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A revealing story told to American journalist Alexander Cockburn:

A friend of mine gave a good parody of the servile posture of the U.S. government and press: “I think,” he wrote to me, “that matters are close to the point where if Hillary Clinton and a group of senior American officials were meeting the Israeli leaders for negotiations, and Netanyahu expressed his displeasure at the American positions by pulling out a gun and shooting her dead, then having the entire American delegation beaten to death by his security guards, there would probably be a small item buried in the next days’ American newspapers that due to conflict with the Israelis, Obama had decided to nominate a new Secretary of State.”

A piece in today’s Murdoch Australian highlights the almost unstoppable movement towards isolating Israel until it recognises the error of its occupying ways. Not much evidence that many Israelis do believe that, but give them time:
The piece is by Michael Shaik:

“MICHAEL, she’s dead.”
It was March 16, 2003. The huge anti-war protests of the month before had failed to deflect the Coalition of the Willing from its imminent invasion of Iraq.
In Palestine, Israel was busily breaking the back of the second intifada, as the pitifully armed resistance retaliated with suicide bombings.
In a desperate bid to resurrect the popular non-violent movement that had been smashed in the first weeks of the intifada, Palestinian leaders had requested the assistance of internationals whose presence, it was believed, would limit the amount of force Israel could use against protesters.
While the US university student Rachel Corrie worked to obstruct Israel’s demolition of 1200 houses along Gaza’s border with Egypt, I was working as the media co-ordinator for the International Solidarity Movement in the West Bank village of Beit Sahour.
Rachel had phoned me to report that one of her colleagues had been picked up in a bulldozer blade and thrown into some barbed wire. Then another activist had phoned to tell me that she had been run over. Then that she was in an ambulance and that her skin was turning blue. Then that she was dead.
Beit Sahour is in a valley where the archangel is believed to have announced Christ’s birth to the shepherds.
In 1997, the people of the village had camped in the forest of Abu Ghaneim overlooking the site of the miracle to prevent its seizure by Israel. Today, the settlement of Har Homa towers over Beit Sahour like a monument to the futility of non-violent resistance.
In 2006, I joined a group of peace activists who had been deported from Palestine to discuss ways in which we could help from the outside. At the beginning of the year, the Israeli government had announced that it would “put the Palestinians on a diet” to punish them for voting for Hamas in parliamentary elections and it was quickly decided that our best course was to try to “break the siege of Gaza” by bringing in supplies by sea.
In August 2008, we had our first success when two wooden fishing boats breached the blockade carrying a cargo of hearing aids for children whose eardrums had been damaged by the sonic booms caused by Israeli jets.
Gradually, our successes accumulated, drawing more people into the movement. Yet the turning point came during last year’s assault on Gaza when Israel systematically destroyed its factories, sewerage infrastructure, residential buildings, farmland and tens of thousands of farm animals. According to Amnesty International, the effect of the assault and blockade has been to “push the crisis to catastrophic levels”.
This year, UN Gaza chief John Ging called upon the international community “to shoulder its responsibility on this issue” by “sending ships to break the siege”.
Despite the mission’s failure, outrage over Israel’s attack on an aid convoy in international waters has forced its apologists to work overtime to explain how a blockade that bars tinned meat, cement, shoes and schoolbooks from entering Gaza, that has reduced 61 per cent of Gaza’s households to “food insecurity” and that has caused widespread stunting among its children, is vital to Israel’s security.
This represents a significant embarrassment for Israel, but for people living in refugee camps, non-violence is a means, not an end in itself.
On Saturday, Federal Labor MP Michael Danby announced that he and the leaders of Australia’s Israel lobby had met Kevin Rudd and Foreign Minister Stephen Smith at The Lodge and gained assurances that the government would not be calling for an end to the blockade nor a UN inquiry but would only support an “independent” Israeli inquiry into its attack on the ships.
Yet while Danby and his associates congratulate themselves on their power to shape Australian foreign policy, there may still be grounds for optimism.
With the possible exception of the invasion of Iraq, the West’s acquiescence to the siege of Gaza represents its greatest moral and political blunder of the modern era.
It pauperises Gaza’s population and strengthens Hamas (which taxes goods smuggled through tunnels from Egypt) while forcing Gaza into Iran’s embrace and providing a priceless example of Western duplicity for jihadi propagandists.
Like Guernica in the 1930s, Gaza has captured the world’s imagination as something larger than itself: a grotesque laboratory for experiments in human suffering and a symbol of the international community’s failure to live up to its professed ideals.
Amid the tragedy and media war of the past week, it is easy to overlook the historic significance of what has been achieved.
Seven years after a girl in a red jacket was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer, her memory is being carried forward by a Nobel peace laureate and former UN assistant secretary-general aboard a cargo vessel bearing her name.
Last weekend the Pixies joined Gil Scott-Heron, Carlos Santana and Elvis Costello in cancelling performances in Israel, recalling the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa.
While none of these events will free Palestine, they certainly represent the coming of age of a global movement that challenges both Israel and an international community whose business-as-usual diplomacy has served to normalise one of the great crimes of the 21st century.
Michael Shaik was a founder of the Free Gaza Movement

Zionist nationalism is out of control. Firs we read, in a rather comical way, that some right-wing Jewish groups want to rename Turkish coffee to, well, something else because Ankara is a terrorist state etc.
But this is far more serious:

The Knesset’s House Committee on Monday recommended revoking the privileges of Israeli Arab MK Hanin Zuabi,  after she participated in last week’s Gaza-bound aid flotilla which resulted in an IDF raid that killed nine activists.
The decision was passed by a majority of seven to one, with MK Ilan Gilon of Meretz opposing.
The Knesset committee recommended rescinding from Zuabi three key privileges usually granted to Knesset Members. One is the privilege to exit the country – which is supposed to prevent Zoabi from fleeing Israel if she commits a felony or has debts in Israel.
Another privilege is carrying a diplomatic passport, which according to the Knesset’s legal adviser, is a privilege that does not grant diplomatic immunity so revoking it would not make it more difficult for Zuabi to fulfill her duties.
The third privilege is the right to have the Knesset cover litigation fees of an MK if he or she is put on trial.
The revocation of Zuabi’s privileges is conditional on the approval of the Knesset plenum.

Too many in the mainstream media simply report Israeli talking points on the humanitarian situation in Gaza. People may not be starving in the streets but every human rights group in the world claims the people there are in desperate need of assistance.
So what do many in the American press do?

Gripping testimony from Al-Jazeera’s Jamal Elshayyal:

Firstly I must apologise for taking so long to update my blog. The events of the past few days have been hectic to say the least, and I am still trying to come to grips with many of the things that have happened.
It was this time last week that I was on the top deck of the Mavi Marmara, and first spotted Israeli warships at a distance, as they approached the humanitarian flotilla.  Little did I know how deadly and bloody the events that soon unfolded would be.
What I will write in this entry is fact, every letter of it, none of it is opinion, none of it is analysis, I will leave that to you, the reader.
After spotting the warships at a distance, (at roughly 11pm) the organisers called for passengers to wear their life vests and remain indoors as they monitored the situation. The naval warships together with helicopters remained at a distance for several hours.
At 2am local time the organisers informed me that they had re-routed the ship, as far away from Israel as possible, as deep into international waters as they could. They did not want a confrontation with the Israeli military, at least not by night.
Just after 4am local time, the Israeli military attacked the ship, in international waters. It was an unprovoked attack. Tear gas was used, sound grenades were launched, and rubber coated steel bullets were fired from almost every direction.
Dozens of speed boats carrying about 15-20 masked Israeli soldiers, armed to the teeth surrounded the Mavi Marmara which was carrying 600 or so unarmed civilians. Two helicopters at a time hovered above the vessel. Commandos on board the choppers joined the firing, using live ammunition, before any of the soldiers had descended onto the ship.
Two unarmed civilians were killed just metres away from me. Dozens of unarmed civilians were injured right before my eyes.
One Israeli soldier, armed with a large automatic gun and a side pistol, was overpowered by several passengers. They disarmed him. They did not use his weapons or fire them; instead they threw his weapons over board and into the sea.
After what seemed at the time as roughly 30 minutes, passengers on board the ship raised a white flag. The Israeli army continued to fire live ammunition. The ships organisers made a loud speaker announcement saying they have surrendered the ship. The Israeli army continued to fire live ammunition.
I was the last person to leave the top deck.
Below, inside the sleeping quarters, all the passengers had gathered. There was shock, anger, fear, hurt, chaos.
Doctors ran in all directions trying to treat the wounded, blood was on the floor, tears ran down people’s faces, cries of pain and mourning could be heard everywhere. Death was in the air.
Three critically injured civilians were being treated on the ground in the reception area of the ship. Their clothes soaked in blood. Passengers stood by watching in shock, some read out verses of the Qur’an to calm them, doctors worked desperately to save them.
Several announcements were made on the load speakers in Hebrew, Arabic and English – “This is a message to the Israeli army, we have surrendered. We are unarmed. We have critically injured people. Please come and take them. We will not attack.”
There was no response.
One of the passengers, a member of the Israeli Parliament, wrote a sign in Hebrew, reading the exact same thing; she held it together with a white flag and approached the windows where the Israeli soldiers were standing outside. They pointed their laser guided guns to her head, ordering her to go away.
A British citizen tried the same sign –  this time holding a British Flag and taking the sign to a different set of windows and different set of soldiers. They responded in the same manner.
Three hours later, all three of the injured were pronounced dead. The Israeli soldiers who refused to allow them treatment succeeded where their colleagues had earlier failed when they targeted these three men with bullets.
At around 8am the Israeli army entered the sleeping quarters. They handcuffed the passengers. I was thrown onto the ground, my hands tied behind my back, I couldn’t move an inch.
I was taken to the top deck where the other passengers were, forced to sit on my knees under the burning sun.
One passenger had his hands tied so tight his wrists were all sorts of colours. When he requested that the cuffs be loosened, an Israeli soldier tightened them even more. He let out a scream that sent chills down my body.
I requested to go to the bathroom, I was prevented. Instead the Israeli soldier told me to urinate where I was and in my own clothes. Three or four hours later I was allowed to go.
I was then marched, together with the other passengers, back to the sleeping quarters. The place was ransacked, its image like that of the aftermath of an earthquake.
I remained on the ship, seated, without any food or drink, barring three sips of water, for more than 24 hours. Throughout this time, Israeli soldiers had their guns pointed at us. Their hands on the trigger. For more than 24 hours.
I was then taken off the ship at Ashdod where I was asked to sign a deportation orde. It claimed that I had entered Israel illegally and agreed to be deported. I told the officer that I, in fact, had not entered Israel but that the Israeli army had kidnapped me from international waters and brought me to Israel against my will; therefore I could not sign this document.
My passport was taken from me. I was told that I would go to jail.
Only then were my hands freed, I spent more than 24 hours with my hands cuffed behind my back, with nothing to eat, and barely anything to drink.
Upon arrival at the prison I was put in a cell with three other passengers. The cell was roughly 12ft by 9ft.
I spent more than 24 hours in jail. I was not allowed to make a single phone call.
The British consulate did not come and see me. I did not see a lawyer.
There was no hot water for a shower.
The only meal was frozen bread and some potatoes.
The only reason I believe I was released was because the Turkish prisoners refused to leave until and unless the other nationalities (those whose consulates had not come and released them) were set free.
I was taken to Ben Gurion airport. When I asked for my passport, the Israeli official presented me with a piece of paper and said “congratulations this is your new passport”. I replied “you must be joking, you have my passport”.  The Israeli official’s response: “sue me”.
There I was asked again to sign a deportation order. Again I refused.
I was put on a plane headed to Istanbul.
Masked Israeli soldiers and commandos took me from international waters.
Uniformed Israeli officials locked me behind bars.
The British government did not lift a finger to help me, till this day I have not seen or heard from a British official.
The Israeli government stole my passport.
The Israeli government stole my lap top, two cameras, 3 phones, $1500 and all my possessions.
My government, the British government has not even acknowledged my existence.
I was kidnapped by Israel. I was forsaken by my country.

I sent the following (now unpublished) letter to the Sydney Morning Herald:

Israel’s raid on the Gaza flotilla has been almost universally condemned but Paul Sheehan (Beware the words of a wolf dressed in sheikh’s clothing, 7 June) asserts that Muslim fundamentalists, the Left and Greens have formed an unholy alliance to destroy the Jewish state. Increasing global opposition to Israel’s behaviour in the West Bank and Gaza is primarily due to the country’s blatant ignoring of international law. Just this week famed British writer Ian Banks called for a cultural and educational boycott of Israel to “convince Israel of its moral degradation and ethical isolation, preferably by simply having nothing to do with this outlaw state.”
The Australian Greens are the only major Australian political party that aren’t afraid to demand Israel comply with humanitarian law.

I’m pleased to see my friend and co-founder of Indpendent Australian Jewish Voices (IAJV), Peter Slezak, with a piece in today’s Sydney Morning Herald on the importance of Jewish dissent.
These are the kinds of debates the Jewish community are so afraid to have. By defending all Israeli actions, they are blind to the reality of what Israel has become. History won’t forget:

The Mavi Marmara victims are the most visible of many unarmed international solidarity workers and Palestinian civilians killed by Israeli military forces at peaceful demonstrations. Charges that Israel’s lethal commando assault violated international law are far from the most serious it faces, after wars on Lebanon in 1982 and 2006, and Gaza in 2008-09. The lame official excuses for the assault invite the question: what does it take for “supporters” of Israel to protest that enough is enough?
Jewish leaders and their community follow Israeli official script: the raid on the unarmed civilians of the flotilla was in self-defence, just as pasta, coriander and children’s toys entering Gaza pose an existential threat to the Jewish state. The collective punishment of Gaza is merely putting them “on a diet”. George Orwell would have been impressed by such Newspeak in “defence of the indefensible”.
Apologists claim international outrage towards Israel is evidence of global anti-Semitism, seeking to “delegitimise” the Jewish state. The slur has caused non-Jewish commentators and individuals to avoid public criticism. The Jewish establishment has even sought to discredit human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, though the same criticisms may be found in reports of Israel’s own B’Tselem.

The Mavi Marmara victims are the most visible of many unarmed international solidarity workers and Palestinian civilians killed by Israeli military forces at peaceful demonstrations. Charges that Israel’s lethal commando assault violated international law are far from the most serious it faces, after wars on Lebanon in 1982 and 2006, and Gaza in 2008-09. The lame official excuses for the assault invite the question: what does it take for “supporters” of Israel to protest that enough is enough?
Jewish leaders and their community follow Israeli official script: the raid on the unarmed civilians of the flotilla was in self-defence, just as pasta, coriander and children’s toys entering Gaza pose an existential threat to the Jewish state. The collective punishment of Gaza is merely putting them “on a diet”. George Orwell would have been impressed by such Newspeak in “defence of the indefensible”.
Apologists claim international outrage towards Israel is evidence of global anti-Semitism, seeking to “delegitimise” the Jewish state. The slur has caused non-Jewish commentators and individuals to avoid public criticism. The Jewish establishment has even sought to discredit human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, though the same criticisms may be found in reports of Israel’s own B’Tselem.
 Diaspora Jewish communities and their leadership have not only avoided making public criticism of Israel themselves, but have sought to prevent other Jews speaking out as well. Those who dare, such as the signatories to Independent Australian Jewish Voices, are labelled “self-hating”, “useful idiots”, “kapos” and even “Jews for genocide”. However, if their communities expect uncritical loyalty of Jews to Zionism, they can hardly be surprised if others fail to make the distinction clearly.
The wider public is not mistaken in seeing a conspicuous Jewish silence as condoning whatever the state of Israel does. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates says: “We should be the first to use rhetoric to denounce ourselves and the people close to us, to expose their crimes and save them from immorality.” It is a moral truism, as is the biblical precept about the hypocrite in Matthew 7:”For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged.”
For such reasons, in a recent article in the New York Review of Books, Peter Beinart has charged the diaspora Jewish establishment with being detached from reality, failing to recognise “Israel is becoming (has become) a right-wing, ultra-nationalist country” being abandoned by younger liberal and progressive Jews. As early as 1948, an open letter published in The New York Times signed by Hannah Arendt, Einstein and others warned against the fatal combination of “ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism and a propaganda of racial superiority”.
It is one of history’s ironies that Jews have embraced an essentialist idea of some intrinsic quality constituting their identity and destiny, since they have been perhaps history’s most aggrieved victims of it. Since the position of diaspora Jews has a critical influence on government policies in Israel itself and elsewhere, Beinart poses the question to Jewish leaders: what would Israel’s government have to do to make them scream “no”? Beinart asks: “If the line has not yet been crossed, where is the line?”
The question of Jewish identity and responsibility has been posed acutely by some Jews themselves, those who break ranks – those referred to in Isaac Deutscher’s essay as ”The Non-Jewish Jew”. Among these, Baruch Spinoza (1634-77) is described by Bertrand Russell as “the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers”. For his heresies, he was given the severest punishment, Cherem – permanent excommunication from the 17th century Amsterdam Jewish community.
He notes the paradox that Jewish heretics who transcend Jewry belong to a characteristically Jewish tradition, among the great revolutionaries of modern thought, including Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. To Deutscher’s list we may add Hannah Arendt, the late renegade American historian Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, all reviled by their communities.
“They all went beyond the boundaries of Jewry,” Deutscher says, to transcend their narrowly conceived ethnic identity while remaining attached to it. Such Jewish thinkers embrace a wider, universal, Enlightenment outlook – the tradition of secular, liberalism and humanism. This is the position of the famous Jewish philosopher Marx – not Karl, but Groucho – who quipped “I wouldn’t want to join any club that would have me as a member”.
Do you feel good when your football team wins a game? Do you know any of the players whose success you enjoy and feel you share? Are you proud of being Jewish? Or Irish? Or Australian? What have you done to deserve credit for the achievements of Einstein, Beckett, Bradman or anyone else?
The true heroes in history are the heretics who adopt a critical attitude towards the national symbols and sacred traditions.
Edward Said, the Palestinian intellectual who took students to visit Auschwitz, made the point: “To this terribly important task of representing the collective suffering of your own people … reinforcing its memory, there must be added something else … The task, I believe, is to universalise the crisis, to give greater human scope to what a particular race or nation suffered, to associate that experience with the suffering of others.”
Israel is not the state of its citizens, of whom now 20 per cent are not Jewish, but the state of the Jewish people. The Knesset has considered a bill that would institute a jail sentence for anyone who speaks ”against Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state”. But, as Ariel Sharon explicitly recognised in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, there is a contradiction inherent in attributing these two properties – Jewish and democratic, like green and colourless.
In view of the brutal occupation of the West Bank, inhumane blockade of Gaza, continuing dispossession, injustice and suffering of the Palestinians, Jews might heed Einstein’s prophetic warning in 1955: ”The attitude we adopt towards the Arab minority will provide the real test of our moral standards as a people.”

Peter Slezak is a senior lecturer at the University of NSW’s school of history and philosophy of science.

The increasingly vocal liberal Zionist Peter Beinart on the fear, loathing and anticipation gripping the Israeli government and its American backers:

Netanyahu’s response to the Gaza blockade crisis shows just how out of touch he is with America. Peter Beinart on why Israeli leaders—and their U.S. defenders—need to join the age of Obama.
This week, Elliott Abrams, the former Bush official and noted neoconservative, wrote an essay in the Weekly Standard attacking the Obama administration for not more forcefully defending Israel during the flotilla crisis. Abrams said the White House had joined an anti-Israeli “lynch mob.” Over the course of the article, he used the metaphor six times.
It’s remarkable when you think about it. To Americans with even the slightest degree of racial awareness, “lynch mob” conjures something quite particular: African American men hanging from trees in the post-civil war South. To deploy the metaphor to describe a United Nations resolution that obliquely criticizes Israel is audacious. To deploy it to describe the support for that resolution by America’s first African-American president is downright astonishing. It’s a bit like calling Joe Lieberman’s opposition health-care reform a “pogrom.”
As an Obama official once told me about the Netanyahu team, with amazement, “these guys are actually waiting for President Palin.”

Read this.
Then watch this: