A.LOEWENSTEIN ONLINE NEWSLETTER

NOVANEWS


Young Australian Jews taken to Hebron and asked to smell freedom
05 Jul 2010

While Jewish settlers bleat about human rights – not of Palestinians, of course, but themselves – we learn that a Birthright trip has visited the illegal settlement of Hebron. Australians, no less, talking about how much they love being there and the connection to the Jewish people. Nothing about Palestinians:
Refugees are sent back to an uncertain fate
05 Jul 2010

The London Independent on what really happens when the UK deports failed asylum-seekers.

 

Insulated Jews turn away from actions down the road
 05 Jul 2010

Joseph Dana on another day protesting in the West Bank and then returning to Israel:

Often the subject of the West Bank will end conversations in Tel Aviv bars. It is a sad reality of this country. My reality of living in Tel Aviv but spending most of my time in the West Bank reinforces a feeling that the disconnect between the reality of Israeli’s position in the West Bank and her desire to live a normal life is so far out of sync that only something truly revolutionary or tragic could break this never ending cycle of madness.

 

Israel needs a new salesman and damn fast
 05 Jul 2010

Straight from the mouth of the Zionist lobby to the Israeli Prime Minister; get your message right cos America ain’t buying your soiled product:

The Israel Project (TIP), an American Hasbara outfit, commissioned Republican political consultant Frank Luntz to examine the effectiveness of Israel’s public diplomacy in the US on the Flotilla debacle. TIP gave the memo to the Prime Minister’s Office, where someone promptly leaked it to Chico Menashe, Channel Ten TV News diplomatic affairs correspondent.
Luntz’s findings are grim. Here’s a summary:

  1. 56% of Americans agree with the claim that there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza;
  2. 43% of Americans agree with the claim that people in Gaza are starving;
  3. [Only] 34% of Americans support the Israeli operation against the Flotilla;

[Only] 20% of Americans “felt support” for Israel following announcement of easing of Gaza closure.

 

Voices Beyond Walls inside Gaza
 04 Jul 2010

American Nitin Sawhney – writer, activist and human rights worker – has spent considerable time in Gaza over the last six months.
He’s not a journalist but a teacher, aiming to bring to Palestinians trapped inside the Strip the media tools to tell their stories. It’s an inspiring story that deserves wide support.
Here’s his latest report:

Voices Beyond Walls conducted its first ever 3-day Training of Trainers (ToT) course on participatory digital media and storytelling with youth at the Canaan Institute of New Pedagogy in Gaza City from June 28-30, 2010. The ToT was led by Dr. Nitin Sawhney, with assistance from Asmaa Al Ghoul, an award-winning writer and journalist in Gaza, and Nasser El Sayyed, the lead coordinator for Les Enfants, Le Jeu et l’Education (EJE) in Gaza.
While we expected around 20-25 participants, we were surprised to see around 36 young men and woman coming to attend all 3 days of the course. They all had prior experience working on creative programs with youth in local community centers including Canaan, Tamer Institute, Sharek Youth Forum, Right to Play, and the EJE woman and children’s centers in Gaza refugee camps like Al Abraj, Jabaliya and Rafah. Many even had experience with photo, video and drama techniques and contributed to the critical dialogue in the sessions quite well.

 

BDS would only empower Israel’s nationalist right
 04 Jul 2010

The importance of the BDS against Israel is regularly covered on this site.
Here’s a counter view, by Zvi Bar’el in Haaretz (essentially arguing that the world should not really do anything about Palestine but hope and pray?)

How charming the boycott cry is. Boycott Israeli universities, Israeli products from the settlements, flowers grown in Israel. When this call comes from Israelis, it reflects a great deal of despair, and stems from goodwill, of course. It’s an enchanting formula: They’ll boycott Israel, the public outcry will reach the government and the latter, being democratic, will have to obey the will of the people. How could they not have thought of it sooner?
They did think about it. That is exactly the formula behind the sanctions against Iran. Economic isolation, frozen bank accounts, senior officials not being able to travel abroad – then the Iranian people will wake up and change their regime, or at least its policies. Iran has been under sanctions for 30 years, and the people, wonder of wonders, have not risen up. They protest, but not because of the sanctions; because of the regime’s suppression.
This remedy was also tried with Iraq. For 12 years the Iraqi people groaned under sanctions and dictatorship, but did not rise up against the great military leader who ruled their bedrooms. In the end there was no choice but war. Sanctions did not help.
And what about South Africa? The ostensibly successful sanctions and boycott, which led to the regime’s fall? Sanctions – first military – were imposed on South Africa as early as the start of the 1960s. Then in the mid-1970s, they were extended to oil exports, and finally came the widescale sanctions of the mid-1980s. But apartheid was eliminated only in the mid-1990s, and even then it was not due to sanctions alone; in fact, in those years South Africa experienced economic growth and its exports increased 26 percent. President P.W. Botha’s response to the blacks was no less vindictive than the West’s desire to impose sanctions. Botha wanted to prove that outside intervention would not impact apartheid.
Israel has adopted the same policy. It has blockaded Gaza to spur the inhabitants to rise up against the Hamas regime, in order to achieve politically what the Israel Defense Forces could not achieve militarily. But three years of blockade, four years of fighting Hamas, and even the destructive Operation Cast Lead did not do the trick. The people of Gaza did not rise up, and the Hamas regime only grew stronger.
Anywhere sanctions are imposed – from Iraq to Iran, from Gaza to Pakistan – nationalist and radical forces actually have become stronger. Even the intellectuals who oppose the regimes have found themselves forced to defend them from outside intervention. Nationalism, or more correctly, extreme nationalism, rejoices.
People calling for a boycott of Israel or its institutions and products have given up on change from within. But what is worse, the call is motivated by the same logic that guides government policy in Gaza, and it is just as mistaken. After all, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that the Israeli government or the public will behave differently than Gazans or Iranians.
The fact that Israel is a democracy is no guarantee. Proof of this lies in the collective behavior in the face of Turkey’s attack on Israel and the threat of military sanctions. Cancelling vacations in Antalya, protests and boycotting Turkish goods have become symbols of the “just struggle” against the bad guys.
If Israeli scholars are banned by universities in London, that’s not so terrible. They can still go to Pennsylvania, and if they are banned there, they can still correspond and publish online; what’s more important is that foreigners don’t dictate policy “to us.” If now, even before a boycott, lecturers have to think twice about what they say lest extreme nationalists mark them, then under sanctions, some elected officials may ensure such academics are immediately fired. In any case, people waiting for an academic uprising amidst a boycott should have their heads examined.
Who else can take part in the civil disobedience in the boycott proponents’ fantasy? Farmers? Students? Travelers? Businesspeople? How many of them will wrap themselves in the Israeli flag to show the world we do not give in to sanctions? That will be the finest hour of the right wing, the “nationalist camp,” fascism. Boycott becomes them.

 

How to report on a descent into African hell
 04 Jul 2010

My following review appeared in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald:

A reporter puts ethics aside when he becomes involved in a bloody rebellion in Liberia.
MY FRIEND THE MERCENARY
James Brabazon
Text Publishing, 304pp, $34.95

Some journalists live under the delusion that they are objective creatures, unable to be bought or sold and committed to telling the truth. Many strive for this goal but others take sides out of necessity or choice.
In war zones, lines are deliberately blurred, with Western governments routinely working with the most brutal individuals in the name of liberation and victory. The role of supposedly independent reporters in these situations should be clear: victims are given precedence.
Witness one of the finest conflict journalists, Nir Rosen, embedded with the Taliban in 2008 (and the fierce criticism he received for spending time with the “enemy”). His task was to understand the other side, to hear why so many Afghans and foreign fighters were determined to battle the invaders.
Sometimes, clear ethics take a back seat to a rollicking good adventure. The British journalist James Brabazon descended into hell in Liberia in 2002 by striving to document the civil war. The political struggle between President Charles Taylor (now facing war crimes charges in The Hague) and the rebel Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy was heating up and soon resulted in extreme violence. “I had been to war before, several times, but nothing like Liberia,” he told Vice magazine in June. “That was the first time I had people trying to kill me at close range.”
Brabazon writes with a pace and passion that reflect a journalist obsessed with the story. After coming down with amoebic dysentery, he is close to broken, and death stares him in the face:
“Battered by near-constant rains, the terrain was sodden. We passed through one last village, whose dilapidated houses hardly kept the encroaching jungle at bay. Deserted, it reeked of putrid flesh. We marched in silence, and out of the shadow of a decrepit hut thatched with torn raffia hobbled a child covered with infected burns. Her limbs were swollen with gangrene. She stood and watched us pass her. The stench was unbreathable. No one stopped. No one spoke. We carried on in silence and left her there to die.”
He travelled with a small camera crew and bodyguard, Nick du Toit, a former South African special forces colonel. The two men soon became close friends and the journalist started hearing details of an impending coup in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea led by a former SAS officer, Simon Mann, and Mark Thatcher, son of the former British prime minister.
The die was cast; the writer planned to be witness to a criminal act of sabotage and robbery.
The attempted coup was a spectacular disaster. Thatcher escaped jail but Mann and Du Toit spent years in the harshest prisons in Africa. Du Toit, with whom Brabazon formed a lasting friendship, told London’s Observer in mid-June that the coup attempt only went ahead because he had been assured that both the British and South African governments were behind it. Brabazon escaped prison by a stroke of good luck.
The appeal of this intriguing book is the constant internal dialogue undertaken by the writer that displays his unease with how to report a story in which he is directly involved. For example, when Britain’s Channel 4 asks him to refer to Du Toit as a “mercenary”, he initially refuses out of loyalty to his friend. He acknowledges the impossibility of being objective when examining the story but his honesty is refreshing; he doesn’t claim to be anything he is not.
Brabazon paints Du Toit, now working for a vehicle sales company in Yemen, as a fascinating contradiction. He is brash and arrogant but also humble with a growing affection for African democracy (as long as he can make money in the process). “You have to get rid of the dictators,” he tells the author, seemingly oblivious to the fact that his actions on the continent (during South Africa’s apartheid and beyond) contributed to the maintenance of a dysfunctional political reality.
“The unpalatable truth,” Brabazon writes, “is that adversity breeds friendships that transcend moral judgments.” He still regards his “mercenary” as a friend.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *