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It’s South Africa all over again

Who says the increasingly vocal campaign to highlight Israel’s “normalisation” efforts isn’t gathering steam?

When well-organized hecklers disrupted a recent London performance by the Jerusalem Quartet, the protest resonated far beyond Wigmore Hall, the city’s famous and much loved lunchtime place of pilgrimage for music lovers seeking a break from the hubbub of central London.
Not only did the disturbance cause the BBC to pull the plug on its nationwide live broadcast of the lunchtime recital; it sparked a new round of increasingly heated debates about the legitimacy of political demonstrations targeting Israel’s “cultural ambassadors” abroad, by protesters seeking to publicize alleged war crimes and human rights violations by the Jewish state.
Since the March 29 Wigmore protest, moreover, a landmark legal ruling elsewhere in the United Kingdom — arising from a previous demonstration against the quartet two years ago — is likely to further embolden those behind such actions.
In an April 8 ruling, a court in Edinburgh, Scotland, cleared five pro-Palestinian activists of racism, dismissing charges that they were guilty of racially aggravated conduct against members of the quartet.
The case dates to an August 2008 concert at the Edinburgh International Festival that hecklers disrupted repeatedly in protest against Israel’s blockade of Gaza, occupation of the West Bank and the musicians’ alleged links to the Israeli military.
State prosecutors had claimed that using this venue to protest against Israel and Israelis showed “malice and ill will” toward the quartet because of the musicians’ membership in a racial group, rendering the protest racist.
But after hearing a full transcript of the incident from a BBC recording of the concert, the presiding legal official (known as a “Sheriff” in this branch of Scottish law) ruled that the charges were disproportionate and failed to meet the test of racial abuse. He ruled the prosecution was a clear breach of the right to protest.
That it was the Jerusalem Quartet’s luck to be the target of high-profile protests in both cases is no small irony: The group’s name and its members’ past national service as musicians in the Israel Defense Forces notwithstanding, only one of the four lives in Israel today. And two are members and section leaders of the West-Eastern Divan — the youth orchestra co-founded by Edward Said, the late anti-Zionist, Palestinian-American scholar and activist, and by Daniel Barenboim, the Argentine-Jewish pianist and conductor.
The orchestra, based in Spain, is composed of musicians from Israel and of Arabs from across the Middle East, along with others from the region, and is conceived, in Barenboim’s words, “as a project against ignorance [where] people get to know the other, to understand what the other thinks and feels, without necessarily agreeing with it… a platform where the two sides can disagree and not resort to knives.”
“I don’t really know how to respond to these people or the misinformation they have been spreading,” said Kyril Zlotnikov, the quartet’s cellist, of the protesters. The musician, who was born in Minsk, Belarus, and is now based in Portugal, added: “I am an ambassador for my country in the same way that any musician from Britain, for example, is an ambassador for their country. Britain is like other countries in the world that have done some terrible things, but also some amazing good things.”
But a statement that the group released right after the Wigmore incident appeared to be less than accurate. “We are Israeli citizens, but have no connection with or patronage by the Government,” the statement said. In fact, publicity for the group lists Israel’s Foreign Ministry as a sponsor or co-sponsor of numerous appearances by the quartet, including on a European tour from 2005 to 2006 and a tour of the United States from 2007 to 2008. The group’s 2009 Australian tour was supported, in part, by an $8,000 Israeli Foreign Ministry grant, according to The Age, an Australian daily.
In that same statement, the two members who play with the West-Eastern Divan added, “It is destructive of our attempts to foster Israel-Arab relations for us to be the subject of demonstrations of the kind we suffered the other day.”
“So what?” say supporters of the protest in the U.K., increasingly a European center for pro-Palestinian activism. Those involved in other manifestations of the same movement scored bigger publicity coups by securing arrest warrants from lower courts ahead of visits by Israeli military and political figures.
The Jerusalem Quartet should be boycotted, they say, for reasons such as their role as cultural ambassadors for Israel, the fact that their tours have been sponsored by the Israeli government and because they have enjoyed an official status in the military as distinguished IDF musicians.
“Their whole career has intertwined with the Israeli army and support for Zionist institutions. That is why they were targeted,” said Tony Greenstein, who was one of the Wigmore Hall protesters.

Threats to shut down Haaretz and silence any questions

An important by Jonathan Cook in The National that reveals the depressing state of intellectual debate in Israel. If you aren’t for the state, get out of the country, so the thinking goes. Dissent is frowned upon, to put it mildly:

An Arab member of the Israeli parliament is demanding that a newspaper be allowed to publish an investigative report that was suppressed days before Israel attacked Gaza in winter 2008.

The investigation by Uri Blau, who has been in hiding since December to avoid arrest, concerned Israeli preparations for the impending assault on Gaza, known as Operation Cast Lead.
In a highly unusual move, according to reports in the Israeli media, the army ordered the Haaretz newspaper to destroy all copies of an edition that included Mr Blau’s investigation after it had already gone to press and been passed by the military censor. The article was never republished.
Mr Blau has gone underground in London after the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police, demanded he return to Israel to hand back hundreds of classified documents they claim are in his possession and to reveal his sources.
Haneen Zoubi, an MP who previously headed an Israeli media-monitoring organisation, said it was “outrageous” that the suppressed report was still secret so long after the Gaza attack. She is to table a parliamentary question to Ehud Barak, the defence minister, today demanding to know why the army suppressed the article and what is preventing its publication now. Mr Barak must respond within 21 days.
She said publication of the article was important both because Israel had been widely criticised for killing many hundreds of civilians in its three-week assault on Gaza, and because subsequent reports suggested that Israeli commanders sought legal advice months before the operation to manipulate the accepted definitions of international law to make it easier to target civilians.
“There must be at least a strong suspicion that Mr Blau’s article contains vital information, based on military documentation, warning of Israeli army intentions to commit war crimes,” she said in an interview.
“If so, then there is a public duty on Haaretz to publish the article. If not, then there is no reason for the minister to prevent publication after all this time.”
Ms Zoubi’s call yesterday followed mounting public criticism of Haaretz for supporting Mr Blau by advising him to stay in hiding and continuing to pay his salary. In chat forums and talkback columns, the reporter has been widely denounced as a traitor. Several MPs have called for Haaretz to be closed down or boycotted.
A Haaretz spokeswoman refused to comment, but a journalist there said a “fortress mentality” had developed at the newspaper. “We’ve all been told not to talk to anyone about the case,” he said. “There’s absolute paranoia that the paper is going to be made to suffer because of the Blau case.”
Amal Jamal, a professor at Tel Aviv University who teaches a media course to professional journalists, said he was concerned with the timing of the Shin Bet’s campaign against Mr Blau. He observed that they began interviewing the reporter about his sources and documents last summer as publication neared of the Goldstone report, commissioned by the United Nations and which embarrassed Israel by alleging it had perpetrated war crimes in Gaza.
“The goal in this case appears to be not only to intimidate journalists but also to delegitimise certain kinds of investigations concerning security issues, given the new climate of sensitivity in Israel following the Goldstone report.”
He added that Mr Blau, who had quickly acquired a reputation as Israel’s best investigative reporter, was “probably finished” as a journalist in Israel.
Shraga Elam, an award-winning Israeli reporter, said Mr Blau’s suppressed article might also have revealed the aims of a widely mentioned but unspecified “third phase” of the Gaza attack, following the initial air strikes and a limited ground invasion, that was not implemented.
On Monday, an MP with the centrist Kadima Party, Yulia Shamal-Berkovich, called for Haaretz to be closed down, backing a similar demand from fellow MP Michael Ben-Ari, of the right-wing National Union.
She accused Haaretz management of having “chosen to hide” over the case and blamed it for advising Mr Blau to remain abroad. She said the newspaper “must make sure the materials that are in his possession are returned. If Haaretz fails to do so, its newspaper licence should be revoked without delay.”
Another Kadima MP, Yisrael Hasson, a former deputy head of the Shin Bet, this week urged Haaretz readers to boycott the newspaper until Mr Blau was fired.
A petition calling on the Shin Bet to end its threat to charge Mr Blau with espionage has attracted the signatures of several prominent journalists in Israel.
“We believe the Blau case is unique and are concerned this unique case will create a dangerous precedent,” their letter states. “Until now, prosecution authorities have not sought to try reporters for the offence of holding classified information, an offence most of us are guilty of in one way or another.”
Media coverage of the case in Israel has been largely hostile to Mr Blau. Yuval Elbashan, a lawyer, wrote in Haaretz this week that most of his fellow military reporters and analysts had in the past few days abandoned their colleague and proven “their loyalty to the [security] system as the lowliest of its servants”.
One, Yossi Yehoshua, a military correspondent with the country’s largest-circulation newspaper, Yedioth Aharonoth, is due to testify next month against Anat Kamm, a former soldier revealed as one of Mr Blau’s sources and who is accused of espionage.
He published several additional reports for Haaretz in 2008 and 2009 that severely embarrassed senior military commanders by showing they had issued orders that intentionally violated court rulings, including to execute Palestinians who could be safely apprehended.

Whatever you do, make sure you keep on saying that Israel is a democracy

Throughout the current Anat Kamm case in Israel – where predictably Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick calls the paper behind the story, Haaretz, a friend of Israel’s enemies and “supporting treason” – Zionists in the West still cling onto the same old myths. Take the New York Forward:

There is a larger issue here: the efficacy of targeted assassinations, and whether the benefit of this practice outweighs the possibility it would, instead, spur on more acts of violence and revenge. This is the kind of issue that Israel, the only true democracy in the Middle East, ought to debate fully and freely. Holding government accountable is the media’s primary responsibility, and in the end can strengthen the bond between citizens and their leaders, a bond that now seems ever more dangerously frayed.

It’s like a mantra. Israel is the region’s only democracy. For Jews. Despite years of human rights reports that finds systemic discrimination against Arabs and others in Israel proper (let along the occupation), it’s still beyond many Jews in the West to acknowledge that Israel isn’t a democracy, it’s an ethnocentric ghetto.

ee: www.antonyloewenstein.com

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