MONDOWEISS ONLINE NEWSLETTER

New footage of flotilla attack contradicts Israeli account

Posted: 10 Jun 2010

Filmmaker Iara Lee on Democracy Now! this morning. Lee will be holding a press conference at the UN later today to share all her footage.

Ads promoting one democratic state pop up in Ramallah

Posted: 10 Jun 2010

These photos are ads in the West Bank promoting the idea of one democratic state. The big wide one says the two-state-solution is impossible and the one-state-solution inevitable. These ads have been popping up in Ramallah for weeks at different billboard locations. The group behind them is indicated as “al-Takamol: for the one state solution”. I have been trying to see who’s behind it; I asked people but they don’t know; a friend and I hypothesized that it’s the PA’s idea, a way of blackmailing Israel into negotiating the two state solution with a modicum of integrity and speed. Maybe someone can do the detective work?

Weiss: I asked Ali Abunimah, who responds, “I’ve seen these and posted one on my blog but I do not know who is doing it.

Israel’s ’self-defense’ narrative falls apart

Posted: 10 Jun 2010

On May 31, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the actions of IDF soldiers who had conducted the raid on the Mavi Marmara, killing at least nine of its passengers, as “a clear case of self-defense because as our soldiers were inspecting these ships, they were attacked – they were almost lynched. They were attacked with clubs, with knives, perhaps with live gunfire, and they had to defend themselves – they were going to be killed.”

That was before video emerged appearing to show two Israeli soldiers first pummeling with their boots and then shooting one of the victims as he lay at their feet. To stand above an injured man and then finish him off with rounds from an assault rifle can by no ones estimation be described as an act of self-defense.

I have asked the IDF Spokesman’s office for comment on the video and been told that they will get back to me in due course.

An explanation from the IDF is unlikely to be swift because a decision on how to handle this matter is now likely to rise above the military ranks to the highest political level.

The Netanyahu government’s political strategy for grappling with the latest international crisis it has triggered has been rooted from its inception in the outlook that molds the Israeli psyche: whatever happens, Israel is always the victim.

Out of a national unwillingness to rise above this unremitting sense of victimization, Israel’s leaders and its population have rendered themselves incapable of accepting responsibility for their own actions.

Right now, there are at least two Israeli soldiers who could step forward, break their silence and act in the greater interest of the country they have pledged to defend.

But I don’t see that happening. Firstly, this would require an unusual amount of personal courage, but anyone who shoots an injured man who is lying helplessly at his feet seems lacking in courage. And secondly, most individuals who follow military commands do so on the assumption that it’s not for them to determine the national interest. Indeed, the orders these particular soldiers have been instructed to follow almost certainly include that they now maintain their silence.

As soon as it became apparent that some kind of investigation of the massacre would be inevitable, Israel’s minister of defense, Ehud Barak, was quick to say that in any investigation of the massacre, no individual commandos would face questioning. In other words, no one who pulled a trigger would be placed in legal jeopardy by being compelled to explain their own actions. The Israeli government has in effect promised legal immunity for its defense forces, in the hope presumably that the government itself will thereby ensure its own legal and political protection.

Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, however, has said: “Israel must pay the price of the blood it shed and the lives of the martyrs. It will do so. We will pursue this within the framework of law.”

So far, the United States, under President Obama’s morally drifting leadership, has maintained its traditional role in acting like Israel’s lawyer. But even the best defense lawyer realizes when the evidence against their client makes a “not guilty” plea untenable. Moreover, every lawyer knows that they can only go so far in loyally defending their client. Past a certain point, a loyal attorney becomes a criminal accomplice.

It’s time for Washington to tell Tel Aviv that it needs to get ready to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the Mavi Marmara massacre. Israel cannot escape facing legal scrutiny from an international investigation.

(This is cross-posted at Woodward’s site, War in Context.)

Christian Zionists pipe new hasbara line (glass houses)

Posted: 10 Jun 2010

I saw this over at Foreign Policy. David Brog of CUFI argues that Americans have no right to criticize Israel because of Fallujah operation in Iraq. Glass houses, etc. I suspect we’ll hear more of this. My two reactions: first, the thing was probably ghost written, because no CUFI member could write an op-ed by himself. (Too cynical perhaps?) Second, I don’t think we would have ended up in Iraq without Israel, the lobby, etc–the Iraq war dovetailed with the effort to convince Americans our struggles were one and the same.

I wonder if this bit of hasbara will take root. I really don’t want to argue that American troops behave better than Israelis– because I’m not sure they do.

Israel said to consider stiff penalties for those supporting BDS

Posted: 10 Jun 2010

The following note is from a friend:

Here’s the crazy news: a new law proposal was submitted yesterday by both “left” (Kadima) and right wing parties, about the boycott against Israel. The law suggest that people who support the boycott would be fined something like $7000. Also, if a supporter of the boycott is not an Israeli citizen or not a resident, he or she cannot enter Israel for 10 years. There is more to it, you can find a short description at Ynet. Unfortunately, I didn’t find any article about it in English yet, but maybe Google translate could be helpful. Must say, I was left speechless by the news.

Editors note: The JVP blog The Only Democracy? has much more on the story here.

Abbas seems to know, one-state solution is coming

Posted: 10 Jun 2010

Jared Malsin of Palestine Note interviewed Abbas’ spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudaina, in Washington yesterday. He asked if Abbas thinks about abandoning negotiations and embracing a new paradigm and this is what he said:

“That’s what we are warning the Israelis and the Americans, that there is a golden opportunity right now, that peace can be achieved, otherwise there are a lot of scenarios, [such as] a one state solution, like South Africa,” Presidential spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina said in an interview on Wednesday.

“Maybe one day this leadership will vanish,” he added. “Nobody knows what the coming generations will decide to do.”

Steven Cook of CFR works overtime to make sure US shares Israel’s new enmity to Turkey

Posted: 10 Jun 2010

I am really bothered by Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations. Check out his page 1 soundbite in the Times yesterday (piece on US-Turkey relations by Tavernise/Slackman). There he confused and conflated Israel’s critique of Turkey with the US.

Turkey is seen increasingly in Washington as “running around the region doing things that are at cross-purposes to what the big powers in the region want,” said Steven A. Cook, a scholar with the Council on Foreign Relations. The question being asked, he said, is “How do we keep the Turks in their lane?”

He called Turkey a frenemey but has no thoughts on why he implicitly considers the pathological actions of Israel to make it a friend. He is a neocon lite, focused on Israel’s interests and conflating them and confusing them with the US.

The article argues that Turkey is a thorn in the side of US policy–unlike Israel. And look here at Foreign Policy; he deliberately misrepresents the Turkish position: 

For the first time in its history, Ankara has chosen sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, demanding that Israel take steps to ease the blockade of Gaza or risk unspecified “consequences.” Well before the recent crisis, the Turks had positioned themselves as thinly veiled advocates for Hamas, which has long been on the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. In public statements, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has compared Turkey’s Islamists and Hamas. Implicit in these declarations is the parallel to his own Justice and Development Party, whose predecessors were repeatedly banned from politics.

The first sentence needs to be parsed and then Cook concludes that the Turks asking for the siege to be eased are supporting a terrorist organization. This is the rhetoric of Netanyahu, which Cook accepts. Does that imply Obama’s recent explicit critique of the siege/blockade makes him a terrorist sympathizer? Cook and his friends at the Council on Foreign Relations conflate Israel with the US and then work to ensure that the Israeli position is adopted and that US foreign policy then is no different than arguably the Israeli frenemey.

Weiss adds: To understand how pro-Israel and stale Cook’s ideas are, consider Stephen Kinzer’s ideas. A former New York Times journalist, who was on NPR yesterday, Kinzer is thinking way outside the box on Turkey, Iran, Israel. A blurb on Kinzer’s new book: “An original, unsettling critique of America’s many blunders in the Middle East. In Iran, a statue honors Howard Baskerville, and streets and schools bear his name. A young American teacher, he died in 1909 leading volunteers in defense of this nation’s fledgling democracy. After delivering this surprising bit of history, journalist Kinzer states bluntly that Iran, along with Turkey, the only Islamic nations in the area with vibrant democratic traditions, should be America’s closest allies, replacing Israel and Saudi Arabia…. An imaginative solution to the Middle-East stalemate.” -Kirkus Reviews

The wait-and-see president

Posted: 10 Jun 2010

Ahmed Moor has a piece on Obama’s post-Cairo folding at EI. Money:

We now know enough about the president’s behavioral patterns to begin to weave a coherent narrative. The Wall Street fiasco, the BP oil spill, the approach to Palestine/Israel, Jeremiah Wright, Charles Freeman, the Afghanistan escalation, the Pakistan drone war, and a host of other cases demonstrate Obama’s “leadership” style. The three steps we’ve seen repeatedly are: wait and see; spin favorably; and act minimally to avoid doing anything that might stick come elections.
Our new understanding can help us calibrate our strategic focus. Basically, Barack Obama’s only passionate cause is his own reelection, not human rights or the rule of law or the environment. The silver lining in all of this is that by linking our votes to human rights or the rule of law, we can influence the president.

An American boat?

Posted: 10 Jun 2010

It’s not too often I come out of a talk about the blockade of Gaza or the situation in Palestine feeling optimistic and hopeful.

But those are exactly the emotions I felt after seeing retired U.S. Army Colonel Ann Wright and Adam Shapiro of the Free Gaza Movement speak about the flotilla that tried to break the blockade of Gaza.

The All Soul’s Unitarian Church on the Upper East Side was packed with between 200 and 300 people for the event, and there weren’t enough chairs for everyone to sit—a sign of the times.

Wright spoke about her experience being on the Challenger 1 boat that was part of the flotilla and about being taken to a prison in the Israeli city of Beersheba.

Shapiro spoke about the next steps being taken by the Free Gaza movement, and about keeping up the momentum in the larger solidarity movement. Shapiro’s message was that “the tide is turning” against Israeli policy, and that we must keep up the pressure, especially on the American government.

At the end of the talk, there was a lot of excited discussion about bringing an American ship with U.S. citizens to Gaza to break the blockade. Laurie Arbeiter, a local activist, suggested naming the boats “The Audacity of Hope” and “Dreams From My (Palestinian) Father,” after the two books that President Obama has written.

For your listening pleasure, I’ve uploaded Ann Wright and Adam Shapiro’s talk as rough, unedited audio files on Zshare.net.

Click here to download Ann Wright’s talk, and go here to hear Adam Shapiro’s.
 

The moral failure of American liberals: A defence of Helen Thomas

Posted: 10 Jun 2010

The ostracism of Helen Thomas, the doyenne of the White House press corps, over her comment that Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and “go home” to Poland, Germany, America and elsewhere is revealing in several ways. In spite of an apology, the 89-year-old has been summarily retired by the Hearst newspaper group, dropped by her agent, spurned by the White House, and denounced by long-time friends and colleagues.

Ms Thomas earnt a reputation as a combative journalist, at least by American standards, with a succession of administrations over their Middle East policies, culminating in Bush officials boycotting her for her relentless criticisms of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. But the reaction to her latest remarks suggest that, if there is one topic in American public life on which the boundaries of what can and cannot be said are still tightly policed, it is Israel.

Undoubtedly, Ms Thomas’ opinions, as she expressed them in an unguarded moment, were inappropriate and required an apology. It is true, as she says, that Palestine was occupied and the land taken from the Palestinians by Jewish immigrants with no right to it barring a Biblical title deed. But 62 years on from Israel’s creation, most Jewish citizens have no home to go to in Poland and Germany – or in Iraq and Yemen, for that matter. There is also an uncomfortable echo in her words of the chauvinism underpinning demands from some Jews – and many Israelis – that Palestinians should “go home to the 22 Arab states”.

But Ms Thomas did apologise and, after that, a line ought to have been drawn under the affair – as it surely would have been had she made any other kind of faux pas. Instead, she has been denounced as an anti-Semite, even by her former friends.

The reasoning of one, Lanny Davis, counsel to the White House in the Clinton administration, was typical. Mr Davis, who said he previously considered himself “a close friend”, asked whether anyone would be “protective of Helen’s privileges and honors if she had been asking Blacks to return to Africa, or Native Americans to Asia and South America, from which they came 8,000 or more years ago?”

It is that widely accepted analogy, appropriating the black and Native American experience in a wholly misguided way, that reveals in stark fashion the moral failure of American liberals. In their blindness to the current relations of power in the US, most critics of Ms Thomas contribute to the very intolerance they claim to be challenging.

Ms Thomas is an Arab-American, of Lebanese descent, whose remarks were publicised in the immediate wake of Israel’s lethal commando attack on a flotilla of aid ships trying to break the siege of Gaza. Unlike most Americans, who were half-wakened from their six-decade Middle East slumber by the killing of at least nine Turkish activists, Ms Thomas has been troubled by the Palestinians’ plight for much of her long lifetime.

She was in her late twenties when Israel ethnically cleansed three-quarters of a million Palestinians from most of Palestine, a move endorsed by the fledgling United Nations. She was in her mid-forties when Israel took over the rest of Palestine and parts of Egypt and Syria in a war that dealt a crushing blow to Arab identity and pride and made Israel a favoured ally of the US. In her later years she has witnessed Israel’s repeated destruction of Lebanon, her parents’ homeland, and the slow confinement and erasure of the neighbouring Palestinian people. Both have occurred under a duplicitious American “peace process” while Washington has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into Israel’s coffers.

It is therefore entirely understandable if, despite her own personal success, she feels a simmering anger not only at what has taken place throughout her lifetime in the Middle East but also at the silencing of all debate about it in the US by the Washington elites she counted as friends and colleagues.

While she has many long-standing Jewish friends in Washington – making the anti-Semite charge implausible – she has also seen them and others promote injustice in the Middle East. Doubtless she, like many of us, has been exasperated at the toothless performance of the press corps she belongs to in holding the White House to account in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon and Israel-Palestine.

It is with this context in mind that we can draw a more fitting analogy. We should ask instead: How harshly should Ms Thomas be judged were she a black professional who, seeing yet another injustice like the video of Rodney King being beaten to within an inch of his life by white policemen, had said white Americans ought to “go home to Europe”?

This analogy accords more closely with the reality of power relations in the US between Arabs and Jews. Ms Thomas is not a representative of the oppressor white man disrespecting the oppressed black man, as Mr Davis suggests; she is the oppressed black man hitting back at the oppressor. Her comments shocked not least because they denied an image that continues to dominate in modern America of the vulnerable Jew, a myth that persists even as Jews have become the most successful minority in the country.

Ms Thomas let her guard down and her anger and resentment show. She generalised unfairly. She sounded bitter. She needed to – and has – apologised. But she does not deserve to be pilloried and blacklisted.