraq, Syria or Iran.

A person who grows up without external borders tends to create distorted internal borders. That is the reason for the attack on Arab MK Hanin Zuabi and her colleagues. While there were certain Arab public figures who went too far in their statements, joining a civilian aid flotilla is one of those legitimate acts which are supposed to be self-evident.

And yet, what was self-evident became betrayal. And citizenship, one of the unconditional foundations of existence, has turned into something that can be revoked - in this case on the basis of ethnicity, a tactic used in fascist regimes. The street has returned to the atmosphere that prevailed under "responsible" opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu and led to the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin - and the next murder is in the air.

The Israeli deed at sea is liable to reach The Hague. The problem is that Israel has genuine enemies who want to destroy it. A country that does not do everything in its power to accumulate legitimacy, along with turning Iran into an entity that is losing legitimacy and can therefore become a target of activities to undermine it, is a country losing its basic survival instinct. Without borders, it turns out, you lose even that.

Young Israelis who have grown up without borders are now dancing and singing "In blood and fire we will expel Turkey" and "Mohammed is dead." If this keeps up, Israel will not make it to The Hague. The entity gradually replacing the State of Israel is liable not to exist long enough to get there.

Remarks at Woodstock, NY, Memorial Day parade

2010-06-03T09:33:00.002-05:00

Remarks at Woodstock, NY, Memorial Day parade, May 31, 2010

A reconstruction from memory, somewhat updated

by Joel Kovel

As a member of Veterans for Peace, I've addressed this event perhaps a dozen times over the years. But never has my heart been so heavy as today, when I have to speak of the terrible news we received less than 24 hours ago, that Israeli Commandos had boarded the Freedom Flotilla bearing humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza and killed some 10 ñ 20 activists, wounding perhaps 50 others in the course of preventing the aid from reaching its destination. Although it may not seem so at first glance, I think you will agree when I am finished that what happened off the coast of Gaza yesterday very much needs to be talked about at a Memorial Day parade.

For those of you who may not know, Gaza is a region within Palestine, seized by Israel in 1967 and since administered under military occupation. Currently its 1.5 million people live in confinement, making Gaza the largest prison in the history of the world. To be more exact, they do not fully live, but merely survive under conditions of great privation. Fully ten percent of the population, needless to say mainly small children, are malnourished to the point of having their growth stunted. A few years ago, an Israeli official was quoted as saying that the people of Gaza are ìgoing to be on a diet.î This gives a sense of the cruelty of the occupation, as does the fact that more than a year after Israel pulverized large portions of Gaza in a deadly attack, virtually no construction materials, neither cement, nails, nor bricks, have been let into the country. Hence it continues as a gigantic ruin and a zone of desperation.

All this has precipitated great consternation among people of good will across the world and spurred efforts to bring aid to the Gazans with the larger goal of bringing Israelís blockade and, indeed, occupation, to an end. The Freedom Flotilla is not the first maritime mission to Gaza, but it was by far the largest, with six ships, 700 activists, and ten thousand tons of material aid for the prisoners of Gaza. Here in Woodstock we are proud of our solidarity group, MidEast Crisis Response, from which eight citizens went last December to Egypt as part of a large delegation to bring aid to Gaza. Five of our members are even now in New York City doing what can be done to demonstrate against this awful crime; we send them all our best wishes and hopes.

We are making progress in bringing Israel to justice, but the road is long and the way is hard. If this were a halfway just world, Israelís wanton attack in international waters would be immediately recognized as sheer, murderous piracy. But the problem runs much deeper than that. For whether Israel attacked on the high seas or elsewhere, its aggression would still be illegal. A fully just world would recognize that Israel would has no right to attack the flotilla in any case, for the simple reason that it has no right to be in Gaza, as occupation is itself a crime under international law. Israelís flouting of innumerable resolutions asserting this does not weaken the truth, but rather, has removed every shred of legitimacy from its behavior. An occupier, the world should remember, has no rights.

But the world is not at all a just place and doesnít remember this truth or even understand it. Instead, we face a situation where Israel repeatedly gets away with murder and every other human rights violation. And it is perfectly understandable why this is so. It is because Israel enjoys a de facto authority that overrides mere international law and human right, so that it can do what it pleases, and the consequences be damned. This de facto authority has two components and one enabling cause. The components are:

ï a world-class military machine, so that Israel enjoys the advantage of brute force in its escapades; and

ï a permanent and renewable ìGet-out-of-jail-freeî card, to be played whenever a crime is committed.

Nothing can be done to bring Israel to justice unless this authority is brought down, for the purpose of which it is necessary to face up to its enabling cause. And this, to get right down to the point, is our own United States, with some help from its Western allies and Arab client states. It is the United States that has financed Israel and built it into a military behemoth. And it is from the United States that the commands are issued that exonerate Israel in advance from the consequences of its criminality. This combination of stupendous power and impunity feeds on itself and breeds the monstrosity that is Israel today. Without it, the terrible killings aboard the Freedom Flotilla would not have happenedóindeed, the flotilla would not have been needed because Gaza would have been free.

It would take time we do not have today to dissect this relationship, taking into account the illegal (because it represents a foreign power without registering as such) Israel Lobby that controls United States foreign policy in the Middle East. I want to bring to your attention instead one elementary principle that would enable us to make a difference. It is to find a location in the here and now where the Israeli killing machine is built up by the United States; and to intervene so that the cycle of impunity can start to be interrupted. It happens that there is one such place right here in Woodstock, as there are in many other locales in the United States.

For we have a firm in town, Rotron by name, that enjoys great prestige in Woodstock and the surrounding region. Rotron is the biggest employer in Woodstock, and has made its esteemed product, fans, for over half a century. And yet, how many people in Woodstock knowóor care when they do know--that the fans Rotron makes are for weapon systems ranging from simple rocket launchers all the way up to the world-destroying Minuteman missile with its H-bomb warhead? And how many know that among the contracts that have brought some wealth to the area is one from last October made with, yes, the State of Israel, to produce and deliver directly to the Israeli Air Force some 50 fans for its aircraft, the cost, a mere $27,712.50, with payment to be made directly by the Pentagon?

In other words, the possibility is quite real that the helicopters carrying the Israeli Commandos to their rendezvous with murder off the coast of Gaza were being cooled by fans made in Woodstock.

I am not here to hand out any instant remedy for this situation. All I can say that is relevant to a national holiday as solemn as Memorial Day is this: that unless we come to grips with truths such as these, we have no right associating Woodstock with its self-anointed identity as the town of Peace and Love. Thereís a fine looking Peace Monument right behind me as I speak, with inscriptions on many languages. But it is not worth the wood and metal it is made of unless we face up to our complicity in the war-making system, that machine that ties together the United States and Israel as the destroyers of peace around the world. The shock of Israelís attack on the Freedom Flotilla may finally begin to break up its shield of impunity. This will happen if we join together in sustained and principled agitation. But we must never forget that we will never have a just world unless we also work to bring down the military machine itself.

Israel: The Only Democracy in the Middle East?

2010-03-14T11:47:00.000-05:00

http://theonlydemocracy.org/

Zionism Laid Bare (from CounterPunch)

2010-02-17T11:59:00.000-05:00

A Review of Shahid Alam's "Israeli Exceptionalism"

Zionism Laid Bare

By KATHLEEN CHRISTISON
The essential point of M. Shahid Alam’s book, Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism, comes clear upon opening the book to the inscription in the frontispiece. From the Persian poet and philosopher Rumi, the quote reads, “You have the light, but you have no humanity. Seek humanity, for that is the goal.” Alam, professor of economics at Northeastern University in Boston and a CounterPunch contributor, follows this with an explicit statement of his aims in the first paragraph of the preface. Asking and answering the obvious question, “Why is an economist writing a book on the geopolitics of Zionism?” he says that he “could have written a book about the economics of Zionism, the Israeli economy, or the economy of the West Bank and Gaza, but how would any of that have helped me to understand the cold logic and the deep passions that have driven Zionism?”

Until recent years, the notion that Zionism was a benign, indeed a humanitarian, political movement designed for the noble purpose of creating a homeland and refuge for the world’s stateless, persecuted Jews was a virtually universal assumption. In the last few years, particularly since the start of the al-Aqsa intifada in 2000, as Israel’s harsh oppression of the Palestinians has become more widely known, a great many Israelis and friends of Israel have begun to distance themselves from and criticize Israel’s occupation policies, but they remain strong Zionists and have been at pains to propound the view that Zionism began well and has only lately been corrupted by the occupation. Alam demonstrates clearly, through voluminous evidence and a carefully argued analysis, that Zionism was never benign, never good—that from the very beginning, it operated according to a “cold logic” and, per Rumi, had “no humanity.” Except perhaps for Jews, which is where Israel’s and Zionism’s exceptionalism comes in.

Alam argues convincingly that Zionism was a coldly cynical movement from its beginnings in the nineteenth century. Not only did the founders of Zionism know that the land on which they set their sights was not an empty land, but they set out specifically to establish an “exclusionary colonialism” that had no room for the Palestinians who lived there or for any non-Jews, and they did this in ways that justified, and induced the West to accept, the displacement of the Palestinian population that stood in their way. With a simple wisdom that still escapes most analysts of Israel and Zionism, Alam writes that a “homeless nationalism,” as Zionism was for more than half a century until the state of Israel was established in 1948, “of necessity is a charter for conquest and—if it is exclusionary—for ethnic cleansing.”
How has Zionism been able to put itself forward as exceptional and get away with it, winning Western support for the establishment of an exclusionary state and in the process for the deliberate dispossession of the native population? Alam lays out three principal ways by which Zionism has framed its claims of exceptionalism in order to justify itself and gain world, particularly Western, support. First, the Jewish assumption of chosenness rests on the notion that Jews have a divine right to the land, a mandate granted by God to the Jewish people and only to them. This divine election gives the homeless, long-persecuted Jews the historical and legal basis by which to nullify the rights of Palestinians not so divinely mandated and ultimately to expel them from the land. Second, Israel’s often remarkable achievements in state-building have won Western support and provided a further justification for the displacement of “inferior” Palestinians by “superior” Jews. Finally, Zionism has put Jews forward as having a uniquely tragic history and as a uniquely vulnerable country, giving Israel a special rationale for protecting itself against supposedly unique threats to its existence and in consequence for ignoring the dictates of international law. Against the Jews’ tragedy, whatever pain Palestinians may feel at being displaced appears minor.

The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians that came as the result of Zionism’s need for an exclusivist homeland was no unfortunate consequence, and indeed had long been foreseen by Zionist thinkers and the Western leaders who supported them. Alam quotes early Zionists, including Theodore Herzl, who talked repeatedly of persuading the Palestinians “to trek,” or “fold their tents,” or “silently steal away.” In later years, the Zionists spoke of forcible “transfer” of the Palestinians. In the 1930s, David Ben-Gurion expressed his strong support for compulsory transfer, crowing that “Jewish power” was growing to the point that the Jewish community in Palestine would soon be strong enough to carry out ethnic cleansing on a large scale (as it ultimately did). In fact, the Zionists knew from the start that there would be no persuading the Palestinians simply to leave voluntarily and that violent conquest would be necessary to implant the Zionist state.

The British knew this as well. Zionist supporter Winston Churchill wrote as early as 1919 that the Zionists “take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience.” In a blunt affirmation of the calculated nature of Zionist plans and Western support for them, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, like Churchill another early supporter and also author of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which promised British support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, wrote that Zionism “is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.” It would be hard to find a more blatant one-sided falsity.

Alam traces in detail the progression of Zionist planning, beginning with the deliberate creation in the nineteenth century of an ethnic identity for Jews who shared only a religion and had none of the attributes of nationhood—neither a land, nor a common language or culture, nor arguably a common gene pool. Here Alam covers briefly the ground trod in detail by Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, whose book The Invention of the Jewish People, appearing in English just months before Alam’s book, shattered the myths surrounding Zionism’s claim to nationhood and to an exclusive right to Palestine. But Alam goes further, describing the Zionist campaign to create a surrogate “mother country” that, in the absence of a Jewish nation, would sponsor the Zionists’ colonization of Palestine and support its national project. Having gained British support for its enterprise, Zionism then set about building a rationale for displacing the Palestinian Arabs who were native to Palestine (who, incidentally, did indeed possess the attributes of a nation but lay in the path of a growing Jewish, Western-supported military machine). Zionist propaganda then and later deliberately spread the notion that Palestinians were not “a people,” had no attachment to the land and no national aspirations, and in the face of the Jews’ supposedly divine mandate, of Israel’s “miraculous” accomplishments, and of the Jews’ monumental suffering in the Holocaust, the dispossession of the Palestinians was made to appear to a disinterested West as nothing more than a minor misfortune.

Addressing what he calls the “destabilizing logic” of Zionism, Alam builds the argument that Zionism thrives on, and indeed can survive only in the midst of, conflict. In the first instance, Alam shows, Zionism actually embraced the European anti-Semitic charge that Jews were an alien people. This was the natural result of promoting the idea that Jews actually belonged in Palestine in a nation of their own, and in addition, spreading fear of anti-Semitism proved to be an effective way to attract Jews not swayed by the arguments of Zionism (who made up the majority of Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) to the Zionist cause. Early Zionist leaders talked frankly of anti-Semitism as a means of teaching many educated and assimilated Jews “the way back to their people” and of forcing an allegiance to Zionism. Anti-Semitism remains in many ways the cement that holds Zionism together, keeping both Israeli Jews and diaspora Jews in thrall to Israel as their supposedly only salvation from another Holocaust.

In the same vein, Alam contends, Zionists realized that in order to succeed in their colonial enterprise and maintain the support of the West, they would have to create an adversary common to both the West and the Jews. Only a Jewish state waging wars in the Middle East could “energize the West’s crusader mentality, its evangelical zeal, its dreams of end times, its imperial ambitions.” Arabs were the initial and enduring enemy, and Zionists and Israel have continued to provoke Arab antagonism and direct it toward radicalism, to steer Arab anger against the United States, to provoke the Arabs into wars against Israel, and to manufacture stories of virulent Arab anti-Semitism—all specifically in order to sustain Jewish and Western solidarity with Israel. More recently, Islam itself has become the common enemy, an adversary fashioned so that what Alam calls the “Jewish-Gentile partnership” can be justified and intensified. Focusing on Arab and Muslim hostility, always portrayed as motivated by irrational hatred rather than by opposition to Israeli and U.S. policies, allows Zionists to divert attention from their own expropriation of Palestinian land and dispossession of Palestinians and allows them to characterize Israeli actions as self-defense against anti-Semitic Arab and Muslim resistance.

Alam treats the Zionist/Israel lobby as a vital cog in the machine that built and sustains the Jewish state. Indeed, Theodore Herzl was the original Zionist lobbyist. During the eight years between the launch of the Zionist movement at Basel in 1897 and his death, Herzl had meetings with a remarkable array of power brokers in Europe and the Middle East, including the Ottoman sultan, Kaiser Wilhelm II, King Victor Emanuel III of Italy, Pope Pius X, the noted British imperialist Lord Cromer and the British colonial secretary of the day, and the Russian ministers of interior and finance, as well as a long list of dukes, ambassadors, and lesser ministers. One historian used the term “miraculous” to describe Herzl’s ability to secure audiences with the powerful who could help Zionism.

Zionist lobbyists continued to work as assiduously, with results as “miraculous,” throughout the twentieth century, gaining influence over civil society and ultimately over policymakers and, most importantly, shaping the public discourse that determines all thinking about Israel and its neighbors. As Alam notes, “since their earliest days, the Zionists have created the organizations, allies, networks, and ideas that would translate into media, congressional, and presidential support for the Zionist project.” An increasing proportion of the activists who lead major elements of civil society, such as the labor and civil rights movements, are Jews, and these movements have as a natural consequence come to embrace Zionist aims. Christian fundamentalists, who in the last few decades have provided massive support to Israel and its expansionist policies, grew in the first instance because they were “energized by every Zionist success on the ground” and have continued to expand with a considerable lobbying push from the Zionists.

Alam’s conclusion—a direct argument against those who contend that the lobby has only limited influence: “It makes little sense,” in view of the pervasiveness of Zionist influence over civil society and political discourse, “to maintain that the pro-Israeli positions of mainstream American organizations . . . emerged independently of the activism of the American Jewish community.” In its early days, Zionism grew only because Herzl and his colleagues employed heavy lobbying in the European centers of power; Jewish dispersion across the Western world—and Jewish influence in the economies, the film industries, the media, and academia in key Western countries—are what enabled the Zionist movement to survive and thrive in the dark years of the early twentieth century; and Zionist lobbying and molding of public discourse are what has maintained Israel’s favored place in the hearts and minds of Americans and the policy councils of America’s politicians.

This is a critically important book. It enhances and expands on the groundbreaking message of Shlomo Sand’s work. If Sand shows that Jews were not “a people” until Zionism created them as such, Alam shows this also and goes well beyond to show how Zionism and its manufactured “nation” went about dispossessing and replacing the Palestinians and winning all-important Western support for Israel and its now 60-year-old “exclusionary colonialism.”

Kathleen Christison is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and theWound of
Dispossession and co-author, with Bill Christison, of Palestine in Pieces: Graphic Perspectives on the Israeli Occupation, published last summer by Pluto Press. She can be reached atkb.christison@earthlink.net.

Biased coverage before this week

2010-02-08T20:46:00.002-05:00

The Huffington Post FEBRUARY 8, 2010

The New York Times' coverage of Israel-Palestine was Biased Before Bureau Chief's Son Joined the IDF

This week the editors of The New York Times's sprang to the defense of Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner following weeks of controversy over his son's service in the Israeli Defense Forces. Public editor Clark Hoyt praised Bronner's track-record at the Times, in his February 6th column but nonetheless concluded that "covering Israel's conflict with a son in uniform might be cause to reassign even a superb reporter." The Times' Executive Editor Bill Keller said in a response that "the editors discussed the situation and sees no reason to change Bronner's status as bureau chief."

Let's get somethings straight. Ethan Bronner is not and never has been a "superb reporter" and there are plenty of reasons why he should not be allowed to run the Times' biggest Middle Eastern bureau, let alone commit blatant anti-journalistic acts on behalf of the "paper of record"--the last of which is his son's military service. No other reporter has turned the paper of record into a mouthpiece for the Israeli occupation more than Ethan Bronner and that is quite an accomplishment for a publication that so consistently represents one party's agenda.

There are too many inaccurate assertions in either of these letters to address in a single blog post, but what's most troubling to me is that both Hoyt and Keller appear to believe in Bronner's, and the Times', objectivity: "Bronner occupies one of journalism's hottest seats, covering the intractable conflict between Israelis and Palestinians," Hoyt wrote. "As the top correspondent for America's most influential newspaper, everything he writes is examined microscopically for signs of bias."

First of all, I object to the characterization of the conflict as "intractable" but that's a minor infraction on the spectrum of editorial infractions. You don't have to be a journalist, editor, or Middle Eastern scholar to find signs of biases in Bronner's coverage. Nor does one have to examine it microscopically. Just type in his byline in the search box of the Times' website and glance at the first twenty headlines that appear and it's obvious where Bronner's sympathies lie. Almost every substantial story is told from the perspective of Israelis: "Israel Nears Membership in Economic Club," from January 19; "For Israel, Mixed Feelings on Aid Effort," published on January 22; "Israel Prepares Rebuttal to the Goldstone Report," from January 23.

Bronner himself told Hoyt that he "would rather be judged by his work than his biography," so a signs of bias take a look at the latter story on what he characterizes as Israel's campaign to "dispel the [Goldstone] report's harsh conclusion -- that the death of noncombatants and destruction of civilian infrastructure were part of an official plan to terrorize the Palestinian population."

In September a United Nations fact-finding mission released a 575-page report of massive war crimes committed by Israel and to a lesser extent Hamas during the 2008 war in Gaza. Bronner did not cover Goldstone's findings for the times in September, but devoted 1,200 words to Israel's rebuttal on January 23.

"The rebuttal will be given to United Nations officials in the coming weeks and its contents will remain under wraps until then," he wrote. "But officers involved in writing the report gave some details."

He proceeds to quote at least seven different Israeli sources and not a single Palestinian or independent human rights group about the details of a document he presumable has not read. The sources refute a few of the specific findings related to infrastructure damage detailed by the commission, but mentions the gravest alleged breaches at the heart of the report, only in passing.

For instance, Bronner makes no mention of the mortar attack on a mosque during prayer service that killed 15 people, but allows an anonymous source to defend itself against the report's minor charges, such as the destruction of a flour mill and chicken coops. "The mission finds that the conduct of Israeli armed forces constitute grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention in respect of wilful killings and wilfully causing great suffering to protected persons and as such give rise to individual criminal responsibility," the executive summary of the Goldstone report said.

Rubble and destruction were the most minor consequences of the war, but you'd never know that from reading Bronner's account. The Times in general, and Bronner in particular, have a long history of burying the plight of individual Palestinians under the rubble in service of furthering a one-sided narrative of the conflict.

Bronner's objectivity deserves to be questioned and If his son's military service is the impetus for readers to look deeper into the news they consumer and the interests driving it, so be it. By pretending to engage in a discussion about journalistic objectivity, Keller and Hoyt made it blatantly obvious that readers cannot rely on editors for a balanced news diet.

"It's not just that we value the expertise and integrity of a journalist who has covered this most difficult of stories extraordinarily well for more than a quarter century," Keller wrote in a response to Hoyt. "It's not just that we are reluctant to capitulate to the more savage partisans who make that assignment so difficult -- and who make the fairmindedness of a correspondent like Ethan so precious and courageous."

Letters to the Woodstock Times

2010-02-05T14:23:00.002-05:00

LETTER A HOAX

Last week's letter entitled 'Anti-Zionist is Anti-Semitic', biblical references and all, was full of mistakes, half-truths and just entirely wrong statements. Normally I wouldn't bother responding but I hate to let such blatant nonsense stand uncontested, especially when it concerns myself and my friends.

First of all, the extensively quoted "Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend" by Martin Luther King Jr. which supposedly appeared in the Saturday Review of 8/67 on page 76 is a complete hoax. There was no such letter that appeared in the Saturday Review or in any other place except for a book written by a one Rabbi Shneier called Shared Dreams who also referenced the same Saturday Review where the supposed letter never appeared. Any check on the web will reveal the letter to be a hoax.

Be that as it may, even if the King letter were real, I would disagree with its conclusions. There are and have been millions of Jews throughout the world, not just here in Woodstock, who have vigorously opposed the Zionist idea of a "Jewish State" with special rights and privileges for Jews and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians - who according to Ben and Batya AmHaAretz - are part of "2000 years of foreign occupation." Hello? You mean because the God of Abraham gave that land to the Jews forever? Please. Get real.

Even the Zionist's own hero, Moshe Dayan once said, "What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived."

Are all anti-Zionist Jews anti-Semetic or self-hating Jews as I have been called by Warren Boroson, whose inane, (if not insane) conclusions are also quoted by the AmHaAretz's?

Millions of Jews who do not accept Zionism, self-haters or anti-semites? Nonsense.

Speaking of the misguided and misinformed Boroson, according to him, "there is no Israeli blockade of food, medical supplies, water, electricity, gas."Are you serious? I suppose the 400 children killed in the invasion in December 2008 were an invention also. I have seen footage of Palestinian infants with bullet holes in their chests.

Had King been alive today, he would side with Nelson Mandela who said, "we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians," and "The so-called 'Palestinian autonomous areas' are bantustans. These are restricted entities within the power structure of the Israeli apartheid system."

King would have unquestionably also agreed with Desmond Tutu, "Yesterday's South African township dwellers can tell you about today's life in the Occupied Territories... More than an emergency is needed to get to a hospital; less than a crime earns a trip to jail... If apartheid ended, so can the occupation."

I was there in Cairo with the Gaza Freedom March - I wonder where Ben and Batya AmHaAretz got this information that we "began pelting the Egyptian Army with rocks" and several of us were arrested? Because that is also nonsense - it never happened. As a group we were committed to nonviolent civil resistance and we stuck to that. The Egyptian police made no arrests of Gaza Freedom Marchers.

Viva Palestina, the 200 truck humanitarian aid convoy that went into Gaza after we had left did suffer some serious violence at the hands of the Egyptian border police with 55 members of Viva Palestina beaten and injured before the trucks were allowed in.

To read a more accurate report of what did happen and to learn about the historical background of Gaza, Woodstock International recently published a special edition Gaza, 20 pages of well written and accurate articles and pictures. You can see it on line at www.WoodstockInternational.us or www.WoodstockInternational.blogspot.com. E-mail me at takauff@gmail.com and I'll be happy to send you a hard copy of the paper. For first hand accounts of what the Hudson Valley contingent went through in Cairo, go to http://www.hudsontogaza.blogspot.com.

Tarak Kauff
Woodstock

SAVE A LIFE, SAVE THE WORLD

I myself do not do roulette. And I make it a point not to present my credentials or prove anything about myself so, like the Jewish whore burned in the Spanish Inquisition who refused to have her neck "mercifully" broken by kissing the cross and from the flames called out "Shmah Israel, Adonoi Eloheinu!" (See film Santo Officio by Arturo Ripstein) I will not state my faith, nor the ways I believe in its true values of solidarity with the downtrodden which in the course of thousands of years our religion evolved to and calls for, nor will I describe how my grandmother, Esther, had a sad face, apparently thinking of the letters that stopped coming from Lithuania, during WWII, a face I mistakenly thought was that of all grandmothers.

The fact of the matter is that the people in Gaza are hungry and starving. They are mostly under 16 years of age. Gaza is blockaded in a way called War of Attrition, a situation the food and medicines carried by our slandered neighbors attempted to alleviate in a small way. As we are told, to "To save one life is to save the world." If people, like myself, are disgusted by the lies of B & B and past writers to the Times who may believe they have the truth, I suggest to the latter that: They pray for enlightenment; Stop flag worship and remember God; cease from violating the commandment Thou Shall Not Bear False Witness, in their attempt to besmirch the names of those who would feed the hungry as our prophets exhorted; and, finally, that they and we all kindly remember, "empty barrels make the most noise."

Roberta Gould

West Hurley

OFFENSIVE, HYPOCRITCAL COMMENTS

Dear Batya and Ben AmHaAretz, you are artists and in your art, I realize you apply the concept of "hidur mitzvah," which is the beautification of the commandments...a directive to make commandments and their fulfillment beautiful while doing good. It is a beautiful creation and expression of doing good deeds, when applied by open, informed and non-bigoted individuals. I saw your art and it is indeed beautiful.

The comments in your letter, however, are offensive and hypocritical; as a citizen, as a peace activist, as an artist and as one having Jewish roots I am offended at your comments for the hate they foment and the intellectual hypocrisy they display towards people who dissent and actively voice their criticisms of corrupt governments and murderers.

Before invoking solemn scriptures and in keeping with your sacred artistic genre/spirit, may I suggest you conduct a simple, objective (or as least subjective) examination of how the Israeli government observes and beautifies the "commandments," among which: You shall not steal (as in land from Palestina...); you shall not murder (Palestinian Women Children and civilians...); you shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor (land, water, olive groves...).

Furthermore as fervent and faithful people, Batya and Ben, you perhaps also forget that The Torah (Vayikra 23:40) refers to the etrog as a p'ri eitz hadar, the beautiful fruit of the tree of life; interpretations aside, for the Palestinians that tree, that fruit, is (was...!) the olive; In Palestine, the olive tree is prized for its historical presence, its beauty, its symbolic significance, and most importantly for its economic significance; how many of those holy, life enhancing fruit trees have been destroyed by the Israeli occupation?

Since you are so intent on Scriptural reference, I would also remind you to revisit another commandment: You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your God. You did!

And please, do not ever make wrongful use of the name of true patriots who have the courage to criticize! Criticism of corruption and murder is not terrorism! It is a mitzvah towards all people of good will and the oppressed!

Maurizio Morselli

New York, NY

Pete Seeger and Jeff Halper

2010-02-01T16:41:00.000-05:00

Pete Seeger's role in ending Israeli house demolitions
by MainStreet, Wed Nov 25, 2009

Pete Seeger and Jeff Halper

One of America's great peace activists, Pete Seeger, now 90 years of age, has never forgotten his roots in the world of social injustice. In this case, it is the plight of the Palestinians, a people deprived of freedom and self-determination for over 40 years. Some would even put that at 60 years when they were first ethnically cleansed from their country of over a thousand years, Palestine, in 1948. It created one of the longest refugee problems, and one of the longest military occupations in modern history.

For the past ten years, Seeger has personally supported Jeff Halper's organization, the Israel Committee Against House Demolition or the ICAHD. The ICAHD has documented over 18,000 house demolitions by Israeli authorities and armed forces since 1948. It has been one method of ethnically cleansing Palestinian families from their land. Other methods have included undermining the ability of Palestinians to feed their families by wrecking their olive and fruit orchards and farmlands.

Anyone who owns a radio probably knows the song "Turn, Turn, Turn" (To everything there is a season) very well. A number of versions of this song have become permanent fixtures on the play lists of most popular music radio stations. Here's what the listeners don't know: every time this song is played, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions receives a few dollars, which accumulate to "several thousand dollars every year," according to the committee's co-founder and coordinator.

Read on HERE: http://icahdusa.org/2009/11/545

When people like Seeger stand up, who cannot take notice.

Ethan Bronner, Israeli apologist at the NY Times

2010-02-01T12:37:00.000-05:00

As'ad AbuKhalil, a frequent critic of Bronner's coverage, blogged in response that "The New York Times devoted more space to Israeli and Zionist criticisms of the Goldstone report than to the [content of the] report itself" (The Angry Arab News Service, "Ethan Bronner's propaganda services, 25 January 2010)

-------------

John Mearsheimer:

"Bronner's job — as usual — is to present Israel in the most favorable light...If we had journalists in Israel who were not pro-Israel (almost all the mainstream ones are) and we had a media that was willing to allow honest reporting and critical commentary regarding Israel — like Ha'aretz does — we would have a discourse in this country about Israel that bears little resemblance to the nonsensical one we now have. This stunted discourse seriously damages Israel, which points up that Bronner is no friend of Israel."

-------------

Terry Gross interviewed Times’ Ethan Bronner yesterday…

by PHILIP WEISS on JANUARY 28, 2009 · 18 COMMENTS

Peter Voskamp writes:

Stumbled upon Terry Gross and Fresh Air last night. Bizarre listening to Ethan Bronner and Gross sort of contort themselves to lay the blame, ultimately, at Hamas' feet. Bronner offers some "horse race" analysis about the why and wherefore (Israel had to do this in part to restore confidence in the military after the 2006 Lebanon incursion; Hamas provoked Israel only because they saw how Hezbollah upped its profile by doing so in 2006). He goes on to admit that the Hamas rockets kill maybe one person a year, but, dammit, the U.N. doesn't enforce resolutions to keep Iran from meddling. The end of the interview, in particular, was odd. Bronner basically acknowledges that if one were to create a "pain index"– there's no question that the Palestinians are much worse off, "But that's not what we're talking about here…" Any atrocities mentioned were only those committed by Hamas.

It almost sounds as if Bronner knows in his heart of hearts that the Israeli response was morally indefensible, but has his reflexive, knee-jerk hiccup back to the party line–

-------------

Bronner's pro-Israeli bias reporting on Israel's attack on Gaza last year was also criticized by the media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) (See "NYT and the Perils of Mideast 'Balance'," 4 February 2009).

NYT and the Perils of Mideast 'Balance'

02/04/2009 by Peter Hart

New York Times reporters Ethan Bronner and Sabrina Tavernise went to Gaza (2/4/09) to look into stories of civilian atrocities, and turned up some very powerful examples. Unfortunately, the impact of that reporting was undermined by the all-too-familiar tendency to "balance" these facts with criticisms of Palestinians.

For a piece that is attempting to get a better sense of who's "version" of events is more accurate, the Times reveals its bias from the start, rendering a white phosphorous attack on a house as a "phosphorus smoke bomb," the qualifier "smoke" helpfully suggesting that the bomb, which accidentally incinerated most of a family in their home, was being used legally as a smoke screen.

The Times underlines this point in the second graph by noting that the bomb was "intended to mask troop movements outside." According to whom? That claim is stated is as a fact, with no attribution.

The Times' reporters continue by writing:

The war in El Atatra tells the story of Israel’s three-week offensive in Gaza, with each side giving a very different version. Palestinians here describe Israeli military actions as a massacre, and Israelis attribute civilian casualties to a Hamas policy of hiding behind its people.

In El Atatra, neither version appears entirely true, based on 50 interviews with villagers and four Israeli commanders. The dozen or so civilian deaths seem like the painful but inevitable outcome of a modern army bringing war to an urban space. And while Hamas fighters had placed explosives in a kitchen, on doorways and in a mosque, they did not seem to be forcing civilians to act as shields.

OK--neither side's tale is completely accurate. But after reading the Times' own account, it certainly seems that the Palestinian "version" is much closer to reality. Nonetheless, the reporters chalk up the differences as part of "a desire to shape public opinion."

The Times goes on to review--and in some cases debunk--some of the Israeli justifications, including an attack on a school and the destruction of homes. The impact of that investigative work is, yet again, diluted by the framing of the big picture:

Both sides engage in their own denials.

Israelis argue that this war was especially tough because they had waited so long before taking action in response to the thousands of rockets fired from Gaza over eight years.

Yet after Israelis withdrew their settlers and soldiers from Gaza in late 2005, they killed, over the next three years in numerous military actions here, the same number of Gazans as those killed in this war--about 1,275.

For their part, few Palestinian villagers even acknowledged the existence of fighters here. Hamas is now asserting that it achieved a victory.

Let's compare those two forms of "denial." Israelis somehow have convinced themselves that their military has been exercising unusual restraint--while killing over 1,000 people before this latest round of attacks. Palestinians, meanwhile, deny the existence of Hamas fighters in their area-- though, by the Times' own reporting, in the very same article, Israeli claims about the numbers of Hamas fighters in this given area appear to be (in some cases) unfounded.

This equivalence comes amid stories of heart-wrenching suffering--an injured baby left to die on a tractor because Israeli soldiers were firing on family members trying to get to a hospital. Why dress up that kind of reporting with this sort of "he said, she said" balance? Perhaps the sense that the truth is too one-sided.

-------------

This is Ethan Bronner’s chance to seize the Friedman laurels

by PHILIP WEISS on DECEMBER 30, 2008 ·

I notice that Ethan Bronner's coverage of Gaza in the Times continues to be cautious. He balances attacks on Islamic University with the threats to Israelis in the Negev. The most vivid moments in this story are anti-Hamas. The execution of a Palestinian collaborator with Israel. The very genuine fear and trembling of Israelis in Ashkelon. Taghreed El-Khodary is in Gaza for the Times; but I sense that Bronner is the writing the piece from the fact that the Times hyperlinks his byline here.

Ambitious Times reporters would be wise to bear in mind: This was the moment in the previous generation that Tom Friedman became Tom Friedman. The fog of war enveloped Beirut too, but Friedman (a '67-War Jew who had lectured his high school classmates on the glories of Zionism in Golden Valley, the Jewish suburb west of Minneapolis) had the cojones as we say in Arabic to say what was happening: "indiscriminate" bombing. The word was cut from his lead by his editors, Friedman threw a righteous fit, which before long became widely known, and his name was inscribed in the pantheon. The rest is history. The mustachioed middlebrovian Friedman now lectures America on the rightness of the Iraq war and the glorious fitness of global capitalism. But let us be clear: Tom Friedman showed great independence and honesty during the bombing of Beirut and later Sabra and Shatila. He was upset by what Israel had revealed to him about its character, and he let his readers know. Great. Then came his book From Beirut to Jerusalem. A star was born.

Ethan Bronner seems too wimpy to grasp the nettle, maybe El-Khodary will. One of you must take some chances, and use some bold adjectives to describe the one-sidedness of the slaughter. Push the envelope. Don't go down in flames (I'm unpaid) but challenge your editors at this moment of shocking horror. American Jews are watching you, Barack Obama is glancing at the front page. Jump up to the challenge

-------------

One of the most insightful articles on Israel/Palestine I've read recently pointed out that the best intentions are always assumed on the part of the Israelis, but the intentions of Palestinians are always assumed to be the worst possible ones. If Israel drops a bomb on a house with a family in it, that's justified by the intent, which was (we are told) only to hurt one person in the house. If Gazans use a tunnel to smuggle goods during a blockade, it's assumed that the intent is to smuggle arms - even though the recent war showed that Hamas had little by way of arms.

-------------

New York Times fails to disclose Jerusalem bureau chief’s conflict of interest Posted by Philip Dru on 1/25/10 • Categorized as Israel, Propaganda

The New York Times has all but confirmed to The Electronic Intifada (EI) that the son of its Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner was recently inducted into the Israeli army.

Over the weekend, EI received a tip suggesting this had been the case and wrote to Bronner to ask him to confirm or deny the information and to seek his opinion on whether, if true, he thought it would be a conflict of interest.

Susan Chira, the foreign editor of The New York Times wrote in an email to The Electronic Intifada this morning:

“Ethan Bronner referred your query to me, the foreign editor. Here is my comment: Mr. Bronner’s son is a young adult who makes his own decisions. At The Times, we have found Mr. Bronner’s coverage to be scrupulously fair and we are confident that will continue to be the case.”

The Electronic Intifada also wrote to Clark Hoyt, the public editor of The New York Times, to confirm the information and ask for an opinion on whether this constituted a conflict of interest, but had yet to receive a response.

Bronner, as bureau chief, has primary responsibility for his paper’s reporting on all aspects of the Palestine/Israel conflict, and on the Israeli army, whose official name is the “Israel Defense Forces.”

On 23 January, Bronner published a lengthy article on Israel’s efforts to refute allegations contained in the UN-commissioned Goldstone report of war crimes and crimes against humanity during its attack on Gaza last winter (“Israel Poised to Challenge a UN Report on Gaza“).

As’ad AbuKhalil, a frequent critic of Bronner’s coverage, blogged in response that “The New York Times devoted more space to Israeli and Zionist criticisms of the Goldstone report than to the [content of the] report itself” (The Angry Arab News Service, “Ethan Bronner’s propaganda services, 25 January 2010)

Bronner’s pro-Israeli bias reporting on Israel’s attack on Gaza last year was also criticized by the media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) (See “NYT and the Perils of Mideast ‘Balance’,” 4 February 2009).

The New York Times’ own “Company policy on Ethics in Journalism” acknowledges that the activities of a journalist’s family member may constitute a conflict of interest. It includes as an example, “A brother or a daughter in a high-profile job on Wall Street might produce the appearance of conflict for a business reporter or editor.” Such conflicts may on occasion require the staff member “to withdraw from certain coverage.”

After Israel’s invasion of Gaza last winter, Israeli military censors banned local media from printing the names of individual officers who participated in the attack for fear that this could assist international efforts to bring war crimes suspects to justice. This followed the publication of a number of soldiers’ personal testimonies in the Israeli press describing atrocities they had seen committed by the Israeli army in Gaza.

The Times’ treatment of Bronner sets an interesting precedent. Would the newspaper’s policy be the same if a reporter in its Jerusalem bureau had an immediate family member who faced Bronner’s son across the battlefield, as a member of a Palestinian or Lebanese resistance organization?

It would appear that despite the highly sensitive nature of Palestine/Israel coverage, and the very high personal stakes for Bronner and his son that could result from full and open coverage of the Israeli army’s abuses of Palestinians, The New York Times does not consider this situation to be a problematic case. It had not even disclosed the situation to its readers — until now.

The Electronic Intifada | Mon, Jan 25, 2010

-------------FROM FANTASYLAND MEDIA----------------

In covering the Israeli "settlements" in the West Bank, Ethan Bronner of the NY Times uses as picture of a small boy outside a shack to represent the close to 500,000 Israelis who are stealing land captured in the 1967 war. Since when do these billion dollar funded settlements look like that? Crude propaganda from the NY Times, always eager to cast Israel in a favorable light.

While praising Israeli concessions, Bronner also fails to mention that 2,000 "buildings" (apartment buildings) will continue to be built according to Israel =150,000 people added to the 300,000+ existing settlers.

(Thanks to Felice Gellman for this story)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/world/middleeast/29mideast.html?hp

--------------

"IDF combat soldiers and officers from the Gaza operation are now beginning to confirm what our enemies have been saying for months. They tell us that, contrary to our own beliefs and expectations, combat norms in Gaza exhibited a blatant disregard for Palestinian civilians. Their comments were not a left-wing leak, but emerged from a frank discussion at pre-army training institute. As Amos Harel writes: 'The soldiers are not lying, for the simple reason they have no reason to.'

...Yet we still must ask ourselves: When Jews around the world literally endangered themselves marching in solidarity rallies in January this year, was this what they had in mind? Were Jewish communities and individuals, and of course the vast majority of the Israeli public, were we all in favor of a lax attitude to civilian casualties? Or did not we all take comfort in the IDF's high moral standards?

Searching for cold comfort, we can nevertheless pride ourselves on the vibrant, dynamic, and brutally honest democracy of Israel. It is unlikely that issues such as these are exposed or ever debated in the countries of Israel's enemies..."

http://makom.haaretz.com/topic.asp

--->But what about the dishonesty of Israel's supposed friends? Ethan Bronner, The NY Times' chief propagandist for Israeli militarism, had this to report last weekend: “'When we entered houses, we actually cleaned up the place,' said Yishai Goldflam, 32, a religiously observant film student in Jerusalem...'There are always idiots who do immoral things. But they don’t represent the majority. I remember once when a soldier wanted to take a Coke from a store, and he was stopped by his fellow soldiers because it was the wrong thing to do.'

300 plus children dead in Gaza, and the NY Times is talking about an Israeli soldier returning a Coke. No "brutally honest democracy" in sight in the good old USA.

--------------

"Human Rights Watch report claims Israel committed war crimes in its use of air-burst white phosphorus artillery shells

'Israel's military fired white phosphorus over crowded areas of Gaza repeatedly and indiscriminately in its three-week war, killing and injuring civilians and committing war crimes,' Human Rights Watch said today.

In a 71-page report, the rights group said the repeated use of air-burst white phosphorus artillery shells in populated areas of Gaza was not incidental or accidental, but revealed 'a pattern or policy of conduct.'

It said the Israeli military used white phosphorus in a 'deliberate or reckless' way..."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/25/israel-white-phosphorus-gaza

--->Rather than covering this story, Ethan Bronner of the NY Times gives it one sentence, buried in an article that disputes Israeli soldiers' accounts of committing war crimes in Gaza. I wonder if Israeli citizens would put up with this level of dishonesty from their own media?

--------------

"U.S. citizens critically hurt at West Bank protest...Protesters who were at the scene said that Anderson was standing by the side of the road when soldiers fired at him...

The protest took place in the West Bank town of Na'alin, where Palestinians and international backers frequently gather to demonstrate against the barrier. Israel says the barrier is necessary to keep Palestinian attackers from infiltrating into Israel. But Palestinians view it as a thinly veiled land grab because it juts into the West Bank at multiple points...

A Palestinian protester was also wounded in the leg as a result of live IDF fire.

In 2003, another ISM activist, 23-year-old American Rachel Corrie, was crushed to death in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer as she tried to block it from demolishing a Palestinian home."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1070940.html

--->The NY Times does a masterful job in twisting stories like this so that they don't appear critical of Israel. Lets see how the reporter, Ethan Bronner, does it this time.

Bronner's story is on page 7 on the NY Times, while Haaretz put the story on their front page. Bronner's headline reads "American Injured in Clash at Israeli Barrier" rather than Haaretz's "U.S. Citizens Critically Hurt at West Bank Protest." "Injured" is less dramatic than "critically hurt." A "clash" would indicate violence on both sides, rather than the "protest" that Haaretz uses in their title.

Going on, Bronner writes, "The army spokeswoman said there were about 400 violent demonstrators at the village of Niilin, west of Ramallah, many of them throwing rocks at the troops. The forces shot back, she said, but not with live fire." No mention here of the Palestinian protester shot in the leg. No mention of the statements by other protesters that Anderson was only standing by the side of the road. And, of course, no mention of the American activist, Rachel Corrie killed this week in 2003 by an Israeli bulldozer.

And to Bronner, why had Anderson come to the West Bank? "Mr. Anderson, 37, came to Israel two weeks ago to join his girlfriend, who is also active in opposing the barrier and the occupation of the West Bank." He was here, according to Bronner simply to join his girlfriend. Not because he was committed to human rights for Palestinians. Haaretz didn't try to minimize his commitment with stories of his girlfriend.

Bronner is simply a masterful Israeli propagandist, the type that any reputable newspapers would fire for consistently distorting the news. But the NY Times is simply not a reputable newspaper, when it comes to Israel.

--------------

"After weeks of denying that it used white phosphorus in the heavily populated Gaza Strip, Israel finally admitted yesterday that the weapon was deployed in its offensive.

The army’s use of white phosphorus – which makes a distinctive shellburst of dozens of smoke trails – was reported first by The Times (UK publication) on January 5, when it was strenuously denied by the army. Now, in the face of mounting evidence and international outcry, Israel has been forced to backtrack on that initial denial...

The incident in question is thought to be the firing of phosphorus shells at a UN school in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip on January 17. The weapon is legal if used as a smokescreen in battle but it is banned from deployment in civilian areas. Pictures of the attack show Palestinian medics fleeing as blobs of burning phosphorus rain down on the compound."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article5575070.ece

--->The NY Times has been slow in reporting the obvious use of white phosphorus in Gaza (YouTube is full of fist hand accounts). As late as January 14, its chief Israeli apologist in the region, Ethan Bronner, was writing that observers had "seen no evidence of the use of white phosphorus, an obscurant used in military conflicts that can be dangerous for civilians under certain circumstances." Such a delicate description of Israeli war crimes.

--------------

I don't know anyone who speaks the truth as bluntly as Noam Chomsky. And the truth must be spoken about the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. Here is Chomsky on the invasion:

"On Saturday December 27, the latest US-Israeli attack on helpless Palestinians was launched. The attack had been meticulously planned, for over 6 months according to the Israeli press...

That surely includes the timing of the assault: shortly before noon, when children were returning from school and crowds were milling in the streets of densely populated Gaza City. It took only a few minutes to kill over 225 people and wound 700, an auspicious opening to the mass slaughter of defenseless civilians trapped in a tiny cage with nowhere to flee.

In his retrospective 'Parsing Gains of Gaza War,' New York Times correspondent Ethan Bronner cited this achievement as one of the most significant of the gains. Israel calculated that it would be advantageous to appear to 'go crazy,' causing vastly disproportionate terror, a doctrine that traces back to the 1950s. 'The Palestinians in Gaza got the message on the first day,' Bronner wrote, 'when Israeli warplanes struck numerous targets simultaneously in the middle of a Saturday morning. Some 200 were killed instantly, shocking Hamas and indeed all of Gaza.' The tactic of 'going crazy' appears to have been successful, Bronner concluded: there are 'limited indications that the people of Gaza felt such pain from this war that they will seek to rein in Hamas,' the elected government. That is another long-standing doctrine of state terror..."

--------------

"As of this writing, Israeli Air Force attacks today on the occupied Gaza Strip killed an estimated 300 or more people and injured hundreds more. These Israeli attacks come on top of a brutal siege of the Gaza Strip, which has created a humanitarian catastrophe of dire proportions for Gaza's 1.5 million Palestinian residents by restricting the provision of food, fuel, medicine, electricity, and other necessities of life."

(From End the Occupation)

http://www.indymedia.org/es/2008/12/918399.shtml

-->To the NY Times, such violations of international law are not war crimes but Israel "reminding foes that it has teeth." Sort of like saying that the Nazis invaded Poland, to continue the NY Times headline story, to "re-establish its deterrence." And Israel's motive in the bombing of Gaza? "It worries that its enemies are less afraid of it than they once were, or should be. Israeli leaders are calculating that a display of power in Gaza could fix that." So whenever a country decides that its neighbors are "less afraid" of it, bring in the bombers to fix things. Eric Bonner, writing for the NY Times, is a veteran Israeli apologist. Researcher John Mearsheimer recently pointed out that "Bronner's job -- as usual -- is to present Israel in the most favorable light."

--------------

Deeply Abhor the Slander

2010-01-31T16:10:00.000-05:00

I deeply abhor the slander to good people aware of the suffering of others who work, give, and suffer hardships to help. Attacking viciously with name calling is the weapon of those of bad faith. Reading this in last weekís times really made my Jewish blood, whatever that is,† boil. † The people who gave their time and lives for our people during Nazism,† Sophie Scholl, the guillotine, Bonhoeffer, the noose,† Marlene Dietrich ostracized and spit at on return to Germany, our departed and beloved neighbor Jotje Vos, from Amsterdam, whose housed 23 Jews in her small house and had to deal with her own cramped family, and Samuel Beckett, bicycling around France with resistance messages, these people† had hearts in their body, along with brains. While† the number of these people were proportionately miniscule among the† brain washed Anti-Semite mobs and finks of Europe,† they attested to the truth.† This is not so in the case of the Port Ewen† Ben and Batya, who dare to call my friends Anti-Semites, just as they would have spat at Marlene Dietrich had they been German.† I myself do not do roulette. And I make it a point not present my credentials, so that the same dirty epithet will† not be hurled at me,† for I do not prove anything.† Like the Jewish whore burned in the Spanish Inquisition who refused to have her neck ìmercifullyî broken by kissing the cross† and from the flames called out ìShmah Israel, Adonoi Eloheinu!î† (See film ìSanto Officioî† by Arturo Ripstein) † I will not state† my faith, nor the ways I believe in the true values of solidarity with the downtrodden which in the course of thousands of years our religion evolved to and at best calls for, nor how† my grandmother, Esther,† had a very sad face, thinking of the letters that stopped coming from Lithuania, during WWII, a face I mistakenly thought was that of all grandmothers.

The fact of the matter is that the people in Gaza ARE hungry and starving. They are mostly under 16 years of age. Gaza is blockaded in a way called WAR OF ATTRITION, a situation the food and medicines carried by our slandered neighbors attempted to alleviate in a small way. As we are told,† to ìTo save one life is to save the world.î† If people, like myself, are disgusted by the lies of B & B and past writers to the Times who may believe they have the truth, I suggest that:
1 They pray for enlightenment. 2 Stop flag worship and† remember God. 3 Cease from violating† the commandment† THOU SHALL NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS,
attempting to besmirching† the names of those† who would FEED THE HUNGRY as our prophets exhorted. 1 And. finally,† that they and we all† kindly remember† ìEmpty barrels make the most noise.î

Sincerely,
Roberta Gould
West Hurley, NY

Anna Baltzer

2009-12-17T23:51:00.002-05:00

The US cash behind extremist settlers

2009-12-10T12:43:00.000-05:00

The Hebron Fund is raising vast sums for Israeli settlements that violate the Geneva convention, with little scrutiny

Andrew Kadi and Aaron Levitt
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 8 December 2009 12.30 GMT

Last month, a Brooklyn-based non-profit organisation called the Hebron Fund, which supports Jewish settlers in the Israeli-occupied city of Hebron, held a fundraiser at the New York Mets' stadium, Citi Field.

The fundraiser went forward despite calls for its cancellation from grassroots human rights organisations from the US, Palestine and Israel. The fact that the Hebron Fund likely raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for extremist Israeli settlers at a major US venue with little public scrutiny is a troubling sign for those who hope that the US can play a constructive role in achieving a just peace in the Middle East.

Perhaps more worryingly, according to Washington Post columnist David Ignatius: "A search of IRS records identified 28 US charitable groups that made a total of $33.4m in tax-exempt contributions to settlements and related organisations between 2004 and 2007." Some of the larger organisations, including Friends of the Ateret Cohanim and Friends of Ir David, both leading the Jewish settler takeover of Palestinian East Jerusalem, are based in New York City.

Israeli settlements violate the Geneva convention's prohibition against an occupying power transferring its population into occupied territory, and Israeli settlement expansion directly contradicts the US call for a settlement freeze.

Hebron's Jewish settlers, who are supported by the Hebron Fund, are openly fundraising in New York City. Under the protection of the Israeli military, they are expanding settlements in Hebron's Old City and driving out the Palestinian residents.

The Hebron Fund's extremist positions are clear. Hebron Fund executive director Yossi Baumol told The American Prospect that "[d]emocracy is poison to Arabs", "Israel must not give Arabs a say in how the country is run" and "[y]ou'll never get the truth out of an Arab". Hebron's chief rabbi, Dov Lior, a featured participant in some Hebron Fund events, recently praised a new book that says it is permitted for a Jew to kill civilians who provide moral support to an enemy of the Jews, and to even kill young children, if it is foreseeable that they will grow up to become enemies.

Settlers and the Israeli army routinely attack and terrorise Palestinians in Hebron, according to human rights groups such as B'Tselem in Israel. In 1994, Hebron settler Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 unarmed Palestinians who were praying in a Hebron mosque. One of the honorees at the 2009 Hebron Fund dinner, Noam Arnon, called Goldstein "an extraordinary person'' in 1995. In 1990 Arnon called three Jewish terrorists who were convicted of killing three Palestinians and maiming two Palestinian mayors "heroes".

Though the Hebron Fund tells the IRS that its purpose is to "promote social and educational wellbeing", in 2008 Baumol assured New York radio listeners: "There are real facts on the ground that are created by people helping the Hebron Fund and coming to our dinners."

A 2007 appeal explained: "Dozens of new families can now come live in Hebron ... waiting for you to be their partners in the redemption of Hebron."

Baumol dedicated the 2009 fundraiser to protesting at "racist limitations, led by President Barack Obama on Jewish growth".

Settlers frequently claim that preventing Jews from living anywhere they want in the Israeli-occupied West Bank is "racist", regardless of the settlers' severe infringement on the rights of longstanding Palestinian residents. Settlers justify their takeover of Hebron by invoking the massacre of 67 Jewish residents of Hebron by Palestinians in 1929. But rather than equality, Hebron's settlers aim for superior rights enforced from the barrel of a gun.

Non-profit organisations like the Hebron Fund play a substantial role in fuelling the Middle East conflict, but largely fly under the radar in the US. They brazenly hold public fundraisers, and the media generally ignore them. Major US advocacy organisations that claim to oppose Israeli settlements typically fail to criticise them. In one rare mainstream media report, David Ignatius highlighted the US government's self-defeating policy, writing that "critics of Israeli settlements question why American taxpayers are supporting indirectly, through the exempt contributions, a process that the government condemns".

Until the public, advocacy groups, media and the US government scrutinise and rein in settlement non-profits like the Hebron Fund, policy statements about peace in the Middle East will do nothing to stop the daily violence and dispossession suffered by Palestinians.

ï Andrew Kadi is an IT professional and a member of the Middle East rights organisation, Adalah-NY: The Coalition for Justice in the Middle East. Aaron Levitt has volunteered as a human rights monitor in Hebron and is a member of Jews Against the Occupation-NYC

Finkelstein in Denmark

2009-11-23T13:24:00.006-05:00

English starts after 35 seconds.
Norman Finkelstein Interviewed regarding israel on Danish TV (November 13 2009)

Statehood a dead end...

2009-11-21T10:55:00.002-05:00

*Virginia Tilley* The Electronic Intifada November 19, 2009

The PA leadership in Ramallah is leading the Palestinian movement of independence to a dead end with its proposed unilateral call for Palestinian statehood.

From a rumor, to a rising murmur, the proposal floated by the Palestinian Authority's (PA) Ramallah leadership to declare Palestinian statehood unilaterally has suddenly hit center stage. The European Union, the United States and others have rejected it as "premature," but endorsements are coming from all directions: journalists, academics, nongovernmental organization activists, Israeli right-wing leaders (more on that later). The catalyst appears to be a final expression of disgust and simple exhaustion with the fraudulent "peace process" and the argument goes something like this: if we can't get a state through negotiations, we will simply declare statehood and let Israel deal with the consequences.

But it's no exaggeration to propose that this idea, although well-meant by some, raises the clearest danger to the Palestinian national movement in its entire history, threatening to wall Palestinian aspirations into a political cul-de-sac from which it may never emerge. The irony is indeed that, through this maneuver, the PA is seizing -- even declaring as a right -- precisely the same dead-end formula that the African National Congress (ANC) fought so bitterly for decades because the ANC leadership rightly saw it as disastrous. That formula can be summed up in one word: Bantustan.

It has become increasingly dangerous for the Palestinian national movement that the South African Bantustans remain so dimly understood. If Palestinians know about the Bantustans at all, most imagine them as territorial enclaves in which black South Africans were forced to reside yet lacked political rights and lived miserably. This partial vision is suggested by Mustafa Barghouthi's recent comments at the Wattan Media Centre in Ramallah, when he cautioned that Israel wanted to confine the Palestinians into "Bantustans" but then argued for a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood within the 1967 boundaries -- although nominal "states" without genuine sovereignty are precisely what the Bantustans were designed to be.

Apartheid South Africa's Bantustans were not simply sealed territorial enclaves for black people. They were the ultimate "grand" formula by which the apartheid regime hoped to survive: that is, independent states for black South Africans who -- as white apartheid strategists themselves keenly understood and pointed out -- would forever resist the permanent denial of equal rights and political voice in South Africa that white supremacy required. As designed by apartheid architects, the ten Bantustans were designed to correspond roughly to some of the historical territories associated with the various black "peoples" so that they could claim the term "Homelands." This official term indicated their ideological purpose: to manifest as national territories and ultimately independent states for the various black African "peoples" (defined by the regime) and so secure a happy future for white supremacy in the "white" Homeland (the rest of South Africa). So the goal of forcibly transferring millions of black people into these Homelands was glossed over as progressive: 11 states living peacefully side by side (sound familiar?). The idea was first to grant "self-government" to the Homelands as they gained institutional capacity and then reward that process by declaring/granting independent statehood.

The challenge for the apartheid government was then to persuade "self-governing" black elites to accept independent statehood in these territorial fictions and so permanently absolve the white government of any responsibility for black political rights. Toward this end, the apartheid regime hand-picked and seeded "leaders" into the Homelands, where they immediately sprouted into a nice crop of crony elites (the usual political climbers and carpet-baggers) that embedded into lucrative niches of financial privileges and patronage networks that the white government thoughtfully cultivated (this should sound familiar too).

It didn't matter that the actual territories of the Homelands were fragmented into myriad pieces and lacked the essential resources to avoid becoming impoverished labor cesspools. Indeed, the Homelands' territorial fragmentation, although crippling, was irrelevant to Grand Apartheid. Once all these "nations" were living securely in independent states, apartheid ideologists argued to the world, tensions would relax, trade and development would flower, blacks would be enfranchised and happy, and white supremacy would thus become permanent and safe.

The thorn in this plan was to get even thoroughly co-opted black Homeland elites to declare independent statehood within "national" territories that transparently lacked any meaningful sovereignty over borders, natural resources, trade, security, foreign policy, water -- again, sound familiar? Only four Homeland elites did so, through combinations of bribery, threats and other "incentives." Otherwise, black South Africans didn't buy it and the ANC and the world rejected the plot whole cloth. (The only state to recognize the Homelands was fellow-traveler Israel.) But the Homelands did serve one purpose -- they distorted and divided black politics, created terrible internal divisions, and cost thousands of lives as the ANC and other factions fought it out. The last fierce battles of the anti-apartheid struggle were in the Homelands, leaving a legacy of bitterness to this day.

Hence the supreme irony for Palestinians today is that the most urgent mission of apartheid South Africa -- getting the indigenous people to declare statehood in non-sovereign enclaves -- finally collapsed with mass black revolt and took apartheid down with it, yet the Palestinian leadership now is not only walking right into that same trap but actually making a claim on it.

The reasons that the PA-Ramallah leadership and others want to walk into this trap are fuzzy. Maybe it could help the "peace talks" if they are redefined as negotiations between two states instead of preconditions for a state. Declaring statehood could redefine Israel's occupation as invasion and legitimize resistance as well as trigger different and more effective United Nations intervention. Maybe it will give Palestinians greater political leverage on the world stage -- or at least preserve the PA's existence for another (miserable) year.

Why these fuzzy visions are not swiftly defeated by short attention to the South African Bantustan experience may stem partly from two key differences that confuse the comparison, for Israel has indeed sidestepped two infamous fatal errors that helped sink South Africa's Homeland strategy. First, Israel did not make South Africa's initial mistake of appointing "leaders" to run the Palestinian "interim self-governing" Homeland. In South Africa, this founding error made it too obvious that the Homelands were puppet regimes and exposed the illegitimacy of the black "national" territories themselves as contrived racial enclaves. Having watched the South Africans bungle this, and having learned from its own past failures with the Village Leagues and the like, Israel instead worked with the United States to design the Oslo process not only to restore the exiled leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its then Chairman Yasser Arafat to the territories but also to provide for "elections" (under occupation) to grant a thrilling gloss of legitimacy to the Palestinian "interim self-governing authority." It's one of the saddest tragedies of the present scenario that Israel so deftly turned Palestinians' noble commitment to democracy against them in this way -- granting them the illusion of genuinely democratic self-government in what everyone now realizes was always secretly intended to be a Homeland.

Only now has Israel found a way to avoid South Africa's second fatal error, which was to declare black Homelands to be "independent states" in non-sovereign territory. In South Africa, this ploy manifested to the world as transparently racist and was universally disparaged. It must be obvious that, if Israel had stood up in the international stage and said "as you are, you are now a state" that Palestinians and everyone else would have rejected the claim out of hand as a cruel farce. Yet getting the Palestinians to declare statehood themselves allows Israel precisely the outcome that eluded the apartheid South African regime: voluntary native acceptance of "independence" in a non-sovereign territory with no political capacity to alter its territorial boundaries or other essential terms of existence -- the political death capsule that apartheid South Africa could not get the ANC to swallow.

Responses from Israel have been mixed. The government does seem jumpy and has broadcast its "alarm," Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has threatened unilateral retaliation (unspecified) and government representatives have flown to various capitals securing international rejection. But Israeli protests could also be disingenuous. One tactic could be persuading worried Palestinian patriots that a unilateral declaration of statehood might not be in Israel's interest in order to allay that very suspicion. Another is appeasing protest from that part of Likud's purblind right-wing electorate that finds the term "Palestinian state" ideologically anathema. A more honest reaction could be the endorsement of Kadima party elder Shaul Mofaz, a hardliner who can't remotely be imagined to value a stable and prosperous Palestinian future. Right-wing Israeli journalists are also pitching in with disparaging but also comforting essays arguing that unilateral statehood won't matter because it won't change anything close to the truth). For example, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened unilaterally to annex the West Bank settlement blocs if the PA declares statehood, but Israel was going to do that anyway.

In the liberal-Zionist camp, Yossi Sarid has warmly endorsed the plan and Yossi Alpher has cautiously done so. Their writings suggest the same terminal frustration with the "peace process" but also recognition that this may be the only way to save the increasingly fragile dream that a nice liberal democratic Jewish state can survive as such. It also sounds like something that might please Palestinians -- at least enough to finally get their guilt-infusing story of expulsion and statelessness off the liberal-Zionist conscience. Well-meaning white liberals in apartheid South Africa -- yes, there were some of those, too -- held the same earnest candle burning for the black Homelands system.

Some otherwise smart journalists are also pitching in to endorse unilateral statehood, raising odd ill-drawn comparisons -- Georgia, Kosovo, Israel itself -- as "evidence" that it's a good idea. But Georgia, Kosovo and Israel had entirely different profiles in international politics and entirely different histories from Palestine and attempts to draw these comparisons are intellectually lazy. The obvious comparison is elsewhere and the lessons run in the opposite direction: for a politically weak and isolated people, who have never had a separate state and lack any powerful international ally, to declare or accept "independence" in non-contiguous and non-sovereign enclaves encircled and controlled by a hostile nuclear power can only seal their fate.

In fact, the briefest consideration should instantly reveal that a unilateral declaration of statehood will confirm the Palestinians' presently impossible situation as permanent. As Mofaz predicted, a unilateral declaration will allow "final status" talks to continue. What he did not spell out is that those talks will become truly pointless because Palestinian leverage will be reduced to nothing. As Middle East historian Juan Cole recently pointed out, the last card the Palestinians can play -- their real claim on the world's conscience, the only real threat they can raise to Israel's status quo of occupation and settlement -- is their statelessness. The PA-Ramallah leadership has thrown away all the other cards. It has stifled popular dissent, suppressed armed resistance, handed over authority over vital matters like water to "joint committees" where Israel holds veto power, savagely attacked Hamas which insisted on threatening Israel's prerogatives, and generally done everything it can to sweeten the occupier's mood, preserve international patronage (money and protection), and solicit promised benefits (talks?) that never come. It's increasingly obvious to everyone watching from outside this scenario -- and many inside it -- that this was always a farce. For one thing, the Western powers do not work like the Arab regimes: when you do everything the West requires of you, you will wait in vain for favors, for the Western power then loses any benefit from dealing more with you and simply walks away.

But more importantly, the South African comparison helps illuminate why the ambitious projects of pacification, "institution building" and economic development that the Ramallah PA and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad have whole-heartedly embarked upon are not actually exercises in "state-building." Rather, they emulate with frightening closeness and consistency South Africa's policies and stages in building the Bantustan/ Homelands. Indeed, Fayyad's project to achieve political stability through economic development is the same process that was openly formalized in the South African Homeland policy under the slogan "separate development." That under such vulnerable conditions no government can exercise real power and "separate development" must equate with permanent extreme dependency, vulnerability and dysfunctionality was the South African lesson that has, dangerously, not yet been learned in Palestine -- although all the signals are there, as Fayyad himself has occasionally admitted in growing frustration. But declaring independence will not solve the problem of Palestinian weakness; it will only concretize it.

Still, when "separate development" flounders in the West Bank, as it must, Israel will face a Palestinian insurrection. So Israel needs to anchor one last linchpin to secure Jewish statehood before that happens: declare a Palestinian "state" and so reduce the "Palestinian problem" to a bickering border dispute between putative equals. In the back halls of the Knesset, Kadima political architects and Zionist liberals alike must now be waiting with bated breath, when they are not composing the stream of back-channel messages that is doubtless flowing to Ramallah encouraging this step and promising friendship, insider talks and vast benefits. For they all know what's at stake, what every major media opinion page and academic blog has been saying lately: that the two-state solution is dead and Israel will imminently face an anti-apartheid struggle that will inevitably destroy Jewish statehood. So a unilateral declaration by the PA that creates a two-state solution despite its obvious Bantustan absurdities is now the only way to preserve Jewish statehood, because it's the only way to derail the anti-apartheid movement that spells Israel's doom.

This is why it is so dangerous that the South African Bantustan comparison has been neglected until now, treated as a side issue, even an exotic academic fascination, to those battling to relieve starvation in Gaza and soften the cruel system of walls and barricades to get medicine to the dying. The Ramallah PA's suddenly serious initiative to declare an independent Palestinian state in non-sovereign territory must surely force fresh collective realization that this is a terribly pragmatic question. It's time to bring closer attention to what "Bantustan" actually means. The Palestinian national movement can only hope someone in its ranks undertakes that project as seriously as Israel has undertaken it before it's too late.

*Virginia Tilley *is a former professor of political science and international relations and since 2006 has served as Chief Research Specialist at the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa. She is author of /The One-State Solution /(University of Michigan Press, 2005) and many articles and essays on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Based in Cape Town, South Africa, she writes here in her personal capacity and can be reached at vtilley@...

Fundraiser in Kingston

2009-11-16T19:50:00.000-05:00

To the Editor:
On Sunday November 8 a fund raiser was held in Kingston in support of the Gaza Freedom March which will try to bring desperately needed humanitarian aid to the Palestinians in Gaza. Fifteen area residents will be joining people from around the world on January 1, 2010 in an attempt to break the illegal and inhumane Israeli blockade. The Hudson Valley contingent will try to bring food, water, medical supplies, and/or educational materials into Gaza from Egypt.

The people living in Gaza under Israeli occupation are essentially a captive population. Israel controls and severely restricts the movement of all goods, services, and people both into and out of Gaza. As the result of Israels' brutal blockade there are severe shortages of food, water, medicine, heat, and electricity. Because of the blockades restrictions on building materials the residents of Gaza have been unable to rebuild the more than 20,000 homes that were damaged or destroyed by Israels Defense Forces during last years Israeli attack and invasion of Gaza.

As I was reminded at the fund raiser, Israel could not continue to administer this collective punishment on the men, women, and children of Gaza without the full support of our government and the US tax dollars that come with that support. Hopefully, the funds raised for the Gaza Freedom March will help to alleviate some of the US sponsored suffering being inflicted upon the population of Gaza.

Finally, thank you to the staff at La Florentina restaurant and the volunteers from the MIddle East Crisis Response group for a wonderful and informative event. Anyone seeking further information about the Gaza Freedom March can go to the MECR website which is www.mideastcrisis.org.

Eli Kassirer
New Paltz=

Vets for Peace discovery in Gaza

2009-11-16T11:34:00.002-05:00

US missile part found in Gaza by Vets for Peace

Peace Activist Confronts Netanhayu

2009-11-09T23:48:00.000-05:00

Peace Activist Confronts Netanhayu on War Crimes During Plenary of United Jewish Federations

WASHINGTON - November 9 -A

t the Annual Conference of the United Jewish Federations in Washington, DC, during the plenary session today, November 9, by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, CODEPINK peace activist Midge Potts stood up with a banner that said “End the Siege of Gaza” and shouted “Stop the blockade of Gaza, Shame on you, Netanyahu.” She was dragged out of the meeting by security guards.

“When I heard that Netanyahu was speaking in Washington DC, I felt compelled to do something,” said Potts, a Navy veteran, resident of Springfield, Missouri and candidate for U.S. Senate. “Netanyahu’s Washington visit comes just after our Congress overwhelmingly passed a resolution rejecting the Goldstone report, a UN report that aimed to hold Israel accountability for its actions during the 22-day invasion of Gaza that left over 1,400 dead. As an American whose government is giving free rein to Israel’s war crimes and is paying—through our taxes—for the bombs and bullets that are killing Palestinians, I had to stand up. I hope my symbolic action will show the people of Palestine that there are many Americans who believe in human rights for all and are determined to change our government’s policy to reflect these values.”

During his talk, PM Netanyahu lauded the Israeli Defense Forces, saying the Israeli army was “as moral as any army on earth” and thanked both President Obama and the U.S. Congress for rejecting the Goldstone report. “It is appalling to us, as peace activists, that Israel committed such atrocities against the people of Gaza and that the U.S. Government is trying to cover up those crimes. As defenders of human rights, we must stand up and demand accountability.”

As part of CODEPINK’s commitment to human rights, it is working with a broad coalition to organize, in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, a massive march on December 31 from inside Gaza to the Israeli border. The March calls on Israel to lift the inhumane siege that is keeping 1.5 million people imprisoned. Already, participants have signed up from 32 countries. They include writers (U.S. Alice Walker), actors (Syrian Duraid Lahham), members of Parliament (from France to the Philippines), diplomats (from Japan to the Netherlands), as well as doctors, lawyers, professors and students.

For more information see www.gazafreedommarch.org .

###

Bard and the Lobby

2009-11-09T14:21:00.002-05:00

November 9, 2009

Bard and the Lobby
Final Thoughts on the Kovel Affair

By JOHN HALLE

In June of 2007, the left website CounterPunch published a short piece of mine addressing the decision of Depaul University to deny tenure to Prof. Norman Finkelstein. Among the forty-odd emails I received in response was one from Bard Professor Joel Kovel. Having served as a Green Party ward Alderman, I was familiar with Joel's Green Party activism and had read occasional articles by him over the years. Also, I had just accepted a position at the Bard Conservatory of Music and was looking forward to having at least one other co-worker to compare notes with as we entered the post-Bush era.

I would have been pleased to have had communications from others at Bard but none was forthcoming. Whether this was due to Joel being the only faculty member to read CounterPunch, simple reticence on the part of those who did, or lack of interest in, or lack of sympathy with Finkelstein's plight, I can't say. As I recall, I assumed the latter, as this was consistent with a longstanding belief on my part that the reputation of colleges as bastions of left wing thinking is grossly exaggerated, most notably when it comes to the Israel/Palestine question. Nothing in the subsequent years here has given me much cause to revise this presumption, not, to be sure, the Bard community's response to Joel's termination, as I will discuss shortly.

Some months after Joel's email, I had the opportunity to return the favor and to revisit the question of Bard's general political orientation. Joel's book "Overcoming Zionism" had been withdrawn by its publisher Pluto Press under pressure from the Israel lobby in what can reasonably be described as the contemporary equivalent of a book burning. Just as he had been the only Bard faculty member to respond to my piece in Counterpunch, so too was I the only member of the Bard community to respond to his request to join the thousands of others who had sent expressions of protest.

When Joel returned to Bard in the fall of 2008, we decided to get together for a weekly meeting which would develop into the eco-socialist lunches, billed in flyers we distributed around campus as an informal discussion of political events from a left perspective, open to all interested students, staff, faculty and community members. Most weeks the group numbered between 8 and 12. Aside from ourselves (and my wife, on occasion) all of the participants would be students. No faculty member attended or expressed any interest in attending or even (with one exception) asked about the group.

While much of the conversation tended to revolve around the Obama campaign and the prospects for an Obama administration, Israel and attitudes towards Israel on the Bard campus were an occasional topic. While no particular consensus was reached, it is fair to say that the administration's later description of "anti Zionism" as "uncontroversial" would have been greeted with some skepticism by most of those attending.
****

Following the Israeli attack on Gaza in December, our shared skepticism as to the willingness and capacity of the Bard community to view Zionism critically would be strongly vindicated. Insofar as anti-Zionism is interpreted, minimally, as criticism of military aggression by the Israeli government, there was nothing of the sort to be found at precisely the time when its presence ought to be most apparent. One searched in vain for joint letters, demonstrations, flyers, teach-ins, or other expressions of concern at the unfolding atrocity.

There was, it should be noted, one faculty member, the college chaplain, who conspicuously weighed in on the subject of the Gaza attacks-on the side of the Israeli Defense Force. While I had, as mentioned, long since parted with any illusions as to what to expect from academics in these sorts of circumstances, it was still a bit shocking to find a supposed voice of moral conscience in an appearance on the far right radio station WABC, championing the bombing of civilian targets and denouncing as anti-semitic those who raised questions as to its moral legitimacy.

This constituted the extent of the visible faculty response to Gaza. There may have been private expressions of concern or even grief-and perhaps public expressions, though if so, none of them found their way back to Bard in any visible form. Given that more than a few Bard faculty members are frequently granted high profile platforms for the expression of their views, any expression of protest would have registered, so it is a reasonable assumption that they didn't exist.

I would like to emphasize that I bring up these facts not out of any personal dissatisfaction with the Bard faculty as a group or animus towards the college chaplain as an individual. My years at Yale were notable for many cordial relationships with colleagues who were universally to the right of me politically and who were, in more than a few cases proud and even virulent reactionaries. Imposing a political litmus test for those with whom I work and socialize would be a recipe for professional suicide, not to mention, misanthropy.

Rather, this context is required to respond to repeated claims emanating from the Bard administration in response to the Kovel affair that Bard is a campus which not only tolerates and but celebrates dissident political views. This general proposition is not supported by any facts that have been apparent in my two years here. And on the specific claim in question, that anti-Zionism is uncontroversial, the silence with which the faculty greeted the Gaza attacks is a prima facie refutation of this proposition, one which is even more glaring when seen in the light of the numerous cris-de-coeur emanating from some of Israel's staunchest advocates in the months since the attacks.

I should also mention here that it does not follow from the above that Joel's charges of political interference in Bard's decision not to renew his contract have any de facto or de jure legitimacy. Nor does it follow that the faculty members who served on the committee evaluating Joel's contributions to Bard (one of whom was the Bard chaplain mentioned above) were unable to exercise independent judgement of Joel's work. However, with the particular issue in question, suspicion is surely called for given the numerous and well document instances of interference in academic affairs by what has become known as the Lobby.
****

By now, the Lobby's crackdown on criticism of Israeli human rights abuses on college campuses should be more than familiar, as every week seems to brings a new and disturbing attempt at academic suppression. The most recent is a charge of misconduct being brought against UC Santa Barbara Prof. William Robinson on direct orders from ADL chairman Abe Foxman. Not long before came news of Clark University having rescinded an invitation to Norman Finkelstein under pressure from Jewish student organizations. Prior to that was an effort at intimidation waged by Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz against Hampshire College students supporting sanctions directed at firms profiting from the West Bank occupation. These join targeted attacks on Columbia Professor Joseph Massad, University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole, and, of course, Finkelstein himself, to mention only a few cases.

That none of these have been mentioned by the administration in responding to Kovel's charges of political interference is disappointing and has fueled suspicion outside of Bard in capitulating to pressure in its decision to remove Kovel academic freedom has been, yet again, violated. There is also at least a whiff of arrogance in Bard's assumption that the illustrious legacy of Hannah Arendt and its description in the Princeton Review as "the most liberal of the liberal arts colleges" exempts it from answering questions about the troubling context of Kovel's termination.

But as the school's connection with its storied radical history recedes into the distant past, it will find that this defense is increasingly less available. Indeed, by now there are very few remaining indications of the radical dissent which it claims to be encoded in its institutional DNA. A strong indication along these lines can be obtained by a perusal of faculty lists in the relevant departments. It will be immediately noticed that the most recognizable names derive from their association not with, for example, the New Left Review, Z, the Left Forum, or even the Nation but with the establishment neo-liberalism of the New York Review, the New Yorker and New Republic (whose publisher, uber-Zionist Martin Peretz, serves on the Bard Board of Trustees). Few Bard faculty would be described, or, I would guess, would describe themselves as political radicals.

Another indication of the actually existing political orientation of Bard is provided by Kovel's replacement in the Alger Hiss chair by an historian whose work provides a defense of, and has been celebrated by those embracing, the most strident varieties of cold war anti-communism. Then there is the increasingly close relationship with its Hudson Valley neighbor West Point which has resulted in appearances on the Bard campus by military functionaries addressing such topics as counter-insurgency warfare. These augment other recently invited speakers discussing Islamic fundamentalist terror and violence, with few if any challenging establishment orthodoxy on these matters. All this, according to administration critics, signals a broader effort to legitimate Bard in establishment circles one which requires that it rid itself of left-wing gadflies such as Kovel.
****

These and other efforts at mainstreaming Bard have, it would appear, met with some success among their target demographic, namely those major donors who are lavishly financing campus initiatives including the much trumpeted Bard-Al Quds joint degree program, a multi-million dollar Frank Gehry designed performing arts center, and an elegant new science building. At the same time, there is some evidence that the strategy has begun to backfire with its primary constituency (or, more precisely, market), namely the students who are willing to dispense with the $40,000 yearly tuition which, it is said, accounts for the bulk of Bard's operating revenues. This base consists of more than a few who, despite their necessarily privileged backgrounds have more or less leftist sympathies and come to Bard based on its reputation-as opposed to its current reality. Some eventually come to recognize that while these views are not actively discouraged, nor are they encouraged or nurtured by the current composition of the faculty. The surprising level of activism precipitated by the Kovel case was likely indicative of a growing dissatisfaction among these sorts of students and the administration is correct to be concerned of the possible effect on Bard's traditional applicant pool and by extension, finances.

There is a chance, albeit a small one, that bottom line considerations will make it necessary for Bard for to reassert its identity as a bulwark of what used to be called the dissenting academy. If so, it has more that a little work to do. Rehiring Kovel is one step in this direction; however, Joel is now 70 and doing so would amount to no more than a reaffirmation of Bard's past. What is needed is a tangible demonstration that a commitment to dissent defines Bard's present and, one hopes, Bard's future.

An action which Bard could take along these lines would be to install Norman Finkelstein as the next occupant of the Alger Hiss chair. Finkelstein's presence at Bard would, of course, indisputably remove any question as to influence of the Lobby on Bard's hiring decisions. But, more importantly, Finkelstein's combination of an impressive scholarly resumé with a long standing record of challenging the most sacrosanct conventional wisdoms make him a scholarly model for the traditions which have defined Bard, and which continue to have resonance for more than a few Bard students.

This is what we should expect of the academy at its best-one which takes seriously its responsibility to tell the truth and expose lies.

It is more than likely that this suggestion will be passed off as frivolous by those who are in a position to act on it. If so, those doing so should consider that this itself is an indication of the gap between Bard's self-image and the objective reality of where it stands when it is called to do so.

Perhaps the best possible outcome of the Kovel affair is for the school to begin to recognize how far it needs to go to bridge this gap.

John Halle is Director of Studies in Music Theory and Practice at Bard College. He can be reached at: halle@bard.edu

Inside the New Print Edition of Our Subscriber-Only Newsletter!

Pete Seeger's role in ending Israeli house demolitions

2009-11-08T17:17:00.001-05:00

Last update - 09:41 08/11/2009

Pete Seeger's role in ending Israeli house demolitions

By Nir Hasson, Haaretz Correspondent

Anyone who owns a radio probably knows the song "Turn, Turn, Turn" (To everything there is a season) very well. A number of versions of this song have become permanent fixtures on the play lists of most popular music radio stations. Here's what the listeners don't know: every time this song is played, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions receives a few dollars, which accumulate to a "several thousand dollars every year," according to the committee's co-founder and coordinator.

The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) is a non-profit organization that uses non-violent means to oppose Israeli demolition of homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Seeger has been donating some of the song's royalties to ICAHD for ten years.

The banjo-playing Seeger, 90, is considered one of the pioneers of American folk music. He is known for his political activism no less than for his musical achievements. In the 1930s he was involved in the establishment of worker unions, in the 1940s he opposed the war against Germany and in the 1950s he was interrogated by Senator Joe McCarthy over suspicions of belonging to the Communist Party. In recent years Seeger has been involved in efforts to clean up the Hudson River in New York and performed at U.S. President Barack Obama's inauguration celebration.

The lyrics of the song "Turn, Turn, Turn" are the words of King Solomon from the book of Ecclesiastes. "All around the world, songs are being written that use old public domain material, and I think it's only fair that some of the money from the songs go to the country or place of origin, even though the composer may be long dead or unknown," Seeger said in an interview with Acoustic Guitar magazine in 2002.

"With 'Turn, Turn, Turn' I wanted to send 45 percent, because [in addition to the music] I did write six words and one more word repeated three times, so I figured I'd keep five percent of the royalties for the words. I was going to send it to London, where I am sure the committee that oversees the use of the King James version exists, and they probably could use a little cash. But then I realized, why not send it to where the words were originally written?"

ICAHD's Halper met with Seeger in New York last week and remarked that "he said he thought it was appropriate that the biblical part of the song make its way to Israel ? he doesn't want to take credit for it."

Halper brought another message from Seeger to the Israelis: "He said that artists and cooks ? it was important for him to include cooks ? must stand up and demand a just peace. That is the duty of artists and cooks."

No Change in US 'Mafia Principle'

2009-11-03T23:07:00.000-05:00

Published on Tuesday, November 3, 2009

by Middle East Online

Noam Chomsky: No Change in US 'Mafia Principle'

by Mamoon Alabbasi

As civilised people across the world breathed a sigh of relief to see the back of former US president George W. Bush, top American intellectual Noam Chomsky warned against assuming or expecting significant changes in the basis of Washington's foreign policy under President Barack Obama.

During two lectures organised by the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, Chomsky cited numerous examples of the driving doctrines behind US foreign policy since the end of World War II.

"As Obama came into office, Condoleezza Rice predicted that he would follow the policies of Bush's second term, and that is pretty much what happened, apart from a different rhetorical style," said

"But it is wise to attend to deeds, not rhetoric. Deeds commonly tell a different story," he added.

"There is basically no significant change in the fundamental traditional conception that we if can control Middle East energy resources, then we can control the world," explained Chomsky.

Chomsky said that a leading doctrine of US foreign policy during the period of its global dominance is what he termed as "the Mafia principle."

"The Godfather does not tolerate 'successful defiance'. It is too dangerous. It must therefore be stamped out so that others understand that disobedience is not an option," said Chomsky.

Because the US sees "successful defiance" of Washington as a "virus" that will "spread contagion," he explained.

Iran

The US had feared this "virus" of independent thought from Washington by Tehran and therefore acted to overthrow the Iranian parliamentary democracy in 1953.

"The goal in 1953 was to retain control of Iranian resources," said Chomsky.

However, "in 1979 the (Iranian) virus emerged again. The US at first sought to sponsor a military coup; when that failed, it turned to support Saddam Hussein's merciless invasion (of Iran)."

"The torture of Iran continued without a break and still does, with sanctions and other means," said Chomsky.

"The US continued, without a break, its torture of Iranians," he stressed.

Nuclear attack

Chomsky mocked the idea presented by mainstream media that a future-nuclear-armed Iran may attack already-nuclear-armed Israel.

"The chance of Iran launching a missile attack, nuclear or not, is about at the level of an asteroid hitting the earth -- unless, of course, the ruling clerics have a fanatic death wish and want to see Iran instantly incinerated along with them," said Chomsky, stressing that this is not the case.

Chomsky further explained that the presence of US anti-missile weapons in Israel are really meant for preparing a possible attack on Iran, and not for self-defence, as it is often presented.

"The systems are advertised as defense against an Iranian attack. But ...the purpose of the US interception systems, if they ever work, is to prevent any retaliation to a US or Israeli attack on Iran -- that is, to eliminate any Iranian deterrent," said Chomsky.

Iraq

Chomsky reminded the audience of America's backing of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein during and even after Iraq's war with Iran.

"The Reaganite love affair with Saddam did not end after the (Iran-Iraq) war. In 1989, Iraqi nuclear engineers were invited to the United States, then under Gorge Bush I, to receive advanced weapons' training," said Chomsky.

This support continued while Saddam was committing atrocities against his own people, until he fell out of US favour when in 1990 he invaded Kuwait, an even closer alley of Washington.

"In 1990, Saddam defied, or more likely misunderstood orders, and he quickly shifted from favourite friend to the reincarnation of Hitler," Chomsky added.

Then the people of Iraq were subjected to "genocidal" US-backed sanctions.

Chomsky explained that although the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which was launched under many false pretexts and lies, was a " major crime", many critics of the invasion - including Obama - viewed it as merely as "a mistake" or a "strategic blunder".

"It's probably what the German general staff was telling Hitler after Stalingrad," he said

"There's nothing principled about it. It wasn't a strategic blunder: it was a major crime," he added.

Chomsky credited the holding of elections in Iraq in 2005 to popular Iraqi demand, despite initial US objection.

The US military, he argued, could kill as many Iraqi insurgents as it wished, but it was more difficult to shoot at non-violent protesters in the streets out on the open, which meant Washington at times had to give in to public Iraqi pressure.

But despite being pressured to announce a withdrawal from Iraq, the US continues to seek a long term presence in the country.

The US mega-embassy in Baghdad is to be expanded under Obama, noted Chomsky.

Optimism

Chomsky stressed that public pressure in the 'West' can make a positive difference for people suffering from the aggression of 'Western' governments.

"There is a lot of comparison between opposition to the Iraq war with opposition to the Vietnam war, but people tend to forget that at first there was almost no opposition to the Vietnam war," said Chomsky.

"In the Iraq war, there were massive international protests before it officially stated... and it had an effect. The United Sates could not use the tactics used in Vietnam: there was no saturation bombing by B52s, so there was no chemical warfare - (the Iraq war was) horrible enough, but it could have been a lot worse," he said.

"And furthermore, the Bush administration had to back down on its war aims, step by step," he added.

"It had to allow elections, which it did not want to do: mainly a victory for non-Iraqi protests. They could kill insurgents; they couldn't deal hundreds of thousands of people in the streets. Their hands were tied by the domestic constraints. They finally had to abandon - officially at least - virtually all the war aims," said Chomsky.

"As late as November 2007, the US was still insisting that the 'Status of Forces Agreement' allow for an indefinite US military presence and privileged access to Iraq's resources by US investors - well they didn't get that on paper at least. They had to back down. OK, Iraq is a horror story but it could have been a lot worse," he said

"So yes, protests can do something. When there is no protest and no attention, a power just goes wild, just like in Cambodia and northern Laos," he added.

Turkey

Chomsky said that Turkey could become a "significant independent actor" in the region, if it chooses to.

"Turkey has to make some internal decisions: is it going to face west and try to get accepted by the European Union or is it going to face reality and recognise that Europeans are so racist that they are never going to allow it in?," said Chomsky.

The Europeans "keep raising the barrier on Turkish entry to the EU," he explained.

But Chomsky said Turkey did become an independent actor in March 2003 when it followed its public opinion and did not take part in the US-led invasion of Iraq.

Turkey took notice of the wishes of the overwhelming majority of its population, which opposed the invasion.

But 'New Europe' was led by Berlusconi of Italy and Aznar of Spain, who rejected the views of their populations - which strongly objected to the Iraq war - and preferred to follow Bush, noted Chomsky.

So, in that sense Turkey was more democratic than states that took part in the war, which in turn infuriated the US.

Today, Chomsky added, Turkey is also acting independently by refusing to take part in the US-Israeli military exercises.

Fear factor

Chomsky explained that although 'Western' government use "the maxim of Thucydides" ('the strong do as they wish, and the weak suffer as they must'), their peoples are hurled via the "fear factor".

Via corporate media and complicit intellectuals, the public is led to believe that all the crimes and atrocities committed by their governments is either "self defence" or "humanitarian intervention".

NATO

Chomsky noted that Obama has escalated Bush's war in Afghanistan, using NATO.

NATO is also seen as reinforcing US control over energy supplies.

But the US also used NATO to keep Europe under control.

"From the earliest post-World War days, it was understood that Western Europe might choose to follow an independent course," said Chomsky."NATO was partially intended to counter this serious threat," he added.

Middle East oil

Chomsky explained that Middle East oil reserves were understood to be "a stupendous source of strategic power" and "one of the greatest material prizes in world history," the most "strategically important area in the world," in Eisenhower's words.

Control of Middle East oil would provide the United States with "substantial control of the world."

This meant that the US "must support harsh and brutal regimes and block democracy and development" in the Middle East.

Somalia

Chomsky tackled the origins of the Somali piracy issue.

"Piracy is not nice, but where did it come from?"

Chomsky explained that one of the immediate reasons for piracy is European counties and others are simply "destroying Somalia's territorial waters by dumping toxic waste - probably nuclear waste - and also by overfishing."

"What happens to the fishermen in Somalia? They become pirates. And then we're all upset about the piracy, not about having created the situation," said Chomsky.

Chomsky went on to cite another example of harming Somalia.

"One of the great achievements of the war on terror, which was greatly hailed in the press when it was announced, was closing down an Islamic charity - Barakat - which was identified as supporting terrorists.

"A couple of months later... the (US) government quietly recognised that they were wrong, and the press may have had a couple of lines about it - but meanwhile, it was a major blow against Somalia. Somalia doesn't have much of an economy but a lot of it was supported by this charity: not just giving money but running banks and businesses, and so on.

"It was a significant part of the economy of Somalia...closing it down... was another contributing factor to the breaking down of a very weak society...and there are other examples."

Darfur

Chomsky also touched on Sudan's Darfur region.

"There are terrible things going on in Darfur, but in comparison with the region they don't amount to a lot unfortunately - like what's going on in eastern Congo is incomparably worse than in Darfur.

"But Darfur is a very popular topic for Western humanists because you can blame it on an enemy - you have to distort a lot but you can blame it on 'Arabs', 'bad guys'," he explained.

"What about saving eastern Cong where maybe 20 times as many people have been killed? Well, that gets kind of tricky ... for people who... are using minerals from eastern Congo that obtained by multinationals sponsoring militias which slaughter and kill and get the minerals," he said.

Or the fact that Rwanda is simply the worst of the many agents and it is a US alley, he added.

Goldstone's Gaza report

Chomsky appeared to have agreed with Israel that the Goldstone report on the Gaza war was bias, only he saw it as biased in favour of Israel.

The Goldstone report had acknowledged Israel's right to self-defence, although it denounced the method this was conducted.

Chomsky stressed that the right to self-defence does not mean resorting to military force before "exhausting peaceful means", something Israel did not even contemplate doing.

In fact, Chomsky points out, it was Israel who broke the ceasefire with Hamas and refused to extend it, as continuing the siege of Gaza itself is an act of war.

As for the current stalled Mideast peace process, Chomsky said that despite adopting a tougher tone towards Israel than that of Bush, Obama made no real effort to pressure Israel to live up to its obligations.

In the absence of the threat of cutting US aid for Israel, there is no compelling reason why Tel Aviv should listen to Washington.

What can be done?

Chomsky stressed that despite all the obstacles, public pressure can and does make a difference for the better, urging people to continue activism and spreading knowledge.

"There is no reason to be pessimistic, just realistic."

Chomsky noted that public opinion in the US and Britain is increasingly becoming more aware of the crimes committed by Israel.

"Public opinion is shifting substantially."

And this is where a difference can be made, because Israel will not change its policies without pressure from the 'West'.

"There is a lot to do in Western countries...primarily in the US."

Chomsky also stressed the importance of taking legal action in 'Western' countries against companies breaking international law via illegitimate dealings with Israel, citing the possible involvement of British Gas in Israeli theft of natural gas off the coast of Gaza, as one example that should be investigated.

In conclusion of one of the lectures, Chomsky quoted Antonio Gramsci who famously called for "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will."

Dear Friends of the Gaza Freedom March

2009-09-07T22:55:00.000-05:00

Felice's latest email. The posters are great.

,

Here is some updated information:
Check out the new call and statement of context. We want to call your attention to a newly updated Call and supporting Statement of Context for the Gaza Freedom March. We shortened the Call and added a more detailed, explanatory Statement of Context after consulting with key Palestinian organizations and individuals (including many in Gaza), who have now signed on as endorsers of the March.

Who is coming. We have more than 100 marchers registered from around the world
-- and we are still more than three months out! (Note that we are encouraging

everyone to register now, since flights at the end and beginning of the year fill quickly.) So far the following countries are represented: Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Jordan, Lebanon, Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Spain, Syria, Tunesia, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Yemen. Among the wonderful marchers is Duraid Lahham, one of the most well-known actors in the Arab world. We are delighted that he and his wife will participate in the march.

Some great new materials. The accomplished Canadian artist Michael Thompson has designed some wonderful posters/graphics for the march You can see all his new designs plus a flyer you can download at:
http://www.gazafreedommarch.org/article.php?id=5027 .

Look at our new Frequently Asked Questions http://www.gazafreedommarch.org/article.php?id=5061 We have hopefully addressed a lot of your questions/concerns. Let us know if you have more.

Want to join our team and help? Whether or not you can join the march, there are LOTS of ways you can help. Check out our committees http://www.gazafreedommarch.org/article.php?id=5034 and contact the committee head. Or write us at info@... with your suggestions or offerings.

Donate, donate, donate. Our greatest need now is funds. The vast majority of this work is being done by volunteers, but we need to pay people's expenses. We have a group leaving for Gaza on September 15 to help lay the groundwork for the march. And we need to raise funds for our partners in Gaza who are making great sacrifices to help organize the march. You can make secured donations online here https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/424/t/9750/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY =5136 or send a check to Gaza Freedom March, 2010 Linden Ave, Venice, CA 90291. Thank for your generosity.

We are excited by the momentum, and grateful for your support. Let's show the Palestinians of Gaza that we are with them and determined to lift this inhumane siege.

Sincerely,
The International Coalition to End the Illegal Siege of Gaza

Can we talk? The Middle East "peace industry"

2009-08-28T22:23:00.001-05:00

Can we talk? The Middle East "peace industry"
Faris Giacaman, The Electronic Intifada, 20 August 2009

Attempts to establish "dialogue" while Israel continues to oppress Palestinians only undermine the call for boycott. (ActiveStills)

Upon finding out that I am Palestinian, many people I meet at college in the United States are eager to inform me of various activities that they have participated in that promote "coexistence" and "dialogue" between both sides of the "conflict," no doubt expecting me to give a nod of approval. However, these efforts are harmful and undermine the Palestinian civil society call for boycott, divestment and sanctions of Israel -- the only way of pressuring Israel to cease its violations of Palestinians' rights.

When I was a high school student in Ramallah, one of the better known "people-to-people" initiatives, Seeds of Peace, often visited my school, asking students to join their program. Almost every year, they would send a few of my classmates to a summer camp in the US with a similar group of Israeli students. According to the Seeds of Peace website, at the camp they are taught "to develop empathy, respect, and confidence as well as leadership, communication and negotiation skills -- all critical components that will facilitate peaceful coexistence for the next generation." They paint quite a rosy picture, and most people in college are very surprised to hear that I think such activities are misguided at best, and immoral, at worst. Why on earth would I be against "coexistence," they invariably ask?

During the last few years, there have been growing calls to bring to an end Israel's oppression of the Palestinian people through an international movement of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS). One of the commonly-held objections to the boycott is that it is counter-productive, and that "dialogue" and "fostering coexistence" is much more constructive than boycotts.

With the beginning of the Oslo accords in 1993, there has been an entire industry that works toward bringing Israelis and Palestinians together in these "dialogue" groups. The stated purpose of such groups is the creating of understanding between "both sides of the conflict," in order to "build bridges" and "overcome barriers." However, the assumption that such activities will help facilitate peace is not only incorrect, but is actually morally lacking.

The presumption that dialogue is needed in order to achieve peace completely ignores the historical context of the situation in Palestine. It assumes that both sides have committed, more or less, an equal amount of atrocities against one another, and are equally culpable for the wrongs that have been done. It is assumed that not one side is either completely right or completely wrong, but that both sides have legitimate claims that should be addressed, and certain blind spots that must be overcome. Therefore, both sides must listen to the "other" point of view, in order to foster understanding and communication, which would presumably lead to "coexistence" or "reconciliation."

Such an approach is deemed "balanced" or "moderate," as if that is a good thing. However, the reality on the ground is vastly different than the "moderate" view of this so-called "conflict." Even the word "conflict" is misleading, because it implies a dispute between two symmetric parties. The reality is not so; it is not a case of simple misunderstanding or mutual hatred which stands in the way of peace. The context of the situation in Israel/Palestine is that of colonialism, apartheid and racism, a situation in which there is an oppressor and an oppressed, a colonizer and a colonized.

In cases of colonialism and apartheid, history shows that colonial regimes do not relinquish power without popular struggle and resistance, or direct international pressure. It is a particularly naive view to assume that persuasion and "talking" will convince an oppressive system to give up its power.

The apartheid regime in South Africa, for instance, was ended after years of struggle with the vital aid of an international campaign of sanctions, divestments and boycotts. If one had suggested to the oppressed South Africans living in bantustans to try and understand the other point of view (i.e. the point of view of South African white supremacists), people would have laughed at such a ridiculous notion. Similarly, during the Indian struggle for emancipation from British colonial rule, Mahatma Gandhi would not have been venerated as a fighter for justice had he renounced satyagraha -- "holding firmly to the truth," his term for his nonviolent resistance movement -- and instead advocated for dialogue with the occupying British colonialists in order to understand their side of the story.

Now, it is true that some white South Africans stood in solidarity with the oppressed black South Africans, and participated in the struggle against apartheid. And there were, to be sure, some British dissenters to their government's colonial policies. But those supporters explicitly stood alongside the oppressed with the clear objective of ending oppression, of fighting the injustices perpetrated by their governments and representatives. Any joint gathering of both parties, therefore, can only be morally sound when the citizens of the oppressive state stand in solidarity with the members of the oppressed group, not under the banner of "dialogue" for the purpose of "understanding the other side of the story." Dialogue is only acceptable when done for the purpose of further understanding the plight of the oppressed, not under the framework of having "both sides heard."

It has been argued, however, by the Palestinian proponents of these dialogue groups, that such activities may be used as a tool -- not to promote so-called "understanding," -- but to actually win over Israelis to the Palestinian struggle for justice, by persuading them or "having them recognize our humanity."

However, this assumption is also naive. Unfortunately, most Israelis have fallen victim to the propaganda that the Zionist establishment and its many outlets feed them from a young age. Moreover, it will require a huge, concerted effort to counter this propaganda through persuasion. For example, most Israelis will not be convinced that their government has reached a level of criminality that warrants a call for boycott. Even if they are logically convinced of the brutalities of Israeli oppression, it will most likely not be enough to rouse them into any form of action against it. This has been proven to be true time and again, evident in the abject failure of such dialogue groups to form any comprehensive anti-occupation movement ever since their inception with the Oslo process. In reality, nothing short of sustained pressure -- not persuasion -- will make Israelis realize that Palestinian rights have to be rectified. That is the logic of the BDS movement, which is entirely opposed to the false logic of dialogue.

Based on an unpublished 2002 report by the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, the San Francisco Chronicle reported last October that "between 1993 and 2000 [alone], Western governments and foundations spent between $20 million and $25 million on the dialogue groups." A subsequent wide-scale survey of Palestinians who participated in the dialogue groups revealed that this great expenditure failed to produce "a single peace activist on either side." This affirms the belief among Palestinians that the entire enterprise is a waste of time and money.

The survey also revealed that the Palestinian participants were not fully representative of their society. Many participants tended to be "children or friends of high-ranking Palestinian officials or economic elites. Only seven percent of participants were refugee camp residents, even though they make up 16 percent of the Palestinian population." The survey also found that 91 percent of Palestinian participants no longer maintained ties with Israelis they met. In addition, 93 percent were not approached with follow-up camp activity, and only five percent agreed the whole ordeal helped "promote peace culture and dialogue between participants."

Despite the resounding failure of these dialogue projects, money continues to be invested in them. As Omar Barghouti, one of the founding members of the BDS movement in Palestine, explained in The Electronic Intifada, "there have been so many attempts at dialogue since 1993 ... it became an industry -- we call it the peace industry."

This may be partly attributed to two factors. The dominant factor is the useful role such projects play in public relations. For example, the Seeds of Peace website boosts its legitimacy by featuring an impressive array of endorsements by popular politicians and authorities, such as Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, George Mitchell, Shimon Peres, George Bush, Colin Powell and Tony Blair, amongst others. The second factor is the need of certain Israeli "leftists" and "liberals" to feel as if they are doing something admirable to "question themselves," while in reality they take no substantive stand against the crimes that their government commits in their name. The politicians and Western governments continue to fund such projects, thereby bolstering their images as supporters of "coexistence," and the "liberal" Israeli participants can exonerate themselves of any guilt by participating in the noble act of "fostering peace." A symbiotic relationship, of sorts.

The lack of results from such initiatives is not surprising, as the stated objectives of dialogue and "coexistence" groups do not include convincing Israelis to help Palestinians gain the respect of their inalienable rights. The minimum requirement of recognizing Israel's inherently oppressive nature is absent in these dialogue groups. Rather, these organizations operate under the dubious assumption that the "conflict" is very complex and multifaceted, where there are "two sides to every story," and each narrative has certain valid claims as well as biases.

As the authoritative call by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel makes plain, any joint Palestinian-Israeli activities -- whether they be film screenings or summer camps -- can only be acceptable when their stated objective is to end, protest, and/or raise awareness of the oppression of the Palestinians.

Any Israeli seeking to interact with Palestinians, with the clear objective of solidarity and helping them to end oppression, will be welcomed with open arms. Caution must be raised, however, when invitations are made to participate in a dialogue between "both sides" of the so-called "conflict." Any call for a "balanced" discourse on this issue -- where the motto "there are two sides to every story" is revered almost religiously -- is intellectually and morally dishonest, and ignores the fact that, when it comes to cases of colonialism, apartheid, and oppression, there is no such thing as "balance." The oppressor society, by and large, will not give up its privileges without pressure. This is why the BDS campaign is such an important instrument of change.

Faris Giacaman is a Palestinian student from the West Bank, attending his second year of college in the United States.