Peter Beinart’s new book, The Crisis of Zionism, tries hard—really, really hard—to distinguish between what he calls “non-democratic Israel”, i.e. the occupation and settlements, and “democratic Israel”, which seems somehow in his and other liberal Zionists’ brains as immune from the theft, murder, and grinding ethnic cleansing of the big-o Occupation.

It’s a charming but silly, ahistorical attitude. The fiction of “democratic Israel”, based on a solid Jewish demographic majority, was artificially constructed via violent as well as legalistic ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Consider this story, as recounted by a Jewish soldier present at the time of the massacres in al-Duwayima, Palestine, 1948:

“I wish to submit to you an eyewitness report given to me by a soldier who was in al-Duwayma on the day following its occupation… The man is one of us [member of the United Workers' Party (MAPAM)]…

“He opened his heart to me because there are not many hearts these days that are willing to listen. He arrived in al-Duwayma immediately after its occupation. The conquering army was the 89th battalion… They killed some 80–100 Arabs, women and children. The children were killed by smashing their skulls with clubs. There was not a single house without dead. The second wave of the army consisted of the battalion of the soldier who gave this eyewitness report… In the village there remained Arab women and men who were put in houses without food or drink. Then the sappers came to blow up the houses. One officer order a sapper to put the two old women into the house he was about to blow up. The sapper refused, and said that he would obey only such orders as were handed down to him by his immediate commander. So the officer ordered his own soldiers to put the women in, and the atrocity was carried out. Another soldier boasted he had raped an Arab women and then shot her. Another Arab woman with a day-old baby was employed in cleaning jobs in the yard… She worked for one or two days in the service, and then she was shot, together with her baby…

Cultured and well-mannered commanders who are considered good fellows… have turned into low murderers, and this happened not on the storm of the battle and blind passion, but because of a system of expulsion and annihilation. The fewer Arabs that remain the better.”

Quoted by Eyal Kafkafi, ‘A Ghetto Attitude in the Jewish State’, Davar, 6 September 1979, as cited by Uri Davis in Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within.

This is why when Israeli right-wingers flyer Jerusalem with ads saying “All of Israel is a settlement”, they are way more precise and honest than is Beinart about the brutal history of Zionism. The difference between the land-obsessed colonialism, ethnic cleansing and violence of “democratic” and “non-democratic” Israel is merely the pace at which the crime is committed.

This is why the artificial distinction between “democratic” and “nondemocratic” Israel can only exist through a historical amnesia that “liberal Zionists” seem far more willing to make—surprise!—than Palestinians.

Aafter an overly long hiatus from Hybrid States due to extreme time pressure in other fields of my life, I read Gershom Gorenberg’s excerpt from his new book The Unmaking of Israel, which deals, ironically enough, with the making of Israel via the removal of 80 percent of the non-Jewish, indigenous population. A response to his rather odd arguments was to be a perfect re-introduction to Hybrid States activity.

But then Noam Sheizaf wrote the piece for me. Sheizaf highlights the weak and frankly silly assertion, made by Gorenberg, that early 20th century Zionists could not have been ethnic cleansers because of the existence of a little committee known as the Situation Committee. This group outlined plans for running the country-to-be, and these plans included provision of education and health services to Arab communities. In Gorenberg’s strangely uncritical reading, this constitutes “strong evidence” against ethnic cleansing.

Sheizaf writes:

Gorenberg goes on to quote plans made by the Situation Committee for civil services in the new state of Israel which include the Arab population; this is the “strong evidence to the opposite” he is referring to. Yet the reason “evidence [for plans of transfer] is missing,” is because Israel has never released these bits in the archives, like it did with most documents from that time. So the public papers reveal what’s necessary to be revealed and conceal the rest – and I have a feeling Gorenberg is falling for this trap. More importantly, by concentrating on the debate in the Jewish leadership before the war, Gorenberg omits the decisions on this issues that were made during the war.

[...]

These paragraphs create the impression that in some cases, local initiatives by commanders led to forced evacuations, but it wasn’t policy. Yet we know for example that by early July 1948, Ben-Gurion had ordered the army to expel the entire populations of the Palestinian towns Ramle and Lod. The orders were given to Yigal Alon, and carried out by Yitzhak Rabin. Many of the refugees were looted by IDF soldiers as they were leaving their homes (see for reference Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli war, p.317 of the Hebrew edition; in a footnote Morris states that there is a censored part in the government’s meeting protocols dealing with the evacuation). This is the most famous case; there were others.

But Sheizaf lets Gorenberg off the hook too easily. Although many of the most sensitive records remain classified, we do know that the Haganah had conducted detailed cartographic work on Palestinian villages and had precise estimates of the Palestinian population across regions, as well as where there were real or imagined pockets of “resistance” to Zionist plans. We also know of the infamous Plan Dalet, which instructed military commanders to preemptively destroy (via “setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris”) population centers “difficult to control continuously”. Plan Dalet specifically targets not only sites that might field “regular and semi-regular forces”, but even those that might be used by irregular, “small forces”, which can mean just about anything, as the liberal interpretation by military commanders demonstrates.

The most shocking omission from Gorenberg’s account of 1948, given that his entire argument rests on the existence of the Situation Committee, is his non-discussion of the Transfer Committee. I asked Gorenberg via Twitter whether his book discusses the Transfer Committee, but he failed to respond. This group, established days after Israel was founded, was comprised of leading Zionists such as Yosef Weitz (of the JNF), and was tasked with overseeing the permanent removal of Palestinians from their former villages. And as we know, they were extraordinarily successful in eliminating more than 400 Palestinian villages from the Zionist map, either through outright destruction or by renaming them and passing them and their material possessions on to Jews. What on earth could be considered ethnic cleansing if not this?

If Gorenberg hadn’t relied on such a puny measure of “strong evidence”, he could have found ample evidence that Zionists perpetrated an ethnic cleansing that was imagined and fantasized about for 50 years, implemented under remarkably clear military orders (even based on the limited evidence we currently know), institutionalized through an ethnic cleansing committee by another (euphemistic) name, and which created the foundational legal framework for excluding one ethnic group from civic and political life (i.e. established Israeli apartheid).

That he failed to do so says much about the ability of Gorenberg, and so-called “liberal Zionists” more generally, to confront the essential crimes of Zionism.

Facing the biggest domestic political crisis since he took office (in the form of of the #j14 protests), Netanyahu responds in the following, all-too-predictable ways:

• Trying to assassinate Nasrallah or other high-ranking Hezbollah officials and spark a new conflagration.
• Announcing the construction of another 930 Jewish-only houses on the Palestinian side of the Green Line.
• Escalating attacks on Hamas and other Gaza targets despite Hamas being formally committed to a ceasefire.

Colonize Palestine and spark violence, the essential political survival strategy of Israeli governments.

How many times have I heard Israelis try to shut down their critics with an argument that preserves for Israelis the right to criticize Israel? The argument is of the following general form: “until you’ve lived in Israel, you can’t criticize it”. Another permutation is that you can’t criticize Israel unless you’ve served (read: been brainwashed) in the Israeli army.

Of course, a massive proportion of the people who defend Israel’s occupation and colonization of the Palestinian territories have never actually seen, much less experienced, said occupation and dispossession. So I say to them, don’t defend the occupation until you’ve lived under it. But I digress…

Now Jeffrey Goldberg provides a perfect rebuttal to this argument. This is the second in the two-day series of Goldbergs (unrelated as far as I know) providing extremely cogent arguments for (1) cultural boycott of Israel and now (2) ardent criticism of Israel, even if you have never lived there.

The context is Alison Benedikt’s piece in The Awl, which ruffled the feathers of Jeffrey Goldberg and many others. Today, Goldberg makes it clear why he got so upset:

The outrage comes form the fact that many of us — I would dare say most American Jews — believe that you just don’t get to walk away. I believe — not just me, this is one of the messages of the Passover seder — that all Jews are responsible for each other. This means when you believe a Jew (or, say, a Jewish state) is going astray, you are duty-bound to intervene. Abandoning Israel, abandoning the Jewish people, is abandoning your own family. As Andy Bachman noted, it is a rabbinic dictum that, “all of Israel (read, ‘the Jewish people’) are responsible for one another.”

There you have it. If you are Jewish and think Israel is going astray, “you are duty-bound to intervene”. There is even a rabbinical pronouncement to this effect. For non-Israeli Jews out there, use this next time an Israeli is yelling at you to shut up for criticizing Israel because you haven’t gone through what they have.

For the record, my opinion is that this tribal collective responsibility provides a nice starting point for Jewish engagement in correcting the so-called Jewish state’s wayward course, but it is not enough. I don’t believe that any human simply gets “to walk away” from their human family. There is no reason save narcissistic navel-gazing to draw the line at one’s own ethnic/religious group. In other words, all humans are duty-bound to intervene when they see each other go astray.

A series of recent discussions in my life (with very well intentioned people) have focused on whether cultural boycott of Israel is perhaps a bit too extreme of a position. Doesn’t it just run the risk of alienating Israelis and making them less likely to make sacrifices for peace and justice?

The problem with this question is its framing. In my reading, Israelis are far too comfortable with the status quo and will never make any sacrifice or question their tribalist and commonly racist ideology without increased incentives to do so. And one of the primary ways Israelis are made to feel comfortable is by their (largely erroneous) self-image as a modern “Western” democracy, which includes, among other things, gay pride parades and visits from prestigious internationals.

Today, JJ Goldberg captures this argument about normalization to an immaculate degree in The Forward. It really is one of the finest arguments for cultural boycott I have ever heard:

If you’re one of those people who tries to follow the news out of Israel, late June probably found you feeling anxious about the impending launch of the next Gaza protest flotilla. You’re worried about a repeat of the May 2010 fiasco, when the Israeli navy boarded a Turkish protest ship to enforce Israel’s Gaza blockade and ended up killing nine Turkish citizens. You’re saddened and angry about Israel’s growing isolation, and hoping its navy gets it right this time.

If you actually live in Israel, on the other hand, there’s a pretty good chance your thoughts were focused on Bob Dylan. You might be one of the 25,000 people who paid to hear him June 20 at Ramat Gan stadium outside Tel Aviv and left feeling confused, annoyed, cheated and perhaps wondering why, after the fiasco of his last appearance in 1993, he couldn’t get it right this time. And, yes, saddened and angry about Israel’s isolation. Fans expected Dylan, the maverick moral voice, spiritual seeker and sometime Chabadnik, to show some sign of love. What he gave was a flat, mechanical performance, 15 songs and then back to the airport without so much as a hello or goodbye, leaving Israelis as alone as before.

Mind you, there’s a part of Israel that revels in isolation, believing it is meant to be, in the Torah’s words, “a nation that dwelleth apart.” For most Israelis, though, it’s a source of mounting dismay. Most Israelis believe their country is unfairly blamed for a conflict that isn’t their fault. They pack their sons off in uniform, worry about rockets and bus bombs and then read that their leaders have been indicted for war crimes and international rock stars are canceling local appearances in protest. Sometimes it feels as though the very walls are closing in.

When celebrities do show up to perform, therefore, it’s more than just a night out. It’s an affirmation that Israel is still part of the world.

Obviously, JJ Goldberg thinks this a fine thing. But for anyone concerned with Israel’s reckless, continuous program of ethnic cleansing and apartheid in service of 19th century ideals of ethnic purity, then this statement is one of the best arguments for cultural boycott you are likely to find.

I just watched Max Blumenthal’s excellent set of recorded interviews and comments from participants at AIPAC 2011.  As a Jew—nay, as a human being—it is heart-wrenching to watch other ostensibly sentient creatures diminish their critical faculties in such obvious, degrading ways in order to advance a 21st century colonial project.  “You constantly reject peace,” in one breath.  “We won the war.  You lost.  It’s our land,” in the next.

Apart from the recurring, blatant denial of Israel’s military occupation, one of the most repeated assertions in the segment is that Palestinian citizens of Israel live better than Arabs in neighboring countries.  Zionists love to talk about this (while purposely ignoring the rampant, often ethnically based inequalities that undermine those arguments).  For example, there is the animated but inarticulate young man who says “I’m an Israeli Jew and I have Israeli Arab friends, in Israel, and they are perfectly comfortable… In Israel.  I have them as Facebook friends.” Wait, you mean Israeli Palestinians are allowed to use Facebook?

If I were trying to design Zionist talking points (which mercifully I’m not!), I would certainly not go down this route.  The relevant comparison group for any sub-population of citizens is not ethnically similar people in other countries.  One does not decide that Jim Crow segregation in the US was an ethically appealing system of discrimination by comparing socio-economic outcomes of African-Americans to Nigerians or Liberians.  If Jews lived in ghettos in two different countries, but one country’s ghettos were more sanitary and supported a higher standard of living than in another country, conditions in the latter do not justify conditions in the former.  The appropriate comparison group must be the other citizens of that country.  Palestinian Arabs should not be compared with Arabs in other countries; they should be compared to the dominant ethnic group in the country that demonstrates what privilege and resources can do for that specific population.  This is not a difficult thing to grasp.

Are Palestinian citizens of Israel better off than Arabs in neighboring countries?

But putting this aside for a moment, is it even true that Palestinian Arabs are better off than other Arabs?  In some ways, yes.  In many ways, no.  It is true, for example, that there is more protection for speech and media than in many highly repressive Arab countries.  But Palestinians are massively underrepresented in political institutions relative to other Arab countries with parliaments or democratic local governments (Arab parties hold at present only 14 out of 120 seats in the Knesset despite comprising over 20% of the population).  They hold fewer civil service jobs (only 6.1% of such jobs despite court rulings that this number must be increased).  This discrimination extends to the private sector as well.  Fewer Arab women in Israel work, due to discrimination, than even women in Saudi Arabia, that bastion of medievally strict gender segregation, and Oman.  The labor force participate rate of Arab women in Israel is less than half what it is in Morocco or Mauritania.

Arab towns in Israel have worse public services than many other Arab counties.  Only in 2010 did they get access to a public bus system for the first time, a change that Israel’s Transportation Ministry announced with great fanfare.   And that is to say nothing of the so-called unrecognized Bedouin communities, where more than 80,000 Arab citizens of Israel receive absolutely no public services (no education, no health no water supply, no sanitation, no electricity, no trash service).  One would have to search carefully for the most deprived groups in other Arab countries in order to find destitution and state-sanctioned public neglect on such an intense scale.

Comparing Palestinian Israelis to Jewish Israelis

Of course, all the outcomes just described coexist with extraordinary privilege and wealth in Israel, which is an OECD country.  How do outcomes for the Palestinian subgroup compare to outcomes for Jews?  I highlight just a few:

• Palestinian Israelis are live on just 7% of the land with high population densities due to de jure discrimination among land authorities in Israel.
• 55% of families below the poverty line in Israel are Palestinian Arab.
• Average Arab salaries are 30% lower than Jewish ones, according to the Central Bank of Israel.
• Average per-student allocation at Arab schools is 1/5 the Jewish average, according to Israel’s Follow-Up Committee for Arab Education.
• Despite poor health outcomes, Israel’s health ministry allocated Arab communities in 2002 less than 0.6% of its 277 million shekel) budget to develop healthcare facilities in Arab localities.
• Of the 55,000 people working in government companies, one percent are Arab.
• From 1952 to 1972, proportion of total government budget allocated to Arab sector ranged from 0.2 to 1.5%. Rose to 4% in 2008.
• Since 1948, approximately 600 new Jewish municipalities, but not one Arab one has ever been built.

These figures show that relative outcomes for Palestinian citizens of Israel, when compared both to other Arabs countries and to the appropriate comparison group, is one of systematic, institutionalized relative deprivation.  As the US State Dept wrote in it’s recent report on human rights in Israel: “Principal human rights problems were institutional, legal, and societal discrimination against Arab citizens, [and] Palestinian residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”

No wonder Israel’s defenders try to distract attention away from their own state’s appalling conduct.

Do you not find it grotesque that Israelis celebrate “Independence Day” in artificial parks built by the Jewish National Fund on the ruins of Palestinian villages?

For example, Canada Park (cited in the link), was built on the depopulated and destroyed villages of Dayr Ayyub, Imwas, Yalo, and Bayt Nuba. The Biriya National Forest on the remains of the Palestinian village of the same name. And on and on…

There existed in summer 1948 an explicit policy to destroy the depopulated Palestinian villages, expropriate any remaining agricultural equipment or valuable supplies, and to turn these former towns into new Jewish settlements or “parks” that hid the macabre, recent history of that land.

The extent and intent of this policy was captured well in the sentiments of some dissidents from the Mapam party, which was opposed to this wholesale ethnic cleansing operation.

“The method of destruction vis-a-vis the abandoned Arab village is continuing… It is difficult to be free of the impression there is a guiding hand, for whom the possibility that the Arabs will have nowhere to return to, or for what, is unproblematic.” (Secretariat of the Actions Committee, Kibbutz Artzi, cited in Benny Morris, 2004).

According to Aharon Cohen, another Mapam leader, wrote:

“Ben-Gurion orders the destruction of villages without strategic need… In the ruling (i.e. Mapai) circles there is an inclination to erase hundreds of Arab villages… Will our state be built on the destruction of Arab settlements?” (Cited in Benny Morris, 2004)

The answer, of course, came in the form of a resounding ‘yes’, as Josef Weitz and the ‘Transfer Committee’, charged with planning the Palestinian dispossession, led the way. For example, some kibbutz leaders wrote on 10 August 1948:

“The destruction of the Arab villages has been going on for some months now… I spoke with members from Kibbutz Ma’ayan Baruch and nearby kibbutzim and I got the impression that there exists the possibility that there is a desire to destroy the villages and the Arabs’ houses so that it will be impossible for the Arabs to return to them. A week ago, a representative of the Jewish National Fund [possibly Yosef Nahmani] came to visit. He saw that in the village of al-Sanbariya… several houses were still standing, albeit without roofs. He told the kibbutz secretariat to destroy the houses immediately and he said openly that this will enable us to take the village’s lands, because the Arabs won’t be able to return there.” (Cited in Benny Morris, 2004)

This is one example of the roughly 400 Palestinian villages whose residents (87% of the Palestinian population at that time) were expelled by military force, or which left out of fear of military attacks by Jewish groups, and whose towns were destroyed and then used to establish Jewish settlements or these parks that Israelis love to go to on “Independence Day”. This erasure of Palestine was almost universal. Moshe Dayan, an active participant as Haganah leader, Israel’s fourth Chief of Staff, and former Defense Minister, remarked:

“You don’t even know the names of these Arab villages, and I don’t blame you, because these geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either…. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.” (Speech at the Technion, Haifa, April 1969)

Obviously, if this history is as poorly known as Dayan suggests, then it makes the Israeli proclivity to party on Independence Day literally on the crushed fragments of Palestinian villages slightly less grotesque.

But knowing better, don’t you find it absolutely appalling?

Doesn’t that make the recently passed Nakba Bill, which prohibits state funding of any activities that discuss or otherwise commemorate this exact disaster, all the more offensive? While Palestinian are disallowed from learning about this very real, very tragic history, Israelis are literally partying on the ruins of Palestinian society.

This is a false and lying form of “independence”. This “Independence Day”, like always, I hope for the true liberation of all peoples in Israel/Palestine.

Israel is “vindicated”, claims FM Lieberman about Richard Goldstone’s latest op-ed in the Washington Post, adding that “we knew the truth and we had no doubt it would eventually come out.”  Netanyahu has gone so far as to demand the Goldstone report be retracted from the UN.  Among all the celebrations and self-congratulatory pats on the back, it is worth pausing for a moment to ask: what exactly does Goldstone’s latest essay vindicate?

The answer seems much less clear than Israel’s unconditional supporters want to argue.  The most charitable portions of his piece (to Israel) suggest that “if I [Goldstone] had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”  This statement is so patently obvious as to be meaningless, particularly given Israel’s steadfast non-cooperation at the time of the investigation, but let’s assume Goldstone means this in a substantive way.  He did publish this piece under a headline of “reconsidering the Goldstone report” after all (in fairness, he likely didn’t write the title himself, but his piece certainly opens this door).

What else is there in this op-ed that suggests a change from the original Goldstone report?  The op-ed focuses on a very select group of three themes.  The first point relates to the ongoing investigations into allegations of war crimes.  Goldstone refers to the UN committee of independent experts’ report to support this argument, and he quotes that report to the effect that “Israel has dedicated significant resources to investigate over 400 allegations of operational misconduct in Gaza” while “the de facto authorities (i.e., Hamas) have not conducted any investigations into the launching of rocket and mortar attacks against Israel.”  The second key claim in Goldstone’s op-ed is confusing, but suggests that the ongoing investigations have proven that Israel did not attack civilians as a matter of intentional policy.  How these conclusions have been reached before the investigations, which the Goldstone report called for as its primary recommendation, have been concluded is unclear.  The third theme is that Hamas has not done any of the good things Israel has done: Hamas did deliberately target civilians, Hamas didn’t investigate anything, Hamas continues to be guilty of war crimes by firing rockets into civilian areas, and Goldstone admits he was maybe “unrealistic” and “mistaken” to believe Hamas would investigate itself.

I want to first highlight several general observations about what this op-ed does and doesn’t say.  Then I will address these three themes in detail.

What the Goldstone Op-Ed Doesn’t Say

Limited to one of seven categories of possible war crimes

The Goldstone commission’s findings on deliberate attacks on civilians is one of at least seven broad findings (which comprise hundreds of specific incidents) that raise issues about Israel’s conduct.  These other key findings include: (1) Israel’s illegal siege on Gaza, which constitutes a form of collective punishment and so violates the Fourth Geneva Conventions; (2) The political institutions and buildings of Gaza cannot be lawfully considered part of the “Hamas terrorist infrastructure” and so Israel’s attacks on them are unlawful; (3) Israel taking insufficient measures to protect the Palestinian civilian population; (4) “indiscriminate” attacks (as distinct from “deliberate” attacks) killed many civilians without any credible military rationale for those actions; (5) Israeli use of weapons, such as white phosphorous and flechette missiles, which, although not banned under current international law, were used in ways that do violate the laws of war; and (6) Israel’s deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure, including industrial plants, food production facilities, sewage treatment plants, and water installations; this destruction has no military justification (for example, Israel’s “wanton destruction” of Mr. Sameh Sawafeary’s chicken coops, killing all 31,000 chickens inside despite there being no military activity in the area) and could constitute a crime against humanity.

Goldstone’s op-ed pointedly excludes discussion of all of these very serious charges of possible war crimes and possible crimes against humanity, so it’s odd that FM Lieberman and his hasbara “excreta” (his word, not mine) think Israel is somehow absolved of all responsibility.  One cannot avoid the impression that Israel’s unconditional supporters still haven’t actually read the report.

Overlooks key impacts of the report

One of the strangest omissions in the op-ed was the recognition that, assuming Israel is conducting investigations in good faith (again, more on that terrible assumption below), it was the Goldstone report that caused Israel to conduct these investigations.  The best evidence this is the case was Israel’s absolute refusal to investigate anything except the credit card theft case, until, that is, it got worried that Israeli leaders might end up in the International Criminal Court.  More evidence to support this argument can be found in Israel’s response to a conflict without a Goldstone kick in the rear: the 2006 Lebanon war.  In that case, Israel constituted the whitewashing Winograd Commission, which didn’t even pretend to investigate “the government policies and military strategies that failed to discriminate between the Lebanese civilian population and Hizbullah combatants and between civilian property and infrastructure and military targets”, as Amnesty International and other human rights organizations observed.  Thus, without the Goldstone report, there is absolutely no reason to believe Israel would be conducting the investigations for which Goldstone is largely praising Israel now.

Another important impact, which was a direct result of the report’s recommendations, was the policy changes, such as “new Israel Defense Forces procedures for protecting civilians in cases of urban warfare and limiting the use of white phosphorus in civilian areas.”  I have argued elsewhere that these policy changes acknowledge implicitly that Israel had not been minimizing civilian casualties, as it so vociferously claims, or else there wouldn’t be any possible policy changes that could further minimize civilian harm.  Either civilian casualties were being minimized before, in which case the policy changes are meaningless, or are minimized now (hypothetically, of course), in which case Israel wasn’t doing its utmost to protect civilians from harm before.  It certainly can’t be both.  Either way, these policy changes are directly related to the report, a point Goldstone’s op-ed also makes.

Validity of Specific Claims Made in Goldstone’s Op-Ed

The credibility of Israel’s investigations

Goldstone’s op-ed gives the strong impression that, despite the length of Israel’s military investigations being “frustrating”, Israel has “appropriate processes” in place.  It is difficult to understand where this belief comes from, because it certainly does not appear in this form in McGowan Davis report he cites (McGowan Davis chairs the UN committee of independent experts monitoring implementation of the Goldstone report recommendations).  That report paints a far less appealing picture of Israeli’s military investigations, noting, for example, that:

1. “That Israel’s military justice system provides for mechanisms to ensure its independence”, but “the Committee further noted that notwithstanding the built-in structural guarantees to ensure the MAG’s [Military Advocate General's] independence, his dual responsibilities as legal advisor to the Chief of Staff and other military authorities, and his role as supervisor of criminal investigations within the military, raise concerns in the present context given allegations in the FFM report that those who designed, planned, ordered, and oversaw the operation in Gaza were complicit in international humanitarian law and international human rights law violations.”
2. “The Committee does not have sufficient information to establish the current status of the on-going criminal investigations into the killings of Ateya and Ahmad Samouni, the attack on the Wa’el al-Samouni house and the shooting of Iyad Samouni.. . . As of 24 October 2010, according to media reports, no decision had been made as to whether or not the officer would stand trial.”  This case is of course cited directly by Goldstone, yet his arguments are incompatible with the actual McGowan Davis report.
3. “The Committee has discovered no information relating to four incidents referred to in the FFM [Goldstone] report: incident AD/02, incident AD/06, the attack on the Al-Quds hospital, and the attack on the Al-Wafa hospital.  Nor has the Committee uncovered updated information concerning the status of the criminal investigations into the death of Mohammed Hajji and the shooting of Shahd Hajji and Ola Masood Arafat, and the shooting of Ibrahim Juha. Accordingly, the Committee remains unable to determine whether any investigation has been carried out in relation to those incidents.”
4. “It is notable that the MAG himself, in his testimony to the Turkel Commission, pointed out that the military investigations system he heads is not a viable mechanism to investigate and assess high-level policy decisions. When questioned by commission members about his “dual hat” and whether his position at the apex of legal advisory and prosecutorial power can present a conflict of interest under certain circumstances, he stated that “the mechanism is calibrated for the inspection of individual incidents, complaints of war crimes in individual incidents (…). This is not a mechanism for policy. True, it is not suitable for this.” “
5. “The Committee expressed strong reservations as to whether Israel’s investigations into allegations of misconduct were sufficiently prompt. In particular, the Committee expressed concern about the fact that unnecessary delays in carrying out such investigations may have resulted in evidence being lost or compromised, or have led to the type of conflicting testimony that characterizes the investigations into the killings of Majda and Raayya Hajaj, and the inconclusive findings reported with respect to the tragic deaths of Souad and Amal Abd Rabbo and the grave wounding of Samar Abd Rabbo and their grandmother Souad.”
6. “The promptness of an investigation is closely linked to the notion of effectiveness. An effective investigation is one in which all the relevant evidence is identified and collected, is analyzed, and leads to conclusions establishing the cause of the alleged violation and identifying those responsible. In that respect, the Committee is concerned about the fact that the duration of the ongoing investigations into the allegations contained in the FFM report – over two years since the end of the Gaza operation – may seriously impair their effectiveness and, therefore, the prospects of achieving accountability and justice.”

These conclusions of the McGowan Davis report give a very different impression of mechanisms for accountability in Israel’s military justice system than one would understand from a casual reading of Goldstone’s latest op-ed.  For additional, excellent analysis of these points, Adam Horowitz’s piece at Mondoweiss is a must-read.

Was it a deliberate policy of targeting Palestinian civilians?

If this op-ed “vindicates” anything, it seems to be about Israel deliberately targeting civilians as a matter of policy.  The Goldstone report investigated 11 specific cases, which were concerning because civilians were killed “under circumstances in which the Israeli forces were in control of the area and had previously entered into contact with or at least observed the persons they subsequently attacked, so that they must have been aware of their civilian status.”  After reviewing the details of these cases, which included not only the attack on the Samouni family (discussed in the op-ed) but also attacks on a mosque at prayer time and the shootings of civilians waving white flags, the report concludes:

“From the facts ascertained in the above cases, the Mission finds that the conduct of the Israeli armed forces constitute grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention in respect of willful killings and willfully causing great suffering to protected persons and as such give rise to individual criminal responsibility.” (Goldstone report, pp. 16)

This finding, of course, is precisely why the report recommends that Israel launch credible investigations into possible wrongdoing, which Goldstone claims Israel is now doing (more on this later).  In that sense, Israel’s investigations confirm many of the key findings of the Goldstone report, a point I’ve raised previously.

The conclusion above, which is easily the strongest charge in the entire Goldstone report, has very little to do with Goldstone’s latest statement that “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.”  The Goldstone commission and other human rights investigations have never said the IDF maintains a policy of deliberately targeting civilians.  This is a red-herring; nobody seriously believes there is a high-level policy to murder civilians.  With that said, there are nearly always instances in war in which certain operational orders, often with much stress, often combined with racism or other forms of dehumanization, result in civilians being deliberately murdered; there is evidence of several such instances in the Goldstone report. There is also a larger, systemic issue. Insufficient concern for civilian life combines with operational orders to result in the systematic murder of civilians. To argue these attacks are not deliberate does not mean they are not easily foreseen, or that those ordering the attacks are not directly responsible for the murder of civilians. The actual issue at hand is not whether there was a high-level policy to kill civilians as civilians, but rather that “these incidents indicate that the instructions given to the Israeli forces moving into Gaza provided for a low threshold for the use of lethal fire against the civilian population” (Goldstone report, pp. 16).  This low threshold was an intentional policy, as has been confirmed by dozens of soldiers’ and officers’ statements.  For example, many people have commented before about how the IDF “rewrote the rules of war for Gaza”, in particular by getting rid of “the longstanding principle of military conduct known as ‘means and intentions’—whereby a targeted suspect must have a weapon and show signs of intending to use it before being fired upon—as being applicable before calling in fire from drones and helicopters in Gaza last winter.”  The intentional, deliberate policy was one of “literally zero risk to the soldiers”, an order that is inescapably related to the high civilian casualties among the Palestinians.  For these reasons the main argument in Goldstone’s latest op-ed, which FM Lieberman erroneously believes “vindicates” Israel, is entirely besides the point.

Condemning Hamas

Hamas certainly, and unlawfully, does deliberately target civilians.  This is not only grotesque but illegal, and Hamas military leaders should be referred to the International Criminal Court for this since Hamas’ political leadership has refused to investigate the matter themselves and hold those responsible for war crimes to account.  But, of course, this was already well known by anybody who read the Goldstone report, which wrote:

“The Mission has further determined that these [8000 rocket] attacks [since 2001] constitute indiscriminate attacks upon the civilian population of southern Israel and that where there is no intended military target and the rockets and mortars are launched into a civilian population, they constitute a deliberate attack against a civilian population.  These acts would constitute war crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity.”

One could have also reached the same level of awareness by reading any of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch or other human rights organizations‘ press releases and  reports.  In this sense, there is absolutely nothing new about Hamas in Goldstone’s latest op-ed, yet some Israelis and Jewish groups seem surprised (see, e.g., AIPAC’s one of many tweets on the matter).

A Sad, Integrity-Damaging Turn

The first time I saw Judge Goldstone speak in person he was striking in his equanimity and unshakeable commitment to international law.  Even in the face of hate-filled attacks by Jews in the audience, who compared his report to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, he handled himself with a level of firm principle that I imagined to be unmovable.  The second time I saw him speak in public a year later, he seemed tired and worn down by the relentless attacks against him by those who chose to attack the messenger instead of deal with the message.  It was nothing concrete that he said, but there was a withered tone in his voice and a sort of quiet resignation that his best intentions had been so vehemently manipulated—and misunderstood.

Goldstone’s latest op-ed is something else altogether.  It does not challenge a single concrete finding in the entire report, and he has not conceded absolutely anything to his critics in that way.  In fact, his findings under severe constraints have held up remarkably well with time.  But the tone and timing of this current piece suggest that somehow the report should be “reconsidered”, that it was somehow wrong.  Moreover, his comments seem to intentionally mislead about the content of the UN independent committee’s findings on due process in Israel.  This is nothing more than a bone to Israel’s apologists, which is deeply problematic for all the reasons discussed here.  I am afraid this is a sad, integrity-damaging turn for a man who had singlehandedly done so much to protect people from war crimes in Israel, Palestine, and elsewhere.

And he should have known better, that is, he should have known that this craven gesture to Israel would not cause his enemies to forgive him and welcome him back to the broader Jewish community.  Already these enemies, sensing weakness, attack for the final kill attempt.  Jeffrey Goldberg, with the tone of the intellectual gatekeeper he fashions for himself, makes it clear this doesn’t change the “blood libel.”  The editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, David Horovitz, tells Goldstone “an apology is not good enough“.  We can expect many, many more such attacks.

Goldstone has done neither his causes of international law and accountability for war crimes—nor himself—any favors with this latest, depressing op-ed.

A routine rebuttal to the argument that Israel is an apartheid state is to focus on the conditions of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Israel’s defenders allege, for example, that Palestinians within its borders (whatever those are taken to be) live better than other Palestinians, or even other Arabs. Others like to point out that Israel has an Arab judge on its Supreme Court, which is an argument on par with the one that the 1960′s US under Jim Crow was not racist or segregated because Jackie Robinson played professional baseball. Moreover, it is verifiably false, as I will discuss in another post; for a taste of the argument I will make, see this article.

Whenever one hears arguments against apartheid that focus on Israel’s Palestinian citizens, it is fundamental to reconnect their history with the broader Palestinian story of which they are an inseparable part. It is disingenuous at best to focus on one subset of the Palestinian population that through historical accident, great bravery in the face of Jewish violence, and/or co-existence with dozens of laws that discriminate against them on the basis of their ethnicity alone, has managed to carve out lives in a state that defines itself without them, and that would love to have them gone.

Zionist thinkers themselves have done an extraordinary job of establishing the link between Israel’s Palestinian citizens’ history and that of its apartheid practices in the occupied Palestinian territories, a history easily overlooked by Israel’s current defenders. These wide-ranging records make clear the manner in which Jewish ethnocracy constitutes a single regime over a fractured Palestinian society, no matter how the specific rights are distributed. For more on this hierarchy of rights, see this previous post.

Here I want to share an article written by Joseph Weitz, Director of the Department of Land and Afforestation of the Jewish National Fund, and chief member of Ben-Gurion’s Transfer Committee tasked with the issue of population transfer, less euphemistically known by the euphemism ‘ethnic cleansing’, of Palestine’s Palestinians in the pre-state and early-state years. He writes in Davar newspaper on September 29, 1967, just three months into Israel’s now 44-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza:

“The first problem is understood by all and needs no explanations. . . . the need to sustain the character of a state which will henceforth be Jewish, and obviously in the near future, by the majority of its inhabitants, with a non-Jewish minority limited to fifteen percent. I reached this fundamental conclusion already as early as 1940, concerning which it is entered in my diary as follows:

“Among ourselves it must be clear that there is no place in the country for both people’s together. . . With the Arabs we shall not achieve our aim of being an independent people in this country. The only solution is Eretz Israel, at least the west part of Eretz Israel without Arabs. . . and there is no other way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, transfer all of them, not one village or tribe should remain, and the transfer must aim at Iraq, Syria, and even Transjordan. . . There is no other alternative.”

From this perspective a solution of transfer was then suggested which was advocated by B. Katznelson, Y. Vulkani, and M. Ussishkin, all of them now deceased; initial investigations were undertaken to help neutralise this concept concretely. After (some) years, consequent to the UN decision to partition the country, the War of Independence broke out to our great happiness, and in its course a double miracle took place: a regional victory and the escape of the Arabs. In the Six Day War only one great miracle took place: a tremendous territorial victory but the majority of the population of the liberated territories remained ‘fixed’ to their places, which can cause the destruction of the foundations of our state.”

This passage is filled with remarkable content that reflects an all-encompassing vision of establishing an ethnic-based rather than race-based apartheid regime in British Mandate Palestine. But I want to focus on just a few points:

• Extremely influential Zionists from Ben-Gurion to Weitz to Allon to Livni to Lieberman have always seen the Palestinians as a group that needed to be minimized vis-a-vis the Jewish population.  This has been true from the earliest years of Zionism.
• Transfer (ethnic cleansing) featured prominently in Zionist thought, as above, and action, as Benny Morris, Nur Masalha, Ilan Pappe, and others have documented.  Moreover, the Zionist leadership was well aware of the rights-oriented sensitivity of this matter and sought since before Israel was established to “neutralise the concept concretely.”
• Among important segments of the Jewish leadership, the War of Independence “broke out to our great happiness” and accomplished both a “regional victory” over additional, non-UN-sanctioned territory but also the “double miracle” of Arab flight, much of which at the hands of Jewish paramilitary groups.
• Unfortunately, for these thinkers, “only one great miracle took place” in 1967 and the Palestinians refused to leave their land after Israel’s “tremendous territorial victory” (Editor’s question: hasn’t this war always been sold as one of necessary self-defense? How quickly does existential self-defense morph into “tremendous territorial victory”?  About three months in Weitz’s case—at most.).
• This passage shows very clearly how the Zionist relationship to Palestinians has been conceived, through various wars and periods, as one of maintaining Jewish privilege and life over and against a Palestinian underclass.  This conception of Palestinian personhood and rights does not vary across Palestinian subgroups, even if the specific rights they have differ, and it links the Jewish treatment of Palestinians during 1948 through to 1967 and today into one apartheid structure with more complexity (and militarized brutality) than we saw in South Africa.

On this last point, I want to buttress the argument with a powerful image I saw today, which captures better than anything I’ve seen how rights are distributed on the basis of ethnicity and it’s intersection with a history of ethnic conflict.  These maps were produced by Arena of Speculation, an interesting new initiative by a group of spatial thinkers:

From left to right: Israeli ID, West Bank ID, Gaza ID, Stateless Palestinian Refugee

Well, the second most meaningless word after ‘terrorism’, of course, as Glenn Greenwald so expressively pointed out last year.  Clearly, terrorism means nothing more than the violence your enemies commit.  By construction, therefore, it never describes your own behavior, no matter how many innocent civilians you kill or under what circumstances, even if you kill your own people.

A very close runner-up must be the word ‘incitement’, currently in vogue all over the Israeli and Jewish press as a result of the gruesome murder of five members of the Fogel family from the Itamar colony deep in the West Bank.  The problem, says more pro-colonization advocates than can be easily summarized, is that ‘Palestinian incitement’ to violence has caused this tragedy.  Indeed, incitement is being proposed as the fundamental reason why there is no peace between Israel and its neighbors.

Here is a representative sample of such comments:

• Brigadier General Kupperwasser, Chairman of Strategic Affairs: “The events of Friday night are, in a way, an expression of the way the Palestinian Authority presents an attitude of hatred and demonization towards Israelis in general and especially towards settlers. These phenomena create a situation where it occurs to someone to carry out an attack like the appalling events in Itamar.”
  
• Israel Consulate (Twitter account): “Years of Palestinian incitement led to a Jewish family’s murder this weekend.  We keep track.”
  
• PM Netanyahu: “A [Palestinian] society that allows wild incitement like this leads to the murder of children.”

The Israel Consulate of New York’s list of ‘incitement’ shows us just how meaningless the word is.  Take the following examples it provides:

• On 6.3.11, the PA’s official newspaper, Al Hayat Al-Jadida, published an item to the effect that the management of a youth club in Ramallah planned to hold a soccer tournament in memory of Wafa Idris, a suicide bomber.
• On 24.1.11, the Governor of Jenin issued a Presidential Grant worth $2,000 to the family of Palestinian terrorist, Khaldoun Samoudi, who was killed while trying to detonate two bombs against IDF soldiers at the Beka’ot Crossing.
• On 30.12.10, Al Hayat Al-Jadida reported that Israel aspired to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque in order to build the Third Temple on its ruins.
• On 6.10.10, Al Hayat Al-Jadida carried an interview with Palestinian Minister Amr Aloul in which the latter said that Israel is, “An apartheid state that carries out state terrorism against the Palestinians.
• On 21.6.10, official Palestinian television broadcast a children’s program in which it was said that, “The Jews are our enemies,” and that, “Israeli soldiers are wild animals.”
• On 28.5.10, official Palestinian television broadcast a report on the family of a Palestinian security prisoner, during which her nieces were interviewed and said that they wanted to bear arms against Israel.

I will let readers decide for themselves which of these examples might fit with whatever definition of incitement they choose.  Some of them sound to me, however, absolutely ridiculous, barely worthy of serious comment (e.g. calling Israel “an apartheid state that practices terrorism”) because they include just about any possible form of uncomfortable criticism of Israeli policy.  But irrespective of your judgment ex-ante, it’s useful and important to compare these examples of so-called incitement to the exact same kind of thing, but coming out of the mouths of “our side”.

For example:

• Netanyahu’s buddy Hanoch Daum: “These are not humans… Are they members of the family of nations at all?… We can keep talking at length about painful concessions, but as long as on the other side we have blood-thirsty psychopaths capable of knifing an 11-year-old child, a four-year-old boy, and a baby who was just born, such talk would mostly be futile… We have to recognize the following fact: Inhumane elements exist in the other camp. These are terrorists that Israel must eliminate, before they kill our children.”  Notice how closely the trope about being “not humans” compares to the “wild animals” piece of incitement cited above.
  
• Knesset Member Michael Ben-Ari: “I call upon the government to carry out a ‘price tag’ and expel the residents of the village from which the murderers emerged, and to demolish the village and build in its place apartments for young couples of army veterans.”  This is an open call for ethnic cleansing, nothing less.
• Gilad Sharon, son of Ariel Sharon: “Let us not forget with whom we are dealing here. You can take the wild Palestinian beast and put a mask on it, in the form of some fluent English-speaking spokesman. You can also put on it a three-piece suit and a silk tie.  But every once in a while – during a new moon, or when a crow’s droppings hit a howling jackal, or when pita with hyssop doesn’t come out just right – the wild beast senses that this is its night, and out of ancient instinct, it sets off to stalk its prey…. A society that can thus sanctify death, and whose best of its youth are baby-stabbers, is simply not like ours…. Their three-piece suit is sullied with blood stains, and the mask falls off… and the image of the beast they tried to hide is once again revealed.”  He then proceeds to spout of anti-Palestinian nationalist mythology, best encapsulated by thess simultaneously self-aggrandizing and brutally condescending lines: “We are everything they never were and never will be. We have a history and culture thousands of years old, we have a functioning, developing society – while they are just the offshoot of our Zionism.  Their entire national story was born in the wake of Zionism. Even their self-definition as a people has no subsistence without us.”

There has been virtually no criticism of this hate speech (a notable example of criticism can be found here), only calls for building new settlements to avenge the blood of the Fogel family, easily the cheapest and most transparent way of desecrating the innocent blood spilled, and ensuring much more tragedy all around.

Moreover, these comments say nothing of the hateful, violence-filled language that has always been a part of the Zionist movement.  Again, some examples:

• Israel Zangwill (of “Palestine is a country without a people” fame): “We must persuade [Arabs] to trek [from Palestine].  There is no reason for them to cling to these few kilometers. ‘To fold their tents and silently steal away’ is their proverbial habit.  Let them exemplify it now.”
• The King’s Torah (Torat Hamelech): “In any situation in which a non-Jew’s presence endangers Jewish lives, the non-Jew may be killed even if he is a righteous Gentile and not at all guilty for the situation that has been created.” Also, specifically on baby-killing: “Hindrances – babies are found many times in this situation. They block the way to rescue by their presence and do so completely by force. Nevertheless, they may be killed because their presence aids murder. There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults.”
• Ben Gurion (1937): “We must expel the Arabs and take their places.”
• Menachem Usskin, Chairman of the Jewish National Fund (1930): “If there are other inhabitants there, they must be transferred to some other place. We must take over the land.”
• Rafael Eitan, former IDF Chief of Staff, after proposing the construction of 10 settlements in retribution for every time a stone is thrown at an IDF soldier: “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it is scurry around like drugged roaches in a bottle.”
• Shmuel Eliyahu, Chief Rabbi of Safed: Advocating carpet bombing to end Qassam rocket fire from Gaza (i.e. explicitly endorsing crimes against humanity), “If they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand, and if they do not stop after 1,000, then we must kill 10,000. If they still don’t stop we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop.” 

And on and on and on.  The historical record on such matters is extensive, but of course these comments can never be considered incitement if you are an Israeli.

Such a consistent application of principles to words like ‘incitement’ or ‘terrorism’ are simply impossible, most likely because they would require an uncomfortable examination of our own dark history of “wild incitement”, which, as Netanyahu so eloquently argued, “leads to the murder of children.”