A.LOEWENSTEIN ONLINE NEWSLETTER

Are you a Zionist and in need of tools to sell the wonderful democracy
known as Israel? Concerned that too many people see the Jewish state
as an occupier? Hope that finding new tactics will assist the noble act of
selling Israel to the world?
Rest easy, help has arrived:

In 2001, IDC Herzliya students Gur Braslavi and Ariel Halevi won
the Oxford Union Debating Competition for teams from foreign countries.
 Nine years later, their joint company, Debate Ltd., was chosen to
carry out the Israeli government’s new public diplomacy initiative.
The company recently took on a contract to conduct 200 workshops
in which its instructors teach regular Israelis the arts of rhetoric and
persuasion. If the pilot proves successful, it will likely be extended and
multiplied. By creating an army of amateur ambassadors, Israel
hopes to counter negative media portrayals and improve its image abroad.
“Define terrorism,” said the instructor, entering the boardroom of the
 Tel Aviv district branch of the Histadrut labor union. “Come on. You’ve
all experienced it. Tell me what terrorism means,” he urged.
After overcoming their surprise at the abrupt and irregular entrance,
the 15 participants – members of the Histadrut’s under-27 exchange
mission to Berlin – started suggesting answers.
“War,” threw out one. “A threat,” said another. “A lethal danger.”
 “Violence.” “Injury to civilians,” more people shot out.
“OK. By those definitions, is Israel a terrorist?” asked the instructor.
In the silence that followed the question, the instructor, a good-looking
 man in his late twenties or early thirties wearing a button-down shirt
 and sporting a short haircut, took a pause to introduce himself.
“My name is Ran Michaelis, and I am a senior instructor at Debate.
Debate is a company that specializes in interpersonal relations and project
management. We work with organizations in Israel and federations abroad
on Israeli advocacy, on behalf of the Ministry of Public Diplomacy and
Diaspora affairs.”
“I was once asked that very question by an Arab woman after a lecture
I gave at Richmond University,” said Michaelis, returning to his question.
“I told her Israel’s definition of terrorism, which is: the attempt to harm or
kill innocent civilians.
“Without pausing for a second, she pulled out a photo of an Israeli soldier
aiming a rifle at an old Palestinian woman. She pointed her finger at me,
and shouted: ‘You, and all the Israelis are not innocent! According to your
own definition, suicide bombers are not terrorists.’
“My question to you,” Michaelis asked the group, “is: How do you answer her?”
In the hours that followed, Michaelis taught the group how best to answer
the woman’s question, as well as many others. Throughout the workshop,
he challenged the participants with difficult situations, all of which have
come up over the years, and provided them with the best tools to approach
resolving them.
Like a young soldier returning from battle, Michaelis regaled the participants
with stories from Israel’s hasbara front lines, sharing his experience of speaking
 before hostile audiences of anti-Israel students and leftist professors in American
universities, tackling issues ranging from the security barrier to the Goldstone report.
“The basic structure of the workshops was developed during an all-night marathon
that Gur and I held,” explained Debate co-founder Ariel Halevi. “After an intensive
brainstorming session, we attempted to turn what we knew intuitively into an
organized lesson plan. The 14-hour session resulted in five principles of effective
advocacy. Later we added two more, to create the backbone of the method.”
The seven principles of effective advocacy are a set of analytical and rhetorical
tools
that help give novice advocates the means of engaging people on issues regarding
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“It’s not about information, it’s about knowledge. It’s about navigating the
discussion
effectively. Every one of the principles offers a different tactic to tackle
issues that come up in encounters with foreigners,” saidHalevi.
The first principle the participants are taught is the importance of terminology.
“Don’t enter into a conversation before you are clear about the terminology
you’re using,” Michaelis urged. “For example, 95 percent of thesecurity
barrier that Israel built around Judea and Samaria is a fence, yet people
 continually refer to it as a wall. The word “wall” tends to conjure up images
of the Berlin Wall. It is an inaccurate and misleading characterization of
the barrier and its function – keeping out terrorists.
“I have no problem with you talking about the merits or problems of the
barrier, but make sure that the conversation sticks to the facts, and not to
an Israel-hater’s misrepresentation of them,” said Michaelis.
Other words to watch out for, according to the seven-principle method,
are apartheid, assassinations, freedom fighters and human shields.
“Each one of them carries some kind of mental or emotional infrastructure.
If you overlook the terms people use and dive straight into the ideological
discussion, you are overlooking a major obstacle that someone put in your
place, preventing the audience from relating to you,” saidHalevi.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald on America’s continuing policies to deny human
beings the right of appeal to terrorism charges. Obama equals Bush:

So congratulations to the United States and Barack Obama for winning
the power to abduct people anywhere in the world and then imprison them
for as long as they want with no judicial review of any kind.
This is what Barack Obama has done to the habeas clause of the Constitution: 
 if you are in Thailand (as one of the petitioners in this case was) and the U.S.
abducts you and flies you to Guantanamo, then you have the right to have a
 federal court determine if there is sufficient evidence to hold you.  If, however,
President Obama orders that you be taken from Thailand to Bagram rather than
 to Guantanamo, then you will have no rights of any kind, and he can order you
detained there indefinitely without any right to a habeas review.

Although Israel says it plans to stop this mission, the aim is clear and should be
warmly
supported:

The biggest attempt by international aid groups to break the Israeli siege on the
Gaza Strip has gotten underway.
Nine ships under the banner, Freedom Flotilla, began their journey to Gaza on
Saturday, despite warnings from Israel that they will be stopped for “breaching
Israeli law”.
The vessels are carrying 5,000 tonnes of reconstruction materials, school supplies
and medical equipment.
The biggest of the nine ships set off from Istanbul, Turkey, heading to the south
western city of Antalya where two other Turkish ships will be waiting to join the
convoy.
The three ships will then travel to the waters off Athens and Crete to rendezvous
with the other six, before making the four-day journey to Gaza.

A handy reminder by Noam Chomsky from 2008 that the corporate press
have a
particular interest in mouthing US foreign policy goals (and all this is relevant
in light of the ongoing irrational hatred against the Islamic Republic):

To take another illustration of the depth of the imperial mentality,
New York Times correspondent Elaine Sciolino writes that “Iran’s
intransigence [about nuclear enrichment] appears to be defeating attempts
by the rest of the world to curtail Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.” The rest of
the world happens to exclude the large majority of the world: the non-aligned
movement, which forcefully endorses Iran’s right to enrich Uranium, in accord
with the non-proliferation treaty (NPT). But they are not part of the world, since
they do not reflexively accept U.S. orders.
We might tarry for a moment to ask whether there is any solution to the U.S./Iran
confrontation over nuclear weapons. Here is one idea: (1) Iran should have the
 right to develop nuclear energy, but not weapons, in accord with the NPT.
(2) A nuclear weapons-free zone should be established in the region, including Iran,
Israel and U.S. forces deployed there. (3) The U.S. should accept the NPT. (4)
The U.S. should end threats against Iran, and turn to diplomacy.
The proposals are not original. These are the preferences of the overwhelming
majority of Americans, and also Iranians, in polls by World Public Opinion, which
found that Americans and Iranians agree on basic issues. At a forum at the Johns
Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies when the polls were released
 a year ago, Joseph Cirincione, senior vice president for national security and
international policy at the Center for American Progress, said the polls showed
“the common sense of both the American people and the Iranian people, [who]
seem to be able to rise above the rhetoric of their own leaders to find
common sense
solutions to some of the most crucial questions” facing the two nations,
favoring pragmatic, diplomatic solutions to their differences. The results
suggest that if the U.S. and Iran were functioning democratic societies,
this very dangerous confrontation could probably be resolved peaceably.

Perhaps the ideologues should simply tell the young that the church should
intervene in every aspect of our lives. It may be coming to an American state near you:

Education officials in the US state of Texas have adopted new guidelines to the
school curriculum, which critics say will politicise teaching.
The changes include teaching that the UN could be a threat to American freedom,
and that the Founding Fathers may not have intended a complete separation of
church and state.
Critics say the changes are ideological and distort history.
However, proponents argue they are redressing a liberal bias in education.
Analysts say Texas, with five million schoolchildren, wields substantial influence
on school curriculums across the US.
The BBC’s Rajesh Mirchandani in Los Angeles says publishers of textbooks used
nationally often print what Texas wants to teach.
Jefferson out
Students in Texas will now be taught the benefits of US free-market economics and
how government taxation can harm economic progress.
They will study how American ideals benefit the world but organisations such
as the
UN could be a threat to personal freedom.
And Thomas Jefferson has been dropped from a list of enlightenment thinkers in
the world-history curriculum, despite being one of the Founding Fathers who is
credited with developing the idea that church and state should be separate.

Following the much-discussed essay in the New York Review of Books on “saving”
liberal Zionism, here’s the relatively liberal Zionist Forward newspaper in an
editorial (and note the inability to take real responsibility for decades of Zionist
backing for utterly inhumane policies in the occupied territories):

Can you be a liberal and a Zionist today? In a long and thoughtful essay in
the New York Review of Books, Peter Beinart accurately describes how and
why so many young American Jews are becoming alienated from Israel and
blames the American Jewish establishment for its lock-step support of the
Israeli government’s current policies and attitudes. His provocative argument
has fostered a robust online conversation, as you’d expect, but one question
posed by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg caught our eye. After lamenting how
“claustrophobic” he feels in confronting the subject, Goldberg asks:
“Who else is still out there arguing that you can be liberal and Zionist at the same
time, meaning, pro-Israel and anti-occupation?”
Well, we are.
Beinart’s essay is alarmist to a fault, and, in our opinion, doesn’t take into
account
the responsibility that Palestinians and the entire Arab world bear in further
isolating
Israel and sometimes leaving it no choice but to, say, build a security barrier to
protect its citizens. His central thesis, though, seems sadly true: “For several
decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their
liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many
young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.”
But the task of reconciling this tension between love for Israel and attachment to
traditional liberal values such as human rights, religious pluralism, equal citizenship
and territorial compromise has not been abandoned. It is being fully explored on
our pages and in our blogs, in works by J.J. Goldberg, Leonard Fein, Yossi Alpher,
Jay Michaelson and many others. More broadly, the wish to resolve the tension
has fueled political movements such as J Street, and myriad efforts on the religious
and cultural scene, here and in Israel, to express those liberal values in non-traditional
venues and idioms.
If young American Jews are disengaging from Israel — or connecting to
it from a more politically right-wing, religiously Orthodox perspective — the
fault lies not only with AIPAC and other organizations that too often confuse
 dissent with disloyalty. Responsibility also lies with a more potent
establishment: the parents, schools and synagogues who should be teaching
the next generation to speak Hebrew, practice ritual, grapple with Jewish text
and access a tradition built on dialogue and debate.
To be a fully realized 21st century Jew, one must engage with Israel in some
fashion. But too many families and communities have failed to provide the tools
to do that in a meaningful way, substituting easy rhetoric for the hard task of real
commitment. Young people see through that sleight-of-hand and either search for a
more authentic version of Judaism in the growing attraction to Orthodoxy, or merely
shrug and walk away.
For those who believe that “liberal Zionism” isn’t an outdated oxymoron, but a
cause to be nurtured, Beinart’s essay was another reminder of the challenge that
lies ahead. But it need not be a lonely one.