Rob Mosrie, Executive Director of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation,
pointed to the hypocrisy of US policy in a press release about the meeting, “Israel’s arrest
of non-violent activists like Abdallah Abu Rahmah mocks President Obama’s call in his
Cairo speech for Palestinians to use only nonviolent means to gain their freedom.
What kind of message does it send to a community when their nonviolent leadership is jailed?” BREAKING NEWS: Benjamin Netanyahu retains control of U.S. Congress
Activism/Solidarity/Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions Refugees in south protest Balfour declaration
SIDON: Palestinian refugees at the south Lebanon refugee camp of Ain al-Hilweh marked
Tuesday the signing of the Balfour declaration. Camp residents and political factions
marched in the street to protest the declaration, considered as a cornerstone in the
Israel’s war on Gaza almost two years ago killed at least 1,400 Palestinians – including
more than 300 children according to human rights groups. Many of the children who
witnessed the violence now suffer ongoing psychological damage. Al Jazeera’s Nadim Baba
reports on how residents are trying to restore some normality to the children of Gaza.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpybxTPbqp4&feature=youtube_gdata
Petah Tikva – PNN – Graffiti was found on house of Major-General Avichai Mandelblit
this morning in response to the prosecutor’s conviction of two Israeli soldiers.
The graffiti called Mandelblit a “traitor” and compared him to Judge Richard Goldstone,
the head of a commission for the United Nations that charged both Israel and Hamas
with committing war crimes during Operation Cast Lead in the winter of 2008 and 2009.
http://english.pnn.ps/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9070&Itemid=64
Iraq shuts Al-Baghdadia after bloody church attack
New York, November 2, 2010–The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by the Iraqi authorities’ decision to close down Al-Baghdadia TV offices in Iraq. The closure of the Cairo-based satellite channel was announced after it broadcast the demands of gunmen who attacked a church in Baghdad on Sunday. Fifty-eight people were killed during the siege, according to news reports. http://cpj.org/2010/11/iraq-shuts-down-al-baghdadia-tv-after-bloody-churc.php
AFP – An Al-Qaeda group in Iraq has declared Christians “legitimate targets” as a deadline expired for Egypt’s Coptic church to free women allegedly held after converting to Islam, SITE monitors said Wednesday.
http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/iraq/*http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20101103/wl_afp/iraqunrestchristianqaedaegypt
On Sunday, a church siege in Iraq left 58 people dead – with an al-Qaeda-linked group claiming responsibility. So, is the attack a fresh round of violence against this community? And is the aim of the attack to force Christians out of Iraq?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW_bqjt6mdU&feature=youtube_gdata
Wikileaks Iraq documents raise critical questions
The trove of Iraq war documents recently made public by Wikileaks underscores several important truths. One, the American people have a right to know when Americans or their allies commit violations of the laws of war. Two, the American government has been woefully nontransparent. Transparency is key to accountability, to minimizing violations and to preventing the civilian population from turning against US forces. This, in turn, protects, rather than endangers, US troops. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/human-rights-first/wikileaks-iraq-documents_b_777792.html
One prominent pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington is already praising the GOP takeover of the House of Representatives as a net benefit for Israel. “While Democrats are likely to keep control of the U.S. Senate, Republicans will take over the U.S. House of Representatives following Tuesday’s elections. This is likely to have implications for Israel-related issues such as Israel’s relationship with the United States and the push for sanctions against Iran,” said an e-mail blasted out by The Israel Project only minutes after news stations called the turnover of House control a certainty.
http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/11/02/pro_israel_group_claims_election_victory
The midterms: an Israeli perspective
President Barack Obama is not popular in Israel, to say the least. Israelis knew John McCain as their supporters; Obama was a mystery. Early in 2009, the new president’s attempts to approach the Arab world defined him as a pro-Palestinian, at least in the eyes of many Israelis. Minister Limor Livnat (Likud) expressed the common view in the government when she declared that “we fell into the hands of a horrible administration” (other politicians were blunter, simply calling Obama “a new Pharaoh
“). Rightwing comments on the internet often refers to him just as “Hussein”.
http://www.promisedlandblog.com/?p=3552
Here are two perspectives on the Tea Party movement that offer tea some sympathy. Both writers are alive to an important trend, the degree to which privilege among Democrats (and there is a clear class break between blue states and red ‘uns) has separated them from populist concerns– including the concern that their children will be killed in Afghanistan. Visionary Milton Friedman wanted this to happen by eliminating the draft; he wanted the elite not to have to decide to murder its own children; and he has got his wish.
http://mondoweiss.net/2010/11/obama-betrayed-the-antiwar-left.html
The French foreign minister says Iran has not yet decided to execute a woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery, amid reports her execution was imminent.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/int/news/-/news/world-middle-east-11681837
Saudi journalist to be lashed in public
A Saudi journalist has been sentenced to be whipped in public after being convicted of “instigating protests” against a government electricity company following a series of power cuts. Fahd Al Jukhaidib, a journalist with the daily newspaper, Aljazierah, must serve two months in prison and suffer 50 lashes with the whip, including 25 lashes in public, in front of the electricity department. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2010/nov/02/press-freedom-saudiarabia
ADL seeks to submarine Gaza boat fundraiser at Rutgers
Nov 03, 2010
Philip Weiss
This is important. Tomorrow night at Rutgers, the New Jersey state university, Palestinian solidarity groups are exercising their right to assembly and free speech by gathering to raise money for the US boat to Gaza— which seeks to aid the 1.5 million people living in an open-air prison, with few political rights. The ADL is smearing the event as an aid to terrorism, inside a public university. Below is reporting from the north Jersey newspaper, followed by the flyer for the event.
The event, sponsored by a group called BAKA: Students United for Middle Eastern Justice, was advertised as a halal buffet followed by speakers in support of U.S. to Gaza, which describes itself as a coalition of organizations and individuals…
BAKA received $2,494 from mandatory fees collected from all students to stage the event, which will be held at the university-owned Busch Campus Center.
“We are deeply concerned that a state-supported university could support an organization that could commit a belligerent act against one of our allies,” said Etzion Neuer, regional director of the state Anti-Defamation League based in Teaneck. “This is not about free speech, it’s about potentially illegal activity.”
Hoda Mitwally, a Rutgers senior and an executive board member of BAKA, said her group was raising money for a humanitarian mission with the blessing of the Rutgers University Student Assembly, the university’s student government.
“We are not bringing weapons, we are not bringing anybody who plans to use violence,” she said. “This is a humanitarian mission. They are framing this as though we were planning some sort of terrorist action or something suspicious, and we strongly denounce that. These are smear remarks intented to discredit our organization and our mission.
The crisis of the liberal Zionist
Nov 03, 2010
Philip Weiss
I often write here that Israel is in crisis; and my belief is confirmed by the growing desperation of liberal Zionists who glimpse the end of the two-state solution and with that the possible end of the Jewish state. I watch liberal Zionists because I want Jews on board in the coming transformation, I want Jewish life to change, and these liberals or their children are the Jewish swing vote; they are the Jews whose commitment to liberalism might lead them to abandon an anachronistic supremacist political ideology (Zionism) or undertake radical reform of the Jewish state.
The interesting thing about these three liberal Zionists, though, is their anxiety, and their clinging to religious and nationalist beliefs. It is important to expose these very conservative views if we are going to win over their children to non-Zionism. Sorry, this is a long post; you can skip from 1, Burston to 2, Gitlin to 3, Samuels.
1. Haaretz columnist Brad Burston gave a talk at a Seattle synagogue, sponsored by J Street, and made a sharply nationalist statement that suggests to me that if push comes to shove, Burston (and J Street) might march shoulder-to-shoulder with AIPAC. Richard Silverstein offered this report. I’m including a lot of Silverstein’s comment, which is very perceptive. Silverstein:
At one point, Burston said, “About the progressive Jew who sees nothing wrong with the many Muslim nations in the world, but who cannot allow the Jews to have a single state of their own anywhere in the world, I say that person is an anti-Semite.”
…I too used to be a liberal Zionist.. But it doesn’t do anyone any good. It sugarcoats Israeli reality. It in a sense infantilizes the Diaspora audience by presuming that it either can’t take or wouldn’t understand a full-bore analysis of the extremity of the political situation in Israel. At the present moment, an Israeli speaking in the Diaspora does a disservice when he makes things appear not quite as bad as they really are. Only the truth suffices in the present situation….
I’m also struck by the phrase “love for Israel” bandied about by so many liberal Zionists including Burston tonight [and by Gershom Sholem when he lectured Hannah Arendt]. One of the reasons … I didn’t attend Daniel Sokatch’s (he is the CEO of the New Israel Fund) talk here in Seattle this month was its title, Loving Israel in Challenging Times. I find the notion that one must profess love for Israel before criticizing it to be preposterous. …Love means that Israel cannot be something I think it should be, a normal state. Love puts Israel on a pedestal just as traditional male attitudes toward women put them on similar pedestals that prevented them from being normal human beings.
In the time when I was still on e-mail terms with Leonard Fein, he practically made a fetish out of my supposed lack of love for Israel. To him, it proved I had left the Zionst reservation because you could only express criticism of Israel out of such deep concern and affection, that your criticism would clearly be couched as that of a concerned parent for a loved one gone astray. Naturally, I don’t have patience in this hour in which Israel finds itself in extremis for such mollycoddling.
To me it is self-evident that I would not write this blog unless I loved Israel. It would simply be a waste of time to devote as many tens of thousands of hours to this enterprise as I have unless there was deep emotion attached to the subject. And there is. Many decades of my life have been devoted to Israel. I could not do so unless I loved it.
I recommended making a distinction between the inflamed anti-Zionism that singles out Israel’s policies as uniquely racist among states, even unto the claim (contrary to many UN declarations ) that the state has no right to exist, and moreover that the Jews are not a people and are not entitled to a majority in a Middle Eastern nation, and the view (my own, as it happens ) that it is the post-’67 occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem that is illegitimate – not only because it violates international law, and not only because it is cruel, and not because the Palestinians are angels, but because the State of Israel is in default on its moral obligations….
In other words, to use a phrase much bruited about nowadays, the occupation is an “existential threat” to the Jewish people, who are a people of an idea. The danger is clear, present and growing….
[At the conference] a host of burning questions that might have been raised – to take one tiny example, whether the Jewish people are well served by the spread of settlers throughout Arab Silwan, next to the Old City wall, guarded by a private security army funded by the government to the tune of NIS 52 million per year – attracted no interest as sources of delegitimization. The profound moral question of why Jews should tolerate land grabs went unasked. The conferees were, for the most part, disinclined to discuss bedrock – even the bedrock of who the Jews are and what we stand for.
Here it interests me that Gitlin dignifies the birth of Israel as moral though it involved landgrab and ethnic cleansing– while he condemns the post-67 landgrab. I don’t know whether it is possible to maintain this position. In the view of many non-Zionists and anti-Zionists, what was so great about ’48? Arabs weren’t consulted despite promises by FDR to consult them; and they were against Partition, as you and I would have been. Jews were granted half the territory by the U.N. and ended up with 78 percent of it. Israel and American Jews went to war against the idea that any of the hundreds of thousands of refugees could come home to their property– a moral savagery that continues to fester 60 years on. “The profound moral question of why Jews should tolerate land grabs went unasked,” to quote Gitlin.
If you’re trying to save the Jewish state, I think you have to deal more honestly with those crimes, which the unending occupation has served to unearth.
When I shared these thoughts with Ilene Cohen, she wrote to me, “The Israelis could have settled for ’48 and been done. That’s what the ’67 borders idea is about. As we know well from our own country, many things done immorally become permanent. The Israelis believed they could do with ’67 what they had done with ’48, but it’s not working. Different time. I’m not sure they actually understand that. Their ’67 problem has not gone away and is undermining ’48. They’re very greedy and very stupid….
“I don’t know how or when this will all resolve itself, but I do believe that Israel as we know it is in deep trouble. Every day I continue to be shocked that they get even worse…
“I think the reality is that there will be one state only if the Israelis make it so by their obstructionism. I don’t think it will happen because people on both sides decide that that is the ideal but it will happen because of the Israeli apartheid regime. I really do believe that the Israelis look to be committing national suicide. How this all plays out in the coming years will not be pretty, but I think that Israeli apartheid will eventually be undone by on person, one vote…
“Personally, I think two states, with the Israelis giving up much, much more than they are willing to, would be best for all. And I think that the two states could become reasonable neighbors. But, again, the Israelis are greedy racists and won’t give up till they’re broken.”
3. Finally, here is David Samuels at Tablet, interviewing Maen Rashid Areikat, the PLO representative to the United States. The most notable moment in the interview is when Samuels says, “Some people in both of our communities believe that a bi-national state is the right answer.” A true statement. And Samuels, a Zionist, is granting honor to a new way of thinking about this problem.
Not that Samuels feels that way himself. The interesting thing about the interview is the angst of the interviewer. The piece reads like an encounter session. Samuels understands that he has to work with Areikat if he’s going to save the Jewish state, but meantime he rages at Areikat about Palestinian identity and Palestinian refugees and sets out as a justification for the Jewish state a religious insistence that the Jews are a people and nation connected genetically to the Jews of Jerusalem for thousands of years, a truly dubious proposition that we would mock if Christians came forward with it.
And by the way, he hints, American Jews feel more loyalty to Israel than the U.S. (note the last, passport comment).
As I read this interview, I don’t see why Samuels couldn’t move toward cultural Zionism and let go of the nation– which he doesn’t want to live in anyway, just reserve as a placeholder with all the racism that entails till the next Holocaust. For as Samuels recognizes, demographically-speaking, My kind of American Jewish identity, in which Israel means very little at all, and is largely a negative, is winning out over his conservative Jewish identity (with its dual loyalty problem). After all, most American Jews have never been to Israel.
I’ll shut up now. Here’s a portion of the encounter. Samuels is in bold:
let me ask you this: Was there ever a Jewish temple in Jerusalem?
I’m not a historian.
I have the reference right here from the Encyclopedia Britannica. Is it wrong?
I’m not a historian. What are you trying to get to? That Jews were present then?
Were they?
President Abbas in his meeting with the leaders of the American Jewish community in June said that yes, the Jews were in the Middle East, and that one-third of the Quran talks about Jews.
Are the people who say they’re Israeli Jews today related to the people who were Jews in the time of the Quran?
It’s for historians to establish the link. I believe many Jews who lived at one point in that land continue to live in that land, and their descendants stayed in that land.
So, today’s Palestinians are the real Jews?
Everywhere in the world, Jews follow the nationality and citizenship of the country where they live. In the United States, you have American Jews, who live in the United States. You have French Jews. And this was the original argument between us and the Jews. Why can’t you be Palestinian Jews?
Is Judaism simply a religion, or are Jews also a people—like Kurds or Armenians?
That is something you have to work out for yourselves….Some of us still make the same arguments of the ’60s and the ’70s: “No, they are not a nation, they are the followers of a faith, they should live in every country as citizens of that country.”
That approach didn’t work out so well for us in Europe.
I think you have been very much influenced by the Holocaust…
So, explain why it’s impossible for the Palestinian people to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
We have no problem whatsoever with what Israel calls themselves. Israel can call themselves “The Great Empire of the Jewish People.” But don’t ask me to recognize that.
Why not? You want us to recognize the validity of your narrative of Palestinian people-hood….Doesn’t the U.N. partition resolution on which you base your own national claims for a Palestinian state already recognize Israel as a state for the Jews—a Jewish state?
…Publicly we are Jordanians, but deep inside we are Palestinians.
That’s how many Jews feel about the passports that they carry.
Obama betrayed the antiwar left
Nov 03, 2010
Philip Weiss
Here are two perspectives on the Tea Party movement that offer tea some sympathy. Both writers are alive to an important trend, the degree to which privilege among Democrats (and there is a clear class break between blue states and red ‘uns) has separated them from populist concerns– including the concern that their children will be killed in Afghanistan. Visionary Milton Friedman wanted this to happen by eliminating the draft; he wanted the elite not to have to decide to murder its own children; and he has got his wish.
First Chris Hedges, “The Phantom Left,” at truthdig:
The Rally to Restore Sanity, held in Washington’s National Mall [last Saturday, Jon Stewart and Stephen Coulbert], was yet another sad footnote to the death of the liberal class. It was as innocuous as a Boy Scout jamboree. It ridiculed followers of the tea party without acknowledging that the pain and suffering expressed by many who support the movement are not only real but legitimate. It made fun of the buffoons who are rising up out of moral swamps to take over the Republican Party without accepting that their supporters were sold out by a liberal class, and especially a Democratic Party, which turned its back on the working class for corporate money.
Justin Raimondo at The American Conservative says the tea partiers are the heirs of the antiwar movement that Obama sold out:
The anti-establishment force behind Obama was one that had lain dormant for a generation: the grassroots Left. It was reawakened by the same causes that had first given it life in the 1960s—opposition to war and demands for civil liberty. Torture, executive secrecy, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan filled the roles once played by segregation and the war in Vietnam. In 2008 as in 1968, the essence of the activist Left was its antiwar faith.
…It was only in response to great shock—the 9/11 terrorist attacks and George W. Bush’s subsequent crusade to democratize the Muslim world—that these ex-Trotskyites-turned-suburbanites woke from their narcotized sleep. The resurgent Left had an ongoing drama to validate its concerns: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the spectacle of untrammeled executive power running roughshod over the Constitution.
…Obama dogged Hillary over her vote in favor of the Iraq War and made an explicit appeal to the netroots and the antiwar movement. That gave him the momentum to snatch the crown from her brow. It didn’t matter that he justified his opposition to the war on the grounds that we were prosecuting the “wrong” war and vowed to fight on the Afghan front with greater vigor than his predecessor. At that point, the anti-interventionist base of the Democratic Party was ready to nominate anybody but Hillary.
…The antiwar Left defeated itself by electing a Democrat little different from Bush. And now Barack Obama is dismantling his own party by repudiating the causes that animated his base—the opposition to war and fear of the imperial presidency. In the run-up to the midterm elections, Obama tried instead to mobilize his party around the weakest items on its agenda: big government and cultural issues….
The Democrats’ decline owes nothing to Republican leaders like John Boehner or Mitch McConnell; it is entirely the result of Obama betraying the antiwar Left at the same time as the grassroots Right finally returned to its economic principles. Should Republicans proceed again as they did under Bush, the cycle will repeat—another war, another resurgence of the Left.
Both parties, in spite of their strenuous efforts, have failed to carry off a political realignment.
Laurence Tribe’s elitist values
Nov 03, 2010
Philip Weiss
I love Sonia Sotomayor because she’s street-smart, because she’s got a huge heart, and because she understands the new diversity of America. And I’m a little shocked to read the leaked letter from eminent Harvard prof Laurence Tribe to Barack Obama a couple years ago, deriding Sotomayor and praising Elena Kagan and Diane Wood because they’re so much smarter than Sotomayor.
My new theme is the complete alienation of the Democratic Party from populist values; and this letter exhibits that arrogance. Its insistence on intelligence as the chief criterion for promotion is meritocratic horsefeathers, SAT thinking. “[Sotomayor] is not nearly as smart as she seems to think she is,” Tribe writes snidely, and she’s a bully. Well I like a bully on the Supreme Court. How else do you muscle Scalia and Roberts and Thomas?
And yes there’s a Jewish component here, in that we helped to build the meritocracy; although Wood is not Jewish. (And I wonder where Tribe is on Israel, probably retro). But the key issue: Where is Kagan’s ferocious commitment to the underdog, a commitment that animates Sotomayor, and one that privileged Laurence Tribe doesn’t really care about when a good job is on the line. He adores Kagan’s “combination of intellectual brilliance and political skill.” Soulless. This is the challenge to liberal Democrats in the age of economic meltdown: what does progressive mean beyond abortion rights and shopping at Whole Foods?
