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
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.
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
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.
Zionism Laid Bare (from CounterPunch)
A Review of Shahid Alam's "Israeli Exceptionalism"
Zionism Laid Bare
By KATHLEEN CHRISTISONThe 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
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."
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
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
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 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 week's 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 happened to have been born German.
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
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