NOVANEWS
- The not-so special relationship
- What does it take to get liberal Zionists on board with BDS, and is it worth it?
- Divestment makes Jews uncomfortable because it confronts them with facts that have been suppressed
- On Israeli Independence Day, some Jews break the law of return
- The internet is great for journalism, but it’s also destroying our lives
- Homogeneity in Israel causes culture shock to diversity after just 18 months
- Realist Ian Lustick pulls out of Phila teach-in with ‘apartheid’ in title
- Assessing Iran’s nuclear intentions
Some British MPs want to get rid of the phrase ”special relationship” in reference to Anglo-American ties, because they say it has lost its meaning, and because it suggests that Britain is the subservient poodle of superpower America.
Asked to respond to this at the White House press briefing on Monday, press secretary Robert Gibbs hesitated to use the phrase in his initial answer.
After being pressed on this by a journalist, he also seemed to suggest that the phrase is a bit of diplo-speak that has no deep meaning: “I don’t have a special relationship with the phrase ‘special relationship.’ We have a special relationship with Britain.” “I’d have the report forwarded in and around to the media and you guys can banter back and forth on the banner that we use it with,” he added. Here’s some banter: No one tell the Israelis that there’s nothing special about “special relationships.” Because as Gibbs spoke, President Obama issued his message to Israelis on their Independence Day, saying, “I am confident that our special relationship will only be strengthened in the months and years to come.” Related posts:
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Jerry Haber’s call for liberal Zionists to join the broader BDS movement is laudable for what he’s attempting to do. Sadly, Haber’s Zionism informs his writing in a way that largely undermines his professed goal. The current of Jewish paternalism that runs throughout the list translates into both an excessive focus on the importance of the Zionist “peace” camp in Israel, and the adoption of an infantilizing and placatory tone vis a vis the Palestinians. While that may not be a reflection of Haber’s personal views, he still seems to think that these are the points that will sway the liberal Zionist.
The peace camp in Israel is mostly non-existent and ineffectual. That’s because liberal Zionists can’t help but be co-opted by the Israeli war camp, which correctly identifies Palestinian equal rights as the end of Jewish-ruled Israel. Any liberal Zionist who actually does agree that “the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality” ought to be recognized by the Jewish state exists in a steadily narrowing temporal envelope.
In time, those non-Jews will undo the Jewish state on their own and those liberal Zionists will have to make a binary decision; equal rights (without an overwhelming racial majority) or Jewish supremacy (i.e. Zionism). I get the sense that liberal Zionists are only capable of subscribing to the ‘Jewish and democratic’ meme so long as they can depend on a Jewish-majority demographic reality, which will not be the case forever. Honest liberal Zionists will recognize the unavoidable decision looming ahead. I hope brave Zionists will make that decision today. As for the second point, Haber writes that “Palestinians should have a little naches (pleasure) after all their suffering and BDS provides them with that.” The goal of the BDS movement is not to provide the Palestinians with a little naches. Instead the BDS movement seeks to correct the effects of decades of imperial control and colonization of Palestine/Israel by Zionists. Admittedly, what that correction may entail is interpreted differently by different people. But truthfully, any Zionist who opts to join the BDS movement in order to provide Palestinians with a little pleasure is probably better off buying me a tuna sandwich and a coke. There is another problem with Haber’s naches. He notes early on that the BDS movement is a product of Palestinian leadership. He then recasts the issue so that Palestinian agency exists as a function of Zionist indulgence. ‘Look, they’re like Gandhi. Throw them a little naches bone.’ Haber casually dismisses the import of the Palestinian right of return to Palestinians when he writes “even if you don’t recognize the right of return, you recognize the importance to the Palestinians of claiming that right.” The right of return is an inviolable and sacrosanct principle which necessarily spells out the end of the Jewish state, as such. Haber should understand that many Palestinians, me included, would prefer to march alone than march alongside anyone who does not endorse our right to return, meaning Zionists. There is a fundamental tension here: on the one hand, Palestinians aren’t human (Jewish) enough to reclaim their birthrights in Israel, but they’re just human enough for us to call for our compatriots to ease the boot heel pressure on their necks a little. That’s like telling black people that they should have the right to property, just not in your neighborhood. But isn’t it better to find common cause with liberal Zionists on this issue? Don’t we need all the allies we can get? People may disagree on this question. But I’m inclined to focus on building a movement with a solid moral foundation, rather than one which is fractured and part racist. If liberal Zionists want to disengage from the settlements for the sake of preserving their racist state they are welcome to do so. But I don’t intend to endorse their racist goal or assuage their Nakba guilt by working alongside them. There are no gradations of humanity; either we’re equal, or we’re adversaries. I regret framing the issue in such aggressively stark terms, but our (Palestinians and Jews) humanity is what is at stake here. I decided to come up with my own list for why liberal Zionists should support BDS and equal rights. Like Haber’s it’s Jewish-centric: 1 Think of your grandchildren. Think of the embarrassment they’re going to feel when they explain that their grandparents were ardent supporters of the world’s last racist apartheid state. If you’ve ever met a white South African in their teens or twenties, then you know what I’m talking about. 2 Think of your next reception in Thailand, Bolivia, France, Britain, or basically anywhere but America, when you explain that you actually don’t believe that Palestinians are somehow inferior (This one pays immediate dividends). 3 Finally, imagine what it might feel like to live in a normal country, where Rabbis don’t tell you who you can marry or where you can build your hospitals, and where you don’t subsidize the activities of roaming gangs of violent supremacists in the West Bank. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Related posts:
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Steve Horn has an op-ed in the UWisconsin newspaper, the Badger Herald, today on divestment. Excerpt:
When divestment is called for, it is often shunned immediately, yet this time around in Berkeley, in the aftermath of the brutal Operation Cast Lead, the political tide has shifted.
The debate, at least among liberals, has moved from “If you’re for divestment, you’re anti-Israel or anti-Semitic” to “There may be other, more effective ways as a liberal peace activist to oppose Israel’s human rights violations than divestment.” This is a huge — let me repeat, huge — step in the right direction. Many on the right, like they do for any criticism of Israel, call divestment “anti-Semitic,” as it singles out only Israel, a Jewish state, for human rights violations, and leaves out many other abhorrent human rights violating countries all around the world. Ironically, these are often the same people who tout that Israel isn’t solely a Jewish state, but a democracy that grants equal rights to all, including to its minority indigenous Arab population. How the call for divestment can simultaneously be coined anti-Semitic despite these claims is anyone’s guess, but no one ever said political rhetoric had to be coherent or logical. Others, liberals included, criticize divestment because it makes Jews feel uncomfortable, particularly on college campuses. These people are missing the point, though. Calls for divestment should make Jews feel uncomfortable, for it challenges many notions they have about Israel as a human rights loving democracy and “Light Upon the Nations.” It’s never comforting to learn things contrary to what you’ve been taught all your life — as a fellow Jew, it hasn’t been for me. But it’s crucial to compare the merits of the discomforts on both sides of the coin. On the other side of the coin, you have the discomfort of knowing your home has been turned into rubble, either by a bomb or a bulldozer, or even worse, the discomfort of knowing that your brothers and sisters have been wounded or killed while in their home. The discomfort Jews feel as it relates to calls for divestment pales in comparison. Divestment isn’t anti-Semitic because it has absolutely nothing to do with Judaism and everything to do with calling on Israel as a state to respect international law and human rights. The occupation does exist because both UN Resolution 242 and the Fourth Geneva Convention, among scores of other legal dictates, say that the occupation is illegal. And it makes sense to single out Israel, if for no other reason than our own government does, in the tune of over $3 billion per year in tax-payer funded military aid, which is more aid than we give any other country in the world — other than Iraq and Afghanistan, including more than we give to the entire continent of Africa. In reality, divestment is one of the few ways student human rights supporters can make a difference in the Israel-Palestine conflict on a micro-level. The more specific and targeted the call for divestment, the better. Calling on “divestment from Israel” as a whole is far too broad and indiscriminate. The UC-Berkeley model is ideal in that its call for divestment hones in narrowly on only two corporations. The Berkeley Student Senate bill calling for the divestment from these two corporations has garnered wide-ranging support, including from 40 student organizations and numerous Jewish groups and individuals on an international-level, such as Jewish Voice for Peace, Rabbi Brant Rosen, Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein, eight Israeli peace groups and Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu’s sister-in-law, among numerous others. Related posts:
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On Israeli Independence Day, some Jews break the law of return
Hannah Mermelstein sent along the following note:
Today (April 20) is Israeli Independence Day, which will be celebrated with parades and carnivals around the world. But Israeli “independence” in 1948 meant dispossession, exile, or death for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, for whom the founding of the state of Israel was a personal and collective catastrophe, or Nakba. As U.S. Jews, we have an automatic right to Israeli citizenship under Israel’s “Law of Return,” while many Palestinians have not been able to return home in over 60 years. It is not right that we may “return” to a state that is not ours while Palestinians are excluded and continuously dispossessed.
We join in the growing international chorus of voices opposed to Israel and its policies, and in support of boycotts, divestment, and sanctions. Join Ammiel Alcalay, Judith Butler, Ronnie Gilbert, Marilyn Hacker, Ricardo Levins Morales, the Shondes, and hundreds of others to break the law of return:
Check out this short video to see why some of us are breaking the law of return: http://bit.ly/cXNXU4.
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The internet is great for journalism, but it’s also destroying our lives
In a couple of days, the LRB is having a panel on the author in the age of the internet, and having some experience of industrial conditions for the last 40 years, here are my thoughts, mostly about journalism:
I don’t think anyone can maintain that the internet has not produced tremendous progress for the business of exchanging ideas and stories. More people are writing than ever before, and there are more better writers at work. Read a newspaper from the 1960s and it is like watching baseball from that era, the old form seems lax and entitled compared to the energetic engaged manner of the average internet journalist. The internet’s greatest achievement is to level, somewhat, traditional divisions of status and authority. Till a few years ago, we were led by a priesthood of journalists and editors, even after the time when because of the internet, anyone and his brother were learning to communicate ideas just as well in social media. That was an insupportable structure. Having made a good living in that priesthood for 25 years, I can summon the decadence of the old order in countless ways, but the picture that leaps to mind is of a group of fact checkers and lawyers and editors gathered around any story of importance that was about to be published, and one looked to the other who looked to the other and said, “Can we say this?” That question was asked again and again in corporate media, because there was too much riding on one article, too much money, too much reputation, too much power and status for anyone to be allowed to say what they really thought; and so the imperative that a good writer is supposed to feel, Is this an accurate expression of my thoughts? was crushed under a lot of external pressures. Readers understood that their writers were being held hostage in corporate dungeons, and they rebelled, and demanded honesty and immediacy. That is the ultimate truth of the internet: if someone had not invented the internet, we would have had to invent it. We are in the midst of a revolution and the best guidepost here is the invention of the printing press, which took power away from clerics and churches and scribes in the 15th century and transferred it to an intelligentsia. As Nabil O-Khowaiter, whom I met on the internet, has pointed out to me, the Catholic heretic Jan Hus was burned at the stake in the 15th century before the invention of the printing press, and after the printing press a man with very similar renegade ideas, Martin Luther, was able to flourish and transform institutions forever. This is one of the great pleasures/privileges of being a journalist now: participating in a revolution. And while I don’t know who the Martin Luther of the internet is, no one can quarrel with the idea that in the bad old days Juan Cole and Glenn Greenwald would have been frustrated blowhards, condemned to express their ideas to bored dinner guests and friends, or fulminating in letters to the editor. Maybe they would have at last gotten book contracts. Today both of them are true stars, and deservedly so. They have found their community, a highly sophisticated global one, and thereby threaten the hegemony of mainstream institutions, such as the New York Times, in their traditional role of managing the agenda. I wonder what would happen today if Judy Miller were publishing her fraud about weapons of mass destruction in the runup to the Iraq war. I wonder. The other great thing about the internet from a journalistic standpoint is that there is more information available than ever, and the boundaries of human knowledge are being expanded rapidly. John Mearsheimer says that his book, The Israel Lobby, which might have been contraband in another era, was kept alive despite savage reviews that accused him of anti-semitism, by the active discussion of his ideas on the internet, including at this site. The globalization of information has made us all smarter. I read something in Haaretz every day and something from Ma’an news agency in Palestine and frequently the Daily Star in Lebanon and the National out of the Gulf. This is a treasure I never had in the bad old days. Blogposts should be short and in that spirit let me get to the downsides of the internet, in terms of journalistic production. The immediacy that I and so many other readers cherish has brought a price in the lack of considered writing. You don’t have time to think thing over, and the loafing mood that Walt Whitman said that a poet required has been destroyed in internet production. That spirit lives on in a large portion of humanity, I’m sure, but they’re not really welcome on the internet, they post too infrequently. The generalist is under siege too, the person who knows everything. You can’t know everything when there is so much more to know that is so accessible. Leading experts are created within their fields—Stephen Walt—but despite his maturity and well-roundedness, I doubt that even Walt would be persuasive on health care policy or the charter school movement. Of course, the readers are also specialized, and they are also writers, commenters, and they run in herds. This site has a non-Zionist/anti-Zionist tribe gathered. The internet is tribal—James North told me this a long time ago. And that’s not a good thing for dialogue. Grammar has gone to hell. I noticed a verb participle I got wrong the other day and didn’t care to try and fix it. I thought, who cares, or more to the point, the merit of my argument is not going to be judged on such a guild-based factitious basis, as it might have been in the old days, so forget about it. (And by the way, if you think the internet is not creating its own elites you’re wrong.) The same goes for typo’s. Who has time for that? I have no time at all. The immediacy of the internet, the 24/7 news cycle, the expectation of readers and writers that important news will be pounced and pronounced upon within an hour or two—it has turned all our lives into hell. My wife is also an internet journalist, and I see it happening to her, she comes back from a party and goes to the computer. And I don’t even have a smartphone or a blackberry, trying to hold the line on my sane offline hours. I work harder than I ever have before and have little income to show for it. Money. I used to talk nonstop about when are they going to monetize the internet, but I’m not going to complain about money here. Oscar Wilde said that writers were like lovers, they did it for love first and then a few friends and then for money, but he was wrong. Samuel Johnson said that no one but a blockhead ever wrote for anything but money and he was wrong too. People will do it for love, that is the definition of the word amateur; and remember that the late J.D. Salinger cherished the amateur reader, and the amateur writer too. The internet is letting more and more of them in; and it’s good for everyone. Related posts:
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Phil mashed up my post on the Mamilla talk at Columbia and an article about the Olmert scandal by Isabel Kershner in the New York Times to ask an important question: “Are there non-Jews in West Jerusalem?”
I’m going riff on this further by bringing in an article from Ha’aretz today, mindful that, this time, the question — “Are there any non-Jews in that neighborhood?” — has an answer.
The article is a shameless screed against diversity. The author, Elie Klein, a native New Yorker, moved to Israel with his family some 18 months ago. Since then, he has been “rewired” by Israel’s Zionist narrative (his words, not mine), and holds contempt for his homeland. Now an “Aliyah enthusiast” and “public relations specialist”, Klein deigns to tell us why he found his former home so off-putting:
Is this superficial (and, in the last case, bogus) stuff, or what?
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Realist Ian Lustick pulls out of Phila teach-in with ‘apartheid’ in title
On Saturday I was part of a teach-in at the University of Pennsylvania on recent developments in the Israel-Palestine conflict organized by several Philadelphia peace groups. Another participant was to be Ian Lustick, a realist scholar who did an important paper on Israel’s crisis two years back.
When I got to the teach-in, I learned that Lustick had pulled out. He sent me and other participants an email, addressed “Dear All,” objecting to the title of the event: “Teach-In: Israeli Apartheid 2010.” Someone read it aloud at the event:
Lustick said that he would “love” to participate if the event were titled Israeli Apartheid? And though he deeply regretted disappointing us, he would be on campus that day during the teach in at such and such an address.
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Assessing Iran’s nuclear intentions
Thomas Schelling, a Nobel laureate and an expert in nuclear strategy, spoke at the New America Foundation in Washington last week. Having recently attended the highly influential Herzliya Conference in Israel, Schelling said:
Israel’s President Shimon Peres, who also attended the Herzliya Conference yet lacks the slightest nuance in his assessment of Iran’s intentions, yesterday declared that Iran poses a threat to the whole civilized world. |
See: www.mondoweiss.net
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