Zionism’s Lost Shine

[seemslikeadream]

Israel does not want peace
Rejectionism is embedded in Israel's most primal beliefs. There, at the deepest level, lies the concept that this land is destined for the Jews alone.
By Gideon Levy | Jul. 4, 2014 | 2:31 PM | 96


Israel does not want peace. There is nothing I have ever written that I would be happier to be proved wrong about. But the evidence is piling up. In fact, it can be said that Israel has never wanted peace – a just peace, that is, one based on a just compromise for both sides. It’s true that the routine greeting in Hebrew is Shalom (peace) – shalom when one leaves and shalom when one arrives. And, at the drop of a hat, almost every Israeli will say he wants peace, of course he does. But he’s not referring to the kind of peace that will bring about the justice without which there is no peace and there will be no peace. Israelis want peace, not justice, certainly not anything based on universal values. Thus, “Peace, peace, when there is no peace.” Not only is there no peace: In recent years, Israel has moved away from even the aspiration to make peace. It has despaired utterly of it. Peace has disappeared from the Israeli agenda, its place taken by the collective anxieties that are systematically implanted, and by personal, private matters that now take precedence over all else.

The Israeli longing for peace seemingly died about a decade ago, after the failure of the Camp David summit in 2000, the dissemination of the lie that there is no Palestinian partner for peace, and, of course, the horrific blood-soaked period of the second intifada. But the truth is that even before that, Israel never really wanted peace. Israel has never, not for a minute, treated the Palestinians as human beings with equal rights. It has never viewed their distress as understandable human and national distress.

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The Israeli peace camp, too – if ever there was such a thing – also died a lingering death amid the harrowing scenes of the second intifada and the no-partner lie. All that remained were a handful of organizations that were as determined and devoted as they were ineffectual in the face of the delegitimization campaigns mounted against them. Israel, therefore, was left with its rejectionist stance.

The single most overwhelming item of evidence of Israel’s rejection of peace is, of course, the settlements project. From the dawn of its existence, there has never been a more reliable or more precise litmus test for Israel’s true intentions than this particular enterprise. In plain words: The builders of settlements want to consolidate the occupation, and those who want to consolidate the occupation do not want peace. That’s the whole story in a nutshell.



On the assumption that Israel’s decisions are rational, it is impossible to accept construction in the territories and the aspiration to peace as mutually coexisting. Every act of building in the settlements, every mobile home and every balcony, conveys rejection. If Israel had wanted to achieve peace through the Oslo Accords, it would at least have stopped the construction in the settlements at its own initiative. That this did not happen proves that Oslo was fraudulent, or at best the chronicle of a failure foretold. If Israel had wanted to achieve peace at Taba, at Camp David, at Sharm el-Sheikh, in Washington or in Jerusalem, its first move should have been to end all construction in the territories. Unconditionally. Without a quid pro quo. The fact that Israel did not is proof that it did not want a just peace.

But the settlements were only a touchstone of Israel’s intentions. Its rejectionism is embedded far more deeply – in its DNA, its bloodstream, its raison d’être, its most primal beliefs. There, at the deepest level, lies the concept that this land is destined for the Jews alone. There, at the deepest level, is entrenched the value of “am sgula” – God’s “treasured people” – and “God chose us.” In practice, this is translated to mean that, in this land, Jews are allowed to do what is forbidden to others. That is the point of departure, and there is no way to get from there to a just peace. There is no way to reach a just peace when the name of the game is the dehumanization of the Palestinians. No way to achieve peace when the demonization of the Palestinians is hammered into people’s heads day after day. Those who are convinced that every Palestinian is a suspicious person and that every Palestinian wants “to throw the Jews into the sea” will never make peace with the Palestinians. Most Israelis are convinced of the truth of both those statements.

In the past decade, the two peoples have been separated from each another. The average young Israeli will never meet his Palestinian peer, other than during his army service (and then only if he does his service in the territories). Nor will the average young Palestinian ever meet an Israeli his own age, other than the soldier who huffs and puffs at him at the checkpoint, or invades his home in the middle of the night, or in the person of the settler who usurps his land or torches his groves.

Consequently, the only encounter between the two people is between the occupiers, who are armed and violent, and the occupied, who are despairing and also turn to violence. Gone are the days when Palestinians worked in Israel and Israelis shopped in Palestine. Gone is the period of the half-normal and quarter-equal relations that existed for a few decades between the two peoples that share the same piece of territory. It is very easy, in this state of affairs, to incite and inflame the two peoples against one another, to spread fears and to instill new hatreds on top of those that already exist. This, too, is a sure recipe for non-peace.

So it was that a new Israeli yearning sprang up: the desire for separation: “They will be there and we will be here (and also there).” At a time when the majority of Palestinians – an assessment I allow myself to make after decades of covering the territories – still want coexistence, even if less and less, most Israelis want disengagement and separation, but without paying the price. The two-state vision has gained widespread adherence, but without any intention to implement it in practice. Most Israelis are in favor, but not now and maybe not even here. They have been trained to believe that there is no partner for peace – a Palestinian partner, that is – but that there is an Israeli partner.

Unfortunately, the truth is almost the reverse. The Palestinian non-partners no longer have any chance to prove that they are partners; the Israeli non-partners are convinced that they are interlocutors. So began the process in which Israeli conditions, obstacles and difficulties were heaped up, one more milestone in Israeli rejectionism. First came the demand for a cessation of terrorism; then the demand for a change of leadership (Yasser Arafat as a stumbling block); and after that Hamas became the hurdle. Now it’s the Palestinians’ refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Israel considers every step it takes – from mass political arrests to building in the territories – to be legitimate, whereas every Palestinian move is “unilateral.”

The only country on the planet with no borders is so far unwilling to delineate even the compromise borders it is ready to be satisfied with. Israel has not internalized the fact that, for the Palestinians, the borders of 1967 are the mother of all compromises, the red line of justice (or relative justice). For the Israelis, they are “suicide borders.” This is why the preservation of the status quo has become the true Israeli aim, the primary goal of Israeli policy, almost its be-all and end-all. The problem is that the existing situation cannot last forever. Historically, few nations have ever agreed to live under occupation without resistance. And the international community, too, is one day apt to utter a firm pronouncement on this state of affairs, with accompanying punitive measures. It follows that the Israeli goal is unrealistic.

Disconnected from reality, the majority of Israelis pursue their regular way of life. In their mind’s eye the world is always against them, and the areas of occupation on their doorstep are beyond their realm of interest. Anyone who dares criticize the occupation policy is branded an anti-Semite, every act of resistance is perceived as an existential threat. All international opposition to the occupation is read as the “delegitimizing” of Israel and as a provocation to the country’s very existence. The world’s seven billion people – most of whom are against the occupation – are wrong, and six million Israeli Jews – most of whom support the occupation – are right. That’s the reality in the eyes of the average Israeli.

Add to this the repression, the concealment and the obfuscation, and you have another explanation for the rejectionism: Why should anyone strive for peace as long as life in Israel is good, calm prevails and the reality is concealed? The only way the besieged Gaza Strip can remind people of its existence is by firing rockets, and the West Bank only gets onto the agenda these days when blood is shed there. Similarly, the viewpoint of the international community is only taken into account when it tries to impose boycotts and sanctions, which in their turn immediately generate a campaign of self-victimization studded with blunt – and at times also impertinent – historical accusations.

This, then, is the gloomy picture. It contains not a ray of hope. The change will not happen on its own, from within Israeli society, as long as that society continues to behave as it does. The Palestinians have made more than one mistake, but their mistakes are marginal. Basic justice is on their side, and basic rejectionism is the Israelis’ purview. The Israelis want occupation, not peace.

I only hope I am wrong.

[seemslikeadream]

As a Jew living in America, the past week has changed me forever
Jul 05, 2014 9:41pm PDT by David Harris Gershon
Comment_large707 681
Originally published in Tikkun Daily

Growing up outside of Atlanta, I learned to crawl with Bob Dylan's "Only A Pawn In Their Game" as my soundtrack, anti-war posters hanging on the walls, beckoning me and my raw knees forward. I was weaned with the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. reverberating down the narrow halls of my parents' apartment, formed my first words as though delivering a soliloquy on equality.

In first grade, I asked the teacher if the 'Indians' still celebrated Thanksgiving. When she asked why I wanted to know, I responded, "Because the people they ate with took their land," something I'd learned from an honest mother. During a Little League game, my father intervened when coaches tried to initiate a prayer circle, wanting us to give thanks in Jesus' name. He fiercely believed in the separation of church and, well, everything.

As an American Jew, I was mostly instilled with progressive values as a child. Rather, I was instilled with progressive, American values – particularly those which aligned with liberal, Jewish ones. A love of social justice, human rights, equality. A disdain for racism, fundamentalism, colonialism. Sure, I attended Hebrew school, but my scripture was more the Bill of Rights than the Torah, and my anthems came from hip-hop and rock, not the Book of Psalms (תהילים).

Despite this, my early love for progressivism was accompanied by a love for the State of Israel. As a short, Jewish kid who wanted to be an NBA star, I was naturally inclined to root for the underdog. And at synagogue, we were taught that Jews were the ultimate underdogs, miraculously surviving the Holocaust and a history of oppression to create a contemporary "light unto the nations" which fought with dogged determination against evil and had a cool flag. And I was taught that I was vulnerable, that there were people who wanted me dead, and that Israel was a safe haven, a beacon, a garden to which I could always escape.

Palestinians, accordingly, were portrayed as just one in a series of people who have risen up throughout history to destroy us, being painted as a caricature of evil. As a boy, I nodded and understood. Israel was not just good, it was necessary.

One Sunday morning, my parents dropped me off at our local, liberal synagogue for what was billed as the youth group's pancake breakfast. Once inside, we were surprisingly herded into a multi-purpose room and sharply ordered to sit against the walls by masked men carrying plastic assault rifles. Stale bread was thrown on the linoleum floor toward me and my friends, perplexed and unsure what the hell this was all about, but smart enough to know it was not actually a dangerous situation. Younger children started crying.

This is what the enemy is like, some teachers told us when it was over.

I nodded. We were the good ones.

--§--
As an adult, I've moved away from such naiveté while holding on to both my Zionist and progressive leanings, despite the growing struggle for coexistence between the two. And it's not as though I'm mildly informed about the region or mildly invested in Israel and my Jewishness. The opposite, in fact, is the case. I'm a Jewish studies teacher at a day school, yeshiva-educated with a master's degree from Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I've authored a memoir about my experience with terror and reconciliation, and write extensively about the region, often critiquing Israel from a progressive perspective while maintaining my desire for a two-state solution to the conflict.

As an adult, I've learned about the cleansing of Arab villages which took place from 1947-1949 to make way for the Jewish state. I've learned about the ongoing settlement enterprise, the appropriation and bifurcation of Palestinian lands. I've learned the horrors of Israel's decades-old occupation of the West Bank, about the suppression of basic human rights and the atrocities committed. I've studied Israel's use of indefinite detentions, home demolitions, restrictions on goods and movement, and the violence visited upon those being occupied.

I've learned that – and this is just one example of many – a Palestinian child has tragically been killed every three days for the past 14 years. That bears repeating, since such deaths are rarely, if ever, given any attention in America: Palestinian parents have had to bury a child every three days for the past 14 years.

Knowing all this, I've still held fast to my 'progressive Zionism,' hoping Israel could become that beacon of liberalism I was presented as a child, a beacon which never truly existed in the first place, despite the country's socialist roots. Why have I done so? For two reasons: 1) deep down, I still believe in the promise of Israel, and 2) I can't shake the notion that a Jewish state is absolutely necessary for our security.

Over the last decade, I've formed alliances with progressive Americans and the Israeli left, working in my own, small ways to try and move Israel away from those illegal, geopolitical policies causing so much suffering for Palestinians and undermining Israel's ability to not just thrive, but survive. All the while, I've watched the anti-war movement in Israel weaken, watched racism flourish and religious fundamentalism grow, watched Israel's government build settlements at a record pace and make clear it has little interest in peace.

These realities have forced me to consider the incongruity between my American-borne progressivism and my Zionism. They have forced me to admit, like Peter Beinart, that in order to continue supporting Israel as a Jewish state, with everything it continues to do, I must compromise my progressivism.

However, the mind-numbingly horrific events of the past week have forced me, for the first time, to wonder whether such compromising can be sustained.

--§--
What has happened? This: on June 12, three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped while hitchhiking in the West Bank by Palestinians belonging to a rogue branch of Hamas. I, along with friends and loved ones, worried they would become three more Jewish victims (added to the 1,100 killed since 2001) in an unending conflict, and watched closely as the Israeli military began combing the West Bank for them. Only, it soon became clear that soldiers weren't looking for them so much as collectively punishing Palestinians for the crime of a few people. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu falsely blamed the kidnapping on Hamas – a move likely aimed at derailing the PA-Hamas unity government – and vowed they would "pay a heavy price." But it was Palestinian civilians who paid a heavy price as for weeks soldiers raided over 1,600 sites in the West Bank, indefinitely detained hundreds, and killed five Palestinians.

Israel placed a gag order on details surrounding the teens' abduction, and reports surfaced that Israeli officials knew the boys were dead, but wanted to justify ongoing military operations under the hope of bringing the boys back. (Alas, it seems such reports may have been accurate.)

And then, on June 30, the tragic news suddenly came: the three teens had been found dead. And just as suddenly, calls for blood and vengeance echoed from Israel, starting with Netanyahu, who turned a Chaim Bialik poem on its head by using it to call for blood:

Vengeance for the blood of a small child, Satan has not yet created. Neither has vengeance for the blood of 3 pure youths who were on their>

— Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) June 30, 2014
way home to their parents who will not see them anymore. Hamas is responsible and Hamas will pay. May the memories of the 3 boys be blessed.

— Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) June 30, 2014
In turn, calls for blood and revenge began echoing throughout Israel and on social media, with a Facebook page dedicated to such calls quickly receiving 35,000 likes. It featured soldiers posing with weapons, asking for permission to kill, along with countless Israelis calling for revenge:

On the left, Israelis hold a sign that reads,"Hating Arabs isn't racism, it's values! #IsraelDemandsRevenge," while on the right, a soldier post a picture with the caption, "Let us simply spray [them with bullets]." <?center>
After the funeral for the three slain Israeli teens on July 1, angry mobs of hundreds began roaming the streets of Jerusalem chanting "Death to Arabs," attacking Palestinians and promising blood by nightfall.
Mob on Jaffa Road, Jerusalem chanting "death to the Arabs." Man tells me, "after sundown we will attack them." pic.twitter.com/ehx7E3BCyS

— benwedeman (@bencnn) July 1, 2014

Chemi Shalev of Haaretz, witnessing the genocidal chants from Israelis and reading reports of Israeli police saving Palestinian citizens from the mobs, wrote the following:
Make no mistake: the gangs of Jewish ruffians man-hunting for Arabs are no aberration. Theirs was not a one-time outpouring of uncontrollable rage following the discovery of the bodies of the three kidnapped students. Their inflamed hatred does not exist in a vacuum: it is an ongoing presence, growing by the day, encompassing ever larger segments of Israeli society, nurtured in a public environment of resentment, insularity and victimhood, fostered and fed by politicians and pundits.
By nightfall, with the ink of Shalev's pen barely dried, horrific news came that a Palestinian teen from East Jerusalem had been abducted and killed by Israeli settlers in an act of revenge, with reports revealing the unspeakable: he was likely burned alive.
Since that night on July 1, parts of Israel have been burning, and clashes between Palestinians and police in Shuafat, the East Jerusalem neighborhood where the killed teenager lived, have been particularly intense. The police have been unrelenting, raining rubber bullets and tear gas down upon a grieving neighborhood. And the scenes have been difficult to watch.

Perhaps the scene that has put me over the edge is one that should hit close to home: an American teenager from Tampa visiting Israel, who happens to be a cousin of the slain Palestinian teen, was almost beaten to death by police, ostensibly for throwing rocks, and remains in Israeli detention. [Video of the incident.]

brutal
Mother of the American teen beaten tells ABC, "He wasn't recognizable."
I have no words.


--§--
There are parts of me right now that feel defeated. Yes, there have been calls for peace and the denouncing of extremism in Israel, but such calls feel as though they have been drowned out by those still craving revenge. And as Shalev notes, this isn't an isolated incident – this is the result of a real shift in Israeli society concurrent with the ongoing occupation.

The past week's events have shaken me to my core, and have forced me to look long and hard at my personal politics. For if this were any country but Israel, my progressive values would not allow me to support, much less love, such an enterprise. Yet the reality is this: I do.

I'm not ready to abandon the dream of a Jewish state that lives up to its democratic promises, and continue to hold tenuously onto the idea of two states for two peoples. However, I have begun, for the first time, to consider what a single, bi-national state might look like, to consider that it might finally end this madness.

And here's the irony: Israel's extreme-right leaders, embracing various one-state solutions, have forced me to do so. Hell, Israel just elected as its President a one-state proponent. How can I not consider what that might look like?

As it happens, during all of this, I've just finished Ali Abunimah's The Battle for Justice in Palestine, which makes an impassioned case for a democratic, bi-national state as the only way to end this conflict.

The progressive American in me agreed with much of his arguments. The Zionist in me was scared by its premise.

The humanist in me just wants all of this to end. Wants all of the suffering and pain on both sides to end.

If not now, when?

[seemslikeadream]

and the murderous rampage goes on

Massacre of the Innocents: Slaughter in the Gaza Ghetto

WRITTEN BY CHRIS FLOYD
SUNDAY, 13 JULY 2014 19:02

The horror of Israel’s latest slaughter in Gaza speaks for itself — despite the mountainous flow of media sludge designed to obscure the reality of the aggression. Even the New York Times has been forced to print a few stories about the high number of civilian deaths being caused by the Israeli assault on the “Warsaw Ghetto” they have made of Gaza, noting the hospitals and mosques and private homes where dozens of innocent people have been blown to pieces by Israel’s weaponry (much of it American-made).

Israel has imprisoned the people of Gaza in a stateless limbo while carefully controlling almost every aspect of their lives, including what medicines they can have, what manufacturing and building materials they are allowed and even, at times, how much food they are allowed to eat to keep the population weakened but just above malnutrition levels. This brutal regimen in daily life is of course punctuated with regular night raids, bombings, kidnappings, “disappearings” and almost weekly civilians deaths at the hands of Israeli overseers. This has gone on year after year. Yet Western media — and Western politicians — are presenting a picture of a nuclear-armed, American-backed ultra-militarist Israel “under siege” from a handful of ineffective rockets fired by factions in Gaza which are answering violence with violence.

But as we all know, the West demands that Palestinians show superhuman, Gandhi-like forbearance in the face of murderous oppression and relentless, widespread violence killing their children and families. They are never to respond in kind — unlike the Americans, who have killed hundreds of thousands of people in response to a single attack on their soil. This after killing, by Washington’s own admission, more than half a million children in Iraq with peacetime sanctions — against a nation which had never attacked the United States and posed no threat to it. The merest hint of a possible threat remotely occurring sometime in a barely imaginable future is justification enough for the Americans to lay waste to whole nations and kill thousands of people. (Of course, in many states in America this principle is now enshrined in law on an individual basis: you can shoot dead anyone you feel might be a “threat” to you — whether they are or not. The ‘stand your ground’ laws are a perfect example of a nation rotting from the head, as the murderous militarism and adherence to violence embodied by the bipartisan elite seep down through every strata of society.) This is the true — the only — meaning of “American exceptionalism”: the right to ruin, rape and murder in perfect moral purity.

To be sure, this golden aura can be loaned out at times to others. Israel above all seems to have acquired a permanent lease on American’s license to kill. But it can also be spread around to other nations and factions, even terrorist groups, if it serves the purposes of the Potomac Imperium. Such as the “moderate al Qaeda” now being supported in Syria (or the al Qaeda forbears supported so fully in Soviet-era Afghanistan). Saddam Hussein was allowed to slaughter tens of thousands, and even use chemical weapons, with America’s blessing and military aid and money. Later of course, he morphed into a new Hitler, and, as noted, America had to kill half a million children in his land, before invading the country and causing the deaths of a million more people. Why, even Vlad the Impaler Putin — the current new Hitler in America’s eyes — was gifted with America’s moral exemption when he was killing thousands of people in Chechnya.

But yes, Israel is the chief beneficiary of Washington’s moral blank check. And so the false narrative — the mendacious “frame” — of a “besieged” Israel defending its poor, innocent self from unprovoked attack is promulgated at every turn by the Western political establishment and most of the media. Barack Obama and a bipartisan gaggle of Capitol Hill geese have lent their support to this narrative — and to the massacre of the innocents that lurks behind it.

Yet as David Cronin notes:

There is no acknowledgement that Israel has been subjecting Palestinian civilians to collective punishment — in clear violation of international law. There is no mention of the seven-year siege that Israel has imposed on Gaza. There is no recognition that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has used the murder of three Israeli teenagers as a pretext to kill much higher numbers of Palestinian children in recent days ….

“Pretext” is certainly the operative word. As Max Blumenthal reports, Netanyahu’s government knew almost immediately that the three teenagers were dead, and who had killed them. But they suppressed these facts in order to rouse atavistic hatred among Israelis and to rally world opinion and sympathy — preparatory to an assault on Gaza that was obviously long-planned, and which had nothing at all to do with the murder of the teenagers at the hands of a “rogue” clan at odds with the Hamas leadership. Blumenthal:

From the moment three Israeli teens were reported missing last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the country’s military-intelligence apparatus suppressed the flow of information to the general public. Through a toxic blend of propaganda, subterfuge and incitement, they inflamed a precarious situation, manipulating Israelis into supporting their agenda until they made an utterly avoidable nightmare inevitable.

Israeli police, intelligence officials and Netanyahu knew within hours of the kidnapping and murder of the three teens that they had been killed. And they knew who the prime suspects were less than a day after the kidnapping was reported.

Rather than reveal these details to the public, Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency imposed a gag order on the national media, barring news outlets from reporting that the teens had almost certainly been killed, and forbidding them from revealing the identities of their suspected killers. The Shin Bet even lied to the parents of the kidnapped teens, deceiving them into believing their sons were alive.

Instead of mounting a limited action to capture the suspected perpetrators and retrieve the teens’ bodies, Netanyahu staged an aggressive international public relations campaign, demanding sympathy and outrage from world leaders, who were also given the impression that the missing teens were still alive.

Meanwhile, Israel’s armed forces rampaged throughout the occupied West Bank and bombarded the Gaza Strip in a campaign of collective punishment deceptively marketed to Israelis and the world as a rescue mission.

Critical details that were known all along by Netanyahu and the military-intelligence apparatus were relayed to the Israeli public only after the abduction of more than 560 Palestinians, including at least 200 still held without charges; after the raiding of Palestinian universities and ransacking of countless homes; after six Palestinian civilians were killed by Israeli forces; after American-trained Palestinian Authority police assisted Israeli soldiers attacking Palestinian youths in the center of Ramallah; after the alleged theft by Israeli troops of $3 million in US dollars; and after Israel’s international public relations extravaganza had run its course.

Israeli forces began rounding up and interrogating family members of the main suspects, Marwan Qawasmeh and Amer abu Eishe, the day after the kidnapping of the Israeli teenagers. Yet this fact too was kept from the public, and from the world. As Blumenthal noted:

While Netanyahu and his top deputies blamed the entire membership of Hamas for the kidnapping, the Shin Bet gag order suppressed all information relating to the identities of the suspects until 26 June. As far as the Israeli public knew, the kidnappers could have been anywhere in the West Bank, in any schoolhouse or coffee house or hen house where anyone remotely affiliated with Hamas congregated.
Having manipulated an exceptionally suggestible population through the careful management of information, the military had all the political latitude it needed to rampage through cities far from the scene of the crime.
Blumenthal further notes:

According to Israeli journalist Shlomi Eldar, members of the Qawasmeh clan of Hebron have earned a reputation for attacking Israeli civilian targets during ceasefires between Hamas and Israel.

While an extended family of over 10,000 can hardly be blamed for the actions of some of its members, it is notable that attacks carried out by fighters from the family were privately criticized by top Hamas leaders, as Eldar explains. Hamas leadership regarded the operations as self-destructive acts of freebooting and often paid for them in the form of Israeli assassinations. In each case, the violence shattered ceasefires and inspired renewed bouts of bloodshed.

“The same is true now,” Eldar writes. “Marwan Qawasmeh and Amer Abu Eishe have taken Hamas to a place where its leadership never intended to go.”

Hamas leadership has yet to take responsibility for the kidnapping and likely had no knowledge of its planning. As Haaretz military correspondent Amos Harel notes, “So far, there is no evidence that Hamas’ leadership either in Gaza or abroad was involved in the kidnapping.” Harel adds that the fallout of the kidnapping “effectively froze the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation.”

The latter is certainly one of the reasons behind the current onslaught. A reconciled Palestinian leadership could offer more formidable resistance to Israeli domination (although the years-long fecklessness of Fatah, its enormous corruption and frequent, brutal cooperation with Israel does not augur well for any principled resistance). But before any reconciliation or spine-stiffening could take hold among Palestinian politicians, Israel went on the attack.

Blumenthal tells a harrowing tale of the propaganda campaign waged by the Israeli government to whip the population into a frenzy of revenging bloodlust over the “missing boys” — even as Netanyahu and his minions knew full well the boy were dead. These efforts were redoubled after the bodies were found, and of course led to the notorious murder of a Palestinian teenager by Israeli youths inflamed by the government’s cold-blooded manipulations. I won’t excerpt the passage here, but you should read the Blumenthal article in full.

But political power-playing to separate Fatah and Hamas were by no means the only impetus behind the operation. In a world whose lifeblood is fossil fuel, it’s no surprise to find that the present attack on Gaza — like the ISIS assault in Iraq — is, in significant measure, one of the “resource wars” which many analysts believe will be one of the defining characteristics of the 21st century. As Nafeez Ahmed notes in the Guardian:

…in 2007, a year before Operation Cast Lead, [Israel’s] concerns focused on the 1.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas discovered in 2000 off the Gazacoast, valued at $4 billion. Defense Minister Ya'alon dismissed the notion that "Gaza gas can be a key driver of an economically more viable Palestinian state" as "misguided." The problem, he said, is that:

"Proceeds of a Palestinian gas sale to Israel would likely not trickle down to help an impoverished Palestinian public. Rather, based on Israel's past experience, the proceeds will likely serve to fund further terror attacks against Israel…

A gas transaction with the Palestinian Authority [PA] will, by definition, involve Hamas. Hamas will either benefit from the royalties or it will sabotage the project and launch attacks against Fatah, the gas installations, Israel – or all three… It is clear that without an overall military operation to uproot Hamas control of Gaza, no drilling work can take place without the consent of the radical Islamic movement."

Operation Cast Lead did not succeed in uprooting Hamas, but the conflict did take the lives of 1,387 Palestinians (773 of whom were civilians) and 9 Israelis (3 of whom were civilians).

Since the discovery of oil and gas in the Occupied Territories, resource competition has increasingly been at the heart of the conflict, motivated largely by Israel's increasing domestic energy woes.

Mark Turner, founder of the Research Journalism Initiative, reported that the siege of Gaza and ensuing military pressure was designed to "eliminate" Hamas as "a viable political entity in Gaza" to generate a "political climate" conducive to a gas deal. This involved rehabilitating the defeated Fatah as the dominant political player in the West Bank, and "leveraging political tensions between the two parties, arming forces loyal to Abbas and the selective resumption of financial aid."

…As Dr Gary Luft - an advisor to the US Energy Security Council - wrote in the Journal of Energy Security, "with the depletion of Israel's domestic gas supplies accelerating, and without an imminent rise in Egyptian gas imports, Israel could face a power crisis in the next few years… If Israel is to continue to pursue its natural gas plans it must diversify its supply sources." …

Earlier this year, Hamas condemned a PA deal to purchase $1.2 billion worth of gas from Israel Leviathan field over a 20 year period once the field starts producing. Simultaneously, the PA has held several meetings with the British Gas Group to develop the Gaza gas field, albeit with a view to exclude Hamas – and thus Gazans – from access to the proceeds. That plan had been the brainchild of Quartet Middle East envoy Tony Blair.

But the PA was also courting Russia's Gazprom to develop the Gaza marine gas field, and talks have been going on between Russia, Israel and Cyprus, though so far it is unclear what the outcome of these have been. Also missing was any clarification on how the PA would exert control over Gaza, which is governed by Hamas.

According to Anais Antreasyan in the University of California's Journal of Palestine Studies, the most respected English language journal devoted to the Arab-Israeli conflict, Israel's stranglehold over Gaza has been designed to make "Palestinian access to the Marine-1 and Marine-2 gas wells impossible." Israel's long-term goal "besides preventing the Palestinians from exploiting their own resources, is to integrate the gas fields off Gaza into the adjacent Israeli offshore installations." This is part of a wider strategy of:

"…. separating the Palestinians from their land and natural resources in order to exploit them, and, as a consequence, blocking Palestinian economic development. Despite all formal agreements to the contrary, Israel continues to manage all the natural resources nominally under the jurisdiction of the PA, from land and water to maritime and hydrocarbon resources."

For the Israeli government, Hamas continues to be the main obstacle to the finalisation of the gas deal. In the incumbent defence minister's words: "Israel's experience during the Oslo years indicates Palestinian gas profits would likely end up funding terrorism against Israel. The threat is not limited to Hamas… It is impossible to prevent at least some of the gas proceeds from reaching Palestinian terror groups."

The only option, therefore, is yet another "military operation to uproot Hamas." Unfortunately, for the IDF uprooting Hamas means destroying the group's perceived civilian support base – which is why Palestinian civilian casualties massively outweigh that of Israelis. Both are obviously reprehensible, but Israel's capacity to inflict destruction is simply far greater.

So here is another reason why the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation cannot be borne by Israel; it not only blocks a billion-dollar deal for existing Israeli gas, it also cuts Israel off from exploiting the 1.2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas off the Gaza shore. As Ahmed notes, this isn’t the only cause behind the current operation — but it is a central one.

But beyond all the politics and petrodollars driving the madness of the latest assault lie the ordinary people whose bodies and lives are being ripped to shreds. As’ad AbuKhalil, the ‘Angry Arab,’ is, as usual, an important source for some hard fragments of reality amidst the toxic sludge of spin and propaganda. AbuKhalil points us to a number of stories on the human toll of the attacks. Such as this one:

Sahir Salman Abu Namous was just four years old, soon to turn five. … Sahir was killed on Friday afternoon when an Israeli warplane bombed his family home in the Tal al-Zaatar neighborhood in northern Gaza. “He was playing and smiling next to his mother when missile shrapnel divided his head,” Mahmoud writes. “His father took him to the hospital screaming ‘Wake up my son! I bought toys for you, please wake up!’”

…Sahir Salman Abu Namous was one of 21 children who had been killed in the onslaught by Friday.

A piece of shrapnel divided his head. “Wake up my son!” Wake up, indeed: the soul of the world is sleeping, and the murderous rampage goes on.

More Than 15,000 Flee Homes in Northern Gaza
Israeli Military Warns Residents to Evacuate


By NICHOLAS CASEY in Gaza City and JOSHUA MITNICK in Tel Aviv CONNECT
Updated July 13, 2014 4:26 p.m. ET
Schools run by the U.N. are providing shelter for many Palestinians in Gaza who were warned to evacuate their homes before an Israeli offensive. WSJ's Nicholas Casey reports.
Thousands of Palestinians fled their homes in northern Gaza for United Nations shelters after Israel warned them with leaflets and phone calls to evacuate ahead of an intensified offensive, the U.N. said.

Ignoring calls from the territory's Hamas rulers to stay, columns of cars, donkey carts and scooters loaded with luggage packed escape routes from the town of Beit Lahiya on Sunday. Residents said that after hearing a fierce gunbattle in the early morning between militants and Israeli commandos, they decided to take the Israeli warnings seriously.

The U.N.'s refugee agency, UNRWA, said about 17,000 Palestinians had reached shelters, and called on both sides to respect the "inviolability" of the centers. Not all those who fled went to shelters, however, with some joining families elsewhere.

Members of a Palestinian family travel to a U.N. school to seek shelter after evacuating their home near the border in Gaza City on Sunday. Zuma Press

The Israeli military estimates that Hamas has an arsenal of some 10,000 rockets, including the recent addition of the Syrian-made, long-range M-302. Via The Foreign Bureau, WSJ's global news update.
The warnings followed a navy commando raid on northern Gaza that Israel said killed three militants and destroyed rocket launchers. It was the first time in this round of hostilities that Israel dispatched commandos instead of launching strikes from the air or sea.

Displaced Gazans crammed into U.N. schoolhouses, laying out blankets as children played soccer outside.

Sabreen Shunnar, 35 years old, sat with her elderly mother and a number of her children at one of the shelters. The family had been hit by fighting before in 2009, which leveled their home. As the children played, the mother, Hoson Jarbuo, flipped through pictures of their house.

"I'm expecting to go back and find rubble," she said.

Ms. Shunnar said that despite Hamas's calls for people to stay put, her decision to leave wasn't out of lack of support for the militants, only that she wanted to remain safe.

"I blame the Israeli occupation for this situation," she said.

A Hamas spokesman, Samy Abu Zohry, claimed the number of those fleeing Beit Lahiya, a town of about 70,000, was exaggerated. He called the Israeli leaflets "war propaganda."

View Slideshow

Smoke rises after a cargo crossing between Israel and Gaza was shelled on Saturday. Associated Press
The exodus was one of a number of setbacks Hamas has suffered in the current conflict. Its rocket barrages on Israel have caused few casualties, no deaths and far less damage than Israel has inflicted on Gaza.

After Hamas issued propaganda videos about a naval special forces unit, five Palestinian commandos sent to raid a military base in southern Israel were shot dead on Tuesday shortly after they stepped ashore.

On Saturday night, Hamas said it was firing a new type of rocket at Tel Aviv. But when the appointed time for the attack came, 9 p.m., Israel's Iron Dome rocket interceptors quickly shot down the volley, as it had nearly all others that posed a danger. Israel said the rocket was nothing new.

Israel military spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner said Beit Lahiya played an important role in both current and past conflicts with Gaza as the "launching pad of the vast majority of rockets into Israel." He said its position at Gaza's northern tip made it ideal for long-range rockets that have been striking deep into Israel.

Israel accuses Hamas of operating from within populated civilian areas for cover.

"We're using missile defense to protect our civilians, and they're using civilians to protect their missiles," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Fox News Sunday.

The movement out of Beit Lahiya showed the population's fatigue with Hamas waging battles among them, said Lt. Col. Lerner.

"There are people who don't want to be fodder," he said.

A military spokeswoman said the Israeli offensive on Beit Lahiya would involve a "significant number of targets" but would be from the air and won't include a ground incursion. A senior Air Force officer said the military would spend several hours to determine whether the neighborhoods had been evacuated.

Israel mounted more airstrikes on Gaza on Sunday, when the Palestinian death toll for nearly a week of fighting reached 170 with about 1,145 injured, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The U.N. said the majority of the fatalities were noncombatants.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he is "deeply worried" about the impact on Palestinian families. "Too many Palestinian civilians have been killed, and any Israeli ground offensive will undoubtedly increase the death toll."

Israel's military said the number of strikes from the air and sea since the operation began last week reached 1,430, up more than 100 in a day.

An Israeli airstrike on Saturday evening on the home of Gaza's police chief killed 18 people as they were leaving prayers at a nearby mosque, officials said. The police chief survived. The senior Israeli Air Force officer said the attack was being reviewed.

No Israelis have been killed but 16 have been wounded, almost all of them civilians.

Mr. Netanyahu has said all options are open, including a ground invasion, to stop rocket barrages from Gaza on Israel.

Israeli forces, tanks and armored personnel are massed on the border between southern Israel and Gaza, poised for a possible ground operation. Israel had called up 36,000 reservists as of Sunday and some were already at the border, training and checking equipment.

Israel said 130 rockets were fired from Gaza on Sunday, bringing the total to 1,110 since the beginning of the conflict. The rockets touched off sirens in most major Israeli cities, including Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. One rocket struck Haifa, the farthest point hit so far. In the city of Ashkelon, a 16-year-old was seriously injured by shrapnel from a rocket, police said.

In the afternoon, minutes after sirens were heard in an attack on Tel Aviv, one rocket was fired from Syria into the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. After midnight, several rockets were fired from Lebanon into northern Israel, the military said.

It was the third day in a row that rockets had been fired from Israel's northern neighbors in apparent solidarity with Hamas. The Israeli military said it returned fire.

A Neil Young concert scheduled for Thursday in Tel Aviv was canceled because of rocket fire. Secretary of State John Kerry spoke by phone to Mr. Netanyahu on Sunday and reiterated U.S. readiness to facilitate a cease-fire, according to a senior State Department official.

Palestinians flee their homes to take shelter at the United Nations school in Gaza City on Sunday. Associated Press
"The secretary condemned the rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel, and stressed Israel's right to defend itself," the official said.

Moussa Abu Marzook, a senior Hamas figure, said in an online message that even if a cease-fire is reached, it would mark only a temporary pause.

Israel's leaflets addressed to the residents of Beit Lahiya warned of a "short and temporary" campaign against militants, adding that those who ignored the warning would "endanger the lives of their family."

Israel has argued that such warnings are reducing civilian casualties from its strikes on Gaza.

Ahmed Al Attar, a 61-year-old farmer, said his extended family of 30 set off on foot at 3 a.m. under the full moon and walked about 7 miles to two schools out of the target zones. He said he feared a new bombardment would destroy about $7,000 of investments he had made to his farm where he grows cucumbers and which was leveled in the last Israel-Hamas conflict in 2012.

"Each couple of years, another war," he said. "I would prefer to leave this country."

Mohammed Arafah AbuHaloob, an 80-year-old man who owns an orange grove a short walk from the northern border, said he received six phone calls from Israelis telling him to leave his home. But he stayed put, saying there were too many valuables in his home.

He left only when his son and daughter—who had already fled—came to his house and refused to leave if he didn't do the same. He is still considering returning, he said

"It's an issue of it being my land," he said from a relative's home in Gaza City.

—Ahmed Abuhamda and Ruth Bender contributed to this article.

[seemslikeadream]

The Heart of the Problem With Israel: The Mass Expulsion of the Palestinian People
Central to the achievement of the “Zionist dream” is the notion that Jewish lives matter more than Arab lives.


July 18, 2014 |



As Israeli government violence against the Palestinians in Gaza intensifies (the latest news being an aggressive ground invasion), I saw a discussion on-line about whether Israel has become more brutal or the brutality has simply become more visible to the public.

I remembered listening to Benjamin Netanyahu when he was at MIT in the 1970’s. He called himself Bibi Nitai and said he was in self-exile until the Labor Party, which he despised, was out of power. He spoke contemptuously about Arabs, and predicted he would be the leader of Israel someday and would protect the Jewish state in the way it deserved. The immediate response many of us had was: “Heaven help us all if he ever gets into power in Israel.”

I also remember the many Israeli leaders I met in the 1970’s from Labor and Mapam and from smaller parties on the “Zionist left” who seemed kind and caring and markedly different from Benjamin Netanyahu—and in many ways they were, not just in their political rhetoric (they all said they were socialists) but as human beings, or so it seemed. But when I finally dug a little deeper and read my history, I learned how they, too, were participants—in fact, often leaders—in the plan to drive the Palestinians out of their homes and off their land. Nothing very kind or caring about that, to say the least.

The bottom line: Israel was created based on the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinians from their land and from their homes (what Palestinians call the Nakba, the catastrophe). This is the heart of the problem.

In some circles, particularly among “progressive” Zionists, the terrible injustice done to the Palestinians is acknowledged, but as awful as the Nakba was, they say, it was what had to be done to create and ensure the security of the Jewish state. (The most recent proponent of this position is Israeli writer Avi Shavit.) It was a terrible price that had to be paid, he and others concede. To be clear, the price was paid by the Palestinians—that is, the killing and expulsion of Palestinians for the sake of Jewish safety. And quite simply, the only way you can think that – that you can excuse the Nakba– is to believe that Jewish lives matter more than Palestinian lives.

And isn’t that what we are seeing today? If Jewish lives matter more than Palestinian lives—if, as the argument goes, the Nakba had to happen so that Jews could be “safe”—doesn’t the brutal violence we see so casually inflicted on the people of Gaza by the Israeli government follow from, in fact, isn’t it embedded in, that history? (And it’s ironic to note that large numbers of the Palestinians in Gaza are from families that fled there during the Nakba in 1948 as refugees from cities and villages in what became Israel.)

That is why I believe those of us working in our own communities—in my case, the Jewish community—need to make sure everyone not only knows about the Nakba but understands that this is the heart of the issue. And that central to the achievement of the “Zionist dream” has been that Jewish lives matter more than Arab lives. That so much attention was paid in Israel to the three kidnapped Israeli boys, in contrast to the total contempt and disregard for the large numbers of Palestinian youth killed and languishing in Israeli prisons for the crime of being Palestinian, brings this point home.

Finally, our understanding of the Nakba cannot end there. We cannot use the acknowledgement of injustice to excuse ourselves from doing anything to end it. We have to take the next step—to think about solutions; to work to hold Israel accountable to basic principles of human rights and self-determination; to recognize the rights of those who have been expelled from their homes. Sometimes the problem is understood as beginning with "the occupation" of 1967, but the root cause goes back to the Nakba and the refusal to allow the return of the refugees in contradiction of UN general assembly resolution 194. In the Palestinian-led call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), which has reverberated across the globe, the principles are laid out clearly: 1. Ending the Israeli occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall;
 2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
 3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194. That is what is needed to address the problem at its core.

[NeonLX]

Oh, whatEVER.

Ya gotta break some eggs ta make a omelet.

Nobody ever said this here life would be easy. 'sides, Israel done the humane thing by leafletting and calling them Palestinian people in advance of the offensive.

Sheesh.

[stefano]

As to the OP about Zionism's lost shine - I definitely get the impression, anecdotal as it might be, that there are more "not in my name"-style letters to the editor from Jews here in South Africa at the moment, and a more robust public debate between pro- and anti-occupation Jews than I remember seeing before. But I don't think that'll stop Israel. Their domestic politics is way off to the right from anything it has been before, and there are probably enough lunatic Eastern Europeans that can still migrate to Israel and settle the whole of the West Bank.

[seemslikeadream]

JULY 22, 2014

... And French Jews
Why Israel Needs Anti-Semitism
by DIANA JOHNSTONE
Paris.

Last July 12, Jewish Defense League (JDL) militants provoked some participants in a Paris protest demonstration against the Israeli attack on Gaza into violent clashes in front of a synagogue in the rue de la Roquette. The JDL militants were protected by police, whereas several pro-Palestinian demonstrators were arrested. The incident was loudly denounced by influential pro-Israel Jewish leaders as an act of French anti-Semitism.

It was no accident that this incident was falsely attributed to anti-Semitism.

It was no accident that Jeffrey Goldberg characterized the violence as “Jews Trapped by Rioters in Paris Synagogue” and questioned whether or not the incident was a cause for migration.

It was no accident that Avi Mayer of the Jewish Agency of Israel described the incident as an “anti-Semitic riot, which masqueraded as an anti-Israel rally.”

It was no accident that Yair Rosenberg, a writer for Tablet Magazine and employee of the Israeli State Archives, posted a video describing the incident as “European anti-Semitic attacks spiking during Israel’s operation”.

It was no accident because this incident was deliberately organized in order to brand a protest against attacks on Gaza as evidence of rampant “anti-Semitism” in France.

Above all, it was no accident because it fits perfectly into an official campaign of the Israeli government to lure French Jews to leave France for Israel.

Recruiting for Aliyah

Last December, the Israeli press announced a new three-year program designed to entice 42,000 French Jews to settle in Israel by 2017. In 2013, 3,120 Jews left France for Israel, compared to 1,916 in 2012. The campaign by the Israeli Ministry of Aliyah and Integration and the Jewish Agency aims to double the number of immigrants each year: targets are six thousand new Franco-Israelis in 2014, 12 thousand in 2015 and 24 thousand in 2016. France’s Jewish population of about half a million is the largest in Europe and the third largest in the world, after Israel itself and the United States. It is a tempting target for Israeli recruitment.

The carrot for this immigration will be government measures to recognize a range of French professional diplomas as well as funding to provide appropriate housing, education and employment.

And the stick? Israel can count on fear of anti-Semitism, real or imagined. Precisely by its support to Israel coupled with constant denunciations of anti-Semitism, the French government gives the impression of strong favoritism toward Jews which Arab and African immigrants interpret as discrimination against themselves. In some mixed neighborhoods, a fringe of marginalized youth increasingly assert themselves by displays of hostility toward Jews (or women, or “native” French). Such incidents create fear that is stoked regularly by alarmist web sites and deliberate exaggerations. Lists of “anti-Semitic incidents” are padded with random personal insults which would pass unnoticed if addressed to someone for being female, badly dressed or too fat. These scratches from prickly reality are by no means a re-emergence of “French anti-Semitism”. They are much more the result of a tendency to experience ethnic inequalities as a reflection of Israel’s domination of the people of Palestine.

Israel needs new immigrants from countries with a Jewish population, and France is high on the list. And what is needed most to recruit new immigrants? Anti-Semitism. The conclusion is clear: Israel has a vital need for anti-Semitism. The more there is, or seems to be, the better for Israel as the only “safe haven” for threatened Jews.

This fear is kept alive by Israel’s many volunteer propagandists in France, the sayanim, a category described in a novel by Jacob Cohen, Le Printemps des Sayanim. Cohen’s novel features an extremely prominent and influential sayan who is obviously meant to represent Bernard-Henri Levy, thinly veiled with a pseudonym. For decades, BHL has promoted the theme that France is singularly and essentially “fascist” in nature, the very heartland of fascism – which is historical nonsense considering that in the heyday of fascism, the 1930s, France alone in Europe had a Jewish prime minister, Leon Blum, while Mussolini ruled Italy, Hitler ruled Germany and fascists flourished in much of the rest of the Continent.

Since World War II, the French alliance with Israel went so far as to include secret cooperation on building nuclear weapons in the 1950s. But the ever-present theme of “French anti-Semitism” serves to keep French leaders endlessly apologetic and submissive to Israeli demands

“French Jews have every reason to be wary…”

An article by Sam Knight in Mondoweiss correctly reported that the July 12 clashes in front of the rue de la Roquette synagogue were deliberately provoked by the Jewish Defense League, citing as eye witness Michèle Sibony, of the Union Juive Francaise pour la Paix (the French Jewish Union for Peace). However, even as he set the record straight regarding the fake “anti-Semitic attack on a synagogue”, the author paid lip-service to the prevailing myth of “anti-Semitic France”.

“From multiple expulsions in the Medieval era to L’Affaire Dreyfuss (sic) and Vichy collaborationism, French Jews have every reason to be wary of anti-Semitism”, the Mondoweiss article conceded.

Unfortunately, this sort of reference to “French anti-Semitism” has become so standard, especially in the United States, that it may be considered required background even to an article casting doubt on the phenomenon.

Let’s look at the three assumptions supposedly confirming the danger of French anti-Semitism mentioned above.

1. As for the Medieval era, there were all sorts of reasons for various people to be
foolsjohnstone“wary” in those days; serfs had reason to be wary of the Lord of the Manor, for example. The Medieval era is over, and was abolished by the French revolution which was first to give equal rights to Jews. A few now complain at having lost their Medieval privileges, but you can’t keep your cake and eat it.

2. The main historical significance of the Dreyfus affair is that defense of a Jew in the end prevailed over the honor of the Army, which wanted to cover up its judicial mistake in condemning the wrong man. The incident served to align the progressive intelligentsia with defense of the Jews, even at the expense of the Army, which marked a basic ideological change. The long-term losers of the affair were the aristocracy (linked to the Army officer corps) and the Catholic Church, as secularism triumphed in France in the 20th century and the status of Jews was strengthened. In other countries, many comparable miscarriages of justice – especially military justice – have surely gone unnoticed.

3. As for Vichy collaboration, how well is this really understood? Jews were persecuted and deported all over Nazi-occupied Europe, but most of France’s Jewish population was spared. Last year, Alain Michel, born in France but now a rabbi in Israel and member of Yad Vashem, published a book, Vichy et les Juifs, which argues that the Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain and Pierre Laval set out to protect French Jews from Nazi persecution and was largely successful. When Nazi Germany defeated France in 1940, there were 195,000 Jews in France with French citizenship as well as 135,000 Jewish refugees, many having fled anti-Semitism in Poland and Germany. Vichy’s concern was to protect the French Jews, and succeeded in saving 95% from persecution and deportation. As for stateless Jewish refugees in France, Vichy’s attempts to persuade governments in the Americas to take them in failed, and over a third were deported to Nazi camps, while the rest escaped deportation thanks in part to evasion and stalling by the Vichy regime, as well as protection by ordinary French citizens. Alain Michel’s evaluation echoes the conclusions of earlier French historians, such as Leon Poliakov, who concluded that Vichy’s collaboration saved many Jewish lives which would have been lost had “Jewish policy” been left to the Nazi Occupation authority alone.

Interpretation of history has its oscillations between the glass half empty and the glass half full. In 1972, the influential film “le Chagrin et la Pitié”, and a year later, the publication of the French translation of American scholar Robert Paxton’s Vichy France contributed to a radical shift away from idealization of the French Resistance which had flourished under the post-war influence of De Gaulle and the French Communist Party. The loss of influence by both de Gaulle and the Communists among the post-war generation that emerged in May ’68 favored identification of France as a whole with the regime of Marshal Pétain in Vichy. Under the influence of so-called “new philosopher” ideologues such as Bernard-Henri Lévy, who stressed this identification as essential, it was easy to forget that Pétain came to power only as a result of France’s humiliating military defeat. His regime never was and never could have been chosen by the French people in free elections. This shift of focus from pride in the Resistance to shame for collaboration has contributed to a prevailing mood of anti-nationalism, even of penitence, centered on commemoration of the Holocaust (or Shoah), which may seem designed to reassure French Jews, but can make them uneasy as well. It may be too much to hope that the pendulum will stop swinging from one extreme to another and seek balance and accuracy in evaluating the complexities of the past.

“Importing the Israeli-Palestine conflict into France”

France today rivals the U.S. Congress as Israel’s most important overseas occupied territory. Considering the incredible rise of BHL to the role of a sort “spiritual guide” to French presidents, advising them to go to war in Libya and Syria and claiming that he does so “as a Jew”, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the most active Jewish community leaders and their organizations, far from “having reason to be wary”, know full well that they have no reason to be waryof anti-Semitism in France. French politicians, media and even school teachers are overwhelmingly devoted to commemorating the Shoah and defending both Jews and Israel (with varying degrees of subtlety). The Jewish Defense League has close relations with French police, even training in their headquarters, on the pretext of “protecting their community”. No other ethnic group enjoys such favors.

That is why certain Jewish organizations and individuals dare engage in the most outrageous provocations, acting as both master and victim, sure that they get away with it. If they really had reason to be “wary”, they might act wary. They might worry (and with reason!) that by constantly claiming to be persecuted in a country where they enjoy every privilege, they could easily be arousing the very hostility to Jews they claim to fear. Instead, the leading Jewish organizations flaunt their unrivaled influence, in blatant contrast to a large Muslim community which is on the constant defensive. They are sure that in a contest between French Jews and Muslims, the Muslims will lose.

Exploiting this favorable position amounts to more than just plain chutzpah. It is primarily an “Israel first” policy.

On the French national holiday, July 14, President François Hollande denounced the rue de la Roquette incident as an attempt to “import the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” into France as a pretext for “anti-Semitism”. Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared that “the Israeli-Palestine conflict cannot be imported into France.”

The French Jewish Consistory denounced “systematic exploitation of the Middle East conflict by organized groups and supporters of Jihadist terrorist movements”.

Roger Cukierman, president of the extremely influential Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), took his complaints in person to President Hollande.“We are in an unheard-of anti-Semitic climate”, he declared, demanding that such demonstrations be banned.

Obediently, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve called on local authorities to increase their “vigilance” and to ban demonstrations that risk to “trouble public order”.

Claiming that France is unable to “guarantee security”, Cazeneuve went on to ban a pro-Gaza demonstration scheduled for Saturday, July 19. The French government threatened demonstrators and even individuals calling for demonstration with long jail sentences and hefty fines.

Thus France became the first European country to outlaw a pro-Palestinian demonstration. Meanwhile, it goes without saying that all manner of demonstrations of solidarity with Israel are totally kosher.

The main effect of the ban was to place the French government clearly on the Israeli side of the Middle East conflict. On July 19, several thousand people defied the ban to gather in the Barbès section of Paris, focusing their protest on President Hollande’s support for the latest Israeli assault on Gaza. As was bound to happen once the demonstration was declared illegal, it attracted a number of apolitical youth who never miss a chance to fight with police, causing violent incidents in the neighborhood, notably setting fire to vegetable stands in a mainly Afro-Arab market.

Pascal Boniface, director of IRIS (the Institute of International and Strategic Relations), and author of La France malade du conflit israélo-palestinien (France is sick from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) is not the only one to point out that the Middle East conflict has long since been “imported” into France, primarily by Jewish organizations which insist on identifying Jewish interests with Israel and stigmatizing criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism. In response to the latest demands “not to import” the conflict, Boniface asked ironically whether that meant banning the annual CRIF banquets – events to which French politicians flock to proclaim their devotion to the Jewish State.

Clearly, the most active Jewish organizations feel that they can only gain by doing what politicians keep saying “mustn’t happen”. Importing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to Europe is exactly what they have been doing for years. In Europe, portraying the conflict as a war between “survivors of the Holocaust” and Islamic terrorists seems a sure way to mobilize public opinion in favor of Israel. Identifying the Palestinians with “Islamic terrorism” has been an obvious Israeli policy goal since September 11, 2001.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrations are called by an array of small organizations of diverse ethnic composition, including the Trotskyist New Anti-Capitalist Party, which like other such groups includes people of Jewish origin. In Belgium more than in France, a certain “return to religion” among young people of immigrant origin makes it easier to identify the Palestinian cause with Islam, even though this identification is false. Nevertheless, using the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to denounce Muslims is indeed tending to foster a religious civil conflict in France which Jews seem bound to win thanks to their vastly superior social status. The pro-Israel lobby can hope that such conflict will oblige European governments to strengthen their support for Israel, treating defenders of the Palestinian cause as “terrorists”. And indeed, in recent years, European governmental attitudes toward Israel have grown more favorable despite the fact that public sympathy for the plight of Palestinians has probably also increased, but lacks effective political expression.

The flagrantly unequal treatment is virtually certain to foster the growth of anti-Jewish sentiment among people of Arab and Muslim origin. But this “disadvantage” can be seen as an advantage if it serves to frighten impressionable Jews into moving to Israel. Importing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can seem to be a win-win strategy for Israel, by strengthening French political support while increasing the Israeli population with a desirable addition of French Jews.

It would be ironic indeed if fear of Muslim neighbors in Paris suburbs should lead French Jews to move to a country totally surrounded by millions of hostile Muslim neighbors.

Such cynical calculations may backfire in various ways. Meanwhile, the majority of French politicians are themselves responsible for importing the Middle East conflict in total contradiction to their own declarations and to the genuine interests of France as a secular country of equality among individuals regardless of religious or ethnic origins.

[KUAN]

All Power To Them

[seemslikeadream]

Scott Horton Show

Israel Motivates Terrorism Against the US
07/23/14 Michael Scheuer
Michael Scheuer, former Chief of the CIA’s Bin Laden Issue Station, discusses the one-sided US-Israel relationship; why Israel’s “right to exist” is meaningless rhetoric; and what motivates Al Qaeda and other Muslim extremists.

[seemslikeadream]

Pascal Boniface: "Criticizing the Policies of Israel Is Not Anti-Semitic"
Saturday, 26 July 2014 10:28
By Alexandre Devechhio, Truthout | Interview

Pascal Boniface speaking at the University of the Euro-Mediterranean. (Photo: Ségolène Royal / Flickr)
This story could not have been published without the support of readers like you. Click here to make a tax-deductible donation to Truthout and fund more stories like it!
Pascal Boniface is the director of the IRIS (Institut des relations internationales et stratégiques), a left-leaning think tank in Paris, and has written many books on international relations. His most recent book is La France malade du conflit israélo-palestinien [France's illness due to the Israel-Palestinian conflict] (Editions Salvator, 2014). This interview took place on the occasion of the prohibition by the French police of a demonstration in solidarity with the Palestinians in Paris on July 20. The demonstration took place nonetheless.
The Interview by Alexandre Devechhio, was published in Le Figaro (Paris), July 18, 2014, and translated by Jim Cohen.
FigaroVox: After the violent incidents that upset the pro-Israeli demonstration last Sunday, July 13th, the police authorities of Paris have undertaken an informal procedure to prohibit a demonstration in support of Gaza scheduled for Saturday. Is French society becoming a collateral victim of the Near-Eastern conflict?
Pascal Boniface: France is not becoming the victim of the Near-Eastern conflict; it has been a victim of it for a long time. The new upsurge in violence between the Israelis and Palestinians has provoked a spike of fever in France, but this "illness" due to the conflict is unfortunately not new. No conflict beyond France's borders has provoked such passion and so much criticism of viewpoints that displease others. Longtime friendships between people who do not share the same views on this conflict have broken up. You don't see this for any other conflict.
What is your opinion of the prohibition of demonstrations. Could this not prove to be counter-productive?
If the goal is to avoid the clash between communities, prohibiting demonstrations produces the opposite effect. Those who want to demonstrate may have the feeling that the government is responding to the desires of Jewish community institutions. There is also a violation of the right to demonstrate. Where should the limits be placed? Will it later be necessary to prohibit the numerous demonstrations of support to Israel? Should articles critical of the action of Israel be prohibited because they supposedly contribute to anti-Semitism? There is a risk of radicalizing a portion of those who feel solidarity with the Palestinians.
In your view, the confusion between anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and criticism of the Israeli government contributes to the importing of the conflict into France. What distinction do you make among these different notions?
This confusion is entertained by Jewish community institutions and certain Jewish intellectuals. Anti-Semitism is the hatred of Jews; anti-Zionism is the opposition to the existence of a Jewish state. Neither has anything to do with criticism of the Israeli government - or else certain Israeli NGOs, and personalities such as Israeli politician Avraham Burg and journalist Gideon Levy are anti-Semites too! When we criticize the policy of Vladimir Putin, we are not accused of being racist toward the Russians. To brandish the accusation of anti-Semitism each time a criticism of the Israeli government is uttered serves only to protect the latter. The huge majority of those who declare their solidarity with the Palestinians also combat anti-Semitism and all forms of racism, and favor a two-state solution, which means they also support the existence of Israel.
When you accuse the Haut conseil à l'intégration [the French High Authority on Integration] of Islamophobia for some of its positions, in particular its recommendation that the Islamic headscarf be banned in the university, are you not committing a dangerous confusion between the legitimate criticism of sectarian community behavior (communautarisme) and anti-Muslim racism?
When the HCI proposed last summer to prohibit the headscarf in universities, I indeed took the position that it was proposing a measure that targeted Muslims exclusively because it did not call for banning signs of religious identification in general. It seemed to me that this would have set off a war at a time when the majority of French people agreed that the law of 2004, prohibiting the wearing of the headscarf in public secondary schools, but not the university, was quite sufficient.
In your view, many non-Jewish French people, Muslims in particular, have the feeling that there is a double standard at work in the struggle against racism and that anti-Semitic acts are given more media attention than other racist acts. But doesn't your approach run the risk of encouraging the resentment of a certain youth in outlying urban areas toward Jews, and toward France, more generally?
Calling for the end of the double standard in the struggle against anti-Semitism as opposed to anti-Muslim racism, whether we're talking about the media or political leaders, does not mean encouraging the resentment of these youth; on the contrary, it is a way of combating it. Denouncing an injustice or a form of unequal treatment is indeed the best way of fighting the syndrome of competition among victims. If everyone is placed on an equal footing - if all the children of the Republic are treated in the same way - then there is no such competition and there is less political space open for resentment.
Can you give some precise examples of this double standard ?
Many attacks have taken place against women wearing the veil, but these have not given rise to mobilizations to nearly the same extent as if the victims were men wearing the Jewish skullcap. To present the wearing of the veil as part of some plot to put the Republic on its knees - as some journalists do - contributes to an unhealthy atmosphere.
In a short article in Libération published on February 22, 2011, we learned that the car and the motorcycle of Dounia Bouzar, an anthropologist specialized in Islam, were vandalized. On one of the vehicles the perpetrators wrote "No to minarets" and a note was left which read: "May Colombey-les-deux-Eglises [De Gaulle's hometown, "Colombey of the two churches"] not become Colombey-les-deux-Mosquées [Colombey of the two mosques]. The moment will come when Islamo-collaborators will be made to pay." Just imagine a comparable act committed against Bernard-Henri Lévy or Alain Finkielkraut - it would have been on the front page of every newspaper and all important politicians would have expressed their solidarity.
In your opinion, all racisms should be criticized, so what do you think about antiwhite racism?
It may be that some Arabs or blacks are racist with respect to those different from themselves. Possibly some whites are victims of racism. But there is no anti-white racism that is powerful, structured, based on many texts of reference, and which develops through social networks, is propagated in the press and supported by political leaders. Whites in France are not discriminated against.
You have had many difficulties in getting your latest book published. Are there certain subjects that remain taboo in France?
Because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict provokes passions, many people prefer to protect themselves, given that political criticism of the Israeli government is rapidly assimilated to anti-Semitism. Many people prefer to avoid the risk of such a defamatory label.
However, the French press is far from being in complicity with the Israeli government . . .
I know of few other subjects that appear so risky for political leaders and for the media. I know of no case in which political leaders, journalists or university professors who manifest their deep and possibly even unconditional commitment to Israel have been exposed to personal or professional sanctions. But many have had to pay a big price for having criticized the Israeli government. It is rather paradoxical that in France it is less risky for anyone to criticize the national authorities than those of a certain foreign government, that of Israel. I know of many people who tell me that they are in complete agreement with my analyses, but who prefer not to declare this publicly because they fear reprisals. I think that this reflects a dangerous strategy in the long run, even though in the short term it protects the Israeli government.

[seemslikeadream]

from Counterpunch

JULY 28, 2014

The Days of the Blockade are Numbered
Israel Has Lost
by SUNERA THOBANI
Israel may yet win its current battle in Gaza, but only by killing even more of the Palestinians it holds captive there with no means of escape. Israel is, of course, a major military power; indeed it is the most militarized nation in the world.i But this is the result of the support it enjoys from the most powerful military and propaganda machine human beings have ever produced, the US.ii Israel has been the biggest recipient of US foreign assistance every year since 1967 – over $81.3 billion dollars in 50 years – and is the largest importer of US arms.iii An Israeli victory in this battle, as in the past, would thus say rather more about the extent of its support from its international backers (including also Canada and the UK) than about Israeli political, military or even moral acumen.

Whatever the outcome of this battle however, Israel has already lost the war. Despite its occupation and blockade of Gaza, Israel has remained unable to isolate or marginalize – let alone destroy – the Palestinian resistance that is now represented by Hamas. Operation Protective Edge is certainly not going to accomplish this. Indeed, quite the contrary. The daily demonstration of Hamas’ resilience and its increasingly sophisticated fighting capability leave little doubt the organization has emerged as the strongest faction within Palestinian society fighting Israel’s decimation of what remains of Palestine.iv The recent statement by doctors, academics, teachers, judges, businessmen, journalists, women’s and human rights activists and other prominent public figures supporting the Hamas position that no cease-fire is acceptable without the lifting of the blockade demonstrates the unity and resolve of Gazans to end this illegal action by Israel and Egypt once and for all.v Even its enemies now define Hamas as the first real Palestinian army.vi With demonstrations in the West Bank and Israel threatening to irrupt into another full-blown Intifada, this Palestinian army will hardly be relegated to the sidelines as collaborationist.

Further, the movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions initiated by Palestinian civil society in 2005 has been growing by leaps and bounds. Initially met with the simplistic charge of being anti-semitic, the BDS campaign is daily winning over public support, including from student groups, unions, churches, academic and professional associations, artists, athletes and ordinary consumers.vii The strength of this grassroots campaign revealed even before the latest atrocity that Israel was losing its ability to control its image in global public opinion (outside the United States, that is). Israel is no longer able to take for granted its occupation of the moral high ground simply through its racist reassertions of Palestinian inhumanity and Islamist barbarity.

Indeed, so greatly has Israel’s standing slipped that the United States and Europe were compelled last week to ground flights into Tel Aviv, sending the clear message that Israel had better put a lid on things before they spiraled out of control.viii The day before, the United Nations Human Rights Council voted to launch a new investigation into possible Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Israel’s response to these developments was to shell a UN school being used as a shelter in Beit Hanoun, killing fifteen more Palestinians and injuring two hundred. This was hardly the most effective – or even rational – means to reclaim its public standing or to reassure its international backers. Instead, the attack on the school revealed just how out of control the Israeli strategy has become. The hubris of colonial power!

Israeli war crimes, although horrific, are nothing new. The last time around, the UN commissioned Judge Goldstone to investigate the violence in Operation Cast Lead (December 2008), when over 1,417 Palestinians were killed – 926 of them civilians, 437 children. The subsequent Goldstone Report found that Israeli troops had indeed committed war crimes.ix Israel denounced the Report while its international backers turned a blind eye, further weakening the UN and leaving intact Israel’s strategy of killing Palestinian civilians, including children. Moreover, pro-Israeli pressure led Judge Goldstone to later cast doubt on the Report’s findings. Citing information provided by the Israeli Defense Forces regarding its investigations into its own actions, Goldstone expressed his “confidence” that Israel would “respond accordingly” to the case of one “negligent” officer in what the Report regarded as the most serious of the attacks on civilians – the “killing of some 29 members of the al-Simouni family in their home.”x Criticizing the UN for its “bias against Israel” and declaring Hamas (morally? innately?) incapable of investigating its own “war crimes”, Judge Goldstone disowned the findings of the Report that will always bear his name.

The shelling last week of the UN school being used as a shelter for Palestinians fleeing the destruction of their homes and neighborhoods attests to how well placed Judge Goldstone’s ‘confidence’ was in Israel’s ‘due processes’ of investigating its “operational misconduct.”xi The death toll in the current assault on Gaza now stands at over 1,030 Palestiniansxii (mostly civilians) and 46 Israelisxiii (mostly soldiers). Israel’s supporters cannot claim innocence from complicity in this massacre of civilians. The Israeli establishment has already begun its propaganda campaign against the new UN investigation that has yet to be established, preemptively denouncing it as “biased” and a “kangaroo court”.xiv Past experience demonstrates that Israel has been able to get away with (mass) murder; this time around, activists have to be prepared for the concerted international action that will be required to ensure that Israel is held to account for its war crimes.

Israel will no doubt continue to justify its genocidal politics by offering its usual Islamophobic platitudes, that is, Palestinians don’t value human life; Hamas is a terrorist organization; they use their own children, families and communities as human shields; Israel lives daily under the threat of extinction, etc. etc. And its political backers, particularly those in the US, Canadian and European media, will continue to help peddle this racist colonial discourse, demonizing Hamas and dehumanizing Palestinians. Some of them may even wring their hands as they do so. But it is clear that Israel has been pushed to the brink by the strength of the Palestinian resistance. Operation Protective Edge has now taken Israel over the edge as it lashes out in a largely self-defeating – albeit murderous – strategy. All Israel has to offer is more massacres, more death, more destruction. This violence has to be made to stop immediately.

The situation is dire for Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, but it is certainly far from hopeless. The anger and resistance of Gazans is inspiring Palestinians in the West Bank and in Israel to rise up again; even Mahmoud Abbas was pushed into expressing solidarity with the Hamas position on the cease-fire.xv

Palestinians have demonstrated again and again their resolve to end the Israeli occupation of their lands. The inspiration of this resistance is further felt in the growing support around the world for the BDS movement’s call for an arms embargo on Israel.xvi The challenge to activists internationally is to intensify the pressure for this embargo. To do otherwise while Israel’s military arsenal becomes even bigger is to be complicit in its genocide of the Palestinians.

The Middle East is no longer what it was in 1967, nor even in 2008. The US defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq have, at least for now, changed the climate for Western occupations, invasions and interventions in the region, the Sisi regime in Egypt notwithstanding. Israel seems to have learned nothing from these defeats. The Palestinians on the other hand certainly have; they are ensuring that the days of the blockade are now numbered.

Sunera Thobani is Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia.

Notes

i Lobe, J. ‘Israel Ranked World’s Most Militarized Nation’, Inter Press Service News Agency. November 14, 2012.

ii Marcus, J. ‘US in major arms deal with Israel’, BBC News Middle East. April 22, 2013.

iii Hartung, W. and F. Berrigan, ‘Report: U.S. Arms Transfer and Security Assistance to Israel – World Policy Institute – Research Project, World Policy Institute. May 6, 2002.

iv Eldar, S. ‘Gaza tunnels take IDF by surprise’, Al Monitor. July 20, 2014.

v ‘No ceasefire without justice for Gaza’, Electronic Intifada. July 22, 2014.

vi Eldar, Shlomo. ‘Hamas, the first Palestinian Army’, Al Monitor. July 23, 2014.

vii See ‘BDS victories’, www.bdsmovement.net

viii ‘Europe lifts ban on flights to Tel Aviv airport’, BBC News. July 25, 2014.

ix Ziyaad Lunat and Max Ajl, ‘A glimmer of hope’, Electronic Intifada. November 12, 2009.

x Goldstone, R. ‘Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and war crimes’, The Washington Post. April 1, 2011.

xi Goldstone, R. ‘Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and war crimes’, The Washington Post. April 1, 2011.

xii BBC News Middle East, ‘Hamas-declared ceasefire in Gaza stalls as conflict continues’, BBC. July 27, 2014.

xiii ‘Hamas ‘declares Gaza ceasefire’’, BBC News, July 27, 2014

xiv Ahren, R. ‘Will Goldstone @ be as bad as the first one?’, The Times of Israel. July 26, 2014.

xv BBC News Middle East, ‘Gaza conflict: Abbas backs Hamas ceasefire demands’, BBC. July 23, 2014.

xvi ‘Nobel laureates call for arms embargo against Israel’, NSNBC International. July 21, 2014. See also Jivanda, T. ‘45, 000 gather in London to protest Israeli action’, The Independent. July 26, 2014

[seemslikeadream]

from Counterpunch

JULY 28, 2014

The Days of the Blockade are Numbered
Israel Has Lost
by SUNERA THOBANI
Israel may yet win its current battle in Gaza, but only by killing even more of the Palestinians it holds captive there with no means of escape. Israel is, of course, a major military power; indeed it is the most militarized nation in the world.i But this is the result of the support it enjoys from the most powerful military and propaganda machine human beings have ever produced, the US.ii Israel has been the biggest recipient of US foreign assistance every year since 1967 – over $81.3 billion dollars in 50 years – and is the largest importer of US arms.iii An Israeli victory in this battle, as in the past, would thus say rather more about the extent of its support from its international backers (including also Canada and the UK) than about Israeli political, military or even moral acumen.

Whatever the outcome of this battle however, Israel has already lost the war. Despite its occupation and blockade of Gaza, Israel has remained unable to isolate or marginalize – let alone destroy – the Palestinian resistance that is now represented by Hamas. Operation Protective Edge is certainly not going to accomplish this. Indeed, quite the contrary. The daily demonstration of Hamas’ resilience and its increasingly sophisticated fighting capability leave little doubt the organization has emerged as the strongest faction within Palestinian society fighting Israel’s decimation of what remains of Palestine.iv The recent statement by doctors, academics, teachers, judges, businessmen, journalists, women’s and human rights activists and other prominent public figures supporting the Hamas position that no cease-fire is acceptable without the lifting of the blockade demonstrates the unity and resolve of Gazans to end this illegal action by Israel and Egypt once and for all.v Even its enemies now define Hamas as the first real Palestinian army.vi With demonstrations in the West Bank and Israel threatening to irrupt into another full-blown Intifada, this Palestinian army will hardly be relegated to the sidelines as collaborationist.

Further, the movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions initiated by Palestinian civil society in 2005 has been growing by leaps and bounds. Initially met with the simplistic charge of being anti-semitic, the BDS campaign is daily winning over public support, including from student groups, unions, churches, academic and professional associations, artists, athletes and ordinary consumers.vii The strength of this grassroots campaign revealed even before the latest atrocity that Israel was losing its ability to control its image in global public opinion (outside the United States, that is). Israel is no longer able to take for granted its occupation of the moral high ground simply through its racist reassertions of Palestinian inhumanity and Islamist barbarity.

Indeed, so greatly has Israel’s standing slipped that the United States and Europe were compelled last week to ground flights into Tel Aviv, sending the clear message that Israel had better put a lid on things before they spiraled out of control.viii The day before, the United Nations Human Rights Council voted to launch a new investigation into possible Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Israel’s response to these developments was to shell a UN school being used as a shelter in Beit Hanoun, killing fifteen more Palestinians and injuring two hundred. This was hardly the most effective – or even rational – means to reclaim its public standing or to reassure its international backers. Instead, the attack on the school revealed just how out of control the Israeli strategy has become. The hubris of colonial power!

Israeli war crimes, although horrific, are nothing new. The last time around, the UN commissioned Judge Goldstone to investigate the violence in Operation Cast Lead (December 2008), when over 1,417 Palestinians were killed – 926 of them civilians, 437 children. The subsequent Goldstone Report found that Israeli troops had indeed committed war crimes.ix Israel denounced the Report while its international backers turned a blind eye, further weakening the UN and leaving intact Israel’s strategy of killing Palestinian civilians, including children. Moreover, pro-Israeli pressure led Judge Goldstone to later cast doubt on the Report’s findings. Citing information provided by the Israeli Defense Forces regarding its investigations into its own actions, Goldstone expressed his “confidence” that Israel would “respond accordingly” to the case of one “negligent” officer in what the Report regarded as the most serious of the attacks on civilians – the “killing of some 29 members of the al-Simouni family in their home.”x Criticizing the UN for its “bias against Israel” and declaring Hamas (morally? innately?) incapable of investigating its own “war crimes”, Judge Goldstone disowned the findings of the Report that will always bear his name.

The shelling last week of the UN school being used as a shelter for Palestinians fleeing the destruction of their homes and neighborhoods attests to how well placed Judge Goldstone’s ‘confidence’ was in Israel’s ‘due processes’ of investigating its “operational misconduct.”xi The death toll in the current assault on Gaza now stands at over 1,030 Palestiniansxii (mostly civilians) and 46 Israelisxiii (mostly soldiers). Israel’s supporters cannot claim innocence from complicity in this massacre of civilians. The Israeli establishment has already begun its propaganda campaign against the new UN investigation that has yet to be established, preemptively denouncing it as “biased” and a “kangaroo court”.xiv Past experience demonstrates that Israel has been able to get away with (mass) murder; this time around, activists have to be prepared for the concerted international action that will be required to ensure that Israel is held to account for its war crimes.

Israel will no doubt continue to justify its genocidal politics by offering its usual Islamophobic platitudes, that is, Palestinians don’t value human life; Hamas is a terrorist organization; they use their own children, families and communities as human shields; Israel lives daily under the threat of extinction, etc. etc. And its political backers, particularly those in the US, Canadian and European media, will continue to help peddle this racist colonial discourse, demonizing Hamas and dehumanizing Palestinians. Some of them may even wring their hands as they do so. But it is clear that Israel has been pushed to the brink by the strength of the Palestinian resistance. Operation Protective Edge has now taken Israel over the edge as it lashes out in a largely self-defeating – albeit murderous – strategy. All Israel has to offer is more massacres, more death, more destruction. This violence has to be made to stop immediately.

The situation is dire for Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, but it is certainly far from hopeless. The anger and resistance of Gazans is inspiring Palestinians in the West Bank and in Israel to rise up again; even Mahmoud Abbas was pushed into expressing solidarity with the Hamas position on the cease-fire.xv

Palestinians have demonstrated again and again their resolve to end the Israeli occupation of their lands. The inspiration of this resistance is further felt in the growing support around the world for the BDS movement’s call for an arms embargo on Israel.xvi The challenge to activists internationally is to intensify the pressure for this embargo. To do otherwise while Israel’s military arsenal becomes even bigger is to be complicit in its genocide of the Palestinians.

The Middle East is no longer what it was in 1967, nor even in 2008. The US defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq have, at least for now, changed the climate for Western occupations, invasions and interventions in the region, the Sisi regime in Egypt notwithstanding. Israel seems to have learned nothing from these defeats. The Palestinians on the other hand certainly have; they are ensuring that the days of the blockade are now numbered.

Sunera Thobani is Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia.

Notes

i Lobe, J. ‘Israel Ranked World’s Most Militarized Nation’, Inter Press Service News Agency. November 14, 2012.

ii Marcus, J. ‘US in major arms deal with Israel’, BBC News Middle East. April 22, 2013.

iii Hartung, W. and F. Berrigan, ‘Report: U.S. Arms Transfer and Security Assistance to Israel – World Policy Institute – Research Project, World Policy Institute. May 6, 2002.

iv Eldar, S. ‘Gaza tunnels take IDF by surprise’, Al Monitor. July 20, 2014.

v ‘No ceasefire without justice for Gaza’, Electronic Intifada. July 22, 2014.

vi Eldar, Shlomo. ‘Hamas, the first Palestinian Army’, Al Monitor. July 23, 2014.

vii See ‘BDS victories’, http://www.bdsmovement.net

viii ‘Europe lifts ban on flights to Tel Aviv airport’, BBC News. July 25, 2014.

ix Ziyaad Lunat and Max Ajl, ‘A glimmer of hope’, Electronic Intifada. November 12, 2009.

x Goldstone, R. ‘Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and war crimes’, The Washington Post. April 1, 2011.

xi Goldstone, R. ‘Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and war crimes’, The Washington Post. April 1, 2011.

xii BBC News Middle East, ‘Hamas-declared ceasefire in Gaza stalls as conflict continues’, BBC. July 27, 2014.

xiii ‘Hamas ‘declares Gaza ceasefire’’, BBC News, July 27, 2014

xiv Ahren, R. ‘Will Goldstone @ be as bad as the first one?’, The Times of Israel. July 26, 2014.

xv BBC News Middle East, ‘Gaza conflict: Abbas backs Hamas ceasefire demands’, BBC. July 23, 2014.

xvi ‘Nobel laureates call for arms embargo against Israel’, NSNBC International. July 21, 2014. See also Jivanda, T. ‘45, 000 gather in London to protest Israeli action’, The Independent. July 26, 2014

[seemslikeadream]

JULY 30, 2014

Ravaging Gaza
The War Netanyahu Cannot Possibly Win
by RAMZY BAROUD
When the bodies of three Israeli settlers – Aftali Frenkel and Gilad Shaar, both 16, and Eyal Yifrach, 19 – were found on June 30 near Hebron in the southern West Bank, Israel went into a state of mourning and a wave of sympathy flowed in from around the world. The three had disappeared 18 days earlier in circumstances that remain unclear.

The entire episode, particularly after its grim ending, seemed to traumatize Israelis into ignoring harsh truths about the settlers and the militarization of their society. Amid a portrayal of the three as hapless youths, although one was a 19-year-old soldier, commentators have failed to provide badly needed context to the events. Few, if any, assigned the blame where it was most deserved – on expansionist policies which have sown hatred and bloodshed.

Before the discovery of the bodies, the real face of Netanyahu’s notoriously right-wing government was well-known. Few held Illusions about how “peaceful” an occupation could be if run by figures such as Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, and Deputy Defence Minister Danny Danon. But because “children” – the term used by Netanyahu himself – were involved, even critics didn’t expect an exercise in political point-scoring.

There was sympathy elicited for the missing settlers case, but it quickly vanished in the face of an Israeli response (in the West Bank, Jerusalem and later in a full-scale war on Gaza) largely seen in the crucible of world opinion as disproportionate and cruel. Rather than being related to the tragic death of three youths, this response obviously reflected Netanyahu’s grand political calculations.

As mobs of Israeli Jews went out on an ethnic lynching spree in Israel, Jerusalem and the West Bank that some likened to a “pogrom”, occupation soldiers conducted a massive arrest campaign of hundreds of Palestinians, mostly Hamas members and supporters.

The Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas said it had no role in the death of the settlers, and this appears plausible since they rarely hesitate to take credit for something carried out by their military wing. Israeli military strategists were well aware of that.

This war on Hamas, however, has little to do with the killed settlers, and everything to do with the political circumstances that preceded their disappearance.

On May 15, two Palestinian youths, Nadim Siam Abu Nuwara, 17, and Mohammed Mahmoud Odeh Salameh, 16, were killed by Israeli soldiers while taking part in a protest commemorating the anniversary of the Nakba, or ‘Great Catastrophe’. Video footage shows that Nadim was innocently standing with a group of friends before collapsing as he was hit by an Israeli army bullet.

The Nakba took place 66 years ago when the so-called Arab-Israeli conflict emerged. An estimated one million Palestinians were forced out of their homes as they fled a Zionist invasion. Israel was established on the ruins of that Palestine.

Nadim and Mohammed, like the youths of several generations since, were killed in cold blood as they walked to remember that exodus. In Israel, there was no outrage. However, Palestinian anger, which seems to be in constant accumulation – being under military occupation and enduring harsh economic conditions – was reaching a tipping point.

In some way, the deaths of these Palestinian youths were a distraction from the political disunity that has afflicted Palestinian leadership and society for years. Their deaths were a reminder that Palestine, as an idea and a collective plight and struggle, goes beyond the confines of politics or even ideology.

Their deaths reminded us that there is much more to Palestine than the whims of the aging Palestinian Authority ‘President’ Mahmoud Abbas and his Ramallah-based henchmen, or even Hamas’s regional calculations following the rise and fall of the ‘Arab Spring.’

The Israeli reaction to the settlers’ death has been different. After the discovery of the bodies, fellow settlers and right-wing Israelis began exacting revenge from Palestinian communities. The mob was united by the slogan “death to the Arabs”, reviving a long-disused notion of a single Palestinian identity that precedes the emergence of Fatah and Hamas.

Perhaps paradoxically, the grief and anger provoked by the death of Mohammad Abu Khdeir, 17, who was burnt alive by Israeli settlers as part of this lashing out, has furthered this reawakening of a long-fragmented Palestinian national identity.

This identity that had suffered due to Israeli walls, military tactics and the Palestinians’ own disunity, has been glued back together in a process that resembles the events which preceded the first and second uprisings of 1987 and 2000 respectively.

However, unlike in the previous Intifadas, the hurdles towards a unified voice this time seem insurmountable. Abbas is a weak leader who has done so much to meet Israel’s security expectations and so very little to defend the rights of his people. He is a relic from a bygone era who merely exists because he is the best option Israel and the US have at the moment.

In the aftermath of the Israeli violent response to the killing of the settlers, Abbas laboured to coordinate with the massive Israeli search. At times, he stayed away as Israeli troops brutalised Palestinians in the West Bank.

It is clear that there can be no third Intifada that leaves Abbas and his wretched political apparatus in place. This is precisely why Palestinian Authority goons prevented many attempts by Palestinians in the West Bank to protest the Israeli violence unleashed in the occupied territories, which finally culminated into a massive war against Gaza that has killed and wounded hundreds.

Whatever credit Abbas supposedly gained by closing ranks with Hamas to form a unity government last June has been just as quickly lost. It has been overshadowed by his own failures to live up to commitment under the unity deal, and the relevance of his ‘authority’ was quickly eclipsed by Israeli violence, highlighting his and his government’s utter irrelevance to Israel’s political calculations.

When Israel launched its massive arrest campaign that mainly targeted Hamas in the West Bank, Hamas’s political wing was already considering “alternatives” to the unity government in Ramallah.

Hamas’s objectives were not being met. The unity deal was meant to achieve several goals: end Hamas’s political isolation in Gaza, resulting from the intensifying of the siege by Egypt’s Abdul Fatah al-Sisi, solving the economic crisis in the Strip, and also allowing Hamas to revert to its old brand, as a resistance movement first and foremost.

Even if Hamas succeeded in establishing a new brand based on the resistance/political model, Israel was determined to deactivate any potential for Palestinian unity. Destroying that unity became almost an obsession for Netanyahu.

The disappearance of the settlers gave Netanyahu’s quest a new impetus. He immediately began a campaign pressuring Abbas to break away from Hamas.

But there is still more to Israel’s war on Gaza than this. Fearing an intifada that would unite Palestinians, threaten the PA, and slow down the construction of illegal settlements, Netanyahu’s war on Gaza means to distract from the slowly building collective sentiment among Palestinians throughout Palestine, and among Palestinian citizens in Israel.

This unity is much more alarming for Netanyahu than a political arrangement by Fatah and Hamas necessitated by regional circumstances. The targeting of Hamas is an Israeli attempt at challenging the emerging new narrative that is no longer about Gaza and its siege anymore, but the entirety of Palestine and its collectives regardless of which side of the Israeli “separation wall” they live on.

A true Palestinian unity culminating in a massive popular Intifada is the kind of war Netanyahu cannot possibly win.

[seemslikeadream]

Iran ready to fully support Palestinian resistance: IRGC

Mon Aug 4, 2014 12:13PM GMT

A senior Iranian military commander says Iran is ready to fully support the "growing" Palestinian resistance movement.

“We are prepared to support the Palestinian resistance in various aspects. In defending Muslims, we recognize no distinction between Shias and Sunnis,” commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari said on Monday.

He added that the Gaza conflict indicated that the power of Palestinian resistance is “endless and growing.”

The IRGC commander further emphasized that the number of rockets launched into Israel and the Palestinian fighters' ability in confronting the Israeli ground invasion is proof to the Palestinian resistance’s growing power.

He added that the events in the Gaza Strip and Iraq are the result of the joint US-Israeli policies.

“The Zionist regime [of Israel] will collapse soon as a result of the unity among Shia and Sunni Muslims and we are ready for that day,” Jafari pointed out.

Medical sources say at least 1,822 people, including 400 children, have been killed and over 9,400 injured since the Israeli regime began its offensive against the Gaza Strip on July 8.

Palestinian resistance fighters are continuing their rocket attacks against Israeli cities in retaliation for the Tel Aviv regime’s relentless onslaught on the blockaded Gaza Strip.

The Israeli military says 64 Israeli soldiers have been killed in the four-week conflict, but Palestinian resistance movement, Hamas, puts the fatalities at more than 150.

[seemslikeadream]

Boycott of Israel Spreads in European Civil Society over Gaza War, Could Cost $5 bn/ yr
By Juan Cole | Aug. 3, 2014 |

By Juan Cole
The ill-considered and remarkably brutal Gaza war likely will give further impetus to the Boycott, Sanction and Divestment movement by Western civil society to pressure Israel on its illegal actions toward the Palestinians. A thoroughgoing such European set of sanctions could cost Israel as much as $5 bn a year and more. Roughly a third of Israeli trade is with Europe, and the EU is Israel’s largest single trading partner.
Unite, the largest British trade union, has now resolved to campaign for adoption of BDS against Israel.
The Sinn Fein mayor of Newry in Northern Ireland is also calling on retailers in the town to boycott Israel.
Although the Irish government has declined to slap sanctions on Israel over the latest Gaza War, Irish civil society is generally disgusted with actions like the Gaza campaign, with its ruthless disregard for the well-being of noncombatants:
“Many businesses, notably The Exchequer bar in Dublin, and the whole town of Kinvara have pledged to boycott Israeli products. The trade union of retail workers, Mandate, has called on shops not to sell Israeli goods and last night Irish rugby legend Gordon D’Arcy tweeted his support for the boycott campaign.”
Exchequer won’t carry Israeli alcohol products. Some Israeli wines are produced on the Occupied Golan Heights and so are illegal enterprises.
Note that these Irish businesses, towns and activists are going beyond boycotting squatter firms on the Occupied West Bank to boycotting Israel per se.
The idea of entire towns and cities boycotting Israeli goods is growing. Kinvara in Ireland is one. But several Spanish cities, especially those that lean left, are considering a similar policy. Many in the Spanish Left also want to pressure the European Union as a whole to take more forceful action to sanction Israel for Apartheid policies and war crimes.
BDS applied to Israelis in the West Bank is more common, still, in Europe.
After the Israelis deep-sixed John Kerry’s peace negotiations last April, 17 European governments cautioned their businesses against doing business with Israeli squatter firms based in the Occupied West Bank, according to the Economist. Under European Union law, these companies could be sued by Palestinians in European courts, claiming a tort over theft of their resources by the squatters and their European partners.
The Economist adds of the growing movement to boycott the West Bank squatters:
” “Tesco: We’ve axed fruit from Israel,” ran a headline about the British supermarket chain . . . referring only to harvests from the occupied Jordan Valley. Others have disinvested from Israeli firms or institutions with settlement-related assets. A Dutch pension-fund manager, PGGM, and Denmark’s largest bank, Danske Bank, have sold stakes in Israeli banks that finance settlement construction. The Netherlands’ largest public water-supplier, Vitens, cut ties to Israel’s water company, Mekorot, which takes water from the West Bank and then sells it back to Palestinians.”
The Soros Fund has sold off its shares in Sodastream, which has a factory in the West Bank (that no longer employs any Palestinians). So too has Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also seems to be divesting from West Bank squatter companies.
Also in Norway, “the leader of Norway’s largest trade union confederation LO call[ed] for a boycott of products from Israeli-occupied land and clearer marking of Israeli goods”
BDS in Europe is clearly growing as a movement. It could have a severe impact on the squatter settlements on the West Bank. But insofar as Israel proper is increasingly intertwined with the squatter enterprises, it seems inevitable that the boycott will spread to Israel itself. This is more especially likely if Israel goes on brutalizing the occupied Palestinians.
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Related video:
Middle East Eye: “Ronnie Kasrils on BDS, Apartheid and the war on Gaza”