- New battleline: ‘Tablet’ calls 4 ‘anti-Israel’ blogs ‘agents of influence’
- Birthright travel diary: Arriving in Tel Aviv
- TIAA-CREF divestment campaign finds strong support among shareholders
- Paul Berman’s hidden agenda
- Bil’in leader sentenced to two months in prison for protesting
- IDF destroys West Bank village after declaring it military zone
- Israeli report on shootings of ‘4 civilians’ fails to state that they were three sisters, 3, 5, and 9, and their grandmother
- Netanyahu moves ahead on taking Jordan Valley
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New battleline: ‘Tablet’ calls 4 ‘anti-Israel’ blogs ‘agents of influence’ Posted: 21 Jul 2010 Tablet ran a piece today on 4 “anti-Israel” bloggers who are allegedly mainstreaming anti-Semitism so as to gin up the traffic numbers of “media companies”: Steve Walt, Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald and me. Exalted company! The piece says that all four are Jew-baiters and “agents of influence,” and none is quoted– though commenters on a couple of the sites are, and Jeffrey Goldberg, too, saying that Walt is trying to marginalize Jews from American life. A truly vicious charge about a guy who I’m told has promoted diversity at every turn. I might respond when I’m not tired. Andrew Sullivan responds here, pointing out that Tablet offered no evidence for the allegations (and that when it comes to an “open sewer of hate,” a choice phrase in the piece, Netanyahu should be the focus). At Foreign Policy, Walt points out that the attack reflects the fact that our side is winning, then pluckily notes that Tablet is trying to intimidate the Washington Post company, which carries his blog.
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Birthright travel diary: Arriving in Tel Aviv Posted: 21 Jul 2010 Earlier this month, activist Rachel Marcuse spent 10 days in Israel as part of the Taglit-Birthright program — a fully sponsored trip for young North American Jews to learn more about the country. She went to bear witness and ask questions about the Israeli state’s treatment of Palestinians, and to learn about other complex issues in Israel today. After the program, she spent another 10 days elsewhere in Israel and the West Bank of Palestine talking to Israeli Jews, Palestinian citizens of Israel, international activists, and Palestinians in the occupied territories. This is the first of a seven-part series on what she found. This series first appeared in rabble.ca and this story can be found here. http://rabble.ca/news/2010/07/my-taglit-birthright-israel-experience-arriving-tel-aviv. Day 1 I arrive at Newark Airport, just outside New York City, at 10 a.m. on a hot day in late June and stumble around — exhausted from the past day of traveling from Vancouver — trying to find my group. I spot a huddle of 20-somethings, some with shockingly large suitcases, sitting near the El Al Airline check-in, and zone-in on Hannah — the only one in the crowd carrying a backpack. We do the standard “What’s your name?” and “Where are you from?” and it becomes clear immediately that we’re going to be friends. I exhale. Gathered together by the organizers, our first team icebreaker has us tell the group of 40 our names, city of residence and describe the theme of our bar or bat mitzvah. I didn’t have a bat mizvah. “Well, then tell us what your theme would have been if you had had one” one of our friendly 25-year-old group leaders says. “I’m Rachel Marcuse, or Rachel four of five,” I say, a little shocked that there are five Rachels on the trip; it seems a little excessive even for such a common name. “I’m from Vancouver. I’m the token Canadian bumped from another trip, so I’m happy to be with you guys… um… I guess my theme would have been dancing if I’d had a bat mitzvah.” It turns out I’m not the only one who hasn’t gone through the Jewish rite of passage. For those who are officially Jewish adults, the most popular theme for those born between 1983 and 1985 was unquestionably “under the sea.” Yay, Disney! At the first El Al Airlines security check, I’m bombarded with rapid-fire questions, all examining my Jewishness. No, I don’t know my Hebrew name. Why am I going on this trip? To see Israel (don’t say Palestine, I repeat in my head to myself). How do I celebrate high holidays? Well, I’m really more culturally Jewish. But, um, my parents met in Israel when they were both working for dance companies in Tel Aviv. The questioner looks dubious. Most participants get one interrogator. I get two. The fact that I’m on Taglit-Birthright seems to be my saving grace. Taglit or Birthright, as it’s translated from the Hebrew, is my “gift” from the Jewish people. It’s also a free trip to the Middle East — 10 days in Israel, all expenses paid save for some lunches and tips. Taglit is funded by North American Jewish organizations, philanthropists and the Israeli government. (Offering this information wins me 100 shekels for snacks in a Q and A at the orientation session, although, perhaps unsurprisingly, everyone receives the money in the end.) Taglit seems to have the ultimate aim of convincing young North American Jews to “make aliyah,” i.e., to ascend to the “homeland” or at least take a more active role in their Jewish communities at home, presumably in a way that will support the State of Israel. So, here I am, on El Al on my way to Tel Aviv. Amazingly enough, economy class is full and I’m bumped up to executive class. I figure it might be good travel karma for my bad trip the day before, a day of luggage delays and a missed flight. Sadly, I don’t get to partake of the excessive booze options — even ice wine is served! — as Birthright prohibits drinking on the plane. I figure it’s too early to start being a troublemaker. |
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TIAA-CREF divestment campaign finds strong support among shareholders Posted: 21 Jul 2010 Yesterday, Jewish Voice for Peace attended TIAA-CREF’s annual meeting as part of its campaign to get the retirement fund to divest from companies profiting off the occupation. The group delivered a petition signed by 15,300 people demanding the fund drop its investments in Caterpillar, Elbit, Motorola, Veolia and Northrop Grumman. Here’s an account of how it went:
In response, TIAA-CREF corporate leadership asked to meet with JVP, and they had their first direct talks today. JVP says the fund will respond if they hear from enough people, especially plan participants. You can find the petition to sign here. |
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Posted: 21 Jul 2010 Paul Berman thinks he is smarter than other people, or braver, or both. His latest book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, indicts a number of Western writers for being too dumb, or too cowardly, to confront what he considers the great and growing threat of “Islamic fascism.” His targets are Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss-born, modernizing Muslim philosopher, and Westerners like Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash, who cannot see that Ramadan’s reasonable public stances conceal sinister truths that he, Berman, will courageously spend 299 pages unveiling. Berman’s pursuit of Ramadan, and his contempt for those in the West he says Ramadan is duping, is pathological. But he nowhere answers what should be his most important question: what actually is Tariq Ramadan’s hidden aim? Is Ramadan simply biding his time, pretending to be moderate until he amasses more Muslim followers, fools even more fellow travelers, and then pops out like a jack-in-the-box to reveal his true views and help establish the Muslim Caliphate across vast stretches of Europe and even America? It is a commonplace in psychology that people often scrutinize others for the very flaws or weaknesses they fear in themselves. Berman’s curious animus toward Ramadan may actually be motivated by his own agenda, which he quite possibly hides from even himself: his passion, in this and previous works, to defend the state of Israel at any cost. Berman has a problem with Ramadan, because, as he admits, most of what the man says and writes is calm and rational. So Berman is boxed into an unpleasant line of argument: Guilt by Genealogy. Tariq Ramadan’s grandfather was the Egyptian Hassan al-Banna, who back in 1928 founded the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the leading nonviolent Islamic movement in Egypt today and almost certainly that country’s strongest single political force. Berman searches Al-Banna’s own writings, but he cannot come up with quite enough incendiary material. So he turns to that old standby, Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem. He discovers that in the 1930s Al-Banna spoke sympathetically of the Mufti, who did go on to ally with the Nazis, including making anti-Semitic broadcasts over Radio Berlin. So here is the biggest strand of Berman’s argument: Ignore nearly everything that Tariq Ramadan says and does today. Instead, note that his grandfather, 75 years ago, praised another Arab nationalist who was similarly resisting British colonialism. Ergo, Tariq Ramadan has inherited anti-Semitism in his bloodstream, which he conceals so he can seduce the Muslims of Europe and trick Western intellectuals. Further proof of Ramadan’s secret guilt is that when he is asked to criticize his own grandfather, he waffles. (The Mufti was not the only anti-colonial figure to promote German or Japanese fascism during World War 2 to strike back at the British or Dutch; nationalists with genuine followings in India [Chandra Bose] and Indonesia [Sukarno] made the same mistake. But Berman could have found an another example even closer at hand. Anwar Sadat was jailed for 2 years by the British in Egypt in 1942 for actually plotting with German spies, but his sins were conveniently forgotten after he signed the 1978 peace treaty with Israel.) Genuine experts like Professor Marc Lynch have already shown that Berman’s view of Tariq Ramadan is warped, “based on a narrow selection of sources read in translation and only a sliver of the vast scholarship on the subject,” and that Ramadan is a genuine reformer. But Ramadan, for Berman, is in fact more of a useful distraction than a real target. There are two vital subjects missing from a book that purports to be about Islamism and violence. The American war in Iraq, in which at least 100,000 and possibly 600,000 people have already died, is scarcely mentioned. And Israel also barely appears – and only as a victim, of the Palestinian suicide bombings of the early 2000s (which Tariq Ramadan and other moderate Islamists are blamed for not denouncing). Berman snickers at the antiwar demonstrations in the West in early 2003 against the impending invasion of Iraq. But he nowhere admits that he supported the war. He is quick to suggest that certain other writers are cowards. But he does not have enough intellectual courage to either admit he was wrong, or to try and argue that the human and material cost of the war – now in its eighth year – has been worth it. And because he tiptoes around the Iraq war, he makes the absurd implication that Muslims are turning against the West partly because Tariq Ramadan was indirectly influenced by the Grand Mufti’s anti-Semitism, instead of because Muslims know about Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and many, many tens of thousands of dead Muslims. Berman’s silence on Israel is just as glaring. His “Index of Names” (there are no footnotes or references in what purports to be a scholarly work) finds room for Plato and Plotinus, but there is no mention of Ariel Sharon, Avigdor Lieberman, or Dr. Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli “settler” who in February 1994 entered a mosque in Hebron carrying his assault rifle and murdered 29 Palestinians as they prayed, before he was overpowered and beaten to death. Goldstein’s “suicide assault” prompted some Palestinians to start retaliating with their own first suicide bombings the next month. Other reviewers, like David Rieff and Pankaj Mishra, have already quite deftly dismantled Berman’s simplistic views of Islamism. But no one so far has paid close attention to his evasions over Israel. In one place, Berman does recognize that the Irgun, the Israeli group that took part in the 1948 massacre of Palestinian civilians at Deir Yassin, “were in fact terrorists” – but the Irgun is safely 65 years in the past. Surely Israel today is a fruitful place to study the connection between extreme socio-religious ideas and political violence? What kind of feverish intellectual atmosphere produced Dr. Baruch Goldstein? What were the influences on Yigal Amir, the fanatic who murdered the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin (an act that some people, like the great Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery, say actually changed history)? Is it true that the Israeli military is so infected with extremist settler ideology that it cannot be relied on to evacuate the settlements? And what of the Settler/Likud fellow travelers in the United States and elsewhere? Have their apologies for Israel’s extremists, their labeling of all criticism as “anti-Semitism,” made a 2-state solution impossible and put off a 1-state solution for many years and many more thousands of deaths? Paul Berman most probably did not set out to distract attention from the U.S. disaster in Iraq and from Israel’s fanatic expansionism. He most likely has a strong attraction to Israel as he thinks it was in 1948 or 1967, and he simply is afraid to examine his views and consider changing his mind. So instead of stalking the leading Israeli right-wingers of today, along with their intellectual apologists in Israel and in AIPAC, he wasted nearly 300 pages on Tariq Ramadan. |
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Bil’in leader sentenced to two months in prison for protesting Posted: 21 Jul 2010 From the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee: Bil’in Protest organizer Abdallah Abu Rahmah was sentenced to two months of imprisonment and to a six month suspended sentence, after a five year long trial on charges clearly related to freedom of speech. Abu Rahmah was convicted of two counts of “activity against the public order”, simply for participating in demonstrations, in one count despite the fact that “No evidence of violence towards the security forces was provided”. Abu Rahmah was also convicted of “obstructing a soldier in the line of duty”, for shouting at a police officer and refusing to leave the scene of a demonstration, of “breaking curfew”, for being in the street in front of his house when the army declared curfew on Bil’in to suppress a demonstration, and of “incitement”, which under military law is defined as “The attempt, verbal or otherwise, to influence public opinion in the Area in a way that may disturb the public peace or public order”. Abu Rahmah was convicted of inciting others to “[…] continue advancing [to their lands during a demonstration in Bil’in], claiming that the land belongs to them. Adv. Gaby Lasky, Abdallah Abu Rahmah’s lawyer said that “The military court threads a dangerous path of criminalizing legitimate protest in the West Bank. Abu Rahmah was arrested, prosecuted and sentenced with the clear intention of sending a message that the Palestinian struggle, even when of civic nature, will not be tolerated”. |
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IDF destroys West Bank village after declaring it military zone Posted: 21 Jul 2010 And other news from Today in Palestine: Land and Property Theft and Destruction/Ethnic Cleansing IDF destroys West Bank village after declaring it military zone, Amira Hass Israeli settlers attempt to burn historical mosque in Jaffa Army Invades Khan Younis Israeli policeman beats a child in Jerusalem Lebanon |
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Posted: 21 Jul 2010 On Monday the Israeli government posted its latest word on the Gaza conflict of ’08-’09. It’s called the “second update” on its investigation of incidents during the conflict. Below I have excerpted three accounts of one incident in the war (to which Norman Finkelstein directed my attention): the shootings of three sisters and their grandmother on January 7, 2009, in which two of the girls died. The accounts: 1, the Israeli government’s account, 2, a report on the incident in the Goldstone Fact-Finding Mission of the U.N., and 3, the account of the shootings from the girls’ father, as told to the Goldstone Mission. Notice that the Israeli account, which absolves the Israeli unit engaged of any criminal responsibility, and describes the shootings as allegations purely, refers to the case as the shooting of 4 civilians, and while it gives their names, it does not say that the civilians were three sisters, aged 3, 5, and 9, and their 60-year-old grandmother. 1, The Israeli investigation:
2, Now: The Goldstone Report,
From the Goldstone Mission’s interview of Khaled Abed Rabbo, the father of the three girls:
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Netanyahu moves ahead on taking Jordan Valley Posted: 21 Jul 2010 Days after it was reported that Netanyahu said in 2001 that Israel would defeat the two-state process by declaring military zones all across the Jordan Valley, Amira Hass reports that Israeli soldiers destroyed a Palestinian village in the Jordan Valley on Monday for just that purpose:
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