Mondoweiss

2009-11-11T17:25:20Z

From AnomalousNYC’s photostream of My Israel, four photos from New York. Anomalous has since left the city and reflects: "Such a great concept, unfortunately I never had a car so it was very tricky to run all over the city to collect them all."

appeal to readers

2009-11-11T17:31:04Z

About a year ago this site was approved as a Google News site, based on the news reporting we do and the number of contributors. This helped our traffic enormously, and restored some of my self-esteem, as a guy who had made a living as a journalist for 33 years but was suddenly an amateur putting out a blog with dog pictures on it. Our url was philipweiss.org.

Then a few months back we did a redesign and changed the domain name to mondoweiss.net, and lo, we dropped off Google News. We’d failed to tell ‘em ahead of time. I have many times filed a change here, but Google seems to ignore us.

I suffer about this, I really want to be restored. Any advice?

Obama aide is not post-racial

2009-11-11T15:06:05Z

Rahm Emanuel, quoted in the Jerusalem Post, his speech to the Jewish Federations:

Beginning his speech by referring to his long-standing ties to Israel, Emanuel warned about the dangers of abandoning the effort to make a deal with the Palestinians.

"Demographics cannot be denied," he declared, referring to a situation whereby Israel would have to "attempt to preserve a democratic state, aJewish state when Jews will soon be a minority west of the Jordan River."

At the same time, he lashed out at Palestinians who advocated a one-state solution, which he described as "the false hope that this measure will eventually overwhelm Israel and lead to its demise."

Obama seems complicit in Netanyahu’s scary obstructionism

2009-11-11T15:39:17Z

Haaretz: Washington is disappointed in Netanyahu. Yes, then why did you meet with him?

The White House expressed disappointment in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent visit to Washington, with officials saying that they had hoped that the prime minister would present a concrete plan to scale back Israeli construction in West Bank settlements, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner condemns the ongoing colonization of the West Bank–as Obama fails to do–and says that Israelis have lost their interest in seeking peace, it’s all about conflict management:

"What really hurts me, and this shocks us, is that before there used to be a great peace movement in Israel. There was a left that made itself heard and a real desire for peace," Kouchner said.

"It seems to me, and I hope that I am completely wrong, that this desire has completely vanished, as though people no longer believe in it," he added.

Bernard Avishai at TPM:

The real question is whether we are going to prevent the kind of general violence that will turn Israel and Palestine into a Balkans-style conflict, with Jerusalem a kind of Sarajevo, and the Israeli Arab villages of the Little Triangle a kind of Bosnia. Without palpable outside action to move Israel off the status quo, especially from the Obama administration, the streets of the West Bank will blow.

AJC dismisses white phosphorus attacks and destruction of flour mill as ‘Oliver Stone’ fantasy

2009-11-11T15:23:43Z

Shame. The American Jewish Committee attacks the Goldstone report and for not one instant examines factual allegations: that white phosphorus was dropped indiscriminately in civilian areas, that the chief food production of the strip was willfully destroyed, and so on. The indifference of a Jewish organization to these actual factual statements is simply staggering blindness. And look at this attack on the Gaza Community Mental Health program, and Eyad El-Serraj. From Ed Rettig of AJC:

[Goldstone's] panel often neglected the most basic examination of
the testimony it heard. Transcripts reveal the credulous atmosphere
in which the commission did its work. When a psychiatrist, Dr. Iyyad
el-Sarraji, suggested that "inside Israel there is an identification
with the aggressor, the Nazi," no one challenged the extraordinary
charge. that thThe credibility of the Goldstone Report, then, resembles that
of an Oliver Stone movie, a problem that its author either cannot see
or chooses not to address.

Well 95 percent of Israelis supported the slaughter. If you don’t think we have psychic work to do involving our projection of the Nazi experience, you should read Avraham Burg on this subject.

Also in this piece Rettig attacks Leonard Fein of the Forward for this piece without mentioning his name. Seems like a dis. (Inside Jewish baseball– sorry!) To his credit, Rettig also goes after the University of Buffalo Hillel’s decision to invite General Effie Eitam, an Israeli propagandist and racist.

we have the UB Hillel’s invitation to a decorated Israeli general, whose hard-line approach in the Knesset was epitomized in a 2006 declaration at the funeral of a fallen IDF officer: "We cannot be with all these Arabs, we’ll have to expel the overwhelming majority of West Bank Arabs from here and remove Israeli Arabs from the political system." The attorney-general of Israel informed him that this constituted incitement and that he would be prosecuted if he repeated it. He has not done so, and yet he has never recanted or apologized, nor gave any reason to suspect that these are not his genuinely held beliefs. Why this particular Hillel thought that someone who has advocated the transfer of Arabs out of the country was an appropriate speaker on Israel-related issues is a question I hope the board of that institution is pondering.

conspiracy theories are like good wine

2009-11-11T15:11:24Z

So are the Israelis finally admitting that the story is true 55 years later? Haaretz:

The Lavon affair – also known locally as esek habish, "the rotten business" – was a plan to discredit Egypt’s government, then headed by Gamal Abdel Nasser, by bombing theaters, post offices and U.S. and British institutions, and making it seem as though Egypt was behind the bombings.

sympathy issue

2009-11-11T16:42:05Z

Ben White says that the 850,000 Jews who left Arab countries in the years after the Nakba were not refugees, by and large, i.e., they were not forced to leave, and that many left for messianic/Zionist reasons, and did so in a somewhat orderly manner. Equating this migration with the Nakba is Zionist propaganda, he says.

While there seems to me truth in each point White makes, I don’t go there. Do those on our side of this issue close off all sympathy to the Jewish/Zionist experience? I believe there was persecution of Arab Jews post the creation of Israel. Mark Cohen said so at JTS last year (and he might agree with some of White’s points). Diminishing human suffering isn’t my game. And the good place that Ali Abunimah is going with his latest piece, on the South Africa model, is some degree of empathy with the Israeli political understanding, knowing that wherever we’re going, we can’t go there without some/many Israelis and Jews.

Israelis said to violate another U.N. resolution

2009-11-11T15:42:33Z

Military flights over Lebanon. h/t Bruce Wolman.

Why does Hassan hate us?

2009-11-11T05:15:16Z

"It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy," Obama said at Fort Hood, but that sure hasn’t stopped anyone from trying.

Tonight on Hardball, for instance, Chris Matthews chalked Major Nidal Hassan’s actions up to radical Islam. He pointed to Hassan’s connections to extremists and said that so long as we were conducting wars in Islamic countries, these sorts of domestic attacks would continue.

Blaming radical Islam is imprecise and not very helpful either. So long as everyone’s speculating, why overlook the Palestinian angle? Hassan is of Palestinian descent, and his parents were from a village near Jerusalem. He isn’t talking, according to news reports, but I’m betting that when we know his mind better, he will prove to have been unhinged not just by American policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, but by American policy in Israel/Palestine– and maybe even by the events of last week, Obama’s wretched failure to follow through on his promise in Cairo to bring justice to Palestinians.

Don’t forget that Israel/Palestine played a large role for other madmen who have hurt our country: Osama bin Laden and his 9/11 bombers. And Sirhan Sirhan, too– RFK’s killer.

No wonder National Security Adviser General Jones said at J Street that he has urged Obama, if there is one problem he could fix in the world, let it be the Israel/Palestine conflict. It ripples all over the globe, he said.

Even, I imagine, to Fort Hood. When Obama was there today, he eulogized Hassan’s victims. One story stuck with me:

Staff Sergeant Amy Krueger was an athlete in high school, joined the Army shortly after 9/11… When her mother told her she couldn’t take on Osama bin Laden by herself, Amy replied: -Watch me.-

Maybe the way to honor Amy Krueger’s thwarted ambition is to actually do something to defeat Osama bin Laden. Stop blaming a religion and look at the raw grievances that animate so many people in the Muslim world.

Abunimah on ‘Israeli Jews and the one-state solution’

2009-11-11T05:07:55Z

Last week Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed Hussein Ibish on "the fantasy world of one-staters." One exchange that stood out to me was the following:

JG: But the one-staters are a very marginal group. I think one of the interesting things you do in your book is show very coolly, calmly, the essential ridiculousness of one-state advocacy based on the simple fact that in order to have a successful one-state plan, you need Israeli Jews to want it, and today, not even one percent of Israeli Jews want it.

HI: You could put all of them in a small auditorium.

When I read this my first question was – has there ever been a group of people that exercised domination over another people and has willfully given up that power without being pressured? Ibish seems to be saying that it doesn’t makes sense to demand an equal and democratic solution in Israel/Palestine because Jews will never go for it. It made me curious about how whites in South Africa viewed the idea of a non-racial democracy at the height of apartheid? And assuming they were not interested in giving up their exclusive power and privilege – was that a reason to not demand equality?

Well, Ali Abunimah has an important new piece up over at Electronic Intifada which I think helps answer some of these questions. Titled "Israeli Jews and the one-state solution," the article looks back at South Africa and reviews the attitudes and beliefs of whites during the 1980s when apartheid still looked to be an unstoppable political reality. He shows that white South Africans held similar views to Jewish Israelis today, and that this only changed as the legitimacy of the apartheid system was called into question.

Abunimah warns however that coercing Israeli Jews to give up their power through strategies like boycott, divestment and sanctions is not enough – it also important to acknowledge where Israeli Jewish fears are coming from without being held hostage by them. Finally, the challenge remains to make the case to Israeli Jews what they have to gain from a just and equitable society in Israel/Palestine. Abunimah:

Coercion is not enough, however; as I have long argued, and sought to do, Palestinians must also put forward a positive vision. Neither can Palestinians advocating a one-state solution simply disregard the views of Israeli Jews. We must recognize that the opposition of Israeli Jews to any solution that threatens their power and privilege stems from at least two sources. One is irrational, racist fears of black and brown hordes (in this case, Arab Muslims) stoked by decades of colonial, racist demonization. The other source — certainly heightened by the former — are normal human concerns about personal and family dislocation, loss of socioeconomic status and community security: change is scary.

But change will come. Without indulging Israeli racism or preserving undue privilege, the legitimate concerns of ordinary Israeli Jews can be addressed directly in any negotiated transition to ensure that the shift to democracy is orderly, and essential redistributive policies are carried out fairly. Inevitably, decolonization will cause some pain as Israeli Jews lose power and privilege, but there are few reasons to believe it cannot be a well-managed process, or that the vast majority of Israeli Jews, like white South Africans, would not be prepared to make the adjustment for the sake of a normality and legitimacy they cannot have any other way.

Please go read the entire piece and here is a longer excerpt after the jump:

During the 1980s, the white electorate in South Africa moved to the right, as Israel’s Jewish electorate is doing today. Support seeped from the National Party, which had established formal apartheid in 1948, to the even more extreme Conservative Party. Yet, "on the issue of majority rule," Hugo observed, "supporters of the National Party and the Conservative Party, as well as most white voters to the ‘left’ of these organizations, ha[d] little quarrel with each other."

The vast majority of whites, wracked with existential fears, were simply unable to contemplate relinquishing effective control, or at least a veto, over political decision-making in South Africa.

Yet, the African National Congress insisted firmly on a one person, one vote system with no white veto. As the township protests and strikes and international pressure mounted, The Economist observed in an extensive 1986 survey of South Africa published on 1 February of that year, that many "enlightened" whites "still fondly argue that a dramatic improvement in the quality of black life may take the revolutionary sting out of the black townships — and persuade ‘responsible’ blacks, led by the emergent black middle class, to accept some power-sharing formula."

Schemes to stabilize the apartheid system abounded, and bear a strong resemblance to the current Israeli government’s vision of "economic peace" in which a collaborationist Palestinian Authority leadership would manage a still-subjugated Palestinian population anesthetized by consumer goods and shopping malls.

Because of the staunch opposition of whites to a unitary democratic state, the ANC heard no shortage of advice from western liberals that it should seek a "realistic" political accommodation with the apartheid regime, and that no amount of pressure could force whites to succumb to the ANC’s political demands. The ANC was warned that insistence on majority rule would force Afrikaners into the "laager" — they would retreat into a militarized garrison state and siege economy, preferring death before surrender.

Even the late Helen Suzman, one of apartheid’s fiercest liberal critics, predicted in 1987, as quoted by Hugo, "The Zimbabwe conflict took 15 years … and cost 20,000 lives and I can assure you that the South African transfer of power will take a good deal more than that, both in time and I am afraid lives."

But as The Economist observed, the view that whites would prefer "collective suicide" was something of a caricature. The vast majority of Afrikaners were "no longer bible-thumping boers." They were "part of a spoilt, affluent suburban society, whose economic pain threshold may prove to be rather low."

The Economist concluded that if whites would only come so far voluntarily, then it was perfectly reasonable for the anti-apartheid movement to bring them the rest of the way through "coercion" in the form of sanctions and other forms of pressure. "The quicker the white tribe submits," the magazine wrote, "the better its chance of a bearable future in a black-ruled South Africa."

Ultimately, as we now know, the combination of internal resistance and international isolation did force whites to abandon political apartheid and accept majority rule. However, it is important to note that the combined strength of the anti-apartheid movement never seriously threatened the physical integrity of the white regime.

Even after the massive township uprisings of 1985-86, the South African regime was secure. "So far there is no real physical threat to white power," The Economist noted, "so far there is little threat to white lives. … The white state is mighty, and well-equipped. It has the capacity to repress the township revolts far more bloodily. The blacks have virtually no urban or rural guerrilla capacity, practically no guns, few safe havens within South Africa or without."

This balance never changed, and a similar equation could be written today about the relative power of a massively-armed — and much more ruthless — Israeli state, and lightly armed Palestinian resistance factions.

What did change for South Africa, and what all the weapons in the world were not able to prevent, was the complete loss of legitimacy of the apartheid regime and its practices. Once this legitimacy was gone, whites lost the will to maintain a system that relied on repression and violence and rendered them international pariahs; they negotiated a way out and lived to tell the tale. It all happened much more quickly and with considerably less violence than even the most optimistic predictions of the time. But this outcome could not have been predicted based on what whites said they were willing to accept, and it would not have occurred had the ANC been guided by opinion polls rather than the democratic principles of the Freedom Charter.

Zionism — as many Israelis openly worry — is suffering a similar, terminal loss of legitimacy as Israel is ever more isolated as a result of its actions. Israel’s self-image as a liberal "Jewish and democratic state" is proving impossible to maintain against the reality of a militarized, ultra-nationalist Jewish sectarian settler-colony that must carry out frequent and escalating massacres of "enemy" civilians (Lebanon and Gaza 2006, Gaza 2009) in a losing effort to check the resistance of the region’s indigenous people. Zionism cannot bomb, kidnap, assassinate, expel, demolish, settle and lie its way to legitimacy and acceptance.

Already difficult to disguise, the loss of legitimacy becomes impossible to conceal once Palestinians are a demographic majority ruled by a Jewish minority. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s demand that Palestinians recognize Israel’s "right to exist as a Jewish state" is in effect an acknowledgement of failure: without Palestinian consent, something which is unlikely ever to be granted, the Zionist project of a Jewish ethnocracy in Palestine has grim long-term prospects.

Similarly, South African whites typically attempted to justify their opposition to democracy, not in terms of a desire to preserve their privilege and power, but using liberal arguments about protecting distinctive cultural differences. Hendrik Verwoerd Jr., the son of assassinated Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, apartheid’s founder, expressed the problem in these terms in 1986, as reported by The Toronto Star, stating that, "These two people, the Afrikaner and the black, are not capable of becoming one nation. Our differences are unique, cultural and deep. The only way a man can be happy, can live in peace, is really when he is among his own people, when he shares cultural values."

The younger Verwoerd was on the far-right of South African politics, leading a quixotic effort to carve out a whites-only homeland in the heart of South Africa. But his reasoning sounds remarkably similar to liberal Zionist defenses of the "two-state solution" today. The Economist clarified the use of such language at the time, stating that "One of the weirder products of apartheid is the crippling of language in a maw of hypocrisy, euphemism and sociologese. You talk about the Afrikaner ‘right to self-determination’ — meaning power over everybody else."

Zionism’s claim for "Jewish self-determination" amidst an intermixed population, is in effect a demand to preserve and legitimize a status quo in which Israeli Jews exercise power in perpetuity. But there’s little reason to expect that Israeli Jews would abandon this quest voluntarily any more than South African whites did. As in South Africa, coercion is necessary — and the growing boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement is one of the most powerful, nonviolent, legitimate and proven tools of coercion that Palestinians possess. Israel’s vulnerabilities may be different from those of apartheid South Africa, but Israel is not invulnerable to pressure.

Coercion is not enough, however; as I have long argued, and sought to do, Palestinians must also put forward a positive vision. Neither can Palestinians advocating a one-state solution simply disregard the views of Israeli Jews. We must recognize that the opposition of Israeli Jews to any solution that threatens their power and privilege stems from at least two sources. One is irrational, racist fears of black and brown hordes (in this case, Arab Muslims) stoked by decades of colonial, racist demonization. The other source — certainly heightened by the former — are normal human concerns about personal and family dislocation, loss of socioeconomic status and community security: change is scary.

But change will come. Without indulging Israeli racism or preserving undue privilege, the legitimate concerns of ordinary Israeli Jews can be addressed directly in any negotiated transition to ensure that the shift to democracy is orderly, and essential redistributive policies are carried out fairly. Inevitably, decolonization will cause some pain as Israeli Jews lose power and privilege, but there are few reasons to believe it cannot be a well-managed process, or that the vast majority of Israeli Jews, like white South Africans, would not be prepared to make the adjustment for the sake of a normality and legitimacy they cannot have any other way.

This is where the wealth of research and real-life experience about the successes, failures, difficulties and opportunities of managing such transitions at the level of national and local politics, neighborhoods, schools and universities, workplaces, state institutions and policing, emerging from South Africa and Northern Ireland, will be of enormous value.

Every situation has unique features, and although there are patterns in history, it never repeats itself exactly. But what we can conclude from studying the pasts and presents of others is that Palestinians and Israelis are no less capable of writing themselves a post-colonial future that gives everyone a chance at a life worth living in a single, democratic state.