Month: August 2010

August 30, 2010

Israeli actors to boycott new West Bank theatre: The Guardian

60 actors, writers and directors argue that performing in occupied territories would legitimise illegal settlements
Ariel Turgeman, manager of the theatre being built in Ariel, a West Bank settlement, which has prompted a boycott by Israeli actors. Photograph: Ronen Zvulun/Reuters
Dozens of Israeli actors, playwrights and directors have signed a letter refusing to take part in productions by leading theatre companies at a new cultural centre in a West Bank settlement, prompting renewed debate over the legitimacy of artistic boycott.

More than 60 have joined the protest over plans by Israel’s national theatre, the Habima, and other leading companies to stage performances in Ariel, a settlement 12 miles inside the West Bank. The letter, to Israel’s culture minister, Limor Livnat, says the new centre for performing arts in Ariel, which is due to open in November after 20 years in construction, would “strengthen the settlement enterprise”.

“We want to express our dismay with the intention of the theatres’ managements to perform in the new auditorium in Ariel and hereby declare that we will refuse to perform in the city, as in any other settlement.” Israel’s theatre companies should “pursue their prolific activity inside the sovereign territory of the state of Israel within the boundaries of the Green Line”.

Livnat said the boycott would cause divisions in Israeli society: “Culture is a bridge in society, and political disputes should be left outside cultural life and art. I call for the scheduled performances to be carried out as scheduled in Ariel and all over the country, as each citizen has the right to consume culture anywhere he chooses.”

Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, said the country was under attack by the international community – including economic, academic and cultural boycotts – and “the last thing we need at this time … is a boycott from within”.

The Habima, Cameri, Beit Lessin and Be’er Shiva theatre companies issued a joint defence of their plans, saying they “will perform in any place where there are theatre-loving Israelis, including the new cultural centre in Ariel. We respect the political views of our actors, but we’ll make sure that the best of Israeli theatre will get to Ariel”. The four companies, plus another two – the Khan and the Haifa – which have also agreed to stage productions in Ariel, all receive state funding.

Ron Nachman, the mayor of Ariel, said: “These actors get salaries from the government, which is sponsoring their theatres. You cannot take the money from the government and then decide your own policies. That is not integrity or honesty. If they disagree [with performing in Ariel], they should resign.”

It was not clear how many of the signatories were listed for planned performances in Ariel. Yousef Swaid, who is appearing in A Railway To Damascus, a production scheduled to be staged in Ariel, told Channel 1 television: “Settlers and settlements are not something that entertain me, and I don’t want to entertain them.” Rami Heuberger, who is not listed, said: “As a stage actor, it is a very, very problematic issue, and I think that so long as settlements are a controversial issue that will be discussed in any negotiations [with the Palestinians], I should not be there.”

Gideon Levy, a leading liberal Israeli commentator, backed the actors’ stance. “Yes, there is a difference between legitimate, sovereign Israel and the areas of its occupation,” he wrote in today’s Haaretz, which first reported the story. “. “Yes, there is a moral difference between appearing here and appearing there in the heart of an illegal settlement … built on a plot of stolen land, in a performance designed to help settlers pass their time pleasantly, while surrounded by people who have been deprived of all their rights.”

The Yesha Council, which represents settlers, said the actors’ letter had been signed by “army evaders and anti-Zionist leftwing activists”.

The actors’ letter follows the refusal of some international artists to perform in Israel because of its occupation of the Palestinian territories. Earlier this summer, Elvis Costello cancelled concerts in Israel, citing the “intimidation, humiliation or much worse on Palestinian civilians in the name of national security”. The Pixies, Gil Scott Heron, Santana and Klaxons have also withdrawn from performances.

Ariel, home to almost 20,000 people, was founded in 1978 deep in the West Bank. Israel wants it to remain on its side of any border resulting from peace negotiations with the Palestinians. All settlements on occupied territory are illegal under international law.

Erekat: Israeli religious figure urging genocide of Palestinians: Haaretz

Netanyahu distances himself from remarks by Shas spiritual leader who said earlier that all Palestinians should perish.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat on Sunday slammed remarks by the spiritual leader of Israel’s leading ultra-Orthodox party, who said the Palestinians should “perish”, saying that it was paramount to incitement to genocide.

Erekat called on the Israeli government to denounce the remarks by Israel’s former chief rabbi Ovadia Yosef, and to take action against racist remarks by other elected officials. He also criticized Israel for allowing the incident to pass without condemnation.

Yosef had said during his weekly Shabbat sermon that the Palestinians, namely Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, should perish from the world. Yosef, a founder of the Shas Party, also described Palestinians as evil, bitter enemies of Israel.

“All these evil people should perish from this world … God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians,” Yosef had said.

The 89-year-old is a respected religious scholar but is also known for vitriolic comments about Arabs, secular Jews, liberals, women and gays, among others.

“Is this how the Israeli government prepares its public for a peace agreement?” Erekat said, days before Israeli and Palestinian leaders were scheduled to meet in Washington for the launch of renewed direct peace negotiations.

“While the PLO is ready to resume negotiations in seriousness and good faith, a member of the Israeli government is calling for our destruction,” Erekat said. “It is an insult to all our efforts to advance the negotiations process.”

Erekat called on Israel “do more about peace and stop spreading hatred” and said Yosef’s comments could be placed within the larger context of Israel’s “policy against a Palestinian state” such as settlement expansion, home demolitions, among other things.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday distanced himself from Yosef’s remarks, but stopped short of a condemnation. “Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s remarks do not reflect Netanyahu’s views, nor do they reflect the stance of the Israeli government,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.

“Israel plans to take part in peace negotiations out of a desire to advance toward a peace agreement with the Palestinians that will end the conflict and ensure peace, security and good neighborly relations between the two peoples,” the statement continued.

Israeli Arab MK Jamal Zahalka, chair of the Balad Knesset faction, sent a letter to Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein, demanding that Yosef be investigated and tried for racist incitement and incitement to murder.

“Yosef’s comments are especially dangerous because he keeps repeating himself again and again, so he must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” MK Zahalka said.

According to Zahalka, Yosef is not a minor public figure, but a spiritual leader whose religious edicts are adhered to by hundreds of thousands of followers, and his comments can be interpreted as permission to kill Palestinians.

Zahalka added, “If, heaven forbid, a Muslim spiritual leader were to make anti-Jewish comments of this sort, he would be arrested immediately.”

MK Ahmed Tibi, chair of the United Arab List-Ta’al Knesset faction, also responded to Yosef’s comments, saying that the rabbi “has long since turned into the biggest blasphemer, the evilest purveyor of hatred and killing, which are contrary to all religions.”

MK Tibi called upon Yosef to reconsider his call for all evildoers to die, “because without realizing it, he is calling for his own death.”

In the past, Israel has accused the Palestinian government of incitement against the Jewish state, including by naming streets after Palestinian militants.

The Palestinian Authority has dismissed such allegations, though U.S. President Barack Obama told Abbas earlier this year he needs to do more to halt incitement against Israel.

An Assault on Israeli Academic Freedom—and Liberal Values: Chronicle of Higher Education

By Neve Gordon
On May 31, I joined some 50 students and faculty members who gathered outside Ben-Gurion University of the Negev to demonstrate against the Israeli military assault on the flotilla carrying humanitarian aid toward Gaza. In response, the next day a few hundred students marched toward the social-sciences building, Israeli flags in hand. Amid the nationalist songs and pro-government chants, there were also shouts demanding my resignation from the university faculty.

One student even proceeded to create a Facebook group whose sole goal is to have me sacked. So far over 2,100 people (many of them nonstudents) have joined. In addition to death wishes and declarations that I should be exiled, the site includes a call on students to spy on me during class. “We believe,” ends a message written to the group, “that if we conduct serious and profound work, we can, with the help of each and every one of you, gather enough material to influence … Neve Gordon’s status at the university, and maybe even bring about his dismissal.”

Such personal attacks are part of a much broader assault on Israeli higher education and its professors. Two recent incidents exemplify the protofascist logic that is being deployed to undermine the pillars of academic freedom in Israel, while also revealing that the assault on Israeli academe is being backed by neoconservative forces in the United States.

The first incident involves a report published by the Institute for Zionist Strategies, in Israel, which analyzed course syllabi in Israeli sociology departments and accused professors of a “post-Zionist” bias. The institute defines post-Zionism as “the pretense to undermine the foundations of the Zionist ethos and an affinity with the radical leftist stream.” In addition to the usual Israeli leftist suspects, intellectuals like Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm also figure in as post-Zionists in the report.

The institute sent the report to the Israel Council for Higher Education, which is the statutory body responsible for Israeli universities, and the council, in turn, sent it to all of the university presidents. Joseph Klafter, president of Tel-Aviv University, actually asked several professors to hand over their syllabi for his perusal, though he later asserted that he had no intention of policing faculty members and was appalled by the report.

A few days later, the top headline of the Israeli daily Haaretz revealed that another right-wing organization, Im Tirtzu (If You Will It), had threatened Ben-Gurion University, where I am a professor and a former chair of the government and politics department. Im Tirtzu told the university’s president, Rivka Carmi, that it would persuade donors to place funds in escrow unless the university took steps “to put an end to the anti-Zionist tilt” in its politics and government department. The organization demanded a change “in the makeup of the department’s faculty and the content of its syllabi,” giving the president a month to meet its ultimatum. This time my head was not the only one it wanted.

President Carmi immediately asserted that Im Tirtzu’s demands were a serious threat to academic freedom. However, Minister of Education Gideon Sa’ar, who is also chairman of the Council for Higher Education, restricted his response to a cursory statement that any move aimed at harming donations to universities must be stopped. Mr. Sa’ar’s response was disturbingly predictable. Only a few months earlier, he had spoken at an Im Tirtzu gathering, following its publication of a report about the so-called leftist slant of syllabi in Israeli political-science departments. At the gathering, he asserted that even though he had not read the report, its conclusions would be taken very seriously.

Although the recent scuffle seems to be about academic freedom, the assault on the Israeli academe is actually part of a much wider offensive against liberal values. Numerous forces in Israel are mobilizing in order to press forward an extreme-right political agenda.

They have chosen the universities as their prime target for two main reasons. First, even though Israeli universities as institutions have never condemned any government policy—not least the restrictions on Palestinian universities’ academic freedom—they are home to many vocal critics of Israel’s rights-abusive policies. Those voices are considered traitorous and consequently in need of being stifled. Joining such attacks are Americans like Alan M. Dershowitz, who in a recent visit to Tel-Aviv University called for the resignations of professors who supported the Palestinian call for a boycott of Israeli goods and divestment from Israeli companies until the country abides by international human-rights law. He named Rachel Giora and Anat Matar, both tenured professors at Tel Aviv University, as part of that group.

Second, all Israeli universities depend on public funds for about 90 percent of their budget. This has been identified as an Achilles heel. The idea is to exploit the firm alliance those right-wing organizations have with government members and provide the ammunition necessary to make financial support for universities conditional on the dissemination of nationalist thought and the suppression of “subversive ideas.” Thus, in the eyes of those right-wing Israeli organizations, the universities are merely arms of the government.

And, yet, Im Tirtzu and other such organizations would not have been effective on their own; they depend on financial support from backers in the United States. As it turns out, some of their ideological allies are willing to dig deep into their pockets to support the cause.

The Rev. John C. Hagee, the leader of Christians United for Israel, has been Im Tirtzu’s sugar daddy, and his ministries have provided the organization with at least $100,000. After Im Tirtzu’s most recent attack, however, even Mr. Hagee concluded that it had gone overboard and decided to stop giving funds. The Hudson Institute, a neoconservative think tank that helped shape the Bush administration’s Middle East policies, has funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Institute for Zionist Strategies over the past few years, and was practically its only donor. For Christians United and the Hudson Institute, the attack on academic freedom is clearly also a way of advancing much broader objectives.

The Hudson Institute, for example, has neo-imperialist objectives in the Middle East, and a member of its Board of Trustees is in favor of attacking Iran. Christian United’s eschatological position (whereby the Second Coming is dependent on the gathering of all Jews in Israel), includes support for such an attack. The scary partnership between such Israeli and American organizations helps reveal the true aims of this current assault on academic freedom: to influence Israeli policy and eliminate the few liberal forces that are still active in the country. The atmosphere within Israel is conducive to such intervention.

Nonetheless, Im Tirtzu’s latest threat backfired, as did that of the Institute for Zionist Strategies’ report; the assaults have been foiled for now. The presidents of all the universities in Israel condemned the reports and promised never to bow down to this version of McCarthyism.

Despite those declarations, the rightist organizations have actually made considerable headway. Judging from comments on numerous online news sites, the populist claim that the public’s tax money is being used to criticize Israel has convinced many readers that the universities should be more closely monitored by the government and that “dissident” professors must be fired. Moreover, the fact that the structure of Israeli universities has changed significantly over the past five years, and that now most of the power lies in the hands of presidents rather than the faculty, will no doubt be exploited to continue the assault on academic freedom. Top university administrators are already stating that if the Israeli Knesset approves a law against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement for Palestine, the law will be used to fire faculty members who support the movement.

More importantly, there is now the sense among many faculty members that a thought police has been formed—and that many of its officers are actually members of the academic community. The fact that students are turning themselves into spies and that syllabi are being collected sends a chilling message to faculty members across the country. I, for one, have decided to include in my syllabi a notice restricting the use of recording devices during class without my prior consent. And many of my friends are now using Gmail instead of the university e-mail accounts for fear that their correspondence will in some way upset administrators.

Israeli academe, which was once considered a bastion of free speech, has become the testing ground for the success of the assault on liberal values. And although it is still extremely difficult to hurt those who have managed to enter the academic gates, those who have not yet passed the threshold are clearly being monitored.

I know of one case in which a young academic was not hired due to his membership in Courage to Refuse, an organization of reserve soldiers who refuse to do military duty in the West Bank. In a Google and Facebook age, the thought police can easily disqualify a candidate based on petitions signed and even online “friends” one has. Israeli graduate students are following such developments, and for them the message is clear.

While in politics nothing is predetermined, Israel is heading down a slippery slope. Israeli academe is now an arena where some of the most fundamental struggles of a society are being played out. The problem is that instead of struggling over basic human rights, we are now struggling over the right to struggle.

Neve Gordon is a professor of politics and the author of Israel’s Occupation (University of California Press, 2008).

Continue reading August 30, 2010

August 29, 2010

EDITOR: Is this as good as it gets?

Please do not believe that David Grossamn is the thing itself, as far as activism in Israel is concerned. Grossman is, at bottom (and top) an Israeli, Zionist nationalist. He has even backed the war against Lebanon in 2006, in which his own son, one of the murderous troops, was killed. Only after some time he started thinking that maybe this war was not such an excellent idea. Of course, the death of his sone has given him a saint’s hallow, and one cannot say anything against him in some circles, not just in Israel.

The interview below has all the hallmarks of a naive groupie – Rachel Cook is so loving, admiring, protective, that she manages to get quite a few details wrong, even the name of Grossman’s wife, which she calls “Machal” (her name is Michal). She obviously does not read and speak Hebrew, knows little of the conflict, and is too admiring to ever question Grossman’s positions, not to mention criticising them. She does a good job of selling his new book as the Tolstoy of our time, which makes me doubt that she has actually read Tolstoy… If Grossman is the best there is, then Palestinians can only hope for God’s help…

David Grossman: ‘I cannot afford the luxury of despair’: The Observer

The Israeli writer discusses his novel To the End of the Land, a memorial to his son who was killed while serving in the army, and why he remains an opponent of his country’s policy towards the Palestinians
Rachel Cooke
Israeli author David Grossman photographed for the Observer in Jerusalem. Photograph: Ahikam Seri/Panos Pictures
In May 2003, David Grossman, one of Israel’s most celebrated novelists, began writing a new book. It was to be about what the Israelis euphemistically call “the Situation”, which was a little odd because, for the past decade, he’d carefully avoided writing about politics, in his stories, if not his journalism. It was not just that he’d long felt that almost anything he could say had already been said by one side or the other. There was the danger that such a story, even in his deft hands, would be creaky and polemical. Now, though, he felt suddenly that he couldn’t not write about it. Grossman’s eldest son, Yonatan, was six months from completing his military service and his younger son, Uri, was 18 months from beginning it. His feelings about this – in Israel, men serve three years – were so acute, it seemed they would push the pen over the paper for him.

The story came quickly. It would be about a middle-aged woman, Ora, whose son, Ofer, only just released from army service, has voluntarily returned to the frontline for an offensive against one of Israel’s many enemies. Ora, having moved from celebration to renewed fearfulness in a matter of hours, is in danger of losing her mind. She has no idea how she will get through the next weeks or months. Then, in a fit of magical thinking, it comes to her. She will mount a pre-emptive strike of her own. She will simply go away, absent herself from her home and her life. That way, she reasons, she will not be there when the army “notifiers” come to tell her of her son’s death. And if she is not there, perhaps he will not die. After all, how can a person be dead if his mother isn’t at home to receive the news of it?

Grossman started writing and as he did, he, too, indulged in a little magical thinking. He had the feeling – or perhaps it was just a fervent hope – that the novel would keep Uri safe. Every time Uri came home on leave, they would discuss the story, what was new in the characters’ lives. “What did you do to them this week?” Uri used to ask. He also fed his father useful military details. This went on for a long time and it seemed for a while as if the charm was working. But on 12 July 2006, following Hezbollah attacks on Israeli soldiers on patrol near the Lebanese border, war broke out. Over the course of the next 34 days, 165 Israelis (121 of them soldiers), an estimated 500 Hezbollah fighters and 1,191 Lebanese civilians were killed.

Grossman was terrified for his son, a tank commander, but he was not, at first, opposed to the war. Though a determined lefty as far as Palestine goes – he is against the occupation of Palestinian territories – he believed that Israel had a right to defend itself against Hezbollah which, unlike the majority of Palestinians, is committed solely to destroying Israel. As the weeks went on, however, he began to think that Israel should show more restraint. At the beginning of August, together with two other great Israeli writers, Amos Oz and AB Yehoshua, Grossman appeared at a press conference in Tel Aviv, demanding that the government negotiate a ceasefire. “We had a right to go to war,” he said. “But things got complicated… I believe that there is more than one course of action available.” He did not mention that his own son was on the frontline. It was not relevant. He would have felt exactly the same had Uri been safely at home.

The Israeli government eventually accepted a UN-brokered ceasefire which came into effect on 14 August. But this was too late for Grossman and his family. On 12 August, in the dying hours of the war, Uri, who was just 20 years old, was killed when his tank was hit by a rocket; he and his crew, who were killed with him, were trying to rescue soldiers from another tank. The notifiers came to Grossman’s house at 2.40am. He heard the voice over the intercom, and he knew what was coming. Between his bedroom and the front door, he decided: “That’s it – life’s over.” But the strange thing is, it was not. The Grossmans buried Uri; his father’s simple but piercing eulogy was reprinted in newspapers around the world, including the Observer; and then the family sat shiva (a period of mourning during which time a Jewish family receives visitors).

The day after the shiva ended, Grossman returned to his book. “I went back to it for an hour,” he says, surprise registering on his face even now. “Then I had to come back home. But the next day, I added 10 minutes, and the day after that, another ten. Yes, it was hard. I was going straight to the place that frightened me most. On the other hand, it was the only possible place for me.” The result – To the End of the Land – was published in Israel in 2008 and arrives here, in the most beautiful translation, this week. What can I tell you about this book? I’m not sure. Only that I loved it. And that it tears at your heart. And that when I heard someone comparing Grossman with Tolstoy, and his novel with War and Peace, I did not scoff.

It is blazing hot in Jerusalem and, as usual, the city is a knot: tight with anger, cinched with frustration. The traffic is so heavy, it takes a taxi 20 minutes or more to move a single kilometre, but walk to your destination, as I’ve just done, and your dress will be sopping wet, the straps of your sandals will have flayed your feet like whips. Forget the holy sites, the bearded priests and the shawled rabbis. On a day like today, the visitor seeks the blessing only air conditioning can bestow: cool, crisp and calming.

I meet Grossman in a coffee shop in Mishkenot Sha’ananim, a venerable Jewish neighbourhood just outside the Old City walls. The view from the window is of a pomegranate tree, the Hagia Maria Sion, formerly known as the Abbey of the Dormition, where the Virgin Mary is said to have fallen into eternal sleep and, following the curve of the next hill, the sombre grey line of the barrier that separates the citizens of Jerusalem from those of the West Bank.

The room is deliciously cold, (goosebumps are already rising on my shins), but the calm I feel, the sense of benediction, is all to do with Grossman. He once said that the effect of regular wars and prolonged uncertainty can be seen in the way Israelis drive (people are prone to honking their horns and yelling out of their windows). But you can no more imagine him going mad at an intersection than you can picture him inviting Binyamin Netanyahu out for beer and pizza.

Grossman radiates wisdom, modesty, kindness and, above all, a sort of stillness: contemplative and tender, but steely, too. This is not to say that the darkness is all behind him. He warns me that there are some things he cannot talk about, will perhaps never be able to talk about, and I cannot look at his heart-shaped face, his big, marsupial eyes, without worrying about manhandling him. Grief, inasmuch as I’m acquainted with it, makes a person feel, among many other things, like an over-ripe peach, prone to bruises and watery leaks.

For his own part, he likens it to exile. “The first feeling you have is one of exile,” he says. “You are being exiled from everything you know. You can take nothing for granted. You don’t recognise yourself. So, going back to the book, it was a solid point in my life. I felt like someone who had experienced an earthquake, whose house had been crushed, and who goes out and takes one brick and puts it on top of another brick. Writing a precise sentence, imagining, infusing life into characters and situations, I felt I was building my home again. It was a way of fighting against the gravity of grief.” The merest flicker of a flinch. “This used to be so hard to express… but now, when I talk about it, I feel able to say that it was a way of choosing life. It was so good that I was in the middle of this novel, rather than any other. A different book might suddenly have seemed irrelevant to me. But this one did not.”

Grossman’s heroine, Ora, whom the American novelist Paul Auster has already likened both to Tolstoy’s Emma, and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, decides to hike in Galilee for the duration of her country’s latest war. She takes with her an old love, Avram, a veteran of the Yom Kippur war and a former PoW. While they walk, they talk. She tells him about Ofer, describing her boy at every stage in his life, carefully bringing him to life (Avram has never met him). Slowly, an absence becomes a presence. The novel, then, works as kind of memorial: not only to Uri, to whom it is dedicated, but to Ofer, who may, or may not, be dead. After Grossman had finished writing it, he handed it to Yonatan, and to his wife, Machal (he also has a daughter, Ruti, but she was too young for this book at the time). “It wasn’t easy for them to read it,” he says. “I think it was only the second time they read it that they understood that it could be a source of comfort to us all. I’m not describing our family, but there are always moments [when the two collide]. And yes, when someone dies, they’re gone and yet they are still so present.”

Four months after Uri’s death, Grossman addressed a crowd of 100,000 Israelis who had gathered to mark the anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. His speech was beautifully controlled, but quietly furious. He denounced Ehud Olmert’s government for a failure of leadership, a failure which would ultimately damage the Jewish state, and he again argued that reaching out to the Palestinians was the only hope. “Of course I am grieving,” he said, anxious that Olmert and his cronies might dismiss his speech as the outpourings only of a bereft father. “But my pain is greater than my anger. I am in pain for this country and for what you and your friends are doing to it.”

I understand that he wants to separate his grief and his politics, but does he think, now, that his loss has changed some people’s opinions of him all the same? “Yes. There were people who stereotyped me, who considered me this naive leftist who would never send his own children into the army, who didn’t know what life was made of. I think those people were forced to realise that you can be very critical of Israel and yet still be an integral part of it; I speak as a reservist in the Israeli army myself.”

His novel provoked a strong reaction in Israel. “Some of my books in the past have aroused hatred [notably his collection of reportage, The Yellow Wind, a sympathetic account of life in the occupied territories]. Not this one. I think this one allowed people to give up on the need to be a fist, to remember the nuances, to ask themselves: what does it mean to be a human being in this situation? Our curse is that all of us become representatives; we congeal. But we need to feel our inner doubts, our contradictions.”

Was it horrible having to grieve in public? He must have feared that his son would be adopted as yet another symbol of the Situation. “I’m not sure it was horrible. One burden is at least taken away [when you are a public figure]: you don’t have to tell people what happened, because they know. We found our way. We’re very private people. We are a close family and we have a wonderful, devoted group of friends. What happens outside that… well, it depends how people approach me. Most approach me with tenderness and sensitivity. There has been a lot of warmth. But I made it clear from the beginning that I don’t ask for special privileges. I don’t want people to say: ah, because he suffered this, his opinions are this. My opinions are not my emotions. I spoke in Rabin Square, but I only do [public] things that I would have done before.

“I’m not a rational, cold person. On the contrary, so much of the politics is emotional here, and the two peoples involved are very emotional, so you must be attuned to emotions very precisely. But the bottom line must be logical. You must not surrender to the primal urges of revenge. I just do not see a better solution than the two-state solution. I’m more sad, and maybe desperate, but not in a way that paralyses me.” He pauses. “Maybe I cannot afford the luxury of despair. Maybe. Or maybe it’s a question of personality: I cannot collaborate with despair because it humiliates me to do so.”

All the same, he cannot feel hopeful at the prospect of more (American-brokered) talks. “I think our prime minister is the only person who can change our destiny for the better. He has a lot of credibility here. The question is: does he really believe in peace with the Palestinians? And I’m afraid that the answer is no. Even if he taught himself to utter the words ‘two-state solution’, he deeply mistrusts the Palestinians.”

To read the rest of the interview, use the link above

Continue reading August 29, 2010

August 27, 2010

Gideon Levy in conversation with Jon Snow: PSC

by Palestine Campaign UK

Gideon Levy in conversation with Jon Snow from Palestine Campaign UK on Vimeo.

Israel’s sad slide from democracy: The JC

Israelis rightly take pride in the existence of the Knesset but they now need to take action to restore its reputation
By Hagai El-Ad, August 26, 2010
In June, Israeli MK Miri Regev (Likud) shouted, in Arabic, at her fellow MK, Haneen Zoabi (Balad): “Go back to Gaza, traitor!” as Zoabi tried in vain to address the Knesset on her return from her participation in the “Free Gaza” flotilla.
In July, the Knesset decided by a 34-16 vote to strip Zoabi of her parliamentary benefits.
In August, the release of a heavily edited video clip by the army led to renewed calls in the Knesset to revoke her citizenship.
These moves in the Israeli parliament meshed well with public opinion: a Facebook group was set up entitled “execute MK Haneen Zoabi”. Security guards were assigned for her protection.
While the MKs may have believed they were shaming Zoabi, the real victim of this public humiliation was Israeli democracy. The removal of Zoabi’s parliamentary privileges simultaneously undermined the hope for full civil equality for all Israeli citizens.
To restate the obvious: in a democracy, members of its parliament must not be punished for fulfilling their roles as representatives of the public – even when their positions clash with the majority view. In a democracy, we are supposed to argue, not silence opposing voices. Democracy gives overriding priority to preserving free political expression, especially by publicly elected officials. As long as MK Zoabi has broken no laws, she has every right to continue expressing her views, however unpopular.
The treatment she received underscores a basic misunderstanding about the nature of democracy. In their haste to label her an “enemy of the state,” Israeli MKs forgot the principles of freedom of expression and the right to dissent. And, sadly, Zoabi’s treatment is just one example within a disturbing trend unfolding before our eyes in the current Knesset. The rules of democracy are crumbling.
The Knesset is passing more anti-democratic laws than ever before — targeting the Arab minority; predicating basic civil rights on declarations of loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state; and limiting the ability of citizens to protest against government policies.
McCarthy-style parliamentary committee hearings on academic freedoms have led to panic-driven responses by Israeli universities. Harassment of human rights organisations is now a commonplace in the Knesset, where one black day for democracy seems to follow on the heels of another.
In this extreme atmosphere, the anti-democratic display against Zoabi was regarded merely as a routine performance. The Israeli parliament is no longer an arena in which the struggle for human rights can be advanced; rather, it is a place where democracy itself has become a punch-bag, and defenders of human rights are fighting to hold the defensive line. The rot set in some time between Operation Cast Lead and the openly racist election campaign that followed.
When the supposed stronghold of democracy abuses its role, this is not a matter to be confined within its own sphere. It is the business of all citizens. Israelis who despair as their elected officials pull the democratic rug from under their feet should fight to protect and strengthen the basis of democracy that still exists and to create a space for democracy where it is lacking.
Concerned citizens should become involved in the struggle for human rights and social justice for all, whether in Tel Aviv, Araqib or Sheikh Jarrah.
There are a number of appropriate avenues – including participation in December’s Human Rights March – where such concerns can be expressed. If enough Israelis want to build together a future of equality, democracy and human rights, then it will become a reality.
To Jews in the UK, and all supporters of Israel who are engaged in passionate discussions about the country’s future, it is surely self-evident that attempts to silence opposition through legislation are catastrophic for any democracy. The only way out of the current impasse is open, respectful debate of all viewpoints.
Israelis who find their own space for debate constricted can draw inspiration from diaspora Jews who understand that what is at stake here is not the prevalence of any single opinion but the right to hold and express an opinion at all.
Hagai El-Ad is the executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel

Hamas: PA can’t give up Jerusalem in direct Mideast peace talks: Haaretz

Speaking at fast-breaking meal in Gaza, Hamas PM Haniyeh says Palestinians worldwide do not support ‘absurd talks with Israel.’

Palestinian negotiators are not mandated to surrender Jerusalem or any part of Palestine, the Palestinian Ma’an news agency quoted Gaza’s Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh as saying on Friday, with the Hamas strongman dubbing upcoming direct peace talks as the latest in a string of Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people.

On Tuesday, Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshal said that the upcoming U.S.-backed direct peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority were illegitimate and the result of coercion by Washington.

Talks between the two sides had been were shelved two years ago, but the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama is hoping for a breakthrough during the new rounds of negotiations set to begin September 2.

Speaking in Ramadan fast-breaking meal in the Gaza town of Khan Younis late Thursday, Haniyeh claimed that “no negotiator who would give up Jerusalem has a national mandate,” adding that “Palestinians across the globe will not support any movement holding absurd talks with Israel.”

The Hamas prime minister, referring to the Palestinian prisoners’ families present at the meal, said that the “prisoners, the injured and the families of martyrs will not authorize anyone who wants to give up Palestine and Jerusalem after they have sacrificed for years and struggled to keep it.”

“The occupation has failed to break the will of the Palestinian people, not by increasing its attacks or increasing the number of dead, not by injuring prisoners or isolating the resistance from its people,” the Hamas leader said.

“Israel is trying in dozens of ways to achieve its goal, and now it is through negotiations,” Haniyeh added, saying that next upcoming negotiations were the latest in a long list of Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people.

On Monday, Haniyeh said the Palestinian people will gain nothing from direct Middle East peace talks with Israel.

Speaking at a Gaza Strip mosque on Monday, Haniyeh said that the scheduled negotiations would not restore Palestinians’ rights or give them control over religious sites, saying that they “should trust God, who will be an ally of the Palestinians.”

According to the Ma’an report, Haniyeh also praised the steadfastness of the Palestinian people in the face of Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, saying the Palestinians were a “model for the Arab nations and Islamic countries.”

EDITOR: Good to know whose side they are on…

The following report has the sound of truth about it… When those US diplomats spenda long time with Israelis, they start speaking and behaving like them. You have to ask yourself: If Israel can destroy everyone around in few hours, why are they so terrified of the smallest thing?

‘IDF can destroy Lebanon army within 4 hours’: YNet

Lebanese paper says US envoy’s advisor threatened Lebanese army chief with Israeli contingency plan following deadly border skirmish
An senior advisor to US special envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell has threatened Lebanese army commander, Jean Kahwajim that should his army initiate additional fire exchanges with Israel, the IDF would annihilate his military within four hours, Lebanese newspaper al-Liwa reported Friday.

According to the report, Frederick Hof spoke to Kahwaji on August 9, following the deadly border skirmish between Israel and Lebanon and informed him of the IDF contingency plan.

The report further quotes Mitchell’s aide as telling the Lebanese commander that Israel had decided to carry out a plan “which would completely destroy the Lebanese army’s bases, centers and offices within four hours.”

Lieutenant-Colonel (res.) Dov Harari was killed in the border skirmish earlier this month and another officer was seriously injured. Firing began when IDF forces entered a border enclave in order to uproot a tree. Lebanon later blamed Israel for violating UN Resolution 1701.

Hof advised the Lebanese army chief to show restraint in any future border conflict with Israel.

US sources said a UNIFIL report which ruled that the tree was on Israel’s side of the border sheds new light on the possible danger caused by the proximity between the Lebanese army and Hezbollah.

Leaked CIA memo cites U.S. Jews among exporters of terrorism: Haaretz

Wikileaks releases a CIA memo titled ‘What if Foreigners See the United States as an Exporter of Terrorism?’ in which American Jews in Israel was one of four groups mentioned.
The Wikileaks website released a CIA document on Wednesday that examines the trend of Americans committing terrorist acts overseas, including American Jews in Israel.

American Jews in Israel were one of four groups mentioned in the classified report, titled “What if Foreigners See the United States as an Exporter of Terrorism?”

“Some American Jews have supported and even engaged in violent acts against perceived enemies of Israel,” the report reads. “In 1994, Baruch Goldstein, an American Jewish doctor from New York, emigrated to Israel, joined the extremist group Kach, and killed 29 Palestinians during their prayers in the mosque at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron which helped trigger a wave of bus bombings by Hamas in early 1995.”

Other groups mentioned were Irish-Americans who supported the Irish Republican Army; a group of Muslim-American men who traveled to Pakistan last year to engage in Jihad; and a Pakistani-American man, David Headley, who conducted surveillance for the Lashkar-i-Tayyiba terrorist group ahead of the attack in Mumbai, India in November 2008 that killed more than 160 people.

The leaked report was compiled in February 2010 by the CIA’s Red Cell, which, according to the memorandum, was tasked with “taking a pronounced ‘out-of-the-box’ approach that will provoke thought and offer an alternative viewpoint on the full range of analytic issues.”

Wikileaks, an online whistle-blowing website, recently published tens of thousands of classified military documents related to the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Boycott Heineken Music Conference in Tel Aviv

Europe’s economic boycott of Israel expanding: YNet

Recent months see sharp rise in number of European companies withdrawing investment from Israeli firms for political reasons. ‘The damage is huge,’ says glass factory owner from Ariel
The decision by Norway’s oil fund to withdraw its investment from Africa-Israel and Danya Cebus citing their involvement in settlement construction is the latest step in an ever expanding list of European private and governmental companies boycotting Israeli firms for political reasons.

Most of the cases pertain to claims of products being manufactured outside the Green Line and therefore in “occupied territory.” Some of the cases serve as political protest against Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians.

Yet, one point is uncontested: Recent months have seen a climb in the scope of the boycott of Israeli products imposed for political reasons.

“Since the Palestinians declared a boycott of settlement goods, there has been a 40% drop in production,” Avi Ben Zvi, owner of the Plastco glass factory in Ariel said. “Export to Europe has ceased in its entirety and traders from the territories have stopped working with us. The damage is huge,” he added.

According to Ariel Mayor Ron Nachman, the region’s factories have taken a massive hit. “We need to initiate a wide-scale governmental campaign threatening the boycotting countries they will not participate in the political process,” he said.

Last March, a large Swedish pension fund decided to boycott Elbit Systems for its part in the construction of the separation fence. The fund declared it had sold its Elbit holdings after its ethics committee recommended pulling out investment from companies involved in a violation of international treaties.

In September, Norway’s governmental pension fund made a similiar move and divested from Elbit.

Last May, Germany’s Deutsche Bank announced it had sold all its Elbit stocks, apparently after being pressured by anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian organizations.

Two years ago, Swedish giant Assa Abloy, owner of the Israeli company Mul-T-Lock Ltd., issued an apology for the fact that its factory in the Barkan Industrial Park was located outside the Green Line. The company promised to move the plant into “Israeli territory” following pressure from a Swedish-Christian human rights group.

Isolated events?
Shraga Brosh, president of the Manufacturers Association, said Tuesday that “from time to time, organizations, mainly Scandinavian, boycott certain Israeli bodies. At the end of the day, these are isolated occurrences which do not affect the whole trade with Israel.”

Soda Club was also hit by boycott: The city of Paris was forced to deny the Israeli company’s participation in a large-scale fair for the promotion of tap water after receiving threats from pro-Palestinian elements.

On July, it was reported that the French transport firm Veolia, which operated the light rail project in Jerusalem had decided to sell its shares in the project without citing any motives. The decision may well be connected to the fact that several months earlier a French court agreed to discuss a lawsuit against Veolia and its involvement in the rail’s construction in east Jerusalem.

David Gardner: A poisoned process holds little hope: IOA

By David Gardner, Financial Times – 25 Aug 2010
www.ft.com/

Israeli Peace Plan, by Carlos Latuff

As the caravans of Middle East peace negotiators rumble into Washington next week for the umpteenth time, the pervasive cynicism and sense of deja vu all over again is overwhelming – and with good reason.
The Middle East peace process long ago turned into a tortured charade of pure process while events on the ground – in particular the relentless and strategic Israeli colonisation of occupied Palestinian land – pull in the opposite direction to peace. “We have all been colluding in a gigantic confidence trick,” is how one Arab minister puts it, “and here we go again”.
While many factors had combined to hand veto powers to rejectionists on both sides, the heart of the question remains the continuing Israeli occupation. It is essential to remember that the biggest single increase of Jewish settlers on Arab land – a 50 per cent rise – took place in 1992-96 under the governments of peace-makers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres at the high-water mark of the Oslo peace accords. Many Israelis will point to the perfidy of the late Yassir Arafat, who wanted to talk peace but keep the option of armed resistance dangerously in play. But what killed Oslo was the occupation. The second intifada that erupted a decade ago was essentially the Oslo war.
A decade on, the Israeli settlement enterprise has turned the occupied West Bank into a discontiguous scattering of cantons, walled in by a security barrier built on yet more annexed Arab land and criss-crossed by segregated Israeli roads linking the settlements. Last month, B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, published a study showing Israel has now taken 42 per cent of the West Bank, with 300,000 settlers there and another 200,000 in East Jerusalem. The siege of Gaza has turned that sliver of land into a vast, open-air prison.
The main feature of the present situation is the disconnect between the high politics of the utterly discredited peace process and these – in Israeli parlance – “facts on the ground”.
At last month’s White House summit, where Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu massaged their long estrangement into a political armistice, the US president praised the Israeli prime minister as a leader “willing to take risks for peace”.
But there is no evidence for this whatsoever. True, in June last year, in response to Mr Obama’s Cairo speech denying any legitimacy to Israel’s settlements, Mr Netanyahu forced himself to utter the words “Palestinian state” – but he surrounded them with barbed-wire caveats that voided them of meaning.
Indeed, the words all sides use – peace, resolution, security, and so on – may be the same; but what each side means by them is different.
The mainstream Palestinian leaders, President Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad, the prime minister, and the Quartet made up of the US, the European Union, the UN and Russia, talk of a negotiated resolution. This means two states living in peace and security, and a Palestinian homeland on the 22 per cent of Mandate Palestine taken by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. East Jerusalem would serve as the capital of the West Bank and Gaza, with marginal land swaps to preserve some Israeli settlements near Jerusalem. But what does Mr Netanyahu mean?
He has been most clear on what he does not mean. For a start, he has set his face against any concessions on Jerusalem. He wants to keep most settlements except for the far-flung “ideological” ones and the 100-plus “outposts” established as pawns to be traded once the chess game began. His idea of a demilitarised Palestinian state is more like a sort of supra-municipal administration than a self-determined, independent government.
Will he surprise us, on the hackneyed Nixon and China principle that holds it is politicians of the right who most easily close difficult deals? There is little to suggest that.
The thinking of Mr Netanyahu, son of a celebrated promoter of Greater Israel, has always been profoundly irredentist. While his nationalist Likud faces the constraints of being in coalition with an assortment of ultra-rightist and ultra-orthodox parties as well as Labour, that was plainly his choice; the centrist Kadima party was (and remains) an alternative. To be fair, Israel’s electoral system – with a low threshold for entry into the Knesset that makes multi-party coalitions inevitable – means lobbies such as the settlers can take the national interest hostage. But Mr Netanyahu magnifies this by his choice of partners and by diligently firing up the ultra-hawks in the pro-Israel lobby in the US.
As risks he has taken for peace, Exhibit A is the much-hyped moratorium on settlement-building, which expires next month and has, in any case, been speciously interpreted. While the bulldozers to build settlements have been idling, moreover, the bulldozers demolishing Palestinian homes have been roaring: the rate of demolition in and around Jerusalem has doubled this year, while the army has just razed the village of al-Farisiye in the Jordan Valley, in line with Mr Netanyahu’s strategically obsolete obsession with keeping the valley as Israel’s eastern border.
As diplomacy struggles to keep alive the viability of a two-state solution, three rival systems of control have crystallised in the occupied territories that would make up a future Palestinian homeland: the settlements; the crimped Palestinian Authority of Mr Abbas and Mr Fayyad; and then Hamas, which Israel and its Arab and western allies have tried and failed to marginalise. Time is short for a negotiated outcome; it may even have run out.
The outlines of a deal are clear, in the (Bill) Clinton parameters of 2000 and Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, endorsed by 22 Arab and 57 Muslim countries (as well as Hamas, as part of the 2007 Mecca accord). There has to be an end to the occupation, and the US and Quartet cannot just allude to this; they must demand it.
The writer is the Financial Times international affairs editor

Any bastard can be a rabbi: Haaretz

These masters of Jewish law act as if they have not heard of Shmaya, and contrary to his recommendations in the Mishna tractate “Avot” (Ethics of our Fathers ), they actually very much like the rabbinate.
By Yossi Sarid

Some 30 years ago, the Hebrew slogan was coined: “Medinat halakha – halkha hamedina,” which means more or less that if Israel becomes a state governed by Jewish law, that will be the end of the state. Is the end near? It is coming.

Something like this has never happened before, even though it seems as if everything possible has already happened – two rabbis being summoned to a police investigation, and announcing that they will not go. Even settlers are kind enough to turn up. True, they are instructed to remain silent, to lead the police astray, but they show up. Rabbis, on the other hand, are even more important people, and if a rabbi is also a settler, there is no one with greater airs than he. Even after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the authorities dealt with the killer but left alone those who had killed wisdom.

Only rabbis permit themselves, with the authority of the Torah, to pass their sacred water in public without fear, and the police keep quiet about this, as do the attorney general and the head of the prosecution, and the legislators and law enforcers.

Not only have they not reported to the police, they are assembling communities of supporters – 250 of their species gathered last week to lend support to their colleagues, Dov Lior and Yaakov Yosef, who have approved the book of abomination, “Torat Hamelech” (The King’s Torah ) written by one Yitzhak Shapira from the Od Yosef Hai yeshiva in Yitzhar.

This theological treatise is a kind of guide to the perplexed – when it is permitted to kill Gentiles in general and babies in particular, and all of this according to Jewish law. Even the Ashkenazi chief rabbi, Yona Metzger, who does not particularly like police investigations, has declared the rabbis who did not report to the police as being in the right.

At the conclusion of the gathering, rabbis from among the religious Zionists who, as civil servants, get their salaries from the taxpayer, had the following to say: “The moral values of the Torah have to be the moral code for the Israel Defense Forces … Our holy Torah is not a subject for investigation or trial by flesh and blood.” Even their colleagues from the holy city of Qom would have been hard pressed to produce a more enduring manifesto.

With this in mind, let us reexamine the meaning of certain terms:

“Rabbis” – Judaism has never been blessed with so many rabbis; how happy is this generation to have so many. No other country has such a rare and generous ratio of clergymen per capita.

“Find yourself a rabbi” [as the Mishna says] – so they find one, why not? Just so there should be someone. Any good-for-nothing can be a teacher for them and any charlatan who gets a number of students together is called a rabbi. It is not clear who has ordained him, and it is not clear whether the one doing the ordination is ordained to ordain, and according to which principles. It is easier to be a rabbi than a professor, and even that is not very difficult.

“Halakha” – If the Torah has 70 faces then halakha (Jewish religious law ) has 700. The sages said that everything can be understood on different levels and in different ways, and everything is included, and if one person has given an interpretation, another can come and overturn it. After all, there is no religious authority that is recognized and accepted by all in these times, to whom people listen and according to whom people act. The halakha says that any bastard can be a rabbi, and he can even give his own kashrut certificates in return for money. And the Chief Rabbinate in Israel is nothing but a depleted organ in a body that is bruised all over.

These masters of Jewish law act as if they have not heard of Shmaya, and contrary to his recommendations in the Mishna tractate “Avot” (Ethics of our Fathers ), they actually very much like the rabbinate. Their halakha looks the kingdom straight in the eye, and the kingdom is humiliated.

An artist’s pledge to boycott: The Electronic Intifada

Dave Lordan, 27 August 2010
I am proud to be among the many Irish and Ireland-based artists from across creative disciplines who have chosen to publicly support the growing campaign of boycott against apartheid Israel. Compared to the imprisoned Palestinian people themselves and to those taking part in flotillas and other perilous anti-apartheid activities in Palestine our contribution and risk may be justly considered small. At most we might lose the chance of lucrative invitations to read, perform or display our works in parts of the US where apartheid Israel’s supporters hold the power of censorship. Departments of foreign affairs and ministries of culture may also not include us among those artists they can rely upon to project a lying image of a harmonious, bon vivant and, above all, harmlessly apolitical intelligentsia. We are sure to be slandered and ridiculed by the hired bullies of the global media empires.

These are tiny punishments indeed compared to the instant annihilation that Israel with its snipers and bombers and jet planes and tanks has visited on a daily basis upon Palestinian men, women and children for the last 62 years. The threat we come under for speaking out at a safe distance is nothing beside the threat apartheid Israel holds constant over every urban civilian in the Middle East with its 200-bomb-strong nuclear arsenal. Besides, to be ostracized and blacklisted by these last remaining friends of apartheid Israel, the gangster governments of west and east and their spies and ideological enablers, is to be reminded of the phrase of that great political artist William Blake, who tells us to “Listen to the fool’s reproach — it is a kingly title.”

The argument that artists should remain aloof from politics does not survive the most cursory of cross examinations. Over the centuries artists have taken every possible political stance both inside and outside their art. They have also performed every possible political action without it having the least negative effect on their own work or on art in general. Indeed, much great art has been produced out of intense engagement with political events and with social movements. One can look up the biographies of the list of Nobel prize winners in literature, or take a stroll around one’s nearest significant gallery if one needs any proof of this.

Artistic aloofness in relation to Israel-Palestine is without doubt a political stance, a signal that one will not stand in the way of the strong as they bear down with all their might upon the weak. But to perform in Israel, or to leave oneself open to performing there, is not simply remaining aloof. It is choosing the side of tyranny. It is a decision to ignore the cry of the oppressed.

Some artists will make this decision out of ignorance, or because they believe in or are confused by apartheid Israel’s untiring propaganda machine, which is so consciously assisted by the western media and politicians. To these artists I say, take a few days to look behind the headlines, give yourself some time to familiarize yourself with the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict in all of its contexts. Inform yourself properly, and then make your decision.

Obviously there are artists, motivated by fame and finance, who will perform in apartheid Israel knowing full well that their actions are an integral part of the war effort against the Palestinians, while of course loudly protesting otherwise. In the long run this may count against them. Their memory will be linked throughout posterity with all those images of rubbled apartment blocks, of old farmers shackled at crossroads, of sad-eyed children dying in makeshift hospitals for lack of basic medicines due to the illegal blockade.

Alongside the financial, political and military support of western rulers, the cultural support of western artists is a crucial link in the chain of oppression that tightens every passing minute around the neck of Palestine. Artists occupy a position of public privilege. What we think and feel as it is expressed through our art is elevated above ordinary discourse and seriously discussed at events, in classrooms, and in all kinds of media. Both individually within our local networks and communities, and collectively at a national and international level, we can and do have a disproportionate effect on opinion. We are, I think, perhaps the last significant body of people to enjoy large-scale public trust in most parts of the globe. Added together, what we say and do publicly in our art and in our lives as citizens is reflected upon by many people in a much more profound way than the utterances of most politicians. Our deeds and words ring louder then, and wider, and longer, then those of many others. But so do our silences, our non-actions. That is why both the tacit and the enthusiastic support of artists have been worth so much to dictators and criminal systems like apartheid over the centuries, and why we have been so brutally persecuted when we have refused to give it.

All an Israeli major has to do to unwind after a day directing the bulldozing of ancestral Palestinian homesteads is to change into her casuals and head out to see a platinum-selling rock group, or to clap along politely like everyone else is doing at the poetry of some prize-glittering western writer. Then she can feel as refined, as hip, and as justified, as any other liberal westerner. The presence of international artists in apartheid Israel normalizes and buttresses the apartheid system, contributing to its self-confidence and smooth functioning.

By performing in Israel, in despite of the clear call of the Palestinian artists and cultural institutions to boycott Israel, an international artist gives — whether or not they are conscious of it — a signal of approval to the settler-pirates and to the racially brainwashed conscripts who take pleasure in having themselves photographed beaming with national joy in front of blindfolded and humiliated Palestinians. Approval for these and countless other abuses and injustices is exactly how the appearance of international artists in apartheid Israel is interpreted by its politico-military leadership and, crucially, by its rank-and-file soldiers, boosting the morale of those who must implement the bloody practicality of apartheid on the ground.

The boycott, if it gained momentum, could have just the opposite effect. It could remove the visage of respectability and normality which the leaders of apartheid Israel so desperately crave in order that they can continue with the dirty work of oppressing the Palestinians unperturbed by the moral opinion of the rest of the world. It could undermine the confidence of the military rank and file and cause significant numbers to question and refuse the implementation of apartheid policies. Above all, it could help to inspire the continuing anti-apartheid resistance of the Palestinian people, and contribute — similarly to how international solidarity with black South Africans did in their case — to the eventual collapse of the apartheid system. To have played even the tiniest of roles in such an outcome would be a greater honor than any prize, review, or invitation is capable of giving us.

Dave Lordan is an Irish writer. His latest collection of poetry is Invitation to a Sacrifice (Salmon Poetry, Cliffs of Moher, 2010).

Only force will stop force: Haaretz

If Yuval Steinitz and Gideon Sa’ar want Israeli Zhdanovism to be attributed to them, they should continue with their indolent attitude toward Im Tirtzu.
By Zeev Sternhell
The threats and pressures on the universities were to be expected. The struggle in the academic world is an integral part of the cultural struggle started by the right, parallel to its political successes. People on the right understand that, just as in the United States and Europe, to survive for long and strike roots they must exploit the regime’s institutions and destroy the left’s hold on the educated sectors of the population.
The right is correct in its diagnosis – the Israeli cultural world, including the universities, tends toward the left. It has been this way since World War II in the entire Western world. The centers of opposition to the war in Vietnam and the occupation of Iraq were the American universities; the Latin Quarter in Paris was the center of the struggle against the war in Algeria; and the student revolt of 1968 swept across America and Europe from California to the Berlin Wall.

In the West, however, the right began regaining its strength and gaining ascendancy in the form of neoconservatism, not especially in the universities but in the world of finance and the media. This has not been true of Israel, where many supporters of economic neoliberalism have fought against the occupation and the settlements and therefore belong to the “political left.” That is why the right’s grip on the secular cultural elite is close to zero; this is the real reason for the recent campaign of intimidation.

The struggle is taking place on two fronts. The Shalem Center is the academic arm and respected ideological laboratory, even if it is neither innovative nor original. The second arm consists of propagandists and demagogues from the Institute for Zionist Strategies and the Im Tirtzu student movement. The attempt to copy America has failed so far for one major reason – the Israeli neoconservative and nationalist right does not have scholars and cultural figures like its counterparts in the United States and Europe.

This sense of weakness and dissociation from the world of research, literature and art has spawned the current outburst of anger, and it is not the last. The real argument, however, is not with the propagandists but with the heads of the regime. The senior politicians know that there is no research without freedom, and they understand that a researcher’s first commitment is to the truth as he finds it, or believes he has found it, in his work.

They know that academic teaching worth its name relies on research, and that intellectual and cultural life in Israel and its research institutes is the country’s true showcase. But their future depends on the support of the street propagandists, and they will not man the barricades to defend the achievements of science and culture. Moral considerations will not help in this game, only considerations of force and immediate benefit. And as everyone knows, force can only be stopped by counterforce.

Therefore, it must be made clear to the finance minister, who called for the firing of university lecturers who support an academic boycott of Israel (which I strongly oppose), that any attempt to harm a lecturer’s status for political reasons will meet with a firm response from Israel’s academic faculty. The expected reaction from the international community, including the possibility of a boycott, could be no less painful.

It is worth explaining this to the education minister, because his plan to bring back talented researchers to Israel will have to address the following question: What researcher who grew up in an American academic environment will be eager to return to a reality that is starting to resemble the black years of the 1950s in the United States? Who will want to work in an institution that exercises the right of censorship to look into the syllabi of its courses? And how many Israelis pondering their future will decide that this is the straw that broke the camel’s back?

If Yuval Steinitz and Gideon Sa’ar want Israeli Zhdanovism to be attributed to them, they should continue with their indolent attitude toward Im Tirtzu.

August 26, 2010

PCHR Condemns Attack by GIS Members on Staff of ‘al-Haq’ in Ramallah: PCHR

Thursday, 26 August 2010 12:00
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) condemns the attack launched on Wednesday, 25 August 2010, by members of the General Intelligence Service (GIS) on staff members of ‘al-Haq’ organization in Ramallah, while documenting GIS’s attempts to stop an assembly organized by Palestinian political factions and civil society organizations in protest a decision by the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) to participate in direct negotiations with Israel.  PCHR calls upon the government in Ramallah to respect public freedoms and to ensure respect for the work of human rights organizations and to provide protection for their personnel.

According to statements made by ‘al-Haq’ and according to Wissam Ahmed, 33, Program Officer at al-Haq, on Wednesday afternoon, 25 August 2010, a number of al-Haq’s staff members got out of their offices as they heard noise coming from the main street.  They had information that GIS members were attempting to stop the assembly of political and civil society organizations which was scheduled to be organized in the hall of the Protestant Church opposite to al-Haq offices. The assembly was supposed to discuss the positions towards direct negotiations between PNA and the government of Israel.  In the meanwhile, Wissam Ahmed, 33, Program Officer at al-Haq, took a video camera and went to the street to film the event, but he was beaten by a person in civilian clothes. Later, it was found out that this person was a GIS member.  The camera was taken from Ahmed and thrown onto the ground.  After Ahmed had managed to get his camera back, he asked why he was prevented from filming the event. In response, more than 10 GIS members surrounded him and beat him on the head and the neck.  They took his camera and pushed him away.

Mrs. Nina Ata Allah, Head of the Observation and Documentation Department at ‘al-Haq’, who intervened to stop the GIS attack on her colleague, was also attacked.  A GIS member stepped on her feet.  She was injured in the feet as a result and was transferred to the hospital of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society in Ramallah for treatment.  Sources from ‘al-Haq’ reported that Mr. Shaawan Jabarin, asked some police members who were in the scene about the camera.  One of them told him that it was with GIS members.

It should be noted that this attack on staff members of al-Haq is part of attacks launched by the Palestinian security services in Ramallah on a peaceful march which was organized with the participation of members of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Secretaries General of a number of political parties, leaders of the civil society organizations as well as independent figures. Security forces prevented the participants in the march from organizing a press conference which was scheduled to be held in the hall of the Protestant Church.  A member of the Executive Committee of the PLO was arrested as well.

In view of the above, PCHR:

Strongly condemns this attack by GIS members on staff members of al-Haq and the confiscation of their camera.
Reiterates that it is important that the Palestinian security forces respect the work of human rights organizations and to ensure protection to their personnel in all circumstances.
Points with concern to the recurrence of attacks on the right to freedom of opinion and expression and the right to peaceful assembly.  PCHR stresses that these two rights are guaranteed by the Palestinian Basic Law and by international human rights instruments.

Gideon Levy: The Media in Israel is the biggest collaborator with the Occupation: MAP

This week MAP attended a CAABU organised meeting with Ha’aretz journalist and editor Gideon Levy in London.

Mr Levy spoke of the “ongoing process of dehumanization and demonizing” of the Palestinians in the Israeli media, which despite being “professional and free” chooses to turn a blind eye to the occupation.

This is particularly true when it comes to reporting on the situation in Gaza. Israeli journalists have been banned from entering Gaza since November 2006. Mr Levy described how during Operation: Cast Lead the deaths of two Israeli dogs received front page coverage whilst news of hundreds of Palestinian casualties was confined to the back pages.

He described Israel as “an Apartheid state by any criteria” and spoke of how the chances of change coming from within Israeli society “are zero’ as people are ‘in a coma’ towards the Occupation. He went on to say that as change “cannot come from within it will have to come from Washington”.

In response to the news of upcoming peace talks, Mr Levy described them as an “ongoing masquerade” as “the absence of leadership in Israel means that people are happy to negotiate forever, the danger is that the failure of the talks might initiate a more violent phase”.

EU rebukes Israel for convicting Palestinian protester: BBC

The European Union has criticised Israel for convicting an organiser of weekly Palestinian protests against the West Bank separation barrier.
EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said she was “deeply concerned” about Abdullah Abu Rahmeh, who now faces several years in prison.
She said he was a “human rights defender” committed to non-violent protest.
Israel’s foreign ministry described her statement as highly improper.

‘Legitimate right’
Jailed since December, Abdullah Abu Rahmeh was convicted by a military court on Tuesday of inciting protests in the West Bank village of Bilin and of participating in the protests without a legal permit.

Lady Ashton expressed deep concern “that the possible imprisonment of Mr Abu Rahmeh is intended to prevent him and other Palestinians from exercising their legitimate right to protest against the existence of the separation barriers in a non-violent manner,” her office said.

“The EU considers the route of the barrier where it is built on Palestinian land to be illegal,” it quoted her as saying in a statement.
Her statement drew a sharp rebuke from Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor, who said that any “interference with a transparent legal procedure is highly improper”.
Sentencing is scheduled for next month, after which Abu Rahmeh – a 39-year-old schoolteacher – will appeal the conviction, his lawyer has said.

Weekly protests
Activists have been protesting against the barrier for five years in what they say are mostly peaceful demonstrations. Some demonstrations have been attended by stone-throwing Palestinian youths.
Israel says it considers the protests to be “violent and illegal”. Israeli security services have fired tear gas, stun grenades, rubber bullets and on occasion live rounds at protesters.

There have been two fatalities among protesters and an American peace activist suffered brain damage after being hit by a tear gas canister.
Israel says the barrier was established to stop Palestinian suicide bombers entering from the West Bank.
But Palestinians point to its route, winding deep into the West Bank around Israeli settlements – which are illegal under international law – and say it is a way to grab territory they want for their future state.
In 2004, the International Court of Justice in The Hague issued an advisory ruling that the barrier was illegal and should be removed where it did not follow the Green Line, the internationally recognised boundary between the West Bank and Israel.

Facing jail, the unarmed activist who dared to take on Israel: The Independent

Baroness Ashton ‘deeply concerned’ at court’s ruling in case of West Bank protest
By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
Thursday, 26 August 2010
Baroness Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, yesterday issued an unusually sharp rebuke to Israel over a military court’s conviction of a Palestinian activist prominent in unarmed protests against the West Bank separation barrier.

Lady Ashton said she was “deeply concerned” that Abdallah Abu Rahma was facing a possible jail sentence “to prevent him and other Palestinians from exercising their legitimate right to protest against the separation barriers in a non-violent manner”.

Though acquitted on two charges – including one of stone-throwing – Mr Abu Rahma, 39, a leader of the anti-barrier protests which have taken place every Friday for five years in the West Bank village of Bil’in, was convicted on Monday on another two: “incitement” and “organising and participating in an illegal demonstration”.

He is in jail, awaiting sentencing next month. He was detained last December by troops who arrived at his Ramallah home at 2am in seven jeeps as part of what anti-barrier activists say has been an escalating wave of arrests of protesters in West Bank villages, angry about the barrier and settlements encroaching on Palestinian land.

Pointing out that the European Union regarded the barrier as “illegal” where – as at Bil’in – it was built on Palestinian land, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy said the EU considered Mr Abu Rahma, who works as a teacher at a private school, to be “a human rights defender committed to non-violent protest”.

The protest by Lady Ashton, who was yesterday accused by Israel’s foreign ministry of “interfering” in the country’s judicial process, follows mounting concern by Western diplomats over the severity of measures taken by Israeli security forces against the mainly rural protests. Officials from several European countries, including Britain, were present for the verdict in the Ofer military court on Monday.

Her intervention was partly designed to demonstrate that the EU representatives will continue closely to watch developments on the ground in the West Bank while direct peace negotiations, due to start in Washington next week, get under way.

The military judge also acquitted Mr Abu Rahma of a charge of illegal arms possession which arose from a collection of used tear gas canisters and bullet cases he had been making to demonstrate that police and troops used violence against protesters.

The Popular Struggle Co-Ordination Committee said the “absurd” charge demonstrated the lengths the military was prepared to go to “to silence and smear unarmed dissent”.

It added that the incitement charge had been upheld even though it was based on the testimonies of minors who had been arrested in the middle of the night, and which the court recognised had defects. No other evidence had been offered, despite the routine filming of the protests by the security forces. It said the charge of organising demonstrations had not been used since the first intifada, from 1987 to 1993.

In 2008 Mr Abu Rahma was given an award by the International League for Human Rights in Berlin for “outstanding service in the realisation of basic human rights”. He met “the Elders”, a group of global statesmen and women including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, when they made a solidarity visit to Bil’in last year.

The protests at Bil’in, the highest profile of several in West Bank villages, have seen clashes between security forces using tear gas and rubber bullets and stone-throwing youths. After a protester was killed there in April 2009, military prosecutors said there was insufficient evidence for an investigation.

Construction work on rerouting part of the barrier at Bil’in finally began this year after the state had twice been found in contempt by the Supreme Court for failing to implement a 2007 court order to reroute the barrier.

Yigal Palmor, Israel’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, said: “In a country in which even open supporters of Hamas and Hizbollah enjoy freedom of speech, Lady Ashton’s accusations sound particularly hollow. If she thinks she can do a better job than the defendant’s lawyer, she should say so. Otherwise, interfering in a transparent legal process in a democratic country is a very peculiar way to promote European values.”

But Mr Abu Rahma’s lawyer, Gaby Lasky, said: “The international community must take a tough stand on this issue, and I am happy that the political motivation of the indictment against a human rights defender was clear to the EU from attending the hearings.”

The Co-ordination Committee, a loose body of protest organisers, said yesterday there had been a “dramatic” increase in arrests. Of 93 made at Bil’in alone in five years, 46 were made since July of last year. At the more recent flashpoint of Nabi Saleh, there had been 41 arrests in the last eight months.

Continue reading August 26, 2010

August 25, 2010

EU rebukes Israel over conviction of West Bank separation barrier protester: The Guardian

Lady Ashton’s support for Palestinian Abdallah Abu Rahmah deemed highly improper by Israeli foreign ministry

Dressed as detainees, Protesters against the West Bank separation barrier sit in front of Israeli troops in the village of Bil'in. Photograph: Majdi Mohammed/AP

Lady Ashton, the EU’s foreign affairs chief, today took the unusual step of publicly criticising the conviction in an Israeli military court of a Palestinian man in connection with protests against the West Bank separation barrier.

Ashton said she was “deeply concerned” the man may be imprisoned as a deterrent to others. The intervention, a week before the start of the first direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians for more than 18 months, is likely to irritate Israeli politicians. A government spokesman described it as “highly improper”.

According to an EU source, Ashton’s statement was intended to show the EU’s support for peaceful opposition to the barrier and to demonstrate to the Israelis that the EU was monitoring events on the ground in the context of next week’s negotiations.

After an eight-month military trial, Abdullah Abu Rahmah, 39, a protest leader in the West Bank village of Bil’in, was convicted yesterday of incitement and organising illegal demonstrations. He was cleared of stone throwing and possession of arms. Abu Rahmah, who has been in custody since his arrest last December, faces a maximum jail term of 10 years when he is sentenced next month.

Bil’in has been at the forefront of largely peaceful protests by Palestinian villagers and Israeli and international activists against the route of the separation barrier in the West Bank.

However, the protests have often included stone-throwing by youths, which the military counter with teargas and rubber bullets . In April 2009 a protester was killed when he was hit by a teargas canister.

Today’s statement by Ashton, the EU high representative, said: “The EU considers Abdallah Abu Rahmah to be a human rights defender committed to non-violent protest against the route of the Israeli separation barrier … The EU considers the route of the barrier where it is built on Palestinian land to be illegal.

“The high representative is deeply concerned that the possible imprisonment of Mr Abu Rahmah is intended to prevent him and other Palestinians from exercising their legitimate right to protest against the existence of the separation barriers in a non-violent manner.”

The EU attended all court hearings into the case over the past eight months.

Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry, said: “It is very unusual for a foreign dignitary to express views on the justice system of another country. If [Ashton] has found a flaw in the system, she should say so. Otherwise it’s unclear why she should interfere in the proceedings. The fact that she has expressed a view and has disregarded the evidence is highly improper.”

Abu Rahmah’s lawyer – “and presumably that lawyer is not Lady Ashton” – was the correct person to the promote the best interests of the accused, Palmor added.

Gaby Lasky, Abu Rahmah’s lawyer, welcomed Ashton’s statement. “Soldiers have killed and injured dozens and hundreds of protesters in the attempt to stop the Palestinian popular struggle, but have failed,” she said. “They are now trying to illegitimately use the courts and the legal system in the same way. The international community must take a tough stand on this issue, and I am happy that the political motivation of the indictment against a human rights defender was clear to the EU from attending the hearings.”

According to the Popular Struggle Co-ordination Committee, the case was the first to use Israeli military law on organising illegal demonstrations since the first intifada, or uprising, which began in 1987.

Abu Rahmah’s conviction, the committee said, was “based only on testimonies of minors who were arrested in the middle of the night and denied their right to legal counsel”. The prosecution had failed to provide documentary evidence against Abu Rahmah despite the filming of all protests by the army.

According to his supporters, Abu Rahmah was arrested at 2am after soldiers broke down the door of his house.

EU ‘concerned’ by conviction of Palestinian anti-separation fence activist: Haartetz

An Israeli military court convicted Abdullah Abu Rahmeh for incitement and organizing illegal demonstrations against Israel’s barrier in the West Bank.

The European Union’s top diplomat criticized Israel on Wednesday over the conviction of a leader of Palestinian protests against Israel’s West Bank separation barrier, calling the activist a human rights defender.

In a strongly worded statement, Catherine Ashton said she was deeply concerned by the guilty verdict against Abdullah Abu Rahmeh, one of the organizers of weekly marches from the Palestinian village of Bil’in to the Israeli-built West Bank barrier nearby.

Israel started taking a harder line against demonstrations in the West Bank late last year, arresting activists and keeping protesters from reaching the barrier. Abu Rahmeh, a 39-year-old schoolteacher, is among the most prominent of those detained in a string of arrests.

Jailed since December, he was convicted in a military court Tuesday of inciting protesters to attack Israeli troops and for participating in protests without a legal permit. The case has drawn international attention, and foreign observers and reporters attended the hearing.

The EU sees the barrier’s route as illegal and views Abu Rahmeh as a human rights defender committed to nonviolent protest, Ashton said.

Ashton suggested the conviction was intended to prevent him and other Palestinians from exercising their legitimate right to protest against the existence of the separation barriers in a nonviolent manner.

European Union Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton speaking in Brussels on June 17, 2010

Photo by: AP
Ashton’s statement drew a sharp rebuke from Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor, who said Israeli law guarantees freedom to protest and that the EU diplomat’s interference with a transparent legal procedure is highly improper.

The General Delegation of the PLO to the United States also condemned Abu Rahmeh’s conviction “in the strongest possible terms.”

Abu Rahmeh’s lawyer, Gaby Lasky, said the charges could carry a jail sentence of several years. Sentencing is scheduled for next month, after which Abu Rahmeh will appeal the conviction, she added.

Lasky noted that Israel’s Supreme Court has ordered the barrier be moved at Bil’in. They try a person who organized protests against a fence that is itself illegal. “This is an unfitting use of legal measures,” she said.

The barrier, which Israel began building in the midst of a wave of attacks by suicide bombers from the West Bank, runs through the village’s farmland. Palestinians view it as an attempt by Israel to seize land in the West Bank.

The Bil’in protests, attended by villagers as well as Israeli and international activists, usually involve a mix of marching, chanting and throwing rocks at Israeli troops. A Bil’in man, and five in the nearby village of Na’alin, have been killed and hundreds wounded by soldiers since the protests began in 2005.

Dozens of Israeli troops and police also have been injured.

The Israeli right’s secret strategy to promote ‘Greater Israel’: Mondoweiss

by SHALOM BOGUSLAVSKY
“I think I will always want to stay behind the scenes. I think that’s where I have the greatest influence. When everyone else is busily thinking about what to say on stage, I’m busily building the stage, [deciding] who actually listens to you. After they start listening, then we can talk about what we’ll say.”

– Moshe Klughaft, in an interview to Israel’s Channel 7 television.

Introducing Moshe Klughaft: Forbes magazine has crowned him the second most influential strategic consultant in Israel, and one of the 300 most influential young adults. He is the man behind the campaigns against the New Israel Fund, both the one by Im Tirzu and the Arab Gas campaign. Obviously, all links between the two campaigns have been denied. Later on we’ll see just why such denial is one of the cornerstones of the system.

Klughaft was also the behind-the-scenes leader of the reserve soldiers’ struggle after the second Lebanon war, a struggle which is already known to have been hiding a separate agenda: preventing the progress of the Gaza disengagement program. Front and center to this effort was Ronen Shoval. After this struggle Shoval, and his number two, Erez Tadmor, took part in an Institute for Zionist Strategy (IZS) young leadership program run by Israel Harel. Last week both organizations (Im Tirzu and the IZS) attacked the academic world, but denied any links between the parent organization and the subsidiary one, claiming that there was merely “a certain degree of ideological congruence” between them. After completing the training program Shoval founded Im Tirzu and Moshe Klughaft became his strategic consultant.

Klughaft is a man of many talents and schemes, but it seems that the thing that most concerns him is how to convey the right wing, religious message to secular people in their own language. Here is a quote, straight from the horse’s mouth:

For religious Zionism and the right, in general, even to penetrate the public, they must move into the colorful, secular rhetoric of the playing field they are in. What you think and how you see the world is nice, but when you get to this specific playing field of politics, of public action, you have to play by the rules that suit the place you are in.

In the two years following the disengagement, which is when planning started for the coordinated attack against everything that bears even the faintest scent of democracy, this point became critical. We are beginning to feel the results on this campaign only now. The leaders of the right wing religious public, the public which sees itself following Rabbi Kook as the ‘vanguard’ and the secular public as the ‘troops’, looked back and saw that the troops were no longer with them. In demonstrations against disengagement, almost all demonstrators wore yarmulkes, which is a hallmark of identification with the religious right.

This led to a strengthening of the separatist, ultra-orthodox wing, which has stopped seeing the Zionist state as “the beginning of redemption” and instead preaches right wing post-Zionism. According to this belief, secular Zionism has finished its job and it is now time for a “faith-based revolution”. The more traditional right wing, represented in the “Yesha council” settler leadership, which believes that secular people have a role in the divine plan as “the ass on which the Messiah shall ride upon” understood that the new trend distances secular people from the right wing. If it were to continue, the right wing would stop leading the country and become a marginal faction, just another one of many religious factions. Israel Harel along with his secular disciple Ronen Shoval have both stated that the rise of the ultra-orthodox nationalist post-Zionism is what called them to action.

It is important to understand how the religious right reads reality. Most of the Israeli public leans to the right, but it is a pragmatic right. In other words, it is a right which could, following various real-world constraints, declare its support for two states for two nations, freeze construction of the settlements, et cetera. In contrast, as far as the religious right is concerned, it is not some constraint of reality that leads to this but rather “a weakness of resolve” on the one hand and subversive elements of impurity that have lodged themselves in powerful focus points: civil society organizations, the academic world, the media, and the courts, on the other hand.

They believe the Jewish nation, which Rabbi Kook portrays as a direct delegation of divine presence onto the world, was contaminated by that riffraff and exchanged Messianic zeal with a passion for the comforts of secular life. They are of the opinion that when the Nation of Israel is committed to their vision the constraints of reality will have no meaning. The leaders of this group came to the understanding that in order to salvage the religious right, secular people must be recruited, ones who are not interested in messianic theology but self-identify as Zionists and are open to the idea that the problems of Israel are not due to stupid policy but rather, to internal subversiveness.

How do you do it? Like this: “You have to make this arena into an exciting one, you just have to. You have to bring in people so that some will say one thing and some will say another. You have to have it be exciting, colorful, to get people to talk about you, to evoke arguments, to have factions leaning this way and that,” said Moshe Klughaft. He has long since developed a theory of “in disunion there is strength.” According to Klughaft, decisions like the Gaza disengagement were made possible because secular people supported parties like Shinui and the Retired Citizens Party, who did not declare a policy in matters of state, and these parties won votes due to other issues, but when it came down to brass tacks, they voted for what he saw as a left-wing policy. The religious right must deploy niche organizations and parties which are attractive to a broad secular public which would, at the moment of truth, vote for the Greater Eretz Yisrael. Pay attention to this: “Do you want to preserve Eretz Yisrael? Wipe it off your map! If it is important, shut up and don’t talk about it.”

That is why the Institute of Zionist Strategy, who established the Yesha Council, and its subsidiary, Im Tirzu, whose opinions on this matter are also well known, consistently avoid taking a stand on the matter of Greater Eretz Yisrael and object so vociferously when anyone tries to mark them as “right wing” organizations. No, they deal in “Zionist consciousness”, in strengthening the flagging national spirit, and in battling that very same riffraff (which would translate as “post Zionists”, when spoken in secular vernacular) which contaminates them: mainly democratic organizations, the academic world, the media, and the courts.

Over the past two yeas, many of us have felt that the democratic camp in Israel has been under a well-planned, coordinated attack. Factual information that has recently begun surfacing confirms that feeling: during [former Prime Minister] Olmert’s term in office, organizations from the old-style religious right, whose status has eroded continually since the eighties – the Yesha Council, the MAFDAL orthodox party, and the Hatchiya party which may be the clearest expression of this ideology – got together and planned, under the baton of one of the most talented and innovative strategic consultants in Israel, the move that would bring them back to the front of the stage as the hegemonic ideology of Israel.

Elements of the system are “laundering” the ideology of the messianic, religious right into terms which the secular public can more easily swallow, creating the appearance of a spontaneous national movement by evoking various organizations, with apparently-different agendas, led by Im Tirzu, which introduce themselves as grassroots activists while in fact they are nurtured, linked, and subsidized by the religious right and secular old boys network, where the secular messianic perception is shared (such as [Minister of Education] Gideon Sa’ar, who had been a member of Hatchiya Youth). This is all done while denying completely and untruthfully any connection between the various persons and organizations involved, and hiding the Greater Eretz Yisrael ideology, which is not shared by most of the public, until that “moment of truth.” The primary working method is an attack on the democratic forces which could call a halt on them, an attack which relies on the willingness of a besieged society to seek guilty parties and the “left wing traitor” stereotype, which has been successful inserted into public discourse.

The first stage was an attack on the institutions of civil society. The second stage, the one we are currently experiencing, is an attack on the academic world. I wager that as soon as this campaign burns itself out, the media will be attacked, and thereafter, the judiciary system. In other words, anyone who can resist, criticize, and expose the true face of this organization will be slurred, sullied, and named as suspected of subversion and treason – before even raising objections about it.

And then they’ll go into politics. Everyone knows that. It could even happen in the coming elections. Following strategic consultant Moshe Klughaft’s system, I think we can expect more than one party, all of which will run on different versions of the same message, position themselves as “center” and talk about “Zionism”, “education”, “society, and “a struggle against post-Zionism.”

On a personal note, I really don’t feel like writing very much about Im Tirzu and its friends and relations. In fact, I’d much prefer to write less about politics and more about other things. But I sense danger, and my gut feelings about what is going on in this story have – so far – all turned out exactly as I feared. I can only hope that I am wrong about the next steps. What I propose is that we stop responding only after we get slammed on the head with yet another brick. What is being exposed here, and in other places, is only the tip of the iceberg. Storm the Internet, search, dig deep, cross-reference, expose – and tell the story.

Shalom Boguslavsky was born in Russia in 1976, has been living in Jerusalem since 1981, studies history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and makes his living as a group leader, facilitating discussions about Jewish-Israeli identity, dialogue & conflict management. This article originally appeared in Hebrew on the blog Put Down the Scissors And Let’s Talk About It. It was translated with the author’s permission by Dena Shunra.

Continue reading August 25, 2010

August 22, 2010

Netanyahu demands talks focus on security issues before borders: Haaretz

PM on upcoming talks with Palestinians: If we get security ensuring no missiles will fall on Tel Aviv, we will be able to move quickly toward a comprehensive arrangement.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu intends to lead the direct negotiations with the Palestinians due to be inaugurated in Washington on September 2. Netanyahu says he plans to focus on security arrangements before addressing final borders.

Speaking behind closed doors, Netanyahu said the success of the talks will hinge on understandings between the leaders. “I will want to reach agreed principles with the Palestinian leadership and there will be no need for many teams [of negotiators] and hundreds of meetings …. If I get the security that will ensure that no missiles will fall on Tel Aviv, it will be possible to move quickly toward a comprehensive arrangement,” he was quoted as saying.
Netanyahu said during his meetings he wants to discuss security issues with the Palestinians first; only then would the two sides focus on borders of a future Palestinian state.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had announced Friday that Israel and the Palestinian Authority would resume direct negotiations for the establishment of a Palestinian state. The talks will be inaugurated at a two-day summit in Washington, which will follow an 18-month lull in the negotiations.

In addition to Netanyahu and PA President Mahmoud Abbas, U.S. President Barack Obama has invited to the summit Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Jordan’s King Abdullah II, and the head of the Quartet, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Obama will hold separate meetings with each of the leaders at the White House on September 1, and will then host a joint dinner. The inauguration ceremony will take place a day later under Clinton’s auspices. The event will probably include speeches by the leaders and initial negotiations about the first round of talks, which are likely to take place shortly after.

Sources close to Netanyahu said on Saturday that most of the negotiations will take place in Israel or the region and not in the United States.

Both Clinton and U.S. special envoy George Mitchell said over the weekend that the negotiations will aim to reach a permanent settlement and the establishment of a Palestinian state in a year. They said the negotiations will focus on all core issues: Jerusalem, borders, refugees, security, settlements and water.

Clinton noted that there will be no preconditions – this is considered a major achievement for Netanyahu, who insisted that the direct talks take place unconditionally.

In her announcement over the weekend, Clinton also did not mention the September 26 expiry of the freeze on settlement construction.

The Quartet’s announcement also made no mention of the construction freeze or building in East Jerusalem. It just referred to its previous statement on the subject, which calls for a construction freeze.

The Quartet issued a statement calling for talks that “lead to a settlement … that ends the occupation which began in 1967 and results in the emergence of an independent, democratic and viable Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel and its other neighbors.”

The Americans offered few details at the press conference that followed, but Clinton recognized that there would be obstacles and warned that the enemies of peace would try to foil the talks.

“As we move forward, it is important that actions by all sides help to advance our effort, not hinder it. There have been difficulties in the past, there will be difficulties ahead. Without a doubt, we will hit more obstacles,” Clinton said.

“But I ask the parties to persevere, to keep moving forward even through difficult times and to continue working to achieve a just and lasting peace in the region.”

The chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said the Israelis “have a choice now whether to choose settlements or peace. I hope they choose peace. I hope that Mr. Netanyahu will be our partner in peace … and we can do it.”

The Islamist group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, dismissed the direct talks as a U.S. attempt to “fool the Palestinian people.” But U.S. officials said Hamas would have no role in them.

Israeli army’s female recruits denounce treatment of Palestinians: The Observer

Facebook images of an Israeli servicewoman posing with blindfolded Palestinians have caused a storm. Now two former female conscripts have spoken out about their own experiences

Israeli servicewomen train to become army instructors. Some former recruits have spoken out against the military action in the occupied territories. Photograph: IDF/Polaris Images

It was a single word scrawled on a wall at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem that unlocked something deep inside Inbar Michelzon, two years after she had completed compulsory military service in the Israeli Defence Force.

The word was “occupation”. “I really felt like someone was speaking the unspoken,” she recalled last week in a Tel Aviv cafe. “It was really shocking to me. There was graffiti saying, ‘end the occupation’. And I felt like, OK, now I can talk about what I saw.”

Michelzon became one of a handful of former Israeli servicewomen who have spoken out about their military experiences, a move that has brought accusations of betrayal and disloyalty. It is impossible to know how representative their testimonies are, but they provide an alternative picture of the “most moral army in the world”, as the IDF describes itself.

Concerns about Israeli army culture were raised last week following the publication on Facebook of photographs of a servicewoman posing alongside blindfolded and handcuffed Palestinians. The images were reminiscent of the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq. But the former soldier, Eden Abergil, said she didn’t understand what was wrong with the pictures, which were described by the IDF as “ugly and callous”.

Israel is unique in enlisting women at the age of 18 into two years of compulsory military service. The experience can be brutalising for the 10% who serve in the occupied territories, as Michelzon did.

“I left the army with a ticking bomb in my belly,” she said. “I felt I saw the backyard of Israel. I saw something that people don’t speak about. It’s almost like I know a dirty secret of a nation and I need to speak out.”

Michelzon, now 29, began her military service in September 2000, just when the second intifada was breaking out. “I joined the army with a very idealistic point of view – I really wanted to serve my country.” She was posted to Erez, the crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip, to work in the radio control room.

“There was a lot of tension, a lot of shootings and suicide bombings,” she said. “Little by little you understand the rules of the game. You need to make it hard for the Arabs – that’s the main rule – because they are the enemy.”

She cited a routine example of a Palestinian woman waiting at the crossing. Michelzon called her officer, asking permission to allow the woman through. She was told to make such a request once the woman had been kept waiting for hours. “I felt very alone in the army. I couldn’t talk about the things I felt were misplaced,” she said. “I didn’t have strong views but I felt uncomfortable about the talk, about soldiers hitting Arabs and laughing. I thought everyone else was normal and I was the one who wasn’t. I felt an outsider to the group experience.”

At the end of her service, in June 2002, Michelzon said she felt the need to escape and took off to India. “I went through a breakdown little by little,” she said. It was only when she returned to enrol in university, and two years of therapy, that she began to consider her “duty” to speak out. She also came across Breaking the Silence, an organisation of army veterans who publish testimonies from former soldiers on life in the occupied territories to stimulate debate about the “moral price” of the occupation.

Michelzon gave evidence to the group and two years ago appeared in a documentary, To See If I’m Smiling, about the experiences of young women in the army. The film, she said, was criticised by all sides. The left focused on “the bad things we did and not on the fact that we wanted to start a discussion. We wanted to put up a mirror and tell Israeli society to look itself in the eyes.

“From the right, the reaction was, why are you doing this to your own people? Do you hate your country? But I did it because I love my country. We had to fight to say we want to talk about the political situation.”

The psychological impact of military service on women is undeniable, according to the testimonies of Michelzon and others, particularly those who serve in the occupied territories. “If you want to survive as a woman in the army, you have to be manly,” she said. “There is no room for feeling. It’s like a competition to see who can be tougher. A lot of the time girls are trying to be more aggressive than the guys.”

Her experience is echoed by that of Dana Golan, who served in the West Bank city of Hebron in 2001-02 as one of about 25 women among 300 male soldiers. Like Michelzon, Golan only spoke out after finishing her service. “If I had raised my anxieties, it would have been seen as a weakness,” she said.

Golan, now 27, said the “most shaky moment” of her military service came during a search for weapons in a Palestinian home. The family were awoken at 2am by soldiers who “turned their whole house inside out”. No weapons were found. The small children of the house were terrified, she recalled. “I thought, what would I feel if I was this four-year-old kid? How would I grow up? At that moment it occurred to me that sometimes we’re doing things that just create victims. To be a good occupier, we have to create conflict.”

On a separate occasion she witnessed soldiers stealing from a Palestinian electronics shop. She tried to report it, only to be told “there were things I shouldn’t interfere with”.

She said that she also saw elderly Palestinians being humiliated on the streets, “and I thought these could be my parents or grandparents”.

Israel is discomfited by these testimonies, she said, partly because of the universality of military service. “We grew up believing the IDF is the most moral army in the world. Everyone knows people serving in the army. Now when I say we are doing immoral things, I am talking about your sister or your daughter. People do not want to hear.”

The IDF is proud that 90% of its roles are open equally to men and women. “Serving in a combat unit where you have daily contact with people who might do you harm is not easy – you have to be tough,” said Captain Arye Shalicar, an army spokesman. “It’s not only a female thing, it’s the same for everyone. In the end, a combat unit is a combat unit. Sometimes things happen, not every deed is 100% correct or fair.” The army, he said, has procedures for reporting misdeeds which soldiers are encouraged to follow.

Both Michelzon and Golan have no regrets about speaking out. “For two years I saw people suffering and I didn’t do anything – and that’s really scary,” said Michelzon. “At the end, it felt like the army betrayed me – they used me, I couldn’t recognise myself. What we call protecting our country is destroying lives.”

Fundamentalism into the mainstream: Haaretz

Fundamentalist rabbis have approved murder, attacks on Arabs, illegal land seizures and racist segregation, and have ignored the murder of a prime minister.
By Zvi Bar’el
First, the daily lesson: “A soldier who takes part in the war against us, but does so only because he is forced to by threats, is an absolute villain …. We are referring to any sort of participation in the war: a combat soldier, a support soldier, civilian assistance or any form of encouragement and support.” And: “Even if civilians are tied up or imprisoned and have no choice but to stay and serve as hostages, it is possible to kill them.”

Also: “In discussions on the killing of infants and children … it is reasonable to harm children if it is clear they will grow up to harm us. Under such circumstances they should be the ones targeted.” And finally: “There is no need to discuss the question of who is and is not innocent, just as when we are defending against evil we do not hesitate to strike at limbs that were not actually used in actions against us.”

These are quotes from the book “The King’s Torah” (“Torat Hamelech” ) by rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur; it was published by Hamercaz Hatorani, near Od Yosef Hai Yeshiva. Many important rabbis have supported the two rabbis, and these quotes are part of the reason they are being investigated for suspected incitement and racism. Their refusal to be questioned allegedly was based on the fact that no one should be questioned or tried for his opinion.

In essence, their refusal places the law of the Torah above the law of the state. Rabbi Dov Lior, who backed the book, explained his opposition to their being interrogated as follows: “The harassment of the rabbis because of their halakhic views stands in direct opposition to the principles of freedom of religion and expression that are accepted by the state.” Indeed, is it possible to accuse someone of hating gentiles? In a Jewish state?

Nothing new, so far. Fundamentalist rabbis have approved murder, attacks on Arabs and their property, the illegal takeover of land, racist segregation between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi female pupils, and have ignored (at least ) the murder of a prime minister. After all, the source of authority of those same rabbis, the book of books, is full of hair-raising descriptions of the vengeance exacted by the Children of Israel on the peoples of this land.

As for the humanity of “the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the third and upon the fourth generation of them that hate Me,” killer of the Egyptian firstborn, we can hold a seminar or two. Thumbing their noses at the law of the state is not an invention by Lior or similar rabbis. As far as disrespecting the law is concerned, Lior is an excellent pupil of Rabbi Moshe Levinger. Only naivete or pretending can explain the surprise at the spitting in the face of the police as they try to investigate the rabbis who provided a wall of defense to abomination.

What is new is that these are no longer “hilltop rabbis,” “wild weeds” or “fence hoppers” who are turning their backs on the instructions of great rabbinical figures and the law. They and their supporters are transforming zealous fundamentalism and the shameful “The King’s Torah “into the mainstream.

After all, what were the critics upset about? Not the content of the book some say they oppose (“of course I don’t support it” ), but rather the state’s audacity to undermine the freedom of expression of the source. No religious protest movement stood against the content; no one wrote a text to counter this Jewish Wahhabism. Suddenly, that same community that sanctifies rabbinical hierarchy, the absolute obedience to the rabbis, is shocked by this affront to freedom of expression.

But these fundamentalists, responsible for the training of tens of thousands of yeshiva students who become soldiers, wash their hands when their followers and students carry out the rabbis’ orders. No rabbi has been tried for an illegal act by a civilian or soldier because of his teachings. After all, they are only tutors, and then “permission has been granted.” In “properly functioning” states like Saudi Arabia or Egypt it has long been understood that the responsibility of a religious figure is no less than that of a terrorist. They arrest and imprison, exile or silence in different ways the preachers who raised generations of murderous zealots. Turkey removes from the military anyone who expresses excessive religious fervor.

In Israel, on the other hand, former chief military rabbi Avihai Rontzki initiated a meeting of intelligence soldiers with Rabbi Lior, the backbone of “The King’s Torah.” The following was said about the Israel Defense Forces’ ethics code: “When there is a conflict between orders based on the ethics code and a halakhic instruction, of course one must follow halakha” – Jewish law. It’s not incitement that’s dangerous, but rather its transformation into the accepted and central form of discourse.

Continue reading August 22, 2010

August 21, 2010

Barak to U.S., France: Take steps to stop Lebanese flotilla: Haaretz

After announced delay in departure of women’s flotilla, Defense Minister speaks with foreign ministers of U.S. and France, stresses that flotilla is an “unnecessary provocation.”

Defense Minister Ehud Barak spoke on Saturday with U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, U.S. National Security Adviser General Jim Jones, and French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, and asked them to act to prevent the launch of the Lebanese flotilla setting for Gaza.

The Defense Minister emphasized that Israel permits the import of civilian materials into Gaza after it is checked at the port of Ashdod. Therefore, he said, “The flotilla’s attempt to reach Gaza is a needless provocation.”

Earlier in the day, the organizers of the women’s flotilla from Lebanon to Gaza announced that the ships would not set sail on Sunday. Apparently, the reason for the delay is Cyprus’s refusal to allow the ships to pass through its territorial waters or to drop anchor in one of its ports.

“We will not set sail tomorrow,” Samar Al Haj, one of the flotilla organizers, said to the Reuters news agency. “We have encountered difficulties. We will try to set sail from another port, we won’t give up so easily.”

On Thursday, the Israeli delegation to the United Nations submitted a complaint to the general secretary of the organization and to the head of its security council. The complaint stated that the flotilla is a needless provocation, and that there are acceptable ways of transferring aid to Gaza.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that all of the other states in the region, including those that do not have diplomatic relations with Israel, understand that any such flotilla will only cause damage to the whole region. “We hope that this understanding will lead to cooperation to prevent the provocations,” Lieberman said.

Earlier Friday, Defense Minister Barak said that the women’s flotilla intends to aid terror groups. “The flotilla planning to set sail from Lebanon has nothing to do with humanitarian goals, it is a hostile irritation,” he said in a Defense Ministry statement.

Emily Henochowicz: artist to pro-Palestinian activist: The Guardian

Jewish-American Emily Henochowicz recalls how she lost an eye at a protest in Israel after the storming of the Gaza aid flotilla
Ed Pilkington

Emily Henochowicz lost an eye when she was hit by a tear gas cannister fired by Israeli troops at a pro-Palestinian protest. Photograph: Tim Knox

As a student artist, Emily Henochowicz has always been fascinated by the way the brain processes visual signals to form images of the physical world around us. That has been a theme of her work at the prestigious New York art college, Cooper Union, which she joined three years ago.

In her first term she made a costume out of papier-mache for the inaugural freshman’s parade that neatly expressed that fascination. It was meant to be a monster cyclops, but the way it came out it resembled a giant eyeball with her arms and legs sticking out of it.

For more than a year she has used a photograph of that eyeball as the icon of her art blog, thirsty pixels. It is all too ironic, she laughs now. The irony is that in May Henochowicz became – in her own words – a cyclops. She lost her left eye as she was demonstrating against Israeli government policy in the Palestinian occupied territories.

With her loss, she became yet another casualty of the ongoing Israeli occupation. But what makes Henochowicz’s story singular was that her experiences were filtered through the lens, the eye, of an artist.

It was art that took her to the Middle East in the first place. She signed up to an animation course in Jerusalem that suited her passion for drawing.

Her choice of Jerusalem had little to do with the fact that she was the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, or that her father was born in Israel and that she herself was Jewish and an Israeli citizen. It had even less to do with any political beliefs she might have on either side of the Israeli-Palestinian divide, though she had been disturbed by Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war of 2008-9.

It was all about art. But a month after she arrived in Jerusalem, an Israeli friend and peace activist took her into Palestinian East Jerusalem. That day changed everything.

“It was a little bit shocking,” she says, recalling the event in a Manhattan cafe. “Suddenly a huge group of Hassidim came down the street. These little Palestinian kids – just five or six years old – linked arms and were standing in the middle of the street. The Hassidim were on the other side, singing prayers at them. It was such a powerful image for me: that line of children, so strong and defiant, this huge group of adults in front of them.”

The next day Henochowicz captured the moment in a dramatic painting that shows the children in front of a swirl of black-clad Jewish men. And then she acted on impulse – something that as an artist she says she is wont to do. She went to Ramallah on the West Bank and joined the protest campaign the International Solidarity Movement.

Over the next few weeks Henochowicz threw herself into the fray, protesting outside Israeli settlements in the West Bank and along the separation wall. She was aware of the dangers, not least because it was with the ISM that fellow-American Rachel Corrie had been demonstrating in 2003 when she was crushed to death by a bulldozer.

“I had a fear the whole time I was going to get hit with tear gas,” Henochowicz says. “I knew the way that it was used. Forget UN regulations, this is Israel, the rules don’t apply here – tear gas is fired directly into crowds.”

At first she kept what she was doing from her parents, certain that they would disapprove. But eventually she told them.

“They were incredibly upset, particularly my dad. He had been to Yeshiva, Jewish school, and speaks Hebrew.’ How could you do this to me?’ he said, but I wasn’t doing it to him.”

Paradoxically, shortly before the incident in which she lost her eye, Henochowicz decided, partly out of concern for her parents, that she would avoid demonstrations and dedicate herself instead to teaching art to Palestinian children. But on the morning of 31 May she awoke to the news that a Turkish flotilla attempting to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza had been raided and nine activists killed.

Mayhem and confusion ensued. She was swept along by the reaction, and found herself at a protest rally at the Qaladiya checkpoint, facing Israeli soldiers. “I was scared in a way I’d never been before.”

It was so quick, maybe just a minute from the first stones being thrown to the tear gas canister striking her in the face.

“I remember a weird crunch feeling and thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve been hit!’ Then there was the thought: ‘Hey guys, my brain’s ok! My brain’s ok!”

“And then I remember falling back and being held, and cameras rushing to me and clicking away and me thinking ‘Oh, I’ve become one of those images’.”

She was treated in a hospital in Ramallah and Jerusalem before returning to Maryland in the US. She has had multiple operations for a fractured skull as well as losing the eye.

The Israeli government has refused to pay thousands of dollars in medical costs, on the grounds that Henochowicz chose to put herself at risk and that she was hit by mistake by a ricochet.

“That’s preposterous,” she says. “A ricochet? From what wall? Where? How? This was no ricochet.”

Henochowicz is now preparing for term to start at Cooper Union. She wears a pair of glasses, the left lens of which she has painted with swirls to obscure the empty socket behind it.

She says she has adapted with amazing speed to the loss. “I go through a lot of my days not even thinking that I’m seeing only through one eye. I’m so fine in other ways, I’m perfectly healthy.”

She stresses how unfair she thinks it is that she gets so much attention, while Palestinians who are injured with depressing frequency go without notice. “I’m white, I’m Jewish, I’m an Israeli citizen and American. When I’m hit by tear gas there are articles, the Israeli government gets involved. When Palestinians are hit, who gives a shit?”

She doesn’t know what the longer-term impact will be on her art. She remembers telling the doctor who informed her she had lost an eye: “But I’m an artist, that’s not supposed to happen!”

“I’ve been sad because this is a moment in my life I can never escape, and that’s what gets me more than the loss of my eye,” she says. “Twenty years from now I will still carry this moment, and I desperately don’t want it to be the end of my story.”

U.S.: Iran’s nuclear power plant bears no ‘proliferation risk’: Haaretz

Iran begins fueling its first nuclear power plant which it refers to as ‘start-up of the largest symbol of Iran’s peaceful nuclear activities.’
The United States does not see the fueling of Iran’s first nuclear power plant in Bushehr as a “proliferation risk,” State Department spokesman Darby Holladay said Saturday.
“We recognize that the Bushehr reactor is designed to provide civilian nuclear power and do not view it as a proliferation risk,” Holladay said, adding that “It will be under IAEA safeguards and Russia is providing the fuel and talking back the spit nuclear fuel, which would be the principal source of proliferation concerns.”

Iran began fueling its first nuclear power plant on Saturday, a potent symbol of its growing regional sway and rejection of international sanctions designed to prevent it building a nuclear bomb.

“Russia’s support for Bushehr underscores that Iran does not need an indigenous enrichment capability as its intentions are purely peaceful,” Holladay said. “Russia’s supply of fuel to Iran is the model we and our P5+1 partner have offered to Iran. It is important to remember that the IAEA access to Bushehr is separate from and should not be confused with Iran’s broader obligations to the IAEA. On this score as the IAEA has consistently reported Iran remains in serious violation of its obligations.‬”

Iranian television showed live pictures of Iran’s nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi and his Russian counterpart watching a fuel rod assembly being prepared for insertion into the reactor near the Gulf city of Bushehr.

“Despite all the pressures, sanctions and hardships imposed by Western nations, we are now witnessing the start-up of the largest symbol of Iran’s peaceful nuclear activities,” Salehi told a news conference afterwards.

Iranian officials said it would take two to three months before the plant starts producing electricity and would generate 1,000 megawatts, a small proportion of the nation’s 41,000 megawatt electricity demand recorded last month.

Russia designed, built and will supply fuel for Bushehr, taking back spent rods which could be used to make weapons-grade plutonium in order to ease nuclear proliferation concerns.

Saturday’s ceremony comes after decades of delays building the plant, work on which was initially started by German company Siemens in the 1970s, before Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

The United States criticized Moscow earlier this year for pushing ahead with Bushehr given persistent Iranian defiance over its nuclear program.

Moscow supported the latest UN Security Council resolution in June which imposed a fourth round of sanctions and called for Iran to stop uranium enrichment which, some countries fear, could lead it to obtain nuclear weapons.

“The construction of the nuclear plant at Bushehr is a clear example showing that any country, if it abides by existing international legislation and provides effective, open interaction with the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), should have the opportunity to access peaceful use of the atom,” Sergei Kiriyenko, head of Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom, told the news conference.

The fuelling of Bushehr is a milestone in Iran’s path to harness technology which it says will reduce consumption of its abundant fossil fuels, allowing it to export more oil and gas and to prepare for the day when the minerals riches dry up.

Following the ceremony, Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told the country’s semi-official Fars news agency that his country would continue to enrich its own uranium.

Iran’s neighbours, some of whom are also seeking nuclear power, are wary of Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and its growing influence in the region, notably in Iraq where fellow Shi’ites now dominate and Lebanon, where it is a backer of Hezbollah.

While most nuclear analysts say Bushehr does not add to any proliferation risk, many countries remain deeply concerned about Iran’s uranium enrichment.

EDITOR: We cannot talk to whoever is representing the Palestinians

Ron Prosor, the typically aggressive Israeli ambassador to the UK, is repeating the age-old argument – the same one Israel has used for decades about the PLO and Arafat. The dominant political force in Palestine is always taboo – this is also why Israel has supported the creation of Hamas , so as to destabilise the PLO. Haven’t they just succeeded beyond their wildest dreams? They must feel a little like Dr. Frankenstein, seeing the Creature tear down the neighbourhood…

Israel always preferred to speak about peace to everyone other than the Palestinians – they would love to have peace with Sweden or Micronesia, for example, and somehow, unfairly, are denied the pleasure of such peace talks…

Before we talk to Hamas: The Guardian

No missiles means no blockade. When Israelis feel secure, concessions will follow. It’s that simple
Ron Prosor
Groucho Marx famously quipped: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them … well, I have others.” The International Quartet (the US, the UN, Russia and the EU) has long applied three principles Hamas must adopt to take part in negotiations. It must renounce violence, recognise Israel and abide by previous agreements between Israel and the Palestinians. At no point has Hamas satisfied these conditions – or indicated any intention to do so.

Those who advocate talking to Hamas are urging a Groucho-Marxist policy in a complex, unstable region. If Hamas is too extreme to accept these principles, they argue, we must tailor our principles to match Hamas’s extremism.

The Hamas charter advocates the destruction of the state of Israel, the genocidal slaughter of Jews and the imposition of an Islamic state governed by sharia law. When an organisation’s constitution venerates your murder, it is difficult to know how negotiations should begin – perhaps with a discussion of the flowers for one’s funeral.

This week marks the fifth anniversary of Israel’s disengagement from Gaza. We withdrew every Israeli soldier and citizen, gambling on the formula of land for peace. Instead of peace and progress we received missiles and misery. Hamas made Gaza a terrorist enclave, launching thousands of missiles at Israeli civilians.

In 2006 it kidnapped Gilad Shalit, holding him in isolation for four years without a single visit from the Red Cross. In a bloody coup in 2007 Hamas attacked its own people, chasing Fatah out of Gaza and hurling its Palestinian brothers from the rooftops. It imposed an Islamic penal code along with the routine torture and execution of political opponents. Simultaneously it relentlessly attacked Israelis and, with Iranian support, stockpiled weapons that today can hit Tel Aviv.

After years of missiles, the bombardment became unbearable. We targeted the terrorist infrastructure through Operation Cast Lead. Israel has tried to stop the flood of weapons through a naval blockade. When Hamas supporters attempt to break the blockade, as occurred with the Turkish IHH flotilla, Israel’s defensive measures must be understood in context. Hamas recently fired a Grad missile at Ashkelon and dispatched a terror cell from Gaza into Sinai that fired missiles at Eilat in Israel, and Aqaba in Jordan: Hamas threatens not only Israel but also Egypt and Jordan.

Some in the west fondly refer to Hamas as the elected representatives of the Palestinians. While Hamas won the Palestinian council elections in 2006, it was not a mandate to violently overthrow the Palestinian Authority. Nor does it justify terror against Israel. Hamas’s concept of democracy fits that of all democratically elected dictatorships – “one man, one vote … once”.

Gaza was a golden opportunity tragically missed. Instead of building a Mediterranean Dubai, Hamas diverted every resource to enslaving its people while attacking ours. In contrast, Israel and the PA have made significant progress in the West Bank, reducing roadblocks, easing access and stimulating economic growth of 8%. The PA should be encouraged to build on these developments at the negotiating table.

Israel has offered direct talks, recognised a two-state solution and introduced an unprecedented moratorium on settlement construction. President Abbas has declined talks, preferring to campaign against Israel internationally. In Palestinian classrooms and civil society incitement against Israel continues.

Our experience following the Gaza pull-out has scarred the Israeli public. Hamas’s missiles wounded the concept of land for peace, increasing Israeli fears and scepticism. Of the same voters who elected governments that signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan and initiated the Oslo Accords, only 32% believe talks with the Palestinians will lead to peace. More than ever, Israelis require confidence-building measures.

When Israelis feel secure concessions follow. Last weekend Israel dismantled the security barrier in Gilo, a Jerusalem suburb that came under heavy Palestinian sniper fire during the second intifada. If in Gilo no sniper fire means no wall, so in Gaza no missiles would mean no blockade. It is that simple.

Sadly Hamas has always torpedoed peace efforts through suicide bombings, kidnappings and missiles. If further steps towards peace are to win Israeli hearts and minds, the price cannot be missiles and mortars in the heart of Israel.

Continue reading August 21, 2010

August 20, 2010

Israel and Palestinians poised for direct talks: The Independent

By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
Friday, 20 August 2010
The first direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations for more than 18 months were in prospect last night after successful diplomatic efforts to find a formula designed to allow the talks to start.

The international Quartet of the US, EU, UN and Russia is expected to issue a statement today paving the way for the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to open political negotiations with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A draft of the statement is understood to say that direct bilateral negotiations which “can be completed within one year” should resolve “all the core issues dividing the two sides and should “lead to a settlement, negotiated between the parties, that ends the occupation… and results in a [Palestinian] state at peace with Israel”.

The Quartet statement is intended to provide Mr Abbas with the internationally endorsed political cover he has been seeking to enter the talks. Mr Abbas had been seeking an affirmation that the talks would be based on Israel’s pre-1967 borders and that it would continue not to build in Jewish West Bank settlements after the present partial freeze on settlement building ends late next month.

The statement will not specifically articulate those points but will make clear its “full commitment to its previous statements” – including those at its meetings in Moscow and Trieste in March and June of this year. The Moscow statement made clear that the negotiations should end “the occupation began in 1967” and repeated earlier calls for Israel to freeze all settlement activity, dismantle settlement outposts erected since March 2001, and refrain from house demolitions and evictions in Arab East Jerusalem.

The delicate construction of the statement is designed to meet Mr Abbas’s demands without making newly explicit what Israel has been arguing would be unacceptable “preconditions” for the negotiations. Neither Israeli nor Palestinian sources commented on the imminent developments yesterday, with an Israeli official simply reiterating that the government had repeatedly called for direct talks to start.

Earlier yesterday the US State Department spokesman P J Crowley said: “We think we are very, very close to a decision by the parties to enter into direct negotiations. We think we’re well positioned to get there.”

Mr Crowley said that the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, had called the Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, late in the day yesterday and also spoken with the Jordanian Foreign Minister, Nasser Judeh, and the former British prime minister Tony Blair, the special representative of the “Quartet”.

While today’s expected move is a breakthrough in the long and tortuous “talks about talks” that have taken place since the indirect “proximity” negotiations mediated by the US Presidential envoy George Mitchell began earlier this year, there remains scepticism in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories that even direct negotiations will have the positive outcome envisaged in the Quartet draft.

There is uncertainty about whether Mr Netanyahu is seriously prepared to make concessions on the core issues – including the future status of Jerusalem, the Eastern sector of which the Palestinians want as the capital of a future state but which Israel regards as under its own sovereignty. However the statement from the Quartet meeting in March of this year explicitly recalled that “the annexation of East Jerusalem is not recognised by the international community”.

Public pessimism appears to be increasingly shared by US voters, according to a new poll for the Israel Project published yesterday. Only 45 per cent of Americans surveyed in the July poll said they felt Mr Netanyahu was committed to the peace process. Only 51 per cent of Americans thought the US needed to support Israel, compared with 63 per cent a year ago.

Quartet ‘aims to start Mideast peace talks September 2’: Haaretz

World powers will invite Israelis and Palestinians to begin direct peace talks on September 2 in Washington, diplomatic source says.
World powers will invite Israelis and Palestinians to begin direct peace talks on Sept. 2 in Washington, a diplomatic source said on Thursday.

Envoys from the so-called Quartet of powers – the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations – agreed to the details on Thursday, the source told Reuters. A formal statement is due to be issued on Friday.

“They’ve got an agreement that the talks will start on September 2 in Washington,” said the source, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The Israelis and Palestinians were expected to agree to attend, and President Barack Obama would be present at the talks, the source said.

Earlier, diplomatic sources said the Quartet was discussing a draft statement inviting Israel and the Palestinians to embark on direct talks intended to conclude a treaty in one year.

The Quartet said in June that peace talks would be expected to conclude in 24 months. The new draft says 12 months. The Palestinian Authority government intends to have established all the attributes of statehood by mid-2011.

Diplomats say the idea that a unilateral declaration of statehood could win support if talks do not start or collapse in the next 12 months is gaining interest.

The peace process resumed in May after a hiatus of 19 months but is stalled over the terms of an upgrade from indirect talks mediated by U.S. envoy George Mitchell to direct negotiations.

Israel insists it is ready for direct talks provided there are no preconditions. The Palestinians are ready provided there is a clear agenda. Israel says an agenda means preconditions.

The White House declined to comment. Obama is currently on vacation in Massachusetts.

Protecting academia: Haaretz Editorial

As education minister and chairman of the Council for Higher Education, Sa’ar must go beyond his feeble condemnation of the attempt to sabotage the universities’ balance sheets.
Presenting his plan for NIS 7.5 billion in additional funding for higher education on Wednesday, Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar described the reform program as “putting higher education back on the right track.” Sa’ar’s comment came at a critical juncture in relations between civil society and the higher education system: Right-wing groups that presumptuously claim to be defending the Zionist ethos are threatening to derail academia from its proper track.

Haaretz revealed earlier this week that the Council for Higher Education gave university heads the Institute for Zionist Strategies’ report on the “post-Zionist” curricula prevalent in sociology departments. In response, Tel Aviv University’s president asked sociology lecturers to provide him with their course syllabi. Following an uproar from within and without the university, this order was retracted.

Also this week, the president of Ben-Gurion University revealed a letter she had received from the Im Tirtzu organization threatening to urge foreign donors to withhold contributions unless the university took action “to correct the anti-Zionist tilt” of its politics and government department. The education minister, who once praised a report the group had drafted on what it termed the “post-Zionist” bent of political science departments, is now railing against Im Tirtzu’s threat to intimidate donors, “independent of any arguments about pluralism.”

The higher education system is not immune to external criticism over the quality of its academics or the proficiency of its administration. But a pluralistic, democratic society is incompatible with external interference in course curricula or lecturers’ political views.

As education minister and chairman of the Council for Higher Education, Sa’ar must go beyond his feeble condemnation of the attempt to sabotage the universities’ balance sheets. No financial assistance can preserve Israeli academia’s prestige or ensure its excellence if the government, including the prime minister, does not unequivocally censure this attempt to undermine the independence of higher education.

Granting even tacit legitimacy to an internal boycott of institutions and lecturers that espouse “unpatriotic” narratives will merely legitimize a foreign boycott of Israeli academia.

Continue reading August 20, 2010