Mondoweiss Online Newsletter

NOVANEWS

• Israeli Foreign Ministry video replicates settler propaganda word for word

• Jenin Freedom Theatre raided in the middle of the night by Israeli military

• ‘NYT’ and Bronner blaze mainstream trail with story likening occupation to Jim Crow

• Holocaust memories and ‘roots tourism’ in Eastern Europe

• Israeli Foreign Ministry launches social media hasbara campaign featuring cute yellow puppet called ‘Hans von Puppet’

• New book investigates the intersection of Jewish identity with the struggle for Palestinian rights

• ‘NYT’ spots Ed Koch standing by Israeli flag (in story hinting at Planet Zio)

Israeli Foreign Ministry video replicates settler propaganda word for word

Jul 27, 2011

Adam Horowitz 

Look familiar? This video was made by the YESHA Council, an Israeli settler umbrella group, in May. Gal Beckerman has a post over at the Forward about how the same filmmaker, Shlomo Blass, made an almost identical video for the Israeli Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon (Bass is also responsible for Caroline Glick’s racist We Con the World anti-flotilla video). It’s not just the style he copied, but also the content, almost word for word.

Beckerman concludes, “Should we not be concerned when the foreign ministry of Israel is using the same propaganda as the settlers? Or should we just assume that their interests are one?”

Jenin Freedom Theatre raided in the middle of the night by Israeli military

Jul 27, 2011

Adam Horowitz

Damage to the Freedom Theatre (Photo: Emily Smith)

The following press release was sent out by the Freedom Theatre in Jenin Refugee Camp:

Special Forces of the Israeli Army attacked the Freedom Theatre in Jenin Refugee Camp at approximately 03:30 this morning. Ahmad Nasser Matahen, a night guard and technician student at the theatre woke up by heavy blocks of stone being hurled at the entrance of the theatre.

As he opened the door he found masked and heavily armed Israeli Special Forces around the theatre. Ahmed says that the army threw heavy blocks of stone at the theatre, “they told me to open the door to the theatre. They told me to raise my hands and forced me to take my pants down. I thought my time had come, that they would kill me. My brother that was with me was handcuffed.“

The location manager of The Freedom Theatre, Adnan Naghnaghiye was arrested and taken away to an unknown location together with Bilal Saadi, a member of the board of The Freedom Theatre. When the general manager of the theatre Jacob Gough from UK and the co-founder of the theatre Jonatan Stanczak from Sweden arrived to the scene they were forced to squat next to a family with four small children surrounded by about 50 heavily armed Israeli soldiers.

Jonatan says: “Whenever we tried to tell them that they are attacking a cultural venue and arresting members of the theatre we were told to shut up and they threatened to kick us, I tried to contact the civil administration of the army to clarify the matter but the person in charge hung up on me.“ 

‘NYT’ and Bronner blaze mainstream trail with story likening occupation to Jim Crow

Jul 27, 2011

Philip Weiss 

You can say it’s a year or so late, that Haaretz was on this a long time ago (or that Bronner privileges Israeli voices over Palestinians ones), but big deal: Hat’s off to Ethan Bronner forpublishing a big story in the New York Times about Israeli women’s illegal smuggling of Palestinians from the West Bank to Tel Aviv to go to the beach. The piece ends with an invocation of Rosa Parks and includes a description of the hateful segregation of Palestinians as the work of “colonialist bureaucrats.” It even offers a glint of a vision of equality and does not include the words “suicide bombers.” And it includes facts about the cruel imprisonment of so many Palestinians for resisting these hateful conditions. Did I repeat the word hateful? Thanks to the New York Times for inspiring me with a horrifying story! Last paragraph:

Ms. [Hagit] Aharoni was asked her thoughts. She replied: “For 44 years, we have occupied another country. I am 53, which means most of my life I have been an occupier. I don’t want to be an occupier. I am engaged in an illegal act of disobedience. I am not Rosa Parks, but I admire her, because she had the courage to break a law that was not right.”

Hints of democracy, information about imprisonment:

The Palestinian visitors came with complicated histories. In most of their families the men have been locked up at some point. For example, Manal, who had never been to the sea before, is 36, the mother of three and pregnant; five of her brothers are in Israeli prisons, and another was killed when he entered a settler religious academy armed with a knife.

She brought with her an unsurprising stridency. “This is all ours,” she said in Tel Aviv. She did not go home a Zionist, but in the course of the day her views seemed to grow more textured — or less certain — as she found comfort in the company of Israeli women who said that they, too, had a home on this land.

 

Holocaust memories and ‘roots tourism’ in Eastern Europe

Jul 27, 2011

Yasmin Qureshi 

A trip to Eastern European cities cannot be complete without visiting the Jewish quarters. The beautifully inscribed names of Bohemian and Moravian Holocaust victims on the inner walls of the serene Pinkas Synagogue in Prague brought tears to my eyes. The text of the inscriptions was compiled from card indexes, drawn up shortly after the war on the basis of extant transport papers to ghettos and extermination camps, registration lists and survivor’s accounts. Most of the sites were destroyed during the World War and the Nazi invasion and were rebuilt, many revived in the post Communist era with funding from American-Jewish organizations or private donors.

A room upstairs had drawings of children from the Terezín concentration camp. As I looked at the children’s drawings during my visit in March, my thoughts went to the drawings I saw at the Dehesiah refugee camp in the West Bank and an exhibition of paintings from children of Gaza. Children’s expressions of their constrained and hostile environment were quite similar, with images of soldiers with guns, tanks and airplanes surrounding their homes.

Krakow, the historical capital of Poland with a rich Jewish history, was my next stop. A few kilometers from Auschwitz, it is also known for Schindler’s factory seen in Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. The old Jewish quarter has beautiful buildings with empty once-vibrant open markets.

Tourism opened up in Poland only after the end of the Communist rule in 1989. Today, Jewish heritage tourism, also called “roots tourism” is a thriving business, revived by American Jewish foundations, the two most significant being The Ronald S. Lauder Foundation and The Taube Foundation. Tourists, mostly from Israel and the US, come to visit the Jewish quarters and concentration camps. Permits to be a tourist guide are given only to Polish citizens but Israelis have been granted an exception.

In 1987, Ronald Lauder, son of Estee Lauder, established the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, a philanthropic organization that is dedicated to rebuilding Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe. The foundation supports student exchange programs between New York and various capitals in Central and Eastern Europe. Lauder is also President of World Jewish Congress.

The Taube Foundation, founded by Tad Taube, originally from Poland, established the Jewish Heritage Initiative in Poland (JHIP) in 2004. Taube was chairman of Koracorp Industries and serves on the boards of a variety of nonprofits, including the Hoover Institution, the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and the Stanford Athletic Board. The Initiative aims to nurture the revival of Jewish life in Poland, bring further awareness of this resurgence among Jews and non-Jews and foster positive interest in Poland and Polish Jews among American Jews.

Part of the revival project is an annual Jewish Cultural Festival in Krakow where thousands of people come from all over the world. According to Taube in an interview in Philanthropy Roundtable in 2009, around 300,000 Americans go to Poland every year. He believes that when the Museum for the History of Polish Jews opens in Warsaw, we’ll see one million foreign visitors per year to that museum alone.

The Holocaust educational tours take young girls and boys to ghettos and death camps with the tour leader recreating the horrors and details about how Jews were exterminated. The objective is to not only revive the past but also bring awareness and prepare the young generation to fight anti-Semitism today’s world.

“Auschwitz is special to us too,” said a local 40 year old tourist guide who prefers to remain anonymous. “Before the German Nazis targeted the Jews, they exterminated Poles. Fifty percent of the people killed by Nazis were non-Jewish Poles,” she said. “Many of my clients are Jews who have come here to trace their roots and find the location of their buried ancestors”, she explained. “I understand their trauma. But sometimes I wonder if it is psychologically healthy to continuously think about being a victim and revisit history.”

When Poland lost six million people it was, according to Professor Richard Lukas, author of The Forgotten Holocaust, the highest ratio of losses to population of any country in Europe. The country was devastated and almost destroyed. Poland, in effect, became a Holocaust survivor — a pathetic skeleton of a country, soon to be further ravaged by the Communists:

“The genocidal policies of the Nazis resulted in the deaths of as many Polish Gentiles as Polish Jews, thus making them co-victims in a Forgotten Holocaust. This Holocaust has been largely ignored because historians who have written on the subject of the Holocaust have chosen to interpret the tragedy in exclusivistic terms–namely, as the most tragic period in the history of the Jewish Diaspora. To them, the Holocaust was unique to the Jews, and they therefore have had little or nothing to say about the nine million Gentiles, including three million Poles, who also perished in the greatest tragedy the world has ever known. Little wonder that many people who experienced these events share the feeling of Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, anxious when the meaning of the word Holocaust undergoes gradual modifications, so that the word begins to belong to the history of the Jews exclusively, as if among the victims there were not also millions of Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and prisoners of other nationalities.” — Richard C. Lukas, preface to The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation 1939-1944

“A Jewish guide confronted me on using the word extermination for non-Jews,” said Andrzej Bajek, another tourist guide. “Why should the term holocaust and extermination only be used for Jews?” he asked. “We don’t want to diminish their tragedy but why should the killing of non-Jewish Poles during World War II not be recognized the way same way as Jews?” he asked.

“News articles in the United States and Western Europe including Germany label concentration camps set up by German Nazis as Polish concentration camps falsely implying it was a Polish policy and tactic of the World War II,” said 26 year old Anna Malinowska, who grew up in Poland and now lives in the United States. “Many Jewish people lived in Poland since the 13th century. Yes there was anti-Semitism before World War II started but just as much as in France, Britain or other European countries. What is missing today is a dialogue between the young generation of Poles and Jews to learn about one another that could lead to a better future,” she continued.

“Israelis who come to see our country only visit the Holocaust sights. They don’t visit museums, parks, castles or churches. They are not allowed by their guardians to have free time in the city to go to a disco club or concert. If we can’t see them in the natural environment where can we learn about them? Israel is not interested in conducting international exchanges for school kids. I think this is where we are very different. Polish people have a much bigger curiosity to learn about Jews than they have to learn about Poles,” said 30 year old Karina Tomczyk, a specialist in Jewish heritage tours studying Jewish religion, culture and history. “For the world’s Jews this is a dead end road, a graveyard, nothing else except a place of despair. Every day I try to bring hope to these people,” she continued.

Tomczyk also talked about the present and the disappointment with the Allies saying, “I think we are angrier about today than of the past. The USA wants to put in here their anti-missile shields; they want our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. We are there for everyone and still not appreciated. We never were and are still not considered a partner.”

Public discourse in the post World War II era has not given other genocides the same acknowledgment as that of the Jews. Often, the politically motivated Zionist narrative uses generations of persecution of the Jewish community in Europe to justify and continue its ideology, making it difficult for people to differentiate between the Jewish community and the state of Israel. Criticism of Israel is equated to anti-Semitism and often leads to confusion between Zionism and Judaism.

I asked a young Israeli girl now studying in New York standing in line to buy tickets to the synagogues in Prague what she thought of the Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank. “Their suffering is nothing compared to ours. They may be segregated and live in bad conditions but it is not as bad as the ghettos. We get trained to think no one’s pain is comparable to ours so it dehumanizes us from their pain,” she shrugged.

Dr Mona elFarra, a physician, human rights and women’s rights activist living in Gaza Strip described the living conditions in her blog, From Gaza, With Love on February 26, 2010, “The small piece of land that is Gaza is surrounded by electrical wires and closed borders, where 1.6 million live from one day to another with all sorts of hardships and no political outlet, exacerbated not only by the occupation but also the internal division.”

The Israeli navy’s attacks on the Mavi Marmara boat sailing from international waters into Gaza in 2010 to break the siege of Gaza, organized by the Free Gaza Movement is a proof of Gaza’s occupation where even the waters are not free. Today Israel is working at the highest diplomatic level, pressurizing governments to disallow boats to sail from their countries. The West Bank is not any better with Jewish settlements, special roads for Jews, checkpoints and walls shrinking Palestinian land.

My trip to East Europe left me disturbed not only with Europe’s brutal past but also the world we live in today. The only way forward seems to be to acknowledge the past, move away from its shackles and work towards a world based on equality, justice and freedom from racism and prejudice.

Yasmin Qureshi is a human rights activist involved in social justice movements in South Asia and Palestine.

 

Israeli Foreign Ministry launches social media hasbara campaign featuring cute yellow puppet called ‘Hans von Puppet’

Jul 27, 2011

Eleanor Kilroy

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs enlarged its budget for the “Brand Israel” campaign last year to an unprecedented 100 million Shekels (over $26,260,000). In an article entitled “Will we conquer the world?”, translated by PULSE media, Globes found out that the Ministry’s PR activity would focus on the internet, especially on social networks.

Is.Real 2011 has its own website and Facebook page, and purports to show the “real and authentic Israel”. It is a “project initiated by a select group of students from Tel Aviv University who participate in the StandWithUs Fellowship”. The Fellowship program “works on behalf of StandWithUs in cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Israeli Student Union.” StandWithUs then have the gall to add that they are a-political and non-partisan. TheStandWithUs organisation most recently released its ‘Flotilla Facts’ about the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza that include typical hasbara such as, “The flotilla organizers intend to aid and support Hamas” and this nugget, “International statistics indicate that Gazans have a higher standard of living than people in nearly all of Africa, including South Africa”.

One of the participants of Is.Real 2011 is a Christian Arab Israeli (Palestinian citizen of Israel), Ayman, who was “born and raised in the village of Yassif”, is into fashion, and is unashamedly camp. Also crucially, there is a gorgeous blonde: Savannah is an Australian singer-songwriter who made Aliya to Israel, while Yair grew up in a religious family in the illegal West Bank settlement of Beit Horon. Meanwhile, Shay, “the most prominent and successful female basketball player in Israel” is the perfect cultural ambassador for Israel. Indeed, they are all just that, as conveyed by the not-very-funny Professor Puppet (below). This is how you sell apartheid Israel to an increasingly critical foreign traveller and international viewer, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs knows it. That is why the docu-reality series appears to be either in, or subtitled in English.

New book investigates the intersection of Jewish identity with the struggle for Palestinian rights

Jul 27, 2011

David Landy 

I was in London, interviewing a very sharp, very funny elderly lady; one of the leading members of the British group Jews for Justice for Palestinians. Since she’d been critiquing Palestinian solidarity, I asked her mischievously; ‘So what scope is there for critical solidarity’. The answer was decisive, not a trace of hesitation: ‘there’s none’, and to dispel any doubt, ‘there really isn’t any.’

So what scope is there for a book on Jewish opposition to Israel, one that’s critical and yet in solidarity with this movement? Here, I’d very respectfully disagree with my interviewee, wanting my recent book on the topic, Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights, to strike such a balance.

The book tracks the development of diaspora Jewish opposition to Israel. With so much bad news about Israel/Palestine, it’s a pleasure to report a success story. Over the last decade this activism has developed from a few isolated individuals and grouplets in a few countries to a fully-fledged and growing movement, active throughout the Western world. It’s still a small movement and stronger in some places than others (for instance, the movement hasn’t yet taken off in Latin America), with the expansion in the diaspora Jewish heartland of North America being probably the most exciting recent development. But even when weak, this movement has enabled the automatic correspondence between Judaism and Zionism to be challenged, both by Jews and non-Jews. These days there’s always a Jewish group able to declare, as the banner of the British group J-BIG has it, ‘It’s kosher to boycott Israeli goods’.

The organization of the movement gives food for thought. In country after country, groups were established as ‘big tent’ or ‘umbrella’ organizations, designed to contain a diversity of opinions. However this diversity has best been achieved by the multiplicity of groups that have sprung up in most countries, organizations which usually exist in friendly co-operation with each other. The big tent is a more patchwork affair than originally envisioned. But it is no less effective for that; and more, as an organizational form it reflects and prefigures the diverse Jewish community that many within these groups are struggling for, alongside working for justice for Palestinians.

During my research, I was fascinated by how activists negotiated their relations with fellow Jews as well as with Jewishness. The movement often creatively draws upon Jewish traditions, with many members seeking a reconstitution of diaspora Jewish identity so it revolves around their interest in justice, human rights and universalism. This then leads to the question about the relationship with Palestinians – is this movement, as some critics have argued, simply about Jews trying to feel good about themselves, with Palestinians being incidental to this identity politics?

The answer is complicated (of course). Some members, seeing themselves as refuges from Zionism, described by one interviewee as ‘the largest mindless solidarity organization in the world’ are reluctant to be drawn back into solidarity again, this time with Palestinians. Others, understanding their work as part of a broader anti-racist movement (especially in North America) or anti-colonial movement (a strong motivation for French activists), have no such qualms with solidarity. But everywhere there is a tension between the identity of the activist and the demands of Palestinians. In order to make themselves heard in their local fields, many groups do engage in a certain muffling of Palestinian subjectivity, a tendency to see Palestinians as victims.

This is not just a feature of Jewish groups – as an active member of the Palestine solidarity movement in Ireland, I’m well aware of this. Viewing the objects of solidarity as no more than objects may well be a tendency of all distant issue activism. But more interesting than the persistence of this tendency, is how groups do manage to challenge it. This is the other way Jewish groups have developed over the last decade – they have not just grown in size, there is also a growing appreciation of the Palestinian point of view and support for their political demands. As a member of the Dutch group, EAJG (A Different Jewish Voice) put it, greater contacts with Palestinians and greater understanding of the situation leads to what he termed ‘a greater consideration of the other’. Critical solidarity, you could possibly call it.

The promise and one of the aims of the movement is that one day this understanding will not be antagonistic to a sense of diaspora Jewishness, but a central part of it.

David Landy is a lecturer in Trinity College Dublin, and the former chair of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign. His book, Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights has recently been published by Zed Books.

‘NYT’ spots Ed Koch standing by Israeli flag (in story hinting at Planet Zio)

Jul 27, 2011

Philip Weiss

Ashley Parker reports in the New York Times on the race to replace Anthony Weiner in Congress from Brooklyn. The piece is all about Israel, with Sheldon Silver, the N.Y. assembly speaker, saying that Israel is the “number one concern of Jewish voters.” But lest you think that the issue has become politicized, the two leading Dem candidates are outdoing one another in their support of Israel. Still, I thought Parker’s flag reference if not subversive, certainly cheeky. Writes a friend, “Reading today’s NY Times: I’m confused–in what country is this election taking place?” (h/t Zaid Jilani) Parker:

On Monday, former Mayor Edward I. Koch, a Democrat, endorsed the Republican candidate in the race, Bob Turner, a retired cable television executive, at a press conference at which he stood next to an Israeli flag. Mr. Koch has acknowledged that Mr. Weprin is a strong supporter of Israel, but argued that the election of Mr. Turner would serve as a rebuke to Mr. Obama for saying that Israel’s pre-1967 border should be the basis for a peace agreement.