Diaspora Issues « Tikkunista!

3. Israel: Netanyahu’s Critics are Circling

May-04-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: The head of Israel’s internal security, Shin Bet, and the head of the Israeli military both attack Netanyahu and deny that there are reasons to wage war on Iran. Tzipi Livni, ex head of Katima (the “middle” party) says the country’s leaders are putting Israel at risk, and resigns in despair from the Knesset. And a fascinating piece from the Tikkun Daily Blog argues for the rights and obligations of Diaspora Jews to speak out on Israel’s politics.

* Ex-Israeli spy boss attacks Netanyahu and Barak over Iran The Guardian

Israel’s former security chief has censured the country’s “messianic” political leadership for talking up the prospects of a military strike on Iran’s nuclear programme. In unusually candid comments set to ratchet up tensions over Iran at the top of Israel’s political establishment, Yuval Diskin, who retired as head of the internal intelligence agency Shin Bet last year, said he had “no faith” in the abilities of the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and the defence minister, Ehud Barak, to conduct a war.

The pair, who are the foremost advocates of military action against Iran’s nuclear programme, were “not fit to hold the steering wheel of power”, Diskin told a meeting on Friday night. “My major problem is that I have no faith in the current leadership, which must lead us in an event on the scale of war with Iran or a regional war,” he said.

“I don’t believe in either the prime minister or the defence minister. I don’t believe in a leadership that makes decisions based on messianic feelings. Believe me, I have observed them from up close … They are not people who I, on a personal level, trust to lead Israel to an event on that scale and carry it off. They are misleading the public on the Iran issue. They tell the public that if Israel acts, Iran won’t have a nuclear bomb. This is misleading. Actually, many experts say that an Israeli attack would accelerate the Iranian nuclear race.”

Diskin’s remarks followed a furore over comments made on Wednesday by Israel’s serving military chief, Benny Gantz, which starkly contrasted with Netanyahu’s rhetoric on Iran. Gantz said he did not believe the Iranian leadership was prepared to “go the extra mile” to acquire nuclear weapons because it was “composed of very rational people” who understood the consequences.

* Israeli Security Elite Slams Netanyahu, sidetracks War on Iran Juan Cole Informed Comment

Not only are high officials and former officials of the Israeli security establishment pushing hard back against Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s seeming rush to war with Iran, they appear actually to be attempting to unseat him, as it becomes possible that Israel may go to early elections in September. Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has become the latest former high-ranking figure to savage Netanyahu and his defense minister Ehud Barak, for their threats to attack Iran unilaterally and soon. In contrast to Netanyahu’s circles, who have threatened a unilateral Israeli strike this summer, Olmert said categorically in a television interview that this is “definitely not to initiate an Israeli military strike.” Olmert, no dove, had himself launched the 2006 Lebanon and the 2008-9 Gaza Wars. But neither went well for Israel, and Olmert may have learned something from that.

…Former officials and opposition leaders have also been scathing about Netanyahu’s lack of interest in negotiating in good faith with Palestine Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, alleging that Netanyahu has zero interest in genuine peace talks.

* Tzipi Livni Quits Knesset, Says Israel’s Leaders Put Country At Existential Risk Haaretz Daily

Former Kadima leader Tzipi Livni resigned from the Knesset on Tuesday, warning in her resignation address that Israel’s leaders are putting the country’s existence at risk by choosing to ignore the mounting impatience on the part of the international community.

…The former Kadima leader also hinted at the possibility of her return to politics through different avenues, that she was “leaving the Knesset at this point, but I’m not retiring from public life,” saying that Israel was “too dear to me.” In her speech, Livni warned of an existential threat Israel faced under its current leadership, saying that “Israel is on a volcano, the international clock is ticking, and the existence of a Jewish, democratic state is in mortal danger.”

“The real danger is a politics that buries its head in the sand,” Livni said, adding that it didn’t “take a Shin Bet chief to know that.”

* I Own Israel: A Diaspora Jew’s Claim Tikkun Daily Blog

I own Israel because the country insists upon such an arrangement, flailing as it struggles to be both Jewish and democratic. I’m a stakeholder because, as a legally-recognized member of the people of Israel (having in the past proven to the State that I have a Jewish mother and father), I’m granted the unequivocal right to return to my country at a moment’s notice. I am encouraged, even solicited, to return to my country at a moment’s notice.

This ownership stake I hold in Israel is less a possession than it is a responsibility – a responsibility I accept willingly and with a seriousness of purpose. I don’t own an apartment in Jerusalem or an Israeli passport, but I do own the shared responsibility of ensuring that Israel, as the national outgrowth of my people, creates a just society. It is a responsibility that has its origins in tradition, in the Talmudic precept that all those within “Israel” are responsible for one another (כל ישראל ערבים זה לזה).

However, in political terms, it’s a responsibility that comes directly from Israel’s Declaration of Independence, a declaration which established the country as one “based on freedom, justice and peace” for all its inhabitants. It’s a declaration that appeals to me directly, in the diaspora, to help Israel realize this reality:

We appeal to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the Jews of Eretz-Israel in the tasks of immigration and upbuilding and to stand by them in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream – the redemption of Israel.

The redemption of Israel. This is why I often sharply critique Israel’s hawkish political elite, its settlement enterprise, its brutal suppression of the Palestinian people. It is why, when Israeli journalist Noam Sheizaf recently wrote in his review of Peter Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism that “the occupation is the greatest moral challenge of my generation,” I nodded in agreement. I nodded instinctively to the words my generation. For his generation is mine. As Jews, we are responsible for this. I am responsible for this – responsible for realizing the Israel envisioned upon its founding, an Israel created to “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants.”

4. Revisiting the Holocaust

May-04-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: No revisionism here, but a look at three very different ways the Holocaust has been cited in the past weeks. In the Guardian, there is a long and fascinating piece about Claude Lanzmann, who made the 9½ hour film “Shoah”. It is an essential read. In Israel, Haaretz newspaper attacks the misuse of Holocaust imagery to demonize political opponents, correctly observing that it cannot be both a unique horror in history, and a one-size-fits-all analogy. And we have a review of Shalom Auslander’s new book,Hope: A Tragedy, which is getting a lot of buzz. If you missed “Death Camp Blues” his powerful Moth podcast about his visit to Auschwitz, it’s also highly recommended.

* Claude Lanzmann: The Man Who Stood Witness For The World The Observer

Lanzmann is a witness of his time. He is one of the few people still living who can testify at close range to the epic events by which the second half of the 20th century is defined and measured.

During the second world war, he was a teenage guerrilla in the French resistance. In its aftermath, he was among the first western writers to probe communist East Germany, the USSR, Chairman Mao’s China and even North Korea, where he fell in love. He lived and worked among that Left Bank, leftwing existentialist avant-garde around his close friend Sartre, and was for many years the lover, travelling companion and confidant of De Beauvoir. He accompanied fighters of the Algerian revolution in desert redoubts under bombardment by the French air force, befriended both its leaders and General de Gaulle, only to be tear-gassed on the streets of the Latin Quarter during the événements of May 1968. He “embedded” himself (as we would say today) with the Israeli armed forces as deeply as is possible without actually joining the IDF, or Tsahal, as he calls them, by their Hebrew name.

But most famously of all, Lanzmann researched, directed and conducted the searing interviews for what is arguably the greatest film of all time, and certainly the most ambitious: the nine-and-a-half hour – “it could have been much longer”, he says – Shoah, which, more than any archive project, history book or attempt on film, remains the definitive and inimitable record for all time of the most appalling catastrophe in history.

*Israeli Politicians, Left And Right, Must Lay Holocaust To Rest Haaretz (Thanks David!)

When the Shoah is invoked by Benjamin Netanyahu to make the claim that “It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany,” the victims of the Shoah are forgotten, not remembered.

Peter Beinart, the American left-leaning Jewish and Zionist journalist, recently lambasted Netanyahu – and other elements of the Israeli right – for instrumentalizing the Shoah for blatant political purposes. This is a familiar accusation. What exposes its cynicism is its inherent contradiction: One cannot claim at one and the same time that the Shoah occupies a singular place in the history of the “crimes and horrors of humanity,” and yet use it as a one-size-fits-all analogy, whenever politically convenient (Ahmadinejad, however dangerous and appalling, is not Hitler ). The same tendency to use the Shoah as a political analogy to scare and condemn can be found in many political persuasions, not all of them on the right. But there is more: In incessantly invoking the Shoah for political purposes of the moment, as is often done in Israel, we are stirring the victims of the Shoah from the quiet of their death, turning them into phantoms and specters, and in effect ordering them to haunt the living, with no rest.

What is a phantom? A phantom is a dead person who haunts us because she did not get proper burial, and has been conjured from the dead to serve the needs of the living. Its spectral presence, caught between the realms of the dead and the living, makes it scary. Phantoms are very good instruments of fear because they are the dead who never go away.

* Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander reviewed by Naomi Alderman (who’s she?) The Guardian

Jews watch Holocaust films differently: we’re looking for advice. When should those schmucks have left the country? What do you do if you have to hide? How do you survive in a concentration camp? It constantly surprises my non-Jewish friends that I don’t feel, as they do, that this event is in the past. That I wonder if they’d hide me if the economy went really bad and people started voting for Nick Griffin. My non-Jewish friends are shocked when they suggest that I could move to (cheap, artsy) Berlin and I say “No, can’t. Too many ghosts of dead Jews.” The thing might be over for you, but it’s still alive for us.

In Shalom Auslander’s funny and acerbic new novel, Hope: A Tragedy, the Holocaust is still alive in the most real way possible. His hero, Kugel (a Dickensian name – kugel is a bland, puddingy Jewish potato dish), an ineffectual worrier with a troubled, overbearing mother, moves his wife and son into a new house only to find the elderly Anne Frank living in the attic.

Is she the real Anne Frank? Yes, it becomes clear, she’s not an apparition, she’s the real woman, grown old hiding in attics. When she tried to tell the world she was still alive, the publisher of her diary – 32m copies sold and counting, as Hope repeatedly reminds us – told her to stay dead. Frank herself is now hideous, deformed – as you would be. “They were survivors,” says Auslander elsewhere in the novel of superficially adorable chipmunks Kugel sees on his walks in the wood, “and survival wasn’t pretty.”

2. Voices From the Other Side of the Media

Apr-20-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: What’s the other side? The one the main stream media don’t carry. Mehanna’s speech is hugely moving, utterly cogent, depressingly convincing, essential reading. Barghouti, the Palestinian leader is also convincing on why “apartheid” is the right word. I don’t know of any other to describe this system of rule. I’ve been enjoying Cenk Uygur’s rants… and I haven’t seen that the supreme head of Iran ruled officially that the use of nuclear weapons is forbidden. Curious how all our papers and radio and TV missed that, isn’t it?

* Sentencing Statement By American Tarek Mehanna, Convicted Of Helping Al Qaeda Salon

In one of the most egregious violations of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech seen in quite some time, Tarek Mehanna, an American Muslim, was convicted this week in a federal court in Boston and then sentenced yesterday to 17 years in prison. He was found guilty of supporting Al Qaeda (by virtue of translating Terrorists’ documents into English and expressing “sympathetic views” to the group) as well as conspiring to “murder” U.S. soldiers in Iraq (i.e., to wage war against an invading army perpetrating an aggressive attack on a Muslim nation)…. I urge everyone to read something quite amazing: Mehanna’s incredibly eloquent, thoughtful statement at his sentencing hearing, before being given a 17-year prison term.

In your eyes, I’m a terrorist, and it’s perfectly reasonable that I be standing here in an orange jumpsuit. But one day, America will change and people will recognize this day for what it is. They will look at how hundreds of thousands of Muslims were killed and maimed by the US military in foreign countries, yet somehow I’m the one going to prison for “conspiring to kill and maim” in those countries – because I support the Mujahidin defending those people. They will look back on how the government spent millions of dollars to imprison me as a ”terrorist,” yet if we were to somehow bring Abeer al-Janabi back to life in the moment she was being gang-raped by your soldiers, to put her on that witness stand and ask her who the “terrorists” are, she sure wouldn’t be pointing at me.

The government says that I was obsessed with violence, obsessed with ”killing Americans.” But, as a Muslim living in these times, I can think of a lie no more ironic.

* Mustafa Barghouti to J Street: I know you don’t like the word apartheid, but what do you call a system that gives a settler 50 times more water than a Palestinian? via Mondoweiss

On March 26, at the J Street conference in Washington, D.C., Palestinian leader Mustafa Barghouti described apartheid in Palestine to a largely-Jewish audience. As he spoke, you could have heard a pin drop in a room jammed with 500 people hearing about the one-state option. His comments have resonated in the weeks since.

Some people might not like the word apartheid, when we say that we live in a system of apartheid and segregation, and I understand why you wouldn’t like it. Because there is nothing to be proud about having a system of apartheid and segregation in the 21st century. But as Menachem [Klein] said, we actually live in that system. It’s one regime.

What is apartheid? Apartheid is a system where you have two laws, two different laws, for two people living in the same area. If you don’t like the word apartheid, give me an alternative to a situation where a Palestinian citizen is allowed to use no more than 50 cubic meters of water per capital year, while an Israeli illegal settler from the West Bank is allowed to use 2400. How would you classify a situation where the Israeli gdp per capita is about $30,000 while a Palestinian’s gdp per capita is less than $1400?

Yet we are obliged to pay the same prices for products as Israelis do. More than that: We are obliged to pay double the price for electricity and water that Israelis do though they make 30 times more than we do.

* Khamenei’s Fatwa against Nukes (Cenk Uygur Rant) via Informed Comment

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks on the progressive network Current TV gives us an insightful rant on Big TV News’ lack of interest in Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s fatwa declaring making, stockpiling and using nuclear weapons a sin. He points out that you almost never hear about this fatwa on television news, and performs a thought experiment. How often would a fatwa to the opposite effect have been mentioned?

4. A Post-Black, Post-Jewish, Post-National World?

Sep-30-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: The bird’s eye does glaze over, we confess, when it encounters “critical theory”, “a form of self-reflective knowledge involving both understanding and theoretical explanation to reduce entrapment in systems of domination or dependence, obeying the emancipatory interest in expanding the scope of autonomy and reducing the scope of domination.”(Thanks, Wikipedia) Here are three pieces, two reviews of a book and an essay. The book reviews focus on arguments it is time to move beyond such divisions as Jewish/non-Jewish or black/non-black; Orwell’s essay argues it’s time to move beyond nationalism. The Atzmon piece is as challenging (intellectually, emotionally, spiritually) to me about what it means to be Jewish as anything I’ve seen. Responses to it are particularly welcomed.

* Interview with Gilad Atzmon, author of The Wandering Who: A study of Jewish Identity Politics Eric Walberg

Gilad Atzmon is a world citizen who calls London his home. He was born a sabra, and served as a paramedic in the Israeli Defense Forces during the 1982 Lebanon War, when he realised that “I was part of a colonial state, the result of plundering and ethnic cleansing.” He has wandered far since then, become a novelist, philosopher, one of the world’s best jazz saxophonists, and at the same time, one of the staunchest supporters of the Palestinian cause, supporting the right of return and the one-state solution…. Atzmon denies that there is even such a concept as “anti-Semitism”, stating that “‘anti-Semite” is an empty signifier. “You are either a racist which I am not, or have an ideological disagreement with Zionism, which I have.” When railed against as an anti-Semite, Gilad quotes the witticism: “While in the past an ‘anti-Semite’ was someone who hated Jews, nowadays it is the other way around, an anti-Semite is someone the Jews hate.”

“Jewish anti-Zionists who criticise Israel for being racist, also operate in Jews-only, racially-exclusive political cells. I realised then that we need a new ideological instrument that would attempt to explain it all. I guess that this is when I started to differentiate between Jews (the people), Judaism (the religion) and Jewish-ness (the ideology). In my work, I avoid the first two categories, I only deal with ideology — the racially-driven supremacist and exclusive philosophy known as Chosen-ness. Zionism is just one face of Jewish-ness. Jewish anti-Zionism is clearly another face. John Zorn and his Jewish Radical Music is another, promoting a racially-driven pseudo-cultural ethos.”

* Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? Touré New York Times

Post-blackness entails a different perspective from earlier generations’, one that takes for granted what they fought for: equal rights, integration, middle-class status, affirmative action and political power. While rooted in blackness, it is not restricted by it, as Michael Eric Dyson says in the book’s foreword; it is an enormously complex and malleable state, Touré says, “a completely liquid shape-shifter that can take any form.” With so many ways of performing blackness, there is now no consensus about what it is or should be. One of his goals, Touré writes in “Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now,” is “to attack and destroy the idea that there is a correct or legitimate way of doing blackness.” Post-blackness has no patience with “self-appointed identity cops” and their “cultural bullying.”

* “Notes on Nationalism” George Orwell

By “nationalism” I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled “good” or “bad.” But secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By “patriotism” I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseperable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

2. Fighting with Israel

Sep-02-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: A look at Israel’s friends, and how the current leadership in Israel is forcing major changes with long-standing allies, even those as as basic as the Jewish people. In today’s news, Turkey has had a major split after Israel refused to apologize n the light of the long-awaited United Nations review of the attack on the flotilla. And in Canada, a coup takes over four separate Jewish groups to form a new monolithic voice (“One star of David to rule them all”)… under Stockwell Day. Independent Jewish Voices don’t seem to be welcome here.

* Israel is tearing apart the Jewish people Carlo Strenger Haaretz

In my travels to Europe I speak to predominantly Jewish audiences, but also to non-Jews who care deeply about Israel. They voice their pain and anguish openly: They want to understand what has happened to Israel. They desperately want to stand by it, but they are, increasingly, at a loss of knowing how to do so. Their questions are simple. They know that Israel is located in one of the world’s most difficult neighborhoods; they have no illusions about the Iranian regime or Hezbollah; and they know the Hamas charter. But they don’t understand how any of this is connected with Israel’s settlement policies, the dispossession of Palestinian property in Jerusalem, and the utterly racist talk about the ‘Judaization’ of Jerusalem. They feel that they no longer have arguments, even words, to defend Israel.

* Turkey Downgrades Ties With Israel Over Flotilla Raid New York Times

Turkey said on Friday that it was downgrading its diplomatic and military ties with Israel and expelling its ambassador in a display of anger at Israel’s refusal to apologize for a commando raid last year on a Turkish protest flotilla bound for Gaza in which nine people died.

…Turkey once ranked as Israel’s closest ally in the Muslim world. The latest move stopped just short of a complete breach in diplomatic relations but nonetheless seemed likely to deepen the already profound alienation between the two countries.

*The demise of the CJC Toronto Star

“Effective July 1, the Canadian Jewish Congress is discontinuing its activities,” dryly states CJC’s website. Victim of a restructuring of Canada’s Jewish and Israel advocacy organizations finalized this summer, the once venerable CJC, founded in 1919, has been folded into a new super-agency, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA).

… Ottawa-based CIJA will now oversee and coordinate the work of the CJC, the CIC, theQuebec-Israel Committee (QIC), National Jewish Campus Life and the University Outreach Committee…. Critics contend that what the monolithic CIJA eliminates is other voices. As well, say detractors, CIJA’s “top-down” approach scorns the grassroots. Already, there are rumblings that the new name is notable for its lack of any reference to “Canada” or “Canadian.” Women will not be happy to learn that of the 24 high-profile people appointed to CIJA’s board of directors by its founders, just five are female (and curiously, several are non-Jews, including a Catholic priest and former Conservative cabinet minister Stockwell Day).

3. Turning Away from Israel

Jun-17-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: US support for Israel is dropping, as Sherry Wolf explores in her blog. But Israeli support for Israel is dropping too: emigration numbers from Israel are greater than immigration numbers to it, as Counterpunch explores. And in a wonderfully written, and deeply moving story, Allison Benedikt (the film editor of The Village Voice) tells of her experience growing up Zionist, and becoming non-Zionist. We give the opening, and the closing, but you really need to read the whole story.

* Israel: Losing Hearts and Minds Sherry J. Wolf Sherrytalksback

Opinion polls in the United States regarding Israel-Palestine are a mixed bag. On the one hand, they reflect the dominant narrative in the West that at turns defends and denies Israel’s racist policies toward Palestinians. On the other, they show disgust with the periodic mass killings of the virtually imprisoned Palestinians, punctuated in people’s minds by last year’s massacre of 9 humanitarian aid activists—murdered at sea in cold blood—their only weapons of defense: deck chairs and cucumber knives.

Two years ago, according to Zogby, 71 percent of Americans held a favorable opinion of Israelis; by March 2010, 65 percent did. A plurality, 40 percent versus 34 percent, believe Israel’s illegal settlements in the Occupied Territories are wrong. Even before the killings on the Mavi Marmara aid flotilla and the recent uprisings across the Middle East that have popularly humanized Arabs as democracy- and freedom-seeking people, 84 percent believed the Palestinians deserved equal rights, 67 percent supported a Palestinian state.

…Even the Zionist J Street poll shows 53 percent of American Jews are not at all bothered by open criticisms of Israel by other Jews.

* Israel’s Changing Demographics Lawrence Davidson counterpunch

If the historical goal of the state of Israel is to provide the world’s Jews a secure national home, a place of refugee in a world of real or potential anti-Semitism, it seems to have failed….Yerida, or emigration out of Israel, has long been running at higher numbers than aliyah, or immigration into the country. “According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, as of 2005, 650,000 Israelis have left the country for over one year and not returned.” The great majority of these were Jews. In addition, polls show that at least 60% and as high as 80% of remaining Israeli Jews “sympathize with those who leave the country.”

Among those who stay, there is the conviction that the safe thing is to have a second passport issued by the United States or a European country. As the Haaretz reporter Gideon Levy puts it, “if our forefathers dreamt of an Israeli passport, there are those among us who are now dreaming of a foreign passport.” At present the United States has issued over half a million passports to Israelis and a quarter million additional applications are pending. Germany runs second with 100,000 passports given to Israeli Jews and 7,000 new ones issued yearly.

There are two prevailing explanations for this phenomenon….

* Life After Zionist Summer Camp Allison Benedikt The Awl

It starts at a very young age. The summer after third grade, my parents sent me to Jewish sleepaway camp. I was deeply homesick at first and cried a lot in my bunk bed, but by the end of the month I didn’t want to leave. So I went back, summer after summer—boarding the plane with a few other Jewish kids from my hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, and flying to Appleton, Wisconsin, with a stop-over at O’Hare, where a volunteer from Hadassah would meet us at the gate and try to keep us from the moo shu pork at Wok-N-Roll.

Those summers blur together, but each day begins and ends at the flagpole, where we raise and lower two flags: the American and the Israeli. We make blue and white lanyard bracelets, carve Israel out of ice cream, and sing “Hatikvah.” Because it’s all Jews, I’m considered cute. The second summer, a boy (Avi, short, red-hair) asks me out (“Will you go with me?” “Go where?”) and I get my first kiss. Other kids from home also go to Jewish camp, but mine is different. It is, I learn, part of a Zionist youth movement. I am in a movement! Weird names like Jabotinsky and Herzl float through the air. I don’t have to know particulars to realize that these guys are (a) important, and (b) connected to me, and I to them.

…John and I have two kids of our own and are raising them as Jews. Most of my Jewish friends are disgusted with Israel. It seems my trajectory is not at all unique. My best memories from childhood are from camp, and I will never, ever send my kids there.

Cross-posted on rabble.ca, Canada’s voice from the left

9. People in Motion

Dec-03-2010 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: a motley collection of links, starting with two marvellous flash videos. The first shows patterns of human movement, emigration and immigration: just mouse over a country and see where its people go to or come from. Then we have the nudemen clock, in which 96 nude men(tiny images: safe for work) form a lovely analog clock (or, if you click on the image, digital clock). We continue with two religious images: people carrying candles through Salisbury cathedral, and Muslims in New Delhi gathered for Eid

* Flight & Expulsion

* Nudemen Clock

* Darkness and Light

* Eid at Jama Masjid

2. The Peace Process is Over. Now What?

Nov-26-2010 | Comments (2)

Bird’s Eye: It’s clear that the US brokered peace process isn’t going anywhere, with Obama hamstrung by his inability (definitely politically, possibly volitionally) to play the only real card the US has and withdraw support from an intransigent Netanyahu. The Palestinians see the increasing support and impact the BDS campaign is drawing, and more than ever are unwilling to settle for non-contiguous territories. So what does the future look like? The truth is that no one has any idea, but we offer some interesting speculations, and one Thanksgiving affirmation of gratitude to those of us who are working to transcend ethnic and religious divides.

* The Endgame For The Peace Process Al Jazeera (Thanks, Gabe)

Future historians will no doubt argue over the precise moment when the Arab-Israeli peace process died, when the last glimmer of hope for a two-state solution was irrevocably extinguished. When all is said and done, and the forensics have been completed, I am sure they will conclude that the last realistic prospect for an agreement expired quite some time before now, even if all the players do not quite realise it yet: anger and denial are always the first stages in the grieving process; acceptance of reality only comes later.

There are growing signs, however, that the realisation is beginning to dawn in Ramallah, Tel Aviv and, most strikingly, Washington, that the peace process, as currently conceived, may finally be dead.

* A Modest Proposal For The Middle East Peace Talks Stephen M. Walt

Here’s my suggestion: assuming direct talks do resume under U.S. auspices, tell the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority that the United States is going to keep a very careful record of who did and said what, and the United States will not hesitate to go public in the event that anybody starts making ridiculous demands, indulging in delaying tactics, or refusing to make reasonable concessions. Unlike Camp David 2000, where nothing was written down and no maps were exchanged (at Israel’s insistence), this time we are going to prevent anybody from doing a lot of spin-control after the fact. In other words, the United States tells everyone we are going to act like an honest broker for a change, and if either side refuses to play ball, we are going to expose their recalcitrance in the eyes of the international community. Most importantly, this declaration can’t be a bluff: if the talks bog down, the administration has to be prepared to go public.

And remember: The goal here is a viable Palestinian state, not a bunch of disarmed and disconnected Bantustans. Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama have all made it clear a viable state for the Palestinians is the only alternative that the United States can get behind. It is what the original U.N. partition plan in 1947 called for, and all the other alternatives (binational democracy, ethnic cleansing, or permanent apartheid) are either impractical or directly at odds with U.S. values.

* Obama: Getting ‘Poned’ Bibi Style Al Jazeera (Thanks, Gabe)

Called the Parallel States Project, the group, whose roster includes former senior settlement leaders as well as Palestinians with longstanding ties to the PLO leadership, early on concluded that nothing short of a wholesale reimagining of Israeli and Palestinian identities in a manner that moved beyond territorial sovereignty while allowing each community to identify and remain loyal to its own state and identity would lift the impasse that has for so long doomed negotiations.

The core component of a Parallel States solution is the move from a two-dimensional notion of sovereignty based on fixed borders, to parallel, or better, overlapping notions of sovereignty, in which Israeli and Palestinian states could each claim sovereignty over the whole territory in a manner that would not infringe on the rights and claims of the other state, or its citizens.

How to pull off such a seemingly impossible magic trick? The answer is as simple as it is profound: Disassemble the triangle linking the citizen to her or his state through the particular piece of territory – Tel Aviv or Nablus, Ariel or Jaffa – on which he or she lives, and replace it with a direct link between the individual citizen and her or his respective state that would holds firm regardless of whether one is a Palestinian living in Herzliyya or a Jewish Israeli living in Gaza.

* Give Thanks To The Community We Are Building Philip Weiss, Mondoweiss

I give thanks today to my community. We are building it, a diverse community of brave people working across traditional tribal and ethnic and religious lines to try and forge a vision of coexistence in a troubled brutalized place. Let us celebrate our commitment, and learn from one another. I’m trying to learn myself, and overcome my own deeply-engrained prejudice.

We disagree about stuff. OK. But remember what happens when we remain inside our own religious and national communities, how weak we can be.

2. American Jews Starting to Question Israel

Nov-19-2010 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: There was a time when North American Jews unquestionably supported Israel. Then there was a time when they would only question Israel among themselves. Now increasingly, Jews are questioning the Israeli government’s actions (and inaction) publicly. And, most threatening from an Israeli perspective, the young Jews are the ones who most question what Israel is doing.

* Progressive Zionists Are Feeling ‘Battered By Boycott’ Mondoweiss

Julie Wiener’s 7 year old daughter “decided” (are 7 year olds autonomous? I don’t know; but she surely reflected her mother’s love of Israel) to have an Israel-themed birthday party in New York. At least a couple of people boycotted the party. Weiner sees the boycott movement gaining traction all around us. Her piece is “Battered by Boycotts” for the New York Jewish Week.

…for those of us who love Israel yet also worry that right-wing intransigence, settlement building and problematic treatment of Palestinians are major (albeit hardly the only) obstacles to peace, it’s hard to know exactly where to stand. Not to mention that it’s exhausting and frustrating to feel like one has to take a stand every time one sees a blue-and-white flag, let alone goes to the grocery store. It’s dispiriting and depressing to feel as if one can never just relax and celebrate the many positive aspects of Israeli culture, without being constantly reminded of the suffering Palestinians…

* Bibi, Tom Friedman, and U.S. Jews divesting from Israel Bradley Burston Haaretz

Where it comes to questions relating to the complex relations between the U.S. Jewish community and Israel, you can either answer in three hours, or in one sentence. This was hers: “You know what it is – American Jews are divesting from Israel.”

This is what I was to see in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Marin County, Portland and Seattle. It’s not that they’re getting involved in significant numbers in the divestment movement. It’s that American Jews are divesting emotionally. They are quietly – but in terms of impact, dramatically – withdrawing altogether. Not just Jews. Americans. And the younger they are, that is, the more crucial they are to Israel’s future, the more likely they are to divest.

… The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman… was talking directly to Israelis, and directly to their prime minister. There was an urgency and a passion in his voice, in his gestures, his eyes, that suggested why this was different. This time it was personal.“You are losing the American people,” Friedman warned.

* Just who is misguided? Haaretz Daily Newspaper

Gandhi said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” In the case of Israel and the tone-deaf American Jewish establishment, one could revise this statement to: First they ignore you, then they call you a self-hating Jew, then they call you a delegitimizer and fight you with $6 million.

What’s next? We young Jews won’t back down, our numbers are growing, and we will win. Israel will change its cruel, self-destructive behavior. We won’t rest until Israelis and Palestinians live together in true equality, safety and mutual respect.

3. The Jewish People

Oct-08-2010 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Rick Sanchez says Jews control the media and gets fired within 12 hours. Joel Stein (yep, he’s Jewish) has a challenging piece about what exactly that proves. Philip Weiss has a brave introspective piece about his own racism, his identification with Jews and the implications of that. And J-Street, the relatively left-wing alternative to AIPAC is in huge political trouble. Never a dull moment.

* Who runs Hollywood? C’mon Joel Stein Los Angeles Times

I have never been so upset by a poll in my life. Only 22% of Americans now believe “the movie and television industries are pretty much run by Jews,” down from nearly 50% in 1964. The Anti-Defamation League, which released the poll results last month, sees in these numbers a victory against stereotyping. Actually, it just shows how dumb America has gotten. Jews totally run Hollywood.

How deeply Jewish is Hollywood? When the studio chiefs took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago to demand that the Screen Actors Guild settle its contract, the open letter was signed by: News Corp. President Peter Chernin (Jewish), Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey (Jewish), Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger (Jewish), Sony Pictures Chairman Michael Lynton (surprise, Dutch Jew), Warner Bros. Chairman Barry Meyer (Jewish), CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves (so Jewish his great uncle was the first prime minister of Israel), MGM Chairman Harry Sloan (Jewish) and NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker (mega-Jewish). If either of the Weinstein brothers had signed, this group would have not only the power to shut down all film production but to form a minyan with enough Fiji water on hand to fill a mikvah

* Notes on my Racism: ‘My people’ Philip Weiss, Mondoweiss

The other day in a post on atavistic Jewish feeling, I offended some readers by using the words “my people” to describe Jews. I did so because it’s a genuine statement of a persistent tribal allegiance that I feel, even in my mid-50s, in a largely gentile world. But let me try and explain just where the feeling comes from, how many other Jews share it, and to what extent I regard it as defensible, which to some extent I do.

* J Street, Down the Rabbit Hole – Jeffrey Goldberg The Atlantic

The scandal grows from a decision by Jeremy Ben-Ami to cover-up, over a long period of time, something he knew to be true: That George Soros, the billionaire investor and non-friend of Israel, provided J Street with almost $750,000 in funding. James Besser, at The New York Jewish Week, frames the impact of this cover-up in stark and simple terms:

There’s no way this isn’t going to make the politicians supported by J Street and those who may be considering accepting its endorsement incredibly nervous. Instead of providing protection for the politicians they supported, J Street essentially hung them out to dry – not by accepting Soros money, but by lying about their connection to the controversial philanthropist.

And there’s no way this doesn’t sow mistrust among commentators and reporters who write and speak about J Street, and who were repeatedly misled by its officials. J Street sought to create a climate of trust with a press corps that was being spun heavily by its opponents; this news undoes a lot of that effort.

2. Israel Lashes Out

Oct-01-2010 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Lashes out against whom? Remember Marlon Brando as Johnny in “The Wild One”? (Mildred: What’re you rebelling against, Johnny? Johnny: Whaddya got?) This week Israel attacked a largely Jewish gaza-bound flotilla with excessive force (as noted in the Jerusalem Post, no less!); humiliated POTUS Obama by ignoring his pleas to not restart settlement construction; and attacked itself as Lieberman and Netanyahu both explained publicly why the other was wrong. Hareetz sums it all up, brilliantly.

* Jewish Gaza-bound activists: IDF used excessive force in naval raid Haaretz

Earlier Tuesday the IDF reported that Israeli naval commandos peacefully boarded the Jewish aid boat attempting to break a naval blockade on Gaza… However, testimonies by passengers who were released from police questioning later in the day seemed to counter the IDF’s claims, with Israeli activist and former Israel Air Force pilot Yonatan Shapira saying that there were “no words to describe what we went through during the takeover.” Shapira said the activists, who he said displayed no violence, were met with extreme IDF brutality, adding that the soldiers “just jumped us, and hit us. I was hit with a taser gun.”“Some of the soldiers treated us atrociously,” Shapira said, adding that he felt there was a “huge gap between what the IDF spokesman is saying happened and what really happened.” (See Jerusalem Post story here)

* Netanyahu Blows off US Juan Cole Informed Comment

Now Netanyahu has reneged on his pledge to negotiate in good faith, and has let the settlement freeze expire while making no effort to extend it. In other words, he humiliated the United States and let them know who is boss. …Obama pleaded with Netanyahu to extend the settlement freeze for a month or two. If at the end of that period, Obama is said to have pledged, there had been no progress in the peace talks, then the US would not object to the freeze lapsing. Moreover, he was willing to given written assurances of American commitment to Israeli security. Netanyahu declined to accept Obama’s pleading. If this story, sourced to a high administration official in Washington who declined to be named, is true, it bespeaks diplomatic amateurism on Obama’s part….

* U.S. Jews outraged by Lieberman’s UN speech on population exchange Haaretz

Many American Jewish leaders fumed Wednesday when Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman proposed “an exchange of populated territory” as part of a Mideast peace deal in a speech before the UN General Assembly in New York…Lieberman also raised the possibility of aiming for a long-term interim agreement with the Palestinians, rather than a final-status one, but warned that this “could take a few decades.” Many Israelis and U.S. Jews were outraged by the foreign minister’s speech, and several American Jewish leaders demanded Lieberman’s resignation…. The Prime Minister’s Office issued a statement on Wednesday stating that “Lieberman’s address was not coordinated with the prime minister,” adding that “Netanyahu is the one handling the negotiations on Israel’s behalf. The various issues surrounding a peace agreement will be discussed and decided only at the negotiating table, and nowhere else.”

* Political Learnings For Make Benefit Of Understanding Glorious Nation Of Israel Haaretz

Israeli Glorious Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu tells world leaders that a final status agreement with the Palestinians is possible in one year. Unknowledgeable commentators think that this is contradicted, when Glorious Foreign Minister Yvet Lieberman announces at the United Nations there will be no final status agreement in the foreseeable future, and also announces a Glorious New Plan that there will be there will be no more Arabs in Israel, which will become a Jewish ethnocracy.

Commentators do not understand how deep a political revolution Israel is bravely putting into practice. For more than two hundred years the world has lived with a highly unimaginative ideal called democracy. This quaint idea called for one law that to rule all citizens, and allots all citizens equal rights; that there will be a parliament that represents the people and formulates the laws, and then there should be a government that runs the state’s affairs according to one coherent policy.

We declare that in the age of cyberspace, this concept no longer makes any sense….Hence Israel after years of dedicated experimentation has developed the Glorious New Method of Government by Chaos. It is my pleasure to introduce readers to the basics of this method, in the hope other countries will benefit from it as well.

9. Rapid Action Summaries

May-21-2010 | Comments (0)

Bird’s-Eye: Just what you need in your busy life: quick summaries that bring you up to date on what’s been happening. Here you see the past 100 million years of continental drift, and a preview of what’s coming. (Helpful hints: that Mediterranean waterfront you bought is in trouble.) In a few more minutes you can see the 100,000 year spread of humans, from Africa over the planet. And five minutes more give you an update on the past 1000 years of war.

* Dance of the Continents New York Times

* Journey of Mankind: The Peopling of the World

* 1000 Years of War in 5 Minutes youtube

Older Posts »

RSS Feed