Mondoweiss

Slaves of the peace process

2009-11-15T16:14:54Z

Despite all its efforts to retract the moment, the Obama Administration’s embrace of Netanyahu 2 weeks ago for "unprecedented" progress was hugely-clarifying to many of us. A shattering moment, it has liberated people to think about the failed peace process in new ways. It has made me vow not to be trusting about officials’ statements in the light of real conditions. Here is Mustafa Barghouti at the Wattan Center in Palestine (hat tip, Seham). My impression is that this eminently-reasonable and even-tempered man is now enraged, and who can blame him?

“We will be unable to freeze settlements expansion or any other Israeli policy of apartheid if we do not engage in a unified strategy against it. Towards this direction diplomatic action is fundamental but is not enough. Non violence resistance is the only means to revive a culture of collective activism among all sectors of the Palestinian people. Powerful models are already spread across several villages in the West Bank. Let’s follow the examples of those Palestinians who succeeded in breaking down sections of the Wall last week, in Ni’lin and Qalandya, marking the 20th Anniversary of Berlin Wall’s fall" went on Barghouti..

“We witness today the complete death of the so called peace process” concluded Barghouti “but nothing will prevent the Palestinian people from declaring their independent state. Israel does not respect the law and it contravenes Oslo agreements, increasing the number of illegal settlements in West Bank, perpetrating the siege on Gaza and stealing Palestinian land with the ongoing construction of the wall. Why should a declaration of an independent state on June 4 1967 borders, including east Jerusalem constitute a violation of the Oslo agreement?”

“We refuse to be slaves of occupation, slaves in ghettos.”

‘only really really bad Muslims will get a fair trial’

2009-11-15T16:05:33Z

He rocks. This is an awesome observation. From Loewenstein/ [and lawyer] Greenwald:

The news that Washington will try some of the alleged 9/11 masterminds in New York is welcome news and yet, writes Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, don’t buy the spin:

…We’re now formally creating a multi-tiered justice system for accused Muslim terrorists where they only get the level of due process consistent with the State’s certainty that it will win. Mohammed gets a real trial because he confessed and we’re thus certain we can win in court; since we’re less certain about al-Nashiri, he’ll be denied a trial and will only get a military commission; others will be denied any process entirely and imprisoned indefinitely.

No related posts.

Barak mentions taboo subject: binational state

2009-11-15T16:02:32Z

From Haaretz:

Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned that Israel risks watching the
international community line up behind the Palestinians if negotiations are not restarted. Without an agreement, there is a possibility that support will increase for the Palestinians declaring a state unilaterally, he told the Cabinet on Sunday

From JPost:

Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Sunday said the fact that the Palestinians were considering such a move [unilateral declaration of statehood] proved that peace talks were preferable to unilateral acts.

"Without an accord, there is the possibility that support will grow for a unilateral declaration of statehood by the Palestinians, as well as the demand – which has already been heard – for a binational state as a solution," Barak added.

Thanks to Ahmed Moor.

I-dont-hate-Israel orders demolition of 9 Palestinian houses near Nablus

2009-11-15T16:33:57Z

Memo to Barack Obama. This is from WAFA, the Palestinian news agency. Is it true? If it’s true, then what are you going to do about it, sit on your hands? It sounds like ethnic cleansing to me, in the name of colonization that is destroying U.S. policy/image in the Middle East.

Israeli Occupation Forces warned, today, nine families that their houses, east of Nablus, will be destroyed.

Israeli authorities ordered these families to evacuate their homes to be demolished immediately.

A Palestinian official in charge of the colonization file in the north of the West Bank, Ghassan Daghlas, said that the concerned Palestinian parties are contacting the families to coordinate legal ways to face these procedures.

h/t Seham

Are American gentiles opening one eye?

2009-11-15T16:57:03Z

When I was in Jerusalem 3 years ago, a Palestinian shopowner said angrily to me, "Muslim people are sleeping. But when George Bush used the word ‘crusade,’ Muslim people open one eye."

I wonder whether the failure of Obama’s Cairo commitment is causing American Establishment types to open one eye on the conditions that we chronicle on this site. Last night I went to a party at a friend’s house. Everyone there was American-privileged, including me. There were a couple of Jews. I had h’ors d’oeuvres with a landowner/intellectual friend who has sympathy for Zionism but keeps up on the news. He said, "Tell me what this ‘unprecedented’ statement means, from Hillary. Don’t you see what is happening? They are setting up apartheid, with an international battle by the Palestinians. And now there are 50 percent Jews. But there will be fewer and fewer in years to come, as they find ways to leave." I told him that Ehud Olmert warned about this two years ago, when the two-state-idea was dying.

Later I was sitting next to my hostess. Fiercely intelligent. She told me about a Republican Washington friend who has recently visited Israel and Palestine and came back appalled at the conditions for Palestinians. My friend was upset. She reflected on the reasons that privileged non-Jewish Americans so supported Israel:

"I believed it all. When the Life Magazine cover came out after the 1967 war, with the Israelis on the tank, I thought, This is really a miracle. The people who were almost wiped out in the Holocaust have been reborn. They’re so goodlooking, and they have kibbutzes, they’re on the land, and they won’t be defeated. I never thought that it involved displacing other people. I’ve come to think that I was brainwashed."

It upset me to hear all that, but I had a tribal feeling, and I said, "Jews were brainwashed too."

There is an old American proverb: Put your money where your mouth is

2009-11-14T14:37:59Z

Haaretz:

In an address to the Middle East Institute, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs William J. Burns on Tuesday said that the Obama administration does not "accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements."

"We consider the Israeli offer to restrain settlement activity to be a potentially important step, but it obviously falls short of the continuing Roadmap obligation for a full settlement freeze," he said.

Aha moment for the chief economics editor

2009-11-14T15:22:45Z

I always miss the story. The other day I linked Sever Plocker’s piece in Ynet about Israel’s growing isolation and missed this line. A friend called my attention to it. Plocker is an influential Israeli journo, and the chief economics editor for Yediot Aharonot.

large foreign investors are pulling out of Israel.

The Israel lobby and the Jewish kings

2009-11-14T15:08:25Z

When people ask why Obama has capitulated to the prime minister of a tiny state– Bibi Netanyahu– various theories are offered about Health care first, or the economy, or Afghanistan, or oil. Few say directly: Netanyahu feels invulnerable because of the Israel lobby in the U.S. As readers of this site know, I am a bull on this issue: I think the lobby has a tremendous amount of power. And all efforts to poohpooh its influence strike me as foolish until such time as the media address it openly and vigorously, as they do, say, the gun lobby. Once there’s information and sunshine, we can argue about its magnitude.

The difficulty is that you cannot be plain about this matter without addressing the idea of Jewish influence. Israelis are often more plain about this. Anshel Pfeffer wrote in Haaretz the other day, "the most significant joint endeavor of America’s Jews [is] six decades of unswerving support for the Israeli government of the day." I.e., a hammerlock on U.S. policy. And last year at the NYPL, former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg described "two structures" built by Jews, one being Israel, the other "the semi-autonomous American Jewry, which was not here 150 years ago– powerful influence, access to the corridors of power, impact on the culture, and civilization… plus the infrastructure of the community of solidarity and fraternity and support system and education etc."

Obama’s crumple cannot be explained without talking about that influence, and Obama’s/Rahm Emanuel’s fears for a second term. Some of this power is media/Establishment presence, to which I was long a personal witness. (And yes I wonder why Nina Totenberg referred to Emanuel as "Rahm" three times in a report last night on NPR.) Some of it is financial. As former AIPAC boss Tom Dine told Helena Cobban lately of a political epiphany he had on the Kennedy campaign in 1980: "[Jews] were the kings in every city!"

The Jews were kings because of money. As I insist on stating, more than half of the money in Democratic politics comes from Jews, the richest group by religion in the U.S. The two baronial families that lifted Barack Obama in Chicago, the Crowns and the Pritzkers, are both Jewish (and one, the Crowns, includes fire-and-brimstone Israel supporters; I am not sure about the Pritzkers).

Money is famously the mother’s milk of politics, and the money that the lobby directs is playing a huge role in limiting debate of Israel/Palestine in the U.S. What follows are several items. The first three are from the recent J Street conference, which prompted this post. The later items are recycled:

–If you look at Video 5 here from J Street, at Minute 48 or so, Congressman Bob Filner speaks openly about the financial threat to a politician in going against the Israel lobby. "Campaign contributions," he explains, are the reason "why you get 400 votes for these measures" in support of Israel. "An economic weapon?" moderator Bob Franken ventures. "Of course," Filner says, with feeling. "On the issue of Israel, people are taking positions that could lead to war on the basis of…’Am I going to get a campaign contribution?’… The dangerous thing here is that people are making decisions– you could have nuclear war in this whole world, and they’re making it on narrow political, parochial grounds." [emphasis Weiss's]

What are those contributions worth? Filner says (at minute 25 or so) said that 10 years ago he voted against a resolution to condemn Khalid Muhammad, an associate of Louis Farrakhan who was making anti-Semitic speeches. Filner didn’t like what Muhammad was saying, but he felt that it wasn’t Congress’s place to condemn speech. "What about the First Amendment?" But only 10 people voted against it, Filner says. "You know you’re going to pay for that," he was told by fellow congressmen. "Then I started getting all these calls. I’m not sure which organization was behind it.I will tell you… on that vote I lost about $250,000 an election cycle in contributions. That’s intimidating to most of my colleagues. That kind of money… is an intimidating factor. Not many people would stand up to it."

–Also at J Street, Elissa Barrett, the executive director of the Progressive Jewish Alliance, in rationalizing her organization’s pitiful silence on Israel’s human rights record, said "we can’t be blase about our funders and how they stand with us." She said that "PJA has lost funders around this." Sad. Presumably she was referring to this type of lame statement in the midst of the Gaza war. This demonstrates that even in the leftleaning Jewish community, people are scared of the neoconservative shadow.

–Jonathan Chait of the New Republic warned J Street that because it was providing a forum for (mild) criticisms of Israel, a leading Democratic consultant had told him recently that he would have to advise political candidates to return contributions from the group.

–Back when Harvard professor Steve Walt co-authored his bombshell paper on the Israel lobby, Bernard Steinberg, director of Harvard’s Hillel center, brought up the money issue unprompted when I was interviewing him for the Nation: "I talked to someone in Harvard development and asked what the fallout had been, and he said, ‘It’s been seismic.’" Subsequently the New York Sun tried to maumau the Jewish benefactor of Walt’s chair at the school, Robert Belfer, and described "snowballing outrage from Harvard donors.

–When Lawrence Summers was forced out as Harvard’s president, Martin Peretz said it was out of "anti-Israel and even anti-Jewish animus" and threatened financial repercussions: "…[M]y own impression of wealthy alumni who were once my students is that Summers made them more generous… I know of at least three gifts in the $100 million range that were very likely to materialize and now are dicey."

Who gets the stolen mustard?

2009-11-14T14:46:41Z

After 20 years, my cultural differences with my wife have softened considerably, and our own mixed, idiosyncratic culture is in the foreground of our lives, but tribal issues still arise. Two nights ago we were driving to Home Depot when she brought up an argument she was having (as an editor) with an entitled writer, and I asked if the person was Jewish, and of course she was, and because I struggle with entitlement issues, I asked if I shared qualities with this person, and my wife said, "Well, maybe her energy around a little question: her nudginess–"

I pointed out that my wife was using a Yiddish word, nudge, which means to pester or bore or nag (per Leo Rosten’s indispensable book on the meritocracy). My wife went on, "It reminded me of that half-hour argument you had with your mother about who gets all the stolen mustard."

I started laughing, but my wife said she wasn’t trying to be funny, and that she still doesn’t understand the incident.

I have a vague memory of it. It must have been 12 or 13 years ago. We had a family party at a restaurant on the Upper West Side, I think when my great-uncle was turning 90. There were a lot of coldcuts with toothpicks to carry away and we went back to my place on the Lower East Side and the stuff was divided. There were several little plastic containers of mustard of different type.

My wife says that we stole lots of little packets of mustard from the restaurant, and some bread too, but I don’t remember it that way. My grandmother used to grab packets of mustard all the time and stuff them in her pocketbook, but my mother and I aren’t that way. And I distinctly remember those little plastic containers sitting in my refrigerator, half-filled with mustard.

Anyway, my mother and my aunt and I had a conversation about… who gets the mustard. I think it went on for a minute. My wife says it went on for a half hour and she was called in. She says she didn’t get the logic of the conversation. "I don’t understand what it was about. I think it was about people trying to prove who was more generous. Your mother was pressing it on you, and you were pressing it on her. ‘No mother, you take the Gulden’s’"

"I never call my mother, Mother. You do that. I call her Mom."

"Well I still don’t understand it."

Looking back on it, I say there were two things going on. There’s way too much energy around things in my family. I relate it to insecurity, and to Kafka’s beautiful statement to his Catholic girlfriend, explaining Jewish anxiety: "The insecure position of Jews, insecure within themselves, insecure among peple, would make it above all comprehensible that they consider themselves to be allowed to own only what they hold in their hands or between their teeth, that furthermore only palpable possessions give them the right to live, and that they will never acquire what they once have lost but that instead it calmly swims away from them forever." Also, I’d quarreled a lot with my mother in the years before the mustard, in an entitled adolescent way, and now I was getting over that. I was patching things up, and I seized any stupid opportunity to engage her positively. I would have pressed the mustard on her.

US-Israel identity crisis

2009-11-14T03:30:58Z

A friend seizes on an aside in a piece in Haaretz:

"Speaking near Jerusalem during the unveiling of a memorial for the victims of
the 9/11 terror attack in the United States, Olmert added that there was a
clear difference between terrorists and the countries that fight them."

One of those puzzling background noises that make you stop, rewind, and replay to make sure. So a memorial for the victims of the September 11 bombings is now a public monument in Jerusalem. What is it doing there? Why should this surprise us less than, say, a Pearl Harbor Monument in Sydney, a Fort Sumter Remembrance Tabernacle in Paris, or a Coventry Blitz Museum in Culver City?