Mondoweiss Online Newsletter

NOVANEWS

Former Israeli general: Provoke a settler attack, then shoot the ‘Jewish terrorist’

Dec 19, 2011

Allison Deger

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Former IDF general Uri Saguy. (Photo: Niv Calderon/Ynetnews)

Responding to the recent settler attack on army base, a former IDF general has said the government should provoke an attack from settlers and then shoot the “Jewish terrorist.”  Retired general Uri Saguy wrote an op-ed in Ynetnews last week, slamming the IDF and Netanyahu for not taking harsher action.

Prompted by Netanyahu’s refusal to term the violent settlers responsible for the recent attack of a mosque and IDF base, and IDF commander, as “terrorist,” Saguy denounced Netanyahu for his lack of “leadership,” and suggested provoking a “confrontation” and then shooting the settlers.

In the absence of leadership, we may have to facilitate a confrontation and win it. As the people who ruin us hail from our midst, we must take action. I fear these domestic threats more than I fear the Iranian threat. At this time, we are in the midst of a messianic, delusional process that is violent, belligerent, intolerant, and also un-Jewish. [emphasis added]

Saguy writes, “the rioters who attacked IDF soldiers resorted to terror, and terror should be addressed firmly.”  Saguy insinuates fears that secular Israelis will become “a persecuted minority in a sea of haredim, fanatics, Arabs and parasites.”  In order to avoid being taken over by these parasidic settlers and Palestinians, the general calls for “real force,” stating “I would have shot them. Terrorists should be shot.”

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Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz. (Photo: Gabi Menashe/Ynet)

The general sees this rise in Jewish extremism as part of what Israeli anti-occupation and Orthodox Jewish intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz forshadowed, following the 1967 occupation of the Palestinian territories.  Leibowitz, a staunch supporter of a secular state, and a staunch supporter of the literal, unquestioning practice of Jewish law, halacha, predicted that the continued occupation of Palestinian lands would lead to the downfall of Israel.  Saguy writes:

While I still served in the IDF, I invited Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz to address my soldiers in the wake of the Six-Day War. He sounded like a prophet of apocalypse, yet to my regret I can today fully endorse his prophecy, which spoke of three phases to follow that war.

In the first stage, he said, we shall see euphoria, upon our return to our ancient sites. Next, we shall see the emergence of messianic, radical and dangerous nationalism. In the third stage, we shall see Israeli society becoming more brutal and the emergence of a police state.

Leibowitz imagined a corruption of halacha, brutality against Palestinians, and a rise in the Israeli right-wing. However, the IDF general misses Leibowitz’s  famous and controversial “prophetic” characterization of the IDF as “Judeo-Nazi,” when he suggests provoking a “confrontation” with the settlers, in which the army will “shoot the terrorist.”

Eldar: ethnocentrism has called on religious and secular alike

Dec 19, 2011

Nima Shirazi

Akiva Eldar
Akiva Eldar

Writing in Ha’aretz today, veteran journalist Akiva Eldar argues that “Israel can be Jewish without being racist,” but admits that, in Israel, “there is no wall separating the religious from the secular.”
He writes, “Jewish ethnocentrism – and the desire to erase the collective identity of the Palestinians and take control of their land – have been a thread linking religious and secular over the past 44 years.”
Eldar is appalled by settlers, especially the so-called “hilltop youth,” who he calls “thugs” and “young Jewish terrorists.” He also condemns recent Knesset legislation:

The most racist legislative proposals have been the product of Knesset members such as Avigdor Lieberman, Avi Dichter, Danny Danon, Yariv Levin, Faina Kirshenbaum and Anastassia Michaeli, none of whom have religious motives.

He concludes thusly:

At the end of a meeting held last week with rabbis and settlement leaders, President Shimon Peres said: “There is one thing that unites us all: not abandoning this country to a group of people who constitute a major danger to the existence of the state.”

 

Mr. President, it is not a marginalized “group of people” that constitutes the major danger to the existence of Israel as a democratic and Jewish state, rather than a racist and Jewish one. The seeds of lawlessness were sowed by good secular people like you.

In the past, Eldar has recognized that the story begins in 1948, not 1967. He wrote, commendably, that his “primary mission is to leave behind for my children and grandchildren a state that is loyal to these principles and values. The occupation of a people, while denying its basic rights, robbing its lands and trampling its dignity, is turning us Israelis into prisoners–prison guards spend a significant part of their lives behind prison walls.”
He went on:

Occupation does not have two sides. There is no symmetry between the occupier and the occupied. This is true even if the occupied fight the occupier with despicable and contemptuous methods. The problem of mainstream politicians and journalists in Israel–including the Zionist left–is that for years, present day included, they have accepted the conversion of the occupation into an annexation process.

And that was written before Cast Lead.

Klein: Ron Paul is surging because he opposes another neocon war for Israel

Dec 19, 2011

Philip Weiss

Joe Klein
Joe Klein

Joe Klein is great. Full stop. He hated the Vietnam war and then he hated the Iraq war and had more courage than any other journalist in the mainstream, to nail it back in ’03 as a war for Israel’s security. He says it again here. And Klein is a liberal Zionist! He understands the importance of Ron Paul, who NPR says is at the top of the latest Iowa polls. Why? Because he’s antiwar!

Iowa Republicans are not neoconservatives. Ron Paul has gained ground after a debate in which his refusal to join the Iran warhawks was front and center. Indeed, in my travels around the country, I don’t meet many neoconservatives outside of Washington and New York. It’s one thing to just adore Israel, as the evangelical Christians do; it’s another thing entirely to send American kids off to war, yet again, to fight for Israel’s national security.

Notice that he pins the tail on the ideology, neoconservatism. This is why David Brooksthought Paul had a “bad debate,” because he is trying to tell Americans about a dangerous ideology, neoconservatism. Oh and look how much air the NYT gives Ron Paul in its Iowa wrapup this morning. About one paragraph.

Iraq war was brought to you by Democrats, too

Dec 19, 2011

Philip Weiss

Joe Scarborough at Politico makes some good points about the origins of the Iraq war (h/t Voskamp):

A cursory review of quotes over the past decade and a half illustrates just how aligned the most powerful Democrats in Washington were with George W. Bush when it came to the threat they thought Saddam Hussein posed to America. The Democratic quotes also show how short our collective memory is as a nation.

Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, called the ability of states like Iraq to use their weapons “the greatest security threat we face.”

Clinton’s national security adviser agreed.

Sandy Berger stated with certainty that “Saddam will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has 1- times since 1983.”

Other Democratic leaders, such as Edwards, Nancy Pelosi and Jay Rockefeller also encouraged military action against Saddam Hussein if it was necessary to eliminate his weapons programs.

One of Bush’s harshest critics during the war, Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, spent the first years of the George W. Bush administration warning the new president of Iraq’s grave threat. In 2001, Levin told Bush that “Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them.”

In 2002, Hillary Clinton also warned that Saddam was working to rebuild his nuclear program and had “given aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members.”

Rockefeller, the Democratic vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, also said in 2002 that “there is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons in the next five years.”

Bush’s 2000 opponent, Al Gore, was quoted in that same year saying that “Saddam has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country” and that finding them would be “impossible for as long as Saddam is in power.”

Bush’s 2004 presidential opponent, John Kerry, also vouched for Iraq’s WMD programs when he told the Senate, “I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction are in Saddam Hussein’s hands and is a real and grave threat to our security.”

Even the president’s harshest war critic, Sen. Ted Kennedy, told fellow senators that “we have known Saddam Hussein has been seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction for some time.”

The New York Times joined the Democratic chorus by grimly warning of the threat posed by Iraq in the final years of the Clinton administration. The Times expressed grave concerns over the dictator’s attempt to develop weapons and warned U.S. leaders that negotiations could be ineffective, since “it is hard to negotiate with a tyrant who has no intention of honoring his commitments and who sees nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as his country’s salvation.”

On the eve of President George W. Bush’s first Inauguration, The Washington Post was even more apocalyptic, calling Iraq’s weapons program the greatest threat facing the new president.

The Democratic Senate passed its war resolution 77-23. The Republican House followed suit, supporting action against Saddam 296-133.

Two years before Bush was even elected to the White House, his predecessor told Americans that their purpose should be to “seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq’s WMD program.” President Clinton saw Iraq as a major threat.

Halfway there! Please donate to Mondoweiss today

Dec 19, 2011

Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz

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Every donation of $100 or more will get matched by an anonymous donor and get you a copy of Joe Sacco’s book Footnotes in Gaza. (Image: Joe Sacco)

Dear readers,

Our fundraiser is now finishing its second week and we need your help! We’re halfway to our goal but behind where we hoped to be at this point (see the counter to the right), and this is your chance to help us out and get a tax-deduction to boot.

 

This website doesn’t run on fumes. We need money. It used to be a labor of love. The two of us were willing to sacrifice sanity and health and lavish lifestyles for the sake of a cause–getting Americans to talk about a central foreign policy issue. But the site is nearly six years old and we still keep it fresh seven days a week and none of seeks a lavish lifestyle but we need to make this place more professional. That’s why we have our new A team (Alex, Allison and Annie, all helping out) and why we are trying to keep saner hours and why we are trying to make the posts more substantive than ever. Less impulsive.

 

Unlike this one. We need you to help out. We don’t bring a gray donation curtain over your reading experience. We don’t have popup ads with hard-to-find exit-clickers. We just run fundraisers twice a year to try and raise $40,000.

This is one of em. Please help out with a tax-deductible donation.

 

Thanks,

Phil and Adam

Another 550 Palestinian prisoners released from Israeli jails

Dec 19, 2011

Annie Robbins

 

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A Palestinian prisoner is greeted by a relative after his release at the Rafah border crossing in southern Gaza Strip on Sunday. Photo: Eyad Baba Associated Press

This feels bitter sweet. While it is indeed precious whenever political prisoners are released from captivity, because of the framework of the prisoner exchange negotiations between Hamas and Israel, the second phase of Palestinian prisoners released Sunday night in exchange for Galid Shalit’s October release were Israel’s choice this time around. Unsurprisingly, many of the prisoners released had very little time left to serve, thankfully some were children, and according to Ethan Bronner, all were categorized as light security prisoners.

Israel chose to release the prisoners at night. Jubilant crowds gathered in anticipation and celebrations followed, complete with tear gas, rubber bullets and arrests from Israel’s military forces overseeing the Occupation of Palestine.

Guy Azriel and Enas Muthaffar, CNN

Thousands of Palestinians celebrated the release Sunday night of 550 inmates from Israeli prisons……The revelry in the Mukataa compound in Ramallah — the long-timehome to the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat — ran late into the night. Tayeb Abdel Rahim, general-secretary in Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ office, was among those officials greeting the line of freed prisoners, as they all paid their respects at Arafat’s grave.

……………………

At least 20 Palestinians and one Israeli soldier were injured in the Sunday evening skirmishes at the Beitunia crossing, according to Palestinian and Israeli officials.

Samer Abu Ali, spokesman for the Palestinian medical relief services in Ramallah, told CNN that many of the Palestinians suffered injuries from inhaling tear gas and from rubber bullets fired by the Israeli security forces at the families and friends of the soon-to-be-released prisoners.

Palestinian independent lawmaker and political activist Mustafa Barghouti, who was at the scene of the clashes, told CNN that he had been sprayed with foul-smelling water used to disperse crowds and had been overcome by tear gas.

An Israeli military spokesman said some 400 Palestinians were engaged in an “illegal riot” at the crossing point and were throwing rocks and burning tires. The spokesman said soldiers were using riot control methods to disperse the crowds.

Ethan Bronner, NYT

This second phase involved what the Israelis call light security prisoners. None had been convicted of killing or wounding anyone, and none were members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad.

About half of the prisoners were serving four years or less, and a third of them two years or less, often for offenses like throwing stones or incendiary bombs or possessing weapons. About 10 percent had sentences of 10 years or more, mostly for throwing or planting bombs or attempted murder. Ten percent are younger than 18; three of the prisoners are 14 years old.

………

“This is not a serious part of the exchange,” Issa Qaraqe, the Palestinian minister of detainees for the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, said in a telephone interview. “Many of those being released were due to get out within months anyway, and there are women left behind and prisoners who have been there a long time. If Israel had wanted to make a real good-will gesture, the list would have been totally different.”

…….

In Gaza, a spokesman for Hamas, Salah al-Baradweel, said Israel seemed to be punishing Gaza by freeing so few prisoners from there: 41 of the 550.

Jihan Abdalla and Nidal al-Mughrabi, Reuters

Nearly all of the prisoners passed through a crossing into the West Bank and were greeted by thousands of Palestinians who danced and cheered in the city of Ramallah……..”My feelings of joy are mixed with sorrow because we left behind beloved brothers, we hope all of them will be freed,” said Samer Aweidat, who was released after serving four years of a six-year sentence for weapons possession and being a member of a miltant group.

Israel’s Supreme Court opened the way for Sunday’s release to go ahead by turning down a petition Friday from Israelis opposed to freeing the prisoners, whose terms ranged from a few months to 18 years.

………….

Hani Habib, a political analyst in Gaza, said that Israel, given the opportunity to pick which prisoners would be freed in the second stage, chose inmates from Fatah rather than Hamas.

“Israel was interested in turning the victory that has been achieved into a Palestinian discomfort and a Palestinian division with its discrimination,” he said.

Hamas said it would petition Egypt to pressure Israel into freeing all the Palestinian women in its jails, something it had wanted to happen in Sunday’s release.

Congratulations to Palestine and especially all the reunited families enjoying the presence of loved ones today, especially the children.

A shout out to Israel’s Supreme Court for turning down a petition Friday from Israelis seeking to renege on Israel’s obligation to release the second group of Palestinians prisoners from Israeli jails.

A huge shout out to Hamas for holding strong and brokering this deal. While it isn’t everything we hope for, there are families across Palestine united and fathers and brothers and sisters and mothers in the arms of their long-missed relations because of your determined sumud.

And finally, thank you Egypt and the Arab Spring for your part in making this happen, this was a long time coming.

Israeli university bids (w/ Cornell and $350 million) to set up on Roosevelt Island in NY

Dec 19, 2011

Philip Weiss

Over the weekend it was announced that Stanford had bowed out of a NY city-sponsored competition to build a huge engineering campus on Roosevelt Island, and Cornell, which is still in the running, just upped the ante.

Cornell University said that it has received an anonymous $350 million donation to back up its bid for a proposed engineering campus in New York City.

The city of NY will also kick in $100 million. Good times. Well Cornell wants to build the campus in league with the Technion, Israel’s version of MIT. As I say often, Follow the money.

From the Cornell University Chronicle, on the intimate connections between the schools. Again I wonder about the fundraising aspects of this alliance:

It should not be a surprise that Cornell and The Technion — Israel Institute of Technology have formed a partnership to propose building a new campus in New York City focused on technology, innovation and commercialization. A web of collaborative research and a shared mission have been connecting them for at least two decades.

“They are two institutions that are land-grant to the world,” said Carol Epstein ’61, a member of the Cornell University Council who also sits on the International Board of Governors of the Technion and the National Board of Directors of the American Technion Society…

Cornell faculty are just as likely to teach in Israel. Zygmunt Haas, professor of electrical and computer engineering, has just settled in for two semesters in the electrical engineering department at the Technion, at the invitation of the department chair, teaching a course in his specialty, wireless networks. An administrator at Technion can quickly reel off the names of 15 Technion faculty members, past and present, who have studied or taught at Cornell.

Cornell President David Skorton also has had Technion connections. He and Technion President Peretz Lavie developed a good relationship when Skorton led an American Jewish Committee Project Interchange tour of Israel with other university presidents in the summer of 2010.

As my friend Dennis Loh asks:

Why is US (NYC) courting Israel, a pariah-state, to develop a high-tech state-of-the-art grad school in NYC? The main issue I have is what it implies for the future. Are American students, post-doctoral fellows, and professors going to be working with/for an institution that is fully-partnered with Israel? Given Technion’s position in Israel (discrimination against Israeli Palestinians), it raises some very serious questions regarding NYC’s role in “legitimizing” Technion. Will US-based brains, resources, and hard work to be “automatically” shared with an Israeli institution? For example, an Asian foreign student working hard at such an institution will indirectly be “helping” Israel. There are so many aspects to this proposed collaboration and the questions should be raised NOW (in public) before the final selection is done in January.

UPDATE: Mayor Bloomberg is reported in today’s Times to be going with the Cornell offer. Note that in the piece there is NO mention of the Israeli connection. Huh.

Defense lawyer Lichtman says Palestinians have a ‘culture of death’

Dec 19, 2011

Philip Weiss

Jeffrey Lichtman is a prominent defense lawyer in New York and radio show host on the weekends. His facebook page is filled with thrusts at Islam. “I feel bad for the virgins,” when Israel claims that it has killed militants in Gaza. Or during the celebration of a Shiite holiday earlier this month: “Well, at least the Muslims who are not blowing shit up today are calmly celebrating such an important holiday.”

And this assertion below is on a University of Pennsylvania boycott page.

Screen shot 2011 12 18 at 7 52 30 PM 1
Screen shot 2011 12 18 at 7 52 30 PM 1

Our second Christmas of protests in Adelaide– now kids ask, ‘What is Palestine?’

Dec 19, 2011

Margaret Cassar

adelaide
Adelaide protests

An extraordinary thing has happened since this site published an article I wrote reviewing our Adelaide Seacret protests. These protests promote the BDS movement and criticize the presence of Israeli company Seacret in our premier shopping precinct, Rundle Mall. We have now been protesting for 62 weeks and since the publication of “44 Weeks of protesting and not a word in print” (August 4) nearly every problem mentioned in the piece has changed. I can only conclude that this website is widely read and influential even in places as far flung as Adelaide.

Most obviously a short time after the Mondoweiss article our local newspaper, News Limited’s “The Advertiser” (23 August) produced a handsome, full page article on the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement in Adelaide titled “Boycott boiling point”. For months this newspaper had studiously ignored dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters and their colourful, noisy counter protesters facing off on arguably the most important political issue of the 20th and 21st centuries in the heart of our small city.

Also our paparazzi admirers have all but disappeared. For a while we almost felt like celebrities we had so much attention from covert and overt photographers. We could never see their fascination with our small peaceful protests. There we were – a fairly ordinary bunch of Australians dressed in the same green T-shirts with the same background every week. Yet anywhere between 5 and a dozen photographers and film-makers thought we were worth filming. We have wondered where all the photographers have gone but more importantly why were they there in the first place? And who were ”the friends in Israel” they kept telling us they were sending the photographs to?

In another development, the Christian Zionist counter protesters have found themselves the subjects of counter-counter- protesters, a group of young kids brought together by Facebook and organized by the gay rights group called Equal Love. The Christian Zionists now have this group to contend with plus court cases stemming from their use of loudspeakers to abuse Christians attending the Paradise Christian church, not to mention ongoing actions by the Adelaide City Council to limit their abuse of shoppers in the Mall. As you can see in this You Tube celebrating our first anniversary we have been able to stage our protests with not one Christian Zionist in sight.   This is also partly due to us changing the times of our protest to a Sunday afternoon and also due to fact they have bigger fish to fry. Our Christian street preachers did not achieve a word of media attention while harassing us but are all over Adelaide’s print and television media when confronting any other group.

What hasn’t changed is the commitment of the protesters to continue the protests. We have just held our 62nd protest. Our latest You Tube celebrates our second Christmas season in the Mall. Nearly 30,000 leaflets have been distributed and hundreds of thousands people have seen these protests. We constantly overhear teenagers asking their friends or parents “What is Palestine?” It’s a great question and one that never would have been asked without our presence in the Mall. The conversation about Palestine is continuing and people are looking for information and want to ask questions. And we are only too happy to provide them with the facts and some answers.

Margaret Cassar is Executive Member, Australian Friends of Palestine Association.

What my God chip says about Jerusalem

Dec 19, 2011

Yonah Fredman

Mount of Olives from Jerusalem
Mount of Olives from Jerusalem, photo (c) Ben Adlin

Yonah Fredman has posted here before and comments under the nom-de-blog wondering jew. He lived in Israel for 4 years 8 months and 16 days and has been back in the states for about half a year. After a virtual discussion following Weiss’s post “Contextualizing the Holocaust”, Weiss invited him to comment on the Holocaust and Jewish identity.

I had two grandmothers. Both lost their mothers in World War Two. One grandmother also lost the rest of her family- father, brother, sisters, nephews and nieces. It’s worse to lose your family than to have your limb amputated, even though it’s less obvious to outsiders.

“If you put your tongue to my heart it would poison you,” one survivor said in Claude Lanzman’s “Shoah”.

Zionism is like a booby prize for the Shoah. “My grandmother went to Auschwitz and all I got was this shitty little country.”

I cannot dismiss Jerusalem as insubstantial. Too much time spent contemplating the Mount of Olives from the walls of the Old City for me to act aloof and disinterested. That piece of the planet sends me. But oy, the meshugene murderous politics! What a curse!

“This long time curse hurts

but what’s worse

is this pain in here/ I can’t stay in here

ain’t it clear

that I just don’t fit.

I believe it’s time for us to quit…”

But quitting as an individual cannot be multiplied by five million. My need to breathe freer air is not a prescription for the conflict. I wasn’t born there and face it- it’s not designed for a spoiled old American like me, who’s not spoiling for a fight.

Will I be young enough to spoil for a fight when Hamas and/or Fatah finally advocate one man one vote. I don’t know.

I do know that I love many people who live there and I care what happens to them.

The Torah and the prayerbook, the Tanach, the Midrash and the wise parts of the Talmud should not be tossed on the ash heap. Neither should they be overestimated. I’m not an atheist. To me religion is like art, an integral part of our humanity. Still, some art is not so pleasant to be around.

The litigious Jew pushing his menorah into the public square and pushing the tree out is not my response. The dissident Jew who listens to “Feliz Navidad” with one ear and rebels against the bombardment of the mass media majority rules seasonal onslaught is a better description. It may seem perverse, but the split mind is the stance that fits me. Maybe a nonsocial individual can afford such a split, whereas more social people cannot. I think this just happens to be the halfway point between the way I was raised and some unknown ideal that I will probably never find. If I cannot be myself, at least don’t drag me into the public sphere to act like something I am not. This is the essence of my stance.

No religion is perfect. No belief system is flawless. Mortal vulnerable life plus the brain chip known as the God chip or the awe chip have produced many systems of belief. My rational mind versus my awe chip wrestle, scratch and elbow each other, depending on the day, the week and the season.

I still participate in most of the Jewish holidays and in an occasional Friday night Shabbos/Shabbat/Sabbath meal. On occasion I read Psalms and Isaiah in Hebrew aided by English translation. I feel closer to my nieces and nephews in Israel because I do. And also closer to my grandmother’s family murdered in the forest outside of Brest Litovsk.

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