Zionism’s Lost Shine

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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Aug 26, 2013 8:25 am

Photo essay: Israeli forces shoot teargas into mosque, suffocating hundreds before start of Kafr Qaddum demonstration
Posted on: August 23, 2013 |
23rd August 2013 | International Solidarity Movement, Nablus Team | Kafr Qaddum, Occupied Palestine

Today, Friday 23rd August, Israeli occupation forces invaded the village of Kafr Qaddum before their regular demonstration began. Shooting gas and sound grenades at residents, the army stormed the village from several different directions, attempting to make arrests – two protesters were injured with teargas canisters, which were shot directly at protesters. Soldiers shot teargas directly into the village mosque, whilst around three hundred people were inside praying, causing people to flee from the building.

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Soldiers inading the village before the demonstration begins (picture by Svenson Berger)

At around midday, over twenty soldiers ran directly down the main road of Kafr Qaddum, shooting gas and sound grenades towards a group of people in the village, some of whom were preparing to go to the mosque. Shortly afterwards they retreated, but continued to attack the village from several directions for the next hour, before the demonstration had started. Two people were injured by teargas canisters which were shot directly into a crowd of people who were running away from the soldiers charging down the road; one was hit in the back and one in his arm. The latter immediately required stitches by Red Crescent medics and later had to go to the hospital for further treatment and to ensure that there was no damage to the bone.

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Protester treated by medic after being hit by teargas canister (photo by ISM)

The Israeli military guidelines for shooting teargas canisters state that they should be fired at an arc into the air, but as usual the soldiers disregarded this rule, shooting directly at people. This is a dangerous practice which has killed protesters in the past – today several villagers reported that they had seen and felt the heavy metal canisters flying straight past their heads. “I feel I was nearly killed today,” said one demonstrator who experienced the near-miss.

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Israeli military shooting teargas canisters (Photo by Svenson Berger)

At 1 o’clock, following a sustained attack of multiple teargas canisters shot from the hill overlooking the village, several canisters were fired directly into the village mosque. Around three hundred men were inside, ranging from the elderly to very young children – most came fleeing outside as the gas filled the building, choking and blinded from the severe effects of gas inhalation.

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People fleeing the mosque after teargas was shot inside (photo by Sevnson Berger)

Angered by the attack on the mosque, residents of Kafr Qaddum then began their weekly demonstration, gathering on the main street which used to lead to Nablus and now is blocked by the settlement of Qedumim. Fires, set by burning tyres, were lit on the road and smoke billowed towards the illegal settlement – a reminder from the villagers of Qaddum that they are still present and that they are the legitimate owners of the land, as well as a deterrent for the army invading the village.

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Protesters burning tyres, the smoke of which blew towards the illegal settlement of Qedumim (photo by Svenson Berger)

Soldiers continued to invade the village, shooting excessive teargas into residential areas, between homes and into gardens – causing many more to suffer from the effects of teargas inhalation. Finally, the villagers advanced all the way down the blocked road towards the settlement as soldiers retreated out of the village – following one final volley of teargas, the soldiers left and the people of Kafr Qaddum went to their homes, chanting and clapping; celebrating their continued existence and resistance.

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Teargas filling the streets of Kafr Qaddum village (photo by Sevenson Berger)

The village of Kafr Qaddum has been holding weekly Friday demonstrations for over two years. In the last weeks, three youths were arrested in night raids on the village, including one seventeen year old – because of this, several impromptu demonstrations were held on days other than Friday in the last week. The demonstrations in Kafr Qaddum are held in protest at the continued occupation of Palestine, along with the injustices and human rights abuses that come along with it. The village has suffered personally from the occupation, with their land stolen for the illegal Israeli settlement of Qedumim and their main access to Nablus being blocked, adding 14 kilometres to the journey and causing two deaths when ambulances were not able to reach the village in time.

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Protester on blocked road leading to Nablus (photo by Svenson Berger)

Follow live tweets every Friday from the International Solidarity Movement at Kafr Qaddum and other demonstrations across the West Bank, by following us on twitter @ISMPalestine or looking up the hashtag #PalResists



Published on Monday, August 26, 2013 by Common Dreams
Deadly Israeli Raid in Palestinian Refugee Camp Puts Talks on Skids
Three people dead and many injured after military raid goes bad in occupied West Bank

- Jon Queally, staff writer
A raid inside the Qalandiya refugee camp in the occupied West Bank by Israeli military forces early Monday has left at least three Palestinians dead, more than a dozen wounded, and put another serious dent in peace talks that only recently began.


Relatives mourn the deaths of two Palestinians shot dead by Israeli troops, at a hospital in the West Bank city of Ramallah August 26, 2013. UN figures indicate Israeli forces have killed 14 Palestinians in the West Bank this year. (Photos: Reuters/Mohamad Torokman)
According to Al-Jazeera:

Medical sources told Al Jazeera that at least 15 others were wounded, six of them seriously, during clashes between the Israeli forces and Palestinians that erupted after the dawn raid on Monday.

An Israeli police spokeswoman told AFP news agency that the officers were on a raid to catch a "terror suspect" when more than 1,500 Palestinians poured into the streets and attacked them with firebombs and rocks.

She said Israeli forces used riot-control munitions - a term that usually refers to rubber bullets and tear gas.

It was not clear if the Israelis made any arrests.
Following the incident a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority said a planned meeting on Monday between the PA and Israeli negotiators would be cancelled.

According to Palestinian medical officials, the dead included Rubeen Abed Fares, 30, and Yunis Jahjouh, 22, both shot in the chest, and Jihad Aslan, 20, who died of brain damage.

"What happened today in Qalandiya shows the real intentions of the Israeli government," Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina told Agence France-Presse in the wake of the deadly raid.

"The meeting that was to take place in Jericho ... today was cancelled because of the Israeli crime committed in Qalandiya today," he said.

From AFP:

The talks have been overshadowed by Israeli plans to build more than 2,000 new homes for Jewish settlers on occupied Palestinian territory.

On Sunday, Jerusalem city council's finance committee approved a budget of $17.3 million (13 million euros) for infrastructure work at the site of the planned new east Jerusalem settlement of Ramat Shlomo.

The site hit the headlines in March 2010, when Israel sparked the ire of the US administration by announcing, during a visit by Vice President Joe Biden, that 1,600 new homes would be built there.

"The daily killings and ongoing settlement activity are all Israeli messages that aim to destroy the peace process," Abu Rudeina said.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby coffin_dodger » Wed Aug 28, 2013 7:38 am



I hadn't heard of this lady until today. She seems sincere, passionate and unafraid.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 30, 2013 11:16 am

coffin_dodger » Wed Aug 28, 2013 6:38 am wrote:

I hadn't heard of this lady until today. She seems sincere, passionate and unafraid.


That's Cynthia McKinney ..she unbelieveable and she is my friend.... here's Cynthia and me at the Green Party convention in Chicago a couple of years ago

that's me in grey face ...I'm kinda shy about putting my face out there :P

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and heres a great vid of her when she was a congressperson during georgie's reign trying to get some questions answered

and this story about her

The Screwing of Cynthia McKinney
How the New York Times, NPR and others drove a U.S. congresswoman out of office based on a quote that was never uttered.
June 17, 2003 |


Have you heard about Cynthia McKinney, former U.S. Congresswoman?

According to those quoted on National Public Radio, McKinney’s “a loose cannon” (media expert) who “the people of Atlanta are embarrassed and disgusted” (politician) by, and she is also “loony” and “dangerous” (senator from her own party).

Yow! And why is McKinney dangerous/loony/disgusting? According to NPR, “McKinney implied that the [Bush] Administration knew in advance about September 11 and deliberately held back the information.”

The New York Times’ Lynette Clemetson revealed her comments went even further over the edge: “Ms. McKinney suggest[ed] that President Bush might have known about the September 11 attacks but did nothing so his supporters could make money in a war.”

That’s loony, all right. As an editor of the highly respected Atlanta Journal Constitution told NPR, McKinney’s “practically accused the President of murder!”

Problem is, McKinney never said it.

That’s right. The “quote” from McKinney is a complete fabrication. A whopper, a fabulous fib, a fake, a flim-flam. Just freakin’ made up .

Hi, Lynette. My name is Greg Palast, and I wanted to follow up on a story of yours. It says, let’s see, after the opening -- it’s about Cynthia McKinney -- it’s dated Washington byline August 21. “McKinney’s [opponent] capitalized on the furor caused by Miss McKinney’s suggestion this year that President Bush might have known about the September 11 attacks but did nothing so his supporters could make money in a war.” Now, I have been trying my darndest to find this phrase . . . I can’t. . .

Lynette Clemetson, New York Times: Did you search the Atlanta Journal Constitution?

Yes, but I haven’t been able to find that statement.

I’ve heard that statement--it was all over the place.

I know it was all over the place, except no one can find it and that’s why I’m concerned. Now did you see the statement in the Atlanta Journal Constitution?

Yeah....

[Note: No such direct quote from McKinney can be found in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.]

And did you confirm this with McKinney?

Well, I worked with her office. The statement is from the floor of the House [of Representatives].... Right?

So did you check the statement from the Floor of the House?

I mean I wouldn’t have done the story. . . . Have you looked at House transcripts?

Yes. Did you check that?

Of course.

You did check it?

[Note: No such McKinney statement can be found in the transcripts or other records of the House of Representatives.]

I think you have to go back to the House transcripts.... I mean it was all over the place at the time.
Yes, this is one fact the Times reporter didn’t fake: The McKinney “quote” was, indeed, all over the place: in the Washington Post, National Public Radio, and needless to say, all the other metropolitan dailies--everywhere but in Congresswoman McKinney’s mouth.
Nor was it in the Congressional Record, nor in any recorded talk, nor on her Website, nor in any of her radio talks. Here’s the Congresswoman’s statement from the record :

“George Bush had no prior knowledge of the plan to attack the World Trade Center on September 11.”

Oh.

And I should say former Congresswoman McKinney.

She was beaten in the August 2002 Democratic primary. More precisely, she was beaten to death, politically, by the fabricated quote.

Months before the 2000 presidential elections, the offices of Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris ordered the removal of 90,000 citizens from the voter rolls because they were convicted felons . . . and felons can’t vote in Florida. There was one problem: 97 percent of those on the list were, in fact, innocent.

They weren’t felons, but they were guilty . . . of not being white. Over half the list contained names of non-whites. I’m not guessing: I have the list from out of the computers of Katherine Harris’ office -- and the “scrubbed” voter’s race is listed with each name.

And that’s how our President was elected: by illegally removing tens of thousands of legal African American voters before the race.

But you knew that . . . at least you did if you read the British papers -- I reported this discovery for the Guardian of London. And I reported again on the nightly news. You saw that . . . if you live in Europe or Canada or South America.

In the USA, the story ran on page zero. Well, let me correct that a bit. The Washington Post did run the story on the fake felon list that selected our President -- even with a comment under my byline. I wrote the story within weeks of the election, while Al Gore was still in the race. The Post courageously ran it . . . seven months after the election.

The New York Times ran it . . . well, never, even after Katherine Harris confessed the scam to a Florida court after she and the state were successfully sued by the NAACP.

So, I can’t say the New York Times always makes up the news. Sometimes the news just doesn’t make it.

At BBC Television, we had Florida’s computer files and documents, marked “confidential” -- stone-cold evidence showing how the vote fix was deliberately crafted by Republican officials. Not a single major U.S. paper asked for the documents – not from the state of Florida nor from the BBC. Only one U.S. Congressperson asked for the evidence and made it public: Cynthia McKinney of Atlanta.

That was her mistake.

The company that came up with the faux felon list that determined the presidency: a Republican-tied database company named “ChoicePoint,” one of the richest, most powerful companies in Atlanta.

Before I started with the BBC in London, I took a one-day television training course with the Washington correspondent for Fox News.

We filmed Al Gore. Specifically, we filmed the eleven seconds of Gore’s impromptu remarks . . . which we’d been given two hours earlier by his advance ladies. They wore blue suits.

The man for the Associated Press wrote a lead paragraph of Gore’s impromptu remarks one hour before Al walked in and said them. The network reporter copied down the AP lead line. I copied down the AP lead line.

After we got Al Gore’s eleven seconds and footage of someone in the crowd saying, “Wow, Al Gore really talked different from the way Al Gore usually talks,” we set up in front of the hotel where Al Gore talked. The important network reporter looked sternly into the camera and spoke in a very important voice. I squinted into the camera and spoke in a very important voice.

I can’t remember what I said.

He can’t remember what he said.

No one can remember what we said.

No one should.

Did I mention to you that (ex-)Congresswoman McKinney is black? And not just any kind of black. She’s the uppity kind of black.

What I mean by uppity is this:

After George Bush Senior left the White House, he became an advisor and lobbyist for a Canadian gold-mining company, Barrick Gold. Hey, a guy’s got to work. But there were a couple of questions about Barrick, to say the least. For example, was Barrick’s Congo gold mine funding both sides of a civil war and perpetuating that bloody conflict? Only one Congressperson demanded hearings on the matter.

You’ve guessed: Cynthia McKinney.

That was covered in the . . . well, it wasn’t covered at all in the U.S. press.

McKinney contacted me at the BBC. She asked if I’d heard of Barrick. Indeed, I had. Top human rights investigators had evidence that a mine that Barrick bought in 1999 had, in clearing their Tanzanian properties three years earlier, bulldozed mine shafts . . . burying about 50 miners alive.

I certainly knew Barrick: They’d sued the Guardian for daring to run a story I’d written about the allegations of the killings. Barrick never sued an American paper for daring to run the story, because no American paper dared.

The primary source for my story, an internationally famous lawyer named Tundu Lissu, was charged by the Tanzanian police with sedition, and arrested, for calling for an investigation. McKinney has been trying to save his life with an international campaign aimed at Barrick.

That was another of her mistakes.

The New York Times wrote about McKinney that Atlanta’s “prominent Black leaders -- including Julian Bond, the chairman of the NAACP and former Mayor Maynard Jackson -- who had supported Ms. McKinney in the past -- distanced themselves from her this time.”

Really? Atlanta has four internationally recognized black leaders. Martin Luther King III did not abandon McKinney. I checked with him. Nor did Julian Bond (the Times ran a rare retraction on their website at Bond’s request). But that left Atlanta’s two other notables: Vernon Jordan and Andrew Young. Here, the Times had it right; no question that these two black faces of the Atlanta Establishment let McKinney twist slowly in the wind -- because, the Times implied, of her alleged looniness.

But maybe there was another reason Young and Jordan let McKinney swing. Remember Barrick? George Bush’s former gold-mining company, the target of McKinney’s investigations? Did I mention to you that Andy Young and Vernon Jordan are both on Barrick’s payroll? Well, I just did.

Did the Times mention it? I guess that wasn’t fit to print.

I suppose it’s my fault, McKinney’s electronic lynching. Unlike other politicians, McKinney, who’s earning her doctorate at Princeton School of Diplomacy, enjoys doing her own research, not relying on staff memos. She’s long been a reader of my reports from Britain, including transcripts of BBC Television investigations. On November 6, 2001, BBC Newsnight ran this report with a follow-up story in the Guardian the next day:
Wednesday, November 7, 2001
Probes Before 11 September

Officials Told to 'Back Off' on Saudis Before September 11.

FBI and military intelligence officials in Washington say they were prevented for political reasons from carrying out full investigations into members of the Bin Laden family in the US before the terrorist attacks of September 11. US intelligence agencies have come under criticism for their wholesale failure to predict the catastrophe at the World Trade Centre. But some are complaining that their hands were tied.

FBI documents shown on BBC Newsnight last night and obtained by the Guardian show that they had earlier sought to investigate two of Osama bin Laden's relatives in Washington and a Muslim organisation, with which they were linked.

And so on. There was not one word in there that Bush knew about the September 11 attacks in advance. It was about a horrific intelligence failure. This was the result, FBI and CIA/DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) insiders told us at BBC, of a block placed on investigations of Saudi Arabian financing of terror. We even showed on-screen a copy of a top-secret document passed to us by disgruntled FBI agents, directing that the agency would not investigate a “suspected terrorist organization” headed in the US by a member of the bin Laden family. The FBI knew about these guys before September 11 (with their office down the street from the hijackers’ address).

The CIA also knew about a meeting in Paris, prior to September 11, involving a Saudi prince, arms dealers, and al Qaeda. Although the information was in hand, the investigation was stymied by Bush’s intelligence chiefs. This is what McKinney wanted investigated.

Why were the Saudis, the bin Ladens (except Osama), and this organization (the World Assembly of Muslim Youth) off the investigation list prior to September 11, despite evidence that they were reasonable targets for inquiry? The BBC thought it worth asking; the Guardian thought it worth asking -- and so did Congresswoman McKinney. Why no pre-September 11 investigations of these characters?

And what was the reason for the block? According to the experts we broadcast on British television, it was the Bush Administration’s fanatic desire to protect their relations with Saudi Arabia -- a deadly policy prejudice which, according to the respected Center for Public Integrity of Washington, DC, seems influenced by the Bush family ties, and Republican donors’ ties, to Saudi royalty. McKinney, a member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, thought the BBC/Guardian/Observer investigation worth a follow-up Congressional review.

According to NPR, her “loony” statement was made on the radio news show Counterspin. (Not incidentally, Counterspin is produced by an NPR competitor, the nonprofit Pacifica Radio Network.) I have the transcript; it’s on the web. Her charge that Bush knew about the September 11 attacks in advance and deliberately covered it up can’t be found.

What can be read is her call for a follow-up on the revelations from the BBC and USA Today on the information about a growing terror threat ignored by Bush . . . and whether the policy response -- war, war, war -- was protecting America or simply enriching Bush’s big arms industry donors and business partners. Fair questions. But asking them is dangerous . . . to one’s political career.

The BBC report which got McKinney in hot water mentioned the Bush Administration’s reluctance to investigate associates of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), which the FBI secret document termed “a suspected terrorist organization.” They may be. They may not be. McKinney’s question was only, Why no investigation?

Just after McKinney’s defeat, the courier of Osama bin Laden's latest alleged taped threat against the United States was busted in Africa: He was on the staff of WAMY. Shortly thereafter, Prince Abdullah, the Saudi dictator, invited WAMY leaders to his palace and told them, “There is no extremism in the defending of the faith.”

So if you listen to U.S. radio and read U.S. papers, you are told this: Abdullah’s protector and godfather, George W. Bush, is sane and patriotic, and McKinney, who wants to investigate these guys, is a loony and a traitor. Got it?

Ted Koppel’s Nightline did a kind of follow-up to the BBC elections story. Our BBC team discovered that of the 180,000 votes never counted in the Florida 2000 presidential race, a sickeningly disproportionate number came from black counties. In Gadsden County, where more than half the population is black, one in eight ballots was marked "spoiled" and, thus, never counted.

Koppel’s team got on the case, flying down to Florida to find out why thousands of black votes were never counted. They talked to experts, they talked to important white people, and Koppel reported this: Many blacks are new to voting and, with limited education, have a difficult time with marking the sophisticated ballots. In other words, ABC concluded, African Americans are too fucking dumb to figure out how to vote .

Hey, if true, then you have to report it. But it wasn’t. It was a fib, a tall tale, made-for-TV mendacity, polite liberal electronic cross-burning intellectual eugenics.

Here’s the real scoop: All races of voters make errors on paper ballots. But in white counties like Leon (Tallahassee), if you make a stray mark or other error, the vote machine rejects your ballot, and you get another ballot to vote again . But in black counties like Gadsden, you make a mistake and the machine quietly accepts and voids your ballot.

In other words, it wasn’t that African Americans are too dumb to vote but that European American reporters are too dumb to ask, too lazy to bother, too gutless to tell officialdom to stop lying into the cameras.

Back in the edit room with Mr. Washington Network TV Reporter, we were ready to bake the cake, the Gore story. We had all the ingredients.

“Take out your watch,” said the Fox man.

“You get 90 seconds,” he said. “That’s what you get. You got an intro, 40 seconds of narration, two sound bites, and end with a stand-up to camera.”

I repeated, “Forty seconds narrate, two sound bites, stand-up.”

He said, “Two sound bites and a stand-up. Every story. Every time.”

He said, “What do you think?”

I said, “I think I’m leaving the country.”


‘Disappearing Palestine’ ads come to Vancouver public transit
Adam Horowitz on August 28, 2013 4

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(Photo: Noor Kesbeh, Palestine Awareness Coalition)

From a Palestine Awareness Coalition press release:

The realities of Palestinian land loss are on display in Vancouver, as a new series of transit ads has been posted at the Vancouver City Centre SkyTrain station and on 15 TransLink buses, on August 27, 2013. The ads, created by the Palestine Awareness Coalition, made up of seven Vancouver-area peace and justice groups, depict the “disappearance” of Palestine due to Israeli occupation over the past 66 years.

“The goal of the advertising campaign is to make the Canadian public aware of Israel’s steady absorption of Palestinian territory from 1946 to the present day and the constant oppression that accompanies that occupation,” said Martha Roth of Independent Jewish Voices, one of the groups in the coalition.

The advertisements, which have rolled out on buses around Vancouver and on a large wall mural at City Centre, feature a simple design that has been used in billboard and transit advertising in Westchester County, NY, Portland, Seattle and other places in the United States and throughout the world in similar advertising campaigns. They feature four maps (1946, 1947, 1967 and 2013) which show Palestinian land loss due to occupation over time. “The progression is breathtaking: one sees the Palestinian territory shrinking to a few patches of green on the greater map of Israel,” said Roth.

The groups involved in the coalition are Boycott Israeli Apartheid Campaign (BIAC), Building Bridges Vancouver (BBV), Canada-Palestine Solidarity Network (CanPalNet), Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), Necef Sabeel (Near-East Cultural and Educational Foundation), Seriously Free Speech and Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights at the University of British Columbia (SPHR-UBC).

The Coalition is currently fundraising to extend the run of the ads. You can learn more on its website here.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Aug 31, 2013 7:40 pm

“American curators are cowards when it comes to political art,” says Palestinian artist
Submitted by Sarah Irving on Sun, 08/25/2013 - 00:40

John Halaka from the Landscapes of Desire series
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‘Survival’ from John Halaka’s Landscapes of Desire series. Image courtesy of the artist.

This week, I had the privilege of speaking at length with Palestinian-American artist John Halaka about his artistic development and his exhibition, Landscapes of Desire, currently showing at the Arab American National Museum in Detroit. The full interview will be running soon on The Electronic Intifada, but as usual, there was too much to fit into one feature.

So, by way of a taster, here are Halaka’s thoughts on how he believes that Americans, and especially the art scene, see Palestine. The excerpt came out of a discussion on the increasingly high profile of Palestinian art – including overtly political pieces – in European galleries.

The recent Shubbak festival in London, for instance, saw several exhibitions of work by Palestinian painters, sculptors and installation artists at both specialist Arab art institutions and even mainstream galleries such as the ICA. According to John Halaka, though, it may be a long time before American audiences have the same kind of opportunities:

I’m glad to hear that in Europe the interest is growing, because I haven’t sensed that at all in the US. There is some interest, but there are still the same – not even glass, but metal – walls, practically impenetrable for Palestinian artists. There is an interest in the idea amongst the general public, especially the progressive public.

The thing about the US is that politically progressive individuals, up until seven to ten years ago, had a very regressive, Zionist vision of the Palestinian conflict. That’s changing, so that gives me hope.

In terms of the art world, it’s not enough. There’s some. I’ve shown my work, other artists have shown their work. The Station Museum, almost ten years ago, put together a major exhibition, Made in Palestine. But those were minor in the big picture of things.

There’s never been a major exhibition of Palestinian art except for someone like Mona Hatoum. A lot of people look at her work — and I find her her work wonderful and fascinating — but they don’t make the connection with Palestine. So in the US, I don’t think the interest in Palestinian art has reached an institutional level, but it’s beginning to reach an individual level.

One of the things that I find interesting and quite hopeful is that my students are beginning to have a complex understanding of Palestine and Israel. What I mean by that is they are beginning to raise questions instead of just listening to the media.

I teach a class with a colleague on Palestinian art and literature, and I find that the students come in with little knowledge and a lot of good questions and they leave with a bit more knowledge and infinitely more questions and to me that’s really wonderful. We taught it just recently and the students were really wonderful. They thought hard, they worked hard, they read a lot and in some cases they tried to contact artists to write their research paper through direct interviews.

I think American curators and museum directors and gallery owners are cowards when it comes to political art. Anything that challenges of critiques American global policy but especially Arab world policy, they don’t deal with it, they ignore it.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Sep 02, 2013 12:44 pm

Israel Attempts to Impose Education System On Palestine
Monday, 2 September 2013, 5:29 pm
Press Release: Palestinian Mission

Palestine Strongly Rejects Israeli Attempts to Impose Israel’s Education System on Palestinian Schools in Occupied East Jerusalem

PLO Executive Committee Member and Chief Palestinian Negotiator Dr. Saeb Erekat condemned the Israeli attempt to impose its own educational system on Palestinian schools in Palestine’s Capital, East Jerusalem:
“Israel has been trying to change the status quo of Jerusalem since its occupation in 1967. In addition to policies of settlement construction and forced displacement, Israel has tried, on several occasions, to impose its own educational curriculum on Palestinian schools.

This act, like many others, is a blatant violation of international humanitarian and human rights law. By imposing its educational curriculum on schools in Occupied East Jerusalem, Israel shows that it has no intention of ending its 46-year old occupation, but rather seeks to consolidate the illegal annexation of Palestinian land.

For the past few years, increasing pressure has been applied on various Palestinian schools in the city, including Christian and Muslim schools and other private institutions, in order to change the educational curriculum. Incentives such as raising salaries and subsidies for schools that adopt the Israeli system were presented with limited success and acceptance. However, this new academic year 2013 – 2014 will witness five important Palestinian schools in Occupied East Jerusalemteaching the Israeli educational curriculum for some of their classes. The schools are Sur Baher Boys School, Sur Baher Girls School, Ibn Khaldoun School, Ibn Rashid School and Abdullah Bin Al Hussein School.

We consider this Israeli step an attempt to rewrite our history and undermine our national identity. We support the actions that are being taken by our student organizations, civil society organizations, parent’s unions and teachers in order to prevent this abhorrent situation from being realized, including their call for peaceful demonstrations.”

Some of the material that the Israeli curriculum for Palestinian children will include is:

Maps showing the Occupied State of Palestine, excluding Gaza, as part of the State of Israel. Hebrew Biblical names are used for Palestinian cities (i.e Shkhem rather than Nablus) in order to justify Israel’s occupation.

References to Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, although this is not recognized by any country, particularly not by Palestine.

The Israeli Annexation Wall described as a “security fence.”

Despite severe violations to Palestinian rights in the city, students will be taught that Israel is a “bastion of human rights and democracy.”

In one section of the book, a conversation between Arab students praising an alleged development supposedly brought by Israel to Palestinian cities. The students conclude by singing the Israeli National anthem in gratitude for all Israel has done for them.

Important Palestinian commemorations such as Al Nakba, Independence Day, President Yasser Arafat’s death or the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People are not included in the textbooks.

Currently there are around 110,000 Palestinian children living in Occupied East Jerusalem. 84% of the Palestinian children in the city live in poverty.

There are 139 kindergartens and 207 schools in Occupied East Jerusalem. Among the 83 private schools, 40 belong to the Islamic Waqf, 18 are private schools, 17 are Christian schools (including Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Armenian and Coptic) and 8 belong to UNRWA, providing education to Palestinian refugees. The Israeli Occupation Municipality has 54 municipal schools and works with another 70 other schools that are recognized by the Israeli Ministry of Education. Currently there is a shortage of 1100 classrooms for Palestinian students in Occupied East Jerusalem, including classrooms that have to be repaired and no less than 400 new classrooms needed.[1]

Only last week, Israel ordered the partial demolition of a Palestinian Elementary School in Khan al Ahmar, within the Jerusalem Governorate. Needless to say, Israel continues to build settlements in Occupied East Jerusalem, including schools for Jewish settlers, radical Jewish religious schools and a planned Military Academy at Mount of Olives.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Sep 03, 2013 4:26 pm

Palestinian Authority loses $300m in trade taxes a year to Israel
UN report defines as 'fiscal leakages' the customs, purchase and value-added taxes destined to the PA but retained by Israel

Mark Tran
theguardian.com, Tuesday 3 September 2013 13.00 EDT
Image
The estimated cost to the Palestinian Authority of the $300m leaked annually to Israel is equivalent to 17% of total tax revenue. Photograph: Khalil Hamra/AP
The Palestinian Authority is losing about $300m (£193m) a year in "leakage" of customs, purchase and value-added taxes which are not transferred to the Palestinian treasury by Israel, according to preliminary UN estimates.

The UN conference on trade and development (Unctad) defines fiscal leakage as Palestinian fiscal revenue destined for the PA but retained by Israel instead. Palestinian trade taxes consist of purchase tax and VAT, levied on all imports, whether they originate from Israel or elsewhere, as well as additional excise tax and custom duties on imports from sources other than Israel.

Mahmoud el-Khafif, co-author of the preliminary report, said initial figures were higher but were revised when challenged by the Bank of Israel. "These are very conservative estimates," he said emphasising that this fiscal loss is from two sources only. "We focused on leakages from indirect imports – goods produced in a third country, imported to Israel and sold on to Palestine. The second leakage is from smuggling."

The report says the losses do not include the revenue leakages from many other sources, including taxes levied by Israel on incomes of Palestinians working in Israel and settlements; revenue loss from under-pricing imported goods in invoices due to lack of Palestinian control over borders and access to proper trade data; revenue loss related to lack of control over land and natural resources; financial resources loss related to goods and services imported through the Palestinian public sector (petroleum, energy, and water); and fiscal loss as a result of the smaller tax base caused by the destruction of the productive base and loss of natural resources to occupation.

According to the protocol on economic relations, or Paris protocol, signed in 1994 by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation, any product wholly produced in Israel or has more than 40% of Israeli value added is exempt from customs duties, but subject to VAT and purchase tax.

Unctad, however, says not all Palestinian imports from Israel are goods produced in Israel or meet the rule of origin. It also says a significant portion of these imports are produced in a third country. These are cleared as Israeli imports before being sold in the occupied Palestinian territory as if they had been produced in Israel.

Customs revenue from these indirect imports is collected by the Israeli authorities but not transferred to the PA, as they are not labelled as being destined for the occupied Palestinian authority and are imported by Israeli importers and resold to Palestinian consumers.

Unctad estimates that about $115m of revenue from direct and indirect imports from Israel were not transferred to the PA in 2010 and 2011.

Smuggling is another source of significant fiscal revenue loss. Where the smuggled goods are produced in Israel, the PA loses VAT and purchase tax revenue.

Where goods are produced in a third country, tariff revenue is also leaked along with VAT and purchase tax revenue. By adding up the leakage from total imports and smuggling from Israel, Unctad estimates the total as more than $300m a year.

The estimated costs to the PA of the $300m leaked annually to Israel is equivalent to 17% of total tax revenue, in addition to 4% in lost GDP and about 10,000 jobs a year. If the leakage could be curtailed, and the money transferred from the Israeli treasury to the Palestinian treasury, the resulting increase in revenue would help to expand economic growth and employment, says Unctad. The gross domestic product of the occupied Palestinian territory would therefore increase by 4% and employment would increase by 10,000 jobs per year, the report contends.

Unctad says foreign aid has masked the impact of the measures imposed by Israel. However, with the decline of such support and the subsequent global economic crisis, the severe impact of the occupation on Palestinians is becoming clearer. The economic impact was most pronounced in Gaza, where growth fell from 21% in 2011 to 6.6% in 2012. The decline is concentrated in Gaza's agricultural and fishing sector, which has been directly affected by Israeli military action in Gaza in last November.

In March, Israel announced it would resume the regular transfer of about $100m a month to the PA after withholding the tax revenues it collects on behalf of the Palestinians as a punitive measure following last November's statehood recognition at the UN. The move came before the resumption of peace negotiations last month.

The report recommends changes to the Paris protocol, so that it is a more balanced framework "consistent with Palestinian sovereignty needs for economic, fiscal and policy independence". The report also recommends that the PA has full access to all data related to imports from or via Israel when the final destination of goods is the occupied Palestinian territory. It also suggests the abolition of existing time restrictions, that prevent the PA from claiming due revenue.


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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Sep 06, 2013 11:09 am

Gaza's enemies come out of the woodwork
Lama Khater
Thursday, 05 September 2013 11:13
Suddenly, blood no longer holds any weight between brothers and no one affiliates with the common thread of Arabism. Talk of an Arab army's aggression towards Gaza is normalised and portrayed as an acceptable outcome in many Arab media outlets.
In an era of Arab degradation, in which many dictators have tightened their grip, the maximum limits of the tragedy have been reached when it comes to Palestinian officials' silence and inability to condemn the tragedy they are facing. Their inaction can be classified as an act of betrayal and active participation in the Zionist crime against Palestine and its people.
In this critical phase of the Arab Spring, which gives rise to tyrants who sow the seeds of hatred towards Palestine and Palestinian resistance in their attempts to cause incitement, the fruit of their efforts will be ugly. Tyrants will step on the bodies of the pure and destroy any positive signs in the Islamic world.
The Egyptian army is currently waging an unprecedented war with its blockade of the Gaza Strip. The media openly speaks of bringing Hamas to its knees; why? It is the only entity of the Palestinian resistance that functions outside the binds and limitations of the Israeli occupation.
All of this is being met with indifference by a wide range of the Arab public and Gaza's enemies creep out of the woodwork. This group of malicious and corrupt people are the same individuals who invested in the epidemics plaguing the Arab word and benefited from the Arab nation's weakened state and lack of will. They were bound to address some of their impulsive degradation towards Gaza so that they would be able to implement the same vices and grab the reins of authority. Dirt has been cast over the glimmer of hope cowering under the ashes of the revolutions.
The worst thing about all of this is the Palestinian Authority contribution to the aggression against Gaza. It claims that the consequences of such actions are positive because they are carried out by an Arab army, while the people of Gaza suffocate due to shortages of fuel, electricity and medicine. Thousands of travellers are in a log-jam at the Rafah border while the coup's authorities in Egypt and the aggressively uncaring PA in Ramallah do not give a fig about the severe consequences of the siege.
It is unknown whether the mountain of hatred that has been placed on the Muslim world's chest can be moved. Nor is it clear how strength and energy can be summoned once more in the light of the ruins caused by Arab villainy, which has silenced outcries against the siege. It is also unclear how events will unfold as the critical breaking point is reached and Gaza is forced to pay the ultimate price. Yet, the Palestinians in Gaza will not bow their head in submission to the machinations of the treacherous. They will not allow anyone else to dictate their future and jeopardise their right to liberty, resistance and persistence.
Do not test the bounds of Gaza's patience and do not place bets on how long it will take to break her if the siege results in strange outcomes this time around. Do not assume that the role of the victim suits the Gaza Strip because every hand that causes harm to the Gaza Strip is more Zionist than the Zionists. These same hands once participated in two devastating wars with the Zionists and eventually had to face the harsh reality that Palestine was lost. At that time they consoled themselves by saying that Palestine will remain the cradle of resistance and rifles will be used to achieve liberation!
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby coffin_dodger » Sun Sep 08, 2013 3:43 pm

Jews Without Israel
6 Sep 2013

In shul this morning, the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the rabbi spoke at length about the State of Israel. This is more surprising than you might think. I’ve been going to this shul since I moved to Brooklyn in 1999, and if memory serves, it’s only been in the last two or three years that the rabbi has devoted at least one of her High Holy Days talks to Israel.

Throughout the aughts, Israel didn’t come up much in shul. During flash points of the Second Intifada, you might hear a prayer for Jewish Israelis or nervous temporizing about some action in Jenin or Gaza. But I can’t recall an entire sermon devoted to the State of Israel and its meaning for Jews.

That’s also how I remember much of my synagogue experience as a kid. Don’t get me wrong: Israel was central to my Jewish education. My entire family—my five sisters, my parents, and my grandfather—visited there with our synagogue in 1977. Several of my sisters, as well as my parents, have been back. The safety of Israel was always on my mind; I remember spending many a Friday night service imagining a terrorist attack on our synagogue, so short seemed the distance between suburban New York and Tel Aviv. I wrote about Israel in school essays (I actually defended its role in the Sabra and Shatila massacre). I had a strong feeling for Israel (or what I thought was Israel): a combination of hippie and holy, Godly and groovy, a feeling well captured by Steven Spielberg in Munich.

But for all of Israel’s role in my Jewish upbringing, I don’t remember my rabbi talking about the state all that much. In fact, the only time I remember him bringing it up was in 1982, not long after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. This was the first time that I became aware of international criticism of Israel. I had known, of course, about Arab and Palestinian opposition to the state, but in the world of American Jewry, that was all too easy to dismiss. The 1982 invasion, however, was especially controversial and brought Israel intense criticism from across the globe. Or at least sufficiently intense that I noticed.

Our rabbi—Chaim Stern, who edited the prayer book that’s now used at Reform synagogues across the country—was wry and erudite, not given to hot pronouncements. But something in the air that year stirred him to defend the State of Israel against its many critics. I’ve forgotten most of what he said, but one comment stuck with me: Israel should be allowed to be a normal state. We shouldn’t demand of Israel that it be a nation above others; we should let it be a state among others. Stern didn’t mean what many of us would now take that statement to mean: that Israel should be held to the same standard as other states, particularly states that claim to be liberal democracies. He meant that it should be free to hunt and kill its enemies. Just like any other state.

But aside from this one instance, my memory of my rabbi is that he was relatively silent on the topic. Israel was so much a part of the moral and material fabric of our lives that it didn’t require elaborate sermons and defenses or justifications. It (or an image of it) was something we lived rather than something we were lectured about.

And that’s how it had mostly been at the shul I now attend in Brooklyn. Until about two years ago. I remember the rabbi first taking up the topic in earnest in 2011 (or was it 2010?), almost apologetically, saying that we in the shul had been too quiet about Israel. It was time to talk. And by talk, she meant defend. Israel was under attack, politically and ideologically; its status in the culture could no longer be taken for granted. We had to speak up on its behalf. I remember wondering at the time whether she wasn’t responding to some specific call from other rabbis, a sense that Israel was beginning to lose control of the conversation not just internationally but in the US as well.

But what’s become clear to me since then—and this morning’s sermon confirmed it—is that it’s not the goyim the rabbis are worried about; it’s Jews. And not merely anti-Zionist, middle-aged lefty Jews like me but also younger Jews who are indifferent to Zionism.

In her talk this morning, the rabbi cited a statistic: where 80 percent of Jews over 65 feel that the destruction of the State of Israel would be a personal tragedy, only 50 percent of Jews under 35 feel the same way. I have no idea if this is true or what study it’s based on (this article in Tablet cites the same statistic), and admittedly it’s a high (and kind of weird) bar upon which to hang and measure support for the State of Israel. But my anecdotal sense is that there is something to it. Earlier this year, I had a drink with a 20-something journalist who’s Jewish. He said most Jews his age didn’t think or care all that much about Israel. Where Jews my age had to work toward our opposition to Israel—overcoming heated criticism and feelings of betrayal from friends and family—Jews his age, he suggested, could simply slough off the state as if it were so many old clothes.

But what most stood out for me from this morning’s sermon was how nervous the rabbi was about bringing up the topic. After talking a bit about how Israel felt to her as a kid (her memories are much like mine), she said that nowadays it seemed as if one couldn’t have a conversation with another Jew about Israel without fearing that it would explode into an argument. So fraught is the topic, she said, that many of us have opted not to talk about it at all. An uneasy silence had descended upon the Jewish community—an anxious modus vivendi in which we don’t agree to disagree but agree not to discuss—and it was this, more than anything, that worried her.

Now there are many reasons why a Jew would be made nervous by such a silence. Jews like to pride themselves on their tradition of argument and internal dissent. For every two Jews, three opinions, and so on. (That’s often not been my experience of Jews and Judaism, but it’s certainly a part of our sense of ourselves). Judaism, moreover, is not a religion of inner lights, of atomistic individuals who do their own thing. Ours is the religion of a people, a people with a rather insistent sense of collectivity. We do not shuffle into private confessionals; we declare our guilt publicly and communally. On Yom Kippur, we recite all the offenses we have committed against God and to each other (my personal favorite is “stiff-neckedness”). Individually, we may not have committed all of them, but that doesn’t matter. Somewhere, someone in the community did, and we’re all responsible.

But the rabbi wasn’t concerned about the conversation about Israel for these reasons. Something else seemed to be bothering her. If Jews can’t speak to each other about Israel, how can they defend the state to the rest of the country, much less the world? If defenders of Israel can’t make the case to the Jewish people, to whom can they make the case? Instead of issuing a call to arms, the rabbi pleaded for civility: let’s learn to speak to each other with mutual regard and respect, not to demonize each other simply because we take different positions on the State of Israel. Though she framed this as a universal injunction, I suspect she was speaking more personally. It seemed as if she felt like she had been demonized for her support for Israel (which is not, I should hasten to add, uncritical support but probably something closer to Peter Beinart’s liberal Zionism). And not by Arabs or the French, but by other Jews, perhaps even Jews in her own congregation.

I know how she feels. Though I grew up in a Zionist family, my position on Israel began to shift during my last years as an undergraduate in the late 1980s. In my junior year, I studied at Jesus College, Oxford. On the one hand, the experience solidified my identity as a Jew. Growing up in suburban Westchester, I never felt marked as other, as exotic or alien or strange. But at Oxford I did (I remember visiting a friend’s family over the Christmas holiday. Upon my arrival, the first thing they remarked upon was my being Jewish. It was as if they had been talking about it for weeks, wondering what they would do with this Jew once he crossed the threshold.) I came away from my year in England not only more identified as a Jew but also more interested in being Jewish.

On the other hand, that was the year of the Intifada, which set me on a path of questioning the State of Israel. When I returned to the States, I heard Edward Said speak on campus. I was mesmerized (anyone who had the privilege of hearing Said on Israel/Palestine knows what I’m talking about).

Coming out of these experiences, I recommitted myself to Judaism while rejecting Zionism. I learned how to be a Jew without Israel.

My break with Israel didn’t happen all at once. It was a process, but it did have an end point. In the summer of 1993, I was in Tennessee with my then-girlfriend, who was doing dissertation research there. Toward the end of the summer, I bought a copy of Said’s The Question of Palestine and read it in two days. As we drove back to New Haven, all hell broke loose. She was Jewish and at the time a firm if critical believer in Israel as a Jewish state. I began the car ride by voicing some tentative criticisms, but the conversation quickly escalated. It ended with me declaring that no child of mine would ever step foot in the State of Israel (I was kind of melodramatic in those days). We didn’t speak for a week.

That was my last experience of really getting into it with another Jew over Israel. I learned my lesson. I kept quiet. For about a decade and a half. The topic was simply too painful. I would only talk about it with ideologically sympathetic friends (and a couple of my sisters, who had come around to the same position as me) or with non-Jews. I couldn’t bear the feeling that I was being disloyal to the Jewish people; it was as if I had turned my back on my own family. I didn’t change my position; I just didn’t publicize or push it.

But something has changed in the last few years. The BDS movement has made great strides, critics like Ali Abunimah provide thousands of followers on Twitter with a constant stream of vital information we wouldn’t get elsewhere, books like Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby (whatever you think of its thesis) have blown open a topic long considered taboo, and respected voices in the mainstream media like Glenn Greenwald (and before him, Tony Judt) have made it possible for Jews to speak our minds on the topic. Now my little tribe within a tribe is more vocal, and suddenly it is our opponents who feel like they have to be careful around us and not vice versa.

I don’t want to overstate things. The pro-Israel forces still have an iron grip on the conversation in Congress (not to mention the expenditures and actions of the American state as a whole); critics of Israel are still vulnerable on college campuses; and lock-step support for Israel is still a requirement for mainstream respectability in most of the mainstream media.

I also wouldn’t want to make too much of a few sermons at my shul in Brooklyn, which despite being Conservative is politically progressive. I suspect the conversation in other shuls is rather different.

Still, if what my rabbi says is any indication, something may be happening in the Jewish community. If we look beneath the world of AIPAC and high politics, if we pay attention to the everyday conversation and its unspoken rules of discretion, we may be seeing a subtle shift in manners and mores that portends something larger and more fundamental.

I don’t know what that something larger is, or will be, and despite what Montesquieu and Tocqueville taught us, the politics of politesse is just that. Even so, for the first time in 20 years, I’m hopeful.

Shanah Tovah.

http://coreyrobin.com/2013/09/06/jews-without-israel/
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby NeonLX » Sun Sep 08, 2013 6:50 pm

SLAD!!! I hope you are my friend, so I can say I have a friend who is friends with Cynthia McKinney!

Actually, I hope you are my friend anyway, Cynthia McKinney or not... :)
America is a fucked society because there is no room for essential human dignity. Its all about what you have, not who you are.--Joe Hillshoist
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Sep 11, 2013 5:01 pm

From the archive, 10 September 1993: Israel and Palestine reach historic agreement

Israelis recognise the unelected PLO as legitimate representative of the Palestinian people while Yasser Arafat accepts Israel's right to exist

Ian Black
theguardian.com, Tuesday 10 September 2013 02.30 EDT

Oslo agreement
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat shake hands as President Clinton looks on, 13 Sept 1993. Photograph: Ron Edmonds/AP

Mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO, announced by both sides yesterday after days of haggling over the final terms, is a quantum leap towards resolving the century-old Middle East conflict - and towards the birth of an independent Palestine.

Recognition matters hugely because it means that Israel has acknowledged the need to deal with the entire Palestinian people - led by its 'sole legitimate representative' - and not just with those who live in the lands occupied in 1967. And national rights will lead eventually, sure as flags is flags, to a new state.

The agreement means surrendering the dream embodied in the Palestine National Covenant by acknowledging the limits of power in redressing the injustice of war and dispersion, and recognising that Israel is there to stay.

For those reasons there are many on both sides who will mourn the breakthrough and work hard to render it meaningless. Israelis who cannot countenance surrendering part or all of the West Bank and Gaza will fight, with words and perhaps guns.

Yitzhak Rabin faces a tough time although unrest in Israel will not mean civil war. Yasser Arafat's problems are more serious. He is weaker than Mr Rabin and more Palestinians oppose the deal than Israelis.

Refugees from 1948 are the biggest losers. For them there is no answer to the poignant question posed by Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet and bitter critic of Mr Arafat's deal: 'Where will the birds fly after the last sky?'

The agreement is an immensely important shift, but it is not a point of no return. Failure by Israel to deliver could bring new desperation. And haste by either side could derail the process before it has time to gather momentum.

Progress towards this historic moment was driven by the intifada, the largely unarmed rebellion that erupted in Gaza in December 1987. This 'war of the stones' proved to Israel that the status quo was untenable and to the Palestinians that there was a middle way between submission and suicidal armed struggle.

Wider changes propelled these old enemies towards a new pragmatism. The end of the cold war, the removal of great power rivalry that kept the long years of confrontation tense and the emergence of militant Islam have redrawn the maps of old battlefields.

Change on the ground is due to begin with interim autonomy in Gaza and Jericho, but change in Nablus and Ramallah will come too. An Israeli peace with the Palestinians opens the way to agreements with Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, because without the open sore of occupation other bilateral matters can be settled more easily.

This agreement is a beginning, not an end. It launches a process which holds out real hope, for the first time since Israel was created in 1948 and the Palestinians dispossessed and scattered, for a peaceful solution to what looked like the world's most intractable conflict.

[The 1993 Oslo agreement was the first time Israel and the PLO recognised each other, marking a historic moment in decades of conflict. It was signed on the White House lawn on 13 September 1993]
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Sep 16, 2013 8:06 am


Palestine: The Great Catastrophe
Historical Review article
By Karma Nabulsi
Global Research, May 15, 2006
The Guardian 12 May 2006


May 15th marks the 58th anniversary of the founding of Israel in 1948 – and the expulsion of Palestinians from their land. With millions still living under occupation or in exile, what Palestinians call their ‘nakba’ remains at the heart of their national identity, argues Karma Nabulsi
In the last week of April 1948, combined Irgun-Haganah forces launched an offensive to drive the Palestinian people out of the beautiful port city of Jaffa, forcing the remaining inhabitants to flee by sea; many drowned in the process. My aunt Rose, a teenager at that time, survived the trip to begin her life in exile on the Lebanese coast. Each Palestinian refugee family grows up hearing again and again the stories of those final moments in Palestine, the decisions, the panic, as we live in the midst of their terrible consequences. Throughout 1948, Jewish forces expelled many thousands of Palestinians from their villages, towns and cities into Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of others fled in fear. The purpose was to create a pure Jewish state, ethnically cleansed of the original inhabitants who had lived there for centuries. The creation of the state of Israel was the heart of this cataclysmic historical event for the Palestinians – the mass forced expulsion of a people; the more than 50 massacres carried out over the summer of 1948 by various armed Jewish forces; the demolition of villages to ensure the refugees could not return – all this is summed up in a single word for Palestinians: nakba, the catastophe.
“We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinians] never do return … The old will die and the young will forget,” said David Ben-Gurion, the founder of Israel, in 1949. But the young have not forgotten. The event is remembered every year on May 15, and the youth are at the heart of it: at a rally on the site of the destroyed village of Umm al-Zinnat near Haifa, Salim Fahmawi, now 65, a primary school student when the soldiers entered the village 56 years ago to expel them, told an Israeli reporter: “The presence of so many young people, many of whom are third- and fourth-generation post-1948, gives me a sense of relief – because I know the torch has not been extinguished and is passing from generation to generation.”
Nakba day has now become a profoundly political event – unlike other cultural and social manifestations of our national identity – because it is all about resistance to the current Palestinian situation rather than enshrining past memories of victimhood. The project against the Palestinians begun at the start of the past century had two purposes: first, to deny the very concept of Palestine and destroy its political and social institutions, and second, to annihilate the spirit of the Palestinians as a people, so that they would forget their collective identity once scattered far from home. But the relentless and dynamic nature of the catastrophe – it is an ongoing daily Palestinian experience – binds this generation directly to the older one, and binds the exiled to Palestine. Indeed, the past few years have witnessed a violent acceleration in this process of attempted destruction – hence the title of this year’s event: The Nakba Continues.
The nakba is being lived again today in the brutal thrust of the current policies of the Israeli state. More than 10,000 Palestinian refugees have been created by the construction of the concrete separation wall that has cordoned off huge new tracts of occupied land. This wall, condemned as illegal by the International Court of Justice, has turned West Bank cities such as Qalqilya into ghost towns, and thousands of refugees have been created for the third and fourth time in the refugee camps in Gaza. Yet it is not simply in the building of the walls and checkpoints by Israel’s occupying forces, or the different roads created for Jews and Arabs on Palestinian land, or the use of specially constructed bulldozers that rip up Palestinian orchards and olive groves and demolish hundreds of homes, or the imprisonment of thousands of political prisoners, or the daily murder of Palestinian civilians, that demonstrates the continuing nature of the nakba. It is also in the dedication of Israel’s military and political machinery to the destruction of Palestinian resistance to their project.
This resistance operates on two levels, just as the nakba operated – and operates today – on both. The first is the Palestinians’ physical effort to resist Israeli attempts to dispossess, disinherit and physically control them and their land, to get rid of its people and to militarily control and legally disenfranchise those they cannot. The second lies in the Palestinians’ existential affirmation of their identity in the face of a systematic Israeli effort to fragment and destroy it, so that Palestinians will surrender, submit, forget. But no matter how violently the first method is used by Israel, the second has been a failure: Palestinian identity is stronger than ever in 2006.
Nevertheless, the denial of the Palestinians’ right to resist what has been imposed on them has been demonstrated dramatically in recent weeks. We have witnessed the astonishing international policy of imposing sanctions as a form of collective punishment on an occupied people – rather than on their occupier who is maintaining that occupation through brute violence. Vital international aid for basic services has been cut off by the European Union and the US – from Palestinians in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967 – because they elected Hamas, voting for representatives who had campaigned on a platform promising to hold the line against this destruction of their national identity and rights.
The most malicious aspect of this policy is the fact that the money being withheld is only needed because the occupation tactics of curfews, closures and checkpoints have destroyed the Palestinian economy. The financial catastrophe triggered by these sanctions is created entirely by the Israeli occupation itself, as World Bank and British parliamentary select committee reports have made clear. The punishment of starving the Palestinians is quite blatant: to force them to their knees and make them repudiate their elected representatives. Even more absurdly, Israel has not accepted – or even been asked to accept – any of the parallel conditions being demanded of the Palestinians for a resumption of aid: an end to violence; the acceptance of the 1993 Oslo agreements; or the recognition of a Palestinian state in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967: the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. Instead they build expand settlements, denounce the Oslo accords, and have used increasingly indiscriminate violence in both Gaza and the West Bank. The west’s response in a conflict it helped created 58 years ago has fallen to a truly cruel, but also bizarre level.
This denial of Palestinians’ worth has been demonstrated again in the way western media studiedly ignore their daily suffering. In April and May, more than 40 Palestinians have been killed by the army – most of them civilians, at least eight of them children – with the most perfunctory coverage in the western press. Schoolchildren blown to bits while playing in Beit Lahia, like Mamdouh Obeid; Eitan Youssef, a 41-year-old mother from Tulkarm, shot in front of her children because troops “thought they saw a suspicious movement”; an old man, Musa Sawarkah, herding his flock in Gaza, gunned down; a taxi-driver, Zakariya Daraghmeh,”accidentally” shot in the back in Nablus. Each one a story unheard, untold.
The predicament of life under military occupation is usually recognised in principle, but life in exile has its own characteristics, and continues to create its own bitter experience for Palestinians. Most young Palestinians today live not in the West Bank or Gaza, but in the immediate region outside of historic Palestine in the Arab world: stateless, ID-less, jobless, without the international legal protections of other refugees from other countries. Theirs is often a relentless struggle to live any kind of life at all. The younger generation, wherever they are, possess a common character created through these harsh conditions of exile and passed on through others’ memories of place names, old liberation songs, photographs of eternally absent relatives, intimate domestic connections and objects – above all, the rusted key to the front door of the lost house, never seen. As the French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs first noted, human memory is an entirely collective engagement. In his book La mémoire Collective, published in 1949 four years after he was executed at Buchenwald, Halbwachs was the first to recognise that memory itself is never really individual.
In 2005, young Palestinian activists helped to organise more than 100 meetings in refugee camps and exile communities in more than 28 countries. The idea was to bring Palestinians together – whether under occupation or in exile – to discuss the things they want to do next. I participated in many of these gatherings and witnessed the promise of this generation replicating something they have no first-hand experience themselves, for it is rarely talked about and is as yet unwritten: the secret history of the previous generation of Palestinian resistance activists and fighters. Their current endeavours echo the same practices, the same spirit, and the same direction.
Although these huge meetings held last year were all organised locally, the transcripts – from places as far apart as Australia, Iraq, Egypt, Sweden, Lebanon, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Greece – show that a shared conversation is happening. Palestinians are reclaiming their past – of the nakba and dispossession – and at the same time preparing the next phase of their fight for justice. By some miracle of the general will, every Palestinian has somehow, through different journeys, arrived together at the same place.
Karma Nabulsi is a politics fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford University and a former PLO representative. She is also the author of the outstanding book “In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story,” which narrates her family’s displacement from Jerusalem in 1948.
The book is available at http://www.palestineonlinestore.com/


The Oslo Accords: 20 Years of a Political Charade
by Ludwig Watzal / September 15th, 2013

Originally, I didn’t want to write anything at the 20th Anniversary of the signing of the Oslo accords, because I consider it a waste of time. But since there are still journalists and politicians who can get something positive out of this charade, I would like to show them that their thinking is illusory. Fact is: Secret negotiations take place between the fourth-largest nuclear power in the world and a brutally colonized and oppressed people, which only has international law on its side. This fact requires no further comment when it comes to a possible outcome.

At the outset, it should be mentioned that the so-called “Geneva Initiative”, initiated by Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abed Rabbo, who claimed to have submitted the non plus ultra of a “peace plan”, was a political flop. This charade was funded by the Swiss Federal Government and presented to the public in Geneva on 1 December 2003. By the way, in that document, all sensitive political questions remained unanswered. These two ex-politicians and their supporters had the hubris to believe that the Sharon government would spare a thought about their proposals. Sharon simply ignored their “plan.” The entire “peace process” may be regarded as a political show for the Western public, so that the Israeli colonization of the occupied territories could proceed smoothly till the bitter end.

The euphoria that prevailed at the signing of the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn, has finally given way to more sober skepticism. For euphoria was already on 13 September 1993, those who bothered to read thoroughly the Accords had no reason for euphoria. These Accords did not mention the establishment of a “Palestinian state,” “sovereignty,” or the “right to self-determination” of the Palestinian people. The Oslo Accords were designed so that the “Palestinian Authority” would serve as a “subcontractor” of the Israeli occupying power. Within narrowly defined limits, it “alone” could take within “zone A” “sovereign” decisions, and it should keep its own inhabitants in check, should they endanger Israel’s security.

This “peace process” has since been in a continuous loop, it has degenerated into a farce, which is currently re-listed as a drama. Under intense pressure from the U.S., the Israeli Justice Minister Tzipora “Tzipi” Livni and Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat claim to “negotiate” in secret a peace settlement of the Middle East conflict. If the Palestinians don’t want to be subject to any Israeli diktat, these “negotiations” will fail, like all previous ones. Under the Ehud Olmert government, Livni and Erekat negotiated inconclusively for several years about “peace.” The negotiations failed because Israel wanted the Palestinians to surrender. The demand for total capitulation was circumscribed by Erekat’s infamous reply to Livni: “The only thing I cannot do is convert to Zionism.” Might Erekat and the “Palestinian authority” “convert” this time? Nor should it be forgotten that Livni stands in the tradition of revisionist Zionism. She is a member of a right-wing nationalist government, which alone has the say. Whatever Tzip Livni “concedes” in the negotiations cannot be taken at face value by the Palestinian side.

With the publication of the “Palestine Papers,” the world was made aware of the policy of rejectionism by the Israeli side. It is not the Palestinians (Arabs) who “miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” as Abba Eban once said; it is the various Israeli governments who torpedo every chance for peace. This attitude is impressively documented in the book Israeli Rejectionism by Zalman Amit and Daphna Levit. This denial represents the red thread of Israeli politics that runs all the way from David Ben-Gurion up to Benjamin Netanyahu.

The “peace process” that broke out with Oslo turned out to be the third “catastrophe” for the Palestinians in their painful history. This “peace process” has brought only disadvantages to ordinary Palestinians, but not for the political class that has financially benefited enormously from it, be it the Abbas administration or the Hamas Palestinians. The former are bankrolled by the West, the latter by some Arab despots. Both political classes live in clover and have made their pile, either in Jordan or Qatar. Their behavior is shameful if one looks at the misery of their subjects under Israeli occupation. An improvement of their situation can only be achieved if the people rise up against these “representatives” or send them into exile in Jordan or Qatar.

This “peace process” has not only led to the tripling of the number of colonizers (settlers) in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, but the number of Palestinians killed has also tripled in the same period in comparison to the period 1967 to 1993. After Oslo, the occupied territories were covered with a road system, which in part is only open for Jewish Israelis. The destruction of Palestinian homes, intended to promote the Judaization of the occupied territories and Jerusalem, has reached unimaginable proportions. Israel has walled itself in by a fence, which in some parts is replaced by an eight-meter high wall, allegedly to protect its citizens against “Palestinian terrorism.” Adequately for the “peace process,” however, would be to finally “give” an oppressed and colonized people self-determination and freedom.

The West may still have to deal, journalistically and politically, with the “peace process” for another century until Israel has brought the whole of Palestine under its control. On land and road maps, it has already done so. Since the West doesn’t care about violations to international law and human rights by Israel and since its patron, the United States of America, breaches international law and human rights on a regular basis, the only effective democratic weapon of the Palestinians – international law – has become worthless. In the next century, this Middle Eastern drama could be performed on the international stage under the slogan, “Once upon a time, there was a Palestine,” if there were no sign of hope, that some people see, in the movement for one democratic state in Israel and Palestine.

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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 02, 2013 8:37 am

A Northern Ireland solution for Palestine?
Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Tue, 10/01/2013 - 18:55

Israeli academic Neve Gordon was the target of a forceful backlash from peers and Israel lobby groups like J Street four years ago when he endorsed the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) targeting Israel – albeit as a last-ditch effort to save the “two-state solution.”

Now, using this week’s conference of the Israel lobby group J Street as a hook, Gordon has come back with an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times concluding that the two-state solution is essentially finished.

Gordon proposes a sort of hybrid one-state solution modeled on the 1998 Belfast Agreement (also known as the “Good Friday agreement”) in Northern Ireland.

Here is an excerpt of Gordon’s op-ed:

Northern Ireland offers a real-life model of a just and equitable one-state solution because it accommodates ethno-national distinctions between citizens. In political science it’s called “consociationalism.”

Premised on collective and individual entitlements, a consociational government guarantees group representation, ensures power sharing in the executive branch and offers group vetoes. It could assure both the Israeli and the Palestinian communities that no important decision would be made without the broad consent of representatives of both groups. No less important is the notion of “parity of esteem,” one of the core concepts of the Northern Ireland peace process.

It requires each side to respect the other side’s identity and ethos, including linguistic diversity, culture and religion.

In order to guarantee political equality to the Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland, the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement assigned essentially equal status to two executive roles — the first and deputy first ministers. Each group has an equal number of legislative committee chairmanships, and membership balance on public bodies, including the judiciary and police forces. Israelis and Palestinians would have to create their own model, and at least initially, it might be good to add to this basic setup internal territorial partition of certain areas, but with porous borders.

Consociationalism offers a tenable framework for beginning to address the contradictions arising from Israel’s wish to concurrently sustain its Jewish character, control territory in which 4.5 million Palestinians live, and maintain a democratic system.

Northern Ireland as a model

While it is encouraging to see the discussion moving in this direction, it is important not to understand what happened in Northern Ireland as a potential way around the need for real, deep decolonization – “ethical decolonization” as Omar Barghouti puts it – entailing the removal of the privileges of Israeli Jews in exchange for citizenship and “indigenization.”

“Consociationalism” can’t be a back door to retain Israeli Jewish privilege and the power that comes with it.

Indeed, elements of the Good Friday agreement were explicitly borrowed by the Palestinian, Israeli Jewish and other authors of the 2007 One State Declaration which offers principles for a single, democratic, decolonized and secular state:

Any system of government must be founded on the principle of equality in civil, political, social and cultural rights for all citizens. Power must be exercised with rigorous impartiality on behalf of all people in the diversity of their identities.

“Consociational” features – not specific to the Belfast Agreement – have already been proposed by intellectuals and political leaders among Palestinian citizens of Israel, notably in the 2007 document “The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel” published by the National Committee for the Heads of the Arab Local Authorities; the “Democratic Constitution” published by Adalah; and the Haifa Declaration.

While these documents spoke only about democratizing present-day Israel within its pre-1967 boundaries, they were provocative enough that Israel’s Shin Bet secret police promised to “disrupt the activities of any groups that seek to change the Jewish or democratic character of Israel, even if they use democratic means.”

Yet there are also aspects of the Northern Ireland agreement that would not and should not apply in Palestine, where Zionist settler-colonialism is more recent than English-Scottish settler-colonialism in Ireland.

And of course Israeli settler-colonialism is still an ongoing process of violent dispossession.
Learning more

In my own work, I’ve looked at Northern Ireland closely both in terms of the political process that led to agreement, and in terms of the institutional-legal form of a political settlement.

In a 2012 article for Al Jazeera (“Finkelstein, BDS and the destruction of Israel), I summarize the relevant historical similarities between Palestine and Ireland and how the principles of the Good Friday agreement could apply in Palestine.

The Al Jazeera piece is partly based on a longer article, “Lessons for Palestine from Northern Ireland: Why George Mitchell Couldn’t Turn Jerusalem into Belfast,” included in the forthcoming book Palestine and the Palestinians in the 21st Century, edited by Mimi Kirk and Rochelle Davis.

I also examined the implications of the Belfast Agreement for Palestinian and Israeli Jewish “self-determination” claims in a 2010 policy brief for Al-Shabaka: “Reclaiming Self-Determination.”

And in 2011, in two articles in the journal Ethnopolitics I looked at how leading scholars of “ethnic conflict” have failed to take seriously the idea that partition might not be the solution in Palestine, but the problem.

Gordon’s piece comes just weeks after University of Pennsylvannia professor Ian Lustick’s New York Times op-ed calling for examination of alternatives to the “Two-State Illusion” set off storms of outrage from die-hard defenders of a two-state solution.

These steps are still tentative, but it’s good to see this discussion coming – belatedly – into the mainstream.

As the two-state solution fades, we can now expect the discussion to shift away from simply putting the “one-state solution” on the agenda, to much more focus on what kind of state it can be.


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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 02, 2013 10:28 am

A Wall for a Wall: Mirroring Racism
by William A. Cook / October 1st, 2013

Now that our President has handed over the resolution of the Syrian debacle to the United Nations, perhaps justice demands that he hand over resolution of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict to that international body as well. One can turn to the reality of the illegal machinations of the Israeli Zionist government any day of the week and see and know and feel the terror that exists for the occupied people who are defenseless before the impunity granted to the state of Israel for crimes that any other member nation of the UN would, as is true of Syria, be brought for justice before the International Courts. Consider these items from today’s news:

In the 12 years since September 2000 up to the end of September 2012 Israel killed 6,550 Palestinians in their homeland. Of these, 1,335 were children. Over the same period Palestinians killed 590 Israelis in their homeland, including 85 children.
This is a kill-ratio of 11 to 1. When it comes to children, the Israelis are even more proficient, achieving a kill-ratio of nearly 16 to 1. This does not take into account the Israeli onslaught on Gaza from 27 December 2008 – 18 January 2009 which killed nearly 1,400 Palestinians a huge number of whom were children. Obama, the US president-in-waiting at the time, refused to lift a finger, let alone utter a word of condemnation.
Finally, the above does not take into account the thousands of Palestinian homes demolished by the Israeli military machine funded by the United States.1

Here’s a piece of disgusting news, so disgusting in fact that it beggars belief. Israel and its army of occupation are not just brutal, inhuman and utterly devoid of morality. Israeli army sprays sewage on the streets of the Palestinian town of Abu Dis.2


Here’s an idea whose time has come: create Israeli designed occupied territories in multiple cities across Europe, Britain, and America, each mirroring the prison that exists in Judea/Samaria (sic). Only here the 400 miles of wall would surround the Jewish enclaves that exist in these cities so that a veritable comparison might be made obvious to the entire world of the conditions that prevail in Palestine. The idea originates from Iran, a land that is threatened by the impunity of the state of Israel; perhaps it could become the next peace project of the United Nations after Syria. After all this one has existed now for over 63 years. Justice demands it.

Supposing Iran imposed strict regulations on its Jewish community telling them there are places in the country they cannot go to, or gives them special coloured number plates for their cars which identifies them as Jews or constructs a ‘barrier’ around their residences restricting their movements and effectively blocking them from accessing other parts of Iran, or make a strict checkpoint system where Jews would have to queue up for hours to get a permit to go to taboo places for legitimate business or to visit a sibling or to take a patient to hospital. Add to this mix an official announcement that henceforth Iran would be an exclusive state for Aryans and Aryans only, thus automatically relegating all minorities to a second class status, can you imagine the outcry of such outlandish racist policies would make?3

Sometimes a wall is needed if only to magnify its purpose, to include and to exclude: apples from cows or humans deprived of life by humans depraved enough to deny life; indeed, a wall mirrors those on each side, the haves from the have-nots, the people without a country from a country exclusively for one people identifiable only by their religion, a people denied freedom of movement or of economic growth or of their natural resources, the aquifers that traverse their land, the oil and gas off their shores, from those who have stolen the land and the aquifers and the taxes and slam the gates shut effectively imprisoning a people without charge or justice.

I speak obviously of the Sharon Wall of Fear and Racism that incarcerates the people of Palestine. It reflects like a glowing mirror in the sun the inherent racism that is embedded in the state of Israel as it continues its devastation of those not born into Judaism and imposes its will on the indigenous people whose land they occupy. I would suggest that Iran build, what Hameed Abdul Karim describes in the above paragraph, in Iran, and America build its own Wall in Brooklyn, and the UK build its Wall in London to reflect before the world what it prefers not to deal with: the lawless state of Israel that has yet to be brought before the international courts.

The irony of this suggestion jostles the just mind that knows in all probability that the people of the United States, many in Britain, some in Europe and all in Israel would be repulsed by such racism and condemn the nation and the people of Iran and America and Britain for such injustice and hate-filled behavior, yet, and this is the irony, they would not see the mirror reflection in that condemnation of the existing state of affairs in occupied Palestine. What is the cause of such overwhelming acceptance of the injustice inflicted on the Palestinian people by the Jewish State; what mental blindness prevents our representatives and Senators from realizing that the foundational principles of the United States of America are antithetical to the foundational policies of the Zionist state; and how can anyone present this contradiction to the citizens of America so that the injustices inherent in our unbridled support may be repudiated?

In 1492, and again about 100 years later when “settlers” from Britain invaded the eastern shores of this continent, they brought with them beliefs rife with racism, arrogance, and military conquest allowing them to enslave, incarcerate, and slaughter the people they encountered indifferent to the plight of these people before the might of their innate beliefs and overwhelming military power. That is the Eurocentric mindset that devastated the indigenous people with disease and massacre until they were essentially eradicated. That is the same mindset that the Zionists brought with them to Palestine. That is the colonialist mindset that cemented in the invaders their superiority over all others. It is a mindset that is anathema to the beliefs that all humans are created equal, that all are endowed by their creator with unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and it is anathema to those who would deny the rights embedded in the Bill of Rights that guarantee to all citizens justice before the law. Yet this nation has supported without condition a nation that has acted contrary to all of these principles since its founding in 1948.

Perhaps it is time America relinquish its "unbreakable" support of the Zionist state so that justice can flourish in Palestine, so that Walls of Hate may fall before bridges of compassion and love, so that weapons of mass destruction can be removed from the face of the earth, so that peace may reign in the mid-East, so that brother and sister can live together throughout the world.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 02, 2013 11:53 am

NYTimes Again Ignores Israel’s Nukes
October 2, 2013
Exclusive: The U.S. news media’s bias in favor of Israel and against Israel’s enemies represents a journalistic failure to honestly inform the American people about issues that can lead to war. A glaring example is the double standard applied to Israel’s rogue nuclear arsenal, notes Robert Parry.


By Robert Parry

If a country with a large but undeclared nuclear arsenal threatens war against a country without a single nuclear bomb, you might think that a serious news organization would note the existing nuclear arsenal at least in passing. But if the country doing the threatening is Israel and the country being threatened is Iran, the New York Times can’t seem to find space to mention Israel’s rogue nuclear weapons.

The fact certainly was relevant to the Times’ storyabout Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s United Nations speech which focused on his fear that Iran might build one nuclear bomb. And Netanyahu’s threat of war against Iran was not exactly subtle, as he referenced the need for “credible military threats” and vowed that “if Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will stand alone.”


Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking to the United Nations General Assembly on Oct. 1, 2013. (UN Photo by Evan Schneider)
For Israel’s threat to unilaterally destroy Iran’s thus-far peaceful nuclear program to be “credible,” Israel’s nuclear weapons – at least its smaller tactical nukes – must be considered as possible elements of that attack. Indeed, I’ve been told that Israel’s tentative war plans against Iran include potential use of low-yield nuclear bombs to shatter some of Iran’s hardened sites.

But the New York Times article on Wednesday made no mention of Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons. Neither did a companion Times editorial which catalogued reasons why the world should be skeptical of Iran’s repeated insistence that it has no intention to build a nuclear bomb. The Times wrote:

“Iran hid its nuclear program from United Nations inspectors for nearly 20 years, and the country is enriching uranium to a level that would make it possible to produce bomb-grade nuclear material more quickly. It has also pursued other activities, like developing high-voltage detonators and building missiles that experts believe could only have nuclear weapons-related uses. These facts make it hard not to view the upcoming American-brokered negotiations skeptically.”

Given the Times’ excoriation of Iran over its alleged secrecy, basic journalistic fairness would seem to require that the Times point out that Israel has hidden its actual nuclear weapons arsenal from the United Nations for longer than 20 years – and Israel has gone far beyond simply pursuing some related activities, but actually has put sophisticated delivery systems in place.

The context of Israel’s regional nuclear weapons monopoly also sheds light on why Iran might actually think it needs a nuclear weapon as a deterrent against the possibility of a preemptive nuclear strike by Israel. Yet, the Times didn’t include a simple sentence acknowledging that Israel itself possesses nuclear weapons.

Surely, if the Times did publish such a sentence in its articles on Netanyahu’s belligerent UN speech, the editors would have gotten some angry e-mails from staunch Israel backers and might have lost some subscriptions. But such fears do not justify journalistic cowardice and malfeasance.

Even the Washington Post, which has served in recent years as the media flagship for America’s neoconservatives, recognized its journalistic duty to acknowledge the existence of Israel’s nuclear weapons. In its story about Netanyahu’s speech, the Post included this simple sentence at the end of a paragraph deep down in the article: “Israel possesses an undeclared nuclear weapons arsenal.”

The sentence didn’t amount to much. The Post could have done a lot more to elaborate on this reality and its relevance to Iran’s behavior. But its inclusion represented at least a minimal nod to journalistic ethics. The Times couldn’t bring itself to do even that.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 04, 2013 2:36 pm

How AIPAC Lost on Iran

3
OCT
I have always believed that, at some point, the Israeli prime minister and his lobby would lose their grip on U.S. Middle East policy, at least I’ve believed that since 1982 when Tom Dine, AIPAC’s most successful executive director, explained how it would happen.

It was during my four year stint at AIPAC that I asked Dine if a president of the United States could take a position opposed by the lobby, in a case where U.S. national security interests were clearly at stake, and prevail.

Dine responded that although he hoped that day wouldn’t come, he did not think a president could make Israel do anything it didn’t want to do given the power of AIPAC and “our friends in Congress.” In other words, as long as politicians need AIPAC-directed campaign funds, it wouldn’t happen.

But then he added a caveat: “Of course, if a president pushed hard enough, and told the American people directly that U.S. security was at stake, he’d win. By that I mean AIPAC would have no choice but to support him. We can never defeat a U.S. president who reaches over the heads of AIPAC and Congress and goes to the American people directly and invokes the national interest.”

Although both my question and Dine’s answer referred to the occupation, his response is even more apt in reference to policies like bombing Syria or Iran, where the actions pushed by Israel and the lobby would lead the United States into war. Although continuation of the occupation endangers U.S. interests and lives, the causal connection is not as obvious as it is to actually attacking another Middle Eastern country.

What Dine got wrong was his belief that the lobby could only be defeated if the president directly confronted it, highly unlikely in the present context in which Vice President Joe Biden never ceases to tell audiences of present and potential donors that there must be “no daylight, no daylight” between U.S. and Israeli policies.

And that is not how the AIPAC collapse happened over the past six weeks.

The lobby has been beaten on Syria and on its #1 priority, blocking any U.S. rapprochement with Iran in order to get the war it wants.

Anyone who follows the news knows that both the Israeli government and its lobby have been hit harder by the U.S. in the last month than at any time since Eisenhower forced Israel out of Sinai in 1956.

One small indication was the reaction to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech at the United Nations. The man actually threatened war with Iran if he did not get his way and Americans, Iranians, Israelis and the world at large reacted with a silence that was less than a yawn. A year ago the world hung on every threat Netanyahu uttered at the General Assembly and his red line cartoon made the front page of every major news outlet in the world. Two years ago, when he spoke to a joint session of Congress, House Members Debbie Wasserman Shultz, Eric Cantor and Eliot Engel orchestrated 29 standing ovations for Netanyahu’s threats. He stood there, joking with Biden like the two old pols they are, and basking in the love.

Look at the situation today.

Netanyahu huffs and puffs and…nothing. AIPAC sent hundreds of lobbyists to Capitol Hill to win support for bombing Syria and didn’t change a vote. Only a few dozen legislators supported the idea and it was withdrawn and replaced by diplomacy. On Iran, with Netanyahu and AIPAC warning that President Rouhani was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, President Obama picked up the phone for the first conversation with an Iranian leader. When Netanyahu howled in protest at the UN, he was dismissed as a wolf in wolf’s clothing.

How did this all happen. It happened because the American people have spoken in almost one voice: it does not want another Middle Eastern war. (The only people who favor confrontation with Iran over its nuclear development are the lobby and its mouthpieces in Congress and the media). In other words democracy prevailed.

I feel odd writing about democracy when 30 Republicans are so blatantly subverting it because they cannot tolerate the idea of an African American president, but that is the result of a ridiculous quirk built into our failing system. That is certainly a catastrophe but one that will soon end with the right’s defeat.

Foreign policy is different. No one can force a president to abandon diplomacy in favor of war. A president can, as Obama is doing with Iran, simply do what he believes is best for America. Obama wants reconciliation. As for Netanyahu, he will just have to content himself with his $3.5 billion in aid, faux words of love at the White House, and the absence of pressure from Obama to allow inspection of his huge nuclear bomb stockpile…for now.

Again, how did this happen? On Iran, Obama led. On Syria, he followed. In both cases, the politicians followed the American people who, the polls showed, overwhelmingly want to avoid another war in the Middle East.

But what about AIPAC?

Can’t it defeat public opinion with its campaign funds and threats?

Apparently not on Iran or Syria.

Rep. Alan Grayson, who led the fight against bombing Syria, although he is very close to AIPAC, says that the lobby is irrelevant when public opinion is on the other side.

Here he is speaking about why AIPAC failed on Syria. His explanation is equally applicable to Iran:

AIPAC has issued a statement saying that they’re in favor of an attack… But at this point it’s not relevant, because the public is engaged, the public is paying attention, and the public is adamantly against this. All these organizations sort of fall to the wayside when the public weighs in. There are now both Democratic and Republican members of Congress who have reported that their emails and letters and phone calls to their office are running more than a hundred to one against this. People are against it. They’re adamantly against it….So, any organization, like AIPAC or otherwise, cannot operate effectively in the environment that we’re in, where the public is speaking and speaking very loudly.

AIPAC “falls to the wayside when the public weighs in.”

I can add nothing to that except: Hallelujah.
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