We're doing an informal roundtable on this site, challenging non- and anti-Zionists to utter some positive formula for peace in the Middle East. On the very-American theory, Now that we have the microphone, we have to step up to the plate. But Seham, our young Palestinian-American correspondent from California, isn't into the vibe:
I don't know how to move forward. I see why that's the direction we
should moving in but I don't know what moving forward means so long as
the people all over the Palestinian territories keep experiencing the
crazy shit they are experiencing in Gaza, E. Jerusalem, West Bank. It's sheer fucking insanity. For the first time in my lifetime I am
hearing a different tone from the media. And it's all because of the
internet. Wapo and NYT's don't throw a bone to the Palestinians every
once a while because they have a little fucking humanity in them, they're doing it because they don't want to become irrelevant, because
the truth is just a google search away. It's because of the internet
and the people who are documenting all these fucking crimes. Because
in reality, the mainstream media doesn't give a shit about Palestinians
and they aren't going to humanize them unless they are forced to and
then when they get forced to do that they are going to go look for Jews
that are humanizing them because it's the safest thing to do. So
basically, team Palestine needs you to keep doing what you are doing
because you're the only way that anyone in this country is ever going
to get to hear about them. No pressure or anything though.
How has the internet liberated journalists? Tom Ricks works at the Washington Post. He also has perches at Foreign Policy and some thinktank. Here a genius post at Foreign Policy about the Post op-ed page titled, Stop the Insanity! In its entirety (Ricks understands the attention span of the internet).
Hardly a day goes by without the op-ed page of the Washington
Post carrying an article by a veteran of the Bush Administration holding
forth on foreign policy. Michael
Gerson, a former Bush speechwriter and policy advisor, even has a regular
columnist gig. And today Yosemite
Sam [evidently a snarky reference to John Bolton's mustache] advocates bombing Iran. It's as if in 1969, the people who brought us
to disaster in Vietnam were constantly writing on how to build on their
success-and expand the war to Thailand, Malaysia, and Burma.
P.S. Note that Foreign Policy blog is part of the Slate Group, which is part of the Washington Post. Sophisticated media.
If you want to understand the liberal media's behavior on Israel/Palestine, this is an important post. In it, a powerful editor admits that his views of the conflict are far more left than you'd ever know from his broadcast. He is self-censoring, or being censored (the difference is not significant).
Sayyid Syeed remembers an interfaith event several years ago when a
Jewish leader went to embrace him, saw someone snapping a photo, then
suddenly pulled back.
"He said to the man, `Stop,'" Syeed recalled, "`I'll lose my job.'"
Reform Judaism has been there before, Conservatives say they feel a "duty" to be there. Also Pastor Rick Warren is going. End of kumbaya moment: All the conservative Jews, f'rinstance Malcolm Hoenlein, trashing Obama for saying there are 7 million Muslims in the U.S. when there are only -- who knows, x marks the spot.
Wonderful piece of analysis of the hateful colonization program, from Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett at Foreign Policy, showing that Obama has accepted pro-Israel premises inherent in George W. Bush's doomed roadmap project:
the road map's most significant flaw
comes in its third and final phase, where not a single word is presented
regarding the parameters for resolving the "final status" issues -- borders,
Jerusalem, and Palestinian refugees -- at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. We all know what these parameters are: 1967 boundaries will be the
starting point for negotiating final borders, with the possibility of marginal
and mutually agreed adjustments. Jerusalem will be shared as the capital of
both Israel and Palestine, with special arrangements for the holy sites in the
center of the Old City. Whatever arrangements are made to recompense and
resettle Palestinian refugees, perhaps even with the theoretical
acknowledgement of a "right of return," those arrangements will not be
implemented in a way that threatens Israel's Jewish-majority character.
Without
such final-status parameters, there can be no credible political horizon for
resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But their omission was no accident.
Again, during 2002 and early 2003, Flynt Leverett argued vociferously within
the White House that such parameters were essential. But President Bush and his
senior national-security team believed them to be unfairly demanding of Israel,
and refused to include them.
By
explicitly declaring Israeli settlements illegal, Obama could have transcended
this fatal flaw in the road map. If settlements are illegal, then no
negotiating process grounded in international law could take any starting point
other than the 1967 boundaries for negotiating final borders. Similarly, if
settlements are illegal, then any negotiating process grounded in international
law would have to start from the premise that all of Jerusalem cannot remain under
exclusive Israeli control.
Actions are more important than words, as in Joseph Dana’s eloquent reply to you; his entry about how the group Ta'ayush skipped potentially-frustrating wordsmithing in favor of direct engagement strikes me as the right approach.
That said, I'll try to answer you, because direct action is not always an option... And also because one desired result of direct action is to create a situation where the kinds of conversations you are having become unavoidable.
When a Zionist asks me if I believe in a Jewish state I say, I believe in a state that treats all its citizens equally. I try and counter a positive with a positive.
Usually the person is Jewish, and usually I continue: Look, a lot of Jews now live in Israel, there is a vibrant exciting Hebrew culture that didn’t exist 100 years ago. I’m all for that. Whatever solution is needed – and there are people dying daily for lack of a solution – we can agree the solution needs to include and preserve that. Also there are religious Jews – I’m not one – but there are those who believe god gave us the land. Great. Plenty of Mormons in the US have a charged belief about certain places in America/Utah but here’s what’s different: they don’t get to be privileged citizens because of what their holy book tells them. The reality is Jews are living in a land that has a strong indigenous Arab population and Israel is not allowed to discriminate against them simply because there’s anti-Semitism in the world or our holy book tells us the land is ours.
Ask them what a Jewish state MEANS to them. Does it mean a place where Jews have a strong connection to the land/history, a place where holidays are Jewish? None of that has to change. Does it mean a place where non-Jews are discriminated against in jobs, housing, education, with both de facto and de jure discrimination in the name of the Jewish state? That’s what the Jewish State means right now. Talk about the Present absentees, the unrecognized villages, etc., make them see that the words “the Jewish State” don’t just mean self esteem/affirmative action for Jews, they mean on the ground awfulness that no Jew would put up with as a minority in the West or anywhere.
As you can see, I have avoided the Occupation in this.
Very good piece by Glenn Greenwald on NPR's refusal to use the word "torture" to describe the interrogation techniques adopted by the Bush administration, and on the refusal of an NPR ombudsman to answer Greenwald's questions. (I'd be afeered of Greenwald too, across a table--steeltrap mind). A friend's comment:
Interesting as a revelation of how successfully the Bush-Cheney intimidation of NPR was carried through. Its peak was the chairmanship of the CPB by Kenneth Y. Tomlinson between September 2003 and September 2005: a Voice of America far-right controller, whose job was to discipline and enforce "balance" to the point where the censorship would be internalized and self-induced. Tomlinson did what he was brought in to do. What we are seeing now are post-mortem effects.
All Things Considered, around 1990, seemed a small miracle, completely out of keeping with the rest of American political culture, a reliable and sometimes a courageous source. Now, it is just part of the scenery. The difference between All Things Considered and Fox Radio is the difference between the drawing room and the garage but the two are audibly members of the same family. The NPR wife and the Fox husband.
The other day Ira Glunts did a fine post here saying that Israel has little interest in the peace process, and that Netanyahu is just playing intransigent foot-dragging tricks with Obama over a semi-fake issue, freezing settlements. I asked Glunts: "What's Israel's endgame, to have the status quo forever? No real Palestinian state?" Glunts: I come up with these strategies:
1. Sticking with the status-quo, keep building settlements and pass the problems to the next guy. This is a lot more appealing than it was in the 90s for the Israelis.
2. Unilateral action. (They would call it unilateral withdrawal.) This plan would set up an "autonomy" in the Palestinian populated areas. Sharon, supposedly, planned on doing this. His plan is said to have annexed 45% of the West Bank. I think Olmert had this in mind when he proposed the hitkansoot. Bibi may have been thinking along these lines when he talked about Palestinian economic independence.
3. Negotiate a settlement which gives the Palestinians a state in name, but is really an autonomy. No control over borders, or airspace, demilitarized, limited foreign treaties, limited rights to water resources, etc. My guess is that, at this point, the Israelis who might have wanted to do this do not trust Mitchell to go along. But if the negotiations do go forward, I think a castrated state will be the Israeli goal.
One thing that makes the status quo option so appealing is that the government would not have to relocate many if any settlers, which I think will be a bigger problem than many assume.
The conversation is obviously changing in the U.S. But I missed this one. It happened at Buchenwald a month ago, Brokaw asked Obama the question. My assiduous coreligionists at CAMERA got it. They're now trying to give Brokaw a spanking, administer a catechism of Holocaust exceptionalism. Tom: Know that many Americans, including many Jews, share your sense that Israelis are visiting upon the Palestinians their uninterrogated rage toward the Germans. (Thanks to Jeff Blankfort)
The best line in Nathan Guttman's piece in the Forward about the Justice Department's effort to prove that a pro-Israel spy ring was operating inside the Pentagon, AIPAC and the Israeli Embassy came from Steve Rosen, the former AIPAC lobbyist whose indictment on espionage charges the Justice Department recently dropped.
In 2003 the Justice Department stung Rosen. Here is how it went down. The feds had flipped a Pentagon analyst named Larry Franklin, who had been passing along secrets to Rosen and fellow AIPAC'er Keith Weissman. And in June 2003 they gave Franklin a fake cable saying that Israeli agents in Kurdistan were in mortal danger. Franklin brought the paper to Weissman at a restaurant. Weissman went back to AIPAC. Rosen promptly told an Israeli diplomat.
Franklin told the Forward that the AIPAC guys' actions crossed a line. The Forward got in touch with Rosen, who bridled.
"Franklin did not expect us to warn
the Israelis that they would be kidnapped and killed? That’s like
telling officials of the NAACP that there is going to be a lynching,
but don’t warn the victims, because it is a secret.”
I can only shake my head. I never trusted Obama, but this report in Time reveals just one more example how BO has stiffed the American people on behalf of his friends/big donors from Goldman-Sachs and Citigroup. Curiously, the only country that has received a genuine diplomat as ambassador is (May we have the envelope, please?) Israel in James Cunningham.
For
the last nine years, Dr. Lerman has served as the director of the
American Jewish Committee's Middle East office. The AJC is one of the
oldest Jewish organizations in the United States, established 103 years
ago. Lerman started his work with the organization while Bill Clinton
was still president and is finishing it as Jerusalem is showing certain
suspicions about the new US administration.
Thanks to Jeff Blankfort, who writes, "that this former Israeli intelligence official who was the head of the
AJC's Middle East office can shift so easy into an important position
in the Israeli government would indicate that there is actually no line
between the AJC and whatever government is in power in Israel."
And then there was the Obama factor. Countless Iranians watched his June
4 Cairo speech, and its transcript was parsed word by word. By offering
to respect Iran rather than locating it in the "axis of evil," Obama
appealed to secular nationalists, activists seeking greater individual
freedom and businessmen hungering for an end to the sanctions strangling
Iran's economy. Nearly everyone I spoke with during the ten days I was
in Iran brought up Obama, whether I asked or not. At a frenzied Moussavi
rally in the city of Karaj, west of the capital, I met a campaign
organizer, Hojatolislam Akbar Hamidi, 48, a distinguished cleric who's
known Moussavi for more than twenty years. "I listened to Obama's
speech, and it made me very happy," he told me. "But we're afraid that
some Iranian authorities do not understand the positive message of
Obama." In interviews at polling places on election day, dozens of
voters praised Obama's opening to Iran. At a Tehran mosque where
hundreds of people were lined up to vote, several dozen crowded around
as I asked an older woman why she supported Moussavi. When I suggested,
"Perhaps Moussavi and Obama might meet someday soon?" the crowd,
translating for one another, erupted in cheers, laughter and thumbs-up
signs.
More prosaically, many plugged-in Iranians told me that nearly the
entirety of Iran's business class is fed up with Ahmadinejad's bellicose
rhetoric, and they want to put an end to sanctions.
It's taken me a while to unpack my trip to Gaza last month. Part of this is technical (I only just learned to upload videos to Youtube) but mostly it is emotional. I have a lot to sort out. Today in my notebooks from Gaza I find a scrawled message I left for myself while we were sitting in one meeting or another. "Annals of Tyranny." That is what we experienced in Gaza: we saw tyranny at every hand. Control over virtually every aspect of other people's lives--Arab people's lives.
We left Gaza with a tremendous responsibility to convey our understanding to the world. Today I'm going to try and execute part of my responsibility by posting videos of two students who have tried to leave Gaza on scholarships but have been prevented from doing so.
The videos aren't really edited, so I need to say something about them. The two students are both beautiful young people. Just watch their faces for a little while, you'll know what I'm saying. Summer Abu Zayed is the woman. She's 23, and dressed immaculately, in a white jacket. She reminded me of a student council president. She has a formal, outgoing quality, she's a graduate of Al-Aqsa University. She came to our hotel to talk to us about her youth organization. Then--23 seconds into the video--Tom Suarez, a member of our delegation, asks her about the scholarships she's gotten stopped from accepting. Summer begins by telling another student's story.
Go 4 and 5 minutes in, and Summer speaks of her own blocked fellowships in leadership.The thing I'd ask you to notice about Summer is how painful and mortifying it is for her to tell her story. At one point she starts to cry and collects herself. This is a young woman like the best young women in your family--your cousin or your niece, an upstanding girl who was made to head organizations-- and she is compelled to talk about her personal humiliations and the "cold" emails she's gotten from the outside world to the point where she's scared to even go to the border and experience the rejection. She's a fucking prisoner.
Summer told her friends we were visiting Gaza, and the next night a half dozen other students came to our hotel, Marna House. This reflects a simple truth: The people of Gaza are desperate that you hear their stories. I pulled aside the kid I could relate to most, an engineer/introvert type, Hazem M. Abukaresh. Another beautiful young person, as you'll see. His family moved back to Palestine from Yemen after Oslo, because they thought that things were opening up. He's 24, and all he wants is to get his Ph.D. in communications and computer engineering by the time he's 30. He is obviously highly intelligent. He has had opportunities/scholarships in China, Malaysia, Jordan and Europe. He has been stopped at the border or in Egypt or Israel four times.
"I have a lot of dreams. I want to be a productive person in my society," Hazem says.
The thing I want you to see in Hazem is a young person whose face is alive with shyness, humor and perception, but whose spirit is being destroyed. He doesn't fully understand it, but the process has begun. His gifts are before him and the road is blocked. You can see the rage come into his face now and then, the despair. His gifts are dying in the sun, his spirit is slowly being crushed. His story begins with his winning a Chinese scholarship, then it takes
3 months for him to get permission to travel, and when he gets to the
border he learns the Chinese have cancelled the scholarship.
Watch these videos, or even a portion of them, hear the anguish in these children's voices, and you will understand why it is absolutely essential for American Jews to recall their cultural memory of the Warsaw Ghetto, and why it is essential for Americans to say, Let these people go.
Last night I did a post stealing Antony Loewenstein's view (and Mohammad of Vancouver's) that it is naive to believe that the U.S. had no hand in the Tehran uprising, especially given the use that neocons are now making of it to try and pave the way for bombing Iran. While I'm agnostic on the question (it's my position on all matters I haven't felt for myself), I recognize the skepticism as healthy; and later that night my friend Peter Voskamp, an editor/musician who grew up partly in Houston and can tell you about the funny connections between the Bay of Pigs and Dallas and Watergate, a post I keep meaning to do, and who got my wife going about Jack Ruby last year (what was that mobster doing in the police station, she asks anyone), offered this antidote to credulity:
Former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney is being held in an Israeli prison, along with 18 other international activists, for trying to bring humanitarian aid into Gaza. She called into a radio station today to give an update:
Ha'aretz is reporting that Richard Falk, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, has called the activists detention "unlawful," and reiterated that the siege of Gaza constitutes a "continuing crime against humanity". The Free Gaza Movement is having trouble with their website, but you can also follow their case over twitter - http://twitter.com/freegazaorg.
Meanwhile, life in Gaza goes on. Today Israel admitted to killing Hiam Abu A'yesh, a 17-year old Palestinian girl who lived in Gaza's Juhor Ad-Dik neighborhood. Israel shelled her family's home, killing her and also injuring her brother and 10 others. Israel originally tried to blame Palestinian militants for the destroying the home, but has since changed their assessment.
Our friend Seham sets us straight: Did you guys come up with some offline pact to not mention Michael Jackson's passing on your site? Lame. Arabs
loved Michael Jackson, they loved him, unapologetically. And my Arabs
still haven't tired of talking about him or his death yet. One of my
cousins sent me a $2.00 text message from Ramallah when he heard the
news that just read: "Mikaeel!!!"
That's what we call him, Mikaeel.
I liked his music and all but I grew up in the post 'Beat It'
Internet era so I can't rightfully claim him as my generation. I do
have some vague memories of being dragged to the flea market before a
trip to Falastin to buy red faux leather "Beat It' jackets for my
cousins. And I really hated that flea market because the guy
collecting money at the entrance was missing an arm and always wanted
to pat my face with his good hand that had really filthy black
fingernails. I was a classist child.
Anyway, this is the most badass performance, ever. Nothing is cooler than this and nothing will ever be cooler than this.
The other day I wrote that now that non-Zionists are finally gaining a voice in the discourse on Israel/Palestine, we have to bring our bat and ball-- positive ideas about how to solve things in the Middle East, not just a litany of Palestinian suffering. I'm planning to have a rolling roundtable on this question. Especially as Obama and Netanyahu conduct a smoldering conflict over an issue-- a settlements freeze-- that for all its appeal on the American lib-left does little to alter the lineaments of Israeli colonization. Here is Antony Loewenstein's response to my challenge:
Proposing 'positive' ideas is essential to move the debate forward. It's not
surprising, however, that all of us in various ways want to document the daily
abuses that occur in Israel proper and the territories. They are numerous and
largely unreported by the mainstream media. The blogosphere is therefore a
necessary reckoning and chronicler of life in or around a 'Jewish state'.
In my own work, in Australia and beyond, I'm often asked to say what I think should happen now and into the future and it's something I've
extensively discussed in a forthcoming edition of my book (My Israel Question), namely the many reasons a one-state solution is the most just outcome. It's
vital not to preach to either side, however, but provide space for varying
narratives to be heard. Yet not all sides are equal (witness the LA Times on the
weekend publishing a piece in defence of the West Bank settlements: ).
Most of us (I think I can presume this?) question the viability and
morality of the two-state equation. Reaching one-state is currently highly
unlikely but I believe an important conversation. So, how about proponents of this
being given air-time and counter positions published, too? A conversation is the
only way to tease out the future. Not preaching, engagement.
Housing Minister Ariel Atias on Thursday warned against the spread of Arab population into various parts of Israel, saying that preventing this phenomenon was no less than a national responsibility.
"I see [it] as a national duty to prevent the spread of a population that, to say the least, does not love the state of Israel," Atias told a conference of the Israel Bar Association, which focused on a reforming Israel's Land Administration.
The Shas minister referred to Harish, a housing project built for the Haredi community in northern Israel, saying that the Arab population from the nearby Wadi Ara was spreading into the Harish area.
Jack Ross writes: Dershowitz is still, at least half-heartedly defending Obama--Commentary's take with a link to the column. I'm not sure quite what to make of it. On the one hand, Dershowitz takes pretty much the same position as Norman Podhoretz, that Obama isn't any real danger to Israel proper, before he descends into the paranoid line about Iran and that any effort to accommodate Iran is an "existential threat". On the other hand Dershowitz is clearly reluctant to go as far as Marty Peretz has in the last month, but at the same time clearly suspecting it will only be a matter of time. I am genuinely puzzled as to what accounts for this difference.
Significantly, the uprising in Iran also makes it more likely that an effective
public diplomacy campaign could be waged in the country to explain to Iranians
that such an attack is directed against the regime, not against the Iranian
people. This was always true, but it has become even more important to make this
case emphatically, when the gulf between the Islamic revolution of 1979 and the
citizens of Iran has never been clearer or wider. Military action against Iran's
nuclear program and the ultimate goal of regime change can be worked together
consistently.
I spoke to Antony Loewenstein today, who says that the Bolton piece lends credibility to the theory that the U.S. had some (even mild) involvement with the Tehran spring. If you look at all the color revolutions and "democratic" insurgencies in Europe and Asia, from Ukraine to Belarus to Moldova to Georgia, he says, there has been a U.S. role. Why and to what end? Mohammad of Vancouver suggested as much in a post on this site a few weeks back. Huh.
The flap over the settlement freeze is an indication of the difficulty the U.S. will continue to encounter in any effort to obtain Israeli cooperation with Obama’s two-state solution plans. The Netanyahu government is not interested in restarting the substantive peace negotiations over final status issues that ceased nine years ago. The Israeli plan is publicly to agree to the talks, participate in them if necessary, but be as intransigent as the Americans will allow--since in Jerusalem’s view the status quo is a comfortable situation. And Israel is surely not likely willingly to stop settlement expansion that it believes will, in the end, strengthen its bargaining position through “creating facts on the ground.” Currently there are almost 500,000 facts parked illegally in the territories, and a vast majority of them are conceded by most to be living on land that will eventually be incorporated into Israel.
On Monday, when Columbia University granted tenure to Joseph Massad -- the professor of Modern
Arab politics whose alleged intimidation of pro-Israeli students likely doomed his first
tenure bid in 2005 -- the University jeopordized [sic] its long-standing commitment to
cultivating and supporting its Jewish student population....
Its students, Jewish and otherwise, will simply have to remember that even in
Manhattan, even at Columbia, Jews and liberals do not reign supreme.
Months ago I declared that Gaza had cracked the Israel lobby. It did so by causing non-affiliated Jews to at last speak out about Israel/Palestine policy. These Jews had traditionally ceded the foreign-policy turf to their pro-Israel cousins (as I did, deferring politely to Marty Peretz out of the stupid guilty feeling that he was a better Jew than I was) till they realized that their cousins were nuts. The Israel lobby is slowly waking up to the new landscape, and blaming anyone but the real culprit: a state practicing Jim Crow with millions of Palestinians under occupation and promoting a policy of permanent war with its neighbors. The latest evidence of the lobby's puzzlement is a highly-tendentious piece by Gary Rosenblatt in the Jewish Week about "Whispered Worries About Obama" that--while poohpoohing the settlements and feeding suspicion about Obama-- states that the body of American Jewry is with Obama, even if the "mainstream supporters of Israel and Jewish causes" (i.e. Jewish chauvinists) are against him.
