NOVANEWS
- The settlers’ one-state argument, or ploy
- Liberal Zionists excommunicate anti-Zionists
- Today in Palestine: Groundbreaking for 600 settlers’ homes!
- Rabbi who went after Helen Thomas has supported ethnic cleansing
- Michael Wolff cant resist trivia
- Update from Oakland: Victory!
- A year after Cairo, global poll on Obama’s Israel/Palestine policy is highly disapproving
- a tale of 3 headlines
- Turkish officials blow AIPAC claims out of the, uh, sea
- Daybreak outpouring of Bay Area picketers stops unloading of Israeli ship
The settlers’ one-state argument, or ployPosted: 21 Jun 2010Apart from the small point that all Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories are illegal according to international law and every single settler living there is ipso facto a law breaker–something the author conveniently omits to mention–this piece by Hagai Segal at Ynet is actually a round-about argument for a one-state solution:
I somehow doubt, however, that Segal really wants to see equal treatment for all human beings, even Muslim and Christian human beings, in the West Bank. What we have here is an increasingly common, cynical ploy by settler advocates to mobilize and deploy the language of universal human rights and egalitarianism in order to advance a Jewish nationalist agenda. It is an inversion of the rhetoric used to speak out on behalf of Palestinian rights and humanity. Playing with the language of equal rights is a dangerous thing. If Hagai Segal doesn’t watch out, his kind of talk might erase the Green Line and advance the struggle for equal rights throughout historic Palestine. |
Liberal Zionists excommunicate anti-ZionistsPosted: 21 Jun 2010It is interesting that when push comes to shove, liberal Zionists will side with rightwingers (Jeremy Ben-Ami will fall into the arms of Jeffrey Goldberg) rather than break bread with non-Zionists and anti-Zionists and Palestinian solidarity types and realists. In the end, their concern for the Israeli state and its continuance trumps their concern for justice. The dynamic is illustrated here in a piece by Israeli Assaf Sagiv where he places leftwingers, anarchists, anti-Zionists outside of Israeli society, the other side of a “chasm.” It is a form of excommunication. And thus, there is no chasm between Sagiv’s imagined left and Avigdor Lieberman. In the end the concern for the Jewish collective trumps the universalist impulse that drives, say, Emily Henochowicz, the young idealistic Jews, who do not see the Jewish state as a necessary response to anti-Semitism.This is an unfortunate dynamic. I hope it breaks down. And I think it will, but when? J Street will inevitably endorse Divestment from the occupied territories and have an art exhibit by Emily Henochowicz and try and work with Steve Walt and other realists, even Palestinian solidarity types. But it seems like a long ways off. |
Today in Palestine: Groundbreaking for 600 settlers’ homes!Posted: 21 Jun 2010Land theft and destruction/Ethnic cleansing22 Palestinian homes to be razed in East Jerusalem
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Rabbi who went after Helen Thomas has supported ethnic cleansingPosted: 21 Jun 2010Sorry I can’t use this contributor’s name but he/she makes some good points, to the rabbi who exposed Helen Thomas.Dear Rabbi Nesenoff,Helen Thomas has been rightfully criticized for her comments to you. Yet you are on record at your website supporting the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians without a word of criticism from any journalist I’ve read. You wrote:
You seem to think this argumentation is acceptable for some people, but insufficient to convince a wider audience and yet in making a broader case you compound the problem: “In the final analysis, the Arabs of Palestine ended up with nearly 85% of the original territory of that area, and it’s called Jordan, or in reality, their ARAB Palestinian state!”So you’re on record regarding Jordan being the Palestinian state. This is very similar to the language used by Helen Thomas, but when it comes to Palestinians losing homes and land no (or few) journalists stand up for them and do the research into your own viewpoints. Since there are still millions of Palestinians living between the river and the sea, what rights do you see them as having? Should they be “transferred” to Jordan as some in the Knesset propose and as the ZOA seems to support? Should they have their own independent state comprising the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip? Or should they have full equal rights with Israel’s Jewish citizens — one person, one vote — in one state? (According to the human rights organization Adalah there are over 30 laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel so it isn’t reality-based to say there are equal rights now for Palestinian citizens of Israel. And clearly Palestinians in the territories have even fewer rights with the dual standard of law that exists there — one for Jewish settlers and one for Palestinians.)Please elaborate your position, and do you repudiate your previous position of support for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians or do you think Israel should extend from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, including the West Bank and East Jerusalem, with no Palestinians present?Do Palestinians expelled from Ashkelon (as late as 1950), where you studied for a year at age 14 according to your website, have a right of return to Ashkelon (what they called Al-Majdal)? If not, why not?Finally, you write, “The truth is that 70% of the Arabs who left in 1948 – perhaps 300,000 to 400,000 of them – never saw an Israeli soldier! They did not flee because they feared Jewish soldiers or Jewish thugs….” Do you deny the massacres of Palestinians that took place in some Palestinian villages, most infamously in Deir Yassin in April 1948 before the establishment of the state of Israel and the entry into war by several Arab states?I would appreciate answers to all of these questions as I am deeply troubled by the views you have spelled out. Helen Thomas has apologized. Will you apologize for the viewpoints you have spelled out on your website? |
Michael Wolff cant resist triviaPosted: 21 Jun 2010Michael Wolff is a provocateur and got me to read what he has to say about Tony Judt, with his teaser, Did Judt make it up? But it’s a foolish trivial point, something about a piece Judt wrote with his son. I don’t care if he scripted his son. I feel a little played, when Israel and Palestine are in the lead paragraphs. Michael, you’re a smart mother, take on the substance here; deal with the crisis of Israel, which a lot of your friends support and you may actually possess the cold wicked distance to judge. It’s in crisis, there could be great bloodshed. Leave the trivia alone. Tell us where Jeffrey Epstein, your old pal, is on Israel. Tell us where Matthew Freud is on Israel. You know money.Tell us about the Jewish establishment and whether they grok jack about Zion. |
Update from Oakland: Victory!Posted: 21 Jun 2010Quick follow-up on today’s action at the Oakland docks: we won! Something like 400 or 500 people – many who had also been there at 5:30 in the morning, plus others who hadn’t made the first shift – turned up to resume the picket line at 4 p.m. I was surprised there weren’t more: I had assumed there would be far more people in the afternoon, with the BART running, but I guess even in the Internet age it’s hard to get people out with only a a couple of hours notice.Still, there were more than enough people to re-create strong picket lines at all three gates to the berth where the Israeli ship was coming in. Faced with the prospect of workers again refusing to cross the picket line and the arbitrator again ruling in their favor, the company that runs the dock (SSA, or Stevedoring Services of America, which has also run the port of Basra, Iraq, since the American invasion in 2003) elected to cancel the evening shift. The ship docked while we picketed, and presumably it will be unloaded tomorrow – right now we don’t have the strength to keep up the picket line indefinitely, and even if we did, we can’t really ask the longshore workers to stay off the job forever. But we succeeded in delaying it for a full day, which was exactly what we’d hoped to achieve.And while none of the local TV stations made it to the 5:30 a.m. picket – despite an extensive media outreach effort – they were there in droves this afternoon. The couple of segments I caught tonight weren’t too bad, even though they gave disproportionate time to the two Zionist counter-protestors who camped out, waving Israeli flags, across the street from the afternoon picket. As of 11:00 p.m. PDT on Sunday, Google News finds 284 stories about the action, and my sampling suggests that most of them – such as this story from the Bay Area News Group, which includes the Oakland Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News, and most of the other community papers in the region – are fair if not actually sympathetic.One final observation: the Oakland police were out in force from before dawn until our closing rally at 7 p.m., but aside from bugging us to stay out of the almost completely deserted roadway in front of the pier, they made no effort to interfere with the picketing, even when we blocked the two or three cars that tried to cross the line. In fact, they weren’t even dressed in riot gear, and some of them went out of their way to be polite. Quite a change from their behavior at the same location in April 2003, when we called a similar early-morning community-labor picket to protest a ship being loaded with supplies for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the cops responded by blasting us, without the slightest provocation, with an array of “sub-lethal” toys they had recently received from the Department of Homeland Security, including “flash-bang” grenades and guns firing wooden dowels and bean-bag rounds.I’ll never forget either that action or today’s, but this one was a lot more satisfying! |
A year after Cairo, global poll on Obama’s Israel/Palestine policy is highly disapprovingPosted: 20 Jun 2010At a time when Obama gets pretty good grades from people around the world for his statesmanship (64 percent approval overall), Jim Lobe reports that the same Pew poll shows that people in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon disapprove of Obama’s handling of the Israel/Palestine conflict by figures of 84 percent, 88 percent and 90 percent respectively. Can you do any worse? Numbers are almost as high for his Iraq steering. And interestingly, Americans disapprove of Obama’s handling of I/P by 41 to 39 percent. Hmmmm.Note that the approval #s generally in Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon were much higher a year ago; also that Obama is faulted worldwide on his handling of Israel/Palestine by 48 percent disapproval to 31 percent approval, the largest gap in any of his numbers. |
a tale of 3 headlinesPosted: 20 Jun 2010let some ketchup into Gaza…
steal some more Palestinian land…
…Amreeka, happy!
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Turkish officials blow AIPAC claims out of the, uh, seaPosted: 20 Jun 2010This is a crosspost from Cobban’s site, Just World NewsSeveral strongly pro-Israeli members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives have stepped up their campaigns against NATO ally Turkey over the past week, in a campaign that has been quietly orchestrated by the big pro-Israel organization AIPAC. (See, for example, the ‘Related Materials’ linked to on this page of the AIPAC website.)First prize for anti-Turkish rabble-rousing has to go to Rep. Shelley Berkley (D- Nevada), who told a press conference convened Tuesday to discuss the recent flotilla murders incident that “Turkey is responsible for the nine deaths aboard that ship. It is not Israel that’s responsible.”The Jerusalem Post reported that Berkley also “pointed to Turkish funding and support for the expedition.”The always-excellent M.J. Rosenberg has more details about the anti-Turkey campaign here. He also notes that, “The bash-Turkey movement did not start with the flotilla incident. It began when Turkey spoke out against Israel’s bloody invasion of Gaza in 2009.Luckily, however, Turkey’s currently-ruling AKP (Justice and development Party) sent a high-powered delegation over to Washington for most of the past week, where they worked hard to get Turkey’s side of the story heard. Some details about their meetings are here. The Middle East Institute conference that I live-blogged Friday morning (here and the next four posts) was just one of the team’s engagements.During the morning, as reported in those live-blog posts, conference participants heard from Adana deputy Ömer Çelik, the AK Party’s chairperson for external affairs, İbrahim Kalın, the chief foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Turkey’s ambassador in Washington, Namik Tan. The three men went to great lengths to refute some of the most damaging accusations that AIPAC and others have launched against the Turkish government, and to explain its position.As they all noted, the current disagreements are not only over the flotilla murders incident, but also over Turkey’s role, along with Brazil’s President Lula Da Silva, in brokering the May 17 enriched uranium exchange agreement with Iran, and in voting against the latest round of sanctions that the Security Council imposed on Iran.Here are some of the crucial points the three men made– both in the open session of the conference and in a smaller press gaggle held in conjunction with it:1. The men strongly denied that the Turkish government had played any role in organizing the aid flotilla. Kalin told the press gaggle: “We advised them not to go but this was an international NGO initiative and we couldn’t prevent them.”2. Like many of the other governments from whose ports boats sailed to join the aid flotilla, the Turkish government gave a thorough pre-sailing inspection to the passengers and freight on the Mavi Marmara and the other two boats that sailed from Turkish ports, to ascertain that no weapons were on board and to register the names of passengers.3. In an additional attempt to forestall violence, the Turkish government also coordinated directly with the governments of the U.S. and Israel while the boats were preparing to sail. In the press gaggle, Kalin said, “We discussed it with the U.S. and the Israelis. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak was on phone with our foreign minister many times before sailing and we understood they would act very differently from way they did act with the boat.”Celik said of the Mavi Marmara.It had been thoroughly checked before it sailed. If Israel had concerns about the ship it could have informed Turkey and Turkey would have taken necessary measures.Before the ship sailed Israel didn’t say anything. The Israeli forces could have disabled the steering and towed the ship to Israel.4. On allegations that the Turkish government favors Hamas over the (western-supported) Fateh Party and its leader Mahmoud Abbas, Celik told the press gaggle:I’m not here to defend Hamas but all the parties do need to be at the table. We have excellent relations with all parties inside Palestine. [Hamas head] Khaled Meshaal has visited Turkey only once, right after the 2006 elections, which Hamas won, while Mahmoud Abbas has been to Ankara God knows how many times including very recently and stretching back to the time that he and Israeli President Shimon Peres visited Ankara together in the lead-up to the Annapolis Peace conference and they addressed our parliament together.The reason we insist Hamas needs to be at table is we don’t want anyone pushed out of the table when they represent half of the Pal people.He also said that Turkey has used its relationship with Hamas to continue pushing Hamas towards support for the two-state solution. “It took the Hamas people a long time to come to the idea of the two-state solution, but they did,” he said. He cited Meshaal’s recentinterview with Charlie Roseas evidence for this.5. On claims that Turkey’s current policies are motivated by anti-semitism or anti-Israeli feelings, Celik said,We always want to have good relations with the American Jewish community. But if the Jewish community wants to change our behavior on issues of importance to us we can’t accept that. We have a long history of good relations. We invited all the Jewish community representatives here in DC to come and meet with us. Some came and some didn’t come. Those who didn’t come made a mistake... Remember that we gave our support to Israel’s OECD membership. Turkey is Israel’s only true friend in region.Friends do not threaten each other. If they threaten each other, then they’re not friends.Israel’s friends should ask “What is the cost to Israel to lose Turkey’s friendship?”6. At points throughout the conference, the three men noted that not only isTurkey a longstanding member of NATO, and its only majority-Muslim member, but also that it currently has troops deployed alongside American troops in Afghanistan and in the waters off Somalia. I can note (which the three Turkish speakers graciously did not) that Israel is not a NATO ally, and has no troops risking their lives in risky, US-led NATO deployments anywhere in the world.7. One last note came in the panel discussion that I missed a lot of, due to the press gaggle. There was a question near the end that I did hear, as to whether Turkey is now seeing an intensification of the years-long struggle between its secularizers and its Islamists (of whom, the AKP are a politically moderate but very politically successful part)– with the suggestion that the current uproar among Turkey’s 74 million people over the flotilla murders is somehow being manipulated by the AKP and other Islamists.The answer was given by Cengiz Candar, a very pro-American Turkish journo whom I’ve known a bit for decades, who is also extremely secularist in his views. His answer was, basically, that the “secular-Islamist struggle story” inside Turkey is old news, and no longer particularly intense; and that Turkish people’s feelings about the flotilla murders have nothing to do with that divide. That was interesting. It reminded me of some conversations Bill and I had when we were in Turkey last summer, when several people who are strongly associated with the secularizing stream in Turkish society said they thought the AKP was doing a generally excellent job in governing the country– including on issues of minority rights for ethnic and religious minorities, women’s rights, and so on.… Bottom line: Turkey, which is an important and “emerging” power in the Middle East in its own right, as well as a crucial U.S. ally, looks as though it is not about to back down in the face of attacks and intimidation from the rabidly nationalist Netanyahu-Barak government in Israel or their politically powerful backers in the U.S. political system.What I also heard from the Turkish leaders and representatives who spoke at the conference, though, was that they were eager to overcome the current, sharp disagreement with Israel; that they recognized that, given the strong emotions aroused among the peoples of both Turkey and Israel by the flotilla raids, it would be hard for the Erdogan government and the Netanyahu government to overcome this agreement on their own– and that therefore they strongly wanted help from the U.S. administration in mediating and de-escalating this conflict.The three men repeatedly made the case that (presumably in comparison with what some political forces inside Turkey are urging them to do) the demands they are making of Israel with respect to the flotilla are modest. “Israel must apologize for those killings, and accept the international inquiry as called for by the U.N. Secretary General,” said Amb. Tan.Of course, in any kind of a similar case of a civilian vessel being attacked by the military forces of another state while on the high seas, many much weightier demands could also be made.We could also note that one of those killed in the Israeli raid was a Turkish-U.S. dual national, Furkan Dogan. Ibrahim Kalin confirmed at the conference that the Turkish autopsy found that Dogan received four bullet wounds in his head and one in his chest. “This was not shooting in self defense, this was unjustified killing,” he said.Thus far, however, the U.S. government has done nothing to try to bring Dogan’s killer to any form of account. (Are some U.S. citizens more equal than others, I wonder? Especially, if some of them happen to be Muslims?) And at a broader level, there are no signs at all that the Obama administration is prepared to do anything at all to help Turkey’s anguished government and people win the apology from Israel and the “credible, international inquiry” that they say they so urgently need.Last Sunday, as we recall, the Obama administration came out with strong support for the (navel-gazing) Israeli-dominated whitewash body constituted by the Israeli government.No word of any U.S. support for Turkey’s request for an Israeli apology for the killing of nine of its citizens and the wounding of many more.I am ashamed of my government. |
Daybreak outpouring of Bay Area picketers stops unloading of Israeli shipPosted: 20 Jun 2010If anyone had any doubts that the movement for justice in Palestine is growing by leaps and bounds, in numbers, breadth, and determination, check out what happened this morning in Oakland, CA:• somewhere between 700 and 1,000 demonstrators from all over the San Francisco Bay Area made their way at 5:30 on a Sunday morning deep into the Port of Oakland to stage a spirited community-labor picket line in front of a berth where an Israeli freighter, the Zim Shenzhen, was due to dock;• dock workers from Local 10 of the International Longshore & Warehouse Union refused to cross the picket line;• under the terms of the ILWU contract, an arbitrator was summoned to the site, he upheld the legality of the dock workers’ refusal to cross the line, and the company was compelled to cancel the shift and send the workers home.Waving Palestinian and Turkish flags and chanting “Free, free Palestine – don’t cross the picket line” and “An injury to one is an injury to all – the Israeli apartheid wall will fall,” the demonstrators blocked three gates to the berth for more than four hours. The turnout was all the more impressive because the BART, the Bay Area subway system, doesn’t even start running until around 8 a.m. on Sunday, and even after people got to the assembly point in West Oakland, we had to walk more than a mile to get to the berth.The event was organized by an ad hoc coalition of dozens of community and labor organizations. The main leadership came from Palestinian-Americans and other Arab Americans, with the Bay Area branch of ANSWER also playing a key role. The idea arose in response to a call issued in the wake of Israel’s attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla by the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions, which asked workers around the world to stop unloading ships carrying Israeli goods.For veteran Bay Area activists, today’s victory echoed a historic milestone in 1984, when ILWU workers in San Francisco refused to unload a ship called the Nedlloyd Kimberley, because its cargo came from South Africa. Just 10 years later, Nelson Mandela was elected president, and apartheid – in its South African form – was dead.With today’s day shift cancelled, most of the picketers have now gone home to get caffeine, food, and rest, but we’re not done yet: we’re going back to the site at 4 o’clock this afternoon to put up another picket line, in hopes that the ILWU workers will again refuse to cross the line and unload the ship. If you’re in the Bay Area, be there or be square – it’s your chance to make history. Just head for the West Oakland BART at 4 to march or get a ride to Berth 58. There’s more information here. |
