MONDOWEISS ONLINE NEWSLETTER

At Columbia University last night they had a panel about the coverage of Israel-Palestine, hosted by Campus Media Watch, a junior Israel lobby group. Free falafel dinner, free Campus Media Watch pens on every seat. It started out right enough, about the delegitimation of the Jewish people’s right to a homeland. One neoconservative said that anti-Semites are behind media coverage that singles Israel out the same the same way a Sunday school teacher gets singled out for having an affair.
Another said that Israel’s response in Gaza was just right, proportionate– look, it stopped the rockets. A Christian Zionist in suspenders who used to work at fishing magazines said that Israel’s open media are “weaponizing” Israel’s enemies globally by giving them information about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
Max Blumenthal kept cracking me up. He mimicked the Christian Zionist saying that the sharks are delegitimizing the dolphins, and he said the two neocons were shmegegges. That’s Yiddish for nobodies. They were both small men with complaining voices. I had that icky feeling I sometimes get that Zionism has called on the most crabbed part of Jewish character, the hunted powerless feeling. Kafka said that going to a Zionist meeting made him feel like a wooden clothes rack, “pushed into the middle of the room.”
But then we got to the liberal side of the panel, beginning with Gershom Gorenberg. He said that journalists are professionals working on time constraints and everything you hear is true, from both sides, and it’s a very complicated situation. “As a religious person, I would say, I only know one objective source and he has not given a press conference in 3000 years.” Great line. 
Gorenberg’s photo makes him look fey but I was surpised to see that he’s anything but, he’s thick and close to the ground and a little hardheaded. He wears a yarmulke and has a thick gray beard you could lose a pencil in. Gorenberg moved to Israel from California for religious reasons 30 years ago and his rap is that both sides are victims.
There came a spectacular statement of this philosophy last night when he referred to the expulsion of the Palestinians in ’48– the Nakba– as the Palestinian “exodus.” It just came out. He elaborated that the purpose of journalism is to make something simple complex. I see his method. His book the Accidental Empire absolves Israel of any real responsibility for the criminal settlement project, it was just a concatenation of events, as his piece on the accidental Nakba said that Israel didn’t realy expel the Palestinians, sh*t happens. P.S. They weren’t allowed to come back, 750,000 of them, after the dust had settled; as if there was not policy in that.
I can’t wait for him to get to slavery. And if you consider his religious dictum, you’ll notice that he’s abdicating all judgment to some guy with a gray beard 3000 years ago.
Let’s be clear, Gorenberg is the sh*t right now. He gets hired by a lot of American publications to explain Israel, but he’s got a very stormy point of view. During the Q-and-A (which was only via 3-by-5 cards for crowd control purposes) he gave a lecture against the questions saying they were ideological statements or leading questions, they weren’t designed to elicit information from the expert panel.
I don’t know where this guy got his ideas about how people ought to conduct themselves at a public event on a controversial subject. He said he woldn’t accept questions like this in his journalistic seminar. So we were attending a seminar, by four Zionist Jews and a Christian Zionist? And the Palestinian-Americans and anti-Zionists in the audience have to defer to teacher?
Charney Bromberg was next. Just to stay on the shmegegge theme, I’d note that he was the only big guy on the panel. I like a big Jew. I like a big redheaded bearded squarejawed barrelchested Jew, which is Charney Bromberg. He’s a giant.
And Charney Bromberg is in agony the way any conscious human being should be. Even Biden said the status quo is unsustainable; when I was in Israel/Palestine for a week recently I understood that it’s in crisis, a country can’t sustain itself if half the population makes all the decisions for the other half. And Bromberg was the one guy on the panel who was on to this. He spoke with honesty and sadness. The Israelis have hermetically sealed themselves off from the occupation. Listen:

Most Israelis have no idea. They won’t travel to East Jerusalem. They certainly won’t go to the crossing point…What you have is a country that has become hermetically sealed from the issue and the problems. And if you believe that you can have peace without a peace agreement, then that’s good, and you go with it, but this situation is not going away.
It may well be that it will be there for decades and decades more, but in the process, something has happened that is a serious affront to the idea of a good Israel that I  believed in when I first started this work some 35 years ago.
[Long pause.]
I’m very leery of the word apartheid. Bishop Tutu says it’s apart-hate, as in hate. Israel was not created as a racist state. I do not believe Israel is a racist state. But cross the Green Line and you will see so many of the accoutrements that the South Africans placed to control their — what they believed to be their hostile population. Roads for whites only. Roads controlled at every pass. Roads controlled by fences and guards.

After that, Bromberg told about his soul-crushing trip to Hebron. Bromberg had been introduced to the audience with a bio about his being a civil-rights activist in the 60s, and he was a marked man for the KKK. Well unlike so many other Zionists, Bromberg is trying to reconcile the ideals of his youth with what Israel has become. In Hebron, he saw the young settler girls attacking Palestinian women — I saw videos of the same there– and now he’s bearing witness. Frankly, I don’t know how anyone can believe in Zionism as a living ideology when you see that.
Then he criticized the journalists for not raising questions.
“There are pieces that come across in youtube and elsewhere that at least should be looked at.” He referred to the killing of a young Palestinian at the fence the other day. I think he means Ahmad Deeb, killed demonstrating in Gaza. God bless Charney Bromberg for mentioning that.

Why was live ammunition used and why was live ammunition aimed at the chest and the head and not at the legs?

Well Charney that doesn’t really follow. It’s crazy. They fired at Ahmad Deeb’s legs. They killed him by hitting his femoral artery. That happened in Palestine, not in Kent State 40 years ago or in Mississippi 47 years ago. They fired on a demonstrator. And this unendable occupation is why many people are calling for a democracy in Israel/Palestine, one country of its citizens, and asking Jews like Charney and me to try and help imagine it so that the shmegegge Jews won’t be afraid.
When Bromberg was finished a bunch of my friends stood up and gave him a standing o. But Bromberg was taken aback by the applause, and promptly distanced himself from any one-state folk. I saw him lumbering out later, a big redheaded Jew who knows that the spirit didn’t just show up 3000 years ago, the spirit is alive in history.

The infographic accompanying yesterday’s New York Times article on the U.S.’s attempt to head off a Middle Eastern nuclear arms race is — as one might have expected — missing a little bit of ink. Guess where?
Let’s take a look:

Iran and Syria are both dark and foreboding — blackened out entirely — for having “construction begun” on their nuclear programs. But the only country in the region that has, indeed, begun construction and brought that construction to full fruition (40 years ago!) as a nuclear weapons arsenal (guess who) is colored in the oh-so-less-threatening darker gray. Israel is merely the shade of the vast majority of its neighbors — signifying “plans developed” for a nuclear program. Yes, just one of the guys, contrasted — literally — against Iran and Syria.
Most offensively, this is a blatant error of fact. It’s such a glaring one — “construction”? hell yes! of even a bomb! — that you have to wonder if it was on purpose.
My sometimes conspiratorial mind — hey, my country was actually overthrown by the C.I.A. — gets all excited about these things and imagines a kid on the infographics desk, barely 26, with a graduate degree in journalism from NYU. He gets the assignment and, perhaps a careful reader of his own paper, immediately thinks about how to draw Israel.
Our young star, with his rapidly rising career — paychecks and health coverage and all — makes the first draft with Israel the same fully blackened shade of Iran and Syria. Then he questions it, turns to a more senior colleague (probably 32, still paying off his own student debt), and asks. But once that question arises, how does it not go all the way up the editorial chain of command?
It’s even more troubling to think that the question was never asked — denoting, perhaps, gross incompetence or, worse yet, a culture of fear on the issue at the Times. Let’s hope the that the Times, at the very least, has the courage to issue a correction.

More Straussian hidden meanings. David Brooks, whose indirection I have blasted in the past (a whole book about the lifestyle of the meritocracy that includes many references to declasse WASPs but none to the spectacular Jewish rise into the Establishment), who surely justifies his indirection by telling himself there will be pogroms if I tell people what I really mean, has a wonky piece about American ethnic trends that contains this buried show-stopper:

Therefore, the first rule of policy-making should be, don’t promulgate a policy that will destroy social bonds. If you take tribes of people, exile them from their homelands and ship them to strange, arid lands, you’re going to produce bad outcomes for generations.

I think he’s talking about the Nakba. I think he’s blaming Israel? I think he’s saying they should have let the refugees have their homes back? I think he’s for the Right of Return!
Oh, no, I think he’s talking about the Zionist project, about the Jewish Agency’s effort to move European refugees to Palestine in the 30s and 40s?
Oh no, he’s talking about the Mizrahi Jews being forced from Arab countries post-48 and going to Israel?
Ah, indirection.

For example, Saban continued, “Obama was asked the same question Hillary was asked—‘If Iran nukes Israel, what would be your reaction?’ Hillary said, ‘We will obliterate them.’ We . . . will . . . obliterate . . . them. Four words, it’s simple to understand. Obama said only three words. He would ‘take appropriate action.’ I don’t know what that means.
A rogue state that is supporting killing our men and women in Iraq; that is a supporter of Hezbollah, which killed more Americans than any other terrorist organization; that is a supporter of Hamas, which shot twelve thousand rockets at Israel—that rogue state nukes a member of the United Nations, and we’re going to ‘take appropriate action’! ” His voice grew louder. “I need to understand what that means. So I had a list of questions like that. And Chicago”—Obama campaign headquarters—“could not organize that meeting.
‘Schedule, heavy schedule.’ I was ready and willing to be helpful, but ‘helpful’ is not to write a check for two thousand three hundred dollars. It’s to raise millions, which I am fully capable of doing. But Chicago wasn’t able to deliver the meeting, so I couldn’t get on board.”

I have tremendous admiration for John Mearsheimer’s intellectual courage, but I think he is mistaken to use the expression “new Afrikaners” to describe the people who will excuse anything Israel does.
During my years in southern Africa, I met plenty of Afrikaners who opposed apartheid, people like the great cleric Rev. Beyers Naude and the novelist Andre Brink.  The poet Breyten Breytenbach spent 7 years in the apartheid prisons for trying to organize an underground resistance.  Mearsheimer’s expression suggests a tribal unity among Afrikaners that never completely existed, and disregards the contributions of these remarkable people and others.
Also, equating apartheid with Afrikaners lets a lot of other people off the hook.  Many among the English-speaking 40 percent of the white population were careful to distance themselves from the regime’s worst excesses, but they made little real effort to change a system that gave them the highest standard of living in the world.  Further up the chain of command were the large mining houses, such as Anglo-American and DeBeers, who said they favored change but in fact did nothing.
And, elsewhere, the CEOs of the big Western banks and corporations continued to lend and invest in apartheid all the while claiming they had nothing to do with the system’s more unsavory features.  It was not until resistance inside the country grew, along with Boycott Divestment Sanctions in the rest of the world, that the regime and its supporters realized they had to negotiate.
John Mearsheimer has quite rightly identified a group of people who will go through strenuous intellectual contortions to justify Israel’s land-grabbing and violence.  I just wish he would find a different name for them — maybe “the Israel Apologists”?

What follows is an open letter to the Boston Museum of Science by leading scholars objecting to the museum’s sponsorship of an Israeli propaganda effort:
We, the undersigned group of scientists concerned with human dignity and equality, condemn the Museum of Science’s decision to co-sponsor and host “Israeli Innovation Weekend” (IIW) on May 2. 
IIW is far from an innocent educational endeavor. It is part of a propaganda campaign by the State of Israel to present itself as a beacon of progress in a desert of backwardness and deflect attention from its atrocious human rights record and fundamentally discriminatory policies.
According to its website, IIW is co-sponsored by the Consulate-General of the State of Israel to New England, which is also one of its top donors; nearly half of IIW’s steering committee are consulate staff.
Propaganda efforts such as IIW are key to sustaining the virtually unconditional U.S. support for Israel that only exacerbates the conflict. The U.S. singles out Israel for special treatment, lavishing billions of dollars of aid upon it every year and protecting it from any concerted action in the UN Security Council. This assistance supports a state that systematically privileges Jews from anywhere in the world over the country’s non-Jewish inhabitants and which continues to perpetrate war crimes and other human rights abuses to uphold this fundamental inequality. 
Moreover, IIW’s own program demonstrates how impossible it is to present scientific innovation in Israel in isolation from a context of inequality and oppression. One of the featured speakers is president of the Technion, an institution with a long track record of developing technologies of death used by Israel’s military. These include remote-controlled bulldozers for demolishing Palestinian homes and drones for picking off Palestinians from the air. 
IIW also attempts to “greenwash” Israel’s image with promises of eco-friendly technology, but it has chosen dubious partners to do so. Its program includes Dan Senor, who was the public face of the American occupying authorities in Iraq. It showcases “Better Place,” an electric car manufacturer that hired Maj. Gen. Moshe Kaplinsky, who oversaw the indiscriminate flooding of southern Lebanon with cluster bombs in 2006, as CEO of its Israel branch.
Science and technology should be used to benefit humanity, not to destroy it. IIW represents a betrayal of this principle. As concerned scientists, we condemn this misuse of science and technology to serve the public relations machine of the State of Israel. 
Sincerely,
Dr. Koby Snitz, Weizmann Institute of Science
Prof. Nancy Kanwisher, professor, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT
Prof. Rachel Giora, Tel Aviv University
Franz-Josef Ulm, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, MIT
Dr. Anat Matar, Tel Aviv University
Prof. Noam Chomsky, MIT
Robert Trivers, Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences, Rutgers University
Sylvain Bromberger, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT
Prof. Steven Rose, Emeritus Prof. of Biology and Neurobiology, the Open University and the University of London
Mary Potter, Professor of Psychology, MIT
Dennis Y. Loh, Former Professor of Medicine, Genetics, and Immunology, Washington University School of Medicine, Saint Louis
Jonathan Rosenhead, Emeritus Professor of Operational Research, London School of Economics
Naila Jirmanus, PhD, Physics
Saul Slapikoff
Hubert Murray, FAIA, RIBA
D. Alwan, MIT Architecture
Aida Khan, PhD
David E. Pegg, MD, FRCPath, Professor, Department of Biology, University of York (UK)
Sayres Rudy, Visiting Professor, Hampshire College
Kamal Ahmed, Software Architect, Arlington, MA, MIT alum
Marshall Shuler, PhD
Maggie Zhou, PhD, Genetics/Molecular biology
[affiliations provided for identification purposes only]

Yediot says that Netanyahu offered the job of Israel’s UN ambassador to Alan Dershowitz, who turned him down. Presumably because he was more effective being Israel’s unofficial ambassador to Harvard/the Establishment and doesn’t want to be outed as a dual loyalty case? (Michael Oren had to give up his American citizenship when he agreed to serve Netanyahu). Yediot: 

He is considered one of the world’s most famous lawyers.  He was the one who got OJ Simpson acquitted from charges of murdering his ex-wife.  He is an ardent supporter of Israel.  Now it turns out that Netanyahu and Lieberman courted him enthusiastically, offering him the position of Israel’s UN ambassador.

I know, I probably don’t know what I’m talking about here. But oh is this choice. From Huffpo:

As top Federal Reserve officials debated whether there was a housing bubble and what to do about it, then-Chairman Alan Greenspan argued that dissent should be kept secret so that the Fed wouldn’t lose control of the debate to people less well-informed than themselves.
“We run the risk, by laying out the pros and cons of a particular argument, of inducing people to join in on the debate, and in this regard it is possible to lose control of a process that only we fully understand,” Greenspan said, according to the transcripts of a March 2004 meeting.

Note that Greenspan wrote in his memoir that the Iraq war was a war for oil. Was he telling us the truth then? Or merely throwing another false scent.

John Mearsheimer’s dynamic speech at the Palestine Center in Washington, D.C. continues to make waves on the blogosphere. Andrew Sullivan notes two responses from Jeffrey Goldberg and Noah Pollak.
But I take issue with Sullivan’s critique of Mearsheimer’s speech. Sullivan is an influential writer read by millions, and I appreciate many of his honest and thoughtful writings on Israel/Palestine, which he has continued to publish despite ridiculous assertions that he is an anti-Semite. So, because of Sullivan’s reach, let’s examine where he falters. His analysis has implications for the discourse surrounding Israel/Palestine, and it’s important to get the facts straight.
Sullivan criticizes Mearsheimer for being “sanguine” about a mass, nonviolent Palestinian movement that will bring about the end of apartheid Israel.
Here’s Sullivan:

With the Likudnik right marginalized, and the ambivalent middle increasingly distressed by a more clearly apartheid system, what will happen? Mearsheimer sees a bi-national democracy achieved through Palestinians winning the international argument that a non-Jewish Israel is preferable to an apartheid Israel. He urges non-violence in such a situation.
This is where he loses me. I suspect he is being far too sanguine about the possibilities of a mature, non-violent Palestinian movement that uses its democratic majority for fruitful and non-violent and non-anti-Semitic ends.

He makes a similar point in a follow-up post:

The obvious and serious flaw in Mearsheimer’s argument, as I noted, is the absence of a deep analysis of Palestinian rejection of a two-state solution and the Palestinian support of those forces that seek to end Israel altogether. He does mention it, but, to my mind, in far too cursory a fashion.

I’m curious to find out what news sources Sullivan reads on Israel/Palestine, and where he got the idea that it’s misguided for Mearsheimer to say that Palestinians should “resist mightily for sure, but their strategy should privilege non-violent resistance.”
I think it’s very clear that this is increasingly the strategy that Palestinians are using. The weekly protests in West Bank villages against the separation wall have now spread to Gaza. The growing boycott, divestment and sanctions movement is Palestinian led and initiated, and has spread to the West. There already is a “mature, non-violent Palestinian movement.” It will continue to grow.
Where are the Palestinians who reject a two-state solution? A recent Jerusalem Media and Communication Centre poll found that 44% of Palestinians still favor the two-state solution, although support for a bi-national state is growing. And support for a bi-national solution does not equal sentiment that is anti-Semitic or people who seek to “end Israel.” It is instead a solution that favors equality for Israelis and Palestinians. 
If we’re speaking of Palestinian politics, Hamas would accept a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, and has been on record saying that multiple times. The Palestine Liberation Organization and Fatah do, as well. Those are the major forces in Palestinian politics, and they don’t add up to “rejection of a two-state solution.”