UN impatient as blockade stalls Gaza building: BBC
By Tim Franks
There is a place of strange quiet in the cramped and crowded Gaza Strip.
It looks, from the roof of a nearby United Nations school, like a film set, or perhaps an army’s urban warfare training ground.
Ranged across the sandy earth of Khan Younis is a large housing estate: 151 apartments, with space for a further 450. Most are three-quarters complete. All are uninhabited.
The project is one of 26 schemes, ranging from houses to schools to medical clinics, that have been years in the making.
They all made good progress until June 2007. At that point, the Islamist Hamas movement – which has fired hundreds of rockets at southern Israeli towns – took control of the Gaza Strip after months of violent struggle with its more secular rival, Fatah.
In response, Israel and Egypt tightened their blockade of the Gaza Strip, allowing in little more than basic food and medicine.
For the past 10 months, the UN has been holding intensive, high-level negotiations with Israel, seeking permission to bring in materials such as doors, windows, pipes and tiles to complete these 26 projects.
But UN officials say they have made no headway. Their expressions of dismay are growing stronger.
‘Huge price’
Fouad Faqawi, a Gazan who works for the United Nations relief agency Unrwa, strides up the rough concrete staircase of one of the Khan Younis housing blocks.
“Nobody can live here,” he says, pausing to look inside the shell of a family home for six. “No way – how can people live without plumbing or sewage, or windows or doors?”
Nearly 100 people, including many children, live in this collection of shacks
Unrwa’s head in Gaza, John Ging, surveys the housing estate on a grey and windy winter’s day. His voice crackles with incomprehension and frustration, as he talks of the people waiting for the new homes to be finished.
“These are civilians, who are of course the victims of this conflict. And yet they’re paying this massive price, in terms of human misery. And the frustration and despair are creating a lot more extremism.”
Barbed wire
Were the estate finished, it might benefit Maryam Ataya.
Along with almost 100 relatives, she lives in a squalid little enclosure a short drive away.
Their home was destroyed during the Israeli offensive last year.
Mrs Ataya’s temporary home is surrounded by rubble and rusted metal
Now, she and her four children live in a collection of shacks, huts and lean-tos.
Children careen bare-footed over the mounds of rubble, barbed wire, and rusted metal within the rickety perimeter walls.
“It’s a disaster,” says Maryam flatly. She stokes the family pot using scraps of wood. “We have no electricity, no running water.”
The Israeli government’s general position on the blockade is that it will remain in place – in the words of a senior official – “as long as Hamas remains committed to destroying Israel and killing Israelis”.
But what of these specific UN projects? In a statement, the defence ministry told the BBC: “Recently, the UN began to submit detailed equipment lists (for the 26 projects). Once the administrative work is completed, it will be agreed with the UN… which projects will be realised, and the timetables for their execution.”
Strong language
The 26 schemes have become known as the “Serry projects”, after Robert Serry, the UN special co-ordinator for the Middle East peace process.
The mild-mannered, quietly spoken Dutch diplomat speaks in the UN’s Jerusalem headquarters with a clear tinge of exasperation.
“Let make this very clear,” he says. “I am disappointed and also frustrated, that after months of discussions… Israel is not yet willing to discuss any of the social housing projects which the (UN) secretary general has been asking Israel now to move on. Frankly, we’re getting impatient.”
For the UN envoy, this is strong language.
Israeli officials have long warned of the danger that Hamas could divert building materials for military ends, such as bunkers and reinforcements.
But the UN stresses that every single tile, pipe or bag of cement is tracked from the border crossing to its final use.
“I fail to see how these kinds of projects, which would help the people of Gaza – not Hamas – would impact on Israel’s security,” Mr Serry adds.
And at Abdelsalaam Al-Shobaki’s small concrete factory, in the north of Gaza, there is proof that the blockade has failed to seal the strip.
There is a large pile of empty packets of cement from Turkey and Egypt, which have been smuggled through the tunnels connecting Gaza to Egypt.
As he mixes the grey slurry, Mr Shobaki says the much-needed building material is punishingly expensive.
But the cement is clearly there, if you have money or power – and Hamas has both.
There is no sign that the struggle between Hamas and Israel will be eased any time soon.
As long as that is the case, there seems little prospect of Gaza’s borders opening.
And that will leave Gazans mired in lives of privation and shortages.
Barack Obama criticised for falling short on human rights: The Guardian
President has set different tone to Bush, but failed to end abuses, says Human Rights Watch
America’s leading human rights organisation has said that Barack Obama is falling far short of his rhetoric by continuing some of the abuses of George Bush’s war on terror and by shielding foreign allies responsible for an assault on human rights activists not seen since the end of the cold war.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch praised Obama for setting a different tone to President Bush, and for ending some of the practices of the previous administration including torture and abduction to secret CIA prisons. But its director, Kenneth Roth, told the Guardian that Obama had failed to end other abuses, such as holding suspected terrorists indefinitely without trial and retaining military commissions.
Roth also criticised Obama for undermining human rights by failing to challenge key allies, such as Pakistan and Egypt, who are at the forefront of a renewed crackdown on activists, and for protecting Israel from accountability for war crimes in Gaza.
Human rights activists were under renewed siege in many parts of the world, he said.
“As human rights groups have put more and more pressure on governments, there’s been an increase in counterattacks of growing sophistication. The thing we’ve noticed is an increase in the deniable repression, the repression that has a facade of bureaucratic legality about it. Using the pretext of criminal prosecutions which are really trumped up charges,” Roth said. “You can really see that in a place like Pakistan where there is a human rights movement but they are fighting for their lives. You see a lot of countries using criminal libel, including Russia.”
Roth said that Moscow led the way in using laws and regulations to curb activists and other states had followed its example.
“Ethiopia is the big new entrant in the field this year with a new law that prohibits any organisation that receives more than 10% of its money from abroad from engaging in any human rights work. Ethiopia has effectively shut down the human rights community. In Rwanda there is a small human rights community that has been largely silenced. These are US allies,” he said.
The Human Rights Watch director said that the Obama administration was continuing a longstanding US practice of selectively challenging foreign governments over human rights.
“He has been a huge improvement at the rhetorical level. The issue has been translating that shining rhetoric into policy practice. If you look for example in Accra … he said that Africa doesn’t need strong leaders, it needs strong institutions, which is a great line,” he said. “But then what have they done about that?
“They’ve defended themselves by saying they’re trying to build up goodwill for use on human rights in the future but it is not credible.”
African leaders have challenged the international criminal court, accusing it of focusing disproportionately on Africa, particularly with its indictment of Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese president, while ignoring alleged war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Roth dismisses the assertion as self-serving.
“You could have imagined African leaders saying: Isn’t it great that finally an international institution is taking seriously the plight of African victims? But that’s not the way they look at it. Instead they’ve identified with African leaders who have been repressing everybody. They treat themselves as a club of dictators who look after their own.”
But Roth added that the court’s position was undermined by US policy, particularly its protection of Israel.
“The US wouldn’t even put pressure on Israel to pursue serious domestic investigations of its war crimes in Gaza. People see that double standard and they say if the west is going to protect its own why can’t we do the same?” he said.
“If Israel was not going to allow an independent domestic investigation, it warranted international scrutiny and the US wouldn’t even allow the first step in the process to be taken. That infuriated people because they did see Washington protecting its own. The Gaddafis of the world had a stronger argument: if this is what the west is going to do, why shouldn’t we protect Bashir?”
Roth said Obama should be given credit for shutting down secret CIA detention facilities and barring the agency from torturing captives.
“Where he’s still falling short is refusing to investigate and prosecute the people who ordered torture, the people who provided the civil and legal justifications for it. It creates a climate of impunity.”
Human Rights Watch has also taken Obama to task about the continued use of military trials and the prospect of about 50 Guantánamo inmates being held indefinitely without charge.
How surrendering Palestinian rights became the language of “peace”: The Electronic Intifada
Joseph Massad, 27 January 2010
The 1993 Oslo agreement did not only usher in a new era of Palestinian-Israeli relations but has had a much more lasting effect in transforming the very language through which these relations have been governed internationally and the way the Palestinian leadership viewed them. Not only was the Palestinian vocabulary of liberation, end of colonialism, resistance, fighting racism, ending Israeli violence and theft of the land, independence, the right of return, justice and international law supplanted by new terms like negotiations, agreements, compromise, pragmatism, security assurances, moderation and recognition, all of which had been part of Israel’s vocabulary before Oslo and remain so, but also Oslo instituted itself as the language of peace that ipso facto delegitimizes any attempt to resist it as one that supports war, and dismisses all opponents of its surrender of Palestinian rights as opponents of peace. Making the language of surrender of rights the language of peace has also been part of Israel’s strategy before and after Oslo, and is also the language of US imperial power, in which Arabs and Muslims were instructed by US President Barack Obama in his speech in Cairo last June.
Thus the transformation that Oslo brought about was not only a transformation of language as such, but also of the Palestinian language and perspective through which the nature of Palestinian-Israeli relations were viewed by the Palestinian leadership, and that institutionalized instead the Israeli perspective and Israel’s vocabulary as neutral and objective. What Oslo aimed to do, therefore, was change the very goal of Palestinian politics from national independence from Israeli colonialism and occupation to one where Palestinians become fully dependent for their political and national survival on Israel and its sponsors in the interest of peace and security for their occupiers.
The key transformative formula of the Oslo agreement enshrined in the Declaration of Principles of 13 September 1993 is “Land for Peace.” This detrimental formula to internationally-recognized Palestinian rights remains the guiding and delimiting approach of all subsequent agreements — and disagreements — between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and successive Israeli governments. This formula alone prejudices the entire process by presupposing that Israel has “land” which it would be willing to give to the “Arabs,” and that the “Arabs” — seen as responsible for the state of war with Israel — can grant Israel the peace for which it has longed for decades. Placing the responsibility of the Arab-Israeli wars on the “Arabs” is a standard view that is never questioned in the Western media or by Western governments. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) concession, however, has finally ensured that official Palestinians and other official Arabs, too, will not question it.
Despite its surface appearance as a political compromise, this formula is in fact a reflection of the racial views characterizing (European Jewish) Israelis and Palestinian and other Arabs. Whereas the Israelis are asked and are ostensibly (presented as) willing to negotiate about property, the recognized (Western) bourgeois right par excellence, Palestinians and other Arabs are asked to give up violence — or more precisely “their” violent means — as illegitimate and attributable only to uncivilized barbarians. The fact that Palestinians have already given up their rightful claim to 77 percent of Palestine and were negotiating about their future sovereignty over a mere 23 percent of their homeland did not qualify for a formula of “land for land” on which to base the “peace process.” In fact, the objective formula for any negotiations would be a “land for peace” formula whereby it is Palestinians who are giving up their rights to their historic homeland in exchange for an end to Israeli oppression of — and colonial violence against — their people.
The PLO, Israel and the Western media hailed the Oslo agreement as “mutual recognition.” This, however, contradicts the actual words uttered by both parties, and the projected actions based on these words. Whereas the PLO (which wrote the first letter) recognized “the right of the state of Israel to exist in peace and security,” the Israeli government, “in response” to Yasser Arafat’s letter, “has decided to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and commence negotiations with the PLO within the Middle East peace process.” But this is not mutual recognition, as the Israelis did not recognize the Palestinian people’s right to exist in a state of their own in peace and security as the PLO had done vis-a-vis Israel. Had the PLO only recognized the Rabin government as the representative of the Israeli people, without necessarily granting any “right” to the Israeli state to exist in peace and security, then the PLO’s recognition would have been on a par with Israel’s. The actual agreement, therefore, did not amount to mutual recognition; rather, it amounted to the legitimation of the Jewish state by the very people against whom its racist colonial policies have been — and continue to be — practiced, with the Israelis committing to nothing substantively new. Granting the PLO recognition as the representative of the Palestinians (something the majority of the world — except the US — had recognized since the mid-1970s) committed Israel to no concessions to the Palestinian people. It committed Israel only to a scenario whereby since the Israeli government was inclined to speak to “representatives” of the Palestinians, it would talk to the PLO, as it now recognized that party as their representative, whereas before it did not. This is precisely why successive Israeli governments and leaders have vacillated on whether they would grant the Palestinians the right to establish an independent state and always refer back to Oslo and subsequent agreements in which they made no such pledge.
Having exacted a precious recognition of their legitimacy from their victims, the Israelis moved forward through the mechanism of the Oslo peace process to divide the Palestinians into different groupings, the majority of whom would be expelled outside the peace process. By transforming the PLO, which represented all Palestinians in the Diaspora and in Israel and the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem, into the Palestinian Authority (PA) which could only hope to represent Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, constituting one third of the Palestinian people, the Oslo agreements engineered a major demographic reduction of the Palestinian people, dividing them by a factor of three while bringing about a major demographic expansion of the Jewish population of Israel, multiplying their number by a factor of three.
The insidious part of this process is how the PA, conscious of this transformation, continues to speak of the “Palestinian people,” which had been reduced through the Oslo accords to those West Bank and Gaza Palestinians it now claims to represent. Diaspora Palestinians are simply referred to, in accordance with US and Israeli parlance, as “refugees,” and Israeli Palestinians are referred to by Israeli diktat as “Israeli Arabs.” In doing so, not only has the scope of the Palestinian leadership and its representative status of the whole Palestinian people been substantially reduced, but the Palestinian people themselves were diminished demographically by the PA’s appropriation of the designation “Palestinian people” to refer to a mere third of Palestinians.
In the meantime, the Oslo process which produced phantom agreements like the Geneva accords, among others, has pushed forward the Israeli claim that Palestinians must recognize Israel’s right to exist not only in peace and security but also as a Jewish state, meaning a state that is racist by law and discriminates by law and governance against non-Jewish citizens, and one that encompasses not only its Jewish citizens but Jews everywhere. This is something that has been pushed by the Clinton, Bush, and more recently the Obama administrations. Indeed Obama does not miss an opportunity to reiterate his administration’s commitment to force the Palestinians to recognize Israel’s right to be a “Jewish state.”
While Israel has no legitimacy and is not recognized by any international body as a “representative” of Jews worldwide, but rather as the state of the Israeli people, who are citizens of it, the PLO and the PA are called upon to recognize Israel’s jurisdiction over world Jewry. As such, the internationally recognized status of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people has been reduced to one third of Palestinians since Oslo, while the representative status of the Israeli government has been expanded threefold as recognized by the PA’s unofficial representatives in Geneva. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is insistent that no progress will take place in the so-called peace process unless the Palestinians officially recognize Israel’s right to be a racist Jewish state. President Obama has also called on all Arabs to ratify this recognition officially. This has been done despite the fact that the majority of Jews living outside Israel are not Israeli citizens and that no bodies representing them ever endowed the Israeli state with representative powers on their behalf.
Dividing and reducing the Palestinian people demographically has gone hand in hand with the territorial reduction of Palestine, or the parts of it that Israel is willing to negotiate over after redeploying its colonial occupation army around. Aside from the removal of the illegally expanded, occupied and colonized East Jerusalem (now expanded to many times its original size at the expense of West Bank lands) from the territories over which Israel would negotiate its redeployment, the West Bank itself has been subdivided into cantons that exclude Jewish colonial settlements and Jewish-only highways connecting them, as well as imposed nature reserves, military bases and closed areas. But this is not all.
Israel also built the apartheid wall inside Palestinian land, effectively removing another 10 percent of the West Bank from the negotiating table and its army redeployment. Another of the more important measures that the Israeli and Palestinian architects of the Oslo agreement took in order to guarantee the structural survival of the Oslo “peace process” was the creation of structures, institutions and classes that would be directly connected to it, and that can survive the collapse of the Oslo agreement itself while preserving the “process” that the agreement generated. This guarantee was enshrined in law and upheld by international funding predicated on the continuation of the “Oslo process,” as long as the latter continued to serve Israeli and US interests as well as the interests of the corrupt Palestinian elite that acquiesced in it.
The five main classes that the architects of Oslo created to ensure that the “process” survives are: a political class, divided between those elected to serve the Oslo process, whether to the Legislative Council or the executive branch (essentially the position of president of the PA), and those who are appointed to serve those who are elected, whether in the ministries, or in the presidential office; a policing class, numbering in the tens of thousands, whose function is to defend the Oslo process against all Palestinians who try to undermine it. It is divided into a number of security and intelligence bodies competing with one another, all vying to prove that they are most adept at neutralizing any threat to the Oslo process. Under Arafat’s authority, members of this class inaugurated their services by shooting and killing 14 Palestinians they deemed enemies of the “process” in Gaza in 1994 — an achievement that earned them the initial respect of the Americans and the Israelis who insisted that the policing class should use more repression to be most effective. Their performance last summer in Jenin of killing Hamas members and unaffiliated bystanders to impress President Obama who asked the Palestinian leadership to keep their security part of the deal is the most recent example of this function.
Also: a bureaucratic class attached to the political class and the policing class and that constitutes an administrative body of tens of thousands who execute the orders of those elected and appointed to serve the “process;” a nongovernmental organization (NGO) class: another bureaucratic and technical class whose finances fully depend on their serving the Oslo process and ensuring its success through planning and services; and, a business class composed of expatriate Palestinian businessmen as well as local businessmen — including especially members of the political, policing and bureaucratic classes — whose income is derived from financial investment in the Oslo process and from profit-making deals that the PA can make possible. While the NGO class mostly does not receive money from the PA, being the beneficiary of foreign governmental and nongovernmental financial largesse that is structurally connected to the Oslo process, the political policing, and bureaucratic classes receive all their legitimate and illegitimate income from the PA directly.
By linking the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to the Oslo process, the architects had given them a crucial stake in its survivability, even and especially if it failed to produce any political results. For the Palestinian elite that took charge of the PA, the main task all along was to ensure that the Oslo process continues and that the elite remain in control of all the institutions that guarantee the survival of the “process.” What the elite did not anticipate was that they could lose control to Hamas, a public opponent of the Oslo process that in accordance with expectations had boycotted the 1994 gerrymandered and Fatah-controlled elections. The 2006 elections, which Fatah was confident it would win, constituted an earthquake that could destroy all these structural guarantees and with them the “process” they were designed to protect. Hence the panic of the Americans who engineered the coup with the aid of Israel and PA security under Muhammad Dahlan to topple the Hamas government, which included kidnapping its members of parliament, government ministers and politicians and holding them hostage in Israeli jails, and finally staging a violent takeover of Gaza that backfired. All attempts since the American failed coup in Gaza have focused on perpetuating the peace process through maintenance of its structures under PA control and away from the democratically-elected Hamas.
Indeed, the destruction of Palestinian democracy was a necessary price to pay, insisted Israel and the Americans, pushed forward by the military efforts of Lieutenant General Keith Dayton. This situation became possible because of the funding strategy of the US, Israel and Arab oil-producing states towards the Palestinian struggle. The story of the Palestinian national movement can only be told through the ways and means that different Arab and non-Arab governments have tried to control it. While the PLO was established and controlled principally by the regime of Gamal Abdel-Nasser, the 1967 defeat weakened that arrangement leading to the revolutionary guerrillas takeover of the organization in 1969. With Fatah and the leftist Palestinian guerrillas at the helm, the revolutionary potential of the PLO constituted such a threat that it precipitated an all-out war in Jordan in 1970, a situation that powerful and repressive Arab regimes did not want to see repeated. It is in this context that Arab oil money (from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Libya, the United Arab Emirates and Iraq) began to pour into the coffers of the PLO, primarily to ensure that it would not encourage revolutionary change in Arab countries and that insofar as it did not compromise Arab regime interests its weapons should only be directed towards Israel. The Lebanese civil war and the PLO role in it in the second half of the 1970s remained a problem but, as far as they were concerned, it was a problem that Arab regimes were able to contain.
With the onset of the 1980s and the military defeat of the PLO in 1982 in Beirut, Arab funding for the PLO was no longer conditioned on its not turning its weapons against them only, but that the organization would also no longer target Israel. The various attempts at agreements between the PLO and King Hussein in the mid-1980s were part of that plan. With continued Israeli and US refusal to deal with the PLO no matter how much its policy and ideology had changed, the situation remained frozen until the first Palestinian uprising in 1987 gave the PLO the bargaining opportunity to lay down its weapons against Israel. The formalization of this transformation took place in Algiers in 1988 and later at the Madrid peace conference in 1991.
As oil funding dried up after the Gulf War of 1990-91, the PLO needed new funders. Enter the United States and its allies whose terms did not only include the Oslo agreement but also that the newly created and Fatah-controlled PA be indeed armed but that its weapons should have a new target: the Palestinian people themselves. The PA obliged and continued to receive its funding until the second intifada when, contra their raison d’etre, some of its security forces did engage the Israelis in gunfire when the Israelis attacked Palestinians. Funding was intermittently stopped, Arafat was placed under house arrest and the Israelis reinvaded. A resumption of steady funding continued after Arafat’s death conditional upon Mahmoud Abbas’s “seriousness” in pointing Palestinian guns at the Palestinians themselves, which he and the PA’s thuggish security apparatuses have done. However, they have not been as effective as the US and Israel had wished, which is why US General Keith Dayton is assuming full control of the military situation on the ground in order to “assist” the Palestinians to deliver their peace part of the bargain to Israel.
Note that throughout the last 16 years, Israeli leaders have consistently said, in line with the formula of land for peace, that they want and seek peace with the Palestinians, but not the establishment of a Palestinian state, nor in order to ensure the Palestinians’ right to self-determination. Indeed, not only has Israel multiplied the number of settlements and more than doubled the Jewish colonial settler population of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, chipping away at more of the land that was said to be under negotiations, it has done so while consistently exacting more Palestinian concessions to ensure Israeli “security” in order for the Palestinians to give Israel the “peace” on which the formula of “land for peace” is based. The Americans and the Europeans have also insisted that the Palestinians must give Israel peace before it can decide which lands to give them back and under whichever arrangement it finds most ensuring of this “peace.” Therefore, what land for peace — despite or because of its definitional prejudice against the Palestinian people — has brought about is a perpetual deferment of the return of land with insistent demands of advance payments on the peace the Palestinians must deliver. While the redeployment around Gaza and laying siege to its population, starving and bombarding them, is marketed as Israel’s compromising by returning land, the reality remains that the Gaza Strip has been transformed from a prison policed by the Israelis into a concentration camp guarded and surrounded by them from the outside with infiltration inside as the need arises, as it did last winter.
Ultimately then, what the Oslo agreement and the process it generated have achieved is a foreclosure of any real or imagined future independence of the Palestinian leadership, or even national independence for one third of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who are, at any rate, the only Palestinians that the Oslo agreement claims to want to help achieve it. By mortgaging the Palestinian leadership to US and Israeli sponsorship, by creating and maintaining administrative, legal and financial structures that will ensure this dependence, Oslo has been what it was designed to be from the start: the mechanism of ending the Palestinian quest to end Israeli colonialism and occupation, and the legitimation of Israel’s racist nature by the very people over whom it exercises its colonial and racist dominion. Anyone who questions these strictures can be fought with the ideological weapon of pragmatism.
Opposing Oslo makes one a utopian extremist and rejectionist, while participating in its structure makes one a pragmatist moderate person working for peace. The most effective ideological weapon that Oslo has deployed since 1993 is precisely that anyone who opposes its full surrender of Palestinian national rights is a proponent of war and an opponent of peace. In short, the goal of the Oslo process, which has been reached with much success, is not the establishment of Palestinian independence from Israel’s illegal occupation, but rather to end Palestinian independence as a future goal and as a current reality. Seen from this angle, Oslo continues to be a resounding success.
Joseph Massad teaches modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University. This is the text of a speech he delivered at a conference in Oslo in 2009.
Defamation defamed: The Guardian CiF
I dispute David Hirsh’s criticism of my film about antisemitism. Far from ‘easy targets’, it is a difficult debate Israel must have
Yoav Shamir Monday 25 January 2010 12.00 GMT
In David Hirsh’s critique of my film Defamation, he accused me of finding “easy targets” as subjects for my film. I can only assume that “targets” is common terminology for him; quite simply, all the subjects in my film (including him) are people who willingly chose to participate.
Let me start with the first person he chose to label “an easy target”: my beloved 94-year-old grandmother. My grandmother lost her husband, my biological grandfather, in the 1948 war of independence, in which he served as an officer with the forces defending Jerusalem; she was left with two young children, my mother and her brother (he is the Israeli ambassador in Germany). She then married the man I knew as a grandfather, an Auschwitz survivor who became a freedom fighter in the Ezel – the underground movement that operated alongside the Haganah and Lechi.
My grandmother loved the film and was proud to take part. Hirsh sees her as an “easy target”, and although I personally completely disagree with what she stated on camera, her perspective represents the very early Zionists thinkers such as Nordau, who wrote Degeneration, and Herzel, “the visionary of the [Jewish] state”. This small and marginal group (representing less than 3% of the entire Jewish population at the time) were young, secular, socialist Jews who wanted to create a “muscle” Jew; a Jew who would be different from all of what they resented in their parents’ generation. My grandmother is a genuine representative of this school of thought. She opens the film, not only because she is a great character who expresses what many people of her generation and, in fact, many Israelis feel toward tdiaspora Jews, but she is a reminder of the vicious cycle that Zionism became caught in – the state that was supposed to be a cure for what antisemitism started, as both Foxman and Finkelstein are actually saying, has ended up generating antisemitism.
The next “easy target” is the ADL. I don’t see how an organisation operating on $70,000,000 a year can be considered an easy target. Abe Foxman, whom I actually like and have a great sympathy for, is one of the most influential figures in the Jewish world of diplomacy, who meets with world leaders, heads of states and foreign ministers. When I approached the ADL, I came with the intention of learning, and after spending many hours with Foxman and key members of the ADL, I believe that they are doing what they are doing because of their true concern for Israel, and a real wish to help the Jewish state. Unfortunately, even though I can understand their drive, I totally disagree with it.
A scene that I witnessed, at the end of their Auschwitz visit, is a sort of game in which each of the ADL members has to name five non-Jewish friends who would hide him if someone came knocking at their door – with reference to the Nazis passing from house to house looking for Jews. As the game continued and none of them could think of five gentiles who would protect them, they then go down to three, then one … and sadly, they cannot think of a one righteous soul who would come to their aid. The lesson is, as Foxman’s book is appropriately titled, “never again”. I am happy to say that, at least in in my Tel Aviv social circle, this is not a very popular game; in fact, I was quite shocked to have witnessed it in Auschwitz. But it was a great insight into that mindset.
In their blind support of Israel, which is the supposed means for fulfilling this “never again” dictum, they are contributing to a place that is driving itself towards the edge of a cliff. Thanks to US support, the drive is a very smooth, air-conditioned and fast. But, nevertheless, it is headed towards a cliff.
I can only encourage every Jew living in the western world, when next visiting Israel, to detour from the 433 Highway into the capital and accompany an Arab Israeli in his search for an apartment in one of the Jewish cities (such as Tel Aviv, Holon and Petach Tikva) and to take a short trip into Nablus or Ramallah. If they have any sense of human dignity, it will change the way they look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But I am sure that most of the educated, liberal and mostly very pleasant people I met in my travels with the ADL are blinded by a false image of Israel. An image that blinds them as they travel from Ben Gurion airport to the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, to the many empty holiday apartments they keep in Jerusalem, which they occupy maybe one week a year; on the 443 Highway, which is prohibited for the Palestinians to travel, although it passes right through the middle of their land. No “easy targets” here, but simply a group of very influential group of people who will go to great lengths defending and securing their “insurance policy” – Israel.
David Hirsh also referred to the interviews with the group of black residents whom I met in Crown Heights, where both blacks and Jews live, although in fairly segregated circumstances. In this scene, a local Jewish reporter claims that if a (black) robber wanted to rob someone, he would choose a Jewish person, because “a Jewish person would be an easier target”. The black residents replied that “actually, if they got caught robbing a Jewish guy, the judges would sentence them to more [prison] time because they would classify it as a hate crime”. They went on, expressing many stereotypes about Jews, ending up with a sad reference to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Is this antisemitism? Of course it is. The question is, what would be the best way to deal with it? A wise local rabbi acknowledged the problem but blames the ADL for inflaming situations like these, because, as he says, “Foxman needs a job.”
Finally, we come to the group of “15-year-old Israeli students on their trip to Poland”, as Hirsh says (in fact, the students were between 17 and 18 years old during the filming, and as you are reading these lines many of them have enlisted in the Israeli army). When the film came out in Israel, I invited the whole class and their parents to the premiere at Doc Aviv documentary film festival. These intelligent young high school students responded very openly and honestly to the film. Adi, the young woman who is one of the main protagonists in the class, told me that it gave her a lot to think about and thanked me for making the film. Their teacher, Assaf, responded in a similar way.
I don’t blame these kids for acting the way they did. Most of them were flying out of Israel for the first time, and being brought up thinking that everybody hates them, find themselves in a cycle that is very hard to break.
I could go on further to address the rest of these “easy targets” Hirsh accuses me of taking advantage, such as Norman Finkelstein, a bestselling author and academic; Dina Porat, head of the center for research on antisemitism at Tel Aviv university; or Charles Jakob, who is very active online, but I think the point is clear: these are people who are passionate about their views and are very happy to share them with me. I am a filmmaker who simply gave them the floor.
Hirsh wonders why is my narration in English? This is a version narrated for an English-speaking audience, and obviously my narration is in Hebrew for the version shown in Israel. In Germany, it will probably be dubbed into German; in France, into French, and so on. There is no hidden agenda about the intended audience, simply basic requirements set by different broadcasters.
Hirsh concludes his article by regretting that he was not invited to speak at this year’s conference about how to combat antisemitism convened by the Israeli foreign office, which he attributes as probably caused by his appearance the film. But I can inform him that, at this year’s conference, Abe Foxman stated that the situation of antisemitism is the worst since the second world war, just as he had said last year and just as he will probably say next year, too.
At the conference I filmed, Hirsh regrets he came out as a hero – his interpretation, of course, as I never declared him one. But in that year, he was the only one speaker who said anything disputing the general consensus and for that, I thought he deserved credit.
It is true there are many Israelis who oppose the occupation and other violations of human rights; but unfortunately, there are not enough. The current Israeli government is the most nationalist, rightwing government in the history of the state of Israel. Those few who oppose and fight against racism, and violations of human rights, risking their freedom – last week, the head of the Israeli human rights association was arrested for demonstrating against the taking over of Palestinian homes in east Jerusalem – those I consider heroes. In fact, my new film is about these unsung heroes.
Defamation is the personal quest of an Israeli Jew trying to understand certain aspects of his society and raising issues that I, living in Israel, don’t think are discussed enough. I am very happy to read all the comments and debates the film has started in the UK: starting a discussion around this subject is something I was waiting for and the many responses here just prove that it is a discussion many are interested in. As for David Hirsh, I warmly invite him, next time he is in Israel, to join me for a tour of the occupied territories.
Holocaust remembrance is a boon for Israeli propaganda: Haaretz
By Gideon Levy
Israel’s bigwigs attacked at dawn on a wide front. The president in Germany, the prime minister with a giant entourage in Poland, the foreign minister in Hungary, his deputy in Slovakia, the culture minister in France, the information minister at the United Nations, and even the Likud party’s Druze Knesset member, Ayoob Kara, in Italy. They were all out there to make florid speeches about the Holocaust.
Wednesday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and an Israeli public relations drive like this hasn’t been seen for ages. The timing of the unusual effort – never have so many ministers deployed across the globe – is not coincidental: When the world is talking Goldstone, we talk Holocaust, as if out to blur the impression. When the world talks occupation, we’ll talk Iran as if we wanted them to forget.
It won’t help much. International Holocaust Remembrance Day has passed, the speeches will soon be forgotten, and the depressing everyday reality will remain. Israel will not come out looking good, even after the PR campaign.
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On the eve of his departure, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at Yad Vashem. “There is evil in the world,” he said. “Evil must be stamped out at the beginning.” Some people are “trying to deny the truth.” Lofty words, said by the same person who only the day before, not quite in the same breath, uttered very different words, words of true evil, evil that should be extinguished at the start, evil that Israel is trying to hide.
Netanyahu spoke of a new “migration policy,” one that is evil through and through. He malevolently lumped together migrant workers and wretched refugees – warning that they all endanger Israel, lower our wages, harm our security, make us into a third-world country and bring in drugs. He zealously supported our racist interior minister, Eli Yishai, who has spoken of the migrants as the spreaders of diseases such as hepatitis, tuberculosis, AIDS and God knows what else.
No Holocaust speech will erase these words of incitement and slander against migrants. No remembrance speech will obliterate the xenophobia that has reared its head in Israel, not only on the extreme right, as in Europe, but throughout government.
We have a prime minister who speaks about evil but is building a fence to prevent war refugees from knocking at Israel’s door. A prime minister who speaks about evil but shares the crime of the Gaza blockade, now in its fourth year, leaving 1.5 million people in disgraceful conditions. A prime minister in whose country settlers perpetrate pogroms against innocent Palestinians under the slogan “price tag,” which also has horrific historical connotations, but against whom the state does virtually nothing.
This is the prime minister of a state that arrests hundreds of left-wing protesters against the injustices of the occupation and the war in Gaza, while time grants mass pardons to the right-wingers who demonstrated against the disengagement. In his speech yesterday, Netanyahu’s equating Nazi Germany with fundamentalist Iran was no more than cheap propaganda. Talk about “degrading the Holocaust.” Iran isn’t Germany, Ahmedinejad isn’t Hitler and equating them is no less spurious than equating Israeli soldiers with Nazis.
The Holocaust must not be forgotten, and there is no need to compare it with anything. Israel must take part in the efforts to keep its memory alive, but in doing so it must show up with clean hands, clean of evil of their own doing. And it must not arouse suspicion that it is cynically using the memory of the Holocaust to obliterate and blur other things. Regrettably, this is not the case.
How beautiful it would have been if on this international day of remembrance Israel had taken the time to examine itself, look inward and ask, for example, how it is that anti-Semitism has reared its head in the world precisely in the past year, the year after we dropped white-phosphorous bombs on Gaza. How beautiful it would have been if on this International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Netanyahu had declared a new policy for integrating refugees instead of expulsion, or lifted the Gaza blockade.
A thousand speeches against anti-Semitism will not extinguish the flames ignited by Operation Cast Lead, flames that threaten not only Israel but the entire Jewish world. As long as Gaza is under blockade and Israel sinks into its institutionalized xenophobia, Holocaust speeches will remain hollow. As long as evil is rampant here at home, neither the world nor we will be able to accept our preaching to others, even if they deserve it.
Barack Obama criticised for falling short on human rights: The Guardian
President has set different tone to Bush, but failed to end abuses, says Human Rights Watch
Barack Obama was criticised by Human Rights Watch for continuing some of the abuses of George Bush’s war on terror.
America’s leading human rights organisation has said that Barack Obama is falling far short of his rhetoric by continuing some of the abuses of George Bush’s war on terror and by shielding foreign allies responsible for an assault on human rights activists not seen since the end of the cold war.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch praised Obama for setting a different tone to President Bush, and for ending some of the practices of the previous administration including torture and abduction to secret CIA prisons. But its director, Kenneth Roth, told the Guardian that Obama had failed to end other abuses, such as holding suspected terrorists indefinitely without trial and retaining military commissions.
Roth also criticised Obama for undermining human rights by failing to challenge key allies, such as Pakistan and Egypt, who are at the forefront of a renewed crackdown on activists, and for protecting Israel from accountability for war crimes in Gaza.
Human rights activists were under renewed siege in many parts of the world, he said.
“As human rights groups have put more and more pressure on governments, there’s been an increase in counterattacks of growing sophistication. The thing we’ve noticed is an increase in the deniable repression, the repression that has a facade of bureaucratic legality about it. Using the pretext of criminal prosecutions which are really trumped up charges,” Roth said. “You can really see that in a place like Pakistan where there is a human rights movement but they are fighting for their lives. You see a lot of countries using criminal libel, including Russia.”
Roth said that Moscow led the way in using laws and regulations to curb activists and other states had followed its example.
“Ethiopia is the big new entrant in the field this year with a new law that prohibits any organisation that receives more than 10% of its money from abroad from engaging in any human rights work. Ethiopia has effectively shut down the human rights community. In Rwanda there is a small human rights community that has been largely silenced. These are US allies,” he said.
The Human Rights Watch director said that the Obama administration was continuing a longstanding US practice of selectively challenging foreign governments over human rights.
“He has been a huge improvement at the rhetorical level. The issue has been translating that shining rhetoric into policy practice. If you look for example in Accra … he said that Africa doesn’t need strong leaders, it needs strong institutions, which is a great line,” he said. “But then what have they done about that?
“They’ve defended themselves by saying they’re trying to build up goodwill for use on human rights in the future but it is not credible.”
African leaders have challenged the international criminal court, accusing it of focusing disproportionately on Africa, particularly with its indictment of Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese president, while ignoring alleged war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Roth dismisses the assertion as self-serving.
“You could have imagined African leaders saying: Isn’t it great that finally an international institution is taking seriously the plight of African victims? But that’s not the way they look at it. Instead they’ve identified with African leaders who have been repressing everybody. They treat themselves as a club of dictators who look after their own.”
But Roth added that the court’s position was undermined by US policy, particularly its protection of Israel.
“The US wouldn’t even put pressure on Israel to pursue serious domestic investigations of its war crimes in Gaza. People see that double standard and they say if the west is going to protect its own why can’t we do the same?” he said.
“If Israel was not going to allow an independent domestic investigation, it warranted international scrutiny and the US wouldn’t even allow the first step in the process to be taken. That infuriated people because they did see Washington protecting its own. The Gaddafis of the world had a stronger argument: if this is what the west is going to do, why shouldn’t we protect Bashir?”
Roth said Obama should be given credit for shutting down secret CIA detention facilities and barring the agency from torturing captives.
“Where he’s still falling short is refusing to investigate and prosecute the people who ordered torture, the people who provided the civil and legal justifications for it. It creates a climate of impunity.”
Human Rights Watch has also taken Obama to task about the continued use of military trials and the prospect of about 50 Guantánamo inmates being held indefinitely without charge.