A. Loewenstein Online Newsletter

Britain is to urge Arab countries to train the disorganised Libyan rebels, and so strengthen their position on the battlefield before negotiations on a ceasefire, senior British defence sources have indicated.
The sources said they were also looking at hiring private security companies, some of which draw on former SAS members, to aid the rebels. These private soldiers could be paid by Arab countries to train the unstructured rebel army.
In what is seen in effect as the second phase of the battle to oust Muammar Gaddafi, it is now being acknowledged that the disorganised Libyan rebels are not going to make headway on their own. Nato member countries are looking at requesting Arab countries, such as Qatar or the United Arab Emirates, to train the rebels, or to fund the training. Qatar and the UAE are already involved in the Nato-led no-fly zone.
Some cabinet sources said that another Arab country that might be willing to train the rebels is Jordan. They are thought to have the best-trained officers, and are possibly the best army in the region, one Cabinet source said. The training of the Libyan rebels might take as long as month to turn them into an effective force capable of holding ground, and organise flanking manoeuvres. A source said: “They’re not advancing, they’re just driving up the road, and when they see guns drawn they turn round and go back again.”

Let’s not forget that Jordan assists in the US-backed training of Palestinian Authority forces. In a new Human Rights Watch report,they are accused of abusing and torturing journalists in the West Bank.

Every day, more celebrated Jewish personalities – writers, artists, academics – are depicting Israel as a racist, vicious and inhumane “entity” that has to be dismantled. Many of them have assumed pivotal roles in the global campaign to delegitimize the Jewish State. Their relentless attacks could well play out in ways that indeed puts an end to Israeli sovereignty.
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United Nations envoy Richard Falk is one of the most radical demonizers of the Jewish State. Historian Norman Finkelstein is one of the staunchest Western supporters of Hezbollah. Nobel laureate Harold Pinter, film directors Ken Loach and Mike Leigh and historian Ilan Pappe have been the most famous anti-Israeli figures in the UK.The initiative for an anti-Israel boycott in London was taken by Stephen and Hilary Rose, two renowned Jewish academics. The linguist Noam Chomsky, considered “the intellectual godfather” of the anti-Israel campaign, seeks the abolition of the Jewish State. Jewish philosopher Judith Butler is leading the divestment from Israel.
Michael Lerner’s magazine, Tikkun, is probably the most virulently anti-Israel screed ever published under Jewish auspices. There are the Israeli “neo- Canaanites”, Haim Hanegbi and Meron Benvenisti, who have come to the conclusion that “Israel as a Jewish state can no longer exist.” In Paris, bestselling author Stephane Hessel, himself of Jewish origin, is also inciting against Israel. …
For well over a century, Jewish intellectuals (and especially German-Jewish academics) rejected the legitimacy and desirability of harnessing the interests of the Jewish people into a political state. Only the Shoah, the most extreme demonstration imaginable of evil versus Jewish powerlessness, succeeded in turning the objections of these intellectuals to Israel into an embarrassment.

The extreme damage to Israel’s reputation inflicted by these and other Jewish intellectuals has been greatly underestimated. Indeed, with their words and actions they are boosting pernicious Judeophobic propaganda. Now, we are again in an era where the Jews are once more sentenced to solitary confinement on the moral high ground, with no other nation except Israel expected to disappear from this world.

“If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone report would have been a different document.” Thus opens Judge Richard Goldstone’s much-discussed op-ed in The Washington Post. I have a strong feeling that the editor might have tampered with the text and that the original sentence ought to have read something like: “If I had known then that the report would turn me into a self-hating Jew in the eyes of my beloved Israel and my own Jewish community in South Africa, the Goldstone report would never have been written at all.” And if that wasn’t the original sentence, it is certainly the subtext of Goldstone’s article.
This shameful U-turn did not happen this week. It comes after more than a year and a half of a sustained campaign of intimidation and character assassination against the judge, a campaign whose like in the past destroyed mighty people such as US Senator William Fulbright who was shot down politically for his brave attempt to disclose AIPAC’s illegal dealings with the State of Israel.
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Winning Zionist love in the short-term is far less important than losing the world’s respect in the long-run. Palestine should choose its friends with care: they cannot be faint-hearted nor can they claim to be Zionists as well as champions of peace, justice and human rights in Palestine.

Jessica Montell from B’Tselem, Israeli human rights group:

Goldstone’s praise of Israel’s investigations seems a bit premature. Of the 52 criminal investigations Israel opened into incidents in Cast Lead, only three have led to indictments. Nearly 2½ years after the operation, we do not know the status of the remainder of the investigations. Furthermore, these investigations look at individual incidents and at the behavior of individual soldiers. There have been no investigations into the policy questions.
Of course, as Goldstone wrote Sunday, this is far more than Hamas has done to investigate its crimes. And that is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Goldstone’s opinion piece and the Israeli spin of it: the measuring of Israel against Hamas. Israel did not willfully target civilians; Hamas did. Israel initiated investigations; Hamas did not. When the bar is set so low, Israel easily clears it.
The Goldstone Report’s shortcomings contributed to a polarization that left little room to address the complexity of the issues involved. The Israeli army was either a gang of criminals or the most moral army in the world. Operation Cast Lead was either flawlessly executed or a crime against humanity. Goldstone’s op-ed presents an opportunity to break down these false dichotomies and generate a more nuanced understanding of the operation, both in the domestic Israeli discourse and among the international community.
It is therefore regrettable that the Israeli government and many in the media have portrayed Goldstone’s op-ed as a retraction of everything in the 575-page report. “The one point of light,” Gabriela Shalev, former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, said of Goldstone’s op-ed, “is that if we have to defend ourselves against terror organizations again, we will be able to say there is no way to deal with this terror other than the same way we did in Cast Lead.”

Incapacity benefit claimants began to be “invited” in for tough new work-capability assessments on Monday – an invitation they can’t refuse. In two pilot schemes 70% of claimants were judged fit for work, with a third put straight on to jobseeker’s allowance – leaving just 30% too frail to be chivvied further.
Last week the government announced who had won contracts for the work programme: there was shock when, out of 40 contracts worth between £3bn and £5bn, only two went to not-for-profit groups. Not so much “big society” as big Serco. The biggest winner – and a surprise – was Ingeus Deloitte, which won seven huge contracts amid acid observation that its CEO was a former director at the Department for Work and Pensions. Concern was expressed that Ingeus had underbid more experienced providers: price was a clinching factor in the official scoring system, whereas bizarrely previous performance was not scored at all.
The greatly disappointed voluntary sector will be relegated to sub-contracting. The big companies will hand down their difficult cases, such as addicts, ex-prisoners or the mentally ill – creaming 20%-30% off the top in “management fees”. The Glasgow-based Wise Group, whose board I was on until recently, is a leading not-for-profit organisation, and was shocked to win no contract and see Scotland go to Ingeus Deloitte despite a lower success rate. Wise is the sixth most successful in the UK for the flexible new deal and top for finding people work in the new deal for the disabled. It’s about as big society as they come. Why didn’t it win? Possibly because it wouldn’t and couldn’t discount too steeply: the voluntary sector can’t gamble and borrow as large companies can.
Among the winners is A4E (Action for Employment) – hardly surprising as its founder, Emma Harrison CBE, was named by David Cameron as his workless families tsar. As the Observer revealed, she and her husband have a joint income of some £1.4m from their welfare-to-work empire. While any public sector chief executive earning over the prime minister’s £140,000 is ritually slaughtered by Eric Pickles, not a word is said about private sector chiefs making a killing out of public contracts. Serco’s CEO had an 18% rise to £1.86m.
Cameron has announced his intention to outsource not just the NHS but virtually the entire public sector to “any willing provider” – with little concern about profits made from the public purse.

Former International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei, who had previously announced his intetions to run for the presidency of Egypt, said Monday that “if Israel attacked Gaza we would declare war against the Zionist regime.
In an interview with the Al-Watan newspaper he said: “In case of any future Israeli attack on Gaza – as the next president of Egypt – I will open the Rafah border crossing and will consider different ways to implement the joint Arab defense agreement.”
He also stated that “Israel controls Palestinian soil” adding that that “there has been no tangible breakthrough in reconciliation process because of the imbalance of power in the region – a situation that creates a kind of one way peace.”
 
* Palestine Solidarity Commision