Mondoweiss Online Newsletter

NOVANEWS

• Barney Frank says he’s going to hit campuses to counter the ‘left’ on Israel

• Karon: Why Abbas is doing US and Israel a favor by going to Security Council

• Tom in Chicago… and Abe in Peoria

• ‘How much of Susan Rice’s job is about Israel?’

• Chris Matthews’s thought bubble: we cut a deal to create Israel after WW2 and we can’t go back on it

• Bronner speech at Duke reveals deep bias and yet another ethical lapse

• Perry says Obama’s Israel policy is one of ‘appeasement’

• Time for the race speech? Does he have it in him?

• Israeli Settlers: ‘Arabs’ attacked us first . . . with harsh language

• Khalidi is sought out by MSM to explain failure of peace process & role of Arab public opinion

Barney Frank says he’s going to hit campuses to counter the ‘left’ on Israel

Sep 20, 2011

Philip Weiss

There was a big rally in Newton, MA., last night with leading political figures in the Jewish community opposing Palestinian statehood. David Harris of the AJC, Barney Frank, state treasurer Steve Grossman (former DNC chair and a big Obama fundraiser), etc. Here are some of the protesters outside. A friend went into the temple to hear the speeches and–

reports: Barney Frank said he will be going to campuses to counter the “left’s” understanding of Israel.” Because “only Israel passes muster in the Middle East.” And Frank equated working for the people who love Israel in his district to working with any other interest group living in the fourth district, e.g., Portuguese.

Karon: Why Abbas is doing US and Israel a favor by going to Security Council

Sep 20, 2011

Philip Weiss

Several people have pointed out this piece at Time by Tony Karon, which argues that Abbas’s resort to the Security Council is his way of folding, and the Palestinian state will disappear into a wet paper bag. Abbas could have had far more effect by going directly to the General Assembly, Karon says, citing Daniel Levy.

 the conventional wisdom has it wrong, suggests former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy, now at the New America Foundation.  An approach to the Security Council will actually reduce next week’s much-hyped showdown during the General Assembly session in New York to little more than a series of predictable speeches. Going the Security Council route makes any action very unlikely. That’s because the first response to a Security Council request to admit Palestine as a U.N. member state would that familiar Washington ritual: Setting up a committee.

“Any application would almost certainly have to be considered by a technical committee of the whole, and that could take time,” warns Levy. The process would almost certainly be drawn out well beyond the General Assembly session.

…Even in the less probable event that a Security Council application for membership was brought to a rapid vote, the U.S. is unlikely to be the only country withholding its support:

Germany has already indicated that it won’t support a recognition of full member status now, nor is Britain likely to do so, while the votes of France and Colombia might be in play and the U.S. might even hope to persuade Nigeria and Gabon to abstain. By going to the Security Council without first demonstrating their overwhelming support in the General Assembly, the Palestinians are therefore taking a risk. …

In short, despite all the buildup, next week’s “showdown” in New York could turn out to be a damp squib if the Palestinians approach the Security Council and, as is likely, get no immediate answer. On the other hand, getting an overwhelming majority of the General Assembly to recognize the contours of a Palestinian state as being based on the 1967 lines, with East Jerusalem as its capital, would strengthen the Palestinians’ hand in future negotiations with Israel, even if the Assembly cannot confer full U.N. membership. That would provide a significant counterbalance to the advantages the Israelis enjoy by having peace talks exclusively mediated by Washington, where Israel’s overwhelming advantage in domestic political support effectively precludes even-handedness.

But although matters remain fluid and very much in play, Friday’s announcement suggests that Abbas is taking the largely symbolic route of applying for full membership, knowing that the outcome will be unfavorable but not having availed himself of an opportunity to expand Palestinian’ leverage in a battle to end the occupation. Indeed, argues Levy, the Security Council route is almost certain to leave the status quo untouched. Abbas will go back to his people and tell them he won a moral victory; Netanyahu will tell Israelis that he, in fact, was the moral victor, and reality on the ground in the West Bank will remain entirely unchanged. As Levy puts it, “The journey back to the golden cage of Palestinian Authority co-habitation with Israeli occupation is a shorter one from the Security Council than it is from the General Assembly.”

Tom in Chicago… and Abe in Peoria

Sep 20, 2011

Philip Weiss

Earlier today we picked up a hugely popular comment at the New York Times from “Tom in Chicago.” Scholar David Bromwich pointed out an echo.

Tom in Chicago, on the U.S. and Israel (2011):

It is our unqualified support of them that has garnered nothing but justifiable
hatred and disgust from a very large chunk of the world’s population. It
exposes our double-standards toward freedom and justice and makes hypocrites of us all.

Lincoln in Peoria, on slavery (1854):

I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in
the world–enables the enemies of free institutions, to taunt us as
hypocrites– causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty.

‘How much of Susan Rice’s job is about Israel?’

Sep 20, 2011

Philip Weiss

“A lot.” (Uriel Heilman at JTA had an interview with Rice and asked her that very smart question. Another price we pay.)

Chris Matthews’s thought bubble: we cut a deal to create Israel after WW2 and we can’t go back on it

Sep 20, 2011

Philip Weiss

The first abdication tonight was that Chris Matthews led his show with a discussion of Obama’s new political tone. When even the NBC nightly news had led with the Rick Perry gauntlet to Obama on Israel. So Matthews buried the political lead.

Then when he did get to the Israel story, second in the lineup, Matthews framed the story by asserting strongly, I think Rick Perry is trying to appeal to evangelicals in Iowa. I.e., Matthews signaled that he didn’t want to talk about N.Y. Jews, let alone Jewish money, and it was guest John Heileman of New York magazine, going further than he did in his piece on Obama, to say that Obama had alienated “a lot of Jewish donors,” because of his Israel attitude.

“It is a real problem,” Heileman said. “Because people forget that back in 2008… [before the internet craze for giving to Obama], the core of his support of the financial community, the core of his support in terms of fundraising was Wall Street donors… He can’t afford to lose any major bundler support…”

This kind of talk makes Matthews uncomfortable.

He changed the subject immediately to Jewish voters. And talked about our “sensibility.” Jews love America, he said. “Of course they also love Israel,” but they love this country because it’s secular and not going to turn into any “theocracy,” which is going to push them around; and Rick Perry scares them on this front, because he has an evangelical belief in the end times, and Jews won’t be saved when the rapture comes…

Matthews refused to take Heileman’s point: Jewish money is in play. And some of it can be stripped from Obama. George W. Bush played this same game in 2000. His transition team reached out to neoconservative Douglas Feith to be under secretary of the Pentagon — Douglas Feith a nobody lawyer — late in that year just days after Sheldon Adelson gave the last third of $300,000 to the Republican National State Election Committee. The two men were both involved with One Jerusalem, which was opposed to the division of Jerusalem pushed by Bill Clinton in the Camp David negotiations earlier that year. And of course Bush filled his administration with neocons.

My point is that there is a lot of pro-Israel money from the Jewish community that Republicans think they can get or, just as important, can maybe alienate from Obama.

I think I know where Matthews stands on Israel. He buys the dream. He reveres Jews as he reveres Catholics, because they are equal constituents in the classic Democratic coalition, and in his pat way, he says to himself, Hey, look, that was the deal after the second World War: The Jews got Israel because the world needed to respond morally to the Holocaust and Jews had been persecuted for centuries. And it was a good deal, Truman had guts, and you don’t go back on such an important deal, and the U.S. is the enforcer of that deal… He’s old school. I sort of think he’s going to go to the grave with this understanding. He went to Israel in the last year. I wonder if he saw any of the people being persecuted by an ethnocracy…

Bronner speech at Duke reveals deep bias and yet another ethical lapse

Sep 20, 2011

Adam Horowitz

Last week we posted on Max Blumenthal’s important investigative piece on the New York TimesBureau Chief Ethan Bronner’s connection to Lone Star Communications, an Israeli PR firm run by the West Bank settler Charley Levine. You can see Lone Star’s promotional material for Bronner here (PDF), where he was promoted through its speakers bureau. One topic Bronner speaks on is “When the Bible Belongs on Page One: Archeological Breakthroughs in Israel,” which caught my eye in light of a story Blumenthal tells in his piece:

In 2008, in an excavation in the Israeli town of Khirbet Qeiyafa, near what was said to be the valley where David battled Goliath, an archaeology professor from Hebrew University named Yosef Garfinkel found a shard of pottery that contained what appeared to have been the oldest Hebrew text ever discovered. Garfinkel believed the artifact offered evidence of a kingdom ruled by King David more than 3,000 years ago. Such a find could be used to boost claims that an ancient empire established the historical precedent for the present day Jewish state, though archeologists differ on their interpretations of what Garfinkel found.

Garfinkel asked two of Israel’s most avid archaeology enthusiasts, David Willner and Barnea Selavan, to start a fundraising operation that would allow the completion of the dig. Willner is a settler from the West Bank who hosts a popular archaeology radio show and Barnea Selavan had previously worked as a public relations hand for the Jerusalem Reclamation Project, an organization dedicated to settling religious nationalist Jews in Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem. Willner and Selavan turned to Lone Star, a Jerusalem-based Israeli public relations firm founded and directed by Charley Levine, a well-connected Israeli media adviser.

Lone Star in turn arranged an exclusive tour for Bronner. “The feeling was the Times was the most serious periodical who could run the story who could generate serious publicity and generate fundraising from the get-go,” Willner said. “And so the feeling was that if it was a New York Times story, it was worth its weight in gold.” Bronner published an October 30, 2008 feature in the Times that examined the historical and political controversies surrounding the dig.

Blumenthal uses the story to demonstrate how Bronner reported on stories about Lone Star clients without disclosing his own business relationship to the firm, which violates the Timesethics policy. It ends up the article in question wasn’t the only place Bronner pushed Lone Star’s Khirbet Qeiyafa story. In April, 2009 Bronner spoke at a Duke University Center for Jewish Studies conference called “Archeology, Politics and the Media” where he discussed Khirbet Qeiyafa, but also displayed a deep bias which should raise additional questions for theNew York Times.

Here is how Bronner described the Khirbet Qeiyafa story to the Duke audience (Audio recordings of the conference are archived here and on iTunes. The following appears at 12:28 on the recording):

I got a call about this story from a guy, who is a sort of, who’s a PR guy, who specializes in right-of-center stuff, shall we say. And the reason he called me is because the people who were ending up funding this dig are not Elad [for more on Elad see here], but Elad light. And so anyway he called me and he said we thinking of (unclear) and so we worked it out and the truth is is that it did seem like a quite a serious thing and Yossi Garfinkel seemed like a great and serious person to me and I spent a long time on it and I’ll just tell you that story very quickly.

Bronner doesn’t mention that he is represented by the same “PR guy,” and it’s clear he understands that his role is to help fund raise for their project:

Why does Yossi, why do they want me to put this in the New York Times? Foundation Stone, Elad light, an organization whose website you can go to, is helping to fund it. They don’t have a Moskowitz in their back pocket, that Elad has, they go out and raise the money. These are modern orthodox, Zionists, Americans, who live in Israel. A guy called David Willner who is from LA, and he lives in Efrat, which is a West Bank settlement by most of our standards, although it’s in Gush Etzion, you know one of the less “setterly” settlements if you like, but nonetheless. And he was the trip, my first visit to the site, and the point of the group is to strengthen the tie of the Jewish people to the land. The website says it is, Foundation Stone is redrawing the map in Jewish education and that it’s activities are anchoring traditional texts to the artifacts, maps and locations that form the context for Jewish identity.”

Dr. Eric Meyers, the organizer of the conference, says that Lone Star did not arrange for Bronner to speak at the conference (Meyers reached out to him himself), but confirmed that Bronner’s speaking fee was paid to Lone Star.

It seems one point of Bronner’s story at the Duke conference was to demonstrate how archeology is used as political tool in Israel, and to show how some archeologists become implicated in efforts to confirm nationalist narratives of history. Bronner sees a possible conflict of interest in this and ironically warned the archeologists in attendance about taking money from people with an agenda. He says, “that is certainly something for you guys to think about.”

It would be convenient to see Bronner’s relationship to Lone Star in a similar light, an unwilling dupe to Charley Levine’s right-wing agenda, but the rest of his remarks at Duke reveal a deep antipathy to the Palestinian people and apparent bias in how he explains the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While he tries to soft step the Israeli settlers’ project above (“less ‘setterly’ settlements”), he comes down hard on the Palestinians, questioning their claims and basically blaming them for Israeli intransigence.

He takes the Palestinians to task for attempting to use archeology to further their own nationalist agenda, and says that he believes that Palestinian rejection of Israeli archeological claims is what is driving the Israeli focus on Jerusalem. He says, “As one-sided and single-focused as the Israeli and Jewish approach to archeology is, the truth is that the Palestinian approach to archeology is really problematic. Really problematic. And I believe it has really made the problem much worse on the Israeli side.”

Moving on from archeology, Bronner goes on attack and belittle Palestinian political demands. He recounts a story with Saeb Erakat and finds it amazing that Erakat would demand that Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem be treated like Israeli settlers in the rest of the West Bank as part of an effort the make the city the capital of a future Palestinian state.  He doesn’t understand why Israeli settlers would have to be uprooted from Jerusalem given that “these neighborhoods have been annexed to Jerusalem for so long.” He then implies that it is important for Israel to retain control over Jerusalem, because if it were left to the Palestinians no Jewish history would be “dug up or highlighted.”

In the end, he sees the conflict as a fight between two sides, which Israel is winning in part to combat Palestinian rejectionism:

“It’s not just the story of an occupying power enforcing its will on a population, that would otherwise be sharing about it all, it’s a story about which side is dominant, and therefore in a position to impose its view on the history of the place. And one problem with all the criticism of Israel’s position from archeologists and from the European Union is that if fails to acknowledge how the Palestinians have acted over the decades and how that has effected the Israeli authorities. You know, to be told you have no roots there, for Jews to be told that, obviously Arafat used to say that all the time, is galling and it makes these Israelis dig their heels in as well as their shovels.”

To finish it off he goes on to say that most of the Palestinian building in Silwan is illegal, and questions that truth behind Palestinian claims that building permits are difficult to get.

While it does seem that Bronner is attempting to play devil’s advocate to a crowd that was critical of Israel’s attempts to steal Palestinian land under the guise of archeology (imagine that!),  this speech does give more context to Bronner’s relationship to Charley Levine and Lone Star Communications. Blumenthal writes, “Bronner says he does not share what he described as ‘Charley Levine’s rightist politics,'” but this speech would seem to indicate they may agree on quite a bit. As so Bronner’s relationship to Lone Star does not only reflect a deep conflict of interest for the Times, but yet another case of his pro-Israel bias.

Perry says Obama’s Israel policy is one of ‘appeasement’

Sep 20, 2011

Paul Mutter, Phil Weiss

Rick Perry’s speech on Israel this morning in NY. Twice uses the word “appeasement.” Does not endorse a greater Israel, seems to want a 2ss under Oslo. Excerpt:

The Obama Administration’s Middle East policy of appeasement has encouraged such an ominous act of bad faith [statehood bid]….

Our muddle of a foreign policy has created greater uncertainty in the midst of the “Arab Spring.” And our policy of isolating and undermining Israel has only encouraged our adversaries in their aggression.

With the end-run on Palestinian statehood imminent before the U.N., America must act swiftly.

First, every nation within the U.N. must know America stands with Israel and the Oslo accord principle of direct negotiations without equivocation.

Second, America must make it clear that a declaration of Palestinian Statehood in violation of the spirit of the Oslo accords could jeopardize our funding of U.N. operations.

Third, the Palestinians must know their gambit comes with consequences in particular that America will have to reconsider the $4 billion in assistance we have provided to the Palestinians over the last 17 years.

Fourth, we should close the PLO office in Washington if the U.N. grants the standing of a Palestinian state.

And fifth, we must signal to the world, including nations like Turkey and Egypt whom we have considered allies in recent years, that we won’t tolerate aggression against Israel.

Israel is our friend and ally. I have traveled there several times, and met with its leaders. It is not a perfect nation, but its existence is critical to America’s security in the world.

It is time to change our policy of appeasement toward the Palestinians to strengthen our ties to the nation of Israel, and in the process establish a robust American position in the Middle East characterized by a new firmness and a new resolve.

If America does not head off the aggression of forces hostile to Israel we will only embolden them.

That would be a tragic mistake.

Time for the race speech? Does he have it in him?

Sep 20, 2011

Philip Weiss

From a rabbi friend:

Do you know that Obama has scheduled a call for rabbis for Thursday at noon? No press allowed.  He has had one every year but this year seems more desperate, and evidently I just saw a note that he is organizing a mass call for Jews in the pews for next Tuesday.  It is all coming apart at the seams.  It is not going to be pretty but God knows it is about time.

Israeli Settlers: ‘Arabs’ attacked us first . . . with harsh language

Sep 20, 2011

Paul Mutter

Israel National News: “First Arab ‘September Attack’: Convoy Approached Negohot; September attacks have begun: Arabs in 40-50 vehicles drove along Jewish community’s fence, taunted and jeered.”

Presumably, this will be used as evidence to suggest that the Arabs “started it,” like the way they “started” the Six Day War. But for a minor incident, it is rather illustrative of the settlement worldview as a whole:

1. Hilltop (Double) Standards – The protesters did not, at least based on what INN has reported, attempt to enter Negohot, a West Bank settlement founded in 1982. Nor did they exit their vehicles or direct anything more than words and posters at the fenced-in settlement. Nevertheless, such actions constitute an attack (not a protest – an attack), according to the settlers. Whereas attacks against Palestinian property and lives are always acts of self-preservation.

2. The Spineless Security Forces – The IDF is criticized for not being more proactive, especially since they have declared there are “red lines” Palestinians must not be allowed to cross around the settlements. According to the article, IDF soldiers simply stood by and watched the convoy slowly drive by. The article asserts that settlers must not rely on a supine IDF in the coming weeks, but rather, on themselves, because Palestinians are hopelessly foolish (but, at the same time, ingenious connivers). The IDF is a potential enemy in the eyes of the settlers, as is the PA.

3. The Arabs’ Useful Idiots – The “anti-Jewish” Israeli Supreme Court is again castigated for a decision made in 2009 that reopened Israeli Route 443 between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to Palestinian drivers such as these. The road, built on “expropriated” Palestinian land located within the West Bank, was closed to Palestinian traffic during the Second Intifada because of attacks on Israeli motorists. With support from Israeli human rights groups, suits to reopen near Palestinian villages made it to the Supreme Court, which overturned the military ban on Palestinian traffic because a panel of three justices decided the ban was a form of collective punishment. But if the road was still closed to non-Israelis, this provocation would never have happened, it is suggested. The Arab-loving left throws away Jewish lives.

4. The Opinion War – Essentially, “leftist” opinion is just as dangerous, if not more so, than any number of al Asqa Brigadists. It is an “enabler” and must be changed. “Being right isn’t enough, selling it is” – and the main talking points must be the Holocaust and the Torah. Changing the way the government appoints Supreme Court justices and licenses Israeli NGOs activities was on the legislative agendas of far-right Israeli parties during this past Knesset session. Neither effort succeeded, but the far-right has vowed to keep trying to wrest humanitarianism in the West Bank away from a far-left minority (in favor of their own far-right minority, of course – parliamentarianism, everybody!).

So as Israel National News noted, Negohot is only the beginning this September.

Khalidi is sought out by MSM to explain failure of peace process & role of Arab public opinion

Sep 20, 2011

Philip Weiss

One astonishing thing about this moment is the Elevation of Rashid Khalidi. As anyone who has heard this softspoken brilliant man speak knows, it’s about time. Back in ’08, Obama threw him under the bus. But now the American media are turning to him! Next, Ali Abunimah… I noted that Khalidi got two MSM platforms yesterday. Now here he is on NPR’s Talk of the Nation yesterday.

I think the United States and Israel and the Europeans and everybody else has to be awakened to the fact that this is not your grandfather’s Middle East. This is not a Middle East where colonial powers or external powers could push people around and pliable, pliant governments would do as they were told, whether by Moscow or Washington or, in an earlier era, by London or Paris. This is an era of growing demand for popular sovereignty. Even if there are not successful or fully successful democratic transitions, people will have a bigger voice. And the people’s voice has been kept out of this. Most people in the Arab world are deeply sympathetic to the Palestinians. Most governments have done what Washington wanted for the past several decades. That’s the reality. Israel was very comfortable with that, because its patron, the United States, made sure that the Arabs were essentially kept out of the equation, except those people who are wheeled in to fund with the Americans had decided they wanted to have happen and Israel was willing to have happen…

United States is between a rock and a hard place. The rock is the domestic realities where Israel is concerned, where, basically, the Israeli position is the bottom line. Whatever position an Israeli government takes is the bottom line for whatever administration is in office. And the hard place is that the Middle East is a much less-forgiving zone of American hypocrisy – you know, rhetoric in favor of self-determination, but voting against a Palestinian state at the United Nations. It’s not an enviable place that this administration is in, and it’s the political realities, and this kind of – the domestic the political realities in this country and our inability to understand that this is really a foreign policy problem, that this is not – and that there are very important interests to the United States. ..

if the ’67 borders aren’t a basis, then what is the basis? What are the borders of this state that we’re asked to guarantee? They’re, apparently, quite flexible. If conquest – if we’re going to throw it the U.N. charter and we’re going to throw out everything that has emerged since World War II in the way of international law and say that conquest is a basis to throw out U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, the acquisition of territory by force is perfectly okay.