Dorothy Online Newsletter

NOVANEWS

Dear Friends,

I wish that the news were more in keeping with the joy associated with the New Year, but . . .

I apologize for the error I made in my New Year’s wish—must have been a Freudian slip, a secret wish to go back to the situation as it was then, in 1911 and 1912.  You of course realized that I meant 2011 and 2012.

As for the 6 items below, I found the first one interesting in that the New York Times took upon itself to report that the IOF had killed another ‘terrorist’ in Gaza, the 3rd in almost as many days.  Israel apparently does want to see the missiles fly to Southern Israel and perhaps kill an Israeli or two so that there will be a good excuse to once again bring the army and air force in to kill another 1000 or 2000 or maybe a million Gazans—elderly, children, infants, adults, and also a few freedom fighters.  That’s one way to reduce the number of Palestinians.  As for the NYTimes, this is not the type of information that it usually makes a fuss over.

Item 2 argues that settlement outposts (why not just colonies?) are the cause of Jewish violence in the WB.  Nonsense!  There has been plenty of violence before the issue of the outposts came up.  Not all colonists are violent or idealist fundamentalist.  Many are there not to colonize but only because they can afford accommodations in the West Bank that they could not afford in Israel.  But to say that it’s a fringe of youngsters that is causing the violence is just not true.  There are plenty of violent idealist fundamentalists among the settlers.  Just look up, for instance, Women in Green in the West Bank (see for instance http://arielzellman.wordpress.com/2010/10/14/women-in-green-interview-with-nadia-matar/  ) And they have been operating for at least since the Oslo accords if not earlier.

Item 3 reports that the PA intends to take the case of continued Jewish building in the WB to the Security Council.  I wish the PA luck.  Obama will undoubtedly veto.

Item 4 reports on efforts to psychologically deal with the situation in Gaza.  What Gazans need is not only psychological means for easing their fears but even more they need an end to the siege and occupation.

Item 5 reports that major Israeli businesses fund—or to be more accurate, help quadruple donations to the right wing Zionist organization Im Tirtzu (the English translation of the name is If you will it, a play on Herzl’s famous statement ‘if you will it [a Jewish homeland] it need be no dream.’)

Item 6 is about Michael Ignatieff, but he was not my reason for including it.  The piece also argues that Israel is an apartheid state, and is also critical of the Canadian government’s stand towards Israel.

That’s it for tonight.Tomorrow is not only a new day, but also a new year.  How they do fly.  Tempus indeed does fugit.

All the best,

Dorothy

1 NY Times

Friday, December 30, 2011

Israeli Strike Kills Gaza Militant

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/31/world/middleeast/israeli-strike-kills-gaza-militant.html?_r=1&ref=middleeast

By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — The Israeli military killed a radical Palestinian militant in Gaza on Friday and seriously wounded another one in what it said was the thwarting of a rocket attack into southern Israel.

Palestinian medical authorities confirmed the strike. Witnesses said a group of militants was near the barrier separating Israel and Gaza and was hit by a missile dropped by an Israeli drone. Tank shells landed immediately afterward, they said.

 

The Israeli announcement said its air force had “targeted a terrorist squad that was identified moments before firing rockets at Israel from the northern Gaza Strip. A hit was confirmed, thwarting the rocket fire attempt. The aforementioned squad is responsible for the firing of rockets at Israel in the past number of days.”

 

About a dozen rockets have been fired at Israel from Gaza in the past week. None caused injury or damage.

 

Palestinian security forces said the men hit on Friday were Salafists, a broad term for Islamists inspired by Al Qaeda who are challenging the rule of Hamas in Gaza. They accuse Hamas of being both collaborationist with Israel and insufficiently pious.

 

Israeli military sources later identified the man killed as Muaman Abu-daf and called him a “senior operative in the global jihad terror movement,” accusing him of involvement in a number of rocket attacks on Israel as well as having placed explosive devices near the barrier with Gaza aimed at patrolling Israeli forces. They also said he had been involved in a thwarted terror attack on the Egyptian-Israeli border this week.

 

Hamas, though rejecting Israel’s existence, follows a more pragmatic Islamist approach than the Salafists do, and it has been trying to stop rocket fire into Israel by the more radical groups.

 

On Tuesday, Israeli forces killed another Salafist and wounded 11 others in two attacks on a motorcycle and private vehicle in northern Gaza.

 

Three years ago, Israel mounted a major invasion of Gaza that lasted three weeks and killed about 1,300 people. In recent days, Israeli military commanders have been quoted as saying that another such invasion might be necessary if rocket fire could not be contained.

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2 LA Times

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Settlement outposts at root of Jewish violence in West Bank

With their legal challenges exhausted, settlers are increasingly nervous Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition is preparing to enforce court orders to dismantle outposts.

  http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-israel-settlers-violence-20111230,0,2176414,full.story

Edmund Sanders

A Palestinian boy in the West Bank village of Bruqin enters a mosque where Israeli settlers had set fire to the entrance and vehicles nearby this month, according to residents. The incident was believed to be an instance of extremist Jews carrying out a so-called price tag operation to dissuade Israeli authorities from dismantling settler outposts. (Alaa Badarneh, European Pressphoto Agency / December 7, 2011)

 

Edmund Sanders Reporting from Givat Assaf outpost, West Bank—

For months many Israelis shrugged off the mosque burnings, the uprooted Palestinian olive trees and even the death threats against Jewish leftists. But when young settlers this month vandalized army bases and stoned Israeli soldiers, the question of Jewish terrorism turned into a national emergency.

 

The recent flare-up in settler violence has puzzled many because it comes when there are no peace talks that might lead to land concessions, Palestinian attacks in the West Bank have dropped to new lows, and Israel is led by a conservative government that is expanding settlement construction.

 

The explanation can be traced to this illegal settlement outpost near the Palestinian city of Ramallah and others like it. After years of legal wrangling, Givat Assaf, a collection of trailers and sheds that house 25 Jewish families, was slated for demolition this month. At the last minute, Givat Assaf and several similar outposts won a temporary reprieve, giving settlers a few more months before government bulldozers are supposed to arrive.

 

With their legal challenges exhausted, settlers are increasingly worried that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition is preparing to enforce court orders to dismantle outposts.

 

So a fringe group of young extremists, fueled by the ideological belief that the entire Holy Land belongs to the Jewish people, have embarked on a campaign of incitement, destruction and intimidation in a last-ditch effort to save their communities.

 

“This is our home and we will not give in easily,” said Revital Sorek, 32, a mother of eight who lives in Givat Assaf. “Evacuation and relocation are out of the question. You don’t move a Jewish community in the Land of Israel. In the event that things reach an evacuation, then yes, there will be use of force. We will not go like lambs to the slaughter.”

 

The recent militant attacks appear aimed at making the prospect of dismantling even one outpost so unappealing and politically costly that the Netanyahu government will search for a way to back off.

 

“The strategic goal is to try to frighten Israeli society to such a degree that it will withdraw from any possibility of a major removal of settlements in the future,” said Yehuda Ben-Meir, a security analyst at Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies. “They’re saying, ‘For every two bricks the government tries to remove somewhere, we’ll go wild.'”

 

The militants think “the only way to prevent it from becoming a slippery slope toward wholesale evacuation is to put up a fight for every house or even a chicken coop,” Ben-Meir said. “Their tactic is to react to even the smallest of such moves with such violence so that eventually the army tells the government they can’t do it.”

 

The so-called price-tag campaign began last year with loose-knit gangs of disgruntled youths. Security officials began warning recently that the groups were becoming more organized and sophisticated, using databases to track potential targets, carrying out surveillance and communicating through social networks.

 

Some Israeli pundits now say the gangs, also known as hilltop youths after the sites commonly chosen for outposts, are a bigger security threat in the West Bank than Palestinian militants.

 

In what appeared to be coordinated attacks, youths struck in three locations on Dec. 12, throwing stones at high-ranking officers, breaking into a closed military zone near the Jordan River and vandalizing an army facility.

 

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said the government should consider designating the settler gangs, which are also implicated in a string of attacks against Palestinians, as terrorist organizations.

 

Netanyahu, who is reluctant to alienate his right-wing supporters, rejected the label but vowed that the government would crack down on anyone who attacks the Israel Defense Forces.

 

“We must join forces against this extremist phenomenon and erase this stain,” Netanyahu said Dec. 20 during a visit to the attacked army base.

 

Security officers have arrested those they called the ringleaders of the gangs. But vandalism of mosques and olive trees has continued, including one attack in which “Muhammad is a pig” was spray-painted on a wall.

 

Critics say the government waited too long to respond to the attacks because they initially targeted only Palestinians. No indictments were handed down and only a few arrests were made in those incidents. Usually suspects were released.

 

Now, analysts say, the real target is Israel’s government.

 

“The recent acts are clearly addressed to Netanyahu and Barak,” said Shlomo Aronson, a Hebrew University of Jerusalem political science professor. “These groups are not immediately concerned with the peace process or the Palestinians, but rather with the Supreme Court decision to remove outposts.”

 

It’s not the first time Israel has battled extremist violence. Assassins targeted Palestinians in the 1980s and ’90s until Israeli security forces cracked down. And it was a right-wing Israeli who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 in the face of peace efforts with the Palestinians.

 

But the recent flare-up has thrust outposts to the forefront of the Mideast conflict.

 

To most of the international community, all of Israel’s housing settlements on land seized during the 1967 Middle East War are illegal. But Israelis have long distinguished between settlements that have been authorized by the government and the outposts that were built by settlers without permission. Many are on private Palestinian land, Israeli courts have ruled.

 

Currently there are about 95 outposts, with more than 4,000 residents, mostly religious and ideological families living in temporary shelters, trailers and prefabricated housing. They are a fraction of the nearly 300,000 Israelis living in the West Bank.

 

Though a succession of Israeli governments have promised to dismantle the outposts, demolitions are rare and the current government gives most of them implicit support by providing electricity, water, roads and security.

 

Court challenges by Israeli groups and Palestinian landowners have succeeded in winning demolition orders for several outposts, including Givat Assaf, Migron and Amona. But some lawmakers are now searching for ways to retroactively legalize the outposts.

 

“They’re trying to pressure the government and it’s working,” said Hagit Ofran, a spokeswoman for Peace Now, an Israeli group that opposes settlements. “The government is afraid.”

 

Ofran, herself a target of death threats and vandalism attacks, said the government’s conservative agenda has only emboldened the settler gangs.

 

“The fact that we have a right-wing government,” she said, “only makes them feel they have the opportunity to behave even more extremely.”

 

edmund.sanders@latimes.com

News assistant Batsheva Sobelman in The Times’ Jerusalem bureau contributed to this report.

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3.  Haaretz

Saturday, December 31, 2011

Palestinian Authority to turn to UN Security Council over Israeli settlement

PA says in statement that ‘in light of the escalation in the settlement campaign’ it will ask the Security Council to discuss settlements in West Bank and East Jerusalem.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/palestinian-authority-to-turn-to-un-security-council-over-israeli-settlement-1.404760

By DPA

Tags: Palestinian Authority UN Security Council Israel settlements West Bank East Jerusalem

The Palestinian Authority said on Saturday that it would ask the United Nations Security Council to discuss Israel’s settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem – land the Palestinians want for a future state.

 

“In light of the escalation in the settlement campaign, the Palestinian leadership has decided to ask the Security Council to discuss this critical development, which threatens to destroy the peace process and the two-state solution,” it said in a statement.

 

A similar attempt by the Palestinian Authority failed in February, after the United States vetoed a draft resolution condemning Israel’s settlement building.

 

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has said he will not resume peace talks unless Israel halts all settlement activities. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he wants to resume peace negotiations without preconditions.

 

On Wednesday, a top Israeli official said the Palestinian Authority informed the Quartet two weeks ago that it would renege on its demand for a settlement freeze if Israel releases 100 prisoners as a show of good will.

 

The prisoners in question are reportedly all veteran inmates, incarcerated in Israeli prisons since before the Oslo accords.

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4.  Haaretz

Saturday, December 31, 2011

Palestinians told to dance to shake off Gaza stress

Some 45,000 Gazans have participated in program brought by U.S. psychiatrist that teaches techniques to deal with anger, stress, anxiety and family tension.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/palestinians-told-to-dance-to-shake-off-gaza-stress-1.404717

By DPA

Tags: Hamas Gaza IDF

Growing up in the Gaza Strip, 17-year-old Mohammed Omran never imagined that dancing eyes shut would induce a liberating feeling, a rare experience for many Palestinians in the Israeli-blockaded enclave run by Hamas Islamists.

 

“The thing I like most is when I close my eyes and start dancing in circles. I feel free,” said Omran, who takes part in a program brought to Gaza by a U.S. psychiatrist to teach people techniques to deal with anger and family tensions as well as stress and anxiety.

 

Some 45,000 children and adults have participated in the program since it was launched in Gaza in 2005 by the Center for Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM), which teaches mental health professionals in conflict and disaster zones meditation and self-expression techniques that can help their communities cope.

 

Palestinian psychologist Hassan Ziada is one of 420 Gaza professionals who have been trained to use body-mind techniques.

 

“People prefer to express their (psychological) suffering by complaining of physical illness,” said Ziada of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, a non-governmental organization. “They feel shy to express something mental or psychological.”

 

Socio-economic conditions in Gaza are dire. Most of its 1.6 million people depend on food aid and unemployment is estimated at 60 per cent. Violence between Gaza-based Palestinian militants and the Israeli army is frequent.

 

“The mind-body techniques are good in reducing the effects of the circumstances in which Gazans live,” said Ziada.

 

CMBM founder and director James S Gordon, 69, decided to launch a body-mind program in Gaza after his first visit to the impoverished enclave in 2002.

 

“Unfortunately, not many doctors recognize that physical disease is connected with the mind,” he said on a recent visit for a workshop in Gaza. “Every human has to be his own doctor.”

 

An expert in using mind-body medicine to heal depression, anxiety, and psychological trauma, Gordon has launched trauma relief programs in Kosovo, Haiti and Israel and has worked with U.S. soldiers returning from service in war zones.

 

The Gaza program has been hailed as a success. An evaluation of 1,000 children and adults who took part in the 10-session mind-body training workshop showed a significant decrease in stress symptoms, CMBM says on its website.

 

The findings were published in the International Journal of Stress Management.

 

“At the beginning I doubted that women would come back to the therapy, especially as I don’t give them something material,” said Siham Al Tawil, a mind-body counselor who works with children and women with special needs.

 

“But then I saw that almost all of them came back to practice these techniques,” she said. “A woman can’t easily go out alone in our culture, but here she brings a friend or a relative. We show them how to cope and change their mood and gain equilibrium.”

 

The program teaches people to dance, draw, close their eyes and think about positive situations to cope with stress, depression and anxiety and to change the realities they live in.

 

The center also runs a workshop to help Gaza women with cancer to better cope with their condition.

 

Dancing is frowned upon in conservative Gaza, where many people observe a strict version of Islam. So doctor Gordon’s team had to put men and women in separate classes.

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5 Haaretz

Saturday, December 31, 2011

Major Israeli businesses helped quadruple donations to right-wing Im Tirtzu movement

Among donors is The Azrieli Group, which claims it has no political agenda.

http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/major-israeli-businesses-helped-quadruple-donations-to-right-wing-im-tirtzu-movement-1.404637

By Uri Blau

Get Haaretz on iPhone Get Haaretz on Android The Azrieli Group is deeply committed to improving and advancing the community, and social responsibility is an integral part of the company’s business program.” This is how one of the most powerful business groups in the Israeli economy − a shareholder in Bank Leumi and LeumiCard, which has 13 malls throughout the country and a controlling share in the Sonol, Tambour and Supergaz companies − introduces itself. Haaretz Magazine is revealing here for the first time that this “social responsibility” includes a substantial donation to the right-wing Im Tirtzu movement.

 

Naturally, companies that raise donations for organizations tend to advertise this, and the Azrieli Foundation, which functions as the philanthropic arm of the Azrieli Group, reports on its website about its various activities.

 

What you won’t find on either the foundation’s or company’s websites is that in 2010 the Azrieli Group apparently donated NIS 30,000 to Im Tirtzu. But following publication of this article in the Hebrew edition of Haaretz Magazine last week, the Azrieli Group Facebook page was updated to include the following comment: “The Azrieli Group, through the Azrieli Foundation, has donated more than NIS 40 million to projects for the advancement of society in Israel. Two years ago NIS 30,000 was donated by Kanit Azrieli [the privately owned company that owns the Azrieli malls] to a project to stop the academic boycott of Israel. This project was spearheaded by Im Tirtzu at the time, and other companies joined the effort. We would like to emphasize that we are not tainted by any political considerations, and have Israel’s best interests at heart.”

Haaretz Magazine has also found that Leo Schachter, Israel’s second-largest exporter of processed diamonds, donated NIS 74,000 to Im Tirtzu last year. That same year, the company, which is headed by Elliot Tannenbaum, who immigrated from the United States in the early 1980s, exported $359 million worth of diamonds. Sources in the company say that Tannenbaum decides with his wife Debbie on the donations made by the company. Tannenbaum’s office said in his name that they are not interested in commenting on the matter.

 

Im Tirtzu, registered in January 2007 as a nonprofit organization by Ronen Shoval, calls itself on its website “an extra-parliamentary movement that works to strengthen and advance the values of Zionism in Israel.” Its objectives, adds the site, “focus on working toward a renewal of the Zionist discourse, Zionist thinking and Zionist ideology, to ensure the future of the Jewish nation and of the State of Israel and to advance Israeli society in coping with the challenges it faces.”

 

But in the past two years, hardly a week has gone by without the organization appearing in the headlines − often in controversial contexts.

 

Earlier this month, for example, Bank Leumi cancelled its “Two Million Reasons” project, through which it planned to distribute NIS 2 million to welfare organizations, following the uproar that arose when it became known that Im Tirtzu also wanted to participate in the project. In this context, it should also be noted that Im Tirtzu keeps its accounts at Bank Leumi, as evidenced by the association’s 2008 budget report.

 

It appears that the media fuss surrounding Im Tirtzu’s activity is only helping it. This can be seen in the scope of the organization’s activity, which has been steadily growing since its inception. In 2007 it reported to the registrar of nonprofit organizations on donations totaling NIS 260,000 ‏(including NIS 97,000 designated for the “Winograd Campaign,” which called for the Winograd commission to issue personal findings about the conduct of then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert‏). That same year, the organization reported hasbara ‏(public relations-related‏) activity totally NIS 80,000.

 

According to Im Tirtzu’s most recent financial report, in 2010 it spent NIS 1.14 million on hasbara and advertising ‏(more than 10 times what it spent in 2009‏). The report also reveals that last year it received donations totaling NIS 1.66 million, almost four times as much as in 2009, when they amounted to NIS 456,000. In 2010 the organization spent NIS 68,000 on “events and activities,” and under the heading “salaries and related expenses” reported spending approximately NIS 250,000. Incidentally, the cost of fundraising efforts in 2010 was close to NIS 70,000 ‏(nearly nine times the sum from the previous year‏).

 

Im Tirtzu also reports that it employs 12 people and that 4,200 people did volunteer work for it in 2010. At the top of the salary list are the head of the missions department, Aharon Noam; spokesperson Erez Tadmor; and head of the activists’ department, Amit Barak. Each earns about NIS 77,000 a year, gross.

 

An interesting comment by the organization’s oversight committee was made regarding a relatively negligible outlay of NIS 33,000 for legal expenses in 2010: “It is important to note that the organization’s legal expenses ‏(as a plaintiff‏) are purely hasbara activity and so we view this as a legitimate and appropriate expense,” the committee reported to the NPO registrar.

 

Aside from the Azrieli Group and Leo Schachter Diamonds, the group mentions three other bodies from which it received donations in 2010 exceeding NIS 20,000, the maximum amount for a donation whose source needn’t be listed.

 

Keren Segal Leyisrael − a fund whose declared objective is “to establish, develop and manage educational and cultural projects about Israel’s heritage and the Jewish community in Jerusalem and Israel,” and which is headed by Jerusalem businessman Yotam Bar-Hama − donated NIS 77,000 to Im Tirtzu last year. In 2008, it donated NIS 190,000 to Im Tirtzu. Bar-Hama declined to explain the motives behind the donation, and said only that the fund’s money comes from his family abroad.

 

Another organization called The Forum for Religious Zionism donated NIS 74,000 to the movement last year. This is a new organization that was registered in 2010 in the name of Zvi Soibel, former director of the Bnei Akiva yeshiva in Kfar Haroeh. Asked why the forum decided to donate to Im Tirtzu, he said: “Our organization works to achieve its objectives that were properly set, and it means to keep on doing so in the future. Among other things, the organization organizes, directly and through other organizations, cultural events related to the State of Israel.”

 

Since its founding, Im Tirtzu has also been supported by the Central Israel Fund, a U.S.-based NPO. The fund, which according to its latest U.S. income tax return, raised nearly $10.5 million in 2010, says that it aids the needy and supports various educational and community projects. Central Israel, which transferred NIS 95,000 to Im Tirtzu last year, raises money for strongly right-wing organizations like Women in Green, and the Hananu organization, which provides legal aid to rightists and in the past even gave money to Yigal Amir.

 

Some of the contributors to Im Tirtzu have been revealed in the past. In 2008, the organization received a donation of NIS 374,000 from the American organization Christians United for Israel, and in 2009 it received the same sum from them. This organization is headed by Father John Hagee, who once said that “God sent Hitler as a hunter to force the Jews to move to Israel in anticipation of Judgment Day.” This money, by the way, was not transferred directly to Im Tirtzu, but rather via the Jewish Agency.

 

Two weeks ago, Shahar Ginossar reported in Yedioth Ahronoth that in 2008 a man by the name of Adam Horowitz donated NIS 75,000 to Im Tirtzu. according to the report, in Isarel there are three people by this name. Two have denied any connection to the donation and the third, a Likud activist close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said, “It must be another Horowitz.”

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6. Al Jazeera

Saturday, December 31, 2011

 

Michael Ignatieff: Intellectual hypocrisy

As Canada’s Liberal leader, the intellectual- turned-politician became an uncritical supporter of Israeli aggression.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/12/20111229111051709479.html

Derrick O’Keefe

Ignatieff came to Canadian politics after a long career as a public intellectual in the UK and US [GALLO/GETTY]

Vancouver, Canada – Under Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, Canada has developed a reputation as the most pro-Israel government in the western world.

 

Three years ago, Canada refused to utter a word of criticism about Israeli war crimes committed during Operation Cast Lead against Gaza. Before that, back in 2006, the first year of the Harper government, Canada insisted that Israel’s attacks on Lebanon were “a measured response” – even after a Canadian family and a Canadian UN peacekeeper were among the victims killed by the intensive Israeli bombing.

 

So it was no surprise that when, in November, a Canadian boat with the Freedom Waves Flotilla to Gaza was hijacked in international waters by Israel’s navy, there was not a word of concern uttered by the Harper government for the Canadians detained in an Israeli jail. That same month, Defence Minister Peter MacKay met with his counterpart Ehud Barak to announce new military co-operation between Israel and Canada. The Harper government also obliged with some saber rattling and the announcement of new, strengthened sanctions against Iran.

 

Although Canada never deserved its reputation as a “fair broker” in the Middle East, there has been a marked shift in recent years culminating in loud, explicit support for Israel’s wars of aggression and its occupation. But Canada’s ignominious status as enabler of Israeli occupation on the world stage has also been facilitated by rampant political cowardice among opposition politicians. In many cases they know better, but remain silent for fear of bearing the brunt of an organised and well-funded lobby that defends Israeli policies.

 

The case of Michael Ignatieff, who resigned as Liberal leader in May 2011 after a devastating electoral defeat, is exemplary. Ignatieff came to Canadian politics after a long career as a public intellectual in the United Kingdom and the United States. And although he was a high profile supporter of war and empire, prior to returning to Canada his work still featured occasional, but sharp critiques of Israeli occupation.

 

As Liberal leader, he became an uncritical supporter of Israel, even joining in the now routine attempts by the Harper government to demonise and criminalise Palestine solidarity activism in Canada.

 

“As Liberal leader, he became an uncritical supporter of Israel, even joining in the now routine attempts by the Harper government to demonise and criminalise Palestine solidarity activism in Canada.”

Ignatieff’s flip-flopping on Palestine illustrates perfectly his own assessment, found in his short 2003 pro-imperialist book Empire Lite, that “modern imperial ethics can only be hypocritical”.

 

In March 2009, Ignatieff, having finally been anointed as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, published an op-ed in the National Post in which he traduced the organisers of Israeli Apartheid Week, an annual event in support of Palestinian human rights and critical of Israeli policies that had been growing in size and scope in Canada and beyond. The right-wing Post is normally hostile territory for a Liberal leader, but in this case they were happy to provide the column space.

 

Charge of racism

 

Ignatieff started off with some good old bipartisan Canadian bromides – “We respect differences of opinion, nationality, race and creed” – the better to level his accusation. Then, he unleashed a flurry of non-sequiturs.

 

International law defines “apartheid” as a crime against humanity. Labeling Israel as an “apartheid” state is a deliberate attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the Jewish state itself. Criticism of Israel is legitimate. Attempting to describe its very existence as a crime against humanity is not.

 

He added to this the extremely serious charge that IAW represents “demonisation”, which “targets institutions and individuals because of what and who they are – Israeli and Jewish”. He further went on to assert, without providing any specific examples or testimony, that IAW had left Jewish students intimidated to the point of being “afraid to express their opinions”. The last half of the op-ed was devoted to attacking the Ontario branch of the Canadian Union of Public Employees for passing a resolution in favour of the international campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, part of what Ignatieff called a “chorus of denunciation of Israel” which “threatens academic freedom” and “free exchange”.

 

In March 2010, Ignatieff again issued a similar denunciation of Israeli Apartheid Week, charging the organisers with “an attempt to heighten the tensions in our communities around the tragic conflict in the Middle East”.

 

This charge of racism, especially of such a pernicious and historically deadly variety, is most serious indeed. And it is entirely baseless, flowing only from Ignatieff’s own logical fallacy about describing Israel with the word apartheid. Given Ignatieff’s own record, the denunciation was also a display of almost superhuman chutzpah.

 

The charge of racism rests first on the equation of the state of Israel with the Jewish people as a whole. This conflation is a transparent, common device used to stifle honest discussion of the Middle East. The second pillar upon which Ignatieff’s allegation rests is the use of the term apartheid to describe the actions of the state of Israel.

 

Although the analogy is certainly not perfect – it is after all an analogy (where the analogy fails most notably is with regards to the relationships between the oppressed communities in question and the needs of Capital. In South Africa, the ruling white elite needed the labour of the black working class to profit from the country’s massive deposits of gold, diamonds and other minerals. Israel’s economy, in contrast, no longer needs its former Palestinian workforce, the massive influx of foreign workers from Asia and Africa having to a large extent replaced them. What economic impact Israel does feel from its policy of closures and expulsion are easily offset by the largess of overseas zealots and of course by military and financial aid from the US government) – many respected human rights activists, scholars and political leaders have used the term to describe Israel and its actions in the occupied territories.

 

Apartheid and Israel

 

Some of the voices who have spoken of apartheid and Israel in the same breath have done so with unquestioned moral authority. These include Ronnie Kasrils, the Jewish South African anti-apartheid fighter and former minister in the post-apartheid government, along with Nelson Mandela and the Archbishop Desmond Tutu themselves. Here is Tutu, from a 2002 article in The Nation:

 

“The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century, but we would not have succeeded without the help of international pressure–in particular the divestment movement of the 1980s. Over the past six months a similar movement has taken shape, this time aiming at an end to the Israeli occupation… Yesterday’s South African township dwellers can tell you about today’s life in the occupied territories. To travel only blocks in his own homeland, a grandfather waits on the whim of a teenage soldier. More than an emergency is needed to get to a hospital; less than a crime earns a trip to jail. The lucky ones have a permit to leave their squalor to work in Israel’s cities, but their luck runs out when security closes all checkpoints, paralysing an entire people. The indignities, dependence and anger are all too familiar.”

Tutu and those who lived through the indignities in Apartheid South Africa’s townships, however, were not the only ones to see an analogy and state it publicly. Here are the opening lines of a Guardian column by Michael Ignatieff, which appeared in 2002, a couple of months before Tutu’s piece:

 

“Two years ago, an American friend took me on a helicopter ride from Jerusalem to the Golan Heights over the Palestinian West Bank… When I looked down at the West Bank, at the settlements like Crusader forts occupying the high ground, at the Israeli security cordon along the Jordan river closing off the Palestinian lands from Jordan, I knew I was not looking down at a state or the beginnings of one, but at a Bantustan, one of those pseudo-states created in the dying years of apartheid to keep the African population under control.”

 

This was not a one-time flourish, either. In Empire Lite, Ignatieff admits, “[America] is hated both because it is Israel’s mainstay and because even when it supports Palestinian statehood, it gives them no more than a Bantustan.” The “sham state” created by the Oslo process made Palestinian revolt “inevitable”, since it “was divided by roads and settlements, split into the West Bank and Gaza and incapable of effective self-rule and development”.

 

Speaking to a Toronto audience in 2004, Ignatieff reminded his audience, “Israel must bear some portion of the responsibility for destroying its partner for peace”. He stated the continuing negation of Palestinian rights by Israel would be “a powerful recruiting sergeant for jihadis” in the Holy Land and beyond. Criticising the settlements and the annexation of territory that accompanied the construction of a massive, misnamed “security fence” through the West Bank, Ignatieff presciently saw the writing on the Apartheid Wall.

 

Guilty of anti-semitism

 

Although he condemned the violent resistance of Palestinians to their oppression, he nonetheless conceded in his book The Lesser Evil that in the West Bank or Gaza his arguments for non-violence would be heard “as a strategy to keep the weak in submission and confirm the privileges of the strong”. He writes that non-violence at this stage in the game might mean surrendering to Israeli-imposed apartheid: “Calling on Palestinians to return to the path of deliberative non-violence might be to condemn them to a Palestine reduced to the size of a Bantustan”. [P. 90, The Lesser Evil] It should be noted that Ignatieff knew well of the horrors of the original Bantustans in South Africa, and of that apartheid’s systemic segregation and oppression. In 2001, he wrote the introduction to the book Truth & Lies: Stories from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, published by Granta Books.

 

“It’s not that one can never genuinely change one’s mind, it’s just there is no trace at all of the humility or shame that would normally accompany such an about face.”

By Ignatieff’s standards, as laid out in his indictment of Israeli Apartheid Week, he is guilty of anti-semitism by comparing Israel with a regime that he defines as having been guilty of crimes against humanity. In fact, he made his apartheid analogy in the pages of one of the most influential publications in the world, before the designation “Israeli apartheid” had become commonplace even in the milieu of Palestine solidarity organising. If activism around the slogan of Israeli apartheid is racist, then Michael Ignatieff is a trailblazing anti-semite.

 

Readers of Ignatieff on Palestine are left to wonder if he has any sort of moral centre whatsoever. It’s not that one can never genuinely change one’s mind, it’s just there is no trace at all of the humility or shame that would normally accompany such an about face. This is much like Ignatieff’s 2007 Iraq mea culpa, which on closer reading was no such thing at all. In it, in fact, he as much as openly admitted his own bad faith. Politics is theatre, he asserted, and so politicians are really actors who have to feign indignation and other emotions they do not feel. Academics, for their part, merely play with words and pursue digressions with ideas for their own sake because they are detached from the real world consequences politicians must anticipate. So had he changed his opinion on Palestine close to 180 degrees, or was he just a self-incriminating hypocrite? Or, was it all an act? Did he believe anything he ever said or wrote?

Belief in power

 

One thing Ignatieff does believe in is power, and I think that is the best lens for understanding the transformation of his discourse on Palestine. It’s the best explanation for how, in less than a decade, he went from being someone willing to tell hard truths about Israel to someone willing to publicly slander the truth-tellers.

 

Back in 2002, Ignatieff tied his support for US invasion and occupation with strong recommendations for an end to Israel’s occupation and colonisation of the West Bank and Gaza, “It is time to say that all but those settlements right on the 1967 green line must go”.

 

Ignatieff’s preferred two-state solution would not be brought about merely by political or economic pressure; in his view, the “US [must] commit its own troops, and those of willing allies, not to police a ceasefire, but to enforce the solution that provides security for both populations”. In other words, before Iraq, Michael Ignatieff advocated a “coalition of the willing” to invade the occupied territories and to liberate Palestinians from their apartheid-like oppression.

 

Although his call for US troops on the Green Line is mentioned in Empire Lite, it’s by then moot because Ignatieff has clearly hitched his “humanitarian” wagon to the imperial horse. And on this ride, sadly for the Palestinians and their like around the world, “modern imperial ethics can only be hypocritical”.

 

Ignatieff is now gone from Canadian politics, but unfortunately this profile in cowardice is typical. And so it is that Canada and Israel appear set to remain the best of friends for some time to come.

 

Derrick O’Keefe is a Canadian writer and social justice activist. He has written widely on Canadian and international politics and has written Michael Ignatieff: The Lesser Evil? (Verso Books), and has co-authored with Afghanistan’s Malalai Joya, A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice.

 

Follow him on Twitter: @derrickokeefe

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

This excerpt is from Michael Ignatieff: The Lesser Evil?

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