What’s behind the effort to make Israel, the ‘Jewish State,’ more ‘Jewish’

Matt Duss writes: With the myriad challenges the Israeli government currently faces – regional turmoil, unrest in Jerusalem, and opposition to a highly contentious budget — this might seem like an interesting time for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to promulgate a new law defining Israel’s identity as “the nation state of the Jewish people.” The bill, which was supposed to have been voted on this Wednesday but has now been delayed, would recognize Jewish religious law as an inspiration for legislation, and affirm that, “The right to the fulfillment of national self-determination within the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.”

At first glance, the timing for this bill is odd. The past months have seen the most unrest in years among Israel’s Palestinian population. The murder of 16 year-old Muhammad Abu Khdeir, who was kidnapped and set on fire in revenge for the murder of three Israeli teenagers in July, have fueled tensions that are high after decades of neglect at the hands of the Israeli government. Anti-Arab demagoguery by Israeli politicians, and anti-Arab attacks by Israeli citizens who take that demagoguery seriously, is on the upswing In the view of Israel’s non-Jewish citizens, who make up some 20% of the population, the new law would make clear that they are second-class citizens.

The move is understandable, however, when one takes into account that Netanyahu needs to protect his right flank from rising contenders like Naftali Bennett, Minister of the Economy, who recently wrote a New York Times op-ed declaring the two-state solution dead. Netanyahu is also pressured by critics within his own Likud Party, where he finds himself representing the left-leaning camp in an increasingly right-wing party. [Continue reading…]

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Israeli ex-spy chief says Netanyahu policies ‘will destroy Israel’

IntelNews.org: The former director of Israel’s internal security service has warned that the policies of the Israeli government could lead to the complete destruction of the country. Carmi Gillon, Israel’s former ambassador to Denmark, led the Shin Bet, also known as Israel’s Internal General Security Service, from 1994 to 1996. In a scathing attack against Israel’s current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Gillon accused him of being “an egomaniac” heading “a bunch of pyromaniacs” in government, who are leading the state of Israel “to its final destruction”. Gillon, 64, was speaking on Saturday evening at the “Peace Now” rally, organized outside the official residence of the Prime Minister in Jerusalem. Participants in the rally were protesting against the so-called Jewish State Law, a bill currently being discussed in the Israeli Knesset, which seeks to officially define Israel as “the nation state of the Jewish people”.

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Spying effort drives ISIS to shut down cellphone service in Mosul

McClatchy reports: A covert campaign of spying by residents and Iraqi intelligence agents hunting for top leaders of the Islamic State has forced the group to suspend cellphone service in areas it controls – a move Kurdish and Iraqi officials say will do little to stop the program but will further infuriate people living under the extremists’ rule.

Iraqi officials read as a sign of success the Islamic State’s announcement last week that it had suspended cellphone service indefinitely in Mosul, the city in northern Iraq it’s controlled since June, and parts of Anbar province for fear local residents were phoning in tips that were used by U.S. and Iraqi commanders to select airstrike targets.

The U.S. military hasn’t said which of its hundreds of airstrikes since August were aimed at suspected Islamic State leaders, limiting its descriptions to generalities – an Islamic State vehicle, a fighting position or a fighting unit. But Iraqi officials confirmed that an aggressive intelligence collection program is in place to help pinpoint Islamic State leaders and military positions.

“Certainly this is an important element,” said Kurdish Foreign Minister Falah Mustafa, who agreed to speak about the intelligence collection only in general. “It helps a great deal when you know the details of what your enemy is doing in terms of their strength, their presence, their weapons, their situation, their internal situation, their supply lines, so all that is very important.” [Continue reading…]

Meanwhile, Hürriyet Daily News reports: The Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) has confirmed that 150 Kurdish Iraqi fighters combatting Islamist jihadists in Kobane will be replaced with a new group that will also use Turkish soil to travel to the northern Syrian town.

Although precise details are not yet known, a group of around 110 fighters is expected to enter Kobane, passing through Turkey as the first group did, Turkish military sources told daily Hürriyet on Dec. 1.

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The new Revolutionary Command Council — the latest effort to unify the Syrian opposition

Aron Lund writes about the launch of the Watasimo — “hold fast” — initiative that has led to the formation of “a joint leadership called the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC, majlis qiyadat al-thawra), which would replace the collapsed institutions of the so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA)”:

On November 27–29, the RCC finally held its founding congress in the Turkish town of Gaziantep. It was attended by several dozen rebel groups, 72 all in all according to the organizers. Also present were a number of well-known exile politicians and Islamist figures, including the pro-Qatari businessman Mustafa Sabbagh, the Salafi televangelist Adnan al-Arour, and members of the National Coalition for the Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, the main body of Syria’s perpetually-splintering exile opposition.

A politico-military structure was set up and a leadership elected that represented a wide variety of rebel factions and regions. It is perhaps the most-broadly-based such rebel unification attempt yet although it excludes the ultra-radical Islamic State, the al-Qaeda-aligned Nusra Front, and the independent jihadis of Ansar al-Din, as well as the Kurdish Popular Protection Units (YPG) — all of which are among Syria’s most powerful armed factions.

The RCC also adopted a charter describing its political goals. Most of the charter is a spiceless mixture of standard rebel fare such as “overthrowing the criminal Syrian regime,” safeguarding Syria’s territorial unity against unspecified “partition projects,” “preserving the Islamic identity of Syria’s society,” and the requisite little bit about fighting terrorism. It provides little detail, skirts the big issues about what sort of political system should be created, and is clearly written to be acceptable to the widest possible spectrum of the opposition and its foreign backers.

However, the charter also signaled that the RCC has grand ambitions by announcing that it will create its own “independent judiciary” and “administer the liberated territories in a way that serves the interests of the citizenry.” It plans to rule Syria in “the interim period until the people’s representatives can accede to power in the state.” [Continue reading…]

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Iraqi government and Kurds reach deal to share oil revenues

The New York Times reports: The Iraqi government agreed Tuesday to a long-term accord with the autonomous Kurdish region to share the country’s oil wealth and military resources in a far-reaching deal that helps reunite the country in the face of a bitter war with Islamic extremists.

The deal settles a long dispute between Baghdad and Erbil, the Kurdish capital in the north, over oil revenue and budget payments. It is also likely to halt a drive — at least in the short term — by the Kurds for an independent state, which appeared imminent this summer after a violent territory grab by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

As the jihadists marched toward Baghdad in June, routing Iraqi Army forces, the Kurds took control of Kirkuk and its rich oil fields. And they intensified efforts to market Kurdish oil independently, arguing that the government had withheld payments to Kurdistan that were badly needed to keep up the fight against the Islamic State in the army’s absence.

Now, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s government has agreed to pay the salaries of Kurdish security forces, known as the pesh merga, and will also allow the flow of weapons from the United States to the Kurds, with the government in Baghdad as intermediary.[Continue reading…]

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The Zionists who are losing faith in Israel

In the eyes of many observers, Israel has never had more than the pretense of being a democracy, but for some of its most ardent supporters, even that pretense is becoming difficult to uphold.

David Ellenson and Deborah Lipstadt write: When Palestinians murdered worshipers in a west Jerusalem synagogue at morning services on Nov. 18, one of the first Israeli policemen on the scene was Zidan Saif, a member of the minority Druse religious community. He played a key role in stopping the assault and was murdered as he did so. The entire nation took note of his sacrifice. Israelis, among them many ultra-Orthodox and President Reuven Rivlin, turned out in droves for his funeral as a sign of respect and gratitude. Now the Israeli Knesset is poised to consider a bill which would demean this man’s standing as an Israeli citizen.

It is with sadness that we write these words. We are both staunch supporters—indeed lovers—of the state of Israel. We rejoice in the fact that we have lived there for extended periods. We consider Israel to be central to our own self-understanding and identity as Jews.

It is precisely because of that love that we find ourselves so alarmed by the Israeli cabinet’s support last week for a proposed basic law called “Israel, the Nation-State of the Jewish People.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he is intent on introducing this proposed bill to the Knesset. The lawmakers may take an initial vote in the next few days; if the bill passes this first stage, it will be sent for mark-up and two more rounds of voting, but its essential effect is unlikely to be altered: The law would formally identify Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, enshrine Jewish law as a source of inspiration for legislation, and delist Arabic as an official language. It pointedly fails to affirm Israel’s democratic character.

The proposed legislation betrays the most fundamental principles enshrined in the Israeli Declaration of Independence, which promises “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex and will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education, and culture.”

Such a bill would certainly concern, if not inflame, Israel’s Arab citizens. However, it also is a cause of concern for countless Jews in Israel and throughout the world who are committed to Israel as a democratic state devoted to human rights and equality. [Continue reading…]

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Israel heads for early elections as governing coalition collapses

Sheera Frenkel reports: Less than two years after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formed his new government, Israel could be heading back to the polls this winter.

Netanyahu said Monday that it is “impossible to manage the country” with the current coalition, claiming that his own ministers were undermining him. The final break came after a fiery showdown between Netanyahu and Yair Lapid, Israel’s finance minister and head of the centrist Yesh Atid party.

Netanyahu was seeking to gain Lapid’s support for a number of contentious bills, chief among them a bill to declare Israel a “Jewish State.” While Israel’s Declaration of Independence already describes Israel as a Jewish State, the new bill is being touted by Netanyahu as necessary to establishing Israel’s national identity.

Critics say it is an unnecessary bill that will infuriate the country’s Palestinian citizens and fuel anti-democratic legislation. [Continue reading…]

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Who made Apple successful? America’s deification of the entrepreneur

Strictly speaking, Tim Cook is not an entrepreneur since he didn’t start Apple — he simply replaced the irreplaceable Steve Jobs. Since then, the company has increased in value by $350 billion.

Since Apple’s success has continued without Jobs, is this a reflection of the talent of the less charismatic Cook?

“Tim Cook has created as much value as Steve Jobs,” says a headline in Quartz above a photo of a triumphant Cook.

“How high can he go?” asks the caption.

Buried down in the report is a note of realism: “How much credit does a CEO deserve for the performance of his company?”

I guess Apple’s 98,000 employees deserve to share some of the credit alongside their new leader.

And then there are the people who actually make the products that Apple sells, but who don’t even get the honor or financials rewards of being Apple employees.

Apple doesn’t make anything. It simply designs products and unless those designs were transformed into physical devices by human hands and machines operated by people, the designs themselves would remain nothing more than wonderfully intricate dreams.

While Apple has come to embody the dream of American free market capitalism, the people who turned that dream into a reality aren’t American — they’re mostly Chinese — but from Apple and its admirers, they receive virtually no credit.

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Rebecca Solnit: Casino capitalism, Nevada-style

One of the first indications of just how bad it would get was the slew of abandoned Ferraris and Porsches ditched in the Dubai Airport parking lot by foreigners fleeing the country — and the debts they’d incurred there — as the 2008 global economic crisis descended with full force. Within months, housing prices in this small Persian Gulf nation crashed. Overnight, developers halted the construction of half-finished luxury high-rises. The government even drafted a law to criminalize any reporting that would “damage the country’s reputation or economy.” The self-proclaimed “emerald city” quickly took on a new identity as a ghost town.

Before the crash, Dubai had been a unique place: a capitalist’s paradise rising out of the desert, complete with dust-kicking fast cars, privately owned islands, and a population sharply divided between wealthy expatriates and trafficked workers held in near slavery. It was a country shaped by staggering dreams (including a $14 billion plan to build a replica of the world on 300 man-made islands) that often failed just as staggeringly. And in the years after the crisis, Dubai grew only stranger as the fleeting nature of such wealth became obvious and, according to rumors, turning on the tap in certain luxury hotel rooms might yield only a flood of cockroaches.

Yet, despite Dubai’s uniqueness, if this corner of the world has any precedent on Earth, it is certainly Las Vegas.

As TomDispatch regular Rebecca Solnit explains in a haunting new piece, in the late 1990s, the bright-lit casinos of Las Vegas’s strip yielded pride of place to a new, far more breathtaking national gambling scheme. The bet would be on luxury housing developments, even though, as Solnit explains, the one thing those in Las Vegas should have known was “that the house always wins.”

When that particular house of cards collapsed, Las Vegas became ground zero for a spreading economic crisis, while its built-up desert suburbs turned into a graveyard of subdivisions, filled with half-built and abandoned luxury homes vividly on display in the exceptional aerial photos in Michael Light’s new book, Lake Las Vegas/Black Mountain (which includes Solnit’s essay and one by art critic Lucy Lippard). In many cases, no one ever lived in those sprawling houses dotting the outskirts of that city. But if their walls could talk, they would tell a tale of an American Dream far more unsettling than those that play out under the neon lights of the Strip, one built on stolen territories and slippery promises, where the only permanence is, as Solnit writes, in the land itself. Laura Gottesdiener

Anywhere but here
Las Vegas and the global casino we call Wall Street
By Rebecca Solnit

[The following Rebecca Solnit piece is slightly adapted from photographer Michael Light’s new book, Lake Las Vegas/Black Mountain, and appears at TomDispatch.com with special thanks to his publisher, Radius Books.]

“Oh my God, I’m in hell,” I cried out when the car that had rolled for hours through the luscious darkness of the Mojave night came to a jolting stop at a traffic light on Las Vegas Boulevard, right by the giant oscillating fuchsia flowers of the Tropicana. Back then, in the late 1980s, the Strip was the lasciviously long neon tongue a modest-sized city unfurled into the desert. Behind the casinos lining Las Vegas Boulevard was the desert itself — pale, flat, stony ground with creosote bushes here and there, a vast expanse of darkness, silence, and spaciousness pressing in on the riotousness from all directions.

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Russia is returning to Soviet military strategy

Alexander Golts writes: French President Francois Hollande has essentially vetoed the transfer of the first Mistral helicopter carrier to Russia. The Elysee Palace announced that Moscow’s actions in Ukraine do not create the necessary conditions for the transfer of the warship. In response, Russian officials threatened to appeal to international arbitration and sue France for 3 billion euros — against the purchase price of 1.2 billion euros for two Mistral carriers — and several State Duma deputies have called for a ban on imports of French wine.

The situation has obviously reached an impasse. The Kremlin shows no intention of budging on its Ukraine policy and the French authorities worried that they might ultimately see their Mistral ship landing Russian troops on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. The Mistral deal seems to have run aground for the foreseeable future.

In an attempt to put a good face on a bad situation, the Defense Ministry hurried to declare that the warships were not all that necessary anyway. If that is true, why did Russia agree three years ago to put up so much money for them? I think the Mistral deal symbolized the attempt to establish military cooperation between Russia and the West, and France’s refusal to transfer an already completed ship indicates the failure of that attempt. [Continue reading…]

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Lebanon detains wife of ISIS leader

Reuters reports: The Lebanese army detained a wife and daughter of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as they crossed from Syria nine days ago, security officials said on Tuesday, in a setback to the group as it comes under increased military pressure.

The woman was identified her as Saja al-Dulaimi, an Iraqi, by a senior Lebanese political source and security official.

The Lebanese newspaper As-Safir reported she had been detained in coordination with “foreign intelligence”.

The arrest is a blow to Baghdadi and could be used as a bargaining chip against his group, which has captured many foreign, Iraqi and Syrian prisoners and declared a caliphate across territory it has seized in Syria and Iraq.

A senior Lebanese security official said Baghdadi’s wife had been travelling with one of their daughters, contradicting earlier reports that it was his son. DNA tests were conducted to verify it was Baghdadi’s child, the official said. [Continue reading…]

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Iranian Phantom jet strikes ISIS in Iraq

IHS Jane’s Defence Weekly reports: An Iranian McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II jet has struck Islamic State targets in the eastern Iraqi province of Diyala, footage shot by regional media shows.

At least one F-4 is seen conducting a bombing run against ground targets in the footage shot by Al Jazeera, which erroneously identified the aircraft as an Iraqi fighter. Iran and Turkey are the only regional operators of the F-4, and the location of the incident not far from the Iranian border, and Turkey’s unwillingness to get involved in the conflict militarily, indicate this to be an Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force (IRIAF) aircraft.

While the IRIAF is known to have contributed Sukhoi Su-25 ‘Frogfoot’ ground attack aircraft to the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq (ostensibly donated to the Iraqi Air Force, but believed to be crewed by Iranian pilots), this footage is the first visual evidence of direct IRIAF involvement in the conflict.

The Al Jazeera footage, which was shot on 30 November, shows the IRIAF F-4 supporting Iraqi forces retaking the town of Sa’adiya in what was purported to be the government’s largest operation against the Islamic State since June. Its release comes weeks after IHS Jane’s reported growing evidence of Iranian involvement in the war in Iraq. [Continue reading…]

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Iran to limit centrifuge R&D under extension

Laura Rozen reports: Iran will limit research and development on its advanced centrifuges, grant the IAEA expanded access to its centrifuge facilities and convert half its stocks of 20% oxide into fuel for a research reactor under the terms of a seven-month extension on an interim nuclear deal reached with six world powers in Vienna last week.

The terms of the extension were shared with Al-Monitor by a source briefed by the negotiating teams. In return for the steps Iran will take, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) have agreed to continue providing Iran $700 million in its oil sale proceeds per month, amounting to almost $5 billion total through June 30, as well as to continue suspending certain sanctions including on petrochemical exports, trade in precious metals and auto parts. Iran and the P5+1 announced Nov. 24 that they would try to reach a political agreement for the final nuclear deal within four months, with the additional three months of the extension to be used to complete drafting of the technical and implementation details.

Among the steps Iran has agreed to take under the seven-month extension, the source briefed by the negotiating teams said: [Continue reading…]

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Long before we learned how to make wine our ancestors acquired a taste for rotten fruit

Live Science: Human ancestors may have begun evolving the knack for consuming alcohol about 10 million years ago, long before modern humans began brewing booze, researchers say.

The ability to break down alcohol likely helped human ancestors make the most out of rotting, fermented fruit that fell onto the forest floor, the researchers said. Therefore, knowing when this ability developed could help researchers figure out when these human ancestors began moving to life on the ground, as opposed to mostly in trees, as earlier human ancestors had lived.

“A lot of aspects about the modern human condition — everything from back pain to ingesting too much salt, sugar and fat — goes back to our evolutionary history,” said lead study author Matthew Carrigan, a paleogeneticist at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Florida. “We wanted to understand more about the modern human condition with regards to ethanol,” he said, referring to the kind of alcohol found in rotting fruit and that’s also used in liquor and fuel. [Continue reading…]

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Milky Way over Devils Tower

Why Devils Tower and not Devil’s Tower? The question might sound trivial when posed next to the expanse of the Milky Way, but for what it’s worth, here’s the answer from the United States Board on Geographic Names:

Since its inception in 1890, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names has discouraged the use of the possessive form—the genitive apostrophe and the “s”. The possessive form using an “s” is allowed, but the apostrophe is almost always removed. The Board’s archives contain no indication of the reason for this policy.

However, there are many names in the GNIS database that do carry the genitive apostrophe, because the Board chooses not to apply its policies to some types of features. Although the legal authority of the Board includes all named entities except Federal Buildings, certain categories—broadly determined to be “administrative”—are best left to the organization that administers them. Examples include schools, churches, cemeteries, hospitals, airports, shopping centers, etc. The Board promulgates the names, but leaves issues such as the use of the genitive or possessive apostrophe to the data owners.

Myths attempting to explain the policy include the idea that the apostrophe looks too much like a rock in water when printed on a map, and is therefore a hazard, or that in the days of “stick–up type” for maps, the apostrophe would become lost and create confusion. The probable explanation is that the Board does not want to show possession for natural features because, “ownership of a feature is not in and of itself a reason to name a feature or change its name.”

Since 1890, only five Board decisions have allowed the genitive apostrophe for natural features. These are: Martha’s Vineyard (1933) after an extensive local campaign; Ike’s Point in New Jersey (1944) because “it would be unrecognizable otherwise”; John E’s Pond in Rhode Island (1963) because otherwise it would be confused as John S Pond (note the lack of the use of a period, which is also discouraged); and Carlos Elmer’s Joshua View (1995 at the specific request of the Arizona State Board on Geographic and Historic Names because, “otherwise three apparently given names in succession would dilute the meaning,” that is, Joshua refers to a stand of trees. Clark’s Mountain in Oregon (2002) was approved at the request of the Oregon Board to correspond with the personal references of Lewis and Clark.

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Syria: Black holes and media missionaries

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: The lights are going off in Syria. Peter Kassig is only the most recent witness that succumbed to the darkness. David Haines, Steve Satloff and James Foley went before him. They had all gone there to assist and bear witness. A measure of the Islamic State’s (IS) monstrosity is the nobility of the people it has killed. International media has rightly condemned these horrific murders.

For IS murder is a political act. But is also a performance–a spectacle as a means to amplify its message. The ritual act of murder, especially of a westerner, is certain to receive media coverage. IS uses this to rudely force attention.

The emergence of IS has been a godsend for the regime. IS is the monster that the regime always claimed it was fighting. Ideologues who echoed and amplified this regime line over the years have proclaimed IS the true face of the opposition. Left unmentioned is the fact that until recently IS fought its biggest battles against the Syrian opposition. Indeed, earlier in the year, rebels had driven it out of Idlib, Deir Ezzor, much of Aleppo and areas around Damascus. It was only after its successes in Iraq and its newly acquired arsenal that it returned to Syria in triumph. But for many western ideologues, IS is part of an undifferentiated radical opposition to the secular regime of Bashar al Assad.

In fact, IS has a lot more in common with the regime. It is a totalitarian force that uses terror as a means of control. The regime kills but is loath to take responsibility; IS revels in murder. The regime kills more, but IS better amplifies its acts. The regime’s audience is domestic; IS has transnational ambitions. Significantly, where IS proudly rejects the international order, the regime presents itself as its indispensable, if ruthless guardian. For the media, IS is a more exciting story.

The media is selective elsewhere too. Foley and Satloff aren’t the only journalists IS has killed: there have been many more—Iraqis and Syrians—whose names remain unknown to the world. And IS isn’t the only force in Syria killing journalists and aid workers: Bashar al Assad’s regime has been doing it far longer. [Continue reading…]

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