Author Archives: News Sources

The Jewish Republic of Israel

Haaretz reports:

Israeli Arab MK Ahmed Tibi was quick Sunday to condemn the Cabinet’s approval of a controversial proposal requiring non-Jews seeking citizenship to pledge allegiance to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.

“The government of Israel has become subservient to Yisrael Beiteinu and its fascist doctrine,” said Tibi. “No other state in the world would force its citizens or those seeking citizenship to pledge allegiance to an ideology.”

“Israel has proven that it is not equal and is a democracy for Jews and not for Arabs,” he added.

The amendment is one of the promises Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made to Yisrael Beitenu in the coalition agreements. Since coming into government Yisrael Beitenu has advanced a long list of “loyalty” laws, which many consider to be discriminatory against Israel’s Arab citizens.

Gideon Levy writes:

Remember this day. It’s the day Israel changes its character. As a result, it can also change its name to the Jewish Republic of Israel, like the Islamic Republic of Iran. Granted, the loyalty oath bill that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking to have passed purportedly only deals with new citizens who are not Jewish, but it affects the fate of all of us.

From now on, we will be living in a new, officially approved, ethnocratic, theocratic, nationalistic and racist country. Anyone who thinks it doesn’t affect him is mistaken. There is a silent majority that is accepting this with worrying apathy, as if to say: “I don’t care what country I live in.” Also anyone who thinks the world will continue to relate to Israel as a democracy after this law doesn’t understand what it is about. It’s another step that seriously harms Israel’s image.

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Israel’s human shields and live bait

Sharmine Narwani writes:

Logic dictates that the physical presence of half a million Jews in illegal settlements and outposts – connected through a maze of Jewish-only roads – has stealthily destroyed the possibility of a land-for-peace compromise. And Israel’s government has spent $17 billion on settlements since occupation began.

But here’s something we don’t talk about readily. Why would consecutive Israeli governments heavily subsidize and incentivize the relocation of young families – women and children – into hostile environments? Why would Israel – which claims security dangers wherever there are Palestinian populations – deliberately and systematically place its Jewish civilian population in “harm’s way?”

The settlers are Israel’s human shields and live bait.

“Naatzi! Naaaatzi!” This word, amazingly enough, is a settler favorite. “Nazis!” they screech at foreign TV crews, while waving their infants around. “Nazi, Nazi, Nazi,” they chant as they provocatively try to stop Palestinians from harvesting their olive crops. And the IDF soldiers wait and watch – occasionally intervening to push a frustrated and humiliated Palestinian objector away from a taunting, threatening Jewish settler.

Eventually, a half-crazed Palestinian will fight back, even kill some settlers. Israeli authorities immediately step in and claim the “Security Risk” has increased and more Palestinian land has to be confiscated to ensure Israel’s security. More Palestinians are detained, harassed, punished. More Palestinian homes are occupied or demolished. See how that works? Unleash your craziest Jews onto a Palestinian civilian population until someone blows a fuse and hits back. Then use that as the pretext to encroach further into the lives and onto the land of Palestinians.

Jewish settlers. Half a million of them in 121 illegal settlements and 102 illegal outposts. Human shields and live bait for Israel. The Jewish state’s frontline army for depopulating Palestinian land.

International law recognizes the right of a person living under occupation to resist or retaliate against occupying forces – nobody would question a Palestinian lashing out at an Israeli soldier. But kill a Jewish settler, and the lines get blurred fast. Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, the “occupier” (Israel) may not settle its populations (Jewish settlers) in occupied areas (West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem), but these laws also do not permit the harming of civilians except in the case of self-defence during an act of violence. In other words, although Israel flagrantly violates the former law by incentivizing Israeli citizens to move into occupied Palestinian territory, these same international conventions do not allow Palestinians to willy-nilly defend their lives and property from Jewish settlers – except during actual hostilities, when they are usually at a considerable disadvantage.

But are settlers really “civilians” as intended by the protective language of the Fourth Geneva Convention? This is debatable on at least one score, as the language dealing with “protected persons” is often prefaced with “civilian persons who take no part in hostilities…”

“The Hilltop Youth consist of hundreds of young settler boys and girls who have become protectors of the illegal outposts pitched on Palestinian-owned land throughout the West Bank. Traumatized by Israel’s desettlement of Gaza, they have vowed to resist a similar fate, and heeding only the “law of God” and the religious-nationalist action calls from the likes of Judeo-fascist high-priestesses Daniella Weiss and Nadia Mattar, these kids have unleashed the newest waves of settler vigilantism: “Price-Tagging.”

Every time authorities act against the perceived interests of the settlers, the latter will exact a “price tag” by carrying out reprisals against nearby Palestinians and their property.

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“This conflict is the bone in the throat of the world”

Phil Weiss, who’s in Israel right now, sat down to talk with Jeff Halper, the Minnesota-born founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, to hear his thoughts on the conflict.

Halper would be happy living in a democracy with Palestinians. I asked him why so many Israelis don’t feel that way.

“There is a principle inculcated in Israelis and Jews from before 1948, by all politicians, newscasters, teachers, journalists, any official, and that is that the Arabs are our permanent enemies. And that’s it! And if you take that as an unchanging premise, then it doesn’t matter what is being done to Palestinians.They brought it on themselves.

“You can’t trust the Arabs. That makes everything else a non-issue… Yitzhak Shamir said, ‘The Jews are still the Jews, the Arabs are still the Arabs, and the sea is still the sea.’ Which means, it’s just the way it is, it’s nature. Arabs are what they are, and we are what we are, and nothing’s going to change that….”

But are Israelis even aware of the tapestry of suffering that is the occupation, and what this does to Palestinian lives?

“Israelis don’t care. Because they’re living the good life. Polls show that peace is the 8th issue in priority for Israelis. It’s like that cover ot Time magazine, Israel doesn’t want peace. I’ve been saying that for years…. And the Israeli government thinks it’s sustainable, they think they can keep this going for another 40 years. They have no idea that we’re living on borrowed time.

“And Israel is not going to cooperate and is not going to negotiate in good faith. Because of the Congress. The only way to go to some kind of peace is by exerting pressure on Israel, which the U.S. could do easily, but the president can’t do. And Israel feels completely protected. The U.S. can’t do anything to Israel, and it won’t let anyone else do anything to Israel. We start building settlements, and it’s, ‘So what?’”

I said that the status quo will bring on violence. Halper said he doubts it.

“It’s too sewn up. Israel is too much in control. Israeli soldiers are every ten feet in the West Bank… Israel is knocking off Palestinian leaders all the time.” And the natural source of Palestinian leadership is all in Israeli jails, 12,000 Palestinians– “I use the term warehousing”– and Palestinian society is rife with collaborators, from the Palestinian Authority on down.

Where’s the hope?

“I don’t use the word hope, I use the word struggle. There’s a struggle going on…”

The good news is that now it’s globalized: the United States is becoming more and more isolated on this issue.

“I don’t think Americans appreciate how isolated they are internationally. This is now a global conflict, and so you have the irresistible force meeting the immovable object. The irresistible force is– the EU can make things hard on Israel economically, and the whole Muslim world can be up in arms, and you have BDS, Turkey, isolating Israel, and the international community saying that this is too costly to accept forever. But then the immovable object is the U.S. Congress.”

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Obama grovels for Netanyahu’s approval

Jonathan Cook reports:

The disclosure of the details of a letter reportedly sent by President Barack Obama last week to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will cause Palestinians to be even more skeptical about U.S. and Israeli roles in the current peace talks.

According to the leak, Obama made a series of extraordinarily generous offers to Israel, many of them at the expense of the Palestinians, in return for a single minor concession from Netanyahu: a two-month extension of the partial freeze on settlement growth.

A previous 10-month freeze, which ended a week ago, has not so far been renewed by Netanyahu, threatening to bring the negotiations to an abrupt halt. The Palestinians are expected to decide whether to quit the talks over the coming days.

Netanyahu was reported last week to have declined the U.S. offer.

The White House has denied that a letter was sent, but, according to the Israeli media, officials in Washington are privately incensed by Netanyahu’s rejection.

The disclosures were made by an informed source: David Makovsky, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a close associate of Dennis Ross, Obama’s chief adviser on the Middle East, who is said to have initiated the offer.

The letter’s contents have also been partly confirmed by Jewish U.S. senators who attended a briefing last week from Ross.

According to Makovsky, in return for the 60-day settlement moratorium, the U.S. promised to veto any UN Security Council proposal on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the next year, and committed to not seek any further extensions of the freeze. The future of the settlements would be addressed only in a final agreement.

The White House would also allow Israel to keep a military presence in the West Bank’s Jordan Valley, even after the creation of a Palestinian state; continue controlling the borders of the Palestinian territories to prevent smuggling; provide Israel with enhanced weapons systems and security guarantees and increase its billions of dollars in annual aid; and create a regional security pact against Iran.

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Obamanation by Lowkey

Lowkey, a 24-year-old British musician, poet, playwright and political activist of English and Iraqi descent, in an interview on RT News, describes “Obamanation” by saying:

It was an examination of America’s role in the world. The main purpose of the song was to draw the American people’s attention to the way in which they are perceived by the rest of the world. Because I think they very much live in a bubble — I’m somebody that has travelled the United States quite thoroughly, and the media in the United States, by and large, does not actually show what is really going on and people have genuine grievances with United States foreign policy. Whether a person thinks those military bases should exist or not [earlier in the interview, Lowkey referred to the 1,000 US military bases located around the world], I think it would be very hard to disagree that those military bases represent the building of empire and the expansion of empire. And I am not anti-American, I am anti-empire.

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An interview with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal

Sharmine Narwani interviews Hamas political bureau chief, Khaled Meshaal (part two):

Palestinian resistance group Hamas has beaten some unusual odds to survive today: Israel’s unlawful siege of Gaza has crippled the coastal strip’s economy and left Hamas scrambling to govern a restless population living under increasingly desperate conditions. Its officials and members are targeted by Israel and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority (PA) for detention, torture and extrajudicial killings. Pro-US Arab leaders undermine it at every turn, partly to satisfy American demands, partly because they fear the widespread popularity of any moderate Islamist resistance group among their own populations.

Classified by the US as a “terrorist” organization, Hamas has spent the past year battling armed Salafist extremists who want to enforce Islamic law in the Gaza Strip and who view the Hamas leadership as too weak-willed to challenge Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

It is ironic that Hamas today is criticized for being hardline — and liberal too. Militant — and not militant enough. Islamist — and not Islamist enough. Iranian stooges — and US pawns, both.

I expected to see some of these contradictions in Khaled Meshaal, head of Hamas’ political bureau, when I interviewed him in Damascus recently. What I discovered instead is that, like a select crop of leaders we are seeing in the Middle East today, Meshaal refuses to be seen through one lens only. A real challenge for US policymakers with their unidimensional approach to regional politics.

The former high school physics teacher convincingly argues that the New Middle East is one where nations need to keep their “options open.” He rejects a regional status-quo where countries stay in “blocs” unthinkingly, and vehemently argues against the notion that Mideast democracy and reform cannot advance unless foreign intervention ends.

Khaled Meshaal: Look at a country like Qatar – it has good relations with the United States, used to have a degree of relations with Israel until the Gaza War, and is considered to be a moderate and liberal state. Qatar’s foreign policy is being formed by the views of its leader, the Emir. The situation in the region created a belief, for a country like Qatar, that if it wants to have a role in the region, it has to open up its options in all directions. The one who keeps himself away from the relevant elements in the region, he won’t be relevant himself. In Qatar you have this leadership – someone who is smart and courageous like the Emir. He understands and realizes full well the aspirations and the mood of his own people and the people of the region. So he adopts those issues and causes which are popular among his constituencies, among those nations – which works well if those issues are already close to his own beliefs and his own interests.

Keeping in mind that other Arab countries have for decades been unable to present a successful model that is attractive for others to adopt, this new regional state model has thrived in recent years. These countries – Qatar, Iran, Syria, Sudan, Turkey – share some common elements, but they are not identical to each other. They each have their own modus operandi and interests. Something these nations do share, however, is the self-desire to develop this new trend, but at the same time to remain open – not closed or bound – to enjoying options.

Sharmine Narwani: Not dogmatic, as in the past…

KM: …ah yes, not like that. Why should we be dividing ourselves into two blocs – either being against America and the West, or acquiescing 100% to them?

The people in the region, they are looking for leadership to match their own aspirations and ambitions. In a way we need a model where democracy is there, internal reform, successful economy, justice at the social level – and at the same time, there is independence in their political decisions, away from acquiescing to the threats of Israel – and not being a proxy to foreign, American and Western policies. We do not want to wage a war against the world. Or to sever relations with countries. So the nations and the people of the region want a state model based on self respect – without any enmity with the world. [Read the rest of the interview here.]

The first part of this interview can be read here.

On Monday, Meshaal called on the Palestinian acting president Mahmoud Abbas to end talks with Israel after Prime Minister Netanyahu failed to extend the settlement slowdown which expired on Sunday. Early Monday morning, bulldozers were clearing ground to construct new homes for Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

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20 per cent of US soldiers returning from Iraq suffer from post traumatic stress disorder

Channel 4 News (UK) reports:

America’s decade long “war on terror” has been deployment heavy, with little time at home in between.

That experience is translating into some worrying figures at America’s largest military base, Fort Hood, in Texas – home to 60,000 troops, one tenth of the US army. Channel 4 News was given exclusive access to the base, to look at their new arrangements for dealing with soldiers bearing the psychological and physical scars of war.

In the past six months at Fort Hood, soldiers have had 10,000 counselling sessions. Some 6,000 servicemen and women there are on anti-depressants, 1,400 on anti-psychotics.

It is a battle on the home front the US military never planned for. And it is scrambled to come up with the right kind of help for those soldiers who so desperately need it. There are now 36 of these so called “Warrior Transition Units” on bases across the US, currently caring for 9,000 soldiers.

The army says there are centres of excellence, designed to offer appropriate care within a military structure, to soldiers with complex, serious, physical and mental health problems. But the units have also been called warehouses for despair, where soldiers are overmedicated, and roughly treated.

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The myth of Israeli democracy

Johann Hari interviews Gideon Levy: “the most hated man in Israel — and perhaps the most heroic.”

Any conversation about the region is now dominated by a string of propaganda myths, [Levy] says, and perhaps the most basic is the belief that Israel is a democracy. “Today we have three kinds of people living under Israeli rule,” he explains. “We have Jewish Israelis, who have full democracy and have full civil rights. We have the Israeli Arabs, who have Israeli citizenship but are severely discriminated against. And we have the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, who live without any civil rights, and without any human rights. Is that a democracy?”

He sits back and asks in a low tone, as if talking about a terminally ill friend: “How can you say it is a democracy when, in 62 years, there was not one single Arab village established? I don’t have to tell you how many Jewish towns and villages were established. Not one Arab village. How can you say it’s a democracy when research has shown repeatedly that Jews and Arabs get different punishments for the same crime? How can you say it’s a democracy when a Palestinian student can hardly rent an apartment in Tel Aviv, because when they hear his accent or his name almost nobody will rent to him? How can you say Israel is a democracy when? Jerusalem invests 577 shekels a year in a pupil in [Palestinian] East Jerusalem and 2372 shekels a year in a pupil from [Jewish] West Jerusalem. Four times less, only because of the child’s ethnicity! Every part of our society is racist.”

“I want to be proud of my country,” he says. “I am an Israeli patriot. I want us to do the right thing.” So this requires him to point out that Palestinian violence is – in truth – much more limited than Israeli violence, and usually a reaction to it. “The first twenty years of the occupation passed quietly, and we did not lift a finger to end it. Instead, under cover of the quiet, we built the enormous, criminal settlement enterprise,” where Palestinian land is seized by Jewish religious fundamentalists who claim it was given to them by God. Only then – after a long period of theft, and after their attempts at peaceful resistance were met with brutal violence – did the Palestinians become violent themselves. “What would happen if the Palestinians had not fired Qassams [the rockets shot at Southern Israel, including civilian towns]? Would Israel have lifted the economic siege? Nonsense. If the Gazans were sitting quietly, as Israel expects them to do, their case would disappear from the agenda. Nobody would give any thought to the fate of the people of Gaza if they had not behaved violently.”

He unequivocally condemns the firing of rockets at Israeli civilians, but adds: “The Qassams have a context. They are almost always fired after an IDF assassination operation, and there have been many of these.” Yet the Israeli attitude is that “we are allowed to bomb anything we want but they are not allowed to launch Qassams.” It is a view summarised by Haim Ramon, the justice minister at time of Second Lebanon War: “We are allowed to destroy everything.”

Read the complete interview.

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What if peace talks “succeed?”

At Al Shabaka, Nadia Hijab writes:

Many commentators expect the direct talks between Israelis and Palestinians to fail. But there is a much worse scenario: What if they “succeed?” The United States appears determined to push for a framework agreement within a year and both Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority (PA), are aiming for that goal. Such an agreement, U.S. peace envoy George Mitchell explained in a September 2 press conference, would be more than a declaration of principles but less than a peace treaty. In it, the two sides would reach the “fundamental compromises” necessary for a peace accord. Like its predecessor, the Obama administration has already indicated that the accord would still have to be fleshed out and then implemented over the course of several years – which virtually ensures that it will be delayed if not derailed as happened to past peace accords.

If the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and PA were unable to secure a sovereign state and rights through U.S.-brokered negotiations with Israel between 1993 and 2000, when they were in a much stronger position, they are highly unlikely to do so today with such a badly skewed Israeli-Palestinian power dynamic. Instead, next year is likely to see a grand ceremony where Palestinian leaders will sign away the right of return and other Palestinian rights in an agreement that would change little on the ground. The plan of the PA’s appointed prime minister, Salam Fayyad, to declare a Palestinian state in 2011 could unwittingly contribute to this outcome by providing the appearance of an “end of conflict” while the reality remains unchanged. If the rest of the world sees that the government of “Palestine” is satisfied with international recognition and a U.N. seat, they will be happy to move on to other problems leaving the Palestinians at Israel’s mercy.

Such a scenario could sound a death-knell for Palestinian human rights. The Palestinian people have shown a remarkable capacity to regenerate resistance and evolve new strategies after suffering harsh setbacks over the past century. But there may be no recovery this time around. A “peace agreement” would end the applicability of international law to the resolution of the conflict; permanently fragment the Palestinian people; and demobilize Arab and international solidarity.

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Terrorist group gets support from US Congress

At Foreign Policy, Patrick Disney writes:

It’s been over two months since the toughest Iran sanctions ever approved by Congress were signed into law, three months since the UN’s latest resolution, and 15 months since Iran’s post-election demonstrations began. Despite all of this, Iran’s clerical government is not crumbling, nor has Iran shown any sign of giving in to the West on its nuclear program.

Recent weeks have seen a renewed discussion of military options for stopping Iran’s nuclear program – kicked off by Jeffrey Goldberg’s cover article in the Atlantic. But there is also a campaign underway to promote a different option on Iran: regime change, via Iranian dissidents in exile.

Members of Congress led by Rep. Bob Filner (D-CA) have introduced a resolution calling on the Secretary of State and the President to throw the support of the United States behind an exiled Iranian terrorist group seeking to overthrow the Iranian regime and install themselves in power. Calling the exiled organization “Iran’s main opposition,” Filner is urging the State Department to end the blacklisting of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) — a group listed by the State Department as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). The resolution currently has 83 cosponsors and is gaining significant ground.

This follows a call for US military action against Iran, made by a prominent Republican senator.

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Monday that the United States must be prepared to use military force to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon — and added that the last-resort step should be taken with the goal of overthrowing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Graham, a military lawyer and a senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, became the first senator to support direct U.S. military intervention in Iran, saying it should not involve ground troops but be launched by U.S. warplanes and ships.

“If you use military force against Iran, you’ve opened up Pandora’s box,” Graham told the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “If you allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon, you’ve emptied Pandora’s box. I’d rather open up Pandora’s box than empty it.”

Graham’s unusual public support for overturning Ahmadinejad and the ruling council of Shiite Muslim clerics that he nominally heads recalled President George W. Bush’s controversial policy of regime change to invade Iraq in 2003 and overthrow dictator Saddam Hussein.

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Toronto-based blogger faces execution in Iran

The Toronto Star reports:

The strange saga of a Toronto-based blogger jailed in Iran on propaganda charges took an alarming twist Tuesday after his supporters said prosecutors requested the death penalty.

Hossein Derakhshan is known as the Iranian “blogfather” for launching the dissident Persian blogosphere — an act of defiance he committed from Toronto, where he lived for eight years after becoming a Canadian citizen.

Toronto was the launching pad for his most daring cyber-caper, when he visited Israel on his Canadian passport and blogged from inside Iran for a massive Persian-speaking web following.

“Hoder,” as Derakhshan calls himself online, was arrested after returning to Iran in the fall of 2008 and jailed for almost two years before facing trial this June. Family and supporters learned Monday night he could face execution.

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Lieberman wants Israel to become a Jews-only state

AFP reports that Israel’s foreign minister hopes to complete the process of ethnic cleansing that began in 1948 and push Israel’s remaining Palestinian population out of the Jewish state:

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Sunday proposed that in a future peace deal the Palestinians should take his country’s 1.3 million Arabs and let Israel keep its West Bank settlements.

“Our guiding principle in negotiations with the Palestinians must not be ‘land for peace’ but an exchange of territories and populations,” Lieberman told reporters as he arrived for Sunday’s weekly cabinet meeting.

Meanwhile, Associated Press reports on Jews emigrating from Israel to Germany.

Nirit Bialer, granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, welcomes listeners in Hebrew to a one-hour radio show of music, talk and interviews. The setting isn’t her native Israel but a radio station in the heart of the German capital — and hundreds of Israeli Berliners are tuning in.

The city from which Hitler unleashed the genocide of 6 million Jews is now attracting a small but growing community of Jews from Israel for whom it embodies freedom, tolerance, and an anything-goes spirit.

“Berlin has become a real magnet for Israelis — everybody wants to move here,” said Bialer, 32, whose Friday noon “Kol Berlin,” Hebrew for “the voice of Berlin,” started three years ago and is something of an institution for young Israelis in Berlin.
[…]
The Israelis who come to stay are looking to work, study, party and make art, and don’t seem to care much about the Nazi past. They arrive on student visas, overstay tourist permits or have German or other European ancestry that entitles them to citizenship. Many start families with German partners, far from the tensions of the Middle East.

“I love Israel, but I just couldn’t live there anymore — it’s like a small village and so militaristic,” explained Lea Fabrikant, a photography student who arrived two years ago.
“Most of all, I needed freedom and space, and I found it here.”

Ahmed Moor writes:

Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Michael B. Oren, argues in his Sept. 15 Times Op-Ed article that Israelis want peace, and I believe him. They’ve said so often enough. But the Israelis want lots of other things too.

For instance, they want the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In addition, they want the Palestinian aquifers situated beneath the West Bank, and they want to preserve their racial privilege in the Jewish state. They also want to shear the Gaza Strip from Palestine.

Most of all, the Israelis want Palestinian quiescence in the face of Israeli wants. Those wants have made the two-state solution impossible to implement.

For decades, the Israelis have taken what they want from the Palestinians. Consequently, there are about 500,000 settlers in Jewish-only colonies in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Today, the Israelis are discovering that what one wants and what one can afford sometimes diverge.

Some Israelis — but apparently not Oren — are beginning to realize that the deep, irreversible colonization of territory comes with a price: the end of the Jewish state as it is. It’s a painful lesson to learn, especially after decades of superpower indulgence. America’s obsequious coddling turns out to have been a curse for the Jewish state. Serious cost-benefit analyses around occupation policies — collectively, apartheid — were evidently never conducted.

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American public opinion and the special relationship with Israel

John Mearsheimer writes:

There is no question that the United States has a relationship with Israel that has no parallel in modern history. Washington gives Israel consistent, almost unconditional diplomatic backing and more foreign aid than any other country. In other words, Israel gets this aid even when it does things that the United States opposes, like building settlements. Furthermore, Israel is rarely criticized by American officials and certainly not by anyone who aspires to high office. Recall what happened last year to Charles Freeman, who was forced to withdraw as head of the National Intelligence Council because he had criticized certain Israeli policies and questioned the merits of the special relationship.

Steve Walt and I argue that there is no good strategic or moral rationale for this special relationship, and that it is largely due to the enormous influence of the Israel lobby. Critics of our claim maintain that the extremely tight bond between the two countries is the result of the fact that most Americans feel a special attachment to Israel. The American people, so the argument goes, are so deeply committed to supporting Israel generously and unreservedly that politicians of all persuasions have no choice but to support the special relationship.

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs has just released a major study of how the American public thinks about foreign policy. It is based on a survey of 2500 Americans, who were asked a wide variety of questions, some of which have bearing on Israel. Their answers make clear that most Americans are not deeply committed to Israel in any meaningful way. There is no love affair between the American people and Israel.

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Pakistan: between drones and a deluge

Tariq Ali writes:

As if everyday life in Pakistan weren’t dispiriting enough, last month the swift and turbulent Indus burst its banks and swathes of the country disappeared under water. Divine punishment, the poor said, but they were the ones who suffered. Allah rarely targets the rich. As the floods came and the country panicked, its president fled the bunker and went on a tour of inspection to France and Britain.

The floodwaters have now receded in many parts of the country, leaving 20 million people homeless. The province of Sindh, however, is still under threat and 800,000 people are marooned without food. Aid agencies estimate the bail-out costs for the country at between seven and ten billion dollars, but only $800 million has been pledged by foreign donors, in total contrast to the support given after the devastating earthquake of 2005. The rebuilt towns and villages are proof that not all the money was stolen that time. But despite this, little help has been forthcoming from abroad, the result of a combination of Islamophobia and distrust of the Zardari government on financial matters.

Did the rulers of Pakistan treat the worst natural disaster to hit their country as an emergency, and pull out all the stops without thinking of themselves or drooling at the prospects of foreign aid pouring in? Like hell they did. For the whole of August the plutocracy floundered hopelessly as the catastrophe grew. The army did its best, but was hindered by the war on terror. As nearly a million people came under threat from the floodwater in Jacobabad, the local authorities were informed that the nearby Shahbaz airbase could not be used for rescue operations. In response to a parliamentary question from the opposition, the health secretary, Khushnood Lashari, explained: ‘Health relief operations are not possible in the flood-affected areas of Jacobabad because the airbase is controlled by the United States.’ It was not necessary to add that those on the base were busy arming and dispatching drones to hit villages in northern Pakistan. In Swat, closer to the AfPak war zones, a detachment of marines was made available to airlift tribal elders to safety, in an attempt presumably to win hearts and minds. Some hope.

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Obama edges to the dark side

Mark Levine writes:

President Obama has essentially continued almost every major Bush security policy, either by default or design. State secrets, targeted killings, renditions and indefinite detention, opposing the right of habeas corpus, preventing victims of admitted torture from seeking judicial redress, expanding the Afghan war while moving – however gingerly – to secure a long-term presence in Iraq; all these must surely be making Bush, and especially Cheney, happy and wealthier men.

As Michael Hayden, Bush’s last CIA Director, put it in a recent interview, “Obama has been as aggressive as Bush” in defending executive prerogatives and powers that have enabled and sustained the ‘war on terror.’

But just how close to the dark side Obama has moved became evident in the last couple of weeks, specifically from two angles.

In the first, a federal appeals court overturned a lower court decision allowing former CIA prisoners to sue companies that participated in their rendition and torture in overseas prisons. In deciding that the plaintiffs could not sue despite an ample public (rather than classified) record supporting their claims, Judge Raymond C. Fisher supported the Obama Administration’s contention that, in his words, sometimes there is a “painful conflict between human rights and national security” in which the former must be sacrificed to preserve the latter.

But this is an utterly ludicrous concept, since a core reason for so much of the frustration, nihilistic anger, radicalisation and ultimately violence involved in Islamist terrorism and insurgencies lies precisely in the long term, structural denial of the most basic human rights by governments in the region, the lion’s share of whom continue to be supported by the United States despite their behaviour on the grounds of ‘national security’.

What neither Attorney General Eric Holder nor the President seems to understand is that there can be no contradiction between human rights and national security, since the absence of human rights can never but lead to a lack of security.

What’s more, the very idea in the globalised era that one country’s “national” security (especially that of the global “hyper-power,” the United States) can be defined apart from and in contrast to the security of other nations is so ridiculous. One wonders how supposedly intelligent people, like former law school professors – turned presidents, can in good faith imagine and declare it.

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How Israel eavesdrops on the world

At Le Monde diplomatique, Nicky Hager reports:

Israel’s most important intelligence-gathering installation is only a 30km drive into the Negev desert from Beersheba prison – where those taking part in the Gaza aid flotilla were briefly detained this June. The base, hidden until now, has rows of satellite dishes that covertly intercept phone calls, emails and other communications from the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Asia. Its antennas monitor shipping and would have spied on the aid ships in the days before they were seized.

Israel’s powerful position in the Middle East is often associated with its armed forces, nuclear weapons arsenal or covert (Mossad) operatives. But just as important is its intelligence gathering – monitoring governments, international organisations, foreign companies, political organisations and individuals. Most of this happens at the installation in the Negev a couple of kilometres to the north of the kibbutz of Urim. Our sources, close to Israeli intelligence, know the base first-hand. They describe lines of satellite dishes of different sizes, and barracks and operations buildings on both sides of the road (the 2333) that leads to the base. High security gates, fences and dogs protect the facility. As you can see on the internet, the satellite images of the base are quite clear. A practised eye easily discerns the signs of an electronic surveillance base. A large circle in the farmland shows the site of a direction-finding antenna (HF/DF) for monitoring shipping.

The Urim base was established decades ago to monitor Intelsat satellites that relay phone calls between countries. It expanded to cover maritime communications (Inmarsat), then rapidly targeted ever more numerous regional satellites. As such, says intelligence specialist Duncan Campbell, it is “akin to the UK-USA pact’s Echelon satellite interception ground stations”. The Echelon system is a network of interception stations around the world, set up in 1996 by the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Satellite phones used by the Gaza-bound aid ships were easy targets for this hi-tech equipment.


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