Zionism’s Lost Shine

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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby semper occultus » Thu Feb 13, 2014 7:10 am

82_28 » 13 Feb 2014 09:34 wrote:
Throwing fucking rocks?!?!?! Who the fuck fucking cares? Kids have thrown rocks forever. Maybe if this "conflict" happened in a more northern clime, you would get arrested for throwing snowballs at fascist sympathizing "police". Also, does this "issue" of the throwing rocks not beg the question of why they are having to resort to throwing rocks at all?


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.....those wacky philistines really missed a trick......should've had a couple of strategically placed snipers instead of that close-quarters hand-to-hand BS.....
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby Searcher08 » Thu Feb 13, 2014 9:18 am

82_28 » Thu Feb 13, 2014 9:34 am wrote:
seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 12, 2014 5:38 pm wrote:
Must Watch Video: ‘Stone Cold Justice’ – Israel’s maltreatment of Palestinian children

On February 10th the longest running current affairs program in the world, ABC Australia’s ‘Four Corners’ ran a 45 minute piece on the maltreatment of Palestinian children by the Israeli occupation forces. This video is shocking, horrifying and contains images that may disturb viewers. Nevertheless, it is essential viewing. This is not how a normal state acts, and by refusing to sanction this rogues state for its abuses, Western governments become complicit in these crimes against children


Absolutely motherfucking disgusting -- MOTHERFUCKING DISGUSTING. I watched the whole thing and have now so little faith in anything that I can't describe it. That fucking lady talking about it being the land god promised the Jewish people seriously believes that shit? I mean fuck, at least fucking christians have like missionaries and shit (which I hate on a lower level because they fuck with indigenous culture and render them not their own). The pure intentional cruelty is dumbfounding. I bless the good souls depicted here.

I cannot believe there is such a hole in the consciences of people. Yet there it is.

Throwing fucking rocks?!?!?! Who the fuck fucking cares? Kids have thrown rocks forever. Maybe if this "conflict" happened in a more northern clime, you would get arrested for throwing snowballs at fascist sympathizing "police". Also, does this "issue" of the throwing rocks not beg the question of why they are having to resort to throwing rocks at all?


Temporal Observation Report USS Relativity
Parallel TimeLine Omega 143 Earth-U.K.-Belfast 2014

In TimeLine Omega 143, a protocol for SCDL (same conditions, different locations) was initiated to map conditions in Belfast to parallel those in Gaza in Timeline Earth Standard. This observation is part of a series of reports following this authorised Temporal Incursion.

British Army forces continued today with their total blockade of West Belfast (population 100,213). Following an incident where a petrol bomb was thrown over a security fence, RAF fighter bombers conducted air strikes against the Royal Victoria Hospital,which was identified by AT-310 surveillance cameras as being a shelter for the terrorists. Casualties were reported as 345 dead, 2309 wounded.
Earlier power cuts had disrupted service at the hospital which is now assessed as 'destroyed'; Land Forces spokesman General James Clark said this was the fault of the terrorists, not his forces, who were doing a great job in difficult circumstances. He praised the implementation of the new 'Shoot on Throw' policy as reducing serious incidents - numbers of weekly deaths have decreased to less than twenty NMTs (Non Maturated Terrorists) per week.
The STR process (Security Through Retaliation) continued with the confiscation of property and demolition of 200 houses on the St James Road and the salting of the last source of food production following the blockade, the Bog Meadows allotments, a step described as 'hitting the terrorists in their soft underbelly'. Security forces have destroyed sewerage systems which were being used as 'tunnels for terrorists to bring in weapons'. Twelve NMTs were shot during subsequent protests,where they claimed they were using the tunnels only to catch rats to eat, claims dismissed as 'hateful propaganda' by General Clark.
Regional Governor Rev Samuel McCrea today said that "God was wielding the mighty sword of justice and truth through the sons and daughters of the Army and the RAF - and was scourging the filth of Irish nationalism from Ulster's sacred British soil"
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Feb 13, 2014 9:42 am

"God was wielding the mighty sword of justice and truth through the sons and daughters of the Army and the RAF - and was scourging the filth of Irish nationalism from Ulster's sacred British soil"





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Eirigi man denies snaps of police were intended for use in terrorism

BY JOHN CASSIDY – 28 JANUARY 2014

A public relations officer for a republican political party who is accused of publishing photographs of police officers on duty on his Facebook page has told his trial that he would learn how to blank out their faces in the future.

Newry man Stephen Murney (30) denies seven counts of publishing, collecting and possessing information likely to be of use to terrorists between August 2011 and July 2012.

The prosecution claims that the photos were found on a computer and two videos on an iPhone after a police search of Murney's Derrybeg Terrace home in November 2012.

Earlier in the hearing, Judge Corinne Philpott QC rejected a defence application to dismiss all charges against Murney.

Giving evidence, Murney told defence counsel Barry McDonald QC that he worked as a public relations officer (PRO) for the Newry branch of Eirigi.

"We are a responsible, non-violent, political party and we work towards a socialist republic,'' Murney said. "We do not support any armed group. We contest elections. Anyone who joins us must sign a declaration that they would not support violence.''

The father-of-one said it was his job as Eirigi's Newry PRO to photograph events in the city relating to peaceful protests. He told trial judge Corinne Philpott QC that after events, he would prepare press releases and post material on the Eirigi website and his Facebook page.

Judge Philpott asked: "Could you have blanked out their faces?''

Murney replied: "I am not very good on the technical side of things. The technical side of things would not be my strong point.''

Judge Philpott QC: "Are you going to remain as a PRO?"

Murney: "Yes.''

Judge Philpott: "Are you going to learn how to pixellate faces?''

Murney: "Yes.''

He added: "I didn't think I was doing anything wrong.''

The trial continues
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Feb 14, 2014 8:38 am

I Traveled to Palestine-Israel And Discovered There is no 'Palestinian-Israeli Conflict'
Posted: 02/10/2014 6:38 pm EST Updated: 02/10/2014 7:59 pm EST


The mind has a way of making traumatic experiences seem like distant dreams to those who survive them. As it goes, the more traumatic the experience, the quicker the paramedics in one's mind rush to dress wounds, resuscitate and stabilize the victim; the victim being you.

Since returning from Palestine 36 hours ago, I find myself confronted with feelings of detachment and minimization of what I encountered. My subconscious has decided the horrors I witnessed in the 'Holy Land' were nothing serious-horrors which include a 26-foot-tall concrete wall enclosing the Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank, and the sniper towers seemingly on every other corner of this open-air prison.

This was my first trip to Palestine-most westerners call it Israel, but I'll address that topic shortly. I had never been to the country, but I read enough to know the basics: Palestinians and Israelis were fighting over land. The Israeli government was formed in 1948 as part of a vision set forth by a secular European colonial political movement called Zionism, founded by Hungarian Theodor Herzl in 1896. Herzl, an atheist, sought to free the Jews from European oppression and anti-Semitism, with the ultimate goal being the creation of a Jewish state. He first proposed East Africa's Uganda as the location of the Jewish state. This proposal also found the approval of the British government which controlled Palestine since the First World War. Herzl, however, later identified Palestine as the country of choice. I knew this.

The history of Palestinians was something I was familiar with as well, only because in high school, my friend's parents were Moroccan Jews with staunch right-wing Zionist views. They'd go on about how Palestinians were worth shit and how they were sucking off the land they stole, and how they were not from Palestine, but Jordan. Truth be told, my friend's parents' passion about their 'homeland' made me sick. As a black person living in the United States, I could not relate to their love for their proclaimed homeland because I never had one. My ancestors were captured from various regions of Africa and forced onto ships bound for the Americas. Therefore, when questioned about the geographic origins of my ancestors, my answers were as vague as Africa is big.

Blurt

Before I go further, I must put to rest a misnomer. Contrary to what's been reported in the news for years, there is no Israeli-Palestinian conflict. None, zero, zilch, diddly-squat. I can say with confidence that Palestinians have no agency. The Israeli government controls everything in the country. This total control which is most magnified in the West Bank, concerns everything from where Palestinians are permitted to travel, to how much water they consume per month. Currently, there is no 'conflict,' only the omnipresent power of the Israeli government and those who resist it. This is important to understand.

Where was I?

I began researching the history of Palestinians in my senior year of college and discovered that my high school buddy's parents weren't only functionally insane, but they were completely incorrect in their claims. Palestinians had not fallen from the clouds and landed on Jewish land, (interpretations of certain religious texts would suggest otherwise) but had inhabited the country for thousands of years. In fact, Palestine hosted several occupations throughout history: Ancient Egyptians, Canaanites, Israelites, Philistines, Tjekker, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Ancient Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Muslims, Crusaders, Ayyubids, Mamluks, Ottomans, British, Jordanians- a gang bang of military occupations. Nasty.

American author and Professor of Political Science Alan Dowty put it best when he wrote, "Palestinians are the descendants of all the indigenous peoples who lived in Palestine over the centuries." Moreover, studies suggest, that part, if not the majority of Arabs living in Palestine, descend from a core population that dates back thousands of years.

Perhaps it would be easier for me to believe the story of Palestinians falling from the clouds, or crossing into Palestine from Jordan shortly before the creation of Israel -- that is, if my perception were formed by mainstream western media. In the years prior to the events of 9/11, including the initial months of the Second Intifada, media outlets such as Fox, CNN, and BBC, unfolded one dimensional narratives which included bloodthirsty Palestinians blowing themselves up in public places, killing innocent people. Never did they examine the societal constraints and conditions which might drive people to commit such atrocities.

In order for colonialism and occupation to be successful, previous inhabitants of a region must be dehumanized, labeled savages, and finally, their very existence denied. Once this paradigm has been established, any and all acts of horror can be inflicted upon them without recourse. Thus, the stories of the oppressed become irrelevant.

2014-02-10-checkpointhebron1.jpg
Members of our delegation show passports at checkpoint entering illegal settlements in Hebron, West Bank. Jewish Israelis are permitted entry, internationals must present passports and endure interrogation and Palestinians are not allowed. Photo: Thomas Dallal

Getting in and out

In the weeks preceding my departure from Chicago's O'Hare International Airport to Tel Aviv, I received travel warnings from The Carter Center, the organization responsible for sponsoring my trip. Our delegation, which consisted of prominent African-American journalists and artists, was provided suggestions of how to increase our chances of getting into Palestine-Israel. It is not uncommon for travelers to be denied entry into the country for absurd reasons such as their father's last name sounds Arab, or they criticized Israeli policy on a social networking website. I decided I would tell my Israeli interrogators the truth, but be as vague as possible.

If denied entry, travelers could be detained for hours, interrogated and forced to board an airplane back to where their flight originated. Other visitors to the region advised me to avoid saying words like "Palestine," "Palestinian," "solidarity," and "West Bank" inside of Israel's airport. I was also advised to sanitize my email in the event that Israeli officials requested my password in order to rummage through my inbox. Unfortunately, this is a common experience for Palestinian-Americans attempting to visit the country. Additionally, I was warned that Israeli authorities, on occasion, provoke visitors by being rude, or asking inappropriate questions-they aim to cause one to feel as though they've done something wrong. In my case, this tactic was working. I felt I was committing a crime by wishing to enter the West Bank to talk to Palestinians. Israel was getting to me already, and I hadn't left my apartment.

How things work

I reached Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport and made my way up a flight of stairs leading to a long, wide, windowed corridor filled with travelers speed-walking towards their destination. To my left were palm trees of a country I was hoping to enter, and fixed high above was the sun, whispering the arduous tale of humankind.

I had made it to customs. It resembled a race track betting area with fifteen booths and neon signs fixed to them which read, "Israeli Citizens" and "Foreigners." I got into the foreigner line. Inside the booth sat an Israeli woman, maybe 20 years old. She looked sad and beautiful.

"Passport," she said in a dry tone.

I gave it to her.

"What is the reason for your visit?"

I smiled and replied, "A tour of the holy land."

She examined my passport, then she examined my face,"Will you be visiting the West Bank or Gaza?"

I said, "No," without thinking.

"Where will you be going?" she asked.

"Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth," I replied.

She examined my passport again, "Do know any Palestinians?" she asked.

I smirked and lied, "No."

I was officially permitted into the state of Israel. I found my taxi driver, loaded my carry-on bag into the trunk, and we were off. Leaving Israel would not be so easy, but I'll save that story for another time.

Riding from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the first thing I noticed, besides the breathtaking Palestinian landscape with its palm trees, olive trees and immense hills and valleys, were walls and barbwire. There were literally hundreds of miles of concrete walls and barbwire-not the kind one sees on a Los Angeles off-ramp, but those belonging to a prison

I'd later find out that a portion of my 90-minute ride from the airport to Jerusalem gave a brief look at "Area-C." As it goes, the occupied West Bank is divided into three parts: "Area-A," "Area-B" and "Area-C." "Area-C" is controlled by the Israeli government, while "Area-A" is supposedly under the control of the Palestinian Authority (or PA), a self-governing body established to govern the West Bank and Gaza Strip ("Area-B" is under glorified Palestinian municipal control and Israeli security control). The reason I say "supposedly," is because after spending a week in the country, I began wondering if the area classifications were simply a broad public relations campaign to convince the world that Palestinians have a degree of military, political, and economic power they do not have. This is not a far-fetched inquiry. Since the second Oslo Accords in 1995, the Israeli government has asserted, and the international community has accepted, the notion that "Area-A" is under PA control, but on the ground, the PA acts as a subcontracted enforcer to the Israeli occupiers.

The Reality

In Jerusalem, I witnessed great religious and ethnic diversity. I saw Arabs, Asians, Europeans, Africans, Orthodox Jews, Muslims, Christians, all scrambling in Old City Jerusalem towards their various destinations. It was postcard worthy.

The variety of cultures in Jerusalem is outstanding. Similar to many societies however, Palestine-Israel presents a polished version of itself to tourists, where 5-star hotels in Tel Aviv and tourist attractions in Jerusalem cloak its brutal realities. The fact remains that our delegation was subject to a type of racism I've only experienced in the southern states of the United States of America. Of course, to a Jew or a middle class Palestinian living in Jerusalem or Nazareth, my observations may sound like exaggerations, but for the African migrant sleeping on the ground in South Tel Aviv, or for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, my evaluations are dead on.

The blatant, systemic subjugation and profiling of Arabs was most pronounced when our tour guide, a middle class Palestinian woman, was forced by IDF soldiers to exit our tour van and pass through a checkpoint on foot. As all Palestinians must do, she was told to place her thumb on a scanner to pass through a turn-style at a checkpoint. The members of our delegation were no exception to IDF scrutiny. The light skinned blacks in our delegation were interrogated and asked bluntly if they were Arab, and if not, what the last names of their fathers' were.

Palestinians and progressive Israelis told our delegation story after story of the abuses and degradation they've suffered at the hands of Israeli settlers or soldiers, and we witnessed some of this treatment first hand. Along with the rampant home and land confiscation in the West Bank (in which settlers receive state subsidies), agricultural violence is on the rise, as settlers uproot and destroy the olive trees Palestinians rely on for income and nourishment. More sinisterly, public beatings, arrests and shootings are common, particularly in the West Bank. Without charges, a Palestinian can be imprisoned and held for months or years under administrative detention. The same law does not apply to Jewish Israelis. In fact, Israeli citizens can commit a range of crimes against Palestinians with near impunity. Furthermore, Israelis benefit from being under police and civil courts jurisdiction, while Palestinians are under military jurisdiction. Human Rights Watch has documented the "Separate and Unequal" legal situation endured by Palestinians.

2014-02-10-susya.jpg
Yehuda Shaul (seen in orange shirt) lectures our delegation near village of Susya. Photo: Thomas Dallal

Our delegation was introduced to Yehuda Shaul, a former commander in the Israeli army and current Foreign Relations Director for Breaking the Silence, an organization of former IDF soldiers who have dedicated themselves to revealing the atrocities committed against Palestinians, as well as the general corruption of higher-ups in the Israeli government. Yehuda, a heavyset man wearing a yarmulke, still moves and speaks like a soldier. As we drove up and down the hills of South Hebron, Yehuda's lecture quickly began to feel like a general preparing a platoon for an offensive. He even revealed Israel's plan to force rural Palestinians away from their land and into West Bank cities, making them dependent on the government.

As a liberal Israeli, Yehuda believes in granting rights to Palestinians and developing a two-state Israeli-Palestinian solution. Yehuda is still a Zionist, and beyond lecturing about various land grabs, violence and injustices committed by Israeli settlers and the government, the 31-year-old steers away from revealing his personal story, which likely involves his journey as an IDF commander who terrorized Palestinian neighbourhoods, to the activist he is today who accepts that Palestinians are human.

Yehuda commanded our Palestinian driver to stop on the side of a road near an illegal Israeli settlement in the village of Susya. I point out that our driver was Palestinian because stopping in Susya was extremely dangerous for the three Palestinians in our van. Susya is home to armed, right-wing Israeli settlers who as Yehuda admitted, would "beat up" Palestinians on sight. Our Palestinian colleagues stayed in the van.

For some reason, Yehuda was compelled to conduct his lecture outside of the bus while our delegation shivered from a mountainous chill. It was then that a dusty car stopped feet away from us, engine running, with the driver focusing a murderous stare on our group. Yehuda kept lecturing as though nothing was happening, and our delegation pretended to listen as we remained vigilant for the deranged onlooker. The man examined us for a minute more, then sped off violently to return moments later to repeat this action. Sensing danger, I suggested to Yehuda we get back in the van and leave, but he ordered us to remain outside.

"This will only take a few minutes more," he said, before continuing his lecture.

The rapid fire gunshots we heard in the distance gave us our cue to finally return to the van. The moment we were about to drive off, Israeli army vehicles pulled up, and a few soldiers peered in at us. They took a quick inventory of the van and then sped off. Apparently, during our lecture, Israeli settlers were attacking a group of Palestinians. I had seen enough.

Zionism has convinced many Jews that they are preserving themselves. The common thought is that if the "savage" Palestinians stop resisting, stop shooting rockets, stop fighting Israel's inevitable domination, there can be peace. I find this peculiar because during my visit, I felt no danger from Palestinians, only from Israeli soldiers. Perhaps it's because I'm accustomed to being hunted in America. There is no Palestinian-Israeli conflict; there is only oppression.

I will never disregard the Holocaust which left millions of European Jews dead or scrambling for survival. There is nothing that will ever right the wrongs committed by the brutal German regime. On the same note, I will never minimize Germany's first, and little-known, genocide against the Herero and Namaqua of Africa, or King Leopold's bloody reign on the continent. Tragedy is tragedy, one should not be placed above the other, nor should a past tragedy justify the next.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Feb 14, 2014 10:33 am

FEBRUARY 13, 2014

Pariah Status and Isolation Lie Ahead
The Tide Turns Against Israel
by JONATHAN COOK
Nazareth

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rarely been so politically embattled. His travails indicate the Israeli right’s inability to respond to a shifting political landscape, both in the region and globally.

The context for his troubles was his commitment in 2009, under great pressure from a newly elected US president, Barack Obama, to support the creation of a Palestinian state. It was a concession he never wanted to make and one he has regretted ever since.

The US secretary of state, John Kerry, has exploited that pledge by imposing the current peace talks. Now Netanyahu faces an imminent “framework agreement” that may require him to make further commitments towards an outcome he abhors.

Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, is not helping. Rather than digging in his own heels, he offers constant accommodation. Last week Abbas told the New York Times that Israel could take a leisurely five years removing its soldiers and settlers from a key piece of Palestinian territory, the Jordan Valley. The Palestinian state would remain demilitarised, while Nato troops could stay “for a long time, and wherever they want”.

The Arab League is another thorn. It has obliged by renewing its offer from 2002, the Arab Peace Initiative, that promises Israel peaceful relations with the Arab world in return for its agreement to Palestinian statehood.

Meanwhile, the European Union is gently turning the screws on the occupation. It regularly trumpets condemnation of Israel’s settlement-building frenzies, including last week’s announcement of 558 settler homes in East Jerusalem. And in the background sanctions loom over settlement goods.

European financial institutions are providing a useful barometer of the mood among the 28 EU member states. They have become the unexpected pioneers of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, with a steady trickle of banks and pension funds pulling out their investments in recent weeks.

Pointing out that boycotts and “delegitimisation” campaigns are only going to gather pace, Kerry has warned that Israel’s traditional policy is “unsustainable”.

That message rings true with many Israeli business leaders, who have thrown their weight behind the US diplomatic plan. They believe that a Palestinian state is the key to Israel gaining access to lucrative regional markets and continued economic growth.

Netanyahu must have been disconcerted by the news that among those meeting Kerry to express support at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month was Shlomi Fogel, the prime minister’s long-time intimate.

Pressure on these various fronts may explain Netanyahu’s hasty convening last weekend of his senior ministers to devise a strategy to counter the boycott trend. Proposals include a $28 million media campaign, legal action against boycotting institutions, and intensified surveillance of overseas activists by the Mossad.

On the domestic scene, Netanyahu – who is known to prize political survival above all other concerns – is getting a rough ride as well. He is being undermined on his right flank by rivals inside the coalition.

Naftali Bennett, the settlers’ leader, provoked a chafing public feud with Netanyahu this month, accusing him of losing his “moral compass” in the negotiations. At the same time, Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister from the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, has dramatically changed tack, cosying up to Kerry, whom he has called “a true friend of Israel”. Lieberman’s unlikely statesmanship has made Netanyahu’s run-ins with the US look, in the words of a local analyst, “childish and irresponsible”.

It is in the light of these mounting pressures on Netanyahu that one should understand his increasingly erratic behaviour – and the growing rift with the US.

A damaging falling-out last month, following insults from the defence minister against Kerry, has not subsided. Last week Netanyahu unleashed his closest cabinet allies to savage Kerry again, with one calling the US secretary of state’s pronouncements “offensive and intolerable”.

Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, tweeted her displeasure with a shot across the bows. The Israeli government’s attacks were “totally unfounded and unacceptable”, she noted. Any doubt she was speaking for the president was later dispelled when Obama praised Kerry’s “extraordinary passion and principled diplomacy”.

But despite outward signs, Netanyahu is less alone than he looks – and far from ready to compromise.

He has the bulk of the Israeli public behind him, helped by media moguls like his friend Sheldon Adelson who are stoking the national mood of besiegement and victimhood.

But most importantly he has a large chunk of Israel’s security and economic establishment on side too.

The settlers and their ideological allies have deeply penetrated the higher ranks of both the army and the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret intelligence service. The Haaretz newspaper revealed this month the disturbing news that three of the four heads of the Shin Bet now subscribe to this extremist ideology.

Moreover, powerful elements within the security establishment are financially as well as ideologically invested in the occupation. In recent years the defence budget has rocketed to record levels as a whole layer of the senior military exploits the occupation to justify feathering its nest with grossly inflated salaries and pensions.

There are also vast business profits in the status quo, from hi-tech to resource-grabbing industries. Indications of what is at stake were illuminated recently with the announcement that the Palestinians will have to buy from Israel at great cost two key natural resources – gas and water – they should have in plentiful supply were it not for the occupation.

With these interest groups at his back, a defiant Netanyahu can probably face off the US diplomatic assault this time. But Kerry is not wrong to warn that in the long term yet another victory for Israeli intransigence will prove pyhrrhic.

These negotiations may not lead to an agreement, but they will mark a historic turning-point nonetheless. The delegitimisation of Israel is truly under way, and the party doing most of the damage is the Israeli leadership itself.


02.12.14 - 11:51 PM
Chutzpah Without Parallel: Knesset Members, Shocked We Tell You Shocked To Hear of Alleged Harsh Treatment of Palestinians, Walk Out
by Abby Zimet


In a dispiriting sign that Israel's wall of denial is as formidable as its wall of apartheid, European Parliament President Martin Schulz caused havoc in the Israeli Parliament when he mildly questioned the Gazan blockade for preventing growth, the unfair water allocations for Palestinians, and other hardships facing those in the occupied West Bank - after which several right-wing Israeli members stormed out in protest against the "very grave” lies and said they could not accept "false moralizing against the people of Israel, certainly not in German," because when in doubt, no matter the subject, cue the Holocaust. In fact, studies have found Israelis get up to 4.42 times more water than Palestinians in the West Bank, unemployment in Gaza is at almost 40%, and Palestinians have broad support in the international community for their desire, as Schultz put it, “to live in their own country, without violence, without restrictions of movement.” Apparently taken aback by the uproar, Schultz later noted to Israeli journalists that, "Mutual criticism is quite normal in a democracy." Yes, well, that must mean Israel is....

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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Feb 17, 2014 6:35 pm

Israel's Netanyahu Calls Boycotters 'Anti-Semites'
JERUSALEM February 17, 2014 (AP)
By IAN DEITCH Associated Press
Associated Press
It is time Israel fought back against those who boycott the Jewish state, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday, dubbing them "anti-Semites."

The comments come as concerns grow in Israel over a Palestinian-led movement of boycott, divestment and sanctions —knows by its acronym, BDS. The boycott has been growing recently, mainly in Europe, where some businesses and pension funds have cut investments or trade with Israeli firms they say are connected to West Bank settlements.

Speaking to a group of visiting Jewish-American leaders, Netanyahu said it is time for Israel to "delegitimize the delegitimizers."

"In the past anti-Semites boycotted Jewish businesses and today they call for the boycott of the Jewish state, and by the way, only the Jewish state," Netanyahu said. "I think that it is important that the boycotters be exposed for what they are, they are classical anti-Semites in modern garb," Netanyahu said.

Many Israelis say the boycott has strong anti-Semitic connotations and is meant to delegitimize the Jewish state as a whole and not merely a pressure tactic against its policies toward the Palestinians.

For many Israelis, the boycott conjures up dark images of the Nazi boycott prior and during WWII when Jewish academics were kicked out of universities and Jewish businesses were vandalized and boycotted.

BDS activists say they promote different objectives, with some focusing on a boycott of the settlements and others saying everything Israeli must be shunned until there is a peace deal. BDS supporters argue that Israel will withdraw from war-won lands only if it has a price to pay. Israeli leaders dismiss such claims, pointing to their willingness to negotiate a land-for-peace deal with the Palestinians.

Netanyahu said Israeli is fighting BDS by exposing the boycotters and with its booming high-tech sector which is a big attraction for leaders and investors worldwide.

After years of brushing off boycott threats as a tool of fringe extremists, Israel seems to have become genuinely worried in recent months.

Israel's finance minister Yair Lapid has said that the country could suffer economically from a costly boycott if peace talks with the Palestinians fail.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who is brokering negotiations with the Palestinians, has warned that Israel could find itself increasingly targeted by a boycott if it fails to reach a peace deal.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 19, 2014 10:48 am

Published on Tuesday, February 18, 2014 by Electronic Intifada
Israel Is Losing the Fight Against BDS
by Ali Abunimah


From 24 February this year, through the month of March, campuses and organizations all over the world, including in Brazil, Europe and across North America will be marking the tenth annual Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW).

IAW, an international series of events, has become a major focal point to rally support and build up organizing for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) on Israel.

The tenth IAW comes at a time when the BDS movement has seen unprecedented growth and attention from world media as well as from Israel and the governments and institutions complicit with its ongoing crimes against Palestinians.

Yet Israel is losing its fight against BDS.

Israel worried

Just yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once more drew attention to the power of BDS by tweeting an attack on activists and falsely claiming that BDS targets Jews rather than targeting Israel’s abuses against Palestinian rights:




The Do Nothing Peace Machine: Why Zionism Negates Peace
by William A. Cook / February 18th, 2014

In 2010 I edited The Plight of the Palestinians: A Long History of Destruction, a collection of articles by world renowned writers who unveil the genocide taking place in Palestine by the occupying power in this “advanced” civilization of 2014, a slow water torture of constant humiliation, destruction and death as the world watches and nothing is done to bring justice to the people of Palestine. In that text, Dr. Jeff Halper details the quest for “peace” that has been crippled by the state of Israel, the intentional, calculated and indifferent response to the conditions facing the Palestinian people every day. He offers this reality:
Israel’s strategy until today is to bypass and encircle them, making deals with governments that isolate and, unsuccessfully so far, neutralize the Palestinians as players. This was most tellingly shown in the Madrid peace talks, when Israel only allowed Palestinian participation as part of the Jordanian delegation. But it includes the Oslo “peace process” as well. While Israel insisted on a letter from Arafat explicitly recognizing Israel as a “legitimate construct” in the Middle East, and later demanded a specific statement recognizing Israel as a Jewish state (both of which it got), no Israeli government ever recognized the collective rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination. Rabin was forthright as to the reason: If Israel recognizes the Palestinians’ right to self-determination, it means that a Palestinian state must by definition emerge – and Israel did not want to promise that.4 So except for vague pronouncements about not wanting to rule over another people and “our hand outstretched in peace,” Israel has never allowed the framework for genuine negotiations. The Palestinians must be taken into account, they may be asked to react to one or another of our proposals, but they are certainly not equal partners with claims to the country rivaling ours (“The Problem with Israel,” Jeff Halper, 2007).
Seven years ago, November 22, 2007, I wrote an article about George W. Bush’s plan to bring peace to the mid-east, a plan that used the city of Annapolis as its label with Condoleeza Rice acting as emissary from the American government meeting with Israeli and Palestinian officials. That article tracked the reality of the failed peace process from before the Mandate to 2007. It is now 2014 and there is no peace—but there is once again a “peace” initiative under way, an initiative every American President seems obliged to give lip service to knowing beforehand no peace will be affected. Why? Why go through a process all know will not result in peace? Why exercise an illusion? For whose benefit? To what end?

Resting on my bookshelf is a cunning little device, an object I’ve had in my office for decades, a curiosity piece that grabs the attention of children and adults, a strange unfamiliar gadget that appears to have a purpose since it has a handle, two gears fastened to small rounded cylinders that crisscross each other as one turns the handle, it’s called a do-nothing machine. Someone conceptualized it and someone created it and someone turns that handle to do nothing. Why? Why go through a process all know will not accomplish anything? Why spend time on an illusion? For whose benefit? To what end?

There it sits next to The Plight of the Palestinians and it seems to me Obama and Kerry must have one just like it since they initiated a process that they know will accomplish nothing, inspired no doubt by the do-nothing machine. Why? Perhaps it’s to pretend that they are not owned by the Israeli state or perhaps to defend themselves against the perception that they have abandoned any thought of a peaceful two state solution in Palestine or perhaps to extend time once again so Israel can steal more land and create more settlements allowing the slow motion genocide to continue. Perhaps an illusion is better than nothing at all.

But what of the Israeli government; why would they join this farce? That’s puzzling to me since I know from their own words and actions that they have no intention of recognizing the rights of Palestinians to a state much less create one. Indeed they have for 65 years denied even the idea of a Palestinian state, and as Halper has made clear they have torpedoed more than 19 times any attempt to create such a state. Indeed, there is no logic, no rational explanation of Israeli insistence that they want a two state solution, that peace is their desire, that the United States must be the interlocutor to bring the two parties together without pre-conditions and then raise conditions that could not be met and maintain this ruse for 65 years while absconding with all but 11% of Palestine (Israel has used a complex legal and bureaucratic mechanism to take control of more than fifty percent of the land in the West Bank. This land has been used mainly to establish settlements and create reserves of land for the future expansion of the settlements” [see Ifamericansknew.com] during that same period). There must be a deeper explanation that drives the Israeli governments to deceive the world year after year, something we have not yet addressed yet could be an explanation.

Perhaps once again it’s necessary to seek wisdom in fiction, to explore the unknown in narratives that dig deep into the subconscious mind, to burrow inside the human innards, to seek beyond the intestines and muscles and sinews and bones where the true being resides, where heartfelt yearnings reside, where the spring of emotions pours forth its latent reactions to self, where needles and surgical knives cannot go if understanding is to be sought, where self responds to urgings that drive the impulses to desperate acts that self itself does not comprehend, where the inner self is encrusted with the fears of generations pounded into the small child from inception, and identity is an accumulation of accepted hatred that seeps into the being in a collective response that determines all acts as self-survival against any outside of the tribal clan that has indelibly marked each member with a new source of pulsating blood, no longer a heart that throbs in rhythm to the hearts of all humankind, but emanates from a somatic fear that seeks only its own security, its own purpose, its own distinction as its hallmark at the expense of all who threaten its existence.

Franz Kafka, in “A Fragment,” tells a story told to him by his father who heard the story from a strange boatman. “A great wall is going to be built to protect the Emperor. As you may know, the infidel nations, with demons among them too, often gather in front of the imperial palace and shoot their black arrows at the Emperor.” A cryptic fragment certainly, about an emperor, an imperial palace, and a wall to protect the emperor and his people; unfortunately there are infidel nations who gather around the palace and shoot the emperor. Ultimately there is no protection, there is only on-going fear that any action to protect is doomed, and if, as Kafka also maintained “Guilt is never to be doubted,” fear exists inside the wall, always fear inside and out, of self and all others. Curiously, the Zionists have found reason for a wall thinking that it could serve as protection against their manifest enemies oblivious to Kafka’s admonition. In 2004 I wrote about Sharon’s wall of fear.
I would suggest that Sharon’s “Wall of Fear” walls in both the Palestinians and the Jews, that it gives offense to those on both sides, and it offends the moral sensibilities of any civilized person anywhere in the world. Sharon prepared for the building of the wall by laying its foundation in the guts of his people, fear of four million terrorists and fear that the future offered no hope for peace. Having bulldozed the Palestinian Authority out of relevance, he removed the possibility of negotiations, and, by that act, left the Jews without hope for peace, leaving him free to force the erection of the “Wall.”
Consider how the Wall walls in the Israeli people: it looms on the horizon a daily reminder that they have failed to achieve their primary goal, a peaceful assimilation of Jews from around the world into a haven, given to them by a remorseful Europe and America, where all could live in dignity and respect, without rancor or fear of racism, hatred and oppression; a daily reminder that they have walled in a poor and deprived people behind barriers that isolate them from the community of nations, from their fields and shops, from relatives and families, not unlike the Pogroms suffered by the Jews in Poland, Austria, Russia, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia; a daily and fearful reminder that someday, somewhere, someone will scale or circumnavigate the Wall as people have done from time immemorial – as the Huns did when they mocked the efforts of the Chinese to keep them at bay on their side of the Great Wall, or the Germans when they laughingly skirted the Maginot Line – to make absurd the efforts of one people to subdue the will of another; a daily reminder that their purported Democracy mocks itself as it seals off an entire population in full sight of the world community despite the vocal objection of that community, indeed, in complete and utter disbelief that the Jews of all peoples could undertake such a heinous act; a daily reminder that they have created a monstrous gray monument to the harm they have inflicted on another people, a monument that in time will have the same effect as the march around Jericho, “And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of their sword”; a daily reminder that visible or no each and every name of an incarcerated Palestinian is carved into that cement just as the names of the fallen Jews, victims of Nazi atrocities, are carved into the marble slabs at the Holocaust Memorial in Florida; and, finally, a daily reminder that this Wall is but the beginning of a Wall that must stretch north and south along the Jordanian border, further north along the Syrian line, west along Lebanon’s southern coast, and south along the Sinai, thus completing the incarceration of the Jews once again” (Cook, “Fence, Barrier, Wall: What’s in a Name?,” 2004).

Could we not ask here as we did of the “Do Nothing Machine” why? What drives the mind to destroy what it claims it must protect? Why build more walls except to keep those not of the tribe out and those within the tribe clean of contamination lest their inner self lose its distinction, its hallmark and find release from the fear that pulses inside threatening its existence by purging it of all that could or would destroy it because it is not of them. The Zionists in forcing the existence of the State of Israel on its people did so by capitalizing on this fear. The world desires to destroy the Jews. There is no protection for the Jews anywhere in the world except in Palestine where their historic rights to the land will prevail and where the Jews will protect themselves from all their enemies; they need only ensure that protection by linking their survival to those nations that have the power and the will to ensure security. This requires control of such umbilical linked “friends,” the United States, England, France, Germany, Canada, Australia who become their “protector” as Rabbi Loew’s Golem protected the Ghetto of Prague in the 16th century (see “A Nation of Golems,” Cook, 2009). It also requires that their protection is sealed by law, hence restrictions on “those who criticize the Zionist state” as H.R. 4009(113th Congress, 2nd Session, 2014) demonstrates, a “Bill to amend the Higher Education Act of 1965 to prohibit an institution that participates in a boycott of Israeli academic institutions or scholars from being eligible for certain funds under that Act” (proposed by Mr. Roskam and Mr. Lipinski as sent to the Committee on Education and the Workforce).

There exists a mindset here driven by forces beyond the reasoning mind. Kafka offers a depiction of this phenomenon in “Metamorphosis,” a tale of surrealistic quality where the protagonist wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect. Yet his mental faculties appeared to be stable, his concerns those of a man prevented from getting to his train on time, on how to deal with the problems of those outside his bedroom door who would be repulsed by his demeanor; fear of confrontations followed, fear of his domineering father rose swiftly, loss of his job, loss of the money he provided for his family, the potential upheaval of his life made by his visible transformation into a loathsome insect roused innate fears both of expulsion and death, his words were not understandable, the imminent awareness by all outside that he was different, driven by different realities, unfit to be welcomed into the community, ultimately to be driven out or destroyed. Such is the inner fear that pulses in Gregor’s being and comes to fruition in the night, a nightmare perhaps but presented as true.

Kafka once stated, “I consist of literature and am unable to be anything else.” The house he (Gregor Samsa aka Franz Kafka) lived in, the town that surrounds it, the wall that surrounds the town metaphorically mirror the inner identity of the narrator, walled within walls, wakening inside a room where now, in this night where he, as he did virtually every night, writes the real world within which he lives, a world of fiction where explanations evoke symbols and depictions that convey truth in images and unleash through dreams the latent fears that energize those forced to exist in isolation from all others for their identity is encased in a tribal mind dependent for its meaning and its understanding of self on those who control their reasoning and determine for them not only who they are but why they are and in that vice how they will act. Thus did Kafka’s narrow world of the Judengassen encompass his entire life, one of Europe’s oldest ghettos, what he called “my prison cell-my fortress.” But in the dream of Samsa transformed into a hideous insect, there comes a release from that control as he can scale now the walls of his room and the very ceiling above, a freedom made possible by his release from his “Penal Colony,” an escape from “The Judgment,” an avoidance of The Trial and find a new life, perhaps, in Amerika.

The Metamorphosis captures the condition of the tribal member caught within the society he must accommodate and assimilate into despite the impossibility of that probability, not because the society consciously refuses the assimilation but because the individual fears those not members of the tribe and because he fears they find him odious as the hideous insect depicts. Crushed inside these twin fears, there is no escape for the tribe but the destruction of the perceived enemies regardless of their passivity to the condition of the tribes’ fears.

But Kafka’s brilliant and penetrating analysis of the tribal mind and its insidious control of its members does not end with The Metamorphosis, it is extended and brutalized in “The Penal Colony.” This narrative captures the incapacity of the individual mind to control its own destiny. There is an Officer who is both controller and judge, guided by a simple rule, “guilt is never in doubt,” a rule that applies to those not of the tribe but to tribal members as well; all are guilty, all threaten the security and control of the Zionist entity, hence the epithet “self-hating Jew.” As the Officer describes the penal colony’s procedures for determining guilt, the condemned are totally submissive to the authorities, they do not expect due rights under the law, they understand that those in control have full authority to arrest, imprison and condemn to death whomever they will thus making legal arrest without due process, incarceration indefinitely and execution as well as extrajudicial assassination.

When questioned by an outside Traveler who comes to interview the Officer, the obvious questions seek obvious answers that the Officer finds incomprehensible, how can anyone question the authorities to inflict what they must to ensure the safety of the people? To justify his position the Officer releases the prisoner who was scheduled for execution and gets on the torture machine that he designed to prove that the judgment of the authorities is justified for all because it stipulates that the judgment must “Be Just.” Ironically, Kafka narrates that the machine goes berserk, and the designer of the hideous machine becomes its last victim as it disintegrates into an uncontrollable monster.

What Kafka envisioned is prophetic; when a state imposes its will on all its sister states, it becomes a monster, a metallic Golem perhaps that destroys at will but creates its own grave in the process, as Kafka’s Officer becomes pinned to the needles that were supposed to inscribe on the prisoner’s back the judgment of the authorities but instead leave his body suspended, bleeding and shredded, hanging above the grave into which he was to have been tossed. There it must remain isolated, condemned, and forever abhorred as an atrocity of insanity and arrogance.

Consider the actions of the Zionist State that from its inception under the control of the Jewish Agency, the eleven controllers in the Red House making their determinations for all Jews arriving in Palestine, as described by Dr. Ilan Pappe in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, to use terror against the British Mandate Government in Palestine, to coerce the members of Parliament in London to overlook their crimes against the British people, to massacre the citizens of Deir Yassin and over 30 other massacres in areas belonging to the indigenous peoples of Palestine, to control by threat and intimidation the new immigrants arriving in Palestine from Europe as depicted by documents seized by the Mandate Police, and available now from the files of Sir Richard C. Catling in the Rhodes House Archives, and one has a clear picture of Zionist power over the Jewish people escaping Germany and elsewhere as they imposed their will on the helpless, both Jew and Palestinian, during the late 1930s and through 1948.

When complicity in crime is imposed on innocent people through coercion and fear, we have an understanding of the truth imbedded in Kafka’s narratives and that gives us pause to realize why this state can attack Iraq to destroy its nuclear plant construction and that of Syria and attempt to force the western world to attack Iran; it makes one realize that invading Lebanon without justified reason, its invasion and retention of the Golon Heights and its invasion and destruction of Gaza happens despite the international laws that should determine the behavior of member nations, and it should make obvious that this state will go to any lengths to control the United Nations by controlling the American Government by controlling its elected officials regardless of the desires of the citizens of the United States.

We need only reflect on the 2008 Christmas invasion of Gaza to understand the irrationality of attacking a defenseless people surrounded by the military power of the IDF with its use of extensive missile force from the air, the eastern borders under Israeli control and from the sea; add to that the needless use of white phosphorus that is both illegal and causes catastrophic pain for those unable to escape its searing pain. Why such brutality against a people incarcerated on all sides without military capability to defend their homes or even the ability to flee the terror of the Jewish invasion? Why inflict such barbaric force when those surrounded had no means to destroy the Zionist state? What irrational behavior erupts in a purported civilized state unless it is itself an irrational fear of self-destruction if perceived enemies are not eradicated as insurance against security (read survival instinct) for the people of Israel? Listen to the voices of those in positions of power and influence that justify the attempted destruction of the Gazan people:
The son of Sharon :’Flatten Gaza, send it back to Middle Ages, they need to die! ’
Interior Minister Eli Yishai said Operation Pillar of Defense would continue and likely be expanded, The war in Gaza “must be so painful and difficult that the terror groups will not think twice but a hundred times before they fire missiles against Israel again…The goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages, only then will Israel be calm for the next 40 years. ” The National Unity Party, Michael Ben-Ari, called for Israeli soldiers to kill Gazans without thought or mercy.“ There are no innocents in Gaza, don’t let any diplomats who want to look good in the world endanger your lives – mow them down! ” A prominent Israeli rabbi, Yaakov Yosef, the son of former chief rabbi, Ovadia Yosef, in a sermon at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron blessed IDF soldiers while urging them “to learn from the Syrians how to slaughter the enemy. ”
How explain these cries of inhumane hate against a place and its people that have never attacked the Zionist state except out of absolute desperation, hopelessness, and despair, the last resort of those who have the right to attack unlawful occupiers of their land and homes? This is the voice of insanity that cannot exist in a sane world where concern, compassion and love should guide our endeavors and foster the drive toward true peace, not a “peace” (shalom) that justifies its rights by demanding absolute control of all that threatens its security as it denies the very thing it claims as its right. This world in this time is not tribal anymore; it is guided by international laws that all peoples of the earth have designed and mutually accept. That should be true of the Israeli State since it has signed acceptance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Accords that have defined genocide, a definition resulting from the catastrophic incarceration and deaths inflicted on the Jews in Nazi Germany. Yet today this definition is disgraced and defied by the Zionist State as it commits genocide in Palestine as the voices in the book that opened this article testifies, and the world watches and does nothing.

Perhaps now we might understand that fiction can enlighten us more than the silent voices of the intimidated and the damned; Kafka has looked inside the human breast and unveiled the true force that gives life to the horrors inflicted on the people of Palestine and the peoples of Lebanon and Syria and Jordan and Gaza as the Zionist power used the teachings of Judaism to control those seeking security and comfort in what could have been a homeland for the Jewish people but has become instead a lawless and ruthless occupation power and destroyer of the true owners of the land from the time they were offered solace to live with the people of Palestine.

And this brings us to the “Do Nothing Machine” that the Zionists use to deceive the people of the world that it desires a peaceful solution to the crisis by a mutually negotiated two state determination when in reality they desire only the eradication of the Arabs in Israel and all other Arabs that inhabit their land in Judea and Samaria; this has been their goal since they first arrived in Palestine and that “peace Machine” they use will ensure that neither peace nor a Palestinian state will ever exist. Let’s end with the unfortunate prophetic words of Israel’s most ardent exponent and the most vocal of its true face, a terrorist of extraordinary visibility and one accepted by the Israeli people as their Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, head of one of the Jewish terrorist groups, who described Deir Yassin as “splendid,” and stated: “As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, Thou has chosen us for conquest.”

There remains only this horrifying possibility: to fill their new state, the Jewish State, the Zionists have utilized the services of “Settlers,” people who think like their ancestors did 3500 years ago, tribally, as those who respond to day to day living instinctively, in fear, always with the tiger lurking in the rocks, always with their enemy tribes anxious to destroy them, always with the mindset that they alone must preempt another lest they become the victim, and always with the rationale that all are potential destroyers and that gives them the right to kill at will by whatever means necessary; yet in bringing this ancient mindset into their midst, the Zionists have created a fearsome and loathsome nightmare not unlike Kafka’s “Burrow” where “unseen enemies crawl through the dark tunnels” and the narrator, Kafka’s only first person tale of horror, feels “threatened not only by outside enemies, but enemies within, in the earth’s entrails,” and they are legendary, and “I believe in them.”
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 19, 2014 1:22 pm

Israel and Palestine: Shifting paradigms
It's time for Israelis and Palestinians to reconsider how they view the conflict and their own aspirations.
Last updated: 17 Feb 2014 10:31
Massoud A Derhally

Israel doesn't like parallels being drawn between it and the South African apartheid system, writes Derhally [Reuters]
"I knew that people expected me to harbour anger towards whites," Nelson Mandela wrote in the Long Walk to Freedom, recalling the morning after his release from 27 years in jail. "But I had none. In prison, my anger towards whites decreased, but my hatred for the system grew. I wanted South Africa to see that I loved even my enemies while I hated the system that turned us against one another."

The late South African president chose the path of truth, justice and reconciliation. Just as blacks and whites drafted a new constitution for a united South Africa so too can Israelis and Palestinians if they choose to live as equal citizens of one state. Segregation would end, political prisoners released, Palestinian refugees in exile allowed to return, loss and dispossession addressed through compensation, a truth and reconciliation commission formed, democratic elections held. Talk of existentialism and boycotts will be irrelevant.

Given these grim realities, and in the face of ethical and legal obligations, it's not by chance that countries and private enterprises are divesting from Israeli companies. PGGM, the largest Dutch pension fund, divested from Israel's five biggest banks last month because of their involvement in financing illegal settlements. Norway's sovereign fund followed suit, blacklisting two Israeli companies because of their involvement in settlement construction.


A transformational point

Israel doesn't like the parallels being drawn between it and the South African apartheid system. But equivalences exist. Israel has in place a formal system that undeniably privileges Israeli Jews while it legalises discrimination against Palestinians (Christian and Muslim) through dozens of checkpoints, segregated roads, arbitrary arrests, house demolitions, land confiscations, collective punishment and forced deportation. Israeli legislation bans Palestinians (and no other ethnic group) from living in Israel after marrying an Israeli citizen.

Just as South Africa was at a transformational point when apartheid ended and Mandela gained his freedom, Israel today in the face of a growing boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, is also at an important juncture. Nearly 66 years after Palestinians were forced out of their homes and 20 years after the Oslo Declaration of Principles was signed, there is little one can point to that shows any measure of success from the so-called peace process.

Since the 1993 Oslo agreement, Israel has paid lip service to the two-state solution, using the cover of "peace talks" to pursue a policy of containment that manages the conflict while in tandem spearheading an expansionary settlement agenda. The settlement enterprise with its segregated roads, security checkpoints, eight-metre wall that is double the size of the Berlin wall (projected to reach 403 miles), contravenes the spirit of peace talks and coexistence. Settlements are an intrinsic and systematic tool of every Israeli government to establish a fait-accompli on the ground that accentuates the marginalisation of Palestinians.

In violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention the number of Israeli settlers across the West Bank has surged from 262,500 in 1993 to more than 520,000, with more than 200,000 in East Jerusalem (the intended capital of a Palestinian state), according to the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Earlier this month, Israel announced further settlement construction in occupied Palestinian land, even as US Secretary of State John Kerry presses on with a controversial and flawed peace deal that would, according to the Israeli media, leave 80 percent of Israeli settlers in place and negate the rights of Palestinian refugees.

While Israel's economy has thrived in tandem with the growth of settlements, Palestinian lives have regressed. The Palestinian Authority which loses about $300 million a year in fiscal revenue retained by Israel is constantly cash-strapped, unable to pay the wages of civil servants, dependent on donations from international organisations and pledges from countries that seldom materialise or are partially met.

About 36 percent of the West Bank's 2.9 million Palestinians suffer from clinical depression, higher than rates in the US, the UK, China and Australia, according to Mohammad M. Herzallah, founder of the Palestinian Neuroscience Initiative and a doctoral candidate at Rutgers University.

Meanwhile, nearly 2 million Palestinians in Gaza remain under siege, in one of the most densely populated strips of land in the world with 50 percent youth unemployment.

Given these grim realities, and in the face of ethical and legal obligations, it's not by chance that countries and private enterprises are divesting from Israeli companies. PGGM, the largest Dutch pension fund, divested from Israel's five biggest banks last month because of their involvement in financing illegal settlements. Norway's sovereign fund followed suit, blacklisting two Israeli companies because of their involvement in settlement construction. Danske Bank, Denmark's biggest bank, has also divested from Israel's largest lender Bank Hapoalim.

An outcry that forced actress Scarlett Johansson to give up her ambassadorial role with the Oxfam international charity over her involvement with Israel's Sodastream company, which operates in the occupied West Bank, cast light on the moral implications of doing business in illegally annexed land.

As in South Africa, more entities will come to refuse doing business with Israel, trade relations will deteriorate and as the rand was undermined, confidence in the shekel too will erode. Military occupations just aren't palatable.

The BDS movement "is approaching the turning point…in which the civic action from below will meet the official policies of governments and parliaments from above, and sanctions against Israel will become a fait accompli", Avraham Burg, a former speaker of Israel's Knesset assembly, wrote in Haaretz this month. Israel "will remain helpless when confronted by a civil rebellion that moves the discourse from who's stronger/tougher/more resilient to a discourse on rights and values", he added.

The two-state solution still viable?
The clock is ticking. Just as the apartheid regime in South Africa had a choice, so too does Israel. President F. W. de Klerk once thought the solution in South Africa would be separate states for blacks and whites. He realised however that was not tenable and took unilateral moves recognising the African National Congress, releasing Mandela from prison and held elections.

There was a time that a two-state solution may have worked. By virtue of Israel's doing, the realities on the ground make it increasingly unlikely. A secular democratic state, however, for both peoples is not a mirage. It requires sacrifice and compromise, foremost that both people forego their obsession with nationalism and its illusions, in exchange for a stake in one nation as equal citizens. That ultimately will be instrumental to true reconciliation among Israelis and Palestinians. Inherently, it is the fundamental reason why "peace talks" have been unfruitful.

It's time for a real paradigm shift in the way Israelis and Palestinians think about the conflict, their aspirations and a lasting solution. More than being an idealistic aspiration, a one-state solution for two people is the realistic choice.

The alternative won't just mean more violence, but also a far larger and different intifada or uprising than the previous two Israel suppressed militarily. It will extend beyond its geography and cast Israel into isolation, ostracising it as a pariah state so long as apartheid continues. No injustice can last forever.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 19, 2014 3:09 pm

Israeli Gov't Forms Strategy to Fight Boycott

Israeli government allocates millions to launch a campaign of PR and intelligence-gathering on those supporting boycott - 58 min ago

Omar Barghouti is an independent Palestinian researcher, commentator and human rights activist committed to upholding international law and universal human rights. He is a founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and the Palestinian Civil Society Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. He holds a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Columbia University, NY, and a master's degree in philosophy (ethics) from Tel Aviv University. He is a freelance dance choreographer and trainer. He is the author of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights (Haymarket, 2011).

Transcript
Israeli Gov't Forms Strategy to Fight BoycottLIA TARACHANSKY, PRODUCER: Nearly a day hasn't gone by without the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against Israel making headline news.
NEWS CLIP, CHANNEL 23 (VOICEOVER) (SUBTITLED TRANSL.): The Finance Ministry warns of a world boycott of Israel that would hurt our standard of living and cost us thousands of jobs. On the other hand, some say Israel's economy is strong enough to withstand a growing European boycott. So who's right?
~~~
NEWS PRESENTER, CHANNEL 22 (SUBTITLED TRANSL.): Leading business people appeal to Prime Minister Netanyahu and pressure him to reach an agreement [with the Palestinians]. They call on him to get to an agreement and warn of the financial boycott. We welcome businessman and CEO of L'Oréal Israel, Gad Propper.
Gad Propper, hello.
GAD PROPPER, L'ORÉAL ISRAEL (SUBTITLED TRANSL.): Good evening.
PRESENTER: After all the press about a European boycott, as a CEO of an international company how much do you really feel this pressure to reach a political resolution?
PROPPER: The pressure from the outside is there. There are companies in Europe, in the U.S., in the Western world that talk about wanting to see peace in the Middle East.
~~~
TARACHANSKY: The movement, called BDS for short, is the latest and most organized call by Palestinian civil society for a boycott of Israel, until its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza ends, the refugees and displaced are allowed to return, and the Palestinians inside Israel are granted equal rights to Jews.
The central founder of the movement is Omar Barghouti. This week, The Real News sat down with him in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
~~~
OMAR BARGHOUTI, FOUNDING MEMBER, PALESTINIAN CAMPAIGN FOR THE ACADEMIC AND CULTURAL BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL: We reached a qualitative leap, if you will. But it's been--the signs have been piling up throughout the last couple of years. In December 2012, the ANC adopted the BDS call in its national conference.
Throughout 2013, we've had many smaller tipping points. Four academic associations in the U.S. adopted the academic boycott of Israel. The teachers union of Ireland did too. Many student councils across U.S. campuses adopted divestment from U.S. companies involved in the occupation.
TARACHANSKY: But all of these are mostly symbolic actions that basically make organizations that have very little financial influence on Israel take a stand. Now we're seeing actual concrete financial impacts.
BARGHOUTI: Absolutely. I was moving to the 2014 era, when we're starting to see real financial impact.
~~~
TARACHANSKY: Last month, the Netherlands' largest pension fund management company has decided to withdraw its investments from Israel's five largest banks, because they have branches in the West Bank and are involved in financing construction in the settlements. A few weeks earlier, the Dutch water company Vitens canceled a contract with Israel's Mekorot water company for similar reasons.
BARGHOUTI: And then we saw the German government excluding settlement entities from scientific cooperation agreements with Israel. We saw the Norwegian pension fund, the largest in the world, excluding Israeli companies from its investments; the largest Danish bank; and so on. So, yes, we're into a totally different era.
With the Dutch pension fund decision to take punitive measures against all Israeli banks involved in the occupied territories, this is very serious, because they're adopting the logic that you should punish the criminal, not the crime. The settlements are the crime. The criminal is the state of Israel. And the criminal at the lower level are the banks involved in those crimes, in funding those crimes.
TARACHANSKY: It was exactly the blurring of the green line by boycott initiatives that got the Israeli business community anxious. Israel's Channel 2 reported that in recent months the legal office of Daniel Reisner has become the main address of companies suffering from the boycott. Their leaders woke up one morning and discovered that to do business in Israel comes at a price, even if their headquarters sit in the heart of Tel Aviv. They've lost contracts, got into trouble with their parent companies abroad, and managers even received letters threatening the cancellation of investments, says Reisner.
Earlier this month, the Israeli prime minister announced he will summon a first-of-its-kind broad meeting of ministers to discuss strategy for how to tackle the boycott. At the moment, Israel's only public strategy is a brand Israel PR campaign run by the Foreign Ministry. However, at the last minute the debate was postponed. But the prime minister tasked his cabinet to come up with ideas. Minister Naftali Bennett's is simply to find new friends. If European and American markets will demand Israel stand by conditions of their own free trade agreements and respect international law as those now advocating boycott do, Israel will simply turn elsewhere.
~~~
UNIDENTIFIED (SUBTITLED TRANSL.): How should we cope with the boycott threats from Europe? Find alternatives in the world. Udi Segel, are [you] there?
UDI SEGEL (SUBTITLED TRANSL.): Listen, there's the European market, and it's important. It's our biggest business partner. And there's a risk some of it is declining. Now Israel is making new contacts in search of new friends. So after our hug with Canada and wink to Australia, there is now a new group entitled Pacific Alliance--Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Chile.
~~~
TARACHANSKY: The Australian reports that Israel has about 40 trade offices, which Bennett is starting to divert from Western Europe towards Asia, with the Sweden office being replaced by one in Hong Kong and Finland's by one in China.
Europe is Israel's number-one export market.
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER: Having failed to dislodge us with weapons, with armies, with terrorists, with rockets, with missiles, they now think that they'll dislodge us with boycotts. Now, don't take my word for it. The founders of the BDS movement make their goals perfectly clear. They want to see the end of the Jewish state. They're quite explicit about it. And I think it's important that the boycotters must be exposed for what they are: they're classical anti-Semites.
~~~
TARACHANSKY: The Israeli Strategic Affairs minister recently asked the Israeli government for 100 million shekels to create a special unit that will deal specifically with the boycott. Now, he said that the work is only partially PR, but in fact most of it is intelligence.
BARGHOUTI: They have an extremely powerful army, a massive nuclear weapons arsenal. But they don't know how to combat a nonviolent movement based on human rights. And BDS is such a movement that Israel is really paralyzed in confronting. Last June, 2013, Israel in fact announced that it has failed in its propaganda efforts to fight BDS. All the attempts to smear, intimidate, and bully have failed. So they shifted in June 2013 overall responsibility for fighting BDS from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Ministry of Strategic Affairs. And now the Ministry of Strategic Affairs is asking for 100 million shekels to fight BDS, and they're establishing all kinds of reconnaissance, all kind of intelligence units, to spy on Western organizations and Western individuals supporting the BDS movement without a peep from those supposed Western democracies.
TARACHANSKY: Another idea came from Minister of Science and Technology Daniel Hershkowitz, who created a special fund for academics who were refused grants abroad for boycott reasons. The fund offers a quarter of a million shekels for research. The sum is symbolic, as 40 percent of Israeli research depends on European funds, a total of roughly 3 billion shekels. But with recent successes of the BDS campaign, researchers are likely to lean more heavily on the Israeli Education Ministry for finance.
On February 10, the prime minister finally held a strategic meeting. But instead of inviting most of his ministers, the head of intelligence agencies, and members of the judiciary as the original debate intended, he stuck to three of his most hardline cabinet members: Foreign Affairs Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Minister of the Economy Naftali Bennett, and Minister of Strategic Affairs Yuval Steinitz.
Recently a secretive report came out by the Foreign Ministry that said that about 30 percent of Israeli companies are going to suffer if the boycott continues. And they estimate that the economic damage overall will be about $20 billion.
BARGHOUTI: We've not read the report, but we've read some leaks in the media about it. And I don't think it's an exaggeration, because Who Profits, which is an Israeli project that documents Israeli and international companies operating in the OPT, estimate about 80 percent of Israeli companies are involved somehow in the occupied Palestinian territory, whether the settlements, the wall, the infrastructure, or other aspects of the occupation. So I wouldn't doubt that the figures will be drastic.
TARACHANSKY: Last month, Minister of Finance Yair Lapid told Israeli daily Ynet that his ministry has gone through all the various scenarios and determined that if the current situation with the boycott continues, it will hurt the pocket of every Israeli: "We are export-leaning, and export is dependent on our position in the world."
Israel's head negotiator with the Palestinians, Minister of Justice Tzipi Livni, echoed such comments when she supported U.S. secretary of state's warning that a failure to reach an agreement would lead to a boycott on steroids.
BARGHOUTI: Unlike South Africa during apartheid, Israel does not produce anything that the world cannot live without. They produce products and services that the world can buy elsewhere, usually at cheaper prices, including technological advances and so on you can get elsewhere. Israel does not have any unique position. Although it markets itself as unique, it's really not. It's very dependent on Western technology, especially U.S. technology. And we see a lot of the commercial relations with Israel are ideologically based, not just financial and economically based.
If they think BDS managed to grow in Western Europe, where support for Israel was once prevalent, they think we cannot have an effective BDS in India, Brazil, and other Global South countries, they are dead wrong.
NETANYAHU: We possess a great treasure. The capacity to innovate is a great treasure of profound economic value in today's world. And that is something that is bigger than all these boycotters could possibly address, because people are coming here, the new powers, the old powers and the new powers, superpowers--Google, Yahoo! You're not laughing. It's not a laughing matter. It's true.
TARACHANSKY: For The Real News, I'm Lia Tarachansky in Ramallah.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Feb 20, 2014 2:15 pm

Details Published on Friday, 14 February 2014 13:57
PNN
Palestinian and Israeli Scholars Unite in Supporting Irish Boycott Pledge


More than 120 Irish academics have signed a pledge to boycott Israeli institutions until Palestinian rights are respected, Academics for Palestine said in a press release Friday.

It added, the number is expected to increase as more lecturers learn about the growing campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel – a campaign led by Palestinians that is gaining global support.

"The conflict in Palestine has now reached its 'South African moment' – the point at which Israeli apartheid has been recognised as such by the international community," Prof Haim Bresheeth, a noted London-based film-maker and academic from Israel, said Friday.

Prof Bresheeth and Dr. Ghada Karmi, a Palestinian doctor of medicine, scholar and lecturer at the University of Exeter, will be in Belfast and Dublin next week to help launch a new Irish campaign to support the academic-boycott pledge, Academics for Palestine declared.

Dr. Karmi emphasised that the boycott does not target Israeli individuals but institutions. Far from being a threat to academic freedom, she said, BDS affirms its importance for Palestinians.

"Israel's well-documented repression of Palestinian academic life and victimisation of Palestinian teachers and students is a scandal to be denounced by all those who claim to care about academic freedom," she said.

Dr. Conor McCarthy, lecturer in English in NUI Maynooth and a long-time campaigner for Palestinian rights, welcomed the initiative.

"The recent endorsement of the boycott campaign by the 5,000-member American Studies Association in the US, along with positive moves by the Modern Language Association and the controversy over Scarlett Johansson, showed that BDS is now very much part of a mainstream international debate," Dr McCarthy said.

Nearly a year ago the Teachers Union of Ireland, which represents lecturers at institutes of technology across the State, became one of the first academic unions in the world to endorse the boycott.

"The TUI's historic decision was the impetus for building a broader academic-boycott campaign in Ireland," AFP chair Jim Roche said today. Roche, who teaches architecture at DIT, was instrumental in securing passage of the TUI motion.

EU-funded research partnerships involving Israeli institutions and worth billions of euro mean that this boycott campaign is not mere posturing: many Irish researchers are involved in such projects, including ones with military/security applications. AFP will be providing detailed information about these partnerships.

"The US, EU and other states have protected Israel and financed its occupation ever since 1967, making it impossible to resolve the conflict through the UN or international diplomatic channels," Prof Bresheeth said. "It puts a special responsibility on international civil society, and BDS is its main tool to resolve the conflict in a just and peaceful way."

The text of the boycott pledge reads:

"In response to the call from Palestinian civil society for an academic boycott of Israel, we pledge not to engage in any professional association with Israeli academic, research and state institutions and with those representing these institutions, until such time as Israel complies with international law and universal principles of human rights."
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 23, 2014 11:53 pm

The campaign against BDS is a deliberate choice to maintain the status quo
David Schwartzman and Mai Abdul Rahman on February 18, 2014 10

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweet from February 17, 2014

On February 12th, Jodi Rudoren argued in a New York Times article against the Palestinian-led Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, imploring readers to consider Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s position that BDS is “immoral”. If we take their claims at face value, than it behooves us to ask why so many Americans consider BDS a moral tool to protest Israeli policies? Why has the international BDS campaign become worrisome for Prime Minister Netanyahu, American Zionists, Israel and its supporters, and why does Ms. Rudoren equate a non-violent movement whose main objective is to achieve equal rights for all citizens whether living in Israel or the occupied territories with prejudice and anti-Semitism? More importantly is it anti-Semitic to envision a political Israeli system where all citizens are equal under the law living within the fold of international covenants and standards?

But first, what are the principles of the BDS Campaign? In July 2005, Palestinian civil society launched

“a call to international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel, similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era, until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with international law.”

BDS also calls for Israel to conform to international law that protects the right of return of the Palestinian refugees who were displaced in 1948. For generations these Palestinians have lived in temporary shelters in neighboring countries without political rights or protections. The BDS campaign reasserted the relevance of the Charter of Nuremberg, which declared forced deportation and uprooting of civilian populations to be both a war crime and a crime against humanity. This is an opinion adopted by the world community following World War II to protect future communities from displacement and to avert a recurrence of the German Jewish experience during the Hitler regime when Germany oversaw the indiscriminate displacement of Jews, with millions perishing in concentration camps. BDS also relies on the examples of the successful South African anti-Apartheid boycott, US civil rights principles, as well as the earlier Jewish United Boycott Committee Campaign when Jews and human rights activists developed an organized boycott campaigns of German goods that was implemented throughout Europe and the US between 1933-1945 to protest German war crimes and injustices perpetuated against Jews. This includes the 1936 boycott of the German Olympic Games, supported by American Jewish Congress and the Jewish Labor Committee, which helped educate the American public on the dire conditions and plight of Jews in Germany. Some German Americans accused the campaign of being fueled by anti-German sentiments, and they also found the US boycott call hypocritical considering our own system of racial segregation. Nonetheless the campaign’s objective succeeded in educating Americans of the conditions and plight of German Jews.

So why now fret about a global movement that is still concentrated in far away places like Europe, South America, Asia and Australia? BDS has been adopted and duplicated widely in the US by religious and non-faith individuals and groups across the United States. For almost a decade Americans devoted to peace and justice have quietly worked to implement some or all of the BDS initiative in their local communities and have succeeded in building a broad national movement. The Israeli government’s continued refusal to consider suspending settlement building – never mind end its illegal occupation of Palestinian land – has so far only generated pathetic rhetorical protests from the US government while massive US military and financial aid to Israel continues. Observing this travesty has been a major factor in encouraging ordinary Americans to implement the Palestinian BDS call.

Like the international BDS movement, the US BDS campaign relies on the guiding principals set by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Convention, UN resolutions and the International Court of Justice decisions on the Separation Wall and the Israeli occupation. The Hague Court stipulates the following: Settlers cannot be transferred into an occupied territory and the indigenous population of an occupied territory cannot be deported from the occupied territory regardless of motive. In addition the International Court of Justice considers it a crime against humanity for any state whether in peace or war to engage in the collective persecution of “any identifiable group on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, or religious” grounds. Israel clearly is guilty of all the above. Since Israel’s inception it has transferred, deported and discriminated against the indigenous Christian and Muslim Palestinian population.

So, on what basis does Ms. Rudoren claim that BDS is anti-Semitic? While most BDS activists are clueless why she chose this derogatory term, they are well aware that it is not unusual for Israel’s supporters to charge anyone who criticizes Israeli policies as anti-Semitic. Unfortunately it has become the norm for those who uncritically defend every action of the Israeli state to call any Jewish or non-Jewish scholar, advocate, academician or religious leader who challenges Israel’s policies a self hating Jew or anti-Semite. Just read the findings of a recent survey of 500 Jewish Rabbis by the Jewish Council of Public Affairs where more than a third of these rabbis indicated fear of expressing their real views on Israel.

In fact, the campaign against BDS can more accurately be described as anti-Semitic in its objective impact. Those who are waging the anti-BDS campaign in the US are blindly whitewashing Israel’s actions that for decades have proved to be fundamentally contrary to our own government’s declared objectives and the goal of peace and security for all in the region, including the Jewish people living in Israel. The campaign against BDS is a deliberate choice to maintain the status quo and the continuation of Israel’s policies regardless of the cost. They prefer to keep Israeli Jews and Palestinians living in a permanent state of fear and anxiety for their future, willing to indefinitely arrest the opportunity for a just peace in the region. Their objectives and motives are a quandary more deserving of critical analysis and labeling.

BDS is not anti-Semitic, nonetheless it is guilty of gaining momentum in the US and posing a serious challenge to Israel’s territorial claims that extend to the West Bank, Gaza and desire perpetual control of Palestinian resources, air, water, land and sea. More importantly BDS is challenging the Zionist narrative, which for so long has been unchallenged in the US. The US BDS campaign is waged by faith and non- faith Americans including Jewish Americans among them. Readers can judge the merits of Ms. Rudoren’s anti-Semitic, prejudicial charges and decide whether or not her accusations are real or not.


Israeli intellectuals decry Knesset plan to investigate Leftist groups
In letter sent to all Knesset members, signatories say investigation of citizens by elected officials signals the end of democracy.
By Jonathan Lis | Jan. 9, 2011 | 12:38 AM | 45


A group of Israeli intellectuals has sent a letter to all Knesset members decrying the intent to establish a parliamentary committee of inquiry into Israeli human rights groups.

The group includes a number of Israel Prize laureates, among them professors Yehuda Bauer, Chaim Adler, Yermiyahu Yovel and Micha Ullman, Shulamit Aloni, David Tartakover, Danny Karavan and Ram Loevy. Signatories also include Prof. Haim Ben-Shahar, Prof. Yaron Ezrahi, the painter Yair Garboz, Prof. David Harel and authors Ronit Matalon, Sami Michael, Yehoshua Sobol, Sefi Rachlevsky and Yoram Kaniuk.

"Last week, the Knesset raised its hand against democracy in Israel," the letter states, adding that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had encouraged the initiative by imposing faction discipline on the vote.

"He, and each of the 41 MKs who voted for the establishment of a political committee to hunt the human rights organizations, will be remembered as being the ones who attempted to smash what is left of democracy in Israel and impose a fascist regime. What is worse, only 17 MKs bothered to try to stop the destruction. Each and every MK who did not find time to oppose the initiative to end democracy in Israel bears personal responsibility for the disaster. A black flag now flies above the legislature in Israel."

The letter also states that in a democracy citizens are sovereign, and the task of elected officials is to supervise the work of the government. "When elected officials, even led by the prime minister, seek to investigate citizens, democracy ends," the document said.

The letter ends by saying that if the committee is established, "the government in Israel will lose the last of its legitimacy. All its activities, its laws and its demands of its citizens will be patently illegal. Thus, the obligation of citizens in a democracy to respect its laws will be fundamentally undermined."
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Feb 28, 2014 12:13 pm

A SPECIAL PLACE IN HELL
by Bradley Burston
Porn-Again Zionism: The dark canon of Israel in the time of Bibi
Netanyahu's betting that political porn, as it corrodes and corrupts, is powerfully addictive, and that Israel simply can't get sober. It's a pusher's bet. Sadly, all too often, it's the pusher who wins.
By Bradley Burston | Feb. 25, 2014 | 5:47 PM

Women draped in Israeli flags praying at the Western Wall, Jerusalem (Michal Fattal)

Netanyahu attends the weekly cabinet meeting in his Jerusalem office, Sunday, February 9, 2014. Photo by AP

By Haim Guri | Feb. 25, 2014 | 4:54 PM | 11
Verete: Piron’s warning to avoid 'cultural land mines’ is 'Orwellian’
By Or Kashti and Yarden Skop
Feb. 3, 2014 | 9:41 AM | 10
A morally disgraceful government
Haaretz Editorial | Feb. 21, 2014 | 8:00 AM | 6

How do you put into one word the way the Netanyahu government operates? How do you categorize in terms of ideology and performance and style and political direction, the declarations and legislative initiatives and world-view and exhortations of its principal spokesmen, Benjamin Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett?

How about "Pornography"?

Pornography, that is, in a political form. But pornography nonetheless.

Pornography, marketing a line of goods which has roots in love - in this case, love of country - but which turns every aspect of it into something dirty, frequently something obscene and hateful, something which, as all pornography does first and foremost, objectifies people.

All kinds of people, objectified at our government's porn shop: Arabs, especially Israeli Arabs, who are secretly traitorous, and Muslims wherever and whoever they are (we've already proposed legislation deciding that Christian Arabs aren't really Arabs after all, no matter what they may think); Africans; asylum seekers in general; all Germans; Jews whom we shouldn't like; Ashkenazim who don't vote right; leftist Jews, all of whom we should detest the most, especially teachers and the ones who live in Tel Aviv; and American Jews who know nothing (the ones who voted three to one for Obama, and for Kerry before him) and are half-breeds anyway.

Pornography tells us that because these people are, in and of themselves, nasty, we can use them and abuse them as we like. Our government, in word and deed, tells us that these people aren't really real. Not like we are. They don't have the same depth of feeling as we do, the same sensitivity, the same histories of personal loss and tragedy and victimization as we do.

In short, "pro-Israel" political pornography as practiced by the Netanyahu government and its supporters, does exactly what Natan Sharansky once
famously told us that present-day anti-Semitism does: it demonizes people, applies double-standards to them, and delegitimizes them.

The pornography of governance in the time of Bibi is meant to serve the needs and urges of a ruling coalition which spends most of its time engaged in sleazy words and acts which are little more than bizarre riffs on real life - often intended to arouse what courts, in trying to define pornography, have called prurient interest ("marked by or arousing an immoderate or unwholesome interest or desire").

And, pornography being what it is, it spreads out to cover the demand of a wide range of fetishes. First and foremost, for the Netanyahu government, is the Holocaust fetish, and the not-unrelated sado-masochism of the anti-Semitism fetish, the one which takes prurient interest, and release - and blissful, furious freedom from the consequences of one's own wrongdoing - in reveling in the glow of an entire world hating the Jews.

Example? How about the Holocaust hat trick earlier this month, in which Bennett, his messianic sidekick Moti Yogev, Netanyahu and his minister of, yes, culture, Limor Livnat, greeted a strongly pro-Israel Knesset address by anti-boycott German politician Martin Schultz with a shameful, competitive, parliamentary Fellini Satyricon of rightist posturing, hectoring, insults and walk-outs, capped by demands that Schultz be the one to apologize.

“We gave him every respect," Livnat told the house. Then, referring to a point Schultz raised, which hinted that settlers use proportionally more water than Palestinians –something which most Israelis know to be true and which many, in fact, applaud - Livnat continued, "but when he tells an outright lie, and in German yet, no wonder MKs and ministers get upset.”

Lest anyone mistake the subtext, already clear as Kristallnacht, Bennett's kingmaker MK Uri Orbach noted that, while Orbach knew nothing of Schultz' family background, the "generation of the parents of the minister" had annihilated the Jews of Europe. Translation: Scratch a German supporter of Israel, and find a Nazi.

Naturally, along with the fetishes, political pornography nurses and profits from fantasies. Example: Netanyahu chose the eve of the current peace-push visit of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and on German television, to bathe in the fantasy of all Israeli rightist fantasies: Settlements are not an obstacle to peace, Netanyahu declared.

He declined to point out what he knows better than anyone – that obstructing a future peace and cementing Israeli control over a maximal Greater Israel are, in fact, the raison d'etre of the entire settlement enterprise, and always, from the first illegal outpost, have been.

In the time of Bibi, many other fantasies abound, of course, among them: There Are No Palestinians; There is No Occupation; Israeli Cannot Be Headed For Apartheid; Boycotting Settlements is Terrorism; There is No Demographic Problem; and All Arabs Want to Kill The Jews And None of Them Will Make Peace, But We Have To Keep The West Bank and Millions of Them Under Our Control Anyway.

At the same time, Porn-Again Zionism, as pornography should, also elevates the crank, the loner hothead, to larger-than-like status, as we saw with a royal Likud-Beiteinu reception for a high school student who, displeased with a teacher's leftist politics, single-handedly nearly got him fired.

Finally, like all pornography, Porn-Again Zionism feeds off of and thrives on a particular form of prudery. In this case, it is the political prudery of "Pro-Israel" Neo-Victorianism, constricting debate worldwide in Jewish community centers, synagogues, campus Hillel houses and other public venues.

The ground rules? Speakers and events are banned as improper if they question too seriously or too stridently the fantasies listed above.

Through all of this, what's Netanyahu betting on? That beyond all else, political porn, as it corrodes and corrupts, is also powerfully addictive. The prime minister is betting that Israel simply can't get sober. It's a pusher's bet. And sadly, all too often, it's the pusher who wins.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 06, 2014 8:42 pm

Palestinians call for Protests against US Military Aid to the Israeli Occupation
by Sarah Marusek / March 6th, 2014

Since the US-sponsored peace negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel recommenced last summer, Israeli forces have: authorised the approval of several thousand illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories; launched the construction of twice as many illegal housing units as in the previous year; forcibly dispersed a peaceful protest camp in the Jordan Valley; violently suppressed the nonviolent demonstrations that happen weekly throughout the occupied West Bank; demolished hundreds of Palestinian homes and structures, with demolitions now at an all time high, leaving entire families homeless and exposed to the cold; arrested hundreds of Palestinian children and thousands of adults to be held without charge or tried in Israeli military courts; and killed dozens of Palestinians in raids in the West Bank and airstrikes in the Gaza Strip, which also injured several thousand.

In addition, Israeli settlers living illegally in the occupied Palestinian territories have carried out countless attacks against Palestinians; for example, uprooting olive trees, burning cars and painting racist graffiti on homes, mosques, churches and schools. According to the Associated Press, UN figures published in January show that the annual rate of Israeli settler attacks against Palestinians has almost quadrupled over the last eight years.

Meanwhile, Palestinians were responsible for the deaths of six Israelis throughout all of last year; and militant groups in Gaza, a territory that the UN has warned may soon become uninhabitable due to the draconian siege imposed by Israel, consistently fired rockets at Israel, none of which caused any significant damage or injuries. In December, militants also planted a bomb on a bus near Tel Aviv, with no injuries reported.

Of course, all suffering is painful, but the systemic nature of Israel’s violence against the Palestinians and the suffering caused by the Israeli occupation of Palestine is extreme.

And yet, the US Congress has decided to place conditions on US aid to Palestine, not Israel, when it passed HR 3547. Furthermore, the bill HR 3868, or the “Palestinian peace promotion and anti-incitement act,” aims to further cut development aid to the Palestinian Authority, apparently because it has not done enough to confront incitement against Israel at a time when Israeli forces and settlers are committing daily crimes and humiliations with impunity.

To provide one example of the power imbalance, according to Haaretz newspaper, Israeli police recently summoned a Palestinian photographer who lives in occupied East Jerusalem for incitement because he posted on his Facebook page that the mayor of Jerusalem is “the mayor of the occupation”. The Israeli newspaper suggests that this view of East Jerusalem is more than justified when the Israeli authorities expel Palestinians from their homes, settlers illegally take over Palestinian neighbourhoods and Palestinian houses are demolished.

The new legal efforts to restrict US development aid to Palestine illustrate why so many people also say that Washington is an occupied city: the actions of US politicians clearly indicate that their primary allegiance is to the government of Israel.

US development aid to Palestine is currently about $440 million annually, slightly less than previous years allegedly due to budgetary constraints. This aid is subject to a wide range of restrictions and conditions to make sure that the Palestinian Authority spends it in a manner that Washington and Tel Aviv fully approve of.

On the other hand, US military aid to Israel is $3.1 billion annually, and with supplemental programmes, despite the budget cuts, this year US military aid to Israel amounts to at least $3.6 billion. Furthermore, the Congressional Research Service notes that: “Strong congressional support for Israel has resulted in Israel receiving benefits not available to any other countries; for example, Israel can use some US military assistance both for research and development in the United States and for military purchases from Israeli manufacturers. In addition, US assistance earmarked for Israel is generally delivered in the first 30 days of the fiscal year, while most other recipients normally receive aid in instalments.”

But despite the vast discrepancies that already exist between US aid policy towards Israel and Palestine, some American lawmakers have decided that it is appropriate to further undermine the Palestinian position while the US-brokered negotiations are unfolding.

The Times of Israel newspaper reports that HR 3547 is a package of several appropriation bills, one of which seeks to limit aid to Palestine by guaranteeing that: “the Palestinian Authority is acting to counter incitement of violence against Israelis and is supporting activities aimed at promoting peace, coexistence and security cooperation with Israel.” The US Congress approved HR 3547 with the federal budget at the end of last year.

Subsequently, the bill HR 3868 was introduced. According to the Congressional Research Service, this bill is more targeted and “expresses the sense of Congress that the Palestinian Authority has not lived up to its agreements with Israel to end incitement and should do more to prepare the Palestinian people for peace with Israel.” HR 3868 has been referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, where it currently awaits further discussion.

The emergence of these two bills while negotiations are taking place under US auspices illustrates that American lawmakers are not interested in brokering a peace that even remotely resembles a just peace. However, they also appear at a time when Washington is becoming more and more isolated in its unquestioning support for Israel. The international community, and increasingly Western corporations, officials, churches, academics, artists and citizens, are voicing their concern and joining the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, as called for by Palestinian civil society.

Now, Palestinians are also calling upon Americans and internationals to protest against US military aid to the Israeli occupation on what is known as America’s Tax Day, 15 April. The call from the Popular Committees of Palestine, which coordinates the nonviolent resistance against Israel’s apartheid wall and illegal settlements, can be accessed here.

In reality, Palestinians are also resisting against censorship across Western societies, because politicians and the mainstream media rarely focus on the stories of the occupied. As Iyad Burnat, head of the Bil’in Popular Committee against the Wall, explains: “Most of the American people are unaware that the Palestinian people live under the Israeli occupation rule, and are also unaware of what is happening to the Palestinians, from killing to destruction to theft of land, and building of settlements and building of the apartheid wall.” The censorship is due to the disproportionate influence of the Israel Lobby, so “the American and European media do not show the true suffering of the Palestinian people under occupation, and all of that under the explicit support of the US government.”

Furthermore, whenever Palestinians do try to raise their voices to communicate their oppression they are brutally suppressed. After Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, the authorities passed “Order No. 101″ or the “Order regarding prohibition of incitement and hostile propaganda actions”. According to +972 Magazine, this order dictates that any assembly, vigil or procession of ten or more people requires a permit from the local Israeli occupation forces commander and imposes ten years’ imprisonment on violators. While the order applies to all Palestinians who live in the occupied Palestinian territories under full Israeli military control, Israeli settlers are subject to Israeli civil law.

This means that under occupation, it is illegal for Palestinians to protest against their occupation, while Israeli settlers are granted extraterritorial rights to openly demonstrate in support of their illegal settler movement. Furthermore, Israel uses American weapons funded by US taxpayers to ensure that the Palestinians remain silent.

Israeli forces regularly use overwhelming force to suppress any form of protest inside the occupied Palestinian territories, turning nonviolent demonstrations into clashes where “non-lethal weapons” result in mass casualties and even death. Indeed, a recent report by Amnesty International entitled “Trigger-happy: Israel’s use of excessive force in the West Bank” finds that Israeli forces often resort to “unnecessary, arbitrary and abusive” force against nonviolent protesters. Burnat describes how in his village “peaceful demonstrators were killed by weapons made in America.” This is powerfully documented in his brother’s Oscar nominated film Five Broken Cameras.

Burnat continues: “Many peaceful demonstrators were killed in many places in Palestine by American-made weapons, and many international activists have been participating in these demonstrations in solidarity with the Palestinians; some were wounded or detained and in some cases were killed like Rachel Corrie, who was deliberately driven over by an American-made bulldozer while trying to prevent the destruction of Palestinian homes.”

The call for internationals to join Palestinians in their protest against US military aid to Israel is a call to end the Palestinian suffering under Israeli occupation.

Although resistance is a long and difficult struggle, Palestinians also know that justice is inevitable. The BDS movement and the tax day protests aim to make Israel’s occupation of Palestine unprofitable, using similar tactics that helped to dismantle South Africa’s apartheid regime. Waiting for peace is no longer an option—direct action is required. As Burnat notes, “The last country to stand against the discriminating regime in South Africa was the US, and it is the only country that has not yet boycotted the Israeli occupation.”

• Article first appeared in Middle East Monitor
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 08, 2014 3:10 pm

AIPAC’s Plan C on Iran Diplomacy Blunted

by Jim Lobe

It’s been a difficult annual policy conference for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its hopes of getting Congress to set the toughest possible conditions on any final nuclear agreement between Iran and the P5+1 (the U.S., Britain, France, China, and Russia plus Germany). As readers of this blog know, AIPAC entered the conference, which ran from Sunday through Tuesday, in a rather parlous state as a result of its worst foreign policy setback in a generation; specifically, its failure to muster nearly enough Democrats to gain a veto proof-majority in favor of the Kirk-Menendez sanctions bill that Obama had threatened to veto. Attacked by hard-line neoconservative groups on the right, notably the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) and the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) for sacrificing its devotion to Bibi Netanyahu’s jihad against Iran in the interests of bipartisanship — namely, not unduly alienating Democrats in Congress and thus bolstering J Street — the nation’s most powerful foreign policy lobby found itself in a seemingly dazed and unfamiliar defensive crouch, lacking until the very last moment a coherent lobbying agenda for the 14,000 attendees signed up for the proceedings.

That was bad enough. But the Russian takeover of Crimea made things worse. The event dominated the news throughout the conference, making it virtually impossible for AIPAC to break through the blanket TV news coverage of the Ukrainian crisis. Even Netanyahu’s belligerent remarks delivered to the conferees Tuesday morning, designed to psyche them up for their subsequent shleps up to Capitol Hill, were relegated to the inside pages of major national newspapers.


Even the weather refused to cooperate. The snowfall that blanketed the area Sunday night and Monday morning effectively shut down the government and downtown, closing Congressional offices, making it highly inconvenient — and, in many cases, impossible — for the usual overwhelming majority of members of Congress, who customarily make cameo appearances at the conference to ensure their good standing, to get to the convention center, and generally cast a wintry pall over the three-day proceedings.

(And then, as if to add insult to injury, on Tuesday, the same day that Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu keynoted the conference, The Hill newspaper, which basically ignored the proceedings throughout, featured a flattering full-page profile of Jeremy Ben-Ami, while the even more influential Politico published an op-ed entitled “Why AIPAC Needs to Get With the Peace Program” by the J Street founder and president. Ouch!)

Ultimately, aside from Netanyahu’s belligerence (a embarrassingly amount of which was directed against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement), what did AIPAC get on the Iran front? Although the smoke has not yet completely cleared on that question, it seems they got some form of its Plan C (after losing on Plan A — the Kirk-Menendez bill — and never getting any lift from Plan B, a non-binding resolution laying out impossible conditions for a final agreement) — a Congressional letter that the group helped to draft.

There are now, however, two such letters that are being circulated in Congress for signature — one hard-line version supposedly co-written by Sens. Lindsey Graham and Robert Menendez that clearly AIPAC and Netanyahu would prefer; the second, a softer one co-authored by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer. The question is, which version (both have been cleared by AIPAC) will get the most support on Capitol Hill?

As I’ve pointed out, both versions are ambiguous on key points, notably on the critical issue of whether Iran will be permitted — at least by Congress as a condition for lifting sanctions as part of any final agreement between the P5+1 — to maintain a limited uranium enrichment program on its own soil. The best analysis of the difference in both letters and the context in which they have been drafted and presented was provided yesterday in a statement by the National Iranian American Council’s (NIAC) policy director (and fellow-Seattle native), Jamal Abdi. Here it is:

…NIAC has serious concerns with the language in the Senate letter regarding demands for a final deal. NIAC outlined its position on what principles should guide Congressional action regarding U.S.-Iran diplomatic efforts in a recent letter to Congressional leadership that was signed by forty organizations. That letter urged that Congress uphold the JPOA [Joint Plan of Action agreed between the P5+1 and Iran last Nov 24], not issue demands on negotiations that contradict the interim terms or the terms outlined for a final deal in JPOA, and that Congress work with the Administration regarding the need to eventually lift sanctions.The House letter meets those standards. NIAC has minor concerns with the House letter, but will not oppose it and commends the efforts of those in the House who succeeded in securing a more balanced letter.
Unfortunately, the Senate letter does not meet those standards and NIAC therefore opposes the Senate letter.
The Senate letter uses new language to offer old ultimatums that will complicate ongoing negotiations, box-in U.S. negotiators, signal that the U.S. would violate the terms outlined in the JPOA, and serve as an invitation to hardliners in Iran to issue similar escalatory demands that will narrow options for compromise. Sections of the letter will be construed to rule out any final deal in which Iran retains a civilian enrichment program, in contradiction of the Joint Plan of Action. This, in combination with demands regarding dismantlement of infrastructure and facilities, and requiring the deal to have regional implications beyond its scope, can only interfere with the work of U.S. diplomats to resolve key concerns at the negotiating table.
NIAC urges that the Administration and Congress coordinate closely regarding ongoing negotiations and work towards the shared goal of preventing a nuclear-armed Iran and averting a disastrous war. NIAC urges that members of the Senate abstain from signing onto the Menendez-Graham letter and instead consider language that supports the ongoing negotiations towards a final deal instead of adding unnecessary complications.
Thus, in NIAC’s opinion, the House letter is preferable for understandable reasons, although the group doesn’t support it.

Now, the latest interesting development is that Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Carl Levin, who was among the first of the senior Democrats to speak out against the Kirk-Menendez bill, has endorsed the House (Cantor-Hoyer, or C-H) letter and proposed it as a substitute in the Senate for the (Menendez-Graham, or M-G) letter. My understanding is that Levin believes that, despite its ambiguity, the House letter gives the administration the room it needs to negotiate a final agreement that would presumably permit some limited enrichment. If, as expected, other Senate Democrats, such as Banking Committee Chair Tim Johnson and Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein, follow suit, the chances are pretty good that he can get the backing of the majority caucus (although bringing around the 16 Democrats who co-sponsored the Kirk-Menendez bill will be a challenge). And, with Cantor as the chief Republican sponsor of the C-H letter, it’s almost certain that a majority of the House will sign onto that. Especially because, like the tougher M-G letter, the C-H letter has also been blessed by AIPAC.

Thus, as recently three weeks ago, AIPAC was still lobbying hard in the Senate for the Kirk-Menendez sanctions bill, which was clearly designed by its drafters to sabotage the JPOA. When it failed to win at that, it tried briefly to get a resolution that would have set out conditions — known to be unacceptable to Tehran — that a final deal with Iran would have to incorporate, but the Democratic caucus would not go along. Twice rejected, it has been forced to settle for a letter and could very well wind up with the weakest one currently on the table. (See update below)

Moreover, the difference between Netanyahu’s maximalist position — no uranium enrichment, no centrifuges, no nothing — and the House letter endorsed by AIPAC is quite large, and Bibi must be rather upset by the gap. Indeed, his strongest supporters here are very upset.

Now, it bears mentioning that the White House, fearful of their effect on the negotiations and feeling perhaps a bit triumphant after frustrating AIPAC so badly over the last couple of months, opposes both letters, which could prove problematic if and when a final agreement with Iran is reached. While Obama can use his executive authority to ease or waive many sanctions, some sanctions can only be lifted by an act of Congress. Moreover, if Obama relies on his waiver authority, there’s no guarantee that his successor, who could even be a Republican, will continue waiving. As the NIAC statement warns “It is critical that Congress work with the Administration to ensure necessary authorizations are in place to enable nuclear-related sanctions to be lifted, as outlined by the JPOA. Those authorizations do not currently exist.” Thus, the administration’s opposition to Congress expressing its views on the subject could have the perverse effect of alienating key lawmakers whose support will eventually be required to fully implement a final agreement — a point made in an ironic tweet (“Pro-Israel and Pro-Iran Lobbies Agree: Iran Cannot Lift Sanctions Without Congress”) by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’ (FDD) Mark Dubowitz, who has long favored waging “economic warfare” against Tehran.

UPDATE: In the battle of the two letters on the Senate side, I understand that the Menendez-Graham version has currently fetched more signatures by a margin of 34-11. The 34 on the M-G side consist of 25 Republicans and 9 Democrats, while the 11 signatories to the Levin (or Cantor-Hoyer) substitute are all Democrats. Two Democrats who did not co-sponsor the Kirk-Menendez bill have signed both letters. I’ve been told that AIPAC is now actively lobbying against the Cantor-Hoyer version, despite the fact that it cleared the letter before the co-authors circulated it. If you have a preference, you should probably call your senator’s office.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 21, 2014 4:48 pm

Ending the “Passionate Attachment”
Allies in the Medieval-Modern Struggle
by Harry Clark / March 15th, 2014

In his farewell address in 1796, George Washington warned the nation he had served as its first president against a “passionate attachment” or “inveterate hatred” toward any nation. Some Americans were impassioned about revolutionary France. Within a few years, agents of foreign minister Talleyrand would boast to American diplomats of French power within the United States, and demand large bribes and loans to advance relations. The correspondence was eventually published in the US, in the XYZ Affair, which embarrassed France and the French party in the US, and incited US opinion against France. The rupture was not permanent, and relations eventually resumed on dispassionate terms, to the benefit of both countries.

Since the 1992 publication of The Passionate Attachment: America’s Involvement With Israel, 1947 to the Present, by George W. Ball, undersecretary of state for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and his son Douglas B. Ball, Washington’s prescient term has become ubiquitous to describe the US-Israel relationship. No agents of Israel have ever been embarrassed by boasting of Israel’s power in the US, or by demanding loans and aid. The protestations of American diplomats at Israel’s aggrandizement and damage to US interests have embarrassed them, not the pro-Israel party, which has gone from strength to strength until quite recently.

This has produced a loose establishment diaspora of US diplomats, military and intelligence officers, politicians, academics and journalists critical of the US-Israel relationship, in Washington and elsewhere. On March 7 a quorum of these and other critics gathered in Washington, for a “National Summit to Reassess the U.S.-Israel ‘Special Relationship.” The event was organized by the Council for the National Interest, If Americans Knew, Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, and Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. There was a full day of six panels with a total of 25 speakers. Despite the full program moderators kept the event on schedule. The ballroom of the National Press Club was filled, and the event was broadcast live on C-Span. Video of each panel and separate audio for each speaker, and near-complete transcripts, are at the IRMEP program page. The proceedings survey Israel’s influence and its damage to the US.

How does the Israel lobby influence Congress?

The first speaker on this first panel was former Congressman Paul Findley, at 92 the grand old man of Arabophile politicians, the handful honest and courageous enough to oppose what the US and Israel do in the Middle East. Findley’s advocacy for Palestine cost him the seat he held in Congress for 22 years, but he regretted not doing more, said he should have made it “the cause of the day.” He called for President Obama to issue an executive order, bypassing Congress, suspending aid to Israel until it recognized Palestinian sovereignty over the territories occupied in the 1967 war, and negotiated a two-state solution, which would require all Israeli officials to leave, and for any remaining Israelis to live as foreign nationals. He extolled the benefits to Palestinians, to the US standing in the region, and not least to Israel.

Janet McMahon of Washington Report discussed the work of pro-Israel political action committees. They hide behind innocuous names, and bundle contributions from individuals, which typically are many times the PAC contribution. Pro-Israel PACs have in the past followed AIPAC’s instructions on which candidates to donate to. AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the main congressional Israel lobby, is not a PAC and does not donate. Such advice is illegal and has been investigated but never prosecuted. Pro-Israel PACs should have ranked sixth in donations to Congress in the 2012 election cycle, as compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, but were not even in the top ten. 58% of pro-Israel PAC donations go to Democrats.

Former Representative Cynthia McKinney of Georgia delivered a taped message, recounting the pressure she and Representative Earl Hilliard of Alabama faced as members of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, which contributed to their election defeats. She had advocated enforcement of US law against weapons sales to human rights violators such as Israel and other positions.

Delinda Hanley of Washington Report discussed US aid to Israel, which is the major recipient of US foreign assistance, despite a GDP per capita at the level of the European Union and high rankings in UN socioeconomic indexes. Direct aid totals over $3.1 billion annually, totaling $134 billion since 1949, plus $19 billion in loan guarantees. Tax-deductible contributions subsidize Israeli institutions and Zionist propaganda. Economist Thomas Stauffer estimates $1.6 trillion in direct and indirect costs of Israel to the US for the period 1973-2003. Israel continues to enjoy US largesse even as public needs for infrastructure and social purposes in the US rise.

Do Israel and its lobby exercise too much influence on U.S. decisions to wage war in the Middle East?

Historian Stephen Sniegoski, author of The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, surveyed the rise of the neoconservatives in US politics and their influence on the Iraq war. This began in the 1970s, with the rightward migration of Jewish former liberals, who rose in the Reagan Administration in the 1980s. During the Clinton Administration they founded the Project for a New American Century and plotted the invasion of Iraq, and then served in the George W. Bush Administration. The 9/11 attacks provided the opening to advocate the invasion of Iraq, and to overcome resistance within the government. While the neocons include gentile radical nationalists, the movement is mainly a Jewish ascendancy in conservative politics.

Retired US Air Force Colonel Karen Kwiatowski recounted her experience in the Near East and South Asia office in the Pentagon, which hatched the Office for Special Plans, the center of Iraq war planning in the Department of Defense. NESA, in the office of the Secretary of Defense, was headed by Navy Captain William Ludy, a lowly rank for such a position, but Ludy had neoconservative connections. He told his analysts to rely solely on OSP and ignore other sources within the government. OSP was headed by neoconservative appointee Douglas Feith, and tailored intelligence to support the war. Visiting Israeli officials were very familiar with it.

Historian Gareth Porter discussed the findings of his recent book, Manufactured Crisis. The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, and the current negotiations over Iran’s nuclear power program. Israel has used the threat of war on Iran to manipulate the US and the EU over Iran sanctions and negotiations; the US is to do any fighting. The neoconservatives had intended regime change in Iraq to lead to Lebanon, Syria and Iran but Iraq backfired. The US has tried to manipulate the International Atomic Energy Agency against Iran. Israel has fabricated evidence on an Iranian nuclear program and fed it to the US through an Iranian anti-regime terrorist group, and German intelligence. The US has just re-introduced this discredited evidence in the current negotiations, raising doubts about US sincerity in reaching an agreement with Iran.

Retired Army Brigadier General James David served in the Middle East from 1967-69, among many other assignments. He emphasized the hypocrisy of ceaseless US calls for freedom and democracy, except in Palestine, where the US calls for the opposite. He also criticized Israel’s ceaseless imprecations of Palestinian and Arab threats, when it holds overwhelming power and commits heinous atrocities. He praised the boycott-divestment-sanctions movement, and the internet, noting that he found the Israeli Haaretz more informative and reliable than US media.

Does the “special relationship” transcend rule of law?

Grant Smith, of IRMEP, surveyed the history of the “Israel lobby” since the 1940s. Smith has written half a dozen books based on documents unearthed with the Freedom of Information Act. He described a pattern of systematic illegality, beginning with arms procurement and smuggling, nuclear fuel procurement and smuggling, evasion of foreign agent registration and lobbying laws, and extensive industrial and political espionage. All this has been detected by US law enforcement and intelligence agencies, but investigations have been quashed and prosecutions thwarted or limited to minor figures, through Zionist influence. Smith concluded that US law is essentially unenforceable against the Israel lobby.

Ernest A. Gallo, retired US Navy and CIA communications technician, is president of the Liberty Veterans Association. He was on board the electronic intelligence ship USS Liberty when it was repeatedly attacked and nearly sunk by Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats in the eastern Mediterranean during the June, 1967 Arab-Israeli war. 34 crewmen were killed and 174 were wounded. He described the official cover-up, including the Navy’s superficial investigation, orders to the crewmen’s families to keep silent, the surreptitious awarding of the Congressional Medal of Honor to the captain, and the failure of Congress to investigate, as it normally does any peacetime attack on a US naval ship. An unofficial investigation in 2003 by retired senior officers and diplomats found that Israel knew that the ship was American, called the attack an act of war against the United States, and said that it was covered up for fear of embarrassing Israel and confronting its lobby.

Mark Perry, an author on military, intelligence and foreign affairs, in addressing the topic of national security reporting, emphasized the terms “national interest” and “skin in the game.” He defined “national interest” as ideological, in terms of free trade, markets, and elections, and as economic, noting that 89,000 jobs in Texas depend on US relations with Qatar. He noted that the Central Command was formed in 1983 to protect US shipping, not to confront Iran. He cited the military’s emphasis on “skin in the game” in assessing allies, and noted that the skin in any war with Iran would be American. He cited the congressional testimony of then Central Command head General David Petraeus that failing to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict was the primary obstacle to obtaining respect and satisfying US interests in the Middle East.

The Jonathan Pollard case may be the exception that proves Smith’s rule. Retired Navy intelligence captain and attorney for military, intelligence and law enforcement, M.E. “Spike” Bowman worked on almost every espionage investigation from 1979 to 2009. He called Pollard one of the four worst espionage cases in that period. Israel wanted not secret but specific top secret and SCI documents (sensitive compartmented information) and had from a different source a Defense Intelligence Agency catalog of documents. By his own admission Pollard provided 360 cubic feet of material. Then Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger wanted the death penalty but it was not legally possible. Pollard is eligible for parole but will not seek it because he wants clemency so he can go to Israel immediately.

History: How did the “special relationship” come to be?

Harvard scholar Stephen Walt outlined what had changed and what had not since the 2007 publication, with co-author John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, of their celebrated book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. He recalled their basic argument that the unprecedented generosity of the special relationship, with its possible Cold War strategic value now a strategic detriment, and any moral case offset by Israel’s own oppression and aggression, could only be explained by the Israel lobby. Since then discussion has widened in the media; the Lobby was unable to have Syria bombed and Iran further sanctioned; the charge of anti-Semitism is losing its power. On the other hand, President Obama’s first term bid for a settlement freeze and two-state solution failed utterly; there was a craven response to Israel’s Cast Lead attack on Gaza; elements of the Lobby intervened publicly and radically in the 2012 elections; aid still flows unconditionally; settlements grow and grow; the two-state solution may be dead; the Lobby continues to receive great deference; establishment insider discourse is still closed, though outsiders may comment. “Reports of the Lobby’s demise are greatly exaggerated”; change does not happen overnight, and a “broad tent” of opponents is needed.

Geoffrey Wawro, a military historian at the University of North Texas, offered a broad survey of the US-Israel relationship. President Wilson initially opposed the Balfour Declaration, but was swayed by its popularity with Jewish voters. President Truman’s diplomatic advisers were thwarted by his aides, and the Palestine portfolio brought into the White House and domestic politics. Such pressure plagued Eisenhower in 1956, even as Israel withdrew from Gaza and Sinai, turned Kennedy’s independent policy into the first arms sales, and led Johnson not to call for withdrawal after June 1967, disregarding the US ambassador’s 1965 warning that Israel had to be restrained, and pressured if it made further conquests . Nixon and Kissinger declined to extract concessions from Israel during the 1973 war and greatly increased US aid afterward. Obama has failed at every attempt to address issue; Israel might agree to a settlement to blunt the BDS movement, and as prerequisite to Sunni Arab coalition against Iran.

Ohio State international law professor John Quigley discussed the impact of the special relationship on US international legal views. Despite legislation requiring that the US embassy be moved to Jerusalem, successive presidents have not done it. Otherwise, President Johnson initially opposed but then assented to Israel’s June, 1967 attack, which the Bush Administration used as “pre-emptive” precedent to justify invading Iraq in 2003. The US has claimed that Palestinian statehood can arise only from Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, but the legal criterion is recognition by the world community. The Carter Administration found Israel’s settlements illegal, which has dwindled to John Kerry finding them “illegitimate.” Ambiguous statehood status has been used to prevent the Palestinian Authority from seeking redress at the International Criminal Court. The right of return of refugees has been recognized but put off pending recognition of Israel by the Arab states, even though Egypt and Jordan do now.

Alison Weir of CNI and If Americans Knew recounted her involvement in the Palestine question, following the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa intifada in 2000. In traveling to Palestine and researching, she found a wide disparity between actual events and US media reports, and an overwhelming disparity of Israeli power and Palestinian suffering. In studying the Zionist movement in the US, she found its first influence in advocating US entry into World War I, in order to induce Britain to issue the Balfour Declaration supporting Zionism in Palestine. She noted the opposition of the US diplomatic and military establishments to Zionism, and the comprehensive Zionist mobilization to overcome it. She also noted Zionist manipulation of Jewish opinion, to overcome its non- and anti-Zionist tendency. Weir noted the lionization of journalist Dorothy Thompson for her criticism of Nazism, and her demonization when she objected to Zionism’s destruction of Palestine. All this is documented in mainstream sources cited in her book, Against Our Better Judgment.

Has the lobby captured political parties and news media?

Journalist Jeffrey Blankfort quoted anti-Zionist author Lenni Brenner’s statement that “the Left is the rear-guard of the Israel lobby.” Blankfort cited Noam Chomsky for setting parameters of criticism, and influential activist Phyllis Bennis for enforcing them in groups like US Campaign to End the Occupation. Chomsky holds that Israel is a US strategic asset, and that US has opposed a settlement with the Palestinians for its own reasons, both of which are “demonstrably false.” These parameters have influenced all US critics of Israel. Blankfort cited the left media, notably Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, for failing to report on Israel’s influence. When the Mearsheimer-Walt book The Israel Lobby appeared, Goodman did not interview the authors, but Noam Chomsky. For such reasons the US Palestine solidarity movement has been a total failure, according to Blankfort.

Alan C. Brownfeld, of the American Council for Judaism, noted that the classical Reform view of Jews as a religious minority, not a nationality, was at one time held by most American Jews. Zionism became a majority view because of Nazism and the Judeocide, and Zionism has had very negative effects on Jewish life; it is subversive of liberalism. Synagogues fly Israeli flags, and Jews are urged to make aliyah. Judaism has become idolatry, substituting Israel for God. American Jews support secularism and pluralism in the US, and obscurantist established religion and fanatical chauvinism in Israel. The American Jewish press reads as if written for an ex-patriate community. Brownfeld feels his views represents a “silent majority” of American Jews. Campus Hillel foundations are resisting official Zionist guidelines in their programming. Zionism is in retreat.

Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com noted the historic opposition of American conservatism to Zionism and its sympathy toward the Arabs. In the 1940s and 1950s, conservative publisher Regnery issued a stream of titles in that vein, which was shared by flagship journal National Review. He contrasted this with the sympathy of the left, in the views of Henry Wallace, the USSR’s support for partition and provision of arms through Czechoslovakia. The Cold War and Stalinist anti-Semitism changed the Soviet orientation, and the June, 1967 war earned criticism from the Left. The neoconservatives, Jewish former leftists, oriented the right toward Israel. The neocons were reinforced by the dispensationalist Christian Zionists, in whose eschatology Israel and the Jews are central. Raimondo finds this component of the Israel lobby the most important, but they and the neocons contend with libertarian anti-interventionism on the right.

Scott McConnell, founder of American Conservative and a former neoconservative, pointed to events at National Review to illustrate the neoconservative takeover of the right. William F. Buckley let neoconservatives dictate his treatment of editor Joseph Sobran and columnist Pat Buchanan when they were accused of anti-Semitism. McConnell found the accusations somewhat justified in Sobran’s case, and cited Buckley’s convoluted absolution of Buchanan; their arguments about Israel’s influence in the US and on US policies, and the consequences, were buried. Sobran eventually left as editor, while Buchanan was marginalized on the right. The neoconservatives effectively supervised discussion of Israel and related matters in National Review, the largest publication on the right, and young conservatives got the message.

Philip Weiss, co-editor of the Mondoweiss blog, cited examples of continuing Israel lobby hegemony in the media, including CNN’s featuring of former Israeli ambassador Michael Oren as new commentator; the triumphant book tour of Israeli author Ari Shavit, arranged by four senior Jewish American journalists, including David Remnick and Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker, Leon Wieseltier, and Thomas Friedman; and acknowledgment by New York Times Jerusalem correspondent Jodi Rudoren of her Jewish background and familiarity with the “American Jewish and Israeli story”, which she has not transcended. Weiss noted positive changes also, including Friedman’s frank recognition of the Israel lobby, and the fair New York Times review of John Judis’s book Genesis, about Zionist influence on President Truman and earlier. Weiss’s journalistic instincts sense a wealth of hidden stories about Zionism to be written, which will eventually lead to high noon for the Israel lobby.

Is Israel really a U.S. ally?

Paul Pillar, 28-year veteran of the CIA and National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia, argued that alliance is based on broad congruence of interests and mutual benefits. He found that Israel’s ethnocracy is foreign to the US; that the US and Israel share some adversaries, but deal with them in different ways; that the occupation and blockade of the West Bank and Gaza are not a US interest; US aid to Israel, $234 billion in current dollars, has opportunity costs. Israel does little for the US that the US would not do for itself. Israel is not a regional military asset; Palestine is the chief grievance of terrorist suspects under interrogation; Israel is the chief source of extremism and terrorism directed against the US. If Israel were afraid of Iran it would support negotiations; denouncing Iran distracts from the occupation, and prevents Iran from becoming a western partner. US should disregard labels and look at interests in the case of each country.

Ray McGovern oversaw national intelligence estimates and the presidential daily briefing in 27 years at the CIA. He argued that “alliance” meant a mutual defense treaty, which the US does not have with Israel. The US offered such an alliance after the 1973 war, but Israel refused, because it preferred not to define its borders, and because an alliance would limit its freedom of action. McGovern noted the British Downing Street memo citing the CIA director’s statement that “intelligence is being fixed around the policy” of invading Iraq. He noted strong Israeli influence on the Bush Administration; the charges of anti-Semitism to his suggestion that Israel wanted to dominate the region; and that Israel’s assassination of Sheik Yassin in Gaza prompted the assault on US Blackwater mercenaries in Fallujah, in occupied Iraq, leading to US atrocities against the city

Philip Giraldi, a veteran of military intelligence and CIA counterterrorism, argued that not only is Israel no ally, but it is no friend, and influences policy in ways that are detrimental to the US and to itself. US officials close to the Israeli government were behind the Iraq war and the phony intelligence that justified it. Israel and its US partisans are trying to create a false casus belli and force the US into war on Iran. Congress is attempting to effectively delegate the decision to Israel. Israel’s actions are sui generis; its lavish aid is dispensed on terms favorable to it and costly to the US; it interferes in US elections; its government officials rebuke and mock US officials from the president down; its officials give alarmist briefings to Congress; it brazenly conducts espionage against the US government, including a murky operation before 9/11, and against US industry, and sells its products to anyone; 125 investigations into Israeli espionage have been stopped due to political pressure.

Michael Scheuer was scheduled to speak but did not. He headed and later advised the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, among many assignments. While still at the CIA he published two anonymous books, on bin Laden, and on the US “war on terror.” He has argued that US patronage of Israel was a major grievance of bin Laden, and that the Iraq invasion, which he attributed chiefly to the influence of the Israel lobby, was a huge gift to al-Qaeda. His appearance would have brought the discussion of whether Israel is a US ally to a negative crescendo.

Observations

The packed schedule and brisk moderation left little time for discussion, though overall there were few differences among the panelists, and in the allotted time few arose with the audience.

Justin Raimondo’s claim that evangelical Christian Zionists are the most powerful component of the Israel lobby was not echoed by other panelists. Mearsheimer and Walt called the Christian Zionists an “important junior partner” in their book, while emphasizing that Jewish organizations were the most important component. The Christ at the Checkpoint conference of evangelicals, held biannually in Bethlehem since 2010, was denounced vehemently by the Israeli government this year. Porter Speakman’s 2010 film With God on Our Side is another sign that evangelical support for Israel is diminishing by the day.

Ray McGovern offered the acronym “O.I.L.”, “oil, Israel and logistics” (bases) to explain the invasion of Iraq, and opined that “no one in this room would argue that Iraq would have been invaded if it had had no oil resources.” No other panelist seconded this. Mearsheimer and Walt found “logical and empirical difficulties” with this claim, and noted that the flow of oil was not endangered, that Saddam Hussein had been prevented from selling it by sanctions, which the oil companies were eager to end. Stephen Sniegoski has written of “‘War for Oil’–the Notion That Will Not Die.”

Scott McConnell argued that by the 1970s Nixon and Kissinger had accepted Israel as a strategic asset in the Cold War. Mearsheimer and Walt acknowledged the argument, but also noted that US support for Israel’s aggression had pushed the Arabs into Soviet arms, prevented a settlement, and fueled anti-Americanism in the region.

One questioner complained about the “religious dogma of the Holocaust taught in public schools which cannot be questioned,” and made some flaky comments about Jewish persecution of Germany at the 1919 Versailles peace conference and in the anti-Nazi boycott. Jeff Blankfort described the school curriculum in California, where he had worked as a teacher. He noted that the schools teach “weeks of Anne Frank” and Elie Wiesel’s Night because material is provided by Jewish organizations, and that was only in English. History teachers are required to teach more about the Holocaust (omitting such facts as the ideological and practical affinity of Nazism and Zionism) than about the genocide of the American Indians, or about slavery.

Philip Weiss then stated that “we should not be problematizing the education of the Holocaust” even if AIPAC and the ADL set the curriculum. He stated that “the West incurred a debt toward the Jews from the Holocaust and the Palestinians paid for that,” as if the creation of Israel were compensation for the Holocaust. He also stated that “one of the great discoveries of the past few years is that the West owes Palestinians a debt also,” as if the Jews, or Zionism and its supporters, do not, a point the conference was called to establish. Neither Brownfeld nor Weiss affirmed the exploitation of the Holocaust on behalf of Zionism and Israel, which has been attested by writers such as Norman Finkelstein and Peter Novick.

Next year’s summit might note the Zionization of US domestic law enforcement after 9/11, with hundreds of police delegations traveling to Israel for training and effectively, ideological conditioning. It might also note the damage to civil liberties and growth of Islamophobia from 9/11. These are domestic costs of the “special relationship.”

There was a patriotic tone to some presentations, and most of the speakers emphasized American interests. This is an observation, not a complaint. The American system of government expresses the democratic sovereignty of the American people, however corrupted and attenuated that principle is. Israel’s influence is fundamentally a usurpation of our sovereignty as US citizens. Veterans of the national security establishment, and democrats left, right and center can agree on that. They may or may not be allies in the class struggle, but they are allies in the medieval-modern struggle which Zionism has joined. As Stephen Walt noted, we need a “broad tent.”
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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