Aside from its incompatibility with genuine democracy, one of the problems with the idea of a Jewish state is that it invests too heavily in the choice of its citizens.

As much as virtually every state is able to drum up a certain amount of nationalistic fervor among its citizenry, the foundation of loyalty behind the facade of flag waving is that for the vast majority of people they have no choice about the country they profess to love: it’s the one they were born in and have no real option to leave. The few paths of migration that do exist are defined by oppression, war, and poverty.

The chosen people are unique in this particular choice. But if becoming an Israeli can for any Jew be a choice, its chosenness — even for those born there — also makes it easier to contemplate the possibility of other choices.

Yuval Ben-Ami writes about the option of leaving Israel.

It was 2:00 AM when we arrived at St. Pancras station. 2:00 AM London time is 4:00 AM Tel Aviv time, and we were certainly still on Tel Aviv time. In a way, we were still in Tel Aviv altogether, or perhaps somewhere in between the two – in the cold sky over Bulgaria or Slovakia. The soul is said to be chasing the body when it is taken away by a jet plane. It only catches up with it several days later.

We stepped into a cab and were surprised by how roomy it was, as well as by the fact that it was driven by a lady, an uncommon sight around our own neighborhood. The air outside the cab was chilly and smelled of large trees and fried food, inside was a unique, inimitable, London cab smell. We were in an environment entirely foreign to us yet felt instantly very much at home. For an Ashkenazi Israeli, Europe will always be a home of sorts. The soul of our nation apparently hasn’t yet caught up with Zionism. It is still on its way from the grassy knolls of our grandparents’ homelands, baffled to behold us flying the other direction in Easy Jet planes.

Our longing for Europe’s mix of the familiar and the exotic grows, the more hopeless Israel’s situation becomes. The rise of fascism, the growing disregard for human rights, the gradual disappearance of our freedom of speech, all of these cause concerned young Israelis, whether Ashkenazi or otherwise, to reconsider their future on the soil of the Holy Land and look west.

Israel is losing its educated, concerned young generation to other countries, ironically: mostly to Germany. The new emigrants (let’s call them “newgoers”) are different from emigrants of decades past, termed “Descenders” in Zionist lingo, which views Israel as elevated above the rest of the world. While the descenders of the ’70s and ’80s were motivated for the most part by economic factors, the newgoers are often driven by a dread of Israeli politics and a sense that they no longer belong in Israel. It is a sense that our government gladly reinforces, mainly via supporting legislation that delegitimizes dissent.

By deliberately alienating this public, Netanyahu’s government is causing what I term a “heart-drain.” Israelis who hold a point of view that isn’t entirely tribal, who empathize with those living under the occupation or others wronged by state-sanctioned prejudice and intolerance, Israelis who take an interest in opening difficult historical questions for discussion, are encouraged to leave. If I had a penny for every time I was told to “just pack up and go,” I could buy my own flat in Pimlico.

The cab brought us the the home of the first exile, a friend who is completing his MA in London. His program is to conclude at the end of the year, but he told us he intends to stay out of Israel for another half a dozen years at least. Currently he is staying in a stately college campus in central London. The campus is made up of a single structure which encloses a serene courtyard. Its grand dining room is vaulted by a high, arched ceiling, beneath which a full English breakfast is served to students for the price of an Israeli popsicle. Its bulletin boards advertise an upcoming production of Macbeth, Its windows overlook a stately park, complete with enormous oaks and well tended paths. All in all the place looks like Epcot Center’s Hogwarts pavilion, and I mean that in a good way.

How, I thought, could I console myself for not living this guy’s life? Not only does he reside in such a graceful, calm environment, but he remains an activist by writing, informing, educating and organizing. It is likely that from from his London location, this man is making more of a difference than I do back home, while building a future for himself, somewhere that has an actual future. [Continue reading…]

A recent poll conducted by the University of Maryland in which 24,090 citizens across 22 countries were interviewed, revealed that around the world Israel is viewed as negatively as North Korea.

Considering the fact that Israel has vastly greater opportunities and resources to promote its image than does North Korea and that the North Korean government has little apparent interest in improving its global image, Israelis should be asking themselves why they have a government that is doing such an appalling job of promoting their interests.

According to those whose job it is to represent Israel, the failure is not their own — it is the result of a powerful global movement hellbent on “delegitimizing” poor little Israel.

Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, laments:

[W]hy have anti-Israel libels once consigned to hate groups become media mainstays? How can we explain the assertion that an insidious “Israel Lobby” purchases votes in Congress, or that Israel oppresses Christians? Why is Israel’s record on gay rights dismissed as camouflage for discrimination against others?

The answer lies in the systematic delegitimization of the Jewish state. Having failed to destroy Israel by conventional arms and terrorism, Israel’s enemies alit on a subtler and more sinister tactic that hampers Israel’s ability to defend itself, even to justify its existence.

It began with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s 1974 speech to the U.N., when he received a standing ovation for equating Zionism with racism—a view the U.N. General Assembly endorsed the following year. It gained credibility on college campuses through anti-Israel courses and “Israel Apartheid Weeks.” It burgeoned through the boycott of Israeli scholars, artists and athletes, and the embargo of Israeli products. It was perpetuated by journalists who published doctored photos and false Palestinian accounts of Israeli massacres.

Israel must confront the acute dangers of delegitimization as it did armies and bombers in the past. Along with celebrating our technology, pioneering science and medicine, we need to stand by the facts of our past.

The fallacy embedded in the idea that Israel is threatened by delegitimization is that Israel does not face legitimate criticism it must answer. “There’s nothing wrong with criticizing Israel…” government officials dutifully repeat yet never acknowledge the specific ways in which Israel has a responsibility to answer its critics.

The real challenge Israel faces is that it is being defended by dissembling whiners like Oren and shrill ranters like Alan Dershowitz. The message of victimhood which they disseminate resonates only with those who already hold the same view. They utterly lack any ability to influence observers who are still in the process of weighing up the issues. Indeed, they do nothing more than present Israel as a crybaby which protests it is being treated unfairly.

Contrast these voices with those that they tar as “delegitimizers” and it becomes apparent that Israel’s image problem stems not only from Israel’s actions and political failings but the fact that among Israel’s defenders there appears to be no one who can speak with integrity.

Take note, Michael Oren, this is what integrity sounds like:

Anyone who is really afraid of the delegitimization of Israel should consider that Israel may face no greater threat than the one posed by its own defenders.

Haaretz reports: Prof. Shlomo Sand, a Tel Aviv University history professor, said Sunday that he had received an envelope containing white powder and a letter that included death threats.

In the letter, which was received by the secretary of the university’s Department of History, the professor was accused of being an “anti-Semitic,” among other things. The letter also threatened Sand that he would “not live much longer.”

In a conversation with Haaretz, Sand said, “I opened a series of letters as usual, and then all of a sudden a white cloud jumped out. I was shocked that the powder got on to my hands and threw down the letter. It’s been brought to the attention of the security officer and the police sent a squad car to the site and the substance was taken for a test.”

Sand, who intends on filing a complaint with Israel Police on Monday, said he was concerned after having received the letter. “They wrote that I’m an anti-Semite, Nazi, that my time will come. It’s a very unpleasant feeling,” he said.

The history professor said it was possible that his new book, “The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland,” might have been what caused someone to send him the letter. “Four years ago, when I published my previous book, ‘The Invention of the Jewish People,’ there were fewer crazy people than there are today,” Sand told Haaretz.

Rick Perlstein writes: In the suburban Midwestern Reform Jewish world I was raised in, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, grown men built plastic scale models of Israeli tanks and F-15 jets and displayed them throughout the house, dangling the warplanes from bedroom ceilings with fishing line. My dad, who had a replica Uzi sub-machine gun on his office wall, wore a tiepin that read, in Hebrew letters, Zachor, which means “remember.” What was meant to be remembered was the “six million,” the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust, a number seared into all of our souls – at home, in Sunday school, at religious services, and at the Jewish Community Center summer camp in the Wisconsin North Woods, where we began each morning by raising the Israeli and American flags side by side.

This all felt right and proper. What didn’t sit so well (with me, at any rate) was the catechism that accompanied the injunction to remember. It held that the next six million, just like the poem says, were still getting ready to die, right here in River City – or in Australia, in Timbuktu, in our own Milwaukee, or anywhere else Jews were granted the privilege – the temporary, conditional privilege — to live. The one safe haven: Israel, whose formidable tanks and planes would hold the line against the eliminationist contempt in which most of the world held us. The message provided a kind of quasi-spiritual ballast to our acquisitive upper-middle-class lives; but as an morally precocious little dude I found it all so far from observable reality, it made me want to puke.

All of which background made Peter Beinart’s recollections, in his powerful new book The Crisis of Zionism, seem very familiar – which felt uncanny, because I thought I had been alone.

As an adult, I’ve always found the stereotype that Jews are liberal a curious one; my parents’ circle was predominantly conservative, not just on Israel but on most political issues. Most of all, they were intensely (and this is a word I remember repeating in my own angry adolescent dialogues with myself) tribal. What I didn’t fully comprehend, until now, was why. Beinart unearths a story of 1970s politics that was unknown to me – except as I so intimately lived it – showing that at the root of this sense of embattled tribalism was a transformation worked by the leaders of right-leaning American Jewish organizations, who traded in their founding (liberal) aspirations to universal justice for a wagon-circling parochalism. [Continue reading…]

Steve Linde, editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, was master of ceremonies at a conference the newspaper hosted in New York City on Sunday. There were 1,200 attendees.

Caroline B. Glick, Post senior contributing editor, drew cheers from the crowd when she called for permanent Israeli control of Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], saying it was better to keep the Palestinians inside Israel rather than allow them to establish a “terror state.”

Have no doubt: neither Glick nor those cheering her believe that keeping Palestinians permanently inside Israel should lead to them acquiring equal rights as Israeli citizens. What she is advocating is quite simply the institutionalization of Jewish fascism in a Jewish apartheid state. But that was just an uncontroversial side note in the event.

This is how Haaretz described what Linde called “most dramatic moment in the conference”:

An embarrassing confrontation broke out … when former Mossad chief Meir Dagan accused Environmental Protection Minister Gilad Erdan of lying, while Erdan replied that Dagan is sabotaging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to put a halt to Iran’s nuclear aspirations.

At the conference … the two also exchanged harsh words after Dagan warned Erdan over the so-called “Dagan law,” forbidding former security officials to issue open statements until a certain cooling period wears off.

“As in Germany, you know where you begin but you don’t know where you end,” Dagan told the audience.

The exchange erupted after Dagan was asked about statements made by former head of the Shin Bet security service Yuval Diskin. Diskin criticized Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Friday over their bellicose stance on Iran, as well as what he called the premier’s unwillingness to advance peace talks with the Palestinian Authority.

Dagan said that Diskin was his friend, and added that he “spoke his own truth.” “Diskin is a very serious man, a very talented man, he has a lot of experience in countering terrorism,” he said, adding that he “talked about a matter that is close to his heart.” Dagan also dismissed criticism of Diskin for not voicing his opinion to Netanyahu and Barak earlier. According to Dagan, Diskin had done so “in close quarters and on many occasions.”

“I have no doubt that the Israeli Air Force is able to destroy the infrastructure of Iran’s nuclear program – but five minutes later, Israel would find itself involved in a regional war, involving Hezbollah and possibly Syria,” the former Mossad chief said.

Dagan also said that an attack would bolster the support for the Iranian regime as opposed to the sanctions imposed by the international community which have been eroding its public support.

He added that a regional war would lead the superpowers to impose a settlement with the Palestinians on Israel – a settlement which he vehemently opposes.

Erdan replied that “if Diskin thinks things are so dangerous, he should not have stayed in his post for five years and agree to a sixth year. He should have resigned.” Dagan intervened at this point and countered that “I may be impolite, but I prefer the truth be told.”

Erdan then said he would prefer if “Mossad chiefs do not sabotage Netanyahu’s efforts to garner the world’s support against Iran. He also referred to Diskin’s description of Barak and Netanyahu’s “messianic tendencies,” and asked, “Is this how a serious man, as you describe him, speaks?”

The exchange between Erdan and Dagan clearly made the audience and American members of the panel uncomfortable.

The ever-eloquent Alan Dershowitz garnered a standing ovation from the crowd when he appealed to Israelis not to hang their dirty laundry in public, keep internal debates in Israel and, when on American soil, refrain from criticizing standing presidents such as Obama, who was essentially a friend of Israel.

For his part, Dershowitz focused his anger at what he called the almost eroticized delegitimization of Israel among certain intellectual elites, including Jews and Israelis.

This new form of anti-Semitism, he said, was as lethal as the rhetoric before the Holocaust, and he urged Israel and world Jewry to combat it effectively.

So let’s be sure I understand this correctly. Dershowitz would presumably see this post as one small part of the delegitimization effort — whether he would discern an almost eroticized element I have no idea. At the same time he apparently does not regard Caroline Glick’s promotion of Jewish fascism as in any way undermining the legitimacy of Israel. Fascism OK. Criticism not OK.

Maybe this explains why Linde was able to wrap up the event feeling deeply satisfied.

As I took a taxi to JFK, the Russian Jewish cabbie asked what I had done in New York. When I told him, he said: “Oh, I heard it was a big success.

“I gave a few of your people a ride to and from the airport.”

And at the airport, the El Al security employee remarked, “Wow, you guys created a big buzz. I’ve seen it on the news all over the place.”

With such glowing reviews (“the Zionist dream is alive and well, and the Jewish state has many more fans than foes,” says Linde), it makes you wonder why anyone’s worried about delegitimization.

Oh right, it’s because there’s another Holocaust lurking round the corner. How could I forget?

'Jesus is the son of a whore,' 'we will crucify you,' 'Jesus is dead' and 'death to Christianity' were among messages left behind by vandals who attacked the Baptist Narkis Street Congregation in West Jerusalem on February 20. Photo: Ryan Rodrick Beiler

When Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, called Jeff Fager, chairman of CBS News and executive producer of 60 Minutes to speak about their upcoming report, “Christians of the Holy Land,” it’s clear he had only one objective: to kill the report.

When interviewed by Bob Simon, Oren did not express concern about how 60 Minutes would report on the plight of Palestinian Christians living in the West Bank. His objection was that CBS should find any merit in the topic whatsoever. Why should the fate of Christians living under Israeli occupation deserve any attention while Christians elsewhere in the Middle East face persecution? The story, Oren was convinced, was merely a pretext for attacking Israel.

In February this year, vandals — the evidence suggests they were Jewish settlers — daubed “Death to Christianity” on the walls of a Baptist church in Jerusalem. “The graffiti also included profanity about Jesus, and the vandals slashed the tires of several cars parked in the church compound,” Reuters reported.

It wasn’t long before Oren spoke up on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal denouncing attacks on Christians and the desecration of a church — though not the one in Jerusalem. The vandalism that concerned him involved the Arabic letters for Hamas being sprayed on a church in Bethlehem in 1994. About the much more recent vandalism on the church in Jerusalem he said absolutely nothing.

Oren’s message while ostensibly being an expression of concern about the plight of Christians across the Middle East, including Palestinian Christians living in the West Bank, was instead a message tailored to resonate with American Christian Zionists: Jews and Christians stand in solidarity opposed to Islamic extremism.

Kairos Palestine, a group of Palestinian Christians in the West Bank who featured in the 60 Minutes report, were quick to denounce Oren’s statement.

In this inaccurate and manipulative text, Oren… blames the plight of Palestinian Christians on oppression at the hands of Palestinian Muslims — rather than at the hands of the illegal Israeli occupation itself, as is our reality.

We add our voices to several other recently published responses that have emphasized this reality and the ways in which Oren’s op-ed attempts to mask it. Indeed, contrary to his assertions, Christian persecution is caused mainly by the occupation that systematically degrades all Palestinians, restricts our movement, confiscates our land, devastates our economy, and violates our rights — including the very basic right to a decent life.

We are particularly troubled by Oren’s attribution of migration within the Palestinian Christian community to ill-treatment by Palestinian Muslims. This damaging analysis wilfully ignores the underlying political oppression that afflicts Christians and Muslims alike. In the case of Bethlehem, for instance, it is in fact the rampant construction of Israeli settlements, the chokehold imposed by the separation wall, and the Israeli government’s confiscation of Palestinian land — largely Christian-owned land in the Bethlehem area — that has driven many Christians to leave.

In Oren’s op-ed and his dealings with CBS we see the two main thrusts of the Zionists’ communications strategy: propaganda and suppression.

If critics can’t be drowned out in the media then efforts to silence them have to become more direct. Never is their any willingness to face a challenge directly. Zionism, it would seem, even for its most strident proponents is indefensible. Rather than respond to honest criticism, first comes the hasbara, then the silencing, and if neither of those work, the plea: our survival is at stake!

But what really threatens Israel?

The breakdown of public morality, in my view, poses the greatest single existential threat to Israel. It is this threat that undermines Israel’s ability to cope with other threats; that saps the willingness of Israelis to fight, to govern themselves, and even to continue living within a sovereign Jewish state. It emboldens Israel’s enemies and sullies Israel’s international reputation. The fact that Israel is a world leader in drug and human trafficking, in money laundering, and in illicit weapons sales is not only unconscionable for a Jewish state, it also substantively reduces that state’s ability to survive.

Those being the words of Michael Oren not long before he became an ambassador and one of the pillars of Israel’s public morality.

Joseph Dana writes: Expanding on his landmark manifesto in the New York Review of Books called, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment”, Peter Beinart sets out to address American Jewish silence on Israel in a new book, The Crisis of Zionism. For Beinart, a generation of young American Jews can no longer identify with Israel as an occupying country. Reconciling their upbringing, soaked in victimhood and Holocaust memory, with the colonial actions of the Israeli government in the West Bank and Gaza is near impossible in the age of new media. Without honest engagement, American Jewish support for Israel risks its own liberal values.

Evidently not strong enough for him to emigrate from New York to Jerusalem, Beinart has a deeply emotional relationship with Zionism. His book is a personal chronicle of his development as a Zionist, which began, of all places, in South Africa. He presents raw reflections about his personal process of awareness of Israel’s immoral treatment of Palestinians, but is careful not to denounce them by always providing an Israel caveat.

Beinart’s arguments are not new or even particularly original, let alone based in reporting from Israel. His analysis draws on a variety of books and reports which don’t capture the entire dialogue taking shape in cafes in Tel Aviv, let alone Ramallah, but allow him to present a slightly new analysis of why the two-state solution has failed. Even those he holds responsible for Israel’s present ills – chief among them revisionist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – are the traditional enemies of American Zionists who start to feel uncomfortable when racism towards Palestinians is clearly articulated, as opposed to quietly carried out.

At its core, The Crisis of Zionism is an ode to liberal Zionism – that confusing ideology which rallies behind the idea Israel can exist as a Jewish and Democratic state – a place where liberalism coexists with tribalism.

Yet, Beinart’s liberal Zionism is a paradox. Zionism, as an ideology and practice, privileges one ethnic group over others. Ignoring this and other bothersome aspects of Israel’s liberal democracy, like the absence of a constitution or the existence of discriminatory laws directed at Israel’s Palestinian citizens, Beinart diverts attention to Israel’s occupation as the root of the country’s problems. West Bank settlers and their allies are portrayed as fanatics, blinded by religious zealotry, which have hijacked Israel’s liberal democracy for their own messianic purposes.

Beinart takes the argument to the extreme in The Crisis of Zionism and a subsequent opinion piece in the New York Times, where he argues that there exists a “democratic Israel”, namely the liberal democracy that exists within the 1948 boundaries of the State of Israel and an “undemocratic Israel”, the West Bank, where Israel controls Palestinians without giving them citizenship and deprives them of basic rights. Not only does this absolve Israelis living in Tel Aviv of responsibility for the entrenchment of the occupation, his separation of the West Bank from Israel safeguards the liberal foundations of Zionism.

Mya Guarnieri: I’m writing this from somewhere in Europe. Sunday morning, I will board a plane* bound for Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport. Organizers of the “Welcome to Palestine” campaign tell me that more than half the passengers on my flight will be international activists.

When they arrive in Ben-Gurion Airport on Sunday, the activists will openly declare their intent to visit Palestine, more specifically, the West Bank city of Bethlehem, which is in Palestinian Authority-controlled Area A.

While thousands upon thousands of tourists make their way from Israel to Bethlehem every year without a problem, Israeli authorities have made it clear that the activists, who number over 1500, will not be allowed to pass. They will be detained and deported.

The activists have been invited by 25 Palestinian civil society organizations to spend next week in the Bethlehem area building an elementary school, planting trees, and repairing village wells that Palestinians say have been damaged by Israeli settlers.

Israeli authorities say the fly-in is a provocation and an attempt to de-legitimize Israel.

On Sunday, hundreds of undercover policemen and Special Forces will be deployed in Ben Gurion Airport in an attempt to stop the activists–who the Israeli authorities call “hostile elements”– from reaching Bethlehem. Israel has also reportedly sent no-fly lists to foreign airlines and has warned the companies that if they do not comply with the state’s demands to prohibit the activists from boarding, the airlines will have to eat the deportation costs.

Associated Press adds: Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Palestinian campaign organizer, said the activists were coming to exercise their right to visit the Palestinian territories.

“The object is not to fly in to make a protest at the airport. The object is for foreigners to visit us,” Qumsiyeh said. “Even prisoners are allowed visits.”

The Guardian reports: Israel has forced low-cost airline Jet2.com to cancel the tickets of three women from Manchester intending to travel to Bethlehem via Tel Aviv this weekend for a gathering of pro-Palestinian activists.

Jet2.com informed the women by email that the airline would refuse to carry them and no refund would be paid. The move follows pressure on airlines from Israel to ban known activists.

One of the women, retired nurse Norma Turner, said Jet2.com had caved in to pressure. “It never crossed my mind that Israel could stop people with British passports leaving British airports,” she told the Guardian.

Israel has promised to deny entry to hundreds of activists due to arrive at Tel Aviv airport on Sunday en route to the West Bank for a week of educational and cultural activities.

Up to 2,000 mainly European sympathisers plan to board planes in what has been dubbed a “flytilla” in reference to previous attempts to breach the blockade of Gaza by flotillas of boats.

Jet2.com’s decision followed a similar move by the German carrier Lufthansa, which cancelled the tickets of dozens of activists on Thursday, saying it was complying with Israel’s demand not to fly certain passengers to Tel Aviv. Other airlines are expected to follow suit.

In an email sent to the three women, Jet2.com said it had been obliged to provide the Israeli authorities passengers’ names, dates of birth, passport numbers and nationalities.

“As a result of providing that information, Jet2.com has been informed by the Israeli authorities that you will not be not permitted to enter Israel. Consequently, if Jet2.com carries you to Israel, you will be refused entry and Jet2.com will be liable for both a fine and your return to Manchester,” the email said.

“We regret that, in light of the decision taken by the Israeli authorities, we are unable to accept you for carriage to Israel on this occasion and your booking with Jet2.com has been cancelled.”

The airline apologised and said the cancellation was “totally beyond our control” but said the passengers would not be reimbursed.

The Israeli authorities have warned they will not permit entry to “hostile elements” and “provocateurs”. It distributed “no-fly” lists of known activists to airlines, which were warned that they would be expected to bear the costs of flying activists back to their point of departure.

“The provocateurs will be dealt with in a determined and quick way,” Israel’s public security minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, said this week. “If they arrive in Israel they will be identified, removed from the plane, their entry into Israel will be prevented and they will be moved to a detention facility until they are flown out of Israel.”

Hundreds of police will be deployed to Ben Gurion airport from Saturday night and flights carrying activists will be diverted to a smaller terminal, where security forces and immigration officials will check and question passengers.

Paul Blumenthal writes: Even in the era of unbridled campaign contributions, Irving Moskowitz’s $1 million donation in February to American Crossroads, the Karl Rove-linked super PAC, is eye-catching.

A retired physician who made a fortune purchasing hospitals and running bingo and casino operations in the economically depressed California town of Hawaiian Gardens, Moskowitz is well-known to those who follow the Israel-Palestine conflict. His contributions to far-right Jewish settler groups, questionable archaeological projects and widespread land purchases in East Jerusalem and the West Bank have routinely inflamed the region over the past four decades and, according to many familiar with the conflict, made him a key obstacle to peace in the Middle East.

Now, at age 83, Moskowitz has turned his money on the American political realm in a more prominent fashion than ever before, funding “birther” groups that question the legitimacy of President Barack Obama’s U.S. citizenship and others that stoke fears about the president’s alleged ties to “radical Islam.”

Although he has funded Republican politicians and organizations in the past, his $1 million donation to American Crossroads is his biggest contribution to U.S. electoral politics to date. Moskowitz did not respond to requests for comment from The Huffington Post. American Crossroads told HuffPost that it does not comment on its donors.

Moskowitz’s contribution was made possible by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling and a subsequent lower court decision that freed corporations, unions and individuals to make unlimited contributions to independent electoral efforts.

And it indicates that supporters of Israel’s right to control the West Bank, occupied since the end of the 1967 war, will vigorously oppose President Obama in his campaign for reelection. [Continue reading…]

Bloomberg reports: Guenter Grass, the Nobel Prize winning author of “The Tin Drum,” compared the ban on his entering Israel to his treatment by dictatorships in Myanmar and East Germany in an article for the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.

On April 8, Interior Minister Eli Yishai declared Grass persona non grata and barred him from entering Israel, after Germany’s best-known living writer published a poem calling the nation’s nuclear capacity a threat to world peace.

“I have been denied entry into a country three times,” Grass wrote in the short article, which was pre-released by the Sueddeutsche Zeitung before its publication tomorrow. He compared the wording of Yishai’s ruling to the tone of his ban by Erich Mielke, the minister in charge of East Germany’s Stasi, or secret police.

Grass wrote that the experience would not erase fond memories of his journeys to Israel, a country to which he still felt “irrevocably bound.” He repeated his criticism of Israel. “As a nuclear power of uncontrolled dimensions, the Israeli government acts only on its own authority and heeds no reprimands,” Grass wrote.

Alex Pearlman writes: Grass’ controversial past could explain away Israel’s actions against that German writer in particular. But it isn’t just the poem. Israel has a free speech problem.

In 2010 renowned professor and linguist Noam Chomsky was banned from entry to Israel after an attempt to give a lecture at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah. Norman Finkelstein, also a Jewish professor, was arrested, deported, and banned from Israel for 10 years in 2008. [Here’s a slideshow of more controversial critics of Israel who have been banned from entering the country.]

“The decision to prevent someone from voicing their opinions by arresting and deporting them is typical of a totalitarian regime,” said Oded Peler, a lawyer for Israel’s Association for Civil Rights to the Guardian after Finkelstein’s deportation. “A democratic state, where freedom of expression is the highest principle, does not shut out criticism or ideas just because they are uncomfortable for its authorities to hear. It confronts those ideas in public debate.”

And it isn’t just Israel itself that has a free speech problem — the modus operandi of Israel’s supporters in the US has long been to use all means possible to silence Israel’s critics.

“Can a Jew be a good Jew and still be opposed to Zionism and to Israel?” This was one of the challenging questions posed by Mike Wallace, a Jew himself, to Abba Eban, Israel’s ambassador to the United States in 1958. That was back in the days when there wasn’t just daylight between Israel and the United States, but divisions could openly be discussed.

Meanwhile, don’t forget to enjoy the clean satisfying smoke of Parliament cigarettes.

Check out Noam Sheizaf’s post on the whole interview.

Yousef Munayyer writes: On April 9, 1948, scores of Palestinian civilians were massacred at the village of Deir Yassin through co-operative efforts of Yishuv forces like the Irgun, Lehi and the Haganah.

The Zionist narrative on the events of 1948 and the Nakba – the Arabic word for the depopulation of Palestine – talks about the war as a defensive one where there was no intention on behalf of the Israeli forces to shift the demographics by force. Rather, that narrative tells us, the refugees were created during the hostilities which began when five Arab armies invaded Israel the day after it declared its independence on May 15, 1948.

Too often, people who talk about “making peace” advise that we pass over history and look forward without getting lost in the “dueling narratives” of this period. But peace cannot happen without a rectification of past injustices and we cannot approach this without talking about what these injustices are.

The Zionist narrative will counter, defensively, that any injustices are not the fault of Israel and this is where the issue of “dueling narratives” prevents further discussion.

“The goal of the Zionist movement was to establish a Jewish state in the land of Palestine which had a significant non-Jewish majority of Palestinian Arabs.”

But there are simple, undeniable facts that any two sane people, Zionist or otherwise, should be able to agree on. For example, I think we can all agree that April 9, 1948, occurred before May 15, 1948. This is not a matter perspective, this is chronology.

When you actually look at the history – even versions documented by Israeli historians using official Israeli archival material – what you learn is that a very significant portion of the total refugees were created long before May 15, 1948. Had it not been for the hundreds and thousands of refugees flowing into Arab states and massacres like Deir Yassin, the Arab armies would likely not have been compelled to intervene.

Clearly, indisputable and historically non-controversial chronological facts blow significant holes in the Zionist narrative about cause and effect. But sequence is not the only problem. The other point of contention Zionists hold is that Israeli actions during the war were defensive and not intended to depopulate.

The goal of the Zionist movement was to establish a Jewish state in the land of Palestine which had a significant non-Jewish majority of Palestinian Arabs. Through years of immigration, the Zionists managed to grow from 11 per cent of Palestine’s inhabitants in 1922 to about 30 per cent in 1946.

The Zionist goal, which was unachievable for decades, came to fruition after 18 months of hostilities when Jews suddenly became 85 per cent of the population of the state of Israel. So, the Zionist narrative will have you believe that the Zionist dream of establishing a state with a Jewish majority, which was unachievable without war then, finally achieved during the fog of one, happened completely by accident.

One does not have to be a supporter of Israel or Palestine to accept this explanation – just astoundingly naïve. [Continue reading…]

In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan Pappe writes: On 9 April 1948, Jewish forces occupied the village of Deir Yassin. It lay on a hill west of Jerusalem, eight hundred metres above sea level and close to the Jewish neighbourhood of Givat Shaul. The old village school serves today as a mental hospital for the western Jewish neighbourhood that expanded over the destroyed village.

As they burst into the village [of Deir Yassin] the Jewish soldiers sprayed the houses with machine-gun fire, killing many of the inhabitants. The remaining villagers were then gathered in one place and murdered in cold blood, their bodies abused while a number of the women were raped ad then killed.
Fahim Zaydan, who was twelve years old at the time, recalled how he saw his family murdered in front of his eyes:

They took us out one after the other; shot an old man and when one of his daughters cried, she was shot too. Then they called my brother Muhammad, and shot him in front us, and when my mother yelled, bending over him – carrying my little sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her – they shot her too.

Zaydan himself was shot, too, while standing in a row of children the Jewish soldiers had lined up against a wall, which they had then sprayed with bullets, ‘just for the fun of it’, before they left. He was lucky to survive his wounds.

Recent research has brought down the accepted number of people massacred at Deir Yassin from 170 to ninety-three. Of course, apart from the victims of the massacre itself, dozens of others were killed in the fighting, and hence were not included in the official list of victims. However, as the Jewish forces regarded any Palestinian village as an enemy military base, the distinction between massacring people and killing them ‘in battle’ was slight. One only has to be told that thirty babies were among the slaughtered in Deir Yassin to understand why the whole ‘quantitative’ exercise – which the Israelis repeated as recently as April 2002 in the massacre in Jenin – is insignificant. At the time, the Jewish leadership proudly announced a high number of victims so as to make Deir Yassin the epicentre of the catastrophe -a warning to all Palestinians that a similar fate awaited them if they refused to abandon their homes and take flight.

Yousef Munayyer writes: Last week, the Israeli central bureau of statistics reported future trends which indicate the proportion of Palestinian Arabs in Israel will increase significantly by 2059.

Well, I have news for those arguing for a two-state solution will rescue a “Jewish and Democratic State.” Not only does the occupation make a liberal Zionist state impossible through the fundamental contradiction between a Jewish state and a democratic one, but to hope for a “democratic” Israel is foolish.

Think about what “democratic” Israel would be like. In order to insure a Jewish majority, the state will have to continue to not only discriminate against the Palestinian citizens in Israel but also continue to treat them as a “demographic threat.”

Numerous Israeli laws discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel. Because of a 2003 law, Palestinians like me can’t reside in Israel with their Palestinian spouse from outside of “Israel proper.” This means that if I want to live in Israel, my wife from the West Bank cannot live with me. Yet Jews are exempt from this hardship. These laws exist to prevent what Netanyahu refers to as a “demographic spillover”; the movement of Palestinians into Israel, which would threaten the state’s desired Jewish majority.

In fact, since the establishment of the state, its laws have marginalized the Palestinian minority. From the 1950 Absentee Property Law, which was used to expropriate hundreds of thousands of dunams of Palestinian land and is still being used today, to a series of other legalistic measures, the Israeli state effectively and significantly targeted the Palestinian minority.

Today, there are roughly 1.6 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, just over 20 percent of the population. This proportion would be even higher, perhaps 25 perecent, if not for the extraordinary influx of over one million immigrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia in the past 20 years—a demographic feat unlikely to be repeated.

In 2003, Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israeli Finance Minister, argued that the “demographic threat” was not from the West Bank and Gaza, but rather from Palestinian citizens of Israel. He stated that 20 percent would be problematic and would have to be managed, but 35 to 40 percent would mean the end of the “Jewish State.” The state perceives that Palestinian wombs threaten its very nature.

“I’ve been duped,” declared the popular travel writer Rick Steves after watching the documentary, Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land.

His perception of Israel was so radically altered he felt compelled to write at the Huffington Post: “If you are a friend of Israel, you must watch Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land.”

The ideologically inclined are likely to read a strong political message in what Steves wrote, but my hunch is that his post was prompted by something else — an everyday concern he has as a travel writer.

Every seasoned traveler knows two things:

1. The most interesting way of experiencing another culture is through deep immersion, and
2. the most common obstacle to that experience is the tourist trade.

As a result, it’s important to get streetwise not so much because foreigners — and especially Americans — are easy targets for one kind of scam or another, but because those who profit from tourism tend to be the least faithful representatives of their own culture. That’s why, as Steves often says, the authentic experience is most often going to be found by going off the beaten track. And this quest for authenticity makes the traveler watch out for false promises.

A good travel writer has little patience for travel guides that paint deceptive pictures — where charming turns out to be tacky or a popular destination turns out to be a tourist trap.

But now, when Steves says he’s been duped, he’s describing a much higher level of misrepresentation. Israel is not the country he took it to be and their is for him a measure of insult in this discovery.

No one takes kindly to being treated like a sucker.

Rick Steves does not have a political axe to grind, but he does have a genuine appreciation of other cultures and an awareness of the degree to which most Americans are ignorant about the rest of the world.

He writes:

On the road, you learn that ethnic underdogs everywhere are waging valiant but seemingly hopeless struggles. When assessing their tactics, I remind myself that every year on this planet many languages go extinct. That means that many heroic, irreplaceable little nations finally lose their struggle and die. There are no headlines—they just get weaker and weaker until that last person who speaks that language dies, and so does one little bit ethnic diversity on our planet.

I was raised so proud of Nathan Hale and Patrick Henry and Ethan Allen—patriotic heroes of America’s Revolutionary War who wished they had more than one life to give for their country. Having traveled, I’ve learned that Patrick Henrys and Nathan Hales are a dime a dozen on this planet—each country has their own version.

I believe the US tends to underestimate the spine of other nations. It’s comforting to think we can simply “shock-and-awe” our enemies into compliance. This is not only untrue…it’s dangerous. Sure, we have the mightiest military in the world. But we don’t have a monopoly on bravery or grit. In fact, in some ways, we might be less feisty than hardscrabble, emerging nations that feel they have to scratch and claw for their very survival.

We’re comfortable, secure, beyond our revolutionary stage…and well into our Redcoat stage. Regardless of our strength and our righteousness, as long as we have a foreign policy stance that requires a military presence in 130 countries, we will be confronting determined adversaries. We must choose our battles carefully. Travel can help us understand that our potential enemies are not cut-and-run mercenaries, but people with spine motivated by passions and beliefs we didn’t even know existed, much less understand.

Growing up in the US, I was told over and over how smart, generous, and free we were. Travel has taught me that the vast majority of humanity is raised with a different view of America. Travelers have a priceless opportunity to see our country through the eyes of other people. I still have the American Dream. But I also respect and celebrate other dreams.

I’ve long been struck by the obvious parallels between America and Israel, both of which built their foundations on ethnic cleansing. Cliff Brown explores this theme in the following video: “Two tragedies: American and Israeli injustice”

Brown describes himself on his blog: I am a 61 year old American male who, as a teenager, cheered on the Israelis in the 1967 war.

What changed my views on Israel? I lost my ignorance of both history and current events in the Middle East.

I decided to educate myself instead of forming my views from received wisdom. Though I knew (and know) many Jews, I did not know one Palestinian. I made it my business to discover the truth of the Palestinian situation for myself as can anyone who has access to the Internet.

In a review of Peter Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism, Mark LeVine writes: Its criticism is far too narrow and timid, while its proffered solution – a focus on settlements and more vigorous support for a two-state solution – is at least a decade out of date. It is almost entirely unrelated to the realities on the ground, which have rendered the creation of a territorially and economically viable Palestinian state a pipe dream.

The problems with Beinart’s argument are almost all apparent in the first few pages of the book; indeed in its first lines. He begins by declaring: “I believe the Jewish people deserve a state dedicated to their protection in their historic homeland, something enjoyed by many peoples who have suffered far less. As a partisan of liberal democracy I believe that a Jewish state must offer equal citizenship to all its inhabitants.”

Putting aside that there are other kinds of political arrangements that could guarantee Jews “protection” in their homeland besides the exclusivist Zionist one, the simple fact is that a Zionist state cannot offer “equal citizenship” to all its citizins, since the whole point of being a Zionist state is that in crucial areas it gives institutionalised preference to Jews, at the inevitable expense of non-Jewish citizens. If it didn’t give preference to Jews then it wouldn’t be a “Jewish” state in any politically meaningful sense; it would just be a democracy.

Indeed, however laudable Beinart’s desire for Israel to behave “in the spirit of [the Rabbinic sage] Hillel” and “not do to others what Jews found hateful when done to them”, it is a century too late. Israel, like every other settler society, could only have been born out of doing things to the country’s indigenous inhabitants that they certainly would not have wanted done to them.