The following is a real heartbreaking story: The American President is hurt and dismayed by Israel’s action. One can understand poor Obamah – after all, what can he do? He is ony the Us President!
US ‘dismay’ at Israel over Gilo plan: The Guardian
• Controversial settlement expansion criticised • Obama’s efforts to resume negotiations undermined The White House yesterday expressed exasperation with Israel over a plan to build 900 new houses on the West Bank at a time when Barack Obama is trying to broker a Middle East peace agreement. Although Obama is mainly focused on a tour of south-east Asia, the White House took time out to express disappointment over approval of the new houses at Gilo, a controversial settlement on the outskirts of east Jerusalem. It is politically risky for Israel to snub Obama so publicly. The White House has been pressing Israel for at least a week not to take this course of action. The White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, said it was “dismayed” by the decision. “At a time when we are working to relaunch negotiations, these actions make it more difficult for our efforts to succeed,” he said. Obama brought together the Israeli leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, and his Palestinian counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, in New York in September but failed to secure the restart of negotiations. Abbas said he would not enter negotiations while Israel continued to build settlements on the West Bank. The Jerusalem municipal planning committee approved the Gilo expansion yesterday. The Palestinians denounced the move as a provocation. Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said: “We condemn this in the strongest possible terms. It shows that it is meaningless to resume negotiations when this goes on.” Since the failure to secure a resumption of talks in September, Obama, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Middle East special envoy George Mitchell have been working to close the gap between the two sides. The Palestinians want a complete freeze on settlement construction first while Netanyahu has offered a temporary freeze, excluding 2,500 houses he insists are already in the pipeline. The Gilo expansion is in addition to those. Jerusalem and settlements are key sticking points in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Israel captured east Jerusalem in 1967. It insists that east Jerusalem is part of Israel and rejects efforts to restrict building there. Palestinians consider the Jewish neighbourhoods there to be settlements. In a statement, Netanyahu’s office defended the plan. “This concerns a routine procedure of the district planning commission,” it said. “The neighbourhood of Gilo is an integral part of Jerusalem.” Although the Obama administration has been more critical of Israel than the Bush administration and has expressed disapproval of settlement expansion in the West Bank, a reprimand such as yesterday’s is still relatively rare. The US state department expressed its disapproval yesterday and the White House could have chosen to leave it at that but opted instead to join the criticism. Gibbs, reflecting White House unhappiness, said: “Neither party should engage in efforts or take actions that could unilaterally pre-empt, or appear to pre-empt, negotiations. “The US also objects to other Israeli practices in Jerusalem related to housing, including the continuing pattern of evictions and demolitions of Palestinian homes. Our position is clear: the status of Jerusalem is a permanent status issue that must be resolved through negotiations between the parties.” Although Gilo is on the Palestinian side of the 1967 Green Line, the border before that year’s war, Israel claims it is not on the West Bank so is not a settlement. The Palestinians want east Jerusalem as their capital. On Friday, Gibbs had expressed regret over reports of the new construction, saying Obama did not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement expansion. Britain also criticised the plan yesterday. The Foreign Office said: “The foreign secretary has been very clear that a credible deal involves Jerusalem as a shared capital. Expanding settlements on occupied land in east Jerusalem makes that deal much harder. So this decision on Gilo is wrong and we oppose it.”
Following the excellent Channel 4 TV Dispatches programme on the Zionist Lobby in Britain on Monday, the usual suspects are creeping out of hiding to put in their tuppence for Israel. First is the long-term, consistent apologist, David Cesarani, never late with accusations of anti-semitism, and second only to Melanie Phillips; His diatribe is revealing – after telling us about some great ‘rift’ in the Jewish community about Israel and Gaza, his bottom line is sheer evidence of his politics – support of Israel for better or worse!
So here are the rules of the game, for those of you who are still perplexed:
Rule 1: Anyone caught crticising Israeli policies and actions is an anti-semite. Even the EU says so. You can crticise everyone else, but not Israel, because it isa Jewish State.
Rule 2: Anyone criticising the the fact that they cannot criticise Israel, is a double-anti-semite.
Rule 3: Anyone criticising the Zionist lobby, which only exists in the fevered imagination of lefty journalists of the Guardian and the BBC, is not only an anti-semite, but also a phantasist and a conspiracy theorist.
Rule 4: Anyone criticising the right of Zionists to attack anyone and everyone who is less than supportive of the Zionist empire and occupation, and its war crimes by calling them anti-semites, is an anti-semite. (Obviously)
Rule 5: Any Jew who is stupid enough to criticise Israel, its many Zionist apologists, the Zionist Lobby (which does not exist, and is a figment of the imagination of said journalists) is not only a an anti-semite, by also a Self-hating Jew.
Rule 6: Anyone who has not yet voiced his unconditional support of Israel is an anti-semite in hiding, not courageous enough to stand up for his mistaken beliefs.
Rule 7: Anyone else, not included in the above, is, in all likelihood, an anti-semite, and is expected to prove that this is not the case.
If you remember those rules, and act accordingly, you just cannot go wrong! So, don’t say you have not been warned!
Shallow polemic on pro-Israel lobby: The Guardian
Peter Oborne’s investigation into Britain’s pro-Israel lobby shows one side of a complicated picture. It will do more harm than good David Cesarani In his Dispatches programme on the pro-Israel lobby, and the accompanying online pamphlet authored with James Jones, Peter Oborne sets out to expose a secretive lobby of rich and powerful Jews who use money and strong-arm tactics to skew British foreign policy in favour of Israel, intimidate MPs, and stifle media criticism of Zionism. Sadly, the result is more heat than light, a controversy that will confuse issues rather than explain anything. It may have worse consequences. Oborne rightly rejects the argument that criticism of Israel is a form of antisemitism and reiterates the received wisdom that the accusation of antisemitism is used to muzzle Israel’s critics. Yet within minutes of the programme finishing, the comments page of the C4 website carried crude anti-Jewish invective. Oborne showed beyond doubt that there are well-resourced pro-Israel advocacy groups operating in the UK. Like other campaigning organisations they mobilise financial support for political allies and cultivate friends in parliament. Both the Conservative Friends of Israel and the Labour Friends of Israel wine and dine MPs at party conferences and fly them in batches to Israel for PR tours. But this is standard operating procedure for lobbying. Indeed, Oborne repeatedly states that: “The pro-Israel lobby does nothing wrong, or illegal.” So what is Oborne’s beef about the pro-Israel activists? First, he complains that they operate semi-covertly. Although he disavows any imputation of a conspiracy, that is what his charge amounts to. The pro-Israel lobby “needs to be far more open about how it is funded and what it does”. But the same can be said about Michael Ashcroft, Rupert Murdoch, the arms industry, the Saudi Arabians, and the list can go on. More to the point, the evidence he amasses comes mostly from publicly disclosed sources, such as the register of MPs’ interests. Political donations have to be made public, too, and these lists provide much of his ammunition. Like many who claim to expose the secretive behaviour of lobbyists, it turns out that much of what they do is already open to scrutiny. With manipulative skill Oborne builds up the frisson of exposing a conspiracy while using publicly available information as evidence and, the ultimate chutzpah, at the same time as declaring that the lobby is doing nothing wrong. A second strand to his thesis is that pro-Israel campaigners target the media and crush any criticism of Israel. But anyone who remembers the coverage of Israel’s assault on Gaza or the battering of Lebanon in 2006 may wonder what more the media could have done to show the appalling effects of Israeli military tactics. Oborne charges that British policy in the Middle East is being influenced by foreigners with interests inimical to those of Britain and the peace process in general. Specifically, he focuses on Poju Zabludowicz, a Finnish-Jewish ex arms dealer and tycoon who bankrolls the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (Bicom). Oborne asks two experts, Professor David Newman and Rabbi David Goldberg, if they have ever heard of Zabludowicz and when they draw a blank he paints the billionaire Finn as some kind of Trilby figure – a man of mystery and power. Perhaps he asked the wrong people. Zabludowicz is regularly in the Sunday Times Rich List, is often mentioned in the Jewish Chronicle, and was even listed as the second most powerful man in the British Jewish community in the JC’s annual round up of the great and the good. Newman and Goldberg need to get better informed. More pertinently for an investigative journalist, so does Oborne. However, the real problem with Zabludowicz lies with his investments in Israel. As well as financing an Israel advocacy outfit and donating generously to the Tories, he owns a share in a shopping mall in Ma’ale Adumim, a town built on occupied territory in the West Bank. This, Oborne intones, means that a man with a stake in obstructing the peace process has an undue influence on British politics. But how do Poju’s real-estate deals compare with UK investments in the Middle East oil industry or arms sales to the Gulf states? What impact do they have on the determination of UK foreign policy? As so often in programmes of this type, there is no context and no perspective. Finally, Oborne and Jones dispute whether British and Israeli foreign policy interests should go in step. They suggest that the amity is false and based on the money power of the hidden lobby or the result of kowtowing to America, which is pretty much the same thing in their world. Oborne never pauses to explore whether Israeli friendship might be a strategic asset at a time when the UK and Israel face the same threats in the Middle East. Throughout this masquerade Oborne presents just one side of a complicated picture. This is nowhere more so than in the depiction of the pro-Israel lobby as a controlling force in British Jewish life. In fact, the Jews in this country are bitterly divided over Israel. Nor do they agree about Britain’s foreign policy. Every point of view is vented, none is suppressed. Why then are British Jews, who tend to be dovish regarding Israel, so alarmed about attacks on Israel and supposed revelations about Jewish lobbies? Just look at the comments that followed transmission of Oborne’s documentary and you can see why. At 21.34 Stuart Downie posted his congratulations to the brave programme makers who showed that “the UK parliament has, like the USA senate and congress, become Israel’s occupied territory”. It showed that British MPs “buckle under pressure from people whose first loyalty is not to the UK but to the State of Israel”. So in a few lines this posting accused Jews of dual-loyalty and echoed the name ZOG – Zionist Occupied Government – that the far right in the US uses to designate Washington. A few comments further on and Detta asked, “why does Israel have such power? Why do most of the world seem afraid of upsetting them?” Nazir, posting at 12.11, chimed in that it is “time to reclaim British policy from those working for a foreign country”. We have thus left the reality in which Israel is internationally isolated and regularly pounded by the UN, and in which sincere men and women support Israel because they think it is an embattled democracy that shares many of the values held dear in Britain, as well as facing many of the same foes. Guided by Oborne and Jones we are drifting into the world of fantasy and phobia. Despite their proclaimed efforts to avoid such an outcome their shallow and irresponsible polemic will do more damage than good. It will only reinforce the very fears that cause British Jews to rally behind Israel, right or wrong.
If David Cesarani, or anyone else, wishes to read despicable anti-semitic and racist views, they only need to read ANY feedback page on ANY Israeli news media blog. Of course, those mad Nazis are writing against Palestinians, so that must be OK…
One hope that Cesarani is proficient in Hebrew (Idoubt it) as otherwise the full venom of those blogs is not available to him…
Olive oil and yoghurt, yoghurt and olive oil: The Electronic Intifada,
Hasan Abu Nimah, 18 November 2009
As a child in early-1940s Palestine, I grew up in a small village of 1,500 individuals with its roots in biblical times. I would like to tell you an anecdote from my childhood that I recalled as I was reading the news the other day.
Life was simple, tranquil and often hard but despite the lack of modern amenities or even what was then available in the city, it was happy. There was no electricity or running water. We used kerosene lamps that gave poor lighting and kerosene stoves for cooking. The best stoves for indoor cooking were of the Swedish-made Primus or Radius brands. Weather-permitting, we cooked outdoors, often using a pottery pot, placed on three stones with a wood-fire underneath.
Food was tastier, simpler and healthier then, although we had no refrigerators. People dried fruits for the long, harsh winter, first by oiling them (which preserved tenderness) and then exposing them to the hot summer sun. Vegetables were sprayed with sea salt before drying. All our winter tomatoes were sun-dried, although nowadays that is a delicacy.
Bread-making was a well-honed process as well. You started with the grain, usually wheat, which was stone ground. I remember the mill was made of two round, heavy coarse black stones on top of each other with a three-inch diameter hole in the center of the top stone. Women (men never did the milling) turned the heavy top stone around with a wood handle while slowly putting wheat in the middle hole. Flour emerged sparingly from between the two stone wheels. The process was repeated daily as wheat was easier to store as grains than flour. Rarely, people carried their wheat to big mills in the city to grind all at once.
The dough made from this flour was left to ferment before being baked over hot round stones inside a thick clay dome called a taboun — which many still use today. The taboun had to be heated by covering it with slow-burning straw and dry manure without flames; it took many hours before it was ready to use. The stones on the ground absorbed the right amount of heat for the baking process to be perfect — producing delicious bread.
Women had to carry water many times a day from the village spring. I often wondered how young women balanced the large pottery jars perfectly on their heads without using their hands as they carried water up from the spring. During village celebrations, the women often danced with jars on their heads to demonstrate their skill, balance and prowess.
Jars, often larger, were used for storing olive oil to supply families with their needs until the next season. People used the same jars year after year, and the porous pottery became saturated with oil. People believed that the jars never needed to be washed because the oil in them never spoiled. Now we know that oil should not be exposed to either heat or light to maintain its color and taste. This wisdom was already built in to the thick-walled pottery storage jars.
Jars were also used to store homemade jams made of grapes, apricots and quince. From grapes they also made a heavy sweet molasses which was a great source of energy as well as a stable source of healthy diet in winter. All such winter supplies were naturally sterilized by prolonged cooking; they therefore kept well with no need for refrigeration.
Villagers were mostly illiterate, but that did not mean they lacked wisdom (though there was a boys school established in 1888, and girls had formal education when UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, established a school in the early 1950s). Despite the distance of formal governmental authorities or police (which ventured out of the city only when there was a serious problem), people followed strict rules and traditions of conduct toward each other.
The hard life that people led, and the necessity of putting all one’s efforts into ensuring you had the means to survive, meant people had little time for nonsense. So, now, after this pleasant digression, let me come back to the anecdote.
I remember that whenever my mother was upset, she would express her anger by uttering the Arabic expression “zeit ou laban, laban ou zeit.” It meant nothing to me until I grew older and my mother explained this common expression of disagreement. My mother said that a man once asked his wife to prepare lunch. When the wife asked what he wanted, the husband answered “laban ou zeit,” which means yoghurt with olive oil — something people ate then and now with fresh bread as a simple and delicious meal. You mean “zeit ou laban” — olive oil with yoghurt? — the wife replied, reversing the order. No, the husband insisted, “laban ou zeit” not “zeit ou laban.” The story goes that the disagreement between the two escalated into a furious quarrel with dire consequences. Neither the wife nor the husband wanted to admit that it made no difference no matter how one would arrange the two simple ingredients.
For the villagers, this story came to stand for any disagreement where the positions being put forward were essentially indistinguishable. So I found myself muttering this ancient expression last week as I read about a new “peace” plan offered by former Israeli deputy prime minister and former army chief Shaul Mofaz.
Despite the hype, it turned out to be nothing more than recycling of familiar worn-out schemes, repeatedly put forward by Israel and then abandoned: a Palestinian state with “temporary borders” on 50 to 60 percent of the West Bank with large Jewish-only settlement blocs annexed to Israel.
Of course Mofaz’s scheme was presented as a great departure — especially since he suggested that he would talk to Hamas in the course of implementing it. But just like all the previous schemes, Jerusalem and the rights of Palestinian refugees would be off the table. With the Palestinians offered no more than about 15 percent of historic Palestine broken up into isolated enclaves, it was simply a case of Mofaz offering “laban ou zeit,” when all the other Israeli schemes offered “zeit ou laban.”
Similarly, French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to host an international summit in Paris to “break the deadlock” in the Middle East peace process sounds indeed like suggesting that putting the “zeit and laban” in a different container would change it into caviar. It is hard to understand how simple facts escape the notice of leaders of the caliber of the French president. The problem is not how, where, or who would attend, and at what level. Rather, it what the conference would be able to discuss with zero options at hand.
The same can be said for all the other “peace process” schemes from Madrid to Oslo to the Clinton parameters, the “Geneva initiative,” the Road Map, Annapolis, and finally the failed mission of US envoy George Mitchell. They can all be summed up in that village wisdom which despite decades of Israeli oppression still survives, and provides much needed clarity, today: “Zeit ou laban, laban ou zeit.”
Hasan Abu Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at the United Nations. This essay first appeared in The Jordan Times and is republished with the author’s permission.
Obama warns Israel on settlements: BBC
US President Barack Obama has said Israel’s approval of 900 extra housing units at a settlement in East Jerusalem could lead to a “dangerous” situation.
Mr Obama told Fox News that additional settlement construction made it harder for Israel to make peace in the region and “embitters the Palestinians”.
The settlement of Gilo has been built on land Israel captured in 1967.
The Palestinians have refused to attend peace talks until Israel stops building settlements on occupied territory.
The Israeli government disputes that East Jerusalem is occupied territory, and therefore refuses to include annexed areas as part of any accommodation of Mr Obama’s past calls for “restraint” in settlement construction.
Nearly 500,000 Jews live in more than 100 settlements built on occupied territory.
The settlements are illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this.
In the interview with Fox News, Mr Obama stressed that Israel’s security was “a vital national interest to the United States”, but warned that its policies were complicating his administration’s efforts to revive the peace process.
“I think that additional settlement building does not contribute to Israel’s security, I think it makes it harder for them to make peace with their neighbours,” he said.
“I think it embitters the Palestinians in a way that could end up being very dangerous,” he added.
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had reportedly rejected a request from Mr Obama to freeze the work at Gilo.
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said the settlement expansion, approved by the Jerusalem Planning Committee, showed Israel was not interested in restraint.
“Obviously this is completely unacceptable.
“There is no such thing as restraint when it comes to settlement activity. Either this stops completely or clearly it doesn’t stop.”
The European Union presidency, currently held by Sweden, added its criticism, saying settlement expansion would hinder the conflict’s resolution.
“If there is to be genuine peace, a way must be found to resolve the status of Jerusalem as the future capital of two states,” it said.
Israel demolished a Palestinian property in occupied East Jerusalem a day after the planning decision was publicised.
Palestinian reports said there were two homes and two commercial premises in the building.
Israeli officials commonly say that buildings they issue demolition orders for have been built without permission.
Palestinians say building permits are virtually impossible to obtain as they face discrimination by the Israeli authorities.