Category: Israel

Jordan Valley is a microcosm of Israel’s colonisation

Israeli land seizure and ethnic cleansing should be met with arrest warrants – not arms sales and diplomatic games.

The Jordan Valley, stretching all the way down the West Bank’s eastern side, is a microcosm of Israel’s discriminatory policies of colonisation and displacement. For 40 years, settlements have been established, military no-go areas declared, and Palestinians’ freedom of movement restricted. There are now 27 colonies in the Jordan Valley – most of them had been established by the late 1970s under Labour governments. There are also nine “unauthorised” outposts. In the 1990s, the size of territory afforded to the settlements increased by 45%.

As we watch yet another bout of periodic, though tempered, enthusiasm about “direct negotiations”, Israel is doing as much as possible to determine the Bantustan borders – policies exemplified in the Jordan Valley, a substantial area of the West Bank almost isolated from the rest of the occupied territories. In 2006, B’Tselem noted how the Israeli military “made a distinction between the ‘territory of Judea and Samaria’ (ie the West Bank) and ‘the Jordan Valley’, indicating that Israel does not view the two areas as a single territorial unit”.

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What Israel and the lobby really fear about Iran

by M.J. Rosenberg

The internet has been burning up with responses to Jeffrey Goldberg‘s Atlantic cover story on the likelihood that either Israel or the United States will preempt development of an Iranian nuclear bomb by attacking its atomic sites.

Goldberg does not flat-out endorse bombing Iran. Rather, after numerous conversations and briefings with US and Israeli officials, he concludes that there is at least a 50-50 chance that bombs will fly in a year or so.

Goldberg himself does not take a position on whether bombing is warranted or justified. But, given the way he frames the article and his personal closeness, to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu – who speaks in apocalyptic terms of the existential danger a nuclear Iran poses to Israel – it is clear that Goldberg sees no alternative to preventing an Iranian nuke, by whatever means necessary. And that includes war.

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Just a normal democracy

Here is a news item from Israel, which is, we are assured in the West by many politicians, commentators, and lobbyists, a regular democracy, if not a multicultural paradise.

Nazareth Illit, which has recently come under threat of an Arab demographic takeover, now is headed to be the religious-Zionist capital of the lower Galilee…

The article goes on to describe various initiatives intended to boost the city’s Jewish population, as a response to an increase in the number of Palestinian citizens who have moved in, keen for a better standard of living. The projects, overseen by the town’s mayor Shimon Gapso, include the renovation of “an old school building to house 15 young families from the former Gush Katif yeshiva of Torat HaChaim” – in other words, former residents of a Gaza Strip colony.

Apparently, one of the other figures involved in these efforts is MK Uri Ariel, who in 2008 “called on the government to encourage Israeli Arabs to “willingly emigrate” from Israel and from large cities within it”. Another personality is Rabbi Hillel Horowitz, who spent years living in the Hebron area settlements.

The piece concludes by reprinting a message from Mayor Gapso that appears on Nazareth Illit’s website:

“It is time to call a spade a spade. Just as Ben-Gurion and Peres said in the 1950’s that the Galilee must be Jewish, we say the same about Nazareth Illit: It must retain its Jewish character. Our goal is to bring 3,000 families within five years… We have been in contact with various ideological groups, and we are definitely considering building a hareidi-religious neighborhood as well. The primary goal is to put the brakes on the demographic deterioration…”

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Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism

The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton- now out in Hebrew!
The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton- now out in Hebrew!

I just came back from a two-week vacation. (I mention this almost completely irrelevant fact because in the field of activism we don’t seem to talk about the perfectly natural human need for rest.) In the throes of contemplating whether to flip over to my backside, or give my ass a bit more quality sun-time, I managed to complete a task I’ve been working at for months (yes, months! That’s how much I needed a vacation): Reading Robert O. Paxton’s ‘The Anatomy of Fascism.’

The Anatomy of Fascism – Mini Book Review

There’s a lot of historical data in The Anatomy of Fascism. Numbers, names- things I’ll never remember because they’re not much use to me, and frankly, they make for a very boring read (with respect to the author’s obvious hard work, dedication and love of his profession). Another thing that makes The Anatomy of Fascism a boring read is that pitfall of most history books: The empire point of view. I couldn’t care less about the Fuhrer and Duce’s political contortions into power, just like I don’t care about the in-house bickering of the Likud and Kadima. Telling me of the empire without any moral stance (except for some small, simplified statement near the end of the book that all this is something we should be repulsed about) is not only uninteresting, it’s also as unethical as the third monkey.

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One More War, Please

by David Bromwich

Will the summer of 2010 be remembered as the time when we turned into a nation of sleepwalkers? We have heard reports of the intrusion of the state into everyday life, and of miscarriages of American power abroad. The reports made a stir, but as suddenly as they came they were gone. The last two weeks of July saw two such stories on almost successive days.

First there was “Top Secret America,” the three-part Washington Post report by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin on the hyperextension of private contracts, government buildings, and tax-funded expenditures in the secret surveillance economy. Since 2001, the new industries of data mining and analysis have yielded close to a million top secret clearances for Americans to spy on other Americans. Then at the end of July came the release of 90,000 documents by Wikileaks, as reported and linked by the New York Times, which revealed among other facts the futility of American “building” efforts in Afghanistan. We are making no headway there, in the face of the unending American killing of civilians; meanwhile, American taxes go to support a Pakistani intelligence service that channels the money to terrorists who kill American soldiers: a treadmill of violence. Both findings the mainstream media brought forward as legitimate stories, or advanced as raw materials of a story yet to be told more fully. This was an improvement on the practice of reporting stories spoon-fed to reporters by the government and “checked” by unnamed sources also in government. Yet, as has happened in many cases in the mass media after 2001 — one thinks of David Barstow’s story on the “war experts” coached by the Pentagon and hired by the networks — the stories on secret surveillance and the Afghanistan documents were printed and let go: no follow-up either in the media or in Congress.

We seem to have entered a moral limbo where political judgment is suspended and public opinion cannot catch its breath.

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Judt on Life, Death and Israel

A couple of shorts on the late, great Tony Judt. First, Still Life focuses on his grace and perseverance while terribly ill. Over the fold, Don’t Talk About Israel shows Judt … talking about Israel.

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Obama Must Bring Back that Magic to the Middle East

Mosaic Intelligence Report: 2010 is far from over, yet the Middle East has witnessed a series of close encounters with major wars. What are Arabs afraid of? And why is Barack Obama’s popularity sinking fast?

Also see Jim Lobe’s analysis of the Brookings/Zogby ‘Arab Public Opinion Poll’.

Not another war for Israel, intelligence professionals warn

Col. (ret.) Ann Wright warns against the United States waging another war for Israel. Reproduced below is a memo Wright co-signed with Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) warning Obama against such a war.

by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

We write to alert you to the likelihood that Israel will attack Iran as early as this month. This would likely lead to a wider war.

Israel’s leaders would calculate that once the battle is joined, it will be politically untenable for you to give anything less than unstinting support to Israel, no matter how the war started, and that U.S. troops and weaponry would flow freely. Wider war could eventually result in destruction of the state of Israel.

This can be stopped, but only if you move quickly to pre-empt an Israeli attack by publicly condemning such a move before it happens.

We believe that comments by senior American officials, you included, reflect misplaced trust in Israeli Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu.

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Edge Man: Tony Judt (1948-2010)

Tony Judt, a towering intellect, a moral giant, and a master of prose, has passed on. He did what only the greatest of thinkers do: he constantly evolved. More significantly, he never succumbed to orthodoxies, he was always on the edge. And that is what gave his writing its distinctive freshness. In his last years, he also outgrew his middle-of-the-road liberalism to adopt principled, at times radical, positions on war and capitalism. He fought successfully to erase the gap between passion and principle. The Zionism of his youth had led him to volunteer for the Israeli forces in 1967; he was disillusioned after realizing that the Israeli soldiers he worked with were ‘right-wing thugs with anti-Arab views’ or ‘just dumb idiots with guns.’

Judt’s disenchantment turned him into one of the most courageous and eloquent critics of the Jewish State. But unlike some luminaries of the left, he also had the moral courage to re-examine his own easy assumptions. A year after his first public statement on Israel-Palestine, in which he had called for a two-state solution, Judt acknowledged its unviability and issued a call for a single binational state in Palestine. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Evan Goldstein describes the essay’s impact.

According to Benny Morris, a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and author of One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict (Yale University Press, 2009), Judt’s essay placed the one-state idea “squarely and noisily on the table of international agendas.” The Forward described it as “the intellectual equivalent of a nuclear bomb on Zionism.” Within weeks, The New York Review had received more than 1,000 letters to the editor. Suddenly, says Robert Boyers, editor of the quarterly Salmagundi and an observer of the liberal intellectual scene, Judt was a major voice weighing in on the Middle East. Indeed, if the death of Judt’s friend the literary critic Edward Said, in 2003, left a “yawning void” in the national conversation about Israel, Palestine, and the Palestinians, as Judt has suggested, then it is Judt himself who has filled that void.

In 2006, he was the only mainstream figure to come to the defence of Mearsheimer & Walt after they published their groundbreaking London Review essay. He later joined John Mearsheimer in a debate organized by the London Review of Books in which they argued against apologists for the lobby. In the same year an event organized by Network 20/20 at which Judt was slated to speak was cancelled following pressure from the ADL and AJC. This prompted Mark Lilla and 114 writers and intellectuals to write a letter of protest to the ADL. He also spoke eloquently in a must-see Dutch documentary on the lobby (in which he also recounts the Network 20/20 incident). Later, he would join Mearsheimer, Tariq Ali and others to stand up for Norman Finkelstein who was being unjustly denied tenure under Israel lobby pressure. He also wrote a burning indictment of Israel’s crime in the same year, calling it the ‘country that wouldn’t grow up.’

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