NOVANEWS
- Did the State Dept cave to pressure in denying flotilla activist entry to U.S.?
- Not just Barak and Olmert– Ben Gurion predicted apartheid 40 years ago
- Helen Thomas (and the long, anticolonial walk to freedom)
- Gack!
- Sometimes Americans deserve to win
- Guardian piece: obsession with Israel has rational basis, but is dangerous
- ‘Fresh Air’ gets Gaza’s history wrong
- Ghetto Israel
- ‘Haaretz’ runs piece saying only boycott will move Israe
- Did the State Dept cave to pressure in denying flotilla activist entry to U.S.?
- Not just Barak and Olmert– Ben Gurion predicted apartheid 40 years ago
- Helen Thomas (and the long, anticolonial walk to freedom)
- Gack!
- Sometimes Americans deserve to win
- Guardian piece: obsession with Israel has rational basis, but is dangerous
- ‘Fresh Air’ gets Gaza’s history wrong
- Ghetto Israel
- ‘Haaretz’ runs piece saying only boycott will move Israe
Did the State Dept cave to pressure in denying flotilla activist entry to U.S.? Posted: 23 Jun 2010
When a near-capacity crowd of New Yorkers sat down in their seats to hear testimonials on June 18 from survivors of Israel’s attack on an aid flotilla trying to break the blockade of Gaza, they expected to hear from three different activists. Instead, they only heard from two at the House of the Lord Church in Brooklyn.
Days after a June 14 press conference, called by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York (JCRC-NY), that demanded a State Department investigation into the visa applications of two of the three speakers, a former Turkish politician named Ahmet Faruk Unsal was not allowed into the United States. The denial of entry to the politician who is also an activist with IHH, the humanitarian organization that was a main force behind the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, raises the question of whether the State Dept. caved to pressure from the JCRC-NY, an umbrella group of local Jewish organizations, and New York politicians who backed the JCRC’s call. The press conference was attended by City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Representatives Jerry Nadler, Anthony Weiner, Carolyn Mahoney, Charles Rangel and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer. JCRC-NY gathered thousands of signatures on a petition that was delivered to the State Dept. The petition detailed the group’s allegations that IHH was linked to “terrorist” organizations. JCRC-NY counts some influential Zionist groups as members of their organization, including the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League and B’nai B’rith. “It is the responsibility of our government to ensure that terrorists, and those who support terrorist activities, not be allowed to enter the United States,” said Nadler, who is known for his ardent support for Israel, at the press conference. However, others have cast doubt on the accuracy of linking IHH to “terror” groups. IHH has worked recently in New Orleans and in Haiti at a time when the United States military took a leading role in directing relief efforts there. No government in the world considers IHH a “terrorist” organization other than Israel. Furthermore, according to Andy Pollack, an activist with Al-Awda NY: The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, the group that organized the Brooklyn event, Unsal’s visa was valid until 2011, and had been used to travel in the U.S. two times before he was denied. “But now all of a sudden he was told it was only a transient visa and no longer valid for US travel,” wrote Pollack in an email. Marsha B. Cohen, an expert on the Middle East and a contributor to Inter Press Service’s Lobelog, detailed in an article on Mondoweiss how the evidence linking IHH to “terrorism” was dubious at best. And an “think tank with ties to Israel’s Defense Ministry, the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center,” reports the Washington Post, has stated that there is “‘no known evidence of current links between IHH and ‘global jihad elements.’” A State Dept. spokesperson reached by phone said she didn’t have any details on Unsal, and that decisions regarding individual visas are confidential. Unsal, a former MP with the ruling Justice and Development Party in Turkey, was aboard the Mavi Marmara when the Israeli Navy raided the ship in international waters and opened fired on activists, killing 9 and injuring dozens. He was scheduled to speak along with filmmaker and activist Iara Lee, whose video of the attack aboard the Turkish ship was seen around the world, and Viva Palestina activist Kevin Ovenden. ”The JCRC was gratified to learn that IHH activist and former Turkish MP Ahmet Faruk Unsal was denied entry when he attempted to enter the United States,” Michael S. Miller, the CEO of JCRC-NY, said in a statement. “We have been advocating for an investigation of IHH and its members for their ties to terrorism and terror organizations and we hope that this level of scrutiny continues.” You can decide for yourself: was the State Dept. cowed into not allowing Unsal to share his story? This article originally appeared at the Indypendent, a free, NYC-based newspaper. |
Not just Barak and Olmert– Ben Gurion predicted apartheid 40 years ago Posted: 23 Jun 2010
It is a well-known fact that two former Prime Ministers of Israel, Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, have in recent years warned that Israel will become an apartheid state if it does not divest itself of the Palestinian territories that it occupies. The two men are cited all the time by American commentators who are not allowed to make this judgment themselves, let alone offer the observation that this is not just a prediction, Israel is practicing apartheid now in the West Bank, with separate roadways etc.
Well, now I learn that another former P.M. also made the same prediction. Hirsh Goodman’s toughminded memoir, Let Me Create a Paradise, God Said to Himself, has a lot about Goodman’s service in several Israeli wars. During the ’67 War, Goodman got back from his Sinai to his kibbutz in time to find his girlfriend in bed with a friend. Then:
Goodman himself grew up in Apartheid South Africa, which he left for Israel. He doesn’t make the complete shift required here, toward understanding of what Israel has become. But he shows us that several former Prime Ministers now have understood the issue. |
Helen Thomas (and the long, anticolonial walk to freedom) Posted: 23 Jun 2010
Someone recently asked me whether I thought Helen Thomas was guilty of anything. My reactions were mixed.
Emotionally, I have to admit that there was something very gratifying about what she said, however flip it was. The fourteen year old boy inside of me loved it. Anyone who is an Arab or a Muslim who is honest will tell you that they had the same reaction. They probably emailed an article about it to a friend, approvingly, though they might deny having done so if asked. And it’s not just Arabs and Muslims who had a moment of private exhilaration at Helen Thomas’s words. Anybody who has ever stopped reading something by Marty Peretz or Charles Krauthammer or Barry Rubin or any number of other writers and analysts mid-paragraph, in quiet revulsion at their undiluted bigotry, or anyone who has been incredulous and felt powerless and angry when one elected official or pundit after another insouciantly talks about sending the Palestinians packing out of the West Bank, or expelling them from Israel, or anyone who has listened to some figure in a position of authority speak with exquisite ignorance, confidence, condescension and derision about Palestinian history and Arab culture will feel the same way. I have heard the Palestinians demonized so much, called so many bad things (non-existent is actually relatively tame) in so many fora, in an unchallenged way that it felt really good to hear somebody say what she said. Even if it was only to quote her and damn her. The shoe was on the other foot—not even on the other foot, sort of in the vicinity of the other foot—for a split second in the national discourse, and there was some inexplicable sense of pleasure in that. Saree Makdisi’s piece in the LA Times was delicious because he chose just a few examples (many, many more could have been adduced) and he called out the hypocrisy. He held a mirror up to our cultural and political elite; I’m sure they looked away. A lot of this conflict, at least in the western media, boils down to the refusal in our discourse to acknowledge the equal humanity of Palestinians. I remember reading the NYT very closely every day during the Second Intifada. You could have done studies on the amount of ink and where that ink was spilled (p. A1 or p. A15?) in terms of its coverage of Jewish and Palestinian deaths. The valuation of human lives implicit in those decisions about space allocation communicated a lot about the relative worth of Arabs and Jews in American mainstream discourse. At Baruch Goldstein’s funeral, the rabbi there announced that a million Arabs weren’t worth a Jewish fingernail. The NYT and other news sources seemed to me to be different only in degree, not in kind in the assumptions they brought to their coverage. I remember going to a protest once as an undergrad; the sign I held just said, “Arabs are People, too.” I don’t think many Americans really believe it. And when I read about Israel funding therapy for pets traumatized by rocket attacks and at the same time that Israeli sonic booms over Gaza have caused a ‘malignant spread of deafness among children,’ I wonder whether the Israeli government really does, either. At a non-emotional level, of course, I know that Thomas was wrong. To make Jewish Israelis leave would be to repeat the disaster of 1948. It would be to inflict upon Jews what the Zionists inflicted upon the Palestinians. It would be to do unto others what they did unto you, not as you would have them do unto you. It would be a mess and a huge human disaster. And, apart from the morality of it all, it would be totally foolish for the Palestinians to do just that. Israel has a highly educated population with a strong economy. It would be an act of national idiocy to try to make Jews leave. You can just look at the mess Mugabe has created in Zimbabwe if you need any more proof of this. (And with this said, I should add that I really don’t think anybody wants to ship Jews out or push them into the sea: this is nothing but a bogeyman that has been held up by Zionists for decades to shut down serious debate and discussion or change the subject away from Israeli crimes and misdemeanors. I hesitate to even mention this issue because in so doing, one plays to Zionist fear-mongering and the image of the Arab as the heartless, barbaric savage, capable of any cruelty). If Arabs and Jews could somehow learn to all get along, it would be one of the most amazing countries in the world. Just a phenomenal place. Thomas’ words were gratifying in the same way that seeing a bully get punched in the nose is gratifying—like that scene at the end of Back to the Future when Biff gets decked—but it’s a dead end in terms of resolving the conflict in real life or in any real way. It’s also wrong because what you have now are generations of people who have been born there and grew up in that place. I like what Ahmad Tibi says. He says I have no problem with Jews being here, but if you want to start talking about shipping people out—a common topic in Israeli mainstream political discourse—we should do it according to the principle that the last to come should be the first to leave. That seems most fair to me. If there were a one-state solution, it would actually be a source of strength to make it a homeland for the Jewish people, even if they are a minority. But nobody is asking me. I’m like Will Rogers: all I know is what I read in the newspapers. But that’s usually pretty depressing, and predictably depressingly slanted. So now I check the blogosphere. Which is often worse. I just read Jeffrey Goldberg’s take on the Helen Thomas controversy. In two paragraphs, he really piles on some hefty charges. Thomas is a foot soldier in a Roman-inspired war against the Jewish people and commits a sin that is “the first cousin of Holocaust denial”: denying that Jews are a nation. Also, she seeks to deny Jews “the truth of their history” (whatever that means). He reels off the charges like a cop reading off of a notepad after arresting a perp. A reading of Thomas’ statement that is much more charitable, plausible and also just simpler would be that Thomas probably doesn’t give a fig about his nationalist anxieties. What Helen Thomas cares about is Palestinians. I don’t know her and have never met her, but my suspicion is that she sees them as…human beings. It’s not metaphysical at all. Nor is it national. Nor is it about denying anything. It’s about affirming the humanity and dignity of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine and refusing to deny them rights and respect because of wrongs inflicted on Jews by Europeans (not by Palestinians), and because they didn’t have the good fortune of being born Jews and not Arabs. Tortured attempts by Zionists to use Hajj Amin al-Husayni’s interactions with Nazis to tar all Palestinians (including the large number of Palestinian Christians) as having been at the forefront of the Final Solution represent an implicit acknowledgment that the moral calculus of Zionism doesn’t quite add up. The journalist Bat Yeor’s polemical, pseudo-historical construction of the notion of dhimmitude represents a similarly deeply problematic effort coming from much the same place. The real fault of the Palestinians is not that they were Nazis and flaming anti-Semites, it was that they were living in the wrong place at the wrong time and had the audacity to not compliantly go along with decisions about their fate that were made without their input and against their wishes in faraway European and American cities. They didn’t do what they were told to do. They didn’t behave as they were expected to behave. This is still the problem with the Palestinians. They will not do as they are told—by the Americans or by the Israelis—and this simply will not do. Good Arabs, those who will do what they are told, get a pass and a pat on the head. So Ahmedinejad (who is Iranian and not Arab) is rightly excoriated for his despicable Holocaust denial but nobody talks about Abu Mazen’s equally despicable doctoral work on Holocaust denial. Abu Mazen says things the Israelis and Americans (and Jeffrey Goldbergs) like. At least most of the time. If Abu Mazen falls out of line, be sure we’ll hear about the Holocaust denial. I guess Sadat being assassinated meant that he could never fall out of line; we remember him as a good Arab and forget that he was a Nazi, too. Because Thomas herself has Middle Eastern heritage, she might be less inclined than other pundits, many of whose knowledge of Arab culture probably does not go much beyond buying Sabra Hummus at Costco, to see the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine as lesser humans than Europeans and somehow, some way, not entitled to the same dignity, self-respect and human rights, essentially because they had the misfortune of being born speaking Arabic and not English, French or German. If achieving and maintaining the Zionist dream means destroying a society, displacing hundreds of thousands of people, killing tens of thousands more, invading, bombing and attacking at least half a dozen countries, developing a large nuclear arsenal, denying minorities equal rights, maintaining a decades-long military occupation, reducing 1.5 million people to grinding poverty, giving aid and comfort to Apartheid South Africa, etc., then maybe that dream should be put into early retirement or atleast radically reconfigured. Something has gone terribly wrong. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Was it? There is a world beyond Europe, eastern and western. You might even say that the world is flat. Non-European peoples have had their own historical experiences and have their own histories of tragedy, suffering and struggle. These are no less vivid, painful, human and important simply because we in the US do not learn about them in school, best-selling popular histories are not written about them and Hollywood does not make movies about them. It is not a coincidence that most of the wider, non-European world is generally more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than it is to the Zionist one. Helen Thomas’s comments raised ire in the US, but they would be seen as utterly unremarkable to much of the population of this planet. Now, this might be because the entire world is anti-Semitic and really just hates Jews. (And there is undoubtedly anti-Semitism at work in some criticism of Israel; and it should be deplored, denounced and shunned.) But chalking all such support up to an irrational, primal hatred of Jews is too facile and too self-serving. Global sympathy for Palestinians might perhaps be because much of the world was colonized by Europe and then went through decolonization. Much of the world recognizes in the Palestinian struggle things that resonate with its own long walk to freedom. Because much of that world, like the Palestinians, had little to do with inflicting suffering on Jews in Europe, it finds the self-pity and persecution complex which seems to animate wealthy, well-educated American Zionists to be bizarre, self-indulgent and totally alien to their own historical experience, not to mention contemporary realities. Netanyahu thinks this is 1938. It feels a lot more like 2010 to me. And I’ve been scratching my head and trying to recall the last pogrom that happened on the Upper West Side, and just can’t remember. It must have been before the Giuliani years. Yes, that’s it. Before Rudy. I’m sure he put a stop to them when he cleaned up the city. With Apartheid over, Israel stands alone as an historical relic and curiosity—the last remaining example of European settler colonialism. And this is how much of the globe sees the question of Palestine, through the lens of anti-colonial struggle and liberation. The French were in Algeria for 130 years and fought savagely to stay there. Israel is only 62 years old and it, too, has fought with a ruthless amorality to maintain its ethnocracy. Time will tell if the Zionists last as long as the French did. Attempting to re-frame the question of Palestine in terms of European persecution of Jews and calling Helen Thomas bad names will not make the anti-colonial narrative that she was giving voice to go away. How many Americans know that when the French left Algeria, almost all of the pied noirs went as well? How many Americans even know what a pied noir is? If the traffic police realize that people might be operating in narratives other than their own, they might realize that it’s possible to be pro-Palestinian and critical of the Zionist project yet not driven by the nefarious (Roman) motive of denying the Jewish people the truth of their history (whatever that means). And, one hopes, they might at least think twice before throwing the book at someone. Palestinians aren’t denying anything. They just want their houses and farms and villages back. Boulos lives in the US. His grandparents were from Jaffa. |
Gack! Posted: 23 Jun 2010
NYT:
h/t Brian Dana Akers. |
Sometimes Americans deserve to win Posted: 23 Jun 2010
I admit it: by the end of the Algeria match right now, I had switched sides and was pulling for the United States. For a simple reason, because they (we!?) deserved to win, and if they had lost, they would have been (twice) stung by injustice. It’s rare these days to feel sympathy for the U.S. as a co-equal player on the world stage, but that’s what I felt. I wish our international profile was one of co-equals, too. (And yes, now I go back to my predictable Third-World sympathy, hoping an African country gets through.)
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Guardian piece: obsession with Israel has rational basis, but is dangerous Posted: 23 Jun 2010
The discourse globally is changing, we all know it. Here’s a wonderful piece by Robert Fowke in the Guardian on the new mood, on the singling out of Israel, and the dangers in doing so. I am totally with him here. I know that I single out Israel in part because of the lies, because the lobby has gotten away with this since Truman’s day, and pulled the wool over the eyes of a balanced policy, and when Walt and Mearsheimer called them on it, there were squalls of denial.
This angers me as a journo and a citizen. And yet it is true that the stakes are huge here. This is why I constantly compare the conflict with the battle over slavery in this country in the 1850s, and the corruption of our political system then, and the difficulty of preventing a crisis of massive proportions. Where are the statespeople?
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‘Fresh Air’ gets Gaza’s history wrong Posted: 22 Jun 2010
Besides the comments Phil has already posted, there are lots more things that could be said about Terry Gross’s interview with Lawrence Wright about Gaza on NPR’s Fresh Air today. Here’s the comment I sent today to Fresh Air and NPR’s ombudsman, Alicia Shepard:
On Fresh Air on June 22, 2010, guest Lawrence Wright said “Then in 2007, there was an election in the Palestinian territories, and to the astonishment of practically the entire world community, Hamas won.” In fact, the election Hamas won (to the Palestinian Legislative Council) was on January 25, 2006, not 2007 (see, for example, the Linda Gradstein report entitled “Hamas Appears to Win Majority in Palestinian Elections” on Morning Edition, Jan. 26, 2006). This seemingly small mistake is only one problem in Wright’s extremely distorted response to Terry Gross’s request that he “Remind us how the Israeli blockade of Gaza was started, how and why.” His response starts with the capture of Gilad Shalit in June 2006, then proceeds to Hamas’s election victory, which he says occurred in 2007, then to the ouster of the (US-backed) Fatah forces in Gaza in June 2007 – “that’s when they [the Israelis] began imposing this very strict blockade,” he says. It’s certainly true that Israel tightened its blockade then, and Wright is hardly alone in dating its beginning to that moment, but in fact the Israelis started it, if in somewhat less stringent form, much earlier. Some would say it dates to the 1990s, when Israel launched its “closure” policy, but in something like its current form it began shortly after Hamas’s election victory in January 2006 – not only before the ouster of the Fatah forces, but also before the capture of Shalit. See, for example, your own Peter Kenyon’s Morning Edition report entitled “Gaza Misery Growing Under Israeli Embargo, Attacks” on Sept. 22, 2006. Or, even earlier and in more vivid detail, the story entitled “Gaza on brink of implosion as aid cut-off starts to bite” in the UK Guardian/Observer as early as April 16, 2006, which begins:
All that, to repeat, well before the capture of Shalit and the ouster of the Fatah forces. |
Ghetto Israel Posted: 22 Jun 2010
Are you watching the World Cup? It is amazing how many different “races,” whatever races are, are mingled in the action, in former apartheid South Africa. There is a piece on Yahoo about the diversity of the American team, all the different backgrounds. The German chancellor has praised the diversity of her country’s team, immigrants from Poland, Brazil and the astonishing midfielder Ozil, of Turkish background.
This of course is Obama’s story too, one that so many can relate to. When I was in Israel in January, a cab driver said it was the worst mistake of his life to move from Brooklyn to Israel 20 years ago. Because nothing changes, he says. The matsav, the situation, never changes. And the world moves forward. A lot of the lack of change is racial. This Tel Aviv store (at left) shows pictures of kids deported from Israel, many the children of migrant workers. [P.S. I’m told these are kids threatened with being deported, they haven’t been yet.] I like to say that Gaza is the Warsaw ghetto, but maybe that’s wrong: Israel is the ghetto. The ghetto was our long condition in Europe, and it seems like we’re replicating it in the Middle East. We are closed off. And even in America we have closed ourselves off to the Palestinian narrative. And Jews celebrate the birth of a nation that included many refugees and blind themselves to the 63-year tragedy of the Nakba refugees, a racial story that Israel cannot bring itself to resolve. So it can’t go forward. At times I feel it is the duty of American Jews to try and help the other Jews, by breaking the ghetto walls. The Jews of Israel are scared. Put aside the war crimes for a second and the tyranny of the occupation, they are afraid: We have established our ghetto and the world outside the walls scares us. There was always a self-imposed aspect to the ghetto. The wall walls Israel too. I used to have a heading on this site, The Assimilationist. Because I’m intermarried and love America and hang out with gentiles, I thought, Alright, that word must describe me, an assimilationist. But I’m not really, I’m more Jewish than I’ve ever been and at this moment I feel a sense of corporate loyalty, to the people I was raised belonging to. As I often say, Zionism attracted the most mistrustful-of-gentiles Jews. They compounded this mistrustful thinking when they met up in Israel. Hirsh Goodman writes that an Auschwitz witness at Eichmann’s trial was one of the main reasons Goodman decided to move from South Africa to Israel in 1965– “His message to me was that we had allowed ourselves to be led like lambs to the slaughter.” I never absorbed that lesson. Zionism was built on anti-Semitism and that is no longer the reality, there just isn’t anti-Semitism in the west to speak of. The integrators of the modern democracies, us Jews who are engaged with non’s, let us help our brothers out of their ghetto, the ghetto of the mind and spirit… |
‘Haaretz’ runs piece saying only boycott will move Israel Posted: 22 Jun 2010
Gosh this piece should be in the New York Times: Ayala Shani and Ofer Neiman, in Haaretz in Hebrew, (translation at JSF), say that only boycott will persuade Israel to change its behavior:
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See: www.mondoweiss.net