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3. Israel: Dramatic Changes

May-18-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Two major developments in Israel: Netanyahu ditches the far-right for the centre-right, and manages to survive without an election, and the Palestinian hunger-strikers wins most of what they wanted. We offer two reports on each.

* The Netanyahu-Mofaz Pact Uri Avnery Counterpunch

THE MASTER magician has drawn another rabbit from his top hat. A real and very lively rabbit. He has confounded everybody, including the leaders of all parties, the top political pundits and his own cabinet ministers. He has also shown that in politics, everything can change – literally – overnight.

At 2 a.m. the Knesset was busy putting the finishing touches to a law to dissolve itself – condemning half of its members to political oblivion. At 3 a.m. there was a huge new government coalition. No elections, thank you very much.

An operetta in 5 acts.

Act One: Everything tranquil. Public opinion polls show Binyamin Netanyahu in absolute control. His popularity is approaching 50%; nobody else’s even approaches 20%. The largest party in the Knesset, Kadima, sinks in the polls from 28 seats to 11, with all indications that it will continue to fall. Its new leader, former Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz, gets even less points as candidate for Prime Minister. Netanyahu could sun himself on the roof of his luxury villa and contemplate the future with equanimity. All is well in the best of all Jewish states….

* New Israeli Government Likely Won’t Launch Iran Attack Juan Cole Informed Comment

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu moved from the far right to just the Right on Tuesday by bringing into his government the center-right Kadima Party, led by Shaul Mofaz.

Mofaz has been sharply critical of reported plans by Netanyahu and his defense minister Ehud Barak, to launch a go-it-alone military attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. Mofaz is not opposed to military action against Iran in and of itself, but wants it coordinated with the United States. He last week aligned himself with the views of former Israel domestic intelligence head Yuval Diskin, who strongly opposed a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran and who attacked Netanyahu as erratic. Mofaz said, “Let President Obama handle Iran. We can trust him…”

Having Mofaz in the cabinet makes Netanyahu less dependent on extreme hawks, and makes it highly unlikely that Israel will act on its own against Iran.

* Many Winners, Few Losers In Deal To End Palestinian Prisoners’ Hunger Strike Haaretz Daily Newspaper

The agreement that brought the Palestinian prisoners’ hunger strike to an end on Monday, alongside a decision to return 100 bodies of Palestinian terrorists buried in Israel, as a gesture to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, were less about possible progress in peace attempts as much as they were about an Israeli effort to preserve the relative silence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Despite the fact that peace negotiations aren’t likely to restart, the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and Israel are all interested in getting rid of anything that could pose a threat to stability in the region. And so, while the Middle East continues burning (Bahrain, Syria, Lebanon and others), and on a day that was once considered highly likely to draw violent confrontations in the Palestinian territories, the Shin Bet and prisoner’s leadership managed to reach a deal that essentially had many winners and few losers.

The Shin Bet has emphasized their significant “achievement” in the deal: having the Palestinian prisoners sign that they will not return to terrorist activities within the prison walls. One does not need to be a security analyst to understand that despite the deal, at least some of them will repeatedly engage in terrorist activity. Their real achievement lies elsewhere: the fact they could neutralize the ticking bomb of 1,500 hunger-striking prisoners.

* In Support of the “Battle of the Empty Stomachs” Rabbi Brant Rosen

After nearly a full month of fasting, around 2,000 Palestinian political prisoners ended last night their mass hunger strike upon reaching an agreement with the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) to attain certain core demands…This is heartening news to be sure, particularly for the families of the strikers. But on an even deeper level, this deal is a testimony to the astonishing moral/political power of fasting in response to oppression.

Hunger striking is, of course, is an ancient time-honored form of protest. As a Jew, I’m particularly mindful that the Book of Isaiah passionately connects the act of fasting to the pursuit of justice:

Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of wickedness,
to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?

Indeed, it is critical that we understand that the Palestinians’ “Battle of the Empty Stomachs” as part of this long and honorable tradition of nonviolent resistance. As we have seen from the events of the past several months, it has lasted so long largely because it is a tactic that works.

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.”

5. Reasons for Hope

May-04-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: So why hope? You’ve just read four sections about how the US has turned mad abroad, and tyrannical at home, how the Israeli government is at best incompetent or mad (At worst? Both.), how the shadow of the Holocaust looms over us, and now I suggest hope? Absolutely. Orion Magazine has a longish piece suggesting the direction out of the US pit, and Uri Avnery, founder of Gush Shalom, writes about why he remains an optimist and why you should be too. And Forbes shows a realistic possible solution to the energy/ global warming crisis. Yes those were btter pills above, but now it’s sweet dessert. You’ve earned it. Have a second helping of hope… no calories, either.

* America the Possible: A Manifesto, Part I James Gustave Speth Orion Magazine (Thanks, Gabe!)

What is now desperately needed is transformative change in the system itself. To deal successfully with all the challenges America now faces, we must therefore complement reform with at least equal efforts aimed at transformative change to create a new operating system that routinely delivers good results for people and planet.

At the core of this new operating system must be a sustaining economy based on new economic thinking and driven forward by a new politics. The purpose and goal of a sustaining economy is to provide broadly shared prosperity that meets human needs while preserving the earth’s ecological integrity and resilience—in short, a flourishing people and a flourishing nature. That is the paradigm shift we must now seek.

I believe this paradigm shift in the nature and operation of America’s political economy can be best approached through a series of interacting, mutually reinforcing transformations—transformations that attack and undermine the key motivational structures of the current system, transformations that replace these old structures with new arrangements needed for a sustaining economy and a successful democracy.

* Confessions of an Optimist Uri Avnery Counterpunch

Some time ago I bumped into the writer Amos Oz at a wedding and we talked about this curiosity, my optimism. He said that he was a pessimist. Being a pessimist, he said, was a win-win situation. If things turn to the better, you are happy. If things get worse, you are still happy, because you have been right all along.

The trouble with pessimism, I told him, was that it leads nowhere. Pessimism relieves you of any urge to do something. If things are going to get worse anyhow, why bother? Pessimism is a comfortable attitude. It even allows you to be contemptuous of the optimists, who still struggle for a better world. Optimism is for simpletons.

But this is exactly what it’s all about. Only optimists can struggle. If you don’t believe in a better world, a better country, a better society, you can’t fight for them. You can only sit in your armchair in front of the TV, tut-tutting at the stupidity of the human race, and particularly your own people, and feel superior.

* Eating Less Meat Is World’s Best Chance For Timely Climate Change Forbes

Shifting the world’s reliance on fossil fuels to renewable energy sources is important, certainly. But the world’s best chance for achieving timely, disaster-averting climate change may actually be a vegetarian diet, according to a recent report in World Watch Magazine.

“The entire goal of today’s international climate objectives can be achieved by replacing just one-fourth of today’s least eco-friendly food products with better alternatives,” co-author Robert Goodland, a former World Bank Group environmental advisor wrote….A widely cited 2006 report estimated that 18% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions were attributable to cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, pigs and poultry. However, analysis performed by Goodland, with co-writer Jeff Anhang, an environmental specialist at the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation, found that figure to now more accurately be 51%.

Consequently, state the pair, replacing livestock products with meat alternatives would “have far more rapid effects on greenhouse gas emissions and their atmospheric concentrations — and thus on the rate the climate is warming — than actions to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.”

3. Günter Grass, Israel, and that Poem

Apr-27-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: “Poetry makes nothing happen” wrote Auden. Günter Grass (who’s he?) seems to have disproved that theory, as his poem criticizing Israel resulted not only in heated debate but got him banished from Israel. Below, the poem itself (we report; you decide) and two Jewish perspectives. Rabbi Rosen’s link is devastating accurate.

* Günter Grass: ‘What Must Be Said’ The Guardian

But why have I kept silent till now?

Because I thought my own origins,

tarnished by a stain that can never be removed,

meant I could not expect Israel, a land

to which I am, and always will be, attached,

to accept this open declaration of the truth.

* Günter the Terrible Uri Avnery Counterpunch

Grass has done the unthinkable: he has openly criticized the State of Israel! And he a German!!!

The reaction was automatic. He was at once branded as an anti-Semite. Not just a run-of-the-mill anti-Semite, but as a crypto-Nazi, who could easily have served as a henchman of Adolf Eichmann! This was shown by the fact that at age 17, near the end of World War II, he was recruited to the Waffen-SS like tens of thousands of others and then – oddly enough – kept the fact hidden for many years. So there you are.

Israeli and German politicians and commentators vied with each other in cursing the writer, with the Germans easily trumping the Israelis. Though our Interior Minister, Eli Yishai, may have garnered the individual championship by declaring Grass persona non grata and banning him from entering Israel for all eternity (at least)….

So what did Grass actually say?

* What Must Be Said: We All Profit from Occupations Rabbi Brant Rosen

There’s been a great deal of analysis written about German writer Gunther Grass’ now-infamous new poem, “What Must Be Said” (in which Grass criticized Israel’s nuclear program as endangering an “already fragile world peace.”) For me, the most astute response by far comes from Mideast historian Mark LeVine, writing in Al-Jazeera.

…These facts are that Israel, however egregious its crimes – and anyone who denies them is either completely ignorant or a moral idiot – is but one cog in a much larger global machine, one that includes too many other cases of occupation, exploitation, and wanton violence to list comprehensively here (we can name a few – Syria, China, Russia, India, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Bahrain, Uzbekistan, Sri Lanka, the Congo, and of course, NATO and the United States – whose oppression, exploitation, and murder of their own or other peoples is a far more concrete “fact” than the potential for mass destruction caused by Israel’s nuclear programme)…

The larger fact is that the global economy is addicted to war, to militarism, oil and the rape of the planet for the minerals and resources that fuel the now globalised culture of hyperconsumption that will doom our descendants to a fate we dare not contemplate. Israel’s gluttony for Palestinian territory, and its willingness to encourage a regional nuclear arms race to keep it, is ultimately no different than the the gluttony for the 60-inch TV, the iPhone/Pad, the cavernous homes and cars, the ability to live at levels of consumption that are only sustainable if most of the world lives in poverty that increasingly defines all our cultures.

April 20th, 2012 :: Year 9, Issue 15

Apr-20-2012 | Comments (0)

1. Followups

Bird’s Eye: Using some of last week’s pieces, I put together a perspective on what I see happening with Israel. Fell free to disagree, of course. The Guardian looks at Israel’s building a security fence, regular correspondent (sometime reader) Linda alerted me to “Thrive” a movie about conspiracies controlling your life (or not). And a great Titanic line that demanded inclusion rounds it all off.

* Losing the Struggle Peter Marmorek

Uri Avnery says that G_d asked Israel when it was born in 1947 what it wanted to be, and Israel answered that it wanted to be Jewish, democratic, and stretch from sea to sea (Mediterranean to Jordan). G_d thought about this, and said that Israel could have any two of those, but not all three. There was a time, maybe up until recently, when Israel could have settled for democratic and Jewish, and taken the ‘67 borders, and allowed Palestine to be a separate country. But that time has passed. Now the Jewish settlers own so much land in Palestine and use so much of the water in Palestine that it is no longer possible to create any real Palestinian state. “Real” means a contiguous state with enough power to satisfy the Palestinian people. Nor is it possible to pull the settlers out of Palestine, as the power in the Israeli parliament depends on rightwing support. But leaving the settlers there without Israeli protection is also impossible, politically. So Israel will stretch from sea to sea, and now must choose between democratic or Jewish.

…There are reasons why this has happened, both because of Israeli and Palestinian intransigence, and because of unwillingness to settle for less than they wanted on both sides. And at this point the reasons why we have gotten to this point don’t matter. In the realistic world of politics there are only two questions that matter: where are we now, and where do we go from here. So, where are we?

* Israel Extends New Border Fence But Critics Say It Is A Sign Of Weakness Harriet Sherwood The Guardian

It cuts a steel swath through the stark wilderness where Israel and Egypt meet, glinting in the desert sun as it snakes across barren hills and sandy plateaus. Wielding blowtorches at the base of the five-metre-high (16ft) barrier are some of the very men the border fence is in part designed to keep out: illegal immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa, now working as cheap construction labour for Israeli contractors.

Israel’s newest frontier fence is being erected at high speed along the 150-mile boundary between the Sinai and Negev deserts. Its construction, due to be completed by the end of this year, was accelerated after last summer’s cross-border attack in which eight Israelis were killed, and amid rising alarm about the number of refugees crossing into the Jewish state.

Once it is finished, Israel will be almost completely enclosed by steel, barbed wire and concrete, leaving only the southern border with Jordan between the Dead and Red Seas without a physical barrier. That, too, may be fenced in the future.

* “Thrive” Debunked (Thanks, Linda)

Thrive promotes conspiracy theories that are based on an imaginary division between “us” and “them.” “We” are many and well-meaning but victimized; while “they” are a tiny, greedy and immensely powerful few who are masterfully organized, who are purposefully causing massive disasters in order to cull the population, and who will do absolutely anything in their quest to achieve total world domination. I think the allure of this way of thinking is that it distracts and absolves us from the troubling truth that the real source of the problem is in all of us, and in the economic systems we have collectively produced. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every heart”

* Titanic Cleverness (via Reddit)

I renamed my iPod ‘The Titanic’ so that when I plug it in, iTunes tells me “The Titanic is syncing.” That is all.

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?

3. The Two State Solution Is Dead. Deal With It.

Apr-13-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: There has been a huge debate among those who care about Israel, in response to Peter Beinart’s “The Crisis of Zionism”. (All Amazon reviews are either 5 stars or 1 / 2 stars. No middle ground.) But what seem startlingly clear in the debate is a increasingly universal agreement that the time is finished when it might have been possible to have two states, an Israeli and Palestinian country side by side. No Israeli government could survive removing the settlers; no Palestinian country is possible while they’re there. So now the debate is about a one-state solution, and how best to get there.

* The Two-State Solution on Its Deathbed Robert Wright The Atlantic

Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator, once told me that part of the problem is a kind of catch 22. When Palestinians aren’t threatening Israelis with violence, there’s no sense of urgency in Israel about dealing with the settlement problem. And when there is ongoing violence (which of course Levy doesn’t support), and therefore there is a sense of urgency, the fear that drives the urgency has an unfortunate byproduct: Israelis don’t trust Palestinians enough to offer a two-state deal that the Palestinians, or any self-respecting people, would accept. (Beinart’s examination of the Camp David talks–see chapter 4–undermines the official Israeli-American story that the Palestinians have been offered great deals but have inexplicably turned them down.)

My point isn’t that we should blame the Israelis for the death or very-near-death of the two-state solution. It’s not surprising that people with their history and geopolitical predicament would let fear get the better of them. (They’re being no more irrationally fearful than Americans were in the wake of 9/11, which led us to launch two wars, one of them against a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and that posed no threat.) By the same token, it’s not surprising that the Palestinians wouldn’t endure 45 years of subjugation, during which they’ve been denied basic human rights, without any eruptions of violence (which of course isn’t to say I support the violence). That’s the depressing thing about the Israel-Palestinian conflict: It results from the Israelis and Palestinians acting more or less the way you would expect people in their shoes to act.

But that’s why it’s crucial that those of us who live at a safe remove from the conflict, and can in theory summon detachment, should try hard to see the situation clearly, succumbing neither to paralyzing fear nor cozy illusions. And the most common cozy illusion is that, though the time may not be right for a two-state solution now, we can always do the deal a year or two or three down the road.

The truth is that a two-state solution is almost completely dead, and it gets closer to death every day. If there’s any hope at all of reviving it, that will involve, among other things, somehow delivering a shock to the Israeli system. Peter Beinart has an idea for how to do that. Does Zvika Kriegert? Do any of the other well-intentioned liberal Zionists who keep affirming their allegiance to a two-state solution as if that ritual incantation was somehow helping things?

* Staying Up To Date On Israel-Palestine Stephen M. Walt

I haven’t commented on Peter Beinart’s new book The Crisis of Zionism for the simple reason that I haven’t read it yet. It’s on my list, but will probably have to wait till the end of the term. In the interim, here are a few things you ought to read if you believe that the Israel-Palestine issue is at least as important as our current obsession with Iran.

You might read Isabel Kershner’s New York Times piece on the eviction of an Israeli settler family from an illegal outpost in Hebron. The kicker, of course, is that the removal of one settler family was accompanied by an announcement that the Netanyahu government had authorized construction of 800 new homes in Har Homa and Givat Zeev, and intended “to seek the necessary permits to retroactively legalize three other West Bank settler outposts that went up without authorization.” And lest you be confused about the Netanyahu government’s intentions, here’s what Netanyahu himself had to say about it (my emphasis):

“The principle that has guided me is to strengthen Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. Today, I instructed that the status of three communities — Bruchim, Sansana, and Rechalim — be provided for. I also asked Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein to see to it that the Ulpana hill in Beit El not be evacuated. This is the principle that has guided us. We are strengthening Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and we are strengthening the Jewish community in Hebron, the City of the Patriarchs. But there is one principle that we uphold. We do everything according to the law and we will continue to do so.”

So Netanyahu’s aim is clear: keeping control of the West Bank forever. And the reference to “doing everything according to the law” is revealing, because “law” here means the law of the occupation, which is the same law that has allowed a half a million Israelis to move onto the territories conquered in 1967 over the past forty years.

* The Real Radical Left Gideon Levy Haaretz

The battle for Hebron has been decided. All that remains is to ask what will replace the solution that was put to death. There will not be two states. Even a child knows the alternative: one state. There is no third option. Israel’s most radical left won. For years it said one state, even as we played with ourselves at two states. Now everyone says two states, in unison, only because they know that train has left the station, and the great train robbery was pulled off.

From now we need only take care with our definitions: The extreme left is whoever endeavors toward a single state – the plundering settlers, the establishment that embraces them and the majority of Israelis, who do not lift a finger to stop them.

The Palestinians, as everyone knows by now, aren’t going anywhere. There is even a handful of settlers that has begun talking about giving them citizenship. If this, too, is not a ruse, then this little group is openly reconciling with the great victory of Israel’s most extreme left.

The struggle? From now on it must focus on human rights. Yes, equal rights for everyone who lives in Greater Israel, just as you wanted.

* Why Continue To Build The Settlements? By Andrew Sullivan The Daily Beast

Why continue to build the settlements? …the evasions of this central point of Beinart’s book by its vitriolic critics are as legion as they are predictable. And they matter. Because the evaders do not want to answer the question: why continue to build the settlements? They do not want to answer that question and dodge it relentlessly because the answer is obvious and devastating to their position. The answer is that the settlements are there because the current Israeli government has no intention of ever dividing the land between Arabs and Jews in a way that would give the Palestinians anything like their own state; and have every intention of holding Judea and Samaria for ever. Netanyahu is, as Beinart rightly calls him, a Monist. He is the son of his father, Ben Zion, as Jeffrey Goldberg has also insisted on. But what Peter does is spell out one side of the Netanyahu vision that Goldberg elides.

4. Thinking about Israel

Mar-30-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Birds can fly over fences, but the rest of us can’t. A set of fascinating insights into the changes that are taking place in Israel. Al Jazeera has a discussion with three distinguished guests of a quality I can’t imagine another media outlet having. Carlo Strenger, who has long favoured the two-state solution, has now abandoned it. Sadly I see no flaw in his reasoning. And once again, Richard Silverstein breaks important news before anyone else.

* Israel and Democracy: Inside Story video Al Jazeera (Thanks, Gabe)

Is Israel violating Palestinian human rights in the Occupied Territories? What does this tell us about the Israeli government and its policy of settlement expansion in Palestinian territory? And, does that contradict its claim of being the only democracy in the region? Joining Inside Story with presenter Hazem Sika to discuss these questions and more are guests: Jessica Montell, the executive director of human rights group B’Tselem; Akiva Eldar, the chief political columnist and editorial writer for Haaretz; and Mark Ellis, the executive director of the International Bar Association.

*Open Letter To Peter Beinart: Boycotting The Settlements Will Not Save The Two-State Solution Carlo Strenger Haaretz

This brings me to the final point of disagreement. You hope to save the two state solution. But I think you try to save spilt milk. You probably know the wisdom of every investment advisor. It is profoundly wrong to handle your investment portfolio reacting to previous losses. You need to look at it as if you were creating it now.

There is little use for us to decry the folly of Israel’s policy of the last forty years. We need to look at the situation as it is now: no Israeli politician will be able to retreat to the 1967 lines as long as Hamas will not radically change its views, and this, researchers familiar with the movement tell me, is not likely to happen soon.

The problem is that the longer the status quo continues, the more impossible the two state solution will become. In fact, it may already be dead. Hence the real question for liberal Jews and gentile friends of Israel is where we need to aim now.

* “Israel Bought an Airfield called Azerbaijan” Richard Silverstein Tikun Olam

One of the logistical nightmares of an attack on Iran is getting Israeli planes to and from their target, a flight of 2,000 miles. The IAF simply doesn’t have the refueling capability that’s required. Thanks to Perry, we’ve just learned one of the ways Israel plans to eliminate the problem:

…Four senior diplomats and military intelligence officers say that the United States has concluded that Israel has recently been granted access to airbases on Iran’s northern border. To do what, exactly, is not clear. “The Israelis have bought an airfield,” a senior administration official told me in early February, “and the airfield is called Azerbaijan.”

Though the country’s foreign minister recently dismissed the notion that his country would serve as a base for an attack on any other country, Perry writes:…Even if his government makes good on that promise, it could still provide Israel with essential support. A U.S. military intelligence officer noted that Azeri defense minister did not explicitly bar Israeli bombers from landing in the country after a strike. Nor did he rule out the basing of Israeli search-and-rescue units in the country. Proffering such landing rights — and mounting search and rescue operations closer to Iran — would make an Israeli attack on Iran easier.

* New Israeli Fence The Guardian

A frontier fence is being erected at high speed along the 150-mile boundary between the Sinai and Negev deserts. Once it is finished, Israel will be almost completely enclosed by steel, barbed wire and concrete, leaving only the southern border with Jordan between the Dead and Red Seas without a physical barrier.

March 16th, 2012 :: Year 9, Issue 10

Mar-16-2012 | Comments (0)

1. Followups

Bird’s Eye: An extraordinary piece by Israel’s greatest writer, David Grossman, starts the followups from two weeks ago. Then a fascinating two minute slide show explains what Earth can expect over the next seven billion years, should current apocalyptic predictions prove wrong. Finally, Foreign Policy’s Stephen Walt looks at the ten most important aspects of the Iran War debate that the media are not giving us. There are three shown, but the other seven are equally insightful.

* David Grossman: Why? Who died? Haaretz, via epalestine

Last Friday Haaretz did something unusual: it placed an opinion piece on top of its front page. But it wasn’t just an ordinary opinion piece, it was written by one of the country foremost novelists, David Grossman. The article, like Emile Zola’s J’accuse, to which it has been compared, was a moral critique. Many who read it were very moved. But the moral missive never appeared in English… And of course translating Grossman is not easy, he is a master of the language and the art of writing.I have no idea whether I have done justice to this work. But it needed to be translated. The message is too important.

* Our World. Putting Things In Perspective. 2 minute animated gif via Reddit

A hugely fascinating series of slides showing what will happen on earth and elsewhere over the next 7+ billion years

* Top Ten Media Failures In The Iran War Debate Stephen M. Walt

#2: Loose talk about Iran’s “nuclear [weapons] program.” A recurring feature of Iran war coverage has been tendency to refer to Iran’s “nuclear weapons program” as if its existence were an established fact. U.S. intelligence services still believe that Iran does not have an active program, and the IAEA has also declined to render that judgment either. Interestingly, both theTimes’ public editor Arthur Brisbane and Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton have recently chided their own organizations for muddying this issue….

#3: Obsessing about Ahmadinejad. A typical insertion into discussions of Iran is to make various references to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, usually including an obligatory reference to his penchant for Holocaust denial and his famously mis-translated statement about Israel “vanishing from the page of time.” This feature is often linked to the issue of whether Iran’s leaders are rational or not. But the obsession with Ahmadinejad is misleading in several ways: he has little or no influence over Iran’s national security policy, his power has been declining sharply in recent months, and Supreme Leader Ali Khameini — who does make the key decisions — has repeatedly said that nuclear weapons are contrary to Islam….

#7: Exaggerating Israel’s capabilities. In a very real sense, this whole war scare has been driven by the possibility that Israel might feel so endangered that they would launch a preventive war on their own, even if U.S. leaders warned them not to. But the IDF doesn’t have the capacity to take out Iran’s new facility at Fordow, because they don’t have any aircraft that can carry a bomb big enough to penetrate the layers of rock that protect the facilities. And if they can’t take out Fordow, then they can’t do much to delay Iran’s program at all and the only reason they might strike is to try to get the United States dragged in. In short, the recent war scare-whose taproot is the belief that Israel might strike on its own-may be based on a mirage.

Mar-02-2012 | Comments (0)

2. On the Continued Existence of Israel

Bird’s Eye: Two Israelis of note worry about whether Israel can continue to exist as a Jewish democratic country, while BDS supporter Norman Finklestein (who’s he?) launches a blistering attack on the BDS movement.

* The Suicide State Uri Avnery Counterpunch

After 1967, another much less funny joke took its place.

It goes like this: many Israelis ask God for their state to be Jewish and democratic, and that it will include the entire country between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. That is too much even for the Almighty. So he asks them to choose between a state that is Jewish and democratic but only in part of the country, or a state in all the country that is Jewish but not democratic, or a state in the entire country that is democratic but not Jewish…..This is the choice facing us today as it did almost 45 years ago. It has only become more sharply defined.

…The current government is determined to prevent any peace that would compel it to give up any part of the occupied territories (22% of pre-1948 Palestine). There is no one around who would compel them to do so.

What remains? A state that is either non-democratic or non-Jewish.

* Come Visit Israel While You Can Bradley Burston Haaretz

I have a nephew who’s never seen Israel. I have young cousins, and friends and children of friends, who have never been here, but who have long wanted to come visit.

I want them to come soon. Before it’s all gone.

The Israel I want them to see is dying by the day.

It’s the Israel I saw when I myself once came to visit. A place which had a calm but breathtaking belief in a better future. A place that still had a shot at just that. It was this Israel that convinced me to stay.

This is this Israel that this government, and this parliament, has decided, once and for all, to finish off, precept by democratic precept. As they see it, the sooner, the quieter, and the more permanently, the better.

My nephew is going to have to hurry.

I want him to see what’s left of a place of quietly extraordinary people who dreamed of decency and peace, who envisioned making a place in the world where both we and our immediate neighbors could live together: no longer hated, no longer hating.

It was a place where there was an overriding belief that democracy was sacred, that minority rights should be respected more and more, rather than less and ultimately not at all.

* Norman Finklestein on BDS Youtube 5 min Transcript below film

I’ve earned my right to speak my mind, and I’m not going to tolerate what I think is silliness, childishness, and a lot of leftist posturing.
…I support the BDS. But I said it will never reach a broad public until and unless they’re explicit in their goal. And their goal has to include the recognition of Israel or it’s a nonstarter. It won’t reach the public because the moment you go out there Israel will start to say “What about us?”, and “They won’t recognize our right” and in fact that’s correct. You can’t answer the Israelis on that because they’re making a statement that’s factually correct.

There’s no Israel. That’s what it’s really about. And you think you’re fooling anybody. You think you’re so clever that people can’t figure that out for themselves? No they understand the arithmetic perfectly well. Are you going to reach a broad public which is going to hear the Israeli side ‘they want to destroy us?’ No you’re not. And frankly you know what? You shouldn’t. You shouldn’t read a broad public because you’re dishonest. And I wouldn’t trust those people if I had to live in this state. I wouldn’t. It’s dishonesty. (good response to NF here)

3. Stratfor & Wikileaks

Mar-02-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Wikileaks this week released 5 million documents from Stratfor, a right-wing research firm. Some chaff, but also some amazing stories. The first one is just mind-blowing.

* No Honour among Thieves Arms Merchants Ynet

WikiLeaks has released an e-mail exchange between employees of Stratfor, the US-based global intelligence company, which reveals Israel and Russia made a deal to swap access codes for defense and surveillance equipment.

According to the leaked document, Israel gave Russia the “data link codes” for unmanned aerial vehicles that the Jewish state sold to Georgia, and in return, Russia gave Israel the codes for Tor-M1 missile defense systems that Russia sold Iran.

* Top 5 Stratfor Revelations Juan Cole Informed Comment

Wikileaks is publishing internal memos of the Stratfor security analysis firm. A few tidbits have emerged in these very early days, to wit:

1. Up to 12 Pakistani active-duty and retired officers from the Inter-Services Intelligence agency knew that Usama Bin Laden was in Abbottabad and were in regular contact with him. The Pakistani chief of staff is denying the report.

2. Dow Chemicals hired Stratfor to spy on activists in Agra who continue to protest over the Bhopal environmental disaster that blinded many workers and destroyed their health. I.e., Stratfor was not just doing analysis but was involved in private intelligence operations against civil society groups that had a right to protest.

3. Stratfor Vice President Fred Burton, a former State Department official involved in counter-terrorism, lamented that in the old days the US would simply have assassinated Venezuelan leftist leader Hugo Chavez and Bolivian leftist leader Evo Morales.

* Wikileaks’ Stratfor Dump Lifts Lid On Intelligence-Industrial Complex Pratap Chatterjee Guardian

What price bad intelligence? …The most striking revelation from the latest disclosure is not simply the military-industrial complex that conspires to spy on citizens, activists and trouble-causers, but the extremely low quality of the information available to the highest bidder. Clients of the company include Dow Chemical, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, as well as US government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Marines.

Analysts working on the Middle East for the company appeared to be very poorly informed, with no more experience than a semester of studying abroad, according to journalists who have studied the documents. “They used Google translate to read al-Akbar news articles,” says an incredulous Jamal Ghosn, associate editor of that newspaper in Beirut, Lebanon. “This is a guaranteed way for good intelligence to be lost in translation.”

Mike Bonnano of the Yes Men, a group of international pranksters who impersonate corporate executives and government leaders to highlight environmental and social abuses, was astonished to discover that his group was being tracked by Stratfor, which was apparently making money selling a list of his public-speaking engagements.

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3. Israel: Dramatic Changes

3. Israel: Netanyahu’s Critics are Circling

4. Revisiting the Holocaust

5. Reasons for Hope

3. Günter Grass, Israel, and that Poem

April 20th, 2012 :: Year 9, Issue 15

2. Voices From the Other Side of the Media

3. The Two State Solution Is Dead. Deal With It.

4. Thinking about Israel

March 16th, 2012 :: Year 9, Issue 10

3. Stratfor & Wikileaks

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