What sad times—a peaceful protest turned into a violent one due to forces (apparently police in plain clothing) claiming to be pro-Mubarak, raising the ‘chaos’ that they say will evolve should Mubarak leave. More likely it will evolve should Mubarak stay.
Meanwhile at home (Israel) things only keep going from bad to worse. But there is not much of that below, though there is criticism of Israel in the 5 items below.
Item 1 is a link that takes you to a brief but potent video by Dave Randall explaining why he refuses to perform in Israel.
Item 2, “A different kind of power struggle,” is about the lack of power—electric power, that is—in Gaza, where Israel controls the amounts of industrial diesel that enters Gaza 7and which is needed to produce electricity.
Item 3 is Bradley Burston’s biting criticism of Israel.
Item 4 Rabbi Lerner writes about American Jewish support for the anti-Mubarak forces.
Item 5 would be funny were it not sad. It shows that if you are not the ‘right’ kind of Jew, you can be denied citizenship. So, those of you thinking about making alyah (literally, ‘going up’ but meaning immigration) had better check your proofs that you are the kind of Jew that Israel wants. This is just a form of racism. But, then, that’s Israel.
All the best,
Dorothy
============================
1. Please watch—about 2 minutes, important message from Dave Randall about why he won’t perform in Israel
Those following the weekly charts on Gaza Gateway might have been surprised to discover that the amount of industrial diesel transferred from Israel to the Gaza Strip has been nil for some weeks now. The fuel, needed to operate Gaza’s power plant, is usually transferred via the Kerem Shalom crossing, though lately, you would only find its low grade cousin, regular diesel, coming in through the tunnels in the Rafah area in the southern Gaza Strip, from Egypt and via coordination with the Gaza government, which collects taxes on it. The change of transfer point did not occur overnight but rather as a result of a, by now, three-year policy on the part of Israel and recently given a stamp of approval by the Turkel Commission, to reduce the transfer of industrial diesel to Gaza. The change also came about as a result of a funding dispute between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the government in Gaza which caused suppliers to seek out more cost efficient methods to supply the fuel.
The transfer of diesel through the tunnels reduces the electricity shortage in Gaza but does not resolve the problem. The power plant still needs industrial diesel, which is mixed with regular diesel coming from Egypt in order to reduce the amount of sulfur emitted from the production process. In these new circumstances, power outages have shortened but still occur for an average of six hours a day, posing hardship for Gaza residents. True to today, the plant is producing about 60 MW of energy, while the total electricity deficit in the Strip stands at 80 MW.
As far as underground economies go, the Egyptian channel is not reliable. Last week there was a drop in transfer of goods from Egypt due to recent events there, casting doubt on the stability of the diesel supply to the Gaza power plant. When the tunnels are operating, the government in Gaza coordinates the transfer of fuel and collects taxes on it (NIS 0.60 per liter of diesel that costs the merchants bringing it in less than one shekel). Based on these figures one can only wonder about the conclusion of the Turkel Commission, which legitimized Israel’s restriction on diesel transferred to the power plant, stating that these restrictions were an instrument to promote Israel’s military objective of harming “Hamas’s capacity, including its military capacity, to continue attacking Israel”.
Goods
Needs Vs. Supply
2/1/11 – 29/1/11
Industrial Fuel
Needs Vs. Supply
2/1/11 – 29/1/11
מתח גבוה מתחת לאדמה
פורסם: יום חמישי, 3 בפברואר 2011
אלו שעוקבים אחרי התרשימים השבועיים של Gaza Gateway אולי הופתעו לגלות שכמות הסולר התעשייתי המועבר מישראל לרצועת עזה דרך מעבר כרם שלום והחיוני להפעלת תחנת הכוח של עזה, עומדת מזה מספר שבועות על אפס. בשביל למצוא את הסולר יש לנדוד לעבר המנהרות שבאזור רפיח, בדרום הרצועה, דרכן עובר סולר רגיל ממצרים, בתיאום עם הממשלה בעזה שגובה על כך מס. השינוי לא התרחש בבת אחת אלא בעקבות מדיניות ארוכת ימים מצד ישראל – שזכתה לאחרונה לאישור ועדת טירקל – של צמצום העברת סולר תעשייתי לעזה, ולאחר צמצום הכמויות שהועברו במשך החודשים האחרונים בעקבות מחלוקת בין הרשות הפלסטינית בגדה והממשלה בעזה באשר לתשלום.
הזרמת הסולר דרך המנהרות מקלה על המחסור בחשמל בעזה אך אינה פותרת אותו. בתחנת הכוח עדיין צריכים סולר תעשייתי, כדי לערבבו עם הסולר הרגיל שמגיע ממצרים על מנת להפחית את כמות הגופרית הנפלטת מהסולר הרגיל. כמו כן, במסגרת המצב החדש, הפסקות החשמל התקצרו אך עדיין מתרחשות בממוצע של 6 שעות ביממה. הדבר מקשה על חיי התושבים מכיוון שתפוקת החשמל של תחנת הכוח עד היום היא כ- 60 מגה וואט, בעוד שהגרעון במשק החשמל עומד על כ- 80 מגה-וואט.
כדרכן של מנהרות לא רשמיות, הערוץ המצרי אינו וודאי. בשבוע האחרון חלה ירידה באספקה ממצרים על רקע האירועים האחרונים, מה שמעמיד בסימן שאלה את יציבות אספקת הסולר לתחנת הכוח של עזה. בינתיים, ככל שהמנהרות פועלות, הממשלה בעזה מתאמת את העברת הדלק וגובה על כך מיסים (60 אגורות עבור ליטר סולר העולה לסוחרים פחות משקל אחד). על בסיס נתונים אלה ניתן לתהות באשר למסקנה של ועדת טירקל, שהכשירה את ההגבלה הישראלית על כמויות הסולר המועברות לתחנת הכוח. הועדה קבעה שהגבלות אלה היוו כלי לקידום מטרה צבאית ישראלית של פגיעה ב”יכולתו של החמאס ובכלל זה יכולתו הכלכלית, להמשיך ולתקוף את מדינת ישראל”.
סחורות
צרכים מול אספקה
2/1/11 – 29/1/11
סולר תעשייתי
צרכים מול אספקה
2/1/11 – 29/1/11
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3, Haaretz,
February 3, 2011
A Special Place in Hell by Bradley Burston | Last Update: 03.02.2011 Latest update 17:42 02.02.11
Tags: Israel news Egypt protests Benjamin Netanyahu Middle East peace
Israel’s sense of entitlement is a curse, and we are all either under its spell or under its shadow; only the inconceivable that turns into the inevitable can bring change to this place.
I want the Egyptian people to win their revolution. And I say this as an Israeli.
I want our neighbors, the people of Egypt, to show us how it’s done. I want you to show us the last thing we expected to see. Because it is only when we see our best consensus assessments proven dead wrong, when the wholly unanticipated stuns us, when the inconceivable turns overnight into the inevitable, that change comes to this place.
Egyptian demonstrators demanding the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak shouts slogans on top of Egyptian army tanks in Cairo on January 29, 2011.
I want you to know that the fear that you may feel coming from here is a good sign. At this point, if change doesn’t terrify us, it isn’t real.
I want you to vex us and baffle us and cause us to realize that some things in this life really are beyond our prediction, beyond our control, beyond our sense that we know what’s best for ourselves and all others.
Israelis were not always slow learners. It may be difficult to imagine this now, with a government here whose only actions, apart from the normal commerce of corruption, are taken in the service of inaction.
The race to concoct laws to legitimize repression and inequality, the deep kowtowing to buy off the settlers and the ultra-Orthodox – all of it is fundamentally aimed at cementing in office an unpopular, unwieldy government whose only campaign platform, at this point, is that any alternative would be worse.
For us, there’s a distinctly uncomfortable but ultimately healthy humility, in realizing that we have no idea what’s going on in the only region we seem to know anything about. I want to thank you for that.
It is beginning to dawn on my people, the Israelis, that freedom for Arabs may have nothing to do with annihilation for Jews. I have you to thank for that.
Here and there, people here are recognizing that the Arab world, and this grand nation which is its cultural epicenter, is vastly more complex than this view of a vast sea of blood-eyed fanatics barely restrained by the brittle dykes of a heavily subsidized corps of despots.
And there’s another lesson we need to learn, most of all.
What is the common thread that ties Hosni Mubarak and Ehud Barak, that makes Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman increasingly resemble the rulers of unapologetically non-democratic Mideast regimes? Why has this Israeli government done its best to emulate in two years, repressive measures Hosni Mubarak took 30 years to refine? Why do they find irrelevant the common good and the public’s welfare and wishes?
It is the sense of entitlement. The leader’s myth of personal exceptionalism. It is a curse, and we are all either under its spell or under its shadow.
Is there another nation in the world which is run by a tinhorn Louis XIV as prime minister, a tin-hearted Louis XIV as defense minister, the Soviet Sun King as foreign minister, and whose candidate for chief of staff had to be dropped when it turned out that he’d lied his way into building himself a Versailles?
The myth of Israeli exceptionalism goes far deeper than our leaders, of course. And so do its consequences. From an amalgam of the concept of the Chosen, the wounds of the Holocaust, and the awe and shock of the 1967 and 1973 wars, it is this sense of entitlement that fuels the settlements, and enshrines the Occupation whose purpose is to shield them.
These are the mantras with which the entitled among us hold the rest of us hostage:
We deserve to build settlements because we have suffered and the Arabs are violent.
We deserve to reject compromise because we are too generous and the Arabs want us dead.
As long as the Arabs refuse to accept us, we dare not show weakness.
The Arabs hate us no matter what we do, so we get to do what we want.
If it wasn’t for the left, the world would understand us and we would be just fine.
Democratic freedoms and the rule of law are vital, but we are in a state of war.
Tuesday’s events said it all.
What better time, as the world watched millions of Egyptians demanding democratic freedoms, for a handful on our right to assault the foundations of democracy in Israel?
At issue – a rightist push to establish parliamentary commissions of inquiry into the funding sources of human rights organizations, the point project of a broader campaign against the work of these groups.
Seeking to head off the effort, Knesset Legal Advisor Eyal Ynon Tuesday issued a ruling strongly condemning the commissions of inquiry as anti-democratic.
“The very fact of establishing the commissions,” Ynon told the Knesset, “creates a public atmosphere which threatens freedom of thought and of protest, an effect which is perceived from a legal standpoint as problematic in a democratic system of government.”
In addition, Army Radio quoted Ynon as saying, parliamentary inquiries are not authorized to investigate civilian bodies which are not part of the executive branch of government, and therefore they cannot require activists of the organizations under investigation to appear before them.
Undeterred by Ynon’s ruling, entitled by various conceptions of a Higher Law, proponents of the commissions – led by a protege of Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu and a hardline, anti-Palestinian statehood, strongly pro-settlement Likud MK – won Knesset House Committee approval of the initiative on Wednesday. The commissions bill must now be passed by the full Knesset to become law.
The revolution of the Egyptian people has little to teach those, like Lieberman, who are too busy unraveling democracy to pay attention. But you do have much to teach the rest of us.
And one other thing. I want some of my people, just this once, to learn to shut the hell up.
When Malcolm Hoenlein, the influential executive vice-president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, chooses this moment to brand Egyptian opposition leader Mohammed ElBaradei “a stooge of Iran,” Hoenlein is showing the world not only how little he knows about Egypt, but how little he really cares about Israel.
I want Malcolm Hoenlein to take a closer look at the Tahrir Square. I want Malcolm Hoenlein to consider that if the people of Egypt win a revolution for democracy and freedom, the people of Israel will have won as well.
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We hope more US Jews and all others will speak up to our government re their support! Anna Rogers]
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From: Rabbi Michael Lerner <rabbilerner@tikkun.org>
To:
Sent: Mon, January 31, 2011 7:31:44 PM
Subject: News Advisory: Liberal & Progressive Jews Support the Egyptian Uprising
Tikkun to heal, repair and transform the world
A note from Rabbi Michael Lerner Join or Donate Now!
News Advisory: Release Feb. 1, 2011 For interviews: call Mike Godbe at 510 644 1200 or mike@Tikkun.org
Why Jews Around the World are Praying for the Victory of the Egyptian Uprising
Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Magazine and chair of The Tikkun Community, affirmed today (Feb. 1, 2011) that there is a growing upsurge of support for the Egyptian Uprising in the Jewish community.
Rabbi Lerner issued the following statement:
Ever since the victory over the dictator of Tunisia and the subsequent uprising in Egypt, my email has been flooded with messages from Jews around the world hoping and praying for the victory of the Egyptian people over their cruel Mubarak regime.
Though a small segment of Jews have responded to right-wing voices from Israel that lament the change and fear that a democratic government would bring to power fundamentalist extremists who wish to destroy Israel and who would abrogate the hard-earned treaty that has kept the peace between Egypt and Israel for the last 30 years, the majority of Jews are more excited and hopeful than worried.
Of course, the worriers have a point. Israel has allied itself with repressive regimes in Egypt and used that alliance to ensure that the borders with Gaza would remain closed while Israel attempted to economically deprive the Hamas regime there by denying needed food supplies and equipment to rebuild after Israel’s devastating attack in December 2008 and January 2009. If the Egyptian people take over, they are far more likely to side with Hamas than with the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
Yet it is impossible for Jews to forget our heritage as victims of another Egyptian tyrant—the Pharoah whose reliance on brute force was overthrown when the Israelite slaves managed to escape from Egypt some 3,000 years ago. That story of freedom retold each year at our Passover “Seder” celebration, and read in synagogues in the past month, has often predisposed the majority of Jews to side with those struggling for freedom around the world. To watch hundreds of thousands of Egyptians able to throw off the chains of oppression and the legacy of a totalitarian regime that consistently jailed, tortured or murdered its opponents so overtly that most people were cowed into silence, is to remember that the spark of God continues to flourish no matter how long oppressive regimes manage to keep themselves in power, and that ultimately the yearning for freedom and democracy cannot be totally stamped out no matter how cruel and sophisticated the elites of wealth, power and military might appear to be.
Many Jews have warned Israel that it is a mistake to ally with these kinds of regimes, just as we’ve warned the US to learn the lesson from its failed alliance with the Shah of Iran. We’ve urged Israel to free the Palestinian people by ending the Occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza. Israel’s long-term security will not be secured through military or economic domination, but only by acting in a generous and caring way toward the Palestinian people first, and then toward all of its Arab neighbors. Similarly, America’s homeland security will best be achieved through a strategy of generosity and caring, manifested through a new Global Marshall Plan such as has been introduced into the House of Representatives by Congressman Keith Ellison.
In normal times, when the forces of repression seem to be winning, this kind of thinking is dismissed as “utopian” by the “realists” who shape public political discourse. But when events like the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt occur, for a moment the politicians and media are stunned enough to allow a different kind of thinking to emerge, the kind of thinking that acknowledged that underneath all the “business as usual” behavior of the world’s peoples, the yearning for a world based on solidarity, caring for each other, freedom, self-determination, justice, non-violence and yes, even love and generosity, remains a potent and unquenchable thirst that may be temporarily repressed but never fully extinguished.
It is this recognition that leads many Jews to join with the rest of the world’s peoples in celebrating the uprising, in praying that it does not become manipulated by the old regime into paths that too quickly divert the hopes for a brand new kind of order into politics and economics as usual, or into extremist attempts to switch the anger from domestic elites who have been the source of Egyptian oppression onto Jews or Israel which have not been responsible for the suffering of the Egyptian people. Such extremists could easily be marginalized were Israel to take definitive action to accept the peace terms offered by the Palestinians in 2007-8 and known to the world through the release of relevant documents by Al-Jazeera, and were the US in conjunction with Israel to announce a Global Marshall Plan with first location being the Middle East. Such a plan has been developed in some detail by the Network of Spiritual Progressives.
We hope that Egyptians will hear the news that they have strong support from many in the Jewish world.
Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun www.tikkun.org , chair of the interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives, and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in Berkeley, California. He can be reached at RabbiLerner@Tikkun.org To read details of the Global Marshall Plan, go to www.spiritualprogressives.org/GMP
