Author: shergald

Not all but most Americans are completely unaware of Israel’s broad and well-orchestrated campaign to keep them ignorant of the truth about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Early last year, a documentary made it to Internet outlets, which provided startling revelations of just how ignorant Americans are being kept about the nature of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank. Its obvious purpose to support the colonization of the West Bank in order to achieve the religious/historical Zionist dream of a Greater Israel is now clear to everyone. If completed, such a project would essentially nullify any possibility for a sovereign Palestinian state. A Palestinian state in such a circumstance would be nothing more than a South African style Bantustan.

In the documentary, Peace, Propaganda, & The Promised Land, featuring the likes of such people as Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, Arik Ackerman (founder of Rabbis for Human Rights), and many others, that story was told. It’s introduction on Google-Video read,

Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land provides a striking comparison of U.S. and international media coverage of the crisis in the Middle East, zeroing in on how structural distortions in U.S. coverage have reinforced false perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This pivotal documentary exposes how the foreign policy interests of American political elites–oil, and a need to have a secure military base in the region, among others–work in combination with Israeli public relations strategies to exercise a powerful influence over how news from the region is reported.

Through the voices of scholars, media critics, peace activists, religious figures, and Middle East experts, Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land carefully analyzes and explains how–through the use of language, framing and decontextualizing–the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza remains hidden in the news media, and Israeli colonization of the occupied territories appears to be a defensive move rather than an offensive one. The documentary also explores the ways that U.S. journalists, for reasons ranging from intimidation to a lack of thorough investigation, have become complicit in carrying out Israel’s PR campaign. At its core, the documentary raises questions about the ethics and role of journalism, and the relationship between media and politics.

Peace, Propaganda, & The Promised Land played to over 900,000 viewers on Google-Video before moving to YouTube, but with all outlets and versions considered, it has probably experienced over a million views in the past 10 months since release.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UldEpr0HCEU

If censoring news outlets and redefining the language of conflict were not enough, strong grassroots efforts to plug leaks has also been underway in recent years, with new Israeli media projects focused on the eyes and ears of America to counteract any truth that might break through this critical foreign Maginot line. Until recently, because the Europeans and peoples in other parts of the world have not been subjected to news censorship and propaganda, their awareness and scrutiny of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians, and thus, their criticism, has been amplified and their involvement in the international peace movement more vigorous. Foreign politicians have also not been much subjected to lobby efforts the likes of the AIPAC/ZOA/Likudnik coalition, representing the right wing Zionist position.

The Israel Project (TIP) describes itself as an “international non-profit organization devoted to educating the press and the public about Israel while promoting security, freedom and peace. The Israel Project provides journalists, leaders and opinion-makers accurate information about Israel. The Israel Project is not related to any government or government agency.”

http://www.theisraelproject.org/site/c.hsJPK0PIJpH/b.672581/k.CB99/Home.htm

The Israel Project will gladly tell us about Israel’s peace efforts, e.g., “Israeli withdrawals in the name of peace (Gaza and Lebanon),” but nothing at all about the continuing occupation and confiscation of Palestinian lands, along with the building and reinforcement of so-called settlements, Israeli-only villages, towns, and cities, and the extensions of Israeli-only roads and highways in the West Bank. The site no longer advertises the availability of Frank Luntz’s consultation, which was completed in 2004. Frank Luntz is the well-known Republican pollster, who invented the “death tax” and other neat deceptions. Luntz’s consultation, which is replete with lies and half-truths, is intended to reinforce and enlarge Israel’s propaganda effort in America and to help curb the spread of knowledge that is transforming the thinking of American university and college students. Student are progressively learning the truth about Israel from leaky sources, such as the European and Middle East press, as opposed to being mesmerized by the censored US media.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/9/13/94033/2608

Here is a sample of Frank Luntz’s consultative subterfuge:

Spokespersons for Israel should always emphasize that they’re for peace. “The only way for Israel to evoke sympathy is to be the side working hardest for peace. The best case for Israel is to demonstrate that she is willing to go twice as far as her neighbors to establish peace.”

“It’s not just a conflict, it’s culture.” Blame alleged defects in Palestinian culture, such as anti-Israel incitement in the media and schools, a culture of martyrdom, etc. “But be careful – do not directly accuse the Palestinians of depravity. Simply show it, and let the images and words speak for themselves. Let the Palestinians speak for themselves. Show them Palestinian TV, unedited, without voiceover.”

Emphasize Palestinian rejection of Barak’s supposedly generous offer at Camp David in 2000.  There is no more powerful tool in driving home Israel’s commitment to a peaceful solution [!!] than the Camp David offer (diarist’s note: Frank said “supposedly” because he undoubtedly knows that Barak was unable to remove the over 150 Israeli villages, towns, and small cities, interconnected with Israel by Israeli-only roads and highways, located in the West Bank and Gaza.).

Emphasize the locations of suicide bombings, especially places that graduate students can imagine themselves congregating [at] – Sbarro pizza restaurant, Dolphinarium disco, Hebrew University cafeteria (diarist’s note: this turns out to be the most repeated half-truth by right wing bloggers, who avoid talking about the many killings of Palestinian civilians, especially children, that preceded these bombings or about the military occupation that is at the root of it all.).

They’re disputed territories, not occupied territories (diarist’s note: contrary to international law and UN Resolutions).

They’re Arabs, not Palestinians. The term ‘Palestinians’ evokes images of refugee camps, victims and oppression. ‘Arab’ says wealth, oil and Islam (diarist’s note: Palestinians are Arabs, the Arabs of Palestine.).

Blame the Wall and the perpetuation of the conflict in general on Hamas and Islamic Jihad. America’s future leaders hate Hamas and Islamic Jihad. If there is such a thing as a magic bullet, this is it.

START EARLY. The earlier in life future leaders hear about Israel in a positive vein, the less likely they are to support the Palestinian position as they grow older. Those kids who first heard of Israel through Biblical references when they were five, six, or seven grew up to appreciate the spiritual importance of the Jewish State [!!].

Every Rabbi, Jewish community leader, and knowledgeable pro-Israel activist in America should commit to visiting parochial schools and Sunday schools to talk about Israel to as many children as possible. Israel has developed a powerful alliance with many Christian organizations, and these alliances need to be utilized to provide teaching opportunities within the church itself (Diarist note: Frank must here be talking about the Evangelicals seeking the Rapture, but any religious school is intended to be targeted.).

In other words, let’s get rabbis involved and begin indoctrinating American children from an early age.

Added to the Israel Project effort to propagandize Americans is another one called GIYUS.

GIYUS.ORG is an unabashed Israeli propaganda website focused on soliciting the services of computer savvy bloggers  to distribute (by download) a program called MEGAPHONE, that is essentially an RSS feed so that interested parties can keep track of where on the web they need immediately to go so they can vote in polls and comment in blogs and forums to bolster support for Israel in its various problem areas. The GIYUS site itself is also a useful resource to bloggers in need of “talking points” to counteract any apparently anti-Israel assertion, whether true or not. Needless to say, dangerous left-wing blogs have undoubtedly been invaded by GIYUS volunteers.

A talking point for both the Israel Project and GIYUS is a false assertion or half-truth intended to convince people of some distorted reality as readily evident from Frank Luntz’s consultation points and the “talking points” section of GIYUS, where bloggers can obtain tips to counteract, what essentially are simple truths about Israel’s West Bank effort. Simple truths about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict often turn out to be the most dangerous kinds of antiIsraeli media leaks. There is little question that GIYUS operatives have infiltrated left-wing political blogs. To date they have practically shut down the Democratic Underground, where only proIsrael contributions pass censorship, and at the world’s largest left wing blog, Daily Kos, which purports to be left of AIPAC/DLC/Likudnik bias, right wing proIsrael operatives, logically of GIYUS origin, congregate freely.

Electronic Intifada’s Israel Lobby Watch section offers news about the ongoing tactics of pro-Israel lobby organizations around the world and analyses attempts to rewrite history with an Israeli narrative, international reactions to pressure, and the effect of the lobby’s work on domestic political life.

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/israellobbywatch.shtml

Let me close with some recent reports from this section of EI published within the past two months. I will quote a brief introduction and provide a link to them. Most demonstrate how the Israeli censorship/propaganda effort has reaching down to the American street, affecting what people like you and me are not permitted to hear from media and non-media resources.

Subcommittee hosts anti-Palestinian threesome posted by Michael F. Brown on February 14, 2007

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6555.shtml

Hubris leads directly to disrespect. Back in power for just a handful of weeks, Rep. Gary Ackerman, the Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, is already displaying his disregard for the Peace Movement, Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, the unfairly maligned progressive Jewish community, and, well, generally anyone who favors a fair debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

No such debate will occur on Valentine’s Day when Ackerman’s Subcommittee hosts a stacked and biased witness list. There to present will be David Makovsky, Director of the Project on the Middle East Peace Process at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), Martin S. Indyk, Director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, and the infamous Daniel Pipes, Director of the Middle East Forum. The latter is akin to a modern-day McCarthy with his close ties to Campus Watch and its classroom monitoring work.

(snip)

For years both Makovsky and Indyk have been obstructionists on advancing Palestinian rights and freedom. More recently, Makovsky defended the illegal separation barrier Israel is building in the West Bank when he testified on the Hill in 2004 alongside his WINEP colleague, Amb. Dennis Ross. Indyk recently hosted Israel’s leading racist, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who was a featured speaker at a Saban conference in Washington, DC. While an invitation does not necessarily constitute endorsement, it did much in this instance to bolster Lieberman as a legitimate politician.

Media fall for pro-Israel hate group’s Terror Free Oil by Ali Abunimah posted on February 13, 2007

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6551.shtml

In recent days, National Public Radio and the BBC have been among the countless media outlets to give prominent publicity to an organization calling itself “Terror Free Oil,” (TFO) which claims to have established gasoline filling stations in several US cities that do not sell oil from the Middle East.

Much of the coverage has read like a press release for the organization, or has treated it as a cute feature story, accepting at face value the claims made by its spokesman. The fundamentally racist nature of the claims TFO makes, and the long history of anti-Muslim statements and activities of its founder have been totally ignored.

The Terror-Free Oil Initiative claims on its website that it is “dedicated to encouraging Americans to buy gasoline that originated from countries that do not export or finance terrorism.” It states, “We educate the public by promoting those companies that acquire their crude oil supply from nations outside the Middle East and by exposing those companies that do not.”

Yet it does not specify anywhere which countries these are more precisely than the “Middle East,” nor how buying oil from them supports terrorism.

TFO spokesman Joe Kaufman is founder of a group called “Americans Against Hate,” whose main agenda appears to be support for the Israeli extremist right. Its main product appears to be a relentless stream of statements claiming that mainstream American Muslim organizations are terrorist fronts, and labeling anyone who dares to criticize Israel a “radical Islamist” or supporter of terrorism. The whole “Terror Free Oil Initiative” and website appear to be little more than a ploy to steer people towards Americans Against Hate, whose Coral Springs, Florida mailbox serves as the corporate address for both organizations.

Silencing critics not way to Middle East peace
 by Joel Beinin was posted on EI on February 5, 2007

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6516.shtml

Last Sunday in San Francisco, the Anti-Defamation League sponsored “Finding Our Voice,” a conference designed to help Jews recognize and confront the “new anti-Semitism.” For me, it was ironic. Ten days before my own voice was silenced by fellow Jews.

I was to give a talk about our Middle East policy to high school students at the Harker School in San Jose. With one day to go, my contact there called to say my appearance had been canceled. He was apologetic and upset. He expected the talk would be intellectually stimulating and intriguing for students. But, he said, “a certain community of parents” complained to the headmaster. He added, without divulging details, that the Jewish Community Relations Council of Silicon Valley had played a role.

(snip)

In fact, this was not our first run-in. I have long advocated equal rights for the Palestinians, as I do for all people. I criticize Israeli policies. I seem to have crossed the council’s line of acceptable discourse. Because I am a Jew, it is not so easy to smear me as guilty of this “new anti-Semitism.” Instead, hosts like the Harker School, and others, are intimidated, and open dialogue on Israel is censored.

Pro-Israel Censorship Hurts Us All, posted by George Bisharat on January 30, 2007

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6470.shtml

In a sad commentary on Israeli-sponsored censorship in the US, George Bisharat begins this story by recounting an incident involving his late father, the artist, Maurice Hanna Bisharat, that occurred in 1981. Michael Himovitz, the young owner of a local art gallery and his father’s friend, offered to hold a one-person show of his father’s paintings, mostly California landscapes. His father had taken up painting after emigrating from Palestine in the late 1940s after the Nakba (the 1948 ethnic cleansing). He was not a politician, but like any Palestinian living in the United States, he felt obligated to relate his people’s experience in his paintings.

Some weeks later I saw my father sitting, stony faced. He turned to me and whispered: “I just got a call from Michael. My show has been canceled.” Michael, it transpired, had been visited by a group from the Sacramento Jewish community. Their message: “If you show Bisharat’s art, we will boycott your gallery and close you down.”

Michael may have been as crushed as my father, apologizing: “I just can’t risk it – it’s my livelihood.” The indirect message to my father, of course, was: “If you speak critically of Israel, you will suffer pain.” Fortunately, art was not my father’s livelihood, and he survived this incident. But a deep sense of outrage never left him.

According to Bisharat’s view, Jews are not suppressing speech. Michael Himovitz didn’t suppress his father’s attempts to explain the Palestinian perspective. He states that many American Jews hold views not dissimilar from his father’s, supporting peace, reconciliation and equal rights for Palestinians and Jews. Yet, a minority of Jews stridently protests any unflattering portrayal of Israel, often with unfounded accusations of anti-Semitism. The pro-Israel lobby, he says, joined by the Israeli government, sustains a systematic campaign to shape American public opinion. And he provides many examples including organizations like CAMERA and others, which have suppressed news reporting from such agencies as CNN.

Debate? What debate? is another story by Michael F. Brown and  was posted on January 15, 2007.

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6391.shtml

There is a misperception in various world locales of Washington’s debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Namely, that substantive debate exists at all. In fact, the debate in the power corridors of Washington is highly constrained, almost non-existent. Should we engage with President Mahmoud Abbas now or require him to leap through several more hoops — including civil war — first? Serious argument on the injustice of Israel’s long-running occupation simply does not take place other than at the margins.

The reason for the silence has become increasingly clear with the publication of President Carter’s courageous book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. CNN’s Glenn Beck labeled the former president a “fathead”. The Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman went so far as to call Carter “bigoted” while Martin Peretz of The New Republic maintains that history will recall Carter “as a Jew hater”. This is extraordinarily vicious language to direct at a former president who brokered Israeli-Egyptian peace.

Read on. There is no end to the attempts to censor news about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict entering America and to inhibit truth telling concerning the intents of Israel’s right wing government. If Brown is correct, “the limited parameters of debate in Washington will feed directly into the highly restrictive boundaries pushed by the Bush administration for the envisioned Palestinian Bantustan.” That Bantustan is the one Jimmy Carter, who broke the silence, warned about.

Crossposted at My Left Wing, Evenhanded Democrats

 
There are only a few published articles that one can read, which give genuine understanding of Israel’s intentions and just what it is that American politicians are supporting when they publicly pronounce their unequivocal, biased support of Israel’s right wing government. Granted, there is a strong Israeli lobby to contend with and highly sophisticated propaganda efforts to keep Americans ignorant of the reality in Palestine and American politicians pretending otherwise.

Jeff Halper’s article, The Problem with Israel, which was released in November 2006, is one of those articles. It deconstructs the apparent reality and is republished here (with permission) in hopes that it help educate people about this aspect of American Middle East foreign policy. The link below provides direct access to the entire article, of which, because of its length, only the first third reproduced. It integrates many topics heretofore seemingly unconnected, talks about why Israel avoids peace initiatives, the US-Israel arms industry, Israel’s preference for militarism and conflict management, and the Greater Israel dream and just how that project is being managed.
The link for the complete text or for bookmarking for later reading is here:

The Problem With Israel

Let’s be honest (for once): The problem in the Middle East is not the Palestinian people, not Hamas, not the Arabs, not Hezbollah or the Iranians or the entire Muslim world. It’s us, the Israelis. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the single greatest cause of instability, extremism and violence in our region, is perhaps the simplest conflict in the world to resolve. For almost 20 years, since the PLO’s recognition of Israel within the 1949 Armistice Lines (the “Green Line” separating Israel from the West Bank and Gaza), every Palestinian leader, backed by large majorities of the Palestinian population, has presented Israel with a most generous offer: A Jewish state on 78% of Israel/Palestine in return for a Palestinian state on just 22% – the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. In fact, this is a proposition supported by a large majority of both the Palestinian and Israeli peoples. As reported in Ha’aretz (January 18, 2005):

Some 63 percent of the Palestinians support the proposal that after the establishment of the state of Palestine and a solution to all the outstanding issues – including the refugees and Jerusalem – a declaration will be issued recognizing the state of Israel as the state of the Jewish people and the Palestinian state as the state of the Palestinian people…On the Israeli side, 70 percent supported the proposal for mutual recognition.

And if Taba and the Geneva Initiative are indicators, the Palestinians are even willing to “swap” some of the richest and most strategic land around Jerusalem and up through Modi’in for barren tracts of the Negev.

And what about the refugees, supposedly the hardest issue of all to tackle? It’s true that the Palestinians want their right of return acknowledged. After all, it is their right under international law. They also want Israel to acknowledge its role in driving the refugees from the country in order that a healing process may begin (I don’t have to remind anyone how important it is for us Jews that our suffering be acknowledged). But they have said repeatedly that when it comes to addressing the actual issue, a package of resettlement in Israel and the Palestinian state, plus compensation for those wishing to remain in the Arab countries, plus the possibility of resettlement in Canada, Australia and other countries would create solutions acceptable to all parties. Khalil Shkaki, a Palestinian sociologist who conducted an extensive survey among the refugees, estimates that only about 10%, mainly the aged, would choose to settle in Israel, a number (about 400,000) Israel could easily digest.

With an end to the Occupation and a win-win political arrangement that would satisfy the fundamental needs of both peoples, the Palestinians could make what would be perhaps the most significant contribution of all to peace and stability in the Middle East. Weak as they are, the Palestinians possess one source of tremendous power, one critical trump card: They are the gatekeepers to the Middle East. For the Palestinian conflict is emblematic in the Muslim world. It encapsulates the “clash of civilizations” from the Muslim point of view. Once the Palestinians signal the wider Arab and Muslim worlds that a political accommodation has been achieved that is acceptable to them, and that now is the time to normalize relations with Israel, it will significantly undercut the forces of fundamentalism, militarism and reaction, giving breathing space to those progressive voices that cannot be heard today – including those in Israel. Israel, of course, would also have to resolve the issue of the Golan Heights, which Syria has been asking it to do for years. Despite the neocon rhetoric to the contrary, anyone familiar with the Middle East knows that such a dynamic is not only possible but would progress at a surprisingly rapid pace.

The problem is Israel in both its pre- and post-state forms, which for the past 100 years has steadfastly refused to recognize the national existence and rights of self-determination of the Palestinian people. Time and again it has said “no” to any possibility of genuine peace making, and in the clearest of terms. The latest example is the Convergence Plan (or Realignment) of Ehud Olmert, which seeks to end the conflict forever by imposing Israeli control over a “sovereign” Palestinian pseudo-state. “Israel will maintain control over the security zones, the Jewish settlement blocs, and those places which have supreme national importance to the Jewish people, first and foremost a united Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty,” Olmert declared at the January 2006 Herzliya Conference. “We will not allow the entry of Palestinian refugees into the State of Israel.” Olmert’s plan, which he had promised to implement just as soon as Hamas and Hezbollah were dispensed with, would have perpetuated Israeli control over the Occupied Territories. It could not possibly have given rise to a viable Palestinian state. While the “Separation Barrier,” Israel’s demographic border to the east, takes only 10-15% of the West Bank, it incorporates into Israel the major settlement blocs, carves the West Bank into small, disconnected, impoverished “cantons” (Sharon’s word), removes from the Palestinians their richest agricultural land and one of the major sources of water. It also creates a “greater” Israeli Jerusalem over the entire central portion of the West Bank, thereby cutting the economic, cultural, religious and historic heart out of any Palestinian state. It then sandwiches the Palestinians between the Wall/border and yet another “security” border, the Jordan Valley, giving Israel two eastern borders. Israel would retain control of all the resources necessary for a viable Palestinian state, and for good measure Israel would appropriate the Palestinians’ airspace, their communications sphere and even the right of a Palestinian state to conduct its own foreign policy.

This plan is obviously unacceptable to the Palestinians – a fact Olmert knows full well – so it must be imposed unilaterally, with American assistance. But who cares? We refused to talk genuinely with Arafat, refused to speak at all with Abu Mazen and currently boycott entirely the elected Hamas government, arresting or assassinating those associated with it. And if “Convergence” doesn’t fly this time around, well, maintaining the status quo while building settlements has been an effective policy for the past four decades and can be extended indefinitely. True, Israel has descended into blind, pointless violence – the Lebanon War of 2006 and, as this is being written, an increasingly violent assault on Gaza. But the Israeli public has accepted Barak’s line that there is no “partner for peace.” So if there is any discontent among the voters, they are more likely to throw out the “bleeding heart” liberal left and bring in the right with its failed doctrine of military-based security.

Why? If Israelis truly crave peace and security – “the right to be normal,” as Olmert put it recently – then why haven’t they grabbed, or at least explored, each and every opportunity for resolving the conflict? Why do they continually elect governments that aggressively pursue settlement expansion and military confrontation with the Palestinians and Israel’s neighbors even though they want to get the albatross of occupation off their necks? Why, if most Israelis truly yearn to “separate” from the Palestinians, do they offer the Palestinians so little that separation is simply not an option, even if the Palestinians are willing to make major concessions? “The files of the Israeli Foreign Ministry,” writes the Israeli-British historian Avi Shlaim in The Iron Wall (2001:49), “burst at the seams with evidence of Arab peace feelers and Arab readiness to negotiate with Israel from September 1948 on.” To take just a few examples of opportunities deliberately rejected:

• In the spring and summer of 1949, Israel and the Arab states met under the auspices of the UN’s Palestine Conciliation Committee (PCC) in Lausanne, Switzerland. Israel did not want to make any territorial concessions or take back 100,000 of the 700,000 refugees demanded by the Arabs. As much as anything else, however, was Ben Gurion’s observation in a cabinet meeting that the Israeli public was “drunk with victory” and in no mood for concessions, “maximal or minimal,” according to Israeli negotiator Elias Sasson.
• In 1949 Syria’s leader Husni Zaim openly declared his readiness to be the first Arab leader to conclude a peace treaty with Israel – as well as to resettle half the Palestinian refugees in Syria. He repeatedly offered to meet with Ben Gurion, who steadfastly refused. In the end only an armistice agreement was signed.
• King Abdullah of Jordan engaged in two years of negotiations with Israel but was never able to make a meaningful breakthrough on any major matter before his assassination. His offer to meet with Ben Gurion was also refused. Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett commented tellingly: “Transjordan said – we are ready for peace immediately. We said – of course, we too want peace, but we cannot run, we have to walk.” Three weeks before his assassination, King Abdullah said: “I could justify a peace by pointing to concessions made by the Jews. But without any concessions from them, I am defeated before I even start.”
• In 1952-53 extensive negotiations were held with the Syrian government of Adib Shishakli, a pro-American leader who was eager for accommodation with Israel. Those talks failed because Israel insisted on exclusive control of the Sea of Galilee, Lake Huleh and the Jordan River.
• Nasser’s repeated offers to talk peace with Ben Gurion, beginning soon after the 1952 Revolution, finally ended with the refusal of Ben Gurion’s successor, Moshe Sharett, to continue the process and a devastating Israeli attack (led by Ariel Sharon) on an Egyptian military base in Gaza.
• In general, Israel’s post-war inflexibility was due to its success in negotiating the armistice agreements, which left it in a politically, territorially and militarily superior position. “The renewed threat of war had been pushed back,” writes Israeli historian Benny Morris in his book Righteous Victims. “So why strain to make a peace involving major territorial concessions?” In a cable to Sharett, Ben Gurion stated flatly what would become Israel’s long-term policy, essentially valid until today: “Israel will not discuss a peace involving the concession of any piece of territory. The neighboring states do not deserve an inch of Israel’s land…We are ready for peace in exchange for peace.” ln July, 1949, he told a visiting American journalist, “I am not in a hurry and I can wait ten years. We are under no pressure whatsoever.” Nonetheless, this period saw the emergence of the image of the Arab leaders as intractable enemies, curried so carefully by Israel and representing such a powerful part of the Israeli framing. Morris (1999: 268) summarizes it succinctly and bluntly:

For decades Ben-Gurion, and successive administrations after his, lied to the Israeli public about the post-1948 peace overtures and about Arab interest in a deal. The Arab leaders (with the possible exception of Abdullah) were presented, one and all, as a recalcitrant collection of warmongers, hell-bent on Israel’s destruction. The recent opening of the Israeli archive offers a far more complex picture.

• In late 1965 Abdel Hakim Amer, the vice-president and deputy commander of the Egyptian army invited the head of the Mossad, Meir Amit, to come to Cairo. The visit was vetoed after stiff opposition from Isser Harel, Eshkol’s intelligence advisor. Could the 1967 war have been avoided? We’ll never know.
• Immediately after the 1967 war, Israel sent out feelers for an accommodation with both the Palestinians of the West Bank and with Jordan. The Palestinians were willing to enter into discussion over peace, but only if that meant an independent Palestinian state, an option Israel never even entertained. The Jordanians were also ready, but only if they received full control over the West Bank and, in particular, East Jerusalem and its holy places. King Hussein even held meetings with Israeli officials but Israel’s refusal to contemplate a full return of the territories scuttled the process. The annexation of a “greater” Jerusalem area and immediate program of settlement construction foreclosed any chance for a full peace.
• In 1971 Sadat sent a letter to the UN Jarring Commission expressing Egypt’s willingness to enter into a peace agreement with Israel. Israeli acceptance could have prevented the 1973 war. After the war Golda Meir summarily dismissed Sadat’s renewed overtures of peace talks.
• Israel ignored numerous feelers put out by Arafat and other Palestinian leaders in the early 1970s expressing a readiness to discuss peace with Israel.
• Sadat’s attempts in 1978 to resolve the Palestine issue as a part of the Israel-Egypt peace process that were rebuffed by Begin who refused to consider anything beyond Palestinian “autonomy.”
• In 1988 in Algiers, as part of its declaration of Palestinian independence, the PLO recognized Israel within the Green Line and expressed a willingness to enter into discussions.
• In 1993, at the start of the Oslo process, Arafat and the PLO reiterated in writing their recognition of Israel within the 1967 borders (again, on 78% of historic Palestine). Although they recognized Israel as a “legitimate” state in the Middle East, Israel did not reciprocate. The Rabin government did not recognize the Palestinians’ national right of self-determination, but was only willing to recognize the Palestinians as a negotiating partner. Not in Oslo nor subsequently has Israel ever agreed to relinquish the territory it conquered in 1967 in favor of a Palestinian state despite this being the position of the UN (Resolution 242), the international community (including, until Bush, the Americans), and since 1988, the Palestinians.
• Perhaps the greatest missed opportunity of all was the undermining by successive Labor and Likud governments of any viable Palestinian state by doubling Israel’s settler population during the seven years of the Oslo “peace process” (1993-2000), thus effectively eliminating the two-state solution.
• In late 1995, Yossi Beilin, a key member of the Oslo negotiating team, presented Rabin with the “Stockholm document” (negotiated with Abu Mazen’s team) for resolving the conflict. So promising was this agreements that Abu Mazen had tears in his eyes when he signed off on it. Rabin was assassinated a few days later and his successor, Shimon Peres, turned it down flat.
• Israel’s dismissal of Syrian readiness to negotiate peace, repeated frequently until this day, if Israel will make concessions on the occupied Golan Heights.
• Sharon’s complete disregard for the Arab League’s 2002 offer of recognition, peace and regional integration in return for relinquishing the Occupation.
• Sharon’s disqualification of Arafat, by far the most congenial and cooperative partner Israel ever had, and the last Palestinian leader who could “deliver,” and his subsequent boycott of Abu Mazen.
• Olmert declared “irrelevant” the Prisoners’ Document in which all Palestinian factions, including Hamas, agreed on a political program seeking a two-state solution – followed by attempts to destroy the democratically-elected government of Hamas by force; and on until this day when
• In September and October 2006 Bashar Assad made repeated overtures for peace with Israel, declaring in public: “I am ready for an immediate peace with Israel, with which we want to live in peace.” On the day of Assad’s first statement to that regard, Prime Minister Olmert declared, “We will never leave the Golan Heights,” accused Syria of “harboring terrorists” and, together with his Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, announced that “conditions are not ripe for peace with Syria.”

To all this we can add the unnecessary wars, more limited conflicts and the bloody attacks that served mainly to bolster Israel’s position, directly or indirectly, in its attempt to extend its control over the entire land west of the Jordan: The systematic killing between 1948-1956 of 3000-5000 “infiltrators,” Palestinian refugees, mainly unarmed, who sought mainly to return to their homes, to till their fields or to recover lost property; the 1956 war with Egypt, fought partly in order to prevent the reemergence onto the international agenda of the “Palestine Problem,” as well as to strengthen Israel militarily, territorially and diplomatically; military operations against Palestinian civilians beginning with the infamous killings in Sharafat, Beit Jala and most notoriously Qibia, led by Sharon’s Unit 101. These operations continue in the Occupied Territories and Lebanon until this day, mainly for purposes of collective punishment and “pacification.” Others include the campaign, decades old, of systematically liquidating any effective Palestinian leader; the three wars in Lebanon (Operation Litani in 1978, Operation Peace for the Galilee in 1982 and the war of 2006); and more.

(continued at link)

The Problem With Israel

(Jeff Halper is a Professor of Anthropology at Ben Guurion University and the Founder and the Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. He can be reached at jeff@icahd.org).

Crossposted at My Left Wing, Eternal Hope, Evenhanded Democrats

 
Last year, a feature film about Palestinian suicide bombers called “Paradise Now” caused an outcry among Israelis. Too sympathetic toward its main characters, who were depicted as being motivated by anger at Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, was the main complaint.

This year, a new documentary, “Suicide Killers,” by the French filmmaker Pierre Rehov may draw as many complaints from the other camp. Rehov interviewed Palestinians imprisoned for trying to detonate suicide bombs. His conclusion was that they were influenced by a religious culture that represses sexual desires and channels the resulting frustration into homicidal rage. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which nominated “Paradise Now” (directed by a Palestinian) for a 2006 best foreign-language film Academy Award, was considering “Suicide Killers” as a 2007 nominee for the Best Documentary, but after it was screened in New York and San Francisco, the Academy judges failed to select it as a finalist in the documentary category.
Rehov’s conclusion about what motivates suicide bombers is interesting if speculative, and may be laden with personal bias, something intimated in an interview with a San Francisco Chronicle reporter (see below).

The question of what motivates some Palestinians to strap on explosives and try to kill Israeli citizens has been debated intensively in past years. The string of attacks during the second Intifada resulted in the deaths of roughly 800 Israeli citizens. Some Palestinians say the bombers are fueled by revenge and hopelessness brought on by decades of Israeli occupation, which have choked off the economic and social life of the Palestinian territories, and by Israeli military actions that have killed and wounded thousands of Palestinians. Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi told the BBC in 2002 that suicide bombers are “driven to desperation and anger by the Israeli activities.” Journalist and United Nations official Nasra Hassan, who has done extensive interviews with Palestinian suicide bombers, found that one of their prime goals was to spread fear in the hearts of Israelis. Hamas members told her that suicide bombings were a legitimate tactic against Israeli aggression. A study of failed Palestinian suicide bombers by an Israeli psychologist, who I recall being interviewed on TV, reported one single universal shared trait: “no fear” (I am unable to link to the study itself). Other studies by Israeli researchers have found that Palestinian suicide bombers are motivated by many factors, including religion and a desire to avenge the deaths of other Palestinians.

Rehov, who was interviewed about his Suicide Killers film, reached a different conclusion.

Several of the young men whom (Rehov) interviews behind bars say they are eager to reach paradise and the 72 virgins promised by Islamic theology. “Those who blow themselves up get a good bonus from God — they marry 72 virgins,” one tells Rehov. (A Hamas cleric told Hassan that the 72 virgins aren’t on hand for sexual gratification, however.) One jailed woman talks about wanting to be the “prettiest” among the heavenly virgins.

“I’ve studied psychology, (Rehov states), and there are a lot of things connected to flashers — they want to destroy innocence. I realized that these guys in the last minute of their lives have this same behavior. This is when I understood there is something really sexual about this extreme act they want to commit. I knew (about the Islamic religious belief) of 72 virgins, and I also knew about how sexual frustration can lead to people becoming serial killers.”

“Suicide Killers,” Rehov says, is “not politically correct.” It minimizes the role that Israel’s territorial occupation has on Palestinian anger and emphasizes the sexual repression that Rehov says contributes to the bombers’ actions.

http://www.sfgate.co...

http://sfgate.com/cg...

Of course, this kind of armchair psychological theorizing from the literati like Rehov is not new. Sexual repression, of course, is an old Freudian notion and were it not for the fact that its reality has been refuted by science-minded psychologists, who see it as little more than a reified myth, one lacking empirical counterparts, it might be taken seriously. It is also obvious that Rehov’s sexual theory depicts Palestinian suicide bombers as pursuing a religious motive, i.e., radical Islam, given his emphasis on sexual repression and the suicide bomber’s quest for the “72 virgins,” which some interviewees apparently mentioned. Such a theory conveniently reinforces recent Israeli-US propaganda efforts to reinterpret the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within the framework of the greater War on Terrorism or radical Al Qaeda Islamism, a theme emphasized in the documentary, Peace, Propaganda, & The Promised Land.

http://www.youtube.c...

In this, the US seems to be alone in the West to give organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah the terrorist stamp, forgetting that both were created to fight Israel’s military occupations of the Palestinian territories and Lebanon, which still continues in the former. In Europe, the members of these groups are variously viewed as “militants,” “resisters,” or even “freedom fighters” rather than “terrorists,” and to respect this difference, news organizations like CNN reportedly interchange these terms when issuing reports in Europe and the US, respectively.

In the context of the second Intifada, which produced strings of deadly suicide bombings in Israel, a sexual-religious theory hardly seems adequate, given all of the other factors in play, not the least of which is the decades long military occupation. The killing of numerous innocent Palestinian adults and children, which both preceded and coincided with these attacks through unremitting cycles of violence, would also seem to induce retaliatory drive, even if it might not explain why one Palestinian would eventually volunteer to become a suicide bomber and not another. I will not attempt to discuss the internal or idiosyncratic factors, the personality variables, if one prefers, but rather the situational, contextual, or behavioral (stimulus) sources of motivation that may specifically apply to the Palestinian suicide bomber.

Studies of suicide bombers in general by political scientists and psychologists may be of value in understanding why an individual might volunteer for such a role, but they may not necessarily apply to what motivated Palestinian suicide bombers during the second Intifada. In other contexts, suicide bombers may be bona fide terrorists, i.e., retain a religious, ideological, or political reason for wanting to instill terror in a target civilian population. Excluding the sporadic Hamas suicide attacks in the 1990s, the motivation of Palestinian suicide bombers during the notorious period of the second Intifada may really have little to do with terrorism, as it is formally understood.

So what is it that might have motivated these Palestinian suicide bomber that is unique?

Do the Intifada suicide bombers fit the accepted profile of the terrorist? In the language of a 1999 UN Resolution, terrorism involves “criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or other nature that may be invoked to justify them (GA Res. 51/210 Measures to eliminate international terrorism).” Well, if we are talking about Al Qaeda or the PLO before Oslo acting to obtain political recognition of their cause, yes. However, typical terrorist motivation does not appear to apply to the Intifada suicide bombers. Although they did manage to throw the Israeli people into a state of terror, terror was hardly their purpose.

According to Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi, the Hamas suicide bomber coordinator and pediatrician, it was situational anger, and the desire for vengeance and retaliation. That is at least what he acknowledged in a Time Magazine interview before his assassination.

Summarizing what Rantisi reported, prior to the second Intifada, he had to scrap the bottom of the barrel to get volunteers to strap on bombs and enter Israel. As a consequence, there were only sporadic incidents during the Olso period, and no suicide bombings at all between 1998 and 2000. However, once the second Intifada began and Palestinians began dying, over fifty suicide bombers entered Israel in the first year alone. And it was not just Hamas; Islamic Jihad and other Fatah associated organizations were also involved in recruitment.

In Time Magazine interview, Rantisi gave some clues about what motivated these Palestinians to strap on bombs.

Until recently most Palestinians believed they had alternatives to the kind of militancy practiced by Hamas. For years after the 1993 Oslo peace accord, which brought limited self-rule to the Palestinians and the prospect of an independent state, polls showed a strong majority of Palestinians supporting the peace process with Israel and only a minority endorsing suicide bombings. Thus, in their headhunting, the fundamentalists were limited to stalwart followers of their doctrine, which holds that any kind of peace with Israel is anathema. Even then, Hamas and Islamic Jihad had to cajole–some might say brainwash–young men into believing that the rewards of paradise outweighed the prospects of life on earth.

But with the breakdown of the peace process in the summer of 2000 and the start of the latest Intifada that September, the martyr wannabes started coming to Hamas–and they didn’t require persuading. “We don’t need to make a big effort, as we used to do in the past,” Abdel Aziz Rantisi, one of Hamas’ senior leaders, told TIME last week. The TV news does that work for them. “When you see the funerals, the killing of Palestinian civilians, the feelings inside the Palestinians become very strong,” he explained.

Indeed, in her documentary, Off The Charts: Media Bias and Censorship in America, Alison Weir provided the names, ages, places, and dates of 27 Palestinian children who were killed by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) before a single suicide bomber entered Israel after the start of the Second Intifada. These 27 children had been killed in the West Bank and Gaza, the youngest only four months of age, the oldest 17 years of age, the majority shot in the head. Numerous children were also wounded. In the first three months alone, 159 children lost an eye, presumably to rubber bullets shot from IDF rifles. While it is unclear from the data provided by Weir, some of these children may have been participating in the Intifada, the resistance instituted by rock-throwing Palestinian boys and girls. Since an Israeli study on the effects of rubber bullets on Palestinian civilians revealed only three deaths in the first year, real bullets were undoubtedly used in the killing of most of these children.

http://video.google….

Innocent children as well as adults kept dying throughout the Intifada along with innocent Israeli adults and children caught in the vicinity of suicide bombers in Israel. From each side, retaliation commonly stimulated more death. From the Palestinian side, just looking at the deadly effect of IDF actions on children alone would seem to be sufficient motivation enough. Rami Khouri, the Palestinian-Jordanian editor of the Beruit Daily Star quoted a report by the Health Development Information and Policy Institute based in Ramallah, which covered child deaths and wounding and other effects in the first two years of the Intifada.

In just the first two years of the second intifada, from September 2000 to November 2002:

• 383 Palestinian children (under the age of 18) were killed by the Israeli army and Israeli settlers, i.e. almost 19% of the total Palestinians killed; those figures have increased since then.
• Approximately 36% of total Palestinians injured (estimated at more than 41,000) are children; 86 of these children were under the age of ten; 21 infants under the age of 12 months have been killed.
• 245 Palestinian students and school children have been killed; 2,610 pupils have been wounded on their way to or from school.
• The Israeli policy of widespread closure has paralyzed the Palestinian health system, with children particularly vulnerable to this policy of collective punishment. Internal closures have severely disrupted health plans, which affect over 500,000 children, including vaccination programs, dental examinations and early diagnosis for children when starting schools.
• During the first two months of the Intifada, the rate of upper respiratory infections in children increased from 20% to 40%. Almost 60% of children in Gaza suffer parasitic infections.
• An overwhelming number of Palestinian children show symptoms of trauma such as sleep disorders, nervousness, decrease in appetite and weight, feelings of hopelessness and frustration, and abnormal thoughts of death.
• There have been 36 cases of Palestinian women in labor delayed at checkpoints and refused permission to reach medical facilities or for ambulances to reach them. At least 14 of these women gave birth at the checkpoint with eight of the births resulting in the death of the newborn infants.

(quoted from the article, Ehud Olmert’s Profound Ethics and Deep Lies)

http://www.ramikhour...

If child deaths were not enough, during the second Intifada, it was reported that of the more than 4,000 Palestinians killed in five years, 80% were classified as innocent civilians, adults and children. In the same period, roughly 1000 Israelis were killed, with the same proportion, 80%, being innocent adults and children.

To say the least, such killings would seem to boil into a sufficient cause for retaliatory reprisals by either side. For the suicide bomber, at least according to Rantisi, it was a necessary condition. His input reveals first, that when the killings of Palestinians are minimal, and there is a hope of peace on the horizon, as during the Oslo period, volunteers for suicide missions are scarce. When violence erupts, innocent people begin to die along with hopes for peace, and anger, hate, and cries for retaliation and revenge surface, “when the feelings inside become very strong,” volunteers for suicide bombings become abundant.

Here is a final commentary from Jonathan Cook on a grandmother suicide bomber, where he offers some additional insight about motivation.

If one thing offers a terrifying glimpse of where the experiment in human despair that is Gaza under Israeli siege is leading, it is the news that a Palestinian woman in her sixties, a grandmother, chose last week to strap on a suicide belt and explode herself next to a group of Israeli soldiers invading her refugee camp.

Despite the “Man bites dog” news value of the story, most of the Israeli media played down the incident. Not surprisingly, it is difficult to portray Fatma al-Najar as a crazed fanatic bent only the destruction of Israel.

It is equally difficult not to pause and wonder at the reasons for her suicide mission; according to her family, one of her grandsons was killed by the Israeli army, another is in a wheelchair after his leg had to be amputated, and her house had been demolished.

Or not to think of the years of trauma she and her family have suffered living in a open-air prison under brutal occupation, and now, since the “disengagement”, the agonizing months of grinding poverty, slow starvation, repeated aerial bombardments, and the loss of essentials like water and electricity.

Or not to ponder at what it must have been like for her to spend every day under a cloud of fear, to be powerless against a largely unseen and malign force, and to never know when death and mutilation might strike her or her loved ones.

Or not to imagine that she had been longing for the moment when the soldiers who have been destroying her family’s lives might show themselves briefly, coming close enough that she could see and touch them, and wreak her revenge.

Yet Western observers, and the organizations that should represent the very best of their Enlightenment values, seem incapable of understanding what might drive a grandmother to become a suicide bomber. Their empathy fails them, and so does their humanity.

http://www.counterpu...

The Israeli occupation is, of course, the problem. Without the occupation and the colonization of Palestinian lands going on under its protection, and the suffering it has caused the Palestinian people, Israel would not have experienced the suicide bomb culture that occupation sired. The Palestinian suicide bomber of the Intifada was not a terrorist, but an avenger. Opinions to the contrary merely repeat a line of propaganda offered by the Israeli and US governments, who wish to portray the Israelis as victims of terror and the Palestinians as perpetrators of terrorism. It is for this reason that Israel must maintain its brutal military occupation and explains its current ability to kill Palestinians with impunity, over 600 in 2006 alone.

Crossposted at My Left Wing, Eternal Hope, Evenhanded Democrats

 
This report appearing in the Jerusalem Post (London) on February 22, 2007, South African Jewish minister sends support to Israeli Apartheid Week organizers, appears to give further support to Jimmy Carter’s thesis that, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, is a valid admonition.

http://www.jpost.com...

Ronnie Kasrils, who is South Africa’s Minister for Intelligence, sent the letter to the Palestinian Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Kasrils said that he was writing in his personal capacity, and not on behalf of the South African government, but as a representative of a society steeped in the vile tradition of Apartheid, his message carried a particular weight.

Kasrils, furthermore, is a Jewish member of South Africa’s cabinet, for which reason the Jerusalem Post presumably took notice. The occasion was last week’s Israeli Apartheid Week at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Israeli Apartheid Week conducted earlier this month through activities at various universities in Canada (Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa), the UK (Oxford, Cambridge), and the United States (New York) to highlight Israel’s apartheid policies.

Kasrils’ position was summarized in a letter which he titled, “A Message of Support from South Africa”. In his letter, he stated,

Please convey to all involved my wholehearted support for your week of solidarity with the Palestinian people in your appropriately entitled Israeli Apartheid Week.

This year sees the 60th anniversary of the UN Partition Plan that set in motion the monstrous Zionist plot to violently dispossess the Palestinian people of their land and rights, and their dispersal through serial ethnic cleansing that has continued in one form or another to this day.

To any fair minded person, this process of colonial-style dispossession is the fundamental cause of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and is certainly akin to the racist-style humiliation and brutality of the notorious apartheid system under which South Africa’s landless and dispossessed people suffered.

Kasrils has been the South African Minister for Intelligence Services since 2004, has been a member of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress since 1987, and has been a member of the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party since 1986.

With the many negative reactions to Jimmy Carter’s book after publication from various quarters including members of Congress, it was obvious that his intent was misunderstood. These criticisms obviously came from people who necessarily avert their eyes to the reality of life on the ground in the West Bank, or who just blindly support Israel’s right wing government.

That a South African official would confirm similarities between Israel’s military occupation and the South African Apartheid system suggests that the comparison is a valid if not exact one as some apologists have indicated. There is an apartheid system in place in the West Bank, and from the observation of South African experts, it exceeds the Apartheid system of the now defunct Africaaner government of South Africa.

Crossposted at My Left Wing, Eternal Hope, Evenhanded Democrats

The Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid reported a Day of Action Against Indigo Books and Music Inc. as part of its protest activity in Toronto, Canada during the third annual Israeli Apartheid Week.

As reported in The Electronic Intifada on February 23, 2007,

Chanting “Fight the power, turn the page: Heather, Jerry, hear our rage!”, one hundred and fifty protesters marched from the Israeli consulate to a nearby Indigo Books and Music store in Toronto on Saturday afternoon. They were protesting Indigo’s majority shareholders’ support for Israeli Apartheid. The day of action was organized by the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (CAIA) as the culmination of the third annual Israeli Apartheid Week.

http://www.caiaweb.org/

Heather and Gerry refer to Heather Reisman and Gerry Schwartz, who founded Heseg: Foundation for Lone Soldiers. At its peak, the foundation will distribute up to $3 million a year to provide scholarships and other support to former ‘Lone Soldiers’ in the Israeli military. ‘Lone Soldiers’ are individuals who have no family in Israel but decided to join the Israeli military. As Israeli soldiers, they are considered to have participated in a military that enforces apartheid by operating checkpoints restricting Palestinian freedom of movement, enforces the occupation of Palestinian land, and has a documented history of human rights violations. This bookstore has been target by CAIA before.

As Andrew Hugill, a spokesperson of the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid explained,

We’re here to put pressure on the majority owners of Indigo Books and Music Inc. to stop supporting the Israeli military through Heseg: Foundation for Lone Soldiers.

Israel is an apartheid state, founded on racism and discrimination. This boycott is part of a worldwide campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions to isolate Israel until it ends the occupation of all Arab lands, release all Palestinian and Arab political prisoners, give the right of return to Palestinian refugees according to UN resolution 194, and grant equal rights to Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Naomi Binder Wall of the Jewish Women’s Committee to End the Occupation, and also a CAIA spokesperson, said,

This store [Indigo Books and Music] presents itself as a benign cultural institution. But its majority shareholders have used the considerable wealth they have derived from it to support the Israeli military, which has been accused of war crimes in Lebanon and Palestine, and has broken international laws regarding the treatment of prisoners. As a Jew, I’m outraged that Reisman and Schwartz are supporting the Israeli military through Heseg: Foundation for Lone Soldiers.

Israeli Apartheid Week otherwise consisted of a series of lectures and activities held on campuses in Canada (Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa), the UK (Oxford, Cambridge), and the United States (New York) to highlight Israel’s policies in the West Bank.

In Toronto, Dr. Jamal Zahalka, a member of the Israeli Knesset, gave a keynote address. It was reported by Dr. Zahalka that he is facing investigation in Israel for “incitement” for giving a lecture entitled, Debunking the Myth of Israeli Democracy. Dr. Zahalka explained to the audience of 350 people who gathered at the University of Toronto that this infringement of the free speech of an elected politician underscores the lack of democracy for Palestinians living under Israeli Apartheid. He reported that a law that could revoke the citizenship of anyone who expresses disloyalty to the idea of “a Jewish and democratic state” had already passed its first reading in the Knesset. The law, he said, targets the Palestinian minority inside Israel.

The CAIA continued to support the call for boycott, divestment and sanctions that came from 170 Palestinian organizations. Reena Katz of the Jewish Women’s Committee to End the Occupation explained the importance of this call for the possibility of a solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict:

Our understanding of restorative justice and true democracy comes from the thousands of Palestinian led progressive, grassroots groups and coalitions worldwide.

Permission to quote from the Electronic Intifada RSS webfeed.

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6584.shtml

Crossposted at My Left Wing, Eternal Hope, Evenhanded Democrats

 
When people speak of “Israeli settlements” in Palestine’s West Bank, for the average American, an image of pioneers might immediately surface, settlers arriving in wagons and building homes and small communities on the western frontier, possibly in the Dakotas or on the plains of Oklahoma in the 19th century. If this image of a settlement seems off base, look up the term, settlement, in the dictionary:  

A colony, a body of people who settle far from home, but maintain ties with their homeland; a village: a community of people smaller than a town; a colonization: the act of colonizing; the establishment of colonies; like the “the British colonization of America;” or an area where a group of families live together.

If any of these definitions of settlement were ever applicable to the typical Israeli settlement in the West Bank, there would hardly be any difficulties in attaining something close to a permanent peace between Israel and Palestinians, a real two state resolution of the conflict. The removal of these settlements would likely be inconsequential.

The problem here is that the term, “Israeli settlement,” is a thoroughly misleading one, a deceiving understatement for what it is that actually confronts the peace process. By the above definition, none of the more than 150 “Israeli settlements” in the West Bank is a settlement by any definition of the term. The typical Israeli settlement in the West Bank is instead a village, town, or small city and they are scattered throughout this small piece of Palestinian real estate.

Although the populations of Israelis living in these West Bank settlements listed in Wikipedia are outdated, thirty-five of them exceed 1000 persons with the largest listed as Ma’ale Adummim with a current (2006) population of 31,400, then Betar ‘Illit with 28,400, and Modi’in Illit with 33,200. Fortunately, these small cities lie near the 1967 border, now protected by the Wall, although Ma’ale Adummim, adjacent to Jerusalem, juts deep into the West Bank almost cutting it in half. The others are spread throughout the West Bank as shown by this map. The blue areas show the larger settlements. The roads interconnecting them with Israeli are also visible.

To obtain a better idea of what an Israeli settlement is, I invite you to watch a documentary called, The Iron Wall, accessed below where the problem caused by their presence becomes evident. It is these “settlements” that is presently a major obstacle to peace, was the major un-removable obstacle in 2000 during the Camp David/Taba negotiations, and is probably the principle reason why Israel rebuffed later peace plans and offers from the Arab League (2002, 2006) and Iran (2003) among others, and has permitted the Road Map to die a slow death. Aside of the other unsettled issues like the right of return and East Jerusalem, a Palestinian state cannot exist as a sovereign entity in the midst of alien villages, towns, and cities, all interconnected with Israel by a network of Israeli-only roads and highways, which wind through the West Bank.

The The Iron Wall begins by telling us about the colonization of the West Bank, which has gone on under the protection of a military occupation for the past 40 years, and that this development was envisioned by the Zionist movement long before the state of Israel was born. The settlement movement is a distinctly right wing movement supported all along by left and right, including the Labor party. Only recently, in 2005, has a major voice come forth to recognize the injustices that are being perpetrated on behalf of the Israeli people, Ehud Barak’s voice, who now appreciates that without the removal of settlements, Israel will forever remain a pariah state, as it attempts to extinguish the yearnings of the Palestinian people for freedom and self-determination.

In 1923, Vladimir Jabotinsky, leading intellectual of the Zionist movement and father of the right wing of that movement, wrote:

“Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an The Iron Wall, which the native population cannot breach.” First published in Russian under the title O Zheleznoi Stene in Rassvyet, 4 November 1923.

From that day these words became the official and unspoken policy of the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel. Settlements were used from the beginning to create a Zionist foothold in Palestine.

The Iron Wall documentary exposes this phenomenon and follows the timeline, size, population of the settlements, and its impact on the peace process. This film also touches on the latest project to make the settlements a permanent fact on the ground; the wall that Israel is building in the West Bank and its impact on the Palestinian people.

Click here for a full education of what the word “settlement” means as it applies to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or bookmark it for later viewing. It has been on YouTube since Sep 15, 2006. Its length is 57 min 19 sec. You will be so much the wiser about the obstacles to resolving this conflict if you do.

http://video.google….

Second Day of Action against Israeli Company Importing Valentine’s Day Flowers, a press release from the International Solidarity Movement on February 11th, 2007, reported.

CARMEL-AGREXCO BLOCKADED

http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2007/02/11/valentine-blockade/

When it comes to fighting against injustice, the British are no slouches, at least not for the few Brits, and it is always the few, who got up off their armchairs to take up the cause. In this case, the cause is the plight of the Palestinian people, whose life and liberties have been stolen from them in a slow but inexorable theft of their homes and lands through a long military occupation, Israel’s, one that is intended to accomplish nothing less than their dispossession, which, from the look at ground level, can mean their containment in a few walled-in Bantustans. Their centuries old attachment to this land will be over.

Isn’t it always the few who lead the rest of us, who wake us up and draw our attention to ongoing injustices around the world. The John Browns and Rosa Parks, the few called Freedom Riders who conquered their fear and mounted buses en route to Mississippi in the sixties, the Berrigans and the Cantonsville Nine, who risked imprisonment to halt a vile war, and now the few who have involved themselves in the Palestinian tragedy, like the Jewish boys and girls staging die-ins in Boston, or the Women in Black protesting an Israel Philharmonic concert in LA, and the volunteers from Jewish Voices for Peace and ISM from America and around the world, who venture into the Palestinian territories.

Here, I bring you just another episode in the lives of another group who belong to the few, thirteen British activists, as described in the press release from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM):

Thirteen Palestine solidarity protesters from London and Brighton are blockading the UK base of an Israeli agricultural export company Agrexco (UK) Ltd, Swallowfield Way, Hayes, Middlesex.

This is the second day of action against Agrexco on one of their busiest weekends of the year. Agrexco are dealing with large amounts of Israeli flowers in the build up to Valentine’s Day. On Saturday over a hundred protesters stood in front of the gates of the depot and deliveries had to be rescheduled.

Agrexco is Israel’s largest exporter of agricultural produce into the European Union, and is 50% Israeli state owned. It imports produce from illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

This morning activists locked themselves to both gates of the Hayes depot. They were met with violence by private security guards from First Class Protection. The blockade is currently stopping all motor vehicle traffic in and out of the building.

Before taking part in this action many of the defendants had witnessed first hand the suffering of Palestinian communities under the brutal Israeli occupation. They do not accept the UK’s complicity in the illegal occupation of Palestine and see the presence of this company as a violation of human rights.

BACKGROUND

Carmel-Agrexco is 50% owned by the state of Israel, and imports produce from illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. At the same time Israeli forces have blocked Palestinian exports on grounds of `security’.

Israeli state sponsored settlements have appropriated land and water resources by military force from Palestinian farmers in a deliberate policy of colonial settlement.

In a hearing in September the judge ruled that Agrexco (UK) must prove that their business is lawful.

Watch a short video of the demonstration here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfQTbf80t9c

The Human Rights Watch site informs that the basic principles of international humanitarian law underlying military occupation are long established. They are based primarily on the 1907 Hague Convention (IV) Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, and customary international humanitarian law.

http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/iraq/ihlfaqoccupation.htm
Under international humanitarian law, once an occupying power has assumes authority over a territory, it is obliged to restore and maintain, as far as possible, public order and safety. Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, the occupying power must also respect the fundamental human rights of the territory’s inhabitants, including refugees and other non-citizens.

Four basic principles of international law underlie an occupation:

1. The occupying power does not, through occupation, gain sovereignty over the occupied territory.
2. Occupation is considered a transitory phase in which the rights of the population must be respected by the occupying power until formal authority is restored.
3. When exercising authority, the occupying power must take into account the interests of the inhabitants as well as military necessity.
4. The occupying power must not use its authority to exploit the population or local resources for the benefit of its own population and territory.

Israel, in its occupation of the Palestinian territories after the 1967 war, has never complied with international law concerning its military occupation of Palestine. To the contrary, since 1967, Israel has succeeded in controlling 40% of West Bank land, while building over 150 settlements whose population presently ranges from small villages to cities of over 30,000 residents. These settlements are connected to Israel by a network of Israeli only roads and highways. The settlements have well-developed commerce, industries and agricultural businesses in the territories. Water aquifers in the West Bank including the Jordan River basin are under the control of IDF forces and the water utilized by settler communities causing scarcity in local Palestinian communities. In formal government law and regulation including military communications, as well as newspaper articles, the term, West Bank, is seldom heard: Judea and Sumaria are the regions in question. In Israeli school books, the green armistice line is obliterated and the West Bank shown as part of a Greater Israel, after the dreams of the hard line Zionists, the right wing keepers of Israel’s purported religious and historical rights to all of the land.

It has been quite evident that the purpose of the military occupation is to protect Israel’s colonization of the West Bank in order to complete the Greater Israel dream. To do so, however, it has had to perpetrate one of modern history’s greatest injustices: the total obliteration of the human and civil rights of the Palestinian people.

Israeli politicians often claim that Israel is the only true democracy in the Middle East. If so, what has given it the “legal” basis to essentially continue its displacement of local Palestinian populations on lands considered to be occupied by a military force.

In a word: the Israeli Supreme Court.

Louis Frankethaler who lives in Jerusalem where he works for the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, wrote in The Electronic Intifada, February 21, 2007, about how Israel’s High Court reinforces the occupation.

Journalist Gideon Levy wrote in the Israeli daily Haaretz: “From now on, the [Israeli] Supreme Court will act without Aharon Barak (who recently retired). It will, however, presumably continue to act within his legacy, which has authorized nearly all injustices in the territories. Barak, meanwhile, will continue to be depicted in Israel and the world as a pursuer of justice.”

(snip)

The Court should have declared the Occupation illegal. It could have used the clear and highly developed legal reasoning for which it is so well known in order to explain exactly how there is no fundamental difference between an ‘illegal’ outpost such as Kochav Ya’akov West and a ‘legal’ settlement such as Kochav Ya’akov or Ma’aleh Adumim (both of which are over the Green Line, on expropriated and occupied Palestinian land) and that the State has no right to confiscate land in order to build a wall that divides Palestinians and protects settlements that have no right to exist.

The Court might have easily relied on international humanitarian law (IHL) which forbids Israel from doing exactly what it is doing in the OPT. The Court left the assassinations policy in place, delivering a meticulously reasoned legal analysis while forgetting or ignoring the human and human rights dimensions of the issue.

Furthermore, the Court, in an important decision, by many accounts, ostensibly prohibited torture in Israel, yet it did not refer to the Israeli euphemism “moderate physical pressure” as torture — which it is. Rather than reconciling its decision with international law and absolutely outlawing torture and cruel and inhuman treatment it left the window open and actually paved the way for torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment to continue to be used as a counter-terrorism/insurgency tool albeit, (and perhaps), to a lesser extent than in the past.

(snip)

The annexation barrier continues to be built, walling Palestinians off from their kin while setting the boundaries for the Palestinian non-state and the expanded Israeli settler state. In fact, in one of the High Court’s most recent decisions on the wall, it too opened with a similar narrative of Israel fighting terror and the need for security. The wall is being constructed, in Barak’s words, “against this background.” Although in this decision (Mara’abe v. Prime Minister of Israel, H.C.J. 7957/04) the Court ordered the State to readjust the route of the barrier, the Court “endorsed the policy of construction of the wall …” In essence, the ‘progressive’ nature (in the Israeli context) of the High Court of Justice is consigned to irrelevance by its inability or unwillingness to come out against the Occupation and the Court simply acts to regulate the Occupation.

According to Frankethaler, the Court has consistently acted as an agent of the state rather than a fully unbiased arbiter of the law. The purpose of his article, however, is not to discuss “the seemingly unending catalog of human rights abuses associated with the Occupation, but rather the fact that these abuses are integral components of the primary human rights abuse, the state violence that is the Occupation.”

Frankethaler’s article is too long to quote in its entirety, but it is highly recommended for an appreciation of how the occupation is viewed within Israel, legally, and as a human rights issue.

Some of the themes he discusses include:

The occupation in itself is a human rights issue.

The Occupation has simultaneously plagued Israel for forty years and imprisoned the Palestinians as a stateless people with virtually no access to rights protection except for the grossly inadequate appeals to the Israeli legal system…

The Occupation and its deleterious effects continue both inside and outside of the Green Line. Israel forbids Palestinian citizens of the state from marrying Palestinians from the OPT. Migrant workers are still treated as virtual slaves while the State pursues children of migrant workers, who know nothing of their “homelands,” targeting them for deportation.

Gideon Levy’s running chronicle of Israel’s cruelty to the Palestinians — killing, destruction of families and homes, humiliation and expropriation of their humanity — in the name of the Occupation.” (Gideon Levy’s articles in Haaretz, the only Israeli newspaper of worth, are highly recommended for anyone interested in understanding the occupation.)

Israel pursues its Occupation enterprise to the point of what seems to be no return. Palestinians have been so dehumanized that they fit Hannah Arendt’s definition of those who “have been driven outside the pale of the law” and who, even while enjoying ‘human rights,’ have been so cut off from political community that they have, at various times, been denied even the right to an identity.

The Palestinian is subject to the will of the Israeli Occupation. He or she has no voice and no substantial political status.

Palestinians are subject to a separate system of justice, namely “military justice” in which their rights to due process, fair trials and pain free interrogations are severely hampered.

Israelis (especially Israeli settlers in the Occupied Territory), on the other hand, are governed by Israeli justice and all too often find that they enjoy virtual immunity from prosecution when they commit crimes — even violent crimes — against Palestinians and when they continue to engage in the structural violence of settlement expansion and construction, which are patently illegal acts.

For Palestinians the principle of equal protection of the law does not to apply to them.

The Israeli High Court of Justice oversaw and continues to oversee developments lending the Occupation its judicial imprimatur. Thus Palestinians remain essentially faceless persons, divested of civil and human rights with no real avenue for redress.

In closing, Frankethaler makes clear that the Israeli High Court is an extension of a colonial pathology that has inflicted Israeli society, which is reflected in the workings of its highest tribunal. He makes this clear in his closing:

….(one cannot) lay the entire blame for this travesty at the feet of Israel’s High Court of Justice. The policy of Occupation is a comprehensive one to which Israel’s citizens have tacitly if not overtly acquiesced over the course of four decades. The extent to which complicity attaches is a complex one yet it is clear that the Occupation constructs a situation in which, at least indirectly, Israeli society bears as much responsibility as Israel’s political, military and judicial authorities. Denial and myopia are Israeli pathologies.

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6576.shtml

Text reprinted by permissions provided through the Electronic Intifada’s Webfeed Generator.

This communication was sent out by email from Citizens for Fair Legislation this morning appealing for support of its petition for our government NOT TO BOYCOTT the unity government recently negotiated by Fatah and Hamas.

SUPPORT PEACE FOR PALESTINE BY NOT BOYCOTTING THE UNITY GOVERNMENT, it said.

While the rest of the world applauds the Palestinians for the ceasefire agreement reached in Mecca last week, the US has issued warnings to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas regarding a potential US boycott of the new unity government. Please let your representatives know that you are outraged that the US will not support measures towards peace in the Palestine and that it is Israel and not the Palestinians who refuse to recognize the rights of Palestinians to exist under international law. Tell your representatives that Palestinians from all political parties have agreed to respect UN resolutions and all decisions that have been made in previous Arab summits.

Tell your representatives that you find it outrageous that the US is threatening to boycott the Palestinians on the basis of their truce and that you question whether the US was hoping for a civil war in the territories.  Ask your representatives whether they support peace between Palestinians and Israelis or not, tell your representatives that a unity government is the first realistic step towards peace and that if they prefer to support chaos in the territories such a position will never lead to peace in the region.   The current sanctions in occupied Palestine will not move the region towards peace, they will only continue to strangle the population and embolden groups who see no point in peace or non violence if their positions are not respected and the US continues to take support measures that would lead to a civil war in the Palestinian territories.

Ask your representatives when they will begin applying pressure on Israel to end its occupation, remove settlements from the West Bank and Jerusalem and stop threatening Muslim holy sites.  Remind your representatives that the Israelis have reneged on every single agreement that they have ever signed on to without a single rebuke from the US.  Tell your elected officials that if they are serious about peace they would stop refusing to deal with a government that has the popular support of the Palestinian people and the Arab world.

EMAIL AND OR CALL THE WHITE HOUSE
WHITE HOUSE COMMENTS LINE: 202-456-1111
WHITE HOUSE SWITCHBOARD: 202-456-1414
WHITE HOUSE FAX: 202-456-2461

OR CLICK HERE to sign a petition.
 http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/org anizationsORG/CFLWeb/campaign.jsp?campai gn_KEY=6781

Following the announcement that Hamas and Fatah had reached an agreement to form a unity government, Bush and Olmert immediately countered that they would not recognize it.

From Reuters,

Olmert, Bush agree to shun Palestinian govt -Israel
Sat 17 Feb 2007

JERUSALEM, Feb 17 (Reuters) – U.S. President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert have agreed to jointly shun a Palestinian unity government unless it meets international conditions, Olmert’s office said on Saturday.

An official in Olmert’s office told Reuters that the agreement was reached in a telephone conversation on Friday between the two leaders.

“We won’t recognise a unity government that doesn’t explicitly accept the conditions. This is the joint U.S.-Israeli position,” the official said, confirming Israeli television reports.

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/CrisesAr ticle.aspx?storyId=L171813223

The Palestinian leader Abbas made an announcement on the matter, which was reported by the Associated Press.

Palestinian leader Abbas says world must learn to live with Fatah-Hamas coalition

The Associated Press
February 17, 2007

RAMALLAH, West Bank: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told a senior U.S. envoy on Saturday that Washington and the international community would have to accept the new coalition between his Fatah movement and the Islamic militant Hamas, sounding a note of defiance ahead of a three-way meeting Monday between Abbas, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/02/1 7/africa/ME-GEN-Palestinians-U.S..php

Some observers on the ground in Israel, like Uri Avnery of Gush Shalom, believe all along that this action not to recognize Hamas’ involvement in the government, based on the “right to exist” notion, is just another “red herring” intended to help the Israel government avoid yet another peace initiative.

http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/chan nels/avnery/1171710253/

It is for this reason that Citizens for Fair Legislation, a grassroots organization primarily concerned with the unbalanced foreign policy demonstrated by our government toward the Arab world, is appealing to Americans to support a petition to our legislators not to boycott the unity government.

Citizens for Fair Legislation may be linked here:  www.cflweb.org

Crossposted from MyDD by shyboy (aka shergald).

Recently received an email from the Council for the National Interest, Washington, DC with an invitation to visit their website. On their front page, I saw what appears to be their latest advertisement, one that appeared in the New York Times on Sunday, November 5th, 2006, which they still seem to be featuring. It is freely distributed by the Council and I felt that it could make for lively discussion by people interested in the Middle East, the hotbed of our foreign policy.
This NYT ad is about a very controversial subject and not everyone will agree with its premises. The role of the Israel Lobby in US foreign policy is extremely contentious as its past discussion attest. It has stirred opinions that extend from full derision to full confirmation. But what is the extent of Israel Lobby influence? Was Iraq done for Israel sake and will whatever is in store for Iran likewise be laid at the Israel Lobby’s doorstep. That’s what the Council seems to imply in this NYT’s ad.

http://www.cnionline.org/

Questions the ad asks, once again:

Did the Israel Lobby encourage the preemptive war with Iraq?

Is the Israel Lobby currently encouraging a US attack on Iran?

Is the Israel Lobby stand attempting to block a real two state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

For publication sake, I had to break the ad up, but I hope that the essentials of its message are plain.

This cartoon, part of the ad, speaks for itself.

The views represented in this ad belong to the Council for the National Interest. But they are food for thought for anyone else interested in where the Middle East has been and where it may be going.