9/02/2009
Sanctions for Israel and U.S.
Paul Craig Roberts
Infowars
September 1, 2009
In Israel, a land stolen from the Palestinians, fanatics control the government. One of the fanatics is the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Last week Netanyahu called for “crippling sanctions” against Iran.
The kind of blockade that Netanyahu wants qualifies as an act of war. Israel has long threatened to attack Iran on its own but prefers to draw in the US and NATO.
featured stories Why Not Crippling Sanctions for Israel and the US?
featured stories Why Not Crippling Sanctions for Israel and the US? featured stories Why Not Crippling Sanctions for Israel and the US?
Benjamin Netanyahu
Why does Israel want to initiate a war between the United States and Iran?
Is Iran attacking other countries, bombing civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure?
No. These are crimes committed by Israel and the US.
Is Iran evicting peoples from lands they have owned for centuries and herding them into ghettoes?
No, that’s what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for 60 years.
What is Iran doing?
Iran is developing nuclear energy, which is its right as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran’s nuclear energy program is subject to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which consistently reports that its inspections find no diversion of enriched uranium to a weapons program.
The position taken by Israel, and by Israel’s puppet in Washington, is that Iran must not be allowed to have the rights as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty that every other signatory has, because Iran might divert enriched uranium to a weapons program.
In other words, Israel and the US claim the right to abrogate Iran’s right to develop nuclear energy. The Israeli/US position has no basis in international law or in anything other than the arrogance of Israel and the United States.
The hypocrisy is extreme. Israel is not a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and developed its nuclear weapons illegally on the sly, with, as far as we know, US help.
As Israel is an illegal possessor of nuclear weapons and has a fanatical government that is capable of using them, crippling sanctions should be applied to Israel to force it to disarm.
Israel qualifies for crippling sanctions for another reason. It is an apartheid state, as former US President Jimmy Carter demonstrated in his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
The US led the imposition of sanctions against South Africa because of South Africa’s apartheid practices. The sanctions forced the white government to hand over political power to the black population. Israel practices a worse form of apartheid than did the white South African government. Yet, Israel maintains that it is “anti-semitic” to criticize Israel for a practice that the world regards as abhorrent.
What remains of the Palestinian West Bank that has not been stolen by Israel consists of isolated ghettoes. Palestinians are cut off from hospitals, schools, their farms, and from one another. They cannot travel from one ghetto to another without Israeli permission enforced at checkpoints.
The Israeli government’s explanation for its gross violation of human rights comprises the greatest collection of lies in world history. No one, with the exception of American “christian zionists,” believes one word of it.
The United States also qualifies for crippling sanctions. Indeed, the US is over-qualified. On the basis of lies and intentional deception of the US Congress, the US public, the UN and NATO, the US government invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and used the “war on terror” that Washington orchestrated to overturn US civil liberties enshrined in the US Constitution. One million Iraqis have paid with their lives for America’s crimes and four million are displaced. Iraq and its infrastructure are in ruins, and Iraq’s professional elites, necessary to a modern organized society, are dead or dispersed. The US government has committed a war crime on a grand scale. If Iran qualifies for sanctions, the US qualifies a thousand times over.
No one knows how many women, children, and village elders have been murdered by the US in Afghanistan. However, the American war of aggression against the Afghan people is now in its ninth year. According to the US military, an American victory is still a long ways away. Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared in August that the military situation in Afghanistan is “serious and deteriorating.”
Older Americans can look forward to the continuation of this war for the rest of their lives, while their Social Security and Medicare rights are reduced in order to free up funds for the US armaments industry. Bush/Cheney and Obama/Biden have made munitions the only safe stock investment in the United States.
What is the purpose of the war of aggression against Afghanistan? Soon after his inauguration, President Obama promised to provide an answer but did not. Instead, Obama quickly escalated the war in Afghanistan and launched a new one in Pakistan that has already displaced 2 million Pakistanis. Obama has sent 21,000 more US troops into Afghanistan and already the US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, is requesting 20,000 more.
Obama is escalating America’s war of aggression against the Afghanistan people despite three high profile opinion polls that show that the American public is firmly opposed to the continuation of the war against Afghanistan.
Sadly, the ironclad agreement between Israel and Washington to war against Muslim peoples is far stronger than the connection between the American public and the American government. At a farewell dinner party last Thursday for Israel’s military attache in Washington, who is returning to Israel to become deputy chief of staff of the Israeli military, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy, and and Dan Shapiro, who is in charge of Middle East affairs on the National Security Council, were present to pay their respects. Admiral Mullen declared that the US will always stand with Israel. No matter how many war crimes Israel commits. No matter how many women and children Israel murders. No many how many Palestinians Israel drives from their homes, villages, and lands. If truth could be told, the true axis-of-evil is the United States and Israel.
Millions of Americans are now homeless because of foreclosures. Millions more have lost their jobs, and even more millions have no access to health care. Yet, the US government continues to squander hundreds of billions of dollars on wars that serve no US purpose. President Obama and General McChrystal have taken the position that they know best, the American public be damned.
It could not be made any clearer that the President of the United States and the US military have no regard whatsoever for democracy, human rights, and international law. This is yet another reason to apply crippling sanctions against Washington, a government that has emerged under Bush/Obama as a brownshirt state that deals in lies, torture, murder, war crimes, and deception.
Many governments are complicit in America’s war crimes. With Obama’s budget deep in the red, Washington’s wars of naked aggression are dependent on financing by the Chinese, Japanese, Russians, Saudis, South Koreans, Indians, Canadians and Europeans. The second this foreign financing of American war crimes stops, America’s wars of aggression against Muslims stop.
The US is not a forever “superpower” that can indefinitely ignore its own laws and international law. The US will eventually fall as a result of its hubris, arrogance, and imperial overreach. When the American Empire collapses, will its enablers also be held accountable in the war crimes court?
8/30/2009
Lavon Affair: Israeli False Flag Terror on U.S.A.
**LAVON AFFAIR** Israel was caught planting bombs at AMERICAN installation's. Zionist Mossad terrorists planted bombs at US sites of importance while also planting false evidence that Egyptian Muslims were responsible for Israels terrorist massacre, so that America would war with Egypt and do Israels dirty work.....Israel was caught engaged in the terrorist attack on Americans when a bomb exploded prematurely killing one of the Israeli terrorists!
8/21/2009
How Israel Wages "Game Theory" Warfare
In 2005, the Nobel Prize in Economic Science was awarded to Israeli mathematician and game theory specialist Robert J. Aumann, co-founder of the Center for Rationality at Hebrew University. This Jerusalem resident explains: “the entire school of thought that we have developed here in Israel” has turned “Israel into the leading authority in this field.”
Israeli strategists rely on game theory models to ensure the intended response to staged provocations and manipulated crises. With the use of game theory algorithms, those responses become predictable, even foreseeable—within an acceptable range of probabilities. The waging of war “by way of deception” is now a mathematical discipline.
Such “probabilistic” war planning enables Tel Aviv to deploy serial provocations and well-timed crises as a force multiplier to project Israeli influence worldwide. For a skilled agent provocateur, the target can be a person, a company, an economy, a legislature, a nation or an entire culture—such as Islam. With a well-modeled provocation, the anticipated reaction can even become a powerful weapon in the Israeli arsenal.
For instance, a skilled game theorist could foresee that, in response to a 911-type mass murder, “the mark” (the U.S.) would deploy its military to avenge that attack. With phony intelligence fixed around a preset goal, a game theory algorithm could anticipate that those forces might well be redirected to invade Iraq—not to avenge 911 but to pursue the expansionist goals of Greater Israel.
To provoke that invasion required the displacement of an inconvenient truth (Iraq played no role in 911) with what lawmakers and the public could be deceived to believe. The emotionally wrenching nature of that incident was essential in order to induce Americans to abandon rational analysis and to facilitate their reliance on false intelligence.
Americans were (predictably) provoked by that mass murder. The foreseeable reaction—shock, grief and outrage—made it easier for them to believe that an infamous Iraqi Evil Doer was to blame. The displacement of facts with beliefs lies at heart of how Israel, the world’s leading authority in game theory, induces other nations to wage their wars.
False but Plausible
To displace facts with credible fiction requires a period of “preparing the minds” so that the mark will believe a pre-staged storyline. Thus the essential role of a complicit media to promote: (a) a plausible present danger (Iraqi weapons of mass destruction), (b) a plausible villain (a former ally rebranded as an Evil Doer), and (c) a plausible post-Cold War threat to national security (The Clash of Civilizations and “Islamo-fascism”).
Reports from inside Israeli intelligence suggest that the war-planners who induced the 2003 invasion of Iraq began their psyops campaign no later than 1986 when an Israeli Mossad operation (Operation Trojan) made it appear that the Libyan leadership was transmitting terrorist directives from Tripoli to their embassies worldwide. Soon thereafter, two U.S. soldiers were killed by a terrorist attack in a Berlin discotheque. Ten days later, U.S., British and German aircraft dropped 60 tons of bombs on Libya.
The following is a senior Mossad operative’s assessment (published in 1994 in The Other Side of Deception) of that 1986 operation—five years before the Gulf War and 15 years before the murderous provocation that preceded the invasion of Iraq:
After the bombing of Libya, our friend Qadhafi is sure to stay out of the picture for some time. Iraq and Saddam Hussein are the next target. We’re starting now to build him up as the big villain. It will take some time, but in the end, there’s no doubt that it’ll work.
Could this account by former Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky be correct? If so, Tel Aviv’s Iraqi operation required more pre-staging than its relatively simple Libyan deception.
America the Mark
From a game theory perspective, what is the probability of a violent reaction in the Middle East after more than a half-century of serial Israeli provocations—in an environment where the U.S. is identified (correctly) as the Zionist state’s special friend and protector?
During the 1967 War, the Israeli killing of 34 Americans aboard the USS Liberty confirmed that a U.S. president (Democrat Lyndon Johnson) could be induced to condone murderous behavior by Israel. Two decades later, Operation Trojan confirmed that a U.S. president (Republican Ronald Reagan) could be induced to attack an Arab nation based on intelligence fixed by Israel.
For more than six decades, the U.S. has armed, financed, befriended and defended Zionism. This “special relationship” includes the U.S.-discrediting veto of dozens of U.N. resolutions critical of Israeli conduct. From a game theory perspective, how difficult was it to anticipate that—out of a worldwide population of 1.3 billion Muslims—19 Muslim men could be induced to perpetrate a murderous act in response to U.S support for Israel’s lengthy mistreatment of Arabs and Muslims, particularly Palestinians?
Israeli game theorists operate not from the Center for Morality or the Center for Justice but from the Center for Rationality. As modeled by Zionist war planners, game theory is devoid of all values except one: the ability to anticipate—within an acceptable range of probabilities—how “the mark” will react when provoked. Thus we see the force-multiplier potential for those who wage war with well-planned provocations and well-timed crises.
Israeli behavior is often immoral and unjust but that does not mean it is irrational. For Colonial Zionists committed to the pursuit of an expansionist agenda, even murderous provocations are rational because the response can be mathematically modeled, ensuring the results are reasonably foreseeable. That alone is sufficient for a people who, as God’s chosen, consider it their right to operate above the rule of law.
This is a surpassingly good commentary -- as is the whole of Mr. Gates' book "Guilt By Association." I make one observation regarding the above statement "Israeli behavior is often immoral and unjust but that does not mean it is irrational." While agreeing with it, I believe that it must be expanded: "rational" behavior can be found within a system of collective psychosis.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Zionist Israel is mired in a criminal psychosis...and the psychotic is in charge of the (global) asylum. This psychotic manipulates, lies, creates diversions, plots, plans, is endlessly enabled, explodes periodically in psychotic rage -- always in furtherance of its objectives of dominance and hegemony.
Zionism is off the rails of sanity, and the sooner the world recognizes and acts upon its psychosis, the better for the Palestinians and for all of us.
Robert H. Stiver
Israeli strategists rely on game theory models to ensure the intended response to staged provocations and manipulated crises. With the use of game theory algorithms, those responses become predictable, even foreseeable—within an acceptable range of probabilities. The waging of war “by way of deception” is now a mathematical discipline.
Such “probabilistic” war planning enables Tel Aviv to deploy serial provocations and well-timed crises as a force multiplier to project Israeli influence worldwide. For a skilled agent provocateur, the target can be a person, a company, an economy, a legislature, a nation or an entire culture—such as Islam. With a well-modeled provocation, the anticipated reaction can even become a powerful weapon in the Israeli arsenal.
For instance, a skilled game theorist could foresee that, in response to a 911-type mass murder, “the mark” (the U.S.) would deploy its military to avenge that attack. With phony intelligence fixed around a preset goal, a game theory algorithm could anticipate that those forces might well be redirected to invade Iraq—not to avenge 911 but to pursue the expansionist goals of Greater Israel.
To provoke that invasion required the displacement of an inconvenient truth (Iraq played no role in 911) with what lawmakers and the public could be deceived to believe. The emotionally wrenching nature of that incident was essential in order to induce Americans to abandon rational analysis and to facilitate their reliance on false intelligence.
Americans were (predictably) provoked by that mass murder. The foreseeable reaction—shock, grief and outrage—made it easier for them to believe that an infamous Iraqi Evil Doer was to blame. The displacement of facts with beliefs lies at heart of how Israel, the world’s leading authority in game theory, induces other nations to wage their wars.
False but Plausible
To displace facts with credible fiction requires a period of “preparing the minds” so that the mark will believe a pre-staged storyline. Thus the essential role of a complicit media to promote: (a) a plausible present danger (Iraqi weapons of mass destruction), (b) a plausible villain (a former ally rebranded as an Evil Doer), and (c) a plausible post-Cold War threat to national security (The Clash of Civilizations and “Islamo-fascism”).
Reports from inside Israeli intelligence suggest that the war-planners who induced the 2003 invasion of Iraq began their psyops campaign no later than 1986 when an Israeli Mossad operation (Operation Trojan) made it appear that the Libyan leadership was transmitting terrorist directives from Tripoli to their embassies worldwide. Soon thereafter, two U.S. soldiers were killed by a terrorist attack in a Berlin discotheque. Ten days later, U.S., British and German aircraft dropped 60 tons of bombs on Libya.
The following is a senior Mossad operative’s assessment (published in 1994 in The Other Side of Deception) of that 1986 operation—five years before the Gulf War and 15 years before the murderous provocation that preceded the invasion of Iraq:
After the bombing of Libya, our friend Qadhafi is sure to stay out of the picture for some time. Iraq and Saddam Hussein are the next target. We’re starting now to build him up as the big villain. It will take some time, but in the end, there’s no doubt that it’ll work.
Could this account by former Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky be correct? If so, Tel Aviv’s Iraqi operation required more pre-staging than its relatively simple Libyan deception.
America the Mark
From a game theory perspective, what is the probability of a violent reaction in the Middle East after more than a half-century of serial Israeli provocations—in an environment where the U.S. is identified (correctly) as the Zionist state’s special friend and protector?
During the 1967 War, the Israeli killing of 34 Americans aboard the USS Liberty confirmed that a U.S. president (Democrat Lyndon Johnson) could be induced to condone murderous behavior by Israel. Two decades later, Operation Trojan confirmed that a U.S. president (Republican Ronald Reagan) could be induced to attack an Arab nation based on intelligence fixed by Israel.
For more than six decades, the U.S. has armed, financed, befriended and defended Zionism. This “special relationship” includes the U.S.-discrediting veto of dozens of U.N. resolutions critical of Israeli conduct. From a game theory perspective, how difficult was it to anticipate that—out of a worldwide population of 1.3 billion Muslims—19 Muslim men could be induced to perpetrate a murderous act in response to U.S support for Israel’s lengthy mistreatment of Arabs and Muslims, particularly Palestinians?
Israeli game theorists operate not from the Center for Morality or the Center for Justice but from the Center for Rationality. As modeled by Zionist war planners, game theory is devoid of all values except one: the ability to anticipate—within an acceptable range of probabilities—how “the mark” will react when provoked. Thus we see the force-multiplier potential for those who wage war with well-planned provocations and well-timed crises.
Israeli behavior is often immoral and unjust but that does not mean it is irrational. For Colonial Zionists committed to the pursuit of an expansionist agenda, even murderous provocations are rational because the response can be mathematically modeled, ensuring the results are reasonably foreseeable. That alone is sufficient for a people who, as God’s chosen, consider it their right to operate above the rule of law.
This is a surpassingly good commentary -- as is the whole of Mr. Gates' book "Guilt By Association." I make one observation regarding the above statement "Israeli behavior is often immoral and unjust but that does not mean it is irrational." While agreeing with it, I believe that it must be expanded: "rational" behavior can be found within a system of collective psychosis.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Zionist Israel is mired in a criminal psychosis...and the psychotic is in charge of the (global) asylum. This psychotic manipulates, lies, creates diversions, plots, plans, is endlessly enabled, explodes periodically in psychotic rage -- always in furtherance of its objectives of dominance and hegemony.
Zionism is off the rails of sanity, and the sooner the world recognizes and acts upon its psychosis, the better for the Palestinians and for all of us.
Robert H. Stiver
8/19/2009
Top Sweden newspaper says IDF kills Palestinians for their organs
By Morten Berthelsen
A leading Swedish newspaper reported this week that Israeli soldiers are abducting Palestinians in order to steal their organs, a claim that prompted furious condemnation and accusations of anti-Semitic blood libel from a rival publication.”They plunder the organs of our sons,” read the headline in Sweden’s largest daily newspaper, the left-leaning Aftonbladet, which devoted a double spread in its cultural section to the article.
The report quotes Palestinian claims that young men from the West Bank and Gaza Strip had been seized by the Israel Defense Forces, and their bodies returned to the families with missing organs.
“‘Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors,’ relatives of Khaled from Nablus said to me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin as well as the uncles of Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who all had disappeared for a few days and returned by night, dead and autopsied,” writes author Donald Boström in his report.
Boström’s article makes a link to the recent exposure of an alleged crime syndicate in New Jersey. The syndicate includes several American rabbis, and one Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, who faces charges of conspiring to broker the sale of a human kidney for a transplant.
Boström also cites an incident of alleged organ snatching from 1992, during the time of the first Palestinian intifada. He says that the IDF seized a young man known for throwing stones at Israeli troops in the Nablus area, who was shot in the chest, both legs, and the stomach before being taken to a military helicopter which transported him to “a place unknown to his loved ones”.
Five nights later, Boström says, the young man’s body was returned, wrapped in green hospital sheets.
“The sharp sounds from the shovels were mixed with the occasional laughter from the soldiers who were joking with each other, waiting to go home. When Bilal was put into his grave, his chest was revealed and suddenly it became clear to the present what abuse he had been put through. Bilal was far from the only one who was buried cut-up from his stomach to his chin and the speculations about the reason why had already started,” he writes.
But the liberal Sydsvenskan – southern Sweden’s major daily – had harsh criticism for the rival paper, running an opinion piece under the headline “Antisemitbladet” (a play on the name Aftonbladet).
“We have heard the story before, in one form or the other. It follows the traditional pattern of conspiracy theory: a great number of loose threads that the theorist tempts the reader to tie into a neat knot without having been provided with any proven connection whatsoever,” writes leading columnist Mats Skogkär of Sydsvenskan.
“Whispers in the dark. Anonymous sources. Rumors. That is all it takes. After all we all know what they [the Jews] are like, don’t we: inhuman, hardened. Capable of anything,” the opinion piece says. “Now all that remains is the defense, equally predictable: ‘Anti-Semitism’ No, no, just criticism of Israel.”
The Foreign Ministry reacted angrily on Tuesday to the report. Ministry spokesperson Yigal Palmor said the newspaper’s decision to publish the story is “a mark of disgrace” for the Swedish press.
“In a democratic country, there should be no place for dark blood libels out of the Middle Ages of this type,” Palmor said. “This is an article that shames Swedish democracy and the entire Swedish press.”
A Foreign Ministry official said that Israel’s embassy in Stockholm have communicated a harsh condemnation to the Swedish government and the newspaper itself.
8/17/2009
8/15/2009
Zionist Pioneer Renounces Zionism
By Helena Cobban
From World View News Service
8-15-9
I've never met Dov Yermiya, a Jewish Israeli peace activist who is now 94 years old. But I read of course the book he published in 1983 in which he wrote with anguish about the torture and other gross mistreatment of civilians he witnessed directly during Israel's invasion of Lebanon the year before. http://www.southendpress.org/2004/items/MyWarDiary
I have it in my hand now.
I just learned, in this open letter published today by Uri Avnery, that Yermiya, recently renounced the ideology and practice of Zionism with these stirring words:
I, a 95 year old Sabra (native born Israeli Jew), who has plowed its fields, planted trees, built a house and fathered sons, grandsons and great-grandsons, and also shed his blood in the battle for the founding of the State of Israel,
Declare herewith that I renounce my belief in the Zionism which has failed, that I shall not be loyal to the Jewish fascist state and its mad visions, that I shall not sing anymore its nationalist anthem, that I shall stand at attention only on the days of mourning for those fallen on both sides in the wars, and that I look with a broken heart at an Israel that is committing suicide and at the three generations of offspring that I have bred and raised in it.
... for 42 years, Israel turned what should have been Palestine into a giant detention camp, and is holding a whole people captive under an oppressive and cruel regime, with the sole aim of taking away their country, come what may!!!
The IDF eagerly suppresses their efforts at rebellion, with the active assistance of the settlement thugs, by the brutal means of a sophisticated Apartheid and a choking blockade, inhuman harassment of the sick and of women in labor, the destruction of their economy and the theft of their best land and water.
Over all this there is waving the black flag of the frightening contempt for the life and blood of the Palestinians. Israel will never be forgiven for the terrible toll of blood spilt, and especially the blood of children, in hair-raising quantities...
Avnery's response is fascinating. He, too, is a veteran peace activist, and of about the same generation as Yermiya. But in the letter he is, I think, pleading with Yermiya not to renounce Zionism completely, but rather to reconnect with the "idealistic" Zionism that they both experienced during their youth.
He writes -
When I think of our youth, yours and mine, one scene is never far from my mind: the 1947 Dalia festival.
Tens of thousands of young men and women were sitting on the slope of a hill in the natural amphitheater near Kibbutz Dalia on Mount Carmel. Ostensibly it was a festival of folk dancing, but in reality it was much more - a great celebration of the new Hebrew culture which we were then creating in the country, in which folk dancing played an important role. The dancing groups came mainly from the kibbutzim and the youth movements, and the dances were original Hebrew creations, interwoven with Russian, Polish, Yemenite and Hassidic ones. A group of Arabs danced the Debka in ecstasy, dancing and dancing and dancing on.
In the middle of the event, the loudspeakers announced that members of the UN Commission of Inquiry, which had been sent by the international organization to decide upon the future of the country, were joining us. When we saw them entering the amphitheater, the tens of thousands spontaneously rose to their feet and started to sing the "Hatikva", the national anthem, with a holy fervor that reverberated from the surrounding mountains.
We did not know then that within half a year the great Hebrew-Arab war would break out - our War of Independence and their Naqba. I believe that most of the 6000 young people who fell in the war on our side, as well as the thousands that were wounded - like you and me - were present at that moment in Dalia, seeing each other and singing together.
What state did we think of then? What state did we set out to create?
What has happened to the Hebrew society, the Hebrew culture, the Hebrew morality that we were so proud of then?
Then, he pleads this:
You, Dov, have invested in this state much too much to turn your back on it in a gesture of anger and despair. The most hackneyed and worn-out slogan in Israel is also true: "We don't have another state!"
Other states in the world have sunk to the depths of depravity and committed unspeakable crimes, far beyond our worst sins, and still brought themselves back to the family of nations and redeemed their souls.
We and all the members of our generation, who were among those who created this state, bear a heavy responsibility for it. A responsibility to our offspring, to those oppressed by this state, to the entire world. From this responsibility we cannot escape.
Even at your respectable age, and precisely because of it and because of what you represent, you must be a compass for the young and tell them: This state belongs to you, you can change it, don't allow the nationalist wreckers to steal it from you!
True, 61 years ago we had another state in mind. Now, after our state has tumbled to where it is today, we must remember that other state, and remind everybody, every day, what the state should have been like, what it can be like, and not allow our vision to disappear like a dream. Let's lend our shoulders to every effort to repair and heal!
These are very weighty issues that these two longtime Zionists are debating.
I remember the evening I had back in early March with longtime Jewish-Israeli nonviolence activist Amos Gvirtz. Gvirtz is "only" in his late 60s or early 70s. But like Avnery and Yermiya he grew up in Israel.
He told me in March,
I became an anti-Zionist after Oslo, when the government expelled the Arabs of Jahhaleenn to make room for the big new settlement area if Maale Adummim... Like the Zionists, I believe we Jews need a state of our own. But unlike the Zionists I don't think this should be built on the ruins of someone else's home. So our state need not necessarily be right here.
Gvirtz, too, like Avnery, identified a strong link between the events of 1947-48 and the situation today-- though the nature of the link Gvirtz identified was very different from Avnery's: "The Nakba wasn't really a single event that happened in 1948, so much as a long-drawn-out process, that continues to this day." In other words, he was quite unwilling to neatly divide Israeli history, as Avnery still does, between the idealized, pre-lapsarian days of the 1947 Dalia festival and the post-lapsarian era that was inaugurated-- in Avnery's view-- only by Israel's conquest of the West Bank.
Obviously, this is a very weighty issue for Zionists and their supporters to grapple with. Did 1967 mark a notable break between a laudable past and a troublesome present? Or were there indeed, as Gvirtz and many other current non- and anti-Zionists have argued, many elements of continuity from the 1947 period right through to the present?
Anyway, I'd love to see the whole text of the latest Yermiya letter from which Avnery is quoting, if anyone can provide a link to it, preferably in English. The only recent English text that I could find by him online was this letter, published in the Communist weekly Zo Haderekh in June 2008.
In it, Yermiya was returning to Defense Minister Barak the invitation he had been sent to attend a ceremony to honor all veterans of Israel's 1948 "War of Independence".
He wrote,
As a veteran of the 1948 war, who was already wounded in face to face combat two weeks before the Declaration of the State, I feel obliged herewith to return the invitation to you, as Minister of Defence. I do so regretfully but see this as my duty.
I consider you, Ehud Barak, as one of the top military commanders and prominent political leaders who were responsible for converting the army from "the Israeli Defence Force" to an army of occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people and defender of the criminal settlements in their country.
40 years of occupation have utterly corrupted the Israeli army and all strata of Israeli society.They are both characterized by the nationalist 'east wind' [the east wind brings the chamsin and locusts - C.A.] which blows and kindles conflagrations of endless wars, which threaten our people and land with the third and final destruction. Your share in the responsibility for all this is enormous, and therefore I return your invitation to you, without thanks...
Israel Seeks To Silence Human Rights Groups
By Jonathan Cook
04 August, 2009
Countercurrents.org
Nazareth: In a bid to staunch the flow of damaging evidence of war crimes committed during Israel’s winter assault on Gaza, the Israeli government has launched a campaign to clamp down on human rights groups, both in Israel and abroad.
It has begun by targeting one of the world’s leading rights organisations, the US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), as well as a local group of dissident army veterans, Breaking the Silence, which last month published the testimonies of 26 combat soldiers who served in Gaza.
Additionally, according to the Israeli media, the government is planning a “much more aggressive stance” towards human rights groups working to help the Palestinians.
Officials have questioned the sources of funding received by the organisations and threatened legislation to ban support from foreign governments, particularly in Europe.
Breaking the Silence and other Israeli activists have responded by accusing the government of a “witch hunt” designed to intimidate them and starve them of the funds needed to pursue their investigations.
“This is a very dangerous step,” said Mikhael Mannekin, one of the directors of Breaking the Silence. “Israel is moving in a very anti-democratic direction.”
The campaign is reported to be the brainchild of the far-right foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, currently facing corruption charges, but has the backing of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Early last month, Mr Lieberman used a press conference to accuse non-government organisations, or NGOs, of replacing diplomats in setting the international community’s agenda in relation to Israel. He also threatened reforms to curb the groups’ influence.
A week later, Mr Netanyahu’s office weighed in against Human Rights Watch, heavily criticising the organisation for its recent fund-raising activities in Saudi Arabia.
HRW has pointed out that it only accepts private donations, and has not accepted Saudi government funds, but Israeli officials say all Saudi money is tainted and will compromise HRW’s impartiality as a human rights watchdog in its treatment of Israel.
“A human rights organisation raising money in Saudi Arabia is like a women’s rights group asking the Taliban for a donation,” Mark Regev, a government spokesman, told the right-wing Israeli daily newspaper the Jerusalem Post.
HRW recently published reports arguing that the Israeli army had committed war crimes in Gaza, including the use of white phosphorus and attacking civilian targets.
HRW is now facing concerted pressure from Jewish lobby groups and from leading Jewish journalists in the US to sever its ties with Saudi donors. According to the Israeli media, some Jewish donors in the US have also specified that their money be used for human rights investigations that do not include Israel.
Meanwhile, Israel’s foreign ministry is putting pressure on European governments to stop funding many of Israel’s human rights groups. As a prelude to a clampdown, it has issued instructions to all its embassies abroad to question their host governments about whether they fund such activities.
Last week the foreign ministry complained to British, Dutch and Spanish diplomats about their support for Breaking the Silence.
The testimonies collected from soldiers suggested the Israeli army had committed many war crimes in Gaza, including using Palestinians as human shields and firing white phosphorus shells over civilian areas. One soldier called the army’s use of firepower “insane”.
The Dutch government paid nearly 20,000 euros to the group to compile its Gaza report, while Britain funded its work last year to the tune of £40,000.
Israeli officials are reported to be discussing ways either to make it illegal for foreign governments to fund “political” organisations in Israel or to force such groups to declare themselves as “agents of a foreign government”.
“Just as it would be unacceptable for European governments to support anti-war NGOs in the US, it is unacceptable for the Europeans to support local NGOs opposed to the policies of Israel’s democratically elected government,” said Ron Dermer, a senior official in Mr Netanyahu’s office.
He added that many of the groups were “working to delegitimise the Jewish state”.
Jeff Halper, the head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, said the government’s position was opposed to decades-old developments in human rights monitoring.
“Every dictator, from Hitler to Milosevic, has said that there must be no interference in their sovereign affairs, and that everyone else should butt out. But international law says human rights are universal and cannot be left to individual governments to interpret. The idea behind the Geneva Conventions is that the international community has a duty to be the watchdog on human rights abuses wherever they occur.”
Mr Halper, whose organisation last year received 80,000 euros from Spain to rebuild demolished Palestinian homes, was arrested last year for sailing to Gaza with peace activists to break the siege of Gaza.
Other groups reported to be in the foreign ministry’s sights are: B’Tselem, whose activities include providing Palestinians with cameras to record abuses by settlers and the army; Peace Now, which monitors settlement building; Machsom Watch, whose activists observe soldiers at the checkpoints; and Physicians for Human Rights, which has recently examined doctors’ complicity in torture.
The government’s new approach mirrors a long-running campaign against leftwing and Arab human rights groups inside Israel conducted by NGO Monitor, a rightwing lobby group led by Gerald Steinberg, a professor at Bar Ilan University, near Tel Aviv.
NGO Monitor has also targeted international organisations such as Oxfam and Amnesty, but has shown a particular obsession with HRW. Mr Steinberg recently boasted that HRW’s trip to Saudi Arabia in May reflected the loss of major Jewish sponsors in the US following the publication of its Gaza reports.
In an article in the Jerusalem Post on Sunday, Mr Steinberg claimed that European governments treated their funding of Israeli human rights organisations “as ‘top secret’, reflecting the realization that such activities lack legitimacy”.
Mr Mannekin said the Breaking the Silence report listed donors on the first page. “We are far more transparent than NGO Monitor. We don’t know who funds them.”
NGO Monitor, which according to its website is chiefly funded by the shadowy Wechsler Family Foundation in the US, is closely linked to Dore Gold, a hawkish former adviser to Ariel Sharon.
Mr Mannekin added: “The government cannot suppress information about what happened in Gaza by shutting us down. You can’t send 10,000 soldiers into battle and not expect that some of the details will come out. If it’s not us doing it, it’ll be someone else.”
The government’s current campaign follows a police raid on the homes of six Israeli women peace activists in April.
The women, all members of New Profile, a feminist organisation that opposes the militarisation of Israeli society, were arrested and accused of helping Israeli youngsters to evade the draft. The women are still waiting to learn whether they will be prosecuted.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
04 August, 2009
Countercurrents.org
Nazareth: In a bid to staunch the flow of damaging evidence of war crimes committed during Israel’s winter assault on Gaza, the Israeli government has launched a campaign to clamp down on human rights groups, both in Israel and abroad.
It has begun by targeting one of the world’s leading rights organisations, the US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), as well as a local group of dissident army veterans, Breaking the Silence, which last month published the testimonies of 26 combat soldiers who served in Gaza.
Additionally, according to the Israeli media, the government is planning a “much more aggressive stance” towards human rights groups working to help the Palestinians.
Officials have questioned the sources of funding received by the organisations and threatened legislation to ban support from foreign governments, particularly in Europe.
Breaking the Silence and other Israeli activists have responded by accusing the government of a “witch hunt” designed to intimidate them and starve them of the funds needed to pursue their investigations.
“This is a very dangerous step,” said Mikhael Mannekin, one of the directors of Breaking the Silence. “Israel is moving in a very anti-democratic direction.”
The campaign is reported to be the brainchild of the far-right foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, currently facing corruption charges, but has the backing of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Early last month, Mr Lieberman used a press conference to accuse non-government organisations, or NGOs, of replacing diplomats in setting the international community’s agenda in relation to Israel. He also threatened reforms to curb the groups’ influence.
A week later, Mr Netanyahu’s office weighed in against Human Rights Watch, heavily criticising the organisation for its recent fund-raising activities in Saudi Arabia.
HRW has pointed out that it only accepts private donations, and has not accepted Saudi government funds, but Israeli officials say all Saudi money is tainted and will compromise HRW’s impartiality as a human rights watchdog in its treatment of Israel.
“A human rights organisation raising money in Saudi Arabia is like a women’s rights group asking the Taliban for a donation,” Mark Regev, a government spokesman, told the right-wing Israeli daily newspaper the Jerusalem Post.
HRW recently published reports arguing that the Israeli army had committed war crimes in Gaza, including the use of white phosphorus and attacking civilian targets.
HRW is now facing concerted pressure from Jewish lobby groups and from leading Jewish journalists in the US to sever its ties with Saudi donors. According to the Israeli media, some Jewish donors in the US have also specified that their money be used for human rights investigations that do not include Israel.
Meanwhile, Israel’s foreign ministry is putting pressure on European governments to stop funding many of Israel’s human rights groups. As a prelude to a clampdown, it has issued instructions to all its embassies abroad to question their host governments about whether they fund such activities.
Last week the foreign ministry complained to British, Dutch and Spanish diplomats about their support for Breaking the Silence.
The testimonies collected from soldiers suggested the Israeli army had committed many war crimes in Gaza, including using Palestinians as human shields and firing white phosphorus shells over civilian areas. One soldier called the army’s use of firepower “insane”.
The Dutch government paid nearly 20,000 euros to the group to compile its Gaza report, while Britain funded its work last year to the tune of £40,000.
Israeli officials are reported to be discussing ways either to make it illegal for foreign governments to fund “political” organisations in Israel or to force such groups to declare themselves as “agents of a foreign government”.
“Just as it would be unacceptable for European governments to support anti-war NGOs in the US, it is unacceptable for the Europeans to support local NGOs opposed to the policies of Israel’s democratically elected government,” said Ron Dermer, a senior official in Mr Netanyahu’s office.
He added that many of the groups were “working to delegitimise the Jewish state”.
Jeff Halper, the head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, said the government’s position was opposed to decades-old developments in human rights monitoring.
“Every dictator, from Hitler to Milosevic, has said that there must be no interference in their sovereign affairs, and that everyone else should butt out. But international law says human rights are universal and cannot be left to individual governments to interpret. The idea behind the Geneva Conventions is that the international community has a duty to be the watchdog on human rights abuses wherever they occur.”
Mr Halper, whose organisation last year received 80,000 euros from Spain to rebuild demolished Palestinian homes, was arrested last year for sailing to Gaza with peace activists to break the siege of Gaza.
Other groups reported to be in the foreign ministry’s sights are: B’Tselem, whose activities include providing Palestinians with cameras to record abuses by settlers and the army; Peace Now, which monitors settlement building; Machsom Watch, whose activists observe soldiers at the checkpoints; and Physicians for Human Rights, which has recently examined doctors’ complicity in torture.
The government’s new approach mirrors a long-running campaign against leftwing and Arab human rights groups inside Israel conducted by NGO Monitor, a rightwing lobby group led by Gerald Steinberg, a professor at Bar Ilan University, near Tel Aviv.
NGO Monitor has also targeted international organisations such as Oxfam and Amnesty, but has shown a particular obsession with HRW. Mr Steinberg recently boasted that HRW’s trip to Saudi Arabia in May reflected the loss of major Jewish sponsors in the US following the publication of its Gaza reports.
In an article in the Jerusalem Post on Sunday, Mr Steinberg claimed that European governments treated their funding of Israeli human rights organisations “as ‘top secret’, reflecting the realization that such activities lack legitimacy”.
Mr Mannekin said the Breaking the Silence report listed donors on the first page. “We are far more transparent than NGO Monitor. We don’t know who funds them.”
NGO Monitor, which according to its website is chiefly funded by the shadowy Wechsler Family Foundation in the US, is closely linked to Dore Gold, a hawkish former adviser to Ariel Sharon.
Mr Mannekin added: “The government cannot suppress information about what happened in Gaza by shutting us down. You can’t send 10,000 soldiers into battle and not expect that some of the details will come out. If it’s not us doing it, it’ll be someone else.”
The government’s current campaign follows a police raid on the homes of six Israeli women peace activists in April.
The women, all members of New Profile, a feminist organisation that opposes the militarisation of Israeli society, were arrested and accused of helping Israeli youngsters to evade the draft. The women are still waiting to learn whether they will be prosecuted.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
7/09/2009
Israeli Settlers attack Jewish Peace Now Activists documenting illigal settlement construction
Two representatives of the Peace Now organization and members of an Israeli television crew were attacked last week (posted on Haaretz 7-5-2009') a settler who objected to their presence in the West Bank as they documented construction in the settlements.
The footage, originally broadcast on Channel 2 Television and posted online by Peace Now, shows a security guard at the Dolev settlement snatching and destroying the TV crew's camera equipment and later attacking the activists' car with rocks.
6/07/2009
Israel Faces 936 War Crimes Lawsuits in Spain's National Court
CAIRO (AlArabiya.net)
Israel was set to face an avalanche of war crimes lawsuits from Palestinian lawyers who accused Tel Aviv of dozens of crimes five months after its three week assault on the Gaza Strip, the German daily Der Spiegel reported Saturday.
A group of Palestinian lawyers filed 936 lawsuits against Israel's Defense Forces (IDF) and the cases will soon be heard in Spain's National Court under universal jurisdiction, Iyad al-Alami, head of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), said.
PCHR's attorneys are collecting evidence of human rights violations and war crimes committed against unarmed civilians.
Accusations ranged fromshooting children and women at close range to the illegal use of white phosphorus bombs on civilians as well as attacks on ambulances and razing civilians' houses.
Hundreds of lawsuits were filed against Israel for war crimes against civilians including children
Structural damage in Gaza was estimated at $ 1.6 billion.
Other than PCHR, there are dozens of attorneys from Britain, Norway, New Zealand, the Netherlands and Spain working on lawsuits against Israel andwhich will be filed under the principle of universal jurisdiction, which studies cases of war crimes, genocide, torture and crimes against humanity.
Six attorneys in Norway filed a lawsuit for human rights violations against Israel and are seeking a European arrest warrant against senior Israeli officials, one of whom is former prime minister Ehud Olmert.
6/06/2009
Belligerent Warmongers Manipulate the Public for War with Iran
The Anti-Empire Report
June 5th, 2009
by William Blum
www.killinghope.org
The great, international, demonic, truly frightening Iranian threat
The United States is "facing a nuclear threat in Iran" — article in Chicago Tribune and other major newspapers, May 26
"the growing missile threat from North Korea and Iran" — article in the Washington Post and other major newspapers, May 26
"Iran's threat transcends religion. Regardless of sectarian bent, Muslim communities need to oppose the attempts by Iran ... to extend Shia extremism and influence throughout the world." — op-ed article in Boston Globe, May 27
"A Festering Evil. Doing nothing is not an option in handling the threat from Iran" — headline in Investor's Business Daily, May 27, 2009
This is a very small sample from American newspapers covering but two days.
"Fifty-one percent of Israelis support an immediate Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear sites" — BBC, May 24
After taking office, on Holocaust Memorial Day, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: "We will not allow Holocaust-deniers [Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] to carry out another holocaust." — Haaretz (Israel), May 14, 2009
Like clinical paranoia, "the threat from Iran" is impervious to correction by rational argument.
Two new novels have just appeared, from major American publishers, thrillers based on Iran having a nuclear weapon and the dangers one can imagine that that portends — "Banquo's Ghosts" by Rich Lowry & Keith Korman, and "The Increment" by David Ignatius. "Bomb, bomb, bomb. Let's bomb Iran," declares a CIA official in the latter book. The other book derides the very idea of "dialogue" with Iran while implicitly viewing torture as acceptable.1
On May 12, in New York City, a debate was held on the proposition that "Diplomacy With Iran Is Going Nowhere" (English translation: "Should we bomb Iran?"). Arguing in the affirmative, were Liz Cheney, former State Department official (and daughter of a certain unindicted war criminal) and Dan Senor, formerly the top spokesman for Washington's Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. Their "opponents" were R. Nicholas Burns, former undersecretary of state, and Kenneth Pollack, former National Security Council official and CIA analyst and author of "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq", a book that, unsurprisingly, did not have too long a shelf life.2
This is what "debate" on US foreign policy looks like in America in the first decade of the 21st century AD — four quintessential establishment figures. If such a "debate" had been held in the Soviet Union during the Cold War ("Detente With The United States Is Going Nowhere"), the American mainstream media would unanimously have had a jolly time making fun of it. The sponsor of the New York debate was the conservative Rosenkranz Foundation, but if a liberal (as opposed to a progressive or radical leftist) organization had been the sponsor, while there probably would have been a bit more of an ideological gap between the chosen pairs of speakers, it's unlikely that any of the present-day myths concerning Iran would have been seriously challenged by either side. These myths include the following, all of which I've dealt with before in this report but inasmuch as they are repeated on a regular basis in the media and by administration representatives, I think that readers need to be reminded of the counter arguments.
* Iran has no right to nuclear weapons: Yet, there is no international law that says that the US, the UK, Russia, China, Israel, France, Pakistan, and India are entitled to nuclear weapons, but Iran is not. Iran has every reason to feel threatened. In any event, the US intelligence community's National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of December 2007, "Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities", makes a point of saying in bold type and italics: “This NIE does not assume that Iran intends to acquire nuclear weapons.” The report goes on to state: "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program ."
* Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust denier: I have yet to read of Ahmadinejad saying simply, clearly, unambiguously, and unequivocally that he thinks that what we know as the Holocaust never happened. He has instead commented about the peculiarity and injustice of a Holocaust which took place in Europe resulting in a state for the Jews in the Middle East instead of in Europe. Why are the Palestinians paying a price for a German crime? he asks. And he has questioned the figure of six million Jews killed by Nazi Germany, as have many other people of all political stripes.
* Ahmadinejad has called for violence against Israel: His 2005 remark re "wiping Israel off the map", besides being a very questionable translation, has been seriously misinterpreted, as evidenced by the fact that the following year he declared: “The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon, the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom.”3 Obviously, he was not calling for any kind of violent attack upon Israel, for the dissolution of the Soviet Union took place peacefully.
* Iran has no right to provide arms to Hamas and Hezbollah: However, the United States, we are assured, has every right to do the same for Israel and Egypt.
* The fact that Obama says he's willing to "talk" to some of the "enemies" like Iran more than the Bush administration did sounds good: But one doesn't have to be too cynical to believe that it will not amount to more than a public relations gimmick. It's only change of policy that counts. Why doesn't Obama just state that he would not attack Iran unless Iran first attacked the US or Israel or anyone else? Besides, the Bush administration met with Iran on several occasions.
The following should also be kept in mind: The Washington Post, March 5, 2009, reported: "A senior Israeli official in Washington" has asserted that "Iran would be unlikely to use its missiles in an attack [against Israel] because of the certainty of retaliation." This was the very last sentence in the article and, according to an extensive Nexis search, did not appear in any other English-language media in the world.
In 2007, in a closed discussion, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that in her opinion "Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel." She "also criticized the exaggerated use that [Israeli] Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears." This appeared in Haaretz.com, October 25, 2007 (print edition October 26), but not in any US media or in any other English-language world media except the BBC citing the Iranian Mehr English-language news agency, October 27.
6/04/2009
Book Review: The Weight of Three Thousand Years
By an Anonymous Reviewer: Such views are usually censored
I highly recommend reading the book "Jewish history, Jewish Religion". Its author, Israel Shahak, a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, engages in deep introspection about Jewish religion and practices.
He seems deeply toubled by the rigidity, and intolerance of Jewish religion. Shahak quotes from the Talmud and points out a pervasive Jewish racism and haughtiness toward non-Jews.
He believes that anti-semitism may have its roots in this historic Jewish mindset. Shahak also points out a wide-spread practice of deception and double-speak.
In writing this book, he hopes that other Jews will engage in similar introspection to estabish a more harmonious relationship with Goyims.
By joe.baker@virgin.net (London, England) A guide to understanding Israel
In his most illuminating and disturbing book Professor Shahak takes the lid off previously hidden Orthodox Jewish beliefs and practices. He explains how these beliefs are at the heart of the Zionist adventure and constitute a major influence upon Israeli government policies and actions. We are made aware of the paradox of a largely secular state basing its raison d'etre and future direction upon biblical text. The depth of Orthodox Jewish antipathy toward the gentile, and especially toward Christianity (and Jesus) will come as an unsettling surprise to the many millions of American evangelical Christians who uncritically accept a fawning admiration of all things Israeli repeatedly displayed by the TV evangelists. Frightening, too, is the near-total control of most Jewish organizations now in the hands of Zionists; it is now almost impossible for a Jew to openly disassociate him or herself from, let alone be critical of, the state of Israel or the aims of Zionism. Whereas the critical gentile must be an 'anti-Semite' so must the critical Jew be 'self-hating'. Whatever your point of view on the situation in Israel, whatever your religion or philosophical perspective, however deeply you hold your convictions, you cannot fail to be challenged by this marvelous book.
By an Anonymous Reviewer: A paradigm shattering book
Shahak, a Holocaust survivor himself, is willing to acknowledge Polish suffering at the hands of the German Nazis in the same breath as the mass murder of Jews. Other aspects of his book are equally "revolutionary". For the longest time, the ruling paradigm has been the following: Christians are solely responsible for the negative aspects of Jewish-Christian relations, and Christians are 100% responsible for past anti-Semitism. This book is paradigm-shattering in that it dares imply that Jewish attitudes and conduct are ALSO responsible for anti-Semitism. Of course, the information presented in this book is not new. For instance, when Martin Luther wrote his infamous tract about Jews, he raised many of the same themes raised by the Jewish author Shahak: Jews taught to spit whenever they passed by a church, the Talmud misrepresenting and slurring the Christian religion, the use of the word Jesus as a curse word, Jews thanking God in prayer that they are not gentiles, Jewish males thanking God in prayer that they are not women, the overall condescending attitude Jews were imbued with against gentiles, etc. To this we can also add that Jews were taught that it is OK to cheat gentiles, as well as the aforementioned tendency for Jews to think that their suffering is to be exalted above the sufferings of all other peoples. Shahak is also skillful in pointing to ways that the Talmud had been deliberately mistranslated at times in order to soften or conceal these aspects from gentiles. Personally, whatever residual anti-Jewish feelings I have are weakened, rather than reinforced, by seeing a Jewish author willing to own up to the faults emanating from the Jewish side. Shahak, you have done a true mitzvah!
This is How Land is Violently Taken from West Bank Palestinians
Ezra Nawi is seen trying to stop a military bulldozer from destroying the homes of Palestinian Bedouins from Um El Hir in the South Hebron region. These Palestinians have been under Israeli occupation for almost 42 years. They still live without electricity, running water and other basic services, and are continuously harassed by the Jewish settlers and the military who are working hand-in-hand in order to seize their land. Notwithstanding the evidence in the film, Nawi has been found guilty by an Israeli court of assaulting an officer. Please support Nawi by sending emails protesting his imminent imprisonment to the Israeli embassy in your country:
http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/Sherut/IsraeliA...
http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/Sherut/IsraeliA...
6/01/2009
5/30/2009
5/28/2009
Former IDF now Oxford Professor Avi Shlaim says; Israel is a "Rogue" State
Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli army and has never questioned the state's legitimacy. But its merciless assault on Gaza has led him to devastating conclusions
The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.
I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.
Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza's prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.
Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day. The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism.
In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. The withdrawal was a humiliation for the Israeli Defence Forces. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But in the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose land over peace.
The real purpose behind the move was to redraw unilaterally the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority but a prelude to further Zionist expansion on the West Bank. It was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken in what was seen, mistakenly in my view, as an Israeli national interest. Anchored in a fundamental rejection of the Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the Palestinian people any independent political existence on their land.
Israel's settlers were withdrawn but Israeli soldiers continued to control all access to the Gaza Strip by land, sea and air. Gaza was converted overnight into an open-air prison. From this point on, the Israeli air force enjoyed unrestricted freedom to drop bombs, to make sonic booms by flying low and breaking the sound barrier, and to terrorise the hapless inhabitants of this prison.
Israel likes to portray itself as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. Yet Israel has never in its entire history done anything to promote democracy on the Arab side and has done a great deal to undermine it. Israel has a long history of secret collaboration with reactionary Arab regimes to suppress Palestinian nationalism. Despite all the handicaps, the Palestinian people succeeded in building the only genuine democracy in the Arab world with the possible exception of Lebanon. In January 2006, free and fair elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority brought to power a Hamas-led government. Israel, however, refused to recognise the democratically elected government, claiming that Hamas is purely and simply a terrorist organisation.
America and the EU shamelessly joined Israel in ostracising and demonising the Hamas government and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax revenues and foreign aid. A surreal situation thus developed with a significant part of the international community imposing economic sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied, not against the oppressor but against the oppressed.
As so often in the tragic history of Palestine, the victims were blamed for their own misfortunes. Israel's propaganda machine persistently purveyed the notion that the Palestinians are terrorists, that they reject coexistence with the Jewish state, that their nationalism is little more than antisemitism, that Hamas is just a bunch of religious fanatics and that Islam is incompatible with democracy. But the simple truth is that the Palestinian people are a normal people with normal aspirations. They are no better but they are no worse than any other national group. What they aspire to, above all, is a piece of land to call their own on which to live in freedom and dignity.
Like other radical movements, Hamas began to moderate its political programme following its rise to power. From the ideological rejectionism of its charter, it began to move towards pragmatic accommodation of a two-state solution. In March 2007, Hamas and Fatah formed a national unity government that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel. Israel, however, refused to negotiate with a government that included Hamas.
It continued to play the old game of divide and rule between rival Palestinian factions. In the late 1980s, Israel had supported the nascent Hamas in order to weaken Fatah, the secular nationalist movement led by Yasser Arafat. Now Israel began to encourage the corrupt and pliant Fatah leaders to overthrow their religious political rivals and recapture power. Aggressive American neoconservatives participated in the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Their meddling was a major factor in the collapse of the national unity government and in driving Hamas to seize power in Gaza in June 2007 to pre-empt a Fatah coup.
The war unleashed by Israel on Gaza on 27 December was the culmination of a series of clashes and confrontations with the Hamas government. In a broader sense, however, it is a war between Israel and the Palestinian people, because the people had elected the party to power. The declared aim of the war is to weaken Hamas and to intensify the pressure until its leaders agree to a new ceasefire on Israel's terms. The undeclared aim is to ensure that the Palestinians in Gaza are seen by the world simply as a humanitarian problem and thus to derail their struggle for independence and statehood.
The timing of the war was determined by political expediency. A general election is scheduled for 10 February and, in the lead-up to the election, all the main contenders are looking for an opportunity to prove their toughness. The army top brass had been champing at the bit to deliver a crushing blow to Hamas in order to remove the stain left on their reputation by the failure of the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in July 2006. Israel's cynical leaders could also count on apathy and impotence of the pro-western Arab regimes and on blind support from President Bush in the twilight of his term in the White House. Bush readily obliged by putting all the blame for the crisis on Hamas, vetoing proposals at the UN Security Council for an immediate ceasefire and issuing Israel with a free pass to mount a ground invasion of Gaza.
As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression but the sheer asymmetry of power between the two sides leaves little room for doubt as to who is the real victim. This is indeed a conflict between David and Goliath but the Biblical image has been inverted - a small and defenceless Palestinian David faces a heavily armed, merciless and overbearing Israeli Goliath. The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim, "crying and shooting".
To be sure, Hamas is not an entirely innocent party in this conflict. Denied the fruit of its electoral victory and confronted with an unscrupulous adversary, it has resorted to the weapon of the weak - terror. Militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad kept launching Qassam rocket attacks against Israeli settlements near the border with Gaza until Egypt brokered a six-month ceasefire last June. The damage caused by these primitive rockets is minimal but the psychological impact is immense, prompting the public to demand protection from its government. Under the circumstances, Israel had the right to act in self-defence but its response to the pinpricks of rocket attacks was totally disproportionate. The figures speak for themselves. In the three years after the withdrawal from Gaza, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. On the other hand, in 2005-7 alone, the IDF killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children.
Whatever the numbers, killing civilians is wrong. This rule applies to Israel as much as it does to Hamas, but Israel's entire record is one of unbridled and unremitting brutality towards the inhabitants of Gaza. Israel also maintained the blockade of Gaza after the ceasefire came into force which, in the view of the Hamas leaders, amounted to a violation of the agreement. During the ceasefire, Israel prevented any exports from leaving the strip in clear violation of a 2005 accord, leading to a sharp drop in employment opportunities. Officially, 49.1% of the population is unemployed. At the same time, Israel restricted drastically the number of trucks carrying food, fuel, cooking-gas canisters, spare parts for water and sanitation plants, and medical supplies to Gaza. It is difficult to see how starving and freezing the civilians of Gaza could protect the people on the Israeli side of the border. But even if it did, it would still be immoral, a form of collective punishment that is strictly forbidden by international humanitarian law.
The brutality of Israel's soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its spokesmen. Eight months before launching the current war on Gaza, Israel established a National Information Directorate. The core messages of this directorate to the media are that Hamas broke the ceasefire agreements; that Israel's objective is the defence of its population; and that Israel's forces are taking the utmost care not to hurt innocent civilians. Israel's spin doctors have been remarkably successful in getting this message across. But, in essence, their propaganda is a pack of lies.
A wide gap separates the reality of Israel's actions from the rhetoric of its spokesmen. It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It di d so by a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men. Israel's objective is not just the defence of its population but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people against their rulers. And far from taking care to spare civilians, Israel is guilty of indiscriminate bombing and of a three-year-old blockade that has brought the inhabitants of Gaza, now 1.5 million, to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.
The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage enough. But Israel's insane offensive against Gaza seems to follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash. After eight days of bombing, with a death toll of more than 400 Palestinians and four Israelis, the gung-ho cabinet ordered a land invasion of Gaza the consequences of which are incalculable.
No amount of military escalation can buy Israel immunity from rocket attacks from the military wing of Hamas. Despite all the death and destruction that Israel has inflicted on them, they kept up their resistance and they kept firing their rockets. This is a movement that glorifies victimhood and martyrdom. There is simply no military solution to the conflict between the two communities. The problem with Israel's concept of security is that it denies even the most elementary security to the other community. The only way for Israel to achieve security is not through shooting but through talks with Hamas, which has repeatedly declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders for 20, 30, or even 50 years. Israel has rejected this offer for the same reason it spurned the Arab League peace plan of 2002, which is still on the table: it involves concessions and compromises.
This brief review of Israel's record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism - the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and it must wear it. Israel's real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbours but military domination. It keeps compounding the mistakes of the past with new and more disastrous ones. Politicians, like everyone else, are of course free to repeat the lies and mistakes of the past. But it is not mandatory to do so.
The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.
I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.
Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza's prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.
Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day. The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism.
In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. The withdrawal was a humiliation for the Israeli Defence Forces. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But in the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose land over peace.
The real purpose behind the move was to redraw unilaterally the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority but a prelude to further Zionist expansion on the West Bank. It was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken in what was seen, mistakenly in my view, as an Israeli national interest. Anchored in a fundamental rejection of the Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the Palestinian people any independent political existence on their land.
Israel's settlers were withdrawn but Israeli soldiers continued to control all access to the Gaza Strip by land, sea and air. Gaza was converted overnight into an open-air prison. From this point on, the Israeli air force enjoyed unrestricted freedom to drop bombs, to make sonic booms by flying low and breaking the sound barrier, and to terrorise the hapless inhabitants of this prison.
Israel likes to portray itself as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. Yet Israel has never in its entire history done anything to promote democracy on the Arab side and has done a great deal to undermine it. Israel has a long history of secret collaboration with reactionary Arab regimes to suppress Palestinian nationalism. Despite all the handicaps, the Palestinian people succeeded in building the only genuine democracy in the Arab world with the possible exception of Lebanon. In January 2006, free and fair elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority brought to power a Hamas-led government. Israel, however, refused to recognise the democratically elected government, claiming that Hamas is purely and simply a terrorist organisation.
America and the EU shamelessly joined Israel in ostracising and demonising the Hamas government and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax revenues and foreign aid. A surreal situation thus developed with a significant part of the international community imposing economic sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied, not against the oppressor but against the oppressed.
As so often in the tragic history of Palestine, the victims were blamed for their own misfortunes. Israel's propaganda machine persistently purveyed the notion that the Palestinians are terrorists, that they reject coexistence with the Jewish state, that their nationalism is little more than antisemitism, that Hamas is just a bunch of religious fanatics and that Islam is incompatible with democracy. But the simple truth is that the Palestinian people are a normal people with normal aspirations. They are no better but they are no worse than any other national group. What they aspire to, above all, is a piece of land to call their own on which to live in freedom and dignity.
Like other radical movements, Hamas began to moderate its political programme following its rise to power. From the ideological rejectionism of its charter, it began to move towards pragmatic accommodation of a two-state solution. In March 2007, Hamas and Fatah formed a national unity government that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel. Israel, however, refused to negotiate with a government that included Hamas.
It continued to play the old game of divide and rule between rival Palestinian factions. In the late 1980s, Israel had supported the nascent Hamas in order to weaken Fatah, the secular nationalist movement led by Yasser Arafat. Now Israel began to encourage the corrupt and pliant Fatah leaders to overthrow their religious political rivals and recapture power. Aggressive American neoconservatives participated in the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Their meddling was a major factor in the collapse of the national unity government and in driving Hamas to seize power in Gaza in June 2007 to pre-empt a Fatah coup.
The war unleashed by Israel on Gaza on 27 December was the culmination of a series of clashes and confrontations with the Hamas government. In a broader sense, however, it is a war between Israel and the Palestinian people, because the people had elected the party to power. The declared aim of the war is to weaken Hamas and to intensify the pressure until its leaders agree to a new ceasefire on Israel's terms. The undeclared aim is to ensure that the Palestinians in Gaza are seen by the world simply as a humanitarian problem and thus to derail their struggle for independence and statehood.
The timing of the war was determined by political expediency. A general election is scheduled for 10 February and, in the lead-up to the election, all the main contenders are looking for an opportunity to prove their toughness. The army top brass had been champing at the bit to deliver a crushing blow to Hamas in order to remove the stain left on their reputation by the failure of the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in July 2006. Israel's cynical leaders could also count on apathy and impotence of the pro-western Arab regimes and on blind support from President Bush in the twilight of his term in the White House. Bush readily obliged by putting all the blame for the crisis on Hamas, vetoing proposals at the UN Security Council for an immediate ceasefire and issuing Israel with a free pass to mount a ground invasion of Gaza.
As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression but the sheer asymmetry of power between the two sides leaves little room for doubt as to who is the real victim. This is indeed a conflict between David and Goliath but the Biblical image has been inverted - a small and defenceless Palestinian David faces a heavily armed, merciless and overbearing Israeli Goliath. The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim, "crying and shooting".
To be sure, Hamas is not an entirely innocent party in this conflict. Denied the fruit of its electoral victory and confronted with an unscrupulous adversary, it has resorted to the weapon of the weak - terror. Militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad kept launching Qassam rocket attacks against Israeli settlements near the border with Gaza until Egypt brokered a six-month ceasefire last June. The damage caused by these primitive rockets is minimal but the psychological impact is immense, prompting the public to demand protection from its government. Under the circumstances, Israel had the right to act in self-defence but its response to the pinpricks of rocket attacks was totally disproportionate. The figures speak for themselves. In the three years after the withdrawal from Gaza, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. On the other hand, in 2005-7 alone, the IDF killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children.
Whatever the numbers, killing civilians is wrong. This rule applies to Israel as much as it does to Hamas, but Israel's entire record is one of unbridled and unremitting brutality towards the inhabitants of Gaza. Israel also maintained the blockade of Gaza after the ceasefire came into force which, in the view of the Hamas leaders, amounted to a violation of the agreement. During the ceasefire, Israel prevented any exports from leaving the strip in clear violation of a 2005 accord, leading to a sharp drop in employment opportunities. Officially, 49.1% of the population is unemployed. At the same time, Israel restricted drastically the number of trucks carrying food, fuel, cooking-gas canisters, spare parts for water and sanitation plants, and medical supplies to Gaza. It is difficult to see how starving and freezing the civilians of Gaza could protect the people on the Israeli side of the border. But even if it did, it would still be immoral, a form of collective punishment that is strictly forbidden by international humanitarian law.
The brutality of Israel's soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its spokesmen. Eight months before launching the current war on Gaza, Israel established a National Information Directorate. The core messages of this directorate to the media are that Hamas broke the ceasefire agreements; that Israel's objective is the defence of its population; and that Israel's forces are taking the utmost care not to hurt innocent civilians. Israel's spin doctors have been remarkably successful in getting this message across. But, in essence, their propaganda is a pack of lies.
A wide gap separates the reality of Israel's actions from the rhetoric of its spokesmen. It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It di d so by a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men. Israel's objective is not just the defence of its population but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people against their rulers. And far from taking care to spare civilians, Israel is guilty of indiscriminate bombing and of a three-year-old blockade that has brought the inhabitants of Gaza, now 1.5 million, to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.
The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage enough. But Israel's insane offensive against Gaza seems to follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash. After eight days of bombing, with a death toll of more than 400 Palestinians and four Israelis, the gung-ho cabinet ordered a land invasion of Gaza the consequences of which are incalculable.
No amount of military escalation can buy Israel immunity from rocket attacks from the military wing of Hamas. Despite all the death and destruction that Israel has inflicted on them, they kept up their resistance and they kept firing their rockets. This is a movement that glorifies victimhood and martyrdom. There is simply no military solution to the conflict between the two communities. The problem with Israel's concept of security is that it denies even the most elementary security to the other community. The only way for Israel to achieve security is not through shooting but through talks with Hamas, which has repeatedly declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders for 20, 30, or even 50 years. Israel has rejected this offer for the same reason it spurned the Arab League peace plan of 2002, which is still on the table: it involves concessions and compromises.
This brief review of Israel's record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism - the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and it must wear it. Israel's real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbours but military domination. It keeps compounding the mistakes of the past with new and more disastrous ones. Politicians, like everyone else, are of course free to repeat the lies and mistakes of the past. But it is not mandatory to do so.
5/26/2009
Israel and Chemical/Biological Weapons: History Deterrence and Arms Control
Dr. Avner Cohen, the author of Israel and the Bomb, is Senior Research Fellow at the National Security Archive. Formerly, Dr. Cohen was co-director of the Project on Nuclear Arms Control in the Middle East at the Security Studies program at MIT (1990-95). In 1997-98 he was a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), where he was working on issues related to arms control and the peace process in the Middle East.
After undergraduate study at Tel Aviv University in Philosophy (1975), Cohen earned his M.A. in Philosophy at York University (1977) and Ph.D. from the Committee on History of Culture of the University of Chicago (1981). He was a member of the philosophy department at Tel Aviv University from 1983 to 1991 and has been a visiting professor at various American universities and colleges.
For more than a decade, Dr. Cohen has written on issues related to nuclear weapons, primarily on the questions of nuclear deterrence and morality as well as issues related to nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. In 1987-88 he was a research fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, where he developed the notion of "opaque" nuclear proliferation. He is the co-editor of Nuclear Weapons and the Future of Humanity (Rowman & Allanheld, 1986), The Institution of Philosophy (Open Court, 1989), and the author of The Nuclear Age as Moral History (in Hebrew, 1989). In 1989 Dr. Cohen was awarded a MacArthur Research and Writing Fellowship to work on the question of nuclear weapons and democracy, focusing on the Israeli case.
Dr. Cohen has published numerous articles in Ethics, The Journal of Strategic Studies, Survival, Israel Studies, Security Studies, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The Nonproliferation Review, The Washington Quarterly, The Journal of Israeli History, the Middle East Journal, as well as op-eds in the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. He is also an occasional contributor to the Israeli daily Ha'aretz.
In this pdf document, Dr. Avner Cohen illustrates Israel's used of chemical/biological warfare against indegenious populations of Palestinian Arabs...in order to displace them from their ancestral lands, here are a few excerpts:
It is believed that one of the largest operations in this campaign was in the Arab coastal town of Acre, north of Haifa, shortly before it was conquered by the IDF on May 17, 1948. According to Milstein, the typhoid epidemic that spread in Acre in the days before the town fell to the Israeli forces was not the result of wartime chaos but rather a deliberate covert action by the IDF - the contamination of Acre's water supply.
In 1999, a palestinian physician, Dr. Salaman Abu Sitta, speaking before the British house of commons, claimed that in 1948, "even bacteriological warfare was used by poisoning wells and infecting drinking water with malaria and typhus. That was the case in Gaza in the summer of 1948, as Ben-Gurion admitted in his diary." Interestingly, however no known Palestinian sources allege that the epidemics in Acre resulted from Israeli sabotage.
5/11/2009
Israel - Death of The 'Jewish' State
Article written by; Nathaneal Kapner Orthodox Christian 'Street Evangelist' of Jewish descent
THE ‘JEWISH’ STATE OF ISRAEL was founded on the premise that Jews and Gentiles cannot get along. Zionist Jews have laid the blame for this upon the Gentiles, although history has proven otherwise. In truth, the Zionists have both fueled and perpetrated this enmity between Jews and Gentiles in their vindication of a ‘Jewish’ homeland in Palestine.
Zionist Jews, with their decades of propaganda via the Jewish-occupied press and media, would have the world believe that the founding and continuation of the Jewish state of Israel is a positive and progressive endeavor. However, in reality, quite the opposite is true. The idea of a Jewish state, is, at its roots, a negative conception that militates against the brotherhood of man.
In 1925, the most vehement protagonist of a Jewish homeland, Jacob Klatzkin, the co-editor of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, laid down the full implications of the Zionist approach to a Jewish homeland.
Klatzkin argued that the only meaningful goal for Zionism was regaining the land of Israel. Along with this goal, Klatzkin called all *'Jewish assimilationists', “traitors to their Judaism.” Klatzkin maintained, in opposition to the assimilationists, that the spiritual definition of Judaism should lead to national chauvinism:
*'Jewish assimilationist' is referenced to Jews with gentile cultural mannerisms
“In the face of Anti-Semitism, we Jews must insist on the rightfulness of our own nationalism. To possess our own national life, we must see ourselves as an alien body within the nations we reside, and thus insist on our own distinct identity.” View Entire Story Here.
However, the problem of this “alien body” residing as a hated people in the Gentile nations that host them, has not been solved by the “rightfulness of Jewish nationalism.” Instead, the problem has expanded into a global pandemic.
The entire world has been in a state of chaos ever since the founding of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948. Indeed, the Zionist argument for a ‘Jewish’ state has been exposed for the hoax and anti-human conception that it is. The world continually witnesses atrocities upon atrocities against the Palestinian people committed by the Israelis and supported by Zionist Jewry worldwide, even up to the present hour.
JEWRY’S GREAT DIVIDE
TWO THREATS TO PRESENT-DAY ZIONISM and the beastial ‘Jewish’ state it has produced, has now come to the fore. Zionist Jews are currently working around the clock to deal with these threats.
The first threat to Zionism is the geopolitical realignment which is now occurring with regard to the nation of Iran and its economic and socio/religious influence globally and in the Middle East.
The second threat to Zionism is an internal threat within Jewry itself, especially within American Jewry. A division is now taking place amongst American Jews which threatens to spread beyond American shores. This division within American Jewry draws a line between Zionist-Jews and Anti-Zionist Jews.
This Great Divide within Jewry began to manifest itself with the recent atrocities committed by the Israelis against innocent Palestinians in Gaza. Outraged by the actions of the Israelis and the support from global Zionist Jewry, many American Jews began calling for the end of US military aid to Israel. And this especially, (which will mean the death of the ‘Jewish’ state), will surely become a matter of contention within Jewry in the months to come. View Entire Story Here.
THE ‘JEWISH’ STATE OF ISRAEL was founded on the premise that Jews and Gentiles cannot get along. Zionist Jews have laid the blame for this upon the Gentiles, although history has proven otherwise. In truth, the Zionists have both fueled and perpetrated this enmity between Jews and Gentiles in their vindication of a ‘Jewish’ homeland in Palestine.
Zionist Jews, with their decades of propaganda via the Jewish-occupied press and media, would have the world believe that the founding and continuation of the Jewish state of Israel is a positive and progressive endeavor. However, in reality, quite the opposite is true. The idea of a Jewish state, is, at its roots, a negative conception that militates against the brotherhood of man.
In 1925, the most vehement protagonist of a Jewish homeland, Jacob Klatzkin, the co-editor of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, laid down the full implications of the Zionist approach to a Jewish homeland.
Klatzkin argued that the only meaningful goal for Zionism was regaining the land of Israel. Along with this goal, Klatzkin called all *'Jewish assimilationists', “traitors to their Judaism.” Klatzkin maintained, in opposition to the assimilationists, that the spiritual definition of Judaism should lead to national chauvinism:
*'Jewish assimilationist' is referenced to Jews with gentile cultural mannerisms
“In the face of Anti-Semitism, we Jews must insist on the rightfulness of our own nationalism. To possess our own national life, we must see ourselves as an alien body within the nations we reside, and thus insist on our own distinct identity.” View Entire Story Here.
However, the problem of this “alien body” residing as a hated people in the Gentile nations that host them, has not been solved by the “rightfulness of Jewish nationalism.” Instead, the problem has expanded into a global pandemic.
The entire world has been in a state of chaos ever since the founding of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948. Indeed, the Zionist argument for a ‘Jewish’ state has been exposed for the hoax and anti-human conception that it is. The world continually witnesses atrocities upon atrocities against the Palestinian people committed by the Israelis and supported by Zionist Jewry worldwide, even up to the present hour.
JEWRY’S GREAT DIVIDE
TWO THREATS TO PRESENT-DAY ZIONISM and the beastial ‘Jewish’ state it has produced, has now come to the fore. Zionist Jews are currently working around the clock to deal with these threats.
The first threat to Zionism is the geopolitical realignment which is now occurring with regard to the nation of Iran and its economic and socio/religious influence globally and in the Middle East.
The second threat to Zionism is an internal threat within Jewry itself, especially within American Jewry. A division is now taking place amongst American Jews which threatens to spread beyond American shores. This division within American Jewry draws a line between Zionist-Jews and Anti-Zionist Jews.
This Great Divide within Jewry began to manifest itself with the recent atrocities committed by the Israelis against innocent Palestinians in Gaza. Outraged by the actions of the Israelis and the support from global Zionist Jewry, many American Jews began calling for the end of US military aid to Israel. And this especially, (which will mean the death of the ‘Jewish’ state), will surely become a matter of contention within Jewry in the months to come. View Entire Story Here.
5/07/2009
Palestine Before 1948
The end of World War II, the curtains of the world stage were raised to mark the beginning of a new dialectical paradigm, the start of the cold-war ( Communism vs Capitalism ) and Israel, birthed out of Jewish Supremacy. The political birth of Israel in 1948 was brought about through Jewish Terror proved to be the continuance of Hitler's accursed legacy of racial genocide and forced relocation and apartheid, only the tables had turned - the victims became the oppressor against the indigenous Palestinian population. As we can see in this youtube videos, The native people of Palestine were beautiful, rich in culture,and freedom. That is until the accursed political Zionism arrived to cleanse and terrorize the land from it's indigenous people and it's culture. what has resulted is over 60 years of war and oppression against a defenseless minority.
5/06/2009
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
Review by: William Podmore U.K.
Pappe, an Israeli historian and a senior lecturer at Haifa University, has written a superb account of the Israeli expulsion of the Palestinians from their land in 1948. He quotes David Ben Gurion, leader of the Zionist movement from the mid-1920 until the 1960s, who wrote in his diary in 1938, "I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it." This contradicts the Zionists' public claim that they were seizing a land without a people.
Pappe writes of the Israelis' March 1948 plan for evicting the Palestinians, "The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be employed to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and, finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning."
Between 30 March and 15 May 1948, i.e. before any Arab government intervened, Israeli forces seized 200 villages and expelled 250,000 Palestinians. The Israeli leadership stated, "The principal objective of the operation is the destruction of Arab villages ... the eviction of the villagers." On 9 April, Israeli forces massacred 93 people, including 30 babies, at Deir Yassin. In Haifa, the Israeli commander ordered, "Kill any Arab you encounter."
This all happened under British rule in Palestine, where Britain had 75,000 troops: Britain's Mandate did not end until 14 May. The Labour government connived at the Israeli onslaught, although the British state was legally obliged as the occupier (and also by UN resolution 181) to uphold law and order. Yet the Labour government announced that it would no longer be responsible for law and order and it withdrew all the British policemen. It also forbade the presence of any UN bodies, again breaching the terms of the UN resolution. The government ordered British forces to disarm the few Palestinians who had weapons, promising to protect them from Israeli attacks, then immediately reneged on this promise.
On 24 May 1948, Ben Gurion wrote, "We will establish a Christian state in Lebanon, the southern border of which will be the Litani River. We will break Transjordan, bomb Amman and destroy its army, and then Syria falls, and if Egypt will still continue to fight - we will bombard Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo. This will be in revenge for what they (the Egyptians, the Aramis and Assyrians) did to our forefathers during Biblical times." These ravings of an insane warmonger hardly betrayed any genuine fear of a `second holocaust'. The Palestinians were suffering massive expulsion, not trying to destroy the Jewish community.
Pappe summarises, "When it created its nation-state, the Zionist movement did not wage a war that `tragically but inevitably' led to the expulsion of `parts of' the indigenous population, but the other way round: the main goal was the ethnic cleansing of all of Palestine, which the movement coveted for its new state. A few weeks after the ethnic cleansing operations began, the neighbouring Arab states sent a small army - small in comparison to their overall military might - to try, in vain, to prevent the ethnic cleansing. The war with the regular Arab armies did not bring the ethnic cleansing operations to a halt until their successful completion in the autumn of 1948."
Overall, the Zionist forces uprooted more than half Palestine's population, 800,000 people, destroyed 531 villages and emptied eleven urban neighbourhoods of their inhabitants. Pappe concludes that this was "a clear-cut case of an ethnic cleansing operation, regarded under international law today as a crime against humanity."
America's Shame
By Paul Craig Roberts
5-6-9
Why does Israel have a right to exist, but Palestine doesn't?
This is the question of our time.
For sixty years Israelis have been stealing Palestine from Palestinians. There are maps available on the Internet and in Israeli publications showing the shrinkage over time of what was once Palestine into what Palestine is today--a small number of unconnected ghettos or bantustans.
Palestine became "the occupied territory" from which Palestinians were ejected and Israeli settlements built for "settlers." Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are full of refugee camps in which Palestinians driven off their lands by Israeli force have been living for decades.
Driving people off their land is strictly illegal under international law, but Israel has been getting away with it for decades.
Gaza is a concentration camp of 1.5 million Palestinians who were driven from their homes and villages and collected in the Gaza Ghetto.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency was created 60 years ago in
1949 to administer refugee camps for Palestinians driven from their lands by Israel. As of 2002, the registered Palestinian refugee population was 3.9 million.
Caterpillar Tractor makes a special bulldozer for Israel that is designed to knock down Palestinian homes and to uproot their orchards. In 2003 an American protester, Rachel Corrie, stood in front of one of these Caterpillars and was run over and crushed.
Nothing happened. The Israelis can kill whomever they want whenever they want.
They have been doing so for 60 years, and they show no sign of stopping.
Currently they are murdering women and children in the ghetto that they have created for Palestinians in Gaza. The entire world knows this. The Red Cross protests it. But the Israelis brazenly claim that they are killing "Hamas terrorists who are a threat to Israel's existence."
The American media knows that this is a lie, but does not say so.
Israel has been able to slowly exterminate a people for sixty years without provoking sufficient outrage to stop it.
The United States, "Christian America," has been Israel's greatest enabler in its long-term murder of the Palestinian people. Millions of "evangelical Christians" endorse Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
The rest of the world condemns the Israeli military attack on the Gaza Ghetto. Last week the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution requiring a ceasefire and the withdrawal of the Israeli SS from Gaz a.
The United States abstained.
While the rest of the world condemns Israel's inhumanity, the US Congress--I should say the US Knesset--rushed to endorse the Israeli slaughter of the Palestinians in Gaza.
The US Senate endorsed Israel's massacre of Palestinians with a vote of 100-0.
The US House of Representatives voted 430-5 to endorse Israel's massacre of Palestinians.
The resolutions endorsed by 100% of the US Senate and 99% of the House were written by AIPAC, as were the speeches praising Israel for its inhumanity.
The US Congress was proud to show that it is Israel's puppet even when it comes to murdering women and children.
The President of the United States was proud to block effective action by the UN Security Council by ordering the Secretary of State to abstain.
Be a Proud American. Swagger and strut. Pretend that you are not besmirched by the shame that your government has heaped upon you. Take refuge in your ignorance, fostered by 60 years of Israeli lies, that the murder of Palestinians and the theft of their lands is "Israel's right of self-defense."
5-6-9
Why does Israel have a right to exist, but Palestine doesn't?
This is the question of our time.
For sixty years Israelis have been stealing Palestine from Palestinians. There are maps available on the Internet and in Israeli publications showing the shrinkage over time of what was once Palestine into what Palestine is today--a small number of unconnected ghettos or bantustans.
Palestine became "the occupied territory" from which Palestinians were ejected and Israeli settlements built for "settlers." Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are full of refugee camps in which Palestinians driven off their lands by Israeli force have been living for decades.
Driving people off their land is strictly illegal under international law, but Israel has been getting away with it for decades.
Gaza is a concentration camp of 1.5 million Palestinians who were driven from their homes and villages and collected in the Gaza Ghetto.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency was created 60 years ago in
1949 to administer refugee camps for Palestinians driven from their lands by Israel. As of 2002, the registered Palestinian refugee population was 3.9 million.
Caterpillar Tractor makes a special bulldozer for Israel that is designed to knock down Palestinian homes and to uproot their orchards. In 2003 an American protester, Rachel Corrie, stood in front of one of these Caterpillars and was run over and crushed.
Nothing happened. The Israelis can kill whomever they want whenever they want.
They have been doing so for 60 years, and they show no sign of stopping.
Currently they are murdering women and children in the ghetto that they have created for Palestinians in Gaza. The entire world knows this. The Red Cross protests it. But the Israelis brazenly claim that they are killing "Hamas terrorists who are a threat to Israel's existence."
The American media knows that this is a lie, but does not say so.
Israel has been able to slowly exterminate a people for sixty years without provoking sufficient outrage to stop it.
The United States, "Christian America," has been Israel's greatest enabler in its long-term murder of the Palestinian people. Millions of "evangelical Christians" endorse Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
The rest of the world condemns the Israeli military attack on the Gaza Ghetto. Last week the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution requiring a ceasefire and the withdrawal of the Israeli SS from Gaz a.
The United States abstained.
While the rest of the world condemns Israel's inhumanity, the US Congress--I should say the US Knesset--rushed to endorse the Israeli slaughter of the Palestinians in Gaza.
The US Senate endorsed Israel's massacre of Palestinians with a vote of 100-0.
The US House of Representatives voted 430-5 to endorse Israel's massacre of Palestinians.
The resolutions endorsed by 100% of the US Senate and 99% of the House were written by AIPAC, as were the speeches praising Israel for its inhumanity.
The US Congress was proud to show that it is Israel's puppet even when it comes to murdering women and children.
The President of the United States was proud to block effective action by the UN Security Council by ordering the Secretary of State to abstain.
Be a Proud American. Swagger and strut. Pretend that you are not besmirched by the shame that your government has heaped upon you. Take refuge in your ignorance, fostered by 60 years of Israeli lies, that the murder of Palestinians and the theft of their lands is "Israel's right of self-defense."
5/04/2009
A Conversation with Prof. Norman Finkelstein; How to Lose friends and Alienate People
Norman G. Finkelstein received his doctorate in 1988 from the Department of Politics at Princeton University. For many years he taught political theory and the Israel-Palestine conflict. He is currently an independent scholar. Finkelstein is the author of five books which have been translated into more than 40 foreign editions: Beyond Chutzpah: On the misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history (University of California Press, 2005; expanded paperback edition, 2008) The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the exploitation of Jewish suffering (Verso, 2000; expanded paperback edition, 2003) Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (Verso, 1995; expanded paperback edition, 2003) A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen thesis and historical truth (with Ruth Bettina Birn) (Henry Holt, 1998) The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A personal account of the intifada years (University of Minnesota, 1996) He has just completed a new book entitled A Farewell to Israel: The coming break-up of American Zionism, to be published in 2009.
By Don Atapattu
Professor Norman Finkelstein is one of a dying breed of American mavericks that relentlessly defies any attempt at easy categorization. He is the son of Holocaust survivors but an unremitting critic of Holocaust reparation claims; a Jew but is a life-long anti Zionist; and though very much a Leftist, he is often praised by far Right revisionists of the Third Reich, such as Hitler-admiring historian David Irving. He initially made his name by revealing Joan Peter's massively successful From Time Immemorial (a book heavily promoted by the Israeli lobby, that claimed there were no native Arabs before Zionist immigration into Palestine), as a colossal fraud, and for 10 years he was a Professor of Political Science at New York University.
However, he is best known as the author of four books, the most recent being The Holocaust Industry, which has catapulted him into the spotlight, due to its contention that American Jewry have ruthlessly exploited the Nazi holocaust for political and financial gain. Often lambasted for his intemperate approach, Finkelstein is unlikely to win popularity contests in America for the language he employs, as much as his arguments. Like his close friend and mentor Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein is not one to mince his words. In his eyes the mainstream Jewish organisations are 'hucksters', 'gangsters' and 'crooks'; Elie Wiesel (celebrity Holocaust survivor) is the 'resident clown' for the Holocaust 'circus'; reparations claims against Germany for Nazi era slave laborers are 'blackmail'; and he infamously dismissed Professor Goldhagen's critically acclaimed Holocaust bestseller 'Hitler's Willing Executioners' as the 'pornography of violence'. Small wonder then that he has few friends amongst the American Jewish establishment, with Elian Steinberg (World Jewish Congress Executive Secretary) stating on TV that 'Finkelstein is full of shit', and the literary editor of the pro Israeli New Republic describing him as 'poisonsomething you would find under a rock'.
In its initial hardback edition, The Holocaust Industry was a tremendous success in many nations (selling 130 000 copies in a few weeks on its publication in Germany), but in America its sales were limited to a paltry 12000. This relative failure stateside is attributed at least in part by Finkelstein to a fatwah by the Jewish establishment--he notes indignantly that the New York Times book review was much more hostile toward The Holocaust Industry than it was even to Adolf Hitler's 'Mein Kampf'. Now the revised paperback edition has just been released many of these same periodicals are uncharacteristically silent, perhaps thinking they can kill it more effectively through lack of exposure rather than outright aggression. The following is an interview conducted with Norman Finkelstein on 15 October 2001, on the eve of the paperback's publication.
It is generally considered that growing up Jewish and growing up Zionist are mutually inextricable. What made you break this link?
First of all, I don't agree that Zionism and growing up in a Jewish household are inextricably linked. It is fair to say that growing up Jewish and having a consciousness about Israel are inextricably linked. As a Jew I felt that I bore a certain amount of responsibility for the policies of Israel because Israel claimed to speak in the name of the Jewish people, and therefore they were using the history and suffering of the Jewish people as a means to justify its policies. However, my family were not Zionists, and therefore I see no special connection between the two.
You stated in a BBC interview that your radical politics have exacted 'a substantial personal cost' to yourself. Have you found yourself alienated from mainstream Jewish life?
I wouldn't say that alienation has been the price because I have managed to find a crowd of people who share my values in my life, which has been quite satisfying to me. I'd say that without wanting to pose a martyr, that I've paid a professional price for my views. Most recently I taught at Hunter College, City University of New York, and every semester I was the highest rated professor in my department on student evaluations, I had also published in the last five years, four books and I would say that in every reckoning I had proven myself to be worthy as a professor. Nonetheless, I was always the lowest paid by far, I had the heaviest teaching load, and this past May after 10 years faithful service at slave wages, I was let go and forced--at the ripe old age of 49--to relocate to Chicago to find temporary work.
How have Jewish academics and Middle East specialists reacted to the arguments that you have expanded upon in your books?
The reviews of my first book (Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict), were given the content of the book remarkably favorable. I was quite surprised by the positive reception of the first book. Generally speaking, I don't have much contact with the mainstream. I don't publish in mainstream journals, and have never been asked to publish in them. It is also true that my name comes up quite a lot in articles in mainstream publications; my writings on a variety of subjects are quite frequently cited.
While researching your second book (The Rise and Fall of Palestine: The Intifadah Years), you lived with Palestinian families in the Occupied Territories. How do you regard this time in retrospect?
First of all, it's not looking back, I still go fairly frequently, I was there in June and I stay in close touch with the families of whom I write in the book. When I first went it was a moral test of the values that are meaningful to me, and I wanted to see if I could bridge the chasm between a Jew and a Palestinian based upon our common humanity and our shared commitment to justice and decency. To that extent I would say that it was a satisfying experience, because I think that we developed close and meaningful relationships.
Were conditions in the territories as bad as you had anticipated?
I would say that the situation there is horrible. Whenever I go I almost literally count the minutes before I leave. I can't stand it there because you feel that you are watching people endure a living death for no justifiable reason people are suffering and they're wasting away a life. It's very hard to bear, because it is impossible to rationalise to oneself why you should have a meaningful and satisfying life, and these people have to endure a meaningless and horrifying life. It is impossible to rationalise, unless you consider yourself a superior human being and deserve better, than maybe it would be a tolerable situation. When you recognise your common humanity and realise that for reasons for nothing to do with anything these people have ever done that they should have to suffer this way.. it's really hard.
Did you ever experience any hostility because of your background (as an American Jew)?
Quite the contrary. The first couple of years, I was treated like royalty and people were gracious and wonderful, by the third year no one could care less that I was Jewish. It was not even a topic of discussion. Even this summer I spent time in Gaza, where the people knew I was Jewish, and they didn't care. It's not an issue; the issue is whether you are for or against the occupation.
'Image and Reality of the Israel Palestine Conflict' is a radical reinterpretation of Israeli-Arab history, turning on its head the standard Western notion of Israel being the constant victim of Arab aggression. How have historians reacted to the arguments contained within it?
As I said earlier it does get frequently cited. The chapter on Joan Peters--the hoax about Palestine being empty on the eve of Jewish colonization--is considered a standard text, everybody cites it. The chapter on Benny Morris and the Palestinian refugee question (in which Finkelstein dismisses Morris' claims that there was no overall plan by the Zionists to expel the Arabs from Palestine), is considered the definitive critique on the Morris book, and nowadays most scholarship agrees that I'm closer to the truth than Morris. The last chapters on the `67 and `73 wars...they're pretty much ignored.
Regarding your most recent work, The Holocaust Industry, can you explain who the Holocaust Industry (according to your interpretation) are and what their goals might be?
The Holocaust Industry, is as I conceive in the book, is institutions, organisations and individuals who have put to use Jewish suffering for political and financial gain. Throughout the little book, I am not at all shy of naming names, so large numbers of organisations and individuals are cited for their activities in the exploitation of the Nazi holocaust. It is hard to say the main ones, but the mainstream Jewish organisations and individuals such as Elie Wiesel, they feature prominently in the book.
Do you believe the 'Holocaust Industry' were responsible for the poor sales of the book in the US in comparison with its spectacular success elsewhere?
First of all, I do name names and a lot of these individuals and organisations have a huge vested interest in the Nazi holocaust. It's a political weapon, but it's also plainly a financial weapon, and it's unsurprising that the book would die an early death in the United States. Given those facts, it would be shocking were it otherwise.
Do you believe these people were involved in your dismissal from New York University?
I think it works much more subtly in our system. Sometimes phone calls are made, no doubt about it, but I think things work through a crystallising of a consensus--in the sense of 'this guy is more trouble than he is worth, and so it is time to let him go'. I think this is what happened at Hunter College, that yes I had an excellent teaching record, yes I had an excellent publication record, but it's also true that 'a lot of people are complaining about him and we do get all these phone calls and there are faculty members who are very uncomfortable with him because he is just not professional' and so on and so forth. Finally, a consensus crystallises that it is time to let him go.
A spokesman for the World Jewish Congress suggested that you should be grateful to organisations such as themselves, for the compensation that your parents received. Is there not some truth in that were it not for the awareness raising campaigns of these bodies, Holocaust survivors would not have been compensated at all?
These organisations frankly, bring to mind an insight of my late mother, that it is no accident that Jews invented the word "chutzpah". They steal, and I do use the word with intent, 95% of the monies earmarked for victims of Nazi persecution, and then throw you a few crumbs while telling you to be grateful. It is very hard to sink much lower than to turn the colossal suffering of the Jewish people during World War Two into an extortion racket. I really think that not even Julius Streicher (leading anti Semitic publisher in 1930's Germany) were he editing Der Stuermer today, could have conjured up the image of Jews huckstering their dead, but that's exactly what this gang of wretched crooks have done. They have disgraced the memory of the Jewish people's suffering on the one hand by turning it into an extortion racket. If there were any doubt left, I would point to the recent London Times article headlined 'Swiss Holocaust cash revealed to be a myth', that is all the claims against the Swiss banks were a fantastic concoction of the Holocaust hustlers. But then after turning Jewish suffering into an extortion racket.to then deny the actual victims these monies extorted..it is very difficult to imagine sinking any lower on a moral level than that. If they were all put behind bars, it wouldn't be yet, in my opinion, be a just punishment.
Many of the same adjectives crop up in the hostile reviews of The Holocaust Industry, such as 'bitter', 'angry', 'shrill', and 'polemical'. Do you think this is because you are breaking a hereto untouchable taboo?
Only one of the many reviews I have read, made the comment that the book was very funny, and I think that there is a certain amount of humour in the book. I didn't note personally any intimation of a rant or shrillness. You find humour there and irony there, but I should point out that the book went through several editors who were quite exacting and wherever it did go over the top, they pulled me back. I think a lot of reviews stem from the fact that most people (including myself), tend to defer to authority, and the first reviews the word that was constantly used was 'rant' and before you knew it everyone began to pick up on that, and so that became the drum beat theme of the negative reviews. Therefore, I don't think it is so much that I broke a taboo; I think the initial negative reviews set a tone for what followed.
One extraordinary fact that I learned in your book was that former President Reagan, and his UN ambassador Jean KirkPatrick, received the Simon Wiesenthal Center humanitarian of the year award (for their staunch support of Israel) despite providing political, financial and military support to extreme Right terrorist groups in Central America. Do you agree that it is an incredible perversion of history that the racism and violence of the Nazi holocaust, is now used to justify turning a blind eye to racism and violence?
Well that is what you would expect from the Simon Wiesenthal Center. This is really a gang of heartless and immoral crooks, whose hallmark is that they will do anything for a dollar. As I point out in the book, the guy who runs their headquarters in Los Angeles, runs it as a family business, and in the mid 1990's they were collectively raking in $525 000 a year.
Do you think The Holocaust Industry would have been published were you not the Jewish son of Holocaust survivors?
(Laughs) No, I have no doubt about that. First of all, it just got barely published as the son of Holocaust survivorsIf I weren't, there would be no chance at all.I would have been buried alive. Just the other day I was speaking to someone who I cannot name for this interview, who met with a high government official in Germany who we both know. My friend asked him about the questions raised in my book concerning the number of surviving slave labourers, and whether the German government knew that the numbers had been grossly inflated to justify the extortion of huge amounts of money. His response was that 'of course we knew what he was saying was true', but a decision was made early on to go on with the blackmail because 'we were afraid of a huge anti Semitic reaction being unleashed in Germany', and the attitude was Germany was rich enough to pay the ransom. But, if you go to Germany and try to say the things that I did, the so called 'Left' become absolutely hysterical as they have this huge vested interest in being professional anti anti-Semites and semophiles. It's this huge identity that they have carved out for themselves, and when I go out there and say that of course be anti Nazis but a lot of what is being done in the name of anti anti-Semitism, is in fact a gross falsification of history .and unless exposed will do huge damage to the Jewish people, these people go berserk. It is one of the peculiarities of this whole industry, in that it has created an alignment between the Left in Germany and the Right-wing Jewish establishment in the US. They sing the praises of people like Israel Singer (disgraced executive V.P. of the World Jewish Congress), a complete and total hoodlum - something that crawled out of the sewer.and they sing the praises of him! You would think he was Demetrios the way they talk about him.
Another matter that puts you at odds with the Jewish establishment, is your rejection of the uniqueness of Jewish persecution compared to the suffering of other peoples. What is the position of groups like the World Jewish Congress on financial reparations for the Indo-Chinese, Black slavery, the slaughter of the American Indians etc?
They don't say anything, well I shouldn't say they don't say anythingDuring the US Congressional hearings on the Holocaust compensation, Maxine Waters (US Congresswoman) raised the issue with the special US envoy on Holocaust compensation, and of course he responded in exactly the way you would expect--he said you can't compare and it is not the same thing, and that is the standard view of these organisations. Nothing compares to the Jews. Everything that the Jews endure, everything that the Jews achieve, is special, because we're the 'chosen people', so don't compare us with garbage like the Tasmanian savages (the entire indigenous population of Tasmania were exterminated under British colonial rule), or don't compare us with the Gypsies. I mean God forbid those uncivilised savages be compared with us. You have to understand that the great tragedy of the Second World War, was not that Jews per se were killed, but such a cultured people were killed--if you kill uncultured people, who cares?
What is your position on the comparison between Israel and the Occupied Territories and South Africa under apartheid (as raised during the recent UN convention on racism in Durban)?
I don't think the comparison with South Africa is exactly precise for a number of reasons. Israel proper--pre June `67 Israel, is a fairly lively democracy, Palestinian Arabs do enjoy rights of citizenship (as) second class citizens, it is probably similar to the situation to Blacks in the American South before the civil rights movement. The difference is that in the US South, Blacks did not have the right to vote, but that question is due to numbers, where American Blacks were the majority in several states in the South and that is why they were disenfranchised, whereas Israel's unstated official policy is that they will tolerate a minority of approximately 15%, so long as the Arabs remain around this percentage its OK to give them the right to vote because it won't affect the Jewish majority. In addition to the second-class citizenship of the Israeli Arabs, there is also the occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, and that too is not really comparable to South Africa because I think it is much worse.
Dr David Rabeeya (Iraqi born American rabbi), talks of a caste system in Israeli society, where the Arabs are clearly at the bottom, but also the non European Jews are considered to be of lesser value. He claims that the wholesale importation of Russian Jews was to ensure the demographic majority of secular European Jews over their Sephardic countrymen for generations to come.
There is some truth to that, because a large percentage of the so-called 'Russian Jews' are not Jewish. In recent years, it has been more than 50%, and the reason why is because the Israeli establishment likes the blue eyed, blonde haired Aryan types as a racial group. The Russians look right even if they are not Jewish, and they preserve the Ashkenazi elite's dominance.
You argue in The Holocaust Industry that if it were no longer in America's interest to support Israel, the Jewish elites would quickly forget about the Jewish state. Is this really tenably considering the huge emotional attachment American Jewry has to Israel?
Generations of Americans Jews have not been brought up on Zionism. Before 1967, Israel barely figured at all in American Jewish life, as anyone who goes back and reads the publications of the US Jews before then will tell you. Even nowadays people are not Zionist by conviction, they are Zionist because it is useful for their political and more recently financial self-interest. The guiding light is what serves their self-interest, not ideological commitment.
Raul Hillberg (leading Holocaust academic) says that he hopes you will expand on your work in The Holocaust Industry. Are you currently working on anything?
No. I suffered the blow of losing my job so I have to make ends meet to survive.
Did you not receive a substantial sum from the spectacular success of The Holocaust Industry in Germany and elsewhere?
No, that is science fiction. You don't receive substantial sums. I received a $5000 advance for the book, and in total I have received about $50 000. You are not going to get rich out of this...I mean $50 000 is the average annual salary in the United States, I have never made more than $22,000 in a year, so it is about two years salary. OK, I am not a kid anymore, but I expect to be living more than two more years.
I noticed that the publication of the paperback of The Holocaust Industry has been delayed in the UK
(Interrupts) No, no it's been published but I don't expect it to get any kind of publicity. It's not a bad paperbackthere is a lot of new material in it.
You dismiss entirely Professor Daniel Goldhagen's argument that the German public were collectively responsibility for the crimes of the Nazis, yet you seem to hold the Jewish people collectively responsible for the policies of Israel. Is this not a case of double standards?
Collective responsibility is not a term that is devoid of any meaning, whether or not it's true depends on the circumstances. In the case of Germany you were dealing with a fascist, terrorist state in which the population had relatively speaking no say in the making of policy and no say in the crimes committed. In other circumstances depending on which a collectivity influences policy and shapes criminal actions, it does bear a responsibility, so you have to examine each individual case for how much collective responsibility is applicable.
Following the tragedy on September 11, Left-wing writer Christopher Hitchens, criticised people like yourself and Noam Chomsky for their 'masochistic' response to the 'Islamic fascism' practised by Bin Laden and his followers. What do you think an appropriate response would be to the destruction of the World Trade Center?
(Incredulously) Well, my views are so conventional it is hard to understand why Christopher Hitchens would point to me at all, and frankly what Noam Chomsky had to say on the topic was interesting in its insights, but his general view was utterly banal. You have to look to the social and political roots of what happened, because if we were just dealing with a bunch of lunatics on the loose, then the whole question would be just a psychiatric and security question. We would bring to psychiatrists to explain what is the source of this lunacy, and we would rely on our security services to correct the problem. But plainly, no one really believes this is strictly a psychiatric or a policing problem, because there has been massive social and political commentary trying to explain it. The moment you have massive social and political commentary trying to explain a phenomenon, then you know we are no longer dealing with a strictly psychiatric question. When there were the Jim Jones mass suicides there was no such commentary, as everyone knew they are a socially and politically marginal cult, but nobody in their right mind would say the Bin Laden phenomenon is something marginal. Everyone understands that this is rooted in a deeper problem.
The next question is what are the sources of the problem? If you are a mainstream conservative the usual answer is that the fundamental source of the problem can be located in the Arab--Islamic world loathing of modernity, freedom and all the virtues of enlightenment and capitalist industry that the US stands for. If you are off the mainstream, or on the Left end of the political system, you say the main source of the problem is US foreign policy in the Middle East which has evoked hatred among Arab-Islamic society because of US crimes in Iraq, the US backed Israel crimes against the Palestinians, and so forth. (Angrily) My point is that everyone, from whatever end of the political spectrum, tries to locate the Bin Laden phenomenon in some deeper social and political current, so for Mr. Hitchens to come along and say that to explain (the attacks) is a form of rationalisation--this is sheer idiocy! There is literally not a single person, apart from Mr. Hitchens who tries to explain it in a deeper social and political current, we may disagree on what this current is, but we all realise that this is not Jim Jones, or the Branch Dravidians.
What do you think of America's moral authority to spearhead a crusade against terrorism?
If you understand terrorism to mean the targeting of civilian populations in order to achieve political goals, then plainly the US qualifies as the main terrorist government in the world today, if only because of the sheer force it has at its disposal. I am not claiming that another government were it to be in the position of the US would act better, but given the predominant material and political weight of the US today, means that they are going to be the main terrorist state in the World today, and I think that's true.
I think I can safely assume that you are not a supporter of George Bush, so did you vote for Ralph Nader or Al Gore in the last election?
I voted for Nader, and I have no doubts at all that it was the right thing to do because the Nader candidacy was extremely energising and a terrific phenomenon in American life, and I hope he continues.
What do you think of the prospects for the Green Party to become a genuine Third Force in US Politics?
I think we are now heading for very dismal time. It seems like Bush is launching a perpetual war. We endured the nightmare of the destruction of Iraq, but at least that had a beginning and an end. This current 'war' does not seem to have an end, and I think it is even conceivable that it going to endure the remainder of my lifetime and in this political climate it is very speculative to make any meaningful predictions for the future.
How democratic is America given the enormous financial and media powers with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo?
There are contradictory tendencies in American society. There's a huge range of activities that one can engage in that mark it as a quite free society. It's also true to say that the powers that be have so much control over how people think that there are fewer and fewer people make use of the rights and information available to them. So I think that both are true. The amount of control exercised by the ruling elites over the decisions, choices, lifestyles, and so forth of American society mean that many of the rights and information that is available are not accessed. I can say what I wantthe worst that is going to happen to me is that I lose my job. I am not going to get shot or put in a psychiatric hospital..though it is also true to say that if a movement developed which actually tried to use on a mass level the rights available, I suspect there would be substantial repression.
If you attended Nader's rallies and speeches as I did, he was delivering a very hard-hitting critique of US capitalism, I mean it is as tough as you can really get and he was able to pull it off. No one prevented him from holding his mass rallies. They prevented him from appearing on TV, they excluded him from appearing on the (presidential candidates) debate, but he was able to organise in constituencies around the country. If it ever became a bigger phenomenon, what would have happened . I don't know.
The Pro Israeli lobby has had spectacular success in getting its version of events picked up by the media, with even the openly anti Arab / pro Israel polemic 'Exodus' on the US school curriculum. Noam Chomsky has even criticised liberal publications such as the New Republic for being openly racist toward Arabs, and Rana Kabbani has said that hating Arabs (and Muslims in particular) is the last acceptable form of racism, would you agree?
I think that they are openly racist in that they say things about Arabs that would not be permitted about other ethnic groups. These people are not pro-Israel, but Israel serves an interest to the US ruling elites and by that fact it serves a useful interest to American Jewish organisations. The moment that Israel ceases to be an interest, Israel will no longer be a concern of these organisations.
You said in your second book that one small Palestinian boy asked you if it was true that Americans believed all Palestinians to be animals, and you didn't answer not having the heart to tell him it was. Yet you also said that Arabs should reach out to America to try and build a counter consensus to Hollywood demonisations. Is this really plausible given the perceptions in American of Arabs and Muslims?
Nowadays nothing is possible with the events of September 11, a lot of hard work over many years to try to build a counter consensus disappeared in the rubble of the World Trade Center. I am utterly pessimistic about the prospects now, but I did not think it was impossible (before). Israel was suffering quite a number of major public relations disasters, beginning with the Lebanon War, the first Intifadah, and then the second Intifadah. As much as the mainstream media tries to depict the reality in a manner that suits US-Israeli interests, enough of the truth was coming through that Israel was suffering a public relations disaster. There were some prospects, how significant the prospects were we don't know, because not enough effort was made in trying to exploit those prospects, but after September 11 I don't think there is much hope.
I get the impression that you think that the West was in some way responsible for the tragedy of September 11.
Lets put it this way. The so-called West, and really we're talking about the United States, and to a lesser extent its pathetic puppy dog in England, have a real problem on their hands. Regrettably, it's payback time for the Americans and they have a problem because all the other enemies since the end of World War Two that they pretended to contend with .. were basically fabricated enemies. The Soviet Union was a conservative bureaucracy by the end of World War Two, which apart from the sphere of influence it carved out--mostly for defensive reasons--was plainly in retrospect a stabilising force in international affairs. Then the enemies that the US conjured up as the Soviet Union fell into decline beginning in the early 1980`senemies like Libya, Iraq, narco-terrorists and so forththese were basically enemies created by the United States to--among other things--justify repressive policies around the world, and to inflate its military budget. Now they do have a problem on their hands, and its going to exact a cost from Americans. The American elites can talk about honour and creativity until the cows come home, but it's not going to be like the Iraq shooting fish in a barrel situation, like they did when they destroyed Iraq in 1991. Frankly, part of me says - even though everything since September 11 has been a nightmare--'you know what, we deserve the problem on our hands because some things Bin Laden says are true'. One of the things he said on that last tape was that 'until we live in security, you're not going to live in security', and there is a certain amount of rightness in that. Why should Americans go on with their lives as normal, worrying about calories and hair loss, while other people are worrying about where they are going to get their next piece of bread? Why should we go on merrily with our lives while so much of the world is suffering, and suffering incidentally not with us merely as bystanders, but with us as the indirect and direct perpetrators. So that I think that you can summon up all the heroic and self-aggrandizing rhetoric you want, but there is a problem facing all of us now, and maybe it's about time that the United States starts having to confront the same sort of problems that much of humanity has had to confront on a daily basis for God knows how long.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)