Mondoweiss Online Newsletter

NOVANEWS

• How to run for Congress in the United States

• Alice Walker: Museum’s decision to censor Gaza children will backfire (like banning Marian Anderson)

• Meritocratic spring: ‘New Yorker’ runs Hisham Matar piece mentioning ‘Palestine’

• Presbyterian Church committee recommends church divest from Caterpillar, HP and Motorola over Israeli human rights abuses

• Ron Paul says our unfairness to Palestinians led to 9/11 attacks

• ‘Forward’s ad director says he’s chosen not to visit Israel because it’s gone ‘so far afield’

• IADL calls on U.N. to override and ‘ignore’ illegal veto of Palestinian right to self-determination

• Richard Cohen instructs Obama: there must be no ‘daylight’ between you and Netanyahu

• ‘Arab Sources’ on Mondoweiss

• Shame on Israel: Jews who kill

How to run for Congress in the United States

Sep 13, 2011

Philip Weiss

Results are not yet in on Weprin-Turner race for Weiner seat in Brooklyn. But here’s a shot of Turner’s announcement stage, from Brooklyn Politics.

 

Alice Walker: Museum’s decision to censor Gaza children will backfire (like banning Marian Anderson)

Sep 13, 2011

Philip Weiss

Inspirational piece by Alice Walker at her site on the banning of the Gaza children’s art by the children’s museum in Oakland (which has drawn wide scorn). Excerpt (thx, Henry Norr):

There was no museum in the tiny, segregated, Georgia town closest to where we lived; though I could be wrong. I was fifty before I understood there was, somewhere hidden in the white part of town, a public library. I do remember that the art of Jimmy Lee Brundidge, a young black folk artist, was shown on the walls of the local shoe shop.

The decision by the Museum of Children’s Art in Oakland not to show the work of Palestinian children from Gaza makes me sad.  But not discouraged.  The art will be shown.  The walls of a shoe shop will be found.  We will all – those of us who care about these children, whose pain our tax dollars assured – go to see it.  Furthermore, we will write to the children to let them know we’ve seen their work and what we think of it.  This is the least we can do.

Such banning as this usually backfires.

I don’t think I was born yet, but I “remember” that, in 1939, Marian Anderson, the great black contralto, was refused venue at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. by the Daughters of the American Revolution because (gasp) the audience would be integrated!  Anderson supporters, including president Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, rallied to the cause and Anderson sang to a crowd in the tens of thousands while standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

We will find a Lincoln Memorial.  We will eventually, on this issue of freeing the Palestinians, find a Lincoln.

Meritocratic spring: ‘New Yorker’ runs Hisham Matar piece mentioning ‘Palestine’

Sep 13, 2011

Philip Weiss

Writes a friend: Goddamn! Riding the Metro home from work I continued to pore over last week’s New Yorker. The week before, I’d taken note of a short memoir, published in the Talk of the Town, by the Libyan writer Hisham Matar. The language lilts and describes and exudes emotion. Then today, with last week’s issue, I found another column by Matar in the Talk of the Town — it was even more wonderful. I think you’ll really like it. (Unfortunately, it’s for subscribers only, so you gotta check it out in the print edition (9/12) or punch in your own user ID and password.) It’s about freedom and oppression and foreign interference and even gives a shout to “Palestine.” Not the Palestinian Territories or any such. It’s very frank about all these things, and it’s about the Arab Spring, and it’s in the New Yorker. That’s right, America — even the liberal Jewish establishment at the New Yorker — is waking up to the Arab desire to be free, and falling in love with the Arabs experiencing it. Read it as soon as possible.

Presbyterian Church committee recommends church divest from Caterpillar, HP and Motorola over Israeli human rights abuses

Sep 13, 2011

Adam Horowitz

The Presbyterian Church (USA)’s Committee on Mission Responsibility Through Investment has recommended that the church divest from Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard, and Motorola Solutions due to their relationship to Israeli human rights abuses in the occupied territories. This decision comes as the result of a corporate engagement process which began in 2004 and sought to influence corporate policy vis-a-vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. From a church press release:

“The General Assembly asked us to do everything we could to bring about change through dialogue, and we have done this, even asking the Assembly for more time over the years,” said committee chair the Rev. Brian Ellison, a pastor from Kansas City, Mo. “Today we are sadly reporting that these efforts have not produced any substantive change in company policies or practices, and that there is little reason for hope they will do so in the future. According to the Assembly’s prior directives and the church’s ordinary engagement process, we have little choice but to recommend divestment.”

The committee has been engaging several companies profiting from non-peaceful pursuits in the region, including activity connected with Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, since the 2004 General Assembly. MRTI’s recommendations will be presented in February 2012 to the General Assembly Mission Council and then, with the Council’s approval, to the General Assembly in July 2012.

“We have not made this decision lightly, but have undertaken it with prayer and great care,” Ellison said. “We have appreciated the witness of brothers and sisters around the church in our process, both from presbyteries where these corporations are located and from those who have called us to move more quickly in this direction. We continue to pray for employees of these companies and their congregations as they are affected by this decision. We also continue to pray that all companies and individuals in the region will redouble their efforts to seek a just peace and support for human rights for all Israeli and Palestinian people.”

The press release also included the following information about the companies in question:

Background on Companies

Caterpillar has profited from sales of its products to Israeli military and civilian authorities, including its D-9 bulldozers which are used to demolish Palestinian homes and construct settlements and Israeli-only roads on Palestinian land, acts deemed illegal under international law. The company has never accepted responsibility for how its products are used and has not responded to requests for dialogue since 2009 from MRTI or other religious groups.

Hewlett-Packard has profited from sales of specialized technology used in invasive and unjust biometric scanning processes at checkpoints in the separation wall constructed on Palestinian territory. It has also provided hardware used by the Israeli Navy in its internationally condemned blockade of the Gaza Strip and in the municipal governments of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, deemed illegal under international law. Discussions with the company have been unproductive, and the company has been unwilling to address serious issues of concern.

Motorola Solutions, one of two companies to emerge from a corporate reorganization of Motorola at the start of 2011, has profited from providing communications technology to the Israeli military used in operations in the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza, and has built and supported high-tech surveillance systems in the separation barrier and Israeli settlements built illegally on Palestinian land. The company has consistently declined to have dialogue with religious investors.

 

Ron Paul says our unfairness to Palestinians led to 9/11 attacks

Sep 13, 2011

Philip Weiss

The only presidential candidate to talk about human rights in Palestine is of course, Ron Paul, who said that it helped foster the 9/11 attacks, during last night’s Republican debate, picked up at NBC. (Thanks to antiwar.com):

“Most of the danger comes by our lack of wisdom on how we run our foreign policy,” and he repeated a statistic he uses on the campaign trail in Iowa: “We’re under great threat, because we occupy so many countries. We’re in 130 countries. We have 900 bases around the world. We’re going broke. The purpose of al Qaeda was to attack us, invite us over there, where they can target us. And they have been doing it.”

Paul went on to claim that al Qaeda has committed “more attacks against us and the American interests per month than occurred in all the years before 9/11” — because the U.S. is “occupying their land.” …

Paul didn’t retreat from his position. “This whole idea that the whole Muslim world is responsible for this, and they’re attacking us because we’re free and prosperous, that is just not true. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda have been explicit… They wrote and said that we attacked America because you had bases on our holy land in Saudi Arabia, you do not give Palestinians fair treatment, and you have been bombing…”

At this point, Paul was interrupted by a chorus of boos. He tried to talk over them, pleading with the audience to understand his position.

“I didn’t say that. I’m trying to get you to understand what the motive was behind the bombing, at the same time we had been bombing and killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis for 10 years. Would you be annoyed? If you’re not annoyed, then there’s some problem.”

‘Forward’s ad director says he’s chosen not to visit Israel because it’s gone ‘so far afield’

Sep 13, 2011

Philip Weiss

I haven’t see this till now; apparently it’s been up on Vimeo for three months, a trailer for a documentary-in-progress on Jews escaping the blinders of Zionism, by Bruce Robbins and Jeff Boyar. Initial Development Trailer: “Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists.” I want to believe scholar Robbins is a tipping-point figure. Has he held forth against Zionism before?

The trailer features Judith Butler, Alisa Solomon, Tony Kushner, James Schamus, and Jerry Koenig of the Forward. Also Columbia’s Robbins, and Alan Sokal who I gather was once a star in the neoconstellation. Now I wonder why Koenig’s common-sense awareness in my headline, quoted below, is not reflected in the Forward every week?

Bruce Robbins of Columbia: going to Israel was worse than he had imagined; he saw the wall encircling the Palestinians and thought of the Warsaw Ghetto. Robbins focuses on the water supply, and the horrifying fact that all the Palestinian buildings have water tanks, because the Palestinians in occupation have no control over their water.

Schamus: Ideologies are malleable. Yes he grew up with Zionism, but the whole deal with an ideology is that you get to abandon it or move on…

“Something’s terribly wrong here and Israel has much to account for in this…” says Tony Kushner.  And the accusation that by saying as much you are going to destroy Israel– “This is bullshit.”

“It’s gone so far afield now, I don’t know… we’ve made decisions not to visit the country because it would be so uncomfortable” — Jerry Koenig, the advertising director for the Forward.

Butler: You cannot produce a state based on the rights of some refugees and create, in 1948, another 750,000. So: honor the rights of all refugees.

Update: headline revised slightly on relistening in response to Witty comment.

IADL calls on U.N. to override and ‘ignore’ illegal veto of Palestinian right to self-determination

Sep 13, 2011

Philip Weiss

The International Association of Democratic Lawyers has sent a letter to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon saying that a veto of the Palestinian statehood initiative would be illegal under the UN charter. Because the charter affirms the right of a people to self-determination. And that the General Assembly must vote for statehood and the U.N. must ignore the veto.

Here’s the resolution.

The International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), a non-governmental organization with members in over 90 countries, and with consultative status with ECOSOC, UNESCO and UNICEF, submits the below resolution to Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon regarding the upcoming discussion of the admission of the State of Palestine to the United Nations.

WHEREAS the question whether to recognize the State of Palestine for admission to the United Nations is to be considered in the near future; and

WHEREAS it is possible that a permanent member of the Security Council may try to use a veto to try to prevent the admission of the State of Palestine; and

WHEREAS the Charter of the United Nations sets forth an international rule of law as an obligation for all states; and

WHEREAS the Article 24.2 of the United Nations Charter places in the Security Council the duty to preserve and implement the principles of the Charter; and

WHEREAS permanent members have the duty to protect the principles of the Charter against a majority which might infringe on those principles and the rule of law; and

WHEREAS permanent members may not legally use the privilege of the veto if such use would be contrary to the duty to preserve and implement the principles of the Charter; and

WHEREAS the application of Palestine is in accordance with Article 4 of the Charter, recognition of a Palestinian state is in accordance with the principles of the Charter in its implementation of the right of peoples to self determination, and Palestine’s right to independence in the face of Israeli Occupation in violation of Article 2.4; and

WHEREAS  the use of a veto to oppose the admission of Palestine would be a violation of the principles of the Charter, and therefore illegal.

 IADL further asks the Honorable Ban Ki-Moon UN Secretary General to circulate this message to all members of the United Nations.

THEREFORE, if a majority of the security council approves recognition of the Palestinian State, even if there is a veto by any permanant member, the General Assembly may and must vote on the admission of the Palestinian State and if approved by the General Assembly the United Nations must ignore the veto and admit Palestine because use of the veto in this context would be against the principles of the Charter and therefore illegal.

Richard Cohen instructs Obama: there must be no ‘daylight’ between you and Netanyahu

Sep 13, 2011

Philip Weiss

The good news is that Obama’s mild demurral re Israel and the panic over the Arab spring means that prominent American Republicans and Democrats are finally going to talk about Israel openly. And Americans may get to differ?

First, the Republican Party: Ron Kampeas reports in the JTA:

the single foreign policy reference in Pawlenty’s statement [endorsing Romney]. My bold:

Abroad, the standing of the United States appears uncertain and adrift under the failed leadership of a president who prefers chastising allies to condemning foes.

…to the degree foreign policy will play a role, it looks like Republicans — the entire party — will hinge their attack on President Obama’s differences with Israel.

Second, the Democratic Party: Liberal Richard Cohen of the Washington Post:

But the United States has the moral obligation to stick by the sometimes obstreperous democracy it felt morally obligated to embrace. The Obama administration has to show no daylight between it and Israel — never mind that Benjamin Netanyahu is no Ben-Gurion.

The no-daylight line is from AIPAC. Note that Cohen’s whole column is based on the idea that the Arab spring is a great step backward. But the peoples overwhelmingly approve the Arab spring. This shows how ethnocentric the Israel lobby is: It will rationalize any people’s oppression so long as Israel is maintained as a Jewish state. Is it worth it? When American Jews live so freely in a plural democracy? Isn’t that the way, Richard?

 

‘Arab Sources’ on Mondoweiss

Sep 13, 2011

Simone Daud

Arab Sources is a place where I translate into English various Arabic sources and opinion. Arab Sources is also a place where I publish my own analysis. My broad aim is for the Arab Sourcesseries to be an invitation to the full Zellij of Arab cultures.

Arab Sources until recently was published in the Democratic party’s community blog DailyKos. It was shut down by DailyKos a week ago in a broad purge that seems to have targeted  a number of African American series and Arab Sources.  I think that Mondoweiss is perhaps a more suitable outlet for Arab Sources and my work.

I hope in this introductory essay to introduce myself,  an artisan working on one corner of Palestinian culture, a corner that I have dubbed Arab Sources. I’m a Palestinian professor and an Israeli citizen, Simone Daud is my late grandfather’s name.

My first breath was of the seashores of my beloved Haifa, which is a coastal town on mount Carmel. My second was the winds of the Galilee. I ate the fruits of my ancestral Olive groves in a Galilee village north east of Nazareth. I grew up with the pronounced Galilean dialect surrounding me. I was never a revolutionary, nor a fida’i. I did not live an intifada. I was never a refugee. I am a Galilean who remained in the Galilee. I share my culture with the gentle people of the Syrian region of the Huran. A culture that extends well into the eastern Galilee. My grandfather wore a white Arab headdress and my grandmother, always in black, had Hurani blue bridal tattoos on her cheek, chin, and hands.

I have quenched my thirst in the springs of Nazareth, bathed in the baths of Acre, and have soared above the skies of our Jaffa. I have walked on the Lake Tiberias. I am a Palestinian not dispossessed. I am free. I am a privileged Palestinian.

Yet I remain a Palestinian tortured by narratives.

It is not clear to me when Isaac Deutscher, the Yiddish poet, biographer of Stalin, and humanist ceased to be an intellectual. This must have happened at least a decade before he passed away.  The provenance of Avraham Berg’s lamentation of the loss of the humanist traditions in his German Jewish community is also not clear to me. But I was an observer of the transformation described in Edward Said’s The Last Jewish Intellectual.

I grew up and came of age in a small tobacco smoke filled apartment on the edge of the Wadi aN-Nisnas neighborhood of Haifa, where the remaining Arabs of Haifa who managed to avoid exile were herded in 1948.  I slept sleepless nights on a carpet between the kitchen and a small living room. My life was not an ordinary life of an Arab child in Haifa. The house was always full.

At night the kitchen saw an ensemble of insomniac  old German Jewish professors, lawyers, and writers who had agglomerated around  my parents. Always in dark uncolored suites and hats. Each night quietly  lamenting, often wailing, for things that have passed. But what of the future? Nothing of the future that I can remember; except once in the ever so European synagog of Weizmann Institute, one of these professors insisted that I should study Mathematics at university; I was six years old and can’t  remember the language that was used but remember the sentence.

In the afternoons our living room was heavily laden with young Arab poets and emerging intellectuals. The greatest Arab poet of our time, Mahmoud Darwish, passed through that room and converted packets of the Israeli brand TIME cigarettes into the poetry of our generation. These intellectuals spoke of the future and never of the past. These Arabs were aspiring, as it were, to appropriate for themselves Jewish humanist traditions. Plotting their own colonial enterprise. The colonisation of the coloniser.

It is to this culture that I belong and for this reason I think that my perspective, Arab Sources, should find Mondoweiss a comfortable new home.