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Imagine reading this report in an American newspaper:

More than half of white Americans think human rights organizations that expose immoral behavior by the United States should not be allowed to operate freely, and think there is too much freedom of expression here, a recent survey found.
The pollsters surveyed 500 white Americans who can be considered a representative sample of the adult white population.
They found that 57.6 percent of the respondents agreed that human rights organizations that expose immoral conduct by the United States should not be allowed to operate freely.
Slightly more than half agreed that “there is too much freedom of expression” in the US.
The poll also found that most of the respondents favor punishing journalists who report news that reflects badly on the actions of the US military.
Another 82 percent of respondents said they back stiff penalties for people who leak illegally obtained information exposing immoral conduct by the military.

In reality, the views related in the fictitious article above are not those of white Americans but come from Jewish Israelis and pertain to their own state, military, and press. The results of the poll commissioned by the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research at Tel Aviv University, are reported by Haaretz.
During his recent visit to Israel, Vice President Joe Biden spoke about the “unbreakable bond borne of common values” shared by America and the Jewish state.
What the Israeli poll makes clear is that Jewish Israelis and Americans, far from having an unbreakable bond of common values, actually have significantly different views about how democracy works. As Daniel Bar-Tal, a professor at Tel Aviv university said: “The public recognizes the importance of democratic values, but when they need to be applied, it turns out most people are almost anti-democratic.”
Of course, even my attempt to contrive some kind of ethnic symmetry by juxtaposing the dominant ethnic group in the United States with that in Israel, is itself a tenuous parallel. We now have a non-white president but for as long as Israel remains a Jewish state it will surely never have a non-Jewish prime minister.
Most Americans understand that the separation of Church and State protects both democracy and religious freedom. In this era, we know that if any single ethnic or religious group were to assert a “right” to control this country, the United States would cease to be a democracy. The principle of equal rights does not come in different ethnic flavors.
This is cross-posted at Woodward’s site, War in Context.

On Saturday night I flew business class to Qatar for the Doha debates. I always fly economy, but as the saying goes, I could get used to this fast. The seats on the Boeing 777 folded down to make a full bed and I was next to a guy from Cesar Pelli’s architectural firm. At the Four Seasons in Doha, I sent my wife an email. “They have Occitane soap in the bathroom.” “Life is good,” she responded. A BMW took me to and from the souk.
The debate was over the proposition, Obama is too weak to bring about Middle East peace, and I argued the affirmative along with a guy from American University of Beirut named Ahmed Moussali. He was unshaven and chain-smoked and kept the other side off balance in the green room by making fun of their clothing and telling scatological jokes.
They were both courtly men, Roger Cohen of the New York Times and Sami Abu Roza of the Palestinian Authority. Abu Roza had longish hipster hair and a German-inflected accent from a youth in Europe. Cohen has an English accent and opened the debate by speaking with fervor about Obama’s character and strength. Moussali promptly undercut him by saying the question was not about whether we love Obama or don’t love him.
He and Cohen clashed a lot during the debate. It wasn’t just a difference in manners, but in world views.
Moussali talked about the right of return. He said Arabs were made to pay the price for European crimes of World War II, and 1 million Russians moved to Palestine when people who were born there cannot visit their former village. He said that Palestinians ended up with less than 22 percent of the land. Cohen was dismissive of that view.
He said we cant keep dwelling on history and trying to outvictimize one another. Cohen had just been in the West Bank. He said to Moussali, When is the last time you have been in the West Bank? He spoke about how much progress the Palestinians were making economically with reduced checkpoints, and he said that Salam Fayyad says the Palestinians are trying to build something and go forward. Cohen was saying that Moussali and I are stuck in the past.
Before the debate Cohen and I had met in the Four Seasons lobby and both regretted that we were on opposite sides. He’s been a leader in American mainstream journalism; and I have several times celebrated him here, for saying that he was ashamed of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, for his personal courage in Iran last year, for attacking neoconservatives on the craziness of the idea of attacking Iran. 
Still I don’t know how a liberal can say that it is a good thing for people who are denied basic political rights and human rights to accept a hot lunch of economic progress. The Boston tea party was about that. Palestinians want freedom, to come and go, and not to live with separate roadways for Jews who are steadily taking more of their land.
I talked about East Jerusalem and the creation of ethnically-cleansed Jewish neighborhoods that memorialize Israel’s annexation of an international city, a violation that happens not in the past but under our noses.
Strategizing that afternoon over espresso at the Four Seasons, Moussali had told me to tell the audience that this debate doesn’t happen in the U.S. There is not a panel that pitted Cohen and Abu Roza on the right and me and Moussali on the left. Indeed, later this week Cohen will be debating a neocon at the American Jewish Committee on the vital question of Iran (the same debate Cohen won handily at a synagogue in New York last year), but no American stage explores the difference between his views and mine, between his attachment to the two-state solution and my own strong feeling that Israel, a democracy that denies leadership to 20 percent of its population, must be reformed.
Between his concern for the civil rights demonstrators murdered in Iran, with endless attention in the US, and my concern for the civil rights demonstrators murdered by Israel without a squeak from our press. 
It was a foregone conclusion that our side would win, 58-42. Moussali told me if the debate were held in Syria it would have been 90-10.
I sat up late at the Four Seasons talking with friends from Saudi and Palestine, both highly educated and well off. The Saudi had lately given me the book, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson’s classic about nationalism, and the Palestinian had read it in grad school. He told me that the negotiating team for the Palestinians always gets along with the Israelis, because “elites always get along with one another.”
I thought about that bit of wisdom for the next day. Of course elites do. When you are at the Four Seasons and discussing the history of nationalism, you get along. And as a Jew, I am accustomed to thinking in such terms. I’m a member of an elite. Israel’s Reut Institute says frankly that Israel needs to personally cultivate the “entire [American] elite” in culture, arts, politics and academia to maintain its status.
And Fayyad is the elite of Palestinian society. Roger Cohen and I both went to fancy schools and lead privileged lives in the US, and surely some of his love for Iran had to do with the education levels of the protesters. 
On the trip back I rolled my seat down, drank Bourdeaux, and watched Avatar till it got too boring. I saw it as others have, a parable for the US relationship to the Arabs– its glorification of an indigenous people tied to the land (the Nabi) and of the American “grunt” hero who is up against the pencil-necked elites. A Jew couldn’t write a movie from the vantage point of a jarhead, I thought. Well I couldn’t.
But during the debate I had been the most forceful on the issue of Palestinian conditions, about life in East Jerusalem and Gaza. On my left I saw Sami Abu Roza nodding his head in agreement. We’re both good guys. Somehow I think the Palestinians also need others to represent them.

A great post at Open Shuhada Street does the tick-tock on the Goldstone bar mitzvah story. And absolutely nails the divided political culture of the Jewish community between neoconservative leaders and the burgeoning grassroots. Boy the internet gets me excited.

Many South African Jews went to synagogue on Friday evening 16 April knowing that their rabbis would address the Goldstone barring. Their relatively coordinated message seems to have been two-fold:
(1) Goldstone should not be barred from his grandson’s bar mitzvah, and according to the communal leadership might not actually have been, and
(2) nobody should forget that he is a traitor to the Jewish people. A good example is the sermon given by Rabbi Yossi Goldman, President of the SA Rabbinical Association, at Sydenham Shul in Johannesburg. Rabbi Goldman said he would “defend [Goldstone’s] right as a Jew to come to shul”.
However he said that Goldstone “may not be counted to a minyan (the quorum of ten Jewish men required for certain prayers)” and indicated that he would possibly have denied Goldstone an Aliyah (the honour of being called to the Torah), explaining that this “one can forfeit such privilege by inappropriate behaviour”. He also denounced Goldstone saying he had not only betrayed Israel and the Jewish people, but also his own grandmother.
…It was at this point, on 19 April, when most other communal bodies seemed to be in full retreat that SAZF [South African Zionist Federation] Chairperson Avrom Krengel made clear that his organisation would in fact protest if Goldstone decided to attend the bar mitzvah. This put to rest any lingering doubts that the situation was being misrepresented in the press.
[Activist Zackie] Achmat, still waiting for a lawyers letter from the Chief Rabbi, immediately issued the following short statement:
It is reported that the SAZF is still threatening to protest at the Sandton Shul if Justice Richard Goldstone changes his mind and dares to attend his grandson’s barmitzvah.
I call upon the Chief Rabbi of South Africa, Dr Warren Goldstein to publicly denounce this fascist threat by the SAZF.
The Chief Rabbi did not denounce the SAZF threat, but it was reported soon thereafter he had withdrawn his threat to sue. 
Two days later, now a week into the crisis, on 21 April, the Chief Rabbi attempted to recover lost ground by writing an op-ed piece in South Africa’s Business Day newspaper in which he wrote of the “ancient and sacred principle: open synagogues”. He said Goldstone was welcome to attend the bar mitzvah, but reiterated his criticisms of Goldstone, who, he claimed, “has done so much wrong in the world.”
This was to backfire almost as badly as his threat of legal action against Achmat. 
The following day, as reported on the front page, Goldstone finally broke his silence through a letter to the Business Day, in response to the Chief Rabbi’s piece. In it he remarked that the Chief Rabbi’s “rhetoric about “open synagogues” simply does not coincide with how my family and I have been treated”.
He went on to say: “I must state that at no time whatsoever has the chief rabbi reached out to my family.” And concluded by stating: “The questionable and unfortunate approach of the chief rabbi, in all the circumstances, makes it less, and not more, possible for me to do so.”
At this point a second wave of opinion pieces, blogs, speeches and letters appeared. A small selection would include Tony Karon’s piece in the Nation, Larry Derfner’s scorching article in the Jerusalem Post, Judge Albie Sachs’ talk at the Cape Town Press Club, Judge Dennis Davis’ further rebuke of the Chief Rabbi, and  Zapiro’s brilliant cartoon (top of this article) in the Mail & Guardian, an invitation to hold the bar mitzvah in California, and a letter signed by US Rabbis in support of Goldstone.
…Jewish leaders often claim to be concerned, above all else, with anti-semitism. The echoes of anti-semitism inherent in their targeting Goldstone, in a place of Jewish worship, for being a traitorous Jew, obviously eluded the mainstream Jewish leaders.
Nor were they hindered by the damage to Judaism’s reputation caused by their actions. But the SAUPJ statement, picked up in various media, including the Citizen, Sowetan and Cape Times, was important in confirming for observers that the Jewish community is not monolythic in its intolerance.
In fact, the groundswell of backlash against the actions of the SAZF, SAJBD, Chief Rabbi, Beth Din and Sandton Shul point to the underlying, and underestimated, tolerance of the majority of Jews.
A statement also emerged from the Cape Council of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies, stating that it “has registered its deep regret that a religious milestone has been politicised and disagrees with the manner in which this matter has been handled.” Although this statement was reported on in the JTA on 20 April, it was only e-mailed out to the Jewish community on 23 April, indicating, perhaps some trepidation.
This was the first, and it seems still only, public criticism by a major organ of the SA Jewish community of this affair. Albeit late and weak, it is nevertheless important. Generally however, there was no moral leadership offered by official Jewish leaders.
…On 24 April it was widely reported that the South African Jewish leaders had reached Goldstone, assured him that no protests would take place, and that on that basis he had declared his intention to attend the bar mitzvah. Such interest had been generated in the story that the news was carried by, amongst others, CNN, the New York Times, Haaretz, the Mail & Guardian, Eye-Witness News and further publicised by the World Jewish Congress. 
On publicising this, the SA Jewish Board of Deputies made the somewhat authoritarian-sounding request that “all parties immediately desist all public activities on this matter”. This is of course unlikely. 
As noted above various Jewish institutions seem to have conducted themselves disgracefully in colluding in an “agreement” that Goldstone would not attend his grandson’s bar mitzvah, and thereafter, when the story broke and an outcry ensued, they seem to have lied to the public. 

Support for divestment continues to grow. Here is the latest amazing statement urging the University of California to divest:

To the ASUC Senate,
We the undersigned Nobel Women Peace Laureates support your courage and call on you to reaffirm the ASUC Bill in Support of UC Divestment from War Crimes. We stand united in our belief that divesting from companies that provide significant support for the Israeli military provides moral and strategic stewardship of tuition and taxpayer-funded public education money.
We are all peace makers, and we believe that no amount of dialogue without economic pressure can motivate Israel to change its policy of using overwhelming force against Palestinian civilians. Last year’s nearly 400 women and children casualties in Gaza, and thousands more injured and killed, were all victims of a well armed military machine allowed to operate unchecked.
A delegation of us went to Gaza and saw firsthand the evidence of wholesale killing and destruction. Our hearts grieve for Gaza and we demand that there be no more Gazas. We urge the UC system to take the lead in this direction as has been its tradition, and commend the students who are working to achieve this goal.
We reject the portrayals of this action as anti-Semitic, and maintain that it does not make a choice between Palestinians and Israelis, but between universal freedom and oppression.
Signed,
Shirin Ebadi, Iran, 2003 Nobel Peace Laureate
Mairead Maguire (Corrigan), Ireland, 1976 Nobel Peace Laureate
Rigoberta Menchu Tum, Guatemala, 1992 Nobel Peace Laureate
Jody Williams, USA, 1997 Nobel Peace Laureate

I am encouraged by the wave of justified indignation, and spontaneous boycott movement, against the new Arizona law. Indeed, requiring citizens and legal resident to carry proof of their status at all times, and encouraging police to profile passersby who “look suspicious”, runs counter to the soul of democracy. The bigots who put together the Arizona law should be made to pay. And hopefully it will be declared unconstitutional.
This is also a teaching opportunity, to explain to fellow Kossacks why the country I come from, Israel, has never really lived up to its “Middle East’s Only Democracy” (TM) branding.
See? In Israel, laws like the Arizona one – and worse – have been in effect ever since independence. No, I’m not talking about the Occupation, but inside Israel proper.

Any resident sixteen years of age or older must at all times carry an Identity card, and present it upon demand to a senior police officer, head of Municipal or Regional Authority, or a policeman or member of the Armed forces on duty.

And guess against which ethnic group this requirement is enforced most often…. some more details and some personal anecdotes below.
In Israel, one of the rites of passage is going (sometime after your 16th birthday) to the Interior Ministry and getting your first ID card. And yes, you do tend to carry it with you at all times when leaving the home.
What happens it a police officer asks you for it and you don’t have it? Well, in principle they could arrest you and you might spend a night (used to be a couple of nights) in jail. In practice, to Jewish-Israeli citizens who look and sound Jewish-Israeli, this rarely happens. Very rarely. I mean, they might get in trouble with the police if they engage in wrongdoing, but almost never they would be booked just for not carrying an ID.
Things slightly change if you are a non-Jewish Israeli. In 1988 I boarded the night bus from Tel Aviv to Eilat (extreme south of the country). Two Bedouin-Israeli youth were about to board, when a policeman came and started questioning them.
They got smart and talked back. I know that in America you never talk back to police, but in Israel it is more common and socially acceptable, and Jews would usually get away with it. But being Bedouin, the policeman got mad and asked them for their ID’s. They didn’t have ID’s on them. They didn’t get to board the bus, instead they seemed to have gone on a field trip with the policeman.
Now, this goes on all the time. If you walk a typical Israeli downtown, especially in Jerusalem, you will always see police officers or soldiers “chatting” with some Arab-looking men and checking their ID’s. The police are acting completely within their rights. See, that’s the beauty: in Israel citizens don’t really have inherent rights because there is no Constitution.
There have been some “Basic Laws”, including a “Human Rights and Dignity Law”, representing an attempt to cobble together a quasi-Constitution. Former Chief Justice Aharon Barak has invented for them the self-serving, completely blown-out-of-proportion brand-name “the Constitutional Revolution”. Truth be told, these laws are subject to change or cancellation by a 61-member majority of the 120-member Knesset – and they have been changed countless of times. Much worse: all these laws have gaping loopholes left in them for “security considerations” and “security measures”, which allow all security forces to continue business as usual, including routine profiling and ID checking (see below for a partial list of these “security measures”).
Recently I’ve become sick of hearing – either from Israelis or from right-wing Americans – how the rest of the world should learn from us if they want, say, to improve travel security while retaining convenience. A couple of weeks ago we returned from a home visit in Israel.
Our inspection was the most lax I encountered anywhere in recent years. They couldn’t care less if we have liquids and how many. Simple reason: they profile and are proud of it. We are immediately recognized as typical middle-class Jewish Israeli family. Free pass. If we were something else (say, a typical middle-class Palestinian family), the story would have been much different.
They claim you can’t argue with success. But consider this:

1. From a mathematical perspective, Israeli security only has to deal with the n=1 problem. The vast majority of their effort is spent profiling, questioning and strip-searching a single target group: Palestinians. Most other security services have more “suspect” ethnic groups to deal with, or they must intercept risks not immediately evident from appearance or other profiling.
2. The Israeli “solution” – i.e., profiling and collectively punishing anyone who looks like, or is affiliated with, a Palestinian – is simply anti-democratic. Dictatorships can adopt it (well, actually, dictatorships don’t really wait for the Israeli example, this is how dictatorships operate in the first place). But democracies cannot afford to do so and remain democracies. Israel is fortunate (or rather, unfortunate) that most of its citizens are raised to believe that we are a democracy, but never really care to check what this term entails.

Ironically, Israel’s ID law originates from the British Mandate’s 1945 Emergency Defense Regulations, enacted to counter… a wave of organized Jewish terrorism. The suite of regulations, all still in effect and used mostly against Palestinians – citizens, residents and Occupied – also includes the authority to demolish homes, arrest without trial (nowadays euphemised as “administrative detention”), to court-martial civilians, to censor the press, etc.
Which does bring us to the Occupied Territories. In the West Bank, a Palestinian caught by our soldiers without an ID is liable to immediate imprisonment, which might last 18 days without trial. And yes, they will be arrested if they don’t have an ID on them.
Since the lot of Jewish-Israelis is so much easier – meaning, the authorities don’t see a point in enforcing the ID law on us – most Israelis are quite complacent with all this. They also err to think they live in a democracy, and mistake their nationality-related privileges for inalienable rights. Not.
They are privileges in both senses: we get more freedoms than other groups in Israel-Palestine get. And the authorities, when push comes to shove, see these as privileges, which they reserve the full right to withdraw when they see fit.
And most Israelis call us progressives “suckers”. We at least know what the real game is.
One last aspect, or irony: if all the above wasn’t enough, until 2003 the ID included an explicit “Nationality” designation, with the options being “Jewish”, “Arab”, “Druze”, “Circassian” (the last two being small minorities who generally cooperate with the Jewish majority).
Mine for example, issued 1994, says “Jewish”. Again, no one cared much about kind of “democracy” this is where a police officer can demand this document from you and ascertain which ethnic/national group you belong to.
But then, a group of Reform-converted Jews, for whom the Interior Ministry denied the “Jewish” designation to preserve the Orthodox monopoly over conversions, appealed to the High Court to be registered “Jewish”, and won. The fundamentalist Interior Minister decided to respond by removing the “Nationality” designation altogether. He’d rather remove it, than admit that Reform-converted Jews are formally “Jewish” in Israel.
So the fundamentalist, anti-democrat politician ended up inadvertently nudging Israel’s draconian ID a bit towards equity and democracy, in order to counter the boutique, spoiled, NIMBY, narrow concern of otherwise-fully-privileged Reform Jews (whose American counterparts often see no other evil in Israel except for the discrimination against Reform Jews). A little story that summarizes the many ironies of public life in Israel.
This post originally appeared on the Daily Kos.
Assaf Oron (b. 1966) is an Israeli human-rights/anti-Occupation activist (also holding US citizenship) and an applied statistician currently living in Seattle.

The joke:
or the apology:

I wish that I had not made this off the cuff joke at the top of my remarks, and I apologize to anyone who was offended by it. It also distracted from the larger message I carried that day: that the United States commitment to Israel’s security is sacrosanct.

Here’s yet another attack on Muslims for being too sensitive about seeing the Prophet Muhammed depicted or caricatured in the press, along with the usual indictment of the West for caving in and “self-censuring.”
But when was the last time you saw the Pope, or Jesus, cartooned or ridiculed in a big newspaper or on a major TV program?  I remember back in the 1970s when Boston magazine published what it thought was a humorous article about the city’s cardinal, Humberto Medeiros.  The public uproar was tremendous, and the editor-in-chief lost his job.
Of course freedom of the press is a primary value.  But Western editors do have red lines, and they try not to pointlessly offend their publics.  Why do they think they can treat Muslims differently?
See: www.mondoweiss.net