Category: Palestine

Sam Bahour on Shahid Alam

We are publishing a series of reviews and responses to PULSE contributor M. Shahid Alam’s latest work, Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism. I would recommend this clear-sighted book to any student of the origins and trajectory of Zionism. Here, Sam Bahour describes his own provocative engagement with Israeli Exceptionalism.

Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism peels the onion of Zionism to reveal how deeply flawed this ideology was and is and how it has become a destabilizing factor which puts people of the region — and arguably beyond — in serious jeopardy.

Israeli Exceptionalism is not only a must read, it is a must-think-about book. To add intellectual spice, every chapter starts with a few quotes of prominent individuals related to the topic at hand. Reading these quotes alone speak volumes of the human tragedy that Zionism evokes.

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Taxpayer-funded ‘anti-Terror’ unit involved in propaganda effort over Gaza

by Scotland Against Criminalising Communities

The Annual Report of the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), laid before Parliament last Thursday, confirms that a Government propaganda unit set up to tackle terrorism intervened to influence British public opinion during the Israeli attack on Gaza last year. The report also outlines a number of other steps taken by the Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU), including the creation of a network of community organisations. RICU is linked to the UK Government’s Prevent programme for preventing “violent extremism.”

Activities of this sort distort democracy in the UK. They aim to mobilise public and voluntary sector workers and ordinary people as propagandists for controversial Government policies. They poison public debate by linking opposition to the Government’s foreign policy to support for “extremism.” And they do all this within a framework of Government initiatives already notorious for the massive intelligence-gathering that they involve.

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Taking Sides: Israel and the lobby against the US

by John Mearsheimer

In the wake of Vice President Joe Biden’s ill-fated trip to Israel last week, many people would agree with the Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s remark that ‘Israel’s ties with the United States are in their worst crisis since 1975… a crisis of historic proportions.’ Like all crises, this one will eventually go away. However, this bitter fight has disturbing implications for Israelis and their American supporters.

First, the events of the past week make it clear in ways that we have not seen in the past that Israel is a strategic liability for the United States, not the strategic asset that the Israel lobby has long claimed it was. Specifically, the Obama administration has unambiguously declared that Israel’s expansionist policies in the Occupied Territories, including East Jerusalem, are doing serious damage to US interests in the region. Indeed, Biden reportedly told the Israeli prime minister, Binyahim Netanyahu, in private:

This is starting to get dangerous for us. What you’re doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us, and it endangers regional peace.

If that message begins to resonate with the American public, unconditional support for the Jewish state is likely to evaporate.

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Israel’s colonization of East Jerusalem – some context

The first political planning decision in the ‘reunified’ city concerned plans not for construction but for the geopolitical determination of borders…the determining consideration, ‘a maximum of vacant space with a minimum of Arabs,’ laid down as the basic tenet in the delineation of the borders, made possible the planning and implementation of the prinicipal political objective: the creation of physical and demographic faits accomplis.

[It became] clear that the planners must set their sights on the vacant areas on the outskirts of the city and surrounding it. These areas would have to be expropriated from their Arab owners. The legal instrument at the disposal of the Israelis for this purpose was the Land Ordinance (Expropriation for Public Purposes) of 1943, which grants the treasury minister the authority to expropriate private land when there is a ‘public need’ for such action – with the definition of ‘public need’ left to the minister himself…

But no one was deceived by the designation of these ‘ethnically colorblind’ needs; the expropriated areas were being taken from Arabs and handed over to Jews. This was an extraordinary interpretation of the word public: The only legitimate public was Jewish, and therefore only jews were entitled to benefit from the expropriation.

From Meron Benvenisti, City of Stone: The Hidden History of Jerusalem, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996, pp.154-55.

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Inside the Lawfare Project

Netanyahu’s Attack on Human Rights NGO’s Hits the States

by Max Blumenthal

As the anti-Goldstone, human rights-bashing Lawfare Project’s opening event on March 11 wrapped up, I asked its chairman, Columbia University Law School Dean David Schizer, for an interview. Schizer, who had just attacked the Goldstone Report from the podium, pointedly refused to speak to me and looked for the exit. As Schizer was leaving, he was politely confronted by Columbia Law School Professor Katherine Franke, who heads the school’s Program in Gender and Sexuality Law.

“Why didn’t you invite any speakers with an alternative perspective?” Franke asked Schizer.

His reply was curt. “We invited one or two but they couldn’t make it,” Schizer claimed before hurrying away.

Schizer was understandably nervous about his exposure. After all, he had just presided over a day-long conference during which Israeli human rights workers were labeled as traitors while Judge Richard Goldstone and human rights groups were compared to “anti-Semitic street gangs.” After several speakers had harshly condemned legal efforts against the construction of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, Schizer appeared beside them to lend his credibility to their views.

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Active Non-violence in Palestine and Israel

By David Hartsough

When some people think of Palestine and Israel, they often picture Palestinians as suicide bombers and terrorists while the Israeli military are seen as bombing whole neighborhoods in Palestine. The violence and counter-violence and endless war has created a hopelessness about any peaceful future for the Holy Land.

However, during a month-long stay in Palestine and Israel recently, I found something else. I found something very positive and hopeful and perhaps the key to a peaceful resolution of this tragic conflict — and a possible path toward a peaceful future for both peoples.

I found that violence is not the whole story. Endless checkpoints, 26-foot high walls, and the great fear and mistrust between many Israelis and Palestinians are grimly persistent features of life there. But there is also an alternative to this cycle of destruction being forged on both sides. There is a larger story beyond the script of retaliatory violence – a story of a growing nonviolent movement that both Palestinians and Israelis are building. It is this larger story that I would like to share.

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Russell tribunal says sanction Israel

Russell Tribunal on Palestine concludes the EU should sanction Israel until violations stop.

The genius of an oeuvre is measured by the breadth of its message – Avatar as not “just another war movie”

by Kim Bizzarri

Following last night’s choice of the Oscars’ jury to award Katherine Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker with the Best Picture prize, the debate has since then moved to the pubs and the ether. It appears to be primarily concerned with whether Bigelow’s portrait of “the” war does justice to the genre and whether, with time, Avatar will come to be recognised as more deserving of the aspired title. The debate however is having the effect of reducing Cameron’s gargantuan critique of modernity to “just another war movie”, adding to the already popular dismissal of the film, by the intellectual left, as a western guilt-fantasy. 

Lets start by considering the assumption that Avatar is “just another war movie”.  

If indeed we accept that Cameron’s intention was to provide us with a science-fictional portrait of war, then we must also conclude that von Trier’s Dogville is nothing more than an aesthetically minimalist representation of the Great Depression. Just as von Trier exploits the Great Depression as a historical backdrop against which he develops a provocative portrayal of human nature, so does Cameron in the use he makes of military intervention in Avatar.  

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The Only Democracy in the Middle East: 5.3.2010

In the village of Nebi Salah, 14 year old Ehab Fadel Beir Ghouthi from Beit Rima was shot with a rubber-coated steel bullet in the head. He was taken to a hospital where he underwent emergency surgery and is currently in a coma.

Israeli army shoots live ammunition at Ni’lin village:

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Finkelstein in Prague

Last week, Norman Finkelstein delivered a series of lectures in Prague as part of his European speaking tour. Finkelstein was initially invited to speak at the prestigious Czech Academy of Sciences but had his invitation revoked less than 24 hours prior to his scheduled talk, allegedly at the behest of the Prime Minister’s office. A similar fate befell Finkelstein’s appearance in Munich and Berlin, where the Heinrich Boll and Rosa Luxembourg Foundations cancelled the events, following “a concerted campaign by neoconservative and pro-Israeli pressure groups, such as Honestly Concerned and BAK Shalom, known for their unconditional support of Israeli policies and the defamation of critics as anti-Semites.”

Here is Finkelstein’s lecture at Casa Gelmi in Prague, organised by the Czech pro-Palestinian group ‘Friends of Palestine’.

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