The West Bank Blog

Two articles of interests

2009-09-23T12:19:00.000-07:00

I've been so busy these last few weeks that I've had barely enough time to stay on top of developments in the region.

Two opinion pieces caught my eye that I thought I would pass along.

The first is an Op-Ed in the Times by Prince Turki al-Faisal - the former head of Saudi Intelligence - dismissing the idea that Arab states should initiate the process of normalizing relations with Israel.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/opinion/13turki.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Prince%20Turki&st=cse

The second article appears today at Foreign Policy magazine's site. Titled "More than Just a Photo Op" the article tries to highlight what most observers see as non-existent: an actual strategy of the Obama administration for Arab-Israeli Peace. I'm not sure I agree with all of Daniel Levy's points but it is an interesting argument and I'm sure a few of the things he suggests are both valid and too quickly dismissed.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/09/22/more_than_just_a_photo_op?page=0,0

Hiatus

2009-09-09T09:05:00.001-07:00

After a complicated and drawn out move, I'm still getting my feet wet with the new school year. I apologize for the absence of postings in the last few weeks and I'm hoping I get back to it shortly. Bear with me!

Comment clash

2009-08-19T12:11:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to become a more active participant in the enormous on-line foreign policy community on topics related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I've done so by commenting on articles and blog posts for the past number of weeks. Some of these exchanges have been fruitful but most are largely exercises in futility. Most of these exchanges are less than civil but some have remained respectful. In both cases though, I've come to accept that the point is not to make friends. That there are many people who know very little despite proclaiming otherwise.

I should also say that I don't find engaging with people I fundamentally disagree with particularly fun. I'm doing it largely as a way for me to hone-in on the substance of my opponents largely illogical arguments. I'm finding it beneficial since so many common tropes - ones largely devoid of truth - keep reappearing.

There was one series of exchanges on The West Bank on Open Salon that I've let die (with my opponent having the last word) simply because it was a topic that I didn't want to pursue (what constitutes "anti-semitism"?). Instead, I will be posting a few exchanges here that I've had in other places in particular from Foreign Policy Magazine, where I'm a regular commenter. Here's a link for a current debate right now:

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/08/18/huckabee_in_the_holy_land#comment-80641

Is Mike Huckabee Crazy?

2009-08-18T11:37:00.000-07:00

Mike Huckabee – erstwhile Republican presidential hopeful – has lost it.

On a junket paid for by a questionable charity run out of New York, the former Governor of Arkansas and Southern Baptist pastor made the following statements while standing in the West Bank:

“The question is should the Palestinians have a place to call their own? Yes, I have no problem with that, should it be in the middle of the Jewish homeland? That's what I think has to be honestly assessed as virtually unrealistic."

Few in the foreign policy blogosphere have really acknowledged just how significant these statements are.

Glenn Greenwald yesterday brought out the comparison between Huckabee “bashing” US policies on foreign soil and Al Gore doing something similar while in Saudi Arabia back in 2006. The particular hypocrisy Greenwald points to is the lax response when it’s a Republican doing the bashing and it’s an excellent point but it’s one of style and not substance.

Huckabee is rejecting the policy that the United States has endorsed since the Occupation began. He is rejecting what most States and most Israelis support. He is, instead, endorsing quite explicitly the ethnic cleansing of The West Bank.

The continued expansion of settlements like the ones Huckabee toured this week is what, to use his words makes a Palestinian state “virtually unrealistic”. Claiming that the Israelis have a “god given right” to live wherever they so chose in whatever he means by “Jewish homeland” flies in the face of agreed upon parameters of international law and, ultimately, common sense.

Richard Silverstein does an excellent job in Tikun Olam at deconstructing where Huckabee is coming from (and more importantly, where his funds are coming from).

In the end one could argue that the inability for any progress to be made on a solution to the conflict makes Huckabee’s assertions the reality anyway. The difference of course, is that the principle that Palestinians have rights in their land – be it full democratic rights of a single state solution or the self-determination of a two-state solution – is still the foundation for discussions. What Huckabee wants is the end of discussions, the military suppression and transfer of Palestinian Muslim and Christians alike, and ultimately an ethnically pure Jewish state.

The United Church and the Israeli Boycott Bruhaha

2009-08-12T07:14:00.000-07:00

The United Church of Canada, Canada’s largest Protestant denomination – with roughly 10% of the country’s population describing themselves as adherents – has made another attempt at addressing the Israeli Occupation of Palestine. The General Council Meeting of the church that is held every three years is taking place this week in Kelowna British Columbia and once again has garnered some controversy over a proposed resolution calling for a divestment and sanctions campaign against the State of Israel.

The key issue seems to be specific language used in background documents of the initial resolution calling for sanctions. The CBC is reporting that the background documents that have raised the ire of the pro-Israel lobby group the Canadian Jewish Congress do the following:

Calls on the Canadian Government to end its support for Israel’s “Occupation” of Palestine.
Calls for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions in protest.
Likens Israeli policies towards Palestinians with Apartheid South Africa.
Questions Canadian Members of Parliament who hold dual Canadian-Israeli citizenship.
Argues that paid junkets to Israel should be classified as “bribes”.

The references to apartheid and members of Parliament have since been removed from the documents and the council will address the rest of the resolution tomorrow. This comes after a sustained PR campaign by the pro-Israel Canadian lobby that called the documents “anti-Semitic” and threatened that the Church was risking an irreparable “schism” with the Jewish community.

As a member of the Task Force behind the proposal I have some information that the pro-Israel lobby tries to hide: These documents that they call “anti-semitic” were drawn up by both members of the United Church and members of the Jewish Community and rely largely on sources and quotes from Jewish academics and activists in Canada, The United States and Israel.

That efforts to call attention to the brutal occupation of Palestine should be branded “anti-Semitic” should come as no surprise. It is, as a matter of routine now, a shield used indiscriminately against opponents of the Occupation. As rational people see that criticism of a state and its actions against civilians is hardly an indictment against a people based on their ethnicity this shield will show increasing signs of wear. When the day comes that Israel finally realizes that the Occupation is unsustainable and reaches a fair peace deal with Palestine – the travesty will be that the use of the epithet “anti-Semitic” will be so worn the real enemies of Judaism may get a free pass.

Foreign Policy's "Attack on Islam"

2009-08-11T10:11:00.000-07:00

Professor Sebastian Gorka of the National Defense University published an article in Foreign Policy magazine yesterday on al-Qaeda’s global reach and what the US can do to combat it. It’s a rambling article with a few good points shrouded with illogical jumps in reason and a shaky hold on terminology.

Gorka walks the reader through an important debate in counter-terrorism circles taking place right now over al-Qaeda’s relative importance in the continuation of a “Salafist-jihadi” terror campaign. One side argues that al-Qaeda as become irrelevant with the rise of “leaderless jihad” where individuals or small groups have become radicalized and carry out act of violence without guidance from al-Qaeda. The other argues the opposite: that al-Qaeda remains a significant threat to global stability and their central operations continue to maintain command and control over global partners.

Gorka wades into this debate by pointing to intelligence assessments and open source information that paints a picture of an al-Qaeda…

“…continuing to exercise a significant degree of control over the shaping and dissemination of its Salafi-jihadi message and with the coordinated acts of violence against civilians that it does manage to carry out continuing to play an important role. Al Qaeda does not possess the organizational strength it had eight or 10 years ago, but al Qaeda’s ideology is not waning among the young and extreme. On the contrary, its ‘propaganda by the deed’ continues to inspire new recruits and terrorist attacks, particularly outside the Arab world.”

I don’t entirely disagree with Gorka’s assertion (we differ on minor points), what baffles me is how he gets there.

Immediately after the above paragraph he asserts that “Salafi terrorism” of the kind al-Qaeda “inspires and directs” has reared its head “thousands of miles from Iraq and Israel”. There is no doubt that al-Qaeda in Iraq is – beyond the name – an ideological successor to Bin Laden’s group. But I’m confused about the Israel reference. This may look like a small point but it’s indicative of a trend in the article. None of the Palestinian groups who have carried out attacks against Israel, nor Hezbollah for that matter, are al-Qaeda inspired Salafists.

Gorka really doesn’t distinguish between Islam, Islamism, or Salafism. This is like collapsing Christians, Protestants and Southern Baptists into one amorphous group. His assertion that al-Qaeda’s ideology is “winning converts among Muslims” because recent polls in Pakistan and Egypt show a majority of the population thinks “the west is at war with Islam” is preposterous. Al-Qaeda’s ideology is a lot more than “the west is at war with Islam” and the elements of that Salafi ideology – a juridical system based entirely on early Sharia law and insistence on labeling Shi’a apostates deserving death for instance – are far less popular among the one billion Muslims worldwide. Let us also not forget that the feeling that “the west is at war with Islam” is one held by thousands if not millions of Americans. Your average Egyptian could be convinced of the existence of such a war as easily by John Hagee as Osama Bin Laden.

It’s clear that the United States has to continue to combat al-Qaeda’s ideology head on. Gorka thinks that a troop surge in Afghanistan is the wrong tactic and he may or may not be right. A murky conflation of who al-Qaeda is and who their message appeals to is certainly unlikely to help guide that strategy. We need an understanding of how and why Salafism becomes appealing to someone in Indonesia, or Somalia or Liverpool and that understanding requires a much more nuanced examination.

The West Bank on Open Salon

2009-08-04T10:29:00.000-07:00

To my (few) loyal readers. I just wanted to both thank you for your continued support and to let you know that in addition to this Blogger site, The West Bank is now being published through Open Salon as well.

I've been doing this blog for three years (apart from that mysterious 2008) and I've appreciated the emails I get from readers, and rest assured that you can still come to this site to get the same posts (if not more) than Open Salon. Open Salon allows me to access a larger pool of readers - many of whom are very engaged in responding to posts with comments and emails - which I'm hoping will help develop the blog further.

I'll post some of those comments here when they seem appropriate.

Here is the Open Salon address if you're interested. Take a minute to explore Open Salon as a whole - you may want to sign up yourself.

http://www.opensalon.com/blog/thewestbank

FP on Aluf Benn's NY Times Op-Ed

2009-07-30T12:07:00.000-07:00

I mentioned yesterday in my take on the Martin Indyk interview in The Daily Beast that Haaretz’s “editor at large” had been complaining in a NY Times op-ed two days ago that Obama has been “ignoring” Israel.
FP has published a response by Steve Breyman that skillfully deconstructs Benn's illogical whining. It's a must read for anyone interested in the current state of affairs between Israel and the Obama administration.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/07/29/is_obama_ignoring_israel

Indyk: Israelis "love to be loved"

2009-07-29T07:26:00.000-07:00

Interesting piece out of The Daily Beast today: a short article from Benjamin Sarlin who interviews former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk about how Obama can get “back on track” with Israel. At no point in the article does anyone really question if Obama is off track with Israel at all. It’s taken as a self evident truth that because Netanyahu is in a huff about Obama’s pressure over settlements, something must be done on the American end to soothe his hurt feelings.

Indyk argues that because the Israelis “love to be loved” and received “a blank check of love” during the Bush years, they’ll need to be reassured that they are still in favor in Washington. Haaretz reported that a lot of these hurt feelings grew out of Obama’s much celebrated Cairo speech in June in which he extended an olive branch to the Arab and Muslim worlds. Apparently peaceful rhetoric towards the Arab and Muslim worlds, and being an ally to Israel, is mutually exclusive.

Elliot Abrams Defends Settlements in the Washington Post

2009-07-28T13:33:00.000-07:00

I recently revisited an op-ed piece Elliot Abrams’ wrote in April for the Washington Post in which he argues that the settlement freeze is a red herring for Arab-Israeli peace. Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and was the deputy national security advisor for Near East and North African Affairs in the George W. Bush White House. While that last job position should be alarming to anyone who follows American involvement in the Middle East, anyone familiar with Abrams’ resume is probably already aware that he lacks much credibility. He was convicted for lying to Congress nearly 20 years ago during their Iran-Contra investigation. His track record in Central America – where he allegedly covered up atrocious violence perpetrated by right-wing Governments – apparently provided a solid foreign relations background for dealing with the Middle East.

His take on an Israeli settlement freeze is shockingly ignorant of what it’s actually like in the Occupied Territories and contains a number of falsehoods as well. He argues that while Israel hasn’t always “kept to the rules” concerning settlements (no new ones, no financial incentives to move to one, no new construction except within boundaries of pre-existing ones) it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter because it won’t affect a final negotiation presumably because Palestinians would have to take land in the Negev desert in exchange for the land on which settlements have been built. He suggests that this is the deal offered to the Palestinians by Ehud Barak in 2000 and Olmert in 2009.

But Abrams shows a stunning ignorance of both history and geography. Firstly, the deals offered by Barak and Olmert for “between 94 and 98 percent” of the Occupied Territories were horrible deals that the PA had to reject. Without getting into the specifics, the territory offered to the Palestinians wasn’t contiguous, creating a series of mini-states similar to their current situation. This setup has been accurately compared to the Bantustans of South Africa. One of the reasons these Cantons would need to be created is to sustain the Israeli-only network of roads that connect Israel proper with their settlements within the Occupied Territories. To suggest that the settlements have no impact on even the idea of land swap is completely disingenuous.

Secondly, the settlements in the Occupied Territories do not have the same value to warrant a one for one land swap with Israeli territory in the Negev desert. Israeli settlements are constructed close to or on top of the few fresh water reservoirs in the region. According to Israeli Human Rights group B’Tselem, Israelis consume five and a half times more water than their Palestinian neighbors on a per capita basis making the control of water a primary driver in settlement policy. Abrams knows this but he’s hoping the average Washington Post reader doesn’t. This problem has been left out of discussions about land swaps since the Barak “offer” was made in the hope that public opinion would see the failure of such a deal as Palestinian intransigence.

Lastly, Abrams is suggests that it doesn’t matter that Israel continues to violate the “rules” that he helped create (during the Bush administration’s Road Map phase). That most settlement expansions “do not affect much Palestinian life” is another fallacy. Palestinians, and the Arab world in general, look to the settlements as an example of Israel’s unwillingness to make even the smallest of concessions. Freezing settlement expansion is literally the easiest thing Israel will have to do if they really want a peace with the Palestinians. It doesn’t involve serious existential questions about Jerusalem or the compensation and return of refugees. It’s continually cited by the UN, the Quartet and most heads of state as the single most pressing issue and yet Israel is still unwilling to stop settlement expansion. What, I wonder, will happen when they have to actually remove some settlements?

It’s a shame Abrams couldn’t have retired like his former boss. Surely his twenty plus years of screwing up other countries has left him with a nice nest egg?

Israel: America can keep its money

2009-07-23T08:47:00.000-07:00

Haaretz is reporting that the Israeli Finance Minister is not just dismissive of the possibility that the US could withhold loan guarantees worth billions of dollars but doubts that the state of Israel even needs them.

"I don't see any limitations on the horizon. It's not time to be concerned about that" said the Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz, "I don't see any need to use them in the near future.”

This comes as a response to the increased tension between the US and Israel over the latter’s plan to move ahead with an illegal settlement construction in the West Bank despite condemnation from President Obama.

Relating back to my post yesterday, I’m not sure if this is Israel calling Obama’s bluff on economic sanctions (not that he’s even suggested them… yet) or if this is a reflection of the relative influence Israel now has over the United States. I’m sure the tough talk (tough in a teenager sort of way: “I don’t even need your stupid allowance Dad!”) has been mandated by Netanyahu and the chorus of “no other country can dictate Israeli policy” that we saw yesterday seems to suggest such a position. But it is interesting that Israel seems to be pushing this issue rather than simply continuing its settlement expansion while trying not to draw American ire. This is starting to look to me like a fight Netanyahu thinks he needs to start. Which in turn begs the question: Is this a fight he can win?

Who is more powerful: Israel vs. The US --- REDUX

2009-07-22T07:50:00.000-07:00

My post yesterday on the resounding chorus of Israeli politicians decrying the external "pressure" and "challenges to its sovereignty" (sound familiar Ayatollah Khamenei?) was a lead into the question I posed and half answered: Who is more powerful: Israel of the United States?
Let me expand a bit...
First let me confess that using the term “powerful” is a bit misleading. What I’m trying to get at is “power” in the sense of who has a bigger influence on the other’s policy making. This isn’t a question of who is militarily stronger or who has a more effective international diplomatic reach. This is purely a question of which state is more reliant on the other.
Now I should also admit that historically the case has always been that Israel has benefitted greatly from American patronage. Without a doubt the United States has always been “more powerful” than Israel. The military aide – and more importantly the weapon sales concessions – that Israel has received from the US has gone a long way in solidifying the Israeli Defense Forces as one of the premier militaries in the world. Diplomatically, the Americans have been involved in most of the successful (and failed) peace efforts between Israel and its neighbors (Egypt and Jordan), and the Palestinians. There has been no equivalent to Camp David – no “Camp Adam” to facilitate peace between the United States and Cuba.
So has that balance shifted in the opposite direction? Sort of…
I doubt that Israel will ever be in a position to negotiate a settlement between an American President and Raul Castro. Israel, in many ways, benefits more from its perceived position of weakness in relation to the US. It relies a great deal on funds raised in the Diaspora for various “emergencies” and while immigration from the West has dropped considerably in the last two decades there is no doubt that there still exists a strong emotional connection between a great many diasporic Jews and their perceived homeland. This is maintained considerably by Israel projecting a sense that their existence is under siege. I won’t get into whether it’s true, or why they think they face these existential threats but that perception (valid or not) has been a great boon to Israel’s state coffers.
But the nitty-gritty of this question of relative power really comes down to need. Who needs who more? I don’t remember a time when the two men leading these states have had as much of an ideological gap between them as today. While Obama is hardly the Marxist Muslim many feared, his liberal centrism is about as far away an American President can get from Benyamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu’s extremism has been bolstered by his own far right leaning coalition government and the country’s domestic fatigue for the ongoing stalemate with the Palestinians. The only person who is trying to moderate Netanyahu – the only person that counts – is Barack Obama.
So when Netanyahu announces that, despite firm proclamations from the Obama administration that the settlement construction in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (East Jerusalem in particular) must stop, Israel will continue with said construction regardless, we have Obama’s first real challenge in his effort on the Arab-Israeli front. How can Netanyahu get away with such intransigence? Because Netanyahu is gambling that Israel is no longer beholden to American power. In fact, he may think that the dynamic is quite the opposite.
Without overstating their influence, we have in the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies. Detailed in their book “The Israel Lobby” Professors Mearsheimer and Walt have laid out a damning indictment of Israel’s influence over American foreign (and in some cases, domestic) policy. In courting the vote of AIPAC supporters (quick: where did Obama make his first major speech after winning the Democratic nomination?) Obama had to continuously assert that American support for the state of Israel is unwavering. On top of that, and in words that should come back to haunt him, he said “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, secure and undivided”. AIPAC has long been controlled by vocal supporters of the Likud party (now under Netanyahu) and the need to vigorously court the support of AIPAC voters has to be seen as a compromise to Likudniks.
Now, it would seem, Netanyahu is cashing that check Obama wrote in front of the AIPAC audience back in June.
Obama, on the other hand, has little to offer Israel. There is no effective organ for promoting American interests among Israeli voters like AIPAC does stateside. Israeli hawks are benefiting from a status quo that hasn’t seen an American President do anything but murmur displeasure with Israeli actions. And even economically – as dire straits as the Israeli economy may be in – they are no longer the struggling economy they once were. On the other hand, being viewed as Israel’s unquestioning patron has cost the United States billions of dollars in both direct aide and costs through association. Their diplomatic stature suffers in both the Arab street and in more progressive European capitals. At some point a Realist look at the US-Israel relationship will conclude that the costs outweigh the benefits when you have so little influence you can’t stop the construction of a single apartment building.
Or, they may conclude that toning down that relationship may be too costly politically. And if this is the conclusion, is it that much of a stretch to suggest that Israel now has the upper hand in its relationship with the United States?

Noah Efron on the Ultra-Orthodox Riots

2009-07-22T06:24:00.000-07:00

Noah Efron has written a fascinating article for Foreign Policy about the recent Ultra-Orthodox riots in Jerusalem and the social inequities that are increasingly pitting secular Israelis against the Ultra-Orthodox underclass.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/07/20/israel_turns_on_itself

Israel: No "Subidiary" of Another State

2009-07-21T12:41:00.000-07:00

Israeli politicians are up in arms at the increasing chorus of international leaders who argue that the proposed settlement construction in occupied East Jerusalem should be stopped.
Haaretz quotes…
Prime Minister Netanyahu: “Israel will not agree to edicts [American, European, Russian] of this kind in East Jerusalem”.
Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon: Israel has an “indisputable” right to build anywhere in East Jerusalem.
Minister of Internal Affairs Eli Yishai: “Israel's government is not a subsidiary of any other world government […] Israel’s Government [is] free to build anywhere in Israel”.
Science Minster Daniel Hershkowitz: “Israel must reject international pressure and the challenges to its sovereignty in Jerusalem”.
It appears that the coalition government is clearly behind the Prime Minister in his refusal to submit to the pressure being put on it by the United States, Russia, France and Germany. And to be honest with you, when it comes to Russia and France, I don’t really blame them. What has either done for Israel recently? The Germans are a curious case in that there are few Western countries who try as hard as the Germans do to stay out of Israel’s affairs and the strong statement from the head of the German Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee suggests that this trend may be slowly changing or it may be an indication of this issue’s importance.
But that of course brings me to the United States. While the Europeans (and Russians even more so) have always posed as a minor irritant in the side of Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians (nothing says rebuke like a polite discussion with an Ambassador) as long as their objections remain dissociated from economic sanctions they have little bite in their mute bark. The Americans, on the other hand, are different. I’m particularly struck by Eli Yishai’s assertions that Israel is no “subsidiary” of another state.
Israel takes billions of dollars annually in economic and military aide from the Americans and does little in return. Israel’s inhumane actions towards the Palestinians have endangered the security of the United States enormously. As the financier of Israeli militarism the United States gets little but the unwanted association of their weapons technologies with civilian deaths.
In reality, the relationship between the US and Israel seems to be asymmetrical but not in the way you’d think. If the Israeli’s continue to defy Obama’s claim that the settlement of East Jerusalem is an impediment to peace it would seem that we’ve entered the era where Israeli influence over American policy is as powerful if not more than American influence over Israel’s.

"A Moral Twilight Zone"

2009-07-15T10:53:00.000-07:00

A group of 26 unnamed Israeli soldiers are claiming that they took part in abuses against Palestinians during the Israel assault on Gaza this past winter. Among the charges levelled in the report include an accusation that IDF troops were encouraged to "shoot first, worry later" and that many civilians were killed "needlessly". Also in the report were confirmations that the Israelis used illegal white phosphorous weapons against civilians, which has been alleged for months, and that they routinely used Palestinian civilians as "human shields". The human shields accusation is also not new.
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/07/15/breaking-the-silence-gaza-israel.html

In the meantime

2009-07-14T11:58:00.000-07:00

I've been working on some longer posts that are time sensitive enough I should have had them finished much faster. In the meantime why don't you check out these two videos.

The first is an Israeli cell phone commercial garnering controversy in Israel and the Occupied Territories for its portrayal of the interactions between the IDF and Palestinians. It's getting flack from both sides for it's message (delivered by voice over in Hebrew at the end) that all we want "is a little bit of fun".

This beauty is a marketing video produced by Rafael, an Israeli arms manufacturer designed to remind it's Indian clients of their genuine respect and understanding of Indian culture.

Rumours of Hamas-Fatah Unity Government?

2009-06-27T09:20:00.000-07:00

Rumours of a Hamas-Fatah Unity Government are circulating in the Middle East right now. Two currents are out there that would suggest that the bilateral talks taking place between the factions in Cairo will either fail or succeed. The first corresponds with a series of reports that both parties have been arresting rival activists in their respective territories. I'm not sure that this bodes well for the talks and frankly releasing the recently arrested as a "good will gesture" is a pretty hollow gesture.

Alternatively, I've read reports that the Egyptians have already coaxed an agreement out of the parties and are waiting until next week to announce it. I'm really unsure of how a Unity Government will play out with the new US administration. But this is certainly another major development in the Arab-Israeli issue for Obama to consider. I'm going to try and do a post on the recent political standoff between Netanyahu and Obama as the former has authorized the construction of new settlements north of Ramallah.

Juan Cole on Michael Jackson? Whaaaaa?

2009-06-26T07:57:00.000-07:00

Actually an interesting post today from Juan Cole on Michael Jackson's reported recent conversion to Islam and his influence in the Middle East. I'll quote directly and embed a great video as well.

Jackson is still enormously popular in the Middle East. Here is a Gulf tribute to the King of Pop. Given the stereotyping of Gulf Arabs as medieval and fanatical, and given the hurtful prejudice against their very form of clothing in the West, it is only right that they should have the last word here on Michael Jackson's universal appeal:

http://www.juancole.com/

2009-06-22T09:49:00.000-07:00

Slate.com: "What does a house in an Israeli settlement go for these days?"

2009-06-16T11:55:00.000-07:00

Slate.com is running a feature titled "Beautiful Two Bedroom on One Disputed Acre: How Much Does and Israeli Settlement Home Cost?"

Answer: Apparently not much.

http://www.slate.com/id/2220531/

Back from Vacation

2009-06-14T10:35:00.000-07:00

I'm back from two weeks of vacation which allowed me to do some reading (though never enough) that I had intended to do for the last number of months. Other than a couple of books I read for pleasure, I'm going to post brief book reviews in the future on more relevant topics to this forum. Before I do that though - let me tell you in an unrelated subject - I really enjoyed Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea on the sinking in 1820 of the Nantucket whaleship Essex. A great read!

New blog links

2009-05-29T00:01:00.000-07:00

I'm adding a couple of blog links (those to the right - no pun intended). Both are blogs from Foreign Policy Magazine.

The first is Mark Lynch's Abu Aardvark blog on the Middle East. Lynch is a professor of Political Science at George Washington University and author of Voices of the New Arab Public: Al-Jazeera, Iraq, and Middle East Politics Today.

The other blog is Harvard Prof. Stephen Walt's blog that runs with the subtitle: "A Realist in an Ideological Age". Walt and I aren't exactly on the same page politically (a topic I've been drafting a blog entry on for weeks now... more on that soon) but, as some of you may know, I'm particularly fascinated by any Realist/Conservative argument against the Israeli Occupation of Palestine. Walt's controversial book The Israel Lobby came out a couple of years ago and was, I think, particularly potent because it was written by two conservative political scientists (Walt along with John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago).

I'll be back from vacation in two weeks!

Israel to continue settlement expansion

2009-05-28T11:05:00.000-07:00

Israel has given a giant middle finger to Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton by announcing that they will continue to expand their illegal settlements in the Occupied Territories. This comes despite a clear demand from Obama and his Secretary of State in the last week on the suspension of construction taking place there. The Israeli government is trying to spin its policy as "natural growth" of existing settlements. This is, obviously, an attempt to distract the reality that whether its a new apartment bloc for 500 new settler families in Ariel (the largest of settlements with more than two hundred thousand residents) or a new settlement around East Jerusalem, the outcome of locating more colonists in what would ostensibly be the territory of a future independent Palestinian state is the same. That is, of course, if the Israeli government had any intention at all of seeing such a state exist.

It will be interesting to see how the US will respond to this pretty blatant incitement. Obama and Clinton made it clear well before this announcement by the Israelis, that the "natural growth" argument wasn't valid. Obama's demand of Netanyahu last week when they met in the White House was as unambiguous as you can get (ie. stop all settlement construction now). Some are saying that this might be the first true test of Obama's finesse in foreign policy (not withstanding, I guess, the calamity in AfPak - that new and ever so jargony term for Afghanistan-Pakistan). And while he has shown to be willing to take Israel to task - I suppose by making unambiguous statements on things like settlements - I'm not really convinced that he has many cards to play at this point.

Of note from the long weekend

2009-05-17T08:08:00.000-07:00

From the weekend, AP has a lengthy piece on the overtures made by Hamas towards the West.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/18/AR2009051800933.html

Juan Cole gives a quick (yet remarkably astute) rundown of the Obama-Netanyahu meetings that took place at the White House on Monday.

Obama wants Netanyahu to commit to supporting a two-state solution to be implemented in the near future. Netanyahu absolutely refused. He did say he is willing to "talk" to the Palestinians, though it is unclear why that would be a productive thing to do if he is die-hard against giving them the only thing they want.

www.juancole.com

Of note today - May 11, 2009

2009-05-10T19:54:00.000-07:00

"The Problem is Statelessness": Juan Cole discusses King Abdullah of Jordan's comments on a potential sweeping Obama Peace Plan for the Middle East. But what is at the root of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Jun Cole argues that it is Palestinian statelessness (and all of the things that come with it).

www.juancole.com

Here's an interesting article on Time's website about the Palestinian Christian community and the Pope's visit to the Middle East.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1897238,00.html

"Death has become like drinking water"

2009-05-05T13:15:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting interview with Khaled Meshal in the New York Times today. Apparently this is Hamas trying to "reach out" to western audiences. Can you tell that Hamas lacks the PR skills that the Israelis have? Meshal can make a great point one minute:

Regarding recognition of Israel, Mr. Meshal said the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and Mr. Abbas had granted such recognition, but to no avail. “Did that recognition lead to an end of the occupation? It’s just a pretext by the United States and Israel to escape dealing with the real issue and to throw the ball into the Arab and Palestinian court,” he said.

Only to also cite the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" as fact (according to the article). Or engage in a discussion over the "long-term"/10 year cease-fire (hudna) with Israel that would follow an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders. Meshal is trying to make concessions ('67 borders) while simultaneously playing to his base (only a 10 year ceasefire). It doesn't come off very well and frankly, he's in a no win situation. Which makes me wonder why Hamas would want to do an interview now anyway?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/world/middleeast/05meshal.html?_r=1&ref=world

Yad Vashem employee fired over Holocaust/Naqba comparison

2009-05-05T09:04:00.000-07:00

The Israeli Holocaust museum and memorial Yad Vashem has fired one of their guides for having the audacity to compare the trauma experienced by the survivors of the Holocaust with those of the Palestinians during the war of 1948. Note that it wasn't a comparison between deaths, or specific acts of atrocities, but an amorphous "trauma". A totally subjective experience.

He said he did so because the ruins of the Arab village, today a part of Jerusalem's Givat Shaul neighborhood, can be seen as one leaves Yad Vashem. "Yad Vashem talks about the Holocaust survivors' arrival in Israel and about creating a refuge here for the world's Jews. I said there were people who lived on this land and mentioned that there are other traumas that provide other nations with motivation," Shapira said. "The Holocaust moved us to establish a Jewish state and the Palestinian nation's trauma is moving it to seek self-determination, identity, land and dignity, just as Zionism sought these things," he said.

These are some pretty reasonable sentiments. There is nothing radical or anti-semitic in such statements. It's a shame that Yad Vashem is wielded as a political tool. You can read my first hand take on Yad Vashem here.

Haaretz article:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1080456.html

George Galloway sues all sorts of jerks

2009-05-04T09:06:00.000-07:00

The CBC is reporting that George Galloway, the British MP who was barred from entering Canada a month and a half ago is suing Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, Kenney's right hand man Alykhan Velshi, the Canadian Jewish Congress, two of the CJC's top dogs Bernie Farber and Sylvain Abitbol, and B'nai Brith Canada's CEO Frank Dimant.

"I welcome robust criticism, but the comments made about me crossed the line," Galloway, an outspoken supporter of the Palestinian cause, said in a statement Friday released by his Canadian lawyer."They are not only untrue, they are outrageous. As an elected member of the British Parliament, I am compelled to exercise my legal right to clear my name."

The only people missing from this list seems to be the Jewish Defense League. I'm curious to know why they dodged these suits. I would have loved to see the JDL's activities examined by a court.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2009/05/01/galloway-libel-suit010509.html

Do Palestinians Want a State?

2009-05-01T08:11:00.000-07:00

Robert Kaplan writes in the Altantic Monthly that it could be likely that the Palestinians are stateless because they want to remain stateless. Citing a "brilliant essay" by Jakub Gygiel Kaplan writes:

Grygiel raises a challenging proposition. If his theory is correct, then the Palestinians may never have a state, because at a deep psychological level, enough of them—or at least the groups that speak in their name—may not really want one. Statehood would mean openly compromising with Israel, and, because of the dictates of geography, living in an intimate political and economic relationship with it. Better the glory of victimhood, combined with the power of radical abstractions! As a stateless people, Palestinians can lob rockets into Israel, but not be wholly blamed in the eyes of the international community. Statehood would, perforce, put an end to such license.

Grygiel isn't actually talking about the Palestinians per se, because if he was I would suggest that he, like Kaplan, appear to be confused about the historical circumstances of Palestinian statelessness.

Kaplan, in his article, cites Hamas and Hezbollah's unwillingness to govern Gaza and Lebanon respectively as evidence that their "power" has been derived from statelessness. That they thrive as political entities because of their statelessness, not in spite of it. This argument proves confusing to anyone with rudimentary knowledge of both Hamas' and Hezbollah's organizational history. Both groups have been responsible for governance in areas that remain ungoverned by the "state" of Kaplan's imaginings. Hamas and Hezbollah run hospitals and schools, they have set up judicial hearings and local political institutions and while you may disagree with the ideological or religious basis on which these institutions are founded, they are the institutions of governance.

Of course, this is one point of many that one could make against Kaplan's totalizing effort to ascribe a generalized psychology to as disparate a community as "the Palestinians". No doubt that there are Palestinians who have taken advantage of their statelessness, just as there were Jews who took advantage of Nazi genocide, or Tibetans aiding Beijing's occupation. but this could only be a legitimate argument if there has ever been an occasion where a fair resolution - a "peace" - between Israelis and Palestinians has been on the negotiating table. Kaplan knows this. He even states that Israel's settlement expansion has continued unabated throughout the so called "peace negotiations". But since Israel has never made a serious attempt to negotiate a peace, the Palestinians have never been given a serious opportunity to govern (in the limited way Kaplan understands governance).

So here's how we should test the thesis: End the Occupation of Palestine.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200904u/palestinian-statelessness

Avigdor Lieberman speaking some truths...

2009-04-22T12:09:00.000-07:00

Israel's Foreign Minister and leading fascist Avigdor Lieberman is doing exactly what Gideon Levy was hoping he'd do which is namely shoot off at the mouth and say things that would "lift the veil" and reveal the "nation's true face". Leiberman, speaking to a Russian daily is quoted saying "Believe me, America accepts all of our decisions".

Judging from the Harman scandal those "decisions" may be indistinguishable.

Also coming out in his interview, was a deviation from standard Israeli sabre rattling: Iran isn't Israel's "number one strategic threat" but is in fact (at least) number two. He thinks (and is probably right) that Pakistan and Afghanistan pose more danger. I would argue - and have before - that Israel's biggest strategic threats are in fact their own far right, of which Mr. Lieberman is the secular flag waver, and the unsustainability of the Occupation. Lieberman, naturally thinks otherwise.

Haaretz article:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1080097.html

2009-04-22T06:46:00.000-07:00

Theres a good blog post by Juan Cole on the AIPAC scandal today. Check the link to the right.

At the end of it he writes "I think the American Israel Public Affairs Committee should have to register as the agent of a foreign state". I couldn't agree more.

A couple of recent updates

2009-04-20T09:48:00.000-07:00

A change at work has kept me from posting anything in the last two+ weeks. Here are a couple of items that you may find interesting:

A major scandal is brewing in Washington. Apparently a very senior Democratic Congresswoman was caught on an wiretap talking to an alleged Israeli spy. The report is that she is overheard making a deal to pressure the Department of Justice to drop an espionage case against two AIPAC lobbyists/Israeli spies in exchange for AIPAC lobbying to have her appointed to a powerful Intelligence Committee seat.

http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=5&docID=hsnews-000003098436&mp=Most_Viewed

Britain is reportedly reexamining their Arms Export agreements with Israel. Enough pressure has mounted in the UK that the Labour government is reviewing all the weapons exports "in light of recent events in Gaza".

http://www.salon.com/wires/ap/world/2009/04/21/D97MV1DG0_eu_britain_israel/index.html

I want to write a bit about the Durban conference. I'll try and have something posted tomorrow.

Does Jason Kenney understand the Internet?

2009-04-02T12:04:00.000-07:00

Jason Kenney's decision to bar George Galloway from entering Canada is ridiculous not the least because he has only given George Galloway and the Anti-War and Anti-Apartheid movement more attention but because Galloway's talk would be broadcast online for EVERYONE to watch. Had he not been barred, his talk would have circulated online primarily among those already familiar with his message. Now, thanks to Jason Kenney, thousands will watch any number of the versions of his speaking engagements that had been denied him.

Jason Kenney is an idiot.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

"Balance"

2009-04-01T10:05:00.000-07:00

Following Terry Cormier's statement that the resolution deploring Israeli settlement expansion was not "balanced" I wanted to post something quickly about the concept of "balance" which, in Canada at least, seems to be the the most important requirement of late when talking about the Occupation of Palestine.

I think this issue really picked up steam following the Israeli assault on Gaza in December. Media outlets were especially careful to appear "balanced" even when reporting largely of the carnage wrought by Israel. It seems - as you saw in my post about the IDF t-shirts depicting cross hairs on a pregnant Palestinian - that regardless of the story, a comment has to be made that shows "balance". The IDF can produce incredibly offensive and hateful t-shirts promoting war crimes, but as long as the reporter makes a reference to the fact that Hamas does bad things to Israelis - the newspaper is "balanced".

We really need a more fundamental understanding of just how insidious this idea of "balance" is, and what it really implies.

It implies that there are no victims. That Israeli actions (be they t-shirts or new settlements) are - despite being crimes - reactions to some sort of incitement by the Palestinians.

It implies that Palestinians somehow have as much control over their institutions as the Israelis - ignoring the 40 years of degradation to Palestinian civil society by the Occupation.

Ultimately though, and most importantly I would suggest, it implies that there can be no moral judgements. This, I think, should be the most troubling for the neoconservatives whose approach to foreign policy is Manichean at best. Conservatives are not the moral relativists that they accuse liberals of being. Yet this need for "balance" in the face of actions that are morally reprehensible bankrupts them of this position. No longer do we talk about rape victims "asking for it" - we've recognized that a crime is a crime. I can only hope that our diplomats and newspapers eventually do the same.

Canada a key ally to Israel at the UN

2009-04-01T09:25:00.000-07:00

Canada, a member of the United Nations Human Rights Council, consistently voted in lock step with the Israeli position on a number of key resolutions on March 26th.

While the votes aren't enforceable - since Israel doesn't abide by International Law anyway - they remain a largely symbolic representation of the international community's discomfort with Israel's 41 year Occupation of Palestine.

The most amazing vote came with Resolution A/HRC/10/L.5 which "deplores" the recent announcement that Israel will begin the expansion of a new housing settlement in the Occupied Palestinian Territory - The West Bank. These settlements are regarded by everyone familiar with this conflict as one of the KEY obstacles to any future Peace agreement. Even George Bush routinely stated that their expansion needed to stop immediately. It seems utterly inconceivable that a democratic country like Canada would vote against a resolution "deploring" their expansion.

Terry Cormier, the Canadian representative, said that Canada would vote against the resolution, unlike other countries like The United Kingdom and France, because the resolution "was not balanced and did not refer to the Palestinian obligation". I don't understand how a violation of International Law and a universally accepted obstacle to peace requires a "balanced" resolution. The Palestinians are not occupying Israeli territory, nor are they confiscating Israeli territory for their own expansion. There is no balance to the settlement issue. If there is no balance to the power dynamic between the best equipped military in the world and a stateless people with homemade rockets, I have no idea how there would be balance to this issue. Canada and it's neoconservative government is once again in bed with Israel's far right.

UN Link:

http://www.unhchr.ch/huricane/huricane.nsf/view01/4C99B0F4E7BC7EE8C1257585007B5D90?opendocument

Galloway and JDL Leader Meir Weinstein

2009-03-31T10:53:00.000-07:00

Here's a great YouTube video from Channel 4 News in Britain. It's an exchange between George Galloway and Meir Weinstein, the "Director of the Jewish Defense League of Canada". This exchange between Galloway and Weinstein is an embarrassment to this country. That Weinstein and his organization can claim to have policy impact on the Conservative government of Canada is shameful especially when considered in light of these two points:

1. Weinstein and the JDL, in this video, claim they will "look into" those who had invited Galloway to Canada. This should not sit well with the 2.9 million members of Canada's largest Protestant denomination, the United Church...

2. The JDL is considered a Terrorist Group by the US State Department and the FBI.

Good link:

http://mostlywater.org/

Jewish Defense League taking credit for Galloway ban

2009-03-30T10:47:00.000-07:00

It seems that the Jewish Defense League of Canada is claiming credit for having George Galloway barred from entering Canada. The Conservatives are claiming that they have not interfered with the Border Services Agency. But they seem very keen on listing all of the reasons why Galloway should not be allowed in. The "infandous street-corner Cromwell" line is getting a lot of negative attention in the British media. "Infandous" is such a self-aggrandizing and pretentious word that it's not in our office dictionary nor is it recognized by my spellcheck. Way to go Alykahn Velshi!

One thing that seems to be lacking in the Macleans article is noting that while "Hamas is listed as a terrorist organization in Canada", The Jewish Defense League is listed as a terrorist organization in the United States.

http://www.macleans.ca/article.jsp?content=n0325154A

George Galloway on being barred from speaking in Canada

2009-03-26T08:33:00.000-07:00

Canada can't muzzle me

To ban me from the country for my views on Afghanistan is absurd, hypocritical, and in vain

George Galloway

The Guardian, Saturday 21 March 2009

The Canadian immigration minister Jason Kenney gazetted in the Sun yesterday morning that I was to be excluded from his country because of my views on Afghanistan. That's the way the rightwing, last-ditch dead-enders of Bushism in Ottawa conduct their business.

Kenney is quite a card. A quick trawl establishes he's a gay-baiter, gung-ho armchair warrior, with an odd habit of exceeding his immigration brief. Three years ago he attacked the pro-western Lebanese prime minister, Fuad Siniora, for being ungrateful to Canada for its support of Israeli bombardment of his country. Most curiously of all, in 2006 he addressed a rally of the so-called People's Mujahideen of Iran, a Waco-style cult, banned in the European Union as a terrorist organisation. On one level being banned by such a man is like being told to sit up straight by the hunchback of Notre Dame or being lectured on due diligence by Conrad Black. On another, for a Scotsman to be excluded from Canada is like being turned away from the family home.

But what are my views on Afghanistan which the Canadian government does not want its people to hear? I've never been to Afghanistan, nor have I ever met a Taliban, but my first impression into the parliamentary vellum on the subject was more than two decades ago. At the time the fathers of the Taliban were "freedom fighters", paraded at US Republican and British Tory conferences. Who knows, maybe even the Canadian right extolled these god-fearing opponents of communism. I did not, however.

On the eve of their storming of Kabul I told Margaret Thatcher that she "had opened the gates to the barbarians" and that "a long, dark night would now descend upon the people of Afghanistan". With the same conviction, I say to the Canadian and other Nato governments today that your policy is equally a profound mistake. From time to time and with increased regularity it is a crime. Like the bombardment of wedding parties and even funerals or the presiding over a record opium crop, which under our noses finds its way coursing through the veins of young people from Nova Scotia to Newcastle upon Tyne. But it is worse than a crime, as Tallyrand said, it's a blunder.

The Afghans have never succumbed to foreign occupation, heaven knows the British empire tried, tried and failed again. Not even Alexander the Great succeeded, and whoever else he is, minister Kenney is no Alexander the Great. Young Canadian soldiers are dying in significant numbers on Afghanistan's plains. Their families are entitled to know how many of us believe this adventure to be similarly doomed and that genuine support for troops - British, Canadian and other - means bringing them home and changing course.

To ban a five-times elected British MP from addressing public events or keeping appointments with television and radio programmes is a serious matter. Kenney's "spokesman" told the Sun, "Galloway's not coming in ... end of story." Alas for him, it's not. Canada remains a free country governed by law and my friends are even now seeking a judicial review. And there are other ways I can address those Canadians who wish to hear me.

More than half a century ago Paul Robeson, one of the greatest men who ever lived, was forbidden to enter Canada not by Ottawa but by Washington, which had taken away his passport. But he was still able to transfix a vast crowd of Vancouver's mill hands and miners with a 17-minute telephone concert, culminating in a rendition of the Ballad of Joe Hill. Technology has moved on since then. And so from coast to coast, minister Kenney notwithstanding, I will be heard - one way or another.

• George Galloway is Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow gallowayg@parliament.uk

Those IDF T-Shirts

2009-03-25T07:53:00.000-07:00

The Israeli Defense Forces have promised to discipline soldiers in their military who created and distributed these T-Shirts.

Although these t-shirts are reprehensible they don't really surprise me. Nor do I think that the Israelis would be alone in creating something so disgusting. I am not surprised though, that the Israelis felt so comfortable with this depiction that they made T-Shirts out of them (the IDF is big on t-shirts glorifying their military - you can buy them online and can occasionally see them in the streets in North America - a sort of anti-keffiyah for the ignorant).

Israeli society is increasingly willing to dehumanize the Arabs in their midst (see any post on Avigdor Lieberman's election success) and these t-shirts, I think, are largely symptomatic of an increasingly unspoken sentiment. Not to mention, of course, the obvious connection to the "demographic bomb" that is so often discussed in Israel (this is the increasing gap between Jewish Israeli birth rates and immigration, and Palestinian/Arab-Israeli birth rates).

After reading the article in The Star last night on my couch I was particularly bothered by one editorial move I came across. It's this paragraph:

In Gaza, Hamas spokesperson Fawzi Barhoum said it "reflects the brutal mentality among the Zionist soldiers and the Zionist society." Hamas-controlled media consistently glorify attacks on Israelis and mock Israeli suffering.

I'm disappointed with the fact that The Star feels that it needs to print a paragraph that, one presumes, was added to combat any potential claim of imbalance. There is no need for a quote from Hamas in an article about the dress habits of the IDF. Can a criticism of these t-shirts not rest on the fact that they are immoral and disgusting in and of themselves? I think it's unlikely, for instance, that in the wake of the beating death of Shidane Arone at the hands of Canadian soldiers in Somalia in 1993, that articles printed about the incident would point out that, in fact, Somalis in Belet Huen are thieves. Am I wrong about this? Does the creation of these t-shirts require a comment from Hamas at all?

http://www.thestar.com/article/607173

George Galloway barred from entering Canada

2009-03-23T07:41:00.000-07:00

Canadian border officials have barred George Galloway, a British Member of Parliament for the last 22 years, from entering Canada on "national security grounds".

Galloway will be in the United States (which he is allowed to visit) and had planned on making a few stops in Canada for speaking engagements.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2009/03/22/canada-bansbritishmp.html

Freeman's Parting Shot (It's Brilliant)

2009-03-11T07:28:00.000-07:00

"You will by now have seen the statement by Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair reporting that I have withdrawn my previous acceptance of his invitation to chair the National Intelligence Council.

I have concluded that the barrage of libelous distortions of my record would not cease upon my entry into office. The effort to smear me and to destroy my credibility would instead continue. I do not believe the National Intelligence Council could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country. I agreed to chair the NIC to strengthen it and protect it against politicization, not to introduce it to efforts by a special interest group to assert control over it through a protracted political campaign.

As those who know me are well aware, I have greatly enjoyed life since retiring from government. Nothing was further from my mind than a return to public service. When Admiral Blair asked me to chair the NIC I responded that I understood he was “asking me to give my freedom of speech, my leisure, the greater part of my income, subject myself to the mental colonoscopy of a polygraph, and resume a daily commute to a job with long working hours and a daily ration of political abuse.” I added that I wondered “whether there wasn’t some sort of downside to this offer.” I was mindful that no one is indispensable; I am not an exception. It took weeks of reflection for me to conclude that, given the unprecedentedly challenging circumstances in which our country now finds itself abroad and at home, I had no choice but accept the call to return to public service. I thereupon resigned from all positions that I had held and all activities in which I was engaged. I now look forward to returning to private life, freed of all previous obligations.

I am not so immodest as to believe that this controversy was about me rather than issues of public policy. These issues had little to do with the NIC and were not at the heart of what I hoped to contribute to the quality of analysis available to President Obama and his administration. Still, I am saddened by what the controversy and the manner in which the public vitriol of those who devoted themselves to sustaining it have revealed about the state of our civil society. It is apparent that we Americans cannot any longer conduct a serious public discussion or exercise independent judgment about matters of great importance to our country as well as to our allies and friends.

The libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively that there is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends and events in the Middle East. The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth. The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors.

There is a special irony in having been accused of improper regard for the opinions of foreign governments and societies by a group so clearly intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government – in this case, the government of Israel. I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the state of Israel. It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say so. This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States.

The outrageous agitation that followed the leak of my pending appointment will be seen by many to raise serious questions about whether the Obama administration will be able to make its own decisions about the Middle East and related issues. I regret that my willingness to serve the new administration has ended by casting doubt on its ability to consider, let alone decide what policies might best serve the interests of the United States rather than those of a Lobby intent on enforcing the will and interests of a foreign government.

In the court of public opinion, unlike a court of law, one is guilty until proven innocent. The speeches from which quotations have been lifted from their context are available for anyone interested in the truth to read. The injustice of the accusations made against me has been obvious to those with open minds. Those who have sought to impugn my character are uninterested in any rebuttal that I or anyone else might make.

Still, for the record: I have never sought to be paid or accepted payment from any foreign government, including Saudi Arabia or China, for any service, nor have I ever spoken on behalf of a foreign government, its interests, or its policies. I have never lobbied any branch of our government for any cause, foreign or domestic. I am my own man, no one else’s, and with my return to private life, I will once again – to my pleasure – serve no master other than myself. I will continue to speak out as I choose on issues of concern to me and other Americans.

I retain my respect and confidence in President Obama and DNI Blair. Our country now faces terrible challenges abroad as well as at home. Like all patriotic Americans, I continue to pray that our president can successfully lead us in surmounting them."

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/03/10/freeman_speaks_out_on_his_exit

Chas Freeman Out of Running

2009-03-11T07:10:00.000-07:00

Well I came to the dance a little late I suppose. I found out this morning that Freeman has withdrawn his nomination. Apparently the statement he made when he withdrew is a great read. I'll look for it and post it shortly.

In the meantime, here's Andrew Sullivan - one of the few "conservative" bloggers who supported Freeman - on Freeman's withdrawal.

There are a couple of things worth noting about this minor, yet major, Washington spat. The first is that the MSM has barely covered it as a news story, and the entire debate occurred in the blogosphere. I don't know why. But that would be a very useful line of inquiry for a media journalist.
The second is that Obama may bring change in many areas, but there is no possibility of change on the Israel-Palestine question. Having the kind of debate in America that they have in Israel, let alone Europe, on the way ahead in the Middle East is simply forbidden. Even if a president wants to have differing sources of advice on many questions, the Congress will prevent any actual, genuinely open debate on Israel. More to the point: the Obama peeps never defended Freeman. They were too scared. The fact that Obama blinked means no one else in Washington will ever dare to go through the hazing that Freeman endured. And so the chilling effect is as real as it is deliberate.
When Obama told us that the resistance to change would not end at the election but continue every day after, he was right. But he never fought this one. He's shrewder than I am.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/

The appointment of Charles "Chas" Freeman

2009-03-10T00:30:00.000-07:00

Most people, especially Canadians, haven't heard much of anything about the battle taking place right now in Washington over the nomination of Charles "Chas" Freeman as the Chair of the National Intelligence Council by Barack Obama's Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair. That's the role responsible for culling information from the dozen or so American intelligence organizations and producing National Intelligence Estimates that are increasingly vital in American foreign policy (unless you ignore them... Bush). Freeman has been an American diplomat for decades holding posts in China and Thailand and most notably was US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Most recently, he has been the President of the Middle East Policy Council, the post in which he made "controversial" comments that have formed the basis of the attack campaign against him. I'll post some of those comments shortly but suffice to say that there is no basis for these attacks (surprise!) by the Israel Lobby. They're measured comments about American Foreign Policy - something that is largely absent from the discourse.

There's an excellent post by Glenn Greenwald of salon.com that summarizes the ongoing controversy with great skill. Here's an excerpt and the link below.

It's destructive enough to artificially limit debate on a matter as consequential as U.S. policy towards Israel. We've been doing that for many years now. But it's so much worse that the people who have been defining and dictating those limits are themselves extremists in every sense of that word when it comes to Israel and U.S. policy towards that country. Their demands that no distinctions be recognized between Israeli and Americans interests have been uniquely destructive for the U.S. Few things are more urgent than an expansion of the debate over U.S. policy in this area, which is exactly why this radical lynch mob is swarming with such intensity to destroy Freeman's reputation and fortify the limitations on our debates which, for so long, they have thuggishly enforced.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/09/freeman/index.html

Closed Zone - Animated Short from Yoni Goodman

2009-03-09T09:58:00.000-07:00

Here's a quick cartoon from Yoni Goodman, the Director of Animation of the Israeli film "Waltz with Bashir". If you haven't seen the Oscar nominated Waltz with Bashir, I recommend you do. It's a hauntingly gorgeous and troubling look at the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. I've pasted the trailer below as well.

Closed Zone - Animated Short

Waltz with Bashir Trailer (English)

http://waltzwithbashir.com/wwbtrailer.html

Hilary Clinton in Jerusalem

2009-03-03T07:59:00.000-08:00

The CBC posted an article to their website that I think is a perfect example of the Kafkaesque farce that Middle East "Peace" has become. Here is the link to the article, with it's headline reading "US supports creation of Palestinian State: Clinton" followed by the sub heading "Says US envoys bound for Syria, pledges 'unshakeable' support for Israel".

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/03/03/clinton-mideast.html

What bothers me so much is that this article (which in the CBC's defense is really only straight up reporting of Clinton's visit to Jerusalem, her statements made there, and the policies of the Obama and Netanyahu administartions) is that it's makes no logical sense. Her statements are full of non sequiters and meaningless aphorisms.

Let me give you a few examples:

First, you cannot have "unshakeable support for Israel" while simultaneously supporting the creation of a Palestinian state. Maybe some of us define "unshakable" differently, but the election of a Netanyahu-Lieberman government in Israel should, at the very least, make your feelings towards Israel a little “shaky”. You cannot simultaneously “push vigorously” for a Palestinian State and have unshakeable support for Israel when it’s population has elected a government that does not recognize the legitimacy or right of a Palestinian State to exist.

Second, the Obama administration, it suggests, might “clash” with the Netanyahu administration unless it pursues the continuation of a “Peace process” with the Palestinians. I’m fascinated to know how Obama and Clinton are going to judge the earnestness with which Netanyahu will approach Peace. The history of Peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians is well documented. If the supposed “doves” of Israeli governments past negotiated with the Palestinians in bad faith I can only imagine how Netanyahu will handle such talks. All the more so considering the charter of his own party promises never to concede anything to the Palestinians.

Lastly, I don’t think I need to say too much about the absolute hypocrisy of a statement like “We will work with the government of Israel that represents the democratic will of the people of Israel”. Hamas, the democratically elected government of the Palestinians that the US refuses to speak with has killed fewer Israelis in its “terrorist” attacks than the Israeli government has killed Palestinian children.

My prediction of where this is heading is, not surprisingly, pretty bleak. The Obama administration may in fact push a Netanyahu administration to the “peace table” for talks with the Palestinians. Obama and Clinton will claim a modicum of success in doing so and meanwhile Netanyahu and Lieberman will “negotiate” with obstinate Arabs all the while offering a nudge and a wink to the majority of Israelis who elected a government that refuses to recognize Palestine’s right to exist. Israel will continue the Occupation, Israel will continue to receive the vast majority of US foreign military aide, and Israel sit back and wait out the change in US administration. It’s already done so with eight previous Presidents.

CUPE's Academic Boycott

2009-02-22T09:38:00.000-08:00

The University workers of the Canadian Union of Public Employees of Ontario (CUPE) have passed a motion calling for the academic boycott of Israel. CUPE is Ontario's largest union, representing 200,000 workers. While I'm pessimistic that such an action would actually lead to any significant reassessment of the relationships between Canadian universities and Israeli institutions, I am buoyed by the significance of the resolution (which faced intense opposition from the pro-Israeli lobby) and I'm hopeful that this will at least get the 200,000 CUPE members talking about what's going on in Palestine.

http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/591429

More Naomi Klein on Boycotts

2009-02-18T10:18:00.001-08:00

On the Question of One-Sided Boycotts

http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2009/01/question-one-sided-boycotts

By Naomi Klein - January 21st, 2009

Read a letter exchange between Robert Pollin, co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, and Naomi on the question of one-sided boycotts.

Robert Pollin:

I strongly oppose Naomi Klein’s proposal to begin boycotts and divestment initiatives against Israel, similar to the approach used against South Africa in the apartheid era [“Lookout,” Jan. 26]. Klein anticipates four objections to her proposal and offers responses. But her list ignores the most important and obvious objection: it is entirely one-sided both in blaming Israel for the horrible cycle of violence in the region and in meting out punishment.

I agree entirely that the Israeli occupation is brutal. But Hamas is also brutal. To date, the only thing preventing Hamas from being less lethal than Israel in the damage it inflicts is its limited resources. Hamas is deliberately firing rockets into Israel with the aim of killing and terrorizing civilians. Should Iran, for example, succeed in supplying Hamas with more effective weapons, Hamas will become more successful in killing and terrorizing Israeli citizens. Rockets are beginning to land only twenty miles south of Tel Aviv.

The toll on Palestinian civilians of the current Israeli attack on Gaza is horrible. But let’s also recognize that Hamas is deliberately using civilians as human shields. The bomb that hit the home of Hamas leader Nazar Rayyan in Jabaliya tragically killed his wives and children as well as himself. Why was Rayyan exposing his family to such danger?

I agree with Klein that economic levers probably have the best chance of dramatically shifting the status quo (even while, given the history and emotions involved, economic initiatives could never offer a sufficient solution on their own). But instead of a one-sided boycott to punish Israel, why not pursue a positive agenda of economic development that would benefit both sides? Consider, for example, a development aid package on the order of $10 bil-lion, spread over two to four years, with funds supplied on an equitable basis from the United States, the European Union and the Arab oil-exporting countries. This amount would be enough to: (1) undertake a massive infrastructure investment and job creation program in Gaza and the West Bank to help create an economically viable Palestinian state; and (2) comfortably resettle the roughly half-million Israelis now living in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and turn over these communities and homes to Palestinians. This second initiative would entail a large-scale home-building, community infrastructure and job-creation program in Israel, perhaps concentrated in the less well-developed northern and southern regions.

The amount of money I’m suggesting seems large, of course. But $10 billion is only about 7 percent of what the United States spent in Iraq in 2007 and 5 percent of Saudi Arabia’s $194 billion in oil revenues in 2008. In short, the amount is modest in comparison with the opportunities it will create to contribute to an equitable and lasting peace in the region.

- Robert Pollin, co-director, Political Economy Research Institute University of Massachusetts

Naomi Klein Replies:

Robert Pollin believes that the biggest problem with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) strategy is that it targets only one side in the conflict. For Pollin, this is a conflict between equally guilty parties deserving of equal punishment. It is not. Israel is the party that displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948, annexed more of their land in 1967 and continues to occupy the land today. Occupiers and occupied people do not share the same responsibilities, which is why the duties and responsibilities of an occupying power are laid out in the Geneva Conventions—laws Israel violates with impunity.

Even if I were to accept Pollin’s argument that any sanction should punish both sides equally, we face a rather large problem. How does Professor Pollin propose that we punish Gazans more than they are being punished already? In case he has failed to notice, there is already a fierce campaign of boycotts and sanctions under way, and it is completely one-sided. I am referring, of course, to Israel’s brutal eighteen-month siege of Gaza, launched to teach Gazans a lesson for voting for Hamas in US-backed elections. As a direct result of this siege, Gazans have been deprived of lifesaving medicines, cooking fuel and paper—not to mention food. This is far more than a mere boycott; it’s “collective punishment,” as described by Richard Falk, United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. By contrast, the kind of legal boycott being called for by the BDS campaign would deprive Tel Aviv of some international concerts and, if it really got going, would cost Israel some foreign investment. It would not starve and sicken an entire people. In this context of actual one-sided punishment inflicted on Palestinians, sanctioned by the so-called civilized world, to complain of one-sided boycotts against Israel is, frankly, obscene.

As for the proposed $10 billion for a redevelopment/relocation fund, there is no doubt that if a just peace agreement is ever to be reached, a generous peace dividend will be required to make it work. But before we start handing out rewards for a nonexistent peace, Israel first has to decide that endless war is too costly. And that’s what the BDS strategy is for: to help Israel come to that eminently reasonable conclusion.

- Naomi Klein

Read more from Naomi Klein at www.naomiklein.org

Amira Hass in Gaza

2009-02-14T20:07:00.001-08:00

A heartbreaking story from Haaretz correspondent Amira Hass in Gaza.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1063768.html

In any other "civilized" society

2009-02-13T13:04:00.001-08:00

Yesterday, a group of Palestinian youths threw stones at one of the hundreds of guard towers that line the Apartheid Wall between Israel and the West Bank. Israeli Border Police targeted, shot and killed the 14 year old boy they deemed to be the "ringleader". In any other civilized society, the execution of a 14 year old boy for what is essentially a non-violent act of civil disobedience would be called murder and that policeman would be tried in a court of law. This, however, is the Occupied Territories where the state sanctioned murder of unarmed teenagers is commonplace.

This is the entirety of the news story in Haaretz:

The Israel Border Police on Friday killed a 14-year-old Palestinian in Hebron during a clash between the Israeli forces and stone-throwing Palestinian youths. The IDF said dozens of Palestinians hurled rocks at a military guard tower next to an Israeli settlement in the West Bank city and a soldier shot the ringleader.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1063981.html

Chapters-Indigo Boycott

2009-02-13T01:18:00.000-08:00

Here is the information some of you have been asking for about the Chapters-Indigo Boycott.

http://www.caiaweb.org/indigoboycott

The "PMs" and "the Kingmaker"

2009-02-12T01:17:00.000-08:00

Here are a couple of fun facts about the men and women at center stage in the Israeli Elections:

Tzipi Livni was a Mossad agent. Her father, Eitan Livni, was Chief Operations Officer for Irgun. Don't know what Irgun is? Well Irgun is... how would I describe it... the Hamas of Israel? He had been sentenced to 15 years in prison for his participation in the "terrorist" murder of six people. Then he escaped from jail and after the State of Israel was created he was elected to the Knesset for the Likud party. But I'm sure Tzipi is nothing like her father. She has others commit murder for her. Plus, shes not in the Likud party anymore!

Binyamin Netanyahu went to both MIT and Harvard which is why his English is so perfectly accented to deliver encouraging speeches at AIPAC meetings. He is the author of two books on "combatting terrorism" which as an Israeli politician must be fairly short books since there is only "one way to deal with terrorists". And as I mentioned in an earlier post, he quit the Cabinet of Ariel Sharon over the closing of Israeli settlements and the "withdrawal" of the Israeli military in Gaza. Remember: he doesn't recognize the right of a Palestinian State to exist. A cheery thought in terms of any future "peace talks".

And then there is Avigdor Lieberman about whom I've written too much already. Apart from his fascism, don't forget that Lieberman, like many Israeli politicians, is currently being investigated for criminal acts. The investigation pertains to alleged bribes received by Lieberman over the development of the Oasis Casino outside of Jericho.

At least none of them are rapists (as far as we know) since thats the role of the President.

Likud will win...

2009-02-11T07:52:00.000-08:00

With Kadima up one seat it looks like Livni's party will "win" the election. Two things make it unlikely that Livni will actually be the next Prime Minister though...

1. Unless she makes an agreement with either Likud (unlikely) or Yisrael Beiteinu she won't be able to garner enough seats in coalition to make her the next PM. I can't see Likud agreeing to any power sharing agreement where Netanyahu isn't the PM, especially when they only have one or two seats less than Kadima. The question then, is how far to the right is Israel's "centrist" party anyway? The only real option for them is Yisrael Beiteinu, Lieberman's fascist party. In which case, it still doesn't matter if it's Livni or Netanyahu.

2. Apparently the thousands of Israelis stationed on military bases around the country have yet to have their votes tallied. I've said it before: a nation of conscripts is bad for the collective psychology of any society, and one can only imagine what sort of voting mind frame a soldier is in. My guess: Likud will have overwhelming support. We'll see in the next few days.

Election Day in Israel

2009-02-10T07:19:00.000-08:00

Today is election day in Israel.

I think this election will be one of the most important in Israel's history. Likud is ahead in the polls with a slight margin over Kadima. Yisrael Beitnu, Avigdor Lieberman's ultra-nationalist/fascist party sits in third. Here is Haaretz's latest poll figures. Keep in mind, governments in Israel are formed through coalitions. Haaretz's is referring to the two most likely coalitions: a right-wing, religious bloc, and a "centrist-left" bloc.

The final Haaretz poll before the election suggested a strong right-wing bloc, comprising Likud with 27 seats, Yisrael Beiteinu on 18 seats, ultra-Orthodox Shas with nine seats and a combined veteran party National Union and fledgling Habayit Hayehudi (the Jewish home) on six seats. According to the poll, a center-left bloc would only be able to muster 54 seats, six short of the 61-seat threshold needed to form a majority coalition. This bloc would consist of Kadima with 25 seats, Labor on 14 seats, New Movemment-Meretz on 7 seats, Jewish-Arab party Hadash on three seats, the United Arab List-Ta'al on three seats and predominantly Arab Balad with two seats.

There are two things that make me say that this is the most important election in Israeli history since Begin's Likud party defeated Labour in 1977.

1. Yisrael Beiteinu is projected to win 18 seats. If you've been reading my posts from the last couple of weeks you know that Yisrael Beiteinu is Avigdor Lieberman's party. If this poll is accurate, fewer Israelis are going to vote for the founding "natural governing party" of the State of Israel (Labour), than they will for a party whose platform calls for ethnic cleansing. I think that this is a monumental shift in Israeli voting patterns. The emergence of Kadima as a centrist party alternative to Labour on the left and Likud on the right becomes a historical footnote when more people vote for a fascist party than the party of David Ben Gurion.

Lieberman has drawn comparisons to French National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen for his open hatred of non-Jews. But his position that all non-Jewish Israeli citizens (meaning the Arab-Israelis who live in Israel, about 20% of the population) should have to take a Loyalty Oath is a first step in his preferred solution to the Palestinian question. Lieberman wants all Arab Israelis to be forcibly transferred to Jordan. Keep in mind that nearly all Arab-Israelis are descendants of Palestinian residents who did not leave or were not evicted in 1948 and have lived in Israel all of their lives, since non-Jews cannot immigrate and become Israeli citizens.

Mainstream media in North America, to their credit, have seen the proposition of the Loyalty Oath and made the Le Pen comparison. Of course, no one would dare make the inevitable next step and admit that a fascist proposing ethnic cleansing as a "solution" to the bothersome presence of a different race merits the comparison to another famous European racist.

2. This election is also significant because it comes on the heels of the Israeli military "offensive" in the Gaza Strip. Forget for a second, if you can, that the IDF killed or wounded 1500 children, and that most of the dozen Israeli casualties were soldiers killed by friendly fire. This was an all out assault on a civilian population in retaliation for rockets fired into southern Israel from the Gaza Strip.

And it was incredibly popular in Israel. So much so, it appears, that the parties that launched the assault, Kadima (Prime Minister Ehud Olmert) and Labour (Defense Minister Ehud Barak) that killed more than a thousand Palestinians, won't win the elections. It seems that what Israel needs is a government more eager to kill and to maintain the Occupation, not one that even maintains the pretense of a "Peace".

I'd like to say that this comes as an ironic counterpoint to the Barack Obama's election in the United States. I'd like to say that while the US, Israel's biggest fancier and unquestioning champion has chosen "Hope" as a political ideology, Israel has chosen the opposite. But the deep cynic in me doesn't think that this is true. If an Avigdor Lieberman didn't emerge at the height of suicide bombings in Israel, what has happened now, fifteen years later that sees a society prepared to elect a Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu coalition?

The answer to my own question borrows from another Obama saying: "Yes, we can". Israel can have it all. Occupation, a non existent Palestinian body politic, economic prosperity, and maybe, one day, and Arab free Israel. And they can do this because so many of us, in other parts of the world, will let them.

George Bisharat on Israel's attack on Gaza

2009-02-09T11:15:00.000-08:00

George Bisharat is one of the most respected scholars dealing with legal dimensions of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Here is an article he wrote in the Seattle Times. I've pasted two links.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/02/06-9
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2008708504_opinb05bisharat.html

Evidence suggests that Israel may have committed at least seven serious offenses during its Gaza invasion: launching a war of aggression (because Israel itself triggered the breakdown of a six-month truce, and therefore did not have a valid claim of self-defense); deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure; deliberate killings of civilians; collective punishment; illegal use of weapons, including white phosphorous; preventing care to the wounded; and disproportionate use of force.

Bisharat, in the end, is arguing for a boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) strategy that is very slowly gaining momentum in North America. For a well argued call for a BDS campaign see my earlier post from Naomi Klein.

On Gideon Levy's Netanyahu article

2009-02-06T08:37:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned yesterday the prospect of Benjamin Netanyahu's impending election as Israel's Prime Minister is deeply disturbing. My disappointment hasn't exactly been alleviated by Gideon Levy's nihilistic call for Netanyahu's election. Levy wants Netanyahu to be elected so the "the veil will be lifted and the nation's true face revealed". The revelation would ostensibly be that Israel is a State founded upon the racist ideology of Zionism and that the majority of the population support the continuation of the brutal occupation of Palestine. That the idea of peace was a masquerade. That while Israel said it was "focused on peace and the end of the occupation", it did everything it could to "further entrench the occupation and distance any chance of a potential agreement".

So, with Netanyahu's election, Levy surmises that the world will finally be able to see Israel for what it is.

I like Gideon Levy quite a bit. I saw him deliver an impassioned talk in Montreal a few years ago without any notes. As one of the few Israelis reporting regularly from the Occupied Territories he's a rare voice for justice in a nation mostly deaf to the plight of their neighbours. A plight they've created.

But let me tell you why his article yesterday scares me.

In many ways, he's right. The election of Netanyahu will make Israel's contempt for a just peace with the Palestinians all the more apparent. What he doesn't mention is the strength of Avigdor Lieberman as well. Compared to Lieberman, Netanyahu looks like Israel's Barack Obama. Lieberman is the leader of the ultra-right wing Yisreal Beiteinu ("Israel is our Home"). His jump in the popular vote could make him, once again, a key player in the Knesset and secure him another big Cabinet position. As an advocate for the forcible transfer of Arabs from Israel (also known as "ethnic cleansing") his prominence in the Government should be another blow to the "masquerade" that Levy refers to.

But it won't.

What scares me most about Levy's hope for Netanyahu's election isn't that Netanyahu will make the Occupation more brutal (which it probably will). My fear isn't that his election reminds us that Israeli society, while not monolithic, is still by and large contemptuous of Palestinians (which it is). My fear is not that his election will lift the veil on the fraud that is the "peace process".

My fear is that the world will see this and still not care.

Gideon Levy: "Let Netanyahu Win"

2009-02-05T07:45:00.000-08:00

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1061736.html

Let Netanyahu win
By Gideon Levy

Click here for exclusive Haaretz coverage of the elections in Israel

Click here for more articles by Gideon Levy

Benjamin Netanyahu will apparently be Israel's next prime minister. There is, however, something encouraging about that fact. Netanyahu's election will free Israel from the burden of deception: If he can establish a right-wing government, the veil will be lifted and the nation's true face revealed to its citizens and the rest of the world, including Arab countries. Together with the world, we will see which direction we are facing and who we really are. The masquerade that has gone on for several years will finally come to an end.

Netanyahu's election is likely to bring the curtain down on the great fraud - the best show in town - the lie of "negotiations" and the injustice of the "peace process." Israel consistently claimed these acts proved the nation was focused on peace and the end of the occupation. All the while, it did everything it could to further entrench the occupation and distance any chance of a potential agreement.

For 16 years, we have been enamored with the peace process. We talk and talk, babble and prattle, and generally feel great about ourselves; meanwhile the settlements expand endlessly and Israel turns to the use of force at every possible opportunity, aside from a unilateral disengagement which did nothing to advance the cause of peace.

With the election of a prime ministerial candidate who speaks of "economic peace," the naked truth will finally emerge. If, however, Tzipi Livni or Ehud Barak are elected, the self-delusion will simply continue. Livni herself is enamored with futile, useless and cowardly negotiations, and Barak has long abandoned the brave efforts he made in the past. The election of either will only perpetuate the vacuum. The world, including Washington, will breathe a sigh of relief that for once, Israel has elected a leadership that will pursue peace. But there is no chance of that happening.

The record of each of these candidates, and the positions they have championed until now, proves that what has been will continue to be. Livni and Barak will rush to every photo opportunity with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah of Jordan. The Americans and Europeans will be pleased, but nothing will come out of it other than the sowing of a few more illusions. We will move from war to war, uprising to uprising, settlement to settlement, and the world will continue to delude itself into thinking an agreement is within reach. Hamas will grow stronger, Abbas weaker and the last chance for peace will be irretrievably lost.

Netanyahu would offer something else. First, he is a faithful representative of an authentic "Israeli" view - an almost complete distrust of Arabs and the chance of reaching peace with them, mixed with condescension and dehumanization. Second, he will finally arouse the world's rage towards us, including that of the new U.S. administration. Sadly, this may be the only chance for the kind of dramatic change that is needed.

The Palestinian Authority, another mendacious facade, will finally collapse, and Israel will face the non-partner it has wanted and sought all these years. The world may not rush to embrace Netanyahu as it would the "moderates" - Livni or Barak, who have led Israel to more unnecessary wars than Netanyahu, the "extremist" - while the real difference between them is almost non-existent.

Lifting the veil will lead to a crisis situation, which unfortunately is the only one that can bring about change. We must hope that both Kadima and Labor do not join a Netanyahu government (regrettably, another futile hope), as Israel's exposure will then be that much starker. A government composed of Netanyahu, Shas and Avigdor Lieberman will not, of course, have to deal with an opposition of Netanyahu, Shas and Avigdor Lieberman, and may therefore behave differently once in power than one might expect. Have we mentioned Menachem Begin?

But even if Netanyahu is the same old Netanyahu, this will be an opportunity to place the right's policies under the microscope. Let's see him stand before Barack Obama and speak of the grotesque idea of "economic peace," or wage foreign or security policies according to his stated positions. Let's see him answer just what exactly his vision is for 20 to 30 years down the road.

In due course, his anticipated failure may just hasten an alternative route, on condition that Kadima and Labor do not join the government and bring us another year of fraud. The lemons may yet yield lemonade - maybe the establishment of a right-wing government will remove all of the masks for good. The alternative, known and expected by all, is far more ambiguous, dangerous and threatening.

So let Netanyahu win. There is no alternative at this point anyway.

Oh Bibi...

2009-02-05T07:05:00.000-08:00

I heard on the radio this morning that polling for Isreal's elections next week is suggesting that Benjamin (Binyamin, "Bibi") Netanyahu will be Israel's next Prime Minister (again).

Here are the quick highlights of Netanyahu's career: Elected Likud leader in 1993, Prime Minister from 1996-1999, cabinet minister (Foreign, Finance) from 2002-2005, reelected Likud leader in August 2007.

But now the lowlights...

Netanyahu resigned from the Cabinet in August of 2005 after Sharon (then Likud leader) implemented his "Gaza Disengagement Plan".

Netanyahu has repeatedly claimed that in terms of negotiations with the Palestinians he would 1. never negotiate with pre-conditions, 2. never negotiate over Jerusalem, 3. never surrender the Golan Heights.

Netanyahu opened a new exit for the Western Wall Tunnel in 1996, sparking riots that killed 70 Palestinians and 16 Israeli soldiers.

Netanyahu, like most Israeli politicians, has been implicated in corruption allegations.

Netanyahu does not support the creation of a Palestinian State (and thus, refuses to recognize their "right to exist").

As disturbing as the return of Israel's "right-wing" party to power is, it's not the thing that worries me most about next weeks elections. What is truly frightening is the likelihood that hundreds of thousands of Israelis will vote for Avigdor Lieberman.

The "Right to Exist" Argument

2009-01-29T11:36:00.003-08:00

This is an email I just received from a friend, pointing out that the Likud Party, which will likely win the next general election in Israel in a couple of months, refuses to recognize the right for a Palestinian State to exist in ANY part of the West Bank or Gaza. It is terribly unlikely that mainstream news media in North America will report the fact that the repetitive cry for Hamas to "recognize the right for Israel to exist" won't be matched with a similar statement by the Israeli Government.

Here is the text of the email. With links to Likud's Charter.

January 27, 2009

The Charter of Hamas vs. The Charter of the Likud Party

Zionist hasbara fighters claimed that it is impossible to talk with Hamas because its charter, written in 1988, calls for the destruction of the state of Israel.

Hamas leader Haniyeh has said publicly that Hamas is willing to accept a Palestinian state with 1967 borders and thereby will effectively recognize Israel. So from Hamas' site, a solution of the conflict is possible.

The Likud charter from 1999 as available on www.knesset.gov.il says:

The Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza are the realization of Zionist values. Settlement of the land is a clear expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and constitutes an important asset in the defense of the vital interests of the State of Israel. The Likud will continue to strengthen and develop these communities and will prevent their uprooting.

...

The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.

Judea and Samaria are the West Bank.

Likud is likely to win next month' election in Israel. Its leader, Netanjahu, promises to extend the Zionist settlements in the West Bank.

This violates international law, the roadmap and other peace plans.

The Likud Platform

(Available online at http://www.knesset.gov.il/elections/knesset15/elikud_m.htm)

The following are excerpts from the 'Peace & Security' chapter of the Likud Party platform. The other chapters are currently being translated.

The Foundations of Peace

Peace is a primary objective of the State of Israel. The Likud will strengthen the existing peace agreements with the Arab states and strive to achieve peace agreements with all of Israel's neighbors with the aim of reaching a comprehensive solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Likud will seek to achieve peace and permanent borders in the framework of peace treaties between Israel and its neighbors and will seek cooperation with them on the practical level. The peace agreements will include full diplomatic relations, borders open to free movement, economic cooperation, and the establishment of joint projects in the fields of science, technology, tourism, and industry.

The Arab states' desire for peace will be measured by their efforts to prevent hostile activities by terrorist organizations from their territory and to dismantle the infrastructure of the organizations. This includes closing their headquarters and preventing economic and political warfare and all hostile acts during the negotiations.

The Palestinians

Declaration of a State

A unilateral Palestinian declaration of the establishment of a Palestinian state will constitute a fundamental and substantive violation of the agreements with the State of Israel and the scuttling of the Oslo and Wye accords. The government will adopt immediate stringent measures in the event of such a declaration.

Settlements

The Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza are the realization of Zionist values. Settlement of the land is a clear expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and constitutes an important asset in the defense of the vital interests of the State of Israel. The Likud will continue to strengthen and develop these communities and will prevent their uprooting.

The Partition of the Negev

Israel rejects out of hand ideas raised by Labor Party leaders concerning the relinquishment of parts of the Negev to the Palestinians. The practical meaning of this plan is that the "Green Line" should no longer be viewed as a "Red Line", which draws us closer to the partition plan of 1947 as it opens the door to the principle that the fate of the Galilee, the Triangle and additional areas within Israel is negotiable. The Likud asserts that such proposals by the Labor Party leadership may literally cause the dismemberment of the State of Israel.

Oslo & Wye River Accords

The Government of Israel will safeguard the state's vital interests in the negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. Having established and meticulously adhered to the principle of reciprocity in the negotiations and implementation of agreements, including the Wye River Memorandum, the government will continue to condition implementation on the fulfillment of Palestinian commitments. The government will continue to insist on the fulfillment of the following Palestinian obligations:

The War on Terror

The Palestinian Authority must wage a systematic war on the terror organizations and their infrastructure. The PA must not only intensify its efforts to prevent attacks, but act with determination to prevent potential terrorist acts by dismantling the terrorist infrastructure that has developed and expanded in PA areas since the Oslo accords.

Halting Incitement

Halting incitement against Israel in the Palestinian media, educational system and all other Palestinian institutions, and turning the Palestinian media and educational system from their current anti-Israel mode to recognition of Israel and developing peaceful and good neighborly relations between Jews and Arabs.

Weapons Collection

The confiscation of illegal weapons held by Palestinian civilians and the removal of weapons held by the PA forces in excess of those permitted under the agreement to areas outside PA territory.

Reducing the Size of the PA Police

The size of the PA police must be reduced to the level permitted under the agreement.

The Permanent Status

The overall objectives for the final status with the Palestinians are: to end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians on the basis of a stable, sustainable agreement and replace confrontation with cooperation and good neighborliness, while safeguarding Israel's vital interests as a secure and prosperous Zionist and Jewish state.

The Likud government will honor all the international agreements signed by its predecessors and strive to achieve a final status arrangement with the Palestinians. The only way to reach a final status arrangement is via dialogue and political negotiations.

The permanent status arrangement will minimize the security dangers implicit in the Oslo accords. The primary such danger is the presence and the possible expansion of the Palestinian security forces within close range of Israel's population centers, government offices, emergency warehouses and staging areas of the Israel Defense Forces.

The permanent status arrangement shall be based on the following principles:

Self-Rule

The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.

The Palestinians can run their lives freely in the framework of self-rule, but not as an independent and sovereign state. Thus, for example, in matters of foreign affairs, security, immigration and ecology, their activity shall be limited in accordance with imperatives of Israel's existence, security and national needs.

Jerusalem

Jerusalem is the eternal, united capital of the State of Israel and only of Israel. The government will flatly reject Palestinian proposals to divide Jerusalem, including the plan to divide the city presented to the Knesset by the Arab factions and supported by many members of Labor and Meretz. The government firmly rejects attempts of various sources in the world, some anti-Semitic in origin, to question Jerusalem's status as Israel's capital, and the 3,000-year-old special connection between the Jewish people and its capital. To ensure this, the government will continue the firm policies it has adopted until now:

No diplomatic activity will be permitted at Orient House. The government stopped the stream of visits by heads of state and ministers at Orient House, begun under the left-wing government.

The presence of the Israeli police in eastern Jerusalem will be increased. This in addition to the new police posts and reinforcements in the neighborhoods.

The Likud government will act with vigor to continue Jewish habitation and strengthen Israeli sovereignty in the eastern parts of the city, while emphasizing improvements in the welfare and security of the Arab residents. Despite protests from the left, the Likud government consistently approved the continuation of Jewish living within the Old City and in 'City of David'.

The Jordan River as a Permanent Border

The Jordan Valley and the territories that dominate it shall be under Israeli sovereignty. The Jordan river will be the permanent eastern border of the State of Israel. The Kingdom of Jordan is a desirable partner in the permanent status arrangement between Israel and the Palestinians in matters that will be agreed upon.

Security Areas

The government succeeded in significantly reducing the extent of territory that the Palestinians expected to receive in the interim arrangement. The government will insist that security areas essential to Israel's defense, including the western security area and the Jewish settlements, shall remain under Israeli rule.

The Golan

Based on the Likud-led government's proposal, the 10th Knesset passed the law to extend Israeli law, jurisdiction and administration over the Golan Heights, thus establishing Israeli sovereignty over the area. The government will continue to strengthen Jewish settlement on the Golan.

Lebanon

Israel will act to implement UN Security Council resolution 425 to withdraw the IDF from Lebanon while ensuring appropriate security arrangements so as to defend its citizens in the north of the country and guarantee the security of South Lebanese Army members. Israel will refrain from rash steps that are likely to move the front line from southern Lebanon to the edge of the Galilee.

Syria

Israel will continue to seek the renewal of peace negotiations with Syria without preconditions.

Israel Accused of Using White Phosphorus

2009-01-14T10:34:00.001-08:00

Israel: Boycott, Divest, Sanction

2009-01-13T13:18:00.000-08:00

By Naomi Klein - January 8th, 2009

It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa.

In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on "people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era." The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions—BDS for short—was born.

Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause, and talk of cease-fires is doing little to slow the momentum. Support is even emerging among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors stationed in Israel. It calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the antiapartheid struggle. "The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves.… This international backing must stop."

Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can't go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. And they simply aren't good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tools in the nonviolent arsenal. Surrendering them verges on active complicity. Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, followed by counterarguments.

1. Punitive measures will alienate rather than persuade Israelis. The world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement." It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures—quite the opposite. The weapons and $3 billion in annual aid that the US sends to Israel is only the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first non–Latin American country to sign a free-trade deal with Mercosur. In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45 percent. A new trade deal with the European Union is set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And on December 8, European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel Association Agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.

It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's flagship index actually went up 10.7 percent. When carrots don't work, sticks are needed.

2. Israel is not South Africa. Of course it isn't. The relevance of the South African model is that it proves that BDS tactics can be effective when weaker measures (protests, petitions, back-room lobbying) have failed. And there are indeed deeply distressing echoes of South African apartheid in the occupied territories: the color-coded IDs and travel permits, the bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the settler-only roads. Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician, said that the architecture of segregation that he saw in the West Bank and Gaza was "infinitely worse than apartheid." That was in 2007, before Israel began its full-scale war against the open-air prison that is Gaza.

3. Why single out Israel when the United States, Britain and other Western countries do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan? Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the BDS strategy should be tried against Israel is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work.

4. Boycotts sever communication; we need more dialogue, not less. This one I'll answer with a personal story. For eight years, my books have been published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I published The Shock Doctrine, I wanted to respect the boycott. On the advice of BDS activists, including the wonderful writer John Berger, I contacted a small publisher called Andalus. Andalus is an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew. We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go to Andalus's work, and none to me. In other words, I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.

Coming up with our modest publishing plan required dozens of phone calls, e-mails and instant messages, stretching from Tel Aviv to Ramallah to Paris to Toronto to Gaza City. My point is this: as soon as you start implementing a boycott strategy, dialogue increases dramatically. And why wouldn't it? Building a movement requires endless communicating, as many in the antiapartheid struggle well recall. The argument that supporting boycotts will cut us off from one another is particularly specious given the array of cheap information technologies at our fingertips. We are drowning in ways to rant at one another across national boundaries. No boycott can stop us.

Just about now, many a proud Zionist is gearing up for major point-scoring: don't I know that many of those very high-tech toys come from Israeli research parks, world leaders in infotech? True enough, but not all of them. Several days into Israel's Gaza assault, Richard Ramsey, the managing director of a British telecom specializing in voice-over-internet services, sent an email to the Israeli tech firm MobileMax. "As a result of the Israeli government action in the last few days we will no longer be in a position to consider doing business with yourself or any other Israeli company."

Ramsey says that his decision wasn't political; he just didn't want to lose customers. "We can't afford to lose any of our clients," he explains, "so it was purely commercially defensive."

It was this kind of cold business calculation that led many companies to pull out of South Africa two decades ago. And it's precisely the kind of calculation that is our most realistic hope of bringing justice, so long denied, to Palestine.

This column was first published in The Nation

An Open Letter From Anti-Zionist Jewish Youth in Canada

2009-01-13T13:09:00.000-08:00

Like much of the world, we have spent the last week watching in shock and disgust as Israel continues its assault on the Gaza Strip. With the body count rising and a new tragedy in full bloom, we feel that it is important to speak out as Jewish youth in Canada and to denounce what Israel is doing in our name.

The Jewish diaspora is diverse and divided on its positions on the state of Israel's policies. At this juncture in history, as Israel has committed its worst massacre in Gaza since it began its illegal occupation in 1967, we feel that it is crucial that Jews speak out and denounce Israel's actions that amount to no less than war crimes committed by an apartheid state.

As Jewish youth, we are diverse, but we are unified in our solidarity with our Palestinian brothers and sisters in Gaza.

Some of us are students. We are outraged by the bombing of the Islamic University in Gaza city, as well as other civilian infrastructure such as hospitals and mosques.

Some of us are Arab-Jews and people of colour. We stand against Israel's racism, which has been enshrined in Israeli law, and privileges its Jewish citizens over its non-Jewish ones. This apartheid state views Palestinians as an expendable people, no more than collateral damage.
Some of us are queer. We reject Israel's branding of itself as the only safe place for queer people in the Middle-East while it targets gay and lesbian Palestinians and renders life unsafe for millions of others.

Some of us are Israelis living in Canada. We are calling for a solidarity that stretches beyond borders and nationalities. Israel's violent actions will only serve to further isolate the state and its citizens from the rest of the world. By calling itself a Jewish state and committing war crimes in the name of Jews everywhere, Israel makes the world even less safe for Jews, leading to an increase in animus towards Jewish people around the world.

Even though there have been approximately 100 Palestinian deaths for every Israeli killed by rocket fire, we recognize that Israeli Apartheid also leads to Israeli casualties. The blame for these deaths lies with Israel – if there were no occupation and no apartheid policies, there would be no rocket fire. If Israel, the world's fourth largest military power, is concerned about its citizens, it would abandon its apartheid policies and seek out justice for the Palestinian people.

In 2005, Palestinian civil society put out a clear call for international support through a non-violent campaign of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) similar to that carried out against the apartheid regime of South Africa. Now, with the people of Gaza being crushed by Israeli bombs, manufactured in the USA and launched with Canada's blessing, it is more important than ever for Jewish communities throughout the world to take up this BDS campaign in order to end Israel's apartheid system, which makes life unsafe for millions of Jews and Palestinians alike.

Let us not be silent bystanders while humanity suffers. Let us raise our voices, as Jewish youth, and demand a single, democratic state, with equal rights for everyone in Israel/Palestine.
Ours is a generation that is committed to ending Middle-East violence by opposing all forms of discrimination, calling for a just peace within the entire region, and condemning Zionism to the dustbin of history.

Free Gaza, Free Palestine,

Jenny Peto, Toronto
Aaron Lakoff, Montreal
Max Silverman, Montreal
Rachel Gurofsky, Peterborough
Simon Gurofsky, Ottawa
Zohar Melinek, Montreal
Claire Hurtig, Montreal
Ben Saifer, Ottawa
Brook Thorndycraft, Toronto
Joel Balsam, Montreal
David Mandelzys, Toronto
Reena Katz, Toronto
Mia Amir, Vancouver
Matthew Shuster, Kingston
Avi Grenadier, Kingston
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Waterloo
Melissa Harendorf, Montreal
Jeff Hiemstra, Toronto
Sacha Moiseiwitsch, Vancouver
Jake Javanshir, Toronto
Noam Lapid, Montreal
Stephen Kamnitzer, Toronto
Naava Smolash, Vancouver
Tamara Herman, Victoria
Ryan Katz-Rosene, Ottawa
Sarah Fuchs, Montreal
Daniel Thau-Eleff, Winnipeg
Deborah Rachlis, Ottawa
Marie L. Belliveau, St. Catharines
Sarah Kardash, Sackville
David Taub Bancroft, Vancouver
Kinneret Sheetreet, Montreal
Rachel Marcuse, Vancouver
Lisa Barrett, Bowen Island
Maisie Jacobson, Montreal
Max Tennant,Vancouver
Noah Fine, Vancouver
David Hill, Vancouver
Corey Balsam, Ottawa
Lee Skinner, Vancouver
Britt Lehmann-Bender, Toronto
Alexis Mitchell, Toronto

http://yayacanada.blogspot.com/2009/01/open-letter-from-anti-zionist-jewish.html

Propaganda war: trusting what we see?

2009-01-13T12:58:00.000-08:00

By Paul Reynolds World affairs correspondent, BBC News website

Israel has tried to take the initiative in the propaganda war over Gaza but, in one important instance, its version has been seriously challenged.

The incident raises the question of how to interpret video taken from the air.

SEE THE VIDEO AND PICTURES FROM B'TSELEM HERE:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7809371.stm

Israel released video of an air attack on 28 December, which appeared to show rockets being loaded onto a lorry. The truck and those close to it were then destroyed by a missile.

This was clear evidence, the Israelis said, of how accurate their strikes were and how well justified. A special unit it has set up to coordinate its informational plan put the video onto YouTube as part of its effort to use modern means of communications to get Israel's case across.

The YouTube video has a large caption on it saying "Grad missiles being loaded onto the Hamas vehicle." As of Saturday morning UK time, more than 260,000 people had watched it.

It turned out, however, that a 55-year-old Gaza resident named Ahmed Sanur, or Samur, claimed that the truck was his and that he and members of his family and his workers were moving oxygen cylinders from his workshop.

This workshop had been damaged when a building next door was bombed by the Israelis and he was afraid of looters, he said.

The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem put Mr Sanur's account on its website, together with a photograph of burned out oxygen cylinders.

Mr Sanur said that eight people, one of them his son, had been killed. He subsequently told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz: "These were not Hamas, they were our children... They were not Grad missiles.".

The Israeli response was that the "materiel" was being taken from a site that had stored weapons. The video remains on You Tube.

But the incident shows how an apparently definitive piece of video can turn into something much more doubtful.

It is reminiscent of an event in the Nato war against Serbia over Kosovo in 1999. In that case, a video taken from the air seemed to show a military convoy which was then attacked.

On the ground however it was discovered that the "trucks" were in fact tractors towing cartloads of civilian refugees, many of whom were killed.

The Israeli propaganda effort is being directed to achieve two main aims.

The first is to justify the air attacks. The second is to show that there is no humanitarian calamity in Gaza.

Both these aims are intended to place Israel in a strong position internationally and to enable its diplomacy to act as an umbrella to fend off calls for a ceasefire while the military operation unfolds.

Israel has pursued the first aim by being very active in getting its story across that Hamas is to blame. The sight of Hamas rockets streaking into Israel has been helpful in this respect.

It has also allowed trucks in with food aid and has stressed that it will not let people starve, even if they go short.

Israel appears to think its efforts are working.

One of its spokespeople, who has regularly appeared on the international media, Major Avital Leibovich said: "Quite a few outlets are very favourable to Israel."

Israel has bolstered its approach by banning foreign correspondents from Gaza, despite a ruling from the Israeli Supreme Court.

The Arab television news channel Al Jazeera is operating there and its reports have been graphic and have affected opinion across the Arab world. The BBC also has its local bureau hard at work. (Update: Al Jazeera also has correspondents reporting from Gaza in English).

But the absence of reporters from major organisations has meant, for example, that Mr Samur's story has not been as widely told as it probably would have been, or his account subject to an on-the-spot examination.

Meanwhile Israel has received good coverage of the threats and damage to its own towns and communities.

Whether Israel retains any propaganda initiative is not all certain. Pictures of dead and wounded children have undermined its claim to pinpoint accuracy and the longer this goes on, the greater the potential for world public opinion to swing against it, with diplomatic pressure building for a cessation.

Its presentational problems would be hugely increased if it engaged in a ground operation, which would bring with it more pictures of death and destruction.

Update: several readers have e-mailed to ask whether I believe Hamas. One said I had "bought into" Hamas propaganda. Another that I should have dealt with Hamas' claims: "What's missing speaks volumes about your one-sidedness."

I do not believe anyone's "propaganda." We seek to verify all claims, from whatever source. One of the main claims in Gaza at the moment is the serious situation for the population. Having reported from Gaza many times over the years, I know how crowded parts of it are and how dependent the people are on food aid from the UN. This means they have no other source of supply but equally, if the system is working, they should be getting enough to get by on. The problem is that foreign correspondents cannot get in to establish the exact situation for themselves.

Further update: I have had several hundred e-mails about this article. They are more or less evenly balanced between those who criticise it and those who praise it. I think I have replied to all. I would stress that I looked only at the Israeli side because of the new factor - Israel setting up a special unit to improve the projection of its arguments around the world.

Paul.Reynolds-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

Israel testing nasty weapons in Gaza, claims Mads Gilbert

2009-01-13T12:42:00.000-08:00

Israel testing nasty weapons in Gaza, claims Mads Gilbert

From correspondents in Gaza January 13, 2009

Article from: Agence France-Presse

ISRAEL is testing a new "extremely nasty" type of weapon in Gaza , two medics charged as they returned home to Norway after spending 10 days working at a hospital in the war-torn Palestinian territory.

"There's a very strong suspicion I think that Gaza is now being used as a test laboratory for new weapons," Mads Gilbert said at Oslo's Gardermoen airport, commenting on the kinds of injuries he and his colleague Erik Fosse had seen while working at the Shifa Hospital in Gaza.

The two medics, who were sent into the war zone by the pro-Palestinian aid organisation NORWAC on December 31, said they had seen clear signs that Dense Inert Metal Explosives (DIME), an experimental kind of explosive, were being used in Gaza.

"This is a new generation of very powerful small explosives that detonates with an extreme power and dissipates its power within a range of five to 10 metres," Mr Gilbert, 61, said.

"We have not seen the casualties affected directly by the bomb because they are normally torn to pieces and do not survive, but we have seen a number of very brutal amputations ... without shrapnel injuries which we strongly suspect must have been caused by the DIME weapons," he said.

The weapon "causes the tissue to be torn from the flesh. It looks very different (from a shrapnel injury). I have seen and treated a lot of different injuries for the last 30 years in different war zones, and this looks completely different", Mr Fosse, 58, said.

"If you are in the immediate (vicinity of) a DIME weapon, it's like your legs get torn off. It's an enormous pressure wave and there is no shrapnel," he explained.

Mr Gilbert also accused Israel of having used the weapon in the 2006 Lebanon war and previously in Gaza, and referred to studies showing wounds from the explosive could cause lethal forms of cancer within just four to six months.

"Israel should disclose what weapons they use and the international community should make an investigation," he said, stressing the amount of damage apparently caused by the new form of explosive. "We are not soft-skinned when it comes to war injuries, but these amputations are really extremely nasty and for many of the patients not survivable," he said.

It's been a long time.

2009-01-13T12:39:00.001-08:00

It's been a long time since I've posted anything to this blog. The pounding of Gaza continues relentlessly and I'm embarrassed to think that three weeks in and only now am I going to start trying to help disseminate some of the information I've been receiving. What follows will be a series of posts whose content is being sent to me on an hourly basis. Some of it is certainly not easy to take.

Mustafa Barghouti on The Prisoner Release

2007-12-04T11:08:00.000-08:00

Ramallah - Ma'an - Secretary General of the Palestinian National Initiative Mustafa Barghouthi on Tuesday described the freeing of 429 Palestinian prisoners as an attempt by Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, "to mislead global public opinion about the true intent of Israel.

"Barghouthi explained that since the last prisoner release on October 1, Israel has arrested 808 new prisoners, including 22 children.

"This means that the liberation of 429 prisoners is not even a return to the situation of 2 months ago. The total number of Palestinian prisoners is in fact increasing," he said in a statement.

"The international community should not be misled: the current Israeli government is no partner for peace," the statement added.

Barghouthi underlined that this "release some and at the same time arrest even more" behaviour was common practice for the Israeli government, which sees Palestinian prisoners as "inexpensive bargaining chips."

"The Israeli military carries on a relentless arrest campaign against Palestinians and these 'goodwill gestures' never really bring down the number of Palestinians detained, currently standing at about 11,000," the statement added.

The Palestinian National Initiative is calling for the immediate release of all prisoners, the end of the siege of the Gaza Strip and "real peace negotiations between a united and democratic Palestinian leadership and Israel on the basis of international law."

http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=26628

Maan Journalists Arrested

2007-11-09T06:36:00.000-08:00

This morning, in my daily check of Ma'an News' excellent coverage of current events in the West Bank and Gaza that are rarely covered in North America this is what I found...

The increasing crackdown on Palestinian journalists is an issue that itself is often neglected even within the Occupied Territories.

Keep checking Maan's website for updates on this grave situation.

Norman Finkelstein in Toronto - November 29th

2007-10-12T13:22:00.000-07:00

Israel and Palestine: Roots of conflict, prospects for peace

Dr. Norman Finkelstein

November 29, 2007
6:30 PM (doors open at 5:30 PM)

OISE Auditorium, G162252 Bloor Street West

Toronto, Ontario

Tickets (at the door): Students $5; General: $10

The Canadian-Palestinian Educational Exchange (CEPAL) invites you to attend its eleventh annual commemoration of the United Nations International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, November 29. This day was instituted in 1977 by the UN General Assembly, and is meant to be one of solidarity with the Palestinian people, as well as an opportunity to reinvigorate efforts aimed at achieving a just peace.

Keynote speaker, Dr. Norman Finkelstein will discuss roots of conflict and prospects for peace in Israel and Palestine. Dr. Finkelstein received his doctorate in 1988 from the Department of Politics, Princeton University, for a thesis on the theory of Zionism. He is the author of five books: Beyond Chutzpah: On the misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history (2005); The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the exploitation of Jewish suffering (2000, 2003); Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (1995, 2003); A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen thesis and historical truth (1998); The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A personal account of the intifada years (1996).

Moreover, CEPAL is honored to host Ms. Olfat Mahmoud, Director of the Women’s Humanitarian Organisation (WHO), a CEPAL partner in Bourj el-Barajneh Palestinian refugee camp near Beirut. Ms. Mahmoud will discuss the role and impact of CEPAL in the refugee camps, specifically its contribution to education and solidarity. She will also address the current situation for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.

For more information about this event, please visit http://www.cepal.ca/

Israel's Toy Soldiers: Chris Hedges

2007-10-04T12:47:00.000-07:00

Israel’s Toy Soldiers
by Chris Hedges

Published on Monday, October 1, 2007 by Truthdig.com

If you are a young Muslim American and head off to the Middle East for a spell in a fundamentalist “madrassa,” or religious school, Homeland Security will probably greet you at the airport when you return. But if you are an American Jew and you join hundreds of teenagers from Europe and Mexico for an eight-week training course run by the Israel Defense Forces, you can post your picture wearing an Israeli army uniform and holding an automatic weapon on MySpace.
The Marva program, part summer camp part indoctrination, was launched in Israel in 1981. It allows participants, who must be Jewish and between the ages of 18 and 28, to fire weapons, live in military barracks in the Negev desert and saunter around in an Israeli military uniform saluting and taking long hikes with military packs. The Youth and Education Corps of the Israel Defense Forces run four 120-strong training sessions a year.
“Upon arrival, the participants experience an abrupt change into army life: wearing uniforms, accepting army discipline, and learning the programs and lessons integral to the program,” the Let Israelis Show You Israel Web site reads. “The program includes military content such as: navigation, field training, weapons training, shooting ranges, marches and more, as well as educational content such as: Zionism, Jewish Identity, history and knowledge of the land of Israel. All of this is taught in Hebrew in an intensive eight weeks.”
“The participants finish the program after completing a short, intensive, exhilarating military experience that allows them to taste Israel in a way that they never could before-as part of the Israel Defense Forces,” the site reads. “They leave the program with a feeling of belonging and a strong connection to Israel, and many return to Israel to continue the connection that was created in the framework of the Marva course.”
There are, of course, gushing testimonials about the program.
“I spent the first few days of Marva doubting my decision, wondering why I had come, wondering if there was any way out. With all of the running, yelling orders, discipline and Hebrew, I felt horribly out of place,” writes Canadian David Roth of his summer. “It was a completely different world from the one I was used to. All that changed, though, by the end of the first week. We had our first ‘Masa’ (Hike). It was very hard, but at the end, we all knew, our M16s were waiting for us at the ‘tekes’ (Ceremony). We got through the 8 kilometers and had our ‘tekes’ and got our guns. It felt amazing, and from that point on Marva was incredible.”
How have we reacted when we discovered that American Muslims were being taught in a foreign country to fire machine guns at paper figures and simulate military maneuvers? And what about the summer schools in Gaza organized by Islamic Jihad designed to train young Palestinians in the basics of military life? These Gaza camps, uncovered in 2001, were widely denounced by Israel as proof that the Palestinians were teaching their children to hate and kill.
The argument in favor of camps in Israel, as opposed to camps in Pakistan, is that these young men and women are not going to come back and use what they have learned to harm Americans. They are not terrorists. Muslims, however, have not cornered the market on terrorism and violence. Radical Jews have also been involved in terrorist attacks in Israel and the United States.
I discovered an American in Israel in 1989 named Robert Manning. A huge, burly man, Manning was living in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Kiyrat Arba. When I found him he was carrying a pistol, a large knife strapped to his leg and an M-16 assault rifle. He was part of a Jewish terrorist group called Committee for Protection and Safety of the Highways that set up ad hoc roadblocks and pulled Palestinians from cars to beat and often shoot them. He was a follower of Meir Kahane, the leader of the Jewish Defense League, who was implicated in terrorist attacks in the United States and Israel. Manning served as a reservist in the Israel Defense Forces in the West Bank.
Manning was wanted in California for murder. He had been charged in a 1980 mail-bomb killing as part of his involvement in the Jewish Defense League. The bomb was intended for the owner of a local computer firm, but the package holding the device was opened by the firm’s secretary, Patricia Wilkerson, who was killed instantly by the blast.
Manning, full of bluster and a bitter racism toward Arabs, used as his pseudonym the name of the FBI agent in charge of his case, a bit of humor that backfired on him by confirming my suspicion of his identify. I obtained the picture from his California driver’s license and showed it to his neighbors at Kiyrat Arba. They identified him from the photo. I wrote an article affirming that Manning, heavily armed and an active member of the Israeli army, was living in a Jewish settlement. The Israeli government, until that moment, said it had no information about his location. He was extradited in 1993 and sentenced the next year to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for 30 years. He is in a maximum-security prison in Florence, Colo.
Those who go through the Marva summer program are indoctrinated as thoroughly as Muslims who go overseas and are told they are part of a greater jihad for Islam. The results, given Israel’s close alliance with the United States, may not be negative for those in power in the United States, but it may be very negative for those Americans defined as the enemy, especially Muslims, should we suffer another 9/11. The program inculcates hatred and a belief in the efficacy of violence to solve the problems in the Middle East. It identifies Israel with militarism. It feeds the idea that a Jew born in Brooklyn has a birthright to settle in Israel that is denied to an American of Palestinian descent.
Jerusalem, aside from being one of the most beautiful cities in the world, is one of the most literate, creative and intellectual. Do these young men and women really know the best of Israel by spending eight weeks playing soldier and glorifying the military? Is the cause of Israel advanced by mirroring the twisted militarism of Islamic fundamentalists?
Terrorists arise in all cultures, all nations and all religions. We have produced more than our share. Ask the people of Vietnam or Iraq. The danger of a military program such as these is that it solidifies a mind-set of us and them. It romanticizes violence. It widens the divide that leads to conflict. It makes dialogue impossible. There are great Israeli institutions, from the newspaper Haaretz to the courageous Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem to Peace Now. A summer working for them, rather than wearing an army uniform, unleashing bursts of automatic fire in the desert and singing Israeli patriotic songs, might actually help.
Chris Hedges, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.“

Mustafa Barghouti - speaking event in Toronto

2007-10-04T06:17:00.000-07:00

The First James Graff Memorial Lecture

Dr. Mustafa Barghouti

Dr. Barghouti is a Palestinian patriot who devotes his life to the freedom and betterment of his people. A medical doctor, he founded and is president of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees, which provides health care in the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. He was also a founder of the Health, Development, Information and Policy Institute, PNGO and Palestine Monitor.

Dr. Barghouti was a delegate to the Madrid Conference in 1991, which was to end the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict. He was a founder and is general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative, an alternative to Fatah and to Hamas. Barghouti was a candidate for the presidency of the Palestinian National Authority in 2005, and was elected as a member of Parliament in 2006.

Sunday, October 28th at 2 p.m.
Trinity St. Paul's United Church
427 Bloor St. West, one block west of Spadina Road at Roberts St.

Tickets at $10/$5 students
Available at Women's BookStore, 73 Harbord St., west of Spadina: 416-922-8744
For more information or reservations go to www.necef.org or email us at necef.canada@gmail.com Ticket proceeds to go to UPMRC medical relief

Gaza to run out of medicine

2007-10-04T06:12:00.000-07:00

Ma'an News is reporting that Gaza will run out of 470 essential medicines within the week.

http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=25684

Down Time

2007-10-01T12:46:00.000-07:00

Once again I've been out of commission for a while. The last couple of weeks have been quite busy (again) for me here at work.

I'm going to add a few things that I've written over these past couple of weeks and add articles and things that I SHOULD have been posting but have clearly been negligent in doing so!

I'm also going to add some reviews of books I've recently read. Hows THAT for a new feature?

Article: Boycott Movement Targets Israel

2007-08-31T06:40:00.000-07:00

Law Professor George Bisharat on Boycotting Israel.

From the San Francisco Chronicle, Wednesday August 15, 2007.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/08/15/EDASRIF3U.DTL

When does a citizen-led boycott of a state become morally justified?

That question is raised by an expanding academic, cultural and economic boycott of Israel. The movement joins churches, unions, professional societies and other groups based in the United States, Canada, Europe and South Africa. It has elicited dramatic reactions from Israel's supporters. U.S. labor leaders have condemned British unions, representing millions of workers, for supporting the Israel boycott. American academics have been frantically gathering signatures against the boycott, and have mounted a prominent advertising campaign in American newspapers - unwittingly elevating the controversy further in the public eye.

Israel's defenders have protested that Israel is not the worst human-rights offender in the world, and singling it out is hypocrisy, or even anti-Semitism. Rhetorically, this shifts focus from Israel's human rights record to the imagined motives of its critics.

But "the worst first" has never been the rule for whom to boycott. Had it been, the Pol Pot regime, not apartheid South Africa, would have been targeted in the past. It was not - Cambodia's ties to the West were insufficient to make any embargo effective. Boycotting North Korea today would be similarly futile. Should every other quest for justice be put on hold as a result?

In contrast, the boycott of South Africa had grip. The opprobrium suffered by white South Africans unquestionably helped persuade them to yield to the just demands of the black majority. Israel, too, assiduously guards its public image. A dense web of economic and cultural relations also ties it to the West. That - and its irrefutably documented human-rights violations - render it ripe for boycott.

What state actions should trigger a boycott? Expelling or intimidating into flight a country's majority population, then denying them internationally recognized rights to return to their homes? Israel has done that.

Seizing, without compensation, the properties of hundreds of thousands of refugees? Israel has done that.

Systematically torturing detainees, many held without trial? Israel has done that.

Assassinating its opponents, including those living in territories it occupies? Israel has done that.

Demolishing thousands of homes belonging to one national group, and settling its own people in another nation's land? Israel has done that. No country with such a record, whether first or 50th worst in the world, can credibly protest a boycott.

Apartheid South Africa provides another useful standard. How does Israel's behavior toward Palestinians compare to former South Africa's treatment of blacks? It is similar or worse, say a number of South Africans, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, U.N. special rapporteur in the occupied territories John Dugard, and African National Congress member and government minister Ronnie Kasrils. The latter observed recently that apartheid South Africa never used fighter jets to attack ANC activists, and judged Israel's violent control of Palestinians as "10 times worse." Dual laws for Jewish settlers and Palestinians, segregated roads and housing, and restrictions on Palestinians' freedom of movement strongly recall apartheid South Africa. If boycotting apartheid South Africa was appropriate, it is equally fair to boycott Israel on a similar record.

Israel has been singled out, but not as its defenders complain. Instead, Israel has been enveloped in a cocoon of impunity. Our government has vetoed 41 U.N. Security Council resolutions condemning Israeli actions - half of the total U.S. vetoes since the birth of the United Nations - thus enabling Israel's continuing abuses. The Bush administration has announced an increase in military aid to Israel to $30 billion for the coming decade.

Other military occupations and human-rights abusers have faced considerably rougher treatment. Just recall Iraq's 1990 takeover of Kuwait. Perhaps the United Nations should have long ago issued Israel the ultimatum it gave Iraq - and enforced it. Israel's occupation of Arab lands has now exceeded 40 years.

Iran, Sudan and Syria have all been targeted for federal and state-level sanctions. Even the City of Beverly Hills is contemplating Iran divestment actions, following the lead of Los Angeles, which approved Iran divestment legislation in June. Yet the Islamic Republic of Iran has never attacked its neighbors nor occupied their territories. It is merely suspected of aspiring to the same nuclear weapons Israel already possesses.

Politicians worldwide, and American ones especially, have failed us. Our leaders, from the executive branch to Congress, have dithered, or cheered Israel on, as it devoured the land base for a Palestinian state. Their collective irresponsibility dooms both Palestinians and Israelis to a future of strife and insecurity, and undermines our global stature. If politicians cannot lead the way, then citizens must. That is why boycotting Israel has become both necessary and justified.
George Bisharat is a professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, and writes frequently on law and politics in the Middle East.

Memo to England.

2007-08-23T10:25:00.000-07:00

What a surprise. The same country that originally played Solomon and carved up the Middle East has decided that the members of the Palestinian National Under-19 Soccer Team are too poor to get visas to play in a tournament in Britain. Scheduled to play against the minor teams of a handful of English soccer clubs, the Palestinian team – who have little access to any sort of soccer field – have been told that the British Government suspects they may try and stay in England instead of returning to the hell hole that Gaza has become. Let’s not forget that Britain plays a significant role in contributing to what Gaza now resembles. Theirs, and other “democracies”, are the ones who cut off aide to the Palestinians after they elected Hamas. And their unwillingness to apply even a modicum of pressure on Israel to alleviate the slow suffocation of the people of Gaza should be seen as criminal. Their denial of visas to these Gazan teenagers for a soccer tournament smacks of their lack of compassion or understanding of their own culpability in the crisis. The reason that the visas have been denied is that the players are incapable of showing that their life in Gaza is good enough for them to want to return. Incredible. Bottom line for the British Government should be: "maybe, even if they DO want to stay in England (which they have no evidence to suggest) we should take responsibility for the mess we helped create and let 15 kids stay."

Not that they’d necessarily want to. There’s a reason that Palestinians have been fighting the Israelis since 1948. It’s called: "Love of Palestine". I hate to spoil it for you England, but your country ain’t that great. And just because they’re poor, it doesn’t mean they want to be rich, it doesn’t mean they want to be British, it doesn’t mean they wouldn’t want to go back to Gaza when they’re done getting beaten by your little English lads. They’re poor because of what you’ve helped do to them, helped do to their people. You want to know how you could solve this problem? When they arrive to play, monitor their movements very closely – like, don’t let their bus go ten minutes without checking to make sure they are allowed to be where they are - and put them up in your local prisons. It’ll actually make them feel at home!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6959707.stm

New blog account info

2007-08-16T06:44:00.000-07:00

I've updated my blogger account and have added a new email address that you can now reach me at... thewestbankblog@gmail.com you may also notice that I have kept my profile largely the same while changing account information. It's been over a year now that I've kept this blog going and now, nearing the 100 posts mark, I'm pleased that I've kept at it. So let me pretend like this is the one year anniversary post and thank you all for reading!

Statement on the Middle East by the former leader of the American Jewish Congress, Henry Siegman

2007-08-14T08:37:00.000-07:00

This is an article published in the London Review of Books by Henry Siegman. Siegman is Director of the US/Middle East Project, former senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and head of the American Jewish Congress.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n16/sieg01_.html

The Middle East Peace Process Scam

Henry Siegman

When Ehud Olmert and George W. Bush met at the White House in June, they concluded that Hamas’s violent ousting of Fatah from Gaza – which brought down the Palestinian national unity government brokered by the Saudis in Mecca in March – had presented the world with a new ‘window of opportunity’.[*] (Never has a failed peace process enjoyed so many windows of opportunity.) Hamas’s isolation in Gaza, Olmert and Bush agreed, would allow them to grant generous concessions to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, giving him the credibility he needed with the Palestinian people in order to prevail over Hamas.

Both Bush and Olmert have spoken endlessly of their commitment to a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, but it is their determination to bring down Hamas rather than to build up a Palestinian state that animates their new-found enthusiasm for making Abbas look good. That is why their expectation that Hamas will be defeated is illusory. Palestinian moderates will never prevail over those considered extremists, since what defines moderation for Olmert is Palestinian acquiescence in Israel’s dismemberment of Palestinian territory. In the end, what Olmert and his government are prepared to offer Palestinians will be rejected by Abbas no less than by Hamas, and will only confirm to Palestinians the futility of Abbas’s moderation and justify its rejection by Hamas. Equally illusory are Bush’s expectations of what will be achieved by the conference he recently announced would be held in the autumn (it has now been downgraded to a ‘meeting’). In his view, all previous peace initiatives have failed largely, if not exclusively, because Palestinians were not ready for a state of their own. The meeting will therefore focus narrowly on Palestinian institution-building and reform, under the tutelage of Tony Blair, the Quartet’s newly appointed envoy.

In fact, all previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank. To be sure, Israel would allow – indeed, it would insist on – the creation of a number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians could call a state, but only in order to prevent the creation of a binational state in which Palestinians would be the majority.

The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’. In his reluctant embrace of the Oslo Accords, and his distaste for the settlers, Yitzhak Rabin may have been the exception to this, but even he did not entertain a return of Palestinian territory beyond the so-called Allon Plan, which allowed Israel to retain the Jordan Valley and other parts of the West Bank.

Anyone familiar with Israel’s relentless confiscations of Palestinian territory – based on a plan devised, overseen and implemented by Ariel Sharon – knows that the objective of its settlement enterprise in the West Bank has been largely achieved. Gaza, the evacuation of whose settlements was so naively hailed by the international community as the heroic achievement of a man newly committed to an honourable peace with the Palestinians, was intended to serve as the first in a series of Palestinian bantustans. Gaza’s situation shows us what these bantustans will look like if their residents do not behave as Israel wants.

Israel’s disingenuous commitment to a peace process and a two-state solution is precisely what has made possible its open-ended occupation and dismemberment of Palestinian territory. And the Quartet – with the EU, the UN secretary general and Russia obediently following Washington’s lead – has collaborated with and provided cover for this deception by accepting Israel’s claim that it has been unable to find a deserving Palestinian peace partner.
Just one year after the 1967 war, Moshe Dayan, a former IDF chief of staff who at the time was minister of defence, described his plan for the future as ‘the current reality in the territories’. ‘The plan,’ he said, ‘is being implemented in actual fact. What exists today must remain as a permanent arrangement in the West Bank.’ Ten years later, at a conference in Tel Aviv, Dayan said: ‘The question is not “What is the solution?” but “How do we live without a solution?”’ Geoffrey Aronson, who has monitored the settlement enterprise from its beginnings, summarises the situation as follows:

Living without a solution, then as now, was understood by Israel as the key to maximising the benefits of conquest while minimising the burdens and dangers of retreat or formal annexation. This commitment to the status quo, however, disguised a programme of expansion that generations of Israeli leaders supported as enabling, through Israeli settlement, the dynamic transformation of the territories and the expansion of effective Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan River.

In an interview in Ha’aretz in 2004, Dov Weissglas, chef de cabinet to the then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, described the strategic goal of Sharon’s diplomacy as being to secure the support of the White House and Congress for Israeli measures that would place the peace process and Palestinian statehood in ‘formaldehyde’. It is a fiendishly appropriate metaphor: formaldehyde uniquely prevents the deterioration of dead bodies, and sometimes creates the illusion that they are still alive. Weissglas explains that the purpose of Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, and the dismantling of several isolated settlements in the West Bank, was to gain US acceptance of Israel’s unilateralism, not to set a precedent for an eventual withdrawal from the West Bank. The limited withdrawals were intended to provide Israel with the political room to deepen and widen its presence in the West Bank, and that is what they achieved. In a letter to Sharon, Bush wrote: ‘In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centres, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.’

In a recent interview in Ha’aretz, James Wolfensohn, who was the Quartet’s representative at the time of the Gaza disengagement, said that Israel and the US had systematically undermined the agreement he helped forge in 2005 between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and had instead turned Gaza into a vast prison. The official behind this, he told Ha’aretz, was Elliott Abrams, the deputy national security adviser. ‘Every aspect’ of the agreement Wolfensohn had brokered ‘was abrogated’.

Another recent interview in Ha’aretz, with Haggai Alon, who was a senior adviser to Amir Peretz at the Ministry of Defence, is even more revealing. Alon accuses the IDF (whose most senior officers increasingly are themselves settlers) of working clandestinely to further the settlers’ interests. The IDF, Alon says, ignores the Supreme Court’s instructions about the path the so-called security fence should follow, instead ‘setting a route that will not enable the establishment of a Palestinian state’. Alon told Ha’aretz that when in 2005 politicians signed an agreement with the Palestinians to ease restrictions on Palestinians travelling in the territories (part of the deal that Wolfensohn had worked on), the IDF eased them for settlers instead. For Palestinians, the number of checkpoints doubled. According to Alon, the IDF is ‘carrying out an apartheid policy’ that is emptying Hebron of Arabs and Judaising (his term) the Jordan Valley, while it co-operates openly with the settlers in an attempt to make a two-state solution impossible.

A new UN map of the West Bank, produced by the Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, gives a comprehensive picture of the situation. Israeli civilian and military infrastructure has rendered 40 per cent of the territory off limits to Palestinians. The rest of the territory, including major population centres such as Nablus and Jericho, is split into enclaves; movement between them is restricted by 450 roadblocks and 70 manned checkpoints. The UN found that what remains is an area very similar to that set aside for the Palestinian population in Israeli security proposals in the aftermath of the 1967 war. It also found that changes now underway to the infrastructure of the territories – including a network of highways that bypass and isolate Palestinian towns – would serve to formalise the de facto cantonisation of the West Bank.

These are the realities on the ground that the uninformed and/or cynical blather in Jerusalem, Washington and Brussels – about waiting for Palestinians to reform their institutions, democratise their culture, dismantle the ‘infrastructures of terror’ and halt all violence and incitement before peace negotiations can begin – seeks to drown out. Given the vast power imbalance between Israel and the Palestinians – not to mention the vast preponderance of diplomatic support enjoyed by Israel from precisely those countries that one would have expected to compensate diplomatically for the military imbalance – nothing will change for the better without the US, the EU and other international actors finally facing up to what have long been the fundamental impediments to peace.

These impediments include the assumption, implicit in Israel’s occupation policy, that if no peace agreement is reached, the ‘default setting’ of UN Security Council Resolution 242 is the indefinite continuation of Israel’s occupation. If this reading were true, the resolution would actually be inviting an occupying power that wishes to retain its adversary’s territory to do so simply by means of avoiding peace talks – which is exactly what Israel has been doing. In fact, the introductory statement to Resolution 242 declares that territory cannot be acquired by war, implying that if the parties cannot reach agreement, the occupier must withdraw to the status quo ante: that, logically, is 242’s default setting. Had there been a sincere intention on Israel’s part to withdraw from the territories, surely forty years should have been more than enough time in which to reach an agreement.

Israel’s contention has long been that since no Palestinian state existed before the 1967 war, there is no recognised border to which Israel can withdraw, because the pre-1967 border was merely an armistice line. Moreover, since Resolution 242 calls for a ‘just and lasting peace’ that will allow ‘every state in the area [to] live in security’, Israel holds that it must be allowed to change the armistice line, either bilaterally or unilaterally, to make it secure before it ends the occupation. This is a specious argument for many reasons, but principally because UN General Assembly Partition Resolution 181 of 1947, which established the Jewish state’s international legitimacy, also recognised the remaining Palestinian territory outside the new state’s borders as the equally legitimate patrimony of Palestine’s Arab population on which they were entitled to establish their own state, and it mapped the borders of that territory with great precision. Resolution 181’s affirmation of the right of Palestine’s Arab population to national self-determination was based on normative law and the democratic principles that grant statehood to the majority population. (At the time, Arabs constituted two-thirds of the population in Palestine.) This right does not evaporate because of delays in its implementation.

In the course of a war launched by Arab countries that sought to prevent the implementation of the UN partition resolution, Israel enlarged its territory by 50 per cent. If it is illegal to acquire territory as a result of war, then the question now cannot conceivably be how much additional Palestinian territory Israel may confiscate, but rather how much of the territory it acquired in the course of the war of 1948 it is allowed to retain. At the very least, if ‘adjustments’ are to be made to the 1949 armistice line, these should be made on Israel’s side of that line, not the Palestinians’.

Clearly, the obstacle to resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict has not been a dearth of peace initiatives or peace envoys. Nor has it been the violence to which Palestinians have resorted in their struggle to rid themselves of Israel’s occupation, even when that violence has despicably targeted Israel’s civilian population. It is not to sanction the murder of civilians to observe that such violence occurs, sooner or later, in most situations in which a people’s drive for national self-determination is frustrated by an occupying power. Indeed, Israel’s own struggle for national independence was no exception. According to the historian Benny Morris, in this conflict it was the Irgun that first targeted civilians. In Righteous Victims, Morris writes that the upsurge of Arab terrorism in 1937 ‘triggered a wave of Irgun bombings against Arab crowds and buses, introducing a new dimension to the conflict.’ While in the past Arabs had ‘sniped at cars and pedestrians and occasionally lobbed a grenade, often killing or injuring a few bystanders or passengers’, now ‘for the first time, massive bombs were placed in crowded Arab centres, and dozens of people were indiscriminately murdered and maimed.’ Morris notes that ‘this “innovation” soon found Arab imitators.’

Underlying Israel’s efforts to retain the occupied territories is the fact that it has never really considered the West Bank as occupied territory, despite its pro forma acceptance of that designation. Israelis see the Palestinian areas as ‘contested’ territory to which they have claims no less compelling than the Palestinians, international law and UN resolutions notwithstanding. This is a view that was made explicit for the first time by Sharon in an op-ed essay published on the front page of the New York Times on 9 June 2002. The use of the biblical designations of Judea and Samaria to describe the territories, terms which were formerly employed only by the Likud but are now de rigueur for Labour Party stalwarts as well, is a reflection of a common Israeli view. That the former prime minister Ehud Barak (now Olmert’s defence minister) endlessly describes the territorial proposals he made at the Camp David summit as expressions of Israel’s ‘generosity’, and never as an acknowledgment of Palestinian rights, is another example of this mindset. Indeed, the term ‘Palestinian rights’ seems not to exist in Israel’s lexicon.

The problem is not, as Israelis often claim, that Palestinians do not know how to compromise. (Another former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, famously complained that ‘Palestinians take and take while Israel gives and gives.’) That is an indecent charge, since the Palestinians made much the most far-reaching compromise of all when the PLO formally accepted the legitimacy of Israel within the 1949 armistice border. With that concession, Palestinians ceded their claim to more than half the territory that the UN’s partition resolution had assigned to its Arab inhabitants. They have never received any credit for this wrenching concession, made years before Israel agreed that Palestinians had a right to statehood in any part of Palestine. The notion that further border adjustments should be made at the expense of the 22 per cent of the territory that remains to the Palestinians is deeply offensive to them, and understandably so.

Nonetheless, the Palestinians agreed at the Camp David summit to adjustments to the pre-1967 border that would allow large numbers of West Bank settlers – about 70 per cent – to remain within the Jewish state, provided they received comparable territory on Israel’s side of the border. Barak rejected this. To be sure, in the past the Palestinian demand of a right of return was a serious obstacle to a peace agreement. But the Arab League’s peace initiative of 2002 leaves no doubt that Arab countries will accept a nominal and symbolic return of refugees into Israel in numbers approved by Israel, with the overwhelming majority repatriated in the new Palestinian state, their countries of residence, or in other countries prepared to receive them.
It is the failure of the international community to reject (other than in empty rhetoric) Israel’s notion that the occupation and the creation of ‘facts on the ground’ can go on indefinitely, so long as there is no agreement that is acceptable to Israel, that has defeated all previous peace initiatives and the efforts of all peace envoys. Future efforts will meet the same fate if this fundamental issue is not addressed.

What is required for a breakthrough is the adoption by the Security Council of a resolution affirming the following: 1. Changes to the pre-1967 situation can be made only by agreement between the parties. Unilateral measures will not receive international recognition. 2. The default setting of Resolution 242, reiterated by Resolution 338, the 1973 ceasefire resolution, is a return by Israel’s occupying forces to the pre-1967 border. 3. If the parties do not reach agreement within 12 months (the implementation of agreements will obviously take longer), the default setting will be invoked by the Security Council. The Security Council will then adopt its own terms for an end to the conflict, and will arrange for an international force to enter the occupied territories to help establish the rule of law, assist Palestinians in building their institutions, assure Israel’s security by preventing cross-border violence, and monitor and oversee the implementation of terms for an end to the conflict.

If the US and its allies were to take a stand forceful enough to persuade Israel that it will not be allowed to make changes to the pre-1967 situation except by agreement with the Palestinians in permanent status negotiations, there would be no need for complicated peace formulas or celebrity mediators to get a peace process underway. The only thing that an envoy such as Blair can do to put the peace process back on track is to speak the truth about the real impediment to peace. This would also be a historic contribution to the Jewish state, since Israel’s only hope of real long-term security is to have a successful Palestinian state as its neighbour.

The small picture

2007-07-27T10:08:00.000-07:00

I'm busy with work and have taken a few days (weeks?) off from the blog. I'm not going to be able to do much over the next two weeks either but when I can, I'll post articles or thoughts about recent happenings...

One thing that caught my eye today while reading Ma'an was the recent death of Jihad al Shaer, a twenty year old from the West Bank. Al Shaer was killed by the Israeli Occupation Forces at a checkpoint outside of Bethlehem near a village called Tuqu'. The Hospital that took al Shaer says he died after receiving multiple blows to the head from a baton.

This is a brief story - one highlighted in part because of the outrage expressed by Mustafa Barghouti, an independent Palestinian Politician - but an important story nonetheless. If you've read the Economist article that I posted earlier, you'll have a better understanding of why checkpoints exist: to harass, to intimidate, and to generally make life as difficult as possible for the indigenous population of the Occupied Territories.

What could highlight the raw brutality of the Israeli Army more than beating a 20 year old to death? This boy did not have a suicide bomb belt on him - why would they choose to beat him then? This boy was not armed with an AK47 - why would they choose to beat him then? No the likely story is that he did something disobedient. Something that upset the soldiers but obviously not threatened enough to just shoot him. Instead they chose to pull out their batons and crush his skull. And they probably continue to inspect Palestinian ID cards at the same checkpoint today. Until a few months form now when they will be released from the military to return to their life of freedom on the beaches of Tel Aviv. I hope they never forget the life they took. Al Shaer's family, his younger brothers and sisters, his parent never will.

READ THIS ARTICLE!...

2007-07-08T16:31:00.000-07:00

This is a MUST READ article. Not since coming home from the West Bank have I found such an apt summation of just what life is ACTUALLY like there. It is these daily "inconveniences" that are often completely lost in reporting here in the West. The fact that it's been written up in the Economist - not exactly a left-wing rag - should only highlight the absence of these details in our mainstream media. Oh, and by the way, there are references in this article to certain practices and LAWS that are at the root of the use of the word "Apartheid" when describing Israel. I challenge anyone to argue that rules like the one that prevents Palestinians from driving in cars with Israeli license plates is not a form of separation BASED ON RACE. If you've ever been to the Occupied Territories, especially of course the West Bank, you'll know just how many Israeli plated-cars are on the roads there. Most of the taxis bear those yellow plates.

So if you can, please pass this article along to everyone you know! ...

The Palestinians

It's the little things that make an occupation

Jan 18th 2007 JERUSALEM AND RAMALLAH
From The Economist print edition

Those seemingly minor inconveniences that make life hellish

DURING 2006, according to B'tselem, an Israeli human-rights group, Israeli forces killed 660 Palestinians, almost half of them innocent bystanders, among them 141 children. In the same period, Palestinians killed 17 Israeli civilians and six soldiers. It is such figures, as well as events like shellings, house demolitions, arrest raids and land expropriations, that make the headlines in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What rarely get into the media but make up the staple of Palestinian daily conversation are the countless little restrictions that slow down most people's lives, strangle the economy and provide constant fuel for extremists.

Arbitrariness is one of the most crippling features of these rules. No one can predict how a trip will go. Many of the main West Bank roads, for the sake of the security of Israeli settlers in the West Bank, are off-limits to Palestinian vehicles—only one road connecting the north and south West Bank, for instance, is open to them—and these restrictions change frequently. So do the rules on who can pass the checkpoints that in effect divide the West Bank into a number of semi-connected regions (see map).

A new order due to come into force this week would have banned most West Bankers from riding in cars with Israeli licence plates, and thus from getting lifts from friends and relatives among the 1.6m Palestinians who live as citizens in Israel, as well as from aid workers, journalists and other foreigners. The army decided to suspend the order after protests from human-rights groups that it would give soldiers enormous arbitrary powers—but it has not revoked it.

Large parts of the population of the northern West Bank, and of individual cities like Nablus and Jericho, simply cannot leave their home areas without special permits, which are not always forthcoming. If they can travel, how long they spend waiting at checkpoints, from minutes to hours, depends on the time of day and the humour of the soldiers. Several checkpoints may punctuate a journey between cities that would otherwise be less than an hour's drive apart. These checkpoints move and shift every day, and army jeeps add to the unpredictability and annoyance by stopping and creating ad hoc mobile checkpoints at various spots.

According to the UN's Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the number of such obstacles had increased to 534 by mid-December from 376 in August 2005, when OCHA and the Israeli army completed a joint count. When Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, agreed last month to ease restrictions at a few of these checkpoints as a concession to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, human-rights people reported that not only did many of the checkpoints go on working as before; near the ones that had eased up, mobile ones were now operating instead, causing worse disruption and pain.

It is sometimes hard to fathom the logic of the checkpoint regime. One route from Ramallah, the Palestinian administrative capital, to Jerusalem, involves a careful inspection of documents, while on another the soldiers—if they are at their posts—just glance at cars' occupants to see if they look Arab. Israeli law strictly forbids Israeli citizens from visiting the main Palestinian cities, but they can drive straight into Ramallah and Hebron without being challenged, while other cities, such as Jericho and Nablus, remain impermeable. In many places the barrier that Israel is building through the West Bank for security purposes (though in Palestinian eyes to grab more land) is monitored with all the care of an international border, while around Jerusalem the army turns a blind eye to hundreds of people who slip through cracks in the wall as part of their daily commute.

Because of the internal travel restrictions, people who want to move from one Palestinian city to another for work or study must register a change of address to make sure they can stay there. But they cannot. Israel's population registry, which issues Palestinian identity cards as well as Israeli ones, has issued almost no new Palestinian cards since the start of the second intifada in 2000. And that means no address changes either. This also makes it virtually impossible for Palestinians from abroad to get residency in the occupied territories, which are supposed to be their future state, never mind in Israel.

No-through-roads galore

On top of that, in the past year several thousand Palestinians who had applied for residency in the West Bank and were living there on renewable six-month visitor permits have become illegal residents too, liable to be stopped and deported at any checkpoint, not because of anything they have done but because Israel has stopped renewing permits since Hamas, the Islamist movement, took control of the Palestinian Authority (PA) a year ago. (Israel says it is because the PA isn't handing over the requests.)

Like Israelis, Palestinians who commit a traffic offence on the West Bank's highways have to pay the fine at an Israeli post office or a police station. But in the West Bank the only post offices and police stations are on Israeli settlements that most West Bank Palestinians cannot visit without a rare permit. If they do not pay, however, they lose their driving licences the next time the police stop them. They also get a criminal record—which then makes an Israeli entry permit quite impossible.

Some of the regulations stray into the realm of the absurd. A year ago a military order, for no obvious reason, expanded the list of protected wild plants in the West Bank to include za'atar (hyssop), an abundant herb and Palestinian staple. For a while, soldiers at checkpoints confiscated bunches of it from bewildered Palestinians who had merely wanted something to liven up their salads. Lately there have been no reports of za'atar confiscation, but, says Michael Sfard, the legal adviser for Yesh Din, another Israeli human-rights body, the order is still in force. As he tells the story, he cannot help laughing. There is not much else to do.

http://www.economist.com/world/africa/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8571800

You, from now on, are not yourself!

2007-07-06T07:17:00.000-07:00

Did we have to fall from a tremendous height so as to see our blood on ourhands... to realize that we are no angels... as we thought? Did we also have to expose our flaws before the world so that our truth would no longer stay virgin?

How much we lied when we said: we are the exception!

To believe oneself is worse than to lie to the other!

To be friendly with those who hate us and harsh on those who love us -- that is the lowness of the arrogant and the arrogance of the low!

O past: Do not change us whenever we stepped away from you!

O future: do not ask us: who are you? and what do you want from me? Because we too, do not know.

O present! Bear with us a little because we are nothing but insufferable passersby.

The identity is: what we bequeath and not what we inherit. What we invent and not what we remember. The identity is the corruption of the mirror that we must break whenever we liked the image!

He masked himself and pulled up his courage and killed his mother... because she was the easiest of prey... and because a female soldier stopped him and exposed her bosoms to him saying:

Does your mother have ones like these?

Had it not been for shame and darkness, I would have visited Gaza without knowing the way to the home of the new Abu Sufian* or the name of the new prophet!

Had Muhammad not been the last of the prophets, every gang would have had a prophet and every apostle had a militia!

June astonished us in its fortieth anniversary: if we do not find someone to defeat us again, we defeat ourselves with our hands so as not to forget!

No matter how long you look in my eyes, you will not find my gaze there. It was kidnapped by a scandal!

My heart is not mine and not for anyone. It became independent of me without turning into a stone.

Does the one chanting on the body of his victim-brother: "Allahu Akbar" know that he is an infidel since he sees God in his image: smaller than any perfectly created human. The prisoner who seeks to inherit the prison hid the smile of victory from the camera, but he could not succeed in curbing the happiness that cascaded from his eyes.

Perhaps because the fast-paced script was stronger than the actor. What is our need for Narcissus so long as we are Palestinians. As long as we do not know the difference between the mosque and the university because they are derived from the same linguistic root, what is our need for a state so long as it and the day are facing one fate?

A large sign on the door of a nightclub: we welcome the Palestinians returning from the battle. Entry is free! And our wine does not intoxicate!

I cannot defend my right to work; a shoe shiner on the pavement. Because my customers have the right to consider me a shoe thief - a university professor told me!

"The stranger and I are against my cousin. My cousin and I are against my brother... and my sheik and I are against myself." This is the first lesson in the new national education in the dungeons of darkness.

Who enters paradise first? The one who died by the bullets of the enemy or the one who died by the bullets of the brother? Some theologians say: Many an enemy of yours that your mother gave birth to!

The fundamentalists do not exasperate me because they are believers in their special way.

But, their secular supporters do and their atheist supporters, too, who only believe in one religion: their images on television!

He asked me: does a hungry guard defend a house whose owner traveled to spend his summer vacation at the French or the Italian Riviera... no difference?

I said: he does not defend!

He asked me: do I + I = two?

I said: you and you are less than one!

I am not ashamed of my identity because it is still in the process of being written.

But I am ashamed of parts of the Prolegomenon of Ibn Khaldoun.

You, from now on, are not yourself!

* Abu Sufian was the leader of Mecca when the Muslims took over; Meccans who entered his home were given sanctuary.

- Mahmoud Darwish

The Time is Now...

2007-07-05T06:47:00.001-07:00

British Academics call for a boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions.

Just as I campaigned for boycotts against apartheid in South Africa many years ago, now I shall do so against Israeli apartheid, says Colin Green

Monday June 11, 2007

EducationGuardian.co.uk

The strong and hostile response from pro-Israeli groups, as well as the UK government fearful of offending Israel, to a recent motion carried by a two thirds majority at the University and College Union (UCU) congress is in marked contrast to the joyful response of Palestinians, which has been almost totally supportive.

Perhaps the former have misunderstood that motion. After an open and very serious debate, one outcome upon which all agreed was that Israel is an oppressive state, illegally occupying territory for 40 years while ignoring numerous UN resolutions, international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Disagreement centred entirely on what the trade union movement could or should do about it. More specifically, we discussed the role of academic boycotts, which to all academics is normally an anathema. Free exchange of ideas and debate, however fierce, is central to our life. However, after 40 years without resolution, many of us believe that the Israel-Palestine conflict is the epicentre of a global conflagration so dangerous for all of us that abnormal responses have become an urgent, indeed desperate, moral imperative.

Even then, urgency notwithstanding, the motion passed was not calling for a boycott, but for a 12-month debate about an academic boycott. I suggest that that is in the best tradition of academic freedom and free speech. We will encourage Israeli academics to visit us, as indeed they did for weeks before the recent debate, and put their case for or against.

There are, after all, many Israeli humanitarian organisations and many Israeli individuals who believe that boycotts, sanctions and disinvestment are the only non-violent ways to force Israel to escape its descent into a pariah and rogue state.

In all this response to the UCU motion, or indeed the call for action against Israeli policies from the National Union of Journalists, architects, artists and doctors, the opinion of the Palestinians is little mentioned.

As one in daily communication with them at all levels, from government ministers, university presidents, professors, teachers, doctors, nurses and many involved in further education, not least the students, I can assure you that they are overwhelmingly in favour of the call for a debate, preferring that to a straight call for a boycott without debate. At last they will have the opportunity to travel outside the occupied territories and describe to the world the almost complete lack of academic freedom they endure.

Israeli apologists frequently quote the opinion against boycotts of a tiny handful of Palestinians, but these have no credibility whatsoever across campuses in the occupied territories.

This motion was tabled because of a call of desperation from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) as long ago as 2004. PACBI is not some fringe, lunatic or radical university group, but a confederation of more than 50 organisations from across Palestinian civil society. The boycott called for by PACBI and supported by the British Committee for Universities of Palestine (BRICUP), which tabled this motion, is institutional. We are not targeting individuals, in some McCarthyite programme, but organisations that have political aims and collude in the occupation, however loudly they protest their innocence.

Since starting academic work in the occupied territories during the first intifada in 1987, I have travelled a trajectory of hope to near despair. From a naïve optimism for a just and lasting peace for Israelis and Palestinians 20 years ago, in which I welcomed with great enthusiasm Israeli postgraduates to my institute for specialist surgical training and research, I now refuse any collaboration with any Israeli university or research institution because of the violations of human rights I have seen over the past two decades and in which they collude.

As in the past, I still work with Israeli humanitarian organisations genuinely seeking justice for the Palestinians. I am no longer prepared to stand idly by and not come out publicly against the level of oppression I have seen, including ethnic cleansing and the establishment of a brutal apartheid regime, a terrible injustice against the indigenous population of the occupied territories.

What experiences can have brought about this revolution in attitude? In 1987, I was buoyed by the gentle, non-bigoted, optimistic attitude toward the Israelis of virtually all the Palestinians I met.

Even in the face of the violence and killings in the first intifada carried out by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), they believed that reason and good will would prevail and the international community would come to their rescue. I was amazed how tolerant academics were toward their oppressors. None of them did, or could have, forecast the descent into hell which the Palestinians would endure in the next two decades, nor believe that a people who themselves had known such a hell could possibly descend to the level of barbarity we are now witnessing.

Just as film documentary images of British soldiers opening the gates of Belsen in 1945 was a defining moment in my life, so the immediate aftermath of the Jenin massacre and the terror of overwhelming military force in the destruction of Rafah, in Gaza, which I have witnessed in recent years have had the most profound effect on my opinions. You have to see it for yourself. We cannot go on muttering platitudes about academic freedom and exchange of ideas. What freedom?

In those two decades, the wretched suppression of academic freedom has been so obvious and overt that the wonder was that international academe did so little to stop it or even to comment on it.

The list of restrictions is too long to detail. Examples include: the closure of Birzeit University for four years; refusal of entry to that and all other universities for teaching faculty and students on the whim of heavily armed Israeli teenagers in uniform at checkpoints; refusal to allow passage to medical students to their teaching hospitals; raiding of campuses in the middle of freezing winter nights forcing women undergraduates to stand for five or six hours outside in their nightdresses simply to humiliate them while their dormitories were ransacked; refusal to allow doctors to attend their clinics and teach students on the ludicrous claim that their ID cards (valid for the previous 15 years) were fake; refusal to allow UK academics entry to Ben-Gurion airport and forced return on the grounds they were engaged in subversive acts simply coming to be medical teachers.

Then has been the refusal to allow a final-year student to attend his graduation ceremony and to add to his humiliation and torment by being forced at gunpoint to stand and watch the proceedings from only 400 metres away; refusal or long delays in granting exit permits for Palestinian research workers and teachers travelling abroad to conferences; the threat that if they travel overseas (especially if they have a Jerusalem ID) they may not be allowed back into their own homes again; endless restrictions on travel within the occupied territories so that attendance at lectures or important exams are a daily nightmare; the forced return of Gaza students "illegally" studying in the West Bank, some after seven years of separation from their families and in their final year of medical training; the deliberate shooting at school buses carrying six to 10-year-old children by Israeli snipers; recently, the kidnapping and imprisonment without charge of five senior university lecturers in Nablus; the killing of a young female medical student by CN gas. All of this I have witnessed at first hand.

My outrage is not fuelled by bigotry or racism, but by what I have seen. I am consumed with anger that I have not come out of the closet many years ago to protest publicly the wickedness I knew full well was going on in the occupied territories.

Without inquiring my opinion about China and Tibet, or Russia and Chechnya, or Darfur and Sudan, critics demand to know why I feel so strongly about Israel. First, it is what I know first hand, initially as sympathiser now bitter critic; second, because Israel does not even pretend to be part of the Orient, but is the one lingering outpost of European colonialism that participates in Euro song contests, football cups, preferential trade agreements, and EU and NATO research grants, and, therefore, has to carry the same human rights obligations and responsibilities we Europeans recently demanded of Serbia; and most important, the Levant has long been historically, and even more urgently so now, the epicentre of world conflict.

Just as I campaigned for boycotts against apartheid in South Africa many years ago, now I shall do so against Israeli apartheid. I strongly support the motion carried by a two third majority by my trade union, the UCU. Now, at last, we can actually have a robust, honest and fearless debate and engage with all shades of opinion on the conflict.

· Colin Green is professor of surgical science at the University of London

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/comment/story/0,,2100391,00.html

Bat Shalom Statement on Gaza...

2007-06-27T13:15:00.000-07:00

Bat Shalom statement about the recent crisis in Gaza

24.02.2007

published in Haaretz on 20/6/07

At this time of a humanitarian disaster which has followed the turmoil in the Gaza Strip, we, women of the Bat Shalom Movement, call upon the government of Israel to recognize its part in the creation of the crisis in the Gaza Strip. The serious crisis is the direct result of the Israeli unilateral disengagement in August, 2005, and the ceaseless blockade of the Gaza Strip.

We demand that the government of Israel refrain from any military action in the Gaza Strip. Such an action would condemn both Israelis and Palestinians to further disaster.

We call on the government of Israel to permit the passage of humanitarian aid to the residents, to insure the continuation of the supply of water, electricity, fuel, gas and other essential services, and to allow the passage of refugees who wish to go from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank.

Any other behavior would be collective punishment of the residents of Gaza strip.

We call upon the international community to intervene in order to bring about:

- The withdrawal of Israel from all of the Occupied Palestinian Territories;

- The reopening of diplomatic negotiations for a permanent settlement on the basis of the peace initiative of the Arab League;

- Generating degrees of trust aimed at the Palestinians: the easing of restrictions on movement, the removal of barriers and checkpoints, the freezing of all building in the Jewish settlements, and the release of the Palestinian tax monies collected by Israel and held illegally;

- International protection and guarantees for guarding the human rights of the Palestinians in all of the occupied territories, including the Gaza Strip;

- The guarantee of a comprehensive political agreement on the future of Gaza strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem as one national unit.

Only a diplomatic process that brings with it the termination of Israeli control of the occupied territories and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel within the demarcation lines of the 4th of June 1967 will insure peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians, and for all those who live in this region.

http://www.batshalom.org/article.php?id=33&&main=43

***

Who we are...

In 1989, a meeting was convened in Brussels between prominent Israeli and Palestinian women peace activists. The meeting initiated an on-going dialogue that in 1994 resulted in the establishment of The Jerusalem Link comprising two women's organizations—Bat Shalom on the Israeli side, and the Jerusalem Center for Women on the Palestinian side. The two organizations share a set of political principles, which serve as the foundation for a cooperative model of co-existence between our respective peoples.

Bat Shalom is an Israeli national feminist grassroots organization of Jewish and Palestinian Israeli women working together for a genuine peace grounded in a just resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict, respect for human rights, and an equal voice for Jewish and Arab women within Israeli society.

Bat Shalom North was formed in 1993, by Jewish and Palestinian women from the kibbutzim, moshavim, villages and towns in the region of northern Israel known as Megiddo, Nazareth and the Valleys. The group identified the need to work together toward full equality of rights between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel.

We, the Jewish and Palestinian Israeli women of Bat Shalom, call upon all women to join our active struggle for peace and equality. We refuse to silently bear witness to the destruction of the hope and future of a peaceful reconciliation.

Dear Oprah,

2007-06-27T07:35:00.000-07:00

I'm no fan of online petitions - especially those that relate to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I feel that 90% of the signatories are earnest and well spoken, while 10% are often either ambivalent or include ignorant statements that detract from the sincerity of the petition itself.

Nonetheless, here is the text of a recent online petition that I feel is worthy to, in the very least, be read...

To: Oprah Winfrey

Dear Oprah,

You are planning to travel to "Israel for a solidarity visit". Israel's UN Ambassador, Danny Gillerman, said that a 'visit of a figure with such influence on the international media could help bring an end to the indifference towards the terror threat faced by Israelis'. This statement as well as your visit is troubling, frustrating and confusing us all. You are renown to stand for peace and to support the weak and the oppressed. As we all hailed for apartheid in South Africa and the God given right for all people to live together with equal rights, how can the world idly watch the continued building of the apartheid wall in Palestine? How can the world stay quiet about the thousands of men, women and children who are continuously tortured and confined in Israeli prisons? How can the world condone the Israeli constitution which only permits rights as a proper citizen to those of one certain religion? What is Danny Gillerman talking about? According to international bodies worldwide (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, United Nations etc.), Israelis are the terrorizors and Palestinians are the terrorized. One of the greatest leaders of our time, Nelson Mandela, said "The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not just an issue of military occupation and Israel is not a country that was established "normally" and happened to occupy another country in 1967. Palestinians are not struggling for a "state" but for freedom, liberation and equality, just like we were struggling for freedom in South Africa. Apartheid is a crime against humanity. Israel has deprived millions of Palestinians of their liberty and property. It has perpetuated a system of gross racial discrimination and inequality. It has systematically incarcerated and tortured thousands of Palestinians, contrary to the rules of international law. It has, in particular, waged a war against a civilian population, in particular children."

The Arab-Israeli conflict has a long and complicated history filled with bloodshed, destruction and injustice. We only ask that you read some of the articles that we have attached to give you an idea about the other, less publicized , side. You have always epitomized truth and justice with such integrity - we are hopeful that you will not allow yourself to only see one side of a story - no matter the circumstances! During your visit, please go visit cities like Gaza, Hebron, and Jenin in order to witness a life that is considered inhumane and, as a result, worthless to those enduring such humiliation. We hope that you will visit the Palestinian women and children who are taunted, raped, tortured , dehumanized and killed everyday while they guard their homes and families from everyday warfare . You will be amazed by the hope most of these people still have - their faith in God is great.

We hope you re-consider the basis for your visit. We want Oprah to promote peace and co-habitation amongst Israelis and Palestinians. We hope that you will not ignore the massacre of thousands of innocent, unnamed Palestinian men, women and children. Israel is blatantly carrying out a massive genocide not to mention violations of basic human rights. There is a dire need for fair representation. If no one will bring it to the forefront, we only ask that you be honest to yourself by basing your visit on solidarity for the Middle East - inclusive of Palestinians. Be objective and ask yourself, who is oppressed? Who is terrorized? In short, Oprah, we hope that you seek truth.

Thank you!

With all our respect and hope,
Seekers of peace and justice: FRIENDS OF PALESTINE
Sincerely,
The Undersigned

http://www.petitiononline.com/104707/petition.html

Jeff Halper from the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions

2007-06-26T10:26:00.000-07:00

KEEPING ON A STEADY COURSE TO APARTHEID

http://www.icahd.org/eng/articles.asp?menu=6&submenu=2&article=373

For all the attention and hysteria the latest events in Gaza have generated since the Hamas “takeover,” for Israel they represent nothing but a minor blip in its inexorable drive towards its own unilateral “solution:” apartheid. Israel’s end-game, explicit and unruffled by the recent turmoil on the ground, is clear. It is laid out in detail in the Convergence Plan” Olmert presented to a joint session of the American Congress in May, 2006, based on Sharon’s plan of “cantonization.” With minor adjustments, it constitutes the plan Israel’s Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is quietly advancing with the help of Condoleezza Rice, and it is accepted in its entirety by Ehud Barak, the newly-elected leader of the Labor Party, who played a key role in its formulation. The Israeli plan for apartheid is as follows:

(1) Creating a truncated Palestinian “state” comprised of four disconnected cantons, three in the West Bank and Gaza. By annexing its major settlement blocs defined by the Wall, Israel thereby expands onto 85% of the country, leaving the Palestinians confined to impoverished enclaves on the remaining 15% of the land. In such a “two-state solution” Israel would control the borders, external and internal Palestinian movement, the “Greater” Jerusalem area, all the water resources, the air space, the communications sphere and even the Palestinian state’s foreign policy. Such a Bantustan would have no genuine sovereignty or viable economy – but would have to accept all the traumatized and impoverished Palestinian refugees.

(2) If this fails, primarily because Israel cannot find the quisling Palestinian leader who would sign off on a Bantustan, Plan B – the Livni-Rice plan – calls for the unilateral declaration by the US of a “provisional” Palestinian state with no fixed borders, no meaningful sovereignty and no viable economy, squeezed between the Wall, Israel’s eastern “demographic” border incorporating the settlement blocs, and the Jordan Valley, Israel’s eastern “security” border. The Palestinians would thus be left in the limbo of a “provisional” state indefinitely – or until they agree to a Bantustan – all in conformity to the parameters of the “Road Map.” Period.

Regardless of the “peace initiative” of the moment – the Road Map, the Saudi initiative, the summit at Sharm el-sheikh, the appointment of a Middle East envoy – all these plans will have to conform to one of these alternatives or be doomed to irrelevance.

What happens in Gaza, then (tellingly nicknamed “Hamastan,” the Palestinian cantons of the West Bank now dubbed “Fatahland”), is therefore irrelevant to Israel, since Gaza represents nothing more than a tiny part of the tiny Palestinian Bantustan (about 8%). Whether Gaza would have been “quieted” after the Israeli disengagement as Sharon had planned, exporting cheap labor into Israel and perhaps enjoying limited economic growth, whether it was merely isolated and impoverished due to US and Israeli sanctions after the Hamas election victory or whether, as happened, it explodes, nothing will hamper Israel’s ceaseless process of consolidating its hold on the West Bank. Sooner or later, in the Israeli-American plan, Gaza will fall into place.

Not only are the Palestinians irrelevant, in Israel’s view, but the Hamas “takeover” is actually a positive development, since it furthers the apartheid process. A key reason why Palestinians voted for Hamas was the perception that it would resist pressures to accept a Bantustan better than the weak, vacillating Fatah movement, which was seen as little more than Israel’s policeman in the Territories. Israel, the US and a complicit Europe is thus seen as trying to isolate precisely those who truly resist the Occupation while “strengthening” Abbas and the “moderates” – “moderate” defined as those willing to pacify the Palestinians without securing their fundamental right to a sovereign and viable state of their own. The American-sponsored program of arming Fatah against its own people, complete with “lending” them an American general (Dayton), only confirms these suspicions, especially if they make Abbas dependent upon outside forces for his survival.

Israel and the US are doing in microcosm in Palestine what the US is doing throughout the Muslim world, forcing the Palestinians to choose between two unacceptable options: either the prospects of an apartheid regime which is all the “moderates” can deliver or continued resistance to occupation and apartheid under Hamas at the price of international isolation and an unwanted process of Islamization. Where are the true liberators who can deliver a viable Palestinian state while recognizing – though standing up to – Israel? Where are the progressive leaders who represent the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the Palestinian people? Where are the “strong” leaders that Bush claims are lacking on the Palestinian side? Either dead, the victims of a 30-year campaign on the part of Israel to eliminate any effective Palestinian leader, or languishing in refugee camps or in exile, or in prison. If Marwan Bargouti and the prisoners of all the factions who produced the Prisoners’ Document, the only viable peace plan that has any chance of success, were free and allowed to lead their people, the Israel/Palestine conflict could be resolved tomorrow.

What is lacking, of course, is good faith. The will among governments to stand up for Palestinian rights and against Israeli apartheid is totally lacking. The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz (21.6.07) noted the cynicism underlying the recent Olmert-Bush meeting. “Olmert reached an understanding with…Bush during his visit to Washington that it is necessary to support Abbas,” a senior political source in Jerusalem said. “The decision to aid Abbas was made despite skepticism about his chances for success, in view of past experience. Olmert and Bush agreed they must not allow the impression that Abbas failed because Israel or the U.S. failed him.”

Israel is not going to bolster Abbas – unless he becomes the collaborator Israel is looking for, which he won’t. Olmert has already announced that there will be no final status negotiations in the foreseeable future. So neither the Saudi Inititative nor the Sharm meeting will lead to genuine negotiations. The US, with its moribund Road Map, will not facilitate the establishment of a viable Palestinian state and Europe will not act independently to do so, even in its own interest. The Palestinians, for their part, are powerless to achieve a viable state on their own and will continue to be beaten and blamed for their own incarceration and resistance.

Our governments have failed us. Unless we, the people worldwide, can mobilize grassroots opposition to the Israeli-US-European Occupation, a new apartheid regime, in the Holy Land no less, will soon emerge before our very eyes. Its only when the people lead that our “leaders” will even contemplate doing the right thing.

***

Jeff Halper is the Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and a candidate, with the Palestinian peace activist Ghassan Andoni, for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.

He can be reached at jeff@icahd.org

What Hamas Wants...

2007-06-25T13:22:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/20/opinion/20yousef.html?_r=1&ex=1183003200&amp;amp;e&oref=slogin

THE events in Gaza over the last few days have been described in the West as a coup. In essence, they have been the opposite. Eighteen months ago, our Hamas Party won the Palestinian parliamentary elections and entered office under Prime Minister Ismail Haniya but never received the handover of real power from Fatah, the losing party. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has now tried to replace the winning Hamas government with one of his own, returning Fatah to power while many of our elected members of Parliament languish in Israeli jails. That is the real coup.

From the day Hamas won the general elections in 2006 it offered Fatah the chance of joining forces and forming a unity government. It tried to engage the international community to explain its platform for peace. It has consistently offered a 10-year cease-fire with the Israelis to try to create an atmosphere of calm in which we resolve our differences. Hamas even adhered to a unilateral cease-fire for 18 months in an effort to normalize the situation on the ground. None of these points appear to have been recognized in the press coverage of the last few days.

Nor has it been evident to many people in the West that the civil unrest in Gaza and the West Bank has been precipitated by the American and Israeli policy of arming elements of the Fatah opposition who want to attack Hamas and force us from office. For 18 months we have tried to find ways to coexist with Fatah, entering into a unity government, even conceding key positions in the cabinet to their and international demands, negotiating up until the last moment to try to provide security for all of our people on the streets of Gaza.

Sadly, it became apparent that not all officials from Fatah were negotiating in good faith. There were attempts on Mr. Haniya’s life last week, and eventually we were forced into trying to take control of a very dangerous situation in order to provide political stability and establish law and order.

The streets of Gaza are now calm for the first time in a very long time. We have begun disarming some of the drug dealers and the armed gangs and we hope to restore a sense of security and safety to the citizens of Gaza. We want to get children back to school, get basic services functioning again, and provide long-term economic gains for our people.

Our stated aim when we won the election was to effect reform, end corruption and bring economic prosperity to our people. Our sole focus is Palestinian rights and good governance. We now hope to create a climate of peace and tranquillity within our community that will pave the way for an end to internal strife and bring about the release of the British journalist Alan Johnston, whose kidnapping in March by non-Hamas members is a stain on the reputation of the Palestinian people.

We reject attempts to divide Palestine into two parts and to pass Hamas off as an extreme and dangerous force. We continue to believe that there is still a chance to establish a long-term truce. But this will not happen unless the international community fully engages with Hamas.

Any further attempts to marginalize us, starve our people into submission or attack us militarily will prove that the United States and Israeli governments are not genuinely interested in seeing an end to the violence. Dispassionate observers over the next few weeks will be able to make up their own minds as to each side’s true intentions.

***

Ahmed Yousef is the political adviser to Ismail Haniya, who became the Palestinian prime minister last year.

Photo Exhibit - "Qalandiya: Our Life"

2007-06-20T11:12:00.000-07:00

Here is a link to some great pictures by Ahmad Housheih done as a part of the al-liquindoi Photography Project at Birzeit University in the West Bank. The pictures are of Qalandiya Checkpoint between Ramallah and Occupied East Jerusalem. Its the place that I earlier described as the most dehumanizing experience of my life. I made that claim early in my time in the Occupied Territories and would revise that opinion a number of times - have a look at the pictures and see what I was talking about.

http://www.al-liquindoi.com/gallery-housheih2.html

and check out the other photographs that came from this project at...

http://www.al-liquindoi.com/gallerypalestine2.html

New Uri Avnery and Naomi Klein Articles

2007-06-19T05:49:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple of great articles by two strong progressive voices. They deal with issues that precipitated the events in Gaza last week.

Uri Avnery is the head of the Israeli peace movement, Gush Shalom, and a former member of the Israeli Knesset.

Naomi Klein is the author of "No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies" (Picador) and, most recently, "Fences and Windows: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate" (Picador). Her new book, "The Shock Doctrine", will be out in September.

Crocodile Tears

Uri Avnery

http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=23041

WHAT HAPPENS when one and a half million human beings are imprisoned in a tiny, arid territory, cut off from their compatriots and from any contact with the outside world, starved by an economic blockade and unable to feed their families?

Some months ago, I described this situation as a sociological experiment set up by Israel, the United States and the European Union. The population of the Gaza Strip as guinea pigs.

This week, the experiment showed results. They proved that human beings react exactly like other animals: when too many of them are crowded into a small area in miserable conditions, they become aggressive, and even murderous. The organizers of the experiment in Jerusalem, Washington, Berlin, Oslo, Ottawa and other capitals could rub their hands in satisfaction. The subjects of the experiment reacted as foreseen. Many of them even died in the interests of science.

But the experiment is not yet over. The scientists want to know what happens if the blockade is tightened still further.

WHAT HAS caused the present explosion in the Gaza Strip?

The timing of Hamas' decision to take over the Strip by force was not accidental. Hamas had many good reasons to avoid it. The organization is unable to feed the population. It has no interest in provoking the Egyptian regime, which is busy fighting the Muslim Brotherhood, the mother-organization of Hamas. Also, the organization has no interest in providing Israel with a pretext for tightening the blockade.

But the Hamas leaders decided that they had no alternative but to destroy the armed organizations that are tied to Fatah and take their orders from President Mahmoud Abbas. The US has ordered Israel to supply these organizations with large quantities of weapons, in order to enable them to fight Hamas. The Israeli army chiefs did not like the idea, fearing that the arms might end up in the hands of Hamas (as is actually happening now). But our government obeyed American orders, as usual.

The American aim is clear. President Bush has chosen a local leader for every Muslim country, who will rule it under American protection and follow American orders. In Iraq, in Lebanon, in Afghanistan, and also in Palestine.

Hamas believes that the man marked for this job in Gaza is Mohammed Dahlan. For years it has looked as if he was being groomed for this position. The American and Israeli media have been singing his praises, describing him as a strong, determined leader, "moderate" (i.e. obedient to American orders) and "pragmatic" (i.e. obedient to Israeli orders). And the more the Americans and Israelis lauded Dahlan, the more they undermined his standing among the Palestinians. Especially as Dahlan was away in Cairo, as if waiting for his men to receive the promised arms.

In the eyes of Hamas, the attack on the Fatah strongholds in the Gaza Strip is a preventive war. The organizations of Abbas and Dahlan melted like snow in the Palestinian sun. Hamas has easily taken over the whole Gaza Strip.

How could the American and Israeli generals miscalculate so badly? They are able to think only in strictly military terms: so-and-so many soldiers, so-and-so many machine guns. But in interior struggles in particular, quantitative calculations are secondary. The morale of the fighters and public sentiment are far more important. The members of the Fatah organizations do not know what they are fighting for. The Gaza population supports Hamas, because they believe that it is fighting the Israeli occupier. Their opponents look like collaborators of the occupation. The American statements about their intention of arming them with Israeli weapons have finally condemned them.

That is not a matter of Islamic fundamentalism. In this respect all nations are the same: they hate collaborators of a foreign occupier, whether they are Norwegian (Quisling), French (Petain) or Palestinian.

IN WASHINGTON and Jerusalem, politicians are bemoaning the "weakness of Mahmoud Abbas".

They see now that the only person who could prevent anarchy in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank was Yasser Arafat. He had a natural authority. The masses adored him. Even his adversaries, like Hamas, respected him. He created several security apparatuses that competed with each other, in order to prevent any single apparatus from carrying out a coup-d'etat. Arafat was able to negotiate, sign a peace agreement and get his people to accept it.

But Arafat was pilloried by Israel as a monster, imprisoned in the Mukata'ah and, in the end, murdered. The Palestinian public elected Mahmoud Abbas as his successor, hoping that he would get from the Americans and the Israelis what they had refused to give to Arafat.

If the leaders in Washington and Jerusalem had indeed been interested in peace, they would have hastened to sign a peace agreement with Abbas, who had declared that he was ready to accept the same far-reaching compromise as Arafat. The Americans and the Israelis heaped on him all conceivable praise and rebuffed him on every concrete issue.

They did not allow Abbas even the slightest and most miserable achievement. Ariel Sharon plucked his feathers and then sneered at him as "a featherless chicken". After the Palestinian public had patiently waited in vain for Bush to move, it voted for Hamas, in the desperate hope of achieving by violence what Abbas has been unable to achieve by diplomacy.

The Israeli leaders, both military and political, were overjoyed. They were interested in undermining Abbas, because he enjoyed Bush's confidence and because his stated position made it harder to justify their refusal to enter substantive negotiations. They did everything to demolish Fatah. To ensure this, they arrested Marwan Barghouti, the only person capable of keeping Fatah together.

The victory of Hamas suited their aims completely. With Hamas one does not have to talk, to offer withdrawal from the occupied territories and the dismantling of settlements. Hamas is that contemporary monster, a "terrorist" organization, and with terrorists there is nothing to discuss.

SO WHY were people in Jerusalem not satisfied this week? And why did they decide "not to interfere"?

True, the media and the politicians, who have helped for years to incite the Palestinian organizations against each other, showed their satisfaction and boasted "we told you so". Look how the Arabs kill each other. Ehud Barak was right, when he said years ago that our country is "a villa in the jungle".

But behind the scenes, voices of embarrassment, even anxiety, could be heard.

The turning of the Gaza Strip into Hamastan has created a situation for which our leaders were not ready. What to do now? To cut off Gaza altogether and let the people there starve to death? To establish contacts with Hamas? To occupy Gaza again, now that it has become one big tank trap? To ask the UN to station international troops there - and if so, how many countries would be crazy enough to risk their soldiers in this hell?

Our government has worked for years to destroy Fatah, in order to avoid the need to negotiate an agreement that would inevitably lead to the withdrawal from the occupied territories and the settlements there. Now, when it seems that this aim has been achieved, they have no idea what to do about the Hamas victory.

They comfort themselves with the thought that it cannot happen in the West Bank. There, Fatah reigns. There Hamas has no foothold. There our army has already arrested most of Hamas' political leaders. There Abbas is still in power.

Thus speak the generals, with the generals' logic. But in the West Bank, too, Hamas did win a majority in the last elections. There, too, it is only a matter of time before the population loses its patience. They see the expansion of the settlements, the Wall, the incursions of our army, the targeted assassinations, the nightly arrests. They will explode.

Successive Israeli governments have destroyed Fatah systematically, cut off the feet of Abbas and prepared the way for Hamas. They can't pretend to be surprised.

WHAT TO DO?

To go on boycotting Abbas or to provide him with arms, to enable him to fight for us against Hamas? To go on depriving him of any political achievement or to throw him some crumbs at long last? And anyway, isn't it too late?

(And on the Syrian front: to go on paying lip service to peace while sabotaging all the efforts of Bashar Assad to start negotiations? To negotiate secretly, despite American objections? Or continue doing nothing at all?)

At present, there is no policy, and no government which could determine a policy.

So who will save us? Ehud Barak?

Barak's victory in this week's Labor Party leadership run-off has turned him almost automatically into the next Minister of Defense. His strong personality and his experience as Chief of Staff and Prime Minister assure him of a dominant position in the restructured government. Olmert will deal with the area in which he is an unmatched master - party machinations. But Barak will have a decisive influence on policy.

In the government of the two Ehuds, Ehud Barak will decide on matters of war and peace.

Until now, practically all his actions have had negative results. He came very close to an agreement with Assad the father and escaped at the last moment. He withdrew the Israeli army from South Lebanon, but without speaking with Hizbullah, which took over. He compelled Arafat to come to Camp David, insulted him there and declared that we have no partner for peace. This dealt a death blow to the chances of peace, a blow which still paralyzes the Israeli public. He has boasted that his real intention was to "unmask" Arafat. He was more of a failed Napoleon than an Israeli de Gaulle.

Will the Ethiopian change his skin, the leopard his spots? Hard to believe.

IN THE dramas of William Shakespeare, there is frequently a comic interlude at tense moments. And not only there.

Shimon Peres, the person who in 55 years of political activity had never won an election, did the impossible this week: he got elected President of Israel.

Many years ago, I entitled an article about him "Mr. Sisyphus", because again and again he had almost reached the threshold of success, and success had evaded him. Now he might feel like thumbing his nose at the gods after reaching the summit, but - alas - without the boulder. The office of the president is devoid of content and jurisdiction. A hollow politician in a hollow position.

Now everybody expects a flurry of activity at the president's palace. There will certainly be peace conferences, meetings of personalities, high-sounding declarations and illustrious plans. In short - much ado about nothing.

The practical result is that Olmert's position has been strengthened. He has succeeded in installing Peres in the President's office and Barak in the Ministry of Defense. In the short term, Olmert's position is assured.

And in the meantime, the experiment in Gaza continues, Hamas is taking over and the trio - Ehud 1, Ehud 2 and Shimon Peres are shedding crocodile tears.

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

Laboratory for a Fortressed World

Naomi Klein

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070702/klein

Gaza in the hands of Hamas, with masked militants sitting in the president's chair; the West Bank on the edge; Israeli army camps hastily assembled in the Golan Heights; a spy satellite over Iran and Syria; war with Hezbollah a hair trigger away; a scandal-plagued political class facing a total loss of public faith.

At a glance, things aren't going well for Israel. But here's a puzzle: Why, in the midst of such chaos and carnage, is the Israeli economy booming like it's 1999, with a roaring stock market and growth rates nearing China's?

Thomas Friedman recently offered his theory in the New York Times. Israel "nurtures and rewards individual imagination," and so its people are constantly spawning ingenious high-tech start-ups--no matter what messes their politicians are making. After perusing class projects by students in engineering and computer science at Ben Gurion University, Friedman made one of his famous fake-sense pronouncements: Israel "had discovered oil." This oil, apparently, is located in the minds of Israel's "young innovators and venture capitalists," who are too busy making megadeals with Google to be held back by politics.

Here's another theory: Israel's economy isn't booming despite the political chaos that devours the headlines but because of it. This phase of development dates back to the mid-'90s, when Israel was in the vanguard of the information revolution--the most tech-dependent economy in the world. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Israel's economy was devastated, facing its worst year since 1953. Then came 9/11, and suddenly new profit vistas opened up for any company that claimed it could spot terrorists in crowds, seal borders from attack and extract confessions from closed-mouthed prisoners.

Within three years, large parts of Israel's tech economy had been radically repurposed. Put in Friedmanesque terms: Israel went from inventing the networking tools of the "flat world" to selling fences to an apartheid planet. Many of the country's most successful entrepreneurs are using Israel's status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious enemies, as a kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day showroom--a living example of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war. And the reason Israel is now enjoying supergrowth is that those companies are busily exporting that model to the world.

Discussions of Israel's military trade usually focus on the flow of weapons into the country--US-made Caterpillar bulldozers used to destroy homes in the West Bank and British companies supplying parts for F-16s. Overlooked is Israel's huge and expanding export business. Israel now sends $1.2 billion in "defense" products to the United States--up dramatically from $270 million in 1999. In 2006 Israel exported $3.4 billion in defense products--well over a billion more than it received in US military aid. That makes Israel the fourth-largest arms dealer in the world, overtaking Britain.

Much of this growth has been in the so-called "homeland security" sector. Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of this year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2 billion--an increase of 20 percent. The key products and services are high-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger profiling and prisoner interrogation systems--precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories.

And that is why the chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn't threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the "global war on terror."

It's no coincidence that the class projects at Ben Gurion that so impressed Friedman have names like "Innovative Covariance Matrix for Point Target Detection in Hyperspectral Images" and "Algorithms for Obstacle Detection and Avoidance." Thirty homeland security companies were launched in Israel in the past six months alone, thanks in large part to lavish government subsidies that have transformed the Israeli army and the country's universities into incubators for security and weapons start-ups (something to keep in mind in the debates about the academic boycott).

Next week, the most established of these companies will travel to Europe for the Paris Air Show, the arms industry's equivalent of Fashion Week. One of the Israeli companies exhibiting is Suspect Detection Systems (SDS), which will be showcasing its Cogito1002, a white, sci-fi-looking security kiosk that asks air travelers to answer a series of computer-generated questions, tailored to their country of origin, while they hold their hand on a "biofeedback" sensor. The device reads the body's reactions to the questions, and certain responses flag the passenger as "suspect."

Like hundreds of other Israeli security start-ups, SDS boasts that it was founded by veterans of Israel's secret police and that its products were road-tested on Palestinians. Not only has the company tried out the biofeedback terminals at a West Bank checkpoint; it claims the "concept is supported and enhanced by knowledge acquired and assimilated from the analysis of thousands of case studies related to suicide bombers in Israel."

Another star of the Paris Air Show will be Israeli defense giant Elbit, which plans to showcase its Hermes 450 and 900 unmanned air vehicles. As recently as May, according to press reports, Israel used the drones on bombing missions in Gaza. Once tested in the territories, they are exported abroad: The Hermes has already been used at the Arizona-Mexico border; Cogito1002 terminals are being auditioned at an unnamed US airport; and Elbit, one of the companies behind Israel's "security barrier," has partnered with Boeing to construct the Department of Homeland Security's $2.5 billion "virtual" border fence around the United States.
Since Israel began its policy of sealing off the occupied territories with checkpoints and walls, human rights activists have often compared Gaza and the West Bank to open-air prisons. But in researching the explosion of Israel's homeland security sector, a topic I explore in greater detail in a forthcoming book (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism), it strikes me that they are something else too: laboratories where the terrifying tools of our security states are being field-tested. Palestinians--whether living in the West Bank or what the Israeli politicians are already calling "Hamasistan"--are no longer just targets. They are guinea pigs.

So in a way Friedman is right: Israel has struck oil. But the oil isn't the imagination of its techie entrepreneurs. The oil is the war on terror, the state of constant fear that creates a bottomless global demand for devices that watch, listen, contain and target "suspects." And fear, it turns out, is the ultimate renewable resource.

June 9th Day of Action

2007-06-13T12:26:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who organized and mobilized this past weekend for the June 9th Day of Action against Chapters-Indigo and their relationship with the Heseg Foundation.

I was in Ottawa for a wedding and stopped in on those handing out fliers in front of the Rideau street Chapters store. I thanked them then for doing what they were doing and I gave them "hellos" and encouragements from their counterparts in Toronto and around Canada.

If you want any information, including details of how Heather Reisman and her partner Gerry Scwartz, along with Robert Pritchard (head of media conglomerate Torstar which publishes the Toronto Star) and Professor Irving Abella (Professor at York University and husband to Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Abella) are associated with alleged War Criminals, visit the CAIA website here:

http://www.caiaweb.org/node/137

A response to Jason...

2007-06-07T14:15:00.000-07:00

Jason commented on my last blog posting writing...

"Would you care to explain how it is wrong to be pro-Israel when the position includes support for an independent and free Palestine? The only requirement is that the Palestinian government stops attacks against Israel."

8:22 AM

I thought it would be better if I brought this discussion (which I think will quickly turn back into a monologue) out into the open and not relegate it to the comments section of my posts.

For Jason:

Before I say what I’m going to say I want to thank you Jason in all sincerity for commenting on my last blog post. You’ve explained a few questions I had in my head, but have also left me wondering about others.

What troubles me so deeply about your callous moral equivocations is that you’re making them on a day when two Palestinian children were shot dead by the IOF in Gaza while they played with kites. Now I’m sure that you’ll suggest that maybe the whole story isn’t being told, that the kite may have held some sort of sophisticated weapon, or that Human Rights groups are notoriously biased. But as a small “l” liberal – as I assume you purport to be – I’m sure human rights play SOMEWHERE in your consciousness. An Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem published their report this year and stated that 141 Palestinian children were murdered by the Israeli military, while Palestinian terrorists murdered one Israeli child. Now you can accuse me of moral equivocations but a 141:1 ratio of child deaths may be relativism, but its also mass murder. Its ethnic cleansing.

So you can pretend that marching with the UJA – who’s slogans on the giant billboard just down the street from my office here reads: “Together with Israel”, and who’s inclusion of the Canadian flag in said ad attempts to suggest that Canada “stands” with a habitual human rights abuser – isn’t necessarily standing “against” a Palestinian State. But you and I and anyone who knows anything about this issue knows that such a position is bullshit. Which is why I now have nothing but contempt for the Liberal Party. At least the Conservatives are honest about their position.

Do I want to see Israel “not exist”? Actually no. I would love to see it as an actual democracy (but we know this is increasingly less-likely). Instead I want Israel to give back the thousands of dunams of land that the State of Israel (the one you marched together with last weekend) it STOLE from the Palestinian farmers who have lived there for decades if not centuries and millennia. The Apartheid Wall – and that’s what it is – is a tool of annexation. So I would love an Israeli State whose borders were faithful to the 1967 green-line, or international law, or even their own!

But what about you? You’re an active member of the Liberal Party of Canada. I assume that you are also a small “l” liberal. Your brilliant runner-up leader argues that wars should be started against chronic Human Rights Abusers, and yet he marches in togetherness with a government that includes a man who advocates the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from Israel? How do you feel about Avigdor Lieberman?

I work on issue related to the Occupation with Jewish women here in Toronto who have been spat upon by people walking in your UJA march. Brave women who protest the Occupation every week and who, under taunts of the most fascist sort, continue to testify to the brutality of the Occupation . You can hate me for calling you out on your fake liberalism, but why don’t you try and seek these people out? Or have you?

Maybe I’m attacking you too personally. I think its your last statement that really got me – that “The only requirement is that the Palestinian government stops attacks against Israel”. The homemade rocket attacks that kill some and frighten so many are hardly a pre-condition for peace. The Israeli state, in terms of violence, is totally unmatched when it comes to "Palestinian Terrorism". Bombings in Tel Aviv, or the launching of homemade projectiles against Sderot, are abhorrent, but luckily for my position, the latter is almost unheard of now, and the former is hardly the military workings of a powerful "government" as you would suggest. On the other hand, the "precision targeting" of civilian areas by one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world has resulted in mass civilian deaths. The economic boycott and theft of millions of Palestinian tax dollars by the Israelis has promoted lawlessness in Gaza - much to the benefit of Israel.

The abject poverty (as reported by such bastions of socialism – the UN, the World Bank) that has been inflicted upon 1.4 million people in Gaza is collective punishment. The rockets fired at Sderot are shot by how many people? How many terrorists would it take for you to justify breaking the Geneva Conventions and punishing all of the people of Gaza? Tell me what’s the number of terrorist that justifies the destruction of the Gazan infrastructure to the point where people literally drown in pools of flowing human shit? 1000 Terrorists? What’s the number?

Tell me then Jason what have YOU done to alter Israel's policies towards the Palestinians? You march with the UJA and hide behind the rhetoric of "I support a Palestinian State", but how? In the Bantustans of Barack's proposal? Will you and the Liberal leaders you associate with make an appearance this weekend at nation-wide protests in front of Chapters-Indigo stores, in solidarity with the Palestinians murdered by the Israeli army?

Tell me - what have you done that is "pro-Palestinian"? I would genuinely like to know. Maybe it will keep me from thinking that the Liberal party is populated with people who are just deeply confused and not morally bankrupt politicians pandering for votes.

Oh what a Love-In! Jockeying for votes at the UJA March

2007-05-31T07:19:00.000-07:00

Jason Cherniak is a Liberal Party blogger and his recent posts have dealt with the Liberal Party and their position on Israel.

This past weekend the annual UJA (United Jewish Appeal) "Walk with Israel" took place in Toronto and judging by the pictures on Jason's Blog - which I've attached here - the Liberals are clamoring to be seen as pro-Israel partisans.

What is even more astounding to me is how there seems to be a race between the Conservative Party of Canada and the Liberals to see who can appear to be more "pro-Israel". Want proof of this? Just read the comments below - the debate isn't about whether or not attending a pro-Israel march is a legitimate act of a Canadian Politician, its which federal party is the most uncompromisingly "pro-Israel".

http://jasoncherniak.blogspot.com/2007/05/israel-is-dion-priority.html

Oh and FYI: Here's Jason's helpful list of Liberal Party MP's who made it out to support the Israel and the UJA...

"As a personal matter, I would like to thank Stéphane Dion, Michael Ignatieff, Bob Rae, Gerard Kennedy, Ken Dryden, Martha Hall Findlay, Joe Volpe, Anita Neville, Irwin Cotler, Carolyn Bennett, Susan Kadis, Judy Sgro, Mario Silva, Borys Wrzesnewskyj, Senator Art Eggleton, Senator Jerry Grafstein, Bonnie Crombie, Deborah Coyne, Minister Caplan, Minister Kwinter, David Zimmer and Mario Racco for joining us."

I'd like to thank Jason for making a list of Liberals I will encourage others not to vote for. Thanks Jason!

So here are the pics: nothing like seeing our politicians (hey - all Caucasians by the way!) celebrate a racist state!

Everyone smile! What a cute kid. Too bad they haven't heard:

141 kids were murdered by the Israeli Army last year.

Some children's lives are worth more.

"See! I'm wearing a t-shirt and waving a flag - we Conservatives love Israel too!"

(Oh, sorry, not from the UJA march)

Nahr al-Bared

2007-05-30T08:05:00.001-07:00

This is an excerpt from a recent Robert Fisk report from the Palestinian refugee camp Nahr al-Bared as the Lebanese Army fires into the camp in an attempt to root out Fatah al-Islam militants.

What, I kept asking myself yesterday, have we unleashed now? Well, you can ask Suheila Mustafa who stood yesterday at the bedside of her 45-year-old sister, Samia, so terribly wounded by army shellfire in the face that she could neither talk nor focus upon us with her bloated left eye. "We had just woken up when we heard the first barrage of gunfire," she said. "My sister was beside me and fell down with her head bleeding. She hemorrhaged from 5.50 in the morning till 3 in the afternoon. At last my brother brought us all out in his car. But let me tell you this. The Palestinian people have heard Walid Jumblatt and we say 'thank you' to him and let us have more shelling. And I would like to thank Prime Minister Siniora, and say thanks - really thanks - very much to George Bush and to Condoleezza Rice. I really want to thank them for these shells and these wounds we are suffering. And if Rice really wants to send more materiel to the Lebanese Army, she had better hurry up. There is a woman still in the camp who is very pregnant and the child in her womb will be born and will grow into a man - and then we'll see!"

The reports coming out of Lebanon state that Fatah al-Islam is about 700 fighters strong, but that only 3% of them are actually Palestinian. That's 21 of 700. And just a reminder: Fatah al-Islam is NOT "Fatah" - the fifty year old Palestinian Liberation Movement, Yasser Arafat's organization that represented Palestinians legitimate struggle for national liberation.

Out of Bounds - Haaretz Article

2007-05-25T12:05:00.000-07:00

This morning my co-worker asked if I liked the blogspot interface and I told him "not really" but that I hadn't posted anything in months (which my mother also reminded me of this past week). He responded that it was a shame.

So here I am.

I'm catching up on old messages from listservs that I'm a subscriber of. Here's an interesting story from Haaretz about a Jerusalem neighbourhood.

w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m

18/05/2007
Out of bounds

By Lily Galili

On Tuesday of this week, convoys of vehicles made their way through the streets of Jerusalem. From early in the morning, thousands of celebrants ascended to the capital for the 40th anniversary of the city's unification. This time even the traffic jams did not annoy the inhabitants, whose nerves are often wracked by the plethora of events that are held in their city.

A few kilometers from the city's center stretched another traffic jam, this one caused by a number of buses that had set out from the Shuafat refugee camp for the Nakba (Palestinian catastrophe of 1948) commemoration in Ramallah. This year the two events took place on the same day. The other cars were just stuck at a roadblock. It should be noted that the Shuafat refugee camp is also within the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem and its 20,000 inhabitants hold the blue identity cards of residents of the city.

There is, of course, nothing new in these two pictures, which represent a polarized reality. Only the fact that both of them occurred simultaneously, that on the day that the 40th anniversary of Jerusalem's re-unification was commemorated the Nakba was also marked, afforded them for a moment a sad, cynical, despairing significance. "On days like this I don't like to leave the camp,"
says Hader Dibs, 43, the secretary general of the refugee camp services committee. "At times like this I prefer to remain off to one side, temporarily. Altogether, we are temporary people."

Within this temporariness, Jerusalem is the more constant factor in Dibs' life, as it is in the lives of his fellow refugees in the camp.
Every several years, the hand of fate seems to descend and move them from one place to another, like pieces on a chessboard. In 1948 his family was expelled from Beit Latif, near Beit Shemesh, and settled in the Old City of Jerusalem. In 1966 they were transferred to the Shuafat camp, under an agreement between Jordan, which ruled the city at that time, and the United Nations. They were promised an improvement in their living conditions, but in fact they were sent to live in small hovels.

Over the years the 540 families in the camp became 20,000 people, living on 203 dunams (roughly 500 acres), and now they are once again slated to be moved. This time the intention is not to move them physically, but rather to move the separation wall in the area in a way that will put the camp outside the municipal jurisdiction of Jerusalem. Despite the blue Israeli identity cards held by residents of Shuafat, the Israeli authorities have now decided that they are not in fact Jerusalemites.

Were the situation not so sad, it might be quite funny: Just when the negative immigration from Jerusalem is being totted up and the number of leavers is being counted (17,000 men and women this year), 20,000 people are waging a determined struggle for their right to remain in the capital.

But these people, Palestinians, are not wanted. There is no better proof of this than the separation fence that is planned to cut the neighborhood off from Jerusalem. In the meantime their case is being clarified in the High Court of Justice, the Ir Amim association is helping them in their public struggle and the fence at their doorstep is standing unfinished.

Truth be told, Shuafat residents don't get much from being part of Jerusalem. Everyday matters in the camp are run by the UN, not by the Jerusalem municipality. Perhaps it is better thus: The inhabitants of adjacent Ras Hamis, also residents of Jerusalem who are about to be transferred to the territories by the fence, are served by the municipality. That is to say, they aren't served. Many of them leave their garbage on the boundary between their neighborhood and the refugee camp so that the UN will collect what the municipality ignores.

Dibs says that in fact he would like to celebrate Jerusalem Day, but not the one that is being celebrated now. "To be a Jerusalemite - for me that's everything," he says. "I was born here and I grew up here and all my family is from here. I have someone in every neighborhood of the city - Beit Safafa, Beit Hanina, Jabal Mukaber. There is no road that I don't know and not a day goes by when I don't go up to pray at Al-Aqsa. I know all that talk about how we want to remain Jerusalemites because of the National Insurance, because of the benefits. That's nonsense. We pay more than we get. I don't want money, I want control. I want Jerusalem as my capital city. I want the Palestinians to control it, not the Israelis and not the Jordanians. Just us. And I am talking about the 1967 borders, not about the whole city. I heard that [Prime Minister] Ehud Olmert says that the camp is not part of Jerusalem. What is that supposed to mean? The camp is part of Shuafat and Shuafat is Jerusalem. Where is he bringing that history from? I am more of a Jerusalemite than he is."

'The good cop'

As we walk around the camp, the inhabitants frequently address Dibs, whom they know as "Abu Amir," regarding all kinds of issues. He has status here by virtue of his position on the services committee and also by virtue of his struggle against the occupation, a struggle that led him to spend a year and a half in an Israeli prison. From the neighborhood activity and from the arrest he acquired two acquaintances. One, a man known as Abu Samer who spent a lot of time moving around the neighborhood, would play table tennis with the inhabitants and would also invite them to interrogations by the Shin Bet security service. Years later Dibs saw Abu Samer on television, and he was none other than MK Israel Hasson of Yisrael Beiteinu. The second acquaintanceship was "Amir," the interrogator who questioned him at the jail at the Russian Compound. Dibs named his eldest son after him. "He was the good cop," he explains.

Ibrahim Bakri also has a pedigree in the camp. His father was the first of its inhabitants to be sent to prison because of membership in the Palestine Liberation Organization. Bakri, who was born in 1948, remembers well the day the Jordanians and the UN moved them from the Old City to the camp. He remembers the trucks that came to take them away, the people who were forcibly taken out of houses and the dinar that each truck received for carrying out the task. "No one in the world needs us," says Bakri sadly. "Not the Arab world, not the Western world. All we have is this land where two peoples are now living in fear, and instead of living together are competing as to who will get rid of whom. It isn't Jerusalem Day that is being celebrated today, it's the occupation of Jerusalem."

Bakri, a welder who has done a lot of work in West Jerusalem, has a practical suggestion: With part of the new budget of $1.5 billion that was approved for Jerusalem this week, a new Temple will be built, at a location somewhat distant from the Al-Aqsa Mosque. This seems to him a plan that is far preferable to the construction of the fence that will once again transform the inhabitants of the camp, all of whom are Jerusalemites, into de facto refugees.

What have we come to?

2007-03-27T12:33:00.000-07:00

Is this is the global punishment for Gazans because they voted for the wrong party?

Lift the embargo now!

Gaza cesspool wall collapses; 5 dead

Five people died Tuesday when an earth embankment around a cesspool collapsed in the northern Gaza Strip, sending a flash flood of sewage into the village.

The victims included two women in their 70s, two toddlers and a teenage girl, said the Palestinian Health Ministry.

At least 25 people were injured when the flood of waste spilled into the village of Umm Naser, 25 homes were destroyed and dozens more houses damaged, said officials.

A local official blamed shoddy infrastructure for the disaster as angry residents mobbed government officials and reporters at the scene. One minister's bodyguards had to fire shots in the air to disperse the angry crowd.

Rescuers, along with members of the militant group Hamas, rushed to the scene to search for people buried by the sewage.

The governor of north Gaza, Ismail Abu Shammala, blamed Israel, saying the problems started when Gaza was under Israeli control 20 years ago, said Reuters.

The Israeli army offered humanitarian assistance to help clean up the spill, but there was no word on whether the offer had been accepted.

Ziad Abu Farya, head of the village council, described the scene as "our tsunami."

UN warning

A 2004 UN report warned that the sewage facility was at maximum capacity and flooding was inevitable unless a new waste treatment plant was constructed. It said the effluent lake was a breeding ground for mosquitoes and waterborne diseases, posing a serious health hazard.

The treatment facility served two heavily populated areas, Beit Lahiya and Jabalya.

A spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said funding has been secured to build a new waste treatment plant, but Israeli-Palestinian violence has delayed construction.

The community is about 270 metres from the Israeli border and the site of Palestinian rocket attacks, and Israeli artillery fire and aircraft attacks.

The Palestinian Authority has also faced a severe cash crunch since Hamas formed the government last year. A number of Western nations and Israel cut humanitarian aid to the government until Hamas renounced violence and recognized Israel.

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2007/03/27/gaza-sewage.html

Iraq 101: Mother Jones

2007-03-26T08:38:00.001-07:00

The American Magazine Mother Jones has published a pretty solid primer on Iraq and the war. I recommend you all check it out.

http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2007/03/iraq_101.html

Here's a sample of what you'll read:

With Friends Like These

41 cents of every dollar of American reconstruction money is spent on the Iraqi military or police.
3 cents goes to “democracy building.”
A newly recruited Iraqi soldier makes $60 a month.
Iraqi units report that half of their soldiers go awol when sent to new combat areas. The Pentagon says it’s trying to instill “a more deployable mindset.”
Of the 323,000 members of Iraq’s security forces, 1/3 are considered “technically proficient” and only 10,000 are “politically dependable.”
American trainers report that 70% of the police force has been infiltrated by militias.
90,000 rifles and 80,000 pistols supplied to the Iraqi security forces cannot be accounted for.

Haaretz: Largest Settlement to be built in the West Bank since 1967

2007-02-28T10:57:00.000-08:00

Haaretz is today reporting that there are plans in the works to build the largest Israeli Settlement in the West Bank since the 1967 war. This is a horrible development at such a tenuous time. Again we need to ask ourselves this: while we demand Hamas recognize Israel's right to exist, when will Israel recognize Palestine's right to exist?

This development certainly indicates that Israel does not recognize Palestines right to exist.

Also, it is being reported in Haaretz that another illegal settlement in the West Bank is being built by two Canadian companies: Green Mount Homes and Green Park Homes. I urge you to read this article and make your objections known to these two Canadian companies that what they are doing is not only illegal according to international laws, but is worsening the crisis in the Middle East.

service@greenparkhomes.com

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/829740.html

***

From Haaretz Online:

Gov't promoting plan for new ultra-Orthodox East Jerusalem neighborhood

By Meron Rapoport, Haaretz Correspondent

Government bodies have been promoting a preliminary plan over the past few weeks to build a neighborhood of 11,000 units for the ultra-Orthodox near the East Jerusalem airport.

The plan also calls for the construction of a tunnel under a Palestinian neighborhood to connect the new quarter to one of the settlements in the Beit El area east of Ramallah.

MK Otniel Schneller (Kadima) said Tuesday that the Housing Ministry is the body that developed a plan to erect a massive new ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in East Jerusalem. The ministry denied any knowledge of the project.

Schneller also said Tuesday that the Jerusalem municipality was "happy with the idea."

In response to Schneller's claims that the housing ministry hatched the plan, they said, "the ministry has no knowledge of this plan. At most, only the Jerusalem district of the ministry knew about it."

The plan has not yet been submitted to the various planning committees since, according to Schneller, "it is only in the idea and feasibility stage."

The new neighborhood is to be built close to the separation fence near the Qalandiyah road block, which separates the Palestinian neighborhoods of north Jerusalem from Ramallah. If approved, it would be the largest building project over the Green Line in Jerusalem since the 1967 Six-Day War.

The neighborhood, which will apparently be built on state or Jewish National Fund land would sit in the heart of one of the most crowded urban Palestinian areas in the West Bank.

The architectural firm planning the project, Reches Eshkol, refused to divulge which government body had commissioned the plans. Despite the Housing Ministry's response, Haaretz has learned that the plan was presented a number of times to various official bodies, and that the director of the Housing Ministry's Jerusalem district, Moshe Merhavya, was present at least at one such instance.

Schneller said of the project: "I saw the plans in the programs division of the Housing Ministry and I very much enjoyed seeing them."

Schneller explained that even though the Safdie Plan to construct housing in the western part of Jerusalem has been shelved, the need to build in Jerusalem still exists. "The ultra-Orthodox public needs its solutions," he said. "There is the possibility that it will conquer the inner city, and that this city will then become an ultra-Orthodox-Arab city, which I would not want to happen."

Schneller, who is the former head of the Yesha settlement council and now serves as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's liaison to the settlers, said he has not yet spoken to the prime minister about the plan. "But from what I know of the government's position, there is an Israeli interest in establishing a neighborhood in Atarot.

The plan proposes connecting the new neighborhood to the ultra-Orthodox settlement of Kokhav Yaakov east of Ramallah, which is at present outside the planned route of the separation fence. To this end, a tunnel a few hundred meters long would be dug beneath the Palestinian village of Aqab and under the separation fence.

The idea to build an "eastern fence" to separate the settlements of the Jordan Valley and the mountains from large Palestinian communities like Ramallah had been raised in the past. The construction of the tunnel might be the first step in this direction. "If it is someday decided that Kokhav Yaakov will be part of the 'Jerusalem envelope' it would be logical to create such a link, but it has not yet been decided," Schneller said.

The municipality said that "when the plan is officially presented to the municipality, it will be discussed and a decision will be made about it."

Some of the neighborhoods built around Jerusalem after the Six-Day War were planned by the Housing Ministry and were established over the objections of then-mayor Teddy Kollek. Meron Benvenisti, who served as deputy mayor at that time, said that the area has complex problems: prior to the Six-Day war some of its land belonged to municipalities like al-Bireh, which are today in the Palestinian territories. "It is complete insanity to place tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews in the heart of a densely populated Arab area," he said. "No one thinks about how they will live there. It's like living in the middle of Ramallah."

Attorney Danny Zindman of the Ir Amim association says such a plan will lead to the "balkanization" of Jerusalem.