NOVANEWS

• A search of the archives show how little has changed

• Picking apart the New York Times Zionist narrative on the Nakba . . . using the New York Times

• If Israel is the multicultural democracy it claims to be, why is it so afraid of the right of return?

• Desmond Travers on Geo Mitchell: Irish-American Diaspora wanted an end to the troubles, Jewish-American Diaspora hasn’t opened its eyes

• Liberal Tomasky’s advice to Obama: do whatever AIPAC wants

• Tariq Ali speaks tonight in Brooklyn on Arab revolutions

• Krista Tippett’s collapse– she calls rightwing settler Halevi ‘redemptive’

• NYT’s Bronner says Netanyahu demonstrates ‘territorial flexibility’ on the basis of no evidence

• Report: Mitchell resigned because Dennis Ross was biased and working against US interests

• Leslie Gelb says Arab democracy movement must leave Israel alone

A search of the archives show how little has changed

May 17, 2011

Ben White

Yousef Munayyer’s post earlier today have highlighted the weakness in Ethan Bronner’s version of the events in 1947-49, quoting from the reports of the time from the New York Timesitself. Similarly refreshing insights can be found in the archives of other publications. I am currently working on my second book, which will focus on the Palestinian citizens in Israel. Consider this article from Time magazine in 1979, and ask yourself whether extracts like these would be printed today:

Last week the Israeli Cabinet proposed a harsh plan that would empower the government to seize 37,500 acres of Bedouin lands, with limited compensation but without right of judicial appeal, and to impel the displaced tribesmen to resettle into new industrial townships…

Abhorring the very idea of living in industrial townships, the Bedouins argue instead for the creation of their own moshavim, the model agricultural cooperatives that have been especially successful in the northern Sinai. But Israeli government officials have long insisted that the tribesmen are needed as a labor force for new industries that are planned for the Negev. Moreover, the well-equipped, high production moshavim require large tracts and expensive irrigation. And, as one senior official bluntly told TIME’s Lesley Hazleton, “I’m not giving good Jewish land and water to Arabs.“

The evacuated Bedouins could well have nowhere to go at all for some time. The four new proposed industrial settlements have yet to be built, and the government has no plans for temporary housing. Shrugs Benjamin Gur-Arieh, Premier Menachem Begin’s adviser on Arab affairs: “They can double up in their tents until the villages are ready. They’re used to it.”

Picking apart the New York Times Zionist narrative on the Nakba . . . using the New York Times

May 17, 2011

Yousef Munayyer

Yesterday’s deaths at various demonstrations commemorating the Nakba remind us of one all-important fact: without a just resolution to the Palestinian refugee issue, the state of Israel will never be welcome or accepted in the region. Those killed highlight the importance of a 63 year-old issue which has yet to be resolved or properly addressed. But it is impossible for there to be any just solution to this issue without a candid discussion of history that many “pro-Israel” types do not want to have. (Image right: AP photo of Israeli soldiers yesterday making sure people inconvenient to an ethno-centric majoritarian state stay out. Kind of like what NY Times editors do to facts inconvenient to the Zionist narrative.)

The Zionist narrative on the Nakba goes something like this: Newborn and defenseless Israel was attacked by 5 Arab armies the day after its birth, and refugees may have been created during the fighting, but tough luck since the Arabs started the war and David defeated Goliath.

You can see this narrative uncritically repeated in the mainstream American press. Take for example this recent article by Ethan Bronner in the New York Times:

After Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, armies from neighboring Arab states attacked the new nation; during the war that followed, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes by Israeli forces. Hundreds of Palestinian villages were also destroyed. The refugees and their descendants remain a central issue of contention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The timeline begins at May 14th, 1948. There are a few rather significant historical facts which are inconvenient for this narrative that go unmentioned in the New York Times. Well, at least today’s New York Times. You see, had Ethan Bronner or the editors of the Times actually read their own newspaper’s reporting on this issue at the time, they likely would not have presented such a distorted representation of the facts. (This certainly isn’t the first time theNYT contradicts itself either)

Two facts which torpedo the Zionist narrative are corroborated by reporting from the New York Times during this period.

1. Masses of Palestinian refugees were created before one Arab soldier ‘attacked’ the new state of Israel. In one story from March, 20th, 1947, the New York Times actually addressed the pre-1948 situation as one of colonization and describes it rather appropriately. Imagining such characterization in the NY Times today is fantasy. I urge you to read the whole article, titled “Palestine Jews Minimize Arabs: Sure of Superiority, Settlers Feel They Can Win Natives By Reason or Force,” but here’s an excerpt:

Whatever the degree of their superiority complex, however, the Jews are certainly confident of their ability to bring the Arabs to terms — by persuasion if possible, by might if necessary. The program of the largest terrorist group, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, is to evacuate the British forces from Palestine and declare a Zionist state west of the Jordan, and “we will take care of the Arabs.”

Despite this, the New York Times today repeats the ridiculous assertion commonplace in the Zionist narrative that the creation of the state was an innocent act that drew unprovoked and barbaric reaction from the Goliath Arab states. Here is another article, this one from April 16, 1948 and titled “Jews Press Arabs in Pitched Battle in North Palestine“:

[Villages] taken yesterday were Dabiat er Ruha, Rihania and Kuteinat. Previously they had occupied Kufrin, Abu Sureik, Abu Shusha, Zerain, Naamieh, Ghubyat at Tahta and Ghubyat al Fauqha. Several bridges blown up by Haganah squads between Jenin and Lajjun are hampering Arabs [sic] communication.

But today’s New York Times wants you to believe that the refugees created during the Nakba period, which is actually from 1947-1949, started only after Arab states attacked the newborn and sinless Israel. In reality, Zionist operations against Palestinian villages began well before the Arab armies crossed any borders. Half the total refugees created during the Nakba were created BEFORE May 15th, 1948.

Again, another New York Times story from May 2nd, 1948 titled “Dispair is Voiced by Arab Refugees: Evacuees from Palestine say Jews Crash Through Weak Resistance by Volunteers“:

A stream of Arab refugees is moving eastward across the Jordan river. Many of the refugees passing Jericho en route to Trans-Jordan, a few miles away, are from Jerusalem and Jaffa. They say they fear that Jewish offensives are crashing through weakened Arab volunteer resistance. Haifa was described as almost a ghost town, with its population having dwindled to less than 20,000 from a normal figure at least five times that.

Another article appearing in the New York Times titled “Palestine Strife Creates DP Issue” is dated May 3rd, 1948 stating “200,000 Arabs are now listed as homeless”:

It is believed that possibly 50,000 Arabs left Jaffa, thousands of them by sea. Other thousands have fled inland, large numbers of them to become cave dwellers in the historic caves of Beit Jibrin, northwest of Hebron…at least 40,000 Arabs left Haifa when the combined Haganah and Irgun Zvai Leumi force stormed the Arab market place and conquered all of the city except the British-held waterfront. From Jerusalem wealthy Arabs have fled to near-by countries, the poorer ones into the hills and villages.

Another New York Times story, this one from April 18th, 1948, tells of horror among refugees and massacres in the Galilee:

According to reports telephoned from Nablus, that town and Jenin are crowded with refugees, among whom the rumor is circulating that the Jews are driving on Jenin. The Haganah said it had killed 130 Druse [sic] tribesmen yesterday when it seized Usha, a village east of Haifa.

This information is important not simply because it illustrates how poorly the New York Times‘ current day reporting is on an issue it reported on thoroughly at the time (They can’t even copy and paste), but also because it clearly rebuts the Zionist narrative people like Jeffery Goldberg incessantly repeat despite mounds of historic evidence to the contrary. In this post, Goldberg argues that the Nakba was “self-inflicted” because the Arabs “attacked the just-born Jewish state and then managed to lose on the battlefield.” Setting aside the already morally corrupt notion that ethnic cleansing during war is somehow acceptable, history simply proves Goldberg wrong. For a detailed account of the patterns of depopulation, you can see this video of Salman Abu Sitta’s recent lecture at the Palestine Center, starting around the 10 minute mark.

2. The pre-state Israeli forces were far greater in number and far better equipped than the combined forces of the “Goliath” Arab armies. This is another myth in the Zionist narrative. They want you to believe that the 5 Arab armies had genocidal intentions and wanted to destroy Israel. Why else would you send 5 armies against one? But if the 13 nation-states of the Caribbean attacked the United States we’d hardly consider the United States the ‘David’ facing a Caribbean Goliath. But the Zionist narrative wants to trick you with a faulty numbers game. In reality, the pre-state Israel forces were greater in numbers and far superior in training than the combined forces of the infamous 5 Arab Armies. Conveniently, the New York Times reported in an article from Feb. 29th, 1948 titled “The Army Called ‘Haganah’” :

Nobody knows its full strength, let alone its membership rolls. But it is no amateur army. It has a nucleus of 30,000 men who served in the British forces. Three thousand of them served in the RAF, including more than forty pilots. More than 300 served in the Commandos and 4,000 in the Jewish Brigade in action in Italy. The British estimate Haganah’s active membership at anywhere from 60,000 to 80,000.

David Ben Gurion’s war diary notes that at every stage of the war Zionist troops outnumbered combined Arab armies. The Arab armies were disorganized having little combat experience prior to this with the exception of some of the Jordanian forces. Most Arab soldiers were using outdated arms from WWI or earlier which were inferior to the Zionist armies’ WWII arms and artillery. But even though these are facts the New York Times told us back then, they don’t want to remind you about it now. It makes you wonder; do the people that write the New York Times read the New York Times?

The depopulation of Palestine of its native inhabitants which took place from 1947-49 was commemorated this weekend and it was marked by Israel with the enforcement of ethnic cleansing. Palestinians seeking to return were shot down in the process. One reason that the Nakba is marked when the state of Israel was created is because the creation of this state meant that a political force would exist to enforce the exile of Palestinian refugees. 63 years later, we are reminded that that fear was very well founded.

Ironically, Israel is complaining to the United Nations that states like Syria and Lebanon would allow Palestinian refugees to come back to their native lands even though it is the UN which inGeneral Assembly Resolution 194 required Israel to do just that.

Peace in the region will not come without an honest discussion of the events of this period, but it’s a discussion the mainstream media doesn’t seem to want to have.

Yousef Munayyer is Executive Director of the Palestine Center. This post originally appeared on the Center’s blog Permission to Narrate.

If Israel is the multicultural democracy it claims to be, why is it so afraid of the right of return?

May 17, 2011

Deppen Webber

Prime Minister Netanyahu, like other Israeli officials, routinely point out that about twenty percent of the population of Israel is Arab. Most often they go on to say that Arabs have significant roles in the Israeli community such as judges and physicians and hold elected seats in the Knesset. Some go on to say that if one were to visit Israel, he or she would find a significant Arab population living in the Jewish state as if to convey a message that Israel is a democracy not unlike Western democracies in Europe and North America.

To be clear, the Arab population remaining in Israel are native Palestinians who have been granted permission to remain on the land since the creation of the state in 1948. The vast majority of Palestinians, however, were expelled and now live in the West Bank and Gaza, in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and around the world and make up a diaspora currently estimated at 4.5 million individuals.

The argument that Palestinians and Israeli Jews can live together peacefully should not be a total surprise. Prior to the Zionist movement, all three Abrahamic religions freely practiced throughout the entire Holy Land and Muslims, Jews, and Christians were highly integrated within communities throughout the region. Even today, Old City Jerusalem has four quarters including Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Armenian.

Yet, while the case is made that Palestinians and Israelis can and do live together peacefully, Israel denies the return of refugees seeking to live within the state.

The right of all refugees is guaranteed by international law and put forth by the United Nations in resolution 194 article 11 which reads:

“Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.”

The Palestinian right of return is at the heart of the 63 year old Mideast crisis. Israel’s own rhetoric strangely supports the argument that integration is possible. Leaving only the question, when will justice finally be realized?

Deppen Webber is a graduate of the University of San Francisco, Organizer of the Free Palestine Movement, and an active member of the International Solidarity Movement – Northern California.

http://www.freepalestinemovement.org

http://www.norcalism.org

Desmond Travers on Geo Mitchell: Irish-American Diaspora wanted an end to the troubles, Jewish-American Diaspora hasn’t opened its eyes

May 17, 2011

Philip Weiss

On Thursday night Col. Desmond Travers, the Irish member of the Goldstone mission, will be speaking in New York. (Click here or the image above if you want to get a ticket.) Yesterday I phoned him at his home in the Republic of Ireland to ask about why George Mitchell was successful in the Irish troubles but failed in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Here’s what Travers said:

“I am not at all the least surprised by George Mitchell’s resignation. For I understand the structural impediments to his work in Israel and Palestine.

“To quote Mitchell himself, he had 700 days of failure and one day of success in northern Ireland. He showed a phenomenal comprehension of the steps that could be achieved incrementally with two communities that were implacably opposed to the idea of settlement and of the compromises that an approach to settlement would entail. And he has a genius for timing. He knew precisely when to throw an additional possibility that might just be attainable into the works.

“And the net result? We haven’t had violence since the northern Ireland accords were signed in 1998. Today you see the representatives of extreme loyalism and extreme Republicanism sitting side by side hammering out the business of statehood, and they were reelected only a week ago. The best and worst that can be said about the accords are that we are better off now than when people were blowing one another up and shooting each other. And it is quite amazing to see these sides horsetrading in democratic fora and doing it quite well. No one would have predicted that.”

So why didn’t this approach work in Israel and Palestine? Travers, the grandson of an Irish revolutionary in the years 1917-1921, points to the Irish and Jewish Diasporas in the United States.

“Diaspora Irish-Americans wanted a peace. The troubles reflected negatively on them, and they wanted them ended. In the multicultural world of the United States, nobody outside the Irish experience could comprehend anything other than Irish as troublesome, violent, aggressive terrorists, and people outside the Irish milieu were not in a position to make distinctions about cause and effect. And so when an emissary with an enormous amount of clout arrived in Ireland he didn’t have to look over his shoulder at the Diaspora Irish who were saying, we don’t want this to happen.”

By contrast, Mitchell spent a lot of his time in Israel and Palestine worrying about Diaspora Jewry, who questioned his efforts.

Also crucial was the end of Diaspora support for Irish terrorism. In the United States and in England, funding Irish republican causes became illegal. “I’m quite certain that American Jews subscribe to Israeli fundraising without being quite aware that some of that funding may not be appropriate, in the very way that Diaspora Irish were funding violence.”

“You have to convince the wider Diaspora community that a resolution is in the Jewish people’s and in Israel’s best interest. I don’t think you can convince Israel of that.” Why not? Travers lived in Israel for several years in the 80s as a military adviser to peacekeeping missions. He says the country is too caught up in a security mindset, convinced that it is surrounded by enemies, and the entire military-industrial culture of the country is built on that understanding, which also generates social “cohesion and camaraderie.”

Can Travers extract optimism for Israel/Palestine from the ending of the Irish troubles?

“I had no optimism whatsoever for George Mitchell’s venture into Northern Ireland.” And yet today the ancient divisions are softening. “For over 300 years we have had institutionalized multigenerational prejudices accumulated in our hearts. The two communities are still entrenched, but they are not shooting each other.”

But there is Partition between the largely-Catholic Republic of Ireland and majority-Protestant Northern Ireland.

“Partition in Ireland was determined by an exiting empire that [in 1921] made compromises to serve the residual majority that was pro-empire, to give them a foothold in Ireland.”

And yet Partition will not last more than a century, he says. Because of the larger forces that are driving the sides together throughout Europe. Ireland and England now need each other economically. And “the two governments are absolutely marching in step.” These processes, he said, will melt multigenerational enmities created by Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and European empire and colony, conflicts that played out in Ireland longer than anywhere else in Europe. “We are steeped in the past, when others had moved on.”

Shouldn’t there be Partition between Israel and Palestine?

It might work, Travers said, if there were a division in keeping with the 67 lines, making two viable states. But he has grave doubts.

“I am not entirely convinced that a single religious entity in the entirety of a state is in the best interests of the society that aspires to that. There is inherent prejudice in it, for starters, inherent racism in it, a propensity to draconian laws that exclude rather than include. And there is a historical propensity toward corruption, in cronyism.”

I said, You are a Roman Catholic, though, in a largely-Catholic state. Travers said the RC on his identity disc now stands for Re Considering (especially in light of the child abuse scandals in the church).

“I can say that my grandfather’s dream of a single Roman Catholic republic with an anti-British stance has outlived its purpose.

“And I would say that the great dynamism and innovation of the Jewish community may be stultified and hindered in a single religious state apparatus. The magnificent Jewish creations of the west have arisen in a multicultural environment. We’ve seen that over the last 500 years. That is the Jewish forte.”

I asked one more question about George Mitchell’s failure, but Travers objected.

“I would hate to describe George Mitchell as having failed– as I would not say that Richard Goldstone recanted. It is not for an Irishman to say that Geore Mitchell has failed– a man who did what he did over 700 days here.

“As we are speaking the Queen of England is coming to Ireland. Imagine that. This is not something that has happened in 100 years. And so the strongest statement I would make is that George Mitchell did not achieve success in Israel and Palestine.”

Liberal Tomasky’s advice to Obama: do whatever AIPAC wants

May 17, 2011

Philip Weiss

Further evidence of how slanted the mainstream American discourse is by the Israel lobby. Michael Tomasky is a liberal Democrat. But at the Daily Beast he tells Obama to get reelected by pursing the most conservative course on Israel– do whatever AIPAC tells you to do.

…But Democrats need to avoid becoming cocky. Republicans will not give up their narrative of liberal weakness so easily. Over the coming weeks, the GOP is likely to strike back on three fronts.

First, Israel. Because of the recent entente between Fatah and Hamas, many in Congress are calling for cancellation of the $450 million in aid the U.S. is slated to give the Palestinian Authority. Meanwhile, the U.N. is scheduled to vote on Palestinian statehood in September. If the administration takes anything less than a hard line on either, conservatives will surely accuse the president of weakness. As a former Bush White House official put it to me last week: “You have to have a hand-in-glove relationship with the Israelis, and this administration doesn’t have that.”

And note how Tomasky mistakes the lobby for “Republicans.” It’s not Republicans, it’s Republicans and Democrats, it’s the political establishment. It’s Tomasky himself serving as the lobby’s Charlie McCarthy here.

Tariq Ali speaks tonight in Brooklyn on Arab revolutions

May 17, 2011

Philip Weiss

Gosh I want to go to this. Tonight in Brooklyn, world intellectual Tariq Ali is speaking on the Arab revolution, from Cairo to Madison, A World In Motion. Madison, huh. Intriguing. It’s at the Galapagos Art Gallery in Dumbo. Talk starts at 8 p.m. If I don’t make it someone’s got to tell me what he says.

Krista Tippett’s collapse– she calls rightwing settler Halevi ‘redemptive’

May 17, 2011

Philip Weiss

This post is more in sorrow than in anger, though if I start thinking about it I might get angry. I love Krista Tippett. She does the On Being show on religion on Sunday mornings on National Public Radio. She has a great voice and an open mind. Well then she went to Israel and Palestine, and once again we see a putatively fair person in the American media corrupted. She gave an hour or some large portion thereof to Yossi Klein Halevi, a rightwing Zionist who has opposed giving up settlements and who lives in occupied East Jerusalem and who as we reported opposes integration/open-housing in Jerusalem neighborhoods– Tippett described him as “redemptive.” This is an intemperate political actor who regards the Holocaust as a living reality of the Jewish condition and who says Jews have a right to “greater Israel” and who wants an Israeli military presence in the West Bank forever because he fears the Arab spring.

Tippett could have chosen so many inspiring Israelis. Noam Sheizaf, Jonathan Pollak, Jerry Haber. No, she chose a rightwinger. And I would note that in a blogpost she describes the Guardian as “fiercely partisan towards the Palestinian cause.”

I know what she thinks she is doing, supplanting the brutalized political plane with a human/spiritual plane. But Palestinians have few rights–and so their lives are necessarily political. It would be like going into the Jim Crow south and talking about blacks reading the gospels and whites reading them, too, as surely they all did. And embracing a segregationist.

NYT’s Bronner says Netanyahu demonstrates ‘territorial flexibility’ on the basis of no evidence

May 17, 2011

Matthew Taylor

Ethan Bronner’s NY Times reports are of fantastic comedic value. Check out the latest spin from the Israeli Army Daddy:

Days before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is to meet with President Obama, he laid out his principles Monday for accepting a Palestinian state, showing greater flexibility on territory…

So Bibi is willing to trade land for peace, more than ever before. On what evidence?

Mr. Netanyahu showed more willingness to yield territory than he had before, strongly implying that he would give up the vast majority of the West Bank for a demilitarized Palestinian state. He said Israel needed to hold onto all of Jerusalem and the large settlement blocs in the West Bank, thereby suggesting that he would yield the rest.

Implying? Suggesting? Mr. Bronner speculates, with no evidence whatsoever, that Bibi’s position has changed, turning this into a press release.

And why would you call an Israeli leader “flexible on territory” when Bibi’s current position as stated is a) a total non-starter for Palestinians and b) vastly less flexible than Barak’s outgoing negotiation team demonstrated during the 2000 Taba talks that eventually lead to the Geneva Initiative?

I love Bronner’s use of the “vast majority of the West Bank,” implying the shop-worn “generous offer” frame. Even if Israel kept, say, 35% of the West Bank, that would leave Palestinians with 65% of 22% and a Swiss Cheese, fragmented Bantustan state. But that would be the “vast majority” of the West Bank, right?

Finally, of course, there’s the elision of all elisions: When has Bronner ever clearly and honestly stated, “Even as he makes speeches about wanting a two-state solution, Netanyahu continuously oversees a policy of land theft and ethnic cleansing”?

P.S. – Haaretz’s Yossi Verter tears Netanyahu’s speech apart, calling it “a dove masquerading as a hawk.” How come Verter can tell it like it is in an oped, whereas Bronner sings Bibi’s praises in a news report?

Update: Earlier version of this post included reference to a purported C.I.A. study saying Israel will be done within 20 years. The study was a hoax.

Report: Mitchell resigned because Dennis Ross was biased and working against US interests

May 17, 2011

Philip Weiss

This is the stuff of history. From Maan news. Reader dont be a surprised virgin. Remember that years ago Aaron David Miller said that Ross acted as “Israel’s lawyer” at Camp David. Remember that Abe Foxman recently said that Ross was Israel’s “advocate.” And this man is making policy in the Obama White House. Why? The answer is, the power of the Israel lobby in our politics, which Chris Matthews can’t even address.

A political adviser to the late president Yasser Arafat issued a statement Tuesday, alleging that US Mideast peace envoy George Mitchell resigned because of the “extreme bias” of his deputy Dennis Ross.
Bassam Abu Shareef said Ross obstructed all US initiatives aiming to achieve progress in the peace process, and blamed the deputy’s bias for Mitchell’s resignation Saturday.
Abu Shareef said senior American officials informed him that Mitchell viewed the appointment of Ross a step to obstruct the peace process. He added that Mitchell believed Ross was working against US interests.

Leslie Gelb says Arab democracy movement must leave Israel alone

May 17, 2011

Philip Weiss

Advice from Washington expert to Middle East regime that denies Arab rights: Whatever you do, don’t make concessions to people seeking democracy. It will only encourage them.

Who? Leslie Gelb, granted a platform at the Daily Beast, to opine on the Palestinian protests, and describe Israel as a “true democracy.”

If Obama breaks any appreciable new ground in his speech, it will be to shower pails full of sympathy on Arab demonstrators for freedom and democracy. This time, he will make perfectly clear that his heart is with the Arab people. But his subsequent actions will remain case by case and circumspect….

Jerusalem has to make sure that Arab democrats are not distracted by Israel and stay focused on their own countries. Israelis don’t want them to turn their populist wrath on Israel.