Category Archives: Israel

Why the future of Palestine looks more promising than the future of Israel

Mary Dejevsky writes:

The Israel of the next 30 years is likely to be more divided, less productive, more inward-looking and more hawkish than it is today – but without the financial means and unquestioning sense of duty that inspired young people to defend their homeland by force of arms.

Recent mass protests against inequality and the cost of middle-class living also suggest that the social solidarity that has prevailed hitherto could break down. In such circumstances, it must be asked how much longer Israel can maintain the unity it has always presented against what it terms the “existential threat”.

An Israel whose borders are leaky, which is surrounded by states that are at once chaotic and assertive, and whose citizens are less able or willing than they were to fight, could face real serious questions about its viability. The choice then might be between a fortress state, explicitly protected by nuclear weapons, and a state so weak that association, or federation, with the burgeoning independent Palestine would become plausible: the so-called one-state solution by other means.

In either event, those with other options – the younger, more educated, more cosmopolitan sections of the population – might well seek their future elsewhere, leaving the homeland of their ancestors’ dreams a husk of its former self.

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Discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel

The Institute for Middle East Understanding lists the forms of institutionalized discrimination that target non-Jewish citizens of Israel.

  • There are more than 30 laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel. directly or indirectly, based solely on their ethnicity, rendering them second or third class citizens in their own homeland.
  • 93% of the land in Israel is owned either by the state or by quasi-governmental agencies, such as the Jewish National Fund, that discriminate against non-Jews. Palestinian citizens of Israel face significant legal obstacles in gaining access to this land for agriculture, residence, or commercial development.
  • More than seventy Palestinian villages and communities in Israel, some of which pre-date the establishment of the state, are unrecognized by the government, receive no services, and are not even listed on official maps. Many other towns with a majority Palestinian population lack basic services and receive significantly less government funding than do majority-Jewish towns.
  • Since Israel’s founding in 1948, more than 600 Jewish municipalities have been established, while not a single new Arab town or community has been recognized by the state.
  • Israeli government resources are disproportionately directed to Jews and not to Arabs, one factor in causing the Palestinians of Israel to suffer the lowest living standards in Israeli society by all socio-economic indicators.
  • Government funding for Arab schools is far below that of Jewish schools. According to data published in 2004, the government provides three times as much funding to Jewish students than it does to Arab students.
  • According to the 2009 US State Department International Religious Freedom Report, “Many of the national and municipal policies in Jerusalem were designed to limit or diminish the non-Jewish population of Jerusalem.”
  • The Nationality and Entry into Israel Law prevents Palestinians from the occupied territories who are married to Palestinian citizens of Israel from gaining residency or citizenship status. The law forces thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel to either leave Israel or live apart from their families.
  • In October 2010, the Knesset approved a bill allowing smaller Israeli towns to reject residents who do not suit "the community’s fundamental outlook", based on sex, religion, and socioeconomic status. Critics slammed the move as an attempt to allow Jewish towns to keep Arabs and other non-Jews out.
  • The so-called "Nakba Bill" bans state funding for groups that commemorate the tragedy that befell Palestinians during Israel’s creation in 1948, when approx. 725,000 Palestinian Arabs were ethnically cleansed to make way for a Jewish majority state.
  • The British Mandate-era Land (Acquisition for Public Purposes) Ordinance law allows the Finance Minster to confiscate land for "public purposes.” The state has used this law extensively, in conjunction with other laws such as the Land Acquisition Law and the Absentees’ Property Law, to confiscate Palestinian land in Israel. A new amendment, which was adopted in February 2010, confirms state ownership of land confiscated under this law, even where it has not been used to serve the original confiscation purpose. The amendment was designed to prevent Arab citizens from submitting lawsuits to reclaim confiscated land.
  • Over the entirety of its 63-year existence, there has been a period of only about one year (1966-1967) that Israel did not rule over large numbers of Palestinians to whom it granted no political rights.
  • Former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert have both warned that a continuation of the occupation will lead to Israel becoming an "apartheid" state. Barak stated: "As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic… If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state."
  • Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, heroes of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, have both compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to apartheid.
  • Today, there is a virtual caste system within the territories that Israel controls between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, with Israeli Jews at the top and Muslim and Christian Palestinians in the occupied territories at the bottom. In between are Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and Palestinian residents of occupied East Jerusalem.
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Netanyahu’s messianism could launch attack on Iran

Sefi Rachlevsky writes:

Benjamin Netanyahu promised to tell the truth at the United Nations, and the truth was indeed revealed. The prime minister chose in this speech to quote reverently from his meetings with one person only: the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who viewed himself as the messiah.

Neither the source nor the inflammatory quotation was coincidental. Netanyahu was intimately acquainted with the Rabbi King Messiah, and also with the views he expressed from on high. The rebbe’s followers stood behind Netanyahu’s victorious campaign in the 1996 election, which following the incitement-filled demonstrations and Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, with the slogan “Netanyahu is good for the Jews.” And on Sunday, the prime minister’s entourage was sent to genuflect at the rebbe’s court.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe was famous for his vehement opposition to even the tiniest withdrawal from any territory ever held by the Israel Defense Forces, even in the framework of full peace. He even opposed withdrawing from territory on the other side of the Suez Canal. In his view, not one inch of the Holy Land could be given to the Arabs. He based this opposition on both security concerns – that missiles would be deployed on any vacated territory – and religious-historical arguments. Netanyahu reiterated both claims in his speech to the United Nations.

The most prominent emissaries of the Lubavitcher Rebbe – the great rabbi, as Netanyahu termed him at the United Nations – included Baruch Goldstein, perpetrator of the 1994 Hebron massacre, and Yitzhak Ginsburg, the rabbi of Yitzhar, he of the radical books “Baruch the Man” (which celebrates the massacre ) and “The King’s Torah: The Laws of Killing Gentiles.” Nor was this by chance. The Lubavitcher Rebbe inculcated his followers with the doctrine of “your people are the land’s only nation”: In the land of the messiah, there is no room for Arabs. Thus racism entered Netanyahu’s speech at the United Nations – not “merely” against Islam, but also against Arabs: They, he said, are not like your neighbors in New York.

Relying on the Lubavitcher Rebbe and his teachings in a speech that was ostensibly in favor of a Palestinian state is like relying on a racist who fervently supports slavery in a speech that is ostensibly in favor of abolition, while also making abolition contingent upon conditions that will never be met. And thus, in a speech that warned about the danger of radical Islam, Netanyahu relied upon the most radically messianic Jewish theologian of our generation.

But Netanyahu, whose speech was steeped in religious extremism, surpasses even his rabbi. For all his hatred of Arabs, the Lubavitcher Rebbe never incited against Jews. Netanyahu – from the demonstrators chanting “with blood and fire we’ll expel Rabin” through the whispers that “the left has forgotten what it is to be Jewish” to his links with the radical Im Tirtzu organization – has also engaged in domestic incitement.

The Quartet’s plea that Netanyahu, of all people, should bring about a full withdrawal from the occupied territories and Arab East Jerusalem within a year is thus pathetic. It is like wishing that Michele Bachmann would turn America into a welfare state or that Eli Yishai, leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, would separate religion and state.

Bill Clinton, someone with vast experience of Netanyahu, had it right: The man is not interested in peace and compromise. Netanyahu opposed peace with Egypt and the first Oslo accord. He led a campaign of incitement against the Oslo-2 agreement and then refused to implement it. Ariel Sharon, Rafael Eitan and then-Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Amnon Lipkin-Shahak were stunned by what they interpreted as his willingness to consider arming doomsday weapons in the face of Saddam Hussein’s threats, and they worked to dissuade him. Netanyahu opposed the pullouts from Lebanon and Gaza, and not because he thought they should have been done by agreement. Nor did he respond to Mahmoud Abbas’ moderation by taking advantage of the opportunity: Instead, he waged a campaign of incitement to preempt any chance of a deal and a withdrawal.

After all, he is the emissary of the Chabad messiah, the man who taught that this is the Jews’ land exclusively. He returned from the United States with the feeling that the American government is a rag to wipe his feet on, with no power to stop his most extremist plans.

This is the background to what must become a global understanding of the issue that is now most important of all, which will also be the main topic of U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s visit. Netanyahu is completely serious in his desire, and also in his preparations to circumvent the warnings of the entire defense establishment in order to implement this desire, which many of those in his inner circle have defined as messianic: to attack Iran before winter. Before the clouds come, anyone who can stop him must do so.

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U.S.-Turkey agree on delivery schedule for Predators

If Israel imagined that Turkey’s reliance on Israeli-made unmanned aircraft might give them some leverage when attempting to mend the two countries frayed relations, the Obama administration is apparently willing to disabuse the Israelis of this hope. Turkey’s recent agreement to install a US-made NATO radar shield against a missile attack in Europe, has no doubt come into consideration as Turkey negotiates with the US over delivery of the UAVs.

Today’s Zaman reports:

Turkey is expecting the delivery of Predators in June 2012, the Turkish defense minister said a day after the country’s prime minister announced that Turkey has agreed with the US on a deal involving the transfer of US-engineered unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that could prove crucial in combating terrorism.

“We have agreed in principle [on the delivery of Predators]. Negotiations will continue,” Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was quoted as saying by the Cihan news agency on Saturday in New York, where the Turkish leader was visiting on the occasion of the 66th session of the UN General Assembly. Erdoğan also noted that Turkey had offered to either purchase or lease the drones and that the two countries were still settling the details regarding the delivery of the Predators.

Following up on the agreement, Turkish Defense Minister İsmet Yılmaz told reporters on Saturday that the drones to be received from the US would be delivered to the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) in June of next year, reported the Anatolia news agency.

“These [Predators] are UAVs with better qualities and features than the Herons,” Yılmaz said, and added that the Turkish-made Anka would also be ready for the TSK around the same time, as an alternative to Israeli-made Herons.

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The end of Oslo

Judith Butler writes:

Among the many astonishing claims that Barack Obama made in his recent speech opposing the Palestinian bid for statehood was that ‘peace will not come through statements and resolutions.’ This is, at best, an odd thing to say for a president whose ascendancy to power itself depended on the compelling use of rhetoric. Indeed, his argument against the power of statements and resolutions at the United Nations to achieve peace was a rhetorical ploy that sought to minimise the power of rhetorical ploys. More important, it was an effort to make sure that the United States government remains the custodian and broker of any peace negotiation, so his speech was effectively a way of trying to reassert that position of custodial power in response to the greatest challenge it has received in decades. And most important, his speech was an effort to counter and drain the rhetorical force of the very public statements that are seeking to expose the sham of the peace negotiations, to break with the Oslo framework, and to internationalise the political process to facilitate Palestinian statehood.

There are reasons to question whether the Palestinian bid for statehood at this time and on these terms is the right thing to do, but they are not the ones that Netanyahu put forward in his blustery and arrogant remarks. Within the Palestinian debates, many have questioned whether the present bid for statehood effectively abandons the right of return for diasporic Palestinians, leaves unaddressed the structural discrimination against Palestinians within the current borders of Israel, potentially abandons Gaza, delegitimises the Palestinian Liberation Organisation by elevating the Palestinian Authority into a state structure, takes off the table the one-state solution, and mistakenly relies on the UN as an arbiter rather than insisting that Palestinian self-determination form the basis of any future state. Critics like Ali Abunimah, the editor of the Electronic Intifada, argue that the UN has proven itself time and again to be a venue for paralysis, given the veto rules that govern the Security Council and secure the hegemony of major powers, making it likely that the present bid for statehood will be defeated by a US veto.

And yet, one effect that is already felt as a consequence of these ‘resolutions and statements’ is that the 1993 Oslo Accords can no longer be presumed to be the framework for future negotiations – indeed, we may see that framework crumble definitively in the coming days. Oslo not only gave the US a privileged position as broker of all ‘peace’ negotiations, but effectively sponsored the massive growth of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land by refusing to recognise their illegal status according to international law. In fact, the Oslo years have seen the number of settlers grow from 241,500 in 1992 to 490,000 in 2010 (including East Jerusalem), and the indefinite deferral of all ‘permanent status issues’ – effectively establishing the occupation as a regime without foreseeable end. The Oslo Accords also implemented the principle that any change of status of Occupied Palestine would depend on the ‘consent’ of Israel. Thus, the power of Israel to decide the future of Palestine pre-empted the international right of Palestinians to self-determination.

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Israel has rendered its closest ally impotent

Larry Derfner writes:

“Tafasta meruba, lo tafasta,” is a Hebrew saying that means, “If you get too greedy, you end up with nothing,” and it fits well to the arm-twisting job Israel just did on Obama at the UN. By leaning on him too single-handedly to block the Palestinian statehood bid, to pressure countries like Gabon and Bosnia-Herzegovina to go along, and to give a speech that Avigdor Lieberman said he would “sign with both hands,” Israel bent Obama too far, until he just broke. In the eyes of Palestinians, Muslims of the Middle East and probably everybody else in the world, the U.S. president has now assumed the identity of the ultimate Israel lobbyist, of Mr.Hasbara. “He’s not the president of the United States, he’s the president of Israel,” a man in Ramallah said to me the day after the speech, and that’s what Palestinians think today: They flat-out hate Obama. They may hate him more than any other U.S. president in history, including George W. Bush. They thought Obama was on their side, and in the moment of truth he sold them out to the LIkud, to the settlers, to the Republican wackos. Palestinians, and presumably all Muslims, feel toward Obama today how the settlers felt toward Ariel Sharon after he decided to withdraw from Gaza: betrayed.

With Obama’s America now having zero credibility in the Middle East, where does this leave Israel? Alone and vulnerable to an extent that’s unfamiliar to Israelis. Until now, the U.S. held sway with the Palestinians; it doesn’t anymore. It held sway with Egypt, Jordan and Turkey; I wonder how much it has left now. In highly dramatic fashion, the U.S. stood up for the occupation and against Palestinian independence, and the result of this disgrace is that outside of Israel and America, the occupation is more unpopular and Palestinian independence more popular than ever. It’s the Palestinians who have the wind at their back now, and Israel that’s pissing in the wind. And America can’t help us anymore because America has become a spent force around here.

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The New York Times’ conflicts of interest

The New York Times has a “public editor” — currently Arthur S. Brisbane — who is described as “the readers’ representative.” His job is to respond to complaints and comments from the public and to monitor the paper’s journalistic practices.

Readers’ representative? Is he selected by the paper’s readers? No. Is he employed by the paper? Yes. So, let’s be clear then: the public editor represents the newspaper — not its readers.

The existence of a public editor is an exercise in self-policing and like most other forms of self-policing, the function of the public editor is to create the appearance of institutional integrity in order to improve the newspaper’s image. In other words, the public editor is regarded as having commercial value as a component in the New York Times’ brand management.

Having said that, I have no doubt Brisbane is a decent guy but he’s as tough as the newspaper wants him to be — which isn’t much.

Of his predecessor, Byron Calame, Jack Shafer at Slate once wrote:

Calame possesses a mandate that would allow him to boil the journalistic ocean if he so desired, but he usually elects to merely warm a teapot for his readers and pour out thimblefuls of weak chamomile.

If the executives at the New York Times actually wanted a public editor intent on boiling the journalistic ocean, they wouldn’t appoint characters like Calame and Brisbane.

Which brings us to today’s column in which Jerusalem bureau chief, Ethan Bronner, gets a slap on the wrists for his own conflicts of interest. Bronner comes out badly not because he gets rough treatment from Brisbane but because he’s a serial offender who’s working on borrowed time.

What both Brisbane and Bronner supposedly don’t understand is that there is no real difference between an “actual” conflict of interest and the appearance of a conflict of interest — conflicts of interest are by their very nature all about appearance.

Here’s the column:

CONFLICT of interest, or the appearance of it, is poisonous in journalism. This is particularly so when it relates to reporting on Israel and the Palestinians, a subject that draws a steady stream of skepticism about New York Times coverage from readers and partisans on all sides.

So it is troubling that, just before the Palestinians brought their case for statehood to the United Nations last week, an American writing for The Columbia Journalism Review accused The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief of appearing to give favorable treatment to his speaking agent’s other clients.

The article by Max Blumenthal on Sept. 14 set off a chain of follow-up pieces by others and by Mr. Blumenthal himself, hammering away at the allegation that Ethan Bronner, the Times bureau chief, was compromised by his relationship with a public relations firm that arranged paid speaking engagements for him.

A close examination of the facts leads me to conclude that the case for an actual conflict of interest is slender. But the appearance of a conflict clearly exists, and that is a problem in and of itself. The Times’s “Ethical Journalism” (PDF) guidelines state that staff members “may not accept anything that could be construed as a payment for favorable coverage or as an inducement to alter or forgo unfavorable coverage.”

Mr. Bronner has now severed his ties to the public relations firm. “In my view, it is all about appearances,” he told me. “I am not denying they matter. There is nothing of an actual conflict.”

The matter revolves around Mr. Bronner’s engagement, beginning in 2009, with Lone Star Communications, a firm operated by Charley Levine, a prominent public relations executive in Israel. Mr. Levine added a speakers bureau to his firm that year, and Mr. Bronner signed on to be represented by him.

The core of Mr. Blumenthal’s critique was that Mr. Levine is a figure of the Israeli right, who counsels prominent Zionists and serves as a reservist in the Israeli Defense Forces Spokesperson’s Unit. Mr. Blumenthal, a writing fellow at the Nation Institute, said it was improper of Mr. Bronner to have a business relationship with Mr. Levine while covering stories that Lone Star promoted.

In The Columbia Journalism Review article, Mr. Blumenthal never explicitly accused Mr. Bronner of providing favorable coverage as a quid pro quo for receiving speaking engagements from Mr. Levine’s firm. He objected that Mr. Bronner “takes paid speaking engagements from a firm that also pitches him stories.” Elsewhere in the article, he wrote: “On the one hand, it might be hard to cover Israel without stumbling across Lone Star’s many clients. On the other, however, that might be a good reason not to have a business relationship with the firm.”

In an interview, Mr. Blumenthal said, “It is a question of appearances and his ability to be taken seriously because he says he is an objective reporter.”

Mr. Blumenthal’s article enumerated six cases in which Mr. Bronner had written about, or at least mentioned, Lone Star clients. Mr. Bronner walked me through those cases. Of the six, he said, only one involved an instance in which he had received a pitch from Lone Star and, on that basis, decided to write about it. The article concerned the Jewish National Fund and was about a fortified play area for children in the Israeli border town of Sderot.

In the rest of the cases except one, he said, he did not receive a pitch from Lone Star and was unaware that the story involved a Lone Star client. The exception involved Danny Danon, a conservative member of the Israeli Parliament. Mr. Bronner said he has covered Mr. Danon but the coverage decisions were influenced not by Lone Star but by the prominence of Mr. Danon, who is deputy speaker of Parliament and chairman of World Likud.

The Blumenthal piece creates the implication of a corrupt arrangement. In my view, the arrangement was ill-advised and created an appearance that could be construed by some as corrupt, but was not in actuality.

I consulted two journalism ethics experts on this, who reached the same conclusion. Stephen Ward, who heads the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin, said: “Has there been an actual conflict of interest? I don’t find it in this case. What about the perception of a conflict? That is where I think some might see the relationship between him and the public relations firm and have some reason to doubt.”

Ed Wasserman, Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, said Mr. Bronner’s decision to sever ties to Lone Star was the “appropriate” action.

For his part, Mr. Bronner is kicking himself over the episode. “I allowed myself to be in a situation where someone could come after me this way,” he said. “I feel pretty bad about it.”

He said Lone Star had booked only a half dozen speeches for him, out of 75 that he had given since he became bureau chief three and a half years ago. He speaks only to nonprofit organizations and, in Israel, typically receives fees of less than a thousand dollars, he added.

He did not tell his editors about his relationship with Lone Star, he told me, because he did not think joining a speakers bureau had to be disclosed. Indeed, the ethics guidelines do not specifically require it. But the guidelines do require Times staff members to provide an accounting to editors if they earn more than $5,000 of speaking fees in a year. Mr. Bronner acknowledged he was “delinquent” in failing to do this, saying he believed he was obligated to account only for any single speech for which he was paid more than $5,000, another requirement of the policy.

(Mr. Bronner faced criticism previously when his son joined the Israeli military, prompting The Times’s public editor then, Clark Hoyt, to recommend that Mr. Bronner be reassigned because of the appearance of a conflict. Bill Keller, the executive editor at the time, supported Mr. Bronner, and he remained in his post. Mr. Bronner’s son has since completed his service and returned to the United States.)

Mr. Bronner was pointed in arguing that the attack by Mr. Blumenthal, who writes critically of Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians, was ideologically motivated and designed to discredit Mr. Bronner.

Mr. Blumenthal’s piece may well have been influenced by an animus toward Mr. Bronner’s reportage for The Times. But the fact remains that the Lone Star engagement created a problem and stands as a reminder that The Times must be fastidiously independent, in reality and in appearance, or face attacks like this one.

Here’s the irony: if the New York Times was to have a public editor worthy of the name, he’d do nothing to insinuate that criticism of the kind delivered by Max Blumenthal was in some way unfair, but on contrary acknowledge the fact that the most rigorous criticism of the paper’s practice of journalism is most often going to come from those who take the deepest interest in the issues — not those who practice the mealy-mouthed art of balanced impartiality.

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French Jewish fighters move in to defend Israeli settlements in West Bank

Armed French citizens in a West Bank settlement -- Photo: Jewish Defense League

While Israeli authorities are making it increasingly difficult for non-violent international activists to visit the West Bank, suspected Jewish terrorists — members of the Jewish Defense League (JDL) — coming from France in recent days apparently had no difficulty reaching the illegal settlements which they claim they want to defend.

The FBI has described the JDL as a “right-wing terrorist group“. One of its most infamous charter members was Baruch Goldstein who attack unarmed Palestinian Muslim worshipers at a mosque in Hebron in 1994, killing 29 and wounding 125 others. On its website, the JDL says “We do not consider his assault to qualify under the label of terrorism,” in reference to Goldstein’s Hebron attack — they also describe him as “a brilliant surgeon, a mild-mannered Yeshiva-educated man.”

Al Jazeera reports on an operation organized by the French chapter of the JDL.

Two weeks ago, an announcement appeared on a French website, calling for “militants with military experience” to participate in a solidarity trip to Israel between September 19 and 25. “The aim of this expedition is to lend a hand to our brothers facing aggression from the Palestinian occupiers, and to enhance the security of Jewish towns in Judea and Samaria,” it explained. The dates of the trip coincide with the Palestinian statehood bid at the United Nations.

As of yesterday, in response to this call, there were 55 French citizens, both men and women, with military experience, stationed inside the illegal Israeli settlements up and down the West Bank. Organised into five separate groups of 11, their mandate is to “defend the settlements against any attack from Palestinians”, and to “aid” in areas where they feel there is a lack of Israeli army personnel or police forces.

The website belongs to the French chapter of the Jewish Defence League (JDL), a far-right Jewish group founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane in the United States in 1968. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has refered to the JDL as a “violent extremist organisation”.

“In France, it is a movement made up of French citizens who defend the Jewish community when faced with aggression, and also defends Israel in a more general manner,” said Amnon Cohen, a spokesperson for the group. “In terms of ideology, we are Zionists, pro-Israeli, and we share similar ideologies to that of the Ichud Leumi [“National Union”] party in Israel.” The National Union advocates the settlement of Jewish people in the entirety of the occupied West Bank, which it calls by its biblical name of Judea and Samaria.

“People say we are extreme because we believe in Judea and Samaria, and that this belongs to the Israelis, the Jews, but I don’t consider this to be extreme,” he told Al Jazeera. [Continue reading…]

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The lies Netanyahu told at the UN

The Institute for Middle East Understanding fact-checked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the UN General Assembly on Friday.

NETANYAHU: “Ladies and gentlemen, Israel has extended its hand in peace from the moment it was established 63 years ago.”

REALITY: The establishment of Israel in 1948 was accompanied by the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes – over two-thirds of the population. It is estimated that more than 50 percent fled under direct military assault. Others fled in panic as news of massacres of hundreds of civilians in the villages of Deir Yassin and Tantura spread. Their exodus, or Nakba, was already nearly half-complete by May 1948, when Israel declared its independence and the Arab states entered the fray. Zionist forces depopulated more than 450 Palestinian towns and villages, most of which were demolished to prevent the return of the refugees. Although Jews owned only about seven percent of the land in Palestine in 1947 and constituted about 33 percent of the population, Israel was established the next year on 78 percent of Palestine.


In 1967, Israel launched a surprise attack on Egypt, leading to the 1967 war, where it militarily occupied the remaining 22 percent of historic Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza Strip) as well as the Syrian Golan Heights and the Egyptian Sinai. Of all this territory, Israel has to this day returned only the Sinai.

NETANYAHU: “And it’s here [at the United Nations], year after year that Israel is unjustly singled out for condemnation. It’s singled out for condemnation more often than all the nations of the world combined.”

REALITY: Israel is not above the law. International law is based on the notion that all human beings are worthy of the same rights and of being treated equally. These laws apply equally to all nations. The UN was instrumental in the creation of Israel through UN General Assembly resolution 181. Because of this, the UN, and the international community in general, bears a responsibility to help resolve the situation, guided by the standards of international law.

NETANYAHU: “Twenty-one out of the 27 General Assembly resolutions condemn Israel – the one true democracy in the Middle East.”

REALITY: For more than 43 years, Israel has militarily occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, a population now numbering 4.36 million people. Except for a few thousand Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, this population has no voice in Israeli national policy despite being subjected to long-term Israeli occupation. Additionally, 1.2 million Palestinians are citizens of Israel and subject to more than 30 laws which discriminate against them solely based on their ethnicity, rendering them second or third-class citizens in their own homeland. From 1948 to 1966, those Palestinians who remained in what became Israel after the ethnic cleansing of the vast majority of the Palestinians from their homeland were governed by Israeli military rule (not unlike what exists in the Occupied Territories today). Thus for the entirety of its 63-year existence, there has been a period of only about one year, between the lifting of martial law in 1966 and the occupation which began in 1967, that Israel did not rule over large numbers of Palestinians to whom it granted no political or human rights. [Continue reading…]

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Obama sold Israel bunker-buster bombs

The Daily Beast reports:

While publicly pressuring Israel to make deeper concessions to the Palestinians, President Obama has secretly authorized significant new aid to the Israeli military that includes the sale of 55 deep-penetrating bombs known as bunker busters, Newsweek has learned.

In an exclusive story to be published Monday on growing military cooperation between the two allies, U.S. and Israeli officials tell Newsweek that the GBU-28 Hard Target Penetrators—potentially useful in any future military strike against Iranian nuclear sites—were delivered to Israel in 2009, just several months after Obama took office.

The military sale was arranged behind the scenes as Obama’s demands for Israel to stop building settlements in disputed territories were fraying political relations between the two countries in public.

The Israelis first requested the bunker busters in 2005, only to be rebuffed by the Bush administration. At the time, the Pentagon had frozen almost all U.S.-Israeli joint defense projects out of concern that Israel was transferring advanced military technology to China.

In 2007, Bush informed Ehud Olmert, then prime minister, that he would order the bunker busters for delivery in 2009 or 2010. The Israelis wanted them in 2007. Obama finally released the weapons in 2009, according to officials familiar with the still-secret decision.

James Cartwright, the Marine Corps general who served until August as the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Newsweek the military chiefs had no objections to the sale. Rather, Cartwright said, there was a concern about “how the Iranians would perceive it,” and “how the Israelis might perceive it.” In other words, would the sale be seen as a green light for Israel to attack Iran’s secret nuclear sites one day?

Meanwhile, Reuters reports:

The United States will not “sit idly by” while its forces are harmed by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, the top U.S. military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, said on Thursday.

Mullen and U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told a Senate committee that while such attacks by groups linked to Iran had declined since the summer, the United States would not ignore it the attacks recurred.

“They (the Iranians) have been warned about continuing it … that if they keep killing our troops, that will not be something we will sit idly by and watch,” Mullen told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“Iran needs to understand that we’re going to be around awhile here, making very clear to them that we’re not — we’re not simply going to ignore what Iran is doing in — in Iraq,” Panetta said.

Fourteen U.S. services members were killed in hostile incidents in Iraq in June. Most of the deaths were attributed by U.S. officials to rocket attacks by Shi’ite militias armed by Iran.

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September 23, 2011: A historic day for Israel-Palestine?

Daniel Levy writes:

Cynicism and skepticism always have their place, but today might just go down as an historic day on the Israeli-Palestinian front. No, there is no direct or quick fix move from the Palestinian application for U.N. membership to the actual realization of a Palestinian state (and certainly not when one factors in the Israeli response) but the Palestinian U.N. move does represent the most definitive break yet with the failed and structurally flawed strategies for advancing peace of many a year. Many Palestinians and others are now suggesting that the PLO leadership progress from the symbolism of September 23rd to a concerted struggle for their freedom centered on nonviolent resistance, diplomacy, and international legality, believing that this would finally deliver a breakthrough.

In its theatrics, today was rather predictable — other than the Quartet statement of the afternoon, on which more in a moment. The speeches of Abbas and Netanyahu held few, if any, surprises. Abbas played to the Palestinian community at home and around the world, and to the rest of the international community.

Abbas spoke to the refugee experience, including his own, while leaving wiggle room for a future solution and embracing the Arab Peace Initiative on this score. He clarified that the PLO would continue to represent all Palestinians until all issues are definitively resolved, urged that this not become a religious struggle (pushing back on Netanyahu’s attempt to make this about a Jewish state), and linked the Palestinian struggle for rights to the so-called Arab Spring, albeit something that will have to be born out in reality beyond the made-for-TV pictures from Ramallah’s town square.

Abbas could also not have been more explicit on this being a Palestine alongside Israel, on the 67 lines, on only 22% of Mandatory Palestine — and thus calling the lie on Netanyahu’s claim that Abbas wants to have a state that would come at Israel’s expense, replacing Israel.

Netanyahu was playing to the Israeli public and to the American and Jewish right. His speech represented a doubling down of the porcupine strategy that guides his government’s policy. He told the world body that its Security Council was being presided over by terrorists and posed as the champion of the “Clash of Civilizations” narrative. In reminding his audience of the sacrifices entailed by Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza six years ago, he somehow overlooked the fact that this was a withdrawal that he himself vociferously opposed. In referring several times to Israel’s peace with Egypt, Netanyahu may have left some reminiscing that in that agreement Israel withdrew to the last centimeter of the 67 lines, removed every settler and IDF position, and entrusted security to an international force — the MFO.

In response to their respective speeches, Abbas received overwhelming applause from the delegates in the GA hall while Netanyahu’s support came only from his own delegation and from the peanut gallery — perhaps that was filled with a U.S. congressional delegation on a daytrip to the U.N.!

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As Netanyahu blasts the U.N. General Assembly the U.S. bullies members of the Security Council

Comparing Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the UN today with Nikita Khrushchev’s boorish conduct in 1960, The Guardian‘s Julian Borger tweeted: “He didn’t take his shoe off and thump the lectern but Bibi just delivered one of the more combative speeches in UN history.”

Netanyahu proceeded to insult the UN which he called “the theater of the absurd”, while he compared the Palestinians to the Nazis.

Here in the UN automatic majorities can decide anything. They can decide that the sun sets in the West — or rises in the West. I think the first has already been preordained. They can also decide — they have decided — that the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Judaism’s holiest place, is occupied Palestinian territory.

And yet, even here, in the General Assembly, the truth can sometimes break through.

In 1984, when I was appointed as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, I visited the great rabbi of Lubavitch. He said to me — and ladies and gentlemen, I don’t want any of you to be offended because from personal experience of serving here, I know there are many honorable men and women, capable and decent people serving their nations here — but here’s what the rabbi said to me. He said to me: “You’ll be serving in a house of many lies.” And then he said: “Remember, that even in the darkest place, the light of a single candle can be seen far and wide.”

Today I hope that the light of truth will shine, if only for a few minutes, in a hall that for too long has been a place of darkness for my country. So as Israel’s prime minister, I didn’t come here to win applause. I came here to speak the truth.

Maybe Netanyahu’s truth-telling will have helped tip some undecided votes in the Security Council in Palestine’s favor but the odds don’t look good.

The Guardian reports:

[Palestinian president Abbas] privately retreated from his pledge to seek an immediate security council vote in part because he is no longer sure of winning the necessary majority, which would have given the Palestinians a moral victory even if the US used its veto. Palestinian sources say they believe Washington has bullied several security council members into withdrawing their support for the Palestinian move, including Portugal, by threatening to withhold support for its stricken economy, and Bosnia, over its opposition to Kosovo being admitted to the UN. Palestinian officials also believe Nigeria is no longer certain to vote in their favour. There are also questions about the position of Gabon and Colombia.

One senior Palestinian official described the Americans as “playing a really nasty game”.

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Palestine doesn’t need Israel’s permission to exist

James Verini writes:

In 1988, Abba Eban, perhaps the finest diplomat and one of the sharpest minds Israel has ever produced, got up before a distinguished crowd in London to give an address with the predictable and yet absurd title, “Prospects for Peace in the Middle East.” Predictable not just in itself, but because Eban and other Israeli leaders had delivered countless such addresses in the 40 unpeaceful years since the country’s creation; absurd because his remarks, which concerned Palestine, came a year into the First Intifada.

But Eban, who served as Israel’s deputy prime minister, its foreign minister, and its ambassador to the United States, laid the case bare for his surprised listeners. He lamented “the paradox of the West Bank and Gaza as an area in which a man’s rights are defined not by how he behaves, but who he is.” He said of the Israeli occupation, “The need to rule one-and-a-half million people of specific and recognized national particularity against their will weakens our economy, distorts our image, complicates our regional and international relations,” and “prevents any prospect of peace.” Weighing the Palestinian stone-throwers in the streets against Israel’s indisputable — no, laughable — military supremacy over its neighbors, he concluded, “We come up against the immense gap between the reality of our power and the psychology of our vulnerability.”

“The immense gap between the reality of our power and the psychology of our vulnerability” — nicely put, and Israel’s existential dilemma crystallized. It’s a phrase worth bearing in mind this week as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. President Barack Obama, and even certain European leaders try to persuade Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to not seek full statehood at the United Nations.

But there’s another phrase in Eban’s remarks that demands as much attention. Note that he referred to Palestinians as a “people of specific and recognized national particularity” — as a nation, in other words, or at least a population deserving one. Eban, who died in 2002, saw his fears borne out. He outlived the First Intifada only to catch the start of the second one, by which time the Palestinians were well-armed enough to inflict real damage, and to watch the eclipse in Gaza of Yasir Arafat’s Fatah party by the more militant Islamist party Hamas. Still, his epigones in Israel and the United States refute him as a matter of course. Get into a discussion with even a well-informed Israeli or defender of Israeli policy on the prospect of Palestinian nationhood, and the outdated and circular line of argument that Palestinians never comprised a state, and thus do not require one now, presents itself inside of a minute. If that doesn’t work, they’ll tell you that, anyway, Hamas has made a Palestinian state untenable.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, for instance, justified his criticisms of what he says are Obama’s too weak efforts by saying, “America should not be ambivalent between the terrorist tactics of Hamas and the security tactics of the legitimate and free state of Israel.” Whether Perry knows that Abbas has risked life and limb defying Hamas he didn’t mention.

The first argument, too, still finds voice in the government offices of West Jerusalem, but it’s not the one Netanyahu and his colleagues, including the prime minister’s critics, are marshaling now. No, they say that recognition of a Palestinian state would subvert the principle of direct negotiation that has been the ideal since the Oslo process; that it would indeed embolden Hamas or inspire Palestine to rash actions such as seeking redress in international courts; or that it would — the psychology of vulnerability again, enhanced by the Arab Spring and the new anti-Israel flare-ups in Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey — compromise Israeli security. Obama, who has spent months trying to head off the vote, purports to agree at least with the first point and has promised to veto any resolution that makes it to the Security Council. But his U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice, was saying more than she knew when she asked, rhetorically, “What will change in the re­al world for the Pales­tini­an people?”

What neither government mentions — but what Eban, who also served as head of the Israeli mission to the United Nations, knew — is that Palestine already is essentially a nation in the eyes of the international body. As set forth in a decades-long procession of decisions in not just the Palestine-obsessed General Assembly, but also the U.S.-dominated Security Council, the West Bank and Gaza possess the same rights of self-determination as any nation. Palestine — and it is known officially as “Palestine” at the U.N. — participates in General Assembly and Security Council debates and enjoys a permanent mission. Merely making this formal, as Abbas wants, would change little at Turtle Bay — and, if history is any indication, less on the ground. [Continue reading…]

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Israel will soon be another South Africa

Carlo Strenger writes:

Research by the Foreign Ministry has shown years ago that the global creative class’s attitudes are critical for Israel’s standing in the world, as it comprises most of the world’s opinion leaders: most serious international journalists, commentators and filmmakers; most academics in the social sciences and humanities, and the majority of Liberals in the Free World including the majority of liberal Jews, for whom insistence on the sacredness of human rights is the main lesson from the Holocaust.

This global class takes human rights paradigm very seriously indeed, and sees it as a moral vision in which individual rights are truly sacred, meant to prevent national sovereignty from being used as cover to kill and torture citizens. Ideally the global human rights regime should, in the future, be able to prevent genocide and human rights abuse worldwide, even though we are far away from this ideal, as the international community’s lackluster response to Assad’s carnage in Syria shows.

Israeli politicians aware of the importance of this class’s attitude towards Israel often ask me what PR trick could get Israel out of the negative spotlight of the international media because of my research on the global creative class. They tell me things like “Brazil’s image is good, despite its terrible social conditions and high crime rates; why can’t we get them to talk about our beaches instead?”

My answer is best summarized in the words of Joseph Nye, a Harvard political scientist who coined the term “soft power” referring to a country’s the ability to get what it wants without its military and economic power: “Even the best advertising cannot sell an unpopular product. Policies that appear as narrowly self-serving or arrogantly presented are likely to prohibit rather than produce soft power.”

The Netanyahu government has depleted Israel’s ability to influence world opinion to an absolute low. Nye’s description of soft power makes it easy to understand why: “The soft power of a country rests primarily on three resources: its culture (in places where it is attractive to others), its political values (when it lives up to them at home and abroad), and its foreign policies (when they are seen as legitimate and having moral authority).”

Israel’s foreign policies, particularly the occupation of the West Bank and the siege on Gaza, are seen neither as legitimate nor as having moral authority, and its political values are seen as chauvinist. As simple as it sounds, this is something that the current government seems incapable of understanding. As a result they behave with arrogance, assuming that the world is too stupid to realize how right they are: Netanyahu’s lectures Obama; Lieberman’s offends foreign diplomats and politicians, and Amidror’s pontificates to foreign Ambassadors.

Israel does have an attractive culture with artists respected worldwide like Amos Oz, David Grossman, Daniel Barenboim and Idan Reichel. But none of this increases Israel’s soft power, because these artists represent the politically disenfranchised minority of Israeli liberals that is diametrically opposed to the Netanyahu government’s policies.

The price of this government’s myopia in terms of Israel’s credibility, standing and popularity is phenomenal. Whatever the exact result of the Palestinian’s UN bid will be, we must not let Netanyahu’s spin, that Israel scores a moral victory if some major European countries will vote against it or abstain, confuse us; Israel’s loss of soft power is no less than a catastrophe. The day when global public opinion will consider Israel as another South Africa and push for sanctions against the country is drawing ever closer.

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Palestinians declare independence from the U.S.

“Israel and the US are one and the same: the US is Israel, and Israel is the US. Israel doesn’t want to give the Palestinians anything and Obama can’t do anything without Israel because Congress is pro-Israel.”

That’s how Marwan Jubeh, a shop owner in Ramallah, neatly sums up the situation.

If there was an honest element in President Obama’s speech at the UN General Assembly yesterday, it was implicit rather than directly spelled out: it was in effect a declaration of impotence.

And as Obama shifts into gear in his campaign for re-election, he will be grateful for the kosher seal of approval he just got from Israel’s political leaders which he can deploy as often as necessary over the next twelve months to signal that for both Democrats and Republicans, Israel and the US are one and indivisible — even when the president’s middle name is Hussein.

“I think it’s in our national interest, and Israel’s national interest, that we have a strong partnership and that the president is perceived as a friend and ally of Israel. While he does that, everybody should be happy.” So says Bob Turner who — even though he just rode to victory in New York’s 9th Congressional district through a campaign that presented Obama as no friend of Israel — now says that he does not see Israel as a wedge issue.

So now that Obama has once again burnished his credentials as a stalwart friend of Israel, he will be only too happy to set aside any expectation that the US, under his leadership, has a constructive role to play in ending the conflict.

Meanwhile, as Obama insists that the current Palestinian bid for statehood will make no difference, as Henry Siegman argues, it may actually completely change the power dynamics as the Palestinians begin to assert their right of self-determination.

The outpouring of commentary on the request that Palestinians intend to submit to the United Nations to affirm their right to statehood within the pre-1967 borders has fallen into two categories. The first supports the Israeli and American view that sees the Palestinian initiative as endangering the Oslo Accords and prospects for a two-state solution. As described by President Obama, it is a “distraction” from the serious business at hand. The second view supports the Palestinian right to apply for UN membership, or for non-member-state observer status, and rejects the notion that this would set back the peace process.

However, both approaches believe that UN action will not result in any practical changes on the ground and that Palestinians will have to return to the U.S.-orchestrated “peace process” to achieve a two-state solution. And both have in common a profound misreading of the significance of the Palestinian initiative, which is likely to be transformative, changing the rules of the game for Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.

According to the prevailing rules, every aspect of the Palestinians’ existence depends on Israel. Whether Palestinians can travel from town to town within the areas to which they are restricted, open a new business venture, see their homes demolished by an Israeli bulldozer—indeed whether they will live or die—are Israeli decisions, often made by armed Israeli eighteen-year-olds just out of high school.

The Oslo Accords, requiring as they do that Israel withdraw its occupation in stages from the West Bank, were intended to change that reality. But Oslo was quickly undermined by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who declared—“unilaterally”—that the dates established in the accords for the withdrawals are not “holy” and can be ignored by Israel. Furthermore, as noted by Uri Savir, who headed Israel’s Foreign Ministry at the time, Rabin had no intention of returning the Jordan Valley or of sharing Jerusalem. (He might well have changed his views on these issues, as he did on some others, had he not been assassinated by a settler.)

Although the Oslo Accords did not mention a Palestinian state, statehood was the goal implicit in the agreement’s terms and the permanent-status issues slated for negotiations between the parties. But the peace process overseen by the United States was based on an unstated principle that fatally undermined the achievement of a Palestinian state: that any change in the Palestinians’ status as a people under Israel’s occupation depended entirely on Israel’s consent. This effectively excluded everyone other than the occupiers from a role in deciding the Palestinians’ fate. The UN, which was established to assure compliance with international law and to facilitate the self-determination of peoples living under colonial domination, was shunted aside. Above all, this principle excluded the Palestinian people themselves.

To be sure, President Obama recently proposed that negotiations begin at the 1967 lines, with territorial swaps. What he failed to say is that if the parties cannot reach agreement on the swaps, the lines will be drawn by the Security Council. Indeed, he said the opposite—that peace terms cannot be imposed on Israel. His proposal therefore changed nothing. Netanyahu can continue to make demands he knows no Palestinian leader can accept, and the occupation persists.

The real meaning of the Palestinians’ decision to defy the United States is that they will no longer accept their occupier’s role in their quest for statehood. They demand national self-determination as a right—indeed, as a “peremptory norm” that in international law takes precedence over all other considerations—and not as an act of charity by their occupiers.

The American insistence on aborting the Palestinians’ initiative and returning them to a peace process in which their fate remains dependent on Israel is shameful. It stains America’s honor. It will not succeed, for the Palestinian decision to defy the American demand is itself a declaration of independence; that genie cannot be returned to the bottle.

On the ground, little will be changed by a UN affirmation of Palestinian statehood. But nothing will be the same again in the Palestinians’ dealings with Israel and the United States. The notion that Israel will decide where negotiations begin and what parts of Palestine it will keep is history. It is sad that America, of all nations, has failed to understand this simple truth, even in the wake of the Arab Spring. Sadder still is Israel’s continuing blindness not only to the injustice but also to the impossibility of its colonial dream. That dream may now turn into a nightmare as the international community increasingly sees Israel as a rogue state and treats it accordingly.

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Most Israelis willing to accept UN recognition of Palestinian state

The Jerusalem Post reports:

Israel should accept the decision if the UN recognizes a Palestinian state, about 70 percent of Israelis answered in a recent Hebrew University poll.

The poll, which was conducted jointly by the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, also found that over 80% of the Palestinians support turning to the UN to obtain recognition of a Palestinian state. The survey was supported by the Ford Foundation Cairo office and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung in Ramallah and Jerusalem.

As well as exploring Israeli and Palestinian attitudes to the Palestinian bid to the UN to obtain recognition as an independent state, the poll looked at other topical domestic issues within each population.

In response to questions about the Palestinian appeal at the UN, 83% of the Palestinians surveyed supported the move to obtain recognition for their state. Majorities on both sides, 77% of the Palestinians and 79% of the Israelis, believed that the US would use its veto power in the UN Security Council to prevent the UN from admitting the state of “Palestine” as a UN member.

In the face of UN recognition of a Palestinian state, 69% of Israelis thought that Israel should accept the decision and either start negotiations with the Palestinians about its implementation (34%) or not allow any change on the ground by the Palestinians (35%); 16% said Israel should oppose the decision and intensify the construction in the settlements; 7% think that Israel should annex the PA territory to Israel; and 4% think Israel should invade the PA territories and use force to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.

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